Chapter IV
That night, in the basement room where I kept my books and music, I was
lying on the couch listening to Pachelbel's Canon in D Major. Though I might
have been thinking about TNM, going over the details and events of the day
searching for reasons to be optimistic, instead I'd had to return to a question
I'd never been able to answer – why was it so important to us that the love
between a man and a woman should last a lifetime?
I wasn't completely alone. Our old cat Brigit, small and black with white
paws, white face and a black nose, had entered the room earlier. Still slim,
she'd jumped silently onto the couch and paced gracefully across the top until
she was next to my shoulder, then, as she did every night, dropped onto my
chest to greet me with a touch of her nose before curling up under my arm to
fall asleep.
The version of the Canon that I was listening to has a part where the
music withdraws, leaving only the sound of waves coming in on a beach,
rolling in slowly from somewhere far out on a wide unknowable sea, from a
place beyond the selfishness, suffering and deceit of life on the land. The
waves continue until deep notes from a harp join in, a haunting sound that
reinforces the mood of the sea while it hints at something more.
And then come the strings, the beautiful, beautiful strings, sweeping away
everything else, filling the world with their sound. This night they spoke to me
of all the places I'd ever been and all the people I'd forgotten or left behind.
This night when I still didn't know if I'd be able to continue in the claims
business, when it looked like my marriage was finally finished and it seemed
as if there was nowhere left to turn, the sound of the strings made me wonder
if it was now only through music that I could experience what people call love.
It had only been another argument with my wife.
She'd started again about buying another house, one more like those of
her upscale friends in the real estate business. Why it had been so important to
bring it up this night, I didn't know, but who was I to question why someone
wanted something badly? It had been important enough to call me a coward
again, the one always afraid to take a chance, the one who had stopped her
from doing everything she'd ever wanted, the one who had never really loved
her.
Until then I'd talked about being patient, about waiting until we had more
money, but suddenly I had realized that I didn't want another house at all. I
didn't want to move, didn't want more debt, and didn't want to follow her any
farther in the financial odyssey she was bent on. When I told her that, she
threatened to leave and buy the place herself. The trouble was, though her
income was now well above mine, we both knew she couldn't carry a house
like that on her own, and I couldn't hold onto the one we had without her.
But I'd told her to go ahead, that I didn't care what she did anymore. As
usual, the argument got worse then and spread to everything that had ever
come between us. This time though, I had said things that I'd hoped I would
never have to say. That was when the woman I'd once loved so much got
badly hurt. Behind the sarcasm in her words and the hardness in her eyes, I
was sure I'd seen a child ready to weep inconsolably.
What had gone wrong?
When we were young, in those years after I returned to Toronto from
the Far East and we first met, Janet and I had loved one another with an
innocence and abandon that we thought would never end. Like a bonfire
burning on the darkest of all nights, our love burned so brightly that it drove
the darkness back until we thought it was no longer there. It burned for a long
time too, but the years were longer and time has never cared much for young
lovers. The fire burned down to its coals, then, one by one, those went out
too. It was completely out now, there was no doubt about that. I had searched
through the ashes myself.
Why do we insist that love should last forever?
Why can't it last for a year, a month, or only a night, and still have been
something good? But a marriage ends and people shake their heads ruefully at
this proof that the union should never have happened in the first place. Maybe
it's our fear of this kind of judgment that makes us cling to one another,
pretending that our relationships only need repair. We head off to counseling,
we read all the books, we talk and talk and learn to be so understanding,
while, behind it all, the ghost of love continues to fade away.
People talk as if they know what love is. They talk about it as if it's
something that can be weighed and measured, bought and sold, or put away
for safekeeping. We ask young couples who are getting married to swear
they'll love one another for the rest of their lives, as if the gods of love are
only servants hired to wait on their commands. In their innocence, they make
those promises, then, when love begins to fail and they're bewildered by
what's happening, they blame themselves, or each other.
Janet and I had been through that. I sometimes wondered if my solitary
nature hadn't doomed us from the beginning. It had always been tough on
Janet. When I was a boy, and throughout my years in high school, I had
always assumed that I would remain single, and maybe I should have.
But my character alone wasn't enough to explain what had happened. I'd
seen it happen to too many couples, seen the sparkle fade from too many
eyes. I'd seen too much disappointment, too many people using each other,
too much false cheer and pretending.
There were some, it was true, who stayed together the whole way,
especially in previous generations. But those were stoic people, given to
making sacrifices. Sometimes the passion they felt for one another in their
youth underwent a metamorphosis, changing into a deep friendship, a
different kind of love. There was no denying the beauty of that when you saw
it. But more often what you saw was just suffering, denial and domestication.
When wild animals are confined for years, they grow accustomed to their
cages and the human spirit can be tamed the same way.
No, for a long time I'd had the sense that something stronger than Janet
and I had been at work. Through the years, event had followed event with
such disturbing inevitability, the split between us widening and widening even
as we did everything we could to stop it. I was convinced by this time that
there was a greater power that didn't want those bonds to last, something
ruthless that insisted on an end to everything and would impose any amount
of suffering to get its way.
The music of Pachelbel was still playing when the door of the room
opened. There, silhouetted in the light from the hall, was my eighteen year old
daughter Tracy, one reason why I was still there after all those years. She had
just come home.
"Dad?" She called softly in case I was asleep.
"I'm here Trace."
"Is something wrong? Mom's sitting in the living room, just staring at
nothing. She won't even talk to me."
"Come here," I said, turning down the music.
For the next hour, I tried to explain some of it to her.
* * *
After Tracy was gone, I lay awake for a long time. She had taken it bravely,
like the little soldier she'd always been. I'd watched her wrestling with it,
tortured by the love she felt for her mother and I, and the pain of knowing
that the happy family we'd once been was breaking up. I saw her groping for
some kind of solution and, as hopeless as that was, it made me love her even
more. I wondered how Rob, still away at university, was going to take it. I
hoped Janet would tell him, that I wouldn't have to do it.
Whatever was going to happen now, there was no going back. I needed
the job at TNM more than ever.
Towards dawn I had another dream of Vietnam.
Tracy was with me, except that she was about nine years old, the age she
always was when she traveled with me in dreams. We were sitting on the
bench seat of a Huey transport, flying up the river valley west of Song Cau.
The engine of the helicopter, behind the wall at our backs, and the rotor
blades overhead, hammered so loudly that we had to shout to one another
when we had something to say.
There was a pilot in front of us, but I never saw his face.
To see better, Tracy got up and went around to the open compartment
on the side of the ship, the place where a door gunner would have been during
the war. I joined her and we looked outside together.
There was nothing to see but a landscape of death.
The steep forested hills that came down to the river weren't green
anymore. The forests that had absorbed our napalm and explosives and grown
back again and again, were now so bombed and burnt that, mile after mile,
there was nothing but charred fallen trees and scorched earth.
Below us, now devoid of water, the dry cracked bed of the river slid
slowly by.
Following the shoreline with my memory, I thought I saw the place
where Jimmy Giardello was killed, and, if I was right about that, just beyond a
bend that was coming up was the place where I shot the girl.
That I didn't want to see, so I looked away to the hills on the horizon.
Even they looked black and empty. Beside me, her hair blowing in the wind,
Tracy pointed to things and shouted, but all I could see was the dead land.
The helicopter turned away from the river, passed through a gap in the
hills, then came down in the middle of a small plateau. The rotors overhead
were still turning slowly when Tracy jumped out and ran around the front of
the machine. Remembering that this had once been dangerous country, I got
out and followed her.
Down on the ground it looked even worse. The blackened trunks of trees
lay crisscrossed and broken in their own ashes, like the bones of dead giants
on some infernal battlefield. Wisps of smoke were still rising from them.
But Tracy was calling to me.
Coming around the front of the helicopter, I spotted her about a hundred
meters away, squatting in front of a low green bush, the only living thing to be
seen. As I approached it, I thought I heard the sound of running water.
"Look Dad! Look!" Tracy called again, pointing inside the bush.
I got down on my knees and peered in through the branches. There, in a
kind of luminous room made golden green by the sunlight entering through the
leaves, I saw many small yellow birds, and they were all singing.
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