Thalo Blue (61 page)

Drive Careful?

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Tan is another of Hannah’s housemates, and she’s the one who had started all of this by dragging Hannah to the Carlton Club in Esquimalt last Saturday night. Esquimalt is close to the ship yards and the club attracts navy men who gyrate to top forty hits until two, then try to trade their Pertinent Information with the easiest girls they can find before last call. It had never been Hannah’s intent to have a good time at the Carlton’s genuine ‘buck-a-draught nite,’ but she had surrendered to Tan’s pleas out of steep boredom and sheer curiosity.

Tannis had been flirting with one of the navy guys on the dance floor, under the hollowed roof of supports, speakers and strobes, all painted black and trimmed with reflective streamers and giant beer posters. She’d been bumping and grinding against him in a playful, girlish way, not as a sexual come-on. But the smile on sailor man’s face, and the bulge in his jeans, suggested that he was looking forward to a little more than just close-up bumping and grinding, after she had a few more drinks and followed him back to his place near the base. Tan wasn’t thinking anything like that, of course. She was just having a laugh.

Tan had downed a few by then, mostly girlie drinks, as Hannah’s big brothers might have called them, stuff like cherry whiskey and Dr. P. Mr. Bumper-Grinder had ordered them two at a time for her and called them “Dr. Cherries”. He even made up a song about them: “Doctor Cherry Popped-er Cherry, Doctor Cherry Popped-er Cherry!” and he wailed it as he circled her under the hot lights on the dance floor. She was definitely feeling it, all that sugar mixed with all that booze, mixed with all that heat. And, like some, when Tannis is feeling it she runs off on philosophical tangents.

This time, after coming back to the table from the dance floor with the Bumper-Grinder, she sat down with Hannah and one of his navy buddies, both of them crew cut and impeccable, in short sleeve silk shirts, not even sweat-stained at the armpits, despite the closeness of the Carlton that Saturday. She was going off about her cat, Devil. Tan was saying that, under the guidance of her older and wiser housemate, Beta, she had let Devil go wild, let him run off to find greener pastures elsewhere, in the wide-open throes of personal and political freedom. Beta had said it was demeaning to keep any creature, cat, dog, woman, otherwise, under lock and key. Telling it where to pee, what to eat, that was wrong. According to Beta, that was “Post-modern Subjugation of Female Powerlessness”–-one of a handful of expressions she would toss out like Tic-Tacs whenever she got in one of her moods.

“—Seriously, though—” Tan was laughing, snorting in her childish way, despite her proportionate body, perfect hair and enviable skin, “What if we live like our pets?” Bumper-Grinder who just wanted Tannis to be his bedtime plaything, let out a chuckle of his own, one that said he thought she was trying to be funny, not serious. He cut it short when no one joined him. Oblivious, she continued, in a lower voice that sounded entirely sober. “What if you caught a secret glimpse of a giant alien hand reaching out of the clouds and switching off the sun one day at dusk? What would you do then?”

Without a word now, he looked across the table at Tan, then back to his silent compadre, his eyes doing a subtle watusi. Then he even looked at Hannah. Tan took a sip from her thin yellow straw, then gaped, wide-eyed, with open, pleading hands, and shrugging shoulders, waiting for Bumper to respond. He got up, looked at her, then at the rest of them, and said, “I’m going to go get a drink.” He never returned to the table, actually, but that wasn’t a surprise to anyone else, or even to Tan. She watched him go, then took another slurp from her yellow straw. “I need to pee,” she said, got up, pulled her panties out of her bum crack, through her skirt in a not-so-feminine manner, then walked off in the direction of the washrooms.

Silent Compadre turned out to be a truly genuine guy. He was Jean-Marc, originally from Montréal. He was built well and his chest held out his short-sleeve silk shirt that was, admittedly, a decade out of date. He was in his late thirties, but you couldn’t tell until you got up close and saw the few sparse grays at his temples, or the fine lines around his eyes. This one had either laughed a lot in his life, or grimaced a lot. After two vodka mixers, Hannah was sure that it had to be the former. His smile turned her on. And those arms didn’t hurt either.

She thought a little harmless flirting was no big deal. It’s not like this is going to lead anywhere. He’s not going to get what Mr. Bumper-Grinder was after. Not with me.

And he wouldn’t. Not with Hannah.

Jean-Marc’s English was spotty—he’d only been out of Montréal for less than a year. Coupled with the music, his choppy English was hard to understand. He became frustrated, hunted for words and repeated things several times to Hannah, though she didn’t mind. He finally asked her if she wanted to talk outside.

Nice, she thought. There’s a line if ever I’ve heard one. Next it’ll be, “Hey bee-you-tiful, I have dis great book of French poh-ettry in my car. I want to read you a pass-ej.” Or maybe “I have dis great Cee-Dee you should hear. My car’s right over dare in da parking lot. Yeah, da red one wid da rilly big wheels.”

She went with him, not wary, not nervous, because she knew there would be dozens of people milling around the Carlton’s doors. Hannah has been proud of her sound ability to judge a person’s character and simply knew he wouldn’t try anything. But even if he did, they were only a few steps away from the general populace. The crazy, drunken, self-centered populace. Why that was a comforting thought, she didn’t know.

When Hannah and Jean-Marc left the club they discarded two half-full drinks—his Corona and her vodka mixer—because drinks weren’t allowed outside. Drinkless and sobering, they went out into the cool ocean air, leaned against the wooden deck railing where there were a few potted geraniums a half-story above a full parking lot. Like a good boy, he stood a little apart from her on the deck.

Jean-Marc’s French-Canadian accent made her cheeks pink more so than the Vodka mix did. He had a charm about him, a willingness to smile and wait for her to speak her piece, a desire to please her first and to bring laughter by way of some gentle self-deprecation. He lost the occasional English word, fouled others up completely, but the way he looked at her! He watched her lips as they moved, and hung on her every word. She was positive he would be a generous one in the bedroom—Jean-Marc, JM to all these younger, English-speaking sailors—had been a sales executive at a clothing manufacturer in Montreal. He wore a jacket and tie, pressed his shirt each night before bed, recorded a voice mail greeting every morning at eight sharp. At thirty-seven he had woken up with a terrible, how do you say, Ache, in his heart. He had felt, what is the word, Empty. Alone. Living like this, he would never meet the woman of his dreams, the woman he was meant to, what is that expression, Spend His Life With. Not with his world moving in that dull direction. No direction. There were only work functions and after-work functions. The only people he could honestly say he knew were his band of buyers and the people in his office and the guy behind the bar that served drinks to him and his office amis each Friday afternoon. His life felt so devoid of adventure, so different than he had imagined it growing up. So he quit that well-paying job, sold his condominium on Rue de la Gauchetière, and had walked into the nearest Armed Forces recruiting office. He signed a seventeen-year contract with the Navy and they moved him here, CFB Esquimalt. Leaving his comfort zone, moving away from family for adventure and newness—maybe it was the effects of the night’s drinks, or the intoxication of speaking with this stranger out in the cooling ocean air, but Hannah thought this the most idealistic personal myth she’d ever heard.

Hannah reluctantly agreed to see him again, after his training exercises had finished late Monday afternoon. They would meet at All Ways Bean in Colwood, a chocolatier and coffee shop. Two of Hannah’s favorite things together under one roof, she joked. This idea came after Jean-Marc had bragged about the chocolate shops back home, one in particular at a place called Marché Atwater. Her challenge to him was whether he could lower himself and try some of her western chocolate in lieu of his fabled stuff from home back east. Having dropped that hint, she could hardly say that she had other plans. She couldn’t gracefully back out now.

But he didn’t try anything with her that night. Didn’t lean in to kiss her, or put his hands on her. Didn’t ask her to follow him to his car. And, after talking for a couple of hours out there on the geranium-filled deck of treated lumber, Hannah Garretty found herself doing something she had never done before: she gave her phone number to a stranger she met at a bar.

As they began their goodbye, he told her in his alluring accent that it would be his honor and pleasure see her at the coffee shop, and, more importantly, he laughed, that he loved chocolate. Hannah was pretty sure he had only said that once he knew of her weakness for it. As they finally parted ways, he had asked her, “Don’t all women love chocolate?”

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If pressed, Hannah wouldn’t be able to explain why she couldn’t meet Jean-Marc at All Ways Bean after telling him she’d be there. It wasn’t that he was a navy boy and it wasn’t that he was older—even though Hannah had been with one much older man and that had turned disastrous. And it wasn’t the language barrier—Jean-Marc’s English was improving, she told herself. He wasn’t a whack-job. Why shouldn’t she at least just spend the evening with him? They could meet at the Chocolatier’s, sit at a cozy little table for a bit, get a few samples of chocolate, a latté, or an iced mochacinno, then if all went well, go for dinner together.

After rear-ending the Westfalia van on the island highway, after seeing that bloody-eyed face in her fraction-grasp, after hearing Mr. Mean Man say through polished corn teeth, one black and bleak, “Drive Careful,” she just can’t see Jean-Marc. She’s shaken. And now she just can’t imagine strolling into the café and making small talk, with the late afternoon’s events still so fresh.

Beta would noisily deliver her obligatory judgments if Hannah brought a sailor home to the house in Oak Bay. And, heavens, if it ever ambled down Relationship Road and got to SeriousVille with Jean-Marc (not that such a preposterous idea was even padding around the insides of her head, her heart, or her below-the-belt places), Beta would say things like, “You can’t trust a navy boy, Han. All the clichés are true: they cheat, they lie, they’re never around. They drink, they smoke up. All they want is a warm berth to launch their torpedoes. And in the middle of the night—I promise you this—you’ll get calls from younger girls looking for him and asking for ‘another ride on the boat’. There’s no sense in letting this get too far, Hannah-Banana. You know it deep down. He’s just gonna trample your ‘lil heart. Just you wait and see, Han-Banan. It’ll be messy.”

So she doesn’t go to All Ways Bean. This castle in the sky of spending the whole week with him non-stop before he sails out—going to restaurants, hitting the downtown shops on Douglas, renting motor scooters and high-tailing it up and down the inclines and valleys in the south of Oak Bay—she feels like she’s already let those ideas go. And in the deepest grotto of her mind, these imagined photographs simply fade into the dark, and disappear.

Instead of heading directly south to Colwood, after her literal run-in with the Unwashed Hair Girl and Mr. Mean Man, she puts on her blinker and turns right onto Goldstream, heading further west to the Langford Caprice where she gets into a romantic comedy just as the previews and commercials are ending and the house lights are coming down.

It seems like a good fix at the time: if she’s bound and determined not to give Jean-Marc a chance, she can at least watch a fictional woman find her own version of him, then lose him, then find him again. It’s a fair compromise.

“Stumble then rise,” she thinks again, as she takes her seat in the darkened theatre. “Stumble then rise.”

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The glimpse of the bloody eye and the bruised cheek with its swath of dirty blonde hair is not Hannah’s first Grasp.

And they always come true. And that’s probably why they bother her so much. She doesn’t get them right off, doesn’t know what they stand for, what they foretell, but when the real thing happens, like that dirty-ashamed one, she wants to run and hide. She wants to rip them out of her mind and throw them as far away from her as she can.

She wishes, just as she has for most of her young life, that she would stop seeing them, that they would wither up and leave her for good.

There was the time she saw Dickie’s foot caught in the drain vent in the Kawalski’s above-ground pool. This was before Dickie had even been invited to Ivan Kawalski’s thirteenth birthday party. There had been some questions about which kids in the neighbourhood would get the green light from Ivan. Everyone wanted to go to the pool party but not everyone was on the A-list and Dickie didn’t know yet either.

Dickie is one of Hannah’s three older brothers, the next oldest in fact, and he hates being called ‘Dickie’. It’s Rich. Or Richard. Not Dick. Never Dickie. “Got that, Little Giiiiirl?” he would demand, holding Hannah down as she giggled. It was playful, usually, but as with most older brothers, sometimes got rough.

Hannah had seen his red trunks and his small pink foot under water, stuck between the slats of the white plastic vent in a Grasp even before he’d been invited to the party. Hannah wasn’t there, wasn’t even six at the time but there’s Dickie, a little more than a week later: diving in head-first, all the boys taking turns to see who can splash the biggest. And there he is: Dickie obviously wins, sends a spray into the air so far it reaches the Kawalski’s upstairs den window, dappling the glass with a wide spray of fat, impressive drops of pool water. Only thing is, Dickie’s not coming up now. The kids are all elbowing each other, the awe and laughter is coming to a gradual end but Dickie’s just a flesh-colored blob in red trunks at the bottom of the pool. Way down below the agitated surface of marbled blue-white water. The water is settling now and still no Dickie. Just bubbles. Calming surface. A few more bubbles.