Object of Your Love Read online

  The snow is falling so thick that I can barely make out the A-frame as I turn off the road. They tell me that at the height of winter up here the skin freezes after thirty seconds out of doors. Moisture crystallizes in the lungs, it is painful to breathe. The sun shines briefly, white and cold in the sky. I had looked forward to deep winter and coming inside with frostbitten patches like white kisses on my face. I had pictured Egan rubbing my cheeks with his great thick hands until my skin burned. The air is dense with spinning snowflakes. I think of Ruth arriving out of the hot, brilliant, windy southern autumn to this gift, this miracle of snow in September. I think of her living the winter that was supposed to have been mine.

  I stamp the snow off my boots, my hand is on the doorknob and I am about to enter the house. Then I notice Egan ten yards away, looking under the house. When I go and stand over him, he straightens up and looks at me calmly. He is a man who is not conscious of how attractive he really is. I look at his ruddy face and his even white teeth, thinking he would make a perfect advertisement for the hardy arctic life. He wears mountain boots and thick cable sweaters and, now that the weather is colder, a navy mariner’s wool cap pulled down to his greying eyebrows. He searches my face to see if I’ve heard the news.

  “Ruth is coming back,” I say, hoping it isn’t true, inviting him to deny it. He might still stop her if he wanted to. A phone call could prevent her from boarding the plane.

  “And the hare is gone,” he answers, as though completing a riddle. His gestures seem to me lighter, more optimistic than I have ever known them, his face, at fifty, suddenly serene and youthful. I see that, all along, what I have taken in him for grief was in fact patience. I wonder this: all those evenings when Egan was moving on top of me, slowly, deliberately, like a great hairy musk-ox swaying out on the tundra, was he holding, in his mind, the image of Ruth’s adamant face, her unimaginative, biscuit-coloured hair falling in a dull curve? Or worse—and this is a notion I can scarcely bear—was he in fact employing me as bait, as a kind of cheap decoy, to lure a jealous Ruth back to him? Is this possible? Did he send her subtle and indirect messages, possibly enlisting Morgan as an unwitting but able agent—for surely she has been in touch with Ruth all along, surely the moment I crossed Egan’s threshold, her brittle airmail letters were winging their poisonous way southward, shooting, fragile as breath, above the snowy craters to fall through the brass letter slot of Ruth’s massive oak door.

  “Did you ever,” I ask him pitiably, “did you ever love me? Or were you thinking always about Ruth?”

  Egan does not answer my question. Perhaps he cannot. He moves on quickly to practicalities. “The wisest thing for you to do now is to leave the community,” he tells me. “The sooner the better. There’s a good chance you could get out in the morning.” I see that he wants to spare Ruth the embarrassment of meeting me on the road. He wants to erase overnight what we had, to restore the past. How convenient for him if I were to board the very flight from which Ruth alights in the morning, take the seat warmed by her body on her way north, while the plane lifts, banks, turns its nose toward the equator, carrying me away forever. The very thought of it rankles me.

  “Why should I go?” I ask bitterly. “Why should I leave a place I love, just for your comfort?”

  “Stella,” he says kindly, taking a step forward, reaching out to touch my arm, but I pull away. “Don’t do this to yourself,” he tells me. “You’re young. You have a long life ahead of you. Get out now while you can. Escape this godforsaken place.”

  “Don’t talk down to me,” I say angrily. “I’m not a child. I’ve been your lover!” I look away, my eyes falling on Ruth’s greenhouse, which stands darkly against the luminous sky. Perhaps I should not have scoffed at the glass house. Perhaps it is not Ruth’s Folly, after all, but Ruth’s Triumph, her private monument, fragile defiance of this infertile land, this bald and windswept curve of the earth with its strange power to seduce, absorb, unite.

  Then, contradicting myself, I do something that is just like what one of Egan’s spoiled children might do. I pick up a ski pole that has been leaning against the house all summer. Stepping toward the greenhouse, I raise the pole high, feeling the need, the right, to smash something. I bring it down on the greenhouse wall, connect with the glass, feel it shattering beneath my blow. Again I raise the pole and bring it down. I am hot and trembling with sweet revenge, expecting that, at any moment, Egan will step forward and grab me, pin my wrists against my sides. Perhaps this is what I want. Perhaps I long to feel one last time his iron grip, the power he has over me, over this community. But he stays where he is, willing, it would seem, to let me do whatever damage I want, if it will satisfy me, get me out of his life. I continue my destruction, wielding the pole like a sword, cleaving the air with it. Slivers of glass fly like rain. I feel them piercing the backs of my hands like needle pricks. When Ruth arrives in the morning, I think, when she climbs up the hill, she will find in ruins whatever hopes or illusions the greenhouse embodies for her. I swing the pole. The splintering of glass, like brittle thunder, will be heard, I believe, down in the settlement. I hope it will carry over the round hills and clear out across the icy bay.

  I walk down the road in darkness to the co-op building. I have never officially given up my apartment above the print shop. It has not been assigned to anyone else. I intend to reoccupy it. I fish for the key I am sure must be somewhere at the bottom of my purse, open a side door, climb the narrow stairs. Unready to face the heartlessness of the rooms, the unadorned walls, the mean furniture, the cold, textureless surfaces, I do not turn on the lights, but rest in darkness at the kitchen table with my coat on.

  The image comes to me of Egan climbing the stairs of the A-frame, changing the bed sheets, moving about the room looking for anything I might have left behind: a comb, a pocket novel, a letter. I picture him stepping to the bureau, setting upright once more the photograph of Ruth, whose face has been thrust for so long against the bitter wood. The Resurrection of Ruth. Her picture gazes now upon the room, upon the bed where Egan and I made love, repossessing them. I do not sleep that night. Just after dawn, I hear the distant drone of a Twin Otter. Moving to the window, still in my coat, for I have not even turned on the heat in the apartment, I see the plane grow large and dark in the sky, making its approach to the airstrip, circling above the community, banking neatly, its wings catching the unobstructed rays of the rising sun.

  * * *

  Egan will no longer employ me at the co-op. My presence there would be awkward, now that Ruth has returned. However, he does not have the nerve to expel me from the apartment. A wise and patient man, he may believe that time will eventually drive me out. I manage to get a job almost immediately at the Hudson’s Bay store, doing the books. The store is on the far edge of the community, at the end of the road that hugs the bay, among hills of empty oil drums thrown out in the snow to rust. Here, exiled from the co-op, at the distant perimeter of the settlement, I sit in a small, dim office at the back, with a window looking out into the store. I can see the Inuit women listlessly pushing their carts up and down the bright, barren aisles. The Hudson’s Bay store is, like the shopping malls of the South, an end in itself, a destination, a place to kill time. In the vacant afternoons, when snow falls steadily outside like an opaque white screen, the women drift in, they shuffle aimlessly through the store, staring at the shelves, searching, searching for something that will make them happy.

  It is October now and we have many feet of snow. The Ski-Doos have come out and, at noon when I walk home for lunch, the teenaged boys are roaring up and down the narrow, high-banked, snow-packed roads, just as southern youth do in their hot rods on steamy summer nights. For my lunch, I heat canned soup on my hot plate and butter a slice of bread, thinking sometimes of the imported green grapes Egan used to feed me, one by one, his great square fingers lingering in my mouth like succulent fruit.

  Each day now, looking down out of my window, I see Ruth emerge from one of the c
ooperative buildings, cross the road and enter another door. She is shorter and slighter than I expected, slender-hipped as a girl and dressed in flat laced shoes, conservative plaid skirts and simple sweater sets. She carries in her arms an archival box full of drawings, bears it high, like a priestess transporting a sacred offering, stepping sure-footedly through the snow. I can see from the rigid set of her shoulders, from her efficiency and brusqueness, that there is a hard knot within her, that she is all turned inward upon herself.

  I have never been introduced to her, but one day, late in September, we came upon each other on the road, or rather, she stopped me when she could conveniently have passed by. I’d been looking the other way, distracted. But she pressed forward, caught my arm. She had evidently been waiting for the moment when we would come face to face, perhaps she had even set out to hunt me down. She seemed to have composed something to say.

  “I know who you are,” she told me quietly, confidently, “and why you are still here. You are not important to me. You don’t matter to me in any way. Do you understand? You are not a threat. This is something you should know.” All I could do was to stare at the unhappy lines chiselled around her mouth. I wanted to believe that she was lying to herself, to me, but I could not. I saw that she was rock hard, impermeable as the land, with a centre like flint, like the stony hills pressing in on us.

  Down at the store, I have heard that Ruth has ordered new plastic pots for her greenhouse, she has ordered new panes of glass. When they arrive an Inuk will have to toil for days out in the cold with putty and knife to repair the damage of a jealous mistress. The greenhouse will be restored to its former majesty. It will again be like a soaring medieval cathedral and Ruth will be its high priestess. She will be productive again. She will have, beneath her fingernails, rich, pungent imported soil flown in alongside her filets mignons and avocado pears. Once more she will grow salad greens. When Egan comes home from work he will find her fragile orchids quivering in a vase on the maple hall table.

  The evenings seem interminable in my little apartment. I do not look very closely at my surroundings for fear they will make me desire the warmth and comforts of Egan’s home. I have stayed in the apartment, though I no longer find its poverty cleansing. There is no other place for me to live and I was right in thinking that Egan would not expel me. He does not want to turn our quarrel into a public drama, though, technically, the apartment is for the housing of cooperative staff. After work I eat dinner alone, watch television, read books. Late at night I lie in bed, listening to the crunch of footsteps on dry snow, to voices passing below on the road.

  The bay is frozen now, the ice is a foot thick. On Saturday mornings I hear a great roaring of Ski-Doo engines down on the shore. Stepping to my window, I see a group of hunters heading out across the bay, rifles glinting in their laps, striking out in search of the seal pods at the distant floe edge. The runners of the long komatik sleds leave clean parallel lines on the untracked snow. Gradually, the drone of the Ski-Doos dies away, the figures of the hunters, dark against the dazzling white landscape, diminish, finally disappearing between two hills sloping down to the mouth of the harbour.

  Sometimes as I move about my apartment on the weekends I hear commotion in the rooms downstairs. It is November and a new collection of graphics is about to be released to the southern market. There is a great flurry of activity. Thirty images in editions of fifty must be hand-printed, orders packed up and shipped. All day long, the sound of voices, heavy feet falling on the crude wooden floors, the scraping of furniture legs, the ring of hammers striking nails into wooden crates rise to where I sit with my hands wrapped around a hot cup of tea. One Sunday evening late in the month, when all the commotion downstairs has subsided, I hear a quiet knock at my door. It is the first caller I’ve had since moving back to the apartment. I think at first that it must be Egan. I realize I have been praying all these months for his defection from Ruth, never believing he wanted her back. Flushed and trembling with gratitude, I rush excitedly to the door and open it. However, standing on the little landing is not Egan, but Moses Akulukjuk, the young co-op manager, a smile, alternately bold and sheepish, flitting across his face. Endeavouring to conceal my disappointment, I invite him in.

  “It is not the same without you at the co-op, Stella,” he says sadly, shaking his head. “Mr. Egan. He should not fire you.” He slips out of his boots and jacket, looks around curiously at the apartment, pads in heavy wool socks to my kitchen table. I reach down another mug from the cupboard but I know already that Moses has not come here for tea. I sit down opposite him, reflecting to myself that winter is upon us and my bed is cold.

  We become lovers. In the following weeks he slips up to my apartment under cover of darkness. It is a bitterly cold December, a month when a white sun, pale and dull as the moon, rises at eleven in the morning, hangs low on the horizon for three hours, then drops from view. In this brief silver light, the landscape is alien and haunting. One must burn one’s electric lights all day long.

  When Moses arrives in the evenings, brazenly entering my apartment without knocking, I am ready for him. I have opened up the sofa bed, turned back the covers. He is small and slight, a good foot shorter than I, but his zeal more than compensates for his diminutive stature. He makes love swiftly, unabashedly, licking and grunting, probing, clambering greedily over my body like a bold little animal sniffing out a rich landscape. His great-great-great-grandfather was a white whaler, but the intervening years have erased any traces of his white ancestry. I find his coffee-brown skin, his wide flat face, his hairless chest enticing. Burying my fingers in his glossy black hair, I call him “My Little Wolf.” Moses strokes my white thighs and says that they remind him of the smooth, flawless ivory he sells to the carvers for their sculptures. He teaches me some Inuktitut vocabulary. I ask him to tell me all the Inuktitut words for obscenities. He laughs, a little puzzled, but complies.

  “Stella,” he says, “you are maybe a little crazy?”

  He was born in one of these prefab houses. He doesn’t know how to hunt or make an igloo. He learned his English from comic books. He asks me if I will take him to Toronto for a holiday. He would like to see the view from the CN Tower. He has heard of Wonderland. He has three young children and a wife who drinks too much. Everyone in the community knows they are not happy. Nevertheless, I send him home at midnight, for the sake of appearances. Standing at my window, watching him walk away in the moonlight, I think that it is a bit of a coup for Moses to be bedding me now. He is a young, clever, ambitious man who would like to have Egan’s job. There is a movement germinating in the community for greater independence, talk of getting rid of the white resource staff. Some day, in the near or distant future, Moses may replace Egan, the White God. In the meantime, he will sleep with Egan’s ex-lover. And am I too, I wonder, am I using this affair as a way of striking back at Egan, of undermining his dangerous power here, of mocking him?

  Despite my precautions, our love affair is no secret in the community. There is no such thing as privacy in a place this size. The sound of footsteps on the snowy road, the opening and closing of doors bring faces to every window. Gossip is endemic here, it poisons conversation. On my way to work, the Inuit nod to me, then pass on, smiling their secretive, comprehending smiles. This is the maddening thing about them: they see straight through everything. They are a people who, in order to survive, had to be able to stand in a stormy landscape which, from sky to earth, was like a great, dazzling white curve, like the featureless inside of an egg, and find their way, detect invisible landmarks, locate their buried cache of food beneath smooth snowdrifts, or die. When they see me in the road, they smile not out of mockery but out of amazement at the folly of people. For generations, they have witnessed the profound indiscretion of human beings, leading to murder, starvation, madness out on the unyielding land where nothing can be hidden.

  * * *

  One Sunday afternoon in April, I meet Morgan on the road outside the cooperativ
e. I am carrying my skis and poles, warmly dressed for a few hours of cross-country skiing. It is some months since I have seen her.

  “You’re pregnant again,” I say, because I notice that she is pale, her face gaunt. She laughs sadly. Her coat is open to the wind. She is wearing an old sweater stained from the spitting up of her young children. I smell thick, sweet liquor on her breath.

  “How many months?” I ask her.

  “Only two,” she says, “but, as usual, I’m sick as a dog.” She is a robust, heavy-hipped woman but her body does not bear children well. The process seems alien, hostile to her very nature. She has told me she always loses weight at the beginning of her pregnancies. She vomits and suffers from depression. Her husband, Manasie, whose own frame has been tempered by arctic winds, by sub-zero temperatures, whose torso, at seventy, is still sound, obdurate as the terrain, says this depression is a white weakness, a southern luxury. She is his fourth wife, the other three having died in childbirth out on the land, the blocks of a snowhouse roof curving over their heads, or of tuberculosis here in the community clinic. He will not let Morgan use birth control. He wants a large family. He wants many sons, the hunters of the future.

  Morgan draws from her coat pocket a mickey of whisky, unscrews the top, holds the bottle out to me. I see the veins standing out like blue roots on the backs of her hands.

  “No, thanks,” I say. “I have to be going. I want to catch the best of the sun.”

  She shrugs and takes a drink herself. “We should get together again,” she says, watching me as she drops the bottle back in her pocket. “For a drink or something.”