Object of Your Love (2 page)

I find Morgan in the sewing room with four or five Inuit women. They are using binder twine to tie up bunches of flowers, lichens and grass collected out in the rocky hills where they bloom, during a brief summer, in miraculous little pockets of blazing colour. These will be dried and then used to make natural dyes. The white duffle we import from the South will be stewed in great vats of colour, producing subtle burnt ochres, hazels, olives, saffrons. Then the women will cut up the cloth and sew Inuit fashions for the southern market, thick parkas with heavy whipstitch detail and appliqued seals, narwhal, bears, caribou, all the creatures that southerners want to believe still populate the North but which now in fact exist in abundance only in Inuit dreams.

When the Inuit women see me they become quiet and look down at their weathered hands. I respect these shy, tough, polite people. In their wise, passive eyes are reflected a history of death by starvation, intense cold, drowning on the sea-floe edge, a heritage of powerful legends involving giants, enchanted loons, man-eating monsters, the marriage of young women to eagles. But they are nervous around me because I am living with Egan. It is not that they pass judgement, as the whites do, but that Egan is their White God. He has run the art cooperative for two decades, buying their carvings and drawings, managing the marketing of their art. He is their lifeline to the bewildering South.

Some of these women may be bashful, too, because in the middle of the night they have come to Egan, who is the local justice of the peace. They climb the hill, bloody-faced, when their husbands have beaten them, and ask Egan what they should do. They come to him when their children have been caught by the
RCMP
, breaking into the nursing station for drugs or into the Hudson's Bay store for cases of Coca-Cola. Now they file past me out of the room, bowing and smiling to themselves. It is four thirty and time to go home. Some of the women wear large, expensive wristwatches, but do not consult them. Most of them were born in snowhouses, they know the precise time of day by the angle and quality of the light outside.

Morgan watches them go, saying, “
Tavvauvutit. Tavvauvutit.
Good night.” She comes down from the ladder where she has been hanging the grasses and flowers from the ceiling to dry. She was the first friend I made here, but she became distant after I moved in with Egan. She and Ruth had been good friends.

“She used to sit up there and cry all day and wring her hands,” Morgan said about Ruth after I had moved up the hill. When she told me this, tears ran down her sharp cheekbones and fell in a pot of ammonia and lichens that she was stirring on the stove in the sewing room.

“Is that my fault?” I asked angrily. “That she was unhappy here? I never met the woman.”

The fact is this: Morgan was not grieving for Ruth, she was simply jealous that I was living with Egan. All the whites are envious that Egan and I have something fresh and passionate and unorthodox. They are trapped in their own dull framework of sin. They survive on gossip and liquor and isolation pay. They learn a little
Inuktitut
and exploit the Inuit, trading packs of cigarettes for valuable carvings, which they hope one day to sell to a museum for a fortune. They slip into traditional role-playing. While the women stay home baking and breast-feeding their babies, the men buy rifles and go hunting on weekends with the Inuit men, sliding smoothly over the snow in plywood boxes mounted on
komatiks
pulled by Ski-Doos. In the dark months of winter, when boredom and hysteria run high, the white men molest the Inuit daughters. Some go insane up here. They develop agoraphobia and must be carried blindfolded on stretchers across the airstrip to a waiting Twin Otter.

To avoid such a fate, Morgan married an Inuk, an older man who was once a powerful camp leader when these people lived on the land. She has produced six flat-faced children, each of them cursed with her frizzy fawn hair. She has become more native than the Inuit themselves, carrying her babies everywhere in the deep hood of an
amautik,
while the young Inuit mothers these days wear ordinary parkas purchased at the Hudson's Bay store and transport their children in their arms. She eats whale blubber and is a champion bannock maker, but to the Inuit she is still an outsider. Behind her back, they call her
Pinguarti.
“The Pretender.” She claims that she is not white any more but, like other whites here, who live in a spiritual void, she turns her television set on for company when she gets up in the morning and leaves it going all day with the volume turned off, its images flickering like blue lightning across her living room, even when she's out of the house.

“Would you take a look at this invoice?” I ask her. “I can't find the order in my records.”

She washes her hands slowly at the sink. I am sure she feels me watching her impatiently. She turns, pulling a towel from a rod on the wall, her habitually serious face spread thick with satisfaction. I can hear the whistle of her baby sleeping heavily in the hood of her
amautik.

“What's the matter?” I say, dropping the invoice at my side.

Morgan dries her hands, watching my face carefully. “Ruth's coming back,” she says with quiet triumph. I see the corners of her mouth twitch.

I stare at her for a moment, snort involuntarily, shake my head, look out the window and see snowflakes falling, as big as quarters. I believe for a moment that I must be hallucinating. I did not know we were due for a snowfall. Is it possible that I have fallen asleep at my ledger, that this is all a dream?

“I don't believe you,” I say, and Morgan raises her eyebrows so confidently that my heart flies up in my throat and I ask, “When?”

“Tomorrow. On the morning flight.”

“I thought she hated it here,” I say.

“The city gave her claustrophobia,” Morgan tells me. “She thought the skyscrapers were going to fall on her head.”

I go looking for Egan but I don't find him in his office. His jacket is gone from its hook. He must be home, starting dinner. I burst out the side door of the cooperative, forgetting my own coat, leap down the wooden steps and head up the hill at a half-run. The wet snowflakes hit me in the face, and in the open neck of my shirt, but I don't shiver. I'm sweating with anger. The muddy road has frozen during the afternoon.

The snow is falling so thick that I can barely make out the A-frame as I turn off the road. They tell me that at the height of winter up here the skin freezes after thirty seconds out of doors. Moisture crystallizes in the lungs, it is painful to breathe. The sun shines briefly, white and cold in the sky. I had looked forward to deep winter and coming inside with frostbitten patches like white kisses on my face. I had pictured Egan rubbing my cheeks with his great thick hands until my skin burned. The air is dense with spinning snowflakes. I think of Ruth arriving out of the hot, brilliant, windy southern autumn to this gift, this miracle of snow in September. I think of her living the winter that was supposed to have been mine.

I stamp the snow off my boots, my hand is on the doorknob and I am about to enter the house. Then I notice Egan ten yards away, looking under the house. When I go and stand over him, he straightens up and looks at me calmly. He is a man who is not conscious of how attractive he really is. I look at his ruddy face and his even white teeth, thinking he would make a perfect advertisement for the hardy arctic life. He wears mountain boots and thick cable sweaters and, now that the weather is colder, a navy mariner's wool cap pulled down to his greying eyebrows. He searches my face to see if I've heard the news.

“Ruth is coming back,” I say, hoping it isn't true, inviting him to deny it. He might still stop her if he wanted to. A phone call could prevent her from boarding the plane.

“And the hare is gone,” he answers, as though completing a riddle. His gestures seem to me lighter, more optimistic than I have ever known them, his face, at fifty, suddenly serene and youthful. I see that, all along, what I have taken in him for grief was in fact patience. I wonder this: all those evenings when Egan was moving on top of me, slowly, deliberately, like a great hairy musk-ox swaying out on the tundra, was he holding, in his mind, the image of Ruth's adamant face, her unimaginative, biscuit-coloured hair falling in a dull curve? Or worse—and this is a notion I can scarcely bear—was he in fact employing me as bait, as a kind of cheap decoy, to lure a jealous Ruth back to him? Is this possible? Did he send her subtle and indirect messages, possibly enlisting Morgan as an unwitting but able agent—for surely she has been in touch with Ruth all along, surely the moment I crossed Egan's threshold, her brittle airmail letters were winging their poisonous way southward, shooting, fragile as breath, above the snowy craters to fall through the brass letter slot of Ruth's massive oak door.

“Did you ever,” I ask him pitiably, “did you ever love me? Or were you thinking always about Ruth?”

Egan does not answer my question. Perhaps he cannot. He moves on quickly to practicalities. “The wisest thing for you to do now is to leave the community,” he tells me. “The sooner the better. There's a good chance you could get out in the morning.” I see that he wants to spare Ruth the embarrassment of meeting me on the road. He wants to erase overnight what we had, to restore the past. How convenient for him if I were to board the very flight from which Ruth alights in the morning, take the seat warmed by her body on her way north, while the plane lifts, banks, turns its nose toward the equator, carrying me away forever. The very thought of it rankles me.

“Why should I go?” I ask bitterly. “Why should I leave a place I love, just for your comfort?”

“Stella,” he says kindly, taking a step forward, reaching out to touch my arm, but I pull away. “Don't do this to yourself,” he tells me. “You're young. You have a long life ahead of you. Get out now while you can. Escape this godforsaken place.”

“Don't talk down to me,” I say angrily. “I'm not a child. I've been your lover!” I look away, my eyes falling on Ruth's greenhouse, which stands darkly against the luminous sky. Perhaps I should not have scoffed at the glass house. Perhaps it is not Ruth's Folly, after all, but Ruth's Triumph, her private monument, fragile defiance of this infertile land, this bald and windswept curve of the earth with its strange power to seduce, absorb, unite.

Then, contradicting myself, I do something that is just like what one of Egan's spoiled children might do. I pick up a ski pole that has been leaning against the house all summer. Stepping toward the greenhouse, I raise the pole high, feeling the need, the right, to smash something. I bring it down on the greenhouse wall, connect with the glass, feel it shattering beneath my blow. Again I raise the pole and bring it down. I am hot and trembling with sweet revenge, expecting that, at any moment, Egan will step forward and grab me, pin my wrists against my sides. Perhaps this is what I want. Perhaps I long to feel one last time his iron grip, the power he has over me, over this community. But he stays where he is, willing, it would seem, to let me do whatever damage I want, if it will satisfy me, get me out of his life. I continue my destruction, wielding the pole like a sword, cleaving the air with it. Slivers of glass fly like rain. I feel them piercing the backs of my hands like needle pricks. When Ruth arrives in the morning, I think, when she climbs up the hill, she will find in ruins whatever hopes or illusions the greenhouse embodies for her. I swing the pole. The splintering of glass, like brittle thunder, will be heard, I believe, down in the settlement. I hope it will carry over the round hills and clear out across the icy bay.

I walk down the road in darkness to the co-op building. I have never officially given up my apartment above the print shop. It has not been assigned to anyone else. I intend to reoccupy it. I fish for the key I am sure must be somewhere at the bottom of my purse, open a side door, climb the narrow stairs. Unready to face the heartlessness of the rooms, the unadorned walls, the mean furniture, the cold, textureless surfaces, I do not turn on the lights, but rest in darkness at the kitchen table with my coat on.

The image comes to me of Egan climbing the stairs of the A-frame, changing the bed sheets, moving about the room looking for anything I might have left behind: a comb, a pocket novel, a letter. I picture him stepping to the bureau, setting upright once more the photograph of Ruth, whose face has been thrust for so long against the bitter wood. The Resurrection of Ruth. Her picture gazes now upon the room, upon the bed where Egan and I made love, repossessing them. I do not sleep that night. Just after dawn, I hear the distant drone of a Twin Otter. Moving to the window, still in my coat, for I have not even turned on the heat in the apartment, I see the plane grow large and dark in the sky, making its approach to the airstrip, circling above the community, banking neatly, its wings catching the unobstructed rays of the rising sun.

*   *   *

Egan will no longer employ me at the co-op. My presence there would be awkward, now that Ruth has returned. However, he does not have the nerve to expel me from the apartment. A wise and patient man, he may believe that time will eventually drive me out. I manage to get a job almost immediately at the Hudson's Bay store, doing the books. The store is on the far edge of the community, at the end of the road that hugs the bay, among hills of empty oil drums thrown out in the snow to rust. Here, exiled from the co-op, at the distant perimeter of the settlement, I sit in a small, dim office at the back, with a window looking out into the store. I can see the Inuit women listlessly pushing their carts up and down the bright, barren aisles. The Hudson's Bay store is, like the shopping malls of the South, an end in itself, a destination, a place to kill time. In the vacant afternoons, when snow falls steadily outside like an opaque white screen, the women drift in, they shuffle aimlessly through the store, staring at the shelves, searching, searching for something that will make them happy.