The Last Woman Page 15

  A week later, he took her to a restaurant off Bloor Street – a low-roofed place with a patio, boxed cedars, French doors and waiters whose elaborate show of expertise left her quietly amused. She wore a dark mauve shirt, its top buttons open. He scarcely dared to glance there, to the rounding of a breast glowing in the candlelight – for in his nervousness, any acknowledgement of his desire, even to himself, was disorienting. When she asked about his background, he told her, “Solid working class” with the bravado he put on in such moments, for he was defensive about where he had come from: ill at ease, for all his show of sophistication, among menus written in French and officious waiters in white aprons.

  When she asked him about his parents, he spoke of his mother, who was living still in his boyhood home. “She’s got this great spirit,” he told Ann. “A real light in her eye. Nothing gets her down for long.” Immediately, he wondered if he’d gone too far, if he’d begged the question about what there might be to get her down. Sully was already haunting their table, his presence as charged as ever with unforeseen consequences. It was with some misgivings, then, that he told her about his father’s love of nature: the camping trips, the midnight awakening to see an eclipse of the moon. It was all true, and yet he could sense the darker depths of his life with his father looming, like a sheer drop glimpsed from a mountain road, and to bring his discomfort to an end, he told her his father had died when he was eighteen, eliciting a cry of sympathy.

  She spoke of her own mother, who had been ill for much of Ann’s childhood. “I never understood exactly what it was. Nerves. Headaches. She spent a good deal of time in bed. I wanted her so much to be like other mothers. I was ashamed to bring my friends home. I think I was awfully cruel some times: I didn’t like being with her. It makes me sick to think of it now. But I’d identified completely with my father. He was so full of life. There were times when I wanted to be a boy!” Lifting her wineglass, she added, “It sounds like it was better in your house.”

  “I was glad to grow up.”

  “I don’t know if I was or not.”

  “Not that we have a choice.”

  “No, not that we have a choice!” Their gazes met then. It was not clear to him why the hackneyed phrase “not that we have a choice” should move him nearly to tears. But across the candle-lit table a connection seemed to form.

  He never got over his amazement that she wanted him. He had never considered himself attractive. At six-four, he loomed above most other people; holding her, he worried there was too much of him, and that she must inevitably find the weight of him, the awkward fitting of their bodies, distasteful. He was intimidated by her sensuality. She would pull apart an orange, slowly, and feed him bits with a playful curiosity, as if half-expecting him to transform. The first time they went to bed, he was so in awe of her beauty – so eager not to fail her – that, unusual for him, he could not perform. In the end she curled up against him, telling him in a child’s voice that it didn’t matter. That night when she bustled out in her raincoat, her head bowed, he feared she might not come back. Two days later, she reappeared with flowers and a red velvet bag stuffed with marijuana. Once he found love possible, everything seemed possible. He glimpsed a kind of happiness he had rarely let himself imagine: one that simply went on, day by ordinary day.

  He was living in a low-rise building near the corner of Bloor Street and Bedford. His furniture consisted of a waterbed, a kitchen table, three chairs, a coffee table, and a leather couch, with nothing on the walls but a framed, signed photo of Arthur Ashe and Ann’s heron painting, with his history and law books stacked along the baseboards: a poverty of taste and comfort he hadn’t noticed until he’d brought her there. One night, undulating gently on their little sea, she asked him about his first time: “Come on. Don’t tell me it’s me.”

  Patsy Dinsmore had been a fellow law student. He had not loved her, with her lank hair, her skin smelling of copper, her passion for the more recondite points of corporate law, but they had drifted together for mutual study sessions, and out of loneliness and boredom had drifted a little further, into each other’s hesitant embraces. He recalled a cold April afternoon on Toronto Island: a few fumbled, urgent minutes in a hollow screened by bracken, the aerials of boats going by. He made his interest in Patsy sound like more than it was, its consequences more troubling than they actually were. “And there were other grapplings. How about your first?”

  He was not particularly eager to hear about Ann’s love life, for he guessed she had far outpaced him in that department. But he was eager to deflect her scrutiny.

  For a few seconds, she was silent. Her face slowly changed, seemed to grow smoother as it emptied. She was somewhere else: something in him hung suspended; a deeper level of attention, of seriousness, had been evoked. “It was a local boy,” she said finally, and her voice, too, had changed. “He was from the reserve at the other end of Nigushi. I first met him when I was a young girl, actually. My father knew his uncle. The uncle did work at our cottage one summer and he’d come along with him.” She sighed; Richard had fallen very still. “But then I didn’t see him for a long time. Then one day he just showed up and we – we were both grown up. Well, we were nineteen. We had a summer together, on the lake.”

  Sitting up, she turned briskly cheerful. “Anyway, a familiar-enough story: two kids with nothing in common, no future at all. As my father kept telling me. I ended it. It was awful. I was awful. I went away after that – England. Art school. When I came back, I lived in Montreal with my mom. She and Dad were divorced. After that, I didn’t get to our cottage much, and I never saw him again.” She slipped out of bed. He listened to her filling the kettle in the kitchen. We had a summer together. Her words, spoken with such delicacy of feeling, had conjured something at once complete, pure, and unrepeatable. The local boy, whoever he was, had touched her, he suspected, in a way he never would.

  He never forgot this exchange and never referred to it again. Yet the topic came up once more. They were married, and had moved up to Black Falls, where Richard had been offered a position in Doug Parson’s law office. They had bought the stucco house near her father’s. One night when another couple was visiting and the liqueur glasses had been filled and refilled, the women started to talk of old relationships. Giselle mentioned a Billy Johnson. “Ancient history!” Ann laughed, making a dismissive motion. But Richard was alert. Was Billy Johnson the “local boy” she’d told him about? Giselle leaned to Richard, slyly confidential. “Don’t let her fool you. She was quite gone on the guy. Of course, they were mere children –”

  “Just nineteen,” Richard said.

  “Well, you know all about it then!” Giselle turned to her husband. “I wonder what’s happened to him? I haven’t seen him for years.” Her husband said he thought he’d gone to B.C. “Somebody told me he’d been in jail.”

  “That isn’t possible,” Ann said. “I mean, he had a stubborn streak, but nothing that would…” She was subdued for the rest of the evening.

  That night, undressing, she was still pensive. Richard was getting used to Ann’s moodiness; despite her high-energy competence, she had a tendency to melancholy abstraction. He often had the sense she was not entirely present, as if she carried an alternate life inside her whose currents at any time were liable to tug her away. “Still thinking about your old boyfriend?”

  She was gazing toward the window. “I just can’t believe he’d do something that would –”

  “You know, it would be an easy thing to find out.”

  “What would?”

  “Whether he’s been to jail.”

  “I don’t want to know,” she told him.

  And there he was, the Indian boy, the local boy, Billy Johnson, his jacket billowing as he ran down the shoulder toward their car. Opening a rear door, he slid in behind Ann.

  Richard turned to him. “Black Falls okay?”

  There was something eager in the broad face – a boyish openness concentrated in the widely set dark e
yes. Of course, he had no idea what he’d just stepped into: Richard felt for him.

  Ann did not turn, not at first, but remained facing straight ahead. Richard, perplexed by her silence, put the car in gear and drove back onto the highway. In the mirror, he could see their guest staring intently at the back of Ann’s head.

  A few moments later, she finally turned around. “Hello, Billy,” she said quietly. Immediately, she burst into nervous laughter.

  For the hour it took them to drive to Black Falls, Ann and Richard carried the conversation, for Billy didn’t say much, and though they tried hard to draw him out (discovering that yes, he had just come back from out west, where he’d spent several years working for a lodge in B.C., and more recently in the Alberta oil fields), he passed most of the trip staring at the passing bush.

  They let him out downtown, near the war memorial. Silent themselves now, they drove up River Street, past the paper mill, and across the Old Woman River into Cartier Point.

  “Well, he seems pleasant enough,” Richard said finally, as they pulled into their drive. “A bit quiet, maybe.”

  “He was nervous,” Ann said defensively. “A shock like that.”

  That night, lying beside him in the dark bedroom, she spoke into the silence. “You know, when I ended it –” He realized she was talking about Billy Johnson, and from the way she simply started in on the subject, he knew she’d been brooding on it. “It was worse than I told you.”

  “Yes?”

  “I was pregnant,” she said at last. “Terrified. It wasn’t in my plans at all, but then neither was –” Again she broke off, and he could sense her wandering a hidden landscape. “My parents took care of everything. I had it in London –”

  “You had the baby,” he said. In an instant, her past had become much more complicated; her present too, for where was the child?

  She took in a shuddering breath. Was she weeping?

  “Love?” he said, reaching for her hand.

  “It wasn’t a baby I had.”

  It took him a moment to understand. “Ah. I’m sorry. That must have been hard.”

  For a long time they said nothing. Through the open window he could hear the Old Woman River, hushing over its stones; the hoot of a horn from the mill, far upstream. He could sense her thinking beside him in the dark. “I’m here if you want to talk about it,” Richard said. Her revelation had changed the mood between them, changed, in some way, who she was.

  “He never knew I was pregnant,” she said finally. “I mean, I couldn’t have had a baby, and he – he would have wanted me to have it. He’d have been so upset, furious really, if he knew I was going to have an abortion. I wrote him later, from England, but I just didn’t have the courage to tell him. What good would it have done? I was a mess.”

  A little later, she spoke more calmly. “Now that he’s come home, we’ll see him probably. He’ll be around. He must never know what I’ve just told you, Richard. Promise me you understand.” She had reared up on one elbow, and he could sense her determination as the pale, indistinct moon of her face hovered. He promised gladly, with a grateful realization that he could give her something valuable. He promised, hoping to bring this difficult pass to an end.

  Ann walks toward the boathouse, the sounds of the dinner party receding behind her. The sun has set and in the silvering channel the inverted reflections of pines tremble in a deepening obscurity. She is thinking of the last time she went down the path, a few hours before, following Billy to the dock, wrapped in the queer sense they were leaving together, like a husband and wife called away by an emergency. On the dock, he had untied his bow rope and swung his boat around, the hull making a hollow, trickling sound as it slid lightly over the water.

  Instinctively, to calm him, she had placed her hand on his back and was shocked at the heat radiating from him. “You’re not well,” she said, and pleaded with him to rest, to lie down, to let her get Dr. Clemens at his cottage. But he paid no attention. “Billy, what happened to you?” He did pause to regard her then, finally: paused with the rope in his hand, above his gently chafing boat. But whatever solace the contact brought her was instantly swept away, for his look held her with a terrible clarity.

  He got into his boat then. She hovered as he ripped his motor to life, too stunned to say anything, and as he drove away, she turned and walked back to the cottage.

  In the darkened studio, she sits on the small cot by the wall. From the house drifts the sound of laughter, and she thinks of Elaine Shewaybick, dignified, silent Elaine, whose grandson had hanged himself, moving around the porch as she served them. The taste of shame.

  Drawing up her feet, she lies curled on her side. When a loon calls, its plunging, liquid cry seems to sound inside her. She is merely a point of consciousness now, an ear, an eye, alert in a corner of the dark studio – waiting for the loon to cry again. As if it might have the answer to the question in Billy’s face: What was she doing with her life?

  Some time later, she hears her husband call her name softly from the dimness beyond the screens. She can hear his feet scuff on the path. A flashlight beam flicks over her windows like a passing ghost. Now comes the creak and slap of the boathouse door, and her name spoken again. His heavy tread on the stairs, preceded by the probing light.

  As its glare finds her, she shuts her eyes – not just the light but being seen is unbearable. His rubber soles squeak as he approaches the cot.

  “Ann?”

  “Don’t shine that on me, please.”

  The light falls away: a white transparent blanket drooping from his hand. “What’s going on? Reg and Marilyn are concerned. I’m concerned. Are you ill?” An impatient note: Ill again? She thinks of her mother. Was it like this for her? Feeling that to do anything but stay in bed was an impossibility.

  All at once, she swings from the cot, an action that leaves her dizzy as she stands. He catches at her arm. “I’m all right,” she tells him sharply and starts toward the stairs.

  Single file they go up the path. Richard is trying to be helpful, shining the light over her shoulder. Rocks and steps appear momentarily, vanishing to be replaced by more rocks, more steps, the black bole of a tree. They pass the side of the cottage and go along the screens and up the porch steps into quavering candlelight, where two faces, scarcely known to her, look up expectantly.

  She dreams she is lying in a hospital bed, so encumbered with tubes and pulleys and covers that she cannot move. She is having a dangerous operation – some kind of machine is drilling away at the back of her skull. She wakes to sunshine behind curtains. The machine is still drilling though; as she listens it grows fainter and she understands it is Elaine Shewaybick, setting off in her boat for Pine Island.

  Beside her, Richard lies asleep on his stomach, a bit of drool shining at the corner of his mouth. He has thrown off the sheet and at the base of his back, just above the elastic waistband of his shorts, is the little tuft of hair that always intrigued and repelled her – like a small furry animal settled on his back. For a long time she studies him. Fourteen years together. She knows everything about him. And she knows nothing.

  During breakfast, Reg Benoit slips off to make a call; returning, he announces that he and Marilyn must leave. The premier wants some revisions, pronto, to a statement to be released the next day. “’Twas ever thus.” Reg shrugs while Marilyn confides a wan smile to her coffee mug.

  The trip to the Harbour feels endless. Ann sits with Marilyn in the rear seat, excused from being sociable by the racket of the outboard. Ahead, Richard leans toward the minister and shouts over the din about his desire to run in Nigushi. Confident I can beat Ferrero. Would like to really work the north side there. The new policies should help. The fragments she can pick up seem propelled by boyish eagerness: she feels sad for him, protective.

  At the Harbour, they tie up and walk the Benoits to their car. Richard and Marilyn make exuberant noises about the visit; everyone kisses like old friends. Reg says to Richard: “These thi
ngs are a matter of strategy. I’m optimistic something will work out. But I’ve got a lot to consider – just not ready to commit at this point.” Their guests get into their car, and Marilyn continues to shower them with goodbyes through a rolled-down window. As soon as they are out of sight, Richard stalks back to the boat without waiting for Ann.

  That afternoon, she thinks she will paint, but when she stands before her canvas, not a single idea emerges. Going outside, she takes a chair overlooking the water. In the shadow of the next island, a duck is floating, motionless as a decoy.

  Richard comes down the rock. He goes past her and stands for a few seconds facing the water, hands on hips. “Well, if I get the nomination, it’ll be a bloody miracle –”

  “We don’t know,” she says. “I thought he was encouraging.”

  “My God, Ann. It was a disaster. Your friend showing up didn’t help.” He says no more, but from the fierceness of his glance, she understands he is far from calm.

  Above the BMW, a loose wall of logs slides past as Richard accelerates. Huge butts leaking sap. Scored trunks. The cab’s assortment of mirrors, with the driver’s face held in each of them. In a few seconds the transport is a toy in the rear-view, while before them, the flat highway divides the bush like a runway.

  “Awfully fast,” Ann says. Ignoring her, Richard speeds over a rise. And there’s a jam – a chain of vehicles curving away toward the flutter of emergency lights.

  Swearing, he touches the brake.

  They join the slow parade. They’re still an hour away from Black Falls. Beside him, Ann rustles in her bag. She has been mostly silent since they left. He feels that, this weekend, she has let him down. Badly.

  “Want an almond,” she says, holding out a small plastic bag.