Communion Page 3

  “I’m sorry,” smiling. “What’s your name? I don’t know your name.”

  “Anderson.” Does she pause, or it his imagination; is she evasive? He’d like that. “Mary Anderson.” And smiling brilliantly, is that sweat on her lip? Married, a bit of danger, he’d like that. “I’m sorry, I should have . . . ” Her eyes, more calculating into his.

  “Oh no, that’s.” It’s sweat, he finds it irresistible, she’s sweating. “I’m Peter Walters.” That’s very nice.

  “Hello Peter Walters.”

  “Hello Mary.” He eases off the counter, no need for that, and his day expands with sweat on her lip, her breasts, his mouth, hands, his . . . No dinner, no. He passes quickly over a supper of some kind, candlelight, very nice with wine, but why not drop by my place for a nightcap? Why not? A smoke, he searches in his pocket. They’re by the ashtray. “Would you like a cigarette?”

  Thanks. Reaching. Reaching “Thanks,” she’s in his bed. A wildcat. Her fingers touch his hand as she inhales, she agrees to everything, maybe she’d. He’s always wanted a . . . Fantastic! No question of that lingering touch: steadying his hand, on his face more like it, his eyes, now tracing intrigued the line of his mouth and he can try it, yes, she’s not like the others.

  Poking into his bellybutton, scraping index fingernail up his thigh and the certainty that she won’t be horrified, afraid, it’s right up her alley, fills his head with blood, it glints in his eyes . . . His legs are like rubber, he can hardly get out of the room to put it on.

  Peter Walters on his hands and knees, fiercely lustful, a dog, a wolf, he pauses to sniff and growl at the bedroom door. It’s cunningly designed. A canine mask covers his head but leaves his mouth, his own fangs free: dog skins have been tailored to fit over his shoulders and along his back to the bushy tail. Surprisingly white underneath, blue-veined at the belly, he’s naked from mouth to thighs.

  A flesh-coloured strap buckled under his chin, another across his chest, two more between his legs, hold everything in place; sleeves to the wrist for his arms, to the knee for his legs, are secured by elastic. It’s beautifully made, it never slips or binds: the straps at his thighs tend to chafe in hot weather, but only because he’s plumper now.

  There’s a piece of wire in the tail (he thought of that himself), stiffly it rises behind him, jerking from side to side as he crawls towards her. He snarls. She understands immediately, she understands! She moans. His small red penis rises like a finger as she moans. He howls, she whimpers. Raising his face in gratitude, his muzzle to the ceiling, he howls and howls! With burning eyes she watches him pad to the bed, she whimpers more excitedly, she rises on all fours, she . . .

  Chaos in the room behind. Good God, turning to the door “Excuse me”, what in hell? A madhouse, they’ve all . . .

  “What’s that?” Her eyes, oh doctor . . .

  “Just a.” The husky, the fucking . . . “Excuse me.” Smiling professional, grimly smiling. “Just a minute, it’s just.” And Peter Walters through the door to restore order. “Don’t go away.” Darting his head back, her breasts, smiling “Don’t go away.” And then between cages with animals launching themselves against their doors, swelling and spitting, it’s a madhouse, a crazy ark because of that goddamn dog and Oswald. What’s he done to it? staring, muttering privately. What if she leaves? hardly a glance for Oswald standing and it’s another fit of course. A bad one by the look of it. Totally hysteric, and that’s enough, it’ll have to go: the dog is completely out of control. Horribly contorted it screams, howls, and Walters decides to make the phone call. There’s no curing it, and they might even pay extra for a specimen as strong as this. The great white body crashes repeatedly against the cage as he watches: the whole tier shudders, but the bugger should collapse anytime now. Really stupid, a frenzy of stupidity, what brings it on? Growing weaker, it stiffens brutally, the foam at its mouth is red with blood, it falls jerking to the floor, it shakes, and flutters, and then lies still . . .

  As its silence spreads Walters hears a sound unlike the others, a rattling mechanical noise and it’s coming from right beside him. Curious he turns to Felix Oswald, sees the chattering teeth, the eyes, and is suddenly, Oswald! “Oswald” for chrissakes, “Felix are you alright?” Reaching for the arm, touching, feeling the tension and soothing, “What’s the matter Felix?” with his voice and hand, “You’ll be alright, you’ll be . . . ” Felix stares for a moment at Peter Walters and then begins to cry.

  He comes to the street and into the sun. It’s two blocks to the subway station, and today there’s no sign of a bus. His long legs carry him unthinking. Automatically he adjusts his stride so that his left foot hits the lines on the sidewalk. He’s particularly anxious to get there and even with his coat open, flapping about his legs, he begins to sweat, it’s because of the effort, the sweater, his winter coat, the sun . . .

  When he bursts onto the platform his body is damp. He can feel the heart alive in his chest: he senses vague pains, he reaches under his sweater, inside his shirt so his fingers are in the armpit, his palm across the nipple, and he presses roughly, he digs his fingers into the moist flesh and leans to stare down the track. There’s only an hour for lunch. No sign of the train, not yet. But there are children chasing among themselves: they appear to be spitting at each other; they make exaggerated hawking sounds in their throats, they rush about noisily, bumping into men and women who, in turn, push back at the children, their mouths opening and closing as they reprimand them. Several have left briefcases on the platform now, so they can run about more freely. One little boy, standing by himself, appears to be crying. Felix watches them and sees that they spit like children with the fronts of their mouths, their lips, and their spittle is frothy and inconsequential. There are many travellers waiting, so he hasn’t just missed a train. He finds that reassuring. At the same time in their frenzy the children may not see that briefcase by the edge, one of them, looking back over its shoulder as it flees could very easily trip over it and fall onto the tracks. And the train is coming. It could easily happen. He hears it to his left, but the children don’t. They continue to chase each other, laughing shrilly: one little girl, perhaps because of her long hair, is being pursued by several boys at once; she darts this way and that in her attempts to elude them. The train hurtles into the station, he can see where the spittle gleams in her hair.

  Standing by the window perhaps. Vaguely aware of the garages at the end of the garden, the catalpa, the sound of a commuter train on the bridge. Not really. Pretending . . .

  Everything dirty, seedy from winter. His hands have no strength. His fingers are trembling. He turns from the window and sees himself reflected in the mirror: he crosses the room to his reflection, he can almost count the hairs in his beard.

  On the subway, not sitting, standing in the corner so that he touches no one, nobody can accidentally brush against him with their bodies because of a sudden stop, or even, as can happen, because the cars sway as they rush from station to station.

  Davisville, past the cemetery, into the tunnel and then St. Clair. Felix on his feet before the train has stopped, even before they’ve entered the station: he’s first to the door and out, he races up the stairs, through the turnstile and into the street. He sprints across St. Clair and heads north on Yonge. Time is passing. He darts among window shoppers in the sun. Although his body seems awkward, his passage uncontrolled, he threads among them expertly, he never contacts, never touches or is touched: it’s almost as if he wasn’t there at all.

  She’s there though, that woman again, perhaps still leaning at the corner. Enveloped in a huge scarf, she pulls it about her head and shoulders: she watches from the other side of the street. Nobody has ever spoken to her, no one has followed her home…

  Felix walking more freely because the shops are behind him and there are few people near the Church. Some old men, that’s all: crouching on benches they examine their
hands, their bodies in the sun.

  The journey is interminable. He’s only now at the gate, it takes him forever to pass the office and he has to follow the drive for thirty yards up the hill before it curves to the left. Felix leaves it here, he continues straight ahead, he walks on the graves, their headstones cut with names, beloved father, strange names lost in memory.

  At the crest of the hill he barely pauses, he knows his route; this is where the ravine begins. There are no graves here, no trees: a shallow valley from the north to the south, it tumbles to dead elms, underbrush at the cemetery’s southern edge; and there the stream, foul smelling, issues from the ground. He reaches the bottom, running to maintain balance, and crosses quickly.

  Often he has walked here almost for pleasure. One summer afternoon he watched a ground hog there, yes there, he could see the mound if he’d only look. But he does not look. And to his left a pile of broken monuments. Fragments of a wing, a face: the scattered headstones, chunks of marble as he passes. Earth sticks to his boots as he climbs to rejoin the road: ice clings in the roots of trees. He’s out of breath, he slides, his heart is pounding, but he’s almost there.

  Mausoleums through the trees above him, he knows them: he’s stared through barred windows in metal doors at luminous angels and virgins, at wreaths, at ivy frozen in the glass. He’s tasted chemical smells that once were Eatons, Wycliffes, men and women, their children: he’s seen them stacked in the light of memorial windows.

  The gross man in the hockey sweater is leaning on a shovel and smoking. He’s incredibly fat and standing very still. Yellow mud from the hole adheres to his feet, they appear enormous, as if wrapped in dirty blankets. He’s looking the other way and doesn’t see Felix: or if he has seen him, he makes no sign. Perhaps he pointedly turned away, perhaps he doesn’t want to acknowledge Felix Oswald for some reason known only to himself. People can be like that. For example, even though Felix has seen the man before, it’s impossible to mistake him because of his immense size, he must weigh three hundred pounds, even though he has seen him with his shovel, his blue construction helmet, in all seasons and at all times of the day, and even though the man has seen Felix, neither of them has given any indication that the other exists. Despite this and for some time now, Felix has wanted to speak to him, to walk up to him and say “Excuse me” or “Good day sir.” It would be pleasant to smoke a cigarette with him, perhaps he has a bottle of wine in his suitcase and they would sit on the steps of a mausoleum, talking or perhaps not talking, perhaps just eating their sandwiches, smiling occasionally, passing the wine back and forth and if everything worked out, Felix might introduce him to the stone ladies.

  And there they are. He begins to run. Twin sisters, he’s sure they’re twins and they’re waiting for him. Sitting at either end of the stone bench, each resting a cheek against the back, staring at each other, they wait: their outside arms are raised, identically, with the inside wrist against the forehead, the elbows up and back, lifting their breasts. They watch each other. They reach with their other arms, their opening hands along the stone and will never touch. They’re so beautiful. He pauses before them, he glances from one to the other as if for a sign, from profile to profile. They’re bigger than he is, probably six and a half feet if they stood up: they’ve got good tough bodies naked to the waist. He knows their breasts, the muscles of their bellies, the strong thighs under the stone draperies gathered about them as they sit.

  Very close to them now, he pauses: still looking from one to the other he comes to sit between them on the bench, right in the middle. That’s important. One day at the beginning he measured the full length of the bench. It’s fourteen feet long. Then he found the exact centre by walking seven feet from the end: with a whitewashed rock from the flower bed, making certain he was unobserved, he scratched his mark into the stone. It’s still there. And he’s come to sit precisely on it, every lunch hour for months.

  Felix sitting with a buttock on either side of the exact centre of the bench; reaching into the bag for his lunch. Perhaps they don’t care: he can’t believe that. Biting into a meat sandwich, he knows it’s important that when he first arrives, he sits in the dead centre like this. He mustn’t show any preference until he’s finished eating. In the same way, they continue staring through him, at each other, as if he wasn’t there. Methodically he eats. He chews his food well and washes down the wads of bread and meat with orange juice. Afterwards, when he’s finished, when they’ve got this stasis to support them, he can, and usually does nestle up close to either one or the other: he can spend all his time talking to one of them, with nothing more than mere courtesy for the other, and sometimes not even that; sometimes he becomes so preoccupied with one, with the intimacy they have, the excitement, that he ignores her sister completely, and still there’s no awkwardness. Even when he leans to circle a nipple with his mouth, or when he fondles the breasts, the belly, rubs his hands longingly over her thighs, even when he kneels on the bench beside her and takes the stone face in both his hands and covers it with kisses, poking his tongue in at the mouth, her eyes, licking her jaw greedily to the ear, even with all this, there’s never a hint of jealousy. It’s worked out very well.

  The limousine, black and official, the sun glinting from its polished surface, slips through the trees before he sees it: next, and close behind, comes the hearse. They make no sound and Felix, eating his apple, is at first unaware of them. When he does look down, when he sees them, more cars have come over the hill, big rented cars with important mourners, and the procession, in slow motion, glides among the headstones. For a moment he believes they’ll go to their left, follow the road that swings away to his right and into the cemetery’s heart. But they don’t, they take the other fork. One after the other. In complete silence: they pass from right to left in front of him. He can hear them now, can see faces looking at that young man sitting between two stone figures on a memorial bench eating an apple.

  The first car stops at the public mausoleum, then the others, the line contracts: figures clamber from the black limousines at the front and he suddenly remembers the chapel, sort of a chapel inside, a vacant-smelling room, like a courtroom, with pews and an altar for the body. He understands. Behind the screens on either side run halls, four to the north and four to the south, high-ceilinged halls, their only light from frosted windows at the end; he’s walked them often, he’s read the names, peered into cells at plastic wreaths, at mouldering flowers, he’s breathed the dead air and stared at corpses filed in drawers to the roof.

  Voices suddenly, doors slamming and Felix averts his eyes as people, singly and in groups, march from their cars: soberly dressed, they straggle to the steps, to the hearse brilliant in the sun ahead of them. There are children too; in little hats and ties, with tiny purses and polished shoes, they trot beside the adults, their pinched faces acknowledge him as they go.

  A terrible commotion from ahead! Violent cries indistinct with distance . . . there’s shouting near the coffin, it’s at the door now: scuffling feet of mourners at the rear, sensing drama they quicken their pace, literally dragging their children to the bottom steps, the edge of the crowd; impatient they struggle and crane to discover the source of all this shouting, these accusations. Felix is drawn unwillingly. Leaving his friends, they understand, he approaches the crowd: it surges on the mausoleum’s steps, something violent is happening at the door, the crowd convulses. Everyone strains to see. Felix can’t be sure but apparently two people, at least two people, although others are taking sides, two women, he thinks, are at the centre, they’re shouting hysterically, he can’t make out what they’re saying, he can’t even be sure that the two of them are opponents, perhaps they’re taking on everyone else, perhaps there’s more than one centre to this. Apart from it all, hands down by his side, he watches. A child, a little girl in blue velvet and patent leather shoes, a tiny child with brass buttons and long hair, growing tired of the crowd because she ca
n’t see anything, or maybe she’s not bored at all, maybe she’s afraid for even Felix is uncertain, yes, something violent is building, she’s probably afraid, she wanders away from her mother in the direction of Felix. He can’t know if she sees him or whether it’s only chance. The sun shines in her hair, the wet earth sticks to her shoes as she comes. Her mother, greedy to see, clawing into the crowd, hasn’t missed her yet. Felix is transfixed. Turning he sees his friends, the one staring past her sister into his face, and behind them, the gravedigger in his hockey sweater standing by a blue tree. He’s left his shovel somewhere and watches the scene intently. The crowd still boils about the coffin, the voices still shout with more and more of them protesting. The child is crying piteously. She totters aimlessly among the ornamental bushes, the naked hedges by the road. Felix doesn’t know what to do. He should do something. Should he try to find the mother? It would be better if he tried to console the child; but how do you do that? Stories and songs, you tell them stories, dandle them on your knee . . . Felix remembers stories, a long time ago, there was someone, a man, a woman, it doesn’t matter now, perhaps it was a maid, a housekeeper, someone told him stories and that’s the important thing. He remembers liking them; now, because her cheeks are smeared with tears, with dirt from her little hands, he remembers a lap, a heart beating inside someone else’s body; he remembers a voice, or is this all imagination, has he made it all up? a voice telling him of wolves with glittering eyes, they encircle the campfire of a traveller far from home, in winter, an especially deep winter so that food is scarce everywhere and the wolves, desperate with hunger, shift closer as the fire dies: shuddering awake he sees their shadows nearly on him, he can smell their bodies! frantically he throws wood on the coals, sparks fly in the towering night, he shouts but they’ve grown accustomed to his noise and fear him no longer. He has only the fire.