Crossings (3 page)

With Ben, of course, I knew all about sex. Ben would know how to spell fellatio and cunnilingus. We had a good sex life, Ben and I. When we were to be married, Ben bought two books:
The Rhythm Method,
approved by the Pope, and
Married Love,
by an Anglican minister in Toronto. Beside our bed for years, on all the rented tables or shelves. The circular chart that was in a pocket in
Rhythm Method,
a darling envelope in the back of the cover. I mean, inside the cover. You turned the chart around until you got the proper slot. It was very complicated at first. Safe days were green for Go; unsafe days were red for Stop. Ben also practiced three other methods of birth control: French safes, norforms, and coitus interruptus. Simultaneously. Years later, when Edna said, ‘But why didn't you trick him? Why didn't you just go ahead and get pregnant if you wanted to?' I didn't know what she meant. How could you trick a man into letting you get pregnant? How was it possible? Even if it were not morally indefensible, which of course it was, how?

We were all so free, so intellectual, so satisfied, we university girls. We never thought of asking real questions of each other. Do you have orgasms? Yes. So do I. Aren't we lucky.

I knew all about sex with Ben. Only with Mik, now, in the little dark room, do I know nothing.

There is a bed here. Low. On blocks of some kind. It is very damp. Musty. The flannelette sheets are damp, musty. The blankets are coarse. How did he get sheets? Mothballs. Smell of. He has my clothes off. The first time is just the punishment. It doesn't matter that I came to the island after all. For a week he thought I might not, and therefore he must punish me. Mik doesn't rely on facts; he knows what is real.

He comes in me, bellowing like a bull, gripping my waist in his hands. Lifting me up to him, throwing back his head and hollering. We are deep in the forest. There is no one for miles, to the circle of the Arctic and beyond that, to the moon, to the great dark empty hole of the sky, like a wound in a dead man. A wound that doesn't bleed, dark and empty. That won't heal.

Over his right nipple,
Cream
; over his left nipple,
Coffee.

Years later, I realize what the joke was. The joke was, must have been, if you asked for sugar. ‘I've got another tattoo, baby,' or, ‘I've another spigot'? Would he have said
spigot
? No. Mik never told me the rest of the joke. I never led into it. It seemed strange to me, a tattoo over each nipple. I didn't understand. I was embarrassed for Mik when we went swimming. It seemed terrible, to have signs, indelible, forever on your body, where everyone could see. Worse than varicose veins or even false teeth.

But of course we are not in the forest now. I only think that. We are in a house on logs, almost in the bed of a stream. A cluttered stream. A few feet away is the lagoon. Jellyfish float in the lagoon, dreamily, like fairy umbrellas, pale, translucent, deadly.

The mattress is on concrete blocks. It is damp in the little room but not so damp as our skins. I have always kept one part of my mind aware. With Ben, I mean. One part of me watched when I made love to Ben. I was in love with the way I looked. I was always on camera. With Mik it

With Mik it is

I am caught in the eye of a hurricane. All around the winds rage, in here it is still, calm, not a leaf stirs. It is terrible.

Was I subjugated? Yes, I suppose that is one word for it.

I am subjugated. Mik subjugates me. Dominates me. Makes me

Makes me

Yes. For him, the second time, there is victory in my coming. I don't come the first time. That is just the punishment. When I come he licks his finger and chalks up an imaginary mark on an imaginary wall. That's one. That's two. That's three. He is pleased, yes, but disappointed too, as if somehow this only proves me to be a slut after all. Not a lady.

I come without dignity, noisily, moaning on a damp mattress.

Ben licking his fingers. Lick lick, all the fingers of his right hand. Not the thumb? Yes, also the thumb. It was terrible to see him do it, before he started to draw. Before he picked up a scalpel. Because he would do it, too, before he began to ‘make love.' Before he followed steps one, two, and three of
Married Love
by the Anglican minister from Toronto. Moisten the lips of the vulva with your fingers. Use Vaseline or prepare your fingers by moistening them with your saliva. By the time he entered me, I was finished. Boom. Shudder. Sigh.

‘Did you come?'

‘I'm sorry.' I used to say that at first. Later I didn't bother.

And he would withdraw and finish, his hand moving busily up and down beneath the covers, finish alone, his back to me, by himself. He didn't want to bother me, he said. ‘I don't like to bother you, Vicky.'

Sometimes he teased me about being trigger-happy. That's what he called it. ‘You're trigger-happy,' he would say. Men gain power over you in many ways. I would come as soon as he entered me, and then he could do it to himself, not bothering me. He was so considerate. I shall never forgive him.

Now, in the dark little room, Mik thumping me down, his great body tearing at me, gouging at the roots of my forest, the great yellow machines, ripping and tearing in the sacred world of men. But of course this happens later. I don't think of the yellow machines now.

And now, now that he has determined my guilt, my defection, the innate capacity for betrayal in women, he gathers me to him, to his great thick strong chest. He says, ‘I'm gonna pull you on like an overcoat. I'm gonna fuck you to death. You're gonna beg for mercy.' And laughter, subterranean, rumbles in his belly. I feel it rather than hear it.

I don't want to tell this.

I got asthma.

I hate it. Asthma is what they all get, silly, squalid, ridiculous people in novels. ‘The middle-aged woman wheezed asthmatically up the tenement steps.' ‘The asthmatic old man looked helplessly in the alley for returnable bottles.' Even elevators wheeze asthmatically. And lap dogs. ‘Without make­up, she looked seventy. With makeup, and her asthmatic Pekinese under her arm, ninety.' ‘Are you wheezy, Vicky?' the aunts would say. ‘Do you feel wheezy?'

I have made it out to the tarpaulin in the big room. Away from the must and the damp and the mothballs. My mouth gaping like a mongoloid's, I rock back and forth, back and forth. Mik hears me, comes out, takes a look at me, and goes out the door. Thump crash bang. Over the log bridge. I can hear him. I feel shame. Oh god. But he has only gone to ‘phone the doctor at Campbell River.' He tells him, ‘Move your ass.'

He doesn't say, ‘Are you all right?' He doesn't say, ‘Do you want me to call the doctor?' He just does it. And the doctor comes, his sea plane thrumming through the cold misty air. Forty-five dollars. The precious vial of adrenalin. But it doesn't work. I am too far gone for adrenalin. Epinephrine. He is well equipped, this doctor. Ties my upper arm with rubber and shoots it in the vein. Whee. Leaves me a syringe and a pack of needles. A bottle of adrenalin. In case.

‘You should carry an emergency kit,' he says sternly. But I have thrown mine away. The little black plastic box. The note from Dr Munston saying: ‘Mrs Ferris is under doctor's care and requires a hypodermic syringe for her asthma.' To prove I'm not a dope addict in public washrooms. I threw it all away, my needles, my syringe, my rubber-tipped vials, the day of the divorce.

Because that's when my marriage really ended. When I said to Ben, ‘I'd rather do it myself.' Like the woman on the television ad: ‘Mother, I'd rather do it myself!'

Ben boiling the syringe, the needles, bubble bubble in the poached egg pan. Drawing up my nightgown. Slowly, oh slowly, pushing it in. So many needles, so many holes, suppurating, festering, turning gold and green with pus. So that once, by accident, arranging me in the oxygen tent, the nurse sees my hips and says: ‘My goodness. What's that?' Thinking I have some loathsome disease. And Dr Soronski coming, cross with me, saying, ‘The nurse says you've something wrong with the hips.'

Pulling up my nightie, saying, ‘Mrs Ferris!' Disgusted. As if I had done it on purpose. As if I did the asthma on purpose.

But now the sores are almost gone. Deep craters of the moon when they healed. The red sores, the black holes, the ones that won't heal, the green and gold, all gone.

I don't hear the doctor go. The world stands still. I am paralytic with ecstasy. White all over, frozen, still, in a deep wide river of pure oxygen. Still and deep and frozen. Blissful. Forgiven.

Ben, in Mexico, sits by my bed and watches me die with typhus. After, when the landlady has got the doctor, he says to me: ‘But I didn't know what to do. You were lying there, you were just lying there. And you know I can't speak Spanish. I didn't know what to do.' The landlady tells me what you were doing.

‘He is sitting there, like this,' and she imitates you, hands flopped helplessly down, palms up. ‘And …' She raises an imaginary glass to her mouth. She shakes her head. ‘It is fortunate I arrive,' she says.

You sat there watching me spew puke and shit and you couldn't think what to do. ‘I was frightened,' you say.

But Mik just radios Campbell River and tells the doctor to get his ass moving.

He goes off to the forest about ten o'clock, leaving me alone in my wide white world, cold and pure. He gathers on his great bulky windbreaker and he says, ‘Well, I got to hump it. See ya.'

That night we make love again.

And every night, all those nights, the first weeks, with the stars so multitudinous in the deep black hole of the sky. I leave the door of the toilet open so I can look up. Of course, there are no octopi. But there are heron, grey-blue, like statues, in the mornings. And a loon, maniac with misery, calling across the lagoon. And the jellyfish.

I used them later, in a story. Festooned like garlands on the pale white body of a woman, drowned. Drowned on purpose. Pushed in. Because she is paralyzed. The jellyfish cover her like gardenias.

One morning, after Mik had gone, I took the typewriter out of its case.

Mik had grumbled about my cooking.

‘It's worse than the cook's!'

‘But the cook makes marvellous meals,' I said. He had taken me there one night, perhaps the first day, when I was sick. ‘Really, I'd much rather eat there. Is it some sort of tradition, to bitch about the cook? Because, really, the food is fantastic.' So it was. She showed me one day how she did it. How she prepared the vegetables in the mornings, and the pies. How she set the dough to rise. Her refrigerator was a large walk-in room, hung with great carcasses of pig and cow. She used real butter in everything. When I went up to the shower house I could smell that day's meals, glorious in the cool air. Great roasts and Yorkshire pudding. Bread stuffing for turkeys. She made breakfast, a huge dinner at noon, another huge dinner at night, and was expected to have pies, buns, cakes on hand for evening snacks. Her pastry could have won prizes. And yet she was spoken of in the most disparaging way. Not only was her cooking not fit for dogs, but she herself was reputed to be sexually insatiable. It was well-established that she spent every night draining the loggers dry in her room behind the kitchen. Yet, when I said, but who? Mik couldn't say. I was not allowed to speak to the men, except for Noddy, the Japanese; but he too seemed to regard the cook with loathing. She was dirty (her kitchen was the cleanest I have ever seen); she was a whore (through the open door to her room, I glimpsed books, a child's sweater on needles, a narrow bed); she was a disgusting old bag (she was about forty-five and her hair was dyed a rather impossible colour).

I'm not sure why Noddy was allowed to speak to me, or I to him. There had been a terrible scene the first week. I had been taking a shower when the men came back into camp. Mik had stormed and raged. I said, ‘But no one could
see
me.'

‘They know you're there,' Mik said. I was forbidden to take my showers between the hours of eleven-thirty and one-thirty. And not after four in the afternoon. In general, I never saw any of the men, except at a distance. Noddy was the exception. He was allowed to come to the house and drink my instant coffee and eat my pathetic biscuits, which he pronounced ‘Great!' He treated me with such deference, such courtesy, that I was tempted now and then to do something outrageous. In that context, something outrageous would have been the utterance of ‘damn,' or, of course, the statement that Mik and I were not married. When I did finally tell Noddy, he was so shocked he couldn't speak for a minute. I suppose I was a lady in the same way the cook was a slut.

I was allowed to see the women. They came over in the mornings, across the bridge, and we had tea. They told me their stories.

‘Bent right back he was, bent right back. When they did the autopsy, they said it was spinal meningitis.' Her five-year-old son.

‘But didn't you take him into hospital? Didn't you take him to Vancouver?'

The woman looked at me, not understanding. It was beyond her, that act of faith. Her child had grown hot, had screamed, had bent slowly backwards like a bow, the crown of his head touching his toes, and she had suffered this to happen. ‘They had to break his bones to put him in the coffin,' she said. She said it without tears, with a kind of awe, a sort of wonder. It was what life did to you, that was all.

One woman said, ‘I had a baby, you know, before.' She waved her hand in the direction of the forest. ‘But he was real good about it. He never said a word. He made me give it up though. Like, I met him when I was in the family way. So you can't blame him. It was a girl. I never saw it. They take them away, like, if you're going to give them up. They don't let you see them. But they told me it was a girl.' She was quiet for a while, drinking her tea from the terrible old mug. ‘It's better that way, not to see them. He never throws it up to me.'