by Alan Cumyn
When the fog lifts I find myself alone in a frozen field looking at barbed wire in the distance, perhaps a mile off. I fall to the ground and begin to crawl. I push and slither with my feet and arms. I feel as if I am leaving half my skin on the hardened German mud. I scan the distance for guards and patrols. How many escaped men have been picked up this close? I have no cover at all, and yet there is no point in turning back, in trying to wait through another day and make the crossing at night. I won’t last that long.
No one comes for me.
There are no guards. It doesn’t seem possible. For a time I am certain again that I’ve gone the wrong direction, that I’ve made it round in a horrible circle back to Münster after all. I am not in my right mind.
I see a group of men near the roadway on the other side of the wire. They have no guns and are not wearing German uniforms. I get up and walk towards them. It is well past dawn by now and still cold enough to see our breath. They look like a huddle of steaming cows, these men: shivering and still, all facing the same direction, out of the wind, by the hut at the gate. Some of them are fannigans, I can tell by the raggedness of their clothes, their eyes.
When I approach they tell me that the war is over, has been for two days. I am not the only one who didn’t know. We look back at the cold dawn and someone says, “Has anyone got some food?” and one man has a tin of biscuits that we share round. They are thin, flimsy things that crumble into pieces in our fingers, and the white sugar crusts on our hardened, swollen lips, then disappears to nothing on our tongues.
Sixteen
I was so tired from the strain and effort of the last weeks and months that on the climb up the office stairs I felt like a fannigan again, famished for the ease of a normal life. When I entered the office my face must have broadcast my weariness, for Dorothy turned and stared. She was watering a pair of geraniums that she kept in the window, and as she looked at me the jug stayed in mid-air, halfway set to pour.
“Are you all right?”
“Fine,” I said, and started to explain the most recent progress. “The walls are pretty well roughed in. Some of the farm boys are helping me out, even though I won’t be able to pay them right away. But I’m going to need —”
I hadn’t even got my coat off and certainly hadn’t planned on launching into my plea right away. But she caught my meaning anyway.
“More time?”
I noticed, through the opened studio door, that the model had already arrived. She was sitting on a stool reading a book, and I immediately liked the way her black hair fell off her shoulder. Dorothy must have followed my gaze. She said, “Isn’t she terrific? Her name is Eleanor and you’re going to fall in love with her. I bought a pan from her at Eaton’s. And I just want a graduation theme. Think spring, youth, beauty. I asked her to bring a dress, and what else have I got for you?” She rooted through her bag, then handed me a white carnation corsage. “You really look as if you need to sleep for about two weeks.”
I shed my coat then and entered the studio, carrying the corsage. When I introduced myself to Eleanor, who stood taller than me even in her low-heeled pumps, she didn’t know where to put her book. She was wearing a cream long-sleeved blouse with a brown cardigan and a loose pleated skirt. She looked perhaps twenty years old, and her face was luminous.
“Dorothy mentioned that you’d brought a dress?”
“My mother’s evening gown.” She pointed shyly to the screen behind which, I supposed, the dress had been hung.
“Perhaps you could change into it, and we’ll see how things look from there.”
She dipped her head modestly and walked behind the screen, placing her book on the workbench as she passed by.
I didn’t like to look at models while they were changing. It made them self-conscious, and I was uncomfortable with the way it affected me sometimes. I didn’t like to get emotionally involved in my work. I wanted to be concerned with light and line, with shade and nuance and colour, with shadow and shape. It is an old artist’s trick to turn an object upside down and paint it as if it were an abstract. The eye looks for detail and proportion then; it sees the actual line, not the one that force of habit has blurred or skewed.
But I couldn’t turn Eleanor upside down. Now she stepped out from behind the screen wearing an evening gown to heal the world. The sight of her hit me with a near-physical wallop. Her bare white shoulders were strong and perfectly rounded. She had pinned her long hair high exposing her exquisite neck. She picked up the corsage and held it in front of the fullness of her chest, and I must have gaped because she stopped and smiled and we stood eyeing one another.
“That’s some dress of your mother’s,” I said.
Dorothy looked in on us later in the day. I had Eleanor posing very simply, as if the door had just been opened and she was standing waiting to go out for the evening. Dorothy stood very close behind me and whispered, “You do have a way with the female form, Mr. Crome. What is it you’re doing with her skin? ”
I continued with the work.
“It looks almost warm to the touch.” And she reached out her hand as if ready to plunge her fingers into the wet paint. I didn’t move and she stopped the barest distance from the canvas. “Eleanor, you’re going to love yourself when you see this. You’re just going to want to stand like that all day and have men swooning over you.”
I was painting very quickly. I felt at one point like a rabbit who will bound over a fence too high to contemplate, change directions four times in a heartbeat and then stop, still as a piece of moss. The world shrank to me and the canvas. It seemed that the light and the paint and the tools and the day were all conspiring.
And the more I stared at Eleanor, the more I felt her beauty seeping into crevices within me. She was more than medicine, and she too seemed to glow even more intensely in the avidity of my gaze. Dorothy too was conscious of something unusual happening and stayed by my shoulder longer than she needed. I could feel the heat of her, the soft touch of her breath on my back, and I remember wanting time to freeze. I spent too long filling in the door frame, working on the edges of an image that was going to be cropped by the camera anyway.
I don’t remember Eleanor leaving. Somehow she was gone and Dorothy and I were left alone in the studio, looking at the painting and breathing rather deeply. I don’t know how long we stood there, still quite close together, without touching. Finally, though, it seemed she was holding something out to me, a thickish envelope.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Just take it.”
I could see there were bills and I backed away, nearly knocking down the easel.
“It’s not a gift,” Dorothy said. “It’s a loan or an advance. I’m not even thinking of you, I’m thinking of your boy and your poor, suffering wife and of my own business interests. For once in your life would you accept a bit of human kindness?”
She waved it in front of me again. I snatched it from her hand and threw it towards the door. Bills scattered everywhere and she slapped hard at my face. Then I smiled so madly at her that she suddenly hit me in the chest and I fell backwards away from the painting. She followed me down in a heap and we began kissing. She kept her eyes on me, and the small silver chain round her neck leapt and bounced with her movements.
We were both ravenous. I remember the storm of it taking us over and how wild we seemed to be and how the grit of the floor impressed itself on my skin wherever I’d lost my clothes. But the mounting sweetness stunned me, and the cold winter rain seemed worlds distant.
“Not inside me, sir!” she gasped, keeping her wits when I was losing mine. She pulled herself away and I sent my seed arcing off. “I’m sorry, but I can’t risk —”
“Shh!” I said, catching my breath.
Afterwards we lay outside of time, her cheek against my chest, my big hands resting on the hard bones of her slight body.
“Now I absolutely cannot take that money from you,” I said.
How she laughed.
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Later — and how much later I have no idea — when we had both blown hot with a new storm, then subsided again, lost in thought, I felt almost as if I were in a dream and could say anything.
“I have known you before,” I said.
“Yes?”
“It was long time ago, but it was you. You in a different life.”
“Oh yes?” All the practical edges of the office had fallen off her. Her hair was loose and wild now over the small shoulder straps of her slip. She looked so thin and pale, waif-like yet full of fire.
“I was in a different life, too. We saw each other across an unusual space.”
Very slowly the world started to intrude. What was I doing? Lillian and my young Michael were waiting at home. I had to rouse my body, get myself to the train station, at least, before it was too late. I had just moved my marriage like a house to the edge of a cliff.
But I was feeling too blissful, too relieved to stir.
“Why me?” I asked instead. “Is there no appropriate young man?”
“Oh, listen to you,” she said, a hard edge suddenly in her voice. But then she smiled and gently kissed my eyes and cheeks. “You have no idea. You have the hungriest eyes.” She laced her slim white fingers in mine. “They’ve seen things. They know what they want. And look how long and strong and dark your fingers are. But you hold a brush like a wand of life.” She kissed my fingers, slowly, as if we had all the time in the world. “Either one without the other wouldn’t work. The hunger without the hands, the hands without the desire . . .” The thought trailed off. “Were we lovers?” she asked. “That time before?”
“Lovers in a way,” I said.
After dark the Montreal train pulled into the little station at Mireille. I was thrilled still, flushed with the heat of Dorothy. I left the station on foot and alone, legged it along Mill Road, down the hill and across the bridge and then up again. In town everything was quiet for the night except the pool hall, in front of which a few trucks were parked. The door and windows, closed against the cold, were still leaking light and smoke and muffled conversation. If I wasn’t so late I might have slipped inside.
Instead I continued out of town. On the way to Maisie Campbell’s I detoured up the lane and looked again at the shell of my house. If I’d come home straightaway I might have been able to start work on the floors, I thought.
Instead I cleared some scrap from the doorway out to the edge of the meadow, where a pile of frozen rubbish was growing. I hadn’t eaten since my sandwich at lunch. The hunger now felt somehow just, as if a part of me believed it could not be right to feel such electric passion for life — not now. Not in these circumstances.
I suppose it was nearly ten o’clock when I stepped onto Maisie Campbell’s lane and sent her sleeping dogs into paroxysms of barking. I let them circle and sniff at me, but they growled and challenged longer than usual, and I imagined they could smell the guilt on my skin.
I stepped through the door as quietly as I could. Maisie was knitting in the front parlour, a large long-haired cat snuggled warmly on her lap.
“Good evening, Mr. Crome,” she said. “You’re a long time getting here.” Her eyes stayed steady on mine.
“I had to stay late at work,” I mumbled. “And I’m still getting used to the trains. I was too slow getting to the station for the 7:15 . . .” The more I said the less credible I sounded. “I’ll just . . . have a look in at Michael.”
“Yes. I put him down hours ago, ” Maisie said.
“Is Mrs. Crome . . . asleep?”
“Mrs. Crome did not get out of bed all day.” Maisie’s words were curt and clear. “And her father has been no help.”
“You’ve been awfully kind.”
Her chin quavered and her stare was so relentless that I believed she could see every falsehood hidden in my bones. “Christ’s mission is to help the less fortunate,” she said finally, and focused again on her knitting.
I stepped down the hall and blew out a bitter breath. Then I passed through the kitchen and into the room where Michael, on his little cot, was clutching his blankets to his throat. His face looked peaceful, his fine brown bangs drooping lower than his eyes. He had Lillian’s fair skin, but there was some of Father too in the sharpness of his chin.
Lillian was lying in the big bed, silently watching me.
“You’re awake,” I said. “I’m sorry I’m late.” I launched into a stumbling explanation about the trains and the house.
“Yes,” she said in a lost little voice.
“Are you feeling all right?” She didn’t answer. “You should have a look at the house,” I said finally. “It’s coming together.” I sat on the edge of the bed and took her hand, which was so warm I wondered if she had a fever. The movement seemed to perk her out of her gloom for a moment. She reached up with her other hand and felt my cheek and smiled in her old way. “It won’t be as large as we’d originally planned, of course. We’ll leave the upstairs for later and concentrate on the main floor. If I can put in some good weekends of work, and if the others keep helping the way they have . . .”
She was staring off at the shadows in the room. Finally she said, “We did go over to the house. Yesterday. And Michael was playing in one of the piles. In the rubbish. And we saw . . . parts of the paintings that you had piled there. Some parts . . . Michael saw.” She turned her gaze on me now. “I saw new paintings there! New paintings of her!”
“Lillian.”
“God is punishing us for your sick thoughts!”
Michael groaned in his cot, and I could hear Maisie Camp-bell’s footsteps in the kitchen.
“Please keep your voice down.”
“I won’t!” Tears now streaked her face.
“Don’t be jealous of Margaret. For God’s sake!”
“Your language, Ramsay!” she said bitterly.
I got up and opened the door. Maisie Campbell stepped back.
“It’s all right, Mrs. Campbell. Everything is fine. Good night now.”
I kept the door open until her feet were disappearing down the hallway, then I closed it again softly. Michael yawned and rolled partway on his side, then settled back into sleep. I sat down again on the edge of the bed.
“You said you would not hurt me.” Lillian looked hard at the wall. “Yet you paint that woman again and again. Do you do them at work? After your advertising pieces? Are they going to fire you, Ramsay? What about Michael and me?”
I hardly knew where to begin, what lies to tell to counter which nightmare concoctions of her overworked imagination.
“You still love her,” she said, before I could begin.
Mrs. Campbell’s footsteps were in the kitchen again, soft but unmistakable.
“Let’s . . . just get through the next months,” I said. “The paintings are gone. We have a house to rebuild. Margaret is . . . larger in your imagination now than she is in mine.”
I could hear Maisie Campbell breathing again outside the door.
“But why do you keep painting her when you know how much it hurts me?” she whispered finally.
I tried to keep my voice steady. “Beauty is like . . . food and air to me. If I paint a woman’s beauty I am breathing, I am having dinner.” The tears came harder. Of course I could not tell her anything more.
“The past died in the fire,” I said. “I won’t be painting her again.”
She could see it in my face and did not press for answers. I was sitting in the studio trying to render a girl in a bathing suit. The girl was long gone, and the bathing suit would not shape properly. I’d returned to sketches and fiddled with colours, and the closer I seemed to get to a version of reality the less right it all looked.
“I gather you are regretting your misdeeds,” Dorothy said.
She stood away from me with her jaw set and her eyebrows knit together with the hardness of the moment. I looked away and stared at the floor, as if some message might be there telling how to keep from blowing us all apart.
“Does your wife know? I’m afraid I don’t even know her name.”
“Lillian doesn’t know. But if she finds out —”
“Come for a walk with me.”
We climbed the hill from the office, walking all the way to the forest trails on Mount Royal. The winds were particularly cold, the skies impenetrably grey. Her body was crushed to my side, with no words passing between us. Parts of the trail were slippery. An old man looked up at us from a bench and then returned to his bottle, which was almost empty. Otherwise there was no one: we seemed alone in a wilderness.
Yet through the leafless branches we could also see the tops of the towering buildings down below us. I did not have a sense of the time except for the oppressively general feeling that the hour was late, that doors were closing and bridges burning all around me.
“I do love you,” she said finally. Her large grey eyes were impressively clear. “I would never have thrown myself at you otherwise. You must understand that. But I will not compete with your wife and child.”
We were stopped and looking at a frozen log that had rolled somehow onto part of the trail.
On we walked until the darkness began to gather and I felt an unspoken question: train or city? For a moment the privacy of her apartment beckoned enormously. I could see myself in her bedroom. I could see the two of us wrapped in the luxury of endless stretches of time.
“I have to make my way home,”
I said. “Of course you do.”
I kissed her neck and throat and then her mouth. She closed her eyes then, and I lifted her a few steps off the trail and leaned her against an oak that must have stood five hundred years. Even in her winter coat she felt lighter than leaves. She wrapped her legs round me and we embraced and an airplane roared above us, but I did not open my eyes. Then a horse trotted by pulling something and after that a dog, and later I heard children’s voices on the trail just steps away.
If we close our eyes, I thought, they will not see us. If no words are spoken then it is not so. Time will slide us through this moment and there will be no need to choose.
