The Early Investigations of Joanne Kilbourn (20 page)

The jargon and narcissism ate at me – the life-denying trajectory and the string of sentences starting with “I.” When I was a kid there was a game we played at birthday parties. Each child was given five beans, and every time we used the word “I” in a conversation we had to forfeit a bean. Soren Eames struck me as a man who would lose his beans pretty quickly.

Whatever the reason, I said no: no to the next hour, no to the next day. After the darkness of the past month, I wanted a birthday that was sunny and uncomplicated, and I told him so. I would see him, but it would have to wait. We agreed to meet at nine o’clock the morning after my birthday at my house. I was not looking forward to it.

The late afternoon sun filtered through the leaves of the cottonwood tree outside the window of the granny flat and made shadow patterns on my desk: a changing play of light and darkness. It occurred to me that before Soren Eames and I had our meeting it would be wise to find out more about the Miracle Man of Wolf River. It was almost 6:00 p.m. in Ottawa. Rick Spenser would be at his house on River Street pouring Beefeaters into a chilled glass. It would be a pleasure to talk to a happy man.

Rick really did sound glad to hear from me. He was buoyant. It had been a good day. The temperature in Ottawa had finally dropped, and the afternoon had been brisk and bright. Even better for a man who hated campaign travel, it looked as if there would be no federal election call. The government polls were down, and just before Rick left his office for the day, a junior minister had phoned to say the government would wait till spring. Rick was celebrating. He’d stopped at the market and he was in the middle of shredding beets for a pot of borscht “in honour of our friend Andy Boychuk,” he said, laughing.

But as soon as I mentioned Soren Eames there was a pause, and when I asked if he’d had trouble finding information on Eames, he sounded sullen.

“I didn’t see it as being worth the bother. I asked one of our researchers to look into it, and she came up with a one-page summary of a rather dismal life – nothing we didn’t know. If you insist, I’ll have her look again.”

“Yeah, I insist,” I said, laughing.

“So be it,” he said, sharply.

Whatever ambivalence he felt about Soren Eames the man, Rick’s journalistic instincts weren’t dulled. When I mentioned Eames’s phone call, the line crackled with interest: What had he said? What had I said? What were my impressions? He congratulated me on my decision to put off seeing Soren until after my birthday. “No use wasting your time on a charlatan, Joanne,” he said – a typical Rick line, but he hadn’t read it well. There was uneasiness in his voice, and I thought I knew why.

Even when I was young I hadn’t been good at boy-girl games. Another woman would have been quick to grab hold of this show of vulnerability. I wasn’t.

“Rick, listen. The only reason I’m seeing Soren Eames again is because I think he knows something. There’s a connection there.”

His answer came from far away. “Good night, Joanne. I’ll call you tomorrow night before I go to bed, ten o’clock your time, midnight here. They won’t have done the daylight savings thing by then.” He sounded fretful.

I laughed. “Rick, it doesn’t matter. Call when you’re near a phone.”

“Ten o’clock,” he said again. “And, Joanne, I’ll get the research person to send what she comes up with on Eames directly to you. Have a splendid day tomorrow. I wish you that.”

The first thing I heard on my forty-sixth birthday was the phone ringing, then my daughter’s voice laughing, tuneless, singing a crazy birthday song I’d made up for her when she was little. The kids always screamed and yelled when I started to sing it, but it was as much a part of all their birthdays as the ugly plastic tree loaded with jellybeans that was the invariable birthday centrepiece and the mug with parrots singing “Happy bird day to you” that was always at the birthday kid’s place on the table. So much a part of their birthdays but never – until that morning – of mine. That Mieka would sing it to me signalled a change in our relationship. When she finished, she was laughing, and I was crying.

“Oh, Mieka, that was beautiful.”

“Mum, that was awful.”

“Well, yeah, but beautiful that you phoned me up and sang. Does it sound that bad when I do it?”

“Worse, Mum, worse.”

“Mieka, it is so wonderful to hear your voice.” And then we were away on a lovely, aimless conversation about the boys (“Tell them I miss them and gently remind them the present for you is under the sleeping bag in Angus’s cupboard”) and her classes (“The woman who teaches my English class is so much like you – that first day I wanted to follow her home like a puppy”) and my growing conviction that Rick Spenser was interested in me (“Well, why wouldn’t he be? Except for your singing and your worrying, you’re practically a perfect person”). Mother-daughter stuff.

Finally I forced myself to look at the clock. “Mieka, I hate for us to stop, but this is costing you a fortune and we can get caught up when we go to Winnipeg for Thanksgiving. It’s only a week from today. I can’t believe how quickly the fall is going.”

There was no response.

“Mieka?”

Her voice was gentle but firm. “Mum, I’m not going to Winnipeg for Thanksgiving.” And then, “Greg’s parents have a cottage at Emma Lake, and they’ve invited me to spend the Thanksgiving weekend with them and Gregory. I really want to do this. I’ve told them yes, Mum.”

No room to negotiate. No need to negotiate. She was grown up. She wanted to spend the weekend with the family of a man she was interested in. Outwardly I was gracious, upbeat, and when I hung up we were both laughing. But inside I was raging. It was, I thought, as I looked at my indisputably forty-six-year-old face in the mirror, one hell of a way to begin a birthday.

It didn’t get any better in the next hour. The boys were at each other from the moment they got up. They fought like a pair of six-year-olds over who got to hand me my birthday present, and the truce at breakfast was a fragile one. Peter couldn’t find his Latin book, and Angus, for the first time since kindergarten, decided he didn’t want to go to school. As I stood on our front porch, shivering in the chill, watching Angus snake up the road toward grade eight, I was not exactly brimming with radiance and peace. When a black Porsche pulled up in front of my house and I saw a slender man in black get out of the driver’s seat, I felt like giving up on being forty-six altogether. The man was Soren Eames.

I was still in my robe. I had brushed my teeth, but I hadn’t showered. I was in no mood for being on either side of a therapy session. If Soren hadn’t already spotted me, I think I would have made it simple and not answered the door, but it was too late. He was coming up the front walk toward me, trying to smile but looking tense. He was carrying a blue box from Birks – the kind you get when you buy a really pricy piece of china or crystal.

He stopped at the bottom of the porch stairs and handed the box to me.

“Many happy returns, Joanne.”

I just stood there.

“Aren’t you going to open it?”

I started to give the box back.

“No,” he said. “Let’s go inside. Please. Once you open the box, I think you’ll understand some things.”

He followed me into the house. I went through to the kitchen, poured us both some coffee and joined him in the living room.

The blue box was on the coffee table between us. Soren leaned over and pushed it toward me.

“Please, Joanne.”

I think I knew as soon as I pulled back the tissue paper and saw the little ceramic figure inside. I had seen it before. In fact, one blistering Canada Day weekend I had bought it at a craft fair in the southwest corner of the province. It was the work of a local artist, and it was a lovely, witty piece – a cabbage, perfect in every detail, unfolding its top leaves like a flower. Rising from the heart of the cabbage is a woman with the broad hips and heavy breasts of the Ukraine. She is wearing a brown peasant’s dress, and a bright kerchief covers her hair. Her face, with its sweep of Slavic cheekbones and bright blue eyes, is uncannily like Roma Boychuk’s. The woman’s arms are raised toward heaven, and in her hands, solemn and handsome, is a baby boy. The piece is called “Ukrainian Genesis,” and as soon as Andy Boychuk saw it that July day he had to have it.

I did the purchasing. Andy paid me later. When you’re in politics and you go to a show where all the work is by local artists, it’s prudent not to single one artist out and stiff the rest. Andy had loved that piece. I would have sworn it hadn’t left his desk since the day he bought it. Except “Ukrainian
Genesis” had left his desk. Somewhere along the line he had given it to Soren Eames; and now Soren Eames was giving it to me.

“How?” I asked.

“It was a gift, a gift to commemorate a special time for me. It was a wonderful gesture.”

I could feel my safe world shifting, and I didn’t want it to. I grabbed a handhold. “Andy was full of wonderful gestures. He was a generous man. He gave things to a lot of people.”

Soren Eames leaned across the table and looked into my face. His voice was soft, almost diffident, but his gaze was steady. “I loved him, Joanne.”

I felt oppressed, as if something were pressing me down. I didn’t want to hear this. I didn’t want to know.

“A lot of people loved Andy,” I said and I turned and looked out the window.

Soren Eames half stood and leaned toward me. His hand touched my cheek and turned my face. “Look at me, Joanne. You’re not a simple woman. You know what I’m talking about here. I didn’t love Andy like a lot of people. It was more for us – a great deal more. He was my lover, and I was his.”

Free fall. The old, safe world gave way. I heard my voice, pleading, stupid. “Who knew? Were you careful?” The political questions. Andy was dead. This man was destroyed by grief, but the political instinct was always alive and kicking. There are a hundred jokes about the referential mania of political people: the husband of a woman running for the House of Commons is killed in a car accident and her opponent bitterly dismisses the new widow’s loss as “a great break for her”; a campaign manager tells his workers to make sure all their supporters in the senior citizens’ homes vote in the advance poll so that, no matter what, the party won’t have lost a vote. And me, right in there with the best
or worst of them, treating this fragile man as a political problem, not a suffering human being.

His face was so close to me that I could see the faint blue-black of the beard growing beneath his skin, and I could smell his aftershave, light, woodsy – familiar.

Surprised, I said, “You smell like Andy. Did you always use that cologne? Or …”

“I changed after,” he said. “Stupid – as if it could change anything.” He flinched, and the pain on his face was as sharp as if he had been stabbed.

It all changed for me in that moment. Not Paul on the road to Damascus, exactly, but the shock of recognition was there.

“I did that, too,” I said, “after my husband died. At night, before I went to bed, I’d rub his aftershave into my body so that when I woke up in the night …”

“You could pretend that he was still there,” he finished for me.

“Something like that.”

We sat in silence, wrapped in our separate memories. Finally, I wanted to talk.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“For what?”

“I don’t know, just … Soren, come into the kitchen and let me get some fresh coffee and we’ll start again.”

He stood up and smiled. “Is being invited into the kitchen a mark of friendship?”

“Yeah, I guess it is.”

“Then I accept with pleasure. I need a friend.”

We sat at the kitchen table. The sky was threatening. The yard was heavy with leaves from the cottonwood tree, sodden and disintegrating. It was a thoroughly dismal day. Soren Eames was oblivious to the weather. For a long time his eyes didn’t shift from the window, but I think he was seeing a different landscape.

He had brought the little baba figure into the kitchen, and as we sat, his fingers traced her lines, like a man playing with worry beads.

Finally, he began to speak. His voice was warm and intimate.

“Joanne, I wish we could stop the movie right here. It’s a good frame – the respectable matron and the closet gay reach out to one another over their friend’s death. But it’s more complex than that. Not long after we met, Andy told me you were one of the few people in his life he trusted. That’s going to have to be good enough for me because” – he swallowed hard – “I have to trust somebody.”

He was wearing a bomber jacket of buttery, smooth cowhide. As he spoke, he reached into an inside pocket and pulled out an envelope. It was of good quality paper, dove grey. On the front, in elegant and familiar calligraphy, was the name Soren Eames. There was no address. My hands began to shake.

“Hand delivered?” I asked in a bright, artificial voice.

He nodded. “Apparently. It was in my mail slot at the college. It’s a fairly public place. Open it.”

I turned the envelope to open it. On the back flap were the letters
A
and
E
intertwined the way they are on a wedding invitation, the way they were on the copy of “The Sick Rose” someone had placed in Andy’s portfolio the day he was killed. My hands were shaking so badly I could barely pull the enclosure from the envelope.

I recognized it immediately. It was a pre-election brochure of Andy’s. I had written the copy. General stuff: a careful biography, a few platitudes and a couple of soaring, meaningless slogans. No one ever reads the words, anyway. But the pictures were extraordinary. They’d been taken by a young man who had wandered into the Caucus Office early in the summer. His name was Colin Grant, and that day he
was wearing cheap runners, cutoffs and a Georgia O’Keeffe sweatshirt. He had a Leica slung around his neck.

“What you want,” he had said as he struck a match on Dave Micklejohn’s no-smoking sign, “is subtext not substance.”

We hired him that day, and he hadn’t disappointed. His pictures were extraordinary. He could do magic things with light, and the photo on the front of the brochure Soren was holding was one of his best – in part, because it violated all the conventional wisdom about how you show your candidate.