Guy Vanderhaeghe - Homesick

He encouraged Frank to get a hair-piece. “Why, it would take twenty years off you. Because, Frank, I have to tell you, that fresh, youthful skin of yours just doesn’t jive with those scraps of old hair. Really, it doesn’t.”

Thomas had no stories for Vera because he could not fathom what she might like to be told. Perhaps it was the mystery that prompted and stoked his ardour. Isolated in his projectionist’s booth he meditated on her constantly. Vera, for her part, hardly gave him a passing thought. If she did, it was to feel sorry for him. Sorry for his long, skinny neck perpetually inflamed with ingrown hairs, sorry that he believed wearing a bomber jacket could cover up the fact that he had been rejected for military service. (Frank laid the blame on a hernia.) Sorry that he talked so smugly and embarrassingly of his ambition to operate a small electrical appliance repair shop. “After the war is the Electrical Age. There’ll be a fortune to be made in that field. For the ones with the brains to get in on the ground floor.”

It never dawned on Vera that the bomber jacket and electrical shop were given such prominence for her sake. Nor that Thomas’s offers to walk her home after the theatre closed were anything but a courtesy extended by a shy young man who happened to be strolling in the same direction. So it took her entirely by surprise when Thomas proposed a date. If she had smelled it in the wind she would have prepared a tactful, graceful refusal. But she hadn’t and, caught without an excuse, Vera heard herself agreeing to have supper with him on Sunday, the one night they were free from work.

It was a wretched, excruciating evening, a disaster. Thomas had the taxi drop them off in front of one of the better hotels where he proposed having supper. There his courage failed. He knew he had enough money in his pocket to buy the very best, most expensive meals the dining room served, but did he know how to act in such a place? Was he well enough dressed? He ran his tie between his fingers and said, “I just remembered something. I knew a guy who worked in the kitchen here once. The stories he used to tell. I don’t think we want to eat here.”

So they set off walking in search of another restaurant. Thomas was in a quandary. He had boasted to Vera of the superb meal she had in store for her. “There are only three decent places to eat in town,” he’d said, “and Thomas knows them all.” Now he was in a dilemma: he had to deliver what he had promised but he was afraid that if he went into a really high-class restaurant he wouldn’t know how to behave and would end up making a fool of himself. So he dragged Vera through a hot, humid July night, searching for a restaurant splendid enough to impress Vera but not so splendid as to bewilder him. He would lead her into a hotel, determined this was to be it, and then on the threshold of the dining room he would be assailed by doubt and would hustle her away. His explanation for these sudden retreats was that the place was clearly not up to snuff, didn’t meet his demanding standards. “No,” he would say, gazing with a wistful air at the waitresses ferrying food from kitchen to table, “this isn’t it. I want you to enjoy something really special. I want you to have the best. Money’s no object with Thomas.”

There was always a better place just up the street, just around the corner. Making for it Thomas would swear to himself that this time there would be no backing down, no failure of nerve. This time he would demand a table in a firm voice, nothing would deter him. But at the last second something always did. Shamefaced he would make his excuses to Vera, invent implausible criticisms, and then bolt with her in tow. Each time his resolve collapsed he grew more desperate. He began to walk more quickly, like a man possessed, hurrying down the hot sidewalks from hotel to hotel with long, stiff-legged strides that almost jerked Vera off her high heels as she clung to his arm. “No,” she heard him mumble, “not good enough.”

Vera felt as if she were being asked to run a race in a steam bath. By nine o’clock she had had her fill of galloping around aimlessly in the heat with this maniac. She was starving, she had sweated clean through her girdle and was hobbled by a blister on her heel. Enough was enough. Vera made Thomas promise that they would eat in the next restaurant they happened upon, even if it was a greasy spoon. Although Thomas pretended to resist this eating house ultimatum, it came as a great relief to him. He saw to it that the next they passed was the sort of place he was comfortable and confident in, the kind that advertised working-man’s specials during the week. Vera was grateful just to be able to sit down and slip her shoe off. She was going to have to stand on that stinging blister through a matinee and two screenings the next day and the sooner she got off it now, the more endurable it would be tomorrow.

The restaurant was deserted and its emptiness made Thomas’s voice seem particularly strident and aggressive as he disparaged what it had to offer. After he read each dish aloud from the menu he repeated the refrain, “What a joint. You mean they’ve got nothing better than this?” He insisted that Vera order the T-bone steak because it was the most expensive item listed. To shut him up she did. Thomas had the Sunday supper special: vegetable soup, roast beef, creamed corn, mashed potatoes and gravy, plus a choice of either vanilla ice cream or chocolate pudding for dessert. When Vera’s steak was served to her by a middle-aged waitress with powerful, spectacularly bowed legs, Thomas inquired anxiously, “Is it okay, Vera? Because if it isn’t, I’ll make them take it back and cook it right. You spend that kind of money – it ought to be done to your liking. Exactly so.”

Vera assured him it was lovely, perfect.

“Well, if it isn’t just give me the nod. I know how to handle them in clip joints like this.”

To deflect Thomas before he really got humming on this topic, Vera remarked: “My, wasn’t it hot today though?”

With passion Thomas agreed that it was. Damn hot. Weather like this made you awfully thirsty. Was there enough ice in her water? He could get her more if she wanted it. Boy, was he thirsty. To illustrate how thirsty he was, Thomas noisily downed a large tumblerful of water in one draught.

Never again, Vera promised herself.

Silence reigned for the remainder of the meal. When it came time for dessert Thomas pressed apple pie and ice cream on Vera. He only gave it up after she told him she was watching her figure. “I don’t mind watching it myself,” said Thomas coyly. Other gallantries were interrupted by the arrival of his chocolate pudding. He complained it had a skin on it.

“They all do,” said the waitress implacably. “Cook made them this morning. Can’t be helped.”

Vera watched, fascinated, as Thomas painstakingly skinned his pudding with the blade of his knife before he mined its goodness with a teaspoon.

It was no longer intolerably hot by the time they came out of the restaurant. Thomas was relaxing now that the evening was almost over. He decided that he had handled things rather well. He sauntered along with his suit jacket slung over his shoulder and a toothpick flicking up and down between his front teeth. “That wasn’t such a bad place after all,” he said. “But next time, we’ll go deluxe.”

Vera didn’t hear what he said. The softness of the warm night air had awakened memories of how her father and mother had taken her and Earl for evening drives in the country, to cool them off before they were put to bed. Earl, who was little, rode in the cab, seated between her parents, but she was allowed to ride in the open, in the box of the truck. That had been pure pleasure, her long hair whipping and streaming around her face as she leaned out against the rush of air, pretending not to hear her mother tapping on the rear window, signalling her to sit down, to be careful. And the tears springing into her slitted eyes so that the big-bellied white moon above actually seemed to be afloat and rolling in a vast black ocean.