Swing in the House and Other Stories Page 4

  Finally, he stubbed out his cigarette. Julie walked back to the table, took a paperback novel out of her bag, and pretended to be reading. She felt guilty and exhilarated. When he sat down, they smiled at each other. He took out two folded sheets of paper and handed them to her.

  It was a letter about why he was applying to study at film school. The first page began beautifully.

  “Sehr schön,” Julie said.

  Max repeated the words and smiled, nodding. She scrambled around in her memory for more German words, but couldn’t find any at all.

  The second page of the letter suddenly shifted into a mess of grammatical and spelling errors and run-on sentences.

  “This isn’t so good,” she said apologetically, and noticed that he looked very disappointed. “Nope, nicht so gut.” She felt very strange; everything felt strange. She wondered if she were speaking gibberish. She decided not to ask the obvious: was the first page heavily edited by a friend, or simply copied from a book? How could Max think she would fail to notice?

  He leaned over and handed her another piece of folded paper. She opened it—it was blank—and heard a click. She looked up to see he was holding a camera.

  “Don’t like having your picture taken, do you? Oh, wonderful, here comes my sandwich.”

  He devoured his food in the space of a few seconds.

  Then he looked at her with glinting wolfish eyes as if she were next.

  “That must have been good,” she said. “What kind of sandwich was that?”

  “Meat,” he said, and licked his lips.

  Julie was appalled. She made an excuse to go home.

  “Zo, I will make the corrections you ask for. Then we could meet again, if you have the time?”

  They made an appointment to meet in two days. Two days, Julie thought, would give her time to calm down. Then she wondered why exactly she needed to calm down.

  She decided that exercise might help her with whatever this was. Mike was already a member of a gym near his workplace. She hired a babysitter one evening and joined Mike in the weight room. She got on an exercise bike and looked across and watched her husband sitting on a leg-lift machine, forcing his poor, battered knees to perform. Their eyes met and he smiled a little. A man working out between her exercise bike and where Mike was sitting seemed to think the smile was for him, and he went over and talked to Mike. She smiled as she watched her husband gamely flirt back.

  Afterwards, though, the thaw in their relationship disappeared. In the car heading home, Julie made a crack about how long he had taken to get changed.

  “What were you doing in that shower? What kind of man takes twice as long as his wife?”

  He just glared at her. He clearly took it as a jibe, and not the light joke it had been intended to be. Oh no, thought Julie. Our marriage is like one long culture shock.

  She met Max again at the same café. Outside the big window, rain fell like ink, blackening the day. Max was shivering. He had got soaked on his motorbike and his leather outfit was even glossier than usual. He sipped his hot coffee, holding the cup with shaking red hands, as Julie read over his work.

  “Better?”

  “Yes,” Julie said. “But what is this word?”

  They huddled together over the page. He smelled of tobacco and cold. She pointed to the letters “uge.” The sentence said, “For many years I have felled the uge to be behind the camera, as opposed to somewhere of in a workshop constructing props for the directerr.”

  “Uhge,” Max said. “I felt zuh uhge.”

  Julie smiled at him and corrected his spelling. His smile was so big it just barely fit his face. She tried to recall the last time Mike had smiled at her like that.

  “Cold?” she asked.

  “Ya, zis is some ugly weather,” he said, with an exaggerated shudder. He made a funny little whirring noise, a foreign sort of noise.

  Julie asked him if he had gone to the library to pick up the practice university entrance tests he had mentioned.

  “Ach no. I will, though.”

  So they would see each other another time. Julie felt something leap happily in her chest.

  “Well, I don’t want to waste any more of your time,” he said, taking both of their coffee bills and standing up.

  So soon? Julie thought. She kept smiling. Everybody, she told herself, looked better with a smile.

  He sneezed as he picked up his helmet and shook the water off his gloves.

  “Can I ask you another favour?” he asked.

  She nodded. He showed her a card from an art gallery on Venables Street. He wanted to know if she would drive him there. She agreed.

  In the car, he asked her if she wanted to go to the gallery.

  “Inside, I mean,” he said.

  “I don’t know…”

  “It is of the German Dada.”

  “I don’t know much about art,” Julie said.

  “Me neither. But I know a little. I will show you. It is my turn.”

  As soon as they were enclosed together in the car, Julie felt nervous and embarrassed. The car seemed to fill with Max’s wetleather cigarette smell; the space they occupied together seemed too small, too intimate. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed that his hands were still trembling despite the warmth of the car, and that he would not look in her direction at all.

  The rain stopped as Julie parked. Light appeared in the sky. They walked past functional, ordinary, graceless city structures: mega-pharmacy, hardware store, laundromat, drycleaners. And, perhaps because of this ugly backdrop, something happened. Julie, catching her reflection in a window, was suddenly able to find beauty in herself. She saw a softness in her features that she liked. She allowed herself to notice Max too, how his hair was badly cut and attractively dishevelled, how the lines on his face seemed thoughtful. He had been looking at his boots, hands in pockets of shiny black pants, but now he turned, looked at her and finally smiled at her again in his generous way. It was as if a lighted mirror had been placed before her. She saw how the mist was making her hair curl, wavy strands pulling free of ties and barrettes, how slender her arms were, and how absurdly bare on this cold grey morning. She shivered and hugged herself. He put his arm around her and they entered the gallery. She felt a shock shoot through her arm and wondered if he could feel it. She also wondered if they looked like a couple.

  Inside, Max and the woman behind the counter kissed hello and exchanged a few words in German. Julie asked him a moment later how they knew each other, but he shook his head and shrugged.

  The gallery was cream-coloured, with spotless carpets that sloped into different rooms. The walls were glass; the pictures exhibited on long, rectangular panels. Each picture was a collage of photographs of European politicians, of whom Julie could recognize only three—and speech bubbles. Max chuckled to himself as he wandered around the room.

  Julie felt stupid. Max walked ahead of her for a moment, and then turned and looked into her eyes. She remembered how he had greeted the unknown German woman, and turned away.

  But then he touched her arm, said, “Come,” in a quiet voice, and with gentle patience, told her everything he knew about the “German Dada,” which turned out to be a lot.

  After failing yet another college-entry English test, Max called Julie and asked for more help. They met a few times, and he was suitably serious. But always late.

  One day, toward the end of their meeting, she looked around at the series of canvasses on the wall of the café. They depicted scenes from a particularly bloody nightmare. Ghoulish, stricken faces, loads of red paint. She asked Max what he thought of them.

  “Not much,” he answered, shrugging, “but maybe I just can’t relate to them somehow.”

  “I have a present for you,” Julie said.

  Max greeted this news the way a child would. His face betrayed no surprise, only a kind of entitlement, but his grin was nevertheless wide and excited.

  “Well,” he said, pulling at her sleeve from across the t
able, “what is it? What is it?”

  Julie had done an outrageous thing. She had bought him a watch. An artsy sort of watch—turquoise strap, Matisse-like cut-out figure, running around the face. She had spent almost a hundred dollars on someone she barely knew. The fact was not lost on Max, she realized. A fleeting look. Then, back to his breezy, charming manner.

  “Thank you. How sweet of you. Oh wonderful, here comes my sandwich.”

  Before they parted, Max invited Julie to a party the following Friday night. Julie wondered about this all the way home, and then all week. She wondered if Mike would care, and whether or not she wanted him to.

  When she got home, before she could take her coat off, Paul ran to her, shouting excitedly.

  “Somebody called three times, Mummy,” Paul told her, showing her three fingers.

  The teenage babysitter apologized for letting him answer the phone.

  Julie reassured her. “Nobody ever calls, hence the excitement,” she explained.

  “She said she wanted to speak to Daddy,” Paul added.

  Julie put her purse on a chair and then leaned against it for a moment.

  “Who?” she asked.

  “Don’t remember,” Paul said, suddenly more interested in a bag of licorice the babysitter had just opened. “She had a funny name. A name like a sneeze.”

  On Friday night Patty called to tell Julie she was going to the party.

  “And you wanted to know if we would babysit?” Julie asked.

  “Hey, it’s okay. My parents said they would if you couldn’t.” She went on to ask her if she wanted to come along.

  “Oh, you figured you’d invite me at the last minute,” Julie said. Something red was rising in her. She told her that she was going too, that someone else had invited her, and that Mike had agreed to watch Paul.

  “What?” Patty laughed, incredulous. “Who invited you?”

  Julie realized she had painted herself into a corner. She needed to control herself. Patty’s laughter was triggering more of this surprising anger.

  “I can’t talk about it right now,” she muttered into the phone. She felt like a character in a film, one with secrets. “I’ll see you later.”

  Mike frowned but said nothing. Julie noticed that he had mashed potatoes in his hair. Paul was screaming, singsong, “Mummy, Mummy, Mummy,” and Julie wondered vaguely how long he had been calling her. The sinks and counters were so full of dirty dishes and pots that they had started a new pile on the floor.

  I have to get out of here, Julie thought. If I don’t, I’m going to turn into one of those mothers in the newspapers who drive their kids into a lake.

  The stereo was blaring. Julie wondered if Max could hear his doorbell. The door opened; Max grinned, then shook his sleeve and lifted his arm to show her his wrist. The watch.

  “Right on time,” he said.

  Julie blushed, and was grateful that the apartment was barely lit. The music was even louder now that she was inside. It was dark, thrusting and male, but also pretty, melodic and bittersweet.

  “Sorry,” Max said unexpectedly, and turned down the volume. Somehow the effect continued to emanate from Max’s eyes, which were at once ice-cold and wolfish, long-lashed and sensitive.

  Julie told him she liked the music and asked if he would make her a tape.

  “Yes, of course. I am delighted. Whiskey?”

  “I’m driving,” Julie reminded him.

  “Ya, okay. You drive, I drink.” He took a sip of his drink, made a face. “That’s enough.”

  “Patty’s going to this party, isn’t she?” Julie said.

  “Is she?” Max said. He thought for a moment. “Ah, but I have just thought of another party we can go to!”

  Who would have thought, after getting married and having a kid, Julie would be driving down city streets late on a Saturday night, a foreign stranger next to her with his smell of cigarettes, leather and whiskey. Where were they going? Max gestured, right here, straight ahead, left, right.

  As they got out of the car, Max let out a yelp and began to run. At the entrance of a nondescript warehouse, a tall, bland-featured man wearing glasses and a trenchcoat stood. Max whooped, jumped into the man’s arms, and turned to Julie to beckon her forward.

  “Come, Julie. Meet my very good friend Brian.”

  Inside, a tiny man wearing a fedora recited poetry on stage, backed by a jazz quartet. Brian picked up one of Julie’s hands and looked into her eyes.

  “Brian’s a great photographer,” Max said. “He likes very much to look at people.”

  Brian ignored him and examined Julie’s hand.

  “Do you play the piano, Julie?” he asked.

  “Yes, a little,” Julie said, giggling. She felt like an impostor. She wasn’t a student, an artist or a musician. She was a married woman with a kid. She wasn’t even unemployed.

  “But you don’t have one, do you?” Brian said.

  “A piano? No. Can you tell that from looking at my hands too?”

  He ignored the question, and instead announced that he was going to Russia.

  “Have a nice time,” Julie said. She turned to watch the poet and the band.

  “I could leave my piano at your house, if you’d like,” he said. “Then you could play.”

  “What’s he saying to you, that one?” Max asked, as if Brian weren’t there.

  Brian explained about the piano.

  “Would you like to have a piano?” Max asked her now.

  “I’d love to,” Julie said, as if accepting an invitation to a ball. Then she realized how much she actually would. She thought of Mike at home, watching TV, how lonely it was when Paul went to bed, how long it had been since she had played, how beautiful a room seemed when filled with the romantic, rippling peals of a piano.

  To her surprise, both Brian and Max were watching her face, not speaking.

  “I don’t have a truck or anything,” she said. “And we’d need a lot of people. I don’t even know anybody.”

  Max was nodding thoughtfully. The poet and band had left the stage. The three of them sat together, not talking. She glanced at Max’s face, and remembered, with a pang, falling in love with Mike.

  She drove Max home about three hours past her normal bedtime. She had had one drink all evening, but it was so late that fatigue and inebriation were indistinguishable; she felt transported, if only into another time zone. It had been so long since she’d driven along roads so still, through a night so black. Devoid of traffic, the streets flew by swiftly, and, as if by magic, the car arrived at Max’s street.

  Max asked her if she had enjoyed the poetry. There had been a few different people on stage, but she could no longer remember any of them.

  “Yes, did you?”

  “No,” he said, yawning. “I wasn’t really listening.”

  “Are you really going to bring me a piano?” she asked, as he leaned over to give her a polite peck on the cheek.

  He paused. “Ya, that should be a fun thing.”

  “And are you going to want piano lessons too?” she blurted out.

  He laughed. “Ya, ya, I saw that movie too.”

  She reached out, touched one of his cheeks and gave him a small kiss on the lips.

  He didn’t react as if he had been bitten. He wanted more. She said, “Sorry.” He took the hint and got out of the car.

  A September day. Bright, but chilly, like a morning. Mike took the day off work to go to the dentist’s and to an eye specialist. Julie dropped him off at the dentist’s, ran some errands and then picked him up from the eye doctor’s. They had twenty-five minutes to kill before it was time to get Paul, so Julie suggested to Mike, as if to a stranger, to have a cup of coffee somewhere together.

  They sat across from each other in silence. Julie played a little game with herself: I won’t speak unless Mike actually says something to me. But there was no sound from Mike, aside from the cold metal ring of his spoon hitting the side of his mug. They sat like that until
it was almost time to go. Then, suddenly, Julie couldn’t take it anymore.

  “Why are we still together?” she blurted out.

  “Hmmmm?” Mike met her eyes, and looked more amused than surprised.

  She felt lost, felt like she could float away. She hoped he would give her a definitive answer that would nail her to the ground.

  And he did.

  “Because of our son.” His gaze was a cool warning.

  Julie thought of all the other things he could have said: We love each other. We make love. Because despite the cold silence they lived in, they still sought out each other’s heat in the night, unthinking, unconscious, like two animals of a lower species. Underwater creatures.

  “So what if one of us meets someone else?” she asked, fighting back tears.

  “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

  Julie thought of an excuse to call Max. He liked art galleries. She would invite him to visit the VAG.

  He agreed. They met downtown. He was wearing his leather gear, a t-shirt that said, “Shoot clean, fuck safe,” two silk scarves around his neck, and, around his waist, a seat belt that seemed to have come from an airplane. She heard Patty’s voice in her head: “He is so cool.”

  The display puzzled her at first. A shelf of glass bottles filled with beads, a woven rug, thatched walls. Then, on a small wicker table, an open copy of National Geographic with what seemed to be a photograph of that scene. They walked on, visiting more scenes from life in the Third World.

  “They’re good, aren’t they?” Julie said. She wasn’t sure what she was looking at.

  “Mmmm,” said Max. “It’s pretty much what I do.”

  “Oh, that’s right. You’re a set builder.”

  “Ya, they give me a picture, like this, and I just copy it.”

  “That’s amazing. How do you know what kind of materials to use? How do you know where to begin?”

  “The cheapest. The cheapest materials, the cheapest way. As long as it looks good, they’re happy. But it’s all fake, of course. Just blow on it,”—he paused and blew— “and it all falls down.”