All the Voices Cry (2 page)

At the beginning a great crowd of friends visited the cabin. Seated in a protective ring of citronella candles they ate berry compote off leaves and argued late into the night. When the mosquitoes became unbearable, they stripped and swam out along the drunken path of the moon. They were a mixed bunch, all happy to escape Toronto. Vernon Hasp, the film maker, and his girlfriend, Tiny, made the long drive across to Quebec in a convertible. Tiny brought bowls of the whipped tofu and lemon delight that she manufactured in great quantities and which, as Hugh said, transmuted the contents of one's stomach to liquid gold. Zach Singer, the oboe player came,
and he played while ageless Frédérique Cyr danced, the humid air making a puddle of the mascara beneath her eyes. After supper, Gypsa McNider recited poetry in the clearing under the birches, her batwing sleeves arcing through the air as she declaimed that the amount of love in the world was constant. Her partner Tim lounged in the shadows rolling joints.

Hugh always sat well back in his chair, legs splayed, hands clasped over his stomach, arguing and drinking and drinking some more. He was a sculptor, and nature was his medium, for Hugh's art celebrated the transience of the day. He spoke of creating with the fundamental drive of a bee or a robin, but it was his personal mission to make manifest the passage of time. A spy out before dawn might glimpse Hugh crouched close to the earth, aligning the cedar fronds on the path to the dock, so that they all pointed like arrows at a newly sprung toadstool capped in neon tangerine. Days later, the fronds would be discovered placed in concentric circles honouring the fall of the same toadstool, its head now pockmarked and saggy with spores. Hugh alone knew how to rearrange a cobweb with a needle, scratch fern fronds onto a clear sheet of ice. The sight of Hugh lying face down on the dock, herding the skipping silver slips of the water beetles into a corral made of reeds threaded together on a horse hair filled Jan with the desire to shout out loud at the magnificence of life. His mode of being challenged Jan's conservative roots and attracted her, held her, and she would not, could not stop giving him her love, for his art, for his vision, for his great arms and fists and for the gold cap on his tooth.

“Stay,” she said to him. “Stay always. My forest is your forest, my woods are your woods, my leaves your leaves, my lake your lake, my streams your streams.” She could remember the silly loving burble of words even now.

Once Hugh made Jan a stained glass window, pieced together out of slips of mica leaded with reeds, glued with pine sap, girded with willow. The window was an impossible gift, and theirs was an impossible relationship, and yet it had lasted. For twenty years, the summer colony in the woods had been a place of refuge for artists of all kinds. Hugh did not know, but after a gust of wind shattered the mica window, Jan had searched the forest floor for shards. She kept them in an envelope under a floorboard in the bedroom.

In the beginning, Jan had considered Hugh's renunciation of permanence to be a grand and free gesture, like the operatic trilling of the hermit thrush or a soprano practising in a neighbouring house. She had honoured his anger when he had discovered her photographing his work. Hugh had knocked the camera out of her hand into the ferns, where she later picked it up, unharmed.
Get out,
he'd said. Get out of her own place. Extraordinary to think of it now, like that. And afterward he knelt before her and soaked her wraparound skirt with his tears.

“Your spirit is wide, Jan, like the horizon,” he said, stretching out his arms to receive her. So she forgave him, and with him she felt forgiven.

Sometimes Jan found it unbearable that Hugh should have seen her aging. She ought to have drifted in and out of
his life like one of his time-limited sculptures, here at dawn, gone in the evening, with the last trilling of the hermit thrush. Now she saw herself standing in the cold forest with an empty cardboard box in her thin hands. Her hair is shorter now, and she keeps it dark by artificial means, but she knows it disappoints people to come across her from behind, to have her turn to face them with the ridged pools of sleeplessness beneath her eyes.

Just as once upon a time Hugh found Jan, so he eventually found Crispin, one summer night in a bar on the Main in Montreal. Crispin was quick, wiry, and witty. In another century, he might have been a velvet-clad poet relishing his dreams, but Crispin was a water-colourist, producing exquisite works of the old school. They sold well. Dreamy clouds are never easy to achieve, but Crispin had a knack for painting the wide sky of Quebec on fire in the evening or nacreous at first light. Crispin's skies caught at the emotions, hinted at spiritual depths, but remained guileless, because when it came down to it, they were just sky, just water-colour.

Jan still has a photograph of Crispin at that time, lithe Crispin wearing a black halterneck with diamantes that stretch in a glittering curve into the hollows of his armpits. Earlier in the day, they had pulled up the chains and anchors on the dock and had paddled off on it as if it were a raft. Crispin swam around in the water, his wet head coppery in the sunlight. For a while, they had all wanted him.

Jan had tried hard. She maintained outward appearances with meals and money, but somewhere she lost the knack of
renewing her love for Hugh each day and she found herself acting more as she felt she ought to, rather than from desire. The parties in the woods changed. Vernon Hasp's documentary about other men called Vernon Hasp attained cult status and he began to hold court in his own penthouse where he could see himself reflected in sixteen panes of glass at a time. Tiny drifted off to farm organic carrots. Frédérique died from complications following a hip replacement. Their places were taken by Crispin's friends: students, actors, musicians shouting at each other about Derrida and hip hop. Hugh was often absent from Jan's bed in the morning, but the woods revealed little trace of his work.

Jan knew better than to say anything. Hugh had every right to live as he wished. Early on, she did her crying on a city bus, during one of those winters when she taught photography at a community college. The tears erupted when she least expected it, pouring out with all the shame and inevitability of vomit onto the sidewalk, while the high-school kids sitting around her sank into their jackets and looked out the window.

The next summer, when they returned to the woods, Jan slept in the cabin and Hugh shuttled between her room and Crispin's in the Bunkie. One morning when she was out taking photographs, she came across Crispin perched on a rock, brooding in the steam that rose off the lake into the cool morning.

“I do love him, you know,” he said.

“You know nothing of love,” she replied. That morning, she took a photograph of a reed bending backwards into its
sharply angled reflection. Around it quivered the lines of the water. The illusion of flexibility recalled her desire to share her streams and woods with Hugh, but when she looked at the bent reed, she also remembered how hard it was to share Hugh.

Later in the day, she woke Hugh from a nap, sat on the edge of the bed, spread out her hands on her knees, placed her ultimatum before him.

“I'm not cooking any more,” she said.

“I never said you had to.”

“I don't want you sleeping in the cabin any more.”

“I'll leave if you want me to, Jan.”

“No, you must stay, but stay in the Bunkie. I'm not leaving you.” It was all she had left to say. She could forgive Hugh for Crispin. Perhaps Hugh had discovered some great and good love in himself with Crispin that he had never experienced with her. She even told herself that she could stop desiring Hugh, if that was what he wanted, but she could not stop caring.

They did not see a couples therapist, but they did see an architect; “the architect of our separation,” she called the rotund little man in his office tower of reflecting glass. They renamed the main cabin the “Ruche” or hive, and constructed a network of simple buildings, half hidden in the bedrock or up on stilts, with shutters that hid the windows, and ferns that grew upon the roof. Fireplaces and rock ledges jutted out into the sitting rooms, and the buildings were joined by walkways with holes cut in them to accommodate the growth of the trees.

Jan built herself a studio where she worked on her photographs with an intensity that surprised her. Her subjects were clouds, trees, reflections. She made photo essays of the barns and shrines in the rural community around the lake, but she rarely took pictures of people. The only face for her remained Hugh's. He had a half-smile of such infinite sweetness, made the sweeter by his capacity to withhold it. She marked every day of their separation with a photograph: ice in the reeds, the coal-bright sparks on the lichen stalks, the water droplets that filled the lichen goblets to the brim.

 

And so the years had passed. During the summers, they lived in a scattered way among the trees, with Crispin, without Crispin, with Crispin again. And little by little Hugh's skin took on the transparency of age, and little by little, Jan's photographs became all the same. Up on the cliff top, with the empty container in her hand, Jan saw how she had lorded it over Hugh in her ownership of the paradise, and somewhere she had lost the natural line of herself, the line that swirled, was elastic and cut on the grain. Glorying in the idea of doing what she said she would do, she had given Hugh a place to stay, always, and in her stubbornness she had made chains for them both.

She had done what she said she would do. She had shared. By God, she shared everything that she had, and now when she finally had it all to herself, the wind lifting the roof in the old cabin, the rattle of flies against the glass in the studio, she found that she did not want it.

Perhaps Hugh had been right in his insistence that there should be nothing left to mark his passage in the world: no child, no artwork, no monument, nothing. Let the cabin and the studio on stilts fall into a careless teepee of boards in the forest, and beneath it a stained kapok mattress, its sodden insides spilling out into the leaf mould. Maybe there is no virtue, after all, in doing what you said you were going to do. Gone were the days of Frédérique lifting her chiffon scarves to the poplars. Jan shrugged. Now Hugh was gone too, and what was the point of holding on to anything? The time had come to pull her resentment out of herself, this anchor of hatred and love, and the gobbet of flesh that it was attached to. Up came the cable, dripping and straining, encrusted with zebra mussels and streaming weed. Mentally she flung it off the cliff after the ashes, left it to coil like a dead snake caught in a cedar tree.

Jan turned away from the cliff's edge and started back down the track. Out of habit she caught herself observing the funneled spider webs and the woodpecker holes, the flaps of lichen attached to the rock faces. It was November 20th, 2003 and Hugh had begun his passage into the ground, but she had no camera, no way to mark this day. Tomorrow the day would be gone. And now the tears came, for there was no other pair of eyes to see, to verify or to contradict her version of the vision. He was a bastard to have left her so alone.

Jan reached the bottom of the hill. In the distance, she could see the huddle of men beside the cars strung out along the road. Crispin was in the middle of the group, no longer young, but preserved by the passage of good scotch and
regular exercise. Four young friends stood about, their beards groomed into neat pubic triangles. Hugh had been in thrall to them, more so than ever towards the end, trapped by loneliness and the camaraderie of rough young sex in tree houses.

The men looked at the cold sky and at the cold land, their hands thrust deep into their jacket pockets. Then they turned to look at her, expectant.

“Well, he's out there,” she said, showing them the empty container. She waited for Crispin to speak. Now it was time to see what Crispin would make of the scattered remains of Hugh's love.

“God, I'm so very sorry,” said Crispin, breathing in deeply and covering his face.

She stood looking at the backs of Crispin's hands, reddened and dry with cold, asparkle with short golden hairs. What was Crispin to her now? He was certainly not a son, or a brother, but some other relation—a step-partner, from whom she expected nothing, and to whom she owed nothing. And yet, she thought, it was true, she had also passed a life of sorts with Crispin.

Hugh was gone, but nothing was finished. Together they had built a colony, and the history of a colony is filled with coming, and going, and coming back again. The words came out of Jan before she could stop them.

“Stay,” she said to Crispin. “Stay. Invite your friends. There's plenty of vegetable soup in the pot.” Her mouth stretched sideways in an elastic line, and there was a give in it that she had forgotten.

Crispin took his hands away from his face and reached out to touch her forearm. His eyes appeared paler than ever now that he had taken to bleaching his hair.

“Thanks for the offer Jan,” he said, “you've been a sweetie. But I think we'll head back into town. Mike has a gig tonight. Don't you Mike?”

A young man in black leather nodded, jingling his car keys.

“Right,” said Jan. “Well. Come up whenever you feel like it.” She turned away, holding herself rigid against the cold. Crispin stopped her as she was unlocking the car.

“Jan,” he said, “Hugh stayed because he wanted to.”

Jan spent the night at the cabin. She did not light the fire and she did not heat the soup. Instead she cocooned in the duvet and lay listening to the scuffle and twitter of mice in the walls. In the night the first snows came, and when she awoke she looked out at the fir trees and their green fingers, now outlined in white, spread wide and ready to bless. So that was it, she thought, the final benediction. She was forty-four, and free to go.