I give up on the book of letters because a bowl the size of a mixing bowl, filled with muddy-looking chili, has been set in front of me. I feel I should have a scoop to shovel it in. I scan the bowl for remnants of shredded wheat, see none and think, Okay, safe to eat.
At the table ahead I hear something about a fork in the road. A decision could go either way. And I think, Pretty easy bet, Anita.
I look towards the creek, or river, whatever it is. In the final rays of light, last year’s grasses on the cleared part of the slope have taken on a touch of gold all the way down to the water. If I could create that colour, if I could mix that colour of gold …
Anita’s voice breaks through again. “This could go on for a long time.”
“Very long?” The woman speaks with a tremor. Her head dips forward.
“It seems so,” says Anita, with flat indifference.
“Maybe it means your research,” says the cheery friend. “Your research never ends, and don’t we both know it.”
This is followed by a murmur of assent.
And then, I hear the most astonishing prediction. Anita, the fortune teller, declares in a semi-tragic voice, “Oh!” As if she has witnessed the inferno itself. She stares into the cup. “I’m sorry,” she says. “Like, I have to tell you. It’s as clear as can be.” She pauses, for effect, no doubt. “You aren’t going to live a long life.”
Two small bowls of chili arrive at this moment and are set at the women’s table. My body pulls up taller in my chair.
“Will she at least live happily?” This has been blurted out by the woman with the fluttering lids.
Anita shrugs—who knows?—tucks her five-dollar bill into her pocket and returns to sit with Rapunzel.
“Don’t pay any attention,” the woman tells her friend. “It’s all nonsense, you know it is. She doesn’t know what she’s saying.”
But the recipient of the news has stilled. She is staring out the window at what I am also seeing: the path she has just climbed; the narrow rays of disappearing light; darkness closing in; a small river that is no more than a murky blur as it curves around the base of a hill of shadows.
Should I stand up and shout? I could laugh or weep. If I start laughing, I’ll have to be carried out. I spoon down half the chili, leave money on the table, grab my book and head for the door while Anita calls after me in a singsong voice, “Don’t you want your fortune told? We’ll bring you a cup of tea.” She and Rapunzel are giggling as I push the door shut behind me.
Basil drags himself back to the cabin, reluctant to leave the warmth of the tea room. I should have intervened when I overheard the fortune. But what would I have said? And why would I interfere? Not my business.
Corpses of black bugs are squashed between tiles on the bathroom floor. I have no interest in identifying them and I don’t look closely. I know that Basil will paw anything that scuttles across his path in the night. As soon as I lock the door, he plunks himself onto the circle of braided rug and glares.
There are two single beds in the room. Both mattresses are lumpy and reek of must. There is an overhead light, no lamp. Between the beds a framed, glassless print hangs at a slant: a sampan afloat on dingy water, cotton-ball clouds puffed in the sky. I have an urge to slice across its surface with a knife. Instead, I straighten the frame, if only to gain control. We are, Basil and I, in what Lena would mercilessly declare to be a fleabag. As I think this, the light flickers once and goes out. I’m standing in blackness. No light in the bathroom, no light coming in from outside. I brush my teeth in the dark, splash water on my face, stub my foot against the tin shower and crawl into the nearest bed like a lame troll.
Basil has ignored my ablutions. I snap on the flashlight and shine it in his direction.
“One night, Basil. That’s all. The power outage is not my fault. We’ll be out of here in the morning. Make up for lost time. And it would be nice if you’d acknowledge my conversation just once. I did not, you’ll recall, abandon you at the kennel.”
Basil raises his head and looks into the cone of light when he hears the word kennel, but he knows he’s not under threat. He closes his eyes and makes it clear that I am the one, the only one, responsible for these unworthy digs.
CHAPTER 8
There is no room to turn on this narrow mattress, so I lie on my back beneath the covers.
Why would I leave my comfortable home only to sleep in a fleabag?
Because your home is empty. Because it’s bleak. Because you want to finish the last few drawings—maybe even another painting. Because you have a deadline. Because this trip might lead to anything. Because you are chasing away your ghosts. Because you are trying to open a door, any door, to some random glimmer or prospect that might be waiting to attach itself to your loneliness …
Loneliness.
I should bring in the Laphroaig from the car, but it’s too much effort to pull on clothes and dash outside and back in again. Shredded-wheat-in-the-beard might be waiting out there with an axe.
I will myself to recall good times. Better times. At least I thought so, at the time.
In the fall of last year, just before Thanksgiving weekend, I suggested that we rent a cabin on the Gatineau River in Quebec, not far from the city, about an hour’s drive. Greg had phoned to say he wouldn’t be coming home. Too far for him to travel, and he’d been invited for dinner at the home of a classmate whose parents lived near campus. A girl? Lena and I wondered. We had always teased him about the day we’d have to find him a bride. “When you’ve finished school, when your student loans are paid off, then we’ll start looking.” Does he have a new girl? Let’s hear about her. Do we stop looking for a bride?
Miss Carrie usually joined us for holiday dinners, but she had a house guest, the nephew of one of her antiquarian friends, a single man of fifty-eight who had arrived to visit for five days. So far—she pushed her walker to our house and related this breathlessly but with a touch of despair—so far, his entire visit had been spent sitting at Daddy’s desk while reading the Bible in Greek. He’d brought the Greek Bible with him in his Gladstone bag. Miss Carrie had plans to cook a chicken for his Thanksgiving dinner. The man was humourless, she said. Hopelessly devoid. Humour could knock him over and he’d reach for his Greek Bible while lying on his back on the floor.
“I’ll need to hear Benny,” she said. “For survival. Will you lend me your old gramophone, Bin? Lena said it’s still working. Maybe you could carry up some of my records from the basement?”
I went next door and hauled up one of the long-buried boxes—a fabulous collection, from what I could see. And helped set up the turntable Lena and I no longer used. We played mostly CDs now, except for tapes in the car. Still, we’d hung on to our LPs, as had Miss Carrie.
Lena needed no persuasion to get away for a cottage weekend. Fall term was underway and she’d been reading essays for weeks. Student appointments had begun, but she could spare three days.
She announced that she would leave all work at home. She hadn’t been feeling well lately. She had a sore throat; she was tired and overworked. “I am definitely in need of a break,” she told me.
She packed lightly: jeans, running shoes, a bulky sweater, a three-inch volume of Collected Stories by William Trevor.
It was my job to choose the music: Beethoven for me, Goodman for Lena—nothing else would do. I took graphite pencils, paper, pen and ink. We packed the cooler with the green lid, and Lena washed a few leaves of romaine before we left. We took salmon steaks and cheese, fall tomatoes and fresh corn, a loaf of bread, a bottle of wine. Lena decided to bring the chequered oilcloth we used as a picnic-table cover, and threw it into the car at the last minute. We drove to the cabin late Saturday morning—I had found the ad in a weekend paper—and Lena, holding the directions in her lap and sitting in direct sun in the passenger seat, nodded off all the way there.
When we first sighted the cabin, we knew it was better, by far, than we could have hoped for. Basil, in the back s
eat, nose out the side window, released a wolf-howl he couldn’t contain as I pulled up. We stepped out and looked around in wonder. A range of hills lay in soft folds beyond the far side of the river. A series of valleys was ablaze: oranges and reds, yellows and greens, one hue blending seamlessly to the next. Oaks were spaced along the water’s edge, and chipmunks in the high branches chattered and tossed acorns to the ground. Squirrels darted in every direction. Brilliant clusters of red maples rose up behind the cabin. All of this, within the crisp, earthy aroma of fall. I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear the blaring of trumpets.
I heard the whoop of pleasure as Lena flicked off her sandals. She rolled up her jeans and waded into the water, with Basil close behind her. He stank of river afterwards, and his legs and belly needed a rinse, but he wouldn’t be held back. Nor did we try to restrain him.
Lena found a large, flat stone to stand on and rocked back and forth, barefoot in shallow water, testing for balance, surveying what she promptly named the realm of beauty that lay before her. Some of the rocks were slippery with moss, a vivid green that shone up through the water. But the rock Lena chose was moss-free, ancient grey and solid.
I began to unload the car and found a set of keys hanging inside the screened porch. I turned to look at Lena. Hands on hips, head tilted back, a soft curve of belly thrust forward. Her dark hair was tucked behind her ears, her skin paler than usual in the sunlight. Shadows had deepened down the lines of one shoulder. She was inhaling the scent of early afternoon, of leaves swirling down, of river itself. It was a moment of perfection in the midst of fall, one short-lived moment. I wanted to set down the cooler, the food, the chequered tablecloth. I wanted to drop everything to the grass while I drew this picture, but I didn’t. I have never drawn it, though every shadow, every curve, every feeling I had in that moment is stored.
I see the picture as vertical, despite the river flowing across the bottom of the mind’s frame. I see the structure of the whole. I see the shade of Lena’s faded jeans; the outline of what I knew to be black bikini underwear beneath; the shape of her calves; the distortion of her ankles where they disappeared beneath the waterline; her T-shirt with horizontal stripes in cream and indigo; the way the stripes held a diagonal, rumpled pull when she stretched her arms overhead for the joy of being part of this. She wanted only to sink into this, and be thankful.
And so did I.
We had brought along a cage for Basil and padded it with a rug-end, and left it in the porch with the wire door open so that he could come and go as he pleased. He liked to sleep in the cage at night when we travelled, as long as the door was open and he knew he could get out. At home, he had a small mattress in his basket. It was only after Lena was admitted to hospital that he began to shred his bedding. But that came later.
Good things, I remind myself. Only good things.
The river was full and peaceful in the late glow of sun. A family arrived at the second cabin next door, a couple in their thirties with an eight-year-old daughter named Florence, who had brought along a friend, Lise. The two young girls tossed their brown hair, jumped from stone to stone in the shallow river, raced in and out of long shadows thrown by the trees. They befriended Basil and tagged after him, and collected acorns, and hooted when he held the squirrels at bay. They broke off layers of shale along the river’s edge. They skipped flat stones in the water and glanced back every now and then for approval, waving to their parents and to Lena and me.
Lena settled into a canvas lawn chair, her head bowed over her book. A dragonfly dipped, rose, dipped again. With its miraculous double set of wings, it hovered above her shoulder on a current of air. Aware of me watching, she looked up, her fingers holding her place in the book.
“This man can write,” she said. “Really write. Look at his face on the cover.” She held out Trevor’s book for inspection. “This is the way I want to look when I’m—well, whatever he was when the book was published. Sixty, maybe. I have a little over a decade to work on the lines of my face.”
In the evening, our neighbours created a rock circle close to the water’s edge, lit a bonfire and invited us to join them. We talked and laughed; there was nothing noisy, nothing brash. We wrapped ourselves in sweaters and listened to crickets and the murmur of flowing water.
Lena said she was tired, and we went to bed early and lay side by side in the dark, my left arm around her as always, her head against my shoulder. The curtains were closed but we could hear night sounds through the screens: far-off calls across the river; a distant, eruptive laugh; the sizzle of the fire being doused by water before our neighbours retired. There was a cassette player on the bedside table; I put in a tape and Benny’s clarinet began, the volume low.
“You’d think the scale was oiled,” Lena said. “The way he glides up and down it.”
That was the night I told her about First Father’s readings of the fates.
“What!” she said. “All these years we’ve been married and you’ve never told me any of this? I could have died and never known.”
“You never asked,” I said.
She couldn’t stop laughing. The mattress shook, the bed shook. I smiled to myself in the dark.
“Did your father always start with Hiroshi’s fate—I mean, Henry’s?”
“First Father?”
“You know who I mean.”
“Hiroshi was number-one son. Stronger, according to his fate. He was skilled; he was given responsibilities as a child. I was less important, being number two. Also, I was shorter, smaller, scrawnier—then.”
“But more important than Keiko, Kay.”
“She was a girl. That’s how it was,” I said.
“Thank God that’s changed.”
“Not entirely. Not in some families. And not only Japanese families, I might add.”
“I’m a woman—must you be reminded?”
“Not at all. Never, in fact.”
“Henry, born in the year of the monkey, was told that he wasn’t supposed to marry a tiger—and he did?”
“He did. You know that he was divorced early in his marriage. She ate him right up.”
“Oh, come on, don’t blame the woman.”
“I didn’t take sides, I assure you. I hardly knew her.”
“But you? Stubborn, yes. Protective, yes. Chasing away ghosts? I’m glad of that. But you don’t weep over nonsensical things.”
“How would you know? Maybe I do.”
This really set her off.
“Do you lock yourself in the bathroom?” she said, between gasps. She pulled away and propped herself on an elbow. “Do you sit on the edge of the tub and weep on the other side of the bathroom door?”
“Go ahead, have your laugh.”
“I am,” she said.
“I see that.”
“But what if the three of you slid into your fates because you knew in advance what they were supposed to be? Think of Kay, all that ambition, all the hard work. And what about the fortune? What about that? Where’s my share? I’m part of your fate.”
“First Father was wrong about that—the fortune part.”
And this set her off even more.
She sobered then, and lay back down and said, “Maybe he was right. Maybe this is it. The fortune. What we have now.”
I pulled her close.
“I mean, think of how you could use the fates,” she said. “It’s what everyone needs—a fate that allows us to chase away our ghosts.”
And then she did one of those rapid switches in conversation, the ones for which I could never prepare.
“But it’s hard to picture you weeping over nonsensical things,” she said. “You’ve always made a supreme effort to hold everything inside. Including, I might add, any accrued anger.”
“Apparently I haven’t held in everything. Not if the fates are correct.”
“Do you know how many times you’ve held my hand in public?”
“You’ve chronicled?” I went still, wondering. I was a
lways uneasy when any sort of effort to probe moved in close.
“I’m trained at chronicling,” she said. “It’s what I do. You know that. I can give a full account. And I don’t have to keep a list; it happened only once. How could I not remember? We were missing life in Montreal and had gone back for a visit. We’d been married five years. We didn’t tell my family we were there, and we sneaked into the city and out again. We wanted to be tourists. It was windy, colder than we’d expected. We were walking down the hill on rue Guy, and you were about to step off the curb when you looked over and saw that I was freezing. You took off your scarf and wrapped it around my neck. Then you tucked my hand in yours and held it the rest of the way back to the hotel. It was the only time you made a public gesture of love.”
“I’m subtle,” I said. “Maybe you missed something. Handholding? How am I to know what you keep track of?”
She shifted and pressed her body into mine. I relaxed again.
“Well,” she said, “there was one other occasion. This time we were staying with my parents; we were visiting for a weekend. We were sitting in their living room—on the couch. It was late Sunday morning and we had made love earlier, upstairs, before they’d come home from church. Bells were ringing at the end of the street. I remember melody, something carillon-like. We were downstairs in the living room when my parents came home. You lifted my hand and held it against your knee. I felt it was an emotional breakthrough.
One of the closest moments between us—because there was someone else present. God, this is really pathetic, isn’t it.”
I didn’t reply.
“Anyway,” she said, “hand-holding in front of my parents doesn’t count. We were in their house, not out in public.”
Lena always got the last word; I didn’t dispute it. It was the way we were together. I suppose I even relied on her for that. Benny was playing “Ballad in Blue,” and I pulled her over, on top, and we made slow, careful love. And slept late the next morning, waking only when we heard Basil push at the screen door of the porch to let himself out.