Pleased to Meet You / The Sky is Falling Read online

  Contents

  Falling

  Petit Mal

  Hauska Tutustua

  Ring Ring

  Spleenless

  Knives

  Mr. Justice

  Shhh: 3 Stories About Silence

  The Maternity Suite

  Pleased to Meet You

  Falling

  Because the underwriter’s wife scraped three long stripes of paint off the side of the car while pulling into a stall next to a concrete pillar in an underground parking garage. Normally she used the van, but had taken the car to return the videos specifically because it was easier to park. She was rueful and the underwriter philosophical and the next day she kept the car so she could take it to the autobody shop for an estimate.

  Because the underwriter took the bus.

  Before he left the house he filled his pockets with change. To the musical accompaniment of loonies and quarters, he walked the three blocks to the stop. After a not unreasonable wait, the bus came and beached itself against the curb and the underwriter got on, lightening his pockets according to the fare schedule on the box.

  Because he made the mistake of taking one of the sideways-facing seats you had to forfeit to the elderly and disabled, which then necessitated that he look at every person boarding to see if they fit this category.

  Because, when too many of them looked back into the morning face of the underwriter, he lifted his not-enough-coffee-yet gaze instead to the advertisements running above the heads of the passengers across the aisle. Marsden Business College A Step in the Right Direction Breathe Clear with Claritin Trouble With Your Tax Forms? Help Is on the Way

  The underwriter read the poem. He read it for the same reason he read the advertisements.

  Because, initially, he thought it was an advertisement too.

  He read it a second time quite differently but found he understood it even less. Intrigued then, he wondered what it, a thing that existed purely for its own sake, not exactly serving the public good, not selling anything either, was even doing on the bus. Did people still write poetry? Evidently. A woman’s name was appended to the poem. Didn’t she feel exposed? Why not just get on the bus naked and ride it all over town?

  Because, while the bus trawled its way downtown, the underwriter kept on reading the poem. He read it fifteen times at least, then got off at his stop and walked the four long blocks to his office.

  By then, the poem was gone.

  Because he felt the way he might have if his briefcase had been open shedding papers along the way. Except, of course, he couldn’t retrace his steps and retrieve the poem. Where did these things go? Is there a void that will really never fill despite all the keys and birthdays and glasses and names, even sometimes of his own children, that are dropped in it? Despairing, he happened then to glance up at the building’s towering mirrored sides.

  And two lines of the poem came back.

  Because he’d just experienced first-hand the transitory nature of memory. Because he was at the age when brain cells die as silently as butterflies in a sudden frost. Because some days he really couldn’t get the names of his own kids straight. He muttered the two lines over and over until he was safely inside and up the elevator and in his own office where he could write them down.

  His wife called a few hours later to tell him how much it was going to cost to have the side of the car repainted. They discussed whether to bother going through the insurance company and his wife apologized again for damaging the car. She was an admirable woman in so many ways, but hopeless in this one respect, particularly parallel parking, which sometimes sent her circling a block for a quarter hour in search of a double spot.

  After he hung up, the underwriter wished he’d thought to read the salvaged lines of the poem to his wife, but felt too foolish to call her back. Instead he summoned the secretary on the pretext of a dictation. She was new to the office, supplied by a temp agency. The underwriter didn’t know much about her other than she had rings in her face and knit surreptitiously under her desk. Despite the jokes cracked behind the boardroom’s closed doors, the general consensus in the firm was that knitting cancelled out face jewellery.

  The secretary came in and took the seat across from him, cardiganned shoulders hunched against the arctic air conditioning, ready with a pad and pen.

  “Falling is not so easy as it looks from the ground.”

  The secretary took it down. She was left-handed.

  “We descend, we descend, only to rise skyward to ourselves.”

  She wrote it as a second sentence, though in the poem they weren’t even consecutive lines.

  “That’s it,” the underwriter said when she looked up for more.

  He expected some kind of reaction—why? He didn’t expect a reaction to a contract amendment or a memo. She closed the pad and stood to go. Disappointed, he got up too and turned to face the floor-to-ceiling windows. Twenty-seven storeys below, the poem was being conveyed through the city on public transit. He thought of celebrations in hot Catholic places where the statue of a saint is hoisted onto believing shoulders and paraded through the streets. Years ago, the underwriter and his wife had honeymooned in Mexico.

  “They don’t open.”

  He turned to the secretary. “What?”

  She came over and stood beside him and neither said a thing. Then the secretary placed both her hands on the view and leaned into it until her whole body flattened against the smoked glass. Click went her eyebrow ring.

  “Don’t be afraid,” she said.

  The underwriter’s palms were wet. They left ghosts of themselves on the glass. He moved closer, pressing a cheek against the cool surface, afraid indeed—to look down, to test the pane with his weight.

  Finally, he let himself go.

  Because the windows were sealed and the poem perfectly safe.

  “It’ll be ready on Thursday,” said the underwriter’s wife at dinner.

  “Fine.”

  “You’ll have to take the bus again.”

  There was no question; his wife drove the kids to school. After school, she drove the older boy to soccer and the younger to the pool and in between she ran a home-based business making lamp-shades for which she needed the van for deliveries and to pick up materials.

  “I don’t mind,” the underwriter said.

  “You are too good.” She leaned over and kissed him and was catcalled for it by their sons who were twelve and ten and hostile to love though still very much in need of it. The underwriter remembered how it felt to be a boy. The older one, who understood about sex now, was at that age when the thought of intercourse between his parents was revolting. The underwriter laughed and wondered if he was going to have intercourse with the mother of his sons tonight or would she be too tired, who could blame her?

  Because that night she climbed into bed smelling of face cream and immediately shut off the light rather than forcing herself to read because she was always the one in her book club who hadn’t finished the book.

  “I put my thing in,” she said.

  The underwriter pulled her on top of him and nuzzled her breasts. He used his thumb until she warmed up, then flipped her onto her back. At the moment of her climax, he whispered in her ear, “We descend, we descend . . .”

  “Oh!” she cried out. “Oh!”

  The second day he took the bus, the underwriter’s wife stopped bellowing to the boys to get out of bed and came to the door to say goodbye. “What was that you said to me last night?”

  “A line from a poem.”

  “A poem!” Delight erased a decade off her face. He would have pulled her to him and recited it again right there in the
hall, but he didn’t want to miss the bus.

  Because he was anxious to copy down the rest of the poem.

  He looked for it as soon as he boarded.

  “Where is what?” the driver asked.

  “Yesterday there was a poem.”

  “Not on this bus.”

  He did a reckless thing then. He pulled the cord and got off at the next stop with the paper tongue of the transfer in his hand. Ten minutes later another poemless bus came.

  It wasn’t important, he decided. It wasn’t the end of the world. Life would go on. On it would go.

  He was late for work. When he came in, the secretary smiled at him because of what had happened the day before. He hurried past, closed his office door, laid his head on the desk. Milk, eggs, hot dog buns Breathe Clear with Claritin You and your means the person(s) Insured on the Declarations page and, while living in the same household, his or her wife or husband, the relatives of either and Puppy Chow, for a full year, till he’s full-grown!

  Because his mind teemed with words.

  Because he had two lines and not a syllable more.

  That night the underwriter fell. He’d been standing at his office window working up the nerve to lean. Too late, he discovered the glass had been removed. Down he tumbled, yet it was not the terrifying sensation he’d assumed. He actually enjoyed the wind on his face and the attention gravity paid him, so confident was he that, somewhere below, the poem was there to break his fall.

  He woke to the sound of crying. Beside him his wife lay deafened by orange foam earplugs.

  “Daddy!”

  He leapt out of bed and followed his son’s cries down the hall. It was his younger boy, the ten-year-old, whom they couldn’t in all fairness forbid to play the computer games his older brother was allowed. The underwriter sat on the bed and, taking the trembling boy in his arms, kissed his forehead and rocked him, as though he were a baby. Even as he was comforting the boy, he envied him his cartoon nemeses, masked and bazookaed villains, dog-headed monsters, zeros and ones on a chip. All day the underwriter had fought off adult demons—loss, disappointment, futility. He was not normally a moody person. His wife had given him a look over dinner in response to some curt thing he’d said. Probably she was wondering what had happened to the great lover of the night before.

  “Shh,” said the underwriter. “Shh.”

  He remembered pacing at night with his son when he was just a few weeks old and colicky, his angry baby fists waving. All at once an image came to him—what the secretary was knitting under her desk.

  A tiny blue mitten.

  “Falling is not so easy as it looks from the ground,” whispered the underwriter to his son, who instantly stopped crying to say, “Wha?”

  “It lies there on the snow, small thing—” He strained. “—small thing, all we have ever lost.”

  The boy sniffed loudly and relaxed in the underwriter’s arms.

  “We descend, we descend . . .”

  He kept repeating the three lines over and over until the boy fell back to sleep.

  The underwriter drove to work the next day. He stopped at the secretary’s desk when he got in, in case he’d seemed rude the day before. She was knitting openly now. No one cared as long as she answered the phone. “What are you making?” he asked.

  “A scarf.” She lifted it to show him, a long orange swath.

  “You finished the mittens.”

  “What?”

  “Weren’t you knitting mittens yesterday?”

  “God no. I’m just a beginner.”

  The underwriter stared at her, then walked off shaking his head.

  Because he was in a much better frame of mind today. The night before, sitting in his son’s room waiting for his breathing to deepen to the point of no return, he’d remembered the name of the poet. It was an easy name for him, his wife’s middle name in fact, grafted onto a revered former prime minister’s. On his lunch break he walked to a big downtown bookstore.

  Because he found nothing by that author.

  “I can order it for you,” the clerk said.

  Because, walking back to the office, he decided to phone the poet. His hands grew clammy. The poet was a woman, true, but it wasn’t going to be that kind of call. Still, the underwriter felt disloyal, as he had the day before yesterday standing at the window with the secretary. He remembered how easy his wife had made it for him all those years ago. He’d been in love with someone else and rejected. How grateful he was for how his life had turned out. Last year the underwriter’s wife had discovered a lump in her breast, but it had been, thank God, benign.

  The secretary was still at lunch when he got back to the office. He opened her desk drawer and took the phone book out from under a ball of orange wool.

  His wife sounded breathless when she answered, likely from running up the basement stairs. Her workroom was down there.

  “Did one of the kids ever lose a mitten?”

  “Probably.” She didn’t sound annoyed until he told her that he loved her. “What is going on?” she cried.

  While he was reassuring his wife that everything was fine, he looked the poet up in the phone book.

  His wife said, “You’ve been working too hard.” She said, “I’d like you to see a doctor.”

  There were several listings with the same initial. He picked, wrongly, the one paired with what he imagined was a poet’s address. On the second try a woman answered. He said her name and she responded. He said, “The poet?” and she laughed. “Ye-es. Who’s this?”

  He’d expected a different voice, a wounded voice, a voice raw and wise. She sounded like a teenaged girl. He was less nervous now.

  “I read your poem on the bus.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “I only remember three of the lines. I was hoping you could read it to me. I’d like to write it down.” He had a pen in hand, a piece of paper ready.

  “Get away,” she said. “Who is this?”

  “Really.”

  “Okay then. What three lines do you remember?”

  He told them to her.

  “Say the last one again,” she said.

  “It lies there on the snow, small thing, all we have ever lost.”

  “Hey. That’s good.”

  “No. That’s all I remember.”

  “I mean the line is good.”

  The underwriter scratched his confused head. “That’s not what you wrote?”

  After he finished talking to the poet, he sat at his desk jotting notes so he wouldn’t forget.

  Because I remember how it felt to be a boy.

  Because, the first time, her breasts smelled like vanilla.

  Because I went out walking that heartbroken winter and found a mitten in the snow.

  With thanks to Elizabeth Brewster

  Petit Mal

  First the pentagram. It preoccupies Inge all day. Then out of the blue she remembers the girls. In the middle of Seniors’ Aquafit. In her mind’s eye they rise out of the crystal and chlorinated waters of the Kerrisdale pool while Denise, the instructor, calls out, “Small circles, small circles!” and bops in the water with them to Tommy Dorsey.

  “Now travel back! Travel back!”

  There were two of them, Inge remembers as she travels back. Nine or ten years old, dressed alike in knee socks and shorts and sleeveless blouses knotted at the midriff. One had sandy ponytails like spaniel ears, the way Inge used to do her daughter Lisa’s hair. The other girl was dark and wore barrettes. Both were thin, the lighter one taller. Being older, they weren’t friends of Lisa, but they went to Elm Park Elementary too, and Lisa knew their names. Lisa was in grade two. Wallace was only in kindergarten, which means this happened thirty-five years ago.

  In the pool directly in front of Inge is a woman with ash-flavoured cotton candy for hair. She seems to have fallen asleep in the chest-deep water, poor soul. She’s not moving at all.

  Denise: “Knee
s up! One, two, three, four!”

  Inge marches under water.

  After class Inge showers in the tiled room. There are no individual stalls. Most of the women shower in their bathing suits, though a few, like Inge, are not so modest. “I saw you at the symphony,” someone says.

  The water is running in Inge’s ears and she’s straining for concrete facts: names, the street they lived on. Is it possible she sent Lisa and Wallace away with the girls without even asking where?

  “Yoo-hoo?” the woman says.

  Inge comes to, sees deflated breasts, a broad white Caesarean scar. The woman’s voice booms: “Was that your son you were with?”

  Inge, assuming hearing difficulties, nods.

  The woman turns to rinse her front, shouting over her shoulder now. “I didn’t think much of the concert. I don’t like that flowery music. I prefer the Pops. Something you can hum along to.”

  Inge recognizes her now by the flaps of mottled skin over her shoulder blades. Useless fins. The one who fell asleep in class. Inge turns the shower off, wrings out her suit then gives the chatty woman a polite smile as she heads for the change room.

  A minute later the woman joins her, towelling herself and picking up the too-loud conversation where it left off. She raises a sizable pair of nylon underpants at arm’s length. “I told the friend who brought me, ‘There’s that elegant lady from Aquafit.’ I said I thought it was nice that your son would give up a Sunday afternoon to go to the symphony with his old mom. If it was your son, that is. He could have been your boyfriend.”

  “Hardly.” Inge steps into her mules and hastens for the dryers.

  “Why not? The things people get up to these days.”

  The hot blasting air is a short-lived refuge. Inge’s cropped hair dries before the machine shuts off.

  Her name is Sheila, she tells Inge after she has followed her to the bathroom. Toilet paper sticks to the wet floor like bleached entrails tossed down to be read. Sheila looks at it. “Disgusting! Is your son married?”

  They stand before the mirror, Inge a head taller. Sheila pulls a cotton turban over her damp grey, plucks free a fringe at her forehead. Inge puts on her earrings, feeling for the holes. If she refuses to answer these nosy questions, next week will be strained. She enjoys the class very much. She always sleeps well on Wednesday night.