Noah's Turn (12 page)

Noah crawled back into bed and stared at the ceiling. He wondered whether these eloquent notions had any reality, or was he simply justifying a horrific crime
with a semantic slight of hand. Was all of it just intellectual gamesmanship? He had read Camus'
The Stranger
, and a significant amount of
Crime and Punishment
, and he wondered whether any criminal act could be justified with a talented play of words.

He wanted to stop thinking. He wanted to go back to sleep and wake up fucking Andrea Scott, “the no fuss, no muss woman.”

He gave her a call.

The sexual fantasy Noah associated with Andrea Scott never came close to his obsession with the fifteen-year-old's orange-half breasts but had taken on a more adult character. Here was, by any upper-middle-class standard, a happily married woman with three healthy children and a successful and wealthy husband, a membership in a golf and tennis club, a two-and-a-half-million-dollar home and an island with a cottage on it in the Eastern Townships, and she would risk it all to satisfy her hunger for sex with Noah Douglas. All of this supported his belief in the vacuity of the American way of life while it confirmed his own masculinity.
After stepping through his door, Andrea seemed to know the right time to slip out of her expensive clothes and crawl into his bed. The right amount of chatter, the right amount of nervousness, the right amount of indecision, all of which added up to an exquisite sexual tension. The sex was better than the last time. When they were finished, she asked if she could smoke a cigarette in his place and he said he didn't mind. She dug a new pack out of her purse and asked if she could leave it behind because she never smoked at home. He said again that he didn't mind. While they lay in bed and she smoked, he thought of the movie
Belle de Jour
and wondered if she knew he was a killer would she become more sexually aroused. Would she react to him like Catherine Deneuve reacted to the thug with the gold tooth, to his brute criminal-class behaviour? It was clear what Andrea wanted from him: she wanted something illicit, something that denied the life she had, and it was embodied in sex and cigarettes. Was she locked in a struggle with herself, perhaps not unlike his before the killing? She put out her cigarette and rolled over next to him. “I must smell of cigarette smoke.”

“I like that,” he said. What he didn't say was that it reminded him of his mother, because that is the last
thing a woman wants to hear after an orgasm. He considered, for one crazy moment, telling her that he had killed McEwen. That might make this the sexual relationship it was meant to be. His confession would put them smack-dab in the middle of a real-life
Belle de Jour
, and his killing would realize its essence as a work of art. But while he believed in a spiritual need to experience art, art is not life; it is something very different from life and if it weren't different from life it wouldn't be art.
Belle de Jour
belongs on the screen, not in my apartment, he told himself.

“What are you thinking?” Andrea asked him.

Christ, he hadn't heard that question in bed after sex since university, and he realized that whatever Andrea's struggle was, it certainly wasn't a heavyweight fight like his. He remembered how his father often quoted Thor-eau's line, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” and how this was Andrea. This was what his father had feared most in his own life, and his only salvation was his unwavering devotion to Noah's mother. When she died and he died of a heart attack just ten months later, his death was no surprise to Noah.

“I'm not thinking anything in particular,” Noah replied.

“I'm thinking about why I'm here,” she said in an unexpressive tone, as if she were laying the foundation for something bigger to come.

“Maybe this conversation shouldn't go there,” he said. “What I mean is, this works because we don't go there.”

She didn't say anything more for two or three minutes. Then she said she'd better go.

Noah put on his only suit, which was now beginning to feel like his dedicated funeral attire, since funerals were, of late, the main occasion for it. He left his apartment to walk the forty minutes it would take to get to the McEwen funeral. He tried to enjoy the mild spring air and not think of the pure madness of his situation, attending the funeral of the man he had killed. This was another act he would have to perform as the “new Noah.” The role required an outward sincerity and an inward deceit. Or was it the other way around? He would treat it like the time he went to a cousin's wedding on acid and all his relatives turned into people out of a Dickens novel, which included Mrs. Haversham
and her cobweb-covered wedding cake. On the inside reality had completely collapsed, but on the outside, as he heard later, he was quite sociable and funny.

He passed a panhandler sitting cross-legged next to the curb with a dirty paper coffee cup held out. Noah gave him five dollars because he felt that any less from someone in a suit would look cheap.

“That'll get you into heaven,” the panhandler yelled after him as he kept walking. But Noah didn't give panhandlers money to get to heaven; he did it because of who they were. Not because they needed it but because they deserved it. For him the panhandler could only be who he or she was. Why be a panhandler when you're really something else—when, for example, you're secretly a person of means? It was the people who played their roles who he resented and hated. The hypocrites who cultivated professional lives and reputations, which they believed defined them, when, in fact, many of them were more than capable of deceit, theft and perhaps murder. Noah wasn't a religious person, so heaven wasn't on his agenda and neither was morality. His social concern was the face and the real person behind it, and almost everywhere he looked he saw fraudulence. The frauds he hated most were the successful frauds, because
their success made him jealous and he hated most of all his own jealousy.

There was no morality, he thought; there was only the struggle to be truthful.

Noah arrived at the church and signed a guest book, which had a space beside each name for short comments about the deceased. No matter how macabre his situation, he couldn't help but think how funny it would be to write, “He didn't die easily. I virtually had to hack his head off.” He signed his name and next to it wrote, “A tragic loss, a remarkable man.”

Noah took a seat and nodded to a few people who he knew. The organ played, lulling everyone into that mourning rhythm that unifies all in common grief. He looked to the front where the coffin sat. During both his mother's and his father's funerals, no matter how hard he stared, he had not been able to imagine a body beyond the heavy wood of the coffin. Somehow the coffin did a miraculous job of isolating death from life, and the result was that funeral ceremonies were all done in the abstract. The actual body was never an issue. Whoever was inside
the coffin had not only passed away but had passed from reality to hagiography. The ceremonies were all about selective memory or pure fiction, and Noah, on these terms, was able to join the chorus. None of the comments of love and admiration expressed by family and friends made Noah react any differently from anyone else. Some comments were touching; others were bullshit. This was like any other funeral, where everyone in the audience keeps his or her own secret scorecard.

Outside the church after the service, Noah expressed his shock to McEwen's closer friends, chatted socially with others about crime rates and the “thin layer of civility” in our “supposedly civil society” and avoided a trip to the cemetery because of a doctor's appointment which he characterized as “important,” but said he would be at the house in the evening.

At the house things were not what Noah expected. This was not just any funeral. This wasn't an old person who had died, or a man who drank too much and smoked and went down with a massive heart attack, whose death was just another chapter in a high-risk life. This was the
victim of a “bloody, sensational, inexplicable murder,” and no one had a clue why it had happened or who had done it; a tense pall hung over everyone because no one really knew why they were there. Not a soul could imagine where this death had come from, but there was still a quiet buzz of speculation, and every passing glance gave Noah a chill. He had a number of drinks, but the drinking only increased his paranoia. Were people watching him and whispering among themselves about him? He started to sweat under his suit, and even the most innocuous conversations became difficult for him to follow as he read insinuation into every comment and suspicion into every look and smile and pause in speech. He had to get out. He got the attention of McEwen's ex-wife, Janice, so he could express his condolences and leave.

“This is like a bad dream. Inconceivable,” he said to her.

“You were supposed to play squash with him that night,” she said without finishing her thought. What she didn't say was “Yes, it is like a bad dream.” She seemed to tilt back and look at him waiting for a response. Had she made a statement or asked a question? Did she expect him to flesh out his story about
the squash game, perhaps add something new, something the police didn't already know? She must have heard about the game from the police. But why would they raise it with her unless they considered it to be a piece of the crime's overall picture?

“I was supposed to meet him at the gym, and when he didn't show up I called him twice but got no answer. I didn't think much of it other than he had forgotten, and when I heard the news in the morning, well … God … I mean …”

“I know,” she said, looking down at her feet, again without finishing her thought, or, for that matter, even expressing a thought. She didn't say anything else, and Noah felt trapped by the silence like an insect stuck in tree sap. He knew he had an expression on his face but couldn't tell what it was or what it said.

“I have to leave,” he said. And, without a handshake or a kiss or any response from her, he was gone and on the street walking as quickly as he could. He started to run. He was in a suit and heavy leather brogues but he pushed himself. He wanted to feel pain. But for what? He got to the point where his lungs were bursting and his feet were sore and his shirt was soaked with sweat. He was now on the main street that led to his apartment
and he had to stop and get his breath. People passed him walking in both directions as he leaned over, his hands gripping his thighs. The odd one looked at him, but strange behaviour was not unusual on this strip and he must have looked like just another guy who had had one too many. He started to walk again. As he looked at people he passed, he no longer felt like the tragic Shakespearean hero amidst the crowd of minor players with insignificant roles. He was no longer the unique assassin, or the killer. He now felt that this wasn't his nature but that he had invented it all to justify his crime. In fact, he had committed a monstrous and sickening crime. He felt a deep chill and his soaking shirt made it even worse in the cool night air. He found himself shivering. A terrifying loneliness seemed to throb through his veins with every pulse beat. He had never imagined that loneliness could be physical, and he felt like he was sinking into a place he didn't recognize and couldn't describe and he thought that this must be what it is to go mad. “This is where you go,” he said to himself with the morbid fascination of a crazed scientist from an old horror movie. As he walked, the new place started to come into a strange, vague focus that defied the senses. He couldn't see it or hear or touch it but it was there,
some deep crevasse between his old self and the killer he thought he could be. It was a place he couldn't describe, with a language he couldn't understand. And his alienation from this place was complete. He was a stranger in this place, a new arrival. This was the place of the truly insane, he thought. But he knew he wasn't insane and he was there by some horrible mistake and he was alone and there was no help, there were no friends, no enemies either, and it was so dark and deep that he could barely see the light of the real world or hear its sounds. The conversations and screams and laughter of the real world had become a faint, muffled gibberish. As he walked, like the crazed scientist, he let himself go deeper and deeper into this place. Would he just keep going until he disappeared? How do you function from day to day in this place? What do you do for a living here? “Maybe politics,” he joked out of nowhere. And it was this joke that jolted him like an electric shock. It was the joke that reminded him he still had a mind. But what was the role of a mind in this place? He was now literally terrified.