THAT WAS THE TIME WHEN PERLEY PHONED JOHN, WORRIED about her again, after he and Greg had gone to Toronto and she refused to see them. This was a month or so after John had gone to her cottage demanding to know where she was, and had run slapdab into former prime minister Brian Mulroney and the glass of freshly squeezed orange juice.
“Your family told me not to bother with her,” John said.
“Sorry, John—it wasn’t me. I just want someone to talk some sense into her. Please.”
So John flew up on a beautiful afternoon in summer, took a taxi into downtown, and found her apartment building (that is, the building she not only stayed at but owned) and waited for her in the lobby, with the security guard watching him out of the corner of his eye and pacing with his hands behind his back.
Mary came in late that night. She had two friends with her, one was Ned and one was Ted—those kinds of men who will always want to be called males. Ned carried keys in his hand, his ponytail and partly baldhead oddly complementing his stark blue denims and his thousand-dollar leather jacket.
He looked at John with mildly ironic eyes—the kind that never seem to go out of fashion but never know the truth. Her second friend, Ted, somewhat broader-shouldered, somewhat more exuberant, was a robust leftist of the western Canadian stamp. Which John felt always had a bit of the pedestrian goofball in it. He was in town on a visit, to give a lecture on oil drilling in the western Artic, and Mary Cyr was a name and he had lucked in. Ned and he had met her for a late lunch and it had gone on for hours. How could her family be involved in any of this—did she not understand how they were ruining the habitats of millions of viable entities? (That is what they chose to call animals and plants.)
They ate well, dined well, drank long.
She of course had paid.
When the two men found out that John was the RCMP officer, they looked knowingly at each other.
“He’s the one who loves you?” one of them said.
“Yes—he is the creepy old man who loves me,” Mary said. “And now he has come up here once again to ruin my fun. My family sent him to spy. He most likely has bullets on him.”
John had heard her speak like this before—once every three or four years she had to be wise, in some way that lessened her.
He told her that was not at all true. She was too drunk to care. She spoke of the occult—she spoke of New Orleans—of being in Haiti. Then she was silent. She slumped against the wall as she lit a cigarette. The security guard said there was a No Smoking policy. She ignored him.
John asked her if she would like to come home, said that everyone was worried about her.
“Never again,” she said. “Back to thieves and ruthless cousins—I want nothing to do with them—or with you.”
“Then I am no longer obligated to be your bodyguard—” he said.
“Then you are fired—” she said, “and you won’t get paid.”
He let her in on a little-known secret. He had not been paid in years. He had taken it upon himself, travelled here and there, without being paid a dime. The two men with her thought this entertaining, the idea that John had travelled at his own expense for seven years. In a way John did too. Then Ned said:
“Maybe you better go?”
And John stared at him, this pale forty-year-old boy, with his schooled morality almost deafening, and smiled.
The robust leftist from Edmonton or Saskatoon, one of those places that have by intellectual standards become somewhat burdened by their universities, asked her to marry him. He was that in love with her, that much smitten. He had divorced, remarried and divorced again—always seeking love but never loving enough to be granted it.
He had been in town a week. She knew he would—propose; she had waited for it, to let him down as gently as possible.
They went on this way, she and her friends, always being outraged at the world that held people like them back. They were part of the central casting of a new stratagem of unease. They were forever adopting the correct posture. They in the end never freed anyone, simply themselves from any deep obligation.
She noticed this about them after John had gone. She noticed the sun on their thin wire glasses, their smooth beards and unimpeachable ponytails, all signifying a certain uninvolved academic status. She waited for John to return so she could tell him that she hadn’t meant anything by her slur that she loved him, in fact the only thing she ever did was love—but he did not come back. She remembered too that for the first time Perley had gone to her great apartment in her grand building, had walked in, saw her lying across the bed naked in the middle of the afternoon, and had dragged her to the bathroom, where he threw her into a tubful of cold water. It was the first time he had been furious with her—he too had gone home. Sometimes in the middle of the afternoon she would look around, hoping they would come back. But they did not. She found herself looking at the phone, hoping it would ring, and when it did, she would pick it up saying:
“John, Perley?”
Yet it was neither.
But then came 9/11. They watched the buildings fall, at the great heady blame cast on the men jumping to their deaths out of those tower windows. Neddy spoke about the attack against the US being a good thing, justified—or perhaps engineered by the CIA. (Which if it was she supposed might have been a bad thing.) One has to know the intellectualized Canadian to know this—which means that on the face of it they never have one position.
“So that is how you think of it all, Ned?” she asked on September 13 of that year.
“It should be how all people think—all people who want a better world.”
“Oh dear me.”