by Heather Burt
“Maybe he just had the guts to do what most people in his situation want to do.” She kicked a chunk of dry snow and it sprayed across her driveway. “Wouldn’t you have loved to tell Joanne Skinner to get lost when she kept coming over here after Dad died?”
“Not really,” Isobel said. “She was the one who got me out taking that accounting course. I’m not sure what I would have done otherwise.”
Clare eyed her mother uncertainly then followed her into the house.
THAT EVENING, EMMA CALLED. She talked for thirty minutes, her thoughts ramming into each other like a high-speed traffic pileup, before finally taking a breath.
“So, what’s up with you?” she said.
Clare was lying on the loveseat, picking idly at its worn beige cushions. She’d said nothing to Emma about Adam’s accident—nor had Emma’s mother gotten around to it, apparently—and though she toyed with the possibility now, a desire to keep her connections with the Vantwests private held her back.
“My mother’s been flirting with her carpet installer,” she said instead.
Emma gasped theatrically. “You’re kidding! Isobel Fraser is out on the scene?! That’s amazing. But I told you she would, didn’t I? So who’s the guy? He’s a furnace installer?”
“Carpet.”
“That’s wild. What’s he like?”
“I don’t know really. His name’s Ted. He’s sort of rugged, I guess.” She paused. Then, to make up for hiding the real story, she added, “It’s kind of weird, imagining my mother with someone other than my dad.”
Emma became serious, her voice like a therapist’s.
“It had to happen, Clare. Your mother’s not ready to lead an old widow’s life. She’s really attractive, and I can really see her getting out there and exploring the possibilities. I know it must seem like she’s replacing your dad, but—and don’t get me wrong here; I really liked your dad—but I bet she’s ready for some younger blood.”
Clare twisted the telephone cord around her index finger and watched the tip turn pink. Emma’s predictions about her mother were logical but wrong. The Isobel Fraser that Clare knew—the woman with whom most of Emma’s world could not be shared—was not, despite the murky circumstances of her pregnancy, an explorer of that sort.
“Anyway,” Emma continued, “I think you’re dealing with two difficult issues here. The first one is having to acknowledge again that your dad is gone. And I totally sympathize with how hard that must be. And the other one is having to face the fact that your mother is becoming sexually active while you’re not. I know that sounds kind of brutal, but I don’t mean it that way. It’s a reversal of the old—Oh, crumb, I’ve got another call. Can you hold on for a sec?”
In the brief silence, Clare unwrapped her finger and massaged it. Emma’s voice, when it returned, was buoyed by a sense of barely contained busyness.
“That was Linus. He’s going out of town and we need to finalize the music for Thursday. I’m really sorry, Clare. Can I call you back in a few minutes?”
“Sure.”
Clare hung up and placed the phone on the floor beside the loveseat. The mention of the Jazz Studies Director with whom she’d gone for coffee made her restless. She didn’t want to hear the rest of Emma’s analysis. It would be clinical and useless, and to avoid it she would say that things had changed.
Markus and I had sex, she tried. We went out for dinner and shared a bottle of wine, and we both kind of lost our inhibitions. We went back to his apartment. It hurt a little. The wine helped. Yes, I had an orgasm.
She started over, fine-tuning her scenario, but when she reached the return to Markus’s apartment, which required considerable elaboration, the phone rang. She snatched up the receiver before her mother could answer downstairs.
“That was quick,” she said.
There was a moment of silence, then a man’s voice spoke, hesitant and formal.
“Is this Mrs. Fraser?”
Clare’s hand tightened around the receiver. She imagined the caller was Ted.
“It’s Clare. Her daughter. Sorry. I thought you were someone else.”
“This is Alec Vantwest. I understand you came to my home this afternoon.”
“Oh. Yes,” she managed to answer, despite the thumping of her heart at the base of her throat.
Mr. Vantwest coughed. “I would like to apologize for my lack of hospitality today.”
Clare swallowed. “It’s okay, I—”
“I haven’t been myself recently, but that’s no excuse for rudeness. I’d be pleased if you and your mother would consider a return visit. Tomorrow afternoon, perhaps. We’ll be at the hospital in the morning. Of course, if you have something else on your program—”
“I have to work tomorrow, but ...”
“Well, perhaps another day then.”
“I’m off on Wednesday.”
“All right then. Let’s say four o’clock Wednesday?”
“Okay.”
“We’ll have tea. Mary will be here as well, of course.”
“Of course. Thank you.”
Mr. Vantwest ended the call with polite efficiency. Clare replaced the receiver and slowly unlocked her hand.
9
Monday (April something), 6 a.m. I spoke to my sister last night. It seems Adam’s recovery isn’t going to be the kind of clear-cut event I’d been waiting for. Some days he improves a little, others he plateaus. Technically he’s not in a coma anymore (he got up to the magic number 15 on the Glasgow coma scale, whatever that means), but he doesn’t sound much better either. Apparently it may be a long time before we know the final outcome. And then there’s the broken arm and the fractured vertebra. They’ve got him braced in some kind of halo contraption to keep him from doing any more damage. “Picture a metal circle bolted to his head with four posts coming down,” Sue said. Jesus Christ. In other words, my brother is quite seriously fucked up. Susie’s feeling guilty about going back to Toronto, but I’m glad she did. It makes me feel like less of a shit. After all, if Susie, with her high-maintenance kid and crumbling marriage, could still manage to drop everything and be there for Dad and Adam, what would my excuse be? My aunt has gone back. Maybe you’ve seen her. That is, if you’re still living on MHR. I realize that’s not very likely, but I still imagine you there, looking out your window. Anyway, I’m finding her absence kind of strange. On the one hand, I feel a little like a kid who’s just moved out on his own for the first time. I eat whatever I like, walk around the house naked etc. etc. Given the stuff going on with Adam, I wouldn’t admit this to anyone else, but there’s a part of me that’s feeling pretty good. On the other hand, without my aunt here I feel kind of strange about being here, in Sri Lanka, at all. It’s as if I’m suddenly a tourist, which is exactly what I didn’t want when I came here. I’ve got a couple of cousins in Colombo, but I don’t really know them, so they don’t really count (neither does Uncle Ernie).
(Later, on the bus) It’s my first day back at school today. I took a few days off after the news about Adam, and I’ve planned a risky lesson for my English twelves. Well, for one of them in particular. Wish me luck.
RUDY GLANCED UP FROM HIS WRITING in time to catch the first saint. He closed his diary and began his tally. He was out of practice, so he did just one side of the street, craning his neck to spot his targets through the morning busyness of Jampettah Mawatha. Outside Ganesh Bookshop a small mob of women blocked the glass-cased Virgin altogether, and at the church he saw only one statue where he thought there’d been two. But when the bus turned off the crowded street, he made a satisfied mental note of the eight saints he’d found then searched his knapsack for the lesson plan he’d written out the previous night.
It was scribbled on a grungy sheet of lined paper, and as he read over the reminders and fragments of ideas, he began to wonder if the lesson itself wasn’t a bit shabby. It wasn’t even English, or a bona fide lesson for that matter. He’d gotten away with such things back home, but the students in h
is current English 12 class would find the activity weird—with the possible exception of Kanda. Kanda might not think it weird, though he’d perhaps find it offensive. He’d know that it was a response to his essay, and that the entire activity had been designed for him, as a rebuttal. Rudy looked around at his fellow passengers, and for a moment he doubted his right to embark on the planned activity at all. He spoke neither Tamil nor Sinhala; he belonged, only loosely, to a mixed-bag ethnic group of no political or social significance; he was a Canadian working in a British-style school that the average Sri Lankan couldn’t afford. In all sorts of ways, he was in no position to involve himself, even abstractly, in the country’s troubled state of affairs. And yet, he reminded himself, these were just the sorts of limitations that Kanda would impose. Just the sort of thinking he hoped to rattle in his second period English class.
He got off the bus in front of the school and made his way directly to the air-conditioned teachers’ lounge. There were a dozen or so staff members there, and a buzz of conversation and faint smells of hair tonic and Magi-board pens greeted Rudy as he slipped through the door at the back of the room. He took in the scene with sudden timidity. He’d missed three days of school, but it seemed he’d been away forever. In his absence, he imagined, this serious-looking crew in business shirts and owlish glasses, the odd sari, had functioned perfectly well without him, and once again, as on the bus, he felt himself to be an intruder. He stood at the back of the lounge, unnoticed, awkward, until Nisal Somapala, head of the math department, waved to him, and the feeling eased a little. He crossed the room to the table where Nisal sat flipping through a textbook.
“Van Twest!”
“Hey there,” Rudy said, pulling out a chair.
“Feeling better, machan?”
Rudy hesitated. He’d told the headmaster he was sick, and the old gentleman himself had covered his classes. “Yeah, I’m okay. How about you?”
Nisal thumped his palm against the cover of his textbook. “Superb! I myself only returned yesterday. You remember, I attended the mathematics conference in New Delhi. This Professor Ahuja was really fantastic.”
He held up the book, and Rudy noted the professor’s name on the cover. He hadn’t remembered that Nisal was going to a conference, hadn’t paid much attention when he was told in the first place.
“That’s great,” he said. “What did he talk about?”
Nisal straightened in his chair. Though a few years older than Rudy, he had a young, pimple-spotted face, and it beamed now with youthful enthusiasm. “Fermat’s theorem. You’ve heard of this?”
Rudy shook his head. “No clue.”
“Oh, Van Twest, you’re missing out. Gripping stuff, I tell you.” He leaned forward, then the warning bell rang, cutting him off. “Ah well, better get to class,” he said. “I’ll tell you about it at break time.”
Rudy said he looked forward to it and offered Nisal a corny salute. Then he shouldered his knapsack and went to the sink for a glass of water. Mrs. Da Silva, the school secretary, was rinsing her coffee cup. She turned and studied him through her thick, round glasses.
“You look thin,” she said.
Rudy glanced down at his belt, which was indeed fastened two notches in from its usual spot. “It’s good for me,” he said, patting his belly the way his father always did after Sunday lunch. “Too many love handles.”
Mrs. Da Silva smiled and frowned at the same time. “Love handles are good for you, I think.”
He laughed uneasily. “I don’t know ... maybe.”
By the end of his first class his stomach was all nerves. He stood under the ceiling fan, reading over his limp page of notes while the year tens scuffled out of the room. The twelves wouldn’t start arriving for another couple of minutes, and in that time he rehearsed his opening in his head.
We’re going to try something a little different today. A debate, if you like. I actually got the idea from Kanda’s last essay. It was better to acknowledge this right off, he’d decided. Let the boy know his choice of topic was appreciated. We’re going to talk about Sri Lanka’s political conflicts. Every one of you is caught up in this mess in some way. Was that too belligerent, he wondered. He tried softening his approach: I’d be willing to bet that all of your families have been affected in some way by these conflicts. You listen to the opinions of the LTTE, the JVP, the government, your families and friends. And I’m sure you all have ideas of your own about how the problem should be resolved. We’re going to talk about some possible solutions this morning. He looked up to see Chamika Heenatigala deposit her books on a desk then slip back out into the corridor. But we’re going to combine our discussion with an exercise in point of view. I’m going to assign each of you a role, a point of view, which might, perhaps, differ from your own personal point of view. Again he paused, pleased with the way he’d managed to tie the unorthodox activity to the regular course material. He imagined looking at Kanda at this moment, making eye contact, sussing out the boy’s reaction. I’ll give you some time to come up with arguments that would correspond to that point of view, and then—
Chamika returned, accompanied by a few other girls, and their conversation, though hardly rambunctious, broke his concentration. He scanned the back of his paper, on which he’d written out the names of his students, and beside each name a narrowly defined identity. He’d considered a few possibilities for Kanda—Muslim doctor, Buddhist monk, indigenous villager—but finally settled on the title now scribbled beside the boy’s name: Sinhalese teacher.
Rudy folded the paper but kept it in his hand as more students filed into the room. A few acknowledged him with nods or smiles; James Fernando even asked if he was feeling better.
“Not too bad,” Rudy said, looking over James’s shoulder at the door. “Thanks.”
“Will you return our essays today?”
“I think so. At the end of class.”
“They were satisfactory?”
Rudy eyed his student more closely, forcing himself to pay attention. Despite everything he’d assumed about James when he confiscated the sprinkler caricature, the boy seemed genuinely keen to please him.
“They were fine. We’ll talk about them later.”
He glanced up at the clock. Kanda was generally one of the last to arrive, but today he was pushing it. Rudy went to his desk and flipped open his daybook. He then struck a contemplative pose—one hand buried in his pocket, the index finger of his other hand slowly tracing the lines of the page in front of him. For a moment the random page actually caught his attention. It was a lesson he’d been particularly proud of: “To be or not to be? How does Hamlet ultimately answer the question?” He’d written the words existentialism and relationships in block letters and circled them, though he could no longer remember precisely how he’d connected the two concepts.
The bell rang. He looked up and saw that Kanda’s desk was still empty. On any other day, he would have been relieved. He would have marked an “a” next to Kanda’s name in the attendance book and gotten on with things. But while there was every reason to assume that Kanda was absent, Rudy believed he’d show up, if only as a fateful rejection of the hope he still harboured that the boy would drop his class or move to another school. He strolled to the door and checked the corridor, but it too was empty. In his own classroom his students were settled, ready to listen to whatever he would choose to say to them. He returned to his desk, where he’d left the lesson outline. He could launch into the political debate as planned, but without Kanda, there was no point.
“Has anyone seen Kanda Selvarajah?” he said, keeping his tone casual.
His students looked at the empty desk, then at each other, shrugging and shaking their heads. Again Rudy checked the clock. He wanted to ask them to wait a couple of minutes but could think of no reasonable excuse for the request. Instead, he stalled.
“Well, it’s good to be back. I’m sure you were in very capable hands with Dr. Muller. He’s filled me in on what you covered las
t week. Does anyone have any questions about the work you did? Keats and Wordsworth, I believe it was?”
For several seconds the class sat mute and still. Then Sharmila Arumugan raised her hand partway, and Rudy called on her, glancing sideways at the clock.
“Will Dr. Muller’s lessons be on the exam?”
“They’d be fair game,” Rudy said. Under different circumstances he would have dropped the matter there; this time he stalled further. “Why do you ask?”
Sharmila gave him an awkward smile and waved her hand in front of her face. “I only was wondering.”
“Okay. Are there any other questions?”
This time there was no response. He considered asking them what they’d learned about the Romantics, but Sharmila’s question suggested that Headmaster Muller, not surprisingly, hadn’t taught them much of anything. Rudy unfolded his lesson plan and headed for his spot under the ceiling fan, skimming the introduction as he walked, weighing his options. If Kanda were to show up within the next five minutes he wouldn’t miss much. He’d still take part in the discussion, still be forced to consider his world from a different perspective. But he’d lose the full impact, the moment of eye contact, when the challenge to his ideas would be made clear and personal. Rudy folded the paper on which he’d made his notes and slid it inside his pocket. He turned slowly under the fan, surveying his students. Several shifted in their seats; James fiddled with his pen. A final glance at the clock told him he could wait no longer.
“A slight change of plans,” he began, dryly. “I was going to return your essays at the end of class, but I think I’ll give you some time to go over them right now. You’re each going to do a rewrite based on the suggestions I’ve made in my comments. Remember that what I’ve commented on is the development of your argument—whether or not you’ve got a thesis, and how you go about proving it. The content of the argument doesn’t really matter.” He paused, facing Kanda’s empty desk. “Let me correct that. Content does matter. It matters a lot. It’s just not what I marked you on, this time.” His words drifted away from him, insubstantial echoes of his thoughts. He sped up. “If my comments say to come and see me, please make sure you do.”
