Bear (9 page)

Slowly, the bear lifted himself up. She had the impression that it hurt or confused him to stand long on his hind legs, that his muscles did not obey him easily in that position, but he stood unsteadily across from her and, as she moved her feet and arms in time to the pulsing music, began slowly to bob and shuffle. She watched him. He was wonderful.A strange, fat, mesomorphic mannikin, absurdly heavy in calf and shoulder, making his first attempt to dance up right. A baby! A wonderful half-balancing, half smiling uncertain, top-heavy…Plink, went he music.Zonk. “Ephies.”… You went away. No, I won’t go away, she thought to him. I won’t ever go away.I shall make myself strange garments out of fur in order to stay with you in the winter. I won’t ever, ever, leave you. He danced across from her. He moved a little, shifting his weight from haunch to haunch, delicately swaying his enormous feet, sawing his arms slowly in the air. he moved towards him.“Eph—ie—esss.“The Greek clubs in Toronto had played that one until even an Anglo-Saxon learned a few of the words. It was a wail of loss, of loneliness. No one could fail to respond. Whatever radio station it was saved her from distraction by switching to a more primitive record. The music was higher, more dissonant, the beat was uncertain. The bear swayed, looking to her for direc tion.She moved towards him and took his paws in her hands, and then, her fingers interlaced with his sets of knitting needles, began to sway against him to the music. She had never embraced him upright. It was hot and strange. She swayed against him. She put her head on his shoulder.He stood still, very still. He did not know what to do. She remembered herself as a halfchild in a school gym, being held to a man’sbody for the first time, flushed, confused, and guilty. He did not reciprocate her embrace. He stood very still as she moved her body as close as possible to his.Then he yawned. She felt his great jaw moving down against her face. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the gleam of his teeth, and that two ofthem were missing. She moved away from him. The music had turned into a strange rubbing pizzicato, rhythmic and systaltic.The bear went down on all fours. Men began to make strange grunting noises against the violins.The bear lay down, his ears pricked to half-animal sounds. She let him rest a moment, then lay beside him. He excited her. She took off her clothes. He began his assiduous licking. He licked her armpits and the line between her breasts that smelled ofsweat. “Byron’s bear danced,” she whispered, “but he paid no attention. If he had known you, would the Beau have finished his days among nuns, playing with his turdies?” Sometimes the bear half-ripped her skin with his efficient tongue, sometimes he became distracted. She had to cajole and persuade him. She put honey on herself and whispered to him, but once the honey was gone he wandered off, farting and too soon satisfied.

“Eat me, bear,” she pleaded, but he turned his head wearily to her and fell asleep. She had to put a shirt on and go back to work. She picked up an embossed volume entitled The Poetical Works of John Milton, Volume 1 published at Hartford in 1856.The illustrations and paper were mediocre, but the print was large. It struck her it would have been pleasant to read “Paradise Lost” in such type at school. It looked somehow forthright. Out of the volume fell another message from God or Colonel Cary:Among the Ainu of Japan, once, long ago, a bear cub was taken from its mother and raised at a woman’s breast. It became a member of the village and was honoured with love and good. At the winter solstice when it was three years old, it was taken to the centre of the village, tied to a pole, and, after many ceremonies and apologies, garroted with pointed bamboo sticks. Ceremonies were again performed, during which its surrogate mother mournedfor it, and its flesh was eaten. “Never,” she cried.She went out and swam naked in the black night river. Lay on her back and watched the aurora flickering mysterious green in the magic sky. It was a hot night, very soft on the skin. The insects seemed mostly to have gone away. She fell asleep on the grass, and dreamt that Grinty and Greedy were rolling down the hill in a butter churn towards her.“We’ll eat her,” Grinty said. “We’ll eat her breasts off.“‘You watch,“said Greedy.“You watch. She’ll eat us first. Let’s run.“She woke, stiff and cold and guilty. She fumbled upstairs and blew the lamps out.The bear was gone. It seemed to her human and sweet and considerate that he should take care of himself when it was time. When she went to bed, she found him in his right place. It was too hot to sleep with him.

She knew now that she loved him.She loved him with such an extravagance that the rest of the world had turned into a tight meaningless knot, except for the landscape, which remained outside them, neutral, having its own orgasms of summer weather. When there were no motorboats she now swam with the bear, swam for hours, splashing and fishing him pretty stones which he accepted gravely and held tohis short-sighted eyes. On the shore, he tossed her pinecones. In the boathouse, she found a ball. They sat with their legs splayed on the grass and rolled it between them. She tried to toss it, but he seemed to be afraid, not to be able to catch it, so they rolled it gravely, hour,it seemed, after hour. Swam again.Played seal games. He swam underneath her and blew bubbles at her breasts. She spread her legs to catch them. She knew now that she loved him, loved him with a clean passion she had never felt before. Once, briefly, she had had as a lover a man of elegance and charm, but she had felt uncomfortable when he said he loved her, felt it meant something she did not understand, and indeed,it meant, she discovered, that he loved her as long as the socks were folded and she was at his disposal on demand; when thefood was exquisite and she was not menstruating; when the wine had not loosened her tongue,when the olive oil had not produced a crease in her belly.When he left her for someone smaller and neater and more energetic and subservient to his demands, she had thrown stones at their windows, written obscenities with chalk on the side of their building, obsessed herself with imagining the neatness of his young girl’s cunt (he had made Lou have an abortion), dwelt on her name (though she never saw her until years later and discovered her to be quite, quite plain), carved anagrams of her rival’s names on her arm, in short, surprised herself with the depths of her passionate chagrin at losing a man who was at heart petty and demanding. For a week,she had loved the Director.For longer than that, perhaps. Certainly she had been in need of a sexual connection. Cucumbers, she had found on investigating the possibilities suggested in Lysistrata, ere cold. Women left her hungry for men. The Director shared her interests, was charming and efficient; they had much in common when they fucked on Molesworths’ maps and handwritten geneologies: but no love. She loved the bear. She felt him to be wise and accepting. She felt sometimes that he was God. He served her. As long as she made her stool beside him in the morning,he was ready whenever she spread her legs to him. He was rough and tender, assiduous, patient, infinitely, it seemed to her, kind. She loved the bear. There was a depth in him she could not reach, could not probe and with her intellectual fingers destroy.She lay on his belly, he batted her gently with his claws; she touched his tongue with hers and felt its fatness. She explored his gums, his teeth that were almost fangs. She turned back his black lips with her fingers and ran her tongue along the ridge ofhis gums. Once and only once, she experimented with calling him “Trelawny” but the name did not inspire him and she realized she was wrong: this was no parasitical collector of memoirs, this was no pirate, this was an enormous, living creature larger and older and wiser than time, a creature that was for the moment her creature, but that another could return to his own world, his own wisdom. She still worked. Upstairs. Slowly. The fishermen of Newfoundland, one of Cary’s notes told her, collect the bones of bears pricks in theforest and pound them into the walls of their cabins to use as coat hooks. His prick was thick, protected, buried in its sheath. She got down on her knees and played with it, but it did not rise.Ah well, she thought, the summer’s not over yet. Then she discovered an immensely valuable early edition of Bewick’s Natural History and felt justified. They lived sweetly and intensely together. She knew that her flesh, her hair, her teeth and her fingernails smelled of bear, and this smell was very sweet to her. “Bear,” she would say to him, tempting him, “I am only a human woman. Tear my thin skin with your clattering claws. I am frail. It is simple for you. Claw out my heart, a grub under a stump.Tear off my head,my bear.” But he was good to her. He grunted, sat across from her, and grinned. Once laid a soft paw on her naked shoulder, almost lovingly. She went to Homer’s as seldom as possible now and only after swimming, in case the bear’s smell carried on the air. She bought more food than she had before. When she cooked for herself she cooked also for the bear, and he sat beside her on the stoop, and sometimes he picked up his plate and licked it. “I do wonder,“wrote the Director, “whether you feel the library is good enough to warrant this investment in time.” Go screw a book, she wanted to write back to him. She now lived intensely and entirely for the bear. They went berrying together in the woods. He pawed the ripe raspberries greedily into his maw. She saved hers like soft jewels in an old Beehive Honey tin with a binder twine handle she found in the shed. She wished he would find a honey tree, she wanted to see him greedy among bees, but he found only worms and grubs under decaying stumps. She found wild asparagus no thicker than trillium stems and cooked it and found it delicious. One morning she got on her hands and knees,and they shared their cornflakes and powdered milk and raspberries. Their strange tongues met and she shuddered. The weather became very hot. He lay in his den, panting. She layon her bed, wanting him, but it was not his time. She thought of her year as a mistress, waiting for her exigent man to come home hungry not for her but for steak au poivre, how she had wanted him always in the afternoon, and never dared to ask. How it might have been different, but… Out on the river, water-skiers buzzed like giant dragonflies. It was too hot to work upstairs. She lay naked, panting,wanting to be near her lover,wanting to offer him her two breasts and her womb, almost believing that he could impregnate her with the twin heroes that would save her tribe. But she had to wait until night fell before it was safe to see him.

It was the night of the falling stars. She took him to the riverbank. They swam in the still, black water. They did not play.They were serious that night.They swam in circles around each other, very solemnly. Then they went to the shore, and instead of shaking himself on her, he lay beside her and licked the water from her body while she, on her back, let the stars fall, one, two, fourteen, a million, it seemed, falling on her, ready to burn her. Once she reached up to one, it seemed so close, but its brightness faded from her grasp, faded into the milky way. Loons cried, and whippoorwills. She sat up. The bear sat up across from her. She rose to her knees and moved towards him.When she was close enough to feel the wet gloss on her breasts, she mounted him. Nothing happened. He could not penetrate her and she could not get him in. She turned away. He was quite unmoved. She took him to his enclosure and sent him to bed. She dressed, and spent the rest ofthe night lying on the coarse marsh grass. The stars continued to fall. Always out of reach.Towards dawn, the skyproduced its distant, mysterious green flickering aurora. The next day she was restless, guilty.She had broken a taboo. She had changed something. The quality of her love was different now.She had gone too far with him. There was something aggressive in her that always went too far. She had thrown a marcasite egg at her lover’s window once, a green egg she particularly valued. She had stayed in this house too long. She had fucked the Director. She had let her breasts hang out before Homer. She had gone too far. No doubt if she had children she would neglect them. She went upstairs and found how little there was left to do. She went downstairs and masturbated. She felt empty and angry, a woman who stank of bestiality. A woman who understood nothing, who had no use, no function. She went down to the boat and rammed around the channel like any other foolish motorized person, veering near shoals, daring the waves of the open water. But the rivers were both very calm and all she saw was the red limb of a maple tree. It made her want to die. She went to bed without supper, without feeding the bear. In her dream, green people slid off the wind and claimed parts of her body to eat. “This is mine! This is mine! No, that part is too old.That is too used. She has hairs on her breast. Take her away.” The horses that pulled the sun stopped and pawed. The Charioteer lashed them on. “Nor snow, now wind, nor rain,” he gabbled at them.“Giddyap, Tarzan, giddyap, Tony. It’s jocund day, get at it, fell as.“Then when he saw the blob of flesh they were shying from, he drove the axe-edges of his wheels in another direction and there was no day in that place. She knew she had to hide, but there was no cavity, no bear. She cooled herself in the water, curling and uncurling, flexing and unflexing, for she knew she had come from water. She sucked at her toes and fingers, pretending to be born. The waves continued to suck at the shore. “It wasn’t very witty,“the Devil said in the night, “to commit an ct of bestiality with a tatty old pet. An armadillo, now, might at least have been original; more of a challenge. Bestiality’s all right in itself, but you have to do it with style. You’ve never done anything with style, have you? You’re only an old kind of tarpaulin woman,you have no originality, no grace.When your lover went off with that green little girl you said the commonest sort of things, you wrote on pavements with chalk like a child, when instead you could have said he wasn’t much of a catch. Then you went after the boss — fancy that, being as unimaginative as that— and when he screwed you, you made sure it wasn’t on the most valuable maps.You have no pride, no sense of yourself. An abominable snowman might have been recherche, or you might had tried something more refined like an interesting kind of water-vole. The lemming’s prick-bone you know, can only be seen under a magnifying glass. There’s a priest in the Arctic with a collection of them; I could have told you about that, if you’d only listened.The trouble with you Ontario girls is you never acquire any kind of sophistication. You’re deceiving yourself about that bear: he’s about as interesting as an ottoman: as you,in fact. Be a good girl, now, and go away. No stars will fall in your grasp.” The bear came to her. His breathing was infinitely heavy and soft. She realized he was watching over her. It was morning.He must be hungry. She got up slowly and heavily and opened them both a can of beans. They ate them cold.