Fog, a Novel

by Rana Bose

  “What’s your point?” I asked.

  “Well, you’d mentioned that Myra wanted to be an actress and that you felt she turned hot and cold, on and off.” I had described her that way. But it also occurred to me that Nat might have suggested certain ideas about her to him.

  “People don’t want attention just for the sake of it. They want to be loved because maybe they never got the attention they needed. So, the child seeks a kind of loving attention when they’re older. Now if they’ve been loved and taken care of when they were kids, then there would be no real reason for them to be unstable. So, if she’s being hot and cold, it’s because she’s trying out different roles. It has to do with social mores. In her mind, she is testing the waters. She wants to be sure, probably because she has no one to fall back on.” For sure, Nat had spoken to him.

  Having said that, he began to cough. I waited for him to settle down. He looked pale. “That’s what led her to become an actress, a profession where she’s encouraged to walk in and out of roles, each on a trial basis. You said she’s the daughter of a well-known critic, didn’t you? You said she doesn’t get along with her mother and her father has been long gone, yes? So, I think she missed out on a few things in life and doesn’t feel stable or doesn’t even know what stability means. Her interests may not be yours.”

  My grandfather was no doubt from another generation, but his observations struck me as worth considering. I didn’t want to argue with him on any finer points or try to make too much of it, either.

  I walked all the way downtown from the canal and passed by my parents’ restaurant. I looked in and saw my father greeting people, a smile on his face, tilting his head to the side and pleasing the entire world with the affected, maudlin ways of a charming, humble, Eastern man, which he was not. I chose not to enter. I finally relented and took the subway at the student-infested Guy-Concordia station, riding it toward the toilet-walled, destitute, and homeless St-Laurent station. I emerged, turned the corner and started for home. In the distance, I clearly saw two women stomping down opposite sides of the street. One wore a black dress that shimmered shapelessly. She was moving away from me. The other wore a white jacket and large sunglasses, and she was striding gauntly towards me.

  Chapter Twelve

  Things to Do

  Suddenly winter had cut loose after an indifferent summer. Blistering winds curved your back. The streets were twig strewn, ice-bound, nearly abandoned, and the day was frigid, bone dry. The sun streamed down on the black ice, deceptive and dangerous. Dried dog poop emerged out of hollow pockets in the dirty ice. With hands tucked inside, I stepped carefully over the marbled surface. I was headed towards the Meeropol home again. She asked me to come over. She had something to say. Important. She seemed happy to see me.

  I’m not sure people ever reveal their true intentions, even to their best friends. And how honest can one be with words, anyhow? Maybe they’re only ever chosen tactically, to distract or redirect; assuming one doesn’t simply remain silent. She told me Nat had been away for a few days in New York, and maybe had landed a contract. I felt happy for him, but couldn’t hold it in any longer. “Mrs. Meeropol, is he going out with someone?” It was my grandpa who had planted that thought. I asked it as casually as I could but, still, I saw that it surprised her. She laughed a bit too noisily and said, “Chuck, if I knew you’d have known before me, no?” Then she stared at me, sensing something was wrong. I knew, too, that something had changed.

  A few weeks earlier, Nat and I had run into each other. When I asked how he was, all he said was “Things to do, stuff.” A breach was building, a greying of space between us. He was holding back and remaining distant, preferring to pretend he was always in a rush. I agree that how-are-yous are often mechanical, inconsequential. But replying “things to do” meant worse. He wasn’t willing to disclose or discuss. Besides, his use of words like ‘things’ and ‘stuff’ riled me. A twenty-year camaraderie was on the ropes for no apparent reason.

  She had asked me to come in, but it seemed like she was not really coming clean. Whenever I went to visit it wasn’t only to look him up, but also to listen to her, so we began a conversation about the two bagel shops on St-Viateur and Fairmont streets. It was enough to briefly light up her face. “Hey!” And was I startled. “Did you know there was a time when people believed they were the same store? Like connected underground. The bagels were exactly the same. Some of my friends said that their basements must be connected under the street with an underground tunnel! Can you imagine? So naïve! But it wasn’t true. We know that because when the telephone people dug up the street we could all see that there were only pipes, no secret corridor. But imagining it was fun!”

  Then she told me that the omelettes at Baby’s were not like when the store had started, around the time of the war. “Anybody who knew how to flip an omelette at home knew how to throw in green pepper, grated cheese and onions and make the mishmash. No big deal, really. It was the feel of the diner that everyone liked.” We talked about the Euro Deli and how she and her husband had often gone there. Then she suddenly looked away and I noticed she was wringing her hands very gently. She became interested in the designs on the carpet under the coffee table.

  “I don’t want to bother you, Mrs. Meeropol. I’ll leave now. Do you know when Nat will be back?”

  “No! No! Don’t go. I want to tell you something.” She disappeared to put the kettle on. She knew how much I loved tea. She had even bought Makaibari Silver Tip Darjeeling from one of the new tea houses on Sherbrooke. I had told her my father served that brand.

  I often perused Nat’s books, so I walked over to the shelf and started looking for anything new. I’d seen them all before: a history of NY Living Theatre, plays by Boal and Fo. He had a political side to him. But no flash. We had seen a few plays together. Yet, as he said about agitprop, “You ain’t goin’ to make a dime out of it, bro’, because the folks who go to theatre aren’t the ones who’ll man the barricades!”

  I noticed a few envelopes, two rings, and a watch on his desk. Beside the lamp I saw a pair of sunglasses. They seemed familiar, but not Nat’s style. I walked back to my chair and saw Mrs. Meeropol standing in the doorway with a cup of tea in her hands, watching me. Her face was long and beautiful. My grandfather once told me he liked Ava Gardner, that she was a true star—gracious, beautiful, and far from a bimbo. He said she was intelligent. I imagined that Mrs. Meeropol was a lot like her. I walked up to her and she handed me the tea. I sat down and started to sip while she fetched crackers and cheese.

  Then she sat next to me and asked, “You were looking at the sunglasses, weren’t you? You know whose they are?”

  Then, yes, I knew. I took another sip and lied. “No, I don’t. Looks like they could be a woman’s.” She hadn’t put any milk in the tea, the way I liked it. You don’t mix Darjeeling with milk. It’s light and delicate. You can mix milk with Assam teas because they have lots of body. They’re blended like Scotch. But Darjeeling is a single malt, as RK would say.

  “Yes, they are. This girl, Myra, has been coming to see him. I think I should tell you because Nat said to me that . . . ”

  I didn’t let her finish, even though I was trembling inside. “I wish he’d told me. Thank you for letting me know.”

  Now I knew why he’d been avoiding me, why he whizzed by on his bike only to wave and disappear. I had understood his distance as his way of concentrating on his stumbling career. I had wanted to give him all the distance he needed. I had assumed he was still seeing Nathalie from Merise’s bar. I had assumed wrong.

  I finished the cup of tea and said I had to go home. I left Mrs. Meeropol standing at the top of the stairs as I gently closed the door.

  I was disgusted. My whole body felt infested, wormed-up. Every step of the way I felt betrayed, detested, done in. Nat and Myra. Nothing meant much to either. Bullies! Everything was made up, appearances only. Images flash
ed by, from the first day I had met her, to our tango tryst, and the encounter after.

  I walked home talking out loud. Every step I took, it felt like the air hung me up. As if I could not get my foot down to the pavement, as if I had lost contact with the street I thought I knew so well. When I passed by the Copa, the barman Rudy shouted out, “Wazzup!”

  I totally ignored him. He hollered after me, “Hey! Chuck! Wazza matter with ya?!” I didn’t turn. I was so mad that nothing mattered anymore.

  I didn’t want to go home and slump onto my couch alone. Nor did I want to go to a pub and drown in alcohol. I wanted to think rationally and stay stable, like my grandfather suggested. They were the same fucking sunglasses she had worn when she sat outside my house. She could have just as easily left them behind at my place. So, she left them at his—what was the big deal? She’d known him longer than she knew me.

  But Mrs. Meeropol had let it all out—hadn’t she—like she was part of the understanding. He was her son, so why should she feel sorry for me? Suddenly Ava Gardner looked a lot more like Meryl Streep; an evil, scheming, conniving woman wearing Prada, not the woman I had imagined. And all for that miserable son of a bitch who had swooped down on Myra, ready to do anything to promote his failing, disoriented, fucked-up life.

  At least I had a job.

  For the next several days I was a zombie at work, moving in a daze, unable to understand what I was doing. At home, I ate whatever I found until the fridge was empty. I refused to cook. I spent a week walking the Main from evening till late at night, only coming back to my apartment when exhausted, collapsing on the couch in front of the droning television until I fell asleep.

  Then one night the doorbell rang, sounding like a hoarse fire alarm and travelled through my body like an electric wave. It went all the way up and then all the way down, from my head to my toes, vibrating my entire length. Never before had the doorbell rung with such brutality. It threw me off the couch and I rolled over before standing unsteadily. The clock on the TV said 1 a.m. I peered through the peephole. Nat didn’t say a word, just stepped in and sat down. The TV had been left on and he quietly went to turn it off, and then settled on the chair opposite me.

  “I wanna straighten this out with you.” He slumped down on the couch and stared at me. “I know what my mom told you.” He began confidently enough, while I remained faint inside, nervous and ready to explode. But he’d been such a close friend; I really was not ready to take him out.

  “I have nothing to say,” I managed in a slow whisper.

  He considered that silently. “My mom knows shit, okay? Actually, you should have a lot to say when you hear what I have to say. And you have to believe me.”

  “Oh, yeah.” I said, “Fuck that, man! Are you going to tell me that you had no choice?”

  “Chuck, it wasn’t like that.” He was calm but I had no intention of letting him off easy. He carried on. “I told Myra that you were my friend from high school and I could never go behind your back. She told me there was nothing happening between her and you.”

  “She said that? Incredible! Was it a fucking fantasy then? I mean, really!”

  “We went for dinner once and . . . yeah.” He hesitated.

  “Okay! Don’t need the gory details. Your mom told me enough.”

  “My mom knows nothing, man! Nothing! Myra came over one of the nights actually to talk about you and started getting playful, like, you know, and mom saw that and because she feels about you like she does, as if you were a second son or something, she gave me shit. And that was it!”

  Suddenly I felt sorry for Mrs. Meeropol, a.k.a Meryl Streep/Ava Gardner.

  He continued, “But something weird happened last night. She was walking down Mont-Royal and was wearing this black dress, like she was going for a tango class or something.”

  “That’s how she looked when I went to her place.” I bowed my head and shivered.

  “Exactly! The woman you know, Chuck, that you’re in love with, is not Myra Banks.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Because when I went up to her she didn’t recognize me. Ignored me totally. She walked right by me and I ran back up to her and she told me to shoo, to get away, to fuck off! She kept walking down the street like she’d never known me. Her cheeks were red with rouge and she was wearing fiery lipstick with a red silk scarf wrapped around her neck.”

  “What the hell are you trying to say? That she didn’t want to talk to you?”

  “No, she didn’t recognize me, man! Like she had never met me! She was walking straight ahead and wouldn’t even look at my face and finally when I touched her arm she whipped around and glared at me like I was some kind of a hobo. She said “Mister! If you come near me I’ll call the police right away!” I backed off.

  “This was not Myra, man. It was someone else.” He looked genuinely sad.

  “And what did you do?” I was beginning to believe him.

  “I just stood there and folks walked by thinking I must be a retard. You know, I think something is wrong with her. Really wrong.” He looked at the rug under my coffee table and I stared at him. “Listen,” he said, after his moment of silence, “I’m not going to fuck you over for this girl or anybody else. Okay? My mom got it wrong and I am not gonna bother straightening it out with her. Myra asked about you more than talking about anything else.”

  “And she told you that she was not seeing me? Is that right?” I wanted him to confirm it one more time.

  “Yeah! I told her, ‘Look, Myra, Chuck’s my best buddy. Be nice.’ And she said that she’d just met you once in your apartment because she wanted to clear things up. She repeated she wasn’t seeing you. I’m not interested in her, man. I like her, like we had a nice dinner once, as I said, but that’s it. There’s something wrong with the girl. You can buy that or not. But that’s the damn truth.”

  “She seems kind of distracted and exciting. But I can’t find her, when I want to. You know, she and her mom slip into an alternate world. They have split personalities. Like they switch in and out. I don’t know. That’s my guess. Like her Mom did stuff out of an uncontrollable instinct. She played games. Myra may have been affected by it. She took it on as a lifestyle. She normalized her dual life.”

  Nat left soon after. I closed the door behind him and fell onto the couch. The phone rang at 3 a.m. but I didn’t answer it.

  Icicles had formed in the eaves outside my window. Looking in. Short daggers of imprecise, unformulated decrees, verdicts. A cold Montreal dawn was sliding through the ill-fitted, uninsulated guillotine windows and slipping in a poltergeist shadow. The wind had crept in and had chosen to wait in the corner of the room, like a cat with a cloak. When I woke up, my hands were chilled. I touched my stomach where it was warm and rolled over. I was there and it was not a delusion?

  Chapter Thirteen

  On Board

  Next night, sounds came up the stairs. Crossing the door in the corridor. Hard heels against creaky wooden stairs. Beads of panic. Slipping down my forehead. The storm trooper walked through my door wearing sunglasses. She was already inside before I could get out of my bed. It was in the middle of the night—the grim clanging of a diesel motor was heard loud in the alley downstairs. Her adjutants were outside in a phalange of cars, arms crossed, waiting to take me away. The über-topmost stomped in and entered my room and removed her long leather gloves. She stood at the foot of the bed for a few seconds and then leapt over the frame and landed with her knees on my hips. I did not cringe. I was paralyzed. I looked at her carefully, at the tone on her skin, when she opened her mouth and said something that I barely understood. Her lips pouted and her knees jarred into my midriff. It sounded barely like a threat but done with a red smile and a dark eye that scanned my face with contemptuous sensuality. I tried to hold her off by the shoulders and her powdery-flowery smell, like in a funeral home, rushed into my face. My h
ands went through the air. She whispered into my ears as her steel-cold teeth bit my earlobes. She said she knew where I was headed and understood my plan. A wind whistled through my body, cold-barrelled into my bones. I was moaning and I knew that.

  I sprung up, shivering, and was awake. I went to the fridge and drank cold water, looking behind me in the glow from the refrigerator light. I swallowed the water, the hair on my neck curling up as if an electro-magnetic wave from a far-off tundra had crossed through my apartment. I lay down, awake for the rest of the night.

  This was not the only time. Once before she stood at the end of the corridor leading to my washroom. Like a tabloid image caught in a grainy long shot by a paparazzi. It reminded me of the photo from the newspaper cutting Myra had given me.

  These visitations were a load I’d have to carry alone. Myra had expressed an interest in helping but wasn’t exactly proving reliable. Nat had egged me on but only cared about his own projects. Then there was Myra and Malia. I decided to visit my grandfather again.

  “Maybe I should go to the Sûreté and let them know what I’ve discovered. What d’you think?”

  “You’ll be handing over an unresolved case of plane sabotage, long forgotten but definitely requiring some intelligent investigation, and exposing yourself to an endless stream of manipulations. It’s your choice.”

  “I could survive that.”

  “Could you? Eventually someone in the Gabriel-Jacops syndicate will learn about you and your information. God knows what they might do.”

  “You mean knock me off?”

  “Possibly,” he replied, and then smiled at me. “More likely the police will decide that you’re a crank. They’ll listen to you, thank you, and advise you to go home. The case will be re-shelved. How would you like that?”