Still Waters

by John Moss

  A door leading to outside steps up into the garden was sealed. He had noticed the low window partially obscured by shrubbery the previous night but had assumed it accessed a closed-in crawl space. The cellar stairway outside must have been filled in. One could only get to this plumber’s fantasy through the den or the garage, which seemed a little inconvenient, though with everything run by computer and insulated from the winter cold, there would be no need to spend much time here. He expected the computer could be monitored from somewhere else in the house, probably the study on the second floor where he had noticed a daunting array of electronic paraphernalia that stood out from the shelves of books like zircons on a platinum ring.

  Turning to leave the way he had come in, Morgan noticed a scrap of yellow notepaper pinned against the edge of a shelf above a workbench. He leaned over the small array of power tools and read slowly, finding it difficult to decipher the smudged script:

  Jacques Lacan suggests language is an essential precondition to the development of the unconscious mind, without which there could be no consciousness, and therefore no sense of the self.

  There were a couple of lines he couldn’t make out. He pulled the note from the pin and took it to the window, holding it slantwise into the light. Several sentences were intentionally obliterated, as if half-formed thoughts had been deleted, then it continued with a certain obstinate obscurity that Morgan found pompous and provocative:

  It seems reasonable to suggest that in the evolution of the species it was the emergence of language that led to consciousness, and not the reverse. Signifieds in the environment had to separate from signifiers before signs became possible —

  The text stopped abruptly, but the writer had found his ruminations worth keeping, if only impaled on a cellar shelf. Morgan folded the note neatly and stuffed it in his pocket to show Miranda.

  As he turned back into the subterranean labyrinth he had come through, made somehow macabre by light bulbs dangling against shadows, the notion of this as a mausoleum for his anonymous forebears gave way to images of the catacombs beneath poppy fields outside the walls of Rome. He half expected burial niches in the walls, an illusion the play of light and shadow on the rough foundation reinforced.

  Morgan remembered how eerie it was that, for all the desiccated corpses and piled bones he had seen in the crypts of Europe, he had felt a stronger presence of death from the absence of human remains in the catacombs. Meandering at the back of a guided tour, past gaping small tombs cut into the lava rock, he had been struck by their emptiness as a mockery of resurrection, their occupants dust inhaled by cadres of tourists. He had felt the cold impress of mortality then, despite the relative warmth of the place. And he felt it now, the familiar chill, yet given the nature of his work and why he was here, morbidity seemed appropriate.

  He stopped again at the wine cellar and peered through the double glass window, regretting not having a flashlight. Only in movies did flashlights appear from nowhere as the plot demanded. If he were in a movie, he would be a younger Gene Hackman. When the credits appeared, his name wouldn’t be there. He would still be inside the story. Closure was only for actors and authors.

  It was in Europe that he had decided against graduate school, though he had tried it briefly when he came back. He went over for two and a half years, crossing both ways on the Stefan Batory, one of the last passenger ships not flaunting itself for the carriage trade. He hadn’t taken out student loans, having been on a scholarship and working in the north each summer, one year building a spur line into a mine, two years on road crew, and one year, the toughest and most lucrative, planting trees. Unlike his middle-class contemporaries, he finished university with money in the bank.

  Trees paid his way through Europe. He was a high-baller, sometimes planting three thousand trees a day, and his savings, subsidized by illegal bar-tending jobs in London and for a while on Ibiza, meant he came home broke but debt-free.

  In graduate school he felt distant from other students who had gone directly into their programs, and had little in common with the older students who were making meaningful career changes. He hadn’t picked up his graduate fellowship cheque by the end of the first week, so he just walked away. At the end of the next week he was enrolled in criminology at George Brown College. It had never occurred to him to join the police; it just happened.

  His first autumn in London he met the woman he should have married. Susan. He married Lucy.

  From the beginning, when Susan answered the door next to his, after he moved into a shabbily genteel bedsitter in Beaufort Gardens on the fifth floor of one of the last unreclaimed buildings in Knightsbridge, he called her Sue.

  “Very Canadian,” she told him. “In England it’s with two syllables.”

  She was amused, however, and agreed to join him for a Guinness at The Bunch of Grapes on Brompton Road.

  He had never before had a friend like her, someone so emotionally complete. Through the long, wet autumn, winter, and spring, when he wasn’t working, they spent weeknight evenings in his room, which was smaller than hers and easier to heat. They were relatively impoverished — London was expensive and wages were low — but they talked their way through the seasons and hardly noticed. He realized, more than two decades later, he must have done most of the talking, while Sue listened with cheerful forbearance, filling gaps in his rambling narrative with self-deprecating anecdotes and funny explanations about the fine points of being English.

  On the weekends she went home and Morgan wandered London. Some Saturday evenings he returned to his garret so exhausted by the miles he had walked that he fell asleep across the top of his lumpy single bed without undressing, pulling his thick Canadian coat around him, shoes still on for warmth. He slept until dawn, got up, peed in the rickety sink, splashed water on his face from the single faucet, brewed a quick cup of tea on his hot plate, and ventured out into the pale green spaces of Hyde Park to watch early arrivals, even in the dreariest weather, taking their morning constitutionals. Then he wandered for the rest of the day, and by afternoon began to anticipate Sue’s return so he could tell her about London.

  They didn’t have a storybook romance; they didn’t fall in love with each other at the same time. He was in love with her now, though his memories of her had merged with Miranda. Sue was patiently in love for at least part of that year before he took off to the Continent. With her coppery red hair and refined complexion, gentle good humour, and patiently inquiring intelligence, she had been remarkably lovely. But Morgan had constructed his personality as someone astonished by the adventures that lay before him, desperately self-reliant and determinedly unattainable. He wanted to explode at the centre of the universe, while Susan remained generous and serene.

  On and off, Morgan worked behind a bar most of the time he was in London, and Susan, as he now thought of her, held a demanding secretarial position with a boss called Nigel and a friend called Fiona, names that seemed eerily exotic. Class, the English pestilence, was never an issue between them. He was educated; Susan was elegant. Neither could place the other in a social hierarchy that made any sense. They had never been good lovers; both of them were relative novices. He was selfish and she was gracious, a bad combination. Their time together was defined more by warmth than by passion. He encouraged her to visit Canada, and she invited him to meet her parents. When Morgan was engaged to be married, he had dreamed Susan would turn up in Toronto. She did, briefly, but the timing was off. He had known even she couldn’t rescue him then.

  Morgan became aware that he was comfortably ensconced on the bench opposite the wine cellar. He didn’t remember sitting down, but he was absorbed in the atmosphere of the place and it didn’t bother him that he had lost track of time. He forgot about Susan and London. They faded from consciousness like the particles of a dream.

  “What is it, Morgan?” Miranda would say. “Where have you been?”

  But he seldom answered. It didn’t seem important to sort out recollections from the swarmi
ng of information careening through the sometimes unfamiliar places in his mind. He wasn’t unstable, but wary of being too much himself.

  The oak door leading toward the den opened this time when he gave it a vigorous shove, and he found himself in a short hallway with the small bathroom to one side. The door at the far end of the corridor leading into the den stood ajar. It was an exterior door made of steel, painted and panelled to look like wood. He had noticed the night before that it had a large lock with a dead bolt, which didn’t strike him as unusual, given that it probably led in from the garage. There was a patina of dents and scratches on the corridor side that advertised its serviceability.

  Availing himself of the bathroom convenience, Morgan admired the absolute simplicity of the room. It was like being inside a tiled box — even the ceiling was tiled — and the toilet and sink were built in. The shower head draped like a pewter sunflower from high on a wall, and the shower stall area was defined only by a standing drain and a ridge in the tile on the floor. There was no mirror, there were no shelves, no pictures, nothing to intrude on the mind or distract the eye, and yet the overall effect was pleasing. Still, it didn’t encourage lingering. Maybe that was the point — a small architectural joke by Robert Griffin, perhaps not shared by anyone else.

  The thought of Griffin made Morgan uncomfortable. This was the first point of connection he had felt with the victim. The passion for koi, he understood, and the books and the carpets, but comprehending the facts of a person’s existence was different from recognition of their secret whims. What other secrets were in this place hidden by the obvious? He stood and pressed a plunger panel that was flush to the wall over the toilet and walked away from the swirling noise, washing his hands and leaving the room without glancing back.

  Morgan settled down in the den on what, from the comforting way the cushion met the weight of his body, he was sure would have been the favourite chair of the dearly departed, sustaining him through long hours of contemplation about koi and linguistics. Gazing out across the garden and lawn, Morgan could see, beyond the trunks of the giant silver maples, intimations of the city he loved like an old family home. This made him feel closer to the house surrounding him, as if it were the mantle of what might have been. Here, but for the grace of God and a lot of money, and the random perversity of genetic progression … his thoughts were outpaced by emotion.

  There was something very sensual and vaguely distressing about letting his feelings run free. Morgan was used to the effects of an unbridled intellect, but sensibility, open and indiscriminate, took him by surprise. It was knowing about wine, not tasting, that enthralled him.

  He shut his eyes and tried to envision Susan as she might be now. She looked like Miranda. He tried to focus, and the name Donna came to mind, preceding an image of someone he had forgotten he had known.

  Susan was his first love. But his first “affair” was Donna. Not with Donna, but Donna herself. She was the affair. Donna didn’t haunt him the way Susan did. She didn’t remind him of Miranda. But Donna had helped shaped who he was.

  She had worked as a waitress in a Jarvis Street diner on the edge of Cabbagetown in a nondescript building squeezed between two former mansions. He had wandered in one night on the way back to his room near the university after one of his rare visits with Fred and Darlene. He and his dad had been sitting on the stoop all evening, drinking beer. His mom was out with her friends. She had been drinking, too. When she came back, they had a raucous three-way quarrel. He couldn’t remember why. The important part of his recollection wasn’t the fight, but meeting Donna.

  “Coffee?” she had asked in the diner.

  “Please,” he answered in a slurred voice, leaning over his elbows on the grey Formica table, head in his hands.

  She brought him the coffee. “You okay?”

  He remembered looking up with tears in his eyes, even though he couldn’t remember why he was crying. Maybe it was something his mother had said, and suddenly he was confronted with childhood’s end. Maybe his father had made a crack about the effete life of a student. Or it might have been the fight itself — being drawn into domestic squalor that he wanted desperately to put behind him.

  The waitress placed her hand over his. “This one’s on me.”

  Instead of saying “what” or “thank you,” he asked, “Why?”

  “Because you’re drunk, you’re not a drinker, you need coffee.”

  “Must be lots of drunks come in here.”

  “Yeah.”

  She smiled as he stared at her face, bringing her eyes into focus. They were bright blue, sparkling in the fluorescent light. Her lipstick was a thick red, and her dark roots made her hair radiate like a platinum halo around her head. In spite of her garish makeup, she was young. They were about the same age.

  He smiled back. “Thanks. He glanced around and realized he was the only customer, then announced in a significant tone, “I’m a virgin.”

  “Good. I’m glad there’s one left.”

  “One what?”

  “Virgin.”

  “I’m a virgin. Technically. You know what I mean.”

  “I can imagine. You’re drunk. But very pretty.”

  Morgan was bewildered. No one had called him pretty before. He didn’t know whether to be flattered or insulted. He decided flattery was preferable. “You’re very pretty, too. Do you want to take me home?”

  She did, and that was the beginning of Morgan’s first affair, which after ten days burned out because they had nothing to say to each other. She taught him about a woman’s body as if she were much older, and he felt secure enough that he learned with awkward enthusiasm more than he could have imagined and far less than he needed to be a good lover. It didn’t occur to him to resent her experience.

  Their last night together, after she finished the late shift and before he went to his morning class, they both knew their relationship had run its course. In a gesture to make the finality of their parting less certain, he invited her to a lecture he would be giving in two months.

  “What are you talking about?” she asked him.

  “It’s by invitation. My philosophy prof asked me to speak at a graduate seminar. It’s a big deal. They don’t usually let undergraduates speak.”

  “What’s it gonna be about?”

  “Heidegger …”

  She smiled benignly, drawing him to her. “You really are sweet.”

  A couple of months later he stepped up to the podium in a lecture hall at the university before anyone else was in the room. His topic had aroused considerable interest, and Father Harris, his professor, had asked if he would mind opening his presentation to a larger audience. Morgan was thrilled. He looked out across the rows of empty seats. He wasn’t at all nervous. He was sure of his material and confident of his ability to deliver. This was a prelude, he thought, to a career in the professorial ranks.

  Father Harris came in and chatted with him. A few students entered and gathered in clusters toward the back of the room.

  “It’s always this way,” Father Harris assured him. “Lecture halls fill up from the back.” Father Harris was enough to make Morgan want to be Catholic, even though he was already agnostic.

  Morgan glanced up the aisle as a flash of brilliant red appeared at the back of the hall. He looked away, then back again. It was Donna, and she was dressed for a party. She waved and manoeuvred precariously on stiletto heels down the incline to where he was standing with the lectern between them. He stared at her with his mouth open, completely thrown. Father Harris reached out his hand and introduced himself. Donna smiled a huge red smile and curtsied slightly. She had never before talked to a priest.

  Struggling to regain his composure, Morgan was too flustered to say anything. Donna leaned around the lectern and kissed him on the cheek. The scoop neck of her dress gaped open. He could feel the smudge of her lipstick like a scarlet letter glowing on his skin as she moved slightly away, being uncertain of the protocol such an occasion demande
d.

  “I’m proud of you,” she said.

  Father Harris took her arm in a proprietorial way, bowing slightly. He smiled at her as if she were an old friend of the family. She gazed up at him and smiled her red smile, and turned and smiled at Morgan. Her eyes dazzled blue in the lights of the hall.

  “Won’t you join me, Donna?” asked Father Harris. “We’ll just give David a few moments. Even the most experienced of us gets a little anxious before giving an important lecture.” He led her to a seat beside his own, making a clear and subtle show to the audience who had understood in the last few minutes that she was his guest.

  The presentation was well received and led indirectly to the offer of a scholarship to do graduate work. At the informal reception following his lecture, Father Harris kept Donna by his side, and when the evening began to subside, he called her a taxi and paid the driver in advance. As she was going out the door, she turned to catch Morgan’s eye and mouthed the words “Thank you” with her full red lips as if it were the best day of her life.

  Morgan was ashamed of himself for weeks afterward and went off to plant trees, then on to his adventure in Europe, without picking up his degree.

  Donna, he thought now, whatever happened to you? As he stirred uneasily in the embrace of the wingback chair in Griffin’s house, he imagined Donna’s big red lips and blue eyes and blond mane of hair with its dark roots surrounding her oval face, and he felt wistful, knowing she would never have thought he had done anything wrong.

  Abruptly, Morgan rose to his feet, breaking the bond between himself and the residual personality of Robert Griffin, leaving memories of Donna behind.

  Morgan leaned over the ceramic box to examine an old board with worn edges, placed alongside it with casual artifice as if the owner were trying to subvert its value. He ran his hand lightly over the etched surface, feeling the hieroglyphs with his fingers.