“I think I recall that,” he says, as if not entirely willing to be reminded of his former, younger self. It disturbs me that he can remember some of these things about himself, but not others; that the things he’s lost or misplaced exist now only for me. If he’s forgotten so much, what have I forgotten?
“Maybe they’re still down there,” I say. “I wonder if anyone ever found them, when they built that new bridge. You buried the map, too.”
“So I did,” he says, smiling in his old, secret, maddening way. He still isn’t telling, and I am reassured: despite his changed façade, his thinning hair and provisional suit, he is still the same person underneath. After he has gone back, to wherever he’s going next, I think of getting him a star named after himself, for his birthday. I have seen an advertisement for these: you send in your money, and you get a certificate with a star map, your own star marked on it. Possibly he would find this amusing. But I’m not sure that the word
Chapter 60
Increasingly, Jon paints these things in my living room. He’s been gradually moving in his things, beginning with the paints and canvas. He says he can’t paint at his place because there are too many people in it, which is true: the front room is silting up with American draft dodgers, a shifting population, all of whom seem to be friends of friends. Jon has to step over them to get to the walls, because they lie around on their sleeping bags, forlorn and smoking dope, wondering what to do next. They are depressed because Toronto isn’t the United States without a war on, as they thought it would be, but some limbo they have strayed into by accident and can’t get out of. Toronto is nowhere, and nothing happens in it. Jon stays over three or four nights a week. I don’t ask what he does on the other nights. He thinks he is making a large concession, to something he assumes I want. And maybe I do want it. When I’m alone, I let the dishes accumulate in the sink, I allow colored fur to grow in jars of leftovers, I use up all my underpants before washing any of them. But Jon turns me into a model of tidiness and efficiency. I get up in the morning and make coffee for him, I set two places at the table, with my newly acquired ovenproof earthenware in off-white, with speckles. I don’t even mind doing his laundry at the Laundromat, along with my own.
Jon is not used to having all these clean clothes. “You’re the sort of girl who should get married,” he says one day, when I appear with a pile of folded shirts and jeans. I think this may be an insult, but I’m not sure.
“Do your own laundry then,” I say.
“Hey,” he says, “don’t be like that.”
On Sundays we sleep late, make love, go for walks, holding hands.
One day, when nothing has changed, nothing has been done or happened that is any different from usual, I discover I am pregnant. My first reaction is unbelief. I count and recount, wait another day, then another, listening to the inside of my body as if for a footfall. Finally I slink off to the drugstore with some pee in a bottle, feeling like a criminal. Married women go to their doctors. Unmarried women do this. The man in the drugstore tells me the results are positive. “Congratulations,” he says, with disapproving irony. He can see right through me.
I’m afraid to tell Jon. He will expect me to go and have it out, like a tooth. He will say “it.” Or he will want me to sit in the bathtub while he pours boiling water into it; he will want me to drink gin. Or else he will vanish. He’s said, often enough, that artists can’t live like other people, tied down to demanding families and expensive material possessions.
I think about things I’ve heard: drinking a lot of gin, knitting needles, coat hangers; but what do you do with them? I think about Susie and her wings of red blood. Whatever it was she did, I will not do it. I am too frightened. I refuse to end up like her.