PAGE 7
Home Girl
by
Ray went with her to look at the Sheridan Road apartment. It was one hundred and fifty dollars. “Phew!”
“But look at what you save? Gas. Light. Maid service. Laundry. It’s really cheaper in the end.”
Cora was amazingly familiar with all the advantages and features of the sixth-floor apartment. “The sun all morning.” She had all the agent’s patter. “Harvey-Dickson ventilated double-spring mattresses. Dressing room off the bathroom. No, it isn’t a closet. Here’s the closet. Range, refrigerator, combination sink and laundry tub. Living room’s all panelled in ivory. Shower in the bathroom. Buffet kitchen. Breakfast room has folding-leaf Italian table. Look at the chairs. Aren’t they darlings! Built-in book shelves—-“
“Book shelves?”
“Oh, well, we can use them for fancy china and ornaments. Or–oh, look!–you could keep your stuff there. Tools and all. Then the bathroom wouldn’t be mussy all the time.”
“Beds?”
“Right here. Isn’t that wonderful. Would you ever know it was there? You can work it with one hand. Look.”
“Do you really like it, Coral?”
“I love it. It’s heavenly.”
He stood in the centre of the absurd living room, a tall, lank, awkward figure, a little stooped now. His face was beginning to be furrowed with lines–deep lines that yet were softening, and not unlovely. He made you think, somehow, as he stood there, one hand on his own coat lapel, of Saint-Gaudens’ figure of Lincoln, there in the park, facing the Drive. Kindly, thoughtful, harried.
They moved in October first.
The over-stuffed furniture of the four-room apartment was sold. Cora kept a few of her own things–a rug or two, some china, silver, bric-a-brac, lamps. Queen Louise was now permanently dethroned. Cora said her own things–“pieces”–would spoil the effect of the living room. All Italian.
“No wonder the Italians sit outdoors all the time, on the steps and in the street”–more of Ray’s dull humour. He surveyed the heavy gloomy pieces, so out of place in the tiny room. One of the chairs was black velvet. It was the only really comfortable chair in the room but Ray never sat in it. It reminded him, vaguely, of a coffin. The corridors of the apartment house were long, narrow, and white-walled. You traversed these like a convict, speaking to no one, and entered your own cubicle. A toy dwelling for toy people. But Ray was a man-size man. When he was working downtown his mind did not take temporary refuge in the thought of the feverish little apartment to which he was to return at night. It wasn’t a place to come back to, except for sleep. A roost. Bedding for the night. As permanent-seeming as a hay-mow.
Cora, too, gave him a strange feeling of impermanence. He realized one day, with a shock, that he hardly ever saw her with her hat off. When he came in at six or six-thirty Cora would be busy at the tiny sink, or the toy stove, her hat on, a cigarette dangling limply from her mouth. Ray did not object to women smoking. That is, he had no moral objection. But he didn’t think it became them. But Cora said a cigarette rested and stimulated her. “Doctors say all nervous women should smoke,” she said. “Soothes them.” But Cora, cooking in the little kitchen, squinting into a kettle’s depths through a film of cigarette smoke, outraged his sense of fitness. It was incongruous, offensive. The time, and occupation, and environment, together with the limply dangling cigarette, gave her an incredibly rowdy look.
When they ate at home they had steak or chops, and, perhaps, a chocolate eclair for dessert; and a salad. Raymond began to eat mental meals. He would catch himself thinking of breaded veal chops, done slowly, simmeringly, in butter, so that they came out a golden brown on a parsley-decked platter. With this mashed potatoes with brown butter and onions that have just escaped burning; creamed spinach with egg grated over the top; a rice pudding, baked in the oven, and served with a tart crown of grape jell. He sometimes would order these things in a restaurant at noon, or on the frequent evenings when they dined out. But they never tasted as he had thought they would.