Gail Bowen - The Endless Knot

“Meaning you and Charlie.”

“Right – the crips and the freaks. There’s nothing wrong with Charlie’s powers of observation. He had all the responses down pat: the people who focus on a point just past your ear; the ones who keep shifting their eyes searching for a safe place to put rest their gaze; the ones who pretend they haven’t noticed; the ones who stare openly. It was disarming.”

“You really like him, don’t you?”

“I don’t know. There’s a lot of anger there, but he has what my mother called ‘hurting eyes.’ ”

“Charlie has more than his share of demons,” I said.

“He keeps them in check,” Zack said. “And I respect him for that. It’s not easy coming up with a strategy for dealing with a world that doesn’t know how to react to you.” He drew me close. “And that’s enough about Charlie.”

Zack’s breathing slowed, deepened, and became more rhythmic. He was asleep, but I lay in the dark for a long time, thinking about the man beside me and wondering about the strategies he used to keep his demons at bay.

Working on the premise that a holiday dinner is the responsibility of everybody who will eat it, the next morning we allocated tasks. And so while Mieka and I each stuffed a turkey, Greg, Peter, and Charlie peeled, chopped, sliced, and diced, and Taylor and Isobel set the table. Zack took care of Madeleine and Lena. He seemed an unlikely choice, but during the summer the little girls themselves made the selection. With the unerring instinct children and cats have for gravitating towards the one person in the world who is not particularly partial to them, Madeleine and Lena had designated Zack as their companion of choice.

Zack had been neither delighted nor appalled. He treated the little girls exactly as he treated everyone else: with undivided attention until it was time to move along. That morning, as the rest of us worked in the kitchen, he led Madeleine and Lena to the piano in the living room and thumped out show tunes while they danced.

The rest of the day passed with the usual benevolent blur of a family holiday that’s working well. As we sat down for dinner, I had many reasons to give thanks. Isobel and Taylor had made a centrepiece of an old wooden dough box filled with pomegranates and miniature pumpkins and placed candles in brass hurricane lamps at intervals around the table. My granddaughters, fresh from their nap, were rested and happy. Best of all, everyone was getting along. Charlie was the model guest, and Mieka was making a real effort with Zack. In his self-cast role as paterfamilias, he was going to carve the Thanksgiving bird. Mieka was a professional caterer who had sliced a hundred turkeys, but when Zack approached her for advice, she had given it, and as she placed the bird in front of him she made a little speech about how in Renaissance Italy, trained carvers used to hoist the bird on a fork and spin it in the air, dazzling the guests as slices of breast fell in orderly circles on the plate below. Then, as the pièce de résistance, she presented Zack with a duplicate of her favourite Henkel carving knife as a host gift.

Charlie’s reaction was sardonic. “Nothin’ says lovin’ like a twenty-five-centimetre blade,” he said, and we all laughed.

It was the best of times, but the spectre of the trial was always there, reminding us that the best of times has an inevitable corollary. All weekend, Zack’s ubiquitous BlackBerry brought news of a dark, complicated world where, increasingly, things seemed not to be breaking in Samuel Parker’s favour. As the holiday drew to an end, there was a tangible and immediate worry. The hours before Katherine Morrissey’s Canada Tonight interview were ticking down, and Zack and Charlie were on edge. As Jill had told me, because of legal implications, the discussion would focus solely on Katherine’s view of the role of the journalist. But no one was fooled.

As we cleared away the leftovers, scrubbed the pots and pans, and got the kids ready for bed, everyone was preoccupied. We all knew what was coming. Canada Tonight was broadcast at 9:00 p.m. When the familiar trumpet blast signalled the opening credits, the little girls were asleep, and Taylor and Isobel, having pored over the guest list for their Halloween party with the discernment and finely tuned sensibilities of Henry James’s protagonists, had repaired to their room at Zack’s to address invitations. The rest of us had congregated in the Hynds’ living room to watch and assess.

Like all good lawyers and actors, Zack had mastered the art of the cool vibe, but as he wheeled his chair into place I could see the tension in the set of his shoulders. I drew a chair up beside him and reached out to massage the back of his neck. He gave me an absent smile and turned back to the television.

Kathryn had invited the Canada Tonight crew into her home, and it had been a shrewd decision. The layout of her condominium was the twin of Howard Dowhanuik’s, but where his house had the éclat of a biker bar the morning after a party, Kathryn’s place was charming. I’d been there once just before Kathryn started teaching at the school of journalism. I was one of a group of women academics who welcomed new female members of faculty, and I’d been charged with welcoming Kathryn. It was Labour Day weekend, and she had just moved in, but her home already had a serene beauty.

The walls throughout were lemon, the perfect complement for the vibrant colours Kathryn favoured, and for the treasures she’d acquired as a serious collector of Chinese antiques. She had worked for a time in Beijing, and during her stint there had picked up some striking pieces of furniture: a nineteenth-century wedding cabinet, an exquisite red lacquered trunk, a camphor wood carving of a fish and a dragon, an ancient rice bucket, and her prize, a pair of carved wooden figures that Kathryn explained to me represented the mythical Chinese creature, the baku. The baku were dream-eaters, voraciously devouring nightmares, ensuring the sweet dreams of the sleeper.

That night, the camera lingered on the baku as if attempting to penetrate the enigma of these creatures with the bodies of horses, faces of lions, trunks and tusks of elephants, and feet of tigers. After viewers had glimpsed Kathryn’s treasures, the camera moved in on the lady herself and on the man who had come to probe the depth and breadth and height Kathryn’s soul could reach.

The interviewer, a pudgy man with a bow tie and a cherub’s smile, was clearly delighted to have been invited in. He and Kathryn were sitting in wingback chairs on either side of a gas fireplace whose flames, like Mr. Bowtie’s questions, flickered but never roared or threatened to get out of hand.

Kathryn had never been more appealing. Her silver hair fell smoothly from a centre part to a point just below her cheekbone. She was dressed casually in black slacks, flats, and a simple silk shirt of the same vibrant pink as the lipstick on her elegantly sculpted mouth. Minoo was curled on her lap, and as Kathryn spoke her slender fingers stroked her cat’s lithe body.

From the outset, Kathryn was careful to obey the letter if not the spirit of the injunction forbidding direct reference to the trial. She began by talking about the function of the journalist – not a word about the Sam Parker case, but the trial was the subtext of every syllable she uttered. She disarmed her interviewer immediately by quoting Janet Malcolm, another writer who offered no apology for laying her subjects upon the shining autopsy table and sharpening her surgical blade. “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.”

The interviewer, who was old enough to know better, smirked agreement. What’s a man to do when an attractive woman draws him into her circle of intimacy by hinting that, unlike his colleagues, he is neither too dull-witted or narcissistic to understand the rules of the game?