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Authors: Jack Hodgins

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The Master of Happy Endings (27 page)

BOOK: The Master of Happy Endings
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Inside his trailer, Travis pounded a fist into the padded arm of his couch. He had removed the wig, but hadn't changed out of his clothes or removed his makeup. “As soon as he sees what we got he'll make Paolo do it again. They had to take me through my
single line
six or seven times before he used the cameras and still I sounded like a high school drama dork with stage fright! Wrecked the scene for everyone.”

“Well, you didn't ask them to expand your role.”

“They're giving me a chance to show what I can do!” His tone suggested that Thorstad was a fool not to have known this. “One of the other guys was dropped and they picked me to replace him.” He ran a hand back over his hair, once and then again. “There's others waiting for me to fail.”

“You know this?”

“Rosie told me. A guy named Reynolds Green is waiting for me to screw up so they'll, you know, give him a chance.”

“Well.” Thorstad lowered himself onto a chair and laced his hands together and looked for a few minutes at his feet. “I suppose,” he said as gently as he knew how, “this is not the time to consider the causes of the Spanish Civil War.” If this were his son he would move to sit beside him on the cot and offer sympathy, but this was the son of Carl and Audrey Montana who were far away, fixing teeth and buying up farms for townhouses.

“I'm sorry.” Travis closed his eyes. “Everything's, like,
crowding
me. That journalist kept reminding me how important it is to get in his stupid magazine. Sticking his camera in my face. No wonder I screwed up, with
him
watching!”

“But you're done with him now?”

“No such luck.” Travis unbuttoned his fire-damaged shirt, shrugged out of it, and tossed it onto a wall hook. “Elliot told him he could meet us tomorrow at breakfast.” He removed his Seattle airport shirt from a hanger, put it on, and began to button it up. “How much more of me does he fucking need?”

14

Before going on to a meeting farther up the coast, Camilla Evans dropped them off at the restaurant in Paradise Cove with instructions to order a hearty breakfast and put in some serious study before she returned. “I don't want to be blamed if you fail at your job.”

He was already failing at his job. What else could you call it but failure when so little had been accomplished? Last night he'd telephoned Carl to explain what he was up against, but Carl had only suggested he employ his teacher-ingenuity to deal with the situation. “Remember how you outsmarted that music teacher who tried to borrow Selena Thompson whenever her pianist was sick?”

But that young music teacher hadn't possessed Elliot Evans's advantages.

Even the choice of this restaurant may have been a deliberate act of sabotage, when you considered the distractions. The walls were crowded with black-and-white photos of old-time movie stars. Cary Grant. Judy Garland. James Dean. Too many of the customers looked, to Travis, like contemporary movie stars he couldn't quite name. And there was the wide beach beyond the glass—golden sand traversed by scantily clad strollers. The long white pier extended well out over the water on picturesquely spindly legs, its nearer railing a roost for resting gulls.

Travis knew too much about this place. Apparently Barbra Streisand lived nearby. A movie named
Gidget
had been filmed here, a series called
Baywatch
as well. He could not believe that Thorstad had never heard of
Baywatch
.

Ignoring this apparently serious gap in his cultural background, Thorstad pushed his coffee mug aside and opened the textbook next to his seafood omelette. “We agreed we would talk about Shakespeare's tragedies this morning.”

“And that other series was shot here too,” Travis said. “A private investigator—had a sidekick named Angel. What was it called? Used to be my dad's favourite show.” He opened his cell-phone and pointed it at Thorstad. “Axel Thorstad amongst the stars.” He frowned for a few moments at the little screen, then folded the gadget shut. “James Garner was the PI.”

Thorstad did not know the series but he did know that if Travis was not familiar with Shakespearean tragedy both of them would be in trouble. Literature, History, and Geography were the courses most at risk. The Montanas would throw Thorstad's belongings out on the road for the
senior-seniors
who passed in their daily walks. Whatever was left would be shipped to the homeless shelter. Angus Walker would be wearing his socks.

“According to the course outline, your teacher could have chosen
The Tempest
,
Hamlet
, or
King Lear
. But yours chose
Hamlet
?”

Travis flopped back in his chair as though dealt a blow by Shakespeare himself. “
Hamlet
boring
Hamlet
!”

Thorstad had heard this quick dismissal too often. “Most of the world's great actors have played Hamlet. Half the actors in this room have probably tried it, even those with roles in
Baywatch
. What is it about the Danish prince that makes him tempting to every actor in the world but Travis Montana?”

“There isn't room in my brain for this.” Travis closed his eyes as though to make Thorstad disappear. “I should be going over my lines.”

“I'll help you with your lines as soon as we've dealt with the Danish prince. Look, we'll come at it another way.” Thorstad drew a sheet of loose-leaf paper from his bag and sketched an isosceles triangle, then divided it with vertical slashes into five parts. “Look at the shape of his tragedies. Five acts. For half the play things go right, more or less.” Here was something he'd always loved. If there were a chalkboard nearby he would be up on his feet drawing diagrams and explaining things to strangers, famous actors included. The geometry of literature! Eyes were supposed to widen now, the lights were supposed to go on. “For the second half, beyond this peak in the middle, they go steadily downhill, usually because of the hero's actions in the first half. Or inaction in this case.” A pause for the beauty of it all to sink in. “What is it about Hamlet that causes his own destruction in the end?”

Before Travis had time to come up with an answer, the journalist from
Teen TeeVee
slipped into the booth beside Thorstad. “Morning!” he cried, loud enough to turn heads. A knapsack was placed on the seat between them. “I have a volleyball in my car,” he said. “And a photographer. I want you out on the sand. Didn't Evans tell you to wear a swimsuit?”

“He didn't,” Travis said.

“We'll have you take off your shirt, then. And roll up your pants. Let's go! The photographer's waiting outside.”

The publicist was outside as well, frowning at the expanse of sand as though doubting its value as a backdrop. After convincing their waiter that he would return immediately, Thorstad followed Travis in order to register his protest. The journalist would be impervious but a grey-haired woman might understand—might hope to see her own children pass exams.

But when she turned to confront Thorstad he saw in her eyes that she made no sentimental distinction between an old man and an inconvenient post. “Lewis is on a tight schedule. We had no choice. We shouldn't be more than an hour.”

Travis had already started out across the sand, but turned suddenly and jogged back. “Hey, look. I'm sorry. Be patient, eh? I don't have any choice here!” He started walking backwards now, away from Thorstad again.
“Hamlet!”
He raised his arm and pointed a finger. “We'll talk about
Hamlet
later.
To be or not to be—
in Teen TeeVee.
Maybe this is the end.” He turned again, and ran to catch up with his masters.

To Thorstad it was obvious that, for this only child, pleasing some adults was more important than pleasing others. His tutor had been demoted to some inessential post-adult state. Travis had made a choice, which was not to say he wouldn't suffer for it. Some only children of Thorstad's experience would make nervous wrecks of themselves if trying to please one adult meant displeasing another.

Of course he'd been an only child himself, and suffered from it still. If he was not more patient with this situation, it was at least partly because he wanted to avoid disappointing Carl Montana. And what were his chances of pleasing anyone? How could his desire to
teach
compete with Travis's drive to
act
, or Elliot Evans's determination to complete his episode within budget? Or, for that matter, the journalist's need to get a good story for his magazine? As though to drive home the point, by the time he had paid for their unfinished breakfasts and gone out to the small sandstrewn terrace, Rosie had also appeared. Was he to compete with her as well?

She was not alone. A dark-haired youth in knee-length shorts and red muscle shirt stood frowning beside her—impatient perhaps, or painfully self-conscious, or so intensely aware of his own good looks that he believed others were compelled to admire him. Apparently, to be this handsome was a serious burden.

The girl smiled at Thorstad in a manner that suggested she was pleased to think a sly trick had been played on him. Or perhaps she thought he was admiring her mostly naked figure. In fact he was thinking how emaciated she appeared in that tiny green swimsuit. Perhaps she had chosen this look to distinguish herself not only from the curvaceous bodies of Hollywood but from the anorexic starlets as well, outdoing all of them to the point of giving herself the perverse appeal of a child prostitute on the streets of a war-torn city.

“It is probably a good sign, my darling, that you notice such things even now—but really, to find something even a little attractive in a starving refugee is almost embarrassing, though I suppose we should be glad you're still alive enough to admire the female figure, but I think pity might be the more appropriate response in this case, a desire to send her away with money for a restaurant meal, except she would probably stuff herself full of the richest food on the menu and then throw it all up in the toilet, which is probably how your friend the photographer ought to be shooting her—so I think you should report the child to some agency that might investigate those bruises, or demand of that executive producer that he forbid his two young actors from seeing one another off the set, it will only lead to serious trouble for them both, and of course for you as well.”

Determined not to react to Elena's voice this time, Thorstad chose a deck chair on the concrete pad between restaurant and sand, to keep a distanced eye on the photo shoot. Also, perhaps, to fight the temptation to indulge in self-pity. Was this sense of frustration and failure unique to him, he wondered, or was it something that came to everyone with retirement and age? Perhaps it occurred only to those who had tried to put themselves back into the world. Well, he couldn't afford to give in. He had better pull himself together and make an effort—put up a fight, if necessary.

No driftwood lay on this sand, no seaweed that he could see, no plastic bottles or wooden crates washed in by the tide. Armies of city employees must have come out at dawn to gather everything up and dispose of it somewhere else. This tidy stretch of sand should be photographed for those on Estevan who'd mocked an old man for rescuing tennis balls and wicker doll carriages from the beach.

The ocean breeze was pleasant but not so warm that he was about to take off his lightweight Thrift Shop jacket. Since he had been rendered irrelevant here, he might as well make use of the time to construct a more convincing lesson on
Hamlet
. Wasn't it widely believed that the young had little trouble identifying with the Dane? It seemed that Travis was not amongst them. But while digging around in his bag in search of the paperback Shakespeare, he came upon yet another of the letters that had arrived as they'd been leaving for the plane. Elena would have been appalled that he hadn't opened it. Good manners dictated that at least you have a look. And you couldn't know for sure that the solution to your life was not inside.

This time the return address was a street only a few kilometres from where he'd lived for most of his life. A former colleague, perhaps. Not, he hoped, a former student requesting a reference letter after all this time.

Dear Mr. Thorstad,
     
I got in touch with the postmistress on Estevan Island to make
sure you were still living up there. She assumed I was responding
to an advertisement in the newspaper and was reluctant to talk
to me at all until I explained that I was a student of yours many
years ago and wanted simply to say “hello.”

The name scribbled at the bottom was “Carter Stone.” Carter had been in one of his very first classes and worked on the school newspaper, an intelligent boy but shy. His romance with Rona Quimby had caused parents to worry and Miss Mavis Hinds to demand he do something to stop it.

I was in your English class the year you took us on a field trip
to the Horne Lake Caves for something to write about and then
got into trouble because you'd neglected to warn the School Board
ahead of time—an uncharacteristic oversight for you. A friend
of mine worked for a while on that little ferry that goes back and
forth between Vancouver Island and Estevan every day, and he
told me you were living over there now. Apparently you aren't
there any more, so I hope Canada Post still forwards things like
they used to.

You may remember that you were the one who suggested I
ask Rona Quimby to the school Christmas dance, assuring me
you'd somehow found out she would not say No. While you and
your wife were not able to attend our wedding, you may remember
my approaching you long afterwards—in a department store
I think it was—to tell you it was our fifteenth anniversary and
to thank you again for giving me that little push. Ours was a
very happy partnership, and she has left me with two wonderful
children (both of them adults now, of course) who are a great
consolation in my grief.

BOOK: The Master of Happy Endings
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