“Tomorrow I will take you out,” I told her. “Maybe for a coffee, a drink. We will talk. And you will not work for one hour!”
“Thanks,” she said, and laughed a little. “But please, let me take you.”
It was part of her job to look after me: I was another segment of the world that kept her from dancing.
The work that I was supposed to be doing, which my rescuers hoped would become a book that would sell to the multitudes, was not going well. They wanted the story of my difficulties, but all I’d managed to do was draw a map of my childhood home, with diagrams of the furniture, the piano, the leather footstool, the ornate chairs inherited from various uncles and aunts. It looked like the scene of a domestic murder. All that was missing was the blood and the outline of my own body.
I had been given an office, a tiny room high up in a concrete building. A single window overlooked an unshaded parking lot. I used to capture ants when I was a child, put them in a glass jar with sand and watch to see what sort of tunnels they would carve. But they never performed for me: they would scuffle hopelessly up the glass sides and fall backwards, then, after an hour or so, they would die.
I met Rita in a Vietnamese restaurant with steamy windows and a noisy air conditioner wedged over the door. She was waiting inside, reading a magazine which she slid into her patterned bag when she spotted me. I greeted her with pleasure, despite my bewilderment at this choice of restaurant, and her smile was swift, disappearing as quickly as the magazine.
She waited until we were slurping noodles from cracked china bowls before getting to the point. She seemed uncomfortable and avoided my eyes.
“You’ve been going through the money too quickly,” she said at last. “We simply can’t afford to front you extra cash; it’s been twice now.”
I nearly choked. Yet she sat there calmly eating, while around us the clink of plastic chopsticks against bowls never ceased. I thought we had come together to talk of our lives as artists.
“My tooth was abscessed,” I said curtly. “I was supposed to tie it to a doorknob and pull?”
“Of course not. But the clothes…”
“I left home only with what was on my back.”
She stabbed at the bowl with her chopsticks. “There are second-hand places we could have taken you to.”
My forehead tightened. I wondered if she and her professor friends bought used clothes. Who knows who’d been wearing them, what diseases they had.
“Daniel Rose is about your size. He’ll have stuff.” Finally she looked up at me. “Also, I don’t see why you go to Millie’s all the time.”
“Millie’s?” This was not a conversation: it was another interrogation.
“The steakhouse. No one I know can afford to eat there three nights a week.”
I stared at her. I enjoy meat. I enjoy a few ounces of scotch with my dinner. I enjoy real food, not these damp noodles and bits of chewy pork. It was not my fault that a nutritious meal costs twenty dollars in this country. But I said none of this. Never before had a woman dared to speak to me in this way, not even when I was a small child in school with the nuns.
She saw my expression. “I’m sorry, Carlos, but we are just trying to help.”
A spritz of cold air hit my backside as the air conditioner switched on. Is this what it was going to be like? I would have to ask permission before eating a potato or buying a shirt? I hated the restaurant with its tippy tables and the plastic tablecloths, which were whipped off between customers. Did she think I wouldn’t know how to behave in a real restaurant with a wine list? In my country, if I met a woman for lunch there would be linen napkins, heavy wooden chairs, soft lighting, and discreet, perfectly trained waiters. And we would not be eating with sticks.
Or perhaps I should be like these Oriental people, working for two dollars an hour and all the noodles I could eat. I should be grateful, always grateful to be here, in Gold Mountain.
I slipped out a Camel and popped it in my mouth.
Rita stared.
“I smoke,” I said. “It’s what I do.”
“Perhaps you can’t afford to smoke so much, Carlos.”
“I am a grown man. I do not need instructions for living.” She poured herself tea from the chipped pot. “There’s one more thing.”
I sucked hard on the cigarette, feeling exhausted. Perhaps it was better in Marta’s basement, where no one was watching and judging.
“We’ve had a few complaints about your behaviour at The Hub.”
This was the student pub on campus. I went there in the evenings when I was lonely.
“I understand you’re there six or seven nights a week.” Seeing my expression, she added quickly, “Your business, except…”
I waited.
“You’ve been borrowing money from the students, telling them that CAFE would pay them back. We can’t keep you in booze, Carlos, and neither can these kids, most of whom bust their asses all summer for tuition money and are living on less, far less than you.”
I stood up, pushing the flimsy metal chair backwards.
“Perhaps next time your group decides to rescue a writer you will conduct much research. Send out questions to all his friends and colleagues, make him sign a temperance petition. I am sorry. I am sorry to all of you.”
I left, or tried to; there was something wrong with the door and it wouldn’t open, though I turned the knob first to the left then the right. Goddamn Vancouver door! When I turned to look at Rita, she was sitting upright in her chair, pale and expressionless.
“Coming or going?” A young man pried open the door from outside and held it for me.
Could I trust one foot to follow the other on the pavement outside? Perhaps the sidewalk had been transformed into a carpet that would be snatched away. I stood there for a moment, dizzy, heart racing. Yet my anger was a mistake. I thought of the woman I had just left in the restaurant, how she had once held up a sign at the airport as she waited for me, her hair raked flat by the rain.
5
“Do you have whisky?”
The bartender, a stout man with an earring, slid a plastic goblet across the counter. “We got red wine, sir. Courtesy of the Okanagan Wine Producers Association. Free for performers.”
I took the goblet with its fruity red wine, and a handful of pretzels from the bowl. It was the annual benefit for the Vancouver chapter of CAFE and I was a featured reader, and nervous as hell. Backstage, the Aquarius Ballroom was jammed with other performers, media types, techies, and beefy men lugging TV cameras on their shoulders. Most of us wore plastic name tags, mine misspelled, and as I wove my way through the crowd, people leaned over in an obvious attempt to read my tag. Many of the media I’d met in the preceding days, when Rita had hustled
