“It
is
my last,” she said, “don’t forget that.” She took the half-smoked joint from a kitchen drawer as if it were money soon to be squandered. A small piece of her past done with. Would that temper his gossip?
“Cool,” he said, reaching for it with the broad smile that softened his face. “I was right about you.”
“I’m afraid to ask.” She didn’t care right now what he meant, she hadn’t much control of what he thought about her.
They passed the roach back and forth until Livingstone pinched it out in a teacup saucer she’d used as an ashtray. “Good stuff,” he said. “I always like to try something new. California? Mexico? Maui Zowie?”
“I don’t know, it was a gift.”
Then he began to talk, there was no theme or thread, local or worldwide, it didn’t seem to matter,
“You know, Anna, this farmer in South Africa, he had a good vineyard, but it got raided over and over by a pack of baboons. Man, they loved those grapes. So what the farmer does, he plants this different kind of grape, see, real juicy, dark red, all along the border of the vineyard. The baboons they start eating these grapes first, they ripen early, but when the juice stains the baboons’ hands, it looks like blood, and that scares the hell out of them. They run away, they don’t come back.” He raised his hands and turned them slowly, backs to palms.
“No baboons here,” she said.
He laughed. “Have to know where to look. Follow the grapes.”
He kept glancing into her room, so she gave in and showed him her drawings, and his questions about them, even if they were just talk, were not flippant—what attracted her to a subject, why the pond under a harsh moon instead of a day with sun and snow, why a composition of fractured pieces of an old barn instead of how the barn really looked? She told him that “really” was a key word, that there were different sorts of reallys, ways of seeing, and this was how she tried to get at them, get into them. It was wearisome to be forced to explain, she did not want to sound pedantic or superior or artsy, and she’d had to come down from a totally private high that had little to do with her work, and nothing to do with him.
He paused before a big sketch of the dog and the bridge, still holding his empty wine glass as if he were at a gallery reception, then took a step back, frowning. “And what kind of really is
this?
“
She didn’t want to tell him about the dog, her instinct was to pass it off as dream or surrealism, but maybe, possibly, he might say something useful. She told him what she’d seen.
“Jesus,” he whispered. “You sure? Might’ve been a bag of trash, people do that. People get shitfaced and do anything. Could I have more of that wine?”
“It was a dog.”
“Maybe it was dead anyway.”
“I heard it yip. The moon was bright. I saw its little legs going as it fell.”
“You saw it
all?
“ He narrowed his eyes at her, then filled his glass from the bottle she handed him.
“All what?” she said.
“The guys up on top, on the bridge …”
“Too far, too dark. A guy, yes. A woman would never do that.”
“Wouldn’t put it past a couple I know.”
“I’ve wondered was it Willard Munro’s dog.”
“No loss if it was. Somebody burned Willard out a while back. He ought to remember that.”
“He’ll never forget it, I’m sure. Who would?”
Willard had told her, Nothing I could do, I couldn’t watch it, no. Every God blessed thing in it. They didn’t even put shoes there to try to save it.
“Breagh thinks it was the wharf rats.”
“The who? How the hell would
she
know?”
“Guys from town, they hang around that little house by the wharf.”
“Billy stays there. Well, I know those fellas, a few. He has a habit of phoning up the Mounties, old Willard does. Not a way to get popular.”
“I doubt that he cares. Why would he call them?”
“He’s a nosy old woman, that’s why.” Livingstone nodded curtly at the sketch before turning toward her stack of cassettes. “You dreamed that, I think.”
“Maybe I did, maybe I am. And go easy on Willard, he’s my handyman. He might even drop by.”
Livingstone gave her a look. “Way past his bedtime, he’s snoozing up there where the pulpit used to be. Good place for him. Anyway, I’m your handyman now.”
“Nothing needs fixing. Sorry.”
“Around here, something
always
needs fixing. Even music.”
He shuffled through the cassettes, squinting at titles, murmuring or grinning according to what he liked. He approved of the Celtic tapes she’d picked up in Sydney, Capercaillie, the Bothy Band, Planxty.
“You need some Cape Breton stuff here,” he said, “I’ll drop a couple by.”
She felt she should usher him back to the kitchen, out of this private space, but she hadn’t the will to orchestrate what they did now, how they arranged themselves. Let it go.
“You mind putting this on, Anna?” holding up Creedence Clearwater’s
Bayou Country.
“This flies at my altitude.”
Anna almost said no, such were the good times packed into that album. She’d first heard it on the jukebox in a college bar. Chet bought a copy later, a staple of many parties, no one could resist dancing to it whether they could dance or not, and in those days it didn’t matter, you just got up and did your thing. But she took it from his hand and slipped it into the cassette player.
“Yeah,” Livingstone said, brushing her breast as he reached to turn up the volume.
At first she just watched him slowly spin and shuffle in the small area by the door, his eyes shut, smiling, snapping his fingers softly, his scuffed side-zip boots sliding on the bare floor, he’d already kicked the throw rug aside. She tried a few easy steps and turns, she didn’t want to get dizzy. Feeling flushed, she tossed aside the yellow shawl. But soon they were both into it, swapping smiles when they bumped each other, lightly, and at the song breaks. “Oh, I love ‘Proud Mary,’” she said, tugging at the neckline of her dress, how could she have broken a sweat? But she had, and Livingstone said, “Let’s keep on chooglin’.” Her azaleas at home, their stunning white blossoms rushed into her mind, so fragrant. She inhaled the memory, then brought in the rest of the wine and they both drank while he slapped in another tape.
“Change of pace,” he said. These blues were slow, a tape she’d put together herself, selections from here and there and the radio back home, “Slow Stuff,” the label read, and in the first strains of “Thinking of You,” Livingstone, his eyes just slits, his smile lazy and fixed, reached out to her, she knew that moment when dancing closes in, when you’re not apart and lost in the rhythm of your own body anymore but suddenly joined to another’s, and all points of touching speak—that was when she might have said, No, Livingstone, you’re Breagh’s, let’s cool down, but she didn’t, that kind of dispassion was not available to her then, there was no time for the burden of consequences, of loyalty, she was floating and light and she liked the feeling, of him, of a man in her arms, his hands sliding over her back, warm through the fabric of the dress. He whispered something she couldn’t make out, his breath in her hair, his arms tightening around her, the dress seemed so thin now, insubstantial, she could feel him harden against her, and she thought, this feels like home, this could happen there, but you’re in a very different place, you have no history, no connection, you don’t know this man who feels so good, who is he? What are the rules, the lines, the limits? And why think of them now, why
must
she? She had to recognize she was pleased that Livingstone desired her, lost in the mood and the moment as she was. She’d made herself attractive for no expected man, yet she
was
appealing to him, like beautiful Breagh—a small, mean triumph she instantly rejected, real as it was—another ingredient in the complex, intoxicating mix she and this man were engaged in. He was humming to a song, swaying her gently side to side, she could feel the vibrations of his voice, and then he kissed her neck and she didn’t need to hear what he was murmuring there, it was flowing through them both. He danced her slowly into the kitchen, toward the daybed, but she said no, not here, and she led him up the stairs as if some voice were calling to her up there, she had to laugh, the room felt so cold. He pulled her to him and kissed her hard, he took the shape of her into his hands, moved them under the skirt of the dress, up her legs, the cheeks of her ass, oh, how might it have gone had she encased herself in her winter clothing, protective, frumpy, chaste, but she unfastened the dress and slid it away and he drew her panties down, kneeling to help her step out of them. He grasped her hips and pressed his tongue in little circles over the soft, taut skin inside her thighs (did she taste of that salty dancing?), pushed it hot and insistent into her bush, the wet lips there. She took his hair in her fists and pulled him up and kissed him, their tongues entwining. The bed groaned as he sat on the edge and yanked viciously at his boots, his jeans, his curses muffled in the bulky black sweater that caught in his wristwatch. She whipped the quilts open and fell back with a yelp onto the chilled sheet. She waited there shivering until he rolled next to her and they plunged under the quilts, shouting with the cold, “Jesus!” he said, “as bad as the pond, this!” But there was nothing of ice in the feel of his hands, the heat of his mouth, and when his cock slid inside her, all was pared down to sheer, blind pleasure, beyond guilt or care or censure, it was all now, now, now.
S
HE DIDN’T REMEMBER
Livingstone leaving, they’d lain there under the quilts amusing each other over what they could make out in the room’s weathered ceiling, with just a nightlight in the hall. She last remembered his insisting a stain was a huge insect, which he described in minute detail. Anna dozed beside his warmth, slept, but he was gone when she woke needing to pee and groped for her robe. Then she remembered what he’d said after a long silence, in a different voice: What were you doing at the bridge that night? She’d replied lightly, not catching his tone, Sightseeing, I guess.
Downstairs a lamp was on in her workroom where their empty glasses sat on the big table. The kitchen was cold, and would remain so until she got up for good. She lifted the saucer on whose pale blue forget-me-nots the roach lay, a black stub of congealed ash: he must have singed his lips before he went out the door. She put on a down vest and took up a pen.
Dear Melissa, you asked how was I doing. I’ve been doing charcoal, it’s a charcoal kind of weather anyway, the shades I’m seeing out the window now wouldn’t challenge a palette much. I prefer drawing anyway, I never took to paints. I will send along a few inks, I’m pleased with them. How are the kids? I miss having them tumble into my studio and be charming pests. They’ d get a kick out of some things here. I had a weasel in my bathroom one evening, came up along the pipe, took a long weaselly look at me while I was poised to step into the tub and then disappeared below the floor. I hear noises at night in the walls, which doesn’t thrill me, even if they’re only weasels or mice or something. Cold drives them inside, can we blame them? I’m not into that lately. We waste so much of ourselves with blame, I hate to think of the time I’ve devoted to it. The cold is good for that (this is a cold house, believe me, you’ve never known a real draft, one seems to find me wherever I’m at), shivering has a way of focusing my attention, my inclination to dwell on all the ways I’ve been wounded tends to fade. Chet is Chet, it’s not like we were in the middle of a romance. Everything here heightens my sense of myself—not always good, of course. I can’t take much for granted anymore, and isn’t that how we get along, how we make it easy on ourselves? A man did visit me here. Yes, here, in my house. Intense, and over. Not in the mood today to talk about it, or probably any day. Going for a walk. Tell me about a good movie you’ve seen, or a book, or a face, anyone, anything we both enjoyed, I want to hear.
After three cups of coffee, Anna negotiated the slippery stones of the shore. Swells, mushy with grey ice, washed lazily near her feet. Maybe a rogue wave would come quietly out of the fog and sweep her away, she didn’t care. Too much wine, too much everything. And the high ride stopped and thumped you to the ground, that was the payback, in this wet and chilling wind. The pain of regret was far more acute than a headache, the nausea of remorse no pills or seltzers could relieve. She’d lost her distance, like a reputation, that saving perk of maturity that had been hers, and much of her privacy too, as casually as if she were twenty. She’d tossed away intimacy on Livingstone because … he was an attractive man, and that’s what she’d wanted last night, to lose herself in the physical, simple as that. Yet things he said came back to her now, bits of talk she could barely recall, but unsettling, suggesting a side to him other than music and dancing and sex.
But wasn’t she free to take a man upstairs if she liked? Of course, but, oh … something to be said for remaining the solitary woman from away. She lingered over a lobster trap the tides had shoved high up the shore, its netting gorged with sand and seaweed and bits of shell: like her mind.
His body was lean and warm, his tongue was all over her. What mood did he take out the door with him? What sense of
her?
And if he talked around about her, about
this?
To Breagh? Anna would never get back to where she’d been, her footing would be as wobbly as walking these stones.
My deceptions, Chet had told her, are only sexual, all of them. I don’t expect, of course, to be thus forgiven.
She was good and cold by the time she reached Murdock’s shorebank. No smoke in the forge chimney high up the back field, but there was a light in his woodshop window. Working. Unavailable. She wouldn’t break in on him, not with last night still on her skin. Why his opinion of her should matter so much she couldn’t say. Would he ever know?
All right. She had opted for escape. What after all was more timeless, placeless, than the intimacies of sex, when there was no world beyond the one that enwrapped you? What, during its illusions, more uncomplicated, intense, direct? And for a short while that evening she’d left everything gladly behind but desire, and she spent it with a man who felt good in her arms. Was that terrible? Familiar complications, followed by new ones. But the act itself—all the whispers and breathing and lips and tongues and hands—was what it was.