Paul Is Dead

by C. C. Benison

  “Cool ring,” Paul says, taking Dorian’s hand and splaying the fingers.

  “A friend brought it back for me from San Francisco a couple of years ago. See? It shows the parts of the peace symbol—the semaphore signals for ‘N’ and ‘D’, nuclear disarmament—and then how they were merged together.”

  Paul slips the ring off easily and slides it over one of his own, his third, his fingers being slimmer than Dorian’s. “Who’s the friend?”

  “Lydia. We’ve known each other since kindergarten.”

  Dorian wants to hold on to this moment, somehow solemnized by the transfer of the ring—to bottle it, preserve it, keep it forever—all that, all of it, this feeling of fraternity, of oh-so-rightness, of a connection so natural and right and true. His encounter in New York the year before had been brief, anonymous, furtive, fleeting, revelatory, but empty—all that. Ric from Toronto had no conversation, dismissed him with haste, almost disgust, once the deed was done. Another opportunity never seemed to present itself that summer, not even in the midst of Norman Mailer’s film-set debauch in East Hampton, not even in the midst of evening circlings of downtown, along the labyrinth of streets in the West Village where he felt prairie-shy and paralyzed. The next summer, this summer, no better. No film work, trip truncated by diminished funds (both Dey and his mother refused to forward money this time), his second-last full day there spent drawn, like thousands of others in the fierce heat, to another celebrity funeral—Judy Garland’s—on the East Side.

  Paul replaces the ring on Dorian’s finger, and Dorian lets that hand roam Paul’s thigh. He wants to try something he’s not done before—and there’s a lot he’s not done before, as Paul makes evident from his own adventures—what seems like a phantasmagoria of forbidden pleasures that Dorian can barely credit, has not even entered his imagination, makes him almost faint with desire and longing, shock and envy. Paul inventories them: permutations and combinations involving all manner of fauna and flotsam and flux. Far out, far out, and far out! The farthest out is something he calls breath play. Huh? Paul explains it. He did it with a guy in Barcelona.

  “It was incredible—intense. The intense-est. We could try it?”

  Dorian’s eyes follow Paul’s upward, through the barrier of the ceiling, to his own attic bedroom. He’s intrigued, more than intrigued, he’s young, he’s reckless, he’s ready for any novelty—now, he’s ready, under Paul’s guidance, but he’s not sure he’s ready for this. Shoulder to shoulder on the bed they talk of many things, other things; they talk small talk, big talk, sex talk, family talk. Paul’s mother is a housewife. He has one brother, younger. He doesn’t remember his father, who died when he was a baby from some illness, and now has a hated stepfather. Likewise, says Dorian, who marvels at the parallels, though his father didn’t get sick and die. Jim Grant perished in a car accident, he says (for this is what he believes).

  “I’m sorry,” Paul responds, stroking Dorian’s neck and pulling him into a kiss.

  Dorian doesn’t want to talk about it, too, because he doesn’t want the mood corrupted, the momentum of desire slowed. The marijuana makes him feel loose, wanton, fabulous. He moves down Paul’s body, readies his tongue—it’s cold from the ice cream. Paul curls around, rolls over, moans at the tender invasion. Later, much later, they will shower together, gobble delivered pizza from Tubby’s together, but Dorian feels no urge to go beyond the house’s confines and Paul evinces no curiosity for a city he’s never before visited. They might be under house arrest; indoors they are two live wires, sparking each other with every passing touch.

  Dorian saw Breathless at the Playhouse Theatre, a relic of vaudeville days, slowly crumbling along with the rest of the downtown, with Lydia and her father who, strangely, enjoyed foreign films. The Winnipeg Film Society rented the theatre Sunday evenings to show works more avant-garde than Hollywood ever produced. Dorian, at fifteen, was intoxicated by the film—or, more precisely, by Belmondo, with his battered jolie laide face, his lopsided smile, insouciant cigarette, and—to be even more precise—his naked torso. And the hat, the hat in bed: somehow it caught Belmondo’s free spirit, his wild joie de vivre. Odd his grandfather should possess much the same hat. It caught nothing of Dey’s spirit, which was unreconstructed Scots Presbyterian.

  “Are you serious about getting into acting?” Paul passes his thumb across his lips. Dorian stares helplessly. Belmondo uses the same gesture in Breathless. Paul can’t possibly know that.

  They’ve been half-watching the eleven o’clock news on Dey’s TV—surreal programming when you’re stoned. Another report on the unsolved L.A. murders the week before focused their attention. Neither had heard of Sharon Tate before.

  “Yeah,” Dorian replies slowly. “Or something related maybe. Directing, script writing. I think I’m going to apply to the National.”

  “In Montreal?”

  “Mmm. Or York University.

  Paul pushes the hat back on his head. “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why keep on going to school?”

  “Well …” Dorian half shrugs. “Because …”

  “You’re majoring in English, you said.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And what’s that going to do for you?”

  “Well, you know, Shakespeare …”

  “Look, Dorian, come with me to L.A. Seriously. I can introduce you to my cousin.”

  “I have to finish my undergrad degree this year.”

  “Fuck it.”

  “Seriously? You sort of mentioned that in the car.” In truth, Dorian has been fantasizing about the idea ever since. It’s wild. On the Road, Kerouac, Cassady, Ginsberg, Catcher in the Rye. Holden Caulfield. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Merry Pranksters. You’re either on the bus or off the bus. Yeah, fuck it! Get the fuck out of here. Blow this town. Be on the bus. Hollywood! Hooray for Hollywood, Where you’re terrific if you’re even good. Dorian suddenly can’t breath. He’s breathless, his heart races. Yes, he should do this! He’s been offered a choice. This is his choice. This is how his life shall be from this moment on. Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less travelled by, And that has made all the difference. All the difference.

  He breathes again. Yes! He will go to California. With Paul.

  But Dorian is wrong. Going to California with Paul is not the choice that will shape his life. That choice comes with a phone call and the phone is ringing now.

  13

  The ancient skeleton key misses the hole, scraping along the metal plate. Tremors fumble Lydia’s fingers. The last time she turned this key she turned it counterclockwise, the final act in the ritual of closing Eadon Lodge and the ritual end of one kind of life. She has a sense memory of doing so, even after thirty-nine years. She needs to turn the key clockwise now, once she steadies her hand. The sun, hot, high, beats down on her back. One foot holds the screen door ajar.

  The key finds the hole, turns (awkwardly, trickily; she remembers this, too), and the heavy wooden door, its varnish cracked by weather and age, swings away from the frame into the shadows of the kitchen. Lydia remains rooted on the stoop as the aroma of warmed dust and warmed wood—the cottage smell—assails her nostrils and sets crashing around her wave upon wave of memories.

  She takes a breath and steps over the threshold. The screen door slaps shut behind her. Musty heat pours along the exposed skin of her face and arms and legs. No window has been opened in more than a month. No blind. To now dark-adapted eyes, the kitchen seems to simmer in a grey light, everything is a grey shape, the counter a grey surface onto which she drops her bag. She reaches for the blind over the window—again the sense memory; it’s like reaching for it in a dream—and pulls. The blind flies up with a vicious bang. Lydia jumps, though she knows every damn blind in the place snaps like a firecracker when it’s opened. Light floods into the galley space. Her galloping heart slows as she look
s around—in astonishment, though she doesn’t know why should be astonished. She didn’t expect anything to have changed, and so it hasn’t. Nothing has changed. It’s still the same. Okay, there’s a microwave, sitting atop the old wood stove, but everything else—everything else—is as she left it August 31, 1969. Her eyes run to the Depression glass butter dish, to the spoon cradle, to the yellow Art Deco dinnerwear. God!

  She moves quickly into the dining room—yes, unchanged—through the double doors into the living room—snap snap snap of more blinds—stopping to yank at the sliding windows either side of the old desk. Wood against wood, they squeak in their frames, slightly warped, resisting, but they do open. Fresh air sweeps through the screens, flutters a Chatelaine magazine on the desk. She glimpses the date—June 2008. Her mother’s final visit, she realizes with a pang.

  A quick glance around tells her nothing has changed in the living room either, but here memories are sharpest and she doesn’t linger, though it will be the logical place to meet with Carol Guttormson, the real estate agent, scheduled to arrive shortly. She goes into the second bedroom, steps onto an old wooden tool chest, reaches up, as if it were yesterday, as if her movements were the most natural in the world, and pulls at a lever on a fuse box high on the wall. There’s another snap, a metallic one. The cottage seems to shudder to life as electricity cascades along the ancient wiring, though it’s only the old Monitor refrigerator trembling in the kitchen giving the floor a shake. Lydia’s ears prick to something nearer, though—the faint pop of light bulbs switching on. The wall in front of her flushes gold. Her mother must have left the electrolier in the living room on when she shut off the electricity. Why? Why did she have that lamp on? Both of them always hated the stark, cruel light it cast over the living room, but Lydia hates the lamp and its light more, much more. It stalks her dreams. She steps off the chest, backs out of the bedroom, and feels for the switch on the near wall. The room behind her returns to natural light and the high ceiling retreats into shadow, as does the electrolier.

  Lydia returns to the kitchen, turns the tap, and watches the water spurt and thrash into the sink, another cottage sound as familiar as the screen door’s slap. She takes the same skeleton key, opens the front door from the inside, unlatches the screen door and looks to the lawn, which appears to have been recently cut. Marion must have some arrangement with someone—a lawn service, a teenager—to keep at least the grass kempt. Perhaps this Carol person will know so she can settle the bill.

  Has the lawn shrunk? The property seems rearranged, like a familiar room with new furniture. A thicket of scrubby poplar trees has overtaken the southeast lawn where two big spruce trees stood in stately glory. Her grandfather planted them—one for each son at his birth. There was the Bibs tree. And there was the Lits tree. This is where the hammock once stretched, strung between the two trees. One is gone. (Which one? Which was which?) A spring storm twenty years before—she recalls this now, her mother told her on the phone: Eadon Lodge narrowly missed in the fall. The surviving spruce, towering above the newer poplar, leans a bit precariously. Impacted by that storm? Maybe. Funny Bibs not attending to it, to that picturesque corner, where he’d wanted his ashes strewn.

  The caragana hedge between the property and the lake is intact, she notes, pushing through the screen door onto what used to be a stoop, now part of a deck that Marion had wrapped around the south and east sides of the cottage. She turns, walks down the deck and looks northeast, toward the sleeping cottage–tool shed. It appears unchanged, almost a child’s version of Eadon Lodge. Northwest of the cottage, at a little distance, is the site of the old outhouse. Lydia hesitates. She didn’t—willfully didn’t—turn her head to look in that direction when she walked from the car, parked southwestish of the cottage, but now she finds herself helplessly drawn there. She must see, for surely it’s all changed, surely roots and branches have overtaken the sod Alan laid nearly four decades ago, as they have elsewhere on the property, encroaching, subsuming, transforming, disguising—doing what nature does when it’s left untrammelled.

  What brought Alan back here that grey morning, their final one at Eadon Lodge? Why did he bother? He—like Dorian, like Paul—had avoided the task set them, to shovel soil delivered earlier and piled under a tarpaulin into the cavity where the outhouse had been. She remembers her simmering annoyance: the boys found common cause only over one thing—not breaking a sweat anywhere but on the beach.

  “We’ll get to it,” Alan said in his hectoring way, but they never did, the three of them.

  What impressions did Alan take away with him that last morning when he departed? He arrived unannounced because Eadon Lodge had no phone. Lydia, wakeful, memory of the evening just passed fresh, beating along her nerves, heard some vehicle pull onto the gravel west of the cottage, heard the chunk of a car door’s closing, heard advancing footsteps—a man’s footsteps—and felt that her heart leaping into her mouth was the only thing keeping her from screaming.

  Police!

  Though this afternoon is hot, Lydia shivers in memory of that morning. Dorian is next to her in the bed, dead to the world. Her eyes dart to his slack features as her ears strain to the sounds outside. The screen door pulled from its hinge. The door handle rattling. A pause. A knock. Dorian stirs in the tangled sheets. God, how it comes back to her! She remembers her inability to move, her desperation to suppress her ragged breathing, as if it could be heard through the walls. Only when she realizes her father’s Buick and Dorian’s Volkswagen declare their presence does she slip from the bed, reach for her dressing gown draped over the iron bedstead, and tiptoe across the cold linoleum toward the front door, unnerved at the floor’s every creaking protest.

  A second knock, a pause filled by the skittering of some small animal on the roof, a scrape of shoes along the steps. Lydia holds her breath. A shadow flicks past the window over the dining room table. Who’s there? She can’t tell.

  She prays for whoever it is to go away. She hovers in the shadow of the door in indecision, her ears attuned to the sounds of the creature’s movements—in her feverish state she thinks of it as a creature—the swish along the grass, the crunch along a few dried leaves, the snap of low-hanging branches. The footfalls fade, dopplerish, but not in the direction from which they came.

  And then Lydia hears it. The ugly scrape of metal on metal. The shovels! She and Dorian had left the blade of one cupped in the blade of the other on the grass and someone is pulling them apart. Sick with fright, Lydia tiptoes back through the living room, to one of the two small windows on the north wall, and peers through a slit in the curtains.

  Alan.

  The relief that almost makes her faint lasts but a second. Alan is lifting the shovel. As she did last night, she realizes she must steel her nerves. She tightens the belt of the dressing gown, crosses the floor once again, slides back the bolt of the inner door—slowly, cautiously, so as not to wake Dorian—and slips out, closing it behind her gently. She navigates the stairs, gripping the wobbly balustrade, suddenly conscious of being lightheaded, her feet plunging into the cool damp of the lawn. She follows the trail through the dew already forged by Alan.

  “Good morning.” Lydia lets her intonation rise, as if her greeting’s a question, a matter of debate.

  “You did the deed, I see.” Alan turns to her. She must have started, for he frowns and adds, as if for clarification, “You filled in the hole.”

  Lydia feels his eyes searching her face. His frown deepens. She wonders what he’s drawing from her appearance. She must look strained; she senses her hair a tangle, and later, when she can look in the bathroom mirror she sees, yes, what he saw, a bruising around the eyes, a raw scraping over her forehead, a pallor below the tan.

  “Yes … well, it … had to be done, didn’t it? Is that why you came this morning?”

  Alan grunts, takes another assessing glance at her face, but he makes no response. Alanna’s sent him, Lydia
thinks. She’s the one feeling contrite about the misadventure with the shotgun. He’s annoyed it’s a wasted trip. “They could have done a better job.”

  “We don’t have your great working-class experience,” she says, smiling thinly.

  “We?”

  “I helped. Dorian did most of the work.”

  “What? No Paul?”

  Lydia inhales sharply. “Yes, he helped. Of course he helped.”

  “Yeah, right.” Alan’s mouth twists. His eyes slip past Lydia’s shoulders to the sleeping cottage.

  “They’re asleep.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure they are. Did you tamp the soil?”

  “Tamp?”

  “You know, pack it down with something—the back of the shovel, something?—as you filled the hole.” Alan jabs the shovel end into the soil; Lydia blanches. “You didn’t, did you. You know that soil settles? No? Well, it will and you’re going to have a hollow. You’ll get a hollow anyway, but not so bad a one if you’d done the job properly.”

  Go away, Alan. Lydia remembers wanting to slap his smug face then. She’d ignored his sanctimony through two years of university. A week in closer quarters was more than she could bear.

  “Look, I can try and fix it, dig some of the soil out and tamp the rest down.”

  “No!” The word explodes from lips with such force that Alan’s head jerks back. “No. If … if you could just lay the sod.”

  “Okay, all right.” He raises his palms in supplication. Lydia remembers him looking around the property, brow furrowed, nose crinkled, as if he smelled something rotten. “Your funeral. With your father, I mean.”

  She has to get rid of him. “It’s kind of early, Alan …”

  “Yeah?”

  “I wouldn’t mind going back to bed.”

  “How about some coffee?”

  Alan’s eyes travel to her chest. She draws the dressing gown tighter around her. “We’re fresh out.”