Still Waters

by John Moss

  I saw his face, dead, through a veil of water, she thought. A stranger. I saw photographs of him in legal regalia and robed for his doctorate. My presence in the newspaper picture authenticates only myself. My God, we shared a prize. I didn’t collect. The rich man took it all.

  The tightness of tears drying on her cheeks made her realize she had stopped crying. She was angry. She felt violated. She was appalled at her own anxiety and confused by her fear.

  Miranda settled back on the sofa, resolved to penetrate the shadows that made her past seem a thronging of separate events. She assumed most people lived inside continuous narratives under occasional revision. Searching, unexpectedly, she encountered her boyfriend from their last year in high school. She smiled to herself, turned the stem of her glass between her fingers, and remembered.

  She and Danny Webster had kissed a lot but had always kept their intimacies from the neck up. They talked to each other in funny voices. They played cryptic word games.

  “Do you want to go to a movie?” he might ask. Someone else would have responded with a tired aphorism like, “Does a bear poop in the woods?” But not Miranda.

  “Did Sandy Koufax pitch on Yom Kippur?” she would answer with a world-weary shrug, and they would both groan and go to see a replay of Cool Hand Luke.

  Or she might ask, about classmates, “Do you think they’re doing it?”

  And he would answer, “Is Dr. Ramsay Catholic?”

  That one was tricky. Miranda’s family was Anglican, so the archbishop of Canterbury was indeed a primate of the “holy catholic church.” However, Danny was Baptist and insisted the Church of England was a breakaway Protestant sect. Yes and no. And to increase their pleasure, they both knew that Ramses were condoms. Were their friends “doing it?” They had no idea.

  They were both attractive, so behaving like geeks was an ironic disguise.

  At the end of the school year they hugged passionately. Miranda didn’t attend her graduation and never saw him again. She thought they had restricted themselves to kissing because that was what she wanted, and because he was a Baptist, but it turned out Baptists like sex. He was gay. According to her mother, who refused to believe the rumour, he came out at Bible College, where he was surrounded by people eager to forgive.

  They had played on the margins of adult experience and had parted as innocents. She wondered if Danny Webster had discovered sex without love. Or was he happy?

  Miranda walked into the bedroom and was startled by flickering shadows emanating from her screen saver. Having descended through real barracuda and drifted among parrotfish and somnolent groupers in the Cay-mans the previous winter, she found the underwater fantasy on her computer reassuring, in the same way a tacky souvenir was, brought back from a genuine adventure. Within the virtual perfection on the screen she caught sight of her face in reflection. She was drifting against the receding depths, and a prolonged shiver made her gasp for air.

  She had never felt so secure, she thought, as being enfolded by the warm waters of the Caribbean, hovering beyond gravity at sixty feet down. It had seemed almost pre-conscious bliss among the mounds and tentacles of coral, breathing in a soft rhythm through an umbilicus of gear. And now visual Muzak on her computer screen was the disingenuous reminder of a stranger’s cadaver, someone misplaced in the drowned caverns of her mind.

  Miranda set the Griffin papers down by the computer, switched on the gooseneck lamp, and twisted it around to shine into a closet jammed with boxes and files. She withdrew a cardboard container labelled “U of T,” and sitting on the floor, dumped the contents between her splayed legs.

  Shifting the pile around with her hand, she came up with the snapshot she had been expecting. It showed an oval table surrounded by a dozen faces leaning in for the camera. On the table were books and a couple of screw-top wine bottles, along with an array of plastic cups and open potato chip bags. This was the end-of-term celebration, hosted and catered by Professor Sandhu for his semiology seminar.

  Miranda had to scan for a moment to establish which indistinct features were her own, at the farthest end of the table. Standing behind her, looming over to get in the shot, was a face she had never seen before except on a corpse.

  She didn’t remember him, she didn’t remember him being in the picture, this man who was older than the rest, perhaps in his forties, who aligned himself for the camera to appear connected, somehow, to the young woman in front of him. She would have sworn he wasn’t in the picture the last time she had looked. Of course, that was a decade ago. She wasn’t nostalgic about her student days.

  Ten years back her ex-roommate in an act of apparent contrition for unfettered sex had come over to welcome Miranda back to Toronto. The two of them had gone through the old pictures, embarrassed they couldn’t restore identity to faces etched into memory from across seminar tables, cafeteria tables and, most of all, across tables topped with endless draft beer in the pubs around campus. Miranda could have named every kid in a class photograph from the village public school she had attended in antediluvian times, but university seemed farther away, less accessible.

  Griffin had worked his way into a photograph. He had even cast a shadow like the rest of them. How real was the past, she wondered, if someone could slip into it who was never there? More to the point, how real was it if someone who was actually there could be erased?

  For some reason she thought of Jason Rodriguez. He seemed like a character she had read about in a novel, an actor in a nearly forgotten movie, far less real than Robert Griffin, the proof of whose being lay on a slab in the morgue.

  During the three years she had spent in Ottawa, Jason Rodriguez was Miranda’s lover. They had met at work. He was her boss, he was married, they were both outsiders. He was considerate to a fault.

  Miranda had met him her first day on the job. He had kind eyes, a soft voice, and a preternatural understanding of her loneliness, something she seldom acknowledged even to herself. The first time they made love she was surprised. It happened as a sort of mutual consolation for the unfairness of life.

  Their early courtship was in Spanish, which put her at a disadvantage since his parents had been in the diplomatic service before settling in Canada and that was the language of his childhood, while she had taken a first-year undergraduate course in Spanish, which she dropped to protect her grade-point average. Still, Spanish made everything tentative, as if they were kids trying to figure things out for the first time.

  After they became lovers, they gradually switched to English. They talked about problems, confiding with each other in an urgent rhythm of revelation and tenderness. Two years passed. Jason’s wife was in a car accident and she died. He was vague on the details of his grief.

  After that Miranda ruminated, arranging and rearranging the details of their affair in her mind, spending long hours by herself trying to recover the past. When she quit her job, he seemed disappointed, but he didn’t try to dissuade her. She explained that all she had revealed about herself was a way of concealing. Now that he chose to withhold his own secrets, this gave him power that frightened her.

  He had touched her lightly on the cheek as if he were whisking away tears. “Frightens you? I don’t think you’re afraid of anything.”

  She had laughed. She wasn’t going to cry.

  Now Miranda dropped the photograph of Professor Sandhu’s seminar onto the debris from her past; she would clean up in the morning. She fingered the letter, then unaccountably put it down. She would read that, too, in the light of day.

  About an hour into sleep she became aware she was dreaming. Photographs displaced one another in random sequence. In each the image of Robert Griffin leered over the scene. Sometimes she was in the picture herself, and sometimes she was an observer. Sometimes Griffin was there as soon as it clarified, and sometimes he emerged after everything else had resolved into a static emblem of strong but elusive emotion. Sometimes he was blurred from the light, and sometimes he was blurred because water was sheet
ing over his features like a fluid shroud.

  Then she was making love with Morgan, surrounded by a flurry of photographs. She was leaning over him; she liked the weight of her breasts pressing against her own skin from the inside as she brushed them across his face in slow, pendulous motion, though actually she had small breasts that were firm and high and she knew this was a dream, and suddenly she became frightened because she also knew that if she arched back to look at him in the oscillating waves of light emanating from their pleasure, she knew he would have Griffin’s face. It would be Morgan, but he would have the drowned features of a stranger.

  Refusing the power of her dream, Miranda thrust away from the deadening embrace of her lover and surfaced into wakefulness. She turned on the light, got up, and took the letter and legal document from her desk. Walking into the kitchen, she made herself a hot chocolate, even though the night was warm and she had awakened in a sweat. She sat down to read, stood up, changed her pajama top for a dry T-shirt from a pile of folded laundry on the counter, felt to see that her breasts were small and firm, checked her hips with the flat of her hands, checked her bottom. Everything was there as it should be. She sat down, got up, dumped the hot chocolate in the sink, opened the fridge, got out a cider, opened it, drank from the bottle, held it for a moment to her temple, enjoying the cool glass against her skin, sat down, and began to read.

  Miranda Quin, spelled correctly. Address. Yesterday’s date, now the day before. She squinted at the postmark on the envelope: definitely dated the day before yesterday. “My Dear Miranda.” The text was terse yet florid.

  Due to circumstances beyond my control, it seems prudent to make final preparations for my death.

  As you may or may not be aware, I am under an obligation to you beyond recompense. We might both find consolation, however, should you agree to act as the executrix of my estate.

  You will be neither swayed nor compromised by the modest honorarium attached for your kindness. However, there may be satisfaction in the sum to be administered at your discretion for the benefit of others.

  Should you decline, these bequests shall be subsumed residual to my estate and distributed as the court deems appropriate.

  I hope your placement within the line of largess will allow you to find in your heart the generosity to forgive me.

  The enclosed document has been signed and witnessed. The notarized application of your signature will make it legal and binding.

  Yours truly,

  (Signed) Robert Griffin, LL.B, Ph.D.

  All this for accepting her share of a scholarship! A macabre joke? Or had a dead man given her the power of absolution for unspecified wrongs?

  Unfolding the legal document, she skimmed through. It seemed authentic. She was named sole executor, and her name was repeated throughout. Griffin’s signature was witnessed by Eleanor Drummond and dated the day before yesterday. The full will would be made accessible to her upon signing. Contingent to her acceptance, respective parcels of ten and twenty-five million dollars (Canadian) were designated for the Policemen’s Benevolent Fund and to establish the Mary Bingham Carter-Griffin Institute of Semiology.

  Nothing for a koi sanctuary!

  She picked up the Bakelite telephone receiver from its antique cradle, the first rotary-dial phone to be installed in her mother’s family home. It still bore a label with the original number: OLive 3, 4231. This was from a time apparently before people had the mnemonic capacity to remember seven digits. We push buttons now, she thought, and still say “dial.” She remembered her father’s number from when he was a child: 557-J. He had once asked the operator to speak to his grandmother — no other information than that — and she had put him through. Every call with this phone, its innards updated, invoked a rich fluttering of images and thoughts. It was like a talisman of ancestral memories.

  “Morgan,” she said when he answered.

  “What?” His voice was thick with sleep.

  “I’ve got to talk —”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, but —”

  He hung up.

  She called back. “Morgan, listen —”

  “You’re not hurt, not in danger?”

  “No, but —”

  He hung up again.

  She had once called him in the small hours of the night after wakening from a nightmare; she was weeping and residual images of violence were still flooding her mind, refusing to coalesce into the shattered narrative from which she had emerged, refusing to fade. “Morgan,” she had said into the phone beside her bed, into the darkness. “Help me.”

  “Turn on the lights,” he had told her. How had he known? She was afraid the walls might be drenched in blood; she was afraid of the light.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “Turn on the lights, Miranda. You’ve been dreaming.”

  She tried to tell him about the nightmare. Her voice was tremulous. She could only remember shrieking, and terrible silence, fragments of horror, images of shattered flesh.

  “I’ve been there,” he said. “We see too much. You can’t suppress horror forever, Miranda. Are you in bed? You relax and just listen. Did you ever consider, during surgery maybe you feel the scalpel at work? Anaesthetic isn’t a painkiller. It just snuffs out the memories of what you’ve been through. Dreams are like that — they absorb the pain. It isn’t the nightmare. It’s waking up in the middle. Doctors have nightmares about patients on the operating table becoming suddenly conscious. Ambulance drivers and firemen…”

  He let his voice drone, reassuring her with empathy and morbid detachment, and then he told her to lie back with the phone on the pillow beside her and try to empty her mind.

  After a while she wasn’t sure whether the sounds of breathing were her own. “Are you still there, Morgan?”

  “Yeah, you go to sleep.”

  And she did. And when the natural light of morning filled the room, she awoke with no recollection of further violence. She mumbled into the phone beside her, “You still there?”

  “Yeah. You have morning breath.”

  “Thanks, Morgan. It’s okay now. See you at work.”

  “G’night,” he said, and a dial tone displaced the open line.

  “Good morning,” she had said into the room. “Good morning, David.”

  Now she grabbed the black receiver again and dialled his number. It rang for a long time, then he picked up.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I was taking a pee. So what’s the crisis?”

  Morgan listened, envisioning his partner in bed. It made him feel lonely. He was sitting on the blue sofa in his living room in boxers and a T-shirt. The city through open blinds loomed under a canopy of dismal light that erased the stars.

  “He doesn’t say who’s going to do it? He doesn’t say why?”

  “No,” she said.

  “He doesn’t say how he knows?”

  “No.”

  “The mistress, Eleanor Drummond, she said nothing?”

  “No.”

  “She witnessed a bizarre codicil to her lover’s will. He dies. She says nothing?”

  “Yes.”

  “He couldn’t anticipate you’d be on the case, Miranda.”

  “I wonder if he knew how he would die?”

  “Surrounded by koi?”

  “He seems almost to welcome it.”

  “He accepts — there’s a difference.”

  “He doesn’t say why he’s picked me or how we connect.”

  “You don’t remember him? Nothing?”

  “Complete blank. When I heard his name today — I mean, WASP names are always familiar, you know what I mean? There are only so many to go around. But I never saw him before. His face in the class photo is indistinct. It was a grad course and I was an undergraduate. Everyone was older. He must have been in his forties if he’s the guy in the pond. Morgan, I was the only undergraduate in linguistics to receive a graduate award. I noticed everything, everything.”

  “I got a philosophy scholars
hip in my last year. I didn’t use it, either.”

  “But this is not about you.” She waited for a response, then decided to override his silence in case he was sulking. “Griffin wants the Institute to be Semiology not Semiotics — in deference to Sandhu’s Continental bent, I assume.”

  “It’s extortion, you know.”

  “If I’m not onside, the Benevolent Fund loses big and the Canadian future of signifiers and signs is in peril. Morgan, maybe he didn’t want to save himself.”

  “Or maybe that’s what this is all about — saving himself.” They both considered the implications; the quiet of their shared breathing held them together. “Chateau Mouton Rothschild came out with a Balthus line drawing on the label of its 1993 vintage — a naked prepubescent vixen, and a threat to neo-puritan propriety. Outside of Europe the vintage was marketed with a blank label. And that’s the one collectors want. Not the Balthus. They covet the empty label.”

  “Which only has meaning if you know the story.”

  “Exactly. You have to know what isn’t there.”

  “That doesn’t help,” said Miranda. “Everything about this guy escapes me. What if we were friends or lovers and it’s all gone away?”

  “Unlikely!”

  “But what if?”

  “Then it will come back.”

  “Do you think you could have a real relationship with someone you don’t know?”

  “I saw a woman on the subway once when I was a kid, and she looked like I thought my mother could have looked if the world was different. I think of that woman sometimes, even now. She stayed the same age while I’ve grown old and cranky and my mother grew old and cranky and died. That woman I never knew has been a shaping influence in my life, and I just saw her once standing on the Rosedale platform, not even on the train. I was the one passing through.”

  “You wanted to become a Rosedale matron?”

  “Good night, Miranda. We’ll sort this out in the morning.”

  He didn’t wait for her to respond but hung up gently. She wandered into the bedroom and turned out the lights.