Northern Exposure

by Michael Kilian

  As best as she could determine, Showers had slept not at all, and had eaten little. He had read a great deal, a hardcover entitled The Invasion of Canada, 1812–1813, by someone named Pierre Berton. He had drunk even more, two cocktails, three glasses of wine, and a succession of small brandies, yet seemed quite himself, and perfectly lucid.

  She stretched her own long legs, and her arms, catching herself admiring them for their tan. It seemed years ago when she lived in a world in which the progress of one’s tan was a matter of great consequence, yet she had lived there only a few days ago.

  What remained of that world? Had her parents been summoned back from their summer’s stay on Martha’s Vineyard? Was the lovely name of Alixe Potter Reston now spoken only in connection with murder and adultery? Had she so scandalized Washington society as to deprive herself of any decent future there? Despite having been born into a circumstance which had largely spared her any injustice, Alixe had a strong sense of fairness. As she and Showers had nothing at all to do with Lila Merridew’s horrible death, she was absolutely certain they would pay no penalty for it, certain that the police and everyone else would be persuaded by their explanation and made to go away, with the ease with which her father made all problems go away.

  As for adultery, she was a happy woman and a poor Christian. The marriage between Dennis and Marie-Claire was a horrible, empty, brittle one, and Alixe felt guilty of nothing. She knew that marriage was more than love, but she knew it was essentially love, impossible without the presence of love, and that there was no love between Showers and his wife and may not ever have been any. Alixe now knew she loved Dennis Tobias Showers, John Cheever person that he was. In the intensity of these past few days, their relationship had progressed beyond infatuation and sexual passion, beyond her irritation with discovered personality defects and character flaws. She had come now to the inner man, and found a strength and intellect and compassion there that she genuinely appreciated, that she dearly appreciated. She began now to wonder what he had come to discover of her. She hoped he would share that with her, for, though only four and a half years short of thirty, she had not yet discovered herself.

  She touched his hand. He looked up and smiled, and closed his book.

  “I’m so tired of this flight,” she said, “and yet I could stay up here forever.”

  “It’s one of the joys of flying. You have the universe to yourself.”

  “You are one of the joys of flying,” she said. “You are one of the joys of everything.”

  He smiled again and squeezed her hand. She smiled back at him. Still holding her hand, he leaned back, took a deep breath, and closed his eyes.

  “What an absurd mess,” he said. “I’ve pulled my whole world down around me.”

  “We’ll get through this, Tobias Showers. What is this book you’re reading? Who invaded Canada?”

  The question worked. He sat up straight, distracted from his contemplation of troubles. “We did,” he said. “The deepest and longest-held desire of the United States of America has been to possess Canada. It’s also been the most elusive. We took half of Mexico, half the Caribbean, half the Pacific, with ease, but never Canada. It’s our least manifest destiny.”

  “Why?”

  “I suppose because the Canadians so strongly resisted the idea. We invaded them in the Revolutionary War. We occupied Montreal for a year. The Montreal Gazette of today, you know, was founded by Benjamin Franklin during that occupation. But it never took. We started the War of 1812 in hopes of snatching Canada from the British while they were busy fending off Napoleon, but it was a failure. We thrashed the British at New Orleans, but we lost the war. If we hadn’t stopped them at New Orleans, we would have lost the continent. There wouldn’t have been a United States of America as we know it today. Or a Canada. North America would have been like Europe—an assemblage of small nations. One of them would probably have been the Confederate States of America.”

  “The British burned Washington.”

  “It was an instructive lesson.”

  “We never tried for Canada again?”

  “No, not really. Though we’ve never stopped wanting it. We had a chance in 1838. There was a revolution in Canada then. Two revolutions, actually. One in French Canada, led by Louis-Joseph Papineau, and another in English Canada, led by the mayor of Toronto. They were very much like our own revolution against the British. Canadian Sons of Liberty, and all of that. Both of them failed miserably.”

  “You know so much history, so much Canadian history.”

  “If you want to hear about the boyhood of Patrice Lamumba, I can tell you. If you want to know about the point in time when Belgium and France did not truly exist and Luxembourg was one of the most powerful kingdoms in Europe, I can tell you. But it’s just part of the job. An auto mechanic can tell you all about the comparative longevity of automobile engines. I can’t.”

  “My uncle was an ambassador. To Norway. He didn’t know much Scandinavian history.”

  “Your uncle didn’t lack a college degree. He was a Harvard man, as I recall. He didn’t enter the foreign service as a clerk in a Greenwich Village bookstore. He was ‘worthy.’”

  She watched him sip, then gulp, what remained of his brandy. He had opened a door to himself, a roomful of snakes, judging by his strained expression, snakes she’d love to walk among and kick to death. But not now. This was the worst possible time for that. “Did we ever try again, for Canada?” she said.

  “Not really. We waited for it to come to us. It almost did after the Civil War. Canadians settled their west when we did ours, but their settlements had little communication with their east. The closest relationship was with our western settlements. British Columbia was on the verge of voluntarily joining the United States when the Canadian government bribed it back by building the Canadian Pacific Railroad.”

  “And that was it?”

  “No. After World War One, and more particularly after World War Two, we simply started to buy Canada. Did you know that, until Trudeau adopted his new energy policy in 1981, United States firms owned some three-quarters of Canada’s energy industry? Can you imagine such an arrangement in our country? We’d go to war first.”

  “Go to war,” she repeated.

  “I was really looking forward to this assignment. I thought there was a chance for me to actually accomplish something. To get beyond this interminable passing around of cables and communiqués.”

  He stopped a passing stewardess and pointed to his empty glass.

  “We’ve been worse than arrogant with Canada, you know,” he said. “We’ve been indifferent. We worry about their new energy program and the confiscation of our oil companies’ property, but we ignore everything else, the problems created by our acid rain, the fishing disputes, the boundary disputes, the reversal of the Garrison River, all this we’ve treated as though it were an irrelevancy. Third-rate generalissimos in Central America get more attention from State than the Canadian Department of External Affairs does. If Quebec were to break away from the Canadian Federation, I’m sure it would come as a complete surprise to us.”

  She pushed the seat-adjustment button and leaned back.

  “Half our difficulties are attributable to a lack of communication,” he continued. “All the situation wants is for all these matters to be related, to be brought together, and have both sides look at everything on the board. That’s the major function of an embassy. Yet we fill ours with specialists who talk only to other specialists and nitwits who do nothing but chase each other’s wives and complain about housing prices.”

  Alixe closed her eyes, listening as he paused to thank the stewardess for his next brandy.

  “I really thought that for once in my career I could make a difference,” he said.

  “You’ll go on with your career. We’ll get all this behind us.”

  The faces of Marie-Claire and her own parents drifted through Alixe’s mind. She remembered her mother’s horrible rage the first and o
nly time she had been caught smoking marijuana in the house.

  “I was beginning to get the White House interested in the military consideration, if nothing else,” Showers continued. “It’s an area where we have serious worries and they have serious guilt, where the relationship is even more symbiotic than it is with trade. Neither country can exist without the other, militarily, but Canada has been woefully deficient. Its army’s troop strength is officially listed at seventy-two thousand, but Harry York has let it deteriorate to considerably less than that. Their navy has only six ships that aren’t obsolete, and two of those lack crews. They bought a squadron of F-Eighteens two years ago, but that’s all. They’re helpless to prevent any Soviet adventuring in the northwest territories. They depend entirely on the American nuclear shield. My hope was to encourage them to make a significant increase in their defense contribution. It would please the White House immeasurably, and make the White House more amenable to their takeover of energy properties. It might also make the White House better disposed to taking action against acid rain.”

  “Buy more guns and bombs, and save the lakes and trees.”

  “Simply put, yes.”

  “I’m not sure how well I’m going to understand the world of diplomacy,” she said.

  She closed her eyes in earnest this time, letting him return to his book. He hadn’t responded to her last remark and she wasn’t sure that she was ready for him to just yet. She wasn’t fully certain what she wanted that response to be. Perhaps what their relationship needed at this juncture was at least one day and night in which they didn’t make love.

  She wondered how they appeared to the stewardesses and other passengers; a good-looking couple, certainly, and very well dressed. Alixe was not one to indulge in false modesty on that. But who would they appear to be? Man and wife? Father and daughter? Executive and secretary? Lover and mistress? Or one of those chichi jet-set couples with no well-defined relationship?

  No, not the last. As always, Dennis was wearing a tie.

  The aircraft decelerated, entering its long descent glide, dropping several hundred feet every mile it drew nearer to their still distant destination. Alixe almost tried to will it back up to cruising altitude again, to keep them high, and safe. She had embarked on this mad chase, this northern anabasis, possessed of an extraordinary, unprecedented feeling of excitement and adventure. Now there was mostly fear, and it was beginning to gnaw at her like her fatigue, a dull, lingering pain.

  “Gone … all is gone …”

  That song. Her own musical experience and taste ran to moderate forms of folk, rock, blues, jazz, and classical works. Every time they were in an automobile or a hotel room together, Showers had turned the radio to elevator music, much of it, she supposed, from the 1950s and early 1960s, and most of it rather alien to her. There was one song that had come to haunt her, that had been playing on the radio as they drove away from the California coast.

  “Gone … all is gone … gone is the madness that filled my heart … gone … gone with the wind …”

  The stewardess announced their imminent arrival in French and English.

  There was no message for them at Air Canada’s information counter in the terminal. They waited for nearly twenty minutes, then Showers, nervous and irritable, gathered up their luggage and started for the cab stand.

  “Where are we going to go?” she asked.

  “To the Ritz-Carlton. That’s what we told him.”

  “Do you suppose that his not being here means something has gone wrong?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “You needn’t be snappish with me.”

  He put his hand to the small of her back as they went out the glass doors to the cab line.

  “I’m not being snappish with you, Alixe. I’m being snappish with Montreal, Canada.”

  The cab driver was French, youngish, with a bad cigarette habit. Alixe spent much of the ride in from the airport at Dorval trying to determine if the man spoke English. Showers kept glancing out the rear window. The burning men in the van in Vancouver had had their effect upon him as well.

  They came south toward the St. Lawrence on the Highway 15 expressway, exiting at Sherbrooke Street, Montreal’s grandest boulevard, the lush green summit of Mont Royal rising from the rooftops ahead and to the left.

  “We’re being followed,” Showers said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. It’s a gray car. A Ford, I think. He was behind us on Highway Five Twenty. He followed us onto Fifteen, and now he’s turned off with us onto Sherbrooke.”

  “Can you see who it is?”

  “No. He keeps two or three cars behind us. Very professional.”

  “What shall we do?”

  Showers studied their driver, then returned to his vigil on the back window. They had stopped at a traffic light. When they moved again, Showers abruptly turned his attention forward again.

  “He turned off,” he said. “I’m becoming paranoid. It’s perfectly logical. That’s a customary route in from the airport. The two expressways, then Sherbrooke. God, next I really will start carrying a gun.”

  “Is something wrong, monsieur?” the driver asked.

  “What? No. Proceed to the hotel.”

  He touched Alixe’s hand again, running his fingers over the backs of hers. “It’ll be better once we get into our hotel room,” he said. “I asked for one with a view of Mont Royal.”

  The brightly uniformed doorman hurried from his station to the curb, snapping open the door at Alixe’s side, handing her out, opening the front door, and removing the luggage, seemingly all in one motion. Showers paid the driver, tipping handsomely in hopes that friendliness might assure silence, acutely aware of how little cash he had remaining. The doorman had their bags in hand and was nearly to the revolving door when a gray sedan, the gray sedan, slammed to a halt just behind Showers and a voice shouted, “Stop!”

  Showers turned, expecting some fiend in a trenchcoat with a gun, and looked instead at the dark, smiling face of Stansfield Joyce.

  “What happened?” said Alixe, after they had tipped the doorman an overly generous amount, mumbled a ridiculous excuse, and sped away in the gray Ford. “There was no message at the airport.”

  “I decided it was a dumb idea,” Joyce said. “I followed you in instead.”

  “Dumb or not,” said Showers, “it was my idea. Please follow my instructions.”

  “Best I can, my man. Where do you want to go now?”

  He had turned south onto Peel Street and was heading into the downtown area.

  “I had thought we’d check into our lodgings and then go to the address in the notebook,” Showers said. “But you seem to have precluded both.”

  “You don’t want to go to that notebook address,” Joyce said. “Least wise, you don’t need to.” He handed Showers a piece of notepaper folded in half. “I checked it out this morning. It’s down near Old Montreal and the docks. Just your run-of-the-mill cockroach heaven. There were dirty dishes in the sink. Dirty glasses in the living room. Empty wine bottles. Dust like a rug. They weren’t subscribers to Good Housekeeping.”

  Showers opened the note, lowering it so that Alixe could see.

  Ric,

  Je suis pressée. Il faut me dépêcher. Dans Ottawa, non, Hull. 114 Rue Melisande. No. 735. Ne quitte pas. Bientôt. Ton amour.

  Felicity

  “Where did you find it?” Showers asked.

  “In the bedroom closet. On a shelf. Just sitting there like it was in a mailbox.”

  “Who is Ric?” Alixe asked.

  “That is how Guy Porique liked to be called.”

  “Where is he? Why was that note just left sitting there?”

  “He hadn’t come for it yet. Perhaps she’d only just left it.”

  “My man. The dust in that place was a rug. On the glasses.”

  “Where shall we go, Tobias?”

  Showers looked quickly about the tall buildings and downtown traffic. �
��Where are you taking us?” he asked Joyce.

  “Down to Old Montreal and the docks. To cockroach heaven.”

  “We don’t need to do that now.”

  “We should go to Ottawa,” Alixe said.

  “To Hull.”

  “To Hull, but quickly. Now.”

  “You want to get this over with, Alixe. So do I. We can be there tonight. But let’s not go yet. The money you gave me is almost gone, Alixe, but we might as well say good-bye to it in some happy fashion. We’ll do a little better than McDonald’s. We’ll go to Chez la Mere Michel. Some people think it a little decadent, but I think it’s the most charming restaurant in Montreal.”

  “I could do with something charming, Toby. A brief moment of happiness.”

  “D’accord.”

  “All right, my man. Direct me to all this happiness.”

  “Take a right. Go on a few blocks and then go right on Guy Street. It will be on your right; an old stone house.”

  “Guy Street,” repeated Alixe.

  Ensconced on a soft settee by the restaurant’s front bay windows, they all had the lobster soufflé, and an extremely expensive white wine. The bill came to so much Showers had to forget his cash and, recklessly, profer one of his credit cards. The waiter paid no special attention to it, before or after dealing with the charges.

  “Wait here,” Showers said. “I’m going to make a telephone call.”

  He decided to risk using his State Department telephone credit card. He went to the downstairs bar, bought a brandy, and went to the phone. The operator took the credit number quickly, just as the telephone at the other end of the line began to ring.

  Judy Sadinauskas had waited more than half an hour to get the seat at the bar nearest the pay telephone. Then she had spent another forty-five minutes fending off would be swains and trying to keep people from using the phone, some of the latter quickly transforming themselves into swains. They bought her free drinks. She was on her third when the awaited ringing finally came. She pushed past the bartender, smiling, and hurriedly took the telephone from the hook.