The Glass Coffin Page 4

  It seemed that Gabe’s reading of the scene and mine had been the same. When the judge finally wound up his instructions, Gabe put his lips next to my ear. “If she’s that powerful at seventeen, she’ll be causing wars by the time she’s twenty-one,” he whispered.

  “Mothers, lock up your sons,” I said. “Mine is certainly no match for her. Until tonight, he’s bounced through life on charm, a good throwing arm, and the philosophy of John Madden.”

  Gabe raised an eyebrow. “Hard to imagine a life situation not covered by John Madden’s wit and wisdom. I met him once, you know. We were in the green room of a TV show. He let me try on his Super Bowl ring.” Gabe flexed his fingers. “It was massive and it was cheesy, but the memory of seeing it on my hand still gives me goosebumps.”

  “If you told Angus that story, he’d build a shrine for you,” I said.

  “I’ll hold that information in reserve. Some day I may just need your son’s approval.” Gabe glanced around the gallery. “We seem to be just about finished here. Can I buy you a drink?”

  “I’d love one, but I’ll have to take a rain check,” I said. “I left a serious mess at the house.”

  Angus was at my elbow. “I’ll clean up,” he said.

  “Out of the goodness of your heart?”

  “I’ve been thinking it might be nice if I got Bryn something – kind of an early Christmas present. They’ve got some cool stuff downstairs at the gallery shop.”

  “Cool … and pricey,” I said.

  “That’s where you come in,” he said.

  “It always is.” I handed him my credit card. “Be prudent.” I turned to Gabe. “We could have that drink at my house. Since Angus has volunteered for scullery duty, all I have to do is put Taylor to bed.”

  The family room was relatively untouched, so I led Gabe in there and took his order: tea – nothing fancy, just plain hot tea with lots of sugar and milk. When I came in with the tray, he held out the videos of Leap of Faith and Black Spikes and Slow Waves and looked at me quizzically. “Homage to our friend Evan?”

  I put the tray on the coffee table. “Less homage than homework,” I said. “I was trying to get acquainted with Jill’s beloved.”

  “Bad call,” he said. “The movies are brilliant – not many filmmakers can convey human loneliness with that kind of intensity – but there’s no doubt that they’re troubling.”

  “Evan MacLeish is a troubling man,” I said. “There are moments when I understand why Jill is drawn to him, but I can’t get past his history. And that scene we walked in on in the kitchen didn’t help.”

  Gabe was silent, absorbed in his private thoughts. When finally he spoke, his words seemed a non sequitur. “Would you mind if we watched the ending of Black Spikes?”

  “Your turn for an homage?” I said.

  Gabe poured the tea. “Nope. Same as you, just doing my homework.”

  I put the tape in the VCR and fast-forwarded to the party scene. The screen was filled with dazzling disjointed images: Annie in a fuchsia halter top, caught like a bird in flight against the brilliant frolic of a Joan Miro painting; Annie slithering playfully through a nightmare melee of women with too thin bodies and too tight faces; Annie throwing her arms around a man whose back was to the camera and kissing him passionately, eyes wide open, watching the camera watching her.

  Finally, she broke from the embrace, exposing the man she’d been kissing. When I saw his face, the breath caught in my throat. It was Felix Schiff.

  “I missed this part this morning,” I said. “Willie was barking to be let out.”

  “I imagine Felix wishes everyone had missed it,” Gabe said dryly. “This footage was shot at the Toronto Film Festival the year everyone discovered ecstasy. Most of us just dabbled, but Felix was convinced he’d found the Holy Grail. That night, he was deep into his journey towards chemical enlightenment.”

  “You were at that party?”

  Gabe nodded. “I even have a cameo in this movie. My appearance comes just about … now!”

  The image of Gabe was fleeting. The camera moved in on his face, then the shot went jerky as if Gabe had been trying to wrest the camera from the man holding it. Apparently, Evan broke free because the next shots were of Annie running down the hall, punching the elevator button, and stepping inside. Just before the doors closed, she gave her husband a mocking wave.

  Scenes from a marriage.

  And then the final scene – this one set in the weird hallucinatory dream world of a traffic accident. Marrow-freezing sounds of sirens and screams; lights as pitiless as the glare on a film set; professionals working silently to extract a body from a twist of metal. Then a man’s voice, rough-edged with fatigue and emotion, “Got her,” as a fuchsia rag is pulled from the wreckage. The camera zooms in hungrily, but Gabe Leventhal shuffles out of the darkness and throws his jacket over the body, denying Annie Lowell’s husband the chance to get his money shot. Then darkness, and the sound of a woman moaning.

  Gabe leaned forward. The TV screen filled with images of the final moments of a childbirth. The baby’s head crowns; its shoulders emerge, hands reach down to pull the baby from its mother’s body. Oddly, the camera doesn’t linger on the newborn. The focus is on the child’s mother. When the baby is given to her, she turns away, lifts a slender arm, and pulls the surgical sheet over her head, shutting out the kitten-like cries of the newborn, denying motherhood.

  Gabe was staring at the screen like a man who had never seen pictures move.

  I was the one who broke the silence. “Evan told me tonight he couldn’t save Annie because she was beyond his reach. I didn’t believe him. I thought he was just making excuses, but a mother who rejects her newborn is beyond reach. Poor Annie,” I said. The penny dropped. “Poor Bryn – having irrefutable proof that her mother never wanted her.”

  “Bryn was able to spare herself that particular trauma,” Gabe said. “She flatly refuses to watch any of her father’s films. A very sensible decision, in my opinion.”

  “I agree,” I said. “She certainly didn’t need to see that scene at the party.” I turned to Gabe. “You were trying to get Evan to stop filming his wife.”

  “She was out of control,” he said dully. “Annie never met a drug, a drink, a fast car, or a man she didn’t like. After Bryn was born, it got worse, but the night she died Annie was beyond wild – it was as if she could hear the clock ticking and she wanted to experience everything before it stopped.”

  “And you were trying to keep Evan from making a permanent record.”

  “There was Bryn to consider – not that either of them ever did. Annie seemed to be taunting Evan that night, trying to provoke him.”

  “Why?”

  Gabe locked his hands around his cup. “I have no idea. Annie was beautiful and talented and she’d just delivered a dynamite performance in a film everyone knew was going to be a hit. She was on her way … but you know, Joanne, when the phone rang that night and Evan’s answering service said Annie had been in an accident, I wasn’t surprised. Somehow, I had the sense that he wasn’t either.

  “I drove him to the accident scene. Annie hadn’t gotten far, but it was the longest drive of my life. As soon as I saw the state of the Porsche, I knew she was dead. There was no way she could have lived. But Evan walked over to one of the cops, introduced himself, and took out his video camera. For all the emotion he showed, he could have been filming a family reunion.”

  “The snowman,” I said. “Evan told me tonight that’s what his mother calls him, because he’s doesn’t feel what other people feel.”

  Gabe slumped. “Poor bastard,” he said. “Maybe that’s why he’s always been drawn to women with such hot emotional lives.”

  “Very Jungian,” I said. “Also very smart for a filmmaker. You get to record the mess other people make of their lives with a clear eye.”

  Gabe looked startled. “The ending.” He turned to me. “What did you make of the way Evan juxtaposed Annie’s death and Bryn�
�s birth?”

  “Maybe he was saying that no matter what happens to the individual, life continues.”

  “So by reconstructing what we know of reality and time, Evan shows a greater reality?” Gabe’s gaze was piercing: the professor pressing for an answer from a promising student. Unfortunately, the student’s promise was limited.

  “I’m out of my depth here,” I said. “I was the only girl in my dorm who didn’t understand Last Year at Marienbad.”

  Gabe put down his tea and looked at me curiously. “That’s an interesting connection.”

  “Especially since I haven’t thought about that movie in twenty-five years. But just now, when we watched the ending of Black Spikes, I felt the same sense of manipulation – as if the filmmaker deliberately made me lose my bearings.”

  “ ‘Always walls, always corridors, always doors – and on the other side, still more walls.’ ” Gabe’s voice was a murmur. Seeing the concern in my eyes, he shook off his reverie and reached out and took my hand. “So what’s been going on in your life since Last Year at Marienbad?”

  The grandmother clock in the dining room had just struck eleven when we said goodnight. Neither of us wanted the evening to end. Admitting that my relationship with my former lover, Alex Kequahtooway, was over was proving so painful that I’d pretty well decided there were worse options than going it alone. But Gabe and I had connected with the kind of pizza and Chianti intimacy I hadn’t experienced since college. We had leapt over the mundane to attack the big topics: love, loss, and – the inevitable for anyone in their fifties – death. Gabe read widely and thought deeply. His conversation was shot through with allusions, but when he spoke about death his words were simple. “I don’t fear it, but I hate the idea that everything I’ve ever been will be over. You were smart to have kids.”

  “Continuance,” I said.

  “An appealing thought,” he said. “Especially for a man without a family.” He put his arm around me and we walked to the door. To an outsider, we would have been nothing extraordinary: two people in late middle age, sagging after a long day. But Gabe and I felt the possibilities, and as we watched his taxi crawl through the ruts towards my house, he turned to me. “So what do you think of our chances?”

  “I’d say that so far we’re doing fine,” I said.

  “Dashiell Hammett would say that fine is too big a word. We’re just doing better than most people.”

  The kiss he gave me was deep and passionate.

  “The wedding isn’t till three,” I said. “We could take a walk in the snow.”

  “I’ll need your number,” Gabe said. He fumbled in his pockets. “No pen,” he said.

  I found pencil and paper in the drawer of the hall table and wrote down my cell and home numbers. Gabe took the paper, slid it into his inside breast pocket, and patted it. “Tomorrow, we get to work on ‘fine,’ ” he said. “Wouldn’t it be ironic if this wedding was the start of a real love affair?” Then he kissed me again.

  The day had been jam-packed, but I was asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. When Jill touched my shoulder and called my name, I had to swim up from the depths.

  Her face was close to mine. “Can I borrow your car?” she said. “I tried to get a cab, but the snow’s really coming down, and the dispatcher said she couldn’t promise anything for at least an hour.”

  “Of course you can borrow the car,” I said. I squinted at the clock. “Jill, it’s 1:30. Can’t it wait?”

  “No,” she said. “It can’t.”

  “The keys are over there in my bag,” I said. “Do you want to tell me what this is all about?”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t. It probably won’t amount to anything, and there’s no need for both of us to lose sleep.”

  I watched at the window till Jill pulled out of the driveway. Angus’s magnificent torches had been reduced to scorched stumps. Their pagan protection was gone, and as the Volvo disappeared down the deserted street, I felt a stab of anxiety that was as intense as it was irrational. Jill was an adult. If she needed me, all she had to do was pick up the cellphone. I went back upstairs, checked on the kids, reassured Willie that all was well, plumped my pillows, and crawled back between the sheets. After half an hour, I knew it was hopeless. The sandman wasn’t coming back to my house. I rearranged the pillows and picked up the remote control.

  On “All in the Family,” Gloria and Mike were getting married. Weddings all around. I had seen the episode at least five times, and the familiarity lulled me. I woke to a staticky screen and the heart-pounding sense of disorientation that comes in the small hours. Remembering the immediate cause of my insomnia, I walked down the hall to the guest room. Jill was sitting on the edge of the bed. She was wearing a pair of panties and Angus’s Mr. Bill sweatshirt.

  “Is that part of your trousseau?” I asked.

  “No, but at the moment, it’s the perfect choice,” Jill grimaced. “Like Mr. Bill, I am Dismembered, Squashed, and Melted Down.”

  “I take it this has something to do with your quixotic midnight ride.”

  Jill ran her fingers through her hair. “Quixotic is good,” she said. “Moronic would be even better. After you went to bed, Gabe called and said he’d just found out something I should know before the wedding. He didn’t want to talk about it on the phone, so I went charging off into the night. The roads were a mess and on the way downtown I hit a patch of ice and ended up in a snowbank. Of course, at that hour, Good Samaritans were in even shorter supply than usual, so I had to dig myself out. The Volvo is fine, incidentally, but by the time I got to the hotel I must have looked like something Willie dragged in. The prim little gent behind the reception desk was so horrified, I almost had to body slam him before he’d even ring Gabe’s room for me. Big surprise – there was no answer. Gabe had obviously given up on me and gone to bed.”

  “And you have no idea what he wanted to talk about?”

  “No, and you know what, Jo? I should have realized it was a fool’s errand. There’s nothing about Evan’s life that I don’t already know. That particular Pandora’s box has been open for a long time. By now, everything has flown out but Hope, and that’s what I’m hanging on to.”

  I put my arms around her. “You deserve better than this.”

  “Maybe so, but I’m forty-five years old, and I’m tired of waiting.” Jill’s smile was weary. “Is there a fairy tale about a girl who has to sleep with every loser on the planet before she finally gets her happily ever after?”

  “Maybe an X-rated one,” I said, smoothing her hair.

  “Not much fun being stuck in an X-rated fairy tale when everybody else is falling into these great love stories,” she said. “This is as close as I’m going to come, Jo, and I’m going to do whatever it takes to make it work.”

  CHAPTER

  3

  It was still dark the next morning when Taylor crawled in beside me, and Willie lumbered up after her.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” my daughter said. “I’m too excited.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Time to get up. Besides Willie wants out.”

  “Willie always wants out.” I drew Taylor close, loving the gust of girl warmth as she snuggled in. “But he’s a reasonable dog. He’ll give us a break this morning.” Ever obliging, Willie inched up the bed, closer to the centre of power. “So what’s on our agenda?” I said.

  Taylor propped herself up on her elbow. “First we eat breakfast and have a bath so Rapti can do our hair before she goes to work, then we go to the mall to get that garter.”

  My daughter scratched Willie’s head absently. “Why does Jill need a blue garter?”

  “To bring her luck,” I said. “Brides are always supposed to have something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue.”

  “Does Jill know she’s supposed to have all that stuff?”

  “I’m sure she’s heard rumours,” I said.

  “Good,” Taylor said. “Anyway, after we come b
ack from the mall, we eat lunch and put on our dresses so the photographer can take our pictures.” She stretched luxuriously. “My hair is going to be soooo good.”

  “Still committed to the ringlets?” I asked.

  “Why wouldn’t I be? The flower girl in that bride’s magazine looked so neat.” She cocked her head. “Didn’t you think she looked pretty?”

  “Sure,” I ran my hair through Taylor’s straight, dark hair. “I guess I just think you’re beautiful the way you are.”

  “Wait till you see me with ringlets,” Taylor said.

  On our way down to breakfast, I stuck my head in the guest room, and was relieved to see Jill sleeping. Angus took Willie for his run while I made oatmeal and toast. After we’d eaten, I poured a mug of coffee and took it up to Jill. “Rise and shine,” I said.

  “Just ten more minutes,” she mumbled.

  “Not for the bride,” I said.

  Jill sat up and took the mug gratefully. “You’re a lifesaver,” she said.

  “Proud to be your java-enabler,” I said. “Rapti’s coming by in twenty minutes to work her magic.”

  Jill got out of bed, walked over to the mirror, and squinted at herself. “I hope she’s bringing some industrial-strength MAC concealer. She’s got serious work ahead.”

  Rapti Lustig didn’t reach for the MAC III, but she did make judicious use of the skills she’d acquired during her ten years as a makeup person at NationTV. She gave Jill and me facials that left us dewy-skinned, and smoothed our deep-conditioned hair into styles that were as elegant as they were understated.

  There was nothing subtle about my daughter’s ’do. Using the photo clipped from the magazine as her guide, Rapti spray-gelled and dry-rolled Taylor’s hair into a medusa explosion of ringlets that was nothing short of spectacular. Taylor usually displayed a healthy lack of interest in her appearance, but that morning, she couldn’t take her eyes off herself. As soon as the last spritz of hairspray kissed her curls, she leapt out of the chair. “Okay,” she said, grabbing my hand, “let’s hit the mall.”