Paul Is Dead

by C. C. Benison

  Seventy? It might as well be forty.

  Dorian cradles the wineglass. “At least we know who it isn’t. You are sure?”

  “Absolutely sure. I asked both the sergeant and the inspector about the body’s location. It’s impossible it’s Paul.”

  “It’s impossible there should be another body on that acre of land.”

  Lydia lifts her teacup and looks over its rim at Dorian bathed in the pearly park light. The memory comes, unprompted, of him crumpled in the shower at Eadon Lodge, oblivious to the hammering water, of her stepping from her own filthy, sweaty clothes to join him, struggle to lift him, begin the ministrations that would end—insane it seems now—in bed.

  “Not impossible.”

  “How not impossible?”

  “I think … I think it’s Lits.”

  “Lits is who?”

  “My uncle. My father’s brother. You remember. Bibs and Lits. My father had a younger brother—his Irish twin, so-called—who died young.”

  “That’s right, I remember the story now. He was … mentally challenged or something.” Dorian lifts his wineglass, hesitates. He sees something unravelling in her expression and realization dawns. “And he was buried at Eadon Lodge? But … why? Is such a thing even kosher? I don’t remember a marker. I thought … wait, wasn’t he buried in England? How do I know that?”

  “Because I must have told you once.”

  “So—”

  “There was shot found among the bones, I told you that on the phone earlier.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “It had to be my father. Or my grandfather.”

  “Who shot him? His own brother? His own son?” Dorian drops the glass. Wine splashes on the table. He studies Lydia’s face. “Shot him, your uncle? Lydia, why would you think that?”

  “It’s horrible thinking it, I don’t like thinking it, but ...”

  “But?”

  “But … I found some letters among my father’s things after Christmas—war letters—some between my father and my grandfather and a few from my father’s aunt—my grandmother’s sister, May, a spinster who came from Ontario to take care of the boys after their mother died.”

  “Yes…”

  “In one my father describes an Italian boy—simple, my father writes.”

  “Simple?”

  “What we used to call ‘mentally retarded.’ Intellectually disabled. Like Lits. The boy was killed by sniper fire. This is at Ortona. Your father would have been there, too,” Lydia continues, but Dorian, unschooled in his father’s war, shrugs. “My father wrote”—and Lydia remembers the words assaulting her as if they had been styled in boldface—“‘I thought of Lits and how he died.’”

  “That’s it?”

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  “No. Maybe just seeing some poor kid die reminded him of his brother.”

  “‘How’ he died, Dorian. ‘How.’”

  “Okay, then, by gun. But why?”

  “An accident. That must be it. Anything else is too horrible.”

  “Why wouldn’t they report it?”

  “Why didn’t we?”

  Dorian blinks. “We thought our lives would be ruined.”

  “And they—my father, my grandfather—must have had the same thought. Imagine the consequences of a criminal conviction—”

  “I have, I do, Lydia.”

  “—my father, already motherless, would become fatherless. Medical school was my father’s ambition. His future would have been destroyed.”

  “How would they get away with it?”

  “How have we gotten away with what we did?”

  That stops Dorian. He gazes off toward the apple sculptures. Luck? Which is running out. “But … England …?

  “This is the point. Lits isn’t buried in England. I’m certain. In the eighties, I went to my grandfather’s birthplace in Norfolk, which he and my father and my uncle visited before the war, where Lits is supposed to have died of influenza, but there’s no gravestone, no record.”

  “But that doesn’t mean—”

  “Eadon Lodge is isolated—was isolated. We know that. And the trip to England gave them a way to explain Lits’s absence.” Lydia raises the teacup to her lips. “I always thought my father nostalgic about the cottage. But he wasn’t. He was safeguarding it. Why did he never sell it? My mother disliked the place. They could have afforded a cottage where your grandparents had theirs. And then my mother keeping the place after Bibs died. Why? In his dementia, he probably said something, told her enough for her to understand she needed to hold on to the property. And—and, Dorian—there was that shotgun on the wall at Eadon Lodge …” Lydia pauses. The tea is growing cold. A thought intrudes. “I wonder …”

  “You wonder …?”

  “… why there was shot in the gun when Alan pulled it off the wall that time.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Elvis muttered that the gun was single-barrel. Not something I ever noticed.”

  “So?”

  “I can’t imagine the gun was ever used again after what happened to Lits. The barrel should have been empty.”

  Dorian frowns. “What? You mean … someone reloaded it later.”

  “Can ammunition still work if it’s sat in a gun for decades?”

  “You mean Paul, don’t you? Loaded it … as a prank. Where would he get the shells?”

  “There were some in the old desk.”

  Something passes between them: dismay at the callow stupidity of youth, including their own.

  “Let’s not think about that, Mrs. Peel. We can’t know. We’ll never know. Just like we can’t know, never know, about your uncle.”

  “We might, if they ask me for a DNA test.”

  “A DNA … how—?”

  “They can. From teeth and bone.”

  “Well, so what? So what if poor old Uncle Lits was buried at Eadon Lodge? So what if it’s anybody? You’re not responsible for something that happened before you were born.”

  “You don’t control a secret, Dorian. A secret controls you. A secret controlled my father. I’m sure this is the secret. And for the last forty years a secret has controlled me … and you.”

  32

  It’s late now.

  Dorian doesn’t hear Paul emerge from the bedroom despite the door’s protesting hinge because he’s busy crumpling sheets of newspaper into balls and stuffing them into the wood stove. An evening chill has crept into the cottage interior. Dorian feels the linoleum floor cool against his soles, the air cool around his exposed skin. In the bedroom, afterwards, sated, as their slippy bodies dried, he noticed Paul’s skin, the scoop of his stomach, turning gooseflesh and suggested a fire. He pauses now to swipe at a sticky trail along his own goosefleshed thigh with a sheet of the newsprint and it’s in that moment he senses someone behind him.

  “How did you get loose?” Dorian asks, turning to see Paul shimmering in a black, silky kimono emblazoned with golden dragons, the old clothesline in one hand.

  “You’re no boy scout.”

  “And you are?”

  “Well”—Paul turns the robe’s collar up around his neck with his other hand—“I know how to tie a knot.”

  “You could have got loose while we were—”

  “I could have, yes, but you know …”

  This is all so new to Dorian, so free: the iron bedstead a playpen, the old clothesline a lariat, Paul a sexy starfish, splayed, vulnerable, submissive—for once. What would his censorious grandfather say, if he knew, if he had a hint, of what he was doing with this wild child, the two of them, now, with Lydia and Briony miles away, released to fashion their world their way? He watches the flames race down through the stove’s cavity, flinches at the sudden roar of paper and kindling and wood catching fire all at once. He q
uickly covers the stove with its lid, steps back, glances away. He’s ravenous. The pot does that. Across the room, on the library table, there’s the remains of a vineterta, but he lingers by the stove. The warmth of the fire is delicious along his naked torso.

  “Where did you find the robe?” he asks Paul, who has gone to lift the Victrola’s lid.

  “In the closet in the bedroom.”

  “It’s Marion’s,” he murmurs, though he doesn’t like to imagine Lydia’s mother in such a slinky thing.

  Paul’s back is turned to him now. The robe is too small for his frame, the hem too high, the sleeves too short. Cinched across his slim waist, it throttles the dragon slithering up the silk and ripples with the rhythm of Paul’s shoulder muscles as he winds the gramophone. The needle hits the shellac with a crackle and a hiss and the plaintive lilt of an accordion passes from the machine’s primitive speaker. Dorian watches Paul lift his arms, watches the back of the robe loosen, sees the dragon freed, then fold and fall to the floor with a silky rustle to offer up a gift—a serpentine line of heedless beauty that dazes and arouses Dorian: bronzed back dipping, pale bottom swelling, taut thighs arcing, limned in a green-gold phosphorescence wrought by the filter of the bedroom screen.

  Paul swivels, one hand on hip, his torso in a sleek contrapposto to the stance of his feet, and beckons with the other, the invitation clear. Dorian has never danced with a man before. How … wondrous and strange and defiant. But who will lead? Paul negotiates the confusion of limbs and Dorian finds himself in democratic embrace, no leaders, no followers, as they move to the music over the cool linoleum in no particular pattern. They are the same height, dark and light, one’s cheek against the other’s. Dorian gazes at the pink shell of Paul’s ear, how exquisite. Paul murmurs into his: “Are we okay?”

  They weren’t okay.

  Briony’s urgent need to leave for the city, to palliate the headache apparently swelling in her poor little head, stirred the waters in a new way: maybe all of them should pack up and leave—now, together? But the afternoon was too far gone to tidy the accumulated mess of ten days living at the cottage. (And that outhouse hole still wasn’t filled and sodded over!) Unvoiced was reluctance to quit their summer idyll, however much the cooler mornings and hazier sunlight signalled autumn and back-to-school. Dorian was eager to get on to California before Dey and Nan resumed their lives in the city, but he wanted Lydia to leave him and Paul alone in this little bit of heaven, if even for one extra day.

  Lydia wanted Dorian to leave her and Paul alone. She suggested coolly that he drive Briony back to the city in his Beetle. He flashed on something hooded in her expression and the suspicions Briony kindled earlier in the day flamed. She’s your friend, he hissed. It’s my cottage, she hissed back. As if she had overheard, Briony made it clear she expected Lydia to drive her. A flurry of packing, of tracking down missing items, of trips to the trunk of Bibs’s car, the last with Paul and Lydia carrying Briony’s father’s Coleman cooler down the path, through the curtain of trees, Briony turning back to fetch one last thing from the cottage, almost as if she’d planned to forget this one last thing, so she would have Dorian to herself for a minute. In that minute, on the front steps, she, the Reverend Telfer’s little girl, turned to him, her expression hard and mean in a way Dorian had never seen in her before and her saying in language he had never heard from her before, “she really is balling him, you know. I gave you a big fat hint in the car earlier. What do you think this afternoon’s trip into town was all about? Getting him away from you, cousin Dorian.”

  So Lydia is driving Briony back. She’ll stay in the city overnight. That’s the plan. The nights are drawing in. She doesn’t want to drive in the dark. She’ll return to Eadon Lodge in the morning. Dorian won, would have Paul to himself, but Briony’s words turned his gut to gall. The effect must have shown on his face, for Briony’s lips twitched in a bitter smile before she swept off to the waiting car. A few moments passed, an engine started, tires hit gravel, and Paul returned, emerging from the light in the trees, smiling as if at some private joke. The sight of him seared Dorian with passions never before entwined, dimly recognized—jealousy, confusion, loss and treachery, desire. Paul joined him on the step, teased him with his smile, reached to unzip his fly. Dorian swatted his hand away.

  Paul’s eyes widened. “What’s the matter? Hey, we’ve got this whole cabin to ourselves for the night.”

  “You balled Lydia.”

  “Says who?”

  “Briony.”

  Dorian watched Paul’s expression shift, the eyes take on a supplicating shine. “She came on to me. What could I do?”

  Nothing? The word screamed in Dorian’s skull. He was helpless to stop his face crumpling and a sissy tear spurt from his eyes. A swift turning, a blind thrashing into the cottage, into the bathroom, the heavy door slamming shut behind him, the door locking, the surge of mortification for reacting so girlishly. And then Paul’s voice on the other side of the door:

  “Look, man, I’m sorry. It just happened. Haven’t you ever …?”

  “No.”

  “I thought you said you and Lydia—”

  “No!”

  “It didn’t mean anything. Hey, we’re going to L.A. together—tomorrow, after Lydia gets back. Promise. Come on, Dorian. Look, I’m really sorry…”

  Door knob rattling.

  “Dorian, come on …” And then, softly, as if Paul had bent to speak into the keyhole, which he had. “Love you.”

  Years later he would ponder the absence of the personal pronoun, but then the few—the two—words startled him. They were magic. Only his mother and his grandmother spoke them, and only before he passed into his sulky teens. He looked at himself in the mirror over the sink, and despite the room’s gloom with the window blind drawn, he could see the flush beneath his sunbaked skin.

  “You can punish me. I know a way.”

  Dorian didn’t understand those words and didn’t care. He opened the door.

  “We’re okay,” Dorian murmurs now, pulling Paul closer. The record ends—too soon—in a sequence of scratches. A 78’s limit is about three minutes. Dorian reaches over to return the needle to the beginning. They start again. A moth, feathery and dusky, floats over the gas lamps, as if made languid by the warmth. The sun, low in the sky now, filters through the curtain of trees, through the bedroom screens, to brush the floor on which they turn and turn as languidly as the moth. The record ends. They begin again. Dorian is conscious of his erection pressing into Paul’s hip, of Paul’s into his. He begins to kiss his way down his lover’s neck down his torso, the goal apparent to them both. But, as the song ends again, Paul pulls him up and kisses him and says, “I know something else we can do.”

  33

  Briony is the last to board the Greyhound and she doesn’t wave to Lydia, though Lydia raises her hand in half-hearted way. After a minute, the door closes with a pneumatic hiss and the bus pulls away from Dorothy’s Café, headed for who knows how many stops before it reaches downtown Winnipeg.

  “How are you going to get home from the bus station?” Lydia asked when they turned off Highway 9, following the Greyhound into Winnipeg Beach.

  “Cab, I suppose.”

  “You could phone your father.”

  “It’ll be late.”

  “Are you sure you really want to take the bus?”

  Lydia offered her one last chance in the rites of politeness. Briony really didn’t want to take the bus into the city. Lydia really didn’t want to drive her. Briony’s migraine was incipient, not crippling. Lydia knew Briony’s migraine was incipient, not crippling. And yet they continued the seesaw of lies from their first sighting of the Greyhound as it turned out of Gimli ahead of them onto Highway 9.

  “But your head…”

  “I’ll be fine, Lydia, really I will.”

  Lydia returns to the car and jams her key
into the Buick’s ignition, annoyance and elation contending. She’s thank-god relieved to be shucked of Briony, who’s spent the last couple of days all Mother-Superior, lips pressed as if she had sucked something bitter, culminating in her grumpiness over agreeing to take Dorian away to town to leave her free to have some time alone with Paul. Yes, she’s sorry Dorian didn’t show up with Blair Connon, sorry he showed up with his cousin instead, but she can’t help it if men find her more attractive. Perhaps if Briony were less Earth Mother, less frumpy, she might stand half a chance. And Briony so tense and tight in the car as if she were about to explode with god knows what. Lydia turns the car back onto Highway 9 out of Winnipeg Beach, to head north again, return to Eadon Lodge.

  Now we are three. And there’s no more reason for this adolescent sneakiness. Briony is departed, as have Alanna and Alan. No avid ear on the other side of the partition wall. She has the cottage all to herself. Dorian can damn well lump it and stay in the Petit Trianon. Why should he care if his cousin shares her bed? The two of them will be gone on their California adventure before long anyway, if that ever comes to pass.

  She rolls down the window, lets her hair blow free, speeds through Sandy Hook, a ragtag trail of old cottages between Winnipeg Beach and Gimli, ignores the speed limit sign, glances at a beautiful boy in swim trunks heading for an evening swim, glances at her watch. The Tip Top should still be open. She’ll buy some pickerel for supper, yes. There’s still the wine that Alanna brought and Paul will have some weed—yes. She imagines another languorous evening swim, yes. Somehow Dorian will not be present—just she and Paul will be on the beach as day turns night and the moon rises over the lake, a golden orb magnified in the humid air.

  Only afterwards—long afterwards—when she allowed her mind to touch on the events of that evening did she recognize she had been visited by premonitions of disaster. Stepping out of the car by Goliath’s molars with the bag of groceries, for instance. Why, in that moment, did the silence send a shiver down her back? The evening was still, yes, but sound was not truly absent: leaves stirred, a bird cawed, some small animal rustled in the undergrowth. Yet something stopped her from letting the weight of the car door fall into the frame with that rich, heavy chunk her father had found so satisfying; she let metal kiss metal instead, as if not to wake a sleeping baby. Perhaps—she thought this later—the absence of human sounds was the source of her disquiet. Six people together punctuated the world with noise. But two? No screen door slammed, no voice rose in laughter or argument, no drain flushed, no glass clinked, no radio played. Or did she hesitate, grocery bag gripped to her chest, because the phalanx of trees between car park and cottage seemed to loom before her like a dark forest in a fairy tale? No, nonsense, nothing occult there. The effect was wrought by a low band of black cloud—she had noted it in gaps driving along the Loney Beach road—shielding the sun in its descent to the horizon. And yet, for a moment, she felt as if she were in a film, in those moments before the axe falls, the trapdoor opens, the ceiling collapses.