Beach Strip

by John Lawrence Reynolds

  The officious Tina returned. She told me not to bring too many clothes because we would buy a whole wardrobe, and besides, I shouldn’t have a bag big enough to check, carry-on was always better, and she was going to tell Goldie to put new sheets on the guest bed, Andrew’s brother had slept there last, he was a carpenter in Moose Jaw, and those sheets just wouldn’t do, she had some flowered 600-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets in the prettiest pattern with lilacs at the edge—

  I cut her off before I changed my mind and cancelled the trip in the interest of self-preservation. And who the heck was Goldie?

  I RETURNED TO TRAFALGAR TOWERS, driving this time, and avoiding eye contact with staff members when I got there. Mother was alone in her room, reading an Elmore Leonard novel. For her birthday two years earlier, I’d bought her a leather-bound set of The Collected Works of Jane Austen, which she kept displayed on a side table like a family heirloom. Good writer, but a prude, Mother wrote to me on her blackboard. She preferred tough talk over sense and sensibility.

  Good! Mother wrote when I told her I was going to spend a few days with Tina. When you come back, they’ll have done their audit and will know the truth!

  She was pleased to hear I was visiting Tina because it was preferable, I suspected, to having Tina visit her.

  Mother loved Tina, because Mother was a good woman who loved her children, which is what mothers are supposed to do. But there had been too many clashes between them over too many years, and I honestly believe that when Tina announced she and Andrew would be living in Vancouver and would keep in touch one way or another, Mother was relieved. Her daughter was married to a successful doctor. They would be living two thousand miles away. And they would not be having any children, meaning no grandchildren for her. Well, two out of three …

  We didn’t discuss this, Mother and I. “I’ll be back within a week,” I explained. “I just need a break, somebody to do the things for me that you always did,” and I began to cry.

  Mother reached her arms to me and I bent into them, her sitting silent in the wheelchair and me, for the second time that day, becoming ten years old again, just for a minute, to enjoy the feeling.

  MY DECISION TO VISIT TINA may not have been profound, but it was popular.

  “Josie, you don’t know how good this makes me feel,” Mel told me. We were in a café down the lake toward Toronto, the remains of our dinner in front of us, the lake shining beyond the window. I had suggested we have dinner together. I didn’t want to meet Mel in my home or his apartment. I just needed a bit of normalcy, or as much as you can have with an ex-lover.

  He wasn’t surprised to hear about Walter Freeman’s visit to Helen Detwiler or his suggestions that I might have been stealing from the retirement home. “He’s fixated on that expensive ring and where Gabe got the money for it,” Mel said. “But more than that, he’s really upset with you. Walter’s not used to people standing up to him, not treating him with the respect he wants. He’s getting back at you in the best way he knows how. Maybe the only way.” He reached across the table and took my hands in his. “This will all blow over, and when it does …” He searched for words. “I’ve been worried about you, and confused about what happened between us.”

  “Confused?” I had expected guilt.

  He looked out at the lake, gathering more words. Plastic surgeons could use his profile as a template for every male patient who wanted his face corrected—the perfect squared chin, the full mouth, the straight, ideally proportioned nose, the narrow eyes, the uncreased forehead …

  “I’m sorry about the pain it caused Gabe.” He turned from the window to face me again. “But you know what? I don’t regret it completely, because of what you came to mean to me. That’s why, sometimes, I might appear tongue-tied or say the wrong things or not say the right things.” He lowered his head and leaned toward me. “Do you understand?”

  I told him I did. I told him we both shared whatever amount of guilt needed to be passed around. I told him I would love to talk about what we had done, and how, when enough time had passed, when all the mystery and questions surrounding Gabe’s death had been resolved. At that point, we might renew our relationship, if we were both comfortable. “Do you know what I would like?” I added. “I would like you to play some of that music you played for me once, that nice bluesy stuff, and tell me who it is and what became of the musicians.”

  He smiled and said, “Sometime soon,” then looked at his watch and told me he had to check on a stakeout team down on Barton Street. “Things are coming together,” he said.

  I drove home pleased that I was going to Vancouver and even more pleased about what I would be returning to.

  24.

  The warm Tina and the cool Andrew awaited me at the airport in Vancouver, Tina running toward me with arms outstretched and Andrew hanging back, clutching a bouquet of flowers. I felt like a bride arriving at her honeymoon resort.

  I survived the hugs and took the flowers and Tina’s arm, and we all walked out of the airport and into Andrew’s Lexus, Tina boasting about the Vancouver weather and the dinner that she and her new maid, Goldie, were planning for us, while Andrew drove us past glass walls and greenery. Everything in Vancouver is green from rain, and maybe from misplaced envy.

  An hour later I was sitting in the den on Point Grey Road, the den’s picture window framing a view that the local tourist bureau no doubt approved and had perhaps even created. We looked across English Bay to the downtown core, its office towers and condominiums shining in the sun. Beyond them, marking the horizon, mountains shone, capped with enamel-white snow. I have been jealous of few things or people in my life, but the view through that window made my dream of living on the beach strip seem about as ambitious as putting on socks in the morning.

  Andrew made me a drink, a vodka and tonic with a perfect slice of lemon and a sprig of mint, served in a Waterford crystal glass. He refilled both our drinks within five minutes while he and I nibbled on buttery Camembert served with crackers shaped like flowers. Dorothy Parker was damn straight: living well really is the best revenge. Tina was in the kitchen, supervising Goldie, based on the clatter of pots and dishes that drifted up the hallway toward us.

  “I must tell you,” Andrew said after I assured him that I was more than pleased with the drink, “how excited Tina has been about your coming here.” Andrew is lean and tall and speaks with a mild English accent. He looked around and lowered his voice as though assuring himself that my sister was not hiding around the corner, eavesdropping. “Tina can be a little, uh, wrapped up in herself at times,” he said.

  “You mean narcissistic?” I suggested.

  He smiled and nodded. At heart, Andrew is a nice man. I often felt that he shared some genes with certain jazz musicians who, I remember reading, become truly at ease with themselves and the world only when they are making music. Andrew, I suspected, was truly at ease only when in an operating room, an anaesthetized patient in front of him, a surgical team around him, and a scalpel in his hand. A little ghoulish, maybe, but wouldn’t it be comforting to know that the man who is about to slice open your body and expose its innards to the world didn’t want to be doing anything else with his life?

  “Mind you,” Andrew said, “the word ‘narcissistic’ has a pejorative sense to it, and I’m not sure that I would want to apply it in a cavalier manner to Tina, who, as you know, has many admirable qualities.”

  Two of the most admirable qualities in a man are his easy use of phrases like “cavalier manner” and his quick defence of his wife, whether she deserves it or not. I assured Andrew that I meant no disrespect to my sister by using the term “narcissistic.” Andrew was so pleased with my comment that he didn’t notice when I checked to confirm that my nose hadn’t grown.

  “She is so fond and so envious of you,” he said, sampling his own drink.

  “What would I have that would ever make Tina envious?” The vodka was warming. I decided I would drink less brandy and more Smirnoff.
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  “Your outlook. Your sense of self. Your …” He smiled over his glass at me. “Joie de vivre.”

  Thank goodness. I thought he was going to say my boobs.

  He was still talking. The vodka was loosening him as much as me. “Tina wraps herself up in material things because she lacks your ability to take life as it comes. Those are her words, by the way. Not mine. ‘Josie would be happy living in sneakers and jeans every day,’ she has said to me a couple of times. ‘She just knows how to take life as it comes and not give a damn about anything else.’ She meant that as a compliment. I mean, Josie, she really adores you. In her own way.”

  “We’re different,” I agreed. “But we’re close. In our own way.”

  He looked toward the open door again and began sliding his chair closer to me. “I know she spends too much time and effort on incidentals in life.” He paused and actually smothered a giggle before speaking again, which suggested that his drink was stronger than mine. “Sometimes I tell people I think I’m married to a centipede when I see all the shoes she keeps in her closet. Did I mention we converted the guest bedroom, the one next to ours, into a closet for Tina’s clothes?” He drained his drink. “Another?” he said, holding his empty glass for me to inspect.

  Like a dutiful sister-in-law, I passed the empty glass to him, and he turned to the small bar next to the window just as Tina leaned in through the open doorway. “How are you two getting along?” she asked. She had changed from the sweater and skirt she wore earlier into a satiny green dress under a flowered apron. She had even changed her lipstick from coral red to a deep crimson, a better match for deep green. At least her hair colour was the same.

  “We’re having a fine old time,” I said, “talking about you.”

  “I love it when people talk about me,” she said. “The nastier the better.” She held up five fingers. I thought she was showing off her manicure. “Five minutes,” she said. “Ten at the most.” She disappeared down the hall.

  “We may have to do more drinking and less talking,” Andrew said, handing me my third drink.

  “The key to sociability,” I said, and we touched the rims of our glasses together. I was beginning to like Andrew. “Your work is so interesting,” I said. “Can you tell me about it?”

  He gave it some thought. “After a while …” he said, and began again. “After all the years I’ve been doing surgery, more than twenty now, there are few surprises, and the surprises I encounter are never good news, only bad. I regret that a little. I think our lives are better when we are surprised from time to time, don’t you? I don’t mean big surprises like your spouse announcing that she’s leaving you or …”

  He looked away. I knew what he had been about to say. He had been about to say we don’t need surprises like finding your spouse dead.

  We both began speaking at once. I started to tell him that he needn’t be embarrassed, it was a normal thing to say, but when I heard him speaking, looking out the window at the mountaintops, I stopped. “I have come to believe that a truly happy life is poised on the edge between routine and normalcy and risk and surprises,” Andrew said. “Maybe that’s why people do things like skydiving or riding roller coasters.”

  Or having affairs with their husband’s partner, I thought.

  “Anyway, I’m sharing office space at the clinic now with a urologist,” Andrew said before taking a long pull from his drink. “We have a lot of fun together. I call him the plumber and he calls me the butcher.” He laughed at his own joke.

  The sounds drifting up the hall from the kitchen were growing louder, along with Tina’s voice barking instructions to the silent Goldie.

  “Tina is very lucky to be married to you, Andrew,” I said.

  He blushed. What makes a celebrated surgeon blush? A compliment.

  “Thank you,” Andrew said, and set his glass aside. “Thank you, Josie, that’s very kind. You know,” and he pulled his chair a few inches closer, “I know Tina has her faults and all of that, and we have our little disagreements over things, but I could do worse. Than be married to her, I mean. Some of her friends … are you playing bridge with them Thursday?”

  “Actually, I hope not.”

  “Avoid it if you can. A couple of her friends, Charlene and what’s the other one? Davida. Charlene and Davida, they are really over the top. Kiss you on the cheek and stab you in the back. Simultaneously.” He stumbled through that word, adding an extra syllable or two. “I came home …” He glanced at the doorway, confirmed that Tina wasn’t lurking there with a shotgun, and dropped his voice so low it was my turn to pull my chair closer. “I came home one afternoon just as the bridge club meeting was breaking up. Davida had already left with a couple of other girls—that’s what they call themselves, and that’s all right, I guess—and three or four of them were getting ready to leave. I got some kisses from them, and then Charlene discovered that someone had walked off with her handbag. She knew it was Davida because they both have the same Louis Vuitton purse, so it was an easy mistake to make. But what happened next was that Charlene and the other women—except Tina, I’m proud to say—when they knew it was Davida’s purse, they opened it and practically ransacked it, looking at all her receipts, her pictures, her address book, everything. I mean, that’s just—”

  “Dinner is finally served,” Tina said.

  “Wonderful.” Andrew smiled, then stood up and took my arm. “Josie and I are starved, aren’t we?”

  I agreed I was, which meant I avoided commenting on Charlene and Davida and their purses and friends.

  25.

  Dinner began with a cold potato soup that Tina kept insisting was not vichyssoise, which I said was fine because I was never sure if I was pronouncing the damn word correctly anyway, which caused Andrew to snort in laughter and me to giggle.

  “It sounds like you two did more drinking than talking in the den,” Tina said, visibly annoyed.

  Through the rest of the soup course, while Tina discussed her problem with damask drapes and grumbled about the terrible job her garden maintenance people were doing, Andrew and I avoided looking at each other lest we both break into giggles. Three glasses of vodka had reduced us to eight-year-olds at summer camp. It was delightful.

  The main course was grilled lamb chops and thinly sliced baked potatoes served on a sauce that I must admit was as gourmet as I ever expect to eat. My compliments were sincere enough for Tina to call Goldie in from the kitchen to take some sort of culinary bow. “Goldie is from Guatemala,” Tina announced in a tone that suggested a Guatemalan maid was a notch or two higher in the Vancouver social strata than one from Mexico or, for all I knew, Kurdistan. Anyway, she was a shy, petite woman with coal black hair and eyes, and Andrew and I toasted her with the Châteauneuf-du-Pape that Tina had made a point of informing us cost eighty-five dollars a bottle, but it was worth it, wasn’t it? I agreed, and said if she cared to break the empty bottle I would be pleased to lick the pieces.

  Dessert was a mango sorbet. It went well with the coffee and not so well with my head, which was bouncing between the appetite satisfaction of the meal and the rapid fading of the alcohol.

  Something was bothering me, had been bothering me since before I sat down at the dinner table. It was a voice in my mind, and if voices can have colour, this one was as dark as Goldie’s hair but not nearly as attractive. I kept trying to listen to this voice, absorb what it was saying to me, but all I could hear was Tina discussing boxwood hedges and cracked flagstone.

  “Josie.” It was Tina, reaching to grab my arm. “Where are you, anyway?”

  I turned to stare at her, my eyes unfocused.

  “You have forgotten,” Andrew said, “that the poor girl is still on Eastern Time, which means,” and he looked at his watch, “it’s well past eleven at night to her inner clock. She must be very tired.”

  I looked at Tina and told her Andrew was right. I was very tired.

  Within minutes I was in the guest room at the far wing of the house, a s
econd-floor suite with the same view across the water to downtown Vancouver that I had enjoyed in the den. A quick tour of Tina’s toiletries, a turndown of the bed, and a kiss on the cheek were followed by blessed darkness and silence and the even more welcome blessing of the soft bed and the duvet and the gentle slowing down of the spinning room.

  I WOKE UP AND I KNEW.

  I knew what happened that night, the night Gabe waited for me on the blanket and died. I knew how and why he had died, and I knew what I had done and what I had not done to cause his death, the story like a picture, and the picture developing like the one the horny Buddhist photographer had shown me in his darkroom once, an image on paper beginning to form. I had been dreaming that I was in the darkroom alone, watching the image appear on the paper in the tray, an image of Gabe on the blanket. In my dream I began to cry, and I was crying when I awoke.

  It was the purses. The identical Louis Vuitton look-what-I’ve-got-you-bitch purses.

  The face of the clock next to the bed glowed 2:15.

  Going back to sleep was out of the question. I needed to walk. I needed to think things through, to decide what to do and how to do it. I dressed, went downstairs, and opened the side door into the garden.

  Tina had told me almost everything about her house, about the custom cabinetry made of Philippine mahogany, the special floor tiles imported from Mexico, and the solid brass door fixtures from a small foundry in England. She had never mentioned the security system.

  Opening the door triggered a speaker somewhere in the house, pulsing a high-pitched tone. Lights in the garden and under the eaves of the house lit up, and while I stood waiting for my addled mind to explain what the hell was happening, the telephone rang.

  I closed my eyes and the door, and waited for Tina to find me, deciding what I would say to her.