The Book of Stanley Page 32

  Charles laughed.

  They stopped for gas and snacks in Jasper. The snow had not reached the valley and the sun was out. Most leaves had fallen from the trees but a few crisp, deep-red flakes of foliage held on.

  Stanley purchased a bottle of water, an act that would never feel natural, and leaned against an aspen tree along the railroad tracks. His mother’s father, a Ukrainian, had been interned here during the First World War. With his countrymen and other unwanted immigrants, he’d built Jasper as a slave. As they prepared to leave Jasper, Stanley related this story to Charles.

  “Not that I’m keeping track, Dad, but I think you told me that every time we came out here. I’ve heard it somewhere between thirty and forty times.”

  “You won’t forget, will you?”

  There were mountain goats on the highway, so they had to wait for several minutes while a woman got out of her station wagon up ahead and shooed them away. With each kilometre, Stanley grew more exhausted, more nauseous. His lung capacity continued to shrink, so that by the time they passed out of the national park and into the smelly suburbia of Hinton, Stanley was sure he would soon stop breathing.

  He closed his eyes. Charles made a few more phone calls. The pull of Stanley’s dream, an incomprehensible thing about flowers and floating and Frieda and New York, was unpleasant. But Stanley preferred the promise of sleep to nausea and panic, so he lowered his leather chair and lay on his side.

  Moments later, it seemed, Charles was whispering and squeezing his arm. “We’re home.”

  Stanley sat up. They were parked in front of the house, in front of the two Douglas fir trees. In his fatigue and confusion, Stanley felt, for a moment, like an eight-year-old boy, returning home from a weekend trip to Skeleton Lake.

  The front lawn had been ravaged by dandelions, and no one had shovelled and bagged the cones. It was dark now. His house keys had been lost in the fire so Stanley followed the steps: take the key from under the deck. With it, open the garage.

  Charles went into the garage and found the spare in the red toolbox, under the old ratchet set. The brown and white vinyl siding was dirty. Tomorrow, Stanley would take the high-pressure hose and wash summer’s grit from the house.

  Inside, his own smell, their smell, nearly knocked Stanley down. How exotic and familiar it was, all at once. Stanley closed the door behind him quietly, carefully, as Charles took his suitcase downstairs to the spare room. The act of closing the door like this reminded him, cruelly, of late nights during his affair with Heather, the retired schoolteacher. Sneaking into the house and hoping, shamefully, that Frieda was asleep.

  The kitchen shone by the light of the lantern in the lane. Frieda had acquired a new stainless-steel coffee maker, and she had left a box of Raisin Bran on the counter. During her pregnancy, his wife had enjoyed a late-night snack of cereal, a habit that never left her. Stanley stood in the kitchen long enough to smile at the box of Raisin Bran, to raise it and admire it like a talisman.

  Then, a scream. A war cry. He backed into the stove and instinctively lowered himself to the floor. The light clicked on, disoriented him. “Frieda?”

  She stood before him in her blue flannel nightgown, holding what appeared to be a paring knife.

  “What are you going to do with that? I thought I told you: a big knife.”

  Frieda looked down at her weapon. “It’s all I had upstairs. I cut up an orange a couple of nights ago, before bed, and forgot to bring it down.”

  “Can you help me up?”

  She put the knife on the counter, crossed her arms, and then helped him up. “God,” she said, as she yanked, “where did all that strength go?”

  “It went.”

  Frieda hesitated, so Stanley pulled her in for a hug. They stayed like that, hugging in the kitchen. Stanley explored her lower back, the way he liked. They kissed and she gently pushed him away so she could look him in the eye, her hands grasping his arms. “Where have you been?”

  EIGHTY-TWO

  They took their morning coffee in the backyard. Frieda read aloud from the newspaper, about superbugs, casualties in Afghanistan, gang murders, the health benefits of consuming wild blueberries on a daily basis.

  Frieda had purchased a radio for the kitchen, and it sat near the open window so they could listen to classical music and the hourly news on the deck. It was on a quiet setting so Charles, who worked on his laptop in the dining room, would not be disturbed by what he called “inane Canadian boosterism.” Crows and magpies hopped about in the yard, edging closer to a few dropped cherry tomatoes. Shortly, after they ate a couple of the muffins that were baking in the oven, Frieda and perhaps Stanley would pull up the dead sunflowers and fold them into clear plastic bags, rake the leaves and fir cones, and wrap burlap around the lavender so it might survive the winter. They would go out for dinner with Charles. Malaysian, most likely–his childhood favourite. He had never been a hamburgers-and-roller-coasters sort of boy. More like Assam Ayam and Verdi. And as much as he would enjoy it, Charles couldn’t stay much longer.

  A voice echoed through the neighbourhood. “Susan, line three. Susan, line three.”

  Stanley interrupted Frieda’s reading. “Did they hire someone new at the Ford dealership?”

  “Susan.”

  It was not a warm morning but it was pleasant enough to be on the deck. The sky was white with cloud. Stanley understood that he had been in this moment, this exact moment, thousands of times. The smells of decomposition, oil refineries, raspberry bran muffins.

  With his wife, he did not feel obliged to speak. Stanley thought, perhaps, if it began to rain and they could not work in the garden they could go to the Bonnie Doon pool or the Kinsmen Centre. Frieda could do laps and Stanley could sit in the hot tub and admire her form. Look up at the clock and watch the second hand’s click click click.

  The timer on the oven beeped. Stanley wanted to get up and pull the muffins out, remove them from the pan, and put them in the basket. He wanted to pull the butter and margarine out of the fridge–butter for him and margarine for his wife–and bring it all outside. He wanted to glance at the digital clock on the stove, even though he knew the time, and he wanted to look at the thermometer and top up their coffees. He wanted to wash his hands and dry his hands, look at himself briefly in the mirror on his way outside and think, Yes, I am that man.

  Of course, he could not fetch the muffins. It would take too long. His breath would fail him and he would become woozy and lower himself to the kitchen floor. The muffins would tip, or the coffee would spill, or the butter would smear on the white linoleum. He would be too bashful at first to call for help and he would sit there until Frieda came in to check on him.

  “Should we go to Emergency today, just to see?” Frieda had finished reading. Her coffee mug was empty and she was on her way to the back door. “No big deal. Just…”

  “We’d sit in the waiting room for hours, and for what?”

  Frieda nodded and went inside.

  In the distance, the sound of a leaf-blower. The neighbour kid who had adjusted the muffler on his Honda Civic opened the garage door and revved his engine. The bass on his stereo thumped so deeply Stanley could feel it in his stomach. Under the newspaper on the patio table, a novel set in Colombia. Had Frieda and the members of her book club grown tired of India?

  She came back outside without the muffins or the butter and margarine or the coffee. Frieda leaned back against the door and squinted. The sun was bright, even through the cloud. “I’ve been wondering about something. Is this a choice you made?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Stan, I think you do.”

  “It’s a choice I made.”

  She went back inside.

  A white helicopter passed overhead. Stanley could not imagine how there could be traffic at this hour, mid-morning, and he stopped himself. He realized: I am thinking about a helicopter.

  The muffins were in the dark-brown basket, lined with wax paper. The c
offee was in its new black-and-steel warmer. Butter and margarine. The smell of butter and margarine. Frieda arranged everything on the table and shooed a bug away.

  “Is there anything else you want? Water?”

  “No, this looks great.”

  “Stan, just tell me if there’s something. I’m up anyway.”

  “There’s nothing. This is already too much. Is Charles joining us?”

  “I don’t want to disturb him.”

  “Charlie!” Stanley called out again, “Charles,” and paused to catch his breath. The talking had exhausted and delighted him, the fullness and emptiness at once, the ordinary ritual. His chest burned. He reached across the patio table and touched his wife’s hand, and smiled. Over the loudspeaker, the secretary announced another phone call for Susan, this time on line two.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I want to thank Jennifer Lambert, my editor, for her brilliance and for her respect.

  Thank you to Ellen Seligman, Ashley Dunn, Terri Nimmo, and my other friends at McClelland & Stewart in Toronto for their continued, superlative support. I want to thank my friend Shawn Ohler in Edmonton, for his fine eye and endless energy. Again, I want to thank my mentors, coaches, and colleagues at the Edmonton Journal for allowing me the time, when I needed it, to nurture this second career.

  A number of friends, across Canada and in France, have generously offered advice and editorial support in reading early drafts of The Book of Stanley, including a lot of Albertans whose names I wish I could provide here. Thanks to all of you.

  Thank you to Anne McDermid and to Martha Magor, for all the wisdom and cheerleading.

  The Canada Council and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts provided much-needed funds some years ago, when I started working on a novel about Stanley Moss. Thank you for that, and long live public arts funding in Canada. The country would be unimaginable without it.

  Thank you doesn’t seem sufficient for Gina and Avia, and the rest of my little family. But thank you, with love.

  Todd Babiak is the author of the #1 bestseller The Garneau Block, which was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. His first novel, Choke Hold, won the Writers Guild of Alberta Henry Kreisel Award for Best First Book, and was shortlisted for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. The Book of Stanley is shortlisted for the Alberta Literary Awards’ George Bugnet Award for the Novel. The culture columnist for the Edmonton Journal, Babiak lives and writes in Edmonton.

  You can read his blog at www.toddbabiak.com.

  BOOKS BY TODD BABIAK

  Choke Hold (2000)

  The Garneau Block (2006)

  The Book of Stanley (2007)

  ACCLAIM FOR

  The Book of Stanley

  “A heady hybrid of Steve Martin…and the absurd antics of Brian’s cultish followers in Monty Python’s epic Life of Brian.”

  –Toronto Star

  “A clever assault on today’s spiritual climate.”

  –Literary Review of Canada

  “Babiak recalls the work of John Irving, showing a knack for making extremely absurd situations seem oddly plausible…. A wonderful read.”

  –Calgary Herald

  “Charming and energetic…. A wry comic novel.”

  –Georgia Straight

  “Babiak skewers all and sundry…with relentless good humour and keen wit…. The strong cast of characters and sense of unpredictability will keep most readers plunging through the brief, almost capsule-like chapters.”

  –National Post

  “[Babiak] has a keen eye for human foibles and our wilful blindness to our own self-delusions.”

  –Edmonton Journal

  “Whimsical and droll…. Stanley’s struggle with his new powers is irresistible.”

  –Quill & Quire (starred review)

  Copyright © 2007 by Todd Babiak

  Cloth edition published 2007

  Emblem edition published 2008

  Emblem is an imprint of McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  Emblem and colophon are registered trademarks of McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher–or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency–is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Babiak, Todd, 1972-

  The book of Stanley / Todd Babiak.

  eISBN: 978-1-55199-232-7

  I. Title.

  PS8553.A242B66 2008 C813'.54 C2008-900911-8

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  75 Sherbourne Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5A 2P9

  www.mcclelland.com

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