Free The Last Woman by John Bemrose Page A

nose. She was taking him apart.
She was just starting to do oils, she told him, talking as she worked; but she still loved to draw, drawing was the basis of everything. She spoke of line and texture and reality versus imagination while he listened alertly, aware of his own ignorance. He had dropped out of school at fifteen.
The next Saturday he sat for her again. He did not recognize himself in the drawing she made: the deep shadings of charcoal evoking a face more handsome, more resolute, than his own. “I think I’ve got you there,” she said, touching the area around the mouth. “And your hair.You’ve got beautiful hair.” She said it matter-of-factly, holding out the paper to study it.
He’d had lots of girlfriends – it had been three years since he’d gone all the way with Barb Hammer on the leaky air mattress they’d dragged into the trees behind Guppy Bay. But with Ann Scott, his experience seemed to count for nothing. He remembered that from before – the sense of being a bit lost around her, a constraining nervousness.
When she finished sketching, they went for a swim and afterwards lay on towels on the rock. He told her stories he didn’t know he knew, for he had never spoken them before. He told her how he had shot his first moose when he was thirteen; how he had followed its tracks in a skim of snow; and when he finally found it, how it had not run away but simply looked at him. He did not tell her how he had grieved afterwards; how, butchering the moose with Matt, he had secretly whispered to it that he was sorry; how, even when they had tied a little packet of bones in a tree, to placate the moose’s spirit, he could not stop seeing how the moose went down on its knees with a queer, grunting sound as if it were grieving too. He would never admit to this feeling because it was a sign of weakness; it was not how things were supposed to be between a hunter and the animal who had given itself to him. He had killed many moose since, and while he never had so strong a reaction of sadness again – he loved hunting – each time he felled an animal he would touch its warm flank, partly to thank it, but also with the slightest hint of regret.
Nor did he tell her about getting drunk at the Rendezvous, or about how he and Gary Sweshikin had escaped the police one night in a stolen car, or about his mother and her troubles. In his happiness with Ann Scott, he lived partly in hiding, and close to shame.
She told him, in turn, of a trip she’d taken the previous fall to Europe, of paintings and cities and ruins, of walking in a cave under Paris among stacks of bones, and of the time she and a friend had hiked up a mountain and then, coming down, had got lost in a mist and nearly walked headlong over a cliff. She spoke again of her parents’ divorce. “I was mad at my father – he wasn’t treating my mom very well – that’s why I went to live with her. But really, it was harder. We always rubbed each other the wrong way. I used to think sometimes, Well, I know why he went off. I’d leave too if I had to live with her . But then I couldn’t stand his girlfriend. I could never forgive her for taking Mom’s place. It wasn’t her fault, but –” She was sitting on the rock with her elbows on her knees, her head down, despondent. Reaching out, he touched her wet hair. Her eyes, filled with a level seriousness, met his. Slipping his arm across her back, he kissed her. Her mouth was barely responsive, and when he pulled back, she was still watching him, as if she were weighing the kiss against the person who had given it.
One afternoon when her father was away, she took him up to her bedroom on the second floor. It was not much changed from how he remembered it: a large, rather stuffy room, with two screen windows opening toward thechannel, under a sloping ceiling. There were the same bookcases crammed with books, the same bedspread with the giant yellow flowers, even the same blue bear, staring from its