A Circle on the Surface Read online

  Kit said the same thing about some men.

  But this was sour grapes! Because there was so much more about a baby to long for. A peach fuzz scalp, rosebud lips, the delicate sponge that was an infant’s brain. It was one thing to guide someone else’s child through the wonders of a curriculum, another to guide your own offspring through lessons you designed out of love. A world handpicked for it, a world with butter, not margarine coloured with orange dye, a world of lawns with grass, not rocks and weeds, of water from reservoirs, not wells, she had said to Enman.

  “Dunno where you’d find a world like that, dear,” Enman had said, and drawn her close.

  Lying on its bed of cotton-wool, at its base the thermometer contained what looked like a tiny silver cake decoration. As she picked it up, its glass cool and as slippery as if greased, it slid—shit!—from her fingers. It was an icicle shattering everywhere. The floor’s slope nudged the mercury ball, pretty as a bead but poisonous, under the bed.

  Goddamnit. When Enman got home, he would have to dispose of it.

  Pulling on her bathing suit, she pushed out her stomach and her breasts. The thought of Enman was jarring. For all his fumbling goodness, he seemed, suddenly, to have fallen away somewhere, to have retreated a lot farther than from sight and more distant than O’Leery.

  The tide was in and, despite being late morning, the beach was deserted. Her loneliness only added to her day’s irritation. She let seafoam scrub her toes while lines from movies washed wantonly in and out of mind—Casablanca especially. Bergman’s Yvonne asking Bogart’s Rick where he’d been the night before, his hedging, “It was so long ago I don’t remember.” Her “Will I see you tonight?” and his “I never make plans that far ahead.” As far as she recalled, Yvonne hadn’t been trying to conceive. No one in movies wanted to get pregnant, babies being where romance ended.

  As she ducked under a wave, a gull nearby picked at a fish. She had read, of course, how a bad seed got passed along in families, though certain traits, aberrations, might skip a generation—or not. Take Enman and his weakness for liquor, his fondness for Barrein, and his alcoholic father, who, despite his wandering eye, had never strayed from this place. Did Barrein apply brakes to everyone’s ambitions?

  Oh yes, brakes. Something else Enman had mentioned on the phone.

  She stepped from the surf, moved onto dry sand. The sun razored down, the sea a dazzle so sharp it hurt to view it. Everything was lost to the glare, hidden, as mysterious somehow as her emptiness, the feeling of a void as deep as the seashore at night.

  Bracketed by rocks, this stretch of beach could not have been more lonesome. The perfect spot, really, for anyone who was up to no good, like Win’s bootlegging son. Or for someone desperate enough to do something rash, a person inclined to walk in over their head, for instance—too far, too deep—and keep going.

  No one around but gulls to see any lines she might have drawn for herself in the sand before waves washed them away. Lines about leaving Barrein, or staying, which boiled down, she knew, to leaving Enman or remaining married.

  It was then she spotted driftwood at a distance, freshly deposited by the tide. Dark against the sand’s dazzle, it had a shape interesting enough that she imagined lugging it home, if she could have, and using it to decorate the end of the lane, as Kit would do, or the big rock behind Enman’s garden.

  But no, it wasn’t driftwood at all but a person, the last thing she expected to see. A bather stretched out on the sand, just above the tidemark. He lay on his back, hand shielding his eyes.

  Her heart still raced from her dip, the thud of her pulse in her ears. Before she could veer off to her spot in the dunes, clothes and towel dropped there aimlessly, the man sat up. He gazed her way. He appeared to be frowning. His wet hair looked the colour of rockweed. His hand moved and he waved and even smiled. He was shirtless, wearing only pants. His face and his build were familiar—it was him, her Gary Cooper, the fellow who had seen her bathing, seen her climb naked to the rock. God.

  What time was it, anyway? It must be noon, the way her shadow pooled underfoot as though she had melted into it.

  He must be camping, then, somewhere in the vicinity, spending several nights sleeping under the stars.

  Curiosity lightened her step. The fellow, still smiling, beckoned. The gesture was chummy and sweet as Clint Goodrow’s nod could be. Except he was younger, so much younger, and much better looking. Enman might know who he was, Enman who wouldn’t be home for hours and then some. Who knew when she would have company again? Company to save her from herself.

  She left her shadow behind and marched over to him. He didn’t speak. He grinned up at her. The muscles of his chest were traced with sweat. His burn had turned to tan. The man patted a place on the sand beside him.

  His callused brown hand was ringless, she noticed.

  Everything in his smile was an invitation.

  It felt a bit like being in a movie, playing Judy Garland, dropping to the sand, arranging herself beside him—fetchingly or not. He was so much younger than she was—even younger, possibly, than she had first thought.

  She could have been his older sister, though not, thank God, his mother. His eyes were like a starling’s, watching her every movement. His own movements were small, careful—economical, Enman might say—as if to conserve his energy. She had the feeling that she herself had somehow rehearsed this scenario, experienced it in a dream only slightly less unsettling than this morning’s. A dream she’d had after visiting Dr. Snow’s office in February, that she was auditioning for some sort of part.

  Quite possibly this was a dream, or a mirage, the man reaching over, his hand moving to hers. A mirage, she told herself. Or a symptom of heat stroke.

  She did notice, couldn’t help but, how quickly he rose to the occasion, as Rick Gregory would say. When his fingers brushed the crook of her arm she closed her eyes, almost expected to catch a whiff of Old Spice—Enman’s—or no, not aftershave but that cool-as-cucumber secretive man-smell of warm skin, sweat. The scent was mixed with that of oiled leather as her fingers, still a bit numb from the sea, moved to his belt buckle.

  There wasn’t another soul around. She would have spotted someone if there were. The only ones to watch were the birds, the beach, and the moment itself, which lay somehow outside everything.

  She squeezed her eyes shut—the sun cast black and red shapes through her lids—as she tugged down the top of her suit. It was already low-slung and gritty inside; was it such a brazen, unnatural thing to do? She felt his tongue circle each nipple. She could hardly believe this was happening. She was lying in a blitz of sun, on a surface where everything seemed to be gritty yet melting, while her mind floated on a watery surface of its own. His lips—his tongue briefly grazing hers—tasted salty and metallic. Lake water? His smell had a deeper note of petroleum and unwashed clothes. She wanted to speak then, to say something—but what, and more to the point, why?

  Lying flat, lifting her bum to squirm free of the suit, she thought not of Rick Gregory but of Enman. Getting out of the suit took long enough that she might have stopped, stood up, walked away. The suit’s dankness twisted around her knees—enough to make her laugh, jarring enough that he stopped helping. His teeth were crooked, she saw, and his chin, in need of a shave, had a sparse prickle of beard. Still, with its fine bones his face was handsome. A son in his likeness was bound to be handsome too. But his clear blue eyes looked suddenly wary, afraid? “Oh my God, you’re not a virg—,” the words escaped before she could swallow them.

  He grinned, oblivious of his teeth, and slid his hand over her and down, moving his fingers, pressing, probing, poking.

  It was so simple, the simplest thing in the world. Is that why the world used that word to describe some women?

  Easy.

  When she felt him push inside—his body’s taut, surprising weight on hers—whatever friend or foe, Kit or
Win might say hardly mattered. It was a respite from loneliness, and possibly even a means to an end: justifiable. A silly concern about her nudity being indecent flared, then fizzled: except for one shoulder, where the sun seemed fixed, the man’s body covered her as squarely as a beach coat.

  This little vacation from herself was as fleeting as the flicker of sun on her brow. The man groaned with what sounded like relief, as if he had waited a very long time for this. The name he breathed into her ear was, naturally, someone else’s. Then he was kissing her all over, trying to pull her on top of him. Her turn to shield him from the sun?

  Gregory had only wanted to smoke afterwards, then play cards. And Enman, poor Enman, well, he generally went right to sleep….Never look a gift horse in the mouth, or was it in the eye? she thought, slipping back into herself, resisting the tug of the man’s arms. She reached for her bathing suit, covered herself with it as much as she could, lying on her back.

  “If you don’t mind…” She didn’t know what to call him. Except for the name he had uttered, he still hadn’t spoken. She moved her hand as if to clear a space. He obliged by edging over so she could lie there, flatten her back to the sand, press herself to it. The ridges of his ribs brushed hers. She shut her eyes to avoid his, staying so still she felt like a mannequin, one of those laid out on the Commons for youths learning first aid.

  As if to rub life into them, he rolled her fingers between his palms, squeezing them almost painfully: bone on bone. A gesture of forced sympathy? Regret? Kindness?

  When he spoke, finally, his voice was surprisingly proper, English-teacher precise, more so than Carmel Rooney’s or Mrs. Greene’s. She thought of the young men she had attended high school with, her mother’s idea of healthy prospects. Unlike her mother’s tone, its undercurrent of judgement carefully contained by social niceties, his tone lacked such snobbery. His properness was nothing like the properness of their neighbours on Waegwoltic Avenue. “You’re a very pretty lady,” he said shyly, touchingly so. Kneeling, he touched his cheek to her collarbone. Ridiculous, she suddenly felt, her lying there in her altogether, the sun basting her all over.

  “It’s, this is…look, it’s not what you think,” she managed to spit out. But already he was standing and buttoning his pants, brushing away sand. She stayed frozen.

  He looked baffled, then alarmed. He was married, his wife not far away, like Enman perhaps, putting in time in O’Leery.

  “What is your name, please?”

  The squawking of a gull just then mimicked Mrs. Greene’s pesky warning: Don’t you hurt my son! Wheeling off—thankfully—the bird was gone.

  She really didn’t want to say. But how to avoid telling him while lying there already so exposed, everything laid bare but the scandalous flutter of hope she felt inside her. The hope of conceiving was gutting now that she realized she had acted out of a cold agency and her desolation. Repeating her name, he pronounced it correctly. “Charming. A beautiful name for a beautiful lady.” His name, uttered as a honking flock of shags flew by, sounded like Phil or “fill-em,” the way Clint Goodrow said “film.”

  “Greene,” he said, “like the colour?”

  But now he was putting on his boots—heavy black ones, odd for a summer day—tying the laces, slinging a greyish shirt over his shoulder. “I’m—sorry. Oonah. If you need—I cannot stay. But, could I see you again?”

  It sounded so sweet, so formal, so high school. How crushed he would be to hear no, so she zipped her lips. He kissed her, a friendly smack, the way Clint might kiss Win or, once upon a time, Enman might have kissed Win. Would Enman still kiss Win if the chance arose? she wondered. Then the man was scooting away, little puffs of sand at his heels. She managed to get back into her suit.

  The grit of sand pricked her, at the same instant her stomach rose. The man’s speech, with its stiffness, seemed to echo in her ears, left a sickening burn. A foulness pooled in her mouth as the man’s strangeness swept over her.

  It was like expecting the sky to fall, like leaving the audition hall in her dream to find thunderheads massed overhead. Something, the darker the better, to remind her of her rashness—her transgression. Yet nothing but blue winked down, the sky the same colour as the sea, until a few wisps of cloud knit together and gently unravelled. Watching their swirling helped calm her. Being calm helped her stay still enough to let the truth of what she had just done—something that made her date with Gregory as innocent as Merry Melodies—nudge itself beyond agency and the strange possibility of conception to the vague, wild hope that a baby would redeem everything she committed.

  After a while the wisps became batts which formed a gallery of faces, none of which looked familiar.

  A gull passed over, carrying a mussel in its bill, circling then smashing it open on the rocks, a late lunch.

  She imagined other kinds of bills. The kind Enman knew all about, monetary transactions. Transaction. As she spoke the word aloud, it rolled easily from her tongue, resonated in her ears, then roosted in the airy space between them. An exchange. What she had done was no different, really, from a bank trading currencies, or Enman swapping cash for liquor wherever he bought it. And hardly different at all, when you thought it through, from Enman sending Dr. Snow a cheque after her appointment.

  The surf’s soft rumble pushed away her own harshest objections to all of this, objections based on sentiment. Sentiment could be dangerous, she knew. She thought of the hygiene book, how its author would say that, at its worst, sentiment was a smallness of mind that hobbled human progress. Hadn’t Snow said that someday results would be achieved using turkey basters and humans could be grown in petri dishes?

  Having acted in the interests of biology, let biology work its wonders. If she lay still long enough for her body to cooperate, she could even convince herself that it had been Enman taking the bull by the horns in this fair trade, this exchange of services on a beach.

  Eyes shut, she clenched every muscle fibre, asking the sun’s blessing on every wondrous loop and sac inside her. She would let the sun’s heat seal whatever activity might be going on inside, while burning away a secret nobody needed to know. Still she grew cold pressing her tailbone down, the suit’s clamminess raising goosebumps. The trouble with having her eyes closed was that it played the man’s face across an inner screen. A silent film. Matted dark blond hair falling across one eye. Chapped maroon lips against unpleasant teeth, and a gauntness that did not mesh with his youth. A nose that was slightly hawkish, but preferable to a snub one, and the rest of him attractive, appealing, even bamboozling. It was best not to forget that he had been good-looking, although she knew the sound of his grunts was something to be pushed firmly from her memory.

  People acted pragmatically all the time, without letting emotions, love, enter into things. Love belonged to marriage, just as the hygiene book said. Love is patient, love is kind, said Mrs. Greene’s Bible. Love is also in the eye of the beholder, Una thought, and judgement belongs to those who exist outside love, on its periphery. Watching the man hurry off, she had longed for him to be Enman, not leaving, of course, but, by some trick of sunlight, approaching.

  Finally rising, snugging up her suit, she padded carefully back to where her belongings lay. Every blade of marram, whiskers in the dune’s wrinkled face, glinted as the sun slid from behind a cloud. A married woman! it seemed to gloat. A teacher to boot!

  Then it struck her again, the way he had smelled.

  Like diesel, to rhyme with the other name he had uttered.

  She had just put on her clothes when a voice called out, a familiar, haranguing one ringing over the dune.

  “Wouldja look at this! Never thought I’d be so jeezly lucky!”

  Win came struggling towards her, a string bag bulging with goodies swaying from each shoulder. She jerked her chin toward the horizon, matted now, vaguely, with a yellowy grey like the cat hair Una swept from under the bed.


  Not a figment at all, it was a fog bank. It hung there, waiting.

  “Hell’s bells, Una—don’t look at me like that. I’m not a ghost. If anything, girl, I’m someone that seen one, or just about.”

  One of the bags full of tins, most missing labels, clanked to the sand. “Don’t suppose you seen this.” Win yanked something the colour of smoke from the other bag, carefully unrolled it.

  Even before Una recognized it, the odour hit her. The smell was like that of spoiled meat—no, blood.

  A jacket—leather, with a gored pocket, a single row of buttons, each embossed with a little anchor. Her stomach knotted. It was just like the one she had seen hanging on a branch. Its ragged lining was a crusty red. As if that wasn’t enough to make her gag, Win pulled out something grey: a serviceman’s cap, woollen, wedge-style, but not like those the Canadians wore. It had a red badge with an eagle on it and a swastika—the symbol splashed across the Enlist! and Smash Hitler! posters plastered everywhere.

  “Don’t suppose you’d know anything about it?” Win’s chippiness made her chest tighten. Queasy, Una stuffed the jacket back into Win’s bag, managed to mumble about getting back in time for Enman.

  “Whoever’s jacket it was, they mustn’t be in too good a shape.” Win gave a frightened laugh, watching her. Una’s heart kicked inside her.

  “Well. Maybe it’s a trophy—washed up like the rest of your loot.” Una spoke hastily, not meaning any criticism.

  “Right.” Win stared at her, offended.

  In scrambling to apologize, Una ended up sounding glib. “Pity it didn’t come with a body.”

  “Well, you’d know about bodies, you poor dear. Helping with Mrs. Greene’s arrangements and that.”

  Una couldn’t tell whether or not Win aimed to be conciliatory, but was not interested in lingering to find out. Clutching her towel, she turned quickly, making for the path.

  “Where’s the fire? Keep me company. You wouldn’t help me with these cans, never know what’s inside ’em. You’re welcome to half. Beat Iris Finck at her trade—might be something nice here. Last time was tinned pears in their own juice.”