Consolation

by Michael Redhill

  Marianne, in fresh clothes, was standing behind him. “So I’m guessing here that Bridget probably didn’t love the idea that she was of more use as a lawyer than as my daughter.”

  John stood up straight behind the window. “I hadn’t thought it through.”

  “There’s something for your gravestone.” The light had changed angles now and it was quieter in the room, an intimate atmosphere, disturbing. “I wish I understood how people of your generation love each other.”

  “Probably the same way everyone else does. With some difficulty.”

  “And you love Bridget.”

  “I don’t think I can explain how I feel to you.”

  “I’m gathering you’re not explaining yourself at home either, since you’ve spent the better part of two weeks lying to my daughter concerning your whereabouts. . . . Is all of this for her own good, John?”

  “It was supposed to be. In part.”

  “How.”

  He ran his palm over his cheek; his hand was wet. He’d eaten only a few of the calamari and now he regretted it. His stomach roiled with grease. “Do you have any idea how angry she is?”

  “At?”

  “Everyone. Especially you.”

  “She takes one stab, over the phone, at talking to me and then she gives up. What right has she got to be mad at me?”

  “That’s ridiculous,” he said. “Do you really think she has to be in the same room with you to have a right to be pissed off?”

  “Fine. Then what is it?”

  “She’s not angry because you’re living in a hotel. It’s because you don’t trust her. You won’t tell her anything until it’s too late. You paralyze her.”

  “She paralyzes herself.”

  “You could have told her what you were planning to do down here. Maybe she would have wanted to be a part of it. Maybe she would have wanted to understand what you were going through.”

  “She doesn’t understand?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “And is this an official message?” She pulled out the desk chair and spun it toward him, but she thought better of sitting, and instead rested her hand on its back. John’s eyes shifted from the chair to her hand, and he understood that she didn’t want him standing over her. But the gesture meant something, a kind of attention forming. He hopped up on the ledge, a space that belonged to her.

  “The two of you have been alone, more or less, in the same city trying to get over the same thing. How many times have you even seen each other since the funeral?”

  “People cope differently.”

  “This isn’t coping. It doesn’t strike you as strange that half of your remaining family is five kilometers away and you’re alone in a hotel room?”

  “You strike me as strange.”

  He leaned against the window and crossed his arms over his chest. He had the immediate feeling that he now owned the room, that he could say anything. “You try to nail me to the wall ten times a day, Marianne. But I just hear you changing the subject.”

  “I don’t have to stay on topic with you, I’m sorry. You’re not the reason I’m here.”

  “I don’t think you know why you’re here.”

  “And you do.”

  “I do,” he said. “You want to prove ‘them’ wrong. Those fuckers, I think you call them.”

  “I am going to prove them wrong.”

  “I thought you were here to prove David right.” Her hand moved along the back of the chair, slowly across the whole length of it as if removing a layer of dust. “If Bridget thought you were here solely out of love,” he went on, “you probably wouldn’t be doing this alone.”

  Her fingers opened and closed on the wood. “Alone would be very pleasant compared to being lectured by you.”

  “It’s not worth the risk to anyone else.”

  “I think you should watch your mouth.”

  “Why don’t you tell me what to say then, and I’ll say it.”

  She pushed the chair in, and there was nothing between them. “I’ll tell you. For one thing, you don’t call me ‘ridiculous.’ And for another, you don’t presume to understand the suffering of a person twice your age when you’ve barely lived yourself. You don’t talk to me like this.”

  “There is no way to talk to you. You don’t hear anything. Why do you think David confided in me?”

  The rest of the color drained from her face. “Get out.” He remained on the ledge, watching her as she reached for the chair again, and then her body jerked and he moved his feet in time to avoid being struck. The chair ricocheted off the wall and crashed to the floor beside her bed. She stood there, breathing heavily. “I’m not defending myself to you! Get out of this room!”

  “I’ll go,” he said. “But I’m coming back in the morning.”

  “Fuck you. I won’t be here.” She stood now with her head lowered, transforming before his eyes into her bull self. He could see the round, glowing edge of her eyes behind her brow.

  “Yes, you will,” he said.

  He didn’t see her arm move, but he felt the blow to his mouth as if a third person had materialized between them and he lurched backwards, stunned. There was the smell of iron in the middle of his head. He found his balance, came forward, and put his hands up to block another blow, but there was an empty column of air in front of him. There was blood in his palm: he was cupping it out of his own mouth.

  He could hear Marianne sobbing in the bathroom.

  He backed up and righted the chair, sat in it, the whole expanse of the room empty in front of him. His head was clanging.

  She came out into the hallway in front of the bathroom, mopping her eyes with a clump of tissue. “You hurt me,” she said. “Is that something you think David wanted you to do? To do harm to me?”

  “I’m bleeding, Marianne.”

  She went back into the bathroom and ran water. He slid his tongue over his bottom lip. It tasted like meat. It felt like everything that had brought him to this moment had been abruptly erased. She brought him a cold, wet facecloth and he sat down on the bed and pressed it against the swelling. “I’m sorry if I hurt you,” he said, feeling idiotic.

  “I loved my husband, John.”

  He spoke with the cloth against his mouth. “You loved him, but you didn’t accept him.”

  “I was married to him. I carried two children for him. I shared a bed with him for almost forty years.” She took the cloth out of his hands and looked at the deep red blot. She rinsed the cloth and brought it back to him. “I don’t know what else I should have done.”

  “You could have taken him at his word. You could have believed in what he believed in. Because you loved him.”

  “Fine. I could have. I didn’t.” She swallowed. “I did everything else, but I didn’t do that.” She sat down beside him on the bed. He felt her shoulder against his. “Okay, John? I didn’t do that.”

  FIVE

  JOHN LEWIS FELT the sidewalks of another city spreading under his feet. Leaving the hotel and wandering north into what he knew was the burial place of ancient waters made him feel insubstantial. Howard had once told him that the ancient Jews thought of all human souls as being the shattered portions of a divinity that had been destroyed by sin. The Jewish messiah, conjured by saintly action, would come and collect these fragments and remake the One-Soul. This was at least how he’d understood the sources he was reading, sources John had collected for him for some theatrical subtext Howard had long since abandoned.

  Still, this oneness that had been strewn into the bodies of human beings was an idea that, at this moment, made sense to John. Except the source wasn’t divinity and its many parts were not souls; to John it felt more as if he were a player in a story made up entirely of extras, each of whom had a line to speak. All the great books and legends were nothing held against this ongoing tale with no main character and no ending. He recognized now that its only action was its telling.

  For once, it felt as if there was nothing he co
uld do and no point in trying. Everything that had been set in motion was going to continue to its end now. Inevitability had an invigorating quality to it, the way touching bottom often did. It was refreshing but painful, like a sudden hail.

  The streetlights came on like the whole city having an idea, and John continued north along Yonge Street. His stomach was sour. He bought a bottle of water to wash out his gut and wandered without purpose. Above Carlton, he stopped into one of the used bookshops with the dirty magazines in the back and browsed the mystery section, thinking he might find something to take to the all-night Fran’s nearby. Normal-looking men drifted in and out of the restricted section, thumbing idly through the wares. No one seemed to care, so he went back as well. The silence among the men there was unique. Not even men standing at urinals were so much in their own worlds as perusers of pornography. It was a pious silence, completely at odds with the raunch on the covers — a strange form of communion.

  He cycled back into the front of the shop and bought a Patricia Highsmith mystery called The Tremor of Forgery. No relation to my current day job, he thought. The back cover promised detailed descriptions of a male writer struggling in a long-distance relationship while stuck in the middle of Tunisia with an unfinished novel. It sounded sufficiently distracting.

  At Fran’s he ordered the mac and cheese. Comfort food. He sat in silence and read the book. He drank four cups of coffee, despite his stomach, with plenty of cream and a teaspoon of sugar in each. He had a drifting memory, his aunt Cecilia telling him he’d get pinworms if he ate too many sweets.

  The book — especially a scene about the writer finding a body outside of his hut one morning — disturbed him more than he was counting on. He went home in the full dark and slept on the couch again. He dreamt he bought an impossible camera with nothing but a slip of acetate behind a metal frame, a camera that recorded the face of anyone who held it. If you picked it up, your face would appear, salted among the many already on the acetate, and you’d see, in the picture, the other men and women who’d once held this machine, their faces now reacting to yours. As if you meant ill by joining their company.

  WHEN HE ARRIVED at room 3347, the door was already open. Marianne was hunched over the Toronto Star. She looked up when he walked in. “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  “How’s your mouth?”

  “It’s still working, I guess.” He tipped his face down to her and she touched the pad of her thumb lightly to his lower lip.

  “I got you good,” she said.

  “It hurts.”

  “I guess you can’t tell people you were slugged by your future mother-in-law.”

  Future, he thought. He wasn’t ready to find any of it funny yet, and he turned his attention to the paper. He saw the scene from the window reflected in her lap. “What’s that?”

  She turned the paper toward him. A headline in the middle of the first section read history a slam dunk at union site. She twisted the paper back toward herself and read, “’Worker Inger Wolfe was the first to see what appeared to be the rib of an old boat. “It was a big surprise,” said Wolfe. “Why would anyone bury a boat?” A spokesperson for Union Arena said that the item had been carefully photographed for the city before being removed.’” She held out the paper, but John was already at the window. Nothing had changed below; he could still see the cresting shape of the wooden rib exactly where it had been the night they uncovered it.

  “It’s still there.”

  “Of course it’s still there.”

  “Why would they have told the Star it was already gone?”

  “Why do you think?” said Marianne. “If there’s nothing left to look at, then no one’s going to be nosing around it, right?”

  “It’s not that smart to fib to the paper of record, is it?”

  “It is if you can get away with it. They’ll wait to see if anyone asks any questions. Then it’ll be full steam ahead.”

  She shrugged, and he had the sense that she was ready to give up, that it had all become just a little too much, with the newspapers getting involved and minor city officials being prodded. He took the paper from her and folded it, put it on the ledge. “We have an appointment,” he said. “We might as well keep it.”

  THE CAB LEFT them at the bottom of Nathan Phillips Square on Queen Street, after a five-minute drive in which Marianne said not a word to him. They walked up through the cold white plaza toward new city hall, where Jack Thomas had his office. Two hundred meters to the east was the red-brick old city hall, downgraded now to a traffic court. It had been deemed unsuitable for the city of the sixties, which had built itself something that looked like a broken ice-cream cone with a tumor in the middle. The plaza was made up of wide, square concrete panes floating over an unseeable depth. The inch-wide cracks between the panes suggested that they were movable, that if you stood on the wrong one, you’d be sucked down into a tar pit that flowed under city hall. On one of these squares, they passed a sparrow lying on its back — it looked dead, but John thought he saw its beak yaw open. He stared at the bird, unsure if he’d seen correctly, and then startled when the hollow chest suddenly expanded in panic.

  He shuddered as he entered through the heavy wooden door to the refrigerated interior. No one signed them in, and they took the sleek silver elevator to the second floor. Thomas’s secretary checked them off on her schedule and then admitted them to the councillor’s office to wait.

  There were two chairs facing the desk, but neither John nor Marianne sat. John stood in front of the pictures on the wall — the standard ceremonial shots of oneself with higher-ups. To be pictured with a person of better standing allowed you to borrow significance, to suck power, to be Someone. It seemed to John, based on the offices he’d been in belonging to various lawyers and deans and medical specialists, that Pierre Trudeau (not to mention Bruno Gerussi and Karen Kain and Terry Fox) had been photographed, at one point or another, with half the population of Canada. Anyone without a memento of a dimly lustered Canadian celebrity truly lived off the beaten track.

  “God, that’s Robertson Davies,” said Marianne, pointing at one of the pictures.

  “Is that good or bad?” Thomas was about thirty in the picture; his famed high forehead had not yet been glossily revealed and was more or less covered in the thin furze that passed for his hair.

  “It just means he paid for something,” said Marianne.

  “Well, I did buy the book,” said Thomas from the doorway behind them. “I actually read it too.”

  “Sorry.” Marianne offered him her hand. “I’m Marianne Hollis.”

  He smiled, shaking her hand, and repeated her name.

  Thomas sat them in front of the impressive wooden desk and laid his thin arms on top of his blotter. He gestured to Marianne to speak, and after glancing at John, she laid out, as calmly as she could, the bare details. The history of the area, the potential value of the find, the minimal work stoppage that would be required. John had never seen her as supplicant to anything, and the quiet performance moved him and made him sad for her. He was not sure it was having any effect on Thomas, however, who listened stonily, occasionally jotting something down. Then he stood up and raised his hands palms out, indicating to Marianne that she’d said enough. “We know all this,” he said. “But here’s the problem.” He snapped open his briefcase and slapped the Toronto Star down on his desk. “The problem is the cat is out of the bag.”

  “It’s not a secret. Probably two dozen people on that site saw it.”

  “It’s the kind of thing the mayor would prefer not to be lectured to about.” He opened the paper smartly and read from the story. “‘Calls from the mayor’s office were not returned. Gerald Lanze, Dean of Urban Studies at the University of Toronto, when asked to comment, said, “The mayor has a sorry record when it comes to city heritage. ”’” Thomas closed the paper. “Unfortunately, now it has to be dealt with smartly, by which I mean intelligently as well as quickly, or they’ll make hay. They’ll
talk about how this mayor doesn’t care about the city’s history.”

  “He doesn’t.”

  “He does, Mrs. Hollis. But he doesn’t want the pink pages to tell him what his business is. So it’s too late. Union Arena won’t hear from his office, and whatever that thing is, it’ll be wood chips by the time the Star sends someone to do a follow-up. If they do a follow-up. Page A-15 doesn’t speak to this being a priority for the paper.”

  “There are two other papers in town.”

  “Not for this kind of thing.” He stood and held out his hand to her. They’d been in the man’s office for all of seven minutes. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Hollis. I wish I had better news.”

  Marianne shifted in her seat. He seemed to be waiting for her, though, so she said, “It wouldn’t take long to see for sure if it was something of interest. If the mayor wanted —”

  Jack Thomas came around the front of the desk. Under the main light in the room, his high fontanel glowed. “Look. This city is only a hundred and fifty years old — ”

  “It’s two hundred, actually. Two hundred and four, to be exact.”

  “You’re right. I’m trying to make a point, though — two hundred is nothing. In just about every American city, not to mention every city and town in Europe, you know what they do when they find something two hundred years old? They toss it out. It’s not that special.”

  “Maybe not to a place that’s been there for hundreds of years. But we’re talking about something that goes back to the beginning here, in this place, and I find it strange you aren’t interested in it.”

  He made an understanding face. It was hard to manage the needs of a big place like a city, said the face. The face probably meant it. Thomas said, “I am interested in it. I am. I didn’t become a city politician because it was my dream job; I did it because I feel involved in what this place is, as well as what it can be. But that means the time and energy we have as a municipal government has to be balanced and based in reality. Things have to be weighed against each other, and that site” — he stared over their heads in the general direction of the arena, as if he could see the money boiling up out of it through the walls — “that site is going to be a completed arena in seven months, by the middle of June, in time for the NBA draft, or the league is going to levy a twelve-million-dollar fine. And as financial guarantor, the city will have to pay at least half of that. Taxpayers’ money. I know it sounds crass, but that trumps the possibility that there is a ship buried in that dirt.”