An Honest Woman

by JoAnn McCaig

  “Oh.” Clear throat. “Well, how are you today?”

  “Great thanks, just wanted to check in about coming over to run those tests.”

  “Right, yes. Well, today would probably be good. We’re just packing up to head back to the city now, should be gone in an hour. So the house will be empty.”

  “Oh. Well. Too bad.” Am I imagining that? That’s regret, that’s disappointment or I don’t know, something —

  “Yes,” I say, “end of a summer. It’s a sad day all right. I’m just heading out for one last swim.”

  “Last swim of the season,” he sighs.

  “Well, yes. But, there’s always next summer.”

  “Is there?” asks Mister Sunshine. “As you get older, you begin to realize how the number of summers you might have left is dwindling down.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “My parents just live up the road a ways from your place,” he says. “I’ve been working around this area for about ten years now. I’ve been around for a while, I mean.”

  “That’s good. You’re lucky.”

  “So.”

  “So.” What now? What am I supposed to say? “So. Hope it all goes well.”

  “I’m sure it will.” He appears to be trying to make conversation. To convey something, but all that really comes through perfectly clearly for me is my own panic, so I take a deep breath.

  “Okay then. Let’s see. You know where the key is, right? Hope it goes well today, Ray. Take it easy. Bye.”

  I set the phone on the cradle, stride down the hall and into the bathroom. Shut the door, sit on the can, head in hands. Moaning, shaking my head: dear god, dear god, this a real guy goddammit, what the fuck, oh man —

  Or maybe I get an email, supposedly from this agent in the U.K. Says he’s interested in purchasing rights to my book. Because screw pseudonyms, I’m brave enough to publish Final Draft under my own name.

  Anyway, this literary agent, he’s going to be in town next week, wants me to meet him at the Westin, in the lobby lounge, Thursday at three. Coincidentally my one day off from teaching. I dress in a floral skirt, white sweater, black stockings and flats. A trench. It’s October.

  I enter the near-empty bar and sit on a banquette, facing outwards, to watch for a man who described himself as “a dapper little English gent, you’ll spot me.” I have ordered, received my drink and am trying to look calm and self-assured when the only other customer in the place, a tall, dark-haired man slouched over his newspaper at the bar suddenly straightens, slides himself off the stool and approaches my table.

  “Waiting for someone?” Voice more trebly than the one I’ve heard reading, being interviewed on the radio. And eyes much kinder than any I’ve ever dreamed. I sit speechless as he, yes, the Englishman, pulls up a chair and sits regarding me with friendly curiosity, like a toddler encountering an upended Junebug.

  “You,” I splutter. “Oh god. You set me up, didn’t you? The whole agent thing was — ”

  A nod. He reaches into his jacket and I flinch. He notices, and laughs. He leans forward, smiles slyly. “Don’t be afraid. I promise I won’t hurt you. I was hoping you’d inscribe this for me,” and tosses his copy of Final Draft on the table.

  I focus on trying to locate my lungs; somewhere below the neck, I seem to recall. “I’m . . . oh man, I — Hey,” I say, made suddenly articulate by the realization that he’s just quoted a line from my book, “write your own goddamn dialogue!”

  And so. Startled laughter. A beginning. And after an hour or so of conversation, I say, “There’s a Newfie expression for how I feel right now: ‘man, he didn’t know whedder ta shit ’er go blind!’”

  The man smiles. “I’ve heard that too. In England. Or rather in certain parts of England.”

  I ask him, “Would you like to go for a walk? There’s Prince’s Island, right nearby. Or we could go to my place, I could show you my own little piece of urban prairie. We could walk my dog.”

  “Prairie.”

  “It’s what about a third of North America is made of. Gawd, you bloody Brits. You know, I read a Salon.com interview of yours where you told this ridiculous story about football players freezing to death in Yellow Night — ”

  “What’s so ridic — ”

  “For one thing, it’s Yellowknife, not Yellow Night. And for another, it’s a preposterous story. Now there was a group of fishermen, or sealers maybe, who froze to death on an ice floe in Newfoundland nearly a hundred years ago. Alastair MacLeod wrote about it in No Great Mischief.”

  “MacLeod?”

  “He won the Dublin IMPAC for Christ’s sake.”

  “Yes. Rings a bell, now. You know, I think I should very much like to see this prairie of yours. But I must be back here to catch my limo at six.”

  “Check out now. You can have a cup of tea at my place, and then I’ll drive you to the airport.”

  At my place, the first thing I do is change into jeans and sneakers, while he pokes through the house. I stack a few dishes, check email and voicemail, brush my teeth — you never know — while he makes friends with the dog. I find him in my office, examining the bookshelves. “The Olympia Reader,” he says. “The Girodias’ brothers classics of erotica?”

  “Yes?”

  “Next to Ways of Seeing?”

  “Makes sense to me.”

  He tags along behind me on the narrow path at the off-leash park; the swish of yellowed grass, the spacious prairie sky seem to unsettle him somehow. I’m glad that it’s mid afternoon, the neighbours aren’t out on the hill with their dogs yet, no need to chat or say hello or worse, do introductions. And the kids won’t be home from karate and hockey practice until after we’ve left for the airport, thank god.

  Midway along the slanting path up the hill, he just stops. Dead still. “This is so strange. For years, now, I have had this . . . vision, waking dream, what have you. Of a girl or woman walking before me on a footpath. Sauntering. In a landscape that is strange but also terribly familiar. And this seems to be it — ”

  I wanted to see the moon rise over the mountain on the last day of August but instead I watch it rise over the city skyline as I walk the dog on the hill. The yellowing grass, Eric yelling up ahead, happy to be reunited with his friends. At least Eric still needs me. I can’t keep forgetting the kids! Bummed me out, though, to wake up this morning to the sound of sirens rather than the cry of a loon. And tonight I can’t concentrate with Calgary’s muffled steady roar, instead of the hooting of owls and the whisper of wind in the trees.

  I left Ray a note on the kitchen table at the cabin. And he hasn’t contacted me. But I had hot times with the Ray of my dreams last night. His function, perhaps, is to give me hope. And to wean me from Leland. But just now, I glimpse my wrinkled face reflected in the car windows outside the Esso where I suck down a desperate smoke, and the dream dies, all the dreams.

  I’ve developed a bizarre infatuation with REM, I tell my kids.

  Matt says he’s horrified at such lowbrow tastes.

  Eric says, “What’s REM?”

  A few days ago I dreamed of a fan letter from Leland’s real life counterpart, saying that the book I’d written about Leland and Jay had tumbled into his hands. And yes, he passed it along to his agent, to consider a British edition. When I was in grad school, the whole department was madly in love with Ways of Seeing. In which, among other things, John Berger asserts that the image of a man speaks about what he can do to you or for you, whereas the image of a woman speaks of what can be done to her or for her.

  The fan letter was just a dream. I’m expecting a call or email from Ray, Mister Sunshine. Perhaps my note was too carefully neutral. No, that was just a dream too.

  The Leland and Jay scene of his reaction to the suicide is too melodramatic — but it definitely needs to be his daughter, not his wife. And Leland’s so flat, a quintessential uppercrust Brit. He needs a quirk; could he be a mimic? Perfect renditions of old falsetto R&B? Country? Tammy Wynette?


  Yes, a pitch-perfect rendition of her signature song “D-I-V-O-R-C-E”!

  How this bright world that spins in my head bumps up against dailiness. How hungrily I scanned the faculty lounge tonight at that interminable first department meeting. Looking for something, anything, that glimmers with life. But no. The same egos, the same turf wars, the same fortresses of ideology. My colleagues. Everyone in the room looked so old and ugly and tired. And the Department Head giving me the gears about my syllabus for a senior seminar on Gender and Identity in Contemporary Canadian Lit. Why shouldn’t I begin with Atwood’s early stories? Why shouldn’t I end with The Diviners? What’s he afraid of, anyway? A revolution?

  But it’s fun to see this department, this campus, as Leland might see it. Because of course he has to come west. After Jay’s seen his glittering world, he must try to enter hers. But then he arrives unexpectedly and that’s when it disintegrates because by then she’s met Gray. Yes, that’s good. Because Gray is of this place. He’s from here, a sculptor. With rough hands.

  After the department meeting that refused to end, I phoned Darce. She was just on her way out to hang with her friends. I confessed to some “ups and downs” out at the lake with Matt. Told her about the bottle pipe, the smell. “I just want to be reassured that it’s only cannabis.”

  Darce chuckled. “I think that’s so cute, how you say ‘cannabis.’ Don’t worry about Matt, Mom.”

  “Well, I can’t help but worry. To be honest, he’s been a bit of a handful lately.”

  “Well, I was a bit of a handful at times.”

  “You were more than a handful, you were awful. But you turned out okay, I guess — ”

  “You guess, huh?”

  And we laughed. The sudden liquid trill of it shook me. When was the last time I laughed? Really laughed?

  My dream world has roared back to life. It’s Saturday and I am completely out of control. Since I left the Ray of my dreams and returned to Leland, I have replayed the bondage scene in Kensington Suites over and over. Three times Thursday, and last night, god help me, I lay on the couch unable to focus on the World Cup semifinal game, waiting for Matt to leave for hockey tryouts so I could, um, take care of business. Then fine, okay, done, and I sleep, then wake too early but eager for my familiar Saturday pleasures of peace and bed and coffee and crossword. But it pushes in, that scene, the ache (my parts squeeze and swell and ache, dear god) and halfway through the morning crossword I have to stop and run through it one more time and my little boy lies asleep (dear god, I hope he’s fast asleep!) in the next room and I’m in the throes and beginning to wonder where is this leading me? where is it going to end? and I have no choice but to get through it but I’m not sure where all this lust is taking me — things to learn, sure, about wanting and dreams and my body and surrender surrender surrender but, dammit —

  Leland shows up after a silence of several months in her, Jay’s, classroom. He has been mute since the Kensington Suites encounter. But then he shows up, comes home with her, falls instantly asleep in her bed. And I’ve liked writing him there, trying on Jay’s world through his eyes. He’s so alien, as if from another planet. But I dread their conversations, I wish they didn’t talk at all.

  “Sauntering” is the word he uses on the path, the Englishman who inspired my fictional hero, my Leland. We stand amid the dry grass on the hillside at the dog park. “In a landscape that is strange but terribly familiar,” he repeats. He looks at me and I look at him. It doesn’t seem necessary to say more than that. Because the place where our dreams connect is beyond words.

  At the airport, we face each other to say goodbye. I’m beyond nerves now, giddy. I like this man so much, and when the moment comes, without even really thinking about it, I lean close, lay a hand on his cheek while stretching on tiptoe to lightly kiss the other. “You really are wonderful, you know. Way better than the man I dreamed up. I’m so glad. That this happened. That we met. That you arranged for us to meet. Thank you.”

  He places his hands gently on my shoulders, says, “I fell madly in love with Jay. The loveliest woman I’ve never met.”

  I hear the words, but before they can fully register, he says, “Well then,” and is gone.

  Heart all aflutter when I open the cabin door on a late September Friday afternoon, but there’s his note, on the table, Thanks Janet! along with his office and cell number and and and call me anytime, Ray. It’s what I’d hoped for, exactly. It’s why I arranged this extra weekend, outside our allotted cottage-time. The pretext is retrieving Dad Moe’s pen, which I had found back in August but forgot to pack, and also Eric’s warrior staff, which he forgot altogether. I’ve sent the boys to their dad’s, told them I need time to write. I’ve told no one what I want from Mister Sunshine.

  It takes me a while to force myself to call his cell number; an hour and a half of telling myself, “You can do this, you can do this.” Imagining every possible scenario, “What? Are you kidding? You’re too old and ugly” or “Sorry, can’t make it, I’m stuck inside my blonde bimbo of a girlfriend right now, but thanks for calling.”

  At first, I get his answering machine — very terse: “Leave a message.” So I say, “Hi Ray, this is Janet Mair. I’m just here for a couple of days and was wondering whether the water system is all set up now. Could you give me a call, please? Hope to hear from you soon.” I figure once I get him on the phone, then maybe, maybe, maybe.

  Terribly proud of myself for having made the call, I walk the dog, talk to a deer. Now the time seems to drag though; it’s been two and a half hours, and nothing. I don’t think I can work tonight; maybe I’ll just make dinner and watch one of the movies I brought. Jane Campion’s Portrait of a Lady, I think.

  Saturday morning, and I just spoke to him, just now. Ray. I was very calm. He sounded warm. Like sunshine. He will be here sometime today. Could be a few hours from now or in the evening. That’s fine because I am calm now, resigned. And I have a legitimate reason for asking him to come by. Because last night the water system actually broke.

  Well. Any time now. I’m powdered and dressed and look about as good as I can. Scenarios suggest themselves but they do not overtake me. The rain pours down from the sky.

  I try to puzzle this out, read the signs. What am I doing here? First, numbers were in fact exchanged. I left my friendly note on the kitchen table, just before Eric and I hit the road a month ago. Could have been read as strictly business, or perhaps more: Hi Ray. Please leave your business card so that I can get in touch. I hope the weather clears enough that you can go for a swim! Cheers, J. I left my home phone and email. But. He didn’t use them.

  Well, at least I didn’t scribble fuck me baby I am so hot for you I could scream. It’s a good thing I was careful, because, horries, Dad Moe has been here for a golf week, and after that he loaned the place to friends of friends, all of whom would have seen the note. But maybe not because of course Ray took my note the day he finished the job, and replaced it with his. So he took my note with him. With my number and email. But then he didn’t use them. In the month he’s had them.

  In the car on the way here, yesterday, I made plans. I’d arrive, I’d call, he’d show up. We’d be naked within an hour. At first I thought I’d prefer to have him arrive at my door Saturday, but then again if it was late Friday, we’d have more time to do all those unspeakable things together we were doing in my head as I drove through the mountains.

  So I left him that first voicemail at 3:30 Friday, less than two hours after arrival. Hope faded as the evening wore on and by 9 I had given up. At 10:30 I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth, mouth full of foam, had just flushed the toilet — and there was a loud clunk and the water just stopped. I could hear a beeping noise. Padded out to the basement in my nightie, found the water unit, found the reset button to stop the bloody alarm, but no luck getting the water running again. Had to laugh. How worried I’d been about having no excuse to call Mister Sunshine. And now I really had one.

 
; But what if all that happened was strictly business? In my imagined seduction, he arrives and I am standing at the door. We smile at each other. I say, “Hug or handshake?”

  “Hug,” he says. But it is brief and awkward. My nipples get hard. He notices and says, “Let’s try that again.” This hug is longer and the results are, once again, obvious. And then I want to tell him everything, to tell him that no human on earth could be this lonely and not die of it, this empty hopeless place where I’ve lived so long that any other life seems inconceivable. And how, this summer, something changed. Desire came back. Fiercely. I knew it back in June when I gave a hug to the husband of a good friend, an innocent brotherly sort of hug, and god, I was horrified with myself, but my breasts tingled for a long time afterwards. I was losing my mind. “But then I met you and thought wow, I am so far out of step that I don’t know what’s happening, I mean, I look at you, and you look at me and I feel this energy and I sort of glance over my shoulder and think ‘That’s nice, wonder what he’s looking at?’ And then when I finally decide that it might actually be me, I think ‘Oh he’s probably a Jehovah’s Witness and he just wants me to accept Christ as my personal savior.’ Or, this is just a kind of hippie tree-hugger generalized love for all our fellow creatures, and I’m just catching a little piece of it as it goes by.”

  A lap dance on the couch, rolling and tumbling in the bedroom, me on my knees? Oh my. He mentioned a son who is twenty. So he couldn’t be younger than forty. He looks early thirties though. Now as the afternoon wears on I write out these dreamy thoughts, they’ll do for Jay in the novel, while awaiting the promised arrival of the man who inspires them; I’m self-conscious, repressed. Can’t help looking over my shoulder.

  My main character Jay will have to deal with another man, too. With Gray. Who maybe looks a bit like Mister S? Yes, and he discovers her with Leland but then . . . Yes, she can take Leland to the lake so that he can come to truly know her. Then the dinner party. Or the dinner first? Yes, they encounter his place in the world first. Then hers. Whatever order I want. Whatever result I want.