The Dead Are More Visible (19 page)

The gully floor was narrow and sunless, carved out by a bouillon-coloured creek whose channel ferried a glowing flotilla of oak, beech and maple leaves southward to the Ottawa. As Cutler crossed another small bridge—weathered, moss-grown, it seemed more a process of nature than an amendment of it—the cyclist pumped past him, as expected, working hard, bunched
over his handlebars like a kid speeding on a tricycle. But now the Reaper. Cutler charged into it, to the left of the zigzag trail, while the cyclist swung into the first switchback, downshifting and pedaling fast—no more trace of pretence now, fully committed to the race. So was Cutler, yet now he wondered if he’d miscalculated—whether the slope was too steep to run up off-trail, the surface too crumbly. He dug with his arms like a sprinter. By halfway up he was leaden, lactic, but here the grade eased off ten degrees and he slowed and glanced down and back: the cyclist was well behind him, stitching his way up the hairpins. Cutler drove himself on, each exhalation a grunt of pain. This was more a climb than a run. Dangerous, Grace might say, thinking not of a fall but of his heart. His legs were tying up badly, his legs were beside the point now, he was drawing on raw will and pride, the things that had kept him moving at a respectable pace in the dying laps of his 5,000 heat in Olympic Stadium thirty-four years ago, though he was punch-drunk and the other runners came gliding past him in a steady file, as if the lane next to him were a moving sidewalk. Their respirations—surreally distinct, stethoscopically loud—crashed in his ear. No other sound; the roar of the home crowd a sort of amplified silence. On the last lap his vision started to go, his brain hypoxic, blackness moving in from the margins. He collapsed on the finish line and lay heaving and for him as a serious competitor a finish line is what it was.

Just below the crest of the hill he veered back onto the trail and ran, or barely trotted, the last two hairpins. The cyclist would need another thirty seconds or more. Cutler topped the hill, gulping air as if surfacing after a full minute under water. Slowly his stride gained back its length, the jolting of the pulse in his jaw eased off. It was clear the cyclist must be heading back to the trailhead and parking lot, a mile farther on. No chance Cutler wouldn’t lose badly if he and the man raced the whole way. Anyhow, he’d beaten him up the hill. Stop here, wave him past with a wry nod.
Nice try, dude
. Or slip away into the forest and run a shortcut—Cutler knew a good one—and so be there waiting for him at the trailhead, the finish line, grinning. Gratifying to think of that. Somehow Cutler couldn’t bring himself to do it.

The gliding whirr of the mountain bike approached from behind him and he opened up his gait, fast but relaxed, fists loose, jaw floating. The trail here was level as it passed through another stand of maples and entered the tract of huge white pines he called the Basilica—not quite a cathedral-like grove of raincoast giants, but close enough, the trail running through a broad nave arcaded by stately, even-spaced trunks, while from ten storeys up, stained-glass light shafted downward, green and gold. A century’s fall of pine duff had laid an ideal surface for running, silent, soft and fast. His favourite part of the trail. He and Mattie would start to recover their speed through here after the gruelling work of the
Reaper. And now he recalled that this was the place—when Mattie was seventeen and Cutler was toughing out an off day—that he’d first felt the boy carrying him, holding back just a little for his father’s sake.

He entered the grove at a controlled sprint, knowing he could hold it to the far side, maybe four hundred metres or so, and knowing that the cyclist would pass him well before he reached that point. But he would make him fight for it. Make him realize he had to work to beat this guy on foot—this old man, as Cutler must seem to him with his dated gear, his vulnerably threadbare scalp, a face creased and strained in the twilight under the trees. Cutler’s anger seemed gone now, depleted or paid out, as at the end of the trial three years back when he’d stood up and, before the bailiff could intervene, addressed the man who had just been convicted of reckless driving (a nine-month suspended sentence). In his fixated way Cutler had rehearsed the moment a hundred times, nights when the vodka and Ativan hadn’t bought him even a few hours’ rest, and he’d meant to holler one of several lashing denunciations he’d prepared. Instead he’d heard himself say, in a voice that must barely have reached the convicted man, “Are we just supposed to go home now?”

The only things that truly helped during those months had been these forest trails and, above all, Grace. Every night for months they lay twined without ever having sex, a strange shift from all the years when they had often made love but always slept a little apart.

The rider came sweeping alongside and past, his legs a blur, nostrils flaring as he exhaled in sharp little huffs. Cutler was almost grateful for this competitive seriousness. He chose not to give the man a direct look, instead fixing his eyes on the trail, trying to retain his speed and stay relaxed and fluent, as dignified as possible for someone in late middle age who’s red-faced, puffing, stumping along in a frantic race with a stranger. At some point a dead leaf had caught between the front mudguard and wheel of the man’s bicycle and the shreds of it rattled in the blurring spokes like those hockey cards Cutler and his friends used to clothespin to the frames of their CCM three-speeds back in the early ’60s, the cards smelling of the brittle wafers of bubble gum you would get in the twenty-five-cent packets. He could no longer recall why they’d wanted to set those cards—always some forgotten journeyman’s card, never one of the stars—rattling in their spokes. Maybe there never was a reason.

The cyclist was pulling away uncatchably, Cutler fading, struggling to hold his form to the far side of the Basilica, and he thought again of Mattie, wondering if the boy and his friends had ever done the same thing with hockey or baseball cards when they were small. The brain, deprived of oxygen, always works poorly at this stage in a race; all the same, it bothered him that he couldn’t remember.

[ NEARING THE SEA, SUPERIOR ]

The world being an ironist with poor taste and perfect timing, Neil Sedaka was on the oldies station crooning “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do.”

“You know you don’t have to do this,” he said.

“You already said that, Erik.”

“She was always crazy about you.”

“You don’t have to
say
that, Erik. I said I’d come. I just wish we could be honest with her.”

His cellphone trembled in the breast pocket of his coat.

“Terminal 1, right?” the driver asked. He wore a topknot turban and had a wispy beard, no accent. He looked about sixteen. Rap or hip hop, you would guess, but he had the radio tuned to a pop oldies station.

“Terminal 1, yes.”

The trembling in Erik’s pocket stopped. In the overheated car his brow and freshly shaven upper lip were damp, oddly chilled.

“Jason Singer actually got married in a hospital,” he said.

“Jason.”

“He had dinner with us last year. He and Ginny? First weekend in June.”

“I don’t know how you keep track of these things,” she said.

“I like people, I guess.”

She let that go. Then: “But ‘first weekend in June’? I mean …”

“It was the second-last dinner we gave.”

The cab started up an on-ramp leading into the airport. In his belly he felt the angle of their climb, a voluptuous sensation, cruelly out of context. The cab fishtailed on the sleety ramp and recovered. She checked her BlackBerry—it seemed their words had brought her own schedule to mind—then said, “The girlfriend was the flapper, right? Cloche hat, short curls?”

“Ginny. They were married. That’s what I was saying. They got married in the hospital, in Jason’s father’s room. They moved the date up, so his father could be part of it.”

Silence; she was back inside one of her designs. “What did her father have?”

“
Jason
’s father. AIDS.”

You don’t listen
. It was one of the first things that had
drawn him to her—a distractedness he’d mistaken for creative dreaminess, thus assigning soft edges to what was actually a tough, selfish trait: the quality that helped her gain a toehold in a field still vastly dominated by men. Porter—the name was her Virginian mother’s maiden name—had a faculty of all-excluding focus that now struck him, at times, as inhuman. At other times he envied it. At all times it whetted his desire to possess her, which was now out of the question, and in fact, he realized, always had been.

“I don’t recall much of that evening,” she said shortly, as if irked at the expectation that she
should
recall it, though Erik had long since given up expecting such things.

“The conversation was scintillating,” he said. “Especially yours.”

She let her heavy, dark eyelids droop—her standard semaphore of warning.

“No, I mean it. You were. It amazes me you can’t remember.”

A few moments of silence, then she said, “It
is
too warm in here,” and frowned, her thumb grazing his brow in an absent way, yet gently, as if she meant to taste the sweat there.

They had opposing views of social need. Neediness, in Porter’s opinion, was the antithesis of charm; worse, those with needs could never be happy or free. To Erik, need was simply the adhesive that held the human world together. When especially frustrated he had
thought of her, wrongly, he knew, as a sort of machine for transforming visual or verbal information into … well, all right, into truly original structures. Gorgeous structures. He was still her helpless fan.

In the terminal, on the moving sidewalk, they glided up the long concourse to the departure gates. It wasn’t like her to stand behind him like this—or just to
stand
, instead of striding decisively onward. Petite, methodically put-together, she’d affixed her gaze to the bank of coffered skylights high above them, her estimation of the design unreadable. The supercilious arch of her brows, the satiric droop of her eyelids, the lines parenthesizing her mouth—all lent her a scornful look. Porter could look haughty patting a spaniel. He stared at her, rapt as always, knowing now that she was so absorbed in her study he was at low risk of receiving one of her fending glares.

Again his cellphone pulsed.

“They couldn’t choose between a space pod or a greenhouse,” she said.

I really should take this call
, he thought.

An announcement rumbled out, slurred with echoes. It was too noisy, he told himself, to take the call.

“I think it’s our flight,” she said, glaring at her watch, then up at the ceiling. “There
has
to be a better way to control sound in these big volumes.” She stalked past him in her long, lint-brushed coat, towing a carry-on bag in the brisk, territorial way of flight crew.

——

They had finally separated last fall. At times it amazed him that their misalliance had survived almost a decade. Still, there had been that certain bond. It was coded, he supposed, in his genes. His parents had spent their lives and raised Erik and his two older siblings up near Thunder Bay—dairy farmers in a subarctic zone, though to Erik’s Finnish grandparents, who had lost their home to the advancing Soviets in ’45, that had not seemed unduly daunting. Erik’s mother had only really confided one thing about her and his father’s marriage, and she probably hadn’t meant to. At Paavo’s wake, shaken but sturdy—drinking vodka and Coke, though not conspicuously drunk—she’d told the three children, “Thirty-two years we are married and never once he walks into the kitchen without that my stomach does like this.” And her large, dry hand flipped over, exposing the pink, open palm. Some years later, when Erik related that anecdote to Porter, she’d said crisply, “You could interpret that sentence in two possible ways.” Yet her gaze was evasive, as if the story unsettled her, imperilled her carefully managed self-containment.

“No, you couldn’t,” Erik told her. “Not if you ever saw them in the same room.”

What wasn’t said: that he and Porter had just the same connection. Whenever they were in each other’s vicinity, a vital arc would leap the synapse between them, etching the air. Some friends even confided they could feel the charge. Porter loathed such talk. And in the sweaty aftermath of sex she would act as if nothing
shocking had just occurred, as if she hadn’t just been far beyond herself, cursing, laughing wildly, her hard little thighs crushing his hot ears and cheeks.

The flight had been called but wasn’t boarding. Erik kept glancing out the wall of windows at their 737 and the runway—visibility poor—and at a display panel listing several departures as delayed. On a wide plasma screen bracketed down from the ceiling, the top-of-the-hour news: a panning shot of parked cars half-buried in snow. First delays, he thought, then cancellations. It was the time of year when this part of the earth is actually turning its face back toward the sun, yet winter goes on deepening its tenancy.

Further palpitations from his phone. Around the gate, passengers, seated, standing, had a herded, nervous look. Porter calmly sat and returned to her BlackBerry, emailing a response to a colleague’s question (he guessed) or, possibly, sending a note to her new man. Her expression and posture gave no hint as to which of these she might be doing.

She and this new man were engaged, waiting for both divorces to come through.

In that state of applied absorption she brought to every task, she would not notice Erik taking the call. He walked past her, toward the food court, mumbling “Coffee?” No response. He took out the cellphone. It stilled in his hand. Three messages from Thunder Bay. He punched reply. Porter was juggling three projects
these days and had made it clear, not unkindly, that if his mother died (she never used euphemisms like “passed away”) before they could fly up there, she would not come along. Would not be able to. Though she might, if she could, still fly up for the day of the funeral.

The ringing was faint. Now another announcement. A pessimist would think
cancellation
but Erik was an optimist and he was finding that even divorce and grief left a basic stratum of one’s character intact. The back of Porter’s head—that practical pageboy cut of wondrous hair so straight and black—was still unmoving. She’d admitted, and she would never lie, especially not to be tactful or kind, that her fiancé was not the lover Erik had been. In fact he didn’t seem to excite her at all. A senior partner in an architectural firm, he did command a better income than Erik, who was a high school guidance counsellor, but Erik believed the true issue here was that Porter desired to live
inside
her calling in every way, not just professionally but domestically, too. For some years, he saw, she had tried to slot their marriage into her life as a sort of moonlighting, or volunteer position, and she was incapable of sustaining a secondary passion. When she wanted to chat, it was about her work—her art—and “chat” was not the word.