Extraordinary

a circle one way, girls walking in a circle the other; everybody eyeing each other. Beautiful in its way, the way life works like that.”

The candle sputtered and went out. We sat in the silence and the darkness. After a while, I said, “Shall I light another candle?”

“No, let’s just sit here like this for a while.”

In the hallway, voices speaking an Indian dialect passed by the door. It’s going to be dark in here tomorrow night, I thought. And for a few nights afterwards; and everything will be different. You assume things are going to be a certain way afterwards, and then you find out, like Macbeth did, that they’re not. Preposterously not. The act, or its after-burn rather, becomes who you are.

How could I have been so naive?

“In Mexico, up in the mountains where I lived, I sometimes felt as if I had just emigrated from a country where it always rained,” Sally said. And it seemed as though I had overheard her thinking, that she hadn’t actually meant to say anything.

A door shut with a bang and the Indian voices disappeared.

And Sally, where will she be? I mean physically. And that too seemed like an extraordinary thing not to have considered. Because you don’t just go into the air when you die; you go other places first, and they’re not so pleasant.

In the darkness, she continued. “Freddie lived on a narrow, windy cobblestone street a few blocks up from the cathedral. He found it comforting, he said, all that redemption so close at hand. He invited all his friends to the party. By sunset, his patio looked like Fire Island. Those tans, those biceps, those white teeth. There were other people too. A Brit with a pirate’s moustache, a sixties rock star from some California band, a handful of alcoholic writers who had spent the morning in the Cucaracha talking about their unfinished Ph.D.s. There was a mysterious, tall Canadian who wouldn’t let anyone take his picture. Some people said he was CIA. I think he’d just been thwarted by life in Toronto and was trying to make himself seem interesting. There was a retired Australian ambassador—some sort of scandal there, I forget what.

“Oh yes, and divorcees! God, so many divorcees. Women with short haircuts and children in Ivy League schools. For them, San Miguel was the last stop before the Pacific Ocean. Their last chance for a slow dance. Even if it meant sleeping with the gardener at night and letting him watch television by the pool all day long. These were transactions, yes, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t friendly, even loving. And let’s face it, a friendly body in the bed is a friendly body in the bed; after a certain age, who cares why it’s there.

“I was cutting limes in the kitchen with Freddie when I recognized a voice in the other room. It was a friend from Toronto who was passing through San Miguel, had stopped for a drink at the Cucaracha and somebody told her about Freddie’s party.

“I heard her say, ‘I hope you don’t mind me crashing in like this.’ I came out of the kitchen, and I was just moving through the living room when I tripped on the carpet, hit my head on the fireplace and broke my neck.

“I didn’t know it was broken at the time. But I knew something bad had happened because I heard a sound I had never heard before. I’ve talked to other people who broke their necks and they say the same thing: in that sound, you know your life is never going to be the same again.

“I lay there for I don’t know how long. There were heads appearing and disappearing above me, but the whole time my body was capable of only one sensation, and that sensation was not pain, it was dread, a sensation that said, like a blunt instrument banging under the floor, This is a very bad thing, this is a very bad thing, this is a very bad thing.

“I heard the voices in the room go silent, like lifting a needle off a record, and that frightened me. And it seemed that I heard Bruce breathing through his nose and saying to someone, She brought this on herself.

“And then I heard other voices, the kind you hear on television. ‘Don’t move her, don’t move her.’ It occurred to me, even there on the floor, that it sounded like television because it was from television. Like ‘Boil some water.’ People are always telling people to boil water on television.”

She breathed deeply and after a pause said, “We should light another candle now. There’s a box of them near the Drambuie. Over the fridge. They’re made from beeswax.”

I pulled down a red candle, unwrapped it from the delicate tissue paper it was covered with and put it on the table between us.

“There’s no paraffin in beeswax candles,” Sally said. “They’re better for the health. More ions. Or fewer. Whichever.”

I lit the candle with a long kitchen match. We watched the wick gradually change shape as the flame caught and gathered brightness. I was suddenly exhausted.

“It’s incredible, isn’t it?” she said.

“What?”

“How people could be so cruel that they could burn another human being alive.”

“Good heavens.”

“You know who I’m thinking of. Whom, rather.”

“Yes.”

“Poor little thing. What was she—fourteen?”

“Something like that.”

“Will you stay the night here? All this booze, I’m going to have to take a pee.”

“Of course.”

“Don’t leave before me.” She smiled at her own joke.

I opened my lips to respond but didn’t.

“When people ask me about the accident—?” she said, her voice rising into a question at the end of the phrase.

“Yes.”

“How I broke my neck at a cocktail party?”

“Yes.”

“They never say it, but I know that they assume I was drunk.”

“Really?”

“I think they rather hope I was.”

“Why would they hope that?”

“Because it’s less tragic,” she said.

“How would it be less tragic?”

“If I was drunk, they could think, Well, she was partly responsible.”

“But if you were sober…”

“If I was sober, then it makes the whole thing, and the consequences that flowed out of it, arbitrary.”

“The consequences?”

“Paralysis. A ruined life. That’s how they see it, not me.”

“Did you ever?” I said.

“See it as a ruined life? Oh heavens, yes. But that changed. But even after all these years, when I first meet people—?”

“Yes?”

“I feel compelled to explain that I wasn’t drunk. That I was just about to have my first margarita. That’s what I was doing in the kitchen with Freddie—making margaritas.”

“Why do you feel compelled to tell them that?”

“Because I don’t want them to think poorly of me.”

“I doubt if they’d do that.” My eyes settled on the cloth figure of the mischievous whale. Red seagulls soared overhead. What was he winking about? What is the secret that he and I supposedly share? “Everybody’s gotten drunk at one point or another,” I said.

I could feel a story insinuating itself onto my tongue, how, years before, I had gone to the washroom on the dark second-floor hallway of a Queen Street bar. Someone had forgotten to rope off the back stairs, and on my