The Beggar's Garden (18 page)

“I don't know. I think Buddy may have a hard time with a vehicle, behaviour-wise. I think the trauma of his relocation is still pretty unresolved.”

Winston wasn't listening. “What's that, Mart …?” The thud of Marta's voice could be heard through Winston's palm placed over the receiver. “And you could bring someone else if you like? How about that woman …” Dan could tell he was stalling for effect. “ … uh, Ginnie? The one you mentioned the other day. I'm sure she'd like it out here.”

Dan had been careful to mention her only in passing and was surprised Winston even remembered. Winston had often tried to set Dan up in the past, having worked his way into a low-level administrative position at the public library, where there was no shortage of women Dan's age. “It's like musical chairs,” Winston had once said, “and they know you know the music stops when they hit forty.” But Dan had never gone for it. People as desperate as he was weren't his thing. He was holding out, for what he didn't know. Then Winston mentioned his new baby, which Dan hadn't yet seen, and that made him feel like a neglectful friend, so he agreed.

They met in the park the next day at the usual time. She said she'd go as long as she could bring Jo. “I get nervous in groups,” she said, touching Dan lightly on the back. This touch was given in the way, he convinced himself later while shaving, that nurses
must touch people all the time. Nurses were just used to having their hands on people, with all that spelunking into chest cavities and various orifices. Lower back, no big deal.

Ginnie pulled up in her compact car with a “Healthcare Before Olympics” bumper sticker and black dog hair blanketing every upholstered surface. They stopped and bought lamb shanks for the adults and some Italian sausages for the dogs. “It's Jo's favourite,” she said, actually colouring slightly with embarrassment.

In the car Dan worried about having failed to prep his friend for Ginnie's harelip. Winston had once dumped a woman he'd dated for over a year, whom Dan had liked very much, because “her tits were like pool balls in socks and the fact she was a card-carrying idiot.” Dan knew something like a harelip fell under the disability classification, those things that cannot be helped or commented upon. And as they exited the freeway, he reminded himself of this once more.

Marta met them at the front door, her face G-force tight with the hue of a professionally roasted turkey. “Wince is in back,” she said, before hugging them rigidly, not batting a heavily mascaraed eye at Ginnie's lip. Dan figured she'd seen her share of disfigurement in the makeup-artist-slash-aesthetician business.

“Take the puppies around the side—we just had the carpets done,” Marta said.

Winston greeted them in flip-flops, Hawaiian shirt fluttering open like two curtains drawn back for the big debut, a hairy belly that had grown since last time.

“So good to
finally
meet you,” he said, as if Ginnie were the subject of frequent discussion. Dan looked puzzled then laughed to make sure Ginnie knew Winston was exaggerating.

They sat out in the yard on some plastic patio furniture.

“Quite a parcel of earth you've purchased here,” Dan said.

“The city is no place for a kid to grow up. Too much stimulation. Too many distractions,” Winston replied, ruffling his son's hair. It'd been ages since Dan had seen Jacob, their oldest, who was now three. He'd sprouted an odd tuft of black hair dead centre on the crown of his head, much darker than the wispy baby hair that surrounded it. It looked like he was growing out a bad dye job. Or into one.

“At least he's
got
hair,” Dan said later, palming his own head and everyone had a chuckle.

Winston set a box of white wine on the table. “The good stuff,” he said, then made a flourish of lighting the barbecue.

Dan noticed that Marta tensed when the dogs came anywhere near Jada, the new baby. Buddy sniffed then licked Marta's manicured hand and she batted him away.

“Tenacious,” Marta said.

“You wouldn't believe it,” Dan said.

Later, out on the grass, Jacob pulled Jo's tail and they both yelped, while Marta directed a barrage of questions at Ginnie, who handled them with grace.

“Well, some suggest the Kerry blue terrier is the result of a Portuguese water dog swimming ashore from a shipwreck and mating with the soft-coated wheaten,” Ginnie told her.

“That is
so
romantic,” Marta declared, glancing at Dan for some reason. “She's
such
a beautiful dog. Gorgeous.”

“Well, she was destined for the show circuit, but her tail was too short. She's lucky they didn't put her out of her misery,” Ginnie said.

“You know it's amazing the kind of things they can do now,” said Marta, blind to the irony of Ginnie's comment. “You wouldn't believe it. I bet you could have the tail lengthened if you really wanted.”

“Oh no, I'm happy with her just the way she is,” Ginnie said.

To steer the conversation away from genetic defects, Dan said, “You know what they
do
have now is an organic dog deli. I did a website for them.”

“Oh god. That's it. Too much,” Winston said, as if this were the final piece in a puzzle he'd been slowly putting together. “You can't make that stuff up.”

“And now they have these dog spas,” Ginnie said. “I'm serious, you drop them off. They supposedly put them in hot tubs and give them pedicures—they call them paw-dicures. What I think is that they probably just stick them in a cage in the basement and then spray them with perfume and give them a Milk-Bone before you come get them. How would anyone know the difference? Isn't that ridiculous? I spoil Jo, but that's just excessive.”

“Well, I think it's cute,” said Marta. “Everyone these days needs to relax, why not dogs? And hey, if there's a market for it.”

“Oh Christ, Marta, let's not use the
m
word at a time like this,” Winston said with the ragged quality his voice got when he drank.

“I'm just saying.”

“I think it's unforgivable we have all these people on the street and people are spending hundreds of dollars on organic dog delis and spas,” Ginnie said. “It's insulting. And inhuman.”

Marta seemed to interpret this as an insinuation and she shot up straighter in her chair. “Maybe if those people took better care
of themselves—their looks, I mean—they wouldn't be in the position, you know, unfortunate as it is, that they're in.”

“What, kids who are living on the street to get away from abusive homes just need to get nice haircuts?” Ginnie's voice had gone up what seemed like a whole octave.

“Well, I know what it takes to make a mohawk stay up, and that is eggs,” Winston said, trying to lighten things up. “Am I right, Dan? And I have serious doubts about the poverty of a kid who is using eggs in that fashion rather than scrambling them with some toast, or feeding them to their dogs. Plus, more often than not these kids run away from good homes, am I right, Dan? That's what we did—it's part of growing up, they'll come around.”

Ginnie was fuming, and it gave her a powerful, attractive quality. She turned to Dan with her jaw hanging and her eyebrows scrunched, and at that moment Dan realized he'd come to this house with a strong, smart woman who held real opinions, opinions about issues he'd never really considered, if only because he hadn't before had anyone to discuss them with. Willing to agree with anything as long as it united him with Ginnie against these people, he smiled and shook his head in the same way she had, knowing his head was by then sweaty and shiny, but for some reason not particularly bothered.

They had more wine and things cooled down. Someone handed Dan the baby and they all stared as if it looked different now it was being held by someone new. The conversation trailed off and Dan passed the baby to Ginnie, who received it with unselfconscious ease.

“Another drink?” Winston called, ducking inside before
Dan could answer, the box now weightless on the table. Same as always, if Dan was drinking, Winston could too.

Dan's mind wandered to the night Marta told Winston she was pregnant. He and Dan were living in a house with five other guys, some of whom were in the band. Winston came down to Dan's room in the basement, drunk. His hands were restless and he spoke very softly. In a disturbingly short period he went from asking Dan how he might convince Marta to have an abortion to what Dan thought they should name it.

Now, looking at this house and everything assembled here—barbecue, playhouse, lawn mower—Dan marvelled at how so much could spring from a decision at the time so seemingly insignificant. He watched Jacob chase Buddy around the yard like a miniature Frankenstein and knew it could really have gone either way.

“Winston. The baby is tired,” Marta said later as if that meant the whole world. As if it wasn't actually she who was tired. Winston strained to his feet, pounded the remains of his wine, regarded them like a cop giving an I'm-just-doing-my-job-here speech and said, “It's been fun.”

“Hey, my brother gave me an extra ball-thrower thing as a gift, you want it?” Ginnie said on the way home.

Keeping up with Winston had left Dan drunker than he'd planned, and he throbbed with the sort of sleepy freedom he'd forgotten larger quantities of alcohol could afford. Really, he preferred throwing to Buddy unassisted—it was a better workout—
but he didn't want to be alone quite yet. He agreed to stop by her place to pick it up.

It turned out Ginnie lived in a building called La Sirenza, built directly across the street from Dan's the year before and obscuring about 30 degrees of his once dazzling 180-degree view of English Bay. Before it was built, Dan had checked out the La Sirenza website and considered buying a unit as an investment, but in the end he put it off and missed the deadline.

Her building had a Mediterranean theme—his was industrial, New York gothic, which he much preferred. The entrance led them beneath some pretty believable faux arches and porticoes into a lobby that gurgled with a white, marble fountain in the form of a spouting swan.

“Wait here,” she said when they arrived at her door, and she rushed inside. Dan felt the alcohol accost his centre of gravity and Buddy's breathing echoed in the empty hallway. He worried she was going to just bring the thrower and say goodbye.

“All ready,” she said, opening the door out of breath, beckoning him inside.

Her condo was on the seventeenth floor—Dan's was on the fifteenth—and standing at the window, he saw that it faced his own. He counted up to his little darkened square in the grid of glass and steel.

The layout of her place was a mirror image of his own, giving it a creepy familiarity. This similarity failed to extend to her kitchen, however, which featured granite counters, white oak cupboards, built-in wine racks and mosaic tile. She must have spent a fortune in upgrades.

“This is Jo's,” she said, opening a door to a room strewn
with bones, balls and a battery of chew toys. Photos of Jo and Ginnie were tacked in random-seeming clusters, low enough for the dog to see them. “There
is
a bed in there, but she usually just sleeps with me.”

They shut the dogs in Jo's room to play and sat on her couch drinking wine, Ginnie drawing deeper slurps now that she wasn't driving.

“So what's with this band?” she said. “Sounds exciting.”

It wasn't. Winston had played guitar and Dan played drums, and they only ever opened for other bands, leagues angrier and better than themselves. An alternative weekly had once called them imitative and redundant, and Dan couldn't find it in himself to disagree. It was a time that Winston had passed sleeping with debatably conscious girls while Dan got blackout drunk trying to figure out whether he was being appropriately punk by doing whatever the fuck he wanted at that exact moment.

He didn't miss it and he told her so.

Ginnie said her brother was into punk music. “I bet he's heard of you.”

“Hope that he hasn't,” Dan said, right before they were suddenly kissing, her mouth pressed to his, her tongue wet and roving. She exhaled heavily through her nose. He found his arms around her and she radiated a surprising heat. It occurred to Dan he hadn't once thought about her lip since he became sure neither Winston nor Marta were judging her. The lip felt slightly tighter than her lower one, though not much. The urgency in her breathing led Dan to wonder how long it had been since she'd kissed anyone. A while, he figured. Her hand brushed his stomach and it flexed. He could feel rolls hanging over his belt and he sucked
it in further. He was light-headed and realized he'd been holding his breath.

She pulled away, a string of spit briefly trapezing between them. “What's wrong? You seem …”—she chose the word carefully—“uneasy.”

“No,” he said, needing to convince her he was enjoying himself, or was just starting to. “I'm good here,” he said, chuckling.

They kissed again. It was different. It felt like a re-enactment. She was tense, and it made him tense. He could feel her monitoring him. She wasn't moving her hands. She somehow knew her lip had once repulsed him. He started focusing his kisses on her lip to prove to her it wasn't disgusting. He licked it and gave it playful nibbles, his tongue flicking over its ridge. He let out a sigh to show her how pleased and relaxed he was by all of this.

Just as he was really getting back into it again, she pulled away a second time, as if it was so she could take a drink of wine. Then she went to the bathroom. When she came back she said she was tired. She smiled at a joke he made at the door but didn't exactly laugh. She passed him the ball thrower on his way out and said she'd see them in the park. Buddy and Dan walked home across the street.

It was an upper-body day, and the weights were kindling dull smoulderings in his chest and arms. He grunted pathetically as he pushed, without embarrassment because there was no one there except for Buddy.