by Don Gillmor
“I had an affair, Harry.”
This was a shock. He had never imagined Gladys in that situation. He had imagined himself having an affair, and in his somewhat Clintonian definition of adultery, he had decided that his one dalliance with Dixie didn’t fall under that heading. Mistake, certainly, but not affair. He was, if not innocent, then faithful by most modern metrics.
“It was eighteen years ago,” Gladys said. “When I was working at the reference library. Ben was two.”
Why was Gladys giving him this news now? First the shock of sex, now the shock of an affair. How calculated was this pairing? Making peace and coming clean as Harry’s life spun to its polyp-filled conclusion.
“Why are you telling me now?”
“An unburdening. I think we need a fresh start.”
“Who was he?”
“A man doing research. He was writing a book on Audubon that was never published.”
Harry nodded, trying to restore some equilibrium, trying to recreate the tenor of that time in their lives together. He remembered visiting Gladys in the religious silence of the rare books room, which was enclosed by glass. The people who came in weren’t allowed to make notes with pens; even their indelible proximity was a threat to the collection. It was where they stored the 435 hand-painted prints of North American birds by John James Audubon. Gladys had brought it out like a sacred text to show Harry. He had to wear white muslin gloves and felt guilty turning the pages. The man she’d slept with would have done the same, their heads almost touching, in reverence.
“Tell me about it,” Harry said.
“About him?”
“About the affair.”
Gladys almost shrugged, a gesture she thought better of. “People always say, ‘It was just one of those things.’ There’s a reason for cliché.”
“Was it the sex?”
“No. More the seduction, I think. He would come in twice a week and need something to do with Audubon. We became complicit somehow. First it was a look. Then a touch. Innocent but not innocent. Ben was two. Remember how mired we were, Harry? It was a difficult age for him. For us. We were exhausted, physically exhausted, and tired of each other, tired of being a family, and we’d only started, so that was a bit frightening.”
What Harry remembered of the Audubon paintings was that the birds looked so alive. There was something oddly human about them, some of them doomed (passenger pigeon, great auk, Labrador duck). Gladys had told him that Audubon shot them all himself.
“Motherhood came as a surprise to me, Harry, which I know sounds strange. It was like any private life was squeezed out of me. Ben was needy, and you were vague. I’m not making excuses. I’m just telling you what I remember.”
“So you slept with this guy. For how long?”
“Three months.”
“And you broke it off?”
“He became as needy as Ben. I’d go to his apartment and he’d want me to read whatever he’d just written. I think he needed an editor more than he needed a lover. Or maybe just an admirer. His idea was that Audubon was a perfect metaphor for America. Audubon genuinely loved those birds. Then he shot them and painted them obsessively, got rich, moved to New York, lost his mind and died. In a way he was a perfect metaphor, but Thomas—”
“Your lover.”
“Yes. He was struggling with the book. He saw America as this place held together by magic realism and violence and dreams of money, and Audubon embodied that. But he wasn’t able to get that on the page.”
“So Thomas became another chore.”
“Remember how you had to whisper in the rare book room? I think that was part of it. Whispering to one another. I didn’t hear his real voice for two months. I think just the private mystery, that seduction, was what was so appealing. He asked me to lunch.” This time Gladys did shrug. “Anyway, I would have been happier if it had just stopped there.”
“Before it became a chore.”
“Before I realized that it was pointless. I wasn’t in love with him. It didn’t make me feel better—well, maybe a bit, at the very beginning.”
“Why did you keep it up, then?”
Gladys toyed with her teaspoon. She stared past Harry. “It was that sudden void with us. I thought I’d regret it if I didn’t have the affair, that years later I’d look back and see it as an experience I’d missed out on.”
“Sex.”
“You keep coming back to that. Sex is the reason you’d have an affair, Harry. Perhaps you did have one. Maybe you’re having one now.”
Harry tried for a blank expression, but Gladys wasn’t looking at him.
“It was more the attention, I think,” Gladys said. “You and I weren’t having sex then. We barely spoke. He thought I was glorious.”
“You were.”
“You’re not angry,” Gladys said. It wasn’t quite a question.
Harry realized that he did feel curiously philosophical about Gladys’s affair: the benefit of almost two decades passing. Thomas was a romantic ghost. What if Thomas had been a brilliant writer? Gladys might have been swayed by genius. As a couple, they were more fragile than Harry remembered. Perhaps everyone is. Every couple is one argument away from divorce. We can all find love around the corner. You need to be careful.
“Eighteen years. It seems an abstraction now,” Harry replied.
“It seemed that way then.”
We’re even, Harry thought. He no longer felt like he owed Gladys for his moment with Dixie. Perhaps he was even owed. At any rate, a debt had been paid.
SEVENTEEN
BLADDOCK CALLED MONDAY AFTERNOON, while Harry was still examining unwanted mental images of his wife being fucked by an unsuccessful writer.
“This just in,” Bladdock said. “There’s maybe $30 million missing from BRG, my guy at the commission tells me.”
“What? Does he know who took it?”
“Well, here’s the thing. August Sampson is missing.”
“Missing? The guy’s dying. Did they check the morgue?”
“Dying?”
“Cancer.”
“Well, he’s been gone three days. And this pile of money is gone too.”
“You think Dale’s money is part of this?”
“It’s possible. The regulators were following another trail. Some hedge fund that’s heading south. But it crossed paths with BRG. And now BRG is suddenly even more interesting.”
“They think these things are connected?”
“Everything’s connected. Harry, listen, I need another $1,500 to keep this thing going. We’re getting close.”
“I’ll get a cheque to you.”
“Much appreciated, amigo.”
Felicia called him at work, a rarity. “Harry, I had a very odd meeting with Dick Ebbetts last night. He came to the apartment.”
“Ebbetts came to your apartment? How did he know where you were?”
“I left a forwarding address for mail. Anyway, he dropped by.”
“What did he want?”
“I think he just wanted to revel in the fact that I was older and no longer the object of his affections. And perhaps there was something else.”
“What?”
“To have a clear picture of me in this apartment. In that house, even as a renter, the facade was intact. I think he needed to see what I’ve come to, somehow. I don’t care in the least, of course, but there was something he said that was slightly disturbing. He told me that Press was drowning and he was going to pull people down with him.”
“Do you believe him?”
“I don’t know whether to believe him or not. Dick isn’t a sophisticated man, but there is a shrewdness to him. The line sounded like something he’d rehearsed, and it came out a bit stiff. I wonder if Dick is involved in all this. He’s a man who has managed to look guilty his entire life, and he’s looked that way for good reason.”
“You think Ebbetts took Dale’s money?”
“Harold, I think you have to face the possibilit
y that you may never find out. Dick stayed for two hours. Frankly, he made me uncomfortable. I’m not sure a life of paid sex makes for a well-rounded individual.”
Ebbetts, Harry thought, would have loved Felicia’s mix of hauteur and gutter vocabulary (Harry still remembered his shock when she’d described one of the BRG wives as “an implausible cunt”). And he would have loved her money. Even when he found there wasn’t any, he would have loved the kind of money she’d had, which wasn’t like the money he had. If you were to be physically confronted with Ebbetts’s money, it would be crumpled twenties stored in a damp basement. Felicia’s money was cool and airy, and when you opened the vault, you wouldn’t see anything at all. That’s how subtle it was; that was its true beauty. In her presence, Ebbetts would have felt both hope and crippling inadequacy, and this powerful combination would create an obsession.
“Do you want me to come over?” Harry asked.
“No, of course not. I’m fine. It was just odd, that’s all.”
Harry decided to drive up anyway. Even without the creepy visit from Ebbetts, he was concerned about his mother. He imagined her afternoons as an unbroken plain she trudged across with her head down against the wind. Making a modest drink and trying on three outfits in the full-length mirror in her bedroom, trying to decide which to keep. Placing the blue wool dress back on a hanger and putting it back into her closet, then taking a sip of her drink.
There would be evenings when she would be grateful for a labour-intensive bouillabaisse: scrubbing the mussels, shelling the lobster, crab and shrimp, sautéing the garlic and shallots. It would give her an hour of mindless work, and she could sip wine and listen to jazz on the French station, dreading that stillness, the sound of her knife as it came to rest on her plate, the sound of her jaws moving.
Harry drove north in the anonymity of the Camry. He parked outside his mother’s building, went in through the lobby and knocked on the door. There was no answer. He put his key in the lock and opened up and went in. Felicia was lying on the floor. There was a glass six feet away; the carpet was stained with its contents. She was a talented drinker, so drinking to unconsciousness at seven p.m. was unthinkable. He ran to her and knelt. Her face was a rictus, her leg bent unnaturally. Her eyes were open. A stroke? A heart attack? God. “Mother.” He put his lips to her ear. “Mother,” he whispered again. She was breathing. He ran to the phone and dialled 911. The woman said an ambulance would be there in eight minutes.
“What should I be doing?” Harry asked.
“Make her comfortable. Get her legs straightened out and her head elevated. Check her tongue. Talk to her.”
Harry moved Felicia’s leg so it was straight and got a pillow from the sofa and put it under her neck. Stretched out on the floor, she looked like a child. Her face hadn’t relaxed, and her arm lay like a piece of wood beside her.
Harry wasn’t sure what to say to her, struggled to find some happy touchstone. “Remember that hotel in Rome that served pastries sprinkled with icing sugar at breakfast?” he said at last. “You and Erin and I were there. Dad had to work.” It was 1974 and Rome looked like a Fellini film: sharp suits, women in dresses and heels, cigarettes and Campari. He recalled a boy standing by a red Vespa, his black hair combed back. He was wearing a sports jacket and talking to a beautiful dark-haired girl in a sundress who touched his arm and laughed. They both got on the Vespa and sped into the insistent Roman traffic. They seemed so impossibly adult, and Harry felt like a bumpkin.
“Remember that restaurant near the Piazza del Popolo?” he said. “We went into a hotel and there was a huge interior courtyard that went up the hill toward the Borghese gardens. There were lanterns hanging from orange trees on the hill. It was like walking into a secret kingdom. The restaurant was under that canopy, made of some kind of white fabric. There were hundreds of candles.” Women leaned forward to have their cigarettes lit, their cleavage suddenly exposed. The candlelight made everyone look glamorous. Felicia was wearing a dress and heels, and the waiter lit her cigarette and flirted with her. Harry could feel men’s eyes on his mother. It was almost a physical force, like a wind that blew by him and his sister. Perhaps it was enough for her that she received that attention. It confirmed that she was in the world and that she was desired.
Harry looked at her face, now rigid with pain, the lines deeply etched. “You took me shopping in Rome,” he said. “You wanted me to dress like all those Italian teenagers, who looked so grown up.” Still no response.
They’d gone to Florence on that trip, then Paris and finally London. They were in Europe because of some particularly ugly marital impasse, and the usual distance of the cottage was insufficient. It was also one of Felicia’s rare but determined forays into full-bore motherhood. Harry said, “You wanted us to see the world, to experience other cultures, learn other languages, you said. You thought we should go abroad for a year of schooling. Remember, we visited that school in England and made inquiries. It looked formal and pleasant, and I dreaded the idea of a year there. In London we stayed with a couple that you knew. There was a party.”
A drunken dinner party that Harry and Erin watched from the stairs for a while. A man with a moustache and sideburns filled Felicia’s wineglass, spilling some and laughing. Later, from the bedroom where he and Erin had been put up, they could hear raucous laughter and glass breaking. There was music and Harry came out of the bedroom to see people dancing, then went back to sleep. At 5:30 a.m. he was shaken awake, opening his eyes to his mother’s face a foot away. Her eyes were puffy and bloodshot, and there was alcohol on her breath and the dead whiff of cigarettes. “Pack your things,” she whispered harshly. “You have two minutes.” Harry got up and looked around at the strange bedroom. The people they were staying with had kids, but they were away somewhere. It was a kids’ room that he and Erin were in, with twin beds and a closet filled with formal-looking clothes. A cricket bat stood against the wall. Harry and Erin got dressed quickly. His mother threw their things into suitcases. It occurred to Harry that she hadn’t gone to bed at all. They left the bedroom quietly and walked down the carpeted stairway. No one else in the house was up. The dining room was a spectacular mess, and there were stains on the carpet. Bottles were tipped over on the table and an ashtray had flipped onto the floor. Harry and Erin went out the front door behind their mother, who marched briskly up the street. She was wearing sunglasses though it was drizzling rain. It was grey and dismal, and it looked like London had died in the night. She finally hailed a taxi and they got in. She lit a cigarette and stared out the window.
“I’d prefer, madam,” the driver said, “if you didn’t smoke in my taxicab.”
Felicia waited a few beats, then exhaled smoke. “I’d prefer if you drove us to the Grosvenor Victoria.”
Harry and his sister spent most of the day playing cards in their hotel room while their mother smoked and stared out the window.
“Remember London?” Harry said now to his mother.
The paramedics came in the open door, sudden and brisk. They laid Felicia on a stretcher and took her out to the ambulance, talking in code to the radios on their shoulders. Harry phoned Erin and told her to meet him at Sunnybrook Hospital, then drove there. He could hear the whine of a siren ahead somewhere, maybe a different ambulance.
Erin arrived shortly after Harry.
“Did they say how bad, Harry? Do we know anything?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, didn’t you ask?”
“I just got here, Erin. They said someone would come out.”
They sat in the fluorescence of the waiting room, on cheerless orange plastic chairs. A woman on a gurney was wheeled past them. She might have been ninety, and her collapsed face was startled-looking, her empty mouth open. How could death be a surprise? Harry wondered.
A doctor came out and introduced himself as Dr. Shakeesh. “You are the children,” he said, an odd though not entirely inapt characterization. “Your mother has had a stroke. What is called
a transient ischemic attack. So this is the bad news. However, it is relatively mild. Not to say it isn’t serious. There is some trauma to her head from when she fell, too.”
“Will she be able to take care of herself?” Erin asked.
Shakeesh shrugged. “Of course. You will have to see how she is feeling, what she feels she is capable of. I’m going to put her on Lipitor.”
Harry looked at Erin. Felicia might begin reaping the rewards that fifty years of gin (and thirty-odd years of cigarettes) would bring: liver, kidneys, diabetes, a brain withered under the assault. Who would deal with her recovery, which would inevitably feature martinis and recrimination? Which of them would take her in if it came to that? Half of each day would be spent pulling Felicia’s barbs out of their flesh.
“The TIA by itself is not that serious.” Shakeesh gave a concerned almost-smile. His teeth were unrealistically white, and it seemed as if he couldn’t wait to set them loose in a smile. He had thick black hair combed back, a handsome man wearing an expensive shirt. “The greatest concern with the TIA is that it can be a precursor to a more serious stroke.”
“You have the statistics.” Erin said this as a statement rather than a question.
“A third of TIA victims suffer a more serious episode. This is something you have to be aware of. There are a number of home-care options,” he offered.