Object of Your Love (6 page)

Joseph produced a camera, motioned for the four of them to stand together so that he could take a picture. “I'm not standing in any fuckin' picture with
her!
” Garreth said, and he pushed his way across the room and through the door.

Out on the sidewalk, he noticed the wineglass still in his hand and threw it against the gallery wall. Hedda tried to follow him but a cluster of reviewers closed in on her. Dempster went out and picked the pieces of glass up off the sidewalk.

“Every last piece sold,” Joseph told Hedda excitedly at the end of the evening, but she did not seem to be listening.

The next day she carried everything up out of her studio and into the backyard.

“What's Mom doing?” Angus asked Garreth, who had come home to pack all his belongings for university. They were to leave together in three days. They stood at an upper window and watched her throw a live match onto the heap of paint cans, plywood, moulds, tools. The pile burst into flame, a paint can exploded. Angus made for the door, but Garreth tackled him from behind, wrestled him to the ground and pinned him there.

“Leave her alone!” he growled into Angus's ear. “If we're lucky, the stupid bitch will set
herself
on fire!”

When the fire trucks arrived Hedda ran indoors. Angus met the fire chief on the front porch.

“Is that your mother in there?” he asked Angus. “She's pretty upset. We got a call from the neighbours about the fire. Why would she want to do a thing like this?” He searched Angus's face with concern. “Maybe you should go in and see how she is. Will you be all right with her? Are there any neighbours who could help? What about your father? We'll get rid of the crowd for you.”

Angus called Dempster and told him about the fire. “No, she's not hurt. But we need you here. She likes to know you're in the house. So will you get here as soon as you can?”

But, Dempster didn't come home at all that night.

“Where's you father?” asked Hedda the next morning when Angus brought her an omelette in bed.

“Maybe he had to go out of town or something,” said Angus, his expression confused, frightened.

Angus called Dempster's office again and left a message but Dempster stayed away another night.

Hedda managed to get herself out of bed by the time Dempster's reflection fell on the river as he crossed the footbridge at noon the next day. The image of his white shirt floated across the water like a cloud. At the end of the bridge he turned right and headed, not down the street, but along the river path. Crossing the narrow strip of park he entered the house through the glass room, the door that was never locked. Hedda, who was on her knees in the kitchen mixing clay in a plastic tub, turned, startled.

“I thought you were a burglar.”

“I forgot my key.”

“I didn't hear the cab.”

“There was no cab. I walked. I had a lot to think about.”

He stood there with the sun on his back and the river shining behind him like a luminous ribbon. The water, in the curves of the river, was now yellow and scummy with algae. In the thick jungle of bullrushes, insects buzzed, stupid with the heat.

Dempster stepped over Charles, asleep on the floor and blocking the kitchen door. He shoved his hands unhappily into his pockets. Hedda held her breath and waited, kneeling with both hands bearing down on the plastic tub for support.

“I'm going to have to leave you, Hedda,” Dempster said.

“Oh.”

Hedda stood up then and wiped the clay powder from her hands. She was wearing a white shirt with the collar open, revealing her frail neck. Perhaps she had expected Dempster and had put on this fresh blouse to meet him. He tried not to look at her lovely throat, at her slender thighs, which were unexpectedly sensuous in tight jeans.

“Maybe you're feeling restless because the boys are leaving,” she suggested. “That should pass. It's a change, something we can get used to.”

“That's not it. It has nothing to do with the boys.”

“What, then?”

“I don't know what you want in life, Hedda. I don't know any more what to do for you. That fire you set after the show. You've never been more successful. But you had to destroy that. You have to push everything to the edge. I'm not sure I've been good for you. I think you have to decide for yourself whether you're going to live or die.”

They both looked sad and apologetic and a little incredulous, because, after all they'd been through, she could not believe—and he too, he could not quite believe—that he was leaving her. After all those times he'd pulled her back from the brink, he was leaving her now, when she was up on her feet, dressed in a crisp blouse, apparently whole and lucid, her hands covered with productive clay?

“I just feel—I'm just so tired, Hedda.”

She said, “I'm willing to try harder. I'll go back into therapy—”

“No, Hedda.”

“Maybe there's another pill—”

“Hedda, stop!” He turned then and crossed the room, a little impatient, frowning. He looked restlessly out at the river. Hedda, noticing for the first time the fine lines on his face, illuminated by the bright reflection from the water, was shocked to see the toll exacted by the events of their life together. He was nearly fifty. She knew he had to get out now.

“There's another complication,” he said unhappily.

“A woman?”

“Yes.”

“Ah.”

Hedda smiled sadly to herself. “When did it happen?” she asked, as though knowing the exact sequence of events might help her understand.

“I don't know,” said Dempster, looking guilty, confused. “Months ago. It was one day when I was out in the Chevy. It was spring.”

*   *   *

The day after Dempster left, Hedda closed the door to the cellar, pressed her forehead against the rough wood and prayed, though she did not know to whom. She waited for the fall to come. She wanted something to change, to mark off from the past this new stage in her life, but summer wouldn't leave. She longed for rain and wind and cold weather and coloured leaves but they didn't come. It occurred to her that this might be some kind of test, some trick, calculated to confuse. Life seemed full of tricks now. She had to be careful.

In the air there was a sense of dangerous ripeness and a feeling of both luck and impatience at this gift of a prolonged summer. The gardens were saturated with colour, the flowers threatened to explode, and the apples, heavy in the backyard tree, still refused to drop. Through September, the reflection of the willows in the glass room was so convincing that birds flew against the windows all day long, killing themselves. Daily, Hedda found their stiff little bodies on the porch and buried them in the garden. She saw people passing along the river, pedestrians and cyclists on the dirt path hugging the bank, so many people passing. For the first time in her life, she wondered who all these people were and where they were going.

Walking with Charles along the river one Saturday, Hedda ran into Dempster, accompanied by a woman. He didn't know what to say.

“Look at this fall we're having, Hedda!” he cried, embarrassed, ridiculously cheerful. It was October and finally the leaves were in full colour. “I never knew autumn was such a beautiful season!” He introduced his companion as Suzie and Hedda wondered if a grown woman could really be called that. Suzie was somewhere in her thirties, healthy, energetic, with straight brown bangs and a perky ponytail. Hedda marvelled at her wholeness, her contentment, her smooth face. She looked entirely unscathed by life. She smiled kindly at Hedda and walked on a little further, leaving Dempster and Hedda to talk.

“She's very pretty,” said Hedda. Dempster reddened, objected mildly.

“It's not her prettiness, it's—she's so—she's just so damned happy. Hedda, I—”

“Do you hear from the boys?”

“Yes. They send their love, of course. They do love you. Never doubt that.” As he spoke, Dempster was patting Charles soundly on the head, scratching him under the chin, rubbing his big floppy ears, all the while unable to take his eyes off Hedda.

She said, “I thought at least Angus—”

“Angus—even Angus has a lot of healing to do.”

Walking home with Charles, Hedda said, “Well, what do you think of her, Charles? She seems to be making Dempster very happy. Are you sure you don't want to go and live with them? Join the great exodus? She looks like she might be a dog lover.”

In November, Hedda put on a coat and went out onto the second-storey deck to pull the geraniums up out of her big clay pots. She tied string around their roots so that she could take them in the house and hang them upside down over the winter. While she was working with the string, she heard Charles bark. Looking down, she saw him racing across the narrow park to greet Dempster, who was passing by.

“How are you doing, old soldier?” Dempster's voice drifted across the yellowed grass and up to Hedda. He clapped Charles on the back. “You old trooper! Where do you get your energy?” Hedda continued tying her string. Then, feeling Dempster's eyes on her, sensing his curiosity, his guilt, she withdrew to the house and watched him walk away down the dusty path, throwing glances over his shoulder at the house.

The first snow fell early in December. Hedda, removing the curtains on the deck windows to wash them, pushed aside the sliding door, bent and scooped up a handful of light, fresh snow. She pressed it to her cheek, felt its purity, its numbing cold. She placed her hand flat on the cool glass and looked out at a film of ice forming on the river. When he was packing his bags in September, Dempster had said to her, “I always wondered why you never tried to drown yourself in the river. It's so obvious and so handy. I would think it would be a gentle way to go, after all the things you've tried.”

In January Hedda worked in the kitchen, potting up narcissus, daffodils, crocuses, in anticipation of spring. She rubbed the moist black earth between her fingers, raised it to her nostrils, sniffed and thought about her clay. She refinished the kitchen table, running her hand over and over the aged wood, warm as flesh in the winter sun. She mended curtains that had needed attention for decades, scraped the old wax off the wide floorboards. It came up in great yellow curls. She worked not with her old manic pace, but slowly, reflectively, while Charles followed her from room to room. If she could just keep herself grounded this way, in touch with all the surfaces, the textures of the house, she thought an existence might just be possible for her.

Then one day in February, when she was upstairs watching workmen cutting keys on the river to prevent spring flooding, the telephone rang.

“Mom?” a voice at once foreign and achingly familiar came over the wire. “Mom, it's Angus. Do you know where Dad is? I've been trying to reach him.”

“No. What's wrong?”

“His office said he was on a holiday. It's urgent. Garreth has slashed his wrists.”

“Where is he?” asked Hedda. “I'll come at once.”

“You can't, Mom,” said Angus gently. “He doesn't want to see you. He made that very clear. It's not that he doesn't love you, Mom. It's just that he's afraid of the effect you have on him. He's afraid he's like you. I guess he's known that for a long time. It's Dad he needs right now.”

Joseph came to visit her that afternoon. He found her upstairs looking out the window, where the men, working with winches, were drawing great plugs of blue ice out of the river and lining them up, forming what looked like a primitive and mysterious monument.

“I look out at this scene,” she said to Joseph. “The river, the park, the trees. I don't understand how everything can be so beautiful, and yet I can't be happy within it. I look out and I see people leading such simple, steady lives and I wonder how they can do it. There was so much potential for all of us to be happy here on the river, in this comfortable old house, but I made it impossible. What am I going to do? My family is gone. I've nearly destroyed my son.”

“You're going to get out your clay and start making art again,” said Joseph gently. He was small, quiet, elegantly dressed, a white-haired man of sixty years. He looked very lonely. It was the first time Hedda had ever noticed this. Possibly he'd always looked lonely. He was a bachelor. She wondered if anyone had ever loved him.

“I feel sick when I think Garreth is going to live the same cycle I've been through.”

“If he does,” said Joseph, “so be it. Hedda, you've got to stop wishing your life had been different. You have to accept that this is the journey you were meant to take. The attempted suicides, Dempster leaving, the estrangement of your children, all of this was in the cards for you from the day you were born and all of it has its own necessary place in your life. If you could just embrace that, maybe you would find a measure of happiness.”

*   *   *

Then it was fall again and the suns in the evenings were pink and the river had a pink skin. Hedda was out when Dempster came to see her, but he sat patiently on the sagging couch in the sunroom, with one hand resting on Charles's old head, until she came in around dinnertime, carrying two paper bags of groceries, which she set on the kitchen counter. The movement of his rising from the couch caught her eye. She wasn't as surprised to see him as he thought she'd be.

“Hello,” she said neutrally, as if she'd found another dead bird on the porch blinded by an illusion of free passage through willow trees. She was wearing a longish tan skirt buttoned as far down as her knee, a pale blue blouse, a creamy vest. She looked younger, healthy and strong. The stark white parting down the middle of her hair reminded Dempster of a seagull's feather.

She remembered Dempster standing there, both of them standing there exactly like this a little more than a year ago—the open door through which he'd silently stepped, his figure filling the kitchen doorway before she even heard him, the water shining behind him, a river of light.