by John Bemrose
“Very good-looking,” he said, struggling to maintain a disinterested note. “Were you in love with him?”
“In a way,” she mused, still watching him.
He could no longer stop himself.
“Will you be seeing him — when you go back?”
“Yes,” she said in a muffled tone, looking down at her book. Staring over the back of his chair, with the false smile dying on his face, he felt suddenly emptied. In two seconds, the happiness and confidence of the entire summer had evaporated.
“So this is my rival,” he said. His voice came out as a croak.
She turned a page. Her bare feet were twining with each other, and this seemed to him the twining of naked bodies, of which his was not one.
“Anna,” he said.
“I feel like you’re picking me apart,” she said to her book.
“It’s a natural-enough question,” he said. “I’m naturally curious, in a jealous sort of way, about my rivals.”
“He’s not your rival,” she said in a flat voice.
“He’s here on your desk. You don’t have a picture of me on your desk. What happened to that little picture I gave you?”
She looked up at him again, without expression: she was displeased. But he brazened it out with her, making no attempt to hide the misery on his face.
“He’s homosexual,” she said finally, looking down again. She sighed and pressed two fingers into her closed right eye, as if to force back some incipient pain.
“Homo —”
“He sleeps with men,” she said.
“I know what it means,” he said, flushing. He stared at her. He might know the word, but he didn’t know any homosexuals himself, though occasionally some boy at school would be denigrated with taunts of “homo!” or “faggot!” There was something other-worldly in the term, since no one really knew what a faggot was, in any experiential sense: the boy might as well have been called a centaur.
On the bed, Anna rolled to her back, holding her book with one hand above her face. After a moment she flung it aside, as if in impatience or disgust, while he watched intently from across the room.
The day before she was to leave, they walked up the Atta to Devil’s Cave. In front of the cave was a sandy depression littered with the remains of old fires: charred logs, nuggets of wadded tin foil, cruel shards of brown glass. Clearing a place for their blanket with his feet, he watched as she stooped to peer into the deep recess between two enormous slabs of limestone. She was wearing white sneakers, jeans, and a white T-shirt that barely reached her belt. It had slid up, revealing the softly notched serpent of her spine. They had not made love for a week, not since his questions about the photograph, he noticed, though her own explanation was that she was having her period.
She came away from the cave without comment and stood near him, looking at the river where it slid into the pool. It was the deepest place he knew of on the Attawan: formed by the river as it rounded a sharp bend and met the sudden resistance of the limestone. The water here, opaque with its burden of soil, was in a constant state of agitation — its surface crossed with little whirlpools that popped up mysteriously and as mysteriously disappeared. Upstream, the bank ascended gradually to a cliff of grey clay, sharp-edged against the almost painful brightness of the sky. There was something oppressive in the look of this cliff — she was staring at it now, one hand shading her face — something rudely prehistoric, as if it had endured from the era before life, the slick, leaden clay falling almost sheer to the water.
“There’s an odd feeling about this place,” she said, coming back. “It’s like there’s somebody else here. I keep feeling I’m being watched.”
“We could go somewhere else.”
She trailed along the edge of the bank without answering. He went on putting out their picnic things. Every object he touched — the pink Tupperware container of sandwiches, the Thermos of coffee, the tinned cheese from France he’d bought in the A&P — seemed oddly insubstantial: cardboard fill-ins for the real thing.
They sat side by side, picking at the ham and cheese sandwiches his mother had made, looking over the coursing water. He had come here all his life, first with his father, then with friends: it was a favourite swimming hole, though at least two drownings had occurred here when weak swimmers had been trapped under the bank. He told her about these deaths now, with a secretly hostile eagerness, unable to stop himself. “One fellow — Graham Lessing — he used to be in my class — when they pulled him out and worked on him, he came to. He sat up and asked for a glass of water and then he lay back down and died.”
“He asked for a glass of water?”
“I know. It’s like he didn’t appreciate them pumping his lungs out.”
“How did he ask? I mean, was he conscious?” she said skeptically.
Joe admitted he hadn’t been there; he’d only heard the story later.
“Aha,” she said.
He was deflated, feeling he’d failed to communicate the strangeness of the drowning. Upstream, near the cliff, the river swished at a broken willow branch. He had always loved this place, but today it had a heartless quality, as though it cared nothing for human beings. “I have to ask you something,” he said.
She glanced at him, a bit guardedly.
“What happened to you, before you came to Attawan? You said you had a bad time.”
She was silent, working the remains of her sandwich between her fingers. Earlier, he would not have dared to ask such this question, wary of the limits she had imposed on him. But now he wanted facts, no matter how treacherous.
“Yes, well, it wasn’t all bad,” she said, tossing the little ball of bread towards the water. There was something new in her tone, a calm, simple sincerity. “I had an affair, this was in France, in Paris, and well — I sort of got in over my head.”
She paused, looking at the sand in front of her. He was scarcely breathing. It was the word “affair” that had done it. It sounded so mature, and somehow dangerous.
“He was a painter,” she said. “The previous fall, he’d taught a few classes at our school. All the girls were crazy for him. When he asked me if I’d model for him, at his studio, I sort of jumped at it.”
So she told him about Guillaume. Guillaume in his paint-stained jeans and T-shirt. Guillaume, who had travelled the world, and kept in his studio a drum from Borneo he said was made from human skin. Chunks of temple carving from Thailand. A six-foot papier mâché dragon from Mexico, its fierce jaws clamped on the body of a hapless victim. He painted richly coloured oils of the human figure — nearly always a naked female extended diagonally across the canvas like some rough, tilting landscape. He was thirty-three. She had just turned seventeen.
She didn’t describe how she came to sleep with Guillaume, she spared Joe that, though he gathered that she had been happy with him in the beginning. “My parents didn’t know,” she said. “At least at first.” She broke off and stared bleakly in front of her, as if whatever came next in her story had somehow deprived her of speech.
“Things started to go wrong,” Joe said, prompting. He wanted — needed — that part of the story now.
A bitterness entered her voice. “If you think someone doesn’t like your body, there’s really no place to hide. He’d tell me I was too heavy. Too slow. I was stupide. I was reading the wrong books. He didn’t have much money, so I’d steal francs from my mother and give them to him. I even stole paint. I’d go into a store and come out with my pockets full of tubes. He used to call me his petite voleuse.” She shook her head. She seemed baffled and dismayed by her own behaviour, and at the same time fascinated by it.
“I wasn’t eating,” she said. “I wasn’t doing my homework. In school, all I could think about was getting out so I could go by his studio. Then he started making these little speeches — I needed to get out more in the world, I needed to have a boyfriend my own age. One afternoon he told me he had to go away for a few days. Stupid me, I started standing in t
he park across the street, watching his building. When I finally went in, the concierge told me he’d moved.”
She raked at the sand with her fingers, once, twice, three times, gouging a small trench. She flung away a handful of sand.
“I saw him again, one day in the street,” she said. “And it all started up again — at least for a couple of hours. Afterwards, he went completely cold. He was like that. He said he just didn’t want to see me again. He meant it this time.”
Joe tried to hug her, but she pushed him off. For a long while, she stared at the sand. When she began to speak again, her voice had flattened, gone almost dead. “Everything seemed raw, too bright. I began to get headaches all the time. I wouldn’t leave the apartment. I refused to go to school.” She glanced up at Joe, and he saw she was ashamed: ashamed she had gone to pieces over this, ashamed, now, that he was seeing what had happened. “It was weeks. My parents didn’t know what to do.” Finally, they had sent her to a psychiatrist, but after three sessions she quit. “He was an iceberg,” she said. “I hated him.” Her real doctor, she maintained, was Enrico, the man in the photograph on her desk. He was the son of friends of her parents. She had known him since she was a little girl. He spent hours visiting her, he coaxed her outside, on walks.
And then her father, who worked in Intertex’s Paris office, was offered a chance to set up new accounting procedures at a mill in Canada, a job that would take one or two years. “Canada seemed safe somehow. I hadn’t lived here since I was ten — my dad was from Montreal — but I had good memories. I had this idea I could start over again, you know, live a kind of normal life, a schoolgirl’s life, nothing so — extreme.”
She fell silent. Her story had come to an end, it seemed, and yet he still didn’t know the most important part. She was dragging her fingers through the hole she’d made in the sand, with an awkwardness that to Joe’s eyes made her seem much younger. He wanted to comfort her, but wasn’t sure she wanted him to. She seemed far away now, isolated in her unhappiness.
“And it worked,” he said, “coming here?”
“We didn’t come here right away. We went to visit my mother’s family, in Brittany. That’s where I started to get better.”
“Ah,” he said.
“It’s been fine here,” she said. “It’s just that — well, I don’t think I’m really a small-town person. I can’t pretend I’m someone I’m not. It was foolish to think I could.”
She spoke haughtily, almost angrily, as if lashing out at him, as if he were somehow to blame for her failure to belong in Attawan. He looked at her. “Liz says you can’t love, because of what happened.” He had thrown the accusation at her, sharply. He suspected now she never had loved him.
“What does Liz know?” she said, and got suddenly to her feet. She walked towards the river, where she stood watching the shifting currents.
“I love you,” he breathed. The words — the tremendous emotion — had come swimming up from his desolation like a new discovery — the discovery he was fated to make over and over.
Turning back to him, she met his eyes. Then her gaze fled.
They stripped off their clothes and walked upstream, following a narrow path that ran along the base of the cliff to the fallen willow that lay aslant the current. He watched her intently as she moved ahead of him: her wide shoulders, her long legs, and her skin so smooth it seemed unnatural. In the shadow of the cliff, she hugged herself and complained of the cold. He showed her how to climb out on the trunk of the willow and drop into the current. She plunged in with a cry, and the river carried her off. He caught up to her downstream, in the pool by the cave, where they briefly kissed, her legs wrapping him in the coursing, tickling water.
Immediately she had to get out and do it again. He stayed in the pool, watching her hurry up the narrow path below the cliff. At the willow, she turned and waved to him. Her nakedness hurt him, yet he could not tear his eyes from her. Against the whiteness of her skin, her bush seemed like some small, dark animal that had clung there.
When she dropped into the water, he did a surface dive and swam for the bottom. It was dark almost immediately, the yellow-brown water of the surface layer turning to impenetrable purple. On the bottom was an old, waterlogged pine trunk, the stumps of its branches stippling it like the cruel knobs of some medieval club. He managed to grasp one of these, using it to keep himself down. Crouching on the cool ooze, he peered up into the haze above, hoping to get a glimpse of her. He stayed down as long as he could — he and Smiley used to play this game, their record for staying under was about a minute and a half — and finally, with burning lungs, he kicked towards the surface.
Broaching with a gasp, he could see no one. She was not in the river. She was not anywhere on shore. He called her name, turning and turning in the pool with a rising concern. His feet scraped bottom: the current had carried him towards the exit of the pool. Swimming back to its centre, he dove again, clawing his way down to where the current was weaker, making his way along the bottom while groping blindly with his hands in the dark. Finally he touched a limb. But it was only the end of the pine tree, slippery with algae. Again he rose to the surface. Again, there was no one there. Panic took him now, ice in the gut. Upstream, the sun was a blaze of thorns above the cliff. Then she was there: popping up not five feet from him, her head slick as an otter’s. She had not seen him.
She was crying out his name, sending it out with thrilling desperation to the empty shore. When he spoke, she screamed and turned to him, her eyes filled with fear. “What happened to you? What happened to you, why did you do that!”
“I just dove,” he said. “I must have missed you when I came up —” He was feigning innocence, secretly gratified at her alarm. He had meant to worry her, with his first dive, he had meant to make her afraid.
She swam to him. He realized she was weeping, her face rubbery like a little girl’s, weeping and hanging on him — inwardly, he triumphed. On shore, he wrapped her in the red tartan blanket. Shivering, she huddled against him.
“You see,” he said, hugging her protectively, “you do love me a little.”
She shuddered and snuggled in closer, while he looked past her, to the dark, oppressive cliff that, like her, had not answered.
That evening, he ate with her family in the backyard, under the maple tree, on the old deal table with the gamey leg, which swayed a little under its white cloth. Her parents were mostly silent — there seemed to be some tension between them — but afterwards Joe and Anna were able to escape in her father’s Bel Air. They drove north out of town, following the winding highway across a plain sectioned into farms. A ripe goldenness suffused the fields, the heightened life before dusk. At Anna’s prompting he turned down a gravel sideroad that ran straight east. They came to a small pioneer church, sheltered in a grove of maples. The pointed doors were locked, but they walked in the churchyard, past the cobblestone walls with their even rows of smooth, egglike stones. The foliage lashed above them with a dry, wild sound like surf, in a wind that seemed to carry the orange light that washed everywhere. To the north, the wooded Reid Hills crept out, blue skirmishers at the edge of the plain.
Anna had more energy for exploring than he did, so he trailed around after her, faintly pleased when something pleased her — an old gravestone, the absorption of a wire fence by the bark of a tree — but also resentful that on their last night, she could bother with anything but him. He could not forget her story. It was obvious, that compared to her painter, he had hardly touched her.
He watched her as she stopped to scratch a bare leg, watched as the wind plastered her dress against her thighs, revealing their shape — that sudden suggestion of hidden nakedness. It seemed he was seeing her for the first time, everything about her seemed that novel, that fresh - though it also occurred to him that this might be the last time too. The last time and the first — the two times had become one, painful in its vividness. He turned away from her, to the field behind the church. Someone, he
saw with a start, was walking there — a tousle-haired child of three or four, walking by himself through the wind-whipped grain. His heart leapt in recognition, though of what he couldn’t have said. A moment later, he saw that the “child” was only the upright iron seat of an old mower, abandoned at the edge of the field. But the vision had moved him. He turned to Anna, thinking to tell her about it. But words seemed pointless now; words could do nothing.
Later, as they drove away through the light-swept fields, he looked over at her where she sat against the door, gazing at a line of tossing maples.
“I have to,” he said, his voice breaking harshly. “I have to make love to you.”
She did not even seem to have heard; he felt that, in some way, she had already left.
“I don’t care about your period,” he said. And a moment later, throwing away the last of his pride: “Anna!”
“All right,” she said, looking over at him. He did not entirely believe her smile, but he was grateful for anything now. He swung the Bel Air up the river road, into the Reid Hills, sliding it into a narrow lane in the woods. When he began to kiss her, she stopped him. “Not here,” she said, “outside.” He led her down a trail, through poplars and spruce. They were sheltered from the wind now, in a kind of sandy bowl at the top of a cliff. They gazed east, over the Shade, the river descending through woods and fields. Far below, in the shadow of the cliff, the dim water whispered around a solitary rock.
They spread an old blanket and an afghan they had brought from the car, quickly stripped off their clothes, and slid into their makeshift bed. He wanted this lovemaking to be better than anything they’d had — it seemed a kind of last chance. She seemed determined too, but there was soon a problem. The mosquitoes were out. Even when he was moving in her, she seemed more aware of them than of him, continuously brushing the insects away from their faces, laughing at the discomfort they caused.
Afterwards, sulking, he pulled on his clothes in silence. He wanted her to speak first, he wanted her to ask him if he was all right — to show that much care for what he was going through — but with only her panties on, she gathered the rest of her clothes and hurried back to the Bel Air. When he got in a little later, he slammed the door and stared out the windshield towards the thicket of birches. “I felt you were hardly there,” he said.
