Inland Passage

by Jane Rule

  Wilson had not met my plane, nor did he come to see me until I’d had several days of blank passivity. I did not think it odd at the time. When he did arrive, I greeted him less shyly than before and felt him pull back. His Dulce was still not a woman but a docile, intelligent child in need of his guidance.

  I could not ask him, as I very much wanted to, “What are we going to do with the rest of our lives?” He considered his to be publicly disposed, as a poet and teacher. He would give up printing, though he might one day use that practical knowledge if he founded a literary press.

  “Vancouver is changing,” Wilson admitted as we looked together at the view, the skyline altered by the first of so many high rises which would eventually make it look more like New York than itself.

  Then he asked, as if an uninvolved spectator, “What are you going to do now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You haven’t thought about it?”

  “I wondered if I’d get a dog…no, I haven’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Do I have to do anything?”

  “Well, eventually,” Wilson said. “You haven’t got enough capital to live on, not the way you’d like to live.”

  I was furious with him for speaking as if I might never marry him or anyone else; yet I knew he would think it beneath me to leave my life to such an eventuality. I must be held accountable for my future.

  All the girls I had known at school were either locked in combat with their parents or already married. Only two had jobs, chosen for their proximity to marriable men, which, of course, Wilson was not and would not be for some time until he could translate his years of learning into a modest academic salary. If I had to mark time until then, I might as well do it with him. I could get a teaching assistantship and take my M.A.

  At first, witness to all the fawning young women who surrounded Wilson, I was both daunted and repelled, but, as I watched him treat them like bodies on a crowded bus, I was reassured. He was a little aloof from me, too, at first, as if he did not want any display of our friendship, but gradually we formed the habit of having lunch together several times a week. For his birthday, I gave him season tickets next to my own for the theatre and the foreign film series. We became in public rather than in private a pair.

  Wilson had rooms in a widow’s house on the second floor with only a hotplate to cook on and a glimpse of view through a small, stained glass window in his bathroom which I saw only in the lines of one of his poems. He never invited me there, in deference to the widow’s sensibilities perhaps but in keeping with his appetite for privacy.

  He visited me comfortably enough, and he did the same things for me that he had done for Mother as well as advising me about my ownerly responsibilities. But we almost always went out after the simple meals I was learning to prepare under his direction and with his help.

  To my relief, Wilson did not want to go to poetry readings. He said he had nothing in common with the other students who claimed to be poets and brought out a magazine called Tish. “It’s not really necessary to spell it backwards,” Wilson said. To focus on the human breath and the heartbeat for a theory of aesthetics was simply an excuse to ignore the great traditions of poetry. For Wilson the roots of poetry were in knowledge, discipline, and concentration. He admired Auden, Eliot, the best of Dylan Thomas, a good reason for avoiding the drunken bellowings of that undersized bull on the stage. About giving readings of his own, Wilson was non-committal. “I’m not ready.”

  We went instead to the Art Gallery for every visiting show. Wilson was fascinated by the question of great subjects. I was more interested in paint and stone and metal; therefore I didn’t have the trouble with modern art which often daunted Wilson, fearful of being tricked by fads and imposters. How could he judge technique without subject matter, he wanted to know. “Think of it as more like music,” I suggested.

  When he went with me to openings of local galleries, Wilson stood back from the conversations I got into, I suppose because he was more comfortable with answers than with questions, but he did listen, and occasionally he would go with me to parties held after the shows for the artist and his friends.

  Wilson would have preferred me to invest in something like first editions, about which he was relatively well informed, but the only first editions I’ve ever bought are new books. I have no taste for books as objects. What I wanted were paintings. For me they were as pure as poems.

  In asserting that aesthetic independence, I did not feel so much Wilson’s equal as a better, more independent companion, one he would some day come to see as a woman rather than a fifteen-year-old with an old soul. He dedicated his second book of poems to me with the words, “For Dulce, my muse.”

  Just the other day I came upon a metaphorical distinction between the romantic and classical poets in Northop Fry: “Warm mammalians who tenderly suckle their living creations and the cold reptilian intellectuals who lay abstract eggs.” There were no love poems at all in this second collection. Like the canvases Wilson was drawn to, they were about great subjects. The title came from the longest and most difficult poem in the book, Exercises in War. Trained as I had been, it didn’t occur to me to wonder whether or not I liked Wilson’s poetry. I admired it as intellectually requiring and courageously cruel about the nature of man.

  Three months before Wilson received his PhD, he accepted a graduate fellowship in England.

  “You’ll never come back,” I said.

  “I hope not.”

  “Wilson, what about me?”

  The eyes turned to me were brilliant with unshed tears. “I’m sorry, Dulce.”

  Now that Wilson C. Wilson has made his name attractive with international honors, occasionally a graduate student comes to me to ask what Wilson was like as a young man. I can only say what he tried to be like as a young man in order to become what he now actually is, a very good poet whose poems I can’t bear to read.

  If Wilson was a coward, he wasn’t coward enough to marry me. I was coward enough to have married him to seal myself away forever from learning either to live alone or truly with another. Instead, he left me when I was twenty-four in the cocoon of my independence which exposed rather than hid my humiliation, for very soon after Wilson left, Oscar Kaufman, a sculptor at whose studio we had often been, said to me, “I thought at least he’d marry you for the view you’ve got here.”

  Perhaps because Oscar was as unlike Wilson as it is possible for a man to be, I was not so much attracted to him as resigned to him for the medicine I needed as a kill or cure remedy for the past ten years of my life.

  He was, as most of our friends were in those days, older. Wilson felt safer among people settled in marriage and the raising of children than among other teaching assistants like ourselves who were marrying in nervous numbers and moving into the ugly and cramped married quarters on campus. Perhaps Wilson thought I might be as put off as he obviously was by family life if I could witness first hand the emotional and physical squalor of it.

  Oscar and Anita had three children under five years old. “Catching up after the war,” Oscar explained. He was both efficient and tender with them, and he gave Anita a day off every Saturday in exchange for a Saturday night for himself, no questions asked.

  When he first stopped by, he had the children with him, and I discovered very quickly how inappropriate my house was for any child neither tied up nor caged. The baby was putting an ant trap in his mouth before anyone had taken a coat off, and Mother’s favorite lamp was smashed on the hearth in the next five minutes. After that, Oscar got ahead of them, kid-proofing the room while I got out cookies.

  While the children climbed all over him, covering him with enough crumbs to feed every bird in the garden, he said to me, “You know, Dulce, what you’ve needed for a long time is a real man.”

  “What’s unreal about Wilson?”

  “He’s a faggot.” When I looked blank, Oscar explained, “A queer, a homosexual.”

  “How do you know
such a thing?”

  “Don’t get mad at me,” Oscar said. “Do you have any better explanation? Did he ever take you to bed?”

  If it hadn’t been for the presence of the children, I would have ordered Oscar out of the house. Instead, we both used them as a distraction, and Oscar didn’t speak of Wilson again then or ever.

  When he had gone, I took down Wilson’s first volume of poems and turned to the love poems which had always bewildered me. What I thought had been about unrequited love was instead forbidden, I could quite clearly see, but nothing prevented the reader from supposing the object to be a female, married or otherwise lost to him. It was not, however, a better explanation. Had they been, in a perverse way, poems also for me, the only way Wilson knew how to tell me that he was incapable of loving me?

  I had ignored his absolute lack of expressions of physical affection, rationalizing it as part of his extreme sensitivity or a peculiarity of his being raised without tenderness or his sense of honor or some lack in myself because I had loathed those aggressive and drunken young men when I was in college. And I had been relieved that I didn’t have to compete with other women for his attention, but there had been no man in his life, of that I was sure. Was Oscar suggesting that Wilson was the kind of man who sought sex in parks and public washrooms? Such an accusation made Oscar rather than Wilson disgusting. If Oscar thought Wilson was queer, why did he also suppose Wilson might have married me?

  I try to explain what happened in terms not only of my own ignorance but of the ignorant intolerance of that time. Oh, I had heard rumors of homosexuality in some of Shakespeare’s sonnets, but I had dismissed them as I did suggestions that Bacon had really written the plays. I had heard a couple of very masculine girls at college referred to as lesbian, but I associated that with the inappropriateness of their style and manner, rather than with their sexual tastes. The only homosexual male I had ever been aware of was a very effeminate brother of a high-school friend of mine who cried because someone had called him a fairy.

  Wilson was entirely masculine. Even in his good looks there was nothing pretty about him. His body was hard and competent, his voice deep. If there was an error in his manner it was an occasional hint of arrogance. There was nothing of the passive or sycophantic about him. He wasn’t exactly a man’s man either, without interest in either sports or dirty jokes. He was a loner, learning to command respect rather than affection. Yet who could call a man of such intense feelings cold?

  I had never pretended to understand Wilson, but he was realer to me than anyone else, both gentler and stronger. My first wish about him, that he could have been my brother, probably most accurately described what we had been for each other and might have gone on being if I had not tried to break the taboo with one question which created the irrevocable separation and silence between us.

  Compared to Wilson, Oscar was transparent, his work hugely, joyously sexual, his needs blatant, his morality patriarchal. He worshipped his wife as the mother of his children; he loved his children, and as a man and an artist he deserved me, but I was also his good deed, part of a sexual altruism he had worked out for himself which drew him to unhappy women. Often in his life he has been bewildered to leave them even unhappier. For some years I let him come to me to be comforted when he was suffering their unreasonable demands and accusations. I can explain that only by my horror at ever again shutting a final door between me and someone I have cared about.

  Oscar was from the first completely open with me. Anita didn’t mind this sort of thing as long as she didn’t have to know about it. His relationship with me was restricted to Saturday nights and would be as entirely private as mine with Wilson had been entirely public. It would end with summer when he was free of his university teaching responsibilities to concentrate on his work. By then I should have become a competent sexual being ready for the open market. No, he didn’t put it that way. He was never again as blunt as he had been about Wilson. Oscar knew how to be kind and funny about not quite savory arrangements so that raising any objection seemed a regression to grammar school morality.

  Used to Wilson’s spartan taste in food, I was unprepared for Oscar’s appetite, and he did not expect to help me in the kitchen or with any other domestic problem. He wanted to leave all husbandly and fatherly responsibilities behind him. He left whatever personal problems he might have had behind him, too. I’ve never known anyone as resolutely and often maddeningly cheerful as Oscar.

  “I made a bargain,” he told me once. “If I made it through the war, I’d spend the rest of my life celebrating it.”

  As he pointed out to me, I could have done worse than to offer my overdue virginity to Oscar. He did not rush me, and he was patient with my timidity and squeamishness. I felt rather like a child being taught to ride a bicycle, that is until he mounted me, and then I became my father’s violin, a thing seemingly of wood and strings, that charged Oscar with crazed energy. I did not know whether I was terrified of him or myself for the power I apparently had to call up such a rutting.

  He did not neglect my ‘pleasure,’ as he called it, so much as never clearly locate it. From his caresses, I thought I should gradually learn to purr like a cat, but I was too tense in my ignorance to feel the heat he called up as anything more than flashes of ambiguous feeling somewhere between pleasure and pain.

  After he left, I often cried hysterically, a response that misled me to think I was in love with Oscar in a way I didn’t consciously comprehend, for I also came to dread his arrival on Saturday night, and I was giddy with freedom the few times he was unable to get away.

  I did have the sense to refuse Anita’s invitation to spend Christmas day with the family. Wilson and I had always planned something to circumvent rather than celebrate that holiday, he not wishing to be politely tolerated in the house where he had grown up, I not wanting to be reminded of the central delight I had been to my parents on such occasions. I had never even explored the cupboard where I supposed the Christmas decorations were stored.

  I did what I had wanted to do when I first came home. I went to the Animal Shelter and picked out an already house-broken and spayed young dog, short-haired and black but not as large as a Lab. Then on whim I picked up a black kitten as well. The major part of my Christmas buying, after I’d chosen extravagant presents for Oscar’s children (nothing for Oscar at his request), was done in a pet shop.

  The dog already had a name, “Rocket,” suggesting a male child’s brief infatuation with a puppy. I didn’t like it, but she was old enough to be used to it. The kitten I named Maud, as all vain, bright and beguiling females should be. From the first night they slept together in the laundry room by the back door.

  Rocket’s occasional growl and brief, sharp bark woke me several times during the night. Only someone who has lived years alone can know the absolute pleasure of those animal sounds in the no longer empty house.

  “What’s this, Dulce?” Oscar exclaimed when Rocket raised her hackles and growled at him and Maud clawed to her highest perch on the bookcase. “A zoo?”

  Oscar didn’t seem able to like an animal he didn’t own. Either Rocket had been abused by a male or she was jealous because, even when I insisted on her good manners, she was sullen about them. She tried to keep herself between me and Oscar, and his slightest affectionate gesture started up a hostile singing in her throat. I finally had to tie her up on the back porch, but just as Oscar went into his fit of passion, Rocket began to howl. I had to disengage myself and go speak to her in my firmest tones.

  When Oscar left that night, I had hysterical giggles.

  “You’re turning yourself into a witch,” Oscar decided. “Next it will be a black minah bird.”

  Neither the image nor the idea of the bird was distasteful to me. But Rocket’s continued hostility was becoming a real problem.

  “Look, Dulce, you have to get rid of her before you become too attached to her. You can’t have a dog around that doesn’t like people.”

  I did no
t tell him that Rocket was not only polite but quite friendly with the friends I occasionally had in for drinks or dinner, but I did not take Oscar’s advice.

  Finally he laid down his ultimatum, “Me or that dog.”

  When I chose the dog, he thought I was joking.

  “I know it’s shameful to admit it, Oscar, but what I need are pets, not a lover.”

  “But that’s crazy.”

  I did not argue with him though I knew Rocket and Maud were my first investments in sanity, creatures with whom I could exchange affection and loyalty, about whom I could be ordinarily responsible. How many bad whims and potential disasters can be more simply avoided than with the words, “I have to go home to feed the animals?”

  Later I understood that Oscar didn’t have the time or energy for more than one woman a winter, and he had to sulk through the rest of that one until he could return to sculpting and to being my friend.

  That summer he introduced into his group of huge phallic and pregnant shapes some less voluptuous figures, empty at the center. I bought one and placed it in the garden by the roses where Wilson had once pitched his impregnable tent.

  I would have liked to declare my independence of Wilson’s influence by dropping out of the PhD program since there was no longer any point in winning his approval. I was, I think, worried that having such a degree might intimidate another more ordinary sort of man who might make friends with my animals, like my view and marry me. I began research for my thesis simply because I didn’t know what else to do.

  Conception and development of character fascinated me in Shakespeare where in the early plays crude models of the later great characters could be found. Left to myself, I would not have spent months locating other scholars who had noted and explored that subject to see if there were any observations left to be made. But it was a more humane topic than many with teasing application to life.