“So what now?” she asked. “Any other projects in the works, now that your show’s finished?”
“God, no. That show almost killed me – literally and figuratively.”
“What are you going to do, then?”
“Get back to some paying work, for starters, I guess. Time to replenish the coffers.”
“I thought you sold a bunch of stuff from your show. That must’ve brought in some cash.”
“Sure, but I had bills to pay. So many bills.” (He’d also purchased a couple of rather pricy new lenses as a reward for his success, a move he was already regretting.)
She grabbed his arm. “Hang on, I’ve got it. This is perfect, Stephan. I’ve a freelance assignment for This City on this trendy little tourist village out in wine country. You could come with me, shoot the photos. September, uh, 5th to the 7th, or somewhere in there.”
“You think they’d let me walk into that?”
“Sure, the assigning editor’s an old friend. I’ll swing it with her. A couple of nights’ free accommodation, complementary gourmet dinners. Plus, a cheque at the end for all your hard work.”
“A cheque, you say.”
“Mmm hmm.”
“I see.”
It was an enticing offer, but he was wary.
“What did you say the dates were again?”
“The 4th to the 7th - we’ll head up Thursday night. It’s the weekend after Labour Day, so it will be nice and quiet, kids just back in school.”
“That does sound kind of nice,” he admitted.
“Check your calendar and let me know.”
* * * * *
She pulled the rental car – a Miata-like roadster of some sort, in a forest-green convertible model – over into the middle lane, zipping around a clot of slow-moving vehicles. A moment later she rolled the wheel back, hard to the left, nearly grazing the front bumper of an eighteen-wheeler as she slid the car back into the passing lane.
“I miss driving,” she shouted – the top was down, so it was a little noisy, and he had to strain to make out what she was saying. “Living downtown, there’s so little opportunity to get out on the open road.”
“That might be for the best,” Stephan mumbled.
“Pardon?”
“I didn’t know you could even rent these things,” he shouted back.
“Of course you can, Steph. You can get anything you want nowadays.”
She had picked him up at his apartment an hour or so earlier, and they’d since made their way, through moderate traffic, to the outskirts of the city.
It was easy for Stephan to feel good about the trip. True, he’d had misgivings since agreeing to participate. The assignment was frivolous, and since the magazine only needed a couple of quick shots, the money wasn’t great either. But he had been unable to turn her down. A beautiful destination, a free trip, a cheque, even a modest one – what did he have to lose, after all? And besides, he deserved a holiday. He’d been working relentlessly all summer, hadn’t left the city in months. It was time for a change of scene.
After an hour or so of driving, the Niagara Escarpment loomed up in front of them, a jagged, cliff-lined frontier between the lakeside low country and the highlands of the Ontario shield. The highway carried them over an arcing suspension bridge that spanned a large shallow bay at the lake’s western terminus – they had turned a corner now and were heading east on the far shore, towards New York state. For another half-hour, they skirted the base of the Escarpment, the lake on their left shoulder, before exiting onto a smaller, single-lane highway that wended its way up and away from the lake.
The land rose before them in a series of gentle benches, ornamented with rolling vineyards, airy woods and villages clustered on stone churches, where homesteading farmers had once gone with their families to pray for a good crop. Periodically they passed the chateau-like main buildings of the area’s larger wineries, their ornate facades incongruous amid the low-key prettiness of the surrounding landscape, as if they’d been Photoshopped in.
The roads up here were tangled and snaking, and he began to wonder if they were lost. But Jenny seemed so intent that he was reluctant to say anything, and after a while they came to a crossroads where a green sign pointed the way to their village. A few minutes later, they were driving down the village’s main street, tidy rows of touristy shops enfolding it on either side. It was a bit like a stage set, and he half expected as they came around a corner that the buildings would be revealed as plywood cut-outs propped up with two-by-fours from behind. Then he heard the low roar of the river, and a moment later they were glimpsing the white peaks of rapids between buildings.
The inn itself was housed in an old mill located on the river’s edge overlooking the rapids. Just downstream there was a waterfall that fed into a deep gorge, surrounded by woods on either side. There was a tiny island, maybe ten feet in diameter, at the crest of the waterfall. Its base was a column of solid stone, topped with a crown of tall grasses out of which rose a single, gnarled tree, like a giant bonsai. The mill’s walls were made of big, rough-hewn stones framed with heavy timbers, a method of construction that would once have been thought of as merely practical. Durable, cheap, no-nonsense. Now the mill seemed picturesque, exotic, a rustic contrast to the in-house chef’s delicate creations and the high-thread-count linens on the guests’ beds.
Their room was located on the building’s fourth and highest floor. It was a sort of garret, with a high, sloping ceiling a little like the one in Stephan’s studio. The walls were a creamy yellow, and the furnishings consisted largely of antiques, or replicas anyway – a heavy iron bed, an old steamer trunk, a roll-top desk. A single window on the room’s outer wall, with a sill so wide you could sit on it like a bench, looked out over the rapids, with a glimpse of a waterfall off to the right.
The room’s outer wall was unfinished, and after dropping his suitcase at the foot of the bed Stephan went over to it and placed his hand on one of the stones. Cool to the touch, it was so solid that it made him nervous – there was a subtle suggestion of violence in a thing so hard and unyielding. He wondered how much that single stone weighed, how much energy and industry it had taken, a hundred and fifty years ago – before modern construction cranes, before backhoes – to dig it from the earth and raise it up to this height.
“It’s weird to think that this place used to be a kind of factory,” he said.
“There’s something sexy about it.” She came up beside him and placed her hand on the stone, then slid it over until it touched his. “Don’t you think?”
He pulled his hand away and then turned her in his arms and kissed her up against the stone wall, careful not to press her too forcefully into its rough surface.
As he lay back on the soft, white sheets a few moments later, he could feel the remaining tension flowing out of his limbs. Her flawless body moved above him, her skin as white as marble against the dark caramel of the wooden ceiling. She leaned down to kiss him and her hair cascaded onto his face, tickling his cheeks. It smelled of the outdoors from the drive, and her kisses tasted of salty sweat. The drone of the rushing water nearby, muffled by the stone walls, gave him a sense of privacy and security. He felt as if they would be safe from the chaos and idiocy of the outside world for as long as they remained here.
The next morning they woke late, mid-morning sunlight already beaming in through flower-patterned curtains. They showered and dressed, then wandered down to the hotel restaurant, where, sneaking in just before the kitchen closed for breakfast, they lingered over crepes (Jenny) Eggs Benedict (Stephan).
“How’d you sleep?” he asked, between mouthfuls.
“Divinely,” she said, giving him a wink. “The sleep of the dead. A good workout always does that for me.”
“Me too.”
“Not to mention that it’s so peaceful and quiet out here compared to the city.”
“Let’s go for a hike today, climb a mountain or something,” he said. He felt like beat
ing his chest, or yodeling.
“We do have work to do, I’m sorry to say.” Her tone was mournful. “Not quite as interesting as mountain climbing, I know. Though there aren’t any mountains to speak of around here anyway, if that’s any consolation.”
“Work? You mean now?”
He wished they could put it off until later, or find some way of avoiding it altogether. Play hooky.
“Let’s just get out there and do it. Once we’re finished we can have the rest of the weekend to ourselves, to enjoy as we please.”
“Sounds good to me.” Come to think of it, he was glad to have a mission – whatever came afterwards would feel like a reward.
Sure enough, they were able to take care of much of the work they’d been assigned that same day. It was easy. Visiting a few shops on the village’s main street, she did quick interviews with owners and staff members, scribbling notes in a spiral-bound reporter’s notepad. Then Stephan would step in for the photos. He took shots in an antique market, a wine store, an artisanal cheese shop, a small gallery specializing in delicate watercolours. Later in the afternoon, when the light was fine and diffuse, he did some outdoor shooting. A panoramic streetscape of stone storefronts foregrounded by iron lamp-posts. A shot of the mill from the far side of the river, whitewater churning in the foreground.
It was strange how much easier the work you were paid for was than the work you weren’t. By the next morning they had already settled into a vacation-style rhythm. After waking, they lingered over breakfast in a booth overlooking the river. They wandered through the shops one more time, their eyes glossing a landfill’s worth of pretty knickknacks. They sat in a café, drinking coffee and flipping through whatever lifestyle magazine, newspaper or book was at hand. For lunch, they drove out to a winery in the countryside outside town and ate dinner in a dining room that overlooked the estate’s vineyards, which rolled away towards the lake lying blue and inscrutable on the horizon. The fields echoed at intervals to the crack of bird bangers – propane-powered noise-cannons designed to scare birds away from the near-ripe grapes.
Once or twice during their shopping expeditions, it had occurred to Stephan to wonder how tourism was able to support so much commercial infrastructure here. This wasn’t Venice or Machu Picchu, after all – how many sales of scented bath salts and antique chandeliers did it take to keep a place like this going? He chalked it up to the mysteries of capitalism, the complex meanderings of which were as alien and inscrutable to him as the currents of the river.
He held on to the hope that the time they were spending together marked a new beginning for their relationship. One day ten years from now they would look back on this trip as a milestone, the moment when they put immaturity behind them and became a real couple. After all, a casual observer could easily have mistaken them for a pair of newlyweds on their honeymoon, or young parents enjoying a refreshing weekend away from the demands of their toddler, having packed the little monster off to his grandparents’. He dropped a couple of hints, testing the waters. During their lunch at the vineyard, after a waiter referred to her as “The Madame,” Stephan had asked her, in a jocular tone, if she thought many of the people they’d encountered had assumed they were a married couple.
“Oh, people will believe anything, whatever appeals to them in the moment,” she said with a shrug. “In my job, I’ve learned not to worry too much about it.”
“I guess you need to protect yourself.”
“I’d go mad in a week, otherwise.”
He pretended he wasn’t disappointed – knowing by now the futility of going down that road – but that night, at dinner in a bistro on the village’s main strip, he slipped into a funk. It was their last night; the following morning they’d be returning to the city.
“Everything okay?” she asked, catching his mood. “The duck confit not to your liking?”
“No, it’s good,” he said. “I was just, uh, thinking about some work I have to catch up on when we get back.”
“Don’t go there, you fool.”
“Sorry. You’re right, I know.”
A part of him wanted to end the charade, to confront her about the subtle dishonesty of what they were doing. But he lacked the energy for a fight, and had heard all of her counter-arguments before, anyway.
That night, unable to fall asleep (no doubt it was all the rich food they’d been eating), he lay in the grey darkness listening to the river’s murmur. On their first night as he drifted off he’d imagined whispered voices within the white noise, and had expected that at any moment he would begin to make out words, entire sentences. But now he knew it was just the ceaseless racket of the water, babbling away mindlessly as it had done for thousands of years, saying nothing.
The next morning, before checking out, they went for a walk along the gorge. It was a perfect September day. The sky was so generically beautiful – cottony clouds against a vivid blue dome – that it reminded him of a stock photo. The gurgle of the river and the whisper of the wind in the treetops were like something from a CD of soothing nature sounds. Following a gravel path that led downstream from the mill, they strolled beneath an arched opening in a stone wall and into a stand of thick-trunked cedars. The roots of the cedars snaked across the trail here and there, ready to trip up the inattentive. They could hear the roar of the rapids close at hand, but the steep walls of the gorge at first blocked the river from view.
A short way into the woods, they came upon the ruins of two stone structures that must have once been outbuildings of the mill. Now all that remained of them were bare walls. Tree branches poked through what had once been windows, as if for a view of what was going on outside. Intrigued, Stephan paused to take a few photos, struck by how different these ruins were from the abandoned factories and warehouses he’d photographed in the city. Both sites had a strong presence, but here the rustic, natural setting gave the ruins a picturesque quality rather than a gritty one. They could almost be called pretty.
“It’s as if they were always meant to be here, now, in this state,” Jenny said.
He nodded. “You’re right.”
They lingered for a few minutes, poking around, before continuing on down the trail. It was silly, but Stephan felt as if they were plunging into a remote wilderness, even though they’d barely just left the village. The path wound its way up to the craggy edge of the gorge, and now they began to catch glimpses of the frothing rapids through the leaves and trunks of the woods. Every hundred feet or so, the cliff face gave way to a narrow chute that plunged steeply down to the river’s edge, where water pooled and eddied away from the rapids’ main thrust.
He glimpsed a pair of kayakers who’d pulled their boats – one the colour of a traffic pylon, the other in a blue that was a close match with the sky overhead – up onto a narrow beach situated between sets of rapids. The two men were munching on energy bars, drinking from plastic water bottles and talking in an excited way, their hands tracing lines down an invisible chart of the river in the air between them. Stephan was intrigued by the idea of running the gorge in a kayak, of skimming along the frothing surface of the river, although he knew it was something he’d likely never get around to actually doing.
After fifteen minutes, the ground about twenty feet to their right, on the opposite side of them from the river bank, began to drop steeply away, soon forming a second cliff face parallel to the one overlooking the river. It took him a minute to realize that there was another, much smaller, body of water – you would call it a creek, he supposed – at the bottom of this second face. It seemed that they were walking out onto a sharp point formed by the joining up of the smaller creek on their right, which ran through its own narrow gorge, with the main river. Yes, that was it.
A minute later, they came to the tip of the point, where the two cliff faces met in a triangular outcropping shaped like a ship’s prow. Water flowed past on either side, and since the “prow” faced downstream, it seemed as if it belonged to a huge ship that was sailing ba
ckwards up towards the headwaters of the river somewhere off behind them. The tip of the point was crowned with a circular viewing platform, built right out over the edge of the cliff, and circled round with a low stone safety wall.
He stepped up to the edge of the platform, rested his hands on the top of the wall to steady himself, and peered down into the gorge. The smaller creek was clear, its shallow waters transparent windows on its pebbled bottom, in contrast to the main river, which he now realized was tinted with rust-coloured sediment. A sharp line marked the spot where the clear water of the creek imbibed the dark sediment of the main river. The single, united river then fell away in sets of steeply layered rapids and passed under a high concrete bridge, before vanishing from view around a sharp bend.
He stepped back from the edge, and was going to ask Jenny what she thought was beyond the bend, but she had vanished. A jolt of fear ran through him. Was it possible that she have fallen into the river while he’d been looking the other way and been carried off? But after a moment she came walking up a half-hidden stairway that (as he now saw) led to a second, smaller observation platform tucked away just below the main one.
“Ah, there you are,” he said, blasé, hiding his relief.
“It’s so beautiful here.” Her face was radiant in the sunlight. “I know it’s cheesy, but it would be nice to get a picture.”
“Sure.”
Right on cue, another couple emerged from the woods and strolled up to the point.
“Excuse me!” Jenny called, rushing over to chat them up. Stephan followed.
They were many years older than he and Jenny were. Early sixties, possibly, prosperous in a down-to-earth suburban sort of way that Stephan knew well from his home town. The woman’s hair was grey, the man’s bone white, and they were dressed head to toe in Gore-Tex and polar fleece.
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