The Better Mother (34 page)

Afterward, Frank’s parents meet them at the café down the street. They are almost always there first, the sleeves of his mother’s cardigan pulled down over her small, spotted hands. His father hunches over a hot cup of coffee, staring at an untouched Danish in front of him. He is quiet and only nods when Danny and Frank arrive, whereas she talks quickly, jumping from one topic to another, repeating what she’s heard on the news.

“Did you know that these young people are trying to stop the seal hunt in Newfoundland? Baby seals, Frankie, with those big dark eyes, being clubbed to death. I can’t bear to think of it.”

She strokes Frank’s hands across the table, inhales and exhales like a mouse catching its breath. Her eyes watch Frank as he sips his apple juice, search his face and neck for any change from the week before. While the rest of her jumps and flits, her eyes are grave and observant, taking in every line, every stray hair on her son’s head.

Frank’s father passes him a lottery ticket, saying in his low voice, “You never know when you might get lucky,” before falling silent again, his thick fingers plucking invisible crumbs off the table and dropping them onto a paper napkin.

When they part on the sidewalk outside the café, Frank’s mother holds his face in both her hands and smiles before linking arms with her husband and walking back to their car. Danny can hear the swish of her pants, the squeak of his clean white runners.

Last time, before they turned away, Frank’s father put his hand on Danny’s shoulder and murmured, “That’s my boy, you know. I pray for him every day.”

In the afternoons, Frank naps, and Danny returns to his own apartment to gather the mail and listen to the messages on his newly acquired answering machine. He shrugs at the urgency in people’s voices, the shrillness in the messages.

“I need you to confirm, Danny. My wedding is in
two weeks.”

“I’ve been calling and calling. Where are you? Mom is worried.”

“Are the prints done yet? I’ve been waiting for a long time.”

“Call me. I know you’re sorry. It didn’t really hurt anyway.”

“Danny? It’s Val. We should talk.”

When he returns to Frank’s apartment, he lets himself in and creeps through the hallway in his socks. He watches Frank breathe, always slowly and sometimes erratically. He sleeps with both hands under his cheek and his mouth open, as if reciting a silent and sideways prayer. Danny sees the bones in his shoulders through the blankets and mentally calculates his dwindling weight. 152. 147. 136. Sometimes he wonders how much skin and bones and barely functioning organs weigh, thinking that Frank can’t grow any lighter. But he does.

Usually, it’s soup for dinner and a game of Scrabble before Danny helps Frank into the bathtub. He washes him carefully, scrubbing gently between all the wrinkles, every jutting bone. He dries him with a fluffy towel and rubs baby oil over his skin, over the rashes and Kaposi’s sarcoma spots, over the boils that seem to multiply daily. Slowly, Danny buttons up Frank’s flannel pyjamas and then they lie in bed together,
Danny’s head resting on the wall as he reads out loud from the pile of library books on the floor. Frank stares at him, his eyes big in his thin face, chuckling when Danny reads something funny from his favourite comic-strip collection, tearing up a little at the sad parts in an old Russian novel. Eventually, he falls asleep, and Danny pulls the covers up and shuts the bedroom door behind him. He drinks tea in front of the television until midnight, when he undresses and lies down on the couch. In the morning, he can never remember if he’s been dreaming or not, and this comforts him. He wakes with no trace of the night clinging to his face or body, and he can be satisfied with the morning and the long list of tasks he knows he will complete. After all, for once in his life he is doing exactly what he’s supposed to.

THE MORNING
1982

There is so much that Danny could say that would be misunderstood and hurtful. He putters around Frank’s apartment, answers his phone when he is asleep, massages his bony feet, which feel like bags of stones. Danny barely looks at himself in the mirror, seeing only the medicine cabinet behind the glass when he brushes his teeth.

If he could, he would say, “This apartment is so small. It’s only you and me here.” But he knows that if he were to
ever say, “I need to get out,” Frank would assume that Danny wanted to leave him to his illness and would tell him to go away forever before he could even explain. Danny longs to walk through the city, hear the truncated conversations of people huddled under awnings in the August heat, smell the grease through the back doors of restaurants, step carefully around the piles of goose shit dotting the lawns at English Bay.

Tonight, Frank sleeps on his back, a pillow behind his head and another under his knees. The apartment is clean. The laundry is folded and tucked into drawers. The doctors told Danny that everything must be washed regularly so Frank is kept away from opportunistic bacteria that could burrow their way into his skin and blood, could travel through his veins to every organ and every bone until the end products of their journey emerge on the surface as pus or abscesses. The hot-water bottle at Frank’s feet will stay warm for another two hours, and yet Danny feels that he can’t leave. What if he’s out and the iron is still plugged in, or Frank reaches for the bucket beside the bed and it’s six inches out of reach? Before he can dwell on all these possibilities, he slips on his shoes and leaves.

For the first time this summer, he feels a wash of cool air down the collar of his shirt. He walks around the perimeter of English Bay, sees two figures huddled in sleeping bags, the tops of their heads resting against a log. He wonders if they’re in love or simply sleeping together for protection.

He continues up Davie Street, feeling the soles of his tan loafers sticking to the layers of grime and gum coating the sidewalk. Apartment buildings rise on the left and right. A bus
rolls past, rumbling and snapping; Danny catches the face of a young girl through the window, her blond hair held away from her face with a barrette, her eyes flitting from tree to building to street sign. The street kids turn their faces away when he walks past and disappear into doorways and behind shrubs. He turns left on Granville, passes the pawnbrokers and sex shops before turning right into an alley. There, the same sign with the crooked letters, the same promise of the best girls in town!

He sits at his usual table in the back, directly opposite centre stage. There are only two other men in the club, both in light-grey suits, whispering in each other’s ears as they drink Scotch on the rocks. Danny takes his beer from the waitress and smiles.

The club is meant to offer the same things over and over. There is always flesh, the curve of breasts against the torso, the soft folds of skin between the legs. The repetition is soothing, like chicken soup on a cold day; comforting, like a pair of socks worn to the shape of your feet.

The dancer twirls on a pole, her dark hair swinging behind her. She looks bored and tired, makeup only partially covering the puffiness around her eyes, the enlarged pores on her cheeks. Still, her legs are long and smooth, and she dances with poise in her six-inch platform heels. In and out of the shadows, she shows her body and hides it, smoothly moving to the music. Danny wonders how he would photograph her, how the hollows above her buttocks would appear in black and white, whether she would be flawless on film or appear even older and drier. Something glitters under the stage lights. Danny squints and sees that, around her neck, a thin gold
chain with a seahorse pendant blinks every time she turns and fixes her disinterested gaze on the empty tables around him. A vestige of her real life.

When he leaves the club, he resists the urge to run back to Frank’s apartment and hurries west and north, toward the park. The residue of cigarettes and beer sits like a skin over his clothes. To his left, the ocean. Above, thin smoggy clouds roll over themselves, changing shape in a darkly blue sky. Danny hears a boom and wonders if a thunderstorm is coming, if Frank will wake up, terrified by the crash and the crackling of lightning through the curtained windows.

He touches his hand to the rough bark of a spruce tree to feel the prickles on his palm. On the trail, dust floats up every time he steps forward. It hasn’t rained in eight weeks and the ground beneath him isn’t damp and spongy like it is in winter, when he feels he is walking on a breathing, fleshy body. Now it feels packed down, but covered in a layer of insubstantial gravel and powder that will cover his shoes and pants with a film of grey that smells both mineral and animal. He longs for rain.

If he finds someone here tonight, what will he bring home to Frank? A wayward, invisible germ on the sleeve of his polo shirt? The smell of another man so tenacious it won’t wash off, and be smelled by Frank, who will understand, but whose understanding will make Danny feel smaller? Or will this be the time he catches AIDS through spit or cum or the unknown substances coating his one-night partner’s body?

Cutting through the rustlings of the park comes a familiar voice. “Where the fuck have you been all this time?”
Edwin sits on a bench, his legs crossed and both arms stretched over the back. In his mouth hangs a bent cigarette.

The other men in the shadows have receded, and Danny is alone with Edwin in the middle of Lee’s Trail, staring at Edwin’s light-blue jeans and white runners.

“Well?” Edwin gestures to the empty spot on the bench beside him. “Are you going to answer me?”

Danny carefully brushes off the seat with his hand and sits. “I’ve been with Frank.”

Letting his head droop, Edwin says, “That’s what I heard. I didn’t believe it, though. Poor Frankie.”

“I’m not much of a nurse, I guess.”

Edwin laughs. “That’s not what I meant. He loves you, always did.”

“I suppose. I sometimes wonder,” he whispers, and the tail of his words is lost in the shifting of the branches around them. In a small voice he says, “Eddie, I’m sorry about that time. When I hurt you.”

Edwin pats him on the shoulder. “I know. I’m annoying sometimes. I’m surprised you never punched me before.”

“You don’t need to joke about it. I’m really sorry. It was my fault. I don’t know how you can even speak to me right now.”

“We all love you, Danny. Even your parents.” Edwin blows a line of smoke straight up, his head cocked back. “By the way, I saw them this morning at the shop.”

“What were you doing there? I didn’t think you went down to Chinatown so much anymore.”

“My dearest mother sent your mom some ginseng from the homeland, so I was dropping it off.” Edwin pauses to pull
the cigarette butt out of his mouth and grind it into the arm of the bench. “They don’t know where you’re staying, and they were asking me if I’d heard from you. I said you were busy with work. Your mom worries, you know. I sometimes think she suspects.”

In a blur, Danny sees his mother, wiping her hands on her apron, watching with her turned-down eyes as he and Cindy play with their paper dolls, the radio at top volume. And then Frank, struggling with the twisted blankets, calling for his own mother, hearing only the bounce of his voice off his apartment walls and nothing else.

“I have to go,” Danny says. “Why am I even here?”

Edwin leans his head back on the edge of the bench and looks at the sky, now totally black. “To get laid; why else?”

“No, why now? I’m supposed to be watching Frank. I could even be hanging out with my mother. But no, I’m here.”

“Listen, Danny. This stupid thing called AIDS is going to get us all sooner or later. And if not that, then a heart attack or a stroke or something. In the meantime, what do we have left? A fuck in the park, that’s what. I might get hit by a bus, or I might live to be eighty. But if I can’t get sucked off once in a while, then none of it matters much, does it?” Edwin’s mouth twitches like he might laugh, and he searches his pockets for his pack of cigarettes.

Danny stands up. “I’m going back to Frank’s.”

Edwin mutters, the lighter held up to his face, “This is what we wanted once, Danny. To come here whenever we wanted; to be with any guy we wanted. For a while, that was enough.”

The confusion in Danny’s head doesn’t clear as he
stumbles through the streets. His thoughts are unfinished, nothing more than a jumbled pile. AIDS. Frank. His mother. Cindy. Sex. He’s tired of trying to sort it all out and wills himself to ignore the ugly mess. But disease and the prospect of death have a way of stirring it all together, like a bubbling, fetid soup. He wants to scoop out most of his brains, leaving behind only enough to function.

As the night air pushes warmly against his hurrying body, he visualizes the men cruising on the trail, their fingers linked. Two months ago, it would have been Danny looking for someone to fill an hour, someone whose face would live on in his memory, unencumbered by name or words or birthplace. And he would have been happy. Now, he can’t stay in the park for more than twenty minutes. Now, it’s not enough, but he doesn’t know what he wants instead.

When he arrives at Frank’s apartment, he rushes to the bedroom. Frank is still asleep, lying on his back as he was when Danny left. The rooms smell of pine-scented cleaner, and the dishes are drying in the rack. He steps into the shower, turning on the water as hot as it will go, until the fog in the stall matches the mess inside his head.

When they were children, Danny and Cindy often said nothing to each other. They walked their dolls across Cindy’s bed, built an indoor tent with blankets and pillows when it stormed outside, pretended to cook with their mother’s old dented pots. For hours, they silently smiled and nodded, dressed Paper Gina and Paper Adelaide in their evening gowns before sashaying them across the footboard to the same ball. As soon as Danny woke up in the morning, he
could feel his sister on the other side of the wall, stretching under the covers, staring at the same morning light that was sometimes camouflaged by low, dense clouds, other times shining clear and thin through the windows and condensation around the sill. What was there to say when you already knew what the other was going to do?