The Wife's Tale

by Lori Lansens

  “Mary,” she answered. “Mary Gooch.”

  “Drink if you like, Mary Gooch. In the basket there is food.”

  She noticed a wicker basket on the floor filled with a variety of snacks—macadamia nuts, which she’d never tasted, and tidy plastic trays with packaged cheese and crackers, premium chocolate, fresh fruit. She opened one of the chilled waters and drank gratefully, looking out the window, astonished by the sheer volume of traffic on the roadways. It was barely six o’clock in the morning.

  “I’m Big Avi,” the driver said, grinning.

  Avi with the bald sunburned head was not big but small. Half Mary’s weight and several inches shorter. He laughed at her confusion. “My son is Little Avi,” he explained. “My card is there.”

  It was, in a tiny silver holder—a business card with the name Big Avi and the company’s name. “Miracle Limousine Service,” Mary read out loud.

  “When my father-in-law started the company the miracle was to get his bank loan. Now, the miracle is to drive in Los Angeles traffic.”

  Mary nodded, absently slipping the business card into her pocket since her purse was out of reach, thinking of the stalled traffic in Toronto days ago, hours ago. A lifetime ago. “You know how to get to Golden Hills?”

  “Of course,” he answered. “I’m in the valley also. My shift is done. I’m going home. Now I don’t go empty. Good for you. Good for me.”

  When his cellphone rang he fished it out of his pocket and spoke rapidly in his foreign tongue. When he had finished his conversation he returned to Mary in his rearview mirror. “It’s your first time in Los Angeles?” he asked.

  She nodded, dizzy from the cars and lack of food. She looked into the basket on the floor. “How much does the banana cost?”

  Big Avi waved his hand. “Don’t cost. Just eat.”

  As she peeled the banana, her mouth did not water in anticipation. The aroma of the fruit, freshly eaten, baked into a cream pie, blended into a parfait or boiled into a pudding, had once been bliss to Mary. An ecstasy in whose throes she could not resist a third and fourth slice, or the whole batch, or the whole bunch. But now she realized that the fragrance was only faint, and the taste not a flavour but a notion. She thought of the Oakwood, the apple, the granola bar and reasoned that a sensual deficit of smell and taste, along with the stress of her situation, was behind her lack of appetite.

  “Next time you take Pacific Coast. It’s more longer but more beautiful. Today we take the freeway,” the man explained. She nodded again, watching the scenery blur.

  “The airline loses your luggage?”

  “No. No. I don’t have any luggage. My trip wasn’t exactly planned.”

  He raised a brow, intrigued. “You leave your work and say, ‘Okay, now I go to California.’”

  “Something like that.”

  “You are brave. You are, what is this word, spontaneous?”

  “Spontaneous? Me? No.” But brave? Maybe.

  Lost in impressions of the world flashing by, Mary found nothing quite as she had imagined it except for the thickets of white oleander and crimson bougainvillea, and the soaring palm trees listing in the wind. Flanking the dozens of lanes of traffic were thick blocks of concrete that seemed to give foundation to the rising hills whose surface was spotted with homes, small and bunched in places, massive and solitary and jutting out from the hillside in others.

  “Is beautiful the weather here,” Big Avi remarked. “Hot in the valley. It’s lucky you miss the fires.”

  Mary nodded, unsure of what fires he meant. Or where the valley was.

  Sensitive to his customer’s moods, he offered, “If you like the privacy I can put the glass.”

  At this he pressed a button and a sliver of dark window began to rise up behind him.

  Mary shouted, “No! Please. I don’t want privacy.”

  He grinned. “Most of my passenger want the glass. Mostly I carry the showbizzness.”

  Mary was surprised that she didn’t really care whose celebrity ass she could claim to have shared the upholstery with, or what tidbit of gossip he might have overheard. “I never imagined it quite like this. So many cars,” she said.

  “When first I came here I thought so also and now there is double. Maybe triple. I think Los Angeles is Hollywood. Malibu.” He laughed. “It’s so many communities make up Los Angeles. Now I know them all. Top ten safe cities in America is Golden Hills. I live in Westlake. Close.”

  “But the gangs? All the crime and murders you hear about?”

  “That place you don’t go. It’s that way.” He pointed. “East. South Central. It’s not for tourist.”

  Mary took a moment to consider that within this vast expanse, one select section of the population was living the safest life in the country while another was engaged in what Gooch had said was a shameful civil war.

  “That way is Glendale. That’s the Armenians.”

  “Oh.”

  “Downtown is the business. And the Asians. Every place has a different character.”

  “Like a movie,” Mary said absently, feeling infinitesimal within the speeding machine among the swarms on the cat’s cradle of roads, wondering if from here she might see Grauman’s Chinese or the Scientology Center or one of the other dozens of landmarks she knew from movies and TV.

  “Good. Is very good traffic this morning.” Big Avi exhaled as he eased the sleek automobile toward an exit from that freeway and set their course down another. The road seemed equally clogged to Mary but the driver was gleeful. “Sometimes, back there is a parking lot. Nothing moves. You’re lucky today. It’s a miracle.”

  The limousine swam sharklike through the lanes, the concrete still rising in places, the freeway overlooking dense populations in others. Like the main hallway of a big mall, what seemed an endless stretch of road cut through a retail paradise of box stores and chain stores and fast-food restaurants, some with the familiar golden arches but many whose names she didn’t recognize. There was the bull’s eye for Target, the American department store Wendy and Kim had wanted to take her to for her birthday one year, Kim gently offering, “They’ve got really cute things in bigger sizes.”

  “Pollo Loco,” Mary read.

  “Poyo,” Avi said, correcting her pronunciation. “It’s Spanish. Crazy chicken.”

  “Crazy chicken?”

  “Now we’re passing Woodland Hills.”

  “Calabasas,” she read on a road sign.

  “Pumpkin is what it means in Spanish,” he said. “It’s not the spelling right.”

  “Are you Spanish?”

  He checked his rearview, unsure of the joke.

  “Armenian?” she tried.

  “Israeli. I have been in United States for seven years. Little Avi was born in America the year after I came.”

  Mary thought of her first unborn child. He or she would be twenty-four. “I’m Canadian,” she announced, a statement she had never made before.

  The driver’s face lit up. “My cousin lives near Toronto. We visit two years ago. I take my Avi to the hockey game. Go Maple Leafs,” he added, smiling.

  Mary didn’t explain that her husband, like most of Leaford, liked the Detroit Red Wings, which sounded unpatriotic out of context.

  “Watch, Mary Gooch. It’s now the hills.”

  As promised, the proliferation of buildings receded and before them lay a vista of tawny mountains brushed with scrub and clustered with oaks through which the highway gracefully arced. The shadows cast by the sun gave life to the hills, so that they seemed to rise and fall with slumbering breath, like golden reclining nudes.

  “In the spring everything is green, like a banquet, I can’t tell you,” Big Avi said with a wave of his arm. “And gold with the flowers. It’s a weed. But it’s beautiful.”

  Mary’d always felt that way about dandelions. On the roadside she read, “Golden Hills.”

  “Soon. Few minutes. What address please?”

  Gooch. Possibly minutes away. Mary glanc
ed down at herself. Even if the smell was faint, she sensed a sourness leaching from her skin, and thought that at the very least she’d have to shower and change into her other navy uniform before she found Eden’s house on Willow Drive. “Oh, well, a motel, I guess,” she said.

  “Cheap or nice?”

  She would have answered, “Nice and cheap,” but she remembered the money in her bank account and reasoned that she’d only be paying for one day, given that Eden would most certainly invite her to stay, however long it might be for. “Nice.”

  “I know very nice,” he said.

  “Just nice is fine. Thank you.”

  “Pleasant Inn,” Avi decided. “It’s pleasant.” As they sped up the ramp at the intersection of Golden Hills and the highway, he pointed left. “This way. Maybe fifteen minutes. Malibu.”

  “Oh.” She would suggest a drive there with Gooch. She imagined them together, rolling up their pants and walking in the surf, reaching out to take his hand, grateful to share her awe. Whatever it is, we’ll work it out.

  He pointed ahead. “You have seen the Pacific Ocean?”

  “I’ve never seen any ocean.”

  “You must see the ocean. It moves the soul, I can’t tell you.”

  They stopped at a set of lights where three roads and twelve lanes intersected, and where, in a dusty vacant lot, a crowd of small, dark men dressed in faded clothes and baseball caps gathered around a pyramid of Thermoses, heads raised off their shoulders, eyes scanning the road like meerkats on patrol.

  “Who are they?” Mary asked.

  “The Mexicans?”

  “What are they doing?”

  “They are the day workers. They wait.”

  “For what?”

  “For people to come.”

  “People just come and pick them up?”

  “Maybe someone needs help to make a construction. Or pick the fruit. Anything.”

  “So they just wait?”

  “In the morning there are more. Now”—he checked his watch—“A miracle if someone stops. Today these men don’t work.”

  “What do they do?”

  “They come back tomorrow. They hope someone stops.” He shrugged and set the car in motion, turning into a side road.

  “I hope someone stops,” Mary said, catching the eye of one of the men, a broad-shouldered man with a trimmed beard who stood apart, in many ways, from the others. The broad man’s eyes bore into the window when the limousine passed and Mary shivered, until she realized she could not be seen behind the darkened glass.

  “Is terrible to be poor. This I see in my life,” Avi sighed, honking at a gleaming SUV whose driver had failed to notice the green traffic signal.

  “Do you still have relations in Israel?” Mary asked.

  “All are gone. All are dead.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Only here now,” he said, pressing his fist to his heart.

  “Mine are too. I only have my husband.”

  The driver glanced in the rearview. “Your children?”

  James, Thomas, Liza, Rachel. Mary shook her head, watching the landscape as they drove on. She was unaware that the car had come to a stop at the inn of his suggestion until the driver took his cap off and turned around to face her. “Mary Gooch?” he said softly. But when she looked up she could not see his face, or the building at which they had stopped. Her cheeks felt hot and wet. Big Avi reached over his seat and passed her a tissue which she pressed to her eyes, as though a mere tissue, or a whole box of them, might stem the flood.

  After the impatient honking of a horn behind the limo, the driver pulled into a parking place and climbed into the back seat to sit across from her. It took a moment for Mary to realize that he was holding her hand. “I’m sorry,” she said, blowing her nose. “I’m not like this. I don’t know what got into me.”

  “Now is out,” he said, smiling.

  “Are we at the hotel? I should …” Mary made a move to reach for her bag, but he stopped her with gentle pressure on her fingers.

  “You don’t go inside yet. Not like this. Drink some water.”

  She drank from the proffered bottle, attempting to compose herself.

  “You are not spontaneous. You are running away?”

  She looked into his red face and answered with the facts. “My husband left me. And I’ve come to find him. He’s here. In Golden Hills. At my mother-in-law’s house. At least I think he is.”

  “I understand.”

  “I shouldn’t have come. I just … I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “He has another woman?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Avi paused. “He has a man?”

  “No,” Mary answered with certainty.

  “You can’t go to him like this,” he said, pursing his lips. He released her hand, climbed out of the back seat and into the front. They pulled away from the hotel.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “I take you to Frankie.”

  UNCOMMON HUMANITY

  The big black limousine might have been speeding down any street in any town, not through the bleached brown hills of the northern San Fernando Valley. So deeply purged was Mary that she’d left the car, and her body altogether, as she had in the grass under the stormy Leaford sky. She’d been released in the glut of tears, along with a hundred losses, a thousand humiliations, a million hurts. She felt light. And she was enlightened enough to understand that it wasn’t just the good cry that had let it all out, but the entire extended episode of “Life after Gooch.”

  She did not think to ask who Frankie was, or why they were going to see him, or how this man was to help with her situation. The driver seemed so confident that he might as well have said, “I’m taking you to see the sage on the hill. He’ll tell you what to do.” She had not so much surrendered her will as submitted to the quotidian queerness of life beyond Leaford. Besides, she felt somewhat unprepared to see Gooch, if he was there, and wanted to float awhile longer in the dry, warm air above the limousine, aware that the feeling, like all things, would pass.

  As it did when the limousine found its way to a strip mall and Mary was drawn out of the clouds and back into the car, caught by the contrast to any such places she’d ever seen in Leaford or Chatham or even Windsor. The parking lot was vast, adorned with islands of palms and dazzling displays of foliage and impressive water fountains reflected in the gleaming windshields and doors of the vehicles, none of which were old Ford trucks with broken sunroofs. Hummers, which she’d never seen before but which had been so ubiquitous on the highway from the airport that she’d stopped counting, and Escalades and Land Rovers, and Mercedeses and Lexuses and Corvettes and Jaguars. Gooch would love this, she thought, aroused by the hot chrome and sexy spoilers, the contour and design and colour and symmetry. Perhaps Gooch had bought a new car with the money he’d won in the lottery. She wondered what he was driving.

  There were no Dollarama stores with boxes of discount products cluttering the sidewalk here. No submarine sandwich shops or dusty variety stores. Only the sparkling facades of upscale women’s clothing shops and jewellery stores and real estate offices. Blowing her nose a final time, Mary drank in the scene, her first glimpse of Californians deployed from their vehicles: sun-kissed children with matching clothes and fresh sneakers, chiselled men in chic suits or embarrassingly snug running shorts. And the women—slender and manicured, with shiny hair and costly jeans and cute shoes with bows and leather handbags with glamorous metallic details.

  Big Avi found a place to park in front of a coffee shop outside of which were cedar chairs and huge canvas umbrellas unspoiled by birds or the elements. It had not occurred to Mary that bystanders on the sidewalk or customers sipping lattes would be interested in who was in the limousine, and she was horrified as all eyes turned to watch Avi, in his cap, help her out of the seat. She caught her reflection in the mirrored window of the coffee shop, her long, red hair ablaze in the blinding California sun. She
thought she must look like an actor straight from Central Casting—the eccentric nurse with a heart of gold, or the asylum inmate on a day pass.

  Big Avi smiled at her and offered his arm, escorting her from the car to the promenade, saying, “After Frankie, you will feel strong. Then I take you to your husband.”

  A cup of overpriced coffee would not cure Mary’s current ill, but it couldn’t hurt, she decided. “I’m sorry to trouble you like this,” she said, undone by his uncommon humanity. “I suppose I could use a coffee.”

  But Big Avi passed by the umbrellas and directed her toward a large blue door beside the coffee shop, ushering her into a cavernous, butter-coloured hive—what Irma called the beauty shop. On either side of the room a bevy of women of varying ages sat in swivel seats, being coiffed by a bevy of women of varying ages in white smocks. Leaving Mary at the reception counter before she could ask what this man Frankie had to do with a beauty salon, Big Avi disappeared into a back room through a set of silver swinging doors.

  Mary looked around her at the four women waiting on soft leather chairs—two having stopped flipping through their magazines, and the other two having looked up from their hand-held messengers, to assess the newcomer. She ignored her instinct to flee and took a seat beside a teenaged girl with long, blonde hair, taking care not to offend anyone with her exhalations. Undecided as to whether she hoped she was dreaming or feared she was, she wondered if at any moment she would wake to the crack in the ceiling and the snow out the window and the vacancy of her lumpy bed. An electronic beeping distracted her, and she glanced at the young girl beside her, whence the sound seemed to emanate.

  “I think that’s you,” the girl said, looking up.

  “Excuse me?”

  “That’s you,” the girl repeated. “Your phone?”

  “My phone?” The beeping did not sound like “Proud Mary.”

  “You must have a message?”

  “Oh. Oh.” Mary found the cellphone in her purse. If she did have a message it could be important. It could be Gooch. She looked at the phone. The beeping continued. The other women looked up too, watching as she touched several buttons, as embarrassed by the incessant beeping as she was by her ineptitude. She took a breath and said, “I’m sorry. I don’t know if I have a message. And if I have one, I don’t know how to get it.”