The Book of Stanley Read online

  In the lobby again, surrounded by other men and women with binders and lanyards, Tanya felt a panic attack coming on. She looked down at her schedule of interviews–five more and then a dinner with the Canada Council–and walked out of the Banff Springs Hotel. Instead of hailing a cab, she took the stairs down to the Bow River and stood among the fragrant pine trees and tourists snapping photographs of the falls. She breathed.

  It was a warm day, with just enough cloud in the sky. She removed her jacket and walked north and west along the rolling white river, from the Banff Springs Hotel toward town. The path wasn’t ideal for high-heeled footwear but, to her surprise, Tanya wasn’t annoyed by its imperfections. Not far from the bridge that arced over the Bow River, near an exposed boulder in the cold water and a sign advising against swimming, Tanya decided that her career in television was officially over. So was her relationship with Brian. She couldn’t imagine herself in the yellow Hummer any more. In sum, this constituted a grave psychological crisis. But it didn’t feel like a crisis. Knowing that the slab hovered above her, ready to fall again, mysteriously freed Tanya from the need to call her analyst and get better.

  Tanya climbed up to the road again and stepped on to the bridge. A Japanese man asked her to take a picture of him with his family, the town and Cascade Mountain behind them. Holding the camera and looking through the digital viewfinder at the love and authenticity of the small Japanese family–their utter lack of interest in licensing or development money–calmed her.

  “Beautiful,” she said, after she had taken the picture. “You’re beautiful.”

  In her hotel room at the Chalet Du Bois, Tanya lay on her bed and turned on the television. She flipped through the seventy-one channels and found precisely nothing she wanted to watch. Tanya had devoted her entire career to precisely nothing.

  She turned off the television and sat in the silence of her hotel room, until the ambient noise rose up around her. The air conditioner, the traffic on Banff Avenue, the voices of other guests through the ceiling and walls, random clicks. The particular beige of the beige curtains, a colour that someone, somewhere actually planned. Dust on the side table, in the grooves of her reading lamp. Lint on her black pants. The rogue pubic hair an inch below her belly button.

  Tanya got up off the bed, sat at the computer desk, and turned on her laptop. It powered up and a schedule of events appeared before her, prepared by the secretary in Vancouver. She closed that window, opened her e-mail program, and began writing to Darryl Lantz.

  Dear Darryl,

  I resign. Please do not send a psychiatrist. This is an act of acute sanity.

  Love,

  Tanya

  TWENTY-THREE

  Until Kal slept with the wrong Soldiers fan and gave Candace that nasty bout of syphilis, their only regular disagreements had been over dirty dishes. It was one of the significant shocks of married life at eighteen, all that time he had to spend at the sink. If Kal made dinner, it seemed reasonable that Candace wash up afterward. Unfortunately, she never saw it that way. Candace preferred to be improvisational about dirty dishes, which usually meant that she played with Layla while Kal did the work. He would wash the dishes and clean the small kitchen in Windsor and then, moments later, it would be a mess again. The smell of a wet rag after a week’s employment, a stainless-steel pot caked with oatmeal, cheese microwaved to the side of a plastic bowl, lettuce and spinach drowned in oil and vinegar: for Kal, it was a question of human rights.

  Yet here he was, in the back of an Asian fusion restaurant in Banff, the door open to the pale-yellow dusk, deeply enjoying his job. The spray nozzle, which he used to rinse the plates and wine glasses before stacking them into the tray, was not only stretchy. It was also mighty.

  Every few minutes, one of the servers would stack a pile of food-encrusted plates and lipstick-stained glasses to his left. Piece by piece he would go through them, first scraping the plates into the garbage and then spraying them clean. Then Kal would artfully separate them on a grey pallet and send them on a conveyor belt through a stainless-steel washing machine. The plates emerged on the other side of the machine, hot and nearly dry. Once or twice, when no one was looking, Kal pressed a hot plate to his cheek.

  The owners of Far East Square, Chip and Wendy Yang, thought music in the kitchen was vulgar. So Kal listened to the radio on a nine-dollar Walkman. Since the Calgary radio waves bounced off the mountains before they could reach Banff, all he could pick up was the local CBC, in French. Tonight’s program featured a special on European music before the Second World War. The songs were sad and romantic, and provided a sense of dreamy grandeur while Kal scraped clean a platter of Singapore beef jerky and spinach risotto, decorated by two balled-up napkins, an opened sugar packet, an empty lip gloss container, and a chewed piece of gum. What stood out, for Kal, was the accordion in the French songs. It was a sullen and mysterious sound, sexy too, and unembarrassed by its earnestness. The explanation of a thing that can’t be explained. He was moved to tears by the instrument, by his memory of the woman in the hot tub, and how it all related to the poem.

  There was a tap on his shoulder. Kal wiped his eyes and turned to see Wendy Yang frowning behind him. He turned off the radio and removed his gloves.

  “You want dinner?”

  Wendy grumbled as she took over at the dishwashing station. Kal hurried to the small staff table, where Chip was already eating. There was a plate of tofu and mixed vegetables, curried fish Singapore style, and three crab cakes. A large, steaming bowl of coconut rice sat between them.

  “I met the most beautiful woman yesterday, Chip.”

  Chip’s mouth was full of curried fish Singapore style. He just nodded.

  Kal scooped a little bit from each bowl onto his plate. “I never thought I could ever feel like this, after Candace broke my heart so hard. I figured my heart’d be a dead thing forever.”

  “Feel what?” said Chip, once he had finished chewing.

  Since his dad’s death, Kal had known that a reserve of energy and hope and goodness and joy was stored in some inaccessible corner of him. In his teen years and beyond, the rye had kept it buried under layers and layers of gloom. The Rilke poem had cracked him open, like an axe, and now all this stuff kept spilling out. Kal had trouble in moments like these, harnessing the bounty. There was no way to explain how he felt when he saw the beautiful woman in the hot tub, or the great grandeur of the accordion, so Kal smashed a wine glass on the floor. “You know what I’m saying?”

  The kitchen went silent for a long while, until Chip stood up. “That was stupid. Get the broom.”

  Kal fetched the broom and started sweeping. “I met her in a hot tub across the street. In the Chalet Du Bois.”

  “Did you knock boots?”

  “Gosh, Chip. I just met her, and she isn’t that kind of girl, I don’t think. To be honest, I’ve had plenty enough of those kinds of girls in the last few years, on account of my broken heart. I never thought of it this way before–I never thought of it at all–but it leaves a guy feeling even emptier, you know what I mean?”

  “I have been married for thirty-seven years.” Chip leaned forward over his bowl and looked toward the dishwashing station, to make sure Wendy wasn’t listening. “Sometimes I want to feel empty. And I mean empty.”

  Kal didn’t want to imagine Chip Yang engaging in sexual intercourse, so he looked down at his broom and the broken glass on the floor and thought about the accordion. It all made perfect sense, why he had been drawn here to change his life. Kal was meant to hear the accordion music on Radio-Canada and become a musician. He was destined to meet the woman in the hot tub, whose ass said “DAMN.” Now that the tiny iceberg of frozen rye whisky in his heart had been axed, Kal was doubly inspired. He would write accordion songs about Layla, her cuteness and superior intelligence and tiny shoes and talent for gymnastics, and the woman in the hot tub.

  Chip finished eating abruptly and pushed himself away from the table. With his hands on his soft
belly, he said, “Sometimes I want to go into a nightclub and say to a tall woman from Germany, ‘Hey, girlfriend, do you want to try something that was once illegal in this country?’ But you know I’m old now, and fleshy. Look: my teeth went yellow from cigarettes and tea.”

  “Listen, Chip. I did that a couple of times when I was married, and you know what? Now my wife and daughter live with a Ukrainian car salesman in Kelowna. You don’t want that, do you?”

  “No.”

  “Well then.”

  Kal sat down to finish his meal while Chip rose and put his black Nehru jacket back on. Before he departed, Chip burped and washed his hands. The Yangs’ cat, Philip, appeared in the doorway. Though he had been working at Far East Square for only a couple of weeks, Kal understood the patterns of the restaurant. One of them involved Philip showing up around nine o’clock. The cat walked into the kitchen from the alley, thereby breaking health code regulations. Eventually, Chip spotted Philip, picked him up, screamed at him in Cantonese, smacked him in the head, and tossed him outside. Each time he witnessed the punishment of Philip Yang, another small piece of Kal McIntyre died.

  “Get,” Kal said, to Philip. “Go away.”

  It was time to get back to the dishwashing station. Kal took his plate and Chip’s plate and tried to shoo Philip away with a fake kick. But this was ineffective. Philip–a thin, Creamsicle-coloured cat–sneaked under the giant steel island where Wendy and the other cook, Yip Suen, usually prepared salads.

  At the dishwashing station, Kal strapped on his radio again. “Philip is here.”

  Wendy shook her head. “Did Chip see him?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Where did Philip go?”

  “Under the island, I think.”

  Wendy took off the yellow gloves. “Don’t worry about Philip, you know. I think this is a game he plays. If he did not want Chip to hit him and throw him and scream at him, he would stay outside.”

  “You mean it?”

  “I have given this plenty of thought. And it is a secret that Philip comes in the kitchen. If an inspector arrives, we have to throw him out. You cannot tell anyone. If you do, I will fire you and then I will hunt you down. It is not worth it for you to open your mouth about Philip.”

  “Wendy?”

  “Yes?”

  “Something wonderful is going to happen to me here.”

  “Does this have to do with Philip?”

  “I don’t think so. It has something to do with the beauty of the accordion.”

  Wendy raised her eyebrows.

  Kal noted, in Wendy’s simple eyebrow lift, a note of apprehension. This job, he saw, would soon be finished. He vowed not to break any more glasses or tell fellows about the beauty of the accordion, especially if the fellows happened to be his employers.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Stanley turned off the highway, and the view astonished Alok and Frieda into a rare silence. On Banff Avenue, crowds of shoppers in sunglasses hurried up and down the sidewalk as though carrying a La Senza bag was a job and they were all late for their next appointments. For Stanley, who had not been there in many years, the stores and restaurants–the artificial heart of a national park–made the treeless peaks of the Rockies seem like another commodity, a mirage, a joke.

  Alok sat up and placed his index fingers on his temples. “We must resuscitate the soul of the western world here in Banff, among all these field stations of the global corporate agenda. From here, the soul will spread and save us all. I’m confident of that.”

  Frieda giggled as Stanley pulled in behind the last hotel on Banff Avenue before the Bow River. The Chalet Du Bois was essentially a commercial motel with a newish log cabin facade, but it was economical. There was an empty parking spot next to a giant luxury bus. Alok asked to get out in case the space between the car and bus was too small for him.

  As Stanley parked, Alok stood in the middle of the lot, his arms out, sniffing it all in. Through the windows of the Oldsmobile, Stanley and Frieda heard Alok hollering to himself and, potentially, others.

  Frieda took Stanley’s hands. “Turn the car back on, please, and let’s go home.” She spoke slowly, pronouncing each syllable. “I have a terrible feeling.”

  “Let’s just–”

  “Oh, let’s not.” Frieda lifted Stanley’s hands to her mouth. “We can go to Lake Louise and the icefields. The icefields are shrinking and we ought to see them one last time. In case all this is…you know. We can stay in Jasper tonight, at the Lodge. Go for a hike tomorrow. Sit in some hot springs.”

  On the other side of a fence, a child sat on the hood of a Volkswagen. The child wore a thick black sweatshirt and stared at Stanley as though, somehow, he were expected. It was not clear, from this distance, if the child was a boy or a girl. Or, perhaps, a dwarf. Stanley could not read the child’s thoughts but felt genuinely nervous, so nervous he stopped listening to Frieda’s quavering voice. He went cold and then hot again. For a moment, he was sure the illness had returned all at once. His heart beat so quickly it seemed to vibrate.

  “Stan.”

  He turned to his wife for an instant, and when he looked back at the child, the child was gone. “Did you see that kid on the Volkswagen?”

  Frieda released Stanley’s hands. “You remember when Charles was called into the gifted program in junior high school and you thought it would turn him into a pompous ass? And I decided it would just stimulate him?”

  “He did become a pompous ass.”

  “You registered your objection but he went into the program anyway, didn’t he? And in the end it turned out you were right. Yes?”

  “I think Charles was destined to be a pompous ass independent of us.”

  “The point here is I am strongly registering my objection.”

  Again, Stanley looked toward the Volkswagen. He shivered.

  “And I’m going to make you eat shit for the rest of your life if this little adventure turns out to be ridiculous and embarrassing.” Frieda opened her door and stepped out. Stanley looked to the Volkswagen one last time and followed his wife.

  Alok stood at the back entrance to the hotel, waving his arms like a giant summer snow angel. He activated the automatic doors. “Let’s go, lovebirds. The land is dying here!”

  “Lovebirds,” said Stanley, as he put his arm around Frieda and pulled her close.

  “Don’t.”

  “Maybe there’s a Jacuzzi in our room. We can have one together.”

  “I’ll have a Jacuzzi by myself, while you and Alok save the land. Then, when you’re finished with this twaddle, we can go home and sit in the garden like proper old people.”

  They entered the Chalet Du Bois arm in arm, three abreast. It reminded Stanley, for just a moment, of The Wizard of Oz. Instead of a buoyant song, they had a sound-track of sighing beverage coolers and snack dispensers in the foyer, and a man arguing on his cellphone in German. Frieda was unhappy, Alok was ecstatic, Stanley was…he couldn’t say, exactly.

  In the lobby, a pretty young woman spoke with the clerk at the desk. It appeared they were negotiating the price of a longer-term stay. Stanley recognized the young woman, who had brown skin, shiny black hair, and big brown eyes, but he did not remember her name or how he knew her. That Greek restaurant at home?

  The young woman abruptly stopped speaking, moved her hair away from her eyes, and turned to Stanley, Frieda, and Alok. “Oh,” she said, and walked to Stanley. She hugged him and her voice broke.

  It wasn’t memory, exactly, but he knew this girl. Despite his wife’s unhappiness, Stanley smiled with the comfortable recognition that he was in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. The anxieties that hung from his thoughts at all times, like heavy ornaments, had dropped away. It was so full, this feeling. He had to stop himself from laughing out loud.

  “I’m Maha,” the young woman said, into his chest. “But you know that. I was worried you weren’t coming.”

  Alok clapped his hands.

  Frieda
turned away. “I’ll get the luggage.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  In the liquor store on Bear Street, Tanya Gervais reached inside the wet paper bag that was her heart and discovered a love forlorn. It was the love she’d once held for France: French cheese, French bread, la langue itself, and, most poignantly, the wine.

  Australian wine had conquered her with its marketing prowess. As much as she appreciated their techniques, Tanya reviled the consequences. Like some yob addicted to season nine of Survivor, here she was, a sophisticated woman, standing before the spiritual emptiness of Wolf Blass Yellow Label.

  Did she actually enjoy Wolf Blass Cabernet Sauvignon? Or had the product seduced her with its ubiquity? The stately air of its raptor mascot?

  “What’s your best-selling wine?” she said, aloud, without looking away from the bottles.

  “Wolf Blass, by a mile,” said the thin man behind the counter.

  “Why?”

  The thin man scratched his arm. “Everyone buys it ’cause…everyone buys it.”

  “That’s right.” Tanya had not noticed that the clerk sported a rather full and regal grey moustache. “It isn’t wine quality or even the quality of the marketing campaign. It’s about mass delusion.”

  “You’re one of those TV people, aren’t you?”

  “I was.” Tanya turned away from Australia and returned to the France of her youth. Yes: Appellation Hermitage Controlée. She carried a bottle to the counter and pulled out her American Express corporate card. “I figure they owe me this, at least. As consolation for destroying my life.”

  The slim man grasped a corner of his regal grey moustache. He didn’t seem capable of processing her remarks. “You gotta do whatcha…” he trailed off.

  Tanya signed her name to the sales slip. “We’re all going to die, you know. You, me, Wolf Blass–if that’s someone’s real name. And at the moment of our death, we’re going to look back on these consumer choices we made. Aren’t we?”