Object of Your Love Read online

  Unbuttoning her coat, Loretto sat on a stool at one of the high counters near the front where all the wallpaper books were kept. She began to look through one. Soon the girl came along, carrying a large cardboard box. She tore it open and began to unpack rolls of wallpaper, placing them in a bin fixed to the wall.

  “Excuse me,” Loretto said. The girl straightened up and looked at her with a flat, vacuous face. When she got a better look at Loretto, something flickered across her expression, like a shadow passing over it, a moment of recognition.

  “Excuse me, but do we know each other?” Loretto said with patient curiosity.

  “I don’t think so,” the girl lied.

  “I feel like we do,” said Loretto calmly. “Why is that?”

  “I don’t know,” said the girl, blushing and backing away.

  “Are you sure?” Loretto went on in a quiet, reasonable tone. “Perhaps we haven’t met directly, but are you certain there isn’t some connection? Some link we aren’t thinking of? Maybe a person we both know, however distantly or—intimately?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said the girl, a blend of defiance and fear in her voice.

  “No? I wonder.”

  The girl picked up the empty box and hurried away, pretended to busy herself at the desk. Now Loretto was openly watching her and this was upsetting the girl—Loretto could see this.

  Presently, Loretto called back to the girl, “Excuse me. Could you come up here, please? I need some advice.” Putting down her papers, the girl reluctantly approached Loretto. “Could you give me your opinion here?” asked Loretto, indicating a wallpaper sample. “Do you like this paper? Do you think it’s appropriate for a bedroom? Do you think it would create the right mood?” She was watching the girl’s face, which was stricken with alarm. “Do you think it would increase my husband’s desire for me? You look like a girl who knows a lot about a man’s desire. Especially a married man’s.” The girl turned and fled to the storage room, her hair flying back, her heels clattering across the linoleum floor. Loretto heard voices back there, a distant door slamming.

  Calmly, she continued to turn the big pages of the book, though her own heart was pounding with the raw and brutal excitement of a dog following a scent, certain of its prey. In no hurry to leave, Loretto ran her hand appreciatively over the flocked paper. The store was bright, warm and pleasant and Loretto found it soothing to sit here and watch the traffic slide past the big windows. Women out on a Friday morning shopping for the weekend. A sense of well-being and industry to the town on a day like this. The sun shone, the streets glistened with runoff. An unexpected thaw.

  Soon, an older woman, the store manager or owner, emerged from the back room, strapped a gallon of paint onto a machine and flicked a switch, setting the can gyrating. She noticed Loretto looking at her and came to the front of the store.

  “May I be of any assistance?” she asked.

  “I was dealing with that young girl,” said Loretto.

  “Wanda.” The woman was tiny, withered and bitter-looking as an old dried-up walnut, her hair a thin pink cloud. “She’s gone home.”

  “Oh?” said Loretto with concern. “What’s the matter with her?”

  “She’s feeling sick.”

  “Oh, dear,” said Loretto tragically. “She didn’t look too good, did she? She was looking a little peaked. The poor girl. I hope she’ll be all right.”

  “Is there something I can help you with?” asked the woman, growing a little suspicious, impatient with Loretto’s solicitude. Perhaps she’d overdone it.

  “No,” Loretto answered, sliding off the stool and picking up her gloves and purse. “I think I’ve accomplished what I wanted. Goodbye.”

  Outdoors in the warm sunshine, Loretto walked along the slushy sidewalk a block or so to the butcher shop, where she pushed through the glass door and shuffled along in line with the other customers until her turn came.

  “I’d like five pounds of liver,” she told the butcher. “Make it good and bloody.”

  “Big fry-up tonight, ma’am?” asked the butcher in a friendly way.

  “Something like that,” said Loretto. She paid for the liver and left the store, carrying back to the car the neat, heavy package wrapped in stiff brown paper and tied with a string. She drove away, turning at the post office, heading north from the commercial street into a residential neighbourhood of old brick homes, some large, some small. Sunshine flooded through the windows, heating the car. Loretto drove along, humming to herself, contentedly stroking the fat butcher’s package on the seat beside her, as though it were a purring cat. She drove slowly, enjoying the sight of the redbrick homes against the bright snow and reading the signs. Ottawa Street. Burwash Street. John Street. Soon she came to a short, quiet, wooded road, shady with tall blue pines, like a street in a cottage town. Here was the cemetery, with its stone pillars, its iron gates standing open, its gravestones descending the white hilly terrain sloping down to the river. Next to the cemetery was the place Loretto was looking for, a narrow red-brick house with plain windows, a shallow porch with the Christmas lights still strung along it, a Victorian gable in need of a coat of paint.

  With the car idling at the curb, she went up to the house, bearing the package. There was a wicker basket hooked beside the door for a mailbox. Loretto untied the string on the package, opened the butcher’s paper and dumped the liver into the basket, in among some letters left by the postman. By the time she was back in her car, the dark blood was flowing out the basket, trickling down the side of the house. As she drove away, she saw the girl, Wanda, standing in an upstairs window, holding a white curtain aside, watching her.

  * * *

  That night Loretto waited for Dewey to come home and face her. It was well after nine before he arrived. Loretto knew why he was late. Bev had called earlier.

  “I heard the girl tried to kill herself,” Bev told Loretto. “Dewey was called away from the factory. The police came and picked him up and took him to the hospital so he could talk to the doctors. Talk to the girl. Maybe try and calm her down.”

  Loretto was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee when Dewey got home. He came and stood in the kitchen doorway, filling it with his bulk. He was a tall, heavyset man with a sandy brush-cut and long, lustrous eyelashes.

  “It’s finished,” Loretto told him. By that, she meant: Don’t ever see her again. If you try to, I’m warning you I can’t be held responsible for what I might do. We won’t speak of it again. We’ll go back to Life before Wanda.

  “I know it’s finished!” Dewey said angrily. “You made goddamn sure of that, didn’t you?”

  “What did you expect me to do? Write her a thank-you note?”

  “No, I didn’t expect that. Not from you.”

  “Do you know how humiliating it was for me to have to face her?”

  “You didn’t have to face her. You didn’t have to go into that store.”

  “I like to meet things head-on.”

  “Why did you have to go for her? Why did you go and scare the shit out of the kid? You could have kept it between you and me.”

  “And pretend she was just an innocent bystander? I believe in people taking the consequences of their actions.”

  “What you did might have killed her. How would you have felt then?”

  “The slashes on her wrists weren’t sincere,” Loretto scoffed. “She called the ambulance herself before she’d bled a thimbleful.”

  Dewey turned from her in disgust and walked away. “Why did you do it?” Loretto yelled after him. “Why would you be attracted to someone like her? How could you touch her pathetic body? I’ve seen more flesh on an insect! I’ve seen more intelligence on the face of a moron! She isn’t even worth talking about. She’s nothing!”

  * * *

  “Maybe you went too far,” Bev said to Loretto the next day on the phone.

  “She had it coming to her.”

  “She was just a child,” Bev
pointed out.

  “She was old enough to commit adultery.”

  “They don’t call it that any more.”

  “What do they call it?”

  “A love affair.”

  “Love!” Loretto spat out.

  Wanda’s parents were contacted by the police and called home. All the way from Florida, where they spent their winters, summoned from their comfortable trailer home at considerable expense, flying because of the emergency when ordinarily they would have returned economically by car in May. Called back to the Canadian winter because of a package of liver.

  “They didn’t have to come back because of a package of liver,” Loretto told Bev. “They had to come back because their daughter is a slut. It’s time they knew what she was up to. Using their house for her carryings on. How many other men were there before Dewey?”

  The whole affair caught the imagination of the town. People visited the wallpaper store to talk to the pink-haired lady—Florence Quickly was her name—asking exactly what Loretto had said to the girl, asking if Loretto had purchased any wallpaper in the end. They’d dropped in at the butcher shop. How much liver had Loretto bought, they wanted to know, and at what price per pound? The butcher offered a week-long special on liver to take advantage of the publicity. He was sold out every day. Households all over town were eating it. People drove past the girl’s house to look at the blood stain, dark as tanned leather and frozen to the front of the house. Wanda’s mother was seen by some spectators on her knees on the front porch with her Florida tan and a pail of steaming water, trying to scrub off the liver blood with a stiff brush.

  “She’s lucky I didn’t smear blood all over the front door, like they did in the Bible,” Loretto told Bev.

  “You probably would have, if you’d thought of it. The Angel of Death. What would you do,” Bev asked Loretto, “what would you do if Dewey ran around again?”

  “He wouldn’t dare.”

  “But if he did. I mean, the liver. That’s a tough act to follow. What would you do next time?”

  “Something drastic.”

  “Murder?”

  “Murder would be too kind.”

  Loretto referred to the girl as “Wanda the Wallflower.” Dewey had not seen Wanda the Wallflower since the day Loretto dropped the liver off. Wanda the Wallflower was permanently out of the picture now. After she was discharged from the hospital, her parents took her back to Florida with them, to recuperate. In the spring, she would return to Canada and move to a nearby city, where she would enroll in a community college, intending to become an interior decorator.

  “That’ll get her into a lot of bedrooms,” mused Loretto.

  * * *

  Early in January, Dewey came home after work with an armload of textbooks.

  “What are those for?” asked Loretto, looking up from the television set.

  “I have to study for an exam,” Dewey told her. “I’ve decided to become a policeman.” He’d been so impressed with the policemen who’d picked him up that day at the factory and taken him over to the hospital to see Wanda: their professionalism, their sympathy for his awkward predicament, their quiet respect. It had made him stop and think. Now he knew he wanted to help people, as those officers had helped him. Loretto was not happy at being reminded of Wanda.

  “You’ll have to lose weight first,” she told Dewey. “They don’t let fat men be cops.” He reddened but didn’t answer her. He went to the kitchen table, sat down and opened a thick volume. “You could have consulted me first,” she said in a conciliatory tone, though she thought to herself that she’d seen some kind of dramatic change coming. Since the incident with Wanda, Dewey had been uncharacteristically quiet. No more jokes. No more clowning around. He’d stopped drinking. Now he started to cut back on meals. He shed pounds. On the weekends, he went jogging out on the highway, running clear to the next town and back.

  Sometimes this new, reflective, philosophical Dewey made Loretto nervous. Other times she was content to think that this was all part of a general renovation, a self-improvement regimen Dewey had undertaken, having recognized his own folly. He’d seen the error of his ways, had set his course on the straight and narrow. Every evening after coming home from the factory, he opened his textbooks, made notes, memorized, tested himself. In February he passed the entrance exam to the police academy. Gradually Loretto grew used to the idea of Dewey in a policeman’s uniform. My husband is a law enforcement officer, she imagined herself saying to people sometime in the future.

  One evening, Dewey said, “Loretto, maybe we should think about moving into town.” He and Loretto had grown up on adjacent tobacco farms. At eighteen, they’d eloped without two cents between them and moved here, to the edge of town, because the rent was cheap and because Loretto had not been quite ready to relinquish the country. She was not sure she was city material. There were a lot of people she didn’t like.

  “We need to become part of a community,” Dewey told her.

  “Don’t you think you’ve done enough already to fit in?” Loretto asked sarcastically, thinking of Wanda the Wallflower. Dewey shook his head in frustration and went back to his reading. “Why would we want to fit into the town?” Loretto continued. “So we can be like them? Sleep around and not have any conscience? I don’t want any part of it.”

  Then Dewey told her she was too critical, she should try to accept people for what they were, stop expecting them to be perfect or make the kinds of choices she made. This was his new posture, this liberalism, now that he was studying to become a law enforcement officer.

  “What are you training for, anyway?” Loretto asked him. “To be a cop, or a psychologist?”

  “You’re afraid of people, Loretto,” said Dewey.

  “Fat chance.”

  “You’re afraid of yourself.”

  * * *

  One afternoon, Bev herded her kids down the snowy highway to Loretto’s place. Loretto had reluctantly agreed to babysit them. Bev pushed the kids into the house. “I won’t be long,” she said.

  “Oh, I bet,” said Loretto knowingly.

  Bev was wearing a low-cut black top with her boobs popping out of it, a black miniskirt, a big shiny red belt, red spike heels, a short raccoon jacket Gabriel gave her for Christmas. She ran out in the snow in her high heels. Just then a long black car came along. It stopped and she got in. It was four thirty before she returned.

  “I don’t know why Gabriel isn’t good enough for you,” Loretto told Bev in the kitchen. “I think he’s a peach.” Gabriel was Bev’s husband, a cabdriver. He owned his own car, something Bev was always quick to point out. It helped Bev to accept that Gabriel was just a taxi driver and not some rich business executive. Owning his own car made him something like an entrepreneur.

  “Peaches are boring,” answered Bev. “Peaches are bland. Peaches go soft and pulpy after a while.”

  Loretto said she didn’t know why Bev needed another man at all.

  “Man!” said Bev ironically. “You mean men!”

  “What are you smirking at?” said Loretto.

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “No, I don’t,” agreed Loretto, “but tell me anyway.”

  Loretto had already heard about the salesman who came to Bev’s house in a refrigerated truck selling fancy dinners, gourmet meals all made up and ready to pop into the oven after a strenuous day of bridge or shopping. He carried in boxes of these meals and stacked them on Bev’s kitchen table. Bev couldn’t stop him. Or wouldn’t. Chicken Kiev. Beef Wellington. Tournedos Rossini. Lobster Thermidor. Coquilles St. Jacques. He was from Newfoundland, a young fellow with a rich, beautiful Newfie accent, the words rolling off his tongue thick as slices of bread. He had a friend with him. They stood in Bev’s kitchen. The salesman told her he could win a trip to Florida if Bev placed a big order. All he needed was one more big order. She couldn’t resist. She couldn’t stop looking at his tanned face, his dimples, his dark shiny hair. She wrote a cheque for two hundred dolla
rs worth of food. She told the young man she hoped she would see him again. The next day he came back without his friend. She put the kids in front of the television and went for a drive in the country.

  “It was just a little ride. It was harmless,” she’d told Loretto.

  “Sure it was.”

  Then there was the company president. He was the kinkiest. He drove her into the country. It was always the country. What Bev and her lovers had put the countryside through was pretty shocking. He took a deserted road, then a cow path, made Bev lie down naked on the hood of his car, poured champagne all over her bare breasts, burned her breasts with the tip of his cigar, slapped her mouth so that it bled. This was what Bev lived for. She had to have it.

  “But didn’t Gabriel ask questions?” said Loretto. “Didn’t he see the burns?”

  “Gabriel sees what he wants to see.”

  “What if Gabriel saw you with one of these men? He’s driving around out there in his cab.”

  “We did see him once when we were heading out of town. I ducked down in the car. We were parked right beside him at an intersection. I thought the light would never turn green.”

  The businessman became violent and serious about Bev. He wanted to marry her but he couldn’t.

  “Why not?” asked Loretto.

  “He’s Catholic. The Catholic church frowns on divorce.”

  “Well, how does it feel about adultery?” asked Loretto.

  “You are so jaded,” Bev told Loretto sadly. “You judge people too harshly. You don’t trust them. You don’t give them a chance.” Anyway, Bev said, she didn’t want to marry anyone else. She liked things this way: the layers of intrigue, the close calls, the double-edged conversations, the prospect of risk. Life wasn’t worth living without this. She was smoking a cigarette and her hands, themselves the colour of cigarette ash, were shaking.

  “You’re sick,” Loretto told her. “Jesus God, you’re sick!”

  “I know,” Bev grinned.

  When the weather turned cold, the Catholic businessman took Bev to motels. The more sordid the better. The possibility of mice in the corners of the room, of holes in the towels and sheets, of grime and turpitude and destruction drove both of them wild with lust. The businessman chased Bev around the motel room, roaring like a lion. When Bev locked herself in the bathroom, he broke the door down. He tore the shower curtain off its hooks, wrapped her in it and carried her back to the bed.