Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [33]
She stands there stranded, as if discovered naked on a stage with a ladder in her arms. He walks in slow circles around her, hemming her in… .
You’ve got feathers on you.
I’ve got feathers, at least I am partially dressed.
Let’s have a bath. I will draw it.
No. The river. As you are. There will be nobody there. You need to just cross the meadow, then you will be in the trees.
His callused fingers hold her at the wrist again. So she goes with him down to the kitchen and out the back.
Next time don’t move the ladder.
Oh, next time I will.
It isn’t much more than a trout stream, so they lie on their backs against pebbles in order to be fully submerged. She sees a curl of water sculpt his hair and shoulders, as if he’s being transformed. This is a first, she thinks. Then realizes so much is a first with him, her running up and down the corridor naked, the loose grip even now on her wrist, his almost sleepy sexuality where there seems no boundary between passion and curiosity and closeness, unlike one of her earlier lovers, who had been ardent but selfish.
And yet he keeps far away from her what else he is. As though he wishes in some way to remain a stranger. Why does that happen … with such an otherwise generous man? These men with art, like nineteenth-century botanists who, though wise and obsessive, claim only professional affection for the world around them.
But the next day, standing in the meadow, he invites Anna to visit the trailer, and she hesitates, thinking the offer is a commitment on his part, even a tentative one. It implies too much knowledge of the other—his home could be a capsule of the past or of a possible future. Her own hesitation at breaking their formality is interpreted by Rafael as shyness, or modesty, or a desire not to take the relationship further. And in some way this is not a misinterpretation of Anna. For she too has lived a stranger’s life. There are layers of compulsive secrecy in her. She knows there is a ‘flock’ of Annas, and that the Anna beside this unnamed river of Rafael’s is not the Anna giving a seminar at Berkeley on one of Alexandre Dumas’ collaborators and plot researchers, is not the Anna in San Francisco walking into Tosca’s or eating at the Tadich Grill on California Street.
She stands looking at Rafael in the middle of that meadow. Why doesn’t she wish to visit her lover’s home? She is curious, after all. But she knows this romance is a romance, in no way an agreement towards permanence, even though much of her wants to see his silhouette moving within that suitcase of a home that once belonged to the mysterious Aria. She wants to climb onto his narrow bed with him and brace her arms against the ledge of the window, look down on his weathered face and slowly bring her head to the patch of his body that smells of basil, next to his heart.
One of the dearest possessions that Anna has is an old map—La Carte du Tendre Pays—sweetly named, of emotions that fit into the shape of France. It was composed by women in an earlier century, during an era of male exploration and mapmaking. But this was a map of yearnings that courteously avoided sexual love, except for a darkly etched thicketed region in the north, listed as ‘Terres Inconnues.’ Well, times change. By the time she earned and saved enough money to pay for her university studies in French, she was told by a dean that the best way to learn French was to take a French lover.
In spite of everything that had existed between Coop and Anna for those two months on the Petaluma farm, they had remained mysterious to each other. They’d really been discovering themselves. In this way they could fit into the world. But years later, never having married, never having lived with anyone in a relationship that intended permanence, she still sidled beside her lovers as if she were on Coop’s deck, glowing in secret with the discovery of herself. So there had always been and perhaps always would be a maze of unmarked roads between her and others. That emotional map of France was still true in the present, full of subtexts, social intricacies,