“Yes?” Dorian frowns, puzzled.
“I work for a small press in Berkeley. Briony probably told you. The book isn’t very good.”
“Then why are you publishing it?”
“Corruption?”
“I don’t understand.”
“We were bought last year by a Silicon Valley billionaire. Obie Mouret. Ever heard of him?”
“Not something I follow.”
“He collects antiques, small presses being one of them. He’s relatively harmless—I think, never met the man—but he installed as publisher this creature with a degree from some MBA mill out east. She knows nothing of publishing, nothing of the audience for our books.”
“Which is?”
“Progressive, radical, intelligent, well-educated. She’s ignorant in most things, but she’s conniving and ambitious. Rumour is her child—she’s unpartnered—was fathered by a donation from Mouret.”
“You mean, he’s gay.”
Lydia nods and lifts her glass. “Do you mind my having a drink?”
“No.”
Lydia welcomes the first sip of gin sting her tongue. “Her first name is Melony. Spelled as in ‘Crenshaw.’”
“Her parents were hippies?”
“Or fruit lovers. However, behind her back, the staff call her ‘Cuntella.’”
“You, too?”
“Sometimes.”
“Lydia, I’m shocked.”
Lydia permits a small smile. “She wants us all gone so she can replace us with her own minions. So she sets us challenges. For me, it is to get this sixties book into quick production for next spring, for the fortieth anniversary of 1969. The book is mostly press clippings cobbled together. The writer is a friend of hers, someone with vague academic credentials and little authority on the subject—that’s the corruption. Our titles are typically peer-reviewed. Not this one. His thesis,” Lydia swirls the olive around the glass with the toothpick, “if you can call it a thesis, is that 1969 was the last utopian year of the last utopian decade of the utopian twentieth century.”
Dorian regards her as she lifts the olive and lets the drips fall back into her glass. “It might not be a thesis, but as an observation, it’s not completely off the mark,” he says, regarding the gin-soaked olive hungrily. “Why—”
“Am I telling you this?” Lydia returns the olive to the glass. “Do you remember that nonsense story from late ’69 about Paul McCartney having died and been replaced by a look-alike? ‘He blew his mind out in a car’? A wreath around his guitar on the Sgt. Pepper cover? The Abbey Road cover with Paul supposedly dressed as a gravedigger?”
“Yes.”
“The writer uses the end of the sunny Beatles as emblematic as that year’s descent into darkness—the Manson murders, Altamont, and so on. His title for the book—and it’s not a working title, it’s too late now—is …” Lydia pauses and quickly consumes the olive. She flicks Dorian a bleak glance. “The title is ‘Paul is Dead.’ There’s a subtitle to be devised, but ‘Paul is Dead’ is on the footer of every page of the manuscript. I can’t escape it. Paul is dead, Paul is dead, Paul is dead.”
“No exit.”
“Sartre?”
“What? Oh, the play? No Exit? I hadn’t thought of that. I mean … we can’t escape it, can we? But the characters in Sartre’s play couldn’t escape the hell they were in, either, could they. Could they? Didn’t we study it in O’Dell’s class?”
“I thought they thought if they confessed to their…”
“Crimes?” Dorian lowers his voice, leans in, smells again the seductive juniper in Lydia’s gin. “They did, they do, confess, but it makes no difference.” If only he could have a cigarette in a restaurant. “You’ve never … told anyone, have you? Let it slip?”
“I’ve wanted to, but no.” Lydia thinks about those first months living in San Francisco, the misery of her self-imposed purdah in the apartment in the dark winter when Helen’s kindness and concern almost—almost—brought her to the brink of telling all. “You?”
“No.”
“Not even under the influence?” Lydia taps the side of her martini glass.
“No.”
“Doesn’t drink loosen the tongue?”
“Only for the casual drinker. Why? Did you think that I would?”
“I don’t know, Dorian. You virtually disappeared that fall and then you were—”
“Hospitalized. Just before Christmas. I had what Mark would call an ‘acute episode of post-traumatic stress disorder.’ What you and I would call a nervous breakdown.”
“I know. I think everyone knew.”
“None of my old friends visited.”
“My father did.”
“I remember. Your father didn’t exactly have a bedside manner.”
“He was a surgeon. Even he admitted they were all bastards, not that Bibs was really…”
“Your father was a hard case, Lydia. I couldn’t figure out why he was visiting me. I never thought he liked me. Actually, I can’t recall him saying very much.” Dorian runs his finger around the rim of his glass. “Did he ever say anything to you … afterwards?”
There is a second or two in which Lydia thinks she will tell him: She will tell Dorian she had a baby. She will tell him she was the one of the unlucky less than one percent who get pregnant with an IUD. She will tell him her father could calculate with the best of them, that he reckoned her pregnancy to August, to Eadon Lodge, where only two boys (he thought) were in residence and one of them tethered to a woman he would marry a year later. She will tell Dorian her father visited him on the psych ward to inspect this boy that simple elimination told him got his little girl into trouble. She will tell him Bibs reported nothing beyond the fact of his visit; she read the adjudication in his face as he read the fear and shame in hers. But something restrains her. She cannot open this door, not now. There is too much else.
“You knew my father,” she replies. “A man of few words and I can’t remember what they were anyway. But I do remember being … worried you might say something to the psychiatrist.”
“No.” Dorian frowns, repeats the word. “No.”
“I had panic attacks that year. I found I couldn’t sit in the front row of the lecture hall, but if I sat at the back somehow it was worse. The backs of everyone’s heads would—”
“Remind you of the back of Paul’s?”
“Perhaps. It was as if I could see their squashy brains.”
“Lydia…”
“It only stopped when I moved away. You moved away, too.”
“I couldn’t imagine living here. I had a friend—you remember Blair Connon, who was in And No Birds Sing?—he’d enrolled at York University’s theatre program. Somehow, miraculously, I got in, too. Took six years to complete a three-year course, but…”
“You were married.”
“Yes. Why…?”
“Oh, just—”
“Seemed like a good idea at the time.” Dorian doesn’t know why he’s explaining. It was the seventies. It was a confusing period. The marriage was lavender. She was a lesbian.
“Do you have any money?”
“You mean, beyond paying for these drinks?”
“Yes, serious money, wealth.”
“What does that have to do with being married?”
“Nothing, I suppose. I was just thinking about sources of money—divorce settlements being one.”
“Well, not in my case. Lydia, I’m an actor—a Canadian actor—a grafter. Blair gave up and went into real estate.”
“Your grandparents were rich. They were Old Money. We were the arrivistes. My grandfather was a railway worker. Yours was a grain family. You must have inherited.”
“My grandparents died thirty years ago.” Dorian has an inkling of where this conversation is going, but it’s t
oo late to backpedal. “Why are you asking?”
“Buy Eadon Lodge.”
“Good god, no.”
“But then the risk—you know what I mean—would be gone.”
“But, Lydia, I have no money, not that kind of money.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure. You remember my grandfather, old Scots Presbyterian tightwad that he was. Do you really think he’d have his descendants not know the value of hard work? The Winnipeg Foundation got the lion’s share. I got a little, enough to pay back my student loans, with a little left over. That’s it.”
“How much left over?”
“Enough for a small down payment on a house in Toronto.”
“You own a house.”
“I co-own a house. My ex-wife and I still own it together. I lived in it for a time, but now we rent it out. It provides the only regular revenue I have.”
“You could sell your share to your ex-wife.”
“She hasn’t got a lot of money. She writes fiction—Canadian fiction, does a little TV. I doubt she’d want to saddle herself with another mortgage to buy my half.”
“Then sell your half to someone else.”
“Jesus, Lydia.”
Dorian can sense her desperation—it matches his own—and silence holds them prisoner a moment. Each imagines the peril in selling Eadon Lodge to a stranger, even to an enthusiast for the quaint and idiosyncratic. Once you’ve sold a property, you’ve lost control over it—and then what follows? Lydia imagines the knock on the door, the dreaded phone call; she has never, foolishly, taken American citizenship. Would that protect her deportation, prosecution, punishment? How she has pushed Eadon Lodge from her mind all these years. Dorian imagines the auto-da-fé, the public burning, but more: the woman across from him with furrowed brow and pinched mouth not Lydia, but Dix pushed to the front of the crowd, to the seat of judgment. But comes another thought, this one more promising. He pushes his chair back. It scrapes along the floor. He says, “I have another idea.”
21
Dorian and Lydia glance at the yellow police tape flashing in the sun and wordlessly pass on. Silence has been their companion since leaving the pub where Lydia fell in with Dorian’s idea—leapt on it, if truth be told. Dorian’s less sanguine about success, wondering if he’s deluding himself, deluding her, but he’s always felt the guiltier, the one responsible, the initiator.
Why did you ever bring him here? Lydia had groaned that terrible evening, her stricken features flamed and distorted in the last rays of the sun as Dorian placed Paul’s body in its purple shroud onto the grass. And Dorian had no answer, because there was no answer and because there was no way to change anything and because he was in such shock that no words could slip past his knotted tongue.
“I have to tell you,” Lydia said at the pub as each dug in pocket or purse for money to settle the bill, “that I did once, years ago, when the Internet was introduced, look to see if there was any record, any mention, any thing about Paul Godwin. I could hardly breathe, my heart was beating so, but I could find nothing.”
“That’s because…” Dorian snatched the bill slip from her. “Paul introduced himself to us using his middle name as his last. His full name was Paul Godwin Radcliff.”
“How do you know that? Dorian?”
“Shhh!” He didn’t want to say, but had to: he told her about his friendship with Dixie-May Lang. “It became unbearable, finally—and that’s part of the reason I relocated to Vancouver. I seemed to awaken something in her about her long-lost son, some vain hope that he was alive somewhere. Good god, Lydia, I’ve sat through all those conversations, all those dinners, and parties all the while knowing Paul’s fate. It was agony. And, of course, I couldn’t bear for her to know now. To know that I know and have known all along.”
“Jesus.”
“He had a true story, he had a backstory, he had a mother.”
“But so much was … fiction.”
“It was the sixties, Lydia. He was young, it was fun, it was the fashion to appear déclassé, to affect being proletarian, to show you weren’t some spoiled upper-class kid. What does it matter what he said about himself? What does it matter what kind of person he was? What does it matter what he did when he was alive? He’s dead.”
Dorian and Lydia pass a building of noticeable ill-proportion—a squat combination of fake half-Tudor timbering and a mansard roof. Dorian’s calming himself with a cigarette. He squints at what appears to be a hand-lettered sign next to the door through a plume of smoke. GIMLI HOTEL.
“Is this,” he says to Lydia with wonder, recalling Alanna’s finickiness, “where Alan and Alanna went the day after?”
He doesn’t have to say to Lydia the day after what. The day after Alan shot Paul in the arm is what. Late the next morning Alan and Alanna packed up the tent and departed Eadon Lodge. For good, back to Winnipeg, thought Dorian, who was absent in the town with Briony buying a new clothesline, and good riddance, until two days later he awoke in Lydia’s bed, previous evening’s horror crashing through his head, to hear Alan’s braying voice outside the cottage walls, his offer to help fill the old outhouse hole.
“They went to the Viking, the motel by the highway,” Lydia says. “I think it was mostly old fishermen and farmers who came here.”
“Why didn’t they just go back to the city? Why did they check into a hotel in Gimli?”
“Can’t you guess?”
Dorian grunts. “Of course—sex.”
“In our day, our parents didn’t let us do it under their roofs, did they? Alanna and Alan didn’t come up to Eadon Lodge for the beachfront. Besides, the atmosphere at the cottage took a turn after Alan shot Paul.”
“If only he had never taken that shotgun off the wall. And it was loaded. How long had that shot been in the gun? Amazing it worked.”
“If only Paul had never filled those water pistols. Dorian, we can go on like this forever—an unending chain of regret.”
“Then why did Alan come back that next morning?”
“I didn’t know you knew.”
Dorian shrugs, looks up the street. “Where the hell is Mark?”
“Alan was … chastened, I’m guessing.” Lydia glances at her watch; they’re late for Mark. “In the circumstances, he was gracious, don’t you think? Paul.”
“Possibly.”
“He could have gone to the police. The RCMP has a detachment here. He probably should have gone to the hospital. Instead, he took it out on that man who appeared with the dog.”
“Elvis.”
“Perhaps your friend’s gone inside the store.”
“I’ll go and see.” Dorian drops his cigarette butt on the pavement.
Lydia frowns. “Dorian…” she begins, reaching for his arm, “You two are common-law, yes? So you’re entitled—”
“I know what you’re going to say,” Dorian interrupts, the touch of her hand reminding him strangely of their last night together. “We have a contract, Mark and I. His parents insisted on it before giving him the house in Vancouver. They don’t much care for me.” He affects a grin. “I’ve gone out of my way to charm their tight little asses off when they visit. I’m too old and too … impecunious for their precious spawn, and the old-Winnipeg-money Grant name cuts no ice in London, Ontario. So, no, it’s all his. I pay rent.”
“Will you know your way to Eadon Lodge?”
“I travel there in my nightmares, Mrs. Peel.”
Dorian is acting cheerful, like a parent on a child’s first day at school. Mark is the child.
“You’ll like it,” he says as they fold themselves into Dorian’s rented Lexus turned furnace in the heat. “Eadon Lodge has a sort of private beach.”
“I was hoping to be on the public beach,” Mark says, as Dorian starts the car and sets the air conditioning to high. “Might be some eye candy
.”
“Don’t be grumpy, sweetheart.”
“I’m not being grumpy.”
“It’s a family beach, not Wreck Beach. You’re not going to see hot men parading their wares up and down the sand here.” Dorian realizes he’s sounding a tad testy and he needs to keep Mark sweet. He affects a theatrical chuckle: “How about I strip down and show you my wares?”
“I’ve seen them plenty.” Mark glances past Dorian toward the Gimli Theatre marquee. The Dark Knight. He saw it last month with Hugh, a first date. “Besides, what would your friend think?”
“Lydia?” Concentrating on a turn, he says something he immediately regrets: “She’s seen me naked.”
Silence descends for a Gimli street length or two and soon they are over a small bridge into Loney Beach. Dorian has gone this route in black and twisted dreams, but today it’s a pleasant green tunnel, the road marshalled with cottages, some old, small, and quaint—relics of times past—others big and ostentatious—not that he’s really paying close attention. He’s much more aware of a growing anxiety, a prickling along his skin, a stone in his stomach as he retraces this route to a place he never expected to see again in his lifetime.
“You mean,” Mark says after a pause, interrupting his thoughts, “she’s the one you slept with at grad, in high school.”
“What?”
“Lydia. Your last remark.”
“Yup.”
A lie, the same lie he told Paul. The deed was attempted graduation night, the culmination of years of flawed yearnings and false expectations, a whole mishmash of delusions that culminated in such an awkward choreography that, frankly, Dorian would rather not revisit.
Improbably—after that humiliating experience—the deed, so-called, was done at Eadon Lodge. On that last night, their terrible task finished, after they burned Paul’s few effects in the old oil drum where days earlier they had toasted marshmallows over the flames of the wood from the razed outhouse, Lydia pushed his mud-streaked, aching body into the shower—the white-upright-coffin shower that Marion insisted Bibs install in the new indoor bathroom—and stepped in herself, catching him before he collapsed into a fetal ball along the soapy floor. The warm water, Lydia’s ministrations, accepted helplessly, let loose a tidal flow of hot grief. He howled, howled like an abandoned dog. Dorian remembers it now, painfully, remembers that first wet burst of tears, feeling as if his face would rip apart, and wished he didn’t remember—wished Mark had never asked his question. As Lydia cleaned him and held him, his salty tears mixing with snot, all of it running down his face as the water streamed from above, he found himself erect and in a moment pushing into her with the unconscious hunger of an animal. Weeping and fucking, fucking and weeping: Dorian remembers it like a sick yesterday. And later, Lydia wrapping him in cotton sheet, how like a shroud, and placing him in her bed where he collapsed into a deep sleep that he would never again have.
Paul Is Dead Page 17
