How Happy to Be (22 page)

Vikram packed up Mercy’s things. He put a quilted coat around her nightgown and one by one, he rolled socks on her feet. She leaned against him and he carried her like that, Mercy on one side, his cane on the other. They shuffled past the doorman to Vikram’s car and the doorman wept.

In Richmond Hill, Mercy was given her own room. She had displaced a few young children, it seemed, as the room was covered in posters of Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys. Mercy remembered Maria’s phases: New Kids on the Block and Milli Vanilli. Kaly brought her tea and sat by her bed, reading, while Mercy memorized the number of links on the pocket chain in Nick Carter’s jeans. Below that was a small shrine to Ganesh, grown dusty with child neglect.

Vikram’s father brought Mercy food on a tray, toast and tea. She stayed in bed a long time, and it was like that dream that everyone has of stopping the clocks.

One evening, Mercy looked out the window at neutral September, the green yard rolling into night in foggy shadows. Downstairs, the family murmured and she missed her village in Guatemala like she had never missed it before, a fist in her back turning, turning. She envied Kaly her statues and shrines, her unspoken certainty that Maria had already returned as something better. Mercy stared at Ganesh in the corner and remembered her idols, her beads and crosses left at home, and the endless depths of belief possessed by her own mother, a drunk. For a day, she lay in bed and hated them, all the devout women.

And then she didn’t.

She awoke one morning to snow soft against the window. Here I am again, she thought. And that was enough.

There was no epiphany to report, just the forward turn of one era, a break in the continuum to be noted later, and by others. This time is finished and so something else would take its place. That she could live with.

Mercy put on jeans and a sweater from the pile of her clothing that Vikram had carefully folded, resting on top of the pine dresser. She went downstairs where music quietly played, everyone in different corners doing different things, watching television, eating, children scribbling in books. Kaly had asked the crew to turn down the volume, and they had.

Kaly saw her, and rose from the table, her reading glasses low on her nose like a cartoon animal. A hedgehog, Mercy thought, and she smiled. It hurt her face to do so.

Mercy moved home, but her life changed. She spent her weekends with Vikram’s family. She cleared out Maria’s room and took in a boarder, a young Japanese student. This made her stronger, she felt, and Kaly helped her distribute Maria’s things. Vikram kept the ring.

Unfortunately, the Japanese student proved to be a TV addict and a food thief. Mercy asked him to leave (his angry ESL reply: “Go fuck your own self!”). Watching him walk out the door – and only because she, Mercy, had asked him to – she felt all powerful. She left the apartment and moved to a small house in Little India.

Mercy tells the story with such perfect timing that it ends one stop before she gets off, leaving just enough space to
appreciate my stunned silence. Mercy looks at me, smiles, and her lips pull back to reveal a set of perfectly straight ivory teeth. Only then do I suffer a flash of doubt. I imagine her riding the streetcar day after day, targeting someone alone and worried looking, adding details, whispering into a new ear, a private turn-on.

I should tell her good luck, or thank you, but I don’t. She picks up her plastic bags and walks out the train doors, thumping with the stocky rhythms of the short. She descends at Queen’s Park to a boulevard of hospitals and emergency rooms. I strain, but after a moment, I can’t see her any more. Still, I imagine that on a day like today, the beginning of spring, the awnings are sure to shelter patients in hospital gowns with IVs in their arms, grazing fresh air or smoking, frowning as if they’re going over a major event in their minds again and again.

S
LEEP CALLS, BELLOWS, BEGS. I PULL THE BEDROOM
curtain and push aside clothes, moist towels, magazines until I get to the quilt. I climb beneath in my jeans and sweater, my head so deep in the pillow I dream I’m eating feathers. It seems impossible that it’s only six weeks since Elaine slept in my bed. Can that be true? No calendars, no watch. I sleep.

When I wake up, bright climbs through the window, morning or afternoon. I hang the towels over the curtain to cut the light and climb back in bed. When I wake again, pushing up through the covers for air, it’s submarine dark.

My bag is ringing, or my phone within my bag, which I locate by ear in the bathroom. I open my bedroom door to light. Daytime again. On the edge of the tub, I pick up the phone’s glowing blue dictates: Nine messages. Theo. Sunera. Theo. Elaine. Editor. Editor. Marvin. Theo. Editor.

I speed-dial.

“Where are you today?” the Editor asks.

“Sick,” I tell her, at which point I realize it’s true, drop the phone, and throw up in the sink. When I pick up the phone again, she’s still on the line.

“You really are sick,” she says, mildly surprised. “Are you too sick to fly to L.A. in the morning?”

I’m silently trying to quell the storm in my stomach.

“Maxime? You know what I’m talking about? The Jennifer Aniston junket. I need to confirm when you’ll be filing.”

L.A. Things I’ve agreed to.

“Friday,” I whisper and I hang up, rest my cheek against the cold sink. The phone rings again: MCARDLE. What could I possibly say to him right now? What words could I use?

I listen to the message: “Hey, it’s me. [pause] Theo. Do I need to say that? I’m feeling a little like a stalker with all these calls. How about doing me a favour and calling me please so I don’t arrest myself? [pause] I don’t know … If this was New Brunswick, I’d say, ‘Okay, boys. See you later.’ And then I would.” Click.

I assume this is a folksy Maritime expression I don’t understand but not long after, when I’m in the bathtub rereading my drinking brochure, there’s a knock at the door.
I pull on my bathrobe and shimmy along the wall so as not to be seen through the front bay window. But if I hide behind the foyer door and crane my neck a little bit, I can see him: Theo McArdle on my porch.

“I see you,” he shouts from the porch, matter of fact.

I open the door.

“I’m sick,” I tell him.

“That sucks,” he says. “Can I come in? I’ll make you feel better.” He raises his eyebrows in a joking, salacious way that makes me think of Ad Sales.

I don’t hesitate. “No,” I say.

“Max, what’s going on? It’s been a week,” he speaks firmly but in a soft voice, a voice of concern. Concern has always made me recoil.

I’m thinking,
All that I am not telling you
, even as I say how busy I am, and how I’m going to L.A. and it’s just not a good time.
All that I am not telling you
.

“Why won’t you look at me?” he asks, again in this voice. So I do, I meet his gaze; my eyes flitting, his holding fast. But my body pulls back, keeping distance. Theo is standing on the porch, wind-churned and handsome from the cold. I’m in the foyer, hugging my body to keep my bathrobe on.

This standoff lasts a beat, and then Theo says, “Let me come in. I’ll make you some tea –” He makes a move to get past me, but I block the door.

He stares at me, a little disbelieving. I can’t bear it, those clear eyes. I imagine them set in the face of an old man. I imagine them set in the face of a baby. What provocation,
what turn of events will end this short, blissful cycle of new sex and the slow learning of one another, I wonder. Is it happening right now? From inside the thought, I suddenly ask, “Are you leaving?”

“Do you want me to?” He has misunderstood me.

“For England,” I say. He lets out a low groan, almost a growl.

“Is that what this is about?” He is angry. “You’re waiting for the inevitable collapse.”

I shake my head no, but I say, “Yes.” I mean it as a joke. Theo knows better.

“I’m right here, you know,” he says, almost snappish, as if it should be obvious. Of all the things he could have said, that’s the one that seems cruellest because it’s the one I believe the least. Tears well.

“Max –” he says, and he moves toward me. I hold out my arms stick straight and shake my head. All this time I’ve been waiting for him to disappoint me, but of course I’m the disappointment.

“I can’t talk to you,” I tell him, tears coming fast now as I move backwards into the house, my arms still out in front of me.

I shut the door and slide my back down the wall, hands around my knees, head bowed. He knocks. Then he waits a long time. Maybe a half-hour passes, maybe longer, and the sun begins to go down. The hallway is cast in darkness. I hear his footsteps down the walk.

I’ve been told that Los Angeles has neighbourhoods of spoon-faced Mexican children where limes grow on trees, but Los Angeles to me is hotels and the airport, window glimpses of blue sky between fingers of palms.

The studio pays for these junkets and those moments of California daylight as they pay for the plane ticket and the brushes with celebrity. The breakfast buffet is swarmed by TV chicks with flammable up-dos and overweight middle-aged journalists happy to be away from their wives, grown men clad in free baseball hats and sweatshirts inscribed with last week’s junket –
Big Mama
3,
Daredevil
2.

The Canadian writers huddle together. “So, Max, when will you be running your Aniston piece?”
The Examiner
asks in a voice that’s supposed to sound casual but hits the upper registers of a cheat. I concede all information.

The star entertainment reporter for
The Other Daily
is a hunched, aging man with hair like an acorn capping a smooth nut head.

“I understand Golden Productions isn’t too pleased with you, Maxime,” he says. “I understand you said something on a panel that upset Nicole Kidman.” He sounds almost admiring.

The alternative weekly has sent Sludge to trap Aniston too, and he has cribbed an entire jug of fresh-squeezed orange juice from the buffet, which he’s drinking through a straw. “More interesting than that is what I heard.” No one leans in because of the juice gale he’s shooting into the atmosphere, but we do cock our ears.

“BFD Television is trying to buy
The Daily,”
he says with a slurp. Heads whip my way. I shrug.

“I don’t know anything,” I tell them. It’s true.

There are eight of us around the table, adjusting our tape recorders, quietly test-test-testing although at this particular table there’s a lot of un, deux, trois and ein, svei, drei. Map-sized plastic tags dangle around our necks, in case we get lost and need to be returned to our home countries:
BELGIUM, JAPAN, SPAIN
, otherwise known as Team A. I’ve been placed at the foreign journalists table by some publicist who finds Canada exotic; it’s flattering, in a way.

“Dinner last night was crep,” says Australia, a man who doesn’t trust the nametag to convey fully his nationality and has topped off his cliché with a floppy Crocodile Dundee hat. “Last year we went to that steak place and this year it’s some Tex-Mex crep.”

Japan nods. “Is more cheap this year,” she says. Japan pulls out a PalmPilot. “From Eddie Murphy junket!”

The table moans with envy. Sure, we’re bunked out in four-hundred-dollar-a-night hotel rooms with spine-conforming pillows and baskets of foot softener, but where’s the free technological equipment? This movie sucks.

“So Team A,” I say. “Do you guys think we should get a mascot or a cheer or something? How about, like, a viper, or a manatee?” Team A ignores me.

A publicist scurries to the table, a single bead of sweat miraculously balanced on his brow, jutting out like a pea.

“The producer will be first, followed by the writer, then Ms. Aniston,” he says. “Anyone need anything? Espresso? Chai latte?” Damn straight; everyone needs something and when the snacks arrive, the table devours and conquers.

Here’s the thing: most entertainment writers earn very little money, and even less prestige. These men and women who have been flown here from all around the world live, most likely, in one-room haciendas, grimy rez-de-chaussée apartments with mouldy bathtub grouting, their desk drawers stuffed with thumbed copies of
Hello Magazine
and half-completed movie scripts of their own. Something in them wanted this; proximity, if nothing else.

The sadder ones, though, are those who truly loved the movies once. They thought they could make a living –
best job in the world –
writing about movies and that writing about movies was a way to write about love and dying and laughing. But slowly, they were pushed toward celebrity profiles and diets and dating stories, and these ones have kids to support, alimony to pay. At the next table, there are two: the stooping Spanish man and the shrivelled British woman, identifiable by the novels in their laps. So they know what it means to write about celebrity for a living – the wearing down, the dulling – but they do it anyway. Those, I admit, are my favourites, the broken-backed ones.

The producer is ushered in, an oily creature in squeaky loafers that warn of his approach. Italy launches the first question: “Do-a you-a love-a the movie?” Why yes, the producer loves-a the movie. Everyone worked together 110 per cent, it was like a family – “Familia!” he says for the benefit
of Italy – and this project mattered because no other movie like it has ever been made before and no, nobody on my movie is a diva. I don’t turn on my tape recorder or take notes or ask questions and eventually, no one else does either. This is too much of a PR crapathon even for Team A. We sit in silence, staring at the producer’s hands, wondering about all those gold rings keeping his fingers from touching. Looking uncomfortable, he signals the publicist and is removed.

The publicist returns cross.

“Listen, you’re expected to ask questions. We do keep a list of who’s participating,” he says. This means we might not be invited back, the same way people who write one too many negative pieces (the actor can never appear too stoned, too fat, too stupid) aren’t invited back and the same way no one on a junket writes negative pieces because the editors need the movie companies to advertise and just thinking about all those unspoken rules, it’s too much like the compound, too much unsaid, and I feel it all of a sudden: language, thick and liquid, curling around us, prying at our mouths and pens, trying to get out, and us, too cowardly to use it.