she hadn’t begun to pack.
She looked down at the menu. “Bacon and Eggs, Any Style,” she read. “Our Plump Tender Sausages.” She thought of pigs and chickens. She shifted hastily to “Toast.” Something moved in her throat. She closed the menu.
“What do you want?” Duncan asked.
“Nothing, I can’t eat anything,” she said, “I can’t eat anything at all. Not even a glass of orange juice.” It had finally happened at last then. Her body had cut itself off. The food circle had dwindled to a point, a black dot, closing everything outside… She looked at the grease spot on the cover of the menu, almost whimpering with self- pity.
“You sure? Oh well then,” said Duncan with a trace of alacrity, “that means I can spend it all on me.”
When the waitress came back he ordered ham and eggs, which he proceeded to consume voraciously, and without apology or comment, before her very eyes. She watched him in misery. When he broke the eggs with his fork and their yellow centres ran viscously over the plate she turned her head away. She thought she was going to be sick.
“Well,” he said when he had paid the cheque and they were standing outside on the street, “thanks for everything. I’ve got to go home and get to work on my term paper.”
Marian thought of the cold fuel-oil and stale cigar smell there would be inside the bus. Then she thought of the dishes in the kitchen sink. The bus would get warm and stuffy as she travelled inside it along the highway, the tires making their high grinding whine. What was living, hidden and repulsive, down there among the plates and dirty glasses? She couldn’t go back.
“Duncan,” she said, “please don’t go.”
“Why? Is there more?”
“I can’t go back.”
He frowned down at her. “What do you expect me to do?” he asked. “You shouldn’t expect me to do anything. I want to go back to my shell. I’ve had enough so-called reality for now.”
“You don’t have to do anything, couldn’t you just…”
“No,” he said, “I don’t want to. You aren’t an escape any more, you’re too real. Something’s bothering you and you’d want to talk about it; I’d have to start worrying about you and all that, I haven’t time for it.”
She looked down at their four feet, standing in the trodden slush of the sidewalk. “I really can’t go back.”
He peered at her more closely. “Are you going to be sick?” he asked. “Don’t do that.”
She stood mutely before him. She could offer him no good reason for staying with her. There was no reason: what would it accomplish?
“Well,” he said, hesitating, “all right. But not for very long, okay?”
She nodded gratefully.
They walked north. “We can’t go to my place, you know,” he said. “They’d make a fuss.”
“I know.”
“Where do you want to go then?” he asked.
She hadn’t thought about that. Everything was impossible. She put her hands over her ears. “I don’t know,” she said, her voice rising towards hysteria, “I don’t know, I might as well go back…”
“Oh come now,” he said genially, “no histrionics. We’ll go for a walk.” He pulled her hands away from her ears. “All right,” she said, letting herself be humoured.
As they walked Duncan swung their linked hands back and forth. His mood seemed to have changed from its breakfast sullenness to a certain vacant contentment. They were going uphill, away from the lake; the sidewalks were crowded with furred Saturday ladies trudging inexorably as icebreakers through the slush, brows furrowed with purpose, eyes glinting, shopping bags hung at either side to give them ballast. Marian and Duncan dodged past and around them, breaking hands when an especially threatening one bore down upon them. In the streets the cars fumed and splattered by. Pieces of soot fell from the grey air, heavy and moist as snowflakes.
“I need some clean air,” Duncan said when they had walked wordlessly for twenty minutes or so. “This is like being in a fishbowl full of dying pollywogs. Can you face a short subway ride?”
Marian nodded. The further away, she thought, the better.
They went down the nearest pastel-tiled chute, and after an interval smelling of damp wool and mothballs let themselves be carried up by the escalator and out again into daylight.
“Now we take the streetcar,” Duncan said. He seemed to know where he was going, for which Marian could only be thankful. He was leading her. He was in control.
On the streetcar they had to stand. Marian held on to one of the metal poles and stooped so she could see out the window. Over the top of a tea-cosy-shaped green and orange wool hat with large gold sequins sewed to it an unfamiliar landscape jolted past: stores first, then houses, then a bridge, then more houses. She had no idea what part of the city they were in.
Duncan reached over her head and pulled the cord. The streetcar ground to a halt and they squeezed their way towards the back and jumped down.
“Now we walk,” said Duncan. He turned down a side street. The houses were smaller and a little newer than the ones in Marian’s district, but they were still dark and tall, many with square pillared wooden porches, the paint grey or dingy white. The snow on the lawns was fresher here. They passed an old man shovelling a walk, the scrape of the shovel sounding strangely loud in the silent air. There was an abnormal number of cats. Marian thought of how the street would smell in the spring when the snow melted: earth, bulbs coming up, damp wood, last year’s leaves rotting, the winter’s accumulations of the cats who had thought they were being so clean and furtive as they scratched holes for themselves in the snow. Old people coming out of the grey doors with shovels, creaking over the lawns, burying things. Spring cleaning: a sense of purpose.
They crossed a street and began to go down a steep hill. All at once Duncan started to run, dragging Marian behind him as if she was a toboggan.
“Stop!” she called, alarmed at the loudness of her own voice. “I can’t run!” She felt the curtains in all the windows swaying perilously as they went past, as though each house contained a dour watcher.
“No!” Duncan shouted back at her. “We’re escaping! Come on!”
Under her arm a seam split. She had a vision of the red dress disintegrating in mid-air, falling in little scraps behind her in the snow, like feathers. They were off the sidewalk now, slithering down the road towards a fence; there was a yellow and black chequered sign that said “Danger.” She was afraid they would go splintering through the wooden fence and hurtle over an unseen edge, in slow motion almost, like movies of automobiles falling off cliffs, but at the last minute Duncan swerved around the end of the fence and they were on a narrow cinder path between high banks. The footbridge at the bottom of the hill came rapidly towards them; he stopped suddenly and she skidded, colliding.
Her lungs hurt: she was dizzy from too much air. They were leaning against a cement wall, one of the sides of the bridge. Marian put her arms on the top and rested. Level with her eyes there were tree-tops, a maze of branches, the ends already pale yellow, pale red, knotted with buds.
“We aren’t there yet,” Duncan said. He tugged at her arm. “We go down.” He led her to the end of the bridge. At one side was an unofficial path: the imprints of feet, a muddy track. They climbed down gingerly, their feet sideways like children learning to go down stairs, step by step. Water was dripping on them from the icicles on the underside of the bridge.
When they had reached the bottom and were standing on level ground Marian asked, “Are we here yet?”
“Not yet,” said Duncan. He began to walk away from the bridge. Marian hoped they were going to a place where they could sit down.
They were in one of the ravines that fissured the city, but which one she didn’t know. She had gone for walks close to the one that was visible from their living-room window, but nothing she saw around her was familiar. The ravine was narrow here and deep, closed in by trees which looked as though they were pinning the covering of snow to the steep sides. Far above, towards the rim, some children were playing. Marian could see their bright jackets, red and blue, and hear their faint laughter.
They were going single file along a track in the crusted snow. Some other people had walked there, but not many. At intervals she noticed what she thought were the marks of horses’ hooves. All she could see of Duncan was his slouched back and his feet lifting and setting down.
She wished he would turn around so she could see his face; his expressionless coat made her uneasy.
