Consolation

by Michael Redhill

  “Honey.”

  “Not quite. Orchids.” He sipped. “Pollen.”

  “Yes, well, I haven’t had either in a while, so it tastes like honey to me.”

  They drank quietly for a while, John in a faked tea reverie while Howard swished his around in his cup and thoughtfully chewed some of the leaves. A black fleck lay on his bottom lip. “So what does Bridget think of your new hobby? What would you call it —? A cross between visiting the sick and hostelry, I’d think.”

  “She doesn’t know.”

  Howard’s eyes widened. “I really am going to have to start writing some of this down. How is it that she doesn’t know? Are you lying to her?”

  “She hasn’t asked.”

  “You mean she hasn’t said, ‘John, you’re not visiting my mother in a hotel room these days, are you?’”

  “That question has not been asked.”

  “I think your very soul may be in danger here.” John didn’t reply, and the expression on his face made Howard add, “But perhaps this is just what it needs.”

  “I don’t know what it needs. Bridget once told me I float above everything, and at the time I didn’t think it was true. But now . . .”

  “You’re feeling a little disconnected are you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That can happen when you start living in a play by Sophocles.”

  John put the sickly-sweet tea down on the table in front of him and moved some papers out of the way. His mouth felt dry, the way all of Howard’s teas made it feel. “Bridget isn’t even talking to her mother. Or me, really. And no one’s talking about David. So however crazy this thing is down at the hotel, I think I should be a part of it.”

  “You owe them that, you feel.”

  “I should be present. David more or less asked me to be.”

  “Well, Marianne, at least, must be pleased to have your support. A show of faith.”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s not how she sees it.”

  “Two beds, right?”

  John laughed. “I don’t think I want to talk about this with you anymore, Howard. I don’t like the way your mind works.”

  “I really had no idea you had a death wish.”

  It pleased John a little that Howard was surprised by him. To be, for a moment, unpredictable. “I just feel I should try to be of some use.”

  “Build houses then!” Howard threw his hands up and let them fall with a heavy slap on his legs. “Hiding out with your girlfriend’s mother isn’t necessarily the way to develop a sense of purpose.”

  “Write a scene with the father taking the home movies,” said John. “Then you can show the movie itself later in the play and we’ll already know what the kids were saying.”

  Howard leaned against the back of the couch and thought for a moment. “I’d have to cast children. Matt would have a cow.”

  “Just the voices. The dad alone onstage and the voices of the children as he’s filming them, but we never see the kids until the mother watches the film.”

  “I put ghosts in my play.”

  “Why not? Isn’t that what it’s about?”

  He’d done this more than once for Howard — somehow thought of an elegant solution to something left-footed in his conception. “Well, geez,” Howard said quietly. “That’s very good. And it gets rid of the technical problem.”

  John stood and put his teacup back on the tray. “That’s what I was thinking. So for next week, no eight millimeter stuff? Or do you still want it?”

  “No,” said Howard. “In fact, I’ll go to the library. You stay here and write the bloody play. I’ll take a story editor credit.”

  “I’d love to,” said John as he silently slipped his check off the mantelpiece, “but I think I’ll be spending most of my time with my own lies.”

  SIX

  THE STEEPEST DECLINE in light always came in the middle of November. There was a point every night now when the sun suddenly plunged below the horizon and dropped the city into a blunt, grayling light. The shock of darkness before five-thirty snapped the cord that connected people to the vain dream of summer, and confirmed that the only way back to daylight now would be to put one’s head down and push on through December, January, February. But it was really February — that month of wet lungs and bird-choking fog — that November’s desolation looked forward to. They were bookends, these two months, one buried in a dead year that said abandon hope, and the other in a fresh one that said what hope?

  This November — even with its grief and the prospect of a first Christmas alone — appeared to have an entirely different effect on Marianne. John almost thought he could attach the word jolly to her mood, if only he believed that her jolliness wasn’t schadenfreude. He knew that Marianne was so inclined; it was one of the qualities Bridget had ascribed to her mother that he never argued with. The failure of the plans of others and their consequent unhappiness did not actually make Marianne happy, but it confirmed for her a certain view of the universe. In school, John had read about the despair of short-sellers in bull markets; how their philosophies of loss were unshakable, and that there was no joy more lunatic than when these investors began finally to make money, when the markets downturned and all the bad bets they’d placed began to pay off. It was this wet-eyed worship of ruin that John thought he was beginning to detect in Marianne.

  He’d found himself less frightened of, and feeling more in common with, Mrs. Edward Copleston, whose memoir he’d read when he’d been alone in the apartment on the weekend, a tiny fire burning off a Java-Log in the shallow fireplace. Her arrival in Toronto had been nothing like his (he took the train, she a boat; there were plenty of roads in his Toronto, in hers you had to hack them into existence), but there was the generous melancholy of wondering what on earth she’d done to her life. Except, for Mrs. C., there was no turning back. And she had three children and a husband in tow and a wet, dark homestead waiting for her up north in Haliburton. He wasn’t sure what, if any, connection there was to David’s work in this slim diary, though. More, he suspected, there was a life lesson to be had in it, and that was why Marianne had put the book into his reading pile. He was worried he’d glean the wrong lesson — the one about persistence and fortitude — when perhaps she was just telling him to get out of town.

  He’d placed the little booklet on the second bed upon being admitted to the room, hoping she’d not quiz him on it, and she didn’t.

  The five-thirty sundown had already passed, and all the lamps were burning. They glowed, Orion-like, in the monograph’s acetate covering. John had brought food for both of them, and when Marianne saw two plastic bags dangling from his hands, the corner of her mouth rose and she said, “Is one of those for me?” By bringing food, he imagined he was performing a proper service, one that could eventually be relayed back to Bridget when the time came to reconstruct these visits. Each day that passed without his telling her compounded his sin. The fact that he told himself variously that he wasn’t doing anything wrong, and that he was entitled to live a life of his own even within her family, only abetted this sensation of guilt that filled him like a bucket catching runoff.

  He sat in the room’s one chair, his back against the wall, facing Marianne in her pillow nest up on the north-facing ledge. She’d transferred her meal of Korean chicken and chap chae to a hotel plate; he ate his noodles right out of the takeout container. “Are you interested in knowing what they found today?” she asked.

  He swallowed and put his fork down on the Styrofoam tray. “I thought you’d tell me as soon as I came in,” he said. “I presumed nothing.”

  “They found something,” she said. She left an annoying pause. “A flügelhorn.”

  “A what?”

  “A flügelhorn. A brass wind instrument whose valves and shape resemble a cornet. I looked it up on the Internet. There are very few pieces written for solo flügelhorn.”

  “Maybe that’s why the owner threw it away.”

  “That’s what I thought,”
she said. She expertly plucked a chunk of chicken with her chopsticks and put it into her mouth.

  “Is that it?”

  “It was flat.” She tucked the meat into a cheek. “Like a cut-out. They were laughing at it and pretending to play it. Marching around like idiots.”

  “Is it the one you have to put around your body?”

  “You don’t know your brass instruments, John. This is a major failing.” She said this with, perhaps, an edge of tenderness. He couldn’t be sure.

  He knew that soon they would turn the kliegs on in the site below, and a cool blue light would glow up from it, as if a moon were embedded down there in the earth. It was in this light, with its sharp shadows and contrasts, that small objects could best be made out in the dirt and in the piles of twisted waste the machines had heaped all over the site. None of what the machines dug up was of more than passing interest to Marianne. If it wasn’t a strongbox encased in leather she didn’t want anything to do with it. A flügelhorn in broad daylight, though — that was an exception.

  Through Marianne’s binoculars John had found the mass of uncovered silver-and-turquoise bottles, yellow brick, and bits of crockery fascinating. Some of the workers had started their own collections, and a row of liniment bottles and powder tins was spread along one of the steel girders on the perimeter of the yard like an open-air shooting gallery. When they turned the kliegs on, some of the bottles glowed with a waxy blue luster, a phosphorescence in their makeup. Their presence, delicate and seeming rare, struck John as an impossibly whimsical counterpoint to the rugged hole and its machines.

  Around six, the lights came on and the room took on a hue that suggested the entire city behind them had turned into a single enormous television set. Marianne looked down to the ground and marked the change, as common now as natural shifts in light. This, however, told of another day of digging over and a night of digging about to begin. They both heard the sound of a machine coughing to a stop. He went to the other window. Two large yellow machines had stopped. In the hard, slanting artificial light, they looked like toys left in a sandbox. “That was a short shift,” he said.

  “Site manager’s probably off duty. Sometimes if a couple of the young guys are alone, they’ll park their machines side by side and get out and stand in the light together. Smoke, or just stand around talking.”

  “It must be pretty dull work.”

  “If only they knew what they were standing on.” John pulled away from the window. The cast of light made a sharp blue shape in her window where her face was reflected, a Noh mask floating over the night. “It used to anger David that people were ignorant of how the places they spent their lives in grew,” she said. “He would say, ‘Neglect of the past is a form of despair.’ I bet the people who started all these places didn’t give a shit about the history they were creating. They just came to make money and that’s the way it’s been ever since.”

  They heard a motor starting below, the sound a dull popping in the distance. Marianne finally turned back into the room and settled against the pillows again. “David thought if people were surprised by what had come before them, they’d get interested in it for their own sake. They might see the connection between those people’s now and their own.”

  “It’s hard to make people care about anything that came before them.”

  “He thought if he made it personal . . .” She paused for a moment and John felt certain that, in her mind, she was taking a long drag on a cigarette. “I had a sick husband going on about buried treasure. I didn’t really think hard on what any of it meant. I just wanted to keep him alive.” She pushed her chopsticks around on the plate. “I’m not sure I was listening all that closely.” She came down off the ledge, collecting her plate, and held up his nearly finished container of noodles. He nodded.

  “What happens if something shows up down there, Marianne?”

  “Then he’ll have been right.”

  “What if it’s not what he said it would be?”

  Something in his voice brought her attention back to him fully, and she tried to read his face. “What does that mean, John? Do you already know what’s down there?”

  “How would I know that?”

  “That’s not really an answer, is it?”

  “There’s got to be something,” he said. “I do believe that.”

  She had her fists on her hips and he thought she could see into his heart at that moment. He felt pierced by her and ashamed of what he possessed that she did not. Those moments with David, in the car on that bright, dread August morning. He had usurped Marianne, replaced her at the signal moment in her own history. Asking him to watch over her was like sending a thief to guard treasure.

  “You don’t want to talk about David anymore,” she said.

  “I do,” he said. “We can.”

  She went into the bathroom and began to run water over her plate. When she came out she held it at her side and it dripped onto the carpet. “You never told me what you thought about the Copleston book.”

  “I was surprised that they said snooze back then.”

  “Did they.” She remained where she was, just outside the bathroom door, in the dimness of the little foyer, her eyes shadowed. He felt faintly endangered.

  “When they get off the boat,” he said, “officials take them to the Swords Hotel, and they give all the travelers dinner, and when her husband goes off to make arrangements at another hotel, she and the children all have a snooze.”

  “Snooze,” Marianne said. “Anything else?”

  “She has a quinsy throat attack.”

  “So they had naps and sore throats in 1856. Is that what you got out of it?”

  “I got out of it that not much has changed.”

  “Do you like that thought?”

  “I don’t know.”

  SHE WANTED TO take a nap. She said she napped for an hour after supper each day now, and then rang down for coffee. She liked to be ready for the night shift, since whatever might be revealed in the excavation would appear with a certain kind of stealth after sundown, and this meant staying up most of the night. Since his first visit ten days earlier, they’d deepened the hole to what looked closer to forty feet. It was impossible to judge the depth: John had discovered the odd fact that his mind (perhaps most minds) was attuned more to horizontal measures than it was to vertical ones. Car lengths, street widths, kilometers per hour — all of these were units that made absolute sense to a life lived on a flat plane. Time was linear: it went forward and back. But up and down was organic, it was growth and decay, it was time as experienced by vegetation. It was history itself. He looked down into the hole and tried to measure it by the time he imagined it would take to fall from the lip of the hole at street level to its black clay depths. Somehow it seemed like thirty-five or forty feet.

  Whatever its measure, though, he knew Marianne was aware now that a skin was about to be pierced and the workers were on the threshold of the old lake. She could not afford to sleep a whole night now. There would be time enough for sleep later.

  She meant for John to leave, but when she turned over and faced the windows, her back curled toward him, he simply stayed. He sat quietly on the other bed, and after a few minutes her breathing deepened. It pleased him that she could sleep in front of him. He had stopped being a threat. He had the urge to call Bridget and tell her what he was doing, but he also sensed that the time was coming when nothing could remain hidden. His anxiety was fading now, replaced by purpose. There was something he could give them, to vitiate his treachery. He saw something emerging from the darkness.

  MARIANNE’S VOICE WOKE him. He shook himself, surprised that he’d drifted off. “I want you to talk about this,” she said, and he saw a pinwheeling light that he realized was the monograph. She had thrown it at him, and it spun open, its brilliant plastic cover flashing under the light like a blade. “Open it up and tell me what you believe.”

  The booklet landed on his belly. “I only know what it says,
Marianne. What he claims.”

  “I’m not asking you to explain it to me. I want to know if you believe it. If you believe him.”

  He closed the monograph and laid it on the bedspread. “No,” he said. “I don’t.”

  “Then why are you here? To lessen a blow?”

  “I’m not.”

  “You have no faith in him.”

  “I never said that.”

  “If you don’t believe him, then you don’t have faith. There’s no distinction.”

  He saw out of the corner of his eye that Marianne had made the bed. He wondered if he’d slept long. “I think the distinction is that I don’t necessarily accept the facts as he has them. But I believe in why he wrote that monograph.”

  “Which was what? I’m doing this for David. Can you say the same thing?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “We’re not going to have any secrets if you plan on showing up in my life like this. Do you understand? I want Bridget to know what you’re doing, I want Alison to know, and if there’s anything you’re holding back about David, I want to know it. I don’t care if it makes things worse.”

  “I don’t want to make things worse, Marianne.”

  “This is your whole world, is it? A widow, a blocked writer, and a woman you’re lying to.”

  “That’s a lot for me.”

  She leaned over his bed and picked up the monograph, held it up to him and shook it. “This . . . this is important to me. This is what I have. It matters if you don’t believe him.”

  “I want him to be right,” said John, and he had raised his voice for the first time in her presence. They both marked it. “But I don’t know if that’s belief.”