Hunger's Brides (100 page)

[31 Aug. 1993]

R
OW ACROSS THE MOUNTAIN LAKE
, tubby Pocahontas in the lead, Hiawatha steering. Just like golden olden times happy times with Gavin, brother dear. Soaring sky's stillness mountains' pendant mass—pure abstracted fact. Unapologetic. Mute. Ice and granite's crystal union—white a brilliant blinding smooth. Monolithic skirts a scaly cuprous green. Iron neckline plummeting unmoved / in still collision with a lake of doctored blue.

Glacial like his eyes.

Far shore a goat trail spun through spare tenacious pines, one thin scar fierce along the rockface sheer and pale. This way he says, Hiawatha lord of nature takes the lead, a wheezy Pocahontas trailing. A thousand feet above the lake a crow's nest chiselled from palest stone. Lichen's cool flickering across a stony screen.

Log railing, picnic table clefted in the rock. DO NOT LEAN AGAINST RAILING—Parks Canada. Safe intercourse with shaggy nature shake a paw, roll over. Play dead. In the fabled distance another golf course.

How'd you know about this place, Beulah?

How Hiawatha? Family camping trips—me Gavin Mummy Jonas, the immigrant way familial bliss.

Lean against the railing cinematic vertigo … Disneyed drop a thousand feet. Feel the loft and draw of empty space. Far below … sandpaper riverbanks emery riverbeds … the coiling pause and glint of polished jade. A lone hawk drifting with the stream … Confluent tongues of jade and turquoise. The lilt of stone …

Why bring me here, Donald? asks Pocahontas. Hiawatha's answer mock surprise his eyes reflecting bright a turquoise mask of ancient blue. But you brought me here first Beulah, didn't you?

Why today.

It's your birthday 'case you'd forgotten. Donald what if someone from the conference—No it doesn't start for four more days. But if someone comes up early? Who's gonna see us way up here? Such a joker such a comic, Why aren't you worried they'll see? I know why I'll tell you why—you've brought me here to end it. What on earth would make
you think—
why didn't you tell me she was pregnant Donald
when were you going to get around to that? It's been months—HOW LONG were you going to keep lying to me? How long have I been waiting to hear one
word
of truth from you?

Ah the tricky joker's pause mid-flight / crestfallen peacock, turquoise eyes bedimmed.

How did you—What the fuck do you care how? You didn't tell me she was so beautiful, Donald—Beulah
you're
beautiful—STOP LIAR get
back
, You didn't tell me you'd started fucking her again. Liar do you / did you ever stop? Why go to so much trouble Don? Why not end it with a phone call leave a message—letting me down easy is that it—one last time a blaze of mountain glory a savage little sympathy fuck for me to cling to? Is all this getting too messy for you too unscholarly Doctor Gregory?—cutting your losses—so what's plan B?

Far down the valley storms sift the hills a pall of incense ash.

You're so fucking pathetic—she's beautiful and you're in love with me. And you don't even
know
it WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH YOU—

Truth or dare Donald. Beulah get down from there! Truth or dare fact or fiction I can make it easy for you Donald easy as falling off a log. One small step for manKind—one giant step for Woman. Come Hiawatha, come on up. I can make you a poet, right here.

All right Beulah that's enough get down come on.

To earn your muse you've got to suffer a little isn't that right Doctor Gregory isn't that what you want from me—gonna myth me Donald, isn't that it, just a little abyss? Why so pale bright eyes? The falling never kills but O the sudden stopping!—now, just a bit more railing from the railing and I can hand you back your complicated conscience. Guilty little clockworks all wound up. Just look at you now. You protestant boys find guilt such WILD MEAT. Beulah please come down!—you want to own a muse Donald? earn her! she's a high maintenance high altitude date Show her some guilt doctor—and if she wants you to really see her she's got to disappear. She can change your life right here—priest to shaman—small-town-boy-made-good to wolfman in one easy step—Oh Grey Owl, you should see your eyes right now.

Don't
move
Donald careful one step more you join the human race—you know? just one second not to wonder if a feeling's real before the trap howls shut again. Please Beulah don't
please
, you're just a—Just a what a
baby
girl?
Don't waste—Waste what Hiawatha, or you mean don't make a mess. Things too white trashy for little Donny?—don't blame me, blame your mummy she's the one not me the homewrecker, blame her dissect HER for the little sister you've never seen—the oil-town trailer courts / the terrycloth beertables—your daddy's boozy breath forlorn. Through dry-well oilman lips not one apology ever crossed never truly kissed—blame them not me, white trash nomad boy made good—Then turn your back on everything one more time, on them on me make us all pay. See everyone? not one grease spot on his phony pedigree / hide behind your Ph.D.—O doctor of philanthropy—

Now. One more little backturn for you, one more little two-step for me—PLEASE Beulah don't
do
this. What Donald—resurrect your cock crowing thrice rejected humanity? LOOK! look around you look at this white Eden.
³⁹
All this can be yours the whole frozen panorama—come up come out little hermit crab hiding in another's shell, look down at the shore WAY DOWN stick your neck out—that's it set your eye stalks aswivel—stand on this precipice peel back your carapace—all this bliss I offer all this I can do for you Donald.

Easy as falling off a log. Watch me—

As Beulah's version of that day may demonstrate, I've never been especially brave. Particularly when it comes to heights, a faintness of heart that, inevitably, became in my late teens a source of humiliation. Oil was the family trade: grandfathers on both sides, my father, one uncle. Not magnates but derrick men, wresting a living in the cruellest extremes of weather from bloodthirsty machinery a hundred feet in the air. The success of a man's working career could be gauged not by fame or publication but by the number of fingers he retired with. An unforgiving trade demanding a physical courage and toughness I lack, though I do like to think I've inherited some of the family discipline.

So I found it just a little troubling—and, yes, intoxicating—on that narrow mountain ledge to discover I would have been willing to climb onto an unsteady railing a thousand feet above a rocky lakeshore. For someone else.

I think I might have, had there been time. But there wasn't, and Beulah knew that. For several moments she held me, helpless, captive, able to hear but barely speak, making me listen in a way I'd never
listened before, with wonder and terror and—why not admit it—awe. She didn't jump of course. I say this not to suggest she was incapable of it. Just then, she was capable of anything—and for an instant, with the mountains as our witness, I believe we both were. No, I say ‘of course' because her story would probably have died there with her. This, she was not yet ready for. I had absolutely no idea what was going on behind those beautiful eyes. But if I had, would I have submitted then to following her into the maze of her journals? I doubt it. I just don't know. And even though she knew me better than I knew her—in some ways better than I knew myself—she couldn't have been certain either. Not yet. What she showed me up there on that ledge was the part of me that
could
be made to follow. I still had no idea what else that part of me might be capable of.

On the night I retrieved—a year and a half later—the box of papers Beulah set out for me to find on her desk, I would begin asking myself,
what did she want from me
. I'd always supposed it was my help she was after. But that morning on the ledge it was clear she was after a little more.

As she worked and wrote, to what extent was she aware of baiting me—writing scenes, planning chapters, anticipating and manipulating my reactions? Deliberately leaving gaps or taking positions I'd feel driven to react to—toying with me. Did it amuse her to picture me plodding through material I was so ill-prepared to deal with, on so many levels?—to cast me as the villain in jack boots. Rule-maker, violator, appropriator. Charges, she had to know, I will never be allowed to answer—given the times we live in, and a domain totally lacking in due process. Except here in these pages, before the Universal Court of Ideas.

But why do this? Was she just looking for a spectator—just setting the scene for this staggeringly baroque passion play? Or maybe she saw me as the one to be sacrificed, while she—and the local news audience—sits eating and drinking behind a flowery screen, settling in to watch the spectacle I'm now making, the contemptible monster hiding from the cameras' righteous glare—retreating to Cochrane, England, Mexico, anywhere. All, of course, for my own good. So righteous these young girls, to rescue us. Because we are living a lie. And the lie is not theirs.

But that day in Banff it was still too soon to guess at any of this.
Now she can't answer. Beulah went back to Calgary. And a day later, shaken in ways I worked at not thinking about, so did I. I skipped the conference I'd worked for weeks to help organize, and back at home felt like a child feigning illness, Madeleine hovering over me. Maybe I should have felt a little more than that.

On that ledge was one of the last times I would ever see her. Though I did continue to receive the odd report of a sighting. And, after the initial shock, a few days of disorientation, a few weeks of sexual withdrawal, I came to suppose it might really be over. And finally to think it was for the best.

After all, I was a few short days from becoming a father. A shot at redemption. My chance to start over.

S
APPHO
        

D
EAREST
S
APPHO
,

In this stone cell trapped in your myth's incandescent calculus—unable to deflect its path much longer I peer into the gathering firestorm bunching and billowing black before me like a veil of obsidian.

Before I too am brought to complete the circle of betrayal, one last time together, sweet daughter of Lesbos.

I who will soon betray you first found your verses' last remnants clinging to the forms of the Egyptian dead. Lines steeped in myrrh … the incensed body, embalmed, embarking calmly at last for its eternity's far shores. Seven hundred lines—torn pages greyed to wasp paper, whisper against the cured flesh inaudibly … with such delicacy. Seven hundred verses are all that survive. Listen to them carefully, listen longingly, hear them lovingly.

Once they simply called you the Poetess. Everyone knew. As him they called the Poet. Two millennia—though torn from their shoots the flowers you coaxed into bloom wear yet their scents, keep their hues. Out from dim Chaos, out from the inchoate roaring of the undifferentiated throng, one voice, one lyric, rings clearly—

And it is the voice of a woman.

I who will betray you this night, and have already begun by beginning this, try one last song of restitution for what is lost, for a sole incomparable echo whispering down through the last passionate ear's frail spirals.

While a girl, as you lay on that sea-girt isle, bright Lesbos, did you ever dream yourself stalked by a beast of flame? There, see it tracking you to Alexandria's great library, burning … and thence to Rome, from Rome to Constantinople, now leaping, now low and unsteady, ravaging you. Your sins were multiple, inflammatory. You the spirit unaccountable, first and final fusion of flame and desert sand—figure of clear liquid glass!

Poet of rapture, architect of ecstasy, love's empiricist.

You were the mistress of flowers, nectared hyacinth at your belly. You mocked war, and the warmakers, you circumnavigated the world, undefended by navies, making beauty its circumference, putting love at its centre.