“Hi.” Lennie gave one of her lucid glances and resumed her study of the sky, sunlight through her fingers as they formed a cat’s cradle, or a pentaprism; maybe Lenore, the grey-eyed observer, will become a photographer.
“Whatcha doin’?”
“Nothin’.”
Suzanne sat beside her and began to finger through the grass, searching for a four-leaf clover. Green is complicated by blue and yellow and red. Colour was making Suzanne anxious. She didn’t know if her unease with colour photography was the result of good taste or a complete lack of talent. Her colour photographs often failed — they were pictures of things, unless she manipulated the filters till the subject morphed in a hallucinatory way. That flinty little critic Walmsley was probably right: her voodoo on film is pretentious.
Part of the show in August would be another series of staged images with lamps and gobos and filters on her lenses. She’d hired an actor and photographed him in a trench coat, against paintings, a diorama of an alley or a highway, climbing a rise to a crossroads with a watercolour sky ahead of him, away from her, his face hidden. It was important to her that he be an actor.
Of course these are photographs of John. Emmett has figured that out, she knows, and she feels rather awed at the largesse of Emmett’s love.
In a subseries for the show, the actor’s face is revealed, heavily made up with a thick layer of white powder and the high, startled eyebrows of the geisha. In other portraits the actor wears more conventionally glamorous makeup, slanting eyeliner and false eyelashes and so on, his lips painted a red that looks black in the photograph. Who are these people, who are they meant to be? No one. A proliferation of empty wishes.
She’d like to develop more natural portraits of Lennie, but Lennie said she’d take her soul. Lennie permitted Emmett to take her picture; she’d even sit still for him. But if Suzanne went anywhere near her daughter with a camera in her hand, Lennie vanished like a little animal down a hole. Suzanne didn’t want the blundering power that she held over her daughter; her maternal force was like an overdeveloped muscle, like a Charley horse.
She knew she’d spoiled Lennie’s fantasizing. Even the westward clouds lose fluidity, do they? When a mother comes around? “Want some lunch before we go to the landing?”
Lenore gave her a look that said, Must you bother me with lowly matters?
“Cucumber sand-wishes.” Her little girl’s word for sandwich and, judging by the disdainful response, out of date. Suzanne ran a hand down Lennie’s shin to her ankle. “How about a swim first. It’s hot.”
“A swim?”
“See if your new bathing suit works.”
A temptation. Lennie rewarded her mother with a smile for an okay try at a joke. She took a last look at outer space. Angel-time being over, she had to get back to the land of the living. She got up, dizzy, and said, “I like it when I can see the whole planet.”
Suzanne didn’t know what Lennie meant, but her heart leapt. Lennie let her kiss the sunny top of her head.
Chapter Four
Now that Emmett knew that the surveillance had been ongoing for ten years, he could never trust his privacy again. And knowing now that his son James was under surveillance, he needed to get to Japan, as if seeing the boy was the same as protecting him, a sort of magic thinking.
From his window, across his darkened lawn when he went down to turn off the lights at night, he’d think he’d seen someone, a shadow crossing the driveway, dodging behind the garage, a small figure, impossible even to tell if it was a man or a woman. Perhaps a mirage. If he went outside, of course the shadow disappeared, absorbed into the leafy back lane.
Norfield’s reappearance had been unsettling, reawakening a friendship, or love. Emmett hadn’t told Suzanne about the deal John had made with the RCMP, the exchange of his freedom for theirs. She’s upset. Better that she thinks that Norfield is in Russia. She’s high-strung. She can’t handle it, thinking John has harmed himself for their sake, thinking he’s accessible, that he might show up again, surprise them. It was time — not to let go of their past but to let it change meaning; let the past become foreign.
Emmett was thirty-nine years old. The world he’d gone to war for, and the post-war world he’d once been convinced he understood better than most men, was both banal and insane. The Russians had recently tested the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missiles, preparing for long-range nuclear rocket strikes, playing a game of catch-up with the Americans in a race to blow up the planet.
A Conservative, John Diefenbaker, was now prime minister, elected with a strong majority last winter, and Diefenbaker’s band of earnest oddballs was running things in Ottawa. Diefenbaker was incoherent on the arms race. Emmett wondered if he was crazy. He’d met crazy leaders before — General MacArthur came to mind — though Diefenbaker was Canadian-crazy, un-heroic crazy, tormented by fear and envy of President Kennedy.
Emmett tried to talk to Bill Masters about Prime Minister Diefenbaker. “These Bomarc missiles,” he said to Bill over lunch. “You know that Dief is prepared to arm them with nuclear warheads?”
Bill was eating a hamburger. He nodded, sure he knew that.
“Paid for by the Americans,” Emmett continued, “who are instructing us to store them here, where we’ll be targets for a first strike by the Russians.”
Bill took a slug of Orange Crush. It was noon, he wasn’t having a drink, doctor’s orders. “We need defence,” said Bill. “We’re gonna need a hell of a lot more than the Bomarc missiles if there’s a nuclear war.”
There were more than Bomarc missiles. Diefenbaker was making verbal commitments to store American nuclear missiles in Labrador and Newfoundland. The US pressed Diefenbaker to agree to store atomic bombs along with anti-submarine nuclear warheads. Canada would be the battlefield of a nuclear World War Three, a quick bright battlefield in a war that everyone on earth would lose in a matter of minutes. The world would burn to ash, nothing would survive, neither root nor branch, this was a fact of every Canadian’s strangely dull existence in 1959.
Chapter Five
At 4:25 on a summery Friday afternoon, Emmett’s secretary asked to be let go early; her husband was picking her up so they could go to Kingston for the long weekend. Emmett told her to go, and she sweetly wished him a good holiday next week, telling him she’d “hold the fort.” He could hear the voices of people well-wishing as they fled the building, a peaceful, glad evacuation, and he stood at the window watching them rush out into summer.
With everyone gone, the offices were provocatively quiet, waxy and gleaming, and he felt excited to find himself quite alone in the citadel. He didn’t have to hurry; Suzanne had said she’d keep Lennie up late for the boat ride to the landing to pick him up. He took a key from his trouser pocket and unlocked his desk drawer where he kept his lovely little Minox in its leather wallet, small enough to fit in the palm of his hand. He stroked its cool surface and slipped it into his pocket.
He was agitated and decided to go for a fast walk downstairs and run back up again before finishing the paperwork on his desk. He was on his way down when he encountered Prime Minister Diefenbaker on his way up.
“Good day.”
“Oh. Hello, sir.”
The stairwell was empty. The prime minister pivoted, one foot on the upper stair, and said, “Say.”
“Sir?”
“I read your memo.”
“Thank you —”
Diefenbaker raised his hand to indicate, No need. It was almost unbelievable that this particular prime minister would read a memo by staff. Diefenbaker distrusted the civil service. But he said, “This Vietnamese character — President Diem — ”
“Yes, sir.”
“The Vietnamese aren’t happy with him.”
“Nobody is, Mr. Prime Minister.”
“So you say, so you say —”
He had read it. Emmett waited.
Finally, Diefenbaker said, “The Americans are backing the wrong horse!” He chuckl
ed.
“That might well be the case in this instance, sir.”
Then Diefenbaker added in a confiding, conspiratorial tone, “I’m thinking of inviting Khrushchev for a visit.”
Emmett held his pose, thinking that he must surely be joking.
But Diefenbaker continued, “It’ll show that son of a bitch Kennedy, we’re not some crushed satellite he can kick around.”
Emmett blinked, trying to reconcile this with Diefenbaker’s recent eagerness to store the Americans’ nuclear warheads at Goose Bay.
“You like the idea, young fellow?” Emmett was casting about for an answer when Diefenbaker suddenly asked, “How is your wife?”
“My wife? She’s well. Thank you.”
Diefenbaker turned his back and began to climb the stairs. “Give her our kind regards, will you?”
Our kind regards. His and his wife Olive’s kind regards. There was not a snowball’s chance in hell Diefenbaker even knew Suzanne’s name. Pearson did. The McCallum tribe was Liberal. Emmett slowly descended the stairs. He felt lightheaded; he lived in a place without any atmosphere. A man has to fight hard to find purchase in this country. He was floating aimlessly through space, turning and turning in the zero gravity of his quiescent land.
Lennie and Suzanne were sitting in the boat at the landing when he drove up and parked. He kissed his wife, apologizing for being late, but he could see that she was so distracted as to not really be here. He kissed Lenore, who was sitting on the engine cover wearing her pyjamas and a white canvas life jacket. A still night. Mars shivering in the black water.
She piloted them to the cottage, a faint mist rising as the lake cooled, the throaty rumble of the engine giving them an excuse not to talk. They docked and tied up, and Suzanne carried his duffle bag so he could carry Lennie, and still they didn’t speak.
Suzanne made hot chocolate. Emmett put a bit of rum in hers and a lot of rum in his. They took it to the veranda, Lennie amazed at being out of bed at this hour, breaking the silence. “I’m going to be ten someday,” she announced defensively, “and thirteen. When I’m a grown-up, I can do whatever I want.”
“You’ve never been as old as you are this second,” he said.
Lennie’s grey eyes widened. “It’s because of all the light hitting us.” She looked out the black window. “How can I get older when it’s night out?” Suzanne gave a giddy laugh. Lennie went on, answering herself. “Because I’ve got light inside.”
Now that it was possible to speak, he told Suzanne that he’d had a conversation with the prime minister a few hours ago, adding that Diefenbaker had sent his and Olive’s kind regards. She said, “That’s nice,” and she nestled into her wicker settee.
He drank his rummy chocolate. Suzanne had assumed the prime minister would know her. He said, “It wasn’t entirely nice.”
“Why?”
He tried to resist the urge to hurt her feelings. He was tired, tired of being Sisyphus, pushing the stone uphill, performing incremental work. She was at home, she’d never known anything but home. He’d let her have everything she wanted, and tonight he felt tired and resentful and frightened and sick of it. Frightened of the possibility of nuclear war, very frightened that he couldn’t protect them, frightened that whatever he had done to redeem the value of his life, to make his existence extraordinary, it wouldn’t matter, his courage and ambitions were an inconvenience to her, she needed him to do nothing more than be the banal facilitator of her pleasant life, the one she got instead of John Norfield. He was a servant. He realized that he was scalding mad.
“What did the prime minister actually say ?” Suzanne asked.
“He read my memo.”
“No,” she said, “I mean about us?”
Lennie got out of her chair and stood on one leg, her cup of hot chocolate in her two hands. She was beginning to bristle, starting up her almost invisible fibrillation.
“I could do — I could,” he waved his cup, then drained it, “do some good work.”
“You could do some good work how?” Abruptly alert, she added, “Where?”
“Oh, I don’t know, how about Asia? Not that it’s my specialty.”
“No married men. That’s the policy. You’re going to have to divorce me.”
Lennie put both feet on the floor.
He said, “No.” Then to Lennie, “I won’t.”
Lennie was visibly trembling now. Suzanne told her to go brush her teeth and she’d come to tuck her in. “Go,” she repeated. When she was gone, Suzanne said, “You want to see Aoi. You want to see your other family. You fret about your son. Don’t think I don’t know how you feel.”
“Let’s drop it for tonight,” he said.
She repeated her question, what exactly did the prime minister say?
“He thought you might want to help me host a state visit from Khrushchev.”
“Me?”
“Why not? Cook him a fancy dinner. Show his wife around Parliament Hill.”
Suzanne threw her head back, exposing her throat. “Oh my god, that’s so crazy.”
She’d started to laugh, but she’d also started to cry. It surprised him, his anger toppled and subsided. He went to sit beside her and put his thumb to the corner of her eye to feel her tears.
“Are you serious?” she asked. “Diefenbaker wants to invite Khrushchev and we’d have to entertain?” She was sobbing with laughter.
He laughed too, his tired eyes stinging, and he said, “We’re the perfect couple.” He stroked her hair.
“Everybody would be so happy to believe we’re communists,” she said, weeping and laughing. “They’d finally understand us.”
“Do you want everyone to understand us?” he asked. “What do you want?”
She jumped a little, a guilty, involuntary, wall-eyed shying from him. “Nothing. I want” — she waved at the room — “this. You.”
“I could be useful,” he said quietly. “I can see things clearly.” She looked startled, he thought, as if threatened. In the memo that Diefenbaker had actually read, he’d written that President Diem was a disaster and couldn’t hold out much longer. He’d written that the Vietcong were a national movement in Vietnam and that they’d win from inside the South. Now he said to Suzanne almost lazily, feeling the rum sweeten his fatigue, “The South Vietnamese support the Vietcong communists. There’s going to be a coup in Vietnam.”
He watched her face fall. “A coup,” she repeated. “Did you tell the prime minister there’s going to be a coup?”
“Everybody knows it.”
“Emmett,” Suzanne said slowly, “will he think that you got this information from some kind of inside source?”
“A spy?” He whispered, “I got it from The Globe and Mail.”
“You did not.”
“I read between the lines.”
“Tell me. How do you know what’s going on with the communists in Vietnam?”
“It’s my job, it’s what I do.”
“Who do you talk to?”
“I have lunch every day with a mysterious representative of the International Ladies Garment Workers.”
“I’m serious.”
“So is she.” He put his hand where her shirt opened at the collar, pulled at the strap of her bra, and felt a rush of desire. “Hanoi is taking over the insurgency from the southern communists. It’s war. China’s involved, Russia’s involved. The Americans will be bombing the place one day soon.”
Warily she asked, “Where’d you hear that?”
“In an American tabloid.”
“Where did you get it?”
“I subscribe.”
“At the Department?”
“I told the prime minister that any attempt at military victory over the communists in Vietnam is going to fail.”
“You told the prime minister that the communists are going to take Vietnam.”
“They will.”
“He’ll fire you.”
He liked that she understood that
much; it was strangely true in Canada, in mimicry of the situation in the US, that any man reckless enough to contemplate the possibility of a victory for communism anywhere on earth was considered disloyal. But Diefenbaker couldn’t fire a civil servant. He tugged at her bra strap. “He can’t,” he told her. “I’m non-partisan.”
She laughed again more calmly and began to fool with his hair, one of her habits, trying to make it curl around her finger. “Tell me really. How do you know all this stuff?”
He said, “I’m not all by myself in my great wisdom.”
“Emmett, baby,” she breathed, “are you happy?”
He took her cup to put it on the floor, she leaned forward to run her hand down his spine and then up around his neck. He was thinking that he’d have one more drink and then he would make love to his wife, he’d make love, he’d make sex, he murmured into her hair, “I’d like to take you to bed,” and looked toward the lamplight reflected in the window where he saw Lenore, so it was at first unclear to him whether she was inside or outside looking in.
Lenore, pale, puppet-straight, shot him her dire stare.
He heard Suzanne’s lips pluck apart. Lennie’s attention dropped to the floor for a second, then back to his face. It was enough, this fracture, this momentary show of self-consciousness, to release in him a hot surge of contempt. He bellowed, “Don’t sneak around!”
Lennie was out of the room before he finished the sentence, Suzanne rushing after her, hissing, “Asshole!”
Alone he went to the kitchen and poured rum into Suzanne’s cup, drinking where her lipstick remained. There was nowhere to go in his wife’s cottage. He was too drunk to go swimming. Out on the water, he heard the chittering love talk of a pair of otters, a party, he and Suzanne had once said, watching them twine each other in moonlight one summer long past. An innocent desire that eluded him, lowly consort to the Ice Queen.
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