The Master of Happy Endings

by Jack Hodgins

  Louise did not look pleased.

  “Except Travis,” Evans said. “Who will be one of the invaders.”

  For the benefit of the confused, Travis explained that the homeless would see the fundraiser as an offensively empty gesture. “Most of the money will disappear into paperwork and newspaper ads broadcasting their generosity.”

  “And here is Mr., uh, Axel’s big chance to be Discovered.” The plastic surgeon seemed pleased to offer this. “What will your costume be?” There might have been a hint of malice in the question.

  “Yes yes.” Camilla Evans seemed delighted to insist. “A wise magistrate? Something tall and important.”

  Thorstad looked into the white tablecloth where his plate had been before it was swept away by Evans, wondering if these people would really go to such lengths to make a fool of him.

  “We will be using stuntmen in the battle,” Evans said. “A chance for you to see the sort of work your father must have done.”

  “He doesn’t need a costume,” Travis said. “Just an open book. He can be the Oxford scholar.”

  “What’s that?” Louise suspected forces moving against her. “What am I missing here?”

  But Travis, grinning, said only, “And gladly would he learn and gladly teach.”

  “Explain! Explain!” Louise demanded of Thorstad, thumping her tiny fist on the table.

  Rather than let this become a case of having to be coaxed, and perhaps to make up for his earlier silences, Thorstad sat up straight and cleared his throat and looked down at his hands while quoting as he might if this were his classroom—adopting, as near as he knew how, appropriate pronunciation:

  “Nought oo word spak he more than was neede,

  And that was said in forme and reverence. . . .”

  Perhaps it was their silence that encouraged him, perhaps it was the look of expectation on Travis’s face, but more likely it was the recognition of some familiar sensation in his gut. He pushed back his chair.

  “Nought oo word spak he more than was neede,

  And that was said in forme and reverence,

  And short and quik, and ful of heigh sentence:

  Souning in moral vertu was his speeche,

  And gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche.”

  This was rewarded with a burst of applause, probably more for the surprise than for his performance. Lyle enlightened the puzzled ones. “The Canterbury Tales! I saw the musical! Well—I read the book. It is a book? Maybe I read the libretto.”

  More surprising than the applause was Thorstad’s discovery that he had risen to his feet during his recital. Of course he could not remain standing now, though he found it easier to breathe up here. But even once he was sitting again it appeared that he still had their attention. “I hadn’t intended to become the evening’s Entertainment!” There were smiles on both sides of the table now. “My ideals may be as high as the Oxford scholar’s but I am less humble about them, I’m afraid. We live in a time when almost everything will claim precedence over learning—ambition, the battle for profit, and competition for the limelight.”

  The smiles had become a little strained. Elliot Evans, who’d kept his gaze on his plate from the beginning, closed his eyes.

  “So it’s settled!” his wife said. “You shall come as an Oxford scholar.” At least she hadn’t proclaimed him a pompous fool.

  He hadn’t meant to make a speech. Nor had he intended to give the impression he would go to this thing as the humble Oxford scholar. Of course he would not go at all. But if he were to go he would prefer to dress as the Oxford scholar’s wise creator himself—a friend to princes, a diplomat to foreign lands, and a beneficiary of countless honours and gifts from the crown, a man who managed to achieve old age without retiring from his work. Also without losing his life to the plague, the sword, the noose, the rioting commons, or the King’s scheming magnates.

  “We’ll take our dessert and coffee into the living room,” Camilla said. “Harold promised to bring his mandolin, so I assume he has it in his car.”

  Dessert was a crème caramel, but Thorstad had little interest in eating anything more. He would head for bed as soon as heading for bed was no longer impolite. He was sure that the adored Louise resented the manner in which her request had been granted not just to herself but to everyone at the table, including Axel Thorstad, who did not belong here and had no business receiving a round of applause for showing off. During the applause, she had turned away, though not before distaste appeared on her face. She would laugh, when she and the plastic surgeon reached home, perhaps while they undressed for bed, about the burr she’d put under the old man’s saddle with nothing more than a glance. “Disgusting old fool, nudging me with his knee! Standing to lecture us! Why do the Evanses always invite some boring old stray to their dinners?”

  He was in need of a good deep sleep to help him shake off this sense of having become irrelevant. Thanks to Travis, he had known before sitting down at the table that if he had been a teacher to one of their children he would not be at the table at all, but eating his dinner in some hot interior valley on the back side of this mountain, far from the view of the sea.

  13

  Carl and Audrey Montana had probably imagined his insular life expanding with exposure to life in Greater Los Angeles, but in fact his world had been shrinking steadily since he’d left their home. How else could he have seen it? One night confined to a hotel room, more than two hours strapped into an airline seat, and several hours restricted to a chair amongst strangers at a dinner party. After being released from dinner, and while Travis telephoned a friend for results of his team’s soccer game, he lay in the prison of his bed, his restless limbs refusing to let him sleep. He longed to go for a walk, but imagined tumbling into one of their canyons and impaling himself on a giant cactus. Eventually, unable to endure the sheets any longer, he got up and looked out from the cantilevered deck upon an ocean lit by moonlight, the moon itself reflected in the surface of the Evanses’ pool.

  Far off to his left, the city towers were a blur of smoky-red. He hadn’t asked anyone where in the city Oonagh Farrell might be found. But there was little point in pursuing old friends until he and Travis had found some way of working together. He had advertised for room and board in exchange for tutoring and should not have to lay down the law as well. He should not be expected to nag.

  He walked cautiously down the steps and crossed the concrete patio to the pool where he stood for a few minutes studying the subtle movements of the winking surface before dropping his pyjama bottoms and lowering himself into the water—almost warm, certainly warmer than the sea at home, and a welcome comfort to his grateful flesh. The breaststroke was the quietest way to travel, so long as he kept his feet from breaking the surface and allowed his limbs and body to glide through the silky reassurance of this underwater world. Even after all these years his instinct was to strike out with all his strength and leave his imagined competition behind—but this was a small pool with more tranquil pleasures.

  He had completed only three slow laps when a floodlight slashed down from somewhere and Elliot Evans stepped out of the nearest door in a pair of striped boxer shorts. “Good lord, man, why aren’t you asleep?” He crouched to sit on his heels, with one hand on the ladder’s top rail. He had not put on his glasses. “I often forget to close the cover before going to bed. Camilla’s convinced she’ll find a dead coyote floating here one morning, or a human corpse and a lawsuit. If you don’t mind, I’ll close it now.”

  Trapping you beneath it if necessary, Thorstad supposed he meant. The naked intruder could only apologize, while dripping water up the flight of concrete stairs.

  In the morning he saw that it was impossible to predict the amount of time he would be allowed to spend with Travis this day. Before breakfast, Travis set off with Evans for their “daily run” on the trails along the ridge above. And later, once they’d been driven to the studio, the day became more uncertain still when they were joined, a
s they stepped out of the BMW, by the journalist from Teen TeeVee, wearing his backwards baseball cap again, a pair of dark glasses, and of course his stupid moustache.

  Evans introduced a stern grey-haired woman as a studio publicist—capable, Thorstad hoped, of exercising control over the writer vibrating with excitement beside her. “Yes! Here he is! Candidate for next month’s heart-throb, wearing a maroon silk shirt!” This young man was probably as much a beginner as the “future stars” he interviewed. “Don’t change—I’ve seen the sort of rags you wear in the show.”

  While the publicist and the journalist led Travis off across the pavement, Evans placed a restraining hand on Axel Thorstad’s upper arm. “Too much depends on that magazine. Come, I’ll ask Zeena to find you a room to work in.” The hand guided an irritated Thorstad in through the door to the Writers’ Roost. “I’ve got to hole up and rewrite—completely rewrite a godawful script by someone who seems to think I hired him for his poetry.”

  Inside, the dreadlocked Zeena informed Evans that Morrison had called. “He’s bringing Mandelson with him this morning to ‘reach an understanding’ with you.” She used fingers to make quotation marks in the air.

  Evans shouted, “Christ!” and tossed papers from his desk into the air. “Did he mention bringing pliers or electric prods?” He crossed the office floor to the washroom, slammed the door behind him, and yelled through the wall. “If you poison their coffee I’ll support you in court!”

  At the top of the stairs, as Zeena was about to open the second door on the left, it opened by itself—or seemed to. A bald slightly built young man wearing pink cotton pyjamas rushed out, stopping himself in time to avoid crashing into Thorstad. “I’m going! I’m going! You’re welcome to the room!” Having blundered past them towards the staircase, he shouted, “An emergency meeting! The other writers think my script for Man in the Shaft sucks!” And went thundering down the steps. “Whoopee! This oughta be fun.”

  If this was the fellow who thought he’d been hired for his poetry, he had more to worry about than the opinion of his fellow writers. “Pyjamas?” Thorstad said. “His way of protesting something?” Perhaps he felt enslaved in a work camp here.

  Zeena did not appear surprised by this encounter. “You could see others in sleepwear as well,” she said, encouraging Thorstad to go before her into the small office. “It means only that they’re writing today. It’s their way of saying Do Not Disturb.”

  Once she had closed the door, Thorstad was alone in a room smelling of burnt coffee. It had been furnished with shelves of books and family photos and framed wall posters of Coen Brothers movies, as well as a photo of Clint Eastwood. A copy of Daily Variety lay on the desk. A second magazine was open to a page of unfamiliar faces: “Leading Ladies of Leading Series.” He put on his glasses to read that an actress named Claire Adams was required by law to pay 8.3 million dollars for backing out of an oral agreement. Apparently you had to watch what you said in this city.

  Against the facing wall a whiteboard had been divided by red vertical lines into six columns. Someone named Bert “appeared” for the first time in Act II, while someone named Carrie was “found dead” in Act IV. It seemed that little else had been decided.

  He took a deep breath and sat at the desk, trying to swallow his resentment. He’d been detoured by a jealous overseer, and hoodwinked, it seemed, by an experienced manipulator. Evans was obvious about it, but Travis . . . There’d been a time when Thorstad could quickly size up someone like Travis—intelligent, talented, and determined, with possibly a sense of his own superiority to teachers. They usually acknowledged that you’d earned their respect—once you had—but Travis must have seen that the old man from Estevan Island had rather liked him, and assumed he’d got himself a pushover, easy to ignore once they were far from home.

  But this old man was not so easily defeated. He brought the sample History exam out of his bag in order to see what lay ahead, and sat at the writer’s desk to organize his attack on the twentieth century. The parade of important events was fairly easy to outline.

  The First World War

  The Russian Civil War

  The League of Nations

  The Spanish Civil War

  India’s rebellion against British Rule

  U.S. isolationism

  The Battle of Britain

  The United Nations

  The Korean War

  The Suez Crisis

  The Cold War

  The Vietnam War

  The Fall of the Berlin Wall

  Travis and his friends were probably relieved they hadn’t been born any sooner than they had been in that bloody century. But shockingly, all of these events would be reduced to best-answer questions. Which of the following was the result of the Suez Crisis? Which two of the following groups fought one another during the Spanish Civil War?

  The building was alive with footsteps and excited voices. Maybe this had become a meeting place for an impromptu seminar. Had Chaucer composed his verses with human discourse all around him in his Aldgate mansion, or had he gone back at night to work in his government office on the docks? Herman Melville locked the door to his writing room but it was not known whether he stuffed cotton in his ears. Perhaps the writers of television scripts required less silence than poets and novelists who wished to hear only the sounds inside their heads. At any rate, it seemed the pyjamas’ message did not go so far as to insist on silence.

  After more than two hours in this borrowed room he found it impossible to concentrate any longer while voices rose and fell around him, sometimes with bursts of laughter. There were benches outside he might sit on, and sunlight to enjoy. With the books back in his bag he went down the stairs and past a coffee urn where a woman in orange shorty pyjamas chatted with a grey-haired gentleman in a blue striped nightshirt. Both looked down at their bedroom slippers and stepped back to let him pass.

  Since Elliot Evans was not in his office, the instruments of torture must be at work in some other room. Outside the front door, sun glared off white stucco on every side. The shadows of leaves from a single tree were playing so prettily over a slatted bench near the door that he sat in order to feel the coming and going of the sun on his face, and to watch the constant movement of the leaf-shadows on his hands. His bag of books gaped at his feet, waiting to be put to use. Failure spoke from every tilted volume.

  From his bag he withdrew one of the letters that had arrived as they were about to leave for the airport. The return address was a post office box in some place called Bald Rock, North Carolina. He imagined green hills and pretty university towns, though he knew nothing about the state except what he’d read in the disproportionate number of novels it produced. The writer had included a telephone number, perhaps in case he was desperate to secure a position in North Carolina as fast as possible.

  Dear Sir,

  I may have come upon your advertisement too late to do either of us any good. My attention was drawn to your ad by an acquaintance who knows I once lived on Estevan myself, a very long time ago, but have never returned. Several of us young women and men left about the same time, and found ourselves drifting south to very different lives. I have kept up a correspondence with an old friend in that part of the world—and she has sent the newspaper on to me with a pencilled circle around your advertisement.

  I have an elderly neighbor who remains illiterate despite my occasional efforts to help her. She is a dear old soul, and was so good to me in the earliest years of my widowhood that I am prepared to return her kindnesses in any way I can—and that would include putting you up in my spare room and cooking your meals if you were to move here and dedicate yourself to her education.

  It is very beautiful here in the gentle shaded coves amongst the blue hills. I have referred to Eleanor Sweet as my neighbor (“neighbour,” I suppose, to you), though her house is a little more than two miles from my own. There has been no serious crime hereabouts since my husband, eighteen years ago, was murdered on our fron
t doorstep by two drunken men from just beyond the first hill to the south, and they, thank goodness, have been put away. Their wives do not speak to me when we meet in the nearest town—as though my husband had invited their men to attack him with their axes—but their attitude is of no importance to me now, and I am quite self-sufficient, even to the matter of growing my own food and shooting my own meat.

  Of course there are times when I am homesick for the lovely island of my childhood. How innocent are the young, so easily convinced that an infatuation with a forceful man is reason enough to abandon all that is familiar and dear and follow him off to foreign locations. I am prepared to contribute what I can to your travel expenses and, as I’ve said, supply room and board, if you are inclined to consider this opportunity to make not one but two women happy who are marooned, so to speak, amongst these quiet hills. I have one of the few telephones up this valley, if you are inclined to respond in that manner.

  Yours truly,

  Isobel Cleary (nee Hammond)

  Might he have been more effective as a tutor to an old mountain woman in North Carolina? He might, at least, have exchanged memories of tiny Estevan Island with the woman whose husband had been murdered on her doorstep—since this Isobel Cleary must have been one of the young islanders who’d fled soon after the cattle-rustling had been discovered and the hippie draft dodgers sent packing. Because she’d included the Hammond in her signature, she may have been related to Bo. Had anyone informed her of his death? Axe murderers aside, he could imagine that life in a remote North Carolina valley should offer fewer distractions than Los Angeles.

  He might have reread the letter if the little courier truck hadn’t appeared from behind a squat white building and pulled to a stop in the shade. Yesterday’s delivery man stepped out, holding a large flat envelope. He nodded to Thorstad before going past him up the steps and in through the door to the Writers’ Roost. Within moments he came out again without the envelope. Before getting back into the little truck he turned a worried face to Thorstad. “You still Lost?” A perfect crease had been ironed down the length of his brown trousers.