The Master of Happy Endings

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The Master of Happy Endings Page 26

by Jack Hodgins


  Travis bounded down the waterfall as though he cared little whether he fell into the stream or broke his neck. It seemed ridiculous to Thorstad that he must rein in such energy for the sake of exams.

  But Oonagh was unwilling after all to wait for Curious George to get bored. She raised her voice. “Come let me hear something from your next scene. Your tutor tells me you’re pretty good but I want to see this for myself.”

  Travis unplugged his ear and stepped out of the creek, clearly alarmed. “Here?”

  Thorstad had decided not to warn him of this, but had made sure he knew who she was.

  “I won’t allow a minute of History till I’ve seen you do your stuff,” Oonagh announced. “Just give me your longest speech. Anyone can say ‘Thanks’ or ‘I’ll be back in a minute’ and sound like they mean it. It’s when you get two or three sentences in a row that we can tell if you’re an actor.” When Travis hesitated, she added, “I’m the one supplying lunch, so you can humour me, for goodness’ sake! I’m in need of entertainment.”

  Thorstad felt his own version of stage fright on behalf of the young actor—required, now, to perform for the expert. Go easy on him, he was tempted to say.

  Travis crossed the length of the highest terrace, one hand pushing his hair back, then letting it fall before pushing it back again. Colour had risen in his cheeks. He scratched at one bare knee. He paused long enough to glance at Thorstad and frown, as though asking for some assurance that this woman deserved the effort. Then, once Thorstad had nodded, he stepped down onto the middle level and worked his legs as though he were preparing for a race.

  Oonagh stood up and removed her hat and stepped back to become his audience. “Any idea how much the crew is paid for every minute you stand there trying to remember who you are?” When Thorstad moved to stand beside her she put a hand on his shoulder as though to suggest he brace himself.

  “Okay,” Travis said. He began to pace again, possibly getting into character. He turned, suddenly, and directed a furious glare at something behind Thorstad, his fists clenched. “Don’t you ever think?” He shouted this. Perhaps an imaginary person behind Thorstad had turned to walk away. He shook his fist. “You know what kind of danger you’re dragging us into? All of us!” He turned, apparently to address a second invisible person. “You’re an idiot! They’ll come down on us now like a pack of bloody Storm Troopers!”

  “Oh my darling boy,” Oonagh said, both hands on top of her head. “Get down off that stage. You’re doing this for television, not for someone on the far side of those hills.”

  Thorstad’s muscles tightened. Had he brought Travis out here to be humiliated? This was not what she had promised.

  With his eyebrows pulled into a fierce scowl, Travis leapt down onto the sparse dry grass and again paced for a moment before stopping to shout his accusations again at the guilty parties—one and then the other.

  Oonagh turned away and studied the treetops for a moment. “Did you actually audition before getting this job, or did you save the producer’s daughter from a fate worse than death?”

  Travis shot Thorstad a glance that blamed him for this. Thorstad was himself indignant, and might have spoken up but Oonagh barrelled on. “You’re only a yard or so away but I can tell you’ve been trained for an auditorium full of old people in chairs. Old deaf people in chairs. Old deaf people in faraway chairs. Too many high school plays, I think!” She closed her eyes and ran a hand down over her face, perhaps choosing her next words with care. “And you seem to believe you have to be doing something all the time. The camera will make you look like some kind of dope addict. All that twitching and turning will make you look shifty and guilty or maybe just plain stupid.”

  Travis appeared to be shaken by this. “You want me to stand here poker-faced when I’m supposed to be furious?”

  Thorstad considered calling this off. There was little pleasure or satisfaction in observing the boy’s discomfort. At the very least, if this continued, he should walk away and pretend he wasn’t observing.

  Oonagh walked up to Travis and put a hand on either side of his face. “Bear with me, my dear.” Then kissed his forehead and stood back. “Imagine the camera is a person. I’m sure someone told you this your first day here but you were too impressed with yourself to take it in. The camera is looking at you from the same distance as someone you could be talking to. It’s close! It picks up every muscle twitch and tiny movement of your eyes. So—don’t show anger. Instead, try not to show your anger.”

  “What if I’m so good at it they can’t tell I’m royally pissed?”

  “If you act as though you’re trying to hide something from the camera you’ll communicate that very thing to the people at home. Instead of acting furious, try to keep the camera from knowing you’re furious. Now run through that again. I’m the camera. Forget our friend Thorstad for a moment, he’s just a stepladder for the lighting crew.”

  She turned to Thorstad and smiled. In case he’d taken offence? He supposed there were worse things to be than a stepladder.

  Travis walked away the length of the terrace and then came back. This time he looked directly at Thorstad to say the first part of his speech with his voice so low he could barely be heard. He said the rest to someone beyond him as though he had trouble opening his mouth for the words.

  Oonagh applauded “A little better.”

  “Why didn’t Paolo tell me this?”

  “Maybe you weren’t listening. Or maybe ‘Paolo’ had other things on his mind. It’s even possible that Paolo doesn’t care if you’re kicked off the show. He knows there’s plenty of others waiting to take your place. Do it again. Don’t let me see how furious you are. This is television. Say it to yourself. This is television. I had to learn this myself after a life on the stage.” She was speaking to both of them now. “You think it’s hard for you? Imagine if you came to TV in your sixties! I could introduce you to directors who pulled out all their hair implants before I finally caught on. Now listen. Think: The audience is three feet away. They can see my every thought—especially in crucial moments. They can smell my breath.”

  “Yow!” Travis pulled a face and shook one hand to rid himself of something foul.

  “Well, it helps if you think so. They’re close enough to see it in your eyes. Will they see I’m an actor pretending to be furious or I’m so furious I don’t want anyone to see how bloody mad I am? Let’s hear it one or two more times. Then we’ll see who’s earned their lunch. The camera, remember, is embedded between my eyes.”

  Once Oonagh had handed out her packaged sandwiches and cans of ginger ale, Travis kicked off his sandals and sat at the edge of the stream with his feet in the water. Thorstad, joining Oonagh in the porous shade of a eucalyptus, felt compelled to defend the boy. “I think this is the first time he’s had more than a few lines to learn. Until now he’s been just a minor face in a crowd.”

  Her glittering bracelets dismissed this. “He couldn’t be that bad and still have his job. The bugger was just humouring me.”

  “Well, he’s a male, so he’ll be as bad as it takes to get your attention.” Thorstad imagined he’d been much the same himself, long ago. “As soon as he’s finished wolfing down that sandwich he’s going to ask if he can try again. It may not be quite so terrible this time but it will be bad enough to keep you watching for as long as you’re willing—out here in this place where nature went mad and drove humans into the sea.”

  Oonagh was about to bite into her sandwich but paused long enough to growl: “I’m sure it drove them no farther than their insurance office.”

  She fell silent, then, and for a few moments appeared lost in thought. Then she laid a hand on Thorstad’s forearm and slid it down to take hold of his hand, which she raised to her lips. “Axel Thorstad in California!” She laughed. “I loved your big hands— do your remember that?”

  “I remember a good deal.”

  “I bet you do. Do you remember our little beach hut? We were so young!”<
br />
  “We were. But I didn’t think so at the time.”

  “I know you didn’t. But for all my noise I seemed to be saddled with an ability to look at myself from some future time. It meant I was bloody sensible for someone so young. Spoiled the fun sometimes. But it also prevented mistakes.” She paused, then smiled, and put a hand on Thorstad’s arm and lightly squeezed. “I’m glad you looked me up. I wouldn’t have been surprised if you’d despised me all these years.”

  “Company,” Thorstad said. A middle-aged man and woman wearing khaki shorts, high laced boots, and sun hats had come into sight on the trail, each of them using a hiker’s sturdy staff. Low bushes were examined, and then compared to something in the woman’s book. Binoculars were raised to the crown of an evergreen, and handed from one to the other.

  “Lovely morning,” the man said, when he’d spotted those who’d got here before them.

  Axel Thorstad nodded his agreement.

  The woman said, “What a perfect spot for a home! It must have broken their hearts to leave it.”

  “Well, you would never feel the same about it again, would you?” the man said. “Not after escaping with the flames licking at your heels.”

  “You would still resent it, of course.”

  There was a sort of singsong quality to the couple’s speech, as though they meant only to remind one another of an earlier conversation.

  “You hearing this?” Oonagh said to Travis. “Your assignment is to explain how you can tell they’re saying this for us. Also why they’d make fairly awful actors.”

  The man’s attention was drawn to the concrete bunker at the far end of the terraces. “Sweetheart—the bomb shelter!”

  It was clearly a hoped-for find. Both quickened their pace, perhaps to be first at the doorway. The man won, though neither went inside. Heads were thrust in the doorway, but quickly withdrawn. “Oh dear. Not very big.”

  “Still,” the woman said, “you would be glad to be safe from the fallout.”

  Her head was again thrust in through the doorway, though shoulders-to-feet stayed safely in the outside world. “There must have been only the two of them.” The head reappeared, speaking again for the watchers on the naked terrace. “We’d have needed this much space for just the food our hungry tribe would need.”

  This time the man addressed the Listeners directly: “How quickly we forget these shelters! You believed it was your only hope of surviving. How many backyards were dug up for one of these?”

  When the couple had completed their examination and climbed over the remains of the house to set off beyond the waterfall, Travis went over to peer in through the door to the concrete box. Thorstad joined him, never having seen a bomb shelter himself. But there was little inside it to see. Rotted leaves. A fallen two-by-six, presumably from the concrete forms. The smell was musty, almost damp despite the dry warm air outside. There was no sign that humans had ever spent a single night in it. It may have been only a cellar to keep the vegetables cool.

  “We know a few people who’d be happy to camp in this,” Travis said, stepping inside.

  Thorstad knew who Travis had in mind. He was reluctant to take the boy away from this bit of concrete history, if indeed that was what it was, but they had come here for more than one purpose. “I suppose we should take the opportunity, with this thing in our midst, to spend a few minutes on the Cold War?”

  Travis protested from within. “We did the Cold War last week in school!”

  “Well, it isn’t the only war you need to know about.” Thorstad removed exam papers from his bag and carried them up from one terrace to the next and onto the flat concrete roof of the bunker where he brushed rotted leaves and twigs aside to sit on the front edge with his legs dangling above the doorway.

  Perhaps curious to see if the old man had taken leave of his senses, Travis came out of the concrete box and climbed up to sit beside him. “You planning to jump or what?”

  “Only if you drive me to it.”

  Travis lowered his voice. “Man, I had you figured wrong. We’ve only been here a few days and already you’ve got yourself in with this big-time actress? You didn’t tell me you were a ladies’ man.”

  When Thorstad did not response to this, Travis sighed. “Okay, boss, you’ve got what you wanted. No Elliot Evans in sight. I dare you to teach me something.”

  Thorstad removed his reading glasses from his shirt pocket and put them on, then opened the exam on his lap. “Here’s the sort of thing that could show up in either History or English. Two lessons for the price of one. And . . . to add to your listening pleasure”—he raised his voice—“we will now have a reading by one of the world’s most highly regarded and honoured-with-statuettes actors.”

  Because the highly regarded and much-honoured actor had not been warned, she hesitated before taking the exam from his hand. She held it at arm’s length and frowned hard. “In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations.’ This what you want?” When he nodded, she let her gaze go down the page. “Am I reading this for television or for the stage?”

  “For your friends and admirers on the roof of a bomb shelter,” Thorstad said.

  She repeated the title then, and, in her deepest voice, read the first stanza.

  “Only a man harrowing clods

  In a slow silent walk

  With an old horse that stumbles and nods

  Half asleep as they walk.”

  Travis wrinkled his nose. “A poem?”

  “A poem,” Thorstad said. “Poems are written in the midst of history. Sometimes poems are about history. Occasionally they can even be history. It’s only schools that like to keep them separate.”

  “Man, you must have driven your principal nuts!”

  “Just listen.”

  Oonagh read the first stanza again, and then the two that followed:

  “Only thin smoke without flame

  From the heaps of couch-grass:

  Yet this will go onward the same

  Though Dynasties pass.

  “Yonder a maid and her wight

  Come whispering by:

  War’s annals will cloud into night

  Ere their story die.”

  When her audience had applauded, Oonagh bowed deeply and passed the exam up to Thorstad, who allowed some silence to follow—a few quiet moments in which he recognized that what he felt here, now, was something very close to joy. He was happy to be teaching again. He was happy to be teaching with Oonagh’s help.

  Oonagh broke the silence. “First question is from me. Does the fellow know what he’s talking about? Do love and love stories really last longer than the effects of war? Hands up everyone who can’t even remember the name of their first love!”

  She raised her own hand. Thorstad did not. To Travis he said, “Because the examiners assume you’re illiterate, they explain below that ‘Ere’ means ‘before,’ ‘annals’ are stories, and a ‘wight’ is a youth. We can look at all their tricky best-answer questions later. First we’re going to consider everything you know about this as a poem, and then everything you know about the war that Thomas Hardy was aware of—within hearing distance, by the way, across a narrow strait.”

  When it appeared that Oonagh intended to wander farther into the woods above the little falls, Thorstad thanked her for her help. “Starting soon, this young man will want to send half his salary to the charity of your choice.”

  “He can start writing cheques any minute,” she said, carefully arranging her Humphrey Bogart hat at a slant across her forehead. “Ladies Too Old for the Stage need all the help they can get.”

  Once she was out of sight they considered the possible essay topics the English examiners might assign, based on this poem, and the possible topics they could imagine from the examiners of History, who would likely accompany this poem with a few short opinion pieces from others. “Let’s gather everything you know for each, and then we’ll see how we’d organize them.”

  Travis tapped his elbow lightly agai
nst Thorstad’s arm. “You think she’s got the hots for you? Coming out to this stupid place to do you a favour.”

  Thorstad lowered his head to look at Travis across the top of his glasses.

  “Just wondered!” Travis laughed. His face was, for a moment, the face of a mischievous boy, maturity a long way off—a sharp reminder that Thorstad had been charged with the welfare and education of his parents’ only child.

  Thorstad shook the exam pages to draw Travis’s attention to where it belonged. “Now, listen—they’re not likely to use this poem again, so it’s the process we’re about to go through that matters, especially when you sit down to show them what you can do.”

  By the time Oonagh returned they had filled several pages with scribbled notes, at first random, then re-organized and numbered for both English and History, with supporting examples indicated briefly in the margins. They had talked about the nature and importance of focus in an essay, whatever its subject might be. Thorstad kept to himself his satisfaction in seeing how this time in the wooded canyon had demonstrated what could be done when they were beyond the interference of Elliot Evans’s world.

  At the foot of the waterfall Oonagh said, “Who remembers when we’re expected back?”

  Thorstad’s entire body reacted. Expected back was an electric shock. Travis, too, had scrambled to his feet, looking at his watch. “Crap! It’s nearly two-thirty!” He pulled his cellphone from a pocket. “I turned it off! I was supposed to be back at two!”

  “Check for a message?” Oonagh said.

  “No point now. Let’s go!”

  Oonagh snatched up her backpack from the floor of the disappeared house. “I’ll have to drive so fast we’ll be there before we leave here. Pray for no cops on the PCH.”

  Once she’d dropped them off at the gate to Evans’s courtyard, Oonagh and the Bronco could not have reached the bottom of the hill before Elliot Evans was at the guest-house door. “So you decided to return.” His face was flushed, his lips tight, his first scowl was for Travis. “I asked Paolo to re-schedule. Who do you think you’re working for, anyway?”

 

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