Paul Is Dead

by C. C. Benison

  Lydia weathered the hormonal storms beginning eight years later by recasting Dorian as some romantic figure out of book or film, Gilbert Blythe in Anne of Green Gables, say, or Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind. He is safe. Smoke abounds, but no fire erupts. And Dorian’s response, though she doesn’t really sense it, is confused and unanchored. “My life will be in your keeping, waking, sleeping, laughing, weeping.” His eyes stray to hers in choir rehearsal, where their teacher has introduced a new song, from some new film they’re too young to see, Mondo Cane, her old spinsterish self tearing at such words of promise in such young voices. Passionate and pure, Lydia waits. Dorian hovers. He phones her and hangs up. She knows it’s him. He bicycles down Oxford. She sees it’s him. And yet something stays him, at friend’s length.

  The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, her father remarks one June evening as they both watch from the porch Dorian ride off on his bike into the shadows of the street’s towering elms. The saying, trite as it is, is new to her, even at fourteen, though its implication eludes her even as her understanding grows that Dorian is somehow, permanently, unfixably different than other boys. They remain friends through high school, part of a brainy, artsy clique. They are Steed and Mrs. Peel, their relationship as mysterious and ambiguous as that of the leads in The Avengers, their comportment stylish and witty and ironic. Meanwhile, on the sidelines, there’s Ross Stubbs to fill another bill. He’s not really someone you can hang much imagination on. He’s practical, rough and ready (he’s on the high school football team), lacks the rounder depths of soul of someone like, well, Dorian, but he’s ardent. Give him that. Lydia accepts his attentions, though she and Dorian look so much better together, prom king and queen material, and wishes sometimes, as high school passes to college, it were Dorian making love to her. Ross shows little curiosity about Dorian. Gosh, Ross is thick, she thinks at times. But then Dorian never, as they say, flaunts it.

  And then, at Eadon Lodge, at the very end, he flaunted it.

  Lydia ignores Briony, who is fluttering around Dorian with a tea towel, and seeks out Alanna. “I’m taking him home,” she shouts over the music into her ear. No need to say who “he” is. Alanna nods. She’s to mind the fort in Lydia’s absence. Car keys fetched, Lydia abandons her parents’ home to god-knows-who-half-these-people-are, affecting indifference, though she’s on the verge of panic, trusting that Alanna, officious even in a harem dress, is insurance against disaster.

  Briony is the more solicitous, taking the towel from Dorian’s trembling hand and gingerly retying the trench coat belt, staring away lest her eyes burn. Coatless, as neither girl can find her coat in the jumble in the front closet, they steer Dorian across the porchful of mildly curious dope smokers to Bibs’s Buick. Thank god no one’s blocked the driveway. Getting Dorian into the passenger seat is like folding an ironing board into a box, but finally they can push the heavy door shut. The rich chunking sound is almost satisfying, like a lock turned on a prison door. Then Briony flicks the lock on the back door and scrambles into the blackness of the interior before Lydia can stop her. Lydia dreads having her with them, but can’t find a reason to order her out of the car. Crossing the lawn to the driveway, Dorian began to babble, not a word unslurred, but Lydia fears the moment of clarity, the unguarded utterance. And Briony with ears alert.

  The drive to the Grant home on Dromore Avenue is not far—walkable, in other circumstances. The car starting with its throaty rasp triggers some shift in Dorian’s consciousness. As Lydia backs the car into the dark street, he lets go a damp sob that bubblebursts into a keening howl. Lydia’s hands grip the cold steering wheel. Her nerves, taut, pull her along an arc of recent memory. She is back at Eadon Lodge, the night of the abomination, her eyes unbelieving, her world spinning. Don’t speak, don’t speak, don’t speak, for Christ’s sake, don’t speak, her mind shouts at him as she crosses Kingsway, her teeth grinding. Briony pushes herself into the soft cushion of the back seat, transfixed by the dramatics, groping for comprehension. This … agony of Dorian’s. His elusiveness all fall. His abandonment of the car pool. His no-shows for lunch at University College cafeteria. His afternoons at the Montcalm’s bar. His class cutting. Lydia’s, too. She looks at the back of Lydia’s head, at the dark hair disappearing behind the headrest. She is rigid. Driving like a drunk, overcautious. But Lydia had no drink. None at all, that Briony could see. Odd. Meanwhile, Dorian’s unrelenting sobs wrench at her heart, but there seems no comforting gesture she can make from the restraint of a back seat and his pickled breath, off-putting, is filling the claustrophobic space. She rolls down the back window a crack.

  And now they are outside the Grant house. Windows like blackened eyes. No front light on. Lawn streetlit greygreen with greyer mottlings of dead leaves. Lydia brakes, but keeps the car in gear. The motor purrs richly. Dorian slumps, oblivious, gasping sobs, wheezing to catch his breath to begin again. Lydia’s knuckles whiten along the steering wheel. Get out, get out, get out. For Christ’s sake, get out of the car. Briony is pinned by indecision. Should she help Dorian to his door? But there comes a break in the extravagant storm. Lydia sees Dorian’s hand grope for the door handle. Thank god. He pulls out of his slump, turns his head to her, his eyes blurred with tears, his lips begin to part. The eyes focus now. It is beseeching she sees. In later years, that is what she will think of it. He pushes against the handle, the door swings open heavily. He says, Briony hears, Lydia shudders:

  “I loved him.”

  Loved him?

  “Alan?” Briony is foggy with confusion.

  Lydia’s eyes flick from the figure of Dorian stumbling through the shadows of the Grants’ front yard to Briony’s disembodied head in the car’s rear-view mirror. She wants to weep, but can’t, doesn’t dare. She manages to croak: “No, of course not.”

  Briony is schooled in an instant. Of course. Not Alan. Paul.

  Loved.

  Dorian loved Paul. The fatal past tense, how curious. She sensed all the girls found Paul … diverting in one way or another. Alanna seemed more to study him, coolly, in that way of hers. Lydia—umph, well … Lydia, she could have anyone she wanted, if she set her mind to it. She herself, little Briony, could wish upon a star and anything her heart desired would not come true. (It does make a difference who you are.) Paul was well out of her league. And then, it seems, there was Dorian. His attraction to Paul she realized too suddenly, too late, and acted very silly about—making Lydia drive her back to the city, then switching to the bus at Winnipeg Beach, never mind, too late for regrets now.

  But Dorian loved Paul. The love ended. Briony will mull this state—or statelessness—for a little while to come. Dorian’s misery actually gives her some small satisfaction, which isn’t very nice. Her reverend daddy wouldn’t approve. And there’s karma to think of. She daren’t ask Lydia for details (loved?) as she got short shrift the one and only time she nerved herself to ask Lydia the whatever-happened-to question about Paul Godwin. Weren’t Dorian and Paul going together to Los Angeles to seek fame and fortune? Apparently not, said Lydia. This was on their first day back in classes in early September. So what happened? I suppose Dorian came to his senses. Then…? Continuing west, I guess, Lydia shrugged. I think Dorian dropped him off on the Trans-Canada somewhere. Has Dorian heard from him? I don’t know.

  Loved?

  Briony won’t fall in love until her first-born is placed in her arms.

  9

  Dorian struggles to keep his breath steady, to control the muscles of his mouth and throat as, finally, he extends his hand and feels Peter Radcliff’s dry palm along his dampening one and a grip more aggressive than polite. He murmurs “pleasure to meet you,” almost inaudible amid the merry Christmas party chatter in Dixie-May’s living room. He smiles with all the thespian facility at his command and continues a semblance of conversation with Peter and Dix and the others in the little grouping by the fireplace, all the while feeling his ears pulsi
ng with blood and his brain afire like the first time he dropped acid, conversation now turned jabbering glossolalia. Finally comes a moment when he can excuse himself—flee! He threads his way through the revellers, cranberry punch in hand, to the downstairs powder room, ablaze with scented candles. As he lets his mask of bonhomie drop, a tremor flies along his nerves and the drink glass slips from his hand into the sink, shattering, the cascade of cranberry red—near black in this light—joined by spurts of blood red—more viscously black—from his scrabbling fingers. Fuck, fuck, fucking Christ. Dorian stuffs the bleeding fingers of his right hand into his mouth, his eyes grazing his image in the mirror. Candles uplighting his face, hollowing his cheeks, fevering his eyes. He would let no lighting director do this. His left hand finds the light switch. The bathroom blazes as bathrooms should.

  Peter Radcliff is Paul’s brother. There is no mistake. He may be Lennon’s bullet-headed Saxon mother’s son grown up now, coarsened, thickened, but beneath the skin is the skull: nose, chin, brow sculpted and aligned so unmistakably in imitation of someone he once knew, that flame in his heart and weight on his soul, Paul Godwin.

  And Dixie-May Lang is Paul’s mother.

  No doubt.

  But the names, the names?

  The next day he will visit the library and pull Canadian Who’s Who from the reference room shelf.

  Dorian and Paul are in Dorian’s little black Bug. It’s a 1967 model Volkswagen that Dorian bought used from a neighbour for high school graduation. Neither speaks as the car rattles down the Trans-Canada. It’s not because the windows are open and the summer air an unrelenting whoosh past their ears. It’s not the radio blasting. Dorian switched it off before he rolled into the Shell station, the song, “Hot Fun in the Summertime,” inescapable that season, reminding him of his failures—unlike the summer before—to find any film work or romance in New York. No, it’s because conversation feels beside the point. The air is freighted with a certain expectation. But an expectation fulfilled so soon? Dorian glances from the road to his passenger’s scuffed boots, to the frayed jeans, which he sees now mended here and there with red embroidery stars that match the T-shirt star, to the tantalizing line of exposed flesh peeking above the belt line. The stranger catches his eye. A dirty angel smirk creases his cheeks—a smile to smite Dorian again and again in the days ahead. His eyes seem to sparkle with shared complicity.

  They drive a short distance.

  A hand rounds the top of Dorian’s thigh. Dorian is wearing shorts. Fingers silk their way under the hem. Dorian doesn’t flinch, but his heart beats a mad tattoo, blood rushing and surging. When the fingers seek a new destination along the zipper, Dorian gasps, suppresses a yelp. What happens next is unsurprising, though it’s useful to know that a mouth, not a hand, is the instrument of pleasure. Such a shenanigan hardly seems novel now, but then Dorian was lost in enchantment. What was the protocol? Brake to the side of the road. Pull off onto a byway? Keep driving? The takeaway here is the risk. Two docked bodies careening at sixty miles an hour down a single lane. No seatbelts. Cars speeding toward you, mere feet on their side of the white line. The blinding moment of release. The point is, our stranger—Paul—very much liked to take a risk. And Dorian’s desire for a larger world was feverish.

  New York had been a sour place that summer. Dorian couldn’t explain why, and no one else, the others he met scrounging—and not finding—film work among the offices on 45th and 46th Streets seemed able to put a finger on it. It was as if a pall had been cast over the city, a harbinger of the decade to come when New York descended into grunginess, danger, and bankruptcy. Dorian found a place in a rooming house at West 72nd and Broadway and spent the empty hours visiting the art galleries and museums and nervously skirting the edges of the West Village.

  The summer before, Robert Kennedy’s funeral notwithstanding, the city had shimmered for Dorian. He found work at the offices of Leacock-Pennebaker where—wow!—Dylan’s Dont Look Back film had been produced. Okay, he toiled for many weeks as a sort of messenger and doing some tedious gruntwork, re-ordering film footage, but a floor above Norman Mailer established a film office for his vainglorious experiments in cinéma vérité and through the Pennebaker connection, Dorian became a sound assistant on Mailer’s Maidstone.

  So radical! No script. No one had any idea what they were doing. Something about political assassination or male prostitutes or both. Topless starlets all over the lawns of East Hampton. Negro militants, Warhol hangers-on, rich socialites, Mailer strutting around shirtless barking orders, Mailer breaking some actor’s jaw, Mailer bashed over the head with a hammer by Rip Torn, crates of booze, bags of drugs, and the sex, Jesus, everywhere. Get any? Maybe. Not telling. (Nothing to tell. The atmosphere of excess grew so freaky his appetite moved swiftly from fascination to flight.) The experience is reputation burnishing, though, and partly on the strength of it, he lands his first film role—a speaking part (five lines!) in And No Birds Sing, an hour-long feature produced by the university students’ union.

  Dorian lets this information tumble out as he drives along the highway, able now to drive without distraction. Particulars have been forthcoming: names, dates, places. Paul. His name is Paul. Paul Godwin. He’s from Toronto. Headed for Los Angeles—the long way, at a right angle, the vertex being Vancouver. See the country. He’s never been through western Canada. He’s in no rush. He was hitching through Europe most of the past year, Barcelona, Berlin, Mykonos. Which is why Dorian, who has yet to travel to Europe, brings up New York and his adventures there, eager not to appear uncooler than thou.

  “Far out,” says Paul, reaching into a leather bag attached to his belt. “So you’re into acting?” He pulls out a joint and beams at Dorian. There’s a kind of wonder and enthusiasm and approval in his voice that makes Dorian an instant ally. The beat of the sentence falls on “acting.”

  “A cousin of mine’s a big producer out there.” Paul wets the joint with his mouth.

  “Really?”

  Paul pulls a lighter from the bag. “Yeah,” he says as he flicks at the recalcitrant thing. “Edgar Z. Rusoff, King of the B’s. Swamp Monster? Heard of it? Fuck this fucking lighter.”

  “Try that,” Dorian gestures to the car’s cigarette lighter, ignoring the explosion of pique, his mind roiling with several confused thoughts: “bees”? and “Rusoff”? Is Paul Jewish?

  “I’m going to be staying with him while I’m there.”

  “Far out.”

  “You should come with me.”

  “To L.A.?”

  “Why not?”

  “School in September?”

  Paul makes dismissive gesture as he reaches for the car lighter. “Edgar could set you up in something, get you an audition. Is going to school how you become an actor?”

  “Is that why you’re going to L.A.? To become an actor?”

  “Me? Maybe. What do you think?” Paul positions the joint between his fingers like one of those bitch-goddess actresses, Joan Crawford or Bette Davis, and takes a campy drag. Dorian explodes with laughter. Paul explodes, too, the smoke exiting his nose in jagged plumes.

  “I think you just want me to drive you to Los Angeles.”

  Paul gasps for breath and hands him the joint. He rubs Dorian’s thigh. “Wouldn’t you enjoy my company?”

  A cousin who’s a Hollywood producer? Sounds like bullshit. What are the chances that the ambitions of one young man could so neatly align with the opportunities afforded by another? But Paul does have a familial connection in Hollywood, no lie, though “cousin” is shorthand, stretching it a bit. With some prompting, Paul explains that the “cousin” is the husband of a cousin of his mother’s—a second cousin, then?—anyway, a girl from Ottawa, Alice, who went to Los Angeles before the war, or during the war, to meet an agent or a producer, and become a star. Instead she became a wife. And the “bees”? That’s “B’s,” as in “B” movies. Edgar Z. produ
ced tons of them—monster movies, horror movies, beach blanket bingo bikini à go go movies. Dorian remembers going with Lydia once, around 1963, to see Gidget Goes Bananas or some such crap at the Gaiety. Did Edgar Z. produce Gidget movies?

  “Probably,” Paul shrugs. “Alice and my mother are pretty close,” he adds, stuffing the roach into the car’s ashtray. “You’ll like Alice. She was in one of Edgar Z.’s films—an early one, Attack of the Ant People or something.”

  “Mmm,” Dorian murmurs. Not exactly Fellini or Antonioni or Polanski, but, still, a foot in the door is a foot in the door. The summer had been so goddamn unpromising—New York a bust, his grandparents at their cottage on Coney Island reproving, his mother at West Hawk distant and his stepfather a bastard—and the next school year looked pretty T.S. Eliotsville. He had a notion to apply for admission to one of the theatre schools in the country when he graduated from the University of Manitoba, but, what the hell, he could cut out the educational middleman, couldn’t he? Was there any practicality in having a BA in English? The future, like the sun-drenched road ahead, suddenly dazzled.

  10

  “‘Monday, July 27, 2008,’” Briony reads from her dream diary as she nibbles a cube of cheese. “‘At the beginning I am in a small Italian grocery store and I meet a boy there, whom I had met before, probably in a previous dream. He invites me to dinner at his place. The next setting is along the lines of Eadon Lodge …’”

  Lydia yearns for the conversation to go anywhere but to the cottage and lets her attention drift to Briony’s untidy dining room and living room beyond. Briony’s dream is the usual surreal grab bag of images anyway.

  She notes the middens of photographs (Ted, her husband, was a professional photographer before MS struck), the plastic dog bone resting on the floor by the baseboard, the clutter of magazines and books. Every fibre of Lydia’s being screams to wipe and clean, tidy and sort. Her heart goes out to her old friend, whose life seems devoted to keeping chaos at bay.