The Journey Prize Stories 25 (10 page)

On this day they do not meet after class. Josephine has to take Christian to the dentist. Paul, though, insists that they continue the lesson later in the day, so that Christian will not lose his momentum. In the meantime Paul naps in his studio apartment, right on the couch because he does not feel like pulling out the mattress, among the posters and knick-knacks taken from all the places he has been to: a Monet print from the Louvre, sand in a bottle from Mauritius, replica Lewis chessmen. Most of the travelling was done with his father. He hasn’t done much since. Just hasn’t had the time, or otherwise couldn’t afford it.

The three of them meet, this time, in the late afternoon. He wears a freshly-ironed shirt. She wears, for the first time, lipstick. Christian seems more withdrawn. Everyone acts more gingerly around each other. It has to do with the break after the class, the change in the angle of sunlight.

Yet she can ask questions that she would not during the day. Like: “Are you a Roman Catholic?”

“Yes,” says Paul, which is not a lie, because he was baptized.

“Which church do you attend?”

“The one at school, sometimes,” he says, which is a lie.

“We usually go to St. Joseph’s, but we’ll try the school’s. Then we’ll see you this Sunday?”

“Sure,” says Paul, then steers them back to the lesson. He pulls out from his vest pocket his paperback edition of
The Stranger
. “Christian can read from this.”

“Oh no,” says Josephine. Paul has never seen her blush before.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything. Maybe he’s too young.”

Josephine takes a deep breath and smiles. “That’s fine,” she says. “He can try.”

Christian puts his fingers on the page as if trying to find the words by touch. To help him along Josephine reads:
“Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.”
She is more uncomfortable reading French out loud than just speaking it herself, feels that her instrument is too blunt for Camus’ words, that she is tone deaf to his music. Paul nods and smiles. Christian repeats after his mother. Under Paul’s forgiving gaze, Josephine finds it in her to continue to read and to wait for her son’s echo.

They read until she looks up at the clock and gasps.

“I’m late for work.”

“You work at night?”

“Yes, downtown. I have to take Christian home first.”

“I can take him,” says Paul.

“Are you sure?”

“No problem. Is someone at home?”

“His father and grandmother.”

“Okay then.”

Josephine darts off. Later, Christian leads Paul down Fleming Street, keeping two steps ahead, past stucco houses and wooden hydro poles. Paul sings
“Ballade à la lune”
to cut the silence. An oncoming car has its high beams on, dilating his eyes, and when he adjusts to the night again, Christian is gone.

Christian must have turned the corner into a side alley. Paul runs as if he is being chased. When he reaches the next turn to the back alley he sees Christian pumping his legs beneath the lamplight. He catches up, puts a hand on Christian’s shoulder. They are both panting.

“This isn’t a game,” says Paul.

“This is my home,” says Christian. Paul takes him down
concrete stairs to the back door. Thuong answers the door wearing an unfortunate wife-beater. He has to crane his neck to meet Paul eye-to-eye.

“Did Sonny send you?” says Thuong, then notices Christian. “Where did you find him?”

“I’m his French teacher,” says Paul. Thuong smiles.

“I’m a teacher too. Well, almost. I study economics.”

Thuong rubs the dressing on his arm. Paul had expected a drunk, but Thuong’s eyes are too lucid. With the look of murder, but lucid.

“How is my son doing?”

“He’s wonderful.”

“I’m so relieved,” says Thuong. “A good teacher is so important in a young man’s life.”

“I agree,” says Paul.

Thuong seems to be staring at Paul’s forehead, maybe trying to look him in the eyes.

“You need a haircut,” says Thuong, “and a shave.”

Paul brushes the back of his scruffy head. “Maybe so.”

“Commanding respect begins with a good haircut and a close shave.”

“You’re right.”

“Stay for tea.”

“Thank you, but no,” says Paul. He heads back to the alleyway.

Josephine works at the top of a thirty-storey building. Or at least that is where she starts, before making her way down one storey at a time, in her cleaner’s uniform and with her cart with
the dual mop bucket. Her luxury is a silk handkerchief that she wraps around her face; the same one that shielded her from the sun in Saigon, now spares her from dust.

The top floors are occupied by a law firm with varnished rosewood offices, its founders memorialized in oils hung on the walls. These offices are more lavishly appointed than any church she knows, yet they fall short of achieving the grace to which the firm no doubt aspires.

She lingers at a wall-length window facing north. She rests her chin on her mop, eye level with the lighted ski slopes of Grouse Mountain. The last building that she was this high up in was in Hong Kong, where she saw the New Year’s fireworks. Gaudy dragons lighting up the night, which reminded her of the fire fight she saw on that rooftop in Saigon.

Up here her mind lingers on Paul and her son together, Paul’s voice, his freckled hands around
The Stranger
. There is no way that heaven can be located in the sky, with what she has seen from this vantage point, with what she thinks of when she is up this high.

Professor Jennings calls Thuong into his office overlooking the North Shore Mountains, tells Thuong that his efforts to debunk Communist economics based on his application of game theory simply cannot be defended.

“I’ll try again,” says Thuong. “Another hypothesis.”

“There’s no point,” says Jennings. “It’s been five years. You’re brilliant, in your own way, but you aren’t meant for economics. I’m sorry it’s taken so long to realize this. That is the Department’s failing.”

“I’ll do anything,” says Thuong. By the time they are finished both men are shaken. Thuong stares at the ground all the way to the bus stop. He will not head home. Not straight away. Somewhere is a card game to take his mind off things. Just penny ante fare.

On Sunday morning Josephine wakes up alone in bed, thinking that Thuong has been spirited away. When she gets up to look for him, opens the back door, and sees what stands before her, she does not hear herself shriek, does not feel her heels leave the ground as she trips over the loose threshold, her chin landing on a clay pot on the concrete step.

Outside stands the General. His expression, Josephine has finally decided, is of someone betrayed.

Thuong, as always, appears out of nowhere. “You’re bleeding,” he says. He pulls her off the floor. “You need a bandage.”

“Why is he back?” she says. “I thought he had come for me.”

“You have a guilty conscience.”

“That’s not an answer.” Josephine goes into the kitchen for a white towel, which she presses to her chin.

“I went to the temple. I found him in storage. The monks never intended to give him an altar.”

“What were you doing at the temple?”

“Praying.”

“To whom?”

Thuong ignores her question. “I couldn’t leave him there,” he says. He carries the statue back to its corner.

“Wake up Christian. We should get ready for church.”

“Go without me.”

“Why?”

He smiles apologetically. “I have to study.”

Josephine and Christian walk to St. Maurice under cloud cover. Its church has no bells to greet the parishioners, no steps to ascend to the nave. The service is in English and so Josephine has difficulty understanding much of it. Paul arrives during the prayer of absolution, in his Sunday best, although he is shaggy around the ears and sporting a two-week growth on his face. He kneels beside her. He hasn’t knelt since he was a child. When they drop their chins in prayer he feels like they are play acting. Before the prayer is over Paul cheats, opens his eyes, and takes in Josephine’s face while her eyes are closed. Her expression is beatific from this angle. He does not notice the welt on her chin until she raises her face to meet his.

“What happened to you?”

“Just an accident,” she says. The blood has dried, but the bruise on her chin is still blooming.

“Your husband did this?”

“I fell.”

“Let me see.” Paul cannot help but touch her for the first time, two fingers on the boundary between white skin and violet. He tilts her bruise up like a jewel to the dim stained-glass light. It is a perfect oval. Nothing fashioned so precisely can be by accident.

They walk up together to receive communion, while Christian receives a blessing. Back in the pews they wish peace on their neighbours, many of whom are familiar children and parents, who smile among themselves, as if confirming a truth about Paul and Josephine that they had always known.

Afterwards, Paul offers to walk them home and, eventually, Josephine relents. Paul has one hand on Christian’s shoulder and the other in a fist. Josephine walks by Paul’s side. They take their sweet time in the Vancouver sunlight, which shines as shyly as they do.

When they reach her backyard they cannot see to the house because the clothesline from the apple tree to the fence is thick with her laundry, clothes that from afar look like dead birds strung upside down. Crows and pigeons, blue birds and red robins, seagulls and doves. Thuong has never done the laundry before.

There is the smell of lunch in the air. Behind the clothesline is Thuong. His shirt is off, showing his rack-thin ribs. He is urinating on Josephine’s mint.

“Do you want me to talk to him?” says Paul to Josephine. She ignores him.

“What are you doing?” she says to Thuong.

“Fertilizing,” says Thuong. He turns, zips up his khaki pants, and walks right up to Paul. “Eat with us,” he says.

“I don’t know,” says Paul, but before he can finish his thought Thuong and Christian bring out the foldout table. Then they bring out chairs – some wooden, some plastic.

“You might as well,” says Josephine.

Banh uot
, vermicelli noodles, and prawns with their eyes still attached are doled out on paper plates. “We save them for special occasions,” says Thuong of the plates and plastic cutlery. Everyone sits around the table and, after Josephine says grace, eats in silence. Paul has never tried Vietnamese food. His nostrils flare when he smells the fish sauce. The food feels strange when it touches his lips, never mind his tongue.
The
banh uot
has a squiggly consistency, and he is not sure if the filling is a ground meat or vegetable paste.

Thuong brings out a six-pack of Molson Canadian. “A friend gave me this gift but I just keep it under our bed.” Thuong pours his beer in a glass full of ice. Paul would rather drink warm beer straight from the can. The fish sauce makes Paul thirsty and when he finishes one beer he accepts another. When the old lady offers Paul another helping of
banh uot
, he does not refuse. He had not known how hungry he is.

“I was supposed to be a teacher,” Thuong says. “But I was really meant to cut hair.”