The Burma Effect

by Michael E. Rose

  “I’ll keep my receipts. Claim when I get back. Cash on delivery.”

  “I think you better have a quick word with Harden, Frank. I had a meeting with him yesterday. About your column. Where it was going, maybe trying to refocus it a bit.”

  “That was good of you Patricia. Looking after my career like that.”

  “To be honest, Frank, we don’t think you’re giving that column your full attention. We think it shows sometimes.”

  “We?”

  “Yes. Harden is concerned too.”

  “Before or after you pissed in my pond?”

  “I think you’d better have a word with Harden before you go anywhere, Frank,” she said.

  “Delaney is at large,” he said.

  “I’m serious,” she said.

  “Me too.”

  He tried not to slam the phone down too hard. A minute later, it rang. It would be Patricia, he was certain of that. Five minutes later his mobile rang. The tiny screen told him “Patricia, office.” He let it go.

  Cynthia Kellner lived a life of suburban Montreal ease. She had, as the saying used to go, married well. Her husband was in the rag trade, ran a big women’s wear operation in Montreal’s East End. Ladies’ blouses, skirts, cheap jeans with brands no one had ever heard of. Lots of Quebecois and Vietnamese and Haitian staff manning the cutting and sewing machines and the loading dock.

  When business had been very, very good, before Asian factories started chipping away at the trade in Montreal and New York, Cynthia’s husband, Josh Rabinowitz, had made serious money. He spent a lot of it on a giant house in Côte Saint-Luc —a split-level number with a three-car garage and perfect hedges. They had several children, apparently; rarely seen. Delaney had met Cynthia a few times; he could barely remember when or where or why. In the old days when he and Kellner had run in approximately the same circles, probably at a party somewhere, or at a bar. She was about 35 or 38 or so now. He had never been to her house.

  She was impeccably and expensively dressed for a weekday afternoon—black cashmere sweater, designer leather pants, black also, and what looked like fake snakeskin boots. Very black hair, very expensively done up, probably that morning. Cynthia had not wanted to meet him downtown.

  She was epileptic and didn’t drive. Kellner remembered that much about her.

  She kissed Kellner elegantly on each cheek in the European way. Her perfume smelled of money and order and calm as she led him through the cavernous entry and living area of the house to the backyard to where some weak April sun was making it just possible to sit outside on what was still known in such neighbourhoods as the patio.

  The outdoor table where she poured Perrier and sliced a lemon was the requisite wrought iron and heavy frosted glass. The chairs, wrought iron with the requisite cheery blue cushions and cheery yellow piping.

  “It’s been years,” Cynthia said as she spooned ice from a small stainless steel bucket. “I always wondered what happened to you and some of the old crowd.”

  “Still plugging away,” Delaney said, wishing the vacuous part of the conversation could be dispensed with altogether.

  “I don’t see your articles in the paper much anymore.”

  “I have a column now. On the opinion page. On Saturdays.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I don’t usually look at that page.”

  “Not many people do. Not enough, or so they tell me.”

  “I’m sure your column’s fine,” she said. Fine is not a word anyone had ever used to describe his column, even when it actually was fine. He decided to save them both a little time.

  “Look, Cynthia, I wanted to talk to you about Nathan for a few minutes.”

  “So you said on the phone.”

  “Have you heard from him lately?”

  “No.”

  “Is that unusual?”

  “No, not with him. Not since he moved to Thailand. I saw him last year when our mother died. He came in for two days only. He stayed downtown, not with us. Josh had to lend him a suit and a yarmulke for the funeral.” This seemed to be a capital offence.

  “What’s he got himself into now?” Cynthia said, sipping her Perrier. “And why should I care? Why should you care all of a sudden, for that matter?”

  “I’d like to talk to him about something I’m working on. I haven’t been able to reach him at all. I’m going over to Bangkok next week and wanted to touch base.”

  “I would imagine he is still living with that teenage girl he hooked up with,” Cynthia said. “My mother detested that girl.”

  “She met her? She’s not a teenager, you know.”

  “Nathan brought her over here once. On some kind of holiday. God knows why.”

  “They’ve been together for a long time,” Delaney said.

  “Maybe she doesn’t charge by the hour anymore,” Cynthia said.

  “I don’t think she was like that. I’m pretty sure she wasn’t a bar girl,” Delaney said. “Nathan made a point of telling everyone that.”

  “Why would anyone believe anything my brother ever said? He usually couldn’t think straight, he smoked so much dope.”

  “He handled it pretty well when I knew him. He was a lovely writer. Very strong. Everyone thought that. And he’s made a bit of a name for himself now in Asia. He’s a real specialist on the region.”

  “He squandered his talents. My mother said that and I said that. Most of you used to say that, too. He could have gone far.”

  “Get himself a Saturday column at the Tribune, for example. That no one reads,” Delaney said.

  “Yes, why not? Better than wasting his life over in Bangkok, taking drugs and living with some little Thai tart.”

  “Shall I put you down in the ‘no comment’ section?” Delaney said. They both smiled.

  “Sorry, Francis. It just makes my blood boil, that’s all. I don’t talk about him much anymore. I never see any of the old crowd anymore.”

  “Nobody?”

  “Oh, I still used to see that character Cohen, Mordecai Cohen, once in a while. You remember him. He and Nathan went to Côte Saint-Luc high school together. Hippies. They always stayed in touch. Mordecai was the man to see for dope in the neighbourhood; he was dealing even in high school. His mother lived around the corner. He used to come in once in a while to see me and Mum when she was still alive. He’s over in Bangkok now, too, I think. Still there probably. Fancies himself an artist. Paints. Takes pictures. Used to, anyway. He’s there for the dope too, I’d say.” “How long’s he been over there?”

  “I don’t know. A fair while now, I think. His mother’s still alive. She came to the funeral. He didn’t.”

  “That’s interesting,” Delaney said.

  “Why would that be interesting?”

  “Well, it might help me track Nathan down.”

  “Maybe. Unless they’re off on some crazy escapade or other. You know what they used to do? Maybe they still do? Nathan told me when he was here for the funeral. You know what’s their idea of fun, a little light entertainment? Mordecai, believe it or not, or maybe it was Nathan’s idea, got some little stainless-steel pea shooters made, somewhere over there. He got them made up by some local gunsmith, god knows how, and they got them rifled inside, I think that’s the word, got them fixed up inside like little rifle barrels so the peas would fire straight and go far. So you know what they like to do over there? They get stoned and or drunk and they go hunting the neighbourhood cats, scaring the poor things with rifled pea shooters. Like a couple of crazy boys. In their forties. Nathan bothered to tell me about this when he came home for my mother’s funeral. They chase the neighbourhood cats around, scaring them with steel pea shooters and probably laughing themselves sick. At night. In Bangkok.”

  “A victimless crime,” Delaney said.

  “Francis, please,” she said. “It’s not normal.�
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  “Do you know how I could get in touch with Mordecai Cohen when I get over there?”

  “No, not really. I could ask his mother for you maybe.”

  “Would you mind doing that?”

  “No. That’s OK. I can call you.”

  “Thanks, Cynthia.”

  They sat in silence for a moment.

  “You never got married again,” she said. “After the first time.”

  “No. That was enough for me.”

  “Was it bad?”

  “At the end. The break-up was bad.”

  “They always are.”

  “Not that bad. Not always.”

  “You seeing anybody?”

  “Sort of.”

  “It’s always ‘sort of ’ with guys like you.”

  “Guys like who?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Journalists. I don’t know. Guys who don’t settle.” “I’m still here in Montreal.”

  “You’ve been everywhere. Foreign correspondent, war correspondent. Investigative journalist. You’ve written books. You’re off to Bangkok next week. Bigtime guy.”

  “Not anymore. Even you don’t read my column.”

  They laughed together, one last time.

  “More Perrier?” she said, looking at a heavy Tag Heuer hanging loosely from her wrist on a steel bracelet.

  “No, thanks. Time for me to go.”

  “Me too really.”

  The European kiss good-bye, a jolt of expensive perfume. Delaney couldn’t be sure if it was the perfume that left him edgy as he drove back downtown, or something Cynthia had said.

  Patricia had left two terse messages on his answering machine, giving him some career advice. Nothing from Harden. A good sign. Delaney didn’t think the editor was as troubled as Patricia had said. Harden was an old pro. He was used to little problems with columnists, feature writers, malcontents. He had bigger fish to fry, putting out Montreal’s only English daily in a tough Quebec market.

  From Kate Hunter there was nothing. From O’Keefe, there was another invitation to drinks. Word, it seemed, had already got round the paper that Delaney was off to London and parts unknown. Patricia was a natural storyteller. O’Keefe always insisted on seeing him off before trips.

  Delaney surprised himself by going to the gym. He hadn’t been in weeks but he usually tried to go before a major assignment or a trip. For this one, since it was a CSIS assignment, he never knew what sort of shape he would need to be in. One session at a gym would not be enough, but it was his routine to at least go before any important departure.

  At least at the gym he was sure to never meet any of the people from the paper. The younger reporters of course would frequent gyms, but not this one, an old and expensive and quite unstylish one right downtown. The scribes of approximately his age would not know what the inside of a gym looked like.

  He sweated for about 20 minutes on the rowing machine, working far too hard on something he used to find easy. He tried the weight machine and the Stairmaster and essentially just punished himself as much as he could. Sometimes a workout was a sort of meditation for him. Today it was penance. But he wasn’t sure what for. He had to assume it was something to do with Kate.

  The trainer, a young McGill University health sciences student named Vernon, came over as he was slowing down.

  “You ought to do some stretches now, Frank,” he said. “Your muscles are going to seize up. I was watching you go.”

  “Geriatric aerobics,” Delaney said.

  “You’re still in pretty good shape,” Vernon said.

  “For a guy my age.”

  “Yeah. You got to keep active. Keep those legs moving.”

  “Fuck off, Vernon.”

  “Will do, Frank,” Vernon said with a grin.

  Another reason for the workout was that Delaney fully expected to get drunk that night with O’Keefe. Not because he wanted to but because it would be almost impossible not to. So the workout would somehow compensate for a night of excess, before the fact. Or something like that.

  O’Keefe suggested they start out at Darwin’s, once a trendy Bishop Street bar and now well past its prime. O’Keefe preferred them like that. He claimed to detest yuppies, claimed he could not be responsible for his actions in a yuppie bar. The yuppies had long since moved on from this establishment and the drinks were now reasonably cheap.

  He was standing at the bar when Delaney arrived, all six feet four inches of him. Hunched over the bar, drinking San Miguel from a bottle into which the waiter had forced a wedge of lemon.

  “That’s a girl’s drink, isn’t it Brian?” Delaney said.

  “No, it is permitted at this time of the night. It is for hydration purposes, before the festivities begin. It is cold and cheap and it goes very nicely with my rum.”

  A short glass with melting ice cubes sat near him at the bar.

  Delaney surprised himself by ordering a double whiskey. Early in the night for him. The bespectacled boy behind the bar looked impressed.

  “Now what have we here? Young Delaney drinking a large Jameson’s and it’s just gone eight o’clock,” O’Keefe said. “Is everything all right at home?”

  “Is this where we’re settling in for the night?” Delaney asked. He felt his Air Canada tickets in his jacket pocket and wished he had left them at home. It was going to be a night to lose things, he thought.

  “I have many fond memories of this place, my lad,” O’Keefe said. “I grew up here.”

  Delaney remembered that O’Keefe used to enjoy picking on university drinkers here years ago, flashing his Quebec Provincial Police press card so fast that it looked like a police pass, confiscating small stashes of hashish from terrified youngsters and smoking it in the men’s room. They drank in silence for a moment.

  “You have been avoiding me, Francis. You have decided I am a bad influence,” O’Keefe said.

  “Correct,” Delaney said.

  “The rule, established and etched in stone over the years, is that we get drunk together before you head off on a big bird somewhere. Is this not our unshakable rule? Am I not your next of kin, God knows, maybe even your only kin, possibly the executor of your will, trusted confidante, former colleague, et cetera, et cetera and so on and so forth? Have we not been somewhat remiss? Would this meeting have taken place without my insisting it be thus?”

  “We have been remiss,” Delaney said.

  “We will make amends,” O’Keefe said.“My heart is heavy with grief, this night, and there shall therefore be festive times. Or something.”

  “Shall we exchange tales of woe?” Delaney said.

  “Me first,” O’Keefe said.

  They drank for hours, moving from bar to bar, slowly but surely moving eastward. They ended up on Saint Lawrence Street, south of Saint Catherine, where the Anglo yuppies rarely went. The language now was almost entirely French, the entertainment tacky, tending toward end-of-the-world striptease and pole-dancing bars. They had not been in such bars for years.

  They talked much less than one would have thought. There was very little to say that had not already been said over the years, through various shared disasters personal and professional. The city spoke for them, said enough, said what needed to be said.

  Late, very late, they made their pilgrimage to Schwartz’s for smoked meat sandwiches. In the crush and noise of the place, under neon, elbow to elbow with strangers, intoxicated, O’Keefe said: “We’ve patched things up, Karen and I. I have rented a van for the transportation of my necessaries. Tomorrow.”

  “Ah,” said Delaney. The room swam slowly around him.

  “Too too much water under the bridge. This particular bridge.”

  “Yes. Possibly. I would say.”

  “Yes.”

  They drunkenly munched sandwiches. “Your love life, of course, is, as alwa
ys, in splendid condition, correct?” O’Keefe said. “Soon to be a feature story on the Tribune lifestyles page?”

  “Yes, absolutely.”

  “RCMP. They always get their man.”

  “Not quite.”

  “She’s OK, you know. Kate is,” O’Keefe said, suddenly made serious by drink.

  “Ah. Advice.”

  “She is OK. You are not. We know this. She is the only one who will have you. All other women everywhere, in every nation, have seen you for what you are. Especially your first wife.They will not have you. Et cetera. Then of course there was Natalia, a possible exception. But Natalia is dead, still dead. She will not wake up. Et cetera.”

  Even seriously intoxicated, Delaney and O’Keefe knew there were lines dangerous to cross. O’Keefe crossed this one anyway.

  “I am allowed to say that,” O’Keefe said. “This is the rule. We have rules for this sort of thing. We get drunk, I advise you to let all of that go. You refuse, your life goes nowhere, we do it again some months down the track. We have rules governing this sort of thing.” “Yes.”

  “You go off on another little assignment. Not for the newspaper this time, right? You leave all of the hard stuff behind. Yes?”

  “My business, Brian,” Delaney said, the alcohol suddenly lighting his aggression fuse. “Wrong, brother. My business too.” Delaney stood up unsteadily. O’Keefe stood up too, put a large hand on Delaney’s shoulder and sat him firmly down again. The other diners carried on with their sandwiches. This was Saint Lawrence Street, after 2 a.m.

  “Wrong, my brother,” O’Keefe said. “My business too.”

  The taxi let Delaney off in front of his place just before three. O’Keefe had walked back to the sports editor’s house, for the last time until Karen threw him out again. Delaney barely managed to get his door open without an instruction manual.

  He sat in Natalia’s chair, with her reading light on. He drank a litre and a half of bottled water. He took three aspirins before sleeping. He did not call Kate until the morning. He dreamed this:

  He is sitting in a barber’s chair in a comfortable, safe old-fashioned barber shop. An avuncular, apronclad barber is slowly and expertly cutting his hair, occasionally massaging his scalp and shoulders. It is a wonderfully soothing and pleasant experience. The barber then somehow tilts the chair so Delaney is completely upside down, suspended completely upside down so that his hair hangs away from his head, straight away from his head. The barber cuts the tips of his hair like that, somehow standing below him and reaching up. Delaney watches the world from this position, as the avuncular barber snips and combs and shapes his hair from below. There is a sudden dizzying return to upright, some final snipping and combing and then the proud barber’s moment with mirrors front and back. Delaney has been transformed. He has the thick, wavy, perfectly combed hair of a very young man, the fresh beardless face of a much younger, a much more hopeful man.