The Love of a Good Woman

the elite.
    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 wasconstant, 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. Therewere 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