She was involved, she realized, in monastic improvement. At the campus in Corner Brook she found a Buddha decal and stuck it to the back of a bronze bust of Wilfred Grenfell that stood in the foyer. She left notes inside the bust hoping someone would find them and write back. The college was named after Grenfell. Grenfell once ate his dogs and used their pelts to make a flag to attract attention. He was lost. Grenfell has a wonderful hospital in Labrador with thick banisters and ochre paint and glossy skirting boards. If you ever go there.
The next week Arthur Twombly was back and he mentioned the son and he hesitated and looked out the window as if Zac might be there, but then he stared hard at us. His son was in his students. You could see his arms galvanized to this realization and it made him touch his neck around the collarbones and breathe deeply.
Once, when she was about twelve, Nell was looking for Christmas gifts in her parents’ closet. She found a dozen bags of white sugar. They were stiff and stacked like bricks. There was trouble with Cuba. She realized her mother was preparing for a siege. There was something in how Arthur Twombly now arranged himself that made her think he was under siege. Some internal force had him cornered.
Arthur put his feet up on his desk. He wore shoes that were leather on the bottom and his socks had a pattern to them. They were expensive socks. He was vain. What do you want to do with your life?
She stared at his impressionist painting. I want to be a famous artist.
Do you know you just said famous.
She found it hard to talk to him. It strained her eyes. She wasnt used to concentrating on a person’s face. Or engaging. Concentration was something you did alone. You did it with a book.
I was kidding, she said. But she hadnt been. She knew she wouldnt paint or write or sing, but she had ambition and she wanted to be noticed. That’s where the Buddha came in, to shed these desires.
I want you to really see things, he said. Even dangerous things.
That Christmas she went to visit her aunt and uncle in Burlington. Burlington is about forty miles southwest of Toronto. It is named after a British parliamentarian who spent some time advocating land reform in the colonies (marshland from the Humber River should be drained and turned into port facilities). Those days are gone, the naming days. Now things are named with no connection between the place and the name. Anyway, my forlorn sadness at the state of things in Nell’s early adulthood. There was a carton of apple juice cans under her bed. She watched her uncle climb into his car, the way he closed his eyes as he ducked in. How he shut the door and pressed his brake lights on and pulled the choke. If only he could believe in me the way he believes in that car.
She switched her ticket and returned to Corner Brook before New Year’s. She took a pair of orange cross-country skis from the rafters in her uncle’s basement. They were Howard’s skis. She found matching lacquered bamboo poles tangled in a bunch in a corner. Her old cracked boots in a top closet and a bag of ski waxes in lead containers.
Nell skied up to Crow Hill at midnight and watched the cold, lonely fireworks spiral in a grey disappointment over the paper mill. In a way, Corner Brook was a Burlington, but at least it had geography. She realized, standing there in her brass bindings, she had chosen this town to be a new Burlington, and what did that mean about her ability to think wide. She looked around at the deep clefts filled with snow, the chain-link fence, the mill pummelling out steam. Suicides came up here, and couples in compacts to make out. Sometimes a car had two couples in it. If Nell had peered into the frosted windows of a blue Matador, she’d have seen Arthur’s son stretched out in the back seat with Gwen Hurley and myself badly drunk in the front with Maggie Pettipaw. Gwen and Maggie were not our girlfriends, just girls we’d known in high school who were now studying nursing and occupational health and safety and were more than happy to enjoy us before we left Corner Brook for good. For we had decided to leave on New Year’s Day. The white tongue of the bay, frozen over. The large peninsula of bark and waste that marched out over the frozen inlet. And the mill humming along, the cement almost green, alive in the way mould is alive.
Nell skied down the unploughed roads. She broke through the herring-bone pattern she’d made on the way up.
In Margaret Bowater Park there was a guy sitting on a freshly sawed stump. He was looking at a parked car. The car had a flat. It looked like he had just cut down the tree so he could sit there and watch the tire lose air. He was drinking a beer.
There was a second course with Professor Twombly after Christmas. She decided to risk it. Nell had come to study communications, but was veering into physics and sociology. She tried narrowing her eyes, but in that focus nothing meaningful materialized. It was like the surprise she had in movies when someone searched with binoculars, and then that sideways-8 framing of the screen occurred as the thing in the distance was found. She had never found anything with binoculars. She had to discover it first with the naked eye and then use binoculars. So her narrowing eyes had nothing to focus on. She did a course in cartography until she woke up one night with a map multiplying in her head, it was like cell growth. It made her think her brain was pregnant. She had taken communications for an easy credit, but it was her hardest course. Who knew reading King Lear was the study of a society transforming from roles to jobs? She turned nineteen in that cinder-block apartment with no friends and felt like she had to try and get close to him. She wanted to be alluring.
She skied every day, doing a loop in behind the Curling Club. She loved the quiet of it, just the sizzle of the skis. One afternoon she noticed off in the woods a spruce tree with a blaze mark. She peeled off to look at it. The snow was wet and her skis stuck, she was using orange klister but the snow temperature had dropped. The scoring on the trunk had been done with an axe. Then she saw another one about a hundred paces in. She skied to that. She was on a blazed trail that was full of new snow. The snow was deep but mainly downhill and it was nice to get off the main run. Then she saw a moving white on white. A dark blinking, the ears set back. It was an arctic hare. The fur around the neck was wet and matted and a raw red ring lifted like a gill, the dull noose of wire. Its alert eye. The snare had cut through the fur but the rabbit was sitting and breathing. She was alarmed and stopped but then skied up to it and the rabbit flung itself away from the snare and the snare tugged it back. She stood quiet again and then she knelt near it, her knee down on one ski. She was frightened by something so wild and alive. But it wasnt alive it was pretty much strangling there. She released her bindings and took off her skis. She tried to walk around behind the rabbit. Its ears followed her. She fell on her knees and made a grab for the panicked back. Thin. Its strong legs plumed up snow. She closed her eyes and pushed the wire through itself and slipped the head out of the noose, but she felt the neck and it was rubbed down to white bone. The noose was picture frame wire. The rabbit hopped off and did a comic swoon and tumbled over. A stain of blood along its white coat.
She stood over the rabbit. Then she dug a hole in the snow and laid the rabbit in the white hole and buried it in snow. She felt very down about it all.
Nell skied along the blaze. She felt blood pumping in her head and took off her hat and stowed it in a pocket. She unbuttoned her coat. The next small cut was on a fir tree. Another grey snare just in a ways. Empty. She unwound it from its stump. She knew what they looked like now and collected twenty-two snares. When she got back to campus she put the snares down through the white lid of a garbage can.
They dont die from the snare, Arthur Twombly said. They perish of hypothermia. She stood very close to his shoulder as he suggested they walk down the hall for a coffee from the machine. They have to keep moving, he said, or they freeze. He handed her a coffee. There was a poster of graduates from the program, their faces in ovals. From a distance it looked like honeycomb, with portraits of all the worker bees.
In her bedroom that night she imagined Arthur Twombly bending his knees. She could hear typing and the AM radio station Lori Durdle li
ked with the commercials that were louder than the songs. The way the rabbit had kicked up snow, it had scratched her wrist. The excitement. It made her think of how Proust sometimes needed two starving rats in the room to get aroused. Professor Twombly had told them that and she didnt believe it until he provided the letter to André Gide. The deep throb of the small city. But it was not the city, it was the refrigerator.
Nell knew she was focusing on him because she had shut herself down. She felt deprived of stimulus and here the erotic side was leaking in. She nodded to herself, she could see how unhealthy it was. She watched the fantasy life reel out and she let herself dream the entire way.
In her mail slot at the laundry room there was a note from Arthur Twombly written with a fountain pen. A man who had developed a loose writing style. That last paper you handed in, the idea of men dying on the battlefield, and the death sounds, when recorded, were indistinguishable from the sounds of orgasm. That’s a beautiful thought, Nell.
She looked at the word indistinguishable. No one had ever written her a note with the word indistinguishable in it. Something in it rhymed with inextinguishable. She felt definitely that the note was code.
He stood by his desk, slightly leaning as he had his fingers touching the desk. It was the new year, he said, and he was starving for students like her. Why on earth had she ever come to Corner Brook? She was the only student he had who wasnt from the island. She should think about communications but she should not stay in Corner Brook. There were better programs at McMaster and U of T. I’ll recommend you, he said, and there are bursaries you can apply for. Wasnt she an Ontario resident? There was a tax credit for parents in Ontario, her father or mother should receive the forms.
His face was turned to her and she closed the door. She had stopped smoking because he didnt smoke. My mother was from here, she said. My father had come to do a locum and met her and then they were married and moved away. They had me. We lived in Burlington, but they often spent a season of the year in a small place.
They were on their way to northern BC in a little plane. Her father was doing a locum there and her mother wanted to ski. The last thing she saw her father do was collect a handful of AA batteries. He was picking them up out of a drawer in the kitchen to put in something portable. That’s the last I knew of my parents, she said, and then I had to handle their mail and transfer monies and decipher how my father had balanced the bills. There were a lot of numbers to go through and I was only eighteen.
She had just finished high school and had been applying to universities on both coasts. Her uncle—her father’s brother—arrived and he loved his brother and was useless.
Uncle Charles lived in a hotel for three weeks and expensed all his costs to the deceased. I had to encourage him to go back to Burlington, that I’d handle it. Which I couldnt do. I was an only child and I felt angry that no one was around to help me.
There was insurance and a pension, but then there was a mortgage and there were ordinary debts. If she sold the house she’d have three hundred thousand dollars. It felt like a lot of money and then at other times it felt like no money at all.
He put a hand across her shoulder, the soft fabric of his good shirt, a youthful shirt. He kissed her in his office and she accepted his open face. She pushed his hand up under her breast. Then his mouth moved away and he opened the door. Arthur, being this close to her mouth. But now nothing had happened and she noticed his teeth were bad.
He and his wife had a friend visiting from New Mexico, Arthur said. A guest lecturer that she should go hear. Youre good with numbers and if you like him we’ll bring you over for dinner. She went to Room 112-A to hear him. Perhaps it was about computers, or essays on computing. It was prose but it was short and the talk was about what had been generated on a computer. She realized students around her knew who he was, that Richard Text had a book with a modest cover and this book was on several of the study desks. Published by a small university press in the States.
She saw Richard the next day on West Street in a barbershop. He was sitting by the window and across his shoulders was the shadow of letters: FOR ME. And she thought, He’s for me. She looked at the window: HAIRSTYLING FOR MEN. He was reading a book. No one reads books in public.
She went over to the house to meet him because she wanted to see what the inside of Arthur Twombly’s home looked like. And how he got along with his wife. Nell was devoting a good chunk of energy to becoming a different person from the one she’d been in Ontario. She’d learned a repertoire of behaviour that made people enjoy her, but she knew the repertoire wasnt really her. The repertoire had gotten out of hand. Kissing Arthur Twombly was something she’d done unintentionally and yet, when she saw the opportunity, recognized it might be considered a new development and progress rather than repetition.
Still, she wanted to live and to listen to interesting people and she decided on a course of action which was to be kind and open and veer on the side of boring people rather than rely on the repertoire.
THREE
THE TWOMBLY HOUSE is a rich dark brown with red trim. It looks like a piece of raw liver, it’s the only house in town that’s painted that way. The wife, Helen, was a business lawyer who worked for the pulp mill. Different last name, Helen Crofter. I’m not sure if back then she went by Crofter or had Twombly as a last name, but she’s a Crofter now. All the lights on both floors were on. In one window a chandelier. It was full of cut-glass pendants laced around a green copper base and below this was where the four of them would eat their salad. Nell would be partnered with Richard Text and she was encouraged by the generosity in this length of light-bearing windows. Nell opened the front door and was surprised to see other students. It was a big party. Of course it wouldnt be just the four of them. She was depressed when Helen met her with a polite face. She felt ashamed of her coat, of the wear line where she’d dropped the cuffs, when Helen took it up the stairs to lay on a bed. Youre nineteen yes? Arthur made her a vodka martini and a flurry of delight rushed through her skin. Arthur Twombly was attending her. She concentrated on the surfaces of things so she could make it all a dramatic event in her diary. Richard Text came over. He was eating an apple. Then he held it away from his mouth the way truck drivers hold the ham radio to listen.
I like shorter books, Richard said.
Arthur: For instance.
I dont want Middlemarch.
You just want a couple of days in March.
A bath of good feeling swamped them and Nell was surprised. Arthur Twombly, she could see, dusted off the goals a man had let sit in the back of a closet since second-year university. He converted people with his scrutiny that was barely judgmental, or at least the judging was generous and without doubt. He did not possess an attitude that made one self-conscious or stutter, and it was only after leaving Arthur Twombly that this impression would be noted. It was true that, under focus, when the diaries were trying to note the precise nature of his performance, the performance could not be crumbled into sentences. You had to be there, more than one person has said. If you only knew him, and a wondrous marvel came over the face.
I first understood Richard at a bullfight, Arthur said.
Youve never truly understood me, Richard said.
Then a young man came over, and Nell knew him.
I saw you, she said, sitting on a tree stump.
The young man thought about that. What was I doing, he said.
It was New Year’s Eve, she said, and you were trying to come up with an equation that would measure air pressure in a deflating tire.
Joe Hurley, he said, and he touched his forehead with his thumb. And that’s exactly what I was doing.
Which got Richard’s attention. But then Nell saw that Richard knew Joe Hurley, and of course Arthur Twombly had invited him. Joe had received a bursary to attend a summer program of study with Richard and Arthur in Madrid. They had been to the Sunday bullfights, drunk sherry in a bar with a wall of oak barrels. They had sat on aluminum kegs o
f beer, you remember that Arthur? Joe called him Arthur. They had stayed up all night on a train to Pamplona and visited the shining tips of white horns behind a fence before the running of the bulls, and they all jumped aboard another train departing for San Sebastian and arrived with drinks in their hands to stumble down the cold sand to the surf and plunge in, still holding their mix of cola and red wine aloft. There was no real difference between student and teacher in Madrid, it appeared. They were comrades.
There were five students and the three adults at dinner and Nell Tarkington clicked in and did her party pieces and at one point got up from the table to do a dance. She did the dance with Joe Hurley staring at her. They had no idea who she was. A lot of the food at dinner as well as the clothes that Helen and Arthur wore were not things you could purchase in Corner Brook. They took trips to Montreal and New York and filled their carry-on bags with clear vacuum packages of deli items and jars of pesto and Italian shirts and boxed sets of chamber music. There was no work in Montreal and they couldnt live in Toronto because it was too ugly. You had to sign a form at the liquor store, Helen said, marking what alcohol you wanted and the reason why you wanted it. The reason.
As she was finding her winter boots Richard was on the third stair and suggested she go up with him. He was in the room with the coats. He had a record player and he played the son’s records. The son he was talking about was David, and David was, at that moment, in St John’s sharing an apartment with me. I get a kick, Richard said, out of living like a teenager. Even though youre thirty, she said. Even though I’m thirty-one. He lives in Santa Fe, working for the US military. His office is on a road named after Robert Oppenheimer. He seemed very right wing. Yet he was bohemian.
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