Charades (19 page)

Yes, that was real. That really happened.

“Happy birthday,” he said. “I thought perhaps a trip to the Garden of Eden?” And on that occasion they took the boat out from Cairns to Green Island where the coral bloomed and where passionfruit lay rotting under the trees. Was that when they finally made love? Because they did. Once. And it would have been, she'd always felt, such a terrible waste of location if the fall hadn't taken place on Green Island. So they slept on the white sand and a snake sunned itself on a rock and she fed Nicholas pomegranates and mangoes and custard apples.

All of which happened, in one sense, only seconds ago: so she knows as she crosses Front Street in Toronto about twenty-three years later and sees a certain reflection, and rushes, heedless of cars and pedestrians, full tilt at the mirrored flank of the Royal Bank.

8

The Tale of Nicholas II

Once upon a time, Charade says, a woman named Katherine ran full tilt at the side of the Royal Bank on Front Street in Toronto. She thought she saw someone she knew, but the image had bounced from a taxi window to the plate glass building, and seemed to be walking toward her when in fact it was half a block away and heading in the opposite direction. A doorman at the Royal York Hotel slammed the taxi door shut, changing the freakish angle of reflection, and
pouff !
the image vanished. Katherine, bewildered, stopped within feet of the mirrored towers, rubbing her eyes and looking up and down the sidewalk. She wondered if perhaps she was sleepwalking. She wondered if she had just been jolted out of the kind of nightmare in which one is about to do something unspecified but extremely embarrassing.

On the sidewalk of Front Street she saw wary eyes and snickers and the pressed-together lips of people trying not to smile. They might as well have projected their thoughts onto billboards.
Loony,
she saw in flashing lights.

She thought with a shiver: It's true.

There was probably a medical term for it — manic obsessive? Possibly there were books, articles, treatments, summer camps for the kind of senseless and passionate attachment picked up much too early, back in unimmunised childhood. It was one of those diseases like malaria. It hung around. It skulked, dormant, in the blood, going into remission for years and years, for decades, and then
shazam,
flaring up again like poisoned toadstools after rain.

Something had made her think of Nicholas. (What was it?
A headline on a news stand? The trail of association was lost.) But definitely, yes, first she had thought of him and then there
he was. Pathetic. She would have liked to distribute leaflets to the politely smiling bystanders: I'm a married woman, a mother of teenagers, a fulfiller of civic obligations; this derangement is not typical of me.

But it was as though a rip had spread and spread, slick as quicksilver, from the San Andreas fault through the Great Lakes and up the length of Yonge Street. A swift but mercifully brief seizure, she thought, pressing her fingers against the bony rim of her eye sockets. Like an itch, like a rash of poison ivy, the recollection of Nicholas went licking across the surface of her skin, but it would pass. One could read any number of articles about such midlife aberrations, the little kinks and tricky riffs of memory.

And then, at the far end of the block, between the Royal York Hotel and the Whalers' Wharf tavern, she saw him again. His back. He was just turning the corner, about to seep into the city, water into sand. She sprinted, half sobbing, half laughing, heedless of stares.

This had nothing to do with the making of a decision, or with any calculation of the pleasures/costs/complications of seeing him again. There was indeed not so much as a second to consider the oddness of boarding the Royal York's shuttle bus to the airport. She saw Nicholas, in the middle of a fog of soft-sided luggage and suitcase-festooned travellers, climb into the bus. She followed him.

“Sorry, ma'am,” the driver said. “Got to get your ticket from the Gray Coach window first.”

“Oh where? where?” she asked, trying not to seem unduly agitated, but in fact breathless, frantic, scanning the bus seats
for Nicholas. The aisles were thick with bodies. There was a waving forest of arms craning to stuff luggage into the overhead racks.

“There,” the driver pointed, and she sprinted to the ticket window and paid her six dollars and rapped on the now closed doors of the bus until they opened with a pneumatic sigh and then she bounded back up the metal steps.

“Yeah, yeah,” the driver grinned. “End of the world if you miss your flight, I know. Six times a day, minimum, I'm offered bribes, threats, and prayers. Trip takes the same thirty minutes, fair weather or foul, ma'am. And the world don't end if you gotta wait for the next flight out.”

“Flight?” she echoed, her brows puckered.

She could see Nicholas — the unruly curls across his forehead — halfway back, a window seat.

“I wonder,” she found herself saying with appalling brashness to the person beside him, “I wonder if you'd mind …? I'd be most grateful. Oh thank you.”

What did she expect?

Not, certainly, the quizzically amused look of someone who was accustomed to mild outlandishness in women, who took fuss as his due, but who nevertheless was perpetually amazed by the assertive ingenuity of total strangers. There was always a dash of titillation about it, a small shock that aroused him. As for Katherine, awareness of the error she had made was not quite instant — after twenty-three years, one expects some differences — and so it took several seconds for her own incandescence to fade. In those moments something twirled between the two of them, between the man and the woman framed by the vinyl seats and grubby windows of the airport bus: a spindle of misplaced and mistaken sexual excitement.

It cast its own spell.

And then Katherine, beached on the shore of receding euphoria, said faintly: “Oh God.” Because he was not Nicholas. Clearly he was not Nicholas. At close range, she could not even call the resemblance striking. (Although, after twenty-three years, would the real Nicholas bear much of a resemblance to the one she remembered?) What she had seen from within the aura of her sudden recollection was a random convergence of details: the general size and shape of his body, the way he walked, the curls. But the curls were not sunbleached wheat-blond Nicholas- coloured at all. They were drab, they were the shade of old and yellowing parchment, they were the colourless colour of a once fairhaired boy who is now in his greying middle age.

“Oh God,” Katherine said, mortified. “I thought you were someone else.” She put her hands to her burning cheeks. “Oh, this is so embarrassing.”

“Not at all,” he said archly. “Not at all.”

“Oh I don't believe I
followed
you …” She held the ticket stub out between them, for pondering, as an artefact of madness.

“The least I can do,” he said, “is offer myself as a substitute.”

“Oh, I'm so embarrassed.”

“You do that well.”

“Pardon?” She looked at him then, took in the meaning of his smile, considered (at roughly the speed of light) several possible courses of action. She considered saying courteously but icily: “I'm afraid you have misinterpreted my behaviour,” and then getting off the bus. She considered saying nothing at all, simply walking back down the aisle with dignity and …

The bus, she realised from the peripheral blur of buildings, was now in motion; she therefore considered, but quickly rejected, telling the driver she had made a mistake, asking him to let her off. It could be assumed that the driver, now negotiating traffic at a dizzying pace on the highway, lived in the constant expectation of new manifestations of lunacy with which to enliven his off duty hours. “Lady,” he would say, possibly gently, possibly rudely. “Sit down.” He would jab his finger toward the sign which said in two languages:
Please do not talk to the driver while bus is in motion.

She considered saying with polite and level malice: “I'm afraid I find middle-aged lechery rather pathetic.” Or, more savage: “It is not always the case, Nicholas …” (
Nicholas?
Had she played this scene before? Had she always wanted to play this scene?) “It is not always the case, sir, that sexual attraction is mutual.” And then getting up and moving to another seat.

All these possibilities passed through her mind between one blink and the next. But what she saw in his eyes, what held her, was that spindle of excitement, accidentally, inadvertently, erroneously set in motion. It was spinning like a top. Without thinking, she put out a hand to ward off giddiness, and he seemed to lurch a little too, ever so slightly, so that their bodies came into marginal contact though their eyes never wavered, both fastened on the thing that buzzed between them. It was mesmerising, gathering speed, giving off vaporous rings, making
grands jet
é
s
of anticipation. So that it suddenly seemed to her they were in collusion, she and this man (she thought of him as Nicholas II); that they had planned the whole thing from the start: the way he had walked past an open taxi so that his image would bounce onto the Royal Bank, the way he had lured her onto the bus, the way she had so willingly followed. It seemed to her that when she had bought her ticket at the Royal York, she had purchased a brief leave of absence from her life which was, in its broader patterns, eminently, even tediously, respectable, and certainly devoid of improper excitement. It seemed to her now that she had known all this with absolute clarity in those flurried seconds at the ticket window.

Perhaps he said something.
Do you do this often?
Something like that. Something urbane, thick with innuendo, but not quite patronising; something that proffered equality of intention and responsibility.

And perhaps she, in the daring language that came to her quite naturally (part of the package deal, part of the ticket), the language that belonged to this sudden time-out from her life, perhaps she said something appropriately ambiguous and arch.
Do you?
she might have lobbed back at him, raising an eyebrow.

Not quite like this,
he might have said.

Or it was possible that nothing was said. What did happen (she could be virtually certain about this) was that for the length of the ride to the airport they watched this thing, this kind of economy class nova, that was vibrating and humming between them, giving off heat. Where there was bodily contact — lightly and coincidentally along the thigh, and after some slight jolting of the bus (which happened opposite the Canadian National Exhibition Grounds, or maybe not until the Carling O'Keefe Brewery) also along the forearm — at such points of contact, there was a burning sensation. An exchange of breathing, of the smell and taste of the body opposite, seemed to be taking place.

Katherine supposed that the name for all this dazzle and heat was lust. She did not think it was ordinary lust — though she could hardly claim to be an expert on any of the varieties. Still, passes had been made off and on throughout her respectable married years (colleagues of her husband, one of the doctors at the clinic, her son's gym teacher) and this seemed altogether different. It must have been a case of convergence, she decided; a random confluence of needs and nostalgias; a sort of king tide of concupiscence.

She thought she asked him, when they found themselves in the hubbub of the international terminal, where he was going, what flight. And she thought he said, rather tersely: “Obviously, for now, nowhere. Back to Boston later.” He did something at the Delta Airlines desk, then made a call from a pay telephone, while she waited and watched as if drugged.

It was when he motioned her back through the instamatic doors and into the taxi — something about the way he leaned forward and told the driver “Bristol Place Hotel,” pointing to it, because the driver was Portuguese, or Mexican possibly, or Guatemalan, or at any rate not in command of much English; and because the hotel was just a step away if one did not mind stepping across tarmacs and superhighways — it was something about the way the curls fell across his forehead and about the quick purposeful negotiations with the driver that made her say to herself: “He
could
be Nicholas.”

As though the thought pricked him, he leaned back into the seat and took her hand and ran his tongue across the tips of her fingers. “So who was I supposed to be?” he asked.

A small nervous fledgling of a laugh rose from her lips. “Nicholas,” she said, relieved that it came out flat, devoid of meaning. “A boy from the golden years of my youth,” every syllable mocking itself. “Ancient history. What
is
your name, anyway?”

“Nicholas will do nicely. I can fit into that as well as anything.”

It is amazing, she thought, how thick with erotic meaning a simple declarative sentence can become when you are in the back of a taxi with your fingers in some stranger's mouth.

“All right,” she said. She felt she knew the rules of this game by instinct. The mask, the costume made her brash. She withdrew her hand from between his lips and loosened his tie. “And what's my name?”

“You don't have a name.”

Her hand stiffened at the top button of his shirt. “Oh yes I do,” she said sharply. Options whirred through her mind again, like symbols on a poker machine. I don't have to go through with this, she thought.

He raised an eyebrow. “Backing out?”

“No,” she said evenly, her heart pounding, her voice calm. “But I do have a name. It's Katherine.”

She waited, flag planted, daring him to challenge her terms.

“As you wish,” he said smoothly. “Katherine.”

The sheets at the Bristol Place are stamped, not embroidered, with the hotel's name. Katherine pleated the hem between her fingers as she watched him light his pipe by the window. What could one compare it to, sex with a stranger?

Sex with a stranger,
she repeated to herself, as though it were a catechism she might come to believe in time.

It was not unlike finding yourself running full tilt into the side of a bank: strangely euphoric while it lasted, but afterwards … not very real; afterwards, one felt slightly bewildered and distinctly foolish. And compelled to explain.

She propped herself on one elbow and studied him. He had dressed already. He believes nakedness puts him at a disadvantage, she thought. She sensed suddenly: He always feels naked.

She, surprisingly, felt languidly uninterested in her clothes, though she was covered demurely enough with the sheet. She rather imagined that after sex with a stranger, men (who presumably did this sort of thing all the time; well, not her husband of course; not anyone she knew well, but
men,
men in the broader foreign sense of the term) she rather supposed they wanted to get away as soon as was decently possible. She did not imagine they dallied for post-coital chats. But Nicholas II showed no sign of haste; he sat on the broad ledge of the windowsill and looked out over Route 407 and the tarmacs and runways and the furthest dreary suburban and exurban reaches of Toronto. He puffed reflectively on his pipe.