The Disinherited (26 page)

“Do you find the present so disgusting?” Valerie had asked him, as if he must be fixed on some other time, some immense single conglomerate complaint from his past that was supposed to be his excuse, and some equally compelling fantasy of the future in which everything would finally come right …

Teeter Totter sliding way out onto the end, coming down hard and then pushing with his feet, springing, he and Brian trying to bounce each other off the wooden board Richard had laid across a sawhorse for them.

“Your parents must have been terrible to you. Don’t you remember anything?” Valerie had been to see a psychiatrist twice a week for three years. Before she went, she had gotten pregnant, had had an abortion. Then a month after the abortion she woke up in the middle of the night and swallowed all of the pills in the house. Now she didn’t take any pills except for birth control pills. She wasn’t afraid to look in the mirror. She liked her job. She only saw her psychiatrist occasionally and wouldn’t talk to Erik about it. “Things come up,” she said. She kept a black bound book beside her bed and recorded her dreams, drawing pictures in harsh magic-marker colours. He wondered if his leaving like this would make her start seeing him again. Perhaps the man in the apartment had been her psychiatrist, turning over the record while Erik was on the telephone. He had always suspected her of carrying his picture in her wallet. He had worn his farm jeans to the hospital and the lake water had soaked the cuffs, was working its way up towards his knees. He kicked his feet in the water, trying to watch the exact moment that his heels made contact, kicked harder, enjoying the twinges of the sharp stones against his skin, trying to anticipate the exact moment of impact, trying to find the exact border between sensation and pain. He looked back towards the hospital. The reflections on the windows had deepened from white-yellow to yellow-orange. He could see Miranda
coming across from the hospital towards him, walking slowly on the grassed area that separated the hospital from the road, stopping and carefully checking the traffic, both ways, as if by instruction, then crossing the road quickly. She looked up and down the lakefront for him, found him. He waved at her, saw by the way she lifted her arm that she was tired but not devastated, nothing catastrophic, not coming to tell him that Richard was dead. Two or three days, maybe a week. Someone would have to distract the nurse while he put the powder into the bottle. Miranda was even smiling as she approached him, holding out her palms to feel the wind coming off the lake.

Standing in front of Rose’s mirror they were colour-coordinated: Rose with her twin bikini stripes and Erik divided neatly in half, white from the waist down to his ankles. At night, the gap between the tanned skin and the white seemed absolutely irrevocable but the next day, in the bright light, they were not so far apart, the white beginning to flush pink and the brown transparent in the sun. They had gone down to Richard’s beach to drink and swim. August, and there were still black flies in the maple bush, black flies and mosquitoes, and in the swampy places the bugs were even worse. “You can’t run,” Erik said. “If you start to sweat they’re twice as bad.” He couldn’t remember the bugs being like this, or maybe he had known better than to go into the bush in the summer. The paths back to the lake were all used and kept clear by the cows; humans had to walk carefully, keeping their eyes to the ground. Rose carried a faded straw purse, the ends of two bottles of wine sticking out its open top. When they got to the beach, Erik found a shady spot and pushed one of the bottles into the sand, underwater, twisting it down in the white sand until only its neck showed. It had been almost eight years since that first argument with Richard, the night he had driven home from the school house in the snow. “You don’t get much of a suntan in the city,” Erik said. Sometimes in the summer he would lie out on a balcony or swim in a chlorinated pool. Twice he had taken a cottage with friends for Labour Day weekend. Now he was in the water, swimming slowly, his stroke awkward and unpractised, shoulders rolling from side to side, his timing
off, so that when his head surfaced he was still breathing out, his lungs quickly tiring from the confusion. Rose was swimming lazily on her back, raising her arms high into the air, her breasts pointing white and absurd out of the water as she swam. When she got to the island, she simply stopped, stayed on her back, beached in the shallow water at the shore. Past the island, half a mile across the lake, was a rocky point where he and Brian used to swim in the summers, cord for bowstring wrapped around their waists and a small tin canister full of matches. When he could touch the bottom with his toes, he began to walk in towards the island, still moving his arms in the water, the way he had cheated when he had first learned to swim. The air now felt cold, his genitals exposed and vulnerable. He knelt beside Rose, then lay down full-length next to her in the water. He kissed her eyes, slid his hand from her neck to her belly, underwater.

She had become an acrobat. Every position she assumed was poised and accomplished. Now the back of her head was cradled in the sand and the water was breathing up and down her, licks across her neck. Her eyes were closed, the lids still streaked with make-up, the lashes rising curled and vulnerable. He moved his hand across her stomach, her hips. While he caressed her, he watched her face. Her face stayed still. The only change was when he shifted his weight, his shadow lurching across it, back and forth. The vein at the corner of one eye, beneath the top layer of the skin, began to vibrate quickly, out of control. She seemed oblivious to it, moved her legs so her knees broke the surface of the water. And then, drawing her knees up further, sat straight up. All afternoon they had been able to hear boats from across the lake, moving indistinct in the glare of the sun, but the sound sharp and definite, like a chainsaw. Now one of the boats was coming closer, its windshield a huge reflector in the sun, ribbons of white water peeling back from the prow. “You didn’t tell me about this,” Rose said. They could see the driver of the boat now, a white-haired man wearing sunglasses, standing up in the boat, hanging on to the wheel and saluting Erik and Rose.

“Go away,” Erik shouted, not even able to hear himself over the roar of the motor, ridiculous to feel caught, naked on your own land. Rose was still lying in the water but Erik was getting
up, waving them away. The driver was pointing to the channel, wanting to know if it was deep enough to go through. And then began to turn the boat, slipping it over on its side as it curved nearer to the island, a woman now visible, a woman who might have been his wife, her hair tied down by a silk handkerchief, steadying herself with her elbows on the gunwale, fat arms shaking with the vibrations of the boat, binoculars held to her eyes, centering in on Erik’s crotch, moving back and forth from Erik to Rose, the woman rotating as the boat turned, not missing anything, finally lined up with the back of the boat, staring down the trough of the wake. “Jesus,” Erik said, as the noise of the motor receded, “they’re getting worse every year.” They could still see the boat, its motor idling now, turning in slow tight circles in the centre of the lake. And could see the two passengers moving, the man holding up a can of beer, walking away from the wheel. And the woman taking the wheel, turning the boat towards the island again, driving in slower now, the prow staying down in the water, no ribbons this time but the man now was leaning over the side of the boat, transformed into a Cyclops with a giant shining eye: the boat moved closer and they could see what the man had, a movie camera with a telescopic lens. His lips were drawn back with concentration, a thin curve of white teeth revealed; with one arm the man was trying to hold the camera steady, with the other, elbow sticking out horizontal to his head, he was pressing the button, the finger jabbing straight into the camera. The tip of his tongue protruded from his teeth as if they must be kept apart at all times or else, with their spring hinges, they would snap shut forever. The first time the boat had come in on them the engine had made a loud high whining sound. Now it was going slowly, a low hollow sound that was beginning to develop small breaks in it, as if a cylinder was missing, sputtering noises and coughing. The man still held the camera but was shouting instructions to the woman. She looked flustered, her head turning back and forth from Erik and Rose to the man, the boat now coming right into the narrow channel between the island and the shore. The motor coughed some more and went out entirely. The man was holding the camera to his eye, and now they could hear the
waves from the boat slapping up against the beaches. They were sitting deeper in the water, to their bellies. Rose had her hands folded across her breasts, was looking curiously at the boat which was still drifting straight towards them.

“Shit,” the man said, furiously adjusting the lens to keep Erik and Rose in focus, “will you start the boat will you?” Now the boat was only a few yards away from them. Erik had stood up and was walking towards it, to push it away before it grounded itself.

“Harry,”
the woman screamed. “We’re going to cr
ash.”
She pointed her finger at Erik walking towards them and then turned away. He could see her hair now, sticking out of her kerchief in tight blonde curls. Her face was covered with some sort of white cream for the sun. Erik was standing chest-deep in the water. The boat came in slowly and he caught its prow with his hands, fielding it like a huge impotent baseball. The man finally put down his camera. He was wearing a red-and-white-striped beanie and horn-rimmed glasses. Coming out from the temple pieces of his glasses were two small wires that dangled near his ears.

“Ran out of gas,” the man shouted at Erik, gesticulating at the motor and a gas can beside it. “Don’t go without gas,” he shouted.

“Harry,”
the woman shouted, “put in your plugs.” The man moved towards the rear of the boat, began fiddling with the gas tank. The woman looked at Erik and shrugged. Her shoulders and neck were fat and powerful, like a bulldog’s. She wore bright red lipstick and now was smoking a cigarette. The man had set up a funnel and was pouring the gas from the can to the tank.

“You shouldn’t smoke when he’s doing that,” Erik said. He was still holding the boat.

“Ain’t no use,” the woman shouted, waving the cigarette, “Harry can’t hear a thing with his plugs out.” Rose was in the water, swimming swiftly on her side. She saw Erik looking at her and waved at him, her hand joggling happily in the air, the same way the man had waved when he first saw them. Erik reached over the side of the boat, took the cigarette out of the woman’s hand and threw it in the water.

“The gas,” Erik shouted, “you’re going to explode the gas.”

“Harry.”

Erik pushed the boat so it swung in an arc, pointing back towards the marina on the other side of the lake. Harry was chewing gum, trying to hold the gas can steady. The gas was slopping all over the place, in the hole, over the sides of the motor, down into the water where it spread in a thin blue film. “Smells terrible,” the man shouted. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt covered with palm trees and grass-skirted women. Rose had reached the shore and was sitting on the beach, a towel around her shoulders, drinking one of the bottles of wine. “She hates it when we run out of gas,” the man shouted. Even while he worked the gum, he kept his tongue in sight. Erik was now surrounded by gas. When he lifted his arms out of the water he could see where it had ringed the flesh, tiny drops clinging to him, matting the hair and forming big oily bubbles on his skin. The man had finished. He screwed the tops back onto the can and the tank. “Thanks,” he shouted. “See you again.”

“Hurry up, Harry.”
The man worked his way to the front of the boat, bermuda shorts and wide knotted calf muscles. Erik pushed the boat away, thinking of Norman Nemo and the submarine that took its revenge with the propeller, piercing through the hulls of wooden sailing ships in one last pointless gesture. There was a whirring sound, the motor caught, started, a deafening roar and the boat was off, the wash pushing Erik back in the water, swamping him in gas and bubbles. When he came up, his ears were splitting with the sound of the motor, the boat was already out of the channel, roaring towards the centre of the lake. The woman had the binoculars out again and the man had one arm extended high into the air, two fingers stretched apart in a V-peace sign.

The wine tasted flat and sour, seemed to belong to the world of gasoline and oil. He took mouthfuls of it, washed it around his teeth and tongue, spat it out in long pink arcs. The smell of the boat still lingered in the channel, a half-imagined grey haze of motor fumes hung over the water, folded in winding spirals, like the debris from an instant sunset kit. Rose had covered herself with suntan lotion and was lying face-down on a towel. Erik sat beside her, playing with his bottle of wine, smoking a cigarette. “If only my mother could see us,” he said.

“She’s a nice lady,” Rose said. She pronounced this in a detached sleepy way, as if she had some secret knowledge of Miranda.

“Well, of course.” He wondered what they talked about. Rose claimed that all she did was to look in people’s teacups and tell stories. When she read Erik’s leaves, she had told him that he would fall in love with a slim dark-haired woman. Valerie was slim with dark hair. Rose’s hair wasn’t dark yet, but it was getting there. He had been to see her a few times but it was as if they were old friends, had gotten to know each other well in the past and could now coast on whatever closeness had been achieved. Their intimacy seemed to take place in pantomime. Often he would catch her looking at him intently, as if he was on stage, about to perform his promised trick that was, in fact, so overdue that she knew he had forgotten what it was and that if she didn’t remind him, he would just fade away in an inarticulate mumble. Her skin was smooth and slippery with the lotion. He slid his hand down her back, over her buttocks and legs. Whatever it was that had first made her seem so exotic had spread to her bones and muscles: now it was not only the way she held herself and dressed, but in every movement she made, like a fencer, parrying the world with swift invisible strokes, never straying from the tape. Where her spine had swung wildly askew it was now only slightly arched, flared in from her waist the way her hips flared out, fencer’s costume, quick and sharp, no fat or extra targets. When he asked her about the changes she just laughed, said that he had never appreciated her, now the complete jungle cat, sensuous and without even the most momentary of debts. At the school house she had frightened him with her child who refused to speak, her sudden violence and her contempt for her husband. But all those things had been incidental, apart from her, like clothes. Now she had incorporated everything into her body and he could be frightened of her as she was, lying half-asleep and naked on the beach, bits of sand gradually finding their way to her oiled skin. He flicked away the grains of sand with his fingernail, crushed bugs on her when they landed, drank more of the wine, cold but still sour. The wine and the day sat uncomfortable in his stomach, so much ballast. He caressed her, but she
didn’t stir. He took his hand away and swallowed another mouthful of wine. Through his eyes the day looked blue and sparkling cool, the water riding to the shore in tiny sparkling wavelets, the sky clear except for a few high white clouds, small dense clouds that seemed miles away. He went into the lake trying to make it feel like it looked, but the water seemed cold, he couldn’t get used to it. Somewhere he could still hear the echo of the motorboat. He decided he would just have to stay in longer, swam out to the island and back, swimming slowly, trying to put together the rhythm of his arms and lungs. When he got back to the beach. Rose was sitting up, dressed, waiting for him. He dried himself and put on his clothes. She waited for him, silently, inspecting some pebbles she had collected.