Machine Without Horses
Page 4
So, this is how I imagine it goes.
Megan arrives on time for the ceilidh. Evelyn arrives late. She had argued with her husband before the dance. He had wanted her not to go out that evening.
“You’re never at home anymore,” he said. And she had relented somewhat, because she did feel guilty about all her absences. She did feel guilty about seeing so much of Megan Boyd and neglecting her family.
Evelyn relented and agreed to stay home that night and forgo the dance, knowing how much she would be missed. Her feelings of guilt prevailed and she decided she needed to put her family first, needed to prove where her loyalties really lay.
The trouble was that her husband had just wanted to make a point, and after an hour of numbing small talk with his wife, he wandered off to listen to the football match in the lounge, and Evelyn was left drinking cups of cold tea in the kitchen and feeling like she’d made a dreadful miscalculation.
At the dance, Megan goes through the motions, but she can’t concentrate properly on the festivities. She is constantly watching the door to the village hall, her breath in her throat every time it opens, and then the corresponding disappointment when the new arrival isn’t Evelyn.
She leaves at the break, gulping in the cold night air to stop from crying as she rushes out to her car. And there, running down the lane, her coat unbuttoned and her hair down, is Evelyn.
This is the unguarded moment. This is the beginning they have been waiting for, the one they couldn’t make happen for themselves.
To the outsider, it is nothing. One woman expected another to show at a local dance and is disappointed that she doesn’t. But to Megan, it is weeks and weeks of emotions so freighted that she is collapsing under the weight of them. And to Evelyn, it is the terrifying realization that it isn’t her husband she longs to be with, and though she tries to bury her feelings under duty, she just can’t seem to manage this charade tonight. So, they rush at each other, in the darkness of the country lane, with no one else around and the cheerful noise of the music behind them in the overlit hall. I don’t think they say a word. They rush at each other and hold on. And then they kiss, and it all begins.
But now what?
For a moment, perhaps this moment in the rutted country lane, with the hall glowing behind them like a lantern, and the soft pass of an owl in the darkness overhead, all will be well. The release of weeks of pent-up emotion will be such a relief, and the expression of shared desire will feel like a miracle to both of them.
It will be a miracle.
They will let it lead them and they will stumble after it, giggling and clumsy, then surprised by the startling clarity of sex, when they get there. They won’t waste any more time in Megan’s garden. Now they will be in a hurry to get to bed, and Evelyn will stride from her car through the garden, barely noticing the flowers or the long blue line of the sea.
And just when it has them, when they are helpless in the clutches of love and desire, all the other feelings will suddenly return. Evelyn will be awash in the terrible guilt that comes from cheating on her husband and neglecting her family. Megan will feel the shame of what they are doing, will fear being caught out. How can they have a future? If Evelyn leaves her family, she can’t just move in with Megan. It’s too small a community. They will be ostracized and talked about. A woman is never forgiven for leaving her children. Megan’s business will suffer as a consequence. If they move to another community, it will take a while to set up in business again, and she might not be as successful there. They will have no means of support; no one who will accept them or forgive them for what they have done.
Love makes starting over seem possible, but starting over is always harder than it seems, and it becomes less and less appealing, the more time goes by. The sheer willpower it takes to upset a life is considerable, and while it seems, in its initial stages, that love is all sustaining, it isn’t, and after the changes have been made, this becomes quickly apparent.
So it ends. Not from lack of feeling, but from lack of opportunity. No one finds out about the affair, partially because no one can even imagine that such a thing could exist. Evelyn stops going to the country dances, spends her evenings at home, trying to coax pleasure out of being with her family. She avoids driving the road past Megan’s cottage. She tries not to think of the kisses, the laughter, the way her body felt under Megan’s, and eventually, she is mostly successful. Megan just works harder, takes in more orders, disobeys her own rules of only tying flies during daylight hours and starts to ruin her eyes with the smoky light from the paraffin lanterns at night.
But what of Glen of the Fairies? In this attempt at giving Megan Boyd a love life, I have forgotten the one real piece of evidence that might exist for such a fancy.
I think that, in this scenario, Glen of the Fairies was where Evelyn and Megan had gone once, on a perfect, and rare, day out, and all of Megan’s subsequent Sunday trips to Glenshee were about remembering what had been, were a sort of memorial to that love.
There are, of course, other things to consider. A friend of mine, who is a doctor, likes to say, “Mostly it’s not cancer. Mostly it’s just heartburn, or a virus.”
Because the simplest explanation is often the correct one.
Once, I had dinner with a famous novelist. He was wearing two different watches, one on each wrist. I asked him why he had on two watches and he said, “I’m going to tell you two different stories, and you tell me which one is the right one.”
He pointed to the watch on his left wrist. “This was my father’s watch. My parents divorced when I was twelve and I didn’t see my father for much of my teenage years. He showed up unexpectedly on my twenty-first birthday and gave me this watch, which he had been given when he was twenty-one by his father. At first, I was angry with him for his long absence and I refused to wear the watch. But later, I came to appreciate the gesture, especially since he died shortly after that exchange. I put the watch on and have never taken it off.”
The novelist tapped the face of the watch on his right wrist.
“I bought this watch because the other watch stopped working, and then, when I put this watch on, the first watch suddenly started working again.”
I guessed correctly.
The simple explanation is that there was no lover. Megan Boyd had been to visit Glenshee with her parents when she was a child and it held sentimental attachment. Or she had gone there alone, as part of her efforts to acquaint herself with the Scottish wilderness. She enjoyed the landscape and she drove there with her dog, on her one day off each week, wandering through the hills and having her tea out as a treat.
Or, there was someone she was once romantically interested in—a man or a woman, it hardly matters which—and she simply never acted or was unable to act on her feelings. She might have met the person during one of the dance competitions at Inverness. Perhaps there was a group outing the next day to Glen of the Fairies and she spent that day in the company of the man or woman whom she had a crush on, not experienced enough in matters of the heart to know that chances are good that someone for whom you have feelings is likely to also have feelings for you.
But while this may be the “truth,” it can’t be the story. A story needs drama, incident. A story needs people in it, not simply a woman walking with her dog over the hills, or tying endless salmon flies in the shed in her garden. A story, this story, needs Megan Boyd to have a lover.
11.
WHEN I TAKE THE DOG DOWN TO THE RIVER tonight there is more activity than usual. People are walking along the banks, peering into the water. There are police officers riding their bikes slowly through the woods, looking right and left into the thicket of trees.
“What’s going on?” I ask one of the officers by the river. “Is it the missing cow?”
“Cow?” He looks at me like I’m crazy. “It’s a missing person.” He reaches into his jacket pocket, hands me a photocopy with a picture on it. In the picture, a smiling, handsome man holds a small dog in hi
s arms. I recognize the dog.
“That’s George,” I say.
“His name is Carlos,” says the policeman, plucking the piece of paper from my hand.
“No, the dog. The dog’s name is George. I know them. I just saw them yesterday. What’s happened?”
“They were spotted walking here a few hours ago and then the dog was found down by the car park, soaking wet. No sign of Carlos Bastida. It looks like he might have gone into the river. His sister said he doesn’t know how to swim.”
“But the river isn’t over a person’s head?” I say. In fact, it is lower than usual this year because of the drought. It is probably only up to my knees in the deepest part. It seems impossible to drown in something that shallow.
The policeman shrugs, bored of my questions. “The dog was wet. The man can’t swim. This is what we have to go on. If you see anything on your walk, let us know.” He hands me a business card and moves off in one direction, while I move off in the other.
It is unsettling to think of someone disappearing while doing something so banal as walking a dog. Also, it is hard not to think that something awful has happened to Carlos if his dog has shown up without him. I turn away from the river and head back into the shelter of the woods.
12.
PAUL IS IN A STRANGE MOOD WHEN I ARRIVE at his house the next morning. He isn’t waiting in the driveway when I pull in. I have to knock on his front door, and when he appears, his face is red and his hair is askew. He is wearing yet another immaculate shorts and shirt ensemble, but I can’t shake the feeling that he has been crying as he leads me, wordlessly, down the hallway of his bungalow, towards the rickety basement stairs.
When we are seated in our side-by-side fly-tying seats, which I have come to think of as being the cockpit of an airplane—pilot and co-pilot—Paul just stares at his vise, his hands immobile in his lap.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“I should never have let you tie the Jock Scott,” he says, without looking at me. “It’s too difficult a fly. You will just make a hash of it.”
This is rather harsh criticism, considering that I have done a fair job of laying down the base layer of thread and tinsel and tying in the pheasant tail.
“Well, I just need to go through the motions,” I say. “For research purposes. I have your example to study for how the fly should actually look.”
“I appreciate your helping me,” I add.
“All well and good,” he says. “But what’s the point?”
I have no idea what he’s talking about.
“I like that you’re a writer,” Paul says. “I don’t usually have writers as clients. It’s mostly fishermen. I thought it would be an interesting change.”
“And isn’t it?”
“You don’t understand.”
“Well, explain it then.” I am losing patience with his halting way of communicating. He has probably spent more time alone than with people, working first on model airplanes and then on fishing flies. I have a flash of thinking that perhaps Megan Boyd wasn’t good at communicating either. Perhaps her exchanges were limited to remarks about her fishing flies or the weather. Perhaps she excelled at country dancing because it was a mute pastime.
Paul pushes back his chair abruptly. “Follow me,” he says, and heads back across the basement to the staircase.
In the kitchen, he leads me over to the fridge and wrenches open the freezer door.
“I can’t eat them,” he says.
I peer into the ice-encrusted box and see a neat stack of trays. Each tray appears to have a piece of masking tape affixed to it, with writing on it. I can only read the top label. It says, “Tuesday.”
“Someone made you this food and you don’t want to eat it?” I say. “Your mother?” Because, despite any hard evidence, I can’t give up on the notion that Paul lives with his mother.
“My wife.” He leans his head against the door. Puffs of vapour drift from the freezer, like smoke.
“She left you?”
“She died.”
I reach into the compartment, lift up the first tray to read the label on the tray beneath. “Monday.” The tray under that one reads, “Sunday.”
“Jesus,” I say. “She cooked for you and then she died.”
“She cooked for me while she was dying,” says Paul. “During those really hot July days. Before she went into hospital for the last time.”
“She died in July?”
“Just over a month ago.”
“Jesus,” I say again. This is more recent than the most recent of my deaths. “I can’t believe you’re coping at all, let alone teaching some idiot to tie a salmon fly.”
Paul smiles at that. “You’re not really an idiot,” he says.
“All things are relative,” I say.
The cool of the freezer air feels good where it wafts against my forehead.
“You really can’t eat them?” I say. “Ever?”
“No. I’ve tried. It makes me feel terrible. Not the food,” he adds. “But that she made them for me with the last of her time on earth. Why didn’t she want to do something else?”
“She was probably worried about how you’d cope without her.”
I think that I might have got the Graham narrative wrong when I entertained it yesterday. What if Graham was a widower? So, married but not married. He could have met Megan because he went to her cottage to order some flies, and then he could have talked to her. She would be a good listener while she was working. She would be sympathetic. Her little shed would have the air of a hushed confessional. That is how their affair could have started.
But then why couldn’t she simply have married him, if he was available?
And what about Glen of the Fairies?
“Give me a garbage bag,” I say to Paul.
I pile the trays of food into the plastic sack, trying not to examine the contents of the segmented containers. But it’s hard not to look at them. “Wednesday” is cabbage rolls. “Friday” is slices of beef, mashed potatoes and peas.
“Okay.” I shut the freezer door. “Come on.”
“The animals,” says Paul, weakly.
“Don’t worry,” I say. “Nothing’s going to eat them. They’re not going out as garbage.”
I march out onto the back deck, then down the steps and onto the parched grass. The dog clambers out of the reeds when I get to the dock, follows me to the end of the platform.
I lean into the bag, pull out one of the trays. The coolness of the frozen metal feels good against my hand.
“Last chance,” I say, holding it out to Paul, who has appeared behind me.
“Go ahead,” he whispers, and I reach my arm around to get a good arc and let it fly. It spins above the water, catching the sun and flickering wildly before skidding across the lake and sinking unceremoniously out past a clump of weeds.
The dog, excited by this activity, jumps into the water and paddles around in circles, barking, as I launch each successive tray off the end of the dock.
When the last container of frozen dinners has disappeared into the water, the dog climbs out at the shore, shakes herself vigorously and gets back to her job of hunting frogs.
Paul takes the empty garbage bag from me as we step off the dock. We’re quiet as we walk back across the lawn.
“The next part of the fly is the body,” he says, as we’re climbing the stairs to the deck. “Ostrich herl and guinea fowl feathers. You should find that marginally easier than the tail.”
13.
WHAT DO WE OWE THE DEAD?
Should we eat their meals?
Remember their last words, their birthdays and death-days?
Should we take up the hobbies they abandoned? Read the books they never finished? Should we listen to their music and wear their clothes? Is it our duty to become a living memorial to those we loved, those who left us by dying? Who left us so bereft by their dying.
There is a myth that says that, although we think about our dead al
l the time, twice a day they think of us, for a minute’s duration. This happens when the clock reads 11:11—once in the morning and once at night. I don’t entirely believe this, but I often look at the clock when it is this time, by accident, and I do wonder, and have wondered, if my dead ever think of me independently of this notion. Mostly because I think about them all the time.
The myth likely arose from biblical origins, as the verse of John 11:11 is about Lazarus, who has been dead for four days, and of whom Jesus says: “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I go to awaken him.” Meaning he will rise from the dead, that death is but a sleep from which the dead may return.
14.
EVERY SPRING, I PLANT A FEW VEGETABLES in my small backyard. Their success is largely weather dependent, although I have found that green beans are fairly reliable, no matter what. But tomatoes are very susceptible to weather. Last summer was rainy and the tomatoes either rotted on the vines or never flowered. This summer, with the drought and the heat, I have to constantly water everything, but the tomatoes are doing splendidly. I have been picking one or two a day now for several weeks.
But last night, when I let the dog out for her final pee before bed, she started growling at something by the tomato plants. I was afraid it might be a skunk, so I quickly ushered her indoors. In her fairly short life, she has already been skunked twice and quilled by a porcupine four times. My former dog went to the vet exactly three times in her thirteen years—once to be spayed, once to have some teeth pulled near the end of her life, and once to end her life. My current dog seems to be at the vet’s at least once a month. Partially, this is because she has a strong prey drive and does not consider her personal safety when she is on the chase. She will crash through bushes and trees, plunge into swamps, leap off walls in her pursuit of a squirrel or rabbit or deer—basically anything that will run away from her. In those moments, she is oblivious to the limits of her own body and often injures herself. The trick is to avoid those situations.