The Sweetness in the Lime

by Stephen Kimber

  I never understood what Eleanor’s father did for a living, but it seemed, at least according to what Eleanor eventually told me, he did most of it on his yacht. I was never invited on his yacht. I never even saw it. I did see their house, which resembled—and may have even been modelled on—a castle.

  After the car accident in which Donnie died, Eleanor seemed to gravitate toward me. She asked me to sit with her at his funeral, to go with her to his interment, to “be there for me” when we all went to his parents’ home after the service for tea and tears. In the days that followed, we met each day after school, walked together down to the coffee shop below the Lord Nelson Hotel, drank coffee and ate rice pudding (“Donnie’s favourite”) while she talked about Donnie, and I listened.

  I only realized years later, and in a very different context, there was nothing unusual—or necessarily “about me”—in how Eleanor reacted. In 1998, I served as the main editor on the Tribune newsroom team that covered the crash of Swissair Flight 111, a New York-to-Geneva passenger jet that flew into the sea near Halifax, killing all 239 people aboard. Part of our ongoing coverage included stories about unexpected post-crash relationships between family members of the victims, mostly high-powered New Yorkers, and locals who lived near the crash site, many salt-of-the-sea fishermen.

  Peggy Aylward interviewed a psychologist who explained what he suggested was a common phenomenon. “When someone loses a loved one in such sudden, unexpected circumstances, they naturally gravitate to people who might have been closest to their loved one, physically, emotionally, at the time of their death. It’s just their way of closing the distance, of connecting with the one who is gone.”

  Of course, my story—my made-up story—that I was supposed to be in the car with Donnie played neatly into that psychological narrative. I kept the clipping because it seemed to me as good an explanation as I would find to explain why Eleanor Pattison fell in love with me.

  By the end of the summer after Donnie died, Eleanor was referring to me as her boyfriend. At first, I had trouble wrapping my head around the concept Eleanor could ever be “my girlfriend.” But the more time we spent together—and we spent more and more time together alone—my mind and body seemed to relax into the idea. I almost believed it.

  Not that we had sex. Not then. I didn’t drive. Neither did Eleanor. She never suggested we go to her parents’ house, and I certainly never considered bringing her to mine. We spent a lot of days walking in Point Pleasant Park. Occasionally, we’d wander away from the well-travelled pathways and into the deep woods, find a quiet space, sit down, talk, lay down, cuddle, make out…never quite going all the way. Eleanor didn’t stop me. I stopped myself. Was I saving myself for something I didn’t understand? Was I afraid of defiling Donnie’s memory? Or just afraid I’d screw up screwing.

  Summer turned into fall, and fall became unseasonably cold for making out in the woods. Then it was winter and there never seemed a right sometime or right somewhere to take the next step. We held hands in the school’s hallways as we moved from class to class. “No touching, Mr. Cooper, no touching,” the hall monitor inevitably admonished, an admonition I just as inevitably ignored as soon as we passed out of her sightline.

  I walked Eleanor home every day after school, my arm wrapped protectively around her shoulders, her body tucking comfortably into mine. We always parted a block from her house—for reasons unspoken but understood—after a few too-brief minutes of deep kisses and roaming hands beneath heavy coats.

  In May of our last year of high school, Eleanor and I attended a memorial service to mark the one-year anniversary of Donnie’s death, and then I walked her home. Our deep kisses that evening were deeper, our roaming hands more urgent. “I want to,” she said as we reluctantly, finally separated our bodies. “Soon.”

  “Soon” came a month later, sometime after three o’clock in the morning during an all-night after-grad party in a cottage near Chester. The cottage was really a mansion, with both a pool and ocean frontage and a sailboat at the dock. It was owned by friends of Eleanor’s parents whose son was one of our fellow grads. His parents hired a bus to bring a dozen of us to the party and back to the city the next morning. This was in the days before alcohol-free grads. His parents just wanted to give us a space where we could all get blotto together one last time, parent-free, but without any of us ending up like Donnie. Donnie’s undying legacy to the rest of us was understood. Do not die drunk in a car accident.

  I was drunk and stoned. So was Eleanor. I had to pee. So did Eleanor. We ended up, accidentally or not, far from the rest of the party, alone together in the parents’ upstairs master bathroom. The bathroom was bigger than my bedroom at home, with a huge walk-in tub in one corner and an incongruously, oversized wicker chair beside the tub. We started in the chair, moved up against a wall and ended, gloriously naked, shudderingly sated, in the empty tub.

  I’d like to believe I recall every delicious moment, every delectable touch and tingle that passed between us that night, but I don’t. Over the years, I know I’ve honed and layered, massaged and manipulated my memories to the point where I no longer know which among them is truth and which is simply part of my made-up Myth of Eleanor and Eli. At some level, it doesn’t really matter. In the end, it was that myth—and my desperate need to see my myth as reality—that determined the rest of my life.

  Until the new Myth of Me and Mariela replaced it.

  The day after grad, Eleanor departed for eight weeks as a counsellor at an expensive summer camp in Quebec, which her father and Eleanor had both attended as campers, and which he now underwrote as his do-good gift to the sons and daughters of his done-well friends. I had a summer job bagging groceries at a Dominion store. Eleanor and I agreed to write each other every day. And we did. In the beginning the letters consisted largely of day-to-day tidbits from our mundane existences—“One of my campers broke out in a poison ivy rash and the whole camp is on lockdown.” “There was a big staff meeting today because the cash didn’t balance at the end of the day yesterday, and the manager is threatening to fire whoever is to blame.”—coupled with pledges of eternal love and modestly racy descriptions of what we would do to, and with, each other when were finally together again. In early August, however, Eleanor’s letters suddenly took on a more ominous if elliptical colouration. “We have to talk…there’s something important we need to discuss…I need to see you now.”

  I feared what I thought would be the worst—that she had fallen in love with a fellow counsellor—which made the eventual reality seem less worse. To me at least. At first.

  Eleanor flew home the week before camp officially ended and called immediately to arrange to meet that night. We kissed when we met, but she quickly cut off my embrace. “Let’s walk,” she said. Our small talk was small as she led me off the park’s main trail and into a clearing in the woods where we’d spent many happy hours the previous summer. She sat on a fallen tree trunk. I sat beside her, expectant, dreading.

  “I’m pregnant,” she said simply, unemotionally.

  It is strange to comprehend—even for me today—but, at the time, the possibility Eleanor might have become pregnant as a result of our one sexual encounter had never occurred to me. Perhaps I was so self-absorbed in my own sweet-shocky surprise she might actually love me in this unexpected way I never bothered to ask who was responsible for what. I know we had not used a condom. Perhaps I had assumed Eleanor was “taking care” of that. I knew other girls in our class were on the pill—or at least that’s what some of the boys claimed—but I never asked Eleanor if she was too. Or maybe I just didn’t want to break the spell by asking the question that might have cooled our ardour and ended my first time before it could become such.

  “Shit,” I said finally. “Really?”

  “Really.” She’d gone to see a doctor in Quebec the week before. He told Eleanor about a doctor he knew in Montreal—I’m guessing now he probably mea
nt Henry Morgentaler—who could perform a safe abortion in his clinic.

  “But I could never do that,” she said. I didn’t ask why.

  “So?”

  “I don’t know. I just know I have to tell my parents tomorrow tonight after my dad gets home.”

  “I could come with you,” I said. “We could tell them together.”

  “No,” she replied firmly. “That would only make everything worse.” I didn’t ask her why that would be. I figured that out later.

  We agreed she would call me after she talked to her parents. I sat by the phone—the same one I would sit in front of many years later waiting for Mariela to call—but Eleanor never called. I tried to call her the next day from the pay phone near work. But the voice on the other end of the line—her mother, I’m sure, her voice stiff and icy—simply said “Eleanor isn’t available.” I was afraid to leave a message. That night I stood for an hour at the corner where we usually parted, hoping she would telepathically receive the message I was sending and come find me. She didn’t. The next night I ventured closer to the entrance to her house, but there was no light outside the door, no lights from inside I could see at all. The night after that, I screwed up my courage and knocked on the door. No response at all.

  Finally, on the fifth night, I saw a light on in an upstairs room. I knocked. And waited. Knocked again. And again. Finally, her father—dishevelled from sleep or drink, I couldn’t tell—opened the door, stared me down.

  “Uh…hello, Mr. Pattison. My name is—“

  “I know who you are.” Flat, hard, with more than a hint of danger.

  “I was just…I mean, I was hoping to talk to Eleanor—”

  “Not here.”

  “Oh.” I hadn’t considered that possibility. “Well, then, can I—”

  “She’s not here. I already told you that. And she won’t be here. Not for you. Not now. Not ever.”

  I hadn’t realized how tall he was. Maybe because he was standing in the doorway while I was on the step below, or maybe it was because he’d puffed himself up, father-protector-like, to appear even more intimidating than I already understood him to be.

  “But—”

  “You should leave if you know what’s good for you, young man. You’re not welcome at this house. Don’t come back—and don’t ever try to contact my daughter again.”

  “But—”

  “My daughter has gone away. And she won’t be back. She doesn’t want to see you again. If you persist in trying to contact her, there will be consequences, serious consequences. Do you understand?”

  “But—”

  “Do you understand?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “You will leave now, young man, or I will call the police.”

  With that, he stepped back into the house and closed the door so hard I could feel the air from its slamming slap me on my face.

  It was only after my encounter with her father that I realized how isolated from the rest of our world Eleanor and I had become. I had no one to call, no one to ask, What now? In the months after Donnie’s death, Eleanor had quit the cheerleading squad (“What’s there to cheer about now?”), gave up hanging out with her former girlfriends, and spent all her time with me, talking about Donnie, about life with Donnie, about whether there was life after Donnie. As for me, I had always been a loner. If not for my friendship with Donnie, which had briefly brought me out of my own one-man-shell of a happy place, I’d never have met Eleanor.

  But the result was I had no one I could ask where she’d gone. I called a few of her cheerleader friends, but they appeared to blame me for the fact Eleanor had grown distant from them. They claimed not to know where she’d gone. They might even have been telling the truth. I would have talked to Sarah, but my sister—who’d been big-sister fascinated with little brother’s love life that summer—had already left for Calgary to prepare for her first year of law school.

  So, in September of 1972, I went off to my first year of university without Eleanor, without Donnie, without anyone I cared about from high school. Every morning, I boarded the bus near my parents’ house in the north end for the crosstown ride to the Dalhousie University campus in the south end, attended my classes, and then returned home at the end of the day to spend my nights alone in my room. I did not join any campus group, did not attend any campus event until the very last day of first term. After I finished my last exam, I noticed a sign advertising an end-of-exam blowout dance. Everyone welcome. Why the fuck not?

  I went alone. I drank alone. I drank a lot. At some point, I decided the time had finally come to confront Mr. Pattison. Why the fuck not? So I walked from the campus toward the Pattison castle, rehearsing the speech I’d been practising since that night in August when he’d told me to get lost. I’d show him. Except….

  Except when I got to the house, there was a sign on the lawn. SOLD. I knocked on the door. Loudly. Repeatedly. No one answered. I walked around the house. There were no curtains on any of the windows. I managed to hoist myself up a wall, look in one of the windows. No furniture. I walked around the house one more time, pissed on the front door, left.

  And that was that. There should have been more to it, a greater sense of occasion, but that was that. And that was all.

  When Sarah returned home at Christmas, I broached the subject with her, explaining that Eleanor and her family had moved away after high school without leaving a forwarding address so I didn’t know where or how to find her, not explaining Eleanor had been pregnant or that her father told me never to darken their door again. Sarah’s reasonable big-sister advice was to forget about Eleanor.

  “Everybody has a first love they think is the one,” she explained sagely, “but she never is. You’ll meet all sorts of other more interesting girls at college.”

  I didn’t.

  “You’ll forget all about her.”

  I didn’t.

  I know now there were resources—even then, even before the internet—I might have marshalled to track down Eleanor. I could have started at the library, looked up her house address in the City Directory, found her parents’ first names (George and Alice, as I later learned), discovered where her father worked, contacted his business, learned where they’d moved, tracked him down through Directory Assistance, called him, insisted he tell me where Eleanor was, boarded a bus or plane or train or boat or whatever I had to in order to go to where she was, tell her I loved her, and wanted to marry her so we could love happily ever after.

  But I was eighteen and hopelessly naive. I didn’t have the journalistic smarts then to know how to begin such a search. By the time I’d learned how to do it, the trail had long since grown cold. Whatever her father had done for a living, I learned when I did look him up, he’d listed no employer, no office I could contact. Perhaps that’s why he conducted all his business on his yacht. But he wasn’t listed as having been a member of any yacht club in the city. There was no record of his existence in the library’s extensive newspaper clippings files, or in the Tribune’s less extensive local biographical indexes either.

  Eventually, I gave up. Almost. Occasionally, after the web cleaved open the world’s secrets, I would amuse myself to sleep on nights after my shift ended and I’d had too much to drink. I plugged search terms into the newest of the ever-evolving numbers of ever more comprehensive search engines. I did find an obituary for a George Pattison, investor and philanthropist, who died in Detroit in 1998 and had lived “briefly” in Halifax with his former wife, Alice, but there were no references to a child by that marriage. Perhaps Eleanor was dead, but that didn’t explain why she wouldn’t be listed. Perhaps the second wife, the current widow, had written Eleanor out of obituary existence for some reason? For what reason? And why just her and not her mother? Perhaps I had the wrong George Pattison. I fell asleep.

  I’m sure, in retrospect, I could have done more—or better.
I could have hired a private detective who specialized in missing persons searches, for example. I did consider that at one point, but ultimately rejected it. I’m not sure why, but I think, when I am being honest with myself, which is not often, I didn’t want to find her. I came to prefer the Delusion of Eleanor to the possibility, the likelihood, I would find her and she would reject me.

  I couldn’t help but acknowledge (though I never really did, not really) that, in all the years since I’d last seen her—thirty-six—Eleanor had never once tried to contact me. That must have meant something.

  Still, I remained faithful to Eleanor. Or to my fantasy of her. When I did finally, half-heartedly, begin to date again—I was already working at the Tribune by then—I compared every fellow journalist, every secretary, every Friday-night bar pickup, to Eleanor. I compared sex with them to graduation night with Eleanor in the wicker chair, up against the wall, in the tub—and found everyone and everything else wanting. Over time, I became less and less interested in looking. Sex became an occasional meaningless release with someone like Liv, someone I understood was also looking for her own meaningless release. And then, of course, there was the occasional unfortunate accident with someone like Wendy, who was too drunk to know I was not what she wanted.

  “How’s Eleanor,” I asked again into the phone. “Your mother, I mean.”

  Kimberly paused, seemed to consider. “I think we should meet. I can tell you everything, and you can tell me everything.”

  6

  Mariela never did call me, but she did send another email from David’s account.

  I am sorry I didn’t telephone you when I told your friend I would. Things here are very unsettled, partly because of the hurricane, but also because of some other reasons. I will explain all that when I see you again, if you are still willing to see me.