Wilderness Tips (10 page)

Richard was taken aback. She’d meant business with that suitcase. Nothing would have pleased him more, he told himself, but there was Mary Jo to be considered. “Of course,” he said, hoping his hesitation hadn’t shown.

“Thank you,” said Selena. “I don’t have anywhere else right now. Anywhere safe.”

He didn’t ask her to explain this. Her voice was the same, rich and tantalizing, on the edge of ruin; it was having its old devastating effect on him. “You can sleep in the rec room,” he said. “There’s a sofa that folds out.”

“Oh good.” She sighed. “It’s Thursday.” Thursday, he recalled, was a significant day in her poetry, but at the time he couldn’t remember whether it was good or bad. Now he knows. Now he has three filing-cards with nothing but Thursdays on them.

When Mary Jo got home, brisk and defensive as he’d decided she always was after furtive sex, they were still sitting in the kitchen. Selena was having another cup of coffee, Richard another beer. Selena’s hat and mended coat were on top of her suitcase. Mary Jo saw them and scowled.

“Mary Jo, you remember Selena,” Richard said. “From the Embassy?”

“Right,” said Mary Jo. “Did you put out the trash?”

“I will,” said Richard. “She’s staying overnight.”

“I’ll put it out myself then,” said Mary Jo, stomping off towards the glassed-in back porch where they kept the garbage cans. Richard followed her and they fought, at first in whispers.

“What the hell is she doing in my house?” Mary Jo hissed.

“It’s not just your house, it’s my house too. She’s got nowhere else to go.”

“That’s what they all say. What happened, some boyfriend beat her up?”

“I didn’t ask. She’s an old friend.”

“Look, if you want to sleep with that weird flake you can do it somewhere else.”

“As you do?” said Richard, with what he hoped was bitter dignity.

“What the hell are you talking about? Are you accusing me of something?” said Mary Jo. Her eyes were bulging out, as they did when she was really angry and not just acting. “Oh. You’d love that, wouldn’t you. Give you a voyeuristic thrill.”

“Anyway I’m not sleeping with her,” said Richard, reminding Mary Jo that the first false accusation had been hers.

“Why not?” said Mary Jo. “You’ve been leching after her for ten years. I’ve seen you mooning over those stupid poetry magazines.
On Thursdays you are a banana,”
she intoned, in savage mimicry of Selena’s deeper voice. “Why don’t you just screw her and get it over with?”

“I would if I could,” Richard said. This truth saddened him.

“Oh. Holding out on you? Tough shit. Do me a favour, just rape her in the rec room and get it out of your system.”

“My, my,” said Richard. “Sisterhood
is
powerful.” As soon as he said it he knew he’d gone too far.

“How dare you use my feminism against me like that?” said Mary Jo, her voice up an octave. “That is so cheap! You always were a cheap little prick!”

Selena was standing in the doorway watching them. “Richard,” she said, “I think I’d better go.”

“Oh no,” said Mary Jo, with a chirpy parody of hospitality. “Stay! It’s no trouble! Stay a week! Stay a month! Consider us your hotel!”

Richard walked Selena to the front door. “Where will you go?” he said.

“Oh,” she said, “there’s always somewhere.” She stood under the porch light, looking up the street. It
was
a bruise. “But right now I don’t have any money.”

Richard dug out his wallet, emptied it. He wished it was more.

“I’ll pay you back,” she said.

If he has to date it, Richard pinpoints this Thursday as the day his marriage was finally over. Even though he and Mary Jo went through the form of apologizing, even though they had more than a few drinks and smoked a joint and had dislocated, impersonal sex, nothing got fixed. Mary Jo left him soon after, in quest of the self she claimed she needed to find. She took their son with her. Richard, who hadn’t paid that much attention to the boy, was now reduced to nostalgic, interminable weekends with him. He tried out several other women, but couldn’t concentrate on them.

He looked for Selena but she’d disappeared. One magazine
editor told him she’d gone out west. Richard felt he’d let her down. He had failed to be a place of refuge.

Ten years later he saw her again. It was 1980, another year of the nothing, or of the white-hot egg. He notes this coincidence only now, laying out the filing cards like a fortune-teller across the surface of his particle-board desk.

He’d just got out of his car, having returned through thickening traffic from the university, where he was still clinging on by his fingernails. It was mid-March, during the spring melt, an irritating and scruffy time of year. Mud and rain and scraps of garbage left over from the winter. His mood was similar. He’d recently had the manuscript of
Spiritual Carnality
returned to him by a publisher, the fourth rejection. The covering letter informed him that he’d failed sufficiently to problematize the texts. On the title page someone had written, in faint, semi-erased pencil,
fatuously romantic
. He suspected that shrike Johanson, who was one of their readers, and who’d had it in for him ever since Mary Jo had left. After a brief interval of firm-chinned single coping she’d moved in on Johanson and they’d lived together for six months of blitzkrieg. Then she’d tried to hit him up for half the value of his house. Johanson had been blaming this on Richard ever since.

He was thinking about this, and about the batch of student papers in his briefcase: James Joyce from a Marxist perspective, or garbled structuralism seeping in from France to dilute the student brain yet further. The papers had to be marked by tomorrow. He had a satisfying fantasy of laying them all out in the muddy street and running over them with his car. He would say he’d been in an accident.

Coming towards him was a short, thickish woman in a black trench coat. She was carrying a large, brown tapestry bag; she seemed to be looking at the numbers on the houses, or possibly the
snowdrops and crocuses on the lawns. Richard did not understand that it was Selena until she’d almost passed him.

“Selena,” he said, touching her arm.

She turned up to him a blank face, the turquoise eyes dull. “No,” she said. “That’s not my name.” Then she peered more closely. “Richard. Is that you?” Either she was feigning pleasure, or she really felt it. Again, for him, there was a stab of unaccustomed joy.

He stood awkwardly. No wonder she’d had trouble recognizing him. He was prematurely grey, overweight; Mary Jo had told him, on the last, unpleasant occasion on which he’d seen her, that he was slug-coloured. “I didn’t know you were still here,” he said. “I thought you’d moved out west.”

“Travelled,” she said. “I’m through with that.” There was an edge to her voice he’d never heard before.

“And your work?” he said. It was always the thing to ask her.

“What work?” she said, and laughed.

“Your poetry.” He was beginning to be alarmed. She was more matter-of-fact than he’d ever known her to be, but somehow this struck him as crazy.

“Poetry,” she said with scorn. “I hate poetry. It’s just this. This is all there is. This stupid city.”

He went cold with dread. What was she saying, what had she done? It was like a blasphemy, it was like an act of desecration. Though how could he expect her to maintain faith in something he himself had so blatantly failed?

She’d been frowning, but now her face wrinkled in anxiety. She put a hand on his arm, stood on tiptoe. “Richard,” she whispered. “What happened to us? Where did everyone go?” A mist came up with her, an odour. He recognized sweetish wine, a whiff of cat.

He wanted to shake her, enfold her, lead her to safety, wherever that might be. “We just changed, that’s all,” he said gently. “We got older.”

“Change and decay in all around I see,” she said, smiling in a way he did not like at all. “I’m not prepared for eternity.”

It wasn’t until she’d walked away – refusing tea, hurrying off as if she couldn’t wait to see the last of him – that he realized she’d been quoting from a folk-song. It was the same one he’d heard sung to the autoharp in the coffee-house, the night he’d first seen her, standing under the single spotlight in her dragonfly shawl.

That, and a hymn. He wondered whether she’d become what his students called “religious.”

Months later he heard she was dead. Then there was a piece in the paper. The details were vague. It was the picture that caught his eye: an earlier picture of her, from the jacket of one of her books. Probably there was nothing more recent, because she hadn’t published anything for years. Even her death belonged to an earlier time; even the people in the small, closed world of poetry had largely forgotten about her.

Now that she’s dead, however, she’s become newly respectable. In several quarterly reviews the country has been lambasted for its indifference towards her, its withholding of recognition during her lifetime. There’s a move afoot to name a parkette after her, or else a scholarship, and the academics are swarming like bot-flies. A thin volume has appeared, of essays on her work, shoddy stuff in Richard’s opinion, flimsy and superficial; another one is rumoured to be in the offing.

This is not the reason Richard is writing about her, however. Nor is it to cover his professional ass: he’s going to be axed from the university anyway, there are new cutbacks, he lacks tenure, his head is on the block. It’s merely because she’s the one thing left he still values, or wants to write about. She is his last hope.

Isis in Darkness
, he writes.
The Genesis
. It exalts him simply to form the words. He will exist for her at last, he will be created by
her, he will have a place in her mythology after all. It will not be what he once wanted: not Osiris, not a blue-eyed god with burning wings. His are humbler metaphors. He will only be the archaeologist; not part of the main story, but the one who stumbles upon it afterwards, making his way for his own obscure and battered reasons through the jungle, over the mountains, across the desert, until he discovers at last the pillaged and abandoned temple. In the ruined sanctuary, in the moonlight, he will find the Queen of Heaven and Earth and the Underworld lying in shattered white marble on the floor. He is the one who will sift through the rubble, groping for the shape of the past. He is the one who will say it has meaning. That too is a calling, that also can be a fate.

He picks up a filing-card, jots a small footnote on it in his careful writing, and replaces it neatly in the mosaic of paper he is making across his desk. His eyes hurt. He closes them and rests his forehead on his two fisted hands, summoning up whatever is left of his knowledge and skill, kneeling beside her in the darkness, fitting her broken pieces back together.

J
ulie broke up with Connor in the middle of a swamp.

Julie silently revises: not exactly in the middle, not knee-deep in rotting leaves and dubious brown water. More or less on the edge; sort of within striking distance. Well, in an inn, to be precise. Or not even an inn. A room in a pub. What was available.

And not in a swamp anyway. In a bog.
Swamp
is when the water goes in one end and out the other,
bog
is when it goes in and stays in. How many times did Connor have to explain the difference? Quite a few. But Julie prefers the sound of
swamp
. It is mistier, more haunted.
Bog
is a slang word for toilet, and when you hear
bog
you know the toilet will be a battered and smelly one, and that there will be no toilet paper.

So Julie always says:
I broke up with Connor in the middle of a swamp
.

There are other things she revises as well. She revises Connor. She revises herself. Connor’s wife stays approximately the same, but she was an invention of Julie’s in the first place, since Julie never met
her. Sometimes she used to wonder whether the wife really existed at all, or was just a fiction of Connor’s, useful for keeping Julie at arm’s length. But no, the wife existed all right. She was solid, and she became more solid as time went on.

Connor mentioned the wife, and the three children and the dog, fairly soon after he and Julie met. Well, not met. Slept together. It was almost the same thing.

Julie supposes, now, that he didn’t want to scare her off by bringing up the subject too soon. She herself was only twenty, and too naïve to even think of looking for clues, such as the white circle on the ring finger. By the time he did get around to making a sheepish avowal or confession, Julie was in no position to be scared off. She was already lying in a motel room, wound loosely in a sheet. She was too tired to be scared off and also too amazed, and also too grateful. Connor was not her first lover but he was her first grown-up one, he was the first who did not treat sex as some kind of panty-raid. He took her body seriously, which impressed her no end.

At the time – what was the time? It was twenty years ago, or twenty-five. More like thirty. It was the early sixties; the precise year had to do with bubble-cut hairdos, with white lipstick, with dark rings pencilled around the eyes. Also, purple was big as a colour, although Julie herself favoured the more rebellious black. She thought of herself as a sort of pirate. A dark-eyed, hawk-faced, shaggy-haired raider, making daring inroads on the borders of smug domestic settlements. Setting fire to the roofs, getting away with the loot, suiting herself. She studied modern philosophy, read Sartre on the side, smoked Gitanes, and cultivated a look of bored contempt. But inwardly, she was seething with unfocused excitement, and looking for someone to worship.