The Last Woman (25 page)

Erica thinks I should get over London. She doesn’t know how hard I’ve tried. A woman’s body is her own, men shouldn’t decide for us, it’s not a child at that stage – I believe all that. For months at a time, I’m convinced. Then one day, rain falling, or I’m alone in the car, waiting for Rowan to come out of school, and it hits me …

– the little girl in the park. Red hat. The seagull
.

… this guilt sometimes – a stone in my chest

Sometimes I get this crazy fear Rowan will be taken away from me – to pay for her. She’s always been a girl to me. A boy for a girl. Crazy, but the thought persists. If we stay stuck on a thought, even one that’s not true, can we make it true? Can thinking something, fearing something, draw it toward you?

That nature program. The biologist said the lions could tell when another animal feared them too much. Was paralyzed by fear, already giving up
.

Dr. Break (what a name for a doctor!) gave me the test results in his office. I was so upset I phoned my mother in Montreal
. Please don’t tell Dad.
She wanted me to come to Montreal. But she was as confused as I was …

everything in me trembling …

The flowers in the market today. Little joy-bursts. I saw but couldn’t feel
.

The flower-seller’s wife – a cheerful woman with a black eye. Did he give it to her? We have no idea of other people’s lives. Dark caves, with secret entrances …

Richard came home today with tickets for New York. He means well – a surprise intended to cheer me. I feel sorry for him, putting up with me. Me with my uncombed hair and not even dressed yet, pretending to be delighted. I can’t imagine going to New York – the effort! Even the thought of MOMA leaves me cold
.

I suppose we’ll go. I see Richard smiling, out of love for me – at least I think it’s love – and all I feel is a kind of pressure. I’ve always felt it around him. He knows what’s best for everyone and insists on it, for their own good, of course. It’s a kind of blind willfulness. The first time I met him I felt it. At our wedding too –

Idea for a painting. A man asleep with his mouth open. His mouth frowning. His whole face, body, slack, unconscious. While sunlight floods in from the window, making a glory of sheets, yellow wall, a child’s toy on the floor. What he doesn’t, can’t see.

We haven’t made love for three months. He doesn’t insist. I don’t know whether he minds or not. I mind: not not making love, but not wanting to. At twenty it was different. Sex: part of my love for the world. Indistinguishable from it. Who next? What next?

Thought of Billy today. That glimpse of Mad Jack’s as we went up to the Harbour (I often look there). A year since his last card from Florida
.

Made the mistake of telling the above to Erica. I hate the way she talks about Billy, like a typical therapist. You can hear her brain turning him into the “love object.” The fantasy object. The locus of immaturity, she calls it
.

I’m drawn to him so much these days, or at least the thought of him. His absence seems part of this ache in me, the emptiness. Sometimes I feel if I could reconnect with him, if I could talk with him about – anything – a lot of this would come clear. As if with him I could go back and reclaim my life. As if with him my mistakes might be dissolved somehow. Resolved? As if, as if. Erica’s probably right: I’m immature. Yet is maturity always the answer?

London. There was a moment going into that house that was actually a hospital. My father brisk and cheerful – everything was going to be fine. We were both scared. He had climbed the steps, but I lingered on the sidewalk, looking off toward the railings of a little park. A grove of trees. I knew that what I was doing was wrong for me. I also knew it was right
.

The light in the prep room like a flying saucer …

So much of the last ten years gone up in unhappiness. Years of not being there for her family, not really. Years of not painting, or not painting very well. Years of not being there for life. She wishes she had never opened the journal, for the sense of waste is overpowering. She can feel again the flattened, identical days. Often she wouldn’t get dressed until late afternoon when Rowan came home. She would try to paint – struggling to find an opening. And small openings
would
occur. But they would last for only a few minutes – a few days, at best – before the darkness descended again. Sometimes, she’d decide to give up painting altogether – and for a week she would feel a burden had lifted. But her malaise always returned. It came back despite everything, even the antidepressants, their joyless
levelling worse than her sickness. And so, not knowing which way to turn, she would go back to her studio.

Turning to the last entry, she draws a sharp line below it and on the next empty page writes:
What does it mean to love somebody?
For some time she sits, thinking. Then she adds,
I suppose that I have to ask tells me something – but enough?
Some minutes later she scrawls furiously, in block letters:
I HAVE TO LIVE
.

At five-thirty on Friday afternoon, Richard phones to say they won’t be able to go up to the cottage until Saturday morning – he has a late meeting tonight with a client. He speaks with a show of cheerful nonchalance, as if their quarrel were behind them, as if
of course
she and Rowan will comply – all of which has the effect of putting her back up. “Well, I’m taking Rowan with me tonight,” she announces. “I have to get back to work.” He says nothing, and in the silence she can sense their hostility, like two obdurate forces set against each other in darkness.

She and Rowan stop for ice cream on the road, and as they drive into piney uplands, they seem to achieve their old, easy intimacy. But that night the boy comes down with a fever, and it is not until late the next afternoon that he’s himself again and she can climb, exhausted, to her studio. On the huge canvas, shiny with oils, her giantess rises. The face is unfinished – it resembles a mask of melted flesh – but the force of her, the force and freshness, stop Ann in her tracks.

Some hours later, the low sun flooding through her western screens, the dabbing of her brush is interrupted by the sound of a boat arriving. Moving to a window, she watches the water taxi pull up to the dock with her husband aboard. She hears him go through the boathouse and on up to the cottage. Some minutes later, he returns, the trudge of his feet on the stairs.

“You want me to make supper or what?” he says. His head, thrusting out of the stairwell, seems disembodied, as if it had been cut off and set there.

“Sorry,” she says, piqued by his tone. “I forgot the time.” She cleans up and goes to the kitchen, where she finds him with an apron over his suit pants, hacking at a carrot.

For the rest of the weekend, they are civil but restrained. It makes it hard to paint, this covert war. It has become its own raison d’etre, an atmosphere they can’t seem to escape. She fights to see her work clearly. She stands before her giantess, while arguments with Richard run through her head. On Sunday evening she announces she won’t be going home with them to the city.

She expects Richard’s disapproval, at the very least. But he accepts with a shrug and the next morning, waving goodbye to them in the Harbour, she is surprised by how upset she is as they draw away – a sense of mortal parting, as if she might not see them again.

The following morning, she calls Yvonne and asks after Billy. Yvonne tells her the hospital is releasing him the next
day. “They told me to pick him up at eleven, but I don’t know how I’m going to do it. Eddie needs the car for work and my cousin’s is getting fixed.” Ann offers to do it for her. “Just bring him to the Harbour,” Yvonne says, quickly taking up her offer. “We can leave his boat there for him.” As soon as Ann hangs up, she experiences resentment – she is entirely wedded to her canvas again. The next day, it is close to noon when she arrives in Black Falls. In the distance, the roof of the ice-hockey arena hovers like a black umbrella in the haze. To come so close to her family and not be with them – there is something deeply unsettling about it, and as she rounds the corner and sees the high, brown facade of the hospital, she is tempted to drive past.

In the lobby, Billy is waiting in a wheelchair.

“My rescuer,” he says, rising. He insists on walking to the parking lot. His grin irritates her, his slowness.

In a few minutes, they pass out of the old neighbourhoods into the spreading frontier of plazas and parking lots; then just as they are about to break free onto the open highway, they must slow for a detour. Huge machines are levelling a mountain of solid rock. Through clouds of drifting dust, she glimpses a blasting mat, lying by the road like a huge rubber mattress; the dust-browned bumper of the next car. Beside her, Billy has braced himself on the dash. Pulling over, she helps him out. He stoops, gagging, but nothing comes up; finally he gets down on all fours, bending over so that his forehead touches the ground.
“Not used to so much movement,” he says. Around them, awkward as film dinosaurs, the machines fill the air with their congested roaring. She gets him back into the car, but when she suggests they return to the hospital, he insists they go on.

At last they climb into pristine country. The road winds among pink outcrops, under groves of old pine. He has closed his eyes.

“There’s a park. You can rest for a while.”

She runs the Honda into the grove where picnic tables sit in the shade. Again, he wants to get right down on the ground. He lies on his back with his knees up, one arm flung over his face, while she sits beside him.

After a while, he drops his arm and looks wearily above him. They hear the muted swish of a speeding car and, moments later, the dropped gears of a transport tackling the grade.

“Don’t you think a doctor –”

“Never,” he says to the high treetops where a squirrel chitters.

“I know you don’t like the hospital.”

“A place of death,” he says.

She snorts, disdainful of his melodrama.

For a long time she is silent. This place with its patches of sun and shade, its dry piney heat, has begun to oppress her. She feels spacey, a little unreal. She picks at a needle that has got onto her jeans and is about to say, “Well, shall we get going?” But she continues to sit, stunned by the heat.
They seem to be waiting for something that must inevitably arrive, like a train that is barrelling across the drought-stricken land. But where they are, boredom and stillness reign.

A needle has fallen on Billy’s shirt. Plucking it off, she tosses it away.

Abruptly he moves his arm and looks at her. Then he reaches up and touches her cheek, lightly strokes her cheek with the back of his finger.

The Nap-A-While Motel sits by itself in a slot carved out between the highway and the bush. It is covered in pink clapboard, the flat roof protruding over the office to make a 1950s-style carport. She leaves Billy in the car and enters the office, where she finds the usual high counter and a curtained doorway leading, she presumes, to living quarters – sights that bring back travelling with her family: the sun-slaked hours in the car, Rowan’s cries of “Can we have a pool?” She strikes the little bell. Behind the flowered curtain, a radio proclaims the worst summer for forest fires in half a century.
In Ontario alone, over a hundred fires are burning, including ten that –

At the rear of the building, hidden from the highway, picture windows, each curtained, look blankly toward the turquoise of a pool, sparkling behind chain-link. A floating toy – it looks like a small red whale adrift under the diving board – seems to her impossibly lonely. No one else is around.

The room is dim. The air conditioner over the door failed some time ago; the only light leaks from the Venetian blinds, slightly parted, so that tiger stripes of sun fall across the carpet where their clothes lie strewn. They lie on damp sheets; above, a missing tile reveals a wood beam, a bit of electric wire.

“Are you okay?”

“Oh, yes,” she says, nestling into him. “How about you? That wasn’t too much for you?”