The Engagement (15 page)

This is very strange: I’d swear for her it was always the first time we’d met and I was always a stranger. I would dial her number and she would not remember me. Sometimes she’d pretend she did, but I knew it was an act. If I saw her in the morning I doubt she’d recognize me that afternoon. Did she see so many people she couldn’t keep track? I’d bring her gifts, expensive things that women like, and next time I would ask her about them and she’d look blank, or say something polite, humoring me, as if I were the one with a poor memory—and it made me wild, just really angry, and I tell you, I could understand then why men want to hurt whores and I didn’t half wonder if in some cases they deserve it.

There was more, but I could not bear to keep reading. I looked up at him, my fiancé. My eyes burned; everything around us seemed to be in extreme focus, and I began to laugh. The room was giving way, the grain of the world turning coarse, and as I laughed I could feel myself falling. I had found the very edge of my life and now, too fast, I was descending.

VI

W
e were in his truck driving across the paddocks. How much later it was I did not know, but the day’s color was leaching from the horizon, making this place colder and grayer and more limitless. Alexander stopped by various gates and I climbed out. I tried to open their bolts efficiently, to not show that terror made my fingers slip on the cold metal, each lock a new test. No longer did I know what to believe. I did not trust the sky. Or the trees. Or the birds, invisible in the trees’ darkening branches, their volume intense. I did not trust my own body, that my hands would do as I ordered. Wrestling with each gate, every field beyond looked just like the last, but with the slightest reconfiguration of trees and animals—two birds on a branch, then three—a kind of memory game.

Imagine someone coming to you and handing over a history of your life threaded with enough truth to make you wonder about the lies.
What have I done?
the letters were gnawing,
I don’t understand what I have done.
They were fabrications, but whoever had written them seemed to know too much, to have access to information I could barely even recall.

Another gate, another bolt and latch connected to a thick steel chain: this one older and held together with pieces of rusting wire. The latch had a hole cut through it, and as I attempted to slide the hole at an angle over the head of the bolt, I could feel Alexander’s eyes upon me. He watched from the driver’s seat, in case I took flight across his fields. I tried to raise the whole gate and then unhook the latch. It would not give but my fingers kept trying, growing more clumsy, the engagement ring knocking against the steel.

Finally the gate came undone; I swung it wide and watched him drive through.

Shivering, I hesitated: I did not know where we were going, or why. What if I now ran and made it to the national park? Maybe he wouldn’t find me. Maybe no one would. I had heard tales of children and foreigners getting lost in the bush. All around them the landscape must have looked the same, with no markers to distinguish where they’d just been among all those trees that wanted to burn. A school-learned line from Emily Dickinson came back to me:
Dare you see a soul at the white heat?
No, I thought, I don’t think I do. Those people never had enough water, and walked around and around in parched circles, slowly perishing.

I heaved the creaking gate closed, and again my fingers wrestled with the cold latch.

Back in the truck, Alexander said nothing. We’d barely spoken since he showed me the letters. I’d sat in my room feeling concussed while he stayed downstairs in the kitchen. He had not been prepared to leave me in the house alone, and now he was giving off patience—stoic, aggressive, phony patience—as he waited for me to admit my past.

I closed my eyes.

What if I had in fact stood against a back fence in a narrow lane, branches splayed above, and at my feet the buildup of leaves, while in the distance traffic sounded, then lights flicked on around the estate—a stranger’s hands on the flesh of my hips?

What if I had been on the golf course at night, kneeling on the beautifully tended grass, unable to see the stars, to see anything with a belly in my face, fingers pulling at my hair?

What if I’d enjoyed it?

As we drove on, the trees moved back and forth, advancing, retreating, their outlines scrambled by mist.

“Wait,” Alexander said to himself. “Do not tell me.”

This paddock had an aluminum enclosure in one corner. The cow was lying here alone; in the distance other black calves and cows were stolid shadows.

Alexander muttered something under his breath. Parking the truck, he got out quickly, swearing. “Do I have to check every tiny detail around here?”

I got out too.

“He should have told me she was ready. Useless fucking manager.”

Through the clumpy, shitty ground, sinking further with each step, I followed as he approached the cow. Up close, the animal was shockingly big, bigger than anything I’d seen outside a zoo. From its vagina jutted two hooves: two round segments of hard, striated bone, then thin ankles strung together, as if the creature were cross-legged inside the womb.

“It’s all right, girl. It’s all right.” Alexander’s voice had changed slightly. He was stroking the animal’s flank. “It hurts, but you’ll be all right.”

Coaxing the cow to its feet, he prodded it toward two vertical bars in the enclosure. “Into the crush, come on, in you go.” He got his shoulder up under the cow, up under the protruding hooves, and half heaved, half cajoled the cow into what he called the crush. There was an echoing clang as he slammed closed a hollow steel bar, fixing in place the animal’s neck. The cow blinked a huge sad eye.

“I’m going to have to pull it out,” Alexander announced, marching to the truck, taking a length of rope from the back. Returning, he looped the rope around the calf’s ankles, then his own body, like he was lassoing himself. He drew it tight, leaning back so the rope took his weight.

“If you want to make yourself useful . . .” he started, irritated.

“Just tell me.”

“Hold the tail out of the way.”

With fingers numb from the bolts and latches, I took the cow’s tail, a sort of coarse tassel, and tried to look elsewhere. As Alexander began winching one creature from the other, I weighed up whether to make a run for it through his paddocks full of prize minotaurs, whether I’d be running from danger or toward it. While the letters scared me, what gave this fear an extra kick was the ungrounded guilt they aroused. It seemed clear who had written them, and yet I still kept thinking, Someone’s found out about me, but he or she has found out things even I didn’t know I’d done.

Into the silence a magpie made a warbling, talking call.

“Push!” Alexander urged tenderly. “Push!” he pleaded, as gently he strained at the rope and the calf moved under the mother’s hide and bone and muscle and meat. The cow bellowed and its legs gave way, the steel crush ringing as its head dropped down. Lying there, exhausted, the animal seemed to call out to the trees and the wind and the dusk, a deep guttural groan of oldest pain.

How could I have run?

With the cow collapsed, it was harder to pull the calf out. Alexander sank into soft, wet ground. And soon he was actually sitting down in the mud, his knees bent in front of him, his torso forward, gripping the rope and pulling. He was strong, very strong, and slowly the calf emerged, its lower legs covered in oozing opalescent membrane.

The mother’s vagina was stretched taut in all its raw elastic complexity, the pink of it unfolding before us. Again the cow bellowed, too alive now, and then the calf’s haunches appeared.

“Push, push, girl!” Alexander now stood. “Get up and push!”

I stared at him, and for the first time I thought I saw clearly who he was—the man I might have known if our first meeting had gone differently, if I had come to this place without charging a fee.

“It’s alive!” Alexander called out, astonished. The cow seemed to be shuddering, but it was the calf’s lithe body moving from inside. “The little bastard’s alive!”

Alexander pulled harder, his whole face alight, and in one final wet heave, the calf came spilling out.

It lay on the ground, a black, spineless thing with arms and legs outstretched. It seemed to have no eyes. It seemed to have no mouth. It swam in shiny black oil, twitching and wriggling inside a translucent sheath.

Alexander grabbed me in an awkward, almost teenage bear hug. He clutched my shoulder, squeezing it, before breaking into an odd little two-step of joy. He was transported. And so was I.
Alive!
We, too, were alive! I had also been witness to the magic act, and a little voice asked me, Wait, what if this man’s been telling you the truth? And then I thought, But if it’s not him writing, who is it?

His arm was still over my shoulder. “Why are you surprised it survived?” I asked.

“I’ve never seen a breech birth that’s left waiting actually make it. They choke usually, choke on amniotic fluid.” Alexander bent down, gently unfolding the calf from the membrane as one might unwrap a parcel. Picking up the thin hind legs, he dragged the newborn beside the mother. He removed the restraints from the cow’s head and prodded its flank with his boot, forcing the animal to stand. “Time for work, girl.”

Heaving itself up, the cow gave a low, deep murmur and sniffed at the calf, licked at it. Under the mother’s great tongue, the calf’s head moved. It flicked its new ears.

I found I was wiping my eyes.

Alexander checked that the cow had expelled the placenta, then, bending down, wiped the blood off his hands and wrists on a patch of grass. I stood watching the calf, stunned. The shining black newborn flung out its legs, learning how they worked.

When Alexander was done, he touched me gently on the arm and we walked to the truck. Dusk was swallowing the horizon, fixing my new need to keep glancing over my shoulder. It was just us, he and I and the animals. I felt a surge of tenderness toward him. I wanted to lay my head on his shoulder, to touch his hand. Watching this had broken me in some way, had broken through to something I hadn’t known was closed over.

We both opened the truck doors and shut them at the same time; looking at each other, we shyly grinned. For a moment, just for the slightest moment, it was as though nothing bad had ever happened. And we were sitting in the near dark, watching as the gleaming calf knelt beside its mother, found a teat, and drank.

 • • • 

The house smelled of Alexander’s cooking: I followed him through the back door and into the kitchen, where he turned on the light to check the oven. The sink was laden with crockery, as if he’d used every utensil he could find. He cooked without bothering to clean up, and on the workbench was a bowl of peeled and cored apples—he’d started filling the apples’ centers with a red jelly from the food processor—alongside a pile of onion skins, a container of leftover stuffing, and the needle and thread with which he’d sewn the bird’s vent after filling it. Nearby,
Larousse Gastronomique
was opened to “Roast Goose with Fruit.” I was starving, but the odor of the roasting bird was intense, almost acrid.

Satisfied with the temperature, he strode out of the kitchen to another of the pokey rooms off the servants’ corridor. He pulled a cord, and on flared a bare globe. This was the laundry.

I stood at the door averting my eyes as he stripped off his birth-stained clothes. When he was just in a white undershirt and a pair of boxer shorts, he turned on the groaning tap and began brushing around his nails in the trough.

“Do you need help with dinner?” I asked.

“Oh, no.” He glanced over at me. “It’s under control. Thank you.”

“I could do the dishes?”

“They won’t take long. I’ll do them later.”

I nodded, not wanting to push him. “Well, I might go and freshen up. Unless you’d prefer to shower first?”

“No, after you.”

The shirt and jacket he’d lent me as well as my own jeans were covered in a less dramatic mix of mud and blood, but I didn’t care. I felt light. Somehow I was managing to hold at a distance the unreality of the letters. And in doing so Alexander became almost an ally. It was easier to cope with being here if I believed there was someone out in the world, out in the darkness beyond this house, who wished us both ill—making him and me sudden innocents. Whoever had been writing was evil, but we were good people who worked on a farm. We helped animals, helped them and their babies. Perhaps it sounds mad, but I felt the flicker of a hope-filled truce open between us.

“Liese.” Turning off the tap, Alexander put down his nailbrush. “I have a surprise for you.”

Half laughing: “Another?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I give in.” I smiled, waiting. “Will you tell me what it is?”

“I’ll show you.”

In his underwear, he led me through the corridor back to the entrance hall; his sinewy shoulders were tense, and a stiff control had returned to his limbs. Pushing open the dining room door, he revealed the long, polished table to be decorated in lavish style, set with crystal wine and water glasses, monogrammed plates—cream with a cobalt trim and cursive
C
—and heavy silver cutlery—knives and forks of different sizes upon embroidered lace napkins. There must have been thousands, tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of family treasure laid out. It gave the table undeniable power. And it posed a kind of dare: there were settings for six people.

He held himself very straight. “I’ve invited a few friends to dinner.”

“Oh.”

“I wanted us to celebrate.”

Whereas an hour ago I would have instantly wondered which of the guests might rescue me, now I was also touched by the effort he had gone to. “It looks beautiful.”

Alexander allowed himself a small grin. “There should be flowers. Wait a minute.” He left the room and returned moments later with a pair of pruning shears. “Will you organize an arrangement?”

“Where from?”

“The garden, Liese.” He reached out, brushing my face. “That’s where flowers are made.”

Taking the key from the little hook behind the curtains, Alexander opened one of the room’s French doors and stood back, evidently satisfied that I would not start running.

On the veranda, inhaling the cool night air, I felt, for the first time in days, that I could actually breathe. The planting beds framing the lawn were lit by the dining room’s windows and I cut a flower, a white camellia, the chill moving into and out of my lungs.

I cut another stem and stretched my neck, just slightly.

Soon this could be over. I had the option of asking one of the guests for a lift to the nearest town. There I could hire a car with the cash and drive through the night to my old life—the idea was wonderful . . . and also not wonderful. My old life seemed increasingly frivolous.

I had lived too close to the surface—that was my job, making spaces easy on the eye. I had worked in artifice and illusion, convincing myself that finding the right stone, or marble, or color of render to conceal some building’s blemishes was a useful way to spend one’s days. Here I was connected to the things humans were meant to be connected to: cows and magpies and mud and dogs. I looked at the camellia bush, the buds set to open like perfectly wrapped gifts, each giving off the subtlest fragrance.