Borderline

by Janette Turner Hospital

  Or perhaps he was in thrall to the woman’s face.

  Perhaps he sniffed the sharp, salty quim of atonement.

  He felt the nether gathering of his wine-limp blood, a tidal miracle. He felt he might smash anyone who had laid a hand on her. He returned to the living room and set down the lantern.

  “It’s no use,” he said apologetically. “If you go to the police, I’ll have to take her. I’ll make a run for it.”

  “Oh really?” The heroics of alcohol, she thought witheringly. “And where would you go?”

  “Away,” he said loftily. “Somewhere.”

  “A fugitive. For the rest of your life.”

  “Until she’s … back on her feet. Until she can make her own decisions.”

  “Oh, I see.” Felicity laughed. “Just until she’s back on her feet.”

  There was a silence, a strange truce. Felicity filled their glasses again. Each stared into private thought. What they do, Gus told himself, is send them back where they came from. He visualized this: the face above the torn dress, pale as hard-chilled butter, in a Ziploc freezer bag, labelled, dated, returned to sender.

  “Your own juices would freeze,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Like those days that are thirty below, with a windchill factor thrown in.” He was running his fingers around the map of his face again. “You know” — he gasped as though the air had turned suddenly arctic — “the way it hurts to breathe.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The truck. The meat van.”

  “Ah.”

  “They must have been desperate.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t,” Felicity sighed. “You don’t seem to realize we’d be criminals.”

  “Oh well,” he said, with a weary gesture of one hand. He had always been that, a miserable worm in the sight of God. (Absolve me, Father, for I have sinned …) “But listen, there’s no need for you …”

  “Oh please. And do wipe that look of sanctity off your face. We have a duty to talk sense into each other.”

  “It’s no use,” he said politely.

  “This isn’t fair. It isn’t fair. Why us?”

  Why not us? he wondered.

  “And what about your wife?” Felicity needled. “What’s she going to think of this, a spare woman in the basement or wherever?”

  “Oh God. Therese.” The euphoria punctured.

  “You see. And I’m in the middle of arrangements for the next exhibition. Ivories from Rome, paintings from northern Italy, manuscripts from Paris and Oxford, transport, insurance, you name it. I haven’t time for complications.” This trip itself, after all, was in order to avoid complications. “I’m right in the middle of the end of an affair, among other things,” she said dryly. “So what am I supposed to do? Kiss the manuscript collection goodbye?”

  He repeated blankly, “Manuscript collection?”

  “Yes. The Braques and Chagalls are going in a couple of weeks. Did you see them?”

  “What?”

  “My gallery in Cambridge. I managed to get two Braques and three Chagalls on loan. If you missed them, they’re going to Montreal next. The Galerie St Joseph, I think.”

  He stared at her. “But …” he said bewildered. He was not sure what he thought the people who went to museums and art galleries would look like. He did not expect them to look like Felicity. “I’ve never been to one of those things,” he said.

  She raised an eyebrow in surprise. “What do you do, then?”

  “I sell insurance.”

  “Good God. You’re kidding.”

  “Oh, scum of the earth, right?” he said bitterly. “You’d think we handed out VD instead of rent to widows.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean … That was awfully rude of me. I just … I don’t think I’ve ever actually met one before, I mean someone who —”

  “Forget it. Goes with the job.” Though whenever it happened he would think of Mrs Fitzsimon, who had got through wake and funeral in dry-eyed shock and then broken down when he handed her the cheque. Oh, thank God, she sobbed. Thank God. You mean we don’t have to move out of the house?

  “I’ll tell you something,” he said sombrely. “There are two ways you learn the real truth about people, and I’ve done them both. Waiting tables and selling insurance.” He swallowed a mouthful of wine and shook his head. “You wouldn’t believe. The most respectable people. Doctors, professors, newspaper editors. The way they speak when they figure you don’t count, it’s interesting. I can tell you, you learn a thing or two.”

  “I expect so,” Felicity said.

  They stared into their wine in silence. They sipped. They refilled their glasses more than once. They seemed to be waiting for a decision to make itself.

  Gus rallied. “I have to call Therese. She worries.” When she floated into vision like this, she came with that tired look that distressed him so much, that look of a woman whose husband is always on the road, whose four daughters promise endless anxiety. She came pulling fretfully at the greying curls on her forehead, brow furrowed, worn out from financial precariousness, so that he would want to scoop her up in his arms and carry her off to their bedroom and anoint her with solace and lick it off — a form of comfort useless to her, threatening only another child. Instead he would bring flowers, or buy her a whole book of lottery tickets, confident always of miracles; even lighting a candle at St Jude’s to that end, pointing out to God that it was not for himself he asked, that in fact he would not touch a cent of the winnings. In his dreams he was the Knight of Happiness, the hero who slashed through thorns, trailing jubilation. But it always turned out that he had embezzled her newspaper money; or the money set aside for the girls’ confirmation dresses; or the candle money kept in a raspberry jelly jar against the saying of requiem masses for his late father-in-law. Or some other misappropriation of funds equally appalling, and wasteful, and sacrilegious.

  He rested his elbows on Felicity’s table and put his head in his hands. “Poor Therese,” he sighed. She would be sick with anxiety at this moment, imagining car crashes, desertion, the running up of bills. “She deserved a lot better.”

  Of course she would never have married him if he hadn’t so cunningly deflowered her. But then the baby, his one and only son, had died anyway, a judgment of God. Whenever he thought of it some rupturing took place inside him, a curse of transposed labour, and he would cringe with pain. Love was at him again. It was a sort of cancerous malady coiled inside him, gnawing away, lashing out in sudden stabbings at unwary moments. A congenital disease. Certainly it mocked him. He loved far too often, too easily, too catholicy.

  “I am a clown,” he told Felicity lugubriously.

  She was somewhere else. Somewhere distant. She blinked, focusing. “Pardon?”

  He searched back for what he had said, caught hold of the words where they lingered, and produced them, mildly puzzled. “I said that I’m a clown.”

  “Aren’t we all? And on strings.”

  “If we do this,” he said, glancing at the bedroom doorway as though children who were to be fed poisoned candy lay beyond it, “I hope we’ll be able to sleep again.”

  Felicity laughed sourly. “Oh, that’s asking too much.” She began walking about the room again. “Either way. No matter what we do.” She sighed. “Thank God for the law. When in doubt, pass the buck and fall back on what is lawful.”

  “I wish you’d keep still,” he said. “Why do you open and shut doors like that all the time?”

  She was startled. “Do I?”

  “You’re doing it now. It’s getting on my nerves.”

  “Let’s go then,” she said. “I’ll take her in my car. You can stop in L’Ascension to call your wife, and then you should drive right on.”

  He was offended. “What sort of a rat do you think I am? We’ll brand ourselves together.”

  “Brand ourselves?”

  “Band ourselves, I said. Band ourselves together. It’s as much my fau
lt.”

  “I know, I know, it’s not that. We can stay in touch. But it’s a matter of strategy. It’ll be simpler this way. No risk of contradicting each other’s story under cross-examination. Besides, this is the kind of dumb thing police expect of a woman; you know, falling in love with condemned men, marrying them on Death Row, that kind of nonsense. We’re subject to aberrant pity, no one is surprised. So as soon as you’re safely back on the highway, I’ll get hold of the priest — and he can decide which doctor.”

  “Priest?” He seemed to have missed something.

  “The priest will take care of everything,” she said. “He’ll see that nothing … nothing unpleasant happens.”

  Gus thought: She has the kind of trust in priests that only Protestants have these days. Or Catholics over sixty. “But why a priest?” he asked. “You’re not a Catholic, are you?”

  “No. But La Magdalena is.”

  “Who?”

  “La Mag — Oh. Silly of me. But she reminds me of a painting of Mary Magdalene.”

  “Oh.” He digested this. “How do you know she’s Catholic?”

  “Everyone is, where she comes from.” Impatiently.

  Of course, Gus thought, flushing. I’m ignorant. Stupid. I sell insurance. But the torn dress had spoken to him. He picked up the lantern and walked into the bedroom again. La Magdalena. It was true that she had the face of a saint. If we lift her, he thought, she might break. He turned to Felicity. “We can’t move her again. You go for a doctor. I’ll wait here.”

  She paced the other room. She opened and closed closet doors and windows. She came back to the bedroom.

  “That won’t work, to have two of us involved. They’ll never believe we both acted on the same impulse. It’s too improbable. Do you really want the police at your office? Immigration people? Reporters?”

  “We can’t move her,” he said stubbornly. “We can’t. She’s exhausted.”

  “All right then.” She took a deep breath. “We’ll leave her here. I’ll bring the priest back.”

  “This is wrong,” he said, but without energy. He knew it was too late. It was like arm wrestling. After a certain point, there was nothing that could reverse the momentum. But he said it again, a protest cravenly registered, a bell tolling: “This is wrong.”

  “Whatever we do is wrong now.”

  “All my life,” he said, “I’ve had this nightmare. I’m somewhere very public and the police arrive. Everyone’s watching and wondering and I know damn well they’ve come for me, even though I don’t know what it is I’ve done. I’m sweating like crazy and I tell them, I tell everyone, I’m shouting it: “But why? What for? I haven’t done anything.’ Then as soon as I say it, I have this sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that I did do something. Maybe I was drunk, or maybe I did it in my sleep, it’s just out of reach in my mind, but whatever it is, I’m guilty of it.”

  He filled his glass shakily, slopping more wine across the table.

  “Crazy, eh? It’ll come back tonight or tomorrow night, for sure. Used to have it all the time when I was a kid.” He gulped at the wine. “Ever have a dream like that?”

  Felicity drew endless circles in the spilled wine and did not answer.

  “Jesus,” Gus laughed self-deprecatingly. “Dumb question, eh?”

  Jesus. He might as well have unbuttoned his fly, exposed himself. The sick things one told after a few drinks. Only Catholics had dreams like that. He drank another glass of wine greedily, as though it were water. We’re marked from baptism, he thought. We’re trained to spend our lives in hell so we’ll consider purgatory a good deal.

  And perhaps the last glass of wine did it. He was pitched, phosphorescent, into the refining blaze of purgatorial fire. There was a sound of shattering — the falling away of his earthly body; or perhaps the crashing to the floor of the wine glass.

  “Headlights,” Felicity said. “From the crest of the drive. Don’t worry about the glass, I’ll clean it up. Damn. They could try low beam, they must have seen our cars by now.” She had found an old rag in a corner cupboard and was mopping at the mess on the floor. “Why don’t they dip their lights?” Goddam city tourists looking for a cottage they’d rented for the weekend. “Happens once in a while. Cars take the wrong turn, can’t find a place to turn round.”

  It seemed endless, the blinding glare, the obscene invasion of privacy. A garrulous car engine, the loud conversation of tyres on gravel. Then an idling, but still no dipping of the lights. This was interminable. Then voices.

  “City drivers!” Felicity said irritably. “Can’t even tell when they’ve made a mistake.”

  She went to the door and was bathed in the lights. “What are you looking for?” she called. But there was no answer. Felicity had to shield her eyes. “They must be able to see me,” she grumbled to Gus. “What are they trying to do? Blind me?”

  At last: a ritual of reversing, a swinging away of the lights, a diminuendo of sound.

  Silence.

  “So,” Felicity said. “Let’s go.”

  Words fell into Gus’s mind like dust dislodged from the low ceiling beams. What you have to do, do quickly. He examined them warily, poked at them with a finger of thought, but they gave back nothing. He did not know where they had come from.

  He followed Felicity into the darkness where the cars waited.

  10

  A jag of lightning reached down like a tuning fork.

  Gus’s aerial sang.

  The highway waited for rain but was rough-housed by bluster, a dry, electric flirtation. Once L’Ascension was behind him, the winds swooped like birds of prey. Splat, the windshield parrying. Perhaps, before Winston, he would drive into rain. No doubt storm clouds were brewing over the Great Lakes and sending foraging parties on dry runs eastward. He tacked into them, exhilarated.

  “I was so worried,” Therese had said, a catch in her voice. Or perhaps it was simply storm interference on the telephone connection. “J’étais en train d’imaginer …” She always lapsed into French when upset. “I don’ know what,” she quavered. “Somet’ing terrible …”

  Her consonants, as ever, seduced him. He was helpless before the segue of her syllables, the unpredictable stresses and intonations. “An accident has arrived, isn’t it?” she faltered.

  No, no, he assured. Safe as churches. Just a darn muddle-up at the border, a bunch of refugees, everyone gets penalized. Luck of the draw, darn it, waiting and waiting and not a chance to make a phone call. But at last, thank God … begun to think they’d never … in just three hours, if he kept to a steady ten kilometres over the limit.

  Grâce à Dieu, she said. Grâce à Dieu.

  The best-told lies, he thought, skirt closest around the truth. It is the telling detail that convinces, the gospel of trivia. The flies, he would say. And the smell — you wouldn’t believe! Like a freezer on the blink, full of rolled roasts and people. Endless delays — what else would you expect? — and more questions than a driver’s licence test.

  In all probability tomorrow’s paper would give impressive confirmation. Television, even, in full living colour. Incident at the border. Perhaps there would be a photograph of the van, the carcasses swaying on their hooks. Your father, Therese would tell the girls with awe, was there.

  A sales rep for history.

  Though he would have to warn them to say nothing beyond the house.

  On cruise control, he set course for hearth and home. Therese would be mellow with relief. His daughters were dreaming the dreams of innocence by now, tucked in their beds, adrift in lace veils and seed pearls and their First Communion; homework done, their packed lunch boxes lined up and waiting for morning. No, tomorrow was Saturday. Well anyway, all would be well.

  Also, it was bound tomake a difference coming home innocent. Virtually innocent. How could it count now, that grappling in a hotel room a century earlier in the day? And in another country on the far side of the border. Another country altogether.

  His aerial
sang to him, humming in the wind.

  Te absolvo, it chanted. The Lord be with you.

  And also — he lifted up his voice in tuneless antiphonal grace — and also with you. Amen.

  Blessed art thou, thrummed the aerial, among clowns and philanderers.

  Amen, he sang.

  He was frequently an optimistic pessimist. When the wind was right, he could soar above the evidence of his life and education. A host of guardians (the nuns and priests of his school years, keepers of the faith) hovered on his lee side, withholding judgment.

  Therese, he would say. I have flowers for you (though they are still at the florist’s until the shops open in the morning). And in a week, two at the most, I’ll have money for the confirmation dresses, white lace on the bodice and cuffs. And by summer, a pool in the yard, you’ll see.

  Oh yes, oh yes, it was possible. Blueprints for the good life had fluttered down on the sales conference like confetti. Whatever the mind can conceive, the mind can achieve: it was on the conference note pads, on every page, in gleaming embossed letters. This was the promise, an article of faith, and the convention speaker had a Cadillac to prove it. And a recipe too, a fail-safe series of steps: one day he was taping a magazine picture of that Cadillac to the cracked slum walls of his life, the next he was dangling the keys in his hands and papering his penthouse with speeding tickets. I wanted that car so bad, he told them, thumping his pulpit in the Grand Hyatt conference room, I could feel the wheel in my hands before I had two half-dollars to rub together. That wheel had a mink collar on it. I could feel the mink between my fingers, I used to fall asleep stroking it.

  Fantasize, fantasize, that was the key. It isn’t raining rain at all, it’s raining swimming pools, sundecks, a Corvette for Therese. It’s coming down silk dresses for the girls. The power of the mind, he could spin his own life out of it. Apparently. New York was swarming with people who would swear to it: I visualize, therefore it is. I believe, and it comes to pass.

  And therefore the woman, La Magdalena, whose torn dress had spoken, was safe. He was not turning a deaf ear, he was not deserting. And it was not required of him to break the law — surely a sign in itself of the Good Living seal of approval. He was drafting her future.