The Glass Coffin (3 page)

“And that exonerates him?”

Gabe squinted at me through the screen of smoke. “Do you know who you remind me of, Joanne?”

I shook my head.

“Sam Waterston,” he said.

“Is that line supposed to make me blush and go weak in the knees?”

“You didn’t let me finish. I was
going
to say you remind me of Sam Waterston in
The Great Gatsby.”

“When he played Nick Carraway.”

“Right,” Gabe said approvingly. “The young man who wanted the world to stand at moral attention. You’ve got more than a little of Nick Carraway in you, Joanne, and that line
is
intended to please you. Moralists raise interesting questions.” He looked at me hard. “Now I have a question for you. Are you romantically entangled?”

I tried to stay cool. “In the process of becoming unentangled,” I said.

“What happened?

“Taylor would say that he just found somebody he liked better.”

“He must be a jerk.”

“Thanks,” I said. There was a catch in my voice that seemed to surprise us both.

Gabe reached out and touched my cheek. “Maybe I can help,” he said.

It was a moment pregnant with possibilities that my son aborted by roaring into the room and slamming on the brakes like a cartoon character. “Sorry,” he said, “but you asked me to remind you to take the meat out at twenty after.”

Gabe shook his head in mock dismay. “First time I’ve made a pass in five years, and it’s intercepted.”

“Come help me rescue dinner,” I said. “Heroes’ journeys are filled with detours.”

When Gabe and I walked into my kitchen, I knew we’d taken a detour that had led us into a danger zone. Tracy had backed Evan into the sideboard. She was pressed against him, her body taut, her hands splayed over his thighs. It was a scene from John Updike: two handsome people, restive with the longings of mid-life, anxious to grab a quickie before old age made
carpe diem
a joke. But this encounter wasn’t about lust.

As Tracy leaned into Evan, her voice was as hushed as a lover’s but the words dripped venom. “I could fucking kill you,” she said.

Evan placed his hands on her shoulders and pushed her back gently. “Stand in line,” he said. “No one’s raising the roof beams about this marriage, but it would be easier for you if you accept the fact that it’s inevitable.”

“And it would be easier for everybody if you just backed out.” Tracy rubbed at the places where Evan’s hands had touched her.

“I’m not going to,” Evan said mildly. “Jill and I are both committed to this marriage.”

“Till death do you part,” Tracy said. “You’re one evil son of a bitch, Evan.” As she stomped out of the room, her stiletto heels tapped the hardwood like hammer blows.

“Great exit line,” Gabe said admiringly. He turned to me. “And to show you how seriously I take my duties as best man, I am going to tame the virago. I’m assuming there’ll be a reward.”

“If you can save this dinner party, you can name your price,” I said.

“Now that’s an offer I can’t refuse,” Gabe replied.

After he left, I opened the oven to take out the venison.

“Anything I can do?” Evan asked.

“I’m fine,” I said, putting the pan on the counter.

“No, you’re not,” Evan said. “I saw your face when I got out of that taxi tonight. You’d made up your mind about me before you met me.”

“Jill suggested I watch your movies,” I said. “So I did – at least two of them.”

He sighed. “I can guess which two.” He stepped close, put his hand under my chin, and lifted it so I had to meet his gaze. “I’m not a monster, Joanne. I didn’t kill my wives.”

“You didn’t save them,” I said.

“They were beyond my reach.” Evan’s eyes bored into me. “I thought I was past the point where people could disappoint me, but you disappoint me, Joanne.”

Suddenly, I was furious. “What are you talking about? Why would you have any expectations about me one way or the other?”

“Because you sent Jill the illumination of that text by Philo of Alexandria.”

A flush of shame rose from my neck to my face. Evan’s lips curved in a smile. He had me. “I was looking forward to meeting the woman who believed those were words to live by.” He took a step towards me. “You do remember the words.”

Suddenly, I felt light-headed. I closed my eyes and nodded.

“Say them.” Evan’s tone was commanding.

“ ‘Be kind,’ ” I said mechanically, “ ‘for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.’ ”

“Good,” he said approvingly. “Now why don’t you make some effort to understand the battles I’m fighting.”

CHAPTER

2

From the moment I’d read the article in the
New York Times
, I’d suspected Evan MacLeish was the wrong man for Jill. Now I was dead certain, and time was running out.

In our house, the dinner table had always been the place where people came to learn things. That night, as we gathered in the candlelight, I was desperate to learn something that would penetrate Jill’s wilful blindness about the man she was about to marry. Discovering who among my guests had the silver bullet would be problem enough. Convincing myself that I had the right to use it would be even more difficult. Jill was an intelligent woman who had assessed a complex situation and made a decision. It was going to be a stretch coming up with a rationale for interfering in her life.

I was glad Felix Schiff had sorted out the luggage problems and joined the party. He was an appealing guest, affable and fine-tuned to nuance. Like many men who work in media, Felix had adopted the man-boy costume of leather jacket and blue jeans, and the combination worked well for him. Looking at his unruly shock of chestnut hair and anxious grey eyes, it was easy to see the tightly wound child he had been. Industry colleagues knew Felix to be one tough cookie, but that night his sensitivity was apparent. He prided himself on being, in a phrase from his native Germany,
ein prakiter Mensch
. Faced with a party ripped by tension, the practical man ratcheted up the charm. Radiating the innocent shine of a Norman Rockwell schoolboy with a frog in his pocket, he surveyed the table.

“And to think, none of us would be here tonight if it weren’t for a water-skiing squirrel,” he said, eyeing his fellow guests to see if he’d hooked his audience. He had, and as people leaned forward with expectant half-smiles, eager to follow the anecdote, I felt my nerves unknot.

Noticing that a tiny frown was crimping Bryn’s forehead, Felix whispered confidingly, “You’ll have to forgive Jill for holding out on you. I’m sure she simply wanted to protect you from the knowledge that she’s anti-squirrel.”

“Hang on,” Jill said. “This is my party, and I’ll tell my own story. And in my version, I behave valiantly. Here’s what really happened, Bryn. Felix and I were working on a show called ‘Canada Tonight.’ He was the executive producer in Toronto, and I was the network producer here in Regina. Everything was cool, including the ratings, so, of course, NationTV decided it needed a saviour.”

“A twenty-seven-year-old saviour,” Felix said. “Still paying off his student loans, and they put him in charge of the network’s news division. A wunderkind, they said. Some wunderkind. We’d been hearing the same mantra for ten years. Appeal to a new demographic: younger, edgier, more urban, more buzz.”

Jill rolled her eyes. “… shorter segments, less analysis, more happy talk …”

“And,” Felix intoned gravely, “more squirrels.”

“Right,” Jill sipped her wine. “More squirrels. Somehow our young genius in Toronto got wind of the fact that a cottager out here had taught a squirrel to water-ski. Now clearly the cottager was a baguette short of a picnic, but the wunderkind was enchanted. He ordered me to replace two minutes of our political panel with squirrel footage, and I refused.”

“Squirrel against woman,” Angus said.

“Right,” Jill said. “And no possibility of rapprochement. The squirrel was out on Echo Lake slapping the waves with his little custom-made skiis, and I was here in Regina clinging to my standards.”

“And you lost,” Taylor said.

Jill nodded in agreement. “And our twenty-seven-year-old genius meted out the worst punishment he could think of …”

“He banished you to Toronto!” Angus said.

“Precisely,” Jill said. “With the kind of task evil fairies hand out in fairy tales. He gave me six weeks to create a cheap, ethnically diverse, spiritually neutral show that would get a 7.8 share on Sunday mornings.”

“Absolutely impossible,” Felix said. “It was a matter of principle. Jill quit, and so did I.”

Jill dipped her index finger into the water in her glass and passed it through the flame of the candle in front of her. “Luckily, Felix and I are not risk-averse. And we were both dying to show that little snot-nose what talent and experience could do.”

“Thus, after only a dozen or so false starts, ‘Comforts of the Sun’ came into being.” Felix bowed his head modestly. “A simple premise but brilliantly executed.”

We all laughed, but the truth of the matter was the premise behind “Comforts of the Sun” was simple: Jill and a small film crew followed ordinary people as they revelled in the pleasures of their Sunday morning. The show cast its net broadly: an all-girl skateboarders’ club in Sault Ste. Marie; a rafter-rattling gospel choir in Halifax; the owners of a trendy lesbian eatery called Tomboy who opened their doors on Sunday mornings to the homeless of Winnipeg; a Tai Chi group who, for three generations, had been harmonizing their minds and bodies in a Vancouver park; an octogenarian Anglican minister who, accompanied by his bulldog Balthazar, drove up and down the Sunshine Coast delivering thumping good sermons to anyone who was of a mind to sit still and listen.

As we passed the wild rice, we talked about why the show had struck a chord with so many people. “I’ll bet most people are like me,” I said. “We watch ‘Comforts of the Sun’ because it makes us feel good.”

Felix furrowed his brow. “Feel good is yesterday, Jo. When I was pitching the show in
NYC
, I talked about urban alienation, fragmentation, and the human need for connection and affirmation.”

Claudia snapped her fingers at an imaginary waiter. “Another order of bullshit for the gent here at table three,” she said, and her laughter was full-bodied and infectious.

Felix was serene. “Manure has its uses,” he said.

“You bet it does,” Jill said. “Thanks to Felix’s judicious spreading, our little family will be in Times Square New Year’s Eve.” She hugged herself. “This show has made so many things possible. It’s an uphill battle not to get cynical in hard news. You’re always trying to get past what people want to reveal so you can shed a little light on what they’re trying to conceal. But ‘Comforts of the Sun’ makes watching the human comedy fun again. Everybody we talk to is pleased as punch to reveal everything.”

Throughout dinner, Bryn and Angus had been so tenderly absorbed in one another that it seemed the rest of us were just a backdrop, but Jill’s words caught Bryn’s attention.

Achingly beautiful, she leaned across the table. “But those people
chose
to let you in, Jill. It’s different when the camera invades your life.”

Evan shifted in his chair. “A camera doesn’t ‘invade’ your life, Bryn,” he said. “It’s just there.”

“A camera is
not
‘just there,’ ” Bryn’s eyes bored into her father. “There’s a person behind it, changing the lens, making sure the shot’s in focus, deciding how far to go.”

Evan speared a morsel of venison. “People who step in front of the camera aren’t victims. They’re willing accomplices. They can always walk away.”

“Not if they trust the person behind the camera,” his daughter said. Her skin had the pale lustre of the white tulips in the centrepiece.

Jill reached across the flowers and took Bryn’s hand. “We have so much to look forward to,” she said. “Sometimes it’s best just to forgive and forget.”

“Great advice, stepmum-to-be.” Tracy’s voice was jagged. “Except where do you draw the line after you pardon scavengers who pick the flesh from other people’s bones?”

Ever the conciliator, Felix jumped in. “Aren’t you being a little unfair, Tracy? We’re not talking about ‘Jerry Springer.’ We’re talking about our show, and we have nothing to be ashamed of. As Jill said, people who step in front of our cameras
want
to reveal themselves. We give them a legacy – something they can slip into their
VCRS
to prove their lives have meaning.”

Tracy’s blue eyes glittered with unshed tears. “And that’s why they count on you not to lie, not to distort, not to seduce them into giving up things that are sacred.” She turned miserably to her brother-in-law. “Some of us counted on you for that too, Evan.”

Taylor had stopped eating. She loved venison and she was, as a rule, a trencherwoman, but the sight of the Broken Wand Fairy having a tantrum obviously knocked her off game.

“Counted on me for what?” Evan asked. “Tracy, the scenes you’re part of in
Black Spikes and Slow Waves
show you at a time when you were more alive than you’ll ever be again. No matter what happens to you, that woman will still exist. What else could you ask?”

“To be treated as a human being,” Tracy snapped.

Evan shrugged. “It’s an old argument: what matters more, art or life? Thomas Mann said that as he watched his young daughter die, he couldn’t stop himself from framing the scene to use in a novel. He gave that child immortality.”

“Is he your role model, Daddy?” Bryn’s voice was bleak, and Jill drew her close.

Claudia mouthed the favourite obscenity of the frustrated, then tapped her wineglass with her knife. “May I make a modest suggestion?” she asked. “Why don’t we all just shut up and eat.”

It was a small window of opportunity, but I squeezed through. “There’s more of everything,” I said. “But leave room for dessert. It’s my daughter Mieka’s recipe.”

Jill brightened. “The lemon pudding cake with raspberries?”

“You’ve got it,” I said. “The Queen of Comfort Foods.”

Gabe drained his glass. “Bring it on,” he said to no one in particular. “We have become a party sorely in need of comfort.”

Taylor picked up her fork. “And joy,” she said. “Don’t forget the joy.”

As we walked from the parking lot to the MacKenzie Art Gallery for the wedding rehearsal, snowflakes fell on a world silvered by a winter palette. It was a Currier & Ives evening, but we were an Alex Colville crowd, our alienation as knife-edged as our emotions. We had paired off idiosyncratically. Angus had deep-sixed his Mr. Bill sweatshirt and cut-offs in favour of pressed slacks, a blue button-down, and a solicitousness towards Bryn that would have been appropriate if he were rescuing her from the gulag, but seemed excessive for a wedding rehearsal in Regina. Claudia, her feet squarely planted in sensible Sorels, had taken on the task of her sister-in-law’s keeper and was frog-marching the skittish, barelegged Tracy towards the warmth of the gallery. Surprisingly, Jill was walking not with her fiancé but with Felix Schiff. Heads together, their whispered discussion grew so heated that Felix finally strode ahead to catch up with Claudia and Tracy, and Jill dropped back to join the two other odd couples: Taylor and Evan, and Gabe Leventhal and me.

Taylor was pointing out the snow maze that the gallery employees and the kids who studied art at the MacKenzie had constructed on the east lawn. It was a serious effort with six-foot walls of packed ice-snow and enough branches and forks to give the maze real complexity. Bathed in moonlight, it had an otherworldly glow.

“Straight out of the Ice Planet Hoth,” Gabe said, shaking his head. “You really could get lost in there.”

“You could,” Taylor agreed, “but I know the secret of how not to.”

“A golden thread,” Gabe said.

Taylor wiped her nose on the sleeve of her coat. “That would probably work,” she said. “But I was talking about the right-hand trick. As long as you keep your right hand against the wall, there’s no way you can’t get out.”

“Nice to have at least one guarantee when you’re stepping into an uncertain world,” Jill said.

“Do you consider marriage an uncertain world?” Evan asked.

Jill’s smile was enigmatic. “I don’t know,” she said. “Can you guarantee that if I keep my right hand on the wall, I’ll get out safely?”

Gabe led our small group through the maze. In his ancient coat, toe rubbers, and striped muffler, he seemed an unlikely guide, but when he announced that, grateful as he was for Taylor’s tip, he planned to find the goal by letting go of his conscious self and stretching out his feeling, we cheered. There was a goofiness about his allusion to
Star Wars
that lightened our spirits and made it seem possible that the Force was with us after all.

We walked single file between walls of ice not much more than three feet apart, along ground that was worn treacherously smooth. Above us stars splattered the sky with an ancient pattern, and as we shuffled along, making mistakes, taking wrong turns, our breath rose in puffs, like incense. Our silence was broken only once, when Evan, who was behind me, asked. “What’s at the end?”

“A surprise,” Taylor said.

“As long as it’s not the Minotaur,” Evan said.

I looked over my shoulder at him. “Closer than you think,” I said.

“Really?”

“Stay tuned.”

We turned a final corner and found ourselves in the square that enclosed the goal. Instinctively, we flattened against the walls to improve our view of the snow sculpture at the centre of the tiny enclosure.

Gabe was the first to speak. “Worth the trip,” he said. “But what the hell is it?”

Taylor took his hand in hers. “You can look closer,” she said. “Have you ever heard of Jacques Lipchitz?”

“One of the great sculptors of the twentieth century? I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck, young woman.”

Taylor rewarded him with a smile. “Our gallery has a bronze sculpture that Jacques Lipchitz made. It’s called
Mother and Child II
. During the war, Jacques Lipchitz saw a Russian lady with no legs. She was singing so he made this sculpture of her. You can see it two ways: as a mother with her child or as the head of a bull.”

“Love or war,” Gabe said.

“That’s right,” Taylor said approvingly. “Anyway, the sculpture is sort of the trademark of the MacKenzie Gallery, so that’s why we made a snow one for the end of the maze. Neat, eh?”

Gabriel moved closer to the piece. “Yeah,” he said. “It really is neat.”

“I wish Bryn had come out here with us,” Jill said. “Speaking of … we should get back. They must be wondering where we are.”

“I know the way,” Taylor said. She hiked up her swooshy dress and headed back through the maze. Jill and Gabe were not far behind. I started after them, then I realized Evan wasn’t with us. When I turned I saw that he was still gazing at
Mother and Child II
. His head was slightly bowed and his hands were crossed in front of him, like a man worshipping or paying his respects at a funeral. His face was unguarded, suffused with a look that I could only describe as longing.