“Well, good for you. Let’s go scuba diving,” said Rachel. “We’re not that far from Tobermory. Miranda, do you want to go wreck-diving? There’s a National Marine Park there; lots of wrecks. How about it?”
They had never talked about diving. Miranda remembered seeing dive gear at Alexander’s Port Hope house. Rachel probably saw it, too. And yet, they hadn’t discussed the subject with him or each other. It didn’t surprise her that Rachel was a diver. It was something else between them. Among them. All three were apparently divers.
“Sounds good,” said Miranda. “Tomorrow, if the weather clears.”
“It’s right as rain right now.”
“But it’ll take a day for the waves to subside. Georgian Bay builds up really big swells.”
“Excellent,” said Alexander Pope. “Tomorrow should be perfect. I would enjoy the break. I have never dived in a wreck.”
“Me neither,” said Miranda.
“Well, let’s do it,” said Rachel. “We’ll rent equipment and a boat in Tobermory. I love it; we’ll have an adventure.”
Miranda looked at her friend, wondering whether the eagerness was for wreck-diving or the chance to cultivate the great poet’s namesake, or for some other obscure reason she could not imagine.
The rest of the day they spent on a charmingly excruciating tour of Alexander’s project, getting a detailed explanation for every minute aspect of his work. So great were his enthusiasm and depth of esoteric knowledge about plaster and frescoes, the structure of the building and the arcane stories it held, that in spite of themselves Miranda and Rachel were captivated, and by the late afternoon all three of them were utterly exhausted.
Over a Chinese dinner in Midland, they recapped some of the highlights of the afternoon and made plans for wreck-diving the following day. They agreed to meet at the church and drive over with Alexander. He was clearly excited at the prospects ahead and actually had his complete scuba gear, including a 7 ml wetsuit, in his van.
“You never know,” he said. “I thought I might get in a dive or two.”
“I’ve never dived in fresh water before,” Miranda announced.
“Actually,” said Alexander, “neither have I.”
“But you brought your gear?” she queried. Turning to Rachel, she asked, “What about you?”
“What about me?”
“Have you dived in cold water before?”
“Fresh water?”
“Cold fresh water?”
“Only. I’ve never been to the tropics.”
“So, okay, tell us…”
“As long as you’re suited up for it, you’re fine.”
“I don’t like the cold,” said Miranda, shivering as she thought about slipping into the depths of Georgian Bay.
They talked about diving for a while, about soaring free of gravity, only bubbles rising to an elliptical plane of light overhead to indicate which way was up. Alexander likened it to the illusions of weightlessness created by dancers in ballet, and Miranda thought of it as walking in space, where direction itself is only an illusion. Rachel chose flying in dreams as her best analogy.
Miranda described Morgan’s diving adventure on Easter Island.
“Without proper training?” said Rachel. “He could have died.”
“What on earth was he doing on Easter Island?” asked Alexander. “Apart from taunting mortality?”
“Good question,” said Rachel. “He probably just wanted to call people ‘buddy.’”
“Buddy?” said Alexander. “How very unlikely.”
“Divers call each other ‘buddy’ a lot,” said Miranda. “It’s like calling your lover ‘darling.’ Then you don’t have to remember his name.”
“Why does one go to Easter Island?” Alexander persisted, and then in response to his own query he continued, “I would imagine for the same reason one travels to Egypt to see the pyramids. Some people need to be confronted with things bigger than themselves. It’s a form of affirmation: you prove your own existence by witnessing works that have transcended the deaths of their makers, whose past existence is thereby indisputable even if your own is in doubt. Are there people on Easter Island, or is it only populated by giant heads?”
Miranda was slightly appalled by his presumptuous misreading of her partner’s existential needs, as well as by his ignorance about Easter Island.
“Morgan,” she said, “has no doubt about his existence — the fact of, if not the quality of — and yes, there are over four thousand islanders, called Rapanui. They call the island ‘Rapa Nui’ — two words — and they have a resounding history of triumph and doom. That’s what interested him, more than the statues, which aren’t heads, you know, but include torsos — although they’re often buried to the neck or decapitated — and they had a written script called Rongorongo, when no one else in all Polynesia had writing, and no other neolithic culture had writing. And now no one knows how to read it. The people faithfully reproduce tablets of Rongorongo for the tourist trade, but they can’t read what they’re writing.”
She realized much of her pedantic oration had been cribbed directly from Morgan, redeeming him, somehow, from the existential limbo assigned him by Alexander Pope.
“Sort of like calligraphy,” said Rachel. “The meaning is in doing it, not what it says.”
“That,” said Alexander, “is the most esoteric of the arts: to write someone else’s signature script and make it your own.”
Miranda continued, feeling Morgan had been given short shrift. “He loves to immerse himself in the details of a place, and let them swarm around him; he counts on them eventually falling into a comprehensible pattern. He’s the same with a case or a culture. Easter Island was an escape to someone else’s reality, a way to be himself in disguise.”
The other two said nothing, so she added, “He got a tattoo.”
“How unlikely,” said Alexander Pope. “A tattoo. How very odd for a grown man. Well, it takes all sorts.”
Miranda regretted her indiscretion, and seeing this, Rachel came to her aid. “I think it’s an adventurous thing to do.”
“Going to Easter Island?”
“Getting a tattoo. He doesn’t fit the demographic; that’s precisely why he would do it. I think it’s adventuresome.”
“The tattooist’s name was Tito,” said Miranda.
“There,” said Rachel. “Proves my point. Who else would know their tattooist’s name but rogues like Errol Flynn and David Morgan?”
“Errol Flynn died before you were born,” said Alexander. “Before any of us were born, even me.”
“He’s become his own name,” said Miranda. “Like Marilyn Monroe. Like the names of painters. Botticelli, for instance. Rachel thinks the faces in the frescoes look like Botticelli.”
“Does she?”
“I do,” said Rachel. “Some of them.”
“Tell us all about it,” said Alexander. Miranda winced, finding his tone condescending, as if he were asking a child to explain why she had coloured the sky orange and green. But Rachel did not seem bothered and, rising to the challenge, she responded with a brief exposition on Renaissance art, the Florentine neo-Platonists, and the achievement of Sandro Botticelli.
“And you think Sister Marie Celeste looks like Simonetta?” Alexander demanded in a quiet but authoritative voice
“Only in the first panel.”
Miranda interjected. “Who is Simonetta?”
“The beloved of Giuliano, brother of Lorenzo Medici… Lorenzo the Magnificent,” said Rachel.
“He wasn’t modest, was he?” Miranda observed.
“Who?”
“Magnificent Lorenzo. Who was Simonetta in her own right?”
“The model for Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, somewhat idealized, I would think,” said Alexander.
“She’s lovely, fragile, and vacuous,” said Rachel. “Appropriate for Venus arising, newborn but fully mature, generated from the cast-off testicles of a truculent god.”
