Mount Pleasant (20 page)

On their first date, Harry and Gladys drank wine and talked about Europe and complained almost ironically about not being able to find a decent espresso in Toronto.

They kept dating and one night went out for dinner with another couple, Toby and Marsha. Somehow, a discussion between Harry and Toby about whether Martin Scorsese was going to be the American Bergman mushroomed into an ugly argument. Harry took the tack that no American could be the next Bergman; that was the point of Bergman: those spaces and silences were so Scandinavian. In American films, you needed someone issuing a death threat every eight seconds.

“
Mean Streets
,” said Toby, an English major who had a store of film and music trivia within him so vast that it had scared
away most reasonable women, “is a masterpiece. Period. It’s basically Scorsese’s
Wild Strawberries
.”

“What?” Harry said. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Both movies are about man’s isolation—Harvey Keitel in
Mean Streets
, and Victor what’s-his-name in
Wild Strawberries
.”

“Next you’re going to tell me about Catholic imagery—”

“De Niro and Max von Sydow are basically the same person,” Toby said, waving a slice of pizza in the air. “They are who the director sees himself through. Like Fellini had Mastroianni.”

“You can’t compare—”

“
Wild Strawberries
is
Mean Streets
with umlauts.”

“So you’re saying
Mean Streets
is derivative.”

“Look,” Toby said. “Violence is America’s métier. And Scorsese gets that, and that’s what makes him a genius. In Sweden, people don’t kill other people, they kill themselves, but basically, they’re talking about the same shit, man. It’s, like, universal.”

“What about
The Gambler
?” Marsha said loudly. She had an overbite and an annoying habit of holding on to Toby as if she were about to fall over. “You have to admit that was a great movie. And it was completely intellectual. James Caan was sooo good.”

“The movie was great,” Harry said, “because it was directed by a European—Karel Reisz.”

“But it was an American movie.”

“Not an American movie per se.”

This went on through a dozen more films. By the time Toby declared to most of the restaurant that film was a quintessentially American art form, and that Scorsese was more of a genius than Fellini and Pink Floyd put together, Harry found himself not just getting angry with Toby and Marsha but kind of hating them, and especially hating Toby’s annoying trivia-filled
head, which he seemed to think was a substitute for intellect. Gladys had sprung to Harry’s defense, mustering her considerable logic (if somewhat limited film knowledge). By the end of dinner, the two couples had settled into a quiet hostility that drew Harry and Gladys closer. They spent the drive home deconstructing their night and deconstructing Toby and Marsha and pointing out the many ways they should have seen this coming. When they got back to Harry’s apartment, they drank more wine and watched, of all things, Bergman’s
The Seventh Seal
, which was the late movie, and which they found oddly hysterical. They laughed so hard they cried when Max von Sydow played chess with Death. Then they made love, and for the first time, Gladys very diplomatically guided Harry’s hand to massage her clitoris with a specific light movement and less like he was pushing the button on a vending machine that wouldn’t give up his Mars bar. In the morning, they went to a greasy spoon for breakfast, and it was there, in that glare, staring across the stained table as she ate her western omelette, that he fell in love with her.

“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

B
LADDOCK CALLED
M
ONDAY 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 possibility 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.