What is Going to Happen Next

by Karen Hofmann

  Maybe I called just to connect with you, she says. To say hi, how was your day? People do that.

  You wanted to have a conversation about the events of my day, and then tell me about yours.

  Yes, she says. Part of her is quaking, perhaps in humiliation, but another part is standing on a magnificent hill, vigorously flapping new wings.

  Is that something you would like to do?

  Occasionally, she says. I live alone, as you know. Sometimes I just want to say: I had this experience today. I think it meant this to me. Or to listen to someone say that to me. To listen while someone makes a story out of the events of their day for me.

  It’s a fairly common human interaction, she wants to add, but doesn’t.

  Were you lonely? he asks, and she can’t pin down his tone as either mocking or sympathetic. It seems to be neither — maybe just curious.

  Yes, she says. I was lonely.

  She has really put herself out there now. She hopes that she sounded ironic, or at least incredibly blasé.

  He takes her hand — he has been parking his car; they’re going to eat at the new French restaurant — he takes her left hand in his left hand and lifts it to his lips. I can’t, he says, kissing the tip of her index finger — be — he kisses the middle finger — the answer to — now the ring finger — everyone’s loneliness (her baby finger). Then holds her thumb between his own index finger and thumb and runs the ball of it over his upper lip.

  Then a smile that she doesn’t know an adjective for — inscrutable seems clichéd, and not quite accurate anyway — and gets out of the car, and comes around — not to open her door; he doesn’t do that, but to hold out his hand again as she steps out — it’s a very low-slung car — onto the curb.

  The next weekend he says: I feel it would be good to have some uninterrupted time together. Should we take a trip? Can you take a week off?

  She feels first a surge of pleasure, excitement; then some doubt. He’ll want to go somewhere she won’t be able to afford, and he’ll have to pay.

  I’ve always wanted to go the Queen Charlottes, he says. Interested?

  Haida Gwaii. Oh, yes.

  I have a couple of ideas, he says. Maybe I could tell you, and you could choose.

  The options are a sailing ship with a naturalist that travels the archipelago in a week, or camping and sea kayaking by themselves. Do you think you could handle the kayaking? he asks.

  She has kayaked. But she can’t decide.

  He gives her brochures to look at. Take a couple of days, he says. When she has some time, the next afternoon, she goes to the library and uses the computer to look up the sailing tour company website, and the cost of renting kayaks at Skidegate. She’s not adept, yet, at navigating websites, finding information on the computer, but she finds her way. The sailing expedition runs about five thousand dollars a couple. The kayaks are a few hundred for a week, camping equipment included. She thinks: He has been very, very sneaky. She calls him up, leaves a message, her first, on his voice mail. Kayaking, she says.

  And then she tells Parvaneh: I need to talk to your uncle about my compensation.

  An Education

  CLIFF HAS BEEN ON THE CAMPUS, which occupies a large promontory of land to the west of the city, before. He had visited the anthropology museum after seeing a program about it, and had descended one of the very long wooden staircases, with its railings and resting platforms, down the cliff face, down deep into the rainforest, and walked along the beaches, even the nude beach (it had been early spring, so no nudes) and back up another zig-zagging set of stairs. The trip to campus had taken him two buses and over an hour. He had always meant to go back, but had not. It seemed a trip to another country, an island perhaps.

  He had skirted the main part of the campus, then, afraid to wander in among the concrete and glass buildings, the manicured gardens. So he hadn’t seen the campus, really.

  Ben notes the names of the clusters of buildings they pass by: Earth Science, Forest Science, Life Science. The buildings named after people. Cliff feels the tug of curiosity. It is another country, he thinks. City state. Everything looks intentional. Students live there in the big towers but he can’t imagine what that would be like. On the outskirts, clusters of optometrists’ offices and pizza takeouts form a kind of village, and then there are the mansions where the profs and university administrators live, some with gardens like parks.

  Cliff has worked in some of those gardens. He tells Ben this. Those places are worth a couple of million, Ben says. It’s ridiculous. But Ben’s parents live near here, too.

  Ben picked Cliff up from his apartment and he sees now that this has meant an hour or more round trip for him. I was going to MEC anyway, Ben says.

  Maybe we’ll crash at my house later, Ben says. Folks are away.

  Ben drives all around and through the campus, showing it to Cliff, and then parks and leads him between buildings to the pub. Cliff wonders if he would be able to find his way back, on his own. Or to find the bus platform.

  In the pub it’s noisy, of course, but really clean. It’s not like a bar. The ceiling is high and there is an architectural grandeur to the room, beyond the clutter of chairs and bodies, the pool tables and the incessant banging and wailing of the band. There are columns and panels and other interesting structures. It’s like a big public room, a library for example.

  The people in the pub are mostly students, he guesses. Young people, mostly taller than him, except the Asian ones. Even some of them though. They have that different look that students have, at least in groups, than other young adults: more casual, more relaxed or at ease. They look like they still think of themselves as adolescents. Carefree? That might be going too far. Maybe something about the shoulders, the spine. They are all wealthy, he supposes, supported by parents or at least growing up with money. What says that? They are certainly all scruffily dressed, in frayed and faded clothes. He sees a lot of worn-in jeans, plaid flannel shirts, old woolen sweaters, thrift-store overcoats. Everyone looks like they need a hair trim — maybe even a shampoo.

  Shabby, scruffy. Ray would have send him home if he turned up for work like that. Yet something about the students says money, privilege. Maybe it’s a kind of healthy good looks: He doesn’t see any bizarre, any ugly faces.

  They haven’t got far into the room before Ben is hailed, met with back slaps, even a handshake. Ben seems unembarrassed. He has a lot of friends. They’re pulled to a table with four others right away. He introduces Cliff: my brother. The friends all say, enthusiastically, Hey, or Hey, man. Good to see you. He thinks for about thirty seconds that they’re interested in him and then realizes that they are just like that. Ben says their names ironically, as if it’s not cool to have names, and he forgets them right way. They refer to each other by nicknames that are different than the ones Ben told him.

  The four other guys all look like Ben, though, or variations of him. One is taller, with a too-lean face and jutting jaw, but the same light hair and beard. Another might be Ben’s double, but has darker hair. One has slightly longer hair and no beard, but a deep tan, and the fourth has really dark skin: Indian maybe, though he has no accent at all.

  They are all interested in snowboarding. That is what they talk about. Cliff has never been snowboarding, though he’s seen it on TV. He hasn’t been to Whistler, where they snowboard. He can’t join in the conversation, though he doesn’t mind just listening and picking stuff up. And not having to be thinking of things to say to Ben, as he did when they were driving up to campus. Ben had kept asking him questions that Cliff couldn’t formulate answers to quickly enough. He knew he should ask Ben things too, but anything he could think of wouldn’t make sense to ask. He wanted to say: Do you notice we have the same hands? And: Do I smell like your littermate? And: Did you ever wake up in the middle of the night when you were small and think you were back home and then realize you weren’t and feel like someone had pulled out a plug in you and you would just drain away?

>   He wants to ask these things, but he wouldn’t even know how to find the right words.

  The other guys, Ben’s friends, are all talking about snowboarding but Cliff doesn’t mind, and he is happy to half-listen and to watch the people around the pub and drink a beer poured from one of the communal pitchers. (Will he have to contribute one? Has he brought enough cash?) He’s happy to listen to them talk about girls, a different category of talking-about-girls than what Ray does, which is body parts and what he’s done to them, a catalogue of deeds. Ben and his friends do kind of the opposite, though their talk is no less dirty: It’s like they’re having a competition to see who is the least adept or lucky with girls.

  Man, one of the guys is saying, she gave me a look, you know, that look, and my manhood kind of did a U-turn and crawled back up my pubes, whimpering. And another of the guys says, Yeah, my date! It was like having to write my calc three exam again, without studying. They all laugh, mocking but also not.

  A competitive display of sexual inadequacy, Cliff hears a voice say in his head, in the awed whispers of David Attenborough. Only in these isolated boreal islands do we encounter these s fascinating adaptations. Only here, where the male of the species don’t need to compete for. . . .

  But faux David Attenborough’s commentary is broken off by the arrival of two girls. Perhaps they are the girls of the conversation: Cliff can’t tell. The guys greet them with minimal attention. One girl leans over and kisses one of the guys fairly intensely on the mouth, but doesn’t then drape herself over him, or giggle, or even sit next to him. They just all squeeze over to make room for a couple more chairs. The girls are both pale, naked of cosmetics except for apparent bruising around their eyes. He knows that’s makeup. They are both skinny, not very big in the chests. Both are wearing tight low-slung jeans and little T-shirts that show their navels. One is wearing a grey ski tuque. The one who kissed, whose long hair is the colour of something familiar that he can’t name, a brownish-tan colour, is sitting so near to him that their thighs are rubbing. He draws his leg away but she doesn’t try to. She looks at him neutrally. Hey, she says. Or not neutrally, but with the look of a member of one species for a member of another that is neither prey nor predator. Like a deer looking at a porcupine. After the girls arrive, the conversation shifts again, to a course several of them have taken, and then to what Cliff thinks at first is a discussion of a TV series, but then comes to realize is actually a group of real people, other students and teachers at the school they all seem to have attended.

  The beer flows and flows. Cliff needs to go to the men’s. He has drunk a lot of beer. A lot. When he stands up, he knows he is actually a bit drunk. He had better be more careful.

  When he comes back, he can’t find Ben or his table. It takes him a while to realize that he has lost them. At first, he thinks he has forgotten where the table is and mills through the crowd, expecting that some stranger’s features will suddenly coalesce into a familiar face. That Ben will suddenly pop out of the background camouflage of people who look similar to him. But Ben doesn’t appear. So maybe he’s outside. Cliff recalibrates: He’ll look for the table instead, for Ben’s friends, Sam and — the other ones, whose names he can’t remember. Only he can’t quite remember what they look like. He circles back to the table he thought was his when he came back from the men’s, and there is a group of three guys and a girl sitting at it. He isn’t sure. He tries to walk past without slowing too much, to make eye contact without seeming to make eye contact. Do any of this party recognize him? But mostly they don’t look up. One guy does, and Cliff thinks he sees recognition in his glance but when he stops, the guy opens his eyes too wide and raises an eyebrow, and Cliff wants to move on without speaking, but he asks, Have you seen Ben?

  No, the guy says, too deliberately, I have not seen Ben. His full, red lips, moist with beer, emerge from a bristly light beard.

  Cliff tries again. Is this Ben’s table?

  The guy laughs. I imagine it might have been Ben’s table at one time, he says, but it is now our table. The girl beside him, long brown hair and oval face, says something to the guy, and he laughs again.

  Do you know me? Cliff wants to ask. Do you recognize me? But how can he ask that?

  He ambles on, makes another weaving, alert walk in a figure eight around the room, trying at look at people intently without appearing to be looking at them. Come on, moron, he says to himself. Remember something. Don’t be so useless.

  On his third round a burly guy about his age, mustached, in a T-shirt, stops him with a type of hip-check. Cliff doesn’t want confrontation of any sort. He says sorry and sidesteps, but the man is there before him, is blocking his way in a manner so subtle yet effective that he must have been practicing for years.

  You looking for someone? the burly guy asks.

  Yes. My brother.

  The guy smiles, shakes his head minutely. He must have a hundred pounds on Cliff. Cliff can feel all of his own animal defences awaken: His feet and hands seem filled with electricity, and the hairs on the back of his neck rise. Hackles, he thinks. But he knows that even to someone standing right next to them, the other man’s actions might be invisible.

  The guy watches Cliff: holds him in his gaze a minute too long. You don’t look like you belong here, buddy, he says, finally. Still smiling. Just letting you know I’ve noticed you circling, eyeing people up. I’m going to give you some friendly advice. Keep your hands where I can see them and find your friends or get out of here really soon.

  Cliff falls away from the guy — bouncer, he must be — as if released from a magnetic force. Crap. His face burns. Low anger begins its spring-thaw trickle, too late. I’m not a pickpocket, asshole, he whispers. Someone turns hearing him. He brushes past. Makes it to the door.

  Outside, groups of people talking, laughing, but he doesn’t recognize anyone. It’s too dark. Ben would not have just taken off, ditched him, would he? But why not? He imagines Ben’s face, remote, polite, kind of surprised. Hey, man. Didn’t know I was supposed to let you know all of my movements. Didn’t know you wanted your hand held. Old insults, the push and shove of adolescence, trickle up. He doesn’t know: Are guys supposed to tell each other before they split?

  In the cooler air his head clears a little. He’s afraid to go back inside but he has to. He’ll put his hands in his pockets, move around more purposefully. It would help if he were taller. Also he sees this now, his blue windbreaker is just kind of the wrong thing, though he can’t put his finger on why. Also his cords and golf shirt. Nobody else is wearing clothes like his, though he can’t say why what they are wearing, specifically, should be correct. Loose, dirty-looking jeans, plaid flannel, rock-band-logo T-shirts. Hiking boots. Things he would not think to wear to work.

  Inside he tries not to look at people but he wants to keep an eye out for the bouncer who, he knows, will approach him with the lethal stealth of a large cat, a leopard maybe. He makes a circuit. Is that the same group of people at the table he thought was his? No Ben, though. What if Ben is looking for him, or thinks he’s left, now? He doesn’t have a sense of how much time has lapsed, so he can’t judge if this explanation is probable. He should get another beer. He doesn’t want another beer — his stomach is churning and he’s still conscious of being drunk — but he should get one so he looks like he has a purpose. Does he have enough cash?

  There’s nowhere to sit so he edges his back up against one of the support columns. Its rough cold edges.

  A hip-check again but this one lower, not subtle. He moves sideways, away, before looking, but it’s a woman, and she’s smiling at him, not with the bouncer’s shark-smile but a real one. Eyes. Dimples and eyes and red lipstick. A little taller than he is.

  She’s at a table with two spots. She has saved a spot with her jacket. She says, sit. The metal seat still warm. Who has he displaced?

  She’s curvy, he sees. Well, fat. Big hips, arms and breasts, and a belly. But also long thick lashes and thick, lustrous ha
ir. Her smiling makes him feel larger, like he has a right to be in this space, like something heavy and sharp-edged is being lifted from his shoulders.

  He can see that she is not so young, and that her makeup is of a different style than that of the other women, the students. Shinier, more opaque. Her clothes are shinier, too: A red sweater stretches across her generous breasts and she’s wearing a skirt and boots of something that looks like some kind of leather or leather-like substance, and they’re shiny too, and maybe don’t reflect light in the same way real leather does.

  She is still smiling, her eyes crinkling at him in the corners. A genuine smile includes the eyes. What program had he heard that on? Her hair is a cascade of glossy curls, not like most of the other girls in the pub, with their lank, unwashed-looking hair. When she moves her head the big curls move around and shine. He tries not to look at her breasts again. He knows he’s looked at them at least twice. She says a couple of things to him but he can’t hear her in the din, which is worse sitting than standing, even. He nods, smiles. . . .friends? she says. . . .U2? That’s a guess, but a U2 song is playing. He leans in closer. . . .work? she asks. He nods, smiles again. This is crazy. He should get up again, look for Ben. But here’s a couple more beers in front of them, and when he takes out his wallet she holds up her hand, she’s got this.

  He doesn’t actually like her smile, he thinks now. There’s something kind of scary about the way her eyes, which are kind of small, it’s the thick black lashes that made them look bigger, and her mouth, which is small, too, like a too-small door, a door leading under some stairs, disappear into the fat of her cheeks. When she smiles it looks like something is being squeezed off.

  She shakes her hair at him again and some small hard thing he doesn’t quite see falls out and strikes the table and falls to the floor. He wants to leave, at that point, but another beer has appeared in front of him, and he begins to drink it.