“Getting over something.”
“Sylvain!” Kate called, and now he turned around and shielded his eyes. I noticed for the first time that his irises were so dark they could have been black. They were what gave him his permanently wounded look. “Let him come down. You start on dinner.”
“You’re next,” he said and patted me on the shoulder.
Kate stood on the tiny beach and when I got closer she slid her arm in mine and brought me into the water. “Nice get- up,” she said. “All you’re missing is the metal detector.”
“Sylvain warned me you’d laugh at my ensemble.”
“He was right.” We were standing in five-inch-deep water now. “What else did he say?”
“Sylvain? He wanted to know if he could rent the cabin after me. To get over you.”
She stopped and took back her arm. She had a look on her face that was somewhere between amused and disgusted. “Maybe the two of you could live here after I go and drink whiskey and keen at the moon together. Maybe turn the place into a retreat for brokenhearted men.”
“That’s an idea.”
“You could offer some kind of package deal: a long weekend up here with mementoes of the old girlfriend, all the chocolate you can eat, and then at the end, someone rows you out to the middle of the lake and puts a bullet in your brain. Charge, like, $399.”
I narrowed my eyes at her and smiled carefully. “Men don’t do the chocolate thing, Kate. That’s girls.”
“Whatever.”
“How come you sound guilty one minute and pissed off the next?”
She started to talk, but it came out as a huff, and then she gestured helplessly toward the cabin. Her hand went up and then flopped down on her thigh with a wet slap. “He thinks I never loved him. I’ve been with three guys whose last words were that I never loved them. Must be something about me, huh?”
“Maybe you’re attracted to the same kind of man.”
“Sylvain’s line is that I was with him because I felt sorry for him.”
“He’s only saying that.”
“When I met him, he was sick, you know that? He was in and out of hospital—and I’ll let you in on something, it wasn’t for any physical problems, okay? And that was fucking hard! I didn’t do it out of pity, I loved him.”
“You shouldn’t take someone who’s in his state too seriously.”
“He’s always in this state. That’s why I’m finished. So he’s giving me one last helping for good measure.” She waved her hand dismissively. “Anyway, good listener, you came down here to catch a frog.”
“We don’t have to. I like talking to you.”
She walked around me to a clearing on the shore a few feet away where she or Sylvain had pushed back the lake grass for a spot to sit, and she sat down and draped her arms over her knees. The insides of her elbows gleamed. “He says to me, the Indians have this saying that if you save someone’s life, you’re responsible for it. How’s that for a fucking guilt trip?”
“Of course you’re not responsible for it.” To this point, I’d tried to ignore that Kate and Sylvain had a past. My attraction to her allowed me to discount that the two of them were probably as inextricably joined to each other as I had once been to J—, the woman I claimed I was getting over. That I’d told a white lie about that in service of not having to tell two strangers that I was trying to win a footrace with depression made me feel pathetic now. It made me feel that I’d lost a chance to say anything of substance to Kate. Now I was in the position of trying to be sensitive so I’d seem appealing to this woman who probably wouldn’t otherwise have invited a person like me into her life. But, I told myself, I’m over it now. I’m ready for someone like Kate. Maybe Sylvain just got to her too soon. Maybe the timing’s perfect for me, for her. These kinds of thoughts go in circles, and as long as you stop them before they reach their inevitable end (where once again the likely decline of everything you care about features as the main outcome) you can convince yourself there are things worth living for. Such conviction, report those who have it, is as good as its being true. I went and sat down beside her. “What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. I think I’m going to wait and see.” She pushed her hair back behind her neck and leaned away a little so she could see me. “He thinks we’re attracted to each other, you and me.”
“He would, I guess. Part of his condition.”
“Right.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him I didn’t know what you were thinking, but I thought you were ugly and you smelled bad.”
“Did he fall for it?”
“It was hard to convince him you smelled bad.” She stood up. “I’m bored talking about relationships now. I’m finished with men. I want to show you how to catch a frog.”
“So that’s it?”
“For now.”
We stood and walked to where there was another concentration of lilypads and reeds. I just wanted to keep on walking until we came around the other side of the lake and could walk back to some road somewhere that would lead away. But I was aware now that I was stepping into a sequence of some kind. Kate unhooked one of the headsets from her bikini strap and put it on me, then slipped her own on. “Can you hear me?” she said.
“I can hear the real you as well as the microphoned you.”
“Walk away now, and don’t make too much noise. Go on.” I reluctantly started off toward the reeds. I didn’t want to catch anything that lived in water. “There’s a bullfrog in there, about two o’clock from where you are right now. I’ve already caught her a couple of times, so she’s tired. As long as you don’t act all clumsy, she’ll probably give up without a fight.”
“They fight?” I whispered into the headpiece.
“They struggle. Wouldn’t you? Keep going.”
I walked toward the edge of the lilypads and scanned the water’s edge. The feeling I was being visited with was one I hadn’t had in some time—that there was something taking shape, ever so vaguely, in my future. Maybe that’s what my illness had been about: not knowing where I was going, or what to want when I got there. Or maybe, as I suspected at the time and still do, it was about nothing I could possibly understand, except the work of being alive and not being good at it.
“Do you see her?” Kate said quietly into my ear.
“Not yet.”
“Maybe she’s gone.” I continued closer to the edge of the water. I could hear Kate’s breathing in my ears. It was like she was a ghost in my head. “The trick,” she said, “is to know they can’t see in front of themselves that well. Frogs have great peripheral vision, but if you come at them front on, they don’t really notice. That’s how snakes get them.”
“Maybe that just makes them stupid.”
“Good scientific insight, poet-boy.” She gave a quiet, scornful laugh. After another moment, though, she said, “What?” and I realized she wasn’t talking to me. I looked up to where she was and saw Sylvain standing at the edge of the lake. He had a windbreaker on and a duffel bag was on the beach. She went back toward him. “Where are you going?” she said.
She dropped the headset down around her neck as she approached him, and he retreated onto the grass. Her voice was fainter now, his even more so. I made out that he was leaving to go back to the city. His voice became agitated.
“. . . that isn’t true,” she said, tired with pleading her version to him. “You believe what you want then.”
He said something else and I heard her say, “Jesus Christ, Sylvain. We’re not going to get paid if we don’t finish.”
I started to walk back toward where they were, not sure what kind of person he might really be, or if she was in any danger. I got a few steps closer and then stopped and turned. There was the frog. It sat, shaded in the cover of the low scrub, looking out serenely into the lake as if daydreaming.
I spoke quietly into the headset. “Kate?”
“Just a second,” I heard her say, and then
she put her earphones back on. “What is it, Russell?”
“I see something here.”
“I’m going to be awhile, okay?”
“Do you need any help?”
“No,” she said, and she took the headset off again. I imagined her turning her face back to Sylvain, trying, as perhaps she’d been trying all along, to convince him that whatever love she had for him, it still meant something. I waited, wondering if she would come back on and instruct me somehow, but I could hear nothing. After a moment, they moved into view closer to the cabin, and I watched them, the discussion their bodies were having, and I saw her take him into her arms. She held him against her, and he let himself be held. That was the kind of embrace it was. Then they vanished from view behind the cabin.
I didn’t know then what was required of me, so I kept moving slowly to where Kate’s frog was and extended my hand. The animal didn’t register me at all, or at least not in a way I understood. I moved forward as slowly as I was able. I knew I’d been taken away from my purpose here, I’d been more than waylaid, but this was as good a reason to be here as any. Letting life come in from the side was a wise thing, I thought. It worked for frogs. Although perhaps they’d settle for a little more of knowing what was right in front of them, in the long, forward view. I was only a couple of feet away now, and the frog turned itself a little to the side, like a mechanical toy. I shifted position as well. I heard a car door shut—it must have been my car—and at that moment, I shot my hand out and tried to grab the thing, but it vaulted into the air, its limbs flailing wildly, and plunged into the water near my foot in a flash of white and green. I felt it brush against me, a glancing of flesh, and then it was gone. I waited a moment to see if it would come up, but it must have known to go somewhere I couldn’t see into.
When I got back to the beach, the tent and the rest of their gear was gone. I went into the cabin and looked around, but there was only silence there, and my keys were gone from the bowl on the front table. I took off the headset and laid it in the bowl, where it gave off a faint crackling, still bringing her in, still connecting us. I had a proper appetite now and started cooking. I had some sense of faith as well, but why and in what, I wasn’t sure. I was settled in myself for once, and had the feeling that I had done something with my day even though it hadn’t remotely been like poetry, and probably it wouldn’t be like poetry again.
Acknowledgments
To Maya Mavjee, Pat Strachan, Ravi Mirchandani, Ellen Levine, Michael Winter, Esta Spalding, and especially Michael Helm and Anne Simard: thank you. “Long Division” is for Tim and Kougar, “Orchards” is for my brother.
Michael Redhill’s first novel, Martin Sloane, received The Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book, Canada and Caribbean, and was a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize. He lives in Toronto, where he serves as the publisher and one of the editors of Brick, a literary magazine. Redhill is a poet and playwright as well as a fiction writer. Fidelity is his first collection of stories.
Fidelity Page 19
