“Not here.”
“But … Briony, Alanna…”
“Paul left, went back to hitchhiking.”
“I was going with him.”
“You changed your mind.”
And it was decided. They were terrorized, naughty children, defaulting to a child’s actions: to deny, to cover up, to lie. Dorian remembers them beginning the task in a silent rhythm, as if they had rehearsed it in their adolescent dreams, somehow suppressing the horror of fashioning the Coronation blanket into a proper shroud, a purple package tied with bits of the offending clothesline, of lifting him—oh, god, the dead weight, the jelly lifelessness. He lifted him, Dorian did, carrying him, Pietà, pushing through the screen door, stumbling through darkness, followed by Lydia with one of the gas lamps, a ghostly procession to the Stygian hole at the far reaches of the property, sinking to his knees next it and then, only then, emitting a low keening that would not, could not stop, until finally the fateful, irrevocable step—the ignominious rolling of the body into the pit. And the sound, the sickening thud as body in motion meets immovable object.
Shuddering at the memory, Dorian doesn’t hear the footfalls behind him, nor the jangling of dog tags on a collar, nor the pronounced throat clearing until the man with the dog is before him and he’s looking into old eyes rimmed with suspicion and disapproval. Dorian starts, stumbling against one of the fallen fir’s blackened roots. The sunglasses bang onto his nose.
“Are you staying in the area?” the man asks, reaching to pat his dog, a black Labrador.
“No.” Dorian brushes his shirt sleeve, annoyed. The shirt is white, streaked now.
“Just visiting then.”
“Yes.”
“We’ve had a number of visitors come here.”
“Oh, yes?”
“Kids, scavengers—”
“Scavengers?”
“Attracts a certain type, this kind of thing does. Amazing what people will take. Sinks. An old toilet.” There’s an insinuation in the man’s tone, and Dorian bristles with distaste for this officious asshole. He’s seen the neighbourhood watch signs along the way in. He affects the cold drawl he used in a play or two: “I knew the family that owned this. I came here once as a teenager.” As he says this, his eyes travel with the scorn of his comparative youth to the older man’s cheeks with their broken veins, the sunken eyes, the wattled throat. He catches his breath, rues his declaration. The man’s censorious regard is the trigger: This is the guy who appeared among them when Alan’s shotgun blast grazed Paul. It’s Elvis, hair subsided to a monk’s tonsure. He sends his eyes to the dog. Christ! Same breed.
“I just thought I’d come see,” Dorian softens his tone. “I … heard what happened.”
The man grunts, continues to study him as if unmollified but—and thank god, Dorian thinks—the sunglasses and baseball cap lend him the anonymity of a tourist.
“Well, I like to keep an eye out,” the man says.
“Are you working for the owners, then, in some capacity?”
“No.”
“Ah, well, I was sort of wondering what will come of this. Funny it hasn’t been cleared.”
There’s something slick about this guy, the man thinks. The linen shirt, that expensive car, something shiny (moisturizer?) about his face, what he can see below the sunglasses. What’s he really doing here? Most of the other rubberneckers he’s known, cottagers from way back, have places at Loney Beach; a few Winnipeggers have happened by to gape, these days including Filipinos or East Indians. This property, he’s pretty sure, will be cleared before too long. He’s seen folk—other out-of-towners—coming and going, and his councillor mentioned that some development scheme has passed the bureaucratic hurdles of the municipal council. So if this guy is some rival developer—well, tits up, buddy, too late. He’s had a cottage here for nearly fifty years, been walking his dog up here for nearly fifty years, seen the number of cottages explode, big buggers too—not really cottages, but second homes, and he expects whatever’s built here will be as big and brazen.
When the man fails to reply, Dorian continues, “Is it on the market? I don’t see any signs.”
“Are you interested in buying?”
“No. Just … curious. Nice beachfront … as I recall.”
“Less of it after last fall’s storm.”
“Is it for sale?”
The man enjoys playing this guy. There’s something familiar about him, too—something about his eyes before the sunglasses dropped over them—but he can’t put his finger on it, some wisp of an unhappy memory of long ago. “Beats me,” he replies, smiling. “Check with the real estate office in town. They’re sure to know.”
35
Her cell rings as Lydia exits the flower shop on Irving. It’s Dorian. She recognizes the number. She doesn’t answer. She would have a flicker of dread—or, possibly, if it were another day, even yesterday, a flicker of hope—but she already knows what he has to report. It’s been a day for phone calls, and she doesn’t like to talk on the phone in the street.
She watches the fog beginning its progress up the street from the ocean. Fool her: she should have put on the quilted jacket when she exited the house, but she was too anxious to leave. When the fog rolls over her the temperature will drop ten degrees in an instant. She’s skin and bone these days, they say—and she overhears—down to a size four, the envy of her book club, though the six of them say nothing to her about her chewed thumbs, her dull eyes and dull hair. They know she’s anxious about her job—they chitchat more than discuss literature—but is there something else? Is it Ray? Her marriage? That can’t be. It’s Ray who sent them the invitations to Lydia’s birthday party this evening, through the mail, no less. The Big Six-Oh! in a lovely script only an artist like Ray would fashion. Maybe Lydia’s just anxious about turning sixty.
Lydia’s given precious little thought to the milestone birthday, politely acceding to Ray’s plans for a big party, graciously giving in to its inevitability. It’s that other (possible) inevitability that’s been consuming her thoughts, never more so than today. She shivers, and it’s not in anticipation of the blanket of fog creeping toward her. She shifts the cone of freesias in her hand and pockets the phone after glancing at its screen. Dorian has left a message.
Helen’s call first. Busy, buoyant Helen, who is bringing the cake for the party. Did Lydia know, she asked as she about to ring off, that a body had been found on the grounds at Eadon Lodge? One of the Winnipeg Clifford cousins who had somehow put two and two together and mentioned it in a letter. Oh, Jesus Christ, fresh hell. Lydia fought to control her breathing, jerked the phone away so Helen wouldn’t hear. Somehow, Helen continued, a bunch of bones popped out of its grave last fall during that big storm they had up there. She thought she was being entertaining and wondered a little at the dead air on the other end. Really? I had no idea, Lydia managed to croak when she recovered her sensibilities. How odd.
And now Ray will wonder if that’s why the RCMP contacted her last fall. It wasn’t Canadian politeness, it was police procedure. And Helen, of course, will not keep mum—not that Lydia could ask her to. She will make it her party piece. Lydia has yet to concoct what she will say to Ray, not knowing that he already knows, has done his own Googling.
Lydia glances at the window of Ouroboros Fine Used Books as she passes. Amid the display, visible by its glaring use of Psychedelia typeface, is that sow’s ear—Paul is Dead: The Twilight of the Sixties and Utopia’s End by Brander Milne, Cuntella’s little friend. Published in early March, now, at the end of June, it’s already slouching toward oblivion. The reviews are dismal, the sales worse—as she knew they would be—but Cuntella is scapegoating her for her failure to fashion a silk purse. How many drafts of a resignation letter has Lydia devised? Many. But many days she keeps a level head only by the routine of work: up, out, BART, some office chatter, nose into manuscr
ipt, out, BART, home, dinner, bed. She walks on, feeling the air chilling, though the bank of fog remains a distance away. Paul is Dead? The least of her worries. Paul is dead? Another matter entirely.
A milestone birthday brings the well-wishers out of the woodwork. But Inspector Dolak could hardly have been aware that this Saturday was her birthday. Or could he have? Now here she is submitting to the simmering paranoia that infects her adopted country. She remembers a mini-bout of this sensation in the seventies when she was, briefly, a proofreader for Ramparts in its FBI-targeted twilight. The same sensation revisits her today: an almost occult sense of being watched. Crazy, yes? She’s had no communication with the Canadian police since Sergeant Sinclair’s call last fall and here they phone on a Saturday, a Saturday—to unsettle her, to goad her? She had imagined the Case of the Mysterious Bones had gone cold after all these months, but not so. Inspector Dolak’s weekend is taken up with it, apparently, though something about his tone suggested he thought investigating the provenance of bones buried seven decades a pain in the neck. He apologized, though, for the Force’s not getting back to her sooner and asked: Would Lydia submit to a DNA test? This is what she feared, this is what she told Dorian might happen. She affected nonchalance. (I can’t imagine what it will prove, but if you like ...) Was there a choice? What fresh hell—speaking of fresh hells—would refusal bring?
And yet that fills her with nothing like the foreboding Briony’s innocent phone call has wrought.
Lydia walks along Irving, passing Citibank and Walgreen’s, glimpsing the brooding fog, so much damper in the Sunset, draw nearer, almost craving the cloak it will be. The Outer Sunset, her home for a quarter-century, is foggy, windy, mostly flat—not tourist San Francisco, a sober place, an acquired taste. She can see the Pacific Ocean when she steps out her door, feels as far away as you can get in North America. She has a sense, however irrational, that she may never walk this way again.
Briony’s phone calls stir her guilt, always. Briony’s the good friend who stays in touch. Lydia wishes she wouldn’t, wishes the connection would wither and die, so the past she represents would no longer flame into life. So she pushes Briony out of mind from day to day, from year to year, but she can’t now. Not this minute. She expected Briony’s condolences and curiosity at Eadon Lodge’s destruction months and months ago, at least in their phone conversation last Christmas. She learned then of Ted’s decline. Now, today, she’s learned Ted’s MS has worsened precipitously. He’s been choking on his food, he’s been growing delusional, violent, she’s been battling the Home Care bureaucracy. Ted went into a nursing home this month. Briony’s matter-of-fact, hardened in some ways to the terrible chaos of life—hers, her children’s, her husband’s, her clients’. Lydia made all the right remarks, all of them anodyne, for what could she do for Briony? And all the while she wanted to twist the conversation to her own desperate urgency: what have you heard, what do you know, about the cottage? How can that property’s fate be so sealed? Briony chattered away: Imagine us being sixty. Who’d think we’d be as old as our parents? Don’t trust anyone under thirty, ha ha! Hope you have a wonderful day! Have a great party! Oh, and I forgot to mention—Eadon Lodge: I was sorry to hear it burned down. Last fall, Briony added in a tone that suggested Lydia should have got in touch with her over this incident. Oddly, Briony seemed to know nothing about the old bones raised to the sky, or at least she didn’t mention it to Lydia.
But Briony did learn something about the property. It’s from whom she learned it, and the details she imparted, that sent Lydia hurrying out the door—jacketless. Briony ran into Alanna just the other day. At an Italian grocery, each shopping for the same take-out lasagna. Hadn’t seen her in years, though Briony’s always surreptitiously kept up with the doings of the Roth-Rayners, their wealth, their success, their Crescentwood home, their Lake of the Woods cottage, their Warhols, their terrible, troubled son. And their lovely, accomplished daughter, who has some big job at the University of Winnipeg and who, like her mother, it seems, married someone not quite suitable in the parental eye, but unlike her mother, was on the verge of divorcing him when the marriage was severed another way, rather spectacularly.
“I suppose it’s ironic who owns Eadon Lodge now,” Briony said.
And Lydia agreed, her voice catching, her hand shaking, the phone dropping.
And now Dorian is calling again. She feels the vibration in her pocket more than hears the tinny ring against the ambient noise along Irving. The fog is nearly upon her, its wispy tendrils snaking along the sidewalk, veiling the store fronts, shrouding the cars. It all seems a little too Gothic in the circumstances, she thinks, adjusting the cone of flowers and reaching into her pocket.
Dorian refrains from the preliminaries. He doesn’t remember it’s her birthday.
“Lydia, there’s heavy equipment at Eadon Lodge. We were filming on the lake yesterday and I could see them moving into place. I finally found out today who the property passed to. It’s worse than we could ever imagine.”
Lydia welcomes the cool damp as it wraps around her. She feels borne along by it, as she would by a river’s current. “I know, Dorian. I already know.”
36
Alan would happily cut short this visit, wishes he could find an excuse to leave, but enduring his host’s company is, in this instance, the price of doing business.
Stuart McFadyen, his business partner in this Gimli property development deal, is tolerable company, man to man, man among men, as they have been this morning at the Sandy Hook golf course with a few of his local cronies. And he’s tolerable at larger social events, fundraising dinners and the like, where he presents himself as expansive and charming. But at this couples getaway at the McFadyens’ Pelican Beach house he’s shown an unpleasant facet of his personality—talking down to his wife as if she were a stupid little girl. And Mariëlle is a senator, no less, appointed in the last round of prime ministerial honours. Stuart was the local party bagman for years, but it was his wife who got the honour. Prime ministerial humour? Prime ministerial oversight? Or did the prime minister’s eye rove past Stuart’s Humpty-Dumpty proportions to rest on Mariëlle’s svelte form and decide the Red Chamber was in better need of decoration than another old toad? Is this why Stuart is such a boor around his wife?
But there’s more: Alan has fallen in love with her, with a violent and unexpected jolt.
Some time later, after the contrived fancy-meeting-you-heres and the fumbled grope at the Gallery Ball in which she will shrink from him, her body contracting in a way that signalled her disgust, he’ll recognize it as infatuation, born of some little acknowledged absence in his life. But at this moment, this Friday in July, the yearning, the adolescent cry, I want more, feels intensely like the real thing, a euphoria rising from somewhere in the gut and racing along his veins. This bolt out of the blue, so unexpected so late in life, is why he’s delaying returning to Stuart’s. He stopped to pick up another case of beer from the motel along the highway. He told Stuart he would do so when they were leaving the golf course. But at the back of his mind was a detour to the property they’re jointly developing, the old Eadon place. It’s crazy, but it’s the only goddamn place he could think of for a little privacy, to have a think, to indulge these feelings of lost control. If he’s too much more in Mariëlle’s orbit, Alanna will twig to the gravitational pull, and he can’t have that—not yet. So it isn’t nostalgia sending him up the road through Loney Beach .
His memories of those days forty years ago at Alanna’s friend’s summer cottage run through his thoughts like disjointed scenes in a barely remembered film. None are particularly vivid. What stands out? Deliriously plowing Alanna over and over and over in a tent until he almost lost consciousness? That stands out. Laying sod over that shithouse hole? That stands out, too, mostly because whatshisname … Dorian and that so-called “cousin” of his didn’t lift a goddamn hand to help. Wait, not true, he has one vivid memory.
Has he been repressing it? Jesus, there was a time when he had nightmares about it. He nearly killed that guy, that “cousin,” with a loaded fucking shotgun. That stands out. If he’d had better aim, if that guy—Paul, was it?—had veered another way, god knows what his life would be like now.
Alan glances into the rear-view mirror and sees for a moment his eyes, the lids drooping a bit, the laugh-lines clearly visible, but not bad, not bad. He lifts his hand from the steering wheel and brushes it through his hair, which is still thick. His jawline shows a hint of incipient sag, but only a hint, and when he smiles he still has that boyishness Alanna once told him first attracted her. He’s a damned sight more attractive than Stuart, whose hair, vanished well below the crown, is worn hippyishly long, whose face is as pale and freckled as Puffed Wheat, whose paunch hangs over his belt like a melting pumpkin.
I love you, Mariëlle. The words, rehearsed, run through his head. He says the words out loud, flicks a glance in the rear-view mirror, reddens. He’s not a blusher.
He and Alanna live much like siblings these days—the dwindling in ardour and frequency a mystery almost untraceable. When did they last have sex? (Passover, if you can believe it.) He wonders about the ebbing for other guys his age, but he really hasn’t got any close buddies any more, guys he might consider broaching the subject with over a few beers. The men he knows now—he acknowledges this dolefully—are all colleagues, employees, business partners, bullshitters—like the great son-of-a-bitch Stuart McFadyen, who roared off ahead of him on the highway as Alan turned into the motel parking lot. His boyhood pals? Vanished. His university comrades? They were never friends, only soldiers in a revolution that never came to pass. He became a nonperson to them when he betrayed the great working class to join his capitalist-stooge father-in-law’s construction business.
Alan’s mind switches, helplessly, to Mariëlle’s slimness, her elegance, her aloof grace, and compares them—unfairly, he knows—to Alanna’s, whose backside has swelled like a summer cloud, whose complexion has turned sallow, whose manner has become severe. Unfair, because Mariëlle is more than a decade younger. Unfair, because Mariëlle hasn’t had the marrow sucked out of her by a child gone off the rails by addiction. Unfair, because Mariëlle, a successful businesswoman, is not a vapid shopaholic like the wives of many of his colleagues. Will he ever have her? He senses she senses his ardour. She avoids his glance. He feels humbled and speechless in her presence. He’ll never have her. Should he dare try to have her? Almost alone among his associates, he has been uxorious. But when his father-in-law brought him into the business, made him crown prince in place of his dead son, he extracted this promise: no whores, no girlfriends, no fucking around behind my daughter’s back, for Alanna was the apple of his eye and the crown of his labours. And Alan swore fealty because Berko Roth was a fierce old bugger and because he saved him from a life of idiocy and because he loved Alanna. Still loves her. In his way.
Paul Is Dead Page 29
