The Last Woman (26 page)

“Nope. Like coming home.”

“It was good,” she says, though some sound – the clatter perhaps of the maid going by with her cart – had broken in upon her too soon.

Her head on his chest – so flat and hard after Richard – she listens idly to a tap dribbling in the washroom, not wanting to move, to disturb their closeness.

“Did you think of me when you were away?”

“Constantly,” he says.

“Don’t tell me you didn’t have other girls!” She is pleased to be calling herself a girl. As if when she goes out that door, she might go anywhere.

“This one time,” he says and tells her how, one night in Georgia, he was camping on a sandbar – his fire burning by a river whose name he cannot remember. “I’m sitting there, stirring my beans – and all of a sudden I sense there’s someone behind me.” He pauses for a moment. “You,” he says. “Just at my shoulder. You touched the top of my head.”

“And did I stay for supper? I mean,
really
–”

“I looked around, you were gone.”

She is silent for a while. He is deadly serious, she realizes: Was it a dream? Had he been drinking?

“You were ill,” he says. “I could tell from your touch – something wrong inside you.”

Her heart begins to pound and she asks when it happened.

About a year ago, he tells her, at the end of August. He had been pruning Christmas trees for a farmer and camping near the plantation.

She tells him how she and Richard had driven to southern Ontario at that time, to see some plays at Stratford. One afternoon in their motel room she had found a lump in her breast. In the end, after several tests, it had been declared benign; but she had been as frightened as ever in her life.

She pads to the toilet and a few minutes later peers at her face in the mirror. A river in Georgia.

In the car they are mostly silent. Billy puts the seat back and is soon snoring in a way that reminds her of Richard. The sun of late afternoon throws tree shadows across the road and floods the interior of the car. Ahead, a cliff opens. High on the rockface, people have painted messages.
MIKE WAS HERE. KILL SIRHAN SIRHAN. DON’T FORGET ME JENNIE.
And her favourite:
A.M. LOVES P.M. FOREVER
.

In the Harbour, they sit with the crowd on Lola’s deck. Everything – the masts in the Harbour, the cup in her
hand, all subtly different – as if a grain of weight had been added. Or taken away. Across the table, he smiles at her – his haggard face lit briefly with a look that melts in her chest.

The Gotliebs are here, surveying the deck from the entrance. She looks away, but already they are approaching. Their tanned, grinning faces. Their heartiness. She hears herself answer them, cheerfully, in a voice from another life. “You remember Billy –” “Yes, we met at Inverness.” No one mentions the bruises on his face, his arms, though she sees Pamela looking. They chat about an idea Ted has for a documentary. About a line of clothing Pam’s bought for her boutique. They laugh over nothing, loudly and self-consciously, while Billy’s neutral gaze wanders the quay. I’m going to go mad, Ann thinks. Suddenly Billy says he has to go and pushes back his chair. Ann is bereft. She cannot find words, cannot reach out and touch him, though he is standing beside her.

They watch him step from the deck and go across the road to the docks, where he soon disappears among the mass of boats.

“He looks in pretty rough shape,” Pamela says, turning back to Ann.

“Yes, well, he had an accident with his boat. It’s a concussion, apparently. I just drove him back from the hospital. Looks like he’ll be all right.”

“Good,” Pamela says. “Still an attractive guy, in spite of all –”

“I suppose,” Ann says dryly, reaching for her bill.

An hour later she ties up her boat and starts up the path toward the cottage. A beautiful evening – the pines across the channel wavering in deep reflection. Nearing the back steps, she turns aside, and for some time sits on the rock with her arms wrapped around her knees. Her sadness has deepened: a floating expansive emptiness that seems to bear her back into girlhood. She has
always
sat just here, among the still, shadowy pines, by the bright water.

Bestirring herself, she gets up and continues toward the cottage, but a few steps shy of it she turns and goes back along the path and into the boathouse. Even before she reaches the top of the stairs, she feels the presence of her painting. She does not look at it, however, but walks the length of her studio and back in a state of suspense, only turning to it when she is directly in front of it. The giant woman still marches through the mob of her tormentors. Her mouth is still open. But there is expression in her face now, which meets the incoming light with surprise – an instant of understanding poised on the near side of horror. In her right hand, she carries a large pine cone, which she holds just under her breasts; in her left, she grips a staff, whose top is twined with leaves. Around her, below knee level (below the tide of flooding light), the horde of much smaller figures moil in shadow. Some of them have managed to loop a cable around the woman’s wrist and are pulling as if to bring her down. A man is hacking at her calf with an axe. Most of the men and women in the crowd
seem curiously zombie-like, unaware of what they are doing. But one of their number, who is being crushed by her descending foot, has come awake, and his face is contorted with recognition.

Ann has given the giantess very pale skin, tinged a faint gold by the incoming light. But she sees now that this is wrong. The woman needs to be red, a real red, to indicate simultaneously her power and her agony. Ann paws through her heap of tubes. Cadmium Red. Rose Madder. Vermillion –

S
itting with his old golfing partner Bob Feydeau on the dining deck of the Wolf Lake Club, Richard catches the drone of a familiar voice riding the murmur of the lunchtime crowd. Among the umbrellas, it takes him a moment to pick out Reg Benoit, but yes, it’s him, vivid in tennis whites as he stands at a table, bald, fit, bronzed, holding forth while a circle of diners looks up at him with smiling and half-smiling faces. Waiting beside Reg is a dark-haired, well-built young man, also in whites, whom Richard does not recognize. As the two men make their way along the rail against the glittering field of Wolf Lake, he continues to watch intently.

Reg and his companion take a table and immediately a
waitress is there with a sheaf of menus. Laughing at some remark of Reg’s, she rises like a young girl on her toes. The minister’s own rich laugh drifts over the crowd, and when the waitress moves away, he leans to the young man and speaks close to his ear. The young man grins. There’s something familiar in his face, but Richard can’t place him.

“You know?” Bob is saying across the table. “They’re still mired in the 1930s – the whole organization. If you wanted to change the Leafs, you’d have to fire everybody, from the top down. But why should they change? Damned fools like me buy tickets anyway. One of the worst teams in the league and the place is packed, game in, game out. So blame us suckers.”

Reg is now scanning the crowd, checking to see who’s lunching with whom – the college president with the visiting paper executive, the socialist MP with the union leader, the doctor with the woman not his wife. Richard has conducted a similar inventory himself, and observing Reg do it charges him with reassuring fellow-feeling, a sense they are connoisseurs of the same intelligence, insiders really. Now Reg seems to be looking his way. But the minister does not, apparently, see him – does not, at least, acknowledge Richard’s upraised hand.

Richard experiences a despondency that only increases as the lunch goes on. He throws himself into the conversation with Bob. He jokes with the golfers at the next table. But his attention keeps straying across the deck, where there’s a steady trickle of people stopping to talk with the minister. The MP. A man in a yellow shirt who laughs
with exaggerated jollity at something Reg says. Beside Reg, the young man picks at his food and says little. Richard is beside himself with the sense he knows the man or at least
should
: that party last year at Reg’s place?

It’s almost 1:45, and Richard remembers he has an appointment at two and a mountain of work that’s been growing all week. But when the waitress who served Reg goes by, Richard calls her over and begins chatting with her about the unusual brands of beer they have on tap. A great crowd, he suggests. “I see you’ve got the minister of natural resources over there.” The waitress seems uninterested. But Bob says, “Where?” and turns around to look. “That guy’s a fool,” Bob says, in a voice Richard is sure is carrying over half the deck. “With all due respect, I know you’re thick with that bunch, but that new tax –”

“Well, it’s pretty complicated…” Each time Richard tries to change the subject, Bob continues his attack on the new tax, which he claims will ruin his business. Richard excuses himself and goes into the bar, where he calls Marg and cancels his two o’clock. He is at loose ends, not knowing whether he should go or stay, whether he should approach the minister or leave it to a better time: you don’t want to be seen lining up with all the rest. He starts away, then stops.

Marilyn Benoit is passing through the bar and onto the deck, where Reg stands to pull out a chair for her. Already Richard is making his way among the empty tables of the bar, out onto the deck where he moves toward the Benoits’ table, carried on a tide of desperate bonhomie that feels more expansive and genuine with each step. Marilyn sees
him first, her face lighting. She whispers to Reg, who, turning from their companion, says, “Rick, good to see you”: warmly enough, Richard thinks. He stands at their table talking.

Marilyn introduces him to the dark-haired young man: her brother, Peter.

“Of course!” Richard cries, relieved. “I’ve met you at Random Lake!”

“Rick and his wife have the most beautiful place out on Nigushi,” she tells Ron. “A tennis court in the woods – really divine!”

“When it’s not under siege by moths,” Richard says, and Marilyn launches into the story of the moths. The minister has gone back to scanning the crowd.

That night, Rowan in bed, Richard carries his second Scotch into his study and calls Inverness. He had called Ann the previous night, three times in all, and got no answer. He had not slept well. This time he lets the phone ring a dozen times before he gives up. It is only on his fourth attempt, close to midnight, that Ann answers.

“Where were you? I’ve been trying to reach you.” “I was painting – not actually painting, staring at it. I think it’s good. I’ll show it to you when you come up. You’ll see.”

“I just wanted to say.” He stops to swallow. “All this business between us – well, I was wrong, what I told you. To tell you what you couldn’t do – not my business.”

“I appreciate that,” she says, in a small voice.

“Good. Good. That’s all right then.”

After a while they hang up and he sits for a long time without moving. Over his desk hangs a framed historical map of North America, drawn in the early years of European discovery. Absently, his gaze lingers at a name, drifts farther west, where the names grow sparse and the continent fades into mystery.

They had been friends for more than a year when Billy asked Richard to go hunting that fall up at Silver Lake, where he had a cabin. Billy had been elected a band counsellor and was also working as a regular guide at the Blue Osprey, as well as running a trapline in the winter months. He was doing well enough, financially, to drive a secondhand Chrysler – a big golden boat with a dream catcher swinging below the rear-view, fender skirts, and an insatiable appetite for gas. Richard had joked to Ann about the car: “Taste was never his forte.” “Actually,” she came back, “in certain ways, he has perfect taste. The taste of modesty, you know? He never pushes himself on you. He wouldn’t think of it.” “Except with his car,” Richard insisted with a smile; somehow, he’d felt criticized.

He borrowed a rifle from Ann’s father, who was more than pleased to give him some shooting lessons. Being athletic and a quick study, Richard picked up the basics soon enough. But there was a world of difference, Charles told him, between shooting at bottles in a quarry and
hitting an animal at a distance of a hundred or more yards. “The heart,” Charles said, sketching the outline of a moose with a stick. “The best shot is here. A lung shot is good too. If you lung him, he’ll drown in his own blood.” The weight of the gun in his hands, the cool, snug perfection of its parts, the pleasing richness of its chestnut stock, the pale wafer of light with its crossed hairs through which he sighted at the bottles, the teasing tension of the trigger – the gun was not just a novelty but called up in him a keen sense of anticipation.