Todd snorted. “I can’t even begin to tell you,” he replied. “Urban expectations at the ass end of the boondocks. They wanted me to produce tramp riverboats on schedule. Endangered birds every time they took out their binoculars.” He shook his head. “One guy in particular was obsessed with seeing a giant river otter. We passed a goddamn puddle, the man would chime, `And this is the habitat of the giant river otter?’ I ended up ready to strip down, dive in, and roll downstream past some specified point where I’d solemnly assured them they were guaranteed to see the goddamn otters.” Smiling, Todd added, “They’re six feet long and beige.”
Holly laughed. “But you said they had binoculars.”
“Binoculars, telescopes, tripods, an entire pharmacy in a suitcase and watches that went beep on Eastern Standard Time. I woke up before any of them one morning at this camp on a river. Everyone sleeping in their hammocks, the bunkhouses dark. Suddenly I hear big wings outside. Some large bird landing on the dock. Then beep beep beep meep meep. The watches go off, right on schedule. I feel like I’m trapped in a cave full of anxious bats.”
Still laughing, Holly said, “As long as they go back with a good report.”
When Todd didn’t answer, she added, “Did they get to meet this Doutor Eduardo as well?”
“None of us actually met him,” Todd replied. “He just came to the bar to check us out. Probably for understandable reasons: a contingent of wackos showing up in his state. I’m probably imagining anything more.”
“They you don’t have to go back. Say you don’t, love.”
Todd shrugged, then said casually, “I saw him give you something when he left. What’s-his-name. Larkin.”
“CDs,” Holly said. “He gave us some CDs of his music. If we can’t talk about Doutor Eduardo, I might as well put one on.”
“I’m sorry,” Todd said. “I’m sorry, I know this affects you. I know you end up covering for me. I know that, Holly.”
“Thank you,” she answered.
“Not that you need to bother taking Larkin out to the Zona Norte. It was kind of you to offer, but Bob was way out of line sending us some goddamn musician with an agenda.”
“Todd, for heaven’s sake, I was just making conversation.” Holly clicked her nails against the glass. “Although now that you mention it, I probably should take him out. Give him the usual tour. He’s probably good for a nice fat cheque.”
“Oh. You want him to give money — “
“For the children.”
Holly didn’t know if she really wanted to take Larkin out to the favela, but she’d had enough of Todd’s demands for one day. After all, who supported the family financially? Who looked after the children? “Money for the children.” Amazing how disagreements which used to take hours could now be condensed into a single phrase. Twelve years into their marriage, things were finely balanced. At least, they were usually fine, and mostly they stayed balanced. Appropriately enough, this being an environmental household. Equilibrium — wasn’t that the green ideal?
But there was also the question of taking Larkin out to the favela. Holly wasn’t sure she could be bothered, but it also seemed a shame to deprive herself of Larkin’s observations. Progressing backwards: she really had liked that one. Story of Todd’s life, wasn’t it?
3
Todd had been born into wealth — Old Money, as far as Vancouver was concerned, the first flush of it dating from frontier days at the end of the last century. His birth had been rather precariously preceded by a society wedding joining two proud provincial families, the Todds and the Austens, fish and lumber, through the athletic matrimony of Sally and Steve. Todd was the first of their three children, although it was generally agreed their contribution in his case was negligible, Todd being the image of his paternal grandfather, old Hank Austen, later Henry, pillar of British Columbia society.
When Holly tried to describe Vancouver to her friends in Rio, she could make them picture the mountains swelling out of the ocean, the intense and tangled green, the frequently oppressive weather. But Rio was so volatile, they had trouble understanding this as a grey oppression that came from weeks of rain and gloom. The weather pressed down on Vancouver, while the wilderness always pressed in. Gardens soon went ragged, and trees leapt up with astonishing speed, hiding even the newest houses in shadows and a mysterious feeling of time and depth which the houses themselves had not yet earned. When Holly was a child, she often had an edgy, claustrophobic feeling that the forest could overrun the city, pushing down from the mountaintops, up from the leafy, loamy soil. It could push people right to the water’s edge, and from there a great earthquake could fling them beyond, sending them falling, splashing, flying, tumbling off the edge of the world.
Edgy, but exhilarating too, especially for sportsmen like Todd’s parents. They sailed and skied, they golfed, they rode, and no matter how they dressed, they always looked as if they were wearing tennis whites. They city was their playground, and if this marked them as privileged when they were young, the economic boom in their middle age meant privilege was recast as rights. Bicycle paths unspooled along the shoreline. Seawalls domesticated squalid False Creek, yachts docked there, lawns sprouted on its banks. Going outside for a solitary ramble meant tripping over a hundred breeds of dog walker and a thousand shades of blond; over espresso bars, movie crews, competitive kite flyers and martial artists practising for slow-motion, well-intentioned kills. Goodbye wilderness outpost. It had turned into a park.
Yet Holly still loved the grimy, raffish city that went about its business a couple of layers underneath. Todd refused to acknowledge anything else. Being fifteen years older than Holly, he was that much more attached to the old port city, which he knew from his trips to the dock with his grandfather. He’d breathed in quantities of salty air, shouted above the bump of logbooms, thrummed to the beat of tugboat engines. He could remember the smell of sawdust inside Sweeney’s Cooperage; had heard grain whistle through the tubes at the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool. At times old Hank had forced him to clamber on board freighters anchored in the Inlet, and once Todd even found himself attending a meeting in which his grandfather explained the issues in the most recent longshoremen’s strike to ranks of red-faced union leaders in language he was bound they would understand.
Henry Austen had his finger in countless pies. Thumb on them, Todd would later say, once he’d joined the environmental movement. Joined the movement, renounced his family, thrown back his income, even quit his anthropology career, making it publicly clear he would no longer associate with profiteers. His grandfather obliged by promoting the fortunes of a cousin Todd disliked. Yet Holly had spent enough time with the old man by then to believe he was able to see past his personal disappointment and understand that Todd really was his heir. Todd was choosing adventure. Not the same adventure, but not its opposite, not the city. Todd had joined his grandfather in fighting for ownership of the wild. A take-over bid, which old Henry was probably more inclined to appreciate than many of his friends, having diversified out of lumber a good dozen years before.
Todd had taken Holly to meet the old man several months after they’d started dating. Todd was still teaching anthropology; the golden boy of Northwest Coast Indian research, the reluctant heartthrob who paced the chalky lecture room utterly destroying the girls with his long blonde hair, his pale, poetic skin and a tongue so sharp it could slice even the limpest insights to shreds.
“Thank you, Ms. Ketcham. We’ll write Chomsky — shall we? — and correct him.”
Holly had taken his survey course the year before, and she’d been awed, nervous, even a little frightened when Todd first held her back after class, leaning against the lectern as he tried to draw out what she knew perfectly well were her worthless opinions of aboriginal art. She suspected he’d noticed her attention wandering in lecture hall, and planned to manoeuvre her into making an absurd assertion that would peel her ignorance
naked. Staring down at his scuffed shoes, at the frayed corduroy cuffs of his pants, Holly had no idea how to behave. Her mother had only prepared her to date frat boys.
Date? The thought startled Holly into glancing up. Todd gave her an earnest, worried smile, his cheeks looking mottled behind an absent-minded stubble.
“We could always talk about this over coffee,” he said.
Holly nodded, warm with shock. What a heady feeling, thrilling, so intimate. It was tempting to be cruel and change her mind, remembering an appointment — though not very. Holly’s wandering attention during his lectures owed a good deal to her daydreams about their accidental meetings. The Japanese garden, all damp moss and rhododendrons flowering, petals falling, an armful of textbooks toppling, something that gave her an excuse to start talking to him. About herself, Holly realized, prickling with amusement. Seeing her half smile, Todd looked more encouraged. People often mistook her that way.
“This was my last class,” Todd said. “Why not head downtown and get a decent cup of coffee?”
“Thank you,” Holly said, and kicked herself. Such a stupid answer. But seeing Todd’s pleasure, she got the happy idea he was hearing what he wanted. An insight into her future husband’s expectations that was far deeper than she could know.
Later, Holly wasn’t sure what to make of the fact that relationships like theirs grew unpopular, with latter-day Todds terrified of sexual harassment charges and younger Hollys acutely aware of the insidious power of older males; intensely mindful of their own sexuality, if not always pleased with it, as if it was something they had to carry around, a battered old Freudian purse. Fashions were always changing, but it was hard to know if something as superficial as fashion, even moral fashion, affected the root sexual response. Perhaps a modern version of their marriage would be prevented. Perhaps it would be improved. At the time, Holly was delighted, flattered, even giddy at the thought of what had so unexpectedly dropped into her lap. It would be an excellent match. Even her mother would be impressed. Holly Austen. She whispered the name at night, littered her lecture notes with sample signatures, and later on, rather than trying to second-guess herself, Holly could only conclude that she’d been unusually young for her age. She hadn’t yet awakened to the world, and had no idea how many other choices she could have made.
Unlike Todd, who had been shuffled between his parents’ absent-minded marriage and his grandfather’s strictures, Holly had grown up protected, her household secure. At least, that was how her mother put it. Mavis held fiercely to the concept of security. We gave you a secure base, she insisted, although Holly always thought of the line in war films, “Sir, we’ve secured the village.” First you encircle, then you overrun, and if you flatten, too bad, that’s war.
Tall, ardent, drawling Mavis played over Holly’s childhood like a restless arc of spotlights. She stayed slender and kept herself brunette. Cigarette smoke swathed her high-boned face, cutting ironic lines between her eyebrows, apostrophes around her curling lips. Martinis and ambition were her two magnetic poles. They were probably fortunate that one kept her from adhering too closely to the other. She’d been an Eaton’s model before she got married. Mavis and Mike. They called each other ‘M’ and bought an architect’s cantilevered house based on Mike’s expectations. He was a surgeon, his fingers keen as his wife’s eyes, eyes rapid as her judgments. They were both operators, though Mavis went the homemaker route, raising three fine boys then Holly, the late-coming, wished-for, pounced-upon girl.
Mavis gave her everything. Dresses with hand-rouched smocking. The canopied bed, a parade of bored-looking porcelain dolls — Eaton’s dolls, some of them antique. When Holly was ten, Mavis started holding children’s tea parties, serving tiny spots of Earl Grey in cups of heated, sugared milk. She served plates of triangular sandwiches, their crusts removed, rolled sandwiches, paté, and tartlets of creamed lobster and crab. How well Holly’s little schoolmates behaved, crossing their frilly white ankle socks. How terrified they must have been to spill, to smear, to turn down any of the rich, unfamiliar food or disgrace themselves by getting sick.
Holly most of all. She knew how unsatisfactory she was. She was so clumsy, so wrong, that Mavis always had to correct her. You really prefer Barbie to that nasty old rabbit. Say thank you, darling. She’ll have milk. It was worse when Holly started school. The other children knew it wasn’t just what she said or did, the problem was Holly herself. Fatty, fatty lumpkin — always sticks her stomach out — hair too thick, lips too big, fatty, fatty lumpkin. Ubangi, that was the name of the tribe that put plates in their lips. All the girls got National Geographic; their parents had subscriptions. Ubangi, Ubangi lips. Even her mouth is fat.
Holly didn’t dare tell her mother what they put her through, but Mavis knew everything and invited them to tea. “Sir, we’ve secured the village.” Disarmed, defused. Did Mavis help? The puckering stuff she painted on twice daily stopped Holly from biting her nails. The diets kept her acceptable — It’s only baby-fat — despite her secret candy-bar binges. But what really ended the teasing was Holly’s sudden growth. At adolescence, she stretched up, slimmed down, filled out what they called ‘properly.’
Holly, you want to come skating with us? Ooooh, look at her outfit. Oooooh, why can’t I look like her? She could be a model like her mother.
Holly didn’t believe them. She also didn’t want to believe them, which was a slightly different thing. How could she look like her mother? Holly started falling down stairs, cutting herself when she was in the kitchen, one time when she wasn’t even in the kitchen.
Her mother had found her tumbled, crying, bleeding, at the bottom of the stairs.
“You’re growing so fast, you’re tripping over your own feet.” Mavis brushed Holly’s hair back, pulled her dress straight at the waist, swabbed the blood from her arms without saying anything about it. Whatever Holly did and was, Mavis wouldn’t see it, leaving Holly unsure how to see herself. She was an unfocused double image: the one people looked at, and the one she was inside.
Who did Henry Austen meet the first time Todd brought her over? Snow White, all red-cheeked and beaming? But Holly knew she was really just one of the dwarves, poison underneath, a poisoned apple. Round as a lumpkin, ugly and rustic. She wasn’t a princess at all.
“Gramps, this is Holly. I’ve told you about Holly.”
“No you haven’t.”
But his handshake was so firm, his eyes so bright, Holly knew he meant she didn’t fool him for a minute.
Henry Austen had been well into his eighties by then, a vigorous old man almost as tall as Todd with remarkably weathered skin. Dropping his hand, Holly thought he looked like an old bull elephant, with those tiny, dark, mobile eyes bracketed by fold upon fold of skin. When the housekeeper served tea, Holly clutched her saucer like a life-ring, her posture perfect and manners formal, feeling hyper-conscious of the old man’s eyes darting all over her. He wasn’t lewd. In fact, she would have said he looked puzzled — a look she was surprised to see later as he opened the double doors of the library to show her his important collection of Northwest Coast Indian art.
Todd had told her that his grandmother had banished the collection from the rest of the house, preferring the homey patterns of chintz and the lemon-scented shine of respectably varnished wood. “Father’s old stuff,” she’d called the collection, which her husband had begun to accumulate years before, having been struck by the way an Indian agent had spirited off whatever he could. Todd claimed his grandfather was more interested in accumulation than he was in the artifacts themselves, a gourmand rather than a gourmet. Yet that day, in the library, Holly hadn’t sensed any simple pride of ownership. Rather, the old man had seemed curiously tentative as he showed her the Haida raven rattle, the Bella Coola thunderbird mask, the argellite pipes and each sinuous, wave-like spoon inside the mirror-bottomed cases.
“They say this here’s a killer whale,” the o
ld man told her. “Although you’ve got to look hard to see it.”
Later on, remembering those puzzled eyes, Holly wondered if Todd’s grandfather was a holdover in the modern age: one of those rare people who allowed himself to feel fascination, even reverence, for something he knew he didn’t understand. Did that also explain his attitude toward her, toward women? After all, he was an old-fashioned man, something of a puritan, who had doggedly courted a small-town teacher, then stayed faithfully married to her for more than sixty years. After she died, he refused to remove even one mask from the library, or reupholster a single fading flowered chair.
“Mother didn’t like it.”
“Mother took care of all that.”
Holly hoped that if she died first, Todd would throw out, rearrange, refuse to huddle in a shrine; although she also suspected he would live precisely like his grandfather. It was a heavy burden to carry. She could still smell the airless rooms of Henry Austen’s house, the institutional odour that made it seem as full and empty as a church. Perhaps puzzlement was a necessary facet of reverence, and reverence an inextricable part of the old man’s greed for possession and destruction: destruction not just of the forest, but of the cultures he had robbed. After all, how could you make your mark destroying something that nobody valued?
“Another Bella Coola mask,” the old man told her. “Bella Bella and Bella Coola, best on the coast.”
“The weasel skins are insignia of rank,” Todd said. “With eight skins, this mask would have belonged to someone important.”
“Now, is that a fact?” Todd’s grandfather marvelled.
“Abalone insets. I’ve told you this before, Gramps.”
“Keep your eye on the figures, not on the field. I’ve told him.” The old man winked at Holly, giving her the interesting idea he thought he could still manhandle Todd back into the family business, despite their fights over the anthropology career and Todd’s loudly reiterated distaste for commerce — Steve and Sally apparently having made an impact on their son’s character, after all.
Drink the Sky Page 3