Harmless (2 page)

“She never goes halfway,” Jane said. “She has to do the real estate seminars and read books on positive thinking.”

“Remember her Zen phase?”

“And
Deep Ecology
.”

“She’d bawl me out for not recycling a beer cap.”

“God—we’re being mean to Liz already.”

Jane walked to the kitchen window, so certain he’d follow that she spoke just as he took his place beside her. “Look at them.”

Franny and Rebecca were heading back to the yard, the blue sky above so bright it might have been freshly painted.

“Franny looks more like Martha every time I see her.”

“I’m going to be spending more time with Franny.” He hated the defensiveness in his voice.

“That would be a start. God, I’m sorry.”

“No, I deserve it. I do want to get Franny out of the city more. Away from her friends.” He left the comment to hang on its low branch.

“You don’t have to worry about Franny—she’s a good kid.”

Invisible hands seized her words:
Franny’s a good kid
. Just a typically confused teenager pushing her parents’ boundaries.

“Rebecca’s a good kid too,” he said, assuming it to be true.

Jane crossed her arms. “She’s pushing me, Joseph. She’s quit everything. Soccer, horseback riding, writing—quit, quit, quit.”

“Franny too.”

“It’s all too
boring
, too
haaaaard
. She just wants to hang out at the McDonald’s with her townie friends.”

“It must be easier for Alex to deal with her.” He was groping for a happy father–daughter ending.

“Are you
kidding
?” Her indignation steamed the window. “Alex is on her about staying on the Internet half the night. He says—to
me
—that she dresses like a porn star.”

“A lot of girls do. They’re pressured to be hyper-sexualized.” He’d written a column on the topic. The trick was to not quote himself.

“Alex is afraid for her.” Her tone was softer now. “It’s this bleak picture he has of the future, what the world’s going to look like in twenty years.”

Jane squinted into the metaphorical distance, as if seeing the apocalyptic mind-pictures everyone under fifty carried with them: the video loops of floods and droughts, fish-emptied seas and dead coral reefs, calving glaciers, and super storms ravaging the cities.

“I don’t talk to the kids about that stuff,” she said. “But Alex has to tell them the Truth.” She spoke with fresh bitterness, as though he’d used the word in a recent argument. “A child shouldn’t have to think about global warming. It’s like asking a ten-year-old to do a grown man’s labour.”

“Yeah, what are you going to tell your kids? ‘You’re going to live through a catastrophe comparable to the last ice age, but your loving parents did nothing to stop it.’ ”

“Please—give me something I don’t get every day.” She let out a long breath. “You’ll party with me tonight, won’t you?” Her voice was husky, private—she could be speaking to him from the shadow of her high-school locker door. The sunlight revealed the fine down on her cheeks, burnishing the golden skin beneath.

“How long’s it been?” he said.

She met his gaze. “We don’t do a lot of drinking here in Eden. Alex doesn’t always get along with Drunk Jane.”

He laughed and put his hand to the window, steering his mind away from the dark shoals of erotic speculation. He formed a half-frame around Franny, then shifted it to bring Rebecca into the picture as the girls walked out of sight. When he lowered his hand, it was as if he’d peeled a sticker from the window to reveal Alex walking across the field toward the house, his body bulging and folding like a flag
in the rising heat. Jane shifted, putting distance between her body and Joseph’s.

“What’s he done now?” she said, heading for the kitchen door. There was nothing for Joseph to do but follow her into the yard.

On the night he’d met Alex, Joseph was riding the bliss of a four-pint high that expanded to envelop every stool and table in the pub. Friends, rivals, ex-lovers, all were gathered to celebrate Jane’s return from a year-long trip around Southeast Asia and Europe, where she’d met Alex, who’d moved to Finland to make a documentary on deforestation. Jane, engaged to be married—it was big news, and Joseph was happy for her, he really was. He’d been dating Martha for a few months, and he was telling friends he was “in a good place,” ready for some necessary life changes. Why begrudge Jane for staking out a proper adult life with the stolidly handsome man who was moving through the crowd, shaking hands and laughing at jokes, gathering more of the room’s energy to himself with each greeting? No reason to envy Alex’s broad shoulders, a trait Joseph had coveted since puberty. No need for rancour, even if Alex’s arrival did mark the end of Joseph’s wild, seven-year affair with Jane. Joseph was even glad for the transformation Alex had worked on Jane, the ten necessary pounds gained and the doomed-waif haircut abandoned. So when Alex cut straight across the room to greet Joseph, his half-embarrassed smile advertising his noble intentions, what could Joseph do but share a few pints with the man who’d
stolen Jane from him? It was as if, from their first greeting, Alex had called out to what was most magnanimous in Joseph—a dynamic that defined their more than decade-long friendship until the day Alex decided Joseph was past saving.

But that was an old story, one they’d be tiptoeing around all weekend if Joseph got his way. He followed Jane past a garden that was lush with tomatoes, carrots, salad greens, even a few rows of corn. They stopped at the edge of the field, the grass before them as bright as a lake beneath the stinging sunlight. Alex was less than a hundred feet away, his brown hair lighter and a little thinner, his shoulders wider than Joseph remembered, his body as solid as the wooden cabinets he built and sold in town. He was elevating his cupped left hand as though it protected a living thing, perhaps a caterpillar on its way to a terrarium by the store’s cash register, where its transformation to a butterfly would serve as a metaphor for societal regeneration.

Alex nodded at him with exaggerated propriety before saying hello, making Joseph wonder if Jane had even told him about the visit. Would she have gone that far to make this reunion happen? Joseph tried to read her face but she was grimacing at Alex’s hand. She flattened out his palm, releasing a thin stream of blood and revealing a small puncture in the fleshy wedge beside his thumb that could have been a small berry ebbing juice. Joseph looked from the wound to the dry ground, where the blood had clotted in the rough shape of an anvil, and then out to the forest, his mind alert, as it always was in Alex’s presence, to the hidden connections between things. But there was nothing
to see but grass and trees, thousands of them, standing in line across the field.

“It’s nothing,” Alex said. His face was deeply tanned and his brown hair bleached by the sun, his thick back straight and his shoulders squared, a few extra lines around his eyes the only sign that Country Life wasn’t everything he’d envisioned. When he tried to lower his hand Jane held it up to catch the sun, then closed it.

“What happened?” she asked.

Alex shrugged, too casually. He had a story to tell her, but he wanted a little coaxing. He was too warm to blush but his face radiated pride and curiosity. The walk in the woods had activated the optimistic vitality that was his best feature.

“I made it about three-quarters of the way to the old commune by Smith Road,” he said. “I was checking out a few abandoned mines.”

“Alex has been mapping the ghost towns and abandoned mines and logging camps.”

“In there?” Joseph said, pointing to the forest.

Jane nodded and rubbed Alex’s shoulder, caught up in a rush of affection that Joseph interpreted as more familial than passionate, as if Alex was a younger brother who was going to do the family proud. Or so Joseph chose to read the gesture. Maybe he was being petty.

“I didn’t know people still lived in communes,” he said.

“Some vets and draft dodgers started a commune in the hills, decades ago,” Alex said. “It kind of went to seed.”

“Drugs, wife-beating, incest—real sixties stuff,” Jane said. “I’m not worried about a bunch of old hippies. You know there’s a grow-op out there.”

“The new local economy.” Alex could barely suppress his anger.

“We talked about this,” she said. “Stay out of it. You’ll get yourself shot.”

Joseph turned away, feeling like an interloper. An itch skittered across his scalp like a line of ants escaping a magnifying glass. The sun was relentless, and the first wave of booze sweat was surfacing on his forehead like diesel oil rising from a sunken ship. He should have slept on the train. He reached into his back pocket, but he’d left his BlackBerry at home for Franny’s sake, only to realize ten minutes into the trip that the last thing she wanted was his undivided attention.

“You should get into the shade,” Jane said. “Alex can show you the lay of the land. I’m going to get a bandage.”

The men took the hint: she wanted them to work something out before the other guests arrived. It hadn’t occurred to Joseph that she was also carrying an idealized version of the weekend, or that she was an adult with a detailed life plan, though she’d been that woman far longer than the wild Jane he’d known as a young man.

They walked to a maple tree near the road and stood beneath the canopy of branches to take in a full view of the property. So this was it: an old farmhouse, a fallow field, and a bursting kitchen garden—the Great Leap Forward on two acres of land. Joseph hadn’t given much thought to what he’d find here, but surely a grander set-up than this. Didn’t Alex’s idealism and unflagging energy demand more? Joseph studied Alex’s face for the beginnings of an answer. Two deep lines stretched from his mouth to his
chin, and his brows came down over his eyes like a hard ridge, giving a preview of the old man he’d be one day—biblically stern, the flat blue eyes taking in the measure of his land, separating the clean from the unclean, the fertile from the barren. Something in that expression, its total identification with the landscape, repulsed Joseph. Sure, the city was going to hell, but as he scanned the fields, wondering where the cows were but knowing the answer would only depress him, Joseph saw nothing to replace the city and all it represented—culture, progressiveness, the energy of self-invention.

Alex saw something more.
Good for him
.

Joseph finally settled his eyes on the forest across the field.

“You should see the forest,” Alex said. His mouth had softened into a self-mocking grin. “Even a nature hater like you would love it.”

“Are people more authentic in the country?” Joseph asked, instantly regretting his flippant tone.

“People do live closer to the land. They’re not waiting for the World-Historical Individual to fix their problems.”

The World-Historical Individual—who else but Alex still referenced Hegel?

Joseph nodded, his attention drawn to a little house near the garden, maybe six feet tall and surrounded by a low chain-link fence. It was a wooden replica of the brick farmhouse it faced across the yard, the colours, angles, and lines so well matched that he felt like he was staring at an allegorical painting.

“What is that?”

“It’s actually a chicken coop,” Alex said. “More of a carpentry project I did with Liam.” He kept smiling as they walked over to the miniature farmhouse. It was a child’s dream fort, with framed windows and a green-shingled, peaked roof topped with a tiny metal weather vane of a man running to nowhere on pinwheeling legs. There were even little window boxes painted beneath the windows.

“It must have been a nightmare to build,” Joseph said.

Alex shrugged. He hated to let a project go unfinished. Back in the city he’d set up a communal garden in the park near their old apartment, and helped found a food co-op and a collective for independent filmmakers. He’d even spearheaded a parent-run alternative school, an idea Joseph enthusiastically supported until the other parents backed out, conceding that, despite their multiple M.A.s and Ph.D.s, they had nothing practical to teach their children. “It’s too bad we didn’t take the basket-weaving course of right-wing lore,” Joseph had joked, scoring a laugh with everyone but Alex.

“None of the chickens will sleep in it,” Alex said, stepping tentatively closer to the coop, as if he were slightly afraid of something inside it.

“Where do the chickens sleep?”

“In the bushes, the trees, everywhere but their house.”

“I’d live in it. With my debts, I may have to.” Joseph laughed, but the knots in his neck tightened. He stooped to look inside a tiny window, relieved that no face, human or avian, stared back. Alex’s determination to finish what most men would have abandoned both shamed Joseph and made him feel slightly superior, but it did not lessen the
queasy presentiment that a face, grotesquely out of proportion to the house’s miniature accessories, was about to appear at the window.

He stepped away from the house, the sweat on his back over-performing its cooling duties, the rising heat from the fields setting the not-so-distant trees in motion so that his throbbing eyes saw them as a bannered army on the march. He squinted again and traced the grey-brown line of trees as it stretched west out of view and northeast along the narrow highway, the forest forming a natural boundary for the farmland, imposing itself on the ordered fields and pastures like the wall of an ancient fortress—if such places had ever existed.

“It’s all Crown land now,” Alex said, studying his face. “Tens of thousands of acres, then it becomes a national park.”

How much land did that add up to? It must be the size of a city. He imagined ancient groves and green hilltops and lush meadows, creeks and swamps and lakes, the idea of sleeping so close to the wilderness casting a pleasant, archetypal shadow over the weekend. He wished Franny were around. The images of ancient forts and groves were right out of the adventure novels she used to read, tales of brave Byzantine slave girls, Celtic women warriors, Maori princesses.

“Do people ever get lost in there?” he asked.