Elizabeth and After (20 page)

“I’ll tell you what. Let’s drive around the back and we can burn the lot of them. I won’t tell if you don’t.” He closed his hand on Adam’s arm. His palm scraped against Adam’s skin like the gritty lichen-covered granite that is West Gull township’s best crop. “Just joking. But I could help you with a couple of those signs.”

Half an hour later they were out on the water of Dead Swede Lake. Gerald had Adam rowing. It was his first time in a boat since the days when he used to fish with his father. Compared to his child’s memory, the oars were surprisingly thin and light; a few hard pulls and the old boat was skimming through the water.

Gerald’s plan was to hug the shore until they reached the
point that jutted towards the lake’s centre—a long treed finger with a giant willow at the tip—then continue on to the McKelvey dock. There they would plant two
LUKE RICHARDSON FOR COUNCILLOR
signs, one facing up to the house and one facing the water. “The one thing I can’t promise,” Gerald pointed out, “is that William is actually going to
vote
for your man. But at least he’ll have the choice. And that’s the democratic way.”

Adam knew McKelvey and Richardson were barely on speaking terms. At the last West Gull Hornets’ Christmas fundraiser, Luke had dumped McKelvey to the ice when he wasn’t expecting it. But McKelvey had done his drinking before instead of after the game. The next time Richardson came down the ice McKelvey dropped his stick and gloves, grabbed Luke by the shoulders, whirled him around and threw him over the boards. The next week’s front page of the
Weekly Bugle
was taken up by three pictures: the first showed Luke Richardson sprawled in the front-row seats; the second had McKelvey lying flat on his back on the ice, his hand over his mouth; the third showed the two men shaking hands.

To sweeten his proposition Gerald Boyce offered to help Adam get rid of two more signs, which he would use to plug a hole in the barn and remind the animals what kind of a country they were lucky to be alive in.

Adam had been rowing for only a few minutes when Gerald Boyce put a finger across his lips for silence, then grabbed the oars. They were just emerging from behind the willow when Adam saw the McKelvey dock. Someone had come out from the woods and was walking towards it. Elizabeth. Now Gerald Boyce was soundlessly pushing them out of sight under the huge willow into branches that curled and drooped down to the water. The long thin leaves brushed
Adams face and he was enveloped in their dry lemony smell. Through the leaves he could still see the dock. Grey weathered boards creaked dangerously as Elizabeth, apparently oblivious, walked to the edge then stood stretching in the sun. She stripped off her sweater, slid her feet out of her shoes. Slowly rocking, she balanced on the dock. Adam was concentrating so intently he could feel the planks flexing beneath his own feet. Elizabeth removed her T-shirt, her pants, her underwear. From this distance her nipples were tiny pink blurs at the tips of her breasts. She was looking straight towards them but they were the sun, the blinding light off the water, a cascade of lime green leaves. She took a quick run. For a moment she was suspended in the air, her dark hair flowing back like the feathers of some mythological bird. Adam went to push the boat further out of sight but Gerald Boyce grabbed his arm again. His brow was trenched, his mouth half-open.

Elizabeth was swimming. She had a smooth strong stroke, the lake was not large, soon she would be able to see them. “We could look the other way,” Adam whispered to Gerald.

“You
look the other way.”

Elizabeth broke the surface. In a few seconds her eyes would be locked onto Adam’s. Then came a loud bellow from the woods behind the dock. McKelvey appeared wearing overalls and a flannel shirt, a towel over his shoulder. Elizabeth turned and swam towards him; when she got to the dock he reached down and pulled her out of the water. Elizabeth’s wet hair fell halfway down her back; she shook it and McKelvey barked with pleasure and surprise as the spray whipped across his face.

“Jay-sus,” Gerald Boyce whispered. He gave a long depressed sigh. McKelvey put his arms around Elizabeth, who pressed herself against him, overalls and all, and it appeared
certain that the McKelveys were going to lie down on the dock and devour each other with Adam Goldsmith and Gerald Boyce crouched in their boat behind the willow tree, going insane with jealousy. But McKelvey just wrapped Elizabeth in the towel. He gathered her clothes in his arms as they started away from the lake. For a moment their voices were inaudible, then Elizabeth gave a laugh that faded as she raced to the house, McKelvey calling as he followed.

Luke Richardson was voted to the town council the same week John F. Kennedy was elected president of the United States. Luke didn’t hesitate to identify with the glitter and excitement of the Kennedy accession. The Kennedys were glamorous, surrounded by the famous and the prestigious; their parties and their cheerleaders and America’s love affair with them filled the newspapers and the television screens. Luke would put his hand on Adam’s shoulder and confide that when he saw Kennedy on television, he
knew
he was seeing his own future.

One Friday afternoon in early September Luke stopped by Adam’s office at closing time to ask him to telephone Amy, tell her he wouldn’t be home until midnight or morning because he had an emergency committee meeting in Cobourg. It was six o’clock and the sun was already low enough in the sky that Adam could see its reflection off the big plate-glass window of the Timberpost. When he called Amy, knowing Luke had put him up to this to avoid her anger, she thanked him coldly and hung up abruptly. A few minutes later she called back and asked Adam to join her for dinner since she had already marinated the steaks.

Adam paused. He’d been having barbecues with the Richardsons all summer and the prospect of being released for
one night was not unpleasant. His dining-room table was still piled with papers from his mother’s estate and he’d begun renovations on the second floor—finally giving away his parents’ clothes and redoing their room with the intention of turning the house from a mausoleum dedicated to his youth to a place he could either make his own or sell.

“We’ll have a good time,” Amy said, her voice pleading. Adam gave in. On the way to the cottage he found himself dreading the evening alone with her, the inevitable confession of unhappiness. But he arrived to find she’d made a giant pitcher of martinis she seemed already to have sampled. Martinis! The Infant Voice of the Inner Circle of the Church of the Unique God had never allowed such a vile concoction to touch his holy tongue. By sunset Adam was lying face down on the living-room couch, looking out on the dark mirror that was Long Gull Lake while Amy massaged scented oil into his back.

Then it was Adam’s turn to do Amy. She was wearing tight white pants and a brassiere he couldn’t unhook. “If you don’t know how, you’d better learn” was the only help she’d offer. When he finally got the brassiere open, its two narrow wings lay limply by her sides like a fallen bird of modesty. This was definitely not a Ladies of the Inner Circle situation.

“What next?” Adam asked.

“Now you put on the oil.” She handed him the bottle. The massage oil was a dark amber fluid with a sharp minty odour. He poured a small quantity into his palm, tipped the oil from his hand onto the centre of Amy’s back. “You have to rub it in,” she said. West Gull’s most eligible bachelor had never touched the naked back of a woman other than his mother. He found Amy’s skin was soft, if vaguely rubbery. As Adam pushed down she gave out a little sigh and the sound startled
him because a few evenings ago, at the Knight house, Maureen had also sighed, and in that sigh Adam had heard a loneliness even more lonely than the time she’d been the single mussel on the guest platter. “Both hands,” Amy instructed. Adam pushed and pulled. The room filled with the scent of mint mixed with Amy’s sweat. After he’d rubbed in several palms full of oil, carefully working his way from the small floating shoulder blades he was beginning to see as the lost islands of her innocence down to the thickly muscled small of her back, Amy asked him to put on the kettle. Drinking his coffee in the darkness, watching the stars grow denser as night fell, Adam could feel—even more than during the actual event—Amy’s touch on his back. Her hands had been small and delicate and as they rubbed the oil into Adam’s skin he’d felt his muscles bunch up in resistance, first twisting away from the unprecedented touching, then giving in to the invasion of a peculiar floating warmth—something dangerously close to gratitude. Amy sat silent, entirely calm and self-possessed, as though in Luke’s absence people were always coming over from the New & Used to exchange a backrub or two.

By the time Adam got home the martinis were starting to wear off. He made some more coffee and switched on the television news. One segment was a special look at the incoming presidential couple. The camera zoomed in on Jackie’s face: her eyes softly luminous, her bones perfectly honed, her cheeks hollow with unknown sorrows, her wide eager mouth flashing its brilliant smile to all in need of her light. That must be, Adam thought, what Luke wanted from Amy: poor Amy who walked around town in her bulging white sweaters and over-tight pants looking as though she was about to burst into tears.

The camera went to John F. Kennedy, the legend himself, the war hero, the carnal embodiment of the American Empire.
Empire, yes, if ever there had been Empire, this was surely Empire itself, the most powerful the world had ever known, and when Kennedy raised his hand in what seemed to be a wave to the crowd but was in fact an effortlessly graceful salute directed to the entire population of the entire planet, Adam could almost hear the electronic roar sweeping through the skies: Caesar! Caesar! Caesar!

Suddenly Adam felt an unexpected tender stab for Amy; somehow—despite his half-contempt for her because she, like him, was under Luke’s dominion—she had effortlessly seen his invisible chains, undone them with a lot less fuss than he’d made over her brassiere, yet known where to stop so there would be no hangover of guilt. Why, Adam suddenly asked himself, could he not in the same spirit supply Maureen with what she needed, yet do so in a way that left them free of obligation? After all, what did Maureen want? Just a bit of company and some face-saving ritual.

Elizabeth thought about him sometimes. Dorothy Dean, her friend from the Inner Circle who credited prayer for taking her from subbing to full-time Grade Three, told her that he was being set up with Maureen Knight, the doctor’s daughter. Maureen came to the school three afternoons a week to teach the senior classes French. Elizabeth found her stilted and artificial, as though she was keeping her real self back—a real self that judged them all provincial and wanting. “I don’t know if I can see them together,” Elizabeth said, immediately ashamed of herself. “Two old maids,” Dorothy shrugged. “They’ll be slow but sure, believe me.”

That September Elizabeth discovered she was pregnant again. She treasured every minute of it and she was so desperately
happy that she almost had to laugh at the way she kept checking her panties for stains. One night she woke up, her stomach convulsed with cramps, the sheets soaked in blood.

“Bad luck,” Dr. Knight said, “but at least we know you’re still fertile.” He admitted her to hospital to have her womb scraped in case some irregularity was preventing a secure implantation. Elizabeth took a month’s sick leave, got a book on nutrition and much to McKelvey’s disgust began eating yoghurt and wheatgerm. But aside from a false alarm, which made her realize she wanted a baby so much she was afraid to get pregnant for fear of another miscarriage, nothing happened.

Adam didn’t see Elizabeth again until the next New Year’s party. He was looking out on the township’s celebrants from his usual station at the mantlepiece when Elizabeth and William McKelvey came into view. She was wearing a long navy gown that fell elegantly from her hips and made everyone else look as though they’d forgotten to dress for the occasion. But before Adam could greet them the McKelveys moved off. Adam, determined to make it through the party, braced himself. Having learned to live without so much else, he could surely survive his feelings for Elizabeth.

He had joined another conversation when there was a hand on his elbow, a touch so light he wondered if he’d really felt it.

“Look, I’m really sorry about what I said last summer. It just—”

“Don’t worry about it. Anyway I’m not what you thought.”

“You don’t have to say that.”

“I know. But I am. Because I’m not.”

“I’m glad. I mean—I’m glad you told me. Would you accept my apologies?”

Her voice was back to its usual intimacy and Adam’s face was as flushed as when he’d spied on her across the lake. “Why don’t we just forget it?” he said.

“I felt so terrible when you stopped coming to the library committee. I was afraid I’d offended you.”

“No. Really. I was just busy helping Luke get elected.”

Whenever a tray came by she would change their empty glasses for full. Gradually the room shrank and nothing was left but Elizabeth’s voice, Elizabeth’s face looking up to his. By midnight he had drunk so many glasses of wine that most of his weight was on the mantlepiece. The orchestra was playing, Elizabeth had folded herself into McKelvey, and the whole room, except Adam, was joined in a circle singing “Auld Lang Syne.” Amy finally dragged him into the circle, inserting him between herself and Luke, and as the voices raised in a chorus Adam joined in, his own voice loud and grateful to have been rescued from a moment he was still shaking free of, like a saved swimmer who’d already given himself up to the despair of loneliness. That was when he looked across the room and saw Maureen Knight, bracketed between her parents, her eyes reproachfully on his.

That January Adam started going to the movies with Maureen. Once a month plus occasional holidays or special features, he’d call on her and they’d drive into Kingston. First it would be dinner at one of the hotels accompanied by a half-bottle of wine. During dinner Maureen would talk about her father’s various cases, the adventures of her two cats, the birds they did or didn’t kill. After a post-dinner cup of tea which Maureen always took with lemon and a trip to the washroom, they would go to see whatever was showing at the university film club. Often it would be a European movie and when there was
subtitled dialogue Maureen liked to whisper her own translation. Then it was time to drive back to West Gull. Near the beginning there were some uncomfortable pauses when they arrived at Maureen’s door. Should he progress from the customary handshake to a chaste kiss? Delay the decision by going inside? Somehow without discussing it they settled on a peculiarly vigorous method of shaking hands, a rough dance that involved all four hands jumping up and down followed by Maureen saying, “See you soon.” Adam felt proud of himself, a virtuous Samaritan who’d offered a bandage to a wounded fellow-traveller.