I took a few moments to adjust the side mirrors and the rake of my seat. I had dropped below the speed limit. “Let me just say, I didn’t like that guy.”
“I could tell.” She smiled at me. This was a good woman I’d been thrown in with. “He didn’t like you either.”
“This is a lousy car,” I said.
Anna turned in her seat, away from me. She looked out her window. We were passing an industrial park that extended for what seemed like half a mile. “I miss my truck,” she said.
When she said this, I tried to remember (I couldn’t, still can’t) the figure of speech in which a part stands in for the whole.
“What kind of car is this?” I said.
“I have no idea,” she said.
“Korean.”
“Maybe,” Anna said. “I don’t know about cars.”
She picked up the smaller of the two manila envelopes and opened the clasp.
“How much did we get?” I said.
“Watch the road,” she said. “I’ll count it.”
There were four stacks of bills, each stack bound with a thick rubber band. Anna counted one stack. “Looks like there’s ten thousand dollars, Canadian.”
“Total?” I said.
“It looks like it.”
“That won’t last very long.”
“We’ll have to see,” she said. She picked up the other envelope and took out the passport and the driver’s license.
“What’s your name?” I said.
She looked at the license. “Jane Grey. I’m from Hastings, Nebraska.”
“Have you been to Nebraska?”
“I’ve been to Omaha,” she said. “I don’t know where Hastings is.”
“I’ve not been in Nebraska.”
“I like my name,” she said. “Makes me sound like the heroine of a Victorian novel.” She opened the passport and looked at her picture. “Dear Lord.”
“Let me see,” I said.
“Not a chance,” she said. “Where did they get this picture?”
“Let me see it.”
“Just drive,” she said.
I would get my passport and driver’s license Sunday afternoon, at the hotel, the day before we left for Ottawa. My new name was Oliver Grey. Maybe because it sounded so fusty, the name pleased me. The picture was, I thought, flattering. Anna thought so, too. It was the same pose on the driver’s license. This was my first alias, long before I adopted, for the purposes of my report, a pen name, long before Anna gave the name to me, before I’d ever heard of Ray Bradbury.
As we neared Montreal, the drive became exacting. I had little experience driving in a city of this size. It was Friday afternoon, three o’clock. On the outskirts of the city, traffic was already heavy, and angry, in both directions. My fellow drivers seemed maniacal. The road signs were in French. Anna navigated. She had a road map opened in her lap, but even she was tentative. At the junction of Highway 133 and Highway 10, against Anna’s clear directive, I pigheadishly went east when I should have gone west. We drove almost five miles before I would admit I’d made a mistake. When we were going in the right direction, heading back towards the city, Anna, who seemed to me unflappable, asked if I’d been to Montreal before.
“I have been,” I said. “One time. With my parents. Before my father died.” I’d been young enough, I told her, that I had no memory of the place. I did not tell Anna—I’m not sure now why I withheld this information—that I’d been to Montreal one other time, still many years ago, with Sara.
Sara and I spent a long weekend there in early spring. We saw the sights, ate at some good restaurants (I can remember a Portuguese restaurant, near McGill, where I had sea bass for the first time), and generally enjoyed ourselves. We were celebrating the news that Sara was pregnant. In a long overdue attempt at rapprochement (this is the chapter for French), Sara’s father offered to pay for our trip, but Sara turned him down.
When we were in Montreal, Sara had not yet begun to show. Nor had she experienced any morning sickness. She was in perfect health—there would be no signs of preeclampsia until a week and a half before her due date—and very happy. I was happy, too.
It was past four when we found, mostly by accident, the Rue St.-Paul and the Hotel Bonsecours, a narrow, four-story brick building, its exterior characterless, among a crowded stretch of small antiques shops and ethnic restaurants. The entrance to the Bonsecours was well-hidden: a single glass door—the hotel name stenciled in small black letters on the glass—which opened onto a steep flight of cement steps. The hotel lobby, small and purely utilitarian, was on the second floor, the guest rooms above on the top two floors. I parked the car in front of the hotel in a space reserved for unloading. I tried to help Anna with the bags. It was as much as I could do to carry one bag up the stairs, and I had to rest halfway. Anna made several trips. I left her with the bags to register at the reception desk—it was she who had the newly forged driver’s license and passport—while I went down to move the car to the hotel’s garage. By the time I’d rejoined Anna in the lobby, I’d had to climb three flights of stairs out of the garage, and then the daunting hotel staircase from the street. I was pretty much spent. Our room was on the fourth floor, Anna said. There was no elevator.
“You’d better give me a minute,” I said.
“Are you all right?” Anna said.
“I’m okay.” In a corner of the lobby there were two fake-leather chairs on either side of a low table. On the table, someone had left a magazine. “Can we sit there?” I said. “Just until I catch my breath.”
“You sit,” she said. “I’ll take the bags to the room.”
“No, no.” I said. “I don’t want you to do that. Stay with me. Let’s sit and talk. Then I’ll help.”
We sat down. I tried to take some deep, long breaths.
“Pretty crummy place they send us to,” she said.
“Maybe the rooms are nice,” I said.
“You think so?”
“We’re the Greys now,” I said.
“You’re Bud.”
“What do you mean?”
“I had to think of a first name for you,” she said. “I picked Bud. Mr. and Mrs. Bud Grey.”
“Why Bud?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Where did you get that?”
“It’s what came to me. Seemed to suit you.”
“It won’t be Bud,” I said. “They won’t give me Bud.”
“I’m sure they won’t,” she said.
“I’m not a Bud,” I said.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said.
Our room on the fourth floor of the Bonsecours was airless and close. There was no air-conditioner, no drapes on the window, just a pull-down shade. A television, too big for the room, was bolted to a blonde-wood credenza. There was also a shabby club chair, and two beds with padded headboards separated by a nightstand. Over each bed was a reading light. The bedspreads looked old and worn. The room smelled of cigarette smoke. From the ceiling in the far corner by the window, a swag lamp hung above an empty space where a table and chair must once have been. I was relieved to see we had a bathroom en suite, with no tub, but a decent stall shower and enough clean towels.
“How much are we paying?” I said.
“Too darn much,” Anna said. “It’s a dump.”
(Over the next year, as we moved with the clone westward in Canada—Oliver and Jane Grey, with their grown son, Alan—we would be provided with better lodging: after Montreal, compact, usually clean, minimally furnished apartments with kitchenettes, leased by the month.)
By the time we’d unpacked our bags, and settled in, it was five o’clock. It quickly became awkward, sitting together in that cramped and comfortless room with nothing left to do. We were grateful to be able, now that it was five, to talk about dinner. Anna had seen a Vietnamese restaurant almost next door to the Bonsecours. She suggested we eat there. I wasn’t hungry, but I was willing, if only to get out of our room and into
a larger, more public space. The restaurant was good enough. At that early hour we were the only customers. I can’t remember what we ate, but Anna would have had something spicy with vegetables, and a Coke. (Everywhere we went in Canada, Anna asked for Cokes, “with lots of ice.”) I would have had something un-spiced with chicken, and a sparkling water. Anna was a sure hand with chopsticks; I used a knife and fork. When the waiter delivered the check, I took out my wallet.
“Don’t,” she said.
“No. Let me.”
“I’ve got the money,” she said.
“That’s all right.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure,” I said.
“You have cash?”
I had three hundred dollars, American, in my wallet.
“I do,” I said.
We thought to take a short walk along the Rue St.-Paul. After four blocks—I was aware of Anna slowing her pace for me—I was winded and dreading the four flights of stairs. “I need to turn back,” I said. “I’m sorry. If you want to walk some more, I hope you will. I don’t mind going up alone.”
“I’m tired, too,” Anna said. “You know, why don’t we just go up? We can watch TV, get into bed early.” It was six-thirty.
I sat on the bed closest to the door—I chose that bed in accordance with some precept of chivalry I thought I remembered but may well have made up—and watched television while Anna took a shower. She came out of the bathroom wearing a flowered cotton robe over a nightgown. She was barefoot. It was the first time I’d seen her feet. She wore toenail polish. Plum color. Her feet were not pretty. (I was sympathetic. They were the feet of a woman in her late sixties. My feet were not pretty either—I had hammertoes—though I did not willingly expose them to view.) Her face was flushed, her hair still wet. Her hair, as I’ve written, was gray and cut short. When it was wet, as then, you could see her scalp. “That’s a good shower,” she said. “There’s a fresh bar of soap in there. And shampoo.”
“Yours?” I said.
“Feel free,” she said. She began to dry her hair with a bath towel.
“Sit, will you?” I said. “There’s something I should show you.”
She pulled the window shade down and switched on the swag lamp, which gave off a jaundiced, ineffectual light. Then she sat on the other bed, the one closest to the window. As if she knew what I’d been thinking, she tucked her feet beneath her.
“What is it?” she said.
“Wait.” I opened the top drawer in my half of the credenza and took out the three L. L. Bean boot socks. I removed the stack of bills from one of the socks, and tossed it on her bed.
“What is this?” she said.
“Money.”
“Where did you get it?”
“I took it out of the bank,” I said. “It’s mine.”
“Ray,” she said. She didn’t call me Ray, of course. Nor did she call me Oliver, or Bud. When she spoke my name, it was my real name, always. “I told you not to do this.”
“I know you did,” I said. “I didn’t trust your group. I wanted us to be able to live up here.”
“This is bad, Ray,” she said. “We would have been fine.”
“I didn’t think so,” I said. “Anyway, it’s done. I can’t imagine it will matter.”
“It might very well matter. It won’t look good.”
“To whom?”
“How much is there?” she said.
“Sixty thousand.”
“Truth?” she said.
“Twenty thousand in each sock.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Again,” I said, “not at all.”
“You are,” she said. “We have to be careful, Ray.”
“So you say.”
“We do,” she said. She looked at the money. “Take it all out.”
I emptied the other two boot socks onto her bed.
“I’ve never seen this much money close up,” she said. She laughed, but she was not happy. “At least we’re rich.”
“We’re hardly rich,” I said.
This was to be the first of many nights in Canada—a year’s worth nearly—Anna and I were, broadly speaking, to cohabitate. We were never in the same bed, but always close. After the clone joined us in Ottawa, except for a single night in a Thunder Bay motel, Anna would sleep in one room, the clone and I in another. It was awkward. For all of us, but especially, I think, for me. (I don’t really know how the clone felt about it. He never said.) I was more fastidious than Anna, primmer, tighter-laced. She told me often she was grateful for how modest, how unobtrusive I was when we were cooped up together. “Let me tell you,” she’d say, with what looked and sounded like glee, “my husband was not a dainty man.” For Anna, the charade of our living together, pretending to be man and wife, father and mother to the clone, was a constituent part of the project to which, at great cost, she’d given herself. I suspect the arrangement was for her amusing, as well. For me, it was a travesty, an inconvenience I could barely abide. The first night I barely slept at all, I was so aware of Anna in the other bed, so alert to her. It had been a long time since I’d slept with anyone else in the room. Anna was a quiet sleeper, that night and afterwards. She didn’t thrash, didn’t move much, didn’t snore. (I snored, “like a walrus,” Anna said.) Still, her presence in the room with me made it hard to sleep. That first night in Montreal I lay in bed homesick and stiff with inhibition, afraid, should I start to drift off, I would make some unseemly noise. In the last several years my prostate gland has palpably enlarged, and I have typically to urinate two or three times in the night. I was embarrassed by this and also worried I’d disturb her sleep. I hadn’t thought to bring pajamas with me; at home I slept in boxers and a T-shirt. I was embarrassed, too, by the state of my body, my general flaccidity and creakiness and pallor.
Saturday, our second day in Montreal, we were both grateful for the morning, which seemed slow to come. It was dark in the room when I got up at six-thirty, as I always do, to use the toilet. I was careful to pick up the seat and, when I was through, put it down again. I worried about whether or not to flush the toilet, then chose the lesser indelicacy and flushed. I came out thinking I’d get back into bed, but Anna was awake.
“I heard you get up,” she said. “What time is it?”
“Six-thirty,” I said. “Sorry.”
“No. I’m glad to be awake. Open the shade a bit, will you? Let’s have some light.”
I raised the shade halfway. “What’s it like out?” she said.
“I can’t tell.”
“Open it all the way,” she said. “We’re up.”
I did as she asked. The sun was not yet fully risen. The room filled with a cool, silvery light. “Looks to be a nice day.”
“It was a long night,” she said.
“Did I disturb you?”
She smiled. “You snored up a storm.”
“It was bad?”
“It was pretty bad,” she said.
“I didn’t know I snored,” I said.
“I’ll get used to it,” she said. “Or I’ll murder you. What do you say we get up and going?”
“All right,” I said. “Will you want breakfast?”
“I will. I’m starving. And you’re buying, Mr. Moneybags.”
“Happy to,” I said. “So it was really bad?”
“Your snoring?”
“Yes.”
“I told you. It was bad.”
“What will we do?”
“We’ll figure it out,” she said. “We’ll be okay.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Stop,” she said. “I get the bathroom first. You already went.”
“That’s fine,” I said.
“Did you pick up the seat?”
“Please,” I said. “Of course I did.”
When Anna had finished, emerging in her robe and nightgown, I showered and shaved, confining myself to the bathroom until I had completely dressed.
Not far from the hotel,
on a street off the Rue de St.-Paul, we found a café. She asked me if I remembered the name of the office supplies place, and the street it was on. I remembered Centaur, but I’d forgotten the street.
“Rue de la Montagne,” Anna said.
“I didn’t bother to remember,” I said. “I knew you would. You’re so diligent.”
“Yes, I am,” she said.
We took a taxi to the Rue de la Montagne, a long north-south street. We didn’t have the address, and it took the driver a while to find the place. When we got out of the cab it was nine o’clock. According to the posted hours, Centaur Office Supplies opened Saturdays at ten. Our appointment was not until eleven. The day was still fresh and, though I hadn’t slept much, I was feeling energetic. We decided to walk along the Rue de la Montagne, north, away from the train station, back the way we’d come in the cab. From my two prior visits—the most recent of which, more than thirty-five years ago—I suppose I’d retained some impracticable sense of Montreal’s geography. But this third time the city felt to me more strange than if I’d not been there before. Because I was there with Anna.
We came to a used bookstore, some of its stock already out on the sidewalk in discount shelves. Anna wanted to go in. “We need to get some books,” she said. The shop was teeming with books, so cluttered it was difficult to move through the narrow aisles—impossible if another person was already there—on both sides of which books were shelved floor to ceiling, excess volumes stacked knee-high on the floor. The air was full of dust and, from the smell of it, more than a few of the books had begun to molder. Whatever principles of organization had once been in place could no longer have any bearing. Everyone, it seemed, was speaking French. Within a minute of going in, I wanted to get out. Anna seemed energized and disappeared into the maze. Even if I’d wanted to, there was no way to go after her. I stood as close to the entrance, and the outside air, as I could, without being absolutely in the way. After ten minutes of standing there, with no sight of Anna, I got tired of being jostled and rubbed up against, and, intending to stake out my piece of ground, I picked up the book nearest me, taking it from the top of a pile precariously stacked on the floor just inside the shop.
It was a thick, heavy volume, bound in black cloth, the pages gilt-edged. On the spine, in gold letters, was “Holy Bible”; farther down the spine, “Authorized King James Version”; and, at the very bottom, “Michelangelo Edition.” On the front cover, dead center, was the somewhat primitive engraving, in gold again, of a lamb in profile, looking back almost coquettishly over its shoulder, standing hoof-deep in a pool of something—water, milk, blood—holding in the upraised curve of its right foreleg a cross. I know now this edition was published over a century ago, in 1965. By the inscription on the inside of the front cover, I also know it was given by her parents, Bruce and Susan Kolberg, to Lisa Suzanne Kolberg, on the occasion of her birth, January 15, 1969, at St. Joseph’s Hospital in St. Paul, Minnesota. I was not often or easily moved, but the inscription, commonplace enough, touched me. The infant, Lisa Suzanne Kolberg, would now be long dead. I hoped her life had been, on balance anyway, a good one. I had not bought a book in years. I bought the bible and took it outside. (I would carry it with me across Canada. I have it with me still.)
The Bradbury Report Page 16