The Last Woman (15 page)

His eyes, she notices, are pouched with fatigue. He is watching her closely and still hasn’t spoken, which only increases her nervousness.

“I came up to ask Elaine to help us out. So, what are you up to there?”

He looks back to the engine. “Oh. She’s been acting up on me.”

“Well, they’ll do that, won’t they, these females? No end of trouble.”

She tells him more about the dog. She can’t seem to drop her joking, slightly arch manner, though she is perfectly conscious of it – her voice running on too loudly, while underneath she wants to weep. He tells her a little story about the same dog, while she stands listening, relieved that he has connected with her. Following him into the house, she drifts about, chatting with him while he makes sandwiches. His homemade shelves are stacked with paperbacks: biographies, history, thrillers, popular science. The sight of his books moves her, has always moved her: he never completed high school.

Carrying two kitchen chairs outside, they sit in the shade with their plates balanced in their laps. He seems reticent, burdened, and she tells him about a recent trip to Toronto, a month before – hoping to engage him, to signal that she’s put the strains of Lola’s behind her.

Some distance away, two boys are making their way across the rock. Noticing Billy watching them, Ann breaks off. One of the boys is stomping on a beer can. The other picks up a stone and fires it toward a house where it rattles on the roof and drops to the ground. There is anger there, and a kind of loose despair, as if at any moment they might throw themselves off a cliff.

Billy’s intense focus alerts her. She asks who they are.

“Oh,” he says, seeming ill at ease, “the tall one’s Randy Kennedy. The other, I think he’s Kelly Laverne’s brother.” They watch until the boys are out of sight.

When he begins to talk, it is slowly, hesitantly, as if each detail were painful to recall. He was out for a walk, he tells her, when he came across some boys sniffing gas. She hears about a boy kicking another boy, about a little boy curled up, stoned, under a tree. The story appalls her.

“That’s awful,” she breathes, after he has been silent for a while, and feels the futility of her words.

She asks what can be done.

He shakes his head slowly, and she thinks this is his answer: nothing. “Oh,” he says, looking off to the lake. “If their fathers had jobs. If they
had
fathers, some of them. If all booze vanished from the face of the earth. If people
would go back to the bush… We’ve been saying the same things for years. But maybe it’s not that at all…”

He is still for a while, then with a shrug he looks up at her, and in his eyes is a faint smile as if everything he’s described is a bitter joke: the fatalism that forever marks the gulf between her world and his.

Some time later, when she says she should be getting back, neither of them moves.

“By the way, your pickerel was delicious. Thank you.”

He nods in acknowledgement.

She gets up and starts to leave, then stops. “Do you ever think about the old days with Richard? The three of us?” She can feel herself redden, sensing the topic is unwelcome. “Anyway. Maybe come down some time when he’s there.”

Billy gives a nearly imperceptible nod and goes on watching her with a tender, unguarded openness. Heart slamming, she turns and walks away.

I
n his office in the Sherwood Plaza, on the outskirts of Black Falls, Richard hovers by his secretary’s desk.

“If Reg Benoit calls –”

“Yes, I’ll put him through.”

“Or his secretary. Or an aide – whoever – I’ll talk.”

“Yes. I know.” A twitch in Marg Corelli’s cheek, the merest hint of impatience that momentarily reveals what she is probably thinking: that he has told her this before and that after twelve years of pretty much faultless service, she might reasonably be trusted to get it right. Annoyed with himself, Richard drifts to a filing cabinet, ruffles through some papers to no particular end, and finally – no help for it – returns to his office. The doorway gives a view
of his littered desk and, behind it, through a picture window, the long-abandoned farm behind the mall. Humps of bedrock. Clusters of cedars. Bleached, leaning fenceposts. The saddled remains of a barn – all that has survived of some family’s struggle to wring a living from land that should never have been cleared. He was elated to move out here to the Plaza, after the cramped old house where Doug Parsons had first set up his practice. In the right mood, he can take delighted notice of maples turning red, or a deer venturing from the bush that throws a dark streak across the horizon. But on this summer’s day, as he turns past the end of his desk, the sun-whitened pasture oppresses him.

“All right, where were we?”

The woman perched on the edge of a wing chair smiles tepidly. Not long ago, a friend had appeared at her house to tell her that her husband was having an affair with a local businesswoman. “The cottage,” she says, in a weak voice. She is pretty in a faux-blonde, cookie-cutter way; Richard finds her tiny mouth intriguing – a sea creature’s mouth, a valve. “It’s mostly paid off.”

Richard makes a mark on his pad. “Whose name is it in?” His pen makes two idle loops, and he looks up. “Gail? Whose name?”

Her eyes brim with water: as if she were drowning from inside. When he indicates the tissue box beside her, she takes no notice. Rounding his desk, he plucks up a few tissues and tucks them into her hand. While she wipes at her cheeks and examines the wad of tissue, Richard waits.
He swivels in his chair, pulls the cap of his pen, replaces it. Through the wall, he can just make out the high, happy tenor of Doug Parsons in full flight. He can see his partner, tilting back with his feet crossed on his desk, the phone coddled at his ear, his fingers tearing a bit of paper to shreds, his eyes still lit, after decades of lawyering, with the joy of the chase. He has to admit that he’s never had Doug’s fire. He chose the law because he wanted to make good money, because business didn’t interest him, because he had to do
something
. Something to launch him as far as possible from the tiny Scarborough bungalow where no room was far enough away from the rest, no door thick enough to keep out what he did not want to hear. Yes, one day he would have a peaceful, ordinary life. After long persistence, he has achieved what he wanted, more than he ever imagined; and he is proud of this, proud of his family, his status, his living, proud of the tenacity around which his sense of himself, of his power and ability, has coalesced – this thing in him that can forge ahead, no matter what. It had been a boon in law school, a necessary boon, for he had to override his distaste every time he opened a law book and met those sentences modelled, it seemed, on the Gordian knot; sentences strewn with absurd repetitions, distinctions so fine they made the old theological question of how many angels could dance on a pinhead sound almost sensible.

Confessing his weariness to Ann the other night had been difficult: to his surprise, he had experienced shame. For he does not think of himself as either emotional or a quitter. Talking with her, he felt he was both.
But you’ve been a wonderful lawyer
. He wanted to weep at that, he hardly knew why.

Politics: his first love. He’s done backroom work for his party, he’s gone door to door, he’s been a delegate to policy conferences, he’s gone cap in hand to local businesses: he’s paid his dues, and when, at a barbeque at Reg Benoit’s Random Lake house the previous year, Reg remarked in the presence of several senior party people that he’d make a first-rate candidate, Richard felt his time was arriving at last. He knew in his bones that politics would never turn into the dry-as-dust duty law had become, for he’s already savoured one of its principle pleasures: the sound of his name on other people’s lips. Since word has gone round that Reg has singled him out, people act differently toward him. They approach him to ask if they can work for him; to see if he could have a word with the minister. They assume he has a power he does not have, at least not yet, and though he does his best to disabuse them, he can see (and takes secret pleasure in the fact) that they do not believe him. His name has been in the papers. He was interviewed on a local TV channel on the subject of garbage disposal. He has discovered he thrives on the sense of being at the centre of things, someone who can make a difference.

But Reg has not yet given him his clear blessing, and since Reg – who holds the seat next to Nigushi – is not only the minister of natural resources, but the party’s northern Ontario boss, this is critical. Richard is not sure whether he should ask Reg outright or wait for him to act
on his own. Meanwhile, he has heard that two or three others are circling the nomination: a fact that has deprived him of sleep – sent him to the bottle of lorazepam he hides from Ann in his golf bag.

He has left his door ajar so he can overhear Marg.
Parsons, Honderich, and Galuta. Yes? Yes? No, I don’t think so. No, he’s busy right now
. Across his desk, a woman with inky blotches under her eyes is staring at him. For a second, he cannot remember why she is there.

The interior of his BMW is stifling. He punches up the air conditioning and, as he swings into the traffic, slips Wynton Marsalis into the tape deck. This moment is usually his best of the day: a pocket of freedom where the gods of possibility can regroup.

But today, he has a headache, and the traffic is slow. A young woman in a hard hat and fluorescent bib stands beside the road, working a Stop sign in a cloud of shimmering dust while behind her enormous machines back and run, back and run. At the next light, he beats his fingers on the wheel (no longer in time) as his gaze strays over the hazed city toward the distant cube of the paper mill. On the bridge, there’s another holdup. Below, on the sun-smitten rock, a gull stands with its head back, its neck and chest convulsing in a silent scream.

All day, for no particular reason, he’s been aware of his father – as if Sully were loitering nearby, just out of sight – an old, familiar feeling of oppression. His father had not
been like other fathers. His friends had fathers with names like Bob Stone or Jack Boileau: self-contained men, who held impressively aloof, and who went to jobs indoors, in offices and mills. But his father was Sully Galuta, Polish immigrant, garbage collector in the city of Scarborough, self-styled expert on every subject under the sun, butcher of the English language. One day Richard’s best friend referred to Sully as “a big know-nothing.” They had fought – more or less to a draw – and when Richard went home with a torn shirt and filthy face, Sully upbraided him. What did he mean by wrecking a good shirt? Did he think money grew on the leaves? People would think he was no better than some goddamn wop. And Richard, who had just been defending his father’s honour, found himself hating the man who loomed over him in his undershirt. Too proud and angry to explain himself, Richard had turned away and received for his audacity a smack across the ear that made his head ring. Yet he had loved his father, at least in the early days: his rough affection could make the sun come out. Sully led him into the local ravine to collect mushrooms; or they drove out of the city to watch the hawks on their annual migrations – times alone, when Sully’s more embarrassing excesses could not be witnessed by anyone. Life with his father was a kind of secret, known only to him and his mother. Doris waited tables in a greasy spoon – a thin, energetic woman who walked with a slight tilt, as if advancing into a strong headwind. Richard sensed she was constantly managing her husband: steering him
toward cheerfulness if he was down, or trying to moderate him if he got too high. Sometimes the two of them danced around the tiny living room to Lawrence Welk. His father would pump and twirl through the polka, surprisingly light on his big feet; and his mother, who was slight in comparison, would put her head back and laugh – on a note that to Richard sounded false, and touched him with a faint, inexplicable fear. He felt collusive with his mother: very early on, he learned that his father was deficient, even pitiable. It was important not to take your eye off him.

Occasionally his mother appeared with a bruise around her eye or on her cheek; she might, one morning, limp out the door to work. At such times, she was more determinedly cheerful than ever, frantically insistent they were no different than anyone else and, even more importantly, no different from the people they believed themselves to be.

Once, the two of them had gone camping, father and son. And Sully was happy as he so often was in the woods. Through the trees of the provincial park, other tents were visible. “Like this,” Sully told him, as he dug a trench to carry off the rainwater. He chopped down saplings to make a frame for the tent. He chopped firewood. As their perogies sizzled in the pan, a ranger arrived to tell his father he had broken several laws: he would have to pay a fine. Spittle flying, Sully had raged about how no one in this country knew how to camp the right way, and how he was going to speak to the mayor of Scarborough, who was a personal friend of his, while the man in the uniform went on calmly writing. Afterwards, Sully tore their camp apart,
flinging the illegal tent poles in the lake, kicking dirt into his illegal trench, and they started the long drive home. In the car, the monologue continued, while Richard silently vowed that when he grew up he would not be like his father. It was a defining moment of his life: all his reasonableness and self-control flowed from it; his hatred of strong emotion; his ability to float above the fray, unflappably sanguine, with a hint of pity or contempt for those who could not control themselves.