Archibald Full Frontal, page 28
James sat on the pool’s edge, feet in the water. I swam towards him, and he offered me a hand. It was almost like being pulled by a magnet. I sat beside him, staring at the slivery crescent moon and a sky bursting with stars. One minute he was talking about something — I don’t remember what — and the next minute he was kissing me. I heard the water in the pool lapping against my legs and feel the warmth of his mouth on mine.
“Susan, come here, please.” It was Archibald, calling from his window. James pulled back.
“Fuck,” he muttered angrily. “He was supposed to be out.”
Dad met me at the top of the stairs, looking disgruntled. “Pack your bags; your mother wants you home tomorrow.”
“But—”
“No buts, my dear. You can always return for modelling jobs … occasionally.”
I guess Dad is trying to stop the romance between James and me, just another protective father after all. I packed my bags, but I hope I can talk him out of sending me home if I promise not to see James again. I wonder if James will be fired.
I walked down the hallway to Dad’s room a few hours later, unable to sleep and wanting to put things right between us. The door was partly open, and a sliver of light protrudes. I can hear voices.
“You have to learn to control yourself. My own daughter!” yelled Archibald.
“I just felt sorry for her. She’s been flirting with me for days. You know I could never love anyone else.”
“James, don’t bullshit a bullshitter. You want me for my money but mainly for my connections.”
“That’s not true. Archibald!”
He threw his arms around Archibald and put his head on his chest. Archibald relented and encircled him in his arms. He closed his eyes. And I could see. I could see that my father loves this boy.
“It will never happen again.”
“You bet your sweet ass it won’t.”
“You won’t abandon me, will you? Not with my book to finish.”
Archibald sighs. “Not as long as you can be faithful.”
I backed away slowly and went back to my room. I am sick to my stomach. I never knew this about my father. I imagined maybe he saw other women but never men! How can this be happening?
July 16
I found Mom in her studio as usual. She didn’t seem surprised to see me.
I told her everything about Archibald and James, everything I saw. I had to. It may break her heart, but I could not carry that burden alone. I cannot let her be shamed by him.
I remember my last conversation with Archibald.
“So this is it?” I said to Archibald at the ferry. “You’re sending me away for that boy?”
“I’m sorry you had to find out this way. It was a bad idea, your coming. It wasn’t your fault. It was mine.”
I felt so rejected, completely deflated. “You’re disgusting. You’re a pervert. And a rotten father,” I said, trying not to cry.
“You may be right,” he said sadly.
Mom just sat there and listened. She didn’t even stop painting.
After I stopped talking, she put her brush down and she looked at me, grey eyes serious. “Are you finished?”
“Yes,” I said, waiting for her to cry and scream and rail, to share my pain and then comfort me, but she did nothing, just gave me a wistful smile.
“You haven’t told me anything I don’t know.”
“Mom, Archibald is having an affair … with a man! Fucking a man!”
“Sweetheart. I’ve kept you too sheltered. You would have found out eventually.”
I was unprepared for that reaction. My own father a queer and my mother doesn’t even give a shit?
“Don’t you care?” I asked.
“I used to. But now I think we have to carve out our own bits of happiness as best we can. It is hard to have everything you want. You can’t be too greedy.” She turned back to her painting, and just like that, I was alone.
Later that night, I sat up. She had taken three of her blue tranquilizers, washed down with vodka. She was out. But I was up and filled with rage. At her. How could she be so passive and accepting? How could she go on knowing what her husband is? That right then he lay in the arms of that horrible man? How could she let me believe in him? The only thing that means anything to her is her art. I drank from the vodka bottle. I found myself at her studio. They were all there. All of her latest portraits. So many of her, Archibald, and me together. She was painting a lie. A fantasy. I grabbed all the paintings I could and heaved them to the floor. I doused them in vodka, and I lit the match. I stood back and watched them burn. Flames consume her work, her art, her lies.
Then I ran outside and watched the fire, angry and alive. The studio was eaten alive by red, orange, yellow rage. When she was finally roused by the fire it was too late. I watched her face. I watched her try to run into the flames as firefighters restrained her. It was like watching a person die. It was terrible. She screamed and screamed. And her screams filled me with terror. But it was too late. I had done enough.
As I write this, she lies in the hospital, heavily sedated, with third-degree burns on her arms. I am filled with trepidation. At what he will do. What he will think. I want him to come back and beg forgiveness.
I find her leaning on the balcony, staring down as though the past is laid out below her in place of the tree-dotted street and the lip of seascape. She has kicked her shoes off and stands beside Archibald’s salmon pink geranium pot. I lean beside her, trying to still the deliration of my thoughts, attempting to grasp a single thread without causing an avalanche of human debris — betrayal, jealousy, despair — to rain on my head.
“You knew Michael?” is the entry point I choose.
“James, yes. His real name was James. He changed it.” So, Archibald had used James in the book as a way of letting Michael know that he was James, literally.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“When I found out about your relationship in Oregon, after the book, it was already far too late to be useful.” Always the pragmatist. She reaches into her purse for a cigarette and lights it, then she lights another for me. I lift my head and glance at the balcony above me, remembering. Michael had moved out quietly, apparently, before the funeral, and the condo had since been sold.
I smoke my cigarette. I look at the tip burning, feel its heat close to my fingers. I have never liked the taste, the tar-ish sizzle of cancer in my mouth. But it now seems appropriate, having something that could incinerate the world between my fingers.
“You set the fire,” I say.
“Yes. It was more terrible than I could ever describe.” She says it like she means it, still, after all these years.
“And my grandmother … after? What happened?” I ask.
“She existed in and out of hospitals. She had always had a problem, but the fire,” she exhales, “exacerbated it. He saw as little of me as possible. It was really over then. I became a nurse, maybe out of guilt, who knows? I met your father in the hospital I worked at; he was an attending then. He was a good listener, and the rest is what it is: history.”
“History,” I repeat lamely. It is a word that I have heard thrown about, mostly to explain, but often to excuse behaviour that defies comprehension.
“But the fire was the beginning of the end. It is the real reason Archibald hated me. Of course, he found many others after that, many other reasons. But he wasn’t cruel, not then.” She sucks on the cigarette, choosing her words. “I loved him so much. He had a gift, the ability to sweep you up in a wave of whatever he was feeling and make you feel … special. I set the fire to get even, but mostly out of desperation after being banished. It was a cry for attention. It had the opposite effect.”
“And the car accident? Did it happen like you said?”
“Yes, more or less. I let her drive. I shouldn’t have. But guilt is a terrible thing. It just saws you into bits. She always had it over me. She was quite ill by then, manic depressive. I had you, and your father was where he always was, at work. Archibald was off partying, who knows, maybe trying to absolve himself of his own strange mixture of guilt. But it wasn’t her fault. She just didn’t know what she was doing.”
“Or maybe she did,” I suggest.
We look at each other, and I know we will not discuss this possibility further. The truth is not always liberating.
“I should have told you everything years ago. I should have at least tried. But I couldn’t. I was so ashamed. I was a coward. I didn’t want my own daughter looking at me as if I were a criminal.”
She is crying. I put my arm around her, thinking about the fire and what it cost her. Living her life in the ruins of its aftermath was something I knew I could never really understand.
What had my grandmother been trying to tell me in my dreams, that she too was sorry? That she too was complicit? I thought about the triangle they had made: my mother, grandmother, and Archibald. They had loved each other, maybe too much, maybe not enough, and, in doing so, had caused incalculable harm. And Archibald? He had loved Michael. I was sure. He had sought to avenge himself. To hurt Michael. The novel had been his tool for revenge, and I had been a necessary means to an end. It was never personal. He had used me, and, in doing so, had grown fond of me. He had cast his peculiar light on me, and I had grown and changed in that illumination, and in the end, become a different species of person than I had been before. I had put down roots, and they held me in place, even as I rejected them, even as I rejected him.
But now, I wanted it finished. All of it. To understand any more was like trying to untangle an intricately knotted chain that grew more snarled with each attempt to free it. My fingers were not up to the task.
“The painting is yours,” I say.
I am alone in his apartment. Mom has flown home. Sam is at the university. Everything will be packed and sold or given to friends. But for now I am here, one last time in Archibald’s apartment. I am planning to sell it. One day I may understand Archibald. I may be able to file his memories away, organize them according to hue, but for now I am still anaesthetized. It is so quiet, so neat and circumspect in here. It is lacking its former flair, a silk scarf thrown here, a martini glass there, a book half-opened beside a Wedgwood china plate containing a quarter of an English muffin and a drizzle of marmalade. I catch a flash at the corner of my eye, a zigzag of light, but the room is empty. Only my imagination pretends there is still something of his presence here.
I slide open the balcony door. I lean against the railing. I lift both hands up high. I want to unleash it all. I want to scream, “WHAT THE FUUUUUCK!!!!” as loudly as I can manage, as he urged me to that Christmas a few years ago. But when I open my mouth, nothing comes out. I close it again. I am not ready. The truth is I do give a fuck. I still care. I care what people think and even, infuriatingly, what he thought. He could always see through a faker.
Instead, I carry his urn out to the garden, which is fragrant and blooming. I glance around to make sure no one is in the vicinity to witness me. I flip open the top and carefully scatter him on his most favourite sections, the lavender, the primroses, the oriental poppies. I stop when it is half-empty. It is only right for him to fertilize the garden he put so much time and energy into. I tuck the urn and the rest of his remains under my arm.
“May your garden grow,” I say.
My suitcase is packed. I put it by the door. He is behind me. I can feel him. He rests his head on my back, leaning in against me like he did that night not so long ago. The night our worlds collapsed and we made a new one.
“I’m going to really miss you,” he says.
“I don’t have to go,” I say. “It’s probably just a stupid idea.”
“It’s a great idea. You know it is.” I turn and he holds my face in his hands. I have an open ticket to Europe. I am planning to travel for a few months. I have money from Archibald and a craving for a change of place. I am taking the semester off school. I have to admit his idea for me to travel was a good one. “I’ve been to Europe and Asia. You’ll have a terrific experience.”
“I wish you could come,” I say for the millionth time.
“Me too. But I have to get my paper finished so I can get my grant money and there are my classes…”
“I know. I know.” I sigh. “The timing is wrong.”
“Otherwise, there is nothing I would like more than to be on an adventure with you.”
I press my cheek against his, feel the soft stubble so familiar to me now. I have made him promise not to come to the airport. I won’t let him. If he comes I won’t go.
I look at him. “But we’ve been on an adventure all this time, haven’t we?”
He opens the door, handsome with wavy hair, now completely grey, dark eyes, just a little more crinkled. He is just how I remember, except older. He looks nervous, but expectant.
“Hi, Dad,” I say.
“Maggie. It’s really good to see you.” He reaches out, hands extending into the air between us. I step into his arms. It is awkward at first. I am stiff and unyielding, unprepared for close contact. But he has learned from my mother. He still knows how to hug. He holds on to me until my muscles release, and his hug tells me that many things have lapsed in the years we spent apart, but not everything.
I spend three weeks with him and his new family: his wife, Joan, and five-year-old daughter, Marie. Joan is a normal version of pretty, as old as Mom, and nothing close to a trophy wife. Her eyes are kind, in the way of someone who is wise but not arrogant, and their little girl is precocious and scary-smart. They are accommodating and pull out all the stops. We see the sights: Oxford with its amazing architecture, cobbled streets, and green hills; the country town of Bath, with its limestone spires and healing waters; and, my favourite, the monolithic Stonehenge, just a strange bunch of rocks arranged on a hillside as though they were dropped from the sky. London’s crowded, shop-filled streets grow on me and so do my hosts.
I babysit Marie while they go to the theatre one night. We play chess, and I search her for traces of me. But I find nothing of me in the angle of her confident hand poised over the board, as though all of the next moves are laid out before her. I do not envy her, because I know life is rarely that predictable. But I find myself hoping that she succeeds.
“What do you think?” Sam asks on the phone.
I hesitate. I don’t mean to, but I do. My voice cracks: “Saskatchewan?”
“If you think it’s a bad idea. I won’t go. Really,” Sam says.
“No. It’s not that,” I say. It’s just I know Carolina is in Saskatchewan interning. I push Archibald’s warning from my mind. Once from the prairies, always from the prairies.
“You might really like it,” he says. “It would only be for a year or two. Until something else opens up.”
“You really want this, don’t you?” I ask.
“It is a full-time professorship,” he says.
“Then, of course, go for it,” I say.
In a travel store in Notting Hill, I search through volumes of guidebooks trying to decide where to go next. I look down and notice a girl sitting cross-legged, a book about Asia open on her lap. She peers up at me with pale blue eyes from above her glasses. Her name is Elspeth. She is Dutch and has been working in England as a barista to make extra money. Now she’s planning a trip. At a coffee shop, we sit outside and get to know each other.
“Where will you go?” she asks.
“Anywhere but Asia,” I say, mostly to irritate Archibald.
Dearest Sam,
I am writing this from our hotel room in Hat Yai. I think Vietnam with its rolling hills, green rice paddies, and beautiful beaches is my favourite place so far. Thailand was intense. We visited the southern islands again. They were pretty much unchanged: beautiful white sand and turquoise water. Elspeth is a fantastic scuba diver. I opted for snorkelling instead. Having all those tiny fishy bodies around me made me nervous! We also shared our hut with a family of bats! They didn’t bother us too much, but all of the high-pitched squeaking and flapping made me miss my comfortable bed at home, and you, of course.
Hat Yai is a busy city, not as crazy as Bangkok, but of course you already know that. It is an underbelly, full of prostitutes and illicit activities. The downstairs hotel restaurant doubles as a karaoke bar and brothel. Apparently, it is commonplace here! Don’t worry, I am safely tucked away in my hotel room as I write this. Anyway, I really, really miss you. We are heading to Burma next. Flying into Yangon with three-week visas. Elspeth talked me into it. She says Burma is the new India, whatever that means! I will try calling you as soon as I can. Hope life in Regina is going well.
Lots of love,
Maggie
I put the pen down with a sigh. It has been a great experience, but I miss Sam.
“Writing your guy again?” Elspeth asks from the bed as she twists open a Singha beer. I stand up from the desk and stretch my back. She passes me a beer. I take a long drink. I have to admit Thai beer is pretty delicious.
“Are you still carting him around?”
“Huh?”
“Your grandfather. His remains.”
“Oh, yeah,” I still have the ashes in a double ziplock in my bag. I take them out now. It has been a real pain to carry around during all of the crammed bus rides and cycle trips we have been doing. But I have yet to find a place to scatter him. I have studiously avoided all things Buddhist, even though Asia is absolutely burgeoning with monasteries. I am being passive aggressive, not willing to give him what he wanted but not willing to let him go either.
