Now here was Victor, with no eyebrows left, forever married to Angelica, venturing to replace the dead racing-car driver who haunted poor Irma’s imagination. He was proposing a neck that, so far, no one had broken. He may even have promised never to die, thinking it would please her — although, I suspect now, it is not at all what women want.
Watching the two make their way hand in hand down the road, I experienced love’s opposite, which is resentment. Neither of them possessed the least qualification for being loved. Irma had never been able to stir up friendship. Some people had imitated her Belgian accent; the Admiral swore she had tried to entangle him in a conversation about art (he was too smart to be caught), and that when she mentioned the Bauhaus he had understood “the bowwows.” I was not so unjust as to think she and Victor deserved each other. He was still the man at the foot of the ladder, scratching his neck and pleading for dignity. Irma was no more a pirate than most of the rest of us; she would have clutched the chandelier and said, “Help me! I’m falling!” She was a sad little amateur, failed before she was launched. Nevertheless, love’s opposite reflected Irma’s vision of Victor. She turned to him there in the road, and it was like watching a tree burst into wild blossom because a saint had touched it. Now my mind changed in a second. She was too good for Victor de Stentor. I believed the story of the lover drowned in the canaclass="underline" brave, disinterested, superior to Victor. For the sake of his memory, I would have seen Victor dead, bloated, devoured by crabs.
“Let me show you where the Cuban used to hold concerts of chamber music for his guests,” I said, guiding Carlotta a few steps toward a bleak terrace surrounded by a broken balustrade patched with concrete.
“Is this old?”
“Some of it. Try and imagine the music, the moonlight, the stiff wind that rises at about ten o’clock, the audience quietly freezing on their gilt chairs. Vladimir de Pachmann played here. He was a great favorite at that time.”
“What did he play?”
“He played Chopin on a grand piano, and every so often he stopped playing and cried.”
“We listen to a lot of music at home. My mother likes it.”
“I know. It used to be music with meals. I can never see a lamb chop without hearing Mozart.”
“You shouldn’t get into those habits — looking at a chop and thinking about Mozart. It comes from living alone.” Strangers had joined us, believing the terrace must be part of a tour. “Steve,” said Carlotta. “Let’s go. The sun’s very hot. You ought to have a hat on.”
On the road she made me walk in shade. The other pair had disappeared. Victor was probably making his pitch about turning our small community into a contemporary instrument for living, once we’d accepted generous compensa-tion. At least the two were safe from prying, if not from each other. Seeing the worst ahead for them did not make me feel on high ground. I held Carlotta’s arm for a second. She said, “Why don’t you buy a car and just leave it here? It would be cheaper than renting one.”
“I’m here only a few weeks a year.”
“Like, how many?”
“Three, four. Sometimes six. It depends. I’m wondering where to take you to lunch.”
“It’s really nice of you,” she said.
“To think about lunch?”
“Yes, and to show me all these different things, and take the time to explain. A lot of men wouldn’t be bothered.”
“I’m sure most of them would,” I said, to round off the subject.
“Mmm. Ya. Men.” From Lily’s daughter, three profound philosophical statements; but she was Ken Peel’s child, too.
The last time I ever saw Ken Peel was on a June afternoon, just before Lily and I got married and sailed to France. He stood on the threshold of his sporting-goods store, hands in his pockets, rocking slightly in his white-and-tan shoes, sniffing the air of downtown Montreal. I was walking west along St. Catherine Street, on my way to see an Italian movie the Church was trying to have banned in Quebec. I could make out the hand-lettered sign Peel hung on the door when he had better things to do than sell gym kits: “BACH IN 20 MIN.” (Either that sign announced a perpetually postponed concert, my aunt once said, or it showed Mr. Peel was careless about everything.)
I supposed he must have been seeing off one of his married women friends: such was his reputation. At that moment the wife of a titled Austrian exile, or a jailed union leader, or a night-club waiter (there was no bias to his adventures) might be combing her hair in a taxi, trying to pull together a credible story about the way she’d spent the afternoon. Perhaps she was one of the stiff, tough, powdered Anglo-Montreal women I encountered at cocktail parties when I was roped in as escort for my aunt. I could see her, Peel’s petite dame, surveying the room with slightly pouched eyes, hand clamped on a gin-and-tonic, thin line of scarlet lipstick, one of the famous Montreal hats sitting square, no one at the party even close to guessing she had recently been treated with some insolence on Peel’s storage-room couch.
Peel, face tilted, smiling at the sky, might have recognized me as an occasional customer. I had never paid by check, so he had no reason to remember my name. I have probably altered my recollection of that moment, changed its shape, refined it, as I still sometimes will tinker with shreds of a dream. It seems to me that I drew level with the store window, then turned and bolted across the street. I think that I saw, or was given to see, with a dream’s narrowed focus, a black-and-white postcard image of Lily on the edge of Peel’s couch, drawing on a stocking. For the first time I noticed how much she resembled the young Marlene, the Weimar Dietrich: the same half-shut eyes, the same dreamy and invulnerable gaze. She slid into the stocking, one perfect leg outstretched, the other bent and bare.
Actually, Lily was already dressed, waiting in the shadow of the store for Peel to give her the all-clear. She moved nearer the hot, bright street, and must have observed me, dodging behind a streetcar. I think I glanced back; either that or a whole city block swung round. Lily, wearing a hat of white straw and a white dress amazingly uncrumpled, slid past Peel and ran straight into traffic, calling, “Steve! Steve!” Peel took his hands out of his pockets; perhaps his way of showing surprise. I think now (I have been thinking it over for years) that she saw me turn round, and knew I knew. So, better to brazen it out.
I slowed down, stopped, examined a display of garden furniture in a store window. She ran on tiptoe, shuffling, the way women used to run in spike heels; caught up; grabbed me by the sleeve. Part of my mind had fallen into darkness. I could not recall having ever loved her. The Dietrich-like image dissolved, was replaced by one of Ken Peel, in heightened tones, wearing the trusting smile of the natural con artist. That face was the stamp of his Montreal generation, distributed unevenly among all ranks and classes of English-speaking males, as luck is thinly or thickly spread.
My next immediate feeling was snobbish relief that Peel was nobody’s friend, and the incident could be contained. But then it occurred to me that the people I knew had already come to some conclusion about Lily. A girl who could glide out of the late-afternoon shadows of Peel’s place had the habit of dark doorways.