Famous Last Meals Read online

  While they ate she told him about the survey she was conducting. She asked her respondents, residents of a riding in Halifax, about their ethnic background, household income, number of children, extended family, spending habits, religious affiliation, moral beliefs, what they thought about various social issues, and how they felt about authority. Her goal was to get five hundred replies. She assured those who answered that their names would not be recorded, that she was compiling aggregate data only, and that it was for use in a wider study of the impact of federal policies on

  their community.

  “Do you tell them where you’re calling from?”

  “I say I’m doing an independent survey for the Kent Hulse Tackeberry Institute for Policy Studies.”

  “What if someone calls your bluff or traces the call?”

  “One, I hang up. Two, the lines we use can’t be traced. Do you want to know where the name comes from?”

  “A law firm.”

  “No, my first boyfriend was Kent Bradley. Hulse was my dog when I was but a wee thing. He got smushed by a bus. And when I was learning to skate I wanted boys’ hockey skates, so my mother bought me a second-hand pair of Tacks. Top drawer!”

  “You should tell people the truth.”

  “Lorne and Monica want their answers to be as free of authority-taint as possible. The minute you tell them you’re PMO you’ve lost the unguarded response. We don’t want them second-guessing themselves. ‘What does she want me to say? Why is the PMO interested in this?’ And so on.”

  She told him that she had been the new PS, Lorne Childs’s star pupil at Brown while he was the Stanley Knowles Distinguished Visitor lecturing on parliamentary procedure. Born in Canada and raised in the States—her parents still lived near Duluth—she had dual citizenship. She was living with an aunt and uncle in Sandy Hill for the summer. Lorne knew bright, talented, delightful and easy-on-the-eyes when he had it beaming at him from the front row of the lecture hall, thought Adam.

  When he returned from lunch he had a note from Monica asking him to see her in her office. Monica Castelli looked like a ballerina, a principal dancer who, at the age of 30 and because of injury or stiffening joints, was moving into the next stage of her life, a new career built upon the foundation of her beauty and poise. The way she carried herself and the way she spoke came from what he thought of as a refinement now rare even among those who purported to be the ambassadors and purveyors of culture. Her style and sense of self were Old World. That she presented herself with such quiet grace was all the more remarkable given the world she worked in, the single-malt, leather-upholstered, Cuban-cigar club in which power was bought, or snatched, then wielded, subtly, in the pursuit of more, or crudely like a bludgeon in Question Period and the committee rooms. Monica Castelli was either shrewder than she let on or, as Pookie believed, she had caught the eye of an old Party rainmaker.

  Monica asked him how the work was progressing. Was there anything he needed or needed to know, anything that had come up in his research? No, he said, he couldn’t think of anything just then, but would be sure to ask.

  “You’re doing a great job on Water, by the way.”

  “I am? I mean, thanks. There’s so much more I—”

  “In fact, you’re doing so well that we want you to take on something new. Switch over, actually, to work on exclusively. Do you think you can handle it?”

  I don’t even know what it is. How can I say? “Sure thing.”

  “Good. We want you to do a study of the federal presence in the riding of Halifax Citadel. What government programs are in place there, how effective they are, how long they’ve been going, that sort of thing.”

  “What about Water?”

  “Move it to the back burner for now. We need this information very soon. Day after tomorrow. Are you up to it?”

  He told her that he was, but left without asking why she needed the study and without making the link between what he would be doing and the survey Pookie was working on. Halifax. It might as well have been one of Jupiter’s moons.

  He returned to his desk and tried to see himself as others in the office did, but nothing gelled. Even Beverley from Lethbridge, who had quit after the first week to work for Greenpeace, seemed to belong there more than Adam did. Everything Beverley said had a political component. She had seen what sour-gas well contamination was doing to ranchers like her father and uncles.

  He wasn’t like Alberta Bev and he wasn’t like the Quebec contingent, either, who approached their internship at the PMO the way a member of Hamas approaches training with Mossad. They huddled in each other’s offices, intently debating the question of their province’s sovereignty. He wished there was something he could love as much as Eugène loved the crooning songs of Old Blue Eyes or his compatriots loved their province-nation or Beverley loved the West and the natural world. Everyone seemed committed to something: Pookie to the pursuit of pleasurable social intercourse; Emma Henry, a politics major, to making as many career contacts as possible before the summer was over; and Isaac Koehler, the son of a deputy premier, to making as few mistakes as possible. Isaac was sure that his father was aware of everything Isaac did.

  “He’s got my phone bugged, I just know it.”

  “It’s not your dad who’s listening,” said Emma. “Trust me.”

  Emma had nothing in excess. It wasn’t that her face was tired looking or drawn. She had no dark circles under her eyes or crow’s feet at the corners. The skin of her face looked as if someone had stretched a fine thin parchment over a delicate frame. She made Adam think of bone china, ivory in colour with gold edges in a precisely scalloped line.

  He was sitting by himself on a bench, eating a sandwich and reading John Fowles’ The Magus, when Emma sat beside him. She lit a cigarette. Her teeth and the fingers of her right hand were discoloured but in a gilt-edged sort of way. She inhaled furtively, blowing the smoke upward and away from him. He had yet to see her eat anything. A protective urge overcame him, a strange feeling because he knew almost nothing about her.

  “I’m keeping an eye on you,” she said. “We don’t quite have a bead on you yet.”

  “A bead?”

  “They’re not sure who you are and what you’re doing here. Can’t be too careful, you know: spies, infiltration from the other side.” He pondered her shift from “we” to “they.” “I’m almost a hundred percent sure you’re harmless.”

  “Oh? I’m kind of disappointed. And how do you know I’m harmless?”

  “Well, for one thing, you haven’t gone to see Lorne yet.”

  “Are we supposed to?”

  “No, not officially, but everyone else has. Lorne paves the way. He writes the exit letters.”

  He hadn’t thought of this. He remembered his father mentioning something to this effect, but had assumed that, like a teacher putting end-of-year comments on a report card, Lorne Childs would automatically write recommendations for everybody in the “class” and that there would be an egalitarian flavour to the process.

  “This is what I was saying earlier. You all have a sense for this kind of thing. I don’t. It’s like I’m missing a piece of clockwork in my head. Every day I come to work, make my calls, write my reports, but I can’t wait for lunchtime so that I can read some more of this book.”

  He thought about Fowles’ main character, Nicholas Urfe, the young Englishman caught up in the mysterious world controlled by Conchis, the Magus, and about the women in the story, the way they were unpredictable pawns, erotic functionaries in the puppet master’s elaborate psychological game. In a way, he imagined, Pookie and Emma were like these Gemini, except that there was nothing similar about them. They were like two opposite halves completing a whole: Emma, watchful, calculating, efficient, bold: rumour had it that she had slipped into an elevator with the PM before the doors could close, and in the brief course of ascending three floors had t
old him her name, background and present duties; and Pookie, sensual, overflowing, radiant, magnetic: her interest in people seemed wholly genuine and selfless. He was beginning to think that he wanted them both, at the same time, and somewhere as hot and shimmering white against royal blue as the island of Phraxos. All that water. There was a reason why he was spending so much time reading and writing about water. Water is sustaining. It can kill. It makes a barrier daring us to cross. Warm enough, salty enough, it becomes a womb in which one can float, thoughtless, like a foetus.

  Emma handed the book back. “I read this doorstop. Sexist male fantasy bullshit. Trust me. This guy wouldn’t know a real woman if she fell on him.”

  On a sunny Saturday after a week of drizzle, they all went to the house that one of the interns, Gilles, was renting for the summer. It was a small cottage on the Quebec side of the river and it had once been owned by Jack Pickersgill. Adam borrowed the family car, drove across the Macdonald-Cartier Bridge, got lost, asked three people for directions, got three different answers, and arrived forty-five minutes late.

  A charcoal barbeque smouldered at the side of the house, and nearby a picnic table was set for lunch. Everyone was crammed into two rooms, a tiny kitchen and a front parlour taken up by Gilles’ ten-speed, a large armoire that partially blocked the view of the river, an antique sofa upholstered in red velvet, and teetering buttes of books piled on the floor.

  They were all talking at once, gesturing with beer bottles and free hands. Not wishing to appear clannish by moving immediately through to the other room, where the English-speakers had gathered, Adam stayed near the kitchen door and listened. He understood more than he expected he would. The gist was that Don Feeney, the PM’s former Principal Secretary, was running for Parliament in a by-election in the riding of Halifax Citadel, and the intern office was now a de facto campaign force.

  Pookie came in from the other room, slipped her arm under Gilles’ and gave him a nuzzling kiss under one ear. Smug bastard, thought Adam, you hardly acknowledge her presence. She was clearly gone on the boy, who didn’t deserve her despite the evidence of breeding in his strong nose, sharp cheekbones and expensive clothes: pressed tan slacks, sky-blue shirt of Oxford broadcloth with a button-down collar open at the neck, and brown leather deck shoes. He had one hand thrust into a roomy pocket. He said something that sounded, after translation, like, “Pigs don’t swim unless called upon to

  do so.”

  Pookie came over to say hello to Adam. “You’ve heard?”

  “It explains Feeney, Manitoba. What’s he going to do, give a speech there?”

  “He’s launching the campaign there, actually. As far as anyone knows, he has no connection to the town, wasn’t born there, hasn’t any family there. Not an impediment to the plan, apparently.”

  “So he’ll get up on his hind legs in the Feeney Legion Hall and tell them all just how impoverished their lives would be without federal government programs.”

  “Quelque-chose comme ça, oui.”

  “Are we all supposed to go?” He pictured the two of them canvassing together, stopping for a beer and a bowl of clam chowder on the waterfront, telling each other things they had never told anyone else.

  “I’m not sure. Nobody’s heard anything official yet. Just what Ben knows.” Ben, still in high school, worked in the Labour Minister’s office and had heard about Feeney’s imminent announcement from one of the secretaries there.

  “Don’t you feel—I don’t know—used? All that work you put into that survey. It seems sneaky.”

  “Duplicitous.”

  “Manipulative.”

  “Underhanded.”

  “Heavy-handed!”

  “You really are naïve, aren’t you, Adam. I knew I wasn’t conducting a census.”

  “You didn’t tell them who you really were.”

  “This is politics. What did you think we were doing here, candy-striping?”

  “No, I didn’t think that. It’s just...I thought the PMO would be involved in...”

  “Matters of state, diplomacy, drafting high-minded legislation.”

  “Yes.”

  “My dear green-gilled boy. You can’t do any of that if you’re not in power, and you stay in power by holding onto more seats than your opponents.”

  Why Halifax? It was timely, she said. The incumbent was retiring for health reasons and the by-election would be held in time for the winner to be inducted at the beginning of the fall session of the House. And it was a safe seat.

  “A shoo-in,” she said. “A lot of new immigrants have moved into that riding recently. They see the Party name and they think “freedom.” Right away they’re embracing us. Think about it. For most of them, anything is better than what they left back home. They come here, they think, “I will become a new Canadian, I will exercise my franchise, I may even join this here political club, although, remembering who tends to get rounded up in the middle of the night, most of them forgo membership. They wave a flag on July 1st, pay their taxes on time, send as much of what’s left as they can afford to their loved ones, and try their darnedest to get them over here to live. We’ve never known that desperation. We’ll probably never know their urgency. We grew up stupid, Adam, stupid and complacent and happy.”

  He studied her face for a moment. Clearly he had misjudged her. She was more complicated and worldly than he had first thought.

  Monday after work they attended a reception for the incoming Principal Secretary in a room off Confederation Hall in the Centre Block. It was a chance for everyone to meet Lorne and for the summer students to have a taste of the grander side of Wellington Street. Adam stood talking to Pookie, Eugène and Isaac, who wiped his brow with the cuff of his shirt every few minutes and repeated that the PM himself was supposed to make an appearance. “What do I say if he asks me a question?”

  “Try your best, Isaac,” said Pookie.

  “But I don’t know anything.”

  “It doesn’t stop most MPs,” she said.

  Lorne spotted Pookie from across the room, came over and draped an arm around her shoulders, giving the far one a fatherly squeeze. She leaned into it, resting her head briefly against his chest. She was smiling in that hilarious way of hers, which to the uninitiated made her look as if she were on the verge of tears.

  Lorne was in a dark, pinstriped three-piece suit. He had a natty sense of style, a step up the fashion ladder from academic tweed and intellectual distraction, but not quite displaying the PM’s flair. Lorne Childs looked as if he would be as comfortable in a Bay Street boardroom as on the dais of an Ivy League lecture theatre.

  He said hello and asked after Adam’s father. “How do you like the work so far?”

  “I’m enjoying it. I’m not sure about what we’re doing, though.”

  “What we’re doing.”

  “The PMO using its resources to put the person it wants into Parliament.”

  “This is a partisan office, Adam. We’re not Canada Revenue.”

  “I know. It still doesn’t seem right to me. I think Don Feeney should have to go the route every other candidate does.”

  “The PMO helps in the campaigns of many candidates in the party. I assumed you knew that.” He looked as if Adam had suggested that the entire democratic system had collapsed. He began panning the room, looking for someone else to talk to.

  Adam looked at the empty Champagne flute in his hand and couldn’t remember draining it.

  The PM, taller than Adam expected he would be, was making his way closer. Adam felt Lorne beside him stretching in anticipation. He thought about sweaty Isaac and his anxiety over not knowing what to say to the leader. Adam had already said something and it had been more than enough. Lorne probably had him pegged for an imbecile. His future on the Hill was now officially null. He imagined that Lorne had communicated Adam’s pronouncement, either telepathically or v
ia a sophisticated electronic device, to the PM. He was convinced that the PM was going to ask him the same question. “So, Adam Lerner, you don’t think it’s a good idea for the PMO to be a politically partisan body. You would prefer something like the Governor General’s retinue, I take it, a household of servants in powdered wigs and velvet breeches, people whose ancestors stretching back many generations did precisely what their descendants are doing today. You would replace a cornerstone of our parliamentary system with something static and elitist. Am I reading you correctly on this? Can we even assume that you would allow the Prime Minister to remain a member of a political party or would you abolish that privilege as well?”

  The great man was getting closer. To leave the reception now, before the leader did, would be the worst kind of insult, and yet that was exactly what Adam felt he had to do before he expired on the spot. The room felt airless, Death Valley hot. Pookie was whispering something in Lorne’s bent ear. Isaac was talking to Emma. They seemed relaxed, even Isaac, who appeared resigned to his fate. The PM was talking in French to Eugène, Gilles and Jean-Marc, who had Che Guevara’s dark looks and radical opinions. They laughed at something the PM had said. Adam looked at the exit. A large plainclothes RCMP officer in a dark blue suit was standing there, an earplug leading to a wire running under the collar of his jacket. Dark sunglasses in the chandelier-bright room. Deadly force. Would he even let him leave?

  He caught Pookie’s eye and gave her a brief finger-riffling wave so as not to draw the attention of the others. She smiled and returned the wave. He took a breath, held it, released it and walked out. The man at the door made no movement. Adam did not look back to see if the policeman was following him or whispering something urgent into his wrist.

  Adam looked past Emma and saw metal wing and a section of sky. Cloud cover hid the ground.

  She ordered a beer and after downing it in a few quick swallows wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. He was fascinated that she could still speak clearly after consuming the drink as if it had been a glass of water.