Flat Water Tuesday by Ron Irwin Page A

South America and Canada. I regretted getting her that mask collection, though. More than a few lovemaking sessions had been interrupted as I moved us away from the leering gaze of all those contorted wooden faces.
    She’d been to Africa and South America with me a few times but she preferred the city and, I felt, work that really paid. Her clients were mostly in New York. She had never romanticized the career of a documentary filmer: the cheap life of third-class flights and overweight baggage and meals on the fly and forced interviews and extreme weather. She liked the cachet that working for National Geographic gave her, and liked to help me, but that was it. I had once, in a rage, accused her of being too corporate-minded, said that money was the driving force behind everything she did. She had conceded the point. She had also wondered aloud if anyone really did anything without thinking about the back-end, and reminded me that she could write off the work she did for me as charity.
    She sounded like my father when she said that.
    Six weeks ago, just before I had flown to South Africa, Carolyn had announced that our relationship was finished. It was an impossible relationship we had, she said. Two people our age had to start making something substantial out of their lives. We agreed on that. It was more than the simple fact we were unmarried, which she claimed didn’t bother her. If I wanted to shoot film and edit, I could do it anywhere. I could do it right here in New York. Anyway, I should be doing more corporate work, she insisted. It was easier, it was fun sometimes and it paid more. Yeah, I had replied, I could just see myself filming the inside of a new bank. Or doing training tapes for sales teams, or filming exterior shots of new offices. I hated the idea of spending weeks shooting restaurant and travel inserts for cable TV channels. Why not? she’d countered. It pays the bills and people care about where they work and where they eat and doing their jobs well.
    But there was more to it as well. Our fights had started occurring more and more regularly, almost immediately after I came back from a shoot, with flare-ups through the ensuing weeks until I left again on the next assignment. The very fact I had an apartment in Cape Town irritated her. My Cape Town place was a small, one-room bachelor studio, I had told her, a place to sleep and get mail and lock up my equipment. I wasn’t going to live in a hotel for half my life. No, she’d said, you could live in our place. I reminded her it was her place. I just helped pay the rent.
    And then there was yet more to it, another layer that we couldn’t touch. Even when the arguments came to the point of her throwing things out the window, of her going so far as to demand I leave the loft and find another place to sleep, we never bore down to it. The last night she threw me out, I walked over to our restaurant and got drunk at a table near the kitchen and then returned and begged her to let me in, freezing my ass off on the sidewalk because I’d stormed out of the loft in a T-shirt and jeans and boots into SoHo in February. I had wound up sleeping on the stairs leading up from the factory entrance. Even when she let me in at 5:00 A.M. and showered with me and brought me to bed, fucked me, and let me lie next to her in drunken silence, shivering, we didn’t talk about it.
    The Titanic had sailed on after it skidded against its iceberg. It had traveled a couple of miles after it was damaged, water creeping up the sides of the ship. Our tear was deep, under the waterline. I knew when it had happened and so did she and the other stuff was just excuses, really. They were the tribulations you could work through when your things weren’t awash all around you. We just made our plans for abandoning ship.
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    Channing’s white farmhouse with its overgrown driveway was right after the main town of Fenton and was pressed too close to River Road. The front