The Chrome Suite Read online

  ACCLAIM FOR

  The Chrome Suite

  “The human landscape and the complexities of relationships ring true. Birdsell’s ability to enter the hearts of her characters keeps us hooked.”

  –Calgary Herald

  “A fluid quality to Birdsell’s prose bids you move ever onward, even into dark and menacing corners where unseen forces bind families, make them crackle with tension, make them unravel. She is that rarity, a consistently interesting writer with an original voice. … As Margaret Atwood captured the tensions that divide young girls in Cat’s Eye, so Birdsell explores the tensions – sexual, emotional, territorial – that fill Amy Barber’s house. … The Chrome Suite seems to have been written from some deep, dark well of inspiration.”

  –Books in Canada

  “The writing is always a joy, the kind that slows the reader down to savour every vivid moment.”

  –Quill & Quire

  “A passionate exploration of loss, betrayal, death, and the heartless whimsy of fate. … The writing is masterful. There is an uncompromising ferocity and harsh power to this author’s work.”

  –Canadian Book Review Annual

  BOOKS BY SANDRA BIRDSELL

  NOVELS

  The Missing Child (1989)

  The Chrome Suite (1992)

  The Russländer (2001)

  SHORT FICTION

  Night Travellers (1982) and Ladies of the House (1984),

  reissued in one volume entitled Agassiz Stories (1987)

  The Two-Headed Calf (1997)

  Copyright © 1992 by Sandra Birdsell

  Trade paperback with flaps published 1992

  First Emblem Editions publication 2002

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Birdsell, Sandra, 1942-

  The chrome suite

  eISBN: 978-1-55199-685-1

  I. Title.

  PS8553.176C4 2002 C813′.54 C2001-903820-8

  PR9199.3.B4385C48 2002

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters described are fictitious, as are the events of the story. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  An excerpt from this novel was published in slightly different form in the summer 1991 fiction issue of Quarry magazine.

  “Keeping Things Whole” by Mark Strand is reproduced by permission of the author. The quotation from The Sweet Second Summer of Kitty Malone by Matt Cohen is reproduced by permission of the author.

  The words from Rilke are taken from Duino Elegies, translated by David Young (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. New York, 1978).

  SERIES EDITOR: ELLEN SELIGMAN

  EMBLEM EDITIONS

  McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  The Canadian Publishers

  481 University Avenue

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5G 2E9

  www.mcclelland.com/emblem

  v3.1

  For my children

  Roger, Angela, and Darcie Birdsell

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part Two

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Keeping Things Whole

  In a field

  I am the absence

  of field.

  This is

  always the case.

  Wherever I am

  I am what is missing.

  When I walk

  I part the air

  and always

  the air moves in

  to fill the spaces

  where my body’s been.

  We all have reasons

  for moving.

  I move

  to keep things whole.

  –Mark Strand

  PART ONE

  June 1992

  can feel it,” I tell the doctor, “right there.” I press the spot just to the left of my breastbone where something swollen lies. Sometimes I imagine it to be thick and flat and the texture of liver, this thing that slides around inside my body, its presence felt in an almost imperceptible movement, a nudge against my bottom rib bone, my skeleton. At other times I envision the swollen thing to have the uncertain shape of an overripe tomato; hold it too tightly and your fingers will penetrate the thin membrane of taut skin and it will spill, a shapeless pulp, into the palm of your hand.

  “Here?” The doctor’s breath smells of mint tea. His fingers probe the area beneath my rib cage. Tanned hands, face. A recent vacation, I speculate, spent some place where the sun is stronger. Florida? Arizona? Perhaps Greece or the Caribbean. Perhaps one of the places Piotr and I had promised ourselves we would visit.

  “There.” I guide his cool hand. His fingers press down and the swelling shifts sideways, eluding his touch.

  “Well,” he says. “You see, it could be almost anything, and then it could be nothing at all.”

  “I see.”

  He turns away from the table and sits down at his desk and slips my chart from its folder. “So how is your professional life these days?” he asks. “Still tramping off here and there?”

  “Fine.” I gather the paper gown closed and sit up. Living With Hypertension, The Facts of High Blood Pressure. I read the titles of the books jammed into a small bookcase beneath the window.

  He squints at the chart. “You were here back in October before last,” he says to himself. He glances up and smiles. Good teeth, I think. “I just happened to turn on the television the other night and caught part of that National Film Board series, the second episode, the one you wrote? Well, it was quite good, yes, quite, quite good, I think,” he says.

  “That’s ancient. I can’t believe they’re still running it.”

  “Now then, you’ll just have to get busy and write some new stuff, won’t you?” His tanned forehead crinkles and he squints at the chart again as though the question he will ask next has only just come to mind. “And your domestic life? How’s that going?” He sets the chart on his lap and riffles through it. “Weren’t you –?” he asks. “Wasn’t there someone in your life fairly steady for a while there?” He peers at the chart and says, “Ah, yes,” as though he has come across Piotr’s name. He leans back in the chair, his posture open, and even though I hear voices in the almost full waiting room, the impatient shuffle and cough of the person in the adjacent examination room, his demeanour invites me to take all day to say whatever it is I must tell him. He knows about Piotr, I think. He knows what happened. It was written up in both the local newspapers and in The Globe and Mail, Saturday Night, Ma
clean’s.

  “Fairly steady, six years or so.” My feet are mottled, have turned blue with the chill of the room. Old feet, I think. “What do you think this thing could be?”

  “What do you think it is?” he asks. “What would be your worst fears?”

  “I’m not at all worried about tumours. Cancer. Not at all.”

  “Well, good. We’ll do the necessary blood work anyway, if only to reassure you. You’re what now?” Again he flips through the chart on his lap. “Ah yes, you’re forty-two. Well, you know the body is not perfect. I get people in here who expect that their bodies should be a hundred per cent all the time. Something goes wrong, they expect that I will tinker with it and send them home in perfect shape,” he says. “I’m not a mechanic.”

  The door closes behind him. I dress hurriedly in the cramped cubicle, bending to slip into my shoes, and feel the swollen thing slide back into place beneath my bottom rib and rest there, a slight pressure against the bone. What do I think it is? It’s absence, I think. And not the absence of Piotr, either. But the absence of me, Amy Barber. Oh who can we turn to in this need? I think of the line from one of Rilke’s Elegies. I have turned to the physician. I would like him to operate, carve around it, deftly lift it from my chest.

  I had arranged to meet a friend, Daria, at The Forks following my appointment with the doctor, and we rush across the parking lot towards one another, two bright and cheerful birds chirping our greetings; but then, as so often seems to happen, we grow closed and as still as the surface of the river, which reflects back to us the bright June sky and trees on the opposite shore. We spread our sweaters on blocks of tyndall stone still cold from the past winter, the chill a fist curled in the stone’s core. We sit side by side for almost an hour, hardly speaking, and except for the dogged drone of a motorboat in the distance, we enjoy the silence.

  It’s early in the afternoon, mid-week, and the lunch crowd has petered out and drifted back into the office buildings behind us. Although I know it is not possible, still I searched, and had not seen Piotr among them. There is little chance that my eye will find something of him today. Daria has come straight from work and she still wears the heavy make-up she must put on to help her look younger, seamless and smooth for the camera’s eye, but in the light of day her face appears soft, swollen. An overripe tomato. I imagine that if I placed a thumb beneath each of her eyes, the slightest pressure … I avoid looking at her and stare out across the river, at the great shell face of Saint Boniface Cathedral. The drone of the motorboat grows louder and then becomes a high-pitched whine as a small craft rounds the bend in the Red River and enters the mouth of the Assiniboine; in it, a man and a young boy. The man cuts the power to enter the marina and we watch as the boat glides towards shore. They moor their boat, the man giving instructions, the young boy scrambling about, gathering up life jackets, a pink pail, which he swings up onto the dock. The man glances our way, and then I do see Piotr. I see him in the shape of this man’s stocky body, the slope of his shoulders. I lean forward and press my palm hard against my rib to push the swollen thing back into place. I hold it there.

  “I wish people wouldn’t do that,” my friend says and turns her face away.

  The young boy has a pair of binoculars around his neck and has raised them in our direction. The man speaks sharply and the binoculars drop to his chest. Daria begins to tell me, then, the reason for wanting to see me. She has broken off with the man she met recently. Not a long-term relationship this time, but still it hurts.

  “Well, you know the saying,” I tell Daria. “If you love someone, let him go.”

  “Yes, I know the saying.”

  “And if he doesn’t come back, hunt him down and kill him.”

  She laughs and then blushes, slightly embarrassed at having laughed. “I must say, I haven’t heard that version before.” Her on-air voice is carefully modulated and serious.

  “I came across it on a tee shirt. It’s crude, but to the point. I think I may be that kind of person.”

  “Maybe you have too much time to think,” she says.

  I choose not to interpret her comment as concern for my mental well-being, but rather as hidden animosity over the fact that she must deny herself the luxury of self-examination; time will not allow it. She has a job she must go to every morning. She rummages about in the oversize bag on the stone beside her and pulls out a Koala Spring. “I’ve only got one. But we can share.”

  “It’s okay, I’m not thirsty.” I don’t want the intimacy a shared bottle of drink implies; my mouth where hers has been.

  “On the way over to meet you, I realized,” Daria says after a while, softly. “It’s June. You must be thinking about Piotr.”

  It is not as silent as I had thought. Not silent at all as I begin to hear the traffic of the city of Winnipeg behind me, a constant, steady hum. I listen to the wail of a siren, the low growl of another motor-boat making its way round a bend in the river, its sound becoming a roaring echo as it passes beneath the Main Street Bridge, a train as it glides across a trestle bridge beyond, a child calling. I begin to hear a hundred different sounds where I once thought there was silence.

  1

  June 1991

  ook at this one,” Amy had said as she held the tee shirt up against her chest, modelling it for Piotr. IF YOU LOVE SOMEONE, LET HIM GO. IF HE DOESN’T COME BACK, HUNT HIM DOWN AND KILL HIM. That was yesterday in a tee-shirt store on Yonge Street. They left Toronto early this morning and are on the highway now heading up towards Owen Sound and the ferry at Tobermory. Hunt him down, Amy thinks as she drives. It seemed hilarious at the time but she wonders now at how the shop is allowed to sell tee shirts like that. More than likely because it says hunt him down and not her, she reasons, otherwise there would be a crowd of demonstrators outside the store.

  Piotr sits beside her, reading, face hidden behind The Globe and Mail he bought outside their hotel earlier. Because she’s usually more alert than he is in the morning, she agreed to take on the first shift of driving, but she wishes now that she hadn’t. She’s still in shock and in the state of heightened awareness that a sleepless night brings. Nerve ends buzz and her mind races ahead, beyond the horizon. The landscape when they’d first entered country was softer, an opaque misty blend of colours, but as the sun rises behind them it becomes too brittle, too bright, and she must squint through watery eyes against the sharpness of it.

  “Canadian humour is very strange. I don’t get it,” Piotr had said when she held the shirt up against her chest. He had been tense and wary and I should have known, Amy thinks: doors closing one by one, his flat-surfaced conversations, cheerful voice. I should have guessed.

  She’d explained the original saying.

  “I still don’t get it.”

  “I think it means, more or less, love me or die.”

  “Oh, I see.” He’d spoken quietly, turned his back to her, faced the window and the street, the shapes of people passing by. “All right.” And then he’d told her that the time had come. He was leaving her within a week.

  Amy squeezes the brakes to reduce speed. They are approaching another of the small villages and towns that have been strung out all along the way. It seems that she’s barely able to gain highway speed before she must slow down again. She’s caught by the old-world look of this one. Quaint, she thinks, of the use of stone, the flash of blue lobelia trailing from window boxes, and the gingerbread-house look of the store-fronts. She drops her sunglasses down to cover eyes that brim suddenly with an unreasonable longing, the desire she has to stop and find a house. The two of them, they’ll enter it and disappear.

  “Nice,” she says as they leave the village limits. They could grow to be Mrs. and Mr. Amy Barber, an ordinary, elderly, and tenderly devoted couple who die within months of one another: tree limbs entwined and inseparable. I didn’t see it coming, Amy thinks, because I didn’t want to. If I had, I would have had to leave him. She watches the needle climb till it reaches a safe ten kilometres
above the limit, then she holds it there. This constant stopping and starting, barely gaining highway speed and then having to cut back again, grates on her, and she worries that they’ll miss the ferry. She doesn’t want to have to wait. She doesn’t want to sit beside Piotr on their grassy knoll overlooking the water, or pass the time on the glass-bottom boat peering at rusted hulks of sunken ships, or stand beside him on the deck while he scans the horizon with the binoculars she gave him as a Christmas gift in their third year. No! she says inwardly and slaps the steering wheel with the flat of her hand.

  Piotr glances up from the newspaper, his expression quizzical.

  “Anything interesting in the paper?” She asks the question he usually asks.

  The question posed. Amy: a reasonable facsimile of a civilized person, a mature adult who understands and accepts that when someone says “I no longer love you,” there is nothing you can do to change it. You would think she would know that by now. But no, as she sat beside Piotr in the car, driving off into the sunset in her mind, she still believed that as long as she was breathing there was something she could do. Loving and being loved was like swinging on a swing or flying. Both will and action, but will mostly. Her ferocious will would make him continue to love her and never, never leave.

  “More on the massacre in the Katyn Forest,” he says. He closes the paper and folds it down into a square. He’s referring to the killing of fifteen thousand Polish officers and soldiers in 1942. He’s told her the story of his father’s narrow escape, how he’d stayed home that day, in his study, listening to his short-wave radio while most of his friends and acquaintances were snatched from city streets in broad daylight. “Photographs,” Piotr says, “of the burial sight. A witness. They can’t deny it much longer.” When he asks her the question, “Anything interesting in the paper?” she’s always perplexed to find that she can’t remember a single item of importance, only incidents, small stories like the one about a woman who loses her wedding ring while out fishing on her honeymoon and then goes back there years later, lands a trophy-size fish, and, when her husband guts it, she discovers the lost ring.