All the Voices Cry Read Free

thrush or a soprano practising in a neighbouring house. She had honoured his anger when he had discovered her photographing his work. Hugh had knocked the camera out of her hand into the ferns, where she later picked it up, unharmed. Get out, he’d said. Get out of her own place. Extraordinary to think of it now, like that. And afterward he knelt before her and soaked her wraparound skirt with his tears.
    â€œYour spirit is wide, Jan, like the horizon,” he said, stretching out his arms to receive her. So she forgave him, and with him she felt forgiven.
    Sometimes Jan found it unbearable that Hugh should have seen her aging. She ought to have drifted in and out of
his life like one of his time-limited sculptures, here at dawn, gone in the evening, with the last trilling of the hermit thrush. Now she saw herself standing in the cold forest with an empty cardboard box in her thin hands. Her hair is shorter now, and she keeps it dark by artificial means, but she knows it disappoints people to come across her from behind, to have her turn to face them with the ridged pools of sleeplessness beneath her eyes.
    Just as once upon a time Hugh found Jan, so he eventually found Crispin, one summer night in a bar on the Main in Montreal. Crispin was quick, wiry, and witty. In another century, he might have been a velvet-clad poet relishing his dreams, but Crispin was a water-colourist, producing exquisite works of the old school. They sold well. Dreamy clouds are never easy to achieve, but Crispin had a knack for painting the wide sky of Quebec on fire in the evening or nacreous at first light. Crispin’s skies caught at the emotions, hinted at spiritual depths, but remained guileless, because when it came down to it, they were just sky, just water-colour.
    Jan still has a photograph of Crispin at that time, lithe Crispin wearing a black halterneck with diamantes that stretch in a glittering curve into the hollows of his armpits. Earlier in the day, they had pulled up the chains and anchors on the dock and had paddled off on it as if it were a raft. Crispin swam around in the water, his wet head coppery in the sunlight. For a while, they had all wanted him.
    Jan had tried hard. She maintained outward appearances with meals and money, but somewhere she lost the knack of
renewing her love for Hugh each day and she found herself acting more as she felt she ought to, rather than from desire. The parties in the woods changed. Vernon Hasp’s documentary about other men called Vernon Hasp attained cult status and he began to hold court in his own penthouse where he could see himself reflected in sixteen panes of glass at a time. Tiny drifted off to farm organic carrots. Frédérique died from complications following a hip replacement. Their places were taken by Crispin’s friends: students, actors, musicians shouting at each other about Derrida and hip hop. Hugh was often absent from Jan’s bed in the morning, but the woods revealed little trace of his work.
    Jan knew better than to say anything. Hugh had every right to live as he wished. Early on, she did her crying on a city bus, during one of those winters when she taught photography at a community college. The tears erupted when she least expected it, pouring out with all the shame and inevitability of vomit onto the sidewalk, while the high-school kids sitting around her sank into their jackets and looked out the window.
    The next summer, when they returned to the woods, Jan slept in the cabin and Hugh shuttled between her room and Crispin’s in the Bunkie. One morning when she was out taking photographs, she came across Crispin perched on a rock, brooding in the steam that rose off the lake into the cool morning.
    â€œI do love him, you know,” he said.
    â€œYou know nothing of love,” she replied. That morning, she took a photograph of a reed bending backwards into its
sharply angled reflection. Around it quivered the lines of the water. The