Wilderness Tips (5 page)

Joanne was hurt. All she was for him was a big flapping ear. Also she was irritated. The dress she’d borrowed was pale blue, and the Purple Jesus would not come out with just water. Darce called the next day to apologize – St. Jude’s at least taught manners, of a sort – and Joanne stuck him with the cleaning bill. Even so there was a faint residual stain.

While they were dancing, before he started to slur and reel, she said, “Do you ever hear from Ronette?” She still had the narrative habit, she still wanted to know the ends of stories. But he’d looked at her in complete bewilderment.

“Who?” he said. It wasn’t a put-down, he really didn’t remember. She found this blank in his memory offensive. She herself might forget a name, a face even. But a body? A body that had been so close to your own, that had generated those murmurings, those rustlings in the darkness, that aching pain – it was an affront to bodies, her own included.

After the interview with Mr. B. and the stuffed pike’s head, Donny walks down to the small beach where they do their laundry. The rest of his cabin is out sailing, but he’s free now of camp routine, he’s been discharged. A dishonourable discharge. After seven summers
of being under orders here he can do what he wants. He has no idea what this might be.

He sits on a bulge of pink rock, feet on the sand. A lizard goes across the rock, near his hand, not fast. It hasn’t spotted him. Its tail is blue and will come off if grabbed. Skinks, they’re called. Once he would have taken joy from this knowledge. The waves wash in, wash out, the familiar heartbeat. He closes his eyes and hears only a machine. Possibly he is very angry, or sad. He hardly knows.

Ronette is there without warning. She must have come down the path behind him, through the trees. She’s still in her uniform, although it isn’t close to dinner. It’s only late afternoon, when the waitresses usually leave their dock to go and change.

Ronette sits down beside him, takes out her cigarettes from some hidden pocket under her apron. “Want a cig?” she says.

Donny takes one and says “Thank you.” Not
thanks
, not wordlessly like leather-jacketed men in movies, but “Thank you,” like a good boy from St. Jude’s, like a suck. He lets her light it. What else can he do? She’s got the matches. Gingerly he inhales. He doesn’t smoke much really, and is afraid of coughing.

“I heard they kicked you out,” Ronette says. “That’s really tough.”

“It’s okay,” says Donny. “I don’t care.” He can’t tell her why, how noble he’s been. He hopes he won’t cry.

“I heard you tossed Monty’s binoculars,” she says. “In the lake.”

Donny can only nod. He glances at her. She’s smiling; he can see the heartbreaking space at the side of her mouth: the missing tooth. She thinks he’s funny.

“Well, I’m with you,” she says. “He’s a little creep.”

“It wasn’t because of him,” says Donny, overcome by the need to confess, or to be taken seriously. “It was because of Darce.” He turns, and for the first time looks her straight in the eyes. They are so green. Now his hands are shaking. He drops the cigarette into the
sand. They’ll find the butt tomorrow, after he’s gone. After he’s gone, leaving Ronette behind, at the mercy of other people’s words. “It was because of you. What they were saying about you. Darce was.”

Ronette isn’t smiling any more. “Such as what?” she says.

“Never mind,” says Donny. “You don’t want to know.”

“I know anyhow,” Ronette says. “That shit.” She sounds resigned rather than angry. She stands up, puts both her hands behind her back. It takes Donny a moment to realize she’s untying her apron. When she’s got it off she takes him by the hand, pulls gently. He allows himself to be led around the hill of rock, out of sight of anything but the water. She sits down, lies down, smiles as she reaches up, arranges his hands. Her blue uniform unbuttons down the front. Donny can’t believe this is happening, to him, in full daylight. It’s like sleepwalking, it’s like running too fast, it’s like nothing else.

“Want another coffee?” Joanne says. She nods to the waitress. Donny hasn’t heard her.

“She was really nice to me,” he is saying. “Ronette. You know, when Mr. B. turfed me out. That meant a lot to me at the time.” He’s feeling guilty, because he never wrote her. He didn’t know where she lived, but he didn’t take any steps to find out. Also, he couldn’t keep himself from thinking:
They’re right. She’s a slut
. Part of him had been profoundly shocked by what she’d done. He hadn’t been ready for it.

Joanne is looking at him with her mouth slightly open, as if he’s a talking dog, a talking stone. He fingers his beard nervously, wondering what he’s said wrong, or given away.

Joanne has just seen the end of the story, or one end of one story. Or at least a missing piece. So that’s why Ronette wouldn’t tell: it was Donny. She’d been protecting him; or maybe she’d been protecting herself. A fourteen-year-old boy. Ludicrous.

Ludicrous then, possible now. You can do anything now and it won’t cause a shock. Just a shrug. Everything is
cool
. A line has been drawn and on the other side of it is the past, both darker and more brightly intense than the present.

She looks across the line and sees the nine waitresses in their bathing suits, in the clear blazing sunlight, laughing on the dock, herself among them; and off in the shadowy rustling bushes of the shoreline, sex lurking dangerously. It had been dangerous, then. It had been sin. Forbidden, secret, sullying.
Sick with desire
. Three dots had expressed it perfectly, because there had been no ordinary words for it.

On the other hand there had been marriage, which meant wifely checked aprons, play-pens, a sugary safety.

But nothing has turned out that way. Sex has been domesticated, stripped of the promised mystery, added to the category of the merely expected. It’s just what is done, mundane as hockey. It’s celibacy these days that would raise eyebrows.

And what has become of Ronette, after all, left behind in the past, dappled by its chiaroscuro, stained and haloed by it, stuck with other people’s adjectives? What is she doing, now that everyone else is following in her footsteps? More practically: did she have the baby, or not? Keep it or not? Donny, sitting sweetly across the table from her, is in all probability the father of a ten-year-old child, and he knows nothing about it at all.

Should she tell him? The melodrama tempts her, the idea of a revelation, a sensation, a neat ending.

But it would not be an ending, it would only be the beginning of something else. In any case, the story itself seems to her outmoded. It’s an archaic story, a folk-tale, a mosaic artefact. It’s a story that would never happen now.

O
n the thirteenth of November, day of unluck, month of the dead, Kat went into the Toronto General Hospital for an operation. It was for an ovarian cyst, a large one.

Many women had them, the doctor told her. Nobody knew why. There wasn’t any way of finding out whether the thing was malignant, whether it contained, already, the spores of death. Not before they went in. He spoke of “going in” the way she’d heard old veterans in TV documentaries speak of assaults on enemy territory. There was the same tensing of the jaw, the same fierce gritting of the teeth, the same grim enjoyment. Except that what he would be going into was her body. Counting down, waiting for the anaesthetic, Kat too gritted her teeth fiercely. She was terrified, but also she was curious. Curiosity has got her through a lot.

She’d made the doctor promise to save the thing for her, whatever it was, so she could have a look. She was intensely interested in her own body, in anything it might choose to do or produce; although when flaky Dania, who did layout at the magazine, told her this growth was a message to her from her body and she ought to
sleep with an amethyst under her pillow to calm her vibrations, Kat told her to stuff it.

The cyst turned out to be a benign tumour. Kat liked that use of
benign
, as if the thing had a soul and wished her well. It was big as a grapefruit, the doctor said. “Big as a coconut,” said Kat. Other people had grapefruits. “Coconut” was better. It conveyed the hardness of it, and the hairiness, too.

The hair in it was red – long strands of it wound round and round inside, like a ball of wet wool gone berserk or like the guck you pulled out of a clogged bathroom-sink drain. There were little bones in it too, or fragments of bone; bird bones, the bones of a sparrow crushed by a car. There was a scattering of nails, toe or finger. There were five perfectly formed teeth.

“Is this abnormal?” Kat asked the doctor, who smiled. Now that he had gone in and come out again, unscathed, he was less clenched.

“Abnormal? No,” he said carefully, as if breaking the news to a mother about a freakish accident to her newborn. “Let’s just say it’s fairly common.” Kat was a little disappointed. She would have preferred uniqueness.

She asked for a bottle of formaldehyde, and put the cut-open tumour into it. It was hers, it was benign, it did not deserve to be thrown away. She took it back to her apartment and stuck it on the mantelpiece. She named it Hairball. It isn’t that different from having a stuffed bear’s head or a preserved ex-pet or anything else with fur and teeth looming over your fireplace; or she pretends it isn’t. Anyway, it certainly makes an impression.

Ger doesn’t like it. Despite his supposed yen for the new and outré, he is a squeamish man. The first time he comes around (sneaks around, creeps around) after the operation, he tells Kat to throw Hairball out. He calls it “disgusting.” Kat refuses point-blank, and says she’d rather have Hairball in a bottle on her mantelpiece than the soppy dead flowers he’s brought her, which will anyway rot
a lot sooner than Hairball will. As a mantelpiece ornament, Hairball is far superior. Ger says Kat has a tendency to push things to extremes, to go over the edge, merely from a juvenile desire to shock, which is hardly a substitute for wit. One of these days, he says, she will go way too far. Too far for him, is what he means.

“That’s why you hired me, isn’t it?” she says. “Because I go way too far.” But he’s in one of his analyzing moods. He can see these tendencies of hers reflected in her work on the magazine, he says. All that leather and those grotesque and tortured-looking poses are heading down a track he and others are not at all sure they should continue to follow. Does she see what he means, does she take his point? It’s a point that’s been made before. She shakes her head slightly, says nothing. She knows how that translates: there have been complaints from the advertisers.
Too bizarre, too kinky
. Tough.

“Want to see my scar?” she says. “Don’t make me laugh, though, you’ll crack it open.” Stuff like that makes him dizzy: anything with a hint of blood, anything gynecological. He almost threw up in the delivery room when his wife had a baby two years ago. He’d told her that with pride. Kat thinks about sticking a cigarette into the side of her mouth, as in a black-and-white movie of the forties. She thinks about blowing the smoke into his face.

Her insolence used to excite him, during their arguments. Then there would be a grab of her upper arms, a smouldering, violent kiss. He kisses her as if he thinks someone else is watching him, judging the image they make together. Kissing the latest thing, hard and shiny, purple-mouthed, crop-headed; kissing a girl, a woman, a girl, in a little crotch-hugger skirt and skin-tight leggings. He likes mirrors.

But he isn’t excited now. And she can’t decoy him into bed; she isn’t ready for that yet, she isn’t healed. He has a drink, which he doesn’t finish, holds her hand as an afterthought, gives her a couple of avuncular pats on the off-white outsized alpaca shoulder, leaves too quickly.

“Goodbye, Gerald,” she says. She pronounces the name with mockery. It’s a negation of him, an abolishment of him, like ripping a medal off his chest. It’s a warning.

He’d been Gerald when they first met. It was she who transformed him, first to Gerry, then to Ger. (Rhymed with
flair
, rhymed with
dare
.) She made him get rid of those sucky pursed-mouth ties, told him what shoes to wear, got him to buy a loose-cut Italian suit, redid his hair. A lot of his current tastes – in food, in drink, in recreational drugs, in women’s entertainment underwear – were once hers. In his new phase, with his new, hard, stripped-down name ending on the sharpened note of r, he is her creation.

As she is her own. During her childhood she was a romanticized Katherine, dressed by her misty-eyed, fussy mother in dresses that looked like ruffled pillowcases. By high school she’d shed the frills and emerged as a bouncy, round-faced Kathy, with gleaming freshly washed hair and enviable teeth, eager to please and no more interesting than a health-food ad. At university she was Kath, blunt and no-bullshit in her Take-Back-the-Night jeans and checked shirt and her bricklayer-style striped-denim peaked hat. When she ran away to England, she sliced herself down to Kat. It was economical, street-feline, and pointed as a nail. It was also unusual. In England you had to do something to get their attention, especially if you weren’t English. Safe in this incarnation, she Ramboed through the eighties.