Paul Is Dead

by C. C. Benison

  “I can take a hint.”

  He laid the sod. It only took twenty minutes to cover four square feet. Had Dorian heard them talking, heard Alan working, then his retreating footfalls along the gravel path, heard him starting his car? He never said when he awoke and Lydia never told him. Alan was the only witness to their handiwork. But for the rest of that school year, the few times Lydia ran into Alan, she sensed him appraising her in some altered fashion. Was she being paranoid? She had to be. How could he possibly know anything of the truth? He couldn’t.

  Lydia can hear the crunch of car wheels on gravel now, the same sound echoing down the decades. It’s Carol, the agent from Interlake Realty, she’s certain, but still, a chill travels her veins. She passed not a few Interlake Realty signs by the roadside as she drove north through Loney Beach to Eadon Lodge. Has the financial crisis pushed tentacles into even this inconsequential place? Buyer’s market here? Or seller’s? There are so many more summer homes now. All her childhood—even to her final visit to Eadon Lodge—acres of scrubby woods lay between the cluster of cottages that was Loney Beach and the solitary property that was Eadon Lodge. No more. The woods are almost vanished, a phalanx of new cottages—second homes, really; winterized, suburban, characterless—is pressing northward. She can almost make out, if she peers through the trees, another phalanx pressing south. It feels like a slow strangulation.

  Carol will assure her no housing bubble is bursting in this neck of the woods, but then real estate agents say that sort of thing, don’t they? Demand is high—well, highish. Those properties for sale along North Lake Street usually go quickly. No, Lydia should have no trouble selling the property. It’s large, it’s beachfront, it’s well-serviced. Carol won’t tell her that her cousin Ívar, who teaches English at the University of Manitoba, mentioned a young colleague looking for an affordable (“cheap” was Ívar’s exact word) cottage retreat. He’s sort of a last resort. But Carol will tell her she knows folk will be much more interested in the land, be willing to pay more, a couple of developers, for instance. It’s the land that’s desirable. Who would want that peculiar old cottage?

  Lydia sees Carol coming down the path now. She notes a woman in her forties, with a frosted flip and a beige suit and suede briefcase, looking much like the conventional idea of a real estate agent. She looks up, spots Lydia, and smiles. There’s a cast of vague surprise on her face, Lydia thinks, which isn’t reassuring, until she realizes Carol has redrawn her eyebrows high on her forehead. This is the woman who must sell Eadon Lodge for her. Lydia has backtracked several times with Ray over the phone in Toyonaka about the fate of the cottage. Keep it? Rent it? Use it? But Ray is firm. He’s not being stubborn and mean, he’s being logical, and Lydia has no argument against it. They will never use it themselves and they can only rent it, if they can rent it—what?—ten weeks a year? There’s taxes and maintenance … even if Lydia were deeply sentimental about the cottage, they would still need to sell it. Ray has a new idea and it’s good; it will make Lydia hopeful: they will convert the garage in the Lincoln Way home into a flat for Erin and Misaki. Erin’s plan is to go to law school when (if?) they get back to the States. Money’s now even more the thing.

  14

  Dorian’s in a little Roman Catholic church off the highway at Winnipeg Beach. It’s Thursday evening—hot, muggy; a fan barely moves the air in the room. The August long weekend is nigh. Does this explain the AA meeting’s sparse attendance? Or is there only a handful of struggling alcoholics at a beach town in summer? Dorian wishes the meeting were better attended. More people would make his unwillingness to share less conspicuous. He doesn’t want to talk. He barely wants to listen. He only wants to sit in silence and share a space for a time with his fellow-travellers.

  We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. AA Promise #3. Someone has tacked the list on a corkboard, covering various church notices. Does Dorian regret the past? Who doesn’t regret something in the past? Dorian has a regret or two. Or three. One in particular, though “regret” is a feeble little word. Does he wish to shut a door on it? God, yes. Could he do that? Is there a way? Once he thought booze would shut a door on it.

  His first drink as a teenager—lemon gin! yuck!—gave him wings, brought him insight, made him bold. He became a more brilliant edition of his already brilliant self. Funny, such transformation never seemed to happened to others under the influence. Funny, he paid no attention to the familial link: his grandmother’s peppermint breath concealing years of pickledness. At least alcohol never seriously harmed his career. He never missed a rehearsal or a performance because of drink. It was almost as if its effects were something to act against, a heroic stand again the invading hangover that somehow sharpened his performance, the way Hemingway and Fitzgerald’s writing was sharpened by drink. Or something.

  He was drawn to acting as a teenager because he craved to be seen, to be admired, okay, yes, to become famous—he admitted that years ago to a therapist; he admits it to himself now, not for the first time, half listening to a woman moan on about her relationship with her mother. But later—sometime during his six years completing his three-year theatre degree at York—he understood that acting had become an escape from overpowering guilt and despair. Inside a character he was someone else: he knew precisely who he was, he could control his circumstances, and he could expect the unexpected not to happen. On stage he could forget about the past, much less regret it.

  But it’s a strain here, where the past seems to haunt the present. This dry heat, this flat landscape, that big grey lake, those rustling poplars, this dusty breeze: in my ears and in my eyes, there beneath the blue da-da-da skies. What’s the missing word? He can’t think of it. He’s lost touch with everyone in Winnipeg. His mother and grandparents died decades ago. His stepfather’s alive, but he feels no obligation to maintain any sort of relationship. If they hadn’t argued that August day in 1969, he wouldn’t have left West Hawk abruptly, would never have encountered Paul at that gas station, would have seen his life twist in another direction. Bob never accompanied Dorian’s mother when she visited him in hospital that December 1969. His old friends didn’t visit him. Not Lydia, whom he’d last seen as he stumbled from her car at Halloween. (Her dad came, though. Somehow Dr. Eadon learned of his presence in the psych ward.) Briony didn’t visit. Ditto Alanna. That party killed him; he was shunned. New friends didn’t visit either: Those from the university drama club and from And No Birds Sing, a whole cadre of wannabe thespians. Except for Blair Connon, who was supposed to join him at Eadon Lodge that August, 1969. Blair brought him to emergency one December Saturday—the 13th, as it turned out. Hard to forget the date.

  “He’s freaking out,” big Blair told the battleax charge nurse as he struggled to hold on to a wriggling, thrashing Dorian. “No, he isn’t on fucking acid. He’s had a few drinks.”

  They’d been at a Christmas party at an old downtown house with a whole lot of people Dorian barely knew. He’d had a few drinks all right and smoked a few joints. But he wasn’t drunk or stoned. He was raving.

  He woke in a hospital room in a Valium haze in a blaze of shame and disgust. He would be there for a week. The psychiatrist—name since forgotten—was a tiny and very young-looking Jewish woman. They talked. Or, rather, he talked. She blank-screened him, giving no advice nor making any judgment. But before long, they hit a wall. Dorian skirted the trauma of what brought him here, the inciting incident, as it were. Round and round the mulberry bush they went, in a stately Freudian way. Vaguely aware of physician-patient privilege, he asked, in a mulberrybushish way, about confidentiality. Could he tell her anything, anything? Anything, she replied. He didn’t believe her—or wouldn’t believe her, because he couldn’t do it, couldn’t bring himself to speak the words about the thing that he had done—that he and Lydia had done together. They sat in silence. By their last session, Dorian found the silence so excruciating he broke it by reciting every A.A. Milne p
oem from his childhood, hoping to shatter her poker face. They parted, he with a prescription for more Valium, she breaking her professional approach not to admonish by saying, rabbinically: guilt will find its own punishment.

  Christ, it is fucking hot. When the meeting ends, when the Lord’s Prayer is done, when he can decently leave, he is going to bypass the bad coffee and head for the door, avoid any chat. The meeting will have served its purpose: to reground him, to remind him of the value of sobriety, to reconnect him to a Higher Power, whatever he conceives it to be, and to help him keep his mind off the one thing that’s been creeping along the edge of his consciousness these last weeks—Eadon Lodge:

  Marion cannot have sold it, because surely to god anyone buying lakefront property like that would have torn it down and replaced it. No one builds little cottages in the style of Eadon Lodge anymore.

  Lydia told him all those years ago she would stop her mother selling the cottage if she tried. She must have succeeded. Or else Marion had a change of heart about Grimli after Bibs’s death. At any rate, Marion is dead and Eadon Lodge surely passes to Lydia. It must. And just as surely Lydia will keep the cottage and pay the taxes, even if she never ever uses it. They will be safe for as long as she lives (and as a woman, surely she will outlive him). He will never have to face Dix with the truth, for she is still alive and compos mentis in Toronto and Palm Beach, and still in touch with Dorian. He had a chatty email from her this very morning.

  Dorian stares at the ringing telephone on Dey’s bedside table.

  “Are you going to answer that?” Paul asks after the sixth ring.

  Dorian picks up on the tenth ring, panicked that it’s his grandfather, calling from the Kenora docks, and he knows what Dorian is up to. Between rings eight and ten he shuts off the TV. Or is it his mother calling to chew him out for his behaviour toward his stepfather? Is there an emergency? Has something awful happened? Who, who, who can it be!

  It’s Lydia.

  “Oh, it’s you, Mrs. Peel.”

  “You sound odd.”

  “You sound odd. Where are you? What’s that noise?”

  “Traffic. I’m in a phone booth. In Gimli.”

  “How nice for you. How did you know I was home?”

  “I didn’t. I guessed. I figured you wouldn’t last long with your stepfather. Anyway, why don’t you drive up?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You said you would.”

  “I said I might.”

  “You’ve got to come, Steed. I need you. We need you. We’ve got Alanna and Alan with us.”

  “So? Didn’t you invite them?”

  “Well, yes, but you know what they’re like.”

  “Alan’s such a prick, Lydia.” Dorian looks at Paul. The word “prick” seems to catch his attention. Paul’s eyebrows nicely graze the fringe of curls over his forehead. Dorian mouths code and makes gestures: “friend” “me” “go” “Gimli” “beach town” “north of here.”

  “This might be our last summer together, Dorian. Who knows where we’ll all be next summer. And bring that friend of yours, Blair—”

  “Why?”

  “For Briony.” Lydia’s voice drops to a murmur. Dorian understands that Briony’s within earshot.

  “He’s probably working. And I think he’s interested in someone.”

  “Find out.”

  “No.”

  “Well, then, come up on your own. It’ll be fun. You haven’t been to Eadon Lodge since you were a baby.”

  “And look what happened then.”

  “Oh? Oh, sorry, Dorian, I forgot about your father. Oh, god, sorry.”

  “It’s all right. Never mind. Look—”

  “Then you’re coming.”

  “Lydia … I’ve got … a guest here.”

  Dorian’s acutely aware of the freighted pause, then the new tone, one of curiosity restrained. “Really,” he hears her drawl. But before she can probe, he feels Paul tug at his arm. He says to Lydia, “Just a sec.”

  Dorian puts his hand over the receiver. He’s about to give voice to his earlier mouthings, but Paul telegraphs something to him with his eyes. “Tell her I’m your cousin,” he says sotto voce.

  “What?”

  “Your cousin. I’m your cousin. Some kind of relative. I’ve been hitchhiking. I’ve shown up at your door, you know. Make it up. Improvise. You’re an actor, remember?”

  Dorian takes a breath, chest swelling with the challenge. He take his hand off the receiver, hesitates, returns the hand to mask their conversation, and frowns. “You mean you want to go to the beach?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  “What about L.A?”

  “It can wait a while.”

  Paul’s eyes are so beguiling. Dorian is so biddable.

  “Sorry,” he says to Lydia, returning to the phone. “I’ve been consulting with my cousin.”

  “Cousin? What cousin?”

  “He’s from Toronto, travelling through.”

  “I didn’t know you had cousins in Toronto.”

  “He’s kind of a second cousin. Or third.”

  “Oh, okay. So …?”

  “So … I guess, we’ll come up then.”

  “Oh, good. When?”

  “I don’t know. Soon.” Dorian flashes Paul a look of annoyance. Women!

  “What does your cousin look like? I’m asking …” Lydia’s voice falls again “… for Briony.”

  “Are you sure you aren’t asking for you?”

  “Shut up, Steed. Does your cousin have a name?”

  “Yes, he has a name. Paul. His name is Paul.”

  15

  Lydia examines the spot on the dining room wall, runs a finger over the painted surface. The ink vanished in the application of soap and water—her last act before closing up Eadon Lodge, August 31, 1969—but the impression of the ballpoint pen did not. It’s faint, very faint, but in the right light—bright light—and at the right angle—she can still make out the phantom signature below Dorian’s—Paul Godwin, August 21, 1969.

  Did her parents ever notice the impression in the paint? Did they frown, wondering? Neither asked her about it. The Hudson’s Bay blanket’s absence was noted, though—the blanket Lydia assured Dorian at that Halloween party her mother would never notice missing. It was Bibs who noticed. Had a little bee in his bonnet about it the next summer, 1970. He was indignant that Lydia was staying on in San Francisco, that she intended to make her life in the States, but sublimated his displeasure, among other things over the phone, by ragging on at her about this missing blanket at the cottage. Her grandfather had bought three that Coronation year, 1937. Did she know? They were expensive! One of the blankets was missing.

  One missing? Lydia only remembers there ever being two purple blankets, but never mind. She knew exactly where one of them was, then. As she knows where it is now. Unretrievable.

  I have no idea what you’re talking about, she told her father.

  Carol prides herself on understanding her clients’ psychology. She’s had ’em all—the hoarders and the alcoholics and the pervs and the freaks, and she can sum them up in a sec. Nothing, for instance, says depressive like a potential client who greets you in sweatpants. She can see in an instant that Lydia is none of the above. The woman is a model of understatement: an Eileen Fisher white linen shirt over black chinos, small gold hoops in her ears, a vintage tank watch, Ray-Ban tortoise-shell sunglasses perched on hair long and straight, parted in the middle. Only Ms Lydia Eadon’s hair is grey. It’s abundant, though, and as Carol steps closer and peers through her sunglasses she can see it isn’t some aging hippie affectation. More than abundant, it’s expensively cut and coloured to a fine and foxy silver framing a city-pale face.

  Carol unconsciously pats her own coif and sizes her potential client up: composed, educated, entitl
ed, has a bit of money, wants a bit more. Oh, she’ll get it, too. This property should sell easily. She removes her sunglasses, puts out her hand in greeting, and immediately senses the woman’s tautness: stiff back, strained eyes, not so composed underneath, really. The hand in hers feels rough; she notes the chewed skin along the thumb as she withdraws.

  Condolences, chit-chat, the weather (hot, my yes!), yes, my grandfather built it in 1923 or 1925—one of those years—yes, spent summer here as a little girl, come inside, have you been inside before?

  No, Carol lies. Selling with Soul, the bible of her profession, would have no truck with this. Carol can’t think why the lie tripped so easily off her tongue. (She tagged along for a viewing with the heritage committee in May, before Marion Eadon died.) She’s suddenly feeling a little off-kilter.

  Lydia gives her the tour—kitchen, dining room, two bedrooms, bathroom, unwinterized. Explains the systems—the well, the septic tank, the electricity. Points out the little design gems, the paned windows, the French doors, the vaulted ceiling. Mentions the separate sleeping cottage–tool shed building on the property.

  It dawns on Carol that her client—her potential client—thinks that the cottage, this old building full of old junk—is the selling point, that someone will be eager to buy it and maintain it in all its eccentricity. Carol’s had these sorts before, people deluded about the charms of their homes or properties. Funny, though, Ms Eadon doesn’t seem the deluded type.

  “It’s adorable,” Carol murmurs, glancing at a cobweb joining a lamp to a wall, which Lydia missed. “The market for a cottage of this … vintage may not be all that large, though. The property, certainly, is attractive—well, very attractive. The beachfront, the size. I think I’ll have no trouble finding a buyer. It could get …”

  She mentions a sum. It’s about what Lydia thought it might be. Enough to ensure the house on Lincoln is hers and Ray’s without a crippling mortgage. However …