Next Life Might Be Kinder
Page 5
“Fast on her feet, Mrs. Fitz. I really like the name Grancel, though.”
“Me too.”
“Can I get in the tub with you?”
“No.”
“How about now?”
“No. What did you make of Arnie Moran?”
“Right out of central casting or what?”
“I’m not so sure,” Elizabeth said. “He seemed, I don’t know, genuine.”
“A genuine something, that’s for sure. Anyway, you caught on to the lindy fast.”
“The lindy’s pretty basic, actually. But Arnie Moran’s a good teacher. ‘Just be loose as a goose in a caboose.’ He says things like that.” Elizabeth stood up and I wrapped a towel around her. “I liked how I felt after the lesson,” she said, “but I had to wash the creep bellman Alfonse Padgett off,” she said.
We then removed directly to the Victorian chaise longue.
Situational Ethics
THE FOURTH OR fifth day I was in the cottage, I said to Philip and Cynthia, over coffee and strudel in their living room after dinner, “As you know, my wife Elizabeth died. But now I’m in luck, because I’m allowed visits with her on the beach behind your house. This began the first night I moved in. How she located me here I don’t know. She lines up books. We sometimes have conversations.” When I said these things, I noticed the look of surprise on their faces. But that was all, really. Neither of them said, “What? What are you talking about?” or any such thing. “My mind’s not in any fragile or dangerous condition,” I said. “I want you to rest assured of that. Please rest assured. But your guests may be bothered or curious, so if you’re having a dinner party, say, and I’m on the beach, you might want to come up with some explanation. That I’m a stargazer or something. I could buy a modestly priced telescope.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Philip said.
“Really, it’s none of our business,” Cynthia said. “Consider the beach yours. Swim there if you like to swim, but the water’s cold even in summer. As for Elizabeth—for my money, for as long as seeing her lasts, you’re one of the lucky ones.”
Who are these good people? I thought. Why aren’t they upset at what I’ve just told them? Maybe it’s too much to take in, just over coffee. Maybe later they’ll get freaked out. Maybe they’ll try to buy the cottage back. But at least now they know this about me. Not a hint of condescension from Philip and Cynthia, whatever they thought or spoke privately about later, and no follow-up inquiry. Though one evening, when I’d stepped into their house (note taped to the door: Sam, come in!), I heard Cynthia’s voice coming from the kitchen: “You know I’m hardly the mystical type, Philip, but if I die in a car wreck, I mean, you never know what might happen next. I might want to hang around and keep an eye on you.” And Philip replied, “You could make a friend of Elizabeth Church on the beach out back.” So I knew they were tossing things around in conversation. Of course they were. I walked into the kitchen and Philip said, “Oh, Sam, hello. Drink?”
Philip is sixty-one; he retired from practicing law three years ago. He was able to do this, financially, because he’d litigated a class-action suit against an Ontario-based pharmaceutical company. The case was in all the papers; the settlement was astronomical. Philip’s fee set him up nicely. After a few glasses of wine one night, he’d said, “At that point in time, my passion was not the law but to get out of the law. I didn’t much like myself in those days. I did some good work, I suppose. But I had just about shut down toward the profession. Some days, and no melodrama intended here, I felt like I was drowning. Then, after the lawsuit was settled, we went on holiday to the south of France. Just for two weeks. While there, my daughter gave me a book of Japanese haiku. It was a birthday present. This may sound, I don’t know, typical, in some midlife-crisis way, but I couldn’t possibly have predicted the effect this collection had. One haiku in particular, and please don’t get the impression I spontaneously had become a Buddhist. It wasn’t that. I suppose I’d brought a rather surprising sort of philosophical need along to France. I can recite it: ‘How far to the end of the world? Why, just a day’s journey.’ That’s the whole thing. I read myself into it and kept reading myself into it. I didn’t crave transcendence, spiritual instruction, none of that. I wanted a different journey. I wanted out of the world of lawyers. Take it a day at a time. Spend more time with Cynthia and our daughter. First day back from France, I gave my notice. Oh, I’m hardly missed, I’m sure. No attorney at base is indispensable, no matter what said attorney would like to think. Next thing I did was start to give training sessions to young attorneys in several countries in East Africa—human rights matters, mainly. I’d traveled there in my twenties and loved the landscapes and the people. I’d like to go back. Generally, we spend all year here in Port Medway, except for December and January, when we’re in Toronto. Our daughter Lauren’s there with the two granddaughters. I do my best thinking in Port Medway. Cynthia does her best work here, too.”
Since leaving the law, Philip has written a controversial and best-selling book about a judge who took bribes. He titled it Crooked Judge. “The title came out of my new directness as a person,” Philip said that same evening. “Now that I’ve told you my life story, want to take a trip to the end of the world? Well, just to the beach at Vogler’s Cove. It’s a short drive. We’ve got a good hour of daylight left.”
Cynthia is a year older than Philip. She was married once before, as Philip had been. She designs tables and has sold her designs all over the world. The only maker of tables I have ever read about was Diego Giacometti, the famous artist Alberto’s brother. An artist himself, Diego constructed glass-topped tables with welded cast-iron legs and frames, some festooned with intricately made birds. He named one table Glass Aviary. In her library Cynthia had a number of books about Diego Giacometti’s tables, and one about the wooden cabinets he designed. Cynthia works every morning in her studio, a structure separate from the house whose window also looks out on the beach. “I let two, at most three, designs out of the house every year,” she told me. “I work all the time. All the time. I just don’t let much out of the house.”
I’ve noticed of late that one of Philip’s oft-used phrases is “situational ethics.” He’s been mulling over his next book; his subject hasn’t come into full focus yet, but it’s something to do with how certain Canadian judges, in critical moments during murder trials, “experience a kind of ethical confusion and make a dubious decision,” as Philip explained it. “It’s about how the simple words ‘sustained’ and ‘overruled’ are never really simple. They can have enormous repercussions. I want to trace all this from the initial utterance to a good or bad end. I’m still working all this out. I’m filling notebooks.” Philip applies the term “situational ethics” to day-to-day behavior too, with his friends, his family, himself. The phrase is constantly on his mind.
Anyway, I was getting to know my neighbors pretty well. One late-spring afternoon, Cynthia dropped by the cottage and asked if I would like to accompany her to some antique shops in villages along Route 3—Eagle Head, Beach Meadows, Western Head, White Point, Hunt’s Point, maybe as far south as Wreck Point.
But I said, “I don’t think I’d be very good company today.”
“That makes two of us,” she said. “How about it anyway? I’ll get us back before dark.” I knew she was alluding to my nightly visits to the beach to see Elizabeth. She was so easygoing and accepting, I changed my mind.
There was a cool breeze, and enormous cumulus clouds floated over the sea. We were having a very good time in the car, talking, not talking. After we’d visited a number of shops, we stopped for lunch at Lower Point Herbert, farther along the coast than Cynthia had intended to drive. “Nice we could both set our bad moods aside for the day, isn’t it?” she said. Following lunch, we decided to continue on to Gunning Cove and made a few stops along the way, this or that antique shop.
At about five o’clock, almost at Gunning Cove, we saw an estate sale in progress at a
n enormous nineteenth-century gabled house with a wraparound porch, in obvious disrepair. All sorts of furniture and paraphernalia were set out on the lawn. There were fifteen or so people looking things over. The house itself was for sale, too. Off to the left, sitting at a roll-top desk (also for sale), sat a stodgy-looking woman about forty-five years old. There was a handmade sign taped to the table: HAGGLING ALLOWED. Cynthia went over to the woman and found out that she was the granddaughter of the original owners of the house, who’d had eleven children and nineteen grandchildren when they died—“within two days of each other, her grandparents, isn’t that something?” Cynthia said to me.
“Detective Cynthia,” I said. “I’m impressed.”
“Still, one thing I’ve learned from living in Port Medway—sometimes the more chatty, the deeper the secrets.”
I sat on the porch watching people inspecting items, buying, hauling off a lamp here, a chair there. Sales of the small items especially were brisk, and the till was slowly filling. I turned my attention to Cynthia, who had gotten down on her knees to inspect something. She then joined me on the porch, tapped a cigarette out of its pack—“I allow myself one per day”—and lit it with a lighter, drawing in the smoke with her lips and cheeks with the succinct choreography of, say, Bette Davis. “My heart is beating a mile a minute,” she said. “I’m going to have a heart attack.”
“What happened, Cynthia?”
“I think—I think—oh, this is too much. Sam, I believe I’ve found a Diego Giacometti table. It’s got the tiny birds and everything.”
“Come on. You’re having an antiquer’s hallucination or something.”
“I’ve studied his tables for thirty years. It’s a signature Diego Giacometti.”
“Here in Gunning Cove, Nova Scotia?”
“I’ve read everything about Giacometti tables. I even attended lectures in Paris and Rome—Philip and I went. And one thing I remember is how American and Canadian servicemen in Europe would pick up amazing art for very small sums. It was the war, of course. Artists were letting things go for a pittance.”
“So you speculate that someone in this family was in France or Italy.”
“That’s my somewhat educated guess.”
“Go back and look again, Cynthia.”
Dropping the cigarette on the porch and pressing a heel to it, Cynthia returned to the ornate table, which had a china tea set on it and a dozen or so paperback books. She then got down on the ground and lay on her back (I didn’t see anyone else notice) and, elegant as she was, inelegantly slid halfway under the table. A few moments later, she slid out again, got to her feet, brushed off the back of her slacks and jacket, tapped a second cigarette from its package, lit it with her lighter, took a few puffs, then walked back to sit next to me on the porch.
“Is it?” I asked.
“Definitely. I all but saw Diego Giacometti’s reflection in the glass.”
“What’s it going for?”
“Twenty-five dollars.”
“Chump change, like they say in the States.”
“Know what’s ringing in my ears? That goddamn thing Philip keeps saying: situational ethics. What are the options here, do you think, Sam? All right, should I just tell the granddaughter what the table is? Tell her its potential worth? You know?”
“What do you think it might be worth?”
“A hundred thousand, if Sotheby’s, or another of the big auction houses, was to appraise and sell it. Oh, I don’t know,” Cynthia said. “I may be high in my estimation. Then again, I might be short.”
“A life-changing amount for most mortals.”
“Even after the auctioneer’s fee. If one were to go that route.”
“Okay, that’s one option,” I said. “You educate the granddaughter, your good deed for the day, and we go home. You could leave her your address. Maybe she’ll send you a thank-you note.”
“Option number two: I buy the table and keep it,” Cynthia said. “An authentic Diego Giacometti table. The granddaughter remains in the dark. What she doesn’t know doesn’t hurt her. Or what is hurting her she’ll never know about. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.”
Cynthia thought for a moment and added, “Option three: I sell it and send the granddaughter a big check. Or how about, I tell the granddaughter it’s a Diego Giacometti and say I feel she should know, in case someone in her family had been in Italy or France during the war, give her a context. Give her some history and say I feel it is very much underpriced, and can I offer her, say, a thousand dollars.”
“Oh, I get it. If you offer five thousand, she might get too strong a hint that it’s worth a lot more.”
“I’m simply thinking out loud here. Okay, what if I rely—rare as it is in a person—on her sense of equity, and tell her I’ll work through professional channels and get the table sold, and promise to split the money fifty-fifty with her.”
“Which option can you live with?”
“I could probably live with any of them, but with each one differently.”
“Slippery use of words, Cynthia.”
“Don’t judge me, for God’s sake. I haven’t made a choice yet.”
“Don’t look now, but you’ve got competition.”
Cynthia hurried over and stood near the Giacometti table and eavesdropped on the conversation between a late-middle-aged man and his wife. When Cynthia returned to the porch, she looked relieved. “‘I don’t want the thing’”—she mimicked the woman’s voice—“‘because those stupid little birds remind me of the chirpers who wake me up before daylight every morning. No thanks.’”
“Close call. What’re you going to do?”
“I’m going to have a heart attack,” she said. “I’m all worked up.”
I walked into the house, which did not seem open to the public despite the For Sale sign. I went into the big empty kitchen, saw some cups and glasses on the counter, filled a cup with water from the spigot, and carried it out to the porch. Cynthia gulped it down. “Thank you,” she said.
“Maybe the best option is to just go home,” I said.
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”
In the end, after an additional twenty minutes of torment, rumination, and debate, striving to worry each option to acceptability, a hint of dusk now on the ocean horizon, Cynthia lit a third cigarette. “Okay, I’ve come to a decision,” she said.
I accompanied her to the granddaughter, who was still sitting at the roll-top desk. The granddaughter said, “I’m Violet, by the way. I used to smoke on the porch too, as a teenager.”
“I’d like to purchase the glass table, please,” Cynthia said.
“Will it fit in your car?” Violet said.
“It’s a station wagon. So, yes, I think so,” Cynthia said.
“Bring me the tag, please, if you would. I can’t recall the price.”
“It’s twenty-five,” Cynthia said.
“Oh, yes, all right. But I’ll need the tag anyway, for recordkeeping.”
The transaction completed, we gently loaded the Diego Giacometti table into the back of the station wagon. I offered no comment on the entire drive back to Port Medway. It was well past dark when we arrived, and I went straight to the beach.
It was nearly an hour before Elizabeth appeared. She lined up her books and we spoke, but only briefly. “I don’t want to talk, not really,” she said. “But tell me about your day, darling. Just tell me, then I have to go.” So what else could I do but tell her about the antique stores and the Giacometti table. I spoke with as much detail and deliberation as I could, to try and keep her on the beach. “I love you but I have so much work to do,” she finally said. Then she picked up her books and was gone. Back in the cottage I thought, Every night is different, promoting, for the sake of a little solace, let alone the possibility of getting some sleep, the obvious as a revelation.
The subject of the table did not come up for another week. Then, quite late one night, Cynthia telephoned. “Can I ta
lk to you?” she said.
“It’s the table, isn’t it? Want some coffee?”
“Yes and yes. I’ll be right over.”
We sat in the kitchen and Cynthia toured me through the tortuous mental landscape, as it were, she’d been traveling in since purchasing the table. “Philip keeps saying what I did was just another example of situational ethics,” she said. “Situational ethics or not, things took a totally different turn than I could ever have imagined.”
“In what sense?” I asked.
“See, when I got the table home, I put it in my studio. You’ve seen it there, I suppose. Then I started doing research. I made some inquiries. I called Sotheby’s in New York. I spoke to higher-ups. They were tremendously interested. I could almost hear them drooling and panting. They wanted to send appraisers, but I said I had to think about it. They have been very solicitous. Very. ‘At least send some photographs,’ they said. So I sent some photographs. A few days later, they called and gave me an estimate, based on the photographs alone. So few Giacometti tables come on the market.
“But I couldn’t sleep. I was tossing and turning, driving Philip crazy. He knew I felt guilty. He kept quoting Freud—Anna Freud, I think: ‘Put your guilt to good use.’ But I didn’t know which good use to put it to. I was going insane with this, Sam. Really, I was.
“Then, just yesterday, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I put the table in the car, drove all the way to Gunning Cove again, and tracked down the granddaughter. I asked for Violet’s address at the post office. I drove to her house and knocked on the door, and when she came out on the porch and saw that I’d set the table on the ground, she said, ‘Oh, Lord, and here I thought I’d got rid of that godforsaken thing. You want me to buy it back—that why you’re here? I can’t believe my bad luck.’
“I asked had she ever heard of Sotheby’s.
“‘The Sothebys, do they live over in Ingomar? Or is it East Point?’ she says.