A Brief View from the Coastal Suite Read online

  He thinks maybe she shops too much. He can’t imagine that there is anything else that they need for their house, and then she brings home more. It will be better though, when she gets a job. She hasn’t wanted to get a job, because her English isn’t good enough yet, she says. She doesn’t want to work at the kind of job where it wouldn’t matter. She did not move here from Estonia, she says, to work in a tool factory or a chicken-plucking factory. Fair enough. She is going to school; she is learning English. That is her job now.

  Even watching TV, that is helping her learn English.

  It will be good when they have kids, too. He can imagine her pushing a nice stroller with a toddler in it, the toddler with a fuzzy hat and pink cheeks from the damp wind that they get around here. Then him coming home and playing with the child the way he had played with his sister’s kids when they were small. He thinks that they should have a baby soon, because Veronika is already thirty-seven, and he will be thirty-six this year. He thinks that it would be a good time to have a baby now, while Veronika is at home a lot anyway, learning English. But she says she wants to have a steady job first; she wants to have a way of supporting herself. He can understand that.

  She puts his plate and utensils and mats for the hot containers on the high table, taking several trips. She could do it all in one trip, or he could do it himself, but he can see that she takes pleasure from opening the drawers in the kitchen cabinets and in the sideboard, taking out one thing from the neat stack of things, and carrying it to the table.

  He can smell the food, now, heating in the oven. He salivates. It had taken him a little while to get used to Veronika’s cooking. There were a lot of onions in it, and doughy things, and meat. It had taken him a while to get used to how it sat in his stomach, but he did not want to complain about food someone else had cooked for him. And now he finds it tasty. He thinks about it during the day, how rich and satisfying his dinner will be.

  How was your day, love? he asks. What did you do today? Did you go to your class?

  She turns toward him a pouty face. I did not feel like it today. I did not have done my homeworks. I went to the mall instead.

  He likes it that she is honest: that she tells him what she feels, and he never has to try to guess or wonder if she is telling him the truth. He is lucky with that, he knows. He tries to be honest too, but he doesn’t always know what he is feeling.

  He feels lucky, though, about Veronika. He knows he is lucky.

  Of course, he had been really stupid. Everybody had explained that to him, after. How it worked. That they weren’t really beautiful Russian girls online looking for Canadian husbands. Those pictures, those introductions — those weren’t even the girls you would be connected to. They weren’t maybe even real girls. Just made-up stories, fake photographs. It was about immigration; they just wanted sponsors. Or worse, it was about prostitution. People said different things to him, but they all showed him how stupid he had been. He would only lose his money. How much did you pay? they asked him. What did you tell them about yourself? What did you promise? Until he saw, yes, that he had done something really, really dumb. Until he had dreaded the future, instead of looking forward to it, thinking happily each morning about the life he was going to have with this girl, when she arrived in Canada.

  He had not wanted to answer the first email from Veronika, with its bad English, or to look at the photo attachments, which had seemed real enough. The girl in amateurish, real-looking shots with the captions “With Cousin” and “With Nieces” and “At Little Lake” did seem to be the same person as the girl in the studio photograph he had originally seen, but he had become ashamed of his fantasies, of how many times a day he had looked at the posed (and airbrushed, as everyone had pointed out to him) photograph, the young woman with the dimples and blonde curls and huge, long-lashed eyes.

  He had been too ashamed of himself to write back, but then she’d written again: I am feeling angry because you treat me like I’m not important. How can you do that? You must be a very hard and brutal man. Yet I will tell you, also hardly, that I will shine if you give me love, and you will not be sorry to help me. But you must be kind enough to answer.

  She had shamed him, when she called him a hard and brutal man. He had never been hard or brutal to anyone. He didn’t want to be. It was his main goal in life, to avoid being that kind of person. So it was an unpleasant feeling to have her accuse him of that. It had made him feel anxious, as if there were bad things he had done that he wasn’t aware of, as if people knew something about him that he didn’t know himself.

  It had taken him a long time to work that out, how he felt. At first, he had just been shocked and angry, and had deleted her email and looked up how to block her (he couldn’t figure that out) and had decided to call it a lesson learned, as his foster mother, Mrs. Giesbrecht, would always tell him to do when things went wrong for him. And then it had come to him, one evening, while he was trying to figure out the crew’s schedule for the next week. He could see, suddenly, that she must be very frightened at what she was going to find. She would be alone in a strange country, far from home, with no money, contracted to a stranger. She had to be very brave.

  He had seen too that she would not have said she was angry, and about him ignoring her (he had already paid for her flight and paperwork), if it was all just a scam. He admired, then — as he did now, three years later — her frankness, her boldness. Her ability to say what was bothering her, to just let it all out.

  Did you find the homework hard? he asks. I could help you with it, if you like.

  She is having a hard time learning English. Well, he can’t imagine how hard it must be. He has tried to learn a few words of Estonian, and of Russian, which, Veronika says, all Estonians speak. He gets a phrase down but then an hour later he can’t remember it.

  Veronika also speaks Finnish, which is related to Estonian, and Latvian. He’d had to look up where Estonia and Latvia were.

  It is hard, she says. I have to write something for my class. About a holiday that is important to your family.

  Oh, yeah, Cliff says. That would be hard.

  Veronika hasn’t told him everything about her life before she came here, he knows. Just a few things. Her father drank and didn’t support them. Her mother worked several jobs and Veronika had to quit school and take care of her younger sister, who drifted into bad habits and who has pretty well disappeared. Veronika had cried when she told him that. Well, her eyes had been wet. She doesn’t really cry.

  So family holidays, that might be a hard subject for her. And it’s not like he has been able to give her a real family life here. He can tell that she had hoped, maybe, for more closeness with his siblings. But they don’t even do holidays together, much. He had explained that Ben had his own adoptive parents, and Cleo was always working, and Mandalay didn’t drive, didn’t have a car, didn’t know how to cook normal food. But he thinks she is disappointed.

  You could write about birthdays, he says.

  That’s not a family holiday.

  Well, they are, kind of. Because of our traditions. In Canada. Or, he says, make it up. Make up a story.

  Yeah, okay, she says. Anyway the problem is mostly that is boring. You know? I have to write about boring thing because my English is so bad still. But I don’t give a shit about those thing.

  He has seen in a magazine or an ad where someone says: After all these years, I love that she can still surprise me. But that is not true for him. He feels like the ground is falling away from under his feet, usually, when Veronika surprises him.

  Well, he says.

  Never mind, she says. I will go tomorrow. I will write the essays. I will write about how dry and boring is turkey. Turkey, blah blah blah.

  That should be good, he says.

  She takes the casserole dish out of the oven and puts it on the cork circle on the table. Takes off the lid.

  Oh, man, the smell. Oh, man. He is so hungry.

  Veronika puts food on his
plate. It smells so good. It looks so good. He is so lucky.

  In the evening Cliff takes Veronika’s little dog out for a walk, beyond the globe cedars in the pea-gravel beds that constitute the condo complex’s landscaping, and up the boulevard to the forest park where real cedars, twice as big around as a man’s arm span, form an otherworld of exposed roots and shadowed archways. Buster, the dog, is so tiny that walking to the end of the boulevard is a good outing for him, but Cliff likes to go further, and carries him when they enter the canopied trails with their writhing tree roots. Buster’s short legs can’t manage the distance or the unevenness of the path, and in this borderland between suburb and forest, coyote or even cougar sightings are not uncommon.

  It’s drizzling a little this evening, but not under the dark dense canopy. It is chilly, though: Buster shivers, and Cliff zips him inside his jacket. The air is different here — not only cooler, but thicker, stiller. In spots where some light penetrates, he sees the white berries of waxberry. They seem to glow faintly with their own illumination.

  That would be the thing, he thinks. All of the new places they’re landscaping, the owners want in-ground lighting, solar lamps hidden in pavers, and stepping stones and ponds. Even in bushes. Sometimes little copper lanterns hung on tree limbs. It all has to be invisibly wired and solar-powered. When it works, it’s dramatic or magical, though he worries about the night creatures that like the dark — things that do better in the dark, growing or looking for food or mates, or places to sleep or hide.

  But in here, in this shadowy vaulted space, the white berries seem to make their own light. What if they really could? Could a person cross a shrub with something that glowed? Something bio-luminescent? He remembers from nature shows that there are deep sea creatures, jellyfish for example, that can produce light, chemically. Could it be done with genetic engineering? He bets it could — the genes that make bioluminescence — or is it bacteria? — could be spliced into something like yucca. Holy Moses, that would be something. Imagine a sloping curve of lawn in the shadow of something tall and dark — yew, maybe — and then cold white candles of yucca. That would be something.

  He doesn’t stay out long. It’s late and he’s been up since before five. And Veronika doesn’t like it if he stays out too long, though she doesn’t like to come with him. She says walking is for the poor and the very old. She had enough walking to do as a child in Estonia.

  The walks calm him.

  At the end of the path under the dark bulky cedars he turns and begins to walk back. He can feel Buster against his shirt, snuffling a little. He had bought Buster for Veronika, as a tiny pup, to give her some company while he is working, but he wonders how much company Buster is. He’s kind of feeble, Buster is. He doesn’t do much: he eats and cries and wants to be picked up. But he sees by the way that Veronika talks to him that Buster is a person, to Veronika.

  He’d had a cat, once: Sophie. She’d been like a person to him. He had understood her, and she seemed to understand him. He still thinks about Sophie, often. He’d lived with her a long time, longer than he has lived with Veronika, if he thinks about it. Sometimes he misses Sophie; he feels a little sadness for her. For his cat. He would never tell anyone that. He’d had to find a new home for her, when Veronika had come to live with him. Veronika did not like cats.

  He turns into the driveway, now, between the sign that says Hillcrest Estates and the flower bed where the rhododendrons are already fattening at their tips, already swelling with the longer days and sunshine. He would have done something different with that flower bed. He had wanted to get the contract for his complex, but he had been underbid by a bigger local company.

  He likes coming back to the complex, after dark has fallen, seeing the warm light in the windows of his condo. His own windows, the warmth and light inside. That’s something.

  Veronika asks him if he wants to watch his favourite program on Oasis, the nature channel. He’s too tired tonight. Thanks, though, sweetie, he says. Okay; she will PV R it for him. Thank you, he says.

  In bed they nuzzle and clamber and hit the sweet point together, which is good. Veronika spoons him until he’s almost asleep, then slips out. She sleeps in late and so she’ll get up and watch T V late into the night, the sound lowered, but he’s happy just to fall asleep. He’s so tired. He’s happy to feel the leaf patterns over him, forming themselves into worlds he can’t decipher, to feel the moss-covered logs of fallen cedars open, to step inside and to fall, fall, weightless, blind and deaf, into the dark calm earth.

  Offer

  DRIVING EAST OUT OF THE CITY, into the suburbs, Cleo sees the moon rise directly ahead of her, huge, yellow, stippled with shadow. The sky, this late afternoon, is a muddy, muted indigo: washed denim at the horizon, deepening overhead. Nice complementary colour effect, she notes. What word for the moon? Pumpkin — one of those new pale ones she had seen last fall, carved out with templates, on sophisticated porches. Lantern — a rice-paper globe with a candle, set aloft. Dirigible. She and her son Sam had looked that word up a couple of weekends ago; she’s always trying to make his video games into more value-added learning experiences.

  For a moment, as the highway angles upward more steeply, the moon expands even more, becomes what it is, a huge mottled goudahued satellite, frighteningly close to the earth. Hurtling toward earth? Cleo briefly imagines the cataclysm, the oblivion. But it is an optical illusion. Like a harvest moon, but it’s only March. She’s read that the effect is caused by dust in the air. The dust is from the excavation of hundreds of new building sites along the valley, not from summer-baked soil and chaff. It has been an unusually dry winter, with an unprecedented amount of new construction.

  The highway dips, and the moon shrinks back a little, into an ordinary full moon. Under the moon, she notices, a star is hanging, like a pendant in a woman’s décolletage. No, not a star; a planet. Is it Mars or Venus? She can’t remember which. Mars for war and Venus for love. Lucky in war; unlucky in love. Where is that from? The star or planet does not twinkle, but is large and lustrous, a deep transparent amber. It’s a gemstone, she thinks, a big yellow sapphire, suspended under the moon. It looks so close tonight that she might reach out and lift it off its invisible chain. Whatever it’s hanging from.

  Imagine a pendant like that, a big pale stone — opal maybe — set in gold, with the darker yellow gem suspended below it. Would it be a topaz? Maybe a citrine? What is a citrine? She doesn’t know, but it sounds yellow. A yellow sapphire? It would be a signature piece; it would dress up a turtleneck or a blazer. It would look smart. She has never owned any real jewellery, or been that interested in it. Her wedding and engagement rings are small dim bands, non-committal. She wears a cheap functional watch.

  Yes, a pendant, a heavy gold pendant. She can almost feel the weight of it against her breastbone, a lovely yellow fire in a heavy gold bezel. How it would glow against her skin.

  She could buy something like that. Have it custom-made, even. She’d want a good big clear stone, handsomely set. But she can afford it. She’s going to be making a lot of money, now. Well, not a lot compared to some people, but more than she had ever thought she would.

  She could spend some on herself. She works very hard.

  It would be nice to have a tangible reward, something beautiful that she had chosen for herself.

  Her boss, Kate, would know what sort of stones. And where to get something like that custom-made.

  She takes the highway exit for her suburb, and now the moon is behind her, reflected in her rear-view mirror. It’s such a long commute. An hour in busy times, two hours if she tries to do it in rush hour. Half an hour, if she waits. She’s found it efficient to do this, to arrange her work schedule — luckily she is only fifty percent, and has some flex time — to arrange her working day so that she comes in very early or at mid-morning, leaves at three or at seven. Though will she be able to continue this if. . . . Well, she’ll have to make sure it’s part of the negotiations.

&n
bsp; Also, she uses that evening time to do errands, which is also efficient of her. It’s amazing how much you can get done with good time management, careful planning.

  A feeling of warmth, of pleasure rises up behind her breastbone.

  Her boss, Kate, calling her into her office this afternoon. Or rather, sending her an email inviting her to drop by at 2:15. Cleo had been raising her hand to knock at ten seconds to the hour, not that knocking was necessary; all of the office walls were glass, completely transparent, though Kate’s could be shuttered at the touch of a button. Everyone’s eyes on her then as she’d walked there from her own desk. Everyone knowing it was a summons, likely, by the promptness of her response.

  Kate had leaned back from her and smiled, and she had seen that the smile was on the sunny side of conspiratorial, so it was going to be okay. Not that it wasn’t, almost always, especially these days. Cleo is one of the few who have been with the company for more than five years, now, which is surprising, because she had been so junior, so marginal, so expendable, to start with.

  She’d been called into Kate’s office quite a bit, her first year. She’d seen the darker conspiratorial smile, the one that said, you and I both know you’ve fucked up, and here are your options, and my options. Of course, she’d thought about quitting, but the job had worked well for her. She was actually quite good at the drafting, even though it was boring, sometimes. She had a degree in engineering, so drafting didn’t use the extent of her skills, didn’t challenge her, but she was good at it. The flex time had worked; she had two children, and didn’t see the point, honestly, of having kids and leaving them in daycare ten hours a day. And the office had what was generally called a relaxed, creative ethos, though what that meant, really, was that the designers wore Lululemon and went for three-hour bike rides on sunny afternoons.