She walked home pretending she had Joe Hurley in her head, sort of standing in her hair, and she was cloaked in the thought of getting his attention. The snow falling. There was a hum from the paper mill. In fact it felt as if the mill was a power generator and the city drew its life from its conversion of fossil fuels to light and in the dark the light was turned to snow.
She figured Richard wanted to sleep with her, so she stayed separate and then he ruined it. She was inscrutable, her hair pulled tight from her face, a slick product, a green hairband. As if she’s doing a lot of work with her face and has to roll up her sleeves, which is her hair. Yes, her face looks like it’s working, even when she’s quietly sitting. It’s her thoughts. Her face is obviously chewing over many thoughts.
Richard:What are you thinking?
Nell: Nothing.
But you are, he thought.
He said Arthur had shown him the paper she’d done on the dying men and loved the image and wanted to say that he was meeting students one on one. There was something analytical in her, something that he could adapt to the computer lab. It was as if he had brought her to the door of his bedroom to tell her this. It made her realize what she wanted, which was Joe Hurley. Joe was a student of his too. Joe, he said, was going places. He was going to hire Joe Hurley.
THERE WAS DISTANCE between Arthur and his wife. They tended not to look at each other, and Nell knew her own trouble at facing someone you are raging at. But it was also true that you cannot quickly sever a bond when youve stood in private rooms and kissed like polite animals smelling scent in the woods. They had gone through a death. It was the death of something to which they’d given birth. Nell didnt feel like a shit disturber, that her own feelings were so new that they must be prized more highly than the jaded and experienced feelings that coursed through this well-educated middle-aged Twombly couple stationed in the hinterland, coming through mourning. She was young, her parents were dead, and she was not wise.
She took the ski trail and slipped into the track left by an earlier skier. At the bend she stepped off into the blazed trail and looked to see if any more snares were set. Even the thought of the snares made her anxious. She stopped by the first old blaze mark and looked for a snare and there was one. A new one, it wasnt one she had missed.
Missus you should stay on trails youre welcome on.
She wheeled around. A man in a checkered woods shirt. Smoking a cigarette. On snowshoes. He had an axe and he was not wearing gloves. She was about a hundred yards off the orienteering loop.
You come down here youre liable to get caught in a snare yourself, he said.
Just the hint of a threat. The ski loop was not well used but there had been another set of skis on it before her. If she yelled someone could hear. The road to the university was just up there. But she wasnt ready yet to be alarmed enough to yell.
I was upset by a rabbit, she said.
I know I lost one. Saw the mess. Thought at first a lynk got him. But then I never known a lynk to go taking up snares.
He looked like he was seesawing towards anger.
Maybe if you didnt hunt so close to the university, she said.
Maybe if the government didnt go building universities on my rabbit line.
He sat himself down on an overhanging bough. He smoked his cigarette and looked away from her.
Then he got up. Come over here, he said. He was walking into the bushes.
She skied up above him and saw him pause near two trees. She could easily outgun him on skis. He was waving her down. She skied down to be ten feet from him.
See this ring here, he said.
He pulled a rusting wire hoop out of the snow with the hilt of his axe. It was like a band saw blade that he snagged up out of the snow.
That’s my moose snare. You dont want to be falling into that. This’ll take your leg off.
He finished his cigarette and threw it in the snow. It sank in the snow.
There’s a big bull, he said, bawling away in there all fall.
He pointed with his chin deeper into the woods behind Margaret Bowater Park.
WHAT DID HE LOOK LIKE.
Nell described him.
Sounds like Loyola Hurley, Arthur said.
Hurley. She thought of Joe Hurley. I went to your office, she said.
Youre a little shaken.
I didnt know I’d want to talk to you.
You probably need to talk to someone who knows the place.
She popped her ski bindings and knocked the skis together and leaned them against the side of Arthur’s house. It was three in the afternoon. His wife wouldnt be home until after five. She saw the stairs and at the top in a room the foot of Richard’s bed where Helen Crofter had put Nell’s coat. There wasnt enough time to weigh the effort it would take to haul herself out of not following him up there if he’d said I’ll be waiting for you in the bedroom.
Let’s go for a walk, he said.
She walked in the ski boots, which made her feel like she was walking on another planet. Nell caught him looking over her head at the neighbours’ house. Or out on the street, though it was a quiet street. He had put on his boots and a puff vest.
Loyola, he said, was the one to find my son. They have a cabin next to mine, that’s how I know Joe Hurley. Joe was a smart kid, he came over to play chess. He knows how to wire a house. No one in his family has ever gone to university, but I talked to Loyola and I got Joe a bursary. Now his brother, Gerard. When it comes to that kind of power, it can go either way.
Richard had taken Joe to Santa Fe for a month. They were setting up a computer lab. This was in the days when computers were as big as rooms and the chess champion could still beat a machine. Richard had explained to Arthur that Joe had it, a kind of manner for machines and numbers. He wanted Joe to work for him, though Joe was considering the reserves. That was the new work now, the work of moving information and storing it in vast boxes, and the army was a good place for a paid education. The reason Joe Hurley was in this kind of study was because of Arthur Twombly. My wife is at work, Arthur said. She’s searching for a legal title.
Nell followed him as they walked down his road and through a trail that ran between two houses. A dog joined them, a neighbourhood dog. Arthur began telling her how Tolstoy, in Anna Karenina, made a dog think. How much in Tolstoy was said in a reproachful or mocking manner. People think, he said, that I sleep with students. I’ve never made a pass at a student. I had an affair with a married woman, and my wife knows about it. I’m just coming out of that, he said. You know about our son’s death.
The one in the picture in the bathroom.
It’s been five months, he said. You dont really know what I used to be like.
But she knew. She knew the heart of him. She knew too the difference in herself since her parents’ death. The difference between her new self and the old one was parallel to Arthur Twombly’s own drift. I was in your class, she said, when you announced it.
I have, he said, several times, been very, what’s the word. Smitten. By a student.
You can give off, she said, alluring eye behaviour.
When his son died Arthur had gone crazy. The love Arthur had for Zac was what had made David move to St John’s. Sasha was having to live with it. It was difficult for Sasha, he knew that. It’s been hard and my wife and I we’re both understanding. So this affair with a married woman. That’s what got around. And once you have one then of course youre capable of sleeping with everybody. That’s called gossip and for some reason I want you to know this about me.
That he was smitten, she guessed.
FOUR
ARTHUR DID NOT SEE HER for eight days. He wondered why she did not come to class or knock on his office door. He was not fully aware of the power he had, and could not see her predicament. He inhaled and kept inhaling until the balloon of his lungs hurt his back. Arthur was not confident that he was worth being loved, and since the death of Zac he didnt care. He was forty-five. He had another son
but he was angry at him. It wasnt that he thought Dave should have done more to save Zac. It was that Zac was him, whereas Dave, Dave did not remind Arthur of himself. He’d said that once to him, when they had a fight. I dont know how I had a son like you. Arthur didnt worry any more what people thought of him, though he did respect what people thought of his wife. The truth is, he realized, he missed Nell’s face.
One day he walked down the orienteering trail where he’d seen her zipping through on skis, but the snow would not hold his weight. Then his wife was away in Chicago dealing with the North American head offices of Bowater and so he approached Nell with a note in the residence laundry room. He missed her. Then he was in the lounge pouring coffee and the window exploded. A snowball. He looked down. Nell was bending to make another one. The second snowball landed on the white patch left from the first. Good aim.
He pulled her skis through the length of the Audi. He drove her back to his house and they went inside and she peeled off a Nepalese sweater then a turtleneck and a pale blue top and collected all her things on the seat of a kitchen chair. Young style. She flipped the back of her hair up and stared inside herself. What was he doing with this situation.
He made two tomato sandwiches. The tomatoes cost a dollar each.
They sat in the living room and listened to a taped radio program of a man describing Frost’s poem about stopping in woods on a snowy evening. They drank a glass of white wine with the sandwiches. Nell touched his knee and then he put his hand on her hand. They sat there holding hands like old people.
When she left he looked at his watch. She’d been in the house forty-five minutes. She skied away from the house along the trail they’d walked that one afternoon. He knew the neighbours had clocked that.
THE NEXT DAY the doorbell rang and it was Nell holding her skis. He pulled her in by the bottom of her coat. Let’s go upstairs, he said. And Nell unlaced her ski boots and went up first and waited at the top of the stairs and said hello in her head to the room that had held the coats. Arthur walked into the bedroom that Richard was using. Nell’s waist was narrow and she was hot from skiing. Arthur pushed her away and she walked back to where she had stood and he pushed her away again. She ran back and shoved him and he fell into a shelving unit. Then she was on him and held the buckle of his belt and she turned the belt buckle over with her cold fingers and knelt and kissed him where the mark of the belt was on his bare stomach. He stood her up and pushed her away again and then walked towards her and cornered her and forced her to sit on the floor. He knelt down to her. He watched his hands land and judge the middle of her. It was as if he was alone in the corner of his son’s room, his forehead pushed against the wallpaper. Though it was Richard’s room now. He had been both jealous and proud of his son, how strong he’d been and his girlfriends and how Zac Twombly wouldnt have settled as quickly as he had. If I could have it all back, he thought, I would not have married Helen so early. Zac was him on a different path. My god they were only what, twenty-two. He thought about that time and he pulled the top of Nell’s head towards himself. The scent they were sending around the rooms. How long would his wife be away. How did smell dissipate. Was this using, was this a breach in goodness. He stopped Nell and helped her up and collapsed his hand in her hair. He kissed her and on her mouth he knew himself and he was alarmed at what he’d allowed. He ran his hands down her body and then pushed her away again and she fell on the bed and she bounced up and laughed and grabbed him and pulled him down. Okay, she said, and opened her legs. He fell into her. They were fully clothed but he discovered himself inside Nell Tarkington. It was one of his other selves that he decided he could keep at a distance from himself and his wife. The root down there and the nerve endings behind his eyes were separate channels of evidence.
Then watching her ski away from the house. If he saw that it would be an affair. How quickly an object recedes.
A week went by. He caught himself thinking of Nell’s skin. The course it followed. He realized she was not nothing, it was not just himself he was wrestling with. There was a personal part leaking through. He sat back and thought of her and thought about her as deeply as he could. Yes, there was no twinge. He worshipped her body.
Look. I am not going to leave my wife.
Nell was too young for this kind of reasoning. She was tenacious and wasnt easily winded. She had no discretion. But the trickle of gossip was not of a new variety—he had been judged already and so no new word headed his wife’s way.
That spring and summer, at least twice a week, Nell met Arthur down by the orienteering trail that doubled in winter as a cross-country ski loop. She got in his car and they drove to Grand Lake. He drove an Audi. It was diesel and he had purchased it out of a dealership magazine and had it shipped from Bremen. It had come aboard a long blue freighter that steamed in the five calm miles of the Bay of Islands, docked near the Humber River and then unloaded the Audi in a yellow box made of Hungarian lumber, the crane swinging it over to the harbour apron where three stevedores touched it on the corners to nudge it a little and make it land flat. He was impressed with how little was needed to alter the course of a three-thousand-pound box. The infrastructure for Corner Brook was huge. It was all built in a time when the prospects for Corner Brook blew off the charts.
She was tall and had long dark hair and she wore the same clothes over and over. He had chosen her because she was the only student he had not from here. You could get into trouble with families. Her mother was from here but her mother was dead. He loved Nell’s body and yet she was too young for him, or he was embarrassed to think of himself with a girl that young. If they were alone on their own planet, but he laughed at himself. There was no future in it. Arthur held her by the shoulder and she felt the peculiar angle of her shoulder blade. Once, when she was nine, she woke up in hospital after a small surgery. Her father had noticed a lump and it was benign. But she thought they had taken the shoulder blade out of her arm. She saw her hands and arms but knew in her back there was no shoulder. She realized she enjoyed this thought, though she immediately worried if women would pity her. She knew that men did not care. It was women who were the problem. Her mother, for instance, an assumption that a weak arm would limit her. As a child she had been scared to death by the war amps commercials. How they pitted children losing an arm in accidents against old veterans with limbs blown off in war. There was something bizarre in the connection of these groups, and with the idea that funding came from depositing lost keys in red mailboxes. She knew an arm without a shoulder blade placed her close to this collection of misfits and she decided in that hospital bed to avoid the stigma. And then the anaesthetic wore off and she realized her arm was normal.
They drove out along the Humber River and parked this time out by Boom Siding and the salmon run was on. Men up to the tails of their coats in the river—I could have been one of them. They watched the anglers arcing rods over their shoulders, a white wet dripping off the corners of their waterproof clothing. Then they carried on to Arthur’s cabin on Grand Lake. There was a lusty carelessness that almost wanted him to get in trouble. He thought she must have other men. The man inside him was lazy. He laughed at himself one day in his office while holding the phone receiver to his forehead. He could hear the student through his skull. I am the other men, he thought.
Arthur Twombly was busy that summer. David was home from St John’s and the family was flying to Detroit to spend the summer in Saginaw Bay. Arthur liked to complicate things. If he were rain he’d fall on the land and flow into a stream and enter the ocean by a river. Some people would just as soon evaporate and rain on the ocean direct—his son David. There’s a lot of rain that falls on water.
Nell didnt see Arthur for two months. She took Richard’s computer lab with Joe Hurley and learned how to send green messages to other students who were sitting in labs like this back in Richard’s hometown of Santa Fe.
She walked through Margaret Bowater Park and enjoyed her choice of aloneness. She did
five hours of weekly volunteer work at the hospital, reading to elderly patients. She felt like if she worked hard, then good things would happen to her. There was a man who combed his hair in the polished mirror of the floor. Once she walked along the green orienteering trail and found the old rabbit line. The snares were up and the band saw blade was gone too. She climbed up through the trees to Jubilee Field and down the quiet street to Arthur Twombly’s cul-de-sac. The town had been planned, the workers up on the hills, the managers of the mill here in the valley. The town was also divided on education—Catholics to Regina, and the Protestants to Herdman. She walked past the Twombly house and looked back to catch an angle of its dark brown siding. Sleeping with a man she could not have, something about it still felt like an ascetic life. She had to be careful with her money because she had decided to give the insurance money to Oxfam in her parents’ names. She knew her father would like that. They had not spoiled her and three hundred thousand dollars might be the wrong thing for her when she’s nineteen. It wasnt easy to give the money away. Oxfam did not want the money. They were suspicious. They suspected she might be acting in a bereaved manner. They forced her to tell her uncle, and Charles was not supporting the donation. Charles sneered at organizations like Oxfam. What about Howard, was his thinking. Howard working at StresCrete. It took six months for the paperwork to make the money go away. Charles thought that was throwing money into the sea.
Her Indian roommate Rasha Vangela. She made curry and the one meal Nell loved was when Rasha had her girlfriends over and they cooked a head of cauliflower. The saris in the cement walls, the intense humid boiling and frying in garam masala. Rasha had a jar of coconut pomade in the bathroom. A strand of hair caught in the twist of the lid. Thick black hair, you could almost see the texture of it, as if the hair were strings of Indian DNA.
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