When Is a Man (34 page)

They'd booked a cabin at a resort with hot springs set among the trees. He and Gina soaked in the hottest of the two pools, immersed to their necks and wreathed in steam. It was early afternoon on a Monday, and the pools were nearly deserted. Snow fell briefly and froze in their damp hair, then turned to a light rain. Gina drifted away, eyes closed, limp body nudged by jets.

Overheated, Paul lifted himself onto the concrete edge and dangled his legs in the water. Rain fell on his head and back, steam billowing off his flushed skin. Weeks of skiing had brought changes—his frame smaller, slimmer, his limbs more fit and toned—refining and completing, in a way, the transformation that the cancer and surgery had begun. He closed his eyes and sucked in a deep breath of cool air. A raven called from a tree overhead. Wing beats, water sluicing off someone rising from the pool. An age passed. Gina returned, silently, and touched his leg with her hand.

When they returned to their simple one-room cabin, Paul showered to wash off the spring's sulphur smell. When he got out, Gina had pulled the curtains shut and waited for him on the bed, naked and reclining on pillows she'd stacked against the headboard. “Take off your towel,” she said. “Sit across from me.” He did as he was told.

“I think you put too much pressure on yourself. Maybe I do too,” she said. No, he began to say, but she stopped him. “Not on purpose, but you're quick to give up, take yourself out of the equation. Then you put all the attention on me, to compensate.”

He shifted cautiously. “I'm not sure what you're suggesting here.”

“To relax.” From under the covers, she brought out a curved, silicon phallus, pastel red with strange, floral ridges and folds. Her smile was both mischievous and embarrassed. She pressed the bottom of the toy, and it hummed to life. “Is this too weird?” she asked.

“Did you just buy that?” he asked, stunned.

“An old friend. Is it too weird?” she asked again. “Or threatening?”

He tried for a joke. “Not as threatening as Billy.”

Sadness flickered briefly across her face. “Don't ever feel threatened by him.”

“All right.”

“I thought, even if things have to be different—they can also be normal.”

“This isn't normal,” he reminded her.

She shrugged and parted her legs. “We can take all day. Maybe you could just watch me. Or do whatever you want.”

She closed her eyes, put her hand between her legs, and began, but he couldn't follow suit. She was too obviously performing. Her eyes would flicker open and closed as if she were checking on him. He remembered how comfortable he and Christine had been in front of each other—or not comfortable, just possessed of an arrogance that was necessary and self-preserving, because they did not really love, did not connect.

She stopped and opened her eyes. “Promise me you won't think about time.”

“I'll try.”

“Did you want me to turn over? So I can't see you?”

Paul thought a moment, nodded. She flipped onto her knees, arching her back and burying her face into the blankets, and began again. She went quiet, except the working of her wrist, said nothing, did not signal. He took a deep, shaking breath. He felt, for too long, disembodied, distanced from everything except the tightness in his chest, as though he were watching the absurd, arousing scene from the far corner of the room. As time went by and she made sounds to herself into the pillow, he began to feel, mercifully, like she'd forgotten about him. She would keep going if he left the room. He sank into his being a ghost, hovering silently behind her. Waiting for something to break through, to fill cell after cell.

After, they both lay on their stomachs. She ran her hand over her lower back in search of his ejaculate, the mess couples made intimate jokes about. “Oh. But I thought I heard you . . .”

“I did. I know.” He stroked the back of her neck, the first time he'd let himself touch her. “Extreme case of shooting blanks.”

“It must feel so bizarre.”

“Very.” Bizarre enough to be disheartening if he let it. What was that all about, anyway, a man's emotional attachment to semen—his most cherished icon of physical release, that crude, ecstatic signifier of being purged, emptied? Was it an act of marking someone and laying claim to them, a symbolic transfer of one's essence to another? “Lacking the stuff of life,” he said.

“Trust me, that life soon becomes someone else's. Shane is very much his own little man,” she said. “How do you feel?” Something in her tone said she wouldn't brook self-pity—and fair enough. After all, she'd risked as much here as he had, they were both equally exposed and vulnerable.

“Chafed, thanks,” he said. At least there hadn't been pain this time. “It's a step closer, I guess.”

“Closer to what?”

“Real sex.”

“That was real sex,” she said. “I had fun.”

“Maybe next time we'll try—anyway, you were right, you know. It's all in my mind. Or mostly.” He looked at the clock. “Took some effort.” She'd granted him time enough for his body to slowly work its response. It felt like an act of forgiveness.

They lay in silence for a while. “It was your mother who gave that food to Cyril Wentz, wasn't it?” he asked. “And then he delivered it to Hardy.”

“Yes.” Her brow furrowed. “I should have figured that out the night we argued, but I was too angry.” She went to rinse the toy in the bathroom sink.

“I wonder how long they've done that for him.” He sat at the edge of the bed, stretching his legs.

“Years, I'll bet.”

“I didn't think they were all friends.”

She returned, placed the toy on the bedside table, and stood in front of him. “They're not. Mom doesn't like either Cyril or Hardy. Who does? But they're all bound together like unhappy, distant relatives.”

He lay his cheek against her bare flank. “Let's have another soak before dinner.”

“We're becoming amphibious,” she said happily. “A real pair of newts.”

The reopening of the mill made the front page of the local paper, and though the article warned that operations might not last through the summer, that the hours and the number of positions had been reduced, Shellycoat hummed with a quiet relief as loggers and mill workers returned to work. From the porch, Paul could see a steady column of smoke from the burners. Trucks and crew cabs filled the parking spaces outside the coffee shops in the early morning and then disappeared until evening.

Tanner had phoned earlier to pass along some news: the environmental assessment for the Spry Creek Hydroelectric Project had been given the go-ahead, which meant the run-of-river dam was one step closer to becoming reality. Once the public learned of the assessment, the protests would begin. Tanner had offered to be the spokesman for the local Streamkeepers Association. “Not going to tie myself to a fucking tree or anything,” he told Paul. “But we'll have some input.”

The five members of the house—Jory and Sonya, Paul, Gina, and Shane—shared a late breakfast of pancakes, waffles, and bacon on the back porch to celebrate Paul's new research grant. He had funding now to live, very cheaply, for several months. They toasted his grant with mimosas—Sonya, unexpectedly, had been the one who bought the champagne.

She'd shed the last vestiges of punk, was plain and unadorned and somehow lovelier. Paul told her he'd have some new interviews for her to transcribe soon, but she didn't hear. Gina was telling her about the new business, the long slog through paperwork and grant applications, collaborating with two other women to buy a van with a deep fryer and grill, a smaller version of what Gina used at tree-planting camps, something they could take to summer festivals and farmers' markets.

“Sounds fun,” Sonya said pensively. She was helping Shane cut his waffle into tattered, sticky pieces and seemed about to say something more when Jory jumped down from the railing where he'd been perched, ignoring everyone.

“Yo, check these out.” He passed around his phone, where he'd stored photos of his latest backcountry expedition. His nose and cheeks were sunburned and raw, giving him a wild-eyed raccoon look. He was a train wreck these days, irresponsible and inconsiderate, but still sweet-natured beneath it all. He'd scrounged up a pair of skis for Paul from the cluttered backroom of his store—“you know, if you stick around for next winter”—and a kid-sized snowboard for Shane. But he no longer draped himself over Sonya, and never shared in her conversations except to argue.

As for Paul, any fantasies involving Sonya were derailed by the prospect of humiliation. Try as he might, he couldn't imagine patience or mercy from someone her age. No, his tenuous recovery, his fragile happiness, was wrapped up in Gina. Sonya, as an object of desire, was too much of a stretch, overmatched by his complicated reality. Poor Jory. They were both losing her.

The results of his blood sample had come back clean, his
PSA
levels decently low—a reason for his own secret celebration. Only now did he realize how tightly he'd held on to his apprehension all winter. Don't dwell on each individual test, the doctor advised, pay attention to how the antigen levels trend over time. So, a six-month respite until his next
PSA
test, when his anxiety would grow again, in the same creeping manner as cancer cells. Time, for him, was a snow cave, carefully cleared to house an unknown amount of future, in constant danger of collapse.

7

“I'm told the road's clear of snow past Dalton Creek,” Lazeroff said. It was the first weekend of May, and the hills above Shellycoat were still in the last throes of winter.

“We'll need to bring Jory along,” Paul said. “He knows that part of the river; I'm hoping he can show us some trails if we're going to explore around the Flumes.”

“Sure. Wear good boots.”

They stopped to gas the truck outside of town. Jory slouched quietly in the back. The fight upstairs last night had been especially loud and nasty, and his young friend had spent the morning brooding in Paul's apartment. He hadn't been all that keen to come along, and wasn't curious about why they were driving to Dalton Creek. Paul and Lazeroff both spied on him in the rear-view mirror. He had his headphones on, eyes squeezed shut, lips moving silently, and he softly tapped the side of his head against the window. Not in rhythm to the scratchy, frantic music, which Paul could faintly hear, but in quick bursts of three, as though he were imagining or practising doing the same thing much harder. Teeing up for the big hit. Lazeroff, who'd raised melodramatic teenagers, gave Paul an irritated, grimly amused look.

In the silence, Paul thought about last night. He and Gina had finally, successfully, made love—sort of. There were awkward pauses and positions, and they had to go slowly and start again several times. Stuffable, indeed. Before his cancer, last night would have been completely devastating. You could get used to anything, it seemed.

Near Bishop, a solitary man was burning a small pile of dead brush on his lawn, and in another yard a dirtbike and
ATV
were freshly spattered with dark mud. As they left the reservoir behind and the river appeared, Jory suddenly perked up. “Freshet's on. Look at that. It'll top the banks.”

The Immitoin had already flooded in some places, leaving puddles that spanned the width of the road. The current ran grey and brown with sediment and heaped logs and debris against boulders. The turnoff to the Spry Creek logging road was marked with ribbons, and a large signboard—
Ruin of the River
—was a soggy mess.

“Classic stretch,” Jory said. “Launch from the mouth of Spry Creek and ride it out until Bishop. Beautiful.”

“Not right now,” Lazeroff said. “That'd be crazy.”

“Insane,” Jory said cheerfully.

Dark smoke rose thickly from the chimney of Hardy's cabin, the driveway a soup of mud and broken spruce and fir branches. “Talked to him lately?” Lazeroff asked. “No letters in the paper this spring. Strange for him.”