The Waterproof Bible (5 page)

Lewis returned to his seat. At 12:55 a.m., now technically Friday, August 20th, Lewis arrived in Vancouver. He did not leave the airport. He stared at the departures board. The next domestic flight scheduled to leave Vancouver International Airport was flying to Winnipeg, Manitoba. Lewis bought a one-way ticket.

Lewis arrived in Winnipeg at 6:37 a.m., although his watch told him it was 8:37 a.m. He walked past reunions, didn’t stop at the luggage carousel, and went directly outside. Standing on the sidewalk, he closed his eyes and listened. Winnipeg felt still, as if it had been unplugged, and this made him feel safe. He had no relatives or friends in Winnipeg. He had never been here before. He had no reason to be in this city. Lewis decided to stay, and he got inside the first taxi in line.

“Take me to the best hotel in town,” Lewis said, then he leaned forward between the seats until he could see
the driver’s face. “No. I want the old hotel. The hotel that used to be the best in town but isn’t anymore. I want elegance in decline.” The driver nodded and drove him directly to the Fort Garry.

The roof of the Fort Garry Hotel had steep lines in the château style. There were turrets and ornately decorated windows. There was a doorman in a long red coat. There were well-dressed couples entering and exiting. Lewis was surprised to find such a vision of old-world elegance in the middle of the Canadian Prairies. When the doorman opened his door, Lewis decided he would stay forever.

He played with the idea of registering under a pseudonym—perhaps S. Isyphus, or Dr. F. Austus. But in the end he rented the Vice-Regal Suite under his own name. The woman who had shown him to his suite had stood in the middle of the living room, hesitating. She studied Lewis. She nodded her head once she was sure that she recognized him.

“Are you?” she asked, her eyes sparkling.

Lewis did not immediately answer. Raising his eyebrows in an unintentionally comic manner, he reached into the inside pocket of his suit. The hotel employee could not help but notice the thickness of the envelope. Lewis held up a hundred-dollar bill. Pausing, he pulled out a second.

“Not anymore,” Lewis said. He held up both bills. The employee nodded. When she’d taken the money, Lewis read the name tag pinned above her heart. “Beth, I’ll need a haircut, too.”

“I’ll make you an appointment.”

“Can you send him up?”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

“Like, right now?”

“Well, as soon as possible.”

“It’ll still be a couple of hours.”

“Okay, then.”

“Is there anything else?”

“I’ll let you know if there is,” Lewis said, and he closed the door of the Vice-Regal Suite. He went into the bathroom. He filled the bathtub but didn’t get in. He pushed down the plug in the sink and filled it too. He sat on the edge of the bathtub, looking from the sink to the tub, then the tub to the sink. But ninety minutes later, when he heard a knock on the suite’s door, the miniature version of his wife had still not appeared. Pulling the drain in both the sink and the tub, Lewis went to answer the door.

Lewis did not open his eyes until the barber took the towel from his shoulders. Tiny pieces of hair floated through the air. Lewis focused on these, consciously avoiding his reflection in the mirror directly in front of him. When the barber had finished sweeping up, Lewis removed the envelope from his inside pocket and took out two bills. He held these out to the barber.

“This is too much.”

“It isn’t. You’ve really helped me here,” Lewis said. He made eye contact with the barber. This was the first time Lewis had done this. It was the first time he’d made eye contact with anyone since leaving the limousine. The barber nodded and took the bills. Lewis walked the barber to the door of the Vice-Regal Suite and held it
open for him. When he was gone, Lewis locked the door and slid the chain across. Then he returned to the bathroom. He stood in front of the full-length mirror. He took a very deep breath. He looked up, and looking back at him was someone trustworthy. Someone who was well adjusted. Someone who hadn’t just failed to attend his wife’s funeral.

Lewis used his teeth to sever the thin plastic string. He put the tags in the garbage can beside the full-length mirror and pulled on the freshly purchased jeans, which were stiff and difficult to button. Pushing with the end of his thumb, he took the toothbrush from its packaging. Remaining shirtless, Lewis began brushing his teeth and was suddenly filled with a sense of comfort, familiarity and home—all three of these sensations caused by a toothbrush.

An hour after his haircut, Lewis had left his hotel room and gone to the Bay, where he’d purchased a complete new wardrobe of clothes in a conservative style, all vastly different from what he typically wore. He’d also bought a razor, deodorant, toothpaste and a toothbrush. It had been quite some time since he’d purchased his own toothbrush, as Lisa had always bought his for him, and unknowingly he had selected one with soft bristles. Lisa had always bought the kind with firm bristles, which was why the toothbrush in his mouth felt broken in and familiar even though it had never been used it before.

Lewis carefully set the brush on the side of the sink. He spit. He walked out of the bathroom and stood over the phone on the bedside table. Picking up the receiver, he pressed a single button and was immediately connected to the concierge.

“I need a garbage bag,” he said. “The thickest one you have.”

“Certainly.”

“And directions to the closest laundromat.”

“Would you like to use our laundry services?”

“No, thank you.”

“We’ll send the directions up with the bag, then.”

“Thank you,” Lewis said.

The garbage bag arrived fifteen minutes later, and came with a map on which the path from the Fort Garry Hotel to the Happy Cat Laundromat had been traced with a pink highlighter. In the bathroom, Lewis removed the clear plastic from his dress shirts. He pulled out the silver pins, making a small pile on the granite to the right of the sink. He let the cardboard fall to the floor. He removed the tags from the remaining six pairs of pants with his fingers. He pulled the socks apart and plucked off the labels. When he’d finished with the underwear too, Lewis stuffed all the clothing into the black plastic garbage bag and swung it over his shoulder.

In the lobby, Lewis pretended not to notice the desk clerk watching him. He walked through the revolving door, his garbage bag just fitting inside it. Having never been in Winnipeg before, Lewis closely followed the directions on his map. He had just turned left onto Corydon Street when the plastic bag started to tear. The split got longer and longer with each step he took. By the time he arrived at the Happy Cat Laundromat, Lewis was cradling the bag in both arms as he would an injured dog.

Once inside, Lewis fit his newly purchased wardrobe into two washing machines. It took twenty-seven
minutes for the clothes to be washed, then he transferred them to two dryers. When the clothes were dry, he put them back in the washing machines. He had just begun his third rotation from dryer to washer when a woman walked into the laundromat. She was fascinatingly un-attractive. Her brown hair was dirty and hung just past her shoulders, slightly too long for her face. Her posture was stooped. She did not take steps but shuffled along as if her feet were skis. She was not curvaceous and yet carried too much weight to be thin. Her mouth hung open. There was a mustard stain so perfectly located over her left nipple that it was hard to believe it wasn’t intentional. Lewis could not take his eyes off her.

Pretending to stare at the television mounted in a corner of the room, Lewis watched her. She loaded a single washer and then began reading a celebrity gossip magazine. She had removed her clothes from the dryer and was folding an excessive number of pairs of once white, now grey cotton underwear when she looked up, directly at Lewis, then walked towards him.

“Do you know who I am?” she asked, a pair of panties in her left hand.

“Um. No.”

“I’m God.”

The woman continued to look directly at him. There was no hint of irony or sarcasm in her words. Instinct told Lewis to stop making eye contact immediately and leave the laundromat, but he did neither of these things.

“Really?” he asked instead.

“In the flesh appearing.”

“Then I have a question for you.”

“Ask me whatever you like, but you have to tell me something first. Why are you doing your laundry over and over again?”

Lewis didn’t immediately answer, although he was fully aware that his wife had inspired the repeated washings. Three, maybe four years ago, she’d painted a series of landscapes. They were some of the best work she’d ever done, and certainly the most marketable. Each canvas looked out onto the ocean, a thin line of sandy brown at the bottom leading to a painstakingly rendered sequence of slightly darkening shades of blue.

But then she’d covered them with a sticky lacquer and set them beside an open window. Three days later, she’d returned and the paintings were covered with dust and grime, much of which obscured the subtlety of the many shades of blue.

“Why did you do that?” Lewis asked. Having never succeeded in making anything so beautiful, the thought of her so carelessly destroying it angered him.

“Because I’m so sick of everything being new,” she answered. “Of everything looking new. Aren’t you?”

Inside the laundromat, Lewis looked up from the floor and into the woman’s eyes, surprised by how easy this was to do. “Because I’m sick of everything being new. I want everything to look and feel old.”

“Why would you want that?”

“No. Now it’s my turn.”

The woman bit her bottom lip and nodded almost imperceptibly.

“It’s a big one,” Lewis said.

“I’m ready.”

“Why do bad things happen to good people?”

“Because it makes a good story.”

Lewis did not know how to respond. Both her response and how quickly she gave it were unexpected. “That’s … cruel,” he said finally.

“You gotta think about it as if you were dead. Because at the end of your life, all you’ve got is the story of it. If you were guaranteed a happy ending, how satisfied would you be? You’d want some drama! Some intrigue! You’d want to feel that you’d struggled and overcome, even if you’d lost.”

“So death just makes a good ending?”

“Works every time,” she said. She turned and walked back to her pile of laundry. She carefully folded the last pair of panties. Tucking her basket under her arm, she turned to go. Looking over her shoulder, she caught Lewis’s eye. “Take care,” she said.

“Oh. Okay.”

A dryer buzzed. Lewis removed his dress shirts and then loaded them back into the washing machine.

Just after nine that evening, Lewis wore a very clean dress shirt and a very clean pair of pants as he sat alone in the Palm Room. Although this was his first visit to the hotel bar, Lewis had already fallen in love with it. He loved that the waiters were all middle-aged men wearing white collared shirts and black vests. He loved that their pants were crisply pressed with a crease down the front. He loved that his drinks arrived on napkins stencilled with the hotel’s logo and were garnished with cubed fruit on a red plastic sword.

But his deepest affection was reserved for the piano player. The black baby grand sat in the exact centre of
the room. Behind it was a grey-haired man with extremely long fingers. His entire body would lean to the right when he played the higher notes, and he would straighten himself out as the melody took him back to the centre. Lewis found himself involuntarily leaning with him.

At the conclusion of a rather trill-filled rendition of “The Girl from Ipanema,” the woman from the laundromat sat down at his table.

Lewis nodded.

“You’d never know that shirt was brand new,” she said. “Its colour is so dull, and the collar is no longer crisp. It looks like you’ve had it forever.”

“Shh,” Lewis said, putting his finger to his lips and pointing at the piano player.

She took the seat beside him instead of the one across from him, and together they watched the pianist work. They did not talk to each other. They ordered drinks between songs but otherwise watched in silence. Lewis found this silence extremely comfortable. The piano player concluded his last set thirty minutes after midnight. At 12:31 a.m. Lewis felt her hand cover his. He did not remove it, and at 12:45 a.m., still without speaking, they left the bar together.

Once inside the Vice-Regal Suite, Lewis went directly to the mini-bar. He looked down at his feet, which left prints in the freshly vacuumed carpet. Removing a tiny bottle of gin from the fridge, he shook it as he crossed the living room. Uncapping the bottle, Lewis set it on the coffee table in front of her.

“One dry martini,” he announced and sat down beside her.

“Are you married?”

Lewis had just begun to run his hand through her hair, but he stopped. He looked at his left hand, the ring finger of which still carried his wedding band. “Oh, don’t worry,” he said. “She’s dead.”

“Did I just break the mood?”

“A little.”

“Recently?”

“Shouldn’t you know?”

“It doesn’t work like that.”

“How does it work?”

“Tell me how she died.”

“It was just, you know,” he said. He stood up and walked back across the carpet to the mini-bar. With his head inside it, Lewis continued to speak. “I couldn’t find her pulse.”

On the morning his wife died, Lewis had decided to let her sleep in. He got the newspaper, made coffee and relished the day’s normalcy. Ninety minutes later he went back upstairs to wake her. But she did not wake up. Lewis stood over her, counted to fifteen and then shook her. He checked for a pulse but couldn’t find one. Her skin was cold.

He then walked downstairs and began reading the business section of the newspaper. It was the only part of the paper he never read. Tales of mergers, takeovers and investments all felt like secret information, the code of a world he’d never been invited to join. He began reading the stocks alphabetically. He’d reached the Gs when he set down the paper and walked back up the stairs.