“Tomorrow. I’ll wake up as usual feeling like hell resurrected. And I’ll hear Gabriel’s typewriter out on the top-floor balcony. It may be nine o’clock. Or ten. You can’t imagine how it makes me feel hearing that productive sound in the morning.”
“It makes you want to kill.”
She sighed. It was midnight, so she was able to be calm. “The girl can’t help it,” she said.
“Why not do it?”
“You jest.”
“Knock him off. Literally. The top-floor balcony at High Heaven has a low railing. It’s a long way down to the patio. The best murders are made to look like accidents. All you do is tippy-toe out there while he’s working, grab the back of his chair, and dump him over the edge.”
“I never tippy-toe in the morning. I creep. Like an iguana.”
“Just as good.”
“Anyway, I’m not a psychopath. I have a conscience. Besides, you just want Gabriel out of the way so you can move back in and get money for your aqua-school.”
“Can’t blame a man for trying.”
Another Thursday, another session in the poolroom. The fact that the snooker table was in the semi-basement playroom at High Heaven instead of in some Montreal back street didn’t make Carolina feel any better about her husband’s addiction to the game. It was the inevitability of it, the predictability. Four o’clock on Thursday afternoon, Gabriel was on the telephone having one of his peppery conversations with Stewart Sunderland at the ad agency.
“Hey, hey, whadya say, Stewie baby! How’s your old straw hat?”
“It’s never been felt, Gabe.”
Carolina could have supplied the other side of the dialogue even if she had not been listening on the upstairs extension.
“Feel like getting your ass whipped at the old snooker table, my son?”
“Careful, Parsons, or I’ll have to come out there and give you another lesson.”
“Why don’t you just jump into that parody of a car and drive out to Beaconsfield tonight? Whenever they let you up the shaft and you’ve brushed the salt from your pant cuffs.”
“I’ll be there. But I’m warning you. I sold my client three full-page ads today. I’m hot, man.”
“See you at seven. You think the rain’ll hurt the rhubarb?”
“Not if we keep it in jars.”
“And well back on the shelf. See you, Stewie.”
Carolina greeted Stewart Sunderland at the door with a kiss on the only bit of exposed face she could find. His brindle hair and beard and scrappy leather jacket matched the rusty MG convertible steaming on the forecourt below the pillared entrance. She saw him to the playroom, where Gabriel was making a production out of practicing shots.
“Have fun, boys. Want me to bring some more beer?”
“I’ll see to it later, love.”
Upstairs, preparing to go out, Carolina heard their chirpy Newfoundland voices and had to smile. Neither of them had been back to the Island in twenty years. But put them together and they began to sound straight off the ferryboat from St. John’s. There was something satisfying about the expensive snooker table being put to use. Her father had installed it and then hardly ever taken the cover off. It became a handy surface on which to pile annual reports and stock prospectuses for gold mines with obscure Indian names. But not any more; these days it was a hustler’s paradise down there.
Carolina went outside and stepped into her Continental. While the engine idled, she glanced at the top-floor balcony. The railing certainly was low. She wondered how Gabriel could bring himself to work out there, but he did. On pleasant mornings, the clatter of his typewriter, heard through her bedroom window on the floor below, was proof of that.
Half awake that morning, she had remembered Bob’s criminal suggestion and had considered it. Now things were back in perspective. To push Gabriel over the edge would be cold-blooded murder, and with very little provocation. If the sound of his typing disturbed her, she could ask him to work inside. But the noise was, of course, only a reminder of his insistence on earning a symbolic amount of money. Gabriel refused to belong to her outright, like the house, the factory down the road, and the various club presidencies she had bought with donations.
Carolina switched on the headlights and drove slowly down the lane between rows of young poplars, toward a spur road leading to the Montreal highway. She wanted very much to be with Bob tonight. The concert at Place des Arts could go to hell. She would tell the girls tomorrow that illness had forced her to cancel at the last minute. She would drive in to Maisonneuve and see if Bob was at home. It was troubling to suspect she might be capable of murdering her husband while in a mood of black depression. It was worse to understand why.
Stewart Sunderland sank the black ball in a corner pocket for his third straight victory, but all the games had been close. Gabriel placed the wooden triangle on the table and began to rack up the red balls while his friend placed the colored ones on their spots.
“It’s a matter of self-respect,” Gabe said, returning to the subject which had been abandoned temporarily as the game reached its climax. “The book reviews keep enough money coming in so that I can clothe myself, take Carolina out for dinner occasionally, and always have cash in my pocket. Without that, I’d be finished as a man.”
“But you live in this mansion rent-free. Why not go all the way? Let her support you while you produce another novel.”
“I can’t. If High Heaven belonged to me I might be able to do good work here, but it’s Carolina’s house, not mine.”
“Then move out.”
“That would be perverse, Stewie. I am the lady’s husband.” Gabe was not quite ready to admit that he was using the situation as an excuse not to risk writing another novel. The last one had been only a small success, even by Canadian standards. The next might be a failure. He was safer turning out criticisms of other people’s work.
By midnight, Stewie had consumed too much beer to consider driving back to Montreal. It would be the guest room for him. And since he was staying, there was no reason not to have another round of cold, foamy quarts. When Carolina returned at one, they were in full voice down in the game room. She stood silently in the doorway, aware of the smell of Bob’s cologne emerging and fading around her, listening to Gabriel and Stewart singing to the tune of “Roamin’ in the Gloamin’.”
She went to bed smiling, feeling at her best. Whatever chemical process would take place in her brain between now and morning, poisoning her outlook and turning her murderous, had yet to happen. Drifting halfway from sleep, she heard them down the hall giggling like schoolboys as they tried to turn down Stewie’s covers.
“You keep a fine hotel here, sir.”
“We aim to please. You aim, too, please.”
“Don’t let me sleep in. Got a client meeting at nine.”
“Have no fear. I’m always up at seven. Best time of the day.”
“Rowing in a dory...”
“Shhhhh!”
Gabriel was romantic when he came to bed. Carolina indulged him. Afterward he said, “I suppose that counts as a superfluous act.”
“Do you care that I still see Bob?”
“Where’s the logic in my caring? I’m forty-eight years old. You’re twenty years younger and so is he. If you were lying to me cheating on me, then I’d be vulnerable. As it is I feel quite secure.”
“My friends are right. I don’t deserve you.”
“You must, or you wouldn’t have me. We all get what we deserve.”