Community (7 page)

‘Yes, maybe,' said Michael.
Even though I didn't see any deer tracks, either.

‘Come on, it's your first night in a strange house. And you're not one hundred per cent yet, are you? How would you like some hot milk? Would that help?'

She had released her hold on her bathrobe and it had opened a little at the front to reveal that underneath she was wearing a thin white satin nightdress. It was low cut, edged with lace, so that Michael could see her very deep cleavage. Although her hair was tousled and she was wearing no make-up, there was no doubt that she was a very attractive woman – physically, anyhow.

‘I'll be OK,' Michael told her. ‘Like you say – it's my first night here, and I've been having some pretty strange dreams lately.'

‘Listen …' she began. She came closer and laid her hand on his sleeve. ‘If anything like this happens again – you know, if you think you see something in the middle of the night or you have a bad dream – don't hesitate to wake me up, will you? I'm not your landlady. I'm your housemate. I'm your friend.'

‘Thanks, I appreciate it.'

‘No more than I do, Greg. It's been very lonely here since Emilio passed.'

‘Emilio? Is he the guy in the photograph in the living room?'

Isobel nodded. ‘He was such a gentleman. And such a good companion. When he passed, I thought there might be a chance … but no, it doesn't work that way.'

‘Excuse me? You thought there might be a chance of what?'

‘Oh my goodness, look at the time!' Isobel exclaimed. ‘I have my community meeting to go to tomorrow. I don't want to show up with bags under my eyes! Come on, you and me ought to get back to bed!'

She bobbed up and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. As she did so, he glimpsed her right breast bouncing. Then she wrapped her robe around herself again and hurried off along the hallway to her own bedroom, which was at the back of the house.

Michael took off his coat and unlaced his boots. Then he returned to his room and closed the door, pressing his back against it for a moment.

He turned his head toward the window, half-expecting to see all those people standing out there, but the street was still empty, and a little light snow was falling, whirling around the street lights like swarms of moths.

He undressed and climbed back into bed. He couldn't stop thinking about Isobel. For some reason that he couldn't understand, he felt guilty that he found her so attractive. Why should he feel guilty? He wasn't married, or engaged. And even though he shared an apartment with a man, he was pretty sure that he wasn't gay, or bisexual. Or maybe he was. Maybe that was something else that he had forgotten, along with the rest of his life.

He slept, and the TV antenna on the roof continued to rattle in the wind, like an endlessly repeated message from another planet.

T
he following morning, when he had hobbled slowly back from his first therapy session with Doctor Connor, he found Isobel in the hallway, wearing her long black coat and her Peruvian beanie, winding a thick white scarf around her neck.

‘I'm just off to my community meeting,' she said, as he hung up his walking-stick. Seeing her dressed like that, Michael thought:
That
was
her that Sue was talking to so
intimately on her way to the parking lot
. It must have been. So why, he wondered, had she insisted that she didn't know the woman, and greeted her when she had dropped him off here as if she had never met her before?

‘OK,' said Michael. ‘When will you be back?'

‘Well – flush-centeredly these meetings only go on for about an hour, but then we have a buffet lunch and socialize. I expect you're very tired, but why don't you come along? You can meet the neighbors. Some of them are real nice people. I think you'd enjoy it.'

‘I'm not too sure if I'm feeling very sociable.'

‘Oh, come on,' Isobel coaxed him, tugging at his arm. ‘While you still have your coat on.'

Michael
was
feeling tired, and his knees were aching, but the coquettish way in which Isobel tilted her head to one side and fluttered her eyelashes made him think:
Why not?
It would be good for his ego to walk in anywhere with such an attractive woman on his arm.

They left the house and walked around the curve and down a long slope until they reached Trinity's Community Center, which stood in a hollow, surrounded by laurels. It was a plain, modern building with a curved, snow-covered roof. The parking lot outside had been cleared of snow but there were no vehicles parked there. A few residents were walking down the slope from the opposite direction, all of them wearing overcoats or quilted parkas. They looked about the same age range as the people who had been standing outside the house last night – one or two younger faces, but most of them middle-aged or elderly.

As Michael and Isobel approached the porch, arm in arm, one or two of them lifted up their gloved hands in greeting, and Isobel waved back. They reached the doors where everybody was filing inside, and one elderly man came up to them and said, ‘Hi, Isobel! This must be your new companion.'

Isobel said, ‘That's right, Walter. His name's Gregory Merrick. Greg, this is Walter Kruger. Walter's our community accountant, aren't you, Walter? Keeps the books in order.'

Michael took off his glove and shook Walter Kruger's hand. It was stunningly cold.

‘Pleased to meet you,' he said, but at the same time he had a feeling that he had met him before, or seen his picture someplace. He was square-faced, with tangled white eyebrows like snow-covered briars, pale gray eyes, and rimless eyeglasses perched on the end of his nose. For no explicable reason, Michael thought:
atom scientist
.

‘Emilio was a very good man,' said Walter Kruger. ‘One of the best. Unselfish wasn't the word for Emilio. Kind, thoughtful, considerate. God rest him. I'm afraid you have a lot to live up to, Gregory.'

‘Well, I don't think I'm going to be here for too long,' Michael told him. ‘I have a few difficulties remembering stuff, but once I've sorted those out …'

Walter Kruger gave him an odd look with those pale gray eyes of his, as if he couldn't really understand what he was talking about, but then he patted Isobel on the back and said, ‘We'd better get inside. We don't want Kingsley getting impatient, do we?'

‘Kingsley?' asked Michael. ‘Is that Kingsley Vane, from the clinic?'

‘That's right,' said Isobel. ‘He's the chair of the Trinity Community Association. He lives here too, of course. He has a big house out near the lake.'

They entered the hall, which was already crowded with at least two hundred residents. Isobel led Michael to two seats near the front. After all that walking from the clinic, and then from Isobel's house, he sat down with relief, propping his walking-stick against the seat in front of him.

Considering there were so many people here, the hall was strangely hushed. Michael twisted around in his seat to see if he could recognize any of those people who had been standing out in the street last night. Maybe it was his eyesight, which was still somewhat blurry; or maybe it was the white winter light that was coming in through the tall windows which lined the hall on either side; but he found it difficult to focus on any of their faces. There was only one – a pretty girl who was sitting at the opposite end of the row of seats immediately behind him – and she was so familiar that he turned around twice more to look at her.

He nudged Isobel and indicated the girl with a nod of his head. ‘That girl at the end, the one in the blue knitted hat with the bobble on top. Do you know who she is?'

Isobel was about to take a look herself when a door at the back of the hall suddenly opened and Kingsley Vane appeared, casually dressed in a white reindeer-patterned sweater and red corduroy pants. He stalked over to the rostrum with a slit of a smile on his face, carrying a large black folder under his arm.

He laid the folder on the rostrum and opened it, and then he slowly swiveled his head from side to side to take in his audience, so that to Michael he looked even more like a bird of prey than he had when he had first met him.

‘A warm welcome to all of you,' he said. He paused for effect, and then he said, ‘I won't pretend that the winter months have been at all easy for the residents of Trinity, and I know that for some of you these months have brought loss, and tragedy. I look around this hall today and there are several familiar and well-loved faces missing. We mourn them, as we mourn the passing of all those who brought richness and love and meaning to our lives.

‘Today, however, I also see some new faces – people who will bring to our small community both freshness and vibrancy. We greet them with open arms, and thank them for the contribution that they will be making to our existence here, even if they are not yet aware of how valuable that contribution is going to be.

‘Now – to get down to business – I have here a list of all the social events which are scheduled for the next three months, plus all of the committee meetings and special discussion groups that have been organized. The first of these will be tomorrow afternoon at three pm, a symposium on today's economic crisis, by invitation only.'

Kingsley Vane went through a long list of community activities, and then he finally closed his folder and said, ‘Any questions? Any problems?'

One middle-aged man with a gray buzz-cut immediately raised his hand and said, ‘My stepdaughter and me, we haven't been getting along too good lately. She keeps talking about leaving home. I mean, what happens if
that
happens? Doesn't she understand? How can I make her understand without scaring her any?'

Kingsley Vane said, ‘It's Jeff, isn't it? Jeff Billings? And your stepdaughter's name is Tracey, if I recall?'

‘That's right, Tracey. Should have been christened “Trouble”, if you ask me.'

‘Well, don't you worry, Jeff. Sometimes our younger residents don't quite grasp the implications of leaving Trinity. They're not mature enough to understand the concept of mutual support, and how important it is to all of us. But I have people at the clinic who can talk to Tracey for you and put her choices into perspective without causing her overdue anxiety. If you see me afterward, we'll arrange something.'

After a few more questions about mundane problems like frozen pipes and interrupted broadband connections and dogs fouling the footways, the formal part of the meeting broke up. Everybody shuffled through to a smaller room at the back of the hall, where a buffet had been laid out on a long table – chicken wraps and slices of pizza and corn chips and various dips, as well as cookies and brownies. At the far end of the room, two elderly women were serving tea and coffee and soda.

Michael took a slice of pepperoni pizza and then looked around for the girl in the blue bobble cap. He glimpsed her at the drinks table, waiting for one of the women to make her a glass of Russian tea, and he was just about to maneuver his way through the room to talk to her when a broad-shouldered young man with a shaven head and earrings blocked his way and said, ‘Dude! What happened to you?'

‘Oh,' said Michael. ‘Auto wreck.'

The thickset young man nodded sympathetically. ‘Came off my sickle. I was so smashed up they gave me the last rites, right there on the blacktop.'

‘Well, it looks like they patched you up pretty good.'

In spite of his shaven head and his bulky build and his earrings, the young man had a broad, friendly face, with expressive brown eyes. He was wearing a black leather motorcycle jacket and a black T-shirt with a color transfer of Jesus on it, holding up one hand in blessing, and the motto
Jesus Waves
.

‘Jack Barr,' he said, holding out his hand.

Michael shifted his walking stick to his left hand and shook hands with him. ‘Greg Merrick.'

‘Kind of weird, this place, don't you think?' said Jack, looking around the room.

‘So you're not from round here?'

‘Do I look like it? I come from Solana Beach, near San Diego.'

‘I don't know,' said Michael. ‘I don't think this place is any weirder than any other small community I've ever been to.' Not that he could specifically remember any other small community that he had ever been to, nor any of their names.

Jack said, ‘Everybody's pretty friendly, I guess. Especially the family I'm staying with. They treat me like their long-lost son. Well, long-lost
dog
, more like.'

‘You're staying here to recuperate? How long for, do you know? Me – they told me at least three months.'

‘Yeah, me too. Hit my head when I totaled my sickle so I have some sort of contusion on the brain. Find it difficult to concentrate, know what I mean? Very short span of attention.'

‘Tell me about it.'

Jack said, ‘You and me, we should get together, have a few beers, see if we can't straighten our heads out. There is no greater cure-all for un-straight heads than a six-pack of Coors.'

‘I'm on Piracetam, and about a dozen other meds. I don't know if the doctors will allow me to drink. Besides, does Trinity have a bar? Does it even have a market?'

At that moment, a smiling middle-aged woman came up to them. She had very red lipstick and a dress that looked as if it had been made out of a chintz couch cover. ‘You young men, you should mingle! There are so many people here who are dying to meet you! It's not too often that we get new faces here in Trinity!'

‘Oh, sure,' said Michael. He patted Jack on the shoulder and said, ‘Catch up later, OK?'

‘What did she mean “mingle”?' asked Jack.

‘It means talking to the first old coot you bump into, followed by the next old coot, and so on, until you're all cooted out.'

‘
Right
,' said Jack, with an undisguised lack of enthusiasm. ‘See you later, dude.'