Paul Is Dead

by C. C. Benison

  Lydia’s head falls against the pillow. She’s feeling mentally exhausted, on the verge of surrendering—gratefully—to slumber, but just as the balm of sleep comes over her, a new and terrible thought jolts her awake. She pushes it away. It will not go. Memories crowding her mind now, she slides from bed, careful not to wake Misaki, barely conscious of her movements, and pads across the rug to the window overlooking the back garden. She sees not the lemon tree which produced the garnish for last night’s martini; she sees the old spruces in Eadon Lodge’s yard, the childish cryptogram in that old novel, her father at Eadon Lodge: moody, taciturn, restless, slipping into town to have a drink at the hotel, her mother frazzled and exasperated. Bibs resisted alteration to the cottage, surrendering to some novelty only when Marion turned virago. Nostalgia? A refusal to spend good money, child-of-the-Depression that he was? And Marion: all those years petitioning him to buy a summer home at Lake of the Woods or Falcon Lake or Wasagaming—somewhere pretty and prominent, where her smart friends gathered. Then, after his death, her conversion to Eadon Lodge. Despite her age, she could have sold it, bought a new place, and, inveterate renovator to her death, gone giddy redecorating. What changed her mind?

  And now, with a clarity that leaves her gasping, she sees that Bibs didn’t cherish the cottage. He hated it. It was no haven. It was hell. A hell he had to endure. And, like his daughter decades later, he didn’t dare sell it to anyone he couldn’t trust to leave it be.

  But would she ever know for certain?

  It’s the Sunday morning the weekend before Christmas and Ray is running his hand along Lydia’s lovely back. How many accumulated hours of their marriage has he spent in bed stroking Lydia’s body? Who’s counting? This morning, however, as his hand moves up and over the smooth surface toward her breasts, he startled by an unfamiliar sensation along his fingertips. Her ribs feel … well, they feel different, more defined.

  Lydia is half not in slumber. She senses the shift in Ray’s gentle motions, his fingers now firmer, more exploratory, like her doctor’s at Kaiser Permanente when she went for her general check-up. Dr. Chen didn’t register any particular change in Lydia’s appearance. How could she? She sees forty patients a day, and Lydia perhaps twice a year. But she did notice a weight loss on her chart. Stress, Lydia said, before Dr. Chen could even think about ordering a raft of tests. She says nothing to Ray.

  Ray says nothing to her. He locks his qualm away. Women always seem to be dieting, anyway, and perhaps Lydia is, too—though he suspects stress. She has been wan, more preoccupied than usual these last weeks. He is alert to her work situation, of course, the skirmishes with Cuntella. He is the cheerful vessel into which she pours her disgust when she returns home from Berkeley every evening. This year they’ll have a winter holiday. Mexico. Hawaii. Get her out of the office. Get some sun on her bones.

  It’s true: Countervail Press’s work atmosphere is progressing from noxious to toxic as Cuntella insinuates herself into its every function. Her fixations—or perhaps Obie Mouret’s, hard to know—seem to ride herd over every editorial decision. Manson left last week. His partner, an HR manager with Chipotle, was transferred to Denver, but Cuntella’s assigning him to a hagiographic treatment of Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy was the last straw anyway. Manson, god love him, told Her Highness, whose adipose bottom happened to be squeezed into leather riding pants that day, to fuck herself and the horse she came in on. He stormed out. She had him photoshopped out of the annual report’s “Countervail Press Team” picture spread.

  Losing her work-husband, her ally, is foreground trouble—almost, if truth be told, a useful distraction, a practical task to be solved: the hiring of a replacement. What thrums in the background, hums along her taut nerves, is the ruin of an ancient cottage fifteen hundred miles away, a blackened spectre covered now in the snow that began falling at Halloween. She has heard nothing from the RCMP. Sgt. Sinclair has not phoned again. The little fillip of press attention paid to the uncovered bones seems to have vanished in a world in thrall to novelty. Is this a good thing? Is this a bad thing? If silence can be sinister, then the silence from north of the 49th parallel is just that. Briony phoned Advent Sunday, but her news, sad, was of Ted’s decline. Lydia commiserated, made no mention of the Thanksgiving storm. She talked with Dorian in Vancouver who, unremarkably, had heard nothing of the weather event in Manitoba. “Bad news, Mrs. Peel,” he said tonelessly, though she could hear his ragged breath. “Very bad news.”

  It’s the snow, the snow that smothers that Arctic country, bringing a halt to everything. Nothing will be resume until the frozen lake and frozen land crawl out from under the dead hand of winter. Meanwhile, she eats less. She picks her way through Christmas dinner with Helen and Joe and the girls. She picks, too, at the skin along her thumbs, leaving them raw and bruised. Erin notices. She and Ray trade notes. She’s covering everything in the fridge now—even the jars and bottles—with Saran Wrap. She had Ray wave, rather than blow, his birthday candles out, and her tidying up after Misaki is compulsive. It’ll be paper seats on the toilet next.

  The garage is on the ground floor of Lydia and Ray’s house, the living quarters are above—classically San Franciscan. But neither has a car, so the garage is a dank repository of the detritus of modern life. Not for long. Months of to-ing and fro-ing with the city bureaucracy over permits and plans mean the renovation can begin at the end of the month. Erin is eager for a place of her own, but Ray knows his daughter and granddaughter are unlikely to be tenants forever. The flat will eventually be a revenue generator, much needed with their 401Ks severely compromised and some sort of retirement sooner than later for at least one of them. Lydia eyes the clutter over the top of the box of Christmas decorations she’s returning to one of the shelves, which will need emptying in advance of the builders. The joy of having Erin and Misaki in the house for the holidays has strained their pocketbooks, as it often does anyway, which makes Lydia even more desperate to find a way to raise money without arousing Ray’s notice. It’s impossible. If she went to him, she could more explain why she needs a six-figure sum than she could argue for not selling Eadon Lodge last summer. That would be confession.

  It’s January 6, a Tuesday, the end of the annual twelve-day Christmas break Countervail Press takes. The temperature is fifty-five degrees and the sky in the Outer Sunset is patched with grey cloud. It’s pleasant with a light jacket. In Manitoba, the weather is bitterly cold, several degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Unpleasant even in a parka. Lydia knows this. Like some glazed-eyed porn addict, she finds herself drawn to her computer screen, sending her search engine on the lookout for news of bones and bodies and cops in the north, and finds only the plummeting temperatures.

  Her eyes fall on her thumbs as she pushes the box of decorations onto the low shelf. The skin is like torn apple skins where she’s chewed. She’s begun picking at the skin along her feet, too, and they are now two walls of diseased flesh. No one but Ray sees that. This activity is new. She’s never done this before. It’s like she’s some sort of neurotic teenage girl cutting herself. She knows this but can’t seem to stop herself. Only when Ray gently takes her hand and pushes it away from her feet does she stop. For a few minutes. Helen wonders, but does not enquire, if she isn’t experiencing a kind of delayed grief for the child she gave away all those years ago. Is it possible? Sometimes she can’t imagine anything worse than going to your grave wondering where your baby is. The rest of them—Ray, Erin, assorted colleagues—blame it on the tension at the office, mad crazy Cuntella, she of the batshit stare and clown makeup and leather pants driving Lydia to breakdown. She lets them think this is true. It’s convenient.

  She glances at the adjacent box, one of several, marked with felt pen, her own elegant printing, and an inelegant description: Oxford Street Stuff. Papers and photo albums and oddities never sorted. Is now the time? Why not? Ray is working in his home office at the back of the house and with the odds and sods of t
he holiday season cleared up, she’s at loose ends. The box is sealed with packing tape, but Lydia takes a battered screwdriver from Ray’s work bench and tears open the seal. An aroma of must and dust rises to her nostrils, but something else, too, some tincture of the Oxford Street house, a powerful conjuring of beeswax polish and fresh paint that sets off a wave of unaccountable sadness, her eyes misting as she pulls back the box’s flaps. A Freemason’s apron is on top, covering Bibs’s framed medical degrees, his eyeglasses, his wallet, a purple felt Crown Royal bag filled with old coins, a wooden box with his watch, rings, and cufflinks.

  She digs a little deeper—many of the things are from her father’s den. She finds again the stationery letterheaded WINNIPEG GENERAL HOSPITAL with the crude bird’s-eye of Eadon Lodge and the “X” that so alarmed her she’d put it away, as she’d put it from her mind all these months. Her heart judders a moment, but now she sees the X marks a spot not to the north of the cottage, where Paul was buried, but to the south, roughly the location of the tree downed in that Thanksgiving storm, roughly where Bibs had originally wanted his ashes scattered. She releases a held breath. Perhaps that’s all this drawing ever was, a prompt to his heirs from a senescent man.

  Really, why is she holding on to these things? Deal with them now, or put it all back in the box and let the dust gather? She lifts the case Helen plucked from the back of the cupboard in Bibs’s den. Is it a briefcase? It looks almost like an old-fashioned suitcase a child might have, it’s so small. Of course, it’s as locked as it was in Winnipeg, key missing. She considers the screwdriver. The case is worth nothing, has no utility, holds no sentiment. She wedges the tip of the screwdriver under one snap and pulls sharply. It doesn’t give easily, but after several yanks and a bash with a hammer, it unlatches with a meaty thunk. The second snap gives way with more ease, and the lid is freed.

  It is a briefcase.

  From inside, Lydia lifts to the grey light of the garage a beaded metal chain with a couple of steel disks attached, one red, one green, with Bibs’s name and number embossed, what appear to be two silver war medals—one with George VI on one side, another with marching figures depicted—a bronze star with “The Italy Star” embossed on it, epaulettes likely taken from a uniform, a small well-thumbed book—a service and pay book, the cover says—and a silver cigarette case.

  And the soft bed on which those items rest?—letters, lots of letters.

  31

  “Rope came up on TV once, years ago. In the seventies. I was living with Helen, my cousin, then. The opening scene was enough. I couldn’t watch it.”

  “So no comps for you, Mrs. Peel.”

  “Thanks, but no, Dorian.” Lydia’s eyes move unwillingly to the artwork on the museum wall, one of Peter Max’s, colours so Popsicle-vivid, her queasiness grows. “I don’t know how you can bear to be in it.”

  “I play one of the guests, an older man. I’m not onstage until the second act. So I’m not part of that opening scene.” Dorian says nothing about his own fraught introduction to Rope in the early eighties. “What have you done to your hand? Eczema?”

  “No.” Lydia glances at her thumb. Her face—it shocked Dorian a little when she pulled off her rain scarf in the lobby—is drawn, skinny Minnie-ish. At least the bubblegum pinkness off the painting plumps it up a bit. “Just anxiety—response to. Everyone thinks it’s work related. I haven’t asked how you are. How are you?”

  “Fine.”

  “You look fine.”

  “Do I? Smell my breath.”

  “I noticed it when you hugged me earlier.”

  Dorian notes the worry and pity in her expression. “I’ve had a drink—”

  “I guessed.”

  “—or two.”

  “You seem okay,” Lydia says, but reconsiders her assessment. Yes, he is a bit florid, a bit bouncy on his feet. On the phone two days before, he sounded scatty, as if untroubled by the reversal that bound them together anew, but now, she thinks, yes, he’d likely had a drink then.

  They agreed to meet in Golden Gate Park at the de Young Museum. It’s a short walk for her and a stroll to the park on a Sunday afternoon is nothing that would rouse Ray’s curiosity. Dorian came by cab. He could make no sense of Lydia’s Muni directions from Union Square.

  His eyes travel to a blazing silkscreen of the word LOVE with some vacant flower-sprite creature. He peers at the adjacent tag. Love, 1968, it says, no surprise. It’s part of an exhibit, Peter Max and the Summer of Love. “I was never a falling-down drunk, Mrs. Peel. Just my own little way—sometimes—of dealing with anxiety.”

  “When did this start?”

  “After your phone call last fall. About the … little holocaust at Eadon Lodge.”

  “I couldn’t not tell you, Dorian.”

  “I know.”

  “How’s … Mark handling it? The drink—”

  “Mark? There is no Mark. We’ve split. Gone our separate ways.” Dorian waves a hand, as if the relationship had been a mere whimsy.

  “I am sorry. He seemed very …. Why?”

  “He’s twenty years younger than me, Mrs. Peel. The young should be with the young. Or the middle-aged with the middle-aged. Or something.”

  “I’m not sure age is that important.”

  Dorian shrugs. “It had run its course anyway.”

  “I’m very sorry.”

  “So you’ve said. Don’t be.”

  “Then where are you living?”

  “With friends in Vancouver, temporarily. Lot of couch surfing in my line of work.” Dorian purses his lips as they step down the gallery. “So with Mark out of the picture, there’s no money from that source.”

  “There wasn’t the first time.”

  “No. I think that my hinting we buy Eadon Lodge was the beginning of the end. Or, perhaps, the end of the beginning of the end. Whatever. Never mind. The point is …” Dorian loses his train of thought as he takes in another Max: It’s a silkscreen of an enormous blue peace symbol attended by a flock of doves.

  “The point is…?” Lydia prompts, glancing at the tag, the wording on which is as redundant as half the others. “Oh! Remember that souvenir I brought back with me when I was visiting my cousin here that summer of ’67? That ring? Everybody wanted to try it on. Have you still got it?”

  “You don’t remember?” Dorian feels himself wobble, clutches her arm. “Lydia, the peace ring is with Paul.”

  Lydia turns to stare. “You mean …”

  “He was wearing it. I gave it to him to wear. It’s on him.”

  “But … why didn’t you take it off him?”

  “It was dark when we—”

  “I … Dorian, everyone—all our friends—will remember that ring.”

  “My point then, Mrs. Peel—what are we going to do?”

  “As I’ve said on the phone, we have to get the property back.”

  “But your suggestion is—”

  “To buy it. To buy it back.”

  “We’re exactly where we were last summer,” Dorian hisses, glancing at a docent leading a tour group in their direction. “And like last summer, neither of us has the money. But the question is—is it even for sale? I’ve looked online. Nothing. Will it ever be for sale? Whatsis—”

  “Black, Jonathan Black.”

  “—Black’s heirs may want to keep it, develop it! Who knows? Isn’t there a wife?”

  “Estranged wife, according to the real estate agent last summer. But there was no mention of a wife in the obituary.”

  “Very estranged, then. Divorced? Maybe. Who would his heirs be? He’s young. I’ll bet he had no will. Did you have a will in your thirties? He probably died intestate and everything will go to … who? The wife?”

  “I think it depends whether they’re divorced or not.”

  “His parents, then.”

  “And do y
ou think his parents are going to want to keep a property on which their son died?”

  “Why don’t you …” Dorian begins, pulling Lydia away from the clutch of people now gathered around Peace, 1967, “… contact your realtor friend in Gimli and see what you can find out?”

  “I don’t dare, Dorian. She’s probably on the same … curling team as that RCMP woman. It’s a small town. They talk. There’s that other body, remember …?

  “A police investigation could put everything in limbo. It could be months before they can—”

  “She’d wonder why I’m so interested in a property I was once so happy to get rid of.”

  “I need a drink.”

  “No, Dorian …”

  “I said a drink, Mrs. Peel. That could mean simply a nice cup of tea.”

  Lydia gazes over the de Young’s sculpture garden—Henry Moores and a couple of Pop Art apples. The mid-March weather is pleasant, somewhere in the mid-sixties, she guesses, opening her jacket a little. They’re sitting at the museum’s outdoor patio, Dorian fiddling with something in his shoulder bag. From a distance comes the sound of a brass band in the park’s bandshell.

  “No smoking here.” Lydia guesses Dorian’s intent.

  “No smoking everywhere.” Dorian reaches instead for his wineglass. “Have you heard anything more from the RCMP about the body—the other body?”

  “No.” It’s not true. She’s had a couple of calls. Winter snows have not completely obliterated the enquiry, which has moved to some investigative unit in Winnipeg. Family history seems to intrigue the inspector assigned the case. Lydia was able to dissemble. What can she say about the world before she was born? She can only repeat what little she knows of her family’s history. Are there no dental records? she asked Inspector Dolak at the criminal investigation division of the RCMP in Winnipeg. No matching missing persons reports from the 1930s? None that they can find, he said. Lydia wanted to ask the inspector, as she’d earlier asked Sgt. Sinclair, after seventy years can it really matter? There’s no one to arrest now. But she didn’t ask. Dolak’s answer, she knew, would be the same as Sinclair’s.