Anna From Away

by D. R. MacDonald

  He paused before a big sketch of the dog and the bridge, still holding his empty wine glass as if he were at a gallery reception, then took a step back, frowning. “And what kind of really is this?“

  She didn’t want to tell him about the dog, her instinct was to pass it off as dream or surrealism, but maybe, possibly, he might say something useful. She told him what she’d seen.

  “Jesus,” he whispered. “You sure? Might’ve been a bag of trash, people do that. People get shitfaced and do anything. Could I have more of that wine?”

  “It was a dog.”

  “Maybe it was dead anyway.”

  “I heard it yip. The moon was bright. I saw its little legs going as it fell.”

  “You saw it all?“ He narrowed his eyes at her, then filled his glass from the bottle she handed him.

  “All what?” she said.

  “The guys up on top, on the bridge …”

  “Too far, too dark. A guy, yes. A woman would never do that.”

  “Wouldn’t put it past a couple I know.”

  “I’ve wondered was it Willard Munro’s dog.”

  “No loss if it was. Somebody burned Willard out a while back. He ought to remember that.”

  “He’ll never forget it, I’m sure. Who would?”

  Willard had told her, Nothing I could do, I couldn’t watch it, no. Every God blessed thing in it. They didn’t even put shoes there to try to save it.

  “Breagh thinks it was the wharf rats.”

  “The who? How the hell would she know?”

  “Guys from town, they hang around that little house by the wharf.”

  “Billy stays there. Well, I know those fellas, a few. He has a habit of phoning up the Mounties, old Willard does. Not a way to get popular.”

  “I doubt that he cares. Why would he call them?”

  “He’s a nosy old woman, that’s why.” Livingstone nodded curtly at the sketch before turning toward her stack of cassettes. “You dreamed that, I think.”

  “Maybe I did, maybe I am. And go easy on Willard, he’s my handyman. He might even drop by.”

  Livingstone gave her a look. “Way past his bedtime, he’s snoozing up there where the pulpit used to be. Good place for him. Anyway, I’m your handyman now.”

  “Nothing needs fixing. Sorry.”

  “Around here, something always needs fixing. Even music.”

  He shuffled through the cassettes, squinting at titles, murmuring or grinning according to what he liked. He approved of the Celtic tapes she’d picked up in Sydney, Capercaillie, the Bothy Band, Planxty.

  “You need some Cape Breton stuff here,” he said, “I’ll drop a couple by.”

  She felt she should usher him back to the kitchen, out of this private space, but she hadn’t the will to orchestrate what they did now, how they arranged themselves. Let it go.

  “You mind putting this on, Anna?” holding up Creedence Clearwater’s Bayou Country. “This flies at my altitude.”

  Anna almost said no, such were the good times packed into that album. She’d first heard it on the jukebox in a college bar. Chet bought a copy later, a staple of many parties, no one could resist dancing to it whether they could dance or not, and in those days it didn’t matter, you just got up and did your thing. But she took it from his hand and slipped it into the cassette player.

  “Yeah,” Livingstone said, brushing her breast as he reached to turn up the volume.

  At first she just watched him slowly spin and shuffle in the small area by the door, his eyes shut, smiling, snapping his fingers softly, his scuffed side-zip boots sliding on the bare floor, he’d already kicked the throw rug aside. She tried a few easy steps and turns, she didn’t want to get dizzy. Feeling flushed, she tossed aside the yellow shawl. But soon they were both into it, swapping smiles when they bumped each other, lightly, and at the song breaks. “Oh, I love ‘Proud Mary,’” she said, tugging at the neckline of her dress, how could she have broken a sweat? But she had, and Livingstone said, “Let’s keep on chooglin’.” Her azaleas at home, their stunning white blossoms rushed into her mind, so fragrant. She inhaled the memory, then brought in the rest of the wine and they both drank while he slapped in another tape.

  “Change of pace,” he said. These blues were slow, a tape she’d put together herself, selections from here and there and the radio back home, “Slow Stuff,” the label read, and in the first strains of “Thinking of You,” Livingstone, his eyes just slits, his smile lazy and fixed, reached out to her, she knew that moment when dancing closes in, when you’re not apart and lost in the rhythm of your own body anymore but suddenly joined to another’s, and all points of touching speak—that was when she might have said, No, Livingstone, you’re Breagh’s, let’s cool down, but she didn’t, that kind of dispassion was not available to her then, there was no time for the burden of consequences, of loyalty, she was floating and light and she liked the feeling, of him, of a man in her arms, his hands sliding over her back, warm through the fabric of the dress. He whispered something she couldn’t make out, his breath in her hair, his arms tightening around her, the dress seemed so thin now, insubstantial, she could feel him harden against her, and she thought, this feels like home, this could happen there, but you’re in a very different place, you have no history, no connection, you don’t know this man who feels so good, who is he? What are the rules, the lines, the limits? And why think of them now, why must she? She had to recognize she was pleased that Livingstone desired her, lost in the mood and the moment as she was. She’d made herself attractive for no expected man, yet she was appealing to him, like beautiful Breagh—a small, mean triumph she instantly rejected, real as it was—another ingredient in the complex, intoxicating mix she and this man were engaged in. He was humming to a song, swaying her gently side to side, she could feel the vibrations of his voice, and then he kissed her neck and she didn’t need to hear what he was murmuring there, it was flowing through them both. He danced her slowly into the kitchen, toward the daybed, but she said no, not here, and she led him up the stairs as if some voice were calling to her up there, she had to laugh, the room felt so cold. He pulled her to him and kissed her hard, he took the shape of her into his hands, moved them under the skirt of the dress, up her legs, the cheeks of her ass, oh, how might it have gone had she encased herself in her winter clothing, protective, frumpy, chaste, but she unfastened the dress and slid it away and he drew her panties down, kneeling to help her step out of them. He grasped her hips and pressed his tongue in little circles over the soft, taut skin inside her thighs (did she taste of that salty dancing?), pushed it hot and insistent into her bush, the wet lips there. She took his hair in her fists and pulled him up and kissed him, their tongues entwining. The bed groaned as he sat on the edge and yanked viciously at his boots, his jeans, his curses muffled in the bulky black sweater that caught in his wristwatch. She whipped the quilts open and fell back with a yelp onto the chilled sheet. She waited there shivering until he rolled next to her and they plunged under the quilts, shouting with the cold, “Jesus!” he said, “as bad as the pond, this!” But there was nothing of ice in the feel of his hands, the heat of his mouth, and when his cock slid inside her, all was pared down to sheer, blind pleasure, beyond guilt or care or censure, it was all now, now, now.

  SHE DIDN’T REMEMBER Livingstone leaving, they’d lain there under the quilts amusing each other over what they could make out in the room’s weathered ceiling, with just a nightlight in the hall. She last remembered his insisting a stain was a huge insect, which he described in minute detail. Anna dozed beside his warmth, slept, but he was gone when she woke needing to pee and groped for her robe. Then she remembered what he’d said after a long silence, in a different voice: What were you doing at the bridge that night? She’d replied lightly, not catching his tone, Sightseeing, I guess.

  Downstairs a lamp was on in her workroom where their empty glasses sat on the big table. The kitchen was cold, and would remain so until she got up for good. Sh
e lifted the saucer on whose pale blue forget-me-nots the roach lay, a black stub of congealed ash: he must have singed his lips before he went out the door. She put on a down vest and took up a pen.

  Dear Melissa, you asked how was I doing. I’ve been doing charcoal, it’s a charcoal kind of weather anyway, the shades I’m seeing out the window now wouldn’t challenge a palette much. I prefer drawing anyway, I never took to paints. I will send along a few inks, I’m pleased with them. How are the kids? I miss having them tumble into my studio and be charming pests. They’ d get a kick out of some things here. I had a weasel in my bathroom one evening, came up along the pipe, took a long weaselly look at me while I was poised to step into the tub and then disappeared below the floor. I hear noises at night in the walls, which doesn’t thrill me, even if they’re only weasels or mice or something. Cold drives them inside, can we blame them? I’m not into that lately. We waste so much of ourselves with blame, I hate to think of the time I’ve devoted to it. The cold is good for that (this is a cold house, believe me, you’ve never known a real draft, one seems to find me wherever I’m at), shivering has a way of focusing my attention, my inclination to dwell on all the ways I’ve been wounded tends to fade. Chet is Chet, it’s not like we were in the middle of a romance. Everything here heightens my sense of myself—not always good, of course. I can’t take much for granted anymore, and isn’t that how we get along, how we make it easy on ourselves? A man did visit me here. Yes, here, in my house. Intense, and over. Not in the mood today to talk about it, or probably any day. Going for a walk. Tell me about a good movie you’ve seen, or a book, or a face, anyone, anything we both enjoyed, I want to hear.

  After three cups of coffee, Anna negotiated the slippery stones of the shore. Swells, mushy with grey ice, washed lazily near her feet. Maybe a rogue wave would come quietly out of the fog and sweep her away, she didn’t care. Too much wine, too much everything. And the high ride stopped and thumped you to the ground, that was the payback, in this wet and chilling wind. The pain of regret was far more acute than a headache, the nausea of remorse no pills or seltzers could relieve. She’d lost her distance, like a reputation, that saving perk of maturity that had been hers, and much of her privacy too, as casually as if she were twenty. She’d tossed away intimacy on Livingstone because … he was an attractive man, and that’s what she’d wanted last night, to lose herself in the physical, simple as that. Yet things he said came back to her now, bits of talk she could barely recall, but unsettling, suggesting a side to him other than music and dancing and sex.

  But wasn’t she free to take a man upstairs if she liked? Of course, but, oh … something to be said for remaining the solitary woman from away. She lingered over a lobster trap the tides had shoved high up the shore, its netting gorged with sand and seaweed and bits of shell: like her mind.

  His body was lean and warm, his tongue was all over her. What mood did he take out the door with him? What sense of her? And if he talked around about her, about this? To Breagh? Anna would never get back to where she’d been, her footing would be as wobbly as walking these stones.

  My deceptions, Chet had told her, are only sexual, all of them. I don’t expect, of course, to be thus forgiven.

  She was good and cold by the time she reached Murdock’s shorebank. No smoke in the forge chimney high up the back field, but there was a light in his woodshop window. Working. Unavailable. She wouldn’t break in on him, not with last night still on her skin. Why his opinion of her should matter so much she couldn’t say. Would he ever know?

  All right. She had opted for escape. What after all was more timeless, placeless, than the intimacies of sex, when there was no world beyond the one that enwrapped you? What, during its illusions, more uncomplicated, intense, direct? And for a short while that evening she’d left everything gladly behind but desire, and she spent it with a man who felt good in her arms. Was that terrible? Familiar complications, followed by new ones. But the act itself—all the whispers and breathing and lips and tongues and hands—was what it was.

  She would have liked to go to Breagh’s, just talk with her about anything mundane and ordinary, but she couldn’t, not yet. Too fresh, too exposed. What would she do but sit there feeling sick and rather tawdry, Lorna on the floor at her feet, drawing pictures with her, soothing in her innocence?

  That afternoon, after fog closed nearer to the house, Anna began a nude study of herself, carrying into her room the wide mirror from above the parlour bureau and setting it vertically against her table. A study of what? She looked over her naked self, at a brutal angle, catching some window, foreshortening her torso, she was all legs, and then upward, goosefleshed, startlingly pale. As honest as Dürer in those ruthless nudes of himself? Could this contrapposto arouse Livingstone again, in this quiet, grey, unforgiving light? Just what he’d thought of her body she wasn’t sure, the room had been dim, perhaps her breasts were not as firm as he was used to, her belly had more flesh now. She seemed incredibly bare in this room where, surely, no woman had stood unclothed sketching her intimate parts with scrupulous detail, her hardening nipples, the curls of her dark bush that Chet had once loved (was it thinning, just a bit?), the vague triangle of hair she scribbled in, the locus of all the fuss. And her breasts of course, more pendulous now, she was standing, not lying on her back. That Livingstone had wanted to fuck her was not much consolation after all. She was filling in too many blanks, or creating them, and she had to quit that, even though she wondered what responses she might elicit from him, what kind of play his talk would take, what he might notice, remark on, remember, dislike the day after, posed here as she was: that mattered, she knew, more than it should. She had no understanding of how he felt about her now, what respect remained, and the pleasure of the night itself was seeping away. Maybe mystery, fantasy, was preferable to the real thing, you could feel then as you wished.

  Later, she pressed her cheek to the window’s darkness, she wanted to hear a voice from home, where taking a lover for the night would, among her friends, be forgiven, understood—as long as he didn’t belong to one of them. And after all, she was an artist.

  XIII.

  RED MURDOCK WAS WORKING wood again, the skates had got him going, pulled him out of that dark pit. He stood amidst a jumble of stopped work—chairs awaiting varnish, a corner cupboard without doors, a long block of pine just beginning to turn into a leg in the lathe. He had walked out of here after Rosaire’s funeral, locked the door behind him.

  Frowning, he slid his palm slowly along the smooth oak grain of Livingstone’s unfinished desk. Did he know Anna Starling? Good God, it couldn’t have been him in her window.

  Murdock got up a good fire in the small wood stove, a smell of resin rose out of the shavings and sawdust. On the cluttered workbench he cleared space for two boards, their lush, flowing grain deep reds and yellowy browns. Long ago his Uncle Hugh, a saltwater seaman, brought them back from Africa, he loved wood, and he’d passed these on to Murdock. Make a lasting thing out of them, Murdo, he’d said, I never got around to it. Murdock had so often caressed their surfaces, the oil of his fingers had darkened them some, polished them. But their beauty had paralyzed him too: what object was worthy of them? He could never imagine wasting a centimetre, and anticipating that first cut always tightened him up as if it were a surgical incision, and then he hesitated, postponed. But at last, a box for Rosaire. Not for jewellery—oh, how he wished to see her in the broad silver bracelets, the amber pendant, amber earrings, topaz ring, the necklace of dark pearls upon her comely skin—but for her ashes.

  She’d said, You build me a box, Murdock, please. Flushed with fever, half out of her head at times. Handsome boards, she said, maybe hard maple, I like maple. You’d do the best job, Murdo, I’d love that. Brass fittings maybe, shiny. That’s all, I don’t want anything fancy. You’ll do it up nice, I know, the wood would be pretty. Sand it so smooth, like a mirror. You’ll see yourself in the lid, when it’s closed. Murdo, don’t frown, dear. I mean it, I
mean all of it. The love. Lovely, lasting hardwood. Holding my ashes. You love me, don’t you? Come here, sit by me, sit. Let me touch your hands.…

  Very hard was this wood, exotic, from a forest in Africa. Murdock inhaled the oily, spicy scent.

  By early afternoon, working slowly, the strange, bitter aroma of their dust in his nostrils, he had the boards sawn, planed, the joints dovetailed. The ice skates sat on a wall shelf. The pond ice was all but gone, a thin rim at the edges, grey among the broken cattails. She wouldn’t skate this season, and who knew where she’d be come winter again? Even so, they were hers.

  He wouldn’t tell her he had come near enough her window that Saturday night, just visiting, just stopping by, to catch her dancing in her workroom. Alone, at first. And then with a man.

  On his way to the house to eat, there she was, coming up from the shore, Anna in her parka bright red against the wan spring turf of the field. She hailed him, some object in her hand, approaching quickly as if he might rush inside. She seemed not at ease, uncertain of him, as well she might be, given that cold morning she’d phoned him up. Last Saturday night, following the shore to her house, he’d hoped to make up for that, but he’d had to settle for a window look, unclear and troubling.“How are you today, Anna?” he said, offering his hand. She grasped it, returned his smile.

  “A little out of breath, Murdock, is how I am.” The wind had ruffled her rich black hair, rouged her cheeks.

  “What have you there?” he said.

  “Look. A wooden wine goblet from the beach. You’d think it’d be beaten up but it’s not even cracked or scarred.”

  Murdock turned the stemmed goblet in his hands. “Teak.” He sniffed the rim. “Odd item to wash up here. We drink more plain than that. Tipped off of a yacht, I suppose.”