The Retreat (19 page)

“But you could have told someone. Nelson. Your grandma. The counsellor at school.”

“Nelson wasn’t there. I did tell him, but way later.”

“This isn’t right, Raymond. Does Alice know?”

“Sure she knows.” He said that his rescue had been written up in the local paper. She had to know.

“And nothing? She did nothing?”

“You met her,” he said.

“Oh, Raymond.” She put her hand on his shoulder. “Poor boy,” she said. And she slid across the seat and put her arms around him as he drove. “Do you want to cry?”

He said no, he didn’t. He sat, stolid and resolute.

Instead she began to cry. Not loudly, but her eyes filled and she said that she loved him. Did he know that? She did. She loved him. She didn’t say anything more until they reached his cabin.

In the darkness, Lizzy found two small candles and lit them. Then she went to Raymond and kissed him and when she pulled away she said that she wanted to stay here, in this room, where the candles were, and the windows. She took off her shoes and looked down at herself and saw the dress she
was wearing as excessive. It was as if she were playing at something, as if everything in her own life was frivolous. Raymond went into the bedroom and returned with a woollen blanket. He placed it on the floor and then took off his boots. They were cowboy boots, well worn, and his socks had holes. He took off the socks and threw them in the corner.

“Music would be nice,” Lizzy said.

Raymond looked around, as if something that could produce music would magically appear. Then he said, “Okay,” and he went outside in his bare feet. Lizzy heard him open the door to the pickup and then the radio was on and music filtered through the door. The tinny voice of a radio announcer and then the Doobie Brothers singing “China Grove.”

Lizzy slid out of her dress and removed her underwear and bra. She blew out one of the candles and the shadows in the room extended. She stretched out on the blanket. The floor was hard, the blanket was itchy. Her breasts were too small. She sat up and took the dress and spread it out underneath her and lay down again. The dress was cool and soft on her bum and on her back. She sat up again. Her breasts were fuller this way. She pressed her legs together and positioned them sideways, so that her feet were tucked behind her bum, rather like a princess. This did not feel right and so she lay down and lifted one leg so that it was bent slightly at the knee. When Raymond came back inside he had the long view of her, from her toes to her head.

He moved his eyes down her body and back up again. “You’re naked,” he said. “I go out to find some music and when I come back, you’re naked. How does that work?”

“Lucky, I guess.”

“Music okay?” he asked. He hadn’t moved from the doorway. Then he said that she could still choose. She could get dressed and he’d take her back to the Retreat. “I don’t want trouble.”

“You see me as trouble?”

He shifted his weight and said, “It’s me. I’m the trouble.”

She shook her head. “No. No, you’re not. Come.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure.”

“You want the light?” He motioned at the candle. And then, without waiting for her answer, he leaned towards the table and blew and it was immediately dark.

At night, she woke and heard rain. There was music playing; the sound came from far away, intermittent and faint through the noise of the downpour. Raymond was sleeping beside her. She reached out and shook him and said his name and then she stood and felt her way to the table. She found the matches, lit one, and held it to a candle. It caught, then flared. Raymond was on his back beside the blanket, one arm thrown back. Lizzy went over to the doorway and the light flickered behind her. She briefly saw her own shadow, wavering and elongated. He had held her head in his hands and asked several times if she was okay. She had said yes, yes, and then her own hands were everywhere and a gust of wind entered and a door swung wildly, back and forth, and she had pulled him hard
against her chest. She felt all of this more accurately now than when they had made love. She pushed the door open, reached out, and felt the rain, then ran through the mud to the pickup and turned off the radio, taking the key from the ignition and picking up the plastic bag that held her jeans and T-shirt. When she got back inside, Raymond was awake.

“I have to get home,” Lizzy said. She’d found her underwear and bra and she was slipping her jeans on. She pulled her T-shirt over her head.

Raymond got up and walked over to the open doorway and stood there and peed into the rain. Then he got dressed and asked if she wanted something to drink before they left. Tea or coffee? He could start the stove. She said no, that people might be looking for her and they should go.

They drove down the slippery road and the pickup tried to slide into the ditch. Raymond swore and steered wildly. The headlight caught the falling rain and it seemed to Lizzy that the world was swollen and angry, that she was hovering somewhere between heaven and earth, that what had happened up at the cabin was an act of little consequence, a mere scrap in the history of the world.

“Are you all right?” she asked. “You’re not disappointed?”

“Not at all,” he said. “Never.” He took her hand.

By the time they reached the driveway that led to the Retreat, the rain had stopped. Lizzy asked Raymond to let her off at the highway, it would be quieter that way. He pulled onto the shoulder, turned to her, and said, “Hey,” and he drew her close and kissed her on the mouth.

“Oh,” she said. “You.”

Then she climbed from the pickup and turned at the last moment to watch his tail lights disappear. Walking down the path in the black night she lifted a hand to her face and found Raymond there at the tips of her fingers, a pleasant and burnished scent, not unlike the warm smell of Fish when he had come up from the pond and lain down and dried himself in the sun.

W
hen he could not sleep, Lewis sat in a chair by the window that looked out over the clearing and plucked at his cobwebbed brain, knowing that any brilliant and important thoughts in the night could, in the light of day, be reduced to neurotic nonsense. He neither drank nor smoked and so to keep his hands busy he knit. Norma had never liked him to knit, she thought it effeminate, or perhaps it went against her image of what she wanted him to be, but now that she was gone he was free to knit during the day or in the evening, on the porch, in the Hall, or now at night, as he sat insomniac by the window. He knit by feel, he had no need to bend his eyes to his task. He was making caps for his children, skullcaps that would sit like beanies on their heads. He had given Everett his already; the boy had taken it, studied it with some doubt, tried it on, taken it off, and said thanks. Lewis had not seen him wear it.

A week after Norma left, a letter had arrived. She talked about Chicago and the heat and about going to a baseball game with her sister. She said, “Don’t tell the boys, Lewis, they’ll be terribly jealous.” She said that the weight she’d felt at the Retreat was gone now. Everything was lighter, even the air was lighter. “Maybe I’m a city girl,” she wrote. She said
that she missed the children and that Lewis should be sure to give them her love. “Especially William,” she said. “I’ve been thinking too much about his reticence, the shell he puts himself into. He reminds me of me.” Then she told Lewis that she loved him. She said nothing about when she was coming back.

He had told the children that their mother had written, and that she missed them. Fish had looked up and asked, “When is it a week?” and Everett said, “It’s already been, stupid.” Fish looked confused. “Don’t call him names,” Lewis said. He gathered Fish in his arms and tickled him and said, “Come, my sweet little chickens,” which was a line from a story Norma liked to tell. Fish, gasping, said, “Again,” and so Lewis told his boys the story one more time.

He had thought of calling her. One evening he’d stood by the phone in the Hall and dialled the number, let it ring once, then hung up. He knew Norma, and he knew that his calling would appear desperate, make her feel pursued, and this might drive her further from the family. He decided instead to write a casual letter, but when he was finished, he reread it and saw that it seemed indifferent, as though the family did not need her, as though they were doing much better now that she was gone, and so he tore it up.

Lizzy had shown no interest in the letter when he told her about it. Lately, she had become more aloof and Lewis knew that she was spending time with Raymond again. Over the last while, almost every night, he had observed her step out of her cabin door and walk up the path that led to the main road. She always returned around one or two, and he’d see her
tiptoeing up the steps and through the door of her cabin and then, inevitably, a candle would be lit and he’d see her shape moving back and forth. Once, briefly, he had seen her undress, lifting her arms above her head as she removed her T-shirt. He had looked away, affording her her privacy, and when he had turned back moments later, the cabin was dark. He had talked to her about Raymond, but it had not gone well. He had felt helpless and overwhelmed. In his concern he had been too harsh. She had refused his advice and talked about her mother, about how selfish she was, and said that she had her own life to live now, and that life included Raymond. He was good and kind, Lizzy said. There were no bad intentions, and even if there were, it wasn’t any of Lewis’s business.

Norma, if she’d been around, would have asked her if she was having sex with the boy and, if so, was she using protection. Norma was good at that. She was not a prude. Norma had had no problem baring her breasts for the Doctor and then talking about it. She’d always leaned towards a brazen lightheartedness, referring to her pussy and Lewis’s cock as if they were domestic pets. Lewis disliked this. Sex was serious and could be ruined by too much talk.

Lewis preferred the secrecy of his own thoughts. Some time ago, he had become more conscious of Emma Poole, and there were times, at night, when he would imagine having sex with her. Her demanding voice, her requirements, her needs, all of this made him excited and anxious. He felt both lust and irritation. He was taken aback one night, as he imagined Emma’s thin arms falling backwards onto the moss of the forest, that he saw Norma instead, and a deep loneliness
invaded him. He had leaned against the window jamb and breathed greedily, trying to regain a sense of the world outside of himself.

Emma Poole did not in fact seem to like Lewis. She had, during a discussion about politics once, called him passive-aggressive, said that his hands were always clenched, his mind limp. And she looked down at his crotch as if the association was obvious. A half-knit cap lay in his lap. Usually, she just ignored him, and it was this that depressed Lewis. He was often ignored. Lately, however, he had been talking to Margaret down by the garden. It had begun one day when Fish wanted to dig in the dirt of the garden with his toy loader and Margaret had been picking beans while her boy Billy flattened a tin can with a large stone. Margaret had whispered that her son had an eating problem, he was fat, and she had said this so matter-of-factly, and yet so filled with worry, that Lewis had suddenly seen her in a new way. She was no longer the complicit partner of the Doctor, allowing him to forage for other women and cheering him on, but she had become instead a mother who sat up at night, worrying about her child. He had lifted his head and said, “No, I don’t think he is,” and she said, “You sound like Amos. Like most men. Always in denial.” She said that she had been reading medical journals, and there were clear signs that her boy leaned that way. “When he was born, for the first two years, he wouldn’t let go of the breast, he was insatiable. He doesn’t know his limits. It’s like his body is missing the regulator that kicks in to tell him he’s had enough.” She was on her knees now, tending her plump tomatoes. Lewis saw her round face, the
scarf covering her hair, her wide shoulders. She was a tall, large woman. Standing, she rose above everyone else at the Retreat. Norma had joked once that in bed she must smother the Doctor. Lewis studied her now and wondered what she looked like naked. For a big woman, her breasts appeared dramatically small. He imagined one in his hand. Fish came to him and pulled at one of his shirt sleeves. He had to pee.

“Do it in the garden,” Margaret said. “The ammonia will do the earth good.”

Lewis nodded at him to go and he did, aiming at the rocks that rimmed the patch, rocks that Lewis had laid out on a hot afternoon, just after the family’s arrival. He had been looking for a job to do, had hated the desultory nature of the camp, the indolence, the lassitude, and so he had created a bit of a rock garden, to no one else’s pleasure it seemed, not even Margaret, who had studied the job when he’d finished and said, “Oh, rocks.”

Over the last while, Lewis’s habit had been to slip down to the garden and talk to Margaret, or to meet her in the Hall where they shared tea, or sometimes Lewis sat in the kitchen and watched her bake while they chatted. She was more complicated than he’d imagined. One afternoon, when the Retreat was quiet, Lewis had found her on the front step of her cabin, patching a pair of jeans. He had sat on the stair just below her, and she began to talk about her husband and the Retreat. She said that what Amos believed in was freedom at work and at love and at play. Freedom was ultimate. She said she still wasn’t sure what that meant but she believed that there was some truth to Amos’s notion of freedom. She said that she
was not caught in the spiral of sexual desire like her husband, and so in some ways she was freer than he was. She said that the year before, a young man named Kyle had come to the Retreat and Kyle had fallen in love with her. She smiled briefly. Her eyes closed and opened again and she looked at Lewis. “Kyle told me and I told Amos and Amos said it was fine. I could sleep with him; it might liberate the boy.” She said that Kyle had spent his days in the field, meditating. He rarely ate, he didn’t bathe, and he was constantly going on about his visions. “Personally, I think he was suffering sunstroke,” she said. In any case, she had had no interest in sleeping with Kyle. She loved her husband. She said that the problem with sex was that people saw it as a form of salvation. It wasn’t. She said, “Take my husband and your wife.”