Consumption (50 page)

“My parents live just a few houses down from here—my father helped Pauloosie build this house—and this is their first grandchild too,” Riri said.

“I would like to meet them.”

“So you’ve come to make up with Pauloosie?”

Which is not how Victoria would have put it at all but, without a concise alternative explanation, she found herself nodding.

When Balthazar knocked on the door, it was to drop off a tuna he had been given that morning. Behind Riri, holding the little girl, was an older woman who looked as if she might have been from one of the out-islands. He smiled at her and handed Riri the fish and started to turn to away and then it was as if his muscles recognized her better than his eyes had. His neck cranked around and his eyes fixed on her and there she was. There.

“Victoria.”

“Keith. I got your letter. Thank you.”

“I’m glad you came,” he managed. Then, looking wide-eyed at Riri, “Is Pauloosie around?”

“He went out fishing early this morning. He doesn’t know she’s here.”

“Oh my.”

“Come in.” She pulled him through the door and directed him toward a chair at the kitchen table opposite Victoria’s.

“Victoria,” he said again.

“Yes,” she said, softening a little, amused by him.

“This is Riri,” he said, gesturing, “I mean, you say ‘Lilly’ but write it Riri, which doesn’t make a lot of sense, if you ask me, the letters all being imported anyway, they might as well reflect the local pronunciation. But they don’t. Anyway. This is Pauloosie’s…”

“Yes, I know. And this is little Iguptak,” she said, holding her granddaughter in front of her and displaying her to Balthazar, as if he, in turn, had not already met the infant.

“Riri, may I use your phone to call the priest? I told him I would, if Victoria came.”

“Sure.”

“Is that Father Bernard you’re talking about?”

“Yes.”

“Your letter said he was here.”

“He is.”

“Invite him for supper,” Riri said.

“Okay,” Balthazar said, inserting his thick fingers into the rotary dial, misdialing, starting over again, and misdialing once more.

They ate late into the night, fresh tuna steaks, and taro and rice, bottles of Burgundy brought by the priest. Pauloosie and his mother did not embrace, but sat across the table, looking often at each other, and nodding. Victoria said Iguptak was the most beautiful baby she had ever seen, and Pauloosie accepted the statement as it was intended, and acknowledged the layers of meaning within it.

Bernard said, “When I saw the name ‘Iguptak’ cross my desk, I tell you, it was like a hallucination: I tasted raw seal in my mouth, and felt wind on my face. I was so happy. I telephoned the
curé
here five minutes later, and he told me what he knew of you. I caught the next boat here. I was so happy, meeting a friend in a faraway place. As we all are tonight.”

“Father, I think you’re feeling the wine,” Victoria said.

“I am. And it is a pleasure to drink wine like this with friends of mine from my young days.”

“You are still young, Father.”

“And you are kind.” Then he said, “What a relief it is on my heart to see you three eating together again.”

There was a long silence and the fish was chewed carefully, though it held no bones. Riri said, “My daughter needs to know her ancestors.”

“I want her to too,” said Victoria.

And Pauloosie: “Yes.”

With that Father Bernard sat back in his chair grinning widely. It was very late, and, old man that he was now, like Balthazar, he was tired. His lids sagged and he rose with effort. “We should go, Keith, let these young people say the things that need to be said.”

“Yes,” Balthazar said, though he wanted only to watch Victoria late into the night, listen to her voice, observe her black eyes flashing liquidly. “In the morning I will be buying my ticket home,” he said, and all present nodded at this. Everyone at the table rose to say goodbye to the two grey men. They were led to the door, and Bernard was kissed in succession. Then Balthazar’s hand was gripped by Riri, and then Pauloosie, and finally Victoria. He reached to embrace her.

“Keep in touch,” he said thickly as she stiffened.

She pulled him closer and whispered in his ear: “I don’t want to stay in touch with you.”

And then she looked at him and he could not meet her eyes and she turned away from him toward her son and her granddaughter.

The two old men walked silently down the unlit dirt road on Hiva Oa, making for the rectory, where both were staying. Bernard’s heart sang, as he studied the brilliant southern hemisphere stars overhead. Balthazar did not speak.

PART THREE

 

Eskimo Poetry

Hard times, dearth times
Plague us every one,
Stomachs are shrunken,
Dishes are empty…
Mark you there yonder?
There come the men
Dragging beautiful seals
To our homes.
Now is the abundance
With us once more
Days of feasting
To hold us together.
Know you the smell
Of pots on the boil?
And lumps of blubber
  Slapped down by the side bench?
Joyfully
Greet we those
Who brought us plenty!

—Recorded and translated from the Inuktitut by Knud Rasmussen,
Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition, 1921–24

TWENTY-EIGHT

IT WAS A GORGEOUS EARLY SUMMER MORNING
. Balthazar stood by the window of the apartment at the top of his house. He could hear Amanda and the girls downstairs, finishing breakfast, chattering and dropping dishes into the sink. He had been writing all night and felt disembodied from sleepiness and fading concentration. John Coltrane was playing “My Little Brown Book,” one of Bernard’s favourite recordings. On the coffee table was a letter he had gotten from Nuku Hiva the week before. Iguptak was nine now, and was taking her catechism with Bernard. Pauloosie and Riri were well. Bernard sent his regards to Amanda and the twins. He had included a letter from Iguptak in imperfect English to Lola; they had been corresponding for the last year.

Balthazar straightened his desk and picked up the dishes left over from the night before. The wooden floors glowed in the morning sun. He walked softly to the kitchen, his sock feet slipping quietly along the wood, and placed his dishes in the kitchen sink. He rinsed them and squirted some dish soap over them, wiped them down, dried them and put them away in the cupboard of his tiny kitchen. He walked back into his living room and sat down on the couch. He opened Bernard’s letter and reread his gossipy account of the island, and paused on the priest’s enjoinder to come visit him again.

Maybe. Maybe. It would have to be soon, though.

In the envelope were photographs Bernard had passed along from Pauloosie, of Iguptak and her mother. Bernard had also included another photograph, of Victoria and Justine, who was in Rankin Inlet on a visit. Victoria’s bright eyes shone with pleasure as Justine’s long lanky arms draped around her neck. More lines in both of their faces now, of course. Justine’s beauty evoked only one memory for Balthazar. He shut his eyes and leaned his head back on the couch. He and Victoria were sitting down by the bay. Before she had met Robertson. She was lonely and eager to talk about the world. He was from New York. The ice was just going out. He didn’t know how long he would work there. The summer, anyway. He had applied for an ophthalmology residency and was hoping to hear back soon. She said she was disappointed to hear that. He smiled when she said that, and felt the world shift a little.

He lay down on the couch, stretching out his shrinking body. He breathed deeply and, on the rock beside the ice, he told Victoria that he had never met anyone like her. She smiled and touched his arm. He leaned his head forward and so did she. Their foreheads touched and from that point on, it was clear, everything would be different.

He felt the hand on his shoulder and resisted it, longing to remain where he was. Victoria grew indistinct and he strained to keep her with him.

“Keith. Keith.”

It was Amanda.

“Hi.”

Her anxious face slackened. “I thought you had started using again.”

“No. You know I don’t do that any more.”

“I know, but are you feeling okay?”

“Just enjoying the morning sun.”

“Can you watch the girls?”

“Of course.” And he sat up, slipped back down, and then with a heave sat up again.

“Are you having any pain?”

“No.”

“Because I have that prescription if you are.”

“I’m fine, Amanda.”

“Girls, you take it easy on your uncle, okay?” Lola and Claire stood in the doorway smiling at him. “Of course, Mom,” Lola answered.

“I’ll be back before supper. There’s food in the fridge, okay Keith?”

“Sure.”

“I’ll pick something up for you if you want me to.”

“I’m fine, dear.”

At the 2002 MTV video awards, Justine sat back in her seat and tried to contain herself. She was a little high, but that was the least of it: the rumour was that Axl Rose, and a reconstructed version of Guns N’ Roses, would be playing that night. And then Jimmy Fallon was smirking onstage and everyone in the audience bit their lip. Axl had been gone ten years, sequestered in his Malibu compound, doing a Brian Wilson, and pining, it was said, for Stephanie Seymour, spending thirteen million on an album no one thought he would ever finish,
Chinese Democracy
. Nine producers, eighty different session musicians, each fired more quickly than the last, and yet nothing released to the public from the man who had eviscerated the bloated, bleached-hair metal music that prevailed when
Appetite for Destruction
had seared its way across the world.

Then there he was, Jimmy Fallon introducing him. The curtain rose and it was not the old band of course, far too much bitterness among them for that, but it was Axl, at least, and the power chords, and the voice, rising with the lights. He was not what he had been, but which of us is? He had been so
lithe
, and supple, and
look
at him. Thickened, coarse, missing the King’s girdle, but at least Elvis kept his voice. That soaring, wailing voice could only ever have belonged to a young man, which was part of why it had been stirring. And he had
been gaunt because of his excesses. Eventually, as he put it, the choice becomes whether to consume oneself along with everything else.

He had still consumed rather a lot: his friends, Slash and Izzy and Duff, his women, none of whom were in contact with him any more, and a trail of empties that stretched behind him, even as he walked across the stage, stiffly attempting the old postures, the old venom. And the room took all this in at a glance, and, in the way of such rooms, their interest wandered. But for those who had been fourteen in 1988, the moment was piercingly sad, and they bit their lips as they mourned their own youths too, and their own increasingly evident obsolescence.

Justine shut her eyes and wished she was less high. She liked her job, and she was good at it. The people who worked for her liked her. She was twenty-eight. She didn’t need to be doing this any more.