One Sunday before the snow came they had gone for an impromptu drive; at her suggestion they had aimed for the zoo twenty miles from the city. After they made it through the oil derricks there had been trees; not the right kind of trees—he had felt, as he had on the way across, that the land was keeping itself apart from him, not letting him in, there had to be more to it than this repetitive, non-committal drabness—but still trees; and the zoo once they reached it was spacious, the animals kept in enclosures large enough for them to run in and even hide in if they wanted to.
Louise had been there before—how, since she had no car, he didn’t ask—and showed him around. “They choose animals that can survive the winter,” she said. “It’s open all year. They don’t even know they’re in a zoo.” She pointed out the artificial mountain made of cement blocks for the mountain goats to climb on. Morrison didn’t as a rule like any animal bigger and wilder than a cat, but these kept far enough away to be tolerable. That day she had told him a little about herself, a departure: mostly she talked about her work. She had travelled in Europe, she told him, and had spent a year studying in England.
“What are you doing here?” he had asked.
She shrugged. “They gave me money; nobody else would.”
Essentially it was his reason too. It wasn’t the draft; he was really over-age, though here they kept wanting to think he was a dodger, it made his presence more acceptable to them. The job market had been tight back in the States and also, when he tried later, in what they called here the East. But in all fairness it hadn’t been only the money or the dismalness of the situation back home. He had wanted something else, some adventure; he felt he might learn something new. He had thought the city would be near the mountains. But except for the raw gully through which the brownish river curved, it was flat.
“I don’t want you to think of it as typical,” Louise was saying. “You ought to see Montreal.”
“Are you typical?” he asked.
She laughed. “None of us is typical, or do we all look alike to you? I’m not typical, I’m all-inclusive.”
She let her fur coat fall down from around her shoulders as she said this, and he wondered again whether he was expected to make a move, to approach her. He ought to approach someone or something; he was beginning to feel isolated inside his clothes and skin. His students were out of the question. Besides, they were so thick, so impermeable; the girls, even the more slender ones, made him think of slabs of substance white and congealed, like lard. And the other single women on staff were much older than he was: in them Louise’s briskness had degenerated into a pinpointing, impaling quality.
There must be a place where he could meet someone, some nice loosely structured girl with ungroomed, seedy breasts, more thing than idea, slovenly and gratuitous. They existed, he was familiar with them from what he had begun to think of as his previous life, but he had not kept in touch with any of them. They had all been good at first but even the sloppiest had in time come to require something from him he thought he was not yet ready to give: they wanted him to be in love with them, an exertion of the mind too strenuous for him to undertake. His mind, he felt, was needed for other things, though he wasn’t quite sure what they were. He was tasting, exploring: goals would come later.
Louise wasn’t at all like them; she would never lend him her body for nothing, even temporarily, though she had the fur spread out around her now like a rug and had raised one corduroy-trousered knee, letting him see in profile the taut bulge of her somewhat muscular thigh. She probably went skiing and ice skating. He imagined his long body locked in that athletic, chilly grip, his eyes darkened by fur. Not yet, he thought, raising his half-full cocoa cup between them. I can do without, I don’t need it yet.
It was the weekend and Morrison was painting his apartment as he habitually did on weekends; he had been at it off and on since he moved in.
“You’ll have to have it painted, of course,” he’d said smoothly to the landlady when inspecting it, but he had already shown himself too eager and she’d outfoxed him. “Well, I don’t know, there’s another boy wants it says he’ll paint it himself…” So of course Morrison had to say he would too. This was the third coat.
Morrison’s vision of wall-painting had been drawn from the paint ads—spot-free housewives gliding it on, one-handed and smiling—but it wasn’t easy. The paint got on the floor, on the furniture, in his hair. Before he could even begin he had to cart out the accumulated discards of several generations of previous tenants: baby clothes, old snapshots, an inner tube, heaps of empty liquor bottles, and (intriguingly) a silk parachute. Messiness interested him only in women; he could not live surrounded by it himself.
One wall of the livingroom had been pink, one green, one orange and one black. He was painting them white. The last tenants, a group of Nigerian students, had left weird magic-looking murals on the walls: a sort of swamp, in black on the orange wall, and an upright shape, in pink on the green wall, was either a very poorly done Christ Child or—could it be?—an erect penis with a halo around it. Morrison painted these two walls first, but it made him uneasy to know the pictures were still there underneath the paint. Sometimes as he rollered his way around the room he wondered what the Nigerians had thought the first time it hit forty below.
The landlady seemed to prefer foreign students, probably because they were afraid to complain: she had been aggrieved when Morrison had demanded a real lock for his door. The cellar was a warren of cubbyholes; he was not sure yet exactly who lived in them. Soon after he had moved in a Korean had appeared at his door, hopefully smiling. He wanted to talk about income tax.
“I’m sorry,” Morrison had said, “some other time, okay? I have a lot of work to do.” He was nice enough, no doubt, but Morrison didn’t want to get involved with someone he didn’t know; and he did have work to do. He felt picayune about it later when he discovered the Korean had a wife and child down in his cubbyhole with him; often in the fall they had put fishes out to dry, stringing them on the clotheslines where they twirled in the wind like plastic gas-station decorations.
He was doing the ceiling, craning his neck, with the latex oozing down the handle of the roller onto his arm, when the buzzer went. He almost hoped it was the Korean, he seldom saw anyone on the weekends. But it was Louise.
“Hi,” he said, surprised.
“I just thought I’d drop in,” she said. “I don’t use the phone any more.”
“I’m painting,” he said, partly as an excuse: he wasn’t sure he wanted her in the house. What would she demand from him?
“Can I help?” she asked, as though it was a big treat.
“Actually I was about to stop for the day,” he lied. He knew she would be better at it than he was.
He made tea in the kitchen and she sat at the table and watched him.
“I came to talk about Blake,” she said. “I have to do a paper.” Unlike him she was only a Graduate Assistant, she was taking a course.
“What aspect?” Morrison asked, not interested. Blake wasn’t his field. He didn’t mind the earlier lyrics but the prophecies bored him and the extravagant letters in which Blake called his friends angels of light and vilified his enemies he found in bad taste.
“We each have to analyze one poem in Songs of Experience. I’m supposed to do the ‘Nurse’s Song.’ But they don’t know what’s going on in that course, he doesn’t know what’s going on. I’ve been trying to get through to them but they’re all doing the one-up thing, they don’t know what’s happening. They sit there and pull each other’s papers apart, I mean, they don’t know what poetry’s supposed to be for.” She wasn’t drinking her tea.