The Last Woman (21 page)

“Oh, my God,” Ann said, looking through the back window, for they had already flown past. “Remember that Indian boy I told you about?”

“You want me to stop?”

“No! Yes! Richard, stop!”

He pulled onto the shoulder. In the rear-view, the young man was hurrying toward their car.

“Oh, my God,” Ann said again, clutching at Richard’s hand. He was half-laughing at her now, but he could not read her at all. She seemed to be reassuring him. Perhaps she was trying to reassure herself.

They had met a year earlier. Richard was twenty-nine, Ann twenty-six. She was living the artist’s life in downtown Toronto. He was working with two other newly minted lawyers out of a storefront in the east end of the city. They were introduced by a mutual friend at a gallery where she was part of a group show. Talking to her that night, he had judged her out of his league. Her full, wide mouth suggested a sensuousness that lay beyond his own experience. Her casually confident manner and the understated tastefulness of her clothes marked her as a girl from a different social stratum; and this was quite apart from the fact she
was beautiful. Secretly, beauty terrified him. Beauty promised peace and delivered war. Stooping over her in the corner by the cheese table, at the edge of the crowd’s din, he kept expecting her to move on; but she stayed talking for half an hour, laughing at his story of his first appearance in court, telling him of her own adventures with unpaid traffic tickets, touching him frequently on the arm. Much later she would confess, “I knew right away you were solid. That I could depend on you.” He did not like to think of solidity as his primary attraction, but when he objected, she added, “Do you have any idea what the men are like out there, most of them? Ask me. I’m the expert.” He bought her most expensive painting: of a narrowing V of mirror-like water held between dark banks, with the tiny silhouette of a heron poised over its own reflection.

A week later, he took her to a restaurant off Bloor Street – a low-roofed place with a patio, boxed cedars, French doors and waiters whose elaborate show of expertise left her quietly amused. She wore a dark mauve shirt, its top buttons open. He scarcely dared to glance there, to the rounding of a breast glowing in the candlelight – for in his nervousness, any acknowledgement of his desire, even to himself, was disorienting. When she asked about his background, he told her, “Solid working class” with the bravado he put on in such moments, for he was defensive about where he had come from: ill at ease, for all his show of sophistication, among menus written in French and officious waiters in white aprons.

When she asked him about his parents, he spoke of his mother, who was living still in his boyhood home. “She’s got this great spirit,” he told Ann. “A real light in her eye. Nothing gets her down for long.” Immediately, he wondered if he’d gone too far, if he’d begged the question about what there might be to get her down. Sully was already haunting their table, his presence as charged as ever with unforeseen consequences. It was with some misgivings, then, that he told her about his father’s love of nature: the camping trips, the midnight awakening to see an eclipse of the moon. It was all true, and yet he could sense the darker depths of his life with his father looming, like a sheer drop glimpsed from a mountain road, and to bring his discomfort to an end, he told her his father had died when he was eighteen, eliciting a cry of sympathy.

She spoke of her own mother, who had been ill for much of Ann’s childhood. “I never understood exactly what it was. Nerves. Headaches. She spent a good deal of time in bed. I wanted her so much to be like other mothers. I was ashamed to bring my friends home. I think I was awfully cruel some times: I didn’t like being with her. It makes me sick to think of it now. But I’d identified completely with my father. He was so full of life. There were times when I wanted to
be
a boy!” Lifting her wineglass, she added, “It sounds like it was better in your house.”

“I was glad to grow up.”

“I don’t know if I was or not.”

“Not that we have a choice.”

“No, not that we have a choice!” Their gazes met then.
It was not clear to him why the hackneyed phrase “not that we have a choice” should move him nearly to tears. But across the candle-lit table a connection seemed to form.

He never got over his amazement that she wanted him. He had never considered himself attractive. At six-four, he loomed above most other people; holding her, he worried there was too much of him, and that she must inevitably find the weight of him, the awkward fitting of their bodies, distasteful. He was intimidated by her sensuality. She would pull apart an orange, slowly, and feed him bits with a playful curiosity, as if half-expecting him to transform. The first time they went to bed, he was so in awe of her beauty – so eager not to fail her – that, unusual for him, he could not perform. In the end she curled up against him, telling him in a child’s voice that it didn’t matter. That night when she bustled out in her raincoat, her head bowed, he feared she might not come back. Two days later, she reappeared with flowers and a red velvet bag stuffed with marijuana. Once he found love possible, everything seemed possible. He glimpsed a kind of happiness he had rarely let himself imagine: one that simply went on, day by ordinary day.

He was living in a low-rise building near the corner of Bloor Street and Bedford. His furniture consisted of a waterbed, a kitchen table, three chairs, a coffee table, and a leather couch, with nothing on the walls but a framed, signed photo of Arthur Ashe and Ann’s heron painting, with his history and law books stacked along the baseboards: a poverty of taste and comfort he hadn’t noticed
until he’d brought her there. One night, undulating gently on their little sea, she asked him about his first time: “Come on. Don’t tell me it’s me.”

Patsy Dinsmore had been a fellow law student. He had not loved her, with her lank hair, her skin smelling of copper, her passion for the more recondite points of corporate law, but they had drifted together for mutual study sessions, and out of loneliness and boredom had drifted a little further, into each other’s hesitant embraces. He recalled a cold April afternoon on Toronto Island: a few fumbled, urgent minutes in a hollow screened by bracken, the aerials of boats going by. He made his interest in Patsy sound like more than it was, its consequences more troubling than they actually were. “And there were other
grapplings
. How about your first?”

He was not particularly eager to hear about Ann’s love life, for he guessed she had far outpaced him in that department. But he was eager to deflect her scrutiny.

For a few seconds, she was silent. Her face slowly changed, seemed to grow smoother as it emptied. She was somewhere else: something in him hung suspended; a deeper level of attention, of seriousness, had been evoked. “It was a local boy,” she said finally, and her voice, too, had changed. “He was from the reserve at the other end of Nigushi. I first met him when I was a young girl, actually. My father knew his uncle. The uncle did work at our cottage one summer and he’d come along with him.” She sighed; Richard had fallen very still. “But then I didn’t see him for a long time. Then one day he just showed up and
we – we were both grown up. Well, we were nineteen. We had a summer together, on the lake.”

Sitting up, she turned briskly cheerful. “Anyway, a familiar-enough story: two kids with nothing in common, no future at all. As my father kept telling me. I ended it. It was awful.
I
was awful. I went away after that – England. Art school. When I came back, I lived in Montreal with my mom. She and Dad were divorced. After that, I didn’t get to our cottage much, and I never saw him again.” She slipped out of bed. He listened to her filling the kettle in the kitchen.
We had a summer together
. Her words, spoken with such delicacy of feeling, had conjured something at once complete, pure, and unrepeatable. The local boy, whoever he was, had touched her, he suspected, in a way he never would.

He never forgot this exchange and never referred to it again. Yet the topic came up once more. They were married, and had moved up to Black Falls, where Richard had been offered a position in Doug Parson’s law office. They had bought the stucco house near her father’s. One night when another couple was visiting and the liqueur glasses had been filled and refilled, the women started to talk of old relationships. Giselle mentioned a Billy Johnson. “Ancient history!” Ann laughed, making a dismissive motion. But Richard was alert. Was Billy Johnson the “local boy” she’d told him about? Giselle leaned to Richard, slyly confidential. “Don’t let her fool you. She was quite gone on the guy. Of course, they were mere children –”

“Just nineteen,” Richard said.

“Well, you know all about it then!” Giselle turned to her husband. “I wonder what’s happened to him? I haven’t seen him for years.” Her husband said he thought he’d gone to B.C. “Somebody told me he’d been in jail.”

“That isn’t possible,” Ann said. “I mean, he had a stubborn streak, but nothing that would…” She was subdued for the rest of the evening.

That night, undressing, she was still pensive. Richard was getting used to Ann’s moodiness; despite her high-energy competence, she had a tendency to melancholy abstraction. He often had the sense she was not entirely present, as if she carried an alternate life inside her whose currents at any time were liable to tug her away. “Still thinking about your old boyfriend?”

She was gazing toward the window. “I just can’t believe he’d do something that would –”

“You know, it would be an easy thing to find out.”

“What would?”

“Whether he’s been to jail.”

“I don’t want to know,” she told him.

And there he was, the Indian boy, the local boy, Billy Johnson, his jacket billowing as he ran down the shoulder toward their car. Opening a rear door, he slid in behind Ann.

Richard turned to him. “Black Falls okay?”

There was something eager in the broad face – a boyish openness concentrated in the widely set dark eyes. Of
course, he had no idea what he’d just stepped into: Richard felt for him.

Ann did not turn, not at first, but remained facing straight ahead. Richard, perplexed by her silence, put the car in gear and drove back onto the highway. In the mirror, he could see their guest staring intently at the back of Ann’s head.

A few moments later, she finally turned around. “Hello, Billy,” she said quietly. Immediately, she burst into nervous laughter.

For the hour it took them to drive to Black Falls, Ann and Richard carried the conversation, for Billy didn’t say much, and though they tried hard to draw him out (discovering that yes, he had just come back from out west, where he’d spent several years working for a lodge in B.C., and more recently in the Alberta oil fields), he passed most of the trip staring at the passing bush.

They let him out downtown, near the war memorial. Silent themselves now, they drove up River Street, past the paper mill, and across the Old Woman River into Cartier Point.

“Well, he seems pleasant enough,” Richard said finally, as they pulled into their drive. “A bit quiet, maybe.”

“He was nervous,” Ann said defensively. “A shock like that.”

That night, lying beside him in the dark bedroom, she spoke into the silence. “You know, when I ended it –” He realized she was talking about Billy Johnson, and from the way she simply started in on the subject, he knew
she’d been brooding on it. “It was worse than I told you.”

“Yes?”

“I was pregnant,” she said at last. “Terrified. It wasn’t in my plans at all, but then neither was –” Again she broke off, and he could sense her wandering a hidden landscape. “My parents took care of everything. I had it in London –”

“You
had
the baby,” he said. In an instant, her past had become much more complicated; her present too, for where was the child?

She took in a shuddering breath. Was she weeping?

“Love?” he said, reaching for her hand.

“It wasn’t a baby I had.”

It took him a moment to understand. “Ah. I’m sorry. That must have been hard.”

For a long time they said nothing. Through the open window he could hear the Old Woman River, hushing over its stones; the hoot of a horn from the mill, far upstream. He could sense her thinking beside him in the dark. “I’m here if you want to talk about it,” Richard said. Her revelation had changed the mood between them, changed, in some way, who she was.

“He never knew I was pregnant,” she said finally. “I mean, I couldn’t have had a baby, and he – he would have wanted me to have it. He’d have been so upset, furious really, if he knew I was going to have an abortion. I wrote him later, from England, but I just didn’t have the courage to tell him. What good would it have done? I was a mess.”

A little later, she spoke more calmly. “Now that he’s come home, we’ll see him probably. He’ll be around. He
must never know what I’ve just told you, Richard. Promise me you understand.” She had reared up on one elbow, and he could sense her determination as the pale, indistinct moon of her face hovered. He promised gladly, with a grateful realization that he could give her something valuable. He promised, hoping to bring this difficult pass to an end.