'Come on, we need a naked lady with big tits and a big ass,' David said in the same tender voice; I recognized that menacing gentleness, at school it always went before the trick, the punchline.
'Look, will you leave me alone?' Anna said. 'I'm minding my own business, mind yours why don't you.' She stood up, her towel sliding off, and tried to get past him to the land, but he sidestepped in front of her.
'I won't take her if she doesn't want to,' Joe said.
'It's token resistance,' David said, 'she wants to, she's an exhibitionist at heart. She likes her lush bod, don't you? Even if she is getting too fat.'
'Don't think I don't know what you're trying to do,' Anna said, as though she'd guessed a riddle. 'You're trying to humiliate me.'
'What's humiliating about your body, darling?' David said caressingly. 'We all love it, you ashamed of it? That's pretty stingy of you, you should share the wealth; not that you don't.'
Anna was furious now, goaded, her voice rose. 'Fuck off, you want bloody everything don't you, you can't use that stuff on me.'
'Why not,' David said evenly, 'it works. Now just take it off like a good girl or I'll have to take it off for you.'
'Leave her alone,' Joe said, swinging his legs, bored or excited, it was impossible to tell.
I wanted to run down to the dock and stop them, fighting was wrong, we weren't allowed to, if we did both sides got punished as in a real war. So we battled in secret, undeclared, and after a while I no longer fought back because I never won. The only defence was flight, invisibility. I sat down on the top step.
'Shut up, she's my wife,' David said. His hand clamped down above her elbow. She jerked away, then I saw his arms go around her as if to kiss her and she was in the air, upside down over his shoulder, hair hanging in damp ropes. 'Okay twatface,' he said, 'is it off or into the lake?'
Anna's fists grabbed bunches of his shirt. 'If I go in, you go in too.' The words spurted from behind her fallen hair, she was kicking, I couldn't see whether she was laughing or crying.
'Shoot,' David said to Joe, and to Anna, 'I'll count to ten.' Joe swivelled the camera and trained it on them like a bazooka or a strange instrument of torture and pressed the button, lever, sinister whirr.
'All right,' Anna said under its coercion, 'you shmuck bastard, God damn you.' He set her down and stepped aside. Her arms, elbows out, struggled with the fastener like a beetle's on its back and the top dropped away: I saw her cut in half, one breast on either side of a thin tree.
'Bottoms too,' David said as though to a recalcitrant child. Anna glanced at him, contemptuous, and bent. 'Look sexy now, move it; give us a little dance.'
Anna stood for a moment, brown-red with yellow fur and white markings like underwear, glaring at them. Then she stuck her middle finger in the air at them and ran to the end of the dock and jumped into the lake. It was a bellyflop, the water splattered out like a dropped egg. She came up with her hair in streaks over her forehead and started to swim around towards the sand point, clumsy, arms flailing.
'Get that?' David said mildly over his shoulder.
'Some of it,' Joe said. 'Maybe you could order her to do it again.' I thought he was being sarcastic but I wasn't sure. He began to unscrew the camera from the tripod.
I could hear Anna splashing and then stumbling below on the sand point; she was really crying now, her indrawn breaths rasping. The bushes rustled, she swore; then she appeared over the top of the hill, she must have climbed up by holding on to the leaning trees. Her pink face was dissolving, her skin was covered with sand and pine needles like a burned leech. She went into the cabin without looking at me or saying anything.
I stood up. Joe was gone but David was still on the dock, sitting now crosslegged. One at a time they were safer; I went down for the canoe.
'Hi,' he said, 'how goes it?' He didn't know I'd been watching. He had his shoes off and was picking at a toenail as though nothing had happened.
David is like me, I thought, we are the ones that don't know how to love, there is something essential missing in us, we were born that way, Madame at the store with one hand, atrophy of the heart. Joe and Anna are lucky, they do it badly and suffer because of it: but it's better to see than to be blind, even though that way you had to let in the crimes and atrocities too. Or perhaps we are normal and the ones who can love are freaks, they have an extra organ, like the vestigial eye in the foreheads of amphibians they've never found the use for.
Anna's bikini lay on the dock, crumpled, a shed chrysalis. He picked up the top and began pleating and unpleating the strap. I hadn't meant to say anything about it, it wasn't my concern, but I found myself asking him anyway. 'Why did you do that?' My voice was neutral and I realized it wasn't for Anna I was asking, I wasn't defending her; it was for myself, I needed to understand.
For a moment he acted. 'What?' he said, grinning and innocent.
'What you just did to her.'
He looked hard at me to see if I was accusing him but I was untying the canoe, I was impersonal as a wall, a confessional, and that reassured him. 'You don't know what she does to me,' he said with a slight whine. 'She asks for it, she makes me do it.' His voice turned crafty. 'She goes with other men, she thinks she can get away with it, but she's too dumb, every time I find out; I can smell it on her. Not that I'd mind if she'd do it openly and be honest about it, God knows, it's not that I'm jealous.' He smiled broadmindedly. 'But she's devious, I can't stand that.'
Anna hadn't told me, she had left something out; or else he was lying. 'But she loves you,' I said.
'Bullshit,' he said 'she's trying to cut my balls off.' His eyes were sad rather than hostile, as though he had once believed better of her.
'She loves you,' I repeated, petals off a daisy; it was the magic word but it couldn't work because I had no faith. My husband, saying it over and over like a Dial the Weather recording, trying to engrave it on me; and with the same bewilderment, as though I was the one who'd been hurting him and not the other way round. An accident, that's what he called it.
'She never tells _me_ that,' he said. 'I get the impression she wants out, she's waiting for the chance to leave. But I haven't asked, we don't talk much any more except with other people around.'
'Maybe you should,' I said; unconvinced, unconvincing.
He shrugged. 'What would we talk about? She's too dumb, she can't figure out what I'm saying to her, Jesus, she moves her lips when she watches the T.V. even. She doesn't know anything, every time she opens her mouth she makes an ass of herself. I know what you're thinking,' he said, almost pleading, 'but I'm all for the equality of women; she just doesn't happen to be equal and that's not my fault, is it? What I married was a pair of boobs, she manipulated me into it, it was when I was studying for the ministry, nobody knew any better then. But that's life.' He wiggled his moustache and gave a Woody Woodpecker laugh, his eyes baffled.
'I think you could work it out,' I said. I braced the paddle across the gunwhales and clambered into the canoe. I remembered what Anna had said about emotional commitments: they've made one, I thought, they hate each other; that must be almost as absorbing as love. The barometer couple in their wooden house, enshrined in their niche on Paul's front porch, my ideal; except they were glued there, condemned to oscillate back and forth, sun and rain, without escape. When he saw her next there would be no recantations, no elaborate reconciliation or forgiveness, they were beyond that. Neither of them would mention it, they had reached a balance almost like peace. Our mother and father at the sawhorse behind the cabin, mother holding the tree, white birch, father sawing, sun through the branches lighting their hair, grace.
The canoe pivoted. 'Hey,' he said, 'where you off to?'
'Oh…' I gestured towards the lake.
'Want a stern paddler?' he said. 'I'm great, I've had lots of practice by now.'
He sounded wistful, as though he needed company, but I didn't want him with me, I'd have to explain what I was doing and he wouldn't be able to help. 'No,' I said, 'thanks just the same.' I knelt, slanting the canoe to one side.
'Okay,' he said, 'see you later, alligator.' He unwound his legs and stood up and strolled off the dock towards the cabin, his striped T-shirt flashing between the slats of the trees, receding behind me as I glided from the bay into the open water.
Chapter Seventeen
I moved toward the cliff. The sun sloped, it was morning still, the light not yellow but clear white. Overhead a plane, so far up I could hardly hear it, threading the cities together with its trail of smoke; an x in the sky, unsacred crucifix. The shape of the heron flying above us the first evening we fished, legs and neck stretched, wings outspread, a bluegrey cross, and the other heron or was it the same one, hanging wrecked from the tree. Whether it died willingly, consented, whether Christ died willingly, anything that suffers and dies instead of us is Christ; if they didn't kill birds and fish they would have killed us. The animals die that we may live, they are substitute people, hunters in the fall killing the deer, that is Christ also. And we eat them, out of cans or otherwise; we are eaters of death, dead Christ-flesh resurrecting inside us, granting us life. Canned Spam, canned Jesus, even the plants must be Christ. But we refuse to worship; the body worships with blood and muscle but the thing in the knob head will not, wills not to, the head is greedy, it consumes but does not give thanks.
I reached the cliff, there were no Americans. I edged along it, estimating the best place to dive: it faced east, the sun was on it, it was the right time of day; I would start at the left-hand side. Diving by myself was hazardous, there ought to be another person. But I thought I remembered how: we took the canoes or we built rafts from strayed logs and board ends, they would often snap their ropes and escape in the spring when the ice went out; sometimes we would come across them again later, drifting loose like pieces broken from a glacier.
I shipped the paddle and took off my sweatshirt. I would dive several feet out from the rockface and then swim down and in: otherwise I'd risk hitting my head, the drop looked sheer but there might be a ledge underwater. I knelt, facing backwards with both knees on the stern seat, then put a foot on each gunwale and stood up slowly. I bent my knees and straightened, the canoe teetered like a springboard. My other shape was in the water, not my reflection but my shadow, foreshortened, outline blurred, rays streaming out from around the head.
My spine whipped, I hit the water and kicked myself down, sliding through the lake strata, grey to darker grey, cool to cold. I arched sideways and the rockface loomed up, grey pink brown; I worked along it, touching it with my fingers, snail touch on slimesurface, the water unfocusing my eyes. Then my lungs began to clutch and I curled and rose, letting out air like a frog, my hair swirling over my face, towards the canoe, where it hung split between water and air, mediator and liferaft. I canted it with my weight and rolled into it over the side and rested; I hadn't seen anything. My arms ached from the day before and the new effort, my body stumbled, it remembered the motions only imperfectly, like learning to walk after illness.
I waited a few minutes, then moved the canoe further along and dived again, my eyes straining, not knowing what shape to expect, handprint or animal, the lizard body with horns and tail and front-facing head, bird or canoe with stick paddlers; or a small thing, an abstraction, a circle, a moon; or a long distorted figure, stiff and
