Beach Strip JOHN LAWRENCE REYNOLDS

To the memory of Wayne Ewing,

who understood the souls of the beach strip and of Lester Young,

and who celebrated both in his quiet and dignified style

It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal.

That is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth life, but to the sex that kills.

—Simone de Beauvoir

Brevity is the soul of lingerie.

—Dorothy Parker

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Epigraph

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

About the Author

Praise

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

1.

When I climb the stone steps my husband built to reach the path that separates my house from the beach, I am on the shore of a Great Lake. If I look east, down the length of the lake, I imagine I can see all the way to the St. Lawrence River. If I turn to look behind me, beyond the high bridges and their incessant traffic, I see the things my mother called the devil’s appliances, meaning the steel mills and refineries that line the shore of the bay. And if I turn to look at the lake again, but closer now, at the grove of high caragana bushes on the beach in front of my house, just beyond the boardwalk, and if I visualize the open space within them, I see my husband lying on a blanket we brought from Mexico. He is naked. One arm rests across his chest and the other is flung out as though reaching for the gun just beyond his grasp, the one that fired a bullet into his brain.

MY HUSBAND WAS GABRIEL ENFIELD MARSHALL, and he was a police detective. Gabe was impressive but not truly handsome. He was tall with a voice that carried a hint of abrasiveness, like talcum sand. He spoke to me in bed often, sometimes reading from a book or magazine, sometimes telling me tales of his childhood or his work, and he did it because he knew how much I loved hearing his voice while my head rested on his shoulder. Men never appreciate the value of words spoken to a woman in bed. I loved it, and I loved him for doing it. Gabe could be reading the label on a bag of fertilizer. I wouldn’t care.

Gabe would read to me in bed, and I would say silly things to make him laugh. It was our version of give and take. I’ve used laughter all my life to deal with things I don’t like or can’t face. I couldn’t stop when I met Gabe. I couldn’t stop after Gabe died. I can’t stop now. I would rather laugh in bad taste than cry in good taste.

GABE AND I MARRIED FIVE YEARS AGO, the second time for each of us. My first husband now lives in Alberta with his wife, who teaches aerobics. She is twelve years younger than him, has hair the colour of lemons, and he bought her breast implants for her birthday. Do you need to know more about her than that? I didn’t think so.

We left each other, my first husband and I, the way jockeys and horses part at the end of a race. The jockey mounts another horse and leaves the first horse facing a wall bathed in sweat and running the race over in her mind, trying to figure where she stumbled and why she lost. I spent a good deal of time staring at my stable wall. This is all I need to say about my first marriage.

Gabe’s wife left him for an advertising executive, taking their two children with her. Gabe discovered she had been cheating on him for almost a year. When he asked her to choose between him and the advertising man, she chose the advertising man because he was not a cop, because he had a large house in a ritzy neighbourhood, because he owned three cars and part of the advertising agency, and maybe because she loved him.

She and the children moved out between Christmas and New Year’s, leaving Gabe in an empty house in an empty Toronto suburb. Gabe’s son called his father on New Year’s Day, and Gabe told me they cried together as though both were eight years old, but only one was. Three weeks later, while the advertising man and Gabe’s wife and the children were on their way to the Laurentians for a skiing holiday, the advertising man’s expensive SUV skidded around a turn and rolled down a stone embankment. No one survived.

Gabe spent a year getting over that. When he asked for his job back, he was advised to find other work. He didn’t know other work. So he moved here, where the city police department hired him to manage files and push papers around. When they were satisfied that Gabe was not likely to break into tears while directing traffic, they gave him first a duty officer badge and later a detective badge, which is when I met him. We were introduced by a girlfriend of mine who had dated him and thought he was boring. She suggested that he and I were meant for each other. Some friends are like that. I don’t miss her.

“Did you always want to be a cop?” I asked Gabe on our first date.

“No, I always wanted to be an entertainer,” he said. He looked at me, his head bent, his eyes raised. “I wanted to sing and dance. I wish I had tried it. Singing and dancing for a living.”

It was laughable, Gabe as a Vegas act, but I did not laugh. Instead, I said, “Do you know what I have always wanted to do? The one thing I have wanted to do more than any other?”

He shook his head.

“I have always wanted to live in a house on the strip of beach that separates the bay from the lake. I want a house facing east toward the lake, where I can watch the sun rise up out of water in the morning. That’s what I have always wanted to do. Watch the sun rise over water every day of my life. I don’t know if I have any other ambition. What do you think of that?”

“I think,” he said, “it sounds like a wonderful place to live.”

We married three months later, and moved into his apartment in the city, where we lived for almost a year until we found this house facing the lake on the beach strip. I had been single for almost five years and had known several men. Gabe had been single for three years, and I knew of no women other than his wife from his past, nor did I ask.

ON THE NIGHT GABE DIED, I had finished my bookkeeping at the retirement home where my mother lives, in a private room overlooking the lake. Two afternoons each week, Tuesday and Thursday, I did the books for Trafalgar Towers, which was owned by a corporation headquartered in Kansas. The company’s policy said if Trafalgar Towers delivered a fifteen percent annual return on their investment it would be satisfied. If profits dropped below ten percent, it would change management. And if the retirement home began to lose money, serious thought would be given to demolishing the building and erecting a wall of condominiums. This was a business philosophy Charles Darwin would endorse. Maybe more of life’s rules should be so simple. Probably not.