The Big Why (33 page)

I have never met the man, so no, there is nothing about him in here.

Rufus, I said, is an old chum.

Our regards to your wife, sir. We hear youre expecting a puff-up in your house.

Let me walk you to the gate.

When I came back in Emily had dressed and taken the children down to the naked man.

I went to St John’s. Kathleen had had the baby. A little girl.

Barbara.

And when I saw her I knew I would not tell Kathleen about Emily. All thoughts of Emily were gone. I loved my wife. I was saturated in love for this woman who had given me this child. When my father died, my mother had been pregnant with my sister, Dorothy. I thought of this during Kathleen’s pregnancy. The birth of my memory came with my father’s death. And in a sense, my father was born to me out of his death. He became a fixed notion that could not be altered. I wanted to stay alive and volatile for the sake of Barbara. So she’d know you could be anything, change yourself, become new.

Kathleen was not well enough to come home. I’m going to rest up in St John’s.

Okay, I said. You two stay here.

I visited Prime Minister Morris. Yes, he’d received my letter. He looked indifferent. He was studying a model of a pulp mill. It had been set up on the floor of his office, the roof on hinges, and it was open. He received a lot of letters.

There was a folder on his desk.

What do you think of newsprint, Kent?

I’ve been known to read papers.

And write for papers.

That too.

We have a number of your letters. To the New York papers and papers here. Youve created quite a little stink, havent you.

It was not I who created it. I’ve merely reacted to false allegation. Something I hoped you might help to alleviate.

Morris was piling tiny wooden logs into a heap beside a model vat inside the open head of the pulp mill. He was hardly listening to me.

They are wanting to build this on the west coast of the island, he said. The largest pulp mill in the world. That’s a tremendous number of New York newspapers. What do you think of that?

Your
they
is telling.

Pardon.

I think
you
should build it.

Lovely.

I mean the government. The people should own it.

Youre opposed to private ownership.

Of the forests and oceans, yes.

He collected up a handful of the pulp logs. He held them as though they were the facts one could know in the world. I’m surprised, Morris said, that youre in my office instead of William Coaker’s.

If he were the prime minister I’d be there.

Look, Kent. This trouble in Brigus. Can you make up with a few people? We know there is nothing to the spy allegations. It is all rather hilarious. But once a file is in the hands of the bureaucrats, it’s hard to extinguish. A folder never grows thinner. He touched something in his pocket. Paper, you know?

We shook hands. I left him to his pulp mill.

I took the train back to Brigus. Every toe in my fingers was tapping. I promised myself to stay away from Emily. I wanted to force myself to be good. I told her it had to stop. Was she relieved? I had convinced her that she was beautiful. That a man could enjoy her. But she was not looking forward to the complications of Kathleen’s return. I’m not sure she was convinced that my wife, even if she knew, would be able to accept it. But then, Kathleen was a woman from New York and they had other arrangements in big cities.

I wrote Kathleen once a day. I drew her landscapes. I had Rocky and little Kathleen draw postcards. I staved off desire — deprivation made me feel good.

I saw Dr Gill. I told him of the girl.

As I predicted, he said.

I’m sorry, you said a boy.

He looked puzzled. Then fished a notebook from his bag. He turned through the pages. No, see here, he said. I wrote it down: a girl.

There it was. And then he laughed. That’s my little trick, he said. I say the one and I write down the other.

So youre right a hundred percent.

Dont tell anyone.

It was July before Kathleen and the baby could travel. I went to meet them when it was safe to return. I held Barbara. It was going to be good. I loved the child. I remembered the promise that children bring. I thought that perhaps it could work out. We had a true Newfoundlander in the family. We showed the baby to the children and Emily had the place spotless.

You must raise her up, Emily said. Stand on a chair.

I stood on a kitchen chair with Barbara. Emily and Kathleen staring up at me. For a second Emily touched my knees. Kathleen saw the look Emily gave me.

Emily: Okay, that’ll be good luck for her.

She said she’d be off now. And Kathleen knew.

What type of man are you.

Her frozen face.

You are a burden, she said. In the end the weight of you.

It’s all over, I said. It was a small thing six weeks ago. It has been stopped for a long time.

I cannot fathom you. Can you call her back.

You know this of me.

I keep praying, though. I keep thinking you will become more like me. Call her.

Kathleen, can you not say anything to her?

You want me to pretend.

Nothing can come — you’ll just make her feel bad.

I wouldnt want to make anyone feel bad. Not this pure girl.

Look. It’s my fault.

She gripped her head to keep it all in. The force in her hands, pressing down.

You pulverize me, Kent. You love that word, and that is what you do to me.

She gave me a mad look.

You want everything and yet you know you can’t have everything. For to have it all excludes a deepening of anything. There is a limit in me.

I have a powerful will and you have a powerful heart.

We paused and there was a moment of tenderness. Kathleen released the agony in her skull. She exhaled. She was about to do something silly. A soft-shoe routine.

So you think, she said, that it’s okay for my friends to sleep with you.

No it’s not okay.

That I shouldnt take it personally.

There was something about Emily that was the hired help.

How respectful.

You know I find a lot of people attractive.

I wish. I wish that at least you’d just find distant women attractive. It wouldnt be so bad if they werent in the same goddamn town.

She swore. It took a lot out of her to swear. I wanted to say I was sorry. I wanted to beg. I loved Kathleen, I loved her integrity and her long arms. The ferocity of her hurt pained me. But also, her anger and her outrageous wishes made me say that I hated the predicament. I hate this, I said.

What if I found Gerald Thayer attractive. Or if I fucked Rupert Bartlett.

Gerald is your cousin. Then I said it: Could you please not swear?

For that was what I hated. The jarring of goodness with a malevolent, ill-used force.

I think that’s what I’ll do.

She was white-hot with anger.

Rupert is not going to sleep with you, I said. And Gerald’s your cousin. I did not know what I was arguing. I had lost my footing, and I did not know where she was or who she was. She had become unknowable. The thing is, we’re all unknowable, but usually we mask it. Now her unknowableness had surfaced.

Kathleen: So youre saying your friends are more principled.

Well, for one thing Gerald’s my best friend, and Rupert is not a sexual man. But in general, yes, I’m saying men are more principled.

You have to be the most arrogant — that is such bullshit. I could have had something with Rupert.

Well okay, sleep with Rupert, but I dont want to hear about it. And if I do hear about it, I won’t embarrass him.

What had I been saying? What was the root of the fight?

That is so civil, she said. Really. Youre such a swell guy, Kent. So where did you fuck her.

Kathleen, that is an endless road that road.

Oh it is endless, I know. So not only in our bed but over the kitchen table. I bet the children had to eat their breakfast on top. You fuck.

Please dont swear.

And in that little room and on the kitchen floor. Did you fuck her in all the unusual places where youve fucked me? Have you so little imagination?

Kathleen.

And in the bed that was her mother’s. That’s very good, Rockwell. You at least. Well, what did you do with the children. She was supposed to be with the children, so did you hire someone else to look after the children while you, or did they just listen in their rooms upstairs. Oh you ingrate, and I suppose the whole town knows.

Kathleen, this is important. No one must know of this. If they knew, that would be it for here.

You remind me of a man in a towel who is staring as his house burns down. I was having a bath — that’s what he says.

She beat her arms against me. She punched me in the neck. She caught a knuckle in my eye. I held my hands up. I took the flurry. I let her flail against me, whip me until she was exhausted. Then she sat down in a chair and caught her breath. She made a concentrated effort to be unapproachable. We stared at parts of the room, as quiet as individuals. She said, It all comes down to what kind of honesty can you dredge up. And am I legitimizing what you did with Emily.

She reminded herself that I didnt mislead her. That she had always known what I was like.

I will not argue with you, I said, or defend my case.

I handed her a glass of water and she drank it. I was standing there, saying nothing. She was waiting for me to say something. She got up and opened a window and it was chilly. I thought that this predicament, if we let time pass without talking about it, would sizzle away and be over with. It is never the case, though. Something is usually said later and it makes the thing harder to take. It makes it bigger because it is deliberated on. This time, though, it would be different. I was a new man. This time was to be the first moment of a new length of time. But there it sat, someplace above the back of her mouth, in her head. It was like an inert material, a grain of a new type of insulation. We both refused to speak — as the room got colder. This time, I thought, she will be able to get over it without saying anything more about it. She is too weary. I have made her weary.

I walked down to the naked man. I was an asshole. I knew that part of my assholeness came from the fact that I was unrepentant. I just wanted to go away and sit with it. I enjoy feeling sorry for myself. I’d had this fight with Kathleen and the children were going nuts and I had to be on my own. I sat there and lit the hurricane lamp. I leaned back against the cairn of rocks and listened to it hiss. It made the night darker — light does that. The dark also makes things louder. Behind me the house all intense, the four tiny bright windows of a family. I had made that. I had willed it and I was strangling the juice out of it. I stretched out my knees, my knees ached. I could feel the heat coming out of the land. The wind swung around. It was warm off the land and then cold off the water. It just swung right around. My light fluttered. I had to shade it, so I leaned up against the naked man. All the lights of the town now. As if there were a dial and it was being turned up just a notch a minute. Waves now. The tide is down and the bare black rock. The crest of a white wave over the rock, creamy and fizzing. Little boats up on the slipway. This was the littoral zone, where so much of the work of the world happens. A few small boats were coming in. You could hear the oarlocks groaning. An oil lamp lit in the bow. Idling in. A painter thrown to the stagehead. The oars drawn up, clunking on the gunwales. Something happening in the dark. Now standing. Now the flash of the sides of fish being pitchforked up. Having to connect shreds of sound and light to a story. Fresh, stiff fish. Pushed around by feet. Into a barrel. Slow, the work is slow and long and constant. A storeroom lit now and they’ll work in there until three in the morning. I stand and I take up my lantern. I swing it in their direction. I swing it as if it’s a toast to their work. I want them to know that I am acknowledging them. I take the path back up to the tight and tiny lights of my will being done.

I wore the scarf that was my wife’s. I wore it the way I’ve seen women wear scarves. You double it, wrap it around your neck, then thrust the two ends through the loop and tighten. I was soaking my feet in a tub of hot water and scraping my soles with a German knife. Kathleen had put the children to bed. I formed a sludge of grey along the edge of the blade. Dunk and scrape. I had a sore nose too, and I was pushing eczema cream into my nostrils. It was all I had. And I noticed how deep and cavernous is the nostril cavity.

They want us to leave.

Kathleen listened. She knew this.

Me: What do you think.

I think it’s hilarious. They want you to leave for being a spy. When all you are is unfaithful.