The Barbarous Coast Read Online Free PDF Page A

its surface.
    “It was a cold winter,” he said. “The snow creaked under your feet and the hair froze in your nostrils. The frost grew thick on the windows. The oil furnace in the basement kept going out. Hester got quite chummy with the custodian of the building, a woman named Mrs. Bean who lived in the next flat. She started going to church with Mrs. Bean—some freakish little church that carried on in an old house on Bloor. I’d get home from work and hear them in the bedroom talking about redemption and reincarnation, stuff like that.
    “One night after Mrs. Bean left, Hester told me that she was being punished for her sins. That was why she missed her dive and got stuck in Toronto with me. She said she had to purify herself so her next incarnation would be on ahigher level. For about a month after that, I slept on the chesterfield. Jesus, it was cold.
    “On Christmas Eve she woke me up in the middle of the night and announced that she was purified. Christ had appeared in her sleep and forgiven all her sins. I didn’t take her seriously at first—how could I? I tried to kid her out of it, laugh it off. So she told me what she meant, about her sins.”
    He didn’t go on.
    “What did she mean?” I said.
    “I’d just as soon not say.”
    His voice was choked. I looked at him out of the corner of my eyes. Blood burned in his half-averted cheek and reddened his ear.
    “Anyway,” he continued, “we had a kind of reconciliation. Hester dropped the phony-religious kick. Instead, she developed a sudden craze for dancing. Dance all night and sleep all day. I couldn’t stand the pace. I had to go to work and drum up the old enthusiasm for basketball and hockey and other childish pastimes. She got into the habit of going out by herself, down into the Village.”
    “I thought you said you were living in Toronto.”
    “Toronto has its own Village. It’s very much like the original in New York—on a smaller scale, of course. Hester got in with a gang of ballet buffs. She went overboard for dancing lessons, with a teacher by the name of Padraic Dane. She had her hair clipped short, and her ears pierced for earrings. She took to wearing white silk shirts and matador pants around the flat. She was always doing entrechats or whatever you call ’em. She’d ask me for things in French—not that she knew French—and when I didn’t catch on, she’d give me the silent treatment.
    “She’d sit and stare at me without blinking for fifteen or twenty minutes at a time. You’d think I was a piece of furniture that she was trying to think of a better place for.Or maybe by that time I didn’t exist at all for her. You know?”
    I knew. I’d had a wife and lost her in those silences. I didn’t tell George Wall, though. He went on talking, pouring out the words as though they’d been frozen in him for a long time and finally been thawed by the California sun. He probably would have spilled his soul that day to an iron post or a wooden Indian.
    “I know now what she was doing,” he said. “She was getting her confidence back, in a crazy, unreal way, pulling herself together to make a break with me. The crowd she was playing with, Paddy Dane and his gang of pixies, were encouraging her to do it. I should have seen it coming.
    “They put on some kind of a dance play late in the spring, in a little theater that used to be a church. Hester played the boy lead. I went to see it, couldn’t make head nor tail of it. It was something about a split personality falling in love with itself. I heard them afterwards filling her up with nonsense about herself. They told her she was wasting herself in Toronto, married to a slob like me. She owed it to herself to go to New York, or back to Hollywood.
    “We had a battle when she finally came home that night. I laid it on the line for her: she had to give up those people and their ideas. I told her she was going to drop her dancing lessons and her acting and stay home and wear