One Hit Wonders Page 2

  “What did you say?”

  “I said, ‘No Chai for me, Argentina.’”

  Since Lila’s death I have been on the verge of collapse. One time I would have just walked away from this, but now—unaccountably—I find myself trying to join in. I clear my throat, immediately capturing Miriam’s and Phil’s attention. “Are either one of you fans of Lord of the Rings?”

  Both Miriam and Phil look at me with wary anticipation. Education is a weight to carry for both of them. Each is afraid that what I say will pass over their heads, make them feel stupid, show them the exact place they stepped off the escalator of evolution.

  “Ya, sure,” says Phil, “of course.”

  “I just love that little Gollum,” Miriam adds. She runs her hand down her face to make it tabula rasa, then tries for a look of extreme avarice but manages only to look like someone suffering from trapped wind. “My precious,” she whispers, while stroking the jewel-encrusted fingers on her left hand, “My precious.”

  I ignore her: “Did you know that Lindsay Lohan has one member of her entourage whose only job is to carry around her feminine protection?”

  Miriam frowns. Phil stares blankly.

  “She’s known as the Shield Maiden of Lohan.”

  No one laughs.

  For a moment I let my being expand. Endorphins flood my brain. I feel happy for the first time since I don’t know when, since long before Lila died. But almost immediately I feel the pressure of the real world surround the bubble of my thinking. The atmosphere becomes unreal. My thoughts echo, as though my inner ear were placed against a seashell. The transmission I was receiving clearly begins to crackle, hiss. The sound I hear is not the sighing ocean but a weak imitation of it. I drop my pen. There are white welts on my index finger and thumb. The world I have created is a fake, a bad joke, nothing but word games. The world is hollow and I am its hollow centre, a space filling with toxins. Lila is dead. I have no right to feel happiness. I am alone in my small apartment downtown.

  2

  WHEN DID IT first occur to me that my life with Lila had become a game inside a game? For years, our two souls—the souls we didn’t believe in, that we made fun of, that we abused—were as one shucked sea blob under one exotic shell. When did I first become aware that Lila had begun to live a separate life that she deliberately kept secret from me, a life other than her ordinary inner life? When did that second empty mollusc shell appear?

  I expect there are perceptive people out there who could answer this question. I expect as well that such visionary eggheads are few and far between. Far more common are minds skilled at ignoring the signs, minds capable of living with illusion. Some are so competent at it that, over time, they become delusional. Illusion is to innocence as delusion is to decadence. Illusion is the farm team and delusion the major leagues. I may have played for the former but never for the latter. The same can’t be said for Lila who progressed from one to the other with grim determination.

  All feelings and all experiences exist along a continuum, says my psychologist, who looks a great deal like DH Lawrence in his middle years, the Penguin book-jacket photo, the one with the author’s face in profile. When he says the word continuum I picture lines of white powder, corridors with rooms ruby-lit like a brothel. I don’t tell him about my obsessive quest for the moment when my relationship began to go south. He may be an emotional savant but he is an intellectual retard, a would-be writer, whom I suspect is taking more from our sessions than he should, professionally speaking. Were I to tell him, he would probably say that I am chasing a ghost, that there is little point in going that far back, that there is no way to know the exact beginning, the moment when the injury occurred. But what choice do I have when I can’t move ahead?

  I must go back to the beginning—though which beginning—the day Lila began her affair with Al Calhoun or the moment when I began to be aware that something was wrong? How should I navigate that stretch of personal history between my first paranoid inkling and the day I admitted to myself that I knew what I knew? Once again I must dip into my deep-brain’s bag of tricks.

  They are about to start their game. I can hear Lila titter in the next room. I hear Al’s voice and then Lila’s; both are muffled. I really can’t hear what they are saying. It occurs to me to cheat, to pick up the empty water glass standing upside down on the bedside table and use it as a listening device, an ear horn, placing it against the wall the way comic book characters do. Either Robert Frost’s theory is true or it isn’t. Either poetry operates at the level of sound or it doesn’t. Frost insisted that without actually being able to hear the specific words being spoken, but from tone of voice and cadence of speech alone, one should be able to arrive at the general drift of what was is being said. He famously described the experience of listening to that deep marriage of sound and meaning as overhearing a conversation in the next room.

  Al Calhoun was unequivocal in his denunciation of the American poet’s theory. Nothing but a cartload of bullshit, he said. I kind of agreed with him but decided to take the opposite position just to see how he would react. Things got heated. It was Lila’s idea that we should give the theory a trial in the real world.

  I knock three times, giving them the pre-arranged signal. I then sit on the edge of the bed, my ear so close to the painted plaster surface of the wall that I feel a waft of cold air lifting off it.

  The first conversation begins slowly. Lila speaks, her tone light and open, her cadence measured. Al responds in kind. There is a pause. Lila speaks again and then Al, both following the same pattern: lightness of tone and measured cadence. There is a burst of laughter that is not really laughter, followed by a longer pause. The silence is broken when Al and Lila began speaking at the same time in a way that is both halting and playful. There is more forced laughter. Listening, it occurs to me that descriptive terms for tone and cadence of speech are impoverished when compared to those used to describe music.

  Transcript of conversation one:

  Lila begins. “Hey. And how are you doing this morning?”

  “Why I’m doing real good. And thank you for asking.”

  [Pause]

  “So what did you do with your weekend?”

  “Why I hung around my apartment thinking about ways I could pleasure your beautiful body. I thought maybe it’s time we made another trip to the motel.”

  [Laughter followed by a long pause]

  “Tell me what you’re going to do.”

  “I’m going to touch you.”

  “Where are you going to touch me?”

  “Here, and a little bit here.”

  “And where else?”

  “I’m going to take my time.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Getting there.”

  “Where?”

  “You know.”

  “Show me.”

  “Down...there.”

  [Laughter]

  “Office talk or small talk,” I say, when they come to the doorway and ask for my verdict.

  “Wow,” says Lila.

  “Hell, boy, I’m beginning to think there’s something to that old Yankee poet’s theory.”

  Al wants to try it again.

  Their second conversation begins with Lila speaking hesitantly, her tone muted. Al says very little throughout, the only sounds he makes are vowel-heavy, his cadence slow, and this is true even when Lila’s cadence picks up, runs faster, becomes hesitant, runs faster again.

  Transcript of Conversation two:

  Lila begins. “Al?”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “I don’t feel good about this.”

  “It’s OK.”

  “It doesn’t feel right. What if he can hear?”

  “He can’t. You know he can’t. We tested it.”

  “I know. But what if he found out somehow?”

  “Shush.”

  “Are we really going to—”

  “Stop there. Don’t say another word.”

  “I�
�m a sick person, Al.”

  “No, Lila. You’re not [sighs]. All you need is a little bump.”

  “We’re being reckless. And these two guys you’ve hired: Snuffy and Gosse. Who are they anyway? Are those even their real names?”

  “Here you go. You’ll feel better.”

  “That’s easy for you to say but I’m the one...It’s me who has everything to lose.... Listen to me when I’m talking.”

  “Don’t be like that, honey baby.”

  “This one is trickier, a confession of some kind,” I pronounce, when they appear the second time, “or at least something intimate—with Al playing the supportive, understanding role.”

  Al extends his hand towards me. I feel my face go red. Lila, who also looks a little flushed, shakes her head slowly. “That’s amazing,” she says, “absolutely freaking amazing.”

  “Double or nothing,” says Al. “Come on. Give us one more chance to fool y’all?”

  “Please,” Lila says, “this is so much fun. So interesting.”

  Their final conversation begins with Al speaking in either angry or excited tones, Lila giving him curt answers, then a slightly longer answer in a slightly louder voice, in response to which Al’s voice grows quieter. Lila’s voice gets higher then, her cadence faster, while Al’s voice goes deeper, slower. There is a period of silence, which Lila breaks, her voice hurried, filled with tension. She seems to be struggling for calm while Al’s voice, still in its deeper register, grows more insistent. There is another long silence, so long that I am surprised when Al and Lila start up again: short bursts of speech in low and urgent turns.

  Transcript of conversation three:

  Al begins. “OK. That was a little bit too close.”

  “I’m feeling a bit better now.”

  “Of course you are, darlin’. Let’s talk about Twinkies.”

  “Twinkies?”

  “Uh-huh. I said Twinkies.”

  “Why in God’s name would you want to talk about Twinkies at a time like this? Twinkies—is that code for something else?”

  “It’s nonsense talk”

  [silence]

  “You mean we just talk nonsense, is that what you want, as a way of covering our tracks. Oh my God, do you think he knows?”

  [silence]

  “Call it a red herring.”

  “I get it. Well, I’ve always enjoyed a Twinkie. I like the fibrous nature of that little sponge cake. I mean there’s nothing I like more than shoving a whole Twinkie into my mouth. That’s all I’m going to eat when we are living like fugitives on some tropical island.”

  “Lila, please calm down. We want to sound normal.”

  “What’s normal? Everything we say means something else. And the way we say what we say either confirms or denies. And maybe neither.”

  “You’re being paranoid.”

  “I don’t think so. I think he knows something is up. I think he knows what we’re planning to do. He set a trap for us and we fell right into it.”

  “There’s no way.”

  “You don’t know Freddy.”

  “Small talk again,” I tell them when they return the final time to hear my judgement, “with something controversial, maybe something political, thrown in there to put me off the scent.”

  Al shakes my hand for a second time. “I’m going to have to make a trip to the bookstore and pick up Mr. Frost’s collected oeuvre.”

  I remember my father saying that only salesmen shake your hand every time you meet them. “I’ll lend you my copy,” I tell him.

  “That settles it,” says Lila.

  That’s how it felt when all the pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place, when I no longer trusted enough to tell myself that my misgivings were unfounded, that I was just being paranoid, that I should lay off the booze for a while, get more sleep; when I was no longer willing to cajole myself (oh, just another kind of indoor game, one on a side, it comes to little more) my suspicion a continuum I travelled along until the moment when all those sounds began to take form, until their meaning came through loud and clear, until I admitted to myself that I knew what I knew, and found I could transcribe, almost verbatim, the content of those hidden conversations.

  3

  I SIT IN my study, listening to the tick of the electric heater as it warms up. The air smells of burning hair and dust. The window above my desk is sealed with green masking tape that sucks in and out on a persistent draft, and from time to time makes muted kazoo sounds. I peer through the frost that formed overnight on the storm glass—not the usual patterns, swishy fronds and flattened clovers, but long narrow tubular formations, jointed in places, crisscrossing one another, like some kind of early life form, something discovered in a lost folio from the book of fossil, spidery spindle shanks, whose ancestors, a billion generations removed, are relatively unchanged, whole colonies of them thriving around vents in the deepest ocean trenches. I am a bathynaut in my fixed-slider bathysphere. I toggle the joystick on my suction-action fountain pen and up I rise, up out of the murk, out of the murk, of the murk. The wind gusts from the northeast, tumbles the clouds across the sky. The cat tips his weight against my shin and purrs. Above my head the curtains frame a brilliant patch of blue. The wind blows hard again and my room shudders. A tail of powdery snow unwinds from the roof next door, pirouettes: the tiny snowflakes, made overnight in the freezer of minus twenty, shiver all silvery in mid-air, like a shoal of sardines turning against a two-dimensional screen of ocean. I am coming up on the hard land of fact—land is the right place for fact. I leave behind the primordial slop of the ocean.

  I am coming up on the where and the when of Al and Lila’s first meeting.

  Closed since November 1, the Tee-Hee-Hee, the golf club’s nineteenth hole, doesn’t quite have the mothball smell it will wear by April. Tradition has it that the club re-opens temporarily on the second weekend of December for what is usually the first Christmas party of the season. This would explain the two-fisted drinking, Lila thinks, as she scans the crowded room.

  Hot air blowing from overhead vents stirs the tinsel garland and the glass decorations swing from the ceiling on various lengths of fishing line. An enormous silver tree stands in the corner; the golf-bag decorations are cute, she decides, the flashing golf-ball lights are seizure inducing.

  Lila is looking for me. She gives up, sips her favourite poison, vodka and soda water with two wedges of lime. Her crimson lips purse deliciously on the end of a plastic straw that is striped like a candy cane or barber’s pole. She’s doing that trick with her tongue, somehow twirling the straw so it turns as she drinks, animating the red stripe, making it coil upwards into her mouth. Every man within viewing distance is mesmerized.

  Above the background chatter and the chink of ice in glasses, Eartha Kitt is enticing Santa to hurry down the chimney. As far as Lila and I are concerned, it is the least wonderful time of the year. Moving through the crowd are waitresses dressed as slutty elves, a buxom Mrs. Claus, and a couple of horny reindeers. The bartender—with his authentic white beard, cheeks filigreed in purple capillaries and belly like a poisoned pup’s—perhaps the source of his halitosis—makes for a convincing St. Nicholas. Green boughs are strung above double French doors that look out over the eighteenth hole. Lila is standing underneath them. I watch her take a deep breath.

  She loves the smell of the woods but can never seem to remember how to tell the difference between pine and spruce. Such things trigger anxiety in her. Because she has a poor memory for facts, she worries that people will think she is stupid. She knows the trick of telling these species of trees apart: one has flat needles like the blades in cocktail swords. The other has rounder needles that can be rolled between the thumb and fingers. But which is which? And what is the difference between white spruce and black spruce?

  “Have you ever noticed that a club is called a club, like a club-club?”

  Lila smiles. It is such a dumb question it puts her instantly at ease. It’s the kind of quest
ion I like to ask when I am setting up a joke—only the person who asks her is not me. It’s Al Calhoun. He leans in close, a little too close. She backs away, though not as much as she could. What from a distance had struck Lila as a bad impression of Jack Nicklaus looks so much different when the frame narrows to exclude the leisure clothes and white shoes. Less Golden Bear than Robert Redford in Out of Africa, but with hooded eyes. His sideburns are angled and tapered like the blade on a Stanley knife. His mouth curls up at the corners as though his first inclination is always to smile. He is smiling now. He wears a neatly trimmed blond moustache. She notices that his lips have a thin white line around them, like a very fine scar. She has the peculiar thought that someone cut out his mouth and replaced it with a prettier one, a woman’s mouth maybe.

  “What do you mean by club-club?”

  “I mean the kind of club you hit someone over the head with.”

  Lila’s forehead becomes a tilled field. Her eyelids pucker and her top lip skins up over her gums.

  “I mean that the word club is spelled the same way no matter if it’s a social club or a caveman’s club.”

  “Oh.”

  “Ya got it?”

  “No.” She notices he has a slight lisp, his tongue blunting on S sounds, as though that particular consonant is one that he—in his gentlemanly Southern way—feels he has to treat with care. Lila senses blood collecting in her nipples—probably a draft from the French doors. She tries to cross her arms but botches it, sloshing her drink in the attempt.