Devotion Read online

  She was not a woman who simply dropped her clothes. That was a phrase favored by her mother, who first introduced it when Maggie was sixteen and lived, of course, with her parents at the estate. It was her mother’s warning, a preemptive admonishment toward any young woman, not Maggie alone, who fell to sleeping with a man before falling in love, in fact testing it with celibacy. “Marlais—your second cousin,” her mother said, sighing in genuinely sad resignation, “well, Marlais dropped her clothes. Just like that. And, I heard, on more than one occasion.” Hearing this in her memory just then, Maggie smiled at the endearing quaintness of her mother’s exasperation and concern, let alone her phrasing. As the cab turned onto George Street and the hotel came into view, Maggie thought, I’m thirty years old. Yes, I have dropped my clothes, perhaps twice, but mostly I have waited to know someone. Mostly. And so far I have not regretted it either way.

  Sitting for drinks opposite each other at a table in the bar, with its well-worn leather banquettes, chess and cribbage boards, scattered magazines, Maggie said, “I’m Margaret Field.” She and David shook hands. He tried to take in her physical self without being obvious, but of course she detected right away and thought, Let’s just get this out of the way, shall we? She had fair skin, a constellation of freckles on the left side of her face, a slightly denser one on the right, dark red hair, green eyes; her smile had two stages, tight-lipped to hesitantly open, and for all David knew, that might be the full extent of it. “I know,” Maggie said, “you look at me and you probably think ‘Irish,’ huh? But my mom and dad are from Scotland. There might’ve been an Irish assignation a long time ago. Who knows?”

  Maggie ordered a gin and tonic, two slices of lime, which she squeezed into the glass, then touched the rinds to her tongue before setting them back in. David ordered a White Russian, too sweet, but the cream in it soothed his jittery stomach. “My friends call me Maggie, but in a way, I prefer Margaret. I’m publicity director and all-around trouble-shooter for an ensemble out of Dalhousie University, Halifax, province of Nova Scotia, Canada. They play classical music.”

  “I’m from Vancouver,” David said. “Though I haven’t lived there since high school.”

  “Two Canadians, then, having a drink together in London.”

  “Do you like your job?”

  “Yes, I do. I do like it. We’re on tour here. London. Copenhagen. Oslo. Rotterdam. So I get to see the world. I iron out all the problems. And you, David Kozol, how do you earn your keep?”

  “I teach photography.” He had never before defined himself like that. Or had not ever thought of himself first and foremost as a teacher. He felt a slight stab of recognition and disappointment, not that Maggie would notice. He simply wanted her to believe he had definition. Wanted her to think he was occupied in a useful manner. He hoped she would not ask if he took photographs himself, though it would be the logical question. Not ask it right away, at least. He had a book of Sudek’s photographs and a half-composed letter to Katrine Novak (not a love letter: some thoughts about possible dates for his next visit to Prague—the contents could have fit on a postcard) in his leather satchel, which was at his feet.

  “Kozol is what, exactly?”

  “Czech. My grandfather was from Czechoslovakia. On my mother’s side.”

  “The ensemble canceled Prague, or vice versa, I can’t remember. Anyway, we aren’t going there this time around.”

  “It’s a beautiful city. Mysterious city, I think.”

  “I’ve never been.”

  It was surprising to Maggie, and equally so to David—each of whom did not counterfeit expectations or tailor their personalities to fit sudden possibilities—that their conversation lasted three straight hours without food and with remarkably few awkward silences. At the least, it was a welcome indulgence to both, requiring no additional drinks, either, to the annoyance of the bartender. Then the mood changed. Perhaps it was as simple a matter as a mutual sense of happiness, a lack of detected affectation, and not a little outright lustful attraction. With a relaxed, though slightly giddy aspect, there arrived a fait accompli, a telepathic decision to extend the meeting elsewhere. “My flat is two blocks away,” David said.

  “My room is 334,” Maggie said.

  They left the bar and entered the lobby. The old Italian bell captain stood at his podium near the registration desk, just in front of the wooden mail-and-key hive, which in turn was adjacent to a storage room and coat rack. Three bellmen, also Italian, at their separate stations, in the formal hierarchical configuration noticeable to any true student of hotel lobbies, as David was, did not watch directly but of course noticed as Maggie and David walked up the central staircase, with its musty-looking maroon carpet, intricate throw rugs at each landing, framed prints of zoology and botany along the wallpapered corridors. In the dusky light of room 334 (no electrical lights turned on) David sat in a pale green overstuffed chair, with its thick armrests like separate flotation devices, should the room capsize. He felt sunk down into it. “Is this the same hotel in which you always don’t have a room when the ensemble’s in London?” he said.

  Maggie was looking out the window onto George Street. “Who’s to say I didn’t phone in a reservation while at my appointment?” she said. “Me being both brazen and hopeful. Apparently.”

  “Then I’m grateful they had a room available. It’s a nice hotel. I’ve walked by it a hundred times.”

  “Never been in it, though?”

  “Not till today, oddly enough.”

  Maggie stepped out of her shoes. “Well, here we are, then,” she said. “I won’t say I’ve not done anything like this before. Because that might sound...I don’t know what. And besides, it wouldn’t be—”

  “The truth? And why should it be true, anyway? I wouldn’t expect it to be true. ‘Unforeseen life intervenes on regular life’—that’s from a book. That’s not my original thought.”

  “I’ve never done it with you before or in this hotel. Unforeseen—”

  She then placed her shoes side by side, but in the middle of the room, smiled at David, and he thought, as comprehensively and directly as he had ever thought anything, Where has she been?

  “Well, David Kozol,” Maggie said. “You’re quite handsome, but so what?”

  Turning back to look out the window, Maggie thought, Rain looks like Braille on the puddles, to her a surprisingly tactile image, obviously one that, deep down, corresponded to how she imagined David might soon touch her. She then slid off her black stockings, reached back and unzipped her black, ankle-length cotton dress, lifted it up over her head and let it fall to the floor. (David—and it may well have been a failure on the part of his imagination—had never before fantasized a woman undressing like this in front of him, certainly had not experienced it. He recalled a phrase from John Keats, on a Poem-a-Month broadside in a London double-decker, “wild surmise,” and let it articulate the moment.) She then glanced around the room, mostly taking in the quality of the light. Every inch of her body felt hastened, on the verge; also, she wished that she could impose her will on the light, somehow hurry it through dusk to dark. The streets were darker earlier than usual because of the cloud cover. This feeling must have largely been shyness, perhaps her wanting more to be touched than seen, yet every moment contains paradox, for there she was, enacting a boldness if not feeling exactly bold, slipping out of her bra and panties as David said, “I believe this could be—” Believe, like an act of faith. And then Maggie lay across David’s lap—he saw that a spray of freckles on her chest stopped at her breasts—fell slightly back in a comic swoon, then recovered and kissed him deeply; he tasted the lime; they kissed a long time while sitting in the chair. Resting—or recovering, they did not know which—they needed to catch their breaths; she had unbuttoned only the top three buttons of his dark gray shirt but had otherwise caressed where she could reach; then Maggie said, “It so happens that next door to us, in 336, is Michael Dunbar, woodwind player. He’s mostly playing oboe on this tou
r. He’s sleeping with Marianne Brockman. She’s from America. Maine, originally, I think. Miss Brockman is our principal cellist. She’s in 332, also next door. You’ll meet her, possibly, if we see each other past this afternoon.”

  “Margaret.”

  “Please don’t fall in love with her. Miss Brockman, I mean. I’m saying it protectively. She’s a bit—unstable. It’s hard to explain, really. I think it has to do with a cellist’s posture, the positioning of the cello itself. Maybe the sound of the instrument. But men, I’ve noticed, tend to fall in love with our cellist.”

  David thought that she was speaking with the utmost analytical seriousness, not at all tongue-in-cheek. This had about it a touch of didactic and eccentric reasoning, and he was interested and amused, every new thing learned a revelation. Maggie kissed him again. “Across the hall, 335, is Rachel Neiman, flautist. She’s from Winnipeg,” Maggie said. “Flute—I don’t know why, because she plays it beautifully, but I’ve never warmed up to the flute. It sounds like some bird gone nuts. Rachel’s very pleasant, though. I’m closest to her, of this whole group. I forgive her for playing flute.”

  “Let’s go over to the bed.”

  “I just knew one of us was going to say that.”

  “You’ve got no clothes on, Margaret, and I have clothes on. Canadians are by nature democratic, don’t you think?”

  Their first time in bed together, they were at once awkward and unhurried. David undressed, pulled back the bedclothes, they lay down and held each other a few moments; David slid lower on the bed and kissed upward from Maggie’s knee. That late afternoon and early evening their lovemaking was interrupted only by a shared glass of whiskey, poured from a miniature bottle provided by the hotel at cost. At about seven o’clock, Maggie rose from the bed and carried her pocketbook into the bathroom (from David’s point of view, she had porcelain skin in that light), took an aspirin with a glass of water, because she knew that even so little whiskey would give her a headache, filled the glass again and carried it to David, who was parched and gulped it right down. At nine they ordered from room service, risotto and salad, but did not answer the door when the waiter knocked, and did not feel bad about it in the least. Then, around eleven, Maggie said, “I know nothing about you.”

  “Not a lot biographically, that’s true. But for the last, what, six hours or so, you’ve learned something about me.”

  “Oh, that. I’ve forgotten everything already.”

  “Can you take the day off tomorrow?”

  “We’re in the middle of a tour here. I’m relied on.”

  “I don’t take your job lightly. I didn’t mean that. What I wanted to say—”

  “What I want to say,” Maggie cut in, “is just the time spent. To my mind it’s a thing of consequence. I simply didn’t need anything else.”

  “I do. I need to see you tomorrow.”

  In a short while Maggie fell asleep. David reached across and took up her book from the bedside table. He recognized the cover of The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard, a Modern Library edition. The bookmark was a sheet from the notepad placed next to the telephone. He read, surprised to hear himself read aloud, in a whisper, at random from page 198: “When I returned to the City of Books I heard Monsieur Gelis and Mademoiselle Jeanne chatting—chatting together, if you please! as if they were the best friends in the world.”

  The passage, of course, meant nothing; all David cared about was that he was reading next to Maggie in bed in a hotel in London. He knew that had he merely found The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard on the chair in the hotel lobby and read this passage, he would have closed the covers and set the book down for someone to retrieve. Yet when Maggie had, in the hotel bar, mentioned her college thesis on Anatole France, he vowed then and there to read every novel of his he could find.

  He fell asleep too, and when he woke he heard Maggie speaking on the telephone: “Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned this fellow at all, Dad.” The room held only the light from the streetlamps. Maggie had pulled the chair close to the French windows and was sitting with a blanket wrapped around her, facing the street. There was a pause, Maggie listening, then she said, “Far far far too soon to answer that, and trust me, it might not get answered at all, ever. On to the next subject, okay? How are the swans?” She listened for quite a while. “Poor swan,” she finally said. “Poor thing—what did Naomi say?” She listened again. “Well, I miss you, Pop. I hope to see you in a week and a half, okay? When I get back to Halifax, I’ll drive right out, how’s that?” Then: “Great, Dad. Okay. Love you. Bye-bye, now.” She set the phone on its cradle.

  “Six hours time difference,” David said. “Or is it five? You did say your father was living in Nova Scotia, didn’t you?”

  Maggie stood up, held the blanket around herself, sat next to him on the bed. “Yep, he still lives in Parrsboro, same village I was born in. I speak with my father as often as possible, David. I told you a lot in the bar, come to think of it. My lord, I told you a lot. I gave you an earful, didn’t I? That my mother died about ten years ago, all of that. And I know I told you my dad, William Field, caretakes an estate. But I failed to mention his great love, you might call it. His great love is the swans.”

  “My own parents—they didn’t get along, to say the least. They both died the same year, 1979, three months apart.”

  “I’m half orphaned, you’re the whole thing.”

  “I’ve come to like swans again. I like looking at them along the Thames, or in a park, wherever.”

  “Again?”

  “Childhood story, Margaret. I actually was bitten by a swan when I was eleven years old. In Vancouver.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Actually, it had to do with photography, in a way.” Maggie turned away from David, as if allowing him some privacy in the recollection; she sensed a foreboding sadness in his shifted tone of voice; she held his left hand in her left hand at her breast. “My mother, Ardith, she used to have this phrase, ‘Your father’s away on business but still here in Vancouver.’”

  “I take it your dad was stepping out.”

  “He’d stay ‘stepped out’ months at a time. Anyway, one morning late in the school year, the telephone rings. My mom and I are eating breakfast. She worked at Belknap Adhesives. They made masking tape, glues and pastes. Anyway, the phone rings, my mom picks it up, I’m eating my cereal, and I hear her say, ‘All right, I’ve written that down. You understand I can’t say thank you.’ Then she slams down the phone. A few minutes go by and she says, ‘David, when you’re waiting for me after school, take some pictures of swans for me, will you?’ I had this Brownie Instamatic camera. Seldom without it. So that afternoon I went to Queen Elizabeth Park, near my school. I had about ten minutes until my mother picked me up. I took out my Brownie and started to snap pictures of the swans. That’s when I looked across the pond and saw my father. On a park bench. He was—how to say it?—smothering a woman with kisses. I took a picture of that. Maybe it was just an instinct to—I don’t know what—maybe preserve an image that proved my dad existed or something. I was just about to snap another picture when all of a sudden this one swan charges at me full throttle. It caught me on the thumb, then gave me a good solid bite above my eye. My mom comes running up. ‘Darling, are you all right?’ I said a swan just bit me. She saw it happen. So I took the opportunity to say, ‘When you say dad’s away on business but still in Vancouver, do you mean—?’”

  “She meant what you saw on the park bench, of course,” Maggie said.

  “The first time I saw that photograph, it was blown up a hundred times normal size, at the hearing for my parents’ divorce. My photograph as evidence.”

  “Your mother sounded desperate, but she shouldn’t have done that to you is my opinion,” Maggie said.

  “Weirder yet, the woman my dad was with? Mrs. Perec, wife of our school-bus driver. Every Wednesday Mr. Perec’d detour the school bus a few blocks and stop in front of his own house. I remember the exact address was 445 Kla
math Road. Mrs. Perec would step from their house dressed in a bathrobe and slippers and bring Mr. Perec a cup of coffee. All the kids on the bus thought she was pretty.”

  They lay there in silence. Maggie was still with the story. “Did you ever find out who called that morning?”

  “Mrs. Perec. I guess she wanted it to end with my dad.”

  “What a shit, your dad. Sorry, I shouldn’t make judgments like I do. It was probably a lot more complicated than that.”

  “On the telephone before, you asked your father about the swans and you said, ‘Poor swan.’ Sounded like there was some kind of problem.”

  “Oh, yes, well, a swan somehow got caught in a tangle of barbed wire. The swans don’t usually wander off too far from their pond, but this one did, and there must’ve been some barbed wire left over from something. Hidden for years maybe in the low brush, and the swan—who knows why?—the swan got into it. My dad said he heard a distress call. Hard to describe it, but swans can sound quite the alarm. He got a wire clipper, clipped the swan out and drove it to the veterinarian’s and woke her up. Her name’s Naomi Bloor. She’s very good at her work. Our swans are a great challenge to her. But she’s learned her way around them over the years.”

  “How’s the swan doing?”

  “Recovering. Bandaged up like a World War One casualty, my dad said.” Maggie pressed backward against David. “I often think of my father as a man who talks to swans all summer long. Growing up, I heard my dad consoling or reprimanding swans in ways that had some effect.”

  “What kind of swans are they?”

  “Mute swans. The classic-looking kind. Long, curved necks—not tundra swans. My father taught me the different kinds, from books, mainly. Their habits, migratory routes and such. It was a separate education, that’s for sure. It’s fair to say my dad’s a self-taught scholar on swans. Anyway, the ones he takes care of are called mute swans. ‘Leda and the Swan’ swans.”