The Progress of Love Read Online Free PDF Page B

The same wood stove was there. “My mother once burned up three thousand dollars,” I said. “She burned three thousand dollars in that stove.”
    He whistled again, differently. “What do you mean? She threw in a check?”
    “No, no. It was in bills. She did it deliberately. She went into town to the bank and she had them give it all to her, in a shoebox. She brought it home and put it in the stove. She put it in just a few bills at a time, so it wouldn’t make too big a blaze. My father stood and watched her.”
    “What are you talking about?” said Bob Marks. “I thought you were so poor.”
    “We were. We were very poor.”
    “So how come she had three thousand dollars? That would be like thirty thousand today. Easily. More than thirty thousand today.”
    “It was her legacy,” I said. “It was what she got from her father. Her father died in Seattle and left her three thousand dollars, and she burned it up because she hated him. She didn’t want his money. She hated him.”
    “That’s a lot of hate,” Bob Marks said.
    “That isn’t the point. Her hating him, or whether he was bad enough for her to have a right to hate him. Not likely he was. That isn’t the point.”
    “Money,” he said. “Money’s always the point.”
    “No. My father letting her do it is the point. To me it is. My father stood and watched and he never protested. If anybody had tried to stop her, he would have protected her. I consider that love.”
    “Some people would consider it lunacy.”
    I remember that that had been Beryl’s opinion, exactly.
    I went into the front room and stared at the butterfly, with its pink-and-orange wings. Then I went into the front bedroom and found two human figures painted on the wall. A man and a woman holding hands and facing straight ahead. They were naked, and larger than life size.
    “It reminds me of that John Lennon and Yoko Ono picture,”I said to Bob Marks, who had come in behind me. “That record cover, wasn’t it?” I didn’t want him to think that anything he had said in the kitchen had upset me.
    Bob Marks said, “Different color hair.”
    That was true. Both figures had yellow hair painted in a solid mass, the way they do it in the comic strips. Horsetails of yellow hair curling over their shoulders and little pigs’ tails of yellow hair decorating their not so private parts. Their skin was a flat beige pink and their eyes a staring blue, the same blue that was on the kitchen wall.
    I noticed that they hadn’t quite finished peeling the wallpaper away before making this painting. In the corner, there was some paper left that matched the paper on the other walls—a modernistic design of intersecting pink and gray and mauve bubbles. The man from Toronto must have put that on. The paper underneath hadn’t been stripped off when this new paper went on. I could see an edge of it, the cornflowers on a white ground.
    “I guess this was where they carried on their sexual shenanigans,” Bob Marks said, in a tone familiar to me. That thickened, sad, uneasy, but determined tone. The not particularly friendly lust of middle-aged respectable men.
    I didn’t say anything. I worked away some of the bubble paper to see more of the cornflowers. Suddenly I hit a loose spot, and ripped away a big swatch of it. But the cornflower paper came, too, and a little shower of dried plaster.
    “Why is it?” I said. “Just tell me, why is it that no man can mention a place like this without getting around to the subject of sex in about two seconds flat? Just say the words ‘hippie’ or ‘commune’ and all you guys can think about is screwing! As if there wasn’t anything at all behind it but orgies and fancy combinations and non-stop screwing! I get so sick of that—it’s all so stupid it just makes me sick!”
    In the car, on the way home from the hotel, we sat as before—the men in the front seat, the women in the back. I was in the middle, Beryl and my mother on either side of me.