The Ravine (25 page)

I spent a total of three and a half hours on the stand. I talked endlessly about the intricacies of television production, I detailed my history with Edward Milligan. I managed to not mention
The Bullet and the Cross.
I did not tell the coroner’s inquest how, one moonless night, I’d screened the film for Edward Milligan. I thought he’d slept through the last half. Apparently I was mistaken.

Milligan, that day, took his position behind the flimsy pulpit. Nicky Poole wrapped one arm around Ed’s chest and pressed the end of the revolver’s barrel against his temple.

Veronica did not speak or move away. My wife was rigid with fury; I knew there would be moments, perhaps even minutes, before she summoned the wherewithal to act. I wasn’t sure what she would do. What she did do, many hours later, was calmly ask me to gather up my stuff—all of my
goddam shit
, as she put it—and move out of the house. This was hours later, as I say, because in the interim there were countless policemen and detectives to talk to, telephone calls to be made, statements to be issued to the press.

“Hey, Phil? You know what would be better? If I did like in that movie!” Edward Milligan looked at me with unbounded delight. Then he reached up and squeezed Nicky Poole’s finger, pulling the trigger, and thus shambling off in search of the Pearly Gates.

“
HELLO
?”

“Veronica?”

“No. Of course it’s not Veronica. Does it sound like Veronica, dickhead?”

“This is John Hooper.”

“I know who it is. Why do you think I called you
dickhead?”

“Is this Phil?”

“Yes, it’s Phil. Who else would it be? You called my house, after all.”

“But you don’t live there any more.”

“Well … point, Hooper. So, what, you’re used to calling here, are you, and when the phone is answered, you’re used to it being Veronica?”

“She left a message to call her back.”

“Did she now?”

“Is she there?”

“She is here, more or less. But I don’t think she can talk to you. She’s rushing around, cramming things into a little carry-on bag. Let me describe the scene. Ronnie is roaming about the house with relentless energy. The airport limo waits, the driver napping in the front seat. Kerwin, Ronnie’s young boyfriend, a doctoral candidate
in the exciting, challenging field of philosophy, is standing in the foyer, trying to avoid eye contact with me, although I don’t allow that, I don’t put up with that, I ask him silly questions, inconsequential questions—have you ever been to Mexico before, who is the current Mexican president, how much did those shoes cost?—and I pin him to the wall with my eyeballs and watch him squirm. I should be getting back to that, I don’t really have time to shoot the breeze with you, Hooper.”

“Fine. Just tell Ronnie, you know, thanks!”

“All right, we can shoot the breeze a little. What do you mean,
thanks?”

“Well, she left a message congratulating me.”

“Why?”

“Oh, you know. The Giller.”

“She congratulated you on your Giller nomination?”

“I … I won, Phil.”

“You won the Giller Prize?”

“Yes.”

“For fiction?”

“That’s what they give it for.”

“Oh.”

“I was as surprised as anybody.”

“Gee, that’s swell, Hooper.”

“Umm… thanks.”

“No, listen. Listen, John. That’s… that’s wonderful. Really.”

“I was very pleased. How’s your novel coming along?”

“You don’t have to pretend to care.”

“I do care. I liked what I read of it. All except for the television stuff. But I’m sure you’ve moved away from that. Written about other things.”

“That I have, that I have. I have written about, oh, the incident,
and the rankers, and I even managed to work in my admiration for Mickey Rooney. I’ve laid all the pipe, as we say in the television business. Now it’s time to go, go, go. I’m in the present tense, baby. I’m writing this on my little laptop. I’m in an old dilapidated car that’s headed up Highway 400. My brother’s driving and the girls are bickering in the back seat.”

“I don’t get you, Phil.”

“No, you wouldn’t. So … the goddam Giller fucking Prize, huh? Maybe I should read your book.”

“You haven’t read it?”

“No, no, no. Veronica—who, incidentally, finally seems ready to vacate the premises—told me that there was a character based on me, a character with some silly name, Paul or something.”

“Uh-huh. I did base him on you.”

“Well, there you go. I could hardly read the book, otherwise I would be forced to sue your ass.”

“Sue me?”

“It’s the old ‘you can’t use people as fodder for your fiction’ chestnut.”

“I really don’t see how you could sue me, Phil. Paul is the most sympathetic character in the novel.”

“I don’t need your … he is?”

“Yeah. I mean, he has issues and everything …”

“Did he fuck up his life?”

“Mmm, yeah, sure.”

“Good.”

“Good?”

“Verisimilitude and all that.”

“Right.”

“But I should let you know, John—and this might affect your next book—there is a reclamation project in the works.”

After I hang up on Hooper, I join my wife and her young boyfriend in the foyer. She is going through the pre-vacation litany, some of which is murmured gently, some of which is directed at Kerwin, who supplies the obligatory responses. “Yes, Veronica,” he says. “We have the tickets, Veronica.” I know that he means this usage of “Veronica” to impress upon me an urbane intimacy, but upon my ears it falls as clunkily as “Mrs. McQuigge.” Another doomed relationship.

“All right,” Veronica says, turning to me. “I guess that’s it.”

“Have a great time!”

“Yeah.” Ronnie nods, bites her bottom lip. “So you’ll pick up the kids after school?”

“Ronnie, I’ve done this before. I’ve executed my parental duties quite successfully for years. Just because you’re out of the country doesn’t mean I’m all of a sudden going to become irresponsible and ignore our daughters’ well-being.”

Ronnie nods, unconvinced, as well she might be, because the kids are in the back seat right now. Currer is fast asleep, the side of her head pressed against the window. Her sleep seems profound. I am reminded of this little factoid, that after police arrest a suspect, they throw him into a little room and watch what he does through a oneway mirror. Innocent people pace nervously; guilty people fall asleep. I’m not saying Currer has a guilty conscience, I’m saying there seems to be a sense of relief, of release. Ellis, on the other hand, is wide awake, caught up in the spirit of adventure. It was hard to spring Ellis out of the Big House. At Currer’s middle school, they handed her over without a fight. They didn’t even mind the vagueness of my plans, my lame explanation as to why she wouldn’t be attending for the rest of the week. “Family business,” was all I said, which, for all they knew, could mean that I intended to lock Currer up in a sweatshop and force her to operate some potentially lethal
steam-driven punch for seventeen hours a day. The women (there were three, but they seemed to function as a single entity) shrugged, flipped on the intercom and commanded Currer McQuigge to report to the office. At Ellis’s school, on the other hand, I encountered the fearsome Miss Ogilvy, whose hackles bolted upright at the irregularity of it all.

“She’ll be gone for the whole week?” Miss Ogilvy demanded, as though a week were some unit of geographical time that was but barely comprehensible to the human brain.

“Yes. But she’ll be back next Monday.”

“Next
Monday?”

“Er … yes.”

“Do you have a note from her mother?”

“Her mother is not
here.
Her mother is in
Mexico.”
I freighted that word mightily, managing to suggest the sordid libidinous behaviour that I was certain was ongoing, or would be as soon as the plane landed. I barely managed to suppress the phrase “with her young lover,” which would have been too slimy even for me.

Miss Ogilvy shook her head. “I’m not sure about all this.”

“But but… it’s by way of being an emergency.”

“Hmm. What sort of emergency?”

Ah, good question. The word “spiritual” sprang to mind, but it wouldn’t signify to Miss Ogilvy. “Medical” wouldn’t really work either—I knew that the battleship had already spotted Jay parked out front of the school in the 1970 Dodge Super Bee. The automobile was nothing but ancient brown metal and pimpled chrome. Jay sat in the driver’s seat, drumming his fingers with the suppressed anxiety of a wheelman at a bank job. “We have to go visit a sick relative in Thunder Bay,” I said tentatively.

“How sick?”

“Very sick.”

“Is this,” asked Miss Ogilvy, “a matter of life and death?”

“Yes! Yes, it goddam
is.”

“I know you can handle things,” Ronnie says, “but it’s a mother’s job to worry about her children.”

(I want to finish writing about what happened this morning, this scene with Ronnie and her lover Kerwin, the priapic student of philosophy. Then we’ll be caught up with the present, and there’s nothing but kilometres of empty highway ahead.)

I turn toward Kerwin. “So … which province of Mexico are you going to be in?”

“Oh, ah, say, I’m not sure.”

He’s got a slight accent, one I can’t place—at least, I couldn’t finger the country of origin on a map. Whichever country it is, Kerwin and his people come from the poncey upper crust.

“Wait a sec.” I snap my pudgy fingers. “Mexico doesn’t have provinces. It has states.”

“Right, right.”

“How many states does it have, again?”

“Um, ah, say, I’m not certain.”

“Phil …” This from Veronica.

“Thirty-one,” say I.

“Ah!”

“Thirty-one states and one federal district, let’s not forget that!”

“Philip, we are leaving now.” My wife flings her carry-on bag over her shoulder, picks up a valise, nods to Kerwin that he should deal with the big suitcase. It’s a huge thing. I think that when Ronnie packs for a week-long vacation, she thinks along these lines:
What if, while I’m away, there is a world war and near-total global annihilation, and I am forced to live out the rest of my life in some strange, desolate land?
That is why she has packed her entire wardrobe and most of the kitchen
appliances. Kerwin bends down to get the suitcase, but I beat him to it. I suppose my limbic brain is in action here; I lift the thing and start for the door, but what I really want to do is hoist it over my head and let out a few good monkey-hoots. Besides, I really don’t think he could manage it. Kerwin only weighs about eighty-three pounds.

Out the front door, down the steps—my shoulder is aching within seconds, and left to my own devices I would take a little rest, just a short twenty-minute one—and out onto the sidewalk. The limo driver wakes up with a start, pops the trunk, and between the four of us we get the luggage stowed away. Now it’s time for goodbyes, and I’m not at all sure how these are going to play out.

Kerwin offers his hand. He is a handsome enough lad, if that’s what you’re wondering, although the word “wan” springs to mind. “Wan” and “fey.” There is a Keatsian quality to him; he is pinch-chested and his skin is virtually transparent. Kerwin is in his late twenties but seems to have overstayed his life expectancy already—all right, I may be overstating the case, but I’m sensitive to such things. Veronica seems to be announcing to the world, “See? I really don’t like burly guys at all.” At any rate, I accept the proffered hand and squeeze with an ounce or two of unnecessary force, just enough to elicit the smallest, most fleeting of grimaces. I am very pleased.

I turn toward my estranged wife. Before I can say anything—not that I have anything to say—she kisses me on the lips. “When I get back,” she says, “we’ll talk.”

As soon as the airport limo takes the corner, the Dodge Super Bee’s engine howls and it crawls up the street to collect me.

“van der … Glick?”

“Now this is very interesting, friends, here on the line is none other than Philip McQuigge.”