Kanata (48 page)

I met Elizabeth at a party. A party I didn't want to go to, like all parties. It was in a small bungalow, filled with men in sports coats and women in dresses, most of them teachers. I was standing
by the hi-fi when a woman walked up and started flipping through the records. She picked out a Fats Waller record and delicately laid the needle down, then stood for a minute, listening to Waller tear through “Honeysuckle Rose.”

Elizabeth had thick blond hair that was fading into grey, and a habit of drawing one hand through it, as if she was renewing her own sense of its lustre. Then she would repeat the gesture, as if she needed to be reminded again of its magnificence, its thickness like a sheaf of wheat. It seemed flirtatious, as if we had mussed her hair together.

Elizabeth talked quickly and her hands moved through the air like a conductor's. She'd grown up in Montreal and for a while lamented the loss of its mystery and romance. But she found solace in the mountains. We spent almost every weekend there, hiking up to the tea hut above Lake Louise, canoeing down the Bow River, driving up to the Columbia Icefield. We swam naked in Emerald Lake, its otherworldly colour giving the water the impression of viscosity, as if it were a green soup, the very water where life had first formed. We made love in our small tent, happy to wake up in the fresh air, cool in the mornings, even in August.

Elizabeth was a nurse and there were more opportunities in Calgary. But there was something else too, I think: She wasn't particularly happy in the place she came from. She didn't really fit in. Or she didn't fit into the romantic version of Montreal she carried with her. Tall and wide-shouldered, on the cusp of bigboned, she was more suited to the West, where her natural grace wasn't eclipsed by the small, slim, dark-haired women that appear in waves on St. Catherine Street, almost military in their numbers, strutting with alluring indifference. Among that army Elizabeth looked ungainly and plain. So she came west.

We were together for a decade. I don't know how it died. We went to Montreal together and she gave me a tour of her childhood,
showed me the place where she first smoked a cigarette, where she went to school, lost her virginity, the café where she talked about Marx with an African exchange student until two in the morning. We drove through Notre-Dame-de-Grâce and I tried to imagine her as a schoolgirl, walking in her uniform smoking experimentally with her fellow Catholics, furtively checking to see if God was going to strike her down. But I couldn't. I couldn't summon her life there, or perhaps I just wasn't interested enough, and she sensed that. We drove past Ogilvy's, Schwartz's Deli, a café where she fell in love, all her landmarks.

Perhaps Elizabeth was an antidote to Marion. They were certainly opposites, both in appearance and temperament. Marion was feral, and that had an appeal, but it was exhausting. Elizabeth was a pragmatist. I never needed to worry about her shooting me in the chest six times with a pistol filled with blanks. If she were ever to shoot me, it would be with real bullets. But in the end, she stayed in Montreal and I came back home alone.

Sometimes people move to reinvent themselves. They move to Paris or Toronto or New York or Los Angeles and become something else. Marion was one of those. She scraped the cow shit off her shoes and disappeared into the movies and never looked back. I went to her funeral. It wasn't that long ago. I hadn't seen her in thirty years. Why go? It ended badly, of course, but I was in love with her once. And that's something. It took me a long time to get over her, two years, probably more. Eventually she faded from my thoughts. But she was a moment in my life. When you're in your twenties you think there will be a lot of these moments, but you look back and there aren't that many.

So I went to her funeral.

The service was held in a small Spanish chapel in east Los Angeles. There was a Mexican priest with a dark, heavy head and six mourners. Rough wooden beams spanned the ceiling and there was an emaciated Jesus on the cross beside the priest, an especially anguished version, his eyes leaking blood, his body a red wound. Marion's coffin was by the altar. It was closed and I wished that it wasn't, that I could see her face. I hadn't kept any photographs of her; I burned them in the desert thirty years ago, and all memory is flawed. What did she look like now? She would have been in her sixties, still slim. I didn't recognize anyone in the chapel, though I hadn't expected to. We didn't have that many friends; we were a nation, enclosed and fractious.

I tried to recall the taste of her, the feel of her skin, something tangible to bury. She had a specific stare, one hand up by her face, squinting through the smoke of a Black Cat, lost in thought. What had she been doing for the last thirty years? I constructed a loose narrative: three more marriages; living in a bungalow on the flats below Beverly Hills in the shadow of celebrity; wearing oversized sunglasses into the evening. She had too much white wine with lunch, did the crossword, owned a small dog that died of neglect, talked about moving to France.

Who was her last lover? I wondered. How long ago?

After the priest's unfelt eulogy, there was a short prayer and we stood up and bowed our heads and filed out into the light.

The priest came over and asked me if I would help with the casket. They were one short. Two of the pallbearers had been supplied by the funeral home, impassive men dressed in black suits. Three others looked like they had some affiliation with the church and had been pressed into emergency service, Mexican men in white shirts that were damp with perspiration. We picked up the casket and walked in a hesitant procession to a hearse, then drove to the graveyard and unloaded her. I was at the front, and my face touched the cool wood of the coffin. Marion's face, unglimpsed in decades, was only inches away. Would they have applied makeup? Probably not. Her face would be pale, hues of greys and blues, her
lips thin and drawn, the lines gathered in small piles. I thought of the night when we made love in the graveyard and now here we were again.

T
he 1950s were good for a lot of people. In 1958, John Diefenbaker became prime minister, landing in office with the largest majority in history. What luck for a politician to arrive on stage at the exact moment that history craves him. Dief the Chief was of the West, with a preacher's rectitude and a lawyer's tongue, an outsider when the country had tired of insiders. His name was given to your school. An easy man to mock; he looked and sounded like the Old Testament, and preached anti-Americanism. He berated them as the devil, wattles shaking, eyes burning, livid and righteous. If we didn't cast the Yankees out of the temple, we were lost, he said. They wanted to put nuclear warheads on Canadian soil. They were buying Canadian companies. Their movie stars were in our dreams and we lusted for them, but when we awoke Marilyn and her comforting breasts were gone.

Well, we hate what is most like ourselves: That's what makes civil wars so potent. The narcissism of small differences. Maybe that was part of my attachment to Stanford; he was my opposite in most ways. He was another world. Diefenbaker was worried the differences between the two countries would be erased completely. He found comfort in the British Empire and the Queen, in tins of Walker's shortbread bought at Eaton's, in lace tablecloths and Anglican ceremony, and millions shared this view. Though not many who were under sixty. It isn't just music that each generation throws away.

Diefenbaker understood the 1950s, a decade of order and prosperity and everyone singing from the same hymn book. But beneath that calm, forces were gathering, the kilotons assembling on
our borders. The world was a quiet hostage, the end of history at hand, a flash of light and physics that would take everything, though people didn't give it that much thought. It was incomprehensible. Who can comprehend that final nullity? It would take all human meaning with it. We would be a blip, that short, violent period between the dinosaurs and nuclear winter.

Diefenbaker didn't understand those forces. He didn't understand the 1960s and still doesn't (he's still in the legislature, sitting in the back benches like a mad uncle they can't find an attic for). How can one decade be so different from another? But of course they aren't neatly divided in ten-year increments; we do that after they're gone.

Diefenbaker is lost now. He can see history moving away from him and doesn't know where it's going. But for a brief moment, he coincided with history, a lucky thing for anyone, especially a politician. He was the people; we were him.

1

J
OHN
D
IEFENBAKER,
W
ASHINGTON,
1961

Standing in the doorframe, John F. Kennedy had a look he'd been practising forever. He bristled with purpose and adventure, the tanned heir, the whole country suddenly young. Jesus, he was handsome. Not like Ike's comfy face, the face of a fishing guide. Diefenbaker had liked Ike, could relax with him, even if they hadn't always agreed. They were of the same generation. But Kennedy was forty-four, Dief sixty-six, and this gap loomed as they shook hands.

Diefenbaker had already built up a reasonable dislike for the man. The Prairie populist with crinkly hair flattened under punishing protestant brush strokes, those hawkish eyes with their hint of evangelical madness, had won in a
landslide. Kennedy, on the other hand, had scraped through with the smallest margin in U.S. history—118,000 votes! On this count, Diefenbaker was ahead. He had campaigned on a vigorous platform of anti-Americanism, tapping into the public mood.

“Would I be right in thinking that the United States is not unhelpful to you for political purposes in Canada?” Kennedy asked, smiling, teasing. He pronounced it “Canader” in his Boston accent. (On announcing Diefenbaker's visit, he had mispronounced his name—Diefen
bawker
—a mistake, though curiously the original pronunciation before it was anglicized after his grandfather's death.)

“That would be a not inaccurate conclusion.”

They chatted in the Oval Office, which had been redecorated since Ike left, and reflected Kennedy's naval background. There were paintings of the War of 1812, which Kennedy saw as a marvellous victory for the States.

“You know,” Diefenbaker said, “the British frigate
Shannon
captured the U.S. frigate
Chesapeake
and took it to Halifax in 1813.”

“If I had that picture,” Kennedy said, smiling, “I'd put it up.”

“I'll give it to you.”

Kennedy had already shown him the sailfish he had caught during his honeymoon in Acapulco. What kind of president had a fishing trophy in the White House?

“Have you ever caught anything better?” Kennedy asked, teasing yet not teasing in that Brahmin way.

“I was in Jamaica,” Diefenbaker answered. “I caught a marlin. Eight and a half feet, one hundred forty pounds. A fighter.”

“You didn't really catch it.” Smiling.

“I did. Three hours and ten minutes.”

“Three hours.”
Owahs
.

“And ten minutes.”

The real point of the meeting, through the terse niceties, the subtle complaints of economic imperialism, the idle chat of dumping surplus goods, and the natural friction due to the gap in age, political belief, and privilege, was nuclear. If the Russians came over the pole, Canada would be the battleground. Kennedy wanted to put nuclear missiles on Canadian soil. Diefenbaker wanted to publicly stand up to Kennedy, but also wanted to have an adequate defence against the Soviet threat. He saw the grey light of compromise in every issue. (He was more decisive when he woke up; as the day wore on he dithered—it was a race to get to him early in the day.)

“We need you to accept those nuclear warheads for continental defence,” Kennedy said.

“There is strong opposition to nuclear bombs,” Diefenbaker said, wandering instinctively to a middle ground. “We will be a strong ally … but we'd like to see the acquisition of warheads tied to disarmament talks.” His nuclear position was a mélange of qualifiers, hypothetical futures, and contrary politics; his private language.

They talked of Latin America, and the Congo, where the Russians and Americans were circling one another like wrestlers. It had been less than a year since the Congo leader Patrice Lumumba had come to Ottawa looking for support and money. Lumumba asked External Affairs Minister Howard Green to send a girl to his suite in the Château Laurier. Green assumed he needed a secretary and sent one. When the naked, professorial Lumumba opened the door,
the girl ran down the hallway clutching her steno pad. External Affairs hired a prostitute the following night and sent her over, then billed the cost to the taxpayer under the entry of “flowers.” And now Lumumba was dead, murdered last month in the African bush, the Belgians standing by apparently, maybe even supervising the execution. A Belgian officer dug up Lumumba's remains and cut them up with a hacksaw, then dissolved them in acid, keeping his teeth as a souvenir. Geopolitics as a horror film. The Americans had wanted to kill him as well, and perhaps the CIA tried.