Paul Is Dead

by C. C. Benison

  Dorian drops their lunch, the camera, and his own towel on the blanket. Shucks his T-shirt. His swimsuit too? In a minute. He sits down, ignoring the hard sand beneath the old blanket, and lets his eyes photocapture the perfection of the moment, the lake calm, Paul motionless, time stilled.

  Soon Paul will turn and see him on the blanket. He will wave and gesture for Dorian to join him and Dorian will, eagerly, the calm waters breaking into ripples around him. He will remove his swimsuit. They will horseplay like a couple of innocent boys until the lakewater’s cold becomes too much to endure and drives them onto the searing sand, first Dorian, who will snatch up the camera and take a picture. They will fall onto the blanket. Paul will open Dead Men Tell No Tales where his swimsuit, next to the dope, will fall out.

  And the world will fall away.

  26

  “I came back to Winnipeg for the first time in 1978 when Nan died,” Dorian says to Lydia. “It was the first funeral I’d ever attended, strange to say. I was what? Twenty-nine? The committal was awful. I didn’t realize ‘committal’ meant ‘burial’. I suppose I’d blinded myself to the facts. Thank god there was a toilet in the little church.

  “But what I remember most is waking up the next morning to find Dey chopping down the apple tree in the backyard, one my grandmother loved. He was in a complete fury, face red, swinging away at that beautiful tree.”

  He is telling Lydia bits of this story as they sit in a the old Adirondack chairs at Eadon Lodge under the shade of another tree—an ancient spruce—awaiting a verdict that will direct their morning, if not the remainder of their lives. Watching his aged grandfather savage the tree, watching the leafy crown topple onto the lawn to a sickening rustle, drove home to him the awful power of grief, and how he was forced to repress his own.

  He’s not sure why he’s telling Lydia this stuff. Nerves? Partially. He’s mired in dread. He’s been off his game at Morningstar Cove much of the week, garbling lines, forgetting others, missing cues. It’s the weekend now, the week after the Icelandic Festival. Mark returned to Vancouver the day before. Lydia spent the week in Winnipeg. The Oxford Street house sold quickly, for a little over asking price, the new owners taking possession September 1. Dorian has a chainsaw next to his chair. He bought it at a Home Hardware along the highway south of town.

  “I remember that tree,” Lydia murmurs, leaning forward to lift a bottle of Purell from her bag on the grass. “Your grandparents stood us there for grad pictures.”

  “I’d forgotten.” Dorian hasn’t really forgotten. The foolish, drunken, failed attempt to make love to her. He watches Lydia squirt the gel on her hands and rub them with ritual movement. She is as mired in dread as he, he can tell. Her sunglasses may be her shield, but he sees her eyes, dark against dark, darting toward the cottage again and again. A real estate agent is inside, with, it seems, a good prospect—if that’s what her thumbs-up gesture means.

  Lydia is mired in dread. She’s managed, barely, to distract herself during the week in last acts of dismantling her childhood home, but here, now, at Eadon Lodge, she can’t ignore the acid drip drip drip on the stone in the pit of her stomach as her eyes dart to Dorian’s chainsaw. Carol Guttormson’s presence may be nothing more than a reprieve and soon she and Dorian will be mired in a task so ghastly, so unbelievable, she has to remember to breathe.

  It’s in the hinterland between wakefulness and sleep that her mind slides helplessly to the details of exhumation, a clinical word she clings to, prefers to “digging up the body.” She knows there will be horror—sharp and nasty horror—and she tries not to dwell on detail, but questions howl in her head: What happens to an uncoffined body buried four decades? Bare bones and skull with rictus grin? A mummy with stretched and leathery skin? Something in between, spilling worms, swarming beetles? What about the soil? Will that make a difference? Paul was buried in topsoil, trucked in, not in whatever soil lies next to this glacial lake. What do forty prairie winters do to something six feet under? As sleep overtakes her, she imagines the rasp of the shovel blade along the soil, the denser tone when it strikes … touching it, lifting it … the smell, god, what will it smell like …

  Dorian has a tarp in the trunk of his car. He showed it to her. He has gloves, he has boots. He’s bought that chainsaw. He is prepared. They’ve talked on the phone this week, each call an intrusion into her hard-won equanimity. She is letting him take the lead, as she took the lead that fateful night. She, in either denial or hopefulness, has brought no heavy-duty work clothes with her from the city—but then she brought no heavy-duty work clothes with her from San Francisco. Why would she? She is dressed as if for a summer’s outing, shorts, a casual top—the strappy sandals are truly a mistake. You’re going to have to go into town and get something to wear, Dorian told her, his mouth a grim line.

  “Your grandfather chopping down the apple tree has an Old Testament resonance.”

  Dorian lifts an eyebrow. “Adam and Eve? Expulsion from paradise? Well, English was your major.”

  “Why did you bring it up?”

  “I think I was thinking more that my grandfather, in a eccentric, repressed Scots way, could at least give expression to his grief at the loss of someone he loved. I knew why he was doing what he was doing.”

  “And you couldn’t … over Paul.”

  “How could I?”

  “I suppose you did … in a way.”

  “In a way, in an unhealthy way, but let’s not go into it. Those cottage walls,” Dorian gestures with his cigarette, “are pretty thin.”

  Something like silence envelops them a moment. A bird caws. Leaves rustle. Carol and whoever she’s with—a youngish man; they were introduced—in the cottage make muffled noises. The walls are thin. Dorian tosses his cigarette butt into a bush and reaches in his pocket for the pack. There is no peace in the silence.

  “I don’t remember you smoking that much in college.”

  “I took it up more when I quit drinking. I had to do something with my hands.” Dorian begins the ritual—strike match, light ciggie, release satisfying first plume of smoke. “Christ,” he says tossing the match to the grass, on another train of thought, “we were naïve. So fucking naïve. Sometimes I read magazine articles or hear commentaries on TV about those years, the sixties and all the radical this and radical that and I think, what are they talking about? Do you remember that party scene we were in in And No Birds Sing? It’s 1968. We—the guys—are wearing suits, to a party, like our dads. And our hair, barely past short back and sides. It might have been 1958 or 1948.

  “Briony was the most naïve of us all. If she hadn’t caught us at it, then maybe—”

  “Caught you at what?”

  “Briony caught Paul and me with my tongue in his mouth.” Dorian glances at Lydia. “You mean she never told you? That day, you know, the day she and I went into town to buy groceries and a new clothesline? After we got back, you and she had lunch here, at the cottage, while Paul and I were at the beach by ourselves. When we came back, she—or you—had put all the towels and things that had fallen on the ground the night before back on the new clothesline, and so, thinking no one could see us hidden, we started fooling around—kissing. Briony saw us—inadvertently photographed us, actually. She was completely shocked. Can you imagine? In those days you could be completely shocked. Anyway, that’s why she insisted on going back to the city.”

  “She said she had a migraine.”

  “She said. Maybe one was on the way, but was she in the throes of it? You couldn’t have thought so, otherwise why did you let her take the Greyhound?”

  “Impatience, I suppose.. I wanted to get back here. I sensed the migraine was more excuse than anything, it’s true. But I didn’t care.”

  “You wanted to come back here and go to bed with Paul.”

  “Yes.”

  “Again.”

  “Yes.”

 
“And how was he?”

  “Dorian, does it matter? It’s been forty years.”

  “I’m curious.”

  “It was fine.”

  “I bet it was more than fine.”

  “All right. It was more than fine.”

  “Mrs. Peel, really, after that lunkhead Ross Whatsisname you went out with for eons, I’ll bet it was mind blowing, as we used to say in the olden days.” Dorian twists his head. “Jesus mothering Christ, how long does it take to assess 600 square feet of ancient cottage?”

  Lydia follows his eyes. She and Dorian arrived at Eadon Lodge almost simultaneously to find Carol Guttormson and her client, a rather short, chubby man with scruffy holiday beard wearing cargo shorts and a T-shirt with Crime Wave emblazoned on it. Second visit, Carol mouthed to Lydia, introducing him as Jonathan Black. He peered at Dorian as if he had seen him somewhere before and askance at the machine in Dorian’s hand.

  “We thought we’d clear some of the overgrowth,” Lydia said.

  “Oh, don’t do that,” Jonathan responded.

  A hopeful sign? Lydia thought so, said so to Dorian, but after Carol and the Boy Wonder disappeared into the cottage, he glass-half-emptied Lydia: A buyer—any buyer—could still flip it or sell off part of the acre it sat on or …

  But Lydia isn’t this moment thinking of the urgency of shucking Eadon Lodge. She’s thinking of Paul, once so alive. Yes, submitting to him in bed was mind blowing. He exuded sex in a way she hadn’t known before—in the way he breathed, in the gaze of his eyes and the parting of his lips. She’d been often turned off by physical stuff with boys, putting up with this or that, tying to overlook some clumsy manoeuvre. Ross had been eager in a taurine sort of way, but unimaginative, she finding only counterfeit satisfaction in his satisfaction—something she didn’t realize until Paul devoured her body in that very bed in the first bedroom in that cottage over there and carried her over the cliff edge of desire. She realized, even then, even in her naiveté, that his charm carried with it a whiff of something more dangerous. He was the Gothic lead, the antihero, the bad boy. Her first of that species. Her last, after what was to follow.

  “Was he your first?” she asks Dorian.

  “Was who my first what?”

  “What do you think I mean?”

  Dorian takes a drag of his cigarette. “First love. Is that what you mean?”

  “No, but it will do. You said something about love when I dropped you off from that horrible Halloween party I had. Do you remember? ‘I loved him,’ you said. Briony was a bit fixated on the past tense—loved.”

  “Was she. Funny old Briony. When you think about it, so much turned on her naiveté. She had never seen two men be … intimate before.”

  “Dorian, I had never seen two men be intimate before. And what an introduction I had.”

  “If I thought an apology would help, I’d give one.”

  “Besides, I think Briony was partly jealous … and confused… Do you know, ‘I loved him’ were the last words I heard you say until we met at Tergesen’s last week?”

  “I did. Love him, I mean. Strange—now, it’s only the memory of feelings I have, not the feelings. But my memory is … what? What cliché can I use? Where’s rewrite when you need it? A door opening? A blinding light on something that had been half in shadow? That’s Streetcar, by the way. It’s the charisma of first love, which can never come again, right? It doesn’t matter what flaws you realize later, what half-truths you learn later.”

  “Half-truths?”

  “I’ve told you I know his mother and … well, let’s just say he was more of a reckless teenager than you or I. His mother worried she’d told him too early how his father had died and that’s maybe why he was so … impetuous.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Paul was three or four when his father died early of Huntington’s, so there’s a fifty percent chance that he … Lydia?”

  Lydia feels the blood draining from her face. Or had a groan escaped her throat? Was it a groan that stopped Dorian, that set him staring at her with fierce consternation? Will she tell him now, now, that she had a child, who might be his, but—oh god in heaven—who might not be? Who might be out in the world, somewhere, near middle-age, perhaps with children of his own, unaware of a harrowing genetic legacy, perhaps experiencing the first insidious symptoms? She can’t stand this. How much longer can she hoard this secret? She opens her mouth to speak, but no words come forth. She strains. But she is saved—or thwarted—not by a bell, but by music. Dorian jerks his head toward the cottage.

  “What is that … that accordion sound?”

  Lydia finds words. She replies weakly, “I guess they’re trying out the Victrola.”

  “It’s … oh, Christ, Lydia, it’s ‘True Love.’ Cole Porter’s,” he adds to her puzzled frown. “From High Society. Bing. Grace.” And, more furiously, when her frown deepens: “We were playing it … that night … has nobody changed the record in forty years?”

  “I’ll get them to stop.”

  “Never mind. It’s stopped.”

  “You mean, that was what was playing when—”

  “Yes. Yes. You don’t remember? And it’s still on that turntable.”

  “Coincidence, surely …” Lydia remembers now the faint strains of accordion as she approached the cottage that evening, the song ending as it began, the record almost over by the time she slipped into the cottage. The choice of song to accompany what she saw seems to her now grotesque.

  “… although,” she continues, the moment for confession lost, grateful now for the distraction, “my father rarely put on a record here. I don’t know why. He played records all the time at home.” She regards Dorian picking at the paint on the chair. “Bibs was funny about the cottage. I’m not sure he ever enjoyed a minute here. I wonder why he didn’t just get rid of it after my grandfather died. If only he had.”

  Dorian’s fervent wish, too. He’s beginning to doubt his resolve. Executing what he’s planned all week in the cool of his rented cottage at Winnipeg Beach seems like madness now, like some scene out of a ‘B’ movie. He will cut the few skinny poplars, slash the few shrubby bushes, as soon as the Boy Wonder and Carol have gone. Then there’s stumps to dig out—or around. The spade is in the Petit Trianon. So is an axe. The chainsaw might prove useful in this, too. All this he can do in the afternoon and early evening—hopefully, though he has no real idea. He’s not assured he knows what he’s doing.

  And then …

  And then, at some hour, this evening, before the sun sets, he will fetch the motorboat he rented from its mooring at Gimli Harbour and bring around to the beach at the cottage. Shouldn’t be difficult. The lake is calm. Lydia will hold a lamp on the shore to guide the way.

  And then …

  And then, the digging will begin in earnest. Darkness will set in. The moon will only be half-full this August 9, not almost full like the day they buried Paul. Dorian takes a calming drag on his cigarette, but it doesn’t work. His guts recoil. Like Lydia’s, his imagination runs riot through the miasma of slime and sucking earth and filthy air, through the hours of exhausting labour—he is, god, what? fifty-nine years old—to find … what? Some iteration of a cadaver like a thing in an anatomy class? God, let there be clean pure bone. Let there be no hint of the flesh that once cushioned the bones. And please, let the ring be there, the peace ring. But, oh god, it will be encircling not flesh but bone. He feels his gorge rise.

  And then, the wrapping of the remains, in the tarp. Tying it. Tying it with weights, stones. (He has some in the back of the rental.) Then to the boat and the water where under cover of darkness they will … He takes a last drag on this last cigarette and flings it away. The morning is growing hot, but there’s a haze in the air—grain dust from nearby farms—hints of autumn. Shadows are tinged orange. It might be August 1969.

  �
��It was you who told me how my father really died.”

  “Did I? Oh, yes, I remember now. I’m sorry.”

  “You know, then,” Dorian says, “that my father killed himself after leaving this place, this cottage.”

  “Yes, I think I knew that. How do you know?”

  “The juxtaposition of dates. He signed the wall in there July 12, 1952. His obituary dates his death to the same day.”

  “Ah, yes, I remember you thinking it bad luck to sign the wall at the end of your visit, so you signed it on arrival.”

  “Why then? … I think I know the reason, though,” Dorian amends. He glances at Lydia. There’s an alertness in her eyes. “You know? You’ve always known.”

  “Not always, no. But something my father once said … about you, when we were around fourteen—it puzzled me at the time.”

  “Me? What …?”

  “A cliché—the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. It was only years later that I understood what he was suggesting.”

  “I got the truth out of my mother before she died. Still, even then, after all those years, she didn’t want to talk about it … but she didn’t deny it … so, your father knew … or suspected.”

  “They were in the war together, weren’t they? And medical school. Close quarters.”

  “You’re not suggesting …?”