Paul Is Dead

by C. C. Benison

  Charmaine called about a job. The terms are acceptable. It’s a season of TV, with the promise of a second season, possibly a third. It’s hardly Shakespeare, but it’s steady work with adequate remuneration. He should be pleased. He’s been “resting,” as actors do, since It’s a Wonderful Life closed at the Arts Club after Christmas.

  “Well?” Mark finishes his sip and folds his lips primly.

  “As I said earlier, it means I’ll be away much of the summer.”

  “I can come and visit.” Mark reaches for a deck chair. “Where exactly is this place they’re filming?”

  “Winnipeg Beach.” Dorian takes the chair opposite. “A little north of Winnipeg.”

  “You’ve been there before, I presume.”

  A lie perches on Dorian’s tongue, but he chooses vagueness instead: “A few times.” He takes a swig of the gassy water and glances at Mark’s martini, craving its juniper bitterness.

  “Is there something off-putting about the role? What is the role, anyway?”

  “I would play the owner of a marina, a widower, with a daughter and a grandson. The series is called Morningstar Cove. It’s about a bunch of teenagers summering at some lake town. Manitoba masquerading as Minnesota or Michigan. It’s been sold to Global, and to ABC in the States, I think.”

  “Sounds all right, I guess. No audition?”

  “Someone else was cast, but had to withdraw suddenly, so no audition. No time.”

  “Then your ‘grandson’”—Mark’s fingers wiggle quotation marks—“in this show is a teenager or something.”

  “And your point?”

  “You’ll have to let your hair go … for one thing.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Oh, I think so.” Mark grins, revealing a set of perfect teeth. “Owner of a marina in some rural backwater? I’m thinking ‘crusty’ and ‘curmudgeonly.’ No Nice’n Easy in his bathroom cabinet.” He takes another sip. “Or you could go bald. Shave it all off, like you did in high school.”

  Dorian is at times disturbed by Mark’s retentive memory—which must have got him through all those years of medical school. Had he really told him that story? And what other stories has he told and forgotten he told?

  When he was in grade twelve, the principal issued an edict forbidding long hair on boys—long hair, in the definition of the day, meaning hair creeping over your ears or your shirt collar. Dorian shaved his head in protest. Hardly worth notice today. But then? A shock wave surged through the student body. Crowds gathered outside the school to stare.

  “Maybe you should shave yours off,” Dorian counters. “You’ll be a cue ball in ten years anyway.”

  Tit for tat. It’s Mark’s turn not to rise to the bait. But it’s true. Mark’s hair, black, but shot with a little grey that he tries to contain with the very Nice’n Easy he dissed Dorian for, is thinning. Dorian sees the pinkish crown turned away from him in bed. If Mark is top dog in the salary sweepstakes, Dorian is top dog in looks. He is, Mark admits, but not out loud, handsome, even as he approaches sixty, even with a history of smoking. Though the lips have thinned, the jaw-line remains firm, the skin smooth, the few wrinkles charming, the blue eyes—which can flicker with a frightening madness at times—clear, and the hair remarkably thick and full—and, in this instance, sort of—what would you call it?—medium chestnut? He pulled off George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, didn’t he? Jimmy Stewart couldn’t have been forty in the movie.

  Dorian is running his hand through that hair now. Will he have to let the colour go? Or will he let them dye it white, the colour of an old man—which, in fact, is his natural colour? The dark blond leached swiftly from his hair in his early twenties. He searched for a familial cause; couldn’t find one. His father looked to have white hair, too, at an early age. But Jim Grant was blond blond.

  It’s this call from Charmaine. It’s this talk of the beach that stirs a particular memory: Dorian arriving at Eadon Lodge that last year of college, entering through the screen door on its shrieking hinges, his eyes travelling to his father’s name and a date in pencil on the wooden slats of the wall nearest the door. It was the thing to do if you were a guest at Eadon Lodge—write your name somewhere on one of the walls rather than in a guest book.

  Jim Grant, July 12, 1952. There it was, under a frayed pennant of Niagara Falls. And just below, his mother’s—Lillian Grant, July 13, 1952. Jim had gone back to the city Saturday afternoon, alone, less than twenty-four hours after he’d arrived. Dorian’s mother stayed on. She continued the holiday with Bibs and Marion Eadon and Lydia, who was a few months younger than he. Neither he nor Lydia could remember being three years old, of course. Thus Dorian can’t remember going home with his mother—Dr. Eadon drove them, he was told much later. Jim had taken their car. He remembers nothing of that Monday afternoon. He really doesn’t remember having a father—who left Eadon Lodge that Saturday, July 12, 1952 and—he was told—died in a car accident on the way home.

  You were supposed to sign Eadon Lodge’s wall when you left, perhaps with a jaunty “had wonderful time” or “great weather.” But Dorian, to be contrary, signed his name upon his arrival: Dorian Grant, August 21, 1969. Bad luck if I sign it when we leave, he said to Lydia, who understood his meaning (but knew the truth of Jim’s death where Dorian did not) and watched as he attached his grand looping signature below those of his parents.

  How wrong he had been about the luck. It was from those days at Eadon Lodge that Dorian marked the beginning of his hair’s swift journey to a freakish, albino white.

  Paul stole the camera, brazenly lifted it with a raptor’s swoop from a blanket on the public beach at Gimli—their one excursion together into town from Eadon Lodge those ten days in August in 1969, their turn to buy groceries. Dorian remembers the sand pulsing with bodies clinging to the last of the summer sun, and for a long time he thought this impulse of Paul’s, this foolish impulse, which made him laugh and his heart soar with wicked glee, would spell his doom. There had to be some witness to the theft, someone who noticed, despite not giving a shit if someone lost a crappy Instamatic, someone who would come forward later, when it was important, and say that he or she recognized Paul.

  Dorian flung the camera into a ditch along the highway as he sped—fled, alone—past harvested fields back to Winnipeg the morning after that last full day at Eadon Lodge, somehow finding the presence of mind to first remove the film cartridge. He secreted it at the back of the desk drawer in his bedroom at his grandparents’ where he lived after his mother remarried, but at night when he couldn’t sleep he sensed it there glowing, beating like Poe’s telltale heart.

  He should have thrown it in the river, dropped it in the neighbour’s trash, buried it in the park, smashed it to smithereens and exposed the film to light, but in those months reason slipped its moorings.

  He transferred it to his shaving kit, bought the year before for his first summer scrounging movie-related work in New York, where it sank below the jumble of toiletries. The kit was always with him—in a cupboard or drawer wherever he was living or in his luggage when he travelled to this or that locale for work. But his fingers would sometimes brush it when he was rooting through his kit, for a buried emery board, say. The fanciful telltale heart beat no more, but a touch of the cartridge was electric along his skin.

  And it was evidence.

  Dorian had the film developed in Toronto on February 26, 1993—which he counts as his sobriety date, though when he put that empty scotch glass down on the bar of the King Eddy that Friday afternoon he didn’t know it would be his last drink. He said goodbye to some actor friends and passed from the hotel’s clubby glow into the silver damp of King Street. He wasn’t drunk. He was certain of that. He would later describe himself in AA as a “high-functioning alcoholic”. So when he looked into the face of a man about his own age emerge out of the drizzle at the Yonge Street crossing he was certain
he wasn’t hallucinating. The man glanced at him as they waited for the light to turn, but with no surprise—or shock—of recognition. Dorian drank in his features, parsed the triangulations of chin, nose, cheekbones (forceful, straight, wide, respectively) resolved now into a mature, faintly coarsened, edition of the youth he’d once known. The Bacchus curls were traded for short-back-and-sides, the eyebrows were thicker, but the eyes—their essential Paulness—were unchanged, only in this instance they brimmed with a hostility Dorian had never witnessed in Paul’s. “Fuck off,” the man snarled at Dorian, shouldering past him as the walk sign flashed green.

  Dorian remained rooted to the pavement. Was he watching a pink elephant vanishing into the grey of sodden humanity?

  He couldn’t take it anymore. His heart was racing. His mouth was sucked of moisture. Nearly a quarter century had passed. No one—no teenaged drone in those photo shops—paid an iota of attention to the dull work of processing people’s dumb pictures. Surely that was true. He had long avoided having the film developed because one image on the cartridge—depending on how he’d angled the camera—might arouse curiosity or concern, might be considered by some prude to be pornographic. But now he cared less. Something else was at stake: Only the developed photos of those days at Eadon Lodge could tell him he wasn’t losing his mind. Again.

  He returned to the Spruce Street house he co-owned with his ex-wife, fetched the cartridge from his kit, took it into a Japan Camera on Bloor, and paid the extra for one-hour processing.

  Dorian looks at the pictures. He slipped out of bed earlier, careful not to wake Mark. It’s 3:40, according to an old digital clock stored in the fourth bedroom—the “box room,” Mark calls it, which houses their luggage, orphan tables and lamps, one of which he switches on, and, yes, boxes, too—for computers, kitchen appliances, and so on. In the third of a Russian-doll set of suitcases is where Dorian keeps his travelling shaving kit. And in the kit, where once he hid the film cartridge, he keeps two photographs. Three by five inches, they fit into a slim silver cigarette case that belonged to Dey, his grandfather.

  His fingers fumble along the case’s rim. He feels edgy. Fifteen years ago, a sickness filled him as he peeled the seal back and lifted the photographs from the packet’s inner pocket. He craved a drink badly then. He could use one now. A ghost scent of Mark’s martini teases his nostrils.

  Fifteen or sixteen pictures were on the cartridge, the first four or five of a chubby, frowning little girl sashed in a Band-Aid pink bikini, which he threw away.

  The first picture past Band-Aid Girl—startling, heartbreaking—was of his own face, younger, of course—impossibly younger, impossibly leaner, hair flying past the frame of the Volkswagen, eyes crossed and crazed, as he mugged for Paul. It was taken as they drove up the gravel road through Loney Beach north to Eadon Lodge. Paul had been greedy with the camera, immune to sharing, maniacally snapping away at Dorian, until he grew bored with the thing and tossed it onto the back seat.

  All the pictures, which shared the fate of the Band-Air Girl photos, were poorly lit close-ups of him driving, but for the last two. Dorian retrieved the camera from the back seat with the groceries, hid it in his knapsack and forgot about it for a few days, then thought to bring it to the Eadons’ stretch of beach their last day together.

  He’d snapped one of Paul, he remembered, as Paul emerged from the lake. He groaned as he came upon it. It was unexpectedly beautiful—the composition all golden ratio, a chance of the moment, the pattern all shapes and shadows, a trick of the light. And there was Paul in his unguarded moment, skinny boy’s chest gleaming, with wet, tanned face angled into the distance in a way that seemed stylized, like a figure in an Avedon photograph. The photo might have, but didn’t, catch anything below Paul’s waist.

  How long did Dorian stand with it in his hand, staring, stunned, before crumpling to the rug by his bed? Who knows? How long do you remain stricken after that late-night phone call? How long before the grief surges from your belly and the hot tears squeeze out of your eyes and you howl an animal howl? How long?

  Dorian studies the photo now with less torment. In the fifteen years that have passed since that night in Toronto he’s learned some things that have blunted the anguish—a little—though not the fear. Even now he can feel a hot bubble of grief swelling in his chest. He suppresses it before it bursts in his throat. He doesn’t want to alert Mark even if Mark does sleep like fallen timber.

  But look at the glistening cap of black hair, sleek as an otter’s, unruly curls tamed by the weight of water streaming to rivulets down his slim neck. And the eyes—large, black-black, and glisteny. There’s a slight shadow under them, an effect of the angled sun, that sets his face to Cubist planes.

  Dorian twists the picture into the light. There’s something of Paul’s precociousness there, in the set of his eyes, the strange knowing in one so young, which confounded and excited and, finally, terrified him—though by then he was too lost in the spell to stop what they were doing. And there’s something else as well, he’s sure, something heavy in those taut features, though perhaps, he thinks, he’s reading into Paul’s expression what he knows now. What Paul didn’t tell him.

  Dorian turns to the second picture, the only one of the two of them—Paul and him—together. Briony snapped it.

  She was so clueless, Briony. Lydia always knew at some level, but didn’t name it. Alanna Roth, always sharp, guessed and didn’t care. Alanna told Alan. Dorian could pinpoint the hour, the minute, when he realized she had. Alan was straight, entitled, oblivious—typical. He was too unimaginative to discern it on his own. But Alan was cool with contempt once enlightened.

  Briony was blinded by her own wishful thinking. Dorian was to have arrived at Eadon Lodge with Blair Connon, an extra he’d befriended on the set of the student film And No Birds Sing the year before. It was a set-up—Blair paired to the slightly chubby, slightly gauche, freckle-peppered Briony. (Blair, a little heavyset himself, was no prize.) But Blair had met some woman over the summer and that was the end of that. So Dorian arrived with Paul, who, he told everyone, was his cousin—or second cousin once removed or something—from Toronto.

  Dorian set the camera on the wooden stairs up to the cottage when they returned from the beach. They slung their wet towels over the clothesline that stretched between the front porch and an old elm and together shook the sand from the old blanket they’d used at the beach, draping it over the line next to the towels.

  A rustle along the grass in the seconds before the camera clicked alerted them to a presence slipping by the blanket barrier. Enough time for Paul and him to pull apart, but not enough to assume some unaffected posture. Dorian can see the discomfit in his own face in the photograph, his mouth and eyes three little O’s. But Paul’s expression conveys challenge, calculation, and disdain. He remembers Briony lowering the camera from her eye, her face gone scarlet. Before long she would leave Eadon Lodge claiming a migraine.

  And before long Paul would be dead.

  Dorian returns the photographs to their little archive. He walks to the window. He’s naked, light streaming behind him, but no one is on the street at this time of night and the window frame is decently above his crotch. There’s pallid lemon streetlight on the pavement. It looks like it’s rained a little. Someone has left a full garbage bag on the sidewalk. How did it get there? Tossed from a car? Body parts within? There’s something sinister about suburban emptiness. Farther off, past the cars lining the street, the houses retreat into shadow. He almost wishes some fellow insomniac would come and set a window aglow and wave to him. You know I can’t sleep, I can’t stop my brain. What’s that from? The White Album?

  Dorian isn’t given to the mystical. Not like Briony. Could she be, still? Didn’t she go into social work? And surely Alan dropped all that Communist crap. But he feels again, as he felt in the garden earlier, a shiver travel along his nerves, a chill of premonition. The feeling’
s not entirely new. Beginnings of new projects often jangle with uncertainty: it all looks good on paper, then it all turns sour in the execution.

  But this has a different shading. It isn’t the job, the silly YA TV program. That doesn’t matter. It will end—well or badly—after a season or two or three. He can take the money—which he could use—and run. His “career arc” doesn’t trouble him much any more.

  No, quite simply, it’s the setting that sends cold fingers along his spine. The horror at Eadon Lodge—not so many miles from fictional Morningstar Cove—sent his life hurtling down an unimagined path. He can’t pretend he isn’t the man he is because of it. He can’t pretend he doesn’t act in the world the way he does because of it. When memory of it intrudes, he pulls his mind away violently. He suppresses it. It’s much easier to do in Toronto or New York or Los Angeles.

  Or in Vancouver.

  All is dark. But two time zones away the sun is advancing over the curve of the earth, pouring a pitiless light over prairie lakes barely emerging from the weight of winter ice and over frozen shores with buried secrets. Dorian can see the great orb in his mind’s eye as he leans out the casement window for an eastward view. No glimmer separates the mountains from the sky. Yet. All is dark. But light—a terrible, ruthless light, colder than the sun’s—is fast approaching, he’s convinced.

  He’s taking the job. Hobson’s choice.