The Scarlet Macaw. S.P. Hozy
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love you, but I’m glad I don’t have to live with you.”
They had hauled her suitcase and the trunk Peter had left her up two flights of stairs. All Maris wanted was something to drink and a place to sleep. “Which is my room?” she asked, looking around.
“Ha ha,” said Ray, “very funny. Since there is only one room, you can either have the pull-out couch with the dirty sheets or the futon on the floor with the sleeping bag.”
“That’s a tough one,” said Maris. “Uh, can I see the sleeping bag?”
“As it happens,” he said, “I actually had it cleaned after my last camping trip. But only because I accidentally made my bed on a pile of bear shit that I didn’t see in the dark.”
“So bears really do shit in the woods?”
“Yes, indeed they do. Luckily, it was fairly old and fairly dry bear shit, otherwise we might not be talking because I’d be bear shit myself. But I did think it would be a good idea to have the bag cleaned. It was pretty disgusting. I even went for the ‘sanitized’ option, with deadly chemicals.”
“Hmmm,” mused Maris. “That almost sounds like the grown-up thing to do. But I’m betting Terra would have burned it and bought a new one. That would be the really grown-up thing to do.” They both laughed.
“Dare I ask if you have anything to drink? I’m dying of thirst.”
“Well, I have beer … and beer. Which would you like?”
“Uh … I guess I’ll have a beer. You mean you don’t have any pomegranate juice?”
He pulled two bottles of beer from the fridge and unscrewed the caps. “If you want pomegranate juice, go stay with Spirit. And if you want Perrier, stay with Terra. I’m a beer and pizza guy right down the line. You will not find a single lentil or a Brussels sprout in this house.”
“I sure hope you have coffee. I’m going to want some tomorrow, whenever I wake up.”
“Ah,” he said, “coffee there is. A nice Colombian dark roast, freshly ground today for a French press coffeemaker. My one luxury.”
“Ooh la la,” said Maris. “I’m impressed.”
They drank their beer and Maris told him about her flight. She’d had a three-hour layover at Narita airport in Tokyo and hadn’t slept at all. She’d watched three movies and eaten several meals and snacks, all of them tasting the same. Maris had a theory that all airline meals were made out of soybean product, cut into the shapes of various foods, dyed the appropriate colours, and injected with artificial flavours.
“God, I’m tired,” she said. “What time is it?”
“It’s 11:00 p.m., Pacific Standard Time,” he answered. “Time for bed.”
Maris slept until ten the next morning. When she woke up — on the futon, on the floor — the place was miraculously tidy — no pizza boxes, no beer bottles, no old newspapers. Even the stainless steel sink was gleaming. Ray had been to the bakery and bought fresh croissants and cheese Danishes. He was sitting at the table reading the newspaper when she stumbled across the room.
“Did you do all this for me?” she asked.
“Of course,” he said.
“Okay, okay,” she said. “The fun’s over. Where’s my real brother? Where have you taken him?”
“Contrary to previously observed and incriminating evidence,” said Ray, “I’m not actually a complete and total slob. I only have occasional lapses. Coffee?”
“Yes. Absolutely. But let me take a shower first. I feel like I’ve been on a plane for twenty hours. Come to think of it, I have been on a plane for twenty hours. And why did I dream about bears all night?”
Ray got up to plug in the kettle. “The blue towel is clean,” he said.
“And sanitized?”
Ray sighed. “Gee, you’re even funnier than I remember. When are you leaving?”
She stuck out her tongue. “How about the day you get married?”
“How about the day you get married?” he retaliated.
“Touché,” she said. “You’re funnier than I remember.” She closed the bathroom door. “Oh, wait,” she shouted through the door. “I forgot. You’re not my real brother. He’s been kidnapped by aliens.”
Ray smiled as he measured coffee into the French press. He really had missed her.
Maris devoured the croissants and Danishes and savoured the coffee. “Mmmmm,” she kept murmuring, until Ray told her to stop.
“You’re a hummer,” he said. “It’s annoying.”
“I’m a what?”
“A hummer. You hum, you know, ‘mmmmm,’ while you eat.”
She laughed. “You’re kidding. I don’t. Do I?”
“You do. And it’s not an endearing trait. It’s probably why you don’t have a boyfriend.”
“A boyfriend?”
“Okay, okay,” he said. “We won’t go there.”
“You’re right. We won’t go there. Not unless you want to talk about your non-existent ‘girlfriend.’”
“I only have two words on the subject,” he said. “Biological clock.” He put up his hands to stop her from responding. “That’s all I’m going to say. End of discussion.”
She grabbed a section of the newspaper and glared at him. She was definitely not in the mood for this conversation.
After a few minutes of silence he said, “Do you hear something ticking?”
“That’s it!” She jumped up and started swatting him with the rolled-up newspaper. “You are such a pig!”
“Ow! Ow! Ow!” he laughed. “I’m just softening you up for Spirit. You know she’s gonna want to talk about it. She’s on my case all the time. ‘You need to have kids, Ra. They’ll centre you.’ Yeah, I wanna say. Centre me in a deep hole that I can’t climb out of.”
Maris sat back down. “I know,” she sighed. “It’s not that I don’t want to have kids, it’s just that … well, I’m not sure I want to raise them alone, the way Spirit did. It was rough for her, despite what she says. And I wonder what she might have done with her life if she hadn’t been shackled with us.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, as an artist. She’s very creative, you know. Where do you think we get our artistic sense from? Do you think you would have been such a good photographer or I would have been an artist without her encouragement?”
“I notice you didn’t say ‘good’ artist,” Ray said. “How’s your work going, anyway?”
“Not so good,” she said. “Ever since Peter died, I haven’t been able to see things in colour, if you know what I mean.”
Ray pointed to a wall of framed photographs behind him. They were all black and white. “Yeah,” he said, “I know what you mean. But is that a bad thing?”
“It is for me. My art is all about colour. I ‘feel’ colour; it’s a mode of expression for intense emotion, which is what I try and paint.”
“But your paintings are so … so … almost sterile,” said Ray. “And I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense. It’s just that they’re so clean, so precise.”
“But that’s the point,” she said. “I don’t want you to be distracted by technique when you look at my paintings. I want you to respond to the purity … no,