Much to her mother’s relief, Emma did not grow into a giant. But she does think like one. She is critical, unswayed by any professor’s dour glare, yet not argumentative — she’s sure; her mind works without a doubt.
By contrast, I used to ponder over which pair of boxers to wear in the morning. Plain, paisley or striped? It took me far too long to sort out those things that truly matter. Maybe one can never make up for lost time — but it’s worth a try.
She drained the enamel percolator while filling our mugs, sat herself down in the process, plopped the pot on the floor beside her chair. She took a drag off her Camel. With her shaky little finger of the hand clenching the cigarette, she approached the button on the black cassette deck.
“Listen to this,” the command scribbled in smoke from her lips.
I leaned backwards, expecting a blast from another needle-chewing band she had discovered in the 1980s — the Cramps, the Pistols, Joy Division. My own taste is incurably acoustic, she claimed, but still tried to save me.
There was none of that this time. It was only a man talking on this tape. An old man, by the sound of it.
Emma lived in an apartment at the crest of Vine Street, overlooking the Vancouver Harbour. She studied English at UBC. She shared the apartment with her lover of late, a punk guitarist and smack user. She hadn’t heard from him in a week.
The previous afternoon I’d stepped off the plane from Amsterdam, down to my last few dollars, after seven months in Europe and Israel. Emma put me up for a few nights. This allowed for my melancholic adjustment to being … home. Travelling can seem so easy. Now I was frightened, at a loss. But Emma’s presence calmed me. Late at night, those nights, I stood at her glass balcony door and gazed out upon the West Coast wonderland. A picturesque vision, which told me nothing. Lying in my musty sleeping bag on her couch, in the partial city dark, half-hypnotized by sirens, the whole of young me strained to transmit my helpless, shining desire through the bedroom wall, to Emma. I’d take a deep breath — wait for her to call my name, but no.
For breakfast she had peeled me an avocado. The halves were paired on an avocado-hued plate, like the succulent breasts of a green dwarf.
Emma laid her head down on folded arms. Her hair was cropped and henna red at this time. Without lifting her eyes she adjusted the volume on the deck, turned the old man down a bit. We had drunk two bottles of vino tinto for my homecoming. We felt the effects.
“So, who are we listening to?” I picked up a breast of avocado in my fingers, tasted it gently. And I wondered what heroin looked like.
“Miller,” she sighed, “he’s half full of shit … but I adore his voice.”
That morning we said only these few things. There were long moments of silence between our sentences, when old Henry held the floor.
Miller had been dead for a year. It had not helped his reputation. As a matter of fact, some were now calling his writing sexist, loathsome, and worse. But Emma didn’t care one whit about any of this. She just loved the old man’s passionate voice on tape. Sun streamed through window onto wooden table. Ablaze with this light, Emma’s cropped hair sprang out like the head feathers on some jungle bird.
“Emma,” I asked at last, sheepishly, “is there any heroin around … just to look at?”
There followed a few years during which Emma and I fell out of touch, for reasons I do not remember, or understand. For part of this time I was living in Montreal, but distance had never been able to separate us before. I can’t blame the distance.
She loves tacky postcards. Once in a while one of these would arrive: a postcard bearing the photo of a beaming honeymoon couple at Hotel Georgia, circa 1966, or of another café she had discovered in Chinatown that served the best almond chicken in the world.
During these years Emma lived with and parted from more than one lover. She completed her degree, then an additional year at UBC, to qualify as a teacher. I have since learned that she also underwent an operation to remove a malignant tumour. Following this came a nervous breakdown.
Where was I? I don’t know. I mean, evidently I was caught up in my own life, probably wasting time. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Sometimes one wants to perceive a need in others that is, at a deeper level, only his own need.
I’m not big on regret. However, I know this: nothing has ever happened to me that justified not being there for Emma, if I might have offered any quiet companionship to her.
Giant Anton Scherfig appears in my mind. The thought of him, at his ranch out in the mountains, evokes keen empathy in me. I believe I understand his need to hide out. I’m not all that tall. I don’t feel tall, to me. But I’m tall enough that when I was a teenager my mother’s friends would always say, “Goodness, isn’t he getting tall.” And way too often when people meet me the second thing they say is, “How tall are you?” It strikes me as a bit rude. When they meet someone a tad shorter than average, do they say, “Pleased to meet you. Say, exactly how short are you?” Height is construed to be something it clearly isn’t, some kind of higher quality. There are always people waiting to foist their own wild expectations on a tall man.
So imagine what Anton Scherfig carries around even when his hands are empty. Think of all that he bears, so far out west, as he steps outside naked at night to gaze up at the stars. He must hear them, if only faintly. The dreams of a pack of townsfolk on their haunches, their yips and cries, as they huddle close together along the ever-infringing neon horizon.
“Come in!” she hollered.
I experienced an odd sense of formality crossing the threshold of Emma’s new apartment.
We’d known each other twenty years, yet I could not remember another occasion when one of us had actually invited the other to dinner. I wore clean jeans, and one of my favourite shirts, a western one with pearly snaps. Emma had requested a bottle of Retsina. I told her I highly doubted the Quesnel liquor store stocked that sort of thing, but I was wrong. On a whim I plucked some fragrant pink roses out of her neighbour’s backyard. It was an unusually warm and muggy evening. And perhaps the occasion seemed more peculiar because this was our hometown. Once qualified as a teacher she’d taken a position at the very same high school we’d graduated from. I was working in a camp out on Matthew River that summer, happened to have an August weekend off, and stayed over at my folks’ place in Quesnel. I phoned Emma. She invited me for dinner.
She was in the kitchen, with butter up to her elbows, some of it smeared along her chin. “What?” she grinned, eyeing the roses and wine, my shirt and the goo in my hair, “No chocolates!”
“Any chance there’s beer in the fridge?” I muttered, embarrassed. There was, so I helped myself, and stowed the Retsina in the icebox.
Emma finished slathering her spanakopita and slid it in the oven. Together we skewered onion, mushrooms, red pepper and cubes of marinated lamb. But after this she declared I was only getting in her way. She handed me another beer and pointed to the front room. Due to the heat she had set up a big fan in there. The blue propeller created a pleasant, Mediterranean sort of breeze. I lay on the floor and flipped through her records.
“Emma, don’t you own a single Neil Young album?!”
She stuck her head out of the kitchen and scowled. I laughed. One of those looks from Emma can bankrupt any fellow’s confidence in his own taste.
“Well hey, I’ve had visions, listening to Neil.”
At this she gave me a ferocious smile, and shook her head. Her tawny hair waved over her shoulders now. She looked beautiful. She did own the latest from k.d. lang, Shadowland, so I played that.
When the spinach pie was nearly done, Emma stepped out onto the balcony to barbecue the kebabs. They sizzled and smelled like a biblical feast.
My eyes roamed Emma’s many bookshelves, lined with titles both new and ancient. On the coffee table were half a dozen in a stack that I guessed were set aside for me. From about the time she figured out my destiny Emma has been lending me books. Actually, she’d command me to rea
d them. No matter if I live to be as old as Methuselah, I’ll never get through the reading list she has compiled in her mind.
Because she’d laboured over it Emma could not enjoy much of the spanakopita. But I ate half a panful, several kebabs, plus two bowls of Greek salad.
“This is amazing,” I told her, “I mean, I hung out in Greece for a couple of months, and I never ate Greek food better than this.”
She gave a shrug, her most common gesture. Then a rarer, shy smile. We talked, and caught up on our lives. She mentioned she was seeing Raymond Pierce, as if I should know him. Took me a minute to realize she meant our very own former French teacher. A heart flicker of anger surprised me. But our conversation ambled on, calmed my jealousy, as well as the loneliness I’d been gripped by too long that summer. I tend to like women more than I should, every part of them. But a woman’s voice truly is the quality which most attracts me, that has more than once lured me into trouble, if only within myself. Emma’s voice is familiar to me, yet ever changing, like the brooks we fished as children. It is rich with light and brilliant colours. There is a little click in her laugh that sends my body diving into a current, the pool of pure sense.
When we polished off the Retsina I was all set to jog back to the liquor store for more. But Emma topped this idea with a bottle of Metaxa from her cupboard. She’d quit smoking some months earlier, but in her cupboard of evils was half a pack of Camels, which we inhaled like fiends.
She put Lou Reed on her stereo, then sat down again and shoved all the dishes into a heap on one side of the table. I enjoyed these undomestic gestures. Just like the old days, almost.
“I thought Monsieur Pierce was married,” I said, as an afterthought.
“He is,” she replied in a way that discouraged pursuit of the matter.
I got up, and stepped over to the balcony door with my glass of brandy. Outside the evening air had begun to bristle. I watched a heated wind ride pell-mell into town; the trees all whirled in unison to gape and wave their arms, dust devils caroused in the parking lot, metallic clouds tumbled in from out west. The evening sun was shining, yet as I stood there, stray, rangy drops of rain began to pelt the glass. An uncertain mood threatened me for a moment, thinking of Emma in a troublesome fix with Ray Pierce. She can take care of herself. That was not my concern. So you’re a selfish sonofabitch, my demon reminded me. Yeah, yeah.
Across the alley a woman was madly reeling in her clothesline, while her husband trotted around their yard bent over retrieving scattered shirts and socks.
“Hey you should see this,” I called to Emma. She came right over and stood close beside me. I felt her smoky breath on my neck. It was an absurd sort of comedy below, which made us smile.
“Let’s go out!” she shouted suddenly, wheeling for the door.
Sunlit raindrops spattered her balcony, and dark-blooded clouds milled in the sky.
“We’ll get wet,” I warned. She hooted with laughter. I grabbed the Metaxa off the table, had to run downstairs to catch up with her.
Rain bounced inches off the warm pavement. Runoff flooded the curbs, the neat green town lawns. People peered outside in awe at the storm from their houses, from between their curtains. Unsheltered, we waltzed back and forth along the centre crown of the street, our sneakers soon soaked, our shirts and jeans plastered to warm skin, me clutching the neck of that bottle in one hand.
Down the street was the park. Beside this park sits the hockey rink. Behind the rink, beneath the boughs of a few huge fir trees and birch, lies a green half-acre, which is Quesnel’s original cemetery.
The sunburnt park grass now streamed with rain. It was slippery for us dancing our way across. In the playground we took a little flight on the swings. Puddles filled before our eyes. Though the downpour was warm, after ten minutes exposed to it the notion to find cover took hold.
We headed up the rise from the park to the cemetery, toward the biggest tree. Emma lost her footing and I caught her in my arm, felt her fingers gripping me. The gravestones were highlighted with rain. This made the inscriptions stand out, but the oldest ones, from the gold-rush era, had stood out in the weather about as long as they could. Persons below those were now anonymous, free. As we rushed along the grassy aisle between the graves my eyes picked out common local names.
Nestled in under the wings of the largest spruce, smelling its sap, we lay down close together. Before we knew what we were doing, what was natural began.
My mind raced backwards in desire’s timelessness. There were the two of us, wrapped once more in the skin of the wolf. Emma pulled me closer, my face was in her hair, my gaze burrowed into the root matrix of the tree to escape meeting her eyes. I was afraid. We swigged brandy from the bottle. Nearby ghosts of the pioneers sat cross-legged on their graves, listening in on us. Her breasts warm on my chest, the fir bark rough against my back. More than warm, my body shivered. Her fingers deftly undid my cowboy belt. In southern Israel, overlooking the Dead Sea, I had climbed the ruins of Massada. Experienced there a horrific vision of myself diving from the rock ramparts into space — had to back away from the edge, sit down on the sun-baked earth. A similar impulse and terror seized me this stormy evening in the cemetery, beneath the boughs of the great tree, with Emma in my arms.
But something stopped us.
There was a hint of resistance in us both. And we trusted this. An old truck passed slowly down the street, water streaming from its tires, headlights shimmering. Gradually the rain abated. Dusk’s clean mauve filter slipped over town. The ghosts grew bored with our still, safe tenderness. They disappeared. Perhaps we fell asleep for a while. I remember the murmur of Emma’s voice. Remember us walking home later, arm in arm, slightly chilled now by our wet clothes. We said goodbye outside her apartment building. We knew enough to do that. She hugged me and whispered goodnight.
Fluke Lightning Strike Claims Life Of 11-year Old.
An 11-year old Quesnel child died Friday after being struck by lightning.
Quesnel RCMP say the boy — whose name had not been released at press time late Tuesday — was playing soccer when the lightning storm and rain struck the area on Friday night.
The incident is under investigation by both RCMP and coroner Kay Green. According to Statistics Canada, death by lightning is an extreme rarity. Of the 184,224 deaths recorded in Canada in 1986, only four were caused by lightning strikes and none of those were recorded in BC.
Quesnel Cariboo Observer, August 9, 1989
This incident lent additional drama to that date, more than was needed, surely. But since then, in rare moments when we’ve referred to that evening, and by the inference to our most intimate encounter, we’ve called it “the storm the boy died in.”
A couple of years later the phone rang. I was the one living in Vancouver now, while Emma remained happy to be in Quesnel.
“Guess what?!” Emma cried. I recoiled from the receiver. “We bought a house! Oh, you’ve got to see it. It’s old and huge, with a porch all around it. I had a renovator’s orgasm when I saw it!”
“Sounds pretty nice,” I said.
“Oh it is! It’s on twelve acres, there’s a natural meadow, we’re going to have horses, maybe even goats!”
“Great, Emma,” I said, “ahh, but, who is we?”
“Larry and I.”
“Larry?”
“Larry Knight, you know, I told you months ago I’d been seeing him, well …”
“Yeah, yeah sure. You didn’t tell me you were investing with the guy. I mean, this is a big step, Emma, there must be contracts and stuff involved.”
Larry Knight was a few years ahead of us in school. He has always lived in Quesnel. He now owns his own nursery and landscaping company, takes trips to places like Peru and Tibet to climb mountains, heads the ski-touring club, as well as the local chapter of Amnesty International. So what? It was hard to get my head around the idea that Emma was moving in with a hometown boy. One who wasn’t me.
The phone rang aga
in, a few months later. Emma said she and Larry were getting married in the spring. She asked if I would read a poem by Lawrence at the wedding.
A man cannot tread like a woman,
Nor a woman step out like a man.
The ghost of each through the leaves of shadow
Moves as it can.
But the Morning Star and the Evening Star
Pitch tents of flame
Where we foregather like gypsies, none knowing
How the other came.
— D.H. Lawrence, from The Plumed Serpent XXVI
As I mentioned: Emma doesn’t care much which writers are currently in or out of others’ favour. She is amazing. That woman is not the least bit threatened by any writer, dead or alive, of any persuasion or gender. Me? Merely whisper Márquez and I’ll tremble in my boots. But Emma, she thinks like a giant.
It was a beautiful June day. The breeze carried the scent of cottonwoods that grow along the banks of the Quesnel River.
The wedding took place in the white wooden church. An old church. I’d never been inside before, and was surprised how very pleasant it is in there. It has stained glass, two rows of long, polished wooden pews, a podium carved in the form of an eagle.
It’s not a very big church, and this posed some difficulty for Anton Scherfig getting inside. But he did. The ushers opened both doors and he crawled in on his hands and knees. He had to duck for the rafters, but otherwise could pretty near stand up straight, even in cowboy boots. Lord knows where he finds boots to fit him. His suit was brown twill, with a western yoke over his broad shoulders, so wide that from the back it looked like a tarpaulin.
When the minister nodded at me I got up. I stood at the eagle podium and read the passage that Emma had chosen.
Afterward Mrs. Scherfig said it was a touching moment, and she thanked me. Though I overheard another woman say my voice had been a trifle solemn for the occasion.
All Those Drawn to Me Page 5
