Duncan
stared at the vacant lot across the street. The concrete blocks were
jetsam, the graffiti scrawls really old-fashioned luggage labels of
exotic destinations visited, Shanghai, Rangoon, Malabar,
Montevideo, Valparaiso, Yokohama; the lone empty wine bottle held
a mysterious manuscript within, tossed from some sinking ship like in
that tale by Edgar Allan Poe. Sometimes he felt his daydreams were
vital to his mental health.
Ship
bound. Becalmed. He could hear the ticking of the clock in
counterpoint to his wristwatch as he brought the cup of tea to his
lips. No customers, no telephone calls. The odd book request from his
online database aroused the occasional sense of being vital, but
selling books online with so little human interaction had always
felt, to him at least, soulless. Book values and prices had dropped
due to increased availability, postage was sometimes more expensive
than the requested book, and the only part he found enjoyable now was
the process of packaging books to secure their safety from bumps and
moisture.
He
returned to his desk, the old wood floors creaking like a merchant
vessel of the nineteenth century. The note on his desk reminded him
to search his shelves for copies of P. K. Loveridge's novels for him
to sign. In the aisle of “L's, he pulled out a copy of Pavor's Rex
in Arcadia and
his Olivaster
Moon, and
brought them back to his desk. Sitting down with a sigh, he
remembered he had awoken last night from some forgotten nightmare,
not quite knowing where he was, and had wondered what it would be
like to lose one's memory. Perhaps it was like that feeling when he
went from one room to another to gather an item, and then completely
forget what it was he had wanted, but multiplied a hundred fold.
Confusion, mystification, frustration, reality issuing a strange
shadow feeling of familiarity. Unable to sleep, he had lain awake
listening to Amelia's breathing, and it had reminded him of waves
breaking upon a shore, her inhalation like the quiet regress, and he
had felt she was the ocean holding him aloft, memory itself keeping
him afloat, looking up at the full moon, its wavering reflection
reaching out to him, luring him back to sleep.
*
The
cream in Arthur's coffee spiralled and swirled like a distant nebula,
the formations resembling his confused search for answers in the dark
brew of shadows. Dipping the spoon into his cup, he circled the
liquids into conformity while an island of bubbles in the middle
turned and slowly collapsed like dying truths. He sipped his coffee
and gazed at Jerome across the uneasy silence. Mrs. Laflamme had left
them in the living room with coffee and fresh-baked ginger
cookies—uniform circles glittering with rough sugar and darkly
fissured like crevices on an alien landscape. They sat in flowery
upholstered comfort and listened to the muffled voices and footsteps
above them as Thérèse and her mother attempted to establish the
past, overcome the present, and discuss the future.
Jerome
looked at Mr. Roquebrune and thought he suited the decor of the
house, the brightly coloured paintings of Québec countryside, images
of horses pulling logs through winter landscapes, an autumnal view of
low rolling hills reflected in a lake, a portrait of a rugged
Habitant with his clay pipe and soft wool hat, Spring flowers in a
vase.
Arthur
was admiring the paintings at the same time, and yet had noticed one
that seemed unusual, like a dissonant chord in a romantic adagio. It
looked more suitable for an arched niche in a Neoclassical vestibule
due to its shape and its quasi-religious arrangement of the figures.
He wondered if it was one of Jerome's.
“Is
the painting in the hallway one of yours by any chance?”
Jerome,
aroused from his concentration on deciphering the noises from the
second floor, looked back to Arthur and then slowly shifted his gaze
to the hallway where the painting hung. “Yes, it is. Stands out
from the others, doesn't it.” Leaning towards Arthur, he said with
a lowered voice, “I wonder if Mrs. Laflamme brought it out of a
closet and hung it there just for our visit.”
Arthur
nodded his head. “It's very good, but yes, the style is . . .
baroque in comparison. Is it based on an original?”
“Yes.”
A
thump from above like a shoe hitting the floor startled them.
"A friend of mine who makes many of my picture frames, had a simple arched frame made of rosewood in his studio, and when I saw it, I thought it would be good for a small scale copy of a painting Thérèse and I had found interesting on a visit to Venice in . . . 2003.” He sipped
his coffee and finished his soft gingery snap. “The original's in
the Rialto area. A church called San Giovanni Elemosinario. Most
people walk right by it because the entrance and iron gate are flush with the facades of the market buildings where shops sell
tourist fare, t-shirts, shoes, jewelry, but the church's towering campanile is there if you look up." Placing his coffee on a
side table and resting his head against the highback chair, he looked
up at the ceiling as if he were sitting in a pew observing the
painting in question. “Besides Titian's St. John the Almsgiver, there's a painting by Il Pordenone depicting St.
Catherine, St. Sebastian and St. Roch. The figures are densely
interwoven and positioned. Very little background to be seen. Thérèse
thought they looked like prisoners squeezed under a transparent
cloche. I've modernized it for my version of course. If you look
closely you'll see the features of St. Catherine are those of
Thérèse, Sebastian those of mine, and St. Roch of my friend Pavor
Loveridge. I'm clothed and holding a camera in my outstretched arms
above me and looking towards her as if twisted in a vortex. Thérèse, in a Tilly vest and chinos, is holding a travel guide open to
pages with an image of the church tower and, in very small writing,
the name of the church. She's looking up as if in awe. Pavor
meanwhile is kneeling down to pet a young Labrador Retriever who has
one leg pointing off canvas, as if giving directions to the straight
and narrow way. In the original the dog is a cherubic winged angel.
St. Roch is, among others, the patron saint of bachelors and those
falsely accused which I thought Pavor would appreciate being a
bachelor and a writer of crime novels.”
“I'll
have to take a closer look before we leave.”
Laughter
filtered down the staircase, Mother and daughter's. Arthur and Jerome
smiled.
“I
think it was Vasari who fabricated a story that Titian was jealous of
Il Pordenone, and then poisoned him. Il Pordenone died in his
mid-fifties while Titian reached his mid-eighties. Such a competitive
world back then. The truth . . . ?” Jerome shrugged his shoulders.
He closed his eyes feeling the truth of anything seemed elusive at
best. He imagined the painting, saw himself turning towards Thérèse
as if he was her shadow guide, ready to add commentary, background,
context, subtitles, colouration, light, meaning, truth, and then the
thought image began to fade, Thérèse's so called transparent cloche
was filling with an opaque mist. Upstairs she was revisiting the
fragments of her life, rediscovering her past. Would she rediscover
their love? Would she still accept him, accept his wedding proposal?
He hadn't thought of that. Doubt tickled the back of his neck and he
began to feel very insignificant and out of place, much like the
painting.
The
sound of footsteps upon the carpeted stairs alerted them to the
descent of either mother or daughter, and they anticipated her like
nervous patients in a dental office waiting room.
Get
on with your life, her mother had said. Leave this globe-trotting
behind for awhile. Settle yourself and find a job here in Québec. No
more danger. She lay on the guest room bed beside an assortment of
older photographs and mementos of her travels. Murano glass pendant
and earrings from Venice; the small Mate gourd with Uruguay written
in black letters on the side; the letter opener from Haiti; the
finely carved pencil/pen holder from Venezuela; the mundane miniature
Eiffel tower; a bookmark from Tallinn; a diversity of coins and paper
money tactile with memories. She picked up a photograph of herself
and the Australian friends she'd met on her travels in South America.
They'd made their way down from Ecuador to the westernmost point of
the continent in Peru past Talara. Climbing the rocks and sand to the
lighthouse above the beach, she'd slipped and scraped the heel of her
right hand, and her right knee, the scar a landscape feature on her
skin, a smooth outcrop like a small phantom island. She remembered
standing at the top, wind-blown, bleeding lightly, the oil tankers motionless in the distance, the round refinery storage tanks behind her like enormous suburban
swimming pools, the birds clinging to the cliffs white-washed with their excrement below. Did she really
visit such a place? Another photograph of the Hotel de Sel in Bolivia
out on the salt flats, she and her friends reflected in the shallow
water, a mirror image of blue sky and white clouds. She shook her
head. It seemed the life of another. The binder in which her mother
had placed all of her cuttings from newspapers, magazines and online
sites—travel pieces, political and social stories, disaster relief
reports, human interest profiles—was of little interest to her.
Something had changed. Nausea overcame her when she contemplated such
work. She imagined it would wear off. She just needed time to
recuperate, adjust, redefine.
She
noticed a colourful square of glazed clay on the night table, a gift
from her friend Melisande, a finger labyrinth she had made using
special paints to form a miniature medieval Chartres labyrinth. She
reached for it and started her index finger along the smooth yellow
path between the raised indigo blue lines, rising up towards the
centre and then swinging away and around. As she continued the
circuitous route, she thought it exemplified the challenge before her
of regaining the past, a visiting, a revisiting, all the points of
her life, a much more demanding task than a direct avenue to a single
memory like a spoke on the wheel from tire to hub. Regaining her
memory was to be a slow, incremental endeavour. And she wasn't sure
of what the outcome would be.
She
rolled off the bed and went to the ensuite bathroom and splashed
water on her face. Leaning over the sink, drops of moisture suspended
on her skin, she looked deeply into the radiating greys and greens of her irises where the dark reflection of her form stared back at her, the pupil, like a black hole, absorbing everything, even light. It
was all there, inside, behind the eyes, stored away like archival
files. Patience Dr. Seymour had said, patience.
*
Amelia
wiped the bathroom mirror with glass cleaner wondering how many times
Thérèse had stood there looking at her reflection. How many
mornings, afternoons, nights, preparing for the day, for the night,
brushing her teeth, plucking an eyebrow—or annoying facial
hairs—applying make-up, combing her hair, opening the medicine
cabinet? All mundane rituals performed with little conscious thought.
Would she use the bathroom and see herself as she once was? The
lighting, the colour of the tiles, the feel of the glazed porcelain
sink, the cold metal of the taps, the sound of the flush, all
reviving old memories.
She
would have to tell Duncan not to mention the odd manuscript found in
the kitchen. Now that it was lost, so may it remain.
Why
did she offer to have them over? What had she been thinking? Was it more to do with Jerome than Thérèse? It might very well be
disastrous. She scrubbed the toilet bowl vigorously as if her doubts
were the germs and mineral scale. As she flushed the soapy water
away, she thought of Thérèse's loss with mild envy. Would it not be
a completely fresh beginning? An opportunity to forget painful
childhood memories? Experience the world without psychological
baggage? Recollection transformed into imagination? An innocence regained?
The
cold, clear water filled the bowl while receding whispers issued from
the tank. She closed the seat lid and wiped the surface where the
fixture's manufacturing name was printed, CRANE. Duncan was
usually the one who cleaned the house and he'd been too rough, having
somehow removed a portion of the 'R' so every time she looked, she
would read CHANEL, even though the last letter was a phantom.
Eau de toilette Duncan had joked. Would Thérèse notice? Would it be
a stimulus?
*
The
storage unit would have to go. He could donate the clothing and
household items to a woman's shelter, and then choose the photographs
of special moments and bring them to a shop to be digitized, reduced
to a slim disc, easily filed away in a drawer of his writing desk. He
needed to forget the dead and get on with the living, but create a
balance of remembering, honour their lives with continued visits to
the cemetery, silent toasts on birthdays, wedding anniversaries.
Pavor felt he had to grapple with the past very carefully. He knew
from experience his dreams and waking thoughts were affected after
handling the remnants of that life, he was often haunted by images of
his wife and child, the apartment they had once shared, the imagined
scenarios of trying to stop them from going out that day, or driving
them himself instead of poring over law books, what he could have
done, the what ifs and the if onlys.
An
equipose, a balance was required, with unwritten rules for his new
relationship with Melisande. He didn't want to be pitied. It would be
a closed book on the topmost shelf, out of reach, out of sight, a
private journal not to be mentioned.
Pavor
dipped his coffee cup into the soapy water and slowly, methodically
scrubbed, enjoying the heat on his hands, the bubbles tickling his
wrist.
*
The
Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove by Dead Can Dance shuffled
its way from her iPod to her earbuds as Melisande finished a
statistical report. She began to tap her thumb beside her mouse, her
mind drifting away from numerical facts to numinous energies. She
closed her eyes tapping her right foot under the desk. She wondered
what Pavor was doing. Pavor Loveridge. Lovegrove vs. Loveridge. Grove
vs. Ridge. Mrs. Loveridge. Would she keep her own name? It was
the law, otherwise she would have to pay for the privilege of Mrs.
Loveridge. She liked it. Melisande Loveridge. Melisande Aurelia
Loveridge vs. Melisande Aurelia Bramente. Initials MAL vs MAB. Queen
Mab, Queen Mal. Would they live separately until the wedding? Would
they leave their separate apartments and buy a small house? The
amalgamation, the division, the balance of belongings. Would her cat
Clio get along with Pavor as a housemate? Would she sleep on his side
of the bed, on him, around him to demonstrate her dominance over him in the pecking order of things?
Would he rise and make her breakfast and her lunch, clean the house,
do the shopping, take out the garbage and recycling? Would she have
an influence on his writing? Negative, positive? Would he be like a medieval walled city when he was writing? Would she be waiting at the tower
gate for entry. Waiting like a merchant or a pilgrim for admittance. Waiting like a refugee from a ruined city. And once within, would she have to
circle round to find his heart?
© ralph patrick mackay
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