The Perfect Order of Things (3 page)

When I awoke in the morning, birds chirping outside my window, the room bathed in yellow sunlight (the wrong kind, the too-early kind), I hovered for a second the way you do, on the verge of remembering: a corpse you can almost make out in the mud. Oh yes,
that
. A foul taste in my mouth, my head aching from the beer as if I had an arrow clean through both temples. My girlfriend gone.

I tried to get back to sleep, but like a diver with an air pocket in his suit
(she’s gone!)
I couldn’t get back under the surface. (How awful it is, more than forty years later, to recall those moments.)

I lay for I don’t know how long staring at a crack in the ceiling over my head, a long, lightning-shaped crack, the kind you see over a lake in the summer. And the events of the previous evening, the girl in the red sweater, the Ferris wheel, Bill Cardelle looking down at his loafers, seemed, at the same time, nightmarish
and
inevitable. As if a handful of cards had been thrown in the air and come down in their precise numerical order. While I was lying there, too stunned to do much except stare at the crack in the ceiling and plan to go downstairs to brush my teeth but unwilling to leave my bed, as if by my moving, and with that movement officially beginning the day, the situation would only become
realer
, I heard, for the first time since I arrived at my uncle’s, a knock on my bedroom door.

“Yes?”

The door opened, my father came in, and the horror of everything, the unfairness of it, tumbled over me like a stack of wooden chairs. I’d forgotten: fresh from the hospital, determined to make up for “lost time” and “bad behaviour,” he had made a plan to take me clothes shopping for the new school year.

In his little blue Morris, we drove uptown, passing on the way the deep ravine on the other side of which I could see Clarissa’s white apartment building where, I imagined, in her parents’ giant white bed, the silk curtains stirring just so (like the hair on Bill’s forehead), the two of them, Clarissa and a boy with blood on his cheeks, stirred, side by side, in their sleep.

I watched the ravine retreat in the mirror and we turned onto Eglinton, still too bright in that awful summer sunshine, and went into Beatty’s Store for Young Gentlemen.

It was a day that went on forever. Perhaps, to this day even, the longest of my life. My father, shaky like all alcoholics about their “former” behaviour, asked me questions as if reading from a manual. My answers barely interested him, except for one. “I hear that you have a beautiful girlfriend.” We bought a blazer, which had to be fitted, grey flannels, which had to be measured, button-down shirts, a belt, a house tie, a school tie, gym socks, dress socks; it went on and on and on; at one point, excusing myself to try on a sleeveless grey sweater, I went into the dressing room, closed the door, sat down with my back to the mirror, and wept into my hand.

Two weeks later, I went into boarding in the same squat brick building I now stood in front of. A boarder! One of
those
guys, along with the chronic masturbators and pimple squeezers and unloved children whose parents plied the civil service in Nairobi or Senegal or East Timor. Those dandruffy, never-have-a-date, sad sack pooches you saw doing their homework on a Friday night! All my life, all my friends, we were “day boys,” we went home after school, we took off our ties, we watched television, we slept in on Saturday mornings and we never went to church. But that, too, was gone now. My parents (could they have made a worse decision?) sold our house in the city, other people lived there now, and moved up to our summer cottage. “Less stimulation,” my father’s doctor recommended. Well, everyone got that.

I shared a room with a boy no one else wanted to room with, whose skin was white as cream and who enjoyed prancing around the room stark naked, flexing his muscles and emitting whoops of laughter. He also had an enormous, uncircumcised unit; it looked like a giant worm and I had an uncomfortable sensation that he found his own nakedness arousing. The window over my bed looked out onto the courtyard and a gloomy statue—the courtyard where I now stood decades later.

A little chamber of horrors, it was. I nearly went mad from the bewilderment of it all. I couldn’t get over the notion: when I went up the Ferris wheel, I had a girlfriend; when I came down, I didn’t. How could this be? What kind of a world was it where things like this could occur? What are human beings really like? Is language simply a disguise, a way to keep people off the scent of who you really are and what you really want?

After lights out, I took out my little plastic viewer and put it to my eye and pushed down on the button—and there we were.

There we were.

I ran away in the middle of the next night. I slipped out the window into the courtyard and scampered past the statue into the shadows.

It took me all night to hitchhike to the American border crossing. By then the sun had come up; cars streamed by in the brilliant sunlight.

“Where are you going today?” the customs agent said at the mouth of the bridge.

“Niagara Falls,” I said.

“For how long?”

“Just the day.”

“Why aren’t you in school today?”

“It’s a scholars’ holiday. Do you want to see my student card?”

“Not particularly,” he said, amused by his own dryness. “Away you go.”

I walked twenty-five, fifty, a hundred yards along the bridge; I looked down at the river crashing below me; the wind picked up; it blew my hair on end. I was seized with the desire to start running, to run and run and run. All my life I had had the suspicion that I was a bad boy and that I was going to be punished for it, that one day a kind of giant fly swatter was going to come down on me with a terrible
whap
. And now here I was, being truly bad, midway across the bridge, a rule breaker of the first order, a middle finger extended to law and order and . . . and nothing. There
was
no fly swatter. No God, no hell, no punishment. Nobody even paying attention, much less punishing. A blind man came tapping his way along the bridge toward me, heading to the Canadian side, his black suit flapping in the high wind from the river. I waited till he got past me and then I broke into a run. I ran all the way across the bridge and when I landed at the very end, when I stepped onto an American sidewalk, I swear I was a different boy than the one who had started on the other side.

The sun had set now behind the school’s clock tower, its round face slowly yellowing. The door to my old dormitory burst open, and a crowd of teenage boys spilled raggedly out into the courtyard. They looked at me quickly—I could have been a pole or a bicycle rack—and hurried across the flagstones. It must have been dinnertime. I waited till the last one had gone up the steps and into the building; from where I stood, you could hear them moving down the hallway toward the dining room, those high, excited voices.

I looked again at the window of my old room. The student who lived there must have turned off the light and I could see only my reflection in the window.

I lingered in the growing darkness a little longer. There was something more I wanted; there always is. I was trying to imagine what I might have thought that night as I slipped into the October darkness, running from shadow to shadow, running across playing fields and bridges, what would I have
said
if someone had told me that one night many, many years later, when my hair was grey, when I was older than the teachers who teach here (strange notion), that I’d end up back in this courtyard.

And why, I’m not sure, but leaving the school property (I could see two paunchy old boys heffing around the track), I felt a great tenderness for that young boy darting into the night. I found myself thinking that he was, above all else, more than reckless, more than daring, more than naive, something
more
. Some extraordinary quality that I no longer possess. The lack of which, when you think about it, is probably a good thing at my age.

And who would have believed it—that Clarissa Bentley would be my great liberator? The dispeller of superstition. A cruel little girl who grew up to be a dishonest adult but who, more than my mother who adored me, more than an English teacher who inspired me, gave me the rule breaker’s freedom for life. A blessing from a monster.

2

Everything Frightened Him

W
hen I was twelve years old, my father, then a successful stockbroker, bought me a gun. It was a .22 rifle with a mahogany stock and a short barrel. He taught me how to use it; how to negotiate a farmer’s field, how to climb over a fence without putting a hole in my forehead. It was a small gun, but it could kill, I learned that from the beginning. Imagine then his extreme displeasure when my teenage brother, Dean, shot out half the windows on the ground floor of our country house while my parents were in the city one weekend for a funeral.

I was innocent, of course; even I had the brains not to point a gun at a window and pull the trigger. Especially when it was your
own
house and your parents were coming home the next day. Still, I didn’t snitch and took the blame along with him, although now at the age of sixty, having raised two children myself, I cannot imagine why. Perhaps I thought I was in a movie. I often did during those early years.
Beau Geste
, maybe, the 1939 melodrama where a young Gary Cooper confesses to a crime of which he’s innocent—the theft of a valuable jewel—and joins the French Foreign Legion where he dies a hero’s death. Exactly my kind of story.

The punishment for the shot-out windows was somewhat less compelling. Instead of sending Dean to a psychiatrist, my parents instructed us to learn Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” by heart (my mother’s idea), which was a snap for me because I had a magpie’s memory and I rather fancied the poem. For Dean, though, it was a struggle, as everything was.

We returned to the city at the end of that summer for school, and the rifle was left behind in a cupboard along with my father’s top hat, spare golf shoes, a box of tie pins, and an exotic pair of red dice he’d picked up in Cuba as a single man.

I grew explosively that year, almost six inches (I looked like a prehistoric bird), so by the time the family car rolled down the driveway in a plume of dust and scattered stones the following June, the gun was too little for me. It made me look as though I were playing with a toy. So it stayed in the cupboard.

A few years later, while attending a new boarding school, this one tucked into the countryside, I was caught smoking hashish with a priest, who, as bad luck would have it, lived in a Jesuit retreat just down the road. I was suspended for a week and sent home to our summer cottage, where my father was living alone, my mother having temporarily left him.

But I didn’t go straight home. I was afraid to confront him (I’d run away from boarding school the year before), so instead I went to see a dirty, sexy, hair-under-her-arms girl who lived in a rooming house in the student ghetto in Toronto. She came to the door dressed all in black. A stick of strawberry incense glowed in the dark behind her. She said, “Come in.”

Sometime that afternoon, my roommate, having guessed where I’d gone, phoned me at the girl’s house. “You better do something. They’re going to call the police,” he said.

I got to the house in Grassmere near midnight. A taxi drove me in from town. The driver, a friendly guy, double-chinned in a red hunter’s hat, dropped me off at the side of the road. Too much snow, he said, didn’t want to get stuck. I started down the driveway just like I used to after a summer dance, the moon sinister between the tree branches. There was no sound, only my boots in the snow and the river rushing in the darkness to my left.

I came around the bend in the driveway, and below me, a hundred yards from where I stood, I could see our house and behind it the frozen lake, which looked grey in the moonlight. A small lamp glowed in the living room window; the rest of the house was cast in darkness.

I went through the garage with its smell of cold, ignored things and in through the side door. I took off my boots; I peeked in the living room. My father was asleep in an armchair in the corner, a James Bond novel on the table beside him. Sean Connery in
From Russia with
Love
.

Hearing me come in, he stirred and woke up. A cleft of grey hair stood straight up on his head; he must have run his fingers through his hair before he fell asleep and it stayed there.

“I didn’t think you were coming,” he said, and in the mildness of his response, its aura of almost gratitude, our roles changed forever. Or what was left of forever.

Nobody saw his final violent moments, but I have thought about them for many years now. Over and over again, like a movie, each “take” slightly different from the previous one. But all ending in the same place.

This much I know. I stayed with him in that country house for three days. Just the two of us. No sound except the ice falling in the forest, the crows cawing across the field. A lonesome sound. The dark trees in the ravine, tufts of grass poking through the snow, all of it like a black and white painting.

The subject of my suspension never came up; I suppose he didn’t want to know the details. Perhaps none of it mattered by then. I asked him if he’d heard from Mother. He said no, which wasn’t true because later the police found a letter from her, from Florida, on the mantelpiece. She was staying in a pink hotel by the sea, the water was warm this time of year, but she was having second thoughts. It was hard, she wrote, to find a “gent” like him. “You are a rare find.” She was going to come back after all. Things could be different . . .

But to me, he said no, he hadn’t heard from her, and lapsed into silence. I think it was the first time I ever noticed that silence was something you could hear. And then you’d hear the crows again.

What did we do in that rambling house? We played cribbage; we put logs on the fire; we had a bacon sandwich for lunch; I played him that strange Beatles instrumental “Flying.” But the electric shock treatment had made him unsure of himself, and while it played, you could see him thinking how he should
seem
.