Once Marthe paused long enough, before she hung up, to tell him, “Your voice sounds like a dog barking.”
He was not surprised. He knew he was an animal. He looked at himself in the cracked bedroom mirror and saw the hairy face of a gorilla with a thatch of slime green on top, moss hanging from his ears like seaweed. He roamed the streets and got himself a dishwashing job. (From the kitchen he came, to the slop bucket it was fitting he return; dishes to dishes and dust to dust.) Sometimes he thought he saw the men who had been at Felicity’s cottage. Sometimes they seemed to be following him. He was afraid his mind was going. It just shows that we never know, he said to fellow customers in the Mister Donut near his boarding house. There’s horror around every corner. His air of conviction sent shivers along the spine. He acquired a small following. He could have written a lot of business.
On a number of occasions, Dolores Marquez appeared to him. She was brutally murdered, he told his audience in Mister Donut. Forty-six stab wounds because I abandoned her. And now she haunts me. He would drop whatever he was doing and follow her. He dropped a column of dinner plates and lost his job. He followed her through a labyrinth of sleazy streets to a Spanish restaurant in Old Montreal, and they gave him a dishwashing job. Through steam and soapsuds he would recite the catalogue of his life’s errors; his need to achieve expiation was overwhelming. He would call and confess to Jean-Marc’s tape.
Sometimes Jean-Marc himself would answer. “Where are you, Gus?” he would ask.
“In hell,” Gus would say. “I’m a destroyer and a killer.”
“Listen,” Jean-Marc would tell him. “It’s all a mistake. She hasn’t been murdered at all. I gave you wrong information.”
But Jean-Marc didn’t understand. He couldn’t see the true horror of things. “Are you back in Winston?” he would ask. “No,” Gus would say. “I’m in hell. Will you call Therese and Kathleen for me? Marthe knows my voice, she hangs up.”
“But I don’t even know them,” Jean-Marc would demur. “Look, why don’t you come on over for a drink?”
“I can’t,” Gus would say. “I’m in hell.”
He said the same in daily letters to Therese and Kathleen. He used whatever paper came to hand in the boarding house — pages and pages of promises and confessions. The postmark was Montreal, but he gave no return address.
One day, as he was scraping the remains of tacos and enchiladas from a stack of plates, Dolores Marquez appeared in the kitchen, and he brushed her arm. Flesh! An electrifying sensation. She was wearing an apron. She set a load of dishes in the sink.
“Are you really real?” he asked. “Are you really Dolores Marquez?”
She put her hand over her mouth in sudden fright. Her eyes darted about like black moths in front of a lamp. She never spoke. He had never heard her speak. He brushed the damp hair from her eyes, he touched her cheek.
“Do you remember me?” he asked.
She smiled her sad smile.
“I’ve found Dolores Marquez,” he told Jean-Marc’s tape. “You were right, she hasn’t been murdered. I’m looking after her. She can’t speak English, but she doesn’t speak Spanish either. Pedro — he’s the owner, and legal — says it happens to some of them. Too much shock.”
Gus wrote a letter to Kathleen:
I am making things right. You told me that day we were sanding the car that you just wanted to know. So I’m telling you the God’s truth before you hear it from anyone else: Dolores Marquez sleeps in my room, but it’s not what anyone thinks. I will swear on the Bible. I’m responsible for her, that’s what it’s about. You’re my favourite, Kathleen, even though that’s a sin. I wish you would talk to me. I wish you would visit. You can leave any messages with Jean-Marc Seymour, he’s a friend, I’m enclosing his phone number and address.
Jean-Marc answered his doorbell, and a teenage fury pounded his chest with her fists. But she stopped in mid-assault, bewildered.
“I thought you were a woman,” she said. “Isn’t this where my father …?” Jean-Marc was briefly astounded. It seemed the ghost of Felicity past. But then, of course, it was obvious. “You must be Kathleen Kelly,” he said. He found her belligerence charming.
“You know about me?”
“I know your father.”
“Are you one of my uncles?” she sniffed.
“I beg your pardon?”
“You look a bit like my father,” she said. “I have all kinds of relatives we haven’t seen for years. I thought maybe you were related.”
“No, no. Just a friend.” He was mesmerized. She had Felicity’s hair and eyes, the same nervous gestures.
“Where’s my father?” she demanded.
“I’m afraid I don’t know, though he calls quite often. Somewhere in Montreal, I think.”
“He’s run off with another woman.” She tossed her long hair. She ran a hand along one of his bookshelves. “He’s abandoned my mother. He doesn’t care about us in the least.”
“That’s not true,” Jean-Marc said. “Your father’s gone chasing his own salvation. He thinks about you all the time.”
“Oh!” she said. She threw her arms around him and sobbed on his shoulder.
Jean-Marc felt a mantle alight on his shoulders. Old shackles fell from him, new powers were granted. He understood how gratitude and adoration could be addictive. It’s as simple as this, he thought, as he stroked her hair. He saw an endless mirrored corridor of clowns. He heard the Old Volcano laughing. The glands are banal, he thought, and without subtlety. And life is such a stale joke — it’s all managed with circles and mirrors, it’s all been done before.
Abruptly she pulled away and picked up her mitts and scarf from the chair where she had tossed them. It was September, and the summer warmth had gone.
“Mummy will be waiting,” she said. “And Aunt Marthe!” — she wrinkled up her nose — “You’d think she was running an army!”
“Please don’t leave,” Jean-Marc said.
She raised an eyebrow in surprise.
“If you stay long enough,” he cajoled, “your father will call and you can talk to him.”
She pulled off her mitts again. She pressed his hand to her cheek with gratitude and he thought: After all, we are far closer in age than the Old Volcano and Felicity. And Felicity was only eighteen when …
“How old are you, Kathleen?”
“Sixteen,” she said.
33
On a strap-hanging morning on the subway, between one armpit and another, Felicity saw Hunter. He was watching her as a small boy watches an insect. The boy removes one wing, he pinches off a leg, he crushes the lower abdomen: merely to see what will happen.
Felicity’s fear was so sharp and sudden that she lost bodily control. Humiliation. She could feel the warm trickle of her own water on her legs. When the train stopped at Harvard Square, she could scarcely breathe. She stayed close to the surging heart of the crowd that rose up to daylight, she flowed across the street in its shelter. When the tangle unravelled into side streets, she shivered from exposure. She was afraid to look behind her. She hailed a cab and got off at her gallery door.
At her desk, she rested her head in her hands. She could do nothing about the agitation of her muscles. The eyes of Dolores Marquez burned in the twilight of the gallery: This is the way it is, she said. A daily diet. You get used to it.
Felicity looked at the photograph in her wallet. The two little girls and the old woman stared impassively back. They told her nothing. She looked at her other photographs: her father was mending nets, preoccupied; her mother would not turn around. No messages there either. Nothing. She could not call the studio, since she herself had disconnected the phone; and when Seymour was working, he had nothing to say.
“And there is nothing you can do,” Jean-Marc told her over the phone. “Except take care never to be alone. You didn’t ask to have that photograph.”
(Naturally I wasn’t going to tell her that Gus, in full raving flight, thought he had
found the woman. No point in stoking one obsession with another.)
“You didn’t ask to have the photograph,” I repeated.
“No,” she sighed. “And yet I have it.”
Perhaps that was when I began to feel truly alarmed. I can read her tones of voice, I’m an expert on Felicity’s silences.
“Fliss,” I cajoled. “You’re not going to do anything rash and pointless, are you?”
“Rash.” She weighed the word, turning it over. “Pointless,” she said, prodding it. As though it might reveal something of the mystery of compulsion. I knew it was only a matter of time before she threw herself into the current of some action. Some futile gesture of expiation. Fear of Hunter and the disapproval of her own fear would drive her to it.
“I have too much, Jean-Marc,” she sighed.
All the fifteenth century at her beck and call, she meant. And her own niche in art history; and the aunts and the Old Volcano and me. I can read her sighs. She had never gone hungry, she meant. She had never offered a dead child up to the crows. She had never had to flee for her life in a refrigerated meat truck. She was born in a goddamned hairshirt. She had her father’s God-hungry blood in her veins.
“I know what you’re doing, Felicity.” I was working up a rage of anxiety. “It’s arrogant of you, it’s sick. You’re chasing a myth. It’s blasphemy, what you’re doing. You think you’ve been singled out, you think there’s some special plan, you think you’ve been chosen. Hah. You think God or anyone else gives a shit what car you’re behind at a border? You have a very perverse understanding of the random, that’s your problem. You’re thirty-three years old, for God’s sake, it’s high time you —”
“Jean-Marc,” she said, “you’re shouting.”
“Listen to me, Felicity, just listen. One art historian, one gallery curator, can save a painter or two from oblivion. One well-tuned piano is worth a roomful of concert performers. They’re pricks, those soloists, every last one of them, and totally dependent on us. We’re sane, you and me, we don’t want centre stage, so don’t you dare do a prima donna exit …”
“Oh Jean-Marc, don’t you see?” She was laughing. “We’re all chasing the same thing, don’t you see? It’s stupid, I agree, but we’re doomed to it. The piano tuner as God, I never thought I’d hear you admit —”
I slammed the receiver down.
“Shit!” I told Kathleen. “It’s the Old Volcano all over again. An infectious disease.”
I could still hear Felicity’s laughter. A weird sound. Not mocking, not cruel. It made me think of the man who watches the boulder crashing down a hill in South India.
34
“You’re not eating,” Seymour said. “I don’t trust so much translucence. It reminds me of your father.”
Felicity turned from the window. “I saw Hunter today. I’m frightened.”
“Your eyes,” Seymour said. “It’s the eyes.”
Perhaps their fevers were contagious.
“There,” he said. “In the window seat, stay there. With the light behind you.” He bit the top off a paint tube, he squeezed paint directly onto his brush, he did the window upright and the sash, a stark cross rising from her shoulders like a falcon.
“You’re not listening to me,” she said. “You’ve been working as though you’re possessed. And another thing: you’re not eating properly. I’m worried.”
“Take your shirt off. And don’t interrupt. There isn’t time.”
He worked.
She went roaming in her own preoccupations.
At dawn he said, “I haven’t got it yet, but I will.” He massaged his hands. “Are you tired?”
“I don’t know,” she said, surprised, stirring in the thicket of a memory. She watched him, concerned, as he rubbed his stiff hands. There were age spots and knotted veins. “You’re working too hard,” she said.
“Jesus,” he murmured, stroking her hair. “You’re not sleeping or eating properly. You’re so gaunt, so luminous, I can’t tell which I want to do more, paint you or fuck you or eat you. They all feel the same to me these days.”
“You shouldn’t worry like this,” she said. “You’ll live to a hundred and three.”
Felicity stopped at the newspaper kiosk by the subway entrance in Harvard Square. Instinct. The pressure of a stare on the curve of her neck. She scanned the magazine rack. New Yorker, Atlantic, Esquire, all those sedate fictions. Not there. Something coarser and grainier. She could smell the musk of violence. Of something unfashionable and not at all in good taste. Her eyes roved across Le Monde, Die Welt, The Times. Beyond sports, beyond the soft, sanctioned pornography, beyond even the news magazines and tabloids.
Over a plain black cover she met his eyes.
He was leaning against the Ticketron window, flipping pages, the magazine held high to shield his face. Hunter. She felt again the despicable craven lurch of several bodily functions. She wanted to demand: Who are you? but only a wisp of fear passed through her lips. She could not move.
“Did you want that?” a clerk asked Hunter.
“Just looking,” he said.
He placed the magazine, open, behind the slats of the rack near Felicity and walked away. Felicity stared at his message: a naked woman spreadeagled over the front of an army truck, her ankles lashed to the bumper, her wrists bound to a rope running over the hood. A jackbooted soldier was sticking the muzzle of his submachine gun up her vagina.
Felicity had to lean on the magazine stand because of her dizziness. She clasped and unclasped her hands. She looked into the passing crowds but could not see Hunter. She paid for a newspaper so that she could keep leaning on the stand for support. The newspaper was smeared with blood. She saw that she had punctured her hands with her own fingernails.
The riptide, she thought. There’s no escaping it now.
She went down the subway steps — she had to hold on to the rail — and took the train to Central Square.
Our Lady of Sorrows rises massively above the flotsam of the square. Out of place, Felicity thought, and out of time. She knelt in the great Gothic cave and peered into the shadows beyond the banks of votive candles. It was amazing: another border crossed. The sun, the hubbub of Central Square, the very look of the twentieth century, all extinguished by the heavy west doors. She was awed by a tradition that could sustain, at the very core of urban dissonance and flux, such a sanctuary to the inner life. The heartbeat of the silence thudded softly in her ears. What could Hunter do in the face of such weighty hush? She would anchor herself to the calm. A phrase came to her: Rock of Ages.
Just one perspective, her father said. One glimpse. You can’t catch God in any of these nets.
Only the red lamp above the altar, an unblinking eye, watched. The place was impassive. Baptisms, marriages, deaths, it had absorbed them all. A man stepped out of the eye of God. So it seemed. He was gliding up the aisle, his face was round and pale as a Communion wafer. She could hear the whisper of his black gown against the floor. He turned into the confessional alcove.
Felicity waited.
Her eyes were growing accustomed, the twilight was settling into shapes. There were perhaps five or six other people, devout elderly women, here and there among the pews. One of the women made her way slowly and painfully toward the confessional. Two canes, tap-tapping down the nave, supported her. The echoes answered: tap, tap. As she passed Felicity, the candlelight fell on her gnarled hands, the veins showing like purple knots, the fingers shockingly twisted by arthritis. A sadness pierced Felicity. So many frailties, she thought. How does anyone manage?
She waited. She read the booklet containing the Mass for the previous Sunday. She murmured the responses, they ran on such ancient grooves of entreaty. She studied the parish bulletin: its cover sketch of Our Lady of Sorrows, its phone numbers, its list of Masses: daily at 7 a.m.; Sundays at 7 a.m. and 11 a.m., Spanish Mass in between at 9. She scanned the list of staff. Rev. Dennis O’Dowd at the top; and lower down, one of six parish assistants,
Sister Gabriel Vergara.
Felicity realized she had expected nuns to be hovering in the nave like ministering doves. She realized she had been listening for the silken rustle of black and white habits. She had thought Sister Gabriel, miraculously recognizing her, would quietly kneel at her side. They would exchange news.
I found Casa del Diablo, Felicity would say, but Dolores Marquez wasn’t there. I don’t know how to find Angelo without wandering around Central Square and asking for Leon, and so endangering him. And now Hunter is following me again. What does it mean, and what do you want me to do?
The silent nave gave back no answers. Sister Gabriel did not appear.
What possible sins could be occupying the woman with twisted hands? How could they take so long in the telling? The silence thudded, the beats were like a doomsday clock. When the canes came tapping their way out toward the square, Felicity gathered up her own shortcomings and all her questions and moved toward confession.
“Father,” she said to the grille. “I am looking for Sister Gabriel.”
“My child!” There was a startled edge to his voice. “Have you forgotten the act of contrition? You must begin: Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”
“I am not a Catholic, Father. I need to see Sister Gabriel.”
Silence. The silence bloomed and grew, it was palpable. Perhaps he had left and had gone padding back down the nave, soft as a cat. “Father?”
“Sister Gabriel is not available,” said the voice behind the grille. “Perhaps I can help you?”
The dark in the box was seductive. Velvet. There was a faint fragrance of candle wax. Against such a backdrop Felicity watched her own thoughts take on form. They danced in front of her voice. They eddied across the partition. And the voice beyond the grille: mellow, caressing, inspiring trust. A watcher of the visible thoughts. Protestant thoughts. The thoughts of a lapsed Protestant. Felicity understood the craving to confess, the temptation to shed the past like an old skin, to step out again newly minted.
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