Polaroid

POLAROID

By John Ellison Davies

She came prepared to make a scene, but the bar's familiar neutral decor and ridiculous carpet - countless laughing lions reared on hind legs across its red expanse - defeated her. She wondered if interior designers use a secret colour chart; this tint to encourage flirtation, that shade for appointments, a comparison of timetables, hints and beginnings suggestive as a Tarot card. The chart would certainly not allow for passion. That happened later with a kiss or an argument in a taxi, not here. She had an odd notion that anger here would hang in the air like too much cigarette smoke. She doubted if the air conditioning could cope with it. The laughing lions discouraged it.

The young blond barman poured her usual vodka. Three loud men in blue suits glanced at her and carried their drinks to a dim corner. Don arrived only a few minutes late and carrying a ribbon-wrapped cardboard box which added a comic touch to his crumpled appearance. His suit needed pressing. They kissed awkwardly. He ordered a drink scattering loose change from his pockets. "Take what you need," he said and for a confused moment she thought he was talking to her.

"What's that?" she asked, intrigued by the white box and the neatly tied feminine bow.

"A cake for Carolyn's birthday," he said, embarrassed. "She's ten tomorrow."

"Of course. How could I forget my rival's birthday?"

"Don't start."

With the intuition of experience the barman edged away. Calm and withdrawn, he sliced a lemon.

"I was passing the shop on my way here and remembered I had to collect it," he explained wearily. "If it bothers you..."

"And what would you do if it bothers me?" she teased. "I don't mind. I hope Carolyn has a lovely birthday. Does Eleanor know where you are?"

"No."

"Does she know about us yet?"

The lions were against her but one vodka's cold warmth encouraged mischief.

"She guesses, I think. I haven't told her. She doesn't ask."

"Poor Don. I'm not being a very good mistress, am I?"

"You know I don't like that word."

"It's a good clear word. A girl knows where she is with a word like that. I'm sorry. You have something to tell me?"

She gave him the opening, prepared for the worst which was, after all, no worse than a solitary taxi ride to a silent apartment and then the dull routine of forgetting him. She remembered his long pauses on the telephone and, after the call, her need to confide her fear in someone. It came as a shock, like stepping into a hot bath, to realise that he was the only one she wanted to confide in.

"I have to spend more time at home for a while."

"Why?"

"Family obligations," he replied vaguely. She knew better than to knock at that door.

"How long?"

"A month, maybe longer. I'll call you when I can. Then we'll go away for a few days."

"Don't lie to me Don. I'm not innocent enough to be lied to."

"Believe me."

On the telephone she could not have been certain, but while his hand rested lightly on her knee as a promise she could believe in him. Sometimes, she knew, it is the light promises we keep. He was not a liar. He was not unkind. Only married. He looked at his watch.

"Do something for me?" she asked.

"Sure."

"Remember you showed me a picture of your family once."

"Yes." He was wary. "I thought it was a mistake."

"No, really. It helped." She had to be careful now. She could not tell him that she had driven by his office once, not too slowly, and by his house, just once. "If you could give me a photograph of your house... from the inside...then I could imagine you there. I mean I could feel somehow connected. Please. It would help. It would help me." She might have been teaching him a new word in a new language. "Please."

.

The house was empty. On the coffee table lay a note from his wife, the blue handwriting as clear and unslanting as Eleanor herself. Her father had invited her and Carolyn over for dinner. She assumed he would not be interested. She had taken a steak out of the freezer for him. Relieved, Don loosened his tie and poured a Scotch.

Family obligations. There was no way to list them. They multiplied like a virus, variable as a mood or a pattern on the weather chart on the evening news. Fine. Cloudy. Possibly showers. Mostly showers. Always unpredictable, uncertain. Jane had been his only certainty, until now. In a month or six weeks... how long would she wait, where exactly was her threshold of pain, boredom, neglect? Where was his? Poor Jane. Poor Don. He had pity to spare tonight, even for his wife, avoiding him to be with a father who scarcely noticed her. Poor Eleanor. She seemed born to be bypassed. (Aren't we all? - the idea came to him sharp as an insect sting.) The old man, widowed and retired, thought only of Carolyn. "My rival," Jane called her. Her mother's too, in a way.

In the untidy apartment, he knew, they would be watching television. Carolyn was asleep beside Eleanor, calmed by television and her grandfather's low voice. The voice Don remembered raging and threatening now lowered itself for a child. Fists that had knocked Eleanor and her mother across the room, the same room, now stroked Carolyn's hair timidly as if she were a rare treasured doll that had learned, incredibly, to breathe. And Eleanor listened to his stories, his chant against loneliness and panic, his hushed lullaby for the child between them. The same stories. Fewer. Some he had forgotten himself and life provided no new ones. Was that death? - No new stories to tell and a slow forgetting until you had only one story to tell?

Don knew what they would be watching. A Western, if there was one on tonight. A story a man could shoot or punch his way out of. Don's first conversation with him, if you could call it that, began with films. "I like a manly story," he'd said, crushing Don's hand. It may have been their last complete conversation. Now they spoke most often on the phone. There was little to say. "Carolyn is fine." Don did not begrudge him that, but when they did meet now he pressed a little harder against the weakening handshake, searching his father-in-law's impassive basalt face for signs of erosion, of an end to the contest.

Don checked the television guide. There was a Western on. Enjoy it, he thought, not maliciously. Jane, in her efficient peach-scented apartment, would also be watching. Dusty heroes with easy answers appealed to her too, though perhaps for different reasons. Again he imagined the old man stroking Carolyn's silken hair, the massive hands flabby as his body, skin rough and crinkled as brown paper, thickened veins carrying sluggish blood like a river silted up and losing interest in the sea.

"You old hypocrite." He raised his glass, speaking to the empty room around him. "You never knew until it was too late, did you?"

If he turned on the same programme himself would he see, for once, through their eyes, through Jane's, through Eleanor's? It was an interesting temptation he resisted. A shared experience, he believed, was a shared illusion, a cheap coat of paint over tired wallpaper. The wallpaper still peeled, underneath. He stared at the brooding unused television screen, preferring the quiet, the scuff of his socks on the carpet, the creak of a door, the refrigerator's dutiful shudder. A window shifted in its frame against the wind outside. This is real, he argued with himself. The Indians never win. The cavalry never comes. Jane wants a photograph. Some animals, he remembered, know instinctively which grasses to chew to cure their diseases. If that was her cure...

His Polaroid camera was on the dresser in his - and Eleanor's - bedroom, loaded. He photographed their bed first, then the room from another angle. A harsh mosquito whine fed each card from the camera. He pressed the button four times in Carolyn's room, taking in the toys and bears, the nail polish she borrowed from her mother, a straw hat on the door handle, the collection of small clothes hanging on a home-made rack. Other rooms he covered at random, keeping count to save enough film for the kitchen, important because all big decisions were made there. He had used all the film. Jane's craving deserved a thorough record.

Spread on the coffee table the grey blank cards slowly developed images and details from flaring shapes and clouds. Like sheets of glass indulging in memory, painted by dreaming hands. Was the bedspread so starkly white and black? He checked back through the house. It was, and the straw hat was grubbier, the clothes on the rack larger than he knew, the colour in the kitchen crueller and more cutting than he realised. His desk, the small bookshelf and a framed print varnished and dusted, glistened untouched.

"Christ," he whispered, reaching for the telephone, but it rang before he touched it.