Object of Your Love

 

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CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Eagle's Bride

A River Landscape

Object of Your Love

Memorabilia

Summer Sky: White Ship

The Sum of Its Parts

Grass

The View From Here

Stroke

Copyright

 

To Paul

 

These stories (some in earlier forms and with different titles) were previously published, as follows:

“Memorabilia,”
University of Windsor Review

“Object of Your Love,”
Prism International
and
Journey Prize Anthology 1994

“Summer Sky: White Ship,”
New Quarterly

“Eagle's Bride,”
Northward Journal

“Grass,”
Grain

“River Landscape,”
A Room of One's Own

“North of the Border,”
Wascana Review

The author would like to thank the
Canada Council for financial assistance.

EAGLE'S BRIDE

I am seized with violent desire

Alone by myself I become lustful.

I am seized with violent desire

Alone by myself I become lustful.

– Inuit song

I
LIVE
with a married man on a hill overlooking an Arctic settlement. From the living-room window I can see the red roofs of fifty prefab houses (bungalows for the Inuit, two-stories for the whites) lining a muddy road curving around the shore, from the Catholic mission at one end to the
RCMP
station at the other. I can look out across the black hills ringing the bay, and beyond at the everlasting frozen sky. The first time I saw this landscape it made me shake. I thought I might have touched down on the fruitless crust of the moon, or the rocky, infertile road to Hell. Now I am in love with its beautiful desolation. There is a sense here that, like the land and the Inuit themselves, there are no beginnings or endings. There is only endurance.

I never met Ruth, Egan's wife. She left six months ago, just before I came to the community. And yet, I feel I know her. You cannot live day in and day out with someone's things and not know them. When I touch the Shaker dining-room chairs, or the antique decoy on the mantle, or the needlepoint cushions, I feel something that is not jealousy, though I have heard of women driven to homicidal thoughts from having to use another woman's dishes, towels, bed sheets. Sometimes I have to bite my tongue. Egan will not hear anything bad about Ruth, though he has consented to turn her photograph face down on the bureau. I like to think of her long, humourless face pressed hard against the walnut surface.

It is possible that I know Ruth better than I know Egan. He is an unreadable, angerless man, but I am not sure he was always this way. They say that any southerner who survives twenty years in the North, as Egan has, has either gone weird or was crazy to begin with. In the evenings, I see him with a book open on his knee, staring for hours at the crackling fire, feeding on his selfish grief like a hungry dog eating its own entrails. I have to get out then. I storm down the hill and stride back and forth on the road beside the bay, looking out at the black water. I walk rapidly, past curtainless windows flickering with blue television light, past houses where men and women sit at kitchen tables killing bottles of whisky.

When my legs ache so much that I can go no further, I climb back up the hill. I have to pass Ruth's greenhouse, perched twenty feet from the house on a cement pad. It is the greenhouse that convinced me that Ruth must have been, in the end, quite mad. She tried to grow lettuce, tomatoes, orchids—
orchids!
—but of course they died during the dark months. The greenhouse stands beside Egan's A-frame, on sunny days glittering like a prism above the community. “Ruth's Folly,” I call it privately.

When Egan is away on business trips to the South, I have seen the raven-haired Inuit children creep up the hill like hunters, step inside the greenhouse, cautiously, superstitiously, gazing round in wonder at the patterns of frost on the windows, intricate as stained glass, at the transparent, soaring ceiling, glorious and divine as a Gothic cathedral. I hear their voices echoing against the brittle walls like the thin cry of seagulls flown too far north or the sound of Ruth's ghost weeping. The children dump the earth out of Ruth's green plastic pots, dump it on the cement floor, and jubilantly bear the pots, like anthropologists' trophies, back down the hill. I have seen fragments of green plastic all over the community, lying in the dirt beside houses, or crushed underfoot on the pebbly beach. I've seen dogs chewing on them.

“Why don't you stop them if you see them doing it?” Egan has asked, smiling sadly, with the same tolerant, paternal expression he uses for the Inuit, and probably with his own children. (I am not much older than his daughter.)

“The greenhouse is preposterous. Why don't you have the silly thing pulled down?” I answer.

“I'm used to seeing it there.”

“How can I replace,” I demand angrily, “how can I
hope
to replace a woman who still lives all around me?”

I came North looking for freedom, a virgin country, a society where there were no rules. Almost immediately I was hired as bookkeeper at the art cooperative, where prints are produced, raw stone sold to carvers, completed sculptures purchased back from them and marketed to the South. I was given the bachelor apartment above the co-op. It was small and poorly heated, with bare windows looking out at the relentless horizon. Like a nun entering her cell, I embraced its brutal simplicity. The cold pine floors and rigid sofa bed made me feel pure and strong. I thought I wanted to live an essential, bedrock existence—like the treeless landscape I saw from my window.

Several times, though, in the months after my arrival, I was forced to spend a few nights in Egan's spare bedroom. There is always a housing shortage in the community and, with Ruth and the children gone, he had more empty rooms than anyone else in the settlement. Being owned by the co-op, my apartment was often given over to official visitors—art historians, photographers, government officials—curious about the richest art community in the North, a settlement where there is a Ski-Doo at every door and a
TV
antenna on every roof. With the snow driving hard against the windows of the A-frame, Egan fed me exotic foods: watermelon, fresh artichokes, cashew nuts, things the Inuit have never heard of or seen. He never shops at the local Hudson's Bay store, where everything is sold dry or frozen; he can afford to fly all his groceries in from Timmins. He has a microwave oven, a Cuisinart, a dishwasher, a
VCR
, a waterbed. There isn't a piece of furniture in his house that isn't a century old. If you were to close the living-room curtains and shut out the vista of thin islands of ice floating on the blue bay, you could believe you are sitting in an upper-middle-class Toronto home.

But even for a man like Egan, who has lived in the Arctic nearly as long as he can remember, there are moments when the vastness of the landscape, the penetrating cold, the sight of the cruel hills and the jarring peacock sky can rock you to your core. Loneliness sets in, followed swiftly by despair. One feels a need to cleave to another human body, like the Inuit babies that lived inside their mother's parkas, wearing nothing but a piece of caribou hide for a diaper, skin pressed against skin, the smells of their bodies intermingling. One evening, during a week-long sojourn with Egan, we climbed the stairs together to retire to our respective rooms. But then Egan turned to me on the little landing and said, his hand on the light switch of his room, “Will you sleep with me tonight?” I didn't need to be persuaded. I was already aroused by his melancholy and restlessness, by his square bristly jaw and frontiersman's shoulders.

Egan has turned out to be a methodical, conservative lover. I put this down to Ruth's passionlessness: it is from a woman that a man learns to make love. His caresses are sorrowful, weary, bordering on penitent. Our love-making seems for him a cautious physical pleasure, but it does not satisfy his soul. I have never been convinced that he feels comfortable about what we are doing. But when I lie with my long thick hair thrown across the pillow and my bare breasts heaving, I do not see how he could prefer making love to plain Ruth. Sometimes, afterwards, he will lie very still beside me and I will turn to him in the dark, expecting to see his lips moving silently. I think he might be praying for Ruth to come back.

Under the house lives a white hare, which Egan feeds daily, squatting on his haunches, offering a carrot. The hare appeared the day Ruth left him. Egan sent word around the community that it was not to be hunted down and killed for someone's supper. I am convinced that Egan believes the hare is Ruth's spirit. That's why he's been throwing leafy vegetables under the house, to keep it alive. After half a lifetime up here, he may put some store in the Inuit notion that everything, animate and inanimate, has a spirit, an
inua.
He believes in transference. A person can become an animal, an animal a person. Creation is fluid. Physical manifestations are merely arbitrary boundaries, through which the soul can migrate, take up residence in another life form.

With Egan's money, Ruth has gone to live in an expensive suburb of Toronto, in a fortresslike stone house with a great medieval wooden door and dense boxwood shrubs clipped to look like unicorns and dragons. She has placed the children in private schools. At first she said Egan might be able to join her later, in the South. She thought that the smog and traffic noise, the long shadows cast by skyscrapers, the pace of city life would obscure the flaws in him that had become so painfully manifest in the pitiless northern light. But when he goes south, she will not let him stay in the house. When she sees him, she says, she feels the arctic wind blowing once more down her back. She is afraid that if she lets Egan near her, she will not be able to resist the strange spiritual pull of the North. Its wintry hand will come down on her, close around her throat.

Egan's children have become strangers to him. They wear the latest in labelled clothing, they go to a white school, they do not miss the North (the country of their birth!) or ever want to go back to it. When Egan visits Toronto, he rings the doorbell of Ruth's house and the children answer it. “Oh, Dad, it's you,” they say coolly, in their new, sophisticated urban voices. “What are
you
doing here?” Until they moved south with their mother, he did not notice how much they resemble her. They have her hard, unforgiving mouth, her careful expressionlessness. Their faces are smooth and impervious as varnished wooden masks. Then Ruth will appear in the hallway behind them, her body rigid, her expression cold, cold as a soapstone carving, cold and distant as an iceberg floating on the Foxe Channel.

*   *   *

One afternoon at the cooperative, I open an invoice for ten bolts of duffle cloth that I can't remember ordering. That would be for the sewing project, I think. I take my cup of coffee and the invoice and set off to see Morgan. To reach the sewing studio, I must first pass through the stonecutting shop where three Inuit men are at work, transferring images on paper to the large stone blocks for the making of stonecut prints. These old men are very brown from a lifetime spent on a terrain offering not a sliver of shade from the raw arctic sun. They have shrunken necks, many missing teeth, bad haircuts revealing large flowery ears. Chipping silently away with chisels on the soft stone, they work without haste, smoking cigarettes. Their friends drop in to talk. This is allowed. We are lucky to get them to come in at all to do what they call “the white man's work.” From time to time they get up and gaze longingly out the window at the land, their elbows, in threadbare sweaters, resting on the high windowsills. Their eyes narrow, scanning the horizon. They are watching for good hunting weather. If it comes, we may not see them again for weeks.