Deadly Appearances (21 page)

I could feel my safe world shifting, and I didn’t want it to. I grabbed a handhold. “Andy was full of wonderful gestures. He was a generous man. He gave things to a lot of people.”

Soren Eames leaned across the table and looked into my face. His voice was soft, almost diffident, but his gaze was steady. “I loved him, Joanne.”

I felt oppressed, as if something were pressing me down. I didn’t want to hear this. I didn’t want to know.

“A lot of people loved Andy,” I said and I turned and looked out the window.

Soren Eames half stood and leaned toward me. His hand touched my cheek and turned my face. “Look at me, Joanne. You’re not a simple woman. You know what I’m talking about here. I didn’t love Andy like a lot of people. It was more for us – a great deal more. He was my lover, and I was his.”

Free fall. The old, safe world gave way. I heard my voice, pleading, stupid. “Who knew? Were you careful?” The political questions. Andy was dead. This man was destroyed by grief, but the political instinct was always alive and kicking. There are a hundred jokes about the referential mania of political people: the husband of a woman running for the House of Commons is killed in a car accident and her opponent bitterly dismisses the new widow’s loss as “a great break for her”; a campaign manager tells his workers to make sure all their supporters in the senior citizens’ homes vote in the advance poll so that, no matter what, the party won’t have lost a vote. And me, right in there with the best or worst of them, treating this fragile man as a political problem, not a suffering human being.

His face was so close to me that I could see the faint blue-black of the beard growing beneath his skin, and I could smell his aftershave, light, woodsy – familiar.

Surprised, I said, “You smell like Andy. Did you always use that cologne? Or …”

“I changed after,” he said. “Stupid – as if it could change anything.” He flinched, and the pain on his face was as sharp as if he had been stabbed.

It all changed for me in that moment. Not Paul on the road to Damascus, exactly, but the shock of recognition was there.

“I did that, too,” I said, “after my husband died. At night, before I went to bed, I’d rub his aftershave into my body so that when I woke up in the night …”

“You could pretend that he was still there,” he finished for me.

“Something like that.”

We sat in silence, wrapped in our separate memories. Finally, I wanted to talk.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“For what?”

“I don’t know, just … Soren, come into the kitchen and let me get some fresh coffee and we’ll start again.”

He stood up and smiled. “Is being invited into the kitchen a mark of friendship?”

“Yeah, I guess it is.”

“Then I accept with pleasure. I need a friend.”

We sat at the kitchen table. The sky was threatening. The yard was heavy with leaves from the cottonwood tree, sodden and disintegrating. It was a thoroughly dismal day. Soren Eames was oblivious to the weather. For a long time his eyes didn’t shift from the window, but I think he was seeing a different landscape.

He had brought the little baba figure into the kitchen, and as we sat, his fingers traced her lines, like a man playing with worry beads.

Finally, he began to speak. His voice was warm and intimate.

“Joanne, I wish we could stop the movie right here. It’s a good frame – the respectable matron and the closet gay reach out to one another over their friend’s death. But it’s more complex than that. Not long after we met, Andy told me you were one of the few people in his life he trusted. That’s going to have to be good enough for me because” – he swallowed hard – “I have to trust somebody.”

He was wearing a bomber jacket of buttery, smooth cowhide. As he spoke, he reached into an inside pocket and pulled out an envelope. It was of good quality paper, dove grey. On the front, in elegant and familiar calligraphy, was the name Soren Eames. There was no address. My hands began to shake.

“Hand delivered?” I asked in a bright, artificial voice.

He nodded. “Apparently. It was in my mail slot at the college. It’s a fairly public place. Open it.”

I turned the envelope to open it. On the back flap were the letters
A
and
E
intertwined the way they are on a wedding invitation, the way they were on the copy of “The Sick Rose” someone had placed in Andy’s portfolio the day he was killed. My hands were shaking so badly I could barely pull the enclosure from the envelope.

I recognized it immediately. It was a pre-election brochure of Andy’s. I had written the copy. General stuff: a careful biography, a few platitudes and a couple of soaring, meaningless slogans. No one ever reads the words, anyway. But the pictures were extraordinary. They’d been taken by a young man who had wandered into the Caucus Office early in the summer. His name was Colin Grant, and that day he was wearing cheap runners, cut-offs and a Georgia O’Keeffe sweatshirt. He had a Leica slung around his neck.

“What you want,” he had said as he struck a match on Dave Micklejohn’s no-smoking sign, “is subtext not substance.”

We hired him that day, and he hadn’t disappointed. His pictures were extraordinary. He could do magic things with light, and the photo on the front of the brochure Soren was holding was one of his best – in part, because it violated all the conventional wisdom about how you show your candidate.

Andy’s back was to the camera. Coatless, hands outstretched, he was plunging into the crowd at a rally in Victoria Park. We saw the people from his angle: hands reaching out to him, touching him, faces raised to his.

It was a scene all of us who’d been involved in politics had seen a hundred times. But Colin Grant had played with the light to show what seemed to happen when Andy walked through a crowd. The sun was behind Andy, so that while his shape was dark, the faces in the crowd were illuminated by a light that seemed to come from him. In truth, he could do that to a crowd. It was, I thought, a great photo. But in the brochure Soren Eames handed me, someone had scrawled a word in dark lipstick over Andy’s back and head. The word was “Faggot.”

“I think we should begin at the beginning,” I said, my voice shaking. And he did – with the night he and Andy became lovers. He told his story with such restraint, but every so often his voice would be soft with joy at the simple pleasure of saying his lover’s name or remembering a moment of intimacy. His voice was full of wonder when he described the night he and Andy walked at dusk to the prayer centre. “I wasn’t his first lover, but he was mine … Oh, Joanne, that first time he touched me, I thought, ‘This is what it feels like to bloom’ – as if I were unfolding under his hands until the dark centre of what I was came into the light. I haven’t had a particularly happy life, but that night everything changed for me – for us both. It wasn’t a casual intimacy for either of us, Jo. I want you to know that. Andy would want you to know that. There hadn’t been anyone before for me, and there had just been one other for him – just one, but he ended that when we fell in love.

“Andy was a person of such honour. That first night we wanted each other so much, but he didn’t begin with me until he’d broken off with the other man.” He picked up the brochure. “Joanne, this obscenity doesn’t make sense because no one knew. We were so careful. For both of us, there were so many other people involved. You, for example – Andy knew how much you’d given to his leadership campaign, and if this had come out … Well, you can imagine. Professionally, it would have been the end for me, of course. The good people at Wolf River think my Porsche is kind of flamboyant and daring, but a gay pastor?” He shrugged and smiled sadly. “However, it was Eve we felt we had to protect the most. There hadn’t been anything between them for years, but I think Andy would have endured anything rather than cause her to suffer. He said she had suffered enough. She didn’t know about us – about me. I’m certain of that. But I always had the sense that she knew the truth about Andy, and I think she knew about the first one.”

“Who was he?”

“Andy was a man of honour, you know that, Jo. I never knew the first man’s name. I do know they were together for a long time – for years. Andy was terribly shaken about severing their relationship.”

Soren looked close to breaking. But I had to press him. “Could it have been him, Soren? Could it have been that first man who killed Andy?”

He didn’t answer. He was watching the cold rain falling on the leaves. Finally, he turned to me.

“Jo, what am I going to do about all this?” He tapped the brochure.

“About all this? I don’t think you have much choice. I think you have to go to the police. Soren, everything’s connected.” I pointed to the initials on the envelope. “It’s not the first time I’ve seen that design. It was on a poem someone put in Andy’s speech folder the day he was killed.”

He looked dazed. I knew how he felt. There had, I thought, been too many shocks.

“Soren, are you all right?”

He held the ceramic cabbage up to the light and turned it gently. “Jo, it’s not the first time I’ve seen those letters, either. I’ve been trying to remember exactly where I saw them before. I know it was at Andy’s house in the city. We were looking through some of his old English texts one day, and I saw those initials drawn together that way a couple of times.”

“Did you say anything?”

“I always hated to bring up the subject of Eve.”

“So you assumed the
E
and
A
were Eve and Andy?”

“It seemed logical. Who else would it be? And that’s one reason I don’t want to go to the police. It was always so important to Andy that Eve be protected – I want to do that for him. And, Jo, I don’t want people to know about Andy. I don’t want anything to hurt him.”

His eyes were full of tears. I reached over and touched his hand. “Soren, he wouldn’t want anything to hurt you.”

He looked up and started to say something. Just then the phone rang. It was Ali Sutherland, breathless, between patients, calling to wish me a happy birthday.

“We are counting the days till Thanksgiving,” she said. “Guess what I bought? China with turkeys on it – ten place settings. It’s your birthday present but we get to use it first. You’ll love it, Jo – a little border of fruits and vegetables and everything – god-awful but right up your alley. There goes my other phone – one of us will meet you at the train – happy birthday!”

When I hung up, Soren was zipping his bomber jacket. “I’ve taken up too much of your time today. I’ll call you in a few days and let you know what I decide about the police.” He touched my cheek with his fingertips. “Thanks for listening. It was good just to say his name.” He smiled. “And, Joanne, many, many happy returns.”

“For you, too,” I said. I walked him to the door and watched him go down the front steps.

“Soren, I’m glad Andy had you.”

He bounded up the stairs like a boy, kissed me on the cheek and gave me a smile of indescribable sweetness.

“Thank you. Jo, you can’t know how much that means to me.” He ran down the walk, jumped into the Porsche and took off. Just as he turned the corner the rain turned to snow, huge wet flakes that fell heavily on everything, and I thought, “I’ll call him tonight and see if he got home all right.” But I never did.

The postman came with a fistful of birthday cards, and a note of thanks from Eve in her curiously schoolgirlish handwriting. There was a Creeds box with a pretty striped silk scarf from Howard Dowhanuik. (A memory – Howard coming to me the Christmas after Marty left. “Jo, what do I get all the women in the office? Booze seems a little crude.” And me: “Well, Howard, you can never go wrong with a scarf.” Indeed.) There was a first edition James Beard cookbook from my old friend Nina Love, and a handsome book on Frida Kahlo from Nina’s daughter, Sally. I looped the silk scarf around my neck, put the James Beard and the Kahlo books on the kitchen table and sat down and looked through my birthday cards.

Then I went upstairs to shower. I stood under the hot water and thought about Soren Eames and Andy.

How could I not have known? That was the thought that kept floating to the top of my consciousness. I shampooed my hair and soaped myself. How could I not have known? I had known Andy for seventeen years. For ten of the years we’d been close, and for two we had been as close as a man and woman working together can be. But it had never crossed my mind. How did I feel about it? Angry. Not angry at it, but angry at Andy for not telling me. Not trusting me – but why would he? Why should he? I turned the cold water down and the shower beat down on me hot and steamy. Why should he tell? Whose life was it anyway?

I went into my room and pulled on jogging pants and a sweatshirt and my old high-tops, went downstairs, put the dogs on their leashes, slipped on a slicker I’d bought Peter to wear to football games and headed for the creek. It was still snowing. In October. “Go for it, prairies,” I said as the snow fell steadily, covering the dead leaves. There was no one in the park, so I unhooked the leashes and let the dogs run. Everywhere their feet touched they left a mark.

“A life in translation.” That’s what a gay friend of mine had called it. His name was Carlyle Wise, and he ran a small art gallery in a heritage house he had restored. He had waited until he was forty to come out, and the only time I heard bitterness in his voice was when he talked about his first forty years. “All that deceit,” he had said. “All that energy wasted translating your life into something other people will accept. You’re always a foreigner.”

The dogs had run down the river bank and were swimming downstream – two sleek golden heads cutting through the grey water.

After he came out, Carlyle Wise had established himself as a kind of informal crisis centre for young men troubled by their homosexuality. Several times a year, one of the hospitals’ psychiatric wards would call him, and he would go down and collect a boy who had attempted suicide, bring him home, arrange for counselling, cook for him, get him started in classes or a job and give him a home until he was ready to start life on his own.