by Marian Engel
Chapter 15
Next morning, using a crude chart she made for herself by comparing survey maps and marine charts, she set out with the bearon his chain to explore. After a few minutes of his pullingo n his chain, she let him go.He would come back, she knew. She marked the dock, the outbuildings and the tree lookout. She marked a row of stones that appeared to have been a foundation. Then, winding a scarf tight around her head against the blackflies, she set off into the southern part of the bush where the bear had gone.She found him digging happily under a rotten log, filling his craw with mittfuls ofearth and grubs. She stood for a moment listening to the eerie half-silence of the bush. The warblers were back.A woodpecker tapped. There was a motorboat far away. The woods had lost the first innocence ofspring. The skunk cabbage had unfolded in sheets, the trilliums were drying.The sun shone through thin foliage. She whistled to the bear and went on walking, beating a path parallel to the lapping sound ofthe shore, looking for stone formations, rotted cabin-shapes, anything, trying to think what it might have been like to arrive from Portland or Bath and find this.In those terms, the island was unpretentious. She had seen parts of Canada that would cause any explorer to roll back his eyes like stout Cortez. In spite ofthe river’s beauty,and the probable violence of the colours in the fall, this was domestic. Suddenly, she burst through the trees and found herself at the southern point, and thought, my God, how wrong.The river was broad and turbulent. Islands and range-lights winked in the sun. The bear crashed through the bracken and bounded to her, snorting.They came for this, she thought: they were landscape nuts.They intended to make watercolours and have Robert Adam do their drawingrooms,HumphryRepton their facades and Capability Brown their gardens. Failing that, they built log-cabins with handsomely proportioned windows, and not where the view was, but where the bog gave over to maple and sand and there was some protection from the weather. If their consols prospered, they replaced the cabins with tall Victorian houses and sent their sonsout for gentlemen who could return in later summers for the view. the ones who were most truly romantic perished horribly, she remembered. Fell through the ice, contracted pneumonia or tuberculosis, died of strange fevers, scurvy, depression, or neglect. Only the hardiest survived and there few memoirs. Often the diaries that were left to the Institute broke off when the settlers arrived from England. Ifyou were building your own cabin, making your own cloth and soap and candles, furniture and tools, there was no time to concoct a bottle of ink or find a quill to use it with.She was descended from a man who came over from the north of Ireland with a wife and ten children to join his brother in Ontario, who had nine children himself. In New York, when they were making their arrangements for the second stage of the journey, the eldest son went out to explore and disappeared.They hunted five days for him, had to leave without him,cried all the way to Canada. When they arrived months later at the brother’s, he said, “But where’s our Andrew?” where upon the pater familias went upstairs and laydown and died. Leaving his brother with two women and eighteen children. There was a certain mad toughness and a definite fear of New York in the family still.Cary would be what was called gentry, though, she thought. Not like our lot. A wife too grand to follow herman to the woods wasn’t our sort of thing. We would have stayed with him to make sure he didn’t take a drink.
slowly, trying to keep from wetting her leather boots, she made her way, the bear behind her,around the magnificent point to the other side ofthe island, where Lucy Leroy was supposed to have a cabin. In the distance, bell-buoys tolled and lakers hooted, but as she circumambulated the whole island she found no sign ofanother habitation.When she got home, she was exhausted. She had walked so little in the past month, her legs were atrophying. She went inside and lay down for a sleep.When she awoke,it was dark. She struggled groggily with the lamps,made coffee,and went out to feed the bear. His eyes gleamed red-gold in the dark as he bustled towards his dish.As she was finishing her supper, she heard him scratching to be let in and thought,why not? It struck her when she opened the door to him that she always expected it to be someone else. She wondered if he, like herself, visualized transformations, waking every morning expecting to be a prince, disappointed still to be a bear. She doubted that.You say you will work, you work. She went up stairs to work.She always held herself to her commitments. In another incarnation she had worked on a newspaper among people who were always going to leave to write books, but meanwhile scurried from deadline to deadline, for missing a deadline was their form of Original Sin. She left the newspaper not to write but because when she was required to interview a baker on his fiftieth wedding anniversary she found him quailing lest she reveal the fact he had married his deceased wife’s sister. That gave her a perverse desire, which she suppressed, to reveal his truth, anda vivid memory of courses in Victorian history. Suddenly her life on the newspaper seemed ephemeral and impoverished (and it is true that Greek newspapers, like certain insects, are called ‘ephemerides’), and she changed her life in order to find a place for herself in the least parasitic of the narrative historical occupations. She went upstairs to work. The bear took some time to follow her.She was at herdesk when he stood full height at the top ofthe stairs, she paid no attention to him. She had found an autographed first edition of Major Richardson’s Wacousta, inscribed to John Cary with regards in 1832. She wished she had saleroom catalogues to ascertain its value. Meanwhile, she catalogued it and held it a long time in her hands. It was a rare, rare bird, worth coming here for.There were other valuable books, Boston editions that were in fact pirated Canadian editions,produced without revenue to English and French authors, but nothing, so far, to equal Wacousta. Strange I have never read it, she thought, but I won’t read this copy.Get myself a reading copy from Toronto and compare the texts. Well, Cary, you were somebody after all if you knew Richardson.“Lie down, by duck, my beau,” she said, for the find had put her in good humour. Then she reached for the next book, shook it for notes, and opened it. Trelawny’s remembrances of Byron and Shelley. She opened it and began to read (for it was not a sacred copy, not a rarity, it was dated London, 1932).
Trelawny? The man who burned Shelley’s body and saved the heart. Yes, that Trelawny. The pirate. Giant of a man. Went to Greece with Byron after Shelley died. She began to read, enthralled.She had never read this book before, though the subject interested her. Why? Someone, some scholar, had told her it was a pile of rubbish. Most autobiography is rubbish, shethought. People remember things all wrong. But what amusing rubbish this is!What a man! Big. Abusive. A giant.A real descendant of the real Trelawny, the one about the twenty thousand Cornishmen. Oh, I’ll believe he’s a liar. Look at the bear, dozing and drowsing there, thinking his own thoughts. Like a dog, like a groundhog, like a man:big. Trelawny’s good. He speaks in his own voice.He is unfair, but he speaks in his own voice. She sat up and said that out loud. The bear grunted. She got down on her knees beside him. Colonel Cary had left her tiny, painful, creepily paper-saving notes. She was stillsearching the house to find his voice. She had an awed feeling that Trelawny and the bear were speaking in Cary’s voice. Trelawny wanted to find a poet, to know a poet, because he couldn’t be one,and he was romantic about p oets.He lived to be old, he knew Swinburne and the pre Raphaelites. There’s some connection there. Cary wanted an island.
She was excited. She wanted to know how and who this Cary was.Trelawny. Colonel Cary.The bear. There was some connection, some unfingerable intimacy among them, some tie between longing and desire and the achievable. She lay beside the bear and read more Trelawny. Appalling blowhard, savage to both Byron and Mary Shelley. Byron was too sedentary. Shelley couldn’t swim. He bought the boat for Shelley. It wasn’t a good one. She read about the drowning.Then she skipped to the end ofthe book.Oh Christ, he turned the shroud back to have a look at Byron’s lame foot. Disgusting man. All the Victorians, early or late, she thought,were morbid geniuses. Cary was one ofthem and bought himself an island here. He didn’t have Ackerman’s Views or Bartlett’s prints to g
o by.He sensed what he wanted and came and found it. How did he start wanting it? Did he come entranced by the novels ofMrs .AphraBehn, then move on to Atala and the idea of the noble savage, then James Fenimore Cooper? He came for some big dream. He knew it was going to be hard. There were no servants who would come to the remoter islands. Books were procured with the utmost difficulty,and the tale of their difficult acquisition had probably caused this library to be left to the Institute. But in return for the sacrifice of civilization as he knew it, what did Cary obtain? An island kingdom, safely hedged by books? The dissipation ofthe sound of revelry forever?Relief from white neck cloths? Or was it simply hope and change? He came, she thought, to find his dream, leaving his practical wife behind him in York.He was adventurous, big-spirited, romantic. There was room for him in the woods. “Bear,” she said, rubbing her foot in his fur, suddenly lonely.The fire was too hot, and the fur rug had edged towards her.Oh, she was lonely, inconsolably lonely;it was years since she had had human contact.She had always been bad at finding it. It was as if men knew that her soul was gangrenous. Ideas were all very well, and she could hide in her work, forgetting for a while the real meaning of the Institute, where the Director fucked her weekly on her desk while both ofthem pretended they were shocking the Government and she knew in her heart thatwhat he wanted was not her waning flesh but elegant eighteenth-century keyholes,of which there is a shortage in Ontario. She had allowed the procedure to continue because it was her only human contact, but it horrified her to think of it. There was no care in the act, only habit and convenience. t had become something she was doing to herself.“Oh bear,” she said,rubbing his neck.She got up and took her clothes off because she was hot. She lay down on the far side of the bear, away from the fire, and a little away from him and began in her desolation to make love to herself.The bear roused himself from his somnolence, shifted and turned. He put out his moley tongue. It was fat, and, as the Cyclopaedia says, vertically ridged. He began to lick her. A fat, freckled, pink and black tongue. It licked. It rasped, to a degree. It probed. It felt very warm and good and strange.What the hell did Byron do with his bear? she wondered. He licked.He probed.She might have been a flea he was searching for. He licked her nipples stiff and scoured her navel. With little nickerings she moved him south.She swung her hips and make it easy for him.“Bear,bear,“she whispered,playing with his ears. The tongue that was muscular but also capable of lengthening itself like an eel found all her secret places.And like no human being she had ever known it persevered in her pleasure. When she came, she whimpered, and the bear licked away her tears.
Chapter 16
She woke in the morning.The weather was like silk on her skin.Wisps of guilt trailed around the edges of her consciousness. She felt as if she had neglected something. What didn’t I do? Oh dear, what did I do? I was reading Trelawny, getting high on Trelawny, feeling I knew Cary, feeling Ih ad tracked down the mentality, then I … the bear.Sweet Jesus, what a strange thing to do. To have done.To have done to one She tested herself, pinching her conscience here and there to see if she felt evil. She felt loved.It was a beautiful day. She went gingerly outside in her nightdress. She was a little sore. She watered the bear and scratched hi sears and fed him. Then, for her sins, went to the garden and worked for an hour, painfully weeding. The rabbits were wrecking it, and the lettuce was sour. She ought to have a fence or a .22, or just leave it alone. I need meat, she thought. She dressed, and without making breakfast she untied the motorboat and slid through the brilliant morning channel to Homer’s. The world was enveloped in a kind of early summer bliss. Kingfishers splashed, fish leapt, lily pads spread out from the sides of the channel. Keats, she thought. Then, were the romantic poets the only people who saw? On this kind of morning, yes. The weather demanded lyricism. The motor made awful gutterals against the crying of water birds. She felt curiously peaceful.At Homer’s there was a letter from the Director, demanding to know when she was coming back. She bought a pad ofpaperand an envelope, and went outside; sat at one of Homer’s picnic tables beside the river, and wrote,“Dear Director.“Sucked her pen, started another page. “Dear David.” No, “Dear dr. Dickson”would do it.“I have been utterly absorbed in the Cary collection. It is, on the whole, better than we could have hoped,though rather orthodox as a nineteenth-century collection goes.I have found an early edition of Wacousta among some far more ordinary looking books,and hope to make other discoveries. There is also hope that journals willeventually turn up — but not a great hope,Iconfess.“I have been working at a slower rate than usual because I have been forced to put in a garden in order to avoid scurvy. It would be as well if I were a fisherman too, but for messing about with boats I have no patience.“There is a Molesworth map in good condition. “If you wish me to do this job thoroughly and well you will have to allow me to spend the rest of the summer here. I am sure you will have no objection to my spending my annual leave at Pennarth.“Scrawling her name, folding the paper clumsily, licking the envelope and entrapping a gnat, thumping it shut. The bugger misses me.Her second letter was from a feminist friend enquiring why she was not doing research on a female pioneer for International Women’s Year. She replied on a postcard ofa bear cub halfway up a tree that she was having a wonderful time. There,“she said, handing them to Homer.“Any meat today?“Nothing fresh. Doing any fishing?““No, I don’t know how.” “There oughta be some good rods there. The Colonel did a lotof it. Just dig up some worms in your garden there and go out in the boat at dusk. It’s peaceful, and the pike are good in that little cove across the river from you, behind the eastward shoal. Pike are good eating.“She shuddered, bought a dozen eggs,and left.She was an inland person, after all. Still, when dusk came, the river looked appetizing, and there were thoughts she wanted to avoid.She got worms and found an old cork-handled fishing rod in the front hall, set out down the channel.The mosquitoes were maddening. Once she had dropped her line in, she could hardly sit still. There were fish; she could hear them plopping, but she did not know that she wanted to catch them. Pike. Were pike really good eating? What was French for pike?Brocket, Quenelles de brocket. Gelatinous and heavy,like gefilte fish.No thank you.She went to pull in her line and leave and found, to her surprise, that there was a fish on it.As easy as that,was it?She tried to reel it in, but the reel tangled, only wanted to spin out backwards. It was an old cotton line as thick as string so she began, incautiously, to pull it in hand over hand. It cut her palms as the fish struggled away.She became determined. In spite of her diffidence, she now wanted the fish. She would kill it and eat it.She leaned out, nearly capsizing, and pulled and pulled. Eventually and ungallantly, she landed it by hand. It was huge and yellowish. It had a long, evil-looking snout. It flopped over her feet in the bottom ofthe boat.Using the line, which was surely beyond repair now, she tied it to an oarlock. When she got back to the house, she had to get a knife to cut it away from the gunnels of the boat. Then run up again to find a net to carry the fish in. There was no net. She came back with a plastic shopping bag. She cut the line, put her thumbs under the fish’s gills, and flopped it into the bag.Not before she had gashed a finger on its spiny fins.
Now I’ll have to cook it and clean it, she thought. Fish. Friday. In horrible white sauce with slices of hardboiled egg and spinach on the side.No.The only good fish is what your father made on camping trips.Does it have the kind of scales you have to trim off backwards? she wondered.Do you skin and fillet it? Is there a knife sharp enough? Cripes. It was a big fish, the kind real fishermen were proud of. She was already disgusted with it. It kept bumping against her in the shopping bag. “Good eating,” she kept hearing Homer saying.She put it on the kitchen counter. Plop. It eeled out of the bag into the sink, lay there panting for water. She felt she had done a frightful thing,removing it from its kingdom. Its mouth was all torn from the hook.How did she know it wasn’t a rare gar-pike of Lake Michigan, strayed a hundred miles to thrill Louis Agassiz? Or full of mercury? She might get Minamata disease and be arrested for
a drunken indian. It had sour and saturnine face.She could not love it.
Grinning ruefully, she recalled who would. She put it back in the shopping bag and lugged it out to the bear.Tomorrow, she thought, dining in state on bologna sandwich, Homer will ask me if I caught anything. I’ll tell him I snagged the line. She lit the lamps and went upstairs. She had left the office in disarray last night. She tidied, finished carding the shelf of books she had assigned herself, then settled down to read Trelawny properly.She had been too excited last nightwhen his personality emerged and she confused him with Cary. Still, he was pretty good. He noticed things. Didn’t like Mary Shelley, or any woman, much. Useful articles, women, she could hear him thinking, when they keep to their place. She thought of the women the officers brought to Canada with them: beached, bent, practical, enduring, exiled. Still, as many there must have been who enjoyed tugging a new world out ofthe universe as cried and died.Her fishy friend came up the stairs. His tongue bent vertically and he put it up her cunt.A note fell out ofthe book: The off springof a woman and a bear is a hero, with the strength ofa bear and the cleverness of a man.— Old Finnish legend.She cried with joy.
Chapter 17
Summer came in swiftly. Rabbits continued to worry the garden. The Director gave her his gracious permission to spend her holidays there, even threatened to come and visit her.She knew he would neverleave the city. Over the first of July weekend, the motorboats, the tourists, the water-skiers and the cottagers arrived: pallid but hearty summer people. At night, knowing they were still out on the river, she pulled down the blinds, and during the days she felt violated, for thesweet silence was gone. A family even came to the door and asked if she could show them her house. She declined the honour. Lovers built bonfires on her beaches. Water-skiers leapt by her, waving. She did not feel friendly. She wanted to be alone with the bear.The Laplanders venerate it, and call it the Dog of God. The Norwegians say, “The bear has the strength of ten men, and the sense of twelve.“They never, however, call it by its true name, lest it ravage their crops or flocks. Rather, they refer to it as “Moedda aigja,“the old man with a fur cloak.Not that she neglected her work.She worked. Always, they had said ofher, she was nothing if not consciencious She had to work.And there was still enough to do. Aside from mere cataloguing, there was the inventory ofthe house to be made.(And each of its angled rooms seemed to contain inumerable little Victorian tables of a kind that distressed her: four-legged, small topped, of a height and size only for a Bible or a fern or perhaps one of those glass bells that displayed decaying birds or funeral wreaths. The splay of the table legs disgusted her.) There were many things to be counted, and with any luck there would also be things to be edited. For although the lawyer’s inventory existed, it was not nearly complete. One bright morning she woke in good spirits and disclosed to herself the fact that she had not even attempted to open the door to the basement.She was afraid ofdamp, spidery places. She breakfasted and briskly looked after the bear (they could not go swimming because there were four motorboats placidly fishing the channel) and, armed with two flashlights and an oil lamp, went through the door, downwards.The nether region was indeed dark and spidery. To her relief, however, she found four filled oil lamps hanging in brackets from the beams.She lit them one by one and the basement flared into eerie dimensions. Assisted by one of the flashlights, she began to explore. It interested her to find that on two sides the foundations of the octagon had been quarried further to form what presumably were cold-rooms, for one contained wooden racks and green-topped jarred preserves, and three totally withered apples. The other was empty save for the long-decayed form ofa burrowing animal. Orderly people, the Carys.Here were stacked neat coils of stove-wire, ordered rows of pipe. Another corner formed a repository for wicker summer chairs. More discarded fern tables. Pictures(The Soul’sAwakening. Wolfe at Quebec, but not, alas, the Siege of Derry, the one she had always wanted) with melted gilt and plaster frames. So they were not sosophisticated they missed the oleograph era.Old, tasselled snowshoes with turned-up toes. A broken banjo.(Did they sing”Old BlackJoe”on the porch steps at night?)Then, along another wall, trunks; in fact, a history of trunks: hoop-topped ones with stamped tin bindings, doubtless lined with printed birds; large theatrical wicker hampers; wood-bound World War One footlockers; turn-of-the-century wardrobe trunks, fit to contain a hundred brides. Trunks upon trunks. Work. Treasure.She grinned and took the boat down to Homer’s and asked if he and Sim could lend her a hand.“Want to get some stuff up from the basement,” she said vaguely. Homer’s eyes glinted behind his glasses. He went to the house part behind the store and spoke to his wife.Her voice rose high and pettish behind the rows of canned goods. “Hepped on those damned Carys,” Lou heard.“Open til nine and then goodness knows what time. Something queer goin’ on, I betcha.“Lou blushed, felt like running away. She thinks I’m after him, she thought. “You wife can come too,” she said to Homer. “The way she’s carrying on, she might like to get her face wiped off,“Homer said, without changing his cheerful grin.“She don’t like me going to the island.Never did. Thinks it’s haunted or something, a bad influence. Look, I can come over myself if you like, if you think the two ofus can manage. Gotta leave Sim to manage the gas pumps. Babs is a pretty good girl but somehow she never cottoned on to the gas pumps.” “How many kids have you got, Homer?” “Nine, counting the two she adopted.” “Gosh, that’s a lot.““You wouldn’t leave a kid without a home just because you’re scared of a little work.” “I would.She wouldn’t. Listen,we can do it when you’re not so busy.” “Monday night’s not so bad. I couldn’t help you on a weekend. This is the busy season,and now we’ve got the campground—they don’t know anything,you know. Half the time not even how to light their Coleman stoves.You got to make sure they don’t fill the tanks with barbecue lighter fluid.Then there’s all the business of the Flushabyes going down the septic tanks. Gotta have septic tanks. What do people go camping for if they can’t take their children?Some of the women spend all their time in the laundromat and the outboards to fix at the Marina.Gosh,some of them come up here and sit in their trailers all day drinking beer. Fishing widows. Main thing is, you can’t do it no more for $2.50 a day, not with all the new regulations. Anyway, I’ll be glad to get away for a bit. She’ll simmer down.” She drove back, her thoughts divided.She felt she was taking a man away from his wife.She felt she was offering him something of a holiday.She was glad his wife adopted children and refused to man gaspumps,but she was angry with her raised and querulous voice. Fish wives give us all a bad name, she thought. Fishwives. Fishwidows. And we all set out to be mermaids. Bears were once common on the British Isles. Caledonian bears were imported by the Romans and used asinstruments of torture. In Wales,it was a beast of chase.Homerbrought a bottle of rye.They had a drink, then went below and lit the lamps.He had never, he said, been “below decks” but once before, and that to bring up some lawn chairs when the old lady held a dim flashlight. He peered around fascinated.He found a stash of old lamps she had not noticed, coal-oil lamps, fancy candle-shades, even a brass student’s lamp,which he coveted. Eventhough it was the Institute’s by law, she gave it to him. Why the hell not? she thought. He’s been so good to me. One by one, they dragged the trunks up the stairs. They put some in the kitchen, some in the bedroom and the dining room. Sat down exhausted at the table.“Well,” he asked, “aren’t you going to open them?““I guess I should.” It struck her as odd that now when there was treasure trove all around her, she was not shaking. “You should dust them, first,” he said. “I guess I should.” “You’re not that kind of woman, are you?” “What kind of woman?““Housekeeping first.““Hell, no, Homer.““You better clean ‘em up before you open them. Where you’ve got no running water, the thing is to get at the dirt right away.Can’t hose the place down,you know.” “Which one first?““You want me to be here?““If you were told to go away, would you, Homer?““Nope.““The oldest or the newest?““That footlocker there from the first war.
I was always interested in uniforms.” She found a rag and rubbed at the trunk.Not too well in case she should appear to be giving in to him. Opened the trunk. It contained two rough green brown army blankets “Can’twin ‘em all,” Homer said.“Have another smidgen of the good stuff.“Some were empty, some were full.One contained empty Gem jars and one beautiful dresses from the nineteen twenties and thirties: beaded chintzes, hcavenly dark velvets, and a strange peach-coloured velveteen evening coat appliqued with silver kid. She took them into the bedroom and tried them on in front ofthe tall, swinging pierglass. Homer loomed in the doorway.“They don’t go with your tan,” he said. “I don’t know what to do with all my straps.” “They held their own busts up, my mother used to say.” nonsense, they tied them down so they could pretend they didn’t have any. On the farm girls, it didn’t work.” Breasts were not Homer’s subject. He began to talk about the marina business. He told her more about the marina business than she would ever need to know. “Whose were the old dresses, do you think?““Oh, the old Colonel’s, I think. She went some where away to school, England, I guess, or Montreal, and she was away a long time.I heard tell once I think, only I’m not sure I remember, she took some millionaire’s daughter around to parties in Europe in the good old days before the crash. In those days they didn’t let the girls run loose. I guess the Colonel had good connections, so she took this girl all around and kept an eye on her. She used ta tell me something about the way they lived over there. They’d hire a plane to get from Paris to parties in London or Oxford, a little open four-seater.They had their own sheepskin jackets and leather helmets made, she said.” “Wow.” “Ah, you and me, what would we do with a butler, eh? Tip him and call him ‘my man’?When I was guiding there was an old Yankee gent I liked, he was real generous, sometimes he called me’my boy.’ I told him I’d quit if he didn’t call me Homer. Or Campie, sometimes they called me Campie, in those days. He understood.” “Come on into the other room, and we’ll get atthe rest of the trunks.” “You know, when you’re drinking, you’ve got to be careful of the lamps.““I’ll take the flashlight in, and you light the gas bracket for me.““Good girl.“She did not like the parlour. It was full of wrong angled, unlivable corners, the weakness ofthe octogon. The furniture was squared and sat ill and off centred. Every time she went into the room,it imprinted on her the conventional rectangle and nagged. However, under the flickering light, half hunkering against the horsehair sofa, she opened one of the trunks.As she leaned to its mystery,Homer pinched her behind. “Don’t,” she said”Engaged elsewhere?“Her heart flopped.“You are,” she said.“Oh, hell, Babs and I … twenty-four years. If a guy can’t . . “If a guy can, she can.” “I’d kill her.““Then keep your hands off me.“He stood sulkily before her now, glowering.“You asked me over.” “To help me with the trunks. As you’ve helped with the trunks.I didn’t ask you to bring the booze, though I’ve enjoyed it. Let’s see what’s in this trunk.” He took her arm.“Look here…” “Shut up, Homer.” She stood and faced him.They were the same height. She was younger, he was stronger. She liked him, but she did not like what he was doing. Taking, she thought, advantage.Suddenly, she wanted to pull rank, pull classon him,keep him in his place. She knew they were equal but she did not feel they were equal, in her head she was a grand lady going to balls, he was a servant who knew her secrets. She was still wearing, in fact, a ball gown. She looked down.There is cleavage, there are breasts half hanging out”Oh God, I’m sorry,” she said. Homer shook his head. “It wasn’t that. I like you, you know. I like you. When I like a woman I like her no matter what she wears. Don’t matter none to me if you’re in jeans and a checkered shirt. Sure, I’m full ofbooze.A man gets a night off every once in a while. Nothing wrong with that.You like it, too, don’tyou? Never once turned down a drink, nor offered one. You’re a snob.I never knew you were that. I should have.” She tried to hold him back.“Homer …” He jammed his cap on his head.“If you want any work from now on you’ll contract it through your Institute, your fucking Institute.“She stood, uncertain, then touched him. “Sit down.” “No, I’m going.““Come into the kitchen where it’s friendly and I’ll put on a sweatshirt so I’m not a grand lady any more. We haven’t notched the bottle yet.” “I got to go home. Babs’ll be mad.” “Come and sit down … my man.” Because the wheels were going around in her head, bells were ringing, she was understanding things. “I like you,” she said in the kitchen.“But there’s Babs.And if I pay you with sex where does that leave me?” “You got a good head,” he said. “I hadn’t thought of that.That bit about Babs—you leave that to me. It’s our private business, see? Everyman and his wife have a deal, you can’t interfere with it. No way you can be good to Babs by pulling a fast one on me. She won’t appreciate it. She don’t care if I’m pulling trunks upstairs or screwing you, it’s all the same to her. I’m just not there. She’s a woman, shewants me to be there, right under her thumb. But a man’s got to be away some of the time, and she don’t man the gaspumps no matter what.” She was thinking, I won’t ever lie back on a desk again, not ever, ever …. “But,” he said,“I like you. And you’re living here all alone. You like to drink, I thought, well, she probably likes to screw and what’s all that wrong with it? You’re a modern woman, after all.“She thought, I could take him into my bed and send him off at dawn through the reeds and the kingfishers. I like him. He’s hard, he’s tough, he’d begood at it. I could hold him. Maybe he’d even hold me. It would be human. God knows, there might be something country boys know I never heard of. But it went against some grain in her. “Listen,” she said.“Just help me move the trunks away so there’ll be a clearway through the kitchen. Anyway, I’ve got the curse. And I did give you some Scotch once, Homer.“She was afraid then that he’d say something unforgivable about riding the rags, but he didn’t. He helped her.“Are we still friends?” she asked.Sort of,” he said sheepishly. Both of them knew they had nobody to tell about this, and it made them feel better.