Object of Your Love (3 page)

It is October now and we have many feet of snow. The Ski-Doos have come out and, at noon when I walk home for lunch, the teenaged boys are roaring up and down the narrow, high-banked, snow-packed roads, just as southern youth do in their hot rods on steamy summer nights. For my lunch, I heat canned soup on my hot plate and butter a slice of bread, thinking sometimes of the imported green grapes Egan used to feed me, one by one, his great square fingers lingering in my mouth like succulent fruit.

Each day now, looking down out of my window, I see Ruth emerge from one of the cooperative buildings, cross the road and enter another door. She is shorter and slighter than I expected, slender-hipped as a girl and dressed in flat laced shoes, conservative plaid skirts and simple sweater sets. She carries in her arms an archival box full of drawings, bears it high, like a priestess transporting a sacred offering, stepping sure-footedly through the snow. I can see from the rigid set of her shoulders, from her efficiency and brusqueness, that there is a hard knot within her, that she is all turned inward upon herself.

I have never been introduced to her, but one day, late in September, we came upon each other on the road, or rather, she stopped me when she could conveniently have passed by. I'd been looking the other way, distracted. But she pressed forward, caught my arm. She had evidently been waiting for the moment when we would come face to face, perhaps she had even set out to hunt me down. She seemed to have composed something to say.

“I know who you are,” she told me quietly, confidently, “and why you are still here. You are not important to me. You don't matter to me in any way. Do you understand? You are not a threat. This is something you should know.” All I could do was to stare at the unhappy lines chiselled around her mouth. I wanted to believe that she was lying to herself, to me, but I could not. I saw that she was rock hard, impermeable as the land, with a centre like flint, like the stony hills pressing in on us.

Down at the store, I have heard that Ruth has ordered new plastic pots for her greenhouse, she has ordered new panes of glass. When they arrive an Inuk will have to toil for days out in the cold with putty and knife to repair the damage of a jealous mistress. The greenhouse will be restored to its former majesty. It will again be like a soaring medieval cathedral and Ruth will be its high priestess. She will be productive again. She will have, beneath her fingernails, rich, pungent imported soil flown in alongside her filets mignons and avocado pears. Once more she will grow salad greens. When Egan comes home from work he will find her fragile orchids quivering in a vase on the maple hall table.

The evenings seem interminable in my little apartment. I do not look very closely at my surroundings for fear they will make me desire the warmth and comforts of Egan's home. I have stayed in the apartment, though I no longer find its poverty cleansing. There is no other place for me to live and I was right in thinking that Egan would not expel me. He does not want to turn our quarrel into a public drama, though, technically, the apartment is for the housing of cooperative staff. After work I eat dinner alone, watch television, read books. Late at night I lie in bed, listening to the crunch of footsteps on dry snow, to voices passing below on the road.

The bay is frozen now, the ice is a foot thick. On Saturday mornings I hear a great roaring of Ski-Doo engines down on the shore. Stepping to my window, I see a group of hunters heading out across the bay, rifles glinting in their laps, striking out in search of the seal pods at the distant floe edge. The runners of the long
komatik
sleds leave clean parallel lines on the untracked snow. Gradually, the drone of the Ski-Doos dies away, the figures of the hunters, dark against the dazzling white landscape, diminish, finally disappearing between two hills sloping down to the mouth of the harbour.

Sometimes as I move about my apartment on the weekends I hear commotion in the rooms downstairs. It is November and a new collection of graphics is about to be released to the southern market. There is a great flurry of activity. Thirty images in editions of fifty must be hand-printed, orders packed up and shipped. All day long, the sound of voices, heavy feet falling on the crude wooden floors, the scraping of furniture legs, the ring of hammers striking nails into wooden crates rise to where I sit with my hands wrapped around a hot cup of tea. One Sunday evening late in the month, when all the commotion downstairs has subsided, I hear a quiet knock at my door. It is the first caller I've had since moving back to the apartment. I think at first that it must be Egan. I realize I have been praying all these months for his defection from Ruth, never believing he wanted her back. Flushed and trembling with gratitude, I rush excitedly to the door and open it. However, standing on the little landing is not Egan, but Moses Akulukjuk, the young co-op manager, a smile, alternately bold and sheepish, flitting across his face. Endeavouring to conceal my disappointment, I invite him in.

“It is not the same without you at the co-op, Stella,” he says sadly, shaking his head. “Mr. Egan. He should not fire you.” He slips out of his boots and jacket, looks around curiously at the apartment, pads in heavy wool socks to my kitchen table. I reach down another mug from the cupboard but I know already that Moses has not come here for tea. I sit down opposite him, reflecting to myself that winter is upon us and my bed is cold.

We become lovers. In the following weeks he slips up to my apartment under cover of darkness. It is a bitterly cold December, a month when a white sun, pale and dull as the moon, rises at eleven in the morning, hangs low on the horizon for three hours, then drops from view. In this brief silver light, the landscape is alien and haunting. One must burn one's electric lights all day long.

When Moses arrives in the evenings, brazenly entering my apartment without knocking, I am ready for him. I have opened up the sofa bed, turned back the covers. He is small and slight, a good foot shorter than I, but his zeal more than compensates for his diminutive stature. He makes love swiftly, unabashedly, licking and grunting, probing, clambering greedily over my body like a bold little animal sniffing out a rich landscape. His great-great-great-grandfather was a white whaler, but the intervening years have erased any traces of his white ancestry. I find his coffee-brown skin, his wide flat face, his hairless chest enticing. Burying my fingers in his glossy black hair, I call him “My Little Wolf.” Moses strokes my white thighs and says that they remind him of the smooth, flawless ivory he sells to the carvers for their sculptures. He teaches me some
Inuktitut
vocabulary. I ask him to tell me all the
Inuktitut
words for obscenities. He laughs, a little puzzled, but complies.

“Stella,” he says, “you are maybe a little crazy?”

He was born in one of these prefab houses. He doesn't know how to hunt or make an igloo. He learned his English from comic books. He asks me if I will take him to Toronto for a holiday. He would like to see the view from the
CN
Tower. He has heard of Wonderland. He has three young children and a wife who drinks too much. Everyone in the community knows they are not happy. Nevertheless, I send him home at midnight, for the sake of appearances. Standing at my window, watching him walk away in the moonlight, I think that it is a bit of a coup for Moses to be bedding me now. He is a young, clever, ambitious man who would like to have Egan's job. There is a movement germinating in the community for greater independence, talk of getting rid of the white resource staff. Some day, in the near or distant future, Moses may replace Egan, the White God. In the meantime, he will sleep with Egan's ex-lover. And am I too, I wonder, am I using this affair as a way of striking back at Egan, of undermining his dangerous power here, of mocking him?

Despite my precautions, our love affair is no secret in the community. There is no such thing as privacy in a place this size. The sound of footsteps on the snowy road, the opening and closing of doors bring faces to every window. Gossip is endemic here, it poisons conversation. On my way to work, the Inuit nod to me, then pass on, smiling their secretive, comprehending smiles. This is the maddening thing about them: they see straight through everything. They are a people who, in order to survive, had to be able to stand in a stormy landscape which, from sky to earth, was like a great, dazzling white curve, like the featureless inside of an egg, and find their way, detect invisible landmarks, locate their buried cache of food beneath smooth snowdrifts, or die. When they see me in the road, they smile not out of mockery but out of amazement at the folly of people. For generations, they have witnessed the profound indiscretion of human beings, leading to murder, starvation, madness out on the unyielding land where nothing can be hidden.

*   *   *

One Sunday afternoon in April, I meet Morgan on the road outside the cooperative. I am carrying my skis and poles, warmly dressed for a few hours of cross-country skiing. It is some months since I have seen her.

“You're pregnant again,” I say, because I notice that she is pale, her face gaunt. She laughs sadly. Her coat is open to the wind. She is wearing an old sweater stained from the spitting up of her young children. I smell thick, sweet liquor on her breath.

“How many months?” I ask her.

“Only two,” she says, “but, as usual, I'm sick as a dog.” She is a robust, heavy-hipped woman but her body does not bear children well. The process seems alien, hostile to her very nature. She has told me she always loses weight at the beginning of her pregnancies. She vomits and suffers from depression. Her husband, Manasie, whose own frame has been tempered by arctic winds, by sub-zero temperatures, whose torso, at seventy, is still sound, obdurate as the terrain, says this depression is a white weakness, a southern luxury. She is his fourth wife, the other three having died in childbirth out on the land, the blocks of a snowhouse roof curving over their heads, or of tuberculosis here in the community clinic. He will not let Morgan use birth control. He wants a large family. He wants many sons, the hunters of the future.

Morgan draws from her coat pocket a mickey of whisky, unscrews the top, holds the bottle out to me. I see the veins standing out like blue roots on the backs of her hands.

“No, thanks,” I say. “I have to be going. I want to catch the best of the sun.”

She shrugs and takes a drink herself. “We should get together again,” she says, watching me as she drops the bottle back in her pocket. “For a drink or something.”

“Yes,” I say without conviction. I head off. On the edge of the community, I snap on my skis and glide over dry, powdery snow into the hills. I try to picture Morgan arriving in the community as a young woman, ten years ago, bringing with her a diploma in fashion design and a ruthless determination. I reflect that the North seems to attract these hard-edge types like a lodestone, metal to metal, people fleeing the ghosts and failures of their past, running from themselves as they cross the treeline and head toward the Arctic Circle, brash, fearing nothing but their own emptiness. I wonder if Morgan thought when she arrived here that, at thirty, she'd be bearing her seventh child. She once told me she'd married Manasie because he was harder, stronger than she. “He was a leader,” she said, “and I'd got tired of leading.”

In the middle of the afternoon, I am skiing on a ridge a few kilometres from the settlement. I pause, wanting to appreciate the panorama, the impressive sweep of the land, the pearly moisture frozen like crystals in the air. I have not seen a soul all afternoon but now, into my vision, slide two figures, also on skis, cutting across a slope a hundred feet below me. It is Egan and Ruth. Without noticing me, they too stop, draw something from their backpacks, perhaps thermoses of tea, exchange a few words, store away their thermoses, pick up their poles. I watch them move away. Soon Egan is skiing well ahead of Ruth, it is a struggle for her to keep up. She moves slowly, without energy or zeal. I have heard that Egan has been away a lot lately. He must fly to Toronto, New York, San Francisco to promote the community's art, leaving Ruth here.

I have passed Egan's house at night, seen a single light burning in a single room and wondered what Ruth does with her time. I have heard she is an accomplished knitter. She makes me think of the legend of the Eagle's Bride: a young Inuit woman picked up by an eagle and flown to a high sea cliff, where she is imprisoned in a nest and must bear the eagle's human-bird children. The girl asks the eagle to bring her a whole young caribou so that, when he is out hunting, she can braid the caribou sinew into a long line for her escape. I think of Ruth alone at night knitting a strong wool rope that stretches through all the rooms and doorways of Egan's house, seeking deliverance. Hasn't she merely, I think, exchanged one kind of suffocation for another: urban skyscrapers for these encroaching hills? Now the figures of Egan and Ruth disappear behind a ridge. I look around at the landscape and marvel at the power of such vastness to crush one.

*   *   *

A few weeks later, I come home for lunch and find a pair of hiking boots on my landing. Cautiously, I enter the apartment and see Morgan lying on my sofa. She turns, her face flushed, and looks at me.

“I wasn't feeling well,” she says. “I came here. I'm sorry. I couldn't think of any other place. I remembered there was an extra key to your apartment in Egan's desk drawer. I had nowhere else to go.” Her legs are pressed up against her belly. I touch her forehead.

“You're burning up,” I say.

She tells me that several days ago she aborted her baby using a knitting needle. She told no one. The abortion itself went well but now some kind of infection seems to have set in. She is weak and inert with pain.

“I can't go home,” she tells me. “Manasie will suspect something. What should I do?”

I sit down at the kitchen table. “You need to see the nurse,” I say.