“I’ll have to think about this. What to do with the rest of the class while you are doing the writing is one of the questions.”
“I’m sure you can figure that part out,” Jacintha said with a smile.
Richard thought again of what Jenny had told him about her vision for the play. Prospero’s care of Miranda was certainly central, but Miranda and Ferdinand’s love story might just be the real key.
As though reading his mind, Jacintha said, “So, I thought the climax could be Miranda and Ferdinand’s wedding. And then the denouement —”
“Hold on! You’ve come up with some good ideas. I’ll think about them and talk to the class about your group wanting to take the writing on, and we’ll see where we might go from there. Thanks for caring and thinking so deeply about it.”
“Right. More another time.”
As she was getting up, she held his gaze and smiled so warmly that Richard’s heart beat faster. After she left, he sat for several minutes, lost, not so much in thought as in the lack of it.
ELEVEN
THE GROUNDS AROUND City Hall were buzzing with activity. The turnout was good, about seventy-five, a lot of the usual suspects — earnest seekers of justice and inveterate agitators. Greg and Brian had put up posters at UBC and on Commercial Drive asking people to bring sheets and blankets and anti-Olympics, pro–affordable housing placards. Tanya had posted the same information on Facebook. It was a Sunday, so city hall was closed.
Brian had managed to bring two dozen shopping carts in a borrowed van and people were draping them with sheets and blankets to represent where the homeless kept their pitiful belongings.
“Where the hell did he get them? Must have stolen them,” Skitch said to Jacintha. “Greg said he’d be a good gofer. And torches. There’s about twelve freakin’ giant torches, tarred rags on poles. He’s fuckin’ good.”
“And what did you do, my little layabout?”
“Nothing so far, but I’m here to raise hell.”
Brian was directing some of the protesters to parade along Twelfth Avenue with signs reading Houses, Not Circuses, and Olympic Excess Means Human Suffering, and similar things. One proclaimed, not mincing words, Fuck the Olympics. Skitch grabbed that one and proceeded to march and yell the same words to the traffic passing by.
The elegant art deco city hall, with its broad lawns and formal flower beds, made a nice contrast to the scruffy blanket-and-cart campground. More signs came out: Home Sweet Home, and My Stinking Low-Cost Housing. A few people spread blankets on the ground, opened picnic baskets, and offered around sandwiches, buns, fruit. The posters advertising the rally had stipulated no alcohol or drugs, but now and then pot smoke enhanced the air.
All six members of the group were there: Tanya, Brian, Greg, Beth, Skitch, and Jacintha. The Gaia Warriors — “Collective” was too tame a word, they’d decided — were ready to fight the power.
Beth stood with a group of protesters near one of the carts, and Tanya and Greg had joined Skitch on the sidewalk parade. Brian scurried around, keeping an eye on everything, and Jacintha watched for a while from a place off to one side, holding a large carrier bag.
The light was dimming as Jacintha walked over to look at the torches piled together on the lawn. They were impressive, as Skitch had said. Five-foot-long poles with generous wrappings of tarred cloth.
When darkness fell, Brian shouted, “I need twelve torchbearers!” and out of the twenty who rushed forward, he chose the lucky ones. When he lit the torches, a cheer went up, and everyone started chanting, “Housing! Housing! Housing!”
The bearers, under Brian’s direction, marched up and down the sidewalk, also chanting.
People gathered to watch on the porches of the large, expensive houses across Twelfth Avenue, and a security guard, who had perhaps been dozing in the bowels of city hall, suddenly appeared. He said nothing, just took out his phone. Within five minutes several police cars had arrived, and close behind them a fire truck, all with sirens blaring.
“Overkill,” Jacintha said to Skitch.
“Move off the grounds quietly and there’ll be no trouble,” a policeman shouted over a bullhorn.
A few people started moving down the hill to Broadway. Most stood their ground.
“Lay the torches down. Now!”
A fireman advanced with a hose. Some of the bearers put the torches down and stepped away. The ones who held on were hosed and fell to the ground.
Tanya took pictures with her cellphone, until Greg shouted, “There’s no way we’re getting hosed — come on,” and they both ran to the back of the building and down to Broadway.
Brian grabbed Beth’s arm and said, “Come on, the hoses are bad enough, but it’ll be tasers next.”
“Are they tasering people now?”
“Not yet, but some of those guys are bound to resist arrest, and things could get ugly.”
It was then that they both saw Jacintha picking up one of the torches from a man the fireman hadn’t got to; she dashed over to a cart covered with a blanket.
“Get back,” she yelled at the two women standing near it, and after they’d run away, she lifted the blankets and threw in the torch. With a great whoosh, flames shot six feet high.
A man started to throw cardboard signs onto the cart. Within moments, a fireman was blasting water at the cart and managed to keep the fire contained.
As Skitch and Jacintha raced down to Broadway, a TV news crew pulled up on Twelfth, too late to get pictures of the hose-downs.
“I’m going to phone the station and give our group credit for organizing this,” Jacintha said.
“Yeah, okay. But shit! Jacintha. What was in that cart?”
“An open container of gasoline,” Jacintha said. “Just a small one,” she added with a smile.
“Wow. You’re amazing. Someone could have got hurt, though. Did you see that woman? Maybe she was burned.”
“No, she was okay. Almost drowned, but not burned. And now she knows who we are — now everyone knows who we are: the Gaia Warriors!” She pulled off her black, knitted cap and her hair cascaded down and shone under the street light.
“Yeah, you’re a goddamned warrior. An Amazon. The others might be a bit pissed, though. Especially Brian. He likes to think he’s in on all the final decisions.”
“He’ll have to get used to being wrong about that.”
Jacintha called the local TV stations: “The Gaia Warriors will strike again, like we did at city hall tonight, unless action is taken to provide housing for the homeless. We’ll go much further.”
“What do you plan to do?” asked the reporter at each station.
“Tell the mayor to act now or he’ll find out,” Jacintha said. “End of message.”
“What’s ‘much further’?” Skitch asked.
“I don’t know,” Jacintha said. “We’ll play it by ear.”
“Fuck, that was exciting,” Skitch said. “You’re exciting.”
He pulled her close, kissed her, and groaned, and Jacintha felt him hardening against her.
“Why won’t you sleep with me?” he asked. “I know you want to.” He put a hand on her breast.
“You know nothing,” she said, slapping his hand. She wiped her mouth and started walking again.
“I know I make you hot. I’m not stupid. So why won’t you? You’re driving me nuts.”
“Look, those roses are gorgeous,” Jacintha said, as they passed a front-yard garden.
“Jacintha!”
“You wouldn’t be able to handle me.”
“That’s crazy. Of course I can handle you. I can satisfy you big time.”
“Big time?” she said, and laughed.
“Yes. You’ll cry for more.”
“I repeat: you can’t handle me. You don’t know what I need. I’m complicated.”
“Tell me, then. Tell me what you need.”
“Maybe later. I need to get to know you better. Know that I can trust you.”
“A
h, Jassie. You can trust me. Don’t torture me.”
“Don’t whine like a big baby. Come on now. Let’s get a bus. I need to get home and get my beauty sleep.”
“All right,” he said. “But I don’t know if I can put up with waiting much longer.”
“You’ll wait, my little friend. You’ll wait,” Jacintha said, looking at the sharp outline of his upper lip and the deep groove above. Like lips sculpted by Michelangelo, she thought, as she had before, then quickly pulled her mind away from the danger, for her purposes, of such an indulgence.
She took his hand and ran, pulling him after her and feeling smugly pleased when he started laughing.
TWELVE
CAROL WAS IN the living room of Janet Warren, psychologist, whose card said Traditional and Alternative Counselling. Janet sat opposite her in a matching armchair upholstered in dark-blue cotton. A small oriental rug in blues and reds lay on the oak floor between them. A forest of plants covered a table beneath the window, and on the walls were oil paintings, mostly of landscapes and flowers.
“Did you paint these?” Carol asked.
“Some of them. The flowers.”
“They’re good. I like the way you’ve liberated the flowers from vases. And the colours are excellent. There’s some of the dissonance that Matisse used to such masterly effect.”
Carol was reassured by Janet’s good taste, then realized what a snob she was being. She remembered having chastised a friend who’d stopped seeing a counsellor because he was inclined to use malapropisms. “Well,” the friend had said, “if he doesn’t understand words, should I rely on him to understand me?”
There was something motherly about Janet, even though she was younger than Carol, maybe forty to Carol’s forty-eight. Janet had short, straight, brown hair and wore black-framed glasses, a green shirt-dress, and sandals. Her hands had been soft and warm when she touched Carol’s arm lightly as she greeted her at the door.
“Thank you,” Janet said. “Do you paint?”
“No. My father was quite a well-known painter — Aubrey Leland. I teach art history.”
“A professional eye, then. I’m flattered. And I’ve heard of your father. I’ll look for his work. Can I see it locally?”
“They have a few of his paintings at the Carlton Gallery on South Granville Street.”
“Good. Well. We should probably get down to business. Why don’t you tell me what you’d like to deal with in this session, and then we can discuss which approach you’d like me to take. We can use meditation, hypnosis, or past-life regression, for example. Or,” she laughed, “all of the above. Then there’s dream work and journalling, among other things.”
God, Carol thought. Maybe she’s flaky. At least she doesn’t have unicorns and fairies on the walls. “Oh, I don’t know. Could we just talk for a while?”
“Of course. Would you like to talk about your father?”
“No.”
“Perhaps later, then.”
A sudden vision of her father’s eyes came to Carol, eyes that could be fierce when he was disappointed in her. She heard his voice saying, “How’s my girl today?” and she felt a moment of grief. Grief didn’t surface too often now, ten years after his death. Anyway, it was something she knew how to deal with.
She didn’t know exactly where to start today, but it was costing her one hundred dollars an hour, so she thought she’d better say something. “I’m having an affair,” she blurted, without knowing she was going to say it. “And I don’t really want to.”
She started to cry, and Janet moved a box of tissues to the arm of Carol’s chair.
“Why don’t you want to?”
“Because I love my husband.”
“I see. Go on.”
Her nose was running and the tears wouldn’t stop and wet tissues were piling up in her lap. Janet moved a wastebasket nearer to Carol’s chair.
“He won’t make love to me anymore. Richard, my husband. We had an accident. I mean, our house came down in a landslide and our boarder, Jenny, was killed.” Carol took a deep, gasping breath and waited a moment. Then she went on. “Richard was badly injured, but he’s healed well. I wasn’t hurt physically as much as he was, but I think we both thought, during the slide, that we were going to die. Now Richard wants to change his life completely, do good works or something. He thinks sex is selfish and trivial, I guess. Anyway, he seems to have given it up and I’ve become kind of … well, obsessed with it. Maybe not obsessed. I don’t know. In the first weeks after the landslide, I was just horny a lot — oh, I hate that word, but it’s appropriate — but lately I’ve been getting these surges, almost electrical, and then I have an ache that lasts for hours. When that began to happen, I started the affair. It’s been helping a little.”
“I see.”
“It feels good to cry. I haven’t really cried like this. Not full out. I didn’t realize how much I’d bottled up.”
Janet was silent as Carol’s tears and sobs gradually subsided, then said, “I’ve heard about this kind of situation before — not with a married couple, but with two male friends who barely escaped death in an accident. One who’d previously liked his beer and his casual affairs became celibate and highly spiritual; the other went from being quite a mild, average Joe, to being wild and promiscuous. Near-death experiences often bring about big changes, a hunger for reassessing one’s life, everyone in his or her own way. And the death of a friend has intensified this for you and your husband. We might say you have developed a lust for life. Pun intended!”
Janet laughed, but Carol didn’t.
“I suppose it’s interesting to know it might be a kind of syndrome,” Carol said, “but it’s not really comforting. Did the two men ever go back to normal — you know, to their previous selves?”
“I don’t know. They weren’t my clients. Anyway, whatever happened to them wouldn’t predict your outcome. We need to focus on you.”
“You make it sound like it’s a psychological thing. But my experience is very physical,” Carol said.
“It can be hard to separate the psychological from the physical,” Janet said. “Each can have a strong effect on the other in many kinds of situations. But listen, you have choices — you’re not a victim of these feelings, whatever their origin. Would you like to try an exercise? A simple meditation?”
“Yes, all right.”
Carol felt better after meditating. She’d gone to her “peaceful place,” and had invited Richard to visit her there. She’d assured him of her love.
Her homework was to start writing letters to Richard, not for him to see, but as a way of refreshing her memory about all the good things they’d shared. Janet said it was important not to show them to Richard, because he might interpret them as pressure.
“Give him more time to sort things out,” Janet said.
“What about my affair?” Carol asked.
“Quit if you can. But be patient with yourself. Here’s a suggestion. When strong sexual feelings arise, talk to them. Personify them. Have your sexually needy self talk to your peaceful self.”
“Okay,” Carol said, but doubted that she would. Flaky raised its embarrassing head. On the whole, though, she had found the session helpful. It was good to talk to someone so openly. She missed her dearest friend, Sandra, who had moved to New Zealand with her husband, who happened to be Richard’s best friend. They kept in touch, but Carol had so far been embarrassed to reveal her worries about Richard or her struggle with her hypersexual state. Face to face, she might have told her, but it was difficult over the phone or in a letter or email. Adding to the difficulty was that they had been “happy couples” together, and a bit smug about their good fortune.
THIRTEEN
RICHARD HAD WALKED a block when he saw a woman on her knees on the grass, digging up buttercups, happily unaware of the futility of lawns. A couple walking their dog smiled at him, content, it seemed, to regularly pick up excrement from the boulevards. A man, one of the many in the neighbourh
ood who mowed his lawn what seemed like every other day, was cutting the already-short grass, the noise and gas of his mower polluting the street. Do they have any inner lives at all, Richard wondered, and he thought of his mother, constantly vacuuming. Perhaps their inner lives consisted of enumerating with satisfaction each chore completed. Perhaps the noise drove all other thoughts from their heads, and they enjoyed a type of meditation. Was there a happiness in that kind of life that he would never achieve? Of course, the avid clippers and dust-suckers might be slowly going mad, the only evidence of it the increased frequency of their obsessive activities.
Richard was thinking grimly of all the silent madness in the world, when his heart lurched at a sudden, terrible cry coming from an elderly woman sitting on her porch, her back straight, her hands folded neatly on her lap, her mouth wide open. Her cry seemed to be coming from so deep inside her that he could hardly bear to listen, and when he moved toward her to see if she needed help, he was stunned to see her start to smile, apparently not agitated at all.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
She didn’t answer, kept smiling, so he slowly turned and walked away. He’d gone no more than half a block when the awful sound rose again from her chest, her throat, her mouth, like an alien being trying to escape. He kept walking, but he was shaking, and an echo of that wail seemed to be building up in his own chest. He walked six more blocks before he felt reasonably calm.
When he returned home, Carol called him into the kitchen, where she was working on her lecture for the next day.
“Sit beside me here,” she said when he joined her. “I want you to look at this painting and tell me what you think. What’s the story?”
She pushed a book toward him. Richard sat down and felt Carol leaning into him without moving physically, as though her aura was nudging his. He moved his chair back a few inches, and she looked at him sharply but didn’t comment. On the table was a reproduction of a painting by Bonnard called The Dessert. In it, a young man and woman sat at a table holding coffee cups and plates that were empty except for one with a few cherries on it. The wall behind the pair was red-orange, as was the woman’s blouse. The young man wore cool colours, blue and green, and he had a stub of cigarette hanging from his mouth.
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