Object of Your Love (22 page)

“What about
me?
” Honora had asked him.

“Of course I love you too,” he told her, but Honora believed that if he'd really loved her, he would have taken her away from her mother and let her have a childhood. When he died, Honora's mother did not attend the funeral.

“I'm too exhausted,” she said from her bed. At the burial site, Honora picked up a handful of earth. It was a dry, loose, infertile soil. When she tossed it on the coffin, much of it blew away in the wind. What a fool you were, Father, she thought. What a waste you made of your love.

“I saw Ford's picture in the news today,” says Honora's mother.

Ford, Honora's ex-husband, is a criminal lawyer who has his name in the papers all the time. He defends famous white-collar murderers, often businessmen, accused of committing clean, brilliant, innovative crimes.

“It was the society column. He goes to all the best functions.”

“That would impress you.”

“Why did you have to move to Franklin Bay?”

“I like the view from here, Mother.”

“If you came back to Toronto,” says Honora's mother, “I'd give you money.”

“You never gave me money before, when I lived there. Actually, Mother, now that you mention it, I could use a little help right now.”

“You shouldn't need my money, at your age. If you hadn't thrown away all your opportunities. Your father and I wanted everything for you. You could have gone to university. You had the brains. You could have gotten an arts degree, like Dilys. But you ran away to Europe. I felt so betrayed.”

“Mother, that was thirty years ago.”

“You didn't call us for months on end.”

“I needed space, Mother.”

“You lived in some slum.”

“It was a flat. There was nothing squalid about it.”

Honora's mother doesn't know the half of it. When she was twenty, Honora was working in Madrid for a photographer. She grew up overnight. She tried marijuana and cocaine. She learned to masturbate. She slept with the photographer and found that she did not feel guilty about his wife Rosaria and their little son Jesus. The photographer paid her very little and, as he neared bankruptcy, nothing at all. After a year, Honora came back to Canada because her parents refused to send her any more money and because, returning one day to the studio with sandwiches and a bottle of wine, she found the photographer naked on top of a client on the floor, all tangled up among the extension cords and electrical wires. Back in Canada, Honora met, in her parents' house, Ford, a law student and the son of an academic colleague of her father. She married him. At the time, it seemed the easiest thing to do.

“Dilys was here to visit—oh, two weeks ago,” says Honora's mother.

“I know. I sent my love through her.”

“She's such a faithful niece. Such original ideas. That is the kind of daughter I wanted. People like Dilys make things happen. She talked about you.” Honora recalls Dilys's words when she set off for the visit. “I'll put in a good word for you,” she promised Honora.

“She's so protective of me,” Honora says.

“Protective! Ha! Don't you know, Honora? Don't you realize that Dilys resents you in so many ways? She says you're passive and lazy.”

“You don't know that.”

“She didn't want to say it but I got it out of her. We had a long heart-to-heart talk. She called you a freeloader. Don't tell her I told you.”

After she hangs up, Honora bites the inside of her cheek until it bleeds. How alike are Dilys and Mother, thinks Honora for the first time: the envy, the nastiness, the blame. What has Honora done to threaten Dilys? Is it her long legs? Her deep, gravelly voice? The tranquil core of her that Dilys has said she so admires? Her Chanel suits left over from her life with Ford? The class she gives the reception desk, which is exactly what Dilys said the hotel needed? Honora looks out the hotel window at leaves blowing down the street, at stores across the way, many of them closed up already for the season; most will not reopen even for Christmas, their owners have gone off to Florida or Australia for the winter. Soon Franklin Bay will resemble a ghost town. Honora feels a wave of something. Sadness? Panic? Once again, she sees herself sitting in the little reception cubicle, a bird in a bright cage. For a moment, she feels she would like to tear the hotel down, board by board.

She sets about sorting the invoices. It is not so big a job after all, it takes less than half an hour. When she begins her hands are shaking, but by the time she finishes the shaking has stopped because she knows what she must do. She gathers the invoices together, lifts a section of the counter, slips through and lowers it again. Quietly, she makes her way upstairs, passing the restaurant, with its orange tile floor and Shaker chairs and stiff white napkins folded like swans and long fan-shaped windows giving a view of the street. Distant, muted sounds of cooking come from the kitchen, the smell of onions frying. Honora treads softly on the deep stair carpet. Turning at the top step, she goes down the narrow, deserted hallway, which is filled with the salty smell from the sauna at the end of the passage. She knocks gently on Victor's door, looks quickly up and down the hall, then slips swiftly inside.

He is sitting in an old, heavy swivel desk chair, wearing his customary three-piece tweed suit—it is a kind of uniform for him, his suit of armour, you might say, protecting him, if that is possible, from Dilys's scrutiny, from her harping. Through the window, a pearl light falls on his long, almond-shaped head, which is bald and shiny and somewhat pointed on top, like a very large, smooth and absurd bird's egg.

“Honora—?” he turns to her, nonplussed. Even after all these years he is shy, surprised around her, perhaps because she and Dilys have such a solid history together, a good chunk of Dilys was already spoken for, before Victor ever met her. He cannot help feeling like a latecomer, a gate-crasher, a third party.

“I've brought you something, Victor,” Honora says. He reaches out to take the invoices. “No, not these,” she says, and lets them flutter to the floor. She grasps the back of his chair and turns him around so that the window is behind him. The room is hot, she can smell his stale suit. Reaching down, she loosens his tie.

“Honora, what—?”

Unfastening his belt, she pulls his trousers, his underwear down over his white hips, over his hairy knees, lets them fall in a tangle around his ankles, onto his heavy-stitched Oxford shoes, so that he could not get up and flee even if he'd wanted to. Even if he'd wanted to. Honora doesn't feel anything like surprise at what she's undertaken, but goes about her task with a certain economy, with rapid, deft movements. Perhaps she has imagined this scene before, perhaps she has dreamt it.

Is this survival? wonders Honora, looking out the window over Victor's head as she moves on top of him, causing his chair to glide pleasantly, rhythmically, on its wheels. Or is it destruction? What does she want? Is she striking out at the alliance between her mother and Dilys? Is she trying to chip away a little piece of Dilys's establishment, attacking at its foundations? The rough wool of Victor's suit jacket burns her knees. She unbuttons her blouse but he does not dare to touch her skin. Victor is terrified of Honora. He is terrified of Dilys. He only looks at her bare breasts, her navel, the curve of her hips revealed by the loosened blouse. His hands rest, as though they are dead, on the chair arms. He is like a little cringing dog, thinks Honora with disgust. Out of him comes a whimper, helplessness, gratitude, begging her not to stop, but to carry them all the way.

What a pathetic ruin he is, Honora thinks, an empty, quaking shell, hollowed out by Dilys, blasted powdery as ash by her temper, by the sheer force of her will. But aren't they both damaged? Aren't they, together, Honora and Victor, the wreckage from Dilys's ambitions? What I am doing, thinks Honora, will cause problems for Victor, problems for Dilys, somewhere down the road. That is enough for me. It is not power she wants. No, the whole idea of power bores her. Rather, she is interested in lies and secrets, broken vows, taboos, sins, betrayals, violations, lust, damage, forbidden pleasures: what she sees as the true undercurrent of life, the dark web of desire, the private deeds meshed together, woven like horny undergarments, worn close to the body, that make the ordinary outward trappings, the apparel of everyday life supportable.

Afterward, Honora moves to the office door. Victor has tucked his shirt back into his pants, straightened his tie, mopped the perspiration from his scalp. He is on his hands and knees collecting the scattered invoices.

“Shall we tell Dilys about this?” Honora asks him.

“Christ, no!” he says, his face flushing with alarm.

“She might like to know. She might be relieved it's finally happened. Another item she could cross off her agenda. She's been pushing us together for a long time, hasn't she? She's been asking for this.” If Honora were to tell her, Dilys would blame Victor. Honora and Victor both know this. She would be more likely to punish Victor than Honora. Blood is thicker than water.

“For god's sake, Honora, don't tell her! Jesus!”

III

Dilys is gone for more than the morning. She does not return until two, her hair wild and her face ruddy from the wind. She comes to Honora before even taking her coat off.

“I saw Rachel,” she says breathlessly. “When I got back into town I needed to go to the hardware store, so I had to drive down Louisa Street, past Holmes's clinic. Honora, I drove past and there she was in the goddamn window, hugging him in plain view. What on earth is she thinking of?”

“She's young.”

“She's over twenty. She should behave more responsibly.”

Dilys is not really one to talk about responsibility in children, thinks Honora. Dilys's daughter Euphemia is living in some sort of commune in Alberta, some sort of crazy religious camp. She has had three babies, all by different men in the commune. She is not even sure which men they were. The people in this commune, the men and the women, look very much the same, they look like sexless acolytes, with their flowing India cotton gowns, long matted hair, unwashed limbs, bead necklaces, thick leather sandals. There are apparently drugs in this community, and nudity, incense burning, trances, chants and rituals carried on by candlelight or by the illumination of the full moon. There may even be guns. Dilys flew out there once, hoping to talk sense into Euphemia, to bring her home. She came back shocked and totally disgusted. The commune, she said, was full of dirty cross-eyed children. She doesn't talk about Euphemia now. It is as if she never had a daughter.

“It's getting too overt,” says Dilys about Rachel's behaviour. “Franklin Bay is a tiny community. People are conservative, they talk. If it gets out, the whole place could blow up over it.”

“So be it.”

“It could affect the hotel.”

“People in Franklin Bay don't stay at the hotel.”

“But they'd talk. They'd find ways to undermine, to sabotage.”

“I'd leave then, if I proved a liability.”

“But that's not the point!”

IV

Honora walks home through the town in the mellow afternoon light. It has been a warm and rainy fall. The last of the leaves have finally been torn from the trees, they are plastered flat to the wet pavement, like extinguished flames; they lie in pools of gold on front lawns, where the grass, uncut since September, is long and wet. It is a soft and agreeable afternoon, tinged with the not unpleasant sense of sadness and termination that autumn brings. The streets are pungent with the perfume of death, of the slow and steady disintegration of matter, the deep rotting smell of composting leaves, of fermenting apples lost in long grass, of branches knocked down by gusty winds to turn soft and slippery as snakes in the gullies, of the funky scent of toadstools and rich damp earth. Everywhere, on porches, in front windows, bedroom windows, is the droll burlesque of Halloween, pumpkins and paper witches and tissue ghosts, vain attempts to stir up a little horror. On one lawn, a dozen little skeletons, swinging from the branches of a crab apple tree, act out a strange and ghoulish comedy.

When Honora arrives home, Rachel is in the kitchen eating a grilled-cheese sandwich. Honora is surprised to see her there so early. This is usually the time of day when she plays her little games with Dr. Holmes, once the patients, the therapist, the bookkeeper have cleared out and before he must go home to his wife.

Honora goes down the narrow hall to the bathroom to freshen up, to give Rachel a little space. She and Rachel tread carefully around each other, they have learned there are regions that are off-limits. There is a fragility, a potential explosiveness to their relationship that has to do with Ford and with why they are both here in Franklin Bay. Rachel knows about Ford's infidelity. She knows the reasons that Honora and Ford are not together any more. She may understand them ideologically, but on an emotional level she is still angry. She will always be a child, in this sense, and she will always blame Honora because it is easier to blame the gender you know than the gender you don't. In the end, thinks Honora, women will always turn on each other like angry dogs.

Rachel went to university in Toronto and dropped out in the spring of her third year. She came here to live with Honora. She lay on the beach all summer and toward the end of August, when the weather grew cooler, she got this job, as the chiropractor's receptionist. Since nearly the first day, since Labour Day, she's been involved with Dr. Holmes. There is a big wire cage in the office, in the physiotherapy area, a section of curtained-off beds, with ropes and sturdy leather straps hanging from it. These are used to support injured limbs, mending hips and fractured arms that need traction and therapy. Rachel has told Honora about how Dr. Holmes puts her in this cage, ties her up, straps her down, whips and spanks and twists and drives her to a climax. Honora is fascinated and disgusted by these stories and also slightly incredulous. She finds it somewhat difficult to picture the shy and introverted, the thin, poker-straight and conservative-looking Dr. Holmes, with his serious face and his short grey military haircut, as a kind of circus ringmaster with a whip, a cruel gamekeeper in a zoo. On the other hand, she is able to believe Rachel's stories entirely, because she has learned that people are usually just the opposite of what they appear.