Paul Is Dead

by C. C. Benison

  “I’d prefer to sell it as is,” Lydia says, studying Carol’s face. “To someone who would love it as much as we do.”

  “As is?” Good grief.

  “Well, at least the building as is,” Lydia continues. “I suppose what people do with the contents is their business, but I would hope they would want to keep some of these antiques.”

  Antiques? “Wouldn’t you be taking most of these … family pieces with you?”

  “No, none. I’ve got no room at home for anything more.”

  “Well, you know, the trend seems to be for larger cottages—second homes, really—winterized, with basements and garages and the like.”

  “You mean a tear-down. Someone would buy this, tear it down, and build some huge thing like the ones down the road.”

  “Well, yes.”

  “I understand there’s a heritage committee …”

  “Yes, but a heritage designation has …” Carol gropes for the right expression “… no force of law.”

  Lydia knows this already. The woman is hardly adept at hiding her dismay. Lydia is more adept at hiding hers. She’s acting the cool customer as much as she can. She imagines Carol has buyers in mind, developers, possibly; certainly no one interested in maintaining a rickety old cottage. She imagines Carol is expecting to make a quick sale, and she realizes she’s been avoiding the truth all these weeks: her options for Eadon Lodge are really very narrow.

  “Finding someone who wants the cottage as is may take time, if you’re prepared to wait,” Carol continues to Lydia’s silence, though she would like to add: till hell freezes over.

  “I can’t wait too long, I’m afraid. I … need to be getting home, to San Francisco.

  “It’s a little late in the season. It’s already August.”

  “I really do need a quick sale.”

  Carol pauses. There is that colleague of cousin Ívar’s. The location is not ideal. The guy seemed keen on something farther south along the lake, near Ívar’s little summer arts colony, where there’s currently nothing available, but maybe, if Eadon Lodge was more … affordable. “Do you think you could be flexible on price?” she asks Lydia.

  “You mean, go lower.”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Do you have someone in mind?”

  “You never know,” Carol demurs, patting her hair, “a lower price widens the field.” And lessens the commission. “Let me see what I can do.”

  Lydia is slightly more reassured. They do some paperwork, discuss cleaning and “staging,” a word her Winnipeg real estate agent irritated her with.

  “I thought I’d stay at the hotel while I’m sorting through a few things here,” Lydia says.

  “Did you book?”

  “At the hotel?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t think you’ll have any luck finding accommodation. It’s Islendingadagurinn this weekend.”

  “Islend …?”

  “The Icelandic Festival.”

  “Oh.”

  “When was the last time—?”

  “It’s been almost forty years.”

  “The town fills to the brim. Every room in town is taken, I’m sure. You could phone around, I guess, but why bother? You have this place.”

  Lydia’s eyes sweep the living room. They are seated either side of the old desk under the east window. The light catches their whites and Carol catches a glimpse of something in them—dread? horror? revulsion? Weird, given she wants someone else to live in this … curiosity. She notes the unhappy tone of Lydia’s reply:

  “Yes, I do, don’t I?”

  Was there ever a comfortable seat in Eadon Lodge? Those two Shaker rocking chairs? The bench at the dining room table? This old fold-out couch she’s lying on? The place seems designed for self-mortification.

  Time has stood still in it. Would that it hadn’t. Would that Marion had changed her mind about the interior design, the way she did so frequently with the Oxford Street house. Refurnishing the cottage wouldn’t alter the past, of course, but at least the past wouldn’t be so cruelly present.

  The Victrola. There it is, in the corner, by the cupboard storing old clothes, bedsheets, and blankets. Surely the cache of 78s is still intact behind those cunning little bottom doors, because why would they be chucked, when the ancient books and china and furniture haven’t been?

  Briony flipped a record on the turntable one evening and suggested everyone dance. Briony was mother, trying, but mostly failing, to organize them, keep them to a schedule of meals, introduce activities, as if she were still a fifteen-year-old counsellor at church camp. She got up early to meditate according to the principles of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. She made breakfast, though few rose before eleven and couldn’t be bothered even with cereal. She did most of the cooking for them. She swept the sand from the floors and tidied the bathroom and kept a shopping list and drove into town for groceries (despite having only a learner’s permit) and suggested card games and Monopoly games and so on. It was not nice—Lydia thinks this now—how they took advantage, when it suited, of her essential decency. It was summer, it was hot, the lake was close and cool. They could hardly be bothered to lend her a hand or participate in her “extracurricular activities.” They just wanted to lie in the sun, swim, drink, and smoke dope—and in Alanna and Alan’s case spend time alone together, in their tent, in the cottage, if no one else was around. It was, Lydia thinks now, the aura of sex that hung over the cottage those days that summer—the doing it of which excluded her—that sent Briony into a spasm of domestic activity. Alan and Alanna’s secret smiles and lazy grins were burden enough, but it was Paul who brought sex with him.

  She suggested for sleeping arrangements that the boys each take a couch in the cottage. She imagined the electric presence of Paul a dozen feet away, but Dorian had espied the sleeping cottage cum gardening shed—the Petit Trianon, he christened it. Might be a bit cramped in the cottage, the four of them, he said. You girls need your privacy, he said. Paul and I don’t mind sharing a room—we’re cousins, after all, he said. And so the matter was settled. The cousins would sleep in the Petit Trianon. Their cousinship no one questioned in those days of indolence until, one by one, she last, the scales fell from their eyes.

  One of the days after Dorian and Paul arrived Briony bought kerosene in town at Golko’s Hardware and set herself the task of cleaning and filling Eadon Lodge’s oil lamps. Lydia can see one of them across the room now, on its own little stand above the library table, its pretty glass fount scintillating in the sun’s rays in low slant through a bedroom window. She doesn’t remember the lamps ever lit as a child, but Briony lit them that evening before the six of them sat down to dinner—their third evening? their fourth?—switching off the electric lights. The cottage interior glowed and flickered like an ancient cave.

  Lydia knows why Briony put the record on. Some of them had drifted into the living room after a spaghetti dinner, mellowed by drink and carbs, cossetted by the muffled lapping of waves along the shore and the warm golden sunset, feeling no need to continue the conversation. No one had yet lit a joint. If someone had, Paul most likely, as he was the one who brought the dope with him, their enjoyment of the summer evening would have turned from languor to stupor. Dancing? I can’t get up.

  Lydia remembers someone—Dorian?—shouting to Briony over the clatter of plates in the sink to leave the dish-washing to them but recalls more her annoyance when Briony, wiping her hands on a tea towel, joined them in the living room and beelined for the Victrola, as if she’d been planning an evening of music all along. For Lydia, the novelty of the gramophone had long since faded. Most of the records were ancient and brittle, the sound scratchy and tinny, the music quaint and corny.

  Lydia realizes she’s muddling her thoughts, deliberately—maybe. Or maybe it’s the wine she had with the supper she bought in town. The atmosphere that even
ing, she recalls, wasn’t really languid. There was silence, yes, but the silence was partly the hangover of a heated dinner-table argument (Chairman Mao: great helmsman or nasty dictator; Alan vs. Briony) and partly expectation, which Briony precipitated by opening the top of the Victrola, winding its side crank tighter and tighter, and saying brightly let’s dance. The machine rumbled and shook the floor like a dog too long indoors eager for release. Briony dropped the needle on Jane Froman singing “Embraceable You.” Lydia studied her friend’s eager face: from among the mostly novelty records and Sousa marches and boogie-woogie, Briony had chosen a slow-dance song. Deliberately. At the ready on the turntable, waiting for the right moment.

  Alan was out in the yard, ungracious in defeat (five of the six thought Mao uncool), though just as likely peeing in the bushes. Alanna, on one of the rocking chairs, followed a moth with her eyes as it flitted from oil lamp to oil lamp, battering its soft head against the glare. Like Briony, she was made anxious by their erratic flight.

  Who invited Lydia to dance? Not Dorian, as Briony had wished. After all, Lydia and Dorian were seated side by side on the couch, this very one, with its burgundy cover, that she was lying on now, and the two were regular partners at parties and such, Ross Stubbs, her old boyfriend, never much of a dancer. No, it was Paul who came over to her, rising from the other rocking chair, stepping over, bowing deeply and solemnly taking her hand.

  Lydia remembers looking up to see his face break into a smile, a sly tuck in one corner of his mouth making a dimple. She remembers, too, Dorian’s reaction. She could see from the corner of her eye his face founder, which she couldn’t interpret, not then.

  Her attraction to Paul on his arrival at Eadon Lodge had been immediate—visceral in a way that was new to her. They were on the lawn—she, Briony, Alanna, and Alan—playing, of all things, croquet, when Dorian rounded the corner of the cottage, Paul in tow, and said, as he was given to do when he arrived anywhere, “ta-dah!” Something about Paul’s eyes, large, glittering black, intoxicating, even at a distance? She felt herself like one of those ingénues in the Harlequins she devoured when she was thirteen—still water stirred or spring ice freed—the sorts of allusions that would have her tossing the offending book against the wall a year or two later. He smiled his greeting to her, his mouth twisting in a way that suggested more than pleasant invitation—conspiracy, perhaps, a secret alliance, a telegraphing that only they two recognized the absurd theatricality of Dorian’s entrance. She smiled back, felt the gravitational pull. He looked little like Dorian (dark vs. blond, brown vs. blue) but then their cousinship was remote. Was it on the Grant side? Or the other side? (What was Dorian’s mother’s maiden name?) Dorian delineated, seemed unnecessarily eager to do so. But other people’s family trees are thickets. Their eyes glazed over. It didn’t matter.

  Lydia slipped easily into the rhythm of Paul’s body, excited to feel the heat of another’s flesh and the weight of another’s hand along her waist.

  She can see herself now over there by the gramophone, in a peasant top, midriff bare, in frayed cutoffs, barefoot on the old oriental runner rug. Paul is wearing cutoffs, too, and a T-shirt, this one tie-dyed, an exploding orange mandala that glows in the lamplight. The floor creaks beneath their feet as they sway. She feels his erection stabbing at her. She’s unsurprised. She wonders if the others can see the tenting. Perhaps not. The light is low and Dorian is up from the couch inviting Alanna, not Briony, to dance. Briony, left wallflower, replaces “Embraceable You”—a 78 spins for barely three minutes—with Kay Starr’s “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool” and flashes, uncharacteristically for her, an acid smile.

  Perhaps Alan will return and ask her to dance and nicely fill out three couples—however—in Briony’s eyes—wrongly matched. Alan does return after a few moments. Lydia hears the screen door squeak (Alan will fix that later to devastating effect), but the next thing she hears, over the final warbles of Kay Starr, is something beating the air. It’s Alan dispatching the dreaded moth with a rolled-up Chatelaine magazine. He doesn’t dance. He doesn’t ask poor Briony. But he doesn’t have to. The record ends. Before Briony can lift it from the turntable, Alan beats her to the punch with a suggestion, a surprising one, since Lydia finds Marxists much like Victorian aunts: a moonlight dip in the lake.

  Yeah! Why not? The cottage is warm from the day’s sun. But more: the idea’s kind of sexy. Alan’s outdone Briony, but Paul does him one better. Scrambles to bedrooms and tent and Petit Trianon for swim suits are aborted as he pushes through the screen door, doffs T-shirt and drops shorts on the steps—almost in a single fluid motion—and vanishes into the darkness, the last of him his tight rounded ass, a dimpled apricot in the yellow porch light.

  What? Chicken out? No way. At least not the boys. Dorian and Alan whoop in a holler of mutual goading and race after Paul, dropping their clothes on the lawn, disappearing in a volume of noise. Lydia senses Briony and Alanna hesitating. But she’s felt herself since Paul’s arrival, since his eyes burrowed into hers, as a woman famished. She’s next. She throws open the screen door, races down the steps, tugging at buttons and zips, heedless of Briony’s cries. Careless in her excitement, she drops top, shorts, bra and panties, the cooling air on her breasts startling, darts though the gate onto the silhouetted beach, flies along the cold sand and bursts onto the lake, gasping as the chilly water sears her hot skin. Overhead the sky clings to the last of the day’s light, a deep navy dome shot with the dying wisps of pink. The boys, shadowy shapes in the rising moon, are well advanced into the waves, splashing and shouting, thrashing about in some horseplay. She pushes herself around against the weight of the water, conscious of her nakedness, her eye catching the twinkle of cottage light through gaps in the foliage, and the shapes, she is sure, of Briony and Alanna. They remind her of anxious wives.

  The boys see her approach through the waves, swarm her. She feels unravelled, loosened, naughty—all her qualms and rigidities falling away. She’s only a body now, a vessel, a being. A hand brushes her thigh—not Dorian’s, not Alan’s—and she shivers, anticipating. It’s Paul swimming beneath her, touching her, teasing her, grazing places he shouldn’t. He bursts through the surface of the waves, water cascading from his hair and face, with a volley of laughter, and though the others don’t know quite why, they join in out of the sheer animal joy of the moment. Dorian and Alan mimic him, diving and twisting around her, but they don’t touch, each pulled back by some veneer of restraint. But a heightened tension crackles along the churning surface of the water and Lydia is conscious of slipping past moorings set down in childhood. Arousal makes her weak. She lifts her eyes to Paul’s, drawn into the depth of their irises caught in the moon’s glow, and reads their message.

  And then—in a moment—the spell is broken. Alanna is calling from the shore. They hear her now, conscious she has been shouting for a while, her words incomprehensible over the sound of the churning water, but the tone is unmistakably peevish. With a muttered oath, Alan turns away. Dorian glances at Paul, then at Lydia. She sees his bemusement. She wants him gone. “I’m getting cold,” he announces and follows after Alan. Two pale backs ply the waves and disappear. Lydia feels a hand on each breast, hot breath nuzzling her neck, the sudden wet warmth of another’s skin along her back. And something else. She knows of the effect of cold water on the male organ. It came as a revelation to her in Alanna’s parents’ pool when she was first dating Ross. But Paul, miraculously, is rampant and is rubbing his hardness against her.

  And then he is inside her. This time she does gasp. Some instinct urges her to resist. It’s an assault. There is a flash of pain. And yet, helpless in lust, she yields to the rhythm of Paul’s body in her and, quickly, to sweet convulsion. Unbidden, this scene will intrude into her mind for the rest of her life—as it does now, as she lies on the old couch nearly four decades later. It was obscene, outrageous, thrilling—a carnal act over as quickly as it began, over before Alan and Dorian
climbed onto the beach, the groan of their climax drowned in the turbulence of the waves.

  Briony brought four towels down to the beach. Of course, she would think to do such a thing. She was at the water’s edge, one towel at the ready in one outstretched hand the moment Lydia, hand where Botticelli placed Venus’s, emerged from the lake. She looked past Dorian, shivering in his towel, to see a white phosphorescence—Alan in a white towel—following a shadow—Alanna—back up the path to the cottage limned by the very last rays of the setting sun. She couldn’t look at Dorian and thanked god for the masking darkness. Neither did she speak, let her voice betray some new emotion. No one else spoke anyway. It was as if something—and not just lust—had been sated. Did Dorian suspect? Did Briony or Alanna? The two women were facing the lake, but perhaps they had been too concentrated on the returning boys. Briony said nothing as she led Lydia back up the path, kindly picking up Lydia’s clothes along the lawn. Paul was still out in the water when they retreated from the shore, a dark shape moving in darkness. They left Dorian waiting for him.

  Lydia sleeps fitfully. The day’s heat lingers well into the evening and though the windows are open, little breeze passes through the screens of the second bedroom, now a hot box. Lydia’s selective memory is of heavenly cool nights at Eadon Lodge, and she prepared the bed just so, topping a duvet with an old blanket—almost impossibly, she’s looking forward to a moment at Eadon Lodge, a moment of sleep. And sleep, rare for her, came swiftly. (The wine!) But now, too soon, she’s awake, suddenly, startled from a dream—was she screaming in the dream? Her head is heavy, her mouth thick. She feels as if a wet, hot cloth had been pressed down on her face. She finds the sheet pushed to her waist, the duvet and the blanket pushed to one side, and a feeble blush of light in the window. She is discombobulated. Can it be dawn? No, no, the window looks west. West is where the sun sets, yes, but it sets late, freakishly late in Canada’s high latitude. The dream—if it’s a dream; so early for REM sleep—leaves a ragtag trail end of images. In the dream, she was screaming. She remembers this now. Ray tells her she screams in her sleep from time to time. But if she wakes him in her agitated sleep, he is more likely to find her mouth an Edvard Munch gap with noise only a rattle in her throat, a scream desperate for release. And what do I say when I scream, if I scream, she asks Ray anxiously. You just scream, he shrugs. Perhaps he’s lying. She hopes he isn’t.