by Robert Clark
When he knows he is going to come and begins to withdraw himself, Emily holds him fast, pulls him back in, says, “It’s okay. It’s all right”; and then he goes on a little longer and floods into her, and as he does she imagines the force of him, having watched him ejaculate so many times, the long strand of semen flinging itself out of him like a whip, like a line cast out and over the lake.
They have always been very careful—excepting two or three times (the first time in the park, another in William’s mother’s apartment, the last by the balcony in Emily’s attic). But Emily knows the night is long, and for the first time, on the following morning, she will wake up a little cold, not merely brushed by a cool wind, but chilled, as though an icy fog has crept down her throat while she slept. Winter is coming, and she needs a reason to stay.
The next day William is especially happy, happy with the house he has built, with the day that is brilliant and cool, with the night before, when Emily drew him in. Regarding this last matter, he imagines that Emily’s period is due, that she knows what she is doing. The fishing takes a little longer—perhaps the fish have gone to ground, so to speak, swimming deeper, down at the bottom of the lake, where maybe it is still summer—and even with Emily’s assiduous bailing, there is enough water in the bottom of the canoe, chilling their feet, for both of them to understand that the lake is cooling.
When that was done and they had cooked and eaten their lunch, they made love, and again Emily held William inside her when his time came. As William pushed on and loosed himself, Emily saw that this furious labor, the pleas and cries that accompanied it, the exhaustion into which it crumbled when it was done, was all truly for her, on her account. William remained inside her afterward, and when the imperceptible contracting of what had been his erection threatened to separate them, they jostled and pushed together so that they remained joined.
They lay quietly for a time and then they began to talk and at one point William said, “You know the book I brought? That I’ve been reading? It’s about enlightenment, about being connected with everything.”
“Yes.”
“And how hard people struggle for that. But the whole point is, it’s not really about struggling. It’s about just being with what already is.”
“Yes.”
“So maybe that’s what this is. Right now.”
“You mean it’s enlightenment?” Emily did not have the same notion of enlightenment that William did, of infinite calm. Insofar as she had pictured such a state, it was more along the lines of Teresa of Avila struck by the arrow of divine love.
“Yeah,” William said. “I mean, everything is perfect. It’s itself. And you and me—we’re . . . one. One with everything.”
They had in the course of this turned a little on their sides, and now Emily rested her head in the little hollow just below William’s shoulder. She said, “Tell me more.”
“So,” he started, and with their limbs tangled up and his hands caught in the wedge where his sex and hers met and perhaps his legs starting to fall asleep, he really could not tell where one of them left off and the other began. “So, it’s like we’re in union with everything. And the union of everything is God, right?”
“I guess.”
“So, in a way, we’re God—doing this, being this way.” William clasped Emily very, very close. “This is it. This is God.”
Emily felt the joy and the triumph in William, and she loved it as she loved him. She did not disagree with it: She just couldn’t see it. She said, “I think God is supposed to be love. And this is love. So . . .”
“This is God, right?”
“Or maybe is like this.”
Just by speaking of it, it was getting away from them. And Emily felt William’s semen on her leg and as they rolled away from each other, she might have seen, through one of the innumerable chinks in the back wall of the lean-to, the plane of cloud and wind from the north, infinite and gray as ashes, sliding down over the lake.
4
IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN THE CHILL THAT PENETRATED their hearts in the night, the miasmas that formed from their own breath, condensing on the ceiling of the lean-to, dripping down upon them in the early morning hours, but by then, in any case, all winter’s creatures had begun their work.
Emily and William talked of weighty matters a great deal—rather abstract things by grown-up lights, but almost fleshily concrete in the mind of a young person, for whom conviction is the very bread of life—and how was Emily to know which topics were best left alone? So it was that they were talking one day of how things might be going “down south,” with the election campaign fully underway, with the inner cities perhaps in flames in the wake of the latest horror, another assassination, a fresh campaign of police repression, the all-but-formal imposition of martial law by National Guard troops.
“Do you ever think,” Emily asked, “that maybe this is running away, hiding from everything that’s terrible?”
“You mean that I ought to be there? Like fighting against it?”
“Maybe. Or trying to do something to change it.”
“I thought you knew,” William said, “that it was too late for that.”
“Maybe,” Emily said. “I just don’t think people ought to give up so easily.”
“This isn’t giving up,” said William, and thought how he might retrieve the amity between them. “And I thought you thought it was good here?”
“I do. I do,” Emily said, and felt how unconvinced this sounded even as she said it. And then, because they did care about what it was they were trying to persuade one another of but had no means to advance it any further, they fell silent. They were silent as William fished, and even though silence was supposed to be conducive to successful fishing, fewer fish than usual came. Emily bailed and the cold water in the bottom of the canoe felt weightier, seemed thicker than it had a week before. She tried to read her poems, but the lines would not hold together: The words bounced around like Ping-Pong balls, spastically, like popcorn popping.
The night was worse. They did not make love, although they held each other. It seemed there was not a sound in the lean-to, not even that of breathing; only a faint ticking that Emily was sure she could hear, the sound of William aching or seething.
Finally she pressed up against him and said, “I love you. I love you more than anything.” This was yielding everything she had to yield, if not, she felt, conceding everything she believed that William did not believe. For were she to do that, who would have been left to love him?
William turned over and said, “I love you too. I just want us to be together. Forever.” He put his arms around her and pulled her close, as though he was cradling her, reassuring her.
But it was Emily who replied, “Of course you do. And so do I.” Then they began to make love, very slowly, cautiously, their flesh seeming to each other a little tender and sore. Even as William thrust toward his climax and, signaled by the way she gripped his neck with one hand and his buttock with the other, Emily rose to hers, they did not move very fast; no faster really than their usual canoe stroke or Emily’s bailing, scooping and pouring, the last of the bilgewater dripping heavily onto the blue-black oil of the gelling lake.
In the morning, all was well again; as it was before, save that it was colder today than the previous day, even as yesterday had been colder than the day before it. Because the fish had been a little recalcitrant in their usual places, William thought that they should try paddling southwest, down the shore in the direction of Nelson’s store. They certainly would not travel that far, but at the point (perhaps a mile out from the island) where they were about to turn around, they noticed the house on the shore, the same summer cottage they first noticed five and a half weeks before when they first paddled in, the only habitation between them and Nelson’s store.
It was clearly closed for the season, just as it had been before. There was no smoke from the chimney and, looking closer, it was apparent that the shutters had been fastened. Wil
liam looked back to Emily in the stern of the canoe and said, “Let’s go look.” And Emily nodded her assent.
They landed the canoe on the stony beach. There was a wooden stairway ascending the bluff on which the cottage was situated, and at the base of it, several sections of dock, removed from the lake and stacked for the winter. William and Emily pulled the bow up onto the shore—even with nothing in it except the three small fish William had caught it seemed heavy—and then they climbed the stairs.
At the top, the house sat in a grove of big jack pines and the ground was covered in their rusty needles. There was a front door giving onto a little porch, but Emily followed William, who was tracking slowly around the side of the house. At the back was another door, a propane tank, and a road leading into the woods bordered by electrical and telephone poles. There was a little shed that housed the well pump, and another in which firewood had been stacked.
William was surprised to find a real house—not a shack or a trapper’s cabin—so deep in the woods, and more surprised when he tried the door to discover it was unlocked.
“I wonder if it’s a good idea to go in,” Emily said.
“If they were so concerned to keep people out, they’d keep it locked,” William said. “Besides, I read how it’s the custom in the far north to leave these places open. In case somebody needs to hole up during a blizzard. A trapper or somebody.”
“I don’t know.”
“We’re not going to hurt anything. Or even touch anything, okay?” And William pushed the door open and Emily followed.
There was nothing remarkable about the interior of the cottage, although it was a little difficult to see by the single long rhombus of light the open back door let in. William tried a switch and to his surprise found that the lights went on; that they were standing in a kitchen, paneled in pine, giving onto a larger room, similarly paneled with a big hooked rug on the floor, a fireplace, and three doors that probably led to bedrooms. There was a stack of lawn furniture by the front door, and, next to those, a croquet set, paddles and oars, fishing gear, and inflatable rafts and water toys.
Emily sees all this, but she sees more, or perhaps at a slightly different level of magnification than William. She sees—or, really, senses—that this is not the house of an Arnie Nelson or Fred Peterson or some other local person, but belongs to a family, and it is a family more or less like hers. She can tell this from the same gear that William has seen, but also from the potholders (made from stretchy loops on a frame at summer camp) in the kitchen, the olive-green napkins and place mats piled on the counter, the unused components from Chinese dinner meal-kits in the cupboards, and the epigram burned onto a tranche of diagonally cut birch log, coated in shellac, and hung on the wall.
Entering one of the bedrooms, Emily can also tell that this is the room of a girl just like her. She can tell by the smell of Noxzema mixed with some other scent—of damp or unwashed hair?—the smell of a girl her age. She sits on the bed for a moment, fingers one of the knobs of chenille on the bedspread, knows that if she opens the nightstand drawer inside there will be one pinecone, a couple of Betty and Veronica comics, and paperbacks of The Great Gatsby and The Spoon River Anthology from last summer’s school reading list. She gets up and looks in the other bedrooms: One tiny one is clearly that of the boys (she thinks there are two) and the other belongs to the parents, which bears the scents of grown-up sophistication; of hairspray, medicine, and mothballs.
All this is making Emily unaccountably sad. She misses these people, these people whom she does not even know, but who are just like her; who, for all she knows, sit two pews back from her every Sunday at mass; who travel in the same model of station wagon as her family does; who play Scrabble and Clue and do crossword puzzles (but only here, only together, during the summer); whose mother is pious and good; whose father is a hero, who regards his daughter with naked adoration.
The house affected William too. It disturbed him. In fact, it diminished him when he thought of everything he had done to bring himself and Emily into the wilderness and to make a home in it—to make it a real and authentic experience—and here sat, not a mile away, this exhibition of bourgeois living with its septic tank, its charcoal grill and Scotch cooler, and its three-horsepower Johnson outboard.
“We’d better go,” he said, and Emily nodded. They switched out the light, slipped out the back door again, and returned to their canoe, to their three fish, and paddled wearily back to their island.
5
THEY ATE THE FISH IN THE LATE AFTERNOON, AND that passed for both lunch and dinner. Later, in the early evening, they each read a little and then Emily read aloud.
William liked it when Emily read to him, and he did not much care what she read. They were, of course, pretty limited with scarcely six books between them. William’s Alan Watts did not lend itself very well to this, so mostly Emily read her poetry, Hart Crane and Gerard Manley Hopkins.
William liked the Crane better. It was sonorous and striving, moving through and beyond great things and spaces, while the other seemed to stand in one place, throbbing and flashing, singing like a bird. Not that he necessarily understood one better than the other: Understanding was not the point. It was more like listening to music.
That night Emily was reading Hopkins. “He didn’t really write this one,” she said. “It’s a translation. From an old Latin thing, a hymn or a prayer really.” And the part that stuck in William’s mind was when she read, “ ‘But just the way that thou didst me/I do love and I will love thee.’ ” That was the part she wanted him to hear, the part that might have been about them.
When she finished, she said, “I suppose at school they’d make us translate it back into Latin.”
“So that’s another good reason to be here instead of there.”
“I suppose,” she said. She did not know what to say next, because she sensed it could cause trouble, that it could take them back where they had been yesterday. Because the truth was, she found herself missing school a little. She found herself missing a lot of things. But missing them seemed to go against her loving William; against the very thing she had meant for him to understand from the lines she had just read. It had never occurred to her that there might be something she dare not say to him; still less that there might be something she might want that he would not want.
“Should I read some more?” she asked.
“Oh, it’s awfully dark,” William said. “I suppose it’s awfully late.” The one watch they possessed, Emily’s, had been allowed to wind down, and of course now there was nothing to reset it against, except approximately: the rough time they supposed the sun rose this time of year.
“It’s getting cold.” After she said it, Emily realized that this, too, was another thing it might not be wise to say.
William understood what she had intended not to mean. “It is. But we have good blankets. And the tent. And we could always go to that cabin, if we needed to.”
“Oh, I wasn’t even really thinking that,” Emily said, and understood that her love might ask her not merely to not say certain things but to tell lies.
William loved Emily as much as Emily loved him. He sensed her worry. “We’ll see. Maybe we’ll go someplace else for the winter. Maybe to California. Wouldn’t that be cool? Wouldn’t you like that?”
“Oh, yeah. I would,” Emily said. She felt terribly sad. She would have liked to crawl over to William and have him hold her while she cried a little. But how could she have explained? There was no place for her to go, not California, not even right here, to William’s body.
6
THE SILENCE DESCENDED AROUND THEM AND EACH day it grew deeper. By the second week of October, everything was perfectly still. It seemed that the loons had ceased their yelping, that the last string of geese, moaning and nattering as they flew overhead, had passed many days ago. Then, in the night, the howling began, icy, stony silence racked by cries.
William and Emily both knew it must be wolves. Neither
had heard a wolf before, but there was no mistaking the sound. It was a howl blending hunger, sorrow, desolation, and ardor, not plaintively, but ravenously. It was terrifying. William told Emily, “We’re on the island. They’re on the other side of the water,” but wondered, in his own heart, what would happen when the lake iced over, as it must in a month or so.
William and Emily were hemmed in by their own sentimentality about wolves, which was a little different from the sentimentality about wolves that prevails today. For Emily and for William the crucial thing about wolves is that they are carnivores of a special kind: that they do not merely eat humans—and human children in particular—but eat them up, this last intensifying adverb serving to underline the wolf’s relish in this act, his lusty capering as he tears his dinner limb from limb, greedily masticates it, and, yes, wolfs it down.
Both William and Emily took in this notion of the wolf almost with their mother’s milk, in fairy tales and songs; and in recordings of Peter and the Wolf, chiefly that narrated by Arthur Godfrey, whose own rather folksy but unmistakably lupine voice—normally employed in pitching Chesterfields and Oxydol—carried a special frisson. So the howling, which was both attenuated and reechoed as it passed over the water to their ears, was not merely disconcerting, but, as it went on for hours each night, buttressed before and after by devastated silence, unbearable. It ripped through the black night sky and sawed through their teeth and bones, cleaved them skull to toenail, flayed them alive; left them wishing to be dead rather than have it go on.
On the morning after the third night, William conceded that they had to go. They would not leave Lac La Cache, not yet, as Emily hoped, but William agreed that they could take refuge in the summer cottage they had explored the previous week. Maybe then, after a while, they could go to California, although William would rather winter here.