When Is a Man (25 page)

He sat on the carpet with Shane, surrounded by train tracks and scattered engines and freight cars. Gina stayed in the kitchen. He smelled chicken stock with arborio and wild rice mixed in and heard the warm sound of a wooden spoon rubbing along the inside edge of a pot.

“How can I help?” he asked the boy.

Shane slid him a section of track without making eye contact. “Put that over there.” With short, not unfriendly commands he directed the layout of the tracks, and Paul contented himself with being his lackey.

If you sat on the floor beside a kid long enough, you could almost regain a child's perspective. The plastic and metal trains became lifelike against the carpet's pattern, the leg of a chair a transmission tower or grain silo, or whatever you wanted it to be. For most of his life, Paul had never understood the hobbyist's fascination with scale. Any serious model—ship, car, plane, glider, or trains—had to be made according to perfect ratio. Why couldn't it just
look
like a boat? Then three summers ago, when he'd been in Victoria for a conference, he'd taken a walk on Dallas Road in the evening, on a paved path above an embankment that overlooked the ocean. A popular spot, full of cruise ship tourists, joggers, and dog owners. On the path above a small, protected beach, a man stood with a remote control device in his hands. He looked out over the bay, oblivious to the terriers and boxers that sniffed at his ankles before dashing back to their masters. At first, the man simply looked lost. There was no whining buzz of a model engine, nothing in the air. Then Paul realized that what he had mistaken for a gull hovering silently was a white model glider. The man would send it out over the ocean, cut the engine, and let the air currents bring it toward land. Left on its own, the glider performed loops and turns, but before it could spin completely out of control the man would fire the propeller and correct its path. Then he would cut the motor again. There was something elegant about his timing.

Paul had walked farther down the line of shrubs until he could no longer see the man, only the model as it circled above him. Long minutes passed before he realized he was doing a childlike thing: he was accepting the illusion, seeing the model as life-sized, the landscape transformed—the scotch broom and roses a forest canopy, the banks heightened into majestic cliffs. He became diminished, vanishing into the scene. It had felt strangely liberating.

As Shane fit together pieces of the track, Paul bunched up part of a blanket that lay on the floor and nudged an empty shoebox near the tracks. “What are you going to use for the river?”

“The river?” Shane looked around.

“The one that connects the two lakes.”

“That'll be over there.” Shane dug through a duffle bag and pulled out a pair of blue underwear. He flattened them on the carpet near the tracks. Then he gathered up all his socks and lined them up across the living room floor.

“Should we make the tracks in a loop?” asked Paul.

“No,” the boy decided. “Because one town's over there.” He pointed at the wall. “On the other side.”

By the time Gina finished the risotto, the two of them had built a pretty good replica of the Immitoin Valley, circa 1940s by Paul's reckoning. They'd piled up blankets for the mountain ranges and used the shoebox for the Shellycoat mill.

“There's your grandma's old house,” said Paul. “And that's Lambert. The box of crayons will be their fruit-packing shed.”

“None of it's there anymore,” said Gina. She wore a blue sweater that brightened her eyes, and her cheeks were flushed from the heat and steam from the risotto.

“You look nice,” he said.

“I feel better. I think I was little dehydrated before.”

“For a single serving of beautiful woman, just add water.”

“Sounds about right.” She pointed at the television remote on the floor. “What's that?”

“Steamboat,” said Shane.

“The
SS
Westminster
,” said Paul. “That doesn't exist anymore either.”

“Just keep my underwear out of this,” she said. She returned to the kitchen but didn't look unhappy.

They'd washed most of the dishes, but the smells of roasted meat and onions still hung in the air. On the kitchen table stood a half-empty bottle of wine, wooden salad tongs set out to dry, and three bowls with melted candy cane ice cream at the bottom. Gina had shoved their suitcases into a corner of the living room and stashed cardboard boxes of cooking supplies and food under the kitchen table. “Just for now?” she asked. He nodded. Wrapped presents lay under the tree, most marked for Shane. The boy had fallen asleep on the living room carpet halfway through the original cartoon version of
How the Grinch Stole Christmas
, and Gina had carried him to Paul's room.

They watched television. Paul asked if it was too loud, but she shook her head. They suffered patiently through an inordinate number of commercials. This one was for a seafood restaurant. There was something obscene about the way the unseen woman in the commercial said, “Lobster.” The “L” guttering up from the back of the throat, and then thrown over her tongue in the shape of the “OB,” and then hissed out between her lips, “STER.” It was like vomiting, like a form of reverse penetration, something retracted from her mouth in an oily, sexual way. She must have repeated the word ten times within the thirty-second ad. The word
lob
was onomatopoeic, it enacted its own meaning through the mouth. All words arose in the body, it occurred to him, passed through it like a type of test. Words were motion, and motion needed a body, and the thought of sex made his head spin.

His head was on Gina's shoulder. She touched the curls above his left ear, and the sensation dazed him. He stroked her arm with delicate attention, afraid his hand might clasp too desperately.

They lay stretched out on the couch, legs intertwined. They were still clothed, though her bra was balled up into a lump under her sweater and shirt. His lips were chapped and torn at. His hand rested against her belly. Her palm lay flat against the fly of his jeans. They were both breathing hard. Paul directed each breath toward the ceiling.

“It's not possible,” he said. “I told you.”

They came up with a new sleeping arrangement. Shane on a makeshift mattress in the living room, Paul and Gina in the bedroom. There would be some nights when Shane would be with his father—there was no choice in this, she said, unless she wanted things to get really unpleasant. It was important, too, that she and her son stay at their own apartment sometimes, with his own bed, his toys and familiar things. Being home, however, meant Billy could phone, cajole, and, as she put it, manipulate. When she said this, Paul heard the underlying anxiety.

Lying naked beside her was a nerve-wracking act of faith in the gods of fortune. How could it not be, when his doctor at the Prostate Centre had warned that sexual anticipation, or nearly anything else for that matter, might make him “leak a little”? To divert attention from his own body, he made a show of studying hers. Her skin's olive tone had not been a trick of the dim sauna light. “I think you have First Nations in you,” he said. “Maybe from the valley?”

“No. Mom would have said something,” Gina said with a wry grin. “Being part Sinixt would carry a lot of weight in her environmental groups.”

Some of his participants, old fruit farmers, had mentioned a possible burial site and pithouses. Some farmers had left patches of brush and trees around the
kekulis
they found, or had been careful not to disturb the petroglyphs on the cliffs along the river. Two sets of petroglyphs had been salvaged by Monashee Power and placed in a museum on the coast, but the reservoir now hid or destroyed the last remaining evidence of stolen land. “At any rate,” she said. “Think I'm just lucky.”

“Lucky?”

“To have nice skin.” She rolled nimbly on top of him and pinned his arms. When she forgot about Billy, she came alive.

Despite his attempts at distraction or anxious protests, she would fondle him, unresponsive as his body was, even take his limp member in her mouth, an act both overwhelmingly tender and humiliating. “I just like the feel of it,” she said. He would blink away tears of shame and stifle the urge to shove her away. Once or twice he thought he felt a physical stirring, a rising surge at his core, but that was only the basic, skin-deep pleasure of being touched, no different than having his finger sucked. Phantom twitches. “Don't,” she said whenever he'd apologize. “You take pretty good care of me. I'm not missing out on anything.”

It was true there were things he could do for her, and he enjoyed doing them. He'd missed the pure, tactile delight, a woman's response, even after a year of convincing himself other­wise. His life had lacked the pleasure he could give to someone else, even if he didn't entirely believe that altruism, on either of their parts, belonged in the bedroom.

Some nights, though, a claustrophobic panic would overtake him, and he'd refuse to take off his boxers, could hardly stand being touched. They would grapple restlessly without any satisfying conclusion and he would lie awake afterwards, his body raw, wired, and uncertain, his thoughts a hot mud. Or, even if things went relatively well, Gina might turn away, curl into herself, and cry. She was afraid of staying at her apartment and afraid of starting over again, she owned almost nothing worth having except a few good pots and pans, and her son was sleeping on her lover's couch. He promised himself he'd buy a bed of some kind for Shane, maybe partition part of the living room.

The intimacy made them aware that they were mostly strangers to each other, and they spent long hours whispering. Because he asked, and because he felt he'd already revealed a lot about himself that night in the sauna, they mostly talked about her. She talked about Billy, how everything had been spoiled for him from the start—the loss of his family's land, the mill always shutting down. Three nights a week he played poker with former co-workers who were as bored, restless, and dangerous as he was. The men, including old Cyril, plotted ways of making quick money—though Gina wouldn't say what that meant.

Having Shane around kept things light. During meals, they turned their chairs toward him as he told rambling, nonsensical stories about kindergarten. He explained video games to Paul. “In the olden days you had joysticks and one button, but in the newden days you need to learn all sorts of controls.” But they couldn't laugh, because the boy might throw a wild tantrum at the slightest offence.

She taught Paul how to make kale and potato frittatas with goat cheese, cannellini bean soup with spinach, zucchini pesto with preserved lemon. Food was a way forward, a way of being able to talk and think about the future. She had dreams of her own café, maybe a catering business.

With Gina and Shane around, Paul didn't have much time for lurking beneath the stairs. In the evenings, they could hear Jory and Sonya drinking with friends or sometimes arguing, which happened more often since Christmas. One of the young guys working at the store had quit Boxing Day morning and Jory had to drive from his dad's to cover a twelve-hour shift. He told all the staff to go fuck themselves, and then spent the rest of the holidays filming backcountry expeditions with friends.