Too Much Happiness

Deep-Holes

Sally packed devilled eggs-something she hated to take on a picnic, because they were so messy. Ham sandwiches, crab salad, lemon tarts-also a packing problem. Kool-Aid for the children, a half-size Mumm’s for herself and Alex. She would have just a sip, because she was still nursing. She had bought plastic champagne glasses for this occasion, but when Alex spotted her handling them he got the real ones-a wedding present-out of the china cabinet. She protested, but he insisted, and took charge of them himself, the wrapping and packing.

“Dad is really a sort of bourgeois gentilhomme,” Kent was to say to Sally some years later when he was in his teens and acing everything at school. So sure of becoming some sort of scientist that he could get away with spouting French around the house.

“Don’t make fun of your father,” said Sally mechanically.

“I’m not. It’s just that most geologists seem so grubby.”

The picnic was in honor of Alex’s publishing his first solo article in Zeitschrift für Geomorphology. They were going to Osler Bluff because it figured largely in the article, and because Sally and the children had never been there.

They drove a couple of miles down a rough country road-having turned off a decent unpaved country road-and there was a place for cars to park, with no cars in it at present. The sign was roughly painted on a board and needed retouching.

CAUTION. DEEP-HOLES.

Why the hyphen? Sally thought. But who cares?

The entrance to the woods looked quite ordinary and unthreatening. Sally understood, of course, that these woods were on top of a high bluff, and she expected a daunting lookout somewhere. She did not expect to find what had to be skirted almost immediately in front of them.

Deep chambers, really, some as big as a coffin, some much bigger than that, like rooms cut out of the rocks. Corridors zigzagging between them and ferns and mosses growing out of their sides. Not enough greenery, however, to make any sort of cushion over the rubble that seemed so far below. The path went meandering amongst them, over hard earth or shelves of not-quite-level rock.

“Ooee,” came the call of the boys, Kent and Peter, nine and six years old, running ahead.

“No tearing around in here,” called Alex. “No stupid showing off, you hear me? You understand? Answer me.”

They called okay, and he proceeded, carrying the picnic basket and apparently believing that no further fatherly warning was necessary. Sally stumbled along faster than was easy for her, with the diaper bag and the baby Savanna. She couldn’t slow down till she had her sons in sight, saw them trotting along taking sidelong looks into the black chambers, still making exaggerated but discreet noises of horror. She was nearly crying with exhaustion and alarm and some familiar sort of seeping rage.

The outlook did not appear until they had gone along these dirt and rock paths for what seemed to her like half a mile, and was probably a quarter mile. Then there was a brightening, an intrusion of sky, and a halt of her husband ahead. He gave a cry of arrival and display, and the boys hooted with true astonishment. Sally, emerging from the woods, found them lined up on an outcrop above the treetops-above several levels of treetops, as it turned out-with the summer fields spread far below in a shimmer of green and yellow.

As soon as she was put down on her blanket Savanna began to cry.

“Hungry,” said Sally.

Alex said, “I thought she got her lunch in the car.”

“She did. But she’s hungry again.”

She got Savanna latched onto one side and with her free hand unfastened the picnic basket. This was not of course how Alex had planned things. But he gave a good-humored sigh and retrieved the champagne glasses from their wrappings in his pockets, placing them on their sides on a patch of grass.

“Glug-glug I’m thirsty too,” said Kent, and Peter immediately imitated him.

“Glug-glug me too glug-glug.”

“Shut up,” said Alex.

Kent said, “Shut up, Peter.”

Alex said to Sally, “What did you bring for them to drink?”

“Kool-Aid in the blue jug. And the plastic glasses in a napkin underneath.”

Of course Alex believed that Kent had started that nonsense not because he was really thirsty but because he was crudely excited by the sight of Sally’s breast. He thought it was high time Savanna was transferred to the bottle-she was nearly six months old. And he thought Sally was far too casual about the whole procedure, sometimes going around the kitchen doing things with one hand while the infant guzzled. With Kent sneaking peeks and Peter referring to Mommy’s milk jugs. That came from Kent, Alex said. Kent was a sneak and a troublemaker and the possessor of a dirty mind.

“Well, I have to keep doing those things,” said Sally.

“Nursing’s not one of the things you have to do. You could have her on the bottle tomorrow.”

“I will soon. Not quite tomorrow, but soon.”

But here she is, still letting Savanna and the milk jugs dominate the picnic.

The Kool-Aid is poured, then the champagne. Sally and Alex touch glasses, with Savanna in their way. Sally has her sip and wishes she could have more. She smiles at Alex to communicate this wish, and maybe the wish that it would be nice to be alone with him. He drinks his champagne, and as if her sip and smile had been enough to soothe him, he starts in on the picnic. She instructs him as to which sandwiches have the mustard he likes and which have the mustard she and Peter like and which are for Kent who likes no mustard at all.

While this is going on, Kent manages to slip in behind her and finish up her champagne. Peter must have seen him do this, but for some peculiar reason he does not tell on him. Sally discovers what has happened sometime later and Alex never knows about it at all, because he soon forgets there was anything left in her glass and packs it neatly away with his own, while telling the boys about dolomite. They listen, presumably, while they gobble up the sandwiches and ignore the devilled eggs and crab salad and grab the tarts.

Dolomite, Alex says. That is the thick caprock they see. Underneath it is shale, clay turned into rock, very fine, fine grained. Water works through the dolomite and when it gets to the shale it just lies there, it can’t get through the thin layers, the fine grain. So the erosion-that’s the destruction of the dolomite-works and works its way back to the source, eats a channel back, and the caprock develops vertical joints; do they know what vertical means?

“Up and down,” says Kent lackadaisically.

“Weak vertical joints, and they get to lean out and then they leave crevasses behind them and after millions of years they break off altogether and go tumbling down the slope.”

“I have to go,” says Kent.

“Go where?”

“I have to go pee.”

“Oh for God’s sake, go.”

“Me too,” says Peter.

Sally clamps her mouth down on the automatic injunction to be careful. Alex looks at her and approves of the clamping down. They smile faintly at each other.

Savanna has fallen asleep, her lips slack around the nipple. With the boys out of the way, it’s easier to detach her. Sally can burp her, settle her on her blanket, without worrying about an exposed breast. If Alex finds the sight distasteful-she knows he does, he dislikes the whole conjunction of sex and nourishment, his wife’s breast turned into udders-he can look away, and he does.

As she buttons herself up there comes a cry, not sharp but lost, diminishing, and Alex is on his feet before she is, running along the path. Then a louder cry getting closer. It’s Peter.

“ Kent falled in. Kent falled in.”

His father yells, “I’m coming.”

Sally will always believe that she knew at once, even before she heard Peter’s voice she knew what had happened. If any accident happened it would not be to her six-year-old who was brave but not inventive, not a show-off. It would be to Kent. She could see exactly how. Peeing into the hole, balancing on the rim, teasing Peter, teasing himself.

He was alive. He was lying far down in the rubble at the bottom of the crevasse, but he was moving his arms, struggling to push himself up. Struggling so feebly. One leg caught under him, the other oddly bent.

“Can you carry the baby?” she said to Peter. “Go back to the picnic and put her down and watch her. That’s my good boy. My good strong boy.”

Alex was getting down into the hole, scrambling down, telling Kent to stay still. Getting down in one piece was just possible. It would be getting Kent out that was hard.

Should she run to the car and see if there was a rope? Tie the rope around a tree trunk. Maybe tie it around Kent ’s body so she could lift him when Alex raised him up to her.

There wouldn’t be a rope. Why should there be a rope?

Alex had reached him. He bent and lifted him. Kent gave a beseeching scream of pain. Alex draped him around his shoulders, head hanging down on one side and useless legs-one so oddly protruding-on the other. He rose, stumbled a couple of steps, and while still hanging on to Kent dropped onto his knees. He had decided to crawl, and was making his way-Sally could understand this now-to the rubble which partly filled the far end of the crevasse. He shouted some order to her without raising his head, and though she could not make out a single word she understood. She got up off her knees-why was she on her knees?-and pushed through some saplings to the rim where the rubble came to within perhaps three feet of the surface. Alex was crawling along with Kent dangling from him like a shot deer.

She called, “I’m here. I’m here.”

Kent would have to be raised up by his father, pulled to the solid shelf of rock by his mother. He was a skinny boy who had not yet reached his first spurt of growth, but he seemed heavy as a bag of cement. Sally’s arms could not do it on the first try. She shifted her position, crouching instead of lying flat on her stomach, and with the whole power of her shoulders and chest and with Alex supporting and shoving Kent ’s body from behind they heaved him over. Sally fell back with him in her arms and saw his eyes open, roll back in his head as he fainted again.

When Alex had clawed and heaved his way out they collected the other children and drove to the Collingwood Hospital. There seemed to be no internal injury. Both legs were broken. One break was clean, as the doctor put it; the other leg was shattered.

“Kids have to be watched every minute in there,” he said to Sally, who had gone in with Kent while Alex managed the other children. “Haven’t they got any warning signs up?”

With Alex, she thought, he would have spoken differently. That’s the way boys are. Turn your back and they’re tearing around where they shouldn’t be. “Boys will be boys.”

Her gratitude-to God, whom she did not believe in, and Alex, whom she did-was so immense that she resented nothing.

It was necessary for Kent to spend the next half year out of school, strung up for the first while in a rented hospital bed. Sally picked up and took back his school assignments, which he completed in no time. Then he was encouraged to go ahead with Extra Projects. One of these was Travels and Explorations-Choose Your Country.

“I want to pick what nobody else would pick,” he said.

Now Sally told him something she had not told to another soul. She told him how she was attracted to remote islands. Not to the Hawaiian Islands or the Canaries or the Hebrides or the Isles of Greece, where everybody wanted to go, but to small or obscure islands nobody talked about and which were seldom if ever visited. Ascension, Tristan da Cunha, Chatham Islands, and Christmas Island and Desolation Island and the Faeroes. She and Kent began to collect every scrap of information they could find about these places, not allowing themselves to make anything up. And never telling Alex what they were doing.

“He would think we were off our heads,” said Sally.

Desolation Island ’s main boast was of a vegetable of great antiquity, a unique cabbage. They imagined worship ceremonies for it, costumes, cabbage parades in its honor.

And before he was born, Sally told her son, she had seen on television the inhabitants of Tristan da Cunha disembarking at Heathrow Airport, having all been evacuated due to a great earthquake on their island. How strange they looked, docile and dignified, like human creatures from another century. They must have adjusted to London, more or less, but when the volcano quieted down they wanted to go home.

When Kent could go back to school things changed, of course, but he still seemed old for his age, patient with Savanna who had grown venturesome and stubborn, and with Peter who always burst into the house as if on a gale of calamity. And he was especially courteous to his father, bringing him the paper that had been rescued from Savanna and carefully refolded, pulling out his chair at dinnertime.

“Honor to the man who saved my life,” he might say, or, “Home is the hero.”

He said this rather dramatically though not at all sarcastically. Yet it got on Alex’s nerves. Kent got on his nerves, had done so even before the deep-hole drama happened.

“Cut that out,” he said, and complained privately to Sally.

“He’s saying you must have loved him, because you rescued him.”

“Christ, I’d have rescued anybody.”

“Don’t say that in front of him. Please.”

When Kent got to high school things improved with his father. He chose to study science. He picked the hard sciences, not the soft earth sciences, and even this roused no opposition in Alex. The harder the better.

But after six months at college Kent disappeared. People who knew him a little-there did not seem to be anyone claiming to be a friend-said that he had talked of going to the West Coast. And a letter came, just as his parents were deciding to go to the police. He was working in a Canadian Tire store in a suburb just north of Toronto. Alex went to see him there, to order him back to his education. But Kent refused, said he was very happy with the job he had now, and was making good money, or soon would be, as he got promoted. Then Sally went to see him, without telling Alex, and found him jolly and ten pounds heavier. He said it was the beer. He had friends now.

“It’s a phase,” she said to Alex when she confessed the visit. “He wants to get a taste of independence.”

“He can get a bellyful of it as far as I’m concerned.”

Kent had not told her where he was living, but it did not matter, because when she made her next visit she was told that he had quit. She was embarrassed-she thought she caught a smirk on the face of the employee who told her that-and she did not ask where Kent had gone. She thought he would get in touch, anyway, as soon as he had settled again.

He did that, three years later. His letter was mailed in Needles, California, but he told them not to take the trouble to trace him there-he was only passing through. Like Blanche, he said, and Alex said, Who the hell is Blanche?

“Just a joke,” said Sally. “It doesn’t matter.”

Kent did not say what he was working at or where he had been or whether he had formed any connections. He did not apologize for leaving them so long without any information or ask how they were, or how his brother and sister were. Instead he wrote pages about his own life. Not the practical side of his life but what he believed he should be doing-what he was doing-with it.

“It seems so ridiculous to me,” he said, “that a person should be expected to lock themselves into a suit of clothes. I mean like the suit of clothes of an engineer or a doctor or a geologist and then the skin grows over it, over the clothes, I mean, and that person can’t ever get them off. When we are given a chance to explore the whole world of inner and outer reality and to live in a way that takes in the spiritual and the physical and the whole range of the beautiful and the terrible available to mankind, that is pain as well as joy and turmoil. This way of expressing myself may seem overblown to you, but one thing I have learned to give up is intellectual pridefulness-”

“He’s on drugs,” said Alex. “You can tell a mile off. His brain’s rotted with drugs.”

In the middle of the night he said, “Sex.”

Sally was lying beside him wide awake.

“What about sex?”

“That’s what makes you get into that state he’s talking about. Become a something-or-other so you can earn a living. So you can pay for your steady sex and the consequences. That’s not a consideration for him.”

Sally said, “My, how romantic.”

“Getting down to basics is never very romantic. He’s not normal, is all I’m trying to say.”

Further on in the letter-or the rampage, as Alex called it-Kent had said that he had been luckier than most people in having what he called his near-death experience, which had given him an extra awareness, and for this he must be forever grateful to his father who had lifted him back into the world and his mother who had lovingly received him there.

“Perhaps in those moments I was reborn.”

Alex had groaned.

“No. I won’t say it.”

“Don’t,” said Sally. “You don’t mean it.”

“I don’t know whether I do or not.”

That letter, signed with love, was the last they had heard from him.

Peter went into medicine, Savanna into law.

Sally became interested in geology, to her own surprise. One time, in a trusting mood after sex, she told Alex about the islands-though not about her fantasy that Kent was now living on one or another of them. She said that she had forgotten many of the details she used to know, and that she should look all these places up in the encyclopedia where she had first got her information. Alex said that everything she wanted to know could probably be found on the Internet. Surely not something so obscure, she said, and he got her out of bed and downstairs and there in no time before her eyes was Tristan da Cunha, a green plate in the South Atlantic Ocean, with information galore. She was shocked and turned away, and Alex who was disappointed in her-no wonder-asked why.

“I don’t know. I feel now as if I’d lost it.”

He said that this was no good, she needed something real to do. He had just retired from his teaching at this time and was planning to write a book. He needed an assistant and he could not call on the graduate students now as he could when he was still on the faculty. (She didn’t know if this was true or not.) She reminded him that she knew nothing about rocks, and he said never mind that, he could use her for scale, in the photographs.

So she became the small figure in black or bright clothing, contrasting with the ribbons of Silurian or Devonian rock. Or with the gneiss formed by intense compression, folded and deformed by clashes of the American and Pacific plates to make the present continent. Gradually she learned to use her eyes and apply new knowledge, till she could stand in an empty suburban street and realize that far beneath her shoes was a crater filled with rubble never to be seen, that never had been seen, because there were no eyes to see it at its creation or throughout the long history of its being made and filled and hidden and lost. Alex did such things the honor of knowing about them, the very best he could, and she admired him for that, although she knew enough not to say so. They were good friends in these last years, which she did not know were their last years, though maybe he did. He went into the hospital for an operation, taking his charts and photographs with him, and on the day he was supposed to come home he died.

This was in the summer, and that fall there was a dramatic fire in Toronto. Sally sat in front of her television watching the fire for a while. It was in a district that she knew, or used to know, in the days when it was inhabited by hippies with their tarot cards and beads and paper flowers the size of pumpkins. And for a while after that when the vegetarian restaurants were being transformed into expensive bistros and boutiques. Now a block of those nineteenth-century buildings was being wiped out, and the newsman was bemoaning this, speaking of the people who had lived above the shops in old-fashioned apartments and who had now lost their homes, and were being dragged out of harm’s way onto the street.

Not mentioning the landlords of such buildings, thought Sally, who were probably getting away with substandard wiring as well as epidemics of cockroaches and bedbugs, not to be complained about by the deluded or fearful poor.

She sometimes felt Alex talking in her head these days, and that was surely what was happening now. She turned off the fire.

No more than ten minutes later the phone rang. It was Savanna.

“Mom. Have you got your TV on? Did you see?”

“You mean the fire? I did have it on but I turned it off.”

“No. Did you see-I’m looking for him right now-I saw him not five minutes ago. Mom, it’s Kent. Now I can’t find him. But I saw him.”

“Is he hurt? I’m turning it on now. Was he hurt?”

“No, he was helping. He was carrying one end of a stretcher, there was a body on it, I don’t know if it was dead or just hurt. But Kent. It was him. You could even see him limping. Have you got it on now?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, I’ll calm down. I bet he went back in the building.”

“But surely they wouldn’t allow-”

“He could be a doctor for all we know. Oh fuck, now they’re doing that same old guy they talked to before, his family owned some business for a hundred years-let’s hang up and just keep our eyes on the screen. He’s sure to come in range again.”

He didn’t. The shots became repetitive.

Savanna phoned back.

“I’m going to get to the bottom of this. I know a guy that works on the news. I can get to see that shot again, we have to find out.”

Savanna had never known her brother very well-what was all the fuss about? Did her father’s death make her feel the need of family? She should marry, soon; she should have children. But she had such a stubborn streak when she set her mind on something-was it possible she would find Kent? Her father had told her when she was about ten years old that she could gnaw an idea to the bone, she ought to be a lawyer. And from then on, that was what she said she would be.

Sally was overcome by a trembling, a longing, a weariness.

It was Kent, and within a week Savanna had found out all about him. No. Change that to found out all he meant to tell her. He had been living in Toronto for years. He had often passed the building Savanna worked in and had spotted her a couple of times on the street. Once they were nearly face-to-face at an intersection. Of course she wouldn’t have recognized him because he was wearing a kind of robe.

“A Hare Krishna?” said Sally.

“Oh, Mom, if you’re a monk it doesn’t mean you’re a Hare Krishna. Anyway he’s not that now.”

“So what is he?”

“He says he lives in the present. So I said well don’t we all, nowadays, and he said no, he meant in the real present.”

Where they were now, he had said, and Savanna had said, “You mean in this dump?” Because it was, the coffee shop he had asked her to meet him in was a dump.

“I see it differently,” he said, but then he said he had no objection to her way of seeing it, or anybody’s.

“Well, that’s big of you,” said Savanna, but she made a joke of it and he sort of laughed.

He said that he had seen Alex’s obituary in the paper and thought it was well done. He thought Alex would have liked the geological references. He had wondered if his own name would appear, included in the family, and he was rather surprised that it was there. He wondered, had his father told them what names he wanted listed, before he died?

Savanna said no, he wasn’t planning on dying anything like so soon. It was the rest of the family who had a conference and decided Kent ’s name should be there.

“Not Dad,” Kent said. “Well no.”

Then he asked about Sally.

Sally felt a kind of inflated balloon in her chest.

“What did you say?”

“I said you were okay, maybe at loose ends a little, you and Dad being so close and not much time yet to get used to being alone. Then he said tell her she can come to see me if she wants to and I said I would ask you.”

Sally didn’t reply.

“You there, Mom?”

“Did he say when or where?”

“No. I’m supposed to meet him in a week in the same place and tell him. I think he sort of enjoys calling the shots. I thought you’d agree right away.”

“Of course I agree.”

“You aren’t alarmed at coming in by yourself?”

“Don’t be silly. Was he really the man you saw in the fire?”

“He wouldn’t say yes or no. But my information is yes. He’s quite well known as it turns out in certain parts of town and by certain people.”

Sally receives a note. This in itself was special, since most people she knew used e-mail or the phone. She was glad it wasn’t the phone. She did not trust herself to hear his voice yet. The note instructed her to leave her car in the subway parking lot at the end of the line and take the subway to a specified station where she should get off and he would meet her.

She expected to see him on the other side of the turnstile, but he was not there. Probably he meant that he would meet her outside. She climbed the steps and emerged into the sunlight and paused, with all sorts of people hurrying and pushing past her. She had a feeling of dismay and embarrassment. Dismay because of Kent ’s apparent absence, and embarrassment because she was feeling just what people from her part of the country often seemed to feel, though she would never say what they said. You’d think you were in the Congo or India or Vietnam, they would say. Anyplace but Ontario. Turbans and saris and dashikis were much in evidence, and Sally was all in favor of their swish and bright colors. But they weren’t being worn as foreign costumes. The wearers hadn’t just arrived here; they had got past the moving-in phase. She was in their way.

On the steps of an old bank building just beyond the subway entrance, several men were sitting or lounging or sleeping. This was no longer a bank, of course, though its name was cut in stone. She looked at the name rather than the men, whose slouching or reclining or passed-out postures were such a contrast to the old purpose of the building, and the hurry of the crowd coming out of the subway.

“Mom.”

One of the men on the steps came towards her in no hurry, with a slight drag of one foot, and she realized that it was Kent and waited for him.

She would almost as soon have run away. But then she saw that not all the men were filthy or hopeless looking, and that some looked at her without menace or contempt and even with a friendly amusement now that she was identified as Kent ’s mother.

Kent didn’t wear a robe. He wore gray pants that were too big for him, belted in, and a T-shirt with no message on it and a very worn jacket. His hair was cut so short you could hardly see the curl. He was quite gray, with a seamed face, some missing teeth, and a very thin body that made him look older than he was.

He did not embrace her-indeed she did not expect him to-but put his hand just lightly on her back to steer her in the direction they were supposed to go.

“Do you still smoke your pipe?” she said, sniffing the air and remembering how he had taken up pipe smoking in high school.

“Pipe? Oh. No. It’s the smoke from the fire you smell. We don’t notice it anymore. I’m afraid it’ll get stronger, in the direction we’re walking.”

“Are we going to go through where it was?”

“No, no. We couldn’t, even if we wanted to. They’ve got it all blocked off. Too dangerous. Some buildings will have to be taken down. Don’t worry, it’s okay where we are. A good block and a half away from the mess.”

“Your apartment building?” she said, alert to the “we.”

“Sort of. Yes. You’ll see.”

He spoke gently, readily, yet with an effort, like someone speaking, as a courtesy, in a foreign language. And he stooped a little, to make sure she heard him. The special effort, the slight labor involved in speaking to her, as if making a scrupulous translation, seemed something she was meant to notice.

The cost.

As they stepped off a curb he brushed her arm-perhaps he had stumbled a little-and he said, “Excuse me.” And she thought he gave the least shiver.

AIDS. Why had that never occurred to her before?

“No,” he said, though she had certainly not spoken aloud. “I’m quite well at present. I’m not HIV positive or anything like that. I contracted malaria years ago, but it’s under control. I may be a bit run-down at present but nothing to worry about. We turn here, we’re right in this block.”

“We” again.

“I’m not psychic,” he said. “I just figured out something that Savanna was trying to get at and I thought I’d put you at rest. Here we are then.”

It was one of those houses whose front doors open only a few steps from the sidewalk.

“I’m celibate, actually,” he said, holding open the door.

A piece of cardboard was tacked up where one of its panes should be.

The floorboards were bare and creaked underfoot. The smell was complicated, all-pervasive. The street smell of smoke had got in here, of course, but it was mixed with smells of ancient cooking, burnt coffee, toilets, sickness, decay.

“Though ‘celibate’ might be the wrong word. That sounds as if there’s something to do with willpower. I guess I should have said ‘neuter.’ I don’t think of it as an achievement. It isn’t.”

He was leading her around the stairs and into the kitchen. And there a gigantic woman stood with her back to them, stirring something on the stove.

Kent said, “Hi, Marnie. This is my mom. Can you say hello to my mom?”

Sally noticed a change in his voice. A relaxation, honesty, perhaps a respect, different from the forced lightness he managed with her.

She said, “Hello, Marnie,” and the woman half turned, showing a squeezed doll’s face in a loaf of flesh but not focusing her eyes.

“Marnie is our cook this week,” said Kent. “Smells okay, Marnie.”

To his mother he said, “We’ll go and sit in my sanctum, shall we?” and led the way down a couple of steps and along a back hall. It was hard to move there because of the stacks of newspapers, flyers, magazines neatly tied.

“Got to get these out of here,” Kent said. “I told Steve this morning. Fire hazard. Jeez, I used to just say that. Now I know what it means.”

Jeez. She had been wondering if he belonged to some plain-clothes religious order, but if he did, he surely wouldn’t say that, would he? Of course it could be an order of some faith other than Christian.

His room was down some further steps, actually in the cellar. There was a cot, a battered old-fashioned desk with cubbyholes, a couple of straight-backed chairs with rungs missing.

“The chairs are perfectly safe,” he said. “Nearly all our stuff is scavenged from somewhere, but I draw the line at chairs you can’t sit on.”

Sally seated herself with a feeling of exhaustion.

“What are you?” she said. “What is it you do? Is this one of those halfway houses or something like that?”

“No. Not even quarter way. We take in anybody that comes.”

“Even me.”

“Even you,” he said without smiling. “We aren’t supported by anybody but ourselves. We do some recycling with stuff we pick up. Those newspapers. Bottles. We make a bit here and there. And we take turns soliciting the public.”

“Asking for charity?”

“Begging,” he said.

“On the street?”

“What better place for it? On the street. And we go in some pubs that we have an understanding with, though it is against the law.”

“You do that too?”

“I could hardly ask them to do it if I wouldn’t. That’s something I had to overcome. Just about all of us have something to overcome. It can be shame. Or it can be the concept of ‘mine.’ When somebody drops in a ten-dollar bill or even a loonie, that’s when the private ownership kicks in. Whose is it, huh? Mine or-skip a beat-ours? If the answer comes mine it usually gets spent right away and we have the person coming back smelling of booze and saying, I don’t know what’s the matter with me today, I couldn’t get a bite. Then they might start to feel bad later and confess. Or not confess, never mind. We see them disappear for days-weeks-then show up back here when the going gets too rough. And sometimes you’ll see them working the street on their own, never letting on they recognize you. Never come back. And that’s all right. They’re our graduates, you could say. If you believe in the system.”

“ Kent -”

“Around here I’m Jonah.”

“Jonah?”

“I just chose it. I thought of Lazarus, but it’s too self-dramatizing. You can call me Kent if you like.”

“I want to know what’s happened in your life. I mean not so much these people-”

“These people are my life.”

“I knew you’d say that.”

“Okay, it was kind of smart-arse. But this-this is what I’ve been doing for-seven years? Nine years. Nine years.”

She persisted. “Before that?”

“What do I know? Before that? Before that. Man’s days are like grass, eh? Cut down and put into the oven. Listen to me. Soon as I meet you again I start the showing off. Cut down and put in the oven-I’m not interested in that. I live each day as it happens. Really. You wouldn’t understand that. I’m not in your world, you’re not in mine-you know why I wanted to meet you here today?”

“No. I didn’t think of it. I mean, I thought naturally maybe the time had come-”

“Naturally. When I saw about my father’s death in the paper I naturally thought, Well, where is the money? I thought, Well, she can tell me.”

“It went to me,” said Sally, with flat disappointment but great self-control. “For the time being. The house as well, if you’re interested.”

“I thought likely that was it. That’s okay.”

“When I die, to Peter and his boys and Savanna.”

“Very nice.”

“He didn’t know if you were alive or dead-”

“You think I’m asking for myself? You think I’m that much of an idiot to want the money for myself? But I did make a mistake thinking how I could use it. Thinking family money, sure, I can use that. That’s the temptation. Now I’m glad, I’m glad I can’t have it.”

“I could let-”

“The thing is, though, this place is condemned-”

“I could let you borrow.”

“Borrow? We don’t borrow around here. We don’t use the borrow system around here. Excuse me, I’ve got to go get hold of my mood. Are you hungry? Would you like some soup?”

“No thanks.”

When he was gone she thought of running away. If she could locate a back door, a route that didn’t go through the kitchen. But she could not do it, because it would mean she would never see him again. And the backyard of a house like this, built before the days of automobiles, would have no access to the street.

It was maybe half an hour before he came back. She had not worn her watch. Thinking maybe a watch was out of favor in the life he lived and being right, it seemed. Right at least about that.

He seemed a little surprised or bewildered to find her still there.

“Sorry. I had to settle some business. And then I talked to Marnie, she always calms me down.”

“You wrote a letter to us?” Sally said. “It was the last we heard from you.”

“Oh, don’t remind me.”

“No, it was a good letter. It was a good attempt to explain what you were thinking.”

“Please. Don’t remind me.”

“You were trying to figure out your life-”

“My life, my life, my progress, what all I could discover about my stinking self. Purpose of me. My crap. My spirituality. My intellectuality. There isn’t any inside stuff, Sally. You don’t mind if I call you Sally? It just comes out easier. There is only outside, what you do, every moment of your life. Since I realized this I’ve been happy.”

“You are? Happy?”

“Sure. I’ve let go of that stupid self stuff. I think, How can I help? And that’s all the thinking that I allow myself.”

“Living in the present?”

“I don’t care if you think I’m banal. I don’t care if you laugh at me.”

“I’m not-”

“I don’t care. Listen. If you think I’m after your money, fine. I am after your money. Also I am after you. Don’t you want a different life? I’m not saying I love you, I don’t use stupid language. Or, I want to save you. You know you can only save yourself. So what is the point? I don’t usually try to get anywhere talking to people. I usually try to avoid personal relationships. I mean I do. I do avoid them.”

Relationships.

“Why are you trying not to smile?” he said. “Because I said ‘relationships’? That’s a cant word? I don’t fuss about my words.”

Sally said, “I was thinking of Jesus. ‘Woman, what have I to do with thee?’”

The look that leapt to his face was almost savage.

“Don’t you get tired, Sally? Don’t you get tired being clever? I can’t go on talking this way, I’m sorry. I’ve got things to do.”

“So have I,” said Sally. It was a complete lie. “We’ll be-”

“Don’t say it. Don’t say, ‘We’ll be in touch.’”

“Maybe we’ll be in touch. Is that any better?”

Sally gets lost, then finds her way. The bank building again, the same or possibly a whole new regiment of loiterers. The subway ride, the parking lot, the keys, the highway, the traffic. Then the lesser highway, the early sunset, no snow yet, the bare trees, and the darkening fields.

She loves this countryside, this time of year. Must she now think herself unworthy?

The cat is glad to see her. There are a couple of messages from friends on her machine. She heats up the single serving of lasagna. She buys these separated precooked and frozen portions now. They are quite good and not too expensive when you think of no waste. She sips from a glass of wine during the seven-minute wait.

Jonah.

She is shaking with anger. What is she supposed to do, go back to the condemned house and scrub the rotten linoleum and cook up the chicken parts that were thrown out because they’re past the best-before date? And be reminded every day how she falls short of Marnie or any other afflicted creature? All for the privilege of being useful in the life somebody else- Kent -has chosen.

He’s sick. He’s wearing himself out, maybe he’s dying. He wouldn’t thank her for clean sheets and fresh food. Oh no. He’d rather die on that cot under the blanket with the burned hole in it.

But a check, she can write some sort of check, not an absurd one. Not too big or too small. He’ll not help himself with it, of course. He’ll not stop despising her, of course.

Despising. No. Not the point. Nothing personal.

There is something, anyway, in having got through the day without its being an absolute disaster. It wasn’t, was it? She had said maybe. He hadn’t corrected her.