Читать книгу Why Love Will Always Be a Poor Investment - Kurt Armstrong - Страница 7

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Brought to My Senses

Sight

Molly is in bed for the night, and Erika is out with friends at her Monday night meeting. My mind is wandering. I’m anxious, though not about anything in particular.

Though we rarely watch TV, tonight I haul it out of the closet and set it up on the shelf in the bedroom. I hook up the old wire antenna and string it around the room to try to get a clear picture. I can usually pick up six channels—four of them are in English—depending on how I hang the antenna and whether or not the people upstairs are using certain kitchen appliances at the time. But I’m hardly “watching” anything here: I don’t stick with any one thing for more than a couple of minutes. I flip from the local news, to a sitcom with an unconvincing laugh-track, to some “reality” show about pop singers, to a crime drama about a new murder this week, and it all starts to blur. I don’t stay on a program long enough to even catch a story line. The advertisements exhaust me: thirty-second rapid-fire comedies or dramas, and watching them reminds me why we keep the TV in the closet. I had imagined that a bit of mindless time with television would be a relaxing treat, but now I’m even more restless than I was an hour ago.

But I keep watching anyway, flipping between channels, hoping I might find something to capture my attention. I can waste hours doing this, watching nothing, gazing at the flashing blue light, gawking at every gadget and gizmo splayed, hawked, and dressed up to look like something I need, and I don’t even understand why I’m watching because I’m conscious of the fact that I am truly wasting my time, and the longer I sit here, the more my mental “To Do” list starts to feel like a bee stinging my conscience—I should do the dishes and I still need to write that film review and I owe Walter a letter and I still haven’t fixed the shelves downstairs and I need to weed the garden and fix the drywall at the neighbors’ place and work on my resume and there’s no doubt I need to start eating better and I need to get more exercise. But I just sit.

Then I hear a key in the lock, the first of a string of familiar sounds, those of Erika coming home: the front door banging shut, folding of an umbrella, click and squeak of closet doors—one for coats, the other for boots—footsteps towards the bedroom. I turn off the TV, awakened not by an image or style, but by a real presence. Her cheeks are red from the cold. She smiles at me. I feel sheepish for wasting the evening, but my wasting time doesn’t bother her. She lays down beside me, puts her arm across my shoulders and rests her head on my chest like she’s listening to my heart. I look at her face. Every so often when I see her face—at a glance before she notices, or examining her closely, as I do now—it almost feels like I am seeing her for the first time. She is still strange to me. I have known her half my life, but when I close my eyes, I can hardly picture her face, as though the longer I know her the more mysterious she becomes.

We undress and climb into bed, and she turns out the light.

Sound

My workday starts when the alarm clock squawks at 5 am. I get up and make some toast, being careful not to set off the smoke alarm. I ride my bike to work on quiet streets, the city just starting to rev up to speed—delivery trucks, a van, transit busses, a few cars with commuters. There’s a siren wailing up the street behind me, but it turns onto a side street.

When I get to work, the music is thumping. Customers show up, order, and wait. I command the big coffee grinder and the hissing espresso machine that seems as big as a little Italian car, and serve up expensive lattes and cappuccinos. A couple hours into my shift, the morning rush arrives, and the banter with the regulars is comfortable and predictable: clichés about work, weather, and politics, gossip from the tabloids, bits of bad news from the day’s newspaper. I holler names and drinks, but it’s hard to be heard over the din of waiting customers and the steady rumble of the coffee roaster in the corner of the room. The satellite radio continuously pipes in a stream of banal songs that all blend together, one into the next. When I started working here, I used to get the songs stuck in my head and they would play on like a jukebox when I was trying to fall asleep at night. Now I hardly notice the music at all. Outside, the cars and busses hiss by on the wet streets.

I’m done by early afternoon. The mid-morning rain has passed and I bike home down the crowded streets: more cars, trucks, vans, busses, sirens, and lots of horns. Vancouver drivers love to use their horns.

When I open the door, I hear Molly shaking a rattle, jangling a bell, and blowing a whistle all at once. “Hi, daddy,” she says. Erika asks me about my day, and I tell her, then ask how the two of them have been. I put on a record, and Molly and I dance together for the first song. I can hear the city workers outside—tractors, dump trucks, jackhammers, cement saws. They’re replacing the water system and they’ve peeled back the asphalt, like they’re doing surgery on the city’s arteries.

Erika and I start working on supper, while Molly stacks blocks and then crashes her little towers with a toy car. Erika and I scrub and peel, slice, chop, and dice meat and vegetables. I whisk a sauce, and she fries the meat. Molly whines and fusses, so I give her a little cup of raisins to snack on until supper is ready. Supper sizzles and simmers, bubbles and boils.

Just when it’s ready and we are about to sit down to eat, the phone rings. “Sorry,” Erika says without answering it, “it’s suppertime here.” Molly eats almost everything we feed her and throws the rest on the floor, laughing and doing her best to hold our attention throughout the meal. The phone rings again; we ignore it. Molly throws her cup on the floor and squeals when I give her a bowl of grapes for dessert. She complains when I clean her fingers and face. We clean up the dishes, put the leftovers in the fridge. Erika transfers a load of wet laundry to the dryer. Molly giggles when I tickle her and wrestle with her on the bed, whines when I change her diaper, fusses when I put her into her pyjamas, and asks me to sing to her when I brush her teeth. In the bathroom, I can overhear the owner of the house, talking in a high, squeaky baby voice to her dog. Downstairs, Erika starts the washing machine.

Molly gives us goodnight kisses, and we put her down in her playpen. I call my brother on the phone, and we talk about books, kids, movies, our marriages, our parents. He tells me that the squealing metal of the trains in the train yard near his house is starting to make him feel like he’s going crazy. “The sound of it,” he says, “I hear it in the middle of the night. It keeps me awake. It makes me so angry. Maybe we’ll just have to move, I don’t know.” I tell him how we used to live right next to one of the busiest streets in the city, and how I had to sleep with earplugs because the incessant noise of the vehicles kept me awake. “That’s part of the reason we moved to this place,” I tell him, “the noise and all.”

Erika and I pick up Molly’s toys and get ready for bed. Everything is tidied up for tomorrow. We get into bed and talk for a bit about the day, the joys and struggles, the big dreams of our life. We tell each other how in love we are with Molly, plan our schedule for the next day, and can hardly keep our eyes open. She switches off the lamp and kisses me goodnight.

And tonight happens to be one of those rare nights when she falls asleep before I do. I listen to her slow, deep breaths, the faint whistling from her nose, the sound of her life. I fall asleep to the rhythm of her breathing in, breathing out, breathing in, breathing out. Breathing.

touch

At the bus stop this morning, there’s a giant picture of an anonymous woman’s bra-clad torso. The lighting and computer-enhanced color tints make everything look too good to be true, which, of course, it is. Like a lot of men, even though I can offer sound moral and philosophical arguments for why a bus stop advertisement featuring a lacy bra on a faceless torso should be offensive, more than anything, I want to stare. I think of the lines from one of Wendell Berry’s poems:

How hard it is for me, who live

in the excitement of women

and have the desire for them

in my mouth like salt.[1]

When the bus pulls up, the ad on the side portrays a man and woman, both half-dressed, the two of them a tangle of limbs. They both look tired or drunk, and both of them are sweaty. Just before the bus doors open, I notice that the ad is actually for shoes, or rather a shoe company.

On the bus there are ads for hair and skin products, for natural cures with miraculous before-and-after photos, and clothing stores. There’s a confusing “safe sex” poster that seems like attempted damage control, conspicuously out of place, I muse, like a bandaid over a bullet wound, or a 1-800 gambling addiction hotline number printed on the seats at a casino.

And on the inside roof, like the advertiser’s centrepiece, is a photo of another anonymous woman from the waist up, who is looking down at the cell phone-shaped opening in her shirt that shows off a section of her bra and an ample amount of cleavage. I have seen this ad before, and I try not to stare, but the whole point of it is that I do stare, and that hopefully the curve of her breasts will entice me into buying a cell phone. When I get off the bus, I see a billboard advertising the “Naughty But Nice” sex tradeshow—no doubt a gratuitous carnival of images, fantasies, desires, and obsessions. But the allure is powerful and real. I can’t pretend I am not drawn to the images, so carefully created and displayed, and my mind starts to wander. I walk home, feeling like there’s something wrong with me.

That night, Erika and I make love.

I know her body. I know the lines and veins, the scar on her foot, the one under her chin, the one on her shin from a cut with a clamshell, the stretch-marked skin around her hips. I know the different tints and lines in her hair, the smooth curve of her neck, her soft earlobes, the pale, smooth skin on her shoulders and stomach and back. I know her teeth—some straight, some crooked—and her nose, narrow like that of a Russian princess, her pointy chin, the creases that frame her mouth, her green eyes, different from when we first fell in love—traced by deeper lines and wrinkles, signs that she is being transformed by sorrow and joy.

I’ve covered every inch of her with my eyes and fingers, thousands of times now, over and over, and still she is new, every time, new. I look for some easier way to apprehend her, some way to make her more mine, but there is nothing simple about her body. Touching her is a mystery of flesh and bone. The real presence of her body resists the smallness of my eyes, my mind, all the words I use to describe her. She is.

[1]. Berry, “Marriage,” 70.