Paul Is Dead

by C. C. Benison

  “How long have you two been together?” Lydia asks, dropping her sunglasses over her eyes.

  “Mark and I? About seven years.”

  “And how is it?”

  “Oh, doomed.”

  “Really? Are you sure?”

  “Gay years are like dog years. Seven is a lifetime.”

  Lydia flicks him a glance he can’t see. “Where did you two meet?”

  “At a Sondheim performance, Merrily We Roll Along. In Vancouver. But enough about me. You? Briony told me you—”

  “Ray and I have been together for nearly twenty-five years.”

  “Is he here with you?”

  “No. He went to Japan about a week before my mother died. His daughter … our daughter, Erin, is leaving her marriage there and she’s in the middle of a nasty child custody battle. She has an eight-year-old she wants to bring back to the States. So Ray’s there helping her. It didn’t make sense for him to fly all the way here, then fly back to Japan.”

  “I’m sorry.” The third time he’s said that, Dorian realizes with a flush as they cross the street, darting amid the traffic affording them a momentary break in the conversation. “I mean, I’m sorry he can’t be with you.” He’s not sure he’s being merely polite or if Lydia’s presence is plucking at his guilt and shame for the terrible act that stained their lives. There’s so much they never said to each other then.

  “Perhaps just as well,” Lydia says in a tone not lost on him.

  “I thought I might hear from you after your father died. I assumed your mother would want to sell the cottage. Didn’t she always hate it?”

  “She changed her mind. I don’t know why. It was odd. Anyway, it was a reprieve.”

  “Then what—”

  “I’m selling it, Dorian. I—”

  “You can’t. Oh, Lydia, you can’t sell Eadon Lodge.”

  “Dorian, I have to. I need the money.

  “Everybody needs money.

  “I need the money urgently.”

  “Urgently? Bibs must have—”

  “Bibs gave most of his money to charity when he died, to—I forget, a society for the disabled. He left enough for my mother to live on—and the house. But you’ve read the news, you know what’s happened to the economy. That, plus my mother’s renovating mania, has reduced the capital considerably. At the same time, I—we, Ray and I—have to buy the house we’ve been renting for decades. With the money from the property here we’ll have just enough and not be slaves to a mortgage—at our ages. Do you have any notion of San Francisco real estate prices?”

  “Move to an apartment somewhere.”

  “We can’t. Erin and Misaki are coming to live with us while Erin goes back to school. But the point, Dorian, is: how would I explain to my husband why—exactly why—I’d sacrifice our home for the sake of a piece of property in Canada that we’ll never come to visit?”

  “Lydia …” Dorian feels perspiration begin to bloom along his skin. The day is hot. They are passing the old movie theatre on a street that has no shade. “You cannot sell that cottage, that property. You know what could happen. I’ve seen what’s changed up there.”

  “You’ve been to Eadon Lodge?” Lydia lifts her sunglasses, looks sharply at Dorian.

  “No, but I’ve seen it from the lake. We were shooting some boating scenes a few weeks ago out on the water. Development is closing in on Eadon Lodge from both sides. Anyone who buys it isn’t going to keep that little cottage long.”

  “I’ve told the realtor—”

  “You’ve already seen a realtor?”

  “Yes, I’ve spent this weekend readying the cottage for sale. I have to drop off the keys—”

  “Oh, god. And what did she say?”

  “What’s important is what I said to her: I’m only interested in a buyer who wants to keep the cottage as is.”

  “And how likely is that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Once it belongs to someone else they could can do what they like. There’s no law to stop them, Lydia. They’ll knock it down and dig…” He stops himself, swallows hard.

  “Maybe they’d miss that spot.”

  “You’re clinging at straws, Lydia.”

  “Then even if… Could they connect him—”

  “Paul?”

  “—to us?”

  “Lydia, who are you playing devil’s advocate with? Me or yourself? Briony, Alanna, Alan—they were all there that week.”

  “They’re our friends.”

  “They would perjure themselves? Alan? Alan? And even if they did—and why they would after a gap of forty years I don’t know—there’s people here who might remember. Paul and I got an ice cream at Tergesen’s. We—”

  “No one would remember Paul from that, Dorian. A lifetime’s passed.”

  “The guy who delivered the earth and sod that afternoon. He came into the cottage. He’d remember. He was our age. He could still be around somewhere.

  They pass in front of the old public school where an old swing set is still in place under a shading tree.

  “Let’s sit a minute,” she says.

  Dorian follows her, pulling a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. “And what about that old guy, Elvis? Remember Elvis? After the gun went off? He was a jerk.”

  The scene lies before them with the force of memory. It was early evening, the light through the trees striping the lawn. Briony was cutting potatoes in the kitchen with an unexplained air of grievance, which Lydia thought then had something to do with the troublesomeness of making home-made french fries, though no one had asked her to make them. Lydia, herself, was cutting up vegetables for a salad, wishing everyone except Paul would just go away. Alanna was lying on one of the couches over the wall in the living room, not helping, an electric fan caressing her body, drinking a gin and tonic, delicate nose twitching as smoke from hot coals outside wafted through the screens. Alan was cooking—barbequing. Man’s work. He was strutting around the grill and fussing with the coals to ready them to sear the hamburgers made from the ground beef Dorian and Paul had fetched in town the day before. Dorian remembers himself and Paul curled like commas into old Adirondack chairs on the lawn, drinking beer, observing Alan in all his glorious self-importance. He was the worker, a proletarian. They were louche, decadent, bourgeois. He had coldshouldered them that afternoon on the beach when they returned after a long spell with a bucket of shells. Paul had proffered Alan a shell, suggesting it as a sort of portcullis for the sand castle he was sculpting.

  “Nice ring,” he’d sneered, glancing at Paul’s fingers as he took the shell. The girls were out of earshot, in the lake with the inflatable raft, nymphs shrieking in the waves. Dorian glanced warily at Alan for signs of some new knowledge. Alan had hard eyes. But Dorian could tell nothing.

  “Peace, man,” Paul replied, V-ing his fingers.

  “Where did you get it?”

  “My cousin here gave it to me.”

  “He’s been wearing that thing for ages.”

  “So?”

  Alan shrugged, turned back to his handiwork. He placed Paul’s shell aside.

  Asshole, Paul mouthed to Dorian.

  That evening, as Alan kept a whip hand on the coals, Paul rose from his chair and went into the cottage to fetch two more beers. Lydia remembers herself next to Briony slicing tomatoes on a cutting board on the counter, shifting slightly so Paul could swing the fridge door open, thrilling to the brush of his ass against hers. She remembers the clatter of the bottles along the refrigerator shelf, the pop of bottle tops, her mind concentrated on cutting vegetables with such a dull knife, then the gush of water running in the bathroom. Dorian remembers Paul exiting the cottage, one of his hands gripping both beers by their necks, the other gripping … something by their necks, something plastic and dripping. Water pistols.


  “I saw them earlier tucked up in a space over the kitchen door,” he murmured to Dorian, grinning, though Dorian didn’t need the grin to get the message. Paul sat. They each took a pistol. They aimed at Alan. He was not amused. He batted at the spray like an angry bear at swarming wasps before registering the source. There followed the predictable bellowing fuck-you-laced invective as Dorian and Paul blasted him with needle-fine jets of water. Alan ran to get out of the way. Dorian and Paul jumped from their chairs and chased him over the lawn. Lydia remembers looking up to the kitchen window to see sprinting shadows and the towel-laden clothesline in sudden motion, sensing Briony beside her startled and uneasy, recalling herself strangely electrified. She remembers hearing above the raucous laughter someone crashing through the front door and tearing across the floor, followed by an unfamiliar metallic rattling in the living room and Alanna saying sleepily, “Alan, what are you doing?” And then someone—Alan, apparently—crashing out the door again and roaring maleness renewed, sharper, more taunting this time.

  And then, the blast—like a crack of thunder sundering the air. Lydia’s head snapping to the window, her cutting her finger. Damp bathing suits and towels collapsing to the lawn, strands of the severed clothesline silvering in the setting sun. And a piercing, shattering scream.

  “That Elvis guy wasn’t a jerk,” Lydia says to Dorian. “If he had been, he would have gone to the police.”

  “He saw Paul.”

  “Barely. And he wasn’t old. He was older. If he had been our parents’ age, he would have made a fuss. He probably wasn’t even ten years older than we were.”

  “Which means he could still be alive.”

  Lydia remembers the frozen moment that followed the scream, her mind racing to attach cause to effect. She remembers the couch’s sharp rasp in the next room, the tea towel dropping from Briony’s hand, the knife dropping from hers, her cut finger frothing blood—her scrambling through the screen door and down the steps and onto the darkening lawn, the others on her heels. She remembers Paul, fallen on a beach towel, clutching his left shoulder with his right hand, blood running between his fingers and pooling blackly on the pale cotton, his face contorted, Dorian’s face captured in a shaft of sun, pale as the cotton—a prefiguring, she reflected much later, of a horror to come, and Alan chanting like a mad monk, “I didn’t know it was loaded, I didn’t know it was loaded.”

  And, improbably, before this tableau of shock and incredulity could break apart, a large black hound, like something out of hell, burst out of the gloom, trailing a leash, trailing a thickset man with slicked-back hair—suddenly an adult among the children. Lydia remembers Briony bursting into a wet sob, herself battling disbelief: a green pistol lay at Paul’s side; Dorian’s limp hand held its twin. Plastic guns. Plastic, impossible. And then she understood. She saw the dark shape of the shotgun fallen to Alan’s side on the grass, heard the stranger say, “What the hell is going on?” as he bent to pull the excited dog away and reattach the leash, pushing the animal away, toward Alanna, who robotically gripped its collar.

  Dorian remembers the man shifting to his knees to examine Paul. With the evening well advanced, the light low, his face leaned in, seemed almost to touch Paul’s. “Are you all right?” he asked, and as Paul strained his reply through gritted teeth—“It’s nothing. We were just horsing around”—he shifted his judgmental gaze to the rest of them standing in a contrite row and continued, “With a loaded shotgun? Are you crazy? Where is it? Give that to me!”

  The tone of his voice broke the spell. Alanna, one hand clutching still the dog’s collar, bent for the weapon and passed it over. Briony reached down for another of the fallen towels and moved to apply it to Paul’s shoulder, while the stranger, who seemed to know what he was doing, opened the chamber, directed it to the light and peered in. “Single barrel,” he grunted, snapped the gun back together, and turned to Alan, who was now trembling uncontrollably. “If your aim had been four inches to the right, he’d be dead.”

  “I didn’t know it was loaded!” Alan’s voice cracked.

  “Jesus, I’m fine,” Paul insisted, struggling against Briony to rise, grabbing the towel from her and pushing it against his shoulder where the shot had ripped through the T-shirt sleeve.

  “We have a first aid kit in the cottage,” Lydia said to the stranger, adding as if it added weight, “my father’s a doctor.”

  “You shouldn’t have this lying around,” the man bristled at her.

  “It’s sat in a rack on the wall all my life. I’ve never seen anyone take it down, ever, my whole life.”

  “You could press charges,” the man turned to Paul.

  “Why don’t you fuck off?” Paul snapped and moved unsteadily toward the cottage, Briony trailing behind. Perhaps the setting sun’s crimson rays were amplification, but Elvis’s face—Dorian recalls this vividly—blazed, his eyes seethed with contempt. He could see what this man—solid, clean-cut, tidily dressed, only a few years older (as Lydia correctly said) but somehow a generation removed—saw: a bunch of stupid, stoned, and irresponsible hippies—the usual litany of complaint of the day.

  Elvis left. Lydia remembers escorting him and his dog off the property, using all her youthful charm, thanking him for his concern and assuring him that it was the most freakish of accidents, that no one was seriously damaged, that she was certain there was no ammunition in the cottage, that it was boys being boys—anything that came into her head—so that he would not contact the police, so that word would never reach her father. Her manner seemed to pacify him and then she couldn’t quite get rid of him. His parents had a cottage at Loney Beach, he told her. He had been taking a long walk with Bruno, the dog, which suggested to Lydia an episode of family discord. She noticed the hand holding the dog’s lead bore no ring. He was regarding her with a certain intensity. Her manner, she realized, was being mistaken for flirtation (licking her cut finger didn’t help) and two evenings later, in the hours after the event that would divide her life, and Dorian’s, into before and after, she feared that he would make a sudden reappearance.

  20

  “What would you have done if your mother had decided to sell the cottage after your father died?” Dorian asks Lydia in a low voice. They’ve moved to a pub down the street, surprisingly devoid of patrons on this hot afternoon.

  “If I couldn’t change her mind, I would have bought it.” Lydia folds her sunglasses and slips them into her bag. “Real estate prices were lower in the late ’90s. It seems there wasn’t a real jump in prices here until a few years ago. For years, Ray and I were living in essentially a rent-controlled house. No real money worries … how life changes in an instant.”

  The server manifests himself in Viking glory before Dorian can respond, uncertain if her last words alluded to their shared wrongdoing. How life changes in an instant. He is young, tall, blond, and built—yes, a Viking, but it’s the horned plastic helmet he’s wearing, an assertion of this Icelandic festival the town is in the middle of, that does the trick.

  “‘Martha? Rubbing alcohol for you?’” The line from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf lands unbidden on Dorian’s lips. He had the LP recording of the Broadway production in high school and played it over and over.

  “‘Never mix, never worry!’” The rejoinder floods Lydia’s memory and she is her teenaged self again, after school, smelling the new paint on Dorian’s bedroom walls, camping George and Martha, and wondering if Dorian will make a move. She feels her face crumple, helpless to stop an unexpected, wrenching sob.

  “Lydia, what is it?” Dorian puts his hand over hers.

  “I’ll have a martini,” she rasps to the waiter.

  “Perrier,” Dorian orders and the waiter bustles off. “Lydia, what—?”

  “Ray makes me a martini every evening after work.”

  “… you’re missing him.”

  “That and …”

&nb
sp; “Everything?”

  “Everything.”

  Dorian takes her hand in his, lifts it, kisses it. He says what he’s sure is a lie: “It’s going to be all right.”

  “I’m frightened, Dorian.”

  “You think I’m not?”

  “I’m old—”

  “You’re not.”

  “—too old for this.” Lydia lets go her hand, fumbles in her bag, lifts a Kleenex. The waiter returns—unhelmeted—and places tiny mats and their drinks on the table with the kind of studied gravity of an extra in a play.

  Dorian watches her dab at her eyes, feels the weight of the moment. “I’m an alcoholic, did you know?” he says, turning from the departing waiter to his Perrier.

  “I know.”

  “Briony?”

  “She got one of your Twelve-Step letters.”

  “In which I apologize for all my manifold sins.”

  “I didn’t get one.”

  “I didn’t know where to find you.”

  Lydia examines the mascara streaks on the Kleenex with distaste, pockets the thing. “I’m not sure that’s true.”

  “Women marry, change their names—”

  “Briony married, changed her name. I married. I didn’t change mine.”

  “Would a letter have been sufficient?”

  “I don’t know, Dorian. I really don’t. It’s not like you’ve not crossed my thoughts over the years.” Lydia sniffs, fumbles into her bag again. “But I try to think of times … you know, before …”

  Dorian watches her lift something from her bag, not another Kleenex, but a tiny bottle—hand sanitizer. She opens it, splashes gel on her hands. There’s compulsion in this. He senses it. He knows the feeling. He can smell the alcohol wafting from the sanitizer and the alcohol wafting from her glass and the aroma affects him powerfully. He has a sudden yearning to grab the martini glass and gulp down its contents, order another and another and another until memory is obliterated.

  “I’m editing a book about the sixties at the moment,” Lydia continues, recovered a little, replacing the bottle in her bag.