Wilderness Tips (9 page)

It was not lust. Lust was what you felt for Marilyn Monroe, or sometimes for the strippers at the Victory Burlesque. (Selena had a poem about the Victory Burlesque. The strippers, for her, were not
a bunch of fat sluts with jiggling, dimpled flesh. They were diaphanous; they were surreal butterflies, emerging from cocoons of light; they were splendid.)

What he craved was not her body as such. He wanted to be transformed by her, into someone he was not.

By now it was summer, and the university and the coffee-house were both closed. On rainy days Richard lay on the lumpy bed in his humid, stifling room, listening to the thunder; on sunny ones, which were just as humid, he made his way from tree to tree, staying in the shade. He avoided the library. One more session of sticky near-sex with Mary Jo, with her damp kisses and her nurse-like manipulations of his body, and especially the way she sensibly stopped short of anything final, would leave him with a permanent limp.

“You wouldn’t want to get me knocked up,” she would say, and she was right, he wouldn’t. For a girl who worked among books, she was breathtakingly prosaic. But then, her forte was cataloguing.

Richard knew she was a healthy girl with a normal outlook. She would be good for him. This was his mother’s opinion, delivered after he’d made the mistake – just once – of taking her home with him to Sunday dinner. She was like corned beef, cottage cheese, cod-liver oil. She was like milk.

One day he bought a bottle of Italian red wine and took the ferry over to Wards Island. He knew Selena lived over there. That at least had been in the poems.

He didn’t know what he intended to do. He wanted to see her, take hold of her, go to bed with her. He didn’t know how he was going to get from the first step to the last. He didn’t care what came of it. He wanted.

He got off the ferry and walked up and down the small streets of the island, where he had never been. These were summer homes,
cheap and insubstantial, white clapboard or pastel, or sided with insulbrick. Cars were not permitted. There were kids on bicycles, dumpy women in swimsuits taking sunbaths on their lawns. Portable radios played. It was not what he’d had in mind as Selena’s milieu. He thought of asking someone where she lived – they would know, she’d stand out here – but he didn’t want to advertise his presence. He considered turning around, taking the next ferry back.

Then, off at the end of one of the streets, he saw a minute one-storey cottage, in the shade of two large willows. There had been willows in the poems. He could at least try.

The door was open. It was her house, because she was in it. She was not at all surprised to see him.

“I was just making some peanut-butter sandwiches,” she said, “so we could have a picnic.” She was wearing loose black cotton slacks, Oriental in tone, and a sleeveless black top. Her arms were white and thin. Her feet were in sandals; he looked at her long toes, with the toenails painted a light peach-pink. He noted with a wrench of the heart that the nail polish was chipped.

“Peanut butter?” he said stupidly. She was talking as if she’d been expecting him.

“And strawberry jam,” she said. “Unless you don’t like jam.” Still that courteous distance.

He proffered his bottle of wine. “Thanks,” she said, “but you’ll have to drink it all by yourself.”

“Why?” he said. He’d intended this to go differently. A recognition. A wordless embrace.

“If I ever started I’d never stop. My father was an alcoholic,” she told him gravely. “He’s somewhere else, because of it.”

“In the Underworld?” he said, in what he hoped was a graceful allusion to her poetry.

She shrugged. “Or wherever.” He felt like a dunce. She went back to spreading the peanut butter, at her diminutive kitchen table.
Richard, wrung dry of conversation, looked around him. There was only the one room, sparsely furnished. It was almost like a religious cell, or his idea of one. In one corner was a desk with an old black typewriter, and a bookshelf made of boards and bricks. The bed was narrow and covered with a swath of bright purple Indian cotton, to double as a sofa. There was a tiny sink, a tiny stove. One easy chair, Sally-Ann issue. A braided, faded rug. On the walls there were no pictures at all.

“I don’t need them,” she said. She’d put the sandwiches into a crumpled paper bag and was motioning him out the door.

She led him to a stone breakwater overlooking the lake, and they sat on it and ate the sandwiches. She had some lemonade in a milk bottle; they passed it back and forth. It was like a ritual, like a communion; she was letting him partake. She sat cross-legged, with sunglasses on. Two people went by in a canoe. The lake rippled, threw off glints of light. Richard felt absurd, and happy.

“We can’t be lovers,” she said to him after a time, She was licking jam off her fingers. Richard jolted awake. He had never been so abruptly understood. It was like a trick; it made him uncomfortable.

He could have pretended he didn’t know what she was talking about. Instead he said, “Why not?”

“You would get used up,” she said. “Then you wouldn’t be there, later.”

This was what he wanted: to be used up. To burn in divine conflagration. At the same time, he realized that he could not summon up any actual, carnal desire for this woman; this
girl
, sitting beside him on the breakwater with her skinny arms and minimal breasts, dangling her legs now like a nine-year-old.

“Later?” he said. Was she telling him he was too good to be wasted? Was this a compliment, or not?

“When I’ll need you,” she said. She was stuffing the waxed-paper sandwich wrapping into the paper bag. “I’ll walk you to the ferry.”

He had been circumvented, outmanoeuvred; also spied on. Maybe he was an open book and a dolt as well, but she didn’t have to rub it in. As they walked, he found himself getting angry. He still clutched the wine bottle in its liquor-store bag.

At the ferry dock she took his hand, shook it formally. “Thank you for coming,” she said. Then she pushed the sunglasses up onto her hair, giving him her turquoise eyes full force. “The light only shines for some,” she said, kindly and sadly. “And even for them it’s not all the time. The rest of the time you’re alone.”

But he’d had enough of gnomic utterances for one day. Theatrical bitch, he told himself on the ferry.

He went back to his room and drank most of the bottle of wine. Then he phoned Mary Jo. When she’d negotiated her way as usual past the snoopy landlady on the ground floor and arrived on tiptoe at his door, he pulled her inside roughly and bent her backwards in a tipsy, mocking embrace. She started to giggle, but he kissed her seriously and pushed her onto the bed. If he couldn’t have what he wanted he would at least have something. The bristles of her shaved legs rasped against him; her breath smelled like grape bubble gum. When she began to protest, warning him again of the danger of pregnancy, he said it didn’t matter. She took this as a marriage proposal. In the event, it was one.

With the arrival of the baby his academic work ceased to be a thing he did disdainfully, on sufferance, and became a necessity of life. He needed the money, and then he needed more money. He laboured over his Ph.D. thesis, on cartographic imagery in John Donne, interrupted by infant squalling and the dentist’s-drill whine of the vacuum cleaner, and by the cups of tea brought to him by Mary Jo at inappropriate moments. She told him he was a grouch, but since that was more or less the behaviour she expected from husbands she didn’t seem to mind. She typed his thesis for him and
did the footnotes, and showed him off to her relatives, him and his new degree. He got a job teaching composition and grammar to veterinary students at the agricultural college in Guelph.

He did not write poetry any more. Some days he hardly even thought about it. It was like a third arm, or a third eye, that had atrophied. He’d been a freak when he’d had it.

Once in a while, though, he went on binges. He would sneak into bookstores or libraries, lurk around the racks where the little magazines were kept; sometimes he’d buy one. Dead poets were his business, living ones his vice. Much of the stuff he read was crap and he knew it; still, it gave him an odd lift. Then there would be the occasional real poem, and he would catch his breath. Nothing else could drop him through space like that, then catch him; nothing else could peel him open.

Sometimes these poems were Selena’s. He would read them, and part of him – a small, constricted part – would hope for some lapse, some decline; but she just got better. Those nights, when he was lying in bed on the threshold of sleep, he would remember her or she would appear to him, he was never sure which; a dark-haired woman with her arms upstretched, in a long cloak of blue and dull gold or of feathers or of white linen. The costumes were variable, but she herself remained a constant. She was something of his own that he had lost.

He didn’t see her again until 1970, another zero year. By that time he’d managed to get himself hired back to Toronto, to teach graduate-level Puritan literary theory and freshman English at a new campus in the suburbs. He did not yet have tenure: in the age of publish-or-perish, he’d published only two papers, one on witchcraft as sexual metaphor, the other on
The Pilgrim’s Progress
and architecture. Now that their son was in school Mary Jo had gone back to cataloguing, and with their savings they’d made a down payment on a Victorian
semi-detached in the Annex. It had a small back lawn, which Richard mowed. They kept talking about a garden, but there was never the energy.

At this time Richard was at a low point, though it was Mary Jo’s contention that he was always at a low point. She fed him vitamin pills and nagged him to see a shrink so he could become more assertive, though when he was assertive with her she would accuse him of throwing his patriarchal weight around. He’d realized by now that he could always depend on her to do the socially correct thing. At the moment she was attending a women’s consciousness-raising group and was (possibly) having an affair with a sandy-haired, pasty-faced linguist at the university whose name was Johanson. Whether it existed or not, this affair suited Richard, in a way: it allowed him to think badly of her.

It was April. Mary Jo was at her women’s group or screwing Johanson, or both; she was efficient, she could get a lot done in one evening. His son was staying overnight with a friend. Richard was supposed to be working on his book, the book that was going to do it for him, make his name, get him tenure:
Spiritual Carnality: Marvell and Vaughan and the Seventeenth Century
. He’d hesitated between
carnal spirituality
and
spiritual carnality
, but the latter had more zing. The book was not going all that well. There was a problem of focus. Instead of rewriting the second chapter again, he’d come downstairs to rummage in the refrigerator for a beer.

“And tear our pleasures with rough strife/Thorough the iron gates of life
, Olé!” he sang, to the tune of “Hernando’s Hideaway.” He got out two beers and filled a cereal bowl with potato chips. Then he went into the living room and settled into the easy chair to slurp and munch, flipping through the channels on the television set, looking for the crassest, most idiotic thing he could find. He badly needed something to sneer at.

This was when the doorbell rang. When he saw who it was he was very glad he’d had the sense to click off the item he’d been watching, a tits-and-bums extravaganza posing as a detective show.

It was Selena, wearing a wide-brimmed black hat and a long, black knitted coat, and carrying a battered suitcase. “May I come in?” she said.

Richard, amazed and a little frightened, and then suddenly delighted, stood back to let her in. He’d forgotten what delight felt like. In the last few years he’d given up even on the little magazines, preferring numbness.

He didn’t ask her what she was doing at his house, or how she’d found him. Instead he said, “Would you like a drink?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t drink, remember?” He did remember then; he remembered her tiny house on the island, in every clear detail: the pattern of small gold lions on the purple bedspread, the shells and round stones on the window-sill, the daisies in a jam jar. He remembered her long toes. He’d made a fool of himself that day, but now she was here it no longer mattered. He wanted to wrap his arms around her, hold her closely; rescue her, be rescued.

“Some coffee would be nice though,” she said, and he led her to the kitchen and made her some. She didn’t take off her coat. The sleeves were threadbare; he could see the places where she’d stitched over the ravelled edges with mending wool. She smiled at him with the same acceptance of him she’d always shown, taking for granted that he was a friend and equal, and he was ashamed of the way he’d spent the last ten years. He must be absurd to her; he was absurd to himself. He had a paunch and a mortgage, a bedraggled marriage; he mowed the lawn, he owned sports jackets, grudgingly he raked the autumn leaves and shovelled the winter snow. He indulged his own sloth. He should have been living in an attic, eating bread and maggoty cheese, washing his one shirt out at night, his head incandescent with words.

She was not noticeably older. If anything she was thinner. He saw what he thought was the fading shadow of a bruise over her right cheekbone, but it could have been the light. She sipped at her coffee, fiddled with the spoon. She seemed to have drifted off somewhere. “Are you writing much?” he said, seizing on something he knew would interest her.

“Oh yes,” she said brightly, returning to her body. “I have another book coming out.” How had he missed the first one? “How about you?”

He shrugged. “Not for a long time.”

“That’s a shame,” she said. “That’s terrible.” She meant it. It was as if he’d told her someone she’d known had died, and he was touched. It wasn’t his actual poems she was regretting, unless she had no taste at all. They hadn’t been any good, he knew that now and certainly she did too. It was the poems, the ones he might have written, if. If what?

“Could I stay here?” she said, putting down her cup.