Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

ending.”
    “Listen,” said Pierre patiently. He enjoyed this sort of conversation, but it was hard on him, he had to take little rests to collect his strength. “If Anna gave in, it’d be because she loved him. When it was over she’d love him all the more. Isn’t that what women are like? I mean if they’re in love? And what he’d do—he’d take off the next morning maybe without even speaking to her. That’s his nature. He hates loving her. So how would that be any better?”
    “They’d have something. Their experience.”
    “He would pretty well forget it and she’d die of shame and rejection. She’s intelligent. She knows that.”
    “Well,” said Meriel, pausing for a bit because she felt cornered. “Well, Turgenev doesn’t say that. He says she’s totally taken aback. He says she’s cold.”
    “Intelligence makes her cold. Intelligent means cold, for a woman.”
    “No.”
    “I mean in the nineteenth century. In the nineteenth century, it does.”

    That night on the ferry, during the time when she thought she was going to get everything straightened away, Meriel did nothing of the kind. What she had to go through was wave after wave of intense recollection. And this was what she would continue to go through—at gradually lengthening intervals—for years to come. She would keep picking up things she’d missed, and these would still jolt her. She would hear or see something again—a sound they made together, the sort of look that passed between them, of recognition and encouragement. A look that was in its way quite cold, yet deeply respectful and more intimate than any look that would pass between married people, or people who owed each other anything.
    She remembered his hazel-gray eyes, the close-up view of his coarse skin, a circle like an old scar beside his nose, the slick breadth of his chest as he reared up from her. But she could not have given a useful description of what he looked like. She believed that she had felt his presence so strongly, from the very beginning, that ordinary observation was not possible. Sudden recollection of even their early, unsure, and tentative moments could still make her fold in on herself, as if to protect the raw surprise of her own body, the racketing of desire. My-love-my-love , she would mutter in a harsh, mechanical way, the words a secret poultice. When she saw his picture in the paper, no immediate pangs struck her. The clipping had been sent by Jonas’s mother, who as long as she lived insisted on keeping in touch, and reminding them, whenever she could, of Jonas. “Remember the doctor at Jonas’s funeral?” she had written above the small headline. “Bush Doctor Dead in Air Crash.” It was an old picture, surely, blurred in its newspaper reproduction. A rather chunky face, smiling—which she would never have expected him to do for the camera. He hadn’t died in his own plane but in the crash of a helicopter on an emergency flight. She showed the clipping to Pierre. She said, “Did you ever figure out why he came to the funeral?”
    “They might have been buddies of a sort. All those lost souls up north.”
    “What did you talk to him about?”
    “He told me about one time he took Jonas up to teach him to fly. He said, ‘Never again.’”
    Then he asked, “Didn’t he drive you someplace? Where?”
    “To Lynn Valley. To see Aunt Muriel.”
    “So what did you talk about?”
    “I found him hard to talk to.”
    The fact that he was dead did not seem to have much effect on her daydreams—if that was what you could call them. The ones in which she imagined chance meetings or even desperately arranged reunions, had never had a foothold on reality, in any case, and were not revised because he was dead. They had to wear themselves out in a way she did not control and never understood.
    When she was on her way home that night it had started to rain, not very hard. She had stayed out on the deck of the ferry. She got up and walked around and could not sit down again on the lid of the life-jacket bin without getting a big wet spot on her dress. So she stayed looking at the froth stirred up in the wake of the boat, and the thought occurred to her that in a certain kind of story—not the kind that anybody wrote anymore—the thing for her to do would be to throw herself into the water. Just as she was, packed full of happiness, rewarded as she would surely never be again, every cell in her body plumped up with a sweet