Next Life Might Be Kinder (11 page)

 

Before and while Elizabeth and I lived in the Essex Hotel, I'd never read
The Victorian Chaise-Longue.
Naturally, I came to know the novel, since Elizabeth detailed its plot and often referred to it, but I'd not read it. Elizabeth was quite aware of this, and it didn't noticeably bother her, though she said, “Before you read my dissertation you really should read the novel itself.” I promised, and the subject never came up again.

However, Elizabeth, during our life in the Essex Hotel together, read the novel at least a dozen times all the way through, not to mention rereading hundreds of individual passages, for the sake of writing her dissertation. Mumbling out loud at her desk, “What are you doing here, Marghanita, what are you trying to do with this paragraph?” The séance aspect of her thinking. I'd find notes like this all over the apartment:
WHY DID M.L. USE THE WORD “DREAD”?

Elizabeth loved reading the letters of Anton Chekhov, and the one she quoted from most was a letter Chekhov had written to his wife in which he reports: “Last night, I dined with intelligent, lively, accomplished people. And yet I could not locate the soul of the evening.” Lizzy and I didn't have a lot of friends—didn't need them—though greatly enjoyed going to the movies with Marie Ligget. On occasion we'd meet our photographer friends Jack and Esme Swir (Esme was later hired to take still photographs on the movie set) at Cyrano's Last Night, or at a pub on Water Street or Gottingen Street. And I could tell when Elizabeth had found the soul of an evening, because she'd relax and have a rollicking good time. But if the soul of the evening proved elusive, she would insist on leaving. She never made excuses, she'd just say, “Sam, I'm tired. Take me home, darling.” People who knew her didn't mind. That was just the way Elizabeth was. We mainly were in each other's company.

But I regret not reading the novel while Elizabeth was alive. So, this evening, I brought her copy with me to the beach. I wanted to tell her that I was reading it now. It was about nine-thirty when Elizabeth appeared, walking out of the stand of birch trees just west of the cove. It was quite cold out; Elizabeth wore an overcoat, dark woolen slacks, galoshes. Her hair was tucked under a knit cap, though the cap couldn't contain it all. She looked out at the water for a moment, then began to set out her eleven books. Once the books were lined up, she walked over to the rocks, where she sat down on a flat rock and looked at the beach again. That is when she noticed me. I was perhaps twenty meters away, and Philip and Cynthia's house was in the background. The light was on in their kitchen, but otherwise the house was dark.

On these occasions, when Elizabeth spoke she sounded like herself. Voice-wise, nothing different. Just the same voice that said, “Sam, when you go out today, can you pick up coffee and bread?” Or whispered, “Tonight, your Elizabeth.” Or said with exhaustion, “Work went like shit today, I'm afraid.”

On the beach, I held up her copy of
The Victorian Chaise-Longue.
Almost immediately, Elizabeth said, “You should have worn a scarf, Sam. Is that my copy of the novel?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Would you do me a favor and set it down here with the other books?”

Walking toward her, I desperately wanted Elizabeth to stay where she was; it would mean I'd get my closest look yet. But as I approached, she stepped back to the rocky surround. I set the novel at the end of the line of books. I didn't try to read the other titles. Then she said, “Thank you. I won't keep it, but I wanted to look at something I wrote in the margin of page 66 again.”

“You remember the exact page?”

“I was working on that page the morning I died, silly.”

I couldn't speak. I can honestly say I was stunned into speechlessness. Elizabeth didn't speak, either. The horseshoe beach came alive as it had not done before, at least to me. Birds at night: nightjars and another kind I could not identify. The wind was light, the tide out, but the white froth where waves met the shore could be seen. I heard the noise of a television, I think from a house just beyond the trees where a retired lobster fisherman, Alan Leary, now a beekeeper, had lived for fifty years, forty-six of those with his wife, Kristin, who had died in 1967. A slight rustle in the dry cattails, maybe a neighborhood cat or a raccoon. Otherwise, a night so quiet it reminded me of a Japanese poem Lizzy once read to me: “A whispered mention of loneliness / from the moon / has finally arrived.”

Elizabeth picked up the copy of
The Victorian Chaise-Longue,
opened it to page 66, read for a moment, said, “Oh, of course, now I remember,” then set the book on the sand again. She looked at all the books for a minute or two. “Do you want to know what happened, my love?” she said. “That day. Will it help you in any way to know?”

“Why do you ask this? Why tonight?”

“Never mind for now. I'll talk about it another night. I can see you're not up to it yet.”

This was one of our briefer reunions. She gathered up her eleven other books and walked back to the trees. Facing away from me, she waved a quick goodbye over her shoulder.

Back in the cottage, I brushed sand from the cover of
The Victorian Chaise-Longue.
Reading it, I finally fell asleep at about four
A.M.
, though just for half an hour, during which time I had a dream that I absolutely despised having, despised the thought that I was capable of having it. In this dream I had driven to Halifax, to the police station. I went to a room that had
Forensics
stenciled on the door. I opened the door and there was Lily Svetgartot wearing a white lab coat. I handed her Elizabeth's copy of
The Victorian Chaise-Longue.
She set it on a rectangle of glass, which she then slid under a big microscope. “Come back in five hours,” she said. “I'll know by then whose fingerprints other than yours I've found.” I spent the rest of the dream trying to find my pickup truck.

I woke in a cold sweat, heard myself give a gasping cry. It was lightly snowing out. I turned on the bedside radio. I saw that the book had fallen to the floor. The weather report said, “an accumulation of up to a half inch of snow.” I went into the kitchen, made coffee, and read more of
The Victorian Chaise-Longue,
but couldn't concentrate. So I drove, mainly in the dark, to Halifax. It was Tuesday, I realized, but my session with Dr. Nissensen was not until ten. At seven o'clock I was at Cyrano's Last Night, disappointed not to find Marie Ligget there. I sat in the café through two espressos and a regular coffee, looking out the window, waiting for my appointed fifty minutes.

S
OMETHING NOT GOOD
was happening with me. How else to explain why I went to the shoot.

The
Chronicle-Herald
listed where the day's scenes would be shot; today the crew was doing “night shots” in the Essex Hotel. I got there at about nine-thirty
P.M.
Though my picture had appeared a few times in the newspaper (“Author Samuel Lattimore, whose wife's murder was the inspiration for the movie
Next Life,
now filming in Halifax, said through a representative, ‘I want nothing to do with the movie. True, I sold the rights, but that is the full extent of my participation, and I wish the filmmakers neither good nor bad luck'”), there was my mug, scowling like I had a degree in scowling. That is to say, no one would recognize me except Lily Svetgartot and Istvakson, so I kept well back from them. I stood with thirty or so people behind a cordon from which hung a sign:
NO SPECTATORS BEYOND THIS POINT
. According to the papers, the crew had struck up cordial relationships with the city, though there had been complaints about traffic being rerouted and actors being seated in restaurants while regular customers had to wait. Nothing much at all. The movie brought a boost to the local economy, of course, even if it was a relatively low-budget operation.

I had told Istvakson nothing of my observations and opinions of Alfonse Padgett, absolutely nothing. I'd read somewhere that he'd had a few “audiences” with Padgett in the interim prison in Bedford, on the outskirts of Halifax. (Padgett had been sentenced to forty years to life. It would be twenty years before he'd qualify for a parole review.) So I could only assume that some of Istvakson's screenplay was based on things Padgett had told him. After much preparation—crew members checking the lobby furniture, various actor-bellmen and hotel patrons standing around in costume, sound and lighting equipment set up—Istvakson appeared. Lily Svetgartot followed close behind, carrying a clipboard and a thermos of coffee. (“Coffee spiked with God knows what,” she had said.) Next, the actor playing Alfonse Padgett—I never learned his name—stepped onto the set. The physical resemblance to Padgett unnerved me. But when he spoke his first lines (“I'm taking those dance lessons Arnie Moran is giving, whaddaya think of that, Mr. Isherwood?”), I felt great relief that his voice scarcely resembled Padgett's. Actor-Isherwood replied, “You trip over your feet just carrying a suitcase to the lift. The thought of you doing the lindy makes me think that ten notes into the first dance, you'll end up in hospital.”

They shot the scene a total of twelve times. Finally Istvakson said, “I'll look at all this in dailies later on. Okay, everybody, go home, and thank you very much.” He spoke briefly with Lily Svetgartot, and she pointed to what was obviously a shooting schedule on the clipboard, because Istvakson said loudly, “More hotel lobby scenes starting at six
A.M.
Nobody late, please!” The crew went to their rooms or out the front door of the hotel, and the onlookers in the street dispersed.

Call it perverse intuition. I don't know what it was, really, but when I saw Istvakson step into the lift (Lily Svetgartot had gone to her room, which was right off the lobby), I inquired at the desk—there was a clerk on duty whom I didn't recognize—about leaving a note for the director. The clerk, a woman of about thirty whose name tag read
Miss Claridge,
said “Certainly.” She slid a piece of hotel stationery over to me, and then a pen. I wrote, “You are getting it all wrong.” I didn't sign it. I folded the note and handed it to Miss Claridge, and saw her put the note into a slot in the wooden mail-and-key hive:
room 58, Elizabeth's and my former room. Istvakson had done his research, all right.

I got back in my truck and drove to the cottage, getting home by about five-thirty
A.M.
There was the faintest tinge of light on the horizon out to sea.

D
EREK BUDNICK WAS
sixty-two years old. He'd been a policeman in Halifax for twenty-five years and then a security guard at Pier 21, the museum of the history of immigration into Canada; after that he became house detective at the Essex Hotel. He was a bachelor and lived in room 28. Elizabeth and I were on a first-name basis with him.

It wasn't more than five minutes after Elizabeth telephoned him in his room and described the damage we'd found to the chaise longue that Derek walked through our open door. He held a Kodak flash camera. “I'm sorry this happened,” he said. “Let me first take a few pictures and then—can you make some coffee, please? Then let's sit and talk.”

We must have woken Derek up. His hair was mussed and I could see the collar of his pajama shirt under his sweater; he had on his woolen trousers and sports coat and black shoes. He took snapshots of the chaise longue from three different angles.

“That's a nasty tear in the fabric,” he said.

After one sharp inhale of sobbing, Elizabeth said, “Definitely it is.”

“Derek,” I said, “you have to talk to Alfonse Padgett about this.”

“Let's have coffee,” Derek said. “Let's sit down and talk.”

I made coffee and we sat at the kitchen table. “Okay, let me get my notebook out here,” Derek said. “Okay, how did you discover this violation?”

Elizabeth sat down across from Derek. “I'm taking lindy lessons offered by Arnie Moran in the ballroom,” she said. “Tonight was lesson number two. Alfonse Padgett was in the ballroom. He acted like a creep. Toward me, he acted like a creep. After the lesson, Sam and I went to a café. We got home maybe eleven, eleven-thirty. We'd left a floor lamp on. That's about it. I mean, we walked in and saw the tear in the fabric right away. Then we telephoned your room.”

Derek nodded and said, “Sam, it's a serious accusation, your mentioning Padgett. Him being a hotel employee.”

“He should be in jail. Starting tonight. Starting right now.”

“Calm down, now,” Derek said. “It doesn't come out of the blue, your naming Padgett, right? You have your reasons?”

“He's a creep,” Elizabeth said. She placed her hands over mine on the table. “He assaulted me at the lindy lesson.”

“What?” Derek said. “How do you mean?
Assault's a serious—”

“Close your eyes a minute, Derek. Please. Then I'll tell you.”

Derek set down his coffee cup and closed his eyes. Consciously or not, he held on to the side of the table as if for dear life. “I'm all set,” he said.

“He touched my breast,” Elizabeth said. “You can open your eyes now. I just didn't want you looking at me when I told you what I just told you.”

Derek opened his eyes and took a sip of coffee. “During a dance lesson, doing that might've been not on purpose,” he said.

“The lindy doesn't call for a lot of holding close,” Elizabeth said. “No, he definitely, um, copped a feel. I pushed him away.”

“He assaulted me this morning in the lift,” I said.

“Whoa, Jesus, hold on here,” Derek said. He set down his cup again. “Two assaults on the same day?”

“He pushed me against the wall of the lift,” I said.

Derek, as he finished jotting a note, said out loud, “. . . against the wall of the lift.” He sighed painfully. “I think I'd better ask Mr. Isherwood to call the police.”