“I saw you and that man come out of the casino.”
“Ah!”
“Oh! Ah! Is that it?”
Harold stood up as if he were a prisoner in court. Y
our honour, the money we have been living on these last few weeks has come from the pockets of people who cannot afford it.
He turned his back to the window because he thought he saw Rolf’s face there, looking in.
I’ve lost my mother, your honour, and I’m only thirty-seven. I had a discouraging start to life and now I need praise. I need admiration. I’m too young for failure.
“I’ve been walking a tightrope,” he said to Maura.
“Your feet are too big for a tightrope.”
“Don’t discourage me,” he said.
“All right, honey.”
“I’ll cook at the weekend,” he said. “I’ll get the groceries. We’ll have fish.”
The silence was full of flying thoughts, his and hers. They met across the table and crashed. Finally he told her the truth. She shrieked. She howled. She said, “You have to get out of there.”
“The boss gave me this.”
He put the envelope on the table and both of them stared at it. White, letter-size, a little crumpled, unimpressive.
“It’s not very thick,” Maura said. So the man called Rolf, the person on the roof, knew she was Harold’s wife. Was this an order to get rid of her? “Have you looked inside?”
“Not yet.”
“Are you going to?”
Harold tapped the floor with his left foot. It was firm. “Did we ever have a honeymoon?” he asked.
“Not so’s you’d notice,” she said. “If you recall, your sister and her husband turned up two days after we got to the cottage. It was six years ago. Why now?”
“Let’s go away for the weekend.”
Sure! To some lonely spot where it was easy to dispose of a body.
“You need to get away from here, sweetheart. You’ll keep staring out the window, seeing what you saw. Let’s go to Vancouver.
Inferno
’s playing at the Orpheum. I just have a couple of calls to make.”
They got ready at different speeds. Him slow. Her fast. But he was first to the car. Maura avoided standing beside the trunk and stretched her arm out to hand him her grey weekend bag.
“There’s something I have to do,” she said. “Won’t take a moment.”
She left a quick voice mail for Kylie: Away till Sunday night. If Harold returns alone, enquire.
“You want to drive?” He always asked. It was a kind of courtesy. But she rarely did.
“Music?”
“I’d like to know what this is all about really.”
On the ferry, while he slept, she looked at his face for signs of degeneracy and found none. His brown hair, greying now, was still thick and fell forward over his brow. His mouth, slightly open, was an innocent mouth. When his eyes weren’t shut, they were truly blue.
The hotel receptionist welcomed them as if forewarned. “We’ve upgraded your room,” she said. “You’ll have a lovely view of the city.”
Harold called for champagne.
Maura looked out the window to the parking area twenty-four floors below.
She was drunk. She fell. I was asleep.
After the champagne bottle was empty, Maura watched Harold slit open the envelope with the blade of his Swiss Army knife. In it were a dry-cleaning slip, thirty-five dollars and a note. The note read,
Pick up my suit and drop it by my place tomorrow morning. Rolf
Harold looked at it.
Maura looked at it. Maura looked at the address.
It was in the Blue Forest area among the two-million-dollar houses, not 2013 Lachlan Street.
“Are you someone who does errands like that?”
“I’ve booked the room for two nights.”
~ • ~
Maura was sitting in the wrong chair again
on Monday morning when the phone rang. Devina Kazlak asked her to come and meet the Everstone Board on Tuesday at ten.
“Should I carry a guitar?”
“We never hire anyone who’s a fan of C and W. We ourselves aren’t prejudiced, but our first CEO, Colonel Everstone, laid it down as an absolute rule.”
Maura wondered what sad song had driven away the man’s wife and his dog. They’d checked her credentials and understood the six-month gap in her résumé. She could work for the most part at home and go to the office on Mondays and Thursdays. The pay was good.
Harold was at his desk on Monday when Rolf came in at lunchtime and said, “You didn’t bring my suit?”
“Suit?”
“The dry-cleaning slip was in the envelope. And the cash.”
“Oh that. It’s over there on the shelf.”
“I needed that suit on Saturday.”
“I’ve written myself a cheque for two months’ wages. I think that’s fair. The books are in good order.”
“Hang on!”
“Is that what you always say?” Harold replied as the wire snapped beneath his feet and he floated to earth in a leisurely way, light as a leaf. He took his coat and walked out, walked to the car park without turning round and drove home.
That evening, Maura was wearing a silky black pantsuit and nursing a large bunch of pink and white lilies. “Someone must mourn,” she said. “She was young and Serbia is so far away. I’ll be back in a minute.”
Standing by the window, Harold saw her look to either side, then cross the road and crouch down to set the bouquet on the grass beyond the yellow tape. She seemed to be praying or was, at any rate, reverential. He glanced at the entrance to the beige building: To one side, half-hidden, a man who looked very like Rolf appeared to be watching Maura too.
The Healing Touch
What had he said to Alma only yesterday?
You are trying to resist. Let it happen.
And she had let it happen, and thanked him later with tears in her eyes.
So now, sitting beside Rebecca, who had never yet come to him for help, he wanted to make her understand his value and believe in his gift. If she kept turning her head away as she was doing, others in the hall would notice. He didn’t want to get up and go to the foyer and mingle in case she moved away altogether. Three of her friends adored him; he was a necessary part of their lives. Her answers to his remarks were short and unamplified. She gave him no more words than politeness required. He felt mentally shunned.
Yet he was Leo by name and by zodiac, admired, sought after, and yes, truly, loved. It wasn’t just that he cared for their bodies, but the people who came to him knew he would keep the secrets of their souls. He handed out solutions and, occasionally, absolutions. His fee was not excessive, and now and then he waived it. He could have covered the wall of his sanctuary with the notes, he might even say
encomia
, he’d received, but instead he kept them in a file with names, dates and addresses in case of later need. Occasionally, when the past wandered into his mind, he took them out and read them.
He said to Rebecca now because he knew she had a degree in French Literature, “Do you think George Sand wrote while Chopin played, or did she just listen and admire him, watch his hands perhaps?”
She nodded and smiled slightly but didn’t respond. He sighed. Being repelled was new to him, and it was a dark, shady place. Twelve years he’d lived and worked in this city by the sea and life had been good, was good. Before that, in the place he called Elsewhere, there had been monsters and false accusations. When he’d figured that he could achieve more by doing less, he’d picked this city on the edge of the country, acquiring the mantle of ‘good son’ by saying he wanted to be near his aging parents. Besides, Margo told him there was no reason he couldn’t make an easy million or two. There were a lot of middle-aged and older ladies who would learn to need him, even some men. Beautiful but mercenary, Margo couldn’t see the abstract value of his work. In fact she refused to refer to it as work, even when he came out of his sanctuary exhausted. “I give to them of my essence,” he kept telling her, but she only imagined him patting naked parts of the clients’ bodies and telling them to get up and walk. And walk they did. And walked back to see him again and again. Like an addiction.
Margo, in the first couple of years after they moved to the city, complained that it was provincial, narrow. She complained too about
the amount of time he spent with his “patients”. But as he now recalled while sitting beside this cold woman, empty chair on his other side so no one else to talk to, Margo hadn’t complained for some time. What was she thinking? More important, what was she doing? He looked around to see if she’d come to the concert too.
~ • ~
Every few weeks, Rebecca came across this man
at a gathering in town. Usually, she acknowledged him and moved on. Several of her friends doted on him.
I went in there in pain and when I came out I was a new woman. He’s just amazing.
There was worship in their tone, as if he were the expected prophet returned to earth. She couldn’t help her irrational Doctor Fell dislike. Instinct? She’d dismissed jealousy. Her friends loved her no less for seeing him. But there was something amiss. Clearly he didn’t like being ignored but she felt it was important to be the standout, to teach this man that he wasn’t a god. And now, by chance, they were sitting side by side because Carrie had given her this ticket.
You don’t get out enough. Go. You like Pärt.
Was it a ploy?
He tried again. “You like modern music?”
“Some.”
“It’s a matter of taste, yes.”
“Yes.”
“How is your son?”
“Fine! Thank you.”
This was how he did it, of course, by finding weak spots. Someone had told him about Owen! It was too much. There was no way she was going to discuss her family with him. She got up and walked to the back of the hall. Her friends, his acolytes, no doubt fed him stories in a kindly way. Thank heavens he didn’t, as far as she knew, go in for blackmail. He had no right to creep into her life. When the players returned to the stage, she found an empty seat in the back row and let the music take over her mind.
~ • ~
Leo couldn’t pay attention to the music.
In fact he thought any classical music later than the early 1900s was crap. And this gloomy Finn or Estonian or whatever wanted to impress on his audience that life was a dreary downhill slope. He’d only agreed to come this evening because of Carrie Delborn. She’d already introduced him to several people who were important in the cultural life of the town, and this evening it was to have been the very wealthy Jermains who’d sponsored the concert. For them he’d put on his best grey suit, silk shirt and dark blue tie. And this woman, this Rebecca, had walked away from him when he’d been about to offer help to her son.
He tapped his feet on the ground. The person behind tapped him on the shoulder. He turned and glared. Had someone from Elsewhere talked? If they had, the unproven and totally false stories would spread, clients would stop coming to him and once again he’d have to move on. Or was it Margo? How was she spending her days? He was so successful now that he often worked fourteen hours straight with only a quick lunch of fruit and cheese to keep up his strength. After their treatment, the clients always wanted to chat awhile. In their forties and fifties, many of them were beginning to fear that loss of youth, of vigour, of certainty that comes with middle age. He was a comfort to them all. And Mary Richards had called him more than once in the middle of the night for help with her back pain, knowing that he wouldn’t take advantage of her. In any case, she was nearly ninety, twice his age. As he drove away from her home at two or three in the morning, going slowly through the quiet streets to avoid deer, he allowed her faith and her gratitude to seep into his soul. He wanted to dance and shout,
I am Leo and I am good.
When he got home he’d have a shot of whisky and arouse Margo to have raucous sex.
~ • ~
Rebecca decided to walk home the long way round.
She wanted to allow the delicate, dreamy music to linger in her head. As if she’d been to a church and prayed, she was looking at her life more calmly, with more faith in a good future than she’d known for a long time. Leo had spoilt the first part of the concert for her, but that didn’t matter now. She could tell that he wanted to draw her out and she’d hated him for mentioning Owen. But the hate was gone. Janice, Carrie, Bren, any of them could have mentioned her in a friendly way. Not gossip, she supposed, but a passing on of information.
Oh yes, my friend Rebecca, she’s a translator and she’s divorced and her oldest son has been in an accident. He’s returned home, poor thing. It could be a while.
She could hear Carrie’s voice feeding these sentences to the man.
She works at home now so that she can attend to him. Her other two are away at school. Some say they couldn’t stand it with the boy’s constant needs and…
She could also hear Carrie saying, “You’ll love her”, as she told Leo that she’d given Rebecca the ticket.
~ • ~
He was standing in the schoolyard,
offering his baseball mitt to the wheelchair kid, as they called him, and the kid stared at him and turned, wheeled himself away.
Leo had sensed great need in the woman as she sat there beside him closed up like a bankrupt store. Shutters down. Nothing on offer. Desperately, he wanted to say to her, you are hurting, let me help you. Moving away like that was an ignorant rejection on her part. And she hadn’t even dressed up for that evening out. Slacks and jacket, in a vague reddish colour. Nice thick brown hair.