The Last Woman (9 page)

Her parents had divorced, she told him, fussing at a napkin. She had gone to live with her mother in Montreal.
“For a long time I hardly came here at all. I used to go to my mom’s cottage in Quebec. I guess that’s why I never saw you.” She paused to regard him. “So tell me what
you’ve
been doing for the last ten years.”

He grinned at the impossibility of this, but what he saw was fire: a torrent of flame pouring through the canopy of a spruce forest with the roaring speed of a train, while he and the other firefighters turned to run for their lives. It had happened the previous summer, when he’d signed on with a crew near the Manitoba border. Two men had been killed in that incident and he had helped carry out their charred bodies. But he did not tell her about that, there seemed no way to begin, no
place
for it here, among the plates and folded napkins. “Nothing much. Helped Matt around the lake.” He shrugged.

At the table, her father described a hunting trip he had taken in the Rockies. The smoke from his cigarette floated upward, forming the cliffs and peaks where the ram he had stalked for three days eluded him yet again. Matt smoked too – Charles lighting his cigarettes for him – and to Billy’s surprise talked more than he usually did in the presence of whites, telling them of a storm he had survived on his trapline twenty years before: all night long, trees had blown down around him. “I kept trying to boil tea, to keep from freezing. But that old wind, she kept blowing my fire out.”

Listening with her head propped on one hand, Ann Scott was rapt. Billy felt it too: the excitement of life stretching before them. Because it was a wonderful thing to sit
there with the old folk talking, and to be young: to feel the adventure of life laid out by their stories, and to know you would go there yourself one day – into the country of your life. He did not realize he was there already.

When she said she wanted to draw him, he followed her out to the boathouse and up the stairs to the room she called her studio. The ping-pong table, now pushed to a wall, bore jars of pencils, brushes, cans of turpentine, stacks of paper, stones. There were drawings stuck to the wall with masking tape, painted canvases propped on the floor: a wind-tortured tree, a green face with one eye.

He sat on a chair while she leaned over the board she balanced on one knee. She studied him, then looked down, her pencil moving. He had never posed before, found it uncomfortable, would have laughed had it not been her sitting a few feet away, studying him with a gravity that commanded him. Still, it was odd having her look at him as if he were a thing. Her eyes flicked to his hair. His nose. She was taking him apart.

She was just starting to do oils, she told him, talking as she worked; but she still loved to draw, drawing was the basis of everything. She spoke of line and texture and reality versus imagination while he listened alertly, aware of his own ignorance. He had dropped out of school at fifteen.

The next Saturday he sat for her again. He did not recognize himself in the drawing she made: the deep shadings of charcoal evoking a face more handsome, more resolute, than his own. “I think I’ve got you there,” she said, touching the area around the mouth. “And your hair.
You’ve got beautiful hair.” She said it matter-of-factly, holding out the paper to study it.

He’d had lots of girlfriends – it had been three years since he’d gone all the way with Barb Hammer on the leaky air mattress they’d dragged into the trees behind Guppy Bay. But with Ann Scott, his experience seemed to count for nothing. He remembered that from before – the sense of being a bit lost around her, a constraining nervousness.

When she finished sketching, they went for a swim and afterwards lay on towels on the rock. He told her stories he didn’t know he knew, for he had never spoken them before. He told her how he had shot his first moose when he was thirteen; how he had followed its tracks in a skim of snow; and when he finally found it, how it had not run away but simply looked at him. He did not tell her how he had grieved afterwards; how, butchering the moose with Matt, he had secretly whispered to it that he was sorry; how, even when they had tied a little packet of bones in a tree, to placate the moose’s spirit, he could not stop seeing how the moose went down on its knees with a queer, grunting sound as if it were grieving too. He would never admit to this feeling because it was a sign of weakness; it was not how things were supposed to be between a hunter and the animal who had given itself to him. He had killed many moose since, and while he never had so strong a reaction of sadness again – he loved hunting – each time he felled an animal he would touch its warm flank, partly to thank it, but also with the slightest hint of regret.

Nor did he tell her about getting drunk at the Rendezvous, or about how he and Gary Sweshikin had escaped the police one night in a stolen car, or about his mother and her troubles. In his happiness with Ann Scott, he lived partly in hiding, and close to shame.

She told him, in turn, of a trip she’d taken the previous fall to Europe, of paintings and cities and ruins, of walking in a cave under Paris among stacks of bones, and of the time she and a friend had hiked up a mountain and then, coming down, had got lost in a mist and nearly walked headlong over a cliff. She spoke again of her parents’ divorce. “I was mad at my father – he wasn’t treating my mom very well – that’s why I went to live with her. But really, it was harder. We always rubbed each other the wrong way. I used to think sometimes, Well, I know why he went off. I’d leave too if I had to live with
her
. But then I couldn’t stand his girlfriend. I could never forgive her for taking Mom’s place. It wasn’t her fault, but –” She was sitting on the rock with her elbows on her knees, her head down, despondent. Reaching out, he touched her wet hair. Her eyes, filled with a level seriousness, met his. Slipping his arm across her back, he kissed her. Her mouth was barely responsive, and when he pulled back, she was still watching him, as if she were weighing the kiss against the person who had given it.

One afternoon when her father was away, she took him up to her bedroom on the second floor. It was not much changed from how he remembered it: a large, rather stuffy room, with two screen windows opening toward the
channel, under a sloping ceiling. There were the same bookcases crammed with books, the same bedspread with the giant yellow flowers, even the same blue bear, staring from its one remaining eye. “You go over there.” He stood where she indicated, on the opposite side of her bed, while she removed her clothes with a confident briskness, standing at last in her panties and bra. When she discovered him watching, she blushed and covered her chest with her arms. Stripping to his shorts, he slid under the sheet beside her.

“I bet you’re pretty experienced at this,” she said.

“A bit.”

“Let’s do it then.”

Afterwards, she wept between bouts of laughter. On the sheet was a bloodstain shaped like a pear. He stroked and held her. She pushed him on his back and examined him between his legs: something electric and fierce in her look now, something at once fascinated and repelled as she lifted his penis between her fingers and studied the wrinkled sac beneath.

In the following weeks, when she met his boat, he could sense her impatience. Usually they went up to her bedroom, though if her father was home they would trek off to a cove at the back of the island where she had cached an old sleeping bag. Her appetite astonished him: it outran his own, or at least her capabilities did. Once, when a boat was idling through the marsh, she insisted they keep going – though they could hear voices, and though his back must have been intermittently visible above the rock.

Another day, in her room, hearing her father arrive, they hardly had time to get into their clothes. When they came downstairs, Mr. Scott looked up from a map he had spread out on a table. “Just showing Billy some books,” Ann sang with forced casualness. Billy liked Charles Scott and had assumed he liked him, but at that moment, meeting the gaze of the figure hulking straight-armed over the map, he experienced a chill, and he recalled faces that had looked at him that way in the Falls, faces pent with unspoken disapproval and even, in some cases, rage, as though his very existence was an affront. And something connected to this look must have happened between Ann and her father, for the next time Billy saw her, she told him she couldn’t see him for a while. She was having company at Inverness – an old girlfriend – and she had to finish some drawings for her portfolio. She seemed flustered: smiling and reddening as they stood together on the boat-house path, casting down her eyes, as if embarrassed not just at what she’d told him but at something she could
not
say. He was certain it was over. For things ended; he knew it beyond doubt. There was nothing you could do about it. Turning, he walked away.

She pleaded for him to stop, and when he kept going, she grabbed his arm. “Billy. Billy, listen.” He turned and saw the anxiety in her face. “Do you know Mad Jack’s Island –”

The next afternoon he arrived first, in his boat, and some time later, waiting on a granite slope, saw her approach
from the south in her red canoe. She had brought the old sleeping bag they had used on Inverness. They spread it in a little hollow beneath a pine whose low, floating bough dropped a flickering net of light over the plaid lining. From their shelter, they could survey the passages, the unoccupied islands – the whole archipelago stretching north and south. But where they were, they were snug, hidden.

Through July and into August, when the air filled with the clacking of grasshoppers’ wings, they met under the pine. It seemed to him that everything spoke of their state – the islands baking in heat; the cool dark water where they swam without suits; the great, smooth waves of rock, bearing away their mobs of pine. He had often felt that the trees were aware of him – that they could hear him and were attuned, even, to his thoughts – and that he in turn could tell, sometimes, what they were saying – but with her this intensified. The pine that shaded them made a third.

And yet: there was something in her he could not reach, and so his joy was never complete. At times she seemed alone in her pleasure, watching him with a bored, pleased indolence as if she were in some way larger or older than he. Her body was a mystery to him – the way it kept renewing itself, perpetually and without effort, to his wonder. He explored it as closely as she would allow: the cleft in her collarbone, filled with her scent; the gill-like flesh between her parted legs. She had a power and seemed conscious of its sway, for there was something almost triumphant about the way she sat gazing over the channel. What was
she thinking? When he asked, she told him, “Happy people don’t think.” He did not believe her.

Sometimes, when she went off out of sight, padding away for a pee or to explore the island with her sketchbook, he experienced stabs of panic: old, familiar stabs that he had not felt in years, for he had schooled himself to hardness. But it seemed – he half-knew this was crazy – that when she disappeared from his sight, her white sunhat sinking below a ridge, that she had left for good.

Of course, she always came back. And he pretended that nothing was wrong. Yet a day came when he could not contain himself and on the slimmest of pretexts started a fight. He knew he was wrecking everything – that the result of his ranting would be to make her disappear for real. But he expected this anyway; better he reject her first.

She fought back, tearfully, while he was cold-hearted, exulting. She paddled off, the red canoe disappearing (as it seemed) into a granite hill. At first he gloated. Then he found himself alone.

He started running – along a ledge, through junipers, onto a cliff. He saw her an instant before he jumped – the interior of the canoe far below him, and she kneeling under the white blob of her hat. But already, he was airborne, aware (too late!) of the ledge thrusting into the dark blue water below. He missed it by inches, plunging into layers of deepening cold. He was nothing now. He was cold water and darkness and struggling limbs: the chain of bubbles that pulled him up toward the light. He popped up
by her gunnel. “I’m wrong,” he told her. He meant he was all wrong; he meant the mistake of himself.

They went back to Mad Jack’s. And kept going back for the rest of the summer. But their meetings had changed. Aware of their power to hurt, they grew tender. At first this was exhilarating, but gradually the restraint wore at them. They became self-conscious. Where before they had glided by instinct, now they fumbled among misunderstandings. He was not touching her the way she liked! He sulked. She broke a favourite glass. Silence deepened beside silence. He stole glances at her: the way her lower jaw stuck out a little – why had he never noticed that before? It seemed not so much a flaw as yet more evidence of her secret life. For no matter what she told him, no matter how intimate they were, he felt the presence of things withheld. Around them, the summer was changing. Colour had come into the poplars, and in the skies ducks and geese beat back and forth, as if trying to decide whether to come or go.

Occasionally, she spoke of going away to art college, in a casual tone that seemed to take his understanding for granted. He guessed she was preparing him for her departure. Brooding on this, he withdrew; she cajoled him to come back to her. They finished a bottle of wine and danced drunkenly on the rock. But their jollity had shallow roots now; they ended by quarrelling. Holding her, he sensed the truth: she was already leaving.

One afternoon kneeling to her pack, she looked off over the island and spoke to the rolling waves of granite: “So you know. I’m going to England next month.”