Free The Box Garden by Carol Shields Page B

stitches?”
    “A few,” he said bravely. “The whole thing’s been so damned stupid.”
    I was prepared to dislike him. First for so perfectly fulfilling the role of the inept and picturesque bachelor who couldn’t make a sandwich without sawing through his hand. And second for being a self-pitying poseur, and now monopolizing the conversation with his idiotic stitches.
    “How are you going to be able to work?” Merv asked him conversationally, and, turning to me, he explained that Eugene was an orthodontist and thus required the use of his hands.
    Eugene shrugged and smiled somewhat goofily, “I’ll take a week off. There’s nothing else to do really.”
    “What about all your appointments?” Gordon Stevens asked.
    “I’ll have to get Mrs. Ingalls to cancel everything Monday morning.”
    “What a shame,” Bea mourned, “what a rotten shame. But look, Eugene, let Merv get you something to drink. That hand must be painful.”
    “It is a bit,” he admitted.
    Did I detect a hint of a whine? Was this ridiculous tooth straightener trying to solicit sympathy? If so, I was not prepared to give it. No wonder his wife ditched him, the big baby. I sipped my gin and tonic sullenly.
    “Merv says you’re a poet,” he said to me later, sitting beside me at one of the little tables along with Gord Stevens and Clara Folkstone. I gave him a long look; with enormous difficulty he was eating his stuffed artichoke with his left hand.
    “Yes,” I said knowing that he was about to tell me he never read poetry.
    “I can’t pretend to know much about poetry,” he said. “Except the usual stuff we had at school.”
    “That’s all right,” I said socially. “It’s a sort of minority interest. Like lacrosse.”
    I had dressed for this evening with deliberate declassé nonchalance, aware that Bea expects me to contribute a faint whiff of bohemia to her parties; I wore a badly-cut gypsy skirt and black satin peasant blouse, both bought at an Anglican Church rummage sale. Fortunately Bea’s expectations conform to what I can afford. I had also brought my special party personality, the rough-ribbed humorous persona which I had devised for myself after Watson left me. I earn my invitations and even for an old friend like Bea Freehorn I knew better than to sulk all evening. So I smiled hard at Eugene as Bea brought round the veal fillets.
    Encouraged he asked, “What sort of poet are you? I mean, what kind of things do you write about?”
    “About the minutiae of existence,” I said with mock solemnity.
    He looked baffled and, putting down his fork, he leaned over to whisper in my ear. Now, I thought, now he is going to ask me why poetry doesn’t rhyme anymore.
    But I was wrong; in a very low murmur, so low that I could hardly hear him, he asked if I would mind cutting up his meat for him.
    I almost laughed aloud. But something stopped me; perhaps it was the extraordinary humility of the request or the reserve with which he made it. I leaned over, my elbows grazing his chest and, picking up his knife and fork, I began sawing through the pale, pink veal. My arm sliding back and forth touched the top of his wrist. Clara and Gordon smiled and watched at what seemed a great distance. Three, four, five pieces. I kept cutting, my eyes on Eugene’s plate, until I had finished. Then I sat back breathless.
    For while I was cutting Eugene’s meat, a sudden blood-rush of tenderness had swept over me. A maternal echo? I had once cut Seth’s meat in just this way. Perhaps someone had once cut up mine—I half remembered. Eugene’s helpless right hand wound in beautiful gauze lay on the edge of the table, and it was all I could do to keep from seizing it and holding it to my lips. I wanted to put my arms around him, to cover him with kisses. The brutal knife, the surgical stitches, the vicious wife who had left him and exposed him to all the hurts of the world—I wanted to stroke them away; I wanted to comfort, to sooth, to