Vandal Love (24 page)

The laser mending, a specialty technique also on trial, didn’t feel great either though some gland in François’s pulsing body had poured heroin into his veins. It had happened when he’d seen his toe on the tray, red as a pork hock. Then it had been reattached. It swelled, ached, but, they admitted, practically healed overnight, leaving only a line like that on a soldered pipe. Laser therapy was continued for two weeks, and they credited this with the quick return of sensation.

Every moment left to himself François read,
Time, Newsweek
, anything up-to-date, and, of course, the paper. He saw his grandmother’s outmoded beliefs now for what they were. He read business and politics. Watching TV, he learned expressions. You’re trying to fleece me, he muttered alone, imagining gritty business deals. Weakness angered him. Newspapers predicted a decade of innovation. In the Travel section he came across snippets of history. The Holy Roman Empire, he thought, this is it, business now, corporations, the future, not some hippie dream but another kind of paradise. He was ready for the normal life.

During his convalescence they fed him well. They weighed each entree, classified its nutritional contents and watched it disappear. By the time he left, he was more than when he’d arrived, not limping either. The head clinician showed him his picture in the paper, the headline:
Human Body Mere Mechanics
. François was interviewed. Speaking well, he decided, was the product
of deep breaths, a guard-dog propensity for looking in the eye. He made people squirm on pauses and over-articulated words that were hardest to say. When he left the hospital, there was even, waiting on the steps, that sudden Western phenomenon, a fan club. He accepted numbers from pretty girls, though he had no time for this, not yet.

He hitched a ride downtown. He looked in the paper for a cheap room. The only one that wasn’t a dive was in the home of Dr. Eduardo Wee, a Peruvian-born Chinese man who’d been raised in Illinois and immigrated to Vancouver in his teens and who, with his Midwestern accent, sounded exactly like Reagan. He even had the Reagan coif, a modest pompadour. He told a little about his history, that he’d never fit in with the local Chinese. He spoke their language poorly, but he’d chosen not to abandon his parents or, later, his wife, who’d become his link to the community and who would never leave. When they all passed away, she too young, his parents too old, he found himself alone, a doctor with a dwindling following. He spoke of a passion for inventing, could manage a few words of sympathetic French though François asked that he speak English—the future world language, he’d read. The house looked somewhat like an English manor and was just out from the downtown, on a scenic stretch. Eduardo lived in the basement. It had low ceilings and cottage-like windows, and he rented it from the woman upstairs, who herself took on boarders. All that François heard of them were their constant comings and goings drumming on the floorboards.

The only problem, Eduardo informed him, and the reason this place is so cheap, is that there’s no bathroom down here. She has the only one. He indicated the upstairs with a lift of his eyes. From the back door he showed François where a trail led through the grass to a clump of trees on a rise. There, an outhouse of ancient though sturdy timbers remained from some other era. François didn’t like it, and Eduardo admitted he didn’t either, especially not in winter. Being an amateur inventor, he’d tried to make an incinerator that would work like a toilet but had almost burned the house down.

If only bodily waste could be eliminated, he said as though facing the critical dilemma of the age.

Those weeks François set to work. He wore a sports jacket with suede patches at the elbows, jeans and polos and tennis shoes. Girls noticed. He honed his projection with daily visits to the fitness club, where women in striped tights, ankle warmers and headbands did aerobics behind a glass wall. Weights gave the Sasquatch a modern allure, though he’d signed up as much for the showers as for the gym. Once he’d walked in on Eduardo standing naked in a ceramic bowl and pouring water over his head.

François planned the practical aspects of earning a fortune. He went to a printer and had seven hundred bumper stickers made. He came up with them on the spot. He’d had a hunch. It was the right time for weirdness. He set up on the street that evening, in Gastown, couples out dining, musicians playing blues and sit-com themes on corners. Within two days he had a thousand
more made. They said things such as I Brake for Ice, Love My Dove, A Flower for My Power, any good mix of sounds he could come up with and often their opposite. People laughed at lines that wouldn’t have drawn a smirk from him. Often he took newspaper headlines word for word, and passersby bought them up, seeming to find in them some hint or expression of the ineffable. His picture appeared in the paper again. Stickers were flying around town. Young people and married couples forked it out. He upped prices and bought himself a used van. Only when the rage lulled did he hire students. He gave each one a post, had them on commission and told them, square in the eyes, You run on me, I’ll break your knees.

Still, for all his effort he had capital for neither house nor commercial space. Those crisp evenings when he crossed the yard, a new roll of toilet paper held close to his sleeve, the life he’d renounced didn’t seem so far. As he sat in the outhouse, on the wooded rise above the bay, there were no ambitions, just land and the steep water the Indians had long ago mediated, the mountains massive and invisible above the night.

All that winter and through the next four years he learned. He had a modest library and studied tax and zoning loopholes. He read books on business, bought magazines on money. He played at anything reasonably legal with low overhead. He made friends and financed a buying trip to Guatemala for gaudy cotton. He had people selling fireworks from booths, fresh-pressed juice
and exotic smoothies in the downtown, avocado and banana. He backed a clever young man who’d found a way to buy designer clothing labels, and now sold them on the street, lucrative, since many a generic garment could become stylish. François even hired high-school kids to sell No Soliciting signs and stickers in residential neighbourhoods. People appreciated the irony. He had a network for distribution and collection.

But on bad days, he feared that he would never be good at this. Loneliness crept into him and settled so deep that he smelled the staleness of his lungs when he exhaled. The meaning and happiness he’d envisioned seemed too far, and he recalled that old gentle nature, or a picnic with Ernestine near the river, the skyscrapers lit like petals in a refracted sundown and the way she’d looked at the sky, her smile in her front teeth. But he didn’t want to suffer over an ugly prostitute. Instead he cut hard deals just to see if he could. He worked his body lifting weights. He even bought a wide girdle fitted with electrical nodes that gave mild shocks that repeatedly flexed the muscles of the belly, resulting in an amazing washboard. As a test of will he wore it day and night, practising holding himself steady. One evening Eduardo noticed François’s vibrating midsection. I wouldn’t use that if I were you, he said. The body has its own electricity, rather fragile, too.

January brought fog and wet squalls, days of cold rain that never quite became snow. Street business was bad, and on his way back from a collection François again felt his heart go out of it a little. Wanting to get warm and dry
off, he stepped in for a drink, but he misjudged the front. Inside was starkly elegant, glass tables and tabourets, a sombre bar, servers in jackets and a woman turned to take him in, alone, a martini in her fingers.

You look cold, she said. Sit down. I’ll buy you one.

It was the kind of place where he could imagine himself in some detached future when success verged on bored decadence. Right now it made him a little shy. He’d been avoiding dating, had Prioritized, as his business books said, and didn’t want anyone to see his transition. But this woman, though petite and busty, drew on her cigarette as if she’d been resurrected from the shadowy streets of some imagined Paris. It was an act, no doubt, but he had great respect for acts.

Are you expecting someone? she asked.

No, he said, grinding out his accent.

Then let’s get out of this dive and go someplace good.

They caught a taxi to a restaurant priced by the table, where she said, Don’t worry, I’m paying. Only later she introduced herself as Elaine, in her penthouse suite overlooking the bay, at a better bar than any he’d paid to sit at, where he found himself many of the nights that followed. She had perfection too lasting for youth, the angle of her jaw and tireless blade of cheekbones, the mandarin slant of her eyes. The taut edges of her lips made her appear to smile. There was something fragile about her sensuality, her slow strides. She listed as she walked, as if drawn by desire, always to the left.

Finally, a man my size, she said as she slid off her shoulder straps. But please, be gentle.

Her nipples were small and dark and hard. Don’t grab, she whispered when he got heated. Keep it slow.

Those next months, he saw her once or twice a week. He toyed with the idea of getting her to finance a venture, though this would betray the self-reliant man he’d put forth. She hardly talked about her means. She preferred silence, wore him best on her arm in places where sound accompanied the meal like an appetizer, jazz clubs mostly. He knew she was widowed, a Jewess married young to an old man and freed young. Her age he guessed in the late thirties.

She’d said she’d come to Vancouver from New York to escape a high society where everyone knows you and judges. Idiots, she’d added casually. Anything beyond this didn’t interest her. Oh, she said with a sigh, after a thin intake through a long cigarette, let the past be.

Only once, when the music took too-extended a pause, was the need for conversation first clear, then crucial, finally polite. The knowing left her eyes. Fear flickered there. Heat touched her cheeks. She pursed her lips as if to spit but swallowed.

Have you thought about taking an investment? she asked.

Because I love you, she added later that night, in that way of hers that made him feel she could continue a conversation one word an hour, two sentences a day. Yes, because I love you, there will be no strings attached. How much do you want?

From the wall she removed a painting of a geisha undoing the front of her dress. In the safe were stacks of big bills.

François’s only regret was that his plan wasn’t as elegant as the jazz clubs with potted palms, dais and piano and floor-to-ceiling fish tanks. He bought an abandoned garage of red brick at the edge of Gastown and converted it into a car museum/burger joint where clients ate out of chrome hubcaps and sat in booths alongside the polished, rebuilt bodies of roadsters. It had shelves of vintage paraphernalia, good swinging music and long-legged waitresses. Businessmen poured in with colleagues and came back with sons. The ambiance was nostalgic, the food good and plentiful and cheap. The decor suggested that heyday America was the place to be and drew that middle class of Canadians who mostly felt the same way.

On the first clear day of spring François’s restaurant received a write-up in the
Vancouver Sun
. He hurried to Elaine’s. He’d rented his own apartment, kept a closet of stylish clothes, finally more than a street huckster. The last time he’d seen Elaine, when he’d told her what a hit the restaurant was, she’d been slow to show interest. Now, with a fist of flowers, he wondered if she cared. No matter. In the elevator he hummed the latest rage and found, in the penthouse, a woman who bore remarkable resemblance to Elaine.

Oy, she said. Not another one, and so young.

Another what?

She gave him a steady look. Her eyebrows and piercing gaze were too familiar.

Well, there’s time to tell, she said. Sit, sit. Mother’s napping. It seems she’s been neglecting her medication. Feeling young again, no doubt.

Your mother? Where’s Elaine?

Oh, she said as if pained. Sit. Please sit.

And so François learned all—saw, in fact, Elaine stretched on the bed, features peaceful, breathing somewhat shallow. The woman, Margaret Meir, was Elaine’s daughter. François sat. Margaret gesticulated as she spoke, then held her hands in her lap self-consciously. The story began with an inheritance, the bit about married young and elderly husband true, though when he conceded to die, Elaine was fifty—Though, Margaret clarified, she was still beautiful. She was uncannily young for her age and didn’t need to do all of … Well, I’ll explain …

Still, we always had a theory that she’d never lived her youth and so had never grown old. Anyway. Like I said. I’ll explain.

At the age of fifty-five—

Fifty-five, François repeated.

She’s now sixty-eight, Margaret said, then went on to tell how, at that respectable age, Elaine began studying means of growing young. She fasted, did heliotherapy, went to cures and mud baths, fraternized with nudists and liberals, submitted herself to fruit regimens and lived in an ashram in the Himalayas where she consumed unheard-of proportions of Asian drugs touted for regeneration and practised deep breathing on glacial slopes until she finally decided that, young as she might
become, such a life was a bore. Then, on the verge of giving up —and closing in on sixty—she heard about a group of avant-garde doctors who claimed that the industry of the future was rejuvenation. The incipient techniques of facelift and liposuction and boob job were taking shape in privately financed labs. Techniques used in the world wars for maimed soldiers were perfected for the elderly or the ugly rich. Elaine was a cross between guinea pig (François saw their connection now) and patron of the sciences. The doctors stretched her face, incised her eyes and lips, padded and tucked her breasts, sucked out varicose veins and removed folds of unwanted skin. They cleaned her jaw of canescence and reset her teeth with drills. The result was stunning. She could make grandsons blush and lust, until, of course, they found out this had taken much of their inheritance and that the rest was going to dressing and lavishing this immaculate body.