Paul Is Dead

by C. C. Benison

  And now Dorian catches his first glimpse of Eadon Lodge—a flash of white through a scrim of green, wrought by a glint of sunlight. His heartbeat quickens and it’s just enough to take his attention from his driving. The gravel road ends abruptly and the car bounces on a hummocky belt of grass, corduroyed by ancient embedded tire tracks. The road this far north was a mud track forty years ago—Dorian’s certain that’s true—but the crude parking lot has undergone no improvement. And here they are, as they were forty years ago—he gasps to see them again—Goliath’s molars (as named by Bibs in a rare flight of fancy)—three great flat Tyndall-stone boulders that demarcated the border of the once-isolated Eadon property.

  Dorian steps from the air conditioning to the moist grassy heat of the afternoon. He glances back down the road to the new properties. The last, on the beach side, one he must have glimpsed during the water shoot the other week, has a FOR SALE sign. He remembers nothing there but forest forty years ago. And forest on the other side. Forest, forest, forest, bisected by a crude track. He jerks around to glimpse Mark past the roof of the Lexus. The air pixilates suddenly. He is falling, fainting. He grips the edge of the open door and takes a ragged breath.

  “Dorian?” He can hear an edge of anxiety in Mark’s voice. “Are you all right?”

  “Vertigo.” Dorian struggles to sound assured. “I’m fine.”

  He’s not. The rocks, the trees, the air, the aroma, everything is suddenly synesthetic—the air colours, the plants speak, the rocks smell—and he is filled with unspeakable dread. He is once again with Paul, parked on this very spot, under these very trees on a very hot August afternoon. He is once again looking at Paul over the roof of the Volkswagen, brimming with lust and excitement and apprehension. He is once again on the brink of adventure.

  “Just give me a minute,” he says to Mark, who has moved to open the trunk and is fetching his bag with his swimsuit and towel.

  “Do you want your stuff, Dorian?” Mark lowers the trunk lid. “Dorian? Are you sure you’re okay.”

  “I am fucking fine. Shut up. Yes, get me my bag.”

  He’s better. He just had a moment, that’s all—a wobble, a wonky bit, though Mark takes his arm and says with a snicker, “C’mon, old man” and Dorian snaps, “Watch it!” They proceed past the molars down a path beaten through a curtain of trees onto a patch of sunlit lawn, and there, shimmering in the muggy air, as though seen through a camera lens smeared with Vaseline, is Eadon Lodge.

  22

  Dorian lights another cigarette and drags deeply. He can’t bear to go into the cottage just yet.

  “Not much has changed,” he remarks to Lydia, exhaling a feather of smoke. Aimless conversation. Mark is within earshot, though squinting at his iPhone in in a patch of shade. They are gathered on the front lawn. Still.

  “The yard’s changed,” Lydia says. “Some of the big trees are gone. A windstorm in the eighties, I think. Many of these are new, fast-growing ash or willow. You’ll have to take a look behind the cottage.” She telegraphs him a warning glance.

  “Later, perhaps,” Dorian returns the glance knowingly and addresses Mark. “Are you going for a swim?”

  “Yes.” Mark draws the word out sulkily.

  “Then,” he murmurs, glancing again at the cottage, at the screen door so ably, so fatally, oiled all those years ago by Alan, “I guess we should go in and change. Are you … joining us?” he adds to Lydia.

  She shakes her head as if the idea were abhorrent. It is abhorrent. Reliving the jolly old trek to the beach? Please, no.

  “Lydia can give us a quick tour first,” Dorian says to Mark, looking for a place to toss his half-finished cigarette and girding his loins. “Eadon Lodge is … unique.”

  “I’m selling it,” Lydia says to Mark as she leads the way to the steps.

  “Oh?” Mark says.

  “I live in California—”

  “Dorian was saying.”

  “—so it doesn’t make sense to hold on to it.”

  “What a shame. My parents have a cabin at Grand Bend, on Lake Huron. I’d hate for them to sell it.”

  Dorian’s seen pictures of the “cabin.” It’s as grand as the shore it’s on. A grand cabin at Grand Bend. Fashionable, loveable, inheritable. Who could ask for anything more?

  The screen door opens much less noiselessly now, but it’s not important now. He steps in behind Lydia and Mark—steps in as he had, behind Paul, on that August day all those years ago. Christ Jesus. His eyes rove the dining room’s boxcar space. Nothing has changed: the faded oriental rug, the linoleum-topped table, the mint-green chairs. It might be the very same air, the very same dust motes, the very same Pinesol. His eyes go to the wall. There’s his father’s name and date. And, pencilled below, there’s his own. But Paul’s signature has vanished. He runs his fingers along the paint. Yes, he can feel a faint indentation, reverse Braille.

  Lydia and Mark have stepped through the open double doors into the living room. He can hear her giving him the potted history of the cottage that he and Paul had received: grandfather had it built it in nineteen-blah-blah by Icelandic fishermen blah blah blah. The dining room is sunny but the living room lies in cool shadow. Always it was in cool shadow, but who among them, other than Briony, was ever awake early enough to witness the room in morning light?

  Dorian prepares to step into that cool shadow when a sudden, never forgotten, but never replicated sound shoots ice water down his veins. There is no sound like it. There is no sound like the to-and-fro, to-and-fro of wooden rockers weighing on linoleum—not wood, linoleum: scrunchy, squishy, squeaky. Mark or Lydia has set one of the rocking chairs in motion. Surely not Lydia. She must remember Paul collapsing into that rocker, remember the scrunchy, squishy, squeaky sound that eclipsed the dying music from the gramophone.

  Lydia remembers very well, but, oblivious, Mark had perched himself on the wide arm of the grandfather rocker—the very arm on which Paul perched that night—and is absently rocking the chair with his feet. He is looking around like a polite tourist as Lydia describes the provenance of this or that artifact. She can tell he’s not intrigued.

  “Dorian?” she says, and he can hear the urgency in her voice.

  Dorian could use the toilet, though he’s not desperate. Draining the lizard would buy some time, but no corner of Eadon Lodge, including the bathroom, is free of memory. He takes a deep breath.

  “Isn’t it marvellous?” he enthuses, sweeping in, as if from the wings, Vera Charles in Bermuda shorts. Mark is looking out through the sliding windows, past the screen, to the lake. Lydia is standing by the library table. Dorian stops, his eyes drawn helplessly upward.

  The electrolier is gone.

  Dorian suppresses a gasp, sees the warning in Lydia’s eyes. He continues: “It really is a great space. Roomy but somehow cozy. I’d forgotten how quirky it is. Oh, look at the old stove! So great in the evenings, wasn’t it, Lydia? And that old desk! What do you think, Mark?”

  “Yeah, it’s sort of cool.”

  “And all those books. I think book-lined shelves really make a room.”

  Mark flicks him a puzzled glance and rises to examine the books. The rocker rocks. Dorian’s soul shrivels. “Anybody actually read these?”

  “My grandfather did,” Lydia answers Mark’s question.

  “I don’t recognize a single author … or title.”

  “Sic transit gloria,” Dorian says.

  “Is there somewhere I can change?” Mark asks.

  “One of the bedrooms.” Lydia points. Two closed doors stand side by side, framed on the right by the Victrola and on the left by the sideboard. Dorian’s eyes go to the shotgun above.

  “Take the door on the left,” he directs Mark.

  “What’s behind the one on the right?”

  “A scary ghost.”

  Dorian can’t think why he direc
ted Mark to the second bedroom, Briony’s room, as he thinks of it. Something to do with that memory in the car? Of Lydia and him swaddled like cried-out babies on that old iron bedstead in the first bedroom after that terrible night?

  Dorian never subscribed to the hippie mystic-crystal-revelation-and-the-mind’s-true-liberation bilge that Briony did—transcendental meditation and the I Ching and astral travel and all that. But he senses the presence of a fourth in this place. There is a ghost. Paul has slipped past the double doors. Dorian whiffs salty sunbaked skin and a whisper of patchouli, feels a hand feathertouch the small of his back. Without thinking he lets his own hand travel back to greet another’s warm flesh, but of course there’s nothing there. He looks at Lydia. Behind door No. 2 is a progression of undressing noises.

  “The lake seems high.” Dorian says, groping for some camouflaging conversation. “I don’t remember it that way from … before.”

  “It must be higher, yes. Wait till you see the beach here. There’s a lot less of it. I can’t think what will happen if there’s ever a big storm on the lake.”

  “Are you joining me?” Mark’s muffled voice comes over the half-wall.

  “Where?”

  “On the beach, of course.”

  “You go down. You know where it is.”

  “Yes, it borders that large wet thing. A lake is it?”

  “I’ll join you in a minute. What do you think of the bedroom?”

  Mark doesn’t respond. He exits in board shorts and flip-flops with a towel over his arm. All set for a day at the beach. He pushes the Ray-bans down his nose. “Well, are you coming?”

  “In a minute. Give me a minute. Have you got a blanket?”

  “Damn, one’s in the car. Got the keys, Dorian?”

  “Wait.” Lydia steps to the living room’s corner closet containing the linens of decades and pulls out a grey wool blanket, pilfered from the railway her grandfather worked for. “Use this.”

  Together Lydia and Dorian watch the younger man flip-flop to the screen door, his figure silhouetted in the frame. Dorian thinks of his younger self going out that door, towel and blanket in hand, innocent.

  “The squeak’s returned,” Dorian remarks.

  “Tempus fugit.”

  Dorian’s eyes go once again to the shadowy cottage rafters, the array of slats that are the building’s skeleton, to a small cluster of exposed wires at the centre. Lydia eyes follow. He doesn’t have to ask the question. She supplies the answer:

  “I cut it down yesterday. I couldn’t bear to look at it.”

  “What did you do with it?”

  “I dragged it into the lake.” Lydia shivers at the absurdity. She was mad to do it. “I hope your friend doesn’t step on it.”

  Mark steps on it. Actually, when Dorian makes his way to the beach, he sees Mark bent over in the lake, bottom raised, back muscles flanged, straining at something below the water’s surface. It isn’t immediately evident what he is doing.

  Mark waited a while for Dorian on the strip of beach. Tried reading off his phone. Gave up because of sun glare and settled on the scratchy old blanket, resigning himself to the silence broken only, after a while, by the sound of his own pale Vancouver-y flesh sizzling in the tanning oil he’d slathered on. He moved to the water.

  Fuck, it was cold, penis-shrivellingly cold. He looked around, arms hugging his goose-pimpled chest, and pushed tentatively into the featureless lake under the featureless sky, a thin green shimmer in the east the seam. He peered. Land or mirage? Would the line vanish on approach? For a stark second, Mark sensed the agoraphobe’s terror. He turned quickly—to the yellow button in the blue sky, to the white cottage in its foliage frame, to Dorian, not yet in swimsuit, emerging through the screen door, with Lydia, walking, walking, walking, yes, but turning away, around the cottage, to—what direction is that?—north.

  What, he thought, are they doing now? It’s been a peculiar afternoon. “Seen a ghost” is the phrase quick to mind to describe the two old friends meeting at Tergesen’s. Mark watched with wonder the miraculous ebb tide of blood in his lover’s face, the actorly self-possession falter. He watched, too, the advancing woman, rigid with something suppressed. Since, there’s been crackling tension and elusive conversation. Dorian and Lydia have been cat-on-a-hot-tin-roof-y, mommy-and-daddy-have-a-secret-y. Son, sit down. Your mother and I are getting a divorce. Mark scooped a little water onto his shoulder and flinched as the cold streamed down his torso. Lydia: A hint of obsessive-compulsive personality disorder there? That cottage so orderly? Her appearance so immaculate? Maybe. Mark held his nose and plunged his torso into the water. He rocketed out with a gasp and a yowl. The gasp was for the cold. The yowl was for something sharper.

  The electrolier tilts on the lip of wet sand, surreally out of place, like one of those melting watches in that Dali landscape. He shifts on the blanket he’s sharing with Mark to banish sight of the thing but he can still see the deep grooves Mark made dragging it up the beach. He readjusts his body again, closes his eyes.

  No damage to Mark’s feet. Damage, more, to his sensibilities: Where the fuck did that come from?

  Dorian reaches for his bag, for his cigarettes. Mark deciphers the sound and motion. Supine, face shrouded in sunglasses, he appears to address the sky: “You seem to be smoking more these days.”

  “Consider the alternative.”

  “Then smoke over there.” Mark waves his arm vaguely.

  “The breeze is blowing off the lake. Away from you.” Dorian flicks his lighter, draws the smoke into his lungs, glances at the sludgy brown lake he was filming on weeks earlier, notices Mark’s hand crawl across his boyish chest.

  “Should I get my nipples pierced, do you think?”

  “I think you should get plates put in your lips. That’s what all the A-list faggots are doing this year. I read it in The Advocate.”

  “‘Total war’?”

  “‘Total.’”

  “Did you do Virginia Woolf lines with her?”

  “Lydia? Oh, yes. She was my Martha. You’re my Martha now.”

  “Well, aren’t you sweet.” Mark listens to Dorian take another long drag. “Is there something on your mind?”

  “Not really … well, okay.” Dorian pulls one out of a hat. “I was just thinking about a parasailing scene Ethan and I have to do next week.”

  “Ethan…?

  “Elias. The star of Morningstar Cove.”

  “Is he the hot one, the blond? Who wants you to be his daddy?”

  “That’s your little fantasy. He’s the star of the show.”

  “Are you parasailing?”

  “Does this amuse you?”

  “Have you been a good boy while you’ve been here?”

  The question comes almost but not quite, given the daddy thing, out of the blue. “Of course,” Dorian lies. He visited the baths in Winnipeg one weekend. “You?”

  “Likewise,” Mark lies and mourns the lost opportunity—and his feeble courage: This might have been the moment to begin a discussion of their future together, though it’s not as if he’d rehearsed introductory remarks.

  And yet, at this very moment, as Dorian gazes over the lake, on this beach, on this very spot where, long ago, he spent ten transformative days, he is seized by domestic yearning, that Mark should be the last and only. It’s all so clear; it’s not too late. He’d done it before, but the longest, his marriage to Rachel, was born of expediency, of madness, of ambition, of drink, of drugs, of everything false, and there was never any question of being ruled by fidelity.

  Or is he being driven again by expediency? He pushes the thought away, runs his hand over Mark’s arm, feeling the soft hairs. “It’s pleasant here,” he says. “The sun. The heat.”

  “Hardly Cabo.”

  “Well … you wouldn’t want to be in Cabo in the summer, would you?”


  “No, I suppose not … though there’d be endless blue sky at Cabo. Not like Vancouver summers sometimes.”

  “Endless blue sky here.”

  “That lake, though. Freezing!”

  “As opposed to what? Kits Beach?”

  “It’s kind of brown.”

  “Lake Winnipeg? Well, it’s sort of a … a bile duct that strains all the river water around here before it flows north, toward the ocean.”

  “Bile duct—that’s an attractive image.”

  “I thought you’d like it, you being a doctor.”

  “I’m not a doctor who deals with bile ducts.”

  This isn’t going well. Dorian lifts his hand from Mark’s arm and shifts on the blanket, finding himself again with a jolting view of the electrolier on the beach. Planet of the Apes, the final scene: that Statue of Liberty crown poking from the sand. He saw the movie at the old 72nd Street Playhouse, late June 1968—anything to get out of New York’s brutal heat. You maniacs! You blew it up. Goddamn you all to hell! Wondrous. Horrifying. Charleton Heston confronts the terrible truth of the past.

  Dorian raises himself on his elbows, butts the cigarette in the sand out of Mark’s sight. “Lydia’s selling the cottage.”

  “So she said.”