Borderline Read online

  Felicity slipped out of her painting and moved discreetly among the navel-gazers, staring through the tropical hole in her guts along with them, listening to the comments. What does it mean? she heard on all sides. According to the guidebook, someone said, the view could be South India or the Queensland coast of Australia. Felicity considered sticking small flags into the canvas to mark the sites of her hometowns. If you scratch the crotch and sniff, someone said, you can smell papaya.

  No touching, please! called a guard.

  There was a stain on the floor below the painting.

  Felicity mingled with the crowd as it flowed toward the exit turnstiles. Escape was at the forefront of her mind. Passports, passports, the border guard said, and people held their documents ready for showing. Scrutiny, rubber stamp, pass on, that was the routine. But there was something wrong with Felicity’s passport; a visa lacking, or a hole in the middle of her photograph. Step aside, she was told. Wait here.

  Once the inspector arrived, it was all over. You again, he said, back you go. The man with the brush was waiting as usual and they pasted her back on the canvas, flattening the curves, elongating here, twisting there, making free with the placing of her eyes. She had not even settled herself properly around the empty space — through which the surf hissed and writhed — when the frame was clanged shut around her. Locked. All borders in place. The man with the keys shook the bunch in front of her face.

  Felicity woke in a sweat.

  Her lover had turned in his sleep and flung an arm across her breasts. She was pinned beneath him. Through the grid of her lashes and across the curved foreground of her cheeks, she could see the delicate hairs, luminous from the street lamp, crosshatching his arm muscle. A novel perspective — though perhaps it had been done in one of da Vinci’s anatomical sketchbooks.

  Her lover’s body pleased her. She could sing it entirely from memory, curve by curve. She loved the taste of its hollows. For years now they had met here and slept here, a comfortable non-commitment. As she eased herself out, she kissed the flesh of his inner forearm — it was vulnerable and sweet — and the small tattoo that had been done in Korea and that tasted of knapsack musk and the 1950s and the Marines. Smooth as a salamander, she slipped past the tips of his fingers. No! he moaned in his sleep, groping at the air, but she tiptoed barefoot to the chair by the window and put on her clothes. The street lamp threw wings of white light on her shoulders, her dress fluttered and sighed. Nothing was left out of place: his shoes black as glass and his woollen socks under the chair, the pinstripe suit, charcoal grey, neatly folded, the silk tie quiet as a furled snake. Everything spoke of regret. In stockinged feet she slithered down to the street.

  A deserted city at this hour, all her own. She loved it this way. On the bridge over the Charles River a man wrapped in newspapers whispered fond words to a bottle of Five Star whiskey. The concrete railings listened. Felicity thought of temple steps and beggars, another life. An emaciated hand with a begging bowl reached out through the windy space at her navel. She drove on through the dimly lit streets to her own apartment.

  The phone was ringing when she entered.

  “Felicity,” her lover said. His name was Aaron. “I can’t stand this anymore. I’m leaving my wife.”

  “I was afraid you were going to say that. I had a premonition.”

  “I’m coming over,” he said.

  “No! No, please don’t do that.”

  She knew he was bitterly hurt. “If you knew the cost of this decision,” he reproached. “The children. The chaos.”

  “I know.” She was speaking gently, she felt relieved. “We cannot have that on our conscience. I won’t let you do it.”

  “But we can’t go on like this. We can’t.”

  “No. We’ll have to end it.”

  They did this once or twice a year, for greater or lesser periods of time. Rehearsals for termination. Eventually, no doubt, one of their abeyances would ripen into a permanent rift.

  Nevertheless she would leave town for a few days in case he did anything rash. There was always a certain amount of grief to contend with, the knack of solitude to be reacquired. She roamed barefoot around her apartment, her own territory, free. She touched her arrangement of arcana: the Queensland conch shell; the sandalwood figure that smelled of monsoons; the lovers drifting in an ivory embrace; the photograph of her father — he was on a beach mending nets; and the one of the mother she had never known — a woman in white, walking away from the camera. (They were married under a frangipani tree, Felicity’s parents. But there is no photograph of the wedding. Noone in Trivandrum had a camera at the time.) And there is Seymour’s portrait of her: the two eyes floating out of a sea of blues, one eye higher than the other. Below the eyes there is a suggestion of a woman’s body, more an echo of one really, a sort of lapis lazuli shape swimming up through aquamarine — as though Seymour had layered his way into abstraction. The painting is called The Ghost of Happiness.

  She turned to look at her reflection in the mirror. Her eyes, the right one slightly higher than the left, stared back. I am often distressed, she confessed to them, by the gulf between experience and the possibility of representing it in any medium other than memory.

  Felicity, Seymour still says to anyone who asks (and of course they often do), is the sanest, the most real, the most ideal of all the women I have known.

  Look at her, he says, when she’s talking. The way she cannot refrain from touching: her listener, her own hair, the coat sleeve of the gentleman beside her. She lives at the tips of her senses.

  And a cunt made for fucking, he sighs fondly (his hand on his interviewer’s knee), a purely sensual being.

  He slides his hand up to the interviewer’s thigh.

  Of course, he murmurs, muffled, into the valley between his interviewer’s breasts, I rarely see her anymore, but still …

  It is a matter of personal honour with him that an interviewer leave dishevelled. He is particular about interviews, rarely granting them. Wrong place, wrong time, wrong sex, he once snapped at Mr K, the well-known art critic.

  As the latest interviewer, flushed, her pupils dilated, is collecting her notes and clothing, Seymour lights a cigarette and sighs: Felicity ruined me for other women.

  Felicity contemplated her lopsided eyes in the mirror.

  Once upon a time, she remembered, Seymour had said: “I prefer the irregular.”

  “Well, I’m certainly that,” she had laughed. She was just a green girl and blushing. “My entire history. Nobody even believes it’s real.”

  “Anything’s real once I’ve painted it,” he said.

  But it was his afterthought, so casually added, that seduced her: “I knew your father. Before he went chasing God.”

  Felicity turned from the mirror of her past and opened her bedroom window. She watched the dawn leak between the buildings and into the streets and the sky, a capillary action of amber. Sadness oppressed her, and she felt an urgent need to flee it. She needed to be on the road, on the move, defying another border.

  I will spend the weekend at the cottage outside Montreal, she decided. She felt better immediately.

  She showered and did her exercises.

  She stepped into a pale blue sundress and a pair of sandals and went out to buy fresh rolls for breakfast. The phone was ringing as she left. Oh Aaron, she sighed, pausing, the key in her hand. But she decided not to answer it.

  5

  “Jean-Marc,” Felicity used to say to me, “you are the world’s most patient person.”

  Perhaps it’s true. One note at a time, that is my credo.

  There are days, however, when I feel like Hercules emptying the ocean with a shell. Today, for example: two pianos, both recalcitrant. The first was a Boston Chickering about fifty years old, a fine old instrument, though much abused. God knows how it ended up in the home of a Montreal building contractor, but he is nouveau riche and believes a grand piano gives class. He lets his children bang the hell out of
it. I had considerable difficulty repairing the action in the middle range, not that a soul in that house would know the difference.

  Still, I have infinite patience. When I left, the jangled air was noticeably unsnarled. Tonight tranquillity will take the building contractor by surprise; it will seep into his thoughts like a perfume remembered. Such is harmony, the science of proper alignments. There is no problem too great for mathematics and the tuning fork.

  Kathleen sat in a corner and watched while I worked. She dreams and smiles; when she thinks of her father she grows pensive until I say something paternal, and at such times I could live off the look in her eyes. I have discovered that admiration sustains — and also, I suppose, corrupts. When she goes off to college … well, I have begun to think of September as eclipse, which is foolishness, since she will be here at McGill and I will certainly offer my services as mentor and tutor. I ply her with books. The temptation to mould her is immense, though misunderstood by her mother and the formidable Aunt Marthe. I imagine a visit from the latter, her eyebrows knitting together like offended caterpillars: What are your intentions? she will demand.

  It’s a question I ask myself.

  In his studio the Old Volcano smirks. He laughs up his sleeve. He guffaws.

  I have explained the craft of “tempering” to Kathleen because it applies to this attempt to set things down.

  Piano tuning, I’ve told her, is both a science and an art (though not an art in the flamboyant and egotistical sense. Not the Old Volcano’s style at all).

  It is a science in that it follows exact mathematical laws: 440 cycles per second for the note of A. I strike the tuning fork, I strike the note, I show her how I bring the vibrations into agreement. When the two sets of sound waves are in flawless alignment (like two bodies locked in sublimely mutual climax), the A is tuned to perfect concert pitch. Then I turn to the fifths and the thirds, making precise mathematical emendations. I tap, I listen, I adjust the pins, I am priest of austere and inviolable computations.

  But here is the crux.

  When the octave is complete, each note mathematically infallible, the scale a paradigm of accuracy in beats per second, the total effect may nevertheless not sound “right” to the genuinely musical ear. To the sophisticated ear. The ear of the initiate.

  This is where tempering comes in.

  This is where art and intuition and musicality apply.

  This is what distinguishes the master piano tuner from the mere technician.

  An octave may need to be “stretched” to the minutest degree, a fifth augmented, a third softened. There are no guidelines now. Tuning forks and mathematics are useless. The tastes of a concert pianist must be taken into account, the pulse of a hall or a room taken, a quantum leap made into the souls of the composer and the performer and the tuner, into their dark corners and most secret desires. The absolutely accurate is too narrow; it is false and imperfect. I am after something more organic: the truth. Which, as Oscar Wilde said, is never pure and rarely simple. I am after the whole of it, the messy unpresentable fantasies, I am going for the well-tempered heart of the matter.

  This afternoon: an ancient and magnificent Steinway in one of the Westmount mansions. I wanted to be alone with it (they are so highly strung) and was very annoyed that a maid kept coming into the room to dust, to arrange the flowers, to bring me tea on a silver tray. Exasperating.

  Though I confess my state of mind was not the best from the start. During lunch there was a contretemps with Aunt Marthe on the telephone. Kathleen thought it wiser to go home. Aunt Marthe does not approve of me. He may have a French name, she sniffs (so Kathleen tells me), but his heart is anglais. Perhaps this was why I had such trouble with the Steinway, why there was so much interference. But eventually I pulled concord from the old strings and pins, my gift to the mansion’s chatelaine who was a frail sparrow of a woman in her eighties. When I left she took my hand in both of hers; they were trembling; thank you, she said, and then went on saying it. Thank you, thank you, thank you. A fitting sense of priorities, I thought. It is not after all a small thing. Only consider: the entire cacophonous universe could be tuned. This is a mathematical possibility and a great comfort, requiring only infinite patience.

  I proceed note by note.

  Kathleen and I have pooled our knowledge.

  This is what I have done: the phone calls, such dates as we can vouch for, the occurrences real or believed to be real, have all been committed to file cards, a box full of three-by-five-inch information. The cards have been shuffled into chronological sequence. It was satisfying, this ordering and shaping of memory. Three lives on tap. The bald facts.

  But the bald facts do not make sense, of themselves.

  Now is the time to breathe life into them, to examine the dynamics and harmonics, to look for patterns, resonances, meaning. Time for tempering the data. Time to begin at the beginning of the events that led up to the disappearances — well before I met Kathleen or her father. Before I was aware of their existence.

  6

  For Gus (christened Augustine, which he detested, by a pious mother) the border was a source of trepidation (what wasn’t?) but also something of a reprieve, a compulsory delay while he took stock of the weather of his emotions. Forecast: instability. A clouded future. He was groping through anxieties: overdrafts, mortgage renewal, the stink of adultery on his underclothes, the dread of Therese’s sharp nose, a rainbow of guilts — and all in pitched battle with a valiant little guerrilla flank of self-confidence, a novelty this, his fix from the sales conference. Success, success: it could be pulled from the air like dandelion puffs. So the speakers had promised.

  At the checkpoint he was handed his duty-free liquor, a fifth of Scotch. As soon as he was through with formalities he would pull over to the shoulder of the road and imbibe comfort, just a little, to calm his nerves. A few more minutes and he would be through — although the crack in his windshield (courtesy of a stone on the turnpike) seemed to leer and promise delays. Border nervousness, habitual, drizzled into his thoughts. Not that he should expect trouble. After all, he was crossing north, he was coming back in. He expected any Canadian immigration officer to share his relief: home is the sailor, and the sheep to the fold, and the fellow citizen to safe haven; unscathed, unmugged, unseduced by kinder taxes south of the border.

  On the other hand, difficulties would not surprise Gus unduly. Sooner or later he would be caught and punished for something, his dreams were full of disaster. He knew what caused this. His pathology had been defined in amazing detail only yesterday, in the conference room of the Grand Hyatt in New York: negative thinking. The source, said the speaker, of all evil. Gus knew he was addicted. This came from being Catholic and Canadian; no one could say it didn’t make a difference.

  Ahead of him, like the monitoring eyes of electronic confessionals, the control-point lights blinked a summons. Only two of the six lanes were open, and as the blonde woman in the sporty Datsun ahead of him veered right into the neighbouring line, he slowed to a halt behind a refrigeration van with “Beckett’s for Meat” emblazoned across its rear doors.

  Weird blue, he thought of the Datsun, eyeing its driver. Custom colour, custom female, classy, both out of his bracket. The woman must have been wearing a strapless sundress, or else one of those things with shoulder-straps thin as spun sugar. From Gus’s angle of vision she appeared naked, her tanned arms amber and tempting as duty-free whiskey. The blue of her car sang an exotic jazz note, disturbing. He thought of cornflowers.

  (Not blue, Felicity would tell him in a near future as yet inconceivable. Lapis lazuli.)

  Ahead of the woman with cornsilk hair and her excessively blue Datsun, a Winnebago with Ontario plates sprouted weekend fishermen. They were perhaps inebriated, not given to meekness, and they appeared to be having minor troubles. As did the Beckett’s Meat man. Ah well, Gus sighed, dreaming of his Scotch, what else could one expect of those poor buggers in Customs and Immigration, obliged as they were to
sit in a sort of upright coffin and wear ties in this summer’s heat? Soon he would be through. He readied his driver’s licence.

  Business or pleasure? the man would ask.

  Pleasure, that scalding word. Probably the man had X-ray eyes, probably he could smell philanderers from three cars away. Gus fidgeted with his ID; its corners were curled and dog-eared. But did you take pleasure, my son, in your impure thoughts?

  Gus would lodge a not guilty plea: Business, sir.

  But suppose the man persisted? Suppose he smirked: And what exactly was the nature of your business?

  If that happened, it was entirely possible that Gus would answer like an obedient Christian Brothers schoolboy: I cheated on my wife (though it was nothing, it meant nothing, an open and shut case of sexual starvation, what legs she had!). I am guilty. I took pleasure. Forgive me, Father.

  He raked his fingers through his thinning hair, gave his head a shake, flinging off irritations. He concentrated on the carnations he would give to his wife. Thinking positively. Also there were the gifts for his four children. He cradled the fifth of Scotch and its duty-free pink slip on his knees. He held his driver’s licence between his teeth. He was ready.

  At about that moment, the strangeness began.

  The driver of the Beckett’s Meat van got down from his cabin. He pushed back his Boston Red Sox baseball cap, gesticulating, asking the August sky to bear witness to bureaucratic insanity. Untouched, buttressed by uniform and badge, the officer indicated that an opening of the rear doors was necessary. Demurral. Argument. A crossfire of anger. For God’s sake, man, Gus thought irritably, just do it and let’s all get moving again. But the Beckett’s man leaned his back against his doors, a martyr for Small Business, the Massachusetts plate glaring from between his straddled legs. He gazed heavenward, a real ham. Mouthed at Gus through the cracked windshield: Jesus! and spread his hands in an elaborate gesture of despair. The gesture said: This is the way they get their kicks, poor bastards.