Inukshuk (21 page)

“What's so funny?”

“It just occurred to me. Please don't be offended.” Again she broke off laughing.

“What?”

“The word in French for seal . . . you know it?
Phoque
.”

“Fuck?”

“Sounds the same anyway. Perfect for you, isn't it?”

“What are you . . .”

She was still laughing.

“You're making fun of me!”

“Only in the best-possible way. Mr. Phoque.”

As she tipped back in his arms, laughing, it dawned on him—the tapered line of her jaw contrasted with her cheekbones' prominence and the slenderness of her neck, the delicate skin there just beside and below her ear: like Joni Mitchell. All this time he'd been attracted to her because of a physical likeness to Joni Mitchell? Because of some hangover adherence to that younger version of himself, adrift following his trip to Unst, listening to too much Joni Mitchell alone in his dorm room and imagining a Canada populated with squarish-jawed blond beauties singing tragic folk songs? Impossible. Therefore probably at least partially true. She was his ideal of youth: a prettier, more approachable-seeming Joni Mitchell. He nuzzled aside her hair and fit his lips there at the juncture of neck and ear. Breathed the warm smell of her and opened his mouth to taste her; felt her surge against him and after a moment go liquid under all the winter layers.

“OK,” she said. “Uncle. Tell me where you live.”

Later, as she drove off and he made his way across the icy lot to his car, he realized—the thing that had looked
wrong
or different about her since they'd left the restaurant: her white fur hat. She'd forgotten and left her fur hat in the restaurant.

Clamping the finger of one glove in his teeth to remove it, he flipped open his phone. Punched up her number and stuck the glove in under his arm, changing course and marching
scrunch-scrunch
back toward the restaurant, through the double doors, and into the
front foyer as she answered, overhead heaters blasting hot air at his head. Like entering an airlock chamber, Thomas had once pointed out, and he'd never been able to see it differently since.

“Dearest,” she said. “So soon?”

“Forgot your hat.”

Silence. “So I did!”

“I'm on my way inside now for it.”

“Thank you
so
much.”

“De rien.”

She laughed. “Phoque.”

Inside, there were other waiting guests to cut past like the pushy American he supposed he was still, and the confusion: No, he didn't want a table; yes, he'd just been in; nothing wrong, no. A hat, had they seen a hat? A very nice, probably very expensive white fur hat? Looking around for the young server from Yellowknife to help, it occurred to him how unlike the mythic taverns and inns of his imagination this Pearle's was—the seal-man swimming upright through air, seeking his fertile human female, and later his bonnie wee bairn—and yet how similar in purpose; how eternal the purposes of public drink and food.

“Haven't seen it,” the greeter was saying. “A number where we could reach you, if it shows up?”

“Sure. But let me go have a look first, if you don't mind,” he said, and pushed by, already knowing exactly where he'd find it: marooned under the table in a crust of sand and snowmelt and dropped fries, rice, the rim of it probably slightly damp. Otherwise, untouched. Knowing, too, how the fur would compress luxuriantly under his fingers—the ridiculous plushness of it; how he would not want to remove his hand from it all the way home.

 

 

HE MUST HAVE FALLEN ASLEEP. His arms were numb and prickling and his mouth felt as if it had been packed with wool. Then he remembered: the sailors coming out of the golf bag, the birthmarks, Jill with her pants off. His explanation for her as he tried to fill her in and
make her see the men:
Like a reverse hallucination, I think, because apparently the ice on the shoreline, the pack ice and bergs and all the other formations everywhere would sometimes look so freakishly much like an exact replica of a city, with streets and houses and cathedrals, the whole deal, the sailors would think they were going bonkers. But they' d all see it together, too. These empty ice cities exactly like England. They' d be sailing along and one of them would say, “Look, it's Westminster Abbey, right there!” Probably only because they wanted so badly to believe. Or maybe it was real. Anyway, instead of that, I'm seeing them! Like the hallucinations are getting jammed up in the space-time continuum and reversed somehow?
Trouble was, as much as he narrated for her what Work and Hoar were doing—Hoar prying his teeth from the golf ball, trying to reinsert them in his bloody gums, Work stealing the ball back and attempting to swallow it whole, spitting it out—he never got the sense she was actually seeing anything. She'd sigh, laugh, and a few times between yawns say things like
Sucks to be him,
and
Really?
and
Which one's which again
? At some point, she'd definitely drifted off and fallen asleep. Now she was sitting beside him, shaking his shoulder, hissing his name. Time had skipped backward or ahead somehow. What had happened? Had anything happened? She was fully clothed, hair combed out and shirt buttoned.

“Wake
up
now, Thomas. My parents are totally going to be home any minute.”

“I was asleep.”

“I
know
. We'll have to sneak you out the back or something.”

“But how”—he yawned—“how long have we been down here?”

She shrugged. “Like an
hour
at least.”

“I thought it was longer.”

“You ate those pills, duh. No wonder.”

“You did, too.”

“I had, like, half a one. You ate all the rest.”

“True not. There's two left.” He rattled the vial for her. “So . . . are they home?”

She tilted her head, listening. “I don't think so.” She prodded him with a foot. “Come on, let's get you out of here.”

He stood, thumped for a moment at his leg, which also had gone mostly numb, and extended his good hand to pull her up. Held her at arm's length and looked at her straight on. There should be something said about what had happened today. He was sure of it, some kind of pact or acknowledgment, and he was just as sure that he was the one who needed to say it, yet he had no clue what the thing might be—the absolutely right thing. The wrong thing would be so terribly wrong, and yet saying nothing at all might be even more fatal than that.

“Got you a good one there,” she said, pointing at his neck. “Sorry.”

“What?”

“Hickey.”

“Oh.” He made a show of trying to see it, and laughed. “The thing is, Jill, I think . . . no, I have to say, I'm totally in love with you.” His eyes fizzed and stung as he finished this, unexpectedly, both because of the feelings awakened in him by saying it, whether or not he truly loved her, and because of the risk of devastating embarrassment he'd so casually wandered into. There must be some connection between this and the way he'd felt last night staring in the mirror, wanting to stab or crush his reflection out of existence, but he couldn't quite see what it was. Then he wasn't sure she'd heard him anyway, she'd gone so completely still, and in the interim he became convinced that he needed to undercut his words a little, go back, give things a jokier, easier spin. “For reals, Jills. You're like . . .”

She swatted his shoulder. “You're not in love with me.”

“Serious! I'm trying to be serious here. Come on!”

She leaned into him, planted herself with arms circling his ribs so fiercely, he thought he'd never escape. He watched his hands slide up and down her back and move aside her hair, stroke and spin together strands. In the shadow where the waist of her jeans gapped slightly he could just make out the top fringe of her underwear and above that the beginning of the blue-purple stain. Blue butt.
Lots of Korean girls,
she'd said. So he hadn't dreamed it. Or at least not all of it. It had happened.

“Maybe I should, like, camp out here. Spend the night.”

“Maybe you want my dad to kill you first.”

“Hmm.” He pretended to think about it. “
On second thought
. . .
forget about Camelot. Rather a silly place, really
. . .” They might not have all the movies in the world in common, but they could riff on
The Holy Grail
together pretty well. Sticking her with a scene ending as he had just done left her free to go anywhere in the script—probably the bit with the castle full of young nuns. One of her favorites. “
The peril is much too perilous
,” he said to prompt her, but she was already on another tack, singing “The Ballad of Brave Sir Robin,” and skipping ahead to the best, goriest details—smashed head, nostrils ripped, bowels unplugged, bottom burnt off—Thomas joining with her for the final lines of the song and Robin's dismissal of his minstrels:

“
Eh—enough music for now, lads.
”

And like that, released from each other, they turned and headed up the stairs—Jill first, so she was first to see: outside the front picture window, the northern sky torn aside with blue-green smoke and wavering, snaky columns of light.

“Northern Lights!” she said, and crossed quickly to the window.

He went to stand behind her and to one side. Said, “A sailor's reminder there's sunlight still in distant lands . . .”

She glanced at him. “What's that from?”

“The movie. A scene I just finished, actually. Hoar says it when—”

“I love you, too, Thomas. Just so you know. I don't know if you meant it before, but you know . . . I don't care.”

He nodded. Waited a moment to be certain of whatever he said next, but before he could think of what it should be, headlights flooded the wall beside them and she pushed him down. “Quick. This way,” she said. “Here.”

He grabbed up boots, coat, knapsack from the far side of the couch and followed her to the kitchen and out the sliding glass door.

 

 

Love and obey
: that paradoxical edict from the wedding vows that he and Jane had so ostentatiously (in his parents' view anyway) decided
to delete, and had later joked about, semiregularly over the years of their marriage, always meaning, he supposed, to point out to each other just how much they really
didn't,
either one of them, control, obey, or answer to the other—so progressive, so evolved. Later, reflected through the children, it took on other layers of meaning: their unconditional love for the boys never diminished by any disobedient act, yet requiring constant monitoring and rearticulation of all rules, terms, and consequences, so very nearly the exact inverse of the love between Jane and him. When Jane had finalized her plan to leave them, go north, it acquired yet another significance and an accompanying emotional/visual analogue that had felt to him like a giant screw unwinding from his chest, leaving a gaping, raw channel. She'd never obeyed. Not him or anyone. Maybe she'd never loved, either. So was he wrong
not
to have insisted that they obey each other? What was obedience, after all—after nineteen, twenty years of marriage, what could it possibly mean? How did a marriage survive without it? But how obey and still love? Her own grandmother had, notoriously, given her grandfather a letter a few weeks prior to their wedding ceremony in which she asked him, please, to remember to keep control over her. Franklin had never seen the letter but had heard Jane paraphrase it often enough that he felt as if he'd viewed the thing firsthand: the plea to her husband to keep her in control, remember the vows they'd soon take, and manage the
untamable wildness
in her.
Save this letter for such time as you need to invoke the authority I hereby freely grant you in it. I fear you'll need it all too often
. Yet, Jane insisted, her grandmother was always the one in control, managing the family finances, working, running the shop. Free-thinking and well ahead of her time. And, of course, to her knowledge, her grandfather had never had cause to use the so-called
authority
given him in that letter.

It needed a container—that was all he'd ever been able to conclude on the matter. Marriage, love, affection of any kind, it needed some
thing
in which to be contained, reflected, and given form, in the same way people themselves needed some form or structure, however fictitious. Once upon a time, some people had agreed to
draw a line around that and call it
obedience
. Politicized, polarizing or not, he still thought it was probably the wrong word, but he had a different perspective now than he'd had twenty years ago on what might have been meant by it. More like a vessel or a seedpod, he supposed. A car. Watch case? Mirror. Anyway, a container. And speeding home to Thomas, he felt
contained
as he hadn't in some time. Held in Moira's attention and given direction by the urge to shape her name over and over in his mind, and to say it out aloud to himself. Also restless and aware that the filaments attaching him to any other human were as tenuous as ever and stretched to the max through the icy dark. Jane would never return from the Arctic. He believed that more fully tonight than he had for some time. Moira might or might not show up at his door. Better to hope that she would; better yet not to expect it.

One of the last times he and Jane had spoken, six, seven months ago now, before they'd agreed to quit their semiregular “talks” and phone updates, she'd told him something he'd often revisited:
It's good you're losing some of your control, John. Your composure, whatever you want to call it, even if it scares the boys sometimes. Good for your soul. I always said.... It's like some kind of false veneer or false protective coating with you, isn't it? The way you keep such close wraps on everything you feel and say and do, such command over how you'll choose to react. You think that was ever fun to be around? I mean, there's nothing really wrong with it, I guess . . . just kind of distancing, isn't it?