God, I loved her.
2
“He really told you that? I mean he actually said it was her ‘dying wish’?”
In the Pathfinder, Ann examined my face anxiously. “Oh, Romain, it just gives me the creeps. What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
I was confused, didn’t know whether I should be angry or rattled or both. The man on the phone, so distraught it was hard to understand what he was saying at first. “Who?” I asked, impatient. “Jack … Jack Holmes.… In Montreal.” “Listen, I’m in a hurry. I don’t know who you are. I’m going to hang up.”
I started the motor, pressed my foot on the accelerator, and the Pathfinder began its descent down Appian Way, a mile of winding road bordered by half-million-dollar homes — at the cheapest. It was a road that you couldn’t take at high speed. A road that required careful driving, a descent to Laurel Canyon of no more than seven minutes, but exasperating when you were late. Next to me, Ann, nervous, her hand on my thigh like a weak supplication for me to slow down.
“Don’t hang up!” the man had said on the telephone. “I’m Gail Egan’s husband.… It’s Gail.… She’s not well, not well at all.…”
A jump back in time, like stumbling off a cliff. A sudden shadow over my face had alerted Ann, “Something’s wrong?” She thought of the people we knew in L.A. Or perhaps my friend Moïse in New York. “Nothing serious, honey?” Gail Egan. Ann had heard of her, of course, and had seen those cards that Gail persisted in sending me on my birthday every year, without exception, on the dot like a reminder from a dentist’s office. And yet, any sort of relationship with her had ended long ago, too many terrible memories. Métis Beach, Gaspé, and now this — would this be another of these moments that brought everything back to the surface?
“Honey, tell me what’s going on.…”
I asked the man on the phone, “Something happened to Gail?”
“She’s in hospital.”
“What do you mean, she’s in the hospital?”
“She … she.…”
He swallowed a sob. Behind him, shards of rusty voices blared out of a speaker.
“Is Gail sick?”
“She doesn’t have much time left.…”
“What are you saying?”
“Gail ordered the doctors to keep her alive … until you got here.…”
“Until I got there?”
“It’s last minute, I know.…”
“I …”
I stopped talking, seized by an avalanche of confused thoughts. Gail dying? Followed by such anger that it surprised even me — why did she ask for me, now, after all these years? Now that things were finally going well for me. Couldn’t she keep from … from what, exactly?
“Listen, Jack.…” Then I heard myself stutter through a series of boring excuses. Yes, I understood his pain. No, I couldn’t leave Los Angeles, the shoot, a delicate situation, a controversial series.… The more I heard my justifications, the more ridiculous they sounded.
“It’s urgent!” Jack interrupted. He’d spoken loudly, with a seething anger that announced danger. “It’s a matter of hours. I know you’re far. I’m sorry.…” Then in a deep voice, irrevocable. “You’re her last wish.”
“I can’t, Jack.”
“Wait!” he shouted.
And I hung up, guilt like fresh skin.
3
Gail would say, “Some people are born in the wrong country, like others are born with the wrong sex.”
Very early she’d put her finger on the source of my anguish. I was in the first category; she was in the second. Not that she would have liked to be a man, no, only that she wanted to have been born a few years later, when women were able to choose their lives — have a career or choose to be mothers, marry or not.
Words that were disarmingly sincere coming from the mouth of a young girl, spoken with a mix of lucidity and resignation, as only adults know how to do, when grave crises appear. But we were too young to be that lucid, we were only seventeen (I was four months younger than she), and miserable. It might have been the only two things that united us, really — besides the dream of living a life far from our parents — because in the end, we came from such different worlds.
You should have seen Métis Beach back then. Métis Beach and its satellite, our village, that the English called the French Village. A traveller passing through would forget it before the dust had time to settle in his wake. A series of modest wooden structures, covered in asbestos shingles. Tiny lawns dotted with sickly bushes, beaten down by the wind coming off the river that was so wide here it was called the sea. Rue Principale and its few shops. There was Mode pour toute la famille, my mother’s store, which we lived above; Quimper’s general store, which doubled as the post office; a bakery, Au Bon Pain Frais; and finally Leblond cobblers. The caisse populaire had its counter at Joe Rousseau’s place, a small white house at 58 Rue Principale, with no sign. (We used to say he’d hit it big, Joe Rousseau, since his rent, electricity, and heat were all paid by the government.) There was the “modern” church and presbytery, built in 1951. And Loiseau’s garage that held the limousines for all of the rich English from Métis Beach in the summer. Bentleys, Cadillacs, Lincoln Continental Mark IIs, and Chrysler Imperials. Black and shiny like seal skin, beautiful cars with gleaming chrome like in the movies, with the drivers in their dark suits, their caps raised on their foreheads when they were off-duty, having a drink at Jolly Rogers on Route 6, today called the 132, before returning to their tiny and badly ventilated rooms over Loiseau’s garage. They dressed sharply, but weren’t of the elegant class that stayed in the grand hotels of Métis Beach.
Métis Beach was to the west, at the very end of Rue Principale. Rue Principale turned into Beach Street — the same street, like an airplane that would bring you from a dull, gloomy country to another place, a shining paradise. You didn’t need a border or a gate to know you were moving into a foreign place. The hundred-year-old pines and spruce, the cedar rows, told you that much. Through them you could see verdant lawns decorated with massive rosebushes, and great summer homes all made of wood with tennis courts beside them. Lives of luxury, sports cars, and endless garden parties. Playing golf till sunset. In Métis Beach, tea time would end well before four o’clock, whisky was poured freely, sometimes as early as noon. We watched them with envy, all the way till Labour Day, when they left in the soft sunlight of early September, with the children and the maids. It would then be my father’s job, as well as the other men’s in the village, to take care of their homes, shutting off the electricity and the gas, purging water from the pipes, and covering up the windows with wooden boards for the winter to come.
Gail’s house, the Egan house, was my father’s responsibility.
Strangely, I can’t remember ever having envied their wealth. It was their freedom I envied, that arrogant freedom. Art and Geoff Tees were two of them, often seen at the wheel of their convertible MGAs (bottle green for Art, red for Geoff), the radio spitting out wild rock music. You could see them driving full speed on the 132, cigarette at their lips, beer bottle in their hands — they were barely sixteen for God’s sake! — accompanied by their girlfriends from Montreal who came to spend their summers in Métis Beach — it was said that they slept with them, in the same bed! The sort of behaviour you’d only see among the English. Among our Protestant neighbours. Where apparently they spoke freely of condoms and tampons, while in the French Village, we didn’t even know such things existed.
Their existence was an itch we’d have to scratch our whole lives until it bled. Unless we left.
The last time we saw each other was in December of 1986. Gail knew I was passing through New York. Her husband had an accountant’s meeting in Union City, New Jersey, on the other side of the Hudson, and she’d come with him. She’d phoned me in L.A. I was surprised and thought it might be my friend John K
innear in Métis Beach who’d given her my number, and perhaps John had even told her I’d be in New York that week. I can’t remember, but I’d been surprised, very surprised. “Romain, it would be nice, no? For lunch?” And I hesitated before answering. We had left each other on bad terms years before, and I still felt she’d stolen something from me. I had the feeling I’d been betrayed by her, that I’d been unable to help her — to save her. “Lunch?” I thought for a moment, yes, no … perhaps my friend Moïse might join us? It might be more pleasant. “Moïse?” Surprise in her voice, perhaps disappointment. “Yes, of course. I haven’t seen him in such a long time. It would be great.” And so we made plans for Zack’s, a deli on the Lower East Side. Moïse had gotten there a good half-hour late, covered in snow, breathless as if he’d run across Manhattan. We laughed, Moïse and I, but not Gail, she barely smiled. She was wearing a dress from another time, her eternal shawl draped across her shoulders as if in a perpetual state of hypothermia, throwing disgusted glances at the salamis that hung from the ceiling like stalactites. She sighed with irritation at the impassioned conversation Moïse and I began about the scandal of the hour, Irangate, which had sullied Reagan’s presidency. To distract herself, she began tearing the labels off our bottles of Beck’s.
“Are you okay, Gail? Everything’s good on your end?” She had little to tell us. Her home in Baie-D’Urfé, the animal rights organizations she was volunteering with. When it came time to order, she dug her heels in, “No vegetarian dishes?” In the end she had a tomato salad, barely ripe, their hearts still white, and mineral water. She pecked at her food, a hand gripping the shawl around her small breasts, throwing haughty looks at our plates full of pastrami.
“You keep going like this, boys, and you’ll be dead at fifty.”
What had I felt? Pity. Pity and a little anger. I was wondering why she’d come to see me. What was the point? After a taxi dropped all three of us at Rockefeller Center, we began walking towards the New York Times building where Moïse worked. A fine but abundant snow was falling over the city, its chaos now muted like a mountain in winter. Moïse was playing the fool, catching snowflakes on his tongue, and Gail walked ahead of us, head down, splitting the crowd like a ship racing for port after months of hard sailing. I escorted her to her hotel near Broadway. What could we say to each other? Between us, there was the weight of the separation for which she was ultimately responsible. She had behaved reprehensibly, egotistically. And we both feared our words would wake the monsters of our shared past. The events of summer 1962 had shattered our lives, marking us for the rest of our days, though it had affected Gail even more than me, I would come to discover.
She said, shame-faced, absorbed by the tip of her boot drawing strange shapes on the snowy sidewalk, “Well, see you next time.”
“See you next time.…”
I remember the small furtive pecks we gave each other on our frozen cheeks, then her hand buried in a large mitten pushing the woollen hat she wore down over her sad eyes. Forty-two years old, lost in a man’s coat, successive layers of shawls and scarfs, she looked like one of those students in Washington Square who found their clothes in an Army surplus store on Canal Street.
After that I wouldn’t see her again. It had been my choice, my decision. Turn the page for good.
4
“You’re not saying anything?” Ann asked in the Pathfinder.
In front of us, Laurel Canyon Boulevard was paralyzed by a long line of stopped vehicles, their brake lights diluted in the fog.
“We can’t know about Gail,” I said. “It might be another of her tantrums.”
She glanced at me out of the corner of her eye, more surprised than indignant. “A tantrum? You don’t call people to your death bed for a tantrum. How can you say such a thing?”
She turned the radio on, cycling through the stations. Traffic reports, the same as usual; streets were clogged throughout the city. Then a couple of ads shouting at us. Exasperated, she lowered the volume and continued, “What you just said about Gail is pretty terrible, isn’t it?”
Yes and no. Gail wasn’t easy to live with. She always thought of herself first and expected everyone to yield to her suddenly changing moods. A woman of fifty-one now, perhaps she’d softened with time. I turned to Ann, “You’re right. But things were complicated with Gail. Not like they are with you, honey.”
And that was true. With Ann, there never were any real fights. We had a bond that our married friends admired, a fulfilling sex life — just like they talked about on the covers of women’s magazines. Of Gail, only a memory of something unsound, a thin crack in a windshield, a misunderstanding, long-winded shouting matches to get her to come to bed with me, one of those women whom despair and anger light like a match, distress a constant in her eyes. I always came away from her unnerved.
Ann measured her smile, not wanting it to be triumphant. I knew her, she wasn’t jealous or the type to delight in easy flattery, not like they are with you, honey. At least she wouldn’t show it.
Ann. Lord, her beauty had cast a spell on me seven years earlier, when we first met at the art gallery on Rodeo Drive, where I worked to help pay the bills. Her mother, a regular customer of the Kyser Gallery, had introduced us. “My daughter studies film at UCLA. I thought you might give her a few tips.”
“Tips? You know, I might not be the best one for.…”
“Come now! Don’t be modest! Sure, there’s your talent, but there’s also that nice mug of yours, young man.…” Followed by a hearty wink. Meanwhile, behind her back, her daughter rolled her eyes.
Laureen Heller was a small skinny woman, moved by the morbid fear of gaining any weight at all, her face worn smooth by too many facelifts. Her taste in art was exuberant — charged, gaudy, garish, like the décor in her large Tudor home in Brentwood. She was a great customer and Ted Kyser, the owner, couldn’t afford to lose her. She bought two or three paintings a year, sometimes more, a welcome relief in the summer of 1988, when business was particularly slow because of the seemingly endless writer’s strike.
While her mother scampered about the gallery, Ann spoke into my ear, “Can I take you out for a drink?” Stunned by her advance, I burst out laughing, charmed by this young woman, so sure of herself. We ended the night a bit past sober in an Italian restaurant in Venice Beach. I was enchanted by her eyes in the flickering candlelight, her jokes and funny faces, her brown braids, thick and heavy like hemp rope.
Seven years later, Ann no longer looked like that young slip of a girl who had so easily charmed me, but she was still as beautiful, with more sensible hair, her pearl grey suit and her immaculate blouse. She’d gained a warm maturity, acquired a profound sense of responsibility. We were a couple, yes, and also business partners in In Gad We Trust. Without Ann, none of it would have happened.
She continued, going through her bag, “We’re going to be cannon fodder for Dick. Not sure we’ll make it out alive this time. One hour late. And maybe two if we don’t start moving soon. Why can’t we just have a phone in the car?”
“Because it’s the only place I can get a moment’s peace.”
My tone had been unintentionally dry. Ann hunkered down in her seat, sighed. Yes of course, a phone. It would certainly be safer. And with all the complaints we’d been getting at It’s All Comedy! you never knew, there were all sorts of crazies in this country, like the guy who’d shot Lennon in New York, and the other one, something like Hickey? Hinckley? Who’d almost got Reagan in Washington to impress Jodie Foster, like in Taxi Driver. There were crazies by the barrelful hearing voices and not seeking help.
I told Ann, “Okay.”
“What, okay?”
“For the phone. I’ll take care of it. I promise.”
That’s how it was with Ann. Simple, easy. I drove in silence and thought back to the time Gail had come to live with me in San Francisco. Nineteen seventy-one. All of it seemed so very far a
way now. The large apartment on Telegraph Hill that cost me an arm and a leg, an aberration so that Gail might live comfortably, so that she wouldn’t feel too much out of her element. But she didn’t care. In fact, she cared about very little at all. With her, I was constantly navigating some tortured roller coaster. In the dizzying highs, she could disappear for days. Or drag me against my will and with five minutes’ notice to some nudism and primal scream expedition somewhere in the Sierra Nevada. Or force me to follow her to a retreat at Shasta Abbey, the Buddhist monastery in northern California where all the hippies loved to go back in those blessed days, in order to “learn how to accept one’s sexual impulses without surrendering to them or suppressing them.”
When she began writing long condemnatory letters to her father in Montreal, I knew she was entering one of her agitated phases. Or if she began sending him Allen Ginsberg’s amphetamine-laced writings and those of his artist friends — “the best minds of my generation starved by madness” — accompanied by a note in her muddled handwriting, “Your daughter’s doing incredibly well, she lives a quiet life in San Francisco, as you can tell.”
A disturbed young woman, unable to defend herself against her fate.
“Gail is an unstable woman, Ann. She might have decided, just like that, to.…” To what? I thought. “I can’t understand why she’s asking for me. Not after all these years.”
“She’s going to die, Romain! You talk about her like she was a stranger. You loved her, didn’t you?”
I didn’t answer, I didn’t know what to think. Ann continued, “My God, if ever life drives us apart for one reason or another, the idea that you have so little consideration for me would be hard to bear.”
The Beatles were playing on the radio, a ballad that sounded ridiculous given the circumstances. “What happened to her, cancer?”
Métis Beach Page 2