WE DROVE TO THE GULF ISLAND IN DANIEL Rose’s navy blue minivan. This was an annual trip for his graduate student seminar and I had been invited as a special guest. It was, I believed, part of my rehabilitation. Would I have the self-discipline to behave myself amongst these young women?
“I hope you don’t mind,” Daniel said, slinging the door back and motioning me in, “sitting with the groceries.”
The rapist was stashed in the rear of the vehicle, safely away from temptation.
Daniel Rose’s wife sat beside him in the front of the van, then slid on a pair of oversized sunglasses, peeled back the lid of her takeout coffee, and we began the journey. Rita was in another car with one of the graduate students. It had all been arranged.
“The day is beautiful.” I had to strain forward in my seat so they could hear me.
“Very beautiful,” they chimed in agreement.
“It could not be better,” I added with confidence.
“Couldn’t be better.”
Perhaps I could say anything at all and they would repeat it. I leaned an elbow on one of the bags of food and felt it shift. There was a strong smell of onions.
“We always buy our groceries in the city,” Daniel called over his shoulder as we merged into the highway. He cranked up the window a notch so we could hear each other speak. “Much less expensive.”
“Ah,” I nodded, face blasted by wind.
“Everything costs more on the Island,” his wife added.
“Normally we buy only organic,” Daniel shouted, “but with this gang it would cost the earth.”
“Prohibitive,” Sharon Rose confirmed.
“See that bag by your elbow?” Daniel nodded.
I did. Half a dozen fat cauliflowers were crammed in. A bland, gassy vegetable I am not fond of.
“Picked up the lot in Chinatown for three bucks.”
“Ah,” I said.
“Just because there were some brown bits.”
I remembered the day, while I was still staying in Rita’s apartment, that she had taken me around to the outdoor bargain bins of groceries. This was what I should buy, she told me, picking up a cellophane-packed carton of rotting eggplant. “Or this.” She pointed to some unnamed straggle of vegetable. “So much cheaper.” And then she immediately went inside to the stall of fresh beans to scoop up a bagful for her own dinner.
Traffic sped past on both sides. Daniel was a careful driver, hands clamped to the wheel, his back very erect. This was not an interesting conversation, I was thinking. Sharon taught anthropology at the university and Daniel was in the department of geophysics. Why did we not discuss theories of cultural determinism, or the disputed age of the Earth?
“We used to get by on fifty bucks a week for food,” Daniel said as the van pitched over a seam in the highway.
“Over twenty years ago,” his wife reminded him. “Before the kids were born.”
I had seen photographs of their sons on Daniel’s desk: handsome blonde boys, very healthy. One was a champion in the rowboat, or perhaps it was kayak, and he had been on the Olympic team in Sydney.
When someone announces that a landscape is “just like a painting” you think he is an idiot. But when the massive car ferry crosses the Strait, leaving the mainland behind until it is a forgotten shape, and when the mist shimmers over water like a gauze canopy, then you understand that the world of the artist may collide with the world of nature, and that only great works of art bring this explosion of joy. This is what I scribbled in my notebook while the others crowded the cafeteria.
The sky was a startling blue in the east, and heavy and dark in the west. You could spot exactly where the shadow began; the water was sliced in two, dark and icy near the bow of the ferry and beyond, sparkling grey-blue off the stern. I wrote a poem in the notebook Rita had bought me. The Gulf Islands ferry cut from one world to the next, its deck doused first with light then darkness. Most of our group stayed in the cafeteria for the entire journey, chattering over coffee and muffins, but I made my way to the deck to be buffeted by wind and spray and the whining of gulls, and to feel the engine vibrate beneath my feet.
In the distance a grey mammal’s back humped through the waves, dolphin or whale, and I thought of the universe of ocean beneath us, those unseen creatures who flash through silence all their lives.
I wouldn’t mind if we never arrived at the Island. This ferry was the perfect capsule for the exiled poet: a complete world that travelled over the watery skin of another hidden world, between land forms and still places.
After two hours, the engines cut and we coasted towards the dock of Daniel’s island.
“Where were you?” Sharon met me in the narrow staircase leading to the carport.
I told her, but my description of what I saw was somehow offensive.
“We were all in the café,” she said, and paused. “Wondering where you’d gone.”
We walked together, threading through the vehicles until we reached the van, where Daniel waited, key in ignition.
“So, you found our wandering man,” he said, leaning out the window.
Chastened, I stepped inside, into the back seat beside the bag of cauliflower.
The students had brought sleeping bags and tents, which they set up outside. The cabin was very simple, aged cedar with a screened-in verandah, musty furniture. I wanted only to stand and breathe this country air, but all around people scurried, heaving groceries and gear, rucksacks full of clothes, bottles of wine, and coolers of ale. Sharon had tied back her hair and was wearing some sort of cut-off trousers and a big shirt that must have belonged to her husband. She barked orders like a drill sergeant: “Take it to the back room! That stays outside. Wipe your shoes!”
Around her neck hung a beaded necklace dripping with fierce-looking porcupine quills. Everyone seemed to know exactly what to do so I stayed out of the way, gazing at the scruffy fields and, in the distance, a ridge brushed with dark fir trees. There were even a dozen cows from a neighbouring farm moving slowly through the tall grasses, munching, barely looking up at our commotion. I’ve discovered, since leaving home, that each shift in locale is a shift in universe, and that I must catch up, find myself in the new place. This island was beautiful, my eyes told me, yet my body was scrambled. Inside, the cabin was dark and stuffy and I heard a low fervent buzzing. When my eyes became accustomed to the lack of light I could see hundreds of flies clustered around the windows, beating their translucent wings against the glass. One of the students had grabbed a copy of The Journal of Physical Sciences and was thwacking the insects as fast as he could.
“Die!” he chanted with each massacre. “Die!” No one but me seemed to notice.
“It is beautiful here,” I said to my hostess when she paused for a moment in her order-giving. “Very simple.”
“We like it.” Her face was red from all the carrying and heaving and her voice had an edge.
Just stand here a few seconds, I wanted to tell her. Breathe in. Feel where you are. And there was Rita, wrenching her back as she worked to jigger open the windows, knocking them with the palm of her hand, struggling until she broke her nails.
“Why do you not relax?” I suggested.
“Because,” she said in an icy voice, “there is a ton of work to be done.”
I understood that she was tense, and that she was thinking of her son back home who had been taken to stay with his father. It is hard for a woman to be separated from her child.
“Why don’t you help Daniel with the fire?”
I smiled gently. “But this man is an expert.” Of course I’ve lit many fires in my day, but always in an open stone fireplace.
Daniel demonstrated the use of the oil lamps, propane fridge, and the wood stove, which was necessary both for heat and cooking. He pointed to the outside toilet, which they call an “outhouse,” a term I found both sensible and amusing. It reminded me of the laundry shack back home where the maids used to wash our clothes and sheets by hand. Someone filled an immense iron kettle with water from the pump, brought it indoors, and placed it on the stove. The students had already dropped gear in carefully selected spots on the field and began to raise their tents expertly, pounding stakes in the ground, heaving the aluminum poles skyward. Before long the fields on either side of the cabin were littered with multi-coloured peaks of nylon. We looked like a small occupying army.
Sharon organized a kitchen crew to peel and chop potatoes while Daniel wedged logs into the stove and tried to get the thing lit, cursing the dampness.
By the westward window there was an ancient straw chair, which I sank into, snapping open one of the cans of beer. Late afternoon heat shimmered over the horizon and the trees on the ridge cast long shadows over the fields. The tops of their branches combed the sky and I decided that this is where I would go. I would enter into the dusk, alone.
But first, a guest has an obligation to entertain his hosts and fellow guests, especially the penniless poet who had brought no groceries or liquor, only his hungry, parched self. Whenever a student drifted in from his labours, I told him a story from my life or made an observation about this place, its smells and tastes, and I felt their earnest attentiveness as I spoke. The poet, from earliest childhood, sees and feels what others may forget.
Rita, red-faced, flitted by complaining about mouse shit in the cutlery drawer.
I talked to a beautiful girl named Maria who had thick eyebrows and was dressed in a green halter top and white shorts. I also spoke to her boyfriend, Marlon (like the great movie star from The Godfather), and finally to their friends in the graduate seminar. They were all so young and clever and polite.
“Maria, bellísima,” I told her, seriously, for beauty is never a joke.
Her boyfriend laughed, but she didn’t. Instead she looked hard at my face, her cheekbones tight against her olive skin, and she knew that I had seen something in her that these Canadian boys had missed.
When they began their first teaching session around the table in the screened-in verandah, I set out for my walk. I grabbed another beer, and an extra for the trip home. It was still hot under the low-slung sky.
The ridge looked about a mile west and it was in this direction that I hiked, squinting against the falling light, making my way slowly through the hay and grasses and spindly wildflowers, a bee buzzing around my head, the scent of camomile clinging to my nostrils while far off the cows lowed and clanged their bells. As I walked I thought of the Indians who must once have roamed these lands. Could I ever do it, live in the bush, planting simple crops, eating berries, writing my poems for no eyes and ears but my own?
Perhaps that was complete freedom for a writer: to have no audience. Does a bird need applause for its flight?
The ridge drew no closer. If anything, it stretched further into the distance as the evening clouds thickened overhead. It was of no consequence if I reached my destination; it was only an ordinary idea to have this goal, which perhaps limited imagination. I drank both beers and tossed the cans into the field where I imagined they would seed and grow tender crops of Budweiser Light.
I stretched my arms towards the sky and was broadsided by a wave of vertigo, and in slow motion I collapsed to the ground. There I lay, spread-eagled on my back, and watched a distant jet tear a seam through the sky. Birds I’d never heard before peeped and chittered, and when I listened very hard I could hear the flap of their wings. I was pitching into deep sleep, a sleep uncluttered by the racket of Rashid’s infernal keyboard clacking as he worked till dawn. It was quite unlike those moments of uneasy silence in the city where I was born, where one lies in fretful insomnia in the hours before dawn hoping for some hint of the life of a fellow human. The grinding wheels of the garbage truck becomes a welcome intrusion.
Hours later, when I opened my eyes I could see only grass, and my eyes and nose were full of it. I sneezed violently then sat up, squinting, hair matted, and realized where I was. But not immediately. First I was a small boy alone in my bed, and in the room beneath a Chopin polonaise lurched forward then suddenly stopped. My father’s footsteps clinked up the stone stairs, his key fitted into the door. We were a family again, and the noise would stop.
“Where on God’s green earth have you been?” It was Rita who jumped to her feet, relief tracking across her face.
They were all frowning up at me through gaslight, and I realized that I was still covered in grass and dirt from my little adventure. My lips were parched and I searched for a cold beer in the propane fridge. When I looked back out the window to where I’d just been, I realized from the waning light that I’d been gone for hours.
“I was listening to the ground,” I said, and looked at Maria, the beautiful Italian girl, because I knew she would understand. “To hear its heartbeat.”
Maria smiled, then stared into her lap.
The seminar had wrapped up and the students were sprawled about the cabin, reading or making notes.
Professor Daniel Rose pinched his reading glasses over his nose. “Never do that again, Carlos. Go off without telling anyone. You can get seriously lost out there.”
Lost? You can only get lost when there is somewhere to get lost from.
I looked at Sharon, who was clearing the table and setting it with dinner things. She glanced up, but catching my eye, went back to her work. There was a tension in her movements; she was pretending to be interested in adjusting the cutlery and napkins, but it was not true. She was angry. At me? I wasn’t sure.
“Anyone want more of this?” Daniel held up the ladle for the stew pot and I waited for someone to say “yes” but no one did. Before I had a chance to utter a word, he’d dropped the lid on the earthenware pot and rushed it back to the kitchen.
“Excellent!” he pronounced with pleasure. “There will be enough for tomorrow.”
At home we never remove the pot before the guests have gone. His wife sat back in her chair with a strange vacant smile. She’d changed her shirt and wore a light jersey blouse, pale green. Daniel spoke to her as he spoke to his students, in this elevated teacherish tone, as if he hadn’t left the lecture hall.
“Sharon, excellent stew!”
She nodded once in response, smile intact.
One of the graduate students began to talk of his trip to Paris.
“Of course the Left Bank isn’t what it used to be in Sartre’s day,” he said, locking his thumb into his belt. He was a sharp-featured boy, perhaps twenty-two, with narrow eyes and hair swept off to one side. “So jammed with tourists,” he sighed. “Deux Magots, just another clip joint.”
“You kids with your European voyages,” Daniel interrupted. “I wish to hell we could afford to go overseas.”
“But you have this lovely island cabin,” I reminded him.
“Half of it. My brother and his brood own the rest.”
“And we must leave everything spanking clean,” Sharon said. “Who’s on dish duty tonight?”
Three of the boys jumped up, two grabbed checked drying cloths, the other an ancient sponge. It was as if they’d been doing this all their lives, hunched over the sink chattering away like old women as they cleaned.
I poured another drink while the girls burrowed deep into their chairs and sipped coffee, and I thought of the tiny state in the eastern part of my country, where the women still ride wooden carts which are pulled by their stoop-shouldered husbands.
After the work was done and the boys had joined us, reeking of detergent, I told my fellow guests of childhood vacations at my grandfather’s finca, a huge ranch in the highlands where longhorned cattle roamed the forbidding landscape. “He was a gaucho,” I explained. “A formidable horseman.”
“Still alive?” Marlon asked, his eyes half-shut and puffy.
“I fear not.” So I told them of his strange death, how he was struck by lightning one winter evening as he stood outside, flooded by the dramatic moonlight of the high country, one hand leaning against the tall metal flagpole as he took a leak. There hadn’t even been a storm; it was one of those electrical short-circuits that sometimes travel between mountain peaks. The flagpole was hit, the fabric of our national banner instantly fried, and my grandfather fused to the metal.
“After a lifetime of breaking horses, murdered by patriotism!”
While I told my stories, Daniel poured rough red wine from a cask. This homemade wine contained a thick sediment that swam around our glasses like chips of paint. In the distance, some animal wailed to the darkness.
We finally left the table for the comfort of the main room. Someone passed around a marijuana cigarette and I was amazed to watch Daniel as he held it between his thumb and index finger and drew it to his lips, then took a long experienced inhalation. This was followed by a series of snorts and coughs as he wrestled to hold the smoke inside his chest.
Rita didn’t smoke. She sat curled like a cat on the old sofa, gazing at nothing. Perhaps she was thinking of Andreas in his father’s girlfriend’s townhouse, lying on the pull-out bed, snoring softly through his open mouth. Above her, attached by a hook to the wall, was an old scythe, badly rusted. Daniel had told us earlier that it had been found in the lower field, dropped by some careless harvester and left to rust in the coastal rains. Daniel liked to tell small historical anecdotes about the cabin. He himself had placed a newspaper in the wall for future generations to find. The drainage system for the fields had been worked out according to some medieval principal that he was experimenting with. He would, in fact, draw us a diagram.
The floor of the cabin was made of unvarnished particle board, partly covered by a worn carpet. The stairs rose from the centre of the room and led to the upper floor, where none of us had been invited.
Daniel examined the immense flask of wine and frowned. “At this rate we won’t last the weekend.”
“What about in town,” I said, remembering the village we’d driven through. A kilometre or two from the dock, I’d spotted a market. “There is a place to buy wine?”
“If you want to pay Island prices.”
I watched his wife’s face. I thought she looked annoyed. Perhaps she was bored by his endless talk of money. I imagined this man in bed: would he monitor his pulse, his rate of ejaculation?
“One of the boys is at Oxford,” Daniel was saying. “A great honour, of course, but Sharon and I are in the poorhouse for the duration.” He looked to his wife for agreement but she just yawned.
He thinks he knows her, I realized. He was sure that he understood what she was thinking and feeling at any moment, and when they climbed the staircase soon to the attic bedroom, he would tell her this, what she had been feeling.
Of course he would be wrong. But she wouldn’t admit this, for it was her great power, his misplaced confidence.
The young women of the graduate seminar were long limbed and slender and I watched their earnest faces as they followed the gestures of the esteemed professor. He was a man whose voice was too low and deep for his body, for he was no taller than I, with small sloping shoulders and a drooping gut. His hands and feet were small and plump, almost embryonic in their lack of detail. Yet these girls wanted him, because he knew more about plate tectonics and the physics of soil erosion than anyone in the province.
I thought they were not beautiful in the way Sharon Rose was. They assumed that any man would prefer their lithe, unseamed bodies to hers, and perhaps there are men who do. Perhaps Daniel was one of them.
Sharon moved slowly in her womanly trance, with those sure hands that could equally cut vegetables or model some complex theory in the air. I had no doubt that those lined freckled hands also knew how to caress a man in the same unhurried manner. Her waist was soft after bearing two children, and there was no vanity in the way she pushed back her hair with restless impatience, and she never giggled as the students did. Occasionally her deep-throated laugh filled the room.
Her husband ignored her when he was speaking. The young men of the graduate seminar mimicked the professor’s voice and they competed with each other to ask penetrating questions, or to make some witticism that would cause him to chuckle. Daniel was the holder of knowledge and the dispenser of praise. The girls lifted their chins and said, “Professor Rose, is it possible to devise a system which…”
Sharon watched all this with an experienced eye. She would not compete. She was beyond such games. Yet, as the evening wore on, I saw that she was tired, that she wished the students would leave the cabin and unroll the sleeping bags in their tents, but instead they lingered while the professor slugged homemade wine and held forth.
To Daniel, everything was an “interesting conceit” or “a marvellous paradox.”
The wood stove crackled with its fire, and the sweet smell of marijuana hovered in the air. Almost none of the kids smoked; they found it amusing to see their teacher suck on a joint, roll his shoulders with pleasure, and ramble on. I was becoming terribly sleepy, my head so heavy I felt the great effort of keeping it up. Rita was still perched on the couch, legs tucked under her bottom, her face expressionless. When I looked around the room I realized that I didn’t know which form was a girl and which was a boy. They sat coiled together, wearing the same padded vests and flannel shirts, their hair tousled. Maria’s boyfriend propped an elbow on her shoulder, as if she were a piece of sturdy furniture.
“Excuse me,” I leaned forward and whispered to her. “Is this man your lover?”
Maria giggled and reached up to touch the boy’s hand. “Are we, Marlon?”
“Something like that,” he said, yawning broadly.
But Maria wasn’t yawning. She looked at me hard, those full lips not assured now, but questioning. She’d pulled away, just a notch, from her boyfriend’s weight. The boy’s touch was repulsive to her now, a dead thing. Her gaze dropped to my hand, which was resting on my thigh, and I knew that she had spotted my small scar, the poor abbreviated finger. Her mouth tightened and I recognized this expression: she was weaving a story of unimaginable pain and peril. When she looked up again, I saw that her eyes were moist, her lips parted.
No Maria, not tonight.
Sharon passed close by on her way to the kitchen and I stared at her bare arm with its canopy of wrinkles that surrounded the elbow. Without thinking, I reached up and touched her there.
She stopped. No one had noticed, certainly not her husband, who tilted his wine glass to the side, demonstrating some aspect of relative viscosity.
“I have been watching you,”
I said in a low voice. “I know.”
“Do you mind?”
“No, I don’t mind.” And she made that gesture again, of pushing her hair back from her face.
“The students are very young.”
She laughed. “You noticed.”
“Young, but not so interesting.”
She pulled away and a moment later she was back sitting on her chair with a glass of water in her hand, not even pretending to keep her eyes open. The room had clogged with wood smoke. Shirts were unbuttoned, collars loosened, and a sleepy stupidity fell over the party. Our host poured himself another glass of his rustic wine and continued talking, to himself now, and the glow of gaslight made us look like nineteenth-century bandits.
“It is our duty,” Daniel was proclaiming in a slurred voice, “to be intelligent. A moral imperative, as Professor Trilling would say. Not only in theory but in action. We are citizens of the world, and those of us who live in safety must help those in peril. Witness our friend right here in our midst, Carlos.”
Each groggy face in the room turned to look at me.
“Observe him sitting in my cabin, smoking his cigarettes.” Daniel raised one arm and gestured towards me. “Free.”
I waved back and flashed a grateful smile, eyes smarting from the wood smoke.
“And should you succumb to lung cancer, it is B.C. taxpayers who will foot the bill, as they will pay to medicate my own spongy liver.”
I smiled again. Yes, thank you B.C. taxpayers. Thank you everyone.
“For God’s sakes, shut up Daniel!”
Eyes snapped open, the wood shifted in the stove and sent out a shower of sparks.
Sharon had leaned forward on her chair, blouse open at the neck. “Stop nickel and diming every minute of the goddamn day,” she went on. “Just stop it.” Her voice trembled.
There was a ghastly silence, and no one dared look at Daniel. When the wood shifted again we stared gratefully into the crackle of the dying fire.
It was he who finally spoke, with a bemused smile on his face. “May I ask who insisted we buy that oversized house in Kitsilano then tear out its entrails?” He looked around the room before settling his gaze back on his wife. “Who chose the fanciest contractor in the city?” Another pause. “So that now we’re lucky to scrape together enough rupees for a dinner out?” The mouth was smiling but his voice was hard.
Sharon squeezed her eyes shut, in obvious fatigue, and like Rita, she had drawn her knees up to her chin. If we were in Santa Clara and I heard a man speak to his wife this way, I would take her hand and lead her outside. Not to make love, but to stare at the night sky with its infinite constellations named for us by the ancients, and to remember that men are small and wearisome.
“She’s not going to engage,” Daniel plowed on. “For the topic is vulgar.” One hand reached down and tipped the giant flask in its metal harness and splashed more wine into his glass. His mouth was bruised red, his teeth dyed crimson. He looked as if he’d just ravaged some animal in the field. “I see our estimable friend, Carlos, and I believe that I would willingly exchange places.”
I tittered. He was making some sort of joke, so we must laugh.
“To be in exile is the ideal state, to be cut off from the bindings of one’s society is to be floating free.” Daniel demonstrated this, by letting his hand rise and flutter through the air.
“I disagree.” It was Marlon who ventured this opinion. “You romanticize the situation. How is it possible to be free yet dependent on others?” The young man fell back against his girlfriend’s shoulder.
Daniel seemed amused by the interjection. “Because dependence is freedom. One loses the need to be responsible.”
That’s when Sharon got up, dusting imaginary crumbs off her lap, picked her rucksack off the floor and began to climb the staircase. We all watched this, her heavy thighs tightening with each step. How I yearned to accompany her to that hot attic room.
No one spoke until the creaking ascent was over.
“I fear I have offended my wife,” Daniel announced. “So I will take my leave now, and appease her.” He pushed himself out of the deep chair and staggered until he found one of the wooden posts to cling to. “To appease such a woman,” he said, “I am obliged to fuck her senseless.”
The silence which greeted this pronouncement was thick with embarrassment. The only consolation was knowing that this drunken fool was incapable of violating anyone.
I stood at the window looking out into the darkness. We can be sucked into landscape and we must hold on, especially at night. For once, I wished I was not drunk. I felt my skin sag, the weight of my hair on my head. How long would I be in this strange country? I thought of the poems I had written since my arrival and I knew they were all shit. I was marking time, but this was not just something that would pass, it was my life.
“You look so sad.”
Startled, I looked around to see Rita, clad in a yellow nightgown, holding her toothbrush. I forced myself to smile.
“Don’t worry about Daniel. He’s always like that,” she said.
Was it our host’s cruelty that had seeped into us all? The fire had died and the cabin was chilly. Rita shivered.
“I will find you a blanket,” I said, but didn’t move.
“Don’t. I’m fine.”
Then she went to her bed, which was a couch by the fire. I was to unroll a mat on the floor and slither into one of the sleeping bags, zip up, and lie like a corpse through the long night. The fire was dead now, its coals barely pink in their memory of heat. Instead I dragged a chair next to the window where moonlight spilled in and this is where I sat, in terrible commotion, for hours. All these people around, in the house, out on the field, and the deep-scented air pressed through the rusted screen, and I had never felt so alone. Was this nostalgia, this deluge of memories, a small boy crouching on the bandstand with his licorice candy, and later, stealing a sugary pastry from the market stall?
The more I remembered, image chasing image, the more it seemed I wouldn’t be able to stop remembering. Yet these new people could see none of it, none of the ordinary moments in a boy’s day: they had to invent their own drama for me. Chewing that thieved sweet roll would be an insult to their imaginations. There could be no long days of dull childhood, only the important tale mattered.
All senses were weary from translating the smells, sounds, and words, and even my hand which clenched the arm of this antique chair couldn’t take in another bite. The country air was perfumed with vegetation I couldn’t name. The traveller with his eager smile and field guide, if he’d ever existed, longs in the end for the smell of his own stove.
The man upstairs stirred in his bed, and I waited for him to settle, chips of dust floating down between the floor boards. I understood that I would never sleep again, not in the way of these people tethered neatly between past and present.
She stepped cautiously down the staircase, feeling with her hands for the wall. Trying to be quiet, she only succeeded in making each stair creak before setting foot on the next. Despite the moonlight, Sharon hadn’t seen me yet. Her white nightgown wrapped about her knees and her hair was wild. When she reached the bottom step she dared look up, and I made a small throat-clearing noise.
“Carlos?” Sharon whispered. “That you?”
“Yes,” I whispered and rose to my feet.
“Water.” She made a gesture of drinking and headed to the back of the cabin, past the sleeping Rita, the kitchen a series of dark shapes she knew by heart. She snapped open a cupboard door, reached for a glass, then tipped the pitcher of pump water. All of this I watched from a standing position. She drank, and I want to say that she was bathed in moonlight, but this was not so: she was, in fact, merely a moving shape in the darkness. Upstairs the man rolled over and grunted, and I could imagine his appalling breath fill that attic chamber.
“Come here,” she whispered.
She pulled up a chair next to the table and motioned for me to sit. I obeyed, while she perched on a low stool a metre away. She smelled of wood smoke. We all did.
“Have you slept?” She glanced at my clothes.
I nodded “no.”
“Neither have I.”
I waited.
“To tell the truth, Carlos, I’ve been thinking of you.”
This should have pleased me, but instead I felt a surge of fear. What had she seen when she’d been thinking of me?
“Want me to go on?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Okay.” She hesitated before finishing her drink, setting the empty glass on the counter, then pulled her stool up a fraction closer to me. “We are all feeling immensely frustrated. You make it so hard for yourself, Carlos, by not meeting us halfway.”
It was as if I’d just been told I had a terminal disease.
“Want to hear more?”
Of course not. Yet I must, and so I nodded.
“You act above us, as if we were your servants.”
I stared. Her nightgown had a series of buttons which led up to the neckline and all were fastened this cool evening.
“Didn’t you notice there’s tons of work to do at the cabin, that everyone was busy? Yet you sat on your backside drinking beer, or buzzed off on some solo hike. Daniel expected you to sit in on his seminar: he was hurt.”
I was too stunned to speak. As she said all this, of course I understood. I could see everything through her point of view. I even saw myself sitting in the corner, holding forth with some ridiculous story about my uncle to the bored students. They had been polite, pretending to listen.
“At supper you didn’t lift a finger to cook or clean up. Just sat there expecting to be waited on. It’s infuriating!” This last word rose above a whisper and I glanced over at Rita, appalled that she might hear. “You have no concept of how to be a guest.”
A guest. Not a guest here, in this cabin; this was nothing. She meant a guest in her country. For that is what an exile must always be, a guest who stays too long.
“Around here everyone pitches in. There are no passengers.” Her voice had softened, but I could see, even in the dim light, that she was shaking. I began to shiver too.
She noticed and for a minute didn’t speak. “Are you afraid, Carlos?”
“Of course I’m afraid!” Of you, especially, I wanted to say.
To my amazement, Sharon reached for my hand. “Rita said something interesting today: ‘We can never make him happy.’”
Her eyes didn’t leave mine. “Perhaps she’s right. We’ve all been expecting too much.”
There was a thump from above as if the beast had fallen out of bed. I watched Sharon’s face as her eyes closed for a second, and I knew she was praying that he wouldn’t awaken.
Something inside me unknotted. It was her loneliness that I felt, even more strongly than my own. Her hand slipped away and returned to her lap.
“This husband does not make you happy,” I said.
“Daniel?” She feigned surprise. “Don’t take his rants too seriously. We get on fine.”
She wasn’t fooled. “You don’t believe me.”
I shrugged.
“Anyhow, what’s ‘happy’?” She smiled, remembering what she’d said a moment earlier. “Sometimes it’s a matter of being used to someone. Not being able to imagine any other life.”
“I was used to my old life. It has been a great surprise,” I said. “A great surprise, every day, to be here.”
She pulled her nightgown over her knees like a little girl. “You must think about going back some day.”
“All the time.”
She waited for me to finish.
“But it is not possible.”
She tugged at her nightgown again. “I’ve thought of leaving Daniel.”
I hesitated. “Maybe you are afraid, too.”
This was a mistake. A good guest does not enter into judgment of his host’s life. Sharon rose to her feet and I feared that I had offended her. But perhaps not. As she passed by on her way to the staircase, her hand touched my shoulder and squeezed me there.
She lay for the rest of the night in her attic bed as I huddled below inside the sleeping bag which smelled of dampness, and it was as if we were reading the same page in the same book. Even her breathing was audible through the drafty floorboards, and listening so hard, I fell asleep.
Was it a rooster or a mooing cow that announced the next day? Perhaps a low-flying seaplane making its way to the mainland in time for work. I was pissing off the porch into the dewy grass when I heard Daniel coming, tripping over rucksacks in the dark cabin, swearing. The door was open and it was just before dawn, the sky soaked with early light. This was what morning should always be like, cold, damp, and promising. Daniel pulled his cock out of his undershorts before he spotted me. Then he said in a completely sober voice, “Too much goddamn wine.”
I nodded agreement, as we shared the relief of emptying bladders. Half of the tents were in shadow, others gleamed with dew. Above, a hawk plunged after its prey then swooped in wide circles over a grove of fir trees. The air was so crisp that my nostrils had gone numb.
We didn’t go back inside right away. There was a magic to the wakening land, the arc of new sky that began to clear our heads. My uncle’s ranch held this same timeless unravelling, and I remembered his work boots, the heels worn down, soles clogged with grass. There were no books in his house except the well-thumbed manual on Diseases of Common Livestock, published in 1952. I loved the careful drawings of hoof and mouth disease, and limb splints, and the oddly formal language chosen by the authors.
The books in this island dacha were paperback mysteries, all composed by women authors. Daniel Rose righted himself with one hand then leaned over the wooden railing, staring into the field. The tang of sweat and earthy wine emanated from his pores. He spoke in a soft voice. “I know I was a prick last night. I hear myself, and I hate it, but I keep going.”
His shorts hung below his belly, but he wasn’t fat, just fleshy, with short legs and a long torso. “I rattle on, Carlos, because I haven’t figured anything else to do.”
He spoke as if he were releasing himself of a great burden, and that I, Carlos, had caused the moment of revelation.
“Perhaps you are a vain man,” I said.
He looked shocked, for wasn’t I supposed to listen to his confession without remark?
“Is that what you think?” He clapped me once on the back. But he wasn’t ready to go back inside. “Is vanity such a bad thing?” Spikes of greying beard coated his chin and cheeks. He waited for me to answer and when I didn’t he went on. “Nothing I do or say can compete with your experience.”
One of the tents began to wake up. First there was quivering within its nylon flank, then moans and shivers, followed by a high-pitched wail. Maria, I knew instantly.
Daniel watched this, scowling. “What a performance,” he said, then disappeared back inside the cabin.
I knew that I had disappointed this man. He’d opened up like a plant which blooms but once a year, and I had forgotten to applaud.
All that day Sharon moved in a deliberate slow dance that her husband couldn’t understand. She organized, cooked, then went for a walk and returned an hour later, knees grass-stained. All of this made Daniel curious, and his eyes followed her. But she ignored him, and I could tell that this made him anxious. Later, I sprayed detergent into the sink and began to wash my plates while Sharon and Rita looked on with approval. There was a window over the sink and I could watch Daniel crouched near a fossil bed with his coterie of students, all of whom were scribbling in their notebooks as he spoke.