The Master of Happy Endings

by Jack Hodgins

  Now he had the job and didn’t know how he could face it.

  How had Axel Thorstad responded to this? He could not remember now if he had given advice. To put the five years of education down to experience and start again with another career in mind? To speak to a lawyer about suing the Faculty of Education for misleading encouragement? He could hardly write out a script for Angus to memorize in order to survive his first week.

  There may have been nothing he could say, beyond expressing the hope that an experienced colleague next door would take him under his wing, that a beauty down the hall would inspire him with her eccentric example, that the failure of another teacher on staff might prove the job was impossible if you didn’t respect and truly care about the students you were supposed to serve. There was no way of knowing, now, what advice he’d given then. He’d probably suggested that Angus would learn how to teach by teaching, like everyone else. Whatever he’d said, their recent encounter at the homeless shelter suggested it hadn’t been enough.

  Should he feel guilt for being a model that someone else believed could be duplicated with sheer willpower? Angus Walker had arrived in his classroom when Thorstad had had two decades of experience behind him, but this was probably not enough to know how to save the life of a frightened young man who’d been sadly misled. Perhaps Walker in his first year had had no Oonagh Farrell down the hall or Topolski next door to help him get started, no Barry Foster as a cautionary tale. Now, according to the dishwasher at the drop-in centre, Angus Walker had a reputation for making life hell for anyone who tried to help him.

  One Angus was enough to have on your conscience—though of course there could be others he didn’t know about. He supposed he’d never thought of this before. He wished he hadn’t thought of it now. Whatever else might happen while he was here in Los Angeles, he could not allow himself to add another failure to the list.

  16

  The silver-blue convertible was waiting for him outside the gate but Oonagh was not alone in it. When Thorstad approached, a young man with sun-bleached hair and a toothy smile leapt out and held the door open for him. “Corbin is off to beg and plead with his agent today,” Oonagh said. Corbin blew a kiss to Oonagh and lightly squeezed Thorstad’s elbow, then turned on his heel to set off briskly up the sidewalk.

  “I didn’t keep you waiting?” Thorstad closed his door and buckled his seat belt. “Our courier friend cornered me just now, wanting to know if there were any books about hurricanes in my bag!”

  Oonagh looked up to the pale blank sky. “He’s expecting a hurricane?”

  “He’s been hearing news from home. New Orleans.” It was necessary to sit at an angle in order to avoid propping his knees against the dashboard. “Crime everywhere, orphan babies playing in mud, his brother’s house still without a roof. He wants to understand what made this mess.”

  She dropped her forehead to the top of the steering wheel. “And he thought your books would help?”

  Thorstad admitted he’d had to disappoint. “A geography textbook won’t explain what happened to his family. I suggested he visit a library, dig up newspapers and newsmagazines. He agreed, but still intends to corner me in his coffee breaks.”

  She recovered from her mock despair and placed the palm of her hand against his cheek. Involuntarily he caught the hand in his and kissed a fingertip. “I’m a lucky man today.”

  She laughed, and took back her hand, and steered them too quickly out into the impatient city traffic. “I should have guessed you’d still be teaching. I’d be in a loony bin by now if I hadn’t quit.”

  “But you were a brilliant teacher.” The students had loved her—adored her perhaps. Girls imitated, boys were beguiled. Those colleagues who weren’t afraid of her were enchanted. He was himself bewitched—and hadn’t, it seemed, entirely recovered. The long line of her thigh was enough to remind him of this. And her pale green eyes.

  She laughed, and shifted into the left lane to pass a dawdling Buick. “I was a good entertainer, which may look like good teaching but isn’t quite. I needed a different sort of audience, and grew tired of writing my own scripts—lesson plans! Are teachers still forced to make lesson plans?” Now, abruptly, they were in the right lane again, too close behind a black Volvo. “I thought we’d visit the Huntington Library after lunch.” She turned onto another, narrower, but just as busy street. “If you’re still a little loopy about English Literature, that is. The Ellesmere manuscript is there behind glass.”

  He should have welcomed the prospect of seeing the Chaucer manuscript, but he suspected that any pleasure in it would be undermined by his sense of being in the wrong place. He was beginning to feel it already. The buzz of anticipation in his limbs did not override this. Travis was scheduled to be working all afternoon, but things could change—a scene could be postponed. He imagined Rosie talking him into an afternoon of kayaking, experimenting with cocaine. He saw the kayak overturn and Travis disappear. How did parents stay sane?

  Wind stirred up his hair. Not all convertibles were made for people his height. Topolski had had a convertible, he remembered—smaller than this. A playboy’s sort of exotic car. Of course this Mercedes could belong to both Oonagh and Topolski if Topolski was still in the picture. But if Topolski was still in the picture, why she hadn’t told him yesterday?

  Her house was a white two-storey flat-roofed box in Venice Beach, not six feet from a neighbouring house on either side and apparently no wider than the one-car garage they drove into. He was finding it a little hard to breathe—anxiety or hope, he wasn’t sure which. An unfamiliar shakiness had invaded. He followed her down a walkway on unsteady legs and in through a side door partially obscured by a cluster of tall bamboo. Inside, they were in an all-purpose room—to one side a small kitchen with white walls and wood-panel cupboards, to the other a lounge area that looked out through a wall of glass upon a small herb garden and a narrow canal with a red canoe roped to the concrete wall.

  “No gondolas,” Oonagh said. She tossed her wide-brimmed hat onto a chair and went behind the counter that divided the room. “It’s small, but it’s mine. I have an old farmhouse outside Toronto where I still do the occasional bit of stage work. Another Life is what you might call my pension.” She held up a tall amber bottle. “Too early?”

  “A coffee maybe.”

  “Coffee later. I need to check my messages. I’m waiting for something.”

  She carried her half-filled glass towards an open doorway but paused when a young man with wet hair and a freshly scrubbed look to his handsome face came bouncing happily down the narrow staircase from above. “You’re up already?” she called, obviously sarcastic. “It’s only noon!” When he’d reached the bottom of the stairs, she turned back to introduce him. “Skyler Shreve.” He wore baggy surfer shorts and a bright red muscle shirt, and flip-flops on his large hairy feet. “He’s camping here till he finds a place of his own.”

  “Just another bloody actor,” the young man said, tilting his head apologetically. “Currently looking for work.”

  “Fresh from the Alberta oil patch,” Oonagh called from another room. “God help us all!”

  “I’m on my way!” shouted Skyler Shreve.

  Through the glass wall Thorstad watched him set off alongside the canal, perhaps, like the other young man, to beg and plead with his agent.

  She hadn’t tidied up for company. Books lay open on the floor. Blouses and slacks had been draped over the counter stools. Unwashed dishes were stacked beside the sink. Thorstad could have predicted this—she had never had the time or patience for housework.

  But no man’s shoes had been kicked off inside the door. No shirts hung from a doorknob. Obviously Skyler Shreve was tidier than Oonagh, and Topolski was either meticulous about his own belongings still or did not share this house.

  “So there really are canals in Venice Beach,” he said, when Oonagh returned to the room. He’d never thought of this before. “You may have noticed how often men in novels go off
to Venice and die. Professor Aschenbach was only one of many. In one, an elderly professor returns to his childhood home in Venice and gradually turns back into a wooden puppet—guess who!” It seemed he had got himself into something he didn’t know how to get out of. He was more nervous than he’d anticipated. “Even Turgenev. I remember saying ‘Oh no!’ out loud when this fellow travelling south from Russia makes a sudden detour to visit Venice. He’d coughed—just once—early in the novel, and no one ever coughs in a novel unless . . . Long before he sees the Rialto Bridge you know the poor man’s doomed.”

  Oonagh was barely suppressing her laughter. “If you’re trying to tell me you’re afraid of my cooking, relax. I’ve made a reservation—walking distance from here.” She placed her emptied glass on the counter.

  He couldn’t seem to stop what he’d started. “It was a woman in the Henry James. A man, I think, in the Unsworth. I don’t think anyone died in the McEwan but I seem to remember someone going crazy.”

  Now, grinning widely, she stepped close and gently took hold of his shirt front with both hands. “But my darling Axel, this is Venice California where no one ever dies. Not even if they cough! They find a yoga teacher and live forever.” She stepped back. “There!” She’d undone his top shirt button. “Now we can breathe!”

  She may have had little interest in housework but she had always showed interest in how others dressed. She dressed, herself, in clothes that were carefully chosen, flattering to her figure, immaculately clean and pressed. Today she’d draped a dark blue filmy scarf over her shoulders, its patterned ends lying down the front of a light blue linen top. Blue pointed shoes peeked out from below her white slacks. She had worn expensive shoes even then, had owned too many. They had teased her about this— would she go without food in order to spend her salary on shoes? He could imagine, now, that her closet overflowed with them.

  A collection of vaguely human carvings had been arranged along a shelf inside the wall of glass. They were each about six inches tall, their outlines appearing to follow the natural grain of the wood, so that rather than attempting to imitate some standard human form they appeared to be solid representations of human attitudes. Horror, delight, and the shrinking violet were easily recognized. Hilarity as well, and despair.

  “My family,” she said, selecting one small figure to stand in the palm of her hand. “All mute.” She laughed. “They don’t yell at me like the directors when my acting stinks. Or write nasty things in reviews. Unlike the men in my life, they don’t nag at me to retire and come live in South Dakota, or northern Quebec. And unlike my widowed sister, they don’t remind me that I might have had children instead of making a public spectacle of myself.”

  After replacing the figure, she took up a multicoloured bag off a chair and looped it over her shoulder. “Now! Shall we eat?”

  She led him out across her small patch of greenery and onto the canal-side walkway, which they followed past several small houses, some of them identical to hers, with windows through which you could see someone moving vaguely in the shadows. Thorstad reduced the length of his stride to match hers, conscious of her hip brushing lightly against him. He was again aware of the unnamed scent she must have worn all her life. Half a century had passed since they had walked together, or touched. His body hadn’t forgotten. His body’s instincts would have him run a hand lightly down her bare arm, if he dared. He’d known the feel of it once. He knew the feel of it even now, in his nerve ends. That he had loved this woman fiercely once was not an imagined thing, though he’d sometimes feared it might be. She had done her best, for his sake, to pretend she hadn’t noticed.

  Sooner or later the question had to be asked. He asked it now, while they weren’t facing one another. “Is there a reason we haven’t really talked about Topolski?”

  “We haven’t talked about what’s-his-name either—Barry Foster. Did someone tell me once the man was in jail?”

  “He wouldn’t be in jail after all this time, surely—not for cooking the company books.”

  “What a grouch!” She paused to breathe in the scent of a scarlet hibiscus alongside the path. “Think what damage he could have done if he’d stayed!”

  Eventually they came out from between two buildings onto the broad walkway bordering a pale expanse of sand that stretched to the sea and off in either direction along the city’s edge. Tall palms grew up from both sand and grass like long-handled feather dusters, some of whose trunks had been decorated with blue and red graffiti. The lower fronds of the closer palms hung grey and ragged as ostrich tails, possibly dead.

  “Sometimes you’d see a fellow juggling three running chainsaws down here,” Oonagh said, “while standing in a ring of fire.”

  “Much as I felt at the beginning of every September.”

  “Your whole career?” She turned abruptly to him, obviously surprised. A stage actress should have understood first-day jitters. “You proved yourself a fine chainsaw juggler in your very first month—that was my impression.”

  “It took most of September every year to get it back. I feel a little like that even now. Dealing with Elliot Evans is much like facing a class of future mechanics who resent the fact they’re forced to read Elegy in a Country Churchyard.”

  Oonagh stepped aside to avoid colliding with a cyclist in a head-down hurry.

  To Thorstad, this walkway appeared to be an orderly sort of flea market, with painters sitting before their easels and craftspeople displaying their wares on a blanket. They passed a row of open-faced shops selling postcards and T-shirts, purses and belts and mugs. Rows of shoulder bags hung from hooks. Most of the tourists or shoppers wore flip-flops on their feet, with shorts and skimpy tops, or in the case of some young men no top at all. Elaborate tattoos crawled up muscular arms.

  “Were we ever that young?” Oonagh said. She’d stopped to watch several tanned youths involved in a game of volleyball. Young males waiting for the ball to come their way explored their own bare chests with the palm of one hand. “We played our own games on a sandy beach, so I guess we must have been.”

  She, too, remembered. Or remembered what she called “games.” Certainly they’d been two young people at play, though Axel Thorstad hadn’t thought at the time that they were merely playing games.

  “Yvonne De Carlo was Miss Venice Beach,” she said. “Did you know that? In 1938, while you and I were in—what?—Grade Two? You remember Yvonne De Carlo?”

  “I do. I also remember a Yvonne De Carlo look-alike flouncing down Hollywood Boulevard.”

  “Oh Lord! Yes!”

  Beyond the volleyball players and the outdoor cafés and children’s playground the grass was available to the less energetic. Some lay on blankets to take in the sun while others chatted over a picnic lunch. A group that might have been a high school class sat discussing something in a remarkably low-key manner. At the foot of a palm tree a young woman in a straw hat and pale green dress sat with her knees pulled up to support the book she was reading.

  “Somewhere along here is where my mother was given the news. While she was reading a library copy of David Copperfield. You may remember knowing this.”

  He supposed it was ridiculous for a seventy-seven-year-old man to be shaken by a surprise reminder of his mother as a young woman. Well, the world must think so anyway, but it felt natural enough to him. Your mother remained your mother, though she had long ago gone from your sight, and your father remained the man who leapt from the building as recently as yesterday. Sometimes what they called the “distant past” seemed as close behind you as your heels.

  Oonagh placed a hand on his arm. “You seemed to think your father’s accident was the most important thing about you. Surely you’ve left all that behind by now.”

  No doubt she could see that he hadn’t. “Does anyone know where Centurion Pictures used to be?”

  “Well, we found it once, didn’t we? Long ago.” She started walking again. “We could look again, I suppose, if it’s important.”


  Three young men in skimpy swimsuits were suddenly upon them, throwing their arms around Oonagh. This was a noisy reunion—with male shrieks and explosions of laughter and much dancing about. No one seemed to listen to anyone else. The pleasure in this reunion seemed an end in itself. Oonagh stood unmoving, apparently accustomed to this, her smile wide and steady and patient.

  Then, as suddenly as they’d appeared, they rushed off, the one in the middle holding a hand on either side, their flip-flops slapping the pavement. Oonagh was left behind to shake her head and smooth back her hair. “So many boys without mothers.” She took hold of his hand and led him down a narrow alley between two buildings painted aquamarine. “Half the young hopefuls in L.A. have camped in my little house.” She seemed to find this amusing. “Mother Courage or Mother McCree, I’m not sure which.”

  The air inside Roberto’s smelled powerfully of seafood, though all the windows were open—were, in fact, without glass. Inside a tank of bubbling water several lobsters crept across the false sea floor, perhaps hoping for a tunnel that would lead to a safer ocean. The nearest of them might have been appealing to Axel Thorstad for help. A slight young man with dark eyes and a broad head of black hair turned away from the table he’d been serving and threw his arms out wide to welcome Oonagh with a grand embrace. He shook hands with Miss Farrell’s “very much welcome guest.”

  “A friend of my youth,” Oonagh said. “The amazing thing is that neither of us has aged a day.” Her laughter rumbled just beneath her words.

  Roberto smiled, and dipped a shallow bow. “But of course.” He led them to a small table in the back corner. Some Spanish was exchanged, haltingly on Oonagh’s part. Elena’s widower understood little. Apparently Roberto’s tooth was painfully roto. He pulled down his bottom lip to display. “Debo ver un dentista.”