Lady Oracle

  Marlene said she had to go to a meeting, so Sam walked me to the subway. He was worried about something. Finally he said, "Joan, are you sure about those men? Are you sure they were watching?"

  "Yes, why?"

  "They just aren't that inefficient. If they've been at it for two days, they'd have got to you by now."

  "Sam," I said, "I'm not really sure at all. Maybe it's them, maybe I'm mistaken. But that's not the only reason I want to get away."

  "What is it then?" said Sam.

  "Promise you won't tell Marlene?" He promised. "I'm being blackmailed."

  "You're kidding," Sam said. "What for?"

  I wanted to tell him, I was about to tell him, but I thought better of it. "It's not political," I said. "It's personal."

  Sam didn't push for details; he knew when to back off. "I'm being blackmailed too," he said. "By Marlene. She wants to tell Don about us."

  "Sam, does she have to come along?"

  "Yes," he said. "We need two witnesses. Anyway, she'll be terrific with the police. She's a terrific liar."

  "Sam, it's very good of you to do this for me," I said. It was a lot to ask, I was beginning to see that. "If you get into any real trouble, I'll come back and bail you out."

  He squeezed my hand reassuringly. "It'll go like clockwork, you'll see," he said.

  I didn't tell him about the other things, the dead animals and the phone calls and letters. That would be too complicated, I felt. Nor did I mention my suspicions about Arthur. Sam had known Arthur for a long time, and he wouldn't be able to believe he would do such things. He'd think I was imagining it.

  The accident was to take place in two days, provided the weather held. I used the intervening time to make the arrangements. First I bought a skirt and blouse so I'd be wearing clothes on the plane that no one had ever seen me in. I went out to the airport, by subway and bus, and got a ticket to Rome, using my Louisa K. Delacourt identification. I said I was going on a four-week vacation. I bought the pink Mountie scarf and some dark glasses, changed into my new outfit in the ladies' can, covered up my hair, and got a Hertz Rent-A-Car, a bright-red Datsun. I said I'd be returning it to the airport in two days. I went to the ladies' can again, changed back to my old clothes and drove away.

  I parked around the corner from our apartment, checked to make sure Arthur wasn't there, dug an old suitcase out of the cupboard, and packed a few essentials. I wrapped the suitcase up in brown paper and carried it like a parcel to the car, where I stowed it in the trunk.

  The next morning I told Arthur I had a headache and was going to stay in bed for a while. I asked him to get me an aspirin and a glass of water. I thought he'd leave the house as soon as possible - he never liked it when I was sick - but to my surprise he hung around, brought me a cup of tea, and asked if he could do anything. I was touched: perhaps I'd misjudged him, perhaps I should tell him everything, it wasn't too late.... But he might be acting this way because he could tell I was up to something. I reminded him of the article he had to finish for Resurgence, and at last he left.

  I jumped out of bed, put on a respectable dress, and stuffed my T-shirt and jeans into my oversized purse. Because of Arthur I was already three-quarters of an hour behind schedule. I drove the rented car east and went past the city and along the shore of Lake Ontario, looking for a spot where I could make a landing without running into a cliff or a crowd of people. I found a stretch of beach with some scrubby trees and a few picnic tables, which were empty. I hoped they'd stay empty; I thought they would, as it was a weekday in early June and the roadside families hadn't yet burst into full flower. I would leave the car here and rendezvous with it later. The trees would screen me as I washed ashore.

  I drove back to the nearest pay phone, which was outside a service station, and called a taxi, explaining that my car had broken down and I was late for an appointment in the city. I described the spot and said I'd be standing beside a red Datsun. I drove back to my beach, locked the car, with my suitcase in the trunk and my ticket and Louisa K. identification in the glove compartment, and buried the car keys in the sand under the right front wheel. When the taxi came I took it to the Royal York Hotel, went in the front door and down to the lower level, changed into my T-shirt and jeans, crammed the dress I'd been wearing into my purse, and walked out the side door. The ferry dock was only a few blocks away. Sam and Marlene were already there.

  "Were you followed?" Marlene asked.

  "I don't think so," I said. We rehearsed again the story they were to tell Arthur: they'd run into me on the street and on impulse we'd all decided to go sailing over at the Island. Sailing rather than canoeing, we felt: it was easier to fall off a sailboat, whereas if it was a canoe, we'd all have to tip into the lake, and I told them there was no reason for them to get wet, too.

  We took the ferry to the Island. Marlene had brought a camera; she felt there should be a pictorial record showing me as happy and carefree, so I posed with Sam, then with Marlene, leaning against the railing of the ferry and grinning like a fool.

  Once on the Island, we strolled up and down past the boat-rental places, trying to decide which outfit would be likely to be the least suspicious of us. We picked the most slovenly-looking one and were granted a boat without any trouble, five dollars down and the rest when we brought it back. It was quite small and the attendant said that really there should only be two people on it, but he'd stretch a point as long as we didn't take it out of the harbor.

  "You know how to sail," he said, more as a statement than a question.

  "Of course," I said quickly. The attendant went back inside his hutch and we were left alone with the boat.

  Sam began to untie it briskly from the dock. We all got in and pushed out into the Toronto harbor, where other sailboats, their white wings flapping, were tacking competently back and forth.

  "Now what?" I said.

  "Now we just run up the sails," Sam said. He undid various ropes and tugged at them, this way and that, until a sail began to move experimentally up the mast.

  "You do know how to sail?" I asked him.

  "Sure. I used to do it all the time, at summer camp."

  "How long ago was that?" Marlene asked.

  "Well, I remember the basics," he said defensively, "but if you'd rather take over...."

  "I've never been in a sailboat in my life," Marlene said, with that shade of contempt women reserve for men who have been caught out in a fraudulent display of expertise. By this time we were moving steadily into the course of an island ferry.

  "Maybe we should go back," I said, "and get a canoe."

  "We can't," Sam said. "I don't know how."

  We ended up with Marlene at the tiller, while Sam and I scrambled around, ducking the boom and trying to control the ropes which somehow in turn controlled the sails. This worked, after a fashion, but my spirits had plunged. Why had I concocted this trashy and essentially melodramatic script, which might end by getting us all killed in earnest? Meanwhile we wobbled across the Toronto harbor, past the causeway they seemed to be constructing out of dumped garbage, and out into the lake. With the boat more or less under control, I crouched on the deck, peering into my compact mirror and trying to cover my face with eye shadow from a pot of Midnight Blue. The blue face was Marlene's suggestion: that way, she said, my white face wouldn't be easily seen from the shore. It was for this reason too that I was wearing jeans and a blue T-shirt.

  Outside the harbor it was windier, and there were real waves. We sped east with the wind behind us. My face was now blue enough, and I was scanning the shoreline, which looked quite different when seen from the water, trying to remember where I'd left the car.

  "We're too far out," I shouted to Sam, "can't you get us farther in?" I could swim, but I was not a strong swimmer. I didn't want to have to float a mile on my back.

  Marlene handed me Don's binoculars, which she'd thought to bring, that old Brownie training. She'd brought everything but semaphore flags. I scanned the shoreline with
them and there were the sandbar and the picnic tables and, yes, the car, receding at a fast clip behind us.

  "It's back there," I called to Sam, pointing. "How do we get back?"

  "Tack," Sam yelled, diving for a rope.

  "What?"

  "I'll have to take the tiller," he screamed, and began to crawl back towards us.

  "Oh, God, I just remembered something," Marlene said; screeched rather, as otherwise we couldn't hear above the wind and the waves, which were beginning to look frightening. They had white foam streaks on them and were splashing over the sides of the boat.

  "What?"

  "Don ... this will be all over the papers, and he'll know we were together."

  "Tell him you're just friends now!" I screamed.

  "It won't work," Marlene said, pleased that the thing she wanted revealed was going to be brought to light with no intervention by her; and in her despair or joy, she let go of the tiller. The boat swung, the sail collapsed, Sam ducked, and the flailing boom hit me in the small of the back and knocked me overboard.

  I was unprepared and got a mouthful of unprocessed Lake Ontario water as I sank. It was much colder than I'd expected, and it tasted like stale fins and old diapers. I rose to the surface, coughing and gasping.

  Sam had dropped the sails and the boat was wallowing uncertainly a little farther on. Marlene was yelling, "Oh, my God," very authentically, as if I really had fallen overboard and was drowning. She reached out her hands towards me, leaning dangerously, and called, "Over here! Joan!" but Sam caught hold of her.

  I couldn't climb back into the boat and do it again the right way; I would have to proceed from here. I made a feeble dive and attempted to swim under the boat, as we had planned. I was supposed to come up on the other side, where I would be out of sight from the shore in case anyone was watching, and this move was necessary as I'd spotted a family at one of the picnic tables. I made it on the second try, but Marlene and Sam were still looking on the side where I had disappeared: they seemed to have forgotten all about the plan. I tore the binoculars off my neck - they were weighing me down - and attempted to heave them into the boat, with no success; they sank forever. Then I remembered my dress, which was in my bag, stowed in the bow. "My dress," I yelled, "remember to ditch it," but they'd drifted downwind from me and didn't hear. They were trying to regain control of the boat.

  I spat out more of the lake and lay back as flat as I could; if there's one thing I knew how to do it was float. I pointed myself towards the shore and kicked my feet under the water; I hoped I was wafting unobtrusively toward the sand spit, helped by the waves, which broke occasionally over my head. We had bungled, but that wasn't so bad. It would look better than if I had simply dived off the boat. I stared up at the blue sky with its white drifting clouds and concentrated on the next move.

  Luckily I ran aground out of sight of the picnic tables, which were screened by the clump of bushes. I was only about five hundred yards from where I should have been. I pulled myself onto the shore and lay there, catching my breath, while orange peels, dead smelts and suspicious-looking brown lumps eddied around me, sucked in and out by the waves. My hair was full of sand and little pieces of seaweed. When I was ready I squelched as quietly as I could along the shore and crouched behind the bushes. My car was on the other side of them, I knew, but so was the picnicking family. I couldn't risk getting close enough to watch them, but I could hear the whining of the children and the grunts of the father.

  I lurked in the underbrush for at least half an hour, dripping and shivering and avoiding the poison ivy and the drying mounds of human shit and melting toilet paper, the wads of crumpled sandwich wrap, bits of salami and old pop bottles, and wondering whether they were going to stay all day and if so whether I would miss my plane. Finally I heard the sound of a car motor and the crunch of wheels on gravel.

  I gave them time to get away, then walked to the car, dug the keys out from where I'd buried them, took my suitcase from the trunk and changed into my skirt and blouse in the back seat, covering my wet hair with the Mountie scarf. My face in the rearview mirror looked starding; genuinely drowned, almost. I wiped the blue eye shadow off with Kleenex, which I threw into the bushes. I wrung out my jeans and T-shirt, rolled them into a ball, stuffed them into the green plastic Glad Bag which I'd brought for this, and packed the bag at the bottom of the suitcase. As I drove off I caught a glimpse of Marlene and Sam; they'd got the sail back up but hadn't managed to turn around, and they were scudding towards Kingston with all sails set.

  I made it to the airport, returned the rent-a-car, and caught the plane with twenty minutes to spare. Sitting on the plane waiting for it to take off was the worst part; I couldn't quite believe that I hadn't been followed. But I was safe.

  PART FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  What price safety, I asked myself. I was sitting on the balcony in my underwear, covered with towels, taking a steamy sunbath in the middle of nowhere. The Other Side was no paradise, it was only a limbo. Now I knew why the dead came back to watch over the living: the Other Side was boring. There was no one to talk to and nothing to do.

  Maybe I really did drown, I thought, and this whole thing, the hours on the plane - I'd watched Young Winston, without the earphones - the Hertz Rent-A-Car, the flat, my trip to Rome for the hair dye, was a kind of joke perpetrated by the afterlife. The soul sticks around the body for a while after death because it's confused, or that's what the Spiritualists said. In that case I should've been hovering somewhere near the oily surface of Lake Ontario, slightly east of Toronto Island, not allowing for the currents. Or they'd fished me out, I was unidentified, I was lying on a public slab; or I'd been cut up for spare parts and this panorama was going on because some other body got my eyes. My entire life didn't flash before me the way it was supposed to, but it would, I was always a late bloomer.

  Learn to live in the present, take life as it comes, that's what they told you in the improve-your-head manuals. But what if the present was a washout and the life to come was a bog? I was feeling marooned; the impulse to send out messages, in bottles or not, grew every day. I am still alive. Stuck here, have not sighted a ship for days. Am tired of talking to the local flora and fauna and the ants. Please rescue. I was here, in a beautiful southern landscape, with breezes and old-world charm, but all the time my own country was embedded in my brain, like a metal plate left over from an operation; or rather, like one of those pellets you drop into bowls of water, which expand and turn into garish mineral flowers. If I let it get out of control it would take over my head. There was no sense trying to get away, I'd brought them all with me, I could still hear their voices, murmuring like a faraway but angry mob. It was too late to rearrange the furniture, I couldn't keep them out.

  Where was the new life I'd intended to step into, easily as crossing a river? It hadn't materialized, and the old life went on without me, I was caged on my balcony waiting to change. I should take up a hobby, I thought, make quilts, grow plants, collect stamps. I should relax and be a tourist, a predatory female tourist, and take snapshots and pick up lovers with pink nylon ties and pointy shoes. I wanted to unclench myself, soak in the atmosphere, lie back and eat the flapdoodles off the tree of life, but somehow I couldn't do it. I was waiting for something to happen, the next turn of events (a circle? a spiral?). All my life I'd been hooked on plots.

  I wondered whether Arthur had gotten my postcard yet. Would he join me, would we start again, would there be a fresh beginning, a new life? Or would he still be angry, had he really been the one ...? Perhaps I should never have sent that postcard. On the other hand, he might just tear it up, ignore my plea for rescue.

  I lay back in my chair and closed my eyes. There was the vegetable man standing in the doorway, his arms full of, what else, vegetables; overgrown zucchinis, artichokes, onions, tomatoes. He smiled, I ran over to him, he crushed me in his shortsleeved olive arms, there was tomato juice all over the floor, we slipped in it and tumbled in a heap
among the squashed zucchinis, it was like making love with a salad, crisp and smooth at the same time. But it wouldn't be like that, he'd appear in the doorway and instead of running over to him I'd remember my underwear draped on the chairback. "Excuse me while I pick up a few things." What would he think of me? I'd scuttle around the room, gathering, concealing. "Won't you have a cup of tea?" Incomprehension. His smile would fade. What did I ask him here for anyway? And besides, he would tell everyone in the village, the men would leer and creep around my house at night, the children would throw stones.

  I sat up in the plastic chair and opened my eyes. It was no use, I was jumpy as a flea on a skillet, I couldn't even have a sexual fantasy without anxiety. I needed a drink and I was out of Cinzano. And the children were already throwing stones; yesterday one had almost hit me.

  I got up and wandered into the flat. I still had no routine, and there seemed less and less reason to do anything at any given time. I went into the kitchen, shedding towels along the way. I was hungry, but there was nothing to eat except some cooked pasta, drying out already, and a yellowing bunch of parsley in a glass of water on the windowsill. There was something to be said for refrigerators. Although they inspired waste, they created the illusion that there would always be a tomorrow, you could keep things in them forever.... Why had the media analysts never done any work on refrigerators? Those who had refrigerators surely perceived life differently from those who didn't. What the bank was to money, the refrigerator was to food.... As these thoughts dribbled through my head I began to feel that my whole life was a tangent.

  I noticed that something was wrong with the ants. I examined their saucer of sugar-water: I'd forgotten to add water and the solution had thickened to a syrup. Some of the ants were nibbling at the edges but others had ventured out onto the surface and were trapped, like saber-toothed tigers in the tar pits. Now they were dead or waving their antennae feebly. I tried to rescue the still-living ones with a matchstick, fishing them out and leaving them on the side of the saucer; but mostly it was no use, they were hopelessly glued. I was always bad with pets. SOS, I wrote in sugar-water. Do something.