Paul Is Dead

by C. C. Benison

  Mark has radar for such movements. “Are you going to smoke?”

  “It’s my house, sweetheart.” Dorian peels back the foil. “Who are you texting with such diligence?”

  “My resident, about a patient who’s been admitted.” Mark keeps his eyes on the tiny screen. He is lying. Dorian can tell. His pang sharpens. Mark is not an actor.

  “Can’t you leave it alone for two minutes?”

  “No.”

  “Then what’s the little problem?” Dorian flicks his Bic, decides to push a little at Mark’s story.

  “A suicide attempt. But the patient’s just a big borderline.”

  Another borderline personality disorder. How they abound. At least in Mark’s world. Folk with poor self-image, with feelings of emptiness, the self-harmers and substance abusers—all reduced to an entry in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, holy writ.

  At times, earlier in their relationship, when Mark was in the full flush of his psychiatric residency, Dorian slipped in a question or two about Paul, presenting him as a friend from the olden days, otherwise named, whereabouts unknown. Did it matter what darkish facet Dix and others had turned to catch the light? For Dorian, no. He can’t forget the adrenalin of those hours and days. A man gets inside you and fills your head and doesn’t leave. But Mark’ s diagnosis was swift, reductive:

  Antisocial. Antisocial personality disorder. What you laypeople call a sociopath.

  Dorian hates this. A boy he knew and loved reduced to a character in an airport thriller, the sort whose backstory includes a childhood spent pulling wings off butterflies and strangling puppies. But there is something else.

  There is a fact, not a theory, about Paul Godwin. Dorian gleaned it some time later, after Dixie-May returned from Palm Beach in the spring of 1998. The two of them were at the COC’s production of The Rape of Lucretia. It was intermission and for some reason Dix—something about the opera’s impulsive prince, Tarquinius?—started talking about Paul, as she had begun to do more and more. It was Paul’s impetuous nature she took as her subject that evening, as Dorian handed her the glass of champagne he’d fetched from the bar.

  “My mistake, perhaps,” she said leaning toward him to be heard in the crowded lobby, “was to tell him too young how his father died.”

  “Your first husband? How—”

  “From complications of Huntington’s.”

  Dorian must have looked blank. Dix explained:

  “Rapid onset. He died when he was thirty-seven. Took his life. Paul was four, Peter two. It’s a horrible, horrible disease. I kept it from the boys, but by the time Paul was thirteen, fourteen, I thought…” A frown puckered her lips. “Well, I had to tell him. What if he … what if he got some girl pregnant? Abortions weren’t easily had in those days. But as it happened, his sexual orientation saved us from that … at least until …”

  It dawned on Dorian: this is why Dix was chair of the Neurological Health Charities Ontario. But there was something else about the disease that was more horrible, which was eluding Dorian, though he realized it was passed genetically. Dix seemed to intuit his ignorance:

  “Your heirs have a fifty-fifty chance of having it, too. They had no genetic tests in those days. Peter has been tested since. He’s fine. His kids, my grandchildren, are fine.”

  A kind of wondering horror washed over Dorian. Why did you marry a man with such distorted genes? Why did you have a child with him? Why did you have two children?

  Again, Dix seemed to anticipate him. “We rolled the dice, William and I. I was young, ten years younger—twenty-one when I married. I thought I could face anything, and he showed no signs then. And before you ask, Peter was not planned.”

  “When you told your son, your elder son”—He couldn’t bear to say Paul’s name—“what? … how? …”

  “At our place at Muskoka. I don’t know why I picked the moment I did. I didn’t plan it. Rorie—my second husband, you remember?—had taken Peter to town to see a dentist, an emergency, a broken tooth, and Paul and I were left sitting on our dock. I suppose worry over Peter made me think about … health. Anyway, I told Paul. He said very little. He was being stoic—little men, you know. But I knew he was shocked. It is shocking.”

  “And frightening.”

  “And frightening, yes. And you know what teenagers can be like—so unpredictable. I date his … wild behaviour from the day I told him.”

  “Let’s just go,” Dorian says to Paul. They are well north of the others now, along the empty beach. “Back to the city.”

  “Why?”

  “You know. My grandparents are still away. The house is empty…”

  “I like it here. Your friends are cool. Except Alan.”

  “But they’re always around.”

  “So?”

  “You know. And what about going to L.A.?”

  “Lots of time yet.”

  “I’d like to be gone before they get home from the lake.”

  “You’ve said. You don’t want to tell them our plans. A couple more days. I like the weather here. Nice and dry. Summers are so fucking muggy in Toronto. Alanna’s not going to blab. And I’m not interested in Lydia.”

  “She’s interested in you.”

  “We’ve been through this. Nothing happened out there in the water. Don’t sulk.”

  “I’m not sulking.”

  “You are. Come here.” Paul reaches for Dorian, but Dorian jerks away. Paul renews the effort, lunging at him this time, and soon they are figures grappling on an empty beach, under a high sun in an unclouded sky, damp blooming along skin and running down backs, Dorian conscious in a new way of Paul’s vitality and cunning as he finds Paul’s legs snaking with his and they fall together in a writhing heap on a grassy rise. Anger and disappointment dissolve.

  Dorian will recall this scene many times in the coming years. He’s thinking about it right now, on his rented porch, in Winnipeg Beach, studying Mark absorbed in his little iDoodad. He will make use of it from time to time in those moments, with someone whose early attraction disappoints or when lovemaking grows tedious or awkward or he just wants to bloody finish. But its aftermath he will always block from memory. It is this:

  When they finally slid apart onto the sandy grass in a slick of sweat, energy drained, blue sky filling their eyes, Dorian felt all Abou Ben Adhem-y, a deep dream of peace passing over him (even if he was fully awake). He was at one with the universe and filled with a growing sense of destiny. From that moment on—he was so sure—he knew exactly how his life would go. His cup ranneth over and so forth. The ring, the peace ring, which Lydia had brought back with her from San Francisco from her visit in the Summer of Love, had slipped past his knuckle. He pushed it back down his finger, twisting it around his damp skin, watching the sun glint along the silver, pleased with its beauty and general grooviness. An idea hatched in him. It was a sweet idea. He felt a bubble of delight and laughter swell in his chest. He would make penance—well, in another way, a more enduring, endearing way than their coupling moments past. He slipped the ring off his finger—it shot off as though greased with butter, falling onto his discarded swim trunks—and took Paul’s left hand in his.

  “Peace, man,” he said, retrieving the ring and slipping it down Paul’s third finger. “Keep it this time.”

  19

  Lydia drifts from one mural to the next along the cement breakwater of Gimli’s pier, oncoming couples and families and children weaving around her like schools of fish. She flicks a glance at the flaking frescoes on the sun-bleached wall from time to time, but mainly—sunglasses her shield—she searches the faces of men who appear to be on the cusp of middle age—the fathers of budding teenagers, the husbands of seasoned women, solitary figures. They weave around her, tanned or bearded, thickening or thin. It’s a habit: Once it was the faces of boys, then teenagers, then young men,
that drew her attention, but time has eliminated those categories. With every scan, she wonders, hopes, dreads, that an arrangement of eyes and nose and mouth and chin will resolve into a semblance so familiar she will know instantly this is the boy she gave away. Matthew. A few times, in other towns or cities, a face has sent her heart crashing to her shoes, but, no, it wasn’t. It never is. The coincidence would be outlandish. And it would never be more outlandish than in this small place on the fringe of the world.

  She has stopped this hot afternoon to drop off a second set of keys to Eadon Lodge and a cheque for the lawn care people with Carol Guttormson, who arranged to meet her at her office, though it is Sunday. She’s packed, her luggage is in the trunk, the car is in the crowded lot across from the old movie house. She’s kept no souvenir—well, except perhaps for the keys—and, by chance, the paper she found in the cavity of Dead Men Tell No Tales, which she slipped into her bag. As she distracts herself on the pier waiting for Carol to return to her office—Lydia found a Post-it saying BACK IN HALF AN HOUR stuck to the office’s front door—she checks her bag again to ensure the keys are there. Her fingers brush the paper. She plucks it out and unfolds it.

  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

  She counts it out on her fingers, discreetly, so she doesn’t appear deranged to passers-by. 9-13 is I’M. So 25-15-21 is … YOU. Lydia shrugs, carries on. 18-5 is … RE. So the first word is YOU’RE. The rest comes quickly, an echo of those moments with Dorian forty years earlier. YOU’RE HIDING UNDER THE LITS TREE.

  Makes little sense. Lydia looks again at the quavery lettering above the childish, though firmer, hand. Some manifestation of Bibs’s wandering mind in later years. The thought comes to her with a pang, and with guilt for her absences in those years before his death. Here, on the pier, she is tempted to let the paper slip away in the breeze, the way his ashes floated away that winter day in Assiniboine Park, but something stays her hand: It’s the don’t-be-a-litterbug campaign of her childhood. It holds her in its grip. She can never drop anything in the street.

  Lydia passes the last of the murals, glimpsing with a shudder what looks like an image of a bison skull, and turns to make her way back into the town, to Carol’s office. It’s nearly one o’clock. She’s anxious to get the necessaries over with now. Get out of here. Get out of town. All the sunny families around her this sunny holiday afternoon cast her solitude into unhappy perspective and from it, looking toward the town, she has the disturbing experience of finding her surroundings suddenly alien, like turning in the street and seeing the face of an old friend altered by unwise surgery. This is not the Gimli pier of her youth, then a simple wooden barricade off which boys dived into the water. And that big generic hotel at pier’s end—what was once in that spot? A fish store? And what opposite? She strains to remember. She can’t remember. There is a band shell now where something—what?—used to be. She passes it now, notes a batch of skinny boys setting up their instruments, and from the other side, from the hotel patio, catches a snatch of conversation. A murder, apparently, in the town, last night. Ah, so that’s why police tape—god help us—was twitching in the breeze along the street near the real estate office. A cloud passes over the sun and the First and Centre intersection suddenly drains of colour. Her eyes travel to two stark figures up the street. Something about the gait of one of them strokes her memory. She strains to glimpse the face, but a hat and sunglasses—and the jostling crowd—obscures. She feels the weight of premonition.

  “That woman knows you.”

  “I’m famous.”

  “You’re not that famous, Dorian,” Mark murmurs.

  “More famous than you.” Dorian doesn’t look up from the book he plucked from a table in Tergesen’s General Store. He’s certain this annex of the store, with its tin ceiling and wooden floors, was once a drugstore, the kind with a soda fountain. He can practically smell the pills and gumballs and cherry Coke, he thinks, though perhaps it’s his tricksy memory at play. He and Paul stepped in here for ice cream on their one foray into town that August, to do, at the girls’ command, the shopping. Paul had with him the camera he had “liberated” from the beach.

  “I’m not kidding, Dorian.” Mark’s voice again, intruding on his reverie.

  Dorian hears a warning tone. “Not kidding what?”

  “That woman. Looking at you. She doesn’t want your autograph.”

  Dorian’s eyes are still on the book, though he feels a frisson, a presentiment. Some mad fan, a psycho? “How can you tell?”

  “I’m a psychiatrist.”

  Dorian sighs. Mark’s trump card. “All right. Where is she then?”

  Mark pretends to study his phone. “Look over by that rack of greeting cards. To your right.”

  With studied nonchalance Dorian lifts his head from the book and glances in the prescribed direction.

  And there is a shutter click of recognition.

  It isn’t the darkness of her eyes or their roundness that’s like a blow to the gut; it’s no physical attribute. It’s their knowingness. You could say—and Dorian thinks this in that very moment—that her eyes burrow to his very soul. And he hesitates. He should let his face light up and go to her immediately, but something akin to stage fright possesses him—much like that episode when he was briefly cast in Rope—and honestly he just wants to run, race down the wings, through the stage door, out into the air and breathe. But he can’t. The theatre is full and his entrance is nigh.

  “Dorian,” he can hear her say through the tourist chatter. Her voice is as instantly recognizable as her eyes, her tone absent that counterfeit interrogatory of friends meeting after a lifetime’s absence (Dorian?). She might as well have returned from stepping from the room only a moment ago. He crosses the few yards between the book table and the card stand, engulfed with feelings he can’t peel apart—guilt, dread, attraction—and takes her in his arms. Her hair, surmounted by sunglasses, he notes, is silver grey. His hair, below the Panama, she notes, is snow white. Lydia is the first to disengage, lest her telltale beating heart give her away, planting a chaste kiss on his cheek in a perfunctory way that belies the strain pulling at her muscles. He looks the same—slim and handsome. She looks the same—slim and beautiful. Somehow they have navigated life unaltered, their prime prolonged, or perhaps they are too blinded by memory and apprehension to see what anyone else, including Mark, would see—bloom gone from rose, brow scored with line, lips thinned with time.

  What to say? They look at each other in a kind of shock. They are in a public place. What to say? The usual opening gambits—Fancy meeting you here. Long time, no see. How have you been?—are ludicrous. As is, what are you doing here? Each has a good idea what the other is doing here.

  “I’m sorry about your mother.” Dorian takes the lead. “I saw the notice in the paper. Perhaps I should have called.”

  “I didn’t call you when your mother died.”

  “How would you have known?”

  “Briony. She keeps me abreast.”

  “Of course. Briony. When I was in town four or five years ago for Night of the Iguana, she met me backstage and mentioned Bibs had died. Funny she never suggests coffee or dinner.”

  “Do you? Suggest it, I mean.”

  “Well … no.” Dorian smiles. She is as astute as ever. “Anyway, Bibs. Alzheimer’s. I’m sorry.”

  “We’re at the cliff’s edge now, Dorian,” she says, echoing Briony’s remark at her mother’s funeral.

  “So we are.” The expression seems fraught with extra texture. He looks more closely into her eyes, which he can see are careworn, tentative, and feels suddenly sad for the years they might have stayed in touch, might have visited, might have remained in each other’s lives. They’d once loved each other with adolescent intensity; their lives might have evolved into a cozy friendship, but for the events of another A
ugust long ago. Now he searches her eyes, as she searches his. Both know what lies between them. He doesn’t want to plunge into the past, he still wants to run from this, but the terrible day has come, as somehow, however much they denied it, they knew it would.

  “The cottage,” he says. “You’ve inherited the cottage.”

  “Yes.” Lydia holds his gaze, conscious now of a younger man who has stepped forward and is hovering expectantly. Her eyes flick to his—they are large and green, she notes—then back to Dorian, who says:

  “My friend, Mark—Mark Nelligan. He’s visiting from Vancouver. Mark, this is Lydia Eadon. We went to school together.

  “In the olden days,” Dorian continues as Mark and Lydia shake hands. “Before you were born. Mark is a psychiatrist,” he adds. “The black arts, voodoo.”

  “At Vancouver General,” Mark says, ignoring Dorian’s familiar jibes, studying the space between the two old school chums, the vibration, the tension, the menu of clues.

  “That must be interesting work,” Lydia murmurs.

  Mark senses Dorian and his friend’s impatience with him—restive mom and dad with naughty adult plans of their own and he’s not surprised—though a little disappointed—when Dorian gives him a tight smile and a suggestion:

  “I think Lydia and I would like to take a little walk down memory lane. You might find it a tad boring.” To Mark’s impassive expression, he adds, “Would you be hurt if I asked you to meet us back here in …” Dorian looks to Lydia for affirmation “… an hour or so?”

  And now they are alone together, Dorian and Lydia. Their hesitation on Tergesen’s steps is momentary. As if of one mind, they move against the beach-bound current on Centre Street toward some unknown, unremembered destination, a handsome couple in late middle age, husband and wife, possibly—some passersby think—dressed almost alike, rich black below, crisp white above.