The Age of Cities (10 page)

You live in a target area.
You must get beyond this 20 mile
limit to be reasonably safe.

A long list of related facts filled the sheet. An address had been printed on the back. Readers were implored to contact their local political leaders. Winston could not imagine what one would say should he decide to write a letter. The likelihood of any local politician getting riled up about the threat of nuclear bombs looked remote: what could he hope to accomplish, after all? The matter would be out of his league.

“Now there's a fine reason not to take that job at the Hudson's Bay,” Alberta remarked. “Unless of course Bailey's Farm is also a target. Those damned strawberries. Then we'll be done for.” She slipped the pamphlet into her purse and turned her attention to the girl's crude map and waved it at him. “Flowers will cure what ails us, my dear,” she said warmly.

 

 

The street was radiant and festive, lit by a strand of pulsating colours, each one amplified by the fresh slick of rain on cars and pavement and put into stark relief by the starless night sky. Next to the flashing gold, red, and blue of Ming's FAMOUS CHINESE FOODS, the cool green neon leaves and glaring yellow stalks of Bamboo Terrace Fine Chinese Food formed an inviting arbor. Winston decided the restaurant's striped metal awning, the only one he had noticed in the entire area, was an incongruous but pleasantly homey touch.

At the Hudson's Bay, Dickie had not been specific about details, and Winston was already worried that he had no idea whether a reservation had been made, if one could be made, and whose name it would be under. Making a fool of himself: that was what he strived to avoid. Seeing his own inclination to worry about details stir to motion, he told himself not to get flustered. It was a bantam-sized restaurant so they would probably be seated in plain sight. The moment he stepped inside, they'd beckon him. He wondered if his on-the-dot punctuality would cause him grief. These men struck him as being slapdash about a social nicety like timeliness.

Through double doors—solid glass and heavy as lead—Winston was still for a minute as his eyes responded to the assault of fluorescence. Like the Port-Land, this place was no different from others he'd visited. The Bend's Prawn Gardens, where he and Alberta had eaten beef chop suey too many times to count, was a carbon copy—a coat of paint a mint lozenge hue that was decorated with lanterns and misty watercolour nature scenes glued onto rectangles of splintered bamboo; particles of scent—onion, fish, soy sauce—hung heavily in the humid air. This slight variation boasted two plaster statues of Oriental ladies in flowing robes, one at the cash register and the other at his feet. It was cookie cutter otherwise. And lit so brightly it could substitute as a surgery theatre. Winston noticed that all the tables were packed with Oriental families. Now, that was definitely not the case anywhere in the Bend.

There was no sign of Dickie. Maybe the gang had changed its dinner plans. At the far right, Winston saw a narrow staircase and grinned in relief. He pointed to it when an elderly woman with unnaturally jet hair approached. Gauging by her silky emerald dress, Winston concluded she must be the hostess. Yet she remained impassive, speaking no words and giving no welcoming gesture. While Winston couldn't see the gang, he did recall Dickie's comment about the mezzanine. When the hostess maintained her ghostly silence—Winston imagined she was trying to intimidate him so that he'd leave—he stepped past her toward the stairs. Hoping to avoid any awkwardness with the mute hostess, he did not turn around to see her response. He felt foolish pushing past her, but bolting out the door would have been worse.

Winston looked up to see that a worn carpet runner began at the midpoint of the wooden stairs. Ahead, the light was faint; he fancied that he was about to enter an opium den and smiled at his unfounded expectations; if nothing else, the Port-Land had taught him that lesson. He reached the top and stood before a room of chattering Caucasian faces—unencumbered adults, their children at home with babysitters. Spotting the gang at a distant table, he noted that they had chartered a new member. Winston paused to take in the surroundings. The contrast between floors was startling; it looked as though a tornado had ripped one restaurant from its original location and slammed it atop another. If it was no decadent lair for dreamy, slack-muscled addicts with heavy lids, there was no denying its exotic lushness. The room ably met his oversized expectations.

The sight prompted a recollection of a production of
The Mikado
put on by the Valley Players he and Alberta had attended a few years back. Here, the walls were papered in muted golden brocade; narrow glass tanks holding darting fish and swaying aquatic plants divided the room. He saw that there were crabs, too, crowded at the bottom, their heavy claws knocking helplessly against the transparent wall of their prison. At the room's far end hung what appeared to be a caravan's wooden wheel thickly coated with red lacquer. Directly in front of it was a bronze Buddha—arms raised in celebration—on a platform of thick bamboo rods. The ceiling glowed green and blue; the lights were perched behind upturned paper umbrellas whose frames were visible like X-rayed bones. Regular beats of neon streetlight passed through the bare windows.

As he approached the table, he heard Dickie bark a demand: “Waiter, we need an extra chair.”

With his back to the corner, Dickie had a clear vantage of the room. He spoke loudly: “Farmer, welcome aboard the SS
Shanghai
. We weren't sure you'd find your way. You'll have a chair in a sec. We ordered about half the menu, so there's plenty to go round.”

Customers from other tables looked up. Winston flushed and wondered whether Dickie was already dead drunk. He glanced at his wristwatch.

A boy arrived just as Dickie finished his sentence. Winston imagined a hidden door that the waiters used instead of the narrow staircase.

“Thank you, Dickie.”

“Left Mother to fend for herself, did you?”

“I couldn't be sure she'd enjoy herself.”

“You think we're an acquired taste, do you?”

Winston smiled. Dickie's bantering game could be sabotaged by an unanswered question. “This place is fantastic.” He turned to Johnny.

“Yes, it is, isn't it?” Johnny replied. “And while I'm able to get a word in edgewise.… Winston, you remember Ed, yes? This young man is Frankie, Frankie Jones, he's, er, my nephew.”

“Nice to meet you, Frankie.”

Frankie stood and extended his hand across the table. “Pleased to meet you, sir.” Even in the kaleidoscopic lights, Winston could see that the cheeks of his pale marble face bloomed with a rose flush.

“Frankie here was in the army, so he's used to formality with ‘senior officers.'” Dickie spoke with a master of ceremony's command.

Frankie shared his uncle's nervous caginess, though his crew cut and collegiate sweater made him appear less a wary gangster than a lanky, nail-biting student. Before sitting down, he handed a highball glass to Dickie.

As he glanced at each man, Winston realized that he was surprised and a touch disappointed that they were real. He had come to think of them as remote, having fantastic movie star lives that required constant costume changes and a stream of adventures. Yet here and now Winston could see that Ed's face could use a shave and that Dickie wore the same coat and tie, even though tonight he'd added a white carnation boutonniere. Their days had been running in routines similar to his since the last time they'd all been together. Work, chores, and leisure were constants; the difference was that their big city setting had deluxe venues.

“Would you like a drink? We're drinking Manhattans, so it's that or—blech!—jasmine tea.” Dickie held up an empty glass.

“Is beer not a possibility?” Winston enjoyed the mixture of beer and salt. He and Alberta always shared a large bottle with their chop suey.

“Well, we didn't think to bring anything so proletarian.”

In answer to Winston's perplexed face, Ed and Johnny—with competing Morse code bursts—explained that Chinatown merchants, like the Kwoks who owned Bamboo Terrace, had a longstanding feud with liquor control bureaucrats, and the result was often suspension of liquor licenses.

“They have philosophical differences,” Dickie interjected.

Johnny, speaking on the side of laissez-faire Chinatown, favoured a lenient, pro-American stance (“This backwater province has its dainty little head stuck in the goddamned Prohibition. Everyone's a lot happier down south”), while Ed dizzily asserted that “rules are rules and everyone has to follow them,” and that “rules are made to be bent.”

Ed was good-natured, but not a man who would have said much of value on a high school debating team, Winston decided. The
happy medium
was the restaurant's mezzanine, where customers in the know could bring their own booze. It was a delicate arrangement: the proprietors were aware that Ed was a liquor inspector because his last official visit there had resulted in a letter that informed them of their suspended liquor license; they also counted on his bending the rules—if they looked the other way while the customers (including a provincial liquor inspector) defied an insignificant technicality of the law, then it would be a benefit to them the next time an official inspection passed by their address.

“It's rather Byzantine,” Johnny said with a roll of his eyes. “Next thing you know we'll have some secret knock and handshake as though we belong to the Oddfellows. Temperance, how ridiculous. People should be free to do what they will.” His testiness caused Winston to think he was personally affected by this arrangement. “Next time, Dickie, I say we drink Old Fashioneds. The shoe fits.”

Winston wondered whether he had walked into the middle of a quarrel. While he could easily recall the men's banter, tonight their conversation was stained dark with anger. It was palpable. He'd seen siblings partake in bitter exchanges like this. He didn't feel he was close enough to them to ask who had offended whom.

“Well, then, Dickie, I'll have a Manhattan, thank you.”

As Dickie poured from a thermos he stored near his chair, he said, “We prefer this cocktail wet, so I hope you don't mind your vermouth. And no maraschino cherry. Sorry, I'm not a lowly secretary, you know. At least it's chilled.”

“That's fine, Dickie, you're such a dedicated host.” Unlike Alberta, Winston had never developed a taste for hard liquor. Wet or dry, it was all Greek to him.

“Old-fashioned graft, hey?” Winston looked at Ed.

“Yes, Edwina, do tell. The whole table awaits your opinion,” Dickie added, intensifying Ed's discomfort.

“Graft is a dirty word, criminals greasing the palms of politicians.” He fidgeted with his pinkie ring as he spoke. “I think that ‘Necessity is the mother of invention' has a truer ring to it. It's a better way to look at the situation, at least. There's a need, there's a goal, and there's an obstacle. The need pushes us to get around the obstacle in order to reach the goal so that we can be happier. So there. Practical.”

“Very eloquently put, Ed. An on-the-spot allegory is not something just anyone can muster.” Johnny spoke like an imperious chairman taken aback by a subordinate employee's solid report.