The Book of Stanley (18 page)

 

FORTY-ONE

T
he television festival was over, but a number of Tanya's colleagues habitually stayed in Banff for an extra week. Officially, the development executives lingered to meet with industry professionals and spirited rookies in a less hectic atmosphere. Unofficially, it was an opportunity to drink excessively and commit a final round of adultery before flying back home to dirty diapers and unmowed lawns.

Tanya arrived at the Banff Springs Hotel wine bar on the evening before Stanley's coming-out party. The executives had shed their suits in favour of garden apparel–tan slacks and white shirts, spring dresses, unnecessary sunglasses. Eight men and six women sat at a couple of long tables pushed together, two bottles of Beaujolais and an Okanagan white before them.

It was the exquisite hour between day and night. The sun had just dipped below the peaks, so the valley was drowned in dreamy pink light. Judging by the gentle slurs in their voices as they welcomed her, Tanya's colleagues had retired to the bar before dinner. And then dinner had failed to happen.

The very important, very attractive people had already flown back to Los Angeles, leaving only Canadians and Australians and Brits–cynical protectors of their national identities. Tanya sat in a chair near the oak-framed window, under a chandelier. She recognized immediately the violent mixture of self-loathing and defensive pride that bubbled up
in Canadians, Australians, and Brits at the Banff World Television Festival in the days after the Americans departed.

We'd never make that shit. Oh, to have an audience.

Of course, her colleagues had questions. There were rumours that Tanya had resigned from Leap: who had head-hunted her? A
BBC
producer named Johnson Quayle who was blind in his left eye and, she had been disappointed to learn on a drunken evening three years previous, functionally impotent, had heard she was moving to London to work for
MTV
Europe.

Tanya answered the question by distributing the hand-bills she had so carefully designed, advertising the event as “A Night of Mystery and Grand Amazement.” She had also brought five copies of The Testament, an eleven-page booklet of The Stan's tenets and principles. It was a hasty compromise, at this point, between her and Alok's interpretation of Stanley Moss and how best to attract six billion people to him. “This is the future, my friends.”

Johnson Quayle glanced at the handbill and led the questions. “A magician?”

“No.” Tanya sighed. Why were people so damn literal? Even smart people? “No, I'm talking miracle, here. This man has genuine powers.”

“Superpowers?”

She poured herself a glass of the Beaujolais, since none of her former colleagues was sober or polite enough to do it for her. “The word
miracle
has been hijacked by comic books and glorified jugglers, hasn't it? I'm talking about an old-time religious miracle that will initiate a new age of spirituality.”

“You're New Age now?” A woman from across the table, heavily involved in the Toronto International Film Festival,
removed her sunglasses. Tanya could not think of her name. Her blond, curly hair seemed blonder and curlier than it had last year.

“This isn't a bunch of crystal-rubbing and drum-beating. It's authentic.”

Johnson Quayle put his hand on Tanya's and squeezed. This news seemed to have aroused him. “A cult.”

Tanya was glad she had come to the wine bar. It was an insight into the marketing and communications challenge that lay before her. Tomorrow night's event had come together so quickly that she wasn't quite prepared for its dangers. Tanya had to take control of the context straight away. Otherwise, her colleagues in the media–slaves to simple, mechanical thinking, she now understood–would have the power to interpret The Stan. Tanya decided not to finish her glass of Beaujolais. She would be up all night, preparing for tomorrow.

“It's not a cult. You have to forget everything you know and leave your skepticism in the lobby. You must be open to the transcendent, to the extraordinary.”

After she delivered these lines, which sounded like lines even to her, the wine bar was silent except for Glenn Gould's
Goldberg Variations
, the soundtrack for every overpriced hotel wine bar in the world. Then, beginning with Johnson Quayle, her colleagues laughed.

For a moment, she missed the routine of her former life. Johnson Quayle had seen a dentist since the last time they'd met, and his teeth were remarkably straight and white. Despite his performance, or lack thereof, in days gone by, Tanya figured that if she had not decided to leave this world behind, she would be in the throes of a short-term affair with Johnson Quayle.

She felt sorry for the development executives of Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom. They would never find what she had found, among the half-talents of their indigenous film and television industries. Soon, they would not look nearly so shiny in garden attire and unnecessary sunglasses. The tanning-bed tans and dental surgeries and eyelifts and bottles of wine would fail them, and the executives would be replaced by younger and perhaps even deader versions of themselves.

“Please come tomorrow night,” she said. “It's an experience you'll never forget. In fact, if I were you, I'd order cameras and reporters to arrive here as soon as possible. If you don't get your own footage of this, you'll be paying for it.”

Cynicism erupted like a puff of smoke from a tired volcano. Johnson Quayle couldn't quite convince himself that Tanya Gervais actually believed in something other than money and advancement. “What's this really about, cookie? You can tell us.”

Tanya took one final sip of her wine, just to wet her lips and remember. “All I can tell you is I've seen something unusual and amazing here in Banff, and if you'll join us tomorrow night you'll see it too.”

As she walked around the table and out of the little wine bar, Tanya knew she had hooked her colleagues. They would arrive as a group tomorrow night, tipsy, making sarcastic comments all the way up to the Banff Centre. But like everyone else in the theatre, they would secretly hope she was telling the truth.

 

FORTY-TWO

A
giant bouquet sat in the corner of the green room, next to a five-page outline of the evening's activities and unsolicited “speaking points” from Tanya. Stanley could not name the flowers in the bouquet, so he attempted to classify them according to scent. The yellow ones were the sweetest, while the white flowers had a hint of spice to them. Five red flowers–he guessed roses–made him feel sad. Two or three of them, as far as he could tell, had no smell at all.

Stanley had forgotten the names of flowers but he had not forgotten this feeling. The empty ache in his chest, cold hands, fear of loneliness. Once, long ago, Stanley had entered into an affair with a customer. The woman was not discreet, and when Stanley realized it was a mistake and tried to end it she wrote a horrifyingly descriptive letter to Frieda. They separated for eight months, during which time Stanley felt
this
, and yearned for the only substance that erased it–equal parts blended Scotch and water.

The speaking points reminded Stanley of late-night television advertisements for self-actualization techniques. Instead of memorizing them, he stared at himself in the mirror and inspected his wrinkles. Muffled by the concrete walls, the symphonic music reminded him of the prelude to magic shows at the Calgary Stampede. He stared at the flowers and willed them to reveal themselves. When they refused, taunting him with their namelessness, he tossed them in the garbage. Then he regretted it and pulled them
back out. The vase was broken so he propped the flowers, one by one, on the back of a chair against the wall. There was a knock on the door and Frieda entered the green room.

“The theatre is full.” She removed her jacket and hung it on the back of the door, revealing a pair of blue slacks and a white shirt. Stanley tried to commit this image of her to memory, as she leaned against the dressing-room table. Though he could not read his wife's thoughts, Stanley knew why she was here and how this would end.

Frieda examined the outline and speaking points, and shook her head. Her voice was fragile. “They want you to cure five or six cancers? Cause a mini-thunderstorm?”

“They provided suggestions.”

“Have you tried creating a thunderstorm?”

Stanley wanted to say something cheery, even ironic, to bind them against Tanya and the rigidity of her marketing and communications plan. But he had already made his choice in this, and so had Frieda. It threatened to exhaust them, as husband and wife. All he could come up with was, “I don't think I can do it.”

“I don't think I can do it either, Stanley.”

He sat in a black leather chair in the corner of the room, and placed his fingertips on his temples. In the 1970s, Stanley had suffered from migraines, and this was the only remedy he knew. He wanted to direct their conversation away from what they had already discussed, endlessly, in their hotel room and on long, searching walks along the river. “I talked to some ghost-people, or something.”

“Lovely.” Frieda sat on the arm of the black chair and ran her fingernails lightly along Stanley's scalp, something he loved. “It can't be that easy, can it? Create a thunderstorm? It seems to me spiritual truth, if there is such a thing,
takes time. Study. Even militancy. You can't just…I know
I
can't just…”

Stanley said what he had to say. “I need you.”

“No, you don't. You did once and someday you might again. I hope you do, desperately.”

“Frieda, don't do this.”

She turned away from him.

“Frieda, please.”

“I'm already packed. The car is full of gas.”

“Wait one more day.”

She smiled. “You don't want me to wait another day, or even another hour. If you're convinced this is what you want to do, I'll only be a nuisance to you.”

“You'll never be a nuisance, Frieda. I–”

“I want my retired florist back.”

“He was dying.”

Her sob was almost imperceptible. “At least he was mine, and I knew him.” She took her jacket off the hook and slipped into it. Then Stanley stood up and they kissed, awkwardly, and held one another. The sound of their clothes rustling together was uncommonly loud to him. With all his focus, Stanley tried to change her mind. Into his neck, she said, “When this disease leaves you, come back to me.”

“Just tonight. Let me show you what I can do.”

“I don't have to watch you do something special. I don't need to see anything to know something spectacular attends you. I've known that for forty years.”

“The ghost-people today. They said I'm a demon.”

“There are no demons, Stanley, or ghost-people, or gods. Men don't jump off the sides of mountains and survive. Cancer is incurable, and thunderstorms are caused by unstable air masses, not preachers in grey suits.” Frieda rubbed
the moisture from her eyes and buttoned her jacket. “I love you.” Frieda walked out of the green room and closed the door very softly behind her.

 

FORTY-THREE

T
he Calgary lawyer had sent documents to the bank, and the bank had agreed to give Kal an advance on his coming settlement with the insurance company. The insurance company had been keen to dispense with the Far East Square matter quickly, and the lawyer had advised that a more lucrative settlement would take five years or longer.

Kal thought it would make him happy, but it confused him, if anything, to have more than a thousand dollars in his chequing account. He walked out of the bank and leaned against a tree in a mini-park surrounded by new construction, and stared at the small vinyl book where his new account balance had been typed by a computer. Mountain peaks were obscured by low afternoon cloud, and the air was still.

On his way to the Chalet Du Bois, to pick up Maha, Kal made two stops. At the Hudson's Bay Company, he bought a black Italian suit. The woman behind the counter clipped up his cuffs, in lieu of tailoring, so he could wear it that evening. The man at the flower shop was bored so he spent far too long arranging a bouquet for Kal that was “bound to make any woman fall at your feet in bliss.”

He passed a mirror in the display window of a jewellery store and barely recognized himself. If not for the yellowing bruises on his face, Kal would have been an entirely respectable young man. He thanked Stanley aloud for his good fortune and a passing couple laughed at him.

Maha was not ready to go when he knocked at her door, so Kal leaned against the wood-grain wallpaper in the hotel hallway. A bit of his blood had stained the lightest corners of patterned carpet outside Maha's room. He could hear her hair dryer inside.

The flowers he held were wrapped in shiny brown paper. Kal picked at the tape and opened the top flap so he could admire and smell them. How had these flowers come to be here in this mountain town, where so few of them could grow? Why did flowers exist, and how had they come to represent love? Like architecture, locomotion, the postal system, and the design of the universe, the complexity and the business of flowers left him spellbound.

Maha opened the door. Kal tried to say good evening to Maha and close the unwieldy paper flap. Neither worked out. He knuckled the head off a gerbera daisy and said, “Piss,” as it fell to the carpet not far from his bloodstain.

Maha picked up the stemless daisy. She wore a short white dress, somewhat nurse-like, with a belt around the waist. When she stood up again, with the daisy, she pulled the dress down. “Too racy, you think?”

Kal had a commanding desire to drop to his knees and kiss Maha's legs and pronounce her the prettiest girl in Banff. “Not at all,” he said, and passed the now-closed bouquet to her.

“Please, come in.”

Maha's perfume filled her suite. Inside, she peeled the paper
away and gasped at the flowers. “Sorry about knocking that one's head off,” Kal said. “And cussing. I'm working on it.”

“You were a hockey player for a long time.”

“‘Piss' is a nice one, when you stack it up against the others.”

Maha sniffed the flowers. “No one's ever bought me a bouquet.”

“That seems wrong.”

“What should I do with them?”

Kal went through the glasses in the room, but they were all too short. He poured out a small bottle of mini-bar white wine and filled it with water. Maha stuffed the flowers inside and arranged them.

Then, for a long time, they stood in a crackling silence. Kal felt a wave of gas coming on and fought hard to keep it bottled up. He failed, however, and coughed to mask the sound of its release.

“You have a cold?”

“No. I swallowed something wrong.”

“You ate already?”

“No. It was gum.”

“Why did you swallow your gum?”

Kal didn't like where this line of questioning was headed, so he picked up Maha's copy of The Testament. It was only eleven pages long because Tanya had argued that no one could read anything longer than eleven pages these days, ruined as humans were by visual media. When this thing caught on, they would hire a professional writer and expand–put in some pictures. The disciples had “worked together” on The Testament over the past couple of days, but none of Kal's suggestions had made it to the final draft. “I read this last night,” he said.

“Me too.”

“Don't you think they should have used words like ‘thou' and ‘thine' and whatnot to make it sound more Bible-y?”

“Absolutely not. That would have been a huge mistake.”

“Yeah,” said Kal. “A totally huge mistake.”

It had been surprisingly easy to ask Maha out for a pre-show dinner. The beating by Gamal had conferred a sort of respectability upon him. When they were writing The Testament with the others, in Tanya's hotel room and at the Rose & Crown, Maha had been the least likely to ignore his suggestions. She had seemed genuinely impressed by his piano-playing.

So far, there was a cloak of innocence over their relationship. As a professional hockey player, he had learned a thing or two about the ladies. Whenever a woman had wanted to leave the nightclub, in Providence or Hamilton, and go have sex in the hotel room he always shared with Gordon Yang, Kal had known it. Maha wasn't dishing any of those signals, yet.

Over dinner at Magpie & Stump, Kal outlined his hockey career. As he told Maha about hockey, which was all he had really known since he was six years old, it began to sound to Kal as if he were talking about someone else. Some other Kal McIntyre from Thunder Bay, Ontario. Maha listened carefully and asked questions, especially about Layla.

“She was an amazing accident,” said Kal.

“Do you get to see her much?”

“Almost never. She's hardly mine any more. Hopefully when she's a teenager and can make her own decisions, she'll want to see me. I figure I'll pay for her tuition, start a trust account with this insurance money. Don't know if I can afford living expenses, though. What if she wants
to go to school in Toronto or Vancouver or something?”

Maha smiled and they had another one of those silences. They thought separate thoughts, obviously about each other, and the mystery of Maha was so uncontaminated Kal wanted to ask if she would like to buy a plot of land with him in Saskatchewan and become soybean farmers.

They walked up Caribou Street and Kal purposely hit her arm with his, to warm Maha up for some possible hand-holding. She told him about growing up Muslim, which sounded quite enthralling to Kal, much more exotic than growing up Catholic.

“So did you ever know any
crazy
Muslims? With the jihad and everything?”

By the look on Maha's face, Kal knew these were not intelligent questions to ask. Hand-holding, suddenly, seemed a remote possibility. They passed a large house with an historical plaque in front. Kal wished they were walking up Tunnel Mountain, so he too could jump off. “I'm sorry,” he said.

Maha led them up a set of wooden stairs leading to the Banff Centre. They passed a visual arts studio, where two women in paint-splattered smocks smoked cigarettes on the deck. Kal was too chastened to say anything else, even about a subject as unrelated to suicide bombings as smocks. Where did people buy smocks, anyway? Then, as they approached the glass facade of the Eric Harvie Theatre, Kal went over the stupid questions he had asked Maha and decided they really weren't so bad. It wasn't easy to be a Muslim, sure, but it wasn't easy to understand Muslims, either. He wasn't in charge of putting things on the news. As they entered the red lobby by separate doors, Kal chose not to let defensiveness overtake him.

“Can I take your coat, mademoiselle?” he said.

Though it was obvious that Maha was still troubled by the jihad business, she granted him that pleasure and they walked among the audience, many of whom were dressed very casually, in fleece jackets and pants with many pockets. In his new suit, Kal was careful to say “Excuse me” and to thank the staff excessively.

Their seats for “A Night of Mystery and Grand Amazement” were in the back. Since Kal and Maha weren't involved in the production, their job was to watch and listen to the audience–take notes. They sat down and pulled out their dollar-store notepads. Fleece jackets and pants with many pockets, a sense of puzzlement, a variety of European and Asian languages, few children, more than half senior citizens. The music was at a decent volume and, to Kal, seemed mysterious and grandly amazing. While they waited for the curtain to rise on their religion, Kal sent silent messages to Maha.

I'm your man. I'm your guy. Not as stupid as I sometimes seem.