Luck
Page 28
“Not at all. Best for you not to be last on the scene, and I can always tell people you became overwhelmed.”
“Overwhelmed by what, grief?” When Max nods, she slaps his arm. “You old devil.”
Although she is nearly overwhelmed, not by grief, exactly, but by a kind of awe. From here in the doorway she can look back past what remains of the crowd, through the wide-open doors of the smaller gallery, and see Philip, triple Philips, looking back. A person has one life and then, as in fire, flood or war, is thrust willing or not, ready or not, into another. Like Sophie’s refugees, in hiding, on the run, searching for places to be safe, although often enough suffering and dying instead; while survivors barter and scrounge, they make things where nothing existed before.
Nora, too. She is lucky so far.
This is a different kind of luck from Philip’s good and bad fortune, slipping quietly out of life in the night.
She slips quietly into the night herself, arm upraised for a taxi. Years ago she stepped out this same door on to this street, although in daylight, and in a mood for celebration. In a diner just down the block she ran into a woman she once knew in high school. Tonight she’ll go home, hang this one-shouldered, slashed-to-the-navel black number back in the closet, and lie alone in her enormous Philip-built bed where, on an August night a year ago, in another place, they fell asleep together and she woke up alone.
She won’t knock again in her life on a door that’s opened by a grinning, lithe, naked man.
She takes the next taxi that stops, gives the driver the address she’s still getting used to, and waves to Max, who waves back although he is already turning away, his attention moving on as attention does when people are alive and attending to the next thing, which is always something right up until the very moment it’s not. Which makes the exhilarating, terrifying, luxurious, thrilling, glad-to-be-alive, diving-into-darkness question, as Nora leans back while the taxi makes its way through the city’s wide streets of neon and light, what it always is. Again, and again, and again, it has to be, Now what?
JOAN BARFOOT is the award-winning author of nine previous novels, including Critical Injuries, which was longlisted for the 2002 Man Booker Prize. Her work has been compared internationally with that of Anne Tyler, Carol Shields, Margaret Drabble, Fay Weldon and Margaret Atwood. Luck was a Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist. Barfoot lives in London, Ontario.
VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2006
Copyright © 2005 Joan Barfoot
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Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, and in Great Britain by Phoenix, a division of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd., London. Originally published in hardcover in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2005, and in Great Britain by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, a division of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd., London, in 2005. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Barfoot, Joan, 1946–
Luck / Joan Barfoot.
eISBN: 978-0-307-37531-5
I. Title.
PS8553.A7624L83 2006 C813′.54 C2006-900140-5
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