Where the HeArt is Read online

  Where The HeArt Is

  by

  Pat Rosier

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright, 2012, Pat Rosier

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Thanks to:

  Libby Clements, Annabel Fagan, Robin Fleming, Jill Hannah, Terry Kennaway, Jill Livestre, Aorewa McLeod, Fran Marno, Barbara Simmons, Jicca Smith, Jan Thorburn, Kate Torrens, and, especially,

  my partner, Prue Hyman.

  A note to readers

  For those who like to see a whole poem where a few lines are quoted, or an image of a work of art referred to, sources are listed at the end of the book. Click on the blue link to get to the information about the source and on “Return to text” to go back to the place in the book you started from.

  Where the HeArt is

  Chapter 1

  She leaves, just like that; announces her intention after lunch and is gone before dinner. Not that Ann wants any.

  “Yes, there is someone else,” she says. “Julie. Sutton.”

  Shit. Julie was Ann’s friend. Emphasise was.

  “How long?” Ann doesn’t want to know and can’t not ask.

  “Six weeks.” She won’t look at Ann. “Look, there’s nothing to talk about,” she says, “it just happened and I didn’t know how to tell you. You’ll get over it.”

  That’s when Ann gets mad and shouts and cries, until her ex-partner—get used to it, Ann—picks up her bag—a small bag for fourteen years—and walks out, saying over her shoulder, “You can stay here for now. We’ll work out the rest later.”

  “CAN!” Ann is yelling again. “I thought we were happy! Happy! Silly me!” The only response is a quietly closing door.

  Ex's laptop is gone, of course. Bella the dog, Ex’s dog, remains.

  “She’s abandoned us Bella, for pastures new. Don’t take it personally, but you’re going too. Until then, I’ll do my best, but we both know I’m not a good dog mother.”

  Ann experiences being left as banal. She thinks of a line from Edna St Vincent Millay.

  Love has gone and left me and the days are all alike

  She finds a mutual friend to deliver Bella to Ex.

  Because Ann has taught a third-year paper on Romantic Literature for a decade she can use last year's lectures and tutorials without revising or rereading the texts. Upheavals in the university pass her by, as she struggles with re-discovering how to live on her own.

  Ex wants to talk about selling the house. “You could buy me out,” she suggests cheerfully.

  It’s a buyer's market, but Ann is not going to be obliging. Nor is she going to be talked to by Julie Sutton. Ever.

  Love has gone and left me and I don't know what to do.

  On a dismal Sunday morning weeks later,

  And life goes on for ever like the gnawing of a mouse.

  Ann wanders through the rooms, feeling each one as a cloak enveloping her. A brutal southerly whips the karaka tree against the side of the house. Her hand slides over the red formica of the kitchen table, built into an awkward space, its bench seating giving it the look of a retro café. Ann never liked it much. Ex showed it off. The rest of the kitchen is slick and modern, including an expensive toaster for Ann, for whom multi-grain bread, toasted until crunchy at its edges, is a food group. She knows exactly which setting works best for her favourite loaves, the ones you buy uncut. She slices them herself, with an old, wide bread-knife, freezes the slit loaf and eases off two slices at a time for breakfast or lunch or dinner. Some of these days it's all three.

  Whole grain bread and peanut butter make a perfect protein. She forgets where she heard this. A lettuce leaf or two, a tomato, a chunk of aging cucumber from the bottom of the fridge and she can convince herself she's having a balanced meal, never mind the two glasses of wine. Only once has she drunk a whole bottle on her own in an evening. Only once, truly.

  They had cooked together a lot at first. Over time, it became usual to take turns; a senior lecturer and a public service manager have busy lives, work long hours.

  The dining room centre-piece is a long rimu table with eight matching chairs. They fought over this table, one wanting it, the other not. Ann can't remember who was on which side. She likes it now, can see it with friends all around, eating, talking, drinking, laughing. The best of times. And meetings. Neighbour-hood watch, until too many people moved out of the street and their replacements didn't opt in. Ex had tried very hard to keep that going. Occasional end-of-year afternoon teas with Ann's third-year students. Their book group—no, that met in the living room. Other gatherings, she can't think what, but she thinks of this room, dominated by the table, as full of people.

  Aah, the living room. Comfort. Big sofas, two. Big arm chairs, two. They got into habits—Ann on a sofa, feet up, Ex in one of the arm chairs, using a squab as a footstool, watching their favourite television shows. Ann followed 24, which Ex hated. Ex was fixated on Lost, which Ann couldn't be bothered with. They both liked ER, and Outrageous Fortune. Now, Ann sits on her sofa for an evening’s channel-surfing, and forgets everything she’s seen by the time she goes to bed.

  The bedroom. Theirs once. Hers now. Ann can't think about that. The office. A spare room, really, they both worked anywhere on their laptops. Sometimes one of them would spread out papers all over the dining room table; they had a kind of two-day limit on that. Now Ann can leave anything anywhere for as long as she wants and she never uses the big table for work or meals. The cubbyhole in the kitchen suits her better, she doesn't feel as lonely there.

  And to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow

  There's this little street and this little house.

  Except the house isn't little. There are two more rooms downstairs, a double garage—probably the only double garage in Wadestown, Ex used to say. But “little” describes Ann to herself today. Diminished. Bereft.

  “Oh, fuck it! Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.” She says—shouts—to the house. “Fuck OFF.”

  “I have,” says the voice of Ex from somewhere in the back of her mind.

  “I mean FUCK OFF HOUSE!” Her mouth is still poised for words, loud words, while her thoughts race ahead.

  “She can buy me out. Or they. Ouch. Yes, they. She/they can buy me out and I can …” That's an idea with nowhere to go, but she feels lighter. Ex can decide what to do with this object, that piece of furniture. She, Ann, will float free.

  She spends the rest of Sunday making a list of what she wants to keep and is surprised at how short it is. Monday and Tuesday evenings she makes another list, of chattels, things they bought together.

  On Thursday she goes to see lawyer Jennifer Ryan who explains the legal situation, which Ann, unusually, doesn't bother to follow. She's still got that floating feeling, as though she’s in a Chagall painting. Ann leaves the chattels list with Jennifer. She and Ex kept well organised accounts, so the list includes the date of purchase and the price they paid for every item.

  *

  “How are you?” asks Ex, from a seat opposite Ann in one of the new cafés in Chews Lane. Her voice is gentle, her eyes are soft.

  “Not your business these days.” Ann likes her own reply. “You—and her if you like—can buy me out. Of the house. You always liked it more than me.” That's not true, but Ann doesn't care.

  There's no reply
for a long time. Ex looks at the table. When she raises her face Ann can't read her expression. Maybe this is what Ex wanted. That doesn’t matter to Ann, it's what she herself wants now and she's not going to go cheaply. She doesn’t want a “screw your partner for everything you can get” scenario she wants to be fair, but fair to herself as well.

  “Well! That's caught me on the hop. I thought you’d want to stay put.”

  “You buy me out or the house goes on the market. Soon. By the end of August.”

  “Hey, I'd have to agree to it going on the market, you can’t just sell our house. We do own it together, after all."

  “I know that. I'm thinking you'll do what I want because you're guilty about dumping me. And guilty about being a coward and not telling me about you and—her.” Ann is pleased with herself, again, for saying what she thinks.

  Ex’s eyes drop back to the table. “I'm not sure that Julie and I have much of a future.”

  Ann throws back her head and laughs. And laughs. People look. Ex wipes away tears.

  “Too late,” says Ann, “I’ve taken your advice and gotten over you. “And,” she pseudo-sings, “I’m mo-oving on,” then reverts to being crisp. “Let me know about buying the house. Here's my lawyer's card.” She tucks it under the saucer of Ex's cup.

  Ex looks at Ann and says, “I miss Shirley and Keith.” She's still teary and Ann is still refusing to take any notice and just looks back and waits, enjoying feeling cool and angry and detached. “I thought I might ring them,” Ex says eventually.

  “They're my parents, not my children, you don’t need my permission to contact them. Ring, don't ring, it's your call.” Ann thinks she is enjoying this far too much.

  “I thought they might be, you know, angry with me or something.” Ex’s voice is practically pleading.

  “We haven't actually been talking about you,” says Ann as she stands up. Which is nearly true, if you don't count her mother's, “How could she?” or her father's, “I always wondered if she could be trusted.”

  Ann doesn't look back as she walks off. She feels tall again, as though she is taking up the right amount of space.

  Chapter 2

  Uncle John, a large, loud man with gingery hair, had appeared now and then in Ann’s childhood. He’d pick her up and swing her around while she squealed in a mixture of fear and excitement. Her father never did that. Once she grew up Uncle John would leer harmlessly and make jokes about finding her a man like himself but younger. He was more sad than threatening.

  “John smokes like a chimney, drinks like a fish, changes women as often as he changes his underwear, just as well he never had children,” her mother would say of him, her older brother. He has died, at seventy, of emphysema.

  “That’s hardly surprising,” is his sister’s response, with a sniff of disapproval, possibly laced with sadness. The funeral will be in Wellington, because there is only Shirley to arrange it. She emails the news to her sister in New York, frowns at the flowers that arrive from Interflora and pays for a minibus to bring her brother’s few friends down from Carterton.

  It’s a small funeral. Ann counts twenty people, including the woman from the funeral directors' standing at the door, and they didn't all know John; some are her parents' friends. In half an hour Uncle John is off to the crematorium, accompanied by Shirley and Ann, who goes with her mother because she is asked to. Neither of them says anything on the drive.

  On the way back, her mother says, “We're not inclined to keep close, my family, nor your father's. Not like my friend Lynne, she's got eight siblings and goodness knows how many aunts and uncles and cousins and had four children herself. She's constantly on the phone to one or other of them and always has a grandchild or two in the holidays. It's family central at their place.”

  Holy shit, Ann thinks, am I about to feel guilty for not giving her grand-children? But Shirley is saying that she hopes Keith encourages the men from Carterton out for a beer and shouts them a round before they’re driven home.

  *

  Ex will buy Ann out of the house. Just Ex. It will take a while to organise a mortgage.

  “Fine,” says Ann. “It will take a while for me to find somewhere else to live.” She doesn't have a clue where or how she wants to be, but she doesn't say that to Ex, nor to anyone else, because she doesn't know which of their friends will pass it on. She lets people think she is still numb with the shock, which is kind of true, and be solicitous.

  Uncle John has left Ann twenty thousand dollars. Oh well, Ann thinks, that will help when I have to buy a house or something. She's rewriting her Emily Dickinson lecture, cutting out “Wild Nights,” and not sure about keeping the famous hope with feathers poem either. She's more inclined to sweet hours that have perished and shadowed tombs.

  Emily is not a Romantic, but Ann does a guest lecture on her every year for James, who really wants to write poetry full-time but has three children and teaches American Poets. It’s a very popular lecture.

  Ann likes her work. She can lose herself in it. Lines of poetry pop into her head at odd times. Having been accused over the years of everything from showing off, to elitism, to an inability to be in the moment, she tends to keep them to herself. Choosing literature over art history for post-graduate study had a lot to do with books being more available to her than original art works. The Romantics attracted the young Ann with their passion and ideals and their contempt for “mechanical” classicism. Their revolutionary fervour was appealing too, even as she became aware of its limitations. She got to travel to conferences overseas and learnt to add on exotic places in South America and Asia. The sabbatical she has coming up in eighteen months was going be a major trip in the United States and Europe, an art gallery trip, with a few sorties into the Romantics on the side. Thinking about that is difficult now, she and Ex were planning it as a trip together. Well, bad luck for Ex, she can stay at home paying her mortgage.

  A colleague, Mark the medievalist, convinces Ann to go to Friday drinks in the staff club. People are talking about restructurings and cut-backs as usual; arts isn't a priority area any more, it’s all technology and commerce. “And what's more an arts degree doesn't prepare the students for the job market,” says someone in a sarcastic voice.

  “Our numbers are holding up,” Ann points out to no-one in particular.

  “Oh, we all have to grow our share these days. Growth or stagnation, that's what they think.” Ann doesn’t know the man speaking.

  “Come on, Gareth, the bean counters might be in ascendance, but employers still like a good arts degree. Look at Bob Jones.” That’s Jeanne-Marie, from French Studies. Ann switches out and soon leaves.

  Within a month she is offered voluntary redundancy. Looking around at harried colleagues jockeying to keep their positions, she accepts. Her career has vanished, like smoke in a strong wind. She will be unemployed from the end of November and feels Wordsworth’s burden:

  the heavy and the weary weight

  Of all this unintelligible world

  without the lightening the poet found at Tintern Abbey.

  *

  “Unemployed, yes, but with a decent redundancy package.” Her friend Ruth is a union rep.

  “And twenty-five working years ahead of me, with a career that's come to a dead end. A career I like.”

  Ann is embarrassed to be crying in front of Ruth, who hands her a tissue, saying, “You’ll be okay.” They go to a night-club and dance to a wild, thumping band. Ann thinks of asking Ruth to come home with her, and then is so overwhelmingly tired she can barely stay awake in the taxi she takes by herself.

  At the weekend, Ann cries herself around the garden. She cries while she trims back the wisteria, and when she looks at the vegetable garden, waiting expectantly for its spring makeover. Shrugging, she turns her back on it.

  *

  “I'm forty-two, my partner has walked out on me and my career has evaporated. How many Eng Lit lecturers are there out there looking for diddley-squat jobs?” Sh
e's gone to the reading group, not caring if Ex is there, not caring if she runs crying from the room at the sight of her, or screams abuse, not caring that she’s forgotten to read the book. There has to be something in her life that will still be there next month, next year.

  They talk about the book, the new Elizabeth Knox. Then someone asks Ann how she is, in that concerned voice she’s getting used to.

  “You should …,” the advice comes thick and fast. Write a novel, write up her lectures into a book, teach English as a second language, do more study; everyone is being kind and helpful. She thanks them, goes home and cries herself to sleep.

  That Friday she has to tell her senior students she won’t be back the following year. They are touchingly outraged for her and anxious about what it means for them. Angry on their behalf, and because she herself has been unable to get any information, she rings the Faculty Dean and insists that he come down and speak to them. Once the Dean arrives, Ann excuses herself. She catches the bus home to Wadestown, gets her car and drives to her parents' place in Lower Hutt, city of roundabouts. Their house, the house she grew up in, is a flat walk from the mall; ten minutes and you can buy all manner of things you don’t need.

  “We only use the car for groceries,” her father would say, which isn't true.

  “Don't worry about me, I'm fine.” Her mother and father are both home, out in the garden with trays of vegetable seedlings.

  “You can come and stay here, you know, any time,” says her mother, her father nodding like a novelty dog in the back window of a car. Ann is feeling mean and crabby, but she will not let that show with her parents.

  “I know. Thanks. Let me help you plant those. And can I stay for dinner?” She has to gather herself together, get back a sense of her own substance, before she goes home.

  They dibble with tools her father made, sliding each seedling in, firming the soil around the base, settling it to grow and produce.