Architects Are Here (6 page)

She was tall and had long dark hair and she wore the same clothes over and over. He had chosen her because she was the only student he had not from here. You could get into trouble with families. Her mother was from here but her mother was dead. He loved Nell’s body and yet she was too young for him, or he was embarrassed to think of himself with a girl that young. If they were alone on their own planet, but he laughed at himself. There was no future in it. Arthur held her by the shoulder and she felt the peculiar angle of her shoulder blade. Once, when she was nine, she woke up in hospital after a small surgery. Her father had noticed a lump and it was benign. But she thought they had taken the shoulder blade out of her arm. She saw her hands and arms but knew in her back there was no shoulder. She realized she enjoyed this thought, though she immediately worried if women would pity her. She knew that men did not care. It was women who were the problem. Her mother, for instance, an assumption that a weak arm would limit her. As a child she had been scared to death by the war amps commercials. How they pitted children losing an arm in accidents against old veterans with limbs blown off in war. There was something bizarre in the connection of these groups, and with the idea that funding came from depositing lost keys in red mailboxes. She knew an arm without a shoulder blade placed her close to this collection of misfits and she decided in that hospital bed to avoid the stigma. And then the anaesthetic wore off and she realized her arm was normal.

They drove out along the Humber River and parked this time out by Boom Siding and the salmon run was on. Men up to the tails of their coats in the river—I could have been one of them. They watched the anglers arcing rods over their shoulders, a white wet dripping off the corners of their waterproof clothing. Then they carried on to Arthur’s cabin on Grand Lake. There was a lusty carelessness that almost wanted him to get in trouble. He thought she must have other men. The man inside him was lazy. He laughed at himself one day in his office while holding the phone receiver to his forehead. He could hear the student through his skull. I am the other men, he thought.

Arthur Twombly was busy that summer. David was home from St John’s and the family was flying to Detroit to spend the summer in Saginaw Bay. Arthur liked to complicate things. If he were rain he’d fall on the land and flow into a stream and enter the ocean by a river. Some people would just as soon evaporate and rain on the ocean direct—his son David. There’s a lot of rain that falls on water.

Nell didnt see Arthur for two months. She took Richard’s computer lab with Joe Hurley and learned how to send green messages to other students who were sitting in labs like this back in Richard’s hometown of Santa Fe.

She walked through Margaret Bowater Park and enjoyed her choice of aloneness. She did five hours of weekly volunteer work at the hospital, reading to elderly patients. She felt like if she worked hard, then good things would happen to her. There was a man who combed his hair in the polished mirror of the floor. Once she walked along the green orienteering trail and found the old rabbit line. The snares were up and the band saw blade was gone too. She climbed up through the trees to Jubilee Field and down the quiet street to Arthur Twombly’s cul-de-sac. The town had been planned, the workers up on the hills, the managers of the mill here in the valley. The town was also divided on education—Catholics to Regina, and the Protestants to Herdman. She walked past the Twombly house and looked back to catch an angle of its dark brown siding. Sleeping with a man she could not have, something about it still felt like an ascetic life. She had to be careful with her money because she had decided to give the insurance money to Oxfam in her parents’ names. She knew her father would like that. They had not spoiled her and three hundred thousand dollars might be the wrong thing for her when she’s nineteen. It wasnt easy to give the money away. Oxfam did not want the money. They were suspicious. They suspected she might be acting in a bereaved manner. They forced her to tell her uncle, and Charles was not supporting the donation. Charles sneered at organizations like Oxfam. What about Howard, was his thinking. Howard working at StresCrete. It took six months for the paperwork to make the money go away. Charles thought that was throwing money into the sea.

Her Indian roommate Rasha Vangela. She made curry and the one meal Nell loved was when Rasha had her girlfriends over and they cooked a head of cauliflower. The saris in the cement walls, the intense humid boiling and frying in garam masala. Rasha had a jar of coconut pomade in the bathroom. A strand of hair caught in the twist of the lid. Thick black hair, you could almost see the texture of it, as if the hair were strings of Indian DNA.

September, when she knew Arthur had returned and the son had gone. She waited. She walked down Main Street. There were boys on the hill above the movie cinema breathing gasoline from grocery bags. And beyond them the solid, permanent pulp mill. She liked Corner Brook for the eddy it provided. It was a milltown, and she found the pulp mill comforting. Whenever she told someone that they laughed at her. No, she said, it’s like a hearth. And she meant it. The soft unravelling steam that rose and carried itself downwind over the mouth of the Humber River where the salmon were returning to the sea. Sometimes you woke up and the cars in the university parking lot were covered with ash.

They met three times in the fall, to talk. Arthur had missed her through the summer. Nell had been like a pharmaceutical prescription for depression. They had not sailed on Saginaw Bay. They had stayed on land and his son David was aloof. David had seen a speedboat in a scrap-yard and that felt like the family that summer, he told me. But the sunlight and Michigan had revived his parents. The waitresses wore minis and orange plastic hoop earrings and even that felt like a reason for living. Arthur understood they’d both pushed back from the brink. Arthur and Helen had sort of fallen in love again.

Nell listened to this and heard the spiral of thought that meant it was over and now they were to be friends. It complicated her feelings and she pushed them down like plunging at water. Arthur Twombly was the first man she had let carry her heart on a plate. That’s how she felt, as if her heart were being lifted on a plate out of water. Now she felt the hoses of her heart held her down. She realized she had moved to Corner Brook as the start of a wilful life. She had been passive, afraid of crowds, worried about her own talent. And here she had moved around the powerful Arthur Twombly and had fallen for him and now they were just talking.

It affected her gait. It was walking through cement. She felt like she was wading. It is hard to turn a corner when there is no wall.

Then, in early November, a note in the laundry room. See me at 4.

T
HEY WALKED
to Arthur’s car and he drove her out to the highway, but they turned south rather than out towards Steady Brook. Open the glove box, he said. The light inside came on and there was a red scarf. Arthur slowed down and pulled over. He took the scarf and wrapped it around her eyes. They drove for ten miles with the blindfold on and then he stopped and helped her take it off. There was a man with a truck. This is Gary Tilley, he said.

She thought they were going to rape her. Then Gary’s face opened up. He operated a Cessna off of Pinchgut Lake. They climbed in, Nell in front. The lake was choppy. The dashboard was very old. Dials. Arthur was in the back with a heavy seatbelt buckle across his waist. Gary flicking on the silver tabs and gauges lighting up with real bulbs. They skimmed along and the pontoons clipped the chop and they teetered up and banked to the right. The coastline of the island yawed across the windshield and she thought of her parents. What they must have felt as they knew they were not going to make it. It was a clear evening, you could see a hundred miles. And all along the coast were these little flickers of orange. Bonfires. It was Guy Fawkes night.

They circled back to Pinchgut and landed and said goodbye to Gary and they drove around the very coast that they had seen from above. There was a bonfire through the trees and they took a road down to the beach. Boys were throwing tires on the fire, the exhausted coils of steel-belted radials. A dog was jumping over the fire, until he hurt his paw. Someone gave the dog a beer. Then he took off down the beach. He goes over those rocks, Arthur said, like he’s doing forty miles per hour.

Owner: It’s a wonder he dont break his fucking leg off.

It was Gerard Hurley. Nell could see Arthur was stiffened. Then Joe Hurley came up from the shore and smoothed it over between his brother and Arthur. They had lost land when the pulp mill had raised the level of the dam, and so Gerard was blaming Arthur’s wife. Nell had slightly forgotten about Joe Hurley. Then the whole side of the power of Joe whammed her in the face. She could hardly stand. She needed to sit down. She felt her heart and had not felt anything like it. They got back in the car and took a run at the dirt road up to the highway, but it was loose gravel and Arthur slid the Audi into the grass and then found the right front wheel was spinning. He sat there, his headlights painting the tall grass white and the dark sky above the grass. Then a knock on the window and Arthur rolled it down.

We’ll try lurching the car, Joe said.

There was an insurance refusal box that Arthur had checked and he saw it now, sitting in the glove box under the blindfold, and he read these words: full value. Three kids came up from the beach. A girl of nine looked at them. That’s not a good place to get stuck, she said. Then her grandfather drove up on a red quad. It was Loyola Hurley. He looked at the front of the car. She’s brought up, Loyola said. I’ll get the young feller in his four-by-four.

Gerard Hurley was in the pickup. And they winched the Audi up. They are careful with bumpers and brake lines and they shout at the fact they make cars now with nothing to hook onto.

Even the nine-year-old girl is disdainful of the new automobiles.

They are wearing white shirts and with the rocking and the winching, Arthur has them covered in mud. But theyre out of the ditch.

Now park that, Loyola Hurley said, up by mother.

We should be getting on, Arthur said.

They took a run and made the hill. And there, at the top, with her arms crossed standing by a place where trucks and ATVs are parked, was Loyola’s mother. Four generations of the Hurleys.

S
MOKE DRIFTED ALONG
the tablelands. They drove on and Arthur calmed down. He said he’d had a piece of land down there that he bought off the Hurleys. He wanted to build a summer cabin there. He’d poured a foundation and a man from the church came down, asked him what he was doing. That it was church land. I bought this off Loyola Hurley, Arthur said. And the man said the Hurleys had owned all of this land a hundred years ago but had sold it to Parks Canada and to Bowater or it had been expropriated to widen the highway, or they had willed it to the church, such as what had happened with this piece here. Yes Loyola Hurley may not agree the church owns it, but does he have a deed to the land. The church has the deed.

And so that was the beginning of the bad blood between Arthur Twombly and the Hurleys. When Helen had described to Arthur how the mill was to raise the level of the lake, he took out a topographical map and made a line on it. He saw that his cabin was safe, but the Hurleys would have water at their front door. They had built too close to the shore.

They drove back into Rocky Harbour over the oldest rock on earth, rock made at the beginning of the earth’s cooling period. And Nell felt it. Like they’d left an ancient time and were heading for civilization. They ate in a straitlaced diner in Rocky Harbour. Doilies on the tables and chowder with edges still to the potatoes. Then they doubled back and stayed in the cabin on Grand Lake. Arthur took her down to the beach and showed her the Hurley land, how the water came up now around the cabin. They used to have a hundred feet of land jutting into the lake, he said. That’s where Loyola was when my boys drove up the lake. That’s how he knew they were lost, when the wind picked up.

They made love and Nell felt something happening to her. Something deep in her pelvic bone was being massaged. It was an inner thrumming, was it vibration or was it sound. She was moved in a way gravity moves things. In a way that is impossible to reverse.

FIVE

S
HE WAS NOT AVAILABLE
to see Arthur. It had stretched to nine days. She was counting. He wanted to see her but she could not explain the thrumming feeling. Then she was in the post office and could smell the scotch tape. She felt as if she had outgrown him. At first it was Arthur who had been mulling over a cease in their relationship. She hadnt been able to muster the big heart needed to see that he had been in grief and was pushing through at least that first white gulf and had regained character and an attention to his family. Since then he’s regressed. Arthur was complicating grief-retirement with turning middle aged and the resentment a man has of ploughing his carnal will into one woman for twenty years. Something about that resentment built into a knot and turned her. Nell had noticed his backside, that he was old. But it was also that she had received a feeling from Joe Hurley, a boy her age, and a recognition filled her body that it was someone like Joe Hurley she should be with. Well, her feeling was open on both ends. What Nell felt was that until she saw Joe Hurley that night she was falling in love with Arthur, and now she understood she did not want to waste her life on a man she could not have. He wouldnt want kids. He had David and Sasha and the memory of Zac. You only have one life, she told herself. It was something you had to remind yourself all the time.

She saw Richard Text one day sitting in the dark windows of the Holiday Inn bar, reading a book. She walked in and he looked up and was happy to see her. You, he said, now there’s a reason to live. She was surprised at how warm he was.

Youre the only person in this town who reads a book in public, Nell said.

It’s an excuse to drink, he said.