Paul Is Dead

by C. C. Benison

  Dorian slurs the words, pushes the hat back on his head: “I’m Dick Tracy. Get it?”

  Lydia’s breath comes in short spurts. She can’t make words. Years later, when a man flashes her at City College, she better articulates—to herself, to one or two others—her shock and outrage. But not this night. She can’t sort feelings from thoughts. She pulls one strand from the skein, however: She’s growing sick of masculine bravado. That head-shaving incident in high school? Driving down the Trans-Canada at night with the headlights off? (He told her about that once.) This get-up? All show, so much show. In the heat, Dorian dissolves. She’s seen it.

  And one more strand, the most important: she must keep her cool, and keep Dorian’s. He can’t be let off half-cocked to speak of their crime.

  Lydia senses the night arcing dangerously out of her control. The jungle throb in the next room shivers the dividing wall and passes along her skin. Someone makes a madhouse shriek, then another, and another. The Westminster chimes of the front door bong bong bong bong again and again and again. And this boy, her old friend Steed, in this ridiculous, stupid flasher costume, is about to pour himself through that door there—yes, over there—into the swelling tide. She wants to really lose her cool, really lose it, this once, this time. She wants it all—everything—to stop. Now.

  But it’s much too late.

  4

  Dorian is driving west along the Trans-Canada Highway from West Hawk Lake. The radio, not the landscape, has his attention—or at least half of it: It’s the day after Woodstock and CKRC is full of its muddy glories. The other half of his attention dwells on his fucking family. He’s coming off three days with his mother, his half-sister and his stepfather—which was all he could take. He told his mother that he would spend a week, but his stepfather, Bob, is an ex-military bully with a mouthful of you should: get off your ass, cut the lawn, get a haircut, get a job, respect your mother, turn off that crap music, and finally, this morning, about eleven o’clock—get out of bed. Dorian gave the departing figure the finger.

  The summer had not tripped along groovily. The summer before, on a quest to find film work, any film work, maybe snatch at a little fame, he’d travelled to New York and after knocking on a lot of doors landed a gofer job at a production house on 44th, which led to a production-assistant job on a Norman Mailer film, which climaxed in a debauched weekend of shooting at Sag Harbor—which, with judicious editing, he had been regaling everyone at home with through the fall and winter. Hungry for more, he returned to New York days after his last exam, in early June. Nothing. No work. The summer of 1968 he felt his whole world blossom. The summer of 1969 he felt adrift in the city’s ghastly heat, a stranger among strangers. Out of money, he retreated home in July.

  Visiting his mother had been duty call anyway. He left before she set out lunch, threw his backpack into the Beetle’s back seat, and heedless of his empty stomach or his near-empty gas tank or his near-full bladder, drove off without a goodbye. He should have stopped at the West Hawk Esso for gas, but so pissed off was he that he didn’t think to look at the gauge until many miles along the highway. He rolled into a Shell station on fumes and rolled into his destiny. Afterwards, often, he thinks about that ribbon of chance—how untransformed life would have been, for him, for others, if he had not flounced off that day, that hour, that minute. If he had left Lillian and Bob’s at twelve-ten, say, instead of noon, Paul would not have stepped out of the washroom at the back of the Shell station in those very moments he was ready and anxious to step in.

  “Some creep truck driver might have picked you up instead,” Dorian said to him a couple of days later at his grandparents’ when they were watching a report on TV about some unsolved murders of a starlet and a middle-aged couple in Los Angeles. “Fucked you, strangled you, and left your body in the woods.”

  “What makes you think some creep truck driver didn’t?”

  “Because here you are. With me.”

  “Well, I wasn’t strangled and left in the woods.”

  Dorian noted the telling absences and the puckish smile linger on Paul’s lips. Vaguely shocked, he said nothing. His next thoughts—they were in Dey’s bedroom, which had a TV—were jealous ones, tinged with a kind of febrile excitement at the imagined scene: Those big trucks, their back compartments, those beefy truckers, their stripped flesh. Two weeks later those thoughts would turn to fear and dread: Who along the highway out of Toronto saw Paul with his thumb out? Who picked him up? Who would remember him?

  The door opens. Finally! Dorian has been standing, arms folded across his chest, the very model of impatience, jingling his car keys, hearing not a quick whoosh of a urinal flushing but a protracted sequence of water splashing, paper towel dispenser slamming, water splashing again—a toilette of some nature. Dorian is glancing past the side of the filling station for a concealing bush or a tree when a face framed by dark curls and sunglasses pushed to the forehead emerges from the grey half-light of the men’s washroom. The facial expression is set to preoccupation. Long strong fingers pushing a paper towel across a tanned forehead bright with damp are curling to ball the paper and send it to join the other rubbish in the scrub when the eyes find Dorian’s.

  A split-second lingering. A burrowing down into the psyche, an electric sensation of connection. But Dorian pushes past—he has to pee! now!—but as he does his arm brushes the other man’s hand. The paper towel, balled up now, begins its descent. Their eyes rise from the ball’s falling arc to meet again. An ironic smile flickers along the other’s cheeks, freshly shaven, Dorian can see now, as he can see the top of the backpack behind his neck. He catches a whiff of cheap soap and musk.

  In the dimly lit men’s room he struggles at first to release urine against the countervailing rush of blood to his hardening penis. He is quick as can be. Painfully shoves the thing back in. Zips up. Flushes. Runs the tap a second, a nod to the rituals of cleanliness and, with galloping heartbeat, pulls the door open. Surprise! Paul is there. Bovver boots, frayed jeans, a clean white T-shirt with a red star in the middle. He has replicated Dorian’s earlier stance, arms crossed below chest, backpack straps straining shirt fabric, tracing nipples. But the posture, unlike Dorian’s foot-tapping impatient pose, is louche, sinuously curved. His head is cocked to one side like a robin’s and his thumb is pointed in the air. “Which way you going, man?” he says in a smiling voice, eyeing the keys in Dorian’s hand.

  “West.”

  “I’m going west, too.”

  In 1998, Dorian went west again. This time to escape a woman, his “hag,” in the parlance of some of his bitchier friends. Dixie-May Lang: She’s society blue book, old money, terribly discreet, well known within a very tight circle, but largely unknown to the knucklehead on the street—even though she has that silly Dogpatch first name, a momentary lapse in taste by her very Old Ontario mother.

  Dixie-May’s pedigree didn’t come from the Langs, pickle producers who, in the scheme of things, are relative parvenus. A descendant of the Family Compact family Godwin, she married a Lang. Gerhard Lang (1919–1995) was Dixie-May’s third husband, as she (1926–) was his second wife. She married him in 1973. Husband #1 (William Radcliffe) and #2 (Rorie Bryce) died young, much too young.

  All this Dorian gleaned from Dixie-May herself in dribs and drabs or from friends of hers they might run into at the theatre or at dinner parties. Among other biographical tidbits: Dixie-May Lang was on the board of Gardiner Museum, is a trustee of the ROM, and is chair of Neurological Heath Charities Ontario.

  Which is how Dorian met Dix, as her close friends call her.

  Every year, Neurological Health Charities Ontario puts on a fundraiser, Date With A Star! Dorian was a Star!, one of about twenty that early November evening at the downtown Hilton. He had been lately visible in Riverdale, an evening TV drama with little future. Like others of his ilk, he had cast his net to Hollywood, which had led to a part or two in Law & Order
and NYPD Blue. His small turn in David Cronenberg’s Crash had garnered favorable notice. And his run at the Tarragon in The Designated Mourner has just finished to good reviews. That’s where Dix noticed him. She’s been lately on the Tarragon Theatre’s board, too.

  This was the arrangement: Punters paid $500 for a ticket to Date With A Star!—the money usually coming out of some corporate coffer. They gathered at the Hilton for drinks, then in groups of eight or ten travelled to a surprise restaurant destination where they were to nosh and bask in the glory of their designated star.

  The lucky eight who joined Dorian atop the TD Bank Tower at Canoe were not very much entertained by the handsome man at least a few of them vaguely recalled seeing on TV. And that’s because he was monopolized by an older woman named Dix Lang.

  And it’s true. Dix did monopolize Dorian. It turned out she had a lively interest in theatre. She had been on the board of governors of the Stratford Festival (Ah! Now the name was familiar!) and knew all sorts of people and had all sorts of gossip. But something else drew Dorian to her. Something about the face? That, in part. Or the eyes. Large, lively—renegade? It was a Harlequin Romance word, but it was there, flecked in their black-blackness. And a gesture. A certain way she inclined her head when she voiced a question.

  Dix, for her part, because she was chair of the NHCO board, had engineered Dorian as the Star! of her table. At the Tarragon performance, she was taken with his beauty—he reminded her a little of her first husband, William, with his slim hips and eyes of the piercing blue variety. She made a few calls, asked a few questions, and got the answer she wanted. Dix was shopping around for what they used to call a “walker.” She had buried three husbands and wasn’t interested in a fourth. What she wanted was something fetching on her arm from time to time, for opening nights at the ballet, the opera, the symphony—the occasional dinner party. She couldn’t depend on her son to fill in on such occasions. He was married, busy, and barely tolerated the arts. Dorian fit the bill. He was easy on the eyes, gay as a goose (but passing straight), and had an uncertain relationship with a steady income. She wasn’t going to pay him, for god’s sake. But she would pick up the tickets and the lunch tabs.

  So their encounter wasn’t some sort of Dickens coincidence. You couldn’t hear scenery moving or trapdoors opening. The real coincidence was to manifest itself later.

  Dorian wasn’t surprised when Dix called. They had clicked at Canoe; she suggested lunch sometime soon. Dorian had actually been flirted with by older women along these lines in the past. One he could remember was quite forthright about wanting sex, and he might have accommodated, but he detected a whiff of bunny boiler about her. No such whiff came off Dix. He became her Rosenkavalier.

  In December Dix invites him to her Christmas party.

  The house is typical Rosedale—a massing of grey stone on a cul de sac at the edge of a ravine approached through a labyrinth of heavily treed streets. It has an ivy-softened portico and a turret—dusted with new snow—and expansive curved windows that on a dark December evening, from the candle-lit interior, seem more like cave walls flickering with silhouettes. The interior is all clubby dark wood and gorgeous rugs and soft furniture with a winter scene by Krieghoff over the fireplace. The house smells spicy, piney, Christmassy, a little like his grandparents’ in the same holiday season. He sips his cranberry juice and soda. Not only is the fire roaring, so is the conversation. Dix’s Christmas parties are legendary and so the rooms hum with merriment, rather like a full house on opening night before the curtain goes up.

  Which is a fine thing. Dorian loves the stage. It’s where he feels most at home in the world. There’s a little tickle of excitement in the pit of his stomach, an anticipation (like when he knows he’s going to get laid) that this is going to be a fun evening. And what better? He is a Figure of Fascination. Not because he’s As Seen on TV. But because he’s rumoured as Dix’s new “friend.” How nice she’s recovering from Gerhard’s death. (Meow!) Dorian takes a position by the fireplace where the backlighting is flattering. He’s talking to a friend of Dix’s—Nicola somebody. He can sense some eye candy moving about the room, the frame of a man with linebacker shoulders, but he’s learned to keep his eyes trained on his interlocutor, to keep the delighted smile twitching around his lips.

  Dix interrupts. She fingers her ropes of pearls with one hand and lays the other on Dorian’s arm, giving it a proprietary little squeeze. She has someone she wants Dorian to meet and has nothing to do with wanting two men to become fast friends. Or anything. She’s simply feeling mischievous, full of a wicked kind of Christmas cheer. Peter is such a dull boy.

  “Excuse me, Nicola, I have someone I want Dorian to meet.”

  Dorian looks to the half-turned figure behind Dix’s head. Nice, he thinks, noticing a certain heft in the upper body, then takes in the man’s face as it pivots toward him. He blinks. It’s the eye candy he thought worth a cruising earlier—when he could get way from chittychatty Nicola—but now the planes and angles of the man’s face, sharpened by the firelight, fuse into a familiarity. He can’t place him. He can place him. Lifted from memory come those lips, now restraining a scowl, those eyes—Dix’s eyes, but more deeply set—now flickering balefully. He is at King and Yonge four years ago, staring at a man who tells him to fuck off, whose dark good looks set him on the path to sobriety. He doesn’t need an introduction. He knows who this must be and he knows who Dix must be. He feels the blood drain from his face.

  “Dorian.” Dix parts to allow the men room to shake hands. “This is my son, Peter. Peter Radcliff.”

  Peter’s frown softens a little at the sight of Dorian’s discomfort as he stretches forth his hand. The little faggot knows his cards are marked, he’s sure. He’d worried his mother might get up to something like this, now that his stepfather was dead—pick up some toy boy, fiddle the will, embarrass the family somehow. When he gets Dorian alone—and he will—he will read him the riot act, run him out on a rail, make sure he never works in this town again. Peter thinks in clichés, but he’s completely misinterpreted Dorian’s reaction.

  So has Dix. She opens her lips to speak, but hesitates. She wants to enjoy Peter’s disapproval, but Dorian looks so odd, so pale. Eyes fixed and burning. Might he have met Peter before? She feels a fillip of fear and immediately dismisses it. She never, ever, had a qualm about this son’s deviance, sexual or otherwise. She looks down. Dorian’s hand fails to meet her son’s.

  5

  “Welcome to the cliff’s edge.” Briony breaks into Lydia’s thoughts, handing her a cup of milky tea.

  Lydia glances past the other funeral guests and smiles. She understands Briony’s meaning instantly and is a little surprised at the gallows humour. Briony, minister’s daughter, has always been so earnest, humourless in a way, never quite getting it (whatever it was), into the fashion just when the fashion was passing. Briony’s parents died years ago. Her husband has multiple sclerosis and one of her two sons somehow landed himself in jail, in California, no less, which accounted for Briony’s intermittent visits to San Francisco for a couple of years in the nineties.

  Lydia accompanied her to the prison in Sacramento once and met Jason. She struggled to disguise her dislike of the supercilious boy-man, who got himself caught in some scheme to defraud the elderly. He slouched and smirked and spoke to his mother in such a patronizing fashion she could only wonder how he’d sprung from Briony the Good’s loins. He had committed a crime and showed no remorse. Dorian and she had committed a crime at Eadon Lodge, but they had been driven by shame and fear and dread and lived the days after imprisoned by the days before. How different their lives—hers and Dorian’s—might have been if their transgressions had happened in 1999 not 1969, a year touched still by the tendrils of Victorianism curling down the generations.

  “I hadn’t really thought about it that way,” Lydia responds to the cliff’s-edge remark. “But my mother is the last of her
sisters, and my dad’s brother died before the war, so, yes, that generation is gone … at least for me.”

  “I wonder if we’re the last generation to say ‘the war’ and mean World War Two?”

  “What about your kids?”

  “They seem to have no interest in politics or history. I don’t think any of their friends do, either. Remember how Alan would go on?” Briony lifts her teacup and takes a smiling sip. She clings to these old days, Lydia thinks, with a pang of pity for her friend, who has grown old and disappointed and frazzled in the intervening years, whose dark blouse shows evidence of an old stain.

  “About the revolution, remember?” Briony returns the cup to its matching saucer.

  “How is Alan, I wonder?”

  “Oh, Alan’s gone to the dark side. Some Marxist he ever was. Big into real estate and you know how corrupt that world is.” Briony’s face darkens, subsuming her freckles. “I’d love all those quotes of his in the student paper about overthrowing the capitalist system to come back to spook him.”

  Briony works for Child and Family Services and sees the spreading taint of the city’s poverty. “Oh! You probably wouldn’t know this, but Alan’s company is having some fight in Winnipeg Beach—or is it Gimli?—over condo development. But there’s a group that wants to give heritage designation to—”

  “Wait. What? Heritage designation? In Gimli?”

  “There’s some old stuff there, Lydia.” Briony responds defensively. “How about Eadon Lodge—that’s old. Didn’t your grandfather build it in something like the 1920s?”

  “About then.”

  “You know, I’ll bet you haven’t been back to the cottage since that week we were all there, have you? When was it? ’69?” Briony knows the year perfectly well. “That strange week.” She says the words brightly, as if it were all a frothy memory, but the events, stained by the shooting—and by something else—remain emblazoned. “Do you ever think about it?”