They are a small race of people who talk fast.
CHIEF NORMA FOX, COCKBURN ISLAND, CIRCA 1985
SHE MET THE MAN A million years ago at a time when she was sleeping with men who practised yoga and wore beards that were not convincing. She had just finished a tetchy major research paper, “The Function of the Interior Vocabulary in the Works of Malcolm Lowry,” and, as a master, or rather a mistress of the arts, she slipped easily into a bohemian half-world of theatre, ritual, and drinking too much. At the time she was living the unregulated life of her body, the El Mocambo on a Friday night, lines of cocaine vanishing off the sink in the bathroom, wearing black tights, ankle bracelets, and heels. There were nights she arrived with Pete, danced with Tony, got felt up by Leonard, smoked a joint with Perry, and finally went home with Phil. It was easy. Men were easy.
She had taken to the stage as if to a sanctuary and performed in a small, unpaid, and unauthorized production of Beckett’s Happy Days at the Poor Alex Theatre. She was appeasing the burden of her mother, she told herself, a highly theatrical woman who had died in a blaze of alcoholic anger, and who sang old show tunes when she ironed, or when she did anything around the house.
The theatre stank of scorched curtains, and during the most dramatic moment of any production the heating pipes would bang loudly and without fail. In the afternoon, when the stage manager switched on the house lights for rehearsal, the same large rat exited stage right. For six nights a week, two weeks in a row, she was buried up to her breasts inside a papier mâché sand dune that she’d constructed with the help of the director and a lighting technician, who brokered bags of marijuana to a succession of budding artistic youngsters, all of them showing up on bicycles and leaving quickly. During the performance, she stuffed cotton batten under her lips to make her look older. “I used to think,” she intoned, “I used to think I would learn to talk alone.”
She met him at a cast party, a nearly nightly romp where the cast and delinquents from the street hovered about a table crammed with liquor, goat cheese, and whole-wheat crackers. He was a sullen older man who cast an atmosphere of sullen disapproval. She knew him to be the murky ex-lover of the stage manager, still hanging about for obscure and sullen reasons. There were rumours about him, or at least a rumour of rumours; he’d been drummed out of a university appointment due to some indelicacy with a grad student. Or something more sinister, something never spoken. He was a murderer. A mass murderer. Or he had written books. More than one. He was tolerated but not embraced. He knew the scene rather well and was decidedly unimpressed by it; these wearers of attractive clothes who made attractive comments to one another, who said scathing and clever things in their pursuit of being epically themselves. They were of the age when they turned heads, took lovers, got rid of them in restaurants, took in stray cats that they christened with ornate literary names and treated with great tenderness. None of them had exactly starved, he knew that, but they had suffered tragedies, often at the hands of older men who betrayed them and turned out to be married with kids. Soon, one by one, he understood they would vanish into advertising. He’d seen it before. Eventually, they all turned their backs on the big truth and began to cozy up to the great big lie.
He did not approve of Beckett, either. He made this known to her. He did not approve of the death rattle of the modern world with its modern art and sickening devotion to comfort, to status, to greed. He approved of her, though. Approved of the pleasure she gave his eyes. Her hair that swung from red to brown, the heavy chest, the figure, the jeans. He approved of these matters.
The man was at least a decade and a half older than any of them, he did not practice yoga, and, for the time being at least, boasted no beard. His face was the weather-beaten texture of the bark of the ironwood tree. (He had told her that, later: “My skin is the texture of the bark of the ironwood trees” he said proudly.) His eyes grey, the skin surrounding them lined and articulated like something from the Pleistocene Age. Also grey. A tangible inner disquiet radiated from him. If this disquiet had a smell, it was the odour of basements where things had been stored and forgotten, old fencing gear from twenty-five years before, ice skates that had rusted. He was in the habit of forgetting that he was staring at the front of her shirt, or unaware he was doing it. He found no shame in this. He told her that. He found his shame elsewhere. There was no shortage of it, he said. Linda had not heard a man make this particular admission before. She was not impressed by it. There was so much she was not impressed by when it came out of the mouths of men. So much had fallen crapulously out of that place, for so long.
In this posture, him holding a glass of beer tilted so that the lamplight flayed into it, his face stuck substantially close to her, he first addressed her.
“Are you any good in a canoe?” He spoke with a sort of muffled weariness that seemed to require some effort on his part to keep it to mere weariness. In fact, he was extremely nervous she would reject him on the spot.
“Excuse me?” she said.
“Canoe. From the Portuguese canoa, into the French canot, and into the English, if we can call it that. Canoe. Are you any good in one?”
“Are you making a joke?” She sounded appalled by this line of questioning. As if somehow it was beneath her.
“It’s a simple question,” he said, cringing inside. She was preparing to destroy him, he knew it.
It was a simple question. Linda was young enough to presume herself to be skilled at just about everything, thank you, even though her most recent experience in a canoe was an August afternoon a number of years ago, shortly after her mother’s funeral, when she had ventured out in her father’s antique sixteen-foot Peterborough with the bronze-coloured ribs made of maple, and immediately cracked it on the wharf at the cottage they rented. It struck her suddenly what a handful she’d been for that man. He had died in a hospital, quietly. His body stiffened oddly, like the root of an ancient tree.
“Pretty good,” she offered. “Good enough.”
“Great,” he said. “Let us go canoeing then, you and I, when the night sky is spread out like a something something on a table. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
“Yes. I do. More than you do. Etherized. The word is etherized.” He had mixed his metaphor, and not successfully either. She would learn that he did that.
“Good,” he said. “Good. Let us go canoeing then, you and I.”
That’s how it happened. Rather than let a somewhat tedious burly man try to best her in a match of literary trivia, she went on a canoe trip with him.