Greetings from the Vodka Sea

by Chris Gudgeon

  He can see nothing outside his box. They are on the highway, that is clear. The road is too straight; they are moving too fast. He’d drifted in and out of sleep a couple of times, so it is impossible for him to tell how long they’ve been driving. But it is still dark. That is a good sign. They couldn’t have gone too far, and it would be light soon.

  . . .

  In 1959, Maurice Duplessis, Quebec’s autocratic premier, died after sixteen unbroken years in office. A Jew-hating, anti-union, anti-communist despot, Duplessis clung to his position by graft, patronage, and the support of a corrupt clergy that, in comparison, made him seem saintly. But he made the trains run on time, as the Italians say: the province’s schools and roads doubled in number; hospital beds tripled; electricity was brought to even the most remote corner of Quebec. Besides, he was not so out of place. He came from an age where people still believed in gods, still entrusted themselves to marble men. People then were comfortable with demi-despots.

  Within a year of Duplessis’s death, the Liberal party slunk into power in Quebec, and the province became acquainted with an enlightened mix of young intellectuals — Quebec nationalists of a sort — and older, devoted federalists, who rejected the tyranny of Duplessis and the church, in that order. Étienne had known many of this second group personally, not that they would admit it now. After the war, they’d opened their homes to him, they’d sought his opinion of the Liberation, which they spoke of with more disdain than he could muster, Laurentia, the Terror (which they humourlessly parodied in their own vision of the Duplessis years as La Grande Noirceur, the Great Darkness) and the politics of Rome. As nationalists, they shared to a degree Étienne did not an ideological sympathy with fascism and, in particular, National Socialism of the Vichy variety. Looked at in its most charitable light, ultranationalism seemed the perfect antidote to the ills inherent in internationalism. These Quebec nationalists could never understand that for Étienne collaboration (a term, by the way, Étienne was comfortable with, although they would never use it) had been perfectly pragmatic. His uncle, a provincial mayor, had had friends in Vichy; Étienne’s conversion was a matter of course, and, if not a pre-requisite to survival, it certainly offered the family a level of comfort and security scarce in those times.

  No one mentioned Vichy anymore. The war years had been swallowed whole. Étienne was forgotten too, more or less, which suited him fine. Not long ago, he’d run into one of the action français men, a federal cabinet minister, at a fundraiser for the new clinic. Once they had regularly drunk together at the Kerhulu. Now they shook hands as impervious strangers — statues — and chit-chatted about sports. Their eyes twinkled a little, of course, although at this point in their lives, laughter was beyond either of them. Their joke, and quarrel, was with history, and there it would remain.

  “Quebec City? I also spent some time there, after the war,” the minister said. He wore a silver chain around his neck that held a small medallion depicting St. Christopher, the patron saint of travellers.

  “Yes. After the war.”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “A long time.”

  “You were a student too?”

  “I was an . . . émigré.”

  “Ah, yes. A long time.”

  For a split second they stood frozen, partially impressed with their own shadow play and partially afraid to go on lest they say something they might regret. They shook hands and parted, but the exchange was not lost on Anna. Exchanges never were.

  “Who was that?”

  “A cabinet minister, I think.”

  “You didn’t know him?”

  “No.”

  “You seemed to know him quite well.”

  “How so?”

  “I don’t know. There was something in your manner. It seemed familiar.”

  “We might have met before, at Laval. We could not be certain.”

  Anna knew there was more to the story — there was always more. But she did not push it. She never did. She was the perfect wife. An afterthought.

  . . .

  Étienne saw another statue at the fundraiser, posing by the artist’s rendering of the new Toronto Cardiology Clinic, talking to Dr. Blair, chairman of the hospital board, and that slithering journalist Madrn, holding on to her champagne glass with one hand while girlishly tracing a line in the condensation with a free finger. She may have been flirting with one of the men, or both. It had been twenty-five years. Predictably, Thérèse’s wonderful, youthful voluptuousness had lost the battle to time and gravity. She was still pretty, he supposed. Handsome. But the size . . .

  Étienne ducked into the atrium. He did not want to see her, or rather, he did not want her to know that she had been seen by him. It would be embarrassing for both of them. He’d aged well enough: slim for fifty, greying in a distinguished way, like an actor or an existential philosopher. But Thérèse would no doubt be self-conscious about her weight; how could she not? He would be looking at her through the eyes of youth, and she would feel naked and ashamed for having transformed, in an instant of sorts, into a very old, very large woman. Étienne positioned himself behind a potted palm and peeked again. Had he really been in love with her? Had she really been as beautiful as he remembered? They’d been together only months or weeks and made love eight or nine times. But Étienne had revisited each encounter a thousand times. Could he ever go back to it?

  “Tell me, who is that woman there, talking to Blair?” Étienne had grabbed Shulman’s elbow. The intern apologized for not having his glasses and strained to see.

  “That’s what’s-her-name, the alderwoman.”

  “Alderwoman?”

  “Yes, I think.”

  “Thérèse?”

  “Yes. That’s it. Her husband’s a writer or something. Lefty, you know — a socialist.”

  Shulman said something else to continue the conversation, but Étienne had moved on. A kind of panic had seized him, and he decided that he and his wife should leave at once. Anna was standing where he’d left her, talking to the reeve about flowers. A passionless man, the reeve had ensnared Anna in a Gregorian monotone that barely subsided as Étienne took his wife’s arm and led her in the general direction of the door.

  “We really must be going . . . tremendous event . . . the clinic . . .”

  Étienne tried to think of some triviality to add but could not. So he smiled and nodded, implying something deeper.

  Anna came quietly. Parties she could take or leave. If her husband was ready to go, she was ready to go with him. She was so uncomplicated, this sturdy Upper Canadian.

  Then the statue appeared again, placed now by the doorway, talking loudly to the director, who was holding her coat. The sleeve was inside out, and had tangled. The slack muscle and fat of Thérèse’s arm had bound with the fabric somehow and pinned one arm behind her back. She did not stop talking. This was the last thing Étienne wanted — to come face- to-face with this former lover at the doorway, his wife in tow. It would have been too horrible, too awkward. They would have to be introduced and coyly remember each other, then Thérèse would see Anna, already so much younger than Étienne, and start to feel self-conscious, and that, that would be enough to let everyone know (the director, Anna) that he and Thérèse had once slept together. It was an embarrassment they could all do without.

  “Drink, my dear?” He piloted Anna toward the bar counter, and not a moment too soon, as he heard the director calling his name from behind.

  “Dr. du Chatelait? Doctor?”

  “I thought you wanted to leave.” Anna was perplexed.

  “No, my dear. I was merely saving you from that awful drone.”

  “He can go on.”

  “He certainly can, my dear. He certainly can.”

  Étienne signalled the bartender with one finger, then called for two gin and tonics. They’d barely started their drinks when he had the curious thought of making Thérèse his lover again. He smiled a little, and Anna, thinking he was smiling at
her in that adoring way husbands sometimes did in laundry commercials, smiled back. It was a private joke, of course: Thérèse did nothing for him. Anna was vastly more attractive, not to mention Dr. Cole. An occasional affair was one thing a wife could always forgive. But to cheat on Dr. Cole . . . to cheat on his mistress? It seemed almost too wicked to contemplate.

  . . .

  Every negotiation is a shared lie that starts when one party tells the other, “I will not negotiate.” Every negotiation, every marriage vow, every death begins this way.

  How did they know? No doubt someone in the RCMP had ratted him out. It was never a good idea to make deals with the cops, it was never a good idea to make deals with anyone. But life was a series of deals and deals within deals, with new ones coming up always to replace the broken promises and lies. That was the nature of his business: survival. Information was Madrn’s currency, and it required considerable investment to keep him going.

  That he’d double-crossed the Front — the FLQ — well, it was expected of him. Now they would want something in return. Madrn was ready to negotiate.

  The van turned sharply, sending Madrn and his box skidding across the floor. The crate jammed into the side panel, smashing Madrn’s ring finger. He swore quickly in Polish, realizing that this was the first time he had spoken his mother tongue in — what? — four years?

  “You should be a little more careful,” he said, good naturedly. He could tell now they were off the highway. The road was bumpier and had many curves. He folded his arms across his chest as the crate skidded around this way and that. “Maybe I should drive,” he said, laughing to stress that his remark was a joke. He wanted to show them he was a good guy. He wanted to show them that he was on their side.

  . . .

  So he saw an old lover at a party, and now he was upset. It would be easy enough to dismiss the queasy feeling as Étienne’s vanity, the dilemma of the middle-aged man who did not wish to acknowledge that time was conquering even him. But there were more practical concerns. After his arrival from France, Étienne hadn’t just flirted with fascism, he embraced it whole-heartedly; they’d set up house together. Not out of a driving political sense, although that grew with time, but mostly because it so very much pleased the people around him. The students, the politicos, the priests (particularly the priests — Abbé Groulx even paid him the honour of a visit) all wanted to meet the elegant young man with the curious accent, almost Swiss, and the intimate ties with Vichy. They treated him as a true relic, a fingernail of Christ, and let’s be clear: he was only twenty-five. It went to his head, of course it did. Thérèse was intimately tied to that moment of his life, and here lay the root of his greatest worry. While he was largely protected from the others, who cowered with him behind the same veil of secrecy, there were no guarantees with this woman. She had been attracted to him because he was handsome and silent and young and foreign and seemed to be a man of rank within the intelligent circles of Quebec City. But she herself had no political interest at the time and therefore was invulnerable today. Étienne could not say the same. If word of his past escaped, everything from his good name (bought and paid for from a Parisian passport forger) to his surgical practice to his Rosedale home, everything he’d struggled to acquire in the years since he’d come to Toronto could dissolve. He’d seen it happen before his very eyes. Himmel was head of cardiology when Étienne first arrived at the clinic back in 1958. Within a year, stories began to circulate about Himmel’s activities during the war, eventually publicly confirmed by a woman who’d been his acquaintance in Austria. To hear Himmel tell it, he’d been some office functionary for the Nazi Party in Vienna, “collecting names for lists.” But the clinic, which depended heavily on the benevolence of the local Jewish community, could not tolerate the whisper of such scandal. A Nazi among us? Himmel lost his post and almost went bankrupt fighting the extradition case launched by overzealous immigration officials. Last Étienne heard, this doctor — a gifted surgeon, really — was working the night shift at a local asylum, dispensing tranquilizers and carrying the bedpans of lunatics.

  It would be foolish to think that things had changed very much in ten years. Certainly the hair was fashionably longer, the clothing looser, and a vine of joyless sexual and moral liberation had crept through the garden of society, but Étienne would not to be fooled. Thérèse was to be wooed and seduced and thus her silence bought. It was a different sort of veil from his own but cut from the same cloth. This silence could be won.

  But how to win her body?

  . . .

  One of Étienne’s pet theories was that, while the fastest route to a man’s heart was through his stomach (emotionally speaking, of course, although some of his experiments with less invasive surgical techniques suggested that the adage might have genuine medical applications), the fastest way to a woman’s heart was through her husband’s chequebook. The meeting was easy to arrange. A writer was always looking for commissions, and when Shulman, under Étienne’s auspices, suggested that the board approach the alderwoman’s husband to write a series of promotional articles on the cardiology clinic, the members immediately recognized the political and public relations benefits.

  Lunch was at the Royal York. The writer came prepared. He opened his clipboard, clicked his pen and adjusted his tie in a manner that led Étienne to suspect he was not accustomed to wearing one.

  “It’s quite a coincidence, really. I’ve only just finished an article on heart disease for Readers’ Digest.” His name was Wonnacott, and he was a likeable enough sort. A little dull, perhaps. But in another time and place, Étienne and he might have been friends, if there were no worthier company around. “I think the world of cardiology is about to explode — if you’ll excuse a bad joke. And as I understand it, you folks here in Toronto are leading the advance guard . . .”

  He needn’t try so hard. The job was already his. But Étienne said nothing, it wasn’t his place, and Dr. Baird of the board let the writer go on, contributing the odd encouraging interjection here and there. Perhaps even the writer knew that no one was interested in him.

  The idea was simple enough. The Globe was a long-time supporter of the clinic. They had agreed to run a special eight-page insert to promote the clinic and its activities. Dr. Baird had even cooked up a title: “Heart to Heart.”

  “Of course, there could be some travel involved.” It was the first time Étienne had spoken since the introductions.

  “Of course.”

  “A couple of weekenders: Ottawa, New York.”

  “The Mayo Clinic?”

  “Exactly. My office will make the arrangements. I’ll have Shulman set it up.”

  “Of course.”

  “Excellent.”

  “Excellent.”

  The subject of money was tactfully broached, with Baird offering a sizable retainer with per diem. And there it was, before the coffee had even arrived, the husband was bought and paid for. The wife would soon follow.

  . . .

  Let us permit Étienne to indulge in a little fantasy. He has taken the train to Marseilles — it could have been yesterday (like any good fantasy, this one seamlessly blends past, present and future) — and, by chance, found himself alone in a compartment with Thérèse and her doddering grandmother. Of course, as far as he knew, Thérèse had never actually been to France, let alone Marseilles. But at seventeen, her chubby beauty and unsophisticated charm — a gorgeous, uninhibited hedgehog — would not have been out of place in the south. Of course, the grandmother would fall asleep some time into the trip, leaving the two teenagers virtually alone. They would have barely spoken up to this point, and both would be pretending to be engrossed in their reading material, when Thérèse would subtly shift her leg, offering Étienne a glimpse of her school-white panties. Of course, it could have been an accident, there was no way of knowing for sure, but Étienne found that if he moved in his seat just so, he could find a spot where a triangle of panties was in full view, and, with a slight tilt
of his head, he could make out the line of her brassiere peeking through an undone button. And so they would continue for the rest of the train ride, Thérèse shifting ever so slightly (a small, planetary motion) and Étienne adjusting himself accordingly. Occasionally, her hand would brush up against herself here or there, seemingly signalling her desire, but nothing definitive. That was the attraction for him: the uncertainty, the endless erotic possibility of the uncertain.

  In truth, she’d been twenty or so when they’d met and he twenty-five, already a veteran of the sexual wars. But where he was reserved in his advance, she went on the attack (they did meet on a train, a train from Montreal, and she did wordlessly seduce him across a crowded compartment in a manner not dissimilar to his fantasy) as only colonial Catholic girls — convinced they were protected by God and society — could do. She’d come to Quebec City that summer to stay with her widowed aunt (a vivacious teacher in her early thirties; Étienne had made a play for her too) but wound up spending most of her time — sleeping, eating, drinking and making love — in Étienne’s bedroom. There were tears when she left to go back to her parents, but not too many. Pleasure was the only stake; that they were doomed from the start only sweetened the pot. Still, Étienne preferred the Marseilles fantasy, the endless tease in a train that would never reach its destination, to the real-life memory. He tried to imagine how things would work out with his newly rediscovered Thérèse and what sort of effect this would have on his fantasies. Would the experience of the present erase the memory of his non-existent past? And how would it all transpire? Perhaps he would telephone her when her husband was away (the telephone was the perfect tool of seduction for Étienne: no eye contact, no body language, every nuance of intent packed into the voice), suggest they go for a drink or a walk in the park (she’d been something of an exhibitionist, and on one occasion had pleased him forcefully in the grassy moat surrounding the Citadel as dozens of tourists wandered close by). Perhaps he could arrange an accidental encounter (women were pushovers when they believed fate was involved); this might take some doing, but it was easy enough to imagine them running into one another on the subway. The symmetry was appealing.