The Progress of Love (6 page)

“To test our ingenuity,” she says. “Always testing something.”

And that is only the more or less organized part of it. Her friends are a mixed bag. People who have retired here, who live in remodelled farmhouses or winterized summer cottages; younger people of diverse background who have settled on the land, taking over rocky old farms that born-and-bred farmers won’t bother about anymore. And a local dentist and his friend, who are gay.

“We’re marvellously tolerant around here now,” shouts Stella, who has gone into the bathroom and is conveying her information over the sound of running water. “We don’t insist on matching up the sexes. It’s nice for us pensioned-off wives. There are about half a dozen of us. One’s a weaver.”

“I can’t find the tonic,” yells David from the kitchen.

“It’s in cans. The box on the floor by the fridge. This woman has her own sheep. The weaver woman. She has her own spinning wheel. She spins the wool and then she weaves it into cloth.”

“Holy shit,” says David thoughtfully.

Stella has turned the tap off, and is splashing.

“I thought you’d like that. See, I’m not so far gone. I just make jam.”

In a moment, she comes out with a towel wrapped around her, saying, “Where’s my drink?” The top corners of the towel are tucked together under one arm, the bottom corners are flapping dangerously free. She accepts a gin-and-tonic.

“I’ll drink it while I dress. I have two new summer outfits. One is flamingo and one is turquoise. I can mix and match. Either way, I look stupendous.”

Catherine comes from the living room to
get
her drink, and takes the first two gulps as if it were a glass of water.

“I love this house,” she says with a soft vehemence. “I really do. It’s so primitive and unpretentious. It’s full of light. I’ve been trying to think what it reminds me of, and now I know. Did you ever’see that old Ingmar Bergman movie where there is a family living in a summer house on an island? A lovely shabby house. The
girl was going crazy. I remember thinking at the time, That’s what summer houses should be like, and they never are.”

“That was the one where God was a helicopter,” David says. “And the girl fooled around with her brother in the bottom of a boat.”

“We never had anything quite so interesting going on around here, I’m afraid,” says Stella over the bedroom wall. “I can’t say I ever really appreciated Bergman movies. I always thought they were sort of bleak and neurotic.”

“Conversations tend to be widespread around here,” says David to Catherine. “Notice how none of the partitions go up to the ceiling? Except the bathroom, thank God. It makes for a lot of family life.”

“Whenever David and I wanted to say something private, we had to put our heads under the covers,” Stella says. She comes out of the bedroom wearing a pair of turquoise stretch pants and a sleeveless top. The top has turquoise flowers and fronds on a white background. At least, she seems to have put on a brassière. A light-colored strap is visible, biting the flesh of her shoulder.

“Remember one night we were in bed,” she says, “and we were talking about getting a new car, saying we wondered what kind of mileage you got with a such-and-such, I forget what. Well, Daddy was always mad about cars, he knew everything, and all of a sudden we heard him say, ‘Twenty-eight miles to the gallon,’ or whatever, just as if he were right there on the other side of the bed. Of course, he wasn’t—he was lying in bed in his own room. David was quite blasé about it; he just said, ‘Oh, thank you, sir,’ as if we’d been including Daddy all along!”

When David comes out of the liquor store, in the village, Stella has rolled down the car window and is talking to a couple she introduces as Ron and Mary. They are in their mid-sixties probably, but very tanned and trim. They wear matching plaid pants and white sweatshirts and plaid caps.

“Glad to meet you,” says Ron. “So you’re up here seeing how the smart folks live!” He has the sort of jolly voice that suggests
boxing feints, playful punches. “When are you going to retire and come up here and join us?”

That makes David wonder what Stella has been telling them about the separation.

“It’s not my turn to retire yet.”

“Retire early! That’s what a lot of us up here did! We got ourselves out of the whole routine. Toiling and moiling and earning and spending.”

“Well, I’m not in that,” says David. “I’m just a civil servant. We take the taxpayers’ money and try not to do any work at all.”

“That’s not true,” says Stella, scolding—wifely. “He works in the Department of Education and he works hard. He just will never admit it.”

“A simple serpent!” says Mary, with a crow of pleasure. “I used to work in Ottawa—that was eons ago—and we used to call ourselves simple serpents! Civil serpents. Servants.”

Mary is not in the least fat, but something has happened to her chin that usually happens to the chins of fat women. It has collapsed into a series of terraces flowing into her neck.

“Kidding aside,” says Ron. “This is a wonderful life. You wouldn’t believe how much we find to do. The day is never long enough.”

“You have a lot of interests?” says David. He is perfectly serious now, respectful and attentive.

This a tone that warns Stella, and she tries to deflect Mary. “What are you going to do with the material you brought back from Morocco?”

“I can’t decide. It would make a gorgeous dress but it’s hardly me. I might just end up putting it on a bed.”

“There’s so many activities, you can just keep up forever,” Ron says. “For instance skiing. Cross-country. We were out nineteen days in the month of February. Beautiful weather this year. We don’t have to drive anywhere. We just go down the back lane—”

“I try to keep up my interests, too,” says David. “I think it keeps you young.”

“There is no doubt it does!”

David has one hand in the inner pocket of his jacket. He brings out something he keeps cupped in his palm, shows it to Ron with a deprecating smile.

“One of my interests,” he says.

“Want to see what I showed Ron?” David says later. They are driving along the bluffs to the nursing home.

“No, thank you.”

“I hope Ron liked it,” David says pleasantly.

He starts to sing. He and Stella met while singing madrigals at university. Or that’s what Stella tells people. They sang other things, too, not just madrigals. “David was a skinny innocent bit of a lad with a pure sweet tenor and I was a stocky little brute of a girl with a big deep alto,” Stella likes to say. “There was nothing he could do about it. Destiny.”

“O, Mistress mine, where are you roaming?” sings David, who has a fine tenor voice to this day:

Down on the beach, at either end of Stella’s property, there are long, low walls of rocks that have been stacked in baskets of wire, stretching out into the water. They are there to protect the beach from erosion. On one of these walls, Catherine is sitting, looking out at the water, with the lake breeze blowing her filmy dress and her long hair. She could be posed for a picture. She might be advertising something, Stella thinks—either something very intimate, and potentially disgusting, or something truly respectable and rather splendid, like life insurance.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” says Stella. “Is there anything the matter with her eyes?”

“Eyes?” says David.

“Her eyesight. It’s just that she doesn’t seem to be quite focussing, close up. I don’t know how to describe it.”

Stella and David are standing at the living-room window. Returned from the nursing home, they each hold a fresh, restorative drink. They have hardly spoken on the way home, but the silence has not been hostile. They are feeling chastened and reasonably companionable.

“There isn’t anything wrong with her eyesight that I know of.”

Stella goes into the kitchen, gets out the roasting pan, rubs the roast of pork with cloves of garlic and fresh sage leaves.

“You know, there’s a smell women get,” says David, standing in the living-room doorway. “It’s when they know you don’t want them anymore. Stale.”

Stella slaps the meat over.

“Those groins are going to have to be rewired entirely,” she says. “The wire is just worn to cobwebs in some places. You should see. The power of water. It can wear out tough wire. I’ll have to have a work party this fall. Just make a lot of food and ask some people over and make sure enough of them are able-bodied. That’s what we all do.”

She puts the roast in the oven and rinses her hands.

“It was Catherine you were telling me about last summer, wasn’t it? She was the one you said was inclined to be fey.”

David groans. “I said what?”

“Inclined to be fey.” Stella bangs around, getting out apples, potatoes, onions.

“All right, tell me,” says David, coming into the kitchen to stand close to her. “Tell me what I said?”

“That’s all, really. I don’t remember anything else.”

“Stella. Tell me all I said about her.”

“I don’t, really. I don’t remember.”

Of course she remembers. She remembers the exact tone in which he said “inclined to be fey.” The pride and irony in his voice. In the throes of love, he can be counted on to speak of the woman with tender disparagement—with amazement, even. He likes to say
that it’s crazy, he does not understand it, he can plainly see that this person isn’t his kind of person at all. And yet, and yet, and yet. And yet it’s beyond him, irresistible. He told Stella that Catherine believed in horoscopes, was a vegetarian, and painted weird pictures in which tiny figures were enclosed in plastic bubbles.

“The roast,” says Stella, suddenly alarmed. “Will she eat meat?”

“What?”

“Will Catherine eat meat?”

“She may not eat anything. She may be too spaced out.”

“I’m making an apple-and-onion casserole. It’ll be quite substantial. Maybe she’ll eat that.”

Last summer, he said, “She’s a hippie survivor, really. She doesn’t even know those times are gone. I don’t think she’s ever read a newspaper. She hasn’t the remotest idea of what’s going on in the world. Unless she’s heard it from a fortune-teller. That’s her idea of reality. I don’t think she can read a map. She’s all instinct. Do you know what she did? She went to Ireland to see the Book of Kells. She’d heard the Book of Kells was in Ireland. So she just got off the plane at Shannon Airport, and asked somebody the way to the Book of Kells. And you know what, she found it!”

Stella asked how this fey creature earned the money for trips to Ireland.

“Oh, she has a job,” David said. “Sort of a job. She teaches art, part time. God knows what she teaches them. To paint by their horoscopes, I think.”

Now he says, “There’s somebody else. I haven’t told Catherine. Do you think she senses it? I think she does. I think she senses it.”

He is leaning against the counter, watching Stella peel apples. He reaches quickly into his inside pocket, and before Stella can turn her head away he is holding a Polaroid snapshot in front of her eyes.

“That’s my new girl,” he says.

“It looks like lichen,” says Stella, her paring knife halting. “Except it’s rather dark. It looks to me like moss on a rock.”

“Don’t be dumb, Stella. Don’t be cute. You can see her. See her legs?”

Stella puts the paring knife down and squints obediently. There
is a flattened-out breast far away on the horizon. And the legs spreading into the foreground. The legs are spread wide—smooth, golden, monumental: fallen columns. Between them is the dark blot she called moss, or lichen. But it’s really more like the dark pelt of an animal, with the head and tail and feet chopped off. Dark silky pelt of some unlucky rodent.

“Well, I can see now,” she says, in a sensible voice.

“Her name is Dina. Dina without an ‘h.’ She’s twenty-two years old.”

Stella won’t ask him to put the picture away, or even to stop holding it in front of her face.

“She’s a bad girl,” says David. “Oh, she’s a bad girl! She went to school to the nuns. There are no bad girls like those convent-school girls, once they decide to go wild! She was a student at the art college where Catherine teaches. She quit. Now she’s a cocktail waitress.”

“That doesn’t sound so terribly depraved to me. Deirdre was a cocktail waitress for a while when she was at college.”

“Dina’s not like Deirdre.”

At last, the hand holding the picture drops, and Stella picks up her knife and resumes peeling the apples. But David doesn’t put the picture away. He starts to, then changes his mind.

“The little witch,” he says. “She torments my soul.”

His voice when he talks about this girl seems to Stella peculiarly artificial. But who is she to say, with David, what is artificial and what is not? This special voice of his is rather high-pitched, monotonous, insistent, with a deliberate, cruel sweetness. Whom does he want to be cruel to—Stella, Catherine, the girl, himself? Stella gives a sigh that is noisier and more exasperated than she meant it to be and puts down an apple half-peeled. She goes into the living room and looks out the window.

Catherine is climbing off the wall. Or she’s trying to. Her dress is caught in the wire.

“That pretty li’l old dress is giving her all sorts of trouble today,” Stella says, surprising herself with the bad accent and a certain viciousness of tone.

“Stella. I wish you’d keep this picture for me.”

“Me keep it?”

“I’m afraid I’ll show it to Catherine. I keep wanting to. I’m afraid I will.”

Catherine has disengaged herself, and has spotted them at the window. She waves, and Stella waves back.

“I’m sure you have others,” says Stella. “Pictures.”

“Not with me. It’s not that I want to hurt her.”

“Then don’t.”

“She makes me want to hurt her. She hangs on me with her weepy looks. She takes pills. Mood elevators. She drinks. Sometimes I think the best thing to do would be to give her the big chop. Coup de grâce. Coup de grâce, Catherine. Here you are. Big chop. But I worry about what she’ll do.”