|
|
Eric Morgan
They Left and are Left
It rained the day they all met in Toronto. The first real rain of the year, welcomed because it was not snow and because it signaled a changing of the seasons, a spinning of the earth into a milder mood, forgiveness. Returning generals are greeted with showers of tickertape. Returning friends are greeted with showers of raindrops sneezing from the sky.
No, friend is the wrong word, for no single, pure bond like that ever ran between them. It was muddier. You could not separate all the strands that wove back and forth and you could not give name to any of them. Acquaintance is the wrong word too, because that makes it sounds as if they communicated by letter and wore bodices, holding each other at arms length. They did not do that sort of thing. They were modern and young. They knew what they were against and could bluff what they were for. She did not wear a bodice and they had not spoken since they had last seen each other, two years away now, an ever-widening time. The only thing that can be said is that once, in the same space of time, a common time to all three, they had known each other, not necessarily deeply or in totality, but they had known each other in a naked sort of way, free from deceit and pretense and all other things adult. Each knew the other's core. Each knew of what basic elements the others were composed. Humor and laughter. Love and hate. Viciousness and vengeance. Intelligence and feeling. Each had seen, in a clear flash, straight to the center of another. And they had been perplexed and unprepared. Two were lovers. Two were brothers. Two were very close.
For you see, they had all been born in Toronto. They had all gone to school together. Now some had left and some had stayed and some would return and some would leave yet. But they had, during the close of their childhood, known each other and now they would meet again, a certain time passed without contact, to take stock of each other and resolve. Yes, resolve, for you see each had an axe to grind, a bone to pick, a hatchet to bury, with one of the others. A pain to be revisited and thereby repaired. Each wanted to see how the core that they knew had manifested itself outwardly. Do people's fundamentals change? I wonder if I have really ever known anyone. This trio, however, most certainly did, though it took them each a while to realize what they had seen.
Once Jacqueline and Peter had bought coffee together on a March day. Jacqueline remembered this as she sat in her dorm room, in front of a mirror, putting her hair up into some loopy sculpture. A girl down the hall had advised her how to do it. Normally it was pulled back simply and sensibly, no fuss, absolutely no nonsense. An economy of appearance. Her hair was black. Her eyes were blue. She had to borrow the clips and things from the girl down the hall. The coffee cup sat on the table beside her. She had woken up early and worked the whole day through, though the university was on break for a week. In the pause she would catch up. She had the gait of a prize pony, bouncing and energetic and fun, but she had the work ethic of a mule, pulling stubbornly, straining against the weight of work. Sometimes it showed in her face, or else in her voice. Sometimes, amid the cheery laughter, she would let slip an impatient remark, curt and cutting, like a knife through flesh, bitter, and then she would retract it, embarrassed, as if someone else had spoken inappropriately. She worked really hard, all the time. She was a serious student. She drank coffee now because she was flagging and would need some kick to keep her pleasant through the night. She wanted to shine. She did her best with what she had been given. She was looking forward to getting to see the others tonight. Particularly Peter.
During high school, Peter and Jacqueline had been quite the couple. Everyone knew that they were a step apart from the usual romantic happenings that normally transpired at that age (furtive, clenching dances, passionate one week affairs that ended without consummation in a kiss). Already a future projected before the two of them like headlights before a car, stretching out into the darkness of tomorrows. He would become a lawyer. She would become a music teacher. They would marry. They would have a happy family.
"I feel as if I am at the top of a long, gentle hill," Jacqueline had told her friends, who had all nodded at the shared accomplishment, the assertion of attraction between the sexes. "It rolls on forever."
Then, one March day in their last year of high school, they had bought coffee. Afterwards they had walked along the street through the soft falling snow, she swinging giddily, he steady and stiff.
"Thanks for the coffee," she said with a hopeful smile.
He did not answer. What he said next he said with a clenched jaw, speaking through his teeth.
"I've decided I'm going to Harvard."
"Harvard?" she said, her voice surprised and falling, as if she had been caught off guard and pushed off a cliff.
"Yes."
"You know what that means, don't you?" she questioned, daintily testing.
"Yes."
"Harvard's in Boston."
"Cambridge, actually."
"I don't care."
He didn't say anything to her. He didn't look at her.
A well-dressed girl passed them and he imperceptibly turned his eyes to watch this other girl swish by. But Jacqueline did notice. She was scrutinizing his face, intensely reading his atrophied jaw, his blunt, square words, his fixed marble eyes.
"I can't come with you."
"I know."
"Is it because I won't sleep with you?"
"No."
"Because I'm not going to now."
Again, he did not speak, as if he didn't think he was expected to, as if he didn't think she expected him to. She wanted him to. But he did not. The exchange was cold and terse and sad, and it was over. All that was left was to clean up.
"So you've decided?"
"Yes."
"But why?"
She still mistakenly thought that if she knew the reason, she could begin to work at reversing it, turning around his decision like wrestling a snake, grabbing it by the end tail as it writhed and curled to escape or attack.
"We've been over this."
"You've never spoken to me about this."
"You could see it coming."
"But why are you doing it?"
"We're two people, and we'll never be one."
"That's not true."
What she said next she said because it was the only thing she could think of. She knew it sounded stupid even before she had finished speaking and, clumsily putting on dark mascara two years in the future in a university dorm room, she would still blush at her idiocy.
"A worm has two hearts."
"What?"
She could not repeat it. She was too embarrassed and she knew she had lost.
"Sometimes you're just silly."
"But why are you really doing this?" was all she could say, repeating again her incomprehension in a stupid stutter.
He did not answer.
He had walked away and left her bewildered and alone. She meant, tonight, to erase what was inexplicable to her. Listening to the rain, she put the brush down on the table.
Peter had picked up his bag at the airport. The flight had been sparsely bought and he had been able to sleep on the way in to Toronto. His mother and father had been waiting for him, all tears and hugs and pride.
They asked him about his flight.
"Did they feed you?"
"Never mind, I've got a great spread prepared for you."
They asked him how school was, though he spoke to them regularly on the phone.
"Do they feed you okay at the dining hall?"
"Of course they do. Hell, for what we're paying, not only should they be cooking for you, they should be eating for you too." A clatter of laughter like someone dropping steel pipes. "Hey, Marilyn, did you hear what I said? Eating for him too."
Also waiting for Peter was his brother, Stephen, the triangle's third point. You see, Stephen and Peter were twins, but they looked so dissimilar they couldn't convince anyone that they were even cousins. In a comic moment of revelation and confidence, even their mother would admit her doubts.
There had never been any open feud between Peter and his brother. Nevertheless, they had ceased to speak to each other when Peter went to Harvard and Stephen had taken up music at U of T. Just as a friendship springs up bridge-like between two people, so too can silence. When Peter phoned, if Stephen was at the home, he lightly declined to speak to him. Never with malice, only casually, as if he didn't want to bother Peter with the sound of his voice. It could wait. Postponed forever into never.
The truth was that, beneath the silent civility, Peter hated Stephen. Peter hated Stephen because Stephen excelled him in the things he cared about. Stephen had been born first, three minutes earlier, and Peter could never catch up. This hatred animated every one of Peter's choices and decided every one of his decisions, heavy hate tipping, if not toppling any scale. An enemy must be a certain proximity to you, within a certain distance, a certain range of familiarity. You have to know at least one thing about someone in order to hate them, even if it is only their name or face. A brother can be at this distance.
Peter was better at sports, but Peter didn't care about sports. If only his tongue or his brain had been as coordinated as his other muscles. Stephen was better at school. Whatever Peter got, add ten and that was Stephen's result. Stephen was better behaved, better liked among the guys. He was at ease among the girls while Peter was obstinate and awkward. Peter was desperately happy to have found Jacqueline because it removed him with dignity from that arena of competition. His own body was an accomplice as well in removing him from other arenas where the two brothers were compared. When they were very young, maybe twelve or thirteen, around the time that Peter and Jacqueline met, Peter began having a strange sort of attack at regular, predictable intervals. Before a test or before a party, he would get a terrific stabbing pain in his stomach, a hot, hard blade of flame burrowed-buried into his belly. His legs and his bowels would quiver like a frightened young dog. He would double over and fall flat, almost unconscious with pain. He would be taken to the doctor and be excused from the test or the party.
Thankfully Harvard was a superlative, a summit from which there was no descending. But it needn't have turned out that way for Peter. Peter had originally decided to study politics at U of T. It was Stephen who was originally going to be the one going to Harvard. Stephen was the smarter one, after all. Peter was glad nevertheless. He would finally be outside Stephen's accomplished swath, removed from a rivalry he could not win and so did not want to continue. Picking universities for them was like that game you can play with pennies. You try to put down the opposite of your opponent; your opponent tries to put down the same as you. Heads, tails or heads, heads. Peter knew Stephen was going to Harvard, so he, Peter, was going to U of T. Anywhere, as long as they weren't together.
But one sunny March afternoon Peter had come into the living room of their beaten-broken old house and said, in a casual, cursory, jealous way, "So, you're all set for Boston, then, eh?"
In an equally casual manner and without looking up from his sheet of notes, Stephen tossed back, "Nope."
The room was filled with sunlight as an aquarium is filled with water, light yellow water
.
"Did you get in?" Peter asked hopefully.
"It doesn't matter."
"So regardless you've decided not to go."
"Yep."
"But why?"
"I'm studying music at U of T."
"But why?"
"I don't have to go to Harvard."
Tonight, although they hadn't spoken, Peter would ask Stephen, again, why.
I needn't bother to mention that Stephen was in love with Jacqueline, because he wasn't exactly. Stephen loved music and Jacqueline was an excellent musician and he often confused the craft and the craftswoman. There was never the full-blown opportunity for love since Jacqueline had always been Peter's girlfriend. Stephen had only known her in that capacity. It wasn't love, so much as a certain warmth that he sometimes wanted to reach out towards her, a gift to give. It was as if sometimes, when he saw her, it was like stepping out into summer sun. Other times when he saw her, at more sudden moments, his stomach would spin like a pinwheel in the wind and he had to go away from her and calm quietly down. He could not forget that she was his brother's girlfriend.
Stephen and Jacqueline had, throughout high school, been in a music band together. It met on Mondays in the morning before school. The chilly teacher would stand in front of them, angrily jabbing the air with a baton like a syringe into a thigh. Jacqueline had accompanied the band on piano. She was brilliant at the piano. Sometimes, when Stephen went with Peter over to her house, Jacqueline would play for hours while her mother sat in a chair next to the piano, watching like a prison warden with stiff-backed severity.
"Beautiful, Jacqueline, beautiful. Now again, do it again once more."
The two boys, the two brothers, did their homework under that same steely gaze, as rabbits hop and crouch under the menacing shadow of a hawk, while Jacqueline played on, working in a different way. Often Stephen would stop midway through what he was doing, not realizing he had paused to listen until he felt the accusatory poke of Jacqueline's mother's stare and he would rush back to work with penitential vigor.
One day, though, Jacqueline's mother did not sit next to her as she played. The adult had left. It was like taking the lid off of a boiling pot, removing to reveal. The froth and bubbles bashfully die down to show the true contents of the water previously on edge, previously under pressure, what really lies within. Jacqueline was free to play and Stephen was free to watch and listen and appreciate. He gazed at her like vanity into a mirror. He marveled at her talent and wished he had a tenth of it but was glad that, since he didn't have, Jacqueline had been the one to get it.
"Is piano going to be your major at university?" he asked hopefully.
"No."
"What will it be then?"
"I haven't decided. I don't think I'll be doing music," she said in a somber tone that sounded new and older to Stephen.
"Why would you ever give up music?"
"I don't know."
"No, really, why?"
"I didn't do it because I loved it."
That night, two years after, the three of them converged like spring-run off rivers at the sea, a confluence of lives running together with common experiences.
"There's something I've been meaning to ask you."
The rain made mirrors with puddles and lit up the streets with reflections of fire. They met at a bar, smoky and hazy vague. They were all slightly older, but still young. They were all slightly distant, but still close enough. And so they went round the table, and discovered.
With a giggle and a sniffle Jacqueline said, "You're going to ruin my mascara."
"I didn't mean to," Peter said.
"Keep talking," Stephen quietly said. "We're not half done yet."
Before going back out into the rain, each understood about the others what they had already known. They all moved backwards and so could move forwards.
Want to respond to this short story? Do it here!
Return to Prose
|
|
|
|
