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Authors: Peter Cameron

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BOOK: The City of Your Final Destination
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“Is there really a letter?”
She turned away from the window and looked at him. She shook her head. “No,” she said.
“It did sound a poor excuse to me,” Adam said.
Caroline said nothing.
After a moment, Adam said, “Then what is it?”
“I think it is guilt. Or shame, perhaps.”
“About what?”
Caroline straightened a quilt that was folded over the back of a couch. “About so many things,” she said. “About everything.”
“Well, that narrows it down.”
Caroline did not smile. She laid her hands on the smoothed quilt.
“I don't understand,” said Adam.
“I know you don't,” said Caroline.
“It is Jules's guilt, Jules's shame—”
“No,” said Caroline. “Not entirely.”
“Well,” said Adam. “Of course. We are all guilty. You do not get to be our age without amassing a burden of guilt. But I do not think a biography written by Mr. Razaghi will delve too deeply into the moral caverns of our lives, or expose us in any way we would rather it did not. That is the beauty of the authorized biography. You have nothing to be scared about, my dear.”
“I'm not scared!” said Caroline, somewhat fiercely. “Of course I am not scared. You don't understand. Even if the book tells nothing, I don't want it, because I will know it tells nothing.”
“I don't think I follow you,” said Adam.
Caroline returned to her chair. She picked up her glass and shook it, looking for any vodka that might remain. Then she put it back down on the low table between them. “Do you know how I met Jules?” she asked Adam.
“You met him on the boat, didn't you? Coming back from France?”
“No,” said Caroline.
“Then how did you meet him?”
“I never took the boat. I flew home. I flew back to New York but Margot wouldn't. We had almost crashed going over, and she hated planes. She took the boat, and met Jules.” She paused. “When I went to meet her at the dock they were together and I could tell she had fallen in love. They were so beautiful together. Margot was very beautiful, she was the beautiful sister, and he was—he was very beautiful too. You know what he was like then. He stayed in New York that summer. Of course I fell in love with him, and he knew it, we all knew it, I suppose, but it was clear that he was Margot's
and I was just adoring him. It was understood. And then something happened, something shifted between us. It didn't feel safe anymore, what I felt, or what I felt he felt.” She stopped.
“And that is your great, awful secret: that you stole your sister's boyfriend?”
“I know it sounds inconsequential, but it was not. It was an awful thing to do. It was a crime, a sin.”
“Falling in love with someone is not an awful thing,” said Adam. “There is no morality about it. As they say: all is fair in love and war. The world would be a very boring place were it not. I think you are being a little absurd, Caroline.”
Caroline shook her head. “I have never talked to Margot since then,” she said. “And my mother never forgave me, either. My sister and my mother, both. And then all I had was Jules and here, and then I stopped loving Jules, because how could I love Jules? But I was too proud, too ashamed to let him go. It is what killed him, I think.”
“Jules killed himself,” said Adam.
“Yes,” said Caroline, “that is what we all let ourselves think, of course. But it is not the truth.”
“And you are afraid that if this biography is written—what? You will be exposed? We will be exposed? I think you overestimate the powers of Mr. Razaghi.”
“It has nothing to do with Mr. Razaghi's abilities.”
“Then I don't follow you.”
“Adam, do you think it's odd that we've never talked about Jules's death? Or perhaps you and Arden have. Have you?”
“No,” said Adam.
“And you don't think that's odd? My husband, your brother, the father of her child—and we don't talk about it?”
“No, I don't think it is odd. What is there to say?”
“I don't know. We must find what there is to say by saying it. But talking to Mr. Razaghi, selling him a life that was not Jules's,
which is what you will do, both you and Arden, I know it, I can hear it all already, the fake version we all have, that ceases to seem fake because we have embraced it for so long—that is not what should happen now. That is not what should ever happen. I will not allow it.” She stood up.
“I don't know what you're talking about. Really, I don't. What fake version? I have never lied about Jules. I am not implicated in his death. And I resent your implying otherwise. Jules was always melancholy. Always, he was born with it. He tried to kill himself once when he was seventeen, did you know that?”
“No,” said Caroline.
“He did. In the garage with the automobile. And don't forget my mother was mad. Of course, her life didn't help much, but she was a bit mad to start, and Jules got some of that. And he wrote a book that was acclaimed and then spent twenty miserable years trying to do it again, and failing over and over again. It is no wonder to me that he destroyed the manuscript and walked out into the woods. I don't think there is any great mystery about his death. No: I don't think there is so very much to talk about.”
“Well, what about that—what you just said: that he tried to kill himself earlier? Why did you never tell me that?”
Adam thought for a moment. “I don't know,” he said. “I suppose I assumed it was private, it was his, to tell you or not. And in a way you are right: we did not talk about it. It was a bad thing that had happened and we did not talk about bad things. It was how my parents dealt with their past.”
“By not talking about it?”
“Yes,” said Adam. “And I am their child. And it is a little late in the game for me to start talking.”
Caroline laughed.
“Why are you laughing?” asked Adam.
“It just sounds odd, what you said, because you talk all the time.”
“You know what I mean,” said Adam.
“Yes,” said Caroline, “and it is a little sad.”
“Well, a lot of things are a little sad,” said Adam.
Caroline remained standing. After a moment she said, “I don't want this book to be written because it won't be an honest book. It will not tell the truth. Perhaps no biography does. I doubt it. But I do not want a false book about Jules. A pretend book.”
“It need not be so complicated. Again, I think you misunderstand the kind of book Razaghi will write. He is a hack. He is concerned with dates and places. None of this concerns him, Caroline.”
“Yes,” said Caroline, “I know. Exactly. None of it concerns him: you express it so well. Better than I. It will be a hollow book. It will be all that is left of Jules and it will be hollow, false.” She stood there for a moment, but Adam said nothing. He did not know what to say.
“I'm sorry,” he said, after a moment. “I don't know what to say.”
Caroline shrugged. She turned and walked out of the room. Adam heard the front door open and close. He sat there for a long time. Then he heard Pete's truck pull up. Good, he thought: Pete is home. He tried to stand up but he felt very tired, and a bit dizzy. How much vodka had he drunk? He leaned back into the cushions, closed his eyes.
Deirdre entered the room. An aluminum chair stood at the foot of each bed; Deirdre pulled the one at Omar's bed around to the far side and sat facing the door. The boy in the other bed studiously ate his meal. He looked very healthy, princely: he was wearing maroon silk pajamas with an indecipherable monogram on the jacket pocket.
Omar lay in the bed, his head off the pillow and oddly askew, as if he had been thrashing about in his sleep; his body was twisted beneath
the thin white blanket, but he slept peacefully. Both of his hands were wrapped in mittens of gauze. He was wearing green nylon pajamas patterned with a hideous purple paisley. For a long while Deirdre just sat there, neither talking to nor touching Omar. A nurse came into the room and took the tray from the boy in the other bed. She looked at Deirdre and nodded, but said nothing. When she had left the room, the boy in the other bed took a book off his bedstand and turned on the lamp over his bed, and then lay down on his side facing away from Deirdre, giving her privacy.
She reached out and touched Omar's arm but he did not stir. She leaned closer and whispered his name into his ear, then studied his face, which remained stilled, passive. She grasped his hand. She felt two things, strongly, simultaneously: she felt a deep, almost debilitating affection for him, the sweetness of him, the goodness of him, the loveliness of him; and she felt also the foreignness of him, his strangeness, his otherness, all the uncharted regions of him she did not know. After a while he withdrew his hand from hers but did not awaken.
She sat there, feeling very tired herself. The boy in the next bed reached up and turned out his lamp, put his book back on the table, and assumed a position that suggested he would soon be asleep. Deirdre stood. She replaced the chair at the foot of Omar's bed. From there she regarded Omar. She wished he would wake up so she would be certain he was not still comatose. Of course, they would not lie to her about that.
After a moment she left the room and walked down the hallway. When she came to the end, she realized she had been walking in the wrong direction. She turned around. She passed the room. Of course he was still lying there, as she had left him. She had irrationally thought her absence might awaken him.
Arden Langdon was sitting by herself in the waiting area, just sitting, not reading a book or a magazine. Deirdre saw her from
down the hall. There was something odd about the absolute stillness, the infinite patience, with which she sat.
On the way home, they said nothing. In the lobby, Arden had asked Deirdre if Omar was awake, and Deirdre had said no, he was not. We can come back tomorrow morning, Arden had said. He will be awake then.
Deirdre fell asleep in the car, her head leaning against the door. Arden thought the cessation of motion might arouse her, but it did not, so she was compelled to reach over and touch Deirdre's shoulder, softly shake it.
“Deirdre,” she whispered, “we're home. Well, I'm home. You're here.”
Deirdre opened her eyes. They were parked at the top of the drive, on a grassy verge beside the house. There was a little light left in the sky, soft, late-evening light, and it poured itself across the miles onto the baked yellow wall of the house. For some reason that seemed absolutely correct and necessary, Arden kept her hand, for a moment, on Deirdre's shoulder. Arden knew, instinctually, how and when to touch people. It was a gift, a talent she had.
“Come in,” Arden said. “And we'll make a bed, and you can sleep.”
Deirdre awoke the next morning in a strange bed in a strange room. It was very quiet. For a moment she thought she was in some sort of sanatorium—the linoleum floor and white metal bed frame seemed quaintly therapeutic; I have TB, she thought, and have been sent to a sanatorium.
Then she saw her suitcase opened on the floor and remembered that she was at Ochos Rios, in Uruguay, and that it was Omar who was incapacitated. She looked at her watch, which was, besides a ceramic lamp and a glass of water, the only thing on the bedside table. There was something oddly lovely about the glass of water: the tumbler itself was delicately etched with a garland of braided flowers, and the water was curiously bright and clear. Schools of tiny bubbles clung to the sheer inside wall. It was 10:40. She had slept for hours and hours. She got out of bed and stood in the center of the room, looking around. There were three doors, one per wall, and on the fourth wall was a window with a rather ugly and ancient venetian blind drawn, and drapes made from heavy brocaded fabric that did not at all suit the utilitarian, therapeutic mood of the
room. They looked like drapes that had been cut down, made over, from other more majestic drapes. They were not drawn. Light leaked prismatically through chinks in the lowered blinds, forcing itself, as if by desire, into the room. It must be very bright outside, Deirdre thought. She parted two lengths of dusty blind and peered out: an unkempt lawn sloped sharply down toward a piney forest. A dog was sitting on the lawn, carefully eating a very large bone. She tapped softly on the glass but the dog did not respond, and she had the odd feeling he was in another world, that it was all other worlds, through the window and behind each of the three doors.
Deirdre hoped that one of the doors might reveal a bathroom. Alas, none did: one opened into a large closet empty save for a pomandered, wizened, unidentifiable fruit that hung on a satin ribbon from the long rod. There was something totemic and disquieting about it hanging there, all by itself, in the dark closet. Another door opened into an identically sized room where in place of a bed there was a long worktable piled high with bolts of fabric and an ancient sewing machine. The third door opened out onto a long corridor, with perhaps a dozen closed doors set along its length. Many chairs of different breeds were set along either side of the hall, between the doors, and it was clear that they served no purpose, that no one sat on them waiting, but they themselves were waiting.
Deirdre now vaguely remembered visiting a bathroom along this hall the night before. How tired and exhausted she had been! She hoped she had behaved all right. She set out in search of the bathroom. She knocked on the door across the hall and when no one answered she opened it. This room, which seemed to be roughly the same size and shape as her bedroom, was empty except for a large wooden table set before the window; on the table was a small, velvet-curtained proscenium stage of the kind used for puppet shows. Marionettes hung, like torture victims, along the walls. There was something creepy about this room—something creepy,
at least, to Deirdre—and she quickly closed the door. Even as a child—especially as a child—she had always hated the dumb, staring faces of dolls. She could never pretend that they were alive, and had disdained girls who did.
The room beside the sewing room was another bedroom, similar to hers. She recognized Omar's suitcase closed, but not latched, upon a chair. The bed was neatly made. She stepped inside and closed the door. She looked into the suitcase. On top of the clothes were a few books: Hermione Lee's biography of Virginia Woolf (which Deirdre had given him, along with a watch, for Christmas), and Spanish and English editions of
The Gondola
. There was also a small, cheap notebook with a pen jammed into its spiral. Deirdre opened this notebook and recognized Omar's careful, somewhat old-world writing. Apparently it was a journal. She looked around the room, and convinced she was alone, began reading:
Well, I got here. Here being Montevideo, which I suppose is really neither here nor there, but I'm still amazed I got this far. Although I think the trip here was the easy part. I feel a little scared and lost. But excited too. Montevideo is half-great and half-ruined, like most places in the world. I've just been walking around. I'm staying in a pretty terrible hotel but it's cheap. My room has no window. It feels very safe, like a cocoon, but it's a little scary. Like you could disappear in it. Like in addition to the window the door could be subtracted and you would be stuck inside. It's a very basic room: floor, walls, ceiling, bed, wardrobe, chair. A lightbulb on a chain hangs from the ceiling. I'm sitting up in bed now, writing this. I could be anywhere in the world. The sheets are stiff and scratchy but clean. They smell of bleach. The bed creaks when I move.
Now that I'm here (although it's only Montevideo) and nothing has really been accomplished yet or changed, but now that I'm here, this far, I feel like things will be okay. I mean whatever happens. I thought about writing them from here, saying I was coming. Send a telegram or something
like that. But I think it would be better if I just show up. I'm sure that there is some way I can present this so that they will be willing to give me authorization. Unless they're totally insane and irrational.
On the plane they gave us all free champagne. Little miniature bottles. The woman next to me didn't want hers so I got two. I'm keeping the extra one to drink with Deirdre when I get back, when all this has been straightened out, when I've got authorization, and everything is okay again. And we can celebrate. It's only a little bottle but we can drink it together.
I'm tired and it's hard to write sitting up in this bed. Needless to say there is no desk.
That is all there was written in the book.
“There you are,” said Arden, when Deirdre entered the kitchen. “I was just thinking about waking you, but felt odd doing so. Did you sleep well?”
“Yes, thank you,” said Deirdre.
“You were exhausted,” said Arden. “I mean really exhausted. Physically exhausted. Emotionally, too, no doubt.”
Although Deirdre knew that exhaustion was a neutral state, she felt in Arden's pronouncement a judgment, as if some weakness on her part had allowed, even fostered, the exhaustion.
“I'm feeling much better now,” she said.
“And did you find the bathroom? I hope there was enough hot water for you to shower properly.”
The shower had been tepid, slurring toward cool as it evolved, but it had nevertheless been much enjoyed by Deirdre, as showers after extended periods of travel inevitably are. “It was fine,” she said. “I'm in love with your house. All the old fixtures, and furniture—”
“Their charm wears thin after a while,” said Arden. “I loved it all when I first came too.” She said this in a way that made it clear
that she still loved it all, but had the time-deeded prerogative to make complaints. “What would you like for breakfast? Everyone eats such different breakfasts, but we have most anything you'd like.”
“Coffee would be wonderful,” said Deirdre.
“Yes, of course,” said Arden. “But what else? You must be starving. You ate nothing last night.”
Deirdre realized she was famished. “I suppose I am a bit hungry,” she allowed.
“Of course you are,” said Arden. “How do you like your eggs?”
“Scrambled,” Deirdre said, “but let me do it. Really, let me. Just show me—”
“Nonsense,” said Arden. “Unless you don't trust me. But eggs I can manage.” She laughed. She poured coffee from a percolator into a mug and set it before Deirdre, and nodded at the milk and sugar waiting on the table. Then she busied herself with the making of the eggs.
The coffee was very good: dark and fragrant and intensely flavorful.
Arden returned to the table with a plate of eggs and bread and fried potatoes. She set the plate down in front of Deirdre, then filled a mug with coffee for herself, and sat at the far end of the table.
“Thank you,” said Deirdre. “It looks delicious.”
Arden sipped her coffee with a vague smile on her face.
“How long have you lived here?” asked Deirdre.
“About ten years,” said Arden. “Eleven, now, I suppose.”
“And are you from Uruguay? Were you born here?”
“No,” laughed Arden. “I was born in England. My father was British, and my mother was American. She was an actress.”
“So you grew up in England?”
“Yes, except for a bit in Los Angeles and Wisconsin. Mostly in boarding schools. My parents were both rather self-preoccupied. They divorced soon after I was born.”
“Does your mother still act?” asked Deirdre.
“I think not,” said Arden. “She's dead.”
“Oh, I'm sorry,” said Deirdre.
“It happened quite a long time ago,” said Arden.
“I wanted to be an actor,” said Deirdre, “but I could never relax on stage. I always looked tense, they said.”
“I see,” said Arden.
“Do you mind me asking you questions?” asked Deirdre.
“No,” said Arden, “of course I don't.”
“It's just that it seems so interesting to me—your being here. How did you get to Uruguay?”
“God brought me,” said Arden.
“Oh,” said Deirdre.
Arden laughed. “I joined one of those awful Christian missionary groups when I was in college. I was a bit of a mess. I think I mostly did it to hurt my father, who was passionately irreligious. The group I joined was called Joyful Noise. We traveled around the world giving concerts and smiling brightly and converting heathens. I shook the tambourine.”
“And you came to Uruguay?”
“Yes,” said Arden. “We were touring South America by bus. My God. Can you imagine? I made it as far as Montevideo, where I came to my senses. I've always loved Montevideo for that reason. I couldn't go home, so I arranged to go to the university and that's where I met Jules. He was teaching there. And then I came here.”
“You've had an interesting life,” said Deirdre.
“Well, it's quieted down. It took me a while to find my home. I had never had a home before I came here. Neither of my parents had time for homes.”
“And it's just you, and Portia, and Caroline living here?”
“Yes. An odd home, I know. Adam and Pete live just down the road. Adam was Jules's brother. Pete's his companion. It was Pete who was with Omar when he had his accident. He feels very bad about all of this, of course. He feels responsible.”
“Do the bees sting often?”
“I suppose,” said Arden. “I'm often stung.” She looked down at her hands and bare forearms, as if for evidence. “No one has ever responded to a sting like Omar. I've never seen anything like it. I really thought he was going to die.”
“Did Omar get a chance to speak with you?” Deirdre asked.
“What do you mean?” asked Arden.
“I mean, about the book. The biography. And authorization.” She heard the curtness in her voice. “I just wondered,” she amended.
“Yes, he did,” said Arden. “And he changed our minds. Well, he changed my mind, and Adam's. Well, Adam was already in favor of it. He changed my mind. Caroline's mind is not changed. She still refuses to grant authorization.”
“How did he change your mind?” Deirdre asked.
“I don't really know if he did,” said Arden. “I mean, my mind has changed, and I suppose it is because of him, but I'm not sure. You see, Caroline claims Jules wrote her—soon after
The Gondola
was published—that he never wanted to have a biography of himself written. I think he was reading a biography at the time—I don't know whose—and was disturbed by it. Biographies can be disturbing. Well, when Omar's letter first arrived, I was persuaded to withhold authorization on the basis of that, but now …” She picked up Deirdre's cleaned plate and carried it to the sink. She rinsed it under the tap and then turned and faced Deirdre, who remained sitting at the table. “Now that seems like a less compelling reason. It was such a long time ago he wrote that letter. Jules is dead. This biography can't hurt him. And Omar is alive, and the biography can help him. It seemed rather simple to me.”
“So it's to help Omar that you changed your mind?” asked Deirdre.
Arden looked over at Deirdre, and smiled. “Yes,” she said. “I suppose that is why. I'm sure you're anxious to see him again.
Should we go? I don't mean to rush you, but I'd like to get back here before Portia returns from school.”
“I feel so terrible you have to drive me there,” said Deirdre. “I wish I could drive myself.”
“Everyone wants to be so self-sufficient these days,” said Arden. “It's a bit sad.”
“It's just that I hate imposing—”
BOOK: The City of Your Final Destination
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