The Killing Circle

complicate that which was, if left alone, cruelly simple. Life’s a bitch and then you die, as the T-shirts used to say.

I would make do with keeping both hands on the wheel of fatherhood, with weekend barbecues and package beach holidays and rented Westerns and Hitchcock. I would no longer feel the need to say something, to stand isolated and furious outside the anesthetized mainstream. Instead I would be among them, my consumer brothers and sisters. The search called off.

There are times I’m walking with Sam, or reading to him, or scrambling an egg for him, and I will be seized mid-step, mid-page-turn, mid-scramble, with paralytic love. For his sake, I try to keep such moments under control. Even at his age he has a keen sensitivity to embarrassment, and me blubbering about what a perfect little fellow he is, how like his mother—well, it’s right off the chart. Not that it stops me. Not every time.

It is these pleasures that The Sandman’s publication has denied me. All the attention afforded the break-out first novelist—the church basement talks, forty-second syndicated morning radio interviews (“So, Pat, loved the book—but, let me ask you, who do you like in the Super Bowl?”), even a few bedroom invitations (politely declined) from book club hostesses and college campus Sylvia Plaths—was poisoned by the fact that I was alone, miles from my son.

“Where are you, Dad?” I remember Sam asking over the phone at one of the campaign’s low points.

“Kansas City.”

“Where’s that?”

“I’m not sure. Kansas, maybe?”

“The Wizard of Oz.”

“That’s right. Dorothy. Toto. Over the rainbow.”

There was a silence for a time after that.

“Dad?”

“Yes?”

“Remember when Dorothy clicked her heels together three times? Remember? Remember what she said?”

That The Sandman wasn’t my own book didn’t help things. Just when a glowing review or snaking bookstore line-up or letter from a high school kid relating how much he thought I was the shit came close to making me forget, Angela’s recorded voice reading from her journal in Conrad White’s apartment would return to me, and any comfort the moment might have brought was instantly stolen away.

There was also the worry I would be found out. Although I hadn’t heard from any of them since The Sandman was published, it was entirely conceivable that one of the Kensington Circle would come across it, recognize its source material, and go to the press. Perhaps worse, Evelyn or Len would come knocking on my door with my book in their hands, demanding hush money. Worse yet, it would be William. And I would pay no matter who it was. I’d done a wrongful thing. I’m not denying it. But if there was ever a victimless crime, this was it. Now, in order to walk quietly away from my fraudulent, non-starter of a writing career as planned, four people had to keep a secret.

When I finally returned to Toronto, I went through the mail piled on my desk in the Crypt expecting at least one of the envelopes to contain a blackmail letter. But there was only the usual bills.

Life returned to normal, or whatever shape normal was going to take for Sam and me. We watched a lot of movies. Ate out at neighbourhood places, sitting side by side at the bar. For a while, it was like a holiday neither of us had asked for.

And the whole time I waited to walk into someone from the circle. Toronto is a big city, but not so big that you could forever avoid the very people you’d most like to never see again. Eventually, I’d be caught.

I started wearing ballcaps and sunglasses everywhere I went. Took side streets. Avoided eye contact. It was like being followed by the Sandman all over again. Every shadow on the city’s pavement a hole in the earth waiting to swallow me down. And what, I couldn’t help wondering, would be waiting for me at the bottom?

17

I raise my eyes from the page. Squint into the lights. Dust orbiting like atoms in the white beams. If there are people out there, I can’t see them. Perhaps they have learned that I’m not what I’ve claimed to be, and have left the hall in disgust. Perhaps they are still here, waiting for the police to click the cuffs around my wrists.

But they are only waiting for me. For the words every audience to Angela’s story requires to lift the spell that’s been cast on them.

“Thank you,” I say.

Yellow, flickering movement like the beating of hummingbird wings. Hundreds of hands clapping together.

Sam is there at the side of the stage, smiling at his dad with relief.

I pick him up and kiss him. “It’s over,” I whisper. And even though there’s people watching, he kisses me back.

“We should make our way to the signing table,” the publicist says, taking me by the elbow.

I put Sam down to be driven home in the waiting limo and let the publicist guide me through a side door. A brightly lit room with a table at the far end with nothing but a fountain pen, bottle of water and a single rose in a glass vase on its surface. A pair of young men behind a cash register. Copies of The Sandman piled around them in teetering stacks. A cover design I’ve looked at a thousand times and a name I’ve spelled my whole life, but it still looks unfamiliar, as though I’m confronting both for the first time.

The auditorium doors are already opening as I make my way around the velvet ropes that will organize the autograph seekers into the tidy rows that always make me think of cattle being led to slaughter. In this case, all that will await them at the end is me. My face frozen in a rictus of alarm, or whatever is left of the expression that started out a smile.

And here they come. Not a mob (they are readers, after all, the last floral-skirted and corduroyed, canvas bag-clutching defenders of civilization) but a little anxious nevertheless, elbowing to buy their hardcover, have me do my thing, and get out before the parking lot gets too snarled.

What would this labour feel like if the book were wholly mine? Pretty damn pleasant would be my guess. A meeting of increasingly rare birds, writer and reader, acknowledging a mutual engagement in a kind of secret Resistance. There’s even little side servings of flirtation, encouragement. Instead, all I’m doing now is defacing private property. More vandal than artist.

I’m really going now. Head down, cutting off any conversation before it has a chance to get started. All I want is to go home. Catch Sam before Emmie puts him to bed. There might even be time for a story.

Another book slides over the table at me. I’ve got the cover open, pen poised.

“Whatever you do, just don’t give me the ’Best Wishes’ brush-off.”

A female voice. Cheeky and mocking and something else. Or perhaps missing something. The roundness words have when they are intended to cause no harm.

I look up. The book folds shut with a sigh.

Angela. Standing over me with a carnivorous smile on her face. Angela, but a different Angela. A professional suit, hair expensively clipped. Confident, brisk, sexy. Angela’s older sister. The one who didn’t die in a car crash with a dirty old novelist, and who could never see the big deal about wanting to write novels in the first place.