Love Among the Ruins

by Robert Clark

  Emily did not like this compromise: She would have liked to get clean away, and did not like the idea of trespassing, even if there was no one to catch them, even if, as William insisted, they would treat the cottage as their own and leave it clean and tidy. This was the best William could do. He was afraid of losing Emily, but he was also afraid of losing what they had made here together; losing what they had become; losing what the north and the woods and the lake had made of them.

  They broke camp. The lean-to had to be partially demolished to remove the tarps on its floor and roof. The dozens of empty tin cans went in the fire pit together with fish bones and the other trash. It made a smoky, mean-spirited, halfhearted fire. They spent the morning at those tasks and at loading the canoe. When it was filled and they climbed in, it was very low in the water, and piloting it to the cottage was like rolling a boulder across uneven ground. They worked at their paddles without comment, having become inured to the canoe’s sluggishness, which seemed just another part of the world’s cooling, of the onset of deep winter. In fact, on account of the canoe’s loose riveting, the front and rear flotation compartments contained as much water as they did air. In complaining of the trouble it took him to hoist the canoe’s bow when they landed a few weeks earlier, Arnie Nelson had for once not been prevaricating.

  7

  THEY DID NOT SETTLE EASILY INTO THE COTTAGE. Despite William’s assurances, Emily could not help continuing to feel that occupying it was wrong and that they might get caught. “Suppose that guy that looks after these places in the winter comes around?” she said as they began to haul their things up the bank.

  “Then we’d tell him it was an emergency. That we were lost or we got soaked in the lake or we ran out of matches or something.” Emily accepted this without being convinced by it. She followed him up the bank and into the house.

  Once inside, William dragged the duffel and their sleeping bag towards the parents’ room and its double bed.

  “I’m not sure we should sleep there. I mean, since we’re not supposed to be here at all, the least we could do is not use their bed. It’d be warmer out here. By the fireplace.”

  William turned around and looked at her. “You’re afraid this is like Goldilocks or something? Like ‘Who’s been sleeping in my bed?’ ”

  “I’m not afraid of anything. I just think it would be more considerate.”

  “Suit yourself,” William said, and set down the duffel and the sleeping bag next to the fireplace, with stiff, exaggerated movements.

  Then they went in the kitchen to eat. William looked through a stack of papers on the kitchen counter. “Their name is Jorgensen,” he said, “these people you’re so worried about.”

  Emily made herself a cup of boiled rice from the last of her supply. William munched from a can of chow mein noodles taken from the Jorgensen’s larder. They said nothing to each other for most of the afternoon, and that evening William laid himself down with an ostentatious sigh onto the sleeping bag on the floor. It was the first night they had ever spent together that they did not make love. They said good night woodenly, and rolled away from each other and feigned sleep.

  They could still hear the wolves, more dimly, insulated by the great forest between them and wherever the wolves were. In the morning the inside of the house was sepulchral because of the shutters. William, trying to be agreeable, volunteered to open some of them, then insisted upon it and just went ahead and did it. Now Emily had to wonder if anyone would notice the shutters (not to mention the smoke issuing from the chimney); if anyone would come and peer in at them while they slept, perhaps even the wolves, with their hungry, liverish yellow eyes.

  William tried to do and say the right thing, and so too did Emily. They uttered pleasantries to one another, but silence was easier, less treacherous. The fish weren’t biting, so they spent most of the day in the canoe, where they were accustomed to not speaking. In the house, it was not so easy. It seemed to William in their mutual speechlessness and paralysis that Emily’s every action, and still more, her inaction, was an irritation or an insult. When without much thought she switched on the table radio in the living room and a basso voice tumbled out of it from Duluth or some such place, William barked at her, “Turn that fucking thing off.”

  The following day, William tried to calculate the day and date using the calendar hanging on the kitchen wall, having lost track. His best guess was around the last week of October. Emily volunteered that she had been, in fact, making a mark for each day since they had arrived on the flyleaf of her Hopkins.

  “Counting the days until you could get out of here.” William glared at her.

  “No. Not at all,” Emily said firmly. “Maybe just counting the days we’ve been together.”

  “You should be honest enough to admit how badly you want to go. To get rid of me,” William replied, and Emily looked to see if his teeth were bared, if his eyes were hot yet empty of feeling. “That’s what this was supposed to be all about,” he added. “Being honest. Being real.”

  “You’re the one that’s not real. Not now. Not acting like this.” Emily saw the telephone on the wall—neither of them had tried it but presumably it worked—and thought of what would happen if she picked up the receiver, of the howl of pain and outrage William would make. But she stood still, saying nothing.

  “So you see. You want to leave.”

  “Maybe I do. When you’re doing this.”

  That was, Emily realized the instant she had said it, the wrong thing to say. Yet it had a pacifying effect on William, for it gave him a choice between calling Emily’s bluff—inviting her to leave—or backpedaling in the service of what he truly wanted, which was for her to stay. “I’m sorry,” he said after a long silence during which they stared at each other. “I just got really upset. Because I know you’re unhappy.”

  Emily went to him, put her arms around him. “And I know you’re unhappy.” And, going a little further than she was sure she had the heart for, she said, “And I want us both to be happy. Together.”

  They held each other in the half-lit kitchen, and they repeated these things, chiefly “I know” and “I know you know,” and took great comfort in these affirmations, these acknowledgments. It was as if they had illuminated each other, made one another visible again, put flesh on what had been mere bones.

  As they began to make love, it seemed to them almost as though they were new together; that they had never done this before. William cried out, “I love you,” and Emily echoed him. William thrust and loosed himself inside her, without a thought. Then they lay at last in the Jorgensens’ big bed, at peace, and they began to talk. Emily had a gift for asking William questions that he liked to answer, that made him feel special, and now she asked him, “When was the very first time you ever saw me?”

  “You told me I must have seen you when we were little. At a birthday party or something. But I don’t remember that.” William paused. He settled into the thing he was going to say. “I remember seeing you in St. Clair Park. The summer before this one.”

  “And what did you see? What did I look like?”

  “You were sitting with Monica. And some other kids. They were smoking, but you weren’t. I think you were wearing cutoffs. And your hair was longer or something.”

  “It was. Back then. And I liked to tie it back with this sort of fat, fluffy yarn.”

  “I remember that,” William said.

  “So what else?”

  “That you were pretty.”

  “Prettier than the others?”

  “You were the prettiest. To me.” William said this, and thought that it sounded a little stupid. He tried for something more, something truer, although the truth was he could not really recollect what he had been thinking all that time ago. “There was something about you that I wanted . . . that I wanted to see. And touch.”

  Emily thought of William looking at her all that time ago and of her not even knowing that he was looking.

  “Touch,” sh
e said. “Now.”

  The following day, Emily and William were pretty much back where they had been on previous mornings, the good mornings. The fishing was good, and Emily was less punctilious about their occupation of the house. When William took logs from the woodpile rather than gather deadfall in the woods she said nothing. She felt freer and more confident, more like herself, the girl in the park, the girl William had been looking at. At lunchtime, as they stood in the kitchen, she picked up the telephone receiver for no particular reason, save that it was there. “Hey, it works,” she said. “We should call somebody.”

  William looked at her rather gravely. “You’d better hang it up,” he said. “And who would we call, anyway?”

  “Maybe Jim. Or Monica. We could say, ‘Hey, we’re up here with White Fang. With Babe the Blue Ox.’”

  “Nobody knows. Where we are. Or even what we’re doing.”

  Emily felt the way she felt when adults said she was “impetuous”; as if there were carbonation flowing through her. “They know we went away together. I sent my mom and dad a postcard.”

  William took a step toward her and then stopped. “You sent them a postcard?” He paused again. “I mean, what did you say?”

  “Just that we were going away together and not to worry.”

  “That we were coming here?” William’s voice rose.

  “No. Of course not.”

  “How could you do that?”

  “Do what? I didn’t say anything.”

  “They might have figured out something,” William said. “That was a really stupid thing to do. A really reckless thing.”

  “I don’t see how.” Emily bit her lip and rested her hands on her hips, and then she put them out, towards William. “I mean, I had to say something. So at least they’d know I wasn’t dead or something. That’s not very much.”

  “It wasn’t being very careful.”

  “Was I supposed to act like I hated them? Like I didn’t care what they felt at all?”

  “You were supposed to care about us more,” William said, and then he looked away from her.

  “It’s not . . . all or nothing. I still love them. I mean, don’t you ever miss your mom? Or your friends?” Emily paused. “Don’t you ever just want to go home?” And then her eyes began to flood.

  “This is home. Our home, that we made for ourselves. Or we could go to California.”

  “We just . . . stole this place,” Emily said. “And I don’t want to go to California. I’d rather just go home. To my real home.”

  William was gazing at the floor, shaking his head, his arms dangling. “We’re supposed to be our own home, for each other. Or don’t you believe in that anymore?”

  Emily said, “I believe in everything. There isn’t anything I haven’t done for you. For us. I give everything to you. I want everything. When we make love, I want . . .”

  After a moment, William understood. He looked at her and said, “Well, that’s reckless too. You—we shouldn’t. . . . It’s careless.”

  “It’s the most I can do. It’s everything. Isn’t that enough?”

  “But you want to go back. You don’t want to be free anymore.”

  “I don’t know,” Emily said. “Maybe what’s free for you isn’t the same as free for me. I really don’t know.”

  Afterwards, they didn’t fight. They were merely confused and sad. In the span of a few weeks, they had traveled a course it often takes grown-up lovers years to transit. Maybe it had been the cold, or something akin to it. Like discussions about God, talk about love is conducted by analogy. We can never quite put our finger upon it, our knowledge of its location, appearance, and history being at best approximate. Clever persons—and persons have grown very much cleverer since that winter—are perhaps rightfully impatient with terms like “approximate” and “mystery” that look like camouflage for thinking that is vague and sentimental. But “God” and “Love,” we cannot but feel, have some great affinity—the truism that “God is Love” must also mean that “Love is God”—but the fact that we make fools of ourselves (rather as love is said to make fools of us) in struggling to ascertain their relation does not mean that they are themselves nonsense. Sometimes we are too clever by half.

  Say it was the cold—something like the cold—that caused this change, this cooling, in their relation. They had found enchantment in and with each other in a thoroughly disenchanted world; and they had come to the north woods to discover a place commensurate with what they had discovered in each other.

  William had told Emily about the windigo, the native daemon that freezes the heart and graces its victims with a fate that ends in cannibalism and self-annihilation. And perhaps, far from having gone the way of the story’s creators, the windigo was still at large in this country; for when William’s ancestors depopulated it of Indian persons, they could not help but populate it with ghosts, and the windigo is first of all a spirit creature.

  So perhaps their hearts were frozen, and they scarcely even knew it. Or it was what Emily understood as the hardened heart, the heart that is embittered, unfeeling, and uncharitable: that lacks mercy, which is no small component of love—which is, on many a day, all the love we shall ever want or need. It is also an unseeing heart. It turns away, averts its eyes, is blind to pity, always looking away, shamefaced. It wills itself not to love, knowing all the while it is precisely for love that it is made. Thus does it grow cold. It is perhaps only a great failure of imagination, a loss of faith.

  It was surely something like this that happened in the cottage or on the island. William and Emily had not reached the point of not being able to stand the sight of each other. But neither could much bear to look upon the other, for they knew they were each killing the other, that they were each dying before the other’s eyes, if they would dare to look.

  8

  EMILY NEVER DID REACH THE CONSCIOUS CONCLUSION that she must leave. But the morning before—the last Thursday in October—it began to snow. William brought her outside to see it fall. He raised his face to the snowflakes and began to twirl, to do a kind of dance, to let the flakes catch in his eyelashes, to catch them upon his face and tongue. He reached for her hand to bring her into his dance, to make merry with him, to celebrate the first snowflakes of the season. And she could scarcely do it. It seemed false. She felt pity for William because he wanted to do it at all, and wanted her to join him. She felt that in another day, perhaps in another hour, the pity would turn to scorn. She could feel her heart going cold, growing hard.

  But when she did go, early the next morning in the indigo light that comes just before dawn, it was the wolves that drove her on, drove her out. It had seemed to her for three nights running that they were coming closer, and perhaps they had, or perhaps her hearing had simply become more acute. She had dressed very quietly in the kitchen, where she had left all her clothes under the pretense of washing them in the sink. It was very cold outside and she put on every item she could, finishing with alternating layers of sweatshirts and sweaters, surely warm enough for both the lake and the long hike from Nelson’s to the highway. When she was done, she stood for a moment, amazed that William had not heard her, was even now sleeping contentedly in the far bedroom; was not going to stop her or even know she was gone for another couple of hours. He was, she could not prevent herself from thinking, that stupid, that great a fool.

  Emily opened the door and the air was as cold as she imagined; colder still, for it seemed that when she breathed she inhaled not air but drafts of ice crystals, of freezing fog. Then, as she rounded the side of the cottage, the howling began, unmistakably near. Her boots scraped and brushed against the cold-brittled pine needles, and she could not tell where the sound of her own footfalls left off and that of the stealthful, onrushing paws and pads of the wolves began. And with that she began to run, to run hard for the beach, for the refuge of the canoe.

  There was a glaze of ice on the shore, on the pebbles and rocks that constituted the beach, and once she over
came the canoe’s inertia, its keel slid almost effortlessly into the water. Once it was gliding forward, she leapt into the bow, scarcely moistening her feet, only to be surprised at feeling her boots penetrate a crust of ice and perhaps four inches of water in the bilge.

  Emily waded through the ice and water to the stern of the canoe, took her paddle, and brought it around on a course headed out into the lake, roughly northwest. She paddled hard, straight out towards deep water. She did not bail. She wanted to put some distance between herself and William, between herself and the wolves, and—in the unfathomable silences between the howlings—she imagined the bailing might be noisy, that William might hear the tin can scraping on the bilge, the water pouring out into the lake.

  Once she was a hundred yards out, the dawn began to gather, or perhaps her eyes had adjusted themselves to the light. In either case, she saw how high the water was in the bottom of the canoe and how low the canoe sat in the lake. She began to bail, rapidly, expertly, efficiently, for she had spent hours, perhaps days, bailing during the last two months. She bailed rather as Ulysses’ wife wove, for the bailing was always being undone, not by her hand, but by entropy, by the unwinding of time and motion and the canoe’s aching joints and seams.

  Emily saw after a few minutes of bailing—halted every twenty seconds or so to lay down a few hard paddle strokes to keep the canoe moving and on course—that the water level in the bilge did not seem to be receding and that the canoe was riding no higher. Her hands were white with cold and so were her knees, and as she kept bailing, she began to lose the feeling in her fingers, which was already gone in her feet. And this was when she began to feel alarmed, because she understood that her ability to bail was becoming impaired by the cold, that the chill in her numbed hands was spreading up her arms and into her shoulders.

  She took up the paddle again and began to try to turn the canoe a little towards shore, or at least parallel to it, but just then there was another burst of howling, magnified by the water, seeming to come from everywhere on the shore, from anyplace she might land, if she could reach it, the shore now two hundred yards distant. When she put down the paddle to resume bailing, she saw that the water was now shin-deep in the bilge, that the canoe was half swamped. She did not so much panic at this as she puzzled over it, for there was no logical explanation for the rising water, and the fact that it continued to rise confounded her, teased her to figure out, to fathom, how this could be happening. But her brain was nearly as cold as her hands and her arms, and when she decided to give up wrestling for an explanation and to begin bailing again, she saw that the can she had been using to bail had floated away into the other end of the canoe.