Something that is in her, wants this baby to grow, and says, damn the consequences. Maybe it is hormones. Maybe self-protective hormones sent out by the baby itself. Maybe just some prescript to breed. Maybe the need to commit to something that only she can take on.
Duane is looking at her with something that is a mixture of vulnerability and self-irony and — yes — tenderness, and she has taken so long to answer that his expression is starting to change, the thing she thinks of as vulnerability erasing itself from the eyes and mouth. She takes her hand out from under his — she hadn’t noticed it there — and says, on the last of an exhale, says, I have to tell you something. I’m not asking you for help, okay? I know you don’t want this. And I hope you know I didn’t plan this: You must know how it happened. On our trip. Anyway I’m not asking you for anything, okay? I’m just letting you know.
And she tells him.
He becomes very formal, but she doesn’t feel hurt or angry at that: It’s his defence, she knows, against shock or surprise; it’s his way of pre-empting any reaction in himself that he might regret or that might offend. He says, very formally, that indeed he knows how it must have happened; it was partly his responsibility, and he wonders if she has really thought out what she wants to do. It is her decision, he says, and he’ll talk to her about fiducial matters. (She wonders: Is that fair? On an individual basis, maybe not; in a larger social context, yes?) It is her decision, he says, and of course he is speaking from self-interest; he’ll admit that, but he wonders, under the circumstance, if it wouldn’t be better also for her not to take this on.
The food comes and they do not eat, and then they both eat hungrily, aggressively, as if it’s a last meal, or as if they are grinding each other up in their chewing.
She says she’ll cab home but he drives her, and then waiting for a light to turn, a light that’s taking its time, he cracks: His voice stays soft and neutral, in the way it is when he is formal, businesslike, but he says: When I read that article about you, I thought maybe you were more — career-driven.
You’re making a lot of assumptions here, she says. She says it in a cold, hard voice, so that she will not cry.
When he pulls up outside her building, he says, We’ll talk about arrangements.
Whatever, she says. I don’t need you, you know.
She had meant to say, I don’t need your help, but she lets it stand.
SHE BEGINS TO LOOK for a new job. This is done over the internet now, she discovers: She has to be grateful for Duane’s gift of his old laptop. She makes up résumés, different ones for different kinds of jobs. She wants a management-type job in a café or restaurant or bakery but there are not so many of these at her level: mostly cashiers or baristas or waiters are wanted, at minimum wage. She looks also for jobs in marketing and office management and personnel, and writes careful cover letters that bullet her management experience, but the ads ask for diplomas or degrees she doesn’t have (and really isn’t interested in getting: When Trent suggests she take a business degree, she realizes that’s the last thing she wants to do.)
Cleo says single moms are often hired as nannies, so she answers some ads for nannies, which are initiated online, and gets a reply from “Academic Couple” that turns out to be from Christopher, her old boyfriend Christopher, now married with two young children. (Is that you, Mandalay? Will you meet me for coffee? No, she says. She can imagine, now, where that might go.)
And then the truly miraculous, the undeserved, the impossible thing happens: Buying vegetables, she bumps into Belinda, the visual arts instructor who had helped her organize the art wall at The Seagull (gone now, of course), and Belinda says that she’s just heard that day that someone she knows is looking for an assistant in her gallery, and Mandalay would be perfect for it: She’d been about to telephone Mandalay. I told her, Belinda says, that you have everything: the aesthetic, the curatorial skills, the business skills.
They go for coffee, then, or rather, steamed milk. Belinda says she has just found out she is pregnant. She and her partner have been wanting this for some time. She’s in her late thirties; she has always wanted to have a child. She says that she and Mandalay should do prenatal classes together. She says that Mandalay should take some art classes herself; she can use Belinda’s studio.
Then Mandalay thinks: See, it was meant, and then laughs at herself for thinking that. Whatever meant means. It is luck that this opportunity has come up, but it is also a step, the culmination of thousands of steps: the years of hanging around galleries, of struggling through those first-year drawing and painting courses she’d convinced Horst were necessary, of working seventy-hour weeks at The Seagull, of coming up with new recipes, of taking the initiative to organize that art wall, the hours and hours of her own time to maintain it, to get the payments back to the artists. She had not envisioned, really, where it was all going, but she had put the work in, hour after hour.
So she will start over again, but not quite from the very bottom. She’ll have a lot of work: It looms before her now, a mountain. But she is not unhappy. She feels in herself finally a lightening: No, that’s the wrong word. It’s more a deepening, a sense of rootedness, as if she has gained gravity, as if her feet have sunk into the earth. It is not unhappiness: It is more as if she has grown larger, more substantial, and sadness can now roost in her, and she is not afraid of it carrying her away.
And then, two weeks after their meal, Duane calls. She is home; she picks up thinking that the call is going to be about the cheque from The Seagull, but it is not.
He says: I have been thinking.
She can hear it in his voice, what’s coming. She waits, then, for her self to dissolve, to become vessel, to find herself once more in the loose floating enchantment of the stream. She does not know if it can happen again. The stream calls to her to put off whatever is binding her, to step in, to allow herself to flow with it. She does not know if she can. If she will. It is too late, maybe. Something has changed.
Latitude
BEN COMES BACK FROM the counter with a red flush on his cheeks. Problem, Bro, he says. He’s angry or embarrassed or both: Cliff thinks that this is the first time he has seen Ben not cool.
Did they lose our reservation? he asks. He has heard of this happening. Ben shakes his head. Oh, man, he says. They won’t let me rent a car. I’m not fucking twenty-five yet.
You have to be twenty-five to rent a car?
Apparently. Of all the motherfucking. . . .
He’s never seen Ben like this. He feels unnerved, but then intrigued, and a curious calm settles on him. Not a dissociative calm, but an alert, steady kind of calm, like when he knows exactly what to do, at work, and Ray’s not there.
Are you allowed to put it on your credit card?
Yeah. That’s not the problem, Ben says, impatiently. I’ve got the money. It’s my fucking ID.
He can see the mechanical structure of Ben’s understanding, his assumption that it is Cliff who has misunderstood, as if it is a clockwork in a glass dome. He sees its structure but he is not caught up in it.
I meant, he says, keeping his voice easy, soft: I mean I can drive, no problem.
You have a driver’s licence? Again, there is Ben’s assumption, which might be insulting, in the space between them, but Cliff can see around it, just at this instant, and there’s that glass case around it, between it and Cliff’s feelings about it.
Yeah, I do. I have to for work. I drive the equipment between job sites. It’s true that Ray mostly does the driving, but Cliff does have to drive, and had to take classes and get his permit, at Mrs. Cookshaw’s insistence. He pulls out his wallet, flips open to the windowed pocket where he keeps his card.
Oh, man, Ben says, slapping him on the shoulder. You are one surprising dude sometimes.
And so they have a car. Ben wants to rent a jeep, so they do. It’s just like CHIPS, now, Cliff thinks. The two of them on the highway winding alongside the ocean, the palm trees, the warm air and sun. He pu
ts on the aviator sunglasses he bought. Let’s roll, he says.
What’s that? Ben laughs at him.
Just some show, Cliff says. He understands that he doesn’t have to go into detail. You wouldn’t have seen it.
They were going to go camping up the west coast, north of Powell River, but then the weather had turn really stormy, and Ben’s parents, his adopted parents, had said, Why not go to Maui, use the condo, nobody rents it the last week of August. And they had paid for Cliff’s flight, too, which he can’t quite understand, but Ben said: They won’t miss it.
He wishes, now, that everyone he knows could have this trip. The air is warm and smells like flowers. There are lizards on the garden walls. The sea is everywhere.
They drive up to the west part of the island and go snorkelling: It’s the thing he has wanted to do most. He pulls on the snorkel and mask, the flippers, and figures out how to get into the water in them. It’s difficult, getting through the shorebreak. He falls, then decides it’s easier, if not very cool, just to paddle out through the shallow surf. He has worried that he won’t be able to swim well enough or get the hang of the equipment, but it’s easy; it feels as if he were born to it. The flippers, the goggles, the mouthpiece, feel almost instantly like parts of his body that his brain already knows how to use.
Then he wonders when he will see the reef: All that he can spot is big dark lumpy rocks. But like magic, he sees this is the reef: He sees first an angelfish, yellow and black and white, and then a blue and yellow fish with what looks like protruding front upper teeth, and then suddenly he’s surrounded. The tropical fish are everywhere. Their names start coming into his head, and he realizes it’s from all of the nature shows he’s watched on TV: convict fish and parrot fish, surgeon fish and trumpet fish, in their multiplicity of shapes and colours, all around him, beneath him, a hundred or more species in all the brilliance and variety the mind can take in.
He thinks that he will die of happiness.
And then Ben pointing to the left, and when he paddles over, a large dark oval shape that resolves itself into a sea turtle as long as his legs and torso, which swims past him, turns its head slightly, looks at him, eye to eye.
First they drive through flat fields of some kind of shrub: taller than a man, with long spiky leaves. What is it? Ben doesn’t know. Pineapple, Cliff thinks. There are acres and acres of the stuff. He can imagine, for some reason, trying to move through it. Hiding in it. He thinks the leaves would cut a man up. He sees a sign: Sugar Museum. Is it sugar cane? But Ben doesn’t know. He has to let go of it, quit worrying it.
They drive through a tiny town set close up on the shoulders of highway. It’s like Butterfly Lake, Cliff thinks. The highway narrows here to a thin two lanes. The posted speed limit is twenty but Cliff slows even more. People of all ages, little kids and guys and women around their age, and sinewy men with grey dreadlocks, people in swim trunks and sarongs and bare chests and bikini tops, with deep tans, sunbleached hair, are walking along, crossing the street randomly. Some are carrying surf boards.
Look at that, Ben says. Cliff has stopped to let a group of three girls, very fit, with long rippling hair, bikinis, cross the highway. One of them turns and gives Cliff a fast, light smile and he realizes that he’s been smiling all along. He feels her smile light down on him, touch him briefly.
Ben says, Come on, man. You gotta like that!
There’s a question, a challenge, behind his words, maybe.
I respect women, Ben, Cliff says.
Ben groans. Yeah, so do I, man. But dude, you gotta, you gotta want to: He holds his hands out in a gesture Cliff has often seen Ray make, a cupping of two round things, an inclination of the head. It always embarrasses him when Ray does this. Now, in the open sunshine, coming from Ben, it’s somehow cleaner, more natural. Cliff laughs. He hears David Attenborough’s voice, not hushed now but slightly mischievous. The male resorts to an incredible variety of gestures to attract females and to signal his territory to other males.
He thinks of Loretta, of her two huge breasts like piñatas, his head between them. He thinks too of the sensation of falling down the stairs, his fear that he was going to be paralyzed. Somehow the memory has receded a bit: It doesn’t fill up his body and brain anymore. It’s not like he’s watching it happen to someone else; it’s just that it has a border, a container, around it now. He can walk around it in his mind. He can see it with a kind of wonder, see the fall as part of the same package as the great full globe of Loretta’s breasts. Can see her moon face, now. Think her name without the roaring starting up in his head.
What? Ben asks, and Cliff realizes that he has laughed out loud.
The road to Hana is fifty-six miles and has six hundred and fifteen turns, Cliff has read. Driving, he has to get into the rhythm of it, slowing, then accelerating slightly into the curve. It’s a kind of slalom, he thinks. The jeep starts to become part of his body. He’s glad they’re on the inside lane, against the upper rise of the cliffs, not the outer, though he wishes he could have more view of the ocean. It will be reversed on the way back. There is a curtain of thick green, too, between the highway and the ocean, but occasionally he can see the loops and turns ahead, and it seems sometimes that the highway is cantilevered out over the sea.
Beside him, Ben is gripping the roll bar, closing his eyes. You okay? he asks.
I always get sick on this road, Ben says.
Do you want me to drive slower?
No, Ben says. I just forgot. I get sick.
Stop at the next lookout? Cliff asks. He is the driver. It is his job to do this.
A couple of bends after that, there’s a break in the trees, a sign, a widening where Cliff can pull over, and he does, and Ben vaults from the jeep and lies on the ground on his belly, breathing deeply. Cliff can hear the surf pounding. They don’t seem to be as high up. There’s a narrow dirt road leading downward through the green curtain, and also a footpath. I’m going to walk down there, he says.
The trees, palms and others, are all strange to him. Their trunks and bark and leaves are all strange. He thinks that some of them are like hothouse plants, like potted plants in the greenhouses where he has to go sometimes to pick up the trays of annuals for planting out. Philodendrons and hibiscus and rubber plants: hothouse plants that have suddenly grown to giant dimensions. Also the path has stairs, like the path down to Wreck Beach, and it is like climbing down the cliff through the rainforest. Only here the air is warm and humid and it feels very old. This is what the world was like in the Mesozoic era, he thinks.
When the path stops descending, there is an opening in the trees and there is the ocean, stretching out as far as he can see, a clear pure blue. The rollers look huge, high as houses, and their motion is hypnotic after a while: It’s perpetual, repetitive, but not quite rhythmic.
It is doing something to his brain, he thinks. There is something about the sound or the amount of ocean, something about scale. In the mile upon mile of sea, the billions of creatures: not just the fish and mollusks and jellies, the singing humpbacks, the hunting dolphins, but the billions of phytoplankton and zooplankton, all of their lives. The ocean a million, million times the size of him.
He reels and nearly falls. The size of it. His own smallness. It makes him feel a lightness, a sort of freedom, as if he could lift off, hover, fly. Insignificance, he thinks. He is insignificant, which means, he doesn’t matter. But that realization is what is making him feel free. His legs his body his guts and veins and bones, his brain: all small enough to escape attention in this world. To not matter. To be only a particle among billions and trillions of particles. To not matter.
And yet to have the right to exist among every other life form. That is it. He runs along the beach. He runs from one end to the other, his arms in the air as if he could take flight. He runs back up the long stairs, back up the cliff, lightness in his heels, his shins, his knees and thighs.
Back at the jeep, Ben is still lying on the ground, but on hi
s back now. He has somehow procured a bag of grass: He holds it up, without saying a word, as Cliff walks up. He says: There are little farms all along the highway, hidden in the bush. Handmade signs. You didn’t notice?
Cliff didn’t notice. His eyes were on the road.
Dad used to buy it, Ben says. I wasn’t supposed to know what it was. They never smoked in front of me but by the time I was twelve or so I knew what the smell was.
Cliff feels anxious now. Should we save it for later, he says. After the drive.
It’s good for motion sickness, Ben says.
I don’t get much out of it, Cliff says. He has had pot a couple of times, at parties. He’s always been worried, though. Last thing he needs, to get caught.
You haven’t smoked enough then, Ben says. You need to develop the receptors in your brain or something. What’s the beach like here?
Rollers, Cliff says.
Rocky?
Some, Cliff says.
I know a good one, Ben says. Should be just a little further.
When they find the turnoff, Ben isn’t sure it’s really the right one, and to Cliff it looks all the same as the rest. It’s like Butterfly Lake, here, though, he thinks in a kind of wonder. For some reason he had thought that Maui would be completely covered with hotels and resorts. He knows too how in Butterfly Lake only the locals can find the good places; some roads aren’t marked. You just have to know.
This beach is a long crescent of sand that’s the same colour as Lucerne brand vanilla ice cream. The waves rise to a translucent pale green curl, like glass, before breaking into foam. Palm trees lean out over the beach, where it meets the forest. It’s like a picture in an ad. Only it is alive, more than alive.
They dive in to cool down, testing the tug of the current, the slam of the shorebreak, then lie on the sand. They flop on the sand. The sun kneads Cliff’s back and shoulders. The breeze off the water licks him cool. If he did not ever leave this spot, for the rest of his life, that would be completely fine.
What is Going to Happen Next Page 29
