Consumption (18 page)

This summer, Marie had less energy, it seemed. She spent most of the time in her bedroom, reading. She was cold even when everyone else was warm, and she wrapped herself in sweaters and blankets. Sitting at the kitchen table drinking tea with her mother, she seemed distracted. When questioned on the matter, she replied she was just daydreaming. Though she denied being sad, she was more withdrawn than anyone in her family had ever seen her. Discussing it with Robertson, Victoria attributed Marie’s behaviour to puberty, but she did not really believe this herself. It was such a long wait for
the TB test results and worry gnawed at her like a stomach ulcer. She recognized that look, that listlessness. She had studied it every morning for the six years after her baby was born dead. But Marie only said, over and over, that she was fine. And then got up and walked back to her room.

Pauloosie was out on the land with his grandfather the moment school was over. He returned at infrequent intervals with appalling laundry only to pack for another trip. Robertson was in the house hardly more than his son. Summer is building season in the Arctic, and every plan and ambition developed in ten months of winter must be realized in a few short weeks. Anyone trying to make the north more like the south has to sprint continuously—from the moment the pack ice breaks up to the first blizzard. Great ruts of grooved mud and berms of compacted muskeg stretched through the town during this time, and Robertson was standing in the centre of most of them, watching the heavy equipment—preposterously expensive to operate here—chug and charge as they prepared foundations and swung shipping containers into position.

Victoria was the one constant presence in the house—though even for her, in summer there was little constancy. She ate breakfast alone at 3a.m., slept in the late afternoon. She listened to the doors emitting and admitting her family during all hours, and gave up trying to keep track of who was where. Absent the solar metronome, individual tempos became improvised and idiosyncratic. The old people had always been suspicious of summer. It was hard to travel on the tundra when it was melted and the season was so short it was easier just to be confused for a few weeks and wait for it to be over.

That summer Justine fell in love, along with twenty million other North American girls, with Axl Rose, the lead singer of Guns N’ Roses. Satellite television had come to town the winter before, and on MTV she watched the video of “Sweet Child O’ Mine” and felt as if she couldn’t breathe. She lay in front of the television fantasizing scenarios involving, variously, airplane engine trouble, a full-up
hotel, and her playing good Samaritan to the band. She’d cook them supper, laughing ironically about the isolation of the place they were marooned. “Oh no, we know your work, well,
some
of us do… Care for another bottle of beer?” Then they would perform a special show at the high school and thank her publicly, and everyone would know how cool she was.

Still, she knew he was bad for her. For long hours at a time she was able to shut him out her mind, but when it was night, and her sister was in bed, her parents in their opposite orbits, and her brother on the land, she turned the television on and waited for him to appear before her. She had subscribed to
Rolling Stone
, and now whenever a GN’R photo appeared, she meticulously cut it out and tacked it to her wall. The gossip pages made allusions to Axl’s excesses, and she ached over these, forgiving him even as she learned of the binges, the rampages, all the women. “Sweet Child O’ Mine.” As supple as a seal.

Satellite television had arrived just at the moment when Justine’s understanding of the world was coalescing. If it had been delayed another year she would not have been receptive to these images of the south, would have been too old to incorporate them into her idea of what was normal and desirable. But as it was, the pictures of Hollywood Boulevard and long, blond leonine hair, surfing beaches, and trees jutting from every unpaved and unpruned surface all sank into her just when she was maximally interested in the world. How lovely all that seemed to her, how these pictures thrilled her. And for the first time, she thought of the place
she
lived as sterile.

Axl’s imitators only served to make more evident his own magnificence. Poison, David Lee Roth, Billy Idol—all compelling in their way, but ultimately trivial beside the regal and disdainful Axl. Who ever imagined that a kilt could look so good on an American rock star?

Balthazar’s brother, Matthew, lived so far south of the city that he had to drive to get there. He caught a cab to the garage where he kept his 1978 Thunderbird and took a moment to check the oil and to marvel that the car hadn’t been stolen in the nine or ten months since he had last used it. When it started, it blew blue smoke for a minute before settling into a smoother rumble and then he slipped it into gear and backed up. He struck a concrete pole. He pulled forward. He backed up again. The concrete pole was still there. He pulled forward again, and then he was free.

Driving south on Garden State Parkway, he watched the city transform itself from the downtown core of mini-marts, pawn shops, and liquor stores into a stretch of franchise box stores and gas stations. Matthew was a Grade Eight English teacher at a local public junior high school. His wife, Angela, was a chartered management accountant, whatever that was. His niece was fourteen years old, played the viola, and attended an expensive private school. Angela’s firm had transferred her to their Newark office from Sausalito two years previously with the understanding that it was only for two years, to bring the Newark office “up to scratch,” as Angela dryly put it. But there had been a number of changes in HR, and the economy was not what it had been, and the move back had been delayed. Matthew and Angela still had most of their furniture wrapped in packing material in a storage unit in California. They knew none of their neighbours. Amanda’s school was a twenty-minute drive away and had been selected largely on the basis of the limited degree to which it would impart Newarkness to her.

Matthew met him on the front step and hugged him stiffly. “Hi, Keith,” Angela called from the kitchen when he came into the foyer.

“Good to see you, brother,” Matthew said as he closed the door behind him. “No peanuts?” Amanda had food allergies.

“Nope.”

“Do you mind?”

“Of course not.”

Balthazar formally pulled out his pockets, shaking them to dislodge any wayward M&Ms that were not there after all, and then turned his pockets rightside in. Angela observed from the kitchen as the ritual was completed in its entirety, scanning with her own eyes for a glimpse of peanut-butter cup wrapper.

Matthew sat down with Balthazar on the living-room couch after he poured glasses of whisky for both of them. “We’ve been meaning to have you over for ages.”

“I’m sorry I’m away so much.”

“How long are you in the city this time?”

“Well, I’ve been back about eight weeks now, so I’m looking at going up again in another three or four weeks.”

“Brother, you’re never gonna get a woman keeping up that kind of travel schedule.”

“Well, I like it up there a lot.”

“And it pays well.”

“Reasonably.”

Angela joined them then, with a glass of cranberry juice for herself, and tucked her legs under her as she sat down on the chair across from them. Amanda emerged from her bedroom, wearing headphones and carrying an electronic viola with ironic disdain.

“You know, I’m still surprised how you were transferred to Newark of all places. What unbelievable luck, isn’t it? I mean, really?” Balthazar offered merrily.

“Unbelievable coincidence, absolutely,” Matthew replied, nodding slowly.

“And it isn’t like they gave me even one other option to choose from,” Angela added.

“Destiny.” Balthazar smiled. Amanda stood behind her mother’s shoulder and waved at him with the tips of her fingers in a fourteen-year-old smart girl sort of way.

“Hey, Amanda.”

“Hello, Keith.”

“Uncle
Keith,” her mother said.

“Did you hear me playing?”

“You sounded great.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Because, I had turned the sound, like, off, and you could only hear it through the headphones.”

“Amanda,” her father said. She looked at Balthazar, the faintest suggestion of a smile on her lips.

“You caught me,” Balthazar admitted.

“I know.”

Then Angela, discomfited by the moment, as she was by many, many moments, stood. “Well, I think we should eat now.” And Balthazar stood as his brother rose too, and they walked over to the dining-room table, whiskies in hand, ice cubes clacking. As they pulled out their chairs before the lavishly laid table, not a misaligned napkin fold in sight, Angela apologized, “Our real silverware is still in…”

“California,” Balthazar said, surprised by his own impertinence.

“Yes.”

Amanda shrugged her headphones off from around her neck and arrived at the table half a beat behind the others. Her father glanced at her just as she slid into her chair and saw her navel sticking out between her jeans and too-tight T-shirt, and he flushed. Balthazar watched Matthew look away for a moment. “Since when do you come to the supper table half-dressed?” her father asked her.

“Matthew, we can discuss this later,” Angela said darkly and began passing around the peas with lemon butter and pepper in a taupe serving dish from the MoMA design store with little silver curlicues embossed on the sides.

Matthew locked eyes with his wife, and what Balthazar wanted to do was run outside to his car and barrel his way down the street. What he did was dish himself some peas while exchanging glances with his niece. Telepathically, she told him, “I’m glad you’re here.”

Telepathically, he replied,
“I’m
not.”

As boys, Matthew and Keith had endured their own parents’ volatile tempers with widely different strategies. Matthew’s recollection was that Balthazar spent much of his childhood face down on his bed with hands over his ears. Their parents’ passions had been more all-encompassing than those of Angela and Matthew, it seemed to Balthazar. Where Angela and Matthew were locked in a cool struggle, circling each other warily in between their periodic eruptions, his parents—when they weren’t actively trying to destroy each other—felt a deep and evident desire for each other. The two types of fighting seemed to Balthazar diametrical opposites. Angela and Matthew were locked together like the deer he had seen on the Discovery Channel, antlers entwined, dying slowly even as they continued to struggle against each other.

Besides the fresh peas, which were set off nicely by the tang of the lemon butter, there were smoked salmon crepes and squash and wild rice. Angela must have been working on the meal all day, Balthazar thought as he ate his way through the servings. Angela had long ago generalized her difficulties with his brother to include him, and probably resisted having Balthazar over in the first place, but there was no denying the work she had put into this meal.

Duty. Resolve. Bafflement. Balthazar had never been married, had not even had a substantial romantic involvement since he had begun working in the Arctic. His own explanation for this—and the one he advanced to anyone clumsy enough to raise the matter with him—was that his divided life was the obstacle he faced. But the truth was that he was grateful for the excuse. He could not have faced the life his brother led, and every married person he knew confronted elements of his brother’s struggles. Which was quite a price to pay to avoid simple stupid loneliness.

After supper, Amanda said good night to her parents and her uncle and retreated to her room, leaving the silence and the forced conversations of the adults behind her. Matthew and Balthazar
cleared the table as Angela began filling the dishwasher. “Can these go in the dishwasher, Angela?” Matthew asked as he brought the serving dishes into the kitchen.

“You know they can’t,” she replied, shrugging, not bothering to disguise anything for Balthazar’s sake.

“I’m just asking,” he said.