Stony River (66 page)

“Do you think those two will ever get married?” Sevana asked, her thoughts straying to Jillian’s confession on the ski hill.

“If they do, it will take some adjustment on both sides,” Willy predicted.

“In what ways?”

“Well, besides Ralf’s delusional state, which has him convinced he can’t afford a wife, and Jillian being a closet mechanic, which is as incomprehensible to Ralf as it is to the rest of us—have you ever been in Jillian’s apartment?”

“No, why?”

“It’s neat,” said Willy, “almost scary-neat. You know when she washes the dishes? Afterwards she puts them all away, and the dish drainer and the dish soap and the dishcloth—nothing in sight but the clean kitchen sink. I left a coffee cup on the counter over there once, went back for it a few minutes later and it was gone, vanished—like it’d been sucked into a black hole. Ralf, I don’t know if he could live like that. He’s more laid back about such things.”

“Still, that’s no reason not to get married if they love each other.”

“Married,” Willy said softly to himself. “That’s a scary word. Almost as scary as Jillian’s kitchen.” And succeeded in getting a giggle out of Sevana.

But after a moment’s reflection, she asked, “Does Jillian
know
Ralf thinks he can’t afford to get married?”

“Well, yes, she knows,” said Willy. “But she thinks it’s just an excuse because she’s insecure enough to think he’s looking for one. But it’s not an excuse. Len and I have seen it for ourselves—it’s Ralf to the core.”

As they entered the outskirts of Calgary, with highrises looming on the skyline and the town sprawling for miles in all directions, Willy became even more animated, brimming with an underlying excitement as he pointed out the sights. The streets were busy, the shops crowded. “Now this is a city!” he exulted, taken up in it all.

“It’s a lot bigger than Lethbridge,” Sevana admitted.

“It sure is. Makes Lethbridge look pretty small-town, doesn’t it?”

“I like Lethbridge. It’s such a friendly place.”

“Nothing wrong with it,” Willy granted her, “except I’m not going anywhere in it. I want to be in the thick of things, Sevana,” he confided, “—right here in the center of trade and commerce and culture. I can’t be satisfied just to establish a comfortable business. I want to be great, well-known.”

“There’s nothing wrong with such ambitions,” she conceded.

He drove downtown in all the fast-paced traffic entirely at ease. The others arrived a few minutes later, Len white-knuckled and Ralf accusing him of nearly getting them killed trying to keep up with Willy’s lane changes.

Jillian was unusually quiet. After the paper had missed a critical morning deadline because her boss had overslept, she had thoughtfully suggested that if he tried her trick of living one hour ahead, he might find it easier to get to work on time. But instead of appreciating the idea, offered in genuine sincerity as something that worked well for her, he’d had just enough touchy pride to take it as a criticism of his frequent tardiness—not to mention an affront to his authority in general—creating an ongoing antagonism in their office relationship. Ralf had told her to laugh it off since she’d only been trying to help; but she was so traumatized by the incident that she’d decided to first count to three before she said anything ever again, to make sure it wasn’t something she would regret. She started to say something several times, but each time stopped and said, “Um—never mind.”

They all crammed into Willy’s car for a tour of the art shops. They visited elite shops with high-priced supplies, and lower-priced stores without the selection. They visited stores that sold only paintings. But not one place offered the range of reasonably priced supplies plus the full spectrum of pictures that Willy’s did—to say nothing of an art class. Willy also took them past two storefronts for rent he’d gotten wind of through a real estate agent.

At the end of the afternoon, the friends walked five abreast across a broad plaza to an old-English eatery Willy liked. Inside the dark tavern they continued to discuss their impressions of the day over prime rib, Willy’s treat. Everyone agreed there was room in that town for him. Ralf, feeling expansive because Willy was picking up the tab, praised the idea with unusual largess; and even Jillian, after the obligatory three-second pause, said Willy should go for it. Len was more hesitant because he didn’t want his best friend to move away. The men quaffed a few rounds of ale from big tumblers.

Then, just when Sevana thought they were ready to leave, the waiter burst forth from the kitchen bearing a white-frosted layer cake embellished with real rosebuds and flaming candles, and set it grandly before her. She looked in astonishment from the elaborate cake to Willy, and saw his beaming, self-satisfied smile. “Willy, how did you know?” she asked weakly.

“A bit of useful information gleaned from the shop records,” he said airily. “Happy eighteenth, Sevana Shanae,”—and kissed her hand with exaggerated elegance.

The others were just as surprised as Sevana—Willy wisely trusting the confidence to none of them—but they recovered more quickly. “My heartiest congratulations, Sevana,” Len said, pumping her hand after she’d blown out the candles. “I was eighteen once myself, but I got over it—although, of course, much more recently than Willy.”

“Don’t look so overwhelmed, Sevana,” Ralf put in, with a kindly quirk of his mustache. “Truth be told, this is just Willy’s excuse for the Saturday night he’s missing out at the Roadhouse.” He reached for the bottle of champagne.

“You two are incorrigible,” Jillian announced after a second or two, with a shake of her shining brown hair. “Happy birthday, Sevana. Here, Willy, let
me
cut the cake. You’re ruining the icing.”

All in all Sevana had to admit it was rather fun, even though she wasn’t used to her birthday being treated as a special occasion. When they left the restaurant, she carried a box containing the leftover cake and roses. Out on the darkening street Willy fell behind her, and she had a sense of some exchange passing between him and Len although she didn’t hear what it was. At the cars Willy said, “I think I need a cup of coffee before I attempt the road home. Do you, Len?”

“No,” said Len, looking straight back at him. “But then, I didn’t have four glasses of champagne.”

“All right, we’ll be behind you, but not for a while.”

“We can wait—” Jillian began without counting to anything, but was pushed into the sedan mid-sentence by Len.

Sevana, feeling something was afoot, nevertheless waved to the departing carload, and allowed Willy to deposit the cakebox in the Jaguar and spirit her to a nearby coffee shop. She didn’t especially crave coffee at the moment, but had a cup with him just for the uniqueness of being in such a fashionable little cafe in that new and stimulating city. A light snow was falling out in the street.

“The birthday party was so sweet of you, Willy,” she said. “I never dreamed you’d planned such a thing.”

“It wasn’t much. Just a small token to show your presence in my life hasn’t gone unnoticed or unappreciated,” he said. In the curio section he bought a chocolate moose in cellophane for her, an expensive cigar for himself.

He locked the candy in the car, then lit his cigar and began strolling down the street. Sevana followed patiently, wondering what he was up to. “Well, Sevana, what do you think of Calgary?” he wanted to know.

“It’s impressive,” she answered readily. “So big and sparkling—not at all dreary like some cities.”

“It’s a special place, all right.” Willy sounded dreamy.

They passed a closed craftsmen’s shop with three violins in the windowcase. Even in the dimly lit display, Sevana could see the gleam of their high-gloss finish. “Look, Willy—” she said in a tight voice, stopping him with a hand on his trenchcoat. “Aren’t they beautiful?” She lingered before the window, unable to tear herself away. Now that she knew the work that went into their making, she could appreciate their handcrafted fineness. “Did you know one violin can have as many as fifty coats of varnish?”

“You’re kidding,” said Willy, puffing away on the cigar. “Come on, I want you to see the river.”

Still in a daze, Sevana followed him inattentively down the street.

They came to stand on the bank of the river flowing through the center of the city. There was ice at its edges but the middle ran free, shimmering over the gravel in the streetlights. It was a pretty river, but Willy wasn’t seeing it. “I’m going to do it, Sevana,” he told her. “I’ve made up my mind.” His voice was full of excitement.

“I wish you all success, Willy.” She meant it in all truthfulness. He was extremely talented; if anyone deserved widespread recognition, he did.

“Don’t just wish me success. Come with me, be part of it,” he coaxed. “You will, won’t you?”

“I—might.”

“I need you, Sevana.”

“Oh Willy,” she said honestly, “I still don’t know what I should do.” Away from the routines of Lethbridge she felt even more misplaced—dislodged from the patterns she’d become entrenched in, so that she was almost overcome by the sense of homelessness she felt. Seeking a center, she found herself gazing north into the night, and had a swift intuition that Joel was thinking about her at that very same instant. Was it true, or just the product of a desperate imagination?

“Sevana!” Willy’s voice exploded into her thoughts. “I wish you would stop trying to make this more complicated than it is. Why can’t you see things the way they are?”

“Don’t think I haven’t tried!” Her eyes mirrored the night’s stormy darkness as she looked up at him through the sifting snow, tiny crystals catching and glimmering on her hair. “But I can only see one thing, and everything else eludes me.”

“And what is that?” he asked, waiting for her to elaborate.

She knew he deserved the truth, even if he wouldn’t go for it. “I want a life that is lost.” Her voice was quiet, yet deliberate. “It was everything I could wish for. And even though it’s not meant for me, yet because of knowing it once, I have an image of what life can be like…an ideal I can’t let go. Nothing else measures up.”

Willy blew out a trail of smoke as he pondered it. “It makes sense, you know,” he said. “Artists live for beauty—for pictures in their minds. It’s natural, Sevana, to find a beautiful place and make it an object of idealism. I can understand that—I’m an artist, too. But I can also see life for what it is. Believe me, I see what you are doing plain as day, and I don’t want you to get hurt. While you are dreaming, the real opportunities you have will slip through your fingers, and you will be left with nothing—nothing!” He broke off with a wave of his cigar, waiting expectantly for her to acquiesce.

What he said cut her to the quick. The idyllic days of summer had vanished—and what good were dreams that couldn’t come true? She knew she was still clinging to them, not quite able to dismiss them and turn away from them for good. But it was time to do that: it was time to let them go without any more lingering attachment. She could no longer afford to court the things that had stepped in between her and her original goals. She sighed inwardly. It all came down to talking yourself out of what you really wanted, and convincing yourself you wanted something else more.

“So the dream world wins?” Willy taunted, misinterpreting her silence. He threw down the stub of his cigar and crushed it beneath his heel. “You would fight against all that can be yours—throwing it away with both hands—while you persist in hanging onto some notion at all cost, despite all reason, and whether or not it is even true?”

“No,” she said, looking away from his confrontive stare. Her guiding force had always been her art career. Maybe she had lost sight of that for a while. But that must not stop her. She had to go forward blindly until she regained some sense of vision. She could not just stand there waiting in the dark. “No, it doesn’t win. I know I have to move ahead, even if my heart is going a different direction. And I will, Willy,” she said, with a kind of desperately wrought conviction.

“Look, Sevana,” Willy said more kindly, sensing her genuine distress. “I think it’s still a question of the familiar versus the unknown. You’ve never had a life in Calgary, so naturally you don’t miss it. But once you give it a try, you might like it better than anything else. How will you know unless you do?”

“I won’t, of course,” she admitted. Inside her coat pockets, her hands were balled in tense fists. “I agree with you, I need to stop hesitating and make some plans.”

So desolate was she, so haunted her lovely face as she looked up to him, that all at once Willy said in a completely different way, “Look, Sevana, it’s your birthday; we shouldn’t be talking shop. I’m sorry I brought it up. It’ll all work out, you’ll see! Put your heart into something—why don’t you paint a masterpiece, and we’ll feature it at our very own art show.”

A faint shine crept into her eyes. “I could try.”

Willy gave her shoulders a squeeze with an intimate look that cut her to the quick. She knew she was hurting him by her reluctance to accept his generous offer. And really, it was nothing short of lunacy to refuse what he was holding out to her in that city of golden opportunity, just because her heart lay somewhere in the western ranges beyond.

As they climbed the hilly street Willy kept his arm around her. “Do you want to go back to Lethbridge tonight—or shall we get a skyrise suite and celebrate your first day of being eighteen in grand style?” His voice had turned soft and caressing, his head bent toward hers.