Make it so, the movie producer says. He slides his sunglasses back onto his face, though the wild acre is quite shadowy, and melts back along the path.
When Cliff relays the request to Ray, Ray swears, then says, Yeah, we’ll find out from the staff when he’s going to be gone for a couple of months, then bring in a bobcat. Should be able to get some new growth started, the damage covered, in that time. We’ll go in on our hands and knees and plug in some ferns and moss.
How do you know he’ll go away for a long time? Cliff asks.
Ray says: You think he lives here? No. He only comes for a few weeks out of the year. Tops.
PARVANEH SAYS, There he is again. Different time today.
It’s seven; they’ve just opened, and the first customers — accountants and bike couriers, Mandalay always thinks — are materializing from the greyish early morning streets. To the south and east, salmon-coloured streaks have made an appearance in the sky, a transparent wash against the blue-grey that she’d like to fix in her mind. Rain later. But it’s clear now.
Different time? she asks. She’s bustling to get a last pan of croissants out of the big oven, Parvaneh decanting brioche. They’ve had more traffic the last few weeks, have to bake more. Out in front, Josh is keeping the espresso machine going at full speed, Katie has the cash register ringing non-stop, and Leila can’t serve from the counter fast enough to keep pace with the lineup. She needs to get out front right away.
He came the last three days, Parvaneh says. On your day off and in the afternoon when you aren’t in.
Ha, Mandalay says. She tightens her buttocks to avoid brushing against Parvaneh’s, makes her way to the counter. Leila sees her, says, Thank you, and subtly adjusts her rhythm and movements to give Mandalay space. Next, please, Mandalay says. The man Parvaneh has pointed out from the kitchen door is now two behind the customer who steps forward to order his latte and cinnamon loaf. She glances at him a couple of times, briefly, while she calls the coffee order to Josh and puts the thick loaf slices into the toaster. Not a regular, no. Tall, fairly lean and muscular. Bald, or shaven, like so many men now, so it’s hard to tell his age: early forties, maybe.
The latte-and-cinnamon customer moves down to the cash end and the next customer is Leila’s and the next after that steps up. Black coffee, fruit salad, oatmeal porridge, egg. That will take her some time. Parvaneh’s mark will go to Leila. But when she looks up, she sees he’s let the customer behind him go ahead, so that Leila serves her, and he’s waiting for Mandalay.
He’s suited, like most of their clientele this time of day, but lacking raincoat or briefcase, and his suit is of a different cut and texture than those of their usual clientele. Different colour, even: a colour between grey and black, lacking the undertone of green or blue or brown that charcoal suits always seem to have. Not an accountant or shop clerk, she thinks. His face young-old: some lines at the corners of the eyes but the skin still taut, lacking those deep parentheses from nose wing to mouth, or the sags and pouches that begin to accumulate in the late forties. His eyes are quite strikingly blue, and his gaze pretty direct. She thinks: I bet he gets a lot of mileage out of those eyes.
He orders an Americano and says: So, up with the crows every morning? And she says, Every morning except Thursday, five to one, and there’s the tiniest of flickers in his eyelid in response. It’s too busy for more than that. When he has his coffee he says, Have a good morning, and moves to one of the small round metal tables and it’s too busy for her to do more than note him sitting there, and she doesn’t notice when he leaves, only looks up finally to his absence.
Parvaneh, out the door at eight, mouths See him? And Mandalay nods and puts more brioche on plates. She thinks: Not a food writer as she’d hoped. Lawyer, maybe. Expensive suit, aura of casual authority. Parvaneh will have romantic notions, but first off, he’s not Mandalay’s type.
If he’s back at one, though? But he’s not. Doesn’t matter. She lingers maybe five or seven minutes, collects her bag, puts on her raincoat, slips out. Things to do. People to see.
Parvaneh is always hoping for Mandalay to meet a nice man. She gets very emotionally invested, which is to say almost offensively involved, when she notices a customer’s attention to Mandalay, or if Mandalay says she’s been out for dinner or to a movie, anything that could be construed as a date. Mandalay always says: You can’t stand it that I’m free! You want me to be tied down and miserable like you! And Parvaneh says, Thirty-four this year; you are going to be too old soon. Tick tick tick!
It’s all said with affection, of course.
Sometimes she is aware of time moving along; that is, she acknowledges that the time for certain things is finite. Having a child. That is certainly something that would have to happen in the next ten years. Or six or seven, maybe. But she’s not even sure she wants to have kids, and the window for other things is closing, too. For having a career as an artist, as she’s always dreamed. For certain trips she wants to make. For buying a house or having a pension. All of those things, in descending order.
But time is a sort of illusion. She’s only aware of it in a scarcity model when she thinks too much about the future. If she remembers to live in the present, she doesn’t feel it at all. She doesn’t feel any older than she has for the last fifteen years or so. In her body, in her soul, she feels exactly the same. And though she knows she’ll die one day, everyone is mortal, the thought that she’ll age and get decrepit and wrinkly doesn’t seem credible at all. It’s not something that’s important, or that she should give any room to.
Are there things she’ll regret not doing? Probably. But that’s true for everyone. And she has done lots of interesting things. She has really lived in the present, really had some rich experience. The Seagull, for example. That’s been huge. She’s put so much energy and time and imagination into it, and it’s a big accomplishment. It’s really rewarding. And she knows it can’t last forever, but she’ll know when to walk away. When the time comes she’ll know: She’ll start feeling like she’s done all she can, or it will start feeling humdrum to her, or something else will come along — something new and fascinating and challenging that she’ll want to give her energies to. Because life is all about growth, having rich experiences. She truly, truly believes that.
And maybe even one day — she doesn’t long for it now but acknowledges that one day it might be right for her — one day, maybe even a long-term relationship, a shared place. Sometimes when things are really hectic she envisions a cool, white, high-ceilinged studio space, the comfort of simple domestic routines with a familiar partner, someone with whom she’s burned through all of the heat and excitement of a new relationship, someone who is just comfortable. But that’s way in the future.
He’s there the next day, at one o’clock, at a table by himself. He’s got a laptop computer out and a mobile phone, but when she looks up from the counter and sees him — somehow he has come in and got coffee without her noticing — he nods at her and closes the lid of the laptop. So what can she do, once she’s taken off her apron, gathered her bag and coat, but walk over to him.
He pulls out a chair, and she sits. Duane, he says. And you’re Mandalay.
So he did see the article, has come looking for her, perhaps.
So, he says. His voice is pleasantly deep, has a timbre of playfulness, of relaxed confidence. Mandalay, eh? That’s a city in Myanmar. Burma. I’ve been there. Have you?
In fact, she has. She doesn’t know anyone else who has. Myanmar is not a safe place these days to go. Three years ago, she says. She’d gone in a little plane from Rangoon, with Benedict, her Swiss doctor working for Médecins Sans Frontières. He’s said that it wasn’t safe, but that it was her own head. She’d met him in Thailand, had been determined to go to the city she’d been named after. She tells this to Duane.
He nods. He had been three years before that. Heavily guarded expedition, he says. Some Canadian mining exploration company. They’d decided not to invest, after
all. At the time.
One part of her mind pricks up at mining exploration. Bad, of course. Exploiting natural resources, third world countries. Environmental piracy. So you’re a — mining engineer? she asks.
Nope. Just a lawyer. Corporate law.
It’s very hard, she thinks, to have a friendly conversation with someone when everything you’ve known about them is bad, according to everything you believe in.
And so you have already decided that I’m a terrible, rapacious, irresponsible, exploitative person, Duane says, easily, pleasantly. He might even have a twinkle in his eye.
She knows how this story is supposed to go. At fourteen, she’d been in a foster home with a woman who had a room in her house completely full of bookcases of Harlequin Romance novels. Mandalay, basically under house arrest, had read through not all of them but a pretty good swathe, averaging about two a day. But since then she’s done some women’s studies courses and she knows exactly what’s wrong with the story, too. Why it doesn’t work.
Are you? she asks.
He says, If you’ve been here since five you probably want to get out. Do you?
She doesn’t need to glance outside to know it’s raining.
I have a very large umbrella, he says. And there’s a decent Thai restaurant three blocks from here if you want to trip some sensory memory.
There is no logical reason for not doing this. She can feel Parvaneh’s eye on her as she moves through the door he’s holding open, holds it open in turn for him while he unsheathes the black umbrella.
Climbing
DINNER AT THE HOUSE of one of Trent’s colleagues. Cleo is pleased about it. She has not been to a social event, she thinks, in nearly a year. They had missed Trent’s firm’s Christmas party because they’d all had the flu. What a holiday that had been — they had been sick, one after the other, all month, and by Christmas Eve she hadn’t got dressed for a week, and Trent hadn’t got out of bed for two days. On Christmas Day Mandalay and Cliff had come on the bus and Mandalay had made soup and done load after load of laundry — the children had been vomiting — and made Cleo have a hot bath and sit over the steamer, and Cliff had watched kids’ shows all day with Olivia and Sam: Frosty and Rudolph and A Christmas Carol, all of it, while Trent and Cleo had got some sleep. Though sometimes, secretly, she thinks of it as her favourite Christmas ever: No gift-opening, except for Olivia, who’d brought the flu home from preschool and was over it the most quickly, and no cooking a big meal, just Mandalay and Cliff in the house, but without the obligation to entertain them, and the quiet, and Mandalay’s soup. In the hot bath, she’d been able to read for an hour. Trent hadn’t been very happy, though.
Now on this Saturday she hasn’t been out for so long she actually feels anxious. Should they bring flowers or wine?
How about dessert, Trent asks. There’s never enough dessert. Make that chocolate thing.
No, she’s pretty sure you don’t bring dessert to a dinner party unless it’s pot luck. Anne will have planned the meal out, she says. It’s kind of insulting to bring something.
Besides, for once, just once, she would enjoy not having to cook.
Are you getting dressed up, Trent asks. I don’t think we need to dress up, do we?
She has put on her one pair of nice jeans and a blue and purple paisley shirt. She would have liked to wear a sort of flowing knit dress she has, but she knows Sam will want to nurse, and she can’t very well do that in a pullover dress. She regrets the dress, though — has imagined herself elegantly seated in an armchair, with a glass of wine. The shirt will have to do. She has curled her hair under, put on a little mascara, eyebrow pencil.
She says, What do you mean, dressed up? I’m wearing jeans and a button-up shirt. Should I go in my baby-spit stained sweats?
You don’t have to get so angry, he says, angrily.
On the way to his colleague’s house he says: At least Anne and Doug don’t have a big fancy yard, and Olivia won’t fall into the pond.
Anger flicks at her again. Last summer, they’d been invited to a barbecue at the house of one of Trent’s senior partners, Andy. The house had been in a part of Vancouver that Cleo didn’t know, a neighbourhood of grand, older, well-kept-up houses with large lots and mature, expensive, finicky trees — magnolia and thread cedar and Japanese maple — and laurel hedges and fishponds and mosaic-tile terraces. The whole office had come. At one point, Cleo had been sitting in a deck chair having a glass of wine and feeding Sam and talking to one of the junior partners, and she’d had the feeling that something had shifted, and had looked around for Olivia, who wasn’t there. Excuse me, Cleo had said, standing up, pulling down her shirt under the shawl, but before she was completely on her feet, there was a splash at the pond, the sound so distant and tiny that it might have been a water drop falling.
Somehow she had passed Sam off to the junior partner and run very quickly to the pond, which was quite far away: It was a big lot. Olivia had gone right under, but she had already regained her footing, was trying to climb out. She can still see her, the scene imprinted on her memory. Duckweed in Olivia’s hair, and she had been clutching the pink blossom of a water lily. Cleo had grabbed her, hauled her out roughly, and Olivia had started to cry. Trent had walked up then, hissed at her, white-lipped: Why weren’t you watching her?
She can’t believe he would bring that up. Maybe this time you’ll take your turn watching Olivia, she says.
What’s that supposed to mean?
So they arrive in a fugue of suppressed snarls.
This house is less grand than Andy’s where they’d had the barbecue (she remembers the white tile on the floor, the sea-colours of aqua and blues on the walls, the pretty mullioned windows of the bathroom in which she had changed Olivia into the spare outfit she always brought along in the diaper bag), but grand enough, with cedar siding and two big decks, vaulted ceilings and enormous view windows and a kitchen into which Cleo and Trent’s entire main floor could probably fit.
They’re the first to arrive, except for the older single colleague who’s always first. (Why had Trent chivvied and rushed them to get going?) There’s a bit of an awkward time, as Doug and Anne are still preparing some food (Why invite people for six, if you don’t really want them to come till seven?) but then the rest of the guests come. There are no other children there but Anne and Doug’s own two, teenagers. The boy disappears quickly, after being made to say hello, but the girl, older, stays around, plays with Sam a little. Anne and Doug make a fuss of Sam and Olivia; we’re starved for little kids around here, they say. Cleo does not believe this.
They have gifts for the children, or Anne does: items that Cleo sees add up to about three times what she has spent on the flowers she has brought. There are books for both of them, a clever board book with mirrors for Sam, a pop-up illustrated fairy tale book for Olivia. There is a brightly-coloured toy for Sam, the kind you get at home educational toy parties, with parts that move and rattle and slide into each other: It’s perfect, Cleo has to admit. And for Olivia, a beribboned gift bag full of small items: small sparkly hair clips and bracelets, sticker books, clear plastic cases that open to release tiny scented dolls, pastel-coloured ponies with tails and manes that can be brushed with miniature brushes. Olivia is enchanted; she says, Oh! Oh! Oh! in a breathy voice. Cleo has never thought to give Olivia things like that herself. She almost has to repress a little jealousy.
The talk at these parties is largely work talk, though there are partners who aren’t in the profession. Talk about local politics does interest Cleo, and she tries to join in, to ask intelligent questions. She has nothing at all to contribute to the other conversations, which are about where people’s children are going, or planning to go, to university, about their own university days, during which they seemed to do little but party, and yet which culminated in dozens of appealing job offers, their trips to Hawaii or Mexico or France, their kitchen renovations. They’re all about ten or fifteen years older than her and Trent;
the firm had not hired for some time before Trent joined it.
She thinks: They are a different generation, the baby boomers; they come from a golden age that won’t appear again, likely. It won’t appear for her and Trent, who have begun working too late, had their children too late, bought into the now inflated housing market too late.
She enjoys being out, though. Trent’s colleagues are kind to her. They are friendly, they have good manners, they make sure she is included, they remember her interests.
Sam is passed around, exclaimed over, dandled and played with. The most severe and unsentimental of Trent’s colleagues plays round- and-round the garden and something called fly-away dickie-birds with Sam, who looks back over his shoulder at Cleo, his face anxious. She’s beginning to see an anti-social personality emerging in Sam: Whereas Olivia is outgoing, and becomes mannered, almost too graceful and adult, in public, Sam is very shy, very clingy, hating to be the centre of attention. She sees Trent’s colleague give him up to the teenager quite quickly. She should probably go rescue him. She will, in a few minutes. After she’s been able to sit with her glass of wine, just a moment more. And then there’s a thud, a crash, a too-long pause and a wail, Sam’s wail, on a note she’s never before heard. The thud replays itself in her head almost instantly: the sound of flesh and bone on something hard.
Sam has climbed up on a kitchen chair, tipped it over backward, hit his head on a corner of a wall on the way down. He has a furrow like a dent in the middle of his forehead, a vertical indent that wasn’t there before, and he’s screaming at an unfamiliar pitch and volume. Doug gets to him first, picks him up, hands him to Cleo. Trent tries to take him from her. Someone passes Cleo a package of frozen peas (frozen peas?) and says to put them on Sam’s forehead. There are a couple of nervous jokes, but everyone is surprisingly calm. After a while, one of the wives, a nurse, asks to have a look at Sam. See there, she says. Bump coming up nicely. That’s what we like to see.
What is Going to Happen Next Page 8
