Vandal Love (25 page)

It isn’t natural, Margaret said. She shouldn’t have done it. Then she left her family and came out here because … and get this … because some doctor said cold firms the flesh and this place is as cold as she can tolerate. Of course, it’s clear that she just wants to live where nobody knows her. Now she’s throwing our fortune to the winds, la-di-da. Don’t think we haven’t tried to stop her. But imagine having a bombshell committed. She’d sleep with the judge.

As François listened, Margaret explained her trips out, how last year Elaine fell and broke her hip, which shed light on her fragile motions.

Left hip? he asked.

Left indeed, she said. Can you imagine what the scar from that operation took to cover? But they did a good job, right? You should be the one telling me.

François tried to excuse himself. Margaret was now practically ranting, Body-sculpting, the future, hah! Well, I’ll say. And my sons in college with only me and Herbert to pay tuition and get their careers going. And she has it all. But don’t think for a minute I’m jealous.

She told him about her mother’s bouts of premature dementia, the great irony of her life that had her spending silly, gaga over the phone late at night and now oblivious, drugged on the bed.

Oh no, Margaret told him. You can’t fix a brain.

He stood and left. The elevator blipping down the spine of the building seemed a fine place for loneliness. He couldn’t say he had any regrets. He looked at himself in the elevator mirrors. The doors binged. He went outside. It was still early. Couples strolled towards the beach. Two Chinese girls on rollerskates sped along a bike path. A brick cottage stood near the park, not seeming to belong to the city, climbing roses on a trellis. A woman pushed a stroller, the baby asleep in its shade. He went to his car and started home.

He was on the Trans-Canada. The Eurythmics were singing
Sweet Dreams
, and he considered this age of change and its magic. If a second-rate John Wayne with a monkey could run the world’s most powerful country then didn’t others have a right to their own more humble dreams? A young woman was hitchhiking, and seeing
her, he felt that old wheel turning, wind, the scent of ploughed Manitoba plains or the cool shadow the first time he’d walked with Ernestine on the shady side of a Montréal street. The woman was pleasantly short, wore jeans and a halter top, held a bulging plastic bag, a long-sleeve shirt tied at her waist. Traffic wind whipped her hair about her shoulders and sunny arms.

Only when he pulled over did he notice her distress. She had an American accent. Her name was Margaret. What a coincidence, he told her, but this girl’s accent was Southern, not Margaret with all of its letters pronounced, but Magret. Call me Peggy, she said, then added, You know—she hesitated—you know, I mean, I’ll—and hesitated again. François felt the offer coming. She broke off to say her stuff had been stolen. I was with this guy and I mean … Her chin furrowed. She was lovely, thin nose, sunstreaked hair. She bit her bottom lip. Shi-it, she said, quietly, dragging it out. I thought this was the place to be.

I don’t have far to go, François told her.

She looked at him across that tiny space as if across a room. I’ll give you a blowjob for forty dollars. I’ll give it for twenty, she said too fast, her voice absent of emotion. I’ll give you a blowjob for something to eat, shit, even a hamburger.

He’d missed his exit and considered that he could continue past the city, up to Squamish or Whistler or just turn around and drive for hours. But he’d never been that way.

I’ll take you to get something to eat, he told her. It’s on me.

He pulled off at the next exit and found a restaurant. He watched as she scarfed. She bit her tongue. Her lips were swollen. She cried. An American girl, he thought.

I keep on biting my tongue, she said. Jesus, what’s wrong with me?

He told her it was all right, don’t rush. He was sad, too. And if you need a place to stay until you get organized …

Afterwards he took her to his new home. Cool air through the screens, a long, shallow wind of night smells, flowerbeds and barbecue. It all felt new, a different speed and rhythm. But he was wrong. The wheel is always the same when it’s turning.

Though scared and lonely and lost, Peggy was not submissive. She drawled, her accent not Southern belle but low and rolling, a man’s sound and suitable for congregation. François expected her to drag him to the bathroom and baptize him, but she preferred puffing away in the kitchen, kneading whole-grain bread, soaking seeds and nuts and beans, hacking greens thick enough to make a cow wish for a fifth stomach. She told him about her family, growing up in Alabama before the big move in the seventies, to
Virginia, for the money. After high school she began to travel and eventually decided on Canada, the unexplored north, natural and free. But there were things he glimpsed only in her silences, the way she disappeared into thought and breathed hard, or when she said, Be rough with me, and he was, and she cried like he’d never seen. He wouldn’t do it again, not even when she asked.

As for his apartment, she told him she’d dreamed of a country home. He broke his lease. Alone in the car he practised talking to realtors with a voice like those he’d heard watching court TV with Eduardo. You trying to fleece me? he said. In Maple Ridge he found a cheap split-level in a rustic residential neighbourhood, sensible linoleum, shag rugs to curls his toes in, rucked plaster ceiling and wallpaper with subtle yellow-brown flowers. Poker-faced, he worked the realtor, a young man who nervously spruced his buzz cut, square at the ears and neck, lots of pink scalp. François didn’t ask Peggy’s opinion. He settled. Good taste, he told her that night, keys already in hand, a fast mover, had collateral. Every room smelled like freshly unrolled carpet, new paint on particleboard. In the yard, there were only two trees to clean up after. The neighbouring lawns were separated by picket fences, neatly mowed.

I guess it’ll do, she said, though I’d rather not have neighbours.

To his surprise she didn’t want a washing machine. She bought an antique washboard and did clothes by hand. She bathed in an oak tub for some holistic property of wood. Soon she learned to make cheese, strained curdled
milk through cloth and stunk up the house. We can buy that, you know, he told her. She planted a garden, made grains, steamy jars on every sill. Her last name, he discovered, she’d changed a few years back to Blossom.

François saw himself as a saintly character. When the homeless begged, he offered jobs sweeping and was vindicated when they refused. Peggy had asked for a meal and had gotten a life, had a man who could pick her up, take care of her, do the right thing. He knew he’d wanted more than a business. He wanted a family and children and a plan for a stable future. But Peggy worried him. Some days she wouldn’t get up until the afternoon and lazed about in dirty clothes and told him to leave her alone when he asked what was wrong. Sometimes she got up at five a.m. and appeared to be praying to the rising sun. Sometimes he’d come home and she’d be red-in-the-face angry and would hector him. Am I the only girl you picked up? A first, huh? Just picked me up and took me in? Maybe you have houses like this all over the place. Cheap little dumps with bimbos off the highway.

The next day she would be fine, rinsing sprouts, unwrapping rank slabs of cheese. He tolerated her obsessions, bought what she wanted, books depicting four-armed blue beings, naked women with suns bursting at their groins. She insisted he take her to fairs where she saw spiritual masters, all indistinguishable from homeless people but for their robes and harmonious gestures, and their followers huddled patiently by.

After announcing her pregnancy, Peggy coddled herself, careful in the first trimester, eating bowls of sprouting
integuments that, on the tongue, felt like fingernail clippings. François held himself as if he were a fighter wary of overconfidence. With Peggy just as with Elaine he sensed his old softness, the possibility of weakness, that there were things he wasn’t wise enough to see. So much had come to him on the highway, his grandmother and now a wife. Perhaps he’d had no time for aphorism in his solitary roving—no Hebrew crossing forty years of wilderness with his nation. Recalling his past, he feared the innocence of the small, happy self that he’d abolished.

But work and being a father, he decided, would be enough. He would set everything straight, buy a bigger house, own more businesses. He’d already opened a bumper-sticker boutique. That first night with Peggy he’d known things would never be the same. A son was coming. He read it in the stars, the generosity of flashing late-summer leaves, even in the celestial spread below the turning observation deck at the Harbour Centre where he took her to eat. For him stars were just a manner of speaking.

During manic hours in the city, he made mental lists to tell his son: conquests, struggles, how he became self-made. He would be a hero for that boy, the manly businessman who divides his time scrupulously between work and play. The larger Peggy’s belly became, the more he pushed himself. He knew that this was his chance to have a family and do it right, to be a better father than his own. Just thinking this gave him a sense of justice, as if he were a great man. He imagined his son reading about interstellar travel, going to a big university,
double scholarship, sports and science, or better yet, business. Perhaps there was nothing wrong with François’s grandmother’s stories after all, the strength, the sense of belonging to a powerful lineage, a true Hervé. François would name the boy Harvey in hopes of that family magic, though he wasn’t sure the anglicization would retain the name’s power. But he wouldn’t even speak to his son in French, and though he was decided about this, oddly, imagining how he would be as a father, he caught himself naming things as if teaching the words.
Une toile d’araignée
, he said of a spider web freshly strung across the backroom of his store and already loaded with dust. Or at night,
la lune
, the pale body glittering like an ice crystal in the winter sky as he turned in his sheets, unable to sleep, but staying there anyway.

That Christmas Eve Peggy, wanting a child born on a holy day, began huffing through the house to induce labour. Dressed in sweats, she climbed the stairs, looped into rooms, sat on the bed and bounced, stepped in and out of the dry bathtub and ventured into the mouldy cold of the cellar as if nearing the earth might bring her closer to the coercion of gravity. She sped Lamaze breaths double time, took to the street, nostrils flaring, her body as mechanical as a speed walker’s so that as François returned home in the dark he
thought he saw a Soviet soldier marching with vigorous arm swings, in a light snow that, just then, the radio announcer said would bring the first white Christmas in years. A Christmas birth François couldn’t have cared less about, though before New Year would be nice. He could claim the child on his taxes and so left Peggy to her methods.

That day the front page of the newspaper had carried the story of a life-sized nativity scene carved in ice. François, on an errand downtown, had stopped at the outdoor skating rink to see it. The artifice had not charmed him. Rather, he’d felt disdain for this otherworldly family, poised beatifically, the Virgin with her opening hands, the baby whittled to spare, alien detail, too perfect for life. It called up memories of his churchly youth, the coloured Bible plates of a Christ his grandmother had dreamed he would emulate. He liked to think of himself as the kind of man who kept up, who read the paper and checked things out, had a word or two on the subject, which he did. Still, he regretted having taken the time to come here. He had no place for the divine, and the season he liked was holiday expenditures. But the image stayed, imprinted on a ghostly inner eye, cold like the beginning of a headache, a vitreous baby, too small, too keenly expressive of its perfection. When, that night, he saw his son in this same way, pale, tiny, as neatly fashioned as an idol, his pangs were of a guilt medieval.

The pearly child filled him with a sense of doom—Peggy’s hubris, his greed—the simple primitive belief in accountability, that by scorning a baby Christ cast in ice
he’d brought it into his life. Holding this polished creature in his palms, François tried to believe Eduardo, who’d said, He’ll grow—they all do. But years did not fade the changeling’s air. And though minute he was no midget and did not have the sturdy bearing of a dwarf. If he grew at all, it was incrementally in relation to his nearly absent appetite. He remained carved and luminous and cold.

So perhaps he would be a genius, François concluded, though with the years, Harvey seemed intent on nothing more than watching and became quickly bored of books. François, reading the paper, would hear the patter of feet and glance over his shoulder to see, peering from the shadow behind his easy chair, two large, moist eyes. He recognized the pattern, Peggy hellbent on making a holy man, bringing home pop-up books of the Buddha and Hindu saints, teaching Harvey to meditate or to say Shanti, Shanti, Shanti over each meal. Had François, by forfeiting the divine calling envisioned by his grandmother, passed the burden on to his son? He tried to make Harvey eat mussels, oysters, men’s food. Harvey gagged. In restaurants François ordered steaks, but Harvey peeled and nibbled a few brown fibres before turning his attention to the lettuce garnish. Though neither François nor Peggy did, Harvey ate in the European fashion, fork in his left hand, dainty from birth. When he got his fingers dirty, he shook them like a puppy that had put a paw in the water bowl.

Those years Peggy immersed herself in the New Age: crystals, meditation, flower essences, earth-breathing to
balance planetary currents. She took Harvey to visit a fat swami whose picture now hung above his bed, the spitting image of a Greek restaurateur François knew, a man with a bad thyroid and buck-teeth like a mule’s, his face saddled in black glasses. Peggy had even joined a congregation where visitors lectured on food combining and past life regression and the sex cults of Jesus. Because of Harvey’s tendency to get sick, she began boiling his toys, so that he grew up with a leprous collection of half-melted figurines and hot rods with flat wheels.