Bear by Marian Engel Page B

They lived sweetly and intensely together. She knew that her flesh, her hair, her teeth and her fingernails smelled of bear, and this smell was very sweet to her. “Bear,” she would say to him, tempting him, “I am only a human woman. Tear my thin skin with your clattering claws. I am frail. It is simple for you. Claw out my heart, a grub under a stump.Tear off my head,my bear.” But he was good to her. He grunted, sat across from her, and grinned. Once laid a soft paw on her naked shoulder, almost lovingly. She went to Homer’s as seldom as possible now and only after swimming, in case the bear’s smell carried on the air. She bought more food than she had before. When she cooked for herself she cooked also for the bear, and he sat beside her on the stoop, and sometimes he picked up his plate and licked it. “I do wonder,“wrote the Director, “whether you feel the library is good enough to warrant this investment in time.” Go screw a book, she wanted to write back to him. She now lived intensely and entirely for the bear. They went berrying together in the woods. He pawed the ripe raspberries greedily into his maw. She saved hers like soft jewels in an old Beehive Honey tin with a binder twine handle she found in the shed. She wished he would find a honey tree, she wanted to see him greedy among bees, but he found only worms and grubs under decaying stumps. She found wild asparagus no thicker than trillium stems and cooked it and found it delicious. One morning she got on her hands and knees,and they shared their cornflakes and powdered milk and raspberries. Their strange tongues met and she shuddered. The weather became very hot. He lay in his den, panting. She layon her bed, wanting him, but it was not his time. She thought of her year as a mistress, waiting for her exigent man to come home hungry not for her but for steak au poivre, how she had wanted him always in the afternoon, and never dared to ask. How it might have been different, but… Out on the river, water-skiers buzzed like giant dragonflies. It was too hot to work upstairs. She lay naked, panting,wanting to be near her lover,wanting to offer him her two breasts and her womb, almost believing that he could impregnate her with the twin heroes that would save her tribe. But she had to wait until night fell before it was safe to see him.
    It was the night of the falling stars. She took him to the riverbank. They swam in the still, black water. They did not play.They were serious that night.They swam in circles around each other, very solemnly. Then they went to the shore, and instead of shaking himself on her, he lay beside her and licked the water from her body while she, on her back, let the stars fall, one, two, fourteen, a million, it seemed, falling on her, ready to burn her. Once she reached up to one, it seemed so close, but its brightness faded from her grasp, faded into the milky way. Loons cried, and whippoorwills. She sat up. The bear sat up across from her. She rose to her knees and moved towards him.When she was close enough to feel the wet gloss on her breasts, she mounted him. Nothing happened. He could not penetrate her and she could not get him in. She turned away. He was quite unmoved. She took him to his enclosure and sent him to bed. She dressed, and spent the rest ofthe night lying on the coarse marsh grass. The stars continued to fall. Always out of reach.Towards dawn, the skyproduced its distant, mysterious green flickering aurora. The next day she was restless, guilty.She had broken a taboo. She had changed something. The quality of her love was different now.She had gone too far with him. There was something aggressive in her that always went too far. She had thrown a marcasite egg at her lover’s window once, a green egg she particularly valued. She had stayed in this house too long. She had fucked the Director. She had let her breasts hang out before Homer. She had gone too far. No doubt if she had children she would