I will never repeat my mother’s mistake. She’s…well, she’s free of him now, in a better world. I refuse to speak of my father.
Arthur distinctly hears a sniffle. “But she does speak of him,” Brian says, “and out comes the tissue, and she gets up a head of steam, comes off the rails a little.”
He used to scoff at my ambitions, said I’d never be a writer…Oh, no, he was the writer, two self-published novels that went nowhere. He never gave me affection, he never hugged. He thought I wasn’t in the house one time, and I heard him tell Mother they should have just gone ahead and terminated the pregnancy…
Another pause in the recording. “Here I am, honest to God, holding her fucking hand. I’m thinking fingerprints, I’m stuffing her used tissues into my pocket. Fingerprints on tissue? Anyway, it turns out that her literary loser of a father snuffed himself, put a bullet in his head. I wanted to explore this, but suddenly the heart-rending episode is over, the clouds break, the sun comes out, rainbows appear.”
I’m being such a goose. I usually don’t drink this much. I’ve just had my first work of fiction published. Would you be interested in reading it? I’m just around the corner.
I’ll walk you home.
“Her flat is in an unhip metal-grey stack of units. She’s been fifteen years in the same apartment, which somehow doesn’t seem normal. I find myself entering the elevator with her-I’m a robot, programmed to follow a path to catastrophe. Her place has three locks, it smells of disinfectant, the decor is so square it’s cubic, with doilies. There’s a balcony with a kind of viewette of a strip mall. Sitting prominently on a table: a metre-high pile of movie magazines and about a dozen copies of this.”
He passes Arthur a copy of Tales of Passion, April edition. The cover illustration is of a well-muscled man outside a window, a woman in a nightie peering out. Readers are invited to turn to page twenty-eight, a story by Adeline Angella, “You’re Not Supposed to Ask.”
“She wanted to read it aloud. Over cognac. On her couch. The evening continues to morph into high surrealism.”
Mind if I visit the little boy’s room?
Yes, of course, freshen up.
“Note, Arturo. I do not say, ‘I have to go to the washroom.’ I am regressing. I am talking her language. I rummage in the medicine cabinet, looking for a secret stash of rochies. Nada. The bedroom door is ajar, and I can’t help glancing in as I pass by, and there she is on the bed, pulling off her leggings, and she gives me this chiding tease, ‘You’re not supposed to lo-ook.’
“I study the situation in the living room, where we have a soft light, cheesy piano music on the stereo, Tales of Passion open to her story. Cognac in liqueur glasses. Unthinkingly, I pick mine up, sip, and I’m overcome by a delusion that it’s been doctored with ten milligrams of Rohypnol. Angella comes out in bare feet, pink toenails, sits catlike on the sofa, pats a spot beside her, tells me it’s only twelve pages, and I should sit. I’m about to take a rain check on the literary reading when a paranoid rush hits: I’ve got my fingerprints all over everything, her cosmetics, her Parfum Fantaisie. Why not go all the way, leave a sample of my semen? I’m panicking, Adeline is tugging at me to sit down. Here are the final few minutes.”
Don’t be a silly. It’s early. We can watch the Tonight Show after.
I’m feeling ill. I’m allergic to Clorox. Let me borrow this, I really want to read your story…
Arthur hears chimes from the laptop, the theme from the Fourth Brandenburg. This is an evil thing, Arthur thinks, the cellular phone. To keep one is never to escape the great sticky web of social intercourse, never to be alone.
My goodness, Adeline, who would be calling me this late?
Sit, sit.
Boilershop Investments. To listen to our easy terms, Press one…Jesus…Well, hi!
“Calling me at this ungodly moment, honest to God, was Professor Caroline L. Pomeroy. She knows it’s late, but she can’t sleep. ‘I want to hear your easy terms,’ she says. I am standing. I have the phone crooked between ear and shoulder while I fumble for a cigarette and struggle for the perfect nuanced response. Angella tries to grab the lighter from my hand. I nearly fall on her as we tug for control of it. Her liqueur sloshes all over the reading copy of Tales of Passion.”
You’re not supposed to smo-oke. Ouch! Your knee!
Brian demonstrates, going on his knees onto the couch, clutching his cellphone and a package of cigarettes. “The recorder not only picked up Angella’s heavy breathing but Caroline’s icy hang-up line.” From the computer, clear and sharp: I presume I’ve called at an awkward time. A click.
That was a client, Adeline, he’s threatening to jump from Lions Gate Bridge!
Don’t forget the magazine! Call me!
I will.
Promise?
The sound of locks being released, the door opening, closing, a fast retreat.
“As soon as I was safely down, I phoned Caroline back. No answer. This morning I phoned again. Caroline’s machine said, ‘Don’t bother.’”
He sighs, picks up Tales of Passion. That’s when Arthur notices the residue of fingerprint powder. “The forensics lab I use took eight lifts off it, couldn’t match any with the unknowns in Cotters’ Cottage.”
A letdown, but Arthur isn’t surprised.
“After I left the lab this morning, I actually sat down and read ‘You’re Not Supposed to Ask.’ Within its gooey pages is a subterranean rape motif, a touching tale of how handsome Harry loses his key and has to go in though a back window, and it’s the wrong townhouse. You’re not supposed to ask, you’re not supposed to look, you’re not supposed to smoke, but you are supposed to fuck.”
“Might we pause here, Brian? Did you happen to ask Angella where she was at two o’clock on April Fool’s morning?”
Brian sags. “Shit, I forgot.”
14
Risking Syd-Air again, Arthur is above the knobby spine of Vancouver Island and can see, through gaps in the mist, the open ocean, its inlets and beaches. This will be Arthur’s first visit to Bamfield-a hamlet so remote it has been spared the uglier benefits of tourism. Claudette St. John, who has quit her job at the bar to run Faloon’s lodge, has agreed to show him about.
He will be looking for the vestigia of Adeline Angella: metaphorical footprints, traces of an April Fool’s visit. Brian Pomeroy’s strange encounter has persuaded Arthur the woman is truly ill-it was as if she was re-enacting the great drama of her life. Maybe to make it seem authentic. He hopes Brian can be prevailed upon to nourish this relationship, to find out if she has an alibi. You’re not supposed to ask…
Lotis Rudnicki is taking briefs from Winters’s three hiking mates today-they’ve invited her for lunch. She has also retained a distinguished scientist, head of biotechnology at the University of Victoria, to do a second DNA test of the incriminating semen.
Arthur asks Syd to circle around Bamfield, for a mental mapping. The inner hills and valleys are a checkerboard of clear-cuts, but a strip along the ocean has been spared, Pacific Rim National Park: forest, lakes and bogs, the fjord called Pachena, and its wide, shallow, log-rimmed beach.