by John Bemrose
“Look at this,” she said. “They’ve got Shelley’s poems —”
“Jeez, do you think we better tell him?”
“Oh you’re as bad as Brad,” she said, giving his arm a squeeze.
“Don’t say that,” he said, keeping up the levity. But her reference to Brad had stung. “I’m far worse.”
“Then I’m really in trouble!”
She squeezed his arm again before releasing it. He watched her take down the ancient-looking volume in its faded leather cover. He was drunk on her now: her smell that was scarcely a smell but a freshness, a space: her shoulder brushing his as they leaned over the musty-smelling pages. He read:
The awful shadow of some unseen Power,
Floats though unseen among us …
Her attention to the brittle page was all-consuming, it drew the whole room towards Shelley’s words: the furniture, the photographs, the other books, all found their centre in the packed lines of verse. But he couldn’t concentrate on the poetry. He kept looking up at her, at the way her lips moved slightly as she read, at the way her hair fell across her birthmark, white burned below brown.
She uncovered a picture of the poet, under a tissue overlay. Shelley’s huge eyes were trained upwards in anxiety and exaltation. “I’ve been in his house,” she said, “on the Gulf of Spezia — the Casa Magni. You can feel him there. He was only thirty when he drowned.”
“How did he drown?” he said, for something to say. His eyes went on roaming her face, her hair.
“He was sailing and — he put out in a storm he shouldn’t have put out in. Maybe he thought it was time.”
She looked at Joe now, with a meaning he could not decipher: a probing seriousness and, far away, a hint of gaiety, of cold, bright gaiety, sun on a cold sea.
“I wonder what year this is,” she said suddenly, turning back to the book.
She found the date on the last page, and they struggled with the Roman numerals.
“I’m no good with these things.”
“Eighteen fifty-six,” he said at last, “the year the Crimean War ended.”
“You love it too, don’t you?” she said. And when he looked puzzled, “The past.”
“Sometimes I feel like it’s still going on,” he said. He had once tried to tell this to Smiley, and Smiley had mocked him mercilessly. He had not told anyone since.
“Yes!” she cried. “You think that when you turn a corner, you’ll run into women with long dresses. You’ll run into Shelley!”
“You’ve been in his house,” he said, wondering.
“Yes, I went there with — a friend. It was hard to find. But the people around there all call it Shelley’s house. There’s not a plaque up or anything. They just remember. You get a feeling they’re proud to.”
“Where is it again?”
“In Italy, near Leghorn. It’s on the sea. You know, the last anyone saw of Shelley he was laughing as he went out to meet the storm.”
For a moment, beyond speech, their gazes remained locked. She was the first to look away. He saw colour flood her neck, saw it change the mark on her cheek: the white becoming pink.
“Let’s go out,” he said.
“Where? Out in the cold?”
She had her head down, evading him.
“I mean, let’s go out on a date. Let’s go for a walk.”
“I can’t, Joe.”
“Why can’t you? You go out with him.”
“I like Brad,” she said, lifting her face in defiance.
“You don’t like me?”
“You know that’s not what I mean. I like you very much.”
She was riffling quickly through the Shelley now. She put the book back on the shelf.
He touched her hair, tried to tuck it behind her ear, as he had seen her do, so many times. She pulled away.
“Just go for a walk with me sometime,” he pleaded.
“Of course I will — a walk.”
She had turned her back on him, and her voice sounded muffled, miserable.
“Anna,” he said.
Liz came in.
“There you are,” she said. “We’ve been looking all over for you!”
Brad, grinning, towered behind her.
17
IN THE OLDS’ SPEEDOMETER, the green ribbon grew longer, extending to seventy-five, eighty, as Brad floated them past a string of slower cars. He steered with one hand, his arm straight to the wheel, and kept glancing over his shoulder at Joe, chatting with his happy, boasting mixture of enthusiasm and disbelief, as if the world were full of marvels he could scarcely credit.
“Too fast,” Anna said from the seat beside him. Her dark glasses gave her a convalescent air. She had a headache, and for the last half-hour had kept mostly silent. They were on their way to Niagara Falls. The trip had been Liz’s idea: Anna, unlike the rest of them, had never seen the Falls, and wouldn’t it be nice for the four of them to go down? So here they were, on the day after the party, in Brad’s father’s black 98, watching the oncoming lane where a tractor and wagon had just pulled into their path.
“Brad,” Joe warned from the back seat.
“I got it,” Brad said, and at the last second, while fascination hovered at the edge of horror, he tucked the Olds behind a station wagon.
“You see,” Brad said cheerfully, “if we’d been going any slower we’d be dead.” In the filthy window of the station wagon a child was waving frantically.
“If you’d been going any slower, we wouldn’t have been out there,” Anna said dryly, and Joe, sitting directly behind her, thought, How can you go out with him?
Through gaps in the trees, Lake Ontario gleamed dully like sheet metal. Their near-miss had filled the car with silence. The bitter, devouring land fled past in its post-harvest brownness. A dog ran down a hedged drive, its bark small and faraway. On a porch, a carved pumpkin scowled. After their exchange over the Shelley, Joe had not been able to talk alone with Anna again. He felt there was unfinished business between them. He’d asked her to go out with him, and in that moment felt he had brought her, her head bowed away from him, to the edge of a response that would reveal something new, that would break them out into new territory. Perhaps his doom lay there, but he was more inclined to think her answer would favour him, for he clung to a conviction that they were bound at a level she must eventually acknowledge. The centre of his awareness was the soft helmet of her hair, not two feet away, and her face, looking straight ahead, alive with expressions he could not see. He felt he was alone with her — the others in the car were no more important than strangers — and that she felt this way too.
They came down through the city of Niagara Falls, past the empty motels and cavernous eating joints, past the low hall with its shadowy bumper cars, huddled together for the winter, past a ten-foot-high picture of a bearded fat lady: Rasputin with breasts.
“God, isn’t this awful,” Brad said happily. No one answered him. A Sunday bleakness had settled in; it seemed a mistake to have come.
Just ahead, across an area of parkland, the tops of the two great Falls came into view: a shredding whiteness, slightly unreal amidst the clouds of mist rising from the gorge and filling the air with moisture. Brad set the wipers going.
“Stop!” Anna cried suddenly.
“There’s no parking here,” Brad said, grinning across at her.
“Stop, stop!” she ordered. Sitting forward, she was pounding her hand on the dash like a child in full tantrum.
“Brad, stop!” Joe shouted. He thought she was going to be sick. When Brad pulled over to the curb, Anna got out immediately. Joe followed.
“Joe, please, I have to do this alone —”
“Are you all right?”
“Yes. Please — I have to see the Falls alone.”
She hurried across the road without looking back, the collar of her camel-hair coat up, and passed among a series of shrubs wrapped head-to-toe in burlap: a procession from the land of the dead. On the far side of the p
ark, she crossed another road and disappeared behind a tour bus.
Her sudden desertion left them stunned. “We should wait for her,” Joe said, but when after several minutes she had not come back, or even reappeared, Brad suggested they go and park. They drove on, behind the dolorous thump of the wipers, to the public lot near the Canadian Falls.
A few minutes later, Joe looked down the length of the stone safety wall, which snaked along the rim of the gorge through the mist. He could see tourists, gathered here and there on the wet pavement, peering over the railing that topped the wall, but there was no sign of Anna Macrimmon. On the other side of the wall, the shallow water of the Niagara raced over limestone towards the brink. There, the edge of the bedrock was a wavering shadow under the turning water. The river at this crucial juncture was green, an extraordinary, livid green, shining and flickering like a living jewel, and for a moment it cleansed his mind of all but itself. Far down, on the black shifting marble of the basin, the Maid of the Mist looked like a toy, its decks crammed with yellow-suited ants.
Desultorily, they debated whether they should look for Anna. Above the Falls, the wide river descended through its rapids, where a rusting barge had stuck on a reef: a pivot for circling gulls. In Anna Macrimmon’s absence, the Niagara had grown cold and desolate. They had come here to show her the Falls, and without her, the water seemed to lose its meaning.
“If she wants to trek around out here, that’s fine,” Liz said. She hadn’t bothered to look into the gorge, and she appeared miserable, her hands buried in the pockets of her fur jacket. The mist and cold and raging river seemed an affront to her, an unnatural habitat she had to endure between the comforts of more sheltered places. “I’m going into the restaurant.”
“I’ll go have a look for her,” Brad said, gazing down the gorge.
“She hasn’t had enough time,” Joe said, meeting Brad’s eyes.
“Oh really?” Brad said, bemused. Joe found his air of superiority maddening.
“She’s never seen the Falls,” Joe said. “This is important to her, seeing them for the first time. She doesn’t want to be disturbed.”
“I’m not gonna stop her looking!” Brad laughed.
“She’s a poet,” Joe said, with real anger. “She can’t look at something if you’re there jabbering beside her.”
“Who says I’ll jabber?” There was a knifing seriousness in Brad’s look now — he didn’t always play the joker.
“Come on, boys,” Liz pleaded, a bit wearily. She took Joe’s arm and tried to draw him towards the restaurant. He broke away.
Joe was prepared to do anything to keep Brad from going after Anna. He knew he looked ridiculous, knew that, in the end, he couldn’t stop Brad, but he hung on stubbornly, with his hands jammed in the pockets of his new coat, glaring at everything that moved.
“Joe, please,” Liz begged softly.
“You don’t know the concentration it takes, to make a poem,” Joe said and felt colour flood his face, to find himself defending poetry. “She has to really look at the Falls. She’s told me about it,” he added, half-lying. She had told him about “looking exercises” she did, when she’d stare for minutes at a time at a leaf or an insect, to train herself to see what was actually there. But he didn’t really know about the connection between this activity and the making of poems. “It’s important that she be alone, because even to have another person around distracts her.”
“Okay, okay,” Brad said, raising his hands in sarcastic surrender. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll walk along here — is that okay? I’ll walk along here, and when I see her, I won’t go up to her. I’ll hang back, okay?”
When Brad trailed off along the wall, Joe was tempted to go after him. For a furious moment, he wanted to grab him, start a fight, throw his joking, lanky body into the gorge. But Liz was tugging at his arm again, and this time he allowed himself to be led into the restaurant. They sat at a linen-covered table behind tinted glass, which made the Falls outside seem doubly gloomy, like an old photograph. A waiter brought them water. Liz ordered soup and a sandwich. Joe, who was not hungry, and who was still conscious enough of his surroundings to be appalled by the prices, ordered soup. He was furious with himself for exposing the depth of his feelings about Anna. What had he gained but the mockery he’d seen dancing in Brad’s eyes?
“Anna’s a strange girl,” Liz said dryly. The soup had left a red mark at the corner of her crimped mouth.
Joe mucked with his spoon in his bowl.
“I guess you’ve seen her poetry,” she said, trying again. “She never shows it to me. Is it good?”
“It’s better than good,” he said. “She’s a poet: it’s what she wants to do. It’s what she does do,” he added defiantly, pushing bits of cracker around. Anna had told him one afternoon when they were sitting together in the school library that she hoped to publish books one day. She had said, “I think my life would be well spent if, at the end, there were a hundred pages of poems that people still wanted to read when I was gone.” He remembered the iron wistfulness of her voice, the sun falling across their scattered books, remembered how the inside of his foot had accidentally brushed hers. Remembered, too, the strange wave of sadness that had overwhelmed him, when she’d revealed her ambition: as if giving your life to poetry were some heroic but ultimately doomed act, like setting off to cross the Atlantic in a boat too small. He had experienced the same feeling while defending her to Brad by the barricade. Her task seemed hopeless, and yet it made him want to protect her all the more. Her ambition was her place of vulnerability, and there, somehow, he felt he could help her.
“So tell me about it — this poetry of hers —”
He met the overly frank gaze of those violet eyes. Liz had made poetry sound like some childish indulgence.
“You can’t tell somebody about poetry,” he said angrily. He was quoting Anna, If you could say what it was about, there’d be no need to write it. He looked away, to the sepia Falls, toiling unreally past the distant safety wall. He felt half-drugged by the warm restaurant, and half-furious with frustration. His body needed to act, to dispense its seething energies. He kept tearing open packets of crackers and crumbling them in his soup while Liz watched.
“You like her, don’t you?”
He blew out dismissively and looked past her to the Falls.
“Because I’ll be straight with you, Joe, she’s with Brad. She’s in love with him. And anyway, I don’t think she’s really for you. You’re too much like her. Too moody. She needs someone like Brad, to keep her spirits up. I mean, Brad makes her laugh.”
He looked into Liz’s cool, almost beautiful face, and hated her. He felt she had put long, cold fingers inside him and grasped some essential organ and squeezed it. But he sat perfectly still, not speaking while she ate her sandwich and sipped her coffee. He looked again past the dark, curly mass of her hair to the distant Falls. A dreariness was overcoming him, an exhaustion. The world was not as it should be, and yet the world was here, as unchangeable and formidable as bedrock. He went on watching the shredding water, sitting in his restaurant chair. It was as if he and she had been together for years: she, his wife, calmly eating, accustomed to his sullen refusal to talk, his wandering eye.
A few minutes later, Brad and Anna came in, their faces pink with activity and excitement.
“She wants to go everywhere now,” Brad announced triumphantly. “The Maid of the Mist, the whirlpool —”
“I’m drunk on this place!” Anna said, stripping off her coat as Joe, suddenly self-conscious, grinned at the tabletop. “It’s cured my headache.”
Later, they drove to the whirlpool, where the Niagara coiled against itself in a great elbow of the gorge, about a mile downstream from the Falls. A steep, forested path led down through a break in the gorge wall. At the edge of the water, Anna stood on a low rock and looked out over the wide, green pool, where whitecaps charged this way and that and chewed-up logs circled endlessly, unable to escape the suck
ing power of the whirlpool. Beyond, where the river entered, were rapids: white giants in perpetual frolic.
And perhaps Joe’s argument with Brad bore some fruit after all, for without speaking of the matter, the three of them left Anna alone. But Joe watched her: she was more fascinating to him than even the surging water, though in a way she seemed part of it, its focus and intelligence. She stood absolutely motionless, with her head a little down, her sunglasses pushed back onto her hair, her hands in the pockets of her coat, confronting the whirlpool. He wondered what she was experiencing, and was moved to think that this was her work. It was her job, as a poet, to open herself to the river. He was envious that, already, she was practising her calling. She was older than he, she was farther down the road that led on through life.
He could feel the force of her concentration. Once, she reached up to keep her glasses from falling. But otherwise she was still. She had forgotten her friends completely, she had forgotten him. He watched her deep gaze travel out, across the powerful river, the shifting slabs of water, the eruptions of liquid bedrock, and at the same time in, as if the whirlpool were inside her. At that moment, perhaps sensing his attention, she looked over at him, though he was not at all sure she actually saw him. Her eyes, he thought, seemed oddly blind.
18
ANNA FELL ILL AGAIN — her headache coming back — and on the way home lay in the back seat with her head in Liz’s lap and Joe’s new coat pulled up to her chin. From the front seat, Joe could sometimes hear her let out a long sigh, or a whimper of pain. Mostly though she was silent, and this silence suggested an act of concentration, as if she were trying to accomplish some delicate, difficult task, like threading a needle in the dark. He had never witnessed such a severe reaction to a headache before, his mother simply took an Aspirin and turned grim. But this, it was as if Anna Macrimmon had been flung violently to the perimeters of existence. Yes, for all her calm, all her maturity, she harboured a sensational vulnerability, a secret dialogue of extremes. In some way he could not fathom, her headache seemed connected to her excitement in the gorge, to the way she had looked so steadily at the river. It was as if she had looked too long at the sun.
