Extraordinary (4 page)

“No, Bruce.”

“I made it clear not to wait around. It was a kindness, really. He was mooning around my yellow apartment one evening, waiting for Chloe to collect her clothes for a sleepover. I sat him down in the kitchen, I put a Scotch in his hand, and I said, ‘There's something I want you to understand. Even if this thing with Marek Grunbaum doesn't work out, even if it doesn't work out with the man
after
him, I will never, under any circumstances, come back to you.'”

“Jesus.”

“He needed to hear it. Bruce was one of those men, you know the kind: A woman leaves them and they take on a look of wounded confusion, as if the whole thing is a kind of
problème psychiatrique.
A fit of madness that could, conceivably, vanish as quickly as it came on. You know how it goes:
My wife went nuts, but I'm being patient.
They overlook the fact that you've hated them for years. They overlook the fact that you've got a new boyfriend, lost twenty pounds, wear different clothes and have an expensive new haircut.”

“Did he believe you?”

“He looked at me with those half-closed eyes and said, ‘I'm not in any hurry.' At which point I snapped at him. I regret it. Sort of. No, I don't. I said, ‘For God's sake, Bruce, you can't jerk off for the rest of your life!'

“Chloe and I flew to Mexico City and then took a bus for a couple of hundred miles north through the desert and up into the mountains. A friend of Peter's, Freddie Steigman, met us at the bus station. He was a native New Yorker, a pensioner, thirty-five years with Allstate Insurance. He used to be roommates with Edward Albee. Back when they were in their twenties. Albee was a poet then, apparently a very bad one. You know him?”

“The
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
guy.”

“Yeah, that's him. When he retired, Freddie came to San Miguel for a holiday. But he fell in love with the Mexican boy who looked after the hotel swimming pool. The boy disappeared after a couple of weeks, but Freddie stayed on.”

The candle sputtered. Sally watched it for a moment, her eyes sleepy. Getting ready to leave the party.

“What was Albee like?” I asked.

 

 

 

S
he looked up from the candle flame.
“Are we going to do this thing?”

“Yes.”

“And you'll stay?”

“Of course I'll stay.”

And I thought, Nothing works out the way you think it will. And this won't either. So I know which way it won't work out. But the other way, the way it will, that I don't know. How was it supposed to go again? The climb up eighteen flights of stairs, the quick walk down the hall, into the apartment. But then what? I can't seem to recall. What did I think would come
after
the apartment? The next day, the next week. A year later. Five years later. Surely I must have thought about that: that the end of something isn't necessarily the end of it. A man parts the curtains one morning and discovers an entire
planet
revolving just outside the window. Oh, I
see.

Sally looked back at the flame, nodding. “What were we talking about?”

“Edward Albee.”

“Somebody asked Freddie about him one night when he was holding court in the Cucaracha bar. ‘If homosexuality had not existed, Albee would have invented it,' Freddie said.” Sally smiled affectionately. “You could tell he'd said it before. Please, another Drambuie.”

In the kitchen doorway, I turned around. “I have to turn the light on now. Close your eyes.”

***

Settled with a brandy snifter that burned like dark gold in her hand, she continued. “Freddie Steigman dressed like a slightly down-at-the-heels salesman from the fifties. Heavy New York accent. A face part bulldog, part baseball mitt. Loved to drink. He wore a baby blue linen jacket every day of the year. He had two or three of them, identically wrinkled, and a white Mexican shirt that he kept unbuttoned almost to the waist. He reminded me of the retired history teacher in
The Catcher in the Rye.
Except it was endearing, it was tender, it was adorable, this old blade with a bony chest insisting he was still in the game.

“And he
was.
Once a month, Freddie took the bus to Mexico City, hired the prettiest boy he could find in the red light district. He paid well, never got beaten up and came back the following Monday with a light step and interested in everything. I
adored
him.

“Freddie knew everybody in San Miguel, and he liked knowing everyone. He got me a ground floor sublet, with an old piano somebody had left behind, a patio and a view of the mountains. When someone asked me where I lived, I'd say, ‘
Callejón de los Muertos.'
The Street of Dead Lanterns. I loved how it rolled off my tongue. Three weeks after my arrival, Freddie threw a party for me.

“The events that day haven't lost a drop of colour. They're vivid the way the world looks when you suddenly surface after swimming underwater. I must have been paying a certain kind of attention. Why, I don't know. Unless you believe that stuff. I've been over these details a million times. Because if I had done anything differently, if I had taken
this
street instead of
that
street, if I'd lingered over the lines in the fruit stall a few moments longer, then what happened would not have happened. It's like watching
Romeo and Juliet
: even though you know the story backwards, you keep hoping that
this
time the Friar will get the letter to Romeo.

“I took a morning sketch class at the Institute. We were drawing a bare-breasted Mexican girl with a beauty spot on her right shoulder. She had a gap between her front teeth and you could see by the way she smiled that she was shy about it. After the class, some of the students, mostly women, stayed on to talk to the instructor, a Frenchman who smoked Gauloises through an absurdly long cigarette filter. But I had things to do. I bought fruit for the party in the
mercado
and then I met Jan Trober for a coffee at the Cucaracha. She was a New York actress who had settled in San Miguel after the bottom fell out of her career and her husband left her. We sat at a table on the sidewalk so we could see all the people in the town square. The boys walking in a circle one way, girls walking in a circle the other; everybody eyeing each other. Beautiful in its way, the way life works like that.”

The candle sputtered and went out. We sat in the silence and the darkness. After a while, I said, “Shall I light another candle?”

“No, let's just sit here like this for a while.”

In the hallway, voices speaking an Indian dialect passed by the door. It's going to be dark in here tomorrow night, I thought. And for a few nights afterwards; and everything will be different. You assume things are going to be a certain way afterwards, and then you find out, like Macbeth did, that they're not. Preposterously not. The act, or its after-burn rather,
becomes
who you are.

How could I have been so naive?

“In Mexico, up in the mountains where I lived, I sometimes felt as if I had just emigrated from a country where it always rained,” Sally said. And it seemed as though I had overheard her thinking, that she hadn't actually meant to say anything.

A door shut with a bang and the Indian voices disappeared.

And Sally, where will she be? I mean physically. And that too seemed like an extraordinary thing
not
to have considered. Because you don't just go into the air when you die; you go other places first, and they're not so pleasant.

In the darkness, she continued. “Freddie lived on a narrow, windy cobblestone street a few blocks up from the cathedral. He found it comforting, he said, all that redemption so close at hand. He invited all his friends to the party. By sunset, his patio looked like Fire Island. Those tans, those biceps, those white teeth. There were other people too. A Brit with a pirate's moustache, a sixties rock star from some California band, a handful of alcoholic writers who had spent the morning in the Cucaracha talking about their unfinished Ph.D.s. There was a mysterious, tall Canadian who wouldn't let anyone take his picture. Some people said he was CIA. I think he'd just been thwarted by life in Toronto and was trying to make himself seem interesting. There was a retired Australian ambassador—some sort of scandal there, I forget what.

“Oh yes, and divorcees! God, so many divorcees. Women with short haircuts and children in Ivy League schools. For them, San Miguel was the last stop before the Pacific Ocean. Their last chance for a slow dance. Even if it meant sleeping with the gardener at night and letting him watch television by the pool all day long. These were
transactions
, yes, but that doesn't mean they weren't friendly, even loving
.
And let's face it, a friendly body in the bed is a friendly body in the bed; after a certain age, who cares why it's there.

“I was cutting limes in the kitchen with Freddie when I recognized a voice in the other room. It was a friend from Toronto who was passing through San Miguel, had stopped for a drink at the Cucaracha and somebody told her about Freddie's party.

“I heard her say, ‘I hope you don't mind me crashing in like this.' I came out of the kitchen, and I was just moving through the living room when I tripped on the carpet, hit my head on the fireplace and broke my neck.

“I didn't know it was broken at the time. But I knew something bad had happened because I heard a sound I had never heard before. I've talked to other people who broke their necks and they say the same thing: in that sound, you know your life is never going to be the same again.

“I lay there for I don't know how long. There were heads appearing and disappearing above me, but the whole time my body was capable of only one sensation, and that sensation was not pain, it was dread, a sensation that said, like a blunt instrument banging under the floor,
This is a very bad thing, this is a very bad thing, this is a very bad thing.

“I heard the voices in the room go silent, like lifting a needle off a record, and that frightened me. And it seemed that I heard Bruce breathing through his nose and saying to someone,
She brought this on herself.

“And then I heard other voices, the kind you hear on television. ‘Don't move her, don't move her.' It occurred to me, even there on the floor, that it sounded like television because it
was
from television. Like ‘Boil some water.' People are always telling people to boil water on television.”

She breathed deeply and after a pause said, “We should light another candle now. There's a box of them near the Drambuie. Over the fridge. They're made from beeswax.”

I pulled down a red candle, unwrapped it from the delicate tissue paper it was covered with and put it on the table between us.

“There's no paraffin in beeswax candles,” Sally said. “They're better for the health. More ions. Or fewer. Whichever.”

I lit the candle with a long kitchen match. We watched the wick gradually change shape as the flame caught and gathered brightness. I was suddenly exhausted.

“It's incredible, isn't it?” she said.

“What?”

“How people could be so cruel that they could burn another human being alive.”

“Good heavens.”

“You know who I'm thinking of.
Whom
, rather.”

“Yes.”

“Poor little thing. What was she—fourteen?”

“Something like that.”

“Will you stay the night here? All this booze, I'm going to have to take a pee.”

“Of course.”

“Don't leave before me.” She smiled at her own joke.

I opened my lips to respond but didn't.

“When people ask me about the accident—?” she said, her voice rising into a question at the end of the phrase.

“Yes.”

“How I broke my neck at a cocktail party?”

“Yes.”

“They never
say
it, but I know that they assume I was drunk.”

“Really?”

“I think they rather
hope
I was.”

“Why would they hope that?”

“Because it's less tragic,” she said.

“How would it be less tragic?”

“If I was drunk, they could think, Well, she was partly responsible.”

“But if you were sober . . .”

“If I was sober, then it makes the whole thing, and the consequences that flowed out of it, arbitrary.”

“The consequences?”

“Paralysis. A ruined life. That's how
they
see it, not me.”

“Did you ever?” I said.

“See it as a ruined life? Oh heavens, yes. But that changed. But even after all these years, when I first meet people—?”

“Yes?”

“I feel compelled to explain that I wasn't drunk. That I was just about to have my first margarita. That's what I was doing in the kitchen with Freddie—making margaritas.”

“Why do you feel compelled to tell them that?”

“Because I don't want them to think poorly of me.”

“I doubt if they'd do that.” My eyes settled on the cloth figure of the mischievous whale. Red seagulls soared overhead. What was he winking about? What is the secret that he and I supposedly share? “Everybody's gotten drunk at one point or another,” I said.

I could feel a story insinuating itself onto my tongue, how, years before, I had gone to the washroom on the dark second-floor hallway of a Queen Street bar. Someone had forgotten to rope off the back stairs, and on my way to the washroom, a little unsteady on my feet, I turned right instead of left and tumbled face first down the stairs to the bottom landing. I scrambled to my feet, as if by getting up quickly I might prevent some physical damage, the possibility of which had already passed.

I was uninjured, not even a bruise. But the event has stayed with me over the years, and I still revisit it at peculiar times: during a bout of insomnia or an afternoon daydream while the snow is falling. I suspect it was my being so drunk that saved me—I should have broken my neck, but I bounced like rubber. Bump, bump, bump, thud! It occurs to me, in those four a.m. bouts where your thoughts seem always to land on the wrong foot no matter where they start, that I am as haunted these days by the catastrophes that
didn't
happen or
almost
happened as I am by the ones that did. Is it, I wonder, that dark hour alone which sends you so far afield in pursuit of such things, such ugly little flowers? Why does one never think of these things in the daylight?

I kept the story to myself for the simple reason that I was in the company of a woman who had been the victim of a less colourful incident (carpet, fireplace) but the manifestations of which had disfigured her life in a matter of seconds. What does such an event say? Is the lure of religion some kind of protection from such a thing happening? From the despair that it
could
happen?
Does
happen? Why would I walk away from my accident and she didn't walk away from hers? So there can't be an afterlife, I thought. Because that would mean there has to be a God. And what kind of God would allow such a thing to happen? In what way is such an incident instructive?

“You've gone off somewhere,” Sally said. “Where did you go?”

“I'm not sure.”

“Yes, you are.”

I grabbed the handle, so to speak, of the first pot I could reach, the recent death of a casual acquaintance, Bobby Coatsworth. Brain cancer. He was a television news anchorman with such a deep broadcaster's voice that sometimes you couldn't quite believe he wasn't putting you on. The cancer started in his throat and bounced around his body like a pinball. Killed him in ten months. When I heard the news, I said, Well, Bobby was always a pretty tense guy. As if his being tense was why he got cancer. And why
I
didn't.

As I talked, Sally leaned forward in her chair, testing her elbow on an embroidered pillow. She was looking at me closely, waiting for something. I went on, “You hear about a plane crash, you want to know immediately where the plane was coming from, or where it was going to.”