by John Moss
Perhaps Griffin enrolled in Sandhu’s semiology course because he was enthralled with language, and wonder of wonders, Miranda was there, too. An older student wouldn’t stand out. They weren’t interested in job potential. They took high-interest seminars with high motivation. He might already have sat behind her in lecture theatres, taking anthropology and human geography courses. Maybe he was in the cafeterias, in the library, watching her on dates. Morgan felt enraged as he thought about Griffin haunting Miranda’s life, and frightened, to know that she had been oblivious.
That was a big leap, though, from university to the present. She did a tour with the RCMP, and she and he had been hanging together in homicide for over a decade. Had Griffin been watching both of them? It wouldn’t be hard from a distance. They had even been in the news every once in a while.
Why, Morgan thought, why name her executor? Griffin lived in her shadow for years, but when he knew someone was going to kill him he came out of the shadows, he touched her, he understood it would bring back the past.
Miranda knew about Molly Bray now. Had Eleanor Drummond known about her?
He switched back to Harry and Sally and turned up the sound. They were getting together at a New Year’s party. Billy Crystal wouldn’t play him. The comedian was charming, but there was nothing ambivalent about him. The best actors projected menace or suffering, even at their lightest moments. Meg Ryan, no, Miranda wasn’t sad and perky. America’s fallen sweetheart. Falling, perpetually falling. Miranda was Miranda. That was what he liked about her.
Morgan wondered about Ellen Ravenscroft. Maybe he should give her a call. He knew he wouldn’t. Miranda would know if he did. He didn’t feel he had to be faithful to Miranda. They lived separate lives, or went through the motions of conducting themselves as if they lived separate lives. It was just that she would know.
He found it easier, at this age, if he tried not to think about sex. During the day, he noticed himself monitoring skirt lengths and panty lines and the contours of sweaters, the peep line of blouses, but he sublimated his visceral responses until evenings, and often by then, now, in his early forties, they dissipated into vague yearnings for company. Not that he wasn’t up for it when the necessity arose. It wasn’t that he was becoming asexual.
Since moving into his postmodern Victorian condo, Morgan hadn’t had many visitors. His former wife, Lucy, had come over once, drunk, and had tried to seduce him. That was when the paint on the door was still tacky, and he hadn’t seen or heard from her since. The Bobbsey Twins had once paid a memorable call. That was an episode that overloaded his stock of erotic recollections to the point of short-circuiting the system. It was the best of adventures, but also the worst. He savoured it sometimes in the depths of the night, and he cringed at how absurdly distressing the whole affair had been.
It wasn’t an affair.
He sat back, staring into the radiant play of colour emanating from the tube, and remembered.
One was blond with big hair and a strapping physique. The other was slender, with a pixie-punk hairdo of indeterminate hue, mostly mahogany mauve, and suction-cup lips. They were known around police headquarters as the Bobbsey Twins.
He looked over at the front door, relieved to know they wouldn’t suddenly appear. At the same time he felt a certain dissolute urgency, hoping they would coalesce out of the images of their indiscretion into another encounter.
There had been a loud rapping on the door. It was evening, the beginning of July, the first real weekend of summer in the city, and the town was alive with festivities marking the First and the Fourth. One holiday marked a revolution, the other was the legislated celebration of an end to tedious negotiations. There were enough Americans living in Toronto, and enough would-be Americans, that parties often extended from one date to the other, especially if they contained a weekend between. It was raining outside, but he had heard street parties only a block or two over in the more bohemian parts of the Annex. Then there was a knock, like a drum roll, on his dark blue door.
That was three, maybe four years ago. Three. He was forty. He opened the door, and a drenching wind hurled weather into the foyer, along with two very young, very wet women.
“Close the door, for goodness’ sake,” he said.
“Hello, Morgan. May we borrow your dryer?”
“My dryer?” He scrutinized them, trying to place them in a recognizable context.
“You know us. I’m Nancy.”
“I’m Anne,” said the other, while rainwater streamed from her mauve hair over her pouting full lips. “No last names.” She grinned, and her lips quivered. “We’re on reception. You’ve seen us at headquarters on College Street, the big new modern building —”
“I know where it is. I work there, too.”
“We know that,” said Nancy with the drowned blond hair. “That’s why we’re here.” She looked satisfied, as if she had explained everything that needed explaining.
“You work together?” Morgan blurted out. God knows, he had seen them often enough. He knew they did.
“Mostly,” said Anne, smiling hugely. Then she exchanged a knowing look with Nancy. “Sometimes we do. It just depends how things turn out. Can we borrow your dryer?” she asked, enunciating the word dryer very clearly as if he might not understand.
“I don’t use a dryer,” said Morgan.
“Your clothes dryer,” said Nancy.
“You’ve been partying,” said Morgan, stating the obvious.
By now his visitors were in the middle of the living room and he had circled around as if to prevent them from going any farther. As they danced about, trying to generate warmth, pools of water sprayed out beneath them.
“Turn your back,” said Anne with a sly curl to her swollen lips. “You mustn’t watch.”
She began to pull her soaking T-shirt over her head. Morgan turned away and stared at the exposed brick wall. He heard wet clothes puddling in piles on the floor. He had no idea what the protocol was, given the circumstances. Suddenly, he realized the lights were on full, and whirled to face them. “For pity sake, the neighbours!”
He didn’t know where to look. They were both stark naked. The neighbours across the street must be having a hard time about now, pretending they couldn’t see everything. He lunged for the overhead light switch, but when he snapped it off all that happened was the glare in the window was reduced. His table lamps still managed to cast full illumination on the entire scene. If he turned them off, too, it would signal to the entire neighbourhood that an orgy was in progress. He moved into the shadows by the spiral staircase. Maybe the neighbours would think he wasn’t home.
“What kind of music you got?” Nancy asked.
She was shaking out her hair in front of the window into the pile of dripping clothes she held in front of her. Anne was ambling around, inspecting the artwork, casual, as if she were at a gallery, wearing a little black dress and over-high pumps. Nancy dropped her clothes onto the hardwood floor beside Anne’s, avoiding the thick Gabbeh rug that so far had only been subjected to a few random droplets. She approached the stereo as if it were a potential dance partner, cocking a hip slightly off centre and coming to rest a little too close to Morgan. “Can I put on something?”
“Anything,” he said. “Please.”
He was flustered as much by the casual familiarity as by their lack of clothes.
“You like Eskimo art?” asked Anne, picking up an intricately carved miniature tableau of whalebone and ivory.
“Inuit art,” he said. “In Canada they’re Inuit.” Pedantry was a way of retrieving composure. “It means ‘the people.’ Inuit is plural. Inuk is one. Inuuk is two. The ivory is from the tusk of a narwhal. The bone is very delicate. It’s very old, from a petrified vertebra.”
Anne smiled indulgently, and her lips quivered. “Can we use the dryer? Sorry about the mess.”
She scooped up the drenched clothes and followed him into the bathroom. He opened the dryer, but she held out the end of a
wad of clothes and stepped backward into the shower.
“Grab tight and we’ll wring them out,” Anne told him.
Water poured down the front of Morgan’s slacks.
“Sorry,” Anne said, her full lips swelling into another smile. She stuffed the clothes into the dryer, and he turned it on. Then she took a towel from the neat pile on the shelf over the dryer.
For a moment Morgan thought modesty had finally set in, and he offered another towel for her friend. Anne declined, saying ominously that one would be enough, and walked into the living room where Nancy was dancing with herself to music that was almost inaudible.
Kneeling on the warm dry wool of the Gabbeh, Anne stretched out to draw the puddles of water on the floor together in large, sweeping motions. Morgan couldn’t help staring, first at Anne, wondrously slender and smooth as she reached and twisted while she dabbed at the floor, with her bottom cocked upward like a beacon, then at Nancy, moving in a dream world of her own to music he could barely hear, her fulsome young body shaping the air as she moved like a Henry Moore carved out of voluptuous flesh. Giving in, Morgan sat on the bottom step of his wrought-iron staircase, absorbing it all, eyes sliding back and forth from one to the other. Anne walked over to the window, stood fully framed for a moment, gazing out at the street, then bent down once again, bottom in the air, and mopped up the remaining water.
“I’ll just throw this in with the clothes,” she said when she was finished.
He looked at the towel, dripping and mottled with residual dirt from the floor, which he tried to keep clean. He was a good housekeeper.
When she came back, she said, “Lovely and warm in here. It’s been a bugger all day, really hot. We needed the rain. Trouble is, we got soaked to the skin, absolutely drenched. It’s been a movable party. We dropped into HQ and picked up your address. We’ve noticed you, Morgan. Happy Canada Day.” She leaned over and gave him a big hug. “Shove over,” she said, sitting on the step beside him. “Hey, what’s that you’re wearing?”
“Clothes.”
“So what do you do when we’re not here?”
“Um …”
“You want to smoke dope?”
“No,” said Morgan. Then, almost in apology, he added, “I’m okay.”
“No, you’re not.” Anne smiled with her great lips less than a head’s breadth away. “Do we make you nervous?”
“No,” said Morgan. He didn’t want either to protest too much or appear nonchalant.
“I’ve got some dope,” she said, and walked over to her bag in the foyer. As she strode away from him, Morgan could see incised on her bottom, like an erotic abstract, the pattern of the wrought-iron step. He relaxed a little. It made her seem vulnerable. She turned and walked toward him. Full-frontal exposure — he felt imponderably vulnerable.
“Come sit with me on the floor,” she said.
She sat cross-legged on the thick Gabbeh, and when he approached, she turned him gently like a marionette so that he settled with his back to her and she drew him down to lie against her lap.
“Comfy?” she asked.
He looked up at her lips. Her breasts came to firm points just above his temple. He couldn’t bring them into focus at the same time, and his eyes, bleary from trying to adjust, shifted back to her lips. “Every man’s fantasy,” he said aloud. But he felt sick. She was twenty. She had the body of a girl.
He could feel her pubic hair against the back of his scalp as she moved about, preparing to light up. He nestled into her, and she seemed to open and press back with her thighs. He felt unnervingly intimate and distant, lying so close but facing away. He watched Nancy, who was still dancing gently, now close to the stereo.
They both watched Nancy. Then Anne placed the crudely rolled joint in his mouth, and he drew in deeply and held. Morgan hadn’t smoked since Ibiza, and there he had mostly observed others doing it. He didn’t like the taste very much, or the sensation of ingesting effluent into his lungs. It made him feel queasy. She was careful not to drop burning embers onto his face.
After a while, she said, “Take those off. You don’t want to burn holes in your clothes.”
He flinched, panicked again. She was twenty; he was a forty-year-old detective. He felt like a pervert. Nancy must have heard them, because she came over and knelt beside him. She undid his belt, zipped his fly down, and with knowing hands reached under him and shrugged his slacks down past his buttocks. He was barefoot, so it was easy to tug them away and slip off his underwear. Then she leaned over him so that her pendulous breasts brushed against his face as she reached between his back and Anne’s thighs and grasped his jersey, which she hauled up and over his head in a single smooth motion. She stood and looked down, surveying her handiwork. Her breasts were perched high on her rib cage. She was young and they were resilient, with lives of their own.
Damn, they were kids, he thought. But he settled against Anne and savoured his torment like a drowning man clutching a treasure of gold as he plummeted into the depths to a gruesome demise.
Nancy returned to her dancing. Morgan glanced up at Anne, seeing her in parts, her breasts, her collarbone, her slender neck, her full lips, nose, eyes gleaming their separate highlights, tendrils of damp hair, all suspended above him like the discontinuous sections of an Alexander Calder mobile. Her lips were succulent, possibly for her as well — she seemed to suck against them in a kind of perpetually rearranging pout as if she were savouring the taste of her own body. Morgan looked down at himself, surprised to see an erection.
He was aroused through his entire being, ready to burst into an annihilating orgasm that would leave him in a pool of fluids on the floor. Morgan hadn’t focused on his penis until then, and now it seemed an absurd appendage, isolated and vulnerable. He half twisted against Anne’s lap to see if he had caught her interest down there. She adjusted her weight and pressed her pubic bone against his skull, and he settled back.
Nancy must have tuned her subliminal sensitivities in his direction. She danced over lazily and dropped slowly to his side, examined him without touching, then rose on tiptoe like a dancer and spread her legs over him, languorously descending, holding herself open and tilting him back as she settled firmly with her bottom against his pelvis. Nancy stayed squatting over him like that without moving except for the slight quivering strain of her thighs. She gazed at him eye to eye, and at Anne, smiling fondly, conspiratorially, then back at Morgan, staring deep into his eyes until the incomprehensible stillness that closed around him began to send waves through his entire body and he shuddered, the two young women like sculpture enfolding him in their cunning stillness. In a slow explosion of pure sensation, he exploded inside her, inside both of them, inside himself.
No one moved. They swayed, Nancy’s thighs quivered, Anne’s lips were moist in the lamplight. Almost on cue, as Morgan struggled between apprehension approaching dread and the pleasures of utter depletion, the dryer bell sounded. Nancy rose over him, draining across his torso, smiling down, standing for a moment, then moved away. Anne smiled with her voluptuous lips and said with affection, “Come on, old man, it’s over.” She slid gently out from under him, stood, and moved away.
He lay back on the Gabbeh, examining the ceiling of the loft, able to recognize details in the patina of paint on the drywall. He wasn’t stoned; he had never been stoned. But he was spent. He felt physically and emotionally and morally spent.
Anne squatted beside him, fully dressed, and kissed him squarely on the lips, sharing her succulence for a long moment, then stood while Nancy, also dressed, leaned over and covered him with his jersey, across his depleted private parts. She knelt by his head and gave him a soft kiss, hardly touching his lips.
“Happy Canada Day,” she said.
At the door Anne called back in a low voice, “Happy Fourth of July.”
The door swung open and clicked shut, his beautiful door. Morgan lay on the Gabbeh for a long time, contemplating.
12
Shiromuji<
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The next morning Miranda returned to the house in Wychwood Park, the most coveted residential enclave in Toronto and a fitting place from which Molly Bray could negotiate her life with Eleanor Drummond. Past tense, she reminded herself. What was it about Wychwood Park that made Miranda feel good about her own limited resources, about the complexities of a fractured identity? It wasn’t about money but taste. Perhaps it was the absence of fences, how one neatly appointed property flowed into the next and into the common grounds shaped by the contours of the ravine. Maybe it was the huge trees standing at random like the towering remains of a natural-growth forest. Or perhaps it was the houses themselves, all of them reflecting the Edwardian precepts of their common era, but each very different, each having reached the present in its own way. It wasn’t about privilege but class.
Wychwood Park nestled in the lee of Casa Loma, the Victorian monstrosity devoted like the Taj Mahal to a beloved wife, in this case one still alive while her memorial was being erected. The woman’s husband, as a bankrupt widower, eventually shared quarters in the carriage house with his valet. Miranda loved that such follies existed, but like most Torontonians she had never been inside, though it was kept open by public subscription.
The previous evening, when she arrived to see Jill after dropping off Morgan, the girl was already asleep. It was barely past nine. Miranda had talked with Victoria in the kitchen.
“How’s she doing?” Miranda asked.
“She’s fine. I think she just wants to sleep more than anything. Sometimes you have to, I suppose.”
Miranda liked Victoria. The woman seemed comfortable in the rambling house, moving through its spaces as if it were her own. At the same time she broadcast a subtle disinterest in her artful surroundings. Victoria seemed self-sufficient, and that appealed to Miranda, who suspected self-sufficiency and self-reliance were traits undermined in herself by her admiration for them in others.