Carthage, NY. A small town dreaming only of the ordinary. White clapboard, shutters, neat lawns, rhododendrons, September chrysanthemums in dappled bloom. The dark visions that issued from the memory of Dolores Marquez would wither in its crisp and decent air. Nothing unpleasant could happen there. There were golden eagles over the doors, flags on front lawns. A tranquil place.
Dolores, fearful, would not accompany Gus into the restaurant beside the gas station.
“You have to eat more,” he told her. “I can almost see through you. I’ll bring you something.”
Her eyes, in their bruised grey caves, watched him soberly.
He thought, as so often, of the first name he had known her by: La Magdalena.
And though a trio of mini-skirted waitresses in the restaurant sang all about his ears, though their long hair swung over their shoulders, though they wore fetching little vests laced tightly below the bust, Gus barely even noticed.
The waitresses, who considered flirtation an obligation of the male customer, clustered helpfully around him at the counter. The least a traveller could do, free as he was to flit in and out of the small, humdrum circle of their lives, was offer dreams. One of the waitresses, with wheat-blonde hair and large, mobile, slickered lips and very long lashes, adjusted Gus’s tie. He felt a tiny tremor of temptation, but immediately repudiated it.
“Yes?” she breathed, leaning so close he could smell her peppermint breath.
Gus coughed and cleared his throat. “Two hamburgers and french fries to go,” he said with a certain asperity.
“My pleasure.” Her voice was husky. He thought of cabarets and satin sheets. “Anything to drink?” she asked, and leaned even closer towards him. There was a tiny gold cross between her breasts. He breathed in perfume — something heavy, Eastern, narcotic. She rested her fingers lightly on his wrist. The nails were like pink, fluted shells. The nails of Dolores Marquez, he had noticed as they fed dishes to steam dragons, were raggedly chipped and her hands were red from kitchen water.
“Two coffees,” he said. “To go.”
And when he crossed the parking lot again with his cardboard tray and Styrofoam cups, his body tingled with exhaustion. Virtuous exhaustion. The kind an Olympic runner feels after breasting the tape, or a dieter after turning down chocolate cake. He had a vision of new snow, whiter than white, falling from the warm night. Everything shimmered. Haloes, milky gold, were looped around the neon parking-lot lights. The eyes of his Chevy burned like sanctuary lamps. Oh shit, he thought. He had forgotten to switch off his lights. Stay calm, he told himself, placing his cardboard tray on the hood. He tried the engine. A hiccup, then power, thank God — though in any case he seemed to have eluded all followers. He switched off again and handed Dolores Marquez her Styrofoam cup as though it were a chalice. She seemed uncertain what to do with it, so he himself wrestled with its plastic snap-on lid. The lid resisted. He applied pressure, too much apparently, since victory was abrupt.
They both gasped as the scalding liquid splashed them. Oh shit, he said; and then, embarrassed: Excuse me. A little flustered, he reached for the glove compartment, but the Kleenex box was empty. He did, however, have a slightly grubby handkerchief in his coat pocket and, oblivious to his own wounds, he daubed at hers. “ Oh Jesus,” he mumbled, “I’m sorry.”
He became aware of the ghost of a smile on her lips. He was overwhelmed. Transfixed. He knocked over the rest of his coffee. Always there were fresh trials and tribulations.
He remembered, as he mopped at his soaked pants, that they were in flight; that at any moment, the Other Car, fearful nemesis, might appear. How unaware, how blithely indifferent, was the man at the gas pumps to these dimensions, to the complexities, to the stature of his customer.
“Sorry,” the man said. “Can’t take funny money. Got a Texaco card or a Visa?”
Gus folded away his Canadian bills with dignity. His look implied reproach. This between nations of goodwill? Between neighbours? He took time with his wallet in order to cover his panic. To have to leave his own trail of clues, sign his own name, trip some computer switch. Augustine Kelly, Ontario licence number such and so, passed here. But he had no choice.
“Augustine!” laughed the gas attendant as he pushed the machine lever over Gus’s Texaco card. “Jesus. Don’t often come across a name like that. Not here in Carthage anyways. Bet no one forgets it.”
Gus’s fevered imagination watched the electronic passage of his name, saw it blipping its way to the heart of some intelligence-eating monster whose tentacles were everywhere. It would only be a matter of time, he was sure, before some sort of worldwide All Points Bulletin went out: from the police, from border officials, from his shadowy pursuers. He had always known he would be caught and punished for something. Sooner or later.
Through the darkened back roads of upstate New York, past barns and silos and fields nearing harvest, they drove (it seemed to him) on mercy and borrowed time. Dolores Marquez slid sideways into sleep. She had almost disappeared. A shadow of a woman, thin as tissue. It seemed to him suddenly that nothing would ever save either of them — though surely grace was attached to the effort. He fixed his memory on that fleeting and shimmering moment in the parking lot, when she had almost smiled. If he could freeze time right there. If there were only a way you could stay inside such moments. If you could die five minutes after confession and Communion, unsullied as morning. Or if they could ride the night forever, in a private glowing bubble (a warm Chevy that flew out of time) so that daylight, failure, disaster, collapsed good intentions — all the harsh hunters — might never catch them.
They were nearing Utica, almost back on the New York State Thruway, and he began to believe they might make it, a smooth straight ribbon of road into anonymity. He drove faster. When he became aware of the headlights stalking him from behind, an even distance, speeding up when he did, slowing down at the same time, his fear touched the Chevy and it responded like a living thing. Its flanks trembled, it surged into a grace of speed. Surely nothing could catch him. The car behind was like a shadow tied to his wings. Faster, faster. Until, over the culvert, they made a leap of faith, a perfect parabola.
This is one of the versions I tell myself. It is not the one I tell Kathleen, who is only a child and needs to believe.
Augustine in Carthage, you say. Oh really! But how could I resist? Blame the police report. Blame the early settlers, the civic founders, the namers of upstate New York. (Were they classicists sent down from Oxford? Packed off to the colonies? There’s a Troy and a Syracuse too.) Blame Gus’s mother, blame his christening. Blame the nature of things. There are only so many stories to go round.
And Dolores Marquez?
Sometimes I ponder this problem: if there were really people who wanted her so badly, she must have been dangerous, mustn’t she? Otherwise who would go to such trouble? So, in spite of the fact that Gus and Felicity thought of her as mute and injured and helpless, she must have been a violent criminal, that’s clear, of either the right or the left. One or the other.
It follows that I must have got her character (or the shadow of it) completely wrong. I am, after all, only a piano tuner, and I never met Dolores Marquez. Some things are beyond me, I admit it.
And Felicity?
For once I’m in agreement with the Old Volcano. She wasn’t there. That is not the way she would go. Don’t think I’m not tempted to describe the fire, the way it might have licked her with its hot desiring tongue, its orange lust. Don’t imagine I never have bad dreams. I have, in fact, looked at the worst possibilities, looked them squarely in the eye, and survived.
I often stayed in her Boston apartment, the one where no lover ever slept, for which even the Old Volcano had no key. Feel free, Jean-Marc, she used to say to me. Any time. You’re welcome. (Just the same as she is here.) I could paint that apartment from memory, I could reconstruct it: beautiful, but stark; she travelled light. And besides, she said, old buildings are their own decoration. Wood floo
rs, white walls, fine old ceiling mouldings, her paintings (a handful by young but promising artists; two by the Old Volcano), Bokhara rugs, a small jungle of plants. (She kept the tropics at her bedside. When she woke she could reach out and touch the passionfruit vine.) There were pillows on which brilliant hummingbirds flew, on which impossible flowers bloomed, vibrant things, handmade from cloths dyed in village wells. There was nothing that could not be moved in two trips of a borrowed van. Almost nothing that could not be abandoned.
Once upon a time I had offered to build in bookshelves, but she had declined.
“It’s only temporary,” she had said.
“Until what?”
“Until I move on.”
It’s true, if she were planning a major move, she would have gone back for the paintings. (They were destroyed in the fire.) But why didn’t you send the Old Volcano? I’ll ask.
Because, she’ll say, I can manage perfectly well on my own, thank you. I always have.
But you knew there was a risk, I’ll say. You knew the place had been ransacked, you were being followed, your own instinct was to stay away.
I’m ashamed of my fears, she’ll say. There comes a time when you have to break the taboos.
So she must have turned her key in the lock.
She must have grimaced a little because of the stale air — the dank smell. But she expected that. She expected disarray. She knew what search warrants could achieve; she could imagine the end result of an illegal search. For that very reason she had stayed away, not wanting to know what casual malevolence could do. And she’d had Seymour’s appalled description; to some extent she was prepared.
Just the same, she was not braced for the extent of the mayhem: the hallway a rubble of uprooted plants and earth and broken pots. Grieving, she picked her way through the carnage. In the living room the furniture was slashed, every pillow slit and spilling its shredded foam guts, obscene drawings on her snow-white walls. She stood there stupefied. It simply did not make sense.
Her eyes clouded. Objects came sliding through vision like ships through a fog. Her heart was thumping like a piston. She hardened herself to absorb what added shock her bedroom-study would offer. She knew that that room, with her desk and her files and her bed, would have been the wreckers’ crowning achievement. She had no illusions. As she stumbled down the apartment hallway, she had a sense of having to push her way through a loathsome and dusty brocade of cobwebs. The trailing strands fingered her, disgustingly intimate. She bit her lips to stop herself from screaming. She reached her bedroom door — and then heard the footstep behind her, and turned to see the spider himself, the hunter.
“I’ve been following you,” he says. “It’s time to talk.”
Felicity licks her dry lips. “But I don’t know anything,” she says. “I have nothing to say.”
“That’s why you went back to Central Square, no doubt. To leave nothing in the way of a message.” He smiles his spider smile and she feels the sticky inexorable web. “There’s no point in holding out,” he says. “It’s all over. We’ve got her, and her knight in shining armour. All we need now is what she told you, and we’ll just stay here together, you and me, until you decide to talk.”
Perhaps he went further than he meant to. Perhaps he left ghoulish evidence that needed a cover of fire.
Or perhaps she got away.
38
Kathleen and I tell each other stories. We rummage in the attics of our memories, we shake loose old sepia scenes.
Look, she says. The time daddy won St Michael and All Angels bingo. Fifty dollars, but you would have thought a million, the way he went on. He had to buy something for all of us. Sylvie and Jeannie wanted skates, and Tina wanted a white rabbit, a stuffed one. I wanted a record, but he bought me a whole book of lottery tickets instead. Because if we win, he said, we can buy the entire recording company. Only we didn’t win anything. She pauses, remembering. Giggles. “He bought mummy flowers and a black lace nightie.” She sighs. “Of course, everything came to more than fifty dollars. He never kept track. And mummy was so mad, she took the nightie back.” She sighs again. “He never bothered about anything for himself.”
It is true, I think. And also, she wants a saint. She needs to believe. She is still a child.
“When he comes back,” I say, “he’ll probably buy you the earth. He’s probably off in the wide world getting rich.”
(And in fact, in fact, an extremely large financial settlement has been made. Bob Wilberforce, manager of the Winston branch of Greater Life, has sent Therese the cheque. A great Canadian, he said of Gus in his letter. Fondly remembered by us all. A knight in shining armour, a champion of the little people, who need protection most, God knows.
Was this lightly done by a good insurance man? I think not. People die of their own intense wishes. Gus’s last great bingo game, the dream come true, the family provided for.)
Kathleen will hear none of this, of course. She sets great store on the fact that the bodies could not be identified.
“If anything had happened to him, I’d know,” she says. “I know I’d know. Besides, his money plans never worked out. Never. It wouldn’t be like him at all.” She is proud of his financial disasters. She needs to believe.
But sometimes she has darker days. Sometimes the weight of circumstantial evidence stuns her. “He ran off with another woman,” she says in a rage. “With a girl not much older than me! That’s why mummy left him. She knew what was going on.” She batters me with her fists. “And he doesn’t give a damn about any of us. He doesn’t even remember us.” She pulls away and stares at me with glittering eyes. I am part of that tribe. “I hate men,” she says. “I will never get married.”
I let her sit beside me while I tune pianos. I show her how to tighten the pins, how to strike the tuning fork, how to listen. It is the minute adjustments that count. I work with what I have, I untangle the out-of-tune world. Note by note. It’s something.
“He talked about you constantly,” I tell her. “He never thought about anything else. Whatever he’s doing, you can be sure he’s thinking of you.”
“He abandoned us,” she weeps. “He never even writes.”
“Oh well,” I shrug. “Fathers. What do you expect?”
“Mine isn’t like yours,” she’ll say quickly. Defensively. “Mine isn’t like yours at all.”
Ah well.
There aren’t many like the Old Volcano.
I remember that night he went tomcatting. The first night I realized it, that is. That night at the cottage, way back, when I still hated Felicity. I was ten years old. It was before I ran away, before she found me in the woods. I hated her.
A summer night. The cottage smelled of citronella candles and my own boredom and anger. He had gone out, off, he hadn’t bothered to say where. He was always thunderous away from his studio. Impossible. And my arrival didn’t help. He never knew how to relax. Eruptions every half hour. There are only two things he has ever known how to do — paint and fuck. If he’s not doing one, he has to be doing the other. I used to lie on my bed at night (the one Dolores Marquez left her blood on) and listen to them in the other room. I used to string the sounds together in my mind, I used to see them moving up and down a keyboard: the base thumps, the quick trills of the sofa-bed springs, grunts that ran into chords, and then those long flights of arpeggios running up and up and up the piano to the final high C of her cry.
I hated them.
At the time, back in Montreal, I was learning to play the piano on an old upright that would never stay in tune. Each time I came home from my lesson, fresh from the teacher’s Steinway, the sound of it would set my teeth on edge. That’s how it was, that same feeling, when I listened to Felicity and the Old Volcano busily forgetting my existence on the other side of a wall.
I had a favourite fantasy. I would lock them both up in a room full of appallingly out-of-tune player pianos that never stopped. The tempo would get faster and faster, the discord shriller
and more unbearable, it would drive them crazy, but they wouldn’t be able to stop, they would have to play each other’s body to a tuneless death.
The night he went tomcatting, she was reading a book on the porch. Above her head, swaying a little on its hook, was a kerosene lamp, and it threw weird moving shadows across her face. I watched from the steps. What I noticed was the way she read. Absorbed. I could tell from her face what was happening in the book. I could tell when something was witty or surprising or sad. She was inside that book. She was living in the country of its pages.
(She has always been like that.
When she calls, I’ll say: Fliss, I knew you’d remember sooner or later. I wasn’t worried. When you’ve got a certain notion in your head, you always did lose track of everything else.)
But back at the cottage, I asked, “Where’s my father gone?” Just to interrupt her, really.
She didn’t hear. She didn’t even glance up. I tossed a pebble at her and that worked. She was startled. Puzzled. She had forgotten I was there.
“I said: Where’s my father?”
“I don’t know, Jean-Marc. I guess in L’Ascension. Or maybe Montreal.”
She went back to her book. I stared at her wide-eyed. I couldn’t believe it. Her calm, I mean. Maman had always been frantic when she didn’t know where he was. (Now that Maman has remarried and has four children in her new family, she is not like this at all. She is fat and contented and so calm that even the displeasure of the Church can’t touch her. Except when I appear for a visit. I stay away out of kindness; I remind her of such a bad time. I quite understand. And besides, Felicity is my real family.)
But I still hated Felicity that night.
“Sometimes,” I said, “he stays away all night.”
The malevolent brilliance of a ten-year-old is something to be wondered at. I saw a cloud, or perhaps just the shadow of a cloud, pass across her eyes. She said nothing. I pressed my advantage. “Maybe he won’t come home tonight.”
Borderline Page 27