They both watched Nancy. Then Anne placed the crudely rolled joint in his mouth, and he drew in deeply and held. Morgan hadn’t smoked since Ibiza, and there he had mostly observed others doing it. He didn’t like the taste very much, or the sensation of ingesting effluent into his lungs. It made him feel queasy. She was careful not to drop burning embers onto his face.
After a while, she said, “Take those off. You don’t want to burn holes in your clothes.”
He flinched, panicked again. She was twenty; he was a forty-year-old detective. He felt like a pervert. Nancy must have heard them, because she came over and knelt beside him. She undid his belt, zipped his fly down, and with knowing hands reached under him and shrugged his slacks down past his buttocks. He was barefoot, so it was easy to tug them away and slip off his underwear. Then she leaned over him so that her pendulous breasts brushed against his face as she reached between his back and Anne’s thighs and grasped his jersey, which she hauled up and over his head in a single smooth motion. She stood and looked down, surveying her handiwork. Her breasts were perched high on her rib cage. She was young and they were resilient, with lives of their own.
Damn, they were kids, he thought. But he settled against Anne and savoured his torment like a drowning man clutching a treasure of gold as he plummeted into the depths to a gruesome demise.
Nancy returned to her dancing. Morgan glanced up at Anne, seeing her in parts, her breasts, her collarbone, her slender neck, her full lips, nose, eyes gleaming their separate highlights, tendrils of damp hair, all suspended above him like the discontinuous sections of an Alexander Calder mobile. Her lips were succulent, possibly for her as well — she seemed to suck against them in a kind of perpetually rearranging pout as if she were savouring the taste of her own body. Morgan looked down at himself, surprised to see an erection.
He was aroused through his entire being, ready to burst into an annihilating orgasm that would leave him in a pool of fluids on the floor. Morgan hadn’t focused on his penis until then, and now it seemed an absurd appendage, isolated and vulnerable. He half twisted against Anne’s lap to see if he had caught her interest down there. She adjusted her weight and pressed her pubic bone against his skull, and he settled back.
Nancy must have tuned her subliminal sensitivities in his direction. She danced over lazily and dropped slowly to his side, examined him without touching, then rose on tiptoe like a dancer and spread her legs over him, languorously descending, holding herself open and tilting him back as she settled firmly with her bottom against his pelvis. Nancy stayed squatting over him like that without moving except for the slight quivering strain of her thighs. She gazed at him eye to eye, and at Anne, smiling fondly, conspiratorially, then back at Morgan, staring deep into his eyes until the incomprehensible stillness that closed around him began to send waves through his entire body and he shuddered, the two young women like sculpture enfolding him in their cunning stillness. In a slow explosion of pure sensation, he exploded inside her, inside both of them, inside himself.
No one moved. They swayed, Nancy’s thighs quivered, Anne’s lips were moist in the lamplight. Almost on cue, as Morgan struggled between apprehension approaching dread and the pleasures of utter depletion, the dryer bell sounded. Nancy rose over him, draining across his torso, smiling down, standing for a moment, then moved away. Anne smiled with her voluptuous lips and said with affection, “Come on, old man, it’s over.” She slid gently out from under him, stood, and moved away.
He lay back on the Gabbeh, examining the ceiling of the loft, able to recognize details in the patina of paint on the drywall. He wasn’t stoned; he had never been stoned. But he was spent. He felt physically and emotionally and morally spent.
Anne squatted beside him, fully dressed, and kissed him squarely on the lips, sharing her succulence for a long moment, then stood while Nancy, also dressed, leaned over and covered him with his jersey, across his depleted private parts. She knelt by his head and gave him a soft kiss, hardly touching his lips.
“Happy Canada Day,” she said.
At the door Anne called back in a low voice, “Happy Fourth of July.”
The door swung open and clicked shut, his beautiful door. Morgan lay on the Gabbeh for a long time, contemplating.
12
Shiromuji
The next morning Miranda returned to the house in Wychwood Park, the most coveted residential enclave in Toronto and a fitting place from which Molly Bray could negotiate her life with Eleanor Drummond. Past tense, she reminded herself. What was it about Wychwood Park that made Miranda feel good about her own limited resources, about the complexities of a fractured identity? It wasn’t about money but taste. Perhaps it was the absence of fences, how one neatly appointed property flowed into the next and into the common grounds shaped by the contours of the ravine. Maybe it was the huge trees standing at random like the towering remains of a natural-growth forest. Or perhaps it was the houses themselves, all of them reflecting the Edwardian precepts of their common era, but each very different, each having reached the present in its own way. It wasn’t about privilege but class.
Wychwood Park nestled in the lee of Casa Loma, the Victorian monstrosity devoted like the Taj Mahal to a beloved wife, in this case one still alive while her memorial was being erected. The woman’s husband, as a bankrupt widower, eventually shared quarters in the carriage house with his valet. Miranda loved that such follies existed, but like most Torontonians she had never been inside, though it was kept open by public subscription.
The previous evening, when she arrived to see Jill after dropping off Morgan, the girl was already asleep. It was barely past nine. Miranda had talked with Victoria in the kitchen.
“How’s she doing?” Miranda asked.
“She’s fine. I think she just wants to sleep more than anything. Sometimes you have to, I suppose.”
Miranda liked Victoria. The woman seemed comfortable in the rambling house, moving through its spaces as if it were her own. At the same time she broadcast a subtle disinterest in her artful surroundings. Victoria seemed self-sufficient, and that appealed to Miranda, who suspected self-sufficiency and self-reliance were traits undermined in herself by her admiration for them in others.
Victoria was maternal, but home was a quality she projected more than a place she inhabited. She gave Miranda confidence that Jill was well cared for and loved.
“Have you always been with Molly and Jill?”asked Miranda.
“I was here from day one. I took them in for Mr. Robert Griffin. I used to clean for him. After the baby was born, we searched out this place. Molly thought it was just right, so Mr. Griffin bought it and we moved in. We’ve been here ever since, for fourteen years. Just over there is where Marshall McLuhan used to live.”
A brief look of defiance crossed her face, which immediately softened to forbearance. “I don’t know if we can afford to stay. Molly paid the bills. But don’t you worry. I’ll look after the girl. Molly counted on me.”
“You’ll be all right, Victoria. This is your home.”
“I come from Barbados,” she said. “I speak Barbadian with my friends. Lord, you wouldn’t understand us. No, you wouldn’t. We speak Canadian dialect here.”
“Do you know who Eleanor Drummond is?”
“Never heard of her before yesterday, the night when you brought the girl home. Jill asked me about that — did I know Eleanor Drummond? I don’t think there are any relatives or otherwise out there, not at all. There’s not anyone but me and the girl. Miss Molly never got a Christmas card in her life.”
“Tell me about Molly Bray.”
“Oh, dear, it’s hard to believe she’s gone.” Victoria lifted her hands to shoulder height and gestured into the depths of the house. “She’s everywhere here. She was so young, too young, you know. There’s no good age for dying, but there are some worse than others. She was too