The Book of Stanley (7 page)

 

THIRTEEN

W
hen Tanya Gervais researched and bought the urban assault vehicle, she knew it wouldn't be popular with all of her friends and acquaintances. But Tanya also knew the most unique and maligned automobile on the road today had a lot in common with the woman who sat behind the wheel. Durable and a bit intimidating on the outside, refined and complex inside, and utterly dominant in its sphere.

The Hummer H2 was still relatively new, with less than a thousand kilometres on the odometer. The cabin was still shiny with the unmistakable fragrance of leather and freshly moulded plastic. Ownership had a retroactive effect. She now could not imagine herself driving anything but a bright-yellow Hummer. When Tanya put it in gear, the sound of her black coat squeaking against the leather seat verged on erotic.

At dinner parties, after a few glasses of wine, when the West Coast crunchies felt empowered to blame her consumer preferences for the war in Iraq, farmed salmon, Hollywood movies adapted from comic books, climate change, deforestation and desertification in Africa, that funny taste in the tap water, religious fundamentalism, and Vancouver house prices, she answered the way her Hummer might answer, if only it had the capacity to speak.

You don't like it, move to Cuba.

A lot had changed recently. Though it had taken almost twenty years in the business, the most miserable of them in dread Toronto, Tanya was finally being recognized for her
talent, experience, vision, and commitment. A month after her thirty-eighth birthday, she had become vice-president, marketing and development, for Canada's newest and hottest entertainment and lifestyle brand, Leap.

Leap Television, Leap Satellite, Leap Mobile, Leap Fashion,
Leaptv.com
. There were even plans for a youth-oriented discount airline if one of the current players in the North American market showed signs of an impending bankruptcy. Her cellphone–a Leap product–linked to a new-generation intercom on the Hummer's dash. The ring was her current theme song, “The Woman In Me” by Shania Twain. Tanya was not a fan of her music, or that of any other country-crossover artist, but Shania Twain had fashioned herself into an international brand, with extensions into a number of cultural sub-industries. “The Woman In Me,” every time Tanya heard it, was a reminder that limitations were for the feeble. Crunchies who disparaged Tanya's Hummer were also inclined to dismiss Shania Twain and her
chanteuse doppelgänger
in Las Vegas, Céline Dion. But the crunchies, drunk on inferior wine, were jealous and pathetic. Were
they
beautiful Canadian multimillionaires living in warm climates? Were any of
them
on the
Forbes
list of Top 20 Richest Female Entertainers?

“The Woman In Me” began to play, and Tanya whispered an affirmation to herself as she pressed talk on her cell-phone. She was stopped at a set of lights in the transition zone from East to West Hastings Street downtown, a buffer between one of the richest and one of the poorest neighbourhoods in the country. Rain joined the strong wind that jolted the Hummer. On the sidewalks, the hipsters and the homeless, the sane and the prophetic, battled their umbrellas.

“Gervais.”

“Tanya, my sweet.”

It was her boss, the thirty-six-year-old genius Darryl Lantz. The man who'd shown her it was folly to pretend she didn't find inspiration in Shania Twain and luxury
SUV
s inspired by military transports.

“Darryl, my liege.”

“I'm in the Vancouver office here with a couple of the lawyers. Where are you?”

“East Hastings, in the rain.”

“The welfare cheques came out today. I hope you brought nunchucks.”

“Hi, lawyers,” Tanya said.

They greeted her, through the intercom, formally. It was her thing, to disarm men in expensive suits with a tone of easy confidence. She allowed phrases like “Hi, lawyers” to carry certain messages, like poison on the tips of arrows.
Yes, I am a woman. Yes, I dye my hair blond. Yes, I've had a teensy bit of pre-emptive work done on the eyes and around the mouth. But if you toy with me I will devote all of my vigour to your undoing.

“Tanya, we're working on the British co-pro and we're stuck on a couple of the details here. You have a minute?”

She had to drop off a package of raw digital video footage several blocks away, at the Pacific National Exhibition, and traffic was tight. Her lane was clogged with a garbage truck and a bus turning left, so she flipped on the signal light and began creeping into the right lane. The car behind her, a little Jetta, did not approve.
Haink
, the Jetta said. So Tanya flattened her hand on the Hummer horn, a real horn. A
go fuck yourself
horn. “Always for you, Darryl.” The rain came down even harder, in waves, so Tanya adjusted the wipers as she half listened to Darryl Lantz and prepared for the light
to change. Her plan was to accelerate through the intersection, return to the left lane for the open road, and come back into the right lane in time to miss the pothole repair crew up ahead. The air smelled like tar, one of Tanya's least favourite smells.

The light turned green and the pickup truck in front of her paused momentarily. Again, Tanya honked. She despised slothful, inattentive drivers. Finally, the pickup accelerated and Tanya deked left to get around it. The road opened up. All she had to do was get past the pickup truck and move into the right lane without clipping the smelly pothole crew. Darryl Lantz talked on. But the pickup didn't slow down. The truck kept pace with her so she had to cut back in behind it. She cussed quietly, and the Jetta driver
haink
ed at her again.

Tanya waited to accelerate, just long enough to flip the Jetta driver the bird. She flipped it, hoping the driver could see through the wet windows, and slammed on the brakes as a rectangular slab of concrete, half the size of the Hummer, smashed into the pavement ten feet in front of her. Tanya screeched to a stop not two inches from the slab, which had burrowed into the pavement like the unexploded bombs of Second World War movies. Above the Hummer, the claws of a crane swaying back and forth like the pendulum of a grandfather clock, next to a burgeoning condominium.

“Tanya? Are you there? What was that?”

It had been so loud and so unexpected and so massive and so heavy that Tanya forgot she was on the phone with Darryl Lantz and the lawyers. “Nothing,” she said. “Nothing.” She said this by reflex because
nothing
was supposed to bother the vice-president, marketing and development, of the hottest new entertainment and lifestyle brand in Canada. A crowd of
curious pedestrians gathered in the rain to stare at the slab of concrete. It was aged and uneven, veined with rebar.

“Good.”

Darryl Lantz continued, but Tanya had lost the ability to process what he was saying about the British reality television concept they were trying to import. She could hear him over the increasing buzz around the slab but the words were not properly linked. Already, she could hear sirens. “There's a concern here, Tanya, that tempting husbands to cheat on their wives with former girlfriends will create some rather complex legal challenges. There's a sinister quality to this concept and I love it, love it unreservedly. But Canadians are becoming more litigious, as you know, inspired by their American cousins. We're wondering how your contacts in London got around this.”

There was an answer to this question, of course. Somewhere. The grey of concrete slab that would have killed her if she had not paused to make an obscene gesture at the driver of a Jetta met the grey of the sky and the grey of the Hummer's interior. Was that how death worked? One instant, everything, and the next, nothing? Maybe it was an outlook formed by a career in the entertainment business, but Tanya had always envisioned her life as an epic. The churchy lower-middle-class upbringing, the idiosyncratic education, the ugly relationships, the rise to power. Once she reached a plateau of sorts at Leap, she would adopt a child and hire a nanny from the developing world to care for it. By forty-five, she would take over from Darryl Lantz, or head up a similar company, her own company. In New York. The first magazine profiles and unauthorized biographies would appear as she eased into her fifties.

The randomness and chaos of the world had always seemed a colourful backdrop for the meticulous strategizing of Tanya's adult life. Real estate prices confirmed that the appearance of randomness and chaos were desirable. Tanya wanted to spend her middle years in New York, the capital of randomness and chaos, because her success, the elegance of her success, would look and feel most artful there. But how many concrete slabs were out in the world, in New York and London and Paris, ready to fall on her Hummer?

“Tanya?”

“Yes.”

“Did you hear me?”

Did she hear him?

Darryl Lantz chuckled, but it was clear he didn't find anything funny. “I'll repeat.”

Even though the climate-control mechanism contended it was twenty-two degrees Celsius in the H2, Tanya was freezing. There was a jaggedness, a moist blackness about her. She attempted to connect the feeling to others in her past–influenza? food poisoning? bladder infection?–but all she discovered was a series of nightmares from her childhood. The earth, or a facsimile, covered in ash and dark angles, Tanya standing utterly alone and abandoned in a clearing. When she tries to reach some of this world, to touch or even understand it, the edges stretch out to infinity.

In sessions with her therapist, years ago, she recalled this recurring nightmare. The therapist, Dr. Huston, said it was one of the most common dreams among career-minded people living in the west end of Vancouver and, indeed, in all major cities in the developed world. Tanya had rejected her evolutionary and social impulses to find a mate at a young
age, reproduce, and purchase a minivan. Dr. Huston leaned forward over the linked fingers on his lap. He said something that ended with “the realization that we are alone.”

But Tanya never felt alone. Not
alone
alone, in the way Ebenezer Scrooge was alone. Tanya was unencumbered, free, available, prepared for anything. Anything except the concrete slab that crushes fabulously successful people in the middle of a rainy afternoon on East Hastings Street. Now she repeated his diagnosis aloud, into the receiver of her cellphone. “The realization that we are alone.”

“Tanya?”

“Yes?”

Darryl Lantz did not chuckle. “Tanya, can you hear me? We can hear you. I'm in the office with a couple of the lawyers.”

Workers from the condo development were on the street now, in their hard hats, screaming at one another. Several men and women under open umbrellas spoke into cellphones. More sirens, getting closer. Tanya turned off the phone.

It wasn't aloneness she feared but the instantaneous unravelling of her dreams and desires, her idea of herself, her plans. The unwriting of those magazine profiles and unauthorized biographies. For all the tepid religion in her formative years, she believed only in Tanya Gervais. But when a concrete slab can fall from the sky and crush you in an instant, in a
thonk
of crushed yellow metal and a malfunctioning alarm–
whoop whoop
–why believe in Tanya Gervais? Of all that is available to the believer today, the buffet of men and women and icons, past and present, why her? What did Tanya Gervais mean, anyway? Where was she going? What was she doing?

Tanya tried to do that thing she did on the day her parents kicked her out of the house for smoking marijuana: push it aside, file it away, use it as fuel. But she couldn't put the Hummer in park, let alone open the window for the bearded man in a hard hat and blue overalls, screaming in the rain. “Are you okay?” said the man in the hard hat. “Miss? Missus?”

 

FOURTEEN

T
wo years ago, in her previous position, Tanya Gervais was production manager on a documentary shoot about the health care system in Costa Rica. On a break one day, bored with the heat in downtown San José, she went for a hike in the hills behind her hotel and saw the most beautiful thing in the world: a blue morpho butterfly. The colour of its wings reached through her chest cavity and fluttered there. And for the first time in her adult life, Tanya was moved to tears.

Luckily, there was no one around.

No words in her vocabulary–lustrous, translucent, iridescent–came close to describing that blue. She continued along on her hike, obsessed with discovering why such a colour should exist. What evolutionary advantage? On the airplane back to Vancouver, she wondered how a woman might make money off the blue morpho. Was there a market
in the U.S. for such a thing? No matter how hard she tried, Tanya could not find a way to reduce the butterfly to a commodity, to sell her experience on the well-worn trail behind the hotel in San José.

Now, Tanya attempted to package her near-death experience on East Hastings. Perhaps it was the sort of thing others might relate to, if she were able to reproduce the slab and its psychological value. Its purity. The new quality of her aloneness that the slab illuminated. When the police and fire trucks arrived, the large and gentle men helped her shut off the Hummer, gave her a cup of substandard coffee, put a blanket over her shoulders, and asked her a number of questions about the slab. Tanya could hardly remember what she said, though she did take a photograph of the slab with her phone. The slab had not crushed her, but it had crushed something. A presence had become an absence.

An hour or so later, she delivered the package to the
PNE
without informing the client that she had come, thereby negating the value of making the trip herself instead of calling a courier. After several failed attempts to speak with her on the cellphone, Darryl Lantz finally advised her, in a stern voice-mail message, to go home, get her shit together, and contact him about the British import in the morning.

Tanya parked the Hummer in the garage under her west-end condominium. She marvelled at the separation between the chemical smell of her garage and the peachy freshness of her building's elevator. Normally Tanya worried that a crack addict would break into the garage and vandalize the Hummer, but today she found herself wondering about the infomercial industry. Maybe she could write a slim volume, produce a set of six compact discs, and sell them on late-night television.

In her 1,400-square-foot condominium, she sat on the couch and watched night fall over the mists of English Bay. Tanya checked her messages. Three from Brian. Brian, the chief financial officer of Leap and her current boyfriend. Brian had heard, from Darryl Lantz, that she had been acting strangely.

Tanya took a bath with a notepad, in case any ideas about packaging and branding the slab came to her. To her displeasure, she cried in the bathtub and accomplished nothing. Instead of Shania or Céline or any of her other mentors, Tanya listened to a satellite radio special on Mahler. Though he had been dead since 1911, Gustav Mahler seemed to understand, with absolute precision, the way she felt in the echo of the slab. She put on a black dress and sat at her dining-room table, staring at the notepad. Blue of the blue morpho. Slab of the slab. No ideas came to her, yet the slab did not allow her to concentrate on the British co-production about cheating spouses, or Brian, or anything else related to Canada's newest and hottest entertainment and lifestyle brand.

When Brian knocked, he was twenty minutes late. The flowers, pale-pink peonies and some baby's breath, looked and smelled fresh enough. Brian, a tall man with a deep voice who wore a lot of aftershave from Paris, kissed her on the lips with his eyes closed.

“You look stunning.”

“I know.”

“What happened today?”

“Nothing major.”

In his car, a Lexus, Brian described his day. He so often felt like the only one in the company who truly understood the relationship between revenues, expenditures, and profits. In
the restaurant, Wild Rice on Pender, not far from the strip of East Hastings where the concrete slab had nearly killed her, Brian whispered that maybe, just maybe, Leap would not survive three years without a takeover by a larger media player. Usually, Brian and Tanya exchanged stories and opinions like fencing opponents, each waiting for a millisecond of silence to strike. Both wanted to be in the position of Darryl Lantz one day, visionary and captain of the digital revolution, and in conversation together they often competed for the right of succession. But tonight, Tanya had nothing to counter Brian's contention that Leap was doomed. She cared neither for the future of Leap nor for the bearing of her own career in the entertainment and lifestyle media.

The restaurant was designed, like so many in the city, in the spirit of Asian minimalism–the cherrywood and stainless-steel accents of western opulence. All around them, fellow Vancouverites whispered and laughed in offensively. After two glasses of wine, and an uninterrupted monologue concerning his majesty, Brian leaned forward and placed his hand on hers. Did the appetizers not agree with her stomach?

Their seats for the touring National Ballet production of
Swan Lake
were in the third row, centre right. Tanya had difficulty paying attention until the corps de ballet. The sight of all those beauties in white tutus, their youth and their innocence, their perfection, their immortality in the context of falling slabs of concrete, brought Tanya to tears again. She tried to fight it by biting the insides of her cheeks and performing Kegel exercises. Tanya closed her eyes, to wipe them without ruining her makeup, and pictured herself in Banff. She was leaving in less than twenty-four hours for the television festival. There, she would have meetings with desperate fools she had known far, far too long. Perhaps the fatigue and
frustration, in concert with the high-threadcount sheets on her hotel bed, would cure her.

At the intermission, her eyes a mess of black mud, Tanya rushed to the ladies' room. In front of the mirror, surrounded by rich women and their talk of everything that did not matter, Tanya felt nauseous. So nauseous she threw up in the sink. The women gasped, one screamed, and they all backed away. When Tanya stood upright from the regurgitated grilled rare ahi tuna and kabocha and butternut squash pot-stickers, she looked at her reflection and did not recognize the vice-president, marketing and development, of Canada's newest and hottest entertainment and lifestyle brand.

For the first time in many years, Tanya wanted her mom. But her mom, unlike the ghost of Gustav Mahler on the radio, would not recognize or appreciate her.

Without fixing her eyes or even wiping her face, Tanya walked on to Hamilton Street without her coat. She hailed a cab and, in the back seat, prepared herself for the implications of unemployment. Drugs, institutions, dry hair, chanting, incontinence.

Instead of sleeping that night, Tanya searched the Internet for a possible treatment. But she did not find it. The next morning, she packed her bag for Banff and arrived at the office before 7:00. She stared at the eighty-three new e-mails in bold on her computer screen. Outside, near the floatplane terminals, workers smashed giant support beams into the beach for something about the Winter Olympics. Carol, the executive assistant to Darryl Lantz, phoned at 8:30 to request a 9:00 in his office. Her employees arrived, the shiny young women of marketing and development, with their bleached teeth and black pinstriped suits from Winners.

Winners.

They chattered in their usual manner, joined their teammates in the oval of cubicles, and fell eerily silent. Tanya's phone call with Darryl Lantz and the lawyers had already become office mythology.
The realization that we are alone.
Her senior manager passed the office and peeked in as though Tanya were a zoo animal masturbating.

“How
are
you?”

“Fuck off.”

Her senior manager, who knew she would soon be the next vice-president, marketing and development, tilted her head in mock sympathy. “Lovely. Let me know if I can help with anything?”

At 8:55, Tanya stood up from her desk. She passed Carol and the office of Darryl Lantz and hit the call button for the elevator.