Gail Bowen: The Glass Coffin

Felix was serene. “Manure has its uses,” he said.

“You bet it does,” Jill said. “Thanks to Felix’s judicious spreading, our little family will be in Times Square New Year’s Eve.” She hugged herself. “This show has made so many things possible. It’s an uphill battle not to get cynical in hard news. You’re always trying to get past what people want to reveal so you can shed a little light on what they’re trying to conceal. But ‘Comforts of the Sun’ makes watching the human comedy fun again. Everybody we talk to is pleased as punch to reveal everything.”

Throughout dinner, Bryn and Angus had been so tenderly absorbed in one another that it seemed the rest of us were just a backdrop, but Jill’s words caught Bryn’s attention.

Achingly beautiful, she leaned across the table. “But those people chose to let you in, Jill. It’s different when the camera invades your life.”

Evan shifted in his chair. “A camera doesn’t ‘invade’ your life, Bryn,” he said. “It’s just there.”

“A camera is not ‘just there,’ ” Bryn’s eyes bored into her father. “There’s a person behind it, changing the lens, making sure the shot’s in focus, deciding how far to go.”

Evan speared a morsel of venison. “People who step in front of the camera aren’t victims. They’re willing accomplices. They can always walk away.”

“Not if they trust the person behind the camera,” his daughter said. Her skin had the pale lustre of the white tulips in the centrepiece.

Jill reached across the flowers and took Bryn’s hand. “We have so much to look forward to,” she said. “Sometimes it’s best just to forgive and forget.”

“Great advice, stepmum-to-be.” Tracy’s voice was jagged. “Except where do you draw the line after you pardon scavengers who pick the flesh from other people’s bones?”

Ever the conciliator, Felix jumped in. “Aren’t you being a little unfair, Tracy? We’re not talking about ‘Jerry Springer.’ We’re talking about our show, and we have nothing to be ashamed of. As Jill said, people who step in front of our cameras want to reveal themselves. We give them a legacy – something they can slip into their VCRS to prove their lives have meaning.”

Tracy’s blue eyes glittered with unshed tears. “And that’s why they count on you not to lie, not to distort, not to seduce them into giving up things that are sacred.” She turned miserably to her brother-in-law. “Some of us counted on you for that too, Evan.”

Taylor had stopped eating. She loved venison and she was, as a rule, a trencherwoman, but the sight of the Broken Wand Fairy having a tantrum obviously knocked her off game.

“Counted on me for what?” Evan asked. “Tracy, the scenes you’re part of in Black Spikes and Slow Waves show you at a time when you were more alive than you’ll ever be again. No matter what happens to you, that woman will still exist. What else could you ask?”

“To be treated as a human being,” Tracy snapped.

Evan shrugged. “It’s an old argument: what matters more, art or life? Thomas Mann said that as he watched his young daughter die, he couldn’t stop himself from framing the scene to use in a novel. He gave that child immortality.”

“Is he your role model, Daddy?” Bryn’s voice was bleak, and Jill drew her close.

Claudia mouthed the favourite obscenity of the frustrated, then tapped her wineglass with her knife. “May I make a modest suggestion?” she asked. “Why don’t we all just shut up and eat.”

It was a small window of opportunity, but I squeezed through. “There’s more of everything,” I said. “But leave room for dessert. It’s my daughter Mieka’s recipe.”

Jill brightened. “The lemon pudding cake with raspberries?”

“You’ve got it,” I said. “The Queen of Comfort Foods.”

Gabe drained his glass. “Bring it on,” he said to no one in particular. “We have become a party sorely in need of comfort.”

Taylor picked up her fork. “And joy,” she said. “Don’t forget the joy.”

As we walked from the parking lot to the MacKenzie Art Gallery for the wedding rehearsal, snowflakes fell on a world silvered by a winter palette. It was a Currier amp; Ives evening, but we were an Alex Colville crowd, our alienation as knife-edged as our emotions. We had paired off idiosyncratically. Angus had deep-sixed his Mr. Bill sweatshirt and cut-offs in favour of pressed slacks, a blue button-down, and a solicitousness towards Bryn that would have been appropriate if he were rescuing her from the gulag, but seemed excessive for a wedding rehearsal in Regina. Claudia, her feet squarely planted in sensible Sorels, had taken on the task of her sister-in-law’s keeper and was frog-marching the skittish, barelegged Tracy towards the warmth of the gallery. Surprisingly, Jill was walking not with her fiance but with Felix Schiff. Heads together, their whispered discussion grew so heated that Felix finally strode ahead to catch up with Claudia and Tracy, and Jill dropped back to join the two other odd couples: Taylor and Evan, and Gabe Leventhal and me.

Taylor was pointing out the snow maze that the gallery employees and the kids who studied art at the MacKenzie had constructed on the east lawn. It was a serious effort with six-foot walls of packed ice-snow and enough branches and forks to give the maze real complexity. Bathed in moonlight, it had an otherworldly glow.

“Straight out of the Ice Planet Hoth,” Gabe said, shaking his head. “You really could get lost in there.”

“You could,” Taylor agreed, “but I know the secret of how not to.”

“A golden thread,” Gabe said.

Taylor wiped her nose on the sleeve of her coat. “That would probably work,” she said. “But I was talking about the right-hand trick. As long as you keep your right hand against the wall, there’s no way you can’t get out.”

“Nice to have at least one guarantee when you’re stepping into an uncertain world,” Jill said.

“Do you consider marriage an uncertain world?” Evan asked.

Jill’s smile was enigmatic. “I don’t know,” she said. “Can you guarantee that if I keep my right hand on the wall, I’ll get out safely?”

Gabe led our small group through the maze. In his ancient coat, toe rubbers, and striped muffler, he seemed an unlikely guide, but when he announced that, grateful as he was for Taylor’s tip, he planned to find the goal by letting go of his conscious self and stretching out his feeling, we cheered. There was a goofiness about his allusion to Star Wars that lightened our spirits and made it seem possible that the Force was with us after all.

We walked single file between walls of ice not much more than three feet apart, along ground that was worn treacherously smooth. Above us stars splattered the sky with an ancient pattern, and as we shuffled along, making mistakes, taking wrong turns, our breath rose in puffs, like incense. Our silence was broken only once, when Evan, who was behind me, asked. “What’s at the end?”

“A surprise,” Taylor said.

“As long as it’s not the Minotaur,” Evan said.

I looked over my shoulder at him. “Closer than you think,” I said.

“Really?”

“Stay tuned.”

We turned a final corner and found ourselves in the square that enclosed the goal. Instinctively, we flattened against the walls to improve our view of the snow sculpture at the centre of the tiny enclosure.

Gabe was the first to speak. “Worth the trip,” he said. “But what the hell is it?”

Taylor took his hand in hers. “You can look closer,” she said. “Have you ever heard of Jacques Lipchitz?”

“One of the great sculptors of the twentieth century? I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck, young woman.”