“Look at that,” he said.
“It’s pretty,” she admitted.
As they trudged along, huddled against the cold, people in cars reached cameras out of windows to capture the panorama. He’d brought theirs, and popped off some shots of the gorge and the observation tower, a deck cantilevered from a massive pier like an aborted bridge, beneath which, like a dark veil, hung a safety net.
Halfway across, a wordy plaque marked the border. He wanted a shot of her with a foot in each country, but she relieved him of the camera and had him do it.
“I wasn’t kidding about having to pee.”
“It’s not far,” he promised, hoping they wouldn’t have to wait in line.
He needn’t have worried. There was a pair of restrooms right inside the doors.
“God bless America,” she said.
Waiting for her with his jacket unzipped and passport in hand, he reviewed the possibility of doing things legally. Together they could bring in just under twenty thousand without declaring a cent. They could rent a safe-deposit box and empty it gradually, they just had to be careful not to get greedy. Valentine’s and their anniversary would work perfectly. They could make it a tradition.
“It’s interesting,” she said, once they’d been processed. “There was a big metal amnesty barrel. I was dying to look inside and see what kind of goodies were in there, but there was a lock on it. Imagine the drugs, especially with all the seniors getting their prescriptions there. They probably have to empty it five times a day.”
“I bet they get a fair amount of guns.”
“What about money?”
He shrugged as if it hadn’t crossed his mind.
“I wonder what they do with it all.”
“Destroy it,” he guessed.
“Not the money.”
“I don’t know, maybe they keep it. Maybe they funnel it back into the budget. Everyone’s looking for new revenue streams.”
The view from the American side was of the Canadian skyline, the futuristic sixties towers and bland seventies hotels, a testament to the perils of overdevelopment, doubly unfair, since the view from there was so pristine.
The line for the observation tower was worse than Journey Behind the Falls.
“Sorry,” Marion said, “I’m not doing that. I did that yesterday.”
“I agree. Let’s go see the Falls. Are you hungry at all?”
“I need something.”
They followed the roar to Prospect Point, and stood at the rail, watching the choppy river turn smooth and sea-green before spilling over the lip. Its chilly grandeur was familiar. During his childhood and well into his teenage years, the broadcast day had ended with a patriotic montage including a black-and-white clip from this vantage backed by a crackly rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” a signal that he’d stayed up too late and would regret it the next morning, yet there was a lonely pleasure in it too, knowing you were awake when the rest of the world was sleeping, a quietude as well as a sense of being closer, truer to yourself.
Sweet, false nostalgia, with its insistence on innocence and loss, brought him back to the prospect of amnesty. What, from his past, would he get rid of, if he could?
The obvious, though the idea of erasing those days was like disowning himself. He’d grown so used to running those afternoons over and over in his mind like beloved old movies, anticipating his favorite scenes—pathetic, yet whenever he and Marion weren’t getting along, he retreated into these daydreams as if they still had substance, the ultimate result of which, after so long, was that he himself had less.
What could he do with the past but renounce it? It was worthless in the present—worse, a negative—and made him feel foolish and weak.
“Had enough?” she asked.
“Let’s see if we can get someone to take our picture.”
“Again?”
“Again,” he said.
The nearest person was a stout Middle Eastern woman in a fur coat with Jackie O sunglasses and striped nails. He programmed the camera so all she had to do was press the button.
“Take two, please.”
“Two?”
“One’s enough,” Marion said.
“Two.” He held up two fingers.
He was glad he asked, because while the woman was framing them, another couple stepped between them, ruining the first shot. In the second, Marion was wearing her patient smile, her arm around his waist.
“Is good?” the woman asked.
“It’s good,” he said, giving her a thumbs‑up. “Thank you.”
“What was with the thumb?” Marion asked when they’d headed upstream.
“I was communicating.”
“She spoke English.”
“It never hurts to reinforce a compliment.”
“Like: You are something else,” she said, giving him a thumbs‑up.
He doffed an invisible top hat. “Why thank you.”
The Cave of the Winds complex was shuttered for the winter, meaning the only place to eat on Goat Island was the Top of the Falls Restaurant. They were serving a prix fixe Valentine’s brunch, complete with a tinkling jazz trio, but the entryway was wall‑to‑wall with people holding their coats. The hostess said the wait for a table could be forty minutes to an hour, if they wanted to put their name on the list.
“I’m not waiting an hour,” Marion said.
“Can we eat at the bar?” he tried, a long shot.
“Please, feel free, if you can find a seat.”
Since it cost nothing, he had her add their name to the list, then cruised the room, expecting to get shut out. They’d have to leave the park to find anything, a good twenty-minute hike.
As if he’d planned it, another couple was just pushing back their stools. He and Marion swooped in, unchallenged. It was like stealing. They were on the far side of the bar, giving them a view of the trio grooving away in the corner, and the curved picture window looking out on the Falls. The harried barmaid left them menus and a wine list and hustled off.
“I’m thinking champagne,” he said.
“I’m thinking a nap.”
“That can be arranged.”
“It’s already one-thirty. When’s dinner?”
“There’s time.”
“And you want to do your wax museum.”
‘We don’t have to do anything. We’ve got the whole day to ourselves.”
“I don’t mind the wax museum, I just don’t want to spend all day there.”
“I’ll be quick,” he said. “Promise. Boom boom, in and out.”
“I’ve heard that before.”
The brunch came with champagne, an out‑of‑season raspberry in each flute sending up bubbles. She slid hers over to him.
“ ‘A man who says no to champagne says no to life,’ ” he quoted with a bad French accent.
“You want me to puke?”
“No.”
“Then just say thank you.”
“Thank you,” he said, toasting her.
His first glass cured his headache; the second made the place seem ideal. After a cappuccino and some banana bread, she revived, laughing at the picture of them by the edge.
“What a puss. Gimme.”
“No way. This one’s going on Facebook.”
They were warm, eating eggs Benedict and listening to a blue “My Funny Valentine,” while outside, the mist boiled up and gulls kited on the wind. The crowd in the entryway had overflowed, a few couples taking their cue, standing behind the line of stools, waiting for someone to leave. There was no rush. Soon enough they’d have to venture out into the cold again and start the long march back to Canada, but for now, if only temporarily, he was happy right where they were.
Odds of a married woman having an affair:
1 in 3
Clifton Hill was a glitzy strip of fast-food joints and silly, overpriced attractions the children would have loved twenty years ago and that Art, with his fondness for corndogs and miniature g
olf, still considered fun. She’d never been fun, and the blister on her heel had popped halfway across the bridge, making the dinosaur statues and haunted houses and fudge shops less whimsical than irritating. GET LOST! the Mystery Maze tempted. She wished she could. She had no interest in laser tag or 4‑D IMAX rides or indoor skydiving. The street smelled of frying grease, and all about them, vying for attention with teenybopper pop songs, speakers broadcast roars and screams and spooky laughter. Neon burned as if it were nighttime, the yellow bulbs on the Movieland Wax Museum’s marquee racing maniacally around the edges like falling dominoes. She thought they would stop there but he kept going, climbing past Ruby Tuesday’s and the Great Canadian Midway arcade and the gigantic SkyWheel and the Rainforest Café and the mysteriously named Boston Pizza, toward the crest of the hill, where a block-long model of the Empire State Building lay tipped on its side, King Kong perched on top, gripping its antenna and snarling down at them with unfocused, totemic rage—Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Museum.
“Wow,” Art said, “it’s completely different,” stopping on the corner to get a picture.
“I’m not sure I see the connection. And I don’t remember King Kong knocking it over.”
“It’s not supposed to make sense.”
“Then it succeeded.”
He fanned out a handful of coupons.
“I thought you wanted to go to Madame Tussaud’s.”
“I don’t think we have time to do both if we want to fit a nap in.”
“It’s totally up to you.” He’d already promised. She wasn’t going to bargain with him.
“I think this looks more interesting overall.”
“Okay then.”
As they were crossing the street, Art stayed her arm. “Check it out.”
On the sidewalk below the glaring Kong, the biker couple from last night stood toe‑to‑toe, jaws thrust forward, yelling at each other, oblivious to the passing foot traffic openly gawking at them. The woman was crying with her arms crossed tightly over her chest, the man shaking his head.
“I don’t care about them, I just want you to be happy with it,” the man argued, palms up, as if he were offering her a deal.
“Well you already ruined that with your stupid fucking remark.”
“I said I was sorry! What do you want me to do?”
“Yikes,” Art said when they were safely inside. “What do you think happened?”
“Obviously it was his fault.”
“And they were so happy.”
“Welcome to married life,” she said.
“That’s right. No free passes.”
You got one, she could have said, but there were people around. She felt grubby enough just overhearing someone else air their private feelings. She and Karen had had to be so careful, not wanting to become a target of break-room gossip. Every little resentment they squirreled away grew and festered separately and then came spilling out when they finally had a chance to talk, all of them related to the main issue, the impossibility of the situation, which would never change, no matter how much they discussed it. Maybe that’s what they’d needed, a big cleansing blowup instead of the endless analysis and tortuous recriminations. At least when she and Art had fought, they’d fought honestly. There was no need to think before she spoke, no pretense of softening the blows, even if, afterward, she wished she could take back some of the crueler things she said. She thought she understood the couple on the street. Better that complete release than a bitter impasse. It was a good lesson to remember.
There was no line to buy tickets. After waiting all day yesterday, she took it as a bad sign. In a far corner of the lobby, between the coat check and the restrooms, a padded bench ran along one wall. Her blister stung. Her head throbbed. All she wanted to do was sit down, but he’d be hurt if she didn’t go with him, as if it were a criticism or coldness on her part. She accepted the admission sticker he gave her, declined the brochure and followed him in.
The first gallery was dedicated to primitive rites. A row of wax busts illustrated tribal body modifications—distended lips, necks and earlobes—an interactive map on the wall highlighting the country of origin at the touch of a button. Art said he recognized one of the shrunken heads from last time, which she thought was impossible. She could barely recall being there. The ceremonial daggers and fertility symbols and blowguns whittled from thighbones were generic, a mix of the macabre and exotic geared to children, who made up the bulk of the audience, dragging their parents from one display to another, having their pictures taken inside a sarcophagus or astride the world’s smallest horse. Little was original, let alone authentic. In smudged plexiglas boxes sat priceless artifacts of the ancient world, shiny with varnish. Most of the exhibits were simply reproductions of old wire service photos. Several times, waiting for him to read the notes on the wall, she had to cover a yawn.
The next room housed, on one side, a massive collection of swords, and on the other, medieval instruments of torture. Behind ropes, a diorama worthy of a chamber of horrors depicted the Spanish Inquisition, a prisoner stretched on a rack while his glassy-eyed captor touched a red-hot poker to his stomach. The tip of the poker glowed like a nightlight.
“Funny and true,” she said, and still he read every word.
They saw a carrot shaped like a hand. They saw a Statue of Liberty made of Necco wafers. They saw a fifty-foot tapeworm fished from a Samoan woman’s stomach. They saw Cleopatra’s false teeth and a faint hologram of Abraham Lincoln reciting the Gettysburg Address. Art especially liked the collection of bullet-stopping pocket Bibles that had saved soldiers from the First World War all the way through Afghanistan. Pictures were encouraged, a yellow-and-red Kodak symbol on the wall prompting visitors as if on their own they might not recognize the opportunity to commemorate their moment with the six-legged calf or the world’s tallest man’s Chippendale chair, or, in Art’s case, the Buddha made of over three million dollars’ worth of shredded bills.
Like the little girl before him, he rubbed its belly.
“Here,” he said, “I’ll take a shot of you.”
“You forget, I’m already lucky.”
“Come on. Today we need all the luck we can get.”
Knowing he wouldn’t let it go, she gave in. The Buddha was surprisingly cold, the compressed money like stone. What was she supposed to wish for—that they’d lose? Posing, she feared the camera would expose her ambivalence, and tried to smile.
The feeling pursued her through the next few rooms, more unsettling than the fakirs and contortionists and the woman struck by lightning nine times. Conveniently, she’d put off thinking of last night and the ring, the same selective amnesia she’d practiced when she was with Karen, temporarily burying her unhappy secret only to have it resurface with an ache. Having been so easily betrayed, she hated being dishonest. Plus, as Celia often noted, even over the phone she was a terrible liar. After her impatience with the cheesiness of the museum, she was relieved that he had something other than her to focus on, and was glad to sit down in the darkness of the Robert Ripley Theater and put on the oversized 3‑D glasses like a mask.
The seats were cushy, and reclined.
“Wake me up if I snore,” she said.
The screen went white, revealing a few people sitting toward the front. One coughed, his head bobbing, and the room went black. From the sound system insidiously rigged beneath each seat came a rumbling that seemed to grow from within, as if it might split her organs, and then, with a crash, they were at the edge of the Falls, the water turning green and going over, triumphal travelogue horns trumping the roar as the crane swung up and back to show the whole glittering vista. The 3‑D effect was more striking in a treetop helicopter shot, flashing down the rapids and sailing weightless out over the gorge, but it seemed ridiculous to be sitting inside watching when right outside they could see the real thing.
The subject of the film wasn’t the Falls but the daredevils who hoped to become rich and famous using them as
a stage. What looked like actual footage sketched in the history. The narrator might have been Donald Sutherland. The first to come were the tightrope walkers. Despite the tricky winds, simply walking across soon proved too tame, forcing them to cook up more elaborate stunts. To breakneck ragtime, in jerky fast-motion, an acrobat pedaled a bike across a wire—forwards, backwards, then again with a frilly assistant on his shoulders, twirling a parasol—amazing yet so effortless as to be uninteresting. It didn’t seem possible, but of the dozens of tightrope walkers who’d defied the mighty Niagara, not a single one had died—“Believe it or not.”
“Believe it,” she stage-whispered.
There were no such guarantees with the eccentrics who designed their own barrels, which made their attempts more dramatic, waiting to see if they’d make it, and why, but the glasses hurt her eyes and she closed them, picturing herself sitting there in the theater, the light playing over her face. She and Karen had never gone to the movies. They met for drinks after work at an out of the way Chili’s, and then, when there was no longer any reason to pretend they were just friends, at Karen’s, where they held hands on her lumpy futon and talked about her girlfriend’s deployment and how screwed up everything was. Marion had never been with a woman, and after some initial awkwardness was surprised at how natural it felt, how right, yet occasionally after they made love, Karen would get upset over some little thing and end up sobbing and angry, saying this was exactly what she didn’t want to happen and that they had to stop. Because Marion needed to be home to cook dinner, their time was brief, and usually these breakdowns took place as she was getting herself together to leave, making the transition back to the other world and the other person she was that much harder. Instead of feeling doubly wanted or torn, she only felt more alone. She wondered how he’d done it for so long. In a twisted way, she envied—in retrospect—how effortlessly he’d carried his secret, and then, when it grew too heavy for him, confessed, unburdening himself by dumping it on her. She was tempted to repay him, but in the beginning Karen had made it clear their arrangement was temporary and that Marion wasn’t the first, an admission she should have heeded as a warning. As impossible as it seemed now, she’d thought she was in love, or maybe after his passion for Wendy Daigle, she just wanted to be. Even before they stopped meeting after work, she had to concede the affair had been, in every sense, a disaster. When they finally broke it off, she was left with an empty secret, one she expected she would take to her grave.
Odds : A Love Story (9781101554357) Page 11