Maxine (18 page)

Barb leans against the doorframe with a bit of a thump.

What's going to get worse? Is Kyle doing fine?

Oh yah. It was about her, not him.

Barb, why don't I make you a cup of tea?

A car turns onto the street and it's a little black car.

'S Dave.

Yes, excellent, OK then, have a good night, Barb, bye.

Maxine turns around to make sure Kyle has his piano book but he's already undoing his seatbelt and cramming it under his jacket.

Have a good lesson.

OK. He hops out and sprints through drizzle along the paving stones to the front door. It swings open and he vanishes. Maxine pulls away from the curb, laps the cul-de-sac, parks across the road from the piano teacher's house. The bay window at the front has a vertical blind and through it she can barely make out the curve of Kyle's head and shoulders, broken up by the slats of the blind, as if he were a character in a flip book or someone trying to materialize in a sci-fi show and not quite able to appear because the Teleport has been sabotaged or the enemy has got to him at the other end. A large mass beside him must be the piano. Maxine slumps back in the seat. She doesn't know this part of town very well and the lesson is only half an hour long. Barb usually does piano but she's coming down with something bronchial, Dave's been working late, and Maxine is starting to feel the positive effects of antibiotics. Maxine adores antibiotics. Everyone she knows says how awful they are, they destroy the good and the bad indiscriminately, take too many and you're begging for Superbug to wipe you out just like that, you have to eat buckets of the right kind of yoghurt to be halfway normal, etcetera, but in Maxine's experience a few days on antibiotics can make you smile for the first time in a week, can make you start to feel like someone who will climb a flight of stairs without having a rest at the top, who will not, fifty times in the run of a day, think, When I've finished this I'll just sit down for a minute. Sometimes she gives the plastic childproof cap on the pill bottle an affectionate tap to let it know she's appreciative.

It would take ten minutes to drive to a coffee shop and another ten minutes back. She might as well sit here. You can sit in the dark and look at lights shining in people's rooms and wonder what the inhabitants are doing. Several of the large, ranch-style houses here have outside lights on, and many have small lamp posts or walkway lights tucked into their lawns and hedges. There's no sign of inhabitants, though, no evidence whatsoever of any indoor human other than Kyle. Not a chickadee. What are the inhabitants doing? Where
are
the bloody inhabitants? Kyle's been plopped on a piano bench in the middle of a desert of high-end '70s architecture, and it's looking as if he and Maxine would be the only life forms to show up on a scanner. The drizzle has turned to rain and now that the wipers are off, droplets stick to the windshield. Soon it's covered with them, jagged little sequins—it looks solid, as if the entire glass surface were textured, coated with bumpy ice after a storm. It's hardly been five minutes. How would Frédérique use this time? Sprays of rain rush at the roof of the car, sounding like waves of applause—thank you, thinks Maxine, thank you very much, yeah.

How unlike Maxine not to have brought a large bag crammed with work, things to read, lists of tasks. She
always
takes work wherever she goes, just in case, and yet this time she has none, and it's been at least partly deliberate. She will sit. She's been to a meditation workshop at the Y and she will sit and tolerate herself— hell, maybe even accept herself, ha!—for thirty minutes, that has been the idea. Thirty minutes of her uninterrupted self, without running screaming from the vehicle. It may be possible. She's too tired to work, anyway.

What would Frédérique see? Maxine looks beyond the glass in front of her face. The streetlights are impressionist paintings, gobs of yellow dots fading to black at their outer circumferences. Out the driver's side window a shrub wags up and down on the wind, branches extended sideways like arms. It bobs, a child in a Jolly Jumper, a clump of underwater seaweed. Frédérique would notice none of this. Frédérique would not be here, are you kidding? She would not, would not sit here in a car, in the dark, with every fraction of a degree of heat in her recently feverish body being sucked out through the soles of her under-insulated all-weather mocs as if she'd stepped on a Dementor by mistake. Frédérique would spurn all-weather mocs—her footwear would not be warmer but would sure as hell look better than all-weather mocs, which don't even end in a complete word. Frédérique would have taken her footwear somewhere else, and her feet and the rest of her also.

Where do the other parents wait? Maxine had asked a feeble-sounding Barb.

Oh I don't know, they drive away...

Well, what do you do? You don't come back home, do you?

No, it's not worth it—Barb sounds faint.

Barb, I need to know. Where do you go when he's in his lesson? What am I supposed to do after I've dropped him off?

Oh, I don't know...

OK, don't worry about it. Try to get some sleep.

Maxine has been wondering—where would Frédérique be?— when answers suddenly flood through her, warm and light and numerous. Frédérique would be striding through Bowring Park, just down the road—wind and rain and all, she'd have some expensive boots in the trunk (it would be her car, not someone else's) and her body would be moving, pumping, breathing along the paths in the dark—purposeful, determined, exhilarated—or, on the other side of the road, she'd have found the cafeteria at the mental hospital and be shaking water from her hair on the way to the coffee machine, where she'd strike up a conversation with someone, a patient, on whom she would focus her full and considerable attention, her penetrating gaze, for a shortish time. She'd recognize the humanity behind the illness and feel, however briefly, the full poignant force of—actually, though, she'd probably have found the young, dark-haired and soon to be comfortably rich psychiatrist. He'd be sitting at a cafeteria table and she would make him laugh. He'd laugh his pleasant laugh and feel it wasn't entirely pleasant enough, not sonorous enough; he wasn't witty enough— he'd feel that somehow she drew him up to a higher standard, that if he spent more time, most of his time, with Frédérique, he would be a fuller, more exciting, passionate, charming human being, all he needed was to be in her presence, to have her smiling at him like this and then asking a question and waiting silently for his response—he would rip open his tan Land's End chinos and—no, no he wouldn't— he would, for her, muster the best response he possibly could to her question—what was her question?—he opens his mouth to speak, he says Rapatapata. Kyle's knuckles on the rain-smeared glass: Maxine, it's locked!

Gail has arrived at suppertime with boxes of Chinese, unannounced and most welcome. She goes throughMaxine's cupboards until she finds a small blue pottery bowl, and in this she arranges the packages of soy and plum sauce. She sets the bowl on the table where Maxine is putting out some cutlery. The cubes of pork are orange and bumpy, with chunks of fresh pineapple. Maxine can feel the insides of her cheeks preparing for the sweet gooey sauce.

Want me to give some to the fish? A little bit of broccoli?

It's got gravy on it. I don't know if he can eat that.

Are you kidding? How often does it get Chinese? It's probably over there in the bowl right now saying Yes, oh please. Gail breaks off a tiny piece of broccoli floret and slides it onto the tip of her chopstick.

No. You might poison him.

I thought you were going to get rid of it anyway, what happened to that? You don't want to be bringing water to room temperature and scrubbing off the castle every week, do you?

Well… Maxine gazes down the hall toward the living room, where the fish bowl sits on a small table.

Well what?

I kind of got used to him.

Gail raises an eyebrow: So, we're talking, what, laziness? Fish by inertia?

It's more like…you know how people come into your life and you haven't chosen them? You don't really want them there but you end up having to deal with them anyway. Sometimes that's OK. Sometimes it works out.

Excuse me, did you say
people
?

Maxine grins.

Max, you're unreal. Look, open a fortune cookie.

Maxine's fork stops halfway to her mouth, with a hunk of pineapple on it: I'm not done yet.

Just open it. Gail pushes the clear plastic package across the table.

The cure for grief is movement.
Maxine rolls her eyes. Oh, great— I get grief.

Max, that wasn't grief, it was the
cure
for grief. OK, here we go,
Wisdom is on her way to you.

Haaaa. Looks like her flight got rerouted. I wouldn't make up the bed just yet.

Pass me another spring roll.

Pass me another spring roll,
please.

Please pass me another spring roll, dink.

Frédérique's phone made its little preeep sound twice and then silence echoed in her office. Moments later, two more preeeps rang out. Frédérique tore off a piece of tape and grabbed her purse. She pushed and twisted the handle of her office door so it would lock behind her. She paused for a moment in the hallway. She looked both ways with her eyes only, without turning her head. Then she groaned and crumpled to one knee. She massaged her ankle, sighed, and pushed against the doorjamb to lift herself back up. Any observer would have had to be watching extremely carefully to notice that as she rested her weight on the wall, her thumb pressed the small piece of tape over the edge of the door and the trim on the doorframe. Once erect, Frédérique tossed her hair back, patted it down, and strode along the corridor with only a slight, elegant limp. The door to the stairwell swung open. Through it Frédérique went, fumbling in her purse for a quarter for the payphone by the stairs. She lifted the receiver, punched in a number, waited a few seconds. “The Chinese Lantern,” Frédérique hissed, glancing over her shoulder. “Twenty minutes.” Frédérique never used elevators. They represented slothfulness. Seconds later, the only evidence of her presence would be a hint of expensive perfume and the clip-clipping of her heels far down the stairs. Twenty minutes later she was biting into a spring roll, strings of bean sprout dangling and glistening. Her tongue reached down and around and scooped them up. Jerome walked in though the heavy wooden doors and closed them behind him. He paused for several seconds before yanking them back open and thrusting his head out. He looked this way and that and then came to join Frédérique. She stood and he wrapped his arms around her as he bent down to take in her fragrance. He put his lips by her ear.

“The shop,” he whispered. “They broke into the shop. They tore it apart. They didn't find your package, but I don't think it's safe any more.” Frédérique pulled away, gazed adoringly at him for all to see, and drew him in close again.

“Was anyone hurt?” she murmured urgently.

“Not badly. A few, just shock.”

“You can die of shock. We need to get help. Is Barry OK?”

“Oh yeah, Barry's fine. I meant, actually...the rabbit. And a couple of the guinea pigs. There was the little hamster but that might be unrelated, he wasn't looking well.”

Today Karen's out of town and Maxine has mistimed her run so that she arrives back in her neighbourhood a few minutes after all of St. Simeon's was unleashed on an unsuspecting sunny afternoon. A multitude of navy-sweatered youngsters clog the sidewalks and the narrow one-way streets are suddenly full of idling Volvos and SUVs. It's Maxine's first run in a while. She's slow and tired now, plodding along, looking for anything to distract her from the fact that she's not quite there yet, that her legs need to keep moving for two more minutes, that although she could stop, she must not. Up ahead two boys have their coats off. They look Kyle's age or younger; one holds his knapsack by the straps and he keeps swinging it to the side, brushing it against the hedge, swing and swing again. The idle swishing against branches seems so boylike, so carefree and indicative of spring that Maxine's back straightens hopefully. Her stride picks up, she considers saying something to the boys, something cheerful and maybe a little comic about sun and youth and freedom from the classroom. She slows as she draws level with them and overhears the boy with the backpack saying to the smaller one: Fuck you, you little fuckin pile of shit.

It's still sunny when Kyle arrives and they stand out on the tiny wooden landing with the door to Maxine's apartment.

You could put a chair out here, Kyle says. You have room for a small chair.

So all the people walking by could gawk at me?

No, silly. It's supposed to be the other way round.

I'd feel exposed.

You're
supposed to be the watcher. They lean on the railing and look down at the melting snow. Across the road something moves in the window, maybe a flick of curtain, and Kyle turns and heads inside. Grownups—he says, flopping into the computer chair, affecting world-weariness—All they do is work. And go to the liquor store.

Maxine can hear from the lack of swivelling that he's waiting, monitoring her reaction. She's bent over untying her sneaker and doesn't turn around. I know, she says in the same mildly disgusted tone. They're soooo boring.

Maxine unlaces her other sneaker, slips both of them off, and heads to the front porch with them. If you get too bored anytime, over there—she's sending this message over her shoulder, setting the sneakers neatly on the rubber mat—You c'mon and visit me. Doesn't matter, you know, if it's nighttime or whatever. She straightens and turns, and Kyle swings his chair away from her, clicks. Ky, they're a bit stressed right now, hey? It's work, it happens, it'll blow over. She puts a hand on one of his shoulder blades and rubs a few friendly circles.