“When’s it due?” he asked, keeping on neutral ground.
“Next week. But I’m not going to do it, not the way they want. I’m giving them one of my own poems. That says it all. I mean, if they have to read one right there in the class they’ll get what Blake was trying to do with cadences. I’m getting it xeroxed.” She hesitated, less sure of herself. “Do you think that’ll be all right?”
Morrison wondered what he would do if one of his own students tried such a ploy. He hadn’t thought of Louise as the poetry-writing type. “Have you checked with the professor about it?”
“I try to talk to him,” she said. “I try to help him but I can’t get through to him. If they don’t get what I mean though I’ll know they’re all phonies and I can just walk out.” She was twisting her cup on the table top, her lips were trembling.
Morrison felt his loyalties were being divided; also he didn’t want her to cry, that would involve dangerous comforting pats, even an arm around her shoulder. He tried to shut out an involuntary quick image of himself on top of her in the middle of the kitchen floor, getting white latex all over her fur. Not today, his mind commanded, pleaded.
As if in answer the reverberations of an organ boomed from beneath their feet, accompanied by a high quavering voice: Rock of a-ges, cleft for me… Let me HIIIDE myself… Louise took it as a signal. “I have to go,” she said. She got up and went out as abruptly as she had come, thanking him perfunctorily for the tea she hadn’t drunk.
The organ was a Hammond, owned by the woman downstairs, a native. When her husband and nubile child were home she shouted at them. The rest of the time she ran the vacuum cleaner or picked out hymn tunes and old favourites on the organ with two fingers, singing to herself. The organ was to Morrison the most annoying. At first he tried to ignore it; then he put on opera records, attempting to drown it out. Finally he recorded it with his tape recorder. When the noise got too aggravating he would aim the speakers down the hot air register and run the tape through as loudly as possible. It gave him a sense of participation, of control.
He did this now, admiring the way the tape clashed with what she was currently playing: “Whispering Hope” with an overlay of “Annie Laurie”; “The Last Rose of Summer” counterpointing “Come to the Church in the Wild-wood.” He was surprised at how much he was able to hate her: he had only seen her once, looking balefully out at him from between her hideous flowered drapes as he wallowed through the snow on his way to the garage. Her husband was supposed to keep the walk shovelled but didn’t.
Louise came back the next day before Morrison was up. He was awake but he could tell by the chill in the room—his breath was visible—and by the faint smell of oil that something had gone wrong with the furnace again. It was less trouble to stay in bed, at least till the sun was well risen, then to get up and try the various ways of keeping warm.
When the buzzer went he pulled a blanket around himself and stumbled to the door.
“I thought of something,” Louise said tragically. She was in the door before he could fend her off.
“I’m afraid it’s cold in here,” he said.
“I had to come over and tell you. I don’t use the phone any more. You should have yours taken out.”
She stomped the snow from her boots while Morrison retreated into the livingroom. There was a thick crust of frost on the insides of the windows; he lit the gas fireplace. Louise stalked impatiently around the uncarpeted floor.
“You aren’t listening,” she said. He looked out obediently at her from his blanket. “What I thought of is this: The city has no right to be here. I mean, why is it? No city should be here, this far north: it isn’t even on a lake or an important river, even. Why is it here?” She clasped her hands, gazing at him as though everything depended on his answer.
Morrison, standing on one bare foot, reflected that he had often since his arrival asked himself the same question. “It started as a trading post,” he said, shivering.
“But it doesn’t look like one. It doesn’t look like anything, it doesn’t have anything, it could be anywhere. Why is it here ?” She implored; she even clutched a corner of his blanket.
Morrison shied away. “Look,” he said, “do you mind if I get some clothes on?”
“Which room are they in?” she asked suspiciously.
“The bedroom,” he said.
“That’s all right. That room’s all right,” she said.
Contrary to his fear she made no attempt to follow him in. When he was dressed he returned to find her sitting on the floor with a piece of paper. “We have to complete the circle,” she said. “We need the others.”
“What others?” He decided she was overtired, she had been working too hard: she had deep red blotches around her eyes and the rest of her face was pale green.
“I’ll draw you a diagram of it,” she said. But instead she sat on the floor, jabbing at the paper with the pencil point. “I wanted to work out my own system,” she said plaintively, “but they wouldn’t let me.” A tear slid down her cheek.
“Maybe you need to talk to someone,” Morrison said, over-casually.
She raised her head. “But I’m talking to you. Oh,” she said, reverting to her office voice, “you mean a shrink. I saw one earlier. He said I was very sane and a genius. He took a reading of my head: he said the patterns in my brain are the same as Julius Caesar’s, only his were military and mine are creative.” She started jabbing with the pencil again.
“I’ll make you a peanut butter sandwich,” Morrison said, offering the only thing he himself wanted right then. It did not occur to him until months later when he was remembering it to ask himself how anyone could have known about the patterns in Julius Caesar’s brain. At the moment he was wondering whether Louise might not in fact be a genius. He felt helpless because of his own inability to respond; she would think him as obtuse as the others, whoever they were.
At first she did not want him to go into the kitchen: she knew the telephone was in there. But he promised not to use it. When he came out again with a piece of bread on which he had spread with difficulty the gelid peanut butter, she was curled inside her coat in front of the fire, sleeping. He laid the bread gently beside her as if leaving crumbs on a stump for unseen animals. Then he changed his mind, retrieved it, took it on tiptoe into the kitchen and ate it himself. He turned on the oven, opened the oven door, wrapped himself in a blanket from the bedroom and read Marvell.
She slept for nearly three hours; he didn’t hear her get up. She appeared in the kitchen doorway, looking much better, though a greyish-green pallor still lingered around her mouth and eyes.
“That was just what I needed,” she said in her old brisk voice. “Now I must be off; I have lots of work to do.” Morrison took his feet off the stove and saw her to the door.
“Don’t fall,” he called after her cheerfully as she went down the steep wooden steps, her feet hidden under the rim of her coat. The steps were icy, he didn’t keep them cleared properly. His landlady was afraid someone would slip on them and sue her.
At the bottom Louise turned and waved at him. The air was thickening with ice fog, frozen water particles held in suspension; if you ran a horse in it, they’d told him, the ice pierced its lungs and it bled to death. But they hadn’t told him that till after he’d trotted to the university in it one morning when the car wouldn’t start and complained aloud in the coffee room about the sharp pains in his chest.