Bear (7 page)

slowly, trying to keep from wetting her leather boots, she made her way, the bear behind her,around the magnificent point to the other side ofthe island, where Lucy Leroy was supposed to have a cabin. In the distance, bell-buoys tolled and lakers hooted, but as she circumambulated the whole island she found no sign ofanother habitation.When she got home, she was exhausted. She had walked so little in the past month, her legs were atrophying. She went inside and lay down for a sleep.When she awoke,it was dark. She struggled groggily with the lamps,made coffee,and went out to feed the bear. His eyes gleamed red-gold in the dark as he bustled towards his dish.As she was finishing her supper, she heard him scratching to be let in and thought,why not? It struck her when she opened the door to him that she always expected it to be someone else. She wondered if he, like herself, visualized transformations, waking every morning expecting to be a prince, disappointed still to be a bear. She doubted that.You say you will work, you work. She went up stairs to work.She always held herself to her commitments. In another incarnation she had worked on a newspaper among people who were always going to leave to write books, but meanwhile scurried from deadline to deadline, for missing a deadline was their form of Original Sin. She left the newspaper not to write but because when she was required to interview a baker on his fiftieth wedding anniversary she found him quailing lest she reveal the fact he had married his deceased wife’s sister. That gave her a perverse desire, which she suppressed, to reveal his truth, anda vivid memory of courses in Victorian history. Suddenly her life on the newspaper seemed ephemeral and impoverished (and it is true that Greek newspapers, like certain insects, are called ‘ephemerides’), and she changed her life in order to find a place for herself in the least parasitic of the narrative historical occupations. She went upstairs to work. The bear took some time to follow her.She was at herdesk when he stood full height at the top ofthe stairs, she paid no attention to him. She had found an autographed first edition of Major Richardson’s Wacousta, inscribed to John Cary with regards in 1832. She wished she had saleroom catalogues to ascertain its value. Meanwhile, she catalogued it and held it a long time in her hands. It was a rare, rare bird, worth coming here for.There were other valuable books, Boston editions that were in fact pirated Canadian editions,produced without revenue to English and French authors, but nothing, so far, to equal Wacousta. Strange I have never read it, she thought, but I won’t read this copy.Get myself a reading copy from Toronto and compare the texts. Well, Cary, you were somebody after all if you knew Richardson.“Lie down, by duck, my beau,” she said, for the find had put her in good humour. Then she reached for the next book, shook it for notes, and opened it. Trelawny’s remembrances of Byron and Shelley. She opened it and began to read (for it was not a sacred copy, not a rarity, it was dated London, 1932).

Trelawny? The man who burned Shelley’s body and saved the heart. Yes, that Trelawny. The pirate. Giant of a man. Went to Greece with Byron after Shelley died. She began to read, enthralled.She had never read this book before, though the subject interested her. Why? Someone, some scholar, had told her it was a pile of rubbish. Most autobiography is rubbish, shethought. People remember things all wrong. But what amusing rubbish this is!What a man! Big. Abusive. A giant.A real descendant of the real Trelawny, the one about the twenty thousand Cornishmen. Oh, I’ll believe he’s a liar. Look at the bear, dozing and drowsing there, thinking his own thoughts. Like a dog, like a groundhog, like a man:big. Trelawny’s good. He speaks in his own voice.He is unfair, but he speaks in his own voice. She sat up and said that out loud. The bear grunted. She got down on her knees beside him. Colonel Cary had left her tiny, painful, creepily paper-saving notes. She was stillsearching the house to find his voice. She had an awed feeling that Trelawny and the bear were speaking in Cary’s voice. Trelawny wanted to find a poet, to know a poet, because he couldn’t be one,and he was romantic about p oets.He lived to be old, he knew Swinburne and the pre Raphaelites. There’s some connection there. Cary wanted an island.

She was excited. She wanted to know how and who this Cary was.Trelawny. Colonel Cary.The bear. There was some connection, some unfingerable intimacy among them, some tie between longing and desire and the achievable. She lay beside the bear and read more Trelawny. Appalling blowhard, savage to both Byron and Mary Shelley. Byron was too sedentary. Shelley couldn’t swim. He bought the boat for Shelley. It wasn’t a good one. She read about the drowning.Then she skipped to the end ofthe book.Oh Christ, he turned the shroud back to have a look at Byron’s lame foot. Disgusting man. All the Victorians, early or late, she thought,were morbid geniuses. Cary was one ofthem and bought himself an island here. He didn’t have Ackerman’s Views or Bartlett’s prints to go by.He sensed what he wanted and came and found it. How did he start wanting it? Did he come entranced by the novels ofMrs .AphraBehn, then move on to Atala and the idea of the noble savage, then James Fenimore Cooper? He came for some big dream. He knew it was going to be hard. There were no servants who would come to the remoter islands. Books were procured with the utmost difficulty,and the tale of their difficult acquisition had probably caused this library to be left to the Institute. But in return for the sacrifice of civilization as he knew it, what did Cary obtain? An island kingdom, safely hedged by books? The dissipation ofthe sound of revelry forever?Relief from white neck cloths? Or was it simply hope and change? He came, she thought, to find his dream, leaving his practical wife behind him in York.He was adventurous, big-spirited, romantic. There was room for him in the woods. “Bear,” she said, rubbing her foot in his fur, suddenly lonely.The fire was too hot, and the fur rug had edged towards her.Oh, she was lonely, inconsolably lonely;it was years since she had had human contact.She had always been bad at finding it. It was as if men knew that her soul was gangrenous. Ideas were all very well, and she could hide in her work, forgetting for a while the real meaning of the Institute, where the Director fucked her weekly on her desk while both ofthem pretended they were shocking the Government and she knew in her heart thatwhat he wanted was not her waning flesh but elegant eighteenth-century keyholes,of which there is a shortage in Ontario. She had allowed the procedure to continue because it was her only human contact, but it horrified her to think of it. There was no care in the act, only habit and convenience. t had become something she was doing to herself.“Oh bear,” she said,rubbing his neck.She got up and took her clothes off because she was hot. She lay down on the far side of the bear, away from the fire, and a little away from him and began in her desolation to make love to herself.The bear roused himself from his somnolence, shifted and turned. He put out his moley tongue. It was fat, and, as the Cyclopaedia says, vertically ridged. He began to lick her. A fat, freckled, pink and black tongue. It licked. It rasped, to a degree. It probed. It felt very warm and good and strange.What the hell did Byron do with his bear? she wondered. He licked.He probed.She might have been a flea he was searching for. He licked her nipples stiff and scoured her navel. With little nickerings she moved him south.She swung her hips and make it easy for him.“Bear,bear,“she whispered,playing with his ears. The tongue that was muscular but also capable of lengthening itself like an eel found all her secret places.And like no human being she had ever known it persevered in her pleasure. When she came, she whimpered, and the bear licked away her tears.

She woke in the morning.The weather was like silk on her skin.Wisps of guilt trailed around the edges of her consciousness. She felt as if she had neglected something. What didn’t I do? Oh dear, what did I do? I was reading Trelawny, getting high on Trelawny, feeling I knew Cary, feeling Ih ad tracked down the mentality, then I … the bear.Sweet Jesus, what a strange thing to do. To have done.To have done to one She tested herself, pinching her conscience here and there to see if she felt evil. She felt loved.It was a beautiful day. She went gingerly outside in her nightdress. She was a little sore. She watered the bear and scratched hi sears and fed him. Then, for her sins, went to the garden and worked for an hour, painfully weeding. The rabbits were wrecking it, and the lettuce was sour. She ought to have a fence or a .22, or just leave it alone. I need meat, she thought. She dressed, and without making breakfast she untied the motorboat and slid through the brilliant morning channel to Homer’s. The world was enveloped in a kind of early summer bliss. Kingfishers splashed, fish leapt, lily pads spread out from the sides of the channel. Keats, she thought. Then, were the romantic poets the only people who saw? On this kind of morning, yes. The weather demanded lyricism. The motor made awful gutterals against the crying of water birds. She felt curiously peaceful.At Homer’s there was a letter from the Director, demanding to know when she was coming back. She bought a pad ofpaperand an envelope, and went outside; sat at one of Homer’s picnic tables beside the river, and wrote,“Dear Director.“Sucked her pen, started another page. “Dear David.” No, “Dear dr. Dickson”would do it.“I have been utterly absorbed in the Cary collection. It is, on the whole, better than we could have hoped,though rather orthodox as a nineteenth-century collection goes.I have found an early edition of Wacousta among some far more ordinary looking books,and hope to make other discoveries. There is also hope that journals willeventually turn up — but not a great hope,Iconfess.“I have been working at a slower rate than usual because I have been forced to put in a garden in order to avoid scurvy. It would be as well if I were a fisherman too, but for messing about with boats I have no patience.“There is a Molesworth map in good condition. “If you wish me to do this job thoroughly and well you will have to allow me to spend the rest of the summer here. I am sure you will have no objection to my spending my annual leave at Pennarth.“Scrawling her name, folding the paper clumsily, licking the envelope and entrapping a gnat, thumping it shut. The bugger misses me.Her second letter was from a feminist friend enquiring why she was not doing research on a female pioneer for International Women’s Year. She replied on a postcard ofa bear cub halfway up a tree that she was having a wonderful time. There,“she said, handing them to Homer.“Any meat today?“Nothing fresh. Doing any fishing?““No, I don’t know how.” “There oughta be some good rods there. The Colonel did a lotof it. Just dig up some worms in your garden there and go out in the boat at dusk. It’s peaceful, and the pike are good in that little cove across the river from you, behind the eastward shoal. Pike are good eating.“She shuddered, bought a dozen eggs,and left.She was an inland person, after all. Still, when dusk came, the river looked appetizing, and there were thoughts she wanted to avoid.She got worms and found an old cork-handled fishing rod in the front hall, set out down the channel.The mosquitoes were maddening. Once she had dropped her line in, she could hardly sit still. There were fish; she could hear them plopping, but she did not know that she wanted to catch them. Pike. Were pike really good eating? What was French for pike?Brocket, Quenelles de brocket. Gelatinous and heavy,like gefilte fish.No thank you.She went to pull in her line and leave and found, to her surprise, that there was a fish on it.As easy as that,was it?She tried to reel it in, but the reel tangled, only wanted to spin out backwards. It was an old cotton line as thick as string so she began, incautiously, to pull it in hand over hand. It cut her palms as the fish struggled away.She became determined. In spite of her diffidence, she now wanted the fish. She would kill it and eat it.She leaned out, nearly capsizing, and pulled and pulled. Eventually and ungallantly, she landed it by hand. It was huge and yellowish. It had a long, evil-looking snout. It flopped over her feet in the bottom ofthe boat.Using the line, which was surely beyond repair now, she tied it to an oarlock. When she got back to the house, she had to get a knife to cut it away from the gunnels of the boat. Then run up again to find a net to carry the fish in. There was no net. She came back with a plastic shopping bag. She cut the line, put her thumbs under the fish’s gills, and flopped it into the bag.Not before she had gashed a finger on its spiny fins.

Now I’ll have to cook it and clean it, she thought. Fish. Friday. In horrible white sauce with slices of hardboiled egg and spinach on the side.No.The only good fish is what your father made on camping trips.Does it have the kind of scales you have to trim off backwards? she wondered.Do you skin and fillet it? Is there a knife sharp enough? Cripes. It was a big fish, the kind real fishermen were proud of. She was already disgusted with it. It kept bumping against her in the shopping bag. “Good eating,” she kept hearing Homer saying.She put it on the kitchen counter. Plop. It eeled out of the bag into the sink, lay there panting for water. She felt she had done a frightful thing,removing it from its kingdom. Its mouth was all torn from the hook.How did she know it wasn’t a rare gar-pike of Lake Michigan, strayed a hundred miles to thrill Louis Agassiz? Or full of mercury? She might get Minamata disease and be arrested for a drunken indian. It had sour and saturnine face.She could not love it.

Grinning ruefully, she recalled who would. She put it back in the shopping bag and lugged it out to the bear.Tomorrow, she thought, dining in state on bologna sandwich, Homer will ask me if I caught anything. I’ll tell him I snagged the line. She lit the lamps and went upstairs. She had left the office in disarray last night. She tidied, finished carding the shelf of books she had assigned herself, then settled down to read Trelawny properly.She had been too excited last nightwhen his personality emerged and she confused him with Cary. Still, he was pretty good. He noticed things. Didn’t like Mary Shelley, or any woman, much. Useful articles, women, she could hear him thinking, when they keep to their place. She thought of the women the officers brought to Canada with them: beached, bent, practical, enduring, exiled. Still, as many there must have been who enjoyed tugging a new world out ofthe universe as cried and died.Her fishy friend came up the stairs. His tongue bent vertically and he put it up her cunt.A note fell out ofthe book: The off springof a woman and a bear is a hero, with the strength ofa bear and the cleverness of a man.— Old Finnish legend.She cried with joy.