Arriving at Trudeau International
airport on a Sunday evening always aroused a stealth-like guilt for
Pavor, a rootless feeling as if he and his dubious fellow passengers
were breaking adamantine tradition by sneaking into the city with
clandestine manoeuvres under the cloak of darkness while the citizens
below in their snug well-lit lives were trying to avoid all thought
of their diminishing weekend, that moment when the cold salty
undercurrent of the coming days is already nipping at their soft
weekend toes with the brackish water of worry, a nettlesome menace to
the weary clock-punchers, students, and office dwellers with their
bureaucratic politics and pedagogic necessities mapped out before
them in an endless series of MTWTF's—or, as his old law school
friend used to say: More Time With The Futiles—driving the
restless to choose variable escapes such as Chinese take-out, a good
book, or the dramatic absorptions of television, and he would imagine
his younger self, lying on the pink and blue Aubusson carpet of his
parent's TV-less living room with his storybooks or toys, listening
to his Mother's occasional quotes from Trollope with her remnant
Czech accent—a favourite author to bolster her vocabulary—while
his Father in his casual postprandial subterfuge of Scotch and soda
behind his main sail of newsprint would listen and offer an Ahh,
very good, or Charming my dear, charming, before returning
to his fascination with the death of others as rounded up by the
obituaries of the week, and he too would provide his own occasional
interruptions with commentaries on the stiff little columns and their
dry little words—interspersed with such recurring sounds of beloved, peacefully, predeceased, condolences, in lieu,
cherished—commentaries
spiced with shocking revelations like so and so had really
been an unhappy person, or, so and so had had an affair with his
secretary, or, so and so had a brother who did himself in after the
war, and these competing words would dance a slow quadrille above him
as he lay upon the soft colourful pile, as if Mrs. Proudie and Osiris
himself were contending, arm and arm, for his soul, and he too would
dread the onset of bedtime, and the prospect of darkness, nightmares,
and worse, the arrival of Monday morning.
Having nothing to declare but his
unwavering thoughts, Pavor passed quickly through customs, and,
having but a simple carry-on bag, avoided the further wait at the
carousels where a diversity of baggage descended a conveyance slide
and circled slowly as tired passengers leaned anxiously like doe-eyed
parents waiting for their children to emerge from a modest fun-house
amusement park ride, a moment which offered the opportunity for
further people watching and the pairing of restless faces with
scuffed and colourful ribbon-marked luggage, and as he passed his
tweedy flight companions he smiled and nodded to them and remembered
the day he saw a robust man retrieve an oversize duffel bag to which
a long wood-handled spade had been securely roped, making him think
of a possible convention for grave diggers. Alas.
His clandestine arrival with its
impending surprise for Mélisande released a reserved energy within
him which he hadn't experienced for some time. With gusto in each
stride, he walked down the broad corridor and felt fortunate that no
one was waiting for him—relatives and friends waving their arms
about like he was lost and now found, were anathema to him—and with
a keen sense of freedom, he ventured into La Maison de la Presse
to pick up a local paper and peruse the best sellers on display.
Invariably he would inwardly groan as he stared at the colourful
books by pinnacle authors with their sharp-edged titles making all
the big bucks while he slogged away in the lower reaches of fictional
achievement. No books by P. K. Loveridge. Understandable. Shelf-space
was at a premium, and he couldn't elbow a King, a Cornwell, or a
Krentz out of the way—although he had thought it would be
interesting to place one of his titles alongside the heavy hitters on
the main display of a large downtown bookstore and sit back and watch
reactions.
As he paid for The Gazette,
two familiar faces passed by on the other side of the glass like
actors in a film walking towards a vanishing point, and for a moment
he had a horrible feeling that Jerome and Thérèse had taken up his
invitation to visit him in Trieste and were preparing to take flight.
“Jerome, Thérèse,” he called out,
but they didn't hear him due to the high level of ambient noise and
whispering echoes in the corridor. He briskly followed up behind them
and called out once again making Jerome turn with a look of fear
tinged with astonishment.
“Pavor? What . . . what are you doing
here?”
He sensed something was odd for Thérèse
looked at him as if he were an advertising poster for a men's
aftershave. “What are you guys doing here? I hope you're not
on your way to Trieste!”
The complexity of thought faltered at
Jerome's lips. It was as if he had been asked to paint Michelangelo's
Sistine Chapel on a match box. He was further exasperated by the
appearance of Mr. Roquebrune who asked him whether everything was
alright, looking with concern at Pavor and his folded newspaper, a
classic hiding place for a silenced gun.
“Mr. Roquebrune please meet Pavor
Loveridge, an old friend of ours.” After they shook hands and
acquired initial impressions, Jerome took Pavor by the arm and
followed Thérèse and Mr. Roquebrune towards the revolving doors.
“Thérèse has suffered some memory
loss. We just arrived from Bergen, Norway, where she was staying with
a friend. It's all very complicated.”
“Ah, I sensed something was wrong. Is
she all right though?”
“Yes, yes, her memory is coming back,
slowly. She's going to stay the night with the Roquebrunes. I live
right behind in their rental property. Did you just arrive from
Italy?”
“Yes, a surprise for Mélisande. I
want to, to . . .” he stammered, not wanting to burden Jerome with
incidentals of his desires at this moment. “I just want to see her,
so here I am.”
“Where are you staying? Isn't Pascal
still using your apartment?
“I was thinking of a cheap hotel.”
“You can stay with me. My pull out
couch is comfortable, and we can talk.”
They watched as Thérèse and Mr.
Roquebrune stepped onto the circular moving platform of the automatic
revolving doors, and then they followed by stepping onto the next
quarter slice. She turned around to face them through the clear
glass, and they looked on silently, like groom and best man to their
bride and father, and Thérèse, with a look of desperation on her
face, refused to budge, and they missed the exit and continued round,
and they too continued, and they too missed the exit while the
October evening air swept in and ran its cold fingers through their
hair.
Pavor felt his buoyant mood deflate as
the discouraging reality before him kept them face to face on this
make-shift merry-go-round.
*
A secular vow of silence to remedy the
unimaginable overcame them as Mr. Roquebrune chauffeured his large
comfortable sedan along Côte-de-Liesse expressway, the central
nervous system of the sprawling industrial sector of the city with
its squat factories, warehouses, expansive parking lots and rail
yards, an essentially treeless landscape, made less disagreeable
cloaked in darkness and developing fog. Pavor looked out at the
uninviting landscape and remembered how his inquisitive fresh-eyed
Mother used to seek out the sources behind Montreal street names, and
how she had discovered this expressway was named after an old
reference to the religious pilgrimage site of the blessed Virgin of
Liesse in north eastern France, and how she thought it had been
degraded to a dusty, noisy pilgrimage of endless trucks, cars and
motorcycles as if it were a thoroughfare in Milton's Pandemonium. He
looked around to see that Thérèse and Jerome were sleeping in the
back seat, like models for a Pre-Raphaelite painting, her head
resting on Jerome's shoulder. He tried to relax but he felt the
awkward imposition of his own presence sitting in the sumptuous front
seat beside the quiet concentration of Mr. Roquebrune. Was Thérèse's
condition a result of the enquiry she had discussed with him back in
January? Was his character of Evan Dashmore too representative of his
deceased counterpart, David Ashemore? Was his imaginative fiction too
close to fact? Was he inviting a bout of memory loss?
When they passed the large red and blue
sign for Kraft Canada, Pavor remembered how his Father, on
their trips back from Ontario, would declare they were almost home
whenever the sign loomed ahead, and still today, whenever he saw
their products in the stores, he would experience a subtle feeling of
impending arrival. But not tonight. Their destination, the leafy
opulence of Outremont's Maplewood Avenue, was a further twenty minute
stretch away, and Pavor, feeling as roped down as the spade to the
duffel bag, felt as numb as an anaesthetised dental patient.
*
After settling Thérèse in
the spare room at the Roquebrunes, Jerome made his way home and found
Pavor browsing his bookshelves.
“How's she doing?” Pavor
asked, a copy of Trois Contes by Flaubert in his hands.
“Good, good. She's got a
lovely room and she seems relaxed. She hit it off with Mrs.
Roquebrune right away. I feel she'll sleep well tonight. Are you
hungry?”
“I could really go for a
poutine,” he said. “And maybe a strong coffee.”
“That's not a bad idea. La
Banquise is open.”
“Great. Something to
adjust the gears of the old internal clocks eh.” He put the
Flaubert back on top of his seemingly unread book of poetry, Alacrity
and Karma on a Yacht Off Palmyra. “I
see you've been busy with a Bronzino. ”
“Hmm,
yeah, a bizarre portrait request. I'll tell you all about it,
Thérèse's story too. Come on, Isodore awaits in the stable
beneath.”
“The
old Deux-Chevaux's still hanging in there?”
“Oh,
yeah. It has more . . . equilibrium than me. At least I hope so.”
Jerome
backed his Isodore out of the garage and Pavor slipped in beside him.
“Do you remember this cassette?” Jerome asked, shaking the music
tape of Depeche Mode's Music for the Masses,
before sliding it into Isodore's modest sound system of a
jerry-rigged cassette player.
“I
haven't heard that in ages. Brings back memories of that road trip to
Québec City.”
The
driving rhythms of Let Me Down Again
followed by The Things You Said
filled the small car and sparingly issued from the open windows as
they drove the ten minute journey to the restaurant, their hands
tapping, heads nodding, lips mouthing the words, youthful memories
cleansing their minds of immediate concerns.
*
The
restaurant was busy, students for the most part, making Pavor feel
that at 47, he was slipping down the other side of the mountain
towards the valley of old age. “Bonsoir Sylvie,” Jerome said to
the young woman who greeted them at the door and showed them to a
table. Pavor noticed the iridescent hummingbird tattoo on her inner
wrist, and thought it rather appropriate for her manoeuvres about the
restaurant. “Pas besoin d'un menu. C'est très simple. Deux
grandes poutines classique et deux cafés, s'il vous plait.” They
both smiled up at her as she nodded her head repeating the order.
Pavor
let his eyes wander around the restaurant with its youthful customers
and employees, its brick wall, wood benches, funky painted tables,
quirky art work, and the quintessential black chalkboard. He missed
Montreal. Missed its smell, its diversity, its triplexes, even its
potholes.
“So,
how's your new novel coming along?”
“Right,
the novel.” Pavor felt like it existed in another time and place.
“Back in January at Thérèse's party, she told me a little about
the case, the David Ashemore case she called it, like she was a
private eye in a hard-boiled novel. What little I know of it,
however, is informing the plot of my recent novel. I was going to
lead with the character's death, but I've found him interesting and
he's turning into someone with possible breadth, someone I can take
places. Maybe I'll dispose of my non-patrician Rex Packard and
continue with this new creature. I named him, perhaps a little too
close to the bone, Evan Dashmore.”
“Maybe
you should change his name to something less . . . coincidental,”
and he told him all about the disappearance of Ashemore's papers at
the law office, the theft of the thumb drive in Bergen, and then the
mysterious spray that caused her memory loss.
“What
does Mr. Roquebrune propose? Can we go after them, bring them out in
the open?”
“At
the moment, he doesn't believe there's anything we can do. I feel so
fucking helpless. I should have told her to let up.”
A young
waitress brought them their coffees and poutines and they donned
their public mask of happy customer and thanked her.
“What
we need is someone like Jack Reacher to bring about a resolution,”
Pavor said, digging into his french fries dripping with gravy and
curds.
“A
friend of yours?”
“No,
unfortunately. He's a fictional character, fictional like his kind of
resolutions.” He chewed the ambrosial offering while thinking he
could try to dramatise a form of justice for Thérèse but it made
him feel equally helpless. “This is the best poutine I've had in a
long time. It's good to be back in Montreal, potholes and all.”
“Best
in the city, perhaps the world,” he said, bringing a forkful of the
rich salty comfort food to his lips. “They serve so many kinds
here, it would take you a month to try them all.”
Silence
overtook them as they ate, that most primal of actions, one, that no
doubt predated mealtime conversation.
*
Outside,
feeling blessed, they leaned on Isodore and picked their teeth with
toothpicks. If only life were so simple they both thought. If only.
“Come
on,” Jerome said, “I know a place where we can relax and talk.”
And they drove back along avenue Rachel towards Mount Royal with its
cross glowing above the rooftops like a night light for the homeless.
He found parking across the street from the orange fronted club and
they made their way over, but on discovering it was a evening devoted
to slam poetry, Jerome suggested another club up the street. The
sidewalk was littered with cigarette butts like spent bullet casings,
and shreds of food wrappers and newsprint. Old discarded gum dotted
the concrete like age spots, while wisps of fog the colour of
parchment malingered round the street lamps. A pan-handler with a dog
gently asked for alms as they approached and Pavor dished out a few
loonies for the young guy. He felt sorry for the dog and wondered
what that revealed of him.
“Le
Bar Prufrock,” Jerome said, pointing up to the gold lettering above
the door, but Pavor was looking towards the curb where an old VW
camper van was parked. Black print on white, letters neatly painted
or perhaps stencilled, covered all surfaces of the van like one of
those circle the words puzzles found in newspapers. The side-door had
a panel with large letters spelling 'ROUGH DRAFT' and the letter 'G'
replaced by a treble clef. “You can't get away from words can you?”
Jerome added, prompting him away.
On the
door of the club, a small hand-lettered poster advertised that the music
group Rough Draft was playing sets that night. Two thin
mop-headed guys and a blond with rainbow eye makeup holding
drumsticks stared back at them in lettered t-shirts, a textual
leitmotif echoing the van, a veritable literary triangle. Once within
the bar, whose floor and ceiling seemed to exist in a realm of
metaphysics, they found their way around huddled groups of youthful
hipsters to a small round table near the back corner whose surface
was sticky with the condensation of old beer.
“I'll
just go get a couple of drinks. Boréale good for you?” Jerome
asked. Pavor nodded his head as he sought to merge with the darkness.
From middle-class suburban Italian bungalow to an obscure music club
on St. Laurent boulevard in one day was testing his resilience.
Jerome returned with two bottles with glass hats, as the song I Melt With You by Modern English played over the sound
system.
“So
how's Trieste?”
“Triste
c'est Trieste said Tristram on the tram,” he replied. “I met a
fan, signed some books for him, then later he was involved in a
motorcycle accident. I passed it as he was being rushed to a
hospital. Tullio Friuli is his name. I visited him at the hosptial
before I left but he was still comatose. Poor bastard. Cheers.”
“Wow, so much for the quiet life to concentrate on a book.”
Pavor
drank deeply enjoying the sharp bold flavor of the Canadian beer. “I
met some interesting characters while there. All grist for the mill.
They might show up one day, well, variations and fragments
reassembled in cubist fashion to use your phraseology. Have you seen
Mélisande lately? I emailed her last week but never got a reply.”
“I
did. Last week some time.” He filled his glass with the remnants
from the bottle. “We discussed you.”
Pavor's
eyes widened. “Really? Nothing good I hope.”
“She .
. . no, it's none of my business. You'll see her tomorrow I imagine.
You know she's the one for you. If not, I'll have to bop you on the
head.”
“I'm
going to propose to her.”
“Marriage?”
Pavor
nodded, then drank deeply, the golden liquid reflecting amber shadows
on his cheeks.
“I'm
thinking of the very same thing with Thérèse. When she recovers
completely, I'll ask her”
“We
can have a double marriage ceremony. Save money,” he added with a
wink. “A toast to our future wives, may we all enjoy happiness.”
“Cheers,”
Jerome said, clinking his glass with his old friend's.
“So
what's this Bronzino portrait all about?”
Jerome
was about to frame his thoughts on the subject when Rough Draft
mounted the minuscule corner stage at the front of the room and began
to prepare for another set. “I'll tell you later. Fascinating
couple. Very rich. I met their friend too, an interesting architect,
named Harry Harrington. Nice guy.”
“That
name rings a bell. Harry Harrington, architect. I think I read a
profile about him in a magazine. His picture reminded me of that old
jazz drummer . . . what's his name? Max . . . Max Roach, yes, yes,
but without the hair.”
Jerome,
though not familiar with the drummer, nodded his head in
acknowledgement while Rough Draft positioned themselves. The
two guys, draped in low slung fenders, one bass, one guitar, were
bookends to the blond rainbow-eyed girl in the middle, a standing
percussionist before her snare and top hat. A young man with
piercings and tattoos mounted the stage and squeezed behind the
girl's microphone.
“Yes,
it's Al, the guy who runs this joint and I just want to introduce the
band to you. On bass guitar we have Adagio, on guitar, Zoran,
and on lead vocals and percussion, the lovely Livia Plurabelle. Let's
hear it for them, great, yes that's wonderful. They'll be signing
merch at the break when you can buy their new cd, or vinyl and that
wonderful t-shirt everyone's wearing. So their first song is called,
Hold Me, enjoy. Rough Draft!
Pavor
and Jerome clapped with the crowd, shared a look of raised eyebrows and settled back to
listen.
In the shadows I've been
searching for you,
Since I left you on the
shore alone.
Paranoia's feeding on my
life's blood,
Tainted by my visions far
from home.
Hold me, hold me,
Hold me, hold me,
Darkly,
Darkly, (Adagio & Zoran)
Can't you see me with
your Google Glass?
Hold me, Hold me,
Hold me, Hold me,
Starkly,
Starkly, (Adagio & Zoran)
Can't you feel me oh my
Mucho Maas?
Imaginary forms are
taking over,
Androids chasing sheep in
chorus sing.
Joseph K. And Hamlet are
debating,
Who will be the ghost and
who the King.
Hold me, hold me,
Hold me, hold me,
Darkly,
Darkly, (Adagio & Zoran)
Can't you see me with
your Google Glass?
Hold me, Hold me,
Hold me, Hold me,
Starkly,
Starkly, (Adagio & Zoran)
Can't you feel me oh my
Mucho Maas?
Alice slayed the dragon
with a hat pin.
Grendel roasted up old
Moby Dick.
Molly Bloom's run off
with Dr. Watson,
Lizzy Bennet's loose and
won't commit.
Hold me, hold me,
Hold me, hold me,
Darkly,
Darkly, (Adagio & Zoran)
Can't you see me with
your Google Glass?
Hold me, Hold me,
Hold me, Hold me,
Starkly,
Starkly, (Adagio & Zoran)
Can't you feel me oh my
Mucho Maas?
Deep within a text of
fine conjecture,
Lost within the maze with
the Minotaur.
Wildly running from the
sound of footsteps,
The tree of knowledge's
now an apple core.
Hold me, hold me,
Hold me, hold me,
Darkly,
Darkly, (Adagio & Zoran)
Can't you see me with
your Google Glass?
Hold me, Hold me,
Hold me, Hold me,
Starkly,
Starkly, (Adagio & Zoran)
Can't you feel me oh my
Mucho Maas?
Pavor's head was spinning with the golden liquid coursing through his veins, all the tensions of the night dissolving with the rhythms, and he closed his eyes as Zoran veered off into a wordless musical bridge with crying
blues and greens of musical texture, launching Pavor, with the essence of driven youth, to the other side of the dark valley beneath him.
Pynch is hitting on the
dusty home plate,
My hair is grey, my pitch
is slowing down.
He hits it to the
bleachers and the bleeders,
Is that you, with
catcher's mitt and frown?
Hold me, hold me,
Hold me, hold me,
Darkly,
Darkly, (Adagio & Zoran)
Can't you see me with
your Google Glass?
Hold me, Hold me,
Hold me, Hold me,
Starkly,
Starkly, (Adagio & Zoran)
Can't you feel me oh my
Mucho Maas?
Can't you feel me oh my
Mucho Maas?
Can't you feel me oh my
Mucho Maas?
Applause
arose from the small room amid the clink of glasses and murmurings
and whistles. Jerome and Pavor felt it was just what they needed to
forget the world for awhile, and ordered another beer, eager to hear
the next song.
© ralph patrick mackay
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