Accusation

by Catherine Bush

  Two months after that, he showed up one night without calling and stepped inside the apartment without taking off his overcoat and as he sat himself on the edge of her sofa, sandy hair greying at the edges of his large head, one hand in the grip of the other, she had an intimation of why he must be there. He said, We got the results of the scan two days ago and the first tumour is gone, but there is another, smaller one. They are doing a biopsy. He said, It is easy to feel you have done something wrong, you have done something to deserve this. This isn’t rational. At every instant one has to fight against this. I don’t know what lies ahead or what I’m going to do, but please don’t tell me you can’t see me right now.

  She had a vision of what they were together, a huge, tensile creature alive in the room. In any relationship, you made a vibrating creature together, and theirs was jagged and roiling and kind and ferocious and tender, it was all these things. She had already put in a request to switch jobs, to do something that would keep her closer to home. She went to the kitchen and made them each a cup of tea with brandy in it: there was no adequate gesture in such a circumstance, and this was the best she could do.

  She’d first thought of buying a house when pregnant; in her grief, she went ahead and did it anyway. Friends helped her move. Greta went back into treatment.

  She and David had survived all this, and what they shared, whatever you called it, had burgeoned into its own form of commitment.

  On the round stage below, two creatures with nubby horns protruding from their heads led a small figure in a blonde wig away from a coat rack and its mother and father, who were seated in two large armchairs. The armchairs vanished and were replaced by another realm in which, as the small blonde person and her companions watched, silver-clad figures descended from the heights of the metal rafters, bending and twisting within silver hoops clasped by a hand or a flexed knee. Tiny Chinese contortionists wrapped their limbs into helixes, as if their joints were liquid or air, while balancing silver balls on various parts of their bodies. Virile, Spandex-clad acrobats rode bicycles, hopped on and off them while keeping the bicycles continuously in motion, tossed the bicycles back and forth, until every one of them was upside down, legs in the air, atop a moving bicycle, balanced on one arm and a hand that grasped a bicycle seat. Sara wondered what Raymond Renaud thought of all this. She kept being distracted by the spectre of money, how much it must cost to mount a spectacle like this, as a woman spun her way down a skein of red cloth attached to a high crossbeam, her sequined body held in place now by a foot, now by a wrist wrapped around the ribbon of red. Violins surged. Everything she saw made her think of money or death. There was the peculiar and mounting exhaustion of watching one act of extreme dexterity after another, the desire for more risk and possible disaster warring with the impossibility of one feat topping another. She found herself longing for the simpler, intimate vitality of the children’s circus.

  At the post-show reception, back in the smaller tent, Raymond Renaud stood in a corner surrounded by a cluster of hangers-on as Juliet filmed him and a photographer snapped his picture. His juggler’s arms, in their yellow checked sleeves, swooped through the air, although Sara was too far off to hear what he was saying. The tiny Chinese contortionists huddled in another corner towered over by the hulking gymnasts. Around the perimeter of the room, on black-cloth-covered risers, large-scale photographs of the Ethiopian circus children were mounted. The photographs must have been there during the pre-show talk, but she had failed to notice them. Glass of wine and plate of canapés in hand, Sara drew close to take a look, all shot, a small sign said, by an Italian photographer.

  The photographs were dense with colour: the saturated red of the ground, the oscillating blue of the sky, the deep green of a fringe of pine and skinny eucalyptus trees pulsed behind the children. In some photographs, they were costumed; in others, they wore street clothes. A team of boys in pink leotards, ribbons fluttering from their sleeves, soared, airborne, knees tucked to chests, arms clasped around legs, shadows like a flight of hawks against the blue canvas scrim at their backs. A quartet of girls in white held aloft a fifth girl, the older one who’d been the most extraordinary contortionist in the show in Copenhagen: once more, her weight rested on her arms and chest, and she inverted her legs above her torso so that her body formed a circle and her feet dangled beside her head, the arc of her legs echoed by the refracted halo of the sun.

  The children looked wholly absorbed in what they were doing, oblivious to the photographer or else ignoring him, the upheld girl’s expression dreamy. A young boy in T-shirt and jeans and running shoes was the same slim boy in blue who’d been the first to spring from beneath the blankets in the Copenhagen show and the last to fling himself over the rope of fire, only now he held aloft two blackened metal torches, flames quickening at their tips. His physical beauty was such as to be almost discomforting, the full lips and fine arch of his brows and almond skin, even as the photographs touched all the children with beauty yet did not objectify them. What shone through was their insistence on being taken seriously, as performers, professionals — either the photographer wanted to suggest this, or they did, or both.

  Someone called out her name. Juliet was approaching, pink-cheeked, without her video camera, in the company of the circus founder, who’d cast off his crowd of followers. Juliet looked, it had to be said, a little in love with him, and he, smiling, light on his feet, glanced at the photographs behind Sara before his gaze veered away.

  Alcohol had widened her veins and made everything drifty. She had to figure out what to do with her glass and plate. Green-eyed, now that was a surprise, and older than when seen at a distance, if still youthful: pouches beneath his eyes, flecks of grey in the tight curls of his black hair.

  Raymond Renaud. This is Sara Wheeler, Juliet said. Sara’s the one who told me about the circus in the first place. She saw you in Copenhagen.

  The grip of his hand in hers was warm and firm. Thank you for that, he said.

  I was there for a conference. I happened to see a poster. They’re wonderful performers. I’m not a circus person, but I thoroughly enjoyed the show.

  Sara’s a journalist, Juliet said.

  Not an arts journalist, though. I write about immigration issues. And immigrant communities.

  Maybe when we come here you can write something, he said, holding her in his green-eyed gaze. He had a supple physical presence, not slim but solid, taller than Sara, and projected a flexible strength. Or when Juliet’s film comes out. When we travel we often do outreach into the diasporic communities. Or maybe one day you will find yourself in Addis Ababa. Have you ever been there?

  I haven’t, no.

  You should come and see the circus in its habitat, or you and Juliet will come and you can write something then.

  Juliet stood beside him, taut in her silky skirt and purple tights and Australian desert boots. Raymond Renaud touched Juliet’s shoulder as if he sensed that she needed to be placated. Juliet says people here are very excited about her film, and I’m so glad to be bringing this momentum and awareness to North America. Now I have to ask you a question. When you saw the show in Copenhagen, tell me truly, what did you think?

  His insistence puzzled Sara: she’d already told him that she’d thought the show was good.

  They’re fantastic performers, exuberant, daring. Do any of them have any prior training or is this all thanks to you?

  What I’ve done is introduce the idea of circus and these particular skills. What is so important to me is that people see what genuinely good performers they are, talented, capable, that people do not watch the show and think charity work or social welfare project or see them as a curiosity.

  I didn’t think that.

  He was alive to the need to bring Juliet into the circle of his attention, Juliet’s lips parting as if she were about to speak. Or patronize them, he said, his gaze moving between the two of them. That is not what this is about. Because they are so good, they are so —
>
  He broke off. Something caught in his throat. He froze, recovered, gathered them both in his radiant smile. It is so, it is so important, this work. I have been changed by it. It’s greater than travel, better than anything I’ve ever done, better than sex.

  Some distance from the entrance of the reception tent, across the parking lot, a light glowed above the metal frame of a payphone. Sara wanted and did not want to know if David, or her parents, had tried to reach her. With David, there was the perennial difficulty of not being able to call him, at least at home. She was ready to leave yet perhaps should wait a little longer for the wine to settle in her bloodstream. She walked toward the metal box, gulls swooping like handkerchiefs through the dark above her, slipped a coin into the slot, and called her answering machine: no messages. The silence fell into her.

  The tent had a side opening, she noted as she returned, and beside it rose a stack of red plastic crates, the kind that held wineglasses, and two figures stood nearby: a waiter, in white shirt and black vest, who ground a cigarette beneath his heel, and Raymond Renaud, in his yellow checked jacket, close at the young man’s side. His words of moments before, better than sex, returned to her. Her approach must have caught Raymond’s eye, for he looked up and, as the waiter slipped back into the tent, called out, Do you happen to know the time?

  A lake breeze hit her as Sara made her way toward him, and she tugged up the cuff of her linen shirt, aware of voices behind her leaving the tent for the parking lot. Almost eleven-fifteen, she said when close and held out her hand to him once more. Sara Wheeler, I’m —

  Yes, yes, I remember. Something peremptory flared through him, though he kept his voice low and conversational, and they were far enough from the main entrance to the tent that they were unlikely to be heard. She was aware, even more intently than when they’d met earlier, of his solid yet quicksilver muscularity. Did you by chance drive here tonight?

  I did, she said, although his question implied another question, and it was already forming between them while she waited to hear exactly what it would be.

  Would you be able to give me a lift to the airport?

  Now?

  There is a late flight to Montreal. I hope to fly stand-by.

  If her memory served her, there was a flight that left around midnight for Montreal. Even if they were to set off now, and as close as they were, a twenty-minute drive from the airport at this hour, she doubted that he would make it, but was it worth a try? His need to fly to Montreal at this time of night puzzled her, and there was also this: I thought someone said you were going on to Washington for another benefit.

  I have a change of plans, he said. Now I have to get back to Addis. I have a flight from Montreal via Frankfurt tomorrow evening.

  So you could take a flight from here tomorrow. There are plenty of flights. If the last flight’s at midnight, I don’t think you’ll make it. Isn’t the Cirque putting you up in a hotel?

  Of course, yes.

  She was trying to piece together various things: his urgency; the fact that he didn’t seem to have asked any of his handlers for a ride; the hippie-esque look of his socked feet in their sandals; a wildness in his glance, as if he didn’t want to be found. What are your plans for tomorrow? he asked, which if it was an attempt at seduction seemed a clunky route in.

  Work, she said.

  Is it essential for you to be there?

  Yes, no, not absolutely essential. A cloud of curiosity sifted up through her.

  What would you think of driving to Montreal?

  Tonight?

  Yes, tonight.

  The proposition seemed outlandish: six hours of night driving, the two of them near-strangers, and what was she supposed to do when she got there? Maybe you would like to spend the weekend, he said.

  It’s Thursday.

  Well, a long weekend. Whatever his urgency, he was also framing the whole thing as a dare. He winked. I will help with the driving, he added. And pay for the gas.

  None of this made any sense, which in itself was intriguing. She was tipped into the vertigo of whatever propelled him, this mystery and the beating of its wings. He was not proposing that they spend the weekend there together.

  There is so much I need to do tomorrow, he said. He slung his juggler’s arms across his chest. I would like to get to Montreal as soon as I can. As if this semi-rational explanation was enough to overcome the preposterousness of proposing to drive through the night rather than his catching the first flight in the morning.

  Did you ask Juliet? She needed to know this.

  No. Juliet doesn’t have a car. Anyway, I don’t think she would do it.

  Sara thought, That isn’t true. For some reason, he didn’t want Juliet to do it.

  Surprise pushed away the last vestiges of the wine’s fuzziness. What she should do, what she could do, was offer to drive him to the airport — and if they left instantly maybe he’d catch the last flight after all, however much of a long shot it seemed. If not, he could spend the night at the airport, or she could drive him back to the airport first thing in the morning. Yet his offer of the larger, crazier adventure had an odd effect. It made her feel recognized, as if he’d seen into her own capacity for impetuous, even reckless behaviour.

  For at other times, and in other parts of the world, she had not been one to hurry home at the end of the evening to put herself to bed before it got too late. No, she had kept herself awake or asked to be woken deep in the night by a phone call or a rap on the door and pulled on her underwear inside-out and bolted mugs of syrupy coffee or tossed back caffeine pills or cold medicine laced with speed before hunkering down in the broken-springed back seat of a van, a nylon headscarf tied about her head, pressed between the exhausted bodies of colleagues, fellow journalists, their translator, often all men, as a driver bore them out, out along the road to Najaf, through the slowly lifting dark.

  Years before that, in the wake of the trial and her acquittal, she had on impulse bought a cheap plane ticket from Montreal to Paris, hours after handing in the final paper that would allow her to graduate. She had bundled clothes into an oversized knapsack and stuffed the rest of her possessions into cardboard boxes, stored them under the bed in the spare room of Norbert McKibben, world-famous political scientist and department chair, in whose house she’d spent those last two months holed up, eating meals made by Norbert’s kindly wife, Maureen, after she’d bolted from Juliet’s apartment.

  On her first day in Paris, she’d met some Gitane-smoking young Parisians in a café in the Marais. Late the next night, she huddled with them around a manhole cover while one young man pried the metal lid open with a crowbar, before the Parisians stubbed out their cigarettes and, one by one, took hold of the supports of a ladder and climbed into the descending tunnel’s mouth. She’d been the last to grab hold of the side rails and reach one foot below another onto the rungs, tugged by the promise of a trip through the catacombs and the chance to throw herself toward something riskily new, once the girl on the ladder ahead of her leaped into the dark toward the dank base of the tunnel, shouting, Sautez!

  On a whim, she had written a piece on the catacomb-walkers and their traipsing and partygoing in the underground tunnels of Paris, and sold it as a freelancer to a New York newspaper. Days later, still gleeful, she’d stepped out of the communal shower in her Paris hostel to hear someone say in English that a nuclear power plant had exploded in the Ukraine and a radioactive cloud was blowing west across Europe. A Lebanese journalist, met at another café, said, Go to Beirut, and gave her the name of a fixer and of a small, cheap West Beirut hotel close to the one where all the journalists stayed. She’d decided maybe it made sense to get out of Europe, and thought, Why not Beirut? Two weeks later, she was stepping off the boardwalk onto the Beirut beach, stones pressing against the soles of her feet as she walked toward the sea.

  And here was this man, the electric heft of his body felt across the space between them. She had no desire to go back to her empty house, to
face, again, the fact that neither David nor her parents had called. She lived a life that left her free, if she wished, to take off in the middle of the night without consulting anyone. On the other hand, she had no desire to sleep with this man. It was her birthday, if only for half an hour more, which made any decision feel numinous. Returning to Montreal, which she did very occasionally for work, would be proof that what had happened to her there — the accusation, the trial, the collapse of her life with Graham — had lost whatever hold it once had on her.

  Okay, she said. Let’s do it. Do you need to go back inside? I’ll get my car. It’s a white Toyota Camry, and I’ll pull up at the back of the lot — Sara pointed, beyond the tent, to the exit lane that led past where the looming, decommissioned battleship was docked.

  I have a bag I must get, Raymond Renaud said. And presumably he would have to say goodbye to people. Thank you so much for this.

  He left her side, loping toward the tent, relief making him buoyant.

  Exhilaration knocked at the top of her head. She could not now go back inside to find Juliet. If Juliet had left while Sara’s back was turned, surely Raymond would have seen her and called out. She could not say goodnight to Juliet and tell her what she was about to do. Nor did she want Juliet to see her driving off with Raymond Renaud. If Raymond told Juliet that he and she were going to drive to Montreal, that was his business. Sara didn’t think he would. She did not want to admit that her own decision had anything to do with Juliet, her complicated feelings toward Juliet, a desire, now, to snatch something from her. She was stepping toward mystery, the lake breeze quickening in the threads of her shirt. Most immediately, she had to make it to her car, get Raymond into her car and the two of them away from this place without being seen.