Can you understand why it feels wrong to completely let go of the possibility of his innocence? Maybe he isn’t guilty of what he’s been accused of. Maybe he did something, and they have good reason to be upset with him and lash out. But maybe, by linking him directly to a pedophile, I’ve helped scapegoat an innocent man. I spent those hours in the car with him. I had no sense of him then as a raging sociopath. Or when I spoke to him. Full of himself, wanting things his way, self-absorbed but not —
It wasn’t just her innocence that she wanted David to see or feel but something else that she wasn’t sure she could articulate properly. Something about the complicated ways in which innocence could be lost. How, having been accused, you turned a false accusation upon yourself. Maybe you had done something in order to be accused, even if you couldn’t decipher what. The blame wasn’t random. There was something about you. The legacy of imagining yourself as others, as your accusers, saw you became internalized. The shame of it. Some countered shame with anger. She had been angry. There was shame in having to defend yourself. And fear. What had happened once could happen again. Mistrust became global. The places you inhabited felt unforgivably tainted, as you grasped at the belief that you could outrun or cover up what had happened.
She had begun to trust again, to trust David, although trust only went so far with him because if she opened herself too much, he’d back off.
Don’t go down that path, he said. It’s dangerous.
What path, how dangerous?
I don’t know any more than what I’ve read and what you’ve told me, but from here, he looks guilty. He runs, he goes to ground, changes his appearance, clearly doesn’t want to be found — and he denies the allegations only when you press him to.
I didn’t press. And I’ve thought about why he didn’t speak before that. Or make a statement. He didn’t want more negative attention to the circus. To risk doing more damage to it.
Listen, he goes right back to working with children in another place. When found, he kills himself. I’m not saying he is guilty, Sara, and granted, that kind of allegation is enough to destroy a person’s life, and potentially enough to make someone want to kill himself. Yes. But. There are patterns of behaviour. I don’t want you to get too knotted up in all this —
Was there something patronizing about David’s words? Even dismissive? There was a strange taste in her mouth. Something was missing, some emotional connection, there was something here that David couldn’t or wouldn’t see. Because it felt too dangerous. Or she couldn’t get him to see it. They had never argued. They had shared a beautiful fluency. They had been through so much together. But their mutual habits of self-protection, which had once seemed like a good thing, a way of being that bound them, were for her no longer enough.
I can’t do this anymore. She’d had no idea she was going to say this until she did.
Do what?
Do this. Be with you like this.
David looked startled. It isn’t possible otherwise, he said. You know that.
In the maelstrom of all that she didn’t know, here was something she did. She felt stuck, trapped in a cage. If he wanted her — he wanted her only like this. He would not leave his wife. He had no desire to change things.
Greta knows you still see me, doesn’t she?
There are some things —
Do you love me?
Sara, please.
You don’t love me or you won’t tell me if you do. You must know I love you. Do you know what it’s like to love someone who can’t or won’t love you back?
Both his face and his body contracted, turning inward and away. She’d raised her voice. He would hate that she was making a scene. The door to the kitchen squeaked somewhere beyond her back. Someone had said to her once that all desire begins in the desire to be witnessed. Did it?
David, do you really think we can go on and on like this? Coat pulled on, she tossed a couple of bills onto the table, which David pushed back at her.
Sara. Stop it.
In pain, she spoke the only words she could think to say to him, It’s an impossible thing.
She came to a halt by the lake. By then a light, cold rain was falling. She had walked west in the dark to the park gates, the pair of old lamps glowing atop their pedestals, and, once through the gate, followed the path that led alongside the duck pond and traversed the lawns beyond, passed no one, and came out again, crossing first the Queensway, then beneath the expressway, then Lakeshore Boulevard, where the arched entranceway of the old bathing pavilion glowed white on her left and a thin strip of beach waited ahead through a drooping line of leafless willow trees. The water’s edge, a line of white froth, curled at her feet. The water smelled fecund and dank. Ducks and geese were small blobs, darker against the tunnel grey of sky and water. Two swans upended themselves and waved about like drowning hands. There was no sign that David had tried to follow her. She did not think he would follow her. To leap from his car and run through the dark across the strip of beach and shout that he loved her, he would leave his wife for her. His mother had left him and part of him would always be leaving, but he would not leave his wife. No, he would speak to the waiter and pay for their food. Once in his car, would he weep? Maybe he would weep and allow himself to feel the loss, some loss of her. Maybe they would speak again, but she’d done something irrevocable and what had been between them was over.
Once, in their very early days, David had driven them west, past her neighbourhoood, to one of the old motels still clinging to the stretch of Lakeshore Boulevard that was becoming a thicket of condominium towers, the wink of their lights visible around the curve of the bay, and in a bleak motel room, lights on, she and David had pulled off their clothes and thrown themselves into sex that had felt combustible and thrilling, their bodies open even if so much else was held back, and at the time that had been enough and now it wasn’t. He had not abandoned her or betrayed her exactly. Yet there was failure here. And loss. And grief. And in its wake, the shock of seeing things newly. This openness. And a need to keep moving, to move through something.
When it came to Raymond Renaud, she could not yet see more clearly. Was David right and she wasn’t seeing something because she was too busy projecting herself onto Raymond? And therefore excusing him? Was sympathy thinking only the best of someone or imagining everything possible about them? Maybe more clarity would prove elusive, but she did not know that yet.
At the bottom of her street, wet but not soaked through, she passed her old white Toyota, the speckled gleam of it. There was no sign of David’s car anywhere ahead of her, amid the row of parked cars. He wasn’t on the porch. The house was lightless.
From inside the front door, the red light of her answering machine blinked on its stand at the other end of the hall. Two messages. The first: not David. Sara, it’s Rafael, from Melbourne — cheerful and astonishing — they’re here, your kids, the younger ones are boarding with a family, the older ones together in one rental unit. They can’t work, but they’re taking English lessons and spending a lot of time hanging out at a community storefront in Maribyrnong. I’ve met a woman who’s teaching them, and I believe I saw two of the boys out juggling, busking on the river walk, yeah? But when I tried to approach them, they scampered off. I’ll keep working on the teacher, her name’s Alice, and see what else I can turn up.
The machine beeped, even as Sara was picking up the phone. He hadn’t left his number. His business card was somewhere, probably upstairs, or his number scribbled on a scrap of paper. The second message: Sara? Are you there? I guess you’re not. The bewilderment in her mother’s voice: and the old mystery of her mother’s closed-off fear, her mother’s stern parents hovering somewhere behind it.
Upstairs, Sara swept her arm across the surface of her desk, searching for Rafael Nardi’s card. The little rectangle found in the side drawer, on top of the audiotape of her interview with Raymond Renaud. The phone rang its Australian ring eight times before the line clicked to a machine:
Rafael here, I’m not here. Leave a message, will you?
When she pressed the keyboard, the swirls of the screensaver were replaced by black-on-white text and in the top right corner a clock: nine-ish, and so a little after eleven in the morning in Melbourne. What did her mother want? She hadn’t said.
Seated, head in her hands, bereft, she waited while the modem sang its dweedling song of connection, then pulled up her email account. Clicked to create a new message, entered Juliet Levin’s address, Juliet whom she hadn’t heard from since their broken-off conversation about Raymond Renaud’s suicide.
Juliet, I’m sorry the story of the circus didn’t turn out as you hoped. I wish it had been otherwise. But if you’re not continuing with your film, at least for the moment, can I borrow your tapes. I’ll take good care of them, but I’d love to take another look as soon as possible. And could you pass on the email of your assistant Justin? Huge thanks. Sara
She heard nothing from Juliet for days, and began to think she wouldn’t hear from her.
Once more Sara sat within the dark walls of an edit suite. And there he was: outside on a white wooden chair, in a pink T-shirt, beardless, cropped hair, a beige stuccoed wall behind him, as Juliet’s close but invisible voice called out, Say anything, through a whooshing that must be the wind. Tell me what you had for breakfast.
A cedar branch quivered above Raymond’s head. Through the sound like sheets flapping, he said, Oatmeal, coffee, juice.
Another male voice, presumably that of Justin, said, The sound’s bad. Juliet’s back appeared, huge, in a mauve sweater, jeans, boots, receding as she walked toward Raymond, and leaned over him, her hair falling across his face, her voice audible, through the crackles and pops of his microphone. She unclipped the mike and moved it from his chest to his T-shirt collar, an intimate gesture that looked intimate, the two of them whispering. How’s that? Juliet asked. Raymond’s hand brushed hers as he responded, Okay. Juliet turned, pink-cheeked, and Raymond began calling out numbers, five, four, three, two, the air still whinnying until Justin’s voice broke in, That’s not going to work. The tape cut out.
When Raymond reappeared, in the same shirt, same chair, microphone pinned again at his chest, he was seated, as Sara remembered from when Juliet had first shown her the selections from her tapes, in front of the blue wall of his garden, the gaudy orange beak of a bird of paradise flower swaying behind him. And, like that first time, she was struck by his air of hopeful and generous engagement. She’d been thinking a lot about innocence. How it was a state that could only be perceived by someone able to conceive of its opposite. To proclaim your own innocence was to be capable of imagining that you might not be innocent. A true innocent would have no awareness of this. She searched his face and body for signs of strain. Or evasion. Hints that he was dissembling. Projecting a mask. Could staring bring revelation — a glimpse of what lay beyond words? What was felt? She stopped him with the little joystick in her right hand, his mouth half open, eyes narrowed, then set him in motion again. He turned his head full-on to the camera. She felt — Exactly what kind of intimacy had he shared with Juliet?
Can you tell me how you came to Addis Ababa? Juliet called to him.
At the end of the interview the camera was switched off. Then someone turned it back on. Raymond still sat in his chair, miked, but his posture had relaxed, and he settled forward, resting his clasped hands and forearms on his thighs. So when you come back, he was saying, You have to go. There’s no one else I can tell this to who will understand how weird it was. I drove up to Lalibela, this was two years ago. Most of the tourists, they fly. It’s easier. Driving takes three days. You go by the Chinese highway and then you go into the mountains, and the roads, well, they are a bit wicked. I had the truck. I was giving lifts to people all along the way. Sometimes — he moved, and the mike crackled and Sara lost some of his words — switchbacks. You feel like you are heading for the roof of the world. But the churches. I think it is thirteen in total, all carved, not built but carved out of the rock, okay? You’ve seen photographs, haven’t you? It is so medieval. There are hermits living in holes in the walls of the courtyards, on beds of straw. I love it. I find this tourist shop. Really it’s a shack. And I’m looking at these little wooden diptychs and triptychs of religious scenes — crackle — the Larsens — they like that kind of thing. There’s a book I notice on a shelf, surrounded by other objects. It has a paper wrapper, and I pick it up because that’s odd. To find a book. And then the wrapper, it’s a page from a German-to-English language lesson. Someone has taped it over the actual cover. I open the book. Guess what it was?
There was a teasing liveliness in him as he spoke that Sara had never observed before. It was different than what he projected in public, when his manner was more performative, and he seemed to have a need to be in control, and when she had spent time with him, those dark and delirious hours, even when things had relaxed between them, there had inevitably remained in him an undercurrent of turmoil and fear and exhaustion. Was this lightness something that Juliet elicited from him? A sign of intimacy, an aspect of their intimacy?
Unseen Juliet said, How can I possibly guess?
Juliet was frightened of disappointing him and, indeed, a flicker of disappointment crossed his face. His shifting face and body were the screen upon which their entire conversation registered. He said, Astonishing novel. By a writer from Montreal.
Something by Mordecai Richler?
No. Again, the flare of disappointment, matched by new anticipation. Okay. Beautiful Loser by Leonard Cohen.
Oh, Juliet said. Right. You mean Beautiful Losers.
Raymond twitched toward impatience. Have you read it, do you not know it?
No. Juliet’s voice sounded small and humiliated.
Ah, so all this is lost on you. This is like explaining a joke.
Can you tell me, please?
Now he turned performative. Whatever that earlier quality was, it vanished. He hadn’t slept with Juliet. It is a very sexually explicit book, it is a bit wild, so you know discovering it there was just so, so, like a little bomb going off. How did it get there? Someone must have left it. What were they thinking?
What did you do?
How do you mean?
Did you buy it, take it?
I don’t even know if it was for sale. No, no, I left it, for someone else to discover and have their own shock.
Juliet had left the tapes in a box on Sara’s porch. One evening near the end of November, Sara arrived home from work to find the box pushed against the wall beneath her mailbox. There was no delivery slip with it, only her name and address written on the top, and a return address on Havelock Street. If Juliet had delivered the box in person, she had done so at an hour when Sara was unlikely to be home. When Sara lifted the box, which was not heavy, its contents rattled, the giveaway shifting of the plastic cases of videocassettes. Seated on the sofa with the box on her lap, she ripped off the tape that sealed the top and lifted the cardboard flaps to find a row of mini Hi8 tapes, clasped in their hard grey covers like miniature books, tapes that, she realized, she wouldn’t be able to watch on her home videocassette player. She would have to find professional equipment on which to do so. Along one side of the box’s interior, Juliet had stuffed a regular-sized VHS cassette, and some file folders, which, when opened, revealed the shot lists from her original tapes, time codes, and next to them descriptions of what the tape contained at that instant: 5:11:05: girls getting into pose, photo shoot; 5:12:33: another pyramid, reverse angle, Raymond watching. A separate folder held the shot list of her abandoned film. There was no accompanying note of any sort. Nor had she included Justin’s email.
A TV journalist friend, Carol Frank, said, Sure, you can use the equipment here, what do you need, like a couple of hours?
Longer than that. Maybe I’ll rent somewhere. There’s a lot of footage.
Yours?
No, someone else’s.
She was in a room nearly identical
to the one in which she and Juliet had sat together at the beginning of the fall, when the days were still long and heat had pressed itself against the walls outside, not in the video post-production facility where Juliet had rented space but in another smaller facility in a smaller warehouse farther west. Her coat hung on a hook on the back of a door and she had arrived in the dark, after work, and would leave, hours later, in the dark, disappearing into the cascade of images in between these times. Leaning back in her chair, Sara stretched out her arms. Was she editing something? Not a film, but editing thought. From the very first jerky shots trained down a hillside toward a wide dirt playing field where men in hats raised a blue canvas scaffold to upright, and one of the men, in a red baseball cap, turned to peer up the hill, she was following Juliet through her trip.
The hungry mouth of the tape player swallowed another small cassette: on the monitor, the interior of the rehearsal hall of painted cinder blocks appeared, and eager children in dirty clothes, who kept looking at the camera, wiggled and hopped in the line they’d been made to form by Gelila Melesse and Kebede Gebremariam and two other older performers. Gelila and Kebede divided the street children into groups, sending boys to one side of the room and girls to the other. Gelila and her partner led the girls in a series of backbends on the blue mats, Gelila shouting to be heard, while beyond the row of cinder-block pillars, Kebede demonstrated how to toss and catch two juggling pins, then three, and the street boys tossed their pins in the air and tried to catch them and sometimes did and at other times pins fell to the floor and rolled or bounced. One boy skittered madly about the room on a unicycle, gleeful arms waving, and two more boys tottered about on stilts. The noise of the room was cacophonous. Raymond was nowhere in sight.
A new shot, still in the rehearsal hall. In a corner of the hall, half-turned from the camera, Raymond wound black electrical cord around one arm, voice raised, directing some of the boys to help him. He wasn’t miked. His words weren’t clear, only the short bursts of his directions. Something didn’t seem to be understood. He appeared to be speaking a mixture of English and Amharic. He set down his looped coils, knelt, pulled out more length of cord. He sounded stern, at instants even sharp with the boys.
Accusation Page 24