What Passes For Normal

Chapter 16

It was almost five p.m. by the time Teddy's ferry pulled into Horseshoe Bay. His father Alan was waiting at the terminal with a woman Teddy had never seen before. He guessed she was about twenty-five. She had long, dark, wavy hair and Teddy could tell she was beautiful despite the huge pair of retro sunglasses she wore. His first thought was that his dad had dumped Cassie for a younger woman, but he quickly realized that this must be one of the models who regularly posed for his dad's paintings.

"Ted!" said Alan, giving Teddy a hug. "So good to see you! Hey, this is Gabrielle."

Gabrielle shook his hand firmly and smiled at him. The afternoon was bright and clear and Teddy caught a glimpse of himself reflected in her sunglasses. Her clothes were casual but stylish enough that Teddy felt a little inadequate in his old jeans and hoody.

"Gabby's been modelling for me lately in the studio," said Alan. "Is that all you have?" he asked, pointing his chin towards Teddy's backpack.

"Yup," said Teddy and they were soon heading briskly down Highway 1 in Alan's black Porsche Cayenne, "Gabby" in the back seat and Teddy up front, his backpack wedged between his feet.

"We just have to drop Gabby off at her place near 21st," said Alan, pulling abruptly into the left lane. The Porsche engine hummed as they breezed past a row of slower cars that had probably been on Teddy's ferry. "She's an artist too," he added.

If that was meant to spark a conversation between Teddy and Gabby it failed. Teddy did a quarter turn toward the back seat to sort of acknowledge her while she just sat quietly.

It was a little awkward but not as bad as the drive from Victoria to Nanaimo earlier in the day when Neea had shuttled Teddy to the ferry terminal an hour and a half up the island from their house. It was Darwin in the back seat for that trip, and the vehicle was Neea's smaller, older and less luxurious Honda which showed its lack of horsepower on a few of the steeper hills along the way. Darwin had stayed mostly quiet in the back and Teddy had either looked down at his phone or stared glumly at the road ahead while Neea optimistically but unsuccessfully tried to engage them both in conversation.

There was a much closer ferry to the mainland, running from Swartz Bay near Victoria, but that one would take Teddy to Tsawwassen on the other side instead of Horseshoe Bay, meaning a one-hour drive each way through Vancouver traffic for Alan instead of the quick ten-minute run to Horseshoe. For years Neea had, without complaint, driven this three-hour round trip every time Teddy went to see his father or came home again because, it went without saying, her time wasn't as valuable as Alan's.

Alan tried again. "Maybe you saw Gabby in one of my recent works," he said. "Did you see Beauty Ascendant on the website? Or Serenity in Solitude? They were both in the September newsletter. You still get those, right?"

Alan grew up in Victoria, the youngest son of two wealthy, art-loving doctors. From an early age he aspired to artistic greatness and his parents spared no expense in helping him on his way. The greatness he sought was not the West-Vancouver-mansion, Porsche-Cayenne, hot-artist's-model kind of greatness; it was the Picasso, Van Gogh, Da Vinci kind. He wanted people to know the name Alan Ames Aiken the way they knew the names Monet and Rembrandt. Somewhere along the way, though, that dream was replaced by a new one, a dream that Alan was now well on his way to fulfilling: the dream of wealth.

Sometime during the early 2000s, after twenty years in unrewarding pursuit of critical acclaim and the attention of serious art collectors, Alan realized three things: that he didn't like art critics and serious collectors, that he wanted to make a lot of money, and that the average person would be much more likely to pay for a painting that was nice, pretty and easy to understand than one that was ugly, challenging and weird. He evolved a style of painting as well as subject matter—mainly beautiful young women—that a lot of people wanted. He also found a business partner, Sheila, who helped him realize that the big money wasn't in the paintings themselves, but in limited edition prints. For the first time in his life Alan started to make real money for himself. As his old friends and associates in the fine art world turned their noses up at his new direction, he just laughed at their pretentiousness and their stubborn refusal to make art that people actually liked.