The ring of the phone on the nightstand penetrates a dream of dunes and wakes him around 4:30. He feels groggy, bleary-eyed, he sits up, nausea. Phone knocked from its cradle, retrieved off the floor, raised to his throbbing head — yeah? A call for you from Toronto, sir. Yeah, okay. And there’s Paulson, whispering, asking him how his flight was, how his trip’s been, not getting to the point. Unlike him. Why are you whispering? He sits on the edge of the bed, nauseous, thirsty. Okay, says Paulson, I can tell you everything at once or I can let you deal with one thing at a time. Tell me everything at once. She’s dead. No screwing around this time. Knife through the heart. I’m very sorry. It knocks the wind out of him. When his breath returns, it brings with it the taste of vomit. The other part you need to know, says Paulson telling him everything at once, is she left a note, going through her reasons, making her argument for suicide and so on, a lot of garbage, she was a very sick lady, but you need to know that even though she doesn’t use your name, you’re mentioned in it. In a way that might be problematic. What does she say? Well, she says, more or less, that there’s a man in her life who — Read it to me. Paulson hesitates. Sound of a briefcase unfastened, papers riffled. Don’t want to keep rolling my numb body up the hill each day. Can’t. Won’t. Too heavy. Longing for the man I can’t have. Pity for the other one. Good God. This man has won everything in his life by exertion of the will and he values none of it. His wife is a possession, his daughter is a weekend hobby. His life is perfectly rational, perfectly controlled, perfectly meaningless to him. He’s incapable of genuine passion, he has eliminated from his life the possibility of anything transcendent, for the sake of simplicity, and out of fear. He’d be a narcissist if he weren’t such a coward, as it is he’s desperately afraid to look at himself, I think he must avoid mirrors for fear of finding he has no reflection. He’ ll believe I’m killing myself because I’m miserable, but he’s wrong. I’m killing myself out of love. Because there’s nothing in the world but love and probably nothing out of the world but love either. I’ve exhausted my options here. I will take my chances elsewhere.
The first thing he does after hanging up the phone is unzip his bag and let its contents spill across the floor.
II.
He had a child’s wonder. Beyond fifty and grey and ragged and his eyes were a child’s and he listened as though he were certain each stranger might offer a revelation that would upset his vision of the world. He was terribly lonely. He had not one month before committed an act of terrible defiance and it nearly killed him, but when I met him he was beginning to emerge from the shadow of what he’d done. He had but a day earlier come forth from the woods where he’d been camping. I call it camping. He’d been sleeping in the woods, that’s all. He’d carried in his sack a paltry amount of food and water, he’d had no knowledge of those woods or of wilderness survival, and if a bear had come or some other misfortune had befallen him, he would have been helpless. How he occupied himself in those days, half-buried in silence, I can’t say. What peace he knew was mixed with staggering pain, the cost of his act of terrible defiance. But just imagine him then: this man who’d spent his life in a grey tower then come down and lived each hour upon the black earth.
I spied on him. Daily he rose late, dressed quickly, left the inn without eating and traipsed through the woods to the beach. I took my lunch break when he left and followed him, and when he emerged on the beach I hid behind the rocks and observed his ritual. He stripped naked. Naked he waded into the water, and in the blistering light he bathed himself and sounds emerged from him that were not song but were not speech either. He was calling his ships to return to him. What those ships were and what bounty they carried neither I nor likely he himself could say. He was exulting in his freedom and trying to exorcise the demons his freedom brought or did not purge. After he had thus bathed himself he returned to the beach and lay down in the sand and there in the caustic sunlight typical of that summer he lingered.
Jacob’s isolated corner of beach was significant to me moreover because it was there that as a girl my life was changed by Wilson Nash. In my last year of high school Wilson Nash was my boyfriend. That was the time when I began to hear my voices. Sometimes woman and sometimes man, my voices from the start issued instructions. They commanded trivial things in those early days: don’t eat that potato, lift your left foot three times before you enter the church on Sunday, that sort of thing. Now I can see those tasks were tests. There were intimations of purpose in my voices’ first commands, but forceful revelation of my purpose was to come much later, when I was ready for it. In the beginning my voices only impressed on me that I must do as they said.
That night on the beach when I was seventeen, Wilson grew amorous and I had to tell him what my loudest voice, the shrill female one, had told me, that I was to leave him and forget about him as soon as I could manage it. This struck him as a declaration of unfathomable cruelty. He was confused and angry and felt something was owed him. I resisted at first but soon ceased to protest, aware that a purpose lay in wait for me that no act of brutality could interfere with. It wasn’t long before the town knew of what they called my madness. The story of my rape became known also and transmuted into the story of my promiscuity, more palatable than the rape of the mad and requiring no involvement of the law. My family bore the social cost as much as I did. Nobody acknowledged the genuine reason why a penalty was thus exacted.
Within days of Jacob’s arrival at the inn, I began to receive from my voices intimations of his importance. At first only hints I got, keep an eye on that man, have you noticed the way he walks, the quality of his gaze, pay attention. My shrill voice soon grew more pointed. That man is your deliverance and you are his, it told me. And so I sought to know him better. One morning at the beach where he swam naked daily, I shed my clothes and stepped out from my hiding place to meet him in my nakedness. It was a rather silly while before he noticed, and when finally he did he was a ways out in the water and I think he didn’t quite trust his eyes, because as he crept to shore he betrayed no reaction at all. We observed each other at ten paces. Without a word between us, I came to him and he took me in his arms. He lowered our bodies to the sand. The midday sun was hot upon us and the tongue of the ocean needled our embrace. But he surprised me then and merely held me close. I thought he must be repelled by my body. But as he gripped me tight the shame passed out of me, and I grew convinced that my purpose lay indeed with this man.
Our days wove themselves together. I’d follow him to the beach by mornings, my presence now acknowledged and plain and what a relief it was, to watch him with frankness, in my nakedness behold his. My senses woke, and all through my body coursed the rattle of the firs and maple leaves, the taste of the ocean breeze, the blue of the sky and the white of the spume and the long, browning flanks of Jacob’s weathered body. He ploughed his limbs through the ragged water and made the noises I’ve described, not quite song but not speech either. Afterwards he’d lie with me, though we continued through that season to abstain. And more and more this seemed no insult and no loss, and more and more I sensed his importance. We lay there like animals scarred by a hunt narrowly escaped and not long past, nursing each other’s wounds.
It wasn’t till I found the courage to visit his room one evening after dinner that words came. He was reticent, but once I’d coaxed a first detail out of him, that his father had died, it would’ve been impossible to dam the flood that followed. When he spoke about the family he’d abandoned and his departure from them, he did so in a way that was contradictory, confused. He said he was in search of something. He didn’t know what. He believed the manner of living he had abandoned was poisonous to him, though he could not say precisely why or with what form of life he hoped to replace it. Often there was an undertone suggesting that he saw his time in our town as a sort of temporary wilderness trial, a test of his resolve and of the willingness of the world to reveal the truths he sought. Often there was an undertone suggesting that to his family a
nd his avowed amoral life he would soon return.
Yet it was only a month later that circumstances changed. He came in from the woods one day soaked through with rain and said he wished to renew a bad habit of his youth, and did I know a place in town where he could find rudimentary art supplies. I directed him to a store that would suit his ends, where he bought canvases and an easel and paints of basic colours. These he carried past the inn to the half-drowned woods. Absent he remained for five hours. It was early evening when at last he returned, the autumn sky streaked with dark. He did not leave his room for dinner. The door was unlocked when I arrived and that was strange, usually he locked his door and checked his locks with a paranoid rigour. I crept inside and found him seated on the far side of the bed with the easel before him, its matter concealed from me by the angle. He motioned that I should approach.
But it was no longer just the two of us in the room. My voices erupted in a raging chorus and I doubled over from the shock, he asked if I was okay, I could barely hear him much less answer. It was some time before the exhortations within me calmed enough that I could distinguish them. The shrill voice broke through at last and told me Jacob was tied to the destiny of our race in ways the greatness and terror of which it was beyond me to conceive, and now my time had come to live my purpose, which was to see the fruits of that man’s soul delivered into the light of day, where the impact they were destined to have was greater and more awful than that of the Hebrew prophets whose vision for mankind was carried forth unto the nations past the bloodied thresholds of disbelief, lo and behold, lo and behold, that. That was my sacred calling. That belonged to me, Patricia Bender, whom everybody sneered at and ignored and thought a whore and an awful blasphemer wise to keep the children far away from. The shrill voice spoke thus to me. And it was a long time before the passion subsided and I became again aware of my body sprawled on Jacob’s bed. The man loomed over me with a look on his face of considerable concern. What on earth could I say. I shook with terror that he’d spurn me for my strangeness. But he merely asked again if I was okay.
Soon afterwards, Jacob said he planned to leave our town and asked if I’d come with him. He’d met a man in the harbour who hoped to sell his cottage and Jacob had proffered the total sum in cash. I told him I’d join him. Gave me no pause. My voices continued to insist on his importance, and he and I had developed what could be called little other than a marriage. Chaste it was, yet I called forth from him the truest stuff of his heart, and he treated me with a tenderness so unlike the glares I’d known most of my life.
I never quit my job at the inn, just packed my bag and left with Jacob. He had purchased a vehicle from the man who’d sold him the cottage, and it was a cool October morning when into the back of that car we loaded the nothing the both of us owned and piled in and drove out of town. We had food for weeks and water and some tools the uses of which I knew even if Jacob didn’t, such ignorance a comical remnant of his prior life. I’d been the one to prepare our provisions also. It was the beginning of a mutual reliance that was to blossom between Jacob and me, a partnership that left him free to become a man untouched by anything outside his immediate sphere. He spoke during our long drive of the needfulness of that transformation. He said he would live henceforward an apolitical life. I just kept my mouth shut. I knew that whatever the story he told himself about why we were driving out of sight of mankind, there to remain for years and perhaps for the rest of our lives, he was certain in that isolation to set upon work of great importance, and I was to be his succour and his aid, his midwife, his wife.
The sun was shining when we arrived at the place that was to be our home. We’d travelled there through the thick of the woods and it was evident on the last stretch of our drive that we’d ventured far from other human life. The property seemed a wreck. The clearing in which the house stood was overgrown with weeds, and through the tangles skittered small life in great profusion. The house itself boasted wood boards rotten past recovery, a dilapidated porch half crumbling, the stairs broken, the front door unwilling to close. Yet the interior suited our ends just fine. The rustic furnishings were in good repair, as were the windows, tall and broad. They flooded the house with light. Perhaps on account of the proliferation of dust that hung everywhere suspended in the sun, that light seemed not entirely of this world. The look on Jacob’s face gave form to the pleasure I felt. He brushed dust off the kitchen table and plugged in the refrigerator and drew an age of repressed water from the tap. We slipped out of the house and roamed the edge of the woods and drank deep our wilderness. Later we unloaded the car and ate fruit and sipped wine and carefully in the evening made a fire. It was no surprise to either of us but felt like the natural course of things when that night for the first time we made love. It was not exactly an act of desire but rather of confirmation. And it rocked the both of us. It rocked us like neither of us had expected. My voices were all silent.
In the dead of that night Jacob got out of bed and set up his easel in the wide main room. The great windows flooded the room with moonlight, more than enough to paint by. Up behind him I crept. There for a while stood observing. And he was ignorant of my presence as his hands moved over the canvas. So strange, I thought, the forms of this life. Interrogated by reason they are inscrutable. Why should a man painting by moonlight in the wild backcountry of his civilization be of any real significance at all? Why should his painting? Why should a woman devote herself to such a man? It seemed to me as I watched Jacob that the answers to those questions would be obscure beyond all hope in the absence of guiding voices. How helpless are the children of the earth who have no voices to guide them. They are freer than me perhaps but compassless and with so few years given them in the span of a life to sort out where they must go and what they must do. My voices made perfectly explicit to me what was worthy of my deepest devotion. How many souls can count themselves so lucky?
III.
The summer when I was 28, I took a week of sick leave from my job at the Jewish community centre and bought a plane ticket to Victoria. I was a little more than five months pregnant with David. My husband gave me his reluctant, anxious blessing and asked if I’d like him to come along. No, I said, stay here for me: be my beacon from home. I might need one.
The morning of my departure, before I left for the airport to catch my early flight, I slipped back into our bedroom to kiss his sleeping face and found him in prayer at the window, tallit and tefillin wrapped around him. Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Ehad. Hear, Israel, the Lord is our God, The Lord is One. I unwrapped the black tefillin cords from his arms, traced with my fingertips the dark hairs that rose from beneath the leather.
He crouched and rested his head on my belly. Listening.
“I hope you find what you’re looking for.”
I hadn’t flown since I was a child. I’d been twelve the last time, a trip to New York City. My father had had a series of Wall Street meetings and, obliged to stay a week but with plenty of spare time, had decided to bring his family down, show my mother and me around, take us to the Empire State Building, Broadway shows, elegant restaurants on the Upper West Side. It had seemed to me such an adventure, such a privilege, though the photographic record of the week suggests I spent nearly every minute with my nose in a book. The experience of flying I’d found terrifying and liberating. This time I had the thought of Aaron and David to comfort me, though also to intensify my fear that the plane might crash. I had more than my life to lose.
A rush of relief upon landing. I rented a car, raced south towards the city, the day hot and bright. Impossible not to wonder if he’d once driven along this same route, observed these same evergreens. Fifteen years is nothing. Had the airport changed, the highway? Had he even flown from Vancouver or had he taken the ferry instead? Were his thoughts of what he was leaving or of what he was heading towards? I rolled down the windows, half-convinced myself I could taste the ocean in the air, sang a soft medley to the vagabond’s grandson inside me.
When I arrived in Victoria, I headed straight to the Segno Gallery, a narrow storefront tucked between a dive bar and an antique shop. I hopped out of the car, peered through the gallery’s windows. And there it was. Close enough to touch.
Proof of life.
Aaron’s cousin had stumbled across it online. After years of therapy and grief, including my runaway act at sixteen, when I’d escaped to Vancouver to look for him and my mom had flown west to collect me and refused, so painfully, to be angry — after all those years of resolving to forget my father, to move on, my husband’s cousin had found him by accident. An art student, at work on a research project about a collective of small galleries in Victoria, Yoni had called me up and said: Man, you’ve gotta see this … some dude on the other side of the country has painted you.
An astonishing resemblance. The portrait was on the gallery’s website. He’d painted me at fifteen or so, an extrapolation of the girl I’d been when he’d known me. Jacob Belinsky — the name he was born with. I didn’t tell my mother, who’d since remarried. I didn’t want to reopen what I knew she’d still feel as a wound. But for me it was too late.
He has me seated in a giant rocking chair. My hands are folded in my lap. Behind me is a window that lights me; through it can be seen a dry and barren plain that stretches to the horizon, a landscape that has a stark noon beauty but nevertheless seems treacherous. The portrait evokes an inconsolable loneliness, though this loneliness doesn’t seem to emanate from me. My eyes are bright. A hint of a smile plays at the corners of my mouth.
Jacob Belinsky. I couldn’t understand it. In fifteen years I’d searched online for him hundreds, thousands of times, every variant of his name. Fruitless, always. For Yoni to stumble across him like this, so casually, was almost beyond belief. Was his reappearance considered, intentional? Was he calling out to me?
Faithful and Other Stories Page 9
