Borderline

by Janette Turner Hospital

  But the volley petered out. Silence at $1.25 a minute.

  “Fliss?”

  She said something softly, but I didn’t catch it. “I didn’t hear …”

  “I don’t believe it.” It was clear this time, though she seemed to be saying it to herself, or to the air. I will admit to a second of fear, to a garish scene played out in a split second in my mind: Hunter (I see him as one of those men grown into his function, a gorilla of a man whose fingers are gun muzzles, a billy club protruding between his legs), Hunter coming at her like a riptide.

  “What?” I asked, a shade frantically. “For God’s sake, Fliss, what —?”

  “It’s Seymour,” she said wonderingly, and there was a break in her voice. “Oh it’s Seymour.”

  “Well, hosannah, hosannah,” I said. “The Old Volcano still active.”

  But it was wasted. She didn’t so much hang up as forget she was holding the receiver. I could tell from the sounds of grope and clatter.

  27

  Felicity did not analyse why she moved between the phone and Seymour. By stealth, behind her back, the receiver found its way to its cradle, as though she were hiding a furtive conversation.

  Not that this helped.

  “Must be the piano tuner,” Seymour laughed. “You get that maternal translucence. Very fetching.” He moved about her office, picking up things and examining them in his usual proprietary way. “Still calling in, is he? Still running under your wings for protection?”

  “I called him,” she said.

  That startled him. He could never imagine himself as anything but the centre of everyone’s circle. He raised an eyebrow. “Why?”

  Could she even begin to sift all the reasons why she turned instinctively to Jean-Marc? She said only: “You don’t even know him.”

  No.

  It’s not going to work.

  Wishful thinking.

  I know perfectly well they are more likely to discuss the properties of tuning forks than me. I might as well not exist once she sees him again. It defies explanation. It’s an obsession. Like her idealization of her father, an irresponsible innocent (a Protestant Gus with a medical degree), tediously fixated on Doing Good. Two of a kind, he and the Old Volcano. Two forms of exhibitionism. Watch me, watch me, and to hell with everyone else.

  No doubt the Old Volcano has planned a similarly flamboyant exit. Apotheosis in oils. Stop press: LAST CANVAS! ARTIST PAINTS HIMSELF INTO A CORNER.

  Hah.

  So His Omnipotence has arrived, and Hunter disappears in a puff of smoke. Angelo and La Magdalena are so much dew in the rising sun. And what shall we do with the Rising Son? Put him in the long boat until the riptide takes him. Sometimes, Felicity, the limits of our extraordinary relationship are strained.

  Enough.

  This is not helping the enterprise. There is a riddle still to be solved and I have to make a more serious effort to discover what it felt like to her, because the key to the mystery could be right there: Felicity and the Old Volcano.

  But I’ll have to do it later. I’ll have to come back to this. After I’ve tuned a piano or two, taken some stridency out of the air, tempered things. Note by note, that’s how it has to be done. And then there are other, easier pieces of the puzzle that can be attended to first. Gus, for instance. Nine hours of drunken monologue, an encyclopedia of information.

  Poor Gus. There is nothing original about a man who has just been abandoned. A comic stereotype. He rages, he drinks, he wallows in self-pity, he burdens with lamentations anyone who will listen, he panics, he lusts every which way, he is impotent. He feels himself to be going under, he clutches for an icon above the flux line, he invents a love (or recalls one) that soars like a helium balloon above his carnal ineptitudes. His suffering is appalling. It is unique and also banal. Embarrassing. Transforming. The stuff of kitsch and great art and religion.

  When Beatrice snickered at Dante and turned away her face, he had his revenge, he swallowed her whole, he fashioned her after his own liking — immaculate and divine, untouchable by Dante or anyone else, forever and ever, amen. When Felicity left the Old Volcano, he raged and mourned in oils through a thousand and one paintings that made him famous. Everywhere he or anyone else looked, her lopsided eyes followed. As now, from over my desk. (I own only one of his paintings, because she gave it to me.) He was cunning, the Old Volcano: he reduced her to the rules of his own imagination, confined her within his own borders, a painter’s perfect revenge.

  And Gus? He added two saints to the St Christopher medal dangling from his dashboard. He took them everywhere with him, divine protectors: St Therese and Our Lady of Sorrows.

  28

  There was scarcely room for Gus in his own Chevy, surrounded as he was by so great a crowd of witnesses, all the saints and holy martyrs and the women he had wronged. His wife, his four daughters, Jillian of the flower shop (still waiting for him, perhaps, by the bridal bouquets), the young mother whose name he could not even remember scattering insurance policies and perfume as she came, the girl in the hotel room in New York, all the girls in all the hotel and motel rooms and back car seats of his life. They wore long white robes and sang the Kyrie Eleison, dropping it note by note into his ears, a soprano ointment. They waved their palm branches before his eyes. They made it difficult to drive.

  Down the corridors of their singing, dimly, he could see the veil that hid La Magdalena from his eyes. Now she had a name: Dolores Marquez. He said it several times, the way he had said the rosary as a boy, experimentally, cautiously, half afraid of its potency. Dolores. She was brighter than the sun. Even through the veil she blinded him. The blood of her martyrdom flowed like a river, it lapped at the banks of his General Motors upholstery (torn in several places), it welled out of the ashtrays, it fed a tributary system in his eyes.

  Murder!

  The word bubbled up out of his mind like a toad. Horrible. If it was true, the whole world was a swamp. He might as well go under, he could taste the mud. He felt queasy and not entirely sober. It was over thirty hours since he had slept. Perhaps he had leaned unduly on Jean-Marc’s whiskey. His bloodshot eyes flickered some blurry warning and a hundred car horns suddenly trumpeted the imminence of the Day of Judgment. Shaking, he pulled into a gas station and drank three cups of black coffee. Blinked. The world came into slightly better focus.

  He tried Marthe’s house one more time. He made a fool of himself hammering at her locked front door. Already, but to no avail, he had made more phone calls than there were years in his marriage. Marthe’s fault. She must have taken her phone off the hook, she was poisoning Therese’s mind, she had never approved of Gus.

  Anglais, she sniffed at the wedding. (In Montreal, this means simply: Not French.) Show me un Anglais you can trust, and I’ll show you a man who’s taken French leave of his own history.

  Where was she keeping Kathleen? And the little ones? He sobbed at the thought of his unfathered children.

  Therese’s face appeared at an upstairs window, as cold and remote as the moon.

  “Trop tard,” she said. Too late for tears. “If you don’t go away, I will call the police.”

  How was it possible? For better or for worse, she had sworn. Till death us do part. “You’re not giving me a chance,” he pleaded. He wanted to speak of his transformation, of new beginnings, though his tongue was not entirely cooperative.

  “Look at you,” she said. “You should be ashamed to let the children see you in such a state. Listen to you.”

  “But you don’t understand …”

  “Nor do you,” she said. She was not vindictive, only impossibly weary of it all. “I’m all used up,” she told him. “I’ve been chewed and spat out. There’s nothing left. You’ll have to feed off someone else.”

  “But something has happened …” How could he speak of a miracle, of rebirth in an apple orchard, when he was shouting up from the street?

  “Please go away,” she said tiredly. “You only make it harder for th
e children when you go on like this.” She closed the casement.

  Gus sat on the curbstone, seasick. He had to wait for the sidewalk to grow calm. His life was threatened by high waves. Reggie! he cried from the depths. I’m going under. And Reggie called over the storm: You gotta find something to hang on to. You gotta believe.

  Then he saw La Magdalena’s sad and beautiful face in the heart of a peony, right there in his sister-in-law’s front garden. Unsteadily he rose to his feet. She was beckoning him. Come, she said. Her body was embroidered with wounds. To L’Ascension, she said. The scene of my transfiguration. And he followed without question.

  His car battled high seas. He had to make temporary harbour for gas and more black coffee. There was a television set on the snack counter in the gas station and he saw three murders between one cup of coffee and the next. Dread seized him. It was not a safe century to live in. On the road again he drove in a state approximating prayer, vowing restitution and making deals: if these horrors could be reversed, he would do such and so with the rest of his life. All of it was noble.

  There seemed to be a pain about the size of a football lodged in his chest cavity, slightly to the left of centre. If he had not needed both hands on the wheel, he could have reached in and got it. He knew what it would look like: a bloodied wad of threads — his writhing muscles — knotted around Therese’s tears and La Magdalena’s wounds. He was beginning to have difficulty with his breathing. He knew it was essential to avoid even a stray thought about the details of the murder, he could not afford to glimpse even one of the forty-six stab wounds. He was so sober now that he could feel the sharp edges of seen objects against his eyeballs, and the signpost to L’Ascension came at him like a guided bowie knife, a gouger, blinding white. He managed the turn, then had to pull off the shoulder of the back road and close his bloodshot eyes till the throbbing subsided a little. Its message was clear: he had left her alone at the cottage; she had been murdered; therefore he was guilty. Fresh paroxysms of pain jolted him. There was a thrumming axis from his eyes to his chest.

  He went back to dickering with God and scaled down his side of the deal: if he could just find some clue as to why, to all the whys, then he would devote his whole future, et cetera. He started the car, his crowd of passengers lurched about his ears with the unexpected momentum, they burst into startled song. L’Ascension flew by his window, the dove of a departing spirit. He was dropping through loops of dirt road toward the cottage.

  Visions scudded towards him: gargoyles, apple orchards in flames, griffons on bat wings, bloodied sides of beef. He prepared to swerve for the Other Car, a hearse, its headlights always blazing. One scorching nick of those lights and a driver was dead. There was a web of tyre marks around the cottage, a geometry of malediction. The Other Car circled and reversed, circled and reversed, driving Gus closer to the eye of the web. He rubbed his fly legs together and prayed.

  He turned a last loop in the road and saw the cottage.

  There was a car.

  Two men on the cottage steps, beer, cigarette smoke. Evidently he had made a mistake. The cottage looked like Felicity’s, but then all cottages looked much the same in this part of the world. It was odd the way those men drank their beer, unsmiling, with excessive concentration, as though they had been waiting for an interruption. As they came towards him, there was a suggestion of swagger, almost; of defiance.

  “Sorry,” Gus said. “Looking for a friend’s cottage and got mixed up. I’ll just back out of your driveway.”

  “Who were you looking for?” one of the men asked. He looked strangely familiar and there was something about him that made Gus nervous. Better not to answer, he decided. He started his engine and called over it, “Sorry to bother you.” He was trying to remember where he had seen the man before.

  “I believe you have a flat tyre,” the man called back.

  It was true. Gus could feel the crippled lurch of his car. Must have been something sharp on the driveway.

  “We’ll help you fix it,” the man offered. Gus could not quite remember him. “You might as well have a drink with us first.”

  Gus was wary of people who did not smile, though the man seemed convivial enough in a restrained way. Perhaps they were simply the kind who did not know how to let themselves go, who fished and hunted from obsession or social obligation rather than for pleasure. They opened a new case of beer. The talk was of local lakes and of the trials of cottage owners: vandals, transients, squatters, border smugglers, summer violence, unsuitable people buying up the surrounding land or renting it for the season or just appearing, like gypsies. Something that was said almost tripped a switch in Gus’s mind, but he lost the clue again.

  “Haven’t we met somewhere before?” he asked.

  “Possibly,” the man said. “We’re hunters. We get around.”

  “I’m Gus Kelly.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Gus. Have another drink.”

  Such attentive hosts, they were, and such good listeners. They kept Gus plied with drinks and questions, they commiserated about Therese. When he spoke of strange events, they did not sneer but took an interest. Encouraged, he poured out his heart. He talked himself into an ever greater thirst.

  There’s more beer in the cottage, he heard one of them say, so he went after another bottle. Inside it was exactly the same as Felicity’s cottage. Same casement windows through which the Other Car had flashed its lights, same large wooden closet she had kept opening and closing, same table they had sat at, same kerosene lamp, same bedroom off to one side. Perhaps cottages were made on assembly lines.

  Dolores Marquez appeared and stood there in her torn black dress, her face pale. He reached out to touch her but his hand moved through space. I have had too much to drink, he confessed. She smiled sadly and vanished. He had to go into the bedroom, he had to touch the bed, just to touch it. Even the arrangement of bedroom furniture was the same as in Felicity’s cottage. Same kind of quilt on the bed. He bent to touch it and saw the dried bloodstain and then he saw the shoes: an old, worn black leather pair, misshapen, cracked, alive with fungus. Peasant shoes.

  The pain was back in his chest and eyes. There were lights popping in his head, his breath staggered in the effort to reach his lungs. The walls were closing in on him. Through the window the Other Car dipped its headlights and leered.

  It happened here, he thought, and felt violently ill. Dizzy, he went back to the porch. He passed between the two men unharmed and lurched down the steps. “Left something in my car,” he mumbled. They fell silent and looked at him strangely. They circled him. Now he could see their horns and cloven feet. He leaped into his car and started it. Your tyre, your tyre, they called. But he was not fooled. He reversed, but the car skewed itself sideways, he had to do a three-point turn. Their eyes were red in the early evening sun. Their thirst for blood was up. He could taste his own terror rancid on his tongue. He accelerated and was free. He flew. He ignored the car’s wild limp, he drove flat tyre and all, cavorting and swerving like a damned soul in a lake of hot pitch. He did not stop in L’Ascension.

  On the highway he pulled into a service station and vomited copiously behind the trucking area while his tyre was changed. I abandoned her, he thought. (He meant Dolores Marquez and Therese.) I am damned forever.

  Where could he go? Where could he hide from his own crimes? He found himself back in Montreal, the oldest part — narrow streets, narrow houses, dilapidation. He found a boarding house as derelict as his life and paid for a room. It did not surprise him that the place smelled of rotten meat and vomit. He followed the wide road of stink along a corridor to a numbered room. He turned the key.

  In his room there were further signs: the mirror over the dresser was cracked; and a fur of mould, which had been gathering quietly on the walls all summer, was running amok. Moss everywhere. Hummocks of it on the ceiling, the windows bleary with slime-green growth, the floor busy with slugs and earthworms.

  A fitting place.

 
He knew he was living in hell.

  Really, Jean-Marc, Felicity will say, how terribly gothic. How Catholic of you.

  But Kathleen likes it. It could have been … she admits. (She has his letters from that time.) Poor daddy, she sighs. (His letters appear to have been written on crumpled toilet paper from an infernal outhouse.) It was mummy and Aunt Marthe’s fault, Kathleen says. They lied to me, they never let me know he called and tried to see us.

  Poor daddy, she sighs again.

  29

  There is an old Baldwin piano in Outremont that survived a bomb blast. This was back at the time of the Québecois turmoils. Some of the pins and strings melted, keys were scattered like loose teeth. A predecessor of mine had restrung it, but new strings take time to settle down, sometimes years, a lifetime even. When the instrument’s history was given me over the phone, I was not hopeful. Don’t expect miracles, I warned. But the Baldwin surprised me. Damage, like violence, ebbs and flows, I suppose. I worked for an afternoon, and the new owner was delighted — not that he’s any judge of tone — but the thing is, even I was delighted.

  “I’m surprised,” I said. “I thought the mutilation would be permanent.”

  “Oh that.” He brushed away old history with a wave of his hand. He is working-class French, a policeman, frugal and aspiring. Politics embarrasses him. He picked up the Baldwin for a song in a Westmount garage sale because he knows a good deal when he sees one, and because he wants the best for his children who take music lessons from un Anglais. “That’s a long time ago, all that,” he said.

  “Not so long,” I told him. “I can still remember.”

  “Ah,” he smiled indulgently. “You’re young. The young think disasters are unique.”

  When I came home, Felicity was in my living room. That’s her style. She’s always had a key, and still does. Now do you understand why I can’t get too upset about the disappearance? It’s true a year has gone by, a long time, longer than ever before, but just the same, I’ll come home one day and she’ll be there, chatting with Kathleen. I got sidetracked, she’ll say. I was climbing some Aztec ruins and I didn’t notice the time. When I looked at my watch and saw a year had gone by, I was truly …