All right, she’d keep her own counsel if she had to. She’d keep her secret, hard as a knot of gristle buried in her chest, a sliver driven deep where it could fester and leak a steady stream of poison into her system. Wherever Avice spent the night during her travels, from Windsor to Toronto to Barrie, in whatever hotel room or berth, she slept with her fingers pressed to her lips. Nothing was going to escape from her. Not a single word, not even one spiked and spiny that might tumble out of her mouth while she lay on some dark shoal of sleep. There’d be no gnawing admissions from her to bore like scarcely audible parasites through the walls and into the heads of the other sleepers, to shock them into wakefulness and alarmed action.
It’s not that she didn’t savour the gobsmacked expression on the face of that clerk at Newcomb-Endicott’s. How smug he had been, his face tight as a nut—cracked open once he fully comprehended what he had heard. And it’s not that she even had to say anything, really. For some reason that she herself didn’t quite fathom, she often inspired a frisson of alarm in the men she encountered—a shudder of disturbed certainties, a shadow of doubt passing, the ominous sensation of a grave disrespectfully trampled over.
A man seated a few tables over from her in the Collingwood Inn had been observing her, quite openly, as was his right, he felt. He watched as she plucked an apple off her plate and stabbed it with her fruit knife, as if through its very heart. Such indelicacy he found abhorrent. He knew women—what they were like, what they were for, what they were capable of. Essentially, there were two kinds. This woman had the appearance of one but was obviously the other, and as he refused to dine in the same room as one of those, he tossed a coin onto the table and left.
Avice hardly noticed. He was of no interest, a stout packet of stale opinion hustling through the door, a man dead and buried in his own body. He didn’t even have to open his mouth, for she knew the type from her many forays into male precincts—smoking cars, saloons, clubs—revelatory as a quick tour of Bluebeard’s forbidden room. She had come to understand that violence was often cleverly accomplished, disseminated as facts that circled and circled a woman like a pack of menacing guard dogs. For instance, it was well known that education damaged a woman’s reproductive system; it had been proven in the medical journals. The higher a woman ascended in learning, the more her womb withered in response. Also, only prostitutes were capable of sexual feeling. (Judith, the Drinkwaters’ maid, had neither the leisure nor the skill to read these journals and had informed Avice otherwise during their bartering session on the eve of her wedding.) The truth of the matter was that a woman’s cranium, like an overbred animal’s, was simply too cramped a space to entertain thoughts of any depth or proportion. It was a cavity as small and empty as the teacup Avice presently drained, although her own cranial reservoir overflowed with ideas—bloody and seditious. She now knew not to show her hand or they would have it off, cut at the wrist. In her own anthropological studies she had found civilized gentlemen not that much different from the labouring brute who sinks his fist into his wife’s face on a Saturday night—only in his methods, and at times not even in that.
Avice stared into her teacup, turning it this way and that, trying to read the leaves, what pattern they formed on the bottom. This hardly qualified as brain work, she realized, but all the same was a prophetic game that she was good at. She used to read the leaves for her credulous sisters, and although she liked to tease them, she had more often than not—and weirdly—made accurate predictions of future events.
“I see a tall dark stranger …”
“Go on, do tell, Avice.”
“He has a hooked nose.”
“Oh!”
“A club foot, a hump on his back.”
“No, no, what’s he really like? You can see him, can’t you?”
Yes indeed, and she had been the one to claim him, the handsome stranger, the envisioned man. And look where it had gotten her.
The way the tea leaves were arranged, clumped wetly one upon another, reminded her of the expression on that clerk’s face—so gratifyingly dumbfounded when apprised of her unruly plans. She had gotten out of that store fast, hotfooted it before he had time to sound the madwoman alarm, or to call in the police. She had wanted none of their instant Yankee justice. What mischief had possessed her? What inspired garrulity had taken hold in that cathedral of commerce? Perhaps, she thought, it was only the confessional effect of the country itself, the looser, more voluble atmosphere in the land of the run-on sentence.
She felt safer here, back home, where shames were kept secret, where crooks and killers at least had enough manners not to brag, and her countrymen had enough sense not to make heroes of them. Besides, she knew that he, Griffith, was here somewhere. The further north she travelled, and the deeper she ventured into this cold province, the warmer she got. So intent on her goal was she, so determined and clear, that she had developed a whole other sense that was trained on him alone. It was no use his dodging, his dissembling, for she would witch him out like a hidden spring that crawled through the earth. She’d gather intelligence of his passing, follow his scent no matter how faint, step on the very stones he had stepped on. She’d step down hard, too, as if upon his very face. She’d grind her heel into his stupid sightless eyes.
It was too bad about that gun, though, which in her hasty retreat she had not been able to purchase. Her name had been practically inscribed on its hilt, and her husband’s name on one of its bullets. How perfectly, how flush the two of them fit together. A weapon made for marriage.
No matter, she sighed (while another male customer fled the premises), there were enough materials in the world with which to do harm. Knives, axes, clubs, bombs, garrotting cords, poisons, acids … and those were just the obvious ones. Once a person began to take note, began to look about her, it was truly amazing how many lethal instruments there were, even in the most innocent and upstanding locations. In a church, you could brain someone with a crozier, run them through with a pastoral staff, strangle them with a rosary. (Catholics obviously enjoyed much more latitude for harm, with all their ecclesiastical props and clutter.) Or in this establishment itself. Her eye now swept the room like a scythe. A chair swung with enough force would knock a man down, then you could finish him off by smashing his head in with that crystal pitcher. You could slice him up like a roast with a broken bottle or a water glass. Cut a vein or, if you were very ambitious and domestically assertive, saw off his head with a carving knife. Smother him with a tablecloth, drown him in the soup tureen, gouge out his eyes with a spoon … Avice laid aside the cup she had been turning dreamily around and around and picked up the silver fork from her place setting. She ran a finger lightly over the tines, then absentmindedly used one to clean a fingernail. Was it possible to kill a man with a fork? She supposed he would look terribly stippled when done, like a baked potato too avidly pricked.
Surveying the dining room once again for dangerous inventory, she was a bit taken aback to see that someone else was seated at the table that the other fat-headed gentleman had vacated. She must have been very deeply engrossed in her thoughts, for she had heard no one enter. This man’s face was obscured by a newspaper, a screen of words, that he held up before him. The fingers that held the paper were tapered and long as a pianist’s, and not at all like the blunt, bloated digits of the other man.
A heading in large type on the front page of the paper caught her eye: ECHO LOST. ALL PASSENGERS AND CREW DROWNED.
Avice shuddered as she conjured up the horrific scene, what those poor people must have experienced. All lost. She hoped that she would be able to avoid boat travel where she was going, wherever that might be. Terrible, a death like that … Of course, it was not to be discounted for someone else. Someone deserving.
Lately, in her lonely rooms at night, tourism beginning to pall, she had taken to killing off the man she had made with her arts and craft. She was starving and fretting him away. And not because she didn’t like him; the trouble was she liked him overmuch. (Is it possible to fall romantically in love with oneself?) She was far too comfortable and easy in his skin. It was fun being him, and, as him, she felt herself to be more credible, more bearable, a better human being. Marriage had changed her. As the wife she was sharp-tongued and cruel, a harridan, a nag. As him she lounged and idled, whistled little tunes, snatches of popular song, incomplete as his very self, yet all the more carefree for that. When she was she, her eyes hardened and narrowed, letting in less light, and her mind darkened. She was full of anger and resentment, she steamed and whistled like a kettle boiling on a hob. It was just so tempting to be him. He was an intoxicating sweetness, an addiction. He drifted through his days aimless as smoke. He pissed them away—but, alas, not against the wall. Possibly the worst thing was that he had room for forgiveness and she did not. He ate away at her resolve, he was on his side—most treacherous self!
Why would anyone want to be married to her, and be ruled by her? (In his kindness, he had not said this.)
So Avice had begun to step far less often into the guise of her husband. She took some effort, mending the breaks in her identity through which she had let herself go. She attempted to wean herself from him as a personal form of temperance. As a mere woman, though, she felt unsafe. Not so much because she was travelling alone and searching in the disreputable places where she had to search for scum like him. It was not an outward threat so much as an inward one. At times, in her abandonment, she thought it possible that she might choke with rage—and she feared what that rage might lead her blindly into.
He wasn’t perfect, her improvisational man, so maybe it wouldn’t be so troublesome to give him up. Self-sufficiency had its limits, especially in the bedroom. Here she was, married for weeks, and the union was still unconsummated. Virginity clung to her like a transparent, skin-tight garment that she could not for the life of her peel off. She would gladly divest herself of it, a woman’s most prized possession, and rip it to shreds. She was more than willing to toss it away in a tumble of arms and legs and slapping, pumping flesh—rend it utterly in a storm of effort, if not pleasure.
Nights, with only her hand for company, she had gotten to know herself very well—better than most women of her station, she suspected, whose bodies were usually buried beneath mounds of cloth, and whose minds floated in some other realm when necessary, heads and bodies severed. She had taken a real interest in herself, a lover’s charged interest in which no physical feature was too insignificant for a fond inspection. She conducted a census of her moles, freckles and toe hairs, and concluded that she was populated, especially in her rural regions, with a pleasing density of human insignia. She traced veins, contours, dips and mounds. She explored every orifice—aural, nasal, vaginal. She might have been a cartographer, a physician … or simply a shockingly indecent woman. She licked her kneecaps. She trailed a pinky over her lips, then ran it up her nose. She smacked herself soundly on the behind, then glanced slyly over her shoulder at her own lovely, blushing bum. (He might not be perfect, but she was darn close.)
With such physical knowledge and bravado it’s no wonder that Avice so casually terrified any number of gentlemen as she blazed a trail through the province. The current one, her fellow diner, did not appear to be one of this timorous brotherhood. He had lowered his newspaper and was watching her closely, almost as if her private thoughts were flickering visibly through her head, a peep show in a kinetoscope.
Waking from her self-starring reverie, Avice realized that she was being observed, and so she observed right back, sending the man that bold and icy look of hers that usually did the trick. Although not this time. He inclined his head in a slight bow and parted his lips, as if to speak. No words came out, but she watched, more fascinated than appalled, as something else did. A fly emerged from the man’s mouth—a large, glistening, blue-black, fully disgusting fly. Once it had crawled out, and over his lips, it progressed through the thicket of his moustache, then walked slowly up his cheek. He didn’t flinch, only looked steadily at her.
Avice wanted to scream with laughter, but he did frighten her a little, this man. He was strangely dressed, she now noticed, all in black: his suit, his cape, his top hat on the chair beside him. He had black, slicked-back hair, and his moustache was waxed to bull’s horn points. He looked overdone, contrived and artificial, not quite real, as if he had just stepped out of some book or someone’s overwrought imagination. Hers, for example.
And there was something else about him besides. A secret. One she would do well to keep to herself. Or rather, she would do better not to keep it at all, for she had no idea what it meant. It was this: she knew from reading the leaves in her teacup that this man, with his mephitic, if stagy, odour, was in her future. He might even be her future. She had read the portent, had seen his face staring up at her from the bottom of the cup, belligerently, even as it now stared at her from across the room.
No. She wouldn’t have it.
Avice stood abruptly, knocking her chair over and snagging the tablecloth, which made the cutlery and porcelain tremble. She snatched up the teacup, then threw it with force onto the floor, where it exploded into flying splinters and shards. Then she marched out of the room.
If he was real, let him pay the bill.