Greetings from the Vodka Sea Read online

  . . .

  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?�
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  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.”

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nbsp; “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.