The Better Mother

THE OBSEVER

1982


Sometimes he is convinced he can touch people through the camera, that the lens is a finger that grazes the backs of people’s necks, smoothes down tufts of hair standing in the wind. He wonders if the simple act of pressing down on the shutter release means that he has left a trace of himself on his subjects’ bodies—a filmic thumbprint, a flash of light that tans the skin ever so slightly. If he actually reached out and grazed them with his hands, they would turn around and stare, not comprehending how in a city this size, human touch is even possible. How strange, they might think. How uncouth.

He leans his body against the hot Orpheum wall on Granville Street. The day has just begun and everything is still new. Hurtful conversations have not yet started. Women still walk through the city with their blank, nighttime faces. He grips his camera tightly. Every week, he leaves his apartment trusting that he will take that one picture that will breathe otherworldly beauty into ordinary, unsuspecting things and people. He walks, looking for that moment that exposes what twirls inside, the secret loves or hates that shimmer through eyes and open doorways. The photo that will make him famous.

He had come downtown at eighteen, camera strapped around his neck, convinced that he would one day see his images in a white-walled gallery, that people dressed in black, holding glasses of wine, would tilt their heads to the side while gazing at his thought-provoking, visceral photographs. “So raw,” they might say, “as if someone splattered their feelings right there.” And he would smile because everyone would finally know how the world revealed itself when he saw it through his viewfinder.

He sees an abandoned bicycle, wheels upended outside a corner store. The blinking of a Pac-Man machine at the arcade down the street. A backyard bordering an alley that is unintended for casual observers and filled with the particular remnants of family: a burnt-out television, a stack of car tires, a one-eyed dog sniffing its own feet. He even sees the sunshine, cutting diagonally across his viewfinder, yellow slashes on grey sidewalks.

But it’s the people he looks for most.

He sees them walking, driving; sees them eating in the big front window of a diner across the street. Their faces move and wrinkle, their expressions fall or light up. They are lovely, touched by light and shadow, dwarfed by the tall lines of buildings, or made giant when their faces fill the viewfinder with pores and wrinkles, their eyes moving up and down with thoughts of what they might have done better, or what they did best. He stops in mid-stride at the sight of a woman with laugh lines around her mouth and a shiny, dangling handbag that he imagines her drawing tissues from. His breath catches in his throat and he wants to tell her story in one glorious, well-focused frame. But when he finally brings up his camera and looks through the viewfinder, this woman, like every person who catches his attention, turns away and he is left with a shot of the back of her head. Frame after frame of the permed, greying curls of older women, the hatted heads of businessmen, the barrettes of little girls.

His body curves in on itself and he lets the camera dangle from his neck. He must spook his subjects; they can sense his hovering presence and turn away even though he is across the street or behind a rhododendron. He might be a bloodsucker, and the men and women and children are simply protecting themselves. Perhaps he clings to the beat and thrum of other people to counteract his own pale, quiet self. He has spent years staring at his collection of images, and none of them pulse with the beat of human breath, or drip desire and pain and longing. They are pretty little pictures and no one ever made it into a New York gallery on pretty pictures alone, something even his more hopeful, younger self understood.

Now he sees a small figure leaping down the sidewalk, wearing a red-and-blue-striped T-shirt and brown shorts. The little boy comes closer, and Danny watches as he very carefully avoids the cracks in the sidewalk and mouths the words of the schoolyard rhyme. “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.”

Danny lifts his camera and the little boy looks behind him in the direction of the rickety rental houses near the bridge, possibly checking for his mother’s watchful eye in the living-room window. Grinning, he breaks into a run, taking advantage of the mostly empty sidewalk now that everyone has reported for work. His arms and legs pump like a marathon runner’s, eyes closed against the wind tunnel he’s created. He shouts into the street, “Watch me! I’m faster than an airplane!” Danny presses the shutter as soon as he can, but the boy speeds past him. The photograph will be a blur of arms and legs, a swirl to indicate the cowlick at the back of his head.

He begins to walk away, mentally listing all the things he has to do for the next Saturday wedding. Tomorrow he will buy film, pick up his suit from the dry cleaner, fill up the gas tank in the car so he can make it to the church for the ceremony, the park for photos and the hotel for dinner. He’ll have to crouch in the aisle of the big church on Burrard, focus on a bouquet of lilies and gladioli and, of course, the heavy wooden cross hanging above the pulpit.

As he turns the corner on the way to his studio, he thinks about the bride, how she will see his pictures as her memories. She will not remember seeing out of her own eyes, not even that moment when she joins her groom at the altar and he brushes her cheek with his thumb. She will not remember having to pee and marching her bridesmaids to a tiny washroom stall so they can hold up her skirt, the toilet-paper roll digging into the back of her beleaguered sister. She won’t even remember her father whispering to her during their dance, “Your room is always yours in case you need to get away.” All these memories will be sucked into a vacuum where other, older things wait: the name of her first kitten, her favourite sandwich during her entire grade six year, the running shoes she saved her babysitting money for. One day, in a hospital room somewhere, long after her worn vocal cords have fallen silent, there will be a flood, and she will remember everything. But no one will hear.

All of this Danny understands and, strangely, loves. Years ago, when he first began looking for work, he was disappointed that he couldn’t find anything more interesting to photograph than weddings. But soon, he began to see their beauty—the dresses, the light diffused and coloured by stained-glass windows, the flowers that cost hundreds but would wilt the next day. And the rest of it: the pinched face of a father not willing to let his daughter go. The hunted look of a groom who proposed because he thought it was time. The shifting of flesh underneath the big white dress, each chunk of skin manipulated to fit the shape the bride always dreamed she could be and not the shape she really was. What Danny ended up loving was the shiny veneer of glamour and happiness, and the human ache and smell and longing that always seethed underneath.

On the street ahead of him, he notices a bulky man with a shaved head and tattoos climbing upward from the collar of his T-shirt. Blue, green and red inks swirl into snakes and thorns, shiver slightly whenever the man looks from side to side. He walks briskly, turning down Smithe toward the Cambie Bridge. Danny hurries after him, fumbling with his lens cap as he goes.

The man stops for the red light and Danny puts his camera to his eye and starts shooting, zooming in on the tattooed skin, the way the snake undulates around the roll of flesh between skull and shoulder. The shutter clicks. The film creaks as it advances.

The man turns around, and Danny can see his small green eyes staring at him through the lens. Danny drops the camera and lets it dangle around his neck.

“What the f*ck are you doing?” the man booms, taking a step closer.

Danny hesitates, but manages to choke out, “I was just taking some pictures of the buildings.” He points at the law courts across the street.

The man scans Danny, toes to head, and sniffs. Danny wonders if he smells like a gay man, if there is some sort of pheromone that betrays him.

“You stay away from me, skinny boy,” he says, pointing his beefy finger in Danny’s direction. “If I catch you following me again, I’ll smash that nice camera you’ve got there. Understand?”

Danny nods and turns around, walking away as quickly as he can without breaking into a run. The camera bangs against his chest but he doesn’t notice; he is concentrating on the incline of the street ahead of him, and how long it will take him to reach the top of the hill and rush down the other side.


That afternoon, Danny walks down Davie on his way home from the studio. When he stops at the crosswalk, he sees a stocky Chinese man standing outside the corner store across the street, carefully unwrapping a Creamsicle and flicking the pieces of paper onto a browning strip of lawn. It’s Edwin, of course, in a light-grey suit and well-shined, darker grey shoes, with a thin moustache lining his upper lip. Edwin’s brushed-back hair is like freshly poured tar and so glossy that Danny wants to dunk his head in a bucket of soapy water. Danny exhales sharply and walks across the street.

“Danny, what a coincidence!” Edwin steps forward, grabs one of Danny’s camera bags with his free hand and grins, his lips already turning orange from his quickly melting snack.

“How is it that I always run into you?” Danny asks, as they walk together toward his apartment.

Edwin grins. “We’re meant to be together. It’s fate, you know, the universe making sure we’re thrown together as much as possible.” He stops walking and lets out a bellowing laugh. “Don’t look so scared, Danny. I’m just joking. God, you’re not my type anymore, all right?”

It’s never a coincidence, no matter what Edwin says. Whenever Danny sees him standing at a traffic light waiting to cross the street, or drinking a glass of Chardonnay in the window of a bar he’s walking past, he always thinks that Edwin has somehow figured out where Danny is going to be and purposely waits for him, the surprised look on his face so practised it’s almost believable. Danny thinks he can see a triumphant glimmer of I knew it in the lines of his mouth.

At the apartment, Edwin asks if there’s any coffee (“What a day—I can barely stand up”) and settles on Danny’s couch, his feet resting on the table in front of him. Danny can see Edwin’s eyes moving and then resting on the Lucite table lamp, the black leather armchair, Danny’s own photographs hanging on the walls in geometric groupings of three and five. When the coffee is ready, Danny hands a mug to Edwin and stands, arms crossed, watching as Edwin sips noisily and winks over its rim.

“I saw you looking. What are you thinking?” Danny asks.

“Why are you so suspicious? I wasn’t thinking anything.”

“Liar.” Danny sits down in the armchair and looks out the patio window at the building across the street.

“Fine. I was thinking that this place looks like a show home. One of those modern apartments we keep building around here. Do you even live here? Where’s the dirty laundry, the crumbs on the table, the fingerprints on the window?” Edwin puts down his coffee and clasps his hands behind his head. “I could sell this place tomorrow, it looks so clean.”

“Listen, not everyone’s a slob like you. You live in that huge house with all that furniture your parents bought. Look at it now. It’s a complete mess.”

“True enough. If it weren’t for my parents, I’d be a total failure. People remind me of that every day.” Edwin closes his eyes and Danny is unsure if he is hiding disappointment or tears, or if he is simply exhausted.

“Did something happen?” Danny asks quietly.

Edwin laughs, his hand on his stomach. “My dear father called at seven this morning from Hong Kong to tell me that our sales aren’t up to snuff and that if I don’t turn it around in six months, he’s going to close the Vancouver office. We’re making money, lots of money, but not fast enough for the Hong Kong crowd. We can sell the properties, but it’s not like Asia where they have ten bidders for every tiny apartment or roach-infested office.” He rubs his forehead. “And then my mother picks up the extension and starts asking me when I’m going to get married. She’s aching for grandchildren, she says, like having none is a disease or something. I should say to her, ‘Ma, I’m never having children because I like to f*ck men,’ and then take bets on whether she has a heart attack, or falls mute and never leaves her bedroom again. What do you say, Danny? Care to wager?”

Danny leans over and pats Edwin’s knee. “I know, Eddie, I know.”

“Of course you do, my closeted friend. Maybe you should tell my parents and I should tell yours.” Edwin throws back his head and laughs some more, until tears form in his eyes. “We’re a little overwrought, Danny. We need a drink.”

Danny stands up and starts to walk to the kitchen. “I have some beer and a bottle of wine. Let me get it.”

“No, no, stupid. We need a drink somewhere else. Somewhere with eye candy. Somewhere I don’t have to look at your sad face all night.” Edwin jumps up off the couch. “Let’s pretend we’re in high school again, when we were ignorant and cute and thin, although I was never the thin one. Come on.” He grabs Danny’s sleeve and propels him toward the bedroom. “Put something nice on and let’s get the f*ck out of here.”


This is a feeling Danny knows well: that combination of weed and gin, when the music in the club bores into his eyes and ears and belly button until his heart is beating harder than he ever thought it could. It rises and falls and rises and falls and he is breathless, leaning against a concrete pillar that is sticky against his palms with old beer and the fluids of others. He wants to scream above the driving music, slam his body into the crowd, fight or f*ck or both, it doesn’t matter. Edwin bounces across the dance floor, damp hair flopping against his forehead. Danny laughs and then emits a loud, deep belly cry that peaks above the driving bass line for one short, crystalline second. He is lost in the crowd, the men whose skin rubs against his, whose sweat dries in layers, one for every hour spent in this dark, airless club.

Edwin breezes past him and shouts something in his ear, but all Danny can hear is hot, green pants and don’t look now. He watches him dance to the middle of the room where he shimmies to the irregularity inside his head, which is like no rhythm Danny has ever heard. Edwin looks over his shoulder and winks in Danny’s direction, and it feels like an arrow burrowing into his gut.

There has always been something about Edwin that isn’t quite right. He explodes with enthusiasm, squeezes kittens until they squirm and cry and wriggle out of his grasp. He smiles openly at strangers until they look at the ground. Instead of walking, he bounds down the street, his unbuttoned jacket flapping in the air behind him. When they were teenagers, he always offered to buy the beer, even though the clerks ejected him, their faces grim when he stuck his tongue out at them through the glass doors. These are the reasons Danny loves him, but these are also the reasons Danny wants to shake him until his head rolls loosely on his neck and he is mercifully silent.

No matter. There is music to dance to and men all around him with square hands and sharply lined jaws. He runs his finger along a tall man’s stubble, his skin tingling as he feels one hair after another. Yes, this is why he’s here. For this very thing.

Later, Danny walks down Richards Street, his hands and hips and spine still loose and warm from an hour in another man’s apartment. He passes club after club, smiling to himself, sure that no one can see his face on this dark night. He can smell the spilled beer on the sidewalk, hear the sound of high heels on concrete. At the corner, he stops for the traffic light and turns his head to look into the lit window of a club on his right. Through the glass, he sees three men—all tall, all handsome—gathered around one woman in a purple dress. She holds a martini glass and balances expertly in her gold pumps. One of the men whispers in her ear, and she flips back her black hair and turns her face upward. Danny starts. It’s Cindy—languorous, lean, smiling. The very same Cindy he saw three days ago shuffling through their parents’ house. Her lipstick is glossy. Her hold on these men is iron-tight; they look at nothing but her.

Danny knows the pre-sex dance as well as anyone, and he can see that Cindy is poised for a long night. The fabric of her dress shivers as she moves, slides like water over her hips, her small breasts. She shines for the night, and the night loves her back.

He knows that Cindy will sleep with one of these men in a matter of hours, a man whom she will probably never see again, even if he phones, even if he asks to meet her parents and offers to take her far from the house on Dundas. He knows that tonight will be filled with deep core urges, and that tomorrow she will smile over her secret while twisting a piece of hair around her finger. But she will still have to sneak into her bedroom, shoes in hand, all the while listening for the sounds of their parents’ breathing—Doug’s snore and Betty’s soft inhale and exhale, still alert because she has waited for her daughter’s return, but is pretending otherwise. How long can Cindy keep this up, swimming in a different life after dark, in these downtown clubs where she can be the most beautiful woman in a room? In the morning, she is just Cindy, the daughter who says little to her parents before taking the bus to the bank. When she returns in the early evening, she changes into her sweatpants and dutifully sweeps the puddles of water off the walk and into the storm drain.

Danny looks up at the changing traffic light. As he walks away, he remembers that she is almost thirty, that one day she will be past the age that most men find attractive, and then what? She could be a caricature, a middle-aged, grinning version of herself in thick makeup who sips vodka tonics at a table for one in the back. Or she might fade away in her Chinatown slippers, white strands of hair growing at her temples as she rubs their father’s back every night in the fall and winter. Run away, Cindy, he thinks as the cars rush past him. Run now.

Danny turns south on Seymour, feeling that the night is not quite finished. He looks ahead to the flickering green neon sign. Underneath, in crooked lettering, the club announces that it has THE BEST GIRLS IN TOWN!!! The fluorescent bulbs have a pulse of their own. Danny feels their buzz inside his body, that dark cavern in his torso where the blood echoes the sputtering rhythm of the flashing lights. Turning up his collar, Danny digs his hands in his pockets and steps from the sidewalk and through the front door, not daring to look up the street.

Inside, he is not the only person sitting at a table by himself. To the right, a tall man with bifocals and sparse, straw-coloured hair sits with rigid posture, his hands wrapped around a full glass of white wine. His expression never changes, his colour remaining an unhealthy yellow, even when the dancer onstage walks slowly toward him and bends over, holding her breasts together two feet from his eyes. He nods slightly, and she walks away, winking at him over her shoulder.

The waitress, wearing a red and black lace bra top and a faux-leather miniskirt, brings Danny a beer. Her frosted hair is carefully brushed away from her face. When she places the bottle on the table in front of him, she smiles. “Back again?”

Danny nods, holds on to the beer with one hand, waiting for that chill to travel up his arm and into his spine.

The waitress pats him on the shoulder. “At least you’re well-behaved, even if you’re a little quiet.” She laughs and turns away, sauntering toward a table of college boys, who wave at her with two-dollar bills.

Danny is here for one complicated reason: this club—with its glossy stage and sticky tables—feels like home. Not, of course, the type of home where just-baked cookies cool on the windowsill, but a home where a fierce mother pulls you in for a hug that envelops you but also makes you gasp for air. A home where comfort and a crackle of excitement commingle. At his usual table, he waits for the stockinged leg to part the curtains with a kick, for the swish of satin as a dancer makes her way to centre stage, head up, back straight. He comes here because, every once in a while, a girl will make his heart swell. Sometimes it’s the ribbon in her hair, or the coral lipstick she wears. Sometimes it’s nothing at all that he understands, but even then he sits at this table, hope and dried liquor gluing him to his chair. There are nights when he sits here for hours and hours, and nothing catches his eye. He leaves dejected with a droop in his shoulders and the film of too many beers on his gums. When he returns home, his apartment feels colder.

Tonight, he doesn’t like his chances.

The two spotlights spin, meeting in the middle of the stage and parting again. The curtain ripples slightly, like skin covering the breathing chest of a sleeping lover. The club is briefly silent. Everyone, even the fraternity brothers across the room, seems to be waiting on tenterhooks for the next performer, for the girl who will emerge with feathers and long gloves, for the girl who will crack jokes and sing a little as she peels off her gown and stockings, for the girl whom they imagine loving for her breasts and legs, but also for her smart mouth and knife-sharp energy. The spotlights come together once more, illuminating a narrow crack in the curtains. There are possibilities waiting to burst through, to overwhelm him with wit and shine and shimmy. He holds his breath.

The music starts, an up-tempo dance track sung by an aging rocker who has turned to disco in desperation. The tall lone man is bobbing his head to the unrelenting beat. The curtains part and standing on the stage is a small, compact woman with high breasts and bleached hair. She struts her way to the pole in front of a row of tables and quickly, with a beauty-pageant smile, she tears off her short plaid skirt, revealing a pair of sheer black panties. She twirls her fingers in her pigtails and launches herself into a spin around the pole, her legs held stiffly in a wide split.

The schoolgirl act. Of course.

Even from where he’s sitting, in the middle of the back row, he can see that she has used heavy pancake makeup to hide the pockmarks on her cheeks. Under the spotlights, her skin wrinkles every time she smiles or puckers, and Danny notices the age in her eyes, in the way she holds her mouth as she unbuttons her blouse. As he does during each visit here, he searches her knee socks, the elastics in her hair, even the tattoo above her left breast for some trace of glamour. Perhaps a sequin or some glitter. A bit of metallic thread sewn into the straps of her bra. Nothing.

The dancer pulls at the shiny green tie around her neck, easing it through its loop. She brandishes it in the air like a whip, then saunters over to one of the college boys. With a lopsided smile, she wraps the tie around his neck, knotting it into a neat bow the colour of unblemished grass.

Danny coughs, cold beer dribbling out the corners of his mouth. He stands up, drops a five-dollar bill on the table for his two bottles of beer, walks through the maze of tables and stumbles outside. On the way back to his apartment, he doesn’t see anything around him, not the homeless couple arguing over a half-smoked cigarette, not even the ambulance parked haphazardly on the sidewalk across the street, its lights flashing and reflecting on the dark shop windows. He is aware of the pounding in his head, the sensation that things long forgotten are smashing their way through the layers in his brain.

He runs up the stairs in his building while reaching into his pocket. His hands shake and he drops his keys before throwing open the front door and rushing into his bedroom. Memories churn.

“Frank?” he asks, and then shivers at the sound of his voice uttering a name he hasn’t spoken in three years. Frank the handsome. Frank the strong. Frank the one he loved, who left him.

No, not Frank. Danny turns around and stares at his black-sheeted bed. Underneath, he thinks. Look underneath.

He lies down on the floor and peers into the darkness. The one flashlight he owns is at his studio and so he relies on his hands. His fingers touch the springs of the bed frame, the cool wall behind the headboard. But then they brush against something pebbly and large, something with loose fibres that tickle his palm.

Still lying on his stomach, he pulls out an old, sand-coloured suitcase, the one he brought with him when he ran away. His mother’s Chinese and English names are written across the woven top in her light, spidery hand. When he undoes the latches and pushes open the lid, mothball-scented dust puffs into the air. He looks at the stained brown lining, the big rectangular space inside. Nothing.

He reaches into a pocket on the inside of the lid until his fingers touch paper. He is holding two department store catalogues, their pages stuck together with time and damp. He gingerly tries to peel one from the other and they fall to the floor. Muttering under his breath, he pulls them toward himself and feels something slippery between their covers, something altogether different from the slight tackiness of the catalogue pages, something that whispers on his fingertips like breath. He picks up a flat green square and it unfurls until he is holding one end of an emerald silk sash that blows the smell of cigarette smoke and female musk into the air.

The fabric shimmers along its wrinkles, ripples like the surface of water. He runs his thumb down its length and feels no loose threads, no seams, only the smoothness of silk, warmed by his own hand.

He spent so long forgetting his incompatible past that the rush of memory threatens to knock him over. All those childhood nights he spent dreaming in his twin bed below the damp ceiling had been carefully locked away. Up until now, he thought he had organized this perfectly, that his adult life was free of weights and burdens, that he was the Danny Lim of his own making, not the one shaped by his parents or the hours spent breathing in the air of the curio shop. He was the man who cruised without guilt and touched the hip bones of his partners with unshaking fingers. He stares at the sash in his hand and knows that he has failed, that his visit to the family house three days ago was a precursor to this moment. He never completely erased anything, only temporarily pushed his memories aside. All this time, they were waiting. He closes his eyes and groans. It has been a long, long night.

But he looks one more time at the sash lying across his lap and, slowly, his parents’ house recedes and he remembers a specific alley during a warm afternoon twenty-four years ago. A beautiful woman stood in a puddle of sunshine and he knew he wanted her to cuddle him as she sang him her favourite song, about a lover who died, her hands resting on that tender spot between his shoulder blades. Right there, beside the garbage cans. Right then. Danny smiles.

The pounding in his head has disappeared. The past has arrived.