The Perfect Order of Things (21 page)

I don’t believe in an afterlife. Well, I do and I don’t. There
is
an afterlife, but not in the religious sense: it’s just that you don’t die
all at once
. It’s more like a light bulb cooling off after you click off the power: things just slowly fade until they match their surroundings: no God, no other plane of existence, just a slight delay in the drop into oblivion. So here we are.

Nick has lit a cigarette but, knowing that I hate him smoking, holds it discreetly by his side, out of my sight. He, too, is lost in thought. I wonder what about. We imagine we know our children, but they too are a vast, dark continent, in which the glow of city lights here and there lets us know that we are over land, but little else. Is he thinking about a blond girl with a silver stud in her nose (they say she’s in law school now)? A Vietnamese beauty who used to wake him up in the morning? On warm summer nights you remember those girls. He takes a deep puff from his cigarette as if he’s intuited my thoughts.

“How did you live?” he asks. “When you were here, in the park?” A deflective question. He has gone somewhere private and doesn’t want to be asked about it.

“Doing that,” I say, pointing at a skinny kid who is walking between the cars up and down the centre of Sunset Strip with a batch of newspapers under his arm. The L.A.
Free Press
. “You made ten cents a paper, plus tips.”

“I bet you were good at it.”

“Not bad. Not bad at all.”

And we retreat again into private silence. I find myself thinking about Clarissa Bentley, the girl on the Ferris wheel. Just thinking about her makes me smile. A bad apple, that one, my Clarissa. I don’t know if she went to trial for that opera house scam, I wasn’t interested enough to find out. But executive swindlers are out of fashion these days. So who knows, maybe she got hers. We all do, sooner or later.

Bill Cardelle, the handsome boy she left me for? Not so long ago I was invited to a Christmas party at the house of a woman I used to work in television with. And guess who turned up with a plump wife? Bill Cardelle. And as the night wore on, the butlers serving martinis and champagne and hors d’oeuvres, one of the hostess’s teenage children put some music on, too loud of course, but before the damage was stopped, I saw old Bill start to move, just the chin, then the shoulders and then he broke into a little two-step, it was over in seconds, his hand perched on his wife’s shoulder, his tummy hanging over his belt, a pair of tasselled crocodile shoes moving light as a feather beneath him. Damned if he didn’t still have the moves. He could still do it.

I’m thinking about Dean now, my older brother. Not such a happy story. He has joined a religious cult and lives in a boarding house somewhere in the Annex. I haven’t talked to him for many years, but sometimes I see him, white-haired, walking along the sidewalk with a kind of aggressive nonchalance. Always alone, no woman, no friend with whom to share a casual dinner. I am his only living relative now, and sometimes when I see him I can feel my heart contract in anguish and I long to approach him, to put my arms around him, to remind him of those years when we shared the second floor of that white house in the country, me at the end of the hall in the room with the cowboy wallpaper, him in the middle with his maroon radio from which issued the echoes of a ghostly baseball game. But I have done that before, and it has always come to a bad end. So I don’t anymore.

My thoughts move to M., my first ex-wife. And I feel myself on the verge of shaking my head, partly with admiration, partly with exasperation. She still sours after her third glass of Chardonnay. More and more things set her off: Republicans, the police, anti-smokers, Catholics, our present prime minister, talkative taxi drivers, corporate lawyers, anyone who finds fault with our daughter. Talking with her after that third drink is a bit like trying to land a fully armed fighter jet on the deck of a heaving aircraft carrier. But for all her prickly eccentricities, she is wildly popular. Rich women give her their fancy, wornonce dresses; lawyers don’t charge for their services (or at least don’t expect to be paid). She continues to be invited everywhere. You’ll see her at the gala party every night of our city’s film festival (where by the end of the evening everyone annoys her). I don’t know how she does it, but she appears to have the capacity to be eternally forgiven. Unlike her ex-husband.

And look, here’s Catherine, the beloved mother of the young man beside me. She is performing in a play right now, I remember, but I forget the title. Ibsen, I think, whom I don’t especially care for. It seems that as she gets older, Catherine grows more beautiful. In fact only the other day I was in a restaurant having dinner and I saw a woman, stately, elegant, rise from a table on the far side of the room. And I thought to myself, My God, who is that beautiful woman? She looks like the queen of a small European country. And it was Catherine. She’d been there all along.

Justin Strawbridge, my childhood soulmate, wanders out of the Los Angeles fog and stands, it seems, right in front of me. I didn’t see him for many years after he got out of jail for the shotgun killing of Duane Hickok. But then one day, not so long ago, I did. He was coming out of a copy shop in Toronto. He had a thick pile of manuscripts in his hands. Poetry, I imagine, reams and reams of poetry. He has grey hair now, tied at the back in a long ponytail. He fancies himself, I think, an outlaw, and given that he’s killed someone, I suppose he is.

Strangely enough, I saw an email from him posted on my website not ten months ago. The first communication in twenty years. It was a sad, meandering note, full of nostalgia and a description of his life that only someone who has accomplished little—and suspects it—would write. He wanted to know if we could get back together, play some music like in the old days, maybe even head off to Jamaica, “have a blast.” He wrote a few more times, but I never responded. Some great love for him died that day in the dandelion field.

And after him, God knows why, comes Pete Best, the man who got kicked out of the Beatles. He’s doing just fine. (As a subscriber to his website, I keep up on these things.) I read a little while ago that his band was on tour in Brazil, and recently I saw his handsome, healthy face in a CNN quiz. Married to the same woman for forty years. A sturdy lot, those Liverpudlians.

And now we’re back at the beginning again, back to Raissa Shestatsky, the memory of whom, it would seem, began this slow swim back up the river. I did see her one more time. Well, not exactly
her
. I was walking toward the library at Victoria University in Toronto, where I’m teaching these days (a lucky break), when I saw a beautiful young girl sitting on a bench with a friend; dark coat, dark hair, dark eyes. It was a fall day, leaves on the ground, squirrels running here and there, and as I approached her, I felt almost embarrassed by her extraordinary beauty. I went up the stairs and through the glass doors into the library, and as a clutch of students pushed by me, I turned around for a last look. It was not a look of longing or desire or even curiosity, but something else; it felt as if I was on the verge of remembering something. But what was it? It was Raissa she reminded me of. Raissa, my long-lost beauty. Raissa, my love.

“What a privilege it is to be alive,” I say to Nick. We are still in the park.

“What makes you say that?” he asks.

“More and more things these days.”

It’s time for us to get back to the hotel. We have a long day tomorrow, a live breakfast television show then lunch with someone and then some print media. I’m pooped. Besides which, tomorrow is my birthday; I want to be in good form. Nick wants to hang around in the lobby for a while, maybe have a drink in the bar. See what time the girl at the desk gets off work, who knows? I want my bed. At my age, beds have become something mostly for sleep. I say good night to him, good night to Sunset Strip, good night to the little park where I once suffered but to which I have now happily returned. Just thinking about all this, how long life is, how much happens, puts my head quickly on the pillow, and after only a few moments, the sound of a car horn, a voice in the hallway, I am asleep.