Necessary Lies(31)
“What has happened,” she asked. It was hard to believe that what she saw had a cause, a beginning, an intention.
When William didn’t answer, Anna walked up to him, took his hands and pulled them off his face. He was crying. The cigarette burns in the soft brown leather of the sofa formed a big, crooked star.
“Do you think I’ve been punished enough?” he asked.
Julia was moving fast behind the doors of her bedroom. When she emerged, she had her rucksack on, a red bandanna across her forehead. The doors closed and the storm doors followed with a thud.
“She threw a party,” William said.
“A party? What kind of a party?”
“The neighbours called the police,” he said. “Someone broke the window in the bedroom. A tire was lit up in the backyard. But they didn’t come fast enough to catch anyone.”
He brought a package of black garbage bags, and Anna opened the windows to get rid of some of the smell. “Don’t touch anything with your hands,” he said handing her a pair of latex gloves. With these rubbery fingers they picked up sticky condoms, crumpled paper towels, tablecloths and sheets glued together with dried vomit. Turning her head away, Anna pushed the soiled cloth into the black bags. William announced a list of damages: beer spilled into his violin case, the toilet seat broken, CDs missing, a handle torn from the door, black scratches on the living room floor. Flour and sugar dumped into the washing machine.
For days everything they touched seemed sticky, defiled. There were tomato seeds still hiding between telephone buttons; a slice of pizza was rotting behind the bookcase. It scared her to think of the destructive rage that must have fuelled it all.
The neighbours were forgiving. “You are not the first ones,” Pauline said. “A Canadian right of passage, a crashed party.” John and Louise apologised for not intervening earlier, but, they stressed, Julia seemed always so mature. She must have had a bit to drink, missed the tipping point beyond which there is no control. “Poor kid, who needs an experience like this? She must feel awful, now.”
Anna thought: Poor Julia? What about me? What about her father?
If she did regret what had passed, Julia kept such feelings to herself. She didn’t call, didn’t write. Not even a postcard with an apology. It’s just as well, Anna thought then. She needed time. She needed time not to feel a tinge of pleasure when William said that he didn’t want to speak of Julia at all. Ever.
The beige metal shelves in William’s office at McGill are full of papers, books, and records. Some of the books have white library stickers on them. Valerie, the secretary in the Music Department gives Anna a few empty cardboard boxes. One of them is marked, “Return.”
“This is for library books if you find any,” she says and sighs. Her red jacket is open at the front. “Take your time. There is no rush. We are all so sorry. He was still so young.”
This is not the worst, Anna thinks. At least she is not offered a spiritual lecture about the ebb and flow of life, the need to accept death. Or told, with an uneasy smile that she will get over it, with time.
“Fifty-one,” Anna says, “Only fifty-one,” and her heart shrinks, for words like these reduce William’s life to a number, a score.
There are two photographs on his desk in brown leather frames, one of her and another of Julia, her hair still long, her now straight white teeth exposed in a wide, cover-girl smile. Anna is glad to have the picture here. Julia called her in the morning and suggested they have dinner together. “Do you want me to come and help?” she asked, but Anna said she would rather go through it on her own.
That was in the morning. Now, overwhelmed by the inevitability of the task before her, Anna escapes to the washroom and stands motionless in front of the bathroom mirror, leaning over an orange Formica counter. Swallowing is hard, painful. She touches the purple shadows under her eyes. Her face has turned alien in grief, bird-like, she thinks, revealing the first short lines cutting into her lips, almost invisible, but already there.
Back in William’s office she goes through his things, slowly, refusing to part with any traces of his presence. A thought that he won’t, ever, touch anything else is what prompts her. At home, she hugs his dressing gown hanging on the door hook, kisses the rim of the collar, touches the polished tips of his shoes, still in the shoetrees to preserve their shape. Here, she is sifting through what has remained.
The papers on the upper shelves turn out to be students’ unclaimed assignments, dusty and yellowed. These the department can have. They can also have the music journals, some of them still in their plastic covers, unopened, unread, as well as the files in the drawers, minutes from committee meetings, grant proposals, students’ petitions asking for his recommendations.
A thick manila envelope is in the file marked personal. It is sealed and when Anna tears the flap to get inside, letters, postcards, and photographs spill on the desk. In these photographs, taken within moments of each other, William’s face is moving from his pensive frown to laughter. He is wearing the black turtleneck and the brown tweed jacket she always liked so much, leaning forward as if trying to convince someone of something very important. In the last picture the lock of his silver hair is falling over his forehead, just before the moment he would brush it away.
A postcard from Baden-Baden — an old, sugar-sweet postcard, flowery wreaths and bells ring merrily, musical notes spilling out. The handwriting is hard to decipher, the letters are tall and tight. It takes Anna a while to see a pattern in these edgy lines, to make out the words. L’absence est à I’amour ce quest au feu le vent, il éteant le petit il allume le grand. It is signed: Ursula.