Wilderness Tips Page 16

  Some days, I think I'm not going to make it. I will have a hot flash, a car crash. I will have a heart attack. I will jump out the window.

  This is what I'm thinking as I look at the man. He's a rich man, that goes without saying: if he weren't rich, neither of us would be here. He has excess money, and I'm trying to get some of it out of him. Not for myself; I'm doing nicely, thank you. For what we used to call charity and now call good causes. To be precise, a shelter for battered women. Molly's Place, it's called. It's named after a lawyer who was murdered by her husband, with a claw hammer. He was the kind of man who was good with tools. He had a workbench in the cellar. The lathe, the vise, the buzz saw, the works.

  I wonder if this other man, sitting so cautiously across the tablecloth from me, has a workbench in the cellar too. He doesn't have the hands for it. No calluses or little nicks. I don't tell him about the claw hammer, or about the arms and legs hidden here and there around the province, in culverts, in wooded glades, like Easter eggs or the clues in some grotesque treasure hunt. I know how easily frightened such men can be by such possibilities. Real blood, the kind that cries out to you from the ground.

  We've been through the ordering, which involved the rueful production of the reading glasses, by both of us, for the scanning of the ornate menu. We have at least one thing in common: our eyes are going. Now I smile at him and twiddle the stem of my wineglass, and lie judiciously. This isn't even my thing, I tell him. I got sucked into it because I have a hard time saying no. I'm doing it for a friend. This is true enough: Molly was a friend.

  He smiles and relaxes. Good, he's thinking. I am not one of those earnest women, the kind who lecture and scold and open their own car doors. He's right, it's not my style. But he could have figured that out from my shoes: women like that do not wear shoes like this. I am not, in a word, strident, and his instinct in asking me to lunch has been justified.

  This man has a name, of course. His name is Charles. He's already said "Call me Charles." Who knows what further delights await me? "Chuck" may lie ahead, or "Charlie." Charlie is my darling. Chuck, you big hunk. I think I'll stick with Charles.

  The appetizers arrive, leek soup for him, a salad for me, endive with apples and walnuts, veiled with a light dressing, as the menu puts it. Veiled. So much for brides. The waiter is another out-of-work actor, but his grace and charm are lost on Charles, who does not reply when ordered to enjoy his meal.

  "Cheers," says Charles, lifting his glass. He's already said this once, when the wine appeared. Heavy going. What are the odds I can get through this lunch without any mention of the bottom line?

  Charles is about to tell a joke. The symptoms are all there: the slight reddening, the twitch of the jaw muscle, the crinkling around the eyes.

  "What's brown and white and looks good on a lawyer?"

  I've heard it. "I'll bite. What?"

  "A pit bull."

  "Oh, that's terrible. Oh, you are awful."

  Charles allows his mouth a small semicircular smile. Then, apologetically: "I didn't mean woman lawyers, of course."

  "I don't practise any more. I'm in business, remember?" But maybe he meant Molly.

  Would Molly have found this joke funny? Probably. Certainly, at first. When we were in law school, working our little butts off because we knew we had to be twice as good as the men to end up less than the same, we used to go out for coffee breaks and kill ourselves laughing, making up silly meanings for the things we got called by the guys. Or women in general got called: but we knew they meant us.

  "Strident. A brand of medicated toothpick used in the treatment of gum disease."

  "Okay! Shrill. As in the Greater Shrill. A sharp-beaked shorebird native to the coasts of ..."

  "California? Yes. Hysteria?"

  "A sickly scented flowering vine that climbs all over Southern mansions. Pushy?"

  "Pushy. That's a hard one. Rude word pertaining to female anatomy, uttered by drunk while making a pass?"

  "Too obvious. How about a large, soft velvet cushion ..."

  "Pink or mauve ..."

  "Used for reclining on the floor, while ..."

  "While watching afternoon soaps," I finished, not satisfied. There should be something better for pushy.

  Molly was pushy. Or you could call it determined. She had to be, she was so short. She was like a scrappy little urchin, big eyes, bangs over the forehead, tough little chin she'd stick out when she got mad. She was not from a good home. She'd made it on brains. Neither was I, so did I; but it affected us differently. I, for instance, was tidy and had a dirt phobia. Molly had a cat named Catty, a stray, of course. They lived in cheerful squalor. Or not squalor: disorder. I couldn't have stood it myself, but I liked it in her. She made the messes I wouldn't allow myself to make. Chaos by proxy.

  Molly and I had big ideas, then. We were going to change things. We were going to break the code, circumvent the old boys' network, show that women could do it, whatever it might be. We were going to take on the system, get better divorce settlements, root for equal pay. We wanted justice and fair play. We thought that was what the law was for.

  We were brave but we had it backwards. We didn't know you had to begin with the judges.

  But Molly didn't hate men. With men, Molly was a toad-kisser. She thought any toad could be turned into a prince if he was only kissed enough, by her. I was different. I knew a toad was a toad and would remain so. The thing was to find the most congenial among the toads and learn to appreciate their finer points. You had to develop an eye for warts.

  I called this compromise. Molly called it cynicism.

  Across the table, Charles is having another glass of wine. I think he's deciding that I am a good sport. So necessary in a woman with whom you're considering what used to be called an illicit affair; because that's what this lunch is really about. It's a mutual interview, for positions vacant. I could have made my charity plea in Charles's office and been turned down shortly and sweetly. We could have kept it formal.

  Charles is good-looking, in the way such men are, although if you saw him on a street corner, lacking a shave and with his hand out, you might not think so. Such men always seem the same age. They were longing to be this age when they were twenty-five, and so they imitated it; and after they pass this age, they will try to imitate it again. The weightiness of authority is what they want, and enough youth left to enjoy it. It's the age called prime, like beef. They all have that beefy thing about them. A meaty firmness. They all play something: they begin with squash, progress through tennis, end with golf. It keeps them in trim. Two hundred pounds of hot steak. I should know.

  All of it swathed in expensive, dark blue suiting, with a thin stripe. A conservative tie down the front, maroon with a little design. This one has horses.

  "Are you fond of horses, Charles?"

  "What?"

  "Your tie."

  "Oh. No. Not particularly. Gift from my wife."

  I'm putting off any renewed mention of Molly's Place until dessert - never make the heavy pitch till then, says business etiquette, let the guy suck up a little protein first - although if my guess is right and Charles too is concerned with his weight, we'll both skip dessert and settle for double espresso. Meanwhile I listen to Charles, as I dole out the leading questions. The ground rules are being quietly set forth: two mentions of the wife already, one of the son at college, one of the teenage daughter. Stable family is the message. It goes with the horse tie.

  It's the wife who interests me most, of course. If men like Charles did not have wives, they would have to invent them. So useful for fending off the other women, when they get too close. If I were a man, that's what I'd do: invent a wife, put one together from bits and pieces - a ring from a pawnshop, a photo or two snuck out of someone else's album, a three-minute sentimental drone about the kids. You could fake phone calls to yourself; you could send postcards to yourself, from Bermuda, or better, Tortuga. But men like Charles are not thorough in their deceptions. Their k
iller instincts are directed elsewhere. They get snarled up in their own lies or give themselves away by shifty eye movements. At heart, they are too sincere.

  I, on the other hand, have a devious mind and little sense of guilt. My guilt is about other things.

  I already suspect what his wife will look like: overtanned, over-exercised, with alert leathery eyes and too many tendons in her neck. I see these wives, packs of them, or pairs or teams, loping around in their tennis whites, over at the club. Smug, but jumpy. They know this is a polygamous country in all but name. I make them nervous.

  But they should be grateful to me for helping them out. Who else has the time and expertise to smooth the egos of men like Charles, listen to their jokes, lie to them about their sexual prowess? The tending of such men is a fading art, like scrimshaw or the making of woollen rose mantelpiece decorations. The wives are too busy for it, and the younger women don't know how. I know how. I learned in the old school, which was not the same as the one that gave out the ties.

  Sometimes, when I have amassed yet another ugly wristwatch or brooch (they never give rings; if I want one of those, I buy it myself), when I've been left stranded on a weekend in favour of the kids and the Georgian Bay cottage, I think about what I could tell and I feel powerful. I think about dropping an acerbic, vengeful little note through the mailbox of the wife in question, citing moles strategically placed, nicknames, the perverse habits of the family dog. Proofs of knowledge.

  But then, I would lose power. Knowledge is power only as long as you keep your mouth shut.

  Here's one for you, Molly: menopause. A pause while you reconsider men.

  At long last, here come the entrees, with a flashing of teeth and a winsome glance from the waiter. Veal scallopini for Charles, who has evidently not seen those sordid pictures of calves being bleached in the dark, seafood en brochette for me. I think: Now he'll say "Cheers" again, and then he'll make some comment about seafood being good for the sex drive. He's had enough wine for that, by now. Next he'll ask me why I'm not married.

  "Cheers," says Charles. "Any oysters in there?"

  "No," I say. "Not a one."

  "Too bad. Good for what ails you."

  Speak for yourself, I think. He gives a meditative chew or two. "How is it that you never got married - an attractive woman like you?"

  I shrug my shoulder pads. What should I tell him? The dead fiance story, lifted from the great-aunt of a friend? No. Too World War I. Should I say, "I was too choosy"? That might scare him: if I'm hard to please, how will he manage to please me?

  I don't really know why. Maybe I was waiting for the big romance. Maybe I wanted True Love, with the armpits airbrushed out and no bitter aftertaste. Maybe I wanted to keep my options open. In those days, I felt that anything could happen.

  "I was married once," I say, sadly, regretfully. I hope to convey that I did the right thing but it didn't work out. Some jerk let me down, in a way too horrible to go into. Charles is free to think he could have done better.

  There's something final about saying you were married once. It's like saying you were dead once. It shuts them up.

  It's funny that Molly was the one who got married. You'd think it would have been me. I was the one who wanted the two children, the two-car garage, the antique dining table with the rose bowl in the centre. Well, at least I've got the table. Other women's husbands sit at it, and I feed them omelets, while they surreptitiously consult their watches. But if they even hint at divorcing the wife, I heave them out the door so fast they can't remember where they left their boxer shorts. I've never wanted to make the commitment. Or I've never wanted to take the risk. It amounts to the same thing.

  There was a time when my married friends envied me my singleness, or said they did. I was having fun, ran the line, and they were not. Recently, though, they've revised this view. They tell me I ought to travel, since I have the freedom for it. They give me brochures with palm trees on them. What they have in mind is a sunshine cruise, a shipboard romance, an adventure. I can think of nothing worse: stuck on an overheated boat with a lot of wrinkly women, all bent on adventure too. So I stuff the brochures in behind the toaster oven, so convenient for solo dinners, where one of these days they will no doubt burst into flame.

  I get enough adventure, right around here. It's wearing me out.

  Twenty years ago, I was just out of law school; in another twenty, I'll be retired, and it will be the twenty-first century, for whoever's counting. Once a month I wake in the night, slippery with terror. I'm afraid, not because there's someone in the room, in the dark, in the bed, but because there isn't. I'm afraid of the emptiness, which lies beside me like a corpse.

  I think: What will become of me? I will be alone. Who will visit me in the old-age home? I think of the next man as an aging horse must think of a jump. Will I lose my nerve? Can I still pull it off? Should I get married? Do I have the choice?

  In the daytime, I am fine. I lead a rich full life. There is, of course, my career. I shine away at it like an antique brass. I add on to it like a stamp collection. It props me up: a career like an underwired brassiere. Some days I hate it.

  "Dessert?" says Charles.

  "Will you?"

  Charles pats his midriff. "Trying to cut down," he says.

  "Let's just have a double espresso," I say. I make it sound like a delicious conspiracy.

  Double espresso. A diabolical torture devised by the Spanish Inquisition, involving a sack of tacks, a silver bootjack, and two three-hundred-pound priests.

  Molly, I let you down. I burned out early. I couldn't take the pressure. I wanted security. Maybe I decided that the fastest way to improve the lot of women was to improve my own.

  Molly kept on. She lost that baby-fat roundness; she developed a raw edge to her voice and took to chain-smoking. Her hair got dull and her skin looked abraded, and she paid no attention. She began to lecture me about my lack of seriousness, and also about my wardrobe, for which I overspent in her opinion. She began to use words like patriarchy. I began to find her strident.

  "Molly," I said. "Why don't you give it up? You're slamming your head against a big brick wall." I felt like a traitor saying it. But I'd have felt like a traitor if I hadn't said it, because Molly was knocking herself out, and for peanuts. The kind of women she represented never had any money.

  "We're making progress," she'd say. Her face was getting that ropy look, like a missionary's. "We're accomplishing something."

  "Who is this we?" I'd say. "I don't see a lot of people helping you out."

  "Oh, they do," she said vaguely. "Some of them do. They do what they can, in their own way. It's sort of like the widow's mite, you know?"

  "What widow?" I said. I knew but I was exasperated. She was trying to make me feel guilty. "Quit trying for sainthood, Molly. Enough is enough."

  That was before she married Curtis.

  "Now," says Charles. "Cards on the table, eh?"

  "Right," I say. "Well, I've explained the basic position to you already. In your office."

  "Yes," he says. "As I told you, the company has already allocated its charitable donations budget for this year."

  "But you could make an exception," I say. "You could draw on next year's budget."

  "We could, if - well, the bottom line is that we like to think we're getting something back for what we put in. Nothing blatant, just what you might call good associations. With hearts and kidneys, for instance, there's no problem at all."

  "What's wrong with battered women?"

  "Well, there would be our company logo, and then right beside it these battered women. The public might get the wrong idea."

  "You mean they might think the company was doing the battering itself?"

  "In a word, yes," says Charles.

  It's like any negotiation. Always agree, then come at them from a different angle. "You have a point," I say.

  Battered women. I can see it in lights, like a roadside fast-food joint. Get some fresh. Sort
of like onion rings and deep-fried chicken. A terrible pun. Would Molly have laughed? Yes. No. Yes.

  Battered. Covered in slime, then dipped into hell. Not so inappropriate, after all.

  Molly was thirty when she married Curtis. He wasn't the first man she'd lived with. I've often wondered why she did it. Why him? Possibly she just got tired.

  Still, it was a strange choice. He was so dependent. He could hardly let her out of his sight. Was that the appeal? Probably not. Molly was a fixer. She thought she could fix things that were broken. Sometimes she could. Though Curtis was too broken even for her. He was so broken he thought the normal state of the world was broken. Maybe that's why he tried to break Molly: to make her normal. When he couldn't do it one way, he did it another.

  He was plausible enough, at first. He was a lawyer, he had the proper suits. I could say I knew right away that he wasn't totally glued together, but it wouldn't be true. I didn't know. I didn't like him a lot, but I didn't know.

  For a while after the wedding I didn't see that much of Molly. She was always busy doing something or other with Curtis, and then there were the children. A boy and a girl, just what I'd always expected, for myself. Sometimes, it seemed that Molly was leading the life I might have led, if it hadn't been for caution and a certain fastidiousness. When it comes to the crunch, I have a dislike of other people's bathtub rings. That's the virtue in married men: someone else does the maintenance.

  "Is everything all right?" asks the waiter, for the fourth time. Charles doesn't answer. Perhaps he doesn't hear. He's the sort of man for whom waiters are a kind of warm-blooded tea trolley.

  "Wonderful," I say.

  "Why don't these battered women just get a good lawyer?" says Charles. He's genuinely baffled. No use telling him they can't afford it. For him, that's not a concept.

  "Charles," I say. "Some of these guys are good lawyers."

  "Nobody I know," says Charles.

  "You'd be surprised," I say. "Of course, we take personal donations too."

  "What?" says Charles, who has not followed me.

  "Not just corporate ones. Bill Henry over at ConFrax gave two thousand dollars." Bill Henry had to. I know all about his useful right-buttock birthmark, the one shaped like a rabbit. I know his snore pattern.