True North

by Jim Harrison

  24

  I had eight days with Vernice that rattled and bruised my world. The damage was permanent in fact. The effect was unintentional in that she had no streak of the missionary. In accepted terms she wasn’t a very nice person but neither was she unkind. Except for Cynthia she was simply who she was more so than anyone I had ever met including Riva or Clarence. She tied me in knots neglecting to untie the more difficult ones. Late on our first day together I had the somewhat spooky science-fiction notion that we did not live on the same earth, or how could we live upon the same earth when our perceptions were so radically different? Her world was a procession of aesthetic perceptions and considerations. She knew the contents of my kind of world fairly well but had rejected them as insufficient to maintain life. Of the hundred or so poets, novelists, painters, and composers she mentioned in the eight days I had heard of only four or five, and then in passing. She said that I was a trapezoid while she was a vulnerable and inclusive circle. She bet that I had done especially well in geometry which was true. I defended myself saying that I had been an excellent student of history but to Vernice history was only an integral part of what she called the “Big Lie.” While we ate tuna fish sandwiches the first day she quoted a sentence in French, then translated it, “Everything we are taught is false.” This was a difficult position from which to begin an affair.

  I didn’t fall asleep until first light. She smoked cigarettes and I smelled the leftover smoke in the dark air, but also that nearly undetectable scent that Polly left in the bedroom when she undressed at night. It was so captivating that I was restless and got up to smoke one of her cigarettes, my first since surviving flu during college. At one point she whimpered and Carla made a similar noise. I thought of opening one of three bottles of my father’s wine Jesse had packed along for my duffel when he retrieved my camping gear from the house I no longer wanted to enter. At the moment of putting out the cigarette the house no longer seemed haunted. Why? Maybe I had already walked and rowed it away. I left the wine unopened because I remembered from the Chicago tavern that she had spent her junior year in France and Italy and she might like it. I drank a beer from the Servel propane refrigerator and smoked another cigarette, admonishing my penis that stuck its head straight up from my skivvies saying “the odds don’t look good, son.” The beer put me to sleep wrapped up in an uncomfortable wool blanket.

  When I awoke Carla’s face was peeking in the paned window near my head, impossible because there was a downward slope on that side of the cabin but Vernice was holding Carla up. She came in and within minutes she had made us a big cheese omelet. To explain the speed she said she had worked for two years in a mediocre French restaurant in Evansville while going to college. I was impressed because she flipped the omelet over on itself in thirds without using a spatula. She had started cooking quite young because both her parents worked, her father as a small-time contractor and her mother as a legal secretary. She had three older brothers: a “Nazi” school principal, and career chief petty officer in the navy, and the youngest worked with her father. He was a cabinet maker and a “problem drinker” but she liked him the best. Her father was in AA but her mother was often clinically depressed and that was why she had learned to cook so early. She asked me about Cynthia and among other words I used “captious” which Vernice liked. I didn’t tell her that it was a word my father had first used for Cynthia. She especially liked the way Cynthia had run off with a mixed-blood at barely sixteen and still finished college.

  When she probed further about my parents I said I’d talk about them later but we had to get going before the day became too warm. While I packed some water, sardines, crackers, and cheese she joked that when she awoke she suspected that I was snoring so loud to draw attention to my dick that was sticking out. I blushed and turned away which she thought was charming. While I checked the straps holding the rowboat firmly in the pickup bed she said that when she met me near the Newberry Library she thought I was probably a rich guy due partly to Fred’s accent which she said was North Shore Chicago. I wasn’t aware of this kind of thing but then she was a poet. She added that I also seemed like a “pleasant prig” and I said “oh fuck you” as we headed down the two-track. “In your dreams,” she responded and a lump formed in my throat. I had developed a trace of optimism when she hadn’t mentioned flying back to Chicago. I had also told her it was okay to wear shorts instead of the jeans she should have worn because of the insects as I wanted a clearer view of her legs and fanny. I felt low rent about this but not after she had used the dreaded “prig” word. Throughout the day she used words as rare as “epistemology, phylogeny, and otiose” but in the same sentences did not hesitate to inelegantly tell me I was “full of shit.” I never lost the feeling of being caught off guard.

  I changed plans because it would be getting too warm by midmorning to head inland. I decided on the Grand Sable Dunes. When we passed through Grand Marais Vernice had me stop by the post office to retrieve her ill-fated letter announcing her arrival. There was also a note from Cynthia I stuffed in my pocket to read later. Meanwhile Vernice was talking about the suicide of Cesare Pavese, then a poem of Valéry when she saw the lovely harbor in the daylight, and when we came out the west side of town it was the poets Ponge and Corbière. I memorized the names for when I might be in a good library in the late fall. When we parked near the dunes she was launched into a regretful spiel about how she had missed being in San Francisco in the mid-fifties because she was only five years old at the time.

  Off she went with Carla up the steepest part of the dunes after shrieking “fucking beautiful.” I was peevish because I couldn’t keep up and took a slower trail and because neither of them looked back. Her legs were smooth but obviously well muscled under the deceptive appearance. I remembered quitting tennis at thirteen because my mother ran me ragged around the court and easily reached any pathetic junk shot I made. With Vernice the consolation was her butt and bare legs churning up through the deep sand. I met them on my circular route about fifteen minutes later on a promontory covered with beach grass from which you could see Au Sable Lake far below and Lake Superior in the distance to the north basking in its cerulean glow.

  Vernice was in tears over the beauty of the place, staring to the west where the dunes ended twelve miles away near a lighthouse. She was sweating and when I sat down next to her she leaned against me for a moment. I started to put my arm around her but she was abruptly up and off and far enough away so that I yelled and pointed to a green covert in a valley about a mile toward Lake Superior. This time Carla didn’t follow and was relieved to be put in her papoose.

  When I reached the covert, about an acre of thick aspen and white birch, Vernice was hiding so I put Carla down and she quickly found Vernice leaning against a birch tree eating wild strawberries with one hand and holding a coyote skull in the other. It’s amazing how long people in their mid-twenties can keep up a bantering quarrel. It was nearly noon and we were to continue well past midnight. Sample:

  “Your body is so stiff you might break. You’re herky-jerky.”

  “I am? I haven’t broke,” I lied.

  “Haven’t you read the Tao te Ching?”

  "I don’t think so.”

  “If you had you’d remember. In the Tao it says you must become supple and pliant. Whatever your obsessions might be they’re making you stiff as a board.”

  “And your obsessions don’t?” I gave Carla a wild strawberry which she spit out as if it offended.

  “Poetry isn’t an obsession, it’s a calling. It’s a river you jump into when you’re called and you spend your life floating along immersed in it.”

  “Until you float to poetry heaven?”

  “You’re fucking right.”

  “How about the rest of us?”

  “You do what you feel called to do, if anything. Poetry doesn’t assume virtue. I’m no better than that group of crows way over toward the lake.”

  “They’re ravens. They’re following
a bear that is doubtless eating beach pea and wild strawberries.”

  “Are they dangerous?”

  “Not if you leave them alone. They’re ironically less contentious than you are.”

  “With three older brothers I had to fight for my territory. They even tried to screw me.”

  “Your brothers? I never thought of Cynthia that way.”

  “You repressed it successfully which is what you’re supposed to do. My parents were terminally disappointed in life when we were young. No guidance. You should do some reading in the area of incest.”

  For some reason, perhaps a plea for sympathy which might lead to the act of love, I confessed my life in an abbreviated form though I included the worst material. It took a half hour and I sweated profusely though the covert was shaded and cool. I finished with the whys and wherefores of my project.

  “You can’t do that,” she fairly exploded.

  “What?” I was startled by her vehemence.

  “You can’t spend your life writing a family history when there’s no one who will want to read it. You can’t spend your life in reaction to your family, mostly your father, because that means you’re still his wounded little boy. You say you’re essentially Christian but you’re hanging out in the Old Testament when you should be in the New. He rose up and slew his father with the jawbone of the ass, that sort of shit. What a stupid way to lead your life. Do you think you’ll have a number of lives or what?”

  I rolled over on my face and watched infinitesimal insects walking to and fro. “Why stay if you’re going to be such a hard bitch?” I asked the live green grass and the dead brown leaves, also the insects.

  “We’re sort of attracted to each other. I’m thirsty.” She took off at top speed. I loaded Carla in the papoose wondering at the improbable demands that desire can put a man through. My brain felt peeled. Was I a wounded little boy? Partly, but my head ached with anger to admit it. The storytelling hour from the Club returned. Maybe the miniature bad animal wrapped around my spine was my father.

  We swam at the launch site and then I rowed down the lake and in order to keep what we were missing in her mind I showed her the sandbar where I had lost my virginity with Laurie. She was amused but then told me a melancholy story about losing her virginity to her first love when she was in the tenth grade and he was two years older. She loved him horribly right up until she entered the university and he suddenly married her best friend because her family had a little dough and he could manage one of their hardware stores. After he was married she returned home and seduced him, making sure her former girlfriend knew, but that had accomplished nothing. She was still sad that she had done such a cheap thing.

  “That’s a terrible story,” I said, watching her take off her wet bra and panties, draping them over the gunwale of the rowboat to dry. “Jesus Christ,” I said as she leaned over the back of the boat to slosh cool water on her face.

  “Relax,” she said. “It’s good for you to work up a head of steam.” She laughed when she turned around and saw my hard-on in my wet underpants. “Is that for me?” She tickled it with a big toe while I rowed. What an extreme game, I thought.

  I sat in front of the IGA grocery store while Vernice ran in to buy a chicken to roast. I began to open Cynthia’s letter when my mind suddenly reenvisioned Vernice leaning over the back of the rowboat. I was no longer looking at Cynthia’s letter or out the windshield for that matter but at the well thought out structure of the vagina and what a problematical theology student had called the “divine perineum.” When my fifth-grade class had made a trip down to a Trenary area farm a bright little girl had commented on cows, “They’re terribly exposed.” The livestock metaphor wasn’t helping so I read Cynthia’s letter only to find out that Laurie had breast cancer, but then there was the usual addition that they seem to have “caught it early enough.” I quickly put away the letter when Vernice came out of the store.

  “I can’t remember seeing so much brown lettuce,” she said. “What the fuck do they eat this far north? You’re the religious one and I haven’t been in church since high school but the dispensation of the New Testament is forgiveness. All that bullshit about the sins of the fathers being visited upon the sons no longer applies. You’re not Moses. You didn’t cut down every fucking tree in the Upper Peninsula. Your cheapness didn’t let miners die in unsafe mines. You didn’t rape that young girl. You admitted that she was attractive but you didn’t do anything. Do you think you’re going to get even with dead people?”

  “My father’s not dead.”

  “You know I meant your ancestors. Your father sounds like a dried-up piece of dog shit. He’s no longer harming your mother or sister, just you.”

  It was too warm in the cabin to roast a chicken until later so we split a tuna sandwich. I got out the three bottles of wine that Jesse had packed for me. I never had been much interested in French wine because my father had made a fetish out of it. The wine made Vernice irritable because the bottles were from the early 1950s, very valuable, and I had them standing up in a cupboard in a warm cabin.

  “I could sell those bottles in Chicago and have a nice month or so in France,” she said.

  “Go ahead. It sounds like a good idea for you.” This comment didn’t please her though I meant it.

  She went over and unpacked her suitcase which encouraged me, but then she discovered the stack of porn magazines in the dresser drawer and glared at me.

  “They came with the cabin,” I shrugged.

  “They just feature women as a target and men forget there’s a woman attached to the target.”

  She stripped down to her bra and panties, flopped on her bed, and was asleep in a minute. I didn’t want to look at her so I went out on the rickety porch, put on mosquito dope, and fell asleep in a rocking chair.

  I awoke in the early evening with the mosquito dope not having worked very well. Vernice was sitting at the table, still in her bra and panties, writing in a journal and drinking coffee.

  “Don’t say anything. I’m in the middle of a poem.”

  I poured a cup of coffee, then took a bar of soap and towel down to the river to bathe. Carla had rolled in something dead out in the dunes so I soaped her down which made her wiggle with enjoyment. There was something eerily pleasant about standing naked in a cool river drinking a hot cup of coffee. I soaped down, then grabbed an alder branch above a deep pool letting my body trail off and rinse in the current. It was nearly sunset and Carla made a sharp dog shadow sitting on the bank.

  Back in the cabin Vernice was getting the chicken ready to roast. I impulsively told her about Laurie’s breast cancer, adding that I was sure she would be fine because she was young and could fight the disease. Vernice told me gravely that it was just the opposite, that her youth would give the disease more energy and that her chances of long-term survival were less than if she were older. This caught me unawares and I got tears in my eyes which I unsuccessfully tried to hide. She looked up at the ceiling to cover for me.

  “O fuck it. I never got to taste anything like this before.” She opened the bottle called Petrus and poured two glasses. “Your father might be the ultimate asshole, and you might be one too, but I thank you.” She took an ample sip, held it in her mouth, and shivered.

  I took a taste and admitted it was pretty good which irked her. Fred had been amused when I chose Michigan State over Yale and now I had hit another of many of my rejections of my so-called class. Vernice teased me that a lot of girls who had been in the restaurant business or to France would be glad to fuck for this bottle of wine. I said, “You must be kidding,” and she stood up and took off her clothes. I said weakly, “I don’t want you to fuck me for a bottle of wine.” And she said, “You’ve been nice while I was being an insufferable prick tease.”

  And that was that. She smelled like fresh lake water and sunburn the same as Laurie had so long ago. The difference was that she laughed a lot throughout the rest of the evening. It was the opposite of anything me
lancholy. The fact that she was so orgasmic had nothing to do with my minimal skills. In the last light through the windows I looked into her eyes and they virtually weren’t there. I was momentarily spooked. I pushed back and heard our sweaty skins separate. When I pushed away she nearly “saw” me but when I came back close she disappeared into herself again and I had to assume that her “self” at that point included me so that the first time in my life while making love I experienced total union with another. Inside my chest and head I felt on the verge of weeping but didn’t. I was mystified but then my mind gave up and I became as lost to the room as she was.

  We had our roast chicken at midnight. She had put lemon, thyme, and blanched garlic in the cavity and surrounded the bird with carrots, onions, and a few new potatoes. She closed her eyes while drinking wine. I had a cold beer myself which she didn’t object to. This level of food pleasure was new to me except that she as a cook was obviously a few steps up from Mrs. Plunkett. The aesthetic principles involved in her poetry obviously also applied to her cooking. In addition I had noticed the way she bobbed her head slightly to frame the outdoors through the small panes of the cabin windows. I caused the only slump during dinner by suggesting that her superb cooking would enable her to get a good husband. There was a deep flash of anger and I had no options for retreat. She actually said that she had grown up Catholic and was a “nun for her art.” To marry would be a blasphemy against all she wished for her life. I tried to withdraw by saying mildly that it was natural for me to think that in biological terms the kind of lovemaking we had just experienced might lead to mating. She laughed and reminded me that I had told her that my separation from Polly had come about because of my refusal to have children. I backed off by saying that she had drained away all of my intelligence. “We’ve just gotten started,” she said.