“Manly, and yet more like a prop than a garment.”
“I bet you anything our giraffe friend here is always buying Shetland sweaters for the younger giraffes, but he doesn’t even understand why he does it.”
“The sweater-buying impulse baffles him more than it frightens him.”
Jason handed his toys to the cashier. “He’s, like, a vice president of Nestlé operating out of Switzerland, but he’s totally clueless, and he always misses the parts of the board meetings where they do all the evil stuff to third world countries. He sort of bumbles into the boardroom and everyone indulges him…”
“His name is Gerard.”
Jason said, “Yes. Gerard T. Giraffe.”
“What does the ‘T’ stand for?”
“‘The.’”
We rang our toys through the till and kept right on talking. I don’t even know who was steering whom, but we ended up in the Denny’s next door, and we kept expanding Gerard’s universe. Jason said Gerard had this real fixation about being manly. “He wears the sheepskin coat as much as he can. He worships George Peppard, and buys old black-and-white photos and scrapbooks about him on eBay.”
“And he decorated his apartment in rich tobacco browns and somber ochers in maybe 1975 and has never changed them.”
“Yes. Manly colors. Burly walnut furniture.”
“Hai Karate aftershave.”
“Yeah, yeah-he still uses words like ‘aftershave.’”
“And he invites his friends over for dinner parties, but the food is from some other period in history. Cherries Jubilee.”
“Baked Alaska.”
“T-bone steaks.”
“Fondue.”
I asked, “What are his friends’ names?”
“Chester. Roy. And Alphonse-Alphonse is the exotic one with a hint of ‘the dance’ in his past. And Francesca, the beautiful but broke fifth daughter of a disgraced Rust Belt vacuum cleaner tycoon.”
“Possibly someone, Francesca even, is wearing a cravat.”
I thought Jason was the most talkative man I’d ever met, but I later found out he’d said more to me in those two hours than he’d spoken to all the people in his life in the past decade. He was obviously a born talker, but he needed a ventriloquist’s dummy to speak through. Somehow that dorky giraffe on the counter had pressed his ON button, and we had just invented the first of a set of what I would call fusion entities-characters, that could only exist when the two of us were together.
I asked, “What kind of car would Gerard drive?”
“Car? That’s simple. A 1973 Ford LTD Brougham sedan with a claret-colored vinyl roof, white leather interior and opera windows.”
“Perfect.”
In the end, I think the relationships that survive in this world are the ones where the two people can finish each other’s sentences. Forget drama and torrid sex and the clash of opposites. Give me banter any day of the week. And our characters were the best banterers going.
When Jason left to go pick up his nephews that day he took my number with him and called me, and that was that.
Barb just phoned. She’s arrived in Redwood City, south of San Francisco, where she works with Chris-Cheryl’s brother. The Cheryl. I’m no dum-dum on the score, but Jason and Cheryl was so long ago. We move on, or rather, Jason sure tries.
Barb’s commuting down the coast, and she asked me to baby-sit the twins for a few days. Chris proposed to her last week, and she accepted; the world moves in mysterious ways-I mean, Cheryl Anway’s brother and Jason Klaasen’s sister-in-law.
Chris creates face-mapping software programs for governments and big business. Chris can take your face, pinpoint your nostrils, the ends of your lips, your retinas, and with a few more measurements generate your unique unchangeable face-map. You can’t fake a face, even with cosmetic surgery. It all seems a bit spooky to me. I mean, this could be abused so easily, and I told Chris so when he was over at our place for dinner.
“Chris, what if you took the face of a famous actor, and entered their facial proportions into your database-would you find their…duplicate?”
“The term we use is ‘analog.’”
“Come again?”
“Your analog isn’t your twin or your clone. He or she is the person out there who’s maybe a millimeter away from having the same face as you.”
“You’re joking.”
“Not at all. But the weird thing is, an analog doesn’t even have to be the same sex, let alone the same hair color or skin color. Put you and your analog into a room together and people are going to assume the two of you are twins. If you’re a boy and she’s a girl, people will simply assume it’s your twin in drag.”
“This exists?”
“The government already has face-maps of all prison inmates and other people who float through the judicial system.”
Barb was particularly intrigued by this idea. Jason’s father had made some very badly chosen comments about the twins at Kent’s memorial a few years back, and since then she’s been on a crusade to learn everything about twins she can. She began to discuss using face-maps to help twins who’ve been separated when very young, and where the law prevents them from accessing closed files. She became passionate, and there’s nothing sexier than enthusiasm, and boy did Chris respond. First, he got her a job at his company’s Vancouver affiliate, and now they’re engaged.
There’s a lesson there.
I’m sitting here inputting this in Barb’s home office beside the kitchen, looking around at all the bits of things that make her house a home: flowers; a regularly culled cork notice board; obviously tended-to IN and OUT baskets; framed family photos (where does she get the energy to frame things-how does anybody get the energy to frame things?); clean rugs-it’s a long list. I love Jason dearly, but neither of us is very gifted on the domestic front. We’re not quite as bad as those people who plaster a Union Jack or a Confederate flag up on the windows as curtains, and Molly Maid comes in once a month to decontaminate the place with industrial vacuums and cleaning agents perfected during the Vietman War. It’s always hard for us afterward to make eye contact with the disgusted Russian and Honduran girls who do the place. Is it so wrong to be a slob?
Okay, I know I’m using both the present and past tenses for Jason and me. Is he alive or dead? I have no choice but to hope he’s somewhere and breathing. He’s been gone a few months now. Not a peep. He went down to buy smokes at Mac’s Milk and never came home. He walked-no car involved-and, well, the thing about people vanishing is that they’ve vanished. They haven’t left you a clue. They’re gone. A clue? I’d kill for a clue. I’d sell my retinas for a clue. But “vanish” is indeed the correct verb here.
It’s…
The phone. I have to answer it.
That was Reg, calling from his apartment over near Lonsdale. He just wanted to talk. Jason’s disappearance has left him as bewildered as it’s left me. And I must say, it truly is hard to imagine Reg as the ogre Jason’s always made him out to be.
Okay, Heather, be honest. You know darn well why Reg changed: losing Jason was the clincher. He also got royally dumped, just after Jason disappeared-by Ruth, this woman he’d been seeing for years. And not only was he dumped, but she really laid into him when she did the dumping. The essence of her farewell speech (delivered in a Keg steak restaurant as a neutral space) was that Reg was the opposite of everything he thought he was: cruel instead of kind; blind instead of wise; not tough but with skin as thin as frost. I didn’t like Ruth much the few times we met; she had judgment written all over her face. In real life, it’s always the judgmental people who get caught robbing the choir-boys’ charity raffle fund.
I think I’m the sole mortal friend or contact Reg still has, which is odd, as I’m not at all churchy. He sure doesn’t have friends at work; the day Ruth dumped him, he was rummaging in the plastic spoon drawer in the coffee room, and found a voodoo doll of himself covered with pins made from straightened paper clips; the head had been burned a few times.
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“Heather.” The sound of his voice just now-his soul was sore.
“Reg. How’re you doing?”
Pause. “Okay. But just okay.”
“I haven’t heard anything from the RCMP today.”
“I doubt we will.”
“Don’t be so glum. Don’t. And you know what? Chris has mapped Jason’s face from an old photo. So at least he’s in that index now.”
“Heather, how many people are in that index, anyway?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a few hundred thousand. But it’s a start.”
“Fah. A few hundred thousand…”
“Reg, don’t be so negative. It’s a start. And the index is only ever going to grow.”
“He’s gone.”
“No, he’s not gone, Reg.”
“He is.”
I lost it here. I said, “Reg, you either have to have some hope here, or you stop calling, okay?”
Reg was silent, and then: “Sorry.”
“It’s hard on all of us.”
“Heather?”
“Yes.”
“Let me ask you a question…”
“Okay. Shoot.”
“If you could be God for a day, would you rule the world any differently from the way it’s being run now?”
“Reg, you know I’m weak on religion.”
“Well, would you?”
“Reg, have you eaten lunch? You need to eat.”
“You didn’t answer my question. If you were God, would you rule the world any differently?”
Would I? “No.”
“Why not?”
“Reg, the world is the way it is because-well, because that’s the way it is.”
“Meaning?”
“Reg, Jason and I once discussed this. Sometimes I think God is like weather-you may not like the weather, but it has nothing to do with you. You just happen to be there. Deal with it. Sadness and grief are part of being human and always will be. Who would I be to fix that?”
“I forget that sometimes. Me, of all people. I take things too personally.” He went quiet again, then: “How are the boys?”
“They’re downstairs, wasted on sugar. Kelly from next door gave them KitKats, and I could just throttle the woman.”
Reg was fishing here. “Reg,” I asked, “would you like to come over for dinner? It’s five o’clock already.” He paused just long enough to make a dinnertime call seem casual. And so he’s coming tonight for dinner, around eight, and I just heard one of the twins crying downstairs…
Saturday afternoon 6:30
Sometimes I think the only way to deal with turbocharged kids is to give them even more sugar and lock them in a room with a TV set. As I know zilch about kids, this is my first (and last) means of coping, and it seems to work just fine.
I was setting the table when I heard a cartoon bird character on the TV squawk-and suddenly I was back on my first official date with Jason. I thought I’d jot it down here quickly.
The day after we met, Jason and I were headed to look at birds in the pet shop at Park Royal-he was thinking of buying a pair of sulfur-crested cockatiels-but in the store I had a rapid-onset itching fit, allergies, and I had to get some cortisone for my elbows. I work as a court stenographer and am somewhat in public all day, so my skin needs to be in relatively okay shape, and lately my eczema has been a real problem.
So we were standing at the counter at London Drugs when I burst into tears. Jason asked me what was wrong, and I told the truth, which was that it was the most unromantic beginning of a date with the most lovable guy I’d ever met. He told me I was being silly, and gave me our first kiss, right there in line-up.
He didn’t get any birds, but he did buy me three small, anatomically correct rubber frogs, the size of canapés, who soon became Froggles, Walter and Benihana, three more characters for our imaginary universe.
I must be coming across as a basket case here. Frogs and giraffes and…Well, we all create our private worlds between us, don’t we? Most couples I know have an insider’s secret language, even if it’s just their special nicknames for the salt and pepper shakers. After a while, our characters were so finely honed that they could have had their own theme parks in Japan, Europe and the U.S. Sunbelt, as well as merchandise outlets in the malls. After his life of silence, I think that our characters were Jason’s liberation.
And now I think I have to start preparing dinner. God bless Barb’s copper-bottomed pots and her spice rack of the gods.
Saturday night 10:30
Okay, Barb’s housekeeper will be in at 8:30 tomorrow to clean up the battlefield. I really ought to have known better than to put the twins at the same table as Reg, who’s too old and too set in his ways to be comfortable around young children. He tried to keep it together for my sake, but the twins tonight would have worn out an East German ladies’ weight-lifting coach circa 1971. They were monsters. In the end I caved in and gave them Jell-O, then packed them off to watch TV. Barb is going to have my head on a block for teaching them such bad habits.
The good part was that once the kids were bundled off, Reg relaxed and got a bit drunk and picked away at his fettuccine. Jason always told me Reg never drank, but then Jason didn’t see his father for so many years…. In any event, Reg drank white wine, not red, and then tested my grounding in reality by bringing out a cigarette and smoking it as if he’d been born to the task.
“Smoking now?”
“Might as well. Always wondered what it was like.”
“What is it like?”
He chuckled. “Addictive.”
“There you go.”
I bummed a cigarette from him and smoked for the first time in twenty years and got the nicotine dizzies. I felt like a schoolgirl. When you conspire with someone like Reg, you feel as if you’re committing one serious transgression.
Soon enough the conversation turned to Reg’s sorrow about his lost boys-Kent the minor deity and his awful senseless death, and then Jason, but after three months there’s simply no new ground to cover. I had the feeling that what we were discussing tonight is almost exactly what we’ll be discussing in a decade.
Reg became morose. “I just don’t understand-the most wretched people in this world prosper, while the innocent and the devout get only suffering.”
“Reg, you can spend all night-and the rest of your life, for that matter-looking for some little equation that makes it all equate, but I don’t think that equation exists. The world is the world. All you can change is the way you deal with what’s thrown your way.”
Reg sloshed around the last bit of wine in his glass, then knocked it back. “But it’s hard.”
“It is, Reg.”
He looked so damn sad. Jason quite resembles his father; I almost wonder if they’d be analogs of each other, but tonight there was something new in his face. “Reg…?”
“Yes, Heather.”
“Do you ever have doubts about…the things you believe in?”
He looked up from his glass. “If you’d asked me that a decade ago, I’d have turned purple and cast you out of my house-or whatever house we were in. I’d have seen you as a corrupting influence. I’d have scorned you. But here I am now, and all I can do is say yes, which doesn’t even burn or sting. I feel so heavy, I feel like barbells. I feel like I just want to melt into the planet, like a boulder in a swamp, and be done with everything.”
“Reg, I’m going to tell you a story, okay?”
“A story? Sure. What about?”
I couldn’t believe I was saying the words, but here I was. “About something stupid and crazy I did last week. I haven’t told anyone about it, and if I don’t tell someone I’m going to explode. Will you listen?”
“You always listen to me.”
I twiddled a noodle coated with cold Parmesan cheese, and said, “Last week I phoned Chris, down in California.”
“He’s a good boy.”
“He is.”
“Why did you call?”
&n
bsp; “I wanted to-needed to-ask him a favor.”
“What was it?”
“I asked him to give me the names and addresses of the people who made the closest match to Jason in the facial profiling index.”
“And?”
“And…there was this one guy who lives in South Carolina, named Terry, who’s about seventy-five years old, and then there was this other guy, Paul, who lives down in Beaverton, Oregon, near Portland. A suburb.”
“Go on.”
“Well, it turns out this Paul guy has a long but minor record-a few stolen cars-and he got caught fencing memory chips in northern California.”
“You went down there to meet him, didn’t you?”
Oh, Heather, you knew it wouldn’t be a good thing.
I drove down I-5 to Beaverton, an eight-hour trip in migraine-white sun, my sunglasses forgotten back on the kitchen counter. In Washington state my body started to unravel: my elbows began crusting with eczema just north of Seattle; by the time I reached Olympia, I felt as if my arms were caked in dried mud. I cried most of the way down-I wasn’t a pretty picture. People who drove past me and saw me at the wheel must have said to themselves, Boy, sometimes life is rough, and they’d be glad they weren’t me.
I found a chain motel on the outskirts of Portland and spent an hour in a scratchy-bottomed bathtub, listening to teenagers party one room over. I was trying to rinse the road trip out of my body, as well as build up the courage to go knocking on this Paul guy’s door. I was expecting him to inhabit a mobile home that listed on three wheels, with a one-eyed pit bull and a girlfriend armed with a baseball bat and incisors loaded with vinegar-and this was pretty close. I mean, what was I thinking? I’m just this broad who comes out of nowhere, who knocks on this guy’s flaking red-painted front door in the dead-yellow-lawn part of town at 9:45 at night. When the door opened, I was struck dumb, because there before me was Jason-but not Jason-hair too dark, maybe a few years older, and with bigger eyebrows, but it seemed like his essence was there.
“Uh, can I help you? Ma’am?”
I sniffled. I hadn’t planned for this moment, and the resemblance to Jason stopped me cold, even though it was the reason for my mission.