The Master of Happy Endings (30 page)

It was Travis's “help me even though I can't be helped” look he had recognized. He'd seen it countless times in students. But here, cast out from the sound stage—banned from the false derelict buildings, the lair of the homeless, the scene of police harassment—it wasn't only Travis he found himself thinking of, or even Evans's casual accusation. Now that he had been left on the pavement with a bitter cup of coffee in his hand, he was thinking too of the people he'd seen sleeping under bushes and down along the water's edge. He was thinking of Angus Walker.

Help me even though I won't accept your help.

That day at the drop-in centre was not the first time Walker had reappeared in his life. Many students returned to the high school, some with problems to share, others with accomplishments to report. A knock at the staff-room door—one more student you hadn't seen for years had come back to say hello.

This was probably early June, the summer break just a few weeks away. Walker stood in the hall, his arms too long for his jacket. He'd come to tell his former English teacher that he'd graduated from university with a degree in education, but not, it turned out, in order to be congratulated. Walker—a young man now—was clearly upset. “Can I talk to you, sir? In private?”

It seemed that he had not only graduated but had been hired by a school board for September and was terrified at the prospect of facing a class of his own. That a new teacher was terrified seemed natural enough to Axel Thorstad, but this was the first time anyone had come back to confess it. Thorstad put a hand on Angus's elbow and walked him down the hallway to his classroom, where he asked the chess club to leave. If he'd been a university professor or a department store manager he'd have had an office for conducting private conversations, but as a high school teacher he'd had only his classroom with its dusty chalkboards and pale green plywood walls. When Thorstad wasn't teaching in it, the room belonged to the chess club on Mondays, the newspaper club on Tuesdays, the future teachers club on Wednesdays, the comic book club on Thursdays, and the grad planning group on Fridays. Chess club members had grumbled when they were asked to leave, but agreed to stand outside the door until they could return to their games. “Can we trust you not to touch?”

“You made it look so easy,” Angus said. He sat on the slanted top of a front desk while Thorstad perched on a corner of his own. “All I had to do, I thought, was to act as enthusiastic about my subject as a ten-year-old explaining the features of his new bicycle. All I had to do was act as though I loved the students like a father, counselled them like an older brother, and disciplined them like a disappointed mother. You see, I paid attention. I watched you—how you did it.”

Thorstad tried not to betray his shock. “You thought I was putting on an act?”

Angus was preoccupied with what he'd planned. “But it wasn't so easy after all. I tried hard through five years of university— weekly practice sessions in someone else's class. I was given barely passing grades but was encouraged to try harder. So I did. Every year.” For his final “long practicum,” however, the sponsoring teacher had given him a failing grade. “To save me from a barely-good-enough future, she said. She said that barely good enough may be fine for some jobs but isn't good enough for a teacher. But the university ignored her grade and I graduated with a degree that's useless for anything else. What could I do but apply for a job, hoping I wouldn't get one?”

Now he had the job and didn't know how he could face it.

How had Axel Thorstad responded to this? He could not remember now if he had given advice. To put the five years of education down to experience and start again with another career in mind? To speak to a lawyer about suing the Faculty of Education for misleading encouragement? He could hardly write out a script for Angus to memorize in order to survive his first week.

There may have been nothing he could say, beyond expressing the hope that an experienced colleague next door would take him under his wing, that a beauty down the hall would inspire him with her eccentric example, that the failure of another teacher on staff might prove the job was impossible if you didn't respect and truly care about the students you were supposed to serve. There was no way of knowing, now, what advice he'd given then. He'd probably suggested that Angus would learn how to teach by teaching, like everyone else. Whatever he'd said, their recent encounter at the homeless shelter suggested it hadn't been enough.

Should he feel guilt for being a model that someone else believed could be duplicated with sheer willpower? Angus Walker had arrived in his classroom when Thorstad had had two decades of experience behind him, but this was probably not enough to know how to save the life of a frightened young man who'd been sadly misled. Perhaps Walker in his first year had had no Oonagh Farrell down the hall or Topolski next door to help him get started, no Barry Foster as a cautionary tale. Now, according to the dishwasher at the drop-in centre, Angus Walker had a reputation for making life hell for anyone who tried to help him.

One Angus was enough to have on your conscience—though of course there could be others he didn't know about. He supposed he'd never thought of this before. He wished he hadn't thought of it now. Whatever else might happen while he was here in Los Angeles, he could not allow himself to add another failure to the list.

16

The silver-blue convertible was waiting for him outside the gate but Oonagh was not alone in it. When Thorstad approached, a young man with sun-bleached hair and a toothy smile leapt out and held the door open for him. “Corbin is off to beg and plead with his agent today,” Oonagh said. Corbin blew a kiss to Oonagh and lightly squeezed Thorstad's elbow, then turned on his heel to set off briskly up the sidewalk.

“I didn't keep you waiting?” Thorstad closed his door and buckled his seat belt. “Our courier friend cornered me just now, wanting to know if there were any books about hurricanes in my bag!”

Oonagh looked up to the pale blank sky. “He's expecting a
hurricane
?”

“He's been hearing news from home. New Orleans.” It was necessary to sit at an angle in order to avoid propping his knees against the dashboard. “Crime everywhere, orphan babies playing in mud, his brother's house still without a roof. He wants to understand what made this mess.”

She dropped her forehead to the top of the steering wheel. “And he thought your books would help?”

Thorstad admitted he'd had to disappoint. “A geography textbook won't explain what happened to his family. I suggested he visit a library, dig up newspapers and newsmagazines. He agreed, but still intends to corner me in his coffee breaks.”

She recovered from her mock despair and placed the palm of her hand against his cheek. Involuntarily he caught the hand in his and kissed a fingertip. “I'm a lucky man today.”

She laughed, and took back her hand, and steered them too quickly out into the impatient city traffic. “I should have guessed you'd still be teaching. I'd be in a loony bin by now if I hadn't quit.”

“But you were a brilliant teacher.” The students had loved her—adored her perhaps. Girls imitated, boys were beguiled. Those colleagues who weren't afraid of her were enchanted. He was himself bewitched—and hadn't, it seemed, entirely recovered. The long line of her thigh was enough to remind him of this. And her pale green eyes.

She laughed, and shifted into the left lane to pass a dawdling Buick. “I was a good entertainer, which may look like good teaching but isn't quite. I needed a different sort of audience, and grew tired of writing my own scripts—lesson plans! Are teachers still forced to make
lesson plans
?” Now, abruptly, they were in the right lane again, too close behind a black Volvo. “I thought we'd visit the Huntington Library after lunch.” She turned onto another, narrower, but just as busy street. “If you're still a little loopy about English Literature, that is. The Ellesmere manuscript is there behind glass.”

He should have welcomed the prospect of seeing the Chaucer manuscript, but he suspected that any pleasure in it would be undermined by his sense of being in the wrong place. He was beginning to feel it already. The buzz of anticipation in his limbs did not override this. Travis was scheduled to be working all afternoon, but things could change—a scene could be postponed. He imagined Rosie talking him into an afternoon of kayaking, experimenting with cocaine. He saw the kayak overturn and Travis disappear. How did parents stay sane?

Wind stirred up his hair. Not all convertibles were made for people his height. Topolski had had a convertible, he remembered—smaller than this. A playboy's sort of exotic car. Of course this Mercedes could belong to both Oonagh and Topolski if Topolski was still in the picture. But if Topolski was still in the picture, why she hadn't told him yesterday?

Her house was a white two-storey flat-roofed box in Venice Beach, not six feet from a neighbouring house on either side and apparently no wider than the one-car garage they drove into. He was finding it a little hard to breathe—anxiety or hope, he wasn't sure which. An unfamiliar shakiness had invaded. He followed her down a walkway on unsteady legs and in through a side door partially obscured by a cluster of tall bamboo. Inside, they were in an all-purpose room—to one side a small kitchen with white walls and wood-panel cupboards, to the other a lounge area that looked out through a wall of glass upon a small herb garden and a narrow canal with a red canoe roped to the concrete wall.

“No gondolas,” Oonagh said. She tossed her wide-brimmed hat onto a chair and went behind the counter that divided the room. “It's small, but it's mine. I have an old farmhouse outside Toronto where I still do the occasional bit of stage work.
Another
Life
is what you might call my pension.” She held up a tall amber bottle. “Too early?”

“A coffee maybe.”

“Coffee later. I need to check my messages. I'm waiting for something.”

She carried her half-filled glass towards an open doorway but paused when a young man with wet hair and a freshly scrubbed look to his handsome face came bouncing happily down the narrow staircase from above. “You're up already?” she called, obviously sarcastic. “It's only noon!” When he'd reached the bottom of the stairs, she turned back to introduce him. “Skyler Shreve.” He wore baggy surfer shorts and a bright red muscle shirt, and flip-flops on his large hairy feet. “He's camping here till he finds a place of his own.”

“Just another bloody actor,” the young man said, tilting his head apologetically. “Currently looking for work.”

“Fresh from the Alberta oil patch,” Oonagh called from another room. “God help us all!”

“I'm on my way!” shouted Skyler Shreve.

Through the glass wall Thorstad watched him set off alongside the canal, perhaps, like the other young man, to beg and plead with his agent.

She hadn't tidied up for company. Books lay open on the floor. Blouses and slacks had been draped over the counter stools. Unwashed dishes were stacked beside the sink. Thorstad could have predicted this—she had never had the time or patience for housework.

But no man's shoes had been kicked off inside the door. No shirts hung from a doorknob. Obviously Skyler Shreve was tidier than Oonagh, and Topolski was either meticulous about his own belongings still or did not share this house.

“So there really are canals in Venice Beach,” he said, when Oonagh returned to the room. He'd never thought of this before. “You may have noticed how often men in novels go off to Venice and die. Professor Aschenbach was only one of many. In one, an elderly professor returns to his childhood home in Venice and gradually turns back into a wooden puppet—guess who!” It seemed he had got himself into something he didn't know how to get out of. He was more nervous than he'd anticipated. “Even Turgenev. I remember saying ‘Oh no!' out loud when this fellow travelling south from Russia makes a sudden detour to visit Venice. He'd coughed—just once—early in the novel, and no one ever coughs in a novel unless . . . Long before he sees the Rialto Bridge you know the poor man's doomed.”

Oonagh was barely suppressing her laughter. “If you're trying to tell me you're afraid of my cooking, relax. I've made a reservation—walking distance from here.” She placed her emptied glass on the counter.

He couldn't seem to stop what he'd started. “It was a woman in the Henry James. A man, I think, in the Unsworth. I don't
think
anyone died in the McEwan but I seem to remember someone going crazy.”

Now, grinning widely, she stepped close and gently took hold of his shirt front with both hands. “But my darling Axel, this is Venice
California
where no one ever dies. Not even if they cough! They find a yoga teacher and live forever.” She stepped back. “There!” She'd undone his top shirt button. “Now we can breathe!”

She may have had little interest in housework but she had always showed interest in how others dressed. She dressed, herself, in clothes that were carefully chosen, flattering to her figure, immaculately clean and pressed. Today she'd draped a dark blue filmy scarf over her shoulders, its patterned ends lying down the front of a light blue linen top. Blue pointed shoes peeked out from below her white slacks. She had worn expensive shoes even then, had owned too many. They had teased her about this— would she go without food in order to spend her salary on shoes? He could imagine, now, that her closet overflowed with them.

A collection of vaguely human carvings had been arranged along a shelf inside the wall of glass. They were each about six inches tall, their outlines appearing to follow the natural grain of the wood, so that rather than attempting to imitate some standard human form they appeared to be solid representations of human attitudes. Horror, delight, and the shrinking violet were easily recognized. Hilarity as well, and despair.