Sunshine Sketches of a Rat-Infested Shitbox

Wonnacott had locked the door from the inside and placed the papier-mâché bust of Canada’s greatest literary criminal in the barred window. He pictured the police snipers, strategically positioned on rooftops along Park Street, taking aim, mistaking one dummy for another.

Wonnacott removed his shoes and then the ancient Robes of State. But the mortarboard stayed. A nice touch. He went to the bed and pushed it to one side, quickly stripping the mattress. This was much better that the authors’ dinner, better by half than all the authors’ dinners in the world.

Wonnacott pushed the mattress to the floor and lay down on it. From here, he could see out the window, past the vacant lot across the street and over and through the houses and off to the shadows of Lake Couchiching. He lay the Indian gun across his chest like an olde tyme sheriff.

It had been easy enough to get back in. After he blew off the conference, he drove back to the Park House. Turner met him at the door in pyjamas, clearly impatient but not willing to appear impolite to a man who, let’s face it, was a minor celebrity in the country. A simple ruse (“I’m afraid I left my chapbook upstairs”) and a furtive glace at the Indian gun and that was it.

Wonnacott stood and whipped off his pants.

He found the switch to the overhead light, turned it off, then lay back on the bed again. He could hear the front door creak open and the irrational chatter from the street below as the Turners brought their neighbours up to date. Who knows what this man might do, they were saying; he was, after all a writer, and capable of anything.

The lamp beside the bed illuminated the room, casting monster shadows on the walls. Wonnacott reached up and shut off the lamp. The room went dark. He could just see the flames rising from the Mariposa Belle.

Go big or stay home.

He closed his eyes and waited for the rats to come.

. . .

They’d spent the summer here together just after they first met. She worked as a cook in a day camp; he’d landed a job as a provincial enumerator. It was nostalgia that brought him back and nothing else. By now, Wonnacott had had his fill of these literary conferences: grey-haired men with last year’s soup on their ties, leaning too close with their coffee breath to make hideous puns or ask him if he’d ever actually met Pierre Berton. This one promised to be more odious than most — The Muse of Laughter: Sunshine Sketches of Stephen Leacock. It was inevitable; a middle-aged male writer with some reputation for wit could go only so far before being asked to deliver a lecture on Leacock, Canada’s official dullard laureate.

Wonnacott had wondered if the rooming house on Park Street was still standing. The Park House, they’d called it twenty years earlier, when it had been a curious hybrid, a cross between a firetrap and a dump, a dirty, peeling friend to wood-worm and carpenter ant, the kind of place that only a pair of twenty-three- year-olds in love could find romantic. There were mice (every so often they’d find one floating in what passed for the kitchen sink with last night’s soaking dishes) and rats (the first night Thérèse caught one climbing out of her boot; she impaled it on a bread knife when it tried to hide behind the icebox) and raccoons (a nest in the attic, beside the wasps’ nest, not far from the covey of bats that daylighted upside-down on the cross-beams). The entire house death-rattled whenever someone flushed the ancient commode (rumoured to have survived the Peloponnesian Wars) or turned on the hot water without first turning on the cold or opened a tap on the top floor without shutting down the outflow valve for the storm sewer in the basement. The house death-rattled whenever the wind blew west from Lake Couchiching or north from Lake Simcoe or down from Washago, Muskoka or North Bay; when someone threw a rock into Shannon Bay, the sewers backed up; when someone had a glass of beer on Grape Island, the whole house teetered in sympathy. But it was summer and they were in love.

The landlady’s name was Grace, but they called her dis-Grace because her own squalid room was filled with cat shit and bags of garbage, and she herself was half-cut on rye by lunch time and passed out in her housecoat and nylons by supper. They cooked their meals, canned soup, mostly, on a Sterno hotplate they stored in the clothes closet (no cooking in the rooms, Grace was firm on that), and slept on a pile of sleeping bags on the floor with one or several of Grace’s cats keeping them company, and made acrobatic love in every conceivable position, on every conceivable stick of furniture, at every conceivable time of day, taking special care that their screams of ecstasy could be heard no further than four blocks away. They were impossibly happy.

. . .

Friday night. Wonnacott had checked into his room at the Mariposa Belle. Like Leacock’s famously unfunny ship, the hotel had seen better days, half sunk, half run aground, the embodiment of middle age. Beside the reception desk, behind a glass case, a marbly bust of the great man sat on a wood pedestal, adorned with a black mortarboard, while inexplicable judicial robes hung as backdrop. In the corner was a cracked blunderbuss; “Leacock’s Indian Gun,” read the handwritten caption. There was a picture of the great man himself behind the desk, a rather too brown-and-blue portrait that bore the stench of commission. In one hand, Leacock held a book, a leathery, reptile tome; his other was hooked on his vest in that jaunty pose academics sometimes affect. His wispy hair writhed in grey and black serpents, more like the real-life Mark Twain than the real-life Stephen Leacock: perhaps the artist was trying to draw a comparison. For Wonnacott, the painting was a reminder of kind of failure that had come to define his country: Canada, the second-rate sketch writer, puffing and preening in the hope that it would be mistaken for a first-rate novelist.

But his room was clean and quiet and afforded a decent view. He’d plugged a little hotplate, just for old time’s sake, into the octopus outlet behind the TV, and lay on the super single. He could see the wharf at Centennial Park and Veteran’s Park beyond it and beyond that Pumpkin Bay. He could see the rock at the tip of Heward’s Point, where he and Thérèse once made love, stopping only momentarily as a convoy of paddle-boating tourists flustered by. He got up and stepped onto the little balcony and looked north. He was too close to the water to see Park Street, but there, across the road in Couchiching Beach Park, was the Champlain Monument, commemorating a brief visit the Father of New France had made to the area in the summer of 1615. Once upon a time, under the light of an August moon, Thérèse stripped naked on its steps. She brought herself off, not allowing him to touch her, not allowing him to touch himself. If he so much as moved, she stopped, and would not start again until he promised to sit dead still. It was the single most erotic moment of his life. Wonnacott checked his printed itinerary. He was expected in the Lakeshore Room at six-thirty for a No-Host Reception. That gave him a little less than an hour. He lay on the bed, he quickly undressed.

. . .

He’d promised himself to save Park Street for Saturday afternoon. There was an Authors’ Breakfast in the morning, and he wasn’t needed again until he gave his keynote speech at the formal dinner that evening. That left the afternoon free. But the reception had been all but unbearable and he’d drunk too much. The walk would do him good.

For most of the reception he’d been pinned like a collected butterfly to a back wall along with the other authors, none of whom he liked or respected or, for that matter, had ever even bothered to read. There was Humphries, an unpleasant Upper Canadian in his mid-hundreds who’d written a scathing exposé on Dieppe (apparently, a lot of young men had been slaughtered needlessly), whose place at the conference was never satisfactorily explained, and a floating, perch-like academic who, between his doubtlessly fumbling attempts to seduce eighteen-year-old dowagers and his all-consuming habit of cultivating dandruff, had managed to find the time to write a humourless monograph on the function of wit in the academic writings of his honour, Lord Leacock. The crowning dung on the heap was a middle-aged woman in a knitted shawl who repeatedly referred to herself as “a poetess,” although, as near as Wonnacott could tell, she was a high school English teacher who’d once been banged by Irving Layton. She was Official Laureate of the conference, which meant, Wonnacott suspected, that the local paper would inflict one of her turdy little poems commemorating the event on its readers. Let’s see, what rhymes with flatulent?

Wonnacott fielded the usual questions as Dutton, the beagle-faced administrator — who ran the conference with military precision — fed him scotch and ice. Yes, he’d been to Pierre Berton’s house. No, he didn’t know Margaret Atwood. Someone, a gentle former grad student named Mervin or Morris or something, even launched into a detailed appreciation of Wonnacott’s earliest and most deservedly obscure work, Flowers for the Sewer, elaborating on the book’s conflicting themes (love and death) and commenting on the challenges of character and narrative (female first person) and repeatedly referring to the title of the work until Wonnacott could no longer cower under the cover of indifference and good manners and practically screamed, “for the Steward, damn it, Steward.” Then came the inevitable hit-on by the woman with big tits and glasses, who’d offered to show him around the sights of Orillia (“Sights, plural?” he’d asided) and then mentioned, as if to lend the clandestine nightmare an odour of probity, that her husband was a volunteer driver for the festival. Her name was Luellen, and by that time Wonnacott was so drunk that he almost took her up on the offer. He did let her press up against him as the conversation persisted, with one of her larger breasts doing serious damage to his yellow and blue boutonniere, a gift from the festival sponsors, Granite Garden Lilies. When she excused herself to go to the bathroom (“Number one or number two?” he’d asided), Wonnacott slipped out the back door, grabbing a tray of finger sandwiches as he went. There were red sandwiches, blue sandwiches, yellow sandwiches and green sandwiches, and they all tasted the same. Some kind of fish-like thing. Fishy. Fish.

. . .

The route had not changed. The buildings were done up or undone, but mostly they were the same as they had always been. Orillia resisted change. First, he walked to the beach, intending to piss in Lake Couchiching for old time’s sake, and by the time he’d reached the wharf he’d made up his mind to swim. The cold water would wash out the cobwebs. But it was barely half-past nine when he reached the lakeshore, and the mild night air had drawn the locals out. He was forced to take his commemorative piss on the steps of the Champlain Monument. Then it was, as it always had been, west up Brandt Street (always “west up,” they’d said) and north on Park.

The house was smaller than he remembered. And cleaner. The roof had been reshingled, and the dormer window, where they’d lain and watched the summer tick past like the last three minutes of math class, was significantly smaller than the dormer window of his imaginings: a portal, not a vista. He could see a couple, upper-middle-aged like him, sitting in the front room where Grace used to bathe in self-pity and filth. The man was reading a paper; the woman was knitting. A swing set rusted in the corner of the yard where the willow, upon which he’d carved their initials, once stood. Wonnacott realized that the heel of his shoe had fallen off. He wondered if he was too drunk to drive back to Toronto.

. . .

When he got back to his hotel room, he found Luellen sitting on the very corner of the bed.

“I let myself in,” she said. “I have a friend who . . .”

“Would you please leave.”

She did not respond but instead removed her beige over-coat. She wore a leather bra and panties and garterless stockings.

“Please. Don’t make me call the manager.”

“Yes. Of course.”

She pulled her coat back on and seemed neither offended nor the slightest bit upset, as if the episode was simply a matter of course. All in a day’s work.

Luellen stopped at the door. “Good night,” she said, her voice rising at the end. Her tone was familiar. Comforting.

“Good evening,” he replied, bolting the door behind her.

. . .

Wonnacott was depressed. He tried to ring Thérèse but the line was busy. She was talking, forever talking. He put a can of Campbell’s chicken noodle on the hotplate, right on the element, just like they did for forty days and forty nights on Park Street, then opened the mini bar. He took out a tiny bottle of Canadian Club, or perhaps, he thought, it was a regular-sized bottle and he’d grown to gigantic proportions. Drink me, the bottle said. Drink me.

The woman depressed him — Luellen — and the poetess and the academic and Mr. Dutton and General Montcalm and the earnest, hardworking grad student who’d only wanted to please him. But what depressed Wonnacott most was Wonnacott. He’d thought his trip to Orillia would take him back to happier times (not that times now were particularly unhappy or happy; they were simply times). But the town had changed just enough to remind him that it was no longer the same. In fact, the town looked younger and fresher, with new sidewalks and well-paved streets and rows of modern houses and a supermart where the grocery once stood. The town had gotten younger; only his memories were old. Time was the enemy, he liked to say. In fact, time had already won. It had sacked the present, injecting him with nostalgia, the morphine of the vanquished, as it marched on.

Wonnacott had finished the Canadian Club and worked his way through a bottle of Smirnoff’s that seemed like a child’s toy in his gargantuan hand. The beer was next, and then the other beer and then the other . . .

This time, Thérèse picked up the phone and answered in a dreamy voice.

“Did I wake you, love?” he asked.

Thérèse yawned, then lowered her voice. “I was waiting for your call . . .”

“The line was busy . . .”

“But now I can’t really talk. I have a man here.”

“Really? Who’s that?”

“Mmmm. Just an old friend.”

“I see.”

“I’m just about to fuck him, do you understand?”

“Yes . . .”

“I’ve got his cock in my hand and I’m about to put it in my mouth.”

It was an old game. Whenever he went away, he would call her. They would make love from a distance with people they’d only just invented. Go big or stay home. That’s what Thérèse called it.

“Just a moment.” Wonnacott kicked off his pants and hopped onto the bed.

“Are you comfortable, now?”

“Yes. Go on.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, please.”

“Good. Because he’s slipping his hands up my dress, and I want to tell you all about it . . .”

. . .

They had met on the bus to Orillia. By chance, he’d found himself alone in the back row with Thérèse and an old woman whom he mistook for her grandmother. Soon the old woman got off, leaving the two young people virtually alone. They had barely spoken up to this point, and both pretended to be engrossed in their reading material, when Thérèse subtly shifted her leg. Now, if he looked — and he did — he could see the edge of her panties. At this point, she began talking to him, as if she’d always known him. She wondered about the book he was reading (More Poems for People, by the radical poet Milton Acorn) and asked him if he liked Leonard Cohen and if he was going to Orillia and why (not so much why Orillia, but more a general why, why anything? Why not?). She had some beers in her backpack, and he had a couple of joints, which they smoked with their heads close to the window, carefully blowing the smoke outside so as not to alert the bus driver. Not that he really gave a shit. He probably enjoyed getting high on the job. Soon Wonnacott let his hand slip onto her knee, and she was asking him if he had a place to stay in Orillia and he already answering no. He moved his hand up her leg slowly. Until, that is, she grabbed it and slipped it inside her panties.

“Maybe we could find a place together,” she said.

He took another toke and tickled her pubic hair. It was a classic case of lust at first sight.

. . .

They used to stay up late and listen to the rats. At first she’d been afraid of them. He’d been afraid of them too but hid it better, using her fear as his camouflage. After impaling one of them that first night, she’d slept sitting upright with a cast iron frying pan in her hand. Both of them were wrecked for work the next day; she’d fallen asleep and burnt the macaroni lunch, he got into an argument with the second woman on his list, then packed it in early and got drunk with some Indians in Couchiching Park. In time they grew more comfortable with their roommates. They’d leave out bits of leftovers — there wasn’t much; it would have been fairer if the rats left food out for them — and it got to the point where a couple of the bigger, braver rats would eat right out of their hands. Not that any of them were tiny; on average, they were roughly the size and shape of a shoebox. Even the cats, great mousers in their own rights, mostly left the rats alone. By the end of the summer, he and Thérèse had come to see them as friends and more, gnawing, scurrying, voracious gods who watched over them as they slept.

. . .

If misery were a rainbow, the Authors’ Breakfast would be at the highest end of the spectrum, a special kind of invisible, ultraviolet misery that only particularly sensitive and habitually mistreated bats could detect. Before the wet eggs and undercooked bacon were served, an asthmatic canon read a meandering prayer, along with several of the longer verses from the Book of Deuteronomy. Then Dutton, standing at attention before a portrait of the Red Ensign (which, to the best of Wonnacott’s recollection, hadn’t been the country’s flag for eleven years) led the group in a rousing chorus of “God Save the Queen.” Wonnacott did not join in, although he stood up exceedingly slowly and remained on his feet, shifting his weight from one leg to the other, for the duration of the anthem, just to be polite (and even then, only polite enough). Next the ill-used poetess rose and read a seven-hundred-line epic narrative entitled “The Death of Wolfe,” for which she was apparently quite famous locally and, most deservedly, completely unknown everywhere else.

The horse, that steed, the Captain held

Before the mighty General fell’d . . .

And on and on in thumping iambs, until the poem surpassed mere annoyance and entered the realm of almost hypnotic irritation. By the end, Wonnacott’s neck hurt from nodding the measure. And just when it seemed the morning could not get any worse, the academic arose. “I have been asked to read one of my favourite of Dr. Leacock’s pieces,” he said, offering no hint of the plague that was about to descend. “I have selected his master’s thesis, The Doctrine of Laissez Faire.”

It was lunch by the time breakfast ended.

. . .

He had the feeling he was being watched. Not looked at, which was to be expected — he was, after all, the conference’s star attraction, a best-selling author who’d twice been long-listed for the CBC short story competition (it was a very long longlist, Bob Weaver assured him) and once very seriously considered for a Governor General’s award. But this was different. Not captured schoolgirl glances, but burning, clicking, sucking eyes, taking him in, taking him on. When he tried to return eye contact and smile and nod, they (many of them at least) looked away, frowning. Clearly they did not approve of him. He spotted Luellen in the back, a bald husband latched to her arm. She turned her head quickly. But he did not, only grabbing his wife tighter and fixed his eyes on Wonnacott.

After the breakfast, Wonnacott stayed on the podium. Not that he wanted to talk to any of the attendees, or worse, let any of them talk to him, but because he did not want to face the ambush that seemed to wait for him by the doors. Luellen and her husband stood there, he with his arms folded, staring directly at Wonnacott, she cooing, it seemed, to get him to leave with her. Finally Wonnacott decided to escape through the kitchen, but as he pushed his way through the yellow room divider and toward a narrow corridor, Dutton grabbed his arm.

“A word, Mr. Wonnacott, if I may . . .”

He had that familiar look publicists and conference organizers get whenever they have to deliver bad news to writers, a drawn-out, pained smile that would not look out of place in a Edvard Munch painting.

“Ah, Dutton. Great breakfast. Thank you so much.”

“The eggs were a little overdone, don’t you think?”

“I hardly noticed.”

“Excellent. And the room? It’s to your liking?” Dutton still held onto his napkin and twisted it obsessively as he spoke.

“I like it fine. It has a fine view of . . . everything.”

“Oh, that’s fine. Fine!”

“Yes, fine.”

“Fine, indeed. I know you used to live here, and thought, you know, the view.”

“Yes. Indeed. The view. It really hasn’t changed. When I wrote the book . . .”

“I love the book, by the way. Sunshine Sketches of . . . a . . . Little . . .”

“Sunshine Sketches of a Rat-Infested Shitbox.”

“Yes. Wonderful book. Memoir, is it not?”

“After a fashion.”

In the long pause, Dutton twisted his napkin ever more vigorously. Wonnacott was not about to make his job easier. There was an undeclared war between writers and conference organizers — or not a war so much as a destructive dependence. Like mutual parasites, they had to feed off one another to survive.

“Excellent. Lovely. Anyway. There is a small programming change I think you should know about.”

“Programming change?”

“Programming change. We’d like to add Humphries to the reading tonight.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“Tonight, at dinner. Humphries is going to read as well.”

“But —”

“I’d really hoped to get him more to do this morning, but I couldn’t very well interrupt Miss Davis’s poem, and everyone else ran on a bit.”

“I’ll be honest. I’m not sure we’d compliment each other. He’s rather more —” Wonnacott struggled for an acceptable euphemism for “dull.”

“I know, it’s all of a sudden.”

“I’d prefer if ­. . .”

“You’ll still be keynote speaker, of course. Everyone will be expecting that.”

“I’m . . .”

“We’ll just save him for later. An after-dinner treat.”

“I’m reading first?”

“That would be more appropriate, don’t you think?”

“Look, I could see him saying a few words before me, to sort of warm up the crowd. But I am, as you say, the attraction here — in all modesty — and it would be highly unusual — unorthodox — for the keynote speaker to go before . . . someone else.”

“I see your point. Perhaps, then, we should make him co-keynote speaker?”

“What?”

“Let’s give it some thought, shall we?”

That was that. Dutton had made up his mind. They could stand there for another hour pretending not to argue, or Wonnacott could simply let it go and hope he’d never be asked back.

“It’s your call, Dutton.”

But there was something else. The grimace, the twisting continued.

“Is that it?”

“There’s just one more thing.”

“Yes?”

“I’m not really sure how to broach this, so I’ll just say it.”

“Please.”

“I . . . I try to run a tight ship. We — myself and the organizers and volunteers — it’s like a family.”

“The point being?”

“It’s just that, well, frankly, you people blow into town and do your business, and that’s really none of my concern, except that I’m the one left standing here to pick up the pieces.” Dutton had become quite animated during that last bit, punctuating every other word by pecking his finger in the air. He was intimating some darker purpose, but his point was lost on Wonnacott.

“I’m not sure I . . .”

“I’m talking about Luellen Dupris, Mr. Wonnacott. And I’d appreciate it if you kept your filthy hands off her.”

. . .

After lunch in his room — soup — Wonnacott had returned to the old house on Park Street. He parked in front of the vacant lot where he and Thérèse used to hunt for garter snakes. The rats, as it turned out, were particularly fond of snakes. Thérèse would cut their heads off, leave them bleeding on the kitchen floor and watch the room fill with rats. She’d named most of them, the regulars anyway: Pratt, PK, Leonard, Archibald, Uncle Milty, Miss Johnson, Purdy. She liked them exactly because other women would have found them repulsive. She liked to be contradictory. One night, after Grace’s son had come and set traps in the gutters and attic, killing perhaps a dozen rats in one sortie and ending their nocturnal visits for the summer, Thérèse smoked almost an entire bag of weed on her own. “You know,” she said, “youth is a trap that only catches you when it’s not there.”

“What?”

“I said, youth is a trap that only catches you when it’s not there.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

Thérèse paused to take another long toke, then started to laugh. She laughed and she laughed and she laughed and she laughed. Wonnacott laughed too. It was, indeed, the stupidest thing she’d ever said.

She would come to say far stupider things than that, and so would he. As the summer came to its close, it seemed that one stupid thing only followed another. And that’s when Wonnacott said the stupidest thing of all. Goodbye. One afternoon he’d left her in the Park Street house with their rats and future memories and found a train home on his own. The summer was over. Go big or stay home.

. . .

Enter Birdie. They’d started off as friends. Maybe that was the problem. They started off as friends and drifted into loverhood, quite the opposite of the natural progress of things, in Wonnacott’s estimation. Eventually they sank into marriage. And thus they floundered.

She had been his brother’s keeper. Literally. She tended to Morgan all through his final illness. Not through the goodness of her heart — although surely her heart was good enough — but in a strictly professional capacity. She’d worked as a home care attendant to put herself through college. Morgan was her attendee.

Birdie and Wonnacott would chat as she wiped or rolled or medicated Morgan. The conversation was pleasant enough: books (she had a distressing interest in the “novels” of Ayn Rand), amateur theatrics, Italian cooking. He’d asked her out once, but even that was platonic: a music recital featuring, as he recalled, several dozen student cellists murdering Bartok. The sex thing started almost by accident. Morgan was asleep, and Wonnacott had called for Birdie with some urgency. He only wanted her to hold a picture while he hammered in the tack. Birdie came running, and when he explained his simple request, she said, as a joke, “Thank God. I thought by the tone of your voice you wanted to kiss me.” The veil of friendship was lifted. He looked at her again, took her in his spindly arms and looked some more. She must have been as horny as he was, for when he kissed her — and he must admit, he wasn’t a bad kisser — her lips parted like the Red Sea. Clothes were quickly shed and parts of people were pressed into parts of other people. And so they continued as absent lovers, remaining cordial for great stretches before lapsing into another bout of perfect, vicious sex. When Morgan finally died, Wonnacott had no choice. He asked Birdie to marry him. With Morgan gone and several months of sex behind her, Birdie felt obligated. They were friends, after all, and the sex was more than adequate. Yes, she said, yes. Yes.

Yes.

. . .

Birdie left him on Christmas Eve. She left him passed out under the neighbour’s tree. When he came to early in the morning, he found his house missing exactly one wife and one son. He cooked the turkey anyway. He had cold turkey sandwiches for breakfast lunch and dinner till the day after New Year’s.

. . .

Her name was Lee, and she had been the back story in l’affaire de Wonnacott et Birdie. A student in his Comparative North American Fictions class at York, she had taken unfair advantage of his weakness for sex with another human being (by this point in their relationship, the Birdie well had pretty much run dry). To be fair, he’d gone into it with his eyes wide open: he knew the young woman had a crush on him, but he accepted her offer of a drink. He knew the risks, although he didn’t wholly believe them. Drinks were drunk and drunks were drinking, and Wonnacott accepted a blow job in the front seat of his car. If it had ended there, it might have been manageable. Wonnacott could have lived with the guilt — in its ever diminishing orbit — and persevered. But blow jobs take on a life of their own, and soon a blow job became the odd blow job, which soon gave way to the where-the-hell’s-my-blow-job. Lee plunged further into infatuation. This particular voyage ended, as these particular voyages do, with a phone call from student to wife. The student declared her everlasting fidelity; the wife, in the difficult position of defending herself by defending her husband (for in these sorts of situations, proprietorship is the key), wholly rejected in the abstract what she knew in the concrete to be true.

. . .

Wonnacott parked in front of the vacant lot where he and Thérèse used to hunt for garter snakes. He got out and went directly to the front door. It was answered by a thin man who appeared to be almost exactly the same age as Wonnacott. The writer wasn’t exactly sure what he was going to say. All he really wanted was to see the room or, to be precise, the view from the room. He’d fixed in his mind a certain picture of that view and associated it with all manner of gnawing nostalgia: the smell of potato peels boiling in an old soup can; the taste of rain and pencil lead; the sound of apples tumbling into a sink; mosquito bites on the back of his hand and that moment of sensual perfection when he finally gave in and scratched. This is what the view meant to him.

Luckily, the man knew of Wonnacott and his work. His name was Turner — Roger, Wonnacott thought, and Beth, or if not Beth, something very much like it. They’d bought the house not long after Wonnacott and Thérèse had moved out.

“It was a mess when we moved in. Of course, no one knew how long she’d been there.”

“The police figured six weeks.” Beth had entered with coffee.

“We thought it would be perfect for . . .” His voice trailed off. “We always wondered if this was the house.” Roger was scouring the bookshelves in the living room. “We knew it was, we just weren’t sure.”

“I love the scene where the roof collapses, and you spend the night sleeping under the stars.” Beth had entered again, carrying a dog-eared copy of Sunshine Sketches of a Rat-Infested Shitbox. Hard-cover, first edition. Signed, it might be rather valuable. “I thought it should have won the Governor General’s Award.” She handed him the book and a fountain pen.

“Politics, you know. It’s all politics.”

They chatted for a little while, with Beth producing some small cakes and date squares and later fresh butter tarts. “No Canadian on earth can resist,” he muttered, taking another.

Eventually, Beth remembered she had another of his books and excavated a tiny volume from under a rubble of old encyclopedias. Singing with Brambles in My Mouth, his first chapbook, printed on the mimeograph machine at Thérèse’s summer camp.

“We found it in the closet when we moved in. You can have it if you want.”

Wonnacott thanked them and put the booklet in his pocket. And then he asked, if it wasn’t too much trouble, if he could just see the room upstairs, for old times’ sake. Beth and Roger looked at one another.

“It’s a bit of a mess,” she said.

“I don’t mind, really. It would mean a lot.”

“It really is a scramble.” His hosts looked at each other again.

“Please?”

Roger slowly rose.

“I’ll get the key,” he said. “But just a quick look.”

The stairway was narrower than Wonnacott remembered, but he instinctively ducked at the corner to avoid hitting his head on the low ceiling. The body, he told himself, never forgets.

The top floor was cold. Not that sweet coolness of a basement in summer, just stale and damp and cold. Roger put the key in the lock.

“We don’t come up here much. Not since Jimmy . . .” He looked again at his wife.

“Left. Not since Jimmy left.” Beth pushed the door open and turned on the light. The room was immaculate. The tidy bed (the linen seemed fresh), a boy’s hockey gear stored neatly in the corner, a shelf of books with the spines ordered in an even line.

“That’s where the kitchen was.” Wonnacott pointed to a little alcove past the bed, which now housed a walnut armoire. “Of course, it wasn’t much of a kitchen.” He stepped toward the closet. “And that’s where Michele Ferrie slept for . . .”

Both Beth and Roger quickly stepped in front of him. Roger put his shoulder against the door.

“This is locked,” he said. “We . . . we don’t have the key.”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to go now, Mr. Wonnacott.”

“We have to go out.”

“We’re going to visit friends.”

“It was so nice to meet you.”

Wonnacott looked at the small window above the bed; they had covered it with an iron grate. Roger followed his gaze.

“There’s been a lot of break-ins around here,” he explained. “Now — oh, look at the time. We really have to get moving.”

Wonnacott nodded and thought to mention (but did not) that if they were going to bar their windows they better be damned sure they never had to get out.

. . .

And so Birdie had been Wife Number One, and not long after that, not counting the two months he waited for Lee to move out after tersely moving in, Wife Number Two (Delores, a real estate agent, don’t ask) had come and gone, along with ten years, and then a few more women whom he’d taken a serious run at. At about this time, just as his daily alcohol intake was reaching that of a small Finnish mining enclave, it occurred to him that what he really wanted wasn’t a wife, per se. What he really wanted was summer. And not just any summer. The Orillia summer, when love and sex were simple and the same, when the boy was more of a girl and the girl was more of a boy, when anyone with a drink or a toke was his lifelong pal, and where even God’s wild creatures (rats, but still) were his friends. The natural, the unnatural and the supernatural merged into one. It was his Summer of Love; his Summer When He’d Conquered Time. He recognized he could never get it back, but he committed himself to the closest approximation possible. The first step was quitting his job at the university and giving himself up fully to his writing. The second step was to sell his share of the house to Wife Number Two and take a funky apartment in an old house near High Park. Toronto wasn’t Orillia, but on the other hand, Orillia wasn’t Toronto. The third step was much harder. The third step was to recreate Thérèse, or rather the relationship he’d had with her. He started by sending her anonymous postcards of Orillia. Then he moved to sending her a little chocolate rat he’d found in a candy shop on St. Claire. He sent her another, then another, then another — all by special delivery, every one in an unsigned gift-wrapped package. When she finally figured it out and called him (she was surprised how easy it was to find him, she just opened the phone book and there he was), Wonnacott could not speak for a very long time.

“I just wanted to tell you how very, very sorry I am,” he said finally, chewing on emotion.

“For what?”

“For . . . for going away.”

“Going away?”

“For leaving .”

“Leaving? You didn’t leave. You just haven’t come home yet.”

Two hours later, they were naked on his mattress, on the floor by the fireplace near the window. She was heavier and jaded; he was bonier, with hair where once there’d been muscle. They gnawed into each other’s soul and promised never to come out.

. . .

The dinner was not sold out. Almost half the tables sat empty. Dutton made a valiant effort to convince the guests to move to the tables near the front, in hopes, perhaps, that then the hall wouldn’t seem so empty. Most people were content to stay in their places. Humphries had arrived early and sat at a table in the back, frantically marking his book; it wasn’t clear whether he was identifying the parts he would read or the parts he wouldn’t. Wonnacott leaned against the back wall and smiled, silently composing.

Most of the things I hate about this country can be summed up in two words: Stephen Leacock . . .

It would be, quite literally, the speech to end all speeches; they’d never ask him back. With luck, no one would. Leacock was Orillia’s favourite son, a writer who, for a brief time after the First World War, could lay claim to being the most famous humorist in the world, although by the 1970s, he was largely forgotten outside of Canada and, inside it, remembered mostly by middle-aged schoolmasters with toast-crumbed beards and bad breath. But he was routinely presented — and this was the irritating part — as a paragon of literary excellence, a shadowing of our primordial, collective summer, when the world decided we weren’t so bad after all. Wonnacott resented Leacock, true, but not for his success. Rather for his legacy of diminished expectations. The Eternal Present.

Wonnacott checked his watch. Just enough time for a quick phone call to his wife and a pre-victory shower.

. . .

This time, Luellen hadn’t even bothered to remove her coat.

“That’s it,” Wonnacott declared. “This time I’m calling the manager.”

“Just one minute, please. Just give me one minute.” Luellen shifted her weight, barely making a ripple on the hard mattress. She sat silently, almost hypnotized by her own breathing.

“Well?”

“Shh.”

The leather bra and panties bound her flesh in all the wrong places.

“I’m waiting.”

Then there was a knock on the door.

“Luellen,” a voice called from the other side. “I know you’re in there. Come out here this instant.”

The woman held her finger to her lips and smiled at Wonnacott. He smiled and fell into the chair.

“Luellen.” The man was desperate now. “Open this door right now, or I’ll break it down.” There was a pause, then a loud crash as Luellen’s husband fell upon the door.

Wonnacott sighed, enlightened. “Have you ever thought of counselling?”

Luellen shrugged.

“You have to forgive my husband. He’s not very worldly, you understand. He’s at that age; he’s afraid that life has passed him by.”

Her husband threw himself against the door one more time and then slipped to the floor. He was whimpering now and muttering her name with each breath. Luellen stood up and pulled her coat close to her shoulders. She thanked Wonnacott and left, walking headlong, Wonnacott realized, into an Orillia summer of her own.

. . .

Somewhere the sun was rising. Somewhere young lovers were lying together in the net of summer, licking the dry salt off each other’s tanned and perfect skin. Somewhere, maybe, a bird was singing, although, to be truthful, who listens to birds any more? They were irritants, mostly. Perhaps even somewhere in that fine little township of Orillia, a man and a woman were now coming together, holding onto one another in defence of history, in defiance of time. For all he could tell, Luellen and her husband were screwing right now in the front seat of their car, parked down by the lakeshore, basking in the conspiratorial shade of Champlain Monument. Wonnacott could not know and did not care. He sat on the bed, naked except for his t-shirt, the receiver still to his ear, the dial tone still buzzing like a crowing bee, his finger still holding down the switch, stuck between hanging up and putting down. His face was probably quite comical, halfway between a smile and a frown. A fmile. A srown. That was it. A bemused srown.

. . .

The encounter had begun like this.

Wonnacott sitting on the bed, soup on the boil. “Did I wake you, love?”

Thérèse yawned, then lowered her voice. “I was waiting for your call . . .”

It had ended like this.

The sound of a man coughing. Then the sound of a man trying to suppress a cough. Then the sound of a man, comically no doubt, stumbling to the floor as he fell out of bed trying to suppress his cough as another man, on the other end of a phone, tried not to listen to the sound of the man stumbling to the floor as he fell out of bed trying to suppress his cough. Then a man hanging up the phone abruptly, pushing the switch down with his finger and lifting it again. Then the sound of the dial tone, buzzing like a crowing bee. Go big or stay home.

. . .

The Mariposa Belle was on fire before Wonnacott had even been booed off the podium. It had started, the Fire Marshall would later conclude, on an unauthorized hotplate in a guest room. But Wonnacott had already left the hotel by the time the alarms went off. He had liberated Leacock’s bust and gown and mortarboard and Indian gun from the display case, employed a little ruse to borrow one of the volunteer drivers’ cars, and used another little ruse (and, okay, a threat) to gain entrance to the Park House.

From below, Wonnacott hears the chief of police hail him on the loudspeaker. He wants to know Wonnacott’s demands. Let’s not do nothing foolish, he says.

Wonnacott laughs. A double negative. Perfect. Come and get me, copper.

Wonnacott stands up quickly and pulls off the Robes of State. But the mortarboard stays. A nice touch.

He gropes for the switch to the overhead light and turns it off.

The lamp beside the bed illuminates the room, casting monster shadows on the walls.

Wonnacott lies back on the mattress again. In the distance he hears a siren wail like a heard of crowing bees. A fire truck for the Belle? Or maybe more cops, cops from as far away as Bracebridge, Barrie, Collingwood, Wasaga Beach . . .

Outside he hears muffled voices and the shuffling of troops. The Turners are still at it, agitating the neighbours. Telling tales out of class. Who knows what this man might do? He is, after all a writer, and capable of anything.

Wonnacott reaches up and shuts off the lamp. The room goes dark. From this vantage he can see the flames rising from the Mariposa Belle.

He closes his eyes.

In the distance, he hears a faint sound, beyond the gossip and organized silence. It might have been a child coughing, or the soft scratch scratching as, a very long way off, all the rats of the world are joining together to burrow into the maw of a perfect, sinking summer. He sighs and gets to his feet, and lifting the Indian gun he moves to the window to take aim and give the nearest police sharpshooter a lesson in history.