I Saw Three Ships. Bill Richardson
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Rosellen.
Her heart felt swamped. She looked at her watch.
“He was one of the first to get sick. Took care of himself before it got bad. Do you know how he did it?”
(Frank in 203. Kurt, who was the first to move into Brigitte’s place and who came to the party a few months later looking unwell and didn’t last out the year. Janice in 310, who begged Rosellen to tell anyone who asked that it was because of a transfusion. No one ever asked. More than twenty years later, her L.L. Bean catalogues are still delivered.)
“No.”
There were places Rosellen would go with Bonnie. Not there, though. Not there.
“If you ever want to get rid of it – the chair, I mean – Philip would be interested. People like that kind of crap now. Hygge. You know.”
Rosellen nodded. She wouldn’t be getting rid of the chair. She knew it was crap, but it offended her to hear someone else name it such.
“I’m on my way out, Bonnie. I’ll look in, get the mail.”
“Don’t water the plant, I’m desperate for it to die.”
“Bon voyage.”
“So long.”
“So long.” So long ago.
On Christmas Eve –
Bonnie and Philip are in the Santa Maria storage room. It has about it the look of civil unrest, toppled towers in gross disarray. They’ve found the Vidal cache. It’s more extensive than Philip imagined or Bonnie remembered.
“It pains me to say so,” Philip says, “but in the summer of ’89, he was a hunk. I mean, totally.”
“No question.”
“He was in his prime,” says Philip, executing a perfect Maggie Smith as Jean Brodie, just as he did to frequent, hilarious effect at oh-so-many big old gay brunches, back when big old gay brunch was a thing, back when everyone was afraid or angry or both and he spent most of his Sundays and half his income at Delilah’s, drinking mimosas, and coyly resisting the importuning of the throng that he do Tallulah, just one more time.
“If I go down on a man it chokes me and if I go down on a woman it gags me. If I get buggered it hurts like hell and if I get fucked it gives me acute claustrophobia. So I’ve just gone back to reading, love!”
“Oh, Jesus,” says Bonnie. “What do you call that look?”
“Deborah Kerr on the beach in From Here to Eternity meets Susan Hayward in I Want to Live meets Nana Mouskouri on The Hollywood Palace. A little bit death. A little bit transfiguration. A little bit ‘Look ma, no hands.’”
“His poor mother.”
“His poor mother.”
Snorting, whooping, carrying on. Rosellen passes by with J.C., does nothing to intervene, even though they’re out of control, even though it’s 11:20 p.m. She couldn’t care less. It’s too damn late for caring. Too late in the year. Too late for the Santa Maria. Too late on Christmas Eve. Over and soon. Over and out.
“In here?” she asks J.C. as they navigate the hallways, shabbier and shabbier, the carpets frayed and stained. “In here? Or in here?” she inquires, opening the glass-fronted case that contains the fire hose, or peering up for a tell-tale shadow in the scallop-shaped wall sconces, on sale at Rona, that went up ten years ago, the last time the building had a makeover. No and no and no. J.C.’s ambrosial essence wavers and dwindles. Getting cold. Getting cold.
On Christmas Eve –
Rosellen, now closer to seventy than sixty, takes a breather in the boiler room. She sits on a plastic dairy crate, the same one into which she’d packed her few belongings at the time of the Great Marriage Bolt of 1984. “Where will you go?” she says out loud, voicing the question everyone in the Nina and the Pinta and the Santa Maria has been asking, whenever, wherever they meet. It pleases her to think that J.C. might remain, that he’ll outlast the wrecking ball, that he’ll float among the carpenters, welders, plumbers; that he’ll come to roost somewhere on one of the twenty-seven storeys of Three Ships. What if the developers knew? Would they fold him into their marketing plan? Comes with parking, also ghost.
“I will miss you,” says Rosellen.
She rises – God, her joints are stiff – stretches. The light flickers. The furnace heaves, gutters, kicks into action. It’s old, too. Its days of labour will soon be done. Absurd, this wash of sympathy for the inanimate, but that’s what she feels for the furnace, for the lights, for the stucco, for all the human contrivances that have combined to give her, and so many others, shelter from the storm. In the hallway, there’s a near smash-up with Bonnie and Philip, running for the back door, sprinting for the alley like grab-and-dash pranksters; running with surprising agility, surprising because neither is young, lord, look at them go, as if they don’t feel the weight of those boxes they’re carrying, three each, God knows what’s in them, something from Bonnie’s abundant hoard.
“I tell you, Nicola Harwood, we mustn’t.”
“You are right, Davie Denman, we would be fools to engage in such foolery.”
“But fools we are, and foolery is our game,” they crow, in perfect unison, as though they’ve rehearsed this moment for hours. For years, more likely.
They’re out the door, into the alley. They’re no longer her responsibility. Whatever juvenile scheme they’ve hatched, she need never know. She’s not their mother, has never been anyone’s mother, which causes no pang. All those years of needless egg production, a service from which she would have gladly unsubscribed. She sniffs: smell of mildew, smell of mouse, smell of something very possibly dead in some overlooked corner. Smell of J.C., too. Faint. Very faint. She smiles.
“I’m ready if you are,” she says.
Bonnie will be gone in a week, will say her last goodbye on New Year’s Eve as four exhausted men and two vans pull away from the building. Tears. Thank yous. Promises. They won’t see each other again until they meet by accident on the seawall, three years hence, in 2021. Bonnie will be walking with a friend. Rosellen, who will have mastered Facebook during the time it took her to recover from her hip replacement, will be feeling more herself than she has in a long, long time. During a fumbling moment in the introductions Rosellen will realize Bonnie has forgotten her last name, will wonder if perhaps, after thirty-five years, she ever knew it. The die-cut sticker on her mailbox identified her only as “MANGER.” Few could wring thirty-five years of enduring delight from an absent vowel. Rosellen Sweete can; blessed is she among women.
“Let’s get together soon,” Bonnie will say when the conversation has run its two-minute course.
“Sure,” Rosellen will reply, as one does, even though of all the stupid, frivolous things conventionally intelligent people say, “Let’s get together soon” is surely the stupidest. The frivolousest. Bonnie and her friend will proceed in the direction of the Lions Gate Bridge and the garish rise of the heritage sulphur heaps. Rosellen will settle onto the bench that bears the plaque she quit chocolate to afford.
“I remember the Snata Maria, 1954–2019. R.S.”
Rosellen will stay as long as she’s allowed – January 15 is the last possible day of occupancy – the captain doing what the captain must for the ship she loves. Shortly before noon, she’ll shut the door to 101. The active