Hunger's Brides (103 page)

We sorted it out like adults.
She intended to get pregnant—end of story
. Perhaps it was already too late? I ventured. (Not a successful counter.)
Birth control, if there was to be any, was now my responsibility
. The cost of raising a child would be hers.
Fine—she'd already missed her period
.

Game. Set. Match.

As her belly swelled I found various ways to console myself. There was a wading pool in the park on the way home from work and soon I would be spending quality time there among the young mothers and the about-to-drop, wading through the tenor riot of children out of school…. In the grassy shade of poplars, young women with infants slung on a hip, new mothers, melon-breasted, giving rapturous suck … adrift, becalmed in their animal selves, sated, paunched … bodies broken in the most primitive ways. My daydreams came as a sort of benediction. But I digress.

There was also the indulgence of the black Saab ragtop I'd been wanting. I started stopping in at dealerships. I took the odd test drive.

And Beulah.

Often it began with a call left on my office answering machine. Never at the house. By mid-March she had stopped coming to class, at least to mine. This wasn't high school; there were no gold stars for attendance. Neither was there cause for alarm. Based on the course-work already done she would at least pass. And if she deigned to take
the finals, her Honours status would not be in jeopardy. After the last few rounds of cuts, virtually every department in the humanities or pure sciences was starved for top-drawer grad students. I'd already talked to Comparative Literature. She'd be accepted on reputation alone.

With the school year ended, her call caught me killing time at the office, filing papers, running over my plans for the summer. May 7, 1993. It was still four months from that day near Banff when she took me to the edge.

Did I have plans for tomorrow? I'll admit to being pleased she remembered my birthday. A day which Madeleine had chosen to spend away, visiting a colleague in San Francisco.

I remember that birthday for a number of reasons. As perhaps the first day I neglected to tell Beulah about the pregnancy, for one.

Saturday, May 8. Beulah's diaries contain no entry for this date—odd, given the religious discipline of her diary maintenance. The trouble with coil-bound notebooks is that one can't always tell if pages have been torn out. In hindsight I'm convinced they must have been, given the day's significance, at least for me. In a perfect world she could tell it herself. I cannot write it for her, tell it as she would, and if I do write it, I do not do it for myself. No. Here, at this intersection of our shared story and my tardive reading of her brief life's work, it first began to dawn on me: the enormous, shaming, vertical chasm that yawned between her experience of life and my own. While I was making thinly clever cuts at art and fashion, she was processing the ‘tottery pottery' before us so much more deeply…. No, let me say this plainly. Of a day I had made shit, she had somehow made art. I saw this when I came to her chapters on craft, saw their origin and knew I had been there too … at a craft fair.

An act of penance, then, as sincere this time as it is small. How would she want to see me tell it? How does the defendant answer to the charges?

He pulls up in front of her apartment, its little ground-floor balcony set back in a shock of untended honeysuckle. He resists the urge to hit the horn. The Saab convertible is a sober testament to European-engineered elegance, stately in its understatement, and this is not a young bachelor's spree.

If she is impressed she does not show it much.

“Very menopausal.” She buckles in, looking straight ahead. His sphinx in a bucket seat. Leather overnight bag, quilted cotton jacket. Long-sleeved black T-shirt, black jeans, white sneakers. Her glossy hair is drawn back in a long braid, reddish in the bright sun.

He pulls away briskly from the curb. Madeleine called less than an hour ago from San Francisco to wish him a happy fortieth. When the phone rang he was in the bathroom conducting a critical survey of his hairline. He has taken to cutting the ponytail shorter—more or less regulation length for the Cartel hit man, Hollywood style. But before it thins down to a sort of white-coolie look he may have to crop it off entirely. Madeleine was calling also to tell him she was extending her trip by a few days. By all means, stay. Call it recklessness, call it young love, but now he doesn't really care who sees them. He will make several mistakes this day. His first at being forty. Call it a kind of innocence.

His mood is buoyant, and why not? The plan is to indulge him with a night's debauch in Pincher Creek, and to indulge her with a stop en route at a craft fair. In a town called Okotoks. Over the past few months she has acquired a taste for prairie anthropology—not, mercifully, wagon-wheels and arrowheads, but small-town flea markets, antique shops, country fairs.

They drive with the top down through new-planted fields, past silos like fifties rocket ships, through the sweetish reek of hog farms. Over the blast of air at seventy miles an hour they talk little. This suits them both. He has learned the hard way how quickly these girls can abuse his confidences. Anyway, she has always disdained small talk. From the first days in her first class with him, she kept to the essentials. When eventually she did open up—no more than a handful of times—it came as a shockwave. Passion, probing insights, sharp turns of mind that poured forth in a stunning rush. Here was the author of those amazing papers, all but invisible, inaudible, at other times.

He hasn't seen this version of Beulah for some months now. A shame but, he supposes, unavoidable in the circumstances. Their future is nowhere, their past officially meaningless. The present? Well, the present is much like today, a hunt for scalps and souvenirs.

Okotoks, he seems to remember, is about an hour south. On the freeway in a Swedish sport sedan, the trip turns out to be thirty-five minutes to what is fast becoming a bedroom community of Calgary,
for people driving cars much like his. As he pulls into the parking lot by the school's gymnasium he sees a real chance of running into someone he knows.

Beulah and he never touch in public, making their intimacies the more intense when they come. And there's always the age difference. Scant cover, but in a pinch he will introduce her as a student. It would have helped had she been less beautiful. But then, on the drive down, glancing at her profile … implacably his eyes seek out the indispensable
flaw
. In this case a slight recessiveness of the chin. Making a little double-chin a near inevitability in forty years. Or even less. It helps him to imagine it lightly whiskered. Her nose, in profile, is just prominent enough to mark her ethnicity. Of course it would be wrong, he chides himself, to ever think of this as a flaw. Rather it is just the sort of flaw to put a face on the cover of a fashion magazine.

With Beulah, the pleasure has now palled somewhat, certainly, but it is still more intense at its best, at its worst, than anything in memory. The truth is, it never occurs to him to end things that day. But that she might think otherwise is a natural mistake: he does have something on his mind, something awkward to tell her. Awkward, yes, but it also never occurs to him to keep Madeleine's pregnancy a secret. Honesty is the bedrock on which all his adulteries are founded.

He turns off the ignition, crisply pulls up the handbrake. He leads the way up the walk. Welcome to the Okotoks Art Trading Post. On an upturned washtub in the foyer some poor sodbuster in chaps and hushpuppies declaims cowboy poetry. In the gym, a savage hunt for relics. Silver-haired ratepayers in elbow-patched tweeds mingle with clod-booted landsmen. Tell me again why we're here? he asks. She calls it a kitsch hunt. On a dais paces a tanned master of ceremonies with a microphone headset, a selling wrinkle picked up from the shopping channel. The MC is making protean use of the word
wonderful
. Don't miss the wonderful artists' panel discussion in Room 101 at noon. Snacks welcome. Bring your purchases in for signing. Come meet the artists, be among the elect. They're just like you and me. This is Renaissance art's logical conclusion: craft superstars. Michelangelos of needlepoint and duck decoys.

He lets her go on ahead, feels a dark flowering of lust as he watches her merge into the crowd. He moves off on his own, tends it, this cruel petulance of pleasure postponed.

Meanwhile he gathers in his own harvest of tribute, registers the flicker of a tall woman's glance that sifts the evidence, deciphers the sex code: white male, six feet, blue eyes, light-brown hair, close-cropped beard, touches of grey. Bare feet in leather sandals, blue T-shirt, cream linen suit. Hit man on holiday, shopping for handicrafts. It is a lot to take in.

Enjoying himself he wades into the pop-art bazaar. Prairie chapels made of Popsicle sticks. Elk fashioned from clothespins, pipe-cleaner antlers. Salt-dough poodles. Brooches and pendants out of something called Fimo. Pot holders, oven mitts, WELCOME mats. From corncobs, a cat's scratching post. And some abomination based on an aboriginal dreamcatcher—a kind of jute-hoop medicine wheel with bits of cut-glass ruby suspended in the centre, satin tassels from the lower rim.

In a perfect world he might have found his mother's pencil landscapes here.

The roving eye is drawn to the intense action at a table of Sante Fe-style silver and turquoise. All are women in their mid-forties, well-kept, hungry-eyed. New-faded jeans and jean shirts, little feet in gleaming cowboy boots.

Farther on, further out, the Lace Lady models her wearable art, a selection of shoes, handbags and hats, aprons and dresses, all garlanded in lace and dried flowers. She wears a velvet choker trimmed with lace, tiny dried roses at that whitest of throats. Elbow-length gloves and granny boots festooned with flowers and lace, scented with potpourri. A flesh and blood altar to Prairie Victorian.

Some time later he glimpses Beulah on the far side of the gym and wends his way towards her to the strains of whale song and pan pipes. She stands before a display of what appear to be crystals—a big egg sac, ruptured to reveal amethysts in their raw and perfect potency. He follows her at a little distance and off to one side, keeping a screen of shoppers between them. A few tables farther along she stops beside a sandwich board bearing the Spanish word for
snail shell
or
conch
, but these are unlike any shell he has seen. Through the crowd he draws a little nearer, steps gingerly to avoid having his sandalled feet crushed by pointy boots. Perplexed she picks a shell up and cradles it in her palm, flinches slightly as the aged vendor reaches for her wrist; the old man hesitates then raises one to his ear, shakes the thing gently. To
show her. With an expression of something like fascination she holds a cupped hand to her ear.

He can see the objects clearly now: ovoid, walnut-sized, earth-coloured. They might be some kind of mineral accretion or a seed pod, but are more likely fired and lightly glazed clay. As she lifts her eyes finally to meet his, the old man blinks. Quickly she replaces the thing and moves on.

He catches up to her between the soapstone walruses and a rack of Indian braves in copper intaglio.

“Let's get some air.”

“A few minutes.”

“How about I buy everything from here to the exit,” he says, “and we sort through it later.”

“It's your birthday, not mine.”

“How about Hiawatha here? Maybe the guy's got a Pocahontas, too. Let's ask.” He turns towards the metal smith without taking his eyes from her face. “Sir?”

“Don't.” A flash of anger as she turns away.

“Not that way—the cafeteria, out there.”

He needs to eat, he knows this edge, of a hypoglycaemic cruelty. They go out the gym fire-door to the tent pavilion: Cowboy Cafeteria, three self-serve food counters on cut-down chuckwagons. In the ceaseless prairie wind the white canvas awnings sag and bulge. In them he sees the burst bellows of a piper's cheeks—and where
is
the piper? The Tourettic hoppery of a Celtic revival is all this event lacks.

They take a table. Across the aisle teen punks drink Diet Pepsis while their parents shop. A reminder, if he still needs one, of how near the city this is. Two girls about sixteen. One tonsured, the other's mohawk teased into violet and lime spikes. Across from him, one thigh scissored over the other, elbows on the table, Beulah twists to look out over the prairie. Away from the burgers and chili dogs, the Tom Thumb donuts, the nachos and the cheese-flavoured vinyls, away from the bearded epicure who gnaws at a cinnamon roll. In a sawdust mumble the sage starts to share with her the oceanic depths of his fashion intuitions: Such an astonishing assortment of piercings, he observes, crummily. We are perhaps to interpret all this as a resurgence of the Dionysian. Notice the Swiss precision of the tiny silver
barbells through each nostril; the outermost rim of the punk's ear pierced at short intervals for a brace of overlapping rings. The tandem disks of farm machinery, or a blade array—for a surgical appliance, wouldn't she agree? Notice the metal standards—like so many prospector's flags planted at each tip and prominence—brow, lip, tongue. The body's final reclamation for the machine age. Slowly we are become recyclable. The more delicate the formation the better: septum, nipples, navel, glans, labia.
“Chic
kebabs,” he lisps and looks at her keenly—surely this she cannot fail to appreciate …