Paul Is Dead

by C. C. Benison

  Another smartass in passing says to Alan, “Hey, man, are you the walrus?” and Alan, his eyes still on that fuck Dorian Grant for lampooning his righteous politics, quotes:

  “‘Here’s another clue for you all: the walrus was Paul.’”

  Dorian’s stomach lurches. Lydia may have been unaware of Paul McCartney’s rumoured death, but Dorian, in a drunken haze at the Montcalm, has heard it all from the other class-cutting reprobates. The word “walrus” is supposedly Greek for “corpse.”

  Oh, Jesus, does Alan know something?

  Is he suspicious?

  At least Lydia had kept her cool about Paul’s whereabouts that morning. Dorian caught snatches of her conversation with Alan through Eadon Lodge’s thin walls. They’re asleep, Lydia said. But Alan’s skeptical tone—“Yeah, I’m sure they are”—will pierce his consciousness in later years if ever “Glass Onion” is played. He will remember all the stoned earnestness about who the walrus was or wasn’t. John or Paul. He’ll recall that Halloween party from another angle because a few feet away others are poring over the cover of Abbey Road for the most sinister of the Paul-is-dead clues, the dirge of “She’s So Heavy” pounding from the hi-fi muffling their words.

  Dorian watches in silent stoned misery various guys yanking one Beatles record off the turntable and slapping on another, each jockeying to expose some profound death clue or other. A song, part of a song, part of a part of a song, is played over and over. The needle skips. The speakers pop. The tone arm lifts and the sudden absence of sound sets heads swivelling, voices groaning, frowns forming. People take turns pressing their ears to the fabric of the hi-fi’s speakers as the most arcane of the clues are buried within the fadeouts. One guy with a black beard forces the record groove against the needle backwards. “Listen! Can you hear it? Lennon’s saying, ‘turn me on, dead man.’” The guy turns, his face beatific, his eyes glittering.

  But the revellers are growing weary of this fucking around with the music. The Paul-is-dead controversy is a couple of weeks old and wearing thin. Music’s background. Foreground is drinking, smoking weed, flirting … more.

  The White Album comes off, bringing a new silence and a new burst of groans. The bearded guy—whoever he is—reaches for Magical Mystery Tour, pulling the disk from the cover. “Fucking cut it out, man,” a male voice slices through the air, but Mister Beardy, smiling stupidly, is oblivious. Click, clunk, pop and the tone arm is bouncing in another vinyl groove and the trippy swirl of Mellotron fills the absence. Dorian recognizes it instantly as the coda, the last thirty seconds, of “Strawberry Fields Forever.” Here’s another clue for you all. Dorian knows which one this is. He can’t bear it. He stumbles to his feet. He’s tall—six, one—and in trench coat and dress shoes he projects, even with naked calves, enough adultlike authority to elbow Mr. Beardy out of the way and snatch the tone arm, catching it before Lennon intones a terrifying confession. The needle rips across the vinyl like a nail on a chalkboard and he feels his gorge loosen. He could spew the contents of his guts into the hi-fi’s cavity right now.

  “Zeppelin!” someone shouts.

  Dorian’s hand reaches blindly into the pile. Meet The Beatles! An album from the age of innocence—his own, and the Beatles, before they discovered acid and Stockhausen and Yoko. Only six years gone, it’s already an oldie. But it’s rock’n’roll. Dorian wants to dance. He grabs Alanna’s hand as Paul (McCartney—or his doppelgänger) does the count: One! Two! Three! Four! Alanna’s nearest. She smiles. She’s instantly game. Alan has been a drag all evening. They fought over coming to the party, over her costume, over his wearing any costume at all. You can’t get Alan to dance anyway except under extreme duress. Screw him.

  Well, she was just seventeen, you know what I mean.

  Dorian remembers dancing with Alanna to this song at a sock hop in grade ten. Or maybe it was Lydia. He’s not sure now. He may have a partner—he and Alanna are doing a sloppy jive, hands slipping and gripping in the small space where the coffee table once stood—but he feels he’s dancing by himself, on the threshold of a kind of animal joy he hasn’t felt in many months, since long before the catastrophe at Eadon Lodge. Okay, he’s pretty drunk, but Alanna knows the moves and steers his. In her harem outfit, her breasts jiggle, and her ass, when she turns, is a fetching thing, too. Dorian can see through the blur of movement and drink, the eyes of several men stray to her and he almost cackles with glee, knowing how this will provoke her territorial boyfriend. Someone is sufficiently taken with the little show before them to move the tone arm to “It Won’t Be Long,” another little rocker on the A side. Dorian and Alanna continue, as if there had been no break in the music. The faces turned to them are a little blurry now. That’s good. He feels the pure pleasure of the moment washing over him. At a turn, he glimpses Alan push through to the front of the growing knot of onlookers. At the next turn, he glimpses Alan cross his arms over his chest, his beer tucked into the crook of his arm. Alan’s frowning. Aw, too bad, asshole. Dorian lets his smile widen at Alan’s displeasure. Dorian’s fedora falls off his head. The belt of his trench slips. Alanna comes out of a swinging turn, her astonished laugh rising above the song’s busy bass line as the coat flies open like cupboard door. The others watching, all University College compatriots, laugh, too. Dorian swings near Alan. Alan leans in, his lips brushing Dorian’s ear, a prelude to a kiss that will never happen.

  “Faggot,” he hisses.

  7

  The weather in August 1969 was gloriously hot and sunny. Perhaps if it had been a filthy rainy day when Briony stepped out onto the street, her social work field placement at the Family Bureau having come to an end, her mind wouldn’t have lit on the notion of a beach idyll at Eadon Lodge. A seed had been planted earlier—Lydia had told her that her parents were spending the last two weeks of the month, not at Gimli as Bibs insisted they do each year, but in Europe, on a tour. Marion’s cudgel had been their wedding anniversary, August 26, which she was not spending at “that goddamn cottage again.”

  Lydia, rarely given to impulse, needed little persuading in this instance. This was her third summer as a fill-in receptionist at a downtown clinic and she was weary of being all young-lady smiles for impatient doctors and apprehensive patients, and unsettled by unseen germs, washing her hands a dozen times a day. She had enough money saved for tuition anyway. But would Bibs let them have the cottage all to themselves? She had to ask his permission. Last summer, Ross—her now ex-boyfriend—cajoled her into sneaking the keys to Eadon Lodge and having a day of privacy, but one of the two keys to the side door, an antique skeleton variety, somehow, maddeningly, infuriatingly, stuck in the lock, then snapped in two. Lydia’s shame before her father was complete. This time, no deceit.

  There were really so many ifs, so many variables, so many possible outcomes—though Lydia entertained these thoughts only afterwards. The issue of a transportation for instance. How were they to get to the cottage? Briony only had a learner’s permit and didn’t have her own car anyway. Bibs had a Buick that he wouldn’t be using while he and Marion were away, but Bibs brought the Spanish Inquisition to Lydia whenever she asked to borrow the car. So Lydia tried car-owning friends.

  Dorian and his black Beetle first: But Dorian, returned early from New York, groaned that after several boring weeks of enforced incarceration with his grandparents at Lake of the Woods, he now had to turn around and visit his mother and stepfather at West Hawk. How long he’d be gone, he didn’t know.

  Alanna and her white Mustang convertible next: Alanna might be more flexible. She was nominally employed at Rhondaco, her father’s company, but spent most of her time at the stables. She was horse mad.

  Here Lydia hesitated: She knew Briony, despite her minister’s-daughter best, didn’t warm to Alanna. So, she argued to Briony, she couldn’t ask Alanna to just drop them off at Eadon Lodge. She would have to invite her to stay with them and hope that maybe the lure of the hor
ses—and Alan—would send her back to town.

  Alanna detected the insincerity in Lydia’s invitation, but it gave her the upper hand. She used it: she insisted on a departure date convenient to her and said Alan, laid off from his construction job, would join them. Briony uttered a rare expletive, plus—how come she gets to have a boyfriend come up?—but there was nothing to be done. They were going to have to take the—ick!—bus if they were to hone to their schedule. Alanna would drive them back to town later.

  Resigned to the Greyhound, Lydia went to her father for permission to use the cottage. Why don’t you use my car? he said. She remembers being stunned by this unusual bout of expansiveness and groped for its source. Was her father actually looking forward to his European trip? He hated travel, another of her mother’s complaints as all her smart friends seemed to be jetting all over the place. Perhaps the war had leached the desire from him. Or that trip he took with his father and brother to England before the war, where Lits died of influenza. Whatever the case, Lydia recovered from her surprise quickly and said, Great, yes, thanks, we’ll use your car, thanks again, Dad.

  So the seeds of disaster were planted. If Lydia had asked her father for the car in the first place, she and Briony would have spent two weeks at Eadon Lodge most likely without company. Briony had no boyfriend to drive up and be useful. Lydia had ended her relationship with Ross—for the second time—the previous Valentine’s Day.

  On August 15, an ordinary Friday, Lydia and Briony stuffed their luggage into the trunk of Bibs’s Buick and drove off to the lake. Alanna would arrive, with Alan, in a few days. Bibs said at the last minute that they had to take delivery, unconscionably delayed, of some soil and sod and fill in the old outhouse pit. “Get the boy—or boys—to do it,” he said, countering her blush with a knowing glance. It was his only proviso, a crimp in their plans for pure indolence, an imperfect start to an otherwise perfect day, the temperature a perfect 77, the sky a perfect blue, perfectly cloudless. Lydia would remember vividly—however hard she tried to push it from her mind—the terrible return journey two weeks later, when the August heat wave had spent itself, when the skies had greyed, the wind risen, and the rain spattered the windshield, but most details of the journey north that late morning eluded her powers of recall.

  What had Briony and she talked about in the car, two young women on the brink of blooming adulthood, their bright lives rolling out in front of them? Books and boys? Jobs and plans? Shops and shoes and whatever was on the news? A song, yes, one—“Lay Lady Lay.” Dylan’s words saturated the car, stirring a longing in Lydia that she gave no utterance of to Briony, who shifted in the passenger seat, turning to study the ripening fields outside the window. Her spurning of other romantic chances in the wake of her break-up with Ross at Valentine’s now seemed foolish, and Lydia’s mind travelled to the iron bedstead at Eadon Lodge, proxy for Dylan’s big brass bed, single billet these coming days. Why wait any longer for the world to begin? the singer sang.

  “Grammatically, shouldn’t it be ‘lie lady lie’?” Briony broke in, plucking at the frayed edge of her cutoffs. “Otherwise it sounds like he’s bossing around some poor chicken.” Feeling cold water on heated thought—this detail Lydia remembers; she uses it later in editorial seminars—she agreed that it should. “Yes,” she repeated with a small sigh, “it should be ‘lie lady lie.’”

  8

  Dorian twists around Alanna to the final notes of “It Won’t Be Long” in the Eadons’ living room, a red mist descending, adrenalin rushing to his fists. The last time he heard the word “faggot” directed at him flashes in his mind diamond bright. He is once again among the multiple thousands amassed up and down Fifth Avenue across from St. Patrick’s Cathedral the second Saturday in June 1968. Unable to penetrate the thick cords of Robert Kennedy’s humble, mostly silent, mourners at the West 50th corner, he finds himself stood against a shop window, his eyes first caught by the glint of sunshine on the cathedral’s soaring spires, then by a glint in the eye of a man a few feet away who appears a few years older and a few pounds bulkier than Dorian, with visible tennis-ball biceps. His dress, like Dorian’s, is too casual for this solemn assembly: jeans, a T-shirt, sunglasses perched on his head. But Dorian arrived in the city only two days before, on a half-baked quest for a job, any job, in New York’s film industry—and though he brought a tie, he never thought to put it on before leaving his hotel room, drawn, like half the city, through the humid heat to this place of mute grief. But it won’t be this prince’s funeral that sticks in Dorian’s memory. He is gone by the time the flag-draped casket is carried out of the cathedral. The bicepy guy smiles a smile Dorian already knows, but has never responded to before in the way he will. He feels the hollow burn of attraction in his stomach and reads the message in the other’s cool grey-eyed gaze.

  The other is Ric (sans “k,” he explains as they move in lockstep west through thinning crowds). He’s also a Canadian, from Toronto, in New York, finishing his degree in journalism at Columbia. He shares a Hell’s Kitchen apartment, his roommate, an American, more stricken by Kennedy’s death, is lost somewhere in the multitude on Fifth Avenue. Dorian and Ric go back to Ric’s room, which is the last-stop room of a railroad flat. It is here, in the hallelujah moments, that Dorian hears the f-word—the six-letter one—bawled, not in scorn, as it was a few seconds ago, but in the sticky throes of pure desire.

  But now Dorian’s fist has found the hard bone beneath Alan’s bearded cheek. Alan’s head snaps back, blood spurts from his nose. The walrus mask twists away. The beer bottle he’s been nestling to his chest slips to the hardwood, not breaking but bouncing, sending an arc of amber fizz over pant legs and socks, and rattling along the floor—noisily, for in the very same moment someone lifts the tone arm and music and conversation halt at once. Bloodlust, like a kind of electricity, surges and soars along the living room with its sectional sofa and pole lamps and step tables that Marion has so tastefully assembled and these children have so quickly disassembled. The nearest noncombatants draw back. A woman screams. Dorian is numbed, dazed by drink and fury. If it wasn’t so, he’d drop to the hardwood from the pain in the balled hand that connected with Alan’s face, but instead, he raises it again, tighter, more conscious now of his task: to beat the living shit out of Alan Rayner, shut his fucking mouth. But Alan is no tyro. He is shorter than Dorian, but those construction jobs over the past two summers have added a layer of hardened muscle to his upper body. Having two brothers, he’s been in more fights than Dorian. He knows where to hit back. Somewhere soft and vulnerable. Dorian’s pale torso, exposed in the frame of the flapping trench coat, for instance. Or Dorian’s flopping genitals, equally exposed. Alan can end Dorian’s attack with a precise blow to the solar plexus or a swift knee to the testicles.

  Alanna’s face rises past Dorian’s shoulder like a new moon. Indignation swiftly replaces shock but Alan’s twisted expression, the blood, his animal verve, thrums along her nerves. Something passes from her to Alan in his adrenalin cloud—consent, though he doesn’t need it. He’s goaded by that shrieking female, too, though he’s in no need of that, either. He senses fandom from the males in the room, though, really, they’re only keen for a fight to continue at interesting length. He doesn’t know half of them would be happy to see his sanctimonious ass creamed.

  Alan jerks his knee upward. Dorian gasps, collapses in slo-mo shock, clutches his genitals, groans. Sympathy, there is little. Alanna rushes to Alan, leads him to the bathroom to wash away the blood. Dorian has no champion, and no one, each for his or her own reason, wants to lend succor to a naked man in an open trench coat in some sort of thrall to his bits. The shunning deepens when Dorian, suddenly ashen, flips onto his stomach and scrambles crablike to Marion’s potted aspidistra and vomits, a torrent of spew splashing onto the soil and dead leaves, spitting onto the rolled carpet and the couch edge. It’s like he’s gagging up all the fear and anxiety and nightmare of the last two months, exorcis
ing it in one rainbow arc of liquors. His head sags over the acrid fumes, one hand clutching the rim of the planter, almost tipping it over with his sweating head. Briony and Lydia zip past each other through the kitchen door, Briony to wet a towel to clean the upholstery, Lydia to seek and destroy the source of this latest disturbance. She passes into the dining room, more crowded and noisy and frowsty than the kitchen.

  She elbows her way into the living room, record player blasting again, to find Dorian’s blond head in a pool of sick and everyone else a measured distance away, oblivious. As some complete stranger leers at her through a scrim of marijuana smoke, Lydia experiences a rising tide of disgust joined with apprehension. She knows Dorian’s weakness for the overblown gesture. She’s seen him drunk before. She’s seen him sick before. She’s seen him gauche before. But now he hoards a secret with her that, let loose, would bring their world to an end. It’s all too much.

  She doesn’t know if she can bear to be in his presence any more. The realization hits her like cold rain, but it’s only her conscious mind acknowledging a truth burrowing sub terra for two months. She is falling away from affection. She and he were introduced to each other as babies—so her mother told her, at Eadon Lodge in the summer of 1950—but Lydia’s first memory of him is in Miss Strath’s kindergarten classroom, a blond boy with pale eyelashes filtered through a halo of September sunshine, tripping with a tray of watercolours, rainbowing her little dress, bursting into tears. But some presentiment of love stopped her shrieking before the wet seeped to her skin, even though fastidiousness was already invested in her with her mother’s milk. Where was young Miss Strath? Nipped out. Lydia comforted Dorian, cleaned herself as best she could, cleaned the floor as best she could. It’s a tiny but telling scene, an augury, the start of a trajectory that has all the inevitability of fate.