The Better Mother (13 page)

When her soldier leaves Bangkok, the Siamese Kitten secretly follows him to America and discovers his wife and two children. She begs and begs, but he does not leave his family. Instead, he hisses at her to get the hell out of town before everyone puts two and two together. Tears streaming, she boards a bus for Los Angeles, where she dances again and where hundreds, nay thousands, of American men love her at first sight.

The act ends with the Siamese Kitten lying on a red silk chaise, a gold cigarette holder in her fingers, wearing nothing but a G-string and an embroidered shawl around her shoulders.

“Who would you rather be, my friends?” she asks the audience. “The wife at home who has no idea what her husband is up to?” The crowd roars with laughter and stamps its feet on the club floor. “Or me, the Siamese Kitten, wearing the finest silk, adored by not
one
man, but more than I can even count?” She winks as the curtains begin to close. “The choice seems crystal clear to me.” She blows a series of smoke rings that float up toward the stage lights, dispersing as they rise.

Danny wakes up covered in a long lick of sweat. It’s still dark and the street is quiet. He wonders how he will get through this summer.

The phone rings and rings. Danny checks the clock—ten thirty in the morning. He’s slept in.

Naked, he hurries to the living room. The curtains are still closed and an otherworldly light filters in. Danny swears he can see a quiver of anticipation shimmering through the air—perhaps the room itself is waiting for the action to begin. Or maybe all he’s seeing are wayward fruit flies, circling the one beam of light that has managed to force its way in.

He picks up the black receiver and clears his throat. Before he says anything, he hears a familiar voice.

“Danny, it’s Frank.”

Danny sits on the floor; his joints have turned to mush. Almost instantly he imagines a reunion, Frank’s arms around im again, the warmth of sleeping with someone whose body is a visceral, nerve-tinged memory.

“Frank,” he says, his mouth immediately recognizing the shape of his name, the catch in his throat for the ending
k
. “It’s nice to hear from you.”

“I need to see you.”

“See me?” He wants to shout,
But it’s been three years, why now, why are you calling me now?

“I just need to talk to you about something. It’s just that, well, things have changed.” Frank’s voice trails off into a crackly, not-quite-silence.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“We have to talk, that’s all. Can you meet me next Thursday? Maybe for lunch?”

Six days away
, Danny thinks.
How can I wait that long?
“Sure. How about the diner on Denman?”

“Fine. I’ll see you there at eleven thirty. Bye.” The line goes dead.

He stares at the receiver in his hand, at his own bony knees splayed out on the living-room floor. He remembers the light, almost blond hair on Frank’s arms and legs. The way he used to brush his hand lightly over the tips until Frank shivered and grasped Danny’s wrist to stop him. When they were lying in bed, while the light in the bedroom brightened from black to grey to dawn, Danny felt immersed, as though Frank’s body were absorbing his so that they would become something else together, a creature both angelically beautiful and reassuringly real. One winter day, they stood together at an art show and Danny turned his head and saw Frank lit from above, the white beam from a ceiling bulb diffusing all the shadows around them. Frank seemed precious, exquisitely pristine and still. If Danny could have folded up that image and pressed it into his own skin, he would have. He is tempted to rummage in his night-stand for the old photos of him and Frank together, but he
resists. Now that he has constructed a life accommodating Frank’s absence, there can be no room for him. None.

He makes it to the bathroom, where he splashes water on his face, feeling the chilly floor tiles radiate cold from the bottoms of his feet to the tips of his ears, touching every part of his body on the way.

THE WEDDING
1982

Saturday, Danny stands on the bride’s parents’ front lawn, sweating into the collar of his white dress shirt. He hopes he has not soaked through his jacket.

The bride’s mother, with carefully curled blond bangs perched on the top of her head, is hustling a group of people outside and pushing them to a spot in front of a multi-coloured wall of dahlias. The heavy-headed flowers droop in the full sunlight and Danny viciously hopes that the blooms will snap under their own weight and bury the muddled relatives in drifts of orange and purple and yellow. He is shocked at his inner rage but blames it on the heat. He silently promises that he will spend the rest of the day smiling. Overhead, a seagull flies sluggishly, turning and turning in the same circle.

One after the other, groups of people—some red-faced from the heat, others squinting against the sunlight—walk slowly to their designated spots, smile at Danny’s camera and
walk off again, their hair glistening, their clothes hanging limply from their bodies.

A woman in her fifties, whose presence in the doorway seems to signal a shift in the atmosphere, steps out into the sunshine. Hair set in glossy brown curls. Red lips to match a red dress. Long, still-shapely legs visible through a modest slit in the skirt. She saunters toward the dahlias, each hip sliding her body forward deliberately so that she seems to be slithering. Hers is a walk that could be described as
liquid, languid, effortless
. She looks around at the family members shading their eyes with their hands, at the respectable men and women shuffling from one inadequate spot of shade to another, and her body resettles. Swiftly, visibly, she crumples in on herself, pulling the slit in her skirt closed. It seems that she has thrown on a cloak of age, one that suggests respectability, decorum, Sunday dinners with a discreet glass of sherry.

And yet, in her hand, a lit cigarette is burning sweetly and disseminating its smoke through the humid air.

She has changed (it has been twenty-four years, after all, and she is heavier all over, her ample bosom weighed down by its own bulk), but her face still glimmers with mocking humour, and her mouth still blows out little uniform puffs of smoke. Danny feels a surge through his body.

“Auntie Val!” The bride steps out onto the lawn, her white dress like a porcelain doll’s. Danny thinks she is blandly pretty, in her blond, safe and creamy whiteness. He watches as Val gazes at the young bride, at her tiara, her pearls, the sash wrapped around her waist. Val’s smile is turned down at the corners, revealing nothing. Danny thinks he sees her hand
reach out, but when he looks again her fingers are resting on the curve of her hip.

“Auntie Val, you have to stand over here, beside Mum. I want a picture of you together.” The bride waves Val over, her ring finger glittering with a high-set diamond.

Val drops her eyelids and smoothes out a wrinkle on her skirt. “I don’t know that your mother wants to stand next to
me
. She might catch something.”

Three elderly men, standing in a circle on the lawn, guffaw.

The sun begins to burn the tips of Danny’s ears as he waits for the two women to finish arranging themselves so that each is presenting her best side. Finally, Val and her sister are ready for the camera. Both smile, but Val’s lips are closed, her chin down so that the lens can capture the full effect of her direct green eyes. Danny snaps, unable to speak. Val frowns and looks, for the first time, at the red-faced photographer kneeling in the grass.

Danny stands and feels her eyes boring their way into his body, past his grey suit, past his underwear and socks, through his skin and into his organs. What is she seeing? His body’s parts—marrow, blood cells, lymph glands—or something else? Perhaps his real self, like a small, hard kernel hidden under layers of muscle and fat and illusion. Silence stops everything around them. If someone is speaking, he can no longer hear it.

She blows out a smoke ring, contemplating his slightly shorter-than-average frame. Her lips purse and she smoothes down a stray hair that has curled up in the humidity. He shivers and wonders how feeling a chill is even possible.

The air seems to part between them, making a narrow path of clear, damp-free air along which her smell—cedar and lipstick, leather and hairspray—floats toward him. She grins, places a hand on her hip and winks.

Slowly, he hears a low buzz: people’s voices, the hiss of air that follows a car driving down the street, doors opening and closing. Blunt ends of grass prickle his neck. Sunlight illuminates the insides of his closed eyelids.

And he remembers.

He was watching Miss Val; in fact, he was on the verge of speaking to her when a stifling heaviness descended on his shoulders and he felt his spine buckling under the pressure. Before he could look around for help, his neck weakened and his head fell to his chest. He had two thoughts before his body hit the ground.

If I fall backward, I can save the cameras
.

What if Miss Val disappears and I never see her again?

He opens his eyes, sees a crowd of faces peering down at him.

“Danny, thank God you’re all right.”

“It must be heatstroke, and you in that dark suit.”

“Come on then, let’s get the boy something to drink.”

He sits up on the lawn and sips a glass of water. The mother of the bride holds an umbrella over his head, shading him from the early afternoon sun. A bridesmaid, holding up her blue skirt with one hand, sets down a plate of crackers beside him. He searches the crowd for Val, for her red dress, for the smirk he would recognize anywhere. Nothing. He sees only a sulky flower girl, wedding guests in tasteful suits and
pastel dresses, and the bride, wilting beside the rhododendron, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue. He looks down at the grass stains on the palms of his hands, at his tripod lying on its side in the garden, at the limousine waiting blackly by the curb. A mess.

At his eye level, a pair of long legs, encased in seamed, sheer black stockings, walks toward him and stops inches from his nose. A voice, throaty but feminine, says, “All right, folks, let’s all go to the church now. We’re running behind, so why don’t you beefy men over there make yourselves useful and help this poor kid up?”

Danny grabs her hand with both of his as she starts to walk away. She turns and stares in confusion at his flushed face.

“Please, Miss Val, you remember me, don’t you?” His voice cracks.

Val squints, purses her lips. “No, I don’t think so.”

She tries to pull her hand away, but Danny pulls it closer.

“I’m Danny. From the alley in Chinatown, behind the club?”

Val manages to shake off his grip. Her smile is tight, sitting on her skin like a disguise. Her eyes dart left and right, at the family members clustered around them.

“What club, sweetheart? I was never much of a club gal, you know.”

And she walks away, clutching her purse to her stomach, seeming like an old lady as she carefully steps across the uneven lawn.

At the church, Danny stands to the side of the altar, snapping photographs of the bride’s tearful face and the looks of
bemusement and resentment on the faces of her bridesmaids. He sees, through his viewfinder, Val standing outside, watching the wedding through the window, her right hand pressed against the glass. His eyes prickle and he blinks hard until the half-formed tears stop brimming and dissipate, until there is no evidence that he might have been crying. He focuses on Val and releases the shutter. She looks directly into the camera, her eyes like sharp pinpoints—assessing, measuring.

The vows are almost over and soon the couple will kiss. If Danny misses this moment because he is staring out the window at the bride’s vaguely embarrassing aunt, the photographs will be ruined. He has no choice but to look away.

The day has been long. One photograph after another. Speech after speech. Nothing makes this wedding any different from the others. Except, of course, Miss Val. Danny has spotted her out of the corner of his eye all day, her tall body wrapped in red, visible one minute and gone the next, never stepping directly in front of him or his lens. Maddeningly elusive.

After finishing the evening with a few shots of the dancing guests, he packs up his camera and light meter and skirts along the edge of the ballroom. Only the bride and groom’s friends are left, dancing in a mob in the middle of the parquet floor. Trampled corsages are scattered throughout the room, brown and flattened and emitting an off-sweet smell, the bruised odour of fruit left too long on the tree. Danny squints, trying to separate real bodies from shadows and strobe lights.

One long arm shoots up from the middle of the crowd. The bridesmaids and groomsmen part and Danny sees that Miss Val, the lone relative still there, is dancing, her right hand
above her head, surrounded by men who are thirty years younger than her. But this pulsing light is forgiving and she is, right now, no older than the girls who giggle behind their hands at her shimmying hips. Danny can’t tell if Val sees them. The dance and the men who watch her are all that matter. He laughs to himself. There are some things even the Siamese Kitten cannot hide.

All of a sudden, he realizes how silly he has been. He turns and walks to the coatroom, where he picks up his equipment and jacket. His face begins to flush from the tips of his ears down, skipping whole sections of his neck but fiercely spreading around his Adam’s apple, on either side of his nose and the knob of his chin.

Miss Val will never recognize him. He might look familiar and he can creep around the ballroom all he likes, but it will never happen. He was only a little boy. She was a stripper who saw thousands of faces in theatres and alleys too. “Stupid,” Danny mutters. “You’re just a crazy wedding photographer.”

He bends down to fold and pick up his tripod and swears under his breath when one of the tripod’s legs refuses to retract. He is turning a loose screw with his fingernail when a rush of cool air blows against his ears. He turns around and Miss Val stands in the doorway, a lit cigarette in her hand. He reaches for the wall behind. She looks evenly at Danny, at his camera bags, at his glossy black shoes. “Well, little man, let’s figure this out. Who are you and what do you know about me?”