The Last Woman Read online

“You’re supposed to hit it back.”

  Okay, he knew that.

  On the floor, digging in a corner, he swept the little ball toward her. But it bounced off a table leg. He scurried on all fours, scraping it frantically between her legs. Then he stood up, grinning, his face hot.

  “That’s not the way! Do you know that’s not the way?”

  In a flood of shame, he crossed his eyes, twirled on the spot, and fell down: dead.

  She squealed and picked up his foot. Laughing, she dragged him across the floor until finally she dropped his leg and stood looking down on him with her hands on her hips. “Want to draw?”

  On a low table below the windows were stacks of paper and cardboard, cans of crayons and coloured pencils, a huge tray of watercolours. They sat side by side on two stools, making pictures. He loved art, his favourite class at school. He loved it when Miss Kilkenny handed out the big, white, stiff pieces of paper on which he might make anything, anything.

  “What’s that?” she asked him, after a while. He had drawn a tall, wide-shouldered man emerging from a tree stump – stepping out of it with a grin.

  “Nanabush.”

  “Looks like a man to me. Not somebody’s Nana.”

  “He is a man,” he said. “He changes himself into things.” He pointed. “He changed himself into a stump so he could catch some ducks.”

  “Why is he red?”

  Red had seemed right. Now he wondered if it was wrong.

  He came back the next day with Matt, and again they painted. She made a picture of a girl in a multicoloured dress facing a line of mountains with her hands up. Her skill astonished him – he could not draw so well himself – but the detail that absorbed him most, that made him look up at her, as she frowned at her work, was that the girl’s skin – her arms and legs and the backs of her hands – were bright red.

  They went into the cottage. The rooms were dim, cool; she sat on a couch of green leather, patting it to indicate he should sit beside her. “This is our living room,” she told him. She pointed at the tall shelves. “My father’s books. A lot of them belonged to Grandpa and Nana. Grandpa’s dead. Nana can’t come up here any more. She’s in a nursing home.” He looked around at the shelves, the pictures, the red and blue regatta ribbons pinned on a wall, the newspapers heaped on a low table, the patterns in the worn rugs, the stone fireplace where under the mantel three dark stones made a kind of face. The place was still and cool; the ceilings were far away. A smell of pine wafted from the wood box. He had never been in such a house before – its spreading rooms – rooms behind rooms where the daylight glowed mysteriously. And all this was her.

  In a room off the hall, he saw a big bed with posts, a rumple of sheets. “My parent’s bedroom,” she announced. She flipped a switch and overhead the blades of a fan began to turn, wafting a breeze onto their lifted faces. He laughed for no particular reason – for delight, for relief, for amazement that the world contained such things. “You’re funny,” she said. She was beaming at him with pleasure; he wondered if he should try falling down again. Her eyes, he saw, were the same colour as birch leaves when they first came out.

  For the rest of that summer, while Matt was building the new guest cabin, the only days that counted were the ones he spent with her. She had not told him her name, though hearing her father call her Annie, he knew what it was. She called him Billy, or Billy-Billy, or some such nickname she made up on the spot, delighting them both. But he did not call her anything. And yet, when he was alone, he spoke her name. On Pine Island, he breathed it south, over the water, in the direction of her cottage. Her name had a power.

  Sometimes, on the days he didn’t go to her cottage, he feared she had forgotten him. Yet each time when he arrived with Matt, she was there to greet him, prettier and odder than he remembered – the oddness centred in her eyes, which held, for all their playfulness, some suggestion of sleep.

  Through July and August, the new guest cabin rose among the trees. Sometimes, they sat and watched Matt work, or did simple jobs. As she bent to pick up a board, her pale hair, almost as pale as the wood that opened under Matt’s saw, swung down. When she rolled down the edge of her shorts to examine a mosquito bite, the whiteness of the untanned skin astonished him: it almost didn’t look normal.

  One day she took him up to a room on the second floor. Piles of books, a bed, a birdcage with paper birds inside, a Hula Hoop, a pair of skis, a photo of a woman in a tiny skirt, poised on tiptoe, a huge blue bear with one eye missing – fragments of her wondrous life, its entirety too large to see. She threw herself back on the bed, just as she had thrown herself on the grass that day, and bounced, legs loose and flying, in a solitude of pleasure.

  One day he found a fisherman’s plastic float that had washed up – a little red-and-white ball. Teasing, he refused to give it to her and they ended up wrestling on the ground. Grabbing her wrists, he overpowered her.

  “Okay,” she said, lying still.

  He let her go. He did not get up right away but continued to straddle her, and for a little while, out of breath, they looked into each other’s faces. Later in the summer, when the guest cabin was finished and he no longer went down to Inverness, this is what he would remember: how she had looked at him in perfect stillness, perfect seriousness – all her mischief disappeared – in the green stillness of the afternoon.

  As he idles along the shore of Inverness, it glides above his boat – the deck that had not existed a decade before, with its deep wooden armchairs and low table where someone has left an overturned paperback, a glass containing a slice of lime. Up the slope of rock, the old cottage rotates behind its pines. The dark veils of its porches, the needle-drifted roof, a little window tucked high under an eave, all turning to fix him, placidly, as he swings around the point and, his engine burbling on a lower note, approaches the boathouse. No one seems to be around, though their boat is at the dock. He is just tying up behind it when, up at the cottage, the back door opens and Ann emerges onto the steps. For a long moment they simply regard each other, across the little bay where a few lily pads rock in the aftermath of his wake. Then she starts down the path toward the boathouse.

  Behind her, the door opens again and a copper-haired boy appears, with Richard towering behind him. They, too, take Billy in, until – Richard tapping the boy on the shoulder – they set off after Ann.

  Her gaze as she strides out the dock meets his directly. There are dark places under her eyes. His memory of her, he realizes, has faded, as the worn photo in his wallet had faded – the photo-booth picture they took at nineteen, her face under its level bangs confronting the camera without expression. At once she is restored – not the Ann of nineteen, or even of ten years ago, but a woman of strange familiarity. “You!” she cries, mock-scolding. “You were supposed to give us some warning.” Then she is in his arms: the brief shiver of hair along his cheek, her body against his. Pulling back, he sees she is tearful. “You’ve gotten so skinny. I thought those southern women knew how to feed a man.”

  Too soon, the others are there. “Look who I’ve found,” she says to the big, sunburned moon of Richard’s face. As he takes Richard’s hand, Billy is surprised by a rush of affection – a sense they had had some good times, done some good things, after all. But the grasp of the large hand is brief: Richard steps away. “And this is our Rowan,” Ann says, bringing the boy forward. Richard’s big bones, but Ann’s eyes, peering shyly from a round face. Rowan also takes Billy’s hand, pumping it with an exaggerated earnestness.

  They go up the path together. Ahead of him, Ann’s calves flex as she treads the carpet of pine needles – past the cottage and down through trees toward the new deck. “My father built it two years ago,” she sings back to him.

  “Just before his stroke,” Richard adds from behind. “I guess Ann told you he passed away.”

  By the time they reach the deck, Rowan is no longer with them. Billy and Richard sit while Ann picks up the glass and book from the little table,
then stands before them, taking orders for drinks: radiant, he thinks. Her gestures – that way she throws out her hand, as if presenting some entertainment, a bit ironically – are the Ann he knows. That nearly invisible mole over her mouth –

  Both men watch her go off, uneasy at being left.

  “So,” Richard says. He is wearing shorts that reveal his thick legs; his big arms rest along the arms of his chair, and he gives off an air of worried seriousness Billy cannot remember. “I want to ask what you’ve been up to, but that’s an impossible question – impossible. We’ll get it out of you as the night goes on – you’re staying for supper, no arguments. Put some weight on you there.”

  “I don’t know,” Billy counters, glancing at Richard’s stomach. “This seems a dangerous place for a man.”

  “Occupational hazard,” Richard says, patting his modest paunch. “Too much fast food in the office. No, I can’t blame this on Ann: she’s always rationing me on lettuce and tofu. Make a rabbit of me.”

  “So you’re prospering,” Billy says.

  “Everyone needs lawyers, it seems. ‘Kill all the lawyers,’ Shakespeare says, but I take it as significant that no one has. We had to move out of that house downtown – we’re out at the Plaza now. Great spot. My office overlooks the old fields. You can see deer sometimes,” Richard says, raising his eyebrows as if this revelation might interest Billy especially.

  Billy has to make an effort not to look at the cottage. “Too bad about Ann’s dad –”

  “Yes! Yes.” Richard’s eyes close. “It’s been pretty hard on her – you know how she was about him. But cancer – it was a mercy, really.” Their conversation keeps breaking off; their old fluency is gone, broken by silences that are increasingly awkward. Richard keeps frowning distractedly over the water, as if more important business were awaiting his attention. A boat goes by. Both men look up, and as it swings into a gap between two islands, Richard launches into a story about a woman on the lake. It seems a non sequitur – told for no reason Billy can see except that Richard tells it well. He listens to the tale of love gone wrong, the woman’s cottage burned down by a rejected lover. Now and then Richard pauses, with a suggestive, penetrating glint of his small eyes: Billy’s cue to laugh. He can barely smile. At the conclusion, Richard chuckles himself and, after a well-timed pause, delivers the denouement: “The moral being that justice comes in unexpected ways.”

  Billy plucks at the leg of his jeans. The remark cuts too close to home. Is that what Richard intends? Surely after all this time, they can put the claim behind them. Another boat is approaching. Again, they both look. “That the Schonfelts?” Billy says, as it plows off. Frowning in his grave way, Richard tells him no. “So many strangers on the lake now. We’ve sort of been discovered.” They both fall silent again, as the wake from the new boat smashes on the rocks.

  It is a relief when Ann appears with her tray. She has put on a dress of some light material, her shoulders bare under thin straps. As she stoops over the low table to pour their wine, the tops of her breasts are momentarily visible. Flushing, Billy looks away.

  Sitting in another of the deep chairs, she leans toward him. “All right now, tell us everything. That last postcard? You were on the Caribbean –”

  He gives them his best story, about the time he went snorkelling: the striped fish, the yellow fish, shimmering past in clouds; the great eels drifting out from their lairs, with their heads like dogs. He had been fascinated by the barracudas – silver torpedoes hovering motionless, then pivoting on the spot like compass needles. “I had this urge to go over and touch one. Wanted to stroke it.”

  “You would!” Ann cries. “He was always wanting to touch things,” she tells Richard.

  “Indeed,” Richard says. “So what were you working at?” A flash of shrewdness, as if he has guessed what Billy has avoided telling them – that, for the most part, he was working at bad jobs for poor pay, when he was working at all. The job that took him to the Caribbean had been an exception. He had crewed on a millionaire’s boat, and he spins out anecdotes of the rich man’s eccentricities: the way he liked Billy to take him out in the Zodiac to feed the dolphins. The late-night confessions at the ship’s rail. Increasingly, he talks with a heartiness he does not feel. For what, after all, does he have to show for his time away? A roll of twenties in his pocket. A few stories.

  Richard grills steaks on the gas barbeque behind the cottage. In the kitchen, Ann chops vegetables. Billy drifts between them, trying to make a show of evenhandedness, but with Richard the conversation still goes haltingly. Escaping to the kitchen, he plants himself beside Ann. She tells him about her father’s time in the hospital, and when she becomes weepy, he reaches out and squeezes her bare shoulder. “Look at me,” she says. “Here I am going on about Dad – but Matt! We were so upset. We put flowers by the road. There were lots of others. I went up to the Island for the funeral. Richard wanted to but he had to be in Toronto that week.” She tells him about the ceremony in the packed little church. The hymn-singing – so moving – and old Betty Clearsky moaning in her pew. And the new priest who kept mispronouncing the Indian names. “He spoke pretty well, considering. But it was odd – so much history in that room, and of course he didn’t know any of it.”

  He watches her knife making pennies of a carrot, adrift with thoughts of Matt.

  “He always taught me to kill cleanly,” he says, apropos of nothing. His throat is hard and he has to pause for a moment. “Better to pass up on a shot than make a bad one.”

  She is looking directly at him – holding his thought, perhaps expecting more. But something in her attention daunts him; he feels he has nothing more to offer her, nothing commensurate with his experience of Matt, or with what she deserves, and on the pretence of hunting for the wine bottle, he turns away.

  They eat on the screened porch where the sun casts a flickering archipelago on the inner wall and makes of Rowan’s face a living mask. Beside the boy, Ann’s arms and chest quaver in the light. She is telling Billy about their trip to Paris, and is more than a little drunk, Richard thinks. “The Louvre!” she exults and lifts her glass. A bit of wine slops. She was entranced by the late-medieval work: the saints and Christs and gold skies that to Richard seemed two-dimensional, almost primitive. They had inched down the high, endless corridors, from room to stuffy room, from frame to frame, from saint to saint: Richard soon bored but glad he had given her a gift she valued. He had taken her to Paris to cheer her up; and for that week, she seemed years younger, keen to walk everywhere and see everything, keen for a student’s lunch of bread and wine on the islands, keen to prowl Père Lachaise and the Luxembourg. But back home, after an initial burst of work, she had been waylaid by her old fatigue, her old sad drift, and had applied her usual remedies: wine and the swearing off of wine, jogging and therapy and meditation. The spark lit by the Louvre had seemed well quenched, but now he hears for the first time what their trip meant to her: “I love how they ignore perspective, time – I mean, Jesus on the cross, and over his head, in the same painting, a window showing his birth in Bethlehem, or the Annunciation. They felt free to put in anything – make the mind jump around. I want to try something like that.”

  Beside her, Billy has leaned back and placed his hand on the back of Ann’s chair, with what seems to Richard a show of casual possessiveness. Still smitten, Richard observes. As for Ann, she seems oblivious to everyone but Billy; she laughs excessively at his stories and keeps pouring him more wine.

  “So what’s your next move?” Richard asks dryly, in a lull. “You thinking of guiding again –?”

  “Thought I’d try at the Blue Osprey,” Billy says, removing his arm from Ann’s chair. Suddenly he seems tired, wary.

  “Well, it’s a different world there now,” Richard says. “Golf course, tennis courts, high-end customers. Very impressive, actually. Gerald’s work – Jack died about five years ago. Not sure if they’re still in the hunting and fishing line –”

  “I t
hink they are,” Ann says. She turns to Billy. “I’m not sure you’d want to work there. The place looks like Disneyland.”

  “The lodge was on its way down,” Richard persists. “Gerald’s really turned it around. He’s got a lot of out-side money behind him, big development firm from Toronto.”

  “Mafia,” Ann murmurs darkly.

  “Well, Italian,” Richard says, with a grain-of-salt glance to Billy. “They’ve laid out a beautiful course.”

  “He golfs now,” Ann announces.

  “She refuses to believe we’re actually members of the middle class. So what’s the matter with golf?” Richard says. He is smiling, though in fact he is irritated by her jab. It is an old thing of hers, behind which he recognizes a heartfelt criticism: that he is so bourgeois, while she is – artistic, he supposes.

  Reaching for the wine bottle, Ann does not answer. Billy has fixed unhappily on his plate while Rowan, lost in his own world, tortures a bean with his fork. Richard surveys the failing party with grim satisfaction: he had not expected better. “Hey, Row,” he says to his son. “Tell Billy about our fishing trip.”

  “We didn’t catch anything.”

  “We drove over to Pointer’s,” Richard tells Billy. “That shoal between the islands – it’s all dry land now. But I thought some of the deeper water looked good.”

  “Huh,” Billy says.

  “It’s the drought –”

  “It’s that golf course,” Ann says, coming out of her reverie. “They’ve got these monster sprinklers,” she explains to Billy. “They’re pumping out millions of gallons.”

  “Not millions, not every day,” Richard says. “In normal circumstances –”

  “Well, these aren’t normal circumstances, are they?”

  Richard shrugs as if indifferent to the point while she goes on about the drought, mainly to Billy, in a tone that makes him feel uncomfortable: as if she were holding him responsible for the state of the lake. Billy, too, seems uneasy. He barely murmurs in response, and soon afterwards announces he’ll be shoving off.