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Exile. Ann Ireland
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She waited until we were slurping noodles from cracked china bowls before getting to the point. She seemed uncomfortable and avoided my eyes.
“You’ve been going through the money too quickly,” she said at last. “We simply can’t afford to front you extra cash; it’s been twice now.”
I nearly choked. Yet she sat there calmly eating, while around us the clink of plastic chopsticks against bowls never ceased. I thought we had come together to talk of our lives as artists.
“My tooth was abscessed,” I said curtly. “I was supposed to tie it to a doorknob and pull?”
“Of course not. But the clothes…”
“I left home only with what was on my back.”
She stabbed at the bowl with her chopsticks. “There are second-hand places we could have taken you to.”
My forehead tightened. I wondered if she and her professor friends bought used clothes. Who knows who’d been wearing them, what diseases they had.
“Daniel Rose is about your size. He’ll have stuff.” Finally she looked up at me. “Also, I don’t see why you go to Millie’s all the time.”
“Millie’s?” This was not a conversation: it was another interrogation.
“The steakhouse. No one I know can afford to eat there three nights a week.”
I stared at her. I enjoy meat. I enjoy a few ounces of scotch with my dinner. I enjoy real food, not these damp noodles and bits of chewy pork. It was not my fault that a nutritious meal costs twenty dollars in this country. But I said none of this. Never before had a woman dared to speak to me in this way, not even when I was a small child in school with the nuns.
She saw my expression. “I’m sorry, Carlos, but we are just trying to help.”
A spritz of cold air hit my backside as the air conditioner switched on. Is this what it was going to be like? I would have to ask permission before eating a potato or buying a shirt? I hated the restaurant with its tippy tables and the plastic tablecloths, which were whipped off between customers. Did she think I wouldn’t know how to behave in a real restaurant with a wine list? In my country, if I met a woman for lunch there would be linen napkins, heavy wooden chairs, soft lighting, and discreet, perfectly trained waiters. And we would not be eating with sticks.
Or perhaps I should be like these Oriental people, working for two dollars an hour and all the noodles I could eat. I should be grateful, always grateful to be here, in Gold Mountain.
I slipped out a Camel and popped it in my mouth.
Rita stared.
“I smoke,” I said. “It’s what I do.”
“Perhaps you can’t afford to smoke so much, Carlos.”
“I am a grown man. I do not need instructions for living.” She poured herself tea from the chipped pot. “There’s one more thing.”
I sucked hard on the cigarette, feeling exhausted. Perhaps it was better in Marta’s basement, where no one was watching and judging.
“We’ve had a few complaints about your behaviour at The Hub.”
This was the student pub on campus. I went there in the evenings when I was lonely.
“I understand you’re there six or seven nights a week.” Seeing my expression, she added quickly, “Your business, except…”
I waited.
“You’ve been borrowing money from the students, telling them that CAFE would pay them back. We can’t keep you in booze, Carlos, and neither can these kids, most of whom bust their asses all summer for tuition money and are living on less, far less than you.”
I stood up, pushing the flimsy metal chair backwards.
“Perhaps next time your group decides to rescue a writer you will conduct much research. Send out questions to all his friends and colleagues, make him sign a temperance petition. I am sorry. I am sorry to all of you.”
I left, or tried to; there was something wrong with the door and it wouldn’t open, though I turned the knob first to the left then the right. Goddamn Vancouver door! When I turned to look at Rita, she was sitting upright in her chair, pale and expressionless.
“Coming or going?” A young man pried open the door from outside and held it for me.
Could I trust one foot to follow the other on the pavement outside? Perhaps the sidewalk had been transformed into a carpet that would be snatched away. I stood there for a moment, dizzy, heart racing. Yet my anger was a mistake. I thought of the woman I had just left in the restaurant, how she had once held up a sign at the airport as she waited for me, her hair raked flat by the rain.
5
“Do you have whisky?”
The bartender, a stout man with an earring, slid a plastic goblet across the counter. “We got red wine, sir. Courtesy of the Okanagan Wine Producers Association. Free for performers.”
I took the goblet with its fruity red wine, and a handful of pretzels from the bowl. It was the annual benefit for the Vancouver chapter of CAFE and I was a featured reader, and nervous as hell. Backstage, the Aquarius Ballroom was jammed with other performers, media types, techies, and beefy men lugging TV cameras on their shoulders. Most of us wore plastic name tags, mine misspelled, and as I wove my way through the crowd, people leaned over in an obvious attempt to read my tag. Many of the media I’d met in the preceding days, when Rita had hustled me around to radio stations and newspaper cafeterias to be interviewed. I was the prize, the example of the organization’s accomplishments. She told me this with a smile, but I understood that it was true. I would be reading from my sequence of “Prison Poems.”
“Doesn’t he have gorgeous hair!” Not for the first time a woman reached for my head and ran her hand through my mess of dark curls. Her companion, a man in a leather vest and jeans, laughed tightly. His tag read: Vancouver Province.
Another woman touched my shoulder and said in a pained voice, “I’m so sorry about what’s happening in your country.”
The elections had been news lately. Fire bombings, a riot in the South.
Christ, I was hot. The room, though big, was crammed and I wished I could shrug off the jacket Daniel Rose had lent me. But underneath was a ratty white shirt and suddenly I felt self-conscious about it, perhaps because I knew its frayed collar would be spied instantly and would instill sympathy and orders for husbands to peel off their own shirts and offer them to the exiled poet. I wished people would stop giving me things, that just for once I could sling my arm over someone’s shoulder and say, “I’ll buy you a drink.” But they don’t want this: as a pair of hands holds out the shirt, the extra winter coat, I see eyes shining with hope and expectation. When I take, with mumbled thanks, what is offered, they smile with pleasure. They watch as I tug on the garment, pulling at too-short sleeves, and nod happily, but they desire more — the coat which touches my back is only part of it.
“Come and meet Stan Drury.” Rita pulled me through the thicket of people to the far corner, under a bleached painting of Queen Elizabeth the Second in her tiara. Wine slapped over my hand onto the cuff of Daniel’s silk jacket. As we tore through the crowd she shot back the biography of the man I was about to meet.
“Stan’s an important poet, not just here, but nationally. And hot to meet you since he’s just come back from your part of the world. Latin America figures large in his work. Stan?” She stopped in front of a huge grizzled man with tufts of grey hair held in place by a bandana. It was his T-shirt that made me gasp: CAFE DE LA LUNA with the familiar logo of two coffee cups tilting inward. The café where every evening of the week I would sit at my corner table with my fellow writers and intellectuals, arguing,