Order of Good Cheer (32 page)

He had to kill the afternoon, just one more. He didn't want to think of art this way but it was either here or home lying in bed. He was still in his work clothes. He could smell himself. He had invited everyone to a party.

He would bring her here too, of course. It was his other place, this new gallery hanging off the Museum of the North. This bench was where he could sit and, similar to his window on the water, do nothing. Here too he was charged with the energy of other, in this case not moving water but fixed art, a stillness that lived. Surrounded by paintings, by such concentrated vitality that could cast itself from itself, he could feel buoyed. By dropping any effort, by simply giving in to the agonizing yellow there in
Sunscape
, 1958, he could feel brilliant. The more he let go, the more brilliant he could feel.

He could relax socially too. No one from work was going to stomp through the art gallery. But no matter who came in, by definition they were now as uncool as he was. So it was a place he fitted, he could sit and say nothing, he could be himself, the blandest of the bland. His blandness was known. That tall Andy Winslow sure doesn't say much. Fine. Ever since his twenties, even since Laura left, in fact, when he stopped wrestling what adolescence shoved in his face with its mirror, he'd been relaxing into his blandness. In fact, in public he was not even shy any more. Laura, the blandness has gained confidence. In fact, he was probably now
eccentrically
bland. Which was a fine thing, that blandness could go full circle, and oxymoronic. Maybe, just in time for her, he'd be
charismatically
bland.

He was alone but smiling. Before chez Winslow and another try at sleep, he stood to scan the fifteen paintings more closely. As usual, even when other people were there, he deliberately moved counter-clockwise, against the flow,
widdershins
, the direction witches walk while casting spells. (Maybe he'd get
magically
bland.)

He was killing an afternoon. How else do you kill one?

He loved this:
A Storm
, 1971. Wildest, darkest wind and water blasted but couldn't defeat something like rock, but softer, its
pinks and yellows suggesting something humbly alive. The impression Andy got was chaos threatening a human heart. Or a person's sanity. He always thought of a crucible, of the transforming fires of alchemy. He'd read that alchemy's changing lead into gold had been a secret society's metaphor — the kabbalists? the Gnostics? — for changing the self. For building a soul. Something like that. Inner change. This painting was alchemical. The small burst of excitement, before words come, surely it was minutely transforming.
All
these paintings. That woman's eyes there,
Her Birthday
, 1989, were better than eyes really were.

He stopped at the last painting by the door,
Field
, S. R. Lewis, 1953. That's all it was, a field, but a purple one, its brush strokes suggesting endless grass diminishing in the distance. It was simple, it was
bland
, and only bland, and Andy could feel nothing dangerous or challenging or alchemical about it. He probably lacked the eyes.

Laura. Tomorrow. There was alchemy in this, wasn't there? There was the churning
impatience
, but let's call it alchemy, in any love that hadn't come to a natural end.

LAURA. TODAY.

Coming off graveyard, driving home, he went into a skid on the curve near Stutz Rapids and barely held it. He slowed down, shook his head. His Mustang had never scared him before.

He wasn't hungry but decided he would make a huge breakfast — pancakes, ham, maybe a cheese omelette too — because if he ate too much he might fall asleep from it. Laura flew in at seven tonight and he was a jangly mess.

When he parked and opened his car door he heard the kitchen phone stop ringing. He knew it would be bad, not just because someone was calling before eight in the morning but
because it began to ring again when he was in the hall tugging off his boots — someone was calling and calling. His stomach flipped when he realized Drew was getting home around now too, and that the phone call might be about Chris.

He was right that it was bad, but it wasn't about Chris.

The hospital was frightening, even if he wasn't there about a loved one. After graveyard, fluorescent lights were always too bright, containing tiny but extra colours, like bad spells being cast, and he felt them harsh over his head as he tried to get directions from the nurse behind her desk. Andy didn't know her, and her glasses were overtly fashionable, the arms weirdly bent, dipping down then back up, suggesting leverage, but it was all a ruse, simple arms were all that was needed, and Andy thought they looked ridiculous. She told him the east wing, fourth floor, pointing to the elevators that he could see.

“Are you related?” the nurse remembered to ask.

“Yes,” said Andy, feeling the thrill of this, because it wasn't quite a lie.

“I'm not sure, but I think you should go
right
up,” the nurse said, meeting his eye significantly, and what worse words could there be?

If he really had been related to Marie Schultz, he should have been able to fly to her. It surprised him that the elevator still stopped at each floor to let people on and off, the doors opening and closing with no attitude of hurry. Above, through concrete, something unknowable and life-changing was taking place, and here people chuckled, debating snow. Andy replayed his mother's words from the phone call, and how the thing she'd said first was, “I didn't want to disturb you right after work,” her tone almost cheerful, her good friend dying or dead yet her worry was that Andy's routine might be disturbed. Her news came more quickly then —“We don't know if she's actually passed”
and the words
massive stroke —
and hearing this Andy had found himself wondering why
massive
was the adjective they always used. Did it have to do with the physical mass of the heart, or the brain, or did it just mean big?

Here was Rita, almost blocking the entrance to the room. Rita loomed large and red-faced, her shoulders up, and she didn't appear to be breathing. Beside her hovered Doris, blinking and birdlike, unable to stop moving her hands. Beside her, his mother stood with hands folded at her solar plexus like a singer in a choir. The look on her face was placid, even pleased. Not even this had ruffled his mother's poise. It looked for all the world like she was giving her friends — Mrs. Schultz on the bed in particular — a lesson in how to be dying correctly.

Laura's mother lay dressed not in hospital garb but her pale rose nightgown. The covers were up to her armpits and her hands folded on her stomach. Morning light streamed in, its intensity and mood for some reason reminding Andy of Easter Sunday. The room was marked by its absence of emergency: no machines were blinking, no tubes ran from Mrs. Schultz, no doctors or nurses worked. The room smelled faintly of women's florid toiletries, and an earthier sour of something else. Mostly, the dominant sense in the room, and one reflected by the posture of everyone standing within it, was that there was suddenly no longer any hurry. It wasn't the lack of medical machinery but rather a palpable feeling, that time itself had been shocked and now moved in an immense new way, that told him this person was dead.

Andy went to Mrs. Schultz. He touched her bare forearm with his fingertips but quickly withdrew them because her arm was sinewy and discoloured and somehow private for that.

He thought of hugging his mother then, but didn't know if he should, or if she would not like the look of it. He was aware
of how stiff he felt, and how
angry
, but in confused directions. He hated this woman, but that body on the bed was this woman no longer. But he was angry at her still, and for new reasons, one of them going something like, Now you've messed up Laura's plans. And another, for making him recall when he was in a room like this, death's white noise in the air, and how he had fallen beside his father and felt the clumsy bones of his own arms hugging that body through the blankets, and his fourteen-year-old voice breaking in his ears as he moaned,
Aw? Aw?

Andy stared at Mrs. Schultz's face. Someone had tastefully removed her pink eye patch and it lay beside her pillow, within reach should she need it. She still looked stern. A hard woman, fortified against any threat. They shouldn't use fluorescent lights in hospital rooms, it made human skin a horror. He wondered, as one must, about the span of a human life, and what it meant, if anything. And then in the midst of this ripe room, and out of his own chaos of voices, one of his mother's sayings came to him, intoning Disney-like and corny in the air. He heard, “When you judge someone, you have no time to love them.” If you're doing one thing you can't do the other. And though it was Mrs. Schultz he stood beside, he hoped that, from now on when he visited his mother, who was posed helplessly in choir position behind him, he'd remember the saying and understand it.

A SMALL CAR FERRY
ran from downtown Prince Rupert across the harbour to Digby Island, or “the airport island” as it was called. Scheduled for every flight, two buses crossed to pick up passengers and bring them back as part of their airline ticket. With buses on board there was deck room for only four or five cars, and this evening there was no room for a black Mustang.
A smaller car could've fit. The loading guy joked that “a Smart car would've been smart.”

Nearly missing the ferry to greet Laura — which would have been absurd — Andy parked and ran back to walk on and board one of the near-empty buses, joining the scatter of other greeters. He closed his eyes. He tried a deep, calming breath and was instantly dizzy. But he thought that maybe he could finally sleep, here of all places, sitting up in a bus seat, on board a boat, going to meet a plane.

This afternoon he'd slept maybe a little in the bathtub, maybe twenty minutes if at all, because he was suddenly aware of lying in cool water. If it was sleep he'd been enjoying it was assaulted by the sudden dead face of Marie Schultz. He recalled how his father's dead face had also haunted him, for weeks and weeks, snapping him out of a doze or, if he was awake, shocking him more awake than ever, the extra clarity a kind of hell. His dad's face was yellow, almost canary yellow along the jawline, and charcoal blue around the sunken eyes, one of which stayed open just enough to give young Andy the steady glint of an eye, Dad's dead eye, a silver crescent that shone crazily while telling him nothing. For months this face with its eye would ambush and impale him, until gradually the image softened and then faded so much that he couldn't get a clear picture of it even if he tried. Though horrified to see it, he was sad when he no longer could, a link with his father gone.

This morning, Mrs. Schultz had her eyes well closed, but through a parted frown you could see a bit of yellow enamel.

Andy lurched from his seat and stepped into the aisle. The driver saw him coming in the rearview and hissed open the door and Andy stepped down into the rain to stand on deck. It was cold and the ferry's speed made it colder. His clothes would
be wet and look pathetic for it, but Laura wouldn't mind because she wouldn't notice, just like she wouldn't notice his lack of a Mustang, or his decent waistline or expensive cable-knit sweater or anything else in the greet-Laura outfit — because her mother was dead. Standing with his face in the rain, Andy felt appropriately lousy for thinking, on this the day of her death, that Mrs. Schultz was doing it still, standing between them, that show of yellow tooth the hint of a fresh sneer.

Andy hunched in the gusts and moved over to the two-storey pilothouse to see if the coin was still there. It was, an old American silver dollar Krazy-Glued to the deck years ago, the source of much merriment to the skipper and deckhand up behind that window. Andy hated it and what it said about Prince Rupert, and how some people will find any cheap route to feeling superior, even if for ten seconds. Andy had been on deck once to see it for himself: a tourist, enjoying the view of the approaching port city, spots the silver dollar, sidles over, and stoops to pinch it up only to find it glued down, then hears the hoots from the wheelhouse, good old boys having themselves a time behind the smoked glass. Welcome to PR.

Andy nudged the coin with one of his new mahogany-brown casuals, which he was starting to like. The coin stayed part of the deck. He heard no hoots from behind the glass.

HE WAITED IN
a building of mostly unadorned cinder block painted in pale government greens. He heard the twin-prop plane land, then taxi up. At this noise, the first real proof of their reunion, Andy realized he had no idea where she was staying tonight, or if she'd arranged something, or assumed something — though there was small chance of that. It might be difficult to broach. He would wait until they were back across the harbour,
off the ferry, off the bus and in his car before a
Where to?
Now the aircraft's wing lights shone through the bank of plate glass. The engine roar ceased and he waited some more.

And here she came. It wasn't Laura, it was a woman. She had both breasts. She was dressed in a long black coat, old-fashioned looking to Andy but maybe stylish in Toronto. She was erect and buoyant in her posture, a dancer, and her walk was still Laura's, if anything more graceful, no longer in a hurry to be somewhere else. Her dirty-blonde hair was cut short, as per women of her age. She approached Andy smiling sadly, her face rich with her mother's death. But the smile was also full of greeting, and of the irony — why was it ironic? but it was — of seeing Andy Winslow again. She had room for that, she had humour for that.

They hugged. His cheek and jaw pressed her hair, and he could smell it, and her scalp, and it was Laura's smell, which was cruel. It wasn't nearly the hug he'd wanted it to be. How could it have been? He felt stunned from all directions, and he could feel her confusion too, could feel in the brief squeeze her tentative relationship to everything now. He could easily imagine her worried he was here, embarrassed for him, knowing she would soon have to turn him down — but maybe it's only sad to have a mind that imagines so well.