The Last Woman Page 7

  Through July and into August, when the air filled with the clacking of grasshoppers’ wings, they met under the pine. It seemed to him that everything spoke of their state – the islands baking in heat; the cool dark water where they swam without suits; the great, smooth waves of rock, bearing away their mobs of pine. He had often felt that the trees were aware of him – that they could hear him and were attuned, even, to his thoughts – and that he in turn could tell, sometimes, what they were saying – but with her this intensified. The pine that shaded them made a third.

  And yet: there was something in her he could not reach, and so his joy was never complete. At times she seemed alone in her pleasure, watching him with a bored, pleased indolence as if she were in some way larger or older than he. Her body was a mystery to him – the way it kept renewing itself, perpetually and without effort, to his wonder. He explored it as closely as she would allow: the cleft in her collarbone, filled with her scent; the gill-like flesh between her parted legs. She had a power and seemed conscious of its sway, for there was something almost triumphant about the way she sat gazing over the channel. What was she thinking? When he asked, she told him, “Happy people don’t think.” He did not believe her.

  Sometimes, when she went off out of sight, padding away for a pee or to explore the island with her sketchbook, he experienced stabs of panic: old, familiar stabs that he had not felt in years, for he had schooled himself to hardness. But it seemed – he half-knew this was crazy – that when she disappeared from his sight, her white sunhat sinking below a ridge, that she had left for good.

  Of course, she always came back. And he pretended that nothing was wrong. Yet a day came when he could not contain himself and on the slimmest of pretexts started a fight. He knew he was wrecking everything – that the result of his ranting would be to make her disappear for real. But he expected this anyway; better he reject her first.

  She fought back, tearfully, while he was cold-hearted, exulting. She paddled off, the red canoe disappearing (as it seemed) into a granite hill. At first he gloated. Then he found himself alone.

  He started running – along a ledge, through junipers, onto a cliff. He saw her an instant before he jumped – the interior of the canoe far below him, and she kneeling under the white blob of her hat. But already, he was airborne, aware (too late!) of the ledge thrusting into the dark blue water below. He missed it by inches, plunging into layers of deepening cold. He was nothing now. He was cold water and darkness and struggling limbs: the chain of bubbles that pulled him up toward the light. He popped up by her gunnel. “I’m wrong,” he told her. He meant he was all wrong; he meant the mistake of himself.

  They went back to Mad Jack’s. And kept going back for the rest of the summer. But their meetings had changed. Aware of their power to hurt, they grew tender. At first this was exhilarating, but gradually the restraint wore at them. They became self-conscious. Where before they had glided by instinct, now they fumbled among misunderstandings. He was not touching her the way she liked! He sulked. She broke a favourite glass. Silence deepened beside silence. He stole glances at her: the way her lower jaw stuck out a little – why had he never noticed that before? It seemed not so much a flaw as yet more evidence of her secret life. For no matter what she told him, no matter how intimate they were, he felt the presence of things withheld. Around them, the summer was changing. Colour had come into the poplars, and in the skies ducks and geese beat back and forth, as if trying to decide whether to come or go.

  Occasionally, she spoke of going away to art college, in a casual tone that seemed to take his understanding for granted. He guessed she was preparing him for her departure. Brooding on this, he withdrew; she cajoled him to come back to her. They finished a bottle of wine and danced drunkenly on the rock. But their jollity had shallow roots now; they ended by quarrelling. Holding her, he sensed the truth: she was already leaving.

  One afternoon kneeling to her pack, she looked off over the island and spoke to the rolling waves of granite: “So you know. I’m going to England next month.”

  He thought of that pink island on the map of the world. His grade three teacher had told him, Now point to England, Billy. Rapping it with the pointer, he’d made a cloud of chalk dust rise behind the map – good for a laugh. The Queen lived in England. The Beatles came from England. It had never been a real place to him; she might have announced she was going to the moon.

  He looked off to the maze of islands with their tortured pines. The future contained these places where things you saw every day ceased to exist. It astonished him that anyone could speak of the future casually.

  She had gone on rummaging in her pack. Pulling out her sketchbook, she flipped it open and, turning toward him, began to sketch. But in a moment, she tossed the book aside.

  “Don’t you care!” she snapped.

  He looked at her: one astonishing statement after another.

  “What?” he said.

  “That I’m going away. That we won’t come here any more.”

  “I care.”

  “I never know what you’re thinking.”

  He frowned: was she supposed to?

  They went for a walk over the high granite and down into the hollows filled with bushes, following a faint trail. She took the initiative, marching briskly out ahead of him, while he followed miserably behind her, hitting at the bushes with a stick.

  She stopped outside the clutch of poplars where Mad Jack had had his cabin. Mad Jack had been a soldier in the war, so people said. For a few years afterwards he had lived here, though all that had survived were a few rotting logs and some relics they had found: a washbasin with the bottom eaten out, an axe-head frowsy with rust.

  “Do you love me?” she said.

  He had never told her he did. The word meant nothing. The girls on Pine Island: I love Ronnie Blake. You love Ernie. Tomorrow they would love someone else. His mother had loved a different man every month.

  What he felt for Ann Scott had no name. For an answer he might point to the blazing islands, the skies strewn with pebbled clouds – the great word of the world that was forever speaking itself. But even that would not be enough.

  When he saw she was weeping, he held her. She lifted her wet face: “Because I love you, you know.”

  And he did tell her he loved her. The words rasped from his constricted throat. He was weeping himself now. Like a boy.

  They entered their last phase on Mad Jack’s. She was cheerful. She brought lunches. He said little. She was frenzied in love-making, while he grew cooler. Stones still had weight, and fell when you dropped them. The sun still crossed the sky. The laws of life still held. They could choose what to do. One day he asked her why she had to go. “Why not stay here?”

  She looked at him as if he had suggested flying.

  “On this island?” She spoke almost with scorn. “I’ve been accepted. This is my chance to work with Armand Perry.” She had talked of him before: a well-known artist. A “genius.”

  “I could come with you,” he said. Days and weeks of thinking were behind this simple statement. Yet it took all his courage to offer it. “I could get a job and save up enough by Christmas. I could come over.”

  “Oh, Billy,” she said. He could not tell if she meant yes or no.

  The sun no longer settled over Credit Island, but over Dooney’s Point, farther south. The rock of Mad Jack’s was no longer too hot to walk on, but warm, like someone’s flesh. What he knew of loss was what his mother had taught him with her death. It was absolute. But her death had come without warning, and what he faced now was proceeding by slow, relentless steps. She must have felt it too, this creeping advance. This slow torture. At times, making love, it seemed to him they were intent on hurting each other, each blaming the other for not finding a solution, each trying to wring an alternative from the clash of mouths and limbs, from the small pale cries of love: each trying to burrow into safety. At times, they seemed to have found it. Momentarily at peace (but as much exha
usted), they lay motionless under the pine.

  One day, she did not show up. He waited from early afternoon until after dark. He slept, then woke to the sun in a new place, throwing the streaked light of morning across the rock. For all he had thought about this moment, and tried in his way to prepare for it, he found himself unable to believe it was actually happening. He waited for another day until, late in the afternoon, he got in his own boat and drove to Inverness. No one was home. The Scotts’ launch was gone. Driving to Carton Harbour, he found it tied at the public dock, its rain cover snugly fastened.

  Using a soft pencil, Ann has blocked out her painting on the canvas. A naked woman, rather larger than life-sized, stands with her knees a little bent, her feet widely planted. Her face, so far, is vague – a statue’s corroded by the elements. Already, there is something massy about the woman Ann likes, a suggestion of endurance in her thick thighs and wide hips, a sense of explosive strength as if she were leaning braced against a load.

  In an open notebook propped on her painting table, Ann has made working sketches of the figure in different poses. In one of the drawings, the woman is surrounded by many small figures. Several of these diminutive people have propped a ladder against her leg; others are tugging on cables attached to her wrists. In other drawings, more miniature elements appear. A cannon. A flag. A church steeple. A factory modelled on the paper mill in Black Falls.

  She’s lost the thread that was leading her forward – the sense of what to do next. She turns to the window. Down through the screen, the channel sparkles along a bank of pink rock. The heat and dazzling light have a hypnotic effect, and for some time she simply drifts. You had no right to touch me like that! To speak to me like that! He had broken a trust, she feels – the unspoken understanding that they were close, that they had a relationship in which a look, a tone of voice, could suggest a bond, an intimacy. But there were limits. You must have understood that!

  Outside, the shadow of a branch trembles on the rock.

  She throws down her notebook.

  Wading into the water, she pauses, fingers brushing the placid surface. On the next island, not sixty feet away, a thin, dark shadow slips from the rock – as if oil had poured from a crack. For a moment, she does not understand what she is seeing. A black, glistening something is pouring endlessly into the water.

  “Oh,” she breathes.

  As a girl, she was terrified of watersnakes. Once, canoeing with her father, they had found one sliding through the reeds. Water snakes didn’t bite unless cornered, he told her, speaking in a low voice from the stern. But what safety he gave in one moment, he took away in the next when he told her they had dirty mouths and jaws that only worked one way. If one bit you, it would hang on until it was cut off, and by then your wound was probably infected. Your wound, as if she carried it already.

  It is swimming below the rocks – nearly invisible now, a ripple among ripples. Then it lifts its head: a low, flat arrowish thing, weaving its way toward the marsh. “You beauty,” she says, while her fingers touch ice along her breastbone.

  She swims in the opposite direction, out through the narrows into the main channel. By the buoy she stops and treads water, gazing back down the channel to where it bends, a little ominously, out of sight. A short distance off, their deck overhangs the water: she could climb out there. But she makes herself go back the same way, around the point and into the side-channel. Beside the boathouse, her robe lies crumpled on the rock. Ahead, the marsh glints among its reeds. Breast-stroking now, she swims toward it.

  Treading water, she surveys the oil-blue passages. She knows the snake is here. That sloping boulder, that ripple along a half-sunk log – all him, or signs of him – messengers from his underwater kingdom. Come on. Let’s see you then. But except for the flutter of a small bird, changing its perch, there is no movement.

  The wet dabbing and stroking of her brush; the short, dry, fibrous note of the bristles, pecking at her canvas or leaving a silent path of cadmium orange while the sun goes from window to window, laying translucent carpets on the hardwood. Mixing paint in aluminum pie plates, sipping or forgetting to sip at her cooling coffee, she is once again magnetized by her canvas. Sometimes she looks away, not really seeing the sunlit channel hazing through the screen – then back again to her painting, hoping to surprise it. To have it surprise her – to announce to her where and how it must evolve next. And who knows where they come from: these tiny spurts of growth. Not solely from her effort, but from some gap between possibility and discovery. The smell of oils. The pecking of her brush. As the sun tracks over the roof of the boathouse and the room grows hotter, her efforts meet a rising resistance. The painting tells her less. She might go off to the bathroom, or to the kitchen to wolf something down (she scarcely knows what). Then almost without noticing, she is back. As her brush moves the thick, glistening oils around the canvas, her headache no longer matters, her mental fog is swept away, and again she finds a way forward, until, nearly sick with her efforts, she reaches the end of her painting day. Cleaning her brushes, she keeps glancing at what she has done. Then, having left the boathouse, she sits stunned on the deck with a glass of wine.

  One evening the phone rings. The sound startles her – a violation of her solitude. She fears it might be Billy, but picks up. Richard. He is robustly cordial.

  “Rowan’s doing really well at hockey camp.”

  “Good, good!” she manages. It takes an effort to re-enter her other life.

  “So how’s the work going?”

  She tells him she’s had a breakthrough. Her own voice sounds odd to her, a desert-island voice, speaking after years of silence. Really, she does not want to talk about her painting, and after a few words she trails off. A silence falls. To her, it seems filled with pressure, as if he were demanding more. It is something she is familiar with: it’s there in the shrewdness of his small eyes, with their prodding insistence, as if he were saying, That’s all? Surely you must have more for me than that?

  “Hey, I miss you,” he tells her.

  “Miss you too,” she says, though in truth she has hardly thought of him.

  He phones the next night as well. He has asked Reg Benoit and his wife to Inverness for the weekend after next, he tells her.

  “That’s when the Gotliebs are coming, Richard.”

  “We’ll have to put them off.”

  “But they can’t come any other –”

  “Annie, you know how important this is to me. The nomination is toast without Reg’s support. I think he’s leaning my way. The signs are good. He was very enthusiastic about coming to Inverness. He’s a tennis buff – excited to know we have a court. That’s their only free weekend this summer.”

  “So you’ve definitely decided to run? I thought we were going to talk about it.” She feels herself bristling as she imagines the arrogant Reg Benoit and his wife. At least he could have asked me.

  “We’ll talk. But please, let’s reschedule the Gotliebs.”

  “Why couldn’t the six of us have dinner?”

  “There’s history between Larry and Reg. It wouldn’t work, trust me. Just do this one thing, will you?”

  When Ann doesn’t respond, he puts Rowan on the line. The boy’s clear voice pierces her.

  “Dad says you’re having a good time at the camp.”

  “Yup.”

  “So, you’ve scored some goals?”

  “Mom, you don’t go to hockey camp to score goals. It’s like – drills.”

  “Oh, sorry. Rowan – Rowan?” She can hear the television going: he’s distracted.

  “Oh wow! There’s a crocodile attacking a gazelle. They’re crossing a river and the crocodiles are waiting for them, mostly they get through but one’s – he’s like attached to his neck. Oh God, he’s got him by the neck. He’s only a little one!”

  She asks him to put his father back on.

  “Are you sure this program’s all right? He sounds awfully speedy.”

  “He�
�s fine, Ann. It’s really quite incredible footage.”

  She is reminded of the snake but does not mention it: her snake can’t compete with their current excitement; and anyway, the snake is hers.

  One evening she takes out her canoe. It is over sixty years old, her father’s as a boy, bought for him by his father from the factory in Peterborough. Inside the hull, its varnished ribs are a deep gold, its seats are made of woven gut. Kneeling on a life jacket, she paddles north, intending to circle Inverness.

  With each stroke, her paddle sends a tiny whirlpool spinning away across the surface; when it emerges, it casts a swishing patter of drops. She passes the deck and soon afterwards the guest cabin; then the tennis court with its sagging net. Near Cigarette Point a gap between islands reveals the open lake. Nigushi is calm, under a low sun, the air so still she is lured into stillness herself. For a while she drifts, her paddle laid across the gunnels. Thirty years ago, she had paddled with her father on just such an evening. The same rocks. The same pines. The same light, suffusing Nigushi’s glass. In another moment, she will hear his voice.

  Standing over his hospital bed, she had silently urged him to die. Shrunken. Rasping under his oxygen mask. She could not bear it, not after what he had been. Two nurses came in to “help him get comfortable.” One heaved him up while the other rearranged his pillows. Upright, he opened his eyes and stared – his blue eyes suddenly vivid through the room as if he had suddenly seen or understood something of absolute importance: some idea that had eluded him his whole life. At the same time a kind of deep, unearthly belch erupted from his mouth (the mask had slipped). The nurses laid him back down. “You’ll feel better now,” one of them said, repositioning the mask. They left. Under half-fallen lids, her father’s eyes seemed frozen. Ann hurried after the nurses, but even before they came back with the stethoscope, she knew what she had seen.