Sunday Best

by Edward O. Phillips

  Instead of playing my queen I played my ace. “When one is climbing out of one relationship, Lois, one is not overly anxious to embark upon another.”

  There it was: alibi number two. The blazing torch held high. It had worked in the past when women tried to get close. Why not now?

  “Geoffry, there’s someone in your life?”

  “Was.”

  “It’s over?”

  “Yes and no. Yes, in that we are no longer seeing one another. No, in that the bruises are not fully healed.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?” (Why did I know she would say that?)

  “Not really.”

  “Some people think that a new love affair, even make-believe, is the best cure.”

  “To steal a line from a musical comedy, Lois, ‘Some people ain’t me!’” Although I have never hyperventilated, I was beginning to experience similar symptoms. My heart was pounding uncomfortably and my breathing had grown shallow. If only I could keep myself from blowing my lid.

  Lois leaned forward, hands together in her lap, arms pressed tight against her sides. The effect was to give primary importance to her secondary sexual characteristics. “Two can mend a broken heart faster than one.”

  My impulse was to reply, “Not on a full stomach,” but God helped me hold my tongue. Still, I was not going to let her off unscathed.

  “Next you’ll be telling me that love is the shortest distance between two hearts.” That seemed to be my tag line for the evening.

  There was a curious and totally unfunny irony in my situation. I had reluctantly relinquished an evening of old movies only to find myself playing in one: the appalling dialogue, the house furnished not as a house but as a set, and the hackneyed situation of the blonde femme fatale trying to put the make on a nerdy man who carries on as though his dork were solely to pee through. Even the aggressive way Lois plied her bust reminded me of an earlier time, when screen sirens wore snug sweaters and two inches of cleavage brought cries from the censors.

  Even though Lois was doing her best to get me into that ghastly white bed, she was still an extreme sexual conservative. In this more than anything else she betrayed her lower-class origins. I’d be willing to bet her parents had practised the flannelette-pyjamas-and-long-sleeved-nightgown approach to sensuality. They probably spoke of homosexual men as queers and refused to admit that lesbians even existed. They would also have endorsed the “when in doubt, don’t” attitude to dating. Lois had obviously thrown off some of these attitudes. But to be a ready lay is not the same as being sexually liberated. Lois Fullerton made me profoundly uncomfortable.

  Yet it was this same conservatism that allowed me to escape. According to her code, she could flash all the necessary come-hither signals, turn the lights green, talk in innuendoes; but it was still up to me to make the first critical move. I did not budge from my chair.

  Lois cleared the air with a laugh. “It looks as though I have to admit defeat.”

  “Only if you believe there is something at stake worth winning. I assure you there isn’t.”

  I finished my drink. At the precise moment my empty tumbler touched the table, Lois stood. “I hate to seem rude, but it’s been a long day. At this point having Douglas to visit is like entertaining a houseguest. And then there’s Charles. I hope you won’t think me rude if I excuse myself.”

  “Not in the least,” I replied, at once delighted and amused. No one would ever call Lois opaque. Once she realized, beyond all reasonable doubt, that she would not get to throw a leg over me, I was of no further interest. Finito! For the third time she had struck out. Stand not upon the order of your going, but go at once.

  It was a no-frills goodnight. I thanked her for dinner and the opportunity to meet the groom. She told me I was quite welcome, in the same way she must have spoken to the boy delivering the newspaper. I said I would be in touch. She said she hoped to see me again soon. There was the sound of one door closing. I glanced at my watch. If I went straight home I might still be able to catch Garbo as Mata Hari doing her temple dance. Perhaps only Dietrich in a monkey suit beats it out for sheer wonderful silliness.

  SINCE IT WAS SATURDAY NIGHT after all, I poured myself a highball to celebrate a safe return to my apartment. Snug in my Eames chair, the black-and-white images flickering reassuringly across the screen, I still found a part of my mind replaying a video cassette of the dinner party. I use party in its conventional sense, for there had been little real festivity.

  Had I followed my own guidelines, I would have put the whole tiresome wedding out of my mind, except for my modest rôle. I could impose a budget on my sister, purchase the haberdashery to go with my morning suit, attend the rehearsal and the ceremony, and otherwise maintain an attitude of strict neutrality. With each passing year I have found it takes a little extra effort just to get through a day. There remains scant energy for causes, philanthropies, and the kind of high-minded meddling which in our society passes for good works.

  People in general, and that includes me, have a marked tendency to believe their way of doing things, if not the only way, is still the best. Thirty years have passed since I was married, in the church of St. Luke the Apostle, a smack-in-the-middle-of-the-road Anglican institution that has always advocated safe sects and that has acquired more of a reputation for rummage sales than for sanctity. The Geoffry Chadwick who took Susan Bradley to be his wife was a different man from the one remembering him now. It was as if I were a character in the play, a variation of which we have all seen, where four separate actors portray the same person at different stages in his life. How would I find the twenty-five-year- old Geoffry Chadwick were I to meet him today? Brash? Smug, perhaps? A bit too self-possessed, with a showy, self-conscious cynicism whose source was about ninety percent literary?

  Dredging memory is like panning for gold. In among all the bits of shale, handfuls of sand, buckets of cloudy water, there are nuggets, gleaming and tangible. Even thirty years later I can remember how much I loved Susan. I am sure at times we believed ourselves in heaven, but there was also much of earth. In fact, from the time I met her, at a debutante ball, until the accident that killed both Susan and our daughter, we were seldom apart. Most of the time it would have been difficult to push a putty knife between us.

  She died while we were still riding the crest of the wave. We were married; we had our own apartment; I had just embarked on my career; and we had the only baby that had ever been born, to anybody, in the whole world, throughout time. I suppose had things turned out otherwise we would eventually have come down. It is oxygen that sustains the body, not ether. We would have been obliged to come to grips with raising children, buying a house, fretting over schools and slipcovers, and watching the bright shiny surface of our marriage acquire the muted patina of familiarity and habit. Perhaps my sexual orientation would eventually have driven us apart. I could speculate endlessly on the what ifs and if onlys. But of one thing I am certain. No matter what the disappointment and disillusion, I would still have wanted Susan alive.

  And I firmly believed my way, and Susan’s, of undertaking marriage to be better than the cool, almost rational, relationship I saw shared by Jennifer and Douglas. Even making allowances for changing fashion, that yesterday’s love affair is today’s neurotic attachment, I can’t imagine embarking on something as daunting as a supposedly lifelong partnership without personal electricity.

  Were Jennifer close to my age, with grown children from a previous marriage, I could understand the absence of passion, turgid and trite and penny-dreadful as that word may sound. People who marry in middle age have different expectations, unless they are caught in the grip of a sexual Indian summer and besotted with someone else’s youth in an attempt to recapture their own. But youth is the time to draw irregular lines on one’s emotional chart, abysmal lows and exhilarating highs. It takes the energy of youth for those blast-furnace fights and melting reconciliations. To grow older is to realize the universe is Copernican, not Ptolemaic, and
that self and the loved one do not form the epicentre of the solar system.

  I am sure there are people who are not capable of a real love affair, and perhaps those who do not really want one. But to have missed out, through ignorance or apathy or timidity, or just plain lack of awareness, is a lingering sorrow. I was afraid that Jennifer, mired in a safe marriage, might one day realize she had arrived in autumn, only to have missed out on spring. Jennifer is not like her brother and sister. Richard will never allow anything as intangible as love to stand in the way of his career, while Elizabeth has been in love more times since last March than I have been in my entire life. It remains Jennifer’s choice, not mine. She is a grown woman and fully capable of taking responsibility for her own decisions. At least I would like to believe she can.

  There is a time in a person’s life when he can love with freedom and generosity and, why not say it, innocence. I do not mean the presexual innocence of a child but that brief state of grace before one has learned guile and the ability to lie to oneself. I had that experience with Susan. All that remains is the memory, but that memory is as bright as the large gold nugget every prospector longs to find. I would like to think Jennifer would one day find what I had known. I would be disappointed if she failed.

  8.

  BECAUSE I HAD PERSUADED JENNIFER to stay with her grandmother for the weekend, I was spared the Sunday lunch party Mother would otherwise have felt obliged to give, and which I would have felt compelled to attend. As a result the day stretched before me, unblemished by engagements of any kind. When I ducked around the corner to pick up the Sunday papers, I found the air cold and raw, perfect weather for staying in, which I did. The Times, television, a companionable highball: there are worse ways to go.

  As dusk was falling I stood at the window of my living room, watching lights flicker on across the city, and thinking of all those tired weekend skiers battling heavy traffic on roads leading into Montreal. They are the four-day people. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday they allot to the town and whatever it has to offer. Friday afternoon, as soon as they can sneak away from work, they head off to “the little place in the country,” often far larger and more elaborate than their urban digs. Sunday afternoon is haunted by the spectre of driving back to the city and the choices of killing the afternoon by leaving early, thus avoiding heavy traffic, leaving after skiing and making most of the trip bumper to bumper, or waiting until traffic has thinned out and driving in the dark. Thank heaven I am forever freed from the tyranny of a country house and the nagging obligation to get out there and enjoy it.

  Monday morning I discovered my good gloves were not in the pocket of my overcoat. I strongly hoped I had left them in the car and not up at Lois Fullerton’s house.

  I took the stairs down to the garage, where I approached my car from the driver’s side. With a slight sinking feeling I could see nothing on the front seat. I go through gloves the way most people go through paper napkins, to the point that whenever I see gloves on sale I usually buy a few pairs. The ones I probably left at Lois’s house were good ones, though, suede lined with fur. Did I want those gloves badly enough to call Lois and arrange to drop by and pick them up?

  So occupied was I trying to decide whether reclaiming my gloves was worth another encounter with Mrs. Fullerton that it took me a moment to notice the car was listing slightly to the right, the cant due to a flat on one of the spanking new tires only recently bought and installed. This flat tire in turn was due to a puncture, not ordinarily unusual. But in this instance the puncture had been made by a switchblade knife. Impaled on the knife was an envelope.

  I watch enough television to know about fingerprints. I wrapped the handle of the knife in the clean handkerchief I always carry, before pulling the blade out of my tire. After carefully wrapping the weapon in the square of fabric, I stowed it in my attaché case. Then I read the note. Again it had been composed of words clipped from an advertising supplement, its message succinct: “This is your last warning. Keep away from L. Fullerton.”

  Suddenly I was shaking with anger. Nevertheless, I hesitated about taking the first, apparently logical step of reporting the matter to the police. My reluctance did not spring from lack of respect for the law; my profession imposed that. The boys in blue do a good job, some an even better one when they are out of uniform. I can remember many pleasant hours when the force was with me.

  The fact remains that a slashed tire is a minor misdemeanour in relation to the volume of major crimes the police have to investigate. I would file a report, offer the few scant facts I had at my disposal, hand over the knife and notes as evidence, and wait for another, possibly more radical, warning.

  I also wanted to shun publicity, to avoid becoming a titillating little paragraph in the paper about a middle-aged bachelor being harassed by an unknown male. I would not be given the benefit of the doubt. (That will teach him not to pick up rough trade.) I wanted the matter dealt with discreetly and at once.

  One problem at a time, however. I returned to my apartment for other gloves and to telephone my mechanic about changing the tire. On my way out of the building I intended to warn the porter that a mechanic was coming by. As I strode into the lobby, I could see him talking to another man, who, as I drew closer, turned out to be Lois Fullerton’s delicious chauffeur.

  “Mr. Chadwick, you are just in time. This man has a package for you.”

  “Thank goodness! My gloves!” I exclaimed, reaching for the manila envelope that contained them. “Thank you, and please thank Mrs. Fullerton.” I looked directly into his oblique dark eyes.

  The chauffeur nodded.

  Some people, regardless of disposition, carry with them an air of menace, a whiff of danger, which can attract and repel at the same time. Lois Fullerton’s chauffeur moved in such an aura of sulphurous sexuality that I found myself wondering what or whom he did on his day off.

  I tore open the envelope. Sure enough, my gloves were inside. “I’m very pleased to have them back.” I looked up as I spoke. What I encountered, or collided with, was a look of such intense malevolence as to make me drop the gloves. From the centre of his narrowed eyes the darker pupils bored into my skull like drills tipped with diamond. Had I not been a true northerner I would have held up two fingers to ward off the evil eye. As I stooped to retrieve my fallen gloves I almost collided with the porter in one of those Alphonse-Gaston situations that had us each straightening up holding a glove. The chauffeur had taken advantage of the momentary diversion to make good his escape.

  I explained to the porter about the car, dropped the extra pair of gloves and the torn envelope into my attaché case, and began to walk briskly towards my office. I was running late, and I have learned that if Monday gets off to a bad start the rest of the week tends to follow suit.

  Hurrying along Sherbrooke Street, I had a flash of intuition which brought me up short. I belong to that generation which denied men – real men – the power of intuition. Women were allowed intuition, that intellectual shortcut which permits you to move from A to C in one smooth glide. But no man could be intuitive, unless it had to do with the stock market.

  My anonymous caller and correspondent was none other than Lois Fullerton’s chauffeur. The mere fact that I was playing a hunch, without a shred of evidence to back it up, made me none the less certain. My case rested on a look, the look that had caused me to drop my gloves. If looks could kill, and so forth. Fortunately they cannot, but the whammy that man gave me was so filled with concentrated ill will that it stopped me dead.

  I resumed walking. Giving someone a dirty look is not a felony, not even, unlike a slashed tire, a misdemeanour. You don’t send a man up the river for failing to flash a toothpaste- bright smile. Maybe the guy was constipated. But no. I trusted my hunch. The problem now was how to proceed without sounding like an hysterical nitwit.

  At my office, I took the gloves from my briefcase and tucked them into a coat pocket so I would remember to take them home. I was about to drop the
manila envelope into the wastebasket when, from force of habit I suppose, I slid my hand inside to make sure it was completely empty. How many times have I discovered a proxy form or a return mailing envelope at the bottom of a discarded envelope?

  To my surprise, I came across a folded piece of paper, which on closer inspection turned out to be a page torn from an advertising supplement. It hardly seemed worth saving, only some sales. I was about to throw it out when I happened to notice one of the advertisements: “Warning! Fabulous Sale at Fullerton’s Fabrics Ends This Weekend!” The ad continued in smaller typeface to suggest only those with unbalanced reason would fail to take advantage of this golden opportunity.

  There on the page, incorporated in this simple-minded layout, were three of the words that had figured prominently in the warning notes, notably the name of Fullerton. It was not an unfamiliar name, to me at least; but on a hunch I checked the telephone directory. The Fullerton listing added up to fewer than twenty entries, making it a somewhat uncommon name, especially to find typecast and printed. Finding this random page in the same envelope as my gloves, following hard upon my hunch, only further reinforced my impression that Lois Fullerton’s chauffeur was indeed the man in question.

  I crossed to the window and gazed at a view I already knew by heart. Did staring into space really help one to think? In the movies a troubled character often walks to a window, the better to see into the future. Were I a character in a movie, I would hire a private investigator. And that is precisely what I decided to do. Yet once having made the decision to engage a sleuth, I found myself temporarily stumped. Hiring a detective is not like buying a car or a computer. You can’t simply ask anyone at all for advice or recommendations, casually, over lunch, or when conversation starts to flag. I could not picture myself sidling up to someone and in a voice pitched barely above a whisper asking for a hot tip on a private eye. The very fact that the investigation to be carried out was private must suggest a violation of the Ten Commandments, most likely the one against adultery.