Marika was a peach-cheeked blonde, about twenty-two or three, anyway no more than five or six years younger than Julia. Although her name suggested the exotic, a Hungarian perhaps, her accent was flat Ontario and her last name was Hunt. Either a fanciful mother or a name-changing father, or perhaps Marika had adopted the name herself. She had been very friendly to Julia. “I’ve read your book,” she said. “I don’t find time to read too many books, but I got yours out of the library because of Bernie. I didn’t think I was going to like it, but actually it’s quite good.” Julia was grateful, Bernie said too grateful, to people who said they liked her work or who had even read it. Nevertheless, she heard a voice inside her head saying, Piss right off. It was the way Marika offered her compliment: like a biscuit to a dog, part reward, part bribe, and condescending.
Since then they’d had coffee together several times. It was always Marika who dropped over, on some errand or other from Bernie. They sat in the kitchen and talked, but no real connections were made. They were like two mothers at a birthday party, sitting on the sidelines while their children whooped and gobbled: they were polite to each other, but the real focus of their attention was elsewhere. Once Marika had said, “I’ve always thought I might like to write myself,” and Julia had felt a small red explosion at the back of her neck and had almost thrown her cup of coffee at her, until she realized Marika didn’t mean it that way, she was just trying to appear interested. “Aren’t you afraid you’ll run out of material?”
“Not material, energy,” she’d said, making it sound like a joke; but it had been true, that was her fear. Weren’t they the same thing? “According to Einstein,” she said, and Marika, having missed the connection, gave her a funny look and changed the subject to films.
The last time Marika came over, Julia wasn’t even out of bed. She had no excuse, no explanation. She almost told her to go away, but Bernie needed his black notebook, the one with the phone numbers, so she had to let her in. Marika leaned in the bedroom doorway, trim in her little layered look, dangling her handwoven bag, while Julia, with unwashed hair straggling over the shoulders of her nightgown, mossmouthed and blurryminded, knelt on the floor and scrabbled through Bernie’s discarded pockets. For the first time in their life she wished he would bloody well pick up his clothes. She felt exposed by them, though she shouldn’t, they weren’t her clothes, she hadn’t dropped them. Marika exuded surprise, embarrassment and a certain glee, as if Bernie’s dirty socks and trampled jeans were Julia’s soft underbelly, which she’d always wanted to get a look at.
“I don’t know where he’s put it,” Julia said, irritated. “He’s supposed to pick them up himself,” and added, far too defensively she knew, “We share everything.”
“Of course, with your work and all,” Marika said. She was scanning the room, the greyish bed, Julia’s sweater slumped in the corner chair, the avocado with brown-edged leaves on the windowsill, their only plant. She’d grown it from the pit of a celebration avocado—she could no longer remember the reason for the rejoicing—but there was something wrong with it. Tea-leaves, you were supposed to put tea-leaves on them, or was it charcoal?
The notebook was finally under the bed. Julia pulled it out; a dustball clung to it. She saw in her mind a small plaque, like the ones on historical houses: DUSTBALL. Once the property of Julia Morse, Poetess. With a few bored schoolchildren looking at it through the glass of a case. That was the future, if there was a future, if she kept on writing, if she became at least marginally significant, an obligatory footnote in someone’s thesis. Fragments left over after the general decay, classified, gathering dust, like the vertebrae of dinosaurs. Bloodless.
She handed the notebook over. “Would you like some coffee?” she asked, in a voice meant to discourage.
“I don’t want to put you out,” Marika said, but she had some anyway, chatting brightly about their plans for a collective show, to be called “Up from Under.” Her eyes shifted around the kitchen, taking in the dripping tap, the smelly J cloth draped over it, the ancient toaster with the crumbs around its base like the debris from a tiny landslide. “I’m really glad we can be friends,” she said just before leaving. “Bernie says we have nothing in common, but I think we get on real well. They’re mostly men down there.” This could have been some ersatz variety of women’s lib, Julia thought, but it wasn’t: Marika’s voice stank of bridge club. “Real well.” How incongruous, with those three-inch platforms, that trendy bum. Marika’s visits made her feel like a welfare case. She wondered how she could get her to stop coming, without being too rude. She begrudged the time, too, she could be using it for work. Though increasingly there was no work.
Bernie didn’t seem to notice that she was doing next to nothing. He no longer asked to read what she might have written during the day. When he came home for dinner he would talk obsessively about the gallery, eating plate after plate of spaghetti and, it seemed to her, whole loaves of bread. His appetite had increased, and they had recently begun to argue about the food bills and who was supposed to do the cooking and shopping. In the beginning they had shared everything, that was the agreement. Julia wanted to point out that since he was now eating twice as much as she was, he really ought to do more of the shopping and pay more than half, but she felt it would be mingy of her to say this. Especially since, whenever they talked about money, he would say, “Don’t worry, you’ll get paid off,” as if she begrudged him the gallery loan. Which she supposed she did.
What time is it? Lift the wrist: six-thirty. The blood seems to have slowed down, but it’s still there, a thickening like sludge at the back of the throat. A teacher, once, in public school, who came into the classroom with her teeth outlined in blood. She must have been to the dentist and then not checked in the mirror, but we were all so afraid of her none of us said anything and we spent the afternoon drawing three tulips in a vase, presided over by that bloodthirsty smile: Have to remember to brush my teeth and clean my face carefully, a drop of blood on the chin might be disturbing to the audience. Blood, the elemental fluid, the juice of life, byproduct of birth, prelude to death. The red badge of courage. The people’s flag. Maybe I could get a job writing political speeches, if all else fails. But when it comes out of your nose, not magic or even symbolic, just ridiculous. Pinned by the nose to the geometric net of this bathroom floor. Don’t be completely stupid, get started. Stand up carefully: if the blood keeps flowing, call off the reading and get on the plane. (Leaving a trail of clots?) I could be home tonight. Bernie’s there now, waiting for me to call, it’s past the time.
She pulled herself up, slowly, holding on to the sink, and walked into the bedroom with her head tilted back precariously. She groped for the phone and picked it up. She dialled 0 and got the operator to place the call for her. She listened to the outer-space noises the phone made, anticipating Bernie’s voice, feeling his tongue already on the inside of her mouth. They would go to bed and after that they would have a late supper, the two of them in the kitchen with the gas oven lit and open to keep them warm, the way they used to. (Her mind skipped the details of what they would eat. She knew there had been nothing in the refrigerator when she left but a couple of aging weiners. Not even any buns.) Things would get better, time would reverse itself, they would talk, she would tell him how much she had missed him (for surely she had been away much longer than a day), silence would open, language would flow again.