Near Canaan

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

“But Beth,” said Joan, her voice almost shockingly light-hearted. She launched into a series of incredible-but-true stories of children lost and found again, long after their abductions, safe and sound. Beth partially revived under the stream of solace, like speeded-up reverse footage of a plant wilting. Her features struggled painfully between despair and a kind of ravaged optimism. I was surprised: I had thought that Beth and I were the two people in Naples immune to Joan’s persuasion. Embarrassed, I turned my face away and looked out over the darkened lawn.

  Later, I drove Beth home. On the way, we said little; when we were about halfway there, she slid over toward me, and slipped under my arm.

  “Cold?” I asked.

  “No,” she said, but she didn’t move. We rode the rest of the way sitting close together like sweethearts, and when I walked her to her door she turned to me on the step and put her face into my shirt. I was confused, putting my arms around her gingerly, stroking her hair.

  “I’m so sad, G.I.,” she said, finally, into my shoulder.

  “I know,” I said.

  “I feel like I’m in the middle of a big white room all alone,” she said. “I dreamed that, too. A big white room like in a hospital, but nothing in it. Not even me in it, but I was there.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “You Corbin boys,” she said, pulling away suddenly. The three-quarters moon danced light off her eyes as she tossed her head back. “What big strong arms you have.”

  I realized how tightly I had been holding her; blushing, I released my grip and moved a little away.

  “I’m worried about you,” I said.

  “Me, too,” she said, going into the house, closing the door.

  “How could you tell her all that stuff?” I asked Joan while we were getting ready for bed.

  She shrugged, removing her earrings.

  “Things look pretty bleak,” she admitted. “But she mustn’t give up.” She slipped her blouse off her shoulders and unfastened her skirt. “And that dream,” she said. “That was creepy.”

  “Maybe it’s time she faced facts,” I said. “She has to get on with her life.”

  “She’s not strong enough for that yet,” said Joan, getting into bed beside me. “She’s still mourning Bill, remember.”

  “She’s divorced, not widowed,” I said, sharply.

  “Loss is loss,” said my wife.

  In July, I found myself embroiled in a town hullabaloo. Devlin had sprung his big plan, which at first seemed flawless. Earlier in the year, he had acquired some property downtown, and wanted permission to build a minimall. The first time he had pitched the idea, the town had refused to approve the rezoning of more than a nominal percentage of the land, which was not enough for Devlin’s purposes.

  “We’ll sweeten the deal,” he told us, his henchmen, in June.

  His new plan included a sop in the form of a new community center at Devlin’s expense. It was to be built on part of the site, if the town would let him develop the area around it. Devlin was multifaceted: to the town council he talked jobs and taxes for the city; to the Historical Committee, he described the historical significance of an industrial building standing empty on the site, crying out for preservation. Devlin intended to renovate the abandoned structure—without, of course, altering its authenticity by one particle—and put it to use as the main building of the Community Center.

  To the public, Devlin waxed eloquent about the wonderful design of the new center—it would have a main hall, perfect for dances and small theater productions, and could be hired out for private parties; the junior high school could hold their graduation there; how much more picturesque than the gymnasium.

  Leaving the boardrooms and the town meetings, shutting the door behind the man from the Chronicle, Devlin was exhilarated.

  “They vote on Friday,” he said. “We start on Monday.” He clapped me on the back. “I’m putting you in charge of the whole shebang,” he told me. The other two “idea men,” Warren Peavy and George Burke, looked at me jealously.

  It was then Tuesday; public opinion was heavily in our favor; there seemed no reason to believe that the new center would not be approved.

  But that portion of a town which always rises up against any kind of development sniffed out the real motivation behind Devlin’s generous proposal. They launched their campaign in Wednesday morning’s Chronicle, with an editorial titled “Devlin Our Midst.”

  Devlin summoned me and Warren and George into his office.

  “This is killing us,” he said, tapping the page. “Damned antiprogress fools. Take away their laundromats and supermarkets, where would they be? Progress gives them leisure time, and what do they do? Spend it screaming about progress. Damn,” he said, bringing his fist down onto the newspaper. “Didn’t we contribute something to them last year?”

  “A sizeable amount, sir, in December,” said Burke.

  “I thought so,” said Devlin. “You’d think it would have bought a little goodwill.” He looked at the three of us. “There’s got to be a way,” he said. “Some way to put this deal across.”

  We all furrowed our brows.

  “What do they want?” asked Devlin, almost to himself. “They want luxury, of course.”

  “They’re mostly women, aren’t they?” asked Burke, nervously. “My wife says all women want a mink coat.”

  Devlin glared him into silence.

  “Luxury,” he repeated. “But luxury disguised to look like practicality. Safety. Luxury and safety.”

  “What about a swim,” I said, and stopped.

  “What’s that?” cried Devlin.

  “A swim,” I said.

  “A swimming pool,” said Warren Piper, almost whispering.

  “What did you say?” growled Devlin, rounding on him.

  “Um,” squeaked Warren.

  “That’s it!” cried Devlin. “A swimming pool. Sheila,” he roared into his intercom, mashing his thumb onto the button.

  We listened, silent stooges, while he dictated the plan. “I can’t believe it,” Warren said to George. “It’s perfect. And I thought of it.”

  Olympic-sized, heated, enclosed, the pool was to stand between the center and the minimall. No matter that there was a local quarry, to which all of the townspeople had always gone to swim during heat waves. No matter that the water there was pure, and the quarry deep and rockless. “Think of the danger,” the Chronicle quoted Devlin in Thursday’s edition. “If just one child hit his head diving from those high quarry banks—”

  He had judged it right, of course. A new faction sprang up instantly, comprised mainly of anxious parents. Devlin had put the spark to their highly flammable fears. The antidevelopment clique clashed against the antiquarry clique, and in the stillness after the battle, Devlin rose triumphant.

  “I thank the citizens for giving me the opportunity to give something back to this fair town,” he said, smiling humbly, waiting for Sam Dooley to catch the expression with his camera; Sam’s flash didn’t go off, though, and so Devlin had to hold the pose while he fiddled with it. Finally, the photograph had been taken; Devlin unfroze, and the reporters faded out of the room. “We’ll make a bundle on the deal,” he told me, after they’d left. “There’s still a lot of square footage zoned for retail.”

  Devlin had done it again; and having gotten the thing going, he skipped away to another project, leaving me to supervise the construction of the center.

  “Start on the renovation and the pool at the same time,” he told me. “To show we’re sincere. I don’t want any more bad press.”

  I spent mornings on the site and afternoons near my desk which was, as Devlin had promised, big, although it was located in a communal and secretaryless office space. The pencil-sharpener was bolted to one corner of the oak surface; when I needed to sharpen a pencil, I had to get up from my chair, walk around the desk, and stand there cranking the handle, feeling foolish.

  Together, the architects and I pored over site plans and elevation
s; they were articulate, capable men, easygoing types who seemed to accept me. I was much more out of place on the construction site, which seemed indisputably the province of the big-shouldered men with their rough voices and yellow helmets. They called to each other in hoarse syllables across the site, and spat streams of tobacco into the dust. They ignored me, but I seemed constantly to be in the way, and spent the first few days scurrying from one point to another, seeking a neutral patch of ground from which to oversee the project.

  Within the first week, I understood that my discomfort was no accident. The men disliked me. They pretended not to know my name every morning when I walked onto the site; they answered my questions with monosyllables, rolling their eyes at my ignorance. To them, I was one of the enemy, a representative of the clean-linened, cravated ranks, a spy sent by the management to harass them. They had seen my kind before—tight-collared little efficiency experts, crisply jacketed, who minced around the site, placing their shoes carefully so as to avoid the mud. These busy men had appeared from time to time, and they were always trouble—poking their noses into everything, asking the same stupid questions I was asking now. Taking copious notes, nodding primly, returning later, with a sheaf of suggestions for improvements in procedure. Most of the crew had been working construction for ten years or more; they resented the little men, with their prissiness and their clipboards, their clean pomaded hair. And the posted suggestion lists, coming as they did from smooth-jawed physical cowards, weaklings who had never done a day’s honest labor, inspired outrage. They were accidentally dropped in the mud, or set afire, or they simply vanished from the door of the site office.

  I had heard all of the stories at one time or another in Stokes’s, and I expected the crew to be set against me from the start. Still, I hoped to break through their resistance and win them over. I donned a yellow hat and hid my intimidation. I imagined them talking amongst themselves about me after I’d gone.

  “He’s all right,” they’d say. “He’s a regular guy.”

  But it was slow going. It didn’t seem to matter that I removed my tie when I was on site. They knew me for what I was, a stoolie sent to pester and annoy them, a pencil pusher, someone whose masculinity was suspect. They made fun of my stutter, and eyed the clean leather of my shoes. I took to wearing beat-up work boots to the site, but then their glances drifted to my smooth hands.

  “Sure thing, Mr. Corbin, sir,” they said, when I spoke to them. “You bet, Mr. Corbin, sir.”

  Their hatred made me uneasy. I liked to watch them work, though, and so I continued to spend hours at the site, enduring their aggression and the grueling heat, breathing the soft red dust.

  I was exhausted most nights, coming home, and so it took me a while to appreciate the relative absence of Joan. While I had been distracted, she had fallen into a routine: Monday evenings at the Chronicle (and sometimes Saturday mornings if something went wrong), Thursday night cooking (she made suppers ahead now, and lunches, and left them for me, neatly marked, in the refrigerator), and Tuesday and Friday with Beth. Often she went to see Beth on Sunday, too, or after she’d finished her weekly cooking; and sometimes she ran down to the Chronicle to discuss some last-minute changes with the editor or to look something up. After a month on the construction site, I rolled my head on my sleepless pillow, calculating that it had been three weeks since my wife and I had eaten a meal together. I felt guilty—I had encouraged her to do the column, after all; and, self-absorbed, I had been nothing so much as grateful for her attention to Beth. I had barely thought about anything but myself and my job for ages. Joan and I were moving apart. Was it my fault?

  “All right if I come with you?” I asked her the following night, as she was preparing to go over to Beth’s. The question was rhetorical; I was already slipping my shoes on.

  “Well,” said Joan. “It might be better if you didn’t, this time.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Girl stuff,” she said.

  “What, does Beth think I don’t know she touches up her hair?”

  “That’s not it,” said Joan.

  “What is it, then?”

  “It’s just,” she said, hesitantly. “Men—make her nervous, these days. Because of Amanda. Try to understand, honey,” she said.

  “She didn’t mean me,” I said.

  “I’m sure it’s temporary.”

  “She can’t have meant me,” I repeated.

  “You’re a man, aren’t you?” said Joan, impatiently.

  Was I? On the construction site, I wasn’t; here at home I evidently was. Like the fable of the bat, I thought, doomed to a life of ambiguity, neither bird nor beast.

  I couldn’t believe it of Beth. What about me could make her uncomfortable? I looked at my hands, patted them against my chest. So I’m male, I thought. That’s how she sees me, in the end. I felt stripped and sickened, reduced from my complicated being to an obscene graffito. Back to the forest, I thought. Waiting for the Indians. With the dry mouth of eagerness, and of dread.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Flirtations

  Dear Tillie,

  I’ve been married six years and I love my husband but I’ve met a man who understands me. He’s younger and he really listens. Me and him (I’ll call him Carl) haven’t done anything yet exactly, but I think we’re going to. My husband would probably never find out. What do you think?

  Confused.

  Dear Confused:

  Your problem isn’t with Carl, it’s with your marriage. Flirtations have the advantage of looking perfect without having to prove it. In other words, it’s easy for Carl to appear understanding—after all, he only has to be understanding a few hours at a time, not all day the way your husband does. Temptation is natural, but when it threatens a lifelong commitment, it’s time to take a good hard look at your priorities. Consider the consequences. You say your husband “probably” wouldn’t find out. Would it be worth it if he did? I say, stay away from Carl for a while and try talking to your husband. Then decide if Carl is worth risking your marriage for.

  Tillie.

  ONCE, MANY YEARS ago, Joan had had a sense of what it might be like to fall out of love with her husband. It was just a taste, a quick impression of unexplored possibility, and then it was gone.

  It was at a faculty party, in the middle of the afternoon following a symposium. Gil was at work, like all of the other spouses, and the party had a restive air, a quality of unnatural freedom, simply owing to the one fact, that most of these people, ordinarily paired off, were at a social function alone. There was a heady recklessness to the way the chairs were dragged back against the wall, as though there might be dancing. And when the refreshments appeared, a faint cheer went up, for all the world as if the offerings were caviar and champagne, when they were really on the order of watery lemon punch and sugar cookies.

  The pull-down projection screen, used that day for visual aids during the lectures, and at other times for educational films, was rolled back up against the ceiling with a flick and a snap; and an industrial-looking phonograph was liberated from one of the locked cabinets and its cord plugged into an outlet. A shelf in the same cabinet yielded a surprising cache of records. Ben Willow, who taught Geometry, set himself to monitor the music. It began to scratch out of the grey built-in speaker, and those who had been holding themselves back were released. This was, after all, a party; and they started to dance, on the flat brown carpet where in the corners still a few peanuts languished, from the last seventh grade tea dance.

  The crowd was largely faculty, but the administration was sprinkled throughout the room, little nuggets of conservatism set afloat among the younger swell of teachers. Joan was a kind of bridge between the two groups; she was not faculty, nor was she purely administration; and she was of a median age, approachable to all. The teachers included her in their jokes, while the drabber ranks, the principal’s secretary and the registrar, seemed to consider her safe harbor in the sea of irreverence, and sought her out.
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  In fact, the principal’s secretary, Miss Pringle, quite attached herself to Joan. At first, it was endearing, the way she appealed to the younger woman for approval, but then it became somewhat irritating, the way she hung on and followed Joan about, clinging to the edges of whatever conversation she was engaged in. Whinnying her nervous little laugh, Miss Pringle was constantly at Joan’s elbow, praying quite overtly for acceptance. Joan, moving freely through the throng, felt the older woman like a thorn in her side. Everywhere she turned, the sad little pony face was there at her shoulder, gazing at her with a kind of ingratiating despair.

  “I’m going to the Ladies’,” Miss Pringle murmured, after half an hour and three glasses of punch. “Do you need …?” she invited, and then stood embarrassed by her own vulgarity.

  Go away, thought Joan viciously, and was shocked at her own intolerance. With the sensitivity of the socially damned, Miss Pringle perceived Joan’s animosity; her face went pink, and her eyes watered. Joan, repentant, made an effort at kindness.

  “You go on,” she said. “I’ll wait for you over there.” She pointed to a triad of empty chairs in one corner of the room.

  “All right,” smiled Miss Pringle, too easily forgiving.

  She’s just nervous, thought Joan, watching her push the heavy grey door open. I should be more patient; it’s just a party. It will mean so much to her if I let her go around with me, and if she comes back and sees me waiting for her in one of those chairs, she’ll be pleased.

  But on her way across the room, she was entangled in a group of about half a dozen, playing audience to Alden Wood, the handsome English teacher, as he made some scandalous, some humorous, all disparaging remarks about different members of the gathering. He began, of course, in an undertone, concerning himself with Principal Beckwith, and then worked his way up and down the ranks at random, until his caustic wit lighted on Miss Pringle, and there it found its home.

  “Her face is constipated,” he said, to the great amusement of the others. “All pinched together. She’d make a great advertisement for laxatives—