Architects Are Here

by Michael Winter

  September, when she knew Arthur had returned and the son had gone. She waited. She walked down Main Street. There were boys on the hill above the movie cinema breathing gasoline from grocery bags. And beyond them the solid, permanent pulp mill. She liked Corner Brook for the eddy it provided. It was a milltown, and she found the pulp mill comforting. Whenever she told someone that they laughed at her. No, she said, it’s like a hearth. And she meant it. The soft unravelling steam that rose and carried itself downwind over the mouth of the Humber River where the salmon were returning to the sea. Sometimes you woke up and the cars in the university parking lot were covered with ash.

  They met three times in the fall, to talk. Arthur had missed her through the summer. Nell had been like a pharmaceutical prescription for depression. They had not sailed on Saginaw Bay. They had stayed on land and his son David was aloof. David had seen a speedboat in a scrap-yard and that felt like the family that summer, he told me. But the sunlight and Michigan had revived his parents. The waitresses wore minis and orange plastic hoop earrings and even that felt like a reason for living. Arthur understood they’d both pushed back from the brink. Arthur and Helen had sort of fallen in love again.

  Nell listened to this and heard the spiral of thought that meant it was over and now they were to be friends. It complicated her feelings and she pushed them down like plunging at water. Arthur Twombly was the first man she had let carry her heart on a plate. That’s how she felt, as if her heart were being lifted on a plate out of water. Now she felt the hoses of her heart held her down. She realized she had moved to Corner Brook as the start of a wilful life. She had been passive, afraid of crowds, worried about her own talent. And here she had moved around the powerful Arthur Twombly and had fallen for him and now they were just talking.

  It affected her gait. It was walking through cement. She felt like she was wading. It is hard to turn a corner when there is no wall.

  Then, in early November, a note in the laundry room. See me at 4.

  THEY WALKED to Arthur’s car and he drove her out to the highway, but they turned south rather than out towards Steady Brook. Open the glove box, he said. The light inside came on and there was a red scarf. Arthur slowed down and pulled over. He took the scarf and wrapped it around her eyes. They drove for ten miles with the blindfold on and then he stopped and helped her take it off. There was a man with a truck. This is Gary Tilley, he said.

  She thought they were going to rape her. Then Gary’s face opened up. He operated a Cessna off of Pinchgut Lake. They climbed in, Nell in front. The lake was choppy. The dashboard was very old. Dials. Arthur was in the back with a heavy seatbelt buckle across his waist. Gary flicking on the silver tabs and gauges lighting up with real bulbs. They skimmed along and the pontoons clipped the chop and they teetered up and banked to the right. The coastline of the island yawed across the windshield and she thought of her parents. What they must have felt as they knew they were not going to make it. It was a clear evening, you could see a hundred miles. And all along the coast were these little flickers of orange. Bonfires. It was Guy Fawkes night.

  They circled back to Pinchgut and landed and said goodbye to Gary and they drove around the very coast that they had seen from above. There was a bonfire through the trees and they took a road down to the beach. Boys were throwing tires on the fire, the exhausted coils of steel-belted radials. A dog was jumping over the fire, until he hurt his paw. Someone gave the dog a beer. Then he took off down the beach. He goes over those rocks, Arthur said, like he’s doing forty miles per hour.

  Owner: It’s a wonder he dont break his fucking leg off.

  It was Gerard Hurley. Nell could see Arthur was stiffened. Then Joe Hurley came up from the shore and smoothed it over between his brother and Arthur. They had lost land when the pulp mill had raised the level of the dam, and so Gerard was blaming Arthur’s wife. Nell had slightly forgotten about Joe Hurley. Then the whole side of the power of Joe whammed her in the face. She could hardly stand. She needed to sit down. She felt her heart and had not felt anything like it. They got back in the car and took a run at the dirt road up to the highway, but it was loose gravel and Arthur slid the Audi into the grass and then found the right front wheel was spinning. He sat there, his headlights painting the tall grass white and the dark sky above the grass. Then a knock on the window and Arthur rolled it down.

  We’ll try lurching the car, Joe said.

  There was an insurance refusal box that Arthur had checked and he saw it now, sitting in the glove box under the blindfold, and he read these words: full value. Three kids came up from the beach. A girl of nine looked at them. That’s not a good place to get stuck, she said. Then her grandfather drove up on a red quad. It was Loyola Hurley. He looked at the front of the car. She’s brought up, Loyola said. I’ll get the young feller in his four-by-four.

  Gerard Hurley was in the pickup. And they winched the Audi up. They are careful with bumpers and brake lines and they shout at the fact they make cars now with nothing to hook onto.

  Even the nine-year-old girl is disdainful of the new automobiles.

  They are wearing white shirts and with the rocking and the winching, Arthur has them covered in mud. But theyre out of the ditch.

  Now park that, Loyola Hurley said, up by mother.

  We should be getting on, Arthur said.

  They took a run and made the hill. And there, at the top, with her arms crossed standing by a place where trucks and ATVs are parked, was Loyola’s mother. Four generations of the Hurleys.

  SMOKE DRIFTED ALONG the tablelands. They drove on and Arthur calmed down. He said he’d had a piece of land down there that he bought off the Hurleys. He wanted to build a summer cabin there. He’d poured a foundation and a man from the church came down, asked him what he was doing. That it was church land. I bought this off Loyola Hurley, Arthur said. And the man said the Hurleys had owned all of this land a hundred years ago but had sold it to Parks Canada and to Bowater or it had been expropriated to widen the highway, or they had willed it to the church, such as what had happened with this piece here. Yes Loyola Hurley may not agree the church owns it, but does he have a deed to the land. The church has the deed.

  And so that was the beginning of the bad blood between Arthur Twombly and the Hurleys. When Helen had described to Arthur how the mill was to raise the level of the lake, he took out a topographical map and made a line on it. He saw that his cabin was safe, but the Hurleys would have water at their front door. They had built too close to the shore.

  They drove back into Rocky Harbour over the oldest rock on earth, rock made at the beginning of the earth’s cooling period. And Nell felt it. Like they’d left an ancient time and were heading for civilization. They ate in a straitlaced diner in Rocky Harbour. Doilies on the tables and chowder with edges still to the potatoes. Then they doubled back and stayed in the cabin on Grand Lake. Arthur took her down to the beach and showed her the Hurley land, how the water came up now around the cabin. They used to have a hundred feet of land jutting into the lake, he said. That’s where Loyola was when my boys drove up the lake. That’s how he knew they were lost, when the wind picked up.

  They made love and Nell felt something happening to her. Something deep in her pelvic bone was being massaged. It was an inner thrumming, was it vibration or was it sound. She was moved in a way gravity moves things. In a way that is impossible to reverse.

  FIVE

  SHE WAS NOT AVAILABLE to see Arthur. It had stretched to nine days. She was counting. He wanted to see her but she could not explain the thrumming feeling. Then she was in the post office and could smell the scotch tape. She felt as if she had outgrown him. At first it was Arthur who had been mulling over a cease in their relationship. She hadnt been able to muster the big heart needed to see that he had been in grief and was pushing through at least that first white gulf and had regained character and an attention to his family. Since then he’s regressed. Arthur was complicating grief-retirement with turning middle aged
and the resentment a man has of ploughing his carnal will into one woman for twenty years. Something about that resentment built into a knot and turned her. Nell had noticed his backside, that he was old. But it was also that she had received a feeling from Joe Hurley, a boy her age, and a recognition filled her body that it was someone like Joe Hurley she should be with. Well, her feeling was open on both ends. What Nell felt was that until she saw Joe Hurley that night she was falling in love with Arthur, and now she understood she did not want to waste her life on a man she could not have. He wouldnt want kids. He had David and Sasha and the memory of Zac. You only have one life, she told herself. It was something you had to remind yourself all the time.

  She saw Richard Text one day sitting in the dark windows of the Holiday Inn bar, reading a book. She walked in and he looked up and was happy to see her. You, he said, now there’s a reason to live. She was surprised at how warm he was.

  Youre the only person in this town who reads a book in public, Nell said.

  It’s an excuse to drink, he said.

  Sometimes she did not like herself, and it was so lovely to have a man say youre worth it. He had grown a beard and wore a new light jacket that someone must have bought for him. He looked good in the neat beard.

  Richard.

  Nell.

  He bought her a drink but she did not drink it. Her body wouldnt allow her. The smell repulsed her. He was writing down strings of numbers. He was writing with a pencil in one of those blue essay booklets. He was a chewer of pencils. There was something well-contained in the pencil, the notebook and the little glass of whisky. His notes on computer algorithms. What the hell, she thought. And he took her back to Arthur’s house. There was no Audi in the driveway, but she felt the betrayal to Arthur with each step. Or the right foot was betrayal and the left foot defiance.

  Nell: I didnt know you were still in town.

  I wasnt, he said.

  I knew Joe was back so I guess I should have known.

  There was something in the light in the room. There was a cheeriness that might have to do with paint or windows or the way the stairs opened more light from below. Richard had gone back to Santa Fe with Joe, but Arthur had more work for him this term. The Santa Fe work—overseeing a thesis, marking papers, he could do all that on computer.

  Richard: Joe just went back to Santa Fe.

  I think I’m pregnant, she said.

  All this time she knew Richard had brought her back to make love to her and she did not know she was going to say this. They lay on the bed and listened to a record. She knew, and relied on the knowledge that she was confident. Richard’s momentum halted. The room smelled of the son who had spent the summer here. There was a mixture of Richard and David in the room.

  It just occurred to me, Nell said. She had never been pregnant before. There was a trickle inside her like one of those false drinking glasses with liquid embedded in the glass. You didnt have to worry about drinking it. In retrospect she pinpointed the evening of the bonfires and the sudden weight she felt as they left the bed and cleaned up. Sunset. She had been thinking of Joe Hurley when they made love. It had been the first time she had made love thinking about another person.

  She lay on the bed with Richard. They just looked at each other with a warmth between them. He was understanding her. Then he warned her. You know the one about not being able to step into the same river twice, he said. Well that’s true with emotions as well. Arthur won’t fall in love with you the way he fell in love with Helen. The only thing that happens twice is, you can recognize an old feeling you had bloom in another person. And Arthur’s probably seeing it, that old feeling. Seeing it in you.

  It moved her, this caring. Did this man love her. In the end, he didnt want to have sex with her, and she realized she had misjudged him. Richard wanted to be a friend. He looked like he wanted to say more but was deciding it was against his best interests. He was deciding to give her advice, a warning about men, even though he was a man.

  She bought a test at the pharmacy and used the public restrooms. But when she was in the stall she felt it was wrong to find out there. She took a city bus back to the apartment. Lori Durdle from Stephenville was watching a soap opera in the living room. Nell sat on the toilet and unwrapped the wand and held the wand between her legs. It was often hard for her to urinate when someone else was nearby. She could hear the actors on the soap. She could imagine Lori Durdle, fat and unloved, living through the hyperbole of these soap lives. She waited for the see through window to change colour. Then she forgot what it meant if it changed colour. She’d left the box in her room. The yellow stick in the window was turning pink but she did not know if this meant she was pregnant or if pink meant status normal or even if the pregnancy kit could detect the sex of the baby and that she was having a girl.

  She crossed to her room. Lori Durdle said hello. She was very nice, Lori Durdle. She was good-hearted and was so right to her marrow. So what if she’d never eaten a red pepper before moving into residence. Lori Durdle didnt have to act at being good.

  The box said yellow was not-pregnant and pink, if it crossed into the A half of the window, meant pregnant. She looked at the window. It was all pink.

  ARTHUR SAT NELL DOWN. No children, he said. She was eating dark cake from a piece of kleenex. They were in Arthur’s office in the arts building. She thought about what Richard had said. She thought how often on the dance floor she’s danced with everyone, including women twice her age. She often led. Okay, Arthur said, there’s no one here to take care of you.

  I already know that, she said.

  But youre okay with what I’m suggesting.

  I’m nineteen.

  But she was not okay with it. She had never thought about having children, not since she was fifteen, which felt like a long time ago. She’d thought about them, but it was a bit like thinking about heaven. It would happen way down the road. She had never been pregnant so she said okay to Arthur because he had opened with that position.

  I’ve checked again, he said, and there’s no safe place here.

  You mean word would get out.

  It’s that it’s legal in St John’s.

  She had seventy-one dollars in her savings account. At one time she had three hundred thousand dollars and she’d given it to help a continent. Now she was thinking that might have been rash. She remembered the man at Oxfam she had spoken with, how Roger Edgecombe had listened to her and let a silence occur to see if she’d blurt out anything else after she had told him her idea. Roger said a reserve of money could come in handy. There were eventualities. The people who work for the third world are the most aware and conservative when it comes to personal well-being. She had been reckless, but no one could persuade her out of the recklessness.

  She agreed to Arthur’s driving her. They would make separate plans to be absent for four days. The drive across took eight hours and Arthur hardly spoke to her. They drove through five hundred miles of woods. Arthur had a lot of music to play on the car stereo. He liked a sort of jazz, she realized. He had arranged an appointment. They stayed in the Newfoundland Hotel. She had never been in a large hotel. She had once left Burlington and hitchhiked to Montreal to see a Picasso exhibit, and had slept outside of a hotel that had been sandblasted. She finally found John Mennie, the man she’d lost her virginity to, and he let her sleep at his apartment but she had to sleep with him. She didnt even take a bath, and had grains of cement in her hair from having slept under the canvas-wrapped scaffolding.

  There was a narrow window near the coffee maker. The window had a slice of the harbour and the ocean. So this was the wide-open ocean. That night Arthur cradled her and she could feel his tears while lying in the vise of his elbows.

  She wasnt that worried about moving towards what Arthur wanted because it wasnt like he could reach over and snatch it from her arms.

  Arthur parked on LeMarchant Road and they looked out upon the orderly fences and the overhanging trees that were not changing colour
as they did in Corner Brook. It was more like the wind was tearing the leaves off. Arthur tilted his wrist and compared the time to the turquoise digital counter on the dash. The hospital, the Grace, was across the street from the clinic. He did a mental check of the road, as if he was on duty. That’s where babies were born, whereas the clinic, that’s where the white suction hose is slid into you. There were seven people carrying signs outside the clinic. The signs had all been made by the same hand. They were all women except for one man, Arthur realized, a young man of about twenty. The people needed someone to wind them up. The man looked like the plumber he’d had in last week to fix the bathroom sink. At first he hadnt looked at the plumber, it was just one of the young men Chester Dawe had recommended. The plumber wanted to use sealant and then was vexed as he had to cut the pipe and take the throat of the drain to a hardware store. When he came back Arthur asked if he wanted a coffee. Not if youre making it special. He had coffee on. Do you take milk or sugar. With both, the young man said. Arthur hadnt poured sugar into a coffee mug in a long time. He stirred it and he remembered stirring coffee as a boy with his father in the woods of Michigan. He’d given up sugar when he was twenty. He’d had a roommate in college who asked him why he put sugar in coffee. Dont you drink coffee to taste coffee.

  He’d made the plumber the coffee and brought it up to the bathroom, where bits of sink were on an old newspaper and the tub had streaks of oil and dirt. Then he knew who the young man was, Gerard Hurley. He remembered him from that bonfire night. He knew from the eyes. He’d seen Gerard as a kid on the beach at the cabins they had at Grand Lake. His brother Joe and his father, Loyola. Plumbing and bathroom supplies. Gerard’s hands were busy, so Arthur put the coffee on the floor. This is the original pipe, Gerard Hurley said, from when the house was built. So what he had in his hand was a piece of plumbing his father had installed. That happened, Gerard said. He often came across his father’s work. He noticed the coffee on the floor and said, Thank you for the coffee. There was something wrong in the thank-you and in Gerard Hurley’s face, and Arthur had wondered if he shouldnt have put the cup on the floor.