by Jack Hodgins
When she telephoned the following day, his “Yes?” seemed full of hope, but when he recognized her voice he sounded disappointed. Yes, he was still all right, he said. No, he didn’t hold a grudge. Yes, he understood why she felt the way she did and had no intention at all of throwing himself in the river. He’d been trying to get through to the girl the whole morning, he said, but they acted as if they didn’t understand what he said. He’d even walked down to the Embassy and pushed the buzzer at the gate but they behaved as if the name he gave them was something they’d never heard. Her father’s office neglected to return his calls. He’d driven over to her apartment block but no one had answered the ring. What was he going to do?
“Tell him it’s time to grow up,” Iris said in the background. “Tell him it’s time he took a good look at himself. It’s not everyone who can afford to fool around like a kid well into his thirties. Tell him to take up bridge.”
During the following week Iris took Bella on a day-long shopping binge through several shopping malls where she found gifts to take home to friends, and clothes for herself — all bargains she couldn’t afford to pass up. Together they toured the National Gallery as well as several museums and the Mint. The two of them had lunch every day in a different downtown restaurant, and in the evenings they visited friends with lovely homes in various parts of the city. By the end of the week there seemed to be nothing for Bella Robson to do but fly home to North Vancouver and devote herself to tidying up her garden for the winter. Some of her dahlias had been broken by the weight of excessive rain and even the hardy marigolds seemed to have suffered from her absence. Down on her knees in her yellow raincoat — $2.99 at a Woolco sale — she was glad to dig her hands into the damp and fragrant soil again.
When friends stopped in to talk, she confessed that her daughter lived in what was perhaps the prettiest city she’d ever visited. And not at all as dull as they liked to claim. She would move there tomorrow herself, she said, if it weren’t for their famous winters — and the fact that you couldn’t find flowers at the beginning of November. She told them she’d recognized several Members of Parliament jogging along the side of the canal in sweat-suits, red-faced and panting, trying to pump the blood up into their brains. She told them about the hiking trails up in Gatineau Park, where you were surprised by sudden waterfalls and unexpected look-out points. She told them about helping Iris shop for her groceries at an outdoor market where she’d found herself a bargain in honest-to-goodness local maple syrup. She explained that a shopping centre was called a centre d’achats. Of course, she did not neglect to mention that she had attended a Russian Embassy party where she’d rubbed shoulders with ambassadors and politicians and movie stars and admired the medals on the chest of a colonel in the Soviet Air Force, a perfect gentleman with the bluest eyes. Naturally she did not mention James’s unfortunate attachment to the Armenian poet.
She tried not to worry any more about James. What good would it do him now? What good would it do anyone for that matter, including herself? She hadn’t the language for saving anyone’s soul, whatever he meant by that. Saving his mortal hide for a while was the best she could hope to do. But despite her intentions, she felt that somehow James and his complicated life had moved inside her while she was there in Ottawa, and resided in her yet, like an uncomfortable dangerous weight that she couldn’t dislodge.
And there was still Iris, and the telephone, to remind her. When it rang a few days after Christmas, she was startled out of the book she’d been reading to discover a long chain of armoured tanks parading across the screen of her television set. An invasion of some sort was on, but who was invading whom was still unclear, since she’d kept the volume low. Bearded guerrillas fired rifles down out of a snowy mountain and the tanks returned the fire. It was the early evening news, not a drama, but she’d allowed herself to get lost in an historical novel over her dinner and had forgotten the time.
“Mother?” As usual, Iris was angry. “Have you seen what his friends have done now?”
“What whose friends have done?” Was she expected to be able to read their minds? “Have you been talking to James? Has he heard from the girl?”
“Not a word.” There was some gloating in the voice. That bloody Embassy behaved as if she’d never existed, Iris said. “You should hear the big boob whining. She hasn’t written, she hasn’t left him a message, she simply disappeared. Good riddance as far as I’m concerned. And now this. Surely you’ve heard. It’s on the news from morning till night in both languages — they’ve invaded Afghanistan.”
She supposed she was watching part of it now. The rows of tanks had halted. Soldiers were out strutting around. It seemed to be desert, but covered with a skiff of snow. Was that what an invasion was like — soldiers stretching their legs and stomping around in the snow? Did it happen like that? “And James?” she said. “Is he all right now?” She was a mother still, and would worry about those Afghanistan people tomorrow.
“He jokes,” Iris said. “The fool. You know how he can’t take anything serious for long — even this. When I called him he didn’t even want to talk, but then he wanted to know if I thought our old friend Vladimir was in one of those tanks. He giggled and sputtered, you know what he’s like, a twit. ‘Watch out when they hit Kabul, ’ he says. ‘That crazy poet will go bashing down their buildings right and left and have the ruins sent over here for Mackenzie King’s collection!’”
“He doesn’t really think it’s funny,” Bella Robson said. “He’s just trying to cover up how he feels. Do you think I should phone him now, to see how he is?”
“He says it’s all your fault. In his giggling and snorting and acting like a little retarded kid he says this whole thing is probably just a scheme to punish that poet, this whole invasion, and none of it would have happened if you hadn’t exposed him here. The weight of this whole damn thing has to rest on your guilty shoulders. What do you think of that? Your son is a moron, Mother, you better forget him.”
“Yes.” She could watch it happening even while listening to Iris’s voice. The parade of armoured tanks was moving again, like squat mechanical reptiles, across the plain. And now, as quick as blinking, a man who looked familiar held a microphone to his face and spoke some silent message in this direction. Behind him, people in colourful desert clothes strolled past the fronts of buildings that looked like the shops and markets of a city. Were these the people the tanks were heading for? If so, the man should be warning them instead of her. Like people anywhere they seemed to be going about their business as if they didn’t know they could be surprised by an invasion at any given moment of their lives. When she turned on the television set tomorrow for the news, she’d be anxious to see how they were handling themselves once it came.
Mr. Pernouski’s
Dream
NO WONDER THIS woman couldn’t take her eyes off Mr. Pernouski. With her knees almost touching his, he knew she could hardly fail to notice his tremendous size. He’d come to expect this kind of attention from strangers; he’d come to depend on it. Perhaps she’d never seen a person like him before, perhaps he was the fattest man this grey-haired lady had seen. Mr. Pernouski believed himself to be the largest person ever to ride these ferries. He hoped he was. Only a few minutes before, he’d made a joke for the young woman who’d sold him his ticket: “Maybe I should sit close to the centre of the boat, in order to keep things in balance?” The young woman had laughed, and said no, that it wasn’t necessary, but if the ferry sank they would know who they ought to blame.
And he didn’t sit in the middle, he sat here in a window seat on the starboard side, facing this elderly couple with the mess of cigarette butts on the carpet around their feet. The gentleman wore a hat with a wide felt brim and took several pictures of the waves that splashed against the ferry below the window, but the woman lit one cigarette off the butt of another and watched Mr. Pernouski out of pale blue eyes that squinted against her smoke. She watched him finish a can of diet cola and beg
in a second. She watched him riffle through a newspaper he’d found abandoned on his seat. She watched him toss back several handfuls of salted peanuts. Then, because Mr. Pernouski believed that a ninety-minute ferry ride across the Strait of Georgia was wasted time if you didn’t make some useful contacts with people, he washed the last of the peanuts down with diet cola and sat back to level a long hard squint of his own in the woman’s direction. She neither flinched nor turned away; she wrapped one long narrow leg around the other and hugged herself while she sucked at her cigarette. Did she think if she stared at him hard enough she would discover the key to his size?
“You see that little sailboat out there, with the bright green hull?” he said. “Got one exactly like it at home but I never have time to use her. She’s been in the water just once in more than a year.”
She frowned, peered out the window at the tiny boat that leaned its narrow sail away from the ferry, and shuddered. “I wouldn’t trust my life to a thing like that. For me, this tub we’re riding on is bad enough. I’d have felt safer in a plane.” She stuck the cigarette in the middle of her mouth, sucked noisily, then jerked it out like a plug while she inhaled.
“You folks are new to this part of the country, aren’t you? Tourists. Myself, I’m just returning to the Island from a convention.” And then, in case she thought of him in robes and an Arab’s hat: “Of salesmen.”
He took her small nod as permission to continue. “You expect outrageous things to happen at conventions. Sometimes that’s why you attend — because you know outrageous things will happen there.” Mr. Pernouski chuckled to himself, then told the woman about poor old Swampy Grogan, who’d got so drunk last night that he’d passed right out. A number of his friends — Mr. Pernouski included — had carried him up to his room, which overlooked the harbour and had seagulls screeching and swooping around the balcony. “We stripped him down to the skin and laid him out on the bed. Then we opened the sliding glass doors to the balcony — this was Mr. Pimlott’s idea — and made a trail of peanuts from out there across the carpet to the bed. We also left peanuts scattered on Swampy’s bed and all over his sleeping body. When he woke up this morning . . .”
“Mmmmfff,” the woman said, and closed her eyes.
“Well, I can see I don’t have to tell you the rest.”
She removed the cigarette from her mouth and held it between two long stained fingers. “Your colours,” she said, “are rude.”
Mr. Pernouski knew that she couldn’t be referring to the colour of his suit, which was a conservative grey, so he lifted one foot to check on his socks. They too were grey. If she meant the orange of the vinyl seats on this ferry he was prepared to agree, but he saw no reason why he should take the blame.
“No no,” she said. “I mean your colours.” She gestured with the cigarette in the direction of the window, where her husband was aiming his camera. “Your greens are too green. Your blues. It’s gaudy here, people must go blind. The trees are unnatural, and look — look at those mountains.”
Mr. Pernouski glanced at the mountains of the island they were approaching, but they looked to him the same as they’d always looked — like mountains. They were part of his own back yard. Something more important than an attitude towards nature’s colour scheme had been uncovered here, however, and he felt his instincts pounce. “You’re from the prairies,” he said.
The man put down his camera and looked at Mr. Pernouski. His wife permitted the smallest smile to flicker across her lips.
“Because of the way you keep taking pictures of the waves.”
The man, who had not taken off his hat, stuck out his bottom lip. “We could be from the Yukon.”
“And because of the skin,” Mr. Pernouski added. “In my business you learn these things. The dry skin always gives them away. You’ve lived all your life in Saskatchewan.”
The woman puffed out another cloud of smoke, and raised her chin. “But I was born in Nebraska.”
“And because, sir,” Mr. Pernouski said to the gentleman with the camera, “your wife has smoked seven cigarettes in a row, sitting directly under the No Smoking sign.”
The elderly couple, apparently so impressed with Mr. Pernouski that they did not challenge his logic, looked at the carpet where the woman had been grinding her cigarette stubs and matches under her heel. The gentleman pushed his hat back and looked up at the sign that hung from the ceiling above him. His wife took another cigarette from her package and lit it off the butt in her hand. “Silly rule,” she said, and added the new butt to the mess at her feet.
Mr. Pernouski explained that the reason he had been so quick to recognize they were from the prairie provinces was that he was in real estate. He said that he saw thousands of people like them every year. They’d left farms behind, or shops. They’d finally retired, or sold everything, and could hardly wait to find a little house on the coast, or some property to build on, in order to escape the winters back home. He himself, he said, had been personally responsible for finding many of them the little retirement place they’d dreamed of. It was one of the rewards of his job. As a matter of fact, it was because he had an appointment this afternoon with a charming couple from Calgary that he was returning a day earlier than the rest of the conventioneers.
“Now what type of home were you folks hoping to find?” he said. “I probably have just the thing.”
The woman unwrapped her left leg from around her right and pointed her toes. “We’re visiting,” she said. “We have friends here. We’ll never stay.”
The gentleman lifted his camera to his eye and took a picture of Mr. Pernouski. People all over the lounge turned to see why there’d been a flash. The gentleman leaned forward and shook Mr. Pernouski’s hand. “The name’s Eckhart.”
“The name’s Pernouski,” Mr. Pernouski said, and reached for one of his cards. “Eden Realty. You might say, without fear of contradiction, that I’m the biggest man in real estate on the Island.”
While Mr. Eckhart stared at the little white card, Mr. Pernouski said he always offered to pay double when he rode the ferries, on account of his size. He patted his belly to show what he meant. “The girl in the window told me they have different fares for the various sizes of automobiles, but lucky for me only one for humans.” Since the elderly couple seemed reluctant to show an interest in his bulk, he decided to tell them that he understood perfectly why so many prairie people fell in love with this part of the world and refused to leave. He’d been everywhere himself, he said, and knew exactly what this island had to offer. He’d been to Saskatoon and Regina and Thunder Bay. He’d also been to Greece once, would you believe it, not long ago. He’d won the trip by selling the most houses that year of anyone in the office. He’d been down to Florida, and Mexico, and over to whatsit, Taiwan. He knew what the rest of the world was like so he also knew precisely why everyone everywhere would give a leg to live on this island they were approaching. Climate was only half of it.
“We haven’t been to many places ourselves,” said Mr. Eckhart, but his wife was quick to add: “Well, there was Montana.” She sounded annoyed, as if she resented telling this stranger even that much about themselves. In case the little couple thought he was bragging when he told about all the places he’d been, Mr. Pernouski remarked that he wasn’t the only member of his family who travelled. His wife Christina, in fact, had been to far more places than he had. She was in Africa right this minute, on a buying trip. Or more precisely — he glanced at his watch — she’d started home but was stopping for a few days in Toronto where she’d been asked to make a speech. Because they looked as if they expected to hear even more, Mr. Pernouski explained that shortly before she married him, a widower with three growing children, his wife had bought an import shop once owned by the husband of one of her sisters and become a successful retailer on her own. Even after their marriage, while caring for his children, she expanded her business in a dramatic fashion until she owned a string of shops right across the country and had to tr
avel abroad in order to select the merchandise herself. She was so successful that groups of businesswomen paid her to stop on her way through their towns and cities to make speeches on the secrets of her success.
Mr. Eckhart said he must be married to a most remarkable woman, but his wife pulled a small hardcover book out of her purse, and said she was going to read. She opened the book to where she’d turned a corner down and settled back in her seat. With eyes shifting back and forth across the pages, she kept her nose in the book while Mr. Pernouski and her husband talked about the price of homes and the differences in weather between the coast and the prairies. She didn’t look up again until a voice came out of the ceiling to warn them they would soon be docking. Mr. Pernouski rode down the three flights of escalators with the Eckharts in order to help them find their car, which turned out to be an expensive late-model sedan with suitcases and cardboard boxes piled high in the back seat. He estimated that they would be in the market for something substantial when they came around, waterfront maybe, or a view home high up a hill. Mrs. Eckhart looked to him like the kind of woman who would demand that her husband buy her only the best. “You’ve got my card,” he said. “You know where you can find me if you want.” Before he shut the little woman’s door, however, he asked them if he couldn’t have the address of their friends, in case he needed to get in touch with them for some reason or other in the next few days. Mrs. Eckhart laughed and said she couldn’t imagine what reason he might have for wanting to contact them, and shut her door herself.
Nevertheless you’ll be seeing me again, Mr. Pernouski thought. He had no doubts about that. For him it was a matter of principle that no ninety-minute ferry ride across the strait be wasted time. He didn’t intend to let today be any exception. While he hurried forward up the ramp and into a light gusting rain, he sorted in his mind through various listings he was responsible for, in search of the one which would be exactly right for the Eckharts.
