Please do your best.
She was so hauntingly lovely with her Mona Lisa smile.. and looked so absurd at the same time, in that suit and tie. Her skin in my clothes. The whole thing was kind of.. well, I felt prickles all over. It was all too damned erotic. Soft music. The fire flickering. I can’t really describe how I felt — I just felt overwhelmed; it still seems like a mystical moment. I wanted so much to touch her, but I was afraid that would make her dis-appear, vanish like the Cheshire cat, fade from my life like a puff of smoke. You’re drunk, I told myself. Your mental functioning is impaired. You must not do this. You are her trustee, she is your guest, your student, she is in love, engaged. But I did it.
What, Jonathan?
I kissed her.
That’s all?
A stolen kiss, the slightest touch of lip on lip, that was my crime. But it must have awakened her, Jane, because she smiled, even though her eyes were still closed. And then she put her arms around me, and her eyes blinked open. And I was blinded by these huge green traffic lights. They said, “Go.” And we. . The rest isn’t going to be easy.
Why?
Well, ultimately we sort of did the whole gamut, so to speak.
Did you tie her up?
Christ, no. What for?
What do you mean by the whole gamut?
The wholeKama Sutra.I see.
Anal coitus, no. I definitely didn’t penetrate her, um. . There was no act of pedication, as she claims. You don’t want all this stuff. I mean, do you need it for my personality profile, or what? Basically, I’d rather talk about sibling rivalry or something.
Just tell me what happened and stop putting up your barricades.
I’m sorry.
And stop being sorry. Be real.
Suddenly the word is out that I am to be disjoined in marriage. I have leaked the news to no one but George Rimbold, but the leak has become a river at flood, and my friends have begun soft-shoeing around me, offering looks of sympathy, dropping by with gifts of cakes and jellies while making jocular conversation meant to keep my spirits high. The news has become distorted in the retelling: my once-a-week housekeepers, Janey Rosekeeper and Ginger Jones, asked me if Annabelle had really run off to Germany with an aging rock star. Another acquaintance was led to believe she’s marrying a train conductor.
And worse is not only yet to come — it is on its way: advancing, waving, towards my dock. On a hot late afternoon, as I squat there, baiting a few crab pots — an art learned from George Rimbold — I see Emily Lemay, the lusty manager of The Brig, waving to me from her cabin cruiser. There is no escape, and I hopelessly await her arrival. She aims her craft in the general direction of the dock, and thudsinto it with minimal damage. She tosses me a line, and then is upon me, clasping me to her ursine bosom. I am astonished, speechless. She is more than a little tipsy.
“You poor man. You must be sick at heart.” She is wearing blue-jean cutoffs and a shirt a size too small through which the vastness of her bosom strains. “I heard she’s run away to Beirut with some rich Arab.” Again I am overcome with the scent of peaches, overripe, fermented. As she unclenches me, I stagger and backpedal nearly into the water.
“I brought a picnic lunch and I’m going to take you out on a romantic cruise, just you and me.”
“Ah, yes, well, I was about to set these traps.” Within them the glassy eyes of fish heads warn me: There is danger on the high seas with this alcohol-impaired woman of forbidding reputation.
“Hey, well, you just let me help.” She starts hauling the traps to her boat. There are life vests in it: if she attacks me, I will simply have to resist manfully — as it were — and swim for home.
Somehow we manage to transfer the cargo without either of us going overboard, and we then embark. As we putt into the bay, Emily Lemay chatters away cheerily about the emotional bruises she herself has suffered at the hands of untold faithless men: She knows exactly how I feel; she’s an expert mender of broken hearts.
From time to time she swigs from a bottle of the peach brandy that she keeps in the cooler, along with sandwiches, pickles, and hard-boiled eggs. I munch nervously on those as we sit together on the bench seat. I try to inch away, but she pursues, squeezing my arm, my knee, my thigh, as if checking to see whether I am ripe.
Now I become nervous as her route takes us near the shore of Margaret Blake’s farm. What if she sees us out here — what will she think? It’s that two-faced eco-enemy Arthur Beauchamp, a wanton roue, he’s cuddled up to a vocal supporter of Evergreen Estates.
Horror of horrors, there is Mrs. Blake indeed, feeding her ducks. She looks up, places a hand over her eyes to shield them from thelate-afternoon sun. I try to shrivel, to disappear. But Emily rises and waves energetically.
A curt wave back from Margaret Blake, and she returns to her tasks. I am mortified.
“There’s a quiet little bay around the corner. We could just anchor out and. . you know, enjoy ourselves.”
I am incapable of resistance, woozy in the alcoholic heat that emanates from her as we slowly motor beyond the Blake farm, past a rocky outcropping and into a tiny cove.
Emily helps herself to another big swallow of her brandy, then turns a pair of large, wet eyes to me and announces, “Arthur, I am a woman.”
“I should think that’s obvious,” I say with a strained, almost strangled, chuckle.
“A woman. Arealwoman. With feelings. With needs.”
“Ah, yes. .” In my panic, I look towards the shore as if for help — and I see another boat in the bay, two men in it fishing. One of them is looking at us and frowning.
“Emily, I — ”
Too late, she is pulling her shirt over her head, and I am confronted with the massive orbs of her breasts, and as she lunges at me I fall backwards, onto the deck, she on top.
“There are some people out there!” I shout. She lifts herself from me and peeks over the gunwales.
“Oh, God,” she says. “It’s Sam.”
She crawls over me, finds her shirt, hurriedly dons it. “Damn.”
I sit up. “Who is Sam?” This hefty, slope-shouldered man is staring at me with an expression of absolute enmity. I have seen him around, as well as his friend, who is looking on with a malicious grin.
Emily is at the wheel, accelerating away from the cove. “I’ve been sort of seeing him. Aw, heck.”
As we head back to my dock, she says, “Don’t want you to worry any, Arthur. His bark is worse than his bite.”Though innocent in deed and mind, Arthur Ramsgate Beauchamp has quickly become the latest victim of this island’s major industry, the gossip mill. The version I hear from Stoney has me not only disrobing Emily Lemay but thereafter being in the throes of naked connection aboard her boat.
“Sam was carrying on at the bar last night,” he says. “But don’t worry. It’s all bullshit talk.”
If I blot out all thoughts of the man called Sam, my satyric notoriety might permit a sense of self-esteem. At a neighbourhood potluck dinner the night after my fabled sexual conquest, men wink and women flirt. Margaret Blake shows up, avoids me for an hour, gets into an argument with someone, then vanishes in a cloud of petulance without partaking of dinner.
I drive home early, too, before dark, seeing Sam lying in wait around every bend.
To amplify my apprehensive mood, roiling black clouds shoulder over Vancouver Island from the ocean, a rare summer storm with pelting rain and gusts of wind that cause my house to shiver. Then the bolts of Jupiter begin to carve the sky above the ocean, and the guttural rumble of his thunderous voice is everywhere.
The power goes out, of course, as it tends to do whenever there’s any kind of weather. I find my way to the kerosene lamp and light it, and sit in my club chair and read the works of dead German poets whileGotterdammerungcontinues unabated.
My reading is abruptly suspended when a great rending sound occurs outside. I rise to investigate. Starkly lit by the flashes from the sky is the gnarled old alder tree that grows just beyond my kitchen window. It has split vertically along the trunk, and half of it hangs menacingly over my roof.