Paul Is Dead

by C. C. Benison

  “Do you shoot?” Dorian asked Paul, surprise evident in his voice.

  “Me? No. My stepfather did … does. He keeps guns at our cottage.”

  “Where’s that?” Alan asked.

  “North of Toronto.”

  Lydia studies the shotgun now. Dispose of it, too? Earlier, at dawn, in her dressing gown, she dragged the cut-down electrolier, heavy as a severed head, across the wet grass, past the gate, over the cold sand, and dropped it into the turbid waters of the lake—with a madwoman’s madness, she thinks now in the strong, clear light of mid-morning. Somewhere nearby a dog had barked at the splash. Had there been human witnesses, too? What would he or she have seen? With the sun a hot pink dot on the far shore and the sky a blue-grey wash of cloud, there was more dark than light—perhaps only a figure silhouetted.

  But the shotgun. She despises guns. Would it float if she threw it in the lake? It is pointed at her great-grandfather. Or is valuable, collectible, saleable?

  That is Ray’s notion. She reported her conversation with the real estate agent in an email what the property might fetch. He’s delighted. Is there anything in that cottage worth anything? he writes back.

  Clutching the dust cloth, she turns to look again around the living room. Is there any treasure here? The Victorian mantel clock, the brass flask, the 1930s chinaware? Not really, she messages back.

  What about the books? Two opposing walls were lined with hardcover books, shelf upon shelf of faded spines. Most, she remembers from childhood, were stamped inside, DISCARD. All came from the Cornish Street branch of the Winnipeg Public Library.

  Unread and unloved, Lydia thinks, passing her eyes over the titles, none of which looks to have been shifted in the years since she last looked at them. Could there be one that is rare, desirable, and valuable? Her cleaning forgotten, she goes from spine to spine, title to title. Nothing. No author, no title, few publishers ring a bell. Near the end of one shelf, next to a small lamp she switched on earlier, one title stirs a memory. Dead Men Tell No Tales by E.W. Hornung.

  Had she read this one? Unlikely.

  And then it comes back to her. This was the book she thought Dorian had desecrated. What possessed him? she thought at the time, though why she didn’t blame Paul is a question she only entertained later, when she was no longer under his spell. But then she focused her fury on Dorian.

  It was an old book. It was an unread book. It was an unloved book. But it was still a book—somehow a valuable, precious thing.

  There was a crude square hole cut into the pages of Dead Men Tell No Tales. She came upon Dorian holding the book open and pushing a small bag into the cavity.

  “Why?”

  “I’m hiding our stash in it, Mrs. Peel.”

  “You ruined this book for that? As if the RCMP would be interested in us.”

  “I didn’t do this.”

  “You didn’t cut this book up?”

  “No. I found it this way.”

  “Then someone else has done this. Bibs will have a fit.”

  “Well, it wasn’t me. Look, Nancy Drew”—he put the open book under her eyes—“those cuts aren’t very fresh. This was done before. It’s the ‘Mystery of the Hollowed-out Book’ by Franklin W. Dixon.”

  “I think you mean Carolyn Keene.”

  “There’s this.” Dorian handed her a piece of folded paper tucked between two pages. “It fell out of the hole when I opened the book.”

  Lydia unfolded it. The paper was yellowed and contained nothing but numbers: 9 13 8-9-4-9-14-7 21-14-4-5-18 20-8-5 12-9-20-19 20-18-5-5. “A child’s hand, but it looks like my father’s.”

  “Then your father did this.”

  “Code.”

  “Pretty simple. Look, it’s just numbers standing for letters. Nine—‘I.’ Thirteen—‘M’: I’M. See? You work out the rest. I’m too stoned.”

  Dorian was buzzed. They were all buzzed at one time or another, toking up in the evenings, more often then not; Paul the provider of these treats. Did Dorian ever use the book for our stash—our stash? She can’t remember. She does remember deciphering the code: I’M HIDING UNDER THE LITS TREE. Some boyish game between brothers, the cryptogram simple enough for Bibs’s mentally challenged little brother. And she does remember checking it before closing up the cottage that late August day. There was no trace of marijuana. She returned the cryptogram to the cavity.

  Lydia removes the book, which comes off the shelf in a cloud of dust. Perhaps she should take this one, for Ray. He would be amused. He has tales of his own druggy adolescence in Modesto. She blows more dust off the top, leafs through the first few pages, and comes to the cavity, its edges as crude as she remembers.

  But it is not empty.

  Puzzled, her heart fluttering a little—why, she’s not quite sure; anticipation?—she plucks from the hollow a yellowed piece of paper. The same, after forty years? She unfolds it. Yes, the same, but for one change. A stroke through the first two numbers and a new set of numbers inked above. She recognizes her father’s hand, but not as it once was, strong, masculine, cursive, but all of a jitter, as it was in his decline.

  25 - 15 - 21 18 - 5

  9-13 8-9-4-9-14-7 21-14-4-5-18 20-8-5 12-9-20-19 20-18-5-5

  18

  “Gimli’s north of here, isn’t it?” Mark says.

  Dorian looks up from his crossword, a distraction born of waiting on set, in dressing rooms, as he places his coffee cup on the patio table. “A short drive, fifteen minutes.”

  “Well, it seems someone there’s been murdered.”

  Dorian allows a beat to pass. “Really,” he says, returning his attention to the crossword.

  “It was on the radio in the kitchen. Some guy, late twenties, beaten to death right on the main street in the middle of the night. They have two teenagers in custody. Kids apparently swarming around when they should be in bed. That sort of thing.” Mark sits, lifts the front section of the Free Press, drops it back on the table. “What kind of place is this Gimli? You told me yesterday it meant ‘paradise’ in Icelandic.”

  “Do I need to point out that the same people named Greenland ‘Greenland’?”

  “Should we go?”

  “Do you want to?”

  “Well …” Mark contemplates the view from the back porch of Dorian’s cottage. “When will I ever have the chance to visit Gimli again?”

  “We could sunbathe instead.”

  “The beach here isn’t much. A thin strip.”

  “Well, the lake’s been high this season. The beach at Gimli is much larger.”

  “How about this then: we go to Gimli and take our bathing suits. They must have a change house or something on the beach.”

  “I can’t remember if they do.”

  “Can’t remember? You told me in Vancouver you’d never been here before, or to Gimli.”

  “I was wrong. Once I got here, I realized I had been here before. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Mark looks at Dorian returned to his crossword. He thinks: Dorian is fifty-nine. The mind isn’t a keen blade forever. Perhaps a test for cognitive impairment?

  The thought passes. Dorian is fine. It’s just that after almost a two-month absence, Dorian looks to him to have, well, aged. Or is it just that he’s allowed his hair to go back to its natural colourlessness? He hoped he suppressed his little jolt of confusion when he exited his rental car, momentarily taken aback by this trim white-haired figure advancing across the lawn. Dorian was always old enough to be his father. Now he looks the part. What if, god forbid, he ever let himself go—below the hairline? They joked about it. The Morningstar Cove costume supervisor, he says, has him in these dad jeans and plaid shirts, which, thank god, Dorian has shucked today for black dress Bermudas and a white linen shirt. But Mark thinks of someone he’s met recently in Vancouver, Hugh, an environmental lawyer. He�
��s older, though much younger than Dorian, and he’s even talked about adopting, wow. Mark would like a child. He can’t have one with Dorian. Dorian’s even resisted getting a dog. Mark’s weighing some new options.

  Dorian truly doesn’t remember if there was a change house at Gimli beach and doesn’t know if there is one now. He was only ever on the public beach once, with Paul when he swiped that camera. But he does remember that if you’re on the public beach in the summer and look north though the heat haze, you can see shimmering in the distance, the beach narrowing, curving to a point of rocky land. It might be the edge of the world, but, Dorian knows and doesn’t like to remind himself, that past the rocky barrier is a scallop of sand, a private enclave, the setting of his revels and his unravelling all those years ago.

  Mark settles into his chair, between sips of coffee reading something off this new iPhone he bought before he left Vancouver. Dorian returns to his crossword. Ten across. All About Eve actress. Easy. Must include an ‘X’. ANNEBAXTER. He pencils it in, but images crowd his mind. He is drifting along that private enclave with Paul, both of them with their eyes to the sand, as a distraction picking up things as they go along, shells and stones—the stones to skip along the water, the shells to pile into a mound—a shiva lingam, Briony will call it, blushing for some unaccountable reason.

  They had wandered off from the cozy cluster of them sprawled over the Eadon Lodge beachfront, Dorian first, sickened and frightened at having his lie—their lie, his and Paul’s—exposed, unable to look at Alanna, though her eyes were covered by dark glasses. Paul followed a little later.

  “I spoke with Alanna,” he said, rounding his arm over Dorian’s shoulder.

  Alanna. Dorian looks up from the crossword again, at Mark preoccupied with his iGizmo. Addison deWitt’s sleek baritone slips neatly into his head. Alanna, the golden girl, the cover girl, the girl next door, the girl on the moon. Has time been good to Alanna?

  Ridiculous, Dorian thinks. Alanna was not golden, not a cover girl, not a girl next door. She was nothing like Machiavellian, manipulative slippery, silky, purring Eve Harrington in All About Eve. Alanna had a feline prettiness, it was true—lots of small, upturned features—but no feline temperament Dorian could discern. The girls in high school were mean about her, bitches, probably because she knew what she wanted and got what she wanted—including boys of choice—and didn’t connive to get them. Alanna kept her counsel, held her tongue, maintained her cool, moved through the halls of Kelvin High and University College in a cocoon of self-possession. Dorian felt sometimes—from a look in her eye, a twist to her lips—that she found them all faintly ridiculous, like they were the amusing denizens of another tribe, but rarely broached an offending comment. Perhaps she was the girl on the moon.

  Alanna came upon them, as it happened. Alan was on Eadon Lodge’s steps, waiting for Alanna to get out of the bathroom. Lydia and Briony, separately, had exited through the screen door (squeeeeak!) not once, but twice, each having forgotten some item necessary for beach lounging—sunglasses, tanning oil, a magazine. Women! The fifth squeak was Alanna, by which time Alan had had it up to here with that fucking squeaky door. A little fed up herself, as Alan was always cranky when she took her time in the bathroom, she paraphrased Marx: “The philosophers, Alan, have only complained about the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it”—and marched across the grass to the Petit Trianon where she reasoned some lubricating oil would be stored.

  Alan was shouting, “It’s interpreted! The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various goddamn ways” when she crossed the lawn and opened the unsqueaky door of the sleeping cottage and came upon Dorian and Paul in an embrace. For some few seconds they were oblivious to her presence, to the shift of light caused by the open door, to the swell of leaf-rustle and birdsong. It was enough time for Alanna to study them. They were standing. They were wearing their bathing suits, the fabric of which was straining in front. She noted that. But, she thought, together, entwined, they looked rather lovely, Hellenic—or was it Hellenistic?—vaguely like figures on some vase in the slides her professor showed them in art history, which was her minor. She was unbothered, untroubled, unshocked by the scene, though it was something she had never seen before. No gasp did she make. Homosexuality was but a thread in life’s rich tapestry, she thought airily, with the new wisdom of her major—psychology. She even accounted herself mildly aroused. The confined space smelled of maleness, of sex. What had they been doing before she arrived?

  “Kissing cousins?” she said dryly when the two snapped to her presence. The wit—she thought her words witty—lightened nothing. Dorian gaped at her with wild eyes, his face turned ghost-white, and he shoved Paul away.

  “Sorry to disturb you,” she said quickly. Her eyes went to Paul. “I’m looking for an oil can or something like that.”

  “You need the door on the other side.” It was Paul who responded. “But it’s locked. I think there’s a key in the kitchen, near the sink.”

  Alanna retreated to the cottage and found the key. By the time she returned, Dorian had left for the beach. She saw him cross the lawn unaccompanied as she exited Eadon Lodge’s side door.

  “Who are you?” she asked as she stepped around the lawnmower and glanced at the rank of shelves on the storage shed side of the Petit Trianon. Only a thin plywood partition wall separated her from Paul in the sleeping cottage side. She could hear him moving.

  “The playboy of the western world,” came the reply.

  Alanna frowned as her eyes searched the shelves. One word, not the phrase (she didn’t know it was an allusion to a play) resonated. “I thought you were interested in Lydia.”

  “I am interested in Lydia.”

  “I’ve seen the way she looks at you. And the two of you were up to something in the lake the other night.”

  “It was dark.”

  “It wasn’t completely dark. Does Dorian know?”

  “Know what? That Lydia and I … No, he doesn’t know. Why? Are you going to tell him? Or tell Lydia about what you saw here earlier?”

  Alanna’s eyes landed on a can of Texaco Home Lubrication Oil. She had a glimmering, a recall of lectures in her Psyc 210: Psychology of Personality class last spring, talk of traits married in one type, of confidence, charm, dishonesty, callousness, of those amused by trouble. She could almost sense his eyes burning through the plywood. She no longer smelled oil. She smelled sulphur. “Somehow,” she replied evenly, reaching for the can, “I think that you might like it if I did tell.”

  “Like what?” Alan’s voice, sudden, clear, near.

  “Oil, Alan.” Alanna was always a fast thinker. “Here’s the can. Now fix the squeak.”

  “Alanna’s cool,” Paul said to him when he joined Dorian up the beach. “She won’t tell, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “You know this how?”

  Paul shrugged. “There’s something about her.” Dorian remembers him as struggling to contain his mirth. Face wreathed in smiles—that sort of thing. “What does it matter, anyway?” he laughed. It mattered. Duck’s back for Paul. So cool, so untroubled. The year he’d spent in Europe, the things he’d done: Dorian envied him, envied it all. He felt like Paul’s pupil sometimes, struggling to keep up, lying to appear worldly. Jesus, he even said he’d slept with Lydia, inventing a lurid high-school-graduation-night scenario, corny and small as that was, after Paul described an encounter with a woman in some club in Berlin who …

  How the mind roils when you’re having a facsimile of fun. Dorian realizes he is staring at his crossword puzzle at the same time he realizes Mark is puzzled by his unmoving pencil.

  “Tough one?” Mark cranes his neck.

  “Mm.”

  “Need help?”

  “No.” Dorian pulls the newspaper to his chest. “Go back to your pretty little machine.”

  Another breakfast
, another year—1998. Well, brunch—with a few old Toronto pals. Dorian’s new hag, Dixie-May Lang, has percolated through the conversation, and it turns out one of them went to UCC during Paul’s era. A certain story rolls out: one about Paul and a nurse—a male nurse. Paul, fourteen, the nurse, thirty. The nurse dying—dying, my dears—in the midst of some amusing activity. Well, nursey was a bit of a pill-popper, maybe he had a heart condition, I mean, who knows, maybe death was the only way to avoid a statutory rape charge, but still… Dorian remembers the lightheadedness that came over him then, images of his own last minutes with Paul draining the blood from his head. What had they, Paul and this nurse, been doing—exactly what had they been doing—when he died? And, oh yes, the one about Paul’s father, no, stepfather, dying under some peculiar circumstances, around the time that Paul vanished, most peculiar, my dears. Dorian remembers the old queen’s exit line: There was something dangerous about Paul, don’t you know. It was part of his allure.

  Dorian lifts his eyes from the crossword to the big prairie sky and lets the late morning sun warm his face. With eyes closed, sound amplifies. Tree leaves rustle, somewhere a lawnmower begins its assault on the peace of the day, startled birds crack the sky, but it’s all background. Foreground, here on the porch, is taken up with salvos of clacketty-clacketty-clack, like impatient fingernails on a tabletop. It’s Mark tapping at his phone. Texting, no doubt. Mark likes to text.

  Dorian lowers his head a little. Enough to unpeel his eyelids and peer at Mark through the scrim of his eyelashes. He observes the cupid’s-bow lips of his quite kissable mouth bending into a—what? conspiratorial?—smile, the laugh lines around his eyes easing into a jolly crinkle. Ah, a private joke, a secret world.

  A cloud appears—a real cloud, passing over the sun and shading the patio, but a metaphorical one passes over Dorian’s heart, too. He feels a pang. I know what follows, the autumn wind. What’s that? Some plangent little tune of years past. Did he sing it in some show? Can’t remember. He reaches for a pack of cigarettes tucked behind the French press.