“And always hire good detail men,” the old man added.
Holly smiled, but Todd wasn’t pleased. “So I’m hired, am I?”
“Even better. Sired.” The old man chuckled happily. “And what about you?” he asked Holly, poking her lightly with an index finger. “What good are you? Eh? What good are you?”
“That’s enough, Gramps.”
“Eh?”
“I don’t know yet,” Holly answered.
The old man laughed, his eyes darting from her to his ladles, his masks, his wood panelled cases, his mirrors, his grandson, his reflection.
When Todd quit everything, two years later, he said in a series of pious newspaper interviews that he’d been inspired to devote his life to environmentalism by the earth-centred teaching of the Northwest Coast Haidas, on whom he’d done his anthropological research. No doubt that was true. Yet as Holly watched him stride back and forth across their living room, explaining almost gleefully that they would have to learn to live on less, get by without a car, start to garden and to barter, what she saw most clearly was Todd’s revulsion from his grandfather’s grasp.
By then, of course, Holly wasn’t surprised. When things first got serious with Todd, Holly had assumed that if he didn’t end up in the family business, at least she’d be a faculty wife, with a house in Point Grey and hobbies, children, charities — in exactly that order. But the last time she’d got what she’d expected was when they were driving home from that first visit with his grandfather. Todd had rolled down the window, adjusted his side view mirror, and said he supposed they ought to get married. Holly felt a stab of delight, but only nodded cautiously, having anticipated this moment for long enough to realize it would be best not to over-react. Stopping at a traffic light, Todd said he supposed she would want to quit university. Again Holly nodded, having already decided that it would be inappropriate for a professor to be married to a student.
“Quit university,” Todd repeated, “drop that damned art history major, get away from that overbearing dragon of a mother, and head downtown to art school where you belong.”
“Who did you say was overbearing?” Holly asked, feeling rather pleased with herself for being so mordant — a word she’d learned only recently. It also happened to be true: Todd was uncomfortably like her mother at times. Or did she mean ‘comfortably?’ “Sir, we’ve secured the village.” Yes, he had, and the joy and uncertainty rounding her words made Holly seem arch and teasing; airy when she felt surprisingly dark.
Todd pulled over to the side of the road.
“Come here then, little wife,” he said.
They were so different. Well-matched, but different. Not quite two years later, as Todd strode across their living room in a glorious fever of giving up, Holly sat anxiously and stubbornly planning to hold onto whatever she could. The idea of bartering and gardening was clearly outlandish. Todd would never get around to it, and she couldn’t do it on her own. Holly didn’t like seeing her older husband so transparently wrong, and her agitation left her almost giddy. Yet that’s when she glimpsed it, a way to make this work. A safety net was something you crafted.
Art school had looked like a mistake at first. Holly’s smudged charcoals, the instructors’ insistence she try harder, the daily proof on paper she was second rate — it was all too familiar, even if the derision she heard came not from the other students but from the truly mordant voice inside herself. She retreated from life class, sketching, oils, and signed up for crafts courses with too many housewives, feeling this was all she deserved.
Yet the colour sense Holly’s instructors all praised gave her a subtle way with natural dyes. Her nervous fingers proved limber on the loom, and soon she was dazzling her classes with weaving. Her throws and cushions would never represent the full expression of her artistic intentions — silently, stubbornly, she was too ambitious for that — but she quickly found they were marketable, and as Todd paced their living room, she understood this to be a blessing. Reviewing Henry Austen’s hints, Holly ticked off ways to step up her production, diversify, find new markets. She didn’t imagine she’d get rich, nor particularly cared if she did. She had no taste for luxury, and in any case she agreed with Todd that the world would be better off without excess. Without poverty, as well: Holly saw no reason to deny herself the same degree of comfort other reasonable people allowed themselves. While Todd described the great migrations of the humpback whale, she calmed herself by thinking dye lots, looms, taxes, craft fairs, wholesale.
As it turned out, Holly not only had a talent for crafts, her strain of nervous sensitivity might have been designed for marketing. She had the knack of seeing what people liked before they noticed it themselves, and was soon pulling in far more orders than she could fill, sub-contracting, representing friends, pushing local taste that eloquent half-step forward — all while running schedules that left a shrinking window for Mavis. A lunch a month, no more. Holly may not have been making the art she’d always dreamed of, but she was plainly a success. Even Todd had to admit it. Not just admit it, but as the craft fairs gave way to a gallery, and her gallery was written up internationally, the poor man had to submit to living in a comfortable house, not in Point Grey but still ample, shingled, squatting on a deep, treed lot and overrun by two children he had not originally wanted to bring into this imperfect, over-populated world. Her poor, dear, transparent husband. He had such a difficult relationship with the material world. He couldn’t cook, didn’t care what he ate, and whenever he had to handle money, he got the same expression of distaste around his mouth as a musician being forced to play an untuned piano.
“Maybe I’ll try one of his CDs,” Holly said, breaking their a long silence.
Larkin had left two pieces of music. One seemed to be performance art. But Holly was sick of words and put on the symphony, hoping for something light to help lift the humidity; something piercing that would finally bring down the storm.
Oboes. A flute. Holly sat down listening to the opening notes, a pair of plaintive cries that sounded faintly Japanese. They grew into a melody, still light, almost springlike. As a child, Holly had pleased Mavis for once by learning to play piano prettily, although she had enough taste to realize she had little real talent. In Larkin, she could recognize a weakness for prettiness as well. His first movement reminded her of the nice upward curl at the edges of his eyes. Then he began layering on the instruments, building his theme, returning almost insistently to the same few lines of melody, until suddenly the piece reminded Holly less of Larkin than it did of Todd. Persistent Todd, dogged Todd, never letting go. Admirable Todd, who had helped her wake up to the real world. Little as he sometimes seemed to enjoy it himself.
The horns clashed. She heard loud Todd, demanding Todd. A clarinet noodled back: his irreverent sense of humour. Holly listened with her eyes closed to the great thrust of her husband’s personality interpreted by someone who didn’t know him. Immense commotion coming out of the speakers. Todd’s anger, his accusations. Then a recessional, a layering back of all the gathered instruments. This was Todd backing off, backing out of the children’s room after he’d read them to sleep. Finally the solo oboe again. His regrets, his farewell, as he was once again leaving. Then silence. Holly sat silently in her chair as Todd turned off the humming machine. She wondered what had really happened in the Amazon, what he wasn’t telling her, what she didn’t understand about her husband’s life, whether this project of moving to Rio was going to let her to lever herself out of his enormous shadow, after all.
Outside, the storm had broken. Rain came down hard, clattering on the tile roof. They sat and listened, while Todd looked at the CD in his hand.
“He tries too hard,” he said.
4
Their house was on the slope of the mountain at the end of Leblon beach. A cobbled one-way street led uphill past a few stoic old houses and the massive encroachment of apartment blocks be
fore taking a wide, sweeping turn in front of some half-built condominiums and starting back down again. The Austens lived not far past the condominiums, buffered from the worst of the construction noise by a forest that lapped down to the road. Macumba offerings appeared at times on a knoll in the forest, clay bowls heaped with rice or maybe a couple of guttering candles, although it wasn’t a popular site. The forest didn’t seem majestic enough — just weedy second growth that straggled back from the road, spilling behind the houses and apartments before struggling uphill in the thinning soil, stunted roots snaking along the surface of the rock, each tree shorter and more tenuous than the one before so that tall grass eventually took over, a wide swath growing — yellowing — above the last of the trees, until finally the granite burst free of the vegetation to rise as two humped peaks, Dois Irmãos, the two brothers that gave the mountain its name.
After pulling out of the driveway, Holly had to back the car uphill so she could park and shut the gate. This usually didn’t bother her, but she was on her way to pick up Larkin for a trip to the favela and for once the extra effort grated badly.
They hadn’t heard from Larkin again after driving him to his hotel, and assumed he’d settled happily into sessions and parties with the musicians he had mentioned. Then he’d phoned, mentioning Holly’s offer of a favela tour without seeming to hear her polite, stammered excuses — one child under the weather, the weather still so hot — instead letting hang a series of awkward little pauses, sentences that trailed off in the direction of his growing interest in Brazil, his wish to see another side of Rio, his hope of pursuing his idea, progressing backwards; all of it so courteous and so relentless that Holly finally found herself agreeing to make the long and draining trip on what was bound to be a malignantly hot day.
Hanging up, she’d been angry with herself. She’d made the huge decision to shed everything, move south and finally make her art. Yet look at her — teaching at the crêche, still fiddling with constructions, helping out at the boys’ school. With Todd travelling so much, she was already doing double duty as a parent. Now Larkin. Why Larkin? It was time to say no, lock herself in the studio and goddamn paint.
Holly slammed the gate to the driveway, propelling it so fast the lock didn’t catch and the spikes rattled at the top of the wall. They lived behind a high, spiked wall with just one gate and one narrow door. Why had Todd had told Larkin the Rio crime rate wasn’t as bad as advertized? Maybe it wasn’t, but Rio still demanded caution, especially in the favelas. Did she really want to take Larkin out there? Even their own neighbourhood was so vulnerable Holly’s friend Tânia kept trying to get them to move into a secure high-rise. Tânia hated the rusty spikes, the overhanging trees, the loose bars on the windows that Holly had seen as a guarantee she’d be able to get the boys out quickly if the ancient wiring sparked a fire.
“But a gang would be inside in half a second,” Tânia insisted.
“Surely we don’t have anything worth stealing. Not here.”
“And what do you think happens, amor, when they go to all the trouble of invading your house and find that you’ve wasted their time?”
Yet Holly still loved her house. As she swung the gate shut — more gently this time — her last narrowing view of the carmine walls, shimmering with bougainvillaea, gave her such intense pleasure that nothing could spoil it. More than that. Everything enhanced it, insecurity most of all. Holly had a few secrets. The glimmer behind her eyes as she walked out into the hot and chancy streets at night. The jagged kick she felt at finding their car windows smashed. Her wicked exhilaration when she heard gunfire in the favela. Being skittish didn’t make her a coward. She thought it might even give her an edge. If you sensed all the possibilities, you’d be ingenious at getting yourself out. Of what? Of something that might happen at the favela with Larkin? Maybe that was why she hadn’t locked her door just yet. Holly sensed that whatever happened would feed her art. She was ready for it. Not just ready, but prepared. They probably shouldn’t let foreigners into Rio unless they’d had a childhood like hers.
At a party one night, Holly had met a Finnish diplomat’s wife visiting from Brasilia. She was an elegant racehorse of a woman, all attenuated energy and small grey eyes.
“You have no idea how much I love coming to Rio,” she’d said, grasping Holly’s arm. “My natural level of paranoia is finally justified.”
Holly was still smiling as she pulled up at Larkin’s beachfront hotel.
“Back to the future?” he asked, climbing in the car. Holly saw a linen shirt, a light tan, light blue eyes taking her in.
“Todd’s probably right,” she said. “Past, future. It’s all mixed up.”
Holly pulled out into traffic and sped inland from the sea.
It took them two full hours to arrive at the entrance to the favela. Larkin looked happy, his theory — expectations, prejudice; what was the word? — apparently confirmed by a drive that had taken them from his luxury hotel in Ipanema to a raw dirt road near a ditch that marked the unofficial end of a decent working-class neighbourhood and the yeasty beginnings of what lay beyond. He paused to scribble in the notebook he’d brought out during the drive. Holly pictured him playing anthropologist like this in Ipanema, where he let her know he’d been partying with the stars. She could almost see his lanky figure on a penthouse roof, spotlit turquoise pool at his feet, floodlit orange Corcovado behind him, with Cristo Redentor spreading his concrete arms to embrace them all in gaudiness. He’d scribble, scribble, shyly playing the artist at work, abashedly recording each numinous inspiration. Meanwhile writing God knows what.
“Ready?” he asked Holly, closing the notebook. She turned to the guide Sister Celeste had assigned them at the crêche. Erenilda was a boxy, mannish-looking woman with a peculiarity. One eye was blue and the other brown. The first time Holly had seen her, she’d been delighted to think Erenilda could close one eye and see the world in either colour, as if she was looking through different panes of stained glass. But not even the children could have asked about this. Whimsy wasn’t Erenilda’s strong point.
Examining Larkin coolly, she told Holly that he looked a little like a musician, but mainly he looked rich.
“She says?” Larkin asked.
“That you’re going to have to do as you’re told.”
“We’re into discipline, are we?” he asked.
“Self-discipline.”
“I’m flattered you find it necessary,” Larkin replied. Holly gave him a quick glance. So this was why he’d called her back instead of asking his new friends to arrange a favela tour. She wondered why he hadn’t met a Brazilian beauty at one of his glossy parties, then realized that he probably had, and she was safer. Smiling, Holly jumped the ditch after Erenilda.
She’d never been to any other part of the Third World, but Holly imagined shanty towns must look much the same everywhere, built with gleaned wood, scavenged tools, ingenuity and desperation. They walked up a red dirt road past a series of gap-toothed fences enclosing irregularly shaped lots, with even more irregular houses — shacks — inside them. It was nearly noon, blistering hot, and there were few people outside to stare back at them, although Holly knew they were inside watching. She kept a sharp eye on Larkin herself. He seemed to be sketching a plan of the street, all angles and edges, almost an aerial view, as if he were designing a quilt. A crazy quilt, the seams half unravelled. It was hard to imagine the respectable working-class neighbourhood on the other side of the ditch had once looked much like this, but people there had started out the same way years before, banging together houses out of whatever they could find. Only gradually had they improved their lots — a foundation one year, a cinder block wall the next, then another couple of walls, and another, a proper roof — until finally they ended up with a house like the groomed white bungalow which, on the way past, Erenilda had been proud to tell Larkin was her home.
Scribble, scribble. He
’d seen the scavenged car seat on the deep front porch where Erenilda liked to sit and watch the world. A striking image, yet his brief visit couldn’t tell him how dearly both that car seat and her few moments of leisure had cost Erenilda over the years. Holly doubted that Larkin had ever managed to exercise the discipline — self-discipline — which had levered Erenilda and her husband into that modest house, kept them married and working, and made sure both their teenage daughters were able to stay in school.
Could Holly have done it? Without even considering the money, where did you find the mettle to work yourself out of a favela? The flimsy houses leaked rain and filth and rat urine during even the mildest storms, spreading disease. Drug lords fought vicious turf battles at night, their bullets ripping through the tenuous walls so people could be casually shot in bed, if they had a bed, or pulled out of it by death squads made up of off-duty police officers bent on executing anyone who looked like a criminal. In the midst of all that, Holly could imagine giving into the grating, teeth-grinding glee of living for the moment. The parties, the sambas, the parade of feckless men. How would it feel to pull the hair of a rival tart, rip open her dress, claw at breasts already bruised by her man’s daily beatings? Afterwards, Holly would drink so much cachaça she’d conceive another of the children Sister Celeste cared for all week, and despaired of every weekend.
Not all the shacks eventually evolved into homes like Erenilda’s. For each success, a dozen, a thousand failures. Larkin exuded such superiority, such confidence. What made him think he wouldn’t fail too?
Or end up wearing a blue plastic shower cap like the man who came trotting around the corner.
“Oi, João!” Holly called. But João ducked and crouched behind a fence, too drunk or hung-over to answer.
Drink the Sky Page 4