The Sweetness in the Lime

by Stephen Kimber

  How long had I known Mariela? Two weeks? No, not even that. I took the calendar off the wall, placed it on the kitchen table. Every Christmas, Sarah would send my father the same Friends of Canadian Broadcasting monthly calendar filled with photos of nostalgic Canadian TV shows I’d never watched, and my father did not remember. Every year, I would replace last year’s edition with this year’s and then forget to change the months until the next calendar arrived. The latest one had not been turned since January 2008, which made it easy to find the month I was looking for. I counted the days. Mariela and I hadn’t actually met until three days after I’d arrived in Cuba. Did the car ride to Havana count? She was in the front seat. I was in the back. We barely exchanged five words. That morning at the Bodeguita? Yes, that would be a more logical starting point, but I was already six days into my two weeks in Cuba by then, which left only a dozen hours—probably not that many—in the physical company of Mariela? How could I have imagined I’d been in love, that we’d been in love?

  The problem, I eventually decided, was not so much that my relationship with Mariela had not worked out as I’d fantasized, but that the prospect of that relationship had changed my relationship to relationships. Now I wanted one. Perhaps my wanting one had nothing to do with Mariela at all. Perhaps my newly discovered lovelorn angst simply reflected the reality I no longer had my job or my father to anchor my waking hours, to give them a sense of purpose, or at least routine. I had gone from—how did that line go?—alone but never lonely, to pathetically lonely and parenthetically alone.

  But if not Mariela, Wendy? Please god, no. Not that she would have had me. I still shuddered to imagine her day-after remorse. Liv? We were never lovers like that, never would be. Besides, she’d already decamped for Toronto and a maternity-leave editing gig at the Post, which she hoped might lead to something more permanent. The revolution would have to go on without her. Or not.

  With that, I had exhausted all the semi-available single women of my quasi-acquaintance. I test-drank my way through a series of local bars, which The Coast, our alternative weekly, had advertised as the city’s best pickup bars—the Dome, the New Palace, even, by accident, Reflections, which I’d neglected to note was a gay pickup bar—neither picking up nor being picked up. I was too old for pickup bars. And too young for Irish singalong pubs.

  Which is how I eventually found myself at an online dating site called Plenty of Fish. A week before I lost my job, I’d edited a wire-service feature—a cutesy Valentine’s Day business feature—about the startling international success of a Canadian internet mating service whose founder had managed to net $10 million a year from his apartment in Vancouver, working no more than ten hours a week. I remembered those details, and also that I’d wasted more time than should have been necessary drowning the reporter’s tortured fishy word play—“casting their nets,” “virtual online sea,” “hooked,” “best thrown back in the pond,” and blub, blub, blub—but I could not now recall suddenly salient-to-me details like how the service worked, or whether it actually did. As I Googled its website, it was no longer lost on me that I had not so much lived a real life as created a facsimile of one out of all the stories I’d edited.

  I filled out the forms. Longest relationship? “Prefer not to say.” Body type? “Prefer not to say.” Looking for? This time there was no prefer not to say choice, so I chose “I don’t care,” which seemed a little too blasé, but there it was. I also took the “world famous” Plenty of Fish personality test: I am comfortable interacting with strangers. “No,” I answered, but then I changed it to “Yes.” Who wants to interact with a stranger who doesn’t want to interact back? My own thoughts and feelings sometimes scare me. They do, but that might make me seem like a serial killer, so…”No.”

  Plenty of Fish claimed more than a half-a-million users. Surely one among them would want to love me as much as I wanted them to love me. It did not seem so. I did have online “interactions” with a number of women who’d read my profile and were interested enough to respond. Once. A few agreed to meet for coffee, but then didn’t show up. I understood that. I had done the same to others in my turn. Second thoughts? Fear? Avoidance? All of the above, probably.

  I did meet one woman face to face. Her name was Catherine. She was a pleasant enough former Ontario public school teacher a few years younger than me. After her twenty-year marriage—“no kids, thank goodness”—fell apart, she decided to start life over again on the east coast. “Is that crazy?” We had coffee. We talked. We laughed. All good. At the end, I asked if I could call her again. She said yes. I never did. And she never called me either. I don’t know why she didn’t. I know why I didn’t. Whenever I tried to think about life with her, all I could think of was Mariela. What was Mariela doing while I wasn’t?

  2

  “Trib–30–Six” had been the cryptic subject line in Peggy Aylward’s email invitation to an end-of-summer barbecue and reunion she and her husband organized for the Trib’s former newsroom staff members. “The ‘-30-,’” as Peggy explained, unnecessarily and unnecessarily loudly sometime after her third beer, “represents the original telegrapher’s symbol for ‘end of transmission,’ signifying the end of the Tribune. The ‘Six’—you’ll note I spelled it out rather than use numbers, in deference to the Canadian Press Style Guide (cheers, laughter)—that’s to indicate it has now been six long months since the Tribune published its last.” She held up her empty mug. “Long may it reign over us, God save the Trib!”

  To the Trib.

  Liv, no longer among us, no longer offering her revolutionary fuck-the-Man toasts, sent an email greeting from Toronto, which Peggy read aloud. In it, Liv offered her heartfelt thanks to everyone for the friendships and the memories. Peggy teared up. As she did again when she asked us to raise our glasses in memory of John Gibson, “our editor and leader forever.” Gibson—I’d never called him John—died of a heart attack two months after the paper shut down. “He died of a broken heart,” Peggy said, though I guessed his many decades of three-beer lunches to wash down his cheeseburger and fries had been at least a contributing factor.

  Most of the rest of us who hadn’t leaped from the Trib’s sinking ship to various floundering-but-still-publishing newspapers elsewhere had come to Peggy’s gathering to see what everyone else was doing—and if they were doing better than we were. Some, including Peggy, had landed well paid and pensionable provincial government jobs as “communications specialists” or “policy advisors” to the same cabinet ministers they’d once written about. Others found short-term gigs working at the CBC or PR firms.

  “What are you up to these days?” people kept asking me, phrasing it that way to avoid asking if I was still unemployed.

  “Living the dream,” I would say. “Staying loose.” I did not mention my Cuban holiday, nor the fact I still didn’t have a clue where, or if, I would ever work again, or what I would do if I did.

  “You should think about marketing,” my sister had suggested before she took her leave. “We just hired two former journalists at the firm to develop our website and market our services to clients.” I didn’t tell her I couldn’t imagine a worse fate, or one for which I was less well suited. I had spent my career becoming more and more skilled at less and less, and none of the skills I had developed involved creating HTML-PSP-CMS-HTTP-BLAH-BLAH-BLAH web pages for ambulance-chasing lawyers or schmoozing with “clients” about developing “marketing messages.”

  What I’d liked most about newspapers, in fact, was that they were repositories for those without discernible social skills. I’d discovered my own career path near the end of my first year of university. Fresh out of my disastrous high school graduating year and all that followed—I’ll come back to that—I’d stumbled blindly into university and one day accidentally wandered into a campus newspaper recruitment meeting for want of anything better to occupy my time before my next class. I saw immediately they were all misfits and, immediate
ly, that I fit. I stayed. Toward the end of my third year, a former Gazette editor who’d landed a job at a start-up tabloid called the Tribune told me the paper was looking for weekend night-shift editors. I applied, landed the gig, never graduated, and never left the Trib. Until it left me.

  “Hey, Eli!” It was Wendy Wagner. “You’re looking good,” she said.

  “You too,” I replied, meaning it. In six months, her teen-goth-moth look had butterflied into sophisticated young urban professional. She’d deep-sixed the nose ring and the heavy makeup, allowed the natural colour back into her hair, lost some puppy fat. Though she was dressed casually for today’s occasion in jeans and a top, it was also clear she’d put time and thought into what she wore, and how she wore it.

  “How goes the job?” I asked.

  “Great! I’m learning a ton, which means I’m, like, still learning how much I don’t know,” she said. “I wish you were still there to answer my questions.” She laughed. “Now I’m the one the other reporters come to and ask questions.”

  “I’m sure you do fine,” I replied, and meant that, too.

  Since I’d returned from Cuba, I’d occasionally picked up Morning Hi and discovered, to my surprise and despite its execrable name, it wasn’t awful. It wasn’t the New York Times, of course, or even the Tribune. But with an editorial staff that seemed to consist of Wendy and two or three reporters—all even more fresh out of J-School—the paper managed to fill its local news columns, sometimes with more and better local stories than the Herald did with twenty times its editorial resources. The stories were invariably bare-bones brief and without detail, let alone analysis, but the paper appeared to be finding a readership. Whenever I happened to spend time in coffee shops—an occupational hazard of the otherwise unoccupied—I’d notice well-thumbed copies of Morning Hi decorating the tables.

  “Are you…?” she asked.

  “No, not yet,” I answered the question she hadn’t found the words to ask. “But I’m living the dream, staying loose, you know.” I needed a better line.

  “If you’re not too busy, I’d love to get together sometime, maybe like for lunch or coffee,” she said. “There’s some stuff I need to talk to you about.”

  Stuff? Like that time in the bathroom at the Shoe? “Uh, sure,” I said. “That would be nice.”

  “How about Wednesday? There’s a great new sushi place near our office, which I think is actually in your neighbourhood. We could meet there at, like, one o’clock if that works for you.”

  “Sure…OK.”

  “My treat,” she said.

  ****

  Even as a child, I rarely spent time in my parents’ bedroom. We were a family that valued our privacy, if that’s what you’d call it. Now I sat on my parents’ lumpy double bed, my father’s side worn into a rut by his extra twenty years of living and sleeping, and I contemplated the collection of photo albums Sarah had left for me to sort. I leafed through random ones, surprised by their number and by the number of eras they reflected. A few must have been passed down from my grandparents, all of whom had died before I was born. There were no captions, though each photo was neatly arranged and inserted into photo corners. I recognized a photo of my father as a teenager, at the beach with his sister, Abigail, and a boy and girl I didn’t know. Were they friends of theirs, or perhaps Abigail’s boyfriend, Arthur’s girlfriend? Could she have been the “fucking cunt” of my father’s dementia delirium? I really should visit Aunt Abigail, bring along the albums and ask her to identify who was who and what was going on. I would probably not do that. I already understood as much.

  Luckily, there were no albums from my father’s final years. I had only just begun to let go of the vivid mental images of those—Dad’s sallow face, wax-paper skin, haunted eyes, shock of unkempt white hair, his incomprehension about who I was, or who he was, or why he was. I’d attempted to replace them in my head with other, better flash memories—Dad teaching me to throw a baseball when I was five, presiding benignly over Sunday dinners while my mother served and my sister and I talked excitedly about our days. There were no actual photos of any of those moments. I began to doubt those memories were real. Did my father teach me how to throw a baseball, or did I just wish he had? I’m almost certain I borrowed my memory about idyllic family dinners from a television sitcom.

  The final album was an oversized school-project-style scrapbook with a homemade brown paper cover featuring a stencilled title, “ELIJAH,” which my mother must have compiled. There were no candid snaps but a seemingly complete collection of “official” photos glued in chronological order in its pages. These were class photos and head shots from Grade Primary to high school graduation, various hockey and baseball team photos, even an official graduation prom picture of a dorky-looking me and—yes, of course, I remembered her name—standing on a fake bridge with fake flowers in a corner of the gym with its hopeful “Good Luck to the Graduates” banner as a backdrop. And then there was the cast photo from the high school musical in Grade 11. Eleanor stood in the front row of the chorus, with me on one side and Donnie Brandon on the other.

  Are high school relationships explicable? Friendships? Donnie was my best friend. I was from the city’s working-class north end, the son of a low-level provincial civil servant. Donnie lived in the richest corner of the deepest, upper-crustiest south end, the son of a corporate lawyer who served as the minister of something or other in the government. Donnie was the star quarterback on the football team. I cheered from the sidelines. Donnie had a new girlfriend every month. I had my first—and only—girlfriend during my last year, which would have been too late for me to tell Donnie about her.

  Donnie died on the May long weekend of our Grade 11 year. A car accident. He and two friends from the football team were on their way to his parents’ summer house—it wasn’t just a cottage—in Chester when they careened off the road, hit a power pole, flipped over, and tumbled down an embankment. Donnie was driving. Too fast. He was drunk. They all were. And then they were gone. Forever. This was in an era before school grief counsellors, so those of us left behind were left mostly on our own, trying to cope with the adult world of loss before our time.

  I handled it by telling everyone I was supposed to have been with Donnie and the others that weekend—the fourth in his father’s car—but had had to cancel for some reason at the last moment. I can’t remember now why I said I couldn’t go. But I do remember I told that story so often and for so long I believed it was true. It wasn’t. I wasn’t friends with the others. Donnie had never invited me to spend a weekend at his parents’ summer place. Donnie and I were never as close as I claimed. Why did I lie? I had many reasons, not the least of which was to insinuate my way into Eleanor’s heart. I wondered now if I had really been that calculating.

  I leafed through the album again. There was only that one photo, at the graduation prom, of just Eleanor and me. Photographs show the laughs.

  3

  Mariela never did return my calls. But one day, apropos of nothing I could discern, an email arrived. It had been sent from David’s Spanish account. There was no explanation for that either.

  Dear Mr. Elijah Cooper,

  Dear Mr. Eli Cooper,

  Dear Elijah,

  Dear Eli,

  Dearest Cooper,

  I know it is not really your first name, but I would like to call you Cooper, the name I first heard you called. Do you mind?

  The reason I am writing to you today is to say I am sorry for the way I behaved the day you left. I had my reasons.

  I am often frustrated by the ways in which foreigners romanticize my country. And I detected some of that when you talked about moving here. I may love my country—and I do, with my whole heart—but I also know how hard it can be. I do not romanticize life here. I want you to love Cuba too, but the real place with all its faults and not some idealized paradise.

  I realize therefo
re I should have welcomed it when David brought you to our building so you could see how we really live. But that is part of my contradiction. As much as I want you to know the real place that is Cuba, I do not want you to know my real place, if you understand what I mean.

  I was grateful when you bought me a mobile, but resentful too. Another contradiction. Why should I need you to provide me with charity? Why should I need anyone?

  At the same time, I did not want to take advantage of you, did not want to become one of those awful women hanging off the arm of their sugar daddies, exchanging sex for CUCs, or for a ticket to some life of riches unattainable in Cuba.

  That is why I rejected your generous gift of the phone. Later, when I had a chance to think about what I had done and how foolish I had been, I decided I would go to Uncle Lío and get it back. But then I discovered I had waited too long.

  I confess I am not unhappy about that. I can express myself in English more clearly on the page than with my voice.

  I will try.

  I must be honest. I did not, in the beginning, think of you in any way other than as a client. But then I came out of the Interests Section reeling, and I heard you call my name. Your eyes exuded warmth and sympathy, and—even though you had no idea what had happened to me—a kind of empathy. You wanted to help me. I was grateful.

  Perhaps that is why what happened between us happened. It shouldn’t have. I know that now. I did not mean to lead you on. I was vulnerable, and you were kind. But kindness is not enough to serve as the basis for a relationship between us. We come from different worlds. We have lived different experiences. It would be foolish for either of us to think or act otherwise.