Elizabeth and After (31 page)

When Carl got home he woke up Lizzie. She had her arm around Ashes and when she sat up the kitten leapt to his shoulder and started licking at his face with his sharp sandpapery tongue. He made Lizzie’s lunch while she ate breakfast. Then he drove her into West Gull. When she got out of the truck and started walking towards the school, with her colourful little yellow-and-blue plastic lunch pail matching the yellow-and-blue
school, something in Carl’s stomach gave way. He started the truck up again and drove slowly through West Gull, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel. That black and unpredictable feeling in his gut had grown to fill his whole body.

A few minutes later he was sitting in Fred Verghoers’ office at Allnew. Fred was leaning back in his swivel chair behind his desk, at one hand a computer with a Screensaver of a rabbit running across a field, at the other a telephone console with a panel of lights that were busily blinking.

“So here you are,” Fred said. “Come to pay a return visit? Should I get Anne-Marie to bring you a coffee?”

“Gave it up,” Carl said, “ever since I went into training to beat up the shitface who knocked me on the head a few weeks ago.”

“What were you planning to do to him?”

“Well, I don’t really have a plan. Just thought I might drive over to his office, ask him to step outside, see what happened.”

“Maybe he doesn’t step outside any more. Maybe he’s getting a bit old for that.”

“I was wondering about that, too,” Carl said. “But most likely he still thinks he’s a pretty big boy. Though he does prefer to work in the dark and from behind. But I don’t think he’d like to say that to my face.”

“Well,” said Fred, “there’s a lot of different things people could say to each other’s faces. And there’s a lot of different things people could do to each other or with each other behind each other’s backs.”

“I was wondering about that, too,” Carl said. “I figured he might think I owed him one.”

“What are you doing here, Carl? Why did you come back? You still trying to get yourself killed?”

“Is that a threat?”

“I’m not threatening you, Carl. See my little tag here? See my election signs all over the township? I’m building a life, Carl, and it’s going to work. What are you getting done? You going to spend the rest of your life down at the Movie Barn, renting out jerk-off kung fu movies? You’re just asking for it, Carl. You always have been. You figure you’re such a fighter and maybe you are. You can scare a little kid like Ned Richardson. But steal other men’s women and take them out for a quick screw, is that what a big man does? Fuck you, Carl, we’re even.”

Following Carl’s birthday there were a few nights of sharp frost that cut down the remaining garden and left clouded skins of ice on his windshield. Then came a week of cold rain. The evening it stopped the sky was blue-black with an angry red edging in the west. Carl left the Balfer place about seven. He was dressed in a pair of grey slacks he’d bought at the shopping centre and under his ski jacket he wore the new blue shirt Lizzie had given him for his birthday. For the occasion he’d even got rid of his bandage, and with artful combing the remaining swellings and scabbed dots left by his seventeen stitches were almost invisible.

When he arrived, shrub-surrounded spotlights were shining on the huge white house. Tonight it looked like the unsuccessful bastard offspring of a colonial movie-set mansion and the Acropolis.

Carl had just stepped out of his truck and was patting the wrinkles out of his pants when Moira arrived. Except for awkward moments at the R&R, it was the first time he’d seen her since the night they’d spent together after he got back from the hospital.

“My turn to say I just can’t do it,” she’d told him over the phone.

“Your choice.”

“I just can’t be casual about this kind of thing. I’m not the come-and-go type.”

“No need to explain. You’ve been great.”

“I guess I should wish you a good life or something.”

“Don’t have to,” Carl had said. “See you around.”

And now here she was, dressed like some kind of university girl, dark wool coat, dark dress, stockings and high heels. Her nice smile, her almost pretty face that wasn’t quite turned towards him, so he couldn’t tell if she’d been expecting him.

“Hey,” Carl said. “Nice surprise.”

At the R&R she had that brisk way of talking fast but friendly that was meant, he supposed, to combine professionalism with letting him know her heart was protected by chain mail. The last time, left alone with him for a moment, she’d asked him first about the Movie Barn, then Chrissy’s health. Before he could answer McKelvey had returned and Moira drifted off leaving Carl saying to himself that, all things considered, both times Moira had come to his house it had been on her own initiative and without an invitation.

Moira glanced at him appraisingly. “Surprise for me, too. Look at you. Dressed like a real blade.”

“Blade? Never heard that one.”

“Everyone says it. Means kind of a sharp guy but I wouldn’t ask you to carry my wallet.”

The front door was a massive wooden slab with a slit window that would have been the perfect place to conceal a machine gun. Beneath was a wide brass nameplate:

The doorbell, a dark green glass button illuminated from the inside, set off a two-toned chime. “You’d be doing me a favour,” Luke had said to Moira about the dinner, as if he was planning to call her father if she refused. Carl was standing passively, his mouth turned and thoughtful. Maybe Luke had got the wrong impression at Carl’s place, and now had brought them together to deliver some unwanted advice. When Luke opened the door, his eyes went to Carl first, and he smiled, a big relaxed smile that made his face crinkle into a friendly cartoon. He turned to Moira, cartoon smile stretching wider, eyes flicking nervously away from her in that way some men have of pretending you aren’t there because they know they aren’t allowed what they’d like: to swallow you right up.

“Evening, Moira.” His arm curved around her, barely touching, and he ushered them in. “Italian marble,” he said as she wiped her feet. “You ever get a windfall, all you have to do is ask Madame Amaryllia to redo your front hall.”

The Richardson living room was all soft pastels and looked to Moira as though it must have come out of one of those decorating magazines at the R&R: peach wall-to-wall broad-loom, white laminate endiables, a pink marble fireplace with a neat pile of birch logs stacked beside it waiting to join those already crackling away inside. Luke led them to a battleship-sized sofa covered in apricot-rose leatherette with tasselled cushions in the corners. A Gordon Lightfoot song filtered discreetly through hidden speakers. Luke stood in front of them asking what they would like to drink, his fancy black Italian loafers winking from the peach shag like kinetic amphetamine eyes.

A few minutes later, Amy appeared. Moira had met her a few times with her parents but they had never really spoken. Amy was squeezed uncomfortably into a red-sashed satin
dress that made her look like an overcooked sausage left on a barbecue so long that its skin was about to split. Beneath her lacquered hair, her face was swollen and inflamed and with each step she seemed about to collapse. Moira struggled to rise from her oversized cushion.

“Please,” Amaryllia said. She pushed Moira back with a tiny touch of her thick hand. Moira fell into place. The woman had little concrete blocks for fingers. “Did you get something to drink?”

Moira nodded towards her glass. The sherry she had asked for, hoping to impress Luke with her ladylike choice, was making her tongue feel as though it had been coated with cough syrup. She turned to Carl. This had to be the strangest way to see him again. She had helped Lizzie select the shirt at the SuperWay. Thick blue cotton, meant to go with jeans, it was wrong with those slacks. He obviously wasn’t back with Chrissy. No woman would have let him out of the house like that. She tried to imagine describing this scene to Lucy: three fat fruity leather cushions away from a man she’d slept with, a man who might or might not be getting back with his wife, a man she might or might not like, and all she could think about was whether his shirt went with his pants. Also, to tell the whole truth, when she’d helped choose the shirt she’d wondered if she’d ever be unbuttoning it.

While they worked their way through their drinks Luke told them about the various places they’d had to search out to buy their furniture and carpet. When they sat down at the table, Luke explained that the made-to-order chandelier was of such splendour and weight that in anticipation of its arrival a special steel beam had been put in the ceiling during construction of the house.

From the moment they entered the dining room Carl had been eyeing that chandelier. Seven separate circles of lights, tiny pointed Christmas-tree-style bulbs shining on what must have been hundreds of pounds of crystal and silver. So bright you could hardly keep your eyes open. In fact, the whole room was done up like some sort of fake castle. The ceiling was at least sixteen feet high and aside from the chandelier and the gigantic feast-sized table with its high-backed chairs done in throne-red plush, was the extraordinary panelling on the walls, brilliantly varnished cherrywood with a bright flaming grain. Luke caught Carl running his fingers along it as they came into the room. “Full-inch tongue-and-groove,” he confided. While Amy lowered her head to recite grace, Carl calculated. The panelling was just above his eyes, say six feet, and the room was so large there’d have to be at least seventy running feet of panelled wall. Which made, Carl figured while eating shrimp on crushed ice with what seemed to be red hot-dog relish, somewhere between twenty and thirty thousand dollars’ worth of cherrywood.

After the shrimp Luke carved the roast. It reminded Carl of a hunk of meat at a restaurant buffet, grilled and channelled on the outside, the insides glistening with blood. Luke was standing over it, sizing it up as he went along, using a cordless electric carving knife that gave off a high buzz as he shaved slices onto the platter. Meanwhile, Amy carried the conversation; whenever she slowed down Moira would dutifully chip in with a question. Carl had been concentrating so intently on the price of the panelling that he half-missed Amy describing her brother’s farm, where their beef came from, but he did hear her say that some cows were so valuable people were offering to pay him five thousand dollars for just one of their eggs.
“Sight unseen,” Luke Richardson put in. “If I could sell real estate that way I’d be rich.” Then he was doling out slices of Amy’s brother’s five-thousand-an-egg beef onto the plates and passing them around.

There was wine, too. French from France, Luke explained, and then Moira cut in to say she’d been to France on a tour. The only images Carl had of France were the Paris he’d seen in movies, especially the Eiffel tower, and the wine bottle on the table which showed a château fronted by a row of trees.

“With your parents?” Luke asked.

“Other kids,” Moira said, and Carl found himself grinning at Luke’s discomfort at the unthinkable thought of ball-cap-wearing gum-chewing teenagers spending their parents’ money roaming around some foreign country where they didn’t even speak the language.

“You ever go to France?” Moira asked Carl. She was right across the table from him. Luke and Amy were at the ends. The whole thing was out of a bad television show. “Did you?” she asked again. As he was trying to decide what to reply he felt the pointed toe of her shoe against his shin.

“My brother went to France about the cows,” Amaryllia said. “He was on a tour, too: cheese and beef. There was a whole group of farmers and they all came home pretty happy and twice as big as when they left.”

Luke Richardson was looking at Carl, eyes open wide, as though challenging Carl to match that. “My mother went to Rome and saw the Pope,” Carl said. “She asked for a special prayer to stop my father’s drinking.” There was a silence during which Luke Richardson laughed without making any sound and Moira looked down at her plate. Carl remembered there had been a big silver crucifix in the front hall.

“Just kidding,” Carl said. There had been a first weak Scotch and water, then Luke Richardson had refilled his glass, just as tall but without the water. He wanted to go outside, get some fresh air. Amy started talking again, this time about how she had travelled to Toronto and stayed in a hotel while she was choosing fabric for the curtains. With her brother’s wife. They even took her sister-in-law’s dog, a pedigreed Irish setter that knew how to use kitty litter. She shopped in Toronto all the time. She was Greek. She had some sort of passport problem and couldn’t shop in New York. Her brother didn’t like her going to Montreal because of the French thing. Which was okay in France but not at home.

“I went to France with my high-school choir,” Moira said. “We spent two years having raffles and selling cookies, then we went to this little town where they had choirs from all over the world.” She looked at Carl and added, “But I’ve never been to the West Coast.”

Luke started serving out the beef and Amy went to the kitchen because she’d forgotten the horseradish. For the first time since coming into the house Carl looked directly at Moira. “Help,” she mouthed.

“I wanted to show you this one.” The moose head, so big the rest of the body must have been attached on the other side of the wall, was stuffed and mounted on a giant heart-shaped plaque. Moira stood and stroked its nose as though she were about to feed it a lump of sugar.

“I tell him this whole place is a zoo,” Amy said. They were in another oversized room, this one windowless with mahogany panelling that rose to within a couple of feet of the ceiling, where it was topped by a trophy shelf. “My den,” Luke had
announced. After admiring the moose, Carl and Moira sat down on a black leather sofa—across from them, on its twin, were Luke and Amaryllia. From side by side on the big living-room sofa to sitting opposite in the dining room to side by side again in Luke’s den: it seemed to Carl this dinner was an agonizingly slow dance designed to turn him and Moira into a couple. Or maybe they were to be the victims in some weird fairy tale Luke had concocted, one of those grim Grimm fairy tales where the children get eaten or turned into repulsive animals. If so they were in the right place. Except for a wall given over to gun racks, they were more or less surrounded by a taxidermist’s paradise. Beside Luke, a stuffed dog lay with its head in its paws, its mournful brown eyes permanently tilted towards his master. On the desk, on the arm of another chair, on the tops of two of the gun racks were stuffed squirrels and chipmunks, raccoons, rabbits, even a skunk. From the trophy shelf hung wood-backed antlered buck trophies; the moose head above the fireplace, the one Luke had pointed out, had a huge spread of antlers that seemed ready to turn into wings and carry the moose crashing to freedom.