All the Voices Cry (6 page)

The women down on the dock could be considered a case in point. About now they would be raising their eyebrows at the silence that followed the strained twirling sound of a motor lacking the juice to start. Apparently, one of them had left the headlights on and car doors wide open, with the express purpose of letting the battery run down. Colin leaned back and let out a broken adolescent yowl at a rip in the vinyl ceiling of the car. The culprit would be towelling her hair dry, her backbone still sparkling with water drops. Her name was Sam and she
was a perfect naiad; she could have been born wearing the pale blue bikini.

 

July had already been in bloom a few weeks when Colin had received the invitation to visit the cottage at Lac Perdu. The lake below the university rose up in a cloud and hovered among the trees, the sun winked off the windshields in the parking lot, but the concrete corridors of the English department remained as still and dry as an ancient seabed. In the dim light of his office, Professor Pilchard idled in his computer chair. He was halfway through an email.

Some three years earlier, in the course of her Master's degree, Samantha de la Tour had attended closely to Professor Pilchard's group discussions of writers who regularly lost all their friends and relations in labyrinthine libraries, who made mosaics out of dull fragments joined with pale grey effusions of guilt, who repeated themselves until the meaning rose like spume over surf, evanescent and impossible to recapture from one day to the next. Colin Pilchard made it his business to listen to his students as if they were instruments in an orchestra and he conducted his tutorials accordingly, setting the bright and the dull voices against each other, adding new ideas to further the development, and using his invisible baton to direct the chorus towards a falling cadence of mutual consent.
Occasionally he pre-recorded his opinions, so that he could sit back and argue with himself in the third person, employing the same discernment as his students.

Among these students, Samantha de la Tour stood out for her refusal to accept any interpretation without question. Sam, who could pour her attention onto a text like a thread of clear water that magnified as it ran. Sam, who had flashed into the department for two years, perched on window seats, and darted out again, like a cardinal on the wing. Graduate students: now you see them, now they are gone, gone. But where? to teach Japanese people to speak English, to work in advertising, to survive for three months as poets, to retrain as lawyers.

Consider it Sam? He had dreamed of it.

As he drove northeast towards Sam's cottage in Quebec, Colin Pilchard contemplated a conference abstract about the monosyllable as
the thing itself,
because the monosyllable says what it means to say in one sound. This was not a theory that Colin had made up himself. Virginia Woolf, a thoroughly respectable writer, has said as much, somewhere. Colin made a mental note to look up just where. In the meantime he revisited the idea of
the thing itself;
the object that was itself alone, and perfect.
The cherry tree is all that it does,
says Fenel-losa (reference available on request). Leaves, berries, roots and
blossoms, the tree stood complete in its functions, not desiring money or love. You could not have it—that much was certain, if anything was, because once you had a cherry tree in your pocket, it was not alone any more, and neither were you. All you could have was wanting it. Oh dear. Such a complicating thing, desire.

Desire. Colin knew the various forms that it could take—light-stepping, feverish, all-filling dream of air—let's shut out the daylight and meld our flesh and blood into something rich and sweet, then emerge eventually for brunch, wet-haired and blind in the afternoon sun. It was natural, between the ages of 15 and 35, to feel this way on a regular basis, once, if not four times a year. Even in the past year, Colin could not deny that he had experienced a definite physiological response to the new administrative assistant: small, dark, compact as an old-fashioned cigarette case. He overran his photocopying allocation ruthlessly during the winter session, all for the pleasure of being pistol-whipped by Tulipa Ferrari's sharp tongue.

Still, Colin shied away from the physical logistics of entanglement. He worried about his weight and the moment of displacement; if a woman should invite him to share a bath with her, for example. And of course love does not last, and does not improve, but only atrophies. Do not all the novels demonstrate it? The fever that does not bring about death or lifelong separation from one's parents abates and clears up. One only has to survive the dangerous years (15 – 35, as mentioned above); to build a life raft of useful things strapped together with webbing—a good pepper grinder, a modest
wine collection, the complete recordings of the Beethoven string quartets, a gaseous golden retriever called Calliope—and then one is ready to ride out the tempests.

Surely there could be no harm in paying a visit to a former student and her relatives?

Colin pulled off the highway at a coffee place where rows of Harley Davidsons glittered in the sunlight, mocking him for the roads he had not taken. He straightened his waistcoat and stood as upright as possible in the lineup behind a man in black leather with fringed sleeves.
Dada's Donuts,
the place was called. He ordered a plain one.

Back on the road he drained the last drops of his coffee. It had taken two goes to get the car started. The Volvo was beginning to show its age.

“Fuck,” said Colin, into the coffee cup. He was disappointed that this was the first monosyllable that came to mind, but he quite liked the hollow sound that his voice made inside the cardboard cup.

“Book,” said Colin into cup, “tea.” Could these words have more integrity than a word like “crappomundi,” which he had once heard a student mutter while collecting her library books off the floor? The monosyllable as
the thing itself
was a silly conceit, like pitting the grunt against the drawn-out moan in a great competition to express a truth that, as the theorists had so lately discovered, no longer existed.

“Sam,” said Colin.

When he arrived, the young woman in question opened the cottage door and heaven was there, on the screen porch,
for the brief span it took to say that he hoped he
had the right place,
and she said
yes you do,
and she looked at him as if he were as delightful as spring blossoms under snow, and she said,
where is your bag?
and he said,
it's in the car,
and before he could prevent her she dashed away to get it.

Colin leaned against the doorframe, smiling at the insouciant rustle of the pine needles beneath her bare feet. How quickly those qualities of
samnicity
came rushing back to him: tough as a stalk, bony of finger and knee, together with his own shortness of breath at the thought that if she turned her head fast enough her ponytail might make a whistling sound in the air.

Then she took him down to the dock and it quickly became awful. Three seconds after they had been introduced, he could not recall whether Sam's stepmother's name was Myra or Myrna. Myra/Myrna gave him champagne with tiny Quebec blueberries in it to choke upon. The stepmother pointed out a grove of old growth white pine, and a boathouse that they were accustomed to rent out to a postman. In response, Colin commented on the tongues of light licking up the trunks of the cedars. After comparing the water lilies bobbing in the cove to poached eggs, he thought it better to stop.

Just beside the dock, a phrase from
As You Like It
was scored into the Canadian Shield, displacing the mossy covering that once grew there. Colin read it aloud, and as he began, he knew that all visitors to the cottage did the same thing:

Samantha and Myra/Myrna chimed in,

“It's a bit indulgent, I know,” said Myra/Myrna, laughing, “but we freshen up the carving every couple of years. We have a sharp chisel for the purpose. It reminds us to be grateful. Even during bug season. Benedictions in blackflies, wisdom in weeds, magic in mosquitoes….”

Samantha took up the refrain:

“Lechery in lichen, frolics in ferns, bathos in blueberries, pathos in...”

While she chanted, she tied her hair up. Colin looked away. It was impossible to witness the movement of her shoulder blades and not to wish to make a personal measurement of the space between the lopsided bikini bow and the slight shadow it cast on the middle of her back.

Pathos in professors. He had the worst possible case of it. The cherry tree is all that it does, Sam is all that she does, did, might do. Colin attempted to focus on the stepmother instead. Myra/Myrna's skin was apricot, and her hair a darker shade. She was hearty as an apple, just as Sam was reedy as a stem.

“She's my stepmother,” Sam had said on the way down to the dock, “after Dad died she brought me up, and I love her for that.”

Colin summoned his most interested voice. “So, Myrna, what is your particular field of expertise within economics?”

“Myra, Colin.” Sam's stepmother chided him gently, nudging his ankle with her bare foot, “and I'm in real estate.”

Myra had well-tended nails, a jangle of bracelets, cropped pants. She wore a spiral toe ring in the shape of a serpent with a glistening red eye. Her look seemed to say,
Sam is twenty-four, you can go ahead and ask her.
But he could not. There are some things that you just cannot have, and if you try, you will make a fool of yourself.

“Is there a...? May I?” He waved his hand back up at the house.

“Of course, make yourself at home Professor P. The bathroom's just down the corridor from the kitchen.” Myra stood up to let him past. “We'll be waiting for you.”

There was a splash and the dock swayed up and down. Sam was in, her narrow form gliding under the water.

It had been a long time since Professor Pilchard had taught Shakespeare.
As You Like It
, he seemed to recall, was set in an enchanted forest where members of court fed each other strawberries and disported themselves in idleness. Sam's dock was indeed a setting for such pleasures, but something about the act of inscription bothered him. He felt that the words ought to float up like smoke from a thin-stemmed clay pipe, hang in the air, and then be off. The sermon in the stone is that everything wears away. The book in the brook is that water runs on. The engraving seemed rather, and he hated to apply the word to Sam or to her family: vulgar.
Make yourself at home Professor P.

Relieved, Colin returned to the living room where he sat a moment in a chair covered in golden velvet with a pattern of black lozenges. His glance ranged over the objects in the room.
There he found a mixture of furniture from across the decades, unconnected by any overarching aesthetic vision except for the passage of the sun, principally a purple fun fur beanbag chair, and an enormous radiogram now functioning as a sideboard. Colin set the champagne glass down on the arm of the chair. He contemplated the bubbles that had attached themselves to the blueberries at the bottom. Perhaps
the thing itself
was not a cherry tree, but a bubble. Sooner rather than later, a bubble pops.

The professor moved his hand as if to wave the thought away, and the glass flew onto the floor, where it shattered, discharging its cargo of blueberries across the tiles.

“Oh dear,” he said.

He thought about returning to the dock to confess to Myrna/Myra that he had broken one of her champagne flutes. But that would necessitate apologies and muddled groping on the floor with paper towels and the creation of shared memory—

Bathos in blueberries. Colin did not want shared memories with Myrna/Myra.

He ignored the broken glass on the floor and leaned back, staring upwards to where bright spots jiggled and swayed in the angles of the ceiling. Sam was down there stirring up
the bay, and the jittery light on the ceiling was caused by the movement of her body in the water, but Sam was unaware of his regard; neither subject could see the other, and yet between them they had created this flickering object. Could
the thing itself
be some kind of charged space between two blind subjects? One of the greats must have already phrased the thought memorably, elegantly, in a couplet. He sent a shadowy messenger off into the archives to look for the reference.

Colin sighed. Adrift on his raft made of copper-bottomed pots and Beethoven string quartets, he became aware that he would much rather be in his office than here, risking it all in the forest, for the sake of Sam and a flicker of hope.

Fool. A monosyllable, Shakespearean, holding at once the carnal capital F, the L of a love that dithered about like light on the ceiling, and in between the puckered mouths of the supplicants. He would not be a fool.

Coward. A word of two syllables with which he could be satisfied. Associate Professor Colin Pilchard, Coward. He patted his waistcoat pocket for his keys, picked up the pigskin bag from beside the screen door, slipped outside and crept up the path towards the car, giving thanks for the uncaring silky whisper of the pine needles beneath his feet.