His house was red brick, a neighbourhood sort of home that had been bought by a contractor and turned into an agglomeration of condos that related to each other like disparate planes in an M.C. Escher drawing. His own place was partly on the second floor but extended via an open-concept stairwell with a wrought-iron staircase up to a third-floor loft. That was his garret bedroom. His kitchen, toward the back of the building, dropped half a storey to accommodate the entryway into another apartment from cantilevered steps up the side of the building over the driveway. He prided himself on not knowing just what fitted where or how many people actually shared the house with him. Not that it mattered. The building was well constructed, the renovations were sound, and his place was sepulchral, unless the shared furnace was running, which sent a hush through the air.
Morgan walked across the living room without turning on the lights. The two-storey window that dominated the front wall, between the foyer and the far-side wall of exposed brick, let in enough city light that he could see his way through the intricacies of modular spaces envisioned by the builder fifteen years ago as urban chic. Two banks of vertical blinds had been installed, but since Morgan first moved in while reconstruction was still going on, neither set had worked. The upper bank stayed permanently closed, which was fine, giving him privacy in his garret loft and a modicum of darkness for sleeping. The lower bank was irreparably open. His neighbours could look in if they wished, just as he could see them, but by urban convention they lived their lives as if neither could observe the other, as if their pre-dawn and evening activities were privy to themselves alone.
He picked up the remote in the darkness and flicked on the television, then without waiting to see what was on went into the bathroom, which doubled as a laundry facility. Shucking his clothes into a basket, he plucked pajamas from a hook on the back of the door, sniffed them, and without showering put them on, splashing a bit of cold water on his face before going out into the hall. He turned abruptly back into the bathroom, clicked on the light, and brushed his teeth. Then he flossed. He always flossed. Even though he hadn’t had dinner yet, he flossed to subdue the bacterial detritus of the day.
In the kitchen he whipped up a quick spinach salad from pre-washed leaves and took it with two bagels and a beer back into the living room, where he settled in front of the television. Reaching over, he turned on a table lamp. Morgan always found it depressing to walk past houses at night and see only the light of a television flickering against the ceiling and walls like some sort of primordial campfire. He watched television with the lights on, though he often listened to music in the dark.
When Harry Meets Sally was playing, or was it When Harry Met Sally? He couldn’t remember, but he recognized the scene immediately. Meg Ryan was just beginning her tumultuous orgasm in the restaurant. Billy Crystal was bemused. Meg was awesomely sexy. Billy was quizzical, unmanned. Meg was frightening, ecstatic. Morgan set his bagels down on the side table.
The most amazing thing about the scene was how erotic it was. There was no other scene to compare, not since Marlene Dietrich snapped her legs apart at the Blue Angel. Sharon Stone was primal, but predatory. And yet Meg Ryan was faking. The whole point was that she was faking. The turn on wasn’t the unrestrained and voluptuous display of sex, but the fact that she was in such awesome control.
Morgan sank back into the sofa, clutching his beer in one hand and reaching for a bagel with the other. The salad sat on the table untouched.
He was restless. He turned off the television and climbed to his bedroom as if he were looking for something, sat down on the edge of the bed, then got up and went back down the spiral staircase. Settling on the sofa, he clicked on the TV again and switched to CNN, with the volume so low that he couldn’t make out what was being said but could follow parallel stories in the subscript scrolling across the bottom of the screen.
The bastard had never lost track of her, he thought. That was the part that made his skin crawl. He lived as a reclusive lawyer, he played in his mills, he amassed his fabulous collection of koi. He did what he did with Molly Bray, and with how many other young girls, as well. But all the time he shadowed Miranda.
Perhaps Griffin enrolled in Sandhu’s semiology course because he was enthralled with language, and wonder of wonders, Miranda was there, too. An older student wouldn’t stand out. They weren’t interested in job potential. They took high-interest seminars with high motivation. He might already have sat behind her in lecture theatres, taking anthropology and human geography courses. Maybe he was in the cafeterias, in the library, watching her on dates. Morgan felt enraged as he thought about Griffin haunting Miranda’s life, and frightened, to know that she had been oblivious.
That was a big leap, though, from university to the present. She did a tour with the RCMP, and she and he had been hanging together in homicide for over a decade. Had Griffin been watching both of them? It wouldn’t be hard from a distance. They had even been in the news every once in a while.
Why, Morgan thought, why name her executor? Griffin lived in her shadow for years, but when he knew someone was going to kill him he came out of the shadows, he touched her, he understood it would bring back the past.
Miranda knew about Molly Bray now. Had Eleanor Drummond known about her?
He switched back to Harry and Sally and turned up the sound. They were getting together at a New Year’s party. Billy Crystal wouldn’t play him. The comedian was charming, but there was nothing ambivalent about him. The best actors projected menace or suffering, even at their lightest moments. Meg Ryan, no, Miranda wasn’t sad and perky. America’s fallen sweetheart. Falling, perpetually falling. Miranda was Miranda. That was what he liked about her.
Morgan wondered about Ellen Ravenscroft. Maybe he should give her a call. He knew he wouldn’t. Miranda would know if he did. He didn’t feel he had to be faithful to Miranda. They lived separate lives, or went through the motions of conducting themselves as if they lived separate lives. It was just that she would know.
He found it easier, at this age, if he tried not to think about sex. During the day, he noticed himself monitoring skirt lengths and panty lines and the contours of sweaters, the peep line of blouses, but he sublimated his visceral responses until evenings, and often by then, now, in his early forties, they dissipated into vague yearnings for company. Not that he wasn’t up for it when the necessity arose. It wasn’t that he was becoming asexual.
Since moving into his postmodern Victorian condo, Morgan hadn’t had many visitors. His former wife, Lucy, had come over once, drunk, and had tried to seduce him. That was when the paint on the door was still tacky, and he hadn’t seen or heard from her since. The Bobbsey Twins had once paid a memorable call. That was an episode that overloaded his stock of erotic recollections to the point of short-circuiting the system. It was the best of adventures, but also the worst. He savoured it sometimes in the depths of the night, and he cringed at how absurdly distressing the whole affair had been.
It wasn’t an affair.
He sat back, staring into the radiant play of colour emanating from the tube, and remembered.
One was blond with big hair and a strapping physique. The other was slender, with a pixie-punk hairdo of indeterminate hue, mostly mahogany mauve, and suction-cup lips. They were known around police headquarters as the Bobbsey Twins.
He looked over at the front door, relieved to know they wouldn’t suddenly appear. At the same time he felt a certain dissolute urgency, hoping they would coalesce out of the images of their indiscretion into another encounter.
There had been a loud rapping on the door. It was evening, the beginning of July, the first real weekend of summer in the city, and the town was alive with festivities marking the First and the Fourth. One holiday marked a revolution, the other was the legislated celebration of an end to tedious negotiations. There were enough Americans living in Toronto, and enough would-be Americans, that parties