The Better Mother (14 page)

The moment is here. He could walk away, pretend that he’s never seen her before and perhaps his eight-year-old self will be quiet again, settle back into his childhood. But a howl has started in his head.

Danny straightens, wipes his hands on his pants and looks directly into her eyes. “I saw you once, outside the Shanghai Junk, in the alley. I was a little boy then. My name is Danny.”

“Listen, Danny, I’ve met a lot of people in my time, and a lot of my past has been forgotten. The people here, at this wedding, they know nothing except what I tell them, and I don’t include the Shanghai Junk in too many conversations, if you know what I mean.” Val steps forward, places a wide hand on Danny’s shoulder and smiles, showing all of her small, yellowing teeth. “You can keep your memories to yourself, if you please.”

Danny can see the slight quiver of rage building under her makeup. But the roar in his head is receding and he is now struck with the desire to jump and giggle like a giddy child because Miss Val, the Siamese Kitten, is touching him, holding his shoulder here, in this coatroom, on this sweltering July evening.

“You gave me the belt from your robe. Green silk. I still have it.”

She steps back, flicking the ash from her cigarette toward a pair of leather oxfords on the floor. “Sweet Caps,” she mutters, smoke floating out from between her lips.

Danny steps forward, close enough to smell her again, close enough to stare at the smooth fabric of her dress. “Yes, you gave me a whole pack for my father. I was scared of him.”

“You reminded me of a little boy I knew once,” she says. “Those big eyes.” Smoke surrounds her head, and she peers at him through the swirl. “That was a long time ago.”

He doesn’t know where the words are coming from, but
he has to get them out. “A few weeks later, I went back to find you, but you weren’t there. I used to think about you all the time. I guess I must have fallen in love with you, like I was your son, or your best friend. I loved your costumes and your makeup. Everything about you.” He is out of breath, deflated. His thin chest heaves and he bows his head, resting his chin on his shirtfront. “I watched your movie.”

When he looks up, he sees that she has dropped onto a chair and leaned her cheek against the wall. Her profile hasn’t changed. The lines around her nose and lips are unblurred and still sharp. He wonders how it would feel to run his fingers down her jaw, if her skin would be soft, or if the muscles underneath would feel like steel, the hard structure holding up everything else. Her cigarette has burnt down and she is left holding the filter.

“No one talks about the Kitten anymore.”

Danny swallows. “We could leave. We could get a drink somewhere. My car’s outside.”

Val turns to look at him, an unpractised smile on her face. “Well, I haven’t been in a strange man’s vehicle for some time. It’s nice to know I still got it.”

When they are in his small blue car, he is acutely aware of her presence, even when she says nothing, even when his eyes are on the road and he can see her in his peripheral vision. Danny feels that he may never understand this day, that he will stumble through it with his mouth half open in awe. All those years ago, he had hoped that he would be elegant, maybe even a little bit glamorous, when they met again. He had always thought that he would be wearing a pressed tuxedo with tails,
smoking a cigarillo, a snifter of cognac in his hand. He would show her what a fine young man he had become, that his glimpse of her all those years ago had pointed him toward a well-dressed life far away from the curio shop or the smell of Chinese cabbage in his parents’ house.

They drive over the Cambie Street Bridge. To the left, English Bay and the barges in the distance, their twinkling lights the only break on the nighttime horizon. To the right, False Creek, its shores dotted with flat, empty lots ringed by chain-link fencing and abandoned shipping containers. Wind whips in through the open windows and Val, her hair whirling around her head, closes her eyes and turns her face into the rushing air. Danny glances at her and sees that she looks both young (with her skin pulled tight from the wind) and old (the white roots of her hair, the low-hanging earlobes pressed flat against her jaw). She holds a hand out the window, pushing against the current.

“A disco,” she says as she turns toward Danny.

“Sorry?”

“A disco. I’ve never been. Can we go to one?”

Danny checks his mirror, turns west. “I guess. Which one?”

“Whichever one you go to. I want to hear some music.” She closes her eyes again and leans her head back against the seat.

At the door to the club, Danny takes Val’s hand. He expects that her grip will be strong and decisive, but she holds his hand like a little girl would, her fingers loosely curled inside his palm, her whole fist weighing practically nothing in his. He leads her in through the dark hallway and past the coat
check. Before they step into the main room, she stiffens beside him and peers around the corner, her neck tense and straight.

Lights pulse on and off, swoop around the room so quickly that all Danny can see are flashes of people; their faces illuminated one second and then blanketed by darkness the next. The long bar at the end of the room is lit from below so that the bartenders are like jack-o’-lanterns, their grins malevolent and Joker-like. At tall tables, men stand and drink. On the dance floor, they twist and spin, their drinks held high above their heads, their eyes sometimes closed, sometimes open and locked on someone else. Danny can smell the musk of all these men, and wonders if this odour is singular to the club, or if it changes every time someone new enters, or every time someone, tired of the throb and thump, leaves for the night, his jacket rolled and under his arm. He swears that the floor itself is vibrating to the beat.

He finds them a low table on the edge of the dance floor. A waiter takes their order, a gin and tonic for Danny and a whisky sour for Val. A new song begins with a driving, synthetic rhythm and Val claps her hands.

“This is gorgeous, sweetheart. Look at all these handsome boys. Exactly what an old broad needs.” The waiter hands her a cocktail and she takes a dainty sip. “Now, this is the life.”

Danny sits beside her, watches her eyes as they follow the dancers. She is focused on their moves, on how they dance alone and then with each other, on the give and take between partners whose arms and legs and pelvises are opposite and complementary. Her fingers tap on the tabletop, keeping time. He counts the wrinkles on her neck, wonders if her swollen
finger joints make it impossible for her to take off her rings at the end of the day. So many years, so many possibilities for undiluted joy, for tragedy, for lines in the skin.

He closes his eyes briefly and allows himself to sink into the memory of his childhood self, the one who wanted to both dance a tango with Miss Val and be wrapped within her strong arms, the stones in her rings winking as she held him tight. Tonight, breathing in the tang of Val’s smell, he thinks that maybe, just maybe, some parts of the past might not be so bad.

The music changes again; it’s a slower song but one that still pounds the walls with a bass line that gracelessly punches its way into Danny’s chest. Val slams both hands on the table and looks him in the face. “Listen, are we going to dance or what?”

He begins by holding on to her hands, placing one on his shoulder. Looking at her face, he is unsure of how to start, how to apply the waltz he once learned from his mother in their kitchen to this club and this recorded song, sung forcefully and richly by a woman he imagines to be both overweight and fearsomely tough. He hesitates, and then takes one step forward, out of time.

Val shrugs off his hands and punches him lightly on the arm. “This is all wrong, Danny! You’re going to shake your rump if I have to shake it for you. Come on.” She slaps him on the ass and laughs wickedly, wiggling her hips to the beat.

He lets her lead him into a raucous dance. She twirls and bounces, gesturing for him to do the same. Under these lights, his arms and legs appear fluid and refined, not gawky and sinewy. Val smiles at him.

“You’re a natural,” she shouts. “A born dancer.”

Danny dances until he vibrates with the beat of the music. Val’s laugh cuts through the song and he reaches out for her, grasping her arms, holding and releasing her into the pounding, dark room. He hears his own laugh meeting hers. This is the very thing he has been waiting for: this dance in the middle of a club with the woman he dreamed of, whose voice filled his imagination when his own mother’s fell silent. Maybe he and the eight-year-old version of himself have become one—lighter, wiser and leading this dance with the twirling Siamese Kitten.

Danny drives Val home through the quiet streets of the North Shore. This is where voices and cars and the hisses of city life are buffered and absorbed by untouched firs and cedars, by the rushing of unnamed creeks, by the thick walls of small, self-contained houses. She turns to him, reaching across the handbrake to grasp his arm.

“Thank you.”

Danny grins. “Same to you.”

He parks the car in front of a low-rise apartment building with wood siding and sagging balconies. All the windows are dark and he hears a cat crying. He walks Val to the front door and, as she searches in her purse for her keys, he says softly, “I’d like to see you again. Maybe somewhere quiet next time.”

She holds a cough candy up to the light above the door before dropping it back into her small beaded purse. “I don’t know, Danny. That old life doesn’t fit in so well with the one I have now.”

“We don’t have to talk about what happened before. We can do things, go anywhere you want.”

“Anywhere?”

Eagerly, Danny steps forward. “Yes, of course. We could see movies, or go to the beach if the weather’s nice.”

“There’s a particular beach in Kitsilano,” she says with a thin layer of excitement in her voice. “I haven’t been there in a long time. It’s near a boarding house where I used to live.”

“We’ll go. Whenever you want.”

She pulls out a key ring chained to a shiny gold lipstick tube. She nods. “Come by on Wednesday morning around ten.” She reaches up and pats him on the cheek. “Danny, you’re one hell of a good time.”

He watches through the glass doors as she walks slowly to the elevator, one hand on her right hip. A little unsteadily, she steps into the elevator and turns around. As the doors to the elevator close, Val blows him a kiss and he swears he can feel it landing like a moth on his cheek.

In his darkroom two days later, Danny moves and mixes, his hands adjusting the focus on the enlarger one minute, fishing out a wedding print from the developer the next. One by one, he pins the prints from the wedding on the drying line. They sway in the breeze from the ceiling fan, like bedsheets hanging in the sun. His fingers travel over their edges lightly, fondly. Sometimes he even smells them, sniffing that faint residual odour of developer, stop bath, fixer. He thinks of it as a clean smell, the smell of genesis, of birth without the mess.

Other prints sit on the counter in four neat rows. Men and women hurry away, their bodies dark against white buildings, light flooding the frames so that it seems to be consuming the figures, eating up the visual space they tenuously inhabit.
A young boy, his ears sticking out like handles on a trophy, cranes his neck so that the very tip of his nose is visible beyond the curve of his cheek. His hair, black and heavy, obscures his right eye. Danny visualizes these prints even when they are out of sight; they feel heavy with their stark blacks and pure whites. They are colourless and bloodless, pictures of featureless people without skin and hair and breath. With their faces turned away, the figures are unknowable. No eyes. No sweat, oil, food. Frank always said that Danny should exhibit his work, and called two galleries and a dealer before Danny stopped him. “They’re just pictures of people retreating,” he said, piling the prints into a box. Maybe they were beautiful, but he knew then as he does now that they’re also empty.

He watches as one wedding print in particular floats in the developer tray, watches as the whites become shapes defined by shadows. A picture of the bride at the altar, her face occupying the right third of the frame. Her eyebrows are knitted and a tear is frozen in place halfway down her cheek. She is the kind of beautiful that men take home to their mothers. The kind of beautiful that, sometimes, is easy to forget.

In the corner of the window, a small black blur.

He drops the next print into the tray. Here it is: a full frame of Val standing in the window, watching the wedding from the outside. As he looks closer, he sees that the corners of her mouth are turned down, that her head is tilted just so. Her eyes droop at the edges and she seems in danger of fading away, her face slightly more distinct than the background or the panes in the window. He sees it clearly now, the look that he has seen hundreds of times before on the faces of bridesmaids, grandparents, mothers. It’s that moment when you are
about to lose control, when you know the tears are coming and you are still, fruitlessly, trying to hold them in. He hangs her story on the line, touches the edges gingerly.

The hot sand stings the bottoms of his feet. He has rolled up his jeans as high as they will go, and they are now bunched around his knees, collecting sweat and sand. Val walks ahead of him, gracefully avoiding the splinters from driftwood. She unfolds a Mexican blanket and arranges it in front of a large, bleached-white log. Squinting into the sun, she lights a cigarette.

Danny settles onto the blanket and empties the sand out of his shoes. When he looks up again, Val has taken off her shirt and skirt and is standing in a black swimsuit, the neck cut low, almost to her waist. Her cleavage is tanned brown, with freckles dotting the space between her breasts. She stands straight, one long leg in front of the other, and surveys the beach, challenging the other people to look at her, admire the lines of her body. When an elderly man behind them, dressed in walking shorts and a Panama hat, stares at her and then stumbles on the path, Val smiles brightly and sits down, her back against the log.