Bodily Harm (6 page)

Which was all very well, but the man existed; he was an accident that had almost happened to her; he was an ambassador, from some place she didn’t want to know any more about. The piece of rope, which was evidence, which the police had taken away with them, was also a message; it was someone’s twisted idea of love. Every time she went into her bedroom she could see it, coiled on the bed, even though it was no longer there.

In itself it was neutral, and useful too, you could use it for all kinds of things. She wondered whether he’d intended to strangle her with it or just tie her up. He hadn’t wanted to be drunk, there had been beer and half a bottle of wine in the refrigerator, she was sure he’d looked, and he’d chosen Ovaltine. He’d wanted to know what he was doing. When he got as far as the scar perhaps he would have
stopped, apologized, untied her, gone home, to the wife and children Rennie was certain he had. Or perhaps he knew, perhaps that’s what turned him on.
Mr. X, in the bedroom, with a rope
.

And when you pulled on the rope, which after all reached down into darkness, what would come up? What was at the end,
the end?
A hand, then an arm, a shoulder, and finally a face. At the end of the rope there was someone. Everyone had a face, there was no such thing as a faceless stranger.

Rennie is late for dinner. She has to wait at the front desk while they set a table for her in the diningroom. Around the corner, where she can’t see, a tray of silverware hits the floor and there’s an argument in low voices. After fifteen minutes a waitress comes out and says sternly that Rennie can go in now, as if it’s a trial rather than a meal.

As Rennie walks towards the diningroom, a woman with a tan the colour of clear tea walks out of it. She has blonde hair braided and wound around her head, and she’s wearing a sleeveless magenta dress with orange flowers on it. Rennie feels bleached.

The woman smiles at her with fluorescent teeth, looking at her with round blue china-doll eyes. “Hi there,” she says. Her friendly, glassy stare reminds Rennie of the greeting perfected by hostesses in the restaurants of Holiday Inns. Rennie waits for her to say, “Have a good day.” The smile lasts a little too long, and Rennie gropes, wondering if she knows this woman. She decides with relief that she doesn’t, and smiles back.

The tables are covered with starched white tablecloths and the wine glasses have linen napkins tucked into them, pleated into fans. Propped against the flower vase, one hibiscus per table, is a small typewritten card which isn’t exactly a menu, since there’s no choice. The food is brought by three waitresses, in light-blue full-skirted
dresses and white aprons and mobcaps. They are totally silent and do not smile; perhaps they’ve been called away from their own dinners.

Rennie begins to compose, from habit and to pass the time, though she doesn’t think the Sunset Inn will find its way into her piece:

The décor is nondescript, resembling nothing so much as an English provincial hotel, with flowered wallpaper and a few prints of hunting and shooting. The ceiling fans add a pleasant touch. We began with the local bread, and butter of perhaps a questionable freshness. Then came (she consulted the menu) a pumpkin soup, which was not the bland version most North Americans may be used to. My companion …

But there is no companion. It’s necessary to have a companion for these excursions, always, if only a paper one. The readers would find the suggestion that you would go to a restaurant and sit there all by yourself, just eating, far too depressing. They want gaiety and the possibility of romance and a mention of the wine list.

Rennie gives up anyway when the roast beef arrives, leathery and khaki and covered with a gravy that tastes like mix. It’s garnished with a cube of yam and something light green that has been boiled too long. This is the kind of food you eat only when very hungry.

Rennie is reminded of the put-on piece she did, months ago, on fast-food outlets. It was for
Pandora’s
“Swinging Toronto” section. She’d once done a piece for them on how to pick men up in laundromats, unobtrusively and safely, with addresses of the good laundromats.
Check their socks. If they ask to borrow your soap flakes, forget it
. The food franchise piece was called “Sawdust Yummies” and the subtitle (not hers) read, “You better take a good thou, ’cause the bread and the wine are nowhere.”

She’d covered every McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken spot in the downtown core for it, dutifully taking one bite of everything.
My companion had the Egg McMuffin, which he found a trifle runny. My buns were chilly
.

Rennie picks at the alien vegetables on her plate, gazing around the room. There’s only one other diner, a man, who’s sitting on the far side of the room reading a paper. In front of him is a dish of what looks like whipped lime Jello. If this were a laundromat, would she pick him up? He turns the page of his newspaper and smiles at her, a half-smile of complicity, and Rennie looks down at her plate. She likes to stare but she doesn’t like to be caught doing it.

Eye contact, that was one hint. She’s not surprised when he folds the paper, gets up, and heads towards her table.

“It’s kind of dumb, sitting across the room from each other like that,” he says. “I think this place is empty except for us. Mind if I join you?”

Rennie says no. She has no intention of picking this man up. She never actually picked men up in laundromats, she just went through the preliminaries and then explained that she was doing research. That’s what she can always say if necessary. Meanwhile, there’s no reason not to be polite.

He goes to the kitchen door and asks for another cup of coffee, and one of the waitresses brings it. She also brings a dish of the green substance for Rennie, and then, instead of returning to the kitchen, sits down at the man’s vacated place and finishes off his dessert, staring balefully at him as she does so. The man has his back to her and can’t see.

“I wouldn’t eat that if I were you,” he says.

Rennie laughs and looks at him more carefully. Before the operation, there was a game she used to play with Jocasta, on the street and in restaurants. Pick a man, any man, and find the distinguishing features. The eyebrows? The nose? The body? If this man were
yours, how would you do him over? A brush cut, a wet suit? It was a rude game and Rennie knew it. Jocasta, for some reason, didn’t. Listen, she’d say. You’d be doing them a favour.

Rennie thinks this man would resist being done over. For one thing, he’s too old: he’s past the Silly Putty stage. Rennie decides he must be at least forty. His tan is leathery, there are permanent white creases around his eyes. He has a light moustache and post-hippie-length hair, bottom of the earlobes in front, top of the collar in back; it’s a little ragged, as if he does it himself with kitchen scissors. He’s wearing shorts and a yellow T-shirt without anything written on it. Rennie approves of this. She liked T-shirts with mottoes on them when they first came out, but now she thinks they’re jejune.

Rennie introduces herself and mentions that she’s a journalist. She always likes to get that in first, before people mistake her for a secretary. The man says his name is Paul and he’s from Iowa. “Originally,” he says, implying travel. He’s not staying at the hotel, he says, just eating there. It’s one of the better places.

“If this is better, what’s worse?” says Rennie, and they both laugh.

Rennie asks him where home is. It’s all right to ask such questions, since Rennie has already decided this does not have the flavour of a pickup. File it under
attempt at human contact
. He just wants someone to talk to, he’s killing time. Which is fine, that’s all she’s doing herself. If there’s anything she doesn’t need in her life right now, it’s another one of what Jocasta would call
those
. Nevertheless, she’s conscious of a desire to stick her head down under the tablecloth, to see what his knees look like.

“Home?” says Paul. “You mean, where the heart is?”

“Was that a personal question?” says Rennie. She starts to eat the dessert, which appears to be made of sweetened chalk.

Paul grins. “Most of the time I live on a boat,” he says. “Over at Ste. Agathe, the harbour’s better there. I’m just here for a couple of days, on business.”

Rennie feels she’s expected to ask what sort of business, so she doesn’t. She’s decided he will be boring. She’s met people with boats before and all they ever talk about is boats. Boats make her seasick. “What sort of boat?” she says.

“Quite a fast one. Actually I have four of them,” he says, watching her. Now she’s supposed to be impressed.

“I guess that means you’re filthy rich,” she says.

This time he laughs. “I charter them out,” he says. “They’re all out now. It’s a pain in the ass in some ways. I don’t like tourists. They’re always complaining about the food, and they throw up too much.”

Rennie, who is a tourist, lets this pass. “How did you get four?” she says.

“You can pick them up cheap around here,” he says, “from the dead or the disgusted, retired stockbrokers who have heart attacks or decide it’s too much trouble scraping off the barnacles. There’s a bit of owner piracy too.”

Rennie doesn’t want to give him the satisfaction of her ignorance, but he smiles at her with his tan folding into pleats around his eyes, he wants her to ask, so she relents and asks.

“People stealing their own boats,” he says. “They collect the insurance. Then they sell the boat.”

“But you would never do a thing like that,” says Rennie. She’s paying more attention. No gold earring, no wooden leg, no hooks on the ends of the arms, no parrot. Still, there’s something. She looks at his hands, square-fingered and practical, carpenter’s hands, on the tablecloth, not doing anything.

“No,” he says. “I would never do a thing like that.”

He smiles a little, his eyes are light blue, and she recognizes something about him, a deliberate neutrality. He’s doing what she does, he’s holding back, and now she’s really curious.

“Do you have a job?” she says.

“If you have four boats you don’t exactly need a job, around here,” he says. “I make enough on the charters. I used to have one, I was an agronomist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. They sent me as an adviser. I was supposed to be telling them what else they can grow here besides bananas. I was pushing red kidney beans. The catch is, nobody really wants them to grow anything here besides bananas. But they wouldn’t send me anywhere else, so I kind of retired.”

“Where were you before that?” says Rennie.

“Here and there,” he says. “A lot of places. I was in Viet Nam, before the war, the official one that is. After that I was in Cambodia.” He says this still smiling, but looking at her straight on, a little belligerently, as if he’s expecting her to react, with horror or at least disgust.

“What were you doing there?” says Rennie pleasantly, putting down her spoon.

“Advising,” he says. “I was always advising. It’s not the same as having people do what you say.”

“What about?” says Rennie; she feels now as if they’re on the radio.

There’s a small pause, another crinkled smile. “Rice,” he says, watching her closely.

She’s being asked for something, but she’s not sure what it is. Not admiration, not absolution. Maybe she’s not being asked for anything at all, which is just as well, since she doesn’t have a whole lot of handouts left. “That must have been interesting,” she says. She hasn’t done profiles for nothing, she isn’t stupid, she knows how to add, she knows there’s an X factor. Ten years ago she would have felt entitled to moral outrage, but it’s no skin off her nose. People get trapped in things that are beyond their control, she ought to know that by now.

He relaxes, leans back in his chair. She’s passed the test, whatever it was. “I’ll tell you about it sometime,” he says, assuming the future; which is more than she can do.

Rennie’s room at the Sunset Inn is papered with a small floral print, pink and blue; there are several pale-orange watermarks near the ceiling, which is fifteen feet high. At the end of the bed, which is single and narrow and covered with a white chenille spread, hangs a picture of a green melon cut open to reveal the seeds. Over the bed itself is a knotted mosquito net, not quite as white as the bedspread. On the night table beside the bed are a Bible, a mosquito coil in a saucer, a box of matches, Three Star, made in Sweden, and a lamp with a pleated paper shade. The lamp is a mermaid with her arms over her head, holding up the bulb. Her breasts aren’t bare, she’s wearing a harem jacket open at the front, its edges grazing the nipples. In the drawer of the night table are two more mosquito coils in a box labelled
Fish Mosquito Destroyer, Blood Protection Co. Ltd
.