Читать книгу After Helen - Paul Cavanagh - Страница 8

I returned to the bookshop on Richmond Street the Saturday after Farley Mowat’s visit to my history class. I was hoping to find Helen behind the counter, but no such luck. A man who could have passed for the sinister schoolmaster in a Dickens novel was presiding over the till. His greying beetle brows cast a perpetual shadow over his eyes. He seemed to be all bone and sinew, angular in appearance and acute in demeanour. I learned a little later that he was Helen’s father, Walter Donnelly, the man whose name was so meticulously painted in the bottom corner of the storefront window, above the word “Proprietor.”

I’d just bought Helen a bouquet of spring flowers, a thank-you for working her charms on Uncle Farley. Walter peered over his half-lens glasses at me as I entered. It was a look designed to turn a man to stone. I know now that it’s an instinct all fathers possess: the ability to smell out men who intend to pursue their daughters. Not that the bouquet didn’t flag me as a pretty obvious threat. I momentarily considered turning tail and heading back out to the street, but I elected instead to drift casually to the shelves in the back and pretend I was just another weekend shopper passing through on his way to meet his sweetie at a café up the block.

It was one of those quirky little shops with uneven wooden floors and a pressed-tin ceiling. A calligraphy sign warned “Watch Your Step” where more than a few patrons had likely failed to do so. As I peeked around the bookcase that held the titles on philosophy, art, and architecture, I saw a faded floral-print curtain drawn across the opening to a closet that contained a narrow set of stairs. They led sharply upward, almost like a ladder. It looked like a portal to the Land of Narnia.

Will was giving a woman in a red vinyl raincoat who’d picked up Don Quixote an unsolicited lesson on the life of its author. After working the full measure of his charm and convincing her to add The Canterbury Tales to her purchases, he made his way over to me.

“Let me guess,” he said, seeing the flowers. “For Helen.”

“I wanted to thank her for coercing Farley,” I said.

“Ah. Yes, well . . .”

“Is she around?” I asked, trying not to show my nerves.

Will gestured towards the ceiling. “She’s in her writing garret.”

“I’m sorry?”

“The little room upstairs,” he explained. “Where once she plumbed the depths of her creative soul. Not that she’s been using it for literary pursuits lately.”

As if on cue, I heard the sound of footsteps from inside the closet. Surprisingly heavy steps. A man with a precisely clipped beard and shiny pate emerged from behind the curtain. I immediately sensed that he fancied himself a Sean Connery clone. His face was flushed, but somehow I doubted that was simply from climbing down the stairs. He leaned back into the closet and looked up the staircase.

“Well, are you coming?” he called.

In an imitation of gallantry, he held back the curtain and offered his hand to Helen as she descended the stairs. She paused on the last step to polish the top of his head with her sleeve.

“I can see myself,” she exclaimed, pretending to admire her reflection. “Except that the lumps on your head make my face look fat.”

“Very funny,” the man said, accepting the dig with a lover’s forbearance.

“Hello, Helen,” I say.

Her smile snagged when she saw me standing there with the bouquet. She quickly recovered her grace, though, sliding her hand down her middle-aged boyfriend’s arm before gliding towards me.

“I just wanted to thank you,” I said. The flowers were an embarrassment to me now, a badge of gullibility.

“How sweet,” she said, seeing the hurt in my eyes but choosing not to acknowledge it to spare me further humiliation. I felt like a peevish first-grader pining for the attentions of his teacher.

She made her balding Romeo wait while she found a vase for the flowers. He squinted at me, sizing me up, wondering just what I was thanking Helen for. I could tell that he didn’t appreciate my interruption. He picked out a book from a nearby shelf and started flipping through it to show me I wasn’t worth his interest any more.

When Helen returned, she thanked me again for the flowers and apologized for not being able to stay to chat. I tried to sound magnanimous, saying I understood. She took her boyfriend by the arm and said goodbye, tossing me one last rueful glance as she stepped to the front of the shop.

Will had apparently seen my crushed look on the faces of other men before. “He’s a biology prof at Western,” he explained. “Divorced and fighting a mid-life crisis.”

“That’s his sports car parked out front, I take it.”

Will nodded. “He’s lasted longer than most. This is his second week.”

Helen slid behind the front counter and gave her father a goodbye peck on the cheek. Walter’s scowl didn’t soften. His Medusa gaze bore down on Helen’s middle-aged beau.

“Why do you suppose daughters so enjoy tormenting their fathers?” Will asked me.

Helen was rubbing up against her biology prof like a purring kitten now, trying to convince him to let her drive his car. I could tell it was eating away at Walter to watch her fondle a man who was almost as old as he was. On the way out the door, Helen rooted in her boyfriend’s pants pockets for the car keys. Old baldy looked annoyed, but I knew her groping was probably giving him a hard-on.

Will glanced at his watch. “And so ends Helen’s workday,” he said wryly. “Early as usual.” He picked up the book that her boyfriend had tossed on a display table and returned it to its proper place. His fingers trailed gently along the covers of the other books on the shelf. “Someday all this is supposed to be hers. Walter wants to pass the shop to another Donnelly, and she’s all he has.” A crooked smile crinkled his lips. “I doubt she knows even half of what we have on the shelves.”

I realized then that we were both failed suitors—in my case for Helen’s affection, in Will’s case for Walter’s favour. His was a hopeless love for books, mine for an errant woman.

“She’s not worth it, Irving.”

Will excused himself to serve a customer perusing the coffee-table books. I lingered at the back of the shop, wanting to make sure that Helen and her date had driven off before I stepped outside. I found myself staring at the titles in the self-help section: Fifty Ways to Find Your Lover, Beyond Sergeant Pepper, Checking Out of Heartbreak Hotel. Pithy, tuneful advice for losers like me.

* * *

I spent that night marking tests at my garage-sale kitchen table, a bag of Oreo cookies at my side. To get through such mind-numbing jobs, I generally bribed myself with petty rewards, including the carrot of slumping in front of the TV once I was done to watch “Hockey Night in Canada.” At the rate I was going, I’d be lucky to catch the late game from the West Coast. I kept picturing Helen upstairs in her bohemian garret, exchanging bodily fluids with her overage lover.

My own career as a lover had been short and unspectacular. The only woman I’d ever taken to bed had been a year ahead of me in teachers’ college. When I met her, I knew she was one of those teachers boys would have wet dreams about, not because she was gorgeous—although she did have a certain country-girl appeal to her, like Mary Ann in “Gilligan’s Island”—but because she was the type of woman who couldn’t help taking pity on stray dogs and helpless little boys. She first spotted me sitting by myself at an orientation week party and naturally took me under her wing. From there, we started meeting each other for meals in the residence cafeterias, then hanging out in her room at the women’s dorm. Eventually, I started staying overnight, slipping out early in the morning, when we figured the proctor wasn’t looking. As a lover she was patient with my clumsy efforts, guiding me where I needed to go in a land I had knowledge of only from books. We became inseparable. Soon, it became too comfortable for me, like being smothered in a warm blanket. I started looking for excuses not to see her. Sensing my distance, she called me at all hours, imploring me to tell her why. Her neediness began to embarrass me. By the time I left for my out-of-town practicum, I’d entirely turned my back on her. I knew I was being an asshole, spurning the very girl who’d taken me in, but I didn’t have a vocabulary for graceful exits. I let callousness be my messenger.

I became accustomed to celibacy after that, as I possessed neither the charm nor the machismo to strike up conversations with women in bars or supermarket lineups. Not to say that I didn’t develop infatuations, and even try to act on them in my own shy and inept way. But for whatever reason, I never got further than a bashful kiss goodnight at the door and a decided lack of response to the awkward little messages I left on various answering machines, asking for another date. I formulated theories to explain my stunning lack of success. One was that when my dates found out I was a teacher, they immediately remembered some anal grammarian haranguing them in grade school and worried that I’d parse every sentence they uttered. That certainly would have explained why our conversations tended to peter out so early in the evening. Another theory was that they were unnerved by how intently I listened to them when they talked about themselves—a rather counterintuitive hypothesis, considering the number of inattentive men they had to have suffered through before me. They distrusted the motives for my interest, it seemed. Perhaps I came off as too eager to unlock their secrets, or, worse yet, unctuous. I’m afraid that back then, when I first started as a teacher, I had a tendency to use the same overly earnest tone on everyone, both students and women I was trying to get in the sack. Whatever the true explanation for my failures, the only “action” I’d been able to count on since teachers’ college was the occasional jack-off in the shower.

And so, on Saturday night I sat in my basement apartment marking papers as the Western students upstairs stumbled out to the pubs. I dropped my marking pen in disgust and pushed myself away from the kitchen table. My gloomy bachelor pad wasn’t big enough for pacing. I sat taking stock of my worldly possessions: a lumpy couch, a Salvation Army floor lamp, a discount microwave, and a thirteen-inch TV perched on an overturned milk crate. My postage-stamp bedroom was hardly big enough to hold my bed. My only solace came from the hundreds of books that lined my walls, crammed onto makeshift plywood-and-cinderblock shelves that rose precariously to the ceiling.

I got up and crossed the room in two steps, scanning the shelves for something to transport me someplace else. I pulled out my atlas of discovery maps of the New World and began leafing through it, careful not to further loosen the worn pages from the binding. The upper corner of a Venetian chart from 1556 showed a large blank space marked “Parte Incognita” to denote all the undiscovered lands west of what was then New France. I realized that I’d lived much of my life in that blank space.

I thought of Helen looking back at me as she left the shop with her biology professor. For a split second, I’d wondered whether she was waiting to see if I’d come after her, attempt to rescue her from the spectacle she was making simply to annoy her father. The moment had been so fleeting that in hindsight I couldn’t even be sure it had actually happened. Just the same, I hung on to the thought, embroidering it until I was offering to buy them both a drink at a bar across the street, then ducking out with Helen when her balding beau was called to the washroom by his aging prostate.

I considered making some popcorn, maybe even renting a movie—something in black-and-white, where the hero overcomes all odds to save the girl from the dastardly, fifty-something villain. But I decided that all the good videos would probably have been taken out already, and besides, I’d also have to rent a VCR and spend half the night trying to figure out how to hook it up.

As I put the atlas back, I spotted my vintage nineteenth-century bubble sextant sitting on the top shelf. I took it down and turned it over in my hands. A clump of dried mud clung to the arc. I believed in living history, in getting kids to feel things with their own hands. That’s why I didn’t mind letting them use my antique, to understand for themselves what it was like for the early explorers who ventured into those blank spaces on the map. I showed my students how to take a reading from the sun and explained what it told them about where they were. Franklin would have had a sextant like mine, I told them, as he tried to find the passage through the ice-clogged channels of the Arctic archipelago.

It was easy for us to second-guess men like Franklin, with all that we knew now from history. Sitting in our warm homes and classrooms, none of us could possibly understand the privations he and his crew endured, the miserable deaths they suffered for the sake of discovery. We criticized him for his arrogance, but in doing so, we proved our own conceit.

I imagined Franklin’s two ships, the Erebus and the Terror, creeping through the Arctic fog, drawn forward as if a siren was promising them a path to the Beaufort Sea. I thought of all the men who’d followed, searching the vast unknown for some clue to Franklin’s fate, shamed and inspired by the unwavering devotion of his wife, each adding his own lines to the maps of the time. It wasn’t until more than fifty years later—long after the cairn containing confirmation of Franklin’s death was discovered—that a Norwegian named Amundsen finally sailed through the elusive passage. He was the same man who later would beat Scott to the South Pole. But rather than belittle Franklin’s efforts, Amundsen cited the British explorer as a boyhood hero, his inspiration, and his guide.

And then it became clear to me. I saw the path to reach Helen.