Clary had said he didn’t know why it was important to be a formal couple and live under the same roof.
Yes, there was something special between them. Alice made him feel jazzed. Made his head rumble with ideas. Her body was satisfying, too. Very much so.
Those thoughts had flipped through his head like a loose filmstrip. They remained unspoken.
All he’d managed to say was, “Why isn’t it enough just to be passport friends?”
For a minute, Alice had looked a little dumbfounded then, “Dammit, you are over sixty, like me! Why is being alone ok at this stage of your life when there is such comfort between us?”
“I don’t want to live a half-life,” she had gone on, “With one of us staying with the other for a couple of weeks, or connecting on Zoom, and taking glorious planned trips in between. We need one coffeepot. In one place!”
She was angry and said so in her native Dutch. “Ik ben boos!”
This had really got him. Alice never raised her voice or spoke in Dutch. She had been panting and a little sweat had beaded her upper lip. Alice was always composed. Her demeanor had rattled Clary more than her words.
He’d taken a few minutes to collect himself.
Then he’d said, “This is awkward as hell… but I’m afraid to have you and afraid to lose you.”
That’s all he could say because a rock had risen up in his throat and he couldn’t swallow.
They never argued. In fact, they’d talked about this very topic a while ago; had agreed that the energy lost in any argument was pointless. Being deferential allowed space for understanding. It also showed a bit more maturity, more class.
So this back-and-forth about the nature of their relationship had been unexpected. Clary was so startled by her snappy tone that at one point he’d said he’d have to watch Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? again to see how it ended so he could figure out what was going on between Alice and him right now.
Alice knew that film scared the hell outta Clary because of all the tension, the yelling. But he’d admitted to her in the past that the yelling was the heart of it. The yelling is what made it a great film!
Clary had made the film reference with his usual flippancy. With a parched throat, too. Alice had said his humor was annoying and used only to escape her strong argument about being a more defined couple. Humor was always his great escape, wasn’t it? There’d been a bit of barb in her voice.
This had made Clary think of Steve McQueen, and then – he just couldn’t help himself – he’d said, McQueen was not as great in that film as some thought. Steve stood out too much. His haircut didn’t quite fit the ensemble cast, even as an American POW. His pale khakis didn’t quite suit the production design even though bomber pilots did wear pants like that in WW2. And Steve’s pants never even got dirty.
It was like two different stories in that film, Clary had said.
He was standing up at this point and waving his arms, if only to avoid the look on Alice’s face.
Everything about Steve’s character stood out for the wrong reasons, he had continued, because Steve just wanted to stand out as himself. The black Triumph motorcycle he zipped around on in that film made him look cool, but it wasn’t in synch with those times, the forties.
Clary was on a roll. Those film critics and the 1960s public were seduced and inspired by Steve’s laconic detachment. He seemed to rise above the everyday. Women loved him. Men, too, said Clary, his voice at a fever pitch.
He had stopped, feeling a tad breathless.
Alice had listened with a taut face, her eyes bright. Then she’d stood and put her hands on her hips.
When she’d opened her mouth to retort, Clary been struck by her long, white incisors, the shark-pointy canines. Not a filling in sight, either.
Alice had said, “Your eyes are the same blue as his, Clary, but you are no maverick like Steve. You’d be hard to cast, in fact.”
Then she had smiled and dropped her voice low and said, “You could pretend to be Steve. Pretend that we’re a motorcycle. Just hold the handles tight and I’ll steer.”
That was a sweet and clever thing to say. But he hadn’t let on. There was too much at stake.
A couple of years earlier, after his wife, Yvonne, had died, Clary had become comfortable with himself. Always a nomad, he had started to travel several times a year, going wherever his interest was piqued.
He flew in and out of Pearson International and sometimes he’d stop by to say to Alice, who lived near Toronto.
The two of them had always shared a love for classic art, music, and film. Her hubby, Lars, had been Yvonne’s art patron. The four of them had socialized and Lars had hosted several showings of Yvonne’s works.
Then Lars had died.
After a few months, Alice had said, “Let’s travel together. I want to see life through another person’s eyes and you’ve always looked at things differently, Clary.”
Their interactions had stayed platonic… until they hadn’t.
Alice was worldly, shrewd, and pretty. An architect, too. Being Alice’s passport pal felt good to Clary. She filled something that he hadn’t known was empty.
He really couldn’t describe it. It was like putting a large fresh plant in a bright room, something tall with glossy leaves, and feeling its presence, its alive-ness fill a space he hadn’t seen there before.
So this conversation, or argument, or whatever the hell it was that he was recalling with such clarity, had actually started a couple of days ago at the end of another quick visit he’d made to Alice’s place.
After serving them a tasty lunch, she’d dished up a cherry clafoutis for dessert. It was a prop, too, because she used it to make a statement and a request. About her need to be closer to him because he’d become more to her than a good friend. Now he was significant in her life. She wanted more from him.
He’d looked at her a little stunned and listened while she’d explained that, as an architect she intuitively knew what fit in a space, what naturally belonged there, and that together, he and were the right fit. They belonged in the same space. What did he think?
It was ok if he disagreed, she’d said, just say so. But she wanted to put it out there. And the clafoutis, which he’d never heard of before, but which she said was a French specialty, like him, ha-ha, was her way of saying that she wanted him to be the cherry on top in her new life, ha-ha.
The meaning of her words had made his head rattle. But he’d joked and said, Oh, am I just a foodstuff to you? No, she’d said, but I’d like you to be my happy mouthful, ha-ha.
Then, to get his wits together he’d gone for a long walk to during which he’d realized something important.
When he came back, he’d said, Yes, he was ok to be significant. Because she was that to him, too. And she’d grinned a big toothy grin that made her brown eyes sparkle. A lovely sight.
And she’d said, Wonderful! She’d also used the Dutch word, geweldig.
Then she’d added, I want you to move here and be with me in this home.
That had thrown him. One new step was big enough. Now it was as if he’d been driving along nicely on a motorcycle that abruptly stalled and he’d sailed over the handlebars and landed on his head.
She’d designed and decorated her house as a handsome and comfortable place, no question. The back garden was lush, and nearby was her private beach. The island boy in him loved that part best.
So his stupefaction at her request had nothing to do with the physical place itself.
Seeing the look on his face she’d quizzed him. Does living in Ontario bother you? No, Clary had said, I’ve lived and worked in worse places.
Do you have a problem living in another man’s house? Nah, he’d said. Lars was a good guy; he didn’t piss in the corners.
She’d persisted and wormed it out of him: he was scared.
Of what, she’d asked in a tender voice that had made his heart feel warm.
What if this house burned down some night, he had said. He was surprised he’d said this specific thing, could hear the smallness in his own voice.
For the little person inside Clary who had that voice, the word home meant everything. It was Grandma Rose’s place, the old farmhouse where he’d been raised, where he heard the voices of his people speak to him from the lath and plaster walls.
When Clary was nine, the farmhouse had burned down. This was a few years after his parents had died in a motorcycle crash. The fire had consumed everything including the only memento Clary had of his father – a ratty-looking teddy bear.
When he had finally said all this to Alice, she had jerked her head in surprise.
“If it burns, then we’ll build another house! It’s not about the space; it’s about being together in a new way.”
You Dutch are so pragmatic, he had said, trying to recover. His gut told him that he had to get back on that cycle, ride with the wind in his hair. Steve would.
And she had said, The Dutch are clever people who like to invent. Besides, you aren’t containable and it’s not my style to do that with people. I’m only interested in containing beauty and light.
Clary couldn’t explain that his fear of fire was really a fear of falling into a safe place again. One that was simple yet magnificent. One that whispered and sang and laughed all at the same time. From watching Steve’s face in his movies, Clary knew the actor felt that way riding a bike.
Clary worried about giving himself up to Alice and nestling in her space and then, one day, it was just… ashes.
Yvonne had terminal cancer. Toward the end, she’d decided she loved her art agent, a woman, more than Clary, and ended up dying in that woman’s arms.
Before Yvonne there was Grandma Rose. After burying her youngest son, who’d crashed his motorbike and died on a rainy highway near Halifax, she’d raised his child. Clary.
When Clary had left home, Grandma Rose had turned into a lush. On her death bed, twenty years later, she’d confessed to him that she’d never wanted to be a mother at all. She’d wanted to be a teacher. She’d wanted to carry books, not babies.
Clary’s skin had felt scorched by her words. And then it had burned all over again with Yvonne.
He knew that some of that same kind of hurt had happened to McQueen. When Steve was a boy he’d lost everything that was safe, everything he held in a precious space deep inside him. Rage and neglect had done it, not fire, but he was scarred just as bad.
Steve fought like a wild dog with everyone and everything for many years. Couldn’t find peace. Clary felt a kinship. Even though Clary and Steve had never met, and Clary had never fought anyone in his life, and Steve had been dead some time now.
For a couple of days after Alice’s invitation to move in, Clary couldn’t find the right words to answer. He felt a bit like McQueen might have felt sitting on the bike, sniffing out the direction while revving the cycle’s handlebars and feeling the engine’s vibration in his thighs.
In every movie, Steve had held his head, been true to himself. In The Great Escape he’d done that while planning a run for freedom on his Triumph TR6. He’d sped with grace across the green countryside. Had come across an unexpected razor wire fence, tried to jump it, but got snared. There were no good guys around to cut Steve loose. So the bad guys caught him.
We’ll build another house, Alice had said. As if she’d watched that scene. As if she was in that film and oblivious to the enemy nearby. As if she was standing by that double-coiled razor wire fence, holding a pair of long-handled pliers to cut Steve free.
Still undecided on his last night with Alice, Clary had an awful dream. A teddy bear was riding the Triumph when it hit something and burst into flames. Then Alice stepped through the blue smoke with something in her hand. She turned and looked….
Clary wakes up to the stink of something burning.
Stumbling downstairs, he finds Alice in the kitchen bending over the countertop.
She turns and smiles.
“Jammer, I burned my toast!”
His Steve McQueen eyes fix on her.
She picks up a bread knife.
He opens his mouth to tell her about the bear and the motorcycle, the ashes and the fence.
To tell her that he remembers reading that Steve had found peace with a good woman before he died.
He wants to make Alice laugh by saying, ‘maybe pliers would be a good housewarming gift when I move into your space.’
Instead, he freezes.
He watches as Alice pokes the knife inside the toaster which is still plugged in.
