The Perfect Order of Things

by David Gilmour

  Wandering back to the Hotel La Mar near midnight, a subdued ocean rolling in and out, I saw her coming down the road toward us. She was alone and it seemed, as she reversed direction and joined us, that I could smell something on her exquisite skin, under the coconut oil, under even a day’s tropical sweat. I opened my mouth to speak, but in mid-sentence a kind of dry-tongued self-consciousness insinuated itself. Justin must have noticed it, because he shot me an irritated glance. Where will she sleep tonight, I wondered, will she come to see me?

  Twenty minutes later, we were settled in deck chairs on the balcony in front of my room. Dexter was downstairs in the bar with the Mississippi girls. They were dancing to old American pop songs that had been re-recorded to a reggae backbeat. It made a cornball song like “Duke of Earl” sound snappy, even subversive. I was going to mention it, an impressive aperçu, surely, but then I thought, subversive? What kind of bullshit is that? And then I remembered the Toronto film critic, the guy with the monkey face who liked to talk about movies being “subversive.” He fancied it made him a cut above regular moviegoers, implied a certain superior niche of sophistication.

  The music stopped. We sat in the moist silence. There was a scream from the foliage behind the hotel, something had something by the throat, a rabbit maybe, but it sounded like a baby being murdered. After a while I had the feeling that they, Justin and Nessa, were waiting for me to leave so they could be alone. As if daring life to wound me, to murder me like the creature in the jungle, I said, “I’m going downstairs to get a beer.” Justin said, “Could you get me one too?” Then Nessa said, “Me too.”

  “I’ll need three hands,” I said. Meaning somebody had to come with me.

  “Never mind, I’m fine,” Justin said.

  There, I thought, that proves it. Now I have to go alone. Now I have to leave them alone.

  I went downstairs and asked the long-necked bartender for two beers, one for me and one for Nessa. How long could that take? You bend over, you open the fridge, you pull out two Red Stripes, you open them and then you put them in my hands. But we might as well have been putting a man on the moon. Dexter and the girls from Mississippi were in stitches of laughter. Somebody kept saying, “My God. My God!”

  I went back up the stairs. The dogs in the yard barked at me. They knew something was fishy. And when I got to the top, Nessa was sitting on Justin’s lap, leaning forward, ostensibly to look at the moonlight but really so that her breasts could brush his lips. And it seemed unbelievable— and at the same time utterly logical—that this terrible thing was happening to me.

  But then Justin said, “You got to get up, Nessa.” He said it the way you talk to a thief who’s got his hand, again, in your pocket. Mechanical but firm. And I remembered him at the New Year’s dance at the winter hotel when I was fourteen, his hand on my shoulder, the whole room staring at me. How kind he is, I thought.

  We left the island a few days later, Justin to his law practice, me to supply teaching. Dexter stayed on with an elderly Australian widow who had a place on the beach. Nessa I didn’t see, but I heard later she took up with one of the Germans who owned Kaiser’s Café until a hurricane blew the whole works, including the German, out to sea. But by then Nessa was long gone, taking acting classes in New York and living with the director of a soap opera.

  A thousand events took place; good-natured wives came and went; I had children who to this day seem so miraculous it’s hard for me to let them walk past the couch without reaching out and grabbing them.

  And then one day, three full decades after that night on the hotel balcony, a letter arrived from a small town in upstate New York. A letter from Nessa Cornblum. Why just the other day she’d found herself thinking about Isla La Mar and how much fun we’d had there and oh, by the way, she was going to be in Toronto in a few weeks, the rabbi was ailing, did I want to get together for a drink maybe?

  I showed the letter to Rachel. (Rule number one on how not to wreck a marriage: If it feels like something you should keep secret, you’re probably doing the wrong thing.)

  “What do you suppose she wants?” she said.

  “Don’t know. Nostalgia maybe.”

  “Old girlfriends don’t look up old boyfriends out of nostalgia. They look them up because their lives aren’t working out and they want to see who’s still interested.”

  I didn’t write Nessa back. I didn’t not write back either. It just never occurred to me to, one way or the other. But then one morning a few months later, I woke up too early in our house in Kensington Market. It was the death season, end of February in Toronto, snow blowing across the porch, the sky bled colourless, litter in the gutter; a wormy dog rubbing his bottom on the frozen sidewalk. And for reasons I still don’t understand (but am not surprised by) I slipped quietly out of bed (my wife sleeps like a child) and went to the head of the basement stairs. I unlocked the door and switched on the light. It smelled down there, of what I don’t know, but I didn’t like it, it scared me. I saw a rat down there once, and now, when I smelt that staleness, that je ne sais quoi, I remembered the rat, how it came scuttling out from behind an old oil painting. They have long tails, those rats. That’s how you tell them from a big mouse.

  There were cartons of old appointment books in our basement, letters you’ll never reread, faded sweaters, electricity bills, galoshes, a fishing rod, income tax statements, a broken hammer, things like that. But there was something else as well: a bottle of OxyContin tablets. Painkillers that almost no one uses for pain. I can’t remember how I got them, a lapse in judgment certainly, but I got them anyway. What can I say?

  Storing them in the basement, though, in a place where the odour made me imagine rats, seemed like an excellent pre-emptive stroke. Who was going to go down there, especially in the middle of the night, the time when much of life’s damage is committed? Very unlikely, too, that Rachel was going to go sorting through that stuff. And if she did, if, say, I was killed in a bank robbers’ crossfire, she’d see the date on the pill bottle, blah blah blah. Even in death I wanted her to think well of me. (She’d put two conditions on marriage: no women, no pills. Who’s going to contest that?)

  And it worked. For the longest time it worked, so much so that for years I forgot they were there. But then that February morning, I remembered. And, like the sailors in The Aeneid, down I went. I gave my hands a vigorous clap (rat alarm), gave the shoe box a good kick (rat alarm), and found what I was looking for in the toe of a child’s skate. I snapped the tablet in half, popped it into my mouth and chewed contemplatively. Gradually the day took on a kind of agreeable, literary melancholy, like the beginning of Moby-Dick. And like the guy in Moby-Dick, I was, indeed, setting out on an adventure, the whale, of course, transforming itself into the same entity as the man pursuing it. It began to hail, small, hard pellets clacking against the window. A pair of Indians, pockmarked and bulbousnosed, passed my window, pushing and shoving each other playfully. One of them had a bottle of sherry or wine, they must have just got it because they were on their way up. By night, by nightfall . . . who knows? We were all going to have a nightfall.

  The OxyContin clicked in another notch. I was rattling around my desk, “tidying up,” when I came across Nessa’s letter. I reread it. It seemed more interesting now. I thought, You’ve gone back to the house with the broken spine, back to your old dormitory, back to the film festival, why not go back there, back to Isla La Mar? Reflect on life’s foolishness and spent passions. Romeo and Juliet on a balcony in the Caribbean. Splendid! It could be the final chapter, the payoff, the snow falling at the end of Joyce’s “The Dead.” How perfect. How inspired. How OxyContin!

  I called an airline office. I said to myself, if they have a flight, I’ll take it. I imagined the island bathed in a pool of sunshine. I saw a lagoon, a bank of cliffs rising behind it. A sailboat rocking slightly at anchor. People snorkelling at the mouth of a cave. Yes, I thought, I’ll do that. I’ll go to Isla La Mar, and I’ll go swimming for two hours a day, I’
ll get a tan, I’ll lose some weight, I’ll go back to the balcony of that gorgeous little white hotel in the cliffs. There will be pretty girls from the University of Southern Mississippi in the bar, there will be families with small children dashing about the yard; there’ll be French-Canadian couples with matching tattoos on their biceps (a beautiful race!), maybe even a pair of young men in the bar, just like Justin and me, drinking too much and raising hell. Perhaps I’d have a word with them. A cautionary note. I’d say . . . what would I say . . . never mind, I’d know when the time came.

  I imagined the hotel owner’s delight when he saw me. His wife emerging from the cool interior shadows, her affectionate disapproval. What naughty things had I been up to? How many years now? Fifteen, twenty since that time when I first read Tolstoy. (How Tolstoyan it all seemed, in fact! The cycle of people and time and places and . . . and so on.)

  Rachel greeted the news circumspectly (“Been to see the doctor recently?”) and slept in the third-floor guest room.

  Five-thirty a.m. The alarm goes off. There it is, my plane ticket on the bedside table. I didn’t dream it after all. Descending through the house like a jittery ghost (Jesus, those OxyContins leave a hell of a hangover), I arrive in the basement. I clap my hands. Was there a flicker of motion just behind the imitation Rembrandt? I look at it in the harsh light. Rachel’s right: it is depressing. Depressing and amateurish. It may be four hundred years old, but they had bad painters then too. I clap my hands again. Yes, I’m sure of it. Something moved over there behind the book carton.

  I shake a tablet into my hand and crunch it between my teeth. Is it my imagination or is the effect almost instantaneous? Horror receding like the tide. I’m down there in the basement, yes, it smells, but voyons, mon vieux, basements are basements. What was all the fuss about, what horror, what rat? And that painting. It does have a certain layered elegance.

  Layered elegance.

  I go back upstairs, pill bottle in hand. So much to do. Pack my fins, my snorkel, my mask; I’ll wear shorts and sandals to the airport. Boy Scout maxim: travel light. By this afternoon the hot sun will pour over my back, I can hear the sweet, cognac-scented voice of Cesária Évora, I can hear the noisy chatter of happy tourists at a cliffside bar. I place the OxyContin bottle in the inside pocket of my overnight bag but then, intuitively, as though someone has dimmed the lights in a theatre, change my mind. Some things you don’t risk. What if my bag gets lost in customs? What if they X-ray it and find my pills? I know better than to take a chance. I put them in my breast pocket and give it a tiny, reassuring tap.

  The limo arrives; I hop in the back. Away we go. The balcony. I’m going back to the balcony in the Caribbean. I see Lake Ontario on my left. Grey water. Then a deserted playground; a lone jogger: poor soul, he’s not coming with me today. I pull out my notebook. I must write everything down. These next few days, they may well be the most important days of my life. Scribble, scribble. I see myself a kind of Marcel Proust on OxyContin. A recorder of the minutiae of human existence. Marcel et moi.

  The plane has barely levelled out when I order a Bloody Mary. “I love to drink when I fly,” I tell the affable young couple in the seats beside me. I make notes, I go to the bathroom fifteen times, I chat to the stewardesses, more Bloody Marys, I start to watch a movie, too slow, and head back to the bathroom; there is always a cluster of people there, you can talk to them . . .

  Three hours into the flight, I feel a slight sag. Hmm. What could it be? In the bathroom I look at my face. My pupils are tiny, like pinheads. I seem to have already lost weight. How great! I’ll come home with my clothes just hanging off me.

  Yet things are not quite as weightless, as compelling, as they were an hour ago. Has something happened? That woman did bring our chat to a rather hasty conclusion outside the washroom. Oh well, that’s happened before: middle-aged women, I’m not their cup of tea, it’s as if— yes, that must be it!

  Reaching down into my pocket, I find a quarter Oxy-Contin (I’d razored them into portions before leaving my house) and chewed it up, munch, munch, munch, and yes, before too long, I found myself in conversation with the couple beside me: how long had they been together, how did they meet, what did their families think of “all that”? They were intrigued that anyone could be so fascinated by their life story. I had a million questions: life on a small farm two hundred miles outside of Calgary: riveting, all of it!

  It was late afternoon when the minivan passed through San Agatha on the north coast of Isla La Mar. Dozens of young black men standing around the town square, bored, looking for tourists to hustle. We followed the shoreline up into the West End, the landscape speckled with paper cups, bottles, candy bar papers. The bars and cafés, the road itself, they were strangely unpeopled.

  “Where is everyone?” I asked.

  The driver looked at me in the mirror with an expression of practised, low-level menace. Just on the brink but not quite there.

  “They don’t come this far anymore,” he said. He kept his eyes on me. I knew that face, the what-can-I-get-from-this-guy face.

  I leaned my forehead against the warm glass. My temples ached. A fat black woman sat on a stoop in front of a shack. T-shirts and knitted caps hanging in the window behind her. It was Pamela waiting for a busload of tourists to sample her hashish cakes on the way to the Café Havana for sunset. Just thinking about her and them and it, that piddly little sunset, made me tired. The driver turned on the radio. Terrible, tinny reggae. A dying art form. No one since Bob Marley.

  But what was happening? Why this sour mood change? Clearly it was time for another OxyContin. Running low. Very low. A worrisome moment. But short-lived: munch, munch, pause, munch, munch, and little by little the colour returned to the ocean, the palm trees, the little yellow shacks by the roadside. The music grew attractive hooks. Just this and no more, I thought, if I could just stay like this, all day, every day, I’d be happy for the rest of my life.

  And then I was thinking about Nessa Cornblum, about her beautiful young face looking out the van window when we made this drive decades ago, the last golden sunlight playing on her features, me falling in love with her and not knowing it. How does she look now, I wondered?

  I asked the driver to drop me off down the road from the hotel. I wanted a slow, sweet return. He pulled over. “Ten dollars,” he said.

  “I’ve already paid.”

  “No, no, this is a gasoline tax. Everybody must pay it.”

  “I’m not paying it.”

  He watched me pull my bag from the rear of the van and played his last card. “You don’t like black people?”

  “Not especially,” I said. “I bet you don’t hear that very often, do you?”

  I walked slowly up the road. There it was, fifty yards away, twenty yards, then ten yards, the awning with the sea-green letters: HOTEL LA MAR. PROPRIETOR MR. DEVANE JOHNSTON. I went up the front steps and looked into the bar where Dexter had danced with the girls from Mississippi. A black metal gate with a comically large padlock stretched across the entrance. I peered through the bars. Old dresses and shirts and trousers and shoes lay stacked on the tables where Nessa had eaten her breakfast, where she had said to me, “Be careful with yourself today.” The bar seemed to have been relegated to a kind of storage room for things nobody wanted. Where were they, those girls from Mississippi?

  A light flickered in the interior of the hotel. I went toward it. Devane Johnston, grey-haired now, was sitting in a small, windowless office with a television set playing in front of him; the tube was blown, the screen was green and cast an unpleasant light over him. On the wall behind him was a patch of circular discoloration, a grease stain from where he leaned back to rest his head.

  “Devane?” I said. He was asleep.

  “Devane?” Eyes opened in a large black face.

  “It could have fallen from the ice truck . . .” he said. He was still dreaming.

  “Do you remember me, Devane?” He rubbed his features with a big hand and l
ooked at me again. I could hear him breathing through his nose.

  After a moment, he said, “You’re still here.”

  “Well, it’s been a while, for sure. But yes, yes, I’m back.” I listened to the silence of the hotel. “Where are all your dogs?”

  “Somebody poisoned them.”

  “You didn’t get any more?”

  “No. No more dogs.”

  His eyes returned to the television screen. A soccer game.

  “Who’s playing?”

  “I don’t really know.”

  We sat for a moment, the green stick figures dashing about on the screen. He picked up the phone and dialed a number. He said my name and then something else in patois. Then he repeated it more forcefully.

  “Is that your wife, Aiesha?”

  “Hmm.”

  Good, I thought, his wife was always fond of me.

  “Where are the other guests?”

  “There aren’t any.”

  I inquired about a slim, rather wry waiter who used to work there. Gone to the States with an American girl he met at the hotel. I inquired about Devane’s mistress, the one he used to fool around with while Aiesha was teaching school a few islands over in Port-au-Prince.

  “Still good.” I asked him more questions, but I soon noticed that the ball never came back over the net. He didn’t ask where I’d come from, how long I’d been in town, even if I was going to stay at his hotel. And this was something of a disappointment. I had told my children perhaps too many times about the famous Hotel La Mar and its commanding proprietor. The former burly police officer who had quit the island’s force, immigrated to England, earned a degree in engineering while raising a family of four, and returned to San Agatha to build the hotel with his own hands. A hotel that had been for many years a favourite getaway for middle-class Canadians and their young families.