Extraordinary

by David Gilmour

  Extraordinary

  David Gilmour

  Dedication

  For Stephanie Saunders

  Epigraph

  For as the dead exist only in ourselves, it is ourselves that we strike without ceasing when we persist in recalling the blows we have dealt them.

  —Marcel Proust

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  About the Author

  Also by David Gilmour

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  One

  What? You didn’t know I had a sister? Yes, Sally, a half-sister really. She was fifteen years older than me, my mother’s daughter from a turbulent first marriage. I saw her now and again when I was growing up, but probably the difference in our ages, a generation, and the fact that she never lived with us, made her seem more like a sympathetic aunt. She swatted me once, just an impatient cuff on the back of the head, when I was eight or nine—I’d knocked over a flower jar in her kitchen—and I thought, You can’t do that, you’re not my mother. And yet it wasn’t quite like a quarrel with my brother, not on the same level, so to speak, as with a peer. How you feel about someone when you’re very young, their stature in the world compared with yours, sometimes never changes. Which made certain moments between Sally and me confusing. Especially later on.

  By the time I was conscious enough to wonder why things were the way they were, she was already married. How such a lovely creature (long face, dark hair) ended up with a blockhead like Bruce Sanders, I’ll never understand. But I suppose that’s the nature of people, even family: you never really get to know anyone that well, even when they try to explain themselves.

  Anyway. For sixteen years, she endured sulks, punishing silences and God knows what kind of lonely moments, until one night she didn’t; and the next day, Bruce Sanders woke up in the guest room of his own house, the evening’s final words thudding between his small ears: “I’m leaving you.”

  It may have taken her a while to get there, but when she did, my goodness, she acted with the efficiency of a guillotine. The straightest line between two points. I was only a teenager, but it felt as though I had just had my first glimpse into affairs of the heart: when a woman’s finished with you, she’s really finished.

  With Chloe, her twelve-year-old daughter, in tow (her son stayed at home with Bruce), she took a studio apartment in San Miguel de Allende, a sun-baked town in the mountains north of Mexico City, and resumed her career as a painter—something for which she was gifted but the execution of which had been discouraged by a husband who thought the whole business “unrealistic.” A few weeks later, Sally attended an afternoon cocktail party at a house on the Callejón de los Muertos, tripped on the carpet, smacked her head against the fireplace and broke her neck. Returning to Toronto on a gurney, she spent six months in rehab and the rest of her life in a wheelchair.

  Nice deal, eh? But she was a hearty soul, and even with the wheelchair, the crutches, the falling down here and there, she raised her preteen daughter all but single-handedly. Her ex-husband, Bruce, in a state of ill-disguised pleasure at the hand life had dealt her, said, “Move back in with me,” the implication being, Now that you’re not in the game anymore, now that no one else will take you, you might as well come back.

  But no handouts, thank you. Sally and Chloe found a way to live and be happy. As for me, I wasn’t around much, to say the least. Sometimes I’d go up to her apartment in the northern part of the city and drink too much and get her to drink too much and then leave for another year or two. The truth is, I was so distracted with the failure of my own life that it felt as though I didn’t have the time to go out of my way, even momentarily, for anyone else. Although God knows what I was doing instead. Still, it makes me queasy with regret, even after all these years, to think about it. Because I loved her, I really did. But I was under the assumption that she would always be there, this not-quite-mother, not-quite-sister, that there was no need to tend to it, to look after it like a garden. And then, suddenly, it was too late by years. Simply too late.

  Looking back on things, I suppose it’s the reason I did what I did that night, to make up for all those times I glanced toward the top of the city and said fuck it and went about my own business instead.

  Do the dead forgive us? I wonder. I hope so. But I suspect not. I suspect they do nothing at all, like a spark flying from a burning campfire: they just go psssst and that’s it. How they felt about you in that last second is where you remain, at least in your thoughts, for eternity. Or rather, until you go psssst too.

  ***

  Years went by. Chloe graduated from high school with green hair and a dagger tattoo on her right arm, went to university in Montreal and then left town to do a graduate degree in the States. Several months later, Sally telephoned me out of the blue one night and asked me to come over to her apartment. To bring a bottle of Russian vodka.

  By the end of the evening, I’d agreed to help her kill herself.

  Over the next five weeks, I raided second-floor medicine cabinets at dinners and parties until I found what I was looking for in the attic of a sweet but doddery aunt. I don’t need to mention the name of the drug here. It was a sleeping pill yanked off the market only a few months after its appearance. Quite the scandal. You mixed it with a couple of stiff belts before bed and you didn’t get up in the morning. End of story. Yours anyway.

  So one June evening, I climbed the eighteen flights of stairs that ran up the back of her apartment building, hurried along the flowered carpeting in the hallway and let myself in. It was important that no one see me.

  Candles were burning. I could see she had made herself up a bit, had on a green silk dressing gown.

  “I had a nap this afternoon. I’m as fresh as a daisy,” she said.

  I said, “You look wonderful tonight.” I went into the kitchen, cracked open the ice tray, made a brace of burnt martinis, poured a round into two tulip glasses and sat down beside her.

  Taking the glass in her hand, partly crabbed, she said, “Cheers.”

  “Cheers indeed.”

  We talked about all sorts of things—the city’s mayor, a stolen Cézanne that had recently turned up in a Chicago attic, mentholated cigarettes, the Dave Brubeck Quartet, Marlon Brando, the arrest of Klaus Barbie, the final episode of M.A.S.H. I didn’t mention the pills, nor the purpose of the evening; neither did she. It was, for a while there, like a Saturday night between two old friends, a forty-nine-year-old woman and her thirty-four-year-old brother. Half-brother, I know, but you wouldn’t have guessed it that night.

  “Let’s put on some music,” she said, and I did, a collection of snazzy Mexican folk songs, which, I don’t know why, reminded me of an incident that had happened years before; how, when I was fourteen, in secret and against the wishes of my parents, she had smuggled me out of the house and driven me to see a girl at a small-town dance fifty miles away, returning hours later to fetch me. (The girl being, in the parlance of my mother, “a cunning little tramp.”) It may sound like a small thing for Sally to have done, this drive down a dark country highway, but I was so hungry for that young girl, for her small face and for the mysterious smell that lay under her jeans, that it was—or seemed to be at the moment—a matter of life and death. And Sally, as though she had maintained one foot still in childhood, understood the degree of it. The urgency of it. It took me years to put words to it, but I intuited something crucial that night: that the doing of something you don’t n
eed to do for someone whose approval you don’t need is an extraordinarily reliable test of character. As the years have gone by—I recently celebrated my fifty-eighth birthday—I think more and more that the course of one’s life and the loyalties which colour it are the flowers that have grown in such unnoticed gardens.

  “Did I ever tell you how kind that was?” I said suddenly.

  Sally appeared to think about that, her glass tilting at a dangerous angle on her lap. “You were in love,” she said simply.

  “I was. But all that driving.”

  She took a sip from her glass. “I like these martinis. How do you make them again?”

  I must have looked surprised as one is sometimes at the end of a Chekhov short story. You don’t know what it means or what it implies about life, but you know it’s the truth. Sally would never live to make a burnt martini, but she wanted to know how to do it anyway.

  In the seconds that followed, I felt a swoosh—a sudden, terrible regret. She seemed to read my thoughts, because she said, “You were fine.”

  I worried I was going to burst into tears and lure the focus of the evening onto myself.

  “I haven’t been much of a brother,” I said.

  She responded with an absolving laugh. “You’re making up for it now. You gave me this,” she said, and raised her martini glass in bent fingers. “But you’re hesitating. You haven’t changed your mind?”

  “No, don’t worry about that.”

  “Good. I don’t want to worry about that.”

  “You don’t have to,” I said.

  “Just think of it as returning the favour for driving you to the dance.”

  I didn’t know how to take this, whether to let it alone or not. Was it a joke? Of course it was, this retreat into flippancy. And yet not a joke you could feel good laughing about. I didn’t know quite where to rest my eyes. But I thought, Don’t perform. Just look at her. But I have never been good with silence, it makes my heart crash, and in that moment it seemed as though she too could hear it thumping and again came to my rescue. “Whatever happened to that girl?”

  “She met someone else.”

  “Ah,” Sally said, not surprised but not superior to it either. A tone of voice that summed you up like a sudden, flattering glance in a store window.

  “Apparently, he was a very good dancer,” I said.

  “They always are, those summer boys.”

  “Anyway, I got over it.”

  “You did indeed.”

  I waited for the small blossom of pleasure to recede and then, seeking a fresher, more subtle kind, added, “Between you and me, Sally, I’ve always talked a bigger game than I played.”

  We fell silent for a moment.

  “Were you?” I said.

  “Was I what?”

  “A good dancer.”

  “Oh, I loved dancing. I’d dance with anyone.” She glanced out the window and I could see her as a teenager, at a dance, in a tangle of young bodies and coloured lights and those neon things they used to stamp your hand with, and for a second I wondered whatever had happened to all those bodies, those young bodies; and again it struck me that life was such a harsh business that no one, not even the beautiful like Sally, was ever safe.

  I said, “Would you like another martini?”

  “Oh boy, would I ever.”

  I went into the kitchen, the pills still in my pocket. I had put a ball of cotton batten in the plastic vial so they wouldn’t rattle when I moved. It was a clean white kitchen with a lot of room. It was the kitchen of a woman who had raised children, who liked order in her life.

  “Don’t forget the Scotch,” she said.

  “It’s already in.”

  When I came back, one of the candles was sputtering. I blew it out, found a pair of scissors in the desk drawer, cut the wick down and relit it. Settled back in my chair, I noticed that Sally’s eyes, pools of ink in a slightly swollen face, were observing me with what, I’m not sure. It was the regard of someone who is seeing something behind their eyes. I couldn’t tell, though, if it was good or bad.

  I said, “Can I ask you something, Sally?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was wondering about your marriage the other day.”

  She nodded her head as if to a question she had been asked many times before. “What part of the marriage?” she asked neutrally.

  “The why part.”

  Again she nodded, this time with a hint of amused sleepiness. “I had my eye on someone else. To say the least. But I couldn’t get him.Or keep him, anyway.”

  “Tell me.”

  I could see her recede into herself and then re-emerge. She had found something in there that pleased her. “There was a boy who went to my high school, a narrow-hipped cowboy. No, he really was a cowboy—wore a narrow-brimmed hat, drove a pickup truck, listened to country and western music.”

  “A cowboy hat?”

  “Even to school. He knew the etiquette, when you could wear a hat and when you had to take it off. Like when you go in a building, you take your hat off, but when you sit at a counter in a diner, you can leave it on. Some smart aleck stopped him in the corridor once, a hockey player, and said in a big attention-getting voice, ‘Hey Tex, can I try on your hat?’ He said, ‘Sure, if I can try on your underwear.’”

  “Wow.”

  “He made furniture. Kitchen tables, chairs, headboards. I remember once he was in such a rush to finish and get over to my place that he had wood chips in his eyebrows. God, he smelt good. You know what the French say about smell?”

  “I do, yes.”

  “Even in the truck I could smell him. He had a narrow chest and he always wore a cowboy shirt. It would have looked corny on anyone else, those imitation pearl buttons, but on him, it was like he was born into it. Like a skin. He called me Miss. He’d say, ‘What time do you want me to come and get you, Miss?’ or, ‘We should be getting you home pretty soon, Miss.’ His name was Terry Blanchard.”

  “Did you ever kiss him?”

  “Every chance I got.”

  “And?”

  “Ever kissed a cowboy?”

  I said, “So what happened to him?”

  “He had some kind of trouble in town. One night he turned up outside my window. He knocked on the glass and said he was going away for a while but he’d write. Would I write him back? And then he kissed me. There was a big country moon that night, the kind you can reach out with your finger and almost touch. I could see it over his shoulder. I said, ‘Come into my bed.’ It just came out, like hearing yourself talk in a dream.

  “He slipped over the window ledge backwards and fell onto the bed, his boots in the air. You could see them against the skyline.

  “I heard my grandmother walk by my room. She said, ‘Everything okay in there, Sally?’ She must have seen his truck in the driveway. And I said, ‘Grandma, just fine. I’m going to sleep now.’ Those country people, they’re a lot more sophisticated than you’d think. I never asked her and she never asked me, but every so often I’d catch her staring at me. Everybody gets up to something private, it’s just that every generation thinks they’re the first ones to do it right.”

  “So did he write?”

  “Never. Not a word. I used to go out to the mailbox—it was at the end of a long driveway—and throw stones at the power lines and the crows, even at the mailbox itself, while I was waiting. An old guy and his son delivered the mail in a car. I’d see the car at the far end of the highway where it broke through the cornfields. Walter, the son, would be in the passenger seat, his tanned arm hanging out the window with the mail in his hand. They’d slow down and I’d grab the mail. I think Walter had a tiny thing for me, but he had a kind of funny-shaped head, like a paint can. I suppose I was cruelly uninterested in him. I’d just snatch the mail, and without even saying goodbye I’d start to go t
hrough it—the local newspaper, ads for baking sales, bills from the local hardware store, even Christmas cards that had gotten lost for six months. I’d start off full of hope, there’d be all this stuff, but then there’d be five letters left, then three, then none, and I’d go through the pile again as though maybe I’d missed it.

  “But never a letter. Once, I even waved down the car as it pulled away. ‘Are you sure there’s nothing for me?’ The father said, ‘Well, let’s take another look.’ And he did. ‘Maybe tomorrow, Sally,’ he said.

  “It was the longest walk back to the house—a hot day, cicadas roaring, those big pointless fields and nothing to look forward to. I let the screen door bang behind me. My grandmother said, ‘Sally, don’t let that door bang, it scares the willies out of me.’

  “I went back into my bedroom and lay down on the bed, the wallpaper with little wooden rocking chairs on it, the yellow fields outside. I thought, I’ve got to do something, read a book or write in my diary or play some records, and I kept thinking my way through it: open up the record box, take out a forty-five, put it on the record player and start it up. But it just seemed like too much work. Everything did. Everything seemed exhausting. I just lay there till supper.

  “I never found out what the trouble was. He just vanished.”

  “And your mother? Where was your mother, our mother, while all this was going on?”

  “She was around. At her convenience, of course. Sometimes she’d come by in a grey car with a big grille with flies stuck in it and take me to the Tastee Freeze in town for a hamburger—it was a ritual we had—and then she’d take me for a long drive on backcountry roads, let me light her cigarettes for her. She was a great talker. A good listener too, to be fair—as long as you said what she wanted to hear.

  “On one of these drives, just as it was getting dark and we were heading back to my grandfather’s, I told her about Terry Blanchard, about that night he tumbled into my bed. It wasn’t a confession, it was just that talking about it was as close as I could get to doing it again.”