The Book of Stanley (11 page)

 

TWENTY-TWO

A
gentleman in his fifties, with acne scars and a $1,600 black suit, stood up from the conference table at the Banff Springs Hotel and rubbed his hands together. In the silence before he spoke, Tanya Gervais wondered where the gentleman had found the money for his Armani suit. She knew it was Armani because Brian had two of them, and because this gentleman had flashed the label inside his jacket. But Brian was a chief financial officer, not a Canadian independent television producer.

“All right, close your eyes,” said the producer, whose name was Seth. One of Seth's two partners, a tiny woman Tanya recognized from a similar meeting in 2003, motioned at her from the other side of the table:
Really, close your eyes. Please.

Tanya closed her eyes.

For the next few minutes, Seth described a forest of cedar and Douglas fir, raindrops on leaves, wild ferns and lichen. Skunk cabbage. Totem poles everywhere. All to locate a dramatic series set in the eighteenth century, just as James Cook and other white sailors began arriving on Vancouver Island. It would be a comedy, about the wacky travails of aboriginal peoples.

“You know,” said Seth, “the hunting, the gathering, the totem pole building, the eating of dogs. Can you see the humour in this? Not that we'll shy away from tough, edgy issues like incest. But most importantly, it's about joy. Laughter, Tanya. Mother Earth, etcetera. What I want to
get across to you is these people are
real storytellers
, and what we don't do enough of, as producers, is tell their stories. We'll focus on a young girl, a Pocahontas type. She'll have an interior monologue and address the camera from time to time, you know, in that exasperated tone of a teenage girl. She can speak with an accent, or not, depending. All the usual pressures of being a teenage girl, plus being aboriginal, plus all these white guys all over the place? The grants'll write themselves.”

It seemed to Tanya that Canadian film and television had already done a more than ample job exploring incest. And why Pocahontas? In some ways it was the ultimate male fantasy, to arrive among the natives and pluck a sexy teenager out of the group for sex and “education,” but in another more important way it made her want to throw up.

Tanya opened her eyes. “Sorry. I have to pass.”

The three producers, Seth and his partners, shared a quick glance. In less than five seconds, Seth was leaning forward and rubbing his hands together again, ready for pitch number two. “Close your eyes,” he said. “This one is gonna
kill you
.”

“I'll listen to one more, if it's quick, but I'm not closing my eyes again.”

“Yeah, but–”

“Sorry. Clock is ticking. The eyes stay open.”

Seth looked wounded, but he recovered quickly.

“There's a young lawyer, a defence attorney. She's cute, not beautiful. Birdy, sorta. Nervous about things, but in a quasi-sexy way. Asian, we're thinking. The series is set in Calgary.”

Tanya stood up. “Thank you.”

“Winnipeg? Halifax? It doesn't matter where we set it.”

“I have another appointment in a few minutes, unfortunately, and–”

“Toronto! It's set in Toronto!”

Tanya shook hands with Seth's fellow producers. Instead of admitting defeat, Seth, steward of the country's national self-image, placed his hands together in prayer and blocked the door.

“We both know how the game's played, Tanya. You have to spend money and we need to develop something.
Anything.
It's a match made in heaven.”

“No, it isn't.”

“What don't you like about the ideas?”

Tanya had been doing this too long, in their position and hers, to respond to his question with any degree of candour. This was her seventh such meeting in two days, and each one of the pitches she had heard was appallingly derivative and sad and, well, Canadian. A loser sandwich covered in loser gravy garnished with fried loser, all in the context of multiculturalism.

“Let me out.”

“Not until you answer the question.” Seth reached up and dabbed his forehead with the sleeve of his jacket. “This is our livelihood.”

“Get out of my way or I'll kick your nuts.”

“Please,” said the tiny woman, in a voice so desperate and tired Tanya wanted to turn around and crush every bone in her body with a hug. “Please.”

“Try the
CBC
.”

Seth moved away from the door as though he had been pelted with machine-gun fire. He whispered, as Tanya started out, “We're
human beings
, you know.”

In the lobby again, surrounded by other men and women with binders and lanyards, Tanya felt a panic attack coming on. She looked down at her schedule of interviews–five
more and then a dinner with the Canada Council–and walked out of the Banff Springs Hotel. Instead of hailing a cab, she took the stairs down to the Bow River and stood among the fragrant pine trees and tourists snapping photographs of the falls. She breathed.

It was a warm day, with just enough cloud in the sky. She removed her jacket and walked north and west along the rolling white river, from the Banff Springs Hotel toward town. The path wasn't ideal for high-heeled footwear but, to her surprise, Tanya wasn't annoyed by its imperfections. Not far from the bridge that arced over the Bow River, near an exposed boulder in the cold water and a sign advising against swimming, Tanya decided that her career in television was officially over. So was her relationship with Brian. She couldn't imagine herself in the yellow Hummer any more. In sum, this constituted a grave psychological crisis. But it didn't feel like a crisis. Knowing that the slab hovered above her, ready to fall again, mysteriously freed Tanya from the need to call her analyst and get better.

Tanya climbed up to the road again and stepped on to the bridge. A Japanese man asked her to take a picture of him with his family, the town and Cascade Mountain behind them. Holding the camera and looking through the digital viewfinder at the love and authenticity of the small Japanese family–their utter lack of interest in licensing or development money–calmed her.

“Beautiful,” she said, after she had taken the picture. “You're beautiful.”

In her hotel room at the Chalet Du Bois, Tanya lay on her bed and turned on the television. She flipped through the seventy-one channels and found precisely nothing she
wanted to watch. Tanya had devoted her entire career to precisely nothing.

She turned off the television and sat in the silence of her hotel room, until the ambient noise rose up around her. The air conditioner, the traffic on Banff Avenue, the voices of other guests through the ceiling and walls, random clicks. The particular beige of the beige curtains, a colour that someone, somewhere
actually planned
. Dust on the side table, in the grooves of her reading lamp. Lint on her black pants. The rogue pubic hair an inch below her belly button.

Tanya got up off the bed, sat at the computer desk, and turned on her laptop. It powered up and a schedule of events appeared before her, prepared by the secretary in Vancouver. She closed that window, opened her e-mail program, and began writing to Darryl Lantz.

 

Dear Darryl,

I resign. Please do not send a psychiatrist. This is an act of acute sanity.

Love,

Tanya

 

TWENTY-THREE

U
ntil Kal slept with the wrong Soldiers fan and gave Candace that nasty bout of syphilis, their only regular
disagreements had been over dirty dishes. It was one of the significant shocks of married life at eighteen, all that time he had to spend at the sink. If Kal made dinner, it seemed reasonable that Candace wash up afterward. Unfortunately, she never saw it that way. Candace preferred to be improvisational about dirty dishes, which usually meant that she played with Layla while Kal did the work. He would wash the dishes and clean the small kitchen in Windsor and then, moments later, it would be a mess again. The smell of a wet rag after a week's employment, a stainless-steel pot caked with oatmeal, cheese microwaved to the side of a plastic bowl, lettuce and spinach drowned in oil and vinegar: for Kal, it was a question of human rights.

Yet here he was, in the back of an Asian fusion restaurant in Banff, the door open to the pale-yellow dusk, deeply enjoying his job. The spray nozzle, which he used to rinse the plates and wine glasses before stacking them into the tray, was not only stretchy. It was also mighty.

Every few minutes, one of the servers would stack a pile of food-encrusted plates and lipstick-stained glasses to his left. Piece by piece he would go through them, first scraping the plates into the garbage and then spraying them clean. Then Kal would artfully separate them on a grey pallet and send them on a conveyor belt through a stainless-steel washing machine. The plates emerged on the other side of the machine, hot and nearly dry. Once or twice, when no one was looking, Kal pressed a hot plate to his cheek.

The owners of Far East Square, Chip and Wendy Yang, thought music in the kitchen was vulgar. So Kal listened to the radio on a nine-dollar Walkman. Since the Calgary radio waves bounced off the mountains before they could reach Banff, all he could pick up was the local
CBC
, in French.
Tonight's program featured a special on European music before the Second World War. The songs were sad and romantic, and provided a sense of dreamy grandeur while Kal scraped clean a platter of Singapore beef jerky and spinach risotto, decorated by two balled-up napkins, an opened sugar packet, an empty lip gloss container, and a chewed piece of gum. What stood out, for Kal, was the accordion in the French songs. It was a sullen and mysterious sound, sexy too, and unembarrassed by its earnestness. The explanation of a thing that can't be explained. He was moved to tears by the instrument, by his memory of the woman in the hot tub, and how it all related to the poem.

There was a tap on his shoulder. Kal wiped his eyes and turned to see Wendy Yang frowning behind him. He turned off the radio and removed his gloves.

“You want dinner?”

Wendy grumbled as she took over at the dishwashing station. Kal hurried to the small staff table, where Chip was already eating. There was a plate of tofu and mixed vegetables, curried fish Singapore style, and three crab cakes. A large, steaming bowl of coconut rice sat between them.

“I met the most beautiful woman yesterday, Chip.”

Chip's mouth was full of curried fish Singapore style. He just nodded.

Kal scooped a little bit from each bowl onto his plate. “I never thought I could ever feel like this, after Candace broke my heart so hard. I figured my heart'd be a dead thing forever.”

“Feel what?” said Chip, once he had finished chewing.

Since his dad's death, Kal had known that a reserve of energy and hope and goodness and joy was stored in some inaccessible corner of him. In his teen years and beyond, the
rye had kept it buried under layers and layers of gloom. The Rilke poem had cracked him open, like an axe, and now all this stuff kept spilling out. Kal had trouble in moments like these, harnessing the bounty. There was no way to explain how he felt when he saw the beautiful woman in the hot tub, or the great grandeur of the accordion, so Kal smashed a wine glass on the floor. “You know what I'm saying?”

The kitchen went silent for a long while, until Chip stood up. “That was stupid. Get the broom.”

Kal fetched the broom and started sweeping. “I met her in a hot tub across the street. In the Chalet Du Bois.”

“Did you knock boots?”

“
Gosh
, Chip. I just met her, and she isn't that kind of girl, I don't think. To be honest, I've had plenty enough of those kinds of girls in the last few years, on account of my broken heart. I never thought of it this way before–I never thought of it at all–but it leaves a guy feeling even emptier, you know what I mean?”

“I have been married for thirty-seven years.” Chip leaned forward over his bowl and looked toward the dishwashing station, to make sure Wendy wasn't listening. “Sometimes I want to feel empty. And I mean
empty
.”

Kal didn't want to imagine Chip Yang engaging in sexual intercourse, so he looked down at his broom and the broken glass on the floor and thought about the accordion. It all made perfect sense, why he had been drawn here to change his life. Kal was meant to hear the accordion music on Radio-Canada and become a musician. He was destined to meet the woman in the hot tub, whose ass said “
DAMN
.” Now that the tiny iceberg of frozen rye whisky in his heart had been axed, Kal was doubly inspired. He would write accordion songs about Layla, her cuteness and superior
intelligence and tiny shoes and talent for gymnastics, and the woman in the hot tub.

Chip finished eating abruptly and pushed himself away from the table. With his hands on his soft belly, he said, “Sometimes I want to go into a nightclub and say to a tall woman from Germany, ‘Hey, girlfriend, do you want to try something that was once illegal in this country?' But you know I'm old now, and fleshy. Look: my teeth went yellow from cigarettes and tea.”

“Listen, Chip. I did that a couple of times when I was married, and you know what? Now my wife and daughter live with a Ukrainian car salesman in Kelowna. You don't want that, do you?”

“No.”

“Well then.”

Kal sat down to finish his meal while Chip rose and put his black Nehru jacket back on. Before he departed, Chip burped and washed his hands. The Yangs' cat, Philip, appeared in the doorway. Though he had been working at Far East Square for only a couple of weeks, Kal understood the patterns of the restaurant. One of them involved Philip showing up around nine o'clock. The cat walked into the kitchen from the alley, thereby breaking health code regulations. Eventually, Chip spotted Philip, picked him up, screamed at him in Cantonese, smacked him in the head, and tossed him outside. Each time he witnessed the punishment of Philip Yang, another small piece of Kal McIntyre died.

“Get,” Kal said, to Philip. “Go away.”

It was time to get back to the dishwashing station. Kal took his plate and Chip's plate and tried to shoo Philip away with a fake kick. But this was ineffective. Philip–a thin, Creamsicle-coloured cat–sneaked under the giant
steel island where Wendy and the other cook, Yip Suen, usually prepared salads.

At the dishwashing station, Kal strapped on his radio again. “Philip is here.”

Wendy shook her head. “Did Chip see him?”

“Not yet.”

“Where did Philip go?”

“Under the island, I think.”

Wendy took off the yellow gloves. “Don't worry about Philip, you know. I think this is a game he plays. If he did not want Chip to hit him and throw him and scream at him, he would stay outside.”

“You mean it?”

“I have given this plenty of thought. And it is a secret that Philip comes in the kitchen. If an inspector arrives, we have to throw him out. You cannot tell anyone. If you do, I will fire you and then I will hunt you down. It is not worth it for you to open your mouth about Philip.”

“Wendy?”

“Yes?”

“Something wonderful is going to happen to me here.”

“Does this have to do with Philip?”

“I don't think so. It has something to do with the beauty of the accordion.”

Wendy raised her eyebrows.

Kal noted, in Wendy's simple eyebrow lift, a note of apprehension. This job, he saw, would soon be finished. He vowed not to break any more glasses or tell fellows about the beauty of the accordion, especially if the fellows happened to be his employers.