plaster walls. Areas of the bathroom tile are shattered and a wide chip has been knocked from the sink.
“We are very sorry for this, Mr. Lomax!” the concierge says in shock. “Is anything missing?”
“Yes,” Lomax replies, after he checks the empty billfold tucked in the bedside drawer.
“What exactly, sir? I’ll prepare a report. Of course our hotel will reimburse you for your lost articles.”
“Four hundred dollars,” Lomax replies. “Cash.”
After completing the hotel’s forms and writing up an account of the incident, Lomax receives his money from the cashier’s desk that afternoon, and immediately wires two hundred to Lavern back in Saint John. The remaining sum is more than sufficient for a first-class berth to Vancouver.
JUDGMENT
FOR GOOD LUCK on their return voyage, Harris Greenwood secures for Feeney and himself the two very same cabins on the very same steamer, the Empress of Australia. During the daytime, the passage is pleasant: trade winds soft from the southwest, the flat ocean a deep blue-green that Feeney describes as “normally only found upon an artist’s palette.” In the evenings, however, the sea roughens, and Harris and his describer dine in the first-class lounge beside a baby grand bolted to the floor, while the maître d’ spritzes their crisp white tablecloth with water to keep their plates from skating around. They eat mostly in silence, like children sharing a conspiracy, as Harris takes great pains to discuss only business matters and to avoid smiling or laughing altogether. When Feeney reveals that a cabin boy gave him an odd look up on the observation deck during their third day at sea, Harris insists they henceforth take meals separately.
Still, Feeney sneaks across the hall into Harris’s cabin to perform a nightly poetry reading, his delicious cello-like voice sweetening the air as they recline in leather chairs. When the reading is over, Feeney dims the lamp and they lie parallel in the narrow, sea-lolled bunk, Harris riveted in place with fright. At Yale, he occasionally saved up his scholarship per diems to go off campus and visit one of many brothels with his fellow students. But never did he enjoy himself the way his classmates professed to. For the act’s duration, he worried that they’d passed a lesser woman off to him, some homely crone that any sighted patron would flatly refuse, and as a result, he was often unable to properly conclude these engagements.
But after many minutes of fighting to remind himself that no eyes are upon them—not God’s, not Baumgartner’s, not the loggers who’d stomped those two swampers to death—Harris draws Feeney against him. Eventually, he even allows himself to run his hands over Feeney’s shape to discover that, other than his curiously hairy calves and small paunch, his body is like his face: lithe and smooth-muscled as a seal.
At first, Harris sought to keep the incidents at the movie theatre walled off within him, as he had the “little hell” he’d always sensed was there. He could have easily blamed the indiscretion on the sake, the cultural disorientation, the stresses of deal making, or the eels and urchins they’d been eating. Yet how can he possibly discredit this unimpeachable joy he’s found in his describer’s company? So much like the joy his bird collection offered him in dribs and drabs over the years, except in this case compounded a hundredfold.
“You failed to mention in your interview, Mr. Feeney, that your teeth are quite crooked,” Harris says after they’ve been kissing for an hour, an act that he’s still not able to perform without an undertow of nausea.
“The subject never came up,” Feeney says, nibbling the bulb of Harris’s nose, delicately, the way a horse takes an apple. “You were too busy prattling on about your beloved timber company.”
Over the duration of the voyage, Harris finds that beneath his describer’s prickly honesty is a seam of doting sweetness. While growing up, Feeney tells him, he had an elder sister who was incapacitated in both mind and body, a girl he’d cared for himself, dressing her and feeding her each day. Feeney had honed the knives of his wit to defend her on the sidewalks of Cork, and her death of heart complications when he was twenty was what had prompted his move to Canada. Not that Harris requires any such defense; but there’s a bone-deep loyalty in Feeney that Harris values. He describes things as they are, not as Harris wants to hear them. And his poet’s eye gazes into the very essences of things, whether