by Alix Ohlin
“The handmaiden?” Jocelyn started to laugh, shaking her head, then clamped her hand over her mouth. “I'm sorry. I'm not making fun of you. I've just never heard anybody use that word in conversation before.”
“Oh, God,” Claire said, “you're right.” Her tension cracked and she could feel laughter breaking the surface of her skin, bubbling up through it as if it were water. “I don't know where that came from.”
At the store Bob handed her the mail.
“Got a visitor with you, eh?” he said, looking at Jocelyn, who stood at the pay phone frowning at an open engagement book and making notes in it.
“That's summer for you,” Claire said, and shrugged. She bought a chicken and some bread, then crossed the street to the vegetable stand. When she came back Jocelyn was still standing next to the phone, no longer talking, just standing, her face tilted to the sky. She had removed her glasses, and her pale skin, exposed to the sun, seemed doubly naked.
As if she'd recognized Claire's steps, she opened her eyes with a smile already present in them. “Ready to go, handmaiden?” she said.
“You stop,” said Claire.
They took the boat back in silence. It was late afternoon, the sky changing to gray, and the water they passed through was planed in shadow, alternately clear and opaque, plants rising up from the deep into occasional visibility. As she docked, Claire looked up and saw Carson moving past a window, his silhouette dark in the light, the line of his neck, the curve of his shoulders. For one instant she didn't recognize him, didn't feel the familiar jolt of his presence. A blankness swept inside her. When she met him she memorized those outlines, raptured by the shape of him, a desire she could not ignore. Now she stood on the dock and looked at him and some emotion drained from her in a trickle like grains of sand marking the passage of time. Jocelyn walked up the hill in front of her, and Claire thought of the woman's questions and her own answers. Whatever she'd said to Jocelyn, she had changed her life because of him, her drastic desire for him. It wasn't possible—or was it?—that after making such a change, the feeling could dissipate, could disappear.
It made her wonder if she knew just what that feeling was. From the moment she met Carson she knew there was a part of him that she could never reach, the part devoted to an abstraction she would never touch. And then the move to the cottage, the distance and isolation and cold. She hadn't been coerced into anything. But what she had chosen was difficult, in fact was chosen for its difficulty. If she'd made a mistake, it was to believe that things struggled for—the cottage, Carson, their life here—had to contain more value than things fallen into with the simple force of the inevitable. A belief engineered by pride.
That night she lay awake, Carson breathing heavily beside her, Jocelyn inaudible in the guest room. She tried to remember as much as she could about his work, her thoughts circulating in a dull frenzy, as they would the night before an exam. All she could think of were the examples from the textbook. Dye dissolving into a glass of water; a dense red drop issuing a cloud of pink. Picture a truck crashing into a wall, she remembered. This is the world in spontaneous action, growing in disorder. Picture a mirror shattering on the floor.
They were almost finished, Jocelyn and Carson, with the final chapter, framing the conclusion. Claire could feel their exhilaration. She made a pot of coffee and joined them at the table with a cup.
“I think that we have an opportunity to extrapolate here,” Jocelyn said. “From the level of chemical processes, the ones you've established, to larger ones.”
Carson shuffled the papers of the manuscript on the table, then ran his hands over his face up to his forehead. From repetition of this gesture his eyebrows had risen into unruly tufts, adding to his look of worry. “I'd like to resist leaping to unwarranted conclusions,” he said.
Jocelyn exchanged a smile with Claire. “I appreciate your caution,” she said, “but this isn't a scientific paper. You don't have to worry about peer review. This is the time for you to make wild claims about the potential of your model to explain biology, economic and social phenomena, the very nature of human existence. Say that the second law of thermodynamics has been forever broken. You can be speculative. Be sexy.”
“Listen,” he said. “You must know by now that physical laws can't be broken. I only uncovered them a little further. They were always there.”
“Come on, Carson,” Claire urged. “Have a little fun with it.”
“Claire.”
“What?”
“I'm a scientist, not a comedian,” he said, sounding stricken. This made both women laugh, and Jocelyn wiped a tear from her eye. Carson shook his head. “You two,” he said. “Ganging up on me.”
She remembered when, in a bar near the university, a colleague of Carson's, an older man, wheezy and red-faced and drunk, rambled on about great discoveries in science, the leaps and bounds of thought. This was a popular subject among scientists, Claire had noticed, as if by discussing the personality of genius they could associate themselves more closely with it. This man said there were two kinds of thinkers, those who led—who thought the new, the fully original—and those who followed in the existing tracks. The searchers and the followers, he called them.
Carson had snapped, “It's true there are two types of thinkers: people stupid enough to believe there are two types of anything, then everybody else.”
“Sore subject, Carson?” his colleague said.
They finished the final edit at seven o'clock, so Claire fixed a late dinner. She lit candles and set a bouquet of wildflowers in a jelly jar on the table.
Carson lifted his wineglass and declared a toast. “As Claire and many undergraduates can attest, I've never been successful in spreading my ideas outside of a narrow group of scientists,” he said to Jocelyn. “I know it's been like pulling teeth to get this book out of me, and I thank you for it. And I'm very glad it's over.”
Though he was smiling, Claire sensed how strongly his relief tugged him: that tomorrow Jocelyn would leave, silence would return, and he would retire to his office with three months left of his leave from school. Three months completely devoted to real work. He lapsed into quiet, and a general exhaustion seemed to spread from him across the table. By nine the candles had burned low and the talk had dribbled to nothing.
At midnight, rising to go to the washroom, Claire passed the guest room, saw light through the door, and, without thinking, knocked. Jocelyn sat up in bed surrounded by sheets of paper, one pencil stuck in her hair, another in her hand.
“Don't you ever stop working?”
“I couldn't sleep.” She waved for Claire to come in.
Claire sat down at the foot of the bed, on a folded quilt her mother had made. She traced the line of a square with her thumb. The pieces came from blankets, rags, and old clothes that her mother had stitched together on rainy summer days, having collected the scraps through the year in a box in the kitchen. Something to pass the time, she called it.
“What are you working on?”
“Paleontology,” Jocelyn said. She put down her pencil and stretched, her neck's tendons visible and strong. When she reached up, the sleeves of her T-shirt fell back, showing the very smooth skin at the underside of her arms. “It's a new theory of dinosaur life. Dinosaurs are very big sellers.”
“I don't know how you do it,” Claire said. “Understand all these things.”
Jocelyn rubbed her eye. “Well,” she said, and smiled, “they're still dinosaurs, right? They still disappeared.”
“I guess that's true.”
“And anyway, I don't have to completely understand it.”
“You don't?”
“Not at all. I just get it as clear as I can, then I move on to the next book.”
Claire looked at the manuscript on Jocelyn's lap. Neat penciled notations lined the margins. Suddenly she was horribly conscious of having interrupted her work. She felt herself flush. “I'm sorry for intruding,” she said, getting up and walking to the door.
Jocelyn gathered up the pages and moved them aside. “No,” she said. “You didn't.”
She practically missed the bus. In the morning she came out of her room with her bags packed, but at the last moment Claire couldn't find her. She went out the back door and saw Jocelyn crouched in a clearing behind the house, staring at a trillium, its single white flower nodding in the grass like some reminder of snow.
“Jocelyn, we really should leave.”
Jocelyn stood and turned around. The slope of her shoulders was outlined in gold by the sun as it arrowed through the pine branches. Her blue eyes looked jeweled. In the sharpness of the light Claire could see the fine down of hair on her cheek. Silence swooned between them.
“I'm sorry to go,” Jocelyn said.
Carson's book appeared the following spring. There was no preface, no page of acknowledgments. The book launched itself into being from the first page, his voice transposed into type: I begin by stating that we live in a non-equilibrial universe, and that the state of disorder we know as entropy is itself an order of the universe that we have not, up to now, been able to recognize. Claire could hear him saying it, picture his palms spread wide. In the bookstore she flipped through the pages, ran the tips of her fingers over the glossy jacket. This new model of entropy could change the way we look at the organization of the universe, the way we think about its future and ours. She turned to the back flap and touched the black-and-white picture of his face, her fingertip leaving a print behind.
Then she put the book back on the shelf, tapped it into place, and walked quickly to the front of the store, where, because, Jocelyn was waiting for her.
Edgewater
When Luz was a baby she used to be afraid of the water, but she wasn't anymore, or said she wasn't. In winter, the water in Lake St. Louis was still and pale, ice-crusted, as gray as the surface of the moon, though in summer it took on a deeper, more alive tinge that she liked better. What she didn't like, even now that she wasn't scared anymore, was how the water slapping against the rocks at the shore turned them green with algae—a slippery, scary mold, akin to pictures of plaque on teeth—and how slippery her hand felt, too, when she dipped it in. Luz had an idea of what water should be like—she'd seen a picture of an ocean once, an endless, clean, turquoise one, with a white beach and pink sunset—and Lake St. Louis was a disappointment to her because of the many ways it didn't conform to this idea.
But she was getting used to it this summer, owing to all the time she spent down by the water with Marie-Claire. Although she wasn't with Marie-Claire so much as within shouting distance of her. While Luz played down by the rocks at the water's edge, Marie-Claire wandered around the park looking for secluded places to smoke a joint. Luz knew about this. She'd seen a joint at home, inside a tin box her father kept in the bottom drawer of his nightstand, and she knew what it smelled like when he smoked it, even in the middle of the night with the windows open. One thing she didn't know was whether her father knew about Marie-Claire. She hoped he didn't, because she was liking spending the summer out here, just thinking and looking out over the lake and pretending that the dim blue land opposite wasn't the south shore of Montreal but China or Mexico or France. She liked to picture the people over there, foreigners wearing strange hats and riding bicycles through foreign streets, never knowing they were being watched. This was a lot better than spending the summer at summer school or at the YMCA or in her backyard playing “imagination games” with her dolls, which was what her last babysitter, Maureen, used to make her do. Maureen would always say, “Let's see you use your imagination,” and then she would stand back, nodding, waiting for Luz's imagination to make an appearance. “Be creative,” she'd urge. Maureen was old, older than Luz's father, and had gone back to school to get her degree in early-childhood education. While Luz played she could feel Maureen's eyes fixed on her, memorizing her every move.
Marie-Claire was calmer; she had her own imagination games to play. When Luz looked back over the grass, Marie-Claire was sitting on a rock, a small black figure (Marie-Claire wore black every day) resting her chin on her knees. They waved at each other and went back to their own business. It was early Wednesday afternoon and not many other people were around. Beyond Marie-Claire, cars went by on Lakeshore Drive, taking the curves too fast. A mom with two babies in a stroller crossed the street toward the lake. Seagulls circled and squawked. Luz turned around and concentrated on watching a couple of boats on the water, sails dipping lazy and graceful and white. She believed that to a certain, impossible-to-prove extent her watching kept the boats and the people in them safe from overturning, and she took the responsibility seriously. She didn't want the people to land in the slippery, gunky water or to have to touch any of the green slime that hovered on the rocks under the surface. You could see how polluted the water was down at the shore: by Luz's feet, scattered over the rocks, were Coke cans and beer bottles and other pieces of disintegrating trash she tried to identify by poking them with a stick. She saw a shoe. A worn-out bicycle tire. She saw Popsicle wrappers and plastic bags and lots of cigarette butts.
Later, when she thought about what she saw next, she would picture it as something small, something that could have come off one of her dolls, and she would think about putting it in her pocket and taking it home and keeping it for herself forever, secret and safe. But in reality it was much too big to fit in her pocket. It was bigger than Luz's whole arm, and it was a weird light brown, almost pink, and it was batting against the rocks like an animal trying to escape a cage: a plastic leg.
On the next block over from the park was the Edgewater Bar & Grill. Inside, there was only one window from which you could actually see the water, and only one table at that window. This was Kelly's table, and had been for ten years. She first started coming to the Edgewater when she was underage, heavily made up, treading carefully in high heels, flirting with older men before retreating to the safety of her friends at the table. By the time she was eighteen she knew the jukebox, such as it was, by heart. She celebrated her birthdays here and was tearfully consoled here after breakups, threw up in the bathroom a few times, tried cocaine in the bathroom once and then twice, came here after classes and instead of them. When she started university she also started waitressing at the Edge a few nights a week to make extra money. She told Manny, the owner, that she spent so much time there, she might as well get paid for it. Then she stopped going to school, but she didn't stop working.
She met the first man she ever slept with here, as well as the last. The last one being almost a year ago, just before she took her chastity vow. Which she also did at the Edgewater. Quitting was easier than she thought, a hell of a lot easier than quitting smoking. It wasn't like she was giving up sex forever; she was just abstaining, taking a break, because she thought it would be good for her, the way some people who aren't even really Christians give things up for Lent. Her head was clearer and calmer than it was before the vow, when a space in the back of her head had always been devoted to the question of sex, of when and who and how and if, a churning little spot of energy that ran underneath and beside all her other mental activities. Now she'd freed up that energy and could just use it—well, what was she using it for?—to live.
What happened was this: on a Friday night—Friday nights at the Edgewater were an institution, and as usual the place was packed—Kelly looked around and counted nine men she'd slept or fooled around with. It wasn't the number that bothered her but that, looking at them, she couldn't stop picturing them all naked, and it was not an arousing picture. She was walking around trying to serve drinks and hear people's orders over the music and all the while seeing naked men, pale-skinned, dark-skinned, potbellied, muscled or flabby, hairy-chested or bare, hairy-backed or not, leaning against doors, sitting back in chairs, everywhere their freckled, spotted, rough or smooth skin. There was just too much skin. She took a deep breath and thought, No more.
That was last July, and she hadn't been with a man since. The chas
tity thing drove Manny crazy and he was always trying to set her up with somebody, most recently with his cousin from Kitchener who was coming to town for a visit. Manny's interest in her was by turns paternal, platonic, and sleazy. He often encouraged her to go back to school, patting her on the shoulder and telling her she was too smart for this dump, too young, too something; he'd also, every once in a while, look down her shirt or squeeze her butt. When he brought up his cousin, she was wiping down the bar while he flipped through catalogs of restaurant equipment. Manny dreamed about making the Edgewater more upscale, a thought that was wishful in the extreme. He wanted to put in stainless-steel chairs and sell microbrews. He also wanted to institute a no-jeans dress code, an idea that, when he floated it by a couple of regular customers, made them snort Miller Genuine Draft out their noses.
“He's a very interesting person, Kel,” Manny said. “You guys would have interesting conversations, I bet.”
“Okay, so I'll talk to him when he comes in. But that's it, talking.”
“Well, okay, but really talk to him. Get to know him.”
“Manny.”
“What?”
“You know I'm off men.”
“Off men? What does that even mean?” He looked around as if he had an audience for this question, but it was Tuesday night at seven-thirty and the place was almost deserted. “It's not normal, a girl your age. Hey, do you like these stools?”
She looked at the catalog. The stools were four feet high and upholstered in a black-and-white cow print. “Looks comfy.”