Wilderness Tips (23 page)

Molly came to see me at my office. She didn’t phone first. It was right after I’d left my last high-class flunkey company position and set up on my own. I had my own flunkies now and I was wrestling with the coffee problem. If you’re a woman, women don’t like bringing you coffee. Neither do men.

“Molly, what’s wrong?” I said. “Do you want coffee?”

“I’m so wired already I couldn’t stand it,” she said. She looked it. There were half-circles under her eyes the size of lemon wedges.

“It’s Curtis,” she said. “Could I sleep over at your place tonight? If I have to?”

“What’s he done?” I said.

“Nothing,” she said. “Not yet. It isn’t what he’s done, it’s how he is. He’s heading straight for the edge.”

“In what way?”

“A while ago he started saying I was having affairs at work. He thought I was having an affair with Maurice, across the hall.”

“Maurice!” I said. We’d both gone to law school with Maurice. “But Maurice is gay!”

“We aren’t talking rational here. Then he started saying I was going to leave him.”

“And were you?”

“I wasn’t. But now, I don’t know. Now I think I am. He’s driving me to it.”

“He’s paranoid,” I said.

“Paranoid,”
said Molly. “A wide-angle camera for taking snapshots of maniacs.” She put her head down on her arms and laughed and laughed.

“Come over tonight,” I said. “Don’t even think about it. Just do it.”

“I don’t want to rush it,” said Molly. “Maybe things will work out. Maybe I can talk him into getting some help. He’s been under a lot of strain. I have to think about the kids. He’s a good father.”

Victim
, they said in the papers. Molly was no victim. She wasn’t helpless, she wasn’t hopeless. She was full of hope. It was hope that killed her.

I called her the next evening. I thought she would’ve come over, but she hadn’t. She hadn’t phoned either.

Curtis answered. He said Molly had gone on a trip.

I asked him when she’d be back. He said he had no idea. Then, he started to cry. “She’s left me,” he said.

Good for her, I thought. She’s done it, after all.

It was a week later that the arms and legs started turning up.

He killed her in her sleep, I’ll give him that much credit. She never knew. Or so he said, after he got around to remembering. He claimed amnesia, at first.

Dismemberment
. The act of conscious forgetting.

I try not to think of Molly like that. I try to remember her whole.

Charles is walking me to the door, past white tablecloth after white tablecloth, each one held in place by at least four pin-striped elbows. It’s like the
Titanic
just before the iceberg: power and influence disporting themselves, not a care in the world. What do they know about the serfs down in steerage? Piss all, and pass the port.

I smile to the right, I smile to the left. There are some familiar faces here, some familiar birthmarks. Charles takes my elbow, in a proprietary though discreet way. A light touch, a heavy hand.

I no longer think that anything can happen. I no longer want to think that way.
Happen
is what you wait for, not what you do; and
anything
is a large category. I am unlikely to get murdered by this man, for instance; I am unlikely to get married to him either. Right now, I don’t even know whether I’ll go so far as dinner on Wednesday. It occurs to me that I don’t really have to, not if I don’t want to. Some options at least remain open. Just thinking about it makes my feet hurt less.

Today is Friday. Tomorrow morning I’ll go power-walking in the cemetery, for the inner and outer thighs. It’s one of the few places you can do it in this city without getting run over. It isn’t the cemetery Molly’s buried in, whatever of her they could put together. But that doesn’t matter. I’ll pick out a tombstone where I can do my leg stretches, and I’ll pretend it’s hers.

Molly, I’ll say. We don’t see eye to eye on some things and you wouldn’t approve of my methods, but I do what I can. The bottom line is that cash is cash, and it puts food on the table.

Bottom line
, she will answer. What you hit when you get as far down as you’re going. After that you stay there. Or else you go up.

I will bend, I will touch the ground, or as close to it as I can get without rupture. I will lay a wreath of invisible money on her grave.

P
rue has folded two red bandanna handkerchiefs into triangles and tied them together at one set of corners. The second set of corners is tied behind her back, the third around her neck. She’s wrapped another bandanna, a blue one, around her head and made a little reef knot at the front. Now she’s strutting the length of the dock, in her improvised halter top and her wide-legged white shorts, her sunglasses with the white plastic frames, her platform sandals.

“It’s the forties look,” she says to George, hand on her hip, doing a pirouette. “Rosie the Riveter. From the war. Remember her?”

George, whose name is not really George, does not remember. He spent the forties rooting through garbage heaps and begging, and doing other things unsuitable for a child. He has a dim memory of some film star posed on a calendar tottering on a latrine wall. Maybe this is the one Prue means. He remembers for an instant his intense resentment of the bright, ignorant smile, the well-fed body. A couple of buddies had helped him take her apart with the rusty blade from a kitchen knife they’d found somewhere in the rubble. He does not consider telling any of this to Prue.

George is sitting in a green-and-white striped canvas deck-chair, reading
The Financial Post
and drinking Scotch. The ashtray beside him overflows with butts: many women have tried to cure him of smoking; many have failed. He looks up at Prue from behind his paper and smiles his foxy smile. This is a smile he does with the cigarette held right in the centre of his mouth: on either side of it his lips curl back, revealing teeth. He has long canines, miraculously still his.

“You weren’t born then,” he says. This isn’t true, but he never misses the chance to bestow a compliment when there’s one just lying around. What does it cost? Not a cent, which is something the men in this country have never figured out. Prue’s tanned midriff is on a level with his face; it’s still firm, still flexible and lithe. At that age his mother had gone soft – loose-fleshed and velvety, like an aging plum. These days they eat a lot of vegetables, they work out, they last longer.

Prue lowers the sunglasses to the end of her nose and looks at him over the plastic rims. “George, you are totally shameless,” she says. “You always were.” She gives him an innocent smile, a mischievous smile, a smile with a twist of real evil in it. It’s a smile that wavers like a gasoline slick on water, shining, changing tone.

This smile of Prue’s was the first interesting thing George stumbled over when he hit Toronto, back in the late fifties. It was at a party thrown by a real-estate developer with Eastern European connections. He’d been invited because refugees from Hungary were considered noteworthy back then, right after the uprising. At that time he was young, thin as a snake, with a dangerous-looking scar over one eye and a few bizarre stories. A collectible. Prue had been there in an off-the-shoulder black dress. She’d raised her glass to him, looked over the rim, hoisted the smile like a flag.

The smile is still an invitation, but it’s not something George will follow up on – not here, not now. Later, in the city, perhaps.
But this lake, this peninsula, Wacousta Lodge itself, are his refuge, his monastery, his sacred ground. Here he will perform no violations.

“Why is it you cannot bear to accept a gift?” says George. Smoke blows into his eyes; he squints. “If I were younger, I would kneel. I would kiss both your hands. Believe me.”

Prue, who has known him to do these things back in more impetuous times, turns on her heel. “It’s lunch-time,” she says. “That’s what I came to tell you.” She has heard refusal.

George watches her white shorts and her still shapely thighs (with, however, their faint stippling of dimpled fat) going wink, wink, wink through the clear sunlight, past the boathouse, along the stone path, up the hill to the house. From up there a bell is ringing: the lunch bell. For once in her life, Prue is telling the truth.

George takes one more look at the paper. Quebec is talking Separatism; there are Mohawks behind the barricades near Montreal, and people are throwing stones at them; word is the country is falling apart. George is not worried: he’s been in countries that were falling apart before. There can be opportunities. As for the fuss people here make about language, he doesn’t understand it. What’s a second language, or a third, or a fourth? George himself speaks five, if you count Russian, which he would prefer not to. As for the stone-throwing, it’s typical. Not bombs, not bullets: just stones. Even the uproar here is muted.

He scratches his belly under the loose shirt he wears; he’s been gaining a little too much around the middle. Then he stubs out his cigarette, downs the heel of his Scotch, and hauls himself out of his deck-chair. Carefully, he folds the chair and places it inside the boathouse: a wind could come up, the chair could be sent sailing into the lake. He treats the possessions and rituals of Wacousta Lodge with a tenderness, a reverence, that would baffle those who know him only in the city. Despite what some would call his unorthodox
business practices, he is in some ways a conservative man; he loves traditions. They are thin on the ground in this country, but he knows one when he sees one, and does it homage. The deck-chairs here are like the escutcheons elsewhere.

As he walks up the hill, more slowly than he used to, he hears the sound of wood being split behind the kitchen wing. He hears a truck on the highway that runs along the side of the lake; he hears wind in the white pines. He hears a loon. He remembers the first time he heard one, and hugs himself. He has done well.

Wacousta Lodge is a large, oblong, one-storey structure with board-and-batten walls stained a dark reddish brown. It was built in the first years of the century by the family’s great-grandfather, who made a bundle on the railways. He included a maid’s room and a cook’s room at the back, although no maid or cook had ever been induced to stay in them, not to George’s knowledge, certainly not in recent years. The great-grandfather’s craggy, walrus-whiskered face, frowning above the constriction of a stiff collar, hangs oval-framed in the washroom, which is equipped only with a sink and a ewer. George can remember a zinc bathtub, but it’s been retired. Baths take place in the lake. For the rest, there’s an outhouse, placed discreetly behind a clump of spruce.

What a lot of naked and semi-naked bodies the old man must have seen over the years, thinks George, lathering his hands, and how he must have disapproved of them. At least the old boy isn’t condemned to the outhouse: that would be too much for him. George makes a small, superstitious, oddly Japanese bow toward the great-grandfather as he goes out the door. He always does this. The presence of this scowling ancestral totem is one of the reasons he behaves himself, more or less, up here.

The table for lunch is set on the wide, screened-in veranda at the front of the house, overlooking the lake. Prue is not sitting at it, but her two sisters are: dry-faced Pamela, the eldest, and soft Portia, the youngest of the three and George’s own wife. There is also Roland, the brother, large, rounded, and balding. George, who is not all that fond of men on purely social occasions because there are few ways he can manipulate them, gives Roland a polite nod and turns the full force of his vulpine smile upon the two women. Pamela, who distrusts him, sits up straight and pretends not to notice. Portia smiles at him, a wistful, vague smile, as if he were a cloud. Roland ignores him, though not on purpose, because Roland has the inner life of a tree, or possibly of a stump. George can never tell what Roland is thinking, or even if he is thinking at all.

“Isn’t the weather marvellous?” George says to Pamela. He has learned over the years that the weather is the proper opening topic here for any conversation at all. Pamela is too well brought up to refuse an answer to a direct question.

“If you like postcards,” she says. “At least it’s not snowing.” Pamela has recently been appointed a Dean of Women, a title George has not yet figured out completely. The Oxford dictionary has informed him that a dean might be the head of ten monks in a monastery, or “as tr. med. L.
decanus
, applied to the
teođing-ealdor
, the headman of a
tenmannetale.”
Much of what Pamela says sounds more or less like this: incomprehensible, though it might turn out to have a meaning if studied.

George would like to go to bed with Pamela, not because she is beautiful – she is much too rectilinear and slab-shaped for his tastes, she has no bottom at all, and her hair is the colour of dried grass – but because he has never done it. Also, he wants to know what she would say. His interest in her is anthropological. Or perhaps geological: she would have to be scaled, like a glacier.