No, he said, grinding out his accent.
Then let’s get out of this dive and go someplace good.
They caught a taxi to a restaurant priced by the table, where she said, Don’t worry, I’m paying. Only later she introduced herself as Elaine, in her penthouse suite overlooking the bay, at a better bar than any he’d paid to sit at, where he found himself many of the nights that followed. She had perfection too lasting for youth, the angle of her jaw and tireless blade of cheekbones, the mandarin slant of her eyes. The taut edges of her lips made her appear to smile. There was something fragile about her sensuality, her slow strides. She listed as she walked, as if drawn by desire, always to the left.
Finally, a man my size, she said as she slid off her shoulder straps. But please, be gentle.
Her nipples were small and dark and hard. Don’t grab, she whispered when he got heated. Keep it slow.
Those next months, he saw her once or twice a week. He toyed with the idea of getting her to finance a venture, though this would betray the self-reliant man he’d put forth. She hardly talked about her means. She preferred silence, wore him best on her arm in places where sound accompanied the meal like an appetizer, jazz clubs mostly. He knew she was widowed, a Jewess married young to an old man and freed young. Her age he guessed in the late thirties.
She’d said she’d come to Vancouver from New York to escape a high society where everyone knows you and judges. Idiots, she’d added casually. Anything beyond this didn’t interest her. Oh, she said with a sigh, after a thin intake through a long cigarette, let the past be.
Only once, when the music took too-extended a pause, was the need for conversation first clear, then crucial, finally polite. The knowing left her eyes. Fear flickered there. Heat touched her cheeks. She pursed her lips as if to spit but swallowed.
Have you thought about taking an investment? she asked.
Because I love you, she added later that night, in that way of hers that made him feel she could continue a conversation one word an hour, two sentences a day. Yes, because I love you, there will be no strings attached. How much do you want?
From the wall she removed a painting of a geisha undoing the front of her dress. In the safe were stacks of big bills.
François’s only regret was that his plan wasn’t as elegant as the jazz clubs with potted palms, dais and piano and floor-to-ceiling fish tanks. He bought an abandoned garage of red brick at the edge of Gastown and converted it into a car museum/burger joint where clients ate out of chrome hubcaps and sat in booths alongside the polished, rebuilt bodies of roadsters. It had shelves of vintage paraphernalia, good swinging music and long-legged waitresses. Businessmen poured in with colleagues and came back with sons. The ambiance was nostalgic, the food good and plentiful and cheap. The decor suggested that heyday America was the place to be and drew that middle class of Canadians who mostly felt the same way.
On the first clear day of spring François’s restaurant received a write-up in the Vancouver Sun. He hurried to Elaine’s. He’d rented his own apartment, kept a closet of stylish clothes, finally more than a street huckster. The last time he’d seen Elaine, when he’d told her what a hit the restaurant was, she’d been slow to show interest. Now, with a fist of flowers, he wondered if she cared. No matter. In the elevator he hummed the latest rage and found, in the penthouse, a woman who bore remarkable resemblance to Elaine.
Oy, she said. Not another one, and so young.
Another what?
She gave him a steady look. Her eyebrows and piercing gaze were too familiar.
Well, there’s time to tell, she said. Sit, sit. Mother’s napping. It seems she’s been neglecting her medication. Feeling young again, no doubt.
Your mother? Where’s Elaine?
Oh, she said as if pained. Sit. Please sit.
And so François learned all—saw, in fact, Elaine stretched on the bed, features peaceful, breathing somewhat shallow. The woman, Margaret Meir, was Elaine’s daughter. François sat. Margaret gesticulated as she spoke, then held her hands in her lap self-consciously. The story began with an inheritance, the bit about married young and elderly husband true, though when he conceded to die, Elaine was fifty—Though, Margaret clarified, she was still beautiful. She was uncannily young for her age and didn’t need to do all of … Well, I’ll explain …
Still, we always had a theory that she’d never lived her youth and so had never grown old. Anyway. Like I said. I’ll explain.
At the age of fifty-five—
Fifty-five, François repeated.
She’s now sixty-eight, Margaret said, then went on to tell how, at that respectable age, Elaine began studying means of growing young. She fasted, did heliotherapy, went to cures and mud baths, fraternized with nudists and liberals, submitted herself to fruit regimens and lived in an ashram in the Himalayas where she consumed unheard-of proportions of Asian drugs touted for regeneration and practised deep breathing on glacial slopes until she finally decided that, young as she might become, such a life was a bore. Then, on the verge of giving up —and closing in on sixty—she heard about a group of avant-garde doctors who claimed that the industry of the future was rejuvenation. The incipient techniques of facelift and liposuction and boob job were taking shape in privately financed labs. Techniques used in the world wars for maimed soldiers were perfected for the elderly or the ugly rich. Elaine was a cross between guinea pig (François saw their connection now) and patron of the sciences. The doctors stretched her face, incised her eyes and lips, padded and tucked her breasts, sucked out varicose veins and removed folds of unwanted skin. They cleaned her jaw of canescence and reset her teeth with drills. The result was stunning. She could make grandsons blush and lust, until, of course, they found out this had taken much of their inheritance and that the rest was going to dressing and lavishing this immaculate body.
It isn’t natural, Margaret said. She shouldn’t have done it. Then she left her family and came out here because … and get this … because some doctor said cold firms the flesh and this place is as cold as she can tolerate. Of course, it’s clear that she just wants to live where nobody knows her. Now she’s throwing our fortune to the winds, la-di-da. Don’t think we haven’t tried to stop her. But imagine having a bombshell committed. She’d sleep with the judge.
As François listened, Margaret explained her trips out, how last year Elaine fell and broke her hip, which shed light on her fragile motions.
Left hip? he asked.
Left indeed, she said. Can you imagine what the scar from that operation took to cover? But they did a good job, right? You should be the one telling me.
François tried to excuse himself. Margaret was now practically ranting, Body-sculpting, the future, hah! Well, I’ll say. And my sons in college with only me and Herbert to pay tuition and get their careers going. And she has it all. But don’t think for a minute I’m jealous.
She told him about her mother’s bouts of premature dementia, the great irony of her life that had her spending silly, gaga over the phone late at night and now oblivious, drugged on the bed.
Oh no, Margaret told him. You can’t fix a brain.
He stood and left. The elevator blipping down the spine of the building seemed a fine place for loneliness. He couldn’t say he had any regrets. He looked at himself in the elevator mirrors. The doors binged. He went outside. It was still early. Couples strolled towards the beach. Two Chinese girls on rollerskates sped along a bike path. A brick cottage stood near the park, not seeming to belong to the city, climbing roses on a trellis. A woman pushed a stroller, the baby asleep in its shade. He went to his car and started home.
He was on the Trans-Canada. The Eurythmics were singing Sweet Dreams, and he considered this age of change and its magic. If a second-rate John Wayne with a monkey could run the world’s most powerful country then didn’t others have a right to their own more humble dreams? A young woman was hitchhiking, and seeing her, he felt that old wheel turning, wind, the scent of p
loughed Manitoba plains or the cool shadow the first time he’d walked with Ernestine on the shady side of a Montréal street. The woman was pleasantly short, wore jeans and a halter top, held a bulging plastic bag, a long-sleeve shirt tied at her waist. Traffic wind whipped her hair about her shoulders and sunny arms.
Only when he pulled over did he notice her distress. She had an American accent. Her name was Margaret. What a coincidence, he told her, but this girl’s accent was Southern, not Margaret with all of its letters pronounced, but Magret. Call me Peggy, she said, then added, You know—she hesitated—you know, I mean, I’ll—and hesitated again. François felt the offer coming. She broke off to say her stuff had been stolen. I was with this guy and I mean … Her chin furrowed. She was lovely, thin nose, sunstreaked hair. She bit her bottom lip. Shi-it, she said, quietly, dragging it out. I thought this was the place to be.
I don’t have far to go, François told her.
She looked at him across that tiny space as if across a room. I’ll give you a blowjob for forty dollars. I’ll give it for twenty, she said too fast, her voice absent of emotion. I’ll give you a blowjob for something to eat, shit, even a hamburger.
He’d missed his exit and considered that he could continue past the city, up to Squamish or Whistler or just turn around and drive for hours. But he’d never been that way.
I’ll take you to get something to eat, he told her. It’s on me.
He pulled off at the next exit and found a restaurant. He watched as she scarfed. She bit her tongue. Her lips were swollen. She cried. An American girl, he thought.
I keep on biting my tongue, she said. Jesus, what’s wrong with me?
He told her it was all right, don’t rush. He was sad, too. And if you need a place to stay until you get organized …
Afterwards he took her to his new home. Cool air through the screens, a long, shallow wind of night smells, flowerbeds and barbecue. It all felt new, a different speed and rhythm. But he was wrong. The wheel is always the same when it’s turning.
British Columbia 1986–1987
Though scared and lonely and lost, Peggy was not submissive. She drawled, her accent not Southern belle but low and rolling, a man’s sound and suitable for congregation. François expected her to drag him to the bathroom and baptize him, but she preferred puffing away in the kitchen, kneading whole-grain bread, soaking seeds and nuts and beans, hacking greens thick enough to make a cow wish for a fifth stomach. She told him about her family, growing up in Alabama before the big move in the seventies, to Virginia, for the money. After high school she began to travel and eventually decided on Canada, the unexplored north, natural and free. But there were things he glimpsed only in her silences, the way she disappeared into thought and breathed hard, or when she said, Be rough with me, and he was, and she cried like he’d never seen. He wouldn’t do it again, not even when she asked.
As for his apartment, she told him she’d dreamed of a country home. He broke his lease. Alone in the car he practised talking to realtors with a voice like those he’d heard watching court TV with Eduardo. You trying to fleece me? he said. In Maple Ridge he found a cheap split-level in a rustic residential neighbourhood, sensible linoleum, shag rugs to curls his toes in, rucked plaster ceiling and wallpaper with subtle yellow-brown flowers. Poker-faced, he worked the realtor, a young man who nervously spruced his buzz cut, square at the ears and neck, lots of pink scalp. François didn’t ask Peggy’s opinion. He settled. Good taste, he told her that night, keys already in hand, a fast mover, had collateral. Every room smelled like freshly unrolled carpet, new paint on particleboard. In the yard, there were only two trees to clean up after. The neighbouring lawns were separated by picket fences, neatly mowed.
I guess it’ll do, she said, though I’d rather not have neighbours.
To his surprise she didn’t want a washing machine. She bought an antique washboard and did clothes by hand. She bathed in an oak tub for some holistic property of wood. Soon she learned to make cheese, strained curdled milk through cloth and stunk up the house. We can buy that, you know, he told her. She planted a garden, made grains, steamy jars on every sill. Her last name, he discovered, she’d changed a few years back to Blossom.
François saw himself as a saintly character. When the homeless begged, he offered jobs sweeping and was vindicated when they refused. Peggy had asked for a meal and had gotten a life, had a man who could pick her up, take care of her, do the right thing. He knew he’d wanted more than a business. He wanted a family and children and a plan for a stable future. But Peggy worried him. Some days she wouldn’t get up until the afternoon and lazed about in dirty clothes and told him to leave her alone when he asked what was wrong. Sometimes she got up at five a.m. and appeared to be praying to the rising sun. Sometimes he’d come home and she’d be red-in-the-face angry and would hector him. Am I the only girl you picked up? A first, huh? Just picked me up and took me in? Maybe you have houses like this all over the place. Cheap little dumps with bimbos off the highway.
The next day she would be fine, rinsing sprouts, unwrapping rank slabs of cheese. He tolerated her obsessions, bought what she wanted, books depicting four-armed blue beings, naked women with suns bursting at their groins. She insisted he take her to fairs where she saw spiritual masters, all indistinguishable from homeless people but for their robes and harmonious gestures, and their followers huddled patiently by.
After announcing her pregnancy, Peggy coddled herself, careful in the first trimester, eating bowls of sprouting integuments that, on the tongue, felt like fingernail clippings. François held himself as if he were a fighter wary of overconfidence. With Peggy just as with Elaine he sensed his old softness, the possibility of weakness, that there were things he wasn’t wise enough to see. So much had come to him on the highway, his grandmother and now a wife. Perhaps he’d had no time for aphorism in his solitary roving—no Hebrew crossing forty years of wilderness with his nation. Recalling his past, he feared the innocence of the small, happy self that he’d abolished.
But work and being a father, he decided, would be enough. He would set everything straight, buy a bigger house, own more businesses. He’d already opened a bumper-sticker boutique. That first night with Peggy he’d known things would never be the same. A son was coming. He read it in the stars, the generosity of flashing late-summer leaves, even in the celestial spread below the turning observation deck at the Harbour Centre where he took her to eat. For him stars were just a manner of speaking.
During manic hours in the city, he made mental lists to tell his son: conquests, struggles, how he became self-made. He would be a hero for that boy, the manly businessman who divides his time scrupulously between work and play. The larger Peggy’s belly became, the more he pushed himself. He knew that this was his chance to have a family and do it right, to be a better father than his own. Just thinking this gave him a sense of justice, as if he were a great man. He imagined his son reading about interstellar travel, going to a big university, double scholarship, sports and science, or better yet, business. Perhaps there was nothing wrong with François’s grandmother’s stories after all, the strength, the sense of belonging to a powerful lineage, a true Hervé. François would name the boy Harvey in hopes of that family magic, though he wasn’t sure the anglicization would retain the name’s power. But he wouldn’t even speak to his son in French, and though he was decided about this, oddly, imagining how he would be as a father, he caught himself naming things as if teaching the words. Une toile d’araignée, he said of a spider web freshly strung across the backroom of his store and already loaded with dust. Or at night, la lune, the pale body glittering like an ice crystal in the winter sky as he turned in his sheets, unable to sleep, but staying there anyway.
Part Two
Vancouver–Virginia
1987–2003
That Christmas Eve Peggy, wanting a child born on a holy day, began huffing through the house to induce labour. Dressed in sweats, she climbed the stairs, looped into
rooms, sat on the bed and bounced, stepped in and out of the dry bathtub and ventured into the mouldy cold of the cellar as if nearing the earth might bring her closer to the coercion of gravity. She sped Lamaze breaths double time, took to the street, nostrils flaring, her body as mechanical as a speed walker’s so that as François returned home in the dark he thought he saw a Soviet soldier marching with vigorous arm swings, in a light snow that, just then, the radio announcer said would bring the first white Christmas in years. A Christmas birth François couldn’t have cared less about, though before New Year would be nice. He could claim the child on his taxes and so left Peggy to her methods.
That day the front page of the newspaper had carried the story of a life-sized nativity scene carved in ice. François, on an errand downtown, had stopped at the outdoor skating rink to see it. The artifice had not charmed him. Rather, he’d felt disdain for this otherworldly family, poised beatifically, the Virgin with her opening hands, the baby whittled to spare, alien detail, too perfect for life. It called up memories of his churchly youth, the coloured Bible plates of a Christ his grandmother had dreamed he would emulate. He liked to think of himself as the kind of man who kept up, who read the paper and checked things out, had a word or two on the subject, which he did. Still, he regretted having taken the time to come here. He had no place for the divine, and the season he liked was holiday expenditures. But the image stayed, imprinted on a ghostly inner eye, cold like the beginning of a headache, a vitreous baby, too small, too keenly expressive of its perfection. When, that night, he saw his son in this same way, pale, tiny, as neatly fashioned as an idol, his pangs were of a guilt medieval.
The pearly child filled him with a sense of doom—Peggy’s hubris, his greed—the simple primitive belief in accountability, that by scorning a baby Christ cast in ice he’d brought it into his life. Holding this polished creature in his palms, François tried to believe Eduardo, who’d said, He’ll grow—they all do. But years did not fade the changeling’s air. And though minute he was no midget and did not have the sturdy bearing of a dwarf. If he grew at all, it was incrementally in relation to his nearly absent appetite. He remained carved and luminous and cold.
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