by Jack Hodgins
There was no harm in reporting what the husband had said to him once the woman was back in the car, however. He said she was a saint, a real saint — could you believe it? He said this little display of anger was as much a surprise to him as it was to Mr. Pernouski. He said he’d never seen anyone bring out the vicious side of her the way Mr. Pernouski had. Back home she was one of those saintly people who quietly go about looking after everybody that needed looking after in their town. She was loved, he said, by everyone.
She was also, Mr. Eckhart added — as if it were an obvious fact — the wisest woman in the world. A respected professor of fine arts in Regina.
Mr. Pernouski did not need to remind his family of how realtors looked on clients who were teachers: the bottom of the list, to be avoided wherever possible, or foisted off on some unsuspecting beginner. They were impossible to get along with. Thought they knew everything. Mr. Pernouski said he also doubted very much that she was the wisest woman in the world since she wasn’t smart enough to know an arbutus tree when she was faced with one. If he had any sense he would forget about her right now. But the thing that made it impossible for him to do that was this — the husband had admitted it was only his wife who was keeping him from buying a little place and settling here. Like everyone else he had dreamed of it for years, but his wife just wouldn’t budge.
“Which means?” his son asked.
“Which means,” Mr. Pernouski explained, “that tomorrow I’m going to sell something to those people, you just watch.”
To Mr. Pernouski’s surprise, this simple announcement led to an instant row. His son said it was typical of these bloody high-pressure gougers to act as if people didn’t mean it when they said they didn’t want to buy; and Mr. Pernouski said that some people just didn’t have the sense to know what was best for them. His son said that if a product didn’t bloody well sell itself, a salesman had no right to try and change a person’s mind, or trick him into thinking he wanted something he didn’t want. He wished to know if Mr. Pernouski was afraid this one old lady teacher would prevent him from being the Number One Salesman for the sixth year in a row, and Mr. Pernouski said that with an attitude like that his son would be on welfare within the year, he’d never last. Because if you weren’t aggressive in this business you might as well give the country back to the Indians and let it sit, just going to waste. Mr. Pernouski’s son became very red in the face and scraped back his chair to stand up. “Maybe that woman’s right, did you think of that? Maybe there’s more in what she called you than you think.” He left the room before Mr. Pernouski could find an appropriate response.
But the Eckharts were not in the coffee shop the next day, or any other place in town that Mr. Pernouski could see. He neglected several clients — forfeited them, in fact, to a panting novice on the staff — while he went in search of them. Shops, restaurants, business offices were full of people, many of them quite likely visitors from out of town, but none delivered up the missing Eckhart couple. No hotels admitted to the name on their list of guests. Mr. Pernouski felt ill at the thought that the Eckharts might have left the Island prematurely, or driven on to another town. When his son at the dinner table asked if he’d found his crazy lady off the ferry yet, Mr. Pernouski said he could curse himself for not insisting on the names of their friends in town while he had the chance. Would he have to knock on doors? His son suggested that a month of knocking ought to be enough — aside from digging up his lady friend it would give him a chance to ram expensive mortgages down the throats of sixty thousand innocent people who might otherwise never even have thought of coming to him for the pleasure.
When Mr. Pernouski’s wife telephoned from Toronto, his son picked up the receiver and told her that Mr. Pernouski had fallen in love. He was sick like a boy for the love of a wild crazy-woman out of a bloody madhouse, he said, and he wouldn’t relax until he’d tracked her down and brought her home to sleep between them in the bed.
“Get out of the way,” Mr. Pernouski said, and took the receiver out of his hand. A client, he said, was driving him crazy. Even at dinner, while he was talking to the children, his mind continued to walk the streets, looking for her. And her husband. He peered into shops, knocked on doors, surveyed the cars waiting at traffic lights. They’d become a damned obsession.
“Sounds like a normal day in a salesman’s life,” Christina Pernouski said. As for herself, she’d had a busy, wonderful day in Toronto. This woman who was herself very successful in the retail business invited her to her home for lunch today, to a lovely brick house in Rosedale with ivy growing all up the face of it and lovely Eskimo sculptures inside. They had eaten salads, which were brought in by a maid, and sipped sherry. And afterwards the woman had taken her on a walk through a park, down by a ravine, and told her she could do anything she wanted, anything. The woman told her she could spend all her time making those wonderful speeches and forget her own business if she wanted. The woman told Christina Pernouski that she was an inspiration to every modern woman in the country, an inspiration and at the same time a challenge.
“Yes,” Mr. Pernouski agreed. “I’m sure it’s the truth.”
“She said I was a genius,” Christina Pernouski said. “I’ve been invited to stay for a few more days. I’m afraid there are several more groups who want me to speak to them while I’m here.” She added that she’d been interviewed by several magazines that day, they were really making a fuss over her back there. “Including Maclean’s,” she said. “They said I was probably one of the three best-known businesswomen in the country already, especially amongst other women, and it was about time they did a feature on me. Chatelaine asked me to condense my speeches into an article for them.” She said a couple more days ought to wrap things up and she could get back to the Coast, she hoped, at least as far as Vancouver, where she would have to look in on her shop. She said she hoped everything else was going well at home, she missed the kids, and missed him too.
His son leaned close to the phone to say she’d better get home in a hurry, that Mr. Pernouski was so much in love with the crazy-woman he was wasting away to a shadow. Sorrowing over this wild impetuous love affair had shrunk him to skin and bones, he said. Down to four hundred pounds, he’d had to take several great big tucks in the plaid jacket. He would soon start losing interest in his job and sink to position three-hundred-and-two amongst the salesmen of the Island.
“A position just above your own,” Mr. Pernouski said, waving his son out of the way. Laughing, his wife said he could fool around if he wanted, see if she cared, but he’d better have that woman out of her bed by the time she got home.
The notion was ludicrous, of course, and she must have known it. Mr. Pernouski seldom considered another woman seriously in that way, she knew that by now. His obsession with the Eckhart woman had nothing to do with that. It had little to do with real estate, for that matter, either. It had something to do with this feeling he had whenever he thought of her with that schoolteacher look on her face. He was sure she believed herself capable of doing him damage. He intended to show her she was capable of no such thing. Nor any other man or woman in this world.
Mr. Pernouski himself could hardly believe he was becoming so obsessed. All his life he’d been a sensible man, his only obsession the healthy drive to be Number One. When he’d fallen in love with the first Mrs. Pernouski it had been a quiet unremarkable affair, just as he’d expected it to be. Their marriage had been a sensible unremarkable relationship, without rifts or ructions, as both of them desired. When she’d died, quite unexpectedly, Christina Barclay had come into his life, quietly, a little older than he was, but wonderfully attractive to him and very kind to his children. She’d been recently divorced from a runaway beachcomber named Speedy Maclean who preferred to live on his boat. A mother herself, of a daughter who’d grown up and left home, she saw no reason why her remarkable success in the business world should stop her from having a second marriage, a second family, and a second home. In seven years they�
�d never had a fight, or any serious interference in their life together.
Of course, it helped that Mr. Pernouski had always been a sensible, reasonable, and even predictable man. He’d never even been one to lie awake at night worrying about his children, or to become a raving maniac when they defied their parents — not even when his son had run away from home to join that commune. Whatever it was this prairie woman was bringing out in him, a streak of some kind he hadn’t suspected he had, he knew he couldn’t rest, or carry on with his job, or care again about the only ambition that meant anything in his life, until he’d cornered her somewhere, and stared her down, and showed her he could sell her a piece of land, or a house, despite her determination to defy him. He dreamed at night that she was watching him from just beyond the rim of his vision, and laughing while she filled the air with her smoke. In the mornings his son reported that the sound of him grinding his teeth carried easily through the wall.
After several days of searching, Mr. Pernouski caught sight of Mr. Eckhart’s hat at a service station, where the little man was putting air in his tires. He looked at Mr. Pernouski as if he had some difficulty imagining why this enormous red-and-white jacket had swooped down on him to shake his hand and slap his back and inquire about his wife.
“Pernouski,” Mr. Pernouski said. “Remember?”
“Yes, yes, of course I remember.”
But nothing had changed. They were catching a ferry back to the mainland in an hour, he was getting the car ready, and no, his wife hadn’t changed her mind about anything. She seldom did. Mr. Eckhart admitted that he himself would give much to buy a little place here before going home, something he could look forward to returning to, but — too bad — it was far too late now, it would probably never happen.
“She’s a stubborn woman,” he said. “And who knows but that she may be right in the end?”
“You’ll give up your dream just like that, because of her stubbornness?”
Mr. Eckhart laughed and dragged the hose around to another tire. “I’ve never met a man so desperate to sell me something.”
“You’ve never met a man so used to getting his way. I’ve got places to show you that even she won’t want to leave behind. Just give me the chance, I’ll turn her around.”
Mr. Eckhart said it was too bad they didn’t have time to look at some undeveloped property. His wife would never say yes to a house, but if he could convince her that buying a piece of land was a good investment, she might agree. He could try and convince her later to let him build a little house on it, a place they could come and stay in a while each year.
“You have an hour? Then give me half of it. Go pick her up and give me half an hour to show you something. A piece of . . .” Mr. Pernouski’s mind went through his files. “A piece of waterfront. The perfect investment. You can’t lose.”
When Mr. Eckhart continued to look doubtful, Mr. Pernouski said he’d make it easier for him. He got into the front seat of the car. “Are you prepared to try pushing me out? Let’s go, we’re wasting time, we’ve got to pick up your wife and tramp over your brand-new piece of the world!”
No wonder Mr. Pernouski’s heart was pounding. No wonder his palms were sweaty, his enormous stomach churning with excitement. His chance had come at last, she wouldn’t escape him now. The showdown, so to speak, was imminent. He was about to demonstrate to that Mrs. Eckhart just what it was he was made of. The thing was to make the best possible choice, to show them a piece of land that would sell itself, something that not even the little madwoman could stand to let go. If he could show them something they would fall in love with right away, then there was nothing left to be done but sign the papers.
Whether he’d made the perfect choice was not immediately clear. This was the best piece of waterfront property he had, with a spectacular view. But it was steep. Now that he was looking at it, it appeared to be nearly vertical. A sudden plunge down from the road to the beach. Maybe not the wisest choice for people who loved their flat prairie, but he hadn’t been given much time to make his choice, he’d operated on instincts only and forgotten about the slope.
He’d also forgotten about the isolation. There was no sign of life around, except for a couple of half-finished houses on neighbouring lots. Once Mrs. Eckhart had dismissed the view of the pale blue strait dotted with fishing boats and the curve of shoreline that lay beneath them, she said a person living in a place like this would have to grow one leg longer than the other just to keep herself upright. “You want to turn us into cliff-dwellers — like birds?” The cliff-dwellers of Arizona, she added, had the sense to build their houses inside the cracks and caves of the hill. Getting out of the car, she smiled at Mr. Pernouski. “They had ladders they could retract — whenever they heard the real estate developers planning to descend.”
Determined to recover what he could from his mistake in judgement, Mr. Pernouski gave the place a history. “All this used to be part of a colony,” he said, indicating with his hand that he meant the whole stretch of land around the bay, not just this lot. “A bunch of religious fanatics from Australia that put up some shacks and a big high fence around them to keep out the world. After their leader blew his own brains out, the rest of them moved away and some hippies took over. To do whatever hippies do when they get together.”
His own son had lived among them for a while, Mr. Pernouski admitted. That was how he’d come to hear about the place and found out who owned the land and convinced his boss to make them an offer. “They practically gave it to us. Those types don’t have any business sense to know what something’s worth, they’re just as well off up in the mountains or wherever they went.”
Mrs. Eckhart looked as if she were prepared to return to the car. “You claimed it was the rest of the world that lived in the rubble of failed dreams,” she said. “This paradise of yours was supposed to be fresh and new.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” Mr. Pernouski said. “We bulldozed all the buildings down and burned them. We cleaned the place right up. You won’t find a trace of any of that left here.”
Mrs. Eckhart squinted at him through the cigarette smoke but said nothing.
Mr. Eckhart stood up on a stump and took a picture of a fishing boat that was throbbing by. The voices of men on board carried hollowly in to shore. “If you lived here,” Mr. Pernouski suggested, “you could have your own boat. Fishing’s supposed to be wonderful out where you can see those specks. I talked to a man last week who caught something that weighed twenty pounds.”
“He can’t swim,” Mrs. Eckhart said. “He’s afraid of the water.”
Mr. Eckhart’s face coloured. He jumped off the stump and aimed his camera down the curve of the coastline. “Maybe that’s only because I never had the chance to learn,” he said. “If I lived here, things might be different.”
“If you lived here, things would be different,” Mrs. Eckhart said. “You’d be living alone.” Using her cigarette butt as a light, she puffed a new one noisily to life. “Now, Mr. Pernouski, do you intend us to tramp over this paradise of yours like genuine customers . . . or are you going to cut us loose to catch our ferry?”
Mr. Pernouski considered the slope beneath him. There was no question that he had to get them down to the lower edge, to the beach, if he had any hope of salvaging something from this big mistake. “What you are about to witness,” he said, “is an act of pure faith. For a man of my size and weight to go down that slope is asking for trouble. I may never get back up again.”
This was the first time that Mrs. Eckhart had shown amusement at one of Mr. Pernouski’s jokes about himself. “A true act of faith,” she said, “would be to throw yourself in that . . . that water down there. And then see.” She turned and snatched a sweater off the seat of the car.
He saw what her grin meant. It wasn’t amusement at all. Having chosen foolishly, having brought her here, he should now be prepared to surrender — this was what she was thinking. Having come this far, to the top of this slope, they bo
th understood that it had nothing to do with real estate, or with selling. Having brought him here — how could he pretend he had anything to do with it? — she expected him now to concede, or jump in the sea.
Mr. Pernouski felt there wasn’t all that much difference between jumping into the ocean and what he was about to do. They were equally foolish. To plunge down into this steep jungle of thick wet underbrush seemed not unlike a dive into a dark bottomless sea. There was no way for him to enter it but to hold his breath and leap, all at once, and to hope that he didn’t disappear altogether, or break an ankle, or go rolling out of control. The thud, when he landed, jarred bones up as far as his neck, and made his ears sing. With salal and tangled vines up to his elbows he turned and waved them down: “Come in, the water’s fine.”
Above him, the Eckharts gaped, apparently unwilling to accept his invitation. Mrs. Eckhart edged herself along the gravel until she’d found a gentler entry, and told him about it. “There’s something of a trail over here . . . where you won’t have to dog-paddle through that mess.” She all but disappeared herself, except for her head, but when he’d waded through to her (his pants and jacket soaked from the rainy leaves) she was standing in a narrow clearing where the ground had been dug up, or pounded bare. Below her a narrow path slashed downhill at an angle . . . why hadn’t he noticed it? . . . a deer’s trail, he supposed, since he hadn’t heard there were mountain sheep in the area. Mr. Pernouski decided it would be best if he led the way, since a woman like Mrs. Eckhart was only too willing to snatch control away from you, and turn it into her own show.