The Love Of A Good Woman

I.

Kath and Sonje have a place of their own on the beach, behind some large logs. They have chosen this not only for shelter from the occasional sharp wind-they’ve got Kath’s baby with them- but because they want to be out of sight of a group of women who use the beach every day. They call these women the Monica

The Monicas have two or three or four children apiece. They are all under the leadership of the real Monica, who walked down the beach and introduced herself when she first spotted Kath and Sonje and the baby. She invited them to join the gang.

They followed her, lugging the carry-cot between them. What else could they do? But since then they lurk behind the logs.

The Monicas’ encampment is made up of beach umbrellas, towels, diaper bags, picnic hampers, inflatable rafts and whales, toys, lotions, extra clothing, sun hats, thermos bottles of coffee, paper cups and plates, and thermos tubs in which they carry homemade fruit-juice Popsicles.

They are either frankly pregnant or look as if they might be pregnant, because they have lost their figures. They trudge down to the water’s edge, hollering out the names of their children who are riding and falling off logs or the inflatable whales.

“Where’s your hat? Where’s your ball? You’ve been on that thing long enough now, let Sandy have a turn.”

Even when they talk to each other their voices have to be raised high, over the shouts and squalls of their children.

“You can get ground round as cheap as hamburger if you go to Woodward’s.”

“I tried zinc ointment but it didn’t work.”

“Now he’s got an abscess in the groin.”

“You can’t use baking powder, you have to use soda.”

These women aren’t so much older than Kath and Sonje. But they’ve reached a stage in life that Kath and Sonje dread. They turn the whole beach into a platform. Their burdens, their strung-out progeny and maternal poundage, their authority, can annihilate the bright water, the perfect small cove with the red-limbed arbutus trees, the cedars, growing crookedly out of the high rocks. Kath feels their threat particularly, since she’s a mother now herself. When she nurses her baby she often reads a book, sometimes smokes a cigarette, so as not to sink into a sludge of animal function. And she’s nursing so that she can shrink her uterus and flatten her stomach, not just provide the baby-Noelle-with precious maternal antibodies.

Kath and Sonje have their own thermos of coffee and their extra towels, with which they’ve rigged up a shelter for Noelle. They have their cigarettes and their books. Sonje has a book by Howard Fast. Her husband has told her that if she has to read fiction that’s who she should be reading. Kath is reading the short stories of Katherine Mansfield and the short stories of D. H. Lawrence. Sonje has got into the habit of putting down her own book and picking up whichever book of Kath’s that Kath is not reading at the moment. She limits herself to one story and then goes back to Howard Fast.

When they get hungry one of them makes the trek up a long flight of wooden steps. Houses ring this cove, up on the rocks under the pine and cedar trees. They are all former summer cottages, from the days before the Lions Gate Bridge was built, when people from Vancouver would come across the water for their vacations. Some cottages-like Kath’s and Sonje’s-are still quite primitive and cheap to rent. Others, like the real Monica’s, are much improved. But nobody intends to stay here; everybody’s planning to move on to a proper house. Except for Sonje and her husband, whose plans seem more mysterious than anybody else’s.

There is an unpaved crescent road serving the houses, and joined at either end to Marine Drive. The enclosed semicircle is full of tall trees and an undergrowth of ferns and salmonberry bushes, and various intersecting paths, by which you can take a shortcut out to the store on Marine Drive. At the store Kath and Sonje will buy takeout French fries for lunch. More often it’s Kath who makes this expedition, because it’s a treat for her to walk under the trees-something she can’t do anymore with the baby carriage.

When she first came here to live, before Noelle was born, she would cut through the trees nearly every day, never thinking of her freedom. One day she met Sonje. They had both worked at the Vancouver Public Library a little while before this, though they had not been in the same department and had never talked to each other. Kath had quit in the sixth month of pregnancy as you were required to do, lest the sight of you should disturb the patrons, and Sonje had quit because of a scandal.

Or, at least, because of a story that had got into the newspapers. Her husband, Cottar, who was a journalist working for a magazine that Kath had never heard of, had made a trip to Red China. He was referred to in the paper as a left-wing writer. Sonje’s picture appeared beside his, along with the information that she worked in the library. There was concern that in her job she might be promoting Communist books and influencing children who used the library, so that they might become Communists. Nobody said that she had done this-just that it was a danger. Nor was it against the law for somebody from Canada to visit China. But it turned out that Cottar and Sonje were both Americans, which made their behavior more alarming, perhaps more purposeful.

“I know that girl,” Kath had said to her husband, Kent, when she saw Sonje’s picture. “At least I know her to see her. She always seems kind of shy. She’ll be embarrassed about this.”

“No she won’t,” said Kent. “Those types love to feel persecuted, it’s what they live for.”

The head librarian was reported as saying that Sonje had nothing to do with choosing books or influencing young people-she spent most of her time typing out lists.

“Which was funny,” Sonje said to Kath, after they had recognized each other, and spoken and spent about half an hour talking on the path. The funny thing was that she did not know how to type.

She wasn’t fired, but she had quit anyway. She thought she might as well, because she and Cottar had some changes coming up in their future.

Kath wondered if one change might be a baby. It seemed to her that life went on, after you finished school, as a series of further examinations to be passed. The first one was getting married. If you hadn’t done that by the time you were twenty-five, that examination had to all intents and purposes been failed. (She always signed her name “Mrs. Kent Mayberry” with a sense of relief and mild elation.) Then you thought about having the first baby. Waiting a year before you got pregnant was a good idea. Waiting two years was a little more prudent than necessary. And three years started people wondering. Then down the road somewhere was the second baby. After that the progression got dimmer and it was hard to be sure just when you had arrived at wherever it was you were going.

Sonje was not the sort of friend who would tell you that she was trying to have a baby and how long she’d been trying and what techniques she was using. She never talked about sex in that way, or about her periods or any behavior of her body-though she soon told Kath things that most people would consider much more shocking. She had a graceful dignity-she had wanted to be a ballet dancer until she got too tall, and she didn’t stop regretting that until she met Cottar, who said, “Oh, another little bourgeois girl hoping she’ll turn into a dying swan.” Her face was broad, calm, pink skinned-she never wore any makeup, Cottar was against makeup-and her thick fair hair was pinned up in a bushy chignon. Kath thought she was wonderful looking-both seraphic and intelligent.

Eating their French fries on the beach, Kath and Sonje discuss characters in the stories they’ve been reading. How is it that no woman could love Stanley Burnell? What is it about Stanley? He is such a boy, with his pushy love, his greed at the table, his self-satisfaction. Whereas Jonathan Trout-oh, Stanley’s wife, Linda, should have married Jonathan Trout, Jonathan who glided through the water while Stanley splashed and snorted. “Greetings, my celestial peach blossom,” says Jonathan in his velvety bass voice. He is full of irony, he is subtle and weary. “The shortness of life, the shortness of life,” he says. And Stanley’s brash world crumbles, discredited.

Something bothers Kath. She can’t mention it or think about it. Is Kent something like Stanley?

One day they have an argument. Kath and Sonje have an unexpected and disturbing argument about a story by D. H. Lawrence. The story is called “The Fox.”

At the end of that story the lovers-a soldier and a woman named March-are sitting on the sea cliffs looking out on the Atlantic, towards their future home in Canada. They are going to leave England, to start a new life. They are committed to each other, but they are not truly happy. Not yet.

The soldier knows that they will not be truly happy until the woman gives her life over to him, in a way that she has not done so far. March is still struggling against him, to hold herself separate from him, she is making them both obscurely miserable by her efforts to hang on to her woman’s soul, her woman’s mind. She must stop this-she must stop thinking and stop wanting and let her consciousness go under, until it is submerged in his. Like the reeds that wave below the surface of the water. Look down, look down-see how the reeds wave in the water, they are alive but they never break the surface. And that is how her female nature must live within his male nature. Then she will be happy and he will be strong and content. Then they will have achieved a true marriage.

Kath says that she thinks this is stupid.

She begins to make her case. “He’s talking about sex, right?”

“Not just,” says Sonje. “About their whole life.”

“Yes, but sex. Sex leads to getting pregnant. I mean in the normal course of events. So March has a baby. She probably has more than one. And she has to look after them. How can you do that if your mind is waving around under the surface of the sea?”

“That’s taking it very literally,” says Sonje in a slightly superior tone.

“You can either have thoughts and make decisions or you can’t,” says Kath. “For instance-the baby is going to pick up a razor blade. What do you do? Do you just say, Oh, I think I’ll just float around here till my husband comes home and he can make up his mind, that is our mind, about whether this is a good idea?”

Sonje said, “That’s taking it to extremes.”

Each of their voices has hardened. Kath is brisk and scornful, Sonje grave and stubborn.

“Lawrence didn’t want to have children,” Kath says. “He was jealous of the ones Frieda had from being married before.”

Sonje is looking down between her knees, letting sand fall through her fingers.

“I just think it would be beautiful,” she says. “I think it would be beautiful, if a woman could.”

Kath knows that something has gone wrong. Something is wrong with her own argument. Why is she so angry and excited? And why did she shift over to talking about babies, about children? Because she has a baby and Sonje doesn’t? Did she say that about Lawrence and Frieda because she suspects that it is partly the same story with Cottar and Sonje?

When you make the argument on the basis of the children, about the woman having to look after the children, you’re in the clear. You can’t be blamed. But when Kath does that she is covering up. She can’t stand that part about the reeds and the water, she feels bloated and suffocated with incoherent protest. So it is herself she is thinking of, not of any children. She herself is the very woman that Lawrence is railing about. And she can’t reveal that straight out because it might make Sonje suspect-it might make Kath herself suspect-an impoverishment in Kath’s life.

Sonje who has said, during another alarming conversation, “My happiness depends on Cottar.”

My happiness depends on Cottar.

That statement shook Kath. She would never have said it about Kent. She didn’t want it to be true of herself.

But she didn’t want Sonje to think that she was a woman who had missed out on love. Who had not considered, who had not been offered, the prostration of love.

II.

Kent remembered the name of the town in Oregon to which Cottar and Sonje had moved. Or to which Sonje had moved, at the end of the summer. She had gone there to look after Cottar’s mother while Cottar took off on another journalistic junket to the Far East. There was some problem real or imagined about Cottar’s getting back into the United States after his trip to China. When he came back the next time he and Sonje planned to meet in Canada, maybe move the mother up there too.

There wasn’t much chance that Sonje would be living in the town now. There was just a slight chance that the mother might be. Kent said that it wasn’t worth stopping for, but Deborah said, Why not, wouldn’t it be interesting to find out? And an inquiry at the Post Office brought directions.

Kent and Deborah drove out of town through the sand dunes-Deborah doing the driving as she had done for most of this long leisurely trip. They had visited Kent’s daughter Noelle, who was living in Toronto, and his two sons by his second wife, Pat-one of them in Montreal and the other in Maryland. They had stayed with some old friends of Kent’s and Pat’s who now lived in a gated community in Arizona, and with Deborah’s parents-who were around Kent’s age-in Santa Barbara. Now they were headed up the West Coast, home to Vancouver, but taking it easy every day, so as not to tire Kent out.

The dunes were covered with grass. They looked like ordinary hills, except where a naked sandy shoulder was revealed, to make the landscape look playful. A child’s construction, swollen out of scale.

The road ended at the house they’d been told to look for. It couldn’t be mistaken. There was the sign-pacific school of dance. And Sonje’s name, and a for sale sign underneath. There was an old woman using shears on one of the bushes in the garden.

So Cottar’s mother was still alive. But Kent remembered now that Cottar’s mother was blind. That was why somebody had to go and live with her, after Cottar’s father died.

What was she doing hacking away with those shears if she was blind?

He had made the usual mistake, of not realizing how many years-decades-had gone by. And how truly ancient the mother would have to be by now. How old Sonje would be, how old he was himself. For it was Sonje, and at first she did not know him either. She bent over to stick the shears into the ground, she wiped her hands on her jeans. He felt the stiffness of her movements in his own joints. Her hair was white and skimpy, blowing in the light ocean breeze that had found its way in here among the dunes. Some firm covering of flesh had gone from her bones. She had always been rather flat chested but not so thin in the waist. A broad-backed, broad-faced, Nordic sort of girl. Though her name didn’t come from that ancestry-he remembered a story of her being named Sonje because her mother loved Sonja Henie’s movies. She changed the spelling herself and scorned her mother’s frivolity. They all scorned their parents then, for something.

He couldn’t see her face very well in the bright sun. But he saw a couple of shining silver-white spots where skin cancers, probably, had been cut away.

“Well Kent,” she said. “How ridiculous. I thought you were somebody come to buy my house. And is this Noelle?”

So she had made her mistake too.

Deborah was in fact a year younger than Noelle. But there was nothing of the toy wife about her. Kent had met her after his first operation. She was a physiotherapist, never married, and he a widower. A serene, steady woman who distrusted fashion and irony-she wore her hair in a braid down her back. She had introduced him to yoga, as well as the prescribed exercises, and now she had him taking vitamins and ginseng as well. She was tactful and incurious almost to the point of indifference. Perhaps a woman of her generation took it for granted that everybody had a well-peopled and untranslatable past.

Sonje invited them into the house. Deborah said that she would leave them to have their visit-she wanted to find a health-food store (Sonje told her where one was) and to take a walk on the beach.

The first thing Kent noticed about the house was that it was chilly. On a bright summer day. But houses in the Pacific Northwest are seldom as warm as they look-move out of the sun and you feel at once a clammy breath. Fogs and rainy winter cold must have entered this house for a long time almost without opposition. It was a large wooden bungalow, ramshackle though not austere, with its veranda and dormers. There used to be a lot of houses like this in West Vancouver, where Kent still lived. But most of them had been sold as teardowns.

The two large connected front rooms were bare, except for an upright piano. The floor was scuffed gray in the middle, darkly waxed at the corners. There was a railing along one wall and opposite that a dusty mirror in which he saw two lean white-haired figures pass. Sonje said that she was trying to sell the place-well, he could see that by the sign-and that since this part was set up as a dance studio she thought she might as well leave it that way.

“Somebody could still make an okay thing out of it,” she said. She said that they had started the school around 1960, soon after they heard that Cottar was dead. Cottar’s mother-Delia- played the piano. She played it until she was nearly ninety years old and lost her marbles. (“Excuse me,” said Sonje, “but you do get rather nonchalant about things.”) Sonje had to put her in a nursing home where she went every day to feed her, though Delia didn’t know her anymore. And she hired new people to play the piano, but things didn’t work out. Also she was getting so that she couldn’t show the pupils anything, just tell them. So she saw that it was time to give up.

She used to be such a stately girl, not very forthcoming. In fact not very friendly, or so he had thought. And now she was scurrying and chattering in the way of people who were too much alone.

“It did well when we started, little girls were all excited then about ballet, and then all that sort of thing went out, you know, it was too formal. But never completely, and then in the eighties people came moving in here with young families and it seemed they had lots of money, how did they get so much money? And it could have been successful again but I couldn’t quite manage it.”

She said that perhaps the spirit went out of it or the need went out of it when her mother-in-law died.

“We were the best of friends,” she said. “Always.”

The kitchen was another big room, which the cupboards and appliances didn’t properly fill. The floor was gray and black tiles-or perhaps black and white tiles, the white made gray by dirty scrub water. They passed along a hallway lined with shelves, shelves right up to the ceiling crammed with books and tattered magazines, possibly even newspapers. A smell of the brittle old paper. Here the floor had a covering of sisal matting, and that continued into a side porch, where at last he had a chance to sit down. Rattan chairs and settee, the genuine article, that might be worth some money if they hadn’t been falling apart. Bamboo blinds also not in the best condition, rolled up or half lowered, and outside some overgrown bushes pressing against the windows. Kent didn’t know many names of plants, but he recognized these bushes as the sort that grow where the soil is sandy. Their leaves were tough and shiny-the greens looking as if dipped in oil.

As they passed through the kitchen Sonje had put the kettle on for tea. Now she sank down in one of the chairs as if she too was glad to settle. She held up her grubby big-knuckled hands.

“I’ll clean up in a minute,” she said. “I didn’t ask you if you wanted tea. I could make coffee. Or if you like I could skip them both and make us a gin and tonic. Why don’t I do that? It sounds like a good idea to me.”

The telephone was ringing. A disturbing, loud, old-fashioned ring. It sounded as if it was just outside in the hall, but Sonje hurried back to the kitchen.

She talked for some time, stopping to take the kettle off when it whistled. He heard her say “visitor right now” and hoped she wasn’t putting off someone who wanted to look at the house. Her nervy tone made him think this wasn’t just a social call, and that it perhaps had something to do with money. He made an effort not to hear any more.

The books and papers stacked in the hall had reminded him of the house that Sonje and Cottar lived in above the beach. In fact the whole sense of discomfort, of disregard, reminded him. That living room had been heated by a stone fireplace at one end, and though a fire was going-the only time he had been there-old ashes were spilling out of it and bits of charred orange peel, bits of garbage. And there were books, pamphlets, everywhere. Instead of a sofa there was a cot-you had to sit with your feet on the floor and nothing at your back, or else crawl back and lean against the wall with your feet drawn up under you. That was how Kath and Sonje sat. They pretty well stayed out of the conversation.

Kent sat in a chair, from which he had removed a dull-covered book with the title The Civil War in France. Is that what they’re calling the French Revolution now? he thought. Then he saw the author’s name, Karl Marx. And even before that he felt the hostility, the judgment, in the room. Just as you’d feel in a room full of gospel tracts and pictures of Jesus on a donkey, Jesus on the Sea of Galilee, a judgment passed down on you. Not just from the books and papers-it was in the fireplace mess and the rug with its pattern worn away and the burlap curtains. Kent’s shirt and tie were wrong. He had suspected that by the way Kath looked at them, but once he put them on he was going to wear them anyway. She was wearing one of his old shirts over jeans fastened with a string of safety pins. He had thought that a sloppy outfit to go out to dinner in, but concluded that maybe it was all she could get into. That was right before Noelle was born.

Cottar was cooking the meal. It was a curry, and turned out to be very good. They drank beer. Cottar was in his thirties, older than Sonje and Kath and Kent. Tall, narrow shouldered, with a high bald forehead and wispy sideburns. A rushed, hushed, confidential way of talking.

There was also an older couple, a woman with low-slung breasts and graying hair rolled up at the back of her neck and a short straight man rather scruffy in his clothes but with something dapper about his manner, his precise and edgy voice and habit of making tidy box shapes with his hands. And there was a young man, a redhead, with puffy watery eyes and speckled skin. He was a part-time student who supported himself by driving the truck that dropped off newspapers for the delivery boys to pick up. Evidently he had just started this job, and the older man, who knew him, began to tease him about the shame of delivering such a paper. Tool of the capitalist classes, mouthpiece of the elite.

Even though this was said in a partly joking way, Kent couldn’t let it pass. He thought he might as well jump in then as later. He said he didn’t see much wrong with that paper.

They were just waiting for something like that. The older man had already drawn out the information that Kent was a pharmacist and worked for one of the chain drugstores. And the young man had already said, “Are you on the management track?” in a way that suggested the others would see this as a joke but Kent wouldn’t. Kent had said he hoped so.

The curry was served, and they ate it, and drank more beer, and the fire was replenished and the spring sky went dark and the lights of Point Grey showed up across Burrard Inlet, and Kent took it upon himself to defend capitalism, the Korean War, nuclear weapons, John Foster Dulles, the execution of the Rosenbergs- whatever the others threw at him. He scoffed at the idea that American companies were persuading African mothers to buy formula and not to nurse their babies, and that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were behaving brutally to Indians, and above all at the notion that Cottar’s phone might be tapped. He quoted Time magazine and announced that he was doing so.

The younger man clapped his knees and wagged his head from side to side and manufactured an incredulous laugh.

“I can’t believe this guy. Can you believe this guy? I can’t.”

Cottar kept mobilizing arguments and tried to keep a rein on exasperation, because he saw himself as a reasoning man. The older man went off on professorial tangents and the low-slung woman made interjections in a tone of poisonous civility.

“Why are you in such a hurry to defend authority wherever it rears its delightful head?”

Kent didn’t know. He didn’t know what propelled him. He didn’t even take these people seriously, as the enemy. They hung around on the fringes of real life, haranguing and thinking themselves important, the way fanatics of any sort did. They had no solidity, when you compared them with the men Kent worked with. In the work Kent did, mistakes mattered, responsibility was constant, you did not have time to fool around with ideas about whether chain drugstores were a bad idea or indulge in some paranoia about drug companies. That was the real world and he went out into it every day with the weight of his future and Kath’s on his shoulders. He accepted that, he was even proud of it, he was not going to apologize to a roomful of groaners.

“Life is getting better in spite of what you say,” he had told them. “All you have to do is look around you.”

He did not disagree with his younger self now. He thought he had been brash maybe, but not wrong. But he wondered about the anger in that room, all the bruising energy, what had become of it.

Sonje was off the phone. She called to him from the kitchen, “I am definitely going to skip the tea and get to that gin and tonic.”

When she brought the drinks he asked her how long Cottar had been dead, and she told him more than thirty years. He drew his breath in, and shook his head. That long?

“He died very quickly of some tropical bug,” Sonje said. “It happened in Jakarta. He was buried before I even knew he was sick. Jakarta used to be called Batavia, did you know that?”

Kent said, “Vaguely.”

“I remember your house,” she said. “The living room was really a porch, it was all the way across the front, like ours. There were blinds made of awning material, green and brown stripes. Kath liked the light coming through them, she said it was jungly light. You called it a glorified shack. Every time you mentioned it. The Glorified Shack.”

“It was on posts stuck in cement,” Kent said. “They were rotting. It was a wonder it didn’t fall down.”

“You and Kath used to go out looking at houses,” said Sonje. “On your day off you’d walk around some subdivision or other with Noelle in the baby carriage. You’d look at all the new houses. You know what those subdivisions were like then. There were never any sidewalks because people weren’t supposed to walk anymore and they’d taken down all the trees and the houses were just stuck together staring at each other through the picture windows.”

Kent said, “What else could anybody afford, for a start?”

“I know, I know. But you’d say, ‘Which one do you like?’ and Kath would never answer. So finally you got exasperated and said, well, what sort of house did she like, anywhere, and she said, ‘The Glorified Shack.’ ”

Kent could not remember that happening. But he supposed it had. Anyway it was what Kath had told Sonje.

III.

Cottar and Sonje were having a farewell party, before Cottar went off to the Philippines or Indonesia or wherever he was going, and Sonje went to Oregon to stay with his mother. Everybody who lived along the beach was asked-since the party was going to be held out-of-doors, that was the only sensible policy. And some people Sonje and Cottar had lived with in a communal house, before they moved to the beach, were asked, and journalists Cottar knew, and people Sonje had worked with in the library.

“Just everybody,” Kath said, and Kent said cheerfully, “More pinkos?” She said she didn’t know, just everybody.

The real Monica had hired her regular baby-sitter, and all the children were to be brought to her house, the parents chipping in on the cost. Kath brought Noelle along in her carry-cot just as it was beginning to get dark. She told the sitter that she’d come back before midnight, when Noelle would probably wake up for a feed. She could have brought the supplemental bottle which was made up at home, but she hadn’t. She was uncertain about the party and thought she might welcome a chance to get away.

She and Sonje had never talked about the dinner at Sonje’s house when Kent got into the fight with everybody. It was the first time Sonje had met Kent and all she said afterwards was that he was really quite good-looking. Kath felt as if the good looks were being thought of as a banal consolation prize.

She had sat that evening with her back against the wall and a cushion hugged against her stomach. She had got into the habit of holding a cushion against the spot where the baby kicked. The cushion was faded and dusty, like everything in Sonje’s house (she and Cottar had rented it ready-furnished). Its pattern of blue flowers and leaves had gone silvery. Kath fastened her eyes on these, while they tied Kent up in knots and he didn’t even realize it. The young man talked to him with the theatrical rage of a son talking to his father, and Cottar spoke with the worn patience of a teacher to a pupil. The older man was bitterly amused, and the woman was full of moral repugnance, as if she held Kent personally responsible for Hiroshima, Asian girls burned to death in locked factories, for all foul lies and trumpeted hypocrisy. And Kent was asking for most of this, as far as Kath could see. She had dreaded something of the sort, when she saw his shirt and tie and decided to put on jeans instead of her decent maternity skirt. And once she was there she had to sit through it, twisting the cushion this way and that to catch the silver gleam.

Everybody in the room was so certain of everything. When they paused for breath it was just to draw on an everlasting stream of pure virtue, pure certainty.

Except perhaps for Sonje. Sonje didn’t say anything. But Sonje drew on Cottar; he was her certainty. She got up to offer more curry, she spoke into one of the brief angry silences.

“It looks as if nobody wanted any coconut.”

“Oh, Sonje, are you going to be the tactful hostess?” the older woman said. “Like somebody in Virginia Woolf?”

So it seemed Virginia Woolf was at a discount too. There was so much Kath didn’t understand. But at least she knew it was there; she wasn’t prepared to say it was nonsense.

Nevertheless she wished her water would break. Anything to deliver her. If she scrambled up and puddled the floor in front of them, they would have to stop.

Afterwards Kent did not seem perturbed about the way the evening had gone. For one thing, he thought he had won. “They’re all pinkos, they have to talk that way,” he said. “It’s the only thing they can do.”

Kath was anxious not to talk anymore about politics so she changed the subject, telling him that the older couple had lived with Sonje and Cottar in the communal house. There was also another couple who had since moved away. And there had been an orderly exchange of sexual partners. The older man had an outside mistress and she was in on the exchange part of the time.

Kent said, “You mean young guys would go to bed with that old woman? She’s got to be fifty.”

Kath said, “Cottar’s thirty-eight.”

“Even so,” said Kent. “It’s disgusting.”

But Kath found the idea of those stipulated and obligatory copulations exciting as well as disgusting. To pass yourself around obediently and blamelessly, to whoever came up on the list-it was like temple prostitution. Lust served as your duty. It gave her a deep obscene thrill, to think of that.

It hadn’t thrilled Sonje. She had not experienced sexual release. Cottar would ask her if she had, when she came back to him, and she had to say no. He was disappointed and she was disappointed for his sake. He explained to her that she was too exclusive and too much tied up in the idea of sexual property and she knew he was right.

“I know he thinks that if I loved him enough I’d be better at it,” she said. “But I do love him, agonizingly.”

For all the tempting thoughts that came into her mind, Kath believed that she could only, ever, sleep with Kent. Sex was like something they had invented between them. Trying it with somebody else would mean a change of circuits-all of her life would blow up in her face. Yet she could not say she loved Kent agonizingly.

As she walked along the beach from Monica’s house to Sonje’s, she saw people waiting for the party. They stood around in small groups or sat on logs watching the last of the sunset. They drank beer. Cottar and another man were washing out a garbage tin in which they would make the punch. Miss Campo, the head librarian, was sitting alone on a log. Kath waved to her vivaciously but didn’t go over to join her. If you joined somebody at this stage, you were caught. Then there were two of you alone. The thing to do was to join a group of three or four, even if you found the conversation-that had looked lively from a distance-to be quite desperate. But she could hardly do that, after waving at Miss Campo. She had to be on her way somewhere. So she went on, past Kent talking to Monica’s husband about how long it took to saw up one of the logs on the beach, she went up the steps to Sonje’s house and into the kitchen.

Sonje was stirring a big pot of chili, and the older woman from the communal house was setting out slices of rye bread and salami and cheese on a platter. She was dressed just as she had been for the curry dinner-in a baggy skirt and a drab but clinging sweater, the breasts it clung to sloping down to her waist. This had something to do with Marxism, Kath thought-Cottar liked Sonje to go without a brassiere, as well as without stockings or lipstick. Also it had to do with unfettered unjealous sex, the generous uncor-rupted appetite that did not balk at a woman of fifty.

A girl from the library was there too, cutting up green peppers and tomatoes. And a woman Kath didn’t know was sitting on the kitchen stool, smoking a cigarette.

“Have we ever got a bone to pick with you,” the girl from the library said to Kath. “All of us at work. We hear you’ve got the darlingest baby and you haven’t brought her in to show us. Where is she now?”

Kath said, “Asleep I hope.”

This girl’s name was Lorraine, but Sonje and Kath, recalling their days at the library, had given her the name Debbie Reynolds. She was full of bounce.

“Aww,” she said.

The low-slung woman gave her, and Kath, a look of thoughtful distaste.

Kath opened a bottle of beer and handed it to Sonje, who said, “Oh, thanks, I was so concentrated on the chili I forgot I could have a drink.” She worried because her cooking wasn’t as good as Cottar’s.

“Good thing you weren’t going to drink that yourself,” the girl from the library said to Kath. “It’s a no-no if you’re nursing.”

“I guzzled beer all the time when I was nursing,” the woman on the stool said. “I think it was recommended. You piss most of it away anyhow.”

This woman’s eyes were lined with black pencil, extended at the corners, and her eyelids were painted a purplish blue right up to her sleek black brows. The rest of her face was very pale, or made up to look so, and her lips were so pale a pink that they seemed almost white. Kath had seen faces like this before, but only in magazines.

“This is Amy,” said Sonje. “Amy this is Kath. I’m sorry, I didn’t introduce you.”

“Sonje, you’re always sorry,” the older woman said.

Amy took up a piece of cheese that had just been cut, and ate it.

Amy was the name of the mistress. The older woman’s husband’s mistress. She was a person Kath suddenly wanted to know, to be friends with, just as she had once longed to be friends with Sonje.

The evening had changed into night, and the knots of people on the beach had become less distinct; they showed more disposition to flow together. Down at the edge of the water women had taken off their shoes, reached up and pulled off their stockings if they were wearing any, touched their toes to the water. Most people had given up drinking beer and were drinking punch, and the punch had already begun to change its character. At first it had been mostly rum and pineapple juice, but by now other kinds of fruit juice, and soda water, and vodka and wine had been added.

Those who were taking off their shoes were being encouraged to take off more. Some ran into the water with most of their clothes on, then stripped and tossed the clothes to catchers on shore. Others stripped where they were, encouraging each other by saying it was too dark to see anything. But actually you could see bare bodies splashing and running and falling into the dark water. Monica had brought a great pile of towels down from her house, and was calling out to everyone to wrap themselves up when they came out, so they wouldn’t catch their death of cold.

The moon came up through the black trees on top of the rocks, and looked so huge, so solemn and thrilling, that there were cries of amazement. What’s that? And even when it had climbed higher in the sky and shrunk to a more normal size people acknowledged it from time to time, saying “The harvest moon” or “Did you see it when it first came up?”

“I actually thought it was a great big balloon.”

“I couldn’t imagine what it was. I didn’t think the moon could be that size, ever.”

Kath was down by the water, talking to the man whose wife and mistress she had seen in Sonje’s kitchen earlier. His wife was swimming now, a little apart from the shriekers and splashers. In another life, the man said, he had been a minister.

“ ‘The sea of faith was once too at the full,’ ” he said humorously. “ ‘And round earth’s shore, lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled’-I was married to a completely different woman then.”

He sighed, and Kath thought he was searching for the rest of the verse.

“ ‘But now I only hear,’ ” she said, “ ‘its melancholy long withdrawing roar, down the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world.’ ” Then she stopped, because it seemed too much to go on with “Oh love let us be true-”

His wife swam towards them, and heaved herself up where the water was only as deep as her knees. Her breasts swung sideways and flung drops of water round her as she waded in.

Her husband opened his arms. He called, “Europa,” in a voice of comradely welcome.

“That makes you Zeus,” said Kath boldly. She wanted right then to have a man like this kiss her. A man she hardly knew, and cared nothing about. And he did kiss her, he waggled his cool tongue inside her mouth.

“Imagine a continent named after a cow,” he said. His wife stood close in front of them, breathing gratefully after the exertion of her swim. She was so close that Kath was afraid of being grazed by her long dark nipples or her mop of black pubic hair.

Somebody had got a fire going, and those who had been in the water were out now, wrapped up in blankets or towels, or crouched behind logs struggling into their clothes.

And there was music playing. The people who lived next door to Monica had a dock and a boathouse. A record player had been brought down, and people were starting to dance. On the dock and with more difficulty on the sand. Even along the top of a log somebody would do a dance step or two, before stumbling and falling or jumping off. Women who had got dressed again, or never got undressed, women who were feeling too restless to stay in one place-as Kath was-went walking along the edge of the water (nobody was swimming anymore, swimming was utterly past and forgotten) and they walked in a different way because of the music. Swaying rather self-consciously, jokingly, then more insolently, like beautiful women in a movie.

Miss Campo was still sitting in the same place, smiling.

The girl Kath and Sonje called Debbie Reynolds was sitting in the sand with her back against a log, crying. She smiled at Kath, she said, “Don’t think I’m sad.”

Her husband was a college football player who now ran a body-repair shop. When he came into the library to pick up his wife he always looked like a proper football player, faintly disgusted with the rest of the world. But now he knelt beside her and played with her hair.

“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s the way it always takes her. Isn’t it, honey?”

“Yes it is,” she said.

Kath found Sonje wandering around the fire circle, doling out marshmallows. Some people were able to fit them on sticks and toast them; others tossed them back and forth and lost them in the sand.

“Debbie Reynolds is crying,” Kath said. “But it’s all right. She’s happy.”

They began to laugh, and hugged each other, squashing the bag of marshmallows between them.

“Oh I will miss you,” Sonje said. “Oh, I will miss our friendship.”

“Yes. Yes,” Kath said. Each of them took a cold marshmallow and ate it, laughing and looking at each other, full of sweet and forlorn feeling.

“This do in remembrance of me,” Kath said. “You are my realest truest friend.”

“You are mine,” said Sonje. “Realest truest. Cottar says he wants to sleep with Amy tonight.”

“Don’t let him,” said Kath. “Don’t let him if it makes you feel awful.”

“Oh, it isn’t a question of let,” Sonje said valiantly. She called out, “Who wants some chili? Cottar’s dishing out the chili over there. Chili? Chili?”

Cottar had brought the kettle of chili down the steps and set it in the sand.

“Mind the kettle,” he kept saying in a fatherly voice. “Mind the kettle, it’s hot.”

He squatted to serve people, clad only in a towel that was flapping open. Amy was beside him, giving out bowls. Kath cupped her hands in front of Cottar. “Please Your Grace,” she said. “I am not worthy of a bowl.”

Cottar sprang up, letting go of the ladle, and placed his hands on her head.

“Bless you, my child, the last shall be first.” He kissed her bent neck.

“Ahh,” said Amy, as if she was getting or giving this kiss herself.

Kath raised her head and looked past Cottar.

“I’d love to wear that kind of lipstick,” she said.

Amy said, “Come along.” She set down the bowls and took Kath lightly by the waist and propelled her to the steps.

“Up here,” she said. “We’ll do the whole job on you.”

In the tiny bathroom behind Cottar and Sonje’s bedroom Amy spread out little jars and tubes and pencils. She had nowhere to spread them but on the toilet seat. Kath had to sit on the rim of the bathtub, her face almost brushing Amy’s stomach. Amy smoothed a liquid over her cheeks and rubbed a paste into her eyelids. Then she brushed on a powder. She brushed and glossed Kath’s eyebrows and put three separate coats of mascara on her lashes. She outlined and painted her lips and blotted them and painted them again. She held Kath’s face up in her hands and tilted it towards the light.

Someone knocked on the door and then shook it.

“Hang on,” Amy called out. Then, “What’s the matter with you, can’t you go and take a leak behind a log?”

She wouldn’t let Kath look in the mirror until it was all done.

“And don’t smile,” she said. “It spoils the effect.”

Kath let her mouth droop, stared sullenly at her reflection. Her lips were like fleshy petals, lily petals. Amy pulled her away. “I didn’t mean like that,” she said. “Better not look at yourself at all, don’t try to look any way, you’ll look fine.

“Hold on to your precious bladder, we’re getting out,” she shouted at the new person or maybe the same person pounding on the door. She scooped her supplies into their bag and shoved it under the bathtub. She said to Kath, “Come on, beautiful.”

On the dock Amy and Kath danced, laughing and challenging each other. Men tried to get in between them, but for a while they managed not to let this happen. Then they gave up, they were separated, making faces of dismay and flapping their arms like grounded birds as they found themselves blocked off, each of them pulled away into the orbit of a partner.

Kath danced with a man she did not remember seeing before during the whole evening. He seemed to be around Cottar’s age. He was tall, with a thickened, softened waistline, a mat of dull curly hair, and a spoiled, bruised look around the eyes.

“I may fall off,” Kath said. “I’m dizzy. I may fall overboard.”

He said, “I’ll catch you.”

“I’m dizzy but I’m not drunk,” she said.

He smiled, and she thought, That’s what drunk people always say.

“Really,” she said, and it was true because she had not finished even one bottle of beer, or touched the punch.

“Unless I got it through my skin,” she said. “Osmosis.”

He didn’t answer, but pulled her close then released her, holding her eyes.

The sex Kath had with Kent was eager and strenuous, but at the same time reticent. They had not seduced each other but more or less stumbled into intimacy, or what they believed to be intimacy, and stayed there. If there is only to be the one partner in your life nothing has to be made special-it already is so. They had looked at each other naked, but at those times they had not except by chance looked into each other’s eyes.

That was what Kath was doing now, all the time, with her unknown partner. They advanced and retreated and circled and dodged, putting on a show for each other, and looking into each other’s eyes. Their eyes declared that this show was nothing, nothing compared to the raw tussle they could manage when they chose.

Yet it was all a joke. As soon as they touched they let go again. Close up, they opened their mouths and teased their tongues across their lips and at once drew back, pretending languor.

Kath was wearing a short-sleeved brushed-wool sweater, convenient for nursing because it had a low V neck and was buttoned down the front.

The next time they came close her partner raised his arm as if to protect himself and moved the back of his hand, his bare wrist, and forearm across her stiff breasts under their electric wool. That made them stagger, they almost broke their dance. But continued-Kath weak and faltering.

She heard her name being called.

Mrs. Mayberry. Mrs. Mayberry.

It was the baby-sitter, calling from halfway down Monica’s steps.

“Your baby. Your baby’s awake. Can you come and feed her?”

Kath stopped. She worked her way shakily through the other dancers. Out of the light, she jumped down, and stumbled in the sand. She knew her partner was behind her, she heard him jump behind her. She was ready to offer her mouth or her throat to him. But he caught her hips, turned her around, dropped to his knees, and kissed her crotch through her cotton pants. Then he rose up lightly for such a large man, they turned away from each other at the same moment. Kath hurried into the light and climbed the steps to Monica’s house. Panting, and pulling herself up by the railing, like an old woman.

The baby-sitter was in the kitchen.

“Oh, your husband,” she said. “Your husband just came in with the bottle. I didn’t know what the arrangement was or I could have saved myself yelling.”

Kath went on into Monica’s living room. The only light there came from the hall and the kitchen, but she could see that it was a real living room, not a modified porch like hers and Sonje’s. There was a Danish modern coffee table and upholstered furniture and draw drapes.

Kent was sitting in an armchair, feeding Noelle from her supplemental bottle.

“Hi,” he said, speaking quietly though Noelle was sucking too vigorously to be even half asleep.

“Hi,” said Kath, and sat down on the sofa.

“I just thought this would be a good idea,” he said. “In case you’d been drinking.”

Kath said, “I haven’t. Been drinking.” She raised a hand to her breasts to test their fullness, but the stir of the wool gave her such a shock of desire that she couldn’t press further.

“Well now you can, if you want to,” Kent said.

She sat just on the edge of the sofa, leaning forward, longing to ask him, did he come here by the front or the back way? That is, along the road or along the beach? If he had come along the beach he was almost bound to have seen the dancing. But there were quite a lot of people dancing on the dock now, so perhaps he would not have noticed individual dancers.

Nevertheless, the baby-sitter had spotted her. And he would have heard the baby-sitter calling her, calling her name. Then he would have looked to see where the baby-sitter was directing her call.

That is, if he came by the beach. If he came by the road and entered the house by the hall not the kitchen he wouldn’t have seen the dancers at all.

“Did you hear her calling me?” Kath said. “Is that why you went home and got the bottle?”

“I’d already thought about it,” he said. “I thought it was time.” He held up the bottle to see how much Noelle had taken.

“Hungry,” he said.

She said, “Yes.”

“So now’s your opportunity. If you want to get sloshed.” “Is that what you are? Sloshed?”

“I’ve taken on my fair share,” he said. “Go on if you want to. Have yourself a time.”

She thought his cockiness sounded sad and faked. He must have seen her dancing. Or else he would have said, “What have you done to your face?”

“I’d sooner wait for you,” she said.

He frowned at the baby, tipping up the bottle.

“Nearly finished,” he said. “Okay if you want.”

“I just have to go to the bathroom,” Kath said. And in the bathroom, as she had expected in Monica’s house, there was a good supply of Kleenex. She ran the water hot, and soaked and scrubbed, soaked and scrubbed, from time to time flushing a wad of black and purple tissues down the toilet.

IV.

In the middle of the second drink, when Kent was talking about the astounding, really obscene prices of real estate these days in West Vancouver, Sonje said, “You know, I have a theory.”

“Those places we used to live in,” he said. “They went long ago. For a song, compared to now. Now I don’t know what you’d get for them. Just for the property. Just for a teardown.”

What was her theory? About the price of real estate?

No. It was about Cottar. She did not believe that he was dead.

“Oh, I did at first,” she said. “It never occurred to me to doubt it. And then suddenly I just woke up and saw it didn’t necessarily have to be true. It didn’t have to be true at all.”

Think of the circumstances, she said. A doctor had written to her. From Jakarta. That is, the person writing to her said that he was a doctor. He said that Cottar had died and he said what he had died of, he used the medical term which she forgot now. Anyway it was an infectious disease. But how did she know that this person really was a doctor? Or even, granted that he might be a doctor, how did she know that he was telling the truth? It would not be difficult for Cottar to have made the acquaintance of a doctor. To have become friends. Cottar had all sorts of friends.

“Or even to have paid him,” she said. “That isn’t outside the range of possibility either.”

Kent said, “Why would he do that?”

“He wouldn’t be the first doctor to do something like that. Maybe he needed the money to keep a clinic going for poor people, how do we know? Maybe he just wanted it for himself. Doctors aren’t saints.”

“No,” said Kent. “I meant Cottar. Why would Cottar do it? And did he have any money?”

“No. He didn’t have any himself but-I don’t know. It’s only one hypothesis anyway. The money. And I was here, you know. I was here to take care of his mother. He really cared about his mother. He knew I’d never desert her. So that was all right.

“It really was all right,” she said. “I was very fond of Delia. I didn’t find it a burden. I might really have been better suited to taking care of her than to being married to Cottar. And you know, something strange. Delia thought the same as I did. About Cottar. She had the same suspicions. And she never mentioned them to me. I never mentioned mine to her. Each of us thought it would break the other’s heart. Then one evening not that long before she -had to go, I was reading her a mystery story that was set in Hong Kong, and she said, ‘Maybe that’s where Cottar is. Hong Kong.’

“She said she hoped she hadn’t upset me. Then I told her what I’d been thinking and she laughed. We both laughed. You would expect an old mother would be grief-stricken talking about how her only child had run off and left her, but no. Maybe old people aren’t like that. Really old people. They don’t get grief-stricken anymore. They must figure it’s not worth it.

“He knew I’d take care of her, though he probably didn’t know how long that would last,” she said. “I wish I could show you the doctor’s letter, but I threw it out. That was very stupid, but I was distraught at the time. I didn’t see how I was going to get through the rest of my life. I didn’t think how I should follow up and find out what his credentials were or ask about a death certificate or anything. I thought of all that later and by then I didn’t have an address. I couldn’t write to the American embassy because they were the last people Cottar would have had anything to do with. And he wasn’t a Canadian citizen. Maybe he even had another name. False identity he could slip into. False papers. He used to hint about things like that. That was part of the glamour about him, for me.”

“Some of that could have been along the lines of self-dramatizing,” Kent said. “Don’t you think?”

Sonje said, “Of course I think.”

“There wasn’t any insurance?”

“Don’t be silly.”

“If there’d been insurance, they’d have found out the truth.” “Yes but there wasn’t,” Sonje said. “So. That’s what I intend to do.”

She said that this was one thing she had never mentioned to her mother-in-law. That after she was on her own, she was going to go looking. She was going to find Cottar, or find the truth.

“I suppose you think that’s some wild kind of fantasy?” she said.

Off her rocker, thought Kent with an unpleasant jolt. With every visit he had made on this trip, there had come a moment of severe disappointment. The moment when he realized that the person he was talking to, the person he had made a point of seeking out, was not going to give him whatever it was he had come for. The old friend he had visited in Arizona was obsessed with the dangers of life, in spite of his expensive residence in a protected community. His old friend’s wife, who was over seventy, wanted to show him pictures of herself and some other old woman dressed up as Klondike dance-hall girls, for a musical show they had put on. And his grown-up children were caught up in their own lives. That was only natural and not a surprise to him. The surprise was that these lives, the lives his sons and daughter were living, seemed closed in now, somewhat predictable. Even the changes in them that he could foresee or was told were coming-Noelle was on the verge of leaving her second husband-were not very interesting. He had not made any admission of this to Deborah-hardly even to himself-but it was so. And now Sonje. Sonje whom he hadn’t particularly liked, whom he’d been wary of in some way, but whom he’d respected, as a bit of a mystery-Sonje had turned into a talkative old woman with a secret screw loose.

And he’d had a reason for coming to see her that they were not getting any closer to, with this rant about Cottar.

“Well to be frank,” he said. “It doesn’t sound like such a sensible thing to do, to be frank about it.”

“A wild-goose chase,” said Sonje cheerfully.

“There’s a probability he might be dead now anyway.”

“True.”

“And he could have gone anywhere and lived anywhere. That is if your theory is correct.”

“True.”

“So the only hope is if he really died then and your theory isn’t correct, then you might find out about it and you wouldn’t be any further ahead than you are now anyway.”

“Oh, I think I would.”

“You could do just as well then to stay here and write some letters.”

Sonje said she disagreed. She said you couldn’t go through official channels regarding this sort of thing.

“You have to make yourself known in the streets.”

In the streets of Jakarta-that was where she meant to start. In places like Jakarta people don’t shut themselves up. People live in the streets and things are known about them. Shopkeepers know, there’s always somebody who knows somebody else and so forth. She would ask questions and word would get around that she was there. A man like Cottar could not have just slipped by. Even after all this time there’d be some memory. Information of one sort or another. Some of it expensive, not all of it truthful. Nevertheless.

Kent thought of asking her what she planned to use for money. Could she have inherited something from her parents? He seemed to remember that they’d cut her off at the time of her marriage. Perhaps she thought she could get a fat price for this property. A long shot, but maybe she was right.

Even so, she could fling it all away in a couple of months. Word would get around that she was there, all right.

“Those cities have changed a lot” was all he said.

“Not that I’d neglect the usual channels,” she said. “I’d go after everybody I could. The embassy, the burial records, the medical registry if there is such a thing. In fact I’ve written letters already. But all you get is the runaround. You have to confront them in the flesh. You have to be there. Be there. Keep coming around and making a nuisance of yourself and finding out where their soft spots are and be prepared to pass something under the table if you have to. I don’t have any illusions about its being easy.

“For instance I expect there’ll be devastating heat. It doesn’t sound as if it has a good location at all-Jakarta. There are swamps and lowlands all around. I’m not stupid. I’ll get my shots and take all the precautions. I’ll take my vitamins, and Jakarta being started by the Dutch there shouldn’t be any shortage of gin. The Dutch East Indies. It’s not a very old city, you know. It was built I think sometime in the 1600s. Just a minute. I have all sorts of-I’ll show you-I have-”

She set down her glass which had been empty for some time, got up quickly, and after a couple of steps caught her foot in the torn sisal and lurched forward, but steadied herself by holding on to the door frame and didn’t fall. “Got to get rid of this old matting,” she said, and hurried into the house.

He heard a struggle with stiff drawers, then a sound as of a pile of papers falling, and all through this she kept talking to him, in that half-frantic reassuring way of people desperate not to lose your attention. He could not make out what she was saying, or didn’t try to. He was taking the opportunity to swallow a pill- something he’d been thinking about doing for the last half hour. It was a small pill that didn’t require him to take a drink-his glass was empty too-and he could probably have got it to his mouth without Sonje’s noticing what he was doing. But something like shyness or superstition prevented him from trying. He did not mind Deborah’s constant awareness of his condition, and his children of course had to know, but there seemed to be some sort of ban against revealing it to his contemporaries.

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 inner workings, halting what had felt like the runoff of bone marrow.

“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.