comes back to Emma. He says, You think you already know most of this stuff? Is that what you think? You think you know me? Well, let me assure you, no one in this room knows me any better than my nurse, Renée. And actually she knows me in ways you guys never will. She puts the catheter in my prick and takes it out, she wipes my ass and changes my diaper, she undresses me, puts me in the tub and bathes me and rubs lotion over my bedsores and dresses me again. She measures out my meds and fills and refills my drip. Renée is beside me every waking minute, and even when I’m sleeping.
Fife knows the camera is running, and he is performing for it. He can’t help himself. How old are you, Sloan? he asks.
Me? I’m twenty-two. Why?
When I was twenty-two, Sloan, I’d already been married, fathered a child, and gotten divorced. By the time I was your tender age, Sloan, I had ruined my life.
Vincent, catch this, Malcolm tells him.
Fife asks Sloan if she can imagine believing at twenty-two that she’s already ruined her life. He means destroyed her future, shut off all possibilities of ever realizing the American dream, or the Canadian dream, although he doesn’t think there actually is a Canadian dream. Imagine if Sloan at twenty-two believed that everything good that could ever happen to her had already happened. Imagine that she’s not going anywhere from here, except downhill. That she’s going to lose her job. Then her boyfriend. She’ll be evicted from her apartment and will have to sleep on a friend’s couch, until her friend kicks her out, and then she’ll be homeless, sleeping in shelters, eating at food kitchens for the destitute, and her health will start to fail, even though she’s only twenty-two …
Sloan interrupts, Is that what happened to you, Leo? Mr. Fife.
Malcolm says, Okay, we’re rolling. Right, Vincent?
Right.
Well, no, it’s not quite what happened, Fife says to Sloan. But almost. Because that’s when I met Alicia Chapman, the belle of Richmond, Virginia, slumming from Simmons College among the beatniks and bohos of Boston’s Back Bay, trolling for a man who was contemplating suicide or murder or both as a last chance to give his life meaning, a man whose mere existence would offend her wealthy, respectable, Republican parents, a man they would hire a private detective to investigate, so they could shock their daughter into beating a hasty retreat once confronted by the ugly facts of his early marriage and divorce and the abandonment of his child, among other minor crimes and misdemeanours. Even though it turned out that she shocked them instead, because she already knew all those facts, and she loved him anyhow. He had told her everything about his past by then, and if they didn’t back off, she was going to run away to South Carolina and marry him. And she did run away to South Carolina and marry him, so there, Mother and Daddy Chapman.
Sloan says, I’m sorry, I didn’t follow that.
Malcolm tells Fife to hold off and go back a little and pick up where he was saying he was twenty-two and had already ruined his life. He claps his hands in front of the camera lens. He says Fife’s name, the date and location.
6
Fife wakes, ending his dream. He’s still in Richmond, he’s at the home of his in-laws. It’s morning.
He tries for a moment to remember the dream, the rules that determined its order, but can recall no more than a half dozen fading images, so gives the effort up. He tries instead to recall what’s going to happen now: living here. Leaving here. Today. Now.
Turning from his back onto his left side, he studies Alicia’s sleeping pregnant body. Beneath blankets, it lies in long mounds that churn with life. His own stringy, inert flesh, as he slowly comes awake, grows heavier and heavier, until finally, when he knows where the room is exactly and where he is located in it relative to everything else, his body, immobile beneath the blankets, weighs on his thoughts like a fallen log. One hand lies trapped beneath a hip, the other pressed against the opposite hip, as if he has caught himself while applauding his dreams.
He tries lifting his free hand, hoping that his torso will spring loose and glide easily away from this strange grasp. But the hand refuses to budge. He tries again. Nothing. Breathing heavily, he becomes suddenly aware of his protruding ankle bones and knees and the top leg pressing heavily down upon the leg beneath, both of them driving down into the mattress. Then his shoulders, and the weight of his chest. Even his skull presses downward, as if it’s been carved from a block of stone and attached loosely to the still larger block of stone that is his body from his shoulders to his large, flat feet. A hard wind or a gang of vandals shoved him off his pedestal and left him to lie here on his side, seeping slowly into the cold soil, silent and motionless.
He groans, and a hand shoots up beneath the sheet that covers him. He slides one leg off the other and is able to free the hand that has been trapped by his hip. He feels his face wrinkle and knows that he is grimacing. His body still weighs on the bed like a fallen statue. It takes all his strength, but he manages to push and shove it from one place on the bed to another. Concentrating his efforts, he flops his body over onto its back again. Then onto its other side. Until he finds himself staring away from his wife toward the window.
Light filtering through membranes, he thinks. Why doesn’t the darkness of the room flow the other way? Why doesn’t the darkness chase the light? Heat chases cold.
He steps from the bed, pushing his naked limbs slowly ahead of him, and dresses, covering his body with the clothes he laid neatly across the chair by the window last night after packing, one item folded neatly on top of the other. His travelling clothes—socks and underwear, grey flannel slacks, white shirt, maroon foulard necktie, navy-blue blazer, all of it mail-ordered from Brooks Brothers, chosen for him by Alicia, menswear brand discrimination, learned from her father. He stuffs his pockets with the loose items on top of the dresser: wallet, change. He straps on his wristwatch.
A checklist: suitcase packed; all necessary papers in briefcase; two novels and a book of Hardy’s poems in briefcase; ticket in jacket pocket; cash in wallet. Anything else? Chequebook? Yes. The bank cheque? In briefcase. Take another look, be sure. Yes, it’s there.
Are you all ready to leave me and your little babies, born and unborn?
He turns, surprised and embarrassed. While he patted pockets and tapped suitcase and briefcase, Alicia has been watching him.
Not quite, he says. No. I haven’t had breakfast yet. Go back to sleep. I’ll come up and say goodbye before I go.
She yawns like a cat, her entire body tightening into a thick arch. Anybody else up yet?
Yeah, I think your mother. And Susannah. I don’t know if Cornel’s awake or not. You sure your mother doesn’t mind taking me to the airport?
Forget it, sweetie. It’s her thing, taking people to airports and waving goodbye to them. She loves it.
What about Cornel? He may cry, Fife says.
Oh, let him sleep. I’ll explain it to him later on. If he’s awake and up, though, you might’s well let him ride out to the airport with you and Mummy and say goodbye to you. She’ll enjoy consoling him on the way back.
He smiles down at her and leaves the room, taking care to close the door quietly behind him, as if she’s already fallen back to sleep. His body descends the carpeted stairs like water down a hillside stream, bumpity-bumpity-bump.
Seated side by side at the kitchen worktable, Cornel and his grandmother
