Wilderness Tips Page 9

  For a moment, Julie feels this digging-up, this unearthing of him, as a desecration. Surely there should be boundaries set upon the wish to know, on knowledge merely for its own sake. This man is being invaded. But the moment passes, and Julie goes out of the tent. Maybe she looks a little green in the face: after all, she's just seen a dead body. When she lights a cigarette her hands are shaky. The Norwegian gives her a solicitous look and places a hand beneath her elbow. Connor does not like this.

  The three men who have been out at the peat-cutting return: one Scottish physical anthropologist and two workmen with peat-cutting spades. Lunch is proposed. The workmen have brought their own, and stay to guard the tent. The archaeologists and Julie get into the Norwegian's rented car. There's no place to eat except the pub, so that is where they go.

  For lunch Julie has bread and cheese, which is the safest thing, a lot safer than the flabby Scotch eggs and the barely warmed, fat-saturated meat pasties. The three men talk about the bog man. That he was a sacrifice is beyond a doubt. The question is, to which goddess? And at which solstice? Was he bumped off at the winter solstice, to make the sun return, or at the summer solstice, to make the crops prosper? Or perhaps in spring or fall? An examination of the stomach - which they intend to remove, not here and now but later and in Edinburgh - will reveal clues. Seeds, grains, and the like. This has been done with all the other bog people that have been found, those who still had stomachs. Julie is just as glad she has stuck to the bread and cheese.

  "Some have said the dead cannot talk," says the Norwegian, twinkling at Julie. Many of his remarks have been addressed to Connor, but aimed at her. Under the table he lays a hand, briefly, upon her knee. "But these bog men have many wonderful secrets to tell us. However, they are shy, like other men. They don't know how to convey their message. They must have a little help. Some encouragement. Don't you agree?"

  Julie doesn't answer. There's no way she can answer without participating, beneath Connor's very nose, in what amounts to a flagrant proposition. It's a possibility; or would be, if she weren't in love with Connor.

  "Perhaps such things as stomachs disgust you?" says the Norwegian. "Things of the flesh. My wife does not like them either." He gives her a hyena grin.

  Julie smiles, and lights a Gitane. "Oh, do you have a wife?" she says brightly. "So does Connor. Maybe the two of you can discuss your wives."

  She doesn't know why she has just said this. She doesn't look at Connor, but she can feel his anger coming at her like heat from a stove. She gathers up her purse and coat, still smiling, and walks out. What's running through her head is one of the first axioms from Logic: A thing cannot be both self and non-self at the same time. She has never been entirely convinced by this, and now she is even less so.

  Connor does not follow her to her room. He doesn't reappear all afternoon. Julie knits and reads, knits and smokes. She's waiting. Something has changed, she has changed something, but she doesn't yet know what.

  When Connor does show up, after sundown, he's morose. He says nothing about her piece of rudeness. He says nothing much at all. They have dinner with the Norwegian and the Scot, and the three of them talk about the bog man's feet. In some of these cases the feet have been tied together, to keep the dead from walking, returning to the land of the living, for revenge or some other reason. But not in this instance; or they think not. The cutting off of the feet may have interfered with something, of course. Ropes, thongs.

  The Norwegian is no longer flirting; the looks he gives her are speculative, as if there is more to her than he'd thought and he'd like to know what. Julie doesn't care. She eats her ossified lamb chop and says nothing. She thinks of the bog man out there under his tarpaulin. Of all of them at this moment, she would rather be with him. He is of more interest.

  She excuses herself before dessert. Connor, she thinks, will stay down there, drinking beer in the pub, and he does.

  Around ten-thirty he knocks on Julie's door as usual, then comes in. Julie is already in bed, propped up on the pillows, knitting. She has been sure he will come, but also not sure. She shoves the wool and needles into her tapestry bag and waits to see what he will do.

  Connor does not say anything. He takes off his sweater, drapes it over the back of the chair, undoes deliberately the buttons of his shirt. He is not looking at Julie, but into the wavering, patchy glass of the dressing-table mirror. His reflection there has a watery look, as if a lake bottom with decaying leaves on it is visible in glimpses beneath him, beneath his face and the whiter skin of his torso. In this light his red hair has faded. "I'm getting love-handles," he says, slapping his belly. This room flattens his beautiful voice, muffles it. "The curse of the middle-aged." It's a signal: if he's angry with her he's not going to mention it. They will go on as if nothing has happened. Maybe nothing has.

  That's fine with her. She smiles. "No you aren't," she says. She doesn't like him doing this. He's not supposed to examine himself in mirrors or think about his appearance. Men are not supposed to.

  Connor gives her a reproachful glance. "One of these days," he says, "you're going to run off with some young stud."

  He has said such things before, about Julie's future lovers. Julie has not paid much attention. Now she does. Is this about the Norwegian; is he looking for reassurance? Does he want to hear from her that he is still young? Or is he telling her something real? Julie has never before thought of him as middle-aged, but now she can see that there might be a difference between her idea of him and his own idea of himself.

  He climbs into the sagging bed with something like a sigh of resignation. He smells of beer and pub smoke. "You're wearing me out," he says. He has said this before also, and Julie has taken it as a sexual compliment. But he means it.

  Julie turns out the bedside lamp. Once she wouldn't have bothered; once she wouldn't have had time. Once Connor would have turned it back on. Now he does not. He does not need to see her, she has been seen enough.

  Meditatively and without ardour, he begins to run his hand along her: knee to thigh to hip, hip to knee. Julie lies stiffly, eyes wide open. The wind gusts through the cracks around the window, handfuls of rain are thrown against the glass. Light seeps in from under the door, and from the few streetlamps outside: in it the dressing-table mirror gleams like dark oil. Connor is a bulk beside her. His stroking does not excite her. It irritates her, like sandpaper, like the kneading paws of a cat. She feels that she's been demoted, against her will. What to her has been self-abandonment, to him has been merely sin. Grubby sin, sin of a small order. Cheating. Now he feels trapped by it. She is no longer a desire for him, she is a duty.

  "I think we should get married," says Julie. She has no idea where these words have come from. But yes, this is what she thinks.

  Connor's hand stops. Then it's withdrawn suddenly, as if Julie's body is hot, hot as coals, or else cold; as if Connor has found himself in bed with a mermaid, all scales and fishy slime from the waist down.

  "What?" he says, in a shocked voice. An offended voice, as if she's insulted him.

  "Forget it," says Julie. But Connor will not be able to forget it. She has said the unforgettable thing, and from now on it will be hopeless. But it has been hopeless anyway. Connor's unseen wife is in the bed with them, where she's been all along. Now she is materializing, taking on flesh. The springs creak with her added weight.

  "Let's talk about it tomorrow," says Connor. He has recovered himself, he's plotting. "I love you," he adds. He kisses her. His mouth feels separate from him; soft, moist, coolish. It feels like uncooked bacon.

  "I could use a drink," Julie says. Connor keeps a flask of Scotch in his room. Grateful that she has given him something to do, some small thing he can offer her instead of what she really wants, he clambers out of bed, pulls on his sweater and cords, and goes in search of it.

  As soon as he's out of the room, Julie locks the door. Connor comes back. He shakes the doorknob; he whispers and taps, but she does not answer. She lies in her
bed, shivering with grief and anger, waiting to see whether Connor loves her enough to kick at the door, to shout. Whether she's important enough. He does not. She is not. After a while he goes away.

  Julie hunches up under the mound of damp coverings and tries without success to go to sleep. When at last she manages it, she dreams of the bog man, climbing in through her window, a dark tender shape, a shape of baffled longing, slippery with rain.

  In the morning Connor makes another attempt. "If you don't answer me," he says through the keyhole, "I'll get them to break down the door. I'll tell them you've committed suicide."

  "Don't flatter yourself," says Julie. This morning she's no longer sad. She's furious, and determined.

  "Julie, what did I do?" says Connor. "I thought we were getting along so well." He sounds truly perplexed:

  "We were," says Julie. "Go away."

  She knows he will try to ambush her in the breakfast room. She waits him out, her stomach growling. Instead of eating she packs her bag, glancing from time to time out the window. At last she sees him leaving for the bog, in the Norwegian's car. There's a noon bus that will get her to another bus that will get her to a train for Edinburgh. She leaves behind the tapestry bag and the unfinished sweater. It's as good as a note.

  Back in Toronto, Julie pins her hair into a brisk but demure French roll. She buys herself a beige cotton-twill suit and a white blouse, and deludes the Bell Telephone Company into hiring her as a personnel trainee. She's supposed to learn how to train other women in the job of complaint management. She doesn't intend to stay with this for long, but it's good money. She rents herself a large, empty apartment on the top floor of a house. She has no long-term plans. Although she was the one who left Connor, she feels deserted by him. At night she listens to the radio and cooks subsistence meals, and cries onto her plate.

  After a while she resumes her black clothes, at night, and goes to folk clubs. She no longer smokes Gitanes, because they frighten men. She picks up with a boy she knew slightly from her Spinoza course. He makes a crack about windowless monads and buys her a beer, and tells her he used to be terrified of her. They end up in bed.

  For Julie, this is like a romp with a litter of puppies. There's the same effect of gangly enthusiasm, of wriggling, of uncontrolled tongues. It's not passionate or even sensuous, but it's invigorating. Julie tells herself she's enjoying it, and she is. Or she would be, except for Connor. She wants him to know about it. Then she would really enjoy it. Even better would be the Norwegian. She should have taken advantage of that while she had the chance.

  Connor returns at the end of August. It doesn't take long for him to track her down.

  "I've missed you," he says. "I think we should talk."

  "What about?" says Julie warily. She thought she was over him, but it isn't true.

  "Why can't we go back the way we were?" he says.

  "Where were we?" says Julie.

  Connor sighs. "Maybe we should get married, after all. I'll divorce her." He says this as if it's being torn out of him.

  Julie starts to cry. She's crying because she no longer wants to marry Connor. She no longer wants him. The divinity is going out of him, like air. He is no longer a glorious blimp, larger than life and free in the heavens. Soon he will be just a damp piece of flabby rubber. She is mourning his collapse.

  "I'll come right over," says Connor, in a pleased, consoling voice. Tears mean he's made headway.

  "No," says Julie, and hangs up.

  She puts on her black clothes, eats quickly, finds her cigarettes. She phones her boyish lover. She wants to pull him over her like a blanket, hug him to her like a stuffed animal. She wants comfort.

  She goes out the door of her building and there is Connor, waiting for her. She has imagined him so much that she's forgotten what he looks like. He's shorter than she thought, he's saggier. His eyes look sunken and also too bright, a little wild. Is this what she's changed him into, or was he always like that?

  "Julie," he says.

  "No," says Julie. The knees of his brown cords are baggy. This is the only detail Julie finds actually repulsive. The rest just leaves her cold.

  He reaches out a hand towards her. "I need you," he says. It's a trite line, a line from a mushy song, but he does need her. It's in his eyes. This is the worst thing yet. It was always supposed to be her who needed him; he was supposed to be well above such a weak thing as need.

  "I can't help it," says Julie. She means she can't help it that things are the way they are, that she herself is without feeling for him; but it comes out more flippant, more pitiless, than she intended.

  "Jesus Christ," says Connor. He moves as if to grab her. She dodges around him and begins to run down the street. She's got her black pants on, and her flat black shoes. Now that she's cut down on her smoking she's a decent runner.

  What does she expect, now that she's in full flight? That he will go away finally, that he'll never be able to catch up? But he hasn't gone away, he is catching up. She can hear the thudding of his feet, the gasping of his breath. Her own breath is rasping in her throat; she's losing speed.

  She's come to a cross-street, there's a phone booth. She ducks into it, slams the folding glass door shut, pushes against it with both of her feet, leaning her back against the phone-book shelf for leverage. The smell of ancient pee surrounds her. Then Connor is right there, outside, pushing at the door, pounding at it.

  "Let me in!" he says.

  Her heart thuds in panic. "No! No!" she yells. Her voice is tiny, as if she's in a soundproof booth. He presses his whole body against the glass door, wraps his arms as far around the phone booth as they will go.

  "I love you!" he shouts. "God damn it, can't you hear me? I said I love you!" Julie covers her ears. She is truly frightened of him now, she's whimpering with fright. He's no longer anyone she knows; he's the universal child's nightmare, the evil violent thing, fanged and monstrous, trying to get in at the door. He mashes his face front-ways into the glass, in a gesture of desperation or a parody of a kiss. She can see the squashed tip of his nose, his mouth deformed, the lips shoved back from the teeth.

  Julie remembers that she's in a phone booth. Without taking her eyes off him, she fumbles in her purse for change. "I'll call the police," she screams at him. And she does.

  It took them some time to come. By the time they did, Connor was gone. Whatever else he wanted, he did not want to be caught in the act of sexually attacking a phone booth. Or this is how Julie puts it, when she tells the story these days.

  At first she did not tell it at all. It was too painful for her, in too complicated a way. Also she did not know what it was about. Was it about the way she had been taken advantage of, by someone older and more experienced and superior to her in power? Or was it about how she had saved herself from an ogre in the nick of time? But Connor was not an ogre. She had loved him, uselessly. This was the painful thing: that she had been so wrong about him. That she was capable, once, of such abject self-deception. Or still is, because in some way she still misses him; him, or her own mistaken adoration.

  Then, after she was married, after she was divorced, she began to tell the story of Connor once in a while. She told it late at night, after the kids were in bed and after a few drinks, always to women. It became part of an exchange, the price she was willing to pay for hearing other, similar stories. These were mystery stories. The mysterious objects in them were the men; men and their obscure behaviour. Clues were discovered and examined, points of view exchanged. No definite solutions were found.

  Now that she has married again, she tells it more frequently. By this time she concentrates on the atmosphere - the Scottish rain, the awful food in the pub, the scowling inhabitants of the town, the bog itself. She puts in the more comic elements: her own obsessive knitting, the long dangling sleeves, the lumpiness of the bed.

  As for Connor, how can she explain him, him and his once-golden aura? She no longer tries. She skims over the worshipping love she once f
elt for him, which would be mawkish out loud. She skims over the wife, who is no longer the menacing rival of the piece: Julie has now been a wife herself, and feels a sneaking sympathy.

  She skims over the grief.

  She leaves out entirely any damage she may have caused to Connor. She knows the damage was done, was severe, at least at the time; but how can it be acknowledged without sounding like a form of gloating? It was unintentional on her part; more or less. At any rate, it does not really fit into the story.

  Julie eases forward in her chair, leans her arms on the table, lights a cigarette. She still smokes, though not as much. Over the years she has put on weight around the face, and her waist has solidified. Also she's cut her hair; it's no longer a mane, it's fashionably short at the back and sides, with a wispy, puckish mop on the top. She wears silver earrings in the shape of starfish, an eccentric touch, the last vestige of her days of piracy. Except for these earrings, she looks like any woman of that age you might see, walking a dog or shopping, in one of the newly renovated neighbourhoods.

  "God knows," she says, "what I thought I was doing." She laughs, a rueful, puzzled laugh that is also indulgent.

  The story has now become a story about her own stupidity, or call it innocence, which shines at this distance with a soft and mellowing light. The story is now like an artefact from a vanished civilization, the customs of which have become obscure. And yet every one of its physical details is clear to her: she can see the ruined mirror in the room, the slabs of dry toast at breakfast, the grasses moving on the surface of the bog. For all of this, she has total recall. With each retelling, she feels herself more present in it.