Authors: Joan Thomas
She’s on Wolseley Avenue, where the finest houses are. Always a pleasure to walk along Wolseley. She sticks the plastic bag in her pocket and thinks about a conversation she had when Sylvie was tiny. Somebody (it must have been one of the
GAP
women) said, “If you pay attention to what your baby is telling you, she will make you into the sort of mother she needs you to be.” Liz was overcome with despair, hearing that. People talk about how helpless babies are, how vulnerable, but it never felt that way to her. From the day Sylvie was born, she was a force to contend with. She resisted anything you tried to give her. If you indulged her whims, she’d flip to wanting the exact opposite. If you tried to cuddle her, she’d squirm frantically away. She was not powerless – she had the power to demonstrate to the whole world what a lousy mother Liz was. Well, now she’s a mother herself and they’ll see how that turns out. This new baby, luckily for Sylvie, has a softer way about her, more of an inquiring presence. You can already see it in the way she opens her round eyes and looks thoughtfully at them.
Liz doubles the leash around her hand. It’s cold, a humid sort of cold with no promise of warmth in it, and she walks quickly, darting glances into the gaps between houses where dogwood and saskatoon and high-bush cranberry compete for the sun. Sometimes when the baby opens her eyes, she seems to ask, Who
are
you? Then her eyes glaze over and she falls back to sleep. But the question remains, as though her very appearance in their house asks it. “Who are you?” Liz says to Max as she follows him along the
street. The boulevard elms arch, their buds all soft and pale, and the green points of iris poke from the flower beds: everything waiting brightly for its meaning to be revealed.
The summer Aiden started his counselling program, the summer Sylvie worked at the Fort, Liz went to a party at Esme Gwynn’s house on Palmerston Avenue. Esme was a maker of experimental films. She was also the director of an artist support organization Liz had freelanced for when Sylvie was small. “I was a bad hire for the Film Group,” she said frankly when she offered Liz her first contract. Esme loved film but she didn’t have an administrative bone in her body. She praised Liz lavishly for the grant applications and reports she wrote, as you might praise a cleaning lady – all work that was not art she held in contempt.
One night she invited Liz into the editing suite and showed her two versions of a short film she was making. It was about a couple arguing, obviously at the end of things, as they wandered around the old cemetery at St. Boniface Cathedral. The setting was lovely, but a little heavy-handed as a metaphor, Liz thought. Esme showed her the two cuts without sound. In the first, the husband (played by the guy in charge of equipment repairs for the Film Group) was clearly an asshole. In the second, his face was open and pleading, and the wife looked as though she despised all men in general and him in particular. “An editor can make a film say anything she wants,” Esme said.
Liz hadn’t spoken to Esme for several years, and then that day she saw her in Safeway, picking up plastic cups and mix.
“I’m so glad I ran into you,” Esme said. “I’m having a barbecue tomorrow. I’d love it if you came.” The whole community was celebrating, she said. Wasn’t it thrilling about Krzysztof Nowak?
“Fabulous!” Liz said. “What can I bring?”
Esme crinkled her eyes appreciatively. “Bring a salad. Something for the vegans.”
The meaning will be in the details, and Liz remembers them perfectly. Walking over wearing a great linen sundress and a baleful sense of freedom. The sundress was vintage; she’d bought it in a little shop off the Magnificent Mile when she and Aiden had that weekend in Chicago. It had a sweetheart bodice. She was wearing strappy sandals and sporting a lavenderish pedicure. Carrying a dark straw bag she’d bought on Isla Mujeres, in which was wedged a chilled bottle of Chardonnay and a blue covered bowl with her salad (marinated wild rice with currants and slivers of almond and apricot).
It was a tiny house on the river, no doubt once a summer cottage, before Wolseley was Wolseley. The crowd in the narrow backyard spilled onto the neighbours’ unfenced property. Liz ran into Esme almost right away, her long, bony feet in buffalo sandals and her hair in a queue down her back. Liz saw in a flash that her own toenail polish was over-coordinated with her sundress. Esme didn’t need fashion – she had personal style.
“I’ve got a press notice I want to show Krzysztof,” Esme said. “Come on, I’ll introduce you.”
Liz followed. She had no clue what the occasion was. Back when she worked for the Film Group, the buzz about Krzysztof Nowak was just starting. She’d never seen his films, but Aiden had. “Those film school grads might know everything about cameras, but they know shit about life” – that’s what Aiden had said when he came home.
Krzysztof was squatting beside three classic hibachis full of actual charcoal and approaching a state of readiness. He got up when Esme introduced Liz. He was their age, not a kid at all, and lavishly good-looking. This party was in his honour but he was
grilling the steaks; he had also, strangely, provided them. On a folding metal table were huge trays with twenty or thirty strip loins marinating and a tarnished silver boat of glistening sauce. “Taste it,” he said, and Liz dipped a finger in and put it to her tongue.
“That’s amazing,” she managed, so broadsided by the sight of him she could hardly speak. The corners of his mouth tucked in in sexy acknowledgement.
“It’s got an espresso base,” he said.
“He’ll tell you it’s his signature sauce,” Esme said, “but I happen to have the same cookbook.
New Essentials
, by Alessandro Aquilino.” She said the name as if she spoke Italian.
He ignored her. He stood there with the press notice in his hand, not reading it, his eyes on Liz.
“I’m going to have to ask for decaf,” she said. It was lame, but it didn’t matter. She was still holding her salad. “I’ll just take this over to the buffet table,” she said.
“Make sure you come back,” he said. “I’m going to save my best steak for you.”
She smiled and turned and wove her way through the party, almost tipsy from the racket he’d provoked in her. Thinking, All right then, cataloguing his features in her mind: the slightly hooked nose and the green eyes and the heavy beard that meant he would never look clean-shaven. Thinking how European he seemed in a charcoal shirt and pants, the faint accent (marvelling and thinking, I’ll have that, the way you might when you see the perfect object on a shelf in an antique store, not that you want it so much as that you’re sick with yearning to be the sort of person who would own it). And then she spotted a woman standing gracefully by the buffet table, arranging the bowls and platters, and it was Mary Magdalene.
Well, Liz had the advantage. She got to watch Mary Magdalene lift her head and register Liz – distaste, you’d have to call her
expression – and then almost immediately produce a smile. She had one of those unravelling topknots that look so great with thick, wavy hair and classic features. Six or so years since they’d seen each other. Since the summer of the swing accident. Of course she was running with an arty crowd now.
“We’re living in Point Douglas,” Mary Magdalene said. “I just love it there. It’s an old farmhouse from before the Louise Bridge was put in.”
“You’re back with George?”
“George Stonechild? I haven’t seen him in years.” Somebody passed her a foil package of supermarket cabbage rolls and she smiled a thank-you that actually looked sincere. “Krzysztof and I bought the house three years ago,” she said.
Chris Toff and I
, Liz heard, but then Maggie glanced towards the barbecue and she got it. “Oh!”
Mary Magdalene took Liz’s salad and pried off the lid. “Wild rice,” she said appreciatively, and stuck a spoon in the bowl. Then she asked how Sylvie was.
“She’s great. She’s got a role at the Fort this summer, as a historical enactor. The daughter of the factor, actually. She’s loving it – it’s just her thing. She’s getting tall.”
“Lovely Sylvie,” Mary Magdalene said. “She has long bones, that girl.”
Liz, of course, was experiencing an insane attack of amnesia regarding the name of the child who’d had his nose broken while under her care. “So is my little guy,” Mary Magdalene volunteered unhelpfully. “Getting tall, I mean. He’s into tai chi. I have to leave in an hour. He had a class tonight and I have to pick him up.”
She reached a hand towards Liz with that sympathetic expression she had perfected. She had a beautiful mouth. Even when she was serious, her mouth carried the memory of her smile.
“Liz, someone who might know about George Stonechild is Peter Biggin. He ran into George on the street in Vancouver about five years ago. He was in really bad shape. Into hard stuff, apparently. It’s very sad. Anyway, Pete would be the one to ask.”
Liz gave Mary Magdalene a wide berth for the next hour. She talked for a while to Steve Presunka, a guy who knew Aiden. “He’s doing an intensive for a master’s in counselling,” she said.
“Lying on the floor on pillows, re-enacting his birth?” Steve said, and treacherously she laughed. Steve Presunka was always inclined to be dismissive of Aiden, though it was hard to know why: he was a thirty-five-year-old man who worked in a bicycle shop.
She moved on. It wasn’t her scene but she knew enough from the Film Group job to fake it, and she worked the yard like a pro. She never actually looked at Krzysztof but she kept her ears tuned – god, how people fawned over him. And then, standing with a plastic tumbler of warmish white wine in her hand, she glanced back and saw that Mary Magdalene was over at the hibachis. She witnessed the tableau of their goodbye kiss. She saw how beautiful and well-matched they were; she saw domesticity, possession in the clasp of Mary Magdalene’s hand on his upper arm. But as Mary Magdalene turned away – as she was in the very act of turning – Krzysztof angled his head and scanned the crowd, and Liz knew he was looking for her.
She took her time, but she didn’t have the will to wait forever. When she drifted casually over to the hibachis, he pointed to the steak he’d been saving for her, a tenderloin with fine marbling. She turned her full smile on him, not bothering to be coy. He served everyone else and then he grilled their steaks together. Liz went to the buffet table to get salads. Walking back with two plates, she saw him clearly – a man who risked caricature in his perfection – and she felt a sudden euphoria. She hadn’t known
his provenance when she first caught sight of him, and what she’d felt in that moment, it was like a calling, a command from a gleaming realm where the proportion of things was totally different.
They carried their plates towards the river. A massive cottonwood grew so close to the collapsing bank that you could see it would be threatened by the end of the summer. Esme had made no pretence of landscaping. There was a cement wall halfway down the yard, almost hidden by ragweed and burdock, the foundation of an old building. Liz and Krzysztof sat on that wall with their plates between them, and he handed her the steak knife and fork he was carrying for her in his shirt pocket. He had the wide shoulders of a construction worker. She thought how daring it was for a man to take up work that said, I’ll show you a world you’ve never before imagined. The meat was tender, so delicious that she understood why people would kill for a good steak.
Below them the brown Assiniboine crawled. “It’s great to live by water,” Krzysztof said. He was off to the States for a few months. He was working on a feature screenplay; he had an artist-in-residence gig at a lake just outside Minneapolis.
“Oh,” she said. This was such a clear sign that she was helpless before it. “I’m taking my daughter to Minneapolis at the end of August,” she said. “To a festival.” There are things you have no idea you are looking for until you find them.
The sunset was behind them but mango-coloured light shone off the trees on the far bank. It seemed it was never going to get dark. The music stopped abruptly at one point and excited cries rose from the yard. Then they heard what everybody else had heard: a loon calling, its wonderful, insane cry floating on the evening air.
“I’ve never heard a loon in the city,” Liz said.
It called again. It was upriver, to the east. “That’s the tremolo,” Krzysztof said. “It’s normally a distress call, although sometimes
you hear a pair doing a tremolo duet when they fly over their own territory.”
Liz could hear her blood thudding in her ears.
“So, you married?” Krzysztof asked, and she understood that it did not lower her stock with him to say, “Yeah. Sort of.”
“Happily?” he asked.
“Most of the time,” she said.
Venus started to shine like the point of light at the centre of the
TV
screen when Liz was a girl. The music had resumed. As they walked back up to the house, a guy appeared on the riverbank to the east. He was holding something up to his mouth, like a harmonica. He came closer and the something was revealed to be a black-and-white plastic bird: a loon whistle shaped like a loon. The crazy tremolo flew out again, over Van Morrison’s reedy voice. Everybody laughed and exclaimed.
They stepped into the yellow light of the tiny, crowded house and put their bloody plates on the counter. Krzysztof made his way through the crowd and she followed him. Into Esme’s bedroom, full of arty kitsch, a cheap white Mexican blanket spread over the bed. He went over to the bookshelf. He’s going to show me something he’s written, she thought with a sinking feeling, or an article about his work. Instead he pulled down a novel at random and ripped a page out of it. Then he picked a pen out of the mess on the bedside table and scrawled something on the page.
She didn’t look at it when he handed it to her. Like someone who had done this sort of thing before, she just folded the paper twice and tucked it into the sweetheart bodice of her sundress, then followed him back to the kitchen.
There’s been a water main break on Evanson, and the street is blocked with ugly piles of river clay. Liz is stepping in muck before
she realizes it. The dog ignores the mud, he’s fully absorbed in sniffing the hedges. Liz has a plastic bag of his poop in her hand; she hasn’t found a place to ditch it. She stands, momentarily disoriented, then pulls Max around and starts to walk back up Wolseley Avenue. When she gets to Augusta, Aiden is riding towards her.