The American Lover

by Rose Tremain

  Lena laid her head on Walter’s chest and he held her close to him. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. He knew that what she said was true.

  What Walter felt, after he’d got over what he called his ‘Fonda moment’, was a sudden burgeoning of delight in himself and in his life.

  He was still an energetic man. He drove a new Honda CRV with 4x4 drive and heated front seats. Now, it amused him to sing a little rhyme as he drove along:

  I’m Henry Fonda,

  Riding in a Honda . . .

  He’d loved and respected learning all his life and his head was full of poetry. The bookstore had been at the centre of the Hillsboro community for more than thirty years. He was proud of this. Proud of the dedication and the continuity. He hadn’t lived in vain. And now he was free. He could walk in the woods, or fish in the lake. He could buy a boat and learn to sail or just get one with an engine and be done with it. He could afford to lay in some nice wine. Sitting on his south-facing porch, he could read Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson all day, sipping Chablis, if he chose to. Lena wouldn’t mind. His happiness was hers. They would eat perch and trout and crayfish for their suppers. They would gorge themselves on fine sunsets. They would have the retirement all Americans dream of and seldom get.

  Lena had stuffed the Honda with her favourite ornaments and china and cushions and lamps from the Greenhills house, so they set about making the cabin ‘cosy’. A nice man called Charlie came to install their wood-burner and congratulated them on buying ‘top of the range’, and said, as he left, ‘These little cabin places, I love ’em. Best kind of home you can get.’

  The warm May weather carried on into June and Lena and Walter took a daily morning dip in the lake before breakfast. The water was cold. It always had been cold, but Walter felt that this immersion somehow cleansed his blood and prolonged his life. The only thing was, he would have liked a target for his swims – some raft or island to reach each time, so that he could say to himself, ‘Here I am!’ when he got there. And he thought that if he’d been younger and had woodwork skills he would have been able to construct a raft and tether it by some means to the lake floor, so that it didn’t float away.

  Then there was the question of a dock. There was no point buying a boat, if there was no dock for getting in and out of it. Even hopeless old Fonda had somehow got himself a dock! So Walter went in search of builders and found one whose name and logo he liked: ‘Jim Pride, Superior Builder. Pride of Lake Superior.’ And Pride came and stood at the water’s edge and made a sketch for Walter of how his dock would look and Walter thought it ‘the prettiest darn dock this side of Daisy’s dock in The Great Gatsby’, and he felt his heart swell. He stuffed Jim Pride’s fist with down-payment dollars and began going round the boat yards. He knew that he’d name his boat Lena.

  In their first weeks, Lena wrote letters to old Nashville friends. Dear Bobbie, Well, here we are, up in Canada, away from it all. Walter’s very tickled by what we’ve done . . . Dear Mandy, Hope nobody’s missing us yet. Think we may be gone a while . . .

  But by the time August came and the dock was almost finished, Lena couldn’t be bothered to tell people their news any more. She said to Walter; ‘Letter-writing’s giving me cramps in my hands, and anyway, what’s important is living this new life, not bragging about it.’ And he said: ‘I one-hundred-and-one per cent agree.’ So she quit writing letters, quit thinking about friends like Bobbie and Mandy, and she found that this liberated a clean space in her head, like her mind was an attic cleared of useless things.

  The only person she wrote to, to ask her to ‘keep an eye on the comings and goings in the house’ was their immediate neighbour, Wilma Thirsk. And Wilma wrote back that Shirley and her friends had ‘gotten the habit of playing guitars and banjos in your yard late at night, but I don’t like to go round to complain because some of the friends are black and bald and scare me half to death’.

  So Lena had to sit Walter down and say, ‘What can we do about this, Walter? It just ain’t fair on Wilma.’ And Walter said, ‘There’s nothing we can do. Remember how it was when we were there.’

  They remembered all right. No sooner did she arrive in Nashville than Shirley got in with a crowd of hangers-on at Opryland. One or two of them were backup singers – which Shirley yearned to be, too. The rest were riggers and costume people and electricians, black and white and Hispanic and Polish. They seemed to move about in one gigantic troupe, invading the house at four in the morning or at two in the afternoon, when Walter was taking his nap, carrying in crates of beer and bottles of whisky, raiding Lena’s refrigerator to make sandwiches or cook burgers and playing music day and night. According to Shirley, they were ‘the best fun people I’ve ever known’, and she explained that she had to stick with them and show them some hospitality because through them could come some singing work, ‘and this is my hope now, my hope for a new life’.

  How could they deny their daughter a new life?

  They tried to be friendly towards the troupe, but there were so darn many of them, Walter kept forgetting their names. When the gang arrived, he and Lena retreated to Walter’s study, where they tried to concentrate on Scrabble through the whine and warble of Country songs and the stink of marijuana, which seemed to be everywhere in the house. ‘I guess we could be arrested and sent to jail for possession, or harbouring possessors, or something,’ remarked Lena. ‘Then what?’

  ‘Then nothing,’ said Walter. ‘They’d just carry on. Nobody would notice we were gone.’

  They patiently restocked and restocked the refrigerator, but the food pillage went on and on. One night, as somebody was frying burgers, an electric plate on the old cooker caught fire and shorted out the main fuse, leaving the house in darkness for two days until the cooker could be ripped out and the wiring renewed. On several mornings, Lena found pools of vomit in the corners of rooms. And then there was the snow of rhinestones each visit left behind on the carpets, as though all the troupe’s Opry finery was falling to bits and shedding itself day by day. Lena and her home help, Barbara, kept going round with the vacuum, but rhinestones were like sticky fish scales that seemed to defy suction; they had to get down on their hands and knees and sweep them up with a brush and pan. And one day, as they swept and swept and aired the room to try to get away the vomit stink, Barbara announced, ‘I’m sorry, Miz Parker, but I think I gotta be movin’ on. I ain’t up to this job no more. You need an industrial cleaner here.’

  That was when Lena had her first cry about it, in Barbara’s arms, and when Walter found her weeping like this, he got so mad at Shirley for causing the distress that he fell backwards over a coffee table and broke it to pieces.

  That night, when he heard Shirley come in very late but without the troupe, he got up and put on his dressing gown and tiptoed to her room. He listened a moment, then went in and found his daughter kneeling down and giving head to Womack, one of the black riggers, and she turned and saw him and brought her mouth away from Womack’s dick to yell, ‘Fuck off, Dad! This is my room!’

  Walter fled, his face red and burning. The thing that bothered him most was how pale and fragile and small Shirley appeared beside Womack.

  He went down to the kitchen and stuck the kettle on to make tea. He stared at his own reflection in the kitchen window and thought, I guess my life is ruined now. I guess I was a no-good father. I guess I deserve to die.

  He sat with the tea till the dawn came up. Overhead, he could hear Shirley’s small bed creaking and moving about as she yielded to the convulsive weight of Womack’s love. He told himself that perhaps it was someone like this she needed, someone who had no hope of her except as a pretty face, a good fuck, someone she wouldn’t disappoint.

  It was agreed, up at the lake, that they wouldn’t talk about Shirley. For what was there to say? She had their house now. She had her lover and her troupe.

  She had the hope of returning to music, even if that hope – like the hope of being a lesbian mother, like the hope
of marrying a famous conductor, like the hope of becoming a novelist or a management consultant – appeared frail. Enough time remained in her life for her to surprise them and they prayed that she would. But it was as though their love for her was awaiting this moment to be released and that until then it was smothered by weariness as much as by disappointment.

  ‘We’re just going to get on with the summer and forget about it all,’ Lena announced.

  ‘Darn right!’ Walter concurred.

  And what preoccupied them now was finding the right boat. Something sturdy, but not too big, with a reliable engine. Prices seemed high. They had good savings from the sale of the bookstore, but Walter was too careful a man to let them dig too far into them. They knew, too, that once the winter came, boating would be impossible, or if not impossible, then too dangerous to be contemplated. ‘We don’t want to wind up like old Shackleton,’ said Walter. ‘I mean crushed by ice.’

  In the end, they bought a second-hand wooden boat with an inboard engine in a tiny cabin, called Maybelle. The owner was a Dutch sculptor with an Australian wife. They were ‘going larger, boat-wise’, but had been fond of Maybelle, ‘especially’ they said, ‘her dinky little wooden fore-deck’.

  ‘Mind if we change her name?’ asked Walter.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said the Dutchman, ‘this is very bad luck, to change the name of a boat. We should not advise it.’

  But Walter thought Maybelle was a dumb name. ‘If I drive around the lake in the boat called Maybelle, people will think I’m a Fonda-style idiot,’ he said. So he commissioned a young boat-yard hand to paint it out and rename it Lena, and when this was done, he and Lena got into the boat and drove slowly around to the new dock, feeling as pleased with life as they could ever remember. They sat there in the boat at the dock’s edge, bouncing just a little on the wavelets.

  ‘I guess we’re true islanders now,’ said Lena. ‘We’ve taken to the water.’

  Most days, after that, they went out in Lena. It had a powerful engine, but Walter drove it very slowly. So slowly, in fact, that other boats often came up on their wake and surged past them, waving and screaming with laughter, but Walter didn’t care. ‘We’re in uncharted waters,’ he said to Lena. ‘And we know nothing about the weather. Let everybody mock.’

  They’d never been on the island past the middle of August. Now, to their surprise, as this month went by, they felt some season begin that they’d never experienced. Light left the sky in late afternoon. The shadows of the woods seemed to creep nearer and nearer to the cabin and remain there. Storms growled over the Canada shore. Hail fell out of a blank white sky. In the calendar of their minds, it was still summer – late summer – but there didn’t seem to be much trace of summer remaining.

  ‘I guess,’ said Lena, as they woke one morning to a hard frost, ‘we’re just being given a taste of the real winter, to see if we can take it.’

  ‘We can take it,’ said Walter. ‘Tennessee winters weren’t a bundle of fun. Or have you forgotten? Remember the ice storms? And, Jesus Christ, I nearly broke my back shovelling snow for Wilma Thirsk. We’re here for the duration.’

  So they began to think about this word, ‘duration’, and what it meant to each of them. Had they thought about it differently? Did they really believe they were never going to return to their ordinary lives, built in Greenhills over so many seasons, so many decades? Lena wasn’t sure what she believed. She said to Walter: ‘When we get through the spring, then, I guess we’ll know what we really intended.’

  Walter was silent a while. Then he said, ‘We ran away, Lena. Remember? We ran away from that carnival. We never said anything about returning. It just wasn’t part of the picture. Nothing that Nature’s planning to dish out could be worse than what we had to leave.’

  ‘We don’t know that yet,’ said Lena.

  ‘Yes we do. Think about all the Canadians in the world: none of ’em go about telling you they died of the weather. They just get on with it.’

  ‘Yes, but we’re not Canadians.’

  ‘We are now. By adoption. Don’t get faint on me, sweetheart. We’re in this together.’

  ‘I’m not getting faint. I’m just pondering things aloud.’

  They lit the wood-burner in the mornings and tried to keep it going twenty-four hours by banking it up before they went to bed, but by breakfast time there was no heat in it, just a few embers.

  Sometimes, Lena took the quilt off the bed and sat wrapped up in this while she drank her morning coffee. She saw how very many man-made things, such as wood-burning stoves, were somehow less efficient than they should have been. It was enough, she thought, to make you believe that somewhere in the universe an advanced Alien society existed, where everything was a shining miracle of perfect function, including the Alien brain, which would have considered rhinestones to be trash and a career as a backup singer risible.

  ‘We’re so flawed, that’s the problem,’ she said aloud.

  ‘Who’s flawed?’ said Walter, as he brought new life to the fire.

  ‘The human race. We’re so mediocre.’

  Walter stood up, brushing ash off his trousers. ‘That could be another thing the long winter’s going to be good for,’ he said: ‘Philosophy.’

  It was October now and the leaf fall around the cabin was dense and pungent. Lena made leaf collages on rough cream paper and pinned them to the wooden walls. Varnish on the leaves kept the colours bright. She knew they looked like a child’s effort, but she smiled to think that ‘children’ were the people they’d become. Shirley and her hard-drinking, hard-screwing friends were living complex, grown-up lives; she and Walter were like castaway kids, diverting themselves with making fires and playing simple games, holding on to each other in their new unknown.

  The light died earlier and earlier in the day. In the mornings, a dense, cold mist shrouded the water, as though the world ended where the lake began.

  Walter walked out onto his dock and stared into the fog. He savoured the idea that it made the territory he now inhabited smaller than ever. ‘This is right,’ he said to himself. ‘When you get old, all you want is a small bit of ground, so you don’t have to see too far down any particular road.’

  He thought about Shirley and all the roads she’d been on, stumbling towards this or that endeavour and always quitting, always failing, and wondered why it had been like this. As a kid, he and Lena had tried to get her to persevere with things. She made the school basketball team for a year, then got dropped, but didn’t seem to know why or even care. ‘Didn’t you jump high enough, or what?’ Walter remembered asking her.

  ‘I jumped a bit,’ she’d replied. ‘I guess they just didn’t rate it.’

  He remembered wanting her to care, wanting her to promise to jump higher, because how could your life have any meaning if you didn’t mind about things, one way or the other? Walter realised he nurtured no hope of her becoming a singer, no hope at all. He didn’t give her one chance in a hundred. And so he fell to thinking, were he and Lena to blame for it all, too wrapped up in each other to ever get right behind Shirley and push her on? ‘We probably were,’ he said aloud, ‘and it’s too late now. We haven’t got any push left in us.’ His voice was small in the freezing mist, but he didn’t mind about this, he even liked it – his own smallness in the white emptiness.

  The winter locked them down. Even the CRV had difficulty getting through the four miles of ice and snow to the stores. They ate the moose steaks and the lake trout they’d put in the freezer, with tins of sweetcorn and beans. They brought their bed into the living room so that they could bank up the burner in the small hours and be warm when they watched TV. When blizzards tormented the cabin, they sometimes mumbled old forgotten prayers. After one fierce storm, Walter put on newly acquired snow shoes and made a circuit of all the summer cabins on their part of the lake, and he saw that they were all shuttered and closed – every single one, except theirs.

  ‘We’re nuts, Lena,’ he said when he got back. ‘Ev
erybody sensible from the summer cabins has gone back south.’

  ‘No, we’re not nuts,’ she said. ‘Because I’ve been thinking, Walter, it doesn’t matter how we live our lives, as long as we’re not harming anyone. We’re all dying, anyway. Being pretend Canadians is perfectly OK.’

  ‘Guess you’re right,’ he said, ‘and let’s try not to die yet. I really liked those snow shoes. Get you a pair, sweetheart, and we can go on snow walks.’

  ‘Good idea,’ said Lena.

  It was a bit like trying to walk on two tennis rackets, but they eventually got the hang of it. They chose days when the sun returned for a few hours and made jewellery out of the trees. And it was after one of these beautiful walks that Lena sat down and decided to write to Shirley. She knew that a letter would tire her. She selected a picture postcard showing ‘A View of Lake Superior in the Fall’ and wrote in large handwriting:

  Shirley dear, Today Dad and I went on one of our walks, wearing our new snow shoes! Guess we look quite droll, but who cares? We saw some black squirrels dancing over the snow and magpies skimming between the branches, and lots of moose prints and the sun was just glorious. Only occasionally can one remember that bits of the world are still grand.

  Please tell us how you are, and Womack and your friends. Hope you may have news of some singing work at the Opry. From your loving mother, Lena.

  PS. Dad sends his best.

  ‘Best what?’ said Walter.

  ‘Oh, don’t be difficult, Walter. Best “stuff” . . . you know . . .’

  ‘She won’t answer anything that short,’ said Walter, as he read it over.

  And they looked at each other. ‘That’s why you chose a card, is it?’ he said. ‘You don’t want her to answer?’

  ‘I dunno,’ said Lena. ‘I absolutely do not know whether I want an answer or not.’