The Night Travellers

2. Estes in Moonlight

Estes inMoonlight Sometimes when he is there alone in the house he is buying now (with the loan his ex-lover Ahmed coaxed out of an uncle), Estes Drover gets to stay with Kathy and she gets to stay with him. He reads to her and laughs with her and talks to her and teaches her little miniature dance steps, around and around his room. She falls asleep there, holding on to his hand, tucked up on the couch. Mary, returned, will pick her up and carry her upstairs to their room. The house is three stories with a basement apartment. Looked at from the street, with a certain lack of faith, it does seem to tiltslightly. But there is another house close to the left, and an alley to the right, and both have remained in the same proportion for the last year. It is better not to consider such things. The ground floor and basement apartment are rented. The second floor houses Estes and two extra rooms (one rented, the other vacant). These rooms are better let to the slightly deaf, as Estes and Mary's dance classes take place in a large room on the top floor. In a room off this one, Mary and Kathy live. They cook on a small hot plate. Their bed is under the window overlooking the alley, shoved against the wall. But Kathy feels peaceful enough to sleep in Estes's room. When she falls asleep, Estes strips naked sometimes and stands before the window in the dark, watching the moon on a clear night, pouring out over the snow-silenced city. He enjoys his lean dancer's body, his sinewy rhythmic legs. Sometimes, with practiced silence on the rug, he will spin with folded arms or execute a whirling jete over the sleeping little girl. Then he will kneel, touch her cheek, with his finger push back threads of her hair. He has always longed for this warm protectiveness he is now able to give. As a child, he had pet 298 2 Reunion 299 dogs and cats for the best of reasons. A sickly child, he had overanxious parents afraid of animal germs, or fate decreed that they be run over in the street, or other parents lured them off to delight other homes. One way or another, he lost them. And then there were the younger children he wanted to escort home from school, who soon got wary around him because he had all the symptoms early on of the way he would grow up to be, and their mothers warned them. But to himself Estes never grew up to be anything: he simply was. He loved Mary. She didn't go around making the sort of distinctions that others had. Mary knew he would never hurt Kathy. He would, in fact, die for her. Mary trusted him. It was for Mary he had given up the fiery pleasures of Ahmed, who still called him to rendezvous but who couldn't stomach to live there, or so he said. (Nobody had invited him.) It was Ahmed nobody could trust. Nobody knew for sure what state of mind he would be in next, what he would do. The uncle who had backed their mortgage had no faith in Ahmed, either and was very conscious that money was desirable. Mary thought that Estes would make good, even to the uncle's satisfaction. Mary saw Estes as a nice Indiana boy, conscientious, whose family had rejected him over his sexual preferences long before anybody had ever heard of Vietnam. He probably would have been in Canada anyway, or some other retreat. Estes's talents were strong. In New York, he had auditioned with Graham, had danced one summer with Lemming. As for permanence with any company, something always went wrong at the last minute. "We could work together," he ventured on Mary's return to Montreal . He sounded casual; like a timid man proposing, he held his breath and almost shook. But weren't they working togetheralready? "Okay with me," she said at once. He went joyously straight to apply for a grant from Ottawa. There was money for such combinations . He gave her the small room upstairs for nothing, while waiting to be answered. Mary wrote to Gordon and Gerda Stewart: Don't worry. I know you must have lost the bail money you put up for me, but I'm back in touch with the probation lady. I quit...