I will back up a few days, Felicity thought. I will stay with Aaron.
She wanted to change her mind about last weekend’s trip to the cottage, to find a way out of the maze, to return to sanity.
She was passing Scoop’s Poopdeck again, walking quickly, anxious now to take the subway on to Harvard Square, to reach the haven of her gallery. But Leon of reggae persuasion and dreadlock hairstyle was leaning against one of the turnstiles: Cerberus of the sidewalk.
“Hey!” he called. “Her ladyship is back!” He turned and winked at his delighted audience in the store. “I think maybe she’s got the hots for me.”
Peripherally Felicity saw him swagger after her. She felt the grit of public laughter. Scoop’s catcalls, pus-like, dripped through the air.
Nothing can happen, she told herself firmly. Her heart was hammering; it might have been auditioning for one of Scoop’s rock bands. Nothing could happen on a crowded street in broad daylight — though perhaps it would be better not to descend into the subway, perhaps better to walk all the way to Harvard Square. In the Jostle of people waiting for the light to change near Cambridge City Hall, mocking Leon rubbed himself against her from behind.
She could have sworn she heard his urgent whisper: “Listen, I’m more scared of you than you are of me. There’s a pub just past the Post Office. The Plough and Stars. Wait for me.”
The light changed and the crowd bore her across the street. At the far side she turned, but Leon was impossibly distant, mimicking some woman’s walk (her own!) for the benefit of a small audience of vastly amused cronies.
She crossed to the Post Office and walked on. I have more than paid my dues, she told herself. I have no obligations. I do not want to be involved any further. I am going straight back to my gallery, she decided, even as she turned into The Plough and Stars.
22
I began as a simple filer of facts. I was recording the truth, the gospel according to Jean-Marc. I told myself that the truth must be tempered because mere accuracy was false. And this is not a fabrication. I was scrupulous, I was after something three-dimensional, I was on the trail of a metaphysical balloon.
I began by guarding not only against error, but against the spirit of error. I know the temper of the times, when politicians never lie but merely “mis-speak” themselves, when heads of state smile winningly through demonstrable contradictions. I have tuned a piano while children watched news clips of the historic D-Day invasion.
“An uncle of mine was killed there,” I told them.
“It’s not as good as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the children said. “Or Star Wars. We like that even better. We’ve got it on video now.”
I know truth is an old-fashioned plant, like sage or thyme. I know the difficulties, but I am steering for the essential rather than the merely literal.
I temper, I stretch, I embroider.
And then self-hypnotism sets in. (Form, after all, is important. One is concerned with the shape of the whole.) One begins to flex new muscles, to sense power, to acquire a taste for it. This is the Pygmalion factor: one falls in love with one’s own creation, one rather enjoys playing God.
(A confession: The piano tuner is getting a yen for the stage.)
Perhaps, when Felicity finally calls, she will disappoint. Perhaps I am better at her lines than she is.
I have begun to dream her dreams.
A beach with rocks. Every few seconds I am drenched: the waves seethe into crevices, froth upwards in fireworks of foam, retreat, hiss, whisper, gather themselves up for another siege.
Felicity! I call. Take care!
Because this is what I see on the rocks: the Old Volcano with his easel, impervious, is painting on through cataclysms of spray. Felicity’s boat is coming closer and closer to the rocks, he has arranged it, he plans compositions of disaster.
Felicity! I call, but a sea fern is growing out of my mouth.
“You bastard!” I scream at the Old Volcano. He thinks he can make the whole world after his own image. He paints, and therefore things are. “You bastard!” I scream. But he does what he wants. He always has.
Felicity’s boat is held in a fist of spray, it is poised in air, in an instant it will be smashed on the rocks. “Oh Jean-Marc,” she says mournfully as she passes over me, like a stricken bird, “why are you making him do this?” And then impact. Fragments.
When Felicity calls in from wherever, she’ll enjoy that dream.
Oh Jean-Marc, she’ll laugh, dream me another. You’re always imagining I’ll come to harm.
That was last night’s dream.
When I told Kathleen, she said: “But my father isn’t cruel at all. He wasn’t like that at all. You are always making him out to be stupid. You are always saying he hurt us because he never knew what he was doing. It isn’t true. He did love my mother.”
Kathleen follows her own trails these days. It’s natural. They’ve been missing for months.
“If you want to stay here for the night,” I tell her, “you can sleep on the sofa. The pianos will keep you company.”
“My mother wouldn’t let me,” she says. “She doesn’t trust you. And nor does Aunt Marthe.”
She only loves me because I knew her father.
But the day Felicity called from a tavern in Central Square, I had still not even met Augustine Kelly, and Kathleen was hidden behind the future. When Felicity called, she said: “Jean-Marc, this is either an absurd game or a deadly one or both. If no one shows up in the next ten minutes, I’m leaving.”
“Never mind that,” I said. “What about Hunter?”
Because I hadn’t had a chance to speak to her since I’d played back her tape. I hadn’t been able to free myself from the break in her voice when she’d called and said, “I’m frightened.”
“Fliss,” I said gently, “the whole world is out of tune. That’s the way it is.” She was right to call me. I’ve never had any illusions. I’m not afflicted with a sense of responsibility the way she is. There’s the difference. One note at a time, that’s my motto.
“The world is full of jerks like Hunter,” I told her. “Don’t let him get to you like that.”She’s not aware of how she encourages men, she has no idea what she does.
“And as for Dolores or whatever her name is,” I said. “You can’t take the whole world on your shoulders. It’s a disease, this belief that you’re responsible. I agree, I agree, it’s all a nightmare, it’s horrific, it’s absurd. But it’s not our concern. It’s against all common sense for a woman to hang around taverns alone.”
“And the main thing,” I told her, “is that you need more sleep. You need someone to look after you — but not someone who will merely use you.”
She let that pass.
She will never hear a word against the Old Volcano.
“Why don’t you come up here for a while?” I asked. “And rest.”
But she didn’t.
She kept right on course for the rocks as though there were nothing she could do about it.
All right, Mr Piano Tuner, you say. Enough of red herrings. Enough of disarming admissions about dreaming Felicity’s dreams and remembering her memories, about putting on the masks of Gus, of Dante, of all the flounderers in dark woods.
We will not be so easily fobbed off, we will not be deceived. Do you think we cannot see through that chapter of conceits in Central Square, the games, the false trails, the elabourate smokescreens, the entire futile hunt to find out what happened to Dolores (Hester, Felicity)? Confess now. The whole truth. Let us hear you say it: Felicity herself, c’est moi.
Touché! I hear you crowing.
Oh come now.
Do you really think you have made an original discovery? The androgyny of Jean-Marc? His own quest for a father? His own meditations on individual accountability? His own hunt through a maze of riddles for a woman who has been missing for a year?
Come now, this trick is at least as old as Shakespeare. “These are all lies,” said R
osalind from behind her Ganymede mask: and we know she was a boy actor playing a girl disguised as a boy who was pretending to be a girl to snare Orlando in the Forest of Arden.
Seriously, is any of us not aware that Dante is Beatrice? That he took on her plumage and presumed, from behind her mask, to discourse on the Empyrean, to bind and loose, to hurl his critics into the Inferno, to pose certain questions, in effect, to God himself?
And is it possible there exists anyone who has not detected Shakespeare’s voice in Rosalind’s, pining in code for the dark lover of enigmatic gender? O coz, coz, coz, my pretty little coz, that thou didst know how many fathom deep I am in love!
(There is, after all, a report that he wrote the part for himself. That cocky young actor, as a rival playwright, Greene with envy, muttered over his beer in a Tudor pub. That upstart crow, that Johannes fac totum, that Shake-ass, that fag, that Rosalind!)
In any case, all this conjuring is both true and not true. There was a Rosalind, there was a Beatrice, there is a Felicity. How many changes can be rung on the human condition? Is it surprising that I feel at home in Felicity’s skin? That sometimes she slides into mine? The truth is, I seem to know more about Felicity’s life than about my own. I understand hers better. I’ve given it more thought. This seems also to be true with Gus and with all of the characters I record. I seem to recognize them, I remember the view from their eyes, as though I were a salamander that slips into the envelopes of other people’s lives.
Don’t obfuscate, you say. And you produce your little list of indictments. Specifically, you want to know:
1) Why does Jean-Marc pretend he took Felicity seriously when she called from her gallery and from The Plough and Stars?
Why does he pretend he made suggestions that might have dissuaded her from the journey toward her disappearance?
Why is he tormented with guilt?
Why, depending on the light, does Dolores resemble Hester resemble Felicity?
2) Why does Felicity’s father, receding into the Indian Ocean in his fishing boat, have a cargo of paintbrushes?
Why does he have bushy eyebrows like the Old Volcano?
And why, when Jean-Marc remembers that phone call from Central Square, does he feel ill all over again with panic?
Why does his mind veer off toward Gus, who was rushing only slightly more slowly toward disaster?
23
Vaguely troubled that Therese was still not answering the phone after his car had been towed from the ditch, Gus headed west. Driving always soothed him. After ten miles he decided: She has taken the girls to the new shopping centre, a very sensible thing to do, since his daughters enjoyed it so much. She was a good adapter, Therese. He could not complain. And he would make it up to her. Perhaps he would take them all out for dinner tomorrow night.
He wound down the window and crept another five miles above the speed limit for the sheer pleasure of the bluster of headwind. He inhaled optimism. Perhaps it was the rush of oxygen, or the strange exhilaration aroused by his vision of La Magdalena. He decided he would contact Felicity in the morning as a courtesy gesture. Just to let her know they had been wrong about Montreal (the church basements, the underground railroad), but that all was well.
The other car, he would say. Probably just weekend people after all. My guess is she sleeps at your cottage. She lives on apples and rainwater.
“Did you check the cottage?” he imagined Felicity asking.
Well, no.
“Why not? When you drove all that way?”
Because, because …
(Because, Gus, one doesn’t tamper with visions of transcendence. Because, like all of us, you want to add a dimension of the ineffable to your unbearably mundane life. But even I, who am busy creating you from bits and pieces of information, and from that long, drunken conversation at which we have almost arrived, cannot put these thoughts into your mind. There are rules. Limitations. Even a master piano tuner cannot make a LeSage sound like a Steinway.)
Gus himself could find no answer to the question he made Felicity ask. Because, he said. Because. He was preoccupied with the memory of a woman washing herself in light. And then the look she had given him when she turned, the look he had been unable to see for the glare. He felt as though he might spend the rest of his life deciphering that look. He felt he would never exhaust the meaning of apples falling from her skirt and of her hair streaming in the dappled shadows beneath the leaves. His skin tingled and was tender, almost bruised, to the touch, as though from sunburn. Or as though it were the kind of new, delicate tissue that grows over a wound. Certainly he felt that he had stepped out of an old scuffed layer of himself and left it somewhere between the pine woods and the orchard.
You’ve got to know what you want, said Reggie, a constant companion, before you can go for it.
And now I do, Gus said.
Go for it, Reggie urged.
But the gas gauge showed almost empty and Gus had to pull into a service station first.
“Super or regular?” asked the attendant at the pumps. She was as young and flawless as the summer evening, dressed in baggy blue denim coveralls and a pale pink T-shirt. When she leaned under the hood to check his oil, her ash-brown mane fell forward over her face and her breasts in petal-pink interlock spilled sideways out of the coverall bib.
“You shouldn’t,” Gus offered, solicitous. “You’ll get oil on your … on here.” He was about to stroke the soft shirt through which an animated nipple was budding. But something restrained him.
“Lucky for you, mister,” she said calmly. “I get mauled by more travelling men than there are hairs around your balls. And that’s exactly where I’ll kick you if I have to.”
He was astonished, but not by her sassy mouth. He was astonished because he had not touched her. It was a miracle. La Magdalena, framed in light, smiled on him from between the windshield wipers.
He said absently, “She has a strange effect on me.”
He saw himself standing beside Therese in church, his thigh brushing hers but his thoughts pure, their daughters in white veils and circlets of orange blossom with their first pale Communion wafers on their tongues. La Magdalena watched from the choir stalls. She was wearing a diaphanous gown and he could see her breasts, though the meaning was as far removed from the carnal as are the breasts of the nursing Madonna in a painting. I will nourish you, La Magdalena promised. Her eyes were lowered in prayer.
“Who has?” asked the girl in coveralls.
“What?”
“Who has a strange effect on you?”
But Gus was elsewhere and did not answer.
“You need oil,” the girl said, holding the dipstick up to the light. She took a canister from a display rack beside the pumps, snapped off its plastic cap, and poured through a funnel. The glug glug reached Gus’s ears between dreams of apples and breasts and daughters, and he turned to watch the girl again. Her movements were quick and deft. She was obviously at home with cars. The gentle rocking of her unsupported bosom filled him with tranquil pleasure.
“You’re very beautiful,” he said.
“Is that the beginning of another pass?”
“No.” And it wasn’t. The miracle held. “I was admiring the way you do your work.”
“I love cars. My mum and I run this place between us since my dad buggered off. You want to come in for a drink before you drive on?”
“Is that a pass?”
She laughed. “First we lure them in, and then we rape them.”
“Our problem, Mr Kelly,” said her mother over tea with a dash of gin added, “is that we are quite partial to male company, but as soon as it sets up camp, so to speak, we realize we’re better off without. On the whole, we find we prefer cars. Better rhythm and spunk. They’re capable of nonstop performance, and they don’t cheat on you.”
Gus liked the mother. She chain-smoked and her voice filtered its way out through gravel. Streaked with axle grease to the elbows, she kept pushing a wayward covera
ll strap back on her shoulders and a lock of hair out of her eyes. Hair? Thatch. Probably once ash-brown like her daughter’s, it had aged into mousiness and wiry rebellion. Various combs, plunged into the growth like surveyors’ markers, tried to keep it in check.
“Lynn here is more sanguine about men than I am,” she said. “As long as they don’t paw her in the first half hour, she thinks the age of chivalry has not passed. Me, I don’t waste energy on romantic illusions.”
“This one’s okay, mum,” Lynn said, as though discussing grades of gasoline. “A bit dreamy. The gentle kind, that you can have a proper conversation with.” And to Gus, by way of extenuation: “My dad lit out without leaving us a cent, so we’ve had to be tough. We’re kinda proud of ourselves.”
“So what do you sell, Mr Kelly?” The mother blew a smoke ring around his head.
“How do you know I sell anything, Mrs —”
“Em. Just call me Em. Short for Emmelina, would you believe?” She laughed and it was like a chorus of uninhibited bullfrogs. He loved the sound.
“Gus,” he said, reciprocal. He could feel the tea and gin purring in sundry odd places: behind his fingernails, in the pulse behind his knees. “So what makes you think I sell anything, Em?”
“Oh, you have all the marks of a man who spends his life away from home in order to keep his marriage intact.”
Gus spluttered into his tea and gin and both women laughed, though Lynn, quickly contrite, said, “That was mean, mum.”
“I’m going to change,” Gus told them solemnly.
“Aren’t we all?” Em was full of good cheer, dispensing insouciance with smoke rings.
“I mean,” Gus amended, “I am changed.”
“That happens,” Em said absently. She seemed to know exactly what he was talking about. “The kind of moment when you know … For me, it was in a grotty public washroom in Toronto, filthy limericks on the walls, mirrors busted. And I saw my face with a crack running right through the middle of it … ” She trailed off, reading earlier pages of her life.
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