To be honest, I’d rather imagined that he might be curious about what I’d been up to during all these, what, twenty, twenty-five years. Apparently not. I mentioned a trip we took once, Devane and I, in his pickup truck to the south end of the island to buy a new refrigerator. No, he didn’t recall that. I reminded him of that time we carried that poor boy from Kansas City to his room (sunstroke). A blank there too.
“Do you still keep a gun in the safe?”
Someone scored a goal and from the little green screen came the rolling, slightly sickening chant of an English soccer match.
“Can we turn off the TV for a second?” I said.
“Of course.”
I gave it a final shot. I reminded him of Justin Straw-bridge and told him the story of the Duane Hickok killing. It appeared to have been the only thing I’d said so far that caught his attention.
“But he’s good now?” Devane said.
“Well, he’s out of jail if that’s what you mean.”
“Well, good. That’s what I’m interested in hearing.” I found this remark puzzling. Was I being too self-congratulatory? Taking too much relish in the misfortune of an old friend?
“I’d like to spend a night or two here, Devane. Can I have my old room, the one upstairs with the balcony facing the road?”
“That’s got air conditioning now.”
“It’ll be a cool night. I won’t be using it.”
“The air conditioning is twenty-five U.S. extra.”
I diverted my eyes to disguise my embarrassment. “Shall I pay now?”
A skinny man appeared in the doorway. He was wearing a pair of jeans several sizes too large secured by a leather belt that was also too long and hung like a snake down the front of his pants. The skinny man, Lee, carried my bag off into the night; I could hear his feet going up the stairs to the room almost above us. To the room with the balcony.
I started to leave. “Oh, Devane. Do you remember Nessa Cornblum? The girl with the beautiful nose?”
“Nessa. . . ?” he said, and tilted his head to the side. “The one that give you such hell?”
“Yes, that one.”
He chuckled and slid a few inches down his chair, settling his hands on his stomach.
“Did she ever come back?”
He thought for a moment. “Yes,” he said. “Five or six years ago. She was looking for someone.”
“Who?”
“A French guy.”
“Did she stay here?”
He thought for a moment, resting his head against the greasy circle. “Just one night. Then she disappeared.” I could hear the croaking of night frogs in the foliage behind the hotel. “She must have found him,” Devane said, and chuckled again.
Was he putting it to me?
“I’m sorry about your dogs,” I said, rising to leave.
“I know who did it, but I can’t prove it.”
Going down the hall, I could hear the soccer game. Like dead men swaying.
I went to the front of the hotel and sat down on the steps. What had just happened? Who was the man in the windowless office? My “old friend” Devane? Oh dear. How could I ever have been so naive? Or was it that he’d just gotten old, an old man with a dying hotel and he didn’t give much of a shit about anything anymore, including his wife to whom he had spoken on the phone in a flat, cold voice, the way islanders talk to their help. Then I remembered that she hadn’t bothered to come out and say hello.
A hand touched my shoulder. I jumped. It was Lee, the man who had carried away my bag. “Do you want me to send a girl to your room?” he asked.
“A girl?”
He nodded.
“Where would you get a girl from, Lee?”
He pointed to the far end of the hotel, an ugly two-floor cement addition that looked like a motel in Florida. A clothesline with a few ghostly shirts hung in front.
“You mean they live on the property?”
He nodded.
I said, “When did this happen?”
“When did what happen?”
“How long has Devane let whores live in the Hotel La Mar?”
Over my head, I heard a television go on.
“That’s Larry,” he said. “From Texas.”
“Just me and the girls and Larry upstairs?” I said.
“Yes, sir.” This mechanically, as if he were repeating the obvious. Then he again looked down at me with a pair of shattered eyeballs. “So I fix you up with a lady tonight?”
I went upstairs and lay down on the deck chair on the balcony in front of my room and tried to think about Nessa and Justin and that night under the moonlight. How it had felt, the sight of her on his lap, as if a huge metal pipe had come swinging through the darkness and hit me right here, in the chest. The personification of everything you feared . . . But the deck chair was filthy and I had to go back inside and get a towel and wipe it down. Nobody cleaned anything anymore at the Hotel La Mar.
I had just settled back down when I heard flip-flop footsteps coming up the stairs. It was Larry from Texas. He was a bland-looking man in a green shirt with bright yellow bananas on it; my age, mid-fifties, with a white plastic nose shield. With that thinning fair hair, he must have been especially sensitive to the Caribbean sun. We chatted for a bit. I found his southern ease comforting. Maybe we could have a drink sometime, I suggested.
“Wish I could,” he said, adjusting his baseball cap and squinting down the road, “but I’m going home tomorrow.” He took off his sunglasses, revealing a pair of extraordinarily blue eyes. “I don’t want this summer to be like last summer.”
“I beg your pardon?”
But he didn’t answer. He pointed those bright blue eyes down the road as if he were hoping someone would appear just at the bend, coming this way, but knew at the same time that no one would. It stayed with me for a while, that remark “I don’t want this summer to be like last summer.” There was something mildly sinister about it, something that whispered Pay attention. But pay attention to what?
It was dark by the time I set off down the road. I walked along the top of the seawall; I put out my arms like I used to in the old days. (I was a lot thinner then.) A wind had come up; the waves crashed against the wall and for a few minutes I was happy to be there, to be back. But I could also feel something just behind me, a patch of dark, heavy air; as if I were keeping just ahead of it. In the corner of my vision, a rodent scurried for cover among the sea grape bushes.
I took another OxyContin and gradually, moment by moment, it seemed that the night was sharper, the stars were sharper, the air dense with meaning and mystery. I stopped in front of an empty discotheque; red and green lights whirled around the dance floor like a madman with an axe.
I went all over San Agatha that night. I found everything thought-provoking (on the way up), sweetly sad (coming down), amusingly irritating (down further), un-amusingly irritating (descending, descending), a persuasive argument for capital punishment (flatlining). Then, a fresh Oxy, ground up between the teeth, things change again. I’m feeling warm and understanding about the Third World situation, at home with the panhandlers and spongers and drug dealers. Live and let live, that’s what I say!
I took a taxi to the end of the beach; I took a taxi far into the cliffs. I walked and walked and walked, and how I saw myself and how I saw my life depended always on where the drug was. Somebody told me there had been a high sea that very morning and a California girl had been swept off the cliffs and out to sea. And someone else said she must have done something to bring on such misfortune.
Near four in the morning, I was crossing the yard toward the stairs to my room when I saw a black girl come out of a doorway at the back of the property. She must have been waiting there. Skinny as a snake in a purple shirt and jeans, she seemed to float across the grass toward me. “You want a back rub?” she said. And I thought, All I need to ruin my life is just to nod and let her trickle back up the stairs behind me, past Nessa’s balcony, into my room. A
nd like a man watching a subway hurtle down the shaft toward him, I thought, I could do this. I could step off this platform into the path of this train and no one would ever know that I only did it because I could, because it was so obviously the wrong thing to do.
When I got back to my room, I fished through my bag, took a sleeping pill and came back out and lay down on the deck chair on the balcony. After a while I began to taste almonds and I knew that the pill was taking hold, that soon it’d pull me under, slowly, happily drown me. And my last thought was: What a frivolous young man I was.
I slept for I don’t know how long. A car door slammed and woke me up. A woman shouted my name just outside the window; a sudden puff of wind blew into the room, the curtains thrashing about like spirits taking flight. I parted the venetian blinds and looked toward the far end of the property. Someone had taken down the clothesline; the shirts lay spread-eagled on the grass. A pair of headlights flashed on; a red car rolled slowly down the driveway. Music from inside. Passing under my window I saw the dreadlocked driver. There was a girl in purple beside him. She glanced up toward my curtains. I stepped back. The car moved out of sight down the driveway and then I heard it turn and accelerate toward San Agatha.
I went out onto the porch; you could see the twinkering lights of the grand hotels across the bay. Couples asleep, families asleep, safe in their beds, together. The reassuring swish of air conditioning in the background. The pills had worn off and I felt myself slipping into a kind of frightened sadness, a lament really, a life lament for all the time I’d wasted here as a young man. For the terrible hangovers, for the pointless love affair with Nessa Cornblum, for the pointless suffering that it involved. But there was something in addition to all that, a sinking realization that for years and years, even into my early thirties, I had persuaded myself that getting drunk in the Hotel La Mar bar and talking about Rimbaud was some kind of achievement.
“I don’t want this summer to be like last summer,” Larry had said. Yes, I understood that now, too.
There was a chill in the air. I crossed my arms and rubbed them. It was just getting light, the first goldfish traces of daybreak across the bay. Something moved at the edge of my vision. I turned my head slowly. It was as if a giant cocoon had been woven during the night, a cocoon at the end of a string. What sort of a beast could make a thing like that? But it wasn’t a cocoon. It was a man hanging by the neck from a clothesline. His shoulder turned slowly toward me. It was Larry. Larry, slowly turning in the morning breeze. A rooster crowed. And then the dogs woke up.
The police were still there when the taxi came. They were upstairs in Devane’s living quarters. I thought I heard the sound of laughter. I’d forgotten: Devane Johnston used to be a cop.
I didn’t bother saying goodbye. As we pulled away, the last thing I saw of the Hotel La Mar was the whore in purple from the night before. She was standing on the balcony outside Larry’s room with his nose guard on her face beneath a pair of pink, heart-shaped sunglasses. There was a different woman inside Larry’s room. You could see her through the open door. She was holding up a green shirt with bananas on it, trying to figure out if she liked it or not.
The taxi bumped slowly down the road, past Pamela on her stool, past a group of fat white men in Harley-Davidson muscle shirts looking for their younger bodies, past those sad little roadside conch shell stands, past a golf course, past a bandaged madman gesticulating wildly on the Green River bridge. A few minutes later, on a stretch of highway, a hot wind blew through the cab, like a stranger expelling a lungful of breath in your face. A sign loomed up on the left. YOU ARE NOW LEAVING SAN AGATHA.
A child in a pink dress looked quickly over her shoulder and disappeared down the embankment.
8
The Pigeon
A friend of mine, a beautiful Chinese Canadian, recently discovered that her ex-boyfriend— she’d been the one to call it quits—had been sleeping with another woman the whole time he was with her. She staggered around for a week or so, stunned. How could this have happened? How could he have come home at the end of the day and asked, “What’s for dinner?” when, only an hour previously, he’d been banging some undergraduate’s head against her dormitory headboard?
And why had he told her now? Probably, I suggested, because he hoped it might spark some terrible jealousy that might, somehow, win her back. Or to get even, perhaps.
Quoting an old Chinese proverb, my friend said, “If you want revenge, dig a grave for two.”
Well, yes and no (although I certainly didn’t say that then). But she came to mind the other day, my Chinese friend, when I went down to the CBC broadcast centre. There was talk about my participation on one of those hokey television panels, this one on why Jane Austen novels make good movies. I was waiting for the show producer when I spotted René Goblin in the lobby. He was older now, his dreadlocks greying, his pink gums still flashing when he smiled. And still sporting those black, thick-framed glasses that made him look like an ousted African dictator. (Why are those men always so ugly?)
I’d forgotten. A while back, René Goblin had gone from being a staple book reviewer at the Globe and Mail to the host of an avant-garde, after-midnight radio program. He was at a table with young people, producers I guessed, talking in that deep, avuncular voice and showing, every so often, those appalling gums.
It surprised me how much pleasure it gave me to see him. Sometimes, contrary to what my Chinese friend says, revenge really works out, really cleans the barnacles off the bottom of the boat. This isn’t an especially attractive story, but it’s a true one. And to be quite honest, just thinking about it still makes me feel good.
It was my fourth novel; I’m not whining, no one forced my hand, but I’d worked very hard, had rewritten the thing seven times from scratch, from page one. It was just about to come out and I was very anxious indeed. The Globe and Mail, Canada’s newspaper of record, had wounded me three times in a row with bad reviews. René had done an especially nasty hatchet job on one of them. The fact that he’d rung up the paper and volunteered for the job gave me the unpleasant sensation that he was gunning for me and that he might well do it again. Make no mistake: people believe what they read in the newspaper. Worse, after a while they start to think that they thought it.
So I did something I’d never done before. I went to see the Globe’s book editor, Avery Lynch. He was a pink-faced man in his late fifties who fancied himself, la grande littérature aside, quite the ladies’ man and detoured the conversation in that direction whenever he could. But I wasn’t there to talk about women. “I’ve gotten wonderful reviews,” I explained (cretinously), showing him (cretinously) clippings from New York, Vancouver and Miami newspapers. “But for some reason I’ve been getting panned over and over again in your paper. I can’t seem to get a good review in my hometown.”
“Really?” he said, looking at the clippings and then up at me. He mentioned the name of a woman novelist considerably more gifted than I and added, “And we’ve panned her three times.” He rounded his eyes with affected surprise.
I went on. “I’m particularly concerned about one of your reviewers. René Goblin.”
Avery nodded encouragingly.
I said, “The truth is, I don’t think René ever got enough girls in high school and I think he’s never forgiven me for the fact that I did.” Prior to opening my mouth, this had sounded plausible, even reasonable.
“Really?” Avery said, amused. A hint of mockery? I wasn’t sure. But I hurried to explain myself, and as I heard the slightly breathless tones in my voice, I felt myself sinking, my point getting lost in vanity and silliness.
“Well then,” Avery said, a smile still animating his pink features, “I’ll have a word with René. And if he does have a problem with you, we’ll make sure to get someone else.”
“Who?”
“Just somebody else.”
“Maybe you should review it,” I said. “I’d be very grateful—”
Avery cut me
off. “Don’t worry, we’ll handle it at this end,” he said, and went on seamlessly to the subject of a young actress we both knew (she wore a slim gold chain around her neck), referring to her as “my lover.” I nodded judiciously, connoisseur to connoisseur. What a dope, I thought.
“Did you, by the way?” Avery asked, rising from his chair to shake my hand (short-sleeved white shirt and tie) and, in so doing, to signal our “meeting” was at an end.
“Did I what?”
“Get enough girls in high school?”
I considered my answer carefully. I knew what he didn’t want to hear. “Does one ever?” I said.
He gave a short bark of laughter in which you could feel the relief. For a second there, I think he was torturing himself with the image of a teenage boy (me) between the legs of a teenage girl, her jeans hanging from the bedpost.
It was an unorthodox thing to do—you’re not supposed to make that kind of personal appeal when you’ve got a book coming out—but I left Avery’s office and headed uptown feeling lighter in spirit, as if, by vocalizing my concern, I had removed a small, insistent headache from right behind my eyes.
So, fine. The book came out; there was a launch party at a bookstore, followed by a gathering at my apartment. My editor came, so did a few old friends and their pals, along with my girlfriend Molly Wentworth, her parents and embittered brother who taught at Stanford but wanted to teach at Harvard. (Academics are even nastier about each other than writers.) I looked around the apartment every so often; there were twenty or thirty people there, including both my ex-wives—M., hawk-featured and somehow “in charge” (she had prepared the food), and Catherine, my son’s mother, a lanky actress who liked everyone and was therefore liked back by everyone. It was, I thought, a pleasant party, everyone talking to everyone. And yet, as I moved from group to group around the room, I had the feeling that I was waiting for something. I couldn’t engage in conversation, not with anyone; each little bit of chit-chat felt as if it were holding me up, stopping me from doing something important. But what was it?
The Perfect Order of Things Page 12
