“I’d like to. Once we get this out of the way.”
She shrugged. “What do I do?”
“Start by picking one of the two men. Don’t think about what he looked like, just think about something he did. Like, smile or not smile. Blink. Pick his teeth.”
She squinted her eyes. “The taller guy. His head…”
“What about it?”
“He kept cocking it to the left, like a dog hearing a whistle. Head shaped like a rectangle. Like a loaf of bread with eyes and a mouth.”
I made some tentative lines, more to encourage her than to accomplish anything. “Hair?”
“Bald as a bottle cap. I don’t think he shaved it bald, I think it was just bald bald. Narrow eyes, close together. His mouth, when he tried to smile, you could see his clenched teeth. White teeth. He’s got a good dental-care plan, whoever he is.”
“What do you mean, when he tried to smile?”
“He smiled like he was faking it. He had one of those mouths that opens like a puppet’s jaw, like on a real crude hinge. Wide. Kind of bracketed, the lines at the side of it, not a curvy smile, kind of inorganic, like a robot smile.”
It turned out I wasn’t especially good at translating any of this to paper, but before too long I had scribbled and erased my way to something Rachel called, “Cartoony, but I guess I’d recognize him from that. Sure.”
The second guy—shorter, rounder, pig-eyed—took less time. I had just finished when Suze came bounding up, demanding to see what I’d done. I showed her. Her eyes went wide. “Who are they?”
“Nobody in particular,” I said.
“Draw me!”
“I think your mother wants to go first.”
“Oh, no,” Rachel said. “Go ahead and make a picture of her. I need to stretch my legs.”
She went off to find a public washroom and smoke a joint. Drawing Suze was fun, though she kept jumping up to see how the picture was coming along. It was pretty good for a rough sketch, I thought. I captured her sandy knees poking out from the hem of her dress, her cautious eyes and wary smile. When it was done I gave it to her. She inspected it critically. “Can I color it?”
“If you like. It’s all yours.”
She nodded, tucked the drawing into her mother’s backpack, and rose to return to the holes she had been making in the beach (because they filled up with seawater, she said, and there were tiny shells in them, along with cigarette butts and bits of charcoal from the nearby barbecue pit). Then she seemed to remember something. She turned back and said, “Thank you for making a picture of me.”
“You’re very welcome.”
When Rachel came back she posed on the drift log, riding it sidesaddle. I produced a quick sketch but a good one; good enough that I was almost reluctant to hand it over to her. She said, “Well, this is bullshit, Adam. I mean, it’s great. But you prettied me up.”
What I had done was pay attention to the way doubt and mischief took turns with the curve of her lips. “Or maybe you’re just pretty.”
“More bullshit.” But she grinned. “Time flies. We should collect Suze and take her to my mom’s. She’ll be wanting dinner soon.”
A few hours in the parking lot had left the car sun-warmed and smelling of sand and ozone. Suze insisted on holding the picture I had drawn of her, and she sang chiddy chiddy bang bang to the hum of the wheels on corduroy blacktop as we crossed the Lions Gate Bridge.
Rachel’s mother struck me as a wearier, more cynical version of Rachel. She had suffered a minor stroke a couple of years back and lived in a public housing complex with two Corgis and a budgerigar named Saint Francis. She didn’t say much—the stroke had left her slightly aphasic—but she surveyed me with unmistakable suspicion, and I did my best to appear small and harmless. “TV dinners?” Suze asked. Her grandmother nodded. “Yay,” Suze said.
Rachel kissed her mom and promised to pick up Suze by noon tomorrow. Then we were on our own. Rachel wanted to have dinner at a New West bar she liked. It was a working-class bar that smelled of stale hops and was dim as a dungeon, but the tables were reasonably clean and the staff called Rachel by name. We ordered steaks from the grill, and I asked for a beer. “Usual?” the waitress asked Rachel, and she nodded. “Usual” turned out to be a rum-and-Coke. She went through a couple of them while we waited for the food, then ordered another. She eyed the beer I was nursing and said, “You drink like you’re afraid of it.”
“I’m not much of a drinker.”
“Yeah, I heard that. About Taus. Big potheads, but not heavy drinkers.”
Sociologists had been taking long, interested looks at the Affinities for years now. The studies were generally accurate, but the public’s misunderstanding of them had generated all kinds of stereotypes. “That’s true,” I said. “Statistically. But in the real world all it means is that the numbers are a little skewed. We have our share of drinkers. A couple of months ago, in my tranche, we helped a guy get into rehab for his alcohol habit.”
“Ah, rehab. Where rich people go, because prison’s so darned uncomfortable.”
The bigger Affinities ran their own rehab and therapy services. It had nothing to do with being rich, but it had a lot to do with being treated by people whose Affinity you shared. Nobody can help a Tau like another Tau. “It’s not always about the money. What else do you know about us?”
“There’s a lot of LGBT people, I’ve heard.”
“A few percentage points over the general population.”
“And you all sleep together.”
“Not true.”
“Maybe not as much as Eyns or Delts. I know a woman who joined the Delts. More like her vagina joined the Delts. We used to be pretty friendly, but she started to ignore me once she found a bunch of fuck friends to play with.”
The steaks arrived from the kitchen, and they were big and unpretentious and reasonably tender. Rachel continued drinking at a steady pace. I did not, which seemed to make her unhappy. I was a bush league drinker; I didn’t like being drunk, I didn’t drink gracefully. So I ordered serial rounds of chips and salsa to keep the waitress happy while some local band began to set up on the tiny stage across the room. The bass player struck an open E that rattled the cutlery.
“You’re going back to Toronto in a few weeks,” Rachel said.
I had told her that the first time we had lunch. “Right.”
“So I guess that means we’re just, we’re … not anything, really. The famous two slips. I mean ships. I keep thinking, I’ll never know him better than I do right now.”
“It is what it is,” I said. “I like you, Rachel. I don’t want to mislead you.”
“You like me all right, but I’m not a Tau.”
“I didn’t say that.”
The heat or the alcohol was making her sweat. She ran the back of her hand over her forehead. “You don’t have to. They used to say, ‘All the good ones are gay.’ Or ‘All the good ones are married.’ Well, sometimes the good ones just have an Affinity to go home to.”
“It’s nice you think I’m one of the good ones.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t.”
The band launched into a full-tilt cover of some old Tom Petty tune, and suddenly Rachel and I were shouting to each other as if we were separated by an abyss. I suggested it was time to start for home.
“Hey,” she said, “no! We’re just getting started! It’s fucking early! Or maybe that’s what you had in mind—some early fucking.”
“Come on, Rachel.”
“I want to hear the music! Then we’ll go. You can keep it in your pants until then.”