The Last Woman (14 page)

“There are better.”

She can sense his disappointment in himself – a vulnerability that moves her. “If you want to run, I’ll be behind you. I can’t promise I’ll play the political wife, at least not like some play it, but – I want it for you, Rich. If that’s what you want.”

Still he remains silent.

“I just hope we don’t drift away from each other. It’s hard enough as it is. People have to make time for each other –”

“Isn’t that what we’re doing now?” he says, a bit peevishly.

“Yes! Yes!” Whenever they talk like this – and the times are rare – she comes up against his resistance; and behind the resistance, what? Fear? Anger? She thinks of his father, who tyrannized their little house with his rages. And his mother, the last word in interfering women. When Ann first met Richard, Doris was still buying his underwear.

“I’m afraid for us sometimes,” she says. It comes out before she can think. “I don’t mean that to be as ominous as it sounds, but we have to be more than a business partnership who keep our sides of this – enterprise – going. We’ve become kind of dry, don’t you think?”

“Well,” he says, heaving one leg over the other. She knows he has taken her remark as a criticism.

“You know I love you,” she says, reaching toward him. It has come upon her in an instant: a swift intuiting of his need, of all they have been through together. She grips his hand where it rests on the broad arm of his chair. Fumbling a bit, it turns and squeezes hers.

That night they make love, and the next day a kind of melancholy fills the cottage. From the moment she gets out of bed, she feels like weeping. Just before noon, the Gotliebs bring Rowan back – they are on their way to lunch at the Harbour. After they leave, Ann talks Richard and Rowan into going out in the canoe.

The afternoon is hot, the rocky shores with their juniper bushes go by with the drugged pulse of her headache. She does most of the talking – she can hear her cheerful voice willing them all into a holiday mood. Behind her, Richard scarcely responds, while his paddle takes sharp bites of the water. From her seat amidships, she compliments Rowan on his bow work, and he tells her, testily, he
knows
he’s a good bowsman. Feeling slighted, she falls silent.

At last they beach the canoe on an island and carry their cooler to the shade. Immediately, Rowan wants to go swimming. “Not too long,” she calls after him. “We don’t want the food going bad,” and Richard says, in his patient-impatient cajoling way, as if she really should consider relaxing some time, “It’ll be
fine
, Ann.”

She perches up on the rock while Rowan shows off for her, crying “Okay, watch this one!” He runs tearing off a small cliff to cannonball into the water. After each splash, he climbs out to see how far the drops have flown. “You try it, Dad.”

She watches her husband climb the rock. His big pale body has grown a paunch he seems half-proud of. When she met him, she had not been particularly attracted to him, physically. In bed they proved not to be the best of matches, but her more sexually compatible lovers had seemed deficient in other ways. Not that pleasure wasn’t important – at times in her life it had been all-consuming – but the men she knew between Billy and Richard had been, in some critical sense, deficient. Lovely in their way, intelligent,
original, sensitive, but there had been too much of the boy about them. They all had big dreams but nothing ever seemed to come of them. Richard was different. She had sensed it right away. There was purpose in him, and a calm, steady pursuit of it. He would get somewhere that mattered and he would do so by his own hard work, his own merits. He was three years older than she, and there
was
something more mature in him, mixed with a kindness that in those days seemed without ulterior motive. The naïveté of his devotion moved her; he seemed not to see her faults, or at least not to care about them, and she found herself trying to be the finer person he imagined. Combined with his ability to set and stay a course, this quality made him extremely attractive. She could sense in him the possibilities of a life for herself – a solid place where she could give her attention to her work and, some day, to having a child.

She had painted well in those days – the early days of her marriage. She had received good reviews, she had been named one of the country’s best under-thirty artists. And after Billy came back into her life, into their life, her surge of work had continued. She painted
The Chronicle of Childhood
then, which was bought by a public gallery outside Toronto. It was only later, after the land claim failed, that the greyness set in – not all at once, but in patches of lethargy, of lost directions, of paintings she could only half-complete. She did finish some – darker works that sold poorly. But there were too many days, far too many days, when her senses seemed blunted and the world outside her unreal.

Her husband crashes into the water and when he pops up some distance away, he looks over at her, as Rowan did earlier.

She claps her hands and grins.

That evening she drives Rowan and Richard to Carton Harbour: they are returning to Black Falls for the week. In the parking lot, Richard asks her to call Elaine Shewaybick to help with the dinner for the Benoits the following weekend. “Make sure she understands she can stay the night. Don’t want her driving back in the dark.” Ann questions whether they really need Elaine, but Richard insists. “I don’t want you stuck away in the kitchen. The Benoits will want to see you.” Back at Inverness, Ann sits for a long time in her chair overlooking the channel. All energy, all purpose, seemed to have drained away. Making herself get up, she goes in and calls Elaine’s place, on Pine Island; but it seems her phone has been disconnected; she will have to drive up to the Island in the morning.

The next day, she wakes feeling a little better. She
could
work, but she’s still loath to climb to her studio. Avoiding it, she swims, changes into fresh clothes, and sets out in the motorboat for Pine Island.

The floating dock, as usual, is crowded with boats, and she has to tie up on their perimeter, stepping from boat to boat until she reaches the dock. A little girl sits in a boat by herself. Ann speaks to her, but she goes on staring straight ahead, her hands clasped in her lap.

Crossing the beach, Ann is climbing toward the houses when a movement startles her. A dog has got up – one of the big, half-wild dogs of the Island. Shaking itself off – releasing a cloud of dust and straw – it begins to edge toward her, growling as it slowly places one foot, then another.

She stops. Up the treeless lanes, no one is in sight. Behind her, at the dock, the little girl sits with her back to her, intent on her solitary journey.

“Go on! Shoo!”

People have been attacked by these dogs, she knows; a child was nearly killed. Beyond, the houses go on simmering under the sun, indifferent. She feels she has met a kind of truth.
Nothing cares for me here
. When the animal charges, she cries out in fear, but the dog veers off the path and promptly collapses, panting as if laughing at its little joke.

She goes on up the lanes. She’s completely off balance now and sweating heavily.
Why did I ever wear jeans?
(
Because you don’t like your legs
, answers a small voice.) Rounding the corner of Elaine’s house, she finds half a dozen women sitting about in lawn chairs. On the ground, in the shade cast by the house, are scattered sewing baskets, rolls of tanned hide, swaths of coloured cloth. Elaine isn’t here.

“I hope I’m not interrupting,” she smiles, coming forward. As one, the women have fallen silent, like birds in a bush. “I just ran into one of those awful logs. I mean, dogs. Really, I was sure he was going to eat me.”

Making herself the butt of her own story, she succeeds in provoking a few smiles. She knows most of the women here and expects to feel at home. But today, she finds them impassive. “I just need to speak to Elaine.” Someone says that Elaine will be out in a minute and the silence continues. Normally, such reticence does not bother her on Pine Island, where chatter for politeness’ sake is not the style. But today her response is to talk more – though she senses this is only making things worse.

Nearby, a woman with heavy arms is sitting with her sewing in her lap.

“Oh beautiful, Deirdre!” Ann says. “I hope you’ll sell that pair to me.” The big suede mitts
are
beautiful. Deirdre has covered the cuffs with wine-coloured felt, and on this she is beading a flower design.

After a pause, Deirdre says, “Well, maybe Ross’ll sell them to you.”

“Oh, they’re for your husband!” Ann knows she has made a gaffe, assuming Deirdre was making the gloves to sell in the co-op, assuming that the offer of money would be welcome. For a moment she sees herself through their eyes: the white woman who comes to buy things. It is a relief when Elaine appears and she can go off and talk with her.

In the end she leaves feeling as she used to in school, when she was rejected by the reigning clique of girls. Near a clutch of dusty poplars, she stops. The path to her right leads to Billy’s house and for some time she looks at it, past an abandoned bicycle toward a clump of birch that she knows lies within sight of his windows.

Halfway to the trees, she is struck with the sense she has done this before, walked toward the blue house in a state of anxious uncertainty, with a feeling that her life, somehow, hangs in the balance – and that what is happening to her is not entirely within her power. So the afternoon of grey calm, all those years ago, comes back. It had happened. That slipped condom, in all probability. Her doctor had broken confidence and told her father; her father had phoned her mother in Montreal and in no time her “predicament” had become the atmosphere they breathed. There was an assumption that “it” had to be taken care of; in one way, she was grateful. But her parents were so quick to take over that she felt completely ignored. Her vague, neurasthenic mother had become steely and organized. Since Ann was going to London, and since London was far away, Bernice took advantage of a family connection and made “arrangements.” Her father’s contributions were less helpful. One day he threw a china figurine at the wall. He shouted at her that she must not see Billy again. Of course he had already told her this once, to no avail.
This time
– but he could not complete his threat. She pitied him, in his exasperation. He seemed diminished; while she experienced a sudden access of power. She was in some way unassailable. Everyone was terrified of what was inside her. With utter calm, she looked back at him. He left the room. At the base of the wall lay the headless figurine.

Driving the boat to Pine Island, she felt she was fleeing a communal madness, toward a place of safety. Her
mother had said,
Do not tell Billy. He does not need to know
. She had agreed, but racing through the islands, any sense of a fixed plan had evaporated.

When he stood up in surprise, scattering the bowl of peas on the ground, she saw for the first time how young he was. Those wide-set, eager eyes meeting hers: he was a boy, really. She saw herself living with him in some poor house in the Falls, tending a squalling child, while he dragged himself off each day to work in her father’s lumberyard. Her freedom gone, her hopes for her art gone. No, she would spare them both.

But a few minutes later, walking with him over the rocks, breathing the scents of the lake, all her terror of spoiling her life lifted, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world to have a baby with him. What was she so afraid of? She started to weep, and she could not stop. Surely there was room on their voyage for an extra passenger. For half a minute, the thought seduced her. But then she saw, again, how impossible it all was. She couldn’t have a baby and she couldn’t tell him about it: because he would want her to have it. And in any case, no matter what he said, she was going away. How could she tell him about her pregnancy and her decision to end it, and then disappear, leaving him alone with such knowledge? So she kept her secret, and the whole way back to her boat, walking beside him, she seemed to feel a tiny life fluttering in panic inside her.

She finds him sitting on a chair near his woodpile, working on an outboard motor he has fixed on a board between two trees. He looks around as she approaches and she experiences a plunging excitement, a kind of dread, which she covers by adopting a jocular tone. “One of your lovely dogs came after me,” she tells him. “You’re a savage people, aren’t you, keeping such
beasts
!” She speaks with ironic emphasis: the sort of thing her English friends might say, that she might have said herself while living in England.