Hunger's Brides

by W. Paul Anderson

  He pulls up in front of her apartment, its little ground-floor balcony set back in a shock of untended honeysuckle. He resists the urge to hit the horn. The Saab convertible is a sober testament to European-engineered elegance, stately in its understatement, and this is not a young bachelor’s spree.

  If she is impressed she does not show it much.

  “Very menopausal.” She buckles in, looking straight ahead. His sphinx in a bucket seat. Leather overnight bag, quilted cotton jacket. Long-sleeved black T-shirt, black jeans, white sneakers. Her glossy hair is drawn back in a long braid, reddish in the bright sun.

  He pulls away briskly from the curb. Madeleine called less than an hour ago from San Francisco to wish him a happy fortieth. When the phone rang he was in the bathroom conducting a critical survey of his hairline. He has taken to cutting the ponytail shorter—more or less regulation length for the Cartel hit man, Hollywood style. But before it thins down to a sort of white-coolie look he may have to crop it off entirely. Madeleine was calling also to tell him she was extending her trip by a few days. By all means, stay. Call it recklessness, call it young love, but now he doesn’t really care who sees them. He will make several mistakes this day. His first at being forty. Call it a kind of innocence.

  His mood is buoyant, and why not? The plan is to indulge him with a night’s debauch in Pincher Creek, and to indulge her with a stop en route at a craft fair. In a town called Okotoks. Over the past few months she has acquired a taste for prairie anthropology—not, mercifully, wagon-wheels and arrowheads, but small-town flea markets, antique shops, country fairs.

  They drive with the top down through new-planted fields, past silos like fifties rocket ships, through the sweetish reek of hog farms. Over the blast of air at seventy miles an hour they talk little. This suits them both. He has learned the hard way how quickly these girls can abuse his confidences. Anyway, she has always disdained small talk. From the first days in her first class with him, she kept to the essentials. When eventually she did open up—no more than a handful of times—it came as a shockwave. Passion, probing insights, sharp turns of mind that poured forth in a stunning rush. Here was the author of those amazing papers, all but invisible, inaudible, at other times.

  He hasn’t seen this version of Beulah for some months now. A shame but, he supposes, unavoidable in the circumstances. Their future is nowhere, their past officially meaningless. The present? Well, the present is much like today, a hunt for scalps and souvenirs.

  Okotoks, he seems to remember, is about an hour south. On the freeway in a Swedish sport sedan, the trip turns out to be thirty-five minutes to what is fast becoming a bedroom community of Calgary, for people driving cars much like his. As he pulls into the parking lot by the school’s gymnasium he sees a real chance of running into someone he knows.

  Beulah and he never touch in public, making their intimacies the more intense when they come. And there’s always the age difference. Scant cover, but in a pinch he will introduce her as a student. It would have helped had she been less beautiful. But then, on the drive down, glancing at her profile … implacably his eyes seek out the indispensable flaw. In this case a slight recessiveness of the chin. Making a little double-chin a near inevitability in forty years. Or even less. It helps him to imagine it lightly whiskered. Her nose, in profile, is just prominent enough to mark her ethnicity. Of course it would be wrong, he chides himself, to ever think of this as a flaw. Rather it is just the sort of flaw to put a face on the cover of a fashion magazine.

  With Beulah, the pleasure has now palled somewhat, certainly, but it is still more intense at its best, at its worst, than anything in memory. The truth is, it never occurs to him to end things that day. But that she might think otherwise is a natural mistake: he does have something on his mind, something awkward to tell her. Awkward, yes, but it also never occurs to him to keep Madeleine’s pregnancy a secret. Honesty is the bedrock on which all his adulteries are founded.

  He turns off the ignition, crisply pulls up the handbrake. He leads the way up the walk. Welcome to the Okotoks Art Trading Post. On an upturned washtub in the foyer some poor sodbuster in chaps and hushpuppies declaims cowboy poetry. In the gym, a savage hunt for relics. Silver-haired ratepayers in elbow-patched tweeds mingle with clod-booted landsmen. Tell me again why we’re here? he asks. She calls it a kitsch hunt. On a dais paces a tanned master of ceremonies with a microphone headset, a selling wrinkle picked up from the shopping channel. The MC is making protean use of the word wonderful. Don’t miss the wonderful artists’ panel discussion in Room 101 at noon. Snacks welcome. Bring your purchases in for signing. Come meet the artists, be among the elect. They’re just like you and me. This is Renaissance art’s logical conclusion: craft superstars. Michelangelos of needlepoint and duck decoys.

  He lets her go on ahead, feels a dark flowering of lust as he watches her merge into the crowd. He moves off on his own, tends it, this cruel petulance of pleasure postponed.

  Meanwhile he gathers in his own harvest of tribute, registers the flicker of a tall woman’s glance that sifts the evidence, deciphers the sex code: white male, six feet, blue eyes, light-brown hair, close-cropped beard, touches of grey. Bare feet in leather sandals, blue T-shirt, cream linen suit. Hit man on holiday, shopping for handicrafts. It is a lot to take in.

  Enjoying himself he wades into the pop-art bazaar. Prairie chapels made of Popsicle sticks. Elk fashioned from clothespins, pipe-cleaner antlers. Salt-dough poodles. Brooches and pendants out of something called Fimo. Pot holders, oven mitts, WELCOME mats. From corncobs, a cat’s scratching post. And some abomination based on an aboriginal dreamcatcher—a kind of jute-hoop medicine wheel with bits of cut-glass ruby suspended in the centre, satin tassels from the lower rim.

  In a perfect world he might have found his mother’s pencil landscapes here.

  The roving eye is drawn to the intense action at a table of Sante Fe-style silver and turquoise. All are women in their mid-forties, well-kept, hungry-eyed. New-faded jeans and jean shirts, little feet in gleaming cowboy boots.

  Farther on, further out, the Lace Lady models her wearable art, a selection of shoes, handbags and hats, aprons and dresses, all garlanded in lace and dried flowers. She wears a velvet choker trimmed with lace, tiny dried roses at that whitest of throats. Elbow-length gloves and granny boots festooned with flowers and lace, scented with potpourri. A flesh and blood altar to Prairie Victorian.

  Some time later he glimpses Beulah on the far side of the gym and wends his way towards her to the strains of whale song and pan pipes. She stands before a display of what appear to be crystals—a big egg sac, ruptured to reveal amethysts in their raw and perfect potency. He follows her at a little distance and off to one side, keeping a screen of shoppers between them. A few tables farther along she stops beside a sandwich board bearing the Spanish word for snail shell or conch, but these are unlike any shell he has seen. Through the crowd he draws a little nearer, steps gingerly to avoid having his sandalled feet crushed by pointy boots. Perplexed she picks a shell up and cradles it in her palm, flinches slightly as the aged vendor reaches for her wrist; the old man hesitates then raises one to his ear, shakes the thing gently. To show her. With an expression of something like fascination she holds a cupped hand to her ear.

  He can see the objects clearly now: ovoid, walnut-sized, earth-coloured. They might be some kind of mineral accretion or a seed pod, but are more likely fired and lightly glazed clay. As she lifts her eyes finally to meet his, the old man blinks. Quickly she replaces the thing and moves on.

  He catches up to her between the soapstone walruses and a rack of Indian braves in copper intaglio.

  “Let’s get some air.”

  “A few minutes.”

  “How about I buy everything from here to the exit,” he says, “and we sort through it later.”

  “It’s your birthday, not mine.”

  “How about Hiawatha here? Maybe the guy’s got a Pocahontas, too. Let’s ask.” He turns t
owards the metal smith without taking his eyes from her face. “Sir?”

  “Don’t.” A flash of anger as she turns away.

  “Not that way—the cafeteria, out there.”

  He needs to eat, he knows this edge, of a hypoglycaemic cruelty. They go out the gym fire-door to the tent pavilion: Cowboy Cafeteria, three self-serve food counters on cut-down chuckwagons. In the ceaseless prairie wind the white canvas awnings sag and bulge. In them he sees the burst bellows of a piper’s cheeks—and where is the piper? The Tourettic hoppery of a Celtic revival is all this event lacks.

  They take a table. Across the aisle teen punks drink Diet Pepsis while their parents shop. A reminder, if he still needs one, of how near the city this is. Two girls about sixteen. One tonsured, the other’s mohawk teased into violet and lime spikes. Across from him, one thigh scissored over the other, elbows on the table, Beulah twists to look out over the prairie. Away from the burgers and chili dogs, the Tom Thumb donuts, the nachos and the cheese-flavoured vinyls, away from the bearded epicure who gnaws at a cinnamon roll. In a sawdust mumble the sage starts to share with her the oceanic depths of his fashion intuitions: Such an astonishing assortment of piercings, he observes, crummily. We are perhaps to interpret all this as a resurgence of the Dionysian. Notice the Swiss precision of the tiny silver barbells through each nostril; the outermost rim of the punk’s ear pierced at short intervals for a brace of overlapping rings. The tandem disks of farm machinery, or a blade array—for a surgical appliance, wouldn’t she agree? Notice the metal standards—like so many prospector’s flags planted at each tip and prominence—brow, lip, tongue. The body’s final reclamation for the machine age. Slowly we are become recyclable. The more delicate the formation the better: septum, nipples, navel, glans, labia. “Chic kebabs,” he lisps and looks at her keenly—surely this she cannot fail to appreciate …

  They’ve shared this savage jocularity a dozen times in the past. Or rather he’s shared it with her, in the manner of two world-weary business rivals met in some street, chatting, at the intersection of his abstract humanism, her theoretical misanthropy…. He exclaims over the inquisitorial joining of metal and parted flesh. He thinks he knows how to bait her, but perhaps he has been too complacent.

  From the corner of her eye she is studying him not quite clinically.

  Still no answer? Still she would have him play both their parts. It is a relief to oblige. This is the safest kind of talk left. With a nod towards the suburban pincushions in black leathers he asks: “Did you ever, I mean were you ever tempted to—” He was going to say, to pierce something.

  “You do that a lot,” she says.

  “What?”

  “That.” She nods.“Rubbing your hands. The silent movie villain.”

  It was an old tic Madeleine had helped him break. He finds this oddly embarrassing, he finds this faintly annoying.

  “No—of course, you’d never draw attention, you want to be invisible.” He has no idea what he is talking about, yet he is not so far mistaken. She wants to be invisible, to everyone else. And in all the essentials, she is, to him. One word too many, one careless comment and everyone will see. Except him.

  “You didn’t answer.”

  “But you just ask away, Donald.”

  “On my birthday.”

  “Fuck your birthday.”

  “You called me. If you don’t think you can get through this …”

  She tilts her plastic cup, pokes at her lime wedge with a straw.

  “So. Back to town? Your call.”

  She looks into his face, then away. She has folded her straw into a tiny white accordion. “Not yet.”

  His voice softens. “Help me out a little, will ya?”

  She thinks about this. “Try again.”

  “You never want to talk about school…. You pick, then.”

  “Pick?” She looks up at him in disbelief.

  He looks out into the schoolyard, except for the trampled grasses indistinguishable from the prairie just beyond the fence.

  “Why only Mexico? Why not myths from here?”

  “We’re finished with all this, Professor. Remember?”

  “That crack about Hiawatha—”

  “Pocahontas forgives all.”

  “Local Cree figures like Berdache and Wiokachuch fit the research you’ve shown me. So why not, Beulah? The Aztecs, you use them.”

  Her lips twist into a wincing smile. “Who hasn’t?” Two fingertips of her left hand slip to a small sore at the corner of her mouth.

  He leans back in his chair, ankles crossed under the table, hands resting comfortably in his pockets. She looks away again, fixes her eyes on the farm machinery. She asks him if they can go now.

  “Better Beulah, do better.”

  “So guide me, O Grey Owl.”

  “Can you answer me or not?”

  She hesitates, still not looking at him, shakes her head slightly, as though in answer to an unspoken question of her own. Begins. At the time he understands only a fraction of what he hears…. We all start with certain global rights, to the fruits of the tree, she seems to be saying. But some forfeit their rights to some of the fruit, for what they have done. Locally. And those rights must be earned back, if at all, with heart and blood.

  “Listen, Beulah. This may all sound very biblical to you, but somebody out there—and this, I can guarantee—will hear Wagner, a whole New-Age fascist Ur-symphony. Racial memory, folk kitsch, sentimentalizing the past—it’s irrational, it’s dangerous, and it never goes away. Like plutonium.”

  “Two. Three. Eight.”

  She says this in a voice so low he can barely hear. And in that murmur there is a tightness he does not hear at all. But he has her attention now, her fullest attention. And she has his. For an instant he stares into the green eyes across the table. Large, intent, a thread of gold around pupils contracted to a point. Flecks of jasper and rust …

  Geology. So many of his father’s lessons he will apply today. But right now he must work hard to interpret what she is saying, this striking oracle of his. She takes the lime from the glass. There is no juice left to squeeze out, though she twists. He notices the little nicks and scrapes, some half-healed … second knuckle of each index finger. He concentrates. No not Plutonium, Don, a teeny tiny bacterium, a benevolent microbe, our symbiant friend—like intestinal flora. Is it all just going too fast Professor?—call it a metaphor. Call what?—myths, Doctor, myths. Without them we are not nourished we are not fed. They are a bacterium, a global super-organism.5 Clostridium dificile—our difficult cloistering, a cluster that darkly blooms in us, like lymphoma. Tiny muscular corpuscular they swim in our blood, they squat in our guts, they help us digest. Too much and they eat us, too little and they starve us to death.

  “Yes I see.” Someday he will come to think of this as the day he saw too little, remembers too well.

  “Then they become our disease and we become—”

  “I have my answer, Beulah.”

  These eyes so bright, this stunning intensity, this face a mask of twisted smile. Does she have any idea how it looks, this mask of herself? He sits straight now, his back not quite touching the chair. What an amazing creature, what a waste. He has offered his help but she has rejected it over and over. He steels himself not to lean back, away, not to flinch.

  For once, she is not the first to worry about what others will see. Has she forgotten where they are?

  “How’s our chat so far Donald? How’s it for you—did I pick right?”

  When the cup snaps in her hands, spilling ice over the table, he feels something rising up in him.

  “Enough.”

  Three tables away a pair of brown eyes meets his and he knows that this one knows him. He does not remember her but she knows exactly what’s happening.

  “You wanted to go, let’s go. Get up.”

  And he too knows what is happening. He knows that after too many years of this, each one gets a little crazier, and he knows the patter
n is in him, not them. He is on his feet. He feels his own rage rising to answer hers—he is not her father and on this day of days I am not as afraid of a scene as you think.

  Something has reminded him of his childhood, long rides, empty highways, a small town off by itself.“Come on. Get up. We’ll be like two strangers on a bus.” He knows he is the one not making sense now, and it feels very good. It is the best feeling of all. “Telling everything, if that’s what you want. Spilling their guts …”

  And for the first time, though she has always guessed it was there, she is seeing it in his face. Sincerity…. At last. It is something real. “Where, Donald?” She is ready to go with him.

  Get her in the car is all he can think. Get her in the car and tell her. Doesn’t matter where. He savours the look that will come into her face.

  She stands, her eyes searching his. “How much time do we have?”

  They are in the car. They are on the highway. She is quiet now. But instead of seeing in this a confirmation that this has all been to provoke him, he is perplexed, he is troubled. His chest is still lightly heaving, his face still flushed. He understands he is afraid of her, for the violence he knows she can bring out of him.

  The air is cool. He tries to give himself over to the spell of the land. They are heading south, flanked by deep green fields. Puffs of cloud scud east, and under them the straight road ahead seems to warp to the west.

  Later, droplets on the windshield. One, then another striking his face. He fumbles for the wiper switch, he is still unfamiliar with the car. She is shuddering with the cold, the wind. He has not noticed this.

  He pulls sharply over to the shoulder, a scrabble of gravel. When the convertible top is latched they sit, rain pattering on the canvas, cars rocketing past. Tell her. Now and then a tractor trailer, the heavy blast and tug. The car rocks faintly in its wake. He knows the moment is now. Tell her. But she is the first to speak. Something about this angers him.

  “Like you said.” She waits. “Strangers on a bus.” He does not answer. He has decided to make her suffer. Let him be judged by his acts.