The Last Woman (29 page)

“Rowan!” He has to speak twice before Rowan looks up. “Give it a rest, will you?”

Rowan stands sullenly, averting his eyes, his hair plastered in sweaty points on his forehead.

“Did you have your afternoon pill?”

“It’s summer holidays.”

“Yes, but you know what the doctor said. Going without your medicine wasn’t working. Didn’t Mrs. Paisley give you one?”

“I don’t want one.”

Richard goes off and comes back with a pill and a glass of water.

“I don’t
want
it,” Rowan says. “I don’t feel like me.”

“What’s this?”

“When I take it, I don’t feel like me.”

“Well, who else could you feel like, eh? Rowan?” When Richard holds the pill near Rowan’s mouth, the boy twists his head away. “Come on, take it.”

Rowan puts the pill in his mouth. Richard hands him the glass of water and he takes a sip.

“Go ahead. Swallow.
Rowan, swallow
.” The boy swallows. He is crying silently now, staring in fury at Richard’s shoulder.

Some time later, at work again in the porch, Richard hears Ann and Rowan in the living room. By leaning forward a little, he can see his wife as she squats before a bookcase, exposing a strip of skin where her T-shirt has slid up. But it is another two hours before he can be sure she is alone: before the light is out in Rowan’s tent, and she is back in her studio. Richard leaves the cottage and hurries to the boathouse, where, pausing to run his fingers through his hair, he mounts the stairs.

The woman stops him. A large, naked, completely red woman, striding through the scalding light of the lamps.

Ann is approaching from the other end of the studio, looking none too pleased. It’s a rule he’s not to come up here unless asked.

“It’s not finished,” she says.

The woman is as tall as he – huge, with stocky limbs and a strong primitive face in which her open mouth suggests a cry of rage or anguish. And she is red, red, the paint slapped up with an almost careless freedom. He lingers, fascinated, over her long hair billowing behind her, which on closer inspection reveals an interweaving of tiny trees and animals, a river like a flowing ribbon. Her force is tremendous: she seems about to burst from the canvas.

“My God, Ann –”

Now he finds the crowd of diminutive figures surging around her legs. Some tug on cables attached to her thighs, her wrists. Several men in hard hats, suspended by cables, are attacking her thigh. Using chainsaws, they have cut away a huge block of flesh, which now hangs by a shred of skin. The wound beneath is as cleanly defined as a swimming pool. In its depths, the pallor of bone.

The longer Richard studies the woman’s expression, the more tragic, the more knowing, it appears. She understands she is being dissected alive.

“I can’t see it any more. Do you think it’s done?”

“It’s incredible. Hugely powerful.” They stand together, looking at the painting. New aspects keep revealing themselves to him: it is as if the painting is growing, actively changing, before his eyes. “Her face.” He points, indicating the ridge of the woman’s cheekbone. “There’s a bit of
you
there.”

“It’s not me,” Ann says sharply; and a few moments later, more reflectively, “I’ve come to think of her as a
sort of Mother Earth figure. You know, Lilith, Eve, the first woman –”

“I don’t know,” Richard says. He has slid his arm over her shoulders. “Looks more to me like the last.”

Later, in bed, he moves on top of her. For all their efforts, she cannot come, and when she urges him to come himself, his sense she is lying in passive acceptance brings him off with a bellow.

She is soon asleep, while he sits with his back to the headboard, unable to settle. In the moonlight, the blotchy shadows of pines move against a wall.

The next day, he wakes to an empty bed. Ann is in her studio, as he discovers when he peers from the kitchen window. He feels obscurely distracted, as though he has forgotten something important. Through the windows of her studio, he can just make her out in the vicinity of her painting wall. He hopes she’s not going at the red woman again: he has seen her spoil more than one painting by not knowing when to stop.

Rowan is eager to start for the Gotliebs’, where he’s to spend the next two nights with the twins. Ann comes down to see them off. Before he climbs into the boat, Richard stoops to embrace her.

“That was good,” he says, while she makes a vague murmur of assent. “Good, good,” he repeats, hugging her
closer, as if he could plant the notion of good deep in her body, quell his doubts.

At the Gotliebs’, he sits on the deck with Ted and Pamela while the three boys play nearby. He does not feel entirely present – his thoughts still with Ann. He had not wanted to leave her, even for this short trip.

“I tell you, I can smell it,” Pamela says. She has lifted her head alertly. “You can’t smell that?”

“Bambina,” Ted drawls. “The breeze – such as it is – is from the other direction. That’s not the forest fire you’re smelling, it’s Sudbury. Or Toronto.” His rangy form draped in his chair, Ted smiles wanly, emanating, as always, quiet self-satisfaction.

“I just wish it would
rain
,” Pamela says, and for some seconds no one speaks. “Where’s Ann? You should have brought her with you.”

“Well, she’s got a big painting going,” Richard says.

“You know, she hasn’t showed me one of her paintings for years.”

“Well, she’ll show you this one, if I have anything to do with it. It’s good.”

Ted is moving his head in time to the Bob Marley pulsing from the cottage and seems to have dropped out of the conversation.

“We saw her last week in the Harbour,” Pamela says. “She was bringing Billy Johnson home from the hospital. He didn’t look good.”

“No. Well,” Richard manages: he plucks at the leg of his shorts. “He’s run into a lot of bad luck lately. Can’t seem to stay away from it.”

“I hadn’t realized he’d come back. I gather he had an accident.”

“Well, if you can call a fight an accident.”

“Oh, I thought he was found in his boat.”

“That too. One thing after another. It seems to be his way these days. A sad case, actually.” Richard offers a bland smile and falls silent.

At supper that evening in the porch, every remark he and Ann make settles on barren ground. In truth, he has little to say; nor has he much appetite. Pushing his plate away, he gets up abruptly with his wine. Beyond the screen, late sun has found a mossy rock, and for some seconds he fixes on it, uncertain whether he will speak his mind or not. His words, when they come, float out of him with a sense of unreality, as if drawn against his will. “I hear you brought Billy home from the hospital.”

At her silence, he turns to find her sitting absolutely still, staring straight in front of her. The sight, for some reason, chills him.

“The Gotliebs told me. It wasn’t pleasant finding out that way –

“I can’t do this,” she says, as if to herself.

“Can’t do what, Ann? Have a civilized discussion?”

“I can’t
breathe
, Richard.” She looks at him, her face filled with terrible candour. His first instinct is to grin. “I have to have space.”

“Space! You’ve got nothing
but
space up here! When did I ever deny you space?” Stunned, he watches a tear slip down her cheek and disappear under her jaw. “Ann,” he murmurs, as if he is stroking her poor head. While somewhere inside him, the walls of a city are crashing down.

“Did something happen between you and Billy?” His voice breaks, scarcely sounding like his own.

Her eyes roam the table, as if searching for something she has misplaced, and for a moment it seems to him that this thing will stop what is happening. They have lost some precious object, some tool, some clue, some memory, some good intention, some plan, and if they can just lay their hands on it.… So his eyes, too, dart among the plates, the unlit candle, the turned-over novel.

“Ann, I’m asking you.”

She shakes her head and after a moment says, in a quiet voice, “I was with him. It’s something old between us. But, Richard, that’s not what this is about –”

He has to put down his glass; and the impossibility of this – the glass seems welded to his hand – floods him with such rage he flings its contents at her. He flings the glass too. It pops on the wall behind her head and its fragments shower to the floor.

The weekend passes in a heavy tread of confusion and pain. They cannot be together constantly, but after bouts of “discussion” – of argument and recrimination and silences – they take refuge apart. They might embrace before they go their separate ways; there is something both real and formulaic in their tenderness, fighters leaning on each other briefly before retiring to their corners.

From the kitchen window, he sees her lying on her back on the dock. She brings a hand to her forehead. She crooks a knee. It is maddening, and in some way incredible, to have her so close, looking as she has always looked, doing simple, ordinary things, as she has always done; to have her so close he can, if he chooses, touch her; and to know at the same time that she is drawing away. If he can just think of the right plan, speak the right words. Yet no matter what he says to her, he runs into something fixed in her, stubbornly fixed, a thing immune to reason, it seems to him, even to the appeals of love.

And here, she’s coming up the path. Richard turns in the kitchen, unsure whether to go or stay. He feels unseemly, out of place.

Pushing through the screen door, she seems surprised to find him, though her face quickly closes as she passes on.

Later, hearing a bump from the dock, he glances out to see her setting off in the canoe. Leaving the cottage, he hurries along the path to the marsh. Beyond, the light burns orange on a cliff; but where she is, among the rushes, a blue transparency holds her motionless canoe.

Picking up a stone, he lobs it toward her. It splashes near the stern. For some time they simply look at each other across the oil-blue water, and for those few seconds, before she paddles away, it seems to him that anything is possible.

That night, at his insistence, they make love. At one point she pulls away, her heavily lidded eyes regarding him with mineral neutrality, then they are at it again, pounding away as if they could break through to a place where contradictions did not exist: some simple exhaustion.

The days of the land claim, what were they? The best of his life, Richard had thought at the time. He had a wife he adored. A friend with whom he could share those particular satisfactions men kindle only in each other. And he had a cause he could believe in.

Running for chief that November proved more of a trial for Billy than Richard would ever have expected. Hostile messages were spray-painted on the walls of his house; threats were uttered. It was rumoured that an old woman had cast a spell. “If you find me face down in the lake,” Billy said to Richard once, “You’ll know old Betty got me.”

Winning by a mere twenty-two votes, Billy moved swiftly to bring Richard on as the band’s lawyer. They registered a claim to a huge area around Nigushi – five thousand square miles of bush and water – and set to work developing their case. They met mostly at Inverness or in Ann and Richard’s house in Black Falls: late-night sessions
conducted among a litter of books and maps and sheets of canary notepaper, among cooling mugs and the crumbs of sandwiches and pizzas. Richard was astonished by Billy’s intensity. He would show up with articles he had clipped from newspapers, books he had borrowed from the library or bought himself, bursting with ideas about how to proceed. And he rapidly learned the law, or such parts of it as pertained. “I told him when this is over, he should go to law school,” Richard said to Ann. At times, Billy’s passion worried him: it seemed a potential source of error, and even seemed to set Richard’s own judgment precariously on edge. He tried to be the cooler head, and in return had to bear Billy’s impatience with his caution.