Читать книгу Film Society - Gilaine E. Mitchell - Страница 13

In twenty-four years of marriage, Anthony Roy never produced a single painting of his wife. It was something that had been on Alex’s mind for some time, although she never brought it up. She let it go by, like everything else, and chose instead to drag it around with her in a suitcase full of self-imposed illusions that never quite worked.

She took it along in her aging blue truck as she drove to the Stirling farmers’ market. It sat next to her the entire morning while she sold her zucchini and tomatoes, and made small talk with women who didn’t seem to recognize her nagging disappointment.

It wasn’t until later in the afternoon that Alex realized how heavy and burdensome the whole thing had become. She saw herself from the rooftop of the Stedman’s department store across the street and allowed one moreillusion — of being in the good care of Anthony’s strong, tanned arms, his palette and his brush giving her their undivided attention. The painting would be Lady at Market, Oil on Canvas. There she’d be, sitting on the tailgate of her truck, in a pair of jeans that were starting to feel fight and a jaded navy T-shirt. Both had dry dirt marks from carrying armloads of tomatoes out of the field at 5a.m. Her long, greying, black hair would be pulled hack out of her sun-reddened face. She’d he surrounded by other trucks and cheap beach umbrellas, and tables full of heat-beat vegetables. The humidity would hang in the air. She’d rub the dull ache above her eyes and sip on a bottle of warm water. She’d be anxious, almost hysterical in her thoughts, hating herself for her lack of calm. She’d try to strike a pose of ambivalence.

On the drive in to the market, clover fields and red barns and the clear sky lent their lines and colour to Alex’s vision of Anthony painting some woman’s breasts. Streaks of alizarin crimson and cerulean blue half-circles erased the politeness and distance of pure white canvas, while Anthony’s layered paint strokes teased swollen nipples until they stood erect to catch the light from the northern window. Alex could picture them winking in delight at the man who caressed them tirelessly in cadmium yellow and Acra red.

This happened every time Anthony painted a nude. Alex imagined her husband having sex with his subject the minute she wasn’t around. It didn’t matter that he repeatedly told her they weren’t women to him, but lines and curves, and light, and energy. Not to mention these paintings were the only source of his meagre income — supported by women who wanted to surprise their husbands or treat themselves to a nude portrait by the renowned artist, Anthony Roy. It kept him well stocked in oils and canvas, and with very little left to contribute to their modest living.

None of that mattered to Alex anymore.

She could no longer believe that when these masses of curves and light crossed their legs, and positioned themselves this way and that way, Anthony didn’t see their vaginas, neatly shaven and moist from the summer heat, and stinging with excitement over being seen by a man they hardly knew. How could he say he only saw a black triangular shape and cobalt violet curls? And what about the sexual energy, with a heartbeat of its own, pounding and begging him to embrace it and devour it for the eternity of the moment?

Those were the thoughts that ran through her mind on a Saturday afternoon at the farmers’ market, when the light changed and cast shadows all around her from its harsh, unforgiving place above. It was defeating when Alex realized, once again, she was seeing herself through her own eyes. Anthony’s continued to elude her.

At some point, Alex started talking to herself — out loud. She did this in her truck when she drove the back roads home from the market and as she sat in the spare room, cutting clothes that used to fit her into square rags for Anthony. He was always saying a painter could never have too many rags.

It had become an annoying habit — this talking to herself. But she no longer trusted the mute voice in her own head to sort things out. To pay heed to what went through her mind.

A few weeks earlier — when she was at the market — dazed from a lack of sleep the night before, and weakened by another day of unrelenting heat, Alex mumbled something about thick arms and unreachable happiness. She was thinking of Picasso’s Seated Nude, and how the woman’s arms were rounded, like parentheses, “bracketing what she could not reach but longed to hold.”

She caught herself quickly, but Alex knew Vincent had heard her, the man who sold sunflowers out of the truck parked beside hers. He never said anything, but she was sure he looked at her differently from that moment on — as if he was waiting for the unbalanced woman selling zucchini beside him to mumble more spontaneous, incomplete thoughts.

In the spare room, Alex cut a pair of beige pants that were destined to be smeared with a burnt sienna and Viridian green hillside, and she thought about the swish-swish-swish sound she heard the other day. It was the sound of friction between her legs. The top of her thighs had rubbed together when she walked down the gravel driveway to check the mail. She had never heard it before and tried walking with her legs farther apart. But it didn’t do any good. She decided she would have to walk bowlegged to separate her newly joined thighs and that seemed extreme and ridiculously vain.

What other betrayals of the body did she have to look forward to, she wondered? Would her sagging breasts eventually reach the crease that formed when she sat, like some kind of stupid grin across her belly? Would she end up with large pockets of cellulite behind her rubbing thighs? Would they look like lumpy beanbags?

No wonder Anthony never cared to throw such horrors of the flesh at his virgin canvas. Even the greatest impressionist must paint with at least some hint of the living creature before him, no matter how unpleasant the reality.

The first time Vincent invited Alex for a drink after the market, she declined. She was afraid he was only curious about the state of her unstable mind. If she was capable of talking out loud to no one in particular, what other strange behaviour might he be entertained with? She’d heard he was a psychotherapist in Toronto before he divorced and moved to the old Ryan farm on the fifth concession. Apparently, he was on some kind of sabbatical from life and didn’t want to do anything but grow sunflowers and fix up the dilapidated farmhouse he had bought a couple of years ago.

The next time Vincent invited her for a drink, Alex accepted. She told herself he was probably just lonely, in need of a little conversation after spending all of his time tending his towering sunflowers, and filling cracks in plaster walls with spackling compound. A person could go mad living the quiet life, especially after being used to the traffic and buzz of the city. Even a woman who talked to herself was better company than no company at all.

After they packed up their unsold goods at the end of a long day, Alex followed Vincent along the back roads to his farmhouse. The sun was already burrowing into the horizon, skipping stones of deep yellow light across the tops of passing trees and turning the metal rooftops on barns into slanted sheets of rippled gold.

She knew Anthony would be admiring the same sunset from the studio window, standing in its path so he could feel the light on his weathered face. She knew he’d eventually close his eyes to watch the private light show of the sun’s after-image. She assumed he wouldn’t be thinking about her. She hadn’t been gone long enough for that yet.

The last time Alex drove down the same road, Vincent had just moved into the greying, white stucco house. The fields that lined the narrow laneway were full of thistles and in need of cutting. She was surprised to see how they had changed, to see them full of sunflowers as tall as any man, with faces glowing as the sun settled down to sleep and gave them one last kiss of light.

She couldn’t help but think of van Gogh, and the number of times his much-loved sunflowers came up in conversations with Anthony. Van Gogh, Chagall, Matisse, Monet, and Gauguin. They weren’t dead at all, she thought. They lived on. On a dirt road in Ontario — the eighth concession of Rawdon Township — in the rags, canvases, and hundreds of tubes of paint in a converted chicken coop.

Anthony always spoke of them as family, as distant relatives whose genius had somehow been passed down to him, deserving of his constant verbal recognition of their technique, passion, and madness.

He never mentioned the wife of Henri Matisse, who supported their family with a millinery before he was able to make a living selling his paintings. Every fall when she found herself back at school teaching the young and the uninterested about the colour wheel — and when she dropped into the tub exhausted from weeding and picking and selling vegetables for extra money in the summer — Alex thought about Madame Matisse.

Anthony never mentioned Chagall’s wife, Bella, either — never talked about the way Chagall celebrated every wedding anniversary with a painting of himself and his wife. Anthony didn’t see what that had to do with anything.

He did give Alex a painting once — early on in their marriage. She never understood it, but dutifully placed it in a prominent place in the house, in the living room, where she could spend the rest of her life trying to figure it out. Most of the space on the canvas was untouched. In the middle, there were a series of shapes and outlines of half-drawn figures, painted in primary colours, in lines that never joined and sometimes trailed off faintly until barely visible. It was untitled.

Alex wondered what Anthony would make of that picture now. Would he see her, or only the colour of her white summer shirt, softened by the onset of darkness? Would he even notice she was some place she’d never been before?

Lady on the Porch, Oil on Canvas. Seated on a red chair, shadows of a dozen sunflowers standing in line along the porch of a freshly painted white stucco house. The woman would be waiting for a man named Vincent, handsome in his dishevelled, introspective way, to bring her a glass of red wine. She would sit with her hands on the sides of the chair, anticipating the burning pleasure of the wine passing her parched lips, making its way down her throat into her chest and her aching back. She’d be looking off to the right — out over the field of a thousand faces, wondering why she was there, and if she would ever want to leave.

“My daughter thinks I’m an aging hippie and my husband’s an irresponsible loser.” Alex and Vincent sat inside, at the kitchen table, after clusters of annoying bugs had chased them off the porch. She told him about Felicity, the daughter she had during a brief relationship before she met Anthony.

“The day of her wedding, she tells me I’m a disappointment because I didn’t register her for Royal Doulton china at the gift store in town.”

“Do people still do that?”

“Apparently. And I blew it. That, and I didn’t bother getting my hair done.”

“Are you supposed to?” Vincent sat sideways, along the table’s edge, his legs stretched out, crossed and relaxed. He ran his index finger slowly along the top of his wineglass.

“Her fiancé’s mother did.” Alex took a few gulps of wine and a little ran down the corner of her mouth. She wiped it with the back of her hand. She was certain that Vincent noticed the drooling and now thought of her as some hick who can’t even manage to keep the wine in her mouth.

“Do you think you’re a disappointment?” he asked.

“Is this therapy?”

“I thought it was a conversation.”

“Sorry.”

“For what?”

“For being accusatory.”

“You’re so formal.” He made it sound like a request, an invitation to stop the verbal dance of the defensive and the guarded. Her shoulders dropped to level comfort. There was nothing to lose. Her pride had been replaced by vanity, and vanity was something she was more than willing to part with.

“I talk to myself. Out loud. Occasionally.”

“I know, I’ve heard you.”

“Is that a sign?”

“Of what?”

“That I’m losing it.”

“I doubt it.”

“I sometimes think I am.”

“So.”

“What do you mean — so?”

“So what if you’re losing it? What difference does it make?”

None. None at all she wanted to say, and mean it. Sure, she could be eloquent, even dazzling with words, captivating onlookers at a gallery opening with talk about enticing nuance and engaging manner, throwing in something about the unending delight and the fullness of form of the impasto style. So what if she ended up walking the streets in town blurting out incoherent excerpts from her internal prose, about unreachable happiness and sagging breasts, and the sound her rubbing thighs make.

“I guess it wouldn’t make any difference,” she finally said, “because you no longer care when you lose it, do you?”

“The only thing you’re in danger of losing, Alex, is your idea about what life was supposed to be.”

During their conversation, Alex thought she saw him gazing into her eyes for long periods of time. She couldn’t be sure, though, because she kept looking away — at the antiques around the room he’d refinished himself, at the aluminum kettle sitting on the stove with a small dent in one side. She could picture Vincent making himself coffee in the morning. She wanted to be there — in the morning — to walk up behind him and put her arms around his still-flat waistline.

When she went to the bathroom upstairs, Alex caught a glimpse of his bedroom and the rumpled mess of sheets on his bed. She wanted to climb in and stay forever. She returned to the kitchen feeling as though some sort of intimacy had passed between them.

He didn’t kiss her when she left, didn’t suggest she come again. He thanked her for an interesting evening and walked her to her truck. It seemed like the wrong ending for the kind of intense conversation they’d had — the wrong piece of footage edited onto the final moment of a film about a completely different night. Alex drove home replaying their conversation over and over again in her mind.

It wasn’t until she pulled into her driveway that she remembered she hadn’t bothered calling Anthony to let him know where she was. The light from the studio was still on and she hesitated before she walked towards it. She decided she’d tell him someone from the market invited her over at the last minute, that she didn’t call because she didn’t want to interrupt him. He wouldn’t pry, or be suspicious. She was sure of that. She’d never given him reason to be before. Besides, nothing happened.

The morning after the evening she spent with Vincent, Alex was picking tomatoes from the field beside the house. Her knees were soaked from the wet earth. It had rained in the middle of the night — a heavy rain that woke her up and sent her downstairs, where she sat in a chair in front of the painting Anthony gave her years before. She had stayed there until it was time to go out to garden, holding a glass of cognac in tired hands she admitted needed more touching, more stroking — less time holding things together, patting someone’s back, and framing someone else’s soul

“Visual innocence,” she said on her way out the door, a pair of garden gloves and a few baskets under her arm. She could no longer look at a field and simply see a field. She saw a carpet of green, which seemed to stretch into forever, and herself, standing at the other end, tiny and insignificant, holding an empty basket. “Nothing is as it once appeared.”

Almost two weeks passed by before Vincent asked Alex over for a drink again. She accepted and told him she’d like to take a walk through his fields of sunflowers. It sounded like the romantic idea of some young virgin who thought love and sex had more to do with setting than anything else — she wished she hadn’t said anything.

Vincent seemed to like the idea, so she stopped second-guessing herself. They packed up a little early that day and ignored the questioning looks from the other farmers who saw them leave at the same time.

As she followed Vincent out to his house, she knew then that she would make love to him. She also knew she’d feel guilty about it later. But she told herself, she’d learn to live with it. She had learned to live with so many other things.

At least there would be pleasure before pain, she rationalized, and she hadn’t felt pleasure for a long time. She was used to rationalizing — accepting Anthony’s art as more important than her own desire to return to the canvas, dismissing his lack of affection towards Felicity as a lack of genetic connection. The list went on, but even Alex had grown bored with it, tired of the impossible task of keeping peace at any price.

Would it have made any difference if she hadn’t bothered rushing in to clean up the mess all those years? Would more blood have been spilled? Would more unspoken truths have been heard by knowing souls? Pity the woman, she thought, who thinks she’s made a real difference in the lives of those who don’t even notice her slipping away.

Just that morning, after the sun came up and Alex came in from the field with arms full of tomatoes for the market, Anthony had offered to wash her hair with the rainwater they collect in a barrel behind the house. She couldn’t remember the last time he offered to do this. It had once been a weekly ritual — a prelude to lovemaking and quiet mornings spent talking about all they wanted to do with their lives, together. It eventually waned to a monthly, then yearly event, trailing off to non-existence like the mysterious figures in the painting he had given her, now hanging in the living room.

Alex sat by the barrel with a towel around her neck, her head tilted backwards, resting on the back of her chair. She jerked slightly when the first drop of cold water ran down the side of her face.

“Sorry,” was all Anthony said. Alex said nothing. She sat there listening to geese fly overhead. Most likely, they were headed for the pond in the woods at the back of the property. She opened her eyes to see them but they were already out of view.

Anthony ran his fingers through her hair after each ladle full of rainwater, carefully separating the knots along the way. Alex heard the odd car go by on the gravel road and the distant sound of a chainsaw cutting through wood. It brought the smell of wet leaves and earth to mind. It would soon be fall when Anthony and Alex would head to the woods themselves, to cut trees for the old wood-stove in the studio. If they were lucky, nature would provide enough fallen trees to avoid cutting any that were still standing.

Alex was going to ask him how much wood he thought they would need to heat the studio all winter. She also thought of mentioning the thank-you note Felicity sent the other day, for the painting they gave her as a wedding gift. She was even considering talking about the weather, just so they’d have something to say to each other. Instead, she only said “thanks” when Anthony finished towel-drying her hair. The damp, cool earth in Vincents sunflower field welcomed Alex’s body and spread before her the possibilities of endless lovemaking. A thousand faces would witness her release, she thought. She had already managed to shut out all concerns of what’s right and what’s wrong — what’s good and what’s bad. There was no room for the remains of dying love in a field full of golden sunflowers.

She lay there waiting in the pencil-thin red light of the fading sun as Vincent undressed, his head lowered in her direction, silhouetting his face and hiding his thoughts. There was no way to tell if what he saw was disappointing to him. She decided she didn’t care, and it helped to know Vincent wasn’t the sort to voice it anyway. So far, everything he had ever said to her was spoken without criticism. There was no reason to ever hold back or change things in mid-sentence at the first sign of judgement coming her way.

Alex wanted Vincent to take his time unbuttoning his shirt. She wasn’t in any hurry. She wanted to lie before him — exposed — and to have the chance to get the perspective absolutely right.

Lady in a Field, Oil on Canvas. Lying naked in a field of sunflowers, one arm resting at her side, the other on her stomach, just above her navel. One leg stretched flat against the ground — the other bent at the knee. Nothing to be embarrassed about. Her hips might have grown slightly wider over the years, but they were strong and bore her a daughter who was feisty and opinionated and determined.

Her thighs were thicker than they once were, but they were part of sturdy legs she could rely on for hours of weeding, and to hold her up during tiring days in the classroom, where she made a living and, sometimes, a difference in a kid’s life.

She would be lying there, waiting to make love to a man she barely knew — waiting to make love to herself. She’d be thinking of the field beside the one she was in, and the one beside that, and how their lovemaking could go on forever, and how comfortable she would suddenly feel lying naked before him.

Fall came with cooler-than-normal weather, changing the leaves earlier, making them more brilliant than Alex could remember. The tall maple near the mouth of the pond — usually a deep — yellow surprised her with its new dark orange leaves. She trailed behind Anthony, carrying a thermos of hot chocolate and looked for other transformations in the season of change.

She was no longer conscious of the swish-swish-swish of her rubbing thighs, or the hours that passed by with hardly a word from her husband. She walked with pleasure through the woods, passing familiar rocks, taking in the smell of the spruce and pine.

Part of her was wishing Vincent could be there. Part of her was happy to be with Anthony, whom she had followed down the same path for what seemed like a lifetime. He still wore the same thick blue and red plaid shirt, and carried the same rusty chainsaw. He still walked with his back straight as a board, his legs barely bending as he moved.

She thought if she could push memory aside, she would see Anthony only as he was that day. A man in the woods. A man walking tall, carrying death in his hands to the hundreds of trees that surrounded him and bathed him in their glory. It wasn’t evil she saw but vulnerability, and his failing eyes, which no longer saw the beauty of what stood before him.

Then memory intruded, and the fleeting freshness of what she saw was lost in the cool air blowing in her face, reminding her of the purpose of the day, and the stale truths about the man who was walking before her. It wasn’t easy to close the private gallery behind her eyes — to leave behind the long-running show of scenes of their life together.

Alex couldn’t look at Anthony without thinking of their time living in Toronto, when they first met after university. She still remembered every inch of the house they rented in the Beaches, and the corner smoke shop where she used to buy licorice pipes for Anthony and Felicity on her way home from teacher’s college.

She couldn’t erase the day they moved out of the city to the old farmhouse they slowly furnished in antiques collected together at auctions and early morning yard sales. Anthony could hardly contain his excitement. He jumped up and down, and sang and danced, as he unloaded the UHaul and carried their possessions across the threshold of the house he could call his own. He had come home to the country, just a few miles from where he grew up.

Everything about the place was endearing to him, even the downstairs windows that had been painted shut, the bodies of dead flies decomposing in the sun between panes of glass. He was going to transform himself into a handyman and fix them in no time, he said. He called a contractor after a week of unsuccessful bouts with several bent paint scrapers. It was the first of many defeats imposed on him by the old house, but nothing it did could ever kill his love for it. The well never ran dry. That was the important thing. He made it a mantra for their life in the country, and their marriage.

The real estate agent who sold them the farm told them it was an artesian well, and that it once supplied five other farms. While their neighbours regularly had their water trucked in during dry, hot summers, Anthony stood proudly on the porch watching the water trucks pass by, then went inside and washed his hands with the taps wide open.

For several years, they worked at restoring the farmhouse to its original beauty — stripping and sanding the hardwood floors, repairing and reinstalling the tin ceilings that had been stored in the attic. They converted the chicken coop into Anthony’s studio. Alex put in flower gardens and eventually a huge vegetable garden in the field beside the house.

There was always work to do, plans to draw up, materials to shop for — the before and after pictures recorded every moment. There were very few pictures of a family having fun. Even Felicity helped with the work, pounding nails into the heavy cedar boards Alex and Anthony held to the outside walls of the studio.

At one time, Alex thought about having another child. Her marriage didn’t seem complete, and she wanted Felicity to have a sibling. Anthony never talked about it much, and didn’t respond when she brought it up. She assumed he didn’t want the responsibility or the intrusion on his life, so she never pushed it. She felt she had already imposed Felicity on him and he had accepted the imposition without complaint.

As they walked on, past the pond and down the path towards a heavily wooded area, Alex tried to recall the day Anthony actually said he didn’t want a child. Nothing came, and she felt a chill in the middle of her back, and heaviness in the pit of her stomach. She watched Anthony’s reflection, rippled by the breeze running along the pond’s dark water.

The truth was Anthony never did say he didn’t want a child. He never said she should give up painting, or go to teacher’s college to support him, either. Or that she should sell vegetables at the market every summer. He never said Felicity was an imposition. They never talked about any of those things. Alex always made the decisions based on what was never said.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been able to talk to you.”

She said it out loud, like a statement in the middle of a conversation that up until that point had been conducted in the silence of her own mind. It intruded on the scene, creating a cloud of tension over the spot where they stood, where lightening had placed a large spruce at their feet, sparing them the depressing task of having to choose which tree would die for their firewood.

“Where is this coming from?” Anthony was squinting in the sun, straining to see, and to grasp the meaning of what had just been said. The chainsaw hung by his side.

“I’m not sure,” was all Alex could manage.

“Well, why did you say it?”

“I don’t know. Let’s just forget it.” Alex put the thermos down and pulled her leather gloves out of her pocket.

“Let’s just cut the tree — please.” She fussed over the fit in the fingers of her gloves so she didn’t have to look up and see her husband’s face.

Finally, Anthony started the chainsaw.

“That’s the thing about an affair,” Alex said when her fear of being heard was drowned by the deafening sound of the rusty chainsaw, and Anthony was busy pushing it into a thick limb. “It awakens the dead.”

Alex held onto the fallen tree as tight as she could while Anthony methodically cut it up. Yes, she thought, it awakens the dead, and the self-conscious, long-denied greediness of an aging libido, and the youthful courage to expose oneself without a care about repercussions or rejection. That — and it brings about the unfortunate surfacing of truths about yourself you managed to shove into the dark corners of your mind. Those convenient man-made cubbyholes you forget exist until your house is shaken up, aroused by the pounding of your own heart and a renewed interest in what the next day might bring.

“So this is what it’s like.”

She wasn’t surprised or disappointed, only certain that Anthony didn’t suffer the same way after his trysts with naked women in the converted chicken coop. That’s what bothered her the most. The guilt and self-blame about what had gone wrong with their marriage had landed squarely in her lap.

On a cloudy Saturday several weeks later, Vincent and Alex got into his truck and drove south with no particular destination in mind. They ended up in Prince Edward County, where tri-coloured gourds and apples of every kind imaginable were on display at tiny roadside stands, with names like Windwillow Farms. They drove past well-run orchards and quaint towns with more antique shops than houses — through valleys and hamlets where people rode mountain bikes in large groups and ate in sophisticated country cafes, then spent the day perusing the area’s artisan shops.

Vincent and Alex passed by it all, opting for the ambiance of the desolate ruins of Lakeshore Lodge on the rocky shores of Lake Ontario. They ate the tomato and red onion sandwiches Vincent had packed for them in the shell of one of the lodge’s cottages — where steady lake winds blew through glassless windows and banged the loose whitewashed boards on the wall against each other.

It wasn’t the first time Alex had been here.

Two years before, she had been standing outside one of the studio windows watching Anthony paint a nude. The young woman looked no more than 25, with brunette hair cut just about her shoulders, streaked with red highlights. Her breasts were on the small side, but her nipples were huge and dark brown. Anthony had matched the colour perfectly on the canvas.

The young woman looked off into the distance, towards the door. Her breathing was shallow, as instructed by Anthony, her life briefly suspended as she sat naked on a white sheet Alex knew she would find later. It would be waiting for her on top of the washing machine in the house. Anthony always used the same sheet.

As she stood watching, nothing happened that could be considered upsetting, except for the way Anthony looked at the woman. He was so intense, so captivated. His eyes smiled at her, amused and smitten. He occasionally made one-word observations. Beautiful. Perfection. Lovely.

Alex soon walked away and got into her truck. She drove aimlessly for hours, talking to herself above the steady drone of the radio, which she turned on in case someone spotted her babbling out loud. They would just think she was singing along — a middle-aged woman who no longer cared about making a fool of herself, belting out off-key songs about love gone wrong.

She eventually ended up at Lakeshore Lodge, after hiking through the huge sand hills of Sandbanks Provincial Park. She stood on the foundation of what was once the main lodge. Parts of it were blackened from the fire that had flattened it a few years before. Then she sat inside the smallest of the remaining cottages, on a tree stump, and emptied the sand from her shoes. There were cigarette butts near her feet and an empty bottle of gin in one corner.

The view from the glassless window looked out over the endless waves on the lake, with a couple of tall cedars to the left, on the crest of a ledge that dropped off sharply. Below the ledge, there were huge flat rocks, soaked from the slapping water. Alex imagined the view had not changed much over the years and that others, who sat in the cottage decades before, had also been calmed by the surroundings and the sound of the seagulls sitting on the rocks nearby.

Something about the place conjured up images of a young woman sitting on a bed in the same room, looking out the window in the late afternoon, tired from playing shuffleboard earlier in the day. Alex had seen the remains of a shuffleboard court in front of the foundation of the main lodge — a flat grave for buried pleasures in the lives of those lucky enough to afford a stay at this old luxury resort.

She had also found the cement wading pool with peeling bright green paint, half-hidden in the tall grass. The pebble-speckled marble floor of the old dance hall, still scuffed from the shuffling feet of those who would have danced to Glenn Miller across the floor and over the embedded Lakeshore Lodge emblem, with the sun and the waves on its crest.

At the time, Alex felt she had been there before — sitting on the edge of the bed in the later afternoon, tired out from a hot day in the sun, anticipating the dance that night and the solitude of the flat rocks in the moonlight. Feeling alone and at home, in the place with the calming view, with water reaching out beyond all that she carried inside her.

Two years later, she was sitting in the same place with her lover, seeking shelter from the wind in a cottage that had seen better days and more love and discontent than the weak and tired walls could reveal to inexperienced eyes. A simple cottage that remains forever in good condition in the memories of those who stayed there — remembered, because of their sudden displays of affection, or the nightmarish release of feelings of emptiness and unhappiness. People either left there more in love than ever before or with the realization that love had died.

Now it was Alex and Vincent who had come to sort things out among the falling walls. Alex knew that they too would become part of its history, and when the cottage finally collapsed and was dragged away, bit by bit, they would still live on there with all the others — that their love, however short it might last, would continue to blow in on the winds. For nothing could ever take away the lake and the flat rocks below. They would always be there even when the last trace of the lodge was gone. She would always be able to come back and remember what it had been like.

After a while, after very little was said about anything, they headed over to the Outlet Beach on the eastern side of the park. A wooden snow fence had already been erected along the top of the beach, to protect the fragile dunes from the oncoming winter winds and frazil ice. Alex and Vincent walked along the water where dark green algae had washed up for the gulls to feed on.

They passed a young family trying to capture the joys of summer with one last chance to build sandcastles. The rest of the beach was empty, hard and wet from an early morning rain.

From a distance, nothing else could be seen. But Alex was walking with her head down, making a mental list of the debris before her — plastic white spoons and baggies, and straws. Bottle caps and cigar tips, and bits of coloured plastic from broken shovels. And a scattering of dull white feathers, where a pack of seagulls stood waiting for a rippled chip to be thrown by a playful child, who was later scolded by annoyed parents who couldn’t stand walking on sand splattered by the gulls’ mushy grey shit.

“Did you ever come here with Anthony?”

Alex spotted a Tootsie Roll wrapper and remembered Felicity sitting on a towel at the age of seven, eating candy and burying her feet in the sand.

“We used to come once in a while, when Felicity was young. Anthony always hated it. Said he didn’t see the fun in roasting like a pig in the hot sun.”

In the two months they had been seeing each other, Alex made a point of not talking about Anthony too much. Partly out of guilt. Partly out of her own need to live for a brief time without him at the back of her neck — something she could only achieve when she was with Vincent, making love in his rumpled bed. The cold nights had forced them inside, reluctantly abandoning the golden fields

“We can’t expect someone to like everything we do.” Vincent’s detached tone was similar to the tone he had used the week before, when he suggested that Anthony might not be having affairs with the women he paints, that perhaps the turn-on was in not touching them, that he used the sexual energy merely to paint. At the time, Alex didn’t respond. But what he had said had been nagging her ever since.

“What are you saying, Vincent, that I expect too much? That I’m too demanding because I wanted my husband to come to the beach with his family?”

“No. I’m not saying that. I’m simply saying that other people — even our partners — don’t always like the same things we do. It’s just a fact of life.”

Alex stopped walking.

“I don’t understand why you feel the need to take his side all the time. What is it? Guilt? Or you just can’t help yourself. You have to psychoanalyse everyone who crosses your path?”

“I’m not taking his side, Alex.”

Vincent moved towards her and reached out with one of his hands.

“I don’t need this from you,” she said, stepping back. She walked away from him, briskly, for several hundred feet, before she looked back. When she finally turned around, she saw him sauntering along the beach, looking out over the lake. He wasn’t in any rush to catch up with her.

As she watched him, the sun peaked out from behind a cloud. It was harsh in its sudden mid-afternoon entrance, the first it had come out all day. It had been trying earlier, when they were still sitting in the shell of the cottage at Lakeshore Lodge, where the mood of the day had taken an odd, uncomfortable turn and they seemed out of place with the rest of the history of the place.

Alex turned away from the sight of Vincent walking along the beach in the sunlight, closing her eyes for a fraction of a second, allowing Vincent’s after-image to appear — the outline of his body in bright yellow lines with trailing dots of light all around. She continued walking down the beach, slowing her pace a little, letting what had passed between them make its way out of her. And then it came —

Lady in Oil on Canvas: Her after-image was painted in half-drawn multiples of herself, in reds, yellows, and blues, in the middle of the white canvas. On the right, she was dance-like in her motions, her arms sweeping towards the sky. In another image on the left, she was sitting, her legs bent, and her head lowered, resting on her knees. In the middle, slightly above the other images, she was walking away with her arms at her side, into the wilderness of the stark white forever.

She was all of them and they’d been staring back at her from the wall in the living room, where she lives with the man who painted his wife, a wife who failed to recognize the basics any artist knows. Who forgot about primary colours and after-images, and how the eye makes up for what is missing.

On the beach, the sun disappeared from sight again, behind a cloud that promised to move on before their eyes got used to its flat, soft light. Alex looked back at her footprints in the sand. Her feet had always been too large for her liking. Anthony used to say that was because she carried the world on her shoulders and she needed the support. Alex only saw the impressions they made in the sand and thought about how they’d be gone the next day.

“Washed away.”

She stopped long enough for Vincent to catch up and they walked the rest of the way in silence, while the waves rolled up along the shoreline in a continuous, cautioning roar — never dipping or quieting, never telling her what to do.