Away from her; Sarah Polley
And perhaps it followed naturally that the men who taught them these things became part of the enrichment, that these men seemed to these women more mysterious and desirable than the men they still cooked for and slept with.
Those who signed up for Grant’s courses might have a Scandinavian background or they might have learned something about Norse mythology from Wagner or historical novels. There were also a few who thought he was teaching a Celtic language and for whom everything Celtic had a mystic allure. He spoke to such aspirants fairly roughly from his side of the desk.
“If you want to learn a pretty language go and learn Spanish. Then you can use it if you go to Mexico.”
Some took his warning and drifted away. Others seemed to be moved in a personal way by his demanding tone.
They worked with a will and brought into his office, into his regulated satisfactory life, the great surprising bloom of their mature female compliance, their tremulous hope of approval.
He chose a woman named Jacqui Adams. She was the opposite of Fiona—short, cushiony, dark-eyed, effusive. A stranger to irony. The affair lasted for a year, until her husband was transferred. When they were saying goodbye in her car, she began to shake uncontrollably. It was as if she had hypothermia.
She wrote to him a few times, but he found the tone of her letters overwrought and could not decide how to answer. He let the time for answering slip away while he became magically and unexpectedly involved with a girl who was young enough to be Jacqui’s daughter.
For another and more dizzying development had taken place while he was busy with Jacqui. Young girls with long hair and sandalled feet were coming into his office and all but declaring themselves ready for sex. The cautious approaches, the tender intimations of feeling required with Jacqui were out the window. A whirlwind hit him, as it did many others. Scandals burst wide open, with high and painful drama all round but a feeling that somehow it was better so. There were reprisals; there were firings. But those fired went off to teach at smaller, more tolerant colleges or Open Learning Centers, and many wives left behind got over the shock and took up the costumes, the sexual nonchalance of the girls who had tempted their men. Academic parties, which used to be so predictable, became a minefield. An epidemic had broken out, it was spreading like the Spanish flu. Only this time people ran after contagion, and few between sixteen and sixty seemed willing to be left out.
That was exaggeration, of course.
Fiona was quite willing. And Grant himself did not go overboard. What he felt was mainly a gigantic increase in well-being. A tendency to pudginess which he had had since he was twelve years old disappeared. He ran up steps two at a time. He appreciated as never before a pageant of torn clouds and winter sunsets seen from his office window, the charm of antique lamps glowing between his neighbors’ living-room curtains, the cries of children in the park, at dusk, unwilling to leave the hill where they’d been tobogganing. Come summer, he learned the names of flowers. In his classroom, after being coached by his nearly voiceless motherin-law (her affliction was cancer in the throat), he risked reciting the majestic and gory Icelandic ode, the Höfudlausn, composed to honor King Erik Bloodaxe by the skald whom that king had condemned to death.
Fiona had never learned Icelandic and she had never shown much respect for the stories that it preserved—the stories that Grant had taught and written about. She referred to their heroes as “old Njal” or “old Snorri.” But in the last few years she had developed an interest in the country itself and looked at travel guides. She read about William Morris’s trip, and Auden’s. She didn’t really plan to travel there. She said there ought to be one place you thought about and knew about and maybe longed for but never did get to see.
Nonetheless, the next time he went to Meadowlake, Grant brought Fiona a book he’d found of nineteenth-century watercolors made by a lady traveller to Iceland. It was a Wednesday. He went looking for her at the card tables but didn’t see her. A woman called out to him, “She’s not here. She’s sick.”
Her voice sounded self-important and excited—pleased with herself for having recognized him when he knew nothing about her. Perhaps also pleased with all she knew about Fiona, about Fiona’s life here, thinking it was maybe more than he knew.
“He’s not here, either,” she added.
Grant went to find Kristy, who didn’t have much time for him. She was talking to a weepy woman who looked like a first-time visitor.
“Nothing really,” she said, when he asked what was the matter with Fiona.
“She’s just having a day in bed today, just a bit of an upset.”
Fiona was sitting straight up in the bed. He hadn’t noticed, the few times that he had been in this room, that this was a hospital bed and could be cranked up in such a way. She was wearing one of her high-necked maidenly gowns, and her face had a pallor that was like flour paste.
Aubrey was beside her in his wheelchair, pushed as close to the bed as he could get. Instead of the nondescript open-necked shirts he usually wore, he was wearing a jacket and tie. His nattylooking tweed hat was resting on the bed.
He looked as if he had been out on important business.
Whatever he’d been doing, he looked worn out by it. He, too, was gray in the face.
They both looked up at Grant with a stony grief-ridden apprehension that turned to relief, if not to welcome, when they saw who he was. Not who they thought he’d be. They were hanging on to each other’s hands and they did not let go.
The hat on the bed. The jacket and tie.
It wasn’t that Aubrey had been out.
It wasn’t a question of where he’d been or whom he’d been to see. It was where he was going.
Grant set the book down on the bed beside Fiona’s free hand.
“It’s about Iceland,” he said. “I thought maybe you’d like to look at it.”
“Why, thank you,” said Fiona. She didn’t look at the book.
“Iceland,” he said.
She said, “Ice-land.” The first syllable managed to hold a tinkle of interest, but the second fell flat. Anyway, it was necessary for her to turn her attention
back to Aubrey, who was pulling his great thick hand out of hers.
“What is it?” she said. “What is it, dear heart?”
Grant had never heard her use this flowery expression before.
“Oh all right,” she said. “Oh here.”
And she pulled a handful of tissues from the box beside her bed. Aubrey had begun to weep.
“Here. Here,” she said, and he got hold of the Kleenex as well as he could and made a few awkward but lucky swipes at his face. While he was occupied, Fiona turned to Grant.
“Do you by any chance have any influence around here?” she said in a whisper.
“I’ve seen you talking to them . . .”
Aubrey made a noise of protest or weariness or disgust. Then his upper body pitched forward as if he wanted to throw himself against her. She scrambled half out of bed and caught him and held on to him. It seemed improper for Grant to help her.
“Hush,” Fiona was saying. “Oh, honey. Hush. We’ll get to see each other. We’ll have to. I’ll go and see you. You’ll come and see me.”
Aubrey made the same sound again with his face in her chest and there was nothing Grant could decently do but get out of the room.
“I just wish his wife would hurry up and get here,” Kristy said when he ran into her. “I wish she’d get him out of here and cut the agony short. We’ve got to start serving supper before long and how are we supposed to get her to swallow anything with him still hanging around?”
Grant said, “Should I stay?”
“What for? She’s not sick, you know.”
“To keep her company,” he said.
Kristy shook her head.
“They have to get over these things on their own. They’ve got short memories, usually. That’s not always so bad.”
Grant left without going back to Fiona’s room. He noticed that the wind was actually warm and the crows were making an uproar. In the parking lot a woman wearing a tartan pants suit was getting a folded-up wheelchair out of the trunk of her car.
FIONA did not get over her sorrow.
She didn’t eat at mealtimes, though she pretended to, hiding food in her napkin. She was being given a supplementary drink twice a day—someone stayed and watched while she swallowed it down. She got out of bed and dressed herself, but all she wanted to do then was sit in her room. She wouldn’t have had any exercise at all if Kristy, or Grant during visiting hours, hadn’t walked her up and down in the corridors or taken her outside. Weeping had left her eyes raw-edged and dim. Her cardigan—if it was hers—would be buttoned crookedly. She had not got to the stage of leaving her hair unbrushed or her nails uncleaned, but that might come soon. Kristy said that her muscles were deteriorating, and that if she didn’t improve they would put her on a walker.
“But, you know, once they get a walker they start to depend on it and they never walk much anymore, just get wherever it is they have to go,” she said to Grant. “You’ll have to work at her harder. Try to encourage her.”
But Grant had no luck at that. Fiona seemed to have taken a dislike to him, though she tried to cover it up. Perhaps she was reminded, every time she saw him, of her last minutes with Aubrey, when she had asked him for help and he hadn’t helped her.
He didn’t see much point in mentioning their marriage now.
The supervisor called him in to her office. She said that Fiona’s weight was going down even with the supplement.
“The thing is, I’m sure you know, we don’t do any prolonged bed care on the first floor. We do it temporarily if someone isn’t feeling well, but if they get too weak to move around and be responsible we have to consider upstairs.”
He said he didn’t think that Fiona had been in bed that often.
“No. But if she can’t keep up her strength she will be. Right now she’s borderline.”
Grant said that he had thought the second floor was for people whose minds were disturbed.
“That, too,” she said.
THE street Grant found himself driving down was called Blackhawks Lane. The houses all looked to have been built around the same time, perhaps thirty or forty years ago. The street was wide and curving and there were no sidewalks. Friends of Grant and Fiona’s had moved to places something like this when they began to have their children, and young families still lived here. There were basketball hoops over garage doors and tricycles in the driveways. Some of the houses had gone downhill. The yards were marked by tire tracks, the windows plastered with tinfoil or hung with faded flags.
But a few seemed to have been kept up as well as possible by the people who had moved into them when they were new—people who hadn’t had the money or perhaps hadn’t felt the need to move on to some place better.
The house that was listed in the phone book as belonging to Aubrey and his wife was one of these. The front walk was paved with flagstones and bordered by hyacinths that stood as stiff as china flowers, alternately pink and blue.
He hadn’t remembered anything about Aubrey’s wife except the tartan suit he had seen her wearing in the parking lot.
The tails of the jacket had flared open as she bent into the trunk of the car. He had got the impression of a trim waist and wide buttocks.
She was not wearing the tartan suit today. Brown belted slacks and a pink sweater. He was right about the waist—the tight belt showed she made a point of it. It might have been better if she didn’t, since she bulged out considerably above and below.
She could be ten or twelve years younger than her husband. Her hair was short, curly, artificially reddened.
She had blue eyes—a lighter blue than Fiona’s—a flat robin’s-egg or turquoise blue, slanted by a slight puffiness. And a good many wrinkles, made more noticeable by a walnut-stain makeup. Or perhaps that was her Florida tan.
He said that he didn’t quite know how to introduce himself.
“I used to see your husband at Meadowlake. I’m a regular visitor there myself.”
“Yes,” said Aubrey’s wife, with an aggressive movement of her chin.
“How is your husband doing?”
The “doing” was added on at the last moment.
“He’s O.K.,” she said.
“My wife and he struck up quite a close friendship.”
“I heard about that.”
“I wanted to talk to you about something if you had a minute.”
“My husband did not try to start anything with your wife if that’s what you’re getting at,” she said. “He did not molest her. He isn’t capable of it and he wouldn’t anyway. From what I heard it was the other way round.”
Grant said, “No. That isn’t it at all. I didn’t come here with any complaints about anything.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well, I’m sorry. I thought you did. You better come in then. It’s blowing cold in through the door. It’s not as warm out today as it looks.”
So it was something of a victory for him even to get inside. She took him past the living room, saying, “We’ll have to sit in the kitchen, where I can hear Aubrey.”
Grant caught sight of two layers of front-window curtains, both blue, one sheer and one silky, a matching blue sofa and a daunting pale carpet, various bright mirrors and ornaments. Fiona had a word for those sort of swooping curtains—she said it like a joke, though the women she’d picked it up from used it seriously. Any room that Fiona fixed up was bare and bright. She would have deplored the crowding of all this fancy stuff into such a small space. From a room off the kitchen—a sort of sunroom, though the blinds were drawn against the afternoon brightness—he could hear the sounds of television.
The answer to Fiona’s prayers sat a few feet away, watching what sounded like a ballgame. His wife looked in at him.
She said, “You O.K.?” and partly closed the door.
“You might as well have a cup of coffee,” she said to Grant. “My son got him on the sports channel a year ago Christmas. I don’t know what we’d do without it.”
¿Por qué dice “mi hijo” y no “nuestro hijo” especialmente si está hablando de su padre?
On the kitchen counters there were all sorts of contrivances and appliances—coffeemaker, food processor, knife sharpener, and some things Grant didn’t know the names or uses of. All looked new and expensive, as if they had just been taken out of their wrappings, or were polished daily.
He thought it might be a good idea to admire things. He admired the coffeemaker she was using and said that he and Fiona had always meant to get one.
This was absolutely untrue—Fiona had been devoted to a European contraption that made only two cups at a time.
“They gave us that,” she said. “Our son and his wife. They live in Kamloops. B.C. They send us more stuff than we can handle. It wouldn’t hurt if they would spend the money to come and see us instead.”
Para lamentarse y hacer una crítica sí dice “nuestro” hijo e incluye a su esposa
Grant said philosophically, “I suppose they’re busy with their own lives.”
“They weren’t too busy to go to Hawaii last winter. You could understand it if we had somebody else in the family, closer at hand. But he’s the only one.”
She poured the coffee into two brown-and-green ceramic mugs that she took from the amputated branches of a ceramic tree trunk that sat on the table.
“People do get lonely,” Grant said.
He thought he saw his chance now. “If they’re deprived of seeing somebody they care about, they do feel sad. Fiona, for instance. My wife.”
Pero eso es justo lo que hizo él: dejar a su esposa en una residencia, privarle de su compañía y atenciones. No está claro si ella ingresó por propia voluntad o tuvo que resignarse a esa suerte por no tener a nadie que quisiera hacerse cargo de ella
“I thought you said you went and visited her.”
“I do,” he said. “That’s not it.”
Then he took the plunge, going on to make the request he’d come to make.
Could she consider taking Aubrey back to Meadowlake, maybe just one day a week, for a visit? It was only a drive of a few miles. Or if she’d like to take the time off—Grant hadn’t thought of this before and was rather dismayed to hear himself suggest it—then he himself could take Aubrey out there, he wouldn’t mind at all. He was sure he could manage it.
¿Por qué lo hace? ¿Porque sabe que Fiona se está dejando morir y no tendría la conciencia tranquila si le ocurriese algo? ¿Lo hace porque de veras ella le importa?
While he talked she moved her closed lips and her hidden tongue as if she were trying to identify some dubious flavor. She brought milk for his coffee and a plate of ginger cookies.
“Homemade,” she said as she set the plate down. There was challenge rather than hospitality in her tone. She said nothing more until she had sat down, poured milk into her coffee, and stirred it.
Then she said no.
“No. I can’t do that. And the reason is, I’m not going to upset him.”
Interesante. Ella se niega y la razón que alega no es personal. Sostiene que las visitas perjudicarían a su marido. ¿De verdad, cuenta aquí para alguien la opinión y los sentimientos de los pacientes? Todos aseguran saber lo que es mejor para ellos, como si hubieran vuelto a la infancia y sus cónyuges se hubieran convertido en sus tutores.
“Would it upset him?” Grant said earnestly.
“Yes, it would. It would. That’s no way to do. Bringing him home and taking him back. That would just confuse him.”
“But wouldn’t he understand that it was just a visit? Wouldn’t he get into the pattern of it?”
“He understands everything all right.”
¿Por qué los tratan como enfermos mentales?
Han perdido autonomía pero entienden lo que les pasa y pueden tomar sus propias decisiones.]
She said this as if he had offered an insult to Aubrey. “But it’s still an interruption. And then I’ve got to get him all ready and get him into the car, and he’s a big man, he’s not so easy to manage as you might think. I’ve got to maneuver him into the car and pack his chair and all that and what for? If I go to all that trouble I’d prefer to take him someplace that was more fun.”
Ella entorna la puerta para que su marido no participe en la conversación pero se siente ofendida cuando Grant le sugiere que igual ella está equivocada y que a Aubrey no le perjudicaría la visita a su esposa
¿Hasta dónde eres capaz de llegar para conseguir tu propósito, Grant?
¿Por qué ella no le pregunta por su esposa?
"Preferiría llevarlo a un sitio más divertido." Con este último comentario confirma que la decisión la toma pensando en sus propios intereses, no en los de su marido
“But even if I agreed to do it?” Grant said, keeping his tone hopeful and reasonable.
“It’s true, you shouldn’t have the trouble.”
¿Convienen que el paciente es un problema? No la enfermedad, el paciente.
“You couldn’t,” she said flatly. “You don’t know him. You couldn’t handle him. He wouldn’t stand for you doing for him. All that bother and what would he get out of it?”
Grant didn’t think he should mention Fiona again.
“It’d make more sense to take him to the mall,” she said. “Or now the lake boats are starting to run again, he might get a charge out of going and watching that.”
She got up and fetched her cigarettes and lighter from the window above the sink.
“You smoke?” she said.
He said no, thanks, though he didn’t know if a cigarette was being offered.
“Did you never? Or did you quit?”
“Quit,” he said.
“How long ago was that?”
He thought about it.
“Thirty years. No—more.”
He had decided to quit around the time he started up with Jacqui. But he couldn’t remember whether he quit first, and thought a big reward was coming to him for quitting, or thought that the time had come to quit, now that he had such a powerful diversion.
“I’ve quit quitting,” she said, lighting up. “Just made a resolution to quit quitting, that’s all.”
Maybe that was the reason for the wrinkles. Somebody—a woman—had told him that women who smoked developed a special set of fine facial wrinkles. But it could have been from the sun, or just the nature of her skin—her neck was noticeably wrinkled as well. Wrinkled neck, youthfully full and uptilted breasts. Women of her age usually had these contradictions. The bad and good points, the genetic luck or lack of it, all mixed up together. Very few kept their beauty whole, though shadowy, as Fiona had done. And perhaps that wasn’t even true. Perhaps he only thought that because he’d known Fiona when she was young.
When Aubrey looked at his wife did he see a high-school girl full of scorn and sass, with a tilt to her blue eyes, pursing her fruity lips around a forbidden cigarette?
“So your wife’s depressed?” Aubrey’s wife said. “What’s your wife’s name? I forget.”
“It’s Fiona.”
“Fiona. And what’s yours? I don’t think I was ever told that.”
Grant said, “It’s Grant.”
She stuck her hand out unexpectedly across the table.
“Hello, Grant. I’m Marian.”
“So now we know each other’s names,” she said, “there’s no point in not telling you straight out what I think. I don’t know if he’s still so stuck on seeing your—on seeing Fiona. Or not. I don’t ask him and he’s not telling me. Maybe just a passing fancy. But I don’t feel like taking him back there in case it turns out to be more than that. I can’t afford to risk it. I don’t want him upset and carrying on. I’ve got my hands full with him as it is. I don’t have any help. It’s just me here. I’m it.”
“Did you ever consider—I’m sure it’s very hard for you—”Grant said. “Did you ever consider his going in there for good?”
He had lowered his voice almost to a whisper but she did not seem to feel a need to lower hers.
“No,” she said. “I’m keeping him right here.”
Grant said, “Well. That’s very good and noble of you.” He hoped the word “noble” had not sounded sarcastic. He had not meant it to be.
“You think so?” she said. “Noble is not what I’m thinking about.”
“Still. It’s not easy.”
“No, it isn’t. But the way I am, I don’t have much choice. I don’t have the money to put him in there unless I sell the house. The house is what we own outright. Otherwise I don’t have anything in the way of resources. Next year I’ll have his pension and my pension, but even so I couldn’t afford to keep him there and hang on to the house. And it means a lot to me, my house does.”
La posesión de una casa significa más para ella que su marido. No es que quiera lo mejor para él, es que no quiere poner en riesgo su única propiedad. Una auténtica negociación.
Y bien Grant, ¿qué está dispuesto a ofrecer?
“It’s very nice,” said Grant.
“Well, it’s all right. I put a lot into it. Fixing it up and keeping it up. I don’t want to lose it.”
“No. I see your point.”
“The company left us high and dry,” she said. “I don’t know all the ins and outs of it but basically he got shoved out. It ended up with them saying he owed them money and when I tried to find out what was what he just went on saying it’s none of my business.
What I think is he did something pretty stupid. But I’m not supposed to ask so I shut up. You’ve been married. You are married. You know how it is. And in the middle of me finding out about this we’re supposed to go on this trip and can’t get out of it. And on the trip he takes sick from this virus you never heard of and goes into a coma. So that pretty well gets him off the hook.”
Grant said, “Bad luck.”
“I don’t mean he got sick on purpose. It just happened. He’s not mad at me anymore and I’m not mad at him. It’s just life. You can’t beat life.”
¿Enfermar a propósito? ¿Cuentas pendientes en el matrimonio que se callan porque ahora él está enfermo y su vida corre peligro? Considera la enfermedad como un castigo
She flicked her tongue in a cat’s business like way across her top lip, getting the cookie crumbs. “I sound like I’m quite the philosopher, don’t I? They told me out there you used to be a university professor.”
“Quite a while ago,” Grant said.
“I bet I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “You’re thinking there’s a mercenary type of a person.”
“I’m not making judgments of that sort. It’s your life.”
“You bet it is.”
He thought they should end on a more neutral note. So he asked her if her husband had worked in a hardware store in the summers, when he was going to school.
“I never heard about it,” she said. “I wasn’t raised here.”
GRANT realized he’d failed with Aubrey’s wife. Marian. He had thought that what he’d have to contend with would be a woman’s natural sexual jealousy—or her resentment, the stubborn remains of sexual jealousy. He had not had any idea of the way she might be looking at things. And yet in some depressing way the conversation had not been unfamiliar to him. That was because it reminded him of conversations he’d had with people in his own family. His relatives, probably even his mother, had thought the way Marian thought. Money first. They had believed that when other people did not think that way it was because they had lost touch with reality. That was how Marian would see him, certainly. A silly person, full of boring knowledge and protected by some fluke from the truth about life. A person who didn’t have to worry about holding on to his house and could go around dreaming up the fine generous schemes that he believed would make another person happy. What a jerk, she would be thinking now.
Being up against a person like that made him feel hopeless, exasperated, finally almost desolate. Why? Because he couldn’t be sure of holding on to himself, against people like that? Because he was afraid that in the end they were right?
Yet he might have married her. Or some girl like that. If he’d stayed back where he belonged. She’d have been appetizing enough. Probably a flirt. The fussy way she had of shifting her buttocks on the kitchen chair, her pursed mouth, a slightly contrived air of menace—that was what was left of the more or less innocent vulgarity of a small-town flirt.
She must have had some hopes when she picked Aubrey. His good looks, his salesman’s job, his white-collar expectations. She must have believed that she would end up better off than she was now. And so it often happened with those practical people. In spite of their calculations, their survival instincts, they might not get as far as they had quite reasonably expected. No doubt it seemed unfair.
IN the kitchen the first thing he saw was the light blinking on his answering machine. He thought the same thing he always thought now.
Fiona. He pressed the button before he took his coat off.
“Hello, Grant. I hope I got the right person. I just thought of something. There is a dance here in town at the Legion supposed to be for singles on Saturday night and I am on the lunch committee, which means I can bring a free guest. So I wondered whether you would happen to be interested in that? Call me back when you get a chance.”
A woman’s voice gave a local number.
Then there was a beep and the same voice started talking again.
“I just realized I’d forgotten to say who it was. Well, you probably recognized the voice. It’s Marian. I’m still not so used to these machines. And I wanted to say I realize you’re not a single and I don’t mean it that way. I’m not either, but it doesn’t hurt to get out once in a while. If you are interested you can call me and if you are not you don’t need to bother. I just thought you might like the chance to get out. It’s Marian speaking. I guess I already said that. O.K. then. Goodbye.”
Her voice on the machine was different from the voice he’d heard a short time ago in her house. Just a little different in the first message, more so in the second. A tremor of nerves there, an affected nonchalance, a hurry to get through and a reluctance to let go.
Something had happened to her. But when had it happened? If it had been immediate, she had concealed it very successfully all the time he was with her. More likely it came on her gradually, maybe after he’d gone away. Not necessarily as a blow of attraction. Just the realization that he was a possibility, a man on his own. More or less on his own. A possibility that she might as well try to follow up.
But she’d had the jitters when she made the first move. She had put herself at risk. How much of herself he could not yet tell. Generally a woman’s vulnerability increased as time went on, as things progressed. All you could tell at the start was that if there was an edge of it then, there’d be more later. It gave him a satisfaction—why deny it?—to have brought that out in her. To have roused something like a shimmer, a blurring, on the surface of her personality.
To have heard in her testy broad vowels this faint plea. He set out the eggs and mushrooms to make himself an omelette. Then he thought he might as well pour a drink. Anything was possible. Was that true—was anything possible?
For instance, if he wanted to, would he be able to break her down, get her to the point where she might listen to him about taking Aubrey back to Fiona? And not just for visits but for the rest of Aubrey’s life. And what would become of him and Marian after he’d delivered Aubrey to Fiona?
Marian would be sitting in her house now, waiting for him to call. Or probably not sitting. Doing things to keep herself busy. She might have fed Aubrey while Grant was buying the mushrooms and driving home. She might now be preparing him for bed. But all the time she would be conscious of the phone, of the silence of the phone. Maybe she would have calculated how long it would take Grant to drive home. His address in the phone book would have given her a rough idea of where he lived. She would calculate how long, then add to that the time it might take him to shop for supper (figuring that a man alone would shop every day). Then a certain amount of time for him to get around to listening to his messages. And as the silence persisted she’d think of other things. Other errands he might have had to do before he got home. Or perhaps a dinner out, a meeting that meant he would not get home at suppertime at all.
What conceit on his part. She was above all things a sensible woman. She would go to bed at her regular time thinking that he didn’t look as if he’d be a decent dancer anyway. Too stiff, too professorial.
He stayed near the phone, looking at magazines, but he didn’t pick it up when it rang again.
“Grant. This is Marian. I was down in the basement putting the wash in the dryer and I heard the phone and when I got upstairs whoever it was had hung up. So I just thought I ought to say I was here. If it was you and if you are even home. Because I don’t have a machine, obviously, so you couldn’t leave a message. So I just wanted. To let you know.” The time was now twenty-five after ten.
“Bye.”
He would say that he’d just got home. There was no point in bringing to her mind the picture of his sitting here weighing the pros and cons.
Drapes. That would be her word for the blue curtains—drapes. And why not? He thought of the ginger cookies so perfectly round that she had to announce they were homemade, the ceramic coffee mugs on their ceramic tree, a plastic runner, he was sure, protecting the hall carpet. A high-gloss exactness and practicality that his mother had never achieved but would have admired—was that why he could feel this twinge of bizarre and unreliable affection? Or was it because he’d had two more drinks after the first?
The walnut-stain tan—he believed now that it was a tan—of her face and neck would most likely continue into her cleavage, which would be deep, crêpey-skinned, odorous and hot. He had that to think of as he dialled the number that he had already written down. That and the practical sensuality of her cat’s tongue. Her gemstone eyes.
FIONA was in her room but not in bed. She was sitting by the open window, wearing a seasonable but oddly short and bright dress. Through the window came a heady warm blast of lilacs in bloom and the spring manure spread over the fields.
She had a book open in her lap.
She said, “Look at this beautiful book I found. It’s about Iceland. You wouldn’t think they’d leave valuable books lying around in the rooms. But I think they’ve got the clothes mixed up—I never wear yellow.”
“Fiona,” he said.
“Are we all checked out now?” she said. He thought the brightness of her voice was wavering a little. “You’ve been gone a long time.”
“Fiona, I’ve brought a surprise for you. Do you remember Aubrey?”
She stared at Grant for a moment, as if waves of wind had come beating into her face. Into her face, into her head, pulling everything to rags. All rags and loose threads.
“Names elude me,” she said harshly.
Then the look passed away as she retrieved, with an effort, some bantering grace. She set the book down carefully and stood up and lifted her arms to put them around him. Her skin or her breath gave off a faint new smell, a smell that seemed to Grant like green stems in rank water.
“I’m happy to see you,” she said, both sweetly and formally. She pinched his earlobes, hard.
“You could have just driven away,” she said. “Just driven away without a care in the world and forsook me. Forsooken me. Forsaken.”
He kept his face against her white hair, her pink scalp, her sweetly shaped skull.
He said, “Not a chance.”
Away from her; Sarah Polley
I think I may be beginning to disappear.
You’re not making this decision alone Grant. I’ve already made up my mind.
We also have a policy that our new residents can’t receive visitors or take phone calls for the first thirty days. To give the resident time to adjust.
But most people need that time to get settled in. Before we had the rule in place, they’d often forget over and over again why they were being left here.
Whereas we find,if they have a month to adjust,they end up happys as clams.
Meadowlake’s their home then. After that, it’s perfectly fine for them to take a little visit home every now and then. Of course, that doesn’t apply to the ones on the second floor. It’s too difficult, and they don’t know where they are anyway.
FIONA
What are these Grant?
GRANT
They’re the... The forms to fill out. If you decide to go to Meadowlake.
She looks frustrated.
FIONA
But that is exactly what I have decided. You were to go and sign these forms. And leave them there.
Is it cold? Is it dark?
Grant and Fiona drive in silence. “Harvest Moon” continues to
play. Fiona spots something just off the road.
FIONA
Oh. Remember?
Grant looks and sees the little hollow where they walked in the spring. The bright yellow flowers are gone. Now it is covered in snow. Grant smiles at her. Looks ahead. It’s all he can do to not turn the car around.
FIONA
You look surprised Grant.
GRANT
Not surprised. Just grateful. I’m grateful you can remember that.
So I’ll leave you then, you can entertain yourself? It must all seem strange to you, but you’ll be surprised how soon you get used to it. You’ll get to know who everybody is. Except that some of them are pretty well off in the clouds, you know - you can’t expect them all to get to know who you are.
You always said, there ought to be one place you thought about and knew about and maybe even longed for - but never did get to see.
When he was not very old or even retired he suffered some unusual kind of damage. They just went on holiday somewhere and he got something, like some bug, that gave him a terrible high fever? And it put him in a coma and left him like he is now.
Between you and me I wouldn’t be surprised if it had something to do with that weed killer. His wife is the one takes care of him usually. She takes care of him at home. She just put him in here on temporary care so she could get a break. Her sister wanted her to go to Florida.
You’ve been good to me Grant. We had nothing to tie us down Grant.
You could have just driven away and forsaken me. But you didn’t. And I thank you for that.
The company left us high and dry.
Basically he got shoved out. It ended up with them saying he owed them money and when I tried to find out what was what he just went on saying it’s none of my business.
What I think is he was doing...well he was pretty stupid. But I’m not supposed to ask so I shut up.
You’ve been married. You are married. You know how it is. And in the middle of all this we’re supposed to go on this trip with these people and can’t get out of it. And on the trip he takes sick from this virus you’ve never heard of and goes into a coma. So that pretty well gets him off the hook.
You could have just driven away.
Just driven away without a care in the world and forsook me. Forsooken me. Forsaken.
GRANT
Not a chance.
Abriendo al azar, por capricho, sin ningún propósito, los diarios de Ernst Jünger, encuentro esta anotación que hizo en París el 24 de febrero de 1943:
“Hay un morir que es peor que la muerte: consiste en que una persona amada vaya matando dentro de sí la imagen con la que vivíamos en su interior. En esa persona nos extinguimos”.
Lo que se apaga, Antonio Muñoz Molina [Escrito en un instante, 28 de octubre de 2010]
El cine que no inventa, el que indaga en lo real, en este caso los lugares inseguros y dolorosos de la memoria familiar: Stories We Tell, un documental de la gran Sarah Polley, que ya dirigió aquella adaptación impecable de un cuento de Alice Munro, Away from Her, con Julie Christie, bellísima en sus setenta años, con los ojos azules, el perfil y la sonrisa intactos, la mirada de inteligencia y dulzura. Esta vez Sarah Polley hace un retrato familiar en el que se contiene una revelación estremecedora, hermosa y triste a partes iguales, que yo no voy a desvelar. Lo que se recuerda, lo que se ha olvidado, lo que nunca se supo y se descubre al cabo de muchos años, lo que se calla, lo que se dice. El talento de narrar sin inventar lo novelesco de la vida.
Historias que se cuentan, Antonio Muñoz Molina [Escrito en un instante, 15 de mayo de 2013]
Away from Her written by Sarah Polley
Based on the short story "The Bear Came over the Mountain" by Alice Munro
The Bear Came over the Mountain by Alice Munro
The New Yorker, December 27, 1999 - January 3, 2000
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