Even though this was said in a partly joking way, Kent couldn’t let it pass. He thought he might as well jump in then as later. He said he didn’t see much wrong with that paper.
They were just waiting for something like that. The older man had already drawn out the information that Kent was a pharmacist and worked for one of the chain drugstores. And the young man had already said, “Are you on the management track?” in a way that suggested the others would see this as a joke but Kent wouldn’t. Kent had said he hoped so.
The curry was served, and they ate it, and drank more beer, and the fire was replenished and the spring sky went dark and the lights of Point Grey showed up across Burrard Inlet, and Kent took it upon himself to defend capitalism, the Korean War, nuclear weapons, John Foster Dulles, the execution of the Rosenbergs- whatever the others threw at him. He scoffed at the idea that American companies were persuading African mothers to buy formula and not to nurse their babies, and that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were behaving brutally to Indians, and above all at the notion that Cottar’s phone might be tapped. He quoted Time magazine and announced that he was doing so.
The younger man clapped his knees and wagged his head from side to side and manufactured an incredulous laugh.
“I can’t believe this guy. Can you believe this guy? I can’t.”
Cottar kept mobilizing arguments and tried to keep a rein on exasperation, because he saw himself as a reasoning man. The older man went off on professorial tangents and the low-slung woman made interjections in a tone of poisonous civility.
“Why are you in such a hurry to defend authority wherever it rears its delightful head?”
Kent didn’t know. He didn’t know what propelled him. He didn’t even take these people seriously, as the enemy. They hung around on the fringes of real life, haranguing and thinking themselves important, the way fanatics of any sort did. They had no solidity, when you compared them with the men Kent worked with. In the work Kent did, mistakes mattered, responsibility was constant, you did not have time to fool around with ideas about whether chain drugstores were a bad idea or indulge in some paranoia about drug companies. That was the real world and he went out into it every day with the weight of his future and Kath’s on his shoulders. He accepted that, he was even proud of it, he was not going to apologize to a roomful of groaners.
“Life is getting better in spite of what you say,” he had told them. “All you have to do is look around you.”
He did not disagree with his younger self now. He thought he had been brash maybe, but not wrong. But he wondered about the anger in that room, all the bruising energy, what had become of it.
Sonje was off the phone. She called to him from the kitchen, “I am definitely going to skip the tea and get to that gin and tonic.”
When she brought the drinks he asked her how long Cottar had been dead, and she told him more than thirty years. He drew his breath in, and shook his head. That long?
“He died very quickly of some tropical bug,” Sonje said. “It happened in Jakarta. He was buried before I even knew he was sick. Jakarta used to be called Batavia, did you know that?”
Kent said, “Vaguely.”
“I remember your house,” she said. “The living room was really a porch, it was all the way across the front, like ours. There were blinds made of awning material, green and brown stripes. Kath liked the light coming through them, she said it was jungly light. You called it a glorified shack. Every time you mentioned it. The Glorified Shack.”
“It was on posts stuck in cement,” Kent said. “They were rotting. It was a wonder it didn’t fall down.”
“You and Kath used to go out looking at houses,” said Sonje. “On your day off you’d walk around some subdivision or other with Noelle in the baby carriage. You’d look at all the new houses. You know what those subdivisions were like then. There were never any sidewalks because people weren’t supposed to walk anymore and they’d taken down all the trees and the houses were just stuck together staring at each other through the picture windows.”
Kent said, “What else could anybody afford, for a start?”
“I know, I know. But you’d say, ‘Which one do you like?’ and Kath would never answer. So finally you got exasperated and said, well, what sort of house did she like, anywhere, and she said, ‘The Glorified Shack.’ ”
Kent could not remember that happening. But he supposed it had. Anyway it was what Kath had told Sonje.
III.
Cottar and Sonje were having a farewell party, before Cottar went off to the Philippines or Indonesia or wherever he was going, and Sonje went to Oregon to stay with his mother. Everybody who lived along the beach was asked-since the party was going to be held out-of-doors, that was the only sensible policy. And some people Sonje and Cottar had lived with in a communal house, before they moved to the beach, were asked, and journalists Cottar knew, and people Sonje had worked with in the library.
“Just everybody,” Kath said, and Kent said cheerfully, “More pinkos?” She said she didn’t know, just everybody.
The real Monica had hired her regular baby-sitter, and all the children were to be brought to her house, the parents chipping in on the cost. Kath brought Noelle along in her carry-cot just as it was beginning to get dark. She told the sitter that she’d come back before midnight, when Noelle would probably wake up for a feed. She could have brought the supplemental bottle which was made up at home, but she hadn’t. She was uncertain about the party and thought she might welcome a chance to get away.
She and Sonje had never talked about the dinner at Sonje’s house when Kent got into the fight with everybody. It was the first time Sonje had met Kent and all she said afterwards was that he was really quite good-looking. Kath felt as if the good looks were being thought of as a banal consolation prize.
She had sat that evening with her back against the wall and a cushion hugged against her stomach. She had got into the habit of holding a cushion against the spot where the baby kicked. The cushion was faded and dusty, like everything in Sonje’s house (she and Cottar had rented it ready-furnished). Its pattern of blue flowers and leaves had gone silvery. Kath fastened her eyes on these, while they tied Kent up in knots and he didn’t even realize it. The young man talked to him with the theatrical rage of a son talking to his father, and Cottar spoke with the worn patience of a teacher to a pupil. The older man was bitterly amused, and the woman was full of moral repugnance, as if she held Kent personally responsible for Hiroshima, Asian girls burned to death in locked factories, for all foul lies and trumpeted hypocrisy. And Kent was asking for most of this, as far as Kath could see. She had dreaded something of the sort, when she saw his shirt and tie and decided to put on jeans instead of her decent maternity skirt. And once she was there she had to sit through it, twisting the cushion this way and that to catch the silver gleam.
Everybody in the room was so certain of everything. When they paused for breath it was just to draw on an everlasting stream of pure virtue, pure certainty.
Except perhaps for Sonje. Sonje didn’t say anything. But Sonje drew on Cottar; he was her certainty. She got up to offer more curry, she spoke into one of the brief angry silences.
“It looks as if nobody wanted any coconut.”
“Oh, Sonje, are you going to be the tactful hostess?” the older woman said. “Like somebody in Virginia Woolf?”
So it seemed Virginia Woolf was at a discount too. There was so much Kath didn’t understand. But at least she knew it was there; she wasn’t prepared to say it was nonsense.