Métis Beach

by Claudine Bourbonnais

  It can wait.

  Someone rang the doorbell.

  “Who is it?” Ann asked, surprised.

  “I don’t know.”

  “At dinnertime?”

  “I’ll go see.”

  I kissed her and left the kitchen. From the terrace, Dick shouted out.

  “With the money you’re making, maybe it’s time to get some help, eh?”

  “I won’t change my habits for money, Dick! Being bourgeois kills creativity!”

  Laughter. The bell rang a second time. “Coming, coming.…” Who could be so irritating at supper time?

  I opened the door. There was no one there. The neighbour’s kids, probably. They used to be nice, well-mannered kids but had transformed into bothersome teenagers. Last week, they had set fire to the garbage can of another neighbour. A garbage fire in New York isn’t a big deal, but in L.A., swept by the warm, circular Santa Ana winds that get their energy from the deserts, a garbage fire can burn down an entire neighbourhood, threaten lives.

  “Who is it?” Ann said from the living room.

  No one, I was about to answer, until I noticed the front steps.

  Blood. A viscous mess of blood, spreading so quickly I backed up as you do when a sudden wave crashes at your feet with unexpected strength. In the middle of the puddle, something shapeless, sticky … a sort of dog without hair, with hooves … a calf fetus? Like the one on the hood of Avril’s Honda Civic?

  Suddenly nauseous, I was about to step back into the house to alert the cops when the woman appeared at the bottom of the steps, the same redheaded woman with her heavy belly, her white tunic stained with blood and her black glasses. My heart was beating frantically. What was she holding in her hands, pointed at me? A … gun? A real one? Behind me, the sounds of a door being pulled open. “Romain? Who is it?” A glimpse of Ann’s stupefied face. My legs buckled under me, the shock of my torso hitting the blood-covered cement. The sounds of shots, one, two, a deafening crack. I felt Ann’s body collapse on mine.

  VI

  MOÏSE

  1

  My jacket collar was raised against the chill as I walked in Central Park. Quick steps, hands balled up in my pockets, with no other goal but to reduce my blood pressure, which I kept under control only through medication. Almost five years and these little green pills — and other pills too — were saving my life, apparently. Since Ann’s murder in 1998. It was now 2003. Years had passed, meaningless time, a new millennium entered without a hiccup, despite the anticipated computer apocalypse. For me, the blow had come before, after which the world had stopped. It could have been six months or twenty years since I’d been back in New York. Time meant nothing to me now.

  To calm myself, I slowed down as I approached the Jackie O Reservoir. The most stable element of my life at that point might have been this great stretch of water, which I likened to an inland sea. I gazed on the waters every day from my apartment on the ninth storey of the St. Urban on Central Park West. It was April, the cherry trees in full bloom, a miracle each spring, the pink spots before the leaves came, like a female presence. Joggers, their ears covered with headphones, didn’t seem to notice life blooming. I was cold, but shook with anger. Because of Moïse. Another one of our fights, this one more serious. Since September 11, to my astonishment, I had discovered a reactionary side to my friend — “They don’t bring the war to us! We bring the war to them!” Moïse had become radicalized, letting his emotions cloud his judgment. You could chalk a lot of things up to the attacks, a break in History, like the ones the world wars had produced. There was a before and an after, a pre- and a post-, and in the after, it seemed like some New Yorkers had lost their ability to think critically. Moïse was one of them. This cynicism, this arrogance of his, it was a typical New York thing. And until then, it had protected the inhabitants of the city from the daily aggressions of a place that was, in truth, infernal. But all of it had fallen down with the Twin Towers, making room instead for fear and a desire for vengeance.

  “You can’t understand! You’re not American!”

  That’s what he had yelled at me an hour earlier at my house. God only knew that in these times of suspicion and exaggerated patriotism which had reached new heights since George W. Bush had declared his absurd war in Iraq, being told that you weren’t American was nothing less than an insult, or, worse still, a curse. I’d been living in the States for forty years — been a citizen since 1979 — and Moïse had the nerve to tell me I wasn’t American, exactly like he had done in 1966 in his East Harlem apartment, when he pushed me with a sneer as he waited, terrorized and dead drunk, for the army to hand down his sentence. Part of his life’s work had been to denounce that war. So, what about this one?

  “No? Not American? So what I am then?”

  He hadn’t answered, preferring to stare at the tips of his shoes. I continued, furious, “If I don’t think like you … Americans, I’m not one of you, is that it? Either with you or with the terrorists, like your good friend George Bush so eloquently put it!”

  Incensed, Moïse grabbed his coat and left, slamming the door behind him. I heard him get into the old elevator at the end of the corridor, then from the window watched him jump into a taxi, full of rage, gesticulating like a broken weather vane.

  A part of me was simply stunned, the other tried to comprehend: Moïse the pacifist, Moïse the draft dodger, giving his support to this warmonger obsessed with Iraq and its oil? Because they were afraid, because they’d been hit on home soil — you can’t understand, you’re not American! — Moïse and a majority of Americans were ready to accept as incontrovertible truth the damned lies about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, impressed by Colin Powell’s wild demonstration at the UN, and despite the UN inspectors saying that Iraq was collaborating with the inspection, that there was no need to get carried away. And Moïse, a reporter at the prestigious New York Times, was only asking me to believe. How could it be?

  “My God, Moïse! Remember the Tonkin incident in 1964! You were the first to say it was all lies! Same shit, different day! It smells even worse today than it did then!”

  He was pacing in the apartment. His eyes didn’t leave the copy of the New Yorker, which he had brought over and thrown on the table, eyes filled with rage, as if to say, how could you do this to me?

  I said, trying to stay calm, “I wrote what I think — that this war is as dirty and immoral as Vietnam.”

  “It isn’t the same! We haven’t been attacked like this since Pearl Harbor!”

  “Who attacked us? Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda! So why go into Iraq? What does Saddam Hussein have to do with Bin Laden?”

  “They want to destroy us! They want to destroy America!”

  Had I heard him right? I couldn’t believe my ears. His eyes glowed with rage, his almost bald head covered in sweat. I continued, outraged, “That’s precisely what all these people you hated back in the day — LBJ, McNamara, Agnew, Nixon — said about Communists, ‘they want to destroy America.’”

  He stiffened, waved me off, as if he didn’t want to waste another minute with an imbecile. “Stop bringing everything back to Vietnam! This time we’re not killing innocent farmers! This time, we’ll destroy their weapons, hit identified targets.”

  I burst out laughing, “You, the reporter at the New York Times? You believe that?”

  That’s when he tightened his fists and looked at me, full of contempt, “You can’t understand, you’re not American!”

  Had the heavy cloud of ash and smoke that covered New York after the fall of the World Trade Center altered the judgment of its inhabitants? Had the dust as fine as talcum powder that stuck to our hair, our skin, our clothes, that we had breathed and eaten for days, that we later learned was toxic, lethal and that had, in fact, led to the deaths of dozens of firemen, made thousands of people sick, had this apocalyptic dust made some of us mad?

&nbs
p; That fateful morning, deeply distressed, Moïse and I had spoken briefly on the phone just before the city’s communications infrastructure went down. Outside, the deafening scream of thousands of sirens. From my window, southern Manhattan and part of the sky disappeared in a heavy cloud of yellow smoke, while footage of the two planes smashing into the towers played in a continuous loop on my television, the second plane destroying all doubt about the first.

  “I … I can’t believe it …” Moïse said. “It’s a nightmare.…” He was interrupted, someone at his office at the Times began speaking to him, the panicked voice of a man. “I’ve got to go, Romain. It’s madness here. I’ve got a lot of work to do.…”

  It was impossible to speak to him after. He spent the rest of the week working and sleeping at the Times office. I managed to speak to Louise. She went to Staten Island to a friend’s house, unable to sleep alone in their own home. I told myself she might have liked to stay at my place at the St. Urban, in my eight-room apartment I still hadn’t had the energy to furnish. But who would have wanted a depressed man to console them in September 2001?

  In the days following the attacks, I left my place, at 88th and Central Park West, walked to Ground Zero — at least as far as they let me — stupefied like everyone else, lingering around the pictures of the missing posted at major intersections, thinking obsessively of all these men and women who died there, their bodies never to be discovered, gone in the smoke that floated over the city. So many innocents killed, like Ann, another innocent, had been killed. My distress mixed with the distress of the families and loved ones of the three thousand people who had died. Survivors staggering, their eyes tormented, waiting … for what? Wondering, simply, why? But there was no answer. Among the pictures, hundreds of young women of Ann’s age, someone even looked like her a little, her eyes and smile filled with the same light of life, and I thought of Ann, feeling so close to her, as if I needed the horrible event to help me truly begin the grieving process, to actually accept that she wouldn’t come back, more than three years after her death.

  Federal agents had worked well and quickly. James F. Lovell was arrested a few days after the murder, in a motel in New Mexico. I was shocked to discover the face of her assassin. Twenty-seven years old, his cheeks covered in pimples, the frail body of a prepubescent boy, almost a child. Images replayed constantly on the television, enough to make me crazy, but I couldn’t look away. As if I was waiting for us to look in each other’s eyes. Waiting for an apology. He had to be remorseful, right? But nothing, always the same images, made meaningless by their repeated broadcast. The same absent smile, same white, spotted skin, same slumped shoulders, same delicate wrists imprisoned in handcuffs that were too big for him, escorted by two cops from a cheap motel room, in Truth or Consequences, a city that sounded like a cruel joke.

  In the trunk of his Chevrolet Cavalier, the police discovered the .32 Smith & Wesson that had killed Ann, as well as a few newspaper articles on me and a woman’s outfit. He offered no resistance and quickly admitted his guilt, enabling me to avoid a painful trial. James F. Lovell received the death penalty for two counts of murder.

  And that’s how I learned the unspeakable news that Ann was two months pregnant. That’s what she had been trying to tell me for days, her beautiful face full of optimism, and what she had promised to tell me that very night as we stood in our kitchen, while our friends talked and laughed on the terrace. I’ve got something to tell you, but not now. Tonight, when everyone’s gone … It can wait.

  Often, I tried to think about the question as honestly as possible, trying to abstract the feeling of loss, trying not to answer with the broken heart that wanted to say anything just for Ann to still be alive — how would I have reacted, that night, once Dick, Bobby, and Dwayne had left, once we were alone in the kitchen filling the dishwasher with dirty glasses and plates? She would have looked at me, an apron covering the slightly swollen belly I had failed to notice, “I’m pregnant, Romain.”

  Would I have been joyful? Terrified? Or would I have said something like, “As long as you help me become a model father this time”?

  I don’t know.

  UNSTABLE PRO-LIFE ACTIVIST ARRESTED

  IN TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES

  FOR MURDER OF PREGNANT WOMAN

  A grotesque headline, almost comical. Enough to make you laugh. Truth or Consequences. Dozens of live news reports covering Ann’s murder. And they’d always mention the origin of the idiotic name of the town, a reference to an old game show. Reality wasn’t any more real than fiction; the two are always intertwined. The same way you could kill in this country because you felt offended by Chastity, a character that came out of my imagination, out of Ann and me, together.

  Ann’s family was deeply offended that I hadn’t gone to the funeral, her mother especially, but it was simply beyond me. And then there was the email from Judd, Ann’s nephew, that had cut me deeply, “Good riddance. We’ll never see you again.”

  Devastated, I left Los Angeles, letting my lawyers take care of everything however they saw fit. I couldn’t bear facing off against journalists excited by the smell of fresh blood, “Mr. Carr, does James F. Lovell deserve the death sentence?” The state of California imposed it in gruesome murder cases like this one, but I’d always been against the death penalty and would remain so. Peace through vengeance is an illusion. And the pain I felt wouldn’t cease because the murderer’s heart wasn’t beating.

  Despite Dick and Josh’s protests, I sold the house on Appian Way and both cars, and gave them total freedom for season 5, which was still being filmed. There were three episodes left to shoot. However, in conjunction with the actors, they decided to cancel them. No one wanted to continue. They would later choose to abandon season 6 entirely.

  In Gad We Trust ended without a conclusion, incomplete, just like Ann’s short life.

  The wind began blowing in gales in Central Park, making snow out of cherry blossoms. I began walking again to warm up, as I’d done often in the early days when I had returned to New York. Walk, that’s all I could do then, for long hours, without any purpose — in L.A. you never walk. I rediscovered the freedom of walking, letting my thoughts wander, stirring up the darkest reaches of my mind. Every morning was the same, assaulted by sinister thoughts from the moment I woke, like a bad toothache. My nights were never good, despite the sleeping pills I took. And so I dozed, my eyes opened on emptiness. I avoided television, didn’t read. I couldn’t deal with all these people who didn’t know that their small misfortunes were a kind of happiness.

  Len’s silence hurt me as well. For weeks, in newspapers, on television, and on the radio, that’s all anybody talked about. He couldn’t have not heard the news. I hadn’t received a letter or even a condolence card that he would’ve needed only to sign, it wouldn’t have been much of an effort. It would have made me happy, though that meant very little to me now. Just a word, just a small gesture to show he wasn’t insensitive to my suffering. But no, nothing.

  Moïse, Louise, and Ethel (I was only twenty-five minutes on foot from Harperley Hall where she still lived with her husband) were worried about me. “My God!” Moïse said. “You need to snap out of it!” Sometimes, exasperated by my apathy, he would simply hang up on me. It was impossible for him, a nervous guy who burned his anxiety in constant activity, to understand that I’d lost all desire. He had his work at the New York Times and his books, novels that he churned out regularly and had a steady market — the last one sold fifty thousand copies. Each time we saw each other he told me to write as well, but I couldn’t concentrate on anything, writing most of all. Ann’s death had put an end to it.

  To avoid going completely mad, I found a job on Amsterdam Avenue — a job that allowed me to stay busy and not get consumed by my thoughts. Moïse was furious, “A slave in a bakery! Good God, you’ve got to get your dignity back!”

  “You’re the first one to say I need to get a
grip. Well that’s what I’m doing. It’s what I need right now, okay?”

  He stared at me with his steel blue eyes, as if he were looking at an idiot. “And, of course, you’re paid. How much? I’m curious.”

  “Six dollars an hour.”

  “You’re a millionaire!” His fist had smashed against the table. “There’s something wrong with you, Romain. You need a psychiatrist.”

  But what would a psychiatrist tell me? That grief is hard?

  My job at Ostrowski’s bakery on Amsterdam Avenue was exactly what I was looking for. Some fifteen minutes’ walking distance from my place, I was there at five in the morning, putting bread in the oven, then taking it out, in the midst of inhuman heat. I worked until eleven and took half an hour off. Then back in front of the oven until two in the afternoon. I returned home drained, my head and mind on neutral, a sort of welcome fog. It was an exhausting job that knocked me out, getting me into bed early in the evening, like the mine and farm workers in Zola and Steinbeck books.

  The owner seemed to be surprised when I entered his shop after seeing the posting through the foggy window. He brought his old Polish immigrant’s head near mine, squinting at me through thick glasses. By the end of the interview, however, they agreed to take me on a trial basis.

  Stan Ostrowski and his wife Maria were among the few decent people that I have met in my life. Worn down by their modest immigrant existence — she was a short, corpulent woman with swollen legs covered in varicose veins, while he was almost blind as a result of diabetes — they were probably seventy years old, and yet neither ever complained. Every day, they were up at two o’clock in the morning and slaved away until seven at night. Bent over by work, every day they had that thankful look on their faces that people have when they say they’ve had a lucky life. Short nights, a little bit of vodka, seven days a week without ever, ever, taking a vacation.