The Master of Happy Endings

by Jack Hodgins

  Thorstad knew he should not have been surprised, but it was a shock now, as it had always been, to see what time had done to people you’d once known as young and strong and handsome. Somehow it was even worse that this victim of time had been that smartly dressed, sophisticated descendant of aristocrats. His hero and “big brother” from his first day in the classroom was now an ancient creature whose handsome face had been twisted into the permanent shape of complaint. His very ordinary striped shirt and wool pants and old-man’s cardigan had been pulled on without making sure they were tidy. This was once the snappy dresser who had whisked them away from school every Friday afternoon in his little Triumph and driven them down to their table in the nearest pub. Though he’d arrived on the Coast only recently himself, he’d introduced Axel Thorstad to the roads and lakes and beaches of his own backyard.

  Now he was a prisoner in this obviously safe, clean, uncluttered, orderly environment—as removed from the world as Mrs. Montana’s imagined resident cruise ship. No turmoil or frenzy could survive here. You could see that someone had barred the gates against every form of anarchy.

  The musical trio had reached a difficult part, perhaps a phrase they hadn’t sufficiently practised. The pianist—a young woman with blue-and-magenta hair—appeared to be more than a little worried. Perhaps she foresaw getting lost or falling apart before they’d reached an end. The cellist was a short, rather pudgy lad who had not been convinced to keep his elbows high and his feet flat on the floor. His slashing glances around the room appeared to blame the dozing audience for his own shortcomings. Thorstad wondered if Audrey Montana had remembered to have his strings replaced.

  “Well,” Topolski said, perhaps recognizing in Thorstad something of a former version, “he . . . can take us . . . back . . . to that, pulp, pulp town.”

  Before Thorstad could explain that he’d been driven through the town just recently, had even passed by the school where the three of them had taught, Topolski laughed. “We’ll . . . put on . . . p-play? That’s . . . you’re here, for?”

  “What are you talking about?” Oonagh said. “It was a joke! Most of the cast are dead! Now we’re old ourselves. Have you forgotten?”

  She got up and walked away a few feet and stood with her arms folded to observe the trio, who had stopped to consult one another before going on. Going on, it turned out, meant starting a few bars back and taking another run at the passage that had resisted them.

  “Well!” Oonagh said. “I’ll leave you two to arm-wrestle or whatever men do when women are not in the room. I usually pay a short visit to Minnie Odegaard.” The look she gave Thorstad clearly meant Don’t panic, I’ll be back.

  But he was about to panic! His palms were damp. His stomach had developed a sort of tic. His body obviously did not want to be left.

  “So,” Topolski eventually said, while Thorstad stirred his spoon around in his pudding. “Here for . . . my money?”

  Thorstad was uncertain how to react to this. “Oonagh suggested a visit, since I happen to be in the city.”

  “Not even . . . sh . . . she . . . gets all.”

  “I don’t know anything about that, Top. I wasn’t even sure I’d get to see Oonagh while I was here.”

  The eyes narrowed fiercely, the whole face working hard to get this out. “This . . . isn’t that . . . play! Where . . . nice, guy . . . getsssss-uh . . . girl. She won’t . . . abandon, now.”

  “I’m sure she won’t,” Thorstad said. He was beginning to feel ill. “Of course she won’t.”

  “So-o-o-o . . .” Whatever he wanted to say next was causing him greater-than-usual difficulty. His face grew red from the effort. His hands clenched the arms of his chair. Then, suddenly, he relaxed and leaned forward. “Welcome to . . . club.”

  “What club is that, Top?”

  “Dumped! Here! She . . . brought you. Samesss . . . me! Now . . . shhhhhe’s . . . gone!” His face twisted into an awkward sort of grin—possibly malicious.

  Oonagh spoke from the doorway. “So poor Minnie has gone and died on us, Top.”

  “Minnie?” Topolski said.

  She took a deep breath and came in to the suddenly quiet room and sat down at her place at the table. “The nurses thought I’d been told.”

  None of them had eaten dessert. The coffee had gone cold. The trio had begun to pack up their instruments. Schubert had defeated them, at least in this setting. It was impossible to know whether the pianist was about to burst into tears or wallop the cellist with his own instrument.

  Without the music, Thorstad realized there was not just quiet here but absolute silence. The thick rug and heavy drapes and perhaps the ceiling as well absorbed all ordinary sound. People sometimes spoke of the silence of the grave as an imagined absolute, but how could they know of such total silence unless they had been in this room? Such pure soundlessness could scare you half to death. He breathed in this terrible quiet and could not think of a thing to say to Andrzej Topolski, who had assumed they were members of the same club.

  “Thorstad is down here helping a young actor with his exams. Isn’t that something? Has he been telling you that?”

  This was met with a steely indifferent look. “Just . . . sitting. A lump.”

  Oonagh put her hands on the table and began to rise from her chair. “Well, we don’t want to bore you with people who sit like lumps. It’s time we hit the road.”

  “Don’t! . . . You came . . . to take!”

  But Oonagh was standing now, and had pushed her chair in to the table. “You’ll be taken back to your room soon.”

  Topolski stiffened against the back of his chair. “Damn . . . you!” His voice cracked in the midst of this, and, incredibly, he appeared to be, like the pianist, fighting to control the muscles in his face. “Oo-nagh! God’s . . . sake!”

  Oonagh’s voice remained cheerful. “We have to go, my darling. We’ve a long drive ahead of us.”

  “No!” A fist struck the tabletop. “No! No! No!”

  “I’m sorry,” Thorstad began, intending this for Topolski. Or for the person Topolski had been. Or for the attendant who was hurrying across the dining room to do something about this angry old man who was pounding his table.

  “Just come,” Oonagh said to Thorstad. “I go through this every time.” She grasped his arm and guided him towards the open doorway to the hall.

  She said nothing more until they had gone down to the foyer and were about to exit through the glass doors. She paused to let Thorstad open the door for her, and then went through and into the harsh sunlight. “I should have thought of this. He blamed you, you see. He believed she married you only because he had already married me! And that was your fault for throwing us together—or so he claimed. In fact it had nothing to do with you. He can be such a hateful bastard! I suspected at the time that you’d inflated the whole business into some great personal sacrifice, but it didn’t have anything to do with you. I’m sorry, but it really didn’t.”

  Thorstad said nothing all the way across the patterned tiles and past the largest of the splashing fountains, vaguely aware that something important in his life had changed. Then, in the parking lot, with his hand on the car door, he said, “He thought you’d brought me here to leave me behind, as you’d done with him.”

  She laughed, and got in behind the wheel. “Well there you are—one more reminder that you put your life in my hands the minute you get in my car.”

  Once they were both in the Mercedes they sat in silence for a while, looking out between the narrow eucalyptus trunks at the silent ocean. There seemed to be nothing to say. Thorstad, at least, could think of nothing. He fought the impulse to go back inside and apologize to Topolski. But for what? What he was feeling now was not so much guilt as horror. He should apologize for the horror, and for his pity. He would not, however, confess this small, uncomfortable, and unforgivable survivor’s satisfaction— this relief that he hadn’t, himself, reached so bad a state as poor Topolski—the man he’d once admired and know
n he could never equal, now gone far beyond any cause for envy. He felt as though he might put his face in his hands and cry.

  “I always have to sit here for a few minutes afterwards,” Oonagh said. “The ocean calms me a little.”

  “It’s always as awkward as this?”

  When she eventually spoke again, it was not to answer his question. “Someone should have told us long ago how fast it would all go by! We should have been warned.”

  It seemed, in the silence that followed, that some sort of response was expected, but he could think of none. Oonagh may have been talking to herself.

  “Haven’t you ever thought that? That someone should have told us life would go by so fast it would seem, looking back, to have lasted only a few months? Of course it could all be just a dream, couldn’t it?”

  “And what good would it have done if we’d been told this at the beginning?” Thorstad asked. “It’s like saying, You might as well jump off a roof and get it over with, since your life will eventually feel as if it lasted no longer than your father’s.”

  “It is not saying that!” Her open hand tapped the dashboard to the rhythm of her words. “It is saying, Whatever you want to do with your life, don’t put it off, get busy and do it now!”

  “Which you did! And I did! Do you have anything wise to say about when you have done what you wanted to do and then are pushed aside?”

  She tossed her hair and started the engine. “Well!” The famous smile reappeared, though perhaps a little forced. Crows’ feet shot out. Teeth gleamed. “It isn’t over yet! It isn’t bloody over till it’s over! And for all we know it may not be over even then. I intend to stagger onto any stage or TV show that will have me until they have to drag my corpse out of their way to go on. I imagine you will do whatever you have to do to keep on going too. I don’t think either one of us is the sort to sit down in front of a train.” She laughed, probably thinking of the inconvenience they might cause the engineer who noticed the two determined septuagenarians camped on the tracks.

  17

  To Axel Thorstad their famous PCH appeared to be ribbon binding stitched to the frayed edge of the continent, a sinuous low-level border between the endless ocean and the precipitous hills, interrupted occasionally where roads disappeared mysteriously into wedged-in canyons. It was into one of these canyons that Oonagh had promised to take them today. Thorstad sat at an angle to keep his knees off the dusty dashboard, aware that behind him Travis crouched amongst the spare tires, oil cans, and several old coats. For the occasion, Oonagh had borrowed Skyler Shreve’s ancient, dirt-crusted, open-air Bronco with Alberta licence plates.

  “We’re leaving it all behind,” Oonagh said. “We are not neglecting our duties. We have no duties.” For leaving it all behind she’d pulled her hair back tight to her skull and clipped it together with a silver brooch at the back of her neck. “Fortunately I love to drive—almost as much as being on stage—but you may have noticed I’m not especially good at it! Topolski once turned me in to the police—begged them to take my licence away. For the public’s safety, as well as his own.” She laughed so hard at this memory that she put her face right down on the steering wheel.

  “Oonagh! My God!”

  She jerked upright and got them back onto their own side of the road in time to avoid colliding with an orange Hummer. The child driver gave them the finger.

  “Jeeeeez,” Travis said.

  “The police thought he was just another husband who wanted to punish his wife after a fight, but he really was terrified when I got behind the wheel.” She briefly put a hand on Thorstad’s thigh. “Poor man, taking your life in your hands when you’d rather be cramming knowledge into one young actor’s head.”

  Cramming knowledge had never been his goal. It was teaching Thorstad regretted losing. But it was more than that. It was also the sort of comradeship that sometimes developed, where teacher and student might set off together in pursuit of something— experience, discovery, knowledge, and wonder.

  “So this is what it’s like to be a star?” Travis leaned forward to shout this. “Racing up and down the highway in someone’s filthy truck!”

  “And to think I turned down a chance to teach school for forty years.” Oonagh raised both hands above her head. Her laughter was loud, teeth bared to the sky. But she took hold of the wheel in time to avoid mowing down a row of cyclists along the side of the road.

  Eventually they turned inland off the highway and travelled for several minutes through deciduous woods where rough pavement gave way to gravel and dusty trees. “No ocean, no beach, no highway,” Oonagh said. “No sound stages, no cameras.” To Travis, who would not be needed at the studio till early afternoon, she’d promised he could “study your Beowulf or whatever on the terrace of a burnt-down house.”

  She had explained that the house had been a victim of a wildfire down off the Santa Monica range, the property later becoming a state-owned park. According to Oonagh, the site of the burnt house was so far up the canyon there’d be little danger of interruptions. Not even the Forces Dedicated to Defeating Axel Thorstad were likely to find them. As they stepped down onto the parking lot, she informed them there’d once been giraffes and camels and buffalo roaming here, a private zoo, though they wouldn’t find any such creatures here now. “But keep an eye open for rattlesnakes and poison oak.”

  “Just what I need,” Travis said, leaning forward to shake his knapsack a little higher up his back. “A hike through a dusty snakepit.”

  Before setting off up the trail, Oonagh removed a felt hat from the Bronco and used both hands to place it on her head at a tilt. It was the sort of fedora that had been worn by Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca.

  Taking hold of the staff that Camilla Evans had pressed upon him, Thorstad set out to follow Oonagh along a rough track worn into the earth by thousands of hikers before him, the long dry grass crackling against his ankles. This was, he supposed, worth a try. He’d suggested to Travis that he record in his notebook anything related to his course in Geography—anything, that is, to do with characteristics of the earth’s surface, including dirt, rocks, plants, trees, water, and any evidences of Nature’s ravages upon itself: floods, droughts, forest fires, or slides. “If you pay attention to the ground at your feet and the landscape around you, I expect the terms chaparral and oak woodlands to enter our conversation. Also, maybe, ridgeline. Compare all this with home.”

  Oonagh led them up the narrow trail with long strides, a man’s white dress shirt flapping its tails about her hips, and multicoloured bracelets flashing at her wrists. After all these years, he was on another hiking expedition with the radiant Oonagh Farrell. Topolski wasn’t here to lead them, and Barry Foster wasn’t here to complain, but Axel Thorstad was traipsing through unfamiliar bush with the present-day Oonagh Farrell, loud and seductive as ever.

  Though it was Oonagh who led the way, Travis made it clear he knew who was responsible for this excursion. “I figure all teachers must take a course on, you know, how to use other people to get what they want themselves.”

  Thorstad said “Could be,” but added nothing about the satisfaction he felt in knowing he was in charge of matters at last, at least for this morning. He was responsible for the shallow stream they followed for a while, and the stone cottage half hidden behind a leafy tree. He might even have conjured up the sign instructing hikers to yield to bikers, and bikers to yield to riders on horseback.

  “Like we’d argue with a horse!” said Travis, who’d expressed serious doubts about this excursion. He hadn’t come to California for a walkathon.

  Thorstad tried to keep in mind that no one was especially interested in preventing him from doing his job; it was just that they didn’t think his job was important. What was important was the TV series. What was important was Travis being in top form while the cameras were rolling, and co-operating with the magazine reporters. What was important was the money he could eventually earn if Old Man Thorstad did not get in his way with Haml
et or the causes of the Second World War.

  “It’ll be your fault if I’m bit by a rattlesnake,” Travis said.

  Oonagh responded without breaking her stride. “There’s an old well up here we can drop you down if we need to. We’ll tell them you ran away.”

  Nothing remained of the house but its foundation: three successive levels of paved terrace and marble floor in the shade of overhanging trees. A brick barbecue sat at the end closest to a small stream that tumbled down a rocky bank and into a pool before wandering off amongst the overhanging bushes. Off the opposite end of the terraces, a concrete box the size of a caboose was half buried in fallen limbs and other debris, a gaping doorway revealing only darkness inside. Thorstad wondered if, in the event of a wildfire, you would take shelter inside that box or run as fast as you could for the ocean.

  Travis dropped his knapsack to the ground and ran ahead to leap, with arms flung wide, onto the lowest terrace. He turned and aimed his voice at the treetops: “Friends, Romans, Countrymen—lend me your chaparrals!” A mock Mark Antony or Marlon Brando in baggy blue shorts and a white Forgotten River T-shirt. He jumped up to the next terrace, then off to dusty earth, a setloose child, and stepped onto a boulder in the creek’s quiet pool. He balanced, arms out, from stone to stone, and then climbed, quickly, from one boulder to another up the face of the little waterfall. At the top he squatted, and dangled his arms off his knees. “You want me to cram for exams, kemo sabe? Come and get me!” He unravelled the black wire from his pocket and plugged the blunt end into his ear.

  Oonagh shrugged out of her backpack and laid it on the lowest marble floor, and dragged Thorstad’s bag over beside it. “Unless you have ambitions to be a monkey like your friend we can sit here till Curious George gets bored enough to join us.”