by John O'Neill
For Ann
Contents
Part 1 - Chapter 1
Part 1 - Chapter 2
Part 1 - Chapter 3
Part 1 - Chapter 4
Part 1 - Chapter 5
Part 1 - Chapter 6
Part 1 - Chapter 7
Part 1 - Chapter 8
Part 1 - Chapter 9
Part 1 - Chapter 10
Part 1 - Chapter 11
Part 1 - Chapter 12
Part 1 - Chapter 13
Part 1 - Chapter 14
Part 1 - Chapter 15
Part 1 - Chapter 16
Part 1 - Chapter 17
Part 1 - Chapter 18
Part 1 - Chapter 19
Part 1 - Chapter 20
Part 1 - Chapter 21
Part 1 - Chapter 22
Part 1 - Chapter 23
Part 1 - Chapter 24
Part 1 - Chapter 25
Part 1 - Chapter 26
Part 1 - Chapter 27
Part 1 - Chapter 28
Part 1 - Chapter 29
Part 1 - Chapter 30
Part 1 - Chapter 31
Part 1 - Chapter 32
Part 1 - Chapter 33
Part 1 - Chapter 34
Part 2 - Chapter 1
Part 2 - Chapter 2
Part 2 - Chapter 3
Part 2 - Chapter 4
Part 2 - Chapter 5
Part 2 - Chapter 6
Part 2 - Chapter 7
Part 2 - Chapter 8
Part 2 - Chapter 9
Part 2 - Chapter 10
Part 2 - Chapter 11
Part 2 - Chapter 12
Part 2 - Chapter 13
Part 2 - Chapter 14
Part 2 - Chapter 15
Part 2 - Chapter 16
Part 2 - Chapter 17
Part 2 - Chapter 18
Part 2 - Chapter 19
Part 2 - Chapter 20
Part 2 - Chapter 21
Part 2 - Chapter 22
Part 2 - Chapter 23
Part 2 - Chapter 24
Part 2 - Chapter 25
Part 2 - Chapter 26
Part 2 - Chapter 27
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
Part I
FATAL LIGHT
There is no history of happy love.
– Denis de Rougement
Man, when he does not grieve, hardly exists.
– Antonio Porchia
1
DARK BORDERS
He associated her with summer and his wife with winter: Alison with the sky, Cynthia with the earth. Alison had kept in touch with him after her high-school graduation, five years earlier. Leonard was her teacher.
He was watching her final performance in a jazz dance piece at the Winchester Dance Theatre in Toronto’s east end. It was titled Dark Borders.
She appeared in an attitude of expectation, waiting at the ragged edges of the hardwood stage for the other dancers to float into shapes from which she was excluded. The role required her to strike several poses that had her straining forward, doubled over, across one of her outstretched legs; or leaning precariously from a black riser, above a trembling nest of bodies, against a backdrop of projected stars. Leonard was overwhelmed, almost embarrassed, at how her slight body was transformed on stage. In school, Alison had always moved in a defensive posture, half turned away, one shoulder riding ahead of her, the other slouching and lagging behind. The wit and discernment her teacher had recognized in her had taken on a bold, new, explicit quality. She was like a strong, dark bird, flying headlong into breathless wind, at once pained and contented at the resistance. Leonard was so engrossed that, despite the theatre’s coldness, heat flushed through him. There was a crackling noise when he stood up from his seat.
They went out for a coffee. It was in early January and just a week before Leonard’s 40th birthday, a sombre occasion that would see Cynthia serve him a roast beef dinner, followed by the presentation of a small but exquisite lemon birthday cake and the gift of a book – a slim, new hardcover edition of Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. (That evening Cyn would, uncharacteristically, quit her side of the bed to wrap herself around him, as if in anticipation of the dream she’d have a few nights later).
They went to the Canary, a greasy spoon in the old distillery district. Leonard drove, Alison rode her bicycle, undeterred by the drifting snow. When he asked: “Isn’t there a cast party?”, Alison made a sour face and said: “I’ve had enough of those girls. They’re all so severe, my mouth is sore from frowning.”
Leonard felt a little thrill, a flutter in his throat. It continued when they sat across from each other in a booth by the front window, the Formica table narrow as the window ledge – their faces were very close. In this proximity, their conversation faltered; but Leonard had the sense that they’d already spoken, as if the space between them, during Alison’s performance, had been material, rent with exclamations, questions, deep pauses, whispers. Then she asked: “Where’s your wife?” Her tone was innocent, though after he answered, forcing his eyes to study the labyrinth of frost on the window, Alison closed her eyes and sighed.
Leonard pinched the inside of his wrist under the table and accidentally brushed her knee. She opened her eyes, looked right at him. He felt this was merely a residue, intensity left over from her performance. It was nothing personal.
But when she said: “We should hook up again, maybe this summer,” he suggested she might like to see his place, aware that Cynthia would be away for the month of July, touring England with her mother. Leonard told himself he didn’t intend for anything to happen. If it happened, it would happen of its own accord. And he had no real indication that Alison’s feelings for him went beyond a still school-girlish fascination for a somewhat dubious mentor. He had always felt that his role in inspiring Alison to pursue a life in the arts was peripheral, fragments of his own stunted creativity dropping like small, sharp stones into a heap. These, she would pick up and preserve, oblivious to their mean origin, and polish and place them, carefully, in a context of her own. Nevertheless, Leonard knew that it was inevitable: he let himself fall.
2
FLOATING WORLD
The dark premonition came, not to Leonard Edison, but to Cynthia, his wife: she dreamed that he would die before his next birthday and that he would die before her. On that January night, deeply dreaming, she awoke – the wind in animal fury against the house – gasping, sweating, her down-filled pillow stained with tears. Leonard persuaded her to tell him what she had dreamed, annoyed that her sobbing had startled him from a vision of himself floating, easy as a cloud, above a field of parked cars where a drive-in movie screen repeated that same image, Leonard in a floating world.
She did tell him after returning from the bathroom to rinse her swollen eyes, to examine herself to be sure she had surfaced, intact, from her nightmare. But he now regretted his insistence to know her dream. She’d found herself in the back of an enormous taxi, sitting on a red vinyl seat. She could not see outside, or who was driving, the cabbie’s photo a featureless blur. Next, she appeared in the middle of an overgrown lawn, wetness on her bare calves and feet. She reached forward, began climbing a burning ladder that creaked with every naked, catlike step.
In a sudden interior, she stood beside a spectral figure with the brooding eyes of a film star, like an actor on the cover of one of her old movie magazines. He turned away from her and opened a long, flat drawer. On it was a naked body, crisscrossed by purplish scars and multiple stab wounds like little mouths, and a riot of white and red hairs; also, a thin scarred face, three rows of stitches on the slashed left cheek. It was his face – “Your face, Leonard” – in terrible repose.<
br />
Still in the dream, Cynthia was crying inconsolably. The man’s voice answered her weeping, as if part of the dialogue from a horror film: 40 is too young to die, and the animal wasn’t even injured. The baritone voice was lost in the swelling music of the soundtrack.
It calmed her to share her dream. But the phrase, too young to die, animal not injured, wormed into Leonard’s brain. The words repeated themselves endlessly and with little variation whenever an unleashed dog sniffed or bounded nearby; whenever they went driving near Algonquin Park in view of bears or wolves, or along Denali Road; whenever he had a close call in traffic; whenever he felt a suspicious ache or pain; whenever he and Cynthia argued or shunned each other. And his fears were increased by his suspicion that she dreamed this dream again and again, many times (repeated instances of her sweating, startling awake, then searching his sleepy face in panic, as if she might find it in black-and-white, drained of life). But she always refused after that first time to give him more details about what had thrust her so violently from sleep.
Later, in the middle of July, the Scarborough sky rippled with white heat. Their clipped lawn was a fiery green. Amidst the smell of cut grass, swish of sprinklers, distant drone of a mower, Leonard was aware of an unidentifiable hum behind everything, as if the nearby giant hydro towers had come to life and were marching, lockstep, in his direction. Finally, startled by the cawing of a single crow that lifted off the screeching rain gutters, Leonard climbed into his green Toyota Corolla, gasped at the oven-hot interior, switched on the AC, selected a CD (Mark Killo’s Hospital Music) he thought would meet with his guest’s approval, and headed for Warden Subway Station to pick her up. He became aware of a new, different sound, pulse in his ears: his own heartbeat and the pulse and flash of moving away from Cynthia and toward his former student, Alison.
3
PARTICULAR BLISS
The sight of Alison on the platform in faded jean shorts and a black t-shirt, sleeves tucked inside, loose black hair framing a face that was all grin, was exhilarating and mortifying. Dark, wet shadows spread out from his armpits and from where the seatbelt pressed his purple shirt. Alison ran up and yanked open the door of the car before he had stopped, jumped in, kissed him on the cheek: “Nice to meet you. How are you?” She greeted him so fervently, showing him the whites of her eyes, he wasn’t sure if she was exaggerating, making a game of it; he felt he should ignore the cars behind them, release the wheel, unstrap himself and turn around full in his seat to face her. Instead, he answered softly, with a cliché. She pulled her seatbelt on, anticipating danger, unreasonable speeds and car crashes.
Whiff of musky perfume, hers. Leonard was reminded of wood burning, of something incendiary. As they drove down St. Clair, he saw her agitation. Her right hand drummed the dashboard, her left on the seat between her legs. He wanted to ask what was wrong. When they approached Kingston Road, skirting the immense cemetery there, Leonard pointed out his old high school. The plain brick building was set far back from the road. The attached seminary was a round gothic tower riding the Scarborough Bluffs. “A skull is more interesting than a naked woman,” Alison said, surveying the rows of tombstones, and the tower beyond them.
“Okay,” Leonard said, confused, delighted.
“It’s my favourite Bergman line. The Seventh Seal. Your school looks a little, you know, grave.”
“I survived. Most of the Christian brothers are dead now. The tower’s drifted farther toward the edge. One day I expect to see it floating in the lake.”
Alison shifted and brought her bare legs up onto the seat. Leonard kept his eyes on the road.
He had to focus on every traffic light, every change in speed and every turn. He found himself wishing he didn’t have to pay attention to place, to surroundings, to the past. Why couldn’t he and Alison float free in some accommodating white blur, above everything? The passing houses, strip malls, car dealerships, were vulgar and enervating. Alison had to catch her breath. This was, Leonard thought, the effect of blandness on the respiratory system.
As they pulled into the driveway, behind Cynthia’s blue Corolla, Leonard realized he’d forgotten to put on the CD he had selected as a soundtrack. The flat, ambient music might have made their drive through Scarborough seem ironic, sarcastic.
It was weird seeing Alison in the driveway, beside the groomed lawn. With her punk, dishevelled look, untucked black shirt, and frayed shorts, he expected her to caw like the crow he’d seen earlier and to disdainfully fly off. He was reminded of how, earlier that summer, he’d had a low-key epiphany, an unsettling moment of self-awareness, as he mowed the lawn. He had paused from running the mower back and forth across a tuft of little crowned thistles. His neighbour was also mowing the lawn, exactly parallel with Leonard, and his other neighbour, farther along, was sweating over his grass. Even farther along, another man was doing the same: doppelganger. In this mirror within a mirror, Leonard felt ridiculous, diminished, being part of this domesticated group of men. At the same time, his Sri Lankan neighbour smiled serenely and nodded at him, then turned and saw his neighbour smile and nod, and on down the line, and Leonard had stopped in his tracks.
As they stood in the living room, he shared this anecdote with Alison.
“I don’t like living here,” he said. “I don’t care about the lawn. I’d rather be reading in some cafe.”
Alison smiled. It was a smile that said she had considered such distinctions, and found them wanting.
“Right on,” she said, turning away. “But it’s just a lawn. If you had a place downtown, you still have mundane stuff, like taking out the garbage, fixing a window. Oh, and the raccoons: they get inside. It’s a little war.”
“But those things don’t imply, ah, a lifestyle, or a life.”
“Shouldn’t worry about what they imply,” she said. “What’s important is –”
As she paused, Leonard expected her to finish the sentence with “what you have inside.”
“ – your attentiveness. And your own particular bliss.”
He was relieved when she avoided the cliché. Still, her words made him feel small. He wasn’t sure how attentiveness or bliss fit into his life or view of himself. Guiding Alison into the hallway that led to the back of the house, he pointed out the gallery of framed photographs from the various trips that he and Cynthia had taken, shots of them in Spain, Italy, France. Most of the pictures escaped the routine of postcard photos with couples arm-in-arm and with forced grins against overexposed images of tourist sites such as Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty. Their photos were snapped with a different, more off-the-wall energy: Cynthia a running blur against a billboard of a Canadian moose outside a travel agency in Barcelona; Leonard with a comically grim expression, crouched down in the crumbling doorway of a Roman laundromat; a close-up of Cynthia’s gloved hand, with a conspicuous hole in the fabric, on a brass-plated concierge button in a hotel in Paris. Leonard was grateful for the oddness of the pictures.
As well, both of them were amateur bird photographers. There were smaller framed pictures of birds on the walls: yellow warblers feeding their young, a snowy owl coming straight at the viewer, in wide-angle, wings outstretched. Yet, when Alison said: “It’s so great that you two travel, that you have the time,” Leonard felt she was implying that their need to explore the world was a compensation for the predictability of their wounded lives.
He brooded. Alison lingered over the pictures. Leonard ushered her away, his palm on the small of her back. He didn’t show her the bedroom. They toured the rest of the house, and went on a particularly fast sweep through the stuccoed, shag-carpeted basement. He apologized for the 42-inch flat screen television and they returned to the living room. Alison sat on the flowered, wood-trimmed couch, an antique they’d recovered. Leonard sat on an elegant rattan chair they’d bought out of a small barn near St. Jacob’s. He kept talking about the downside of home ownership. He didn’t want her rough, vibrant eyes to linger over the silver tea-se
rvice, the cherry china cabinet, the dining room set with the six, high-backed, upholstered chairs or the gilt-framed, derivative-of-Bateman wildlife print. He loathed the smoked glass coffee table and he considered sharing this observation with Alison, more for the opportunity of saying the word loathe aloud than anything else. He also despised the Royal Doulton figurines that posed there, two Civil War era Southern Belles smiling deliriously above their billowing skirts and petticoats beneath their porcelain parasols.
“Don’t think I’ll ever own a house,” Alison was saying, responding to his catalogue of complaints about owning a home, about owning anything. “Not sure what I’ll do with my film degree. I’m getting work as a projectionist. It’s not much, but I can spend my days dancing. And I need to start my documentary.”
Alison had told him that she was in the early stages of planning a film about a man who, first thing every morning, summer or winter, goes out and mournfully collects the corpses of birds that have collided with downtown office towers, and takes them to a place in the Don Valley where he cremates them, accompanied by recitations from Hart Crane’s The Bridge.
After Leonard commented that, yes, the idea for her film was good, and that a part of him wished he and Cynthia hadn’t bought a house in the suburbs, and had instead rented something downtown in the Annex, Alison said: “Why don’t you? Have you ever asked her?”
He shrank further. Alison was right. Cyn had never been obsessed with the house, especially not with lawns or china cabinets. She had never searched antique markets for furniture, never stalked through home shows or studied catalogues of porcelain figurines. These things had come to them haphazardly (with the exception of the dining room set), the figurines from her mother, the rest of the furniture over a period of ten years, one thing at a time, on drives through northern and southwestern Ontario, drives whose real purpose was the enjoyment of scenery, the breathing of air that hadn’t skulked around gridlocked rows of cars. Their house and its contents represented no plan, no overall aesthetic. It didn’t mirror the stultification of his soul. The house was an investment (the word sounded like an obscenity), but was chosen primarily for the pleasant rural feel of the street, and for its proximity to both their places of work.