It had been, for a good and pleasant while, that every other Friday evening, Rose from her home in Guanagaspar and Harry from his in Elderberry Bay would speak on the telephone. Harry would hurry from work so they might have a chance to chat well in advance of her husband Shem’s return from his standing poker engagement with the boys.
However, one Friday evening in the late summer/early fall, knowing that Rose and Shem were scheduled to spend that weekend at their beach house, Harry, rather than return home to an end-of-week evening without Rose’s scheduled voice in his ear, decided to eat his supper at the Squamish Hotel pub.
A mournful wail of country music from the jukebox clashed with laughter, excited chatter, the pings, whistles, and dings of pinball machines, the clack of pool balls, and an undecipherable buzz of commentary that accompanied car racing on a huge television screen in a corner. Two smaller screens hung from the ceiling near the bar, throwing irregular flashes of blue light throughout the room. One ran a sitcom with a black family. Their chatter was inaudible, yet every few seconds a burst of audience laughter erupted. The other screened music videos, though no sound was heard.
Harry had ordered the fisherman’s catch and a local beer and sat at a table in an area he had determined to be the least noisy.
Along with two of his workers, he had spent most of that day, a cool but sunny one, crouched under rosebushes, tilling and turning powdered oyster shell and fresh compost into the soil around the plants’ thick aged trunks where the toughest, largest thorns were. Long and unyielding spicules had gripped his clothing and etched his arms with inch-long blood-beaded slashes. His body burned and his scalp stung. He felt alive.
Under the dim yellow light of a torch-shaped wall sconce, he listed the following week’s chores in a notebook, Rose always at the back of his mind, imagining that she, too, missed their week’s end telephone engagement.
Copper fungicide on fruit trees, he wrote. Spray can.
Telephone Asha’s Garden Center for grease bands. Call Dalton’s.
He absently looked up. Among a handful of male patrons was a woman hugging the bar counter one minute, swinging around to lean her back against it the next. She wore a cropped blouse, one of those handkerchief-type tops that tie in a knot just below the breast area, and jeans that seemed to pinch her lower body into rigidity so that she swiveled on the pointed toes of her high-heeled shoes. Harry stared at the exposed belly and, when she swiveled, at the taut behind, of the flamboyant woman. Her roaming eyes caught his. She smiled quickly. He bent his head again.
Apply grease bands to apple trees MONDAY!
Mountain ash, strawberry flats for Osborne’s.
Mildew spray/Dr. Chen’s roses.
Suddenly his name was shouted by a woman’s unfamiliar voice. Not expecting that any woman he knew would visit a place like this, he decided instantly that another patron named Harry was being addressed. The noise in the pub had certainly increased since his arrival half an hour earlier. He applied himself to the list again.
Birdseed.
Sharpen pruning shears.
Cultivator rental.
Shoelaces.
Unexpectedly his shoulders were grabbed, thumbs shoved into his back and released before there was time to react. He swung around and there was Kay. He pushed his chair back and stood.
She ignored his outstretched hand and wrapped her arms around him. He imagined he smelled of oyster ash, compost, and the sweat of a hard day’s work. He looked to see from where she might have appeared: on the other side of the room was a congregation of women, some sitting at a long table, some milling about, all behaving rather raucously. Kay pulled back a chair and sat at his table. He lowered himself into his chair.
She was instantly full of chatter. She and her friends were celebrating the end of “summer camp for grown-up girls.” She had won the prize for having the season’s highest number of bogus golf shots. She carried on about not being much of a golfer; the only driving she really fancied was on logging roads that led to remote lakes and campsites. She laughed at herself, and he couldn’t help but laugh along. He was happy to see her. It was good, to tell the truth, to have her come up to him and greet him so warmly in such a public place. It made him feel as if he belonged—nowhere in particular, yet everywhere. Sometimes, she was saying, she just got in her vehicle and headed to one of the lakes—she pointed vaguely behind her—to do a little canoeing.
And what about him, she perked up still more, startling him. He had no chance to consider the most meager of answers, for she continued: he was a wine drinker, that much she certainly knew. In fact, she rolled on, just the other day she had been thinking about his club and was curious about how it had come about. His club. He smiles at this notion.
“You don’t too often see people from the islands—you know, people like yourself, darker-skinned I mean, if you don’t mind me saying, is it kosher to say that? You don’t see them paying close attention to the wines. Well, at least not as carefully as I’ve caught you doing. The ones you buy are always, and I mean always, winners.”
He enjoyed the flattery.
She simply couldn’t pass up this opportunity, she said, to hear about the club. “So, who else is in it?”
She was welcome relief from the isolation of his secret and enveloping liaison. And the topic of the club did concern her. It was she, after all, who, though still unknown to her, through an ill-conceived bit of deducing on her part, had planted the notion in his and his friends’ heads that they were a wine-tasting club. When they called themselves that, it was in jest, mocking the eager clerk he had once mentioned to them.
As he turned in his mind what it was that this rather forward woman was wanting from him, and what he might offer her, his impulse was to provoke her. He told her that on arrival in Canada, to put himself through school—for he was a qualified gardener now, he interjected—he had driven a taxi. He paused for a response, a show of surprise or some noticeable loss of interest, but she merely nodded to indicate her attentiveness. A few of the drivers in the company he had worked for became friends, and long after they had moved on from that line of work, they maintained their closeness.
Kay’s attentiveness intrigued Harry. Happy now to be socializing, he expounded: at one of their regular rum-drinking gettogethers, one of the ex-taxi-driving friends, a man named Anil, waxed on with inebriated eloquence that fine-wine drinking was nothing but status-mongering; it served only to exclude immigrants and to imprison them—in particular those from the non-grape-growing equatorial climes, the darkies of the world—in what was supposed to be their rightful place: that of backwardness.
Unfazed, Kay asked, “And is this man still with you guys today?”
He nodded affirmatively.
“So his position has changed, then. Good. You’re definitely a first. Carry on.”
She was certainly a brassy woman. He noticed that the roots of her red-tinted hair were brown and that at the temples there were gray strands. He decided to relay what Anil had said, as if reciting a well-known piece of lore.
“‘Fellows like we could smell curry a hundred miles away. We born with taste buds that mourning the scarceness up here of scents and flavors like hurdi, illaichi, dhania, the tandoor.’ Do you know what those are?” he interrupted himself to ask her. “Turmeric, cardamom, Indian spices, and that sort of thing. So, to continue, Anil said to us, ‘You ever hear of wine that have those flavors? Is a simple fact, man: people like us not born with a wine-tasting gene.’”
Alertness brightening her eyes, Kay opened her hands in a gesture of impatience, saying, “And so?”
And so, continued Harry, at the following gathering of the old friends, another ex-driver, Partap, deciding to prove Anil wrong, showed up with what had been determined for him—and Harry pointed to Kay as he said, “By someone exactly like yourself”—to be a so-called fine red wine.
Kay nodded as if accepting a compliment that had been slid to her across the table.
To the surprise of the old friends, they had indeed discerned the distinct aroma of oak and an unlikely tang of black pepper, exactly as the bottle’s label had promised. Kay nodded aggressively, as if to say, “Of course!” With their curiosity piqued, the following week there was another bottle of fine wine, and the week after that, yet another. The jaded Anil proclaimed in good time that after one of their sessions, he had felt a tingling and a twitching deep inside of him, so deep he could hardly identify where, but he knew instinctively that it was the awakening of his latent wine-tasting gene.
And so the Once a Taxi Driver Wine Tasting and General Tomfoolery Club, as they eventually dubbed themselves, was still un-corking. Kay clapped her hands as if she herself had triumphed. A mischievous impulse to rein in her too-eager enthusiasm prompted him to blurt out, “But tell me something, have you ever tasted the flavor of coconut in a wine? And lamb vindaloo? Because, I will tell you, we have tasted mango, curried crab, red fish, and chicken stew. We have even identified in certain South American reds a variety of styles of garlic—sliced, smashed, minced, roasted.”
Kay showed no surprise but looked eager. She asked if he had a preference for a particular grape, or for the wines of a specific region. Before he could answer, she slipped in that she hardly ever drank anything but Italian, and mostly the heavier reds, the Barolos and Barberas, and she couldn’t honestly say that she had ever tasted anything like curry or garlic in them. Harry was compelled to take advantage of how readily she indulged him.
He reveled, gilding fact and fiction, that he and his friends vowed to shun the Old World vintners—the wines of Europe. They, the dark-skinned island people, he said, squinting mischievously at her, had been too wounded by centuries of Old World greed and exploitation to unbegrudgingly partake of its stuffy fare, the result of which was that he and his ex-taxi-driver friends agreed to drink only the less expensive but lighthearted wines of Chile and Argentina, those of Australia, since it was, after all, a commonwealth country and, one way or the other, their consumption would benefit the aboriginal population. They conceded, Harry added, to support the British Columbia wine industry, and still drank Californian wines because they were all in agreement that much of the labor propping up that industry was immigrant, and it was the support of the immigrant—not the consideration of taste—that was of significance to them. Kay laughed raucously, blurting out that she thought he and his friends were wonderfully mad, and she drew out the word “wonderfully.”
Abruptly, she reached out, slid aside his beer mug, and cupped both her hands over the tiny blood-beaded dashes on one of his forearms. The fingertips of one hand, wet from the condensation on the mug, startled him.
“Animal or roses?” Her voice lowered in the noisy room; it was a few seconds before he realized what she had said.
He answered. She nodded knowingly, moved her cupped hand lower then higher, resting it lightly each time for a few seconds. Her forwardness was beguiling. On account of it, he had just revealed things about his life, made light of his insecurities, and suggested that there could be a frugal side to him. After being faced with Rose’s discomfort of Harry’s early Canadian work experiences, hardly any of this—even in jest—would he have dreamed of disclosing to her. But his friends, their club, their antics, and their delight in inventing off-color moral justification for their actions meant a great deal to him, and Kay’s indulgence was a much appreciated validation.
Her hot hand, still on his arm, only made the rosebush wounds sting more.
“Well, I know a whack about you—still not enough—but fair is fair: let me tell you about myself,” she said, causing him to realize that he knew hardly a thing about this person in front of whom he had so unreservedly revved himself up. She proceeded to impart that she had been married to a man from Iran. Peeved by this revelation, he slid his arm away from her; he mused inwardly that perhaps he was not special after all—it was merely that this woman liked foreign men, immigrant men. Perhaps his wine-club story wasn’t all that interesting, he thought, and admonished himself to exercise more discretion with his babbling in the future.
After the second of two daughters was born, her husband left them and returned to his country, and ever since, she has been on her own, she said.
To break the awkwardness that immediately ensued, Kay, again gesturing to some undefined vicinity behind her, asked Harry if he had ever canoed on any of the lakes. He muttered that he hadn’t. “Not very Canadian of you,” she said in a tone of mock accusation. “We’re just going to have to fix that, aren’t we!”
Getting up as the waitress arrived with Harry’s order of deep-fried seafood, Kay suggested that since fall was just around the corner, they take advantage of the good weather forecast for the weekend and head out the very next morning. Harry thought again of Rose; with Shem ever present, there was hardly a chance that she would try and contact Harry from their seaside home. Besides, he had no other pressing engagements. It was a well-timed opportunity, he reasoned, to do something out of the ordinary. From his notepad he tore a page and handed it and his pen to Kay.