Garden of Eden (16 page)

“How will you — I mean —”

“How will I live? I got a grant. It’s not very much, but I told the Council I was going to write some non-fiction pieces on country life and they bought it.”

“You mean —” she hesitates, puzzled, and he glances at her, then looks away.

“I’m an artist! They already gave me three grants to finish my novel and I haven’t been able to in that time. Who the hell are they to tell me how long it’s going to take? Art is art! You can’t fake it! You can’t write to somebody’s timetable —” He stops abruptly, turns away, but not before she sees the way his mouth has twisted, and his unexpected vulnerability fills her with surprise.

The sharply sloped clay wall they’ve come down is behind them and the cow path they’ve been walking on has given way to a long grassy slope that rises gently in two levels to the flatland above. He turns back to the rise and runs up the slope to the first level. By the time she reaches it, he has gone on and is back at the top at a narrow point that widens farther on to the west, but on the Normans’ side of the fence where it’s all grass. She climbs up slowly and finds him sitting in sparse dead grass on the rock-strewn coulee edge. As she sits down beside him, he stretches out and leans on one elbow, his head on his fist, facing her.

“So you want to get to know us,” she says.

“I want more than that,” he tells her, but he has shifted his gaze over her to the sky.

“Which is what?”

“I thought that country people were basically the same as city people, that they were motivated by the same drives. Well, in the end I suppose they are. But the other night I saw that it’s all nuanced differently, that the life I thought was so simple is really surprisingly complex and —” He pulls himself into a sitting position beside her, staring out over the coulee and the river cliffs and the sky.

“Of course we’re not the same,” she says. Again he ignores her remark, which is probably just as well since she isn’t sure she could
defend it. There’s a long pause. “With their high-tech equipment and their market-talk — their belief in the individual and in business, as if it were the new God.” He turns to her, looks into her eyes. “I couldn’t believe it. Here they’ve lived on the land all their lives! They’ve known nature in a way I’ll never know it, I couldn’t see a trace of —” He turns away abruptly.

“A knowledge of nature is the bedrock of all our lives out here. Just because we don’t talk about it all the time …” Her voice trails off. He sighs, then stretches out full length again.

Sitting with her legs curled up under her makes them ache and she stretches them out, then turns on her side, and, supporting herself on her elbow, her head propped on her palm, lies face to face with him. It crosses her mind that this is a bit like being in bed together, but a stubborn part of her denies that there’s anything wrong or unseemly about it. Anyway, there’s no one here to see it. They lie like that for a couple of minutes, not speaking, studying each other in an intimate way.

“You’re tired,” he says.

“I have trouble sleeping now,” she says. But she doesn’t want to think about her dreams, and in the brief instant she closes her eyes she sees Lannie in her yellow dress, the sun striking fire in her red-gold hair, waving goodbye for the last time as she drives away. Lannie would be — thirty — now, she can hardly believe it. She feels his breath on her face; it makes her forget what she was thinking about. “How old are you?” Her voice comes out husky and soft, surprising her.

“Thirty-six.”

“I’m almost twenty years older.”

The prairie sky soars at their backs and elbows. At their feet is only the emptiness of the wide valley that extends outward to the pale cliffsides with their darker blue shadows in the draws that are stands of firs. A light breeze lifts locks of her hair and then riffles his, leaving a strand on his forehead. She wants to reach out and brush it back into place.

“How did you wind up here?” he asks her.

“I’ve always lived here. Except for a year at university in Saskatoon.”

“Only a year?”

“I only went to please my mother.”

“What did you want to do yourself? Get a job?”

“I’ve never had a job.” She’s a bit rueful.

“No kidding? How did you manage that?”

“I didn’t need money,” she points out, caught between embarrassment at having to say it and reasonableness.

“There are other reasons to get a job,” he says, laughing a little, as if he finds her innocence charming.

“That’s what my mother said,” Iris answers, aware she sounds petulant. “But she never had one either.”

“Didn’t you have an ambition? A dream, I mean?”

No, Iris thinks, ambition was for people who hadn’t enough, or who weren’t satisfied with what they had. “I did lots of volunteer work, taught Sunday school, and church camp in the summer …”

He’s continuing to study her closely as she speaks, as if he sees something in her that interests and pleases him. How long has it been since a man really looked at her? “I was in love with Barney and I wanted to be his wife. That was what I wanted.” After a long minute he lifts his head from his fist and moves his face closer to hers. She sees his intention in his eyes, can’t quite believe it, so doesn’t flinch or move away; he comes a little closer, puts his lips on hers.

It’s a gentle kiss, with closed lips, but she feels it all the way down in her vagina, that first, most exquisite flush of sexual arousal, and as he draws slightly away, she opens her lips so she can catch some air. He comes closer again, his second kiss is just as gentle as the first, but she tastes the warm moisture of his mouth and, realizing abruptly how hungry she is for a man’s touch, reaches out her hand to rest her palm against his cheek, then slides it back farther to cup the hard base of his head, his thick hair tangling in her fingers. He rests one hand on the curve of her hip below her waist. She’s about to pull herself harder against him, when suddenly he rolls over to lie on his back and stare up into the sky.

Her body protests, making her breath come quickly. She sees him put one hand over his eyes, and then take it away. His gesture, its meaning unclear but surely boding no good, makes her lower her elbow, and lie motionless, her head resting on her outstretched arm. What has she done? What’s the matter with her?

“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to take advantage of a widow,” he says, as if he’s angry. “I’ve been celibate for quite a while. I’ve been trying …” But his voice trails away. So have I, she’s thinking. She almost tells him then about the last few months of their marriage, of her ardour, and Barney’s attempts to respond to her but his failure — or was it her failure that she no longer aroused her husband, after all those years? But she can’t bear to have him know that her own husband stopped desiring her.

“Why?”

“I just thought it was something I needed to try for — for my writing —” She feels such tenderness at his admission. How could he think such a thing would help anything? She reminds herself she’s twenty years — no, sixteen years older than he is. He’s not looking at her, seems to have forgotten she’s there, and suddenly she finds herself desperate to have back the intimacy they were feeling.

“What’s it like kissing somebody old enough to be your mom?”

He casts her a mischievous glance. “Delicious,” he says, which makes her laugh, although it hurts her, too. “I’m leaving in a few days to go back to Toronto. Get my stuff together.” He moves abruptly, as if he’s just relinquished something, pulls himself close to her again; this time when he takes her in his arms he presses the length of his body against hers. Such a surge of electricity goes through her, confusion and desire, comfort at his maleness, an instant’s longing for Barney, and more deeply, that other unnameable yearning.

He kisses her face, her eyes, her cheeks, her mouth, and in his passionate gentleness she’s reminded of James. When he moves his head to nuzzle his face in the hollow between her shoulder and her jaw and presses hard there with his open mouth and begins to tug her blouse up out of her slacks, she suddenly sees she’s a hair’s breadth away from unzipping her slacks and pulling them off, and then she feels deeply embarrassed, as if she’s gone backwards into teenagerhood, or fallen into some space of utter confusion where she doesn’t know which man is making love to her: Barney? James? This stranger? She’s breathless and trembling, but she manages to pull away from him. Neither of them speaks, and she feels she doesn’t have to say, he knows what she’s thinking: I’ve only been a widow a
few weeks, you’re too young for me, and, my God, I’m not ready yet for this.

“Sorry,” he says again. “I don’t think I’m ready for this.” She can’t tell if he’s joking or not, wasn’t she the one to pull away this time? “Let’s go back.” He jumps up and stands over her.

“I thought you wanted to go walking,” putting her hand over her eyes so she won’t have to look into his face.

“I’ve seen enough for now,” he says. Slowly, still trembling, she gets to her feet and brushes off her slacks. He lifts a blade of grass from her hair, and she has to stop herself from catching his hand and pressing it to her mouth. They walk silently back toward her farmland, holding the barbed-wire fence apart for each other to climb through, then walking on in silence, past the falling-down barn and sheds, past the stone circles which have retreated out of sight in the grass, back down the machinery trail on the edge of the field of stubble.

“I’m staying with Henry and Sylvia,” he says, when they’re almost back at the house. “Henry’s family knew my dad’s family, years ago in Toronto,” he explains, although she hasn’t asked. “Call me there if you feel like it.”

“You can call me,” she says, suspecting he thinks he shouldn’t phone her. Besides, she comes from a time when women did not phone men, and she can’t quite imagine doing it.

At the house he stops at the bottom of the stairs, his forehead creased, his eyes that liquid dark brown, full of some deep sadness or longing. She wants to hold him, to comfort him. After a moment she says, making her voice bright, “I’ll make some lunch,” and goes quickly up the steps onto the deck. He follows her, then stops and leans against the railing.

“No, thanks. The Swans are going to pick me up on their way back and it’s probably going to be any minute.”

She wants to ask him what his kisses mean, she wants him to say something promising or final, she wants him to kiss her again, hard, she wants — but instead they stand side by side, barely speaking, Iris so intent on picking up every nuance of emotion or intent on his part that she’s barely breathing, and he, sunk so deep in thought, she
doubts he remembers she’s there. In a few moments the small red car comes putt-putting up the driveway.

“Here they are,” he says. She wants to speak to him, tries in the minute or two before the car arrives at the house, to think of something meaningful and strong, something that will bring him back to her. But she can’t think of anything that doesn’t sound needy or schoolgirlish, so in the end, again, she says nothing. He smiles at her briefly, without intimacy, then goes down the steps to the waiting car. As Henry pilots it away down her access road Iris stands watching. It turns onto the grid that leads to town, and as she watches it grow smaller and smaller, she feels relief and disappointment, embarrassment and excitement in roughly equal quantities, until the car disappears from view.

Iris, still in her pink satin dressing gown, stands with her back to the front window and surveys the living room where last night the two dozen members of the Women’s League met. She muses on their new gentleness with her, and the sympathy for her she’d seen in their faces whenever they looked at her, yet as the evening passed, certain nuances, it seems to her, crept into the subtext of the conversations: assumptions that she would or wouldn’t do certain things any more now that she doesn’t have a husband, a certain subtle drop in her status, although she can’t quite put her finger on specifics, now that she’s a widow. She sees why all the widows she knows holiday together, play cards together, drive to the city together. It isn’t so much because of the widowhood they have in common, as she’d thought, but because of their having been pushed aside by the society of which they’d always been a part. I used to do that to them too, she thinks now, and is saddened as much by this new perception as she is by her realization that Barney’s death has caused her to lose rank.

The chairs have to be rearranged, the sofa cushions need fluffing, the bric-a-brac on the tables has to be moved back into place, the rug vacuumed to restore it to its air of never having been walked on. A half-hour’s work, if that. The women had washed the cups and saucers and dessert plates before they left; there isn’t even washing up to do.

She wonders what she did with her days before Barney died? They always seemed so busy, and now, no matter what she has to do, they seem empty, and everything she does increasingly pointless. She hopes this is just a stage in widowhood that will pass eventually. She
remembers now that she had that frightening dream again last night, and for an instant the memory freezes her to the spot. Always the same dark water threatening her, trying to drag her under. She supposes the dream has to do with losing Barney, although she can’t see what the connection is. But she’s beginning to feel it’s trying to tell her something, she has no idea what, and she doesn’t know who might be able to help her understand.

“Iris.”

His voice startles her into an involuntary jerk and she snaps her head up to see Luke standing in the dining room, having entered so quietly through the kitchen that she didn’t hear him at all. He’s not standing straight, his back seems bent, as if he has hurt it, and in the shadows — the dining room with only one small window high in the wall is the darkest room in the house — she can’t quite make out his face, but his voice — it’s the quavering voice of an old man. She stares at him, her uncertainty growing.

He comes forward slowly, as if each step is painful, past the heavy old mahogany table covered with papers she has been trying to deal with, past the sideboard making the silver-framed family pictures jingle, into the living room where he stops at the sofa that acts as a divider between the two rooms in front of him.