by Alex Pugsley
~
It was faded, timeworn, and kept tightly shut by a thick purple rubber band, the kind you might find around grocery store broccoli. I removed the rubber band. Inside the cover, on a gilt-edged front page, in kindergarten printing was the name Cyrus Francis Mair. The subsequent pages were worryingly dense with writings and ink-spills—as if an overzealous props department had been tasked to create the dream journal of an Unstable Outsider Artist—but I soon saw, after a section where pages had been ripped out, that the handwriting settled into a steady, adult-looking cursive. I flipped to a midpoint and then, standing in a bathroom of the Halifax Infirmary, somewhat scared I would be caught, quite literally, with my pants down, I began reading the diary of Cyrus Francis Mair.
June 2. London. “Don’t you dare put things in there about how I’m not as nice as other girls you went out with!” Karin sits across from me in The White Horse, reading a book and eating green grapes. Two in the afternoon and I’ve been thinking to make a proper entry in these pages for three months now. We meet next week Karin’s father in Nice, a city she has been dreaming about for “billions of months.” And something still to be remembered.
June 4. A movie in Leicester Square where we walk the sloped aisle of a cavernous theatre amid smells of popcorn and throw-up, invisible to the couple kissing onscreen. In the tube to Parsons Green, we run down to the street, smelling the cotton of our clothes, the scent of an approaching storm, and a quick downpour on scorching asphalt as Karin’s rain-spotted sundress covers in prickles.
June 6. “Put on your hat, Flippit! You’ll get a sunburn on your head and have to stay in the bathroom puking all day.” Before leaving London we stop at Piccadilly Hatchards for books. Karin gets a Woolf, me another Weil. Every time I think I understand her (“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity”) she comes up with: “There is a reality outside the world, that is to say, outside space and time, outside’s man’s mental universe, outside any sphere whatsoever that is accessible to human faculties.” Who says that? “Honeybunch,” says Karin. “I love you to the moon and back but what are you doing in the window?” “Trying to figure out this book.” “What’s it about?” “The difference between what people think and what people are made to think.” “Oh. That. This wine is for you, freak. Can I just say you smell so beautiful and look so beautiful with that white shirt and blue sky?”
June 12. Paris. Blood-damp towel on the empty bed. Mrs. Dalloway face down on the floor. A centime, a flip-flop. Postcards written to Zuber and McKee. The smells of the building itself, a hundred and fifty years old, and Karin sitting naked within a blowing curtain, all holding in place a river-breeze on a Sunday afternoon.
June 24. Gare Thiers. Michael Friday a no-show. Two hours waiting last night in the restaurant. Ridiculous. Not even a phone call. Karin silent, sullen. Apparently he’s done this before.
June 29. Salzburg. Karin saddened so I speak to school kids and four-year-old Erin. “Does the sun know it’s hot?” “Yes!” “Why?” “Because it’s way high up in the air.” “Does it have a birthday?” “No.” “Who made it?” “God made it.” “Does it know it’s alive?” “If the sun is God then it knows it’s alive and can hear you when you say your prayers. And also my sister’s.” “Do you think God could be a girl?” “No.” “Why not?” “Because God’s not a girl’s name.”
June 30. Karin troubled. More than a few times we’ve talked of families. She explains why her mother left her father and worries my growing up without parents has made for a “strange bouncing around.” Then: “Sometimes I think you don’t want me to love you.” “When?” “Because everyone who’s loved you has gone away. And I don’t want to have thoughts you don’t have and you do.”
July 1. Break up in July under a wide open sky and I can no longer express in words what I am anymore.
July 8. London. Weird, recurring memory. A week before we split, on the train out of Rome, Italian men were giving Karin a terrible time. Hooting, grabbing. We were exhausted with travel, wary of being mugged, drugged. After she fell asleep beside me, I went to the bathroom to write in this diary. When I came back, two older nuns, disembarking at Siena, could not keep from staring at her. One of them, her eyes wet with tears, put her hands on Karin’s face and kissed her awake. “Una ragazza cosi bella. Una ragazza cosi bellissima.” Karin looking very Vermeer but in a too-dreamy-to-think state. And furious with me. “When I looked for you before, I thought you were gone. I thought you weren’t going to come back. Cyrus, what if something happened?”
These last lines, as Fortune would have it, coincided with an urgent knocking on the bathroom door. I snapped shut the diary and replaced the rubber band. I did up my pants. I chugged what was left in the silver flask—about three shots of scotch—and emerged from what had been my own private dressing room and study carrel, choosing to avoid eye contact with the room’s next occupant, a plump woman with a four-point cane who seemed a very buxom doppelganger of Sir John A. MacDonald. But on second thought, remembering it was a day of surprise guests but odd graces, I turned to smile respectfully at my fellow outpatient. But the door had closed, the lock-bolt spun, and I was pivoting away when I noticed the Trivial Pursuit card on the floor. I was happy to see it. For this item, like the blue cashmere coat, had developed over the night into a spirit guide of sorts and I gladly returned it to my pants pocket. Pleased with my service stop, I thought to check in with the front desk to see if any Mairs or Fridays, or elderly Siennese nuns, for that matter, had been admitted to hospital.
The waiting area was Standing Room Only, crowded with exhausted-looking interns, watchful paramedics, and assorted refugees from the extreme weather. The triage nurse was understandably reticent with me. She explained that, unless I was family, she could not disclose any information about recent admittances. But she did tell me, because the Infirmary’s resources were at capacity, that ambulances in the last hour had been redirected to the Victoria General Hospital on South Street. I was moving to an exit door, and shoving it open against the storm, when my name was roared—rather as it would be during roll call at boot camp—back in the waiting area.
~
There under fluorescent ceiling lights stood Bunker Burr, the day’s best man. He wore a black tuxedo, a Boston Red Sox cap, and he was bleeding freely from his left eyebrow. There have been in these reminiscences more than a few allusions to the Burrs and now that one of the more exemplary family members has shouted his way onto the page it seems appropriate to set down a few essentials. The Burrs were fantastically confident, beautifully handsome, and carelessly rich. They were originally from the South, traced their line to Aaron Burr, and came to Halifax following the American Civil War. Though Nova Scotia’s sympathies were mostly with the Union states, Halifax gave extended safe haven to a number of Confederate ships, among them the CSS Tallahassee, a steamer warship out of Carolina. The Burrs were likewise out of Carolina and, like the Loyalists before and the Draft Dodgers after, migrated north because of a war. Over the decades, they’d become a family of some means and influence in the city. They were sharp and ambitious—with a vast strength of will—and I’m not sure I can convey how potent such a party mix can be. It can be so diverting to consort with pretty, affluent people that you may not notice when their smiles tighten with competition, or when a racist joke is repeated, or when you sense they have in their hearts a determined inclination toward Money and Achievement and the Right Sort of Person. Because, for the Burrs, winning mattered. Before a family member’s race or final, they held a pep rally, called Burr-Ups within the family circle, to maximize the competitor’s mojo. Framed photographs of these team-building exercises, the family posed like a football team on their cottage dock, were conspicuously displayed over the fireplace in their Halifax house on Belmont on the Arm. They were a big noise in Halifax, to be honest, and represented the zenith of a certain sort of South End expectation—well-to-do husband-and-wife, three children, Labrador Retriever, house on the Nor
thwest Arm, cottage in Chester, sailboats, ski trips, scandal. People loved to talk about the Burrs. Gregor and Tiggy were a storied socialite couple and their three sons were notorious on the highways and byways of the province.
My Mother Talking: “I don’t know how Tiggy does it. They’re in Toronto, Tiggy comes home, Gregor stops off in Ottawa to see his mistress. She’ll say Gregor’s seeing to some parliamentary matter. Or he’s seeing a friend. That’s what she calls it. A friend. Must be nice. Must be nice to live in that much of a dream world. He could’ve been a cabinet minister in Mulroney’s government if he could’ve kept his dick in his pants. Such a sleaze bucket. My God, the Burrs, the Flynns, the Jessups. They don’t read. They don’t go to the theatre. There’s always people in their homes. All they do is drink! Those people—I don’t know how your father puts up with them—they’ve always got to do things in a group. Sugarloaf. Race Week. Always together. They don’t know what they think about anything. They have no ideas. No inner life. Eli Brimmer. The Ogilvies. They all go skinny-dipping, you know. They’re in their hot-tubs. They’ve all seen each other naked. They’re so bored they don’t have anything better to do. I don’t know. People talk about the good side of the Burrs. I haven’t seen it for a while.”
I’d seen Bunker through the ages, the awkward stages, the dental braces, the paisley bandanas, the blond fringe tips. As a kid, I more than casually admired the brothers Burr for I keenly wished for any type of brother and to have an identity within a family of boys who raced in sloops and shells and giant slaloms seemed sterling to me. In my boyhood, my awareness of the world of older kids was gregariously mediated by the lives of Brecken and Bunker and Boyden Burr. They were lively, pubescent, autonomous, teenage jocks in tie-dye shirts, tennis shorts, falling-apart Tretorn sneakers, and their older teenaged lives were linked in my mind with the theme song from the television show Room 222 and with Dennis Wilson, the drummer for the Beach Boys, whom they all closely resembled, especially as he was pictured in the stills for The Pet Sounds album, the sun-bleached hair swooping across the eyes. First-born Brecken was his father’s favourite, the baby Boyden his mother’s pet, and Bunker a case study in messed-up Middle Son Syndrome—hyper-competitive, highly erratic, and somewhat criminal. I admired perversely his wild compulsions and troubled history. He once threw a dinky toy and hit my sister Faith in her backyard playpen. At twelve, he chugged a bottle of Tabasco on a bet. At seventeen, Bunker sank his grandfather’s Boston Whaler cranking whoopee turns in the open ocean, totaled his dad’s BMW doing donuts in the snow, and wrapped his older brother’s Kawasaki Z1000 around a service pole on the Hubbards highway on-ramp. Tribulations continued. The summer of freshman year, he served a commuted sentence on weekends for sucker-punching a bouncer at The Palace Cabaret. At twenty-two, with a roommate from St. Francis Xavier University, he tried to windsurf from Nova Scotia to Prince Edward Island, got blown out the Northumberland Strait, and had to be rescued by the Coast Guard. None of this fazed or dazed or much amazed him. Bunker Burr had immense self-possession, bulletproof belief in his own prospects, and at the first sign of complication he pressed for advantage. He could be selfish and hilarious and juvenile. But he liked people—his kind of people—and simply ignored details that didn’t square with his version of the world. He had plans for himself and from these plans he would not be distracted. Besides, like his brothers, Bunker Burr stood to inherit half a million dollars from his paternal grandmother. For a few years playing tennis tournaments we were friends. I found him dope, he bought me booze. We partnered in doubles when Cyrus quit the sport, Bunker bouncing around the backcourt, thumping forehands, serving bombs, crushing match points. We played the Nova Scotia Closed, Atlantic Regionals. At the Maritime Open we made the semis, beating the top seeds in fading sunlight, and that Saturday I was invited to the Chester cottage for supper. Chester is a seasonal life of sailing and golf and partying, full of great quantities of fizzing beer and tanned young people in pink shirts and plaid shorts and sockless deck shoes, a vacation town for the great washed and blowdried and wind-tousled. The Burrs in Chester sauntered over summertime grass to the Fo’c’sle Tavern with a kind of indiscriminate amiability—Canadian variants on Kennedy-style frat boys—and lived a life of shirts untucked, faded jeans, floating key chains. My memory of that dinner is vivid and blurry, a scene sequence of hot-boxing and sunburn, lobster leftovers and rhubarb fool, and Bunker’s mom in an outdoor hot tub, clad only in a string bikini bottom, sitting with a blissful smile, nominally absorbed in a hardcover edition of The Hotel New Hampshire. “There they go,” I remember her saying. “The men who make it all possible.” Bunker and I swam blitzed out of our minds to the sailboats moored in the Back Harbour, climbing aboard and raiding cans of beer from Wind Runner and Rum on the Rocks, Sundowner and Sticky Fingers, wet jeans weighed down with our thievery and sinking us in tidal seawater. We drank on the shore past midnight, talking, riffing, dreaming on things to come. It was as close as we’ve ever been and since then we’ve always approached each other with the idea that we’d enter into some serious, marvellously fulfilling conversation but, seeing him now in the Halifax Infirmary, I wondered if that conversation was ever going happen.
“There he is!” Bunker strode over to me. “Prince of the city.” He spoke with wonderful confidence and humour, as if it was only natural he was the one doing the talking. “How are you, brother? Haven’t seen this clown in ages.” He smacked me on the back and turned to a fellow with a crewcut sitting in the waiting area. This man wore a brown suit, had his hand wrapped in paper towels, and sat beside an opened magnum of champagne. He seemed drunk out of his mind but tried to look sober as he stared at the paper towels which, after he flexed his fingers, coloured with blood. Bunker introduced him as Dunc Chapman and I asked if he was all right.
“You kidding me?” said Bunker. “Dunc’s the real deal.”
“Everything—” Dunc Chapman smiled at me after a complicated burp. “Cancelled.”
I asked if that meant there’s no wedding.
“Is no anything.” Dunc Chapman directed his smile toward his shoes. “City down. Storm.”
“The storm—” Bunker made a strangely enlightened sneer, as if he was sort of happily disgusted, then turned to me with a winning smirk. “I know. Insane. It’s insane out there. It’s a fucking zoo. We got so boned by this blizzard. The whole city’s totally boned.” He reached for the magnum of champagne. “Bottom of Spring Garden and I’m seeing the Archbishop fighting his way into a taxi. How is this happening? Brutal. Just brutal. Taxi gets stuck in the snow and me and Dunc, we’re pushing—how many cars we push out, Dunc? Fucking dozens. We fall I don’t know how many times. Dunc slashes his hand there. That’s going to need stitches. I pop a header and gash my head on a fucking bumper. I think we can keep going but it’s like, ‘It’s over. You’re gone. You’re done, bud. Nobody cares what you think. Go get checked at Emergency.’” Bunker drank from the champagne, a ring on his hand flashing with reflected light. It was an X-Ring, a senior class ring from St. F.X., which meant he must’ve graduated and I remembered now he went through law school at UNB and was articling with his father’s old firm, once called Merton Mair McNab but now, after amalgamation with firms in the three other Atlantic Provinces, rebranded as Merton Fortiers Chisolm Blades. “Been quite a week,” said Bunker. “At the stag last night, we got fucking wrecked. Just face-plant, retarded drunk. Flaming Sambucas. Montecristos. The whole bit.” Bunker had missed a spot shaving, I noticed, and dark little bristles sprouted beneath a nostril. “It was like the night Dooder fell out of Dad’s boat. Remember that? The boys were trying to remember who pulled Dooder out of the Arm that night. I said McKee’d remember. If anyone could.” Bunker put his arm around me and swiveled toward Dunc Chapman. “McKee here’s got the most phenomenal memory. This guy remembers everything. Name of your imaginary friend in nursery school. Capital of Kamchatka. Maybe there’s a blind kid in Calcutta who’s better but the smar
t money’s on McKee. He’s got all the goop. Seriously.” His arm still around me, Bunker slapped his hand against my chest. “And this guy’s dad? The lawyer’s lawyer. McKee’s dad is easily the top litigator in the province. He’s an icon around here. An icon.”
“Right on.” Dunc Chapman opened his eyes very wide, trying to focus on me. “Was your name again?”
“But Dunc here?” Bunker released me and shadowboxed at Dunc Chapman. “This fucking guy? Just made partner at Merton and his billable hours are ridiculous. I mean this year alone Dunc’s billing twenty-two hundred hours.” He mussed Dunc Chapman’s crewcut. “You fucking high-baller. You’re king of the zoo. You got due diligence up the ying-yang, brother. But you got to learn to kick back once in a while. Like last night after the stag, I take Dunc to the Liquor Dome. My Apartment, Lawrence of Oregano, you know.”
At the mention of these nightspots, Dunc Chapman raised a fist to say, “Hell, yeah.”
“Absolutely, absolutely.” Bunker smiled. “Pretty target-rich environment. Where do these girls come from? I meet some chick named Courtney? Makes it three chicky-babes in three nights. Not too shabby. Done and done. What can I say? I’m on a roll.” Bunker jingled some coins in his front pocket and turned to me with a friendly you-know-what-I-mean smile. “Because when you get that first one? Dunc?”