Page 8 of Each and All

  Chapter 8

  Love is a drug. It’s a drug that behaves very differently in different people.

  For George it was an addictive depressant like heroin that began with such a powerful rush that he would always feel the need to chase it’s elusive, incredible high. The rush pushed away all doubt and pain, and the dull depression that followed it made all the anxieties of responsible life irrelevant.

  For Amanda, love was a gentle hallucinogen that changed her perceptions, changed her physiology, changed her psychology, changed the very nature of reality. It made the ordinary, extraordinary, it made space and time feel like it flowed directly through her body like a still, powerful river towards the man she loved.

  For Laura love was the deep end of the pool where staying afloat always became harder and harder and always took more and more effort to survive. George’s incessant phone calls continued, his email messages multiplied, each one sounding angrier and more desperate than the last. He was acting like a love struck adolescent. His cool detachment and smooth charm were dissolving before Laura’s eyes.

  For Amanda and Laura, who were now both in the deep end of the pool, their feelings and reactions were the same only in the tremendous anxiety about what they had begun and what it was about to become. Each was expecting a broken heart. Amanda, for the first time in her life, was terrified it would be her’s. Laura, for the last time in her life, expected it would be someone else’s. Both were terrified of the aftermath.

  As always, Laura ignored or ran from the big emotional issues in her life, even as she went back to work on Anthony’s big book launch. The event had to be held in a large meeting room in one of the big hotels because of the mass of reporters suddenly eager to share drinks and crudites with an irascible old poet. Laura had cleverly arranged that the centerpiece on each table contained two fighting Man of War tropical fish separated by a plastic barrier. It was a perfect little visual reminder about the nature of marriage and divorce, and the natures of Anthony and his ex-wife. It was also a metaphor for the press and celebrity, which Anthony noticed and pointed out to Laura. She was amused. The press was there to take as many little bites out of Anthony as they could. They would continue to take bites out of him and any moving and vulnerable celebrity until the poor celebrity was obviously thrashing about in the lasts throws of public interest. The only difference between a celebrity and a gold fish was that the celebrity got great eulogies of praise on the way to being flushed down the toilet.

  Laura enjoyed being with Anthony because he was an old fish that knew how to fight. He understood fame and celebrity because he understood that the media was just an unpaid, fickle entourage who believed they were somebody because they could confront people who really were someone, people who had really done something.

  The first thing that went wrong with the book launch was that the gathered media types could not resist removing the plastic separator between the fighting man-of-war fish. Suddenly every table’s interest was in an actual fight to the death. Everyone lost interest in Anthony and his book, so Laura had to wait impatiently until one of the fish in each bowl was dead.

  When she looked up and saw George among the crowd of people standing at the back of the room her mind reeled in rage and shock. Smooth and cool, as ever, he seemed to be introducing himself to people. His eyes never looked for hers, he seemed content to mingle and talk with the people he met.

  That he’d come into her world unwanted, unasked, and so unexpectedly made her want to fly to the end of the room and rip off his face, but the constraint of her secret, illicit affair left her standing there trying to find his eyes, building a looked that would kill. He never so much as glanced her way. And finally just as he had appeared, he was gone. Laura was appalled that the excitement of Anthony’s book launch had been so completely contaminated by the sudden appearance of her lover. She could barely contain her anger and outrage but she did it, only Anthony saw the dark fire in her eyes burning behind the musical voice and the lovely practiced smile.

  After the reporters were gone and after she had shared drinks with Anthony in the hotel bar where she had come close to confessing her problem concerning George, she was more than a little drunk. She was again shocked when she found George sitting casually on the hood of her BMW in the hotel parking lot. He was carrying a huge bouquet of yellow roses. His body said cool and smooth and casual like always, but his eyes told the truth; he was nervous, he was afraid. He was facing the rejection he knew was coming. He knew he was getting to his last desperate chances. It was obvious to him and to her that his desire ran too deep, a desire that had gone from ecstasy to torment; characters improvising a scene had become people sinking in the heartache of reality.

  Seeing him there, seeing the adolescent terror in his eyes, stopped her rage like an emotional air bag. In the cold city wind of the late autumn day, George suddenly started to shiver under her gaze.

  “Don’t ever, don’t you ever show up again in my life, come into my life without being asked.” she said coldly. “You understand me? Do you absolutely understand me?

  George slid down the hood of the car. “I’m sorry. I knew you’d be angry, but I tried everything to get you to respond . What is it that you want me to do?” And then he said it, the worst thing of all. “I’m in love with you. I’m sorry”

  “You should be. Please! You’re not love with me. And even if you were, I’m not in love with you.”

  There it was; the bottom-line. He hung his head like James Dean and when he raised his eyes to look at her she could see that he had stepped into his role.

  “I know that. And I know you are not in love with your husband. I knew you never loved Eugene all those years ago. I don’t think you ever let yourself love anyone. I know that because you and I are just the same.”

  “Maybe. But I’m fifty years old. I have a life. As the lady says, ‘What’s love got to do with it?’ You may be the only middle-aged man in North America who wants to give up a series of hot little affairs with impressionable young girls for a middle-aged woman who sees through his bullshit. Georgie, you’ve got to let this go. We have no past. We have no future. We had an exciting little present and it might have gone on for a while, but all these hearts and flowers have ruined it. You’ve got to be a big boy and go get drunk and cry in your single malt Scotch and get over it. It’s over.”

  “All right, but before I go I want you to think about something.”

  He stood up and came towards her and stopped when he saw his approach made her nervous. He paused and seemed to be about to turn away when he looked back at her and gave the speech he’d been preparing for weeks. He knew it would all one day come down to this speech. He would have to take her to an emotional precipice where her reactions were no longer completely within her control. His performance would have to take her to a place where she would actually have to reach into the resources of her heart to respond. He would have to reach the place in her heart where she was no longer safe. He would have to make her reach a personal reality that only actors know. This was the audition of his life. He would have to convince her that this was the audition of hers.

  “The one thing an actor knows in life is a real response. The one thing I know about you, when we’re together, is that your responses are real. You can deny it to me. You can deny it to yourself. I know and you know that when we’re together you’re closer to being who you are, and what you are, than you have ever been in your life. I know the cool, detached Laura is all a performance. I thought, in grade eleven, that I was the first one to cop an attitude toward life, but you were way ahead of me, the girl who was above it all. It’s still your attitude. I like it. I liked it then. I like it now. But it’s attitude.”

  “The one thing an actor knows is a great performer. And only a great performer knows the real depth of human feelings. When I’m with you it’s like being with Brando or Streep. All my life I’ve been
waiting for someone who could go further, go deeper, someone who could go deeper than the lines. Do you have any idea how magical, how powerful, how beautiful it is to find someone who can bring more out of a scene than you ever imagined was there. Imagine what it’s like to meet someone who can actually top you, take a moment and make it so intense and spectacular it leaves your heart pounding with excitement and pure unadulterated admiration. You are a magical woman. You could have been anything. You could be anything. And the only thing stopping you is you don’t have the guts. Every time we talked, every time we made love, every time you felt the emotional intensity of our connection you got up and ran.”

  “Maybe you’re right. That’s exactly what I want to do right now. I want to leave this right here, right now, for now and forever. I want this over.”

  He was getting to her. She walked around the car to the driver’s door and he cut her off, the big bouquet between them.

  “No. This time you don’t run away. This time I direct the scene.”

  She stood back in shock and she could see the intensity in his face, could see he was not going to back down. At best, she was at least going to have to hear him out. If she walked away, she knew he would follow. If she ran this time, she knew he would catch her, eventually. In the cold wind, she felt small and chilled and alone.

  “You know what I’m saying is true. If you can tell me honestly, with absolute sincerity that what you have experienced with me has not been the most intense experience of your life, I’ll walk away.” he continued passionately.

  “It hasn’t.” Laura replied in a small cold voice.

  “You’re lying. You know you’re lying. I know you’re lying. I can see it in your eyes. I can hear it in your voice. You have to cop a better attitude than that to end this. Come back to my place with me right now and make love with me and you won’t be able to deny what you feel any more. For the first time in my life I love someone. I love you. I love you. And for the first time in your life I think you’ve met someone that you can love too. Past the attitude, the cool, lovely Laura could actually love someone. I’m not like Eugene who you could waive away like a puppy. I’m not going anywhere until I hear the real Laura tell me she couldn’t love me. Come with me, right now, we’ll make love and it’ll be better, more intense, more beautiful then it’s ever been, more intense than you’ve ever known. Come with me right now, you know there’s a part of you that finally wants to love someone, wants to let go of her heart, to give it completely. Come with me. Come with me.” George reached out his hand for hers and she gave it to him and it felt like a cold dead bird. He had reached the hidden wellspring of her self-doubt and fear. He had shaken her. His persistence and passion had thrust her into herself as no one had ever done. Love was a drug and she was feeling its incredible force pulling her down. She had to kick hard to get back to the surface.

  “Next.”

  “What did you say?” he replied.

  “Next. What’s next? I’ve got a life. I like my life. I just can’t trust love. I just can’t believe in passion like some kid. I can’t come with you.”

  She took back her hand.

  “But you want to.”

  “Maybe when we were seventeen. Maybe the first time I could have done it, maybe then I could have loved you. Georgie, we’re just not kids anymore. Please let me go. I have to go home to my husband and my daughter.”

  “No, you actually should come home to me.”

  “You drink way too much.” she said softly.

  “So do you.” he said, as he stepped out of the way and opened the car door so she could get in.

  “Come home with me.” he asked again.

  “I can’t. I can’t. Please let go of the door?”

  He held it for a long second while they looked into each other’s eyes. They faced the undeniable truth only two great actors ever know.

  When she drove away he stood there alone in the parking lot lights, the flowers in his hands a deserving tribute for the bravura performance of his life. He had gotten to her. It wasn’t over. Two things that hardly ever change is the process of falling in love and the repercussions of having a lover. Mother and daughter were going through the classic patterns of the two kinds of love.

  Sometimes, in love, the better it gets the worse it feels. That’s how it was for Amanda. It was all too perfect: everything he did, everything he was, everything she felt was just as she imagined love would be. The only tiny residual doubt, the doubt all women feel in love, was whether she was beautiful enough to keep him. Tom was, like the farm, too good to be true, her mother’s attitude and her own experience with boys at school and on the street said the dark side was not hard to find. Until then, only her father was an example to her that there might be such exceptions. Now there was Tom, and now there was even his paralyzed father to whom Amanda felt such a strong, lovely, unexplainable bond. There was a marriage to admire. At least that’s how it looked to Amanda.

  The first great question of love is whether it is returned. In her first email message to Tom after the weekend, Amanda had not dared raise the question. She did it by implication by describing her own reactions to everything she had been shown on the most beautiful Saturday of her life. She told him what it felt like to sing beside him. She told him what it felt like to ride beside him through the beautiful fields and the Walnut Wood. She even dared to tell him how it felt to feel their first kiss, how it felt like the first real, breathless kiss of her life.

  The first great question of love was answered in absolutely unambiguous terms when the first thing that appeared on Amanda’s computer screen in his reply were the words, ‘I think I’m falling in love with you.’ Amanda almost fell off her chair. All the rest of the words were shared reflections of the same feelings Amanda had described to him. So unlike a boy, so unlike a man, Tom, at least when he wrote them down, was absolutely comfortable, absolutely at ease in expressing his thoughts and feelings, even the deepest and most tender ones.

  The better it got the worse it felt. She had to believe him. If she believed him, the consequences, the risks, the enormous reality of it was terrifying. The very fact that he could so easily, so completely, so openly express his love for her instantly created expectations that she must do the same, and in an equal measure, and it was terrifying. Unlike Tom, who had years of experience writing his own personal journal, Amanda had years of keeping her deepest feelings unspoken, words she had never even heard spoken aloud.

  Her reaction was simply to say how glad she was that he felt that way about her. She told him his words had blown her away. She confessed her total fear, and then she confessed the joy she felt at the memory of his face and his touch and his voice. It would take time and courage and surviving the greatest horror of her life before she would say the simple words that ran in her head and her heart so constantly. For now, she contented herself with satisfying the second great question that came with in falling in love, ‘When will I see you again?’

  Surprisingly, the answer to that question had not come as easily as she had hoped. For her, it was simply a matter of Tom getting in his old red car and coming to see her. For him, it was simply a matter of her getting on a bus or getting on the train and coming to the farm every weekend. ‘I can’t stand the city. It stinks. It’s noisy. There’s absolutely nothing interesting to do or see.’ he wrote.

  Amanda carried on an email argument with Tom above the virtues of the city but he was absolutely stubborn and adamant about his feelings. “Why would you want me to come there, when you can be here where there’s so much to do and so many great people. Where can we go in Toronto and just get up and sing together? You know this is where you want to be.”

  He was right of course, but getting him to come to her territory would make her feel she still had some control, and she thought that getting permission to go there wouldn’t be easy. She sensed that taking that first step alo
ne onto the farm would be submitting herself to its incredible power. Like her mother, she felt the power of the farm and, like her mother, it made her strangely uncomfortable and afraid.

  This wasn’t like deferring to a boy about the choice of a movie, this was like giving in to a man who was asking her to become a part of his life. The worst part was that it was just what she wanted, because she loved the farm, she loved Tom, but this was so big and so fast that she felt very young and absolutely unprepared.

  To add to Amanda’s anxiety were the things that Tom wrote to her about his dreams and plans for the future. It seemed that Tom had decided that when he was twenty one he would take the money that had accumulated as his part in the family business and go to British Columbia and purchase land for his ancestor’s people and build a native version of the farm to help sustain the people he never knew, the people that were the source of his own blood.

  Amanda read Tom’s words again and again trying to imagine the awesome implications of such ambitions. He would want a woman with equal ambitions, the same ambitions. He would want a woman like his mother.

  The worst part was that she loved him for the great scope of his dream. It was a dream so much beyond anything she could imagine, anything she had imagined, that it again left her feeling very small and inadequate.

  When she questioned the practical aspects of Tom’s dream, she was shocked to discover that there were many millions of dollars at his personal disposal. It seemed that his brother Tranh had made them very rich indeed. This wasn’t just a dream, and that only made it worse. Amanda’s only dream was to feel his touch and perhaps to sing together when they were alone.

  It was hard for her to maintain the lightness of her new young love. Tom had taken her soaring heart so high she was, even in her ecstasy, suffering from an excruciating vertigo that came with looking down and seeing life’s tremendous possibilities and their unavoidable responsibilities. When she asked how Tom had decided upon this ambition for his life, he told her the story written on the white card held in the brass box under the great crown of the family tree. It was the story of his great-great grandfather hunting the gray whale with a harpoon tipped with a clam shell. It told of his great-great grandfather jumping into the water with the dying whale to sew up it’s lips with a bone needle and Cedar twine so it wouldn’t fill up with water and sink and be lost. ‘My grandfather died of small pox given to his people on blankets given as presents by white men wanting their land. I wanted to do something to honor my great-great grandfather and people with such courage.’ he had written.

  What was a girl to say to that?

  She told him how she admired his courage and wished she had had traditions among her own people that were not just greed and exploitation.

  ‘Me too.’ he wrote, ‘But then I wouldn’t be in the position to go back and help my people. I wouldn’t live on this farm, I wouldn’t have my brothers and sisters, I wouldn’t have my parents, and I never would’ve met you.’

  The better if felt, the worse it was. She just wanted to be a teenager in love.

  And like every other teenager in love, the thing she ached to do, almost more than anything, was tell someone everything, every single thing, the best things and the worse things about it. She wanted to describe every moment, every thought, every feeling. She wanted to describe every inch of Tom, every movement, every gesture, every word and thought he shared with her. And like almost every other teenager in love, nobody cared!

  She tried talking to Kara who made fun of the very idea that Amanda could be with a farm boy with millions of dollars and sang like an angel and had a body like a statue and was wise and sweet and tender and generous and brave and, wonder of wonder of wonders, loved her, Amanda McCall, ordinary, boring, screwed up Amanda McCall. It was the love story of love stories and nobody cared. Nobody even believed her.

  She even called Stacy Peak and she did at least listen, and she did at least believe, and she was so positively green with envy and self pity that it made her sound so sad, almost like she was about to cry. The one person who understood, understood only too well. What Amanda could not possibly know was that most of the best, most of the most beautiful, most of the most intense feelings most people ever feel almost always ended up with no one prepared to hear them.

  By Friday she decided that she had no choice, she wanted to be with him no matter where it led. Her parent’s approval was shockingly easy to get. Sharon called and spoke to Ian and told him there was a guest room and that Amanda would be safe and under the vigilant eyes of both her and many nosey brothers and sisters. Her parents seemed to have no problem with her having a serious boyfriend. If they had known, as she did, how serious he was they might not have been so easy and accommodating. But, they didn’t know and so Friday, after school, Amanda was alone on the train to the farm.

  As Amanda was quietly riding the train to love, her mother was lying underneath George Marshall in an almost brutal and violent sexual coupling. All week he had simply sent her one email message a day of only one simple sentence that stated emphatically,’You will come to me!’ And finally out of fear and tension and growing anxiety that was almost sexual in intensity she finally called him and agreed to meet him at his place that Friday evening.

  When she walked into the room she faced a George she never seen before.

  “Your drunk. I’m leaving.” she said, disgustedly.

  “You’re not going anywhere.” he spat back. He had primed his passion all week. He was going to push her. He was going to push her violently.

  And this time he was more than drunk, this time he was trembling like a volcano before it exploded. He grabbed her by the arm and dragged her to the bedroom. She struggled, she cursed and screamed but his rage and power moved her as if she was a suit on a hangar. When he let her go, he told her she had thirty seconds to strip or he’d rip her clothes from her body and she could see that he absolutely meant what he said. Breathless with fear, for the first time in her life, she felt helpless and overwhelmed by a man. That was just his intention. She knew it was his intention. Her heart pounded with fear and what she hoped to god wasn’t sexual anticipation. When she was naked he pushed her back on the bed and stripped over her. She tried to curl away but when he reached for her she couldn’t resist him. Then he took her. She had never been taken, except in distant dreams. He was convinced she needed to be taken. It was the only way to touch her real feelings and desires he thought. And the worst thing of all for Laura was that in some part of her she was not sure that he wasn’t right. He wasn’t. Reality proved the real horror of fantasy. Surrendering control, surrendering power was surrendering her most basic self-respect. With his body pounding into hers, she felt so small and so foolish and so helpless and pathetic and weak and degraded. And she took his body, his rage into her. She didn’t fight, she didn’t resist because this was where she had gotten herself. This was what she had done to herself.

  All week she had thought about what George had said to her in the parking lot. It made her think about the emotional need inside her that would never ever give in to love’s power. Giving in to love’s power for her was like giving into George as he all but raped her throbbing limp body.

  Where George was sure he was finally making her his, Laura lay there and was sure she could never be his, she could never belong to this man or any man, belong to any man as love asked a woman to belong. George knew her better than any man had ever known her. He knew her strengths and weaknesses. He knew how to crush the one with the other. He made her feel so good. He made her feel so small. That was when she knew she could never see him again. That was when she knew it was really over.

  Surprisingly, her steel resolve came out with a flood of tears. George didn’t care. He came inside her and collapsed beside her and at last, still crying silently, Laura crawled from his bed and picked up her clothes and put them on as he rolled over and smiled at her like a Cheshire cat
who had swallowed a great gorgeous canary. He just didn’t get it. He thought he had made her his. What he had done was lose her forever.

  She realized later that she should have walked away without saying anything.

  “I don’t ever want to see you again.” she said, coldly.

  Her words hit George like a slap in the face. He was out of the bed in an instant and caught her in the hallway as she ran for the door. He grabbed her by the throat and started to squeeze and Laura would have screamed except no sound came because no sound could come from her throat because he was squeezing so hard. Then, like a rag doll, he slammed her head against the wall through the big abstract painting hanging there, and sky rockets exploded in Laura’s eyes, and the blood and the strength in her whole body seemed to flow out of her into a shallow pool beneath her feet . He let her go, and she held her throat and gasped for breath as his hard cold blooded voice hit her like the back of his hand.

  “That is never going to happen. You will see me. You will be my woman! You will! You may never have the guts to choose love. You may never have the balls to give it up to anyone. But I know, and you know that you will give it when you have no choice but to give it, and you have no choice but to give it now. If you have a choice, you do nothing but run, nothing but hide from yourself and what you are capable of feeling. I love you enough to know I can’t give you a choice. You will love me, because you must love me. Do you understand me? You will love me!”

  “You’re terrifying me.” she said, meekly.

  “Good. We understand each other. There’s no going back now. You have to end your other life or I will end it for you. Do you understand me?”

  Laura was shaking. She could see he meant it. Somehow, in this thing he called love, she had unleashed a black, obsessive insanity that was more real than anything she had ever confronted in her life.

  “Please, my husband, my daughter, I can’t hurt them. Please don’t hurt them.” she pleaded.

  “This has gone too far for that, and it’s going to go a whole lot further. There are no more choices here. One thing I’ve learned from loving you is there are no choices. You’re spending the night here. Now get back in the bedroom and get off your clothes.”

  And trembling like a schoolgirl, Laura did just as she was told.

  What followed was the longest, saddest night of sex Laura could ever imagine there being. She was broken and terrified and helpless to resist what had become of her exciting affair.

  Past midnight, while Amanda was singing her first sweet solo,’ Over the Rainbow,’ Laura lay still in the bed beside George where he had just fallen asleep, his hand resting on her still throbbing throat.

  For the first time she noticed the big bouquet of dying yellow roses in the vase beside the bed. It was just how she felt.

  Performance. What if it was all just a performance? The more she thought about it, the more it seemed possible that this was all just an enormous improvisation to push her to the limit of her acting ability. It certainly was the way he had lived his life. It certainly fit with everything that he had ever said to her. The thought that he could cold bloodedly savage her, assault her, so completely terrified her that it made her want to kill him. Part of her wanted to believe everything that was happening was all performance. Then it would be over. He would take his bows and laugh at her humiliation at not realizing it was all just a game.

  But, even though she wanly wished that was the only humiliation left to her, she didn’t believe it. The look in his eyes and the touch of his hand were too real, too intense, too powerful to be just performance. That he was really in love with her made it something that seemed would be impossible to escape without having her life torn to pieces. Performance. If it was all only, just a matter of performance. If all the world was only a stage. Wondering how she could slide from under his grasp, move from the bed without waking him, gather her clothes without him hearing her, and leave the room and dress and make her escape, she was paralyzed, terrified of taking the risk.

  Replaying their affair, remembering its excitement, wondering why it became such an obsession for him and remained just a diversion for her, there were no answers. They were too much alike, and yet it all had turned out so differently for each of them. A man’s power, a woman’s power, the way a man performed, the way a woman felt, the way a woman performed, the way a man felt were always in such a perpetual, insoluble imbalance that to Laura the battle of the sexes was more like the thrashing of a set of scales where a man and a woman could only jump up and down trying to swing the balance in their favor.

  Confronted with the violent potential that had awakened in this man, Laura was afraid even to move, much less jump up and down. Violence! That was the one power a woman still, after all of history, had no effective means to resist. She lay there and knew that as long as he was prepared to hurt her physically, trying to escape would be like rolling a stone up a desperate, slippery slope. Even more terrifying than the physical force and intensity of his sexual energy were the quiet words spoken into her hair telling her how she had opened his heart completely, how he couldn’t imagine living without her, how they were perfect together, how he could never let her go. And most terrifying of all, was when he whispered softly, ‘You belong to me.’

  Unforgettable. Irresistible. Without you, I’m nothing. There’s no one for me, but you.

  Only you ! The enduring words of love, so soft, so tender.

  Early in the morning, long after George’s hand had slipped from her throat Laura finally got the courage to slide off of her side of the bed and slowly and silently find her clothes where they had been left, her heart pounding as she was ready to instantly tell him that she was only going to the bathroom. But George didn’t wake and Laura dressed by the front door as she had imagined herself doing, but without the shaking hands, and the more clothes she put on, and the closer she got to escaping, the more frightened she became. The explosive pain and shock when he had slammed her head into the wall rang in her ears as she bent over to put on her shoes, and the click of the door opening echoed inside her, and the tiny click of the door lock finding its place as she closed the door when she was outside and free was like a starter pistol going off beside her head. She ran to the elevator, terrified that she would hear the click of the door opening again, terrified he would somehow still get to her before the elevator arrived, so that when she heard the elevator arrive at long last, her heart was pounding and her breath was gasping from her throat and she looked back down the hall and saw nothing.

  When she crawled into her bed beside Ian, as she often did in the early hours of the morning, she felt like a terrified kitten crawling under rumpled bed clothes. She put her arms around him and curled herself to his body and held him and felt her arms trembling as he slept. Then she felt the pain between her legs.

  From the moment Laura woke up in the morning, she could feel the pool of fear beneath her feet, thick and cold and exhausting. The first thing she did was make an emergency call to her friend Ann Marie and they walked in Mt. Pleasant Cemetery in a very cold blustery afternoon and Ann Marie, whose practice as a professional and as a person included a long list of experiences with male violence, was sure and direct in her advice to her friend

  “The first thing you have to do is take away his power over you. You have to tell Ian. If George’s determined to hurt you, that’s the first place he’ll go. You’ve got to get there ahead of him. Ian will take it a whole lot better from you than from some strange man who will say God knows what.”

  “I suppose that’s true,” Laura replied, “ I keep thinking this may all just be an act, part of his course in the power of love, and sex, and imagination. I’m just really not sure what’s going on in his mind.”

  “He hit you. He raped you. Once a man finds that either of those things get him what he wants, it’ll only get worse. Trust me. I’ve seen this too many times before to think your lover’s a
n exception. The next thing you’ve got to do is start documenting everything he does, every phone call, every email, get yourself a video camera and carry it with you and use it whenever he approaches you. Then we have to make it clear that you will use the courts. You’ll do everything to make his life just as miserable as he’s trying to make yours.”

  Rather than reassure her, Ann Marie’s advice only succeeded in deepening the pool of fear that Laura waded through on the bare sidewalk. Like most women in her position, she didn’t want to believe it was as bad as it appeared. She believed love had the power to calm the rage of a violent man who said he loved her. She believed that love was the way to regain control because love was the reason she had lost control. It took a fire to stop a fire.

  When Ann Marie couldn’t give her an answer that wasn’t going to shake her life to it’s foundations, Laura retreated into herself and the long moment of silence was enough to let Ann Marie remember her own heartache and begin to pour out the nightmare of loss, anxiety and terror that had come from the fact that her daughter Megan was no longer calling her, even for money. She had called the Vancouver police and they had been no help. She had called a detective agency and found out that Megan was living with her boyfriend in a rundown apartment.

  The detective agency confirmed the she was selling her body. And worse than anything was the fact that the detective approached her on the street and offered to trade heroin for sex and Megan had accepted the offer. The detective told her that he had changed his mind because she looked under age, but the worst truth was confirmed.

  Ann Marie had her own sorry Movie of the Week. Middle-class mother faces battle to save her under age daughter from heroin addiction and prostitution.

  The only thought that Laura had was that Megan might just be lucky like Amanda and find some nice boy to turn her life around. Of course she couldn’t say such a thing to her friend because teenaged hookers on smack did not tend to meet many nice boys.

  The one thing Ann Marie did say before they parted was that she remembered Laura telling her that Sharon had run a battered women’s shelter before she married Eugene.

  “She probably knows George better than you do. Why don’t you call her and ask her for some advice. It couldn’t hurt.

  Laura knew the force of Sharon’s personality and being reminded of her experience with violent men, the knowledge had the feel of a slack lifeline that she suddenly found in her hands, a line that might just pull tight and save her. It would be a humiliating and difficult phone call to make, but a lot less humiliating and difficult than telling Ian she put them all at risk for the sake of a stupid little affair.

  Sunday night Amanda joined Ian and Laura at their Italian restaurant when she got back from her weekend at the farm.

  Ian had no idea that his two lovely women were edgy and nervous because they were both covering any trace of the enormous emotions and the enormous consequences they feared were coming, coming from their being unable to resist the power of those emotions.

  Amanda talked about all the things she did at the farm that weekend. She told about singing,’ Send in the Clowns,’ and how well it was received.

  “What made you choose to sing that?” Ian asked, “a hip and happening girl like you?”

  “They aren’t exactly into Gangstra rap at the farm you know.”

  She didn’t tell about the ovation she got or about how she and Tom had curled up together in a big leather chair in the music room and listened to Edith Piaff and Joe Williams and Carmen McCrae and so many others she never heard of who put their heart and soul into the words of a lyric and into the silences that fell between syllables and words and phrases. It was Tom who pointed out to her what his mother had pointed out to him, that the music was as much in the rhythm of the silence as in the rhythm of the actual words and notes. When there was the occasional song that Amanda knew, Tom would sometimes sing, and with his eyes pass a chorus to her and she would sing, and it was beautiful, truly, actually beautiful. When Sharon came from checking on Eugene at four in the morning and found them kissing, Amanda got up and left Tom and let Sharon show her the way to the guest room that she didn’t need any help finding. Amanda learned what it was like to walk on a pine floor and not hear the sound of her own feet, not feel the movement of her own legs, only feel the sweet pulse of desire flooding through her veins.

  And although she tried not to talk about Tom to her parents lest they see the love that was boiling out of her heart, she couldn’t help herself. She started to tell them the stories she had read standing under the Walnut family tree, with Tom beside her saying nothing.

  She told her parents how disease and alcohol had devastated Tom’s native people. She told how the government in the 1970s had made them choose between staying on their land and keeping their children. As they were no longer willing to support a school on the ancestral lands, the government would take the children away to residential school. That was how most of the people in the tribe came to live on a few terrible acres beside a pulp mill. Tom’s mother had become a prostitute because of the new conditions and her alcoholism and the sudden complete poverty they had to live with.

  Both of Amanda’s parents were shocked that such things went on so recently.

  Amanda told her parents that Tom was conceived while Tom’s mother was a prostitute. It was impossible for him to ever know who his father was. Tom was taken away from his mother by children services and he never knew who she was until Eugene found her.

  “Now she’s back with her people and Tom supports her. The kids on the farm also have to give ten percent of their personal yearly earnings to some charity. Tom sends his people nearly a ten thousand dollars a year. A big part of it goes to an incentive program that gives anyone that stays clean of drugs and alcohol a share in the check Tom sends every month. “If you could hear some of the stories Tom’s mother told about her life and her parents and grandparents, it would break your heart. You can’t believe how soft our lives have been because we are white. No, really, it would make you sick if I told you some of the stories.”

  Amanda was shocked at her mother’s reply.

  “You mean Tom, and every one of the kids make a a hundred thousand dollars a year. What do they do with it?”

  “Most of them seem to give a lot of it away. Tom is the only one that sticks to the ten percent minimum for charities. He’s got some kind of plan for his future that’s going to take a whole lot of money.”

  “Amanda, how does it feel to be going out with a multi-millionaire?” Ian teased, “Where it is all that money coming from?”

  “Most of it comes from the stock market. All the family businesses are kind of just to have something to do, I think.” Amanda replied

  “I think it must go a little deeper than just having something to do.” he replied seriously.

  “Really. I guess that’s pretty obvious.” she admitted.

  Laura sat watching the obvious look of love in her daughter’s eyes and thought of the look of love she had seen in George’s eyes, the look that seemed almost intense enough to kill. Laura thought about how fate was indulging Amanda’s innocence and inexperience with one blessing after another, and the same fate that made her the main instrument that brought Tom and the farm into Amanda’s life was turning on her with a vengeance so undeservedly brutal that it just didn’t seem fair. She realized that the stories about Tom’s mother’s life as a prostitute and an alcoholic made her problems with her intense little lover seem very insignificant indeed. But the terror she felt was so great, and the breakup of her family would be so real and painful that the degree of suffering somehow just couldn’t be compared. The one strange thing about her reaction to Amanda telling about Tom’s mother was that it somehow seemed to soothe any shame she had felt about what she had done. It wasn’t guilt she was suffering as much the fear that she was about to lose the only two emotional reference points she had in life. Without them, emotionally, she wo
uld be nothing. The realization shook her and made her drink too much and too fast. And unlike most times when she drank too much and too fast, this time it made her a much better listener. She watched and listened to Ian and Amanda and felt that she was almost eavesdropping on a lovely conversation between a father and daughter who obviously loved one another and were completely comfortable with that.

  If they divorced who would have custody? She knew the terrible answer to that. She knew that when she would have her visitation days with Amanda that they would go to a place like the one they were in, but it would never ever possibly be like it was when they were all together. Losing Ian would mean she would probably be losing Amanda. Losing Amanda would mean the she would be completely, utterly alone. It was the first time in her life that she actually thought that it would be possible to kill someone. In her mind, in that moment, the thing George was preparing to do was worth killing over.

  The next days George stopped sending email messages. He started making a nightly phone call in which he told her she had six more days to leave her husband, then five days, then four. When it came to day three, Laura screamed into the phone that she had told Ian everything. The only reply was the click of the receiver and the dial tone buzzing. She called Sharon.

  Even though it was embarrassing and humiliating, Laura poured out the story of her affair with George and described in detail what it had come to as she described every moment of the last Friday night when he had terrorized her. She felt ridiculous and desperate, but Sharon was the only person she could think of who might be able to somehow influence Eugene’s old friend.

  She was not surprised to learn that Sharon had guessed about her affair with George. What did surprise her was the advice she got. Sharon was obviously trying to control the anger she felt because of what Laura had told her.

  “It’s okay. Like most bullies, they’re only brave with people who they think are weak. They are only brave when there are no consequences for them. You get him up here this weekend and I’ve got two big old boys who will take him outside and make him think he’s a bit player in some bad Biker movie. They’ll pick him up by that perfect little pony tail and seriously convince him that they will pin his nuts to his sleeve if you ever even see him on the same street again.”

  Laura was shocked. She had no idea her problem could bring out such anger and cold bloodedness in Sharon. But, for the first time in days there was a thought, a course of action that actually made her feel better.

  “But what if Amanda is there?” Laura asked nervously.

  “Tom went to South Dakota to pick up an El Camino with Rosie and they may be stuck there for a week because of the big snow storm that’s supposed to hit us tomorrow. I think he already called Amanda to tell her he probably wouldn’t be back before late Saturday.” Sharon explained.

  Suddenly, Laura understood Amanda’s long face for the past days. It was fate, on Laura’s side for once. Now all she had to do was work with it and deliver George to Sharon’s goons. She loved the very thought of it. Ruthlessly planning something with Sharon that was potentially violent and certainly illegal made her feel close to the woman for the first time since they had met. She took comfort knowing that under the righteousness was a calculating operator just like herself. For the first-time since her ordeal, she felt the slimy, cold pool of fear draining away from her feet. She also realized, with some excitement, that Sharon had probably used her two big old boys to do something like this before. She called George.

  She was surprised at how normal he sounded. She lied and told him that she’d told Ian everything and that she was very disappointed that he had forgiven her and understood how her affair could have happened. She told George that she was very anxious and confused about her feelings for him. She said that she decided that she wanted to see him again but it would have to be somewhere where she felt safe. She suggested they go to visit Eugene that Saturday afternoon but George didn’t seem very enthusiastic about the idea.

  “Can’t we just find a little Inn somewhere?” he asked.

  “No, I want to be somewhere I can get back on my own, if you decide you’re going to toss me around again. You realize you could have fractured my skull?”

  “I didn’t push you that hard. But you do need to be pushed. You understand that, don’t you?”

  “I understand that we have feelings for each other that we have to work out.”

  “You have feelings for me that you have to accept.”

  “Maybe you’re right, but I don’t want to talk about that now.”

  And so George reluctantly agreed to go to the farm with her on Saturday afternoon.

  Friday night, from a little motel room off a cold interstate highway, Tom called Amanda after a long day of following the big snowstorm, the snowstorm that had buried Prince Edward County and the farm the night before.

  Amanda was thrilled to hear his voice but was sorely disappointed when she realized that he was saying that he would be back at the farm sometime late the next afternoon. She could have seen him for least one day, now it would be too late, it would seem too desperate to ask if she could come. They talked about the things they did that week as if they had been talking to one another all of their lives, and as always Tom’s week seemed to be fascinating and exciting. His description of fighting through the snowstorm dragging a trailer carrying an old truck sounded quite scary.

  Tom told her that he wanted to find some of the Plains Indians so he could get to know those people, but the storm had not left them enough time. When Amanda said that he would be able to go back sometime, Tom shocked her by saying he didn’t imagine he would have the time. He was coming into his money when he was twenty-one and by then he wanted to be married and ready to move out West and begin his new life.

  Married! This was the man who said he was in love with her. Married! Married to whom? This was the boy who fell in love forever. By implication that made her the married lady moving West with her man. That made her the teenage girl listening to an implicit proposal of marriage. She didn’t want to believe this was happening. So fast! So sure of himself! They had spent exactly three days of their lives together. She was just a girl. She wished he could be just a boy. He continued to absolutely take her breath away with his speed and confidence and self-assurance. The question echoing in her mind, the question she was terrified to ask was, ‘And it wouldn’t be me who you would be thinking you’re married to when you start this new life?’ Her senses were spinning and she couldn’t think of anything to say. Strangely, the image that flashed into her mind was the memory of their first kiss in the Walnut Wood.

  More to change the subject than anything, Amanda asked him what would happen to the Walnut Wood.

  “When my mom and dad both die, each of the kids will get their share of the trees that are standing. I don’t know what the others are going to do, but I’m going to have mine felled.”

  Amanda was shocked. The Walnut Wood was the most beautiful place she’d ever been in her life and she told him she was shocked that he would even consider destroying such a beautiful, almost sacred place. “I think it’s disgusting.” she said.

  The tone in Tom’s voice suddenly changed. She could tell he was angry. And unlike most people when they get angry his voice got quieter, and slower and deeper.

  “White people rape my ancestors land, and I want to take the gift of my father and his father and his father, and use that gift of the land to help my own people, and you think it’s disgusting. It’s true that the trees are beautiful, but so are people who need the money that will come from those trees.”

  “That’s just what lumber companies say when they cut down beautiful old trees.” Amanda replied, seriously.

  “You think I’m like some heartless lumber Company? I could tell you things that they have done.”

  Amanda couldn’t back down. “ You’re not heartless, but the trees will be dead and gone just the same.”


  “When I took you for a ride in my dad’s Gull Wing Coupe, you realize one of those beautiful trees died so my dad could have that car. You think that was disgusting?”

  “No. But I think it’s still sad.”

  “It is sad. But that’s life. In life beautiful things die so other things can prosper. At least that makes some kind of sense.” It was Tom who could remember what it looked like to see a great old beautiful tree lying dead on the ground, buds still breaking for weeks with the insistent force of life still coming from the great fuse of its trunk.

  Amanda instantly realized that the senseless death that he was talking about was his own father’s. She did not know the nerve she’d touched inside him because of the number of times he thought about what it would mean to take those old trees out of the forest, destroy a forest that was really almost a monument to his father’s family. Yet his practical nature and the depth of his heart could not bear to think that those trees should not give their lives to the benefit of so many people. He thought he would never be able to speak about those feelings to anyone. He did not expect that he would speak about them to even Amanda. But he did say them because Amanda had somehow read his heart when she said to him, “Losing your father will be like cutting down those trees, won’t it?”

  Tom agreed with her.” But my dad dying is just a total waste.” And then he told her how he felt. He told her how horrible and painful his decision was going to be. No one in the family had ever had the heart to take more than a single tree. He did not know whether he had the heart to take what was going to be his.” I keep thinking that I’m really just behaving like any white man, taking what he wants.”

  So tender and romantic, Tom was also determined and unsentimental about the future. Caught between two cultures, caught between two sides of his own nature, there was no way to describe that conflict. And Amanda felt that conflict. She understood what he was feeling because she had stood in the magical forest beside the black pool and felt the strange silent force of feeling she, herself, might be a part of something that saw generations pass and might see generations to come. Amanda loved the Walnut Wood. She had no idea what it was, and she never could have explained the awe and majesty of what had been her first real spiritual experience.

  When Amanda tried to console him by saying it would be a long time before he would have to make that decision, he agreed that time was a great comfort, but not much. For Amanda time was not a comfort, time was suddenly something that felt like it accelerated like Eugene’s Gull Wing Coupe.

  They said goodbye feeling very close indeed. Neither of them slept very much that night.

  That Saturday began without a sky, fine snow drifting out of the grey city air. The wind from the last of the big snowstorm was gone and the air had warmed, so the worst seemed to be over. George picked Laura up at her office and when she got in the car she was pleased to see that he didn’t look like he had been drinking. Then she remembered that he was so afraid of Sharon’s reaction to alcohol. It made her smile thinking about the reaction that was waiting for George at the farm this time. George took her smile as a good sign.

  Surprisingly, George looked nervous. She wondered whether he was nervous because of what she might say or do or if he was nervous because he actually felt guilty for what he had done. What she didn’t imagine was the George was nervous because he was sitting next to her. The courage he had found in a bottle of single malt Scotch wasn’t available. He loved her. He wanted her. The rest of his life was being decided in her reactions. And he knew he would never have her unless he could break her need to have absolute control over every relationship. Like most men who only saw relationships in terms of power, he believed he would have to break her like a nervous colt.

  Laura was surprised that for the first hours of the drive George only made small talk as they drove the highway in the spray of dirty slush. He was telling her about things he had read in the paper and about his week as a high school teacher. Laura barely knew how to reply to what he was saying. He smelled like mouthwash and the smell of it was almost worse than the constant smell of liquor on his breath. Silence fell between them when he ran out the things to say. He was trying to make her comfortable. But the silence that fell between them was not like the silence that falls between old lovers, it was the silence of anticipation and fear and emotional vertigo, like suddenly looking down from a high, precarious place. Finally, when they turned off the highway into the white country fields, the snow turned to sleet and the ice built up in piles beneath the hammering strokes of the black windshield wipers and with it Laura’s growing anxiety about the weather went up another gear. And just when she thought that George would have to concentrate even more intently on driving, he suddenly began to rant about how she had wasted her life and all her potential. She told him to slow down. He didn’t and her heart started to pound. George saw the look of fear in her face and it shook him. He attacked.

  “I can’t believe your imagination hasn’t died of atrophy living your boring little middle class life. If you were with me you would experience feelings you’ve been afraid to feel all your life. I never thought I would ever meet anyone who could make me feel the way you do. I know what you are capable of feeling because you and I are two of a kind.”

  “You don’t know me, Georgie.” She was trying to hold back her fear as sleet sprayed the windscreen. “You have some method actor’s fantasy about who I am, what all this is about. It isn’t real.” she said with serious finality. She was so afraid, it took her breath away.

  “I know who you are. I know who you’re afraid of becoming. I also know you need to be pushed. I’m the only person you’ve ever known in your life capable of pushing you until you finally do it, finally open up and feel what you’re capable of feeling.” he shouted.

  This time it wasn’t tender words and rough treatment. This time he was trying to act cool as always and let his words grab her by throat and slam her head into the hard reality of her life. She decided it was best to just sit and listen, but she couldn’t help herself, she was so angry. Suddenly, it rose over her fear, words like wipers pushing it down to one side.

  “What do you know about life? Life isn’t romance. Life isn’t love. Love is a luxury. It’s a great suit, it’s single malt Scotch, it’s a little red Porsche. Life is doing what has to get done. Don’t tell me about love. And you know nothing about life. You’re a high school teacher for God’s sake.”

  She barely heard his reply because he was driving faster as he talked and the slush turned to freezing rain that slowly started to constrict the visible area of the windshield. The wipers struggled to keep the windshield clear and the wiper fluid barely helped because it came in such a meager spray. Laura was getting more and more frightened. She begged him to slow down.

  And finally George did just as she asked, and Laura felt a great relief that he did it as they broke the crest of a little rise and the wheel turned to a touch, and fate turned inexorably with it and the car slid on a patch of black ice and began a long, slow, skater’s death-spiral that would tear apart Laura’s life in a single guillotined second. George gasped and tried to catch the slide as the wheel turned uselessly in his hands, and he screamed at what he saw through the windshield ice, and Laura screamed when she felt the heavy thump beside her as her whole world exploded. Breathless shock struck with the searing impact and the screaming of metal grinding on metal, the blast of snow and wind exploding over them with the white glass of the windshield, showering them in a gut wrenching dizziness that made everything seem to go silent, even as the chrome handle bar of the bicycle hooked into the post of the windshield was heaving, screaming, the bicycle thrashing like an injured animal beside the car, right beside Laura. The bicycle groaned like it was dying, and then there was something like pain and cold and warm wetness as there was another explosion as the bicycle was crushed into a snow bank as the car came to rest in an absolu
te stunned cemetery stillness.

  Laura couldn’t take her eyes off of the still chrome bicycle hand brake in front of her. The rain pouring over her face washed away the blood she didn’t notice was pouring from where she was cut by the glass of the side window the bicycle had exploded beside her.

  “We hit someone!” Laura screamed through the breath that was heaving up out of her lungs. George was staring at the chrome handle bar.

  “It wasn’t my fault. It was a patch of ice.” he gasped.

  Laura’s heart was screaming like an engine with a jammed throttle, an engine about to explode from its own power, screaming in the wind, crying in the rain, screaming in the silence of the uncontrollable agony of what they had done.

  Laura tried to open her door but it was held fast by the bicycle and the snow bank in the ditch. She told George to get out and he didn’t move, he just turned and looked at her and his eyes were so wide and so focused that it looked completely surreal and terrifying.

  “George get out! We hit someone! “ she screamed.

  He didn’t move.

  “Open the door! Get out! Get out! George you’ve got to get out. We hit someone!”

  He just stared at her and Laura exploded in anger and started to slap him and hit him until finally he just grabbed hold of both of her wrists and held them in a searing, painful grip until she finally calmed down and he said, “We have to talk.”

  “Talk! You’re insane. There’s some child lying back there on the road. Don’t you understand we hit someone?”

  “I don’t have a driver’s license.” he said, calmly.

  “You what?” she shouted, “You what?! I don’t care about that now, we have to help! We have to help!”

  George loosened his grip and then let her go and then he slowly got out of the Porsche and stood aside as Laura crawled over his seat and crawled into the snow at the side of the road and got up as he stood aside and watched her run, watched her break through the ice over the soft snow below, and watched her fall and get up and leave blood every place that she touched, every step that she took. With her lungs almost exploding, she struggled and strained the long way back, and the wind made her breathless as she saw the broken body in the ditch and she fell and almost had to crawl the last few yards before she finally got to the boy who was lying so still in the snow.

  ‘Please live!’ she begged him silently, and she lifted his head and saw the face of a young boy, his acne medicine dissolving in the rain, and then she saw his leg, and the way it was bent at right angles to his body, and the bone protruding, and she saw the blood pouring out of his mouth and his ears, and she lifted his head up, and she screamed out loud, “Oh my God! No!”

  And she felt him breathing, and she saw his blue eyes open and he said to her, softly “Tell....... Tell...” and then his eyes closed and he lost consciousness or died, as Laura’s heart burst out of her throat as she screamed, “George!.... George! You have to help me!”

  Then she saw George get back in the car and for a horrible instant she thought he was going to drive away. She screamed his name as loud as she had ever screamed in her life and she hated him with a black burning intensity like she had never known she was ever capable of feeling for anyone. She got up and struggled to take off her coat and when she finally did it and wrapped it around the boy, she fell back exhausted as packed bits of snow dissolved in the rain on her face, in her hair, sliding in red rivulets of blood trickling from her fingers into the snow. Behind her, a red Osier dogwood grew out of the snow with it’s long slim red branches like veins the color of blood, and it looked almost like the earth was cut open so it’s own living flesh would shine before them, mocking their hideous human mortality. As the blood fell and flowed all around Laura, bare red branches thickened in the freezing rain.

  Then she felt the pain in the glass embedded in her flesh. She laid back into the dogwood and felt the throbbing, searing slivers of glass and then she held up her hand and saw it was red with blood and she wondered if George would just wait until she died.

  She heard the old brown pickup truck stop on the road and it seemed only an instant before two young faces looked down at her, two ordinary faces that would be etched forever in her mind, every detail, every contour of their faces seemed so strangely beautiful. They were not handsome, they were beautiful. They were talking, one went to the broken boy and left the other lifting her up and talking to her and she would never remember what he said or what she replied as she looked over at the broken boy and saw the young man rise up over him like an Angel, and for a second when she saw it, she thought he was rising into the air, and then she felt hands around her, arms hold her and lift her and help her and her legs vanished as she walked with them back to the pickup truck. Time was compressed and time disappeared as Laura was beginning to go into deep shock. She felt the lightness of her body as they walked through the heavy snow and for an instant she thought that she too was about to rise into the air and fly.

  The warmth inside the cab of the pickup was like the blast of an oven and she laid back and the beautiful young man tried to hold her still as the pain of the glass stabbed into her again and again whenever she moved.

  Then she saw George standing by the open door of the truck talking to the beautiful young men telling them that he had used Laura’s cell phone to call for an ambulance. Then she heard him say the most hideous words she ever heard in her life.

  “It wasn’t her fault. She wasn’t used to driving my car. When she hit the patch of ice she just couldn’t recover.” He looked in at her and said directly to her face, “I should never have let you drive.”

  He sounded so calm, so detached, so diabolically self-serving that she didn’t believe it, but she hated him almost absolutely. This was the man who said he loved her. He had been true to his word, he had made her feel things she hadn’t even imagined she was capable of feeling.

  “You fucking son of a bitch. My fucking hero!” Her rage broke through the shock. “I wasn’t driving. He was driving. He doesn’t have a license.” she said to the young man who smiled at her and said it was okay and she asked him if he believed her as he tried to wipe some of the blood from her face with his scarf. The touch of it only made her scream in pain.

  The ambulance came and they worked quickly for what seem like an eternity while Laura was lying inside the ambulance for a very long time drifting on painkillers. As they had pulled the biggest pieces of glass from her neck and face and bandaged her cuts, time dragged like cold steel on pavement and then vanished the way a sheet of snow could turn in the wind and disappear.

  A policeman came into the ambulance and asked her things and she replied and he looked so young, so worried.

  Laura’s heart broke when they loaded the stretcher and she saw the white body strapped under blankets. His face was covered. He was just a little rise, like a drift of snow. She could feel every pounding beat of her heart and every missing one of his as she lay there and time was forever until the ambulance moved and she felt a hand holding hers.

  In the hospital they stripped away her clothes and stitched the big cut on her neck that would have killed her if it had been an inch to the side. Her ability to remember faces became perfect and she remembered one face after another and hardly anything of what happened. She would never remember the words they said. She would never remember the things they did. She would remember eyes and the shape of lips and jaws and the subtlety of expression in every different moment of life. Ordinary life!

  It was late in the afternoon when Ian saw the sky clear as he drove as fast as he dared the two hours of an instant that it took to reach the hospital.

  Sharon and Tom were waiting there with George. Ian’s confusion and terror at how Laura came be in a hospital hours from home was something he’d already dealt with in the car. She had lied to him about where she was going that day. When he looked at the man standing with Sharon and Tom, he knew. The look in George
’s eyes made him almost completely certain.

  Sharon hugged Ian and Tom asked where Amanda was.

  “I don’t know. I called everyone I could think of.”

  The emergency waiting room was a pit of anxiety and boredom in a great circle of industrial chairs. There were no seats available and so they stood while Sharon explained the extent of Laura’s injuries. She told Ian that Laura would recover completely, that her injuries were painful but would heal. There might be some scars. She told him that Laura was sedated and asleep and they were just moving her to a hospital room. She also said that a boy on a bicycle had been killed.

  “Oh, no! Oh my God!”

  George finally spoke up and introduced himself. “I’m George Marshall. I was with your wife when she had the accident. I should never have let her drive. The sleet had turned to freezing rain.”

  “What did you say?” Ian suddenly interjected.

  “I said I should never have let her drive.”

  Ian interjected again, “And you said the sleet had turned to freezing rain. You’re lying. Laura would never drive in bad weather. She would never even drive her own car in bad weather. It was you who was driving.”

  Everyone looked at George in shock. The look on his face told everything.

  “I don’t know why you want to blame my wife for an accident. I assume you’re her lover. I assume you are a piece of shit and I’d like you to get out of my sight this minute.”

  “You know I’m her lover. But, if you want me to give you some space, I can understand that.”

  “You understand.” Ian said contemptuously.

  George told Sharon that he would go and wait in the coffee shop. Sharon told him that that was a good idea.

  When he was gone the first thing Sharon said to Ian was that Laura was bringing George to the farm because she had asked her to help in breaking off her affair with him.

  “He was frightening her. I thought I could help her. I’m so sorry.”

  “What do you mean he was frightening her?”

  “That isn’t important right now. I’ll deal with George. Tom is going to drive him back to Toronto. You and I are going to stay here until she’s awake.

  “Mr. McCall, when I’m in Toronto is there any way that I could wait for Amanda at your house? Maybe she’s come home. I’ve been trying to call from here at the hospital but there’s only the answering machine with your message saying to call the farm.”

  “Of course. I’d want you to wait for her. I’d really appreciated it and, if it’s not too much trouble, maybe you could drive her back here to the hospital and we could find a motel nearby.”

  “You’ll stay at the farm. It’s only a half an hour away.” Sharon interjected.

  “You’ll need the keys to the front door and the apartment. And you should take my cell phone.” Ian said as he gathered the things for Tom and told him how much he appreciated what he was doing. “And you’ll need directions.” And he took out a pen and drew a little map on the back of one of his business cards in his fine, minuscule hand. Tom looked at Sharon and he saw that, as always in crisis, she was the one who could look so calm and serene.

  Before Tom left to get George in the coffee shop, the look in Tom’s eyes made Ian almost nauseous. It was the look of pity.

  In the half-hour before they came to tell them they could see Laura, Ian and Sharon sat in the coffee shop and he felt so lost, so bruised, so stupidly innocent of Laura’s betrayal that he didn’t know what to say as Sharon told him everything she knew about what had happened. He had asked her to tell him what she knew and, as she talked, her compassion and care and obvious respect and affection for Laura made him actually start to feel that they would somehow get through it. Deep inside, he was heart-broken and bruised so deeply that it would be painful for a long time, every time he felt his heart respond to his wife. They had made a point of not defining what marriage meant to either of them and if there had been infidelity when they had first been married he might have been able to more easily adjust to the idea and the reality of it. But, after all the years, he thought that his marriage had actually defined itself. After all the years, new definitions were very hard to take.

  He wasn’t angry. He didn’t feel sorry for himself. More than anything, he felt like it was partly his own doing, partly his own fault. Holding a beautiful wife was something he hardly imagined he would ever be able to do. That he had held Laura to himself for all those years was more than he had ever expected when they married.

  Sharon talked and Ian listened and he felt a sad satisfaction for what he had. He also felt grateful that Sharon was the one to tell him. Like every good lawyer, he wanted to be prepared. He hated surprises, and Laura’s betrayal had been the surprise of his life. Its bitter taste was new and would linger, and he would try as hard as he could to cover the taste with other feelings.

  “Who was the boy who died?” Ian finally asked when Sharon seemed to have finished talking.

  “I don’t know. I’ll find out for you, if you like.”

  “That would be good. That son of a bitch wants to blame this on her. That’ll cure her of any romantic illusions about her trendy little lover. She won’t even drive in the rain. She pulls off the highway. That son of a bitch.”

  When they finally got to see Laura, she looked so frail and bruised and battered, her blond hair matted where someone had washed out the blood and it had dried in heavy tangles. Cuts were stitched with blood. Her face was very swollen. Her eyes were open. They looked desperate and afraid.

  Ian took her hand and bent down and kissed her.

  “You’ve never looked lovelier.” he said to lighten the mood.

  “The real me.” she replied in a horse little voice.

  “This must be tearing you up.” he said, softly. It was the best he could do. He hoped it was what she needed to hear.

  “You know?” she said into his eyes. It wasn’t what he had meant. He had intended to comfort her feelings about the dead boy.

  Then he knew the rest of it was written on his face. He didn’t have to say anything. From the moment he spoke to her he knew she could see that he knew everything.

  “Sharon will tell you anything you want to know about George except that I’m so sorry I hurt you. Please don’t break up our family.” she said in her sore little voice.

  “Not even if you were dating the Buffalo Bills.” he said, and squeezed her hand.

  “Now he tells me.” She tried to force a smile. She told him she didn’t deserve him and he told her that it was true, but that life wasn’t always fair. Laura then asked them not to leave but said she felt she had to sleep. She couldn’t force her eyes to stay open any more. She slept for hours and when she woke near midnight Sharon and Ian were still sitting in the visitor’s chairs beside her bed. She asked the time and said she hoped they could stay just a little longer. She didn’t want to talk, but she wanted them to be there with her. Laura couldn’t stand to be alone with herself that night. And so that was the way Ian and Laura would spend the next hour, silently winnowing their hearts between the heavy threads of love and marriage, betrayal and responsibility, looking to see what held and what fell through the spaces between.

  In Toronto, that day, Amanda had been going through the nostalgia of her heart’s old rebellions. Her feelings for Tom had left her feeling overwhelmed and very much alone, so when Kara had called her that afternoon she was glad to hear from her, and so they had gone out shopping with Amanda’s money as they had done so many times before. Amanda was almost relieved to be back where there were virtually no expectations except having a cynical attitude.

  That was the hardest part for her to revive. Kara was a little high on an ecstasy buzz and after they ate and they had caught up on gossip about the street people they both knew, it didn’t take too much to talk Amanda into dropping a little pill and getting on a little buzz of her own.

  The
big news was that Kara had scored an invitation to a very select Rave at the warehouse loft of a very fierce modern artist and musician who went by the name of Freaky Deaky.

  It took some time and a whole lot of laughing in strange little Raver boutiques, trying on clothes and finding two very aggressive, very cool outfits, before Amanda and her little ecstasy buzz made her agree to go to the Rave that night. They looked like baby faced time traveling hookers or what a teenage boy might imagine a time traveling teenage hooker might look like.

  Kara teased Amanda about her description of coffee night at the farm , “Where we’re going, I don’t think anyone is gonna be singing Kum by Ah.”

  “They’re not folkies, they sing every kind of music.” Amanda said defensively.

  “Except new or good.”

  “It’s great music.”

  “It’s Mama and Daddy’s music. It sucks. No man is worth having to put up with a whole shit pile of bad music.”

  Near midnight, when they both felt happy and tired and stopped for fries and a drink, Kara slipped another pill into Amanda’s mouth, and as she had done so many times before, she swallowed.

  They stopped at Kara’s place and shared a joint with her mother and her boyfriend who looked at all young girls as if they were walking pornography. When he was really stoned he would start to tell the girls how fine he thought their bodies were; their best points, their real potential. Kara would just laugh hysterically and Amanda would feel her skin start to crawl.

  When they finally got to the Rave and floated out of the cab, they could hear the huge amplified base shaking the old brick warehouse. There was a huge crowd of people on the street and when they finally found the door they were surprised that there were two skinheads with bare chests standing there in thirty degree weather checking names.

  Amanda thought that their night was over until Kara went to one of the skinheads in a pair of Everlast boxing trunks that seemed, with high top black running shoes, to be the standard uniform. Amanda was shocked when Kara waved to her and she pushed through the crowd and they floated up the stairs to the second floor of the warehouse where all the music was pounding.

  “I told you this is real exclusive shit.” Kara said proudly to Amanda on the stairs.

  At the top of the stairs they were met by two more skin heads.

  “Down this.” one of them said to Kara and produced a pill from his hand and placed it in Kara’s mouth and she swallowed it without a thought. When he said the same thing to Amanda and she told him no thanks, that she had her own buzz going, he refused to accept her answer.

  “Nobody gets in without a little taste.”

  “Come on! Come on! We’re almost in.” Kara pleaded. The footsteps coming up the stairs behind them pushed Amanda over the edge and she took the pill and swallowed it.

  It would be a few minutes before the powerful little combination of MDMA., and LSD would hit them.

  Inside the door it was an explosion of bodies moving and dancing and milling about like some great fermenting pool of synthetic smells and sweat and clothes and make up.

  Up! Up ! Down! Down! The base pounded. The base pounded. Up! Down! Up! Down! Base pounding! Base pounding! Scream! Treble! Scream! Treble ! Inside the body. Outside the body. Inside the mind. Outside the mind. Just feel! Feel! Feel!...... Then don’t!

  The room smelled foul. It was an enormous room with an old, worn, oil covered hardwood floor. High windows stood behind the steel four foot wide cat walk that completely surrounded the room. All the light in the room came from banks of Florescent fixtures hung high enough to make everything on the cat walks visible.

  In one end was the band: drums, guitars, an electric organ. All the players were bare to the waist skin heads in the boxer trunks and black shoes. Each one also wore a latex mask of Edward Munck’s, the Scream, which was how band members were distinguished from the other head shaved minions. Two sets of amplifiers pointed down into the pit from both sides. At the end opposite the band was Freaky Deaky with his hand-held remote microphone.

  Freaky Deaky was also bare to the waist and wore the Scream mask as well, but the difference between him and his crew was that he wore bare feet and had tattoos covering half the exposed area of his body. His body was his best performance. He obviously had spent many, many hours pumping weights, sculpting his body so that his stocky trunk and arms looked like heavy faded white roots. His square flat head and the horrific rubber image in which his big lips moved, made him an imposing presence, solid, stolid, hard. If he had frozen in place, he would have looked like a strange old, brooding lichen covered rock ready to roll down and crush anyone in his path. He also looked much older than his skin headed followers.

  As he spewed out his rage and invective at the crowd, he rocked forward and back as if he was in severe abdominal pain. He spat out an electric inexhaustible stream of words over the music. It was Rap, but it wasn’t like the Rap that came out of black experience with the repetitive rhyme and the internal rhythms that carried the meaning in it, carried the feeling in it, as everyone knew it, as everyone construed with in the drawl of a last word or phrase that led you consider it, that let you reconsider the way it should be said, the song of the head when it was still attached to the heart, the Plantation call still there coming from behind a high, invisible wall.

  Freaky Deaky’s rap came from machines and from technocratic jargon and intellectual posturing and sped out in his mouth in an automatic fire like a machine pistol. “ Dreck ...ka- ka ... dreck ...co -ax.... co -ax. Coaxial ..... maxial..... spacial is palatial .. democracy is hypocrisy... abandoned idealism drowning in rivers of pompous shit. And you are nothing but unwiped assholes and I am the enema that’s going to come blowing out your nose... I’ll show you. I’ll blow you. Co-ax co-ax You are all wet rubbers left by your fathers in your mother’s little trendy purse. You’ll never know the trouble I’ve seen. You’ll never know the trouble I’ve been. Co-ax Life is! Life is shit! Get over it! I am what I am what I am what I am. Get it! You will get shit! I am the one who will give it to you.” Co-ax co-ax. The words came out so fast that it was almost impossible to understand them. It didn’t matter, only phrases mattered, disconnected phrases that carried all the meaning that was possible or even necessary to his art

  He was a strange hypnotic force that stalked back and forth along the iron cat walk, rocking like a psychotic, glaring down into the crowd, picking out people with his cold little eyes and then attacking them with the amplified power of his voice like a killer whale striking a seal from below where the base beat was throbbing. The people in the milling sea of bodies knew when he was looking at them and talking about them and taking them apart, ridiculing the way they looked and dressed and moved. And every one of them, even in their drug haze and the big rush of mellow waves and hallucinogenic distortions in their heads, stopped and stared and took the abuse like calves in a slaughter house Shute watched a sledge hammer blow coming at them.

  Amanda and Kara moved up closer to where Freaky Deaky was working the room. It wasn’t long before the drugs hit them and they started to dance with each other, Kara getting wilder and wilder as if her body was somehow connected instantly to the electricity and the ear splitting decibels of the heavy baritone voice pounding in everyone’s brain.

  Amanda felt her whole body rise and fill with the seething power of the room. It was so intense and so impersonal at the same time that it was easy to float on the big wave like the bodies that occasionally went surfing on hands over the heads of the people. The Mosh pit seemed to be on the edge of exploding, some had completely shed their clothes and, as they slammed into one another, it looked like a big pack of pit bulls barely constrained by invisible leads.

  Amanda and Kara danced until the sweat poured off their bodies and saturated their clothes. Surrender and go. Amanda danced. Do what you wanna wanna do. She danced. She danced: arms, hips and legs crashing together in the bump
er pool of freedom and, as she danced and danced and forgot everything about everything, she almost felt that she began to shine inside. When she and Kara finally went to look for something to drink, she felt the energy of the room in every step she took, every move she made. It was intoxicating in ways that the drugs only made better.

  Finally they found the source of the aluminum beer cans littered everywhere on the floor. Amanda paid the ten dollars for the two cans of beer and watched Kara swallow it straight away. Then she went, stuck her face in the ice water and drank from the huge plastic tub of water that most people seemed to be ignoring.

  It wasn’t an instant before Amanda lost sight of Kara and when she went looking for her she couldn’t help but see the people were suddenly trying vainly to stay away from the cat walk where Freaky Deaky had work himself into an absolute arm waving frenzy, rocking back and forth, leaning over the railing, pointing to various people and screaming, “You, Asshole! Rauss! Rauss!”

  “Out! Out!” And his barefaced minions would come and drag or escort the person to the door. Amanda was stunned and sickened to see what he was doing. He swore and cursed at the people as he chose them, as he directed his henchmen to the next victim.

  Excluded! Banished! Rejected! Uncool ! The look on the people’s faces as they were thrown out of the room was a study in shock and humiliation.

  Amanda had a moment of panic wondering if Kara had already been thrown out of the room. One after another people were chosen and banished. ‘Why does anyone come here? Amanda wondered to herself as she searched the sea of bodies for her friend.

  She was left almost alone as everyone in the crowd reeled back. The music pounded. Freaky Deaky screamed and then at last when he broke his banishments with one of his songs, all the people went go back to dancing like sheep would go back to grazing after a dozen members of the flock had been culled.

  “Bubbles of self awareness floating in a void.... Vails of obscurity and the sheer impossibility of objectively .... Bureaucratic atrocities on the canvas of blood...mega cartels of information flowing, the ink jets of becoming in the third person singular...the kinship of madness and art...living in the state of siege, controlled and victimized by unseen powers...paranoia awaking from a dream about meaning....Voyeuristic survivors of boring class histories, we can Iive only in the shallows, earth maps and mirrors, displacements of personality and self-effacing anonymity swallowed in the self-indulgence of idle subjectivity. It’s the machine that is really the art. There is only addiction. Chaos is the only order.” Dreck...ka-ka ...Dreck....Co-ax. Co-ax

  He was no longer speaking to the crowd. His arms thrust up like Moses receiving the word of God, the personal invective and the personal interest in the crowd below had seemed to disappear in his transcendent revelation, and the screaming mask on his face contorted as he spoke and his fleshy lips pronounced the pseudo-intellectual rant that inspired him. And it did have a powerful effect on the crowd. Everyone stopped dancing. Only the music accompanied him as he shared his vision with all those beneath him that had apparently completely vanished from his awareness. Amanda could not help but be trans-fixed by his incomprehensible babbling. But, even in her drug hazed mind, she knew he was just a fool.

  Then the vision was over and he returned to the main task of savaging the un-hip and the uncool.” Out! Out! Rauss! Rauss!”

  As the crowd thinned down Amanda hoped she would be able to see Kara and her fear grew greater and greater that she had somehow missed her friend being thrown out of the room. The dancing resumed as Amanda looked for Kara and more and more people were rousted. Amanda’s heart was beating faster and the drugs were hitting more powerfully as she tried to search the room in some systematic way, but it felt just like she was always only getting back to where she began, seeing faces she recognized again and again, feeling bodies push her over and over, feeling the music pounding up through the floor. Time was a moment and time was eternity looking for someone she couldn’t find. Space was a footstep and space was infinity as she tried to remember just where she’d been. Hallucinations started to weave into her emotions and she started to become very frightened indeed. This was going to be her last bad trip. ‘Rauss! Rauss! Rauss!’

  Finally just to calm herself she found a place by a wall and watched the northern lights dissolving over her eyes, watched the cartoon characters dancing with the people. She was leaning against one of the eight foot square paintings that she now could see were hung all around the room. For some reason, they made her want to throw up. The room started to dissolve and change, as time slipped and slid sideways and her rational brain tried to adjust. Finally her legs were tired and her mouth felt like congealed spit as she stood there stoned and just waited for the real world to return.

  When the crowd was finally down to a few dozen people Amanda looked over to where the big tub of water sat alone, and she would never know why she did it, but she went to it and plunged her head into the water again and left it under, holding her breath, waiting for the colors to fade inside her. The underwater music was like a great, sick heart. When she came up gasping for air she was shocked to realize that suddenly she felt almost completely straight. She could think. She could see. She could choose. She could act.

  And when she saw poor Kara sitting by the doorway by the black shoes of one of the goons she went over to where her friend sat completely wasted. Amanda tried to help Kara to her feet but it took a moment before Kara finally understood what her friend wanted her to do, and when she finally did get up and Amanda told the two doorway attendants that they were going, the goons told her she wasn’t going anywhere. Nobody left the room until the boss said they could go.

  Suddenly enraged that they were imprisoned, Amanda told them to go fuck themselves.

  Then the great, amplified voice of the great Oz spoke and said, “That one, out! Rauss!”

  One of the guards pointed to Amanda and he shook his head and the lackies understood and one of them took Kara from Amanda while the other pulled her away from her friend. Amanda started to curse and scream at them and suddenly Kara was gone as Amanda tried to push past the guard and follow her friend down the stairs. But he was too big, too strong.

  When she realized she could not get through the guard she also realized the only way to get out the door would be to have the monster act evict her, and so she strode intently to where he presided over the room from the high cat walk and screamed up at him to let her go.

  “Let me out of here! Pick me! Kick me out, you big asshole.”

  Her voice was almost drowned out in the music but he saw her and looked down and for the first time that night his rubber lips formed into an unmistakable smile. He started to taunt her, asking her if she had to go home to her mommy and daddy. He watched her, laughing as she screamed up at him, but he stopped dead when she called him fat boy.

  “Cut! Cut!” he screamed, and the band stopped playing immediately, and a deafening silence filled the room, and it was so enormous and empty that the dozen dancers and the dozen half- bare skin heads seemed to suddenly disappear into the empty cavern of the room. Freaky Deaky suddenly had the cold deliberate movements of someone very intense and focused and very determined.

  What she said seemed to have set off something inside him and he made a gesture to two followers below and they came and grabbed her, but instead of being hustled to the door as she had expected, Amanda was dragged to the center of the room from where she watched as Freaky Deaky slowly come down from the cat walk on a steel chain fall, holding on to its hook with one hand, letting one of his lackies let down the chain where it gathered and rattled on the floor.

  Amanda watched as he approached her with a steady, slow, almost graceful gait. He looked at the crowd that was gathering and no one spoke, every person’s eyes he looked into turned away, afraid of his attention, afraid that they would not get to see.

  Amanda noticed that it was mostly males left in the room. She
heard strange sounds behind her as the crowd gathered around her and he stopped in front of her and his whispered voice echoed in the room. “No emotion.” he whispered.

  Of course the emotion in the room was absolutely electric and Amanda’s bravado collapsed in a quiet voice and she pleaded with him, “Please, just let me go.”

  His whispered voice replied, “No subject. No object.”

  “Just let me go.” Amanda begged him, her heart racing with the drugs and the absolute terror of the silence and the absolute fear that came from looking into his dead little eyes. And then she knew he would hurt her. It was like swallowing vomit.

  His voice whispered again, “No symbol. No image.”

  “What are you talking about?” Amanda gasped.

  “No form, no design, no light, no space, no time.” he said as she came up to within inches of her face. “I am an artist.” he said to her. “You are a poor pathetic middle-class monstrosity. I have given you a night to remember. Now I’m going to give you a night neither of us will ever forget because you will be my instrument. You are only a brush that’s discarded after the act of creation.

  “You’re no artist. You even have to hide behind the mask of someone who really was an artist.” Terror had sobered Amanda almost completely. She didn’t know what he was about to do, but she knew by the look in his eyes that it would mean her complete humiliation. That was his idea of art.

  “What do you know about art, you oozing little zit? Who do you think you are, calling me fat? Look at this body.” He preened like a wrestler for her and for the rest of the crowd and then turned back and grabbed her by the throat. “No pleasure, no beauty.”

  He nodded and Amanda was turned around to face an eight foot square piece of white canvas lying before her on the floor. The crowd had surrounded the canvas and gallons of paint were open and waiting and with another nod the paint cans were handed from one spectator to another, each one throwing a splash of paint down onto the canvas. When all the spectators had participated and the canvas was covered and shining wet in the sick florescent light and Amanda believed she was going to have to get down and grovel for her freedom, Freaky Deaky whispered into her ear from behind, “Strip or be stripped.”

  It was then Amanda realized the horror. It was then Amanda realized what the paintings were that hung all around the room.

  “Noooooooo!” she screamed. “Please don’t hurt me. Please don’t hurt me.” she begged.

  “Strip or be stripped.” he repeated.

  “I can’t. Please don’t do this. Please don’t do this.”

  “I’ll count to three and if you haven’t started stripping we will do it for you.”

  “You son of a bitch, my father’s a lawyer. If you rape me, you’ll spend the next twenty years in jail. You’ll regret this.” She tried to sound anything but desperate and terrified. When he chuckled into her ear and said, “Oh, really.”, and it sent a cold shudder right through her body.

  “One.” He stopped whispering. “Two.” The crowd joined him in counting.

  “No! Please God, noooo!” Amanda began to sob and cry uncontrollably.

  “Three.” That was when Amanda, hearing the crowd counting, realized they’d all seen this before. She started to thrash and struggle trying to break free of the hands holding her wrists, but they only held her tighter, and suddenly other bodies approached and hands began to tear at her clothes and she began to scream and scream and scream and the screams echoed in the room, and the eyes in the faces of the people all around looked so terrible and ugly and surreal that Amanda threw up right into the middle of the canvas and the paint, and then she felt her panties pulled down her legs and she was naked, still held hard by the wrists, and when she started to kick, hands grabbed her legs and ankles and she was lowered down slowly, so slowly, wriggling like a worm on a hook, and all the faces stared at her body and she began to speak to the people watching, begging them to help her, and all there was was the wide eyed stare of drugs and seared minds waiting, and then she felt the paint, cold and sticking beneath her and felt herself spread-eagled in the ultimate humiliation, and when she knew it would happen, she suddenly became clear headed and what came up out of her was pure unadulterated rage and hatred. The crying stopped completely. Her searing lungs calmed their heaving.

  “Is this the only way you can get a piece of ass, fat boy?” she said, as she raised her head and glared at him. “You’re not in artist. You’re a fat, sick geek.” she shouted.

  “I am not fat!” he screamed at top of his lungs and the shock in the silence that followed his scream seemed to terrify everyone in the room. Then he did it again. “I am not fat.”

  Then he seemed to recover himself and stared down at Amanda. “It’s not my emotions that are supposed to be left on the canvas. Do not say I am fat again. If you do, it will be your blood mixing with the paint you feel between your legs.”

  When he started to pull down his silk fighter’s trunks Amanda laid back and closed her eyes and for the first time since she was a very little girl, she prayed to a merciful God to please spare her this pain. Then she realized that he was speaking to her. Then she realized he was asking her a question.

  “Is it a fuck or a rape?”

  When she didn’t reply, he shouted the question at her. “A fuck or a rape?”

  “Amanda opened her eyes and glared at him. “What the fuck are you talking about, this is rape! Are you people going to just stand by and let him do this? What kind of people are you?

  “If your hands and legs are free, it’s a fuck. If they are held, it’s rape.” he explained patiently. “It would be better for you if you fuck me.”

  “You sick bastard. I’d like to kill you.” Then she saw he was stroking himself and he was erect and it was about to happen, and she started to cry once more when she suddenly thought about Tom, and it nearly broke her heart. Thinking about Tom was almost like having him see what was happening. She hoped she would live. She hoped she would survive. She hoped he would never ever know what happened.

  “Raped or fucked?” Then he did the counting to three with the crowd and when she only started to thrash he said, “Raped it is.” And then he moved toward her, his enormous tattooed bulk looming over her, and she cried and she cried as he knelt between her legs to gasps from the audience. He loved gasps from the audience. When he pressed himself down into her like a thick slug on a flower, she could feel his weight crushing her body and feel him begin to explore her unpainted torso with his mouth and then go lower and feel his hands moving over her body, covered in paint, slick and wet, and she thrashed harder trying to heave him up away from her and she swore at him as she never swore in her life, calling him every kind of filthy name she could think of, names coming through her tears and heaving lungs, and he kept moving, sometimes sliding up over her and he would look in her eyes and listen to her screaming filthy names at him and he would smile. He loved it.

  “Would you like me to kiss you?” he said when her breath finally ran out and she stopped screaming at him. Then he mashed his mouth down on hers as she felt him slide wet with paint into her body and she started to shiver like she was freezing in a snow bank, and it was a horror she never knew or imagined she could feel, and it went on for an eternity, and far in the distance she could hear him groaning and moaning and then he screamed in the silence. When it was over and he pulled up and away from her, she felt hands lift her up and she was back on her feet standing at the end of the canvas and he was behind her and heard his voice within her as his lips touched her ear once more. “What do you think of your painting? “he asked softly. He stepped away from her and hands stretched her arms out, and buckets that had been filled from the big water tub hit her like a scourge, cold, cold, and the pain ran down her body with the paint and they stuck her with more cold water and mercifully she passed out and she never knew the rest of the horror.

  She woke up shiver
ing, lying beside a big blue dumpster in an alley in a snow bank stained with the paint from her body. She felt nothing. They had put her torn clothes back on her body and where the paint had dried in the cold air it was stuck to her skin and it cracked and tore at her as she struggled to her feet and fell through the snow to the street.

  In the street lights a few cars passed and she heard footsteps and felt someone gather her and hold her and comfort her and pull a big fur coat around her. It was a woman’s clothes, a woman’s hair she felt touching her but the hands around her, holding her were the hands of a man.

  Amanda pulled away violently. The hands gathered her back in.

  “It’s okay. It’s okay. I’ll take you someplace safe. We’ll call the police.” The man’s strange voice said soothingly.

  “Please, no. Please, no.” Amanda begged the person holding her, and the voice comforted her and she let herself be comforted.

  “Can we call your parents? Do you know your phone number?”

  “Please.” was all Amanda could say.

  It was then Amanda realized that the man holding her was dressed as a woman. It didn’t matter. She let herself be turned and led down the street, a strong arm supporting her, holding her until they got to a phone booth at a closed gas station and the stranger finally got Amanda to repeat her phone number until it was understandable. When Tom answered, the stranger told him that he was holding a girl who had been somehow attacked and hurt. The stranger told Tom that she seemed to be just covered in paint but not broken or bleeding. The stranger told their location and then put the phone to Amanda’s ear as Tom had insisted and when Amanda heard his voice instead of her father’s, as she expected, she swooned in shock and confusion. When she realized it was really him, she started to cry and just say his name over and over, “Tommy.... Tommy.... my Tommy..... Ohhhhh.”

  The stranger took back the phone. Tom asked if their location was near Queen Street and Church and the stranger said it was quite near, and Tommy told the stranger he would call his brother who lived close by and he would be there in just a few minutes.

  “Nervously, the stranger asked Tommy’s brother’s name and when he told him the stranger screamed, “It’s not. What a small world. We’ll wait right here.”

  When the stranger hung up the phone, Amanda could see the man dressed as a woman was shivering almost uncontrollably. She tried to give back the long fur coat but he pulled it tight around Amanda and looked into her eyes and then he began to cry. Paint flaking away from her skin, paint dripping down her legs the big man pulled her into his arms and held her close for a few minutes until a perfect old black Mercedes pulled up and Tom’s brother Wayne and his lover Charles tore out of the car and took Amanda from the arms of the transvestite prostitute. It was then that Wayne recognized the stranger who had helped Amanda.

  “Hello, Crystal. Are you O.K.?” Wayne asked the stranger.

  “I’m okay. Could I just come with you and warm up. Maybe I could try to get some of the paint out of my coat.”

  Wayne and Charles rode in the front seat and the prostitute sat in the back seat with Amanda, Amanda’s head was down, resting in the man’s lap, and she felt the sheen of the dress under her cheek and felt the power of the man’s leg muscles underneath it.

  “Where are we going?” Amanda whispered.

  The prostitute repeated her question and it was then that Wayne introduced himself.

  “We’re going to my place nearby. I’m Tommy’s brother Wayne. Tommy will be here as soon as he can.” he replied to the unheard question.

  “Not Tom. I want my mom.” she said, in a barely audible voice.

  There is a level of heart break everyone can imagine and another level so far below it that the abyss a person has to fall through to reach it seems to distort all space and time. It seemed to Amanda that it would be that way forever.

  Above the big antique store was Wayne’s apartment. It was warm and simple like the Arts and Crafts oak furniture that filled it.

  Wayne sat Amanda in a big love-seat, sat beside her where she sat in the fur coat she was reluctant to surrender at the door. Gently, he talked to her about what had happened. He made statements and asked her just to shake her head yes or no in reply. He wanted to know if she wanted to go to the hospital. No. He wanted to know if she knew the people who did this. No. He wanted to know if she wanted them to call the police. No. He wanted to know if she had been raped. Yes. He wanted to know if she wanted to take a shower. Yes.

  Then Wayne spoke to Charles. “You’re closest to her in size. Could you find her something to wear, a sweatshirt, those jeans you don’t fit any more, a pair of wool socks.”

  Charles, who seemed absolutely horrified by everything that was happening, took the orders almost like a slap in the face until he realized Wayne wanted him to help. But, when he realized what he was being asked to do, he went quickly away to his task.

  “You’re going to need someone to help you in the shower. Would you like one of us to help, or would you like to wait for Tom?” Wayne asked gently but firmly.

  “Oh, no! Not Tommy. Not Tommy.” She looked up into the long thin face of the stranger who found her in the street, and when their eyes met he knew she was asking him again for help.

  “Come on sweet cream. We’ll get you cleaned up. You know of course I’m beyond any prurient interest in your gender.” Amanda got up and shed the coat and reached out her hand to the prostitute who told her that his name was Crystal. Charles came back into the room just as Amanda had shed the coat and he gasped when he saw the tattered clothes hanging from her body, the congealed paint everywhere her flesh appeared.

  Wayne told Crystal the way to the bathroom and Charles handed him the clothes he had found as they passed him. “Oh, you poor baby.” Charles said and he reached out to touch Amanda’s head gently as she passed.

  It was over half an hour and Amanda and Crystal were still in the shower, the hot water having turned tepid and then cold. Crystal had scrubbed Amanda from head to foot, standing outside the shower in her slinky silk dress feeling it would be too inappropriate to get naked and look totally like a man. The shower splashed him and made his clothes and makeup a total dripping disaster. Amanda stood and let herself be washed like a puppy and finally when the paint had all gone down the drain, she stepped out on to a sodden floor, standing among wet bath towels, feeling herself being dried in the heaviest, soft terrycloth she ever felt in her life. It was the first overwhelmingly delicious feeling of pleasure she had felt since her ordeal had begun.

  Tom was waiting in the living room with Wayne and Charles when he saw Amanda. She was dressed in the big sweatshirt that simply said Queens. She wore stone washed baggy jeans rolled up in thick heavy cuffs over heavy wool socks. Tom’s heart, racing with heartache, collided with the overwhelming force of her simple beauty. Amanda looked in his eyes and it was like a deer in headlights. She froze the instant she saw him. When he walked to her and took her in his arms she felt absolutely rigid.

  “Are you okay?” he whispered into her ear. Her heart lurched to hear a man’s voice whispering so close to her head. She lunged back and pulled away from him.

  “How could you be here? How could you be here?” she asked looking terrified and confused.

  “It’s a long story. Your mom was in a car accident. She got some cuts but she’s going to be okay. I came to Toronto because your dad is with her at the hospital and wanted me to bring you there. Wayne told me you were raped.”

  Her lip started to shake and her eyes still looked frozen and terrified. It was her eyes that made Tom first feel hate in his life. It was her trembling mouth that made him feel a pure white searing rage.

  The phone rang and Wayne answered it and it was Ian calling back, wanting to talk to Tom or Amanda.

  Tom had called the farm after he hung up the phone at the McCall’s apartment. He’d talked to Sharon and told her that Aman
da had been hurt, that she was being taken to Wayne’s apartment. Sharon had called while Amanda was in the shower and Wayne had explained to her what he found and what he knew. Sharon was horrified.

  It was 4:30 in the morning when she woke Ian with the horror of what has happened to his daughter. His eyes filled with tears like a child’s as she told him of the rape and her refusal to go to the police or the hospital.

  When the heart breaks it breaks in levels. That night Ian found out how much deeper a level at which his heart could break. What Laura had done seemed to be little more than a pang compared to the grief in which he dressed.

  That was the heartbreak Ian took to Laura in the hospital as he woke her from a sound sleep, and Ian was shocked as Laura wailed for her daughter, even as she got out of bed and dressed and brushed aside the angry night nurses who insisted she couldn’t leave before she was formally discharged. Finally she took one of the night nurses by the shoulders and shook her and said, “My baby’s been raped. Don’t you understand that?”

  And before security could be called, before anything else could be done to stop them, Ian and Laura were out into the cold of the night, into the car and away in the speed of terror.

  It was amazing to both of them how fast the hours flew as Laura was almost rigid with fear as Ian drove as fast as he dared push the car. It piled onto the terror of what had happened to her and what had happened to her daughter, and by the time they got to Toronto Laura thought she knew just how much her mind and heart and body could bear in one day.

  At Wayne’s apartment they were told Amanda had been given some Valium and was asleep in Wayne’s guest bed. When they opened the door to the bedroom and Ian and Laura looked in at their daughter, Tom sitting on the floor beside her holding her hand as she slept, Laura knew the heart could never exhaust its potentials of pain. She stood stone frozen in the borrowed clothes Sharon had thrust at Ian as he had left the farm, her swollen face covered in lines of dried blood, her sore eyes staring at the lovely, innocent, unblemished face of the beautiful daughter to whom she had given life, for all that it was worth.