Who Do You Think You Are

(Perhaps she didn’t lie so beautifully after all, perhaps she overdid it.) She had been awake almost the whole weekend, drinking, not so very much, but steadily. I’m not having any of it, she said out loud, very seriously and emphatically, as she loaded the car. And as she crouched in the front seat, writing the letter, which she could more comfortably have written in the house, she thought how many crazy letters she had written, how many overblown excuses she had found, having to leave a place, or being afraid to leave a place, on account of some man. Nobody knew the extent of her foolishness, friends who had known her twenty years didn’t know half of the flights she had been on, the money she had spent, and the risks she had taken. Here she was, she thought a bit later, driving a car, shutting down the windshield wipers as the rain finally let up on a Monday morning at ten o’clock, stopping for gas, stopping to get a transfer of money, now that the banks were open; she was competent and cheery, she remembered what to do, who would guess what mortifications, memories of mortification, predictions, were beating in her head? The most mortifying thing of all was simply hope, which burrows so deceitfully at first, masks itself cunningly, but not for long. In a week’s time it can be out trilling and twittering and singing hymns at heaven’s gate. And it was busy even now, telling her that Simon might be turning into her driveway at this very moment, might be standing at her door with his hands together, praying, mocking, apologizing. Memento mori .
    Even so, even if that were true, what would happen some day, some morning? Some morning she could wake up and she would know by his breathing that he was awake beside her and not touching her, and that she was not supposed to touch him. So much female touching is asking (this is what she would have learned, or learned again, from him); women’s tenderness is greedy, their sensuality is dishonest. She would lie there wishing she had some plain defect, something her shame could curl around and protect. As it was, she would have to be ashamed of, burdened by, the whole physical fact of herself, the whole outspread naked digesting putrefying fact. Her flesh could seem disastrous; thick and porous, gray and spotty. His body would not be in question, it never would be; he would be the one who condemned and forgave and how could she ever know if he would forgive her again? Come here, he could tell her, or go away . Never since Patrick had she been the free person, the one with that power; maybe she had used it all up, all that was coming to her.
    Or she might hear him at a party, saying, “And then I knew I’d be all right, I knew it was a lucky sign.” Telling his story to some tarty unworthy girl in a leopard-spotted silk, or—far worse—to a gentle long-haired girl in an embroidered smock, who would lead him by the hand, sooner or later, through a doorway into a room or landscape where Rose couldn’t follow.
    Yes, but wasn’t it possible nothing like that would happen, wasn’t it possible there’d be nothing but kindness, and sheep manure, and deep spring nights with the frogs singing? A failure to appear, on the first weekend, or to telephone, might have meant nothing but a different timetable; no ominous sign at all. Thinking like this, every twenty miles or so, she slowed, even looked for a place to turn around. Then she did not do it, she speeded up, thinking she would drive a little further to make sure her head was clear. Thoughts of herself sitting in the kitchen, images of loss, poured over her again. And so it was, back and forth, as if the rear end of the car was held by a magnetic force, which ebbed and strengthened, ebbed and strengthened again, but the strength was never quite enough to make her turn, and after a while she became almost impersonally curious, seeing it as a real physical force and wondering if it was getting weaker, as she drove, if at some point far ahead the car and she would leap free of it, and she would recognize the moment when she left its field.
    So she kept driving. Muskoka; the Lakehead; the Manitoba border. Sometimes she slept in the car, pulled off to the side of the road for an hour or so. In Manitoba it was too cold to do that; she checked into a motel. She ate in roadside restaurants. Before she entered a restaurant she combed her hair and made up her face and put on that distant, dreamy, short-sighted look women