Of course, he wouldn't be able to talk with her, either.
Inside the Narwhal, a man was laying down strips of a silver substance in the hallway, painting them with solvent which some teenager would probably want to sniff, and a man sat reading and smoking a cigar by the pool table and the hanging plants grew, but the wind kept blowing and the ceiling kept thumping and creaking. Outside, snow blew in thin puffs and streamers across the snow-packed road and parking lot that were the same blue as snow-shadows because it was only a bit past sunrise, the orange still a long narrow triangular intrusion in the sky (nested in it, a flag on one of the airport buildings, straining like a horse's thirsty head, the flagpole bending fantastically but always straightening), and now the sky had lightened to a calm cold blue but the moon hung on, half gone, thickly yellow-white around the edge, the rest so distinctly mottled that it almost seemed possible to make out individual mountains and craters, and because the moon was pretty and far away the husband couldn't believe that it would be a more difficult place than Resolute. Meanwhile the snow-dust continued its empty rushing, not just in stripes as before but also in discrete fog-clumps which rose as high as the power wires, skating across the blue snow with the frictionless insatiability of spotlight beams. The crisscrossed tracks and treads on the snow reminded him of the dance floor in the community hall at Pond Inlet, a scratched slab of dull gleam in the warm darkness whose loud scratchy music made his ears ache; little kids in boots and parkas ran across the floor while the high school students whose dance it supposedly was sat shyly on wall benches, girls with girls, boys with boys, waiting for midnight or some even more impressive hour when things would happen; he danced with a girl once and then she wouldn't dance with him again. Maybe at one o'clock something would happen. It was for that something that people were drinking home brew, potent but thin, at a house in Clyde River, telling the same old polar bear stories, making plans to get rich, talking about ladies and dogs and distances, eating black hunks of barbecued caribou, dipping into smoked char and roasted char with onions, getting louder and more insistent about their own greatness until one of the quietly smiling Inuk women, having drunk a glass, began screaming obscenities and smashing things and then everyone had to leave. The husband imagined marrying her and getting her drunk, knowing that she wouldn't remember what she did; she'd stab him and hit him; when she came out of it she'd be amazed and tenderly concerned, unable to believe she'd done it; so he'd offer her another drink and watch the complicity in her eyes as she swallowed eagerly, knowing she was going to be transformed… At the dance one woman was already leaving, a beautiful young mother in a white parka, the baby in the armauti, and she walked white and silent through the white silent streets, brightening and fading in accordance with the laws of streetlamps, and a little girl opened the orange square of light, leaned out and cried: heüo, hello! and a skidoo went by and the mother passed the last streetlight, turned snow-blue and vanished. Once she was gone, the husband began to ache with longing. He believed that if only he could have convinced her to love him, then he might have advanced a step away from his old errors. Now, although he might love other women, and although he had utter faith that soon he'd be with Vanna, he would never learn whatever it was that the woman in the white parka might have taught him.
He wondered about the girl he'd almost married. She'd worn a parka of blue duffel. . Was she well and happy? If he'd married her, would he be closer to where he wanted to be as Vanna's husband? If he married her now, could he marry her and Vanna at the same time? Suppose they all lived together, the husband with all his wives (even the one he'd put off could come back then), all loving one another like the inmates of a monastery, walled off from sadness because none would ever have to go away…? This ideal city of wives might well be the answer, or at least part of the answer. Certainly it wouldn't be a shortcut to his ultimate union, but it might be a flowering from it. It was so simple! If he could keep them all with him, then he could make them all happy!
There was a Peruvian lady who was working with the flying court while her divorce pended (the notion of a flying court always made the husband think of red-buttocked gibbous judges leaping through rings of fire, landing perilously on legal tightropes which they clenched between their hairy toes to pivot their bodies three hundred and sixty degrees through the air, to the accompaniment of stormy cheers; from this conception it was an easy progression to imagining sexual trapeze acts with the court stenographers, which the Peruvian lady was), and just for amusement's sake he started calling her his wife. She was warm and plump; how good it would be to snuggle her while the wind slavered outside. .
But I am married! she cried in indignation.
Exactly, he said. To me.
Everyone else laughed, and she pretended to pout. - Eh, what will you give me, if I am to be your wife?
He still had oodles of Cambodian money, which he carried around with him everywhere. He started swirling the almost worthless notes down around her by the handfuls, and everyone had a good time. .
On the day he had to leave he went into her room to say goodbye and she said: Wait! I have no clothes! I am undressed for the shower!
Well, that's perfect, he said.
She laughed, but kept the door closed until she'd put her dress on.
Can I kiss you goodbye?
Kiss me where?
On the mouth.
Her roommate came in just then, and the Peruvian lady said: He wants to kiss me on the mouth!
Pig! laughed the other girl.
Okay, okay, just one time on the mouth. You sure you don't have herpes?
I'm sure.
They kissed a few times. The husband was really enjoying himself.
But you know I am really married, said the Peruvian girl. I am not yet divorced. And you?
The same.
Why is it no good with your wife? I think you are very intelligent. Is that true?
I guess so.
And your wife, is she intelligent?
Very intelligent.
Ah, then that is why. You are intelligent, so you need a stupid girl.
Maybe you're right, said the husband thoughtfully. Maybe that's what I need.
I think so — husband, she laughed.
Well, wife, you're always right.
And now I must get undressed again. No, you can't stay. But here is my telephone number in Jeune-Lorette. Call me sometime. . when my husband isn't around.
At the co-op hotel in Grise Fiord he met a white man who was almost bald; what hair he had left was bluish-white like the snow outside. The man said little at dinner, but from what he did say the husband began to understand that he was wise and good. The husband believed in wise men because he had to. He was desperate for someone to explain to him what he should do, and why. Having advanced beyond any picayune hopes of those paid mirrors, psychiatrists, he'd been torturing his friends with questions for years every time any of them showed signs of wisdom. (That was when he still allowed himself to mention Vanna directly to others; now the most he could do would be to mention the Inuk girl.) A year or two ago, he'd nerved himself up to go to a priest, thinking that if he could only be made to BELIEVE he'd gladly COMMIT or RENOUNCE; he was with his other wife then and they were so unhappy together because he'd done everything possible and she'd done the same and they'd both given until they were exhausted and couldn't give anymore and were screaming at each other hating each other so much; these arguments had always come out of the blue, so at first he'd been stunned by them, and then after awhile he was continually waiting for them — oh, how he needed wise men! — maybe the priest could help… but just as he walked into the church he saw a newsletter with photos of the priest's henchmen blockading abortion clinics, and he came to his senses. After that he'd given up on wise men for awhile. But as he spoke with the old man, he began to feel a thrilling sense that this had been meant to happen, that this person had been sent to him to help him, if he had the courage and intelligence to ask the right questions. Once he'd told a French-Canadian friend how he'd been lost and hallucinating in the snow and had seen angels and the woman said: Mon Dieu! and he said: But I think they were all one angel who was meant to help me; I think maybe I saw my guardian angel, because she told me what to do and I did it and I lived! — and she said in a low voice of utter belief: Yes, I think so. - This wise man, then, was his guardian angel. The husband knew it. And he knew that this time he'd not be tested cruelly beyond his faith; the answers he'd receive would make sense in and of themselves.