The Last Woman (6 page)

“I don’t know,” Billy counters, glancing at Richard’s stomach. “This seems a dangerous place for a man.”

“Occupational hazard,” Richard says, patting his modest paunch. “Too much fast food in the office. No, I can’t blame this on Ann: she’s always rationing me on lettuce and tofu. Make a rabbit of me.”

“So you’re prospering,” Billy says.

“Everyone needs lawyers, it seems. ‘Kill all the lawyers,’ Shakespeare says, but I take it as significant that no one has. We had to move out of that house downtown – we’re out at the Plaza now. Great spot. My office overlooks the old fields. You can see
deer
sometimes,” Richard says, raising his eyebrows as if this revelation might interest Billy especially.

Billy has to make an effort not to look at the cottage. “Too bad about Ann’s dad –”

“Yes! Yes.” Richard’s eyes close. “It’s been pretty hard on her – you know how she was about him. But cancer – it was a mercy, really.” Their conversation keeps breaking off; their old fluency is gone, broken by silences that are increasingly awkward. Richard keeps frowning distractedly over the water, as if more important business were awaiting his attention. A boat goes by. Both men look up, and as it swings into a gap between two islands, Richard launches into a story about a woman on the lake. It seems a non sequitur – told for no reason Billy can see except that Richard tells it well. He listens to the tale of love gone wrong, the woman’s cottage burned down by a rejected lover. Now and then Richard pauses, with a suggestive, penetrating glint of his small eyes: Billy’s cue to laugh. He can barely smile. At the conclusion, Richard chuckles himself and, after a well-timed pause, delivers the denouement: “The moral being that justice comes in unexpected ways.”

Billy plucks at the leg of his jeans. The remark cuts too close to home. Is that what Richard intends? Surely after
all this time, they can put the claim behind them. Another boat is approaching. Again, they both look. “That the Schonfelts?” Billy says, as it plows off. Frowning in his grave way, Richard tells him no. “So many strangers on the lake now. We’ve sort of been discovered.” They both fall silent again, as the wake from the new boat smashes on the rocks.

It is a relief when Ann appears with her tray. She has put on a dress of some light material, her shoulders bare under thin straps. As she stoops over the low table to pour their wine, the tops of her breasts are momentarily visible. Flushing, Billy looks away.

Sitting in another of the deep chairs, she leans toward him. “All right now, tell us
everything
. That last postcard? You were on the Caribbean –”

He gives them his best story, about the time he went snorkelling: the striped fish, the yellow fish, shimmering past in clouds; the great eels drifting out from their lairs, with their heads like dogs. He had been fascinated by the barracudas – silver torpedoes hovering motionless, then pivoting on the spot like compass needles. “I had this urge to go over and touch one. Wanted to stroke it.”

“You
would
!” Ann cries. “He was
always
wanting to touch things,” she tells Richard.

“Indeed,” Richard says. “So what were you working at?” A flash of shrewdness, as if he has guessed what Billy has avoided telling them – that, for the most part, he was working at bad jobs for poor pay, when he was working at all. The job that took him to the Caribbean had been an exception. He had crewed on a millionaire’s boat, and he
spins out anecdotes of the rich man’s eccentricities: the way he liked Billy to take him out in the Zodiac to feed the dolphins. The late-night confessions at the ship’s rail. Increasingly, he talks with a heartiness he does not feel. For what, after all, does he have to show for his time away? A roll of twenties in his pocket. A few stories.

Richard grills steaks on the gas barbeque behind the cottage. In the kitchen, Ann chops vegetables. Billy drifts between them, trying to make a show of evenhandedness, but with Richard the conversation still goes haltingly. Escaping to the kitchen, he plants himself beside Ann. She tells him about her father’s time in the hospital, and when she becomes weepy, he reaches out and squeezes her bare shoulder. “Look at me,” she says. “Here I am going on about Dad – but Matt! We were
so
upset. We put flowers by the road. There were lots of others. I went up to the Island for the funeral. Richard wanted to but he had to be in Toronto that week.” She tells him about the ceremony in the packed little church. The hymn-singing – so moving – and old Betty Clearsky moaning in her pew. And the new priest who kept mispronouncing the Indian names. “He spoke pretty well, considering. But it was odd – so much history in that room, and of course he didn’t know any of it.”

He watches her knife making pennies of a carrot, adrift with thoughts of Matt.

“He always taught me to kill cleanly,” he says, apropos of nothing. His throat is hard and he has to pause for
a moment. “Better to pass up on a shot than make a bad one.”

She is looking directly at him – holding his thought, perhaps expecting more. But something in her attention daunts him; he feels he has nothing more to offer her, nothing commensurate with his experience of Matt, or with what she deserves, and on the pretence of hunting for the wine bottle, he turns away.

T
hey eat on the screened porch where the sun casts a flickering archipelago on the inner wall and makes of Rowan’s face a living mask. Beside the boy, Ann’s arms and chest quaver in the light. She is telling Billy about their trip to Paris, and is more than a little drunk, Richard thinks. “The Louvre!” she exults and lifts her glass. A bit of wine slops. She was entranced by the late-medieval work: the saints and Christs and gold skies that to Richard seemed two-dimensional, almost primitive. They had inched down the high, endless corridors, from room to stuffy room, from frame to frame, from saint to saint: Richard soon bored but glad he had given her a gift she valued. He had taken her to Paris to cheer her up; and for
that week, she seemed years younger, keen to walk everywhere and see everything, keen for a student’s lunch of bread and wine on the islands, keen to prowl Père Lachaise and the Luxembourg. But back home, after an initial burst of work, she had been waylaid by her old fatigue, her old sad drift, and had applied her usual remedies: wine and the swearing off of wine, jogging and therapy and meditation. The spark lit by the Louvre had seemed well quenched, but now he hears for the first time what their trip meant to her: “I love how they ignore perspective, time – I mean, Jesus on the cross, and over his head,
in the same painting
, a window showing his birth in Bethlehem, or the Annunciation. They felt free to put in anything – make the mind jump around. I want to try something like that.”

Beside her, Billy has leaned back and placed his hand on the back of Ann’s chair, with what seems to Richard a show of casual possessiveness. Still smitten, Richard observes. As for Ann, she seems oblivious to everyone but Billy; she laughs excessively at his stories and keeps pouring him more wine.

“So what’s your next move?” Richard asks dryly, in a lull. “You thinking of guiding again –?”

“Thought I’d try at the Blue Osprey,” Billy says, removing his arm from Ann’s chair. Suddenly he seems tired, wary.

“Well, it’s a different world there now,” Richard says. “Golf course, tennis courts, high-end customers. Very impressive, actually. Gerald’s work – Jack died about five years ago. Not sure if they’re still in the hunting and fishing line –”

“I think they
are
,” Ann says. She turns to Billy. “I’m not sure you’d
want
to work there. The place looks like Disneyland.”

“The lodge was on its way down,” Richard persists. “Gerald’s really turned it around. He’s got a lot of out-side money behind him, big development firm from Toronto.”

“Mafia,” Ann murmurs darkly.

“Well, Italian,” Richard says, with a grain-of-salt glance to Billy. “They’ve laid out a beautiful course.”

“He
golfs
now,” Ann announces.

“She refuses to believe we’re actually members of the middle class. So what’s the matter with golf?” Richard says. He is smiling, though in fact he is irritated by her jab. It is an old thing of hers, behind which he recognizes a heartfelt criticism: that he is
so
bourgeois, while she is – artistic, he supposes.

Reaching for the wine bottle, Ann does not answer. Billy has fixed unhappily on his plate while Rowan, lost in his own world, tortures a bean with his fork. Richard surveys the failing party with grim satisfaction: he had not expected better. “Hey, Row,” he says to his son. “Tell Billy about our fishing trip.”

“We didn’t catch anything.”

“We drove over to Pointer’s,” Richard tells Billy. “That shoal between the islands – it’s all dry land now. But I thought some of the deeper water looked good.”

“Huh,” Billy says.

“It’s the drought –”

“It’s that golf course,” Ann says, coming out of her
reverie. “They’ve got these monster sprinklers,” she explains to Billy. “They’re pumping out millions of gallons.”

“Not millions, not every day,” Richard says. “In normal circumstances –”

“Well, these aren’t normal circumstances, are they?”

Richard shrugs as if indifferent to the point while she goes on about the drought, mainly to Billy, in a tone that makes him feel uncomfortable: as if she were holding him responsible for the state of the lake. Billy, too, seems uneasy. He barely murmurs in response, and soon afterwards announces he’ll be shoving off.

They walk him to the dock. A flat-sided moon has turned the channel to foil. Richard watches as his wife and Billy embrace. Then Billy sets off, his wake sparkling behind him as his boat carries him down the channel and out of sight.

Later they do dishes together. Conversation has failed, and the only sound is the splashing and clunking of dishes as she scrubs.

“It was good to see you and Billy talking again,” she says after a while. “I thought the evening went very well –”

“Hardly surprising you would think that –”

“What do you mean?”

“If you can’t see it, Ann.”

“You’re upset,” she says, straightening at the sink.

Turning to put up a glass, he struggles to suppress his anger. Under the weak overhead light, the kitchen
suddenly seems a poor, depressing place, with its worn floor and battered counters. He wills himself to icy calm. “Look. I’m not questioning your right to friendship, I never have. But you
know
we’ve been estranged. It was hard to sit there and watch you
dote
on him like some kind of –” Stopping just in time, he takes a dish from the rack. “And maybe you had a wee bit too much wine?”

“Ridiculous,” she says sharply. “So you’d rather I cold-shouldered him? You’ve never even deigned to tell me what really happened between you two.”

“You know that’s not what I’m talking about.”

“What are you talking about then?”

She turns to him, eyes blazing. The fierceness she can summon astonishes him: a force that seems to come from outside the Ann he knows, from outside the recognized bounds of their marriage.

“Maybe just a little moderation?” he says. As soon as he can, he escapes to the porch and resumes work. Some minutes later Ann goes by. He does not look up, but when she passes out the porch door, he glances through the screens just in time to see her descend the steps. She is wearing nothing but a towel slung over one shoulder. Dimly, he feels her nakedness is directed at him – a pale weapon in the night. Seconds later comes the crash of water as she dives in. Flicking over a page, he tries to go on working. But his concentration is gone. He can hear her swimming briskly into the channel, then silence – silence that stretches on for several seconds, broken only by the
distant lap of water. He peers out. His wife is a strong swimmer, but still –

After a while, the faint chop of her stroke resumes as she swims off.