Various Miracles (22 page)

In Le Grand Hotel in Beaune, in a second-floor room that faces onto the rue Principal and which is directly accessible all night long to the river of loud traffic destined for the south, Sally and Harold achieve one of those rare moments of sexual extravagance that arrives as a gift perhaps two or three times in one’s life. Whether it was an enabling exhaustion—exhaustion can be cumulative, as all travelers know—or whether it was the bottle of soft, pale-red dinner wine—softer than rain, softer even than the sound of the word
rain—
or whether they felt themselves previously and uniquely abandoned in the strange, many-veined hexagon of France where their children and their children’s babysitter and their aged parents and even the Canadian embassy in Paris could not possibly track them down—whatever the reason, they’ve been led, extraordinarily, into the heaven of ecstasy and then into the cool, air-filled condition of deep rest. Harold sleeps, his eyelids unmoving, and Sally, entering a succession of linked dreams, transcends herself, becoming S., that brave pilgrim on a path of her own devising. The ubiquitous satin coverlet presses and the shutters preserve darkness—though they do next to nothing to keep out the sound of traffic—and the long night leans in on them, blessing the impulse that coaxed them away from Oshawa and from the North American shore into this alien wine-provisioned wilderness where they are minutely and ecstatically joined and where they exchange, as seldom before in their forty-year lives, those perfect notices of affection and trust and rhapsody. (“H. and I slept well and in the morning … ”)

HALFWAY THROUGH
his Canadian lecture tour, Thornbury found himself at an all-male dinner where the conversation had begun to flag. It seemed to him that much human effort went into separating men from women, and he often wondered why and to what effectiveness. Here, at the—what was it called? The Manitoba Club—there was still a quaint prohibition against women, yet there was something distinctively feminine about the pink-shaded wall lamps and the bowls of wet roses on every table. Women, Thornbury could not help thinking, might have kept the evening livelier; women would not have permitted the sudden falling off of discussion that brings official functions to a self-conscious halt.

This happened between the salad and the dessert course, the final stretch of a small club dinner organized in Thornbury’s honor. Politics had been discussed, national and local, and flattering—though vague—references had been made to Thornbury’s afternoon lecture. He supposed that,
somewhere within his bloated body, his star of celebrity still twinkled, and for that reason he felt an obligation to keep the evening lively. Part of his arrogance, his wife Flora charged, was his belief that he had to assist others over the difficult sill of language. This was not so, he maintained, but he rightly felt that, were it not for his visit, the six men seated at the table would be at home enjoying the company of their wives and children.

Gathered around him were a judge, two lawyers, a deputy provincial minister, the publisher of a small literary quarterly, and a man who had been introduced earlier as a theologian. Thornbury turned to the theologian, who was sitting on his left, and said, “There’s something I’ve been wondering about lately. It’s a biblical question, and perhaps you would be able to provide me with an answer.”

At this the theologian looked mildly disoriented, and a bridge of bone over his eyes pushed forward. “Well I’m afraid my Bible’s a bit rusty—”

“It’s just this,” Thornbury said. “Why was it that Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of salt?”

“Disobedience, wasn’t it?” The theologian was vague, engagingly so, probing his salad with a busy fork. “She disobeyed God by turning and looking back at the burning city.”

“Yes,” Thornbury said, “of course. But my question is, why salt? Why not limestone, for instance? Or marble?”

“Salt is soluble,” someone pronounced, not very helpfully. One of the lawyers. “Highly perishable, a pillar of salt. Wouldn’t last long in this part of the world, not in the springtime anyway.”

“But in that part of the world where the rainfall—”

“Didn’t Lot’s wife have a name?” It was the judge who was speaking, a mild, contemplative man, ridiculously young
to be a judge, in Gordon Thornbury’s opinion. Earlier, he had predicted that the judge would be the one most likely, as the evening sank beneath the tipping horizon of drink, to address him as
Gord
. (On the Australian tour it had been
Gordo;
in America, once,
Gord-boy.)

“No woman would stand for it nowadays,” the theologian said. “Being labeled Lot’s wife, that is. Not my wife, at any rate.”

Thornbury felt the conversation drifting off again. This seemed a pattern he had observed elsewhere in North America, the impulse to broaden rather than focus, and he imagined it must have to do with a perceived obligation to democratize even the smallest social discussion. There was something compelling about New World discursiveness, particularly in this flat, pleasant prairie city where the trickle-down despair of the century—like the elm beetle—seemed not to have reached; this width of fresh faces, this courtesy, this absurd willingness to offer up an evening from their connubial lives! But he steered back, nevertheless, to his original question. “Why salt?” he said again.

The two lawyers scowled as though pretending to think, and the theologian looked bewildered—in fact, at that moment, though Thornbury could not have known it, a gas pain shot across the man’s heart, causing him to set down abruptly his wineglass. A little wine leapt from the glass onto the tablecloth, a pink stain from which eyes were quickly withdrawn.

The local publisher, springy as an athlete, jumped in with, “I expect it’s an example of synecdoche, a term my wife’s recently introduced me to. She would be able to explain it better than I, but it means that the word
salt
, as used in this case, could imply a broader category—mineral,
for instance. Just as,” he looked around the table, “just as the apple in the story of Adam and Eve stands for all manner of fruit.”

“Hmmmm,” said Thornbury, who saw the logic of this but was reluctant to surrender the image of salt—he was a man with a gift for selling his private visions to others, and it piqued him, more than it should, to be diverted.

A number of points were raised. Wasn’t salt considered a luxury? Not in the Mediterranean, where salt was plentiful. Wasn’t salt a preservative? Perhaps Lot’s wife was just being salted away temporarily until she pulled up her socks. (Gruff laughter here, and Thornbury felt for an instant a chill maleness breezing off the fairway.)
Was
there, when it came down to it, such a thing as an actual pillar of salt? The deputy minister cleared his throat at last and said that, yes, indeed there was, and that such pillars occurred naturally in underground caves. It happened that he had been a mining engineer before entering public life, and he and his wife could vouch for such curious structures.

“The injustice of it,” sighed the youthful judge, not inappropriately. “Which of us, even Gord here—or our wives—
wouldn’t
have looked back when specifically told not to? I’m not sure I’d call that disobedience.” He shot the theologian a look. “I’d call it a justifiable compulsion.”

“Almost an invitation.”

“The gauntlet thrown.”

“Absolutely.”

“I picture a sort of Ionian column,” said the publisher in his speculative way. “With the wind howling around it.”

This remark produced a sudden flush of intimacy. “Well,” one of the lawyers said, clearly the cleverer one, “what I picture is the female form preserved in the pillar. Like one of
those temple goddesses who support the cornices of classical buildings. Last summer my wife and I—”

Thornbury thought of his own wife, Flora, as he had last seen her in London. She was striding away from him at Heathrow, chip-chipping on her high, very slender shoes. He had kissed her lips, something he seldom did in public; she’d been cross with him that day, unexpectedly argumentative and, with some logic, accused him of seizing upon travel as a retreat from difficulty. There was nothing saline about Flora’s lips. More like summer fruit, though some would say past ripeness. He recalled the day he first met her. Her hair was a crown of auburn; they had taken a taxi across London, and she had been wearing a rather short skirt which exposed a pair of sharp, carved knees, reminding him, more than anything else, of the small shrewd heads of foxes. His hands had wanted to reach out and cover them.

A week ago, at Heathrow, he’d gone through the barrier and turned for a final look at her, wondering almost abstractly whether she would turn at the same moment. She hadn’t. She’d walked briskly to the automatic doors and disappeared. He felt himself stiffen with loneliness. Montreal lay ahead—woods, deep lakes—then Toronto, Winnipeg, Calgary, Vancouver, a stretched follow-the-dot ganglia of effort and rich meals. It was then he thought of Lot’s wife, wondering if it had been tears that turned her to salt, her wish to stay rooted in one spot. He was about to risk this thought aloud when he saw that dessert was being served.

Dessert was maple mousse, one of the club specialties, almost always trotted out for foreign guests (or overseas visitors, as the somewhat old-fashioned chef would have put it). In Quebec, Thornbury had been served
jambon au sirop d’érable
, in Toronto a bizarre maple liqueur, and he imagined
that, esophagus to gut, he soon would be lined with a bed of sweetness. His health, his celebrity, were toasted with brandy.

“I’m sure you gentlemen will be wanting an early night,” he said, acting out of the guilt that attaches to guests of honor and imagining the faithful waiting wives.

It is a trick of perception, he believes, that makes him see these absent wives as faithful. He has absorbed, in the barely glimpsed cities—Melbourne, Perth, Tulsa, Austin, Denver, San Francisco—an impression of marital order, an ongoing pageant celebrating the richness of that phantom, fidelity. A mirage of course. Sweet and druggy, fleeting as music that leaks from car windows, he breathes it in as a necessary potion. “My wife and I” is a phrase he leaps upon. “My wife said to me—”

“My wife read your recent article—” These wives, with their unassailable good faith, have won his love. It’s they he thinks about before falling asleep in his first-class hotel rooms, though his dreams are about Flora and the helpless worries that gabble behind him like starved geese. He and Flora had once talked about emigrating. Rhodesia was mentioned, he recalls. Well, that would have been a mistake, anyway.

Good night. A pleasure. An honor. Enchanting. Good night. Within minutes, with almost painful haste, the guests scatter, going out through the heavy club doors into a moist spring night. Only the theologian lingers for a moment. His voice is breathy and excited. He intends to pursue the question of Lot’s wife, he tells Thornbury. Why salt indeed? An interesting question. No doubt one of the biblical commentaries he has at home will have something to say on the subject. He promises to drop Thornbury a line if he discovers anything.

Thornbury looks at the man’s round face, its open, large-eared symmetry and nascent jowls, and clearly sees how
he must have looked as an infant, imagining first a fair wisp of hair and then the beginnings of a knitted bonnet with matching satin ribbon bow fixing it to his head. He also divines in him an anxious groping toward recognition—someone in the same boat, as
he
might put it—and even a flimsy uprooted reaching for love. What can he say under the circumstances? Speaking from the heart, Flora always says, turns him to pulp.

He pictures the now inevitable postcard winging its way across the Atlantic, its tough little Canadian stamp and postmark, its cramped, pedantic printing, the horror of a cheery set of exclamation points, hail-fellow-searcher-after-truth. Dear God.

Flora, elegant and angular, will stoop and pick it up, peer at it and say, slippingly, “What’s all
this
about salt?” She cannot imagine his life, what it’s composed of and how he conspires to preserve it.