The Last Woman Page 11

  Confessing his weariness to Ann the other night had been difficult: to his surprise, he had experienced shame. For he does not think of himself as either emotional or a quitter. Talking with her, he felt he was both. But you’ve been a wonderful lawyer. He wanted to weep at that, he hardly knew why.

  Politics: his first love. He’s done backroom work for his party, he’s gone door to door, he’s been a delegate to policy conferences, he’s gone cap in hand to local businesses: he’s paid his dues, and when, at a barbeque at Reg Benoit’s Random Lake house the previous year, Reg remarked in the presence of several senior party people that he’d make a first-rate candidate, Richard felt his time was arriving at last. He knew in his bones that politics would never turn into the dry-as-dust duty law had become, for he’s already savoured one of its principle pleasures: the sound of his name on other people’s lips. Since word has gone round that Reg has singled him out, people act differently toward him. They approach him to ask if they can work for him; to see if he could have a word with the minister. They assume he has a power he does not have, at least not yet, and though he does his best to disabuse them, he can see (and takes secret pleasure in the fact) that they do not believe him. His name has been in the papers. He was interviewed on a local TV channel on the subject of garbage disposal. He has discovered he thrives on the sense of being at the centre of things, someone who can make a difference.

  But Reg has not yet given him his clear blessing, and since Reg – who holds the seat next to Nigushi – is not only the minister of natural resources, but the party’s northern Ontario boss, this is critical. Richard is not sure whether he should ask Reg outright or wait for him to act on his own. Meanwhile, he has heard that two or three others are circling the nomination: a fact that has deprived him of sleep – sent him to the bottle of lorazepam he hides from Ann in his golf bag.

  He has left his door ajar so he can overhear Marg. Parsons, Honderich, and Galuta. Yes? Yes? No, I don’t think so. No, he’s busy right now. Across his desk, a woman with inky blotches under her eyes is staring at him. For a second, he cannot remember why she is there.

  The interior of his BMW is stifling. He punches up the air conditioning and, as he swings into the traffic, slips Wynton Marsalis into the tape deck. This moment is usually his best of the day: a pocket of freedom where the gods of possibility can regroup.

  But today, he has a headache, and the traffic is slow. A young woman in a hard hat and fluorescent bib stands beside the road, working a Stop sign in a cloud of shimmering dust while behind her enormous machines back and run, back and run. At the next light, he beats his fingers on the wheel (no longer in time) as his gaze strays over the hazed city toward the distant cube of the paper mill. On the bridge, there’s another holdup. Below, on the sun-smitten rock, a gull stands with its head back, its neck and chest convulsing in a silent scream.

  All day, for no particular reason, he’s been aware of his father – as if Sully were loitering nearby, just out of sight – an old, familiar feeling of oppression. His father had not been like other fathers. His friends had fathers with names like Bob Stone or Jack Boileau: self-contained men, who held impressively aloof, and who went to jobs indoors, in offices and mills. But his father was Sully Galuta, Polish immigrant, garbage collector in the city of Scarborough, self-styled expert on every subject under the sun, butcher of the English language. One day Richard’s best friend referred to Sully as “a big know-nothing.” They had fought – more or less to a draw – and when Richard went home with a torn shirt and filthy face, Sully upbraided him. What did he mean by wrecking a good shirt? Did he think money grew on the leaves? People would think he was no better than some goddamn wop. And Richard, who had just been defending his father’s honour, found himself hating the man who loomed over him in his undershirt. Too proud and angry to explain himself, Richard had turned away and received for his audacity a smack across the ear that made his head ring. Yet he had loved his father, at least in the early days: his rough affection could make the sun come out. Sully led him into the local ravine to collect mushrooms; or they drove out of the city to watch the hawks on their annual migrations – times alone, when Sully’s more embarrassing excesses could not be witnessed by anyone. Life with his father was a kind of secret, known only to him and his mother. Doris waited tables in a greasy spoon – a thin, energetic woman who walked with a slight tilt, as if advancing into a strong headwind. Richard sensed she was constantly managing her husband: steering him toward cheerfulness if he was down, or trying to moderate him if he got too high. Sometimes the two of them danced around the tiny living room to Lawrence Welk. His father would pump and twirl through the polka, surprisingly light on his big feet; and his mother, who was slight in comparison, would put her head back and laugh – on a note that to Richard sounded false, and touched him with a faint, inexplicable fear. He felt collusive with his mother: very early on, he learned that his father was deficient, even pitiable. It was important not to take your eye off him.

  Occasionally his mother appeared with a bruise around her eye or on her cheek; she might, one morning, limp out the door to work. At such times, she was more determinedly cheerful than ever, frantically insistent they were no different than anyone else and, even more importantly, no different from the people they believed themselves to be.

  Once, the two of them had gone camping, father and son. And Sully was happy as he so often was in the woods. Through the trees of the provincial park, other tents were visible. “Like this,” Sully told him, as he dug a trench to carry off the rainwater. He chopped down saplings to make a frame for the tent. He chopped firewood. As their perogies sizzled in the pan, a ranger arrived to tell his father he had broken several laws: he would have to pay a fine. Spittle flying, Sully had raged about how no one in this country knew how to camp the right way, and how he was going to speak to the mayor of Scarborough, who was a personal friend of his, while the man in the uniform went on calmly writing. Afterwards, Sully tore their camp apart, flinging the illegal tent poles in the lake, kicking dirt into his illegal trench, and they started the long drive home. In the car, the monologue continued, while Richard silently vowed that when he grew up he would not be like his father. It was a defining moment of his life: all his reasonableness and self-control flowed from it; his hatred of strong emotion; his ability to float above the fray, unflappably sanguine, with a hint of pity or contempt for those who could not control themselves.

  Sully dropped dead of an embolism when Richard was eighteen. He can recall, still, his father’s head laid on its satin pillow in the funeral home. The few strands combed back over his bald head; his mouth too big, as if it had been stretched; and the hands, the huge, nicked hands clasped over his one good suit, the beaded loop of his rosary draped across his fingers. The numbness of those days lasted for a long time, as if Sully had gone out with a final, enormous explosion, stunning Richard and his mother both.

  Escaping the traffic at last, he turns into the neighbourhood of Cartier Point: an enclave of big, 1920s-era houses held in a bend of the river. Fifteen years ago, they bought a two-storey, stuccoed house with a tower he considers pretentious, a stone’s throw from where Ann grew up. When recently he suggested they move to a new sub division on the edge of town, Ann wouldn’t hear of it: she didn’t want one of those new houses, she said, with their oversized garages that made the whole street look like an industrial park. She was adamant, as she often was; her ferocity, her deep certainty about some things, were qualities he both respected and feared. He had a sense sometimes of putting his own opinions on, like a style in coats; and while he had his convictions too, he thought that at times she was excessive in the way she clung to hers. She knew those houses on the new estates were bad. They were wrong. They were an excrescence in taste and social living. And when he said, modestly, “Well for you they are. Lots of people, me for instance, actually like them,” his relativism left her unimpressed. He felt superior to her in these matters: more reasonable, more gen
erous. And yet at the same time, he envied her her passions – the natural authority they gave her. There was something primitive in his wife, he had thought more than once. Something capable of striking at random, out of an obscure depth.

  Their neighbourhood is in decline. Some of the bigger houses have been broken into apartments; many lawns and gardens are no longer well kept: he can’t imagine Reg being impressed. They had compromised with an addition – family room and expanded kitchen below; a studio for Ann above, its huge windows overlooking the long backyard, the maple tree, the crumbling brick of the enormous outdoor grill built by an earlier owner, the dyke that protects the neighbourhood from the river. He slides past the overgrown hedge, its tiny leaves crisping in the drought, stopping just short of the open garage where her Honda sits. He misses his wife. Her decision, weeks ago, to stay at Inverness took him off guard. Billy had shown up and stayed for supper. Later, she had been getting ready for bed when she announced that she couldn’t leave her new painting – it was simply going too well. She intended to remain at the cottage on her own. He picked up something in her voice – a nervous eagerness to gain his favour, as if she were afraid he might not grant it (when had he ever stood in the way of her painting?) – a certain thickening of her words, as if she were holding something back. He thought immediately of Billy – a crude reaction, he decided, and unworthy of her, of them both. Yet waking in the night, he finds himself returning to Billy obsessively – to the Toronto hotel room where they confronted each other ten years before, after hearing they’d lost the claim. Billy sitting on the edge of his bed while he paced the fading carpet, arguing that they should appeal. Billy hadn’t seemed to be listening, but sat in silence, rigid as wood, and it was only some minutes after Richard finished that he began to speak. He had attacked Richard’s handling of the case, accusing him of going maverick, of ignoring their agreed-upon tactics. But he had said worse, much worse. Richard can’t shake it from his thoughts. He finds himself back in that tawdry room, compulsively speaking the words he was unable to speak at the time: piling up his arguments, point by unassailable point. But it is never enough.

  It galls him that Billy and Ann are both at Nigushi. It’s true that Pine Island and Inverness are miles apart. But seen from the vantage point of Black Falls, a ninety-minute drive to the southwest, that distance shrinks to almost nothing.

  In the kitchen, Mrs. Paisley sits behind the glass-topped kitchen table, with her thick shanks braced under the lap of her patterned dress and the pages of the Black Falls Sentinel spread before her. Richard makes dutiful small talk while she waits to be picked up by her husband. No, Ann hasn’t phoned, she tells him. He pours a Scotch and calls hello into the family room, where Rowan is watching TV. He’d rather join his son, but Mrs. Paisley is tapping her finger on the paper.

  Someone from Pine Island has been convicted of a stabbing in a downtown bar, apparently. “So terrible,” she croons. “These people.”

  “Well.” Richard swirls his Scotch. He knows it’s pointless to argue with her. “It’s only a chance that he’s native.”

  For a second or two she stares at him from behind her bifocals.

  “I’m afraid to go shopping. I’ve got nothing against them. But we can’t have them just lying around.”

  “I really don’t think they’re any danger to you,” Richard murmurs, glancing at the clock.

  At last he can sprawl beside Rowan. It is a good moment – the best of the day – to lounge beside his son with his Scotch as two guys with sticks wearing white pyjamas whack the hell out of each other.

  “So how’d it go today?”

  “Fine.”

  “How’s the backwards skating?”

  For a long moment Rowan simply looks at him. There is a sweetness in his face, a wondering openness that recalls his mother’s more reflective moods. Reaching out, Richard squeezes the boy’s knee in its faded jeans.

  The white pyjamas continue their battling. It’s a collage of footage from various matches, held together with the dubious bonding agent of disco music.

  “When is Mom coming home?”

  “Well, like I said, after this weekend – we’ve got a big dinner this weekend. I don’t know if she’ll come back on Monday with me or stay up for a few more days. She’s got a painting going.”

  “I don’t want to go to the Ducettes’.”

  “You wanted to before,” Richard says, smiling encouragingly.

  “I said I don’t want to.”

  “Rowan, listen –”

  “Really, I don’t!”

  Rowan’s tears astonish him. They seem to astonish Rowan too. He sniffs and turns back abruptly to the TV. “Let’s turn this thing down,” Richard says. Finding the remote, he kills the sound. “Now, are you listening? You know you had a good time at the Ducettes’ before. We had trouble getting you away.”

  “I want to be with you and Mom.”

  “It’s just two nights, Row. We have people coming, for my business. It’ll be boring, I can guarantee,” Richard says, speaking as calmly as he can. “Remember, you asked to go to the Ducettes’. They’re making special plans. You’re going to the water slides.” Rowan is watching the screen with his jaw thrust out – that, too, like his mother. “You love the water slides. Rowan, buddy, look at me –”

  On the smooth rock shores of a bay not far from his house, their gold-brown bodies stand in the late-afternoon sun or cannonball into water crosshatched by their play. He listens to their cries, their watery explosions, as he works around the house. Their existence seems to him provisional, like the light that glows on their skin and gives the lake its steely sheen. When a day goes by without their appearing, he worries they have returned to the clearing. Yet the light keeps coming back. And the boys come back to the rock.

  Since he surprised them that afternoon, they have avoided him: stepping off the path at his approach, falling silent as he goes by, unresponsive to his greetings. It is clear they remember how he had laid into them. He half-regrets it now. He should put them out of his mind. What good can he do? But he wakes thinking of them in the morning. At night, sitting out on his step, he listens to them laughing as they chase each other in the dark, and for a time all seems normal, and the hope rises that they have turned their backs on the gas.

  But he cannot tell for certain. He can only see what he can see. That cut over George Shewaybick’s eye, glimpsed across a pile of boxes in the co-op – where did that come from? What are those boys carrying in that rolled blanket? Yvonne has given him names, bits of information, and soon he can fit each boy into the web of Island families, reading their parents and grandparents in the turn of a mouth, the darting of a glance. For they are aware of him, no doubt of that. At a distance, a few of them stand watching him across the rock, as a group of animals will watch in the stillness before flight.

  Sometimes he sees girls among them – a promising sign, for he believes the girls are a good influence. In some ways, they have it worse – they have us to deal with – and yet (he’s noticed it at Yvonne’s) they have more maturity, more calm.

  Among the boys, only Lance Cormier acknowledges him openly. He will sit on Billy’s step and drink chocolate milk: a bright, eager little fellow with a ready laugh, perhaps a bit too ready.

  Linda Cormier had been in her nightgown when Billy arrived with her son. Holes in the interior walls – the wallboard punched right through – a stench of shit and Linda, smelling of booze, chastising the boy for upsetting her. Lance had clung to him, and in the end, with his own past waking, Billy had brought him to Yvonne’s.

  Despite what Yvonne said about the clear-cuts, he keeps thinking of taking Jimmy to the cabin on Silver Lake. Just being in the bush can put a person right. He has seen it many times.

  One night he’s at his sister’s when Jimmy appears. “Come and sit down!” his mother says. “We’re hearing about Mardi Gras.” The boy has stopped inside the door. “Go on,” Yvonne urges Billy. “The girl in the cat suit!” Brenda i
s there too, playing on the floor; and Eddie, sitting across the table with sawdust in his hair from his job in Black Falls. Billy goes on with his New Orleans story: the party, the girl in the cat suit, the men in the room upstairs. He does not look at Jimmy again, but his attention tends toward the door where the boy hovers. The story is for his nephew now.

  Yvonne laughs. Eddie smiles. Brenda bangs a plastic baseball bat on the floor. And still, by the door, the boy waits with his head down, hair hanging past his face, as if he were more interested in his shoes.

  Billy has never put so much into a story. The girl in the cat suit. The men in the room upstairs. The man with the gun. Yvonne is roaring. By the door (he only dares look once), Jimmy is frowning into space, his eye, the only one visible past the wing of his hair, fiercely bright.

  Sometimes Billy has coaxed a chickadee to take food from his hand. The crimp of its claws; the thrill of its tiny, pulsing life. Jimmy’s presence is like that: a wrong move, or even the thought of one, and he will vanish.

  Finishing his story, he begins another. His sister is soon laughing again – calling him her bad little brother. With exaggerated casualness, almost like someone asleep, Jimmy comes to the table, draws out a chair, and sits.

  Yvonne tells stories from their childhood – the good ones involving a joke, or a piece of luck so outrageous you had to suspect the little people. The talk drifts to more distant times. That famine spring. The year the lakes were overrun with beaver. Now and then they fall silent, as the spaciousness of the country enters the room; the silences of winters past.

  Billy tells a story of ice-fishing up at Silver Lake. He forgets even Jimmy as he talks – even though he is telling it for him: to show him another life. When he rediscovers the boy, he has pushed back his hair behind both ears and is watching him.