The Last Woman Page 6

  Murmuring a vague response, Billy stands, relieved to be finished. His face is hot, and as he heads for the door, he doesn’t realize, at first, that Gerald is still speaking to him: “I’d really like to show you the place.” As they go down the stairs into the lobby, Gerald points out the teak front doors (“dropped five thousand bucks on them”). Outside, he insists Billy see the course. Boarding a golf cart, they hum down an asphalt path toward the green glow of the fairways. “This is a Phil Waits course,” Gerald tells him as they draw up on a knoll. Before them, as far as they can see, sprinklers fling long, shuddering plumes over the grass. Billy does not know who Phil Waits is, but he catches the pride in Gerald’s voice as he explains how he and Phil worked on the design together. He keeps glancing at Billy, eager for his approval, it seems, and though Billy responds with an occasional nod or grunt, there’s such an air of unreality about it all, such a feeling of bleakness, that he has trouble staying focused. And the sun beats down on the emerald fairways; and the sprinklers go on shushing and jiggering; and the sweat is prickling inside his shirt.

  An hour later, arriving at the Harbour, he walks to Whitbread’s store. A new cement-block extension runs into a field, but the old country storefront persists, its tall show-windows plastered with the week’s specials. Taking a cart, he heads toward the produce section. When the trees are all gone, the people will be gone. For some time he stands without moving, as other shoppers push past: Fred Plante’s words opening a vast space, invisible to the eye, but felt – a chill fleeing over it like a breeze shivering the surface of a lake.

  A minute later, he sees Ann Scott at the pharmacy counter. She is talking to a clerk and at first doesn’t notice him approach.

  “Well!” she says, colouring.

  “Thought you’d gone back to the Falls.”

  “I’ve got a painting going – couldn’t leave it.” She goes on watching him, as if trying to make out exactly what or who he is; after her warmth at Inverness, he is taken aback.

  He waits while she makes her purchase, then they go outside, into the sun, and walk to Lola’s restaurant, where they take a table on the empty deck. She has put on sunglasses with outsized frames, which give her the look of some exotic insect. He asks about her painting.

  “Here’s Lola,” Ann says, and for a couple of minutes they deal with Lola.

  “How’s your painting?” he persists, after the woman goes off.

  “It’s so fragile at this point. I can’t really say much about it.” For a moment she is silent, then the huge dark eyes fix on him. “It was good to see you and Richard talking again.” She pauses, and when he doesn’t respond, she tries again: “I know things weren’t good between you when you left –” He shakes his head. He does not want to talk about Richard or the land claim. He does not want to revisit the past. He wants to reach out and remove her glasses.

  “You know, he’s never really told me what happened –”

  “I may have said a few things,” he allows, shrugging. “We were both pretty angry. Upset.” He feels cornered, resentful. For some time they sit in silence, drinking the coffee Lola brings in thick china cups.

  “You haven’t been happy, have you –”

  He shifts in irritation. Happiness: people are always going on about it, about their right to it and their search for it. As long as you’re happy. Makes him sick, really.

  “Why did you stay away for so long? Was it the claim, or –”

  “I don’t know, Ann. Why do we do anything? You go into a city, you get a job or you don’t get a job, but somehow, you live. The sun shines the same as here. It didn’t seem to matter where I was.”

  “Sounds like depression,” she says. Another of those words, the opposite of happiness, a place with neatly defined borders, to be escaped at all costs. “I’ve come to know something about that.”

  “Didn’t realize you’d missed me that much,” he says.

  “Things go flat,” she says, ignoring his joke. “Nothing means anything. There were times when the only reasonable thing – well.”

  He looks up, alerted.

  “But then it goes,” she says with a faint smile, sweeping past the shadows she has evoked. “It’s gone now. I don’t ask why – I just – go back to painting.”

  They fall silent again. Out in the Harbour, boats sit motionless in the sun-blackened noon. Stirring her cup, Ann starts to talk again about Richard. She’s worried about him, she says. He’s got thick with the upper crust in Black Falls, he’s involved in local politics. In fact, he’s thinking about running for the legislature. But he has no real friends in that world, she says. “Nothing like the two of you. He’s alone, really. All he does is work.”

  He watches her intently as she talks: the way she touches one finger, thoughtfully, to the handle of her cup; the way she brushes a hair from her cheek. He doesn’t want just an hour with her. “Could you take off those glasses?”

  For a long moment she stares at him and then, with both hands, removes them. Her glance is pained, elusive.

  Taking her free hand, he draws it toward him.

  “Billy –” she warns, but he is beyond warnings now: he no longer cares. Her hand is cool, surprisingly cool, and remains open to the stroking of his fingers.

  He finds the little white scar. It is fainter than he recalls: a fading scimitar. “I see a lot of confusion here.”

  “Oh, tell me something I don’t know.”

  “There’s a man who’s very close to you. This man loves you –”

  “Billy,” she scolds softly, pulling her hand away.

  They walk along the quay without speaking. At her boat, he unties her lines for her.

  “When can I see you?”

  She is standing behind the wheel looking up at him: the sunglasses again. He feels he is oppressing her.

  “You make everything impossible, Billy.” Below her dark mask, her lips tighten in an expression he can’t read.

  Later that week, he drives to Mad Jack’s, an uninhabited island a mile from Inverness. The approach to the island is more difficult than it used to be – heaps of boulders denying him passage. Finally, he leaves his boat and wades ashore, clambering up a hill of pink rock. Standing with his back to the sun, he finds the little hollow shaded by the low, spreading branch of a pine. Twenty years of dropped needles have made the depression shallower, but all around, the island looks remarkably the same: the same long swells of rock, rolling away under a blazing sky; the same mobs of white pine, their dark, ragged branches streaming toward the southeast. Mad Jack’s burns still under the summer sun, as sharply defined and fresh as ever. Yet what happened here has left no trace: it is a kind of mockery.

  She knelt a little to one side, so that the red canoe heeled over slightly while her blade cut the water with slow, lingering strokes. He had never seen anyone paddle with such effortless economy: the hull progressing as if drawn by a magnet down the brimming channel. She was wearing a white sunhat with its brim rolled up, and sunglasses, so that at first he did not recognize her, though he was primed to, had been primed all morning, ever since he and Matt had pulled into the familiar island to work on the dock.

  And now: the knock of her paddle on the gunnel, the sudden pivoting of the hull. He was standing in the water where the dock met the boathouse, hammer in hand. He had turned nineteen that summer.

  She paused to talk with Matt before paddling along the side of the dock. A few feet away she stopped and began to unload. “I won’t be in your way a second,” she told him. Walking by with a pack and a woven basket, she disappeared into the boathouse and returned seconds later to haul up the dripping canoe and overturn it on the dock. Again she went past. Her voice was lower, but her face – she had removed her sunglasses – yes, it was Ann Scott. He had not seen her since the summer he’d first met her.

  Some time later, she returned. “Dad wondered if you and Matt would like to stay for supper. I’m Ann, by the way,” she said, looking down from the dock.

&n
bsp; “I know,” he said, shading his eyes.

  “You know?” A hint of playful remonstrance. “So, and what’s your name?”

  When he told her, he could sense something stop, behind her eyes.

  He helped her carry plates to the porch, setting them out on the table where purple and white asters poked from a glass. He drank her in: her broad hands cutting cheese; the faint, blonde hairs lacing her forearms; the strong-looking fullness of her compressed mouth. She was the same and yet not; and the change seemed to have come upon her in an instant, like in one of the old stories Matt told, when a woman was changed to a bear, or a girl into a star.

  Her parents had divorced, she told him, fussing at a napkin. She had gone to live with her mother in Montreal. “For a long time I hardly came here at all. I used to go to my mom’s cottage in Quebec. I guess that’s why I never saw you.” She paused to regard him. “So tell me what you’ve been doing for the last ten years.”

  He grinned at the impossibility of this, but what he saw was fire: a torrent of flame pouring through the canopy of a spruce forest with the roaring speed of a train, while he and the other firefighters turned to run for their lives. It had happened the previous summer, when he’d signed on with a crew near the Manitoba border. Two men had been killed in that incident and he had helped carry out their charred bodies. But he did not tell her about that, there seemed no way to begin, no place for it here, among the plates and folded napkins. “Nothing much. Helped Matt around the lake.” He shrugged.

  At the table, her father described a hunting trip he had taken in the Rockies. The smoke from his cigarette floated upward, forming the cliffs and peaks where the ram he had stalked for three days eluded him yet again. Matt smoked too – Charles lighting his cigarettes for him – and to Billy’s surprise talked more than he usually did in the presence of whites, telling them of a storm he had survived on his trapline twenty years before: all night long, trees had blown down around him. “I kept trying to boil tea, to keep from freezing. But that old wind, she kept blowing my fire out.”

  Listening with her head propped on one hand, Ann Scott was rapt. Billy felt it too: the excitement of life stretching before them. Because it was a wonderful thing to sit there with the old folk talking, and to be young: to feel the adventure of life laid out by their stories, and to know you would go there yourself one day – into the country of your life. He did not realize he was there already.

  When she said she wanted to draw him, he followed her out to the boathouse and up the stairs to the room she called her studio. The ping-pong table, now pushed to a wall, bore jars of pencils, brushes, cans of turpentine, stacks of paper, stones. There were drawings stuck to the wall with masking tape, painted canvases propped on the floor: a wind-tortured tree, a green face with one eye.

  He sat on a chair while she leaned over the board she balanced on one knee. She studied him, then looked down, her pencil moving. He had never posed before, found it uncomfortable, would have laughed had it not been her sitting a few feet away, studying him with a gravity that commanded him. Still, it was odd having her look at him as if he were a thing. Her eyes flicked to his hair. His nose. She was taking him apart.

  She was just starting to do oils, she told him, talking as she worked; but she still loved to draw, drawing was the basis of everything. She spoke of line and texture and reality versus imagination while he listened alertly, aware of his own ignorance. He had dropped out of school at fifteen.

  The next Saturday he sat for her again. He did not recognize himself in the drawing she made: the deep shadings of charcoal evoking a face more handsome, more resolute, than his own. “I think I’ve got you there,” she said, touching the area around the mouth. “And your hair. You’ve got beautiful hair.” She said it matter-of-factly, holding out the paper to study it.

  He’d had lots of girlfriends – it had been three years since he’d gone all the way with Barb Hammer on the leaky air mattress they’d dragged into the trees behind Guppy Bay. But with Ann Scott, his experience seemed to count for nothing. He remembered that from before – the sense of being a bit lost around her, a constraining nervousness.

  When she finished sketching, they went for a swim and afterwards lay on towels on the rock. He told her stories he didn’t know he knew, for he had never spoken them before. He told her how he had shot his first moose when he was thirteen; how he had followed its tracks in a skim of snow; and when he finally found it, how it had not run away but simply looked at him. He did not tell her how he had grieved afterwards; how, butchering the moose with Matt, he had secretly whispered to it that he was sorry; how, even when they had tied a little packet of bones in a tree, to placate the moose’s spirit, he could not stop seeing how the moose went down on its knees with a queer, grunting sound as if it were grieving too. He would never admit to this feeling because it was a sign of weakness; it was not how things were supposed to be between a hunter and the animal who had given itself to him. He had killed many moose since, and while he never had so strong a reaction of sadness again – he loved hunting – each time he felled an animal he would touch its warm flank, partly to thank it, but also with the slightest hint of regret.

  Nor did he tell her about getting drunk at the Rendezvous, or about how he and Gary Sweshikin had escaped the police one night in a stolen car, or about his mother and her troubles. In his happiness with Ann Scott, he lived partly in hiding, and close to shame.

  She told him, in turn, of a trip she’d taken the previous fall to Europe, of paintings and cities and ruins, of walking in a cave under Paris among stacks of bones, and of the time she and a friend had hiked up a mountain and then, coming down, had got lost in a mist and nearly walked headlong over a cliff. She spoke again of her parents’ divorce. “I was mad at my father – he wasn’t treating my mom very well – that’s why I went to live with her. But really, it was harder. We always rubbed each other the wrong way. I used to think sometimes, Well, I know why he went off. I’d leave too if I had to live with her. But then I couldn’t stand his girlfriend. I could never forgive her for taking Mom’s place. It wasn’t her fault, but –” She was sitting on the rock with her elbows on her knees, her head down, despondent. Reaching out, he touched her wet hair. Her eyes, filled with a level seriousness, met his. Slipping his arm across her back, he kissed her. Her mouth was barely responsive, and when he pulled back, she was still watching him, as if she were weighing the kiss against the person who had given it.

  One afternoon when her father was away, she took him up to her bedroom on the second floor. It was not much changed from how he remembered it: a large, rather stuffy room, with two screen windows opening toward the channel, under a sloping ceiling. There were the same bookcases crammed with books, the same bedspread with the giant yellow flowers, even the same blue bear, staring from its one remaining eye. “You go over there.” He stood where she indicated, on the opposite side of her bed, while she removed her clothes with a confident briskness, standing at last in her panties and bra. When she discovered him watching, she blushed and covered her chest with her arms. Stripping to his shorts, he slid under the sheet beside her.

  “I bet you’re pretty experienced at this,” she said.

  “A bit.”

  “Let’s do it then.”

  Afterwards, she wept between bouts of laughter. On the sheet was a bloodstain shaped like a pear. He stroked and held her. She pushed him on his back and examined him between his legs: something electric and fierce in her look now, something at once fascinated and repelled as she lifted his penis between her fingers and studied the wrinkled sac beneath.

  In the following weeks, when she met his boat, he could sense her impatience. Usually they went up to her bedroom, though if her father was home they would trek off to a cove at the back of the island where she had cached an old sleeping bag. Her appetite astonished him: it outran his own, or at least her capabilities did. Once, when a boat was idling through the marsh, she insisted they keep going – though the
y could hear voices, and though his back must have been intermittently visible above the rock.

  Another day, in her room, hearing her father arrive, they hardly had time to get into their clothes. When they came downstairs, Mr. Scott looked up from a map he had spread out on a table. “Just showing Billy some books,” Ann sang with forced casualness. Billy liked Charles Scott and had assumed he liked him, but at that moment, meeting the gaze of the figure hulking straight-armed over the map, he experienced a chill, and he recalled faces that had looked at him that way in the Falls, faces pent with unspoken disapproval and even, in some cases, rage, as though his very existence was an affront. And something connected to this look must have happened between Ann and her father, for the next time Billy saw her, she told him she couldn’t see him for a while. She was having company at Inverness – an old girlfriend – and she had to finish some drawings for her portfolio. She seemed flustered: smiling and reddening as they stood together on the boat-house path, casting down her eyes, as if embarrassed not just at what she’d told him but at something she could not say. He was certain it was over. For things ended; he knew it beyond doubt. There was nothing you could do about it. Turning, he walked away.

  She pleaded for him to stop, and when he kept going, she grabbed his arm. “Billy. Billy, listen.” He turned and saw the anxiety in her face. “Do you know Mad Jack’s Island –”

  The next afternoon he arrived first, in his boat, and some time later, waiting on a granite slope, saw her approach from the south in her red canoe. She had brought the old sleeping bag they had used on Inverness. They spread it in a little hollow beneath a pine whose low, floating bough dropped a flickering net of light over the plaid lining. From their shelter, they could survey the passages, the unoccupied islands – the whole archipelago stretching north and south. But where they were, they were snug, hidden.