I filled three glasses with ice and poured us all scotch. I knew instinctively that Kate drank scotch, but when she took it and rolled the liquor around the ice and then let a bit of it fall into her mouth, that was the first thing. That was the thing you always look back on and you think, yes, that was it.
Kate took the meat from Sylvain and opened it, then cut it into slices. “Venison Stroganoff,” she said. There was no cognac, so she poured the rest of her scotch into the skillet. She put on a pot of water to boil the noodles and in about half an hour it was all ready. I’d never eaten venison before. It seemed somehow disrespectful to take a creature like that out of the forest, antlers and all, and poach it in cheap liquor. But it was delicious all the same.
“Why do you keep looking at your watch?” I asked Sylvain when we were done. All through the meal he kept glancing outside and then looking at his watch. It was one of those heavy watches you could swim with underwater as well as calibrate stuff. We’d had scotch with dinner, too.
“I have to finish every day with a count,” he said, “and the count has to start at the same sun time every day. That’s whatever time I did it yesterday minus eight minutes.”
“The sun sets a little earlier every day,” Kate said. “So they start calling a bit earlier, too. Go on out with him, you two can do it together. I’ll clean up.”
Sylvain stood—the wild was about to start calling—and waited for me. I made a murmuring sound that suggested maybe I wasn’t entitled to such a wonderful experience as standing out in the water at dusk with a heavily pierced Frenchman, but Kate started shooing us away from the table. So I went outside with Sylvain, when all I really wanted was the sensual pleasure of being passed wet dishes and drying them while talking about this and that. I looked back and saw Kate through the window above the sink, not aware she was being watched, and I imagined that after I saw Sylvain off to wherever he lived I would be going back up to the cabin and we’d sit down on the couch and Kate would put her feet in my lap while she read a novel. Afterward, we’d talk about the novel and she’d be really smart about it, although not intellectual, and then she’d say, “Let’s go to bed, babe, long day tomorrow.”
“Hold this,” said Sylvain. It was a clipboard with a pencil tucked in at the top. There was a list of frogs on it: Bullfrog, Green, Mink, Northern Leopard, Pickerel, Spring Peeper, Western Chorus. We were down on the little gray beach. “I say a name and you make a tick mark. That’s all.”
“Okay.”
He stood completely still. I realized that the fact of the frogs’ calling wasn’t to help lead him to where they were in the failing light: he was just going to count them by sound. This was impressive. To me, the sounds along the lake edge were without distinction. It was a general commotion, high and low sounds mixing together, repeating sounds flowering up over singular sounds. It was a hubbub and a buzz and nothing stood out of it for me.
“Pickerel,” said Sylvain.
“Just one?”
“We can’t talk right now. Green. Mink. Take my watch and tell me when exactly ten minutes is up. Another green. Bull.”
I started dashing the marks onto the page. At first the pickerels were winning, but then they went pretty much head-to-head with the northern leopards. The spring peepers and western choruses were no-shows. Sylvain stood there as tensed as a pointer and spat out the names. I wondered when Kate had fallen in love with him. It wasn’t when he was leaning into the frog-filled dusk, his ear turned slightly toward the water, croaking the names of his prey.
“Northern,” he said.
“You sure that wasn’t a pickerel?” I said. “Just joking.”
When we were done, he took the list away from me and tilted it into the light from the cottage as it gave up its secrets to him. He nodded a couple of times. “Are you interested in this?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Last year, we did this lake and two others nearby, and the pickerel and northern leopard populations were lower by twenty-five percent. Can you guess what that means?”
“They were quieter then?”
He smiled. He surprised himself by doing it; he wasn’t expecting that I’d be anything but a drag. “That could be,” he said. “But it probably means that the predator population has dropped off in this area. Snakes and herons, some kinds of fish. Maybe they overfed and went elsewhere, or maybe there was a die-off. More pollution in the water.”
“Why wouldn’t that affect the frogs?”
“It would, but then so would the reduction in the predator groups. We don’t really know what causes these fluctuations. That’s why we’re studying them.”
What I didn’t like about Sylvain at this particular moment was that I was starting to think he was a pretty decent guy. To care like this. I’d learned by experience plenty of times that there’s no benefit in judging people too early. Doing that had landed me with J—. Mere attraction can get the better of you and it usually does. “So, will the increase in these kinds of frogs bring back the snakes and fish?” I said, trying to stay on his wavelength.
“If that’s the reason why their numbers are increasing, then maybe. That’ll be a question we come out here with next year.”
“You and Kate?”
He shrugged; that wasn’t the point. “Whoever the ministry sends.”
Kate’s voice came over the ridge just then. It was saying coffee and something else, so we started walking back up. “It probably won’t be me and Kate,” Sylvain said. “But you never can tell.”
I pinched my lips together and nodded knowingly. I think this gesture began in the movies and then men all around the world started doing it. It means you don’t have to say another word.
“Anyway,” said Sylvain, and that was the end of it. We came up past the tent, and the tub I’d seen earlier started making sounds again.
“What’s in there?”
“Bullfrogs. The big ones go to the lab for blood tests. You know, a three-quarter-pound bullfrog can tell you the ratios of all the various minerals and chemicals in a lake. They’re mirror images of the bodies of water they live in. It’s actually quite amazing.”
I was nodding enthusiastically. Maybe he was a loon. “Then what happens after?”
“Don’t worry—they come home. We show the elders the respect they deserve.” He smiled at me again.
Kate had made Rice Krispie squares. “I didn’t want to deprive you of your evening’s ration of cereal,” she said. She had piled them onto a plate into a pyramid and they looked exactly like the photo in the Kraft Foods recipe book my mother had when I was a kid.
MAYBE I’D suffered depression as a child, but I don’t remember. How many kids would pass for sane anyway?
Many nights during the worst of it in the city, I’d lain awake in bed and tried to recall if there had been anything really wrong with me as a kid. I supposed that the big difference between then and now was that now I knew what things were called, and I knew what was generally accepted to be normal. As a child, I’d succumbed on a couple of occasions to strange behavior, and perhaps it had been in line with what children of my generation and demographic were supposed to do. All of childhood is training the animal out of the human—who’s to say that the animal doesn’t need to manifest some last wild desires? One night I’d run out of the house after some small thwarting—a television show denied, or some insignificant punishment levied—out onto the street, crying and waving my hands around. Neighbors called to me from their front stoops (had I done such a thing more than once?) and I ran past them. I stopped to catch my breath outside of my school and saw my mother turn the corner in her car and come toward me. I ran again, even diving over hedges to keep her from seeing me, and when she drove past she seemed to float by over the street in a bubble of pale light, her face yellowed by the dashboard into a grave frieze of worry.
Another time, a whole summer in fact, I tried to kill animals. I didn’t go for the easy ones, like fish, which you could catch on a line and smack
with a stick, or even birds, which you could catch with a net if they were feeding on the ground. My prey that summer was squirrels. I figured the matchup was fair: they could run and go right up the sides of trees, and I could throw rocks. They seemed to have a second sight when it came to rocks—they knew to go where the rocks wouldn’t. And even when, in rare instances, I made contact, they just shrugged it off. Then I got one. It was eating an apple core on a rock and my own rock caught it there. It tumbled unnaturally off the back and fell into the grass. I went to the rock and looked down, and there it was on its side, some of its ribs sticking out of its fur. And it was breathing, just as it had been when it was eating the apple core. It looked up calmly into the sky for a while, its eye moving back and forth quickly, and then it shook one of its limbs and the eye stopped moving.
I brought it into the house weeping. I told my father it had fallen out of a tree. We buried it and marked the grave and nothing else was said about it.
Maybe I was mad that summer. Or maybe there was more animal left in me than there should have been.
KATE AND Sylvain argued that night. Their voices rose to a pitch and then they realized they could be heard and they became quiet again. For a while, there was a lamp on in the tent, and I could see from their shadows that they were sitting as far apart as they could in the pinched space. Then the lamp went out, and Kate appeared, coming up toward the lawn. I returned inside quickly and switched the lights off. She came up below the cabin and spread her sleeping bag on the grass, then slipped herself into it and arranged a pile of clothes under her head. It was a warm night, so she wasn’t going to freeze out there. I sat down, worrying that I was seeing their problems as an opportunity. That, I thought, didn’t make me a very good person, never mind a good host. But I knew I wouldn’t sleep if I didn’t go out there.
When she heard my approach, she turned over and shielded her eyes against the porch light I’d turned on as a sort of signal that I was coming down.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” she said. Her face was a little swollen. “I spent the second half of last summer sleeping outside.”
“I can get you another blanket if you want.”
She hesitated for a second. Accepting something for herself alone would mean that she was having a separate relationship with me. This I understood: to that point, it had been a relationship with both of them. “That would be great,” she said. “And maybe a pillow.”
I went in and gathered what she needed, then came down with the whiskey. She sat up and drank a little and we passed the bottle back and forth.
“Are you okay okay?”
“Don’t worry about us,” she said. “We’ll be fine. He just has to accept it, is all.”
“You’ve known each other for a long time.”
“We were in the same program. He doesn’t look the part, but he’s amazingly dedicated. He’d do this all year if the lakes didn’t freeze.” She looked over her shoulder down to the top of the tent and her face changed. “I don’t want to hurt him.”
“I understand.”
“But I can’t force myself. I mean, to feel something I don’t.”
I drank. I had the unpleasant sensation that my simple listening was a form of falsehood. Most men have this instinct. Watching her talk, I was filled with tenderness for her, for the trouble she was willing to invite into her life. “Well,” I said, “if he can accept what you’re offering, it sounds like he’ll have a good friend.”
“He will,” she said resolutely. She put the cap back on the bottle. “You’re kind to let us invade your privacy here. I’m sure this is no good for your writing.”
“Anything can help,” I said. “It’s impossible to know in advance what might unlock you.”
“Is this unlocking you?” She lay down and put her arms up under her head. In certain books and movies, that would have been my cue. But excruciating experience had taught me that women’s come-on lines were never what men thought they would be.
I said, “A little.”
“I guess you can’t really force that, either.”
“You really can’t.” I collected the bottle off the grass and stood up. “Goodnight then,” I said.
I lay in bed after that, and felt her presence out there on the grass. I couldn’t have drunk myself unconscious if I’d wanted to. I got up around three in the morning and went back out into the front room to look at her, but she was gone and the light in the tent was back on. The two of them were unable to leave it alone, this relationship that wanted to devour them.
IN THE morning, I felt uneven. I took my spiked coffee and went out to my spot. Kate and Sylvain were nowhere to be seen, already on the survey’s schedule. I took out my two lines of poetry, lonesome lines with no source and no destination, and I experimented with them, removing various words to see if anything about the lines was absolute, inevitable.
of the elements:
human limbs, months, and hours
quadrabalance of human limbs,
and months
quadrabalance of the elements
human months and hours
human elements
This turned out to be a distressing exercise, since it seemed to me that all the lines that were left by these mechanical amputations were all better than the ones I’d sweated so hard to create from will. It started to seem as if poetry followed natural laws that perhaps I had once known, but that now were an alien algebra to me. Probably Sylvain, with his training in the systems of nature, had an innate connection to the very things that had abandoned me. It certainly seemed to me that what he was doing, his head tilted into the night air, was a better lightning rod for the phenomenological world than was the feeble apparatus of my language. In disgust, I wrote jugorum in my book, then slammed it shut and went inside.
Since it would still be hours until dinner (how quickly the shape of my days was changing), I gave in to the pull of television, which to that point I’d treated as a piece of furniture. When I switched it on, the signal came through like light cast through a tunnel. There was a cooking show on one channel, an American game show on another. The sound on that channel was as clear as a person standing behind you, even though the picture swayed like a silk curtain. A woman told something of herself to the host. Where she was from and how many children. That was her, that little list of things. Had she always been this happy? Did she do with her life as she had intended? What threads of circumstance saw her born in that town, give birth to those children, end up guessing the names of songs for money? Her image, almost insubstantial, drifted across; she was as fragile as the signals that came down through space carrying her in them.
“Can you even see anything?” asked Kate. She was standing in the kitchen.
“Whoops,” I said. “I’m taking a break. You want a coffee?”
“Actually, I was coming up to tell you that if you want, in a couple of hours you can come out with me and I’ll show you how to catch a frog. Sylvain’s offered to make dinner.”
“I thought you said he didn’t cook.”
“He doesn’t. But he thinks he owes me something for last night.” She tried to make it sound like an amusing side effect of an experience that had left her with tired gray sacs under each eye.
“You went back to the tent,” I said.
“I did.” She looked out at the lake. There had been a couple of moments like this, when it seemed that she was on the verge of crossing a line with me. But then she said, “If you thought you were the reason someone was unhappy, you’d probably find it hard to walk away. I do.”
“Didn’t your mom ever tell you it takes two to tango?”
“Dancing’s supposed to be fun.” Her eyes drifted to the television for a moment, where the ghostly woman was frantically clapping and weeping. I shut it off.
“If you want to talk . . .”
She turned her eyes on me. “If I want to talk, you’re a good listener?”
“Yeah. I am.”
She went out. I had an extra minute or two, so I watched her walk all the way down. Being around Kate for even those two days made me wonder if there could be a world where sex and love weren’t so gloomy a business. It seemed that somewhere, people were enjoying carnal lives, unencumbered by ineptitude or shyness. But I’d never met these people, or been to where they were. I looked at Kate and felt as if she were pulling the scent of that world into this one, where the great unloved might learn to be more at ease with themselves.
I WENT down at five minutes past four, after washing my face and changing into some shorts. I had no swim trunks; I hadn’t intended on swimming while I was up there, and I generally stayed away from water. I met Sylvain on the way up and he scanned my attire with a jaundiced eye. “You’ll get those filthy,” he said, stopping me on the path.
“It’s just dirt. It’ll come out.”
“She’ll laugh at you and call you a city boy.”
“I am a city boy,” I said.
He looked up to the cabin and then back at me. “How long have you been here? Writing your poems.”
“Almost a month.” Kate had come across to the beach and was looking up at us. I waved to her. Sylvain didn’t turn around. “Why?”
“Maybe I’ll rent it after you go. See if I have better luck than you.”
“At what.”
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