Trial of Passion (9 page)

Testing a theory that plants respond to fine music, I have set speakers out on the back deck so that my peas and carrots may enjoy Bach
and Vivaldi while I hack away at the uncultured thistles with my hoe. The flowers of late May are making a vigorous show: daisies, foxgloves, lupines, purple roadside sweet peas. The song sparrows are in full-throated ease. The days are growing longer; summer waits anxiously in the wings for her grand entrance.

In response to a notice in the
Island Echo
(“14-foot runabout with engine and canopy that runs like new for sale at marina, just ask Emily”), I stop by the marina office. Emily is fetched from The Brig, where she has been tending bar, a woman of middle years who wears tight jeans that make a swishing sound between her bounteous thighs as she walks towards me with extended hand.

“Hi, I'm the manager here. Emily Lemay.”

Ah, this is the seductress I have been warned against. I will strive to keep my honour intact.

She leads me to the boat, which is tied to one of the slips. It is homely, but looks serviceable and safe. During a demonstration of the thirty-horse engine, the arms of Emily Lemay entwine with mine, and I am overcome with the smell of ripe peaches with which, apparently, she has perfumed her ample bosom.

“I'll sell it to you cheap,” she says. “One of the local characters gave it to me to pay off his bar bill. George Rimbold? Met him?”

“I have read of his exploits.”

We negotiate a price, and she offers a drink to seal the bargain.

“Thank you, but I don't. Any more.”

“Well, then, a coffee.”

“Tea, if you don't mind.”

We repair to The Brig, which is empty in the afternoon of all but a loud table of four who are debating politics, hotly castigating the government for reducing welfare benefits. These I am told are the local drunks. Is one of these lads the notorious George Rimbold?

I survey with trepidation the many alluring labels of bottles arrayed on the counters behind Mrs. Lemay. I wonder if there is not, on this sinful island, a chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Mrs. Lemay is a woman without secrets, and she babbles merrily on about various marriages she has suffered — brutish, callused men, none of them the gentleman she perceives me to be. I am rather flattered by her attentions, for she is attractive, open and gregarious, a full-fleshed woman of the type celebrated by the Dutch masters.

She extracts from me the confession that though I am married I am currently living alone, and as I rise to leave she offers to come visiting one day. I am too polite to demur to this, though I suspect her intentions are dishonourable. But why should I, the impotent cuckold, worry? No stirring of the slumbering weakling below answers her call.

In the men's room, I unleash my fearsome weapon (spineless soldier, when last did you go forth to battle?) and piss into the urinal, a stream the colour of cowardice. Am I different from other men? I always marvel at the locker-room tales of multiple conquests that I have heard, of concupiscent appetites, of night-long rigours between the sheets. Oh, there was a time when I could rut with adequate if not extravagant vigour. Enough to perform my duty to the species. But soon after my wedding, a series of humiliations proved I was unequal to the task of responding to Annabelle's womanly wants, and I went as dead as the poets of antiquity.

And yet — as I keep proclaiming (can anyone hear me?) — I hold this unyielding affection for Annabelle. Call me ill, call me twisted. I love her.

I was thirty-three and she was twenty-four. She was newly graduated from a prestigious school of fine arts, with a budding career as a set designer, but when we met, her role was as a Crown witness in the courtroom. A fraud case, something to do with an arts grant: the dreary details are forgotten.

I cross-examined her for two hours. She stayed on in the courtroom and, as she said, “watched me” for the rest of the day. Afterwards she complimented me on my victory. I stammered out an invitation to buy her a drink.

Three months later we married. We quickly parented a child of whom neither of us saw enough. Little Deborah was entrusted to a nanny while Annabelle furthered her career — set design, art direction, the stage, then opera — and while I busied myself gaining fame and fortune, and a reputation as a wonderful fellow to have a drink with.

But I presume she became progressively bored with windy Arthur Beauchamp, with all his bloated, orotund posturings. I was about as romantic as the sacking of Rome. I didn't know until later on she'd had a series of suitors. As sharply tuned as I may have been in the courtroom, I was a blind witness to the transgressions of the woman with whom I had sworn to share my life. But upon one wine-soaked evening, overcome by an unguarded desire to repent, Annabelle reeled off her list of lovers and I died as many deaths.

I am sorry, Gowan, if I have seemed so self-pitying. As I have admitted, I am slightly under the influence. Okay, let us make haste to the dance. It was well under way when I arrived. Kimberley spotted me immediately, pounced like a cougar, grabbed my hand and yanked me onto the dance floor, where we staggered around for a while in imitation of Astaire and Rogers. Afterwards — I will admit this, however incriminating it might be — I offered to buy her a drink. A rye and ginger, that is what she asked for. I should have realized right then she was not a well person.

I had a double whisky. I was packing it away, frankly, getting sloshed. It had been a tough week of marking mid-term papers. Was that it? I don't know what my excuse was. Maybe it was the strange electricity in the air. Maybe I should worry about my drinking. . . .

God, what's my father going to think? Or would the
old roué even give a sodding damn?

So I escaped from her, circulated, joked it up with the jocks, talked football — the Grey Cup was on Sunday — but every time I turned around she was in my face. Making merry conversation, all bright green eyes and bright red lips (a product called Shameless!) in a huggy little basic-black mid-thigh mini. I actually had a good time with her. She keeps coming at you from places you don't expect. She's a stitch. She has incredible timing.

Gowan, she is going to be brutal to cross-examine. She has an élan. Blunt. Chatty. Makes lots of eyeball contact. She'll play to the jury; she'll have all the men smitten. I don't think we ought to have too many males on this jury, Gowan. I fear we are the more stupid sex. There's a tendency among members of our endangered gender to think more erratically than erotically when dealing with matters carnal. Don't you think women are more likely to see through her?

I began thinking: O'Donnell, old sport, is she offering her body for a passing grade? Be on the alert. But all the time she has this gold chain around her neck with a cross on it, and a ring on her finger as big as a stop sign. Where was her fiancé, I asked. She said, “We're enjoying a little time apart together.” Apart together. We both realized how odd that sounded. We laughed. You know how people sometimes connect? I
liked
her.

Gowan, I'm not going to lie. I had
thoughts
. Any normal human male would have thoughts. But that's all. It's not as if I've been forced to make out with Man Friday on a desert island for all my years of manhood. I date. I've had girlfriends. We commit consenting acts.

I didn't pursue her.
I
am the victim.

In current time, as I write this, it's almost 11:30 p.m. In
half an hour I'll put on my funny hat and blow one of those paper whistles that curls out like a snake and bops someone on the nose.

Happy New Year, Gowan. I look forward with joy to the unfolding events of the coming year. I'll finally emerge from jail talking like a greeting card. Best wishes to my favourite parolee on his seventieth birthday. You'll have to forgive some of my typing errors. My fingers keep slipping between the keys.

We had the last dance together, a slow one, but I managed to keep her at arm's length. She carried on in this deep, melting voice of hers about how she enjoyed my classes. Thought I was a wonderful teacher. Such understated wit. So cute with my little half-moon spectacles perched on my nose. I think I said something flattering, too, which no doubt will be used against me.

“Thank you for the dance, Kimberley.” “Oh, no, Jonathan, thank
you.”
She doesn't like to be called Kim, by the way. Kimberley.

For a reason I cannot fathom, I accepted her invitation to an after-party. No, that's not fair. There was a reason. I was having a good old-fashioned time. It was Friday night, I had a weekend to recover.

So a throng of us went in my car. I was still sober enough to ask someone else to drive. Charles Stubb, a young Liberal with an obscene ambition — he wants to be prime minister. We were crammed four in the back seat, and I was thigh on thigh beside the Dragon Lady. I remember us both being sweaty from dancing. She began reciting lines from
Saint Joan. Yes,
Gowan, Kimberley is the shepherd maid of the battle of Orleans, the heretic saint. But it is I who shall be tied to the stake

Do you know, despite everything, despite the supposed
trauma of being bound and raped, she gave four performances of that play? In the middle ofJanuary at the Frederick Wood Theatre. Shaw would have been proud, he loved his plucky heroines. Gowan, if
you'd
been tied up, and had your loins girded with Shameless lipstick, and been buggered and raped, could
you
sit around and memorize all those exhortations about going into battle with God on your side?

We went to some great shambling house in the West End where several students were jointly renting the ground floor. I think I was mostly talking to Charles, explaining how his beloved Liberal party was a collection of fuzzy ideologues in politically correct multiculturalist drag. Kimberley kept hovering. She had at least one refill. They didn't have ginger ale, so she mixed her rye with Sprite one time, and if I'm not mistaken with lemonade a second time. We're up against some dark forces here, Gowan. Satan rules.

After a while I said, okay, someone drive me to my house. There was a debate about the mechanics of this, and I agreed to pay for a taxi home to whomever volunteered. Several of them offered, and ultimately five of us left in my car, Charles Stubb driving again, and a young girl Charles was with — I forget her name, Asian Canadian, first-year arts — and a notorious sluff-off by the name of Egan Chornicky — I don't know how these people find their way into law school. He was blowing about a .30. And of course Kimberley Martin came along. The next scene plays out at my house

Have I wronged Arthur Beauchamp in some way? We used to chum socially. He's had dinner at my place, the very scene of the crime. He and his wife, Annabelle. Gowan, I beg, arrange for me to see him. Please.

Annabelle gives me no warning, and I am flustered beyond words when, having driven over on the early Monday ferry, she materializes in front of my woodshed, incredibly beautiful, radiant and cheerful, carrying on as if it were only yesterday we parted. She wears a colourful
décolleté
sundress while I, of course, am adorned in the authentic garb of a rube, tractor cap, work boots, unshaven, unshorn, sweaty. I have been splitting wood.

Undeterred by what she sees and smells, she kisses me full on the lips, and I let go the axe and it falls on my foot. (The blunt part, but it pains nonetheless. A pain that can be endured.)

“Bristly. Are you growing a beard, darling?”

“What? Oh, no, I hadn't thought so.”

“I think you'd look lovely in one.”

“I'm quite discombobulated.”

“What an awful word.”

“I'll clean up. I was . . . I'll show you the garden and . . . I have a boat now. My goodness, it's delightful to see you.”

I lead her past my vegetable patch towards my leaning tower of Pisa. As the construction of my new veranda advances, the house seems to heave ever more to one side. Fortunately the girls from Mop'n'Chop were recently here and cleaned up the construction mess.

Annabelle sails inside and looks about with what seems an expression of approval — Janey and Ginger swabbed the inside as well.

I shower. I change. I make lunch. I am grateful Annabelle is in a talkative mood, for I can find nothing worthwhile to say. She is in excellent spirits, teasing me gently about my hitherto-unappreciated survival skills with axe and hoe, and kitchen stove.

It is a perfect June day under an effulgent sun, the island wearing a fresh green dress with floral decorations, so after lunch I take Annabelle touring in the Rolls-Royce, visiting many of the charming bays and overlooks.

My island does not receive the cynical review I had expected.

“It seems all so calm and clean, and pretty,” she says. “Such a sleepy little island. I get so weary of Vancouver. Everything is so unnecessarily hectic. Arthur, you know, maybe I could come out here for a few weeks this summer. Maybe after
Götterdämmerung
gets under way.”

“I'd love that. Come and enjoy the sunset of the gods here on Garibaldi. A spectacular performance every evening.”

Do I mean this as devoutly as it sounds? Do I still desire the pain? There are narcotics fiercer than alcohol, more tenacious.

I suggest a cruise over the waters next, but Annabelle is either leery of my seamanship or, as she says, prefers to exercise her legs, so our next journey leads us up an old fire road and through the forest. Annabelle, fitter than I — she has played tennis through the winter — is waiting at the bluffs at the top as I struggle around the last bend. Panting, wheezing, I light a cigarette.

The rocks on which we stand are thick and soft with moss. Chickadees scamper among the fir and arbutus. From somewhere the perfect silence is broken by the elegiac, distant bleat of sheep. Garibaldi lies beneath us, seemingly lifeless, torpid. There is the general store and there the school and there my house, and my demesne. Sailboats struggle on the wind-calmed ocean. But above, a more skilled sailor floats on outstretched wings, a bald eagle canvassing its vast, wide world.