Still Waters (5 page)

Beside her was Victor Sandhu, Ph.D., professor of semiotics, or semiology, as he preferred. He had arranged a major fellowship that would have enabled Miranda to pursue graduate studies in the Department of Linguistics at a level just above poverty. That was a significant accolade, considering the fact that she was graduating in honours anthropology and had only taken semiotics courses as electives.

The small cluster of faculty and students in the photograph was parsed, left to right, each identified either by discipline and credentials or by award. The caption ran to several hundred words, longer than some of
The Varsity
articles. The last words in the caption read: “Absent, co-winner of the Sandhu Semiology Fellowship: Robert Griffin.”

“No way!” she exclaimed. “No bloody way!”

Her words echoed as if the walls, though accustomed to her voice, now refused to absorb her incipient panic. She looked around, then back at
The Varsity,
page six.

Robert Griffin. Indisputably: co-winner… Robert Griffin.

Miranda poured herself a tumbler of red wine from an open bottle on the counter, took a sip, then reached for a wineglass from the cupboard above the sink and transferred most of the contents into the tulip crystal. She drained the dregs from the tumbler, held the bottle up to examine the label, set it down, gazed off into the middle distance, and surprised herself to find the world was blurred and that her eyes had filled with tears.

“I don't remember Robert Griffin.” Miranda spoke out loud with a zealot's conviction. She put her fingers to her mouth as if to stifle her own voice.

I saw his face, dead, through a veil of water,
she thought.
A stranger. I saw photographs of him in legal regalia and robed for his doctorate. My presence in the newspaper picture authenticates only myself. My God, we shared a prize. I didn't collect. The rich man took it all.

The tightness of tears drying on her cheeks made her realize she had stopped crying. She was angry. She felt violated. She was appalled at her own anxiety and confused by her fear.

Miranda settled back on the sofa, resolved to penetrate the shadows that made her past seem a thronging of separate events. She assumed most people lived inside continuous narratives under occasional revision. Searching, unexpectedly, she encountered her boyfriend from their last year in high school. She smiled to herself, turned the stem of her glass between her fingers, and remembered.

She and Danny Webster had kissed a lot but had always kept their intimacies from the neck up. They talked to each other in funny voices. They played cryptic word games.

“Do you want to go to a movie?” he might ask. Someone else would have responded with a tired aphorism like, “Does a bear poop in the woods?” But not Miranda.

“Did Sandy Koufax pitch on Yom Kippur?” she would answer with a world-weary shrug, and they would both groan and go to see a replay of
Cool Hand Luke
.

Or she might ask, about classmates, “Do you think they're doing it?”

And he would answer, “Is Dr. Ramsay Catholic?”

That one was tricky. Miranda's family was Anglican, so the archbishop of Canterbury was indeed a primate of the “holy catholic church.” However, Danny was Baptist and insisted the Church of England was a breakaway Protestant sect. Yes and no. And to increase their pleasure, they both knew that Ramses were condoms. Were their friends “doing it?” They had no idea.

They were both attractive, so behaving like geeks was an ironic disguise.

At the end of the school year they hugged passionately. Miranda didn't attend her graduation and never saw him again. She thought they had restricted themselves to kissing because that was what she wanted, and because he was a Baptist, but it turned out Baptists like sex. He was gay. According to her mother, who refused to believe the rumour, he came out at Bible College, where he was surrounded by people eager to forgive.

They had played on the margins of adult experience and had parted as innocents. She wondered if Danny Webster had discovered sex without love. Or was he happy?

Miranda walked into the bedroom and was startled by flickering shadows emanating from her screen saver. Having descended through real barracuda and drifted
among parrotfish and somnolent groupers in the Cay-mans the previous winter, she found the underwater fantasy on her computer reassuring, in the same way a tacky souvenir was, brought back from a genuine adventure. Within the virtual perfection on the screen she caught sight of her face in reflection. She was drifting against the receding depths, and a prolonged shiver made her gasp for air.

She had never felt so secure, she thought, as being enfolded by the warm waters of the Caribbean, hovering beyond gravity at sixty feet down. It had seemed almost pre-conscious bliss among the mounds and tentacles of coral, breathing in a soft rhythm through an umbilicus of gear. And now visual Muzak on her computer screen was the disingenuous reminder of a stranger's cadaver, someone misplaced in the drowned caverns of her mind.

Miranda set the Griffin papers down by the computer, switched on the gooseneck lamp, and twisted it around to shine into a closet jammed with boxes and files. She withdrew a cardboard container labelled “U of T,” and sitting on the floor, dumped the contents between her splayed legs.

Shifting the pile around with her hand, she came up with the snapshot she had been expecting. It showed an oval table surrounded by a dozen faces leaning in for the camera. On the table were books and a couple of screw-top wine bottles, along with an array of plastic cups and open potato chip bags. This was the end-of-term celebration, hosted and catered by Professor Sandhu for his semiology seminar.

Miranda had to scan for a moment to establish which indistinct features were her own, at the farthest end of the table. Standing behind her, looming over to get in the shot, was a face she had never seen before except on a corpse.

She didn't remember him, she didn't remember him being in the picture, this man who was older than the rest, perhaps in his forties, who aligned himself for the camera to appear connected, somehow, to the young woman in front of him. She would have sworn he wasn't in the picture the last time she had looked. Of course, that was a decade ago. She wasn't nostalgic about her student days.

Ten years back her ex-roommate in an act of apparent contrition for unfettered sex had come over to welcome Miranda back to Toronto. The two of them had gone through the old pictures, embarrassed they couldn't restore identity to faces etched into memory from across seminar tables, cafeteria tables and, most of all, across tables topped with endless draft beer in the pubs around campus. Miranda could have named every kid in a class photograph from the village public school she had attended in antediluvian times, but university seemed farther away, less accessible.

Griffin had worked his way into a photograph. He had even cast a shadow like the rest of them. How real was the past, she wondered, if someone could slip into it who was never there? More to the point, how real was it if someone who was actually there could be erased?

For some reason she thought of Jason Rodriguez. He seemed like a character she had read about in a novel, an actor in a nearly forgotten movie, far less real than Robert Griffin, the proof of whose being lay on a slab in the morgue.

During the three years she had spent in Ottawa, Jason Rodriguez was Miranda's lover. They had met at work. He was her boss, he was married, they were both outsiders. He was considerate to a fault.

Miranda had met him her first day on the job. He had kind eyes, a soft voice, and a preternatural understanding
of her loneliness, something she seldom acknowledged even to herself. The first time they made love she was surprised. It happened as a sort of mutual consolation for the unfairness of life.

Their early courtship was in Spanish, which put her at a disadvantage since his parents had been in the diplomatic service before settling in Canada and that was the language of his childhood, while she had taken a first-year undergraduate course in Spanish, which she dropped to protect her grade-point average. Still, Spanish made everything tentative, as if they were kids trying to figure things out for the first time.

After they became lovers, they gradually switched to English. They talked about problems, confiding with each other in an urgent rhythm of revelation and tenderness. Two years passed. Jason's wife was in a car accident and she died. He was vague on the details of his grief.

After that Miranda ruminated, arranging and rearranging the details of their affair in her mind, spending long hours by herself trying to recover the past. When she quit her job, he seemed disappointed, but he didn't try to dissuade her. She explained that all she had revealed about herself was a way of concealing. Now that he chose to withhold his own secrets, this gave him power that frightened her.

He had touched her lightly on the cheek as if he were whisking away tears. “Frightens you? I don't think you're afraid of anything.”

She had laughed. She wasn't going to cry.

Now Miranda dropped the photograph of Professor Sandhu's seminar onto the debris from her past; she would clean up in the morning. She fingered the letter, then unaccountably put it down. She would read that, too, in the light of day.

About an hour into sleep she became aware she was dreaming. Photographs displaced one another in random sequence. In each the image of Robert Griffin leered over the scene. Sometimes she was in the picture herself, and sometimes she was an observer. Sometimes Griffin was there as soon as it clarified, and sometimes he emerged after everything else had resolved into a static emblem of strong but elusive emotion. Sometimes he was blurred from the light, and sometimes he was blurred because water was sheeting over his features like a fluid shroud.

Then she was making love with Morgan, surrounded by a flurry of photographs. She was leaning over him; she liked the weight of her breasts pressing against her own skin from the inside as she brushed them across his face in slow, pendulous motion, though actually she had small breasts that were firm and high and she knew this was a dream, and suddenly she became frightened because she also knew that if she arched back to look at him in the oscillating waves of light emanating from their pleasure, she knew he would have Griffin's face. It would be Morgan, but he would have the drowned features of a stranger.

Refusing the power of her dream, Miranda thrust away from the deadening embrace of her lover and surfaced into wakefulness. She turned on the light, got up, and took the letter and legal document from her desk. Walking into the kitchen, she made herself a hot chocolate, even though the night was warm and she had awakened in a sweat. She sat down to read, stood up, changed her pajama top for a dry T-shirt from a pile of folded laundry on the counter, felt to see that her breasts were small and firm, checked her hips with the flat of her hands, checked her bottom. Everything was there
as it should be. She sat down, got up, dumped the hot chocolate in the sink, opened the fridge, got out a cider, opened it, drank from the bottle, held it for a moment to her temple, enjoying the cool glass against her skin, sat down, and began to read.

Miranda Quin, spelled correctly. Address. Yesterday's date, now the day before. She squinted at the postmark on the envelope: definitely dated the day before yesterday. “My Dear Miranda.” The text was terse yet florid.

Due to circumstances beyond my control, it seems prudent to make final preparations for my death.

As you may or may not be aware, I am under an obligation to you beyond recompense. We might both find consolation, however, should you agree to act as the executrix of my estate.

You will be neither swayed nor compromised by the modest honorarium attached for your kindness. However, there may be satisfaction in the sum to be administered at your discretion for the benefit of others.

Should you decline, these bequests shall be subsumed residual to my estate and distributed as the court deems appropriate.

I hope your placement within the line of largess will allow you to find in your heart the generosity to forgive me.

The enclosed document has been signed and witnessed. The notarized application
of your signature will make it legal and binding.

Yours truly,

(Signed) Robert Griffin, LL.B, Ph.D.

All this for accepting her share of a scholarship! A macabre joke? Or had a dead man given her the power of absolution for unspecified wrongs?

Unfolding the legal document, she skimmed through. It seemed authentic. She was named sole executor, and her name was repeated throughout. Griffin's signature was witnessed by Eleanor Drummond and dated the day before yesterday. The full will would be made accessible to her upon signing. Contingent to her acceptance, respective parcels of ten and twenty-five million dollars (Canadian) were designated for the Policemen's Benevolent Fund and to establish the Mary Bingham Carter-Griffin Institute of Semiology.

Nothing for a koi sanctuary!

She picked up the Bakelite telephone receiver from its antique cradle, the first rotary-dial phone to be installed in her mother's family home. It still bore a label with the original number: OLive 3, 4231. This was from a time apparently before people had the mnemonic capacity to remember seven digits.
We push buttons now,
she thought,
and still say “dial.”
She remembered her father's number from when he was a child: 557-J. He had once asked the operator to speak to his grandmother — no other information than that — and she had put him through. Every call with this phone, its innards updated, invoked a rich fluttering of images and thoughts. It was like a talisman of ancestral memories.

“Morgan,” she said when he answered.

“What?” His voice was thick with sleep.

“I've got to talk —”

“Are you all right?”

“Yes, but —”

He hung up.