Albert Camus, who was unhappily taken from the world two years ago, wrote “there is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.” This is no flashy new notion. Sophocles argued that not to be born is the appropriate anticipatory solution to the burdens of life, and that the second best solution is for life, once it has appeared, to go swiftly whence it came. Yet he lived to ninety, a great age in that Great Age, “fortunate in death, as he had been fortunate in life,” said his contemporary Phrynichus.
As I ponder the quality of existence, upon attaining slightly more than half of Sophocles’ years, I find myself emboldened by other sages of millennia past, those Greek philosophers and Roman heroes who accepted suicide as the noble route to oblivion. I am emboldened too by more modern thinkers. Nietzsche: “Conversely, the compulsion to prolong life from day to day, and accepting the most painful, humiliating conditions, without the strength to come nearer the actual goal of one’s life: that is far less worthy of respect.”
And here is Dermot Mulligan, professor emeritus, author of no little repute, at the supposed peak of life and career, almost relishing being accused at graveside of committing suicide by leaping from the pinnacle of success.
Do I engage in such contemplation in defiance of God, who alone, we are taught, is life’s giver and taker? Or have the sanctified popes and other twisters of Christian truth corrupted the Word? Did not Moses himself beg of his Creator: “Kill me at once, if I find favour in your sight, that I may not see my wretchedness”? And did not Christ himself choose to go to the Cross, not just inviting death but welcoming it with his unbending passion? And is not a self-willed death therefore at the heart of redemption?
After all, why ought we to assume God condemns us for self-inflicted death but not for abandoning Him? For having committed evil, unforgivable evil.
This is surely the loneliest moment, knowing that consciousness will presently be extinguished. This is surely the loneliest moment.
Take arms, Mulligan, take arms
And that’s it – one and a half double-spaced pages with slightly raised o’s and dotless i’s. A few corrections, some words crossed out by overlaid X’s, interlineations above. Not a mark by pen or pencil, but there can be no doubt this came from the same typewriter that produced his manuscripts. I have filed affidavits from two document examiners hired by the Archives, and the Crown will likely concede that this discursive declaration was produced on Dermot’s old Remington upright, last seen by me in the Squamish RCMP exhibits locker.
Why had he so carefully edited and repaired this little dissertation, then somehow lost it in the shuffle of his papers? Is there another page somewhere, a lost confession of unforgiven sins? Evil, unforgivable evil.
The final sentence lacks a period. I visualize Mulligan rising from his desk, drawing Hamlet from the shelf, rereading that most famous of soliloquies. For surely that was the reference: Take arms, Mulligan, take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep no more.
His Dilemmas of Moral Behaviour, I recall, contains a lively analysis of the soliloquy. It was not fear of the unknown that made cowards of us all, but moral guilt. But what was Dermot’s dilemma, what was the unforgivable evil that would drive him to suicide? Something far more desperate than writer’s block.
I feel warm breath behind my ear, a touch, Margaret’s soft voice. “Let’s go out to the point, darling, and catch the final rays.”
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2011
I am in much finer fettle this morning, enjoying a bracing wind off the bow as I lean upon the railing of the Queen of Prince George, whose transsexual name still provokes humour after forty years on the Gulf Islands run. Known locally as the Queen George, this old tub brought me to Garibaldi twelve years ago, a refugee from the law and the wounds from a faithless spouse.
My concerns about Margaret, distorted to the point of near-illness by my febrile imagination, have eased. There were warm cuddles last night, and some activity that could almost pass as foreplay, though it soon wilted into sleep. How could I have allowed myself to sink into such a cesspool of doubt? My proud feminist partner scorns the cheap sexual games, the flirtations, the hushed-up bed-jumping practices of the many satyrs among her political peers.
I am Pavlov’s dog, conditioned by years of marital torture to seek unfaithfulness in the remotest clues. At the end, Annabelle had finally admitted to twelve medium-to-long-range affairs over our quarter-century of marriage, the final one to the popinjay she’s now divorcing. I had thought there’d been only four or five – the notorious ones. I’d blinded myself to the details of what everyone else knew.
Below me, awarded a prime spot at the bow by the ferry staff, is the Mustang with its ribald decals and motifs of lightning and fiery manes. I’d got taunts in the ferry lineup: “Lose a bet?” “You get this off of some Seattle pimp?” “Hey, Artie, ain’t you too old to be having a mid-life crisis?” But despite its imperfections, the car seems reasonably street legal: the horn works, the lights work, as do the brakes, in their fashion.
Soon the wind is whipping my hair as I head north from the Tsawwassen terminal across the verdant Fraser Delta, the rising Pacific lapping at its dikes. Then I am in the dense grid of the world’s most liveable city, or so the street banners proclaim. I get fist pumps from a carload of teens, and I salute them back.
The elevator disgorges me onto the forty-second floor of the BMO building, one of four occupied by Tragger, Inglis, Bullingham. Roy Bullingham is the threesome’s sole survivor, still in harness at ninety-two, and reputed to be immortal.
The irascible tyrant usually pops in without warning on long weekends, and I don’t want to see him, don’t want to endure his digs. Out of retirement so soon, Beauchamp? He’s irked that I have undertaken my pro bono appeal while rejecting a seven-figure fee from a tycoon who allegedly electrocuted his mother-in-law in the bathtub.
I enter by a medieval-looking pair of oak portals and return greetings from some Labour Day workaholics. A private elevator takes me to the partners’ floor. There I move stealthily down a deep-carpeted corridor, past Bully’s closed door to my own, and escape into the anteroom. Gertrude Isbister yelps with surprise at my quiet entry.
“Holy cow, don’t do that.”
I kiss her cheek “Thank you for being so unretiring, my dear.”
“My other choice was to get hauled around by the grandkids at the PNE.” She’d called me after A Thirst came out, hugely embarrassed that Wentworth would publicly repeat her confidence that she’d had a crush on me.
After sharing news, as older friends do, about our respective states of health – her arthritis, my foot – she asks, “Will you be staying at your club?”
“If they’re not full. Otherwise, ask if the Hotel Vancouver has my favourite corner room.”
“You have a bunch of messages.”
“You know where they can go.”
“Ms. Wu phoned to confirm she’ll be here at one-thirty. Hubbell wants you to join him for lunch.”
“Excellent.” Hubbell Meyerson, also retired. I haven’t seen him since Iris divorced him. It’s been awkward – Margaret is fond of Iris.
“Also, this just arrived.” On her desk near the wall, a stem vase with a single red rose, and beside it a copy of A Thirst. “It’s from Annabelle – she’s back. She’d like you to sign the book.”
I was aghast. “Did you tell her I was coming in?”
“Arthur, it’s hard. I’ve known her for ages – I couldn’t cut her off cold. She has your direct line anyhow, so I had to pick up.”
“Is she threatening to come by?”
“I warned her you’d be tied up.”
I go to the door, peek out. “Explain to her I missed my ferry.”
“Please don’t ask me to lie.”
“Call April Wu, tell her not to come here; I’ll go to her office instead. Meanwhile, I’ll be hiding in the library.”
I close my ears to Gertrude’s protests,
pick up the Swift file, and scoot down the emergency staircase, a back channel to the vaulted, tiered imitation-Gothic library, where portraits of Tragger, Inglis, and other prominent dead glower from the heights.
I presume that’s old Riley at his usual table, hidden behind a slag heap of casebooks. Most lawyers now use computerized research services, but Riley does it the old, familiar way. I approach quietly, lean over his scrawny shoulder, read a heading in Wigmore on Evidence – “Inadmissible Confessions.” Other texts form a ring around him. Questioned documents. The forensics of DNA.
He must sense me hovering but doesn’t turn, merely points to a pile of bookmarked cases. “Start there. Baron Parke, 1845, Exchequer Court, top of 321 to 323, a third of the way down to the paragraph ending ‘makeshift analogy.’ ”
I’m not yet ready to swim the turbid waters of stare decisis, and in seeking diversion spot Hubbell Meyerson in a corner cubicle. He is absorbed in a book, smiling so lasciviously that I suspect it may be pornographic. He has grown a curly beard as amends for his baldness and has fattened his face with chipmunk cheeks. A wry smile as he sees me approaching.
“Hot stuff.” His hand jumps from the book as if burnt.
I am dismayed on seeing the cover: a nose in profile to rival Cyrano’s. My second sighting today.
Hubbell rises, grabs his hat. “You owe me lunch from two years ago. Chez Jean Genet?” He slips A Thirst into his valise, then gives me a friendly nudge. “Tell me honestly, old chum, did you really go groin to groin with Ophelia Moore?”
The question is too offensive to merit an answer. But it’s a reminder to call her. She has retired to the Osoyoos desert for her asthma.
I lead him to the firm’s row of reserved parking spaces, where a Land Rover, a BMW, and a Cadillac sit several stalls away from the Mustang, shunning the purple, topless, tattooed hoodlum.
“Join me for a spin, Hubbell. This baby burns.”
“Burns what, oil?” He stares at my machine, suspicious. “Is everything all right between you and Margaret?”
I pretend I didn’t hear that and take him on a breezy spin uptown to downtown, to the Jean Genet, a chi-chi bistro disarmingly located on Granville’s rough half-mile. We take a window table, where I can watch my steed at a meter. Hubbell, smiling his cheeky smile, proffers his copy of A Thirst to be signed. “How could you be so stupid as to allow that fellow Chance such liberty? He had a bloody field day with you.”
I scribble, half-heartedly, To my close friend of fifty-five years. Has it been that long since the college years? Were we really so close? Strait-laced Stretch and the Ladykiller – I’d been in awe of his amorous prowess. “I expected discretion from Wentworth. I trusted him.”
“Nonsense. You might as well have been emptying your heart to some supermarket tabloid writer. He hustled you.”
“I’d thought, until I read this, Wentworth was incapable of hustling anyone, let alone the prime object of his almost religious devotion. Somehow I must have embittered him toward me. A Thirst was his revenge.” Had I been abrupt and unfeeling in persistently brushing off that fluttering moth?
“More likely he fell under the sway of those brigands he’s partnered with. I can picture them, Macarthur and Brovak, working him over: Juice it up, Wentworth. Let’s see the real Arthur, warts and all, preferably with his dick hanging out.”
As this bear-baiting continues over naissains d’huîtres and salade Niçoise, I decide Hubbell is getting back at me for my hesitant support during his difficult divorce. The marriage collapsed under the weight of his final, ridiculous affair, which also died on the vine. He’s alone now at seventy-six, and I can see how forlorn he is behind the big laugh.
“The critical consensus,” I say, “has it that I am portrayed as extraordinarily human – even, however tacky it sounds, lovable.” The review that most frightened me began: Expectations of a dry, pompous paean free of ribald anecdotes were quickly doused …
Hubbell recites his favourite passage, the quote from Ophelia Moore: “If Arthur doesn’t want to say what went on, I shall not embarrass him. Ho-ho. Yes, you’ll get quite a ribbing from the Appeal Court this month. Not sure if they’ll be able to take you seriously.”
Wednesday, September 21, in Room Sixty of the Law Courts. Wentworth, who has boned up on the case, will surely be there, making notes for his revised edition with its heartbreaking conclusion of the Swift saga. Oblivious of his fading powers, Beauchamp had clearly stayed in the ring too long.
“You ought to thank me for keeping your Mr. Chance at bay. He pestered me, of course. I had to send him on a few innocent detours to nowhere. When I think of some of the yarns I could have told him … That cathouse in Grandview? Your birthday? You were making out with that tawny little knockout.”
I nearly choke on a baby oyster, quickly change the subject. “Another fan has just popped up with a book to sign.”
“Yes, I heard she was back.”
“How?”
“Well, actually, from Annabelle herself. She phoned me.” Hubbell tips back his glass of Chablis, dabs his lips – spinning it out, taking excessive comfort from my lack of it. “Her job at the VOA hasn’t kicked in yet, so she’s busy reconnecting with old friends. Mind you, we maintained contact while she was overseas. Her letters gave me quite a boost when things were at their bleakest. How goes it between you and Margaret these days?”
“Fine. And what did Annabelle have to say?”
“About you?”
“About anything, damn it.” Hubbell has got under my skin.
“Oh, she felt she shouldn’t bother you. I told her, ‘Nonsense. Arthur doesn’t retain awkward feelings. The past is past.’ ”
“And you suggested I wouldn’t mind getting together.”
“I assumed that, naturally. Good lord, you were married thirty years. You shared the raising of a wonderful daughter.”
Deborah, a high school principal in Australia, cherished mother of my cherished grandchild, Nick. Deborah was a supporting angel during the stressful final years of that marriage.
I check my watch. “Time flies. I can’t stay for coffee. You’ll be fine with a taxi?”
I drop a credit card on the table but Hubbell returns it. “Not a chance – you’re buying dinner instead. I’ve reserved at Hy’s.”
I am finding this a bit much. Has Hubbell no other friends?
“So everything is fine with you and Margaret?”
That is obviously what Annabelle is seeking, through Hubbell’s agency, to squirrel out of me. “We are inconceivably happy.”
Hubbell nods, skeptical. “Where are you staying? I’ve been stumbling around my condo like a ghoul in an echo chamber. There’s a vacant room with an en suite Jacuzzi and a view over English Bay. I’ve even had the maid perfume the sheets for you.”
“A handsome offer, but Gertrude has reserved other digs.” A white lie. Hubbell seems needy for my friendship, but that may be a cover for his role as fifth columnist for the stalking divorcée.
I hesitate, then embrace him. As I hurry to my car, I call Gertrude on my cell. “If you’ve checked me into any of my preferred hotels, check me out.” Annabelle knows all of them.
“Well, where am I supposed to put you?”
“You’re not to worry, I’ll find something. I may not be back today.”
“Riley will have his brief on your desk by this evening.”
“Buy him those chocolate-covered macadamias he likes. Annabelle?”
“Nothing.”
I hurry off to the tarted-up part of Chinatown, East Pender. There, on the top floor of a low-rise near the Sun-Yat Sen Gardens, is the April Wu Detective Agency, established three years ago after she quit a major investigative service in Hong Kong, where she’d learned her trade. Most of her work entails following disloyal husbands, but she prefers the more dramatic assignments from the several criminal lawyers who conspire to keep her a secret from the rest of the bar.
April’s burly male assistant escorts me to
an inner office, where awaits the slender Oriental temptress. She is posing for me, framed in the sunshine from a tall window behind her desk. Normally she’s a sun-avoider, a night person, and her face seems extraordinarily pale against the jet-black hair that frames it and the blue-black eye shadow. Early thirties, though it’s hard to tell. I have always assumed that her air of witchy mystery is an elaborate masque. She knows lawyers love theatre.
She advances and busses me on the lips – just a bunt, but it startles me. I hadn’t known we were that well acquainted.
“Everything is well in your life?” British accent with an underlay of Cantonese. She directs me to a well-padded rattan chair. The prints that adorn the walls are of terraced hills, ancient palaces, pagodas.
“Everything is not well. Margaret is off to Ottawa, my ex-wife is on the prowl, and I am back practising law when I should be selling goat cheese at the farmers’ market. How are you, my dear?”
“Content. Choose a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life.”
“Who says?”
“Confucius.”
I counter with something I’d read on a bumper sticker: “When you realize there is nowhere to go, you have arrived.”
“Sounds New Agey. I want you to relax, Arthur.” An ethereal smile as she draws the drapes across her windows. “I have just come back from a Cree reserve in Saskatchewan. I talked to a number of elders there, students at Pius Eleven in the early 1940s.”
The room is in semi-darkness. April has paused, fully expecting me to beg for more. I give in. “What inspired you to go to there?”
“The Truth and Reconciliation Commission.”
That body has had some engine problems but is soon to chug off on a coast-to-coast tour. The First Nations are preparing for it, gathering and publishing histories of those abused in residential schools. I’ve read Gabriel’s critique of it in the New Internationalist. The “forgiveness game,” he called it, a sly government effort to forestall heavy reparations and keep the churches solvent.
I'll See You in My Dreams: An Arthur Beauchamp Novel Page 30
