Don't I Know You? Page 9

  The long shadows were still golden. The air had just an edge of coolness, an edge of autumn. Riding in the car with these two undemanding swains, my hair whipping around in the breeze and one wheel of my horizontal bike slowly spinning in the air, I realized that it had been too long since I’d felt this way. Hopeful.

  They dropped me off on Abbey Dawn Road at the top of the long gravel driveway into the farm. Bill Murray helped me hoist my bike out of the car, and we said goodbye. He crooked his finger under my chin, tilting it up in an ironic movie moment. “You’re one hell of a woman,” he said in a John Wayne voice.

  Really? For a second I believed him. I hope I blushed. Then I got on my bike and headed down the road toward the lights of the farm and my last night with Roberto.

  Just beyond the little bridge over the creek, I passed the horse meadow, where I could see an orange dome tent pitched in the far corner. Our South America tent. Lantern light glowed through the nylon walls. I cycled past slowly, surreptitiously, hoping he couldn’t hear the gravel under my wheels. It was obvious that Roberto had decided to skip the fight we were about to have and make the first move.

  Good, I thought, good for him.

  Bob Dylan Goes Tubing

  One morning Eric and I came back from town to find a strange car parked under the white pines beside our cottage. An old Citroën, the kind where the chassis goes up and down hydraulically. Yellow. Nobody we knew drove a Citroën.

  Eric’s son, Ryan, ran down the long switchback of wooden steps that led to the water. “There’s somebody out on the lake,” he called up, “on the air mattress.”

  We shaded our eyes. A pale, small, but visibly adult figure was lying on the mattress, slowly paddling with his hands toward the diving raft.

  “I need the binocs,” Eric said, and went in to get them. Standing on the deck he studied the figure.

  “This is really weird, but whoever that is looks exactly like Bob Dylan.” He passed the binoculars to me. He was right. A pale little guy with a pencil mustache, in a Tilley hat, was on our air mattress.

  “See? Dylan, only older.”

  “Well, he is older.”

  The figure paddled closer. Eric waved and called out. “Hi there! We’re back.”

  I waved too. It could, remotely, be some friend of a friend, dropping by on his way up to another cottage. Our place, a rental, had no landline. So sometimes people just turned up.

  “Yeah, I’m back too,” the Dylan person called. Then he started singing in a slightly hokey Nashville Skyline voice, “Back here on Kashagawigamog.”

  That was in fact the name of a northern Ontario lake, but not ours. Ours was Sturgeon.

  “What do we do now?” Eric said.

  “Invite him up, I guess. Offer him a drink. Although, it’s early.”

  Eric cupped his hands. “Come on up and join us if you’re heading in.”

  “Sure thing,” the floater said, having reached the raft. I got a towel from the pump shed and took it down to the dock. Bob Dylan—no question, it was him—slung the mattress up on the raft and did a credible breaststroke over to our dock, keeping the brim of his hat dry. He held on to the edge with thin white fingers.

  “No ladder?” The nails on the baby finger of each hand were extra long, and filed square.

  “Let me give you a hand.”

  I leaned over, careful to keep my scoop-neck shirt from gaping, and Dylan grabbed hold of me like a big ropy eight-year-old. He was pale as a grub with a dot of chin hair and a riverboat-gambler mustache. But his blue eyes were still strong and clear. They met mine, took me in. He whisked the water off his arms with his hands as he stood up.

  “Water’s real nice, once you get in.”

  Dylan was wearing a pair of old-fashioned wool swimming trunks with a narrow white belt. Wet, the suit revealed a springy crescent of cock underneath. His skin was so white it looked translucent, but he had biceps—from playing guitar, probably. His forearms had energy too, and drew your eye.

  He wrapped himself in my blue towel.

  “Want to see the boathouse?” said Ryan, who had run back down the stairs again. He showed Dylan Eric’s old green Chestnut canoe hanging from the rafters, and the aluminum boat we use for fishing. Ryan was nine and didn’t know or care who this skinny stranger was. Our seven-year-old daughter, Ceri, was staying with her grandparents in Quebec and he was getting bored on his own.

  “The canoe leaks,” Ryan said, “but we can go tubing. My friend Trevor has a Chris-Craft with a Merc one-twenty.”

  “Sounds good,” Dylan said, using his finger to close one nostril as he blew out the other one to clear his sinuses. Then we all climbed the eighty-seven wooden trestle ties up to the cottage, where Eric was waiting for us with the map spread out on the kitchen table.

  “Okay now Bob, you’re here,” he said, pointing to Sturgeon Lake, a liver-shaped body of water northeast of Huntsville, “and Kashagawigamog is quite a ways over there.” Kash was closer to Bancroft, in Haliburton.

  “Guess I kinda overshot it,” Dylan mumbled. “Nice ride up, though.”

  I was staring into the fridge without registering anything.

  “Can I offer you something? Orange juice? Gin and tonic? We have beer, of course. Canadian beer.”

  “Sure, that all sounds good.”

  “Or how about a nice cold Stoli with some lemonade?”

  “Fifty-two gypsies went down by the wall/and none of them came back,” he sang. “Give it to me in a cup/and let the Queen dance with the Jack.”

  After some dithering, I mixed Dylan a Red Needle—scotch and cranberry juice with lots of ice—and opened a couple Coronas for us. Ryan was back into his video game. Bob downed his drink and fingered peanuts from a dish as he studied the map, using a felt pen to circle some of the names that caught his fancy.

  “Arnprior,” he murmured, with a faint lift of the mustache. “Irondale. Madoc. Madawaska.”

  Meanwhile Eric stood in front of our CD collection sweating over what to play for Bob Dylan.

  “Rose, where’s that bootleg unmastered copy of ‘Brown Sugar’?”

  “No!” I cried, leaping over to the CD player. “Play … play the Robert Johnson box set, did we bring that?”

  Dylan looked up from the map.

  “Got any old Valdy?”

  “Valdy.” Eric swiveled on his heels to me with panic-stricken eyes. “Now, let me have a look.”

  Valdy is a West Coast Canadian folksinger who enjoyed a little plateau of fame in the 1980s, and then disappeared from view. While Eric inverted his head to read the labels on the lowest shelf, Dylan turned on the radio. CBC’s book show was wrapping up.

  “Good old Shelagh Rogers,” said Dylan, putting chunks of cheddar on a row of crackers. “Turn ’er up.”

  “Really?” Eric said. “You follow Shelagh Rogers?”

  “The boys on the bus listen to NPR and CBC all the time. When you’re on the move it’s good to have something that’s always there, right? Something regular.”

  “Huh,” Eric said. He was staring at a CD of Glenn Gould, the Goldberg Variations. Too manic for this time of day, and a little show-offy, he decided.

  Ryan came in and said that Trevor and Angus were coming by to go tubing and did Bob want to go out with them? We explained tubing to Dylan—being dragged around the lake behind a powerboat while clinging to a large inflated rubber donut with handles. Like tobogganing down a hill, only over water.

  “Sure, I’ll give it a shot,” Dylan said, wiping crumbs off his little mustache. Ryan got him a life preserver and we went down to the waterfront to watch the big Chris-Craft chug up to the dock. As they all roared off, the brim of Dylan’s hat flipped straight up in the wind. He looked happy. Eric waved and turned to me.

  “What do we do when Dylan gets tired of tubing?”

  “Let’s worry about that later.” I hung the towels out on the line, lay down on our bed, and fell asleep. I wasn’t used to drinking before lunch.

  * * *


  Dusk was coming on. We had cocktails and listened to Lucinda Williams singing “Passionate Kisses.” I held off pouring myself a second one. Dylan stood at the big front window scowling at the horizon, which was a bloody red.

  “Look at the sun,” he said, “goin’ down over the sea.” He spider-walked one hand down the windowpane. “The sky is erupting now, and I must take my leave.” He went into the guest bedroom. We heard him rummaging around in the dresser and then he emerged wearing an old pair of Ryan’s pajamas, blue flannel with a Smurf motif. He held a toothbrush in his hand.

  “Okay if I drink the water?”

  “Go ahead, we just had it tested.”

  For several minutes he scoured his teeth over the kitchen sink, brushing and spitting methodically. Then he flossed, making the thread pock rhythmically. Rinsed.

  “Think I’ll sleep down by the lake tonight,” he said, before he banged out the screen door with a striped Hudson’s Bay blanket over one shoulder, and Ryan’s cheap guitar in his hand.

  I stood at the window. Wrapped in the blanket, Dylan settled on our yellow plastic chaise at the end of the dock. I had a good view of him through the birches, in the early lavender darkness. He took out a pack of American Spirits, lit one, broke up several more, and threw the crumbs of tobacco to the minnows that dimpled the surface of the water. Farther out on the lake, a pair of loons, long-bodied, black, and plump, left a placid W behind them. This was the time of evening when the fish fed and unseen bugs disturbed the water, as if a light rain were falling.

  Then it was truly dark. Eric made a fire in the woodstove. In his room, Ryan had fallen asleep over an old Spider-Man comic book. I covered him and turned off his light. He had Eric’s habit of sleeping with both hands shoved under the pillow.

  A little later, I slipped out of bed and down the trestle stairs to give Dylan a flashlight and some bug repellant. He was still awake, playing the guitar softly.

  “If you hear rustling in the woods, it’s just raccoons,” I told him. “They won’t bother you on the dock.”

  “Frogs are jumpin, toads are croakin’/seems like everything is broken,” he crooned in his cigarette-frayed voice.

  “Good night, Bob. Sleep tight.”

  “Hey Ro, you too.”

  We watched the moonless night sky for a moment. The stars were all out, coming at us in smithereens. Coldness radiated off the dark water. A shooting star slipped across the blackness.

  * * *

  And so, without a word of explanation, Bob Dylan became a guest at our cottage. Every morning he got up first—we would hear him plunge off the dock, thrash out to the raft, and then swim back again. Later on he’d often take a trip into town to buy the local Chelsea buns. And most afternoons he went tubing with Ryan and the boys.

  “It’s not too different from being on the road with the band,” he said, “just more fun.”

  Sometimes we would stand on the dock with the binoculars, watching him bump over the waves behind Trevor’s boat, and think, Bob Dylan is tubing on our lake. It was pretty surreal. But Canadian summers are so short that everything about them feels dreamlike. Like something separate and lovely, bound to end. We were only renting the cottage and didn’t socialize too much on the lake. As usual, I was trying to get some writing done, without much success. So it was just the four of us that August—me, Ryan, Eric, and Bob Dylan. And it was good at first.

  The cottage was old-fashioned, with partitions between the three small bedrooms that didn’t go all the way up. With Dylan next door, Eric and I had to make love like hostages, scarcely moving. I began to develop a taste for it that way. One night, not long after his arrival, we had flipped our covers down to get at each other more quietly when we heard Dylan talking in his sleep.

  “Someone’s got it in for me,” he said, clearly and loudly, “they’re planting stories in the press.”

  “Just let me check on him,” I said to Eric. I slipped into his room and there he was, an aging poet in Smurf pajamas, his white feet uncovered. Now he was mumbling. I put my hand on his brow and he soon settled down. I tucked him in. He looked so young asleep.

  The next morning he emerged with a rumpled face, unsmiling.

  “Bad night?”

  “Seems like sleep’s the only place I’m not alone,” he muttered, topping his Chelsea bun with a half inch of cold butter.

  “Did you hear the loons?”

  “Yeah. Good tune. D minor.”

  “Your oatmeal’s ready, Bob.” Like me, he preferred it with a lot of maple syrup in a wide soup bowl, so it cools quickly. We sat down at the table. The day was overcast and chilly, and the lake looked too rough for tubing. Eric was in the porch playing Monopoly with Ryan, crowing about having acquired eight hotels.

  “Want to play?” Ryan asked Dylan, who sat down with them. They gave him a silver candlestick from the Clue game as his marker and he shook the dice long and hard when his turn came round. I could have slipped away then to do some writing, but I decided to make a lamb stew instead and started chopping up onions. In no time, Dylan had snagged three railroads, as well as Park Place and Marvin Gardens.

  “Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle,” Dylan sang, zipping his candlestick around the board, an unlit cigarette hanging off his lip. We let him smoke inside, but he usually didn’t push it.

  “Hurry up and roll,” Ryan said morosely. Eric, who didn’t like board games, gazed out the window at the choppy gray lake. He was looking a little fed up, I noticed. Sooner or later we were going to have to do something about Bob Dylan.

  “We should go down and put the chairs in the boathouse.” I looked pointedly at Eric. “It looks like it’s going to storm.”

  “I’m sure he’ll leave soon,” I said when we were down by the lake and out of earshot. “He just needs to rest.”

  “But what if he doesn’t? What if he ends up coming back down to the city with us?” Eric gnawed at the side of his thumb.

  “Somebody’s going to track him down eventually. He’s world-famous, for God’s sake.”

  “Plus, the guy likes to eat, in case you haven’t noticed. When you factor in gas for the outboard, and all those cartons of American Spirit I bring back from town, it starts to add up.”

  “He’s rich. Money probably never crosses his mind.”

  “Well, it should. It crosses mine.” Eric was already nervous about the money he would have to raise for his next film project.

  “Let’s give him a bit more time. It’s good for Ryan; he’s teaching him chords on the guitar. We could have nipped it in the bud on the first day, but we can’t kick him out now. It would be rude.”

  “And I don’t appreciate the way he goes around doing those imitations of Paul Simon singing ‘Graceland’ when he can tell by our CD wallet that we like him.”

  “That’s just how he is.”

  “He gets away with murder playing Scrabble—you didn’t even challenge ‘zydeco’! You wouldn’t take that shit from me. Why are you defending him?”

  “I’m not defending him, I just think he’s fragile right now. Empire Burlesque was not a big seller. And I like it when he sings for us.”

  “Right,” Eric snorted. “When he can remember the words.”

  * * *

  If you asked him directly, Dylan wouldn’t sing. But after supper he might sit down with Ryan’s guitar and ease into a song. One chilly evening we made a bonfire outside. Dylan wrapped himself in the Bay blanket and sang “Farewell, Angelina,” followed by “Tangled Up in Blue.” He played with his head bowed, his voice hard-edged, like an old sharpened knife. That night he made up a song for Ryan called “The Man in the Loon.” It was about a boy who fell into the lake as a baby and was raised by a pair of loons, so he grew up thinking he was a bird, and could swim forever underwater.

  “Slept in a rowboat/swam through the reeds/livin’ in the river/where the crawfish feeds.”

  Later on he sang that Beach Boys song “In My Room,” changing the chorus to “In My Loon.” Rya
n played along on his little Casio keyboard. “Now play ‘Surfer Girl,’” I asked, excited. But then Dylan put the guitar aside, ground his cigarette into the dirt, and went off to bed like a small king, his blanket sweeping the pine needles behind him.

  That night in bed, Eric turned to me. “Were there any messages at the marina when you went to town? Hasn’t his manager or somebody tried to reach him?”

  “Nothing.” A mosquito hovered. I let it land on my arm, and smacked it. “We’re it, I guess.”

  “Anyone else would at least buy the odd bottle of wine,” Eric said, rolling away. “Talk about out of touch.”

  “He’s just lost.”

  * * *

  For some reason, Ryan got the best bed in the cottage. Well, I knew why. His mother and Eric had split up when he was two, and I sometimes favored him over Ceri, to win his affection. The bed had a new mattress encased in zippered plastic that rustled whenever he shifted in his sleep. Our bed was bigger, but old, and it sagged. The law of physics meant that Eric occupied the middle, so on hot nights I would often move to the screened-in porch to sleep on the sofa-bed. I liked to feel the cushions against my back, and my feet solid against the upholstered arms.

  I was settled in with a duvet on the porch one night as a ribbon of cool air flowed over me. I could feel the presence of the lake, like a sleeping dog. The call of the loons was so clear and loud, notes breathed into a bamboo instrument. Sometimes the sound of laughter from a party on the other side of the lake would carry over, but that night it was perfectly quiet. I listened to everyone in the cottage breathing—Eric, almost a snore. Ryan, turning often and rustling his plastic. I couldn’t hear anything from Dylan’s room. Then I heard someone get up and use the bathroom.

  “Ryan?”

  “No.”

  Dylan, wrapped in the blanket, came onto the porch. His feet were long and narrow and white. I could smell tobacco and the strange lanolin cream he used on his hands and nails. Bag balm, he called it, something farmers used on cracked cow udders.

  “Quarter moon, Ro,” he whispered. Through the trees I could see the bone-colored crescent.