The Love Of A Good Woman

The pill was just in time. A tide of faintness, unfriendly heat, threatened disintegration, came crawling upwards and broke out in sweat drops on his temples. For a few minutes he felt this presence making headway, but by a controlled calm breathing and a casual rearrangement of his limbs he held his own against it. During this time Sonje reappeared with a batch of papers-maps and printed sheets that she must have copied from library books. Some of them slipped from her hands as she sat down. They lay scattered around on the sisal.

“Now, what they call old Batavia,” she said. “That’s very geometrically laid out. Very Dutch. There’s a suburb called Weltevreden. It means ‘well contented.’ So wouldn’t it be a joke if I found him living there? There’s the Old Portuguese Church. Built in the late 1600s. It’s a Muslim country of course. They have the biggest mosque there in Southeast Asia. Captain Cook put in to have his ships repaired, he was very complimentary about the shipyards. But he said the ditches out in the bogs were foul. They probably still are. Cottar never looked very strong, but he took better care of himself than you’d think. He wouldn’t just go wandering round malarial bogs or buying drinks from a street vendor. Well of course now, if he’s there, I expect he’ll be completely acclimatized. I don’t know what to expect. I can see him gone completely native or I can see him nicely set up with his little brown woman waiting on him. Eating fruit beside a pool. Or he could be going around begging for the poor.”

As a matter of fact there was one thing Kent remembered. The night of the party on the beach, Cottar wearing nothing but an insufficient towel had come up to him and asked him what he knew, as a pharmacist, about tropical diseases.

But that had not seemed out of line. Anybody going where he was going might have done the same.

“You’re thinking of India,” he said to Sonje.

He was stabilized now, the pill giving him back some reliability of his i

“You know one reason I know he’s not dead?” said Sonje. “I don’t dream about him. I dream about dead people. I dream all the time about my mother-in-law.”

“I don’t dream,” Kent said.

“Everybody dreams,” said Sonje. “You just don’t remember.” He shook his head.

Kath was not dead. She lived in Ontario. In the Haliburton district, not so far from Toronto.

“Does your mother know I’m here?” he’d said to Noelle. And she’d said, “Oh, I think so. Sure.”

But there came no knock on the door. When Deborah asked him if he wanted to make a detour he had said, “Let’s not go out of our way. It wouldn’t be worth it.”

Kath lived alone beside a small lake. The man she had lived with for a long time, and built the house with, was dead. But she had friends, said Noelle, she was all right.

When Sonje had mentioned Kath’s name, earlier in the conversation, he had the warm and dangerous sense of these two women still being in touch with each other. There was the risk then of hearing something he didn’t want to know but also the silly hope that Sonje might report to Kath how well he was looking (and he was, he believed so, with his weight fairly steady and the tan he’d picked up in the Southwest) and how satisfactorily he was married. Noelle might have said something of the kind, but somehow Sonje’s word would count for more than Noelle’s. He waited for Sonje to speak of Kath again.

But Sonje had not taken that tack. Instead it was all Cottar, and stupidity, and Jakarta.

The disturbance was outside now-not in him but outside the windows, where the wind that had been stirring the bushes, all this time, had risen to push hard at them. And these were not the sort of bushes that stream their long loose branches before such a wind. Their branches were tough and their leaves had enough weight so that each bush had to be rocked from its roots. Sunlight flashed off the oily greens. For the sun still shone, no clouds had arrived with the wind, it didn’t mean rain.

“Another drink?” said Sonje. “Easier on the gin?”

No. After the pill, he couldn’t.

Everything was in a hurry. Except when everything was desperately slow. When they drove, he waited and waited, just for Deborah to get to the next town. And then what? Nothing. But once in a while came a moment when everything seemed to have something to say to you. The rocking bushes, the bleaching light. All in a flash, in a rush, when you couldn’t concentrate. Just when you wanted summing up, you got a speedy, goofy view, as from a fun-ride. So you picked up the wrong idea, surely the wrong idea. That somebody dead might be alive and in Jakarta.

But when you knew somebody was alive, when you could drive to the very door, you let the opportunity pass.

What wouldn’t be worth it? To see her a stranger that he couldn’t believe he’d ever been married to, or to see that she could never be a stranger yet was unaccountably removed?

“They got away,” he said. “Both of them.”

Sonje let the papers on her lap slide to the floor to lie with the others.

“Cottar and Kath,” he said.

“This happens almost every day,” she said. “Almost every day this time of year, this wind in the late afternoon.”

The coin spots on her face picked up the light as she talked, like signals from a mirror.

“Your wife’s been gone a long time,” she said. “It’s absurd, but young people seem unimportant to me. As if they could vanish off the earth and it wouldn’t really matter.”

“Just the opposite,” Kent said. “That’s us you’re talking about. That’s us.”

Because of the pill his thoughts stretch out long and gauzy and lit up like vapor trails. He travels a thought that has to do with staying here, with listening to Sonje talk about Jakarta while the wind blows sand off the dunes.

A thought that has to do with not having to go on, to go home.

Cortes Island

Little bride. I was twenty years old, five feet seven inches tall, weighing between a hundred and thirty-five and a hundred and forty pounds, but some people-Chess’s boss’s wife, and the older secretary in his office, and Mrs. Gorrie upstairs, referred to me as a little bride. Our little bride, sometimes. Chess and I made a joke of it, but his public reaction was a look fond and cherishing. Mine was a pouty smile-bashful, acquiescent.

We lived in a basement in Vancouver. The house did not belong to the Gorries, as I had at first thought, but to Mrs. Gorrie’s son Ray. He would come around to fix things. He entered by the basement door, as Chess and I did. He was a thin, narrow-chested man, perhaps in his thirties, always carrying a toolbox and wearing a workman’s cap. He seemed to have a permanent stoop, which might have come from bending over most of the time, attending to plumbing jobs or wiring or carpentry. His face was waxy, and he coughed a good deal. Each cough was a discreet independent statement, defining his presence in the basement as a necessary intrusion. He did not apologize for being there, but he did not move around in the place as if he owned it. The only times I spoke to him were when he knocked on the door to tell me that the water was going to be turned off for a little while, or the power. The rent was paid in cash every month to Mrs. Gorrie. I don’t know if she passed it all on to him or kept some of it out to help with expenses. Otherwise all she and Mr. Gorrie had-she told me so-was Mr. Gorrie’s pension. Not hers. I’m not nearly old enough, she said.

Mrs. Gorrie always called down the stairs to ask how Ray was and whether he would like a cup of tea. He always said he was okay and he didn’t have time. She said that he worked too hard, just like herself. She tried to fob off on him some extra dessert she had made, some preserves or cookies or gingerbread-the same things she was always pushing at me. He would say no, he had just eaten, or that he had plenty of stuff at home. I always resisted, too, but on the seventh or eighth try I would give in. It was so embarrassing to go on refusing, in the face of her wheedling and disappointment. I admired the way Ray could keep saying no. He didn’t even say, “No, Mother.” Just no.