Stalwart Island
Cassie’s mom wouldn’t have liked Paul. She would have said he was a braggart, a redneck, a liar. But Cassie knows his softness bears a diamond’s worth of pressure
Born in Russia, Polly Phokeev is a Toronto-based writer. She is an award-winning playwright (”Seams,” “How We Are,” “The Mess”), and is currently working on her debut novel as thesis work for her MFA in creative writing at the University of British Columbia.
Phokeev explores the stark power dynamic between a couple, set against a lush backdrop of a boat ride to an island. While flipping between flashbacks and the present moment, Phokeev builds tension with what is left unspoken.
“The question of power imbalances, I think, is also the question of human existence, and so it's a fundamental theme,” Phokeev said. “I do intend to continue exploring that.”
She comes back, always, to the charts, tracing a finger along the dotted line between white islands. Sometimes her finger slips by accident, sometimes by design, and she rewrites her memory of where the boat revved and where it waited. It takes a particular kind of patience to know just when to ease the engine and S-turn through a passing wake. A particular kind of patience to learn the rules of buoys, red and green, and where to outplay them, and take an outer channel. The water is high this year, she’d know that if she knew anything about this place. But Cassie might as well have been blindfolded in the back of the cruiser, flown like a flat stone across the archipelago. She spends half an hour tracing in the wrong direction, and by that point Paul comes out of the bedroom and laughs at the way she’s hunched, leg up on the wicker chair, half the fingers of her spare hand digging out the inside of her bottom lip.
“You’re like a little kid,” he says, “honestly.” And he bites at the nape of her neck, and drapes two bulky arms around her, and points to a large white splotch stretching almost, but not quite, into open water.
Stalwart Island, he tells her. All around them is wilderness. Rattlesnakes and deer. Some of the most beautiful gneiss in the region, eons-old boulders worn smooth by waves, copperswirled, facing the sunset. The guy who used to own it never even built a cottage here, never visited, refused to let anyone else have a piece. Paul likes bragging about his purchase, likes reminding Cassie of the way he got the old man to budge, alternating saccharine promises with hefty bribes, until with a bright believable smile he received the deed.
“Tell you what,” he says as she scrapes to standing. “If you ask real nice, I’ll give you the tour.”
Paul’s got a raised white scar on the side of his face that runs from his hairline, past the outer edge of his left brow, to the bottom of his ear. He says it was a bar fight, a guy came at him with a shattered bottle, he had to get fourteen stitches.
“Another millimetre,” Paul likes to say, whenever someone else is injured, like the time Cassie burned her thumb on the barbecue skewers, “and it would’ve been the end. See that, that’s your superficial temporal artery.” He likes to point to the place where, in fact, a millimetre away, a vein presses against the wind-thickened skin of his temple.
The only time Paul’s brought Cassie along to meet his downtown friends was at a Wild Wing on Dundas. This guy Rob leaned into her unprompted and said, “He telling you the bulls—t about the scar?”
According to Rob, who was there, it hadn’t been a fight at all, unless it counts if you’re battling gravity.
“You know Paul,” he said, “he’s like Donkey Hotty. With the windmills? S--t gets real with him. But sometimes that s--t’s right up in there.” He tapped his temple. “So this one time he gets piss drunk and tries to take on a motherf--king pinball machine. Next thing we know, he’s slipped on some s--t and slammed his face into it. Right along that sweet metal edge.” Here he traced, with the long nail on his pinky finger, through the thin fringe stuck to his forehead.
Paul laughed along, and Cassie laughed, and then when he took her home at the end of the night Paul told her never to talk to Rob again.
“When we were kids he used to cut up squirrels,” he said, “f--king psychopath.”
After breakfast Paul takes Cassie out in the putt-putt boat. He sits at the back of the metal hull, one hand on the propeller, and Cassie takes the bow. It’s times like these, watching Paul point out the rocks where he’s going to build a deck, that she can see the good inside him. Some people have goodness right on their faces, pouring out the eyes, her mother used to say, but some have their goodness tucked in an envelope with a big bright seal that reads “For Those Who Love Me.”
Cassie’s mom wouldn’t have liked Paul. She would have said he was a braggart, a redneck, a liar. She would have begged Cassie to leave him. But Cassie knows his softness bears a diamond’s worth of pressure. She knows that she has never met a man so comfortable in silence. Most nights she and him are animals coexisting. She sits on the couch with a dollarstore mystery, nails in her teeth, and he practises blowing smoke rings from the bean bag chair. Sometimes he gets up and grabs M&Ms from the fridge, shakes the bag into his open mouth, and retreats. As Cassie thinks of this, in her mind his teeth sharpen, like a cartoon shark, and she flinches.
“What?” Paul yells over the motor.
Cassie waves it away. They pull into a bay on the other side of the island, where the water is shallow enough for Paul to hop out and wade the boat to shore. On the rocks in the shadow of bent pines, Paul and Cassie have their picnic, and Paul tells her about the time he met a bear.
“It wasn’t on Stalwart,” he points to a small group of stones shrouded in blue on the horizon. Atop the pile stands one single tree, leaning away from the wind. “Last summer the water was low enough I could walk along the shoreline. I’d get so hot building all day, I’d take the shade right around, and I’d get up on that rock over there and dive.”
When the water’s low, he tells her, you can swim right across to the leaning tree, rock by rock — you can’t see them now but just below the water there are shoals all over. It’s why you never see boats come through here. If they tried they’d shred their bellies on the stone.
Paul recounts how he climbed onto those shoals by the leaning tree just as the tip of a bear’s head poked out behind it. How he froze, “honestly scared s--tless,” lowered his weight so as not to slip off the algae.
“You’d think bears are slow swimmers,” he says, “but that’s not true, they’re f--king fast, if I tried to run away I’d be dead. This thing kept chewing, like there was something stuck in its teeth.” He looks down at his hands, stretches out the fingers until they crack.
“Maybe it was blueberries,” says Cassie. “They eat a lot of berries.”
“They’re f--king smart.” Paul snaps. It comes out of nowhere, a fist of words. “It was thinking things through. Should it get me or not. You don’t know s--t about life until you’ve seen nature do that.”
Cassie lets it fall into silence. She watches the white crests of waves out in the channel. Far across, dots with skinny legs, a family brings canvas bags up the stairs of a russet cottage. A sailship snails beyond the bend of trees.
“It’s not up to us,” Paul says, in time, to himself and the water. “When you’re out here long enough, you realize it’s not up to us.”
Sometimes Cassie wonders what might have happened if she’d stayed in Montreal. She still has a bike there, though it’s probably been stripped for parts by now, locked up by the gas station at Notre-Dame and Guy. She only lived there six months, and never learned a lick of French, but it felt like some kind of home. Paul makes fun of her for it, and it is silly, but she still thinks with fondness of her shared apartment in Little Italy. Its icy fire escape, the candles she set up in the derelict mantle of her bedroom. It was five hundred bucks a month, which she scraped together knocking on doors in Westmount for an NGO. She wasn’t good at it, notoriously inept at persuasion, but sometimes, after a long day of getting yelled off porches, she would treat herself to free samples at Jean Talon.
It’s like with maps. Cassie knows it’s pointless to time travel, to strategize a game you can’t replay. But it’s something to do, retrace your steps, like a puzzle, figure out how you got to where you are. As a kid she was obsessed with chooseyour-own-adventures. The ones in paperback from the library, with voyages through haunted pyramids and Saturn’s outer rings. There, when you realized the story you were on was not the one you wanted, you could skip back to page fourteen, or twenty-one, or thirty. Countless junctures. Cassie dog-eared the important pages, made books of notes on what thread she should choose, flipped back and forth, comparing every possible world.
Anyway. If Cassie had stayed in Montreal, she probably would have run out of money. She was already out of work when Doug and Marianne came down on their road trip out of Nova Scotia. They were willing to give her a ride back to her mom’s house on their way to Toronto. It seemed, at the time, like a sign. But if she had stayed, who knows, maybe she would have gotten a cleaning job or something. Maybe she would have worked up the nerve to befriend her roommates, who were all into yoga. They might have convinced her to go on a meditation retreat, where she would have met some French guy with a billion dollars. Maybe she would have moved into his mansion and spent her days taking art classes and writing poetry. Maybe, if Cassie had stayed in Montreal, she would have found out she was good at something.
“Do you ever wonder,” she says that night as Paul cracks a beer to the setting sun, “if there’s another you out there, somewhere?”
“Like a doppelganger?” he grunts.
“Yeah. I don’t know. Like someone that looks like you, but acts a little different, maybe. Lives a whole different life.”
Paul gives her a smirk, the smallest of gifts, and chugs back half a bottle.
“If I ever meet my doppelganger I’ll beat the s--t out of him.”
And maybe it’s all the thinking, or the beating of waves against the dock, or the image of that bear weighing its decisions by the leaning tree, but Cassie can’t bring herself to let the silence settle.
“Where,” she says, with a diplomat’s caution, “do you want to be in five years?”
She knows that’s an impossible question. She was once asked it in a job interview at a Cinnabon in Brockville. It would have been her first job, at age fourteen and three quarters, and at the time it had seemed like the most ridiculous question in the world. In five years, she’d probably be in the same place she was then, in the semi-detached with the wooden porch, helping her mom run a home daycare. In retrospect, she sees that they wanted someone with dreams.
Paul doesn’t like the question either. He chugs the rest of his beer and cracks another. She should have let it go.
“You making plans?” he says as she creaks higher up the sofa springs.
He gets like this sometimes, like those waves he showed her out in the open water. Big dips and three-metre swells. If she isn’t careful, he might say something he’ll regret.
“I’m just thinking out loud,” she says, and lays a soft hand on his thigh. It’s a little cold, her hand, bad circulation, it always betrays her, but Paul runs hot.
“Think you can do better than this?” he says, and she chooses to believe he’s talking about the water.
“It’s gorgeous.” “Because you can leave. You know? If I’m such a loser.” “I didn’t say you’re —” “You know, a lotta guys out here, they’re either millionaires or they’ve got family, but I came up on my own, you know, just on my own. Walked up to the guys at the marina, said, gimme a job, I’ll do anything, pump the septic, whatever.”
This is a myth she knows well, how he started with nothing and no one. It’s true that he doesn’t speak to his folks, but Cassie knows he got his first job out here through Rob, the psychopath from Wild Wing. On another sort of night she might have let it go. Like anyone, Paul tells stories, Paul paints a portrait of his goodness. Like her, he knows what it is to feel small. She should take his hand, she should call him brave, at the very least she should change the subject.
But she has been thinking about dog-eared junctures. She’s chosen Paul, that’s true, for now, but she knows how for
now can become forever, without her even noticing, just a slip off a shoal into the green-black waters between thirty thousand isles. And he’s the one that’s brought it up, and now it’s hanging between them, and he’s looking at her like she’s the bear on the rocks, chewing the berries, weighing his life against the effort of a swim.
“What?” says Paul, and his eyes are hard with terror.
If she were wiser, as she hopes one day to be, Cassie would puncture the blister, tell him precisely the thing no one ever has, that he is good, that he does not have to grip so hard at his rugged fiction. He might take it badly, fling the beer against the window, but he wouldn’t lay a hand on her. He may be a liar, yes, but he is also all bark.
Paul stays out late that night. He doesn’t come to bed when Cassie settles in, even though she wears the lavender-lined flannel that makes her eyes look soft. He cracks open beer after beer, Cassie counts eight, but could be mistaken. Through the folding door she listens to him stumble about, clanking empties. He lights something, a cigarette maybe, or maybe a joint. Outside, water crashes rocks against each other. The chain on the door rattles. Its frame slams shut.
“Paul?” says Cassie, after too long.
She thinks she hears the rumble of a motor. It could just as easily be the wind.