That’s terrible, Hannah said.
She’s only nine years old. There’s going to be a nationwide charity drive next week. I’m organizing the whole event. It’s the biggest thing I’ve ever done in my life.
Big as in size? Hannah said. Or big as in important?
Both, Mona said and turned to Florence, who was staring into her fridge. Flo, do you need help with dessert?
I had a salmon-coloured fridge once, Florence said dreamily, that lit up from the bottom. It made everything glow like a Gilbert and Sullivan production. And Flo crossed her hands like fans under her chin and batted her eyelashes.
There was whisky in the living room after dessert. Hannah felt unlaced and drunk. What time was it? She was sitting on the floor facing the sofa, talking to Mona’s husband. His face reflected a certain curiosity. He was taking an interest and it was encouraging her.
I was in Venice a few weeks ago, she said, half-reclined on her elbow. For my friend Ursula Bishop’s wedding? We took a boat to the reception, just stepped off this boat, right into this medieval palazzo, and all the Italian men with their shaved heads, wearing sunglasses and beautiful suits. The groom gave a speech and halfway through, this guy he’s known since he was like, six years old, started heckling him and said, go fuck your mother, in Italian.
Mona’s husband said, What’s go fuck your mother in Italian?
Mona turned and said, What is this, a joke?
It was a wedding, Hannah said. Via tua madre.
What did you say?
She said, go fuck your mother.
That’s what the guy said. And they came down hard on him, so he got his coat, as they say, and left.
That’s so great, Mona said and looked away.
It was a little freaky, Hannah said. I was running back to my hotel room at three in the morning with absolutely no one around. From the reception to my hotel, it was like I was the only person in Venice. Just the clack of my high heels. And corner after corner of old rock and cement and brick. Nothing alive, not a blade of grass, and the little tickle of water, the little lap of water, and all the shutters shut fast, and a thin strip of sky with stars overhead. I was laughing because I was wearing this silver fox-fur stole and to a half-British wedding. I mean, I wasn’t even trying to be provocative.
Hannah heard Norm laugh in another part of the house. Florence ran into the living room as if running across the deck of a listing ship and collapsed onto Mona’s lap. She crossed her legs and cupped a hand to Mona’s ear and started whispering.
Excuse me, Hannah said and swayed out of the room. She started up the stairs. It felt like climbing an escalator that was slowly coming down. When she came out of the bathroom she couldn’t remember if she had flushed. God, she was drunk. Norm was there. Where have you been?
In the kitchen, he said, with Bernice.
Hannah looked at her feet. Can we please leave now?
I never get to see these people, Norm said. They’re my friends. I just want to enjoy myself.
So maybe you’d prefer it if I left.
If you have to leave, that’s fine by me.
She wasn’t expecting this. Norm reached into his pocket and pulled out the key to the house they were staying in. He handed it to her and went downstairs. He said something in the living room, which was greeted with laughter and cheering. Hannah walked into the master bedroom. She sat down on the queen-sized bed for a few minutes. Somebody outside rumbled past the house on a skateboard. An image of the boy her parents had adopted, laughing and falling backwards off a flipped-up skateboard, arms windmilling over his head, flared in her mind, then faded. Zeus was eight years old when he came to live with her parents. Hannah was living at home as well. She hadn’t for years, but she’d just finished her BA and gone home for a few months to save some money. It was weird to see her parents looking after an eight-year-old. He was almost too unbearably cute, although what happened in the end was all wrong. Hannah always felt bad that, at the time, she’d never tried to do anything about it. He left when he was fifteen, without saying goodbye, and no one really knew where he was for a while. They thought he might have gone back to New Mexico, to look for his family, but then he called one day from Chicago. And that’s where he was living now, with his boyfriend, some older guy apparently, and working as a clown with kids in a hospital there, which she thought was pretty remarkable. Suddenly, she wanted to talk to Norm. She went back downstairs to the living room.
Mona’s husband was saying, It’s what Gertrude Stein told Hemingway not to be. Like Modigliani’s nudes. They were inaccrochables.
Modigliani was born in Venice, Hannah said, standing in the doorway. Where had she recently learned this?
We were all born in Venice, Roger said.
No, no, listen. His family was Jewish and they went bankrupt, she said. But there was this law, if the mother was about to give birth, the family was allowed to keep whatever they could pile onto the birthing bed. So Modigliani was born on a four-poster bed piled high with candelabras and clocks and silver spoons.
There was a dreamy silence. It’s true, she said, then Mona’s husband laughed briefly at something totally unrelated. It sounded like a cough. Mona swung around to scold him and spilled red wine on the carpet and ran to the kitchen to get a cloth. Hannah sat down on the floor again and felt the wild horses of her own drunkenness move in dizzying circles.
How long was it before they were struggling to push their arms into the sleeves of their coats. Norm and Hannah stood in the foyer. It was foggy outside, and the rain had stopped. The trees were still dripping and the road was shiny and black as a canal.
Be careful, Florence hollered at their backs as Norm and Hannah took off down the hill. They walked as if carrying heavy suitcases. They crossed a spongy field to get to a street of tight rowhouses. At a spot on the sidewalk, Hannah stopped. I’m just gonna lie down here for a minute.
Norman stood above her and held his arms out. He bent forward and almost fell. He was swaying. Aw, come on, babe!
The cold was seeping into her, but Hannah felt so tired. She understood the only way she’d get home was if she ran. She leapt to her feet and took off.
Hey! Norm shouted after her. Wait for me!
When he got to the house, she was curled up on the front stoop like a cat. He dug in her pockets for the key. Up you get, he said.
Hey baby, she said.
Hey.
I’m so wasted.
I know you are.
I love you, baby.
I love you too.
I wanna spend the rest of my life.
I know you do, baby. I do too. Now give me a hand. The screen door hit Hannah’s forehead with an aluminum twang. Sorry, Norm said.
Didn’t feel a thing, she said.
That’s good.
Can we get a puppy, Norm?
Okay, he said.
And a little baby? Just a teeny one?
Norm didn’t say anything to that but folded her carefully over his shoulder and took her upstairs, all the burden he wanted in the world for the moment.
Harlan Douglas Foster locked up and left Home Protection Plus at twelve-fifteen in the morning with the last two of a six-pack of beer he’d bought earlier that evening. They were swinging by the neck from their soft plastic nooses. Something about those plastic rings made him think of lingerie, a drawer full of Connie’s bras. He bleeped the car alarm and slung his briefcase and the two cans onto the passenger seat and got inside his Cherokee Jeep.
For a moment he contemplated suicide.
Harlan had deceived his wife. He knew that much. What he didn’t know was how he’d allowed things to unravel to such an extent in the first place. He was a ruined man. And he still hadn’t told Connie.
How does a thing like this happen? All he wanted to do was please her. Show her how lucky he was, how lucky she was to have him, get that high and hold on to it, that cosy high like a cocoon or a womb where nothing can touch you – not failure or futility,
or the fear of death, or the devil himself. That’s how a thing like this happens. The devil has crept in, but you don’t know it. You start with a simple equation. A stock that’s breaking through its fifty-day average, verging on parabolic. A ten-bagger. The next Voisey Bay. But then it plummets. They call it a falling knife.
He couldn’t get away from the thought that it had all begun so promisingly. He was having a slow season in the security business, time on his hands, and started checking his stocks online. He tried his hand at making a trade, enjoyed it, then made another one. He got lucky that year and made fifty thousand dollars off a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of trading. It was a rush, but he should never have fired his accountant and taken over his own investments. Why had he been so stupid? He started playing futures and shorting stocks. He adjusted his account so he could trade on margin.
Three years ago, he’d tried to take advantage of the depressed American economy. He waited for the equity market to correct itself, but it took another downturn. His investments bottomed out and he found himself in a desperate situation. He started borrowing to pay his mortgage and expenses, and that’s when the calls began. He changed his cell number three times to escape the debt collectors, each time inventing a new explanation to give Connie. He couldn’t bring himself to file for bankruptcy, and then, a few days ago, a collection agency finally sent their repo men to clear out his business effects. Now his lender had a court order to seize all his assets, the house and its contents, both vehicles, a speedboat he had docked in the Mill Bay Marina, all of which he’d agreed to put a lien on at the time of borrowing, as collateral for what was supposed to be his final consolidating loan. He was, he realized now, sitting in an SUV that technically he no longer owned, while Connie, at this very moment, was sleeping in a bed that wasn’t hers, under a roof that no longer protected her, dreaming of a future for her children she would no longer be able to afford.
Harlan accelerated down a stretch of highway so familiar he had it memorized. How awful it was to have a life that finally resembled what his father’s life had been – recklessly irresponsible. What memories he had of him, they’d been surfacing more and more of late, and less damningly so than ever before. He thought about how, when he was eleven years old, his father just up and left him to fend for himself in an apartment full of women, and while he never grew accustomed to the painful longing in his heart, he did over time forget the cause of it. Besides, the women in his life had long ago cornered the market on displays of emotion and expected him to be strong, not needy, but to show manly composure, even offer assistance.
His mother was so reliant. She started helping herself to his money when he was just a boy. At the age of twelve, he got a paper route. One evening, at the end of his first month, he left the apartment – with his shiny new hole-punch and a stack of customer cards held together by a big silver ring – and went to collect payment. He met the grumpy, fat housewives and the sweet young mothers, and found out who had dogs and whose house smelled bad and what people ate for dinner. When he got home and tallied it all up, he’d made forty-seven dollars, including tips. His first earnings! He ran into his mother’s bedroom and waved the bills in the air.
Let me see that, his mother said, transferring the cigarette to her mouth and holding out her hand. Harlan gave her the money and she said, Boy, you must be the smartest kid on the block, look at all this dough. Am I ever lucky or what? She kept twenty and handed him the rest.
What? she asked with her chin, tucking the bill into the bosom of her bright yellow nightgown, between soft papery breasts that were, when his mother hugged him, the source of either delirious comfort or smothering panic. She rolled over onto her other side like a huge caterpillar and resumed her reading. A magic beanstalk of smoke tendrilled up from her hip. The ceiling was beginning to turn yellow. He could still see her now, clutching one of her thick, corner-store paperbacks, with the black-and-crimson covers, embossed with gold lettering – a woman in a scarlet bodice, holding on to some long-haired, bare-chested pirate, on top of a windswept cliff somewhere in the Caribbean, a plume of black smoke rising from the burning topsails of a full-rigged ship on the horizon.
Like his wife, Harlan’s mother always feared the worst, but she had none of Connie’s good intentions or energetic willfulness. Misery is fond of company, and the bitterness Harlan’s mother felt at her own failed wish for love in the dancehalls of the Okanagan Valley resurfaced as the implied wish that everyone else in her life should fail as well.
There were tears on his cheeks. Harlan was crying again and this annoyed him no end. He flicked them off with a finger. How many times had he cried today? He couldn’t remember, but it was a lot. When he cried as a boy, his sisters made fun of him. They hugged him too, lavishly, almost sexually – they were very expressive, very indulgent – but not before making him feel like a sissy. Shame on you for crying, Harley. Have you ever seen a boy cry like this, Jodes?
No, and if I did, I’d kick him where it counts.
They laughed into their cans of root beer and rye. Everything was a joke to them. They made him feel ridiculous.
When a parade of undeserving boyfriends started traipsing through the apartment, expecting nothing less than the fawning submission of his older sisters and trampling on his instinct to be protective, Harlan was too young to object, too powerless to stop it. When they spoke in lewd terms about his sisters, Harlan felt a thing subside in him like an exhausted muscle, a blueness spreading out. What’s more, his desire to protect his sisters was matched by the embarrassment he suffered, the shame he felt over their poor taste. He couldn’t help confusing good taste with moral superiority, and so there was disdain for his family mixed in with his jealousy and pity, and all of this sat heavy on his love.
He remembered how his sisters would squeeze into the hall mirror, popping their mouths with last-minute lip gloss, while a V8 engine revved at the curb. At least they have each other, he’d think, as they fluttered blue eye shadow and kissed him on the head. He could smell their black-market Poison for hours after they had left. And always they carried these little vinyl purses jammed with menthol cigarettes and spearmint gum and God knows what else. Out the door and Harlan would kneel on the sofa and pull the polyester sheers aside to watch them leave with a mixture of envy and scorn, aware of their own drastic, wildcat need for escape.
And when they were gone, to a tavern somewhere, or a pool hall or a bowling alley, he’d eat a dozen doughnuts. The small cheap ones with the sharp baking soda tang all covered in sweet white powder. They came twelve to a box and you could find them almost anywhere, in the basements of department stores, pharmacies even. He’d eat them until the sting in his mouth and the ache in his gut was a mild distraction to the desolation he felt. Sometimes he’d slip eight doughnuts on the fingers of both hands and make them beg for mercy before he ate them.
One evening, Harlan’s mother surprised him by joining him on the sofa to watch the girls leave the building. Jodie had cut the neck out of her t-shirt and by the time she reached the curb, it had slipped down off her shoulder. Harlan’s mother had said, If there’s anything a whore can’t resist, it’s her nature. Whore was his mother’s favourite word. It denoted the two things that were missing in her life – sex and money.
But Jodie had looked good that night, he recalled now, in her Santana jeans, Nike high-tops, and peacock-feather earrings. He wished he had told her so. And if that was her nature, so be it, for who can resist their nature anyway?
Harlan was stopped at a red light, sitting at an empty intersection waiting for the light to turn green. The streetlights giving the outdoors an indoor appearance. Not a car or another human being in sight. The pavement light grey. The intersection tidy and the roads straight. Despite his mother’s best attempts to keep him down and close at hand, the first thing he did when he graduated from high school was join the army. He wanted to hear the constant and merciless barrage of commands exhorting him towards his own excellence, be
llowed out through the loudspeakers morning, noon and night. He did not improve, he excelled. And quickly acquired the nickname Overkill, for how much time he spent polishing his boots.
He kept to himself and nobody could say of him that he wasn’t a good kid. He seemed to have things pretty well sorted out. His marks were okay. He had a couple of friends. He didn’t binge-drink like the guys in his barracks, though he did like a good all-you-can-eat buffet on the weekends. He spent three years in the military and didn’t think anything was missing until the day he met a girl who took him to a Leighton Ford crusade, where he’d first felt the powerful love of God. How certain he’d been of God’s love for him at the moment of his conversion. He’d been nineteen years old. He was overcome. He found himself on all fours, on a grey meadow of industrial carpet, in an auditorium full of folding chairs, under harsh fluorescent lighting, weeping like a baby. The service was over and most of the congregants had stood up and were collecting their songbooks and Bibles and quietly, peacefully, making their way home. While others, like himself, were being prayed for in small groups.
Dear Father in Heaven, shower this man with your love, we beg you. Let him feel the power of your Holy Spirit move within him. Let him feel the breath of your Holy Spirit like a flame on his tongue, that he should be set free in your mercy, to go forth and witness to the glory of your word, in the name of your son, Jesus Christ. Amen.
He remembered a young Indian man who sat down cross-legged in front of him and opened his Bible. The pages made a wet sound. He put his hand on the back of Harlan’s neck and leaned forward until their foreheads were touching. He said in a heartfelt voice, And his father, when he saw him coming, ran to meet him. Such was his happiness.
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