Greetings from the Vodka Sea (20 page)

. . .

Enter Birdie. They'd started off as friends. Maybe that was the problem. They started off as friends and drifted into loverhood, quite the opposite of the natural progress of things, in Wonnacott's estimation. Eventually they sank into marriage. And thus they floundered.

She had been his brother's keeper. Literally. She tended to Morgan all through his final illness. Not through the goodness of her heart — although surely her heart was good enough — but in a strictly professional capacity. She'd worked as a home care attendant to put herself through college. Morgan was her attendee.

Birdie and Wonnacott would chat as she wiped or rolled or medicated Morgan. The conversation was pleasant enough: books (she had a distressing interest in the “novels” of Ayn Rand), amateur theatrics, Italian cooking. He'd asked her out once, but even that was platonic: a music recital featuring, as he recalled, several dozen student cellists murdering Bartok. The sex thing started almost by accident. Morgan was asleep, and Wonnacott had called for Birdie with some urgency. He only wanted her to hold a picture while he hammered in the tack. Birdie came running, and when he explained his simple request, she said, as a joke, “Thank God. I thought by the tone of your voice you wanted to kiss me.” The veil of friendship was lifted. He looked at her again, took her in his spindly arms and looked some more. She must have been as horny as he was, for when he kissed her — and he must admit, he wasn't a bad kisser — her lips parted like the Red Sea. Clothes were quickly shed and parts of people were pressed into parts of other people. And so they continued as absent lovers, remaining cordial for great stretches before lapsing into another bout of perfect, vicious sex. When Morgan finally died, Wonnacott had no choice. He asked Birdie to marry him. With Morgan gone and several months of sex behind her, Birdie felt obligated. They were friends, after all, and the sex was more than adequate. Yes, she said, yes. Yes.

Yes.

. . .

Birdie left him on Christmas Eve. She left him passed out under the neighbour's tree. When he came to early in the morning, he found his house missing exactly one wife and one son. He cooked the turkey anyway. He had cold turkey sandwiches for breakfast lunch and dinner till the day after New Year's.

. . .

Her name was Lee, and she had been the back story in
l'affaire de Wonnacott et Birdie
. A student in his Comparative North American Fictions class at York, she had taken unfair advantage of his weakness for sex with another human being (by this point in their relationship, the Birdie well had pretty much run dry). To be fair, he'd gone into it with his eyes wide open: he knew the young woman had a crush on him, but he accepted her offer of a drink. He knew the risks, although he didn't wholly believe them. Drinks were drunk and drunks were drinking, and Wonnacott accepted a blow job in the front seat of his car. If it had ended there, it might have been manageable. Wonnacott could have lived with the guilt — in its ever diminishing orbit — and persevered. But blow jobs take on a life of their own, and soon
a
blow job became the odd blow job, which soon gave way to the where-the-hell's-my-blow-job. Lee plunged further into infatuation. This particular voyage ended, as these particular voyages do, with a phone call from student to wife. The student declared her everlasting fidelity; the wife, in the difficult position of defending herself by defending her husband (for in these sorts of situations, proprietorship is the key), wholly rejected in the abstract what she knew in the concrete to be true.

. . .

Wonnacott parked in front of the vacant lot where he and Thérèse used to hunt for garter snakes. He got out and went directly to the front door. It was answered by a thin man who appeared to be almost exactly the same age as Wonnacott. The writer wasn't exactly sure what he was going to say. All he really wanted was to see the room or, to be precise, the view from the room. He'd fixed in his mind a certain picture of that view and associated it with all manner of gnawing nostalgia: the smell of potato peels boiling in an old soup can; the taste of rain and pencil lead; the sound of apples tumbling into a sink; mosquito bites on the back of his hand and that moment of sensual perfection when he finally gave in and scratched. This is what the view meant to him.

Luckily, the man knew of Wonnacott and his work. His name was Turner — Roger, Wonnacott thought, and Beth, or if not Beth, something very much like it. They'd bought the house not long after Wonnacott and Thérèse had moved out.

“It was a mess when we moved in. Of course, no one knew how long she'd been there.”

“The police figured six weeks.” Beth had entered with coffee.

“We thought it would be perfect for . . .” His voice trailed off. “We always wondered if this was the house.” Roger was scouring the bookshelves in the living room. “We knew it was, we just weren't sure.”

“I love the scene where the roof collapses, and you spend the night sleeping under the stars.” Beth had entered again, carrying a dog-eared copy of
Sunshine Sketches of a Rat-Infested Shitbox
. Hard-cover, first edition. Signed, it might be rather valuable. “I thought it should have won the Governor General's Award.” She handed him the book and a fountain pen.

“Politics, you know. It's all politics.”

They chatted for a little while, with Beth producing some small cakes and date squares and later fresh butter tarts. “No Canadian on earth can resist,” he muttered, taking another.

Eventually, Beth remembered she had another of his books and excavated a tiny volume from under a rubble of old encyclopedias.
Singing with Brambles in My Mouth
, his first chapbook, printed on the mimeograph machine at Thérèse's summer camp.

“We found it in the closet when we moved in. You can have it if you want.”

Wonnacott thanked them and put the booklet in his pocket. And then he asked, if it wasn't too much trouble, if he could just see the room upstairs, for old times' sake. Beth and Roger looked at one another.

“It's a bit of a mess,” she said.

“I don't mind, really. It would mean a lot.”

“It really is a scramble.” His hosts looked at each other again.

“Please?”

Roger slowly rose.

“I'll get the key,” he said. “But just a quick look.”

The stairway was narrower than Wonnacott remembered, but he instinctively ducked at the corner to avoid hitting his head on the low ceiling. The body, he told himself, never forgets.

The top floor was cold. Not that sweet coolness of a basement in summer, just stale and damp and cold. Roger put the key in the lock.

“We don't come up here much. Not since Jimmy . . .” He looked again at his wife.

“Left. Not since Jimmy left.” Beth pushed the door open and turned on the light. The room was immaculate. The tidy bed (the linen seemed fresh), a boy's hockey gear stored neatly in the corner, a shelf of books with the spines ordered in an even line.

“That's where the kitchen was.” Wonnacott pointed to a little alcove past the bed, which now housed a walnut armoire. “Of course, it wasn't much of a kitchen.” He stepped toward the closet. “And that's where Michele Ferrie slept for . . .”

Both Beth and Roger quickly stepped in front of him. Roger put his shoulder against the door.

“This is locked,” he said. “We . . . we don't have the key.”

“I'm afraid you'll have to go now, Mr. Wonnacott.”

“We have to go out.”

“We're going to visit friends.”

“It was so nice to meet you.”

Wonnacott looked at the small window above the bed; they had covered it with an iron grate. Roger followed his gaze.

“There's been a lot of break-ins around here,” he explained. “Now — oh, look at the time. We really have to get moving.”

Wonnacott nodded and thought to mention (but did not) that if they were going to bar their windows they better be damned sure they never had to get out.

. . .

And so Birdie had been Wife Number One, and not long after that, not counting the two months he waited for Lee to move out after tersely moving in, Wife Number Two (Delores, a real estate agent, don't ask) had come and gone, along with ten years, and then a few more women whom he'd taken a serious run at. At about this time, just as his daily alcohol intake was reaching that of a small Finnish mining enclave, it occurred to him that what he really wanted wasn't a wife, per se. What he really wanted was summer. And not just any summer. The Orillia summer, when love and sex were simple and the same, when the boy was more of a girl and the girl was more of a boy, when anyone with a drink or a toke was his lifelong pal, and where even God's wild creatures (rats, but still) were his friends. The natural, the unnatural and the supernatural merged into one. It was his Summer of Love; his Summer When He'd Conquered Time. He recognized he could never get it back, but he committed himself to the closest approximation possible. The first step was quitting his job at the university and giving himself up fully to his writing. The second step was to sell his share of the house to Wife Number Two and take a funky apartment in an old house near High Park. Toronto wasn't Orillia, but on the other hand, Orillia wasn't Toronto. The third step was much harder. The third step was to recreate Thérèse, or rather the relationship he'd had with her. He started by sending her anonymous postcards of Orillia. Then he moved to sending her a little chocolate rat he'd found in a candy shop on St. Claire. He sent her another, then another, then another — all by special delivery, every one in an unsigned gift-wrapped package. When she finally figured it out and called him (she was surprised how easy it was to find him, she just opened the phone book and there he was), Wonnacott could not speak for a very long time.

“I just wanted to tell you how very, very sorry I am,” he said finally, chewing on emotion.

“For what?”

“For . . . for going away.”

“Going away?”

“For leaving .”

“Leaving? You didn't leave. You just haven't come home yet.”

Two hours later, they were naked on his mattress, on the floor by the fireplace near the window. She was heavier and jaded; he was bonier, with hair where once there'd been muscle. They gnawed into each other's soul and promised never to come out.

. . .

The dinner was not sold out. Almost half the tables sat empty. Dutton made a valiant effort to convince the guests to move to the tables near the front, in hopes, perhaps, that then the hall wouldn't seem so empty. Most people were content to stay in their places. Humphries had arrived early and sat at a table in the back, frantically marking his book; it wasn't clear whether he was identifying the parts he would read or the parts he wouldn't. Wonnacott leaned against the back wall and smiled, silently composing.

Most of the things I hate about this country can be summed up in two words: Stephen Leacock . . .

It would be, quite literally, the speech to end all speeches; they'd never ask him back. With luck, no one would. Leacock was Orillia's favourite son, a writer who, for a brief time after the First World War, could lay claim to being the most famous humorist in the world, although by the 1970s, he was largely forgotten outside of Canada and, inside it, remembered mostly by middle-aged schoolmasters with toast-crumbed beards and bad breath. But he was routinely presented — and this was the irritating part — as a paragon of literary excellence, a shadowing of our primordial, collective summer, when the world decided we weren't so bad after all. Wonnacott resented Leacock, true, but not for his success. Rather for his legacy of diminished expectations. The Eternal Present.

Wonnacott checked his watch. Just enough time for a quick phone call to his wife and a pre-victory shower.

. . .

This time, Luellen hadn't even bothered to remove her coat.

“That's it,” Wonnacott declared. “This time I'm calling the manager.”

“Just one minute, please. Just give me one minute.” Luellen shifted her weight, barely making a ripple on the hard mattress. She sat silently, almost hypnotized by her own breathing.

“Well?”

“Shh.”

The leather bra and panties bound her flesh in all the wrong places.

“I'm waiting.”

Then there was a knock on the door.

“Luellen,” a voice called from the other side. “I know you're in there. Come out here this instant.”

The woman held her finger to her lips and smiled at Wonnacott. He smiled and fell into the chair.

“Luellen.” The man was desperate now. “Open this door right now, or I'll break it down.” There was a pause, then a loud crash as Luellen's husband fell upon the door.

Wonnacott sighed, enlightened. “Have you ever thought of counselling?”

Luellen shrugged.

“You have to forgive my husband. He's not very worldly, you understand. He's at that age; he's afraid that life has passed him by.”

Her husband threw himself against the door one more time and then slipped to the floor. He was whimpering now and muttering her name with each breath. Luellen stood up and pulled her coat close to her shoulders. She thanked Wonnacott and left, walking headlong, Wonnacott realized, into an Orillia summer of her own.