She didn’t mention he was fun, that she’d never laughed so much.
Martha was quiet. Reflective. Becky prayed really hard for a bullseye.
Security phoned and announced that the doctor had been cleared. Becky started decluttering Martha’s bed. “He was a dreamer,” she said, still feeling Martha watching her. And then came the knock at the door.
During a stolen lunch in her own study, Becky phoned Apoonatuk and disinvited him as token male at the all-gal gathering that night. He’d only been asked to cover Part One—drinks—as he was on his way to a charity event at the Westin, but she wanted to let him know there would be fallout for inviting her father on the show to ambush Greg and quiz him about the supernatural stock market crash. Apoonatuk protested—playing up the humanizing optics of the segment. Becky didn’t touch that one.
Then she tried phoning her father again. She left a message this time. “Hi Dad, Becky here, you were in fine form this morning, love to talk to you.” She ate some celery, picked at the Gouda, and peeled the skin off her gala apple and devoured it.
Her cell rang, she saw it was Glenn and she answered. “Hi Dad, it’s about—”
“Are you calling to give me shit too?” he started. “Your goddamn mother, the goddamn assholes at your goddamn husband’s PMO, they’re PO’d, and since when do I have to kiss everybody’s holy asses to get permission to speak in this country? Last time I voted, this was a free country with free freedom of speech.”
“Dad, calm down.”
“The hell! Here I was trying to do your goddamn husband a favour, maybe insert some family into his campaign, why in hell he doesn’t get you out there with your legs and your looks is beyond me, and those cute kids, and the little South American one too, and the whole global financial system is on life support, and your husband’s lackeys are phoning me and fucking lecturing me right and left and—I’m not donating one fucking cent to this illegitimate turkey called the Conservative Party of Canada. And I’m not shutting up. You’ve never picked the right man, Becky. Your heart’s in your—”
Becky heard her mother in the background, yelling at him to stop, just stop.
The line went dead.
At the party that evening, Becky noticed there was a moment when both sides of the room were engaged in discussing the American election. The corporate wives were exchanging tidbits about Cindy McCain and rumours of a lover and also about Sarah Palin and the nasty interviewing techniques of a certain female anchor.
“Why didn’t she just interrogate Sarah about Dostoyevsky?” demanded a thrice-married high-tech mogul’s wife.
“One of the oligarchs,” deciphered a Cegep-graduated figure skater.
Meanwhile, the hockey wives were full of admiration for Michelle Obama and her Target and Toledo wardrobe mash-up, intermingled with knowing comments about Barack Obama’s tight butt and cerebral sexiness. “His brain goes right to my clit,” said one, setting them all howling.
They seemed to have completely forgotten that their hostess’s husband was battling for his own return to office. But that didn’t bother Becky. It was something she’d laugh about with Greg on the phone before turning in. That’s Cana-dumb for you, she’d say. So busy gawking on the front porch, anyone could come in the back and rob the place blind.
The women spilled through the main floor, waltzing between the dining and living rooms, and pieces of epic Canadian art and outdated floral drapes resembling castoffs from Buckingham Palace. For Becky, it was a bit like home, before Ottawa, when a house party meant a keg in the back of the truck and a group howl at the moon. Mi casa es su casa. Yes. And the pitchers of mom-jitos, the recipe her mixologist had concocted, were going down swimmingly.
All Becky had to do was relax and mingle and foster goodwill among the insipid women. The boys had worked with the tutor and were now off at violin with an aide-de-camp. Martha was resting. Dr. Cambridge had spent considerable time with her, even asking Becky to leave the room for a few minutes, and she’d advised Becky to let Martha stay in bed and skip her internship the next day. If it was Norwalk, it was mild. When Becky had pressed and asked for a firm diagnosis, the doctor said she’d know better tomorrow. She spoke of a swab. “All will declare itself,” she’d said with a shake of her stethoscope.
Lise, as she always did, worked the rooms, the main hall and the corridors. Outfitted in a sizzling golden shalwar kameez, vintage, a gift from the current president of PEN International and one of Mahatma Gandhi’s descendants, she went on a spree of hugs and flesh kisses, posing under Pachter’s iconic flag portrait on the entry stairway, complimenting highlights and new geometric cuts, laughing too forcefully at their jokes, tearing up at a confidence, dragging the Indonesian transgendered chef in to praise the mango-cilantro prawns. She cradled the sweet six-week-old infant, Tiramisu, conceived out of wedlock in a Tuscan villa; nobody knew if it was a boy or a girl. She remembered everything the women had ever implied and shared raunchy confessions about René’s adventures in the acting trade and his day of shooting with, yes, Penélope Cruz! No, they didn’t embrace, merci, mon Dieu. Corporal Shymanski, with his limp, shadowed the GG and Becky noticed that he needed to shave. She was relieved that Martha was in quarantine.
Lise kept avoiding Becky, or so it seemed to her, bare shoulder inclined a little the other way, gaze aimed at Becky’s forehead rather than her eyes. Out of nowhere, though, while Becky was in the midst of inviting the first line forward’s main squeeze to a prayer brunch, Lise pried her aside, steering her into the stainless steel kitchen.
“Lise”—Becky singsonged her name so she wouldn’t sound snarky—”I’m just about to start the movie.”
“It has to wait,” Lise said.
“I’ve wangled a screener, and it’s the singalong version.” This was courtesy of Tory allies at the New York PR firm, the ones who’d coached her in how not to cry and who’d put Greg so uniquely on Broadway.
“Un moment,” Lise insisted.
Becky tried to keep cool. Everybody knew that guests hated it when their hostess abandoned them—the backlash could play out passive-aggressively in the deposit column.
Lise planted herself against the huge Fisher & Paykel refrigerator morgue in the industrial kitchen, swishing the staff out into the pantry. In the glittering Indian garb, offset by her gorgeous caffe latte skin, against the steel backdrop, she resembled a glorious animation dropped into a technological wasteland.
“We need damage control, tout de suite,” Lise said sharply. “Do you know what he’s just done?”
“Who?” asked Becky, though she knew instantly exactly whom Lise was talking about.
“The PM. Quebec.”
“What?” said Becky. She’d spoken to Greg just before the arrival of the first guests and updated him about Martha’s flu, and how Martha would have to cancel a few campaign stops with him.
“He’s denigrated the arts. He’s said the majority—”
Becky tingled.
“—the majority of Canadians don’t give two cents about ballet and opera and esoteric literature and don’t want to subsidize it for the pleasure of the elites.”
Becky’s first thought was, He’s right. Her second thought was, Minority, minority, minority, minority, minority.
“You can imagine what’s happening. The artists in Quebec are very upset, the First Nations are upset—it’s all about culture, identity. A few of the anglo artists—the Ghost of Peter Gzowski cult, the Ghomeshi gang and a couple others, also on the blogs—all furious. Culture is subsidized, identity is subsidized—why has he done this?”
“I had nothing to do with it,” Becky said.
“And the ArtsCAN! Our gala! How can I work with you as co-chair? Where is my credibility as Governor General working with you on this?” Lise’s eyes were wide. “What are you going to do?”
Becky thought about it—the carefully cultivated list of corporate sponsors and spouses, all delighted to be rubbing anything with Greg, with her, and the Canadia
n luminaries who had fled the shallow Canadian turtle dish and become fast-swimming, sleepless celebrity sharks in the translucent global ocean. The waste of money, relationships and months of strategy.
Becky spoke carefully. “Mamma Mia! I’m starting the movie. Then I’m going to call my husband. Can you stay with the gals?”
Lise nodded. “Make him feex eet.”
Becky punched in the lock code for the swimming pool. It had been the same for years: 1217, December 17, Mackenzie King’s birthday. She pulled out her BlackBerry and plunked down on the end of a chaise longue. Steam rose from Mila’s Jacuzzi and she knew she was barely visible to security. So be it. She needed to be somewhere she wouldn’t be disturbed.
She punched Greg’s direct number and received his voice mail. “It’s Becky,” she said. “The kids are fine. Call me ASAP.”
She stared out the window into the dusk. The garden was just about under cover of darkness now, with the last stalks starting to rot from the root.
She called Doc.
“Becky.” Clipped, Mr. Importante.
“Give me the leader.”
“He’s with Chief.”
“Interrupt.”
“No can do.”
“Not good enough.”
Pause.
“All I can do is give him the message—”
“Get him!”
Pause.
“We’re coming in for a landing here in Winnipeg. Have to end. The pilot’s waving at me—”
Becky knew that pilot, the congenial Trenton commander. “Doc.”
The phone went dead.
She was about to call Greg back and leave a caustic version of her original message when somebody appeared at the pool entrance. Silhouetted and in uniform, he wasn’t anyone she recognized from the 24 Sussex staff. She had the insane feeling that she was in danger. She eyed a kayak paddle glistening on the deck six feet away. The boys hadn’t put it away again. Here was the sting: an official residence full of inebriated guests singing an ABBA hit with the Governor General and here she was, far from the literally madding crowd, by a roiling hot tub haunted by the ghosts of prime ministers’ families past, with unnurtured children, and the lonely, loyal, preoccupied wives. Security was anywhere but upon her. Oh, for the cojones of Madame Chrétien.
Then she realized from the man’s gait, as he walked toward her, that it was Corporal Shymanski.
“Madame Leggatt.”
“Corporal Shymanski. What are you doing here? How did you get in?”
“The door—it was unlocked.”
Becky stared at him, supremely ill at ease. “It locks automatically.”
“Martha gave me the code.”
She was supposed to have the indelible upper hand, the authority of her husband’s office as chief executive of the dominion, but she didn’t. She felt violated, even threatened. “I need to get back,” she said. “My guests.”
“I am wondering how Martha is.”
“She’s sick.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“She’s probably got a virus. We all have to keep washing our hands. Take one of my party favours when you leave.” Becky got to her feet then, and moved past the paddleboards and mini-kayak. “I’ve packed little pocket-size dispensers. Rosemary and lavender. So soothing.”
Corporal Shymanski stepped in front of her.
Becky made herself taller, using some of the Mountain pose techniques—pushing the balls of her feet, in her high heels, against the tiles, pressing on the inside of her thighs, pretending there was a string, make that steel wire, lifting the crown of her head to the low ceiling.
“It was you who transferred me to Her Excellency.”
Becky’s voice was measured, calm. “You should not be addressing me. This is inappropriate.”
“It’s important.”
“You’re out of line, sir.”
“We both care about her.”
“Her Excellency?”
“Martha.”
“Corporal, the conversation is over and you’re out of here.”
“Elle est enceinte.”
Becky heard, Elle est a saint.
“She’s pregnant.”
Becky couldn’t breathe. This couldn’t possibly be happening. Yet, like the illustrations in the Christian pop-up books she still read to Pablo, events of the past weeks sprang from the page like a giant Noah’s Ark, or Burning Bush, so to speak: her knowledge of their relationship, Martha throwing up, the secrecy, her questions about Becky’s love life—all loomed, leered, waggled their collective misery at her, sticking out of the flat, uniform, linear, orderly and distinguished progress of her constructed life.
“That’s a lie,” Becky said.
It was hard not to recollect Corporal Shymanski’s record in Kandahar at the Provincial Reconstruction Team and his heroic work with Lieutenant-Colonel Aisha K. She didn’t know much about him, but in a way she didn’t have to: they kept him close in Ottawa and that told her just about everything she needed to know. He was a boyish young man, desperate to reconnect with normalcy, and he had targeted her very young, serious, just-about-married-to-Jesus daughter. They’d been together or in close proximity all the hot summer. She had to tell Greg what had gone down; she could not possibly tell Greg.
“That is why the doctor is coming back tomorrow,” Shymanski said. “Tonight, Martha’s thinking about what to do. She needs your support. We need it.”
“You were supposed to take care of her, not pass on Stockholm Syndrome.”
“She is eighteen, Madame Leggatt.”
“Don’t tell me my own daughter’s age.” Becky pushed him. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, sir. We have never had this conversation.”
After the guests had ebbed away, singing “Money, Money, Money,” and Corporal Shymanski had escorted Lise back across the street to 1 Sussex Drive, and Pablo had woken from a nightmare about that book he hadn’t read, The Giver, Becky checked in on Martha.
She was sitting up in her bed with her sketchbook across her knees. She’d drawn a unicorn and was adding shadings to its very pointy horn.
“I spoke to Corporal Shymanski,” Becky said.
“I know,” Martha said.
“Why didn’t you tell me about him?”
“I didn’t want him discharged.”
“You kept on seeing each other after the transfer?”
“Yes. He was on afternoon shift at Rideau Hall, so we’d meet on my lunch hours.”
“To do—?”
“Just walking. On the Hill or down by the locks.”
Becky sat down on the edge of the bed. “It’s not the flu, is it?”
Martha fixed her steady gaze on Becky’s face. Then she opened her bedside drawer and passed Becky the pregnancy test wand, two blue lines, the aroma of pale urine steeped in Jamieson multivitamin, the assurance of health.
Becky couldn’t help herself. “This is very serious. This is a crossroad.” She wrapped her daughter in her arms and didn’t think she could ever let go. This was one fucking epic maternal fail.
“I love him, Mom,” Martha said over Becky’s shoulder. “He’s a good person. He’s been through so much.”
“He should have worn a condom.”
“I wouldn’t let him.”
“Oh my God, Martha,” Becky said.
“I wanted to give him pure love. Who else is going to love him with one leg?”
“Terry Fox had one leg!” Becky let go of her. “Everyone adored him! He could have had any girl in the country! And their mothers too.”
“This is different. And Taylor may have PTSD.”
“It doesn’t mean you’re under any obligation to love him, honeybee. You’re just eighteen. This is your first—relationship. Your first obligation is to love yourself. To figure out what love even is, for God’s sake!”
“That’s not Christian, Mom.”
“Oh, yes it is. Jesus had terrific boundaries.”
“Christia
nity is about sacrifice. That’s what Dad says.”
Martha was tucked into her pink pyjamas with her hair tied up in a tight topknot. It didn’t seem possible that she could have had intercourse in the underbrush with a one-legged military Mountie. It would have been beyond Becky’s capability or empathy, at age eighteen, to make love with a physically challenged man.
“I do love him, Mom. But I don’t want to have a baby.”
Becky took her daughter’s hand.
“Not right now. Not yet. He’s not ready.”
Becky was ashamed at the relief flooding through her total Beckyhood. She wanted to walk her fingers up Martha’s back and croon “Itsy Bitsy Spider.” Becky wasn’t hearing marriage, nor vaunted motherhood, and so she had finally found her window to fix this problem. “It’s about you, honeybee,” she said. “You first.” But she also knew it had a lot to do with Greg.
It was midnight when Becky threw on jeans, poncho, Roots cap, boots, boy glasses, all to hide her ginger-ness, and told security, “Car.”
Greg had not returned her call. She couldn’t stay in the house another second. When she was younger, just after she got her driver’s licence, she’d borrow her mother’s Honda Civic and head out on the country roads, the radio loud, Top 40, button-drunk, always pushing toward the next hit, any way she could get her autocratic father out of her head.
In Ottawa she was imprisoned, tethered like a Clydesdale.
It took only a few minutes to drive past seemingly quiet embassies—the U.K., France, Saudi Arabia. She turned the corner by Maman, the huge and ghastly metal spider outside Martha’s National Gallery of Art, past the newer U.S. embassy, which insisted itself upon the city like an armed fortress. Past Revenue Canada. Past the Governor General’s private entrance at the Château Laurier, with its ominous fading grandeur. She steered through the heart of the National Capital Region, the War Memorial, the Peace Tower, and she caught sight of the very human-sized sculpture of Terry Fox, with his own prosthetic toothpick. She cursed.
All the way down stately Elgin until the city became a neighbourhood, with laundromats, nail salons, barber shops and shawarma parlours. She parked the car by a fire hydrant and tucked into the diner, which was busy with a few post-clubbers and locals. She took a booth at the back and hid behind the brontosaurus-sized vinyl menu. She ordered the mac and cheese, and pulled out her BlackBerry. If she could have, she would have driven to Toronto and then carried on to Niagara Falls, over the border, and disappeared.
Sussex Drive: A Novel Page 7