Famous Last Meals (3 page)

He studied her face for a moment. Clearly he had misjudged her. She was more complicated and worldly than he had first thought.

Monday after work they attended a reception for the incoming Principal Secretary in a room off Confederation Hall in the Centre Block. It was a chance for everyone to meet Lorne and for the summer students to have a taste of the grander side of Wellington Street. Adam stood talking to Pookie, Eugène and Isaac, who wiped his brow with the cuff of his shirt every few minutes and repeated that the
PM
himself was supposed to make an appearance. “What do I say if he asks me a question?”

“Try your best, Isaac,” said Pookie.

“But I don't know anything.”

“It doesn't stop most
MP
s,” she said.

Lorne spotted Pookie from across the room, came over and draped an arm around her shoulders, giving the far one a fatherly squeeze. She leaned into it, resting her head briefly against his chest. She was smiling in that hilarious way of hers, which to the uninitiated made her look as if she were on the verge of tears.

Lorne was in a dark, pinstriped three-piece suit. He had a natty sense of style, a step up the fashion ladder from academic tweed and intellectual distraction, but not quite displaying the
PM
's flair. Lorne Childs looked as if he would be as comfortable in a Bay Street boardroom as on the dais of an Ivy League lecture theatre.

He said hello and asked after Adam's father. “How do you like the work so far?”

“I'm enjoying it. I'm not sure about what we're doing, though.”

“What we're doing.”

“The
PMO
using its resources to put the person it wants into Parliament.”

“This is a partisan office, Adam. We're not Canada Revenue.”

“I know. It still doesn't seem right to me. I think Don Feeney should have to go the route every other candidate does.”

“The
PMO
helps in the campaigns of many candidates in the party. I assumed you knew that.” He looked as if Adam had suggested that the entire democratic system had collapsed. He began panning the room, looking for someone else to talk to.

Adam looked at the empty Champagne flute in his hand and couldn't remember draining it.

The
PM
, taller than Adam expected he would be, was making his way closer. Adam felt Lorne beside him stretching in anticipation. He thought about sweaty Isaac and his anxiety over not knowing what to say to the leader. Adam had already said something and it had been more than enough. Lorne probably had him pegged for an imbecile. His future on the Hill was now officially null. He imagined that Lorne had communicated Adam's pronouncement, either telepathically or via a sophisticated electronic device, to the
PM
. He was convinced that the
PM
was going to ask him the same question. “So, Adam Lerner, you don't think it's a good idea for the
PMO
to be a politically partisan body. You would prefer something like the Governor General's retinue, I take it, a household of servants in powdered wigs and velvet breeches, people whose ancestors stretching back many generations did precisely what their descendants are doing today. You would replace a cornerstone of our parliamentary system with something static and elitist. Am I reading you correctly on this? Can we even assume that you would allow the Prime Minister to remain a member of a political party or would you abolish that privilege as well?”

The great man was getting closer. To leave the reception now, before the leader did, would be the worst kind of insult, and yet that was exactly what Adam felt he had to do before he expired on the spot. The room felt airless, Death Valley hot. Pookie was whispering something in Lorne's bent ear. Isaac was talking to Emma. They seemed relaxed, even Isaac, who appeared resigned to his fate. The
PM
was talking in French to Eugène, Gilles and Jean-Marc, who had Che Guevara's dark looks and radical opinions. They laughed at something the
PM
had said. Adam looked at the exit. A large plainclothes
RCMP
officer in a dark blue suit was standing there, an earplug leading to a wire running under the collar of his jacket. Dark sunglasses in the chandelier-bright room. Deadly force. Would he even let him leave?

He caught Pookie's eye and gave her a brief finger-riffling wave so as not to draw the attention of the others. She smiled and returned the wave. He took a breath, held it, released it and walked out. The man at the door made no movement. Adam did not look back to see if the policeman was following him or whispering something urgent into his wrist.

Adam looked past Emma and saw metal wing and a section of sky. Cloud cover hid the ground.

She ordered a beer and after downing it in a few quick swallows wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. He was fascinated that she could still speak clearly after consuming the drink as if it had been a glass of water.

She was wearing the charcoal-coloured skirt and jacket she often wore to work. He glanced down. Her nipples were puckering the fabric of her top, an armless chemise he had noticed before. He didn't know silk from satin. He wanted it to be silk because he thought the sound of the word suited her, wanted her to remove the jacket so that he might see her bare arms again against the mauve singlet, her pale freckled shoulders and neck, the shape of her small breasts.

She returned her tray to its upright position and locked it into place against the back of the seat in front of her, tucked her plastic beer cup into the webbing that held the airline's in-flight magazine, a brochure for Oak Island and the emergency procedures pamphlet, and moved the armrest so that it was hidden flush between the backs of their two seats. Unbuckling her seatbelt she skooched closer. She slipped her arm under his the way Pookie had done with Gilles that day in Jack Pickersgill's cottage, and rested her head on Adam's shoulder. At first he thought that she had fallen asleep, but then she slipped her left hand across and undid the middle button of his shirt. Her hand slid in. They sat like that until the attendant leaned in to check to see that their belts were fastened. They were going to feel some turbulence on their descent into Halifax, said the captain.

Adam opened his mouth to say something. She put her fingers to his lips. She shook her head slightly and smiled as if to say, ‘You didn't think you were going to be in control, did you?'

The approach was bumpy, the landing hard but steady. She dug her nails into the back of his hand. When he looked over she was gazing placidly out at the tarmac. The sky was low and dark. Fine droplets of rain played across the window. They put their watches ahead an hour. The time was now, the temperature five degrees cooler than it had been in Ottawa. Anything was possible here. Despite his
faux pas
in the Confederation Room, they had still asked him to work on the campaign.

They waited for the covered walkway to swing into place and the door of the plane to open. After he said that it was his first time in Nova Scotia, she told him that she had lived in Mahone Bay for two years when she was a little girl. Her parents ran a restaurant that didn't do well enough to sustain them, and they moved back to Guelph, Ontario. Those years were still vivid for her, the white churches with their high steeples, the brightly coloured monochromatic houses, the brackish scent of the tide.

She said that she wanted to be a little girl again. She was afraid of dying, convinced she was going to kick off at an early age.

“Look at this life line,” she said, showing him her palm. “Look how it's all broken up.”

“Yes, but it continues, don't you see? It picks up good and strong farther on. All it means is that you're going to change direction a couple of times.”

She looked relieved but also flustered, even annoyed, as if he had stolen something from her moment of drama.

The last two off the plane, they caught up with the rest of the group around the baggage conveyance. He could still feel her hand against the skin of his chest. It had been light and heavy at the same time, dry and still but seeming in motion, heavy because he had been so intent on it. He wished he was more muscular and had more hair there. He thought he might be in love with her. What else could it be? She had staked a claim. All questions of who they were, what they were doing, how legitimate their cause, fell away. He looked around at their colleagues intent on the stream of luggage. None of them could claim independence from the office, the Party machinery, now, could they, so what did it matter?

It was like that mysterious car in the
BSC
parking lot. Something had happened there, something out of his control. He had taken a few steps toward it, instinctive steps, thinking that this was what one did, one made a show if not an actual effort to help. He had told someone about it, someone in a position of authority. That was the right thing, wasn't it? When he had returned, the car was no longer there. It no longer touched him. He no longer had to think about it.

The airport shuttle was a small rattling old bus with seats enough for about twenty-five people. They handed their luggage to the driver, who loaded it into a compartment at the rear. It cost twelve dollars a person one-way, twenty to return. Gilles complained that the
PMO
was becoming cheap. He thought they should be riding in a fleet of airport limousines or in taxis at the very least. Jean-Marc and Eugène said some things in French that sounded as if they were mocking him. Despite the appearance of insufferable arrogance, the boy seemed to be the genuine article. His rich tastes were not, as far as Adam could tell, evidence of affectation covering deeper insecurity. Adam appreciated the boy's unapologetic expressions of
noblesse oblige
. He still didn't like him being with Pookie, but in his mind that was a separate thing.

The highway took them past dismal terrain covered by exposed rock and stunted fir. Someone had propped an inflatable sea monster on a pole in a lake near the road. They came into Dartmouth, wended through streets of low-rent apartment buildings and crossed over a bridge spanning the harbour, a brawny, bustling, breathtaking expanse rimmed by glass towers, tall smokestacks, naval dry docks, with a second bridge off to their right. Adam tried to take it all in at once and felt the weird desire to get off the bus, climb onto the long arching support cable and jump.

Emma and Pookie were sitting together two seats ahead of him and across the aisle. He couldn't hear what they were saying. He didn't care. Yes, he knew he did. He wanted to know what they were saying and whether or not it was about him. Worse would be to know that they weren't talking about him. He wanted them both, neither more than the other but not at the same time. He was bedevilled by the thought of being with one and thinking about the other. How can one both have a desire and dread it? He wondered what he was doing there, so far from the familiar, in a pursuit he cared so little about. He had an open plane ticket home, courtesy of the
PMO
. At the first sign of trouble—but what was trouble, anyway, in this regard? The candidate floundering didn't qualify as trouble, since Adam held no emotional stake in the success or failure of Don Feeney's bid. Adam did what was expected and took direction well. What, then, might this nebulous Trouble be, what form would it take?

The bus pulled up on the street in front of the Lord Nelson Hotel, a handsome red brick building newly renovated with an inviting entrance and lobby. Isaac and Adam were given a room together, as were Pookie and Emma, Eugène and Jean-Marc, and Gilles and a newcomer named Oliver Schwartz, who came from Winnipeg. The front desk treated them with a reserved deference, leading Adam to wonder whether every guest was welcomed so, and whether they were perceived, given their affiliation and purpose, as invaders or liberators.

The next day, a Monday morning, Adam and Eugène were assigned to stay at campaign headquarters, which was also Don's room, a large two-room suite in the hotel, to make cold calls introducing the candidate to those who did not know who he was or, if they did, trying to persuade them of his suitability for office. Every third or fourth person who answered hung up immediately. Some cursed before doing so.

Monica handed him a note on
PMO
memo paper. It said, “Mrs. E.M. Fallingbrooke. Important contact. Waiting for
your call.”

The woman who answered waited for Adam to complete his introduction before saying that she needed someone to take her to the shopping centre. Her grandson usually drove her there on Mondays so that she could have her hair done, but the man was away on a camping vacation with his second wife and her children by a previous marriage. Difficult teenagers; surely Adam knew just what she meant by that. She and her husband used to camp in a tent at Kejimkujik Park, but those days were long past. The closest thing to wilderness camping she did now was the occasional weekend retreat down to White Point Beach when the heat became unbearable, which hadn't been all that often in the past few years, despite what those Cassandra meteorologists said. She was a widow. How soon could he get there?

He asked her where she lived and she said, indignantly, “South on the peninsula,” as if to live anywhere else in the city were inconceivable. He located the area on his map. It was not far away. He had to plug his other ear to block the sound of Eugène speaking loudly in English in the adjoining room in a voice so insistent and grammatically creative that Adam felt he could dissolve into giggles at any moment. The old dear on the phone was describing the horde of outrageously rude people she had seen on television eating grubs and throwing metal folding chairs at each other.

The room felt stale and muggy-hot despite the noisy air conditioner chugging under the window. He was supposed to stay and work the phone, but he had to take a break sometime, didn't he? Monica had left to supervise the canvassers. She would not have directed him to call Mrs. Fallingbrooke had she not thought it important. Perhaps the old kook was a big Party supporter. The sun was shining. An inviting expanse of green enclosed by a black-metal, spike-topped fence, a city-block's worth of lush Victorian garden, beckoned from across the road.