Wilderness Tips

by Margaret Atwood

  "We can't be lovers," she said to him after a time, She was licking jam off her fingers. Richard jolted awake. He had never been so abruptly understood. It was like a trick; it made him uncomfortable.

  He could have pretended he didn't know what she was talking about. Instead he said, "Why not?"

  "You would get used up," she said. "Then you wouldn't be there, later."

  This was what he wanted: to be used up. To burn in divine conflagration. At the same time, he realized that he could not summon up any actual, carnal desire for this woman; this girl, sitting beside him on the breakwater with her skinny arms and minimal breasts, dangling her legs now like a nine-year-old.

  "Later?" he said. Was she telling him he was too good to be wasted? Was this a compliment, or not?

  "When I'll need you," she said. She was stuffing the waxed-paper sandwich wrapping into the paper bag. "I'll walk you to the ferry."

  He had been circumvented, outmanoeuvred; also spied on. Maybe he was an open book and a dolt as well, but she didn't have to rub it in. As they walked, he found himself getting angry. He still clutched the wine bottle in its liquor-store bag.

  At the ferry dock she took his hand, shook it formally. "Thank you for coming," she said. Then she pushed the sunglasses up onto her hair, giving him her turquoise eyes full force. "The light only shines for some," she said, kindly and sadly. "And even for them it's not all the time. The rest of the time you're alone."

  But he'd had enough of gnomic utterances for one day. Theatrical bitch, he told himself on the ferry.

  He went back to his room and drank most of the bottle of wine. Then he phoned Mary Jo. When she'd negotiated her way as usual past the snoopy landlady on the ground floor and arrived on tiptoe at his door, he pulled her inside roughly and bent her backwards in a tipsy, mocking embrace. She started to giggle, but he kissed her seriously and pushed her onto the bed. If he couldn't have what he wanted he would at least have something. The bristles of her shaved legs rasped against him; her breath smelled like grape bubble gum. When she began to protest, warning him again of the danger of pregnancy, he said it didn't matter. She took this as a marriage proposal. In the event, it was one.

  With the arrival of the baby his academic work ceased to be a thing he did disdainfully, on sufferance, and became a necessity of life. He needed the money, and then he needed more money. He laboured over his Ph.D. thesis, on cartographic imagery in John Donne, interrupted by infant squalling and the dentist's-drill whine of the vacuum cleaner, and by the cups of tea brought to him by Mary Jo at inappropriate moments. She told him he was a grouch, but since that was more or less the behaviour she expected from husbands she didn't seem to mind. She typed his thesis for him and did the footnotes, and showed him off to her relatives, him and his new degree. He got a job teaching composition and grammar to veterinary students at the agricultural college in Guelph.

  He did not write poetry any more. Some days he hardly even thought about it. It was like a third arm, or a third eye, that had atrophied. He'd been a freak when he'd had it.

  Once in a while, though, he went on binges. He would sneak into bookstores or libraries, lurk around the racks where the little magazines were kept; sometimes he'd buy one. Dead poets were his business, living ones his vice. Much of the stuff he read was crap and he knew it; still, it gave him an odd lift. Then there would be the occasional real poem, and he would catch his breath. Nothing else could drop him through space like that, then catch him; nothing else could peel him open.

  Sometimes these poems were Selena's. He would read them, and part of him - a small, constricted part - would hope for some lapse, some decline; but she just got better. Those nights, when he was lying in bed on the threshold of sleep, he would remember her or she would appear to him, he was never sure which; a dark-haired woman with her arms upstretched, in a long cloak of blue and dull gold or of feathers or of white linen. The costumes were variable, but she herself remained a constant. She was something of his own that he had lost.

  He didn't see her again until 1970, another zero year. By that time he'd managed to get himself hired back to Toronto, to teach graduate-level Puritan literary theory and freshman English at a new campus in the suburbs. He did not yet have tenure: in the age of publish-or-perish, he'd published only two papers, one on witchcraft as sexual metaphor, the other on The Pilgrim's Progress and architecture. Now that their son was in school Mary Jo had gone back to cataloguing, and with their savings they'd made a down payment on a Victorian semi-detached in the Annex. It had a small back lawn, which Richard mowed. They kept talking about a garden, but there was never the energy.

  At this time Richard was at a low point, though it was Mary Jo's contention that he was always at a low point. She fed him vitamin pills and nagged him to see a shrink so he could become more assertive, though when he was assertive with her she would accuse him of throwing his patriarchal weight around. He'd realized by now that he could always depend on her to do the socially correct thing. At the moment she was attending a women's consciousness-raising group and was (possibly) having an affair with a sandy-haired, pasty-faced linguist at the university whose name was Johanson. Whether it existed or not, this affair suited Richard, in a way: it allowed him to think badly of her.

  It was April. Mary Jo was at her women's group or screwing Johanson, or both; she was efficient, she could get a lot done in one evening. His son was staying overnight with a friend. Richard was supposed to be working on his book, the book that was going to do it for him, make his name, get him tenure: Spiritual Carnality: Marvell and Vaughan and the Seventeenth Century. He'd hesitated between carnal spirituality and spiritual carnality, but the latter had more zing. The book was not going all that well. There was a problem of focus. Instead of rewriting the second chapter again, he'd come downstairs to rummage in the refrigerator for a beer.

  "And tear our pleasures with rough strife/Thorough the iron gates of life, Ole!" he sang, to the tune of "Hernando's Hideaway." He got out two beers and filled a cereal bowl with potato chips. Then he went into the living room and settled into the easy chair to slurp and munch, flipping through the channels on the television set, looking for the crassest, most idiotic thing he could find. He badly needed something to sneer at.

  This was when the doorbell rang. When he saw who it was he was very glad he'd had the sense to click off the item he'd been watching, a tits-and-bums extravaganza posing as a detective show.

  It was Selena, wearing a wide-brimmed black hat and a long, black knitted coat, and carrying a battered suitcase. "May I come in?" she said.

  Richard, amazed and a little frightened, and then suddenly delighted, stood back to let her in. He'd forgotten what delight felt like. In the last few years he'd given up even on the little magazines, preferring numbness.

  He didn't ask her what she was doing at his house, or how she'd found him. Instead he said, "Would you like a drink?"

  "No," she said. "I don't drink, remember?" He did remember then; he remembered her tiny house on the island, in every clear detail: the pattern of small gold lions on the purple bedspread, the shells and round stones on the window-sill, the daisies in a jam jar. He remembered her long toes. He'd made a fool of himself that day, but now she was here it no longer mattered. He wanted to wrap his arms around her, hold her closely; rescue her, be rescued.

  "Some coffee would be nice though," she said, and he led her to the kitchen and made her some. She didn't take off her coat. The sleeves were threadbare; he could see the places where she'd stitched over the ravelled edges with mending wool. She smiled at him with the same acceptance of him she'd always shown, taking for granted that he was a friend and equal, and he was ashamed of the way he'd spent the last ten years. He must be absurd to her; he was absurd to himself. He had a paunch and a mortgage, a bedraggled marriage; he mowed the lawn, he owned sports jackets, grudgingly he raked the autumn leaves and shovelled the winter snow. He indulged his own sloth. He should have been living in an attic, eating bread
and maggoty cheese, washing his one shirt out at night, his head incandescent with words.

  She was not noticeably older. If anything she was thinner. He saw what he thought was the fading shadow of a bruise over her right cheekbone, but it could have been the light. She sipped at her coffee, fiddled with the spoon. She seemed to have drifted off somewhere. "Are you writing much?" he said, seizing on something he knew would interest her.

  "Oh yes," she said brightly, returning to her body. "I have another book coming out." How had he missed the first one? "How about you?"

  He shrugged. "Not for a long time."

  "That's a shame," she said. "That's terrible." She meant it. It was as if he'd told her someone she'd known had died, and he was touched. It wasn't his actual poems she was regretting, unless she had no taste at all. They hadn't been any good, he knew that now and certainly she did too. It was the poems, the ones he might have written, if. If what?

  "Could I stay here?" she said, putting down her cup.

  Richard was taken aback. She'd meant business with that suitcase. Nothing would have pleased him more, he told himself, but there was Mary Jo to be considered. "Of course," he said, hoping his hesitation hadn't shown.

  "Thank you," said Selena. "I don't have anywhere else right now. Anywhere safe."

  He didn't ask her to explain this. Her voice was the same, rich and tantalizing, on the edge of ruin; it was having its old devastating effect on him. "You can sleep in the rec room," he said. "There's a sofa that folds out."

  "Oh good." She sighed. "It's Thursday." Thursday, he recalled, was a significant day in her poetry, but at the time he couldn't remember whether it was good or bad. Now he knows. Now he has three filing-cards with nothing but Thursdays on them.

  When Mary Jo got home, brisk and defensive as he'd decided she always was after furtive sex, they were still sitting in the kitchen. Selena was having another cup of coffee, Richard another beer. Selena's hat and mended coat were on top of her suitcase. Mary Jo saw them and scowled.

  "Mary Jo, you remember Selena," Richard said. "From the Embassy?"

  "Right," said Mary Jo. "Did you put out the trash?"

  "I will," said Richard. "She's staying overnight."

  "I'll put it out myself then," said Mary Jo, stomping off towards the glassed-in back porch where they kept the garbage cans. Richard followed her and they fought, at first in whispers.

  "What the hell is she doing in my house?" Mary Jo hissed.

  "It's not just your house, it's my house too. She's got nowhere else to go."

  "That's what they all say. What happened, some boyfriend beat her up?"

  "I didn't ask. She's an old friend."

  "Look, if you want to sleep with that weird flake you can do it somewhere else."

  "As you do?" said Richard, with what he hoped was bitter dignity.

  "What the hell are you talking about? Are you accusing me of something?" said Mary Jo. Her eyes were bulging out, as they did when she was really angry and not just acting. "Oh. You'd love that, wouldn't you. Give you a voyeuristic thrill."

  "Anyway I'm not sleeping with her," said Richard, reminding Mary Jo that the first false accusation had been hers.

  "Why not?" said Mary Jo. "You've been leching after her for ten years. I've seen you mooning over those stupid poetry magazines. On Thursdays you are a banana," she intoned, in savage mimicry of Selena's deeper voice. "Why don't you just screw her and get it over with?"

  "I would if I could," Richard said. This truth saddened him.

  "Oh. Holding out on you? Tough shit. Do me a favour, just rape her in the rec room and get it out of your system."

  "My, my," said Richard. "Sisterhood is powerful." As soon as he said it he knew he'd gone too far.

  "How dare you use my feminism against me like that?" said Mary Jo, her voice up an octave. "That is so cheap! You always were a cheap little prick!"

  Selena was standing in the doorway watching them. "Richard," she said, "I think I'd better go."

  "Oh no," said Mary Jo, with a chirpy parody of hospitality. "Stay! It's no trouble! Stay a week! Stay a month! Consider us your hotel!"

  Richard walked Selena to the front door. "Where will you go?" he said.

  "Oh," she said, "there's always somewhere." She stood under the porch light, looking up the street. It was a bruise. "But right now I don't have any money."

  Richard dug out his wallet, emptied it. He wished it was more.

  "I'll pay you back," she said.

  If he has to date it, Richard pinpoints this Thursday as the day his marriage was finally over. Even though he and Mary Jo went through the form of apologizing, even though they had more than a few drinks and smoked a joint and had dislocated, impersonal sex, nothing got fixed. Mary Jo left him soon after, in quest of the self she claimed she needed to find. She took their son with her. Richard, who hadn't paid that much attention to the boy, was now reduced to nostalgic, interminable weekends with him. He tried out several other women, but couldn't concentrate on them.

  He looked for Selena but she'd disappeared. One magazine editor told him she'd gone out west. Richard felt he'd let her down. He had failed to be a place of refuge.

  Ten years later he saw her again. It was 1980, another year of the nothing, or of the white-hot egg. He notes this coincidence only now, laying out the filing cards like a fortune-teller across the surface of his particle-board desk.

  He'd just got out of his car, having returned through thickening traffic from the university, where he was still clinging on by his fingernails. It was mid-March, during the spring melt, an irritating and scruffy time of year. Mud and rain and scraps of garbage left over from the winter. His mood was similar. He'd recently had the manuscript of Spiritual Carnality returned to him by a publisher, the fourth rejection. The covering letter informed him that he'd failed sufficiently to problematize the texts. On the title page someone had written, in faint, semi-erased pencil, fatuously romantic. He suspected that shrike Johanson, who was one of their readers, and who'd had it in for him ever since Mary Jo had left. After a brief interval of firm-chinned single coping she'd moved in on Johanson and they'd lived together for six months of blitzkrieg. Then she'd tried to hit him up for half the value of his house. Johanson had been blaming this on Richard ever since.

  He was thinking about this, and about the batch of student papers in his briefcase: James Joyce from a Marxist perspective, or garbled structuralism seeping in from France to dilute the student brain yet further. The papers had to be marked by tomorrow. He had a satisfying fantasy of laying them all out in the muddy street and running over them with his car. He would say he'd been in an accident.

  Coming towards him was a short, thickish woman in a black trench coat. She was carrying a large, brown tapestry bag; she seemed to be looking at the numbers on the houses, or possibly the snowdrops and crocuses on the lawns. Richard did not understand that it was Selena until she'd almost passed him.

  "Selena," he said, touching her arm.

  She turned up to him a blank face, the turquoise eyes dull. "No," she said. "That's not my name." Then she peered more closely. "Richard. Is that you?" Either she was feigning pleasure, or she really felt it. Again, for him, there was a stab of unaccustomed joy.

  He stood awkwardly. No wonder she'd had trouble recognizing him. He was prematurely grey, overweight; Mary Jo had told him, on the last, unpleasant occasion on which he'd seen her, that he was slug-coloured. "I didn't know you were still here," he said. "I thought you'd moved out west."

  "Travelled," she said. "I'm through with that." There was an edge to her voice he'd never heard before.

  "And your work?" he said. It was always the thing to ask her.

  "What work?" she said, and laughed.

  "Your poetry." He was beginning to be alarmed. She was more matter-of-fact than he'd ever known her to be, but somehow this struck him as crazy.

  "Poetry," she said with scorn. "I hate poetry. It's just this. This is all there is. This stupid
city."

  He went cold with dread. What was she saying, what had she done? It was like a blasphemy, it was like an act of desecration. Though how could he expect her to maintain faith in something he himself had so blatantly failed?

  She'd been frowning, but now her face wrinkled in anxiety. She put a hand on his arm, stood on tiptoe. "Richard," she whispered. "What happened to us? Where did everyone go?" A mist came up with her, an odour. He recognized sweetish wine, a whiff of cat.

  He wanted to shake her, enfold her, lead her to safety, wherever that might be. "We just changed, that's all," he said gently. "We got older."

  "Change and decay in all around I see," she said, smiling in a way he did not like at all. "I'm not prepared for eternity."

  It wasn't until she'd walked away - refusing tea, hurrying off as if she couldn't wait to see the last of him - that he realized she'd been quoting from a folksong. It was the same one he'd heard sung to the autoharp in the coffee-house, the night he'd first seen her, standing under the single spotlight in her dragonfly shawl.

  That, and a hymn. He wondered whether she'd become what his students called "religious."

  Months later he heard she was dead. Then there was a piece in the paper. The details were vague. It was the picture that caught his eye: an earlier picture of her, from the jacket of one of her books. Probably there was nothing more recent, because she hadn't published anything for years. Even her death belonged to an earlier time; even the people in the small, closed world of poetry had largely forgotten about her.

  Now that she's dead, however, she's become newly respectable. In several quarterly reviews the country has been lambasted for its indifference towards her, its withholding of recognition during her lifetime. There's a move afoot to name a parkette after her, or else a scholarship, and the academics are swarming like bot-flies. A thin volume has appeared, of essays on her work, shoddy stuff in Richard's opinion, flimsy and superficial; another one is rumoured to be in the offing.

  This is not the reason Richard is writing about her, however. Nor is it to cover his professional ass: he's going to be axed from the university anyway, there are new cutbacks, he lacks tenure, his head is on the block. It's merely because she's the one thing left he still values, or wants to write about. She is his last hope.