A Jest of God by Margaret Laurence
Oh Rachel. He’d never say that in a million years. What is he going to say to you, then, after that touching outburst? “Thank God you are here, darling – together we can face this wildness and walk hand-in-hand into the etcetera.” I’m ashamed. But I don’t stop. I’m addicted.
“You’re an awfully long time in there, Rachel.” Mother’s anxious quaver. “Are you all right?”
I won’t answer. I haven’t heard. Shut up, for God’s sake, can’t she? No, I’m not all right. I’ve just drowned.
“Are you all right, Rachel?”
“Yes, I’m quite all right. Be out in a minute.”
The water is clouded with soap, and through the murkiness my flesh does have a drowned look, too pale, lethargic, drifting, as though I could nevermore rise and act. I look thin as a thighbone. Naked, I am so bone-thin and long, my legs placed maidenly together and my arms out-dangling. Underwater, this cross of bones looks weird, devalued into freakishness. My pelvic bones are too narrow, too narrow for anything.
The phone.
I rise, listening, slithering on the porcelain, drenched, listening, cursing myself for not having got out before, listening.
It is. And Mother’s voice is breathless, as though she can’t wait to hang up the receiver.
“No, I’m sorry, she’s having a bath right now.”
“Hang on – I’m coming!”
He’ll have heard that, oh my God, that cry, as though I were a Saint Bernard galloping to the rescue of some stranded Alpine party.
“Hello.”
“Hello – Rachel?”
“Yes. How are you?”
“Sorry, darling, I didn’t recognize your voice at first. Oh, I’m more or less fine. Are you free?”
“Tonight?”
“Yes, tonight.”
“Yes. I’m free.”
When I hang up, Mother is standing in the kitchen doorway, watching me, distaste in her face, and then I realize I haven’t even got a towel around me.
“Really, Rachel, that doesn’t look very nice.”
“Don’t worry –” I don’t know what I’m saying. “The telephones aren’t equipped with TV yet.”
Then, while her disapproval turns to concern over the worrying gaiety of my madness, I begin in relief to laugh, to laugh and laugh, and it goes on.
“I’m sorry – I’ll stop in a moment –”
I close the door of the bathroom, and lock myself inside, and laugh shudderingly, light-years away from laughter.
Nick’s shirt is dark brown, the sleeves rolled up and showing his forearms, brown with summer and lightly covered with fine black hair, and where his shirt is open at the neck I can see the dipping curve of his collarbone. The male smell of him, clean sweat and skin, compels me to touch him. He smiles, but abstractly, as though not really noticing, and starts the car.
“They’re home tonight.” He sounds annoyed. “Shall we just drive out somewhere?”
“All right.”
“I tried to induce them, in my tactful way, to go to the movies, but no dice. The old man and I haven’t been on very good terms recently, so whatever I suggested, he was bound to do the opposite. If I’d had any sense, I would have begged him to stay home and he would’ve been out like a shot.”
“What’s the trouble, Nick?”
“Nothing’s the trouble,” he says. “He’s got such an awful temper, that’s all, and I’ve got a pretty evil one myself.”
“You? I don’t believe that.”
“You don’t know me very well.”
“Enough to know about your temper.”
“No, darling,” he says. “You don’t.”
“You shouldn’t run yourself down.”
“You’ve got it wrong,” he says. “I’m not. You’re the one who does that.”
Then I’m silenced. Is that what he thinks? Is that how I strike him? What must it be like, to be with someone who plays that drab tune repeatedly?
“I don’t! Anyway, not now. I haven’t recently.”
“Oh darling,” he says, and I cannot interpret his voice, something regretful in it, as though he were thinking a thing he couldn’t hope to explain. “Well, that’s good, I guess.”
“Your father – has he been keeping on at you about staying?”
He has talked so much before, but now he doesn’t seem to want to talk about it.
“Mostly other things,” he says reluctantly. “Complexities all around. Goddamn spider webs. Am I the spider or the fly? Philosophical question. Never mind. Look – wild raspberries. Shall we get some?”
The road is banked with bushes on either side, green stinging walls, and when we get out of the car, the smell of oil and engine fades in a moment, leaving the dusty smell of the gravel and the green dusty smell of the leaves.
“The best ones are always hidden. You have to look for them.” He scratches himself on the raspberry thorns. “Bloody hell. My right hand seems to have forgotten its cunning.”
“Nick – he’ll never ask you in so many words to stay, but –”
“How could I?” His voice is aggressive, and I see I’ve picked the wrong time, but I have to go on.
“Well, you might teach here, I suppose.”
My voice, which was intended to be so unstudiedly casual – how has it sounded to him? He smiles, a token smile only.
“Not possible, darling,” he says. “Let’s go, eh?”
The hoarse metallic roar of the car provides some sound to overcome the lack of voices. I cannot say anything, and he will not. What possessed me, to suggest a thing like that? So openly. Haven’t I any pride?
No, I have no pride. None left, not now. This realization renders me all at once calm, inexplicably, and almost free. Have I finished with façades? Whatever happens, let it happen. I won’t deny it.
“It isn’t so much his wanting me to stay,” Nick says suddenly. “It’s the way he goes about it.”
“How do you mean?”
“This apparently accidental way he’s developed. It’s what he calls me that bugs me to some extent.”
“I don’t see –”
“Three times in the last week,” Nick says, “he’s called me Steve.”
“Oh Nick –”
“Yeh, well, you don’t need to sound all that sorrowful on his account,” Nick says angrily. “It’s not some sad slip of the tongue or mind, with him. It’s this fantastic way he has, of creating the world in his own image. He knows perfectly well what’s what. He’s not senile, for God’s sake. It’s this crazy kind of guile he has. He hasn’t thought all this out. He’s never thought out anything in his life, I don’t suppose. It’s just some instinct, maybe, that suggests to him if he can’t persuade me in an indirect way, without demeaning himself to ask openly, then he may be able to shame me into doing what he wants. I’m buggered if I’ll be manipulated like that. Anyway, I’m no actor, and even if I were, that rôle wouldn’t suit me. I’m not going to be taken over by a –”
He breaks off, and when he goes on again his voice has become deliberately callous.
“– a dead man. That’s what he is, let’s face it. After all this time. Not my brother, not anybody’s anything. A dead man.”
“Hasn’t your father ever accepted –?”
“Maybe not,” Nick says. “But he’ll have to, or else – well, that’s up to him. I can’t make it all better. I couldn’t then and I can’t now. I’ve got other things to do. The hell with it. No use in talking. I’m fed up with the whole issue. C’mon, Rachel – here’s the summer house.”
The summer house. The green edge of a brown river, the broken branches that clutter the shallow water, the high grass loosely webbed – a screen anyone could look through, and the road close enough for us or anyone to walk down here, no distance at all, and up from our place, within eye-shot, the sweeping half circle of fields, the barbed wire, and the grain beginning to turn the pale colour of ripeness with the autumn coming on. If only it weren’t so exposed. He claims it isn
A lie. He said I like you, Rachel, and once he said That’s better, darling, you’re getting used to me. I don’t know how it is that I can want him, want him specifically, and yet can’t lose sight of myself and still worry whether I’m doing well, and so don’t. I am fine only in dreams.
On the tall couchgrass, Nick spreads a meagre dark blue car rug. It hovers for an instant, impaled on green spears, and then it sinks and he treads it down to make a room on the ground.
“I brought this along this time,” he says proudly. “I thought it would be an improvement. For you.”
“Thanks – you’re very thoughtful.” I try to make my tone like his, bantering, but mine emerges too serious.
“That’s me,” he says. “Gallant to a fault. Well, I thought – you know – it’s okay for me, but I assume you would just as soon not have a flank full of thistles.”
I want to yield to his laughter, to have everything happening on his terms, lightly, not as though it were the beginning of the world. But I can’t. I don’t know how to make it unimportant enough.
“Nick –”
“Mm? That’s right, darling, right here beside me. That’s comfortable. Want a cigarette?”
“Yes, please.”
“Here you are. You’re getting a tan after all, Rachel, on your arms.”
“What do you mean, after all?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I never thought you were out enough in the sun, to change colour. Your skin’s very pale. I thought probably the sun didn’t affect you well, and that you couldn’t take too much of it, or something.”
“I used to be like that, I guess. I don’t actually get burnt, but I suppose I still expect to. When I was a kid, my mother was always after me to wear a sun hat because fair-haired people always burned, she said. I had fair hair then. It’s darkened.”
“I can’t imagine you as a blonde, Rachel.”
“No – I suppose not.”
“Well, don’t sound discouraged. I meant it as a compliment, as a matter of fact.”
His voice sounds vaguely irritated. I’ve misinterpreted something again. Now I can only try to get away, if that’s possible.
“You tan quickly, Nick. In only a few weeks you’ve –”
“That’s right, I do,” he says, peeling off his shirt. “Look – how about that for a tan? I’ve got it in the past week, mainly, working with my shirt off. I say working, but what I actually mean is I have to get the hell out of the house so I mooch around after Jago, getting in his way, until finally he gets fed up and says to me, ‘Nick, how come you are so useless around here? Don’t you remember nothing from when you was a kid?’ And I say – you know, taking some low kind of pleasure from the double negative – ‘That’s right, Jago, I don’t remember nothing.’ And then my mom comes out and yells Lunch, and that’s half a day gone, praise God.”
“You hardly ever talk about her.”
“My mother? Well, it isn’t necessary, I guess.”
“You’re fond of her?”
“Unfashionable as it may be,” he says, slightly sourly, “yes, I am. She’s – oh, you know – solid. Physically and spiritually. She’s not eccentric like my old man. Or if she is, she never lets on. And yet in some ways she is eccentric, I suppose. Or – not so much that, just completely inner-directed. You’d never think it to look at her.”
“How do you mean?”
He’s lying beside me now, and I touch the skin of his shoulder. My fingers explore a little the thicket on his chest; and his nipples which seem to me so strange on a man – what evolutionary freak or chance left them there? He is talking. He wants to talk, right now. For God’s sake hold your tongue and let me love. But it’s a man who is supposed to say that.
“She believes in omens,” he is saying, “which she interprets in any way that happens to suit her. She’s got this marvellous belief in her own intuition. Not towards everything – only where her kids are concerned. Something magical, she thinks, given by heaven to mothers like her, the devout, those who are really bound up with their kids. She wouldn’t give you fifty cents for these women who park their kids and go out to work. A spit in the face of God, she thinks. For herself, she knows. She knows what is going on without being told.”
“Is she ever right?”
“Quite often,” he says. “Of course, like any other oracle, the times she goofs on the predictions are forgotten in the wonder of the times she happens to be right. ‘Julie’s husband is no good,’ she says to me. This was years ago. ‘What makes you say that?’ I asked her. ‘I feel it,’ she says. Naturally I laughed. She hardly knew Julie’s husband at all. However, as it works out, she is not so far off the beam. No good is a kind of easy way of putting it, and even if I say he was off his rocker, what do I know of it? That was Julie’s first husband, and she pulled out. My sister has this very unreasoned but strong urge for self-preservation. At the time I thought she was just being a first-rate nut, as she sometimes is, leaving this guy who was making a good living as a long-distance driver. That was in B.C. and he was doing the long hauls, Alaska Highway and that, and I thought – if she doesn’t like him so very much, hell, she only has to see him one day out of seven or whatever it was. I was all for basic security in those days. Let’s worry about the subtleties after we’ve paid the rent, that kind of thing. I thought she was out of her mind. But she took off, nevertheless, with the one kid. Divorce, the whole jazz. She re-married and went to Montreal. Not long ago her first husband ended up in the morgue because he played chicken with his truck once too often, and this time the other guy didn’t swerve and neither did Buckle Fennick, prince of the highway.”
“That’s – terrible.”
“Why?” Nick says. “He got what he wanted, didn’t he? It was a good thing Julie wasn’t there, that’s all. I give full marks to my mom, though. She never said I told you so.”
“What did she say?”
“She didn’t say anything,” Nick says, leaning back on an elbow. “When something can’t be said, she doesn’t try to say it. Not like my dad. Or me. Steve was like her. The old man always feels Steve was like him, but he wasn’t. He was like her, able to rely on faith, and not having to make everything public. My dad has to see to it that everybody knows what he’s feeling. He makes a kind of theatre out of his life, and yet in the end he doesn’t intend anyone to know how much of the act is real or if any of it is. Pretty corny. I understand it, though.”
“Do you?” The words have no relation to what he is saying. They’re only spoken to make some sound, to draw him back and away from where he’s been, back to here, because I want to make love with him.
He laughs, and the past thread dwindles, and he is looking now at me.
“I like the way you do that, Rachel.”
“Do what?”
“Oh – run your fingers along my ribs.”
“It’s because they’re amazing.”
“Are they? Why?”
“I don’t know. I can’t say. Just to feel you living there under your skin.”
“Darling – be careful, eh?”
“Why should you say that to me? I thought it was the opposite I should try for.”
“That’s what I thought, too,” he says, “but now I don’t know.”
“Your spine isn’t quite straight. The bones jut, right here. Did you know?”
“Yes, I knew. It’s from – I had polio, as a kid.”
“And you got better. That’s unusual, for then.” I don’t know why I say this – only out of gratitude. “You weren’t crippled.”
“Not so anyone would notice,” he says.
“Nick – take off your clothes.”
“Darling –” he says, surprised and smiling, “is it really you first, this time?”
“Never mind.??
“All right,” he says. “Never mind.”
“Go into me. Now. Right now.”
“All right, darling.”
Nothing is complicated. He inhabits whatever core of me there is. I can move outward to him, knowing he wants what I am, and I can receive him, whatever he is, whatever. And then this tender cruelty, always known to him but never before to me, the unmattering of what either of us is – only important that what we are doing should go on and go on and go on –
“Nick – Nick –”
Only his name. Only, at this moment, his name. The only word.
A gap in time. Then our makeshift bed returns to my sight. And he is still here, with me.
“Rachel –”
“Yes?”
“That was good luck,” he says.
“Yes.”
He wants to sleep, to be left alone. I want to sleep, too, but not for the first thing. I want to draw away only slowly and gradually, so it will not hurt to break and be separate. And something else. If one speaks from faith, not logic, how does that turn out? I do not know, except that I am so strong in it, so assured, that it cannot possibly go wrong.
“Nick –”
“Mm?”
“If I had a child, I would like it to be yours.”
This seems so unforced that I feel he must see it the way I do. And so restrained, as well, when I might have torn at him – Give me my children.
His flesh, his skin, his bones, his blood – all are still connected with mine, but now suddenly not. Not a muscular withdrawal. Something different, something unsuspected.