Stanley Park (19 page)

So Margaret didn’t fuss about the future like everybody else but planned dispassionately instead. Margaret made a significant mark on the landscape (her firm was tearing up and reassembling buildings and bridges all over Vancouver), but she did so merely by spontaneously acting out who she was. She premitigated damages by designing such things as seismic gas-flow cut-off triggers, shock absorber systems. Restraining cables for heavy objects and the crafty reinforcement of fifty-year-old bridges. Jeremy’s favourite example was the strong-motion network.

“What does it do?” he asked her once. They had been shutting down The Paw together. One in the morning, something they did when Olli went to Palo Alto or Redmond overnight and Trout was with a neighbour. Her foodie friends would leave, and Margaret would stay behind to drink grappa and talk.

“It measures strong ground motion so we can analyze the quake afterwards. Statistically speaking, there is a significant probability that we’ll have a subduction quake in the next 150 to 200 years. It’ll be massively destructive, we know that, maybe a thousand Loma Prietas combined. And no one’s ever measured something like that. How the ground moves, directions, speeds, distance, which plates.”

“Who’s going to be around to read the meter after all that?”

“Well, someone will survive. We’re not
all
going to die.”

She actually got upset with pop science’s apocalyptic interest in The Big One. “What a name,” Margaret would say, with visible disdain. Subduction quakes in the Pacific North-west are all pretty big, baby—they just don’t happen that often. “Throwing darts at the millennial calendar is less useful than, say, four gallons of water a person and heavy-soled shoes under the bed.”

“For what?” Jeremy asked.

“To drink, duh.”

“I meant the shoes.”

“Oh,” Margaret said, looking at Jeremy seriously. “Earthquake. Glass. Think about it. Heavy soles.”

She went and got herself the drink. Trout had finally risen quietly to his feet. Jeremy turned to watch the little boy as he stared down unsmiling at his painting. He looked at the tip of his paintbrush, wiped it on a stained towel and packed up his kit. When he was finished he took the painting gently by its two upper corners and, holding it out from himself, swung it slowly back and forth to dry it. There was no point fussing with this kid, it occurred to Jeremy, his movements were so simple, so unswervingly predetermined. So like his mother’s.

Jeremy looked around himself now and registered how even the layout of these two-thousand-square-foot Yaletown lofts resonated with a particular kind of architectural certainty. Steel cable railings along the edge of the overhanging second floor. A concrete and aluminum spiral staircase. Exposed steel beams, the centre ones still with the tracking for some kind of monster crane. The kitchen itself more slick by far than The Paw’s, everything top end. Aga. Calphalon. Cuisinart. Good Grips.

Margaret turned away from him now and held a crystal tumbler under the ice dispenser on the front of the aluminum fridge, came back to the island and poured herself some Stoli. Took a big sip.

“Cheers,” she said. “And hello, by the way.”

“Hi.” He laughed at her. Standing there in her long black skirt, cream sweater. Pearls. Apron with the Microsoft Windows95 logo (an ironic gift for Olli, no doubt). With one hand aiming the tiny matt-black remote at the stereo and sparking up a Tony Bennett CD. In her other hand the glass dipping over dangerously, bracelets falling down her slim arm towards her elbow. She had beauty, thought Jeremy compulsively as he watched her. She owned it. Somebody or
something had bequeathed it to her. He imagined there might have been a ceremony involved, at which some quiveringly perfect, angelic being spoke silver words: “You shall have beauty, daughter. You have been chosen.”

“So, what’s she like? She cute?” Margaret said.

“Can we talk about something else?”

“Don’t be shy, it’s me.”

“She’s very attractive, in an odd way.”

“Odd how?” Margaret asked, smiling internally at the description. Weren’t they all? Except Jules, of course, but Margaret sensed that Jules was somehow out of bounds.

“Why don’t you wait and see, Peggy?” Jeremy said. He didn’t use this name with her often, a university name. A rockabilly pretence she adopted during those days. She wore it the same way he wore his pompadour back then, although she grew out of her pretence more quickly.

“Well, you can’t tell me what you really think when she’s here,” Margaret said, pretending not to have noticed.

Jeremy thought for a minute about the question. Odd how? Well, there’s the tongue stud, he thought. Odd because I might have expected to be repulsed by this detail but am not in her case. She’s hard and symmetrical and certain. A bit like you, but more compact and more dangerous and, well, just odder.

“She has short white hair and pale blue eyes,” he said finally. “She’s very smart.”

“Jay, look,” said Trout, standing next to him now.

Jeremy crouched next to the boy, glad for the distraction. Trout had slipped out of his smock and was wearing his uniform: blues jeans rolled up a turn at the bottom and a white pocket tee. Jeremy wasn’t sure he had seen the kid wear anything else in the past three years. Now he took hold of Jeremy’s shirt at the shoulder. “It’s a dollar,” he said.

Margaret came around the Aga to look down on the two of them.

“Very nice, honey,” she said to Trout.

An American dollar, painted to fill the middle of an 8 ½-by-1 1-inch sheet of paper. Another discernible stab at president Washington. He had the hair right this time, those solid-looking waves of powder white.

“Olli gave him a U.S. dollar after coming back from California about a year ago,” she explained to Jeremy. “Trout pinned it to the wall above his bed.”

“She made me take it down,” Trout said. “Peggy said a dollar would make me greedy if I looked at it all the time.”

Jeremy stifled a laugh. Margaret widened her eyes.

“Don’t call me that, sweetie.”

“Why money, Trout?” Jeremy asked.

Trout didn’t offer an answer, and Jeremy didn’t know precisely what else to say. He was looking at the painting, feeling the snuffly breathing of Trout next to him. Feeling, as always, the impenetrable nature of what lay behind Trout’s fixations.

“I didn’t exactly make him take it down,” Margaret said when Jeremy stood up. Did she come off hard sometimes? Like a tough mom? She knew she had no perspective on the matter. Self-evaluation in parenting was about the most imprecise science there was, she imagined.

She moved back into the kitchen, leaned and opened the oven door. “Roasted yams,” she said. “Stuffed with garlic and ginger. Recommended by Martha.”

“Oh, splendid.”

“She’s wonderful—don’t you say a snide word. And quails with grapes. I hope you like quails.”

“I love quails. I love to eat little birds. I love ortolans, remember?”

“Oh right, you animal.” Margaret said. “Is that what we ate that one time?”

“Sure. Remember putting the napkins over our heads while we ate them?” he asked her, reminded of how they’d
gone along with this gourmand convention ostensibly meant to capture the delicate aroma.

“Yes,” she said, smiling. It was all coming back. “I think they were pretty good, weren’t they?”

“Oh, they’re delicious. Silly but good.”

“Why silly?”

“Well, to truck in this little bird all the way from France, you know. What’s the point?”

“It was fun,” she said. Now she was holding a hand gently against her sandy hair as she read from a magazine open on the counter. Silver Palate, he noted and congratulated his nose. “I was going to open a Pinot Gris, Jay. Does that work?”

“It works fine. Was Olli in California again this week?” Jeremy asked.

“Redmond, Washington. The next big thing.” She sighed and looked around for a moment, losing her train of thought. She took another sip from her vodka and clumped the tumbler onto the counter.

Jeremy rested the heels of his hands on the edge of the island and watched Margaret corral the quails on the corner of the cutting board and begin to truss them for browning.

“Jay!” Trout yelled from up in the loft.

Jeremy craned his neck back. “What?” he said up into the open air.

“Jay!” Trout yelled again. And Jeremy continued to gaze upwards, waiting for the little face to appear at the railing of the loft. The loft where Margaret and Olli slept in the huge antique sleigh bed. Beyond the bed was a second, smaller staircase that ran up a side wall into the back of the building. Into a small room, separate from the main space, with large rearward-looking windows and a very high ceiling. Here was Trout’s spectacular garret. A place where he could contemplate the hive of other lofts rising out of the slopes of Yaletown.

Trout didn’t appear, so Jeremy looked back down at Margaret and was startled to find her looking directly at him.
Her hands cupped one of the quails, a bit of string emerging between her fingers, her expression thoughtful.

“Why don’t you go up and see him,” she said, and she lifted her chin slightly without moving her eyes from his face.

The truth was, all their dates had ended badly. Jeremy drunk and despondent, sucking down a final Pabst in whatever road-house The Decoders had selected to support their rockabilly fantasy that evening. Peggy in her hoop skirt. Bright red lipstick reapplied angrily. They argued endlessly about getting things done, or around this issue. They were both nineteen. She was fantastically impatient and practical, a deep well of potential energy. And taking Jeremy at his word, treated his music seriously too. She could not understand why the Decoder album never got made, and Jeremy played his natural nineteen-year-old nihilism off this pressure. Physically, she had grown into the strength that she now so clearly had. She had been tiny then, and frighteningly soft in his hands. The sex had been erratic. It hurt her sometimes. Other times he couldn’t perform, spent from drinking or from some fear she inspired.

From the very beginning they were being torn apart by the strong currents that ran through everything they jointly touched. They made an electric field, certainly, but Jeremy started feeling physically ill. He used to wake in the late morning, missing classes, feeling his heart beat. An unsteady beat he couldn’t play along with. It would stop without warning, miss two, three, even four beats. He was reminded of a documentary he’d seen about heart problems in cows raised under power lines, all that electricity running through them day after day.

One doctor’s visit convinced him he was at least partly bringing it on himself. The doctor said: “Do you drink a lot?”

Jeremy thought he probably did.

“How much on a weekend night? A six-pack?”

Which meant he was drinking a real lot.

Still, understanding it was self-induced did nothing for the symptoms, which persisted. Walking around campus at one point, ten in the morning, up a little earlier than normal, his heart went into its stuttering, falling two-step. He began to shake minutely and suddenly felt a tremendous certainty that at the end of the two-step his heart would simply stop. He’d never felt as certain about anything in his entire life as he was about the blackness sweeping up underneath his feet to catch him.

He laid down on the grass in the middle of the quad. Simply laid down flat, not caring what anyone might think. He slid an intro art-history text under his head and closed his eyes, whereupon he felt the dying two-step transmute into pulsing shapes. He didn’t like that particularly, not wanting to actually
see
the end coming. So he opened his eyes again, looked at the clouds, thought about God and waited for the curtains to fall.

By the end of an hour, flaked out, unmoving, the two-step simply faded away and was imperceptibly replaced by a softer, rounder beat, which Jeremy had to admit felt essentially normal. His heart was beating serenely along, the fibro-palsy having passed on through and disappeared.

But it was a catalyst. They split soon afterwards and adopted what they thought at the time was a very adult post-intimacy friendship, vibrating with aftershock tension. She hung out the available sign and found a boyfriend immediately: Cliff. And Jeremy (disgusted with this choice and possibly acting out a vicarious revenge plot) pushed her together with Olli. The lead singer setting up the girl with the bass player. He drinks even more than I do, enjoy! He knew Olli would go for her.

What he couldn’t have known was how Margaret would take to Olli. He made her laugh, she said. And so, assessing
her options, Margaret dated Cliff and Olli for a stretch and wouldn’t let either touch her. Jeremy watched and shook his head, admiring how cool she was about the balancing act. Two boyfriends: a present perfect and a future conditional.

Present perfect, Cliff: who might be called a solid prospect, handsome, enrolled at medical school, but who by temperament and training was increasingly unsuited to dealing with anything outside the narrowing corridor of his own studies, which were evolving from success to success, from general practice to surgery to neurosurgery, which was simply beyond comprehension.