by Howard Akler
Joe stays for dinner. Yesterday’s chili, a plate of cornbread whipped up quick. A beeswax candle brightens the room. Something itches his eyes, the dander of domesticity. He turns to Lily. Do you have a cat?
Are you allergic?
It’s mild. He clears his throat. So, he says, what kind of city do you want?
An inclusive one, Lily says. One that doesn’t mess with people’s homes, with their livelihoods.
Honey, it already does.
Don’t call me honey.
Sorry. All I’m saying is you got cars clogging residential streets, you got trucks stuck god-knows-where trying to deliver goods.
So the solution is to tear out the middle of the city?
Joe’s nose twitches. Ah-choo!
Sachs forks his beans. Bless you.
Listen, says Joe. Progress has a price.
Easy for you to say: you aren’t paying it.
True. But that’s because I was smart enough to get out in front of this deal. Unlike some.
Sachs bites and chews. The table cozy as a toothache. Y’know, he says, Joe’s folks ran a cigar shop on Dundas.
Lily dabs the corner of her mouth with a napkin. Oh yeah?
Joe nods. Yup. Near Huron. Though the real business was in back: a numbers bank. Nothing major, but enough to parlay into a mortgage payment.
The odds were what, Joe? Six hundred to one?
For the payoff. Odds of winning were more like a thousand to one. The suckers loved to play the leap year. We used to get hundreds of plays on two-two-nine. They never hit, of course.
For dessert, fruit cocktail from the can. Spoons clink the bottoms of bowls. Joe’s done first. Did you hear the province is getting in on the action, he says. They want to take it away from the syndicate. Legalize it. Don’t know who scares me more, the crooks or the bureaucrats.
Sachs smiles. Not like the old days, he says. Remember the shmoes that used to work for your dad? Joey Applebaum. Solly Cling. The Volgaysi brothers. Wonder where they are now?
Now? says Joe. He makes a face like a fat man climbing stairs. They’re either dead or uptown.
Lily takes a call in the bedroom and leaves the men to clean up. Sachs is wrist-deep in suds. Joe dries a bowl.
She’s a real firecracker.
Thought you’d like her.
Joe twirls the dishtowel. Different from the others, too. Like what’s-her-name. The milquetoast.
Sachs lifts a pot out of the water and examines a starchy glob on the lip. Ever hear from Dot?
Alice pads near. After protracted study she moves on. Ah-choo! says Joe. In the three years since his ex walked out, he’s had plenty of luck with women, most of it bad: possessiveness, spite, penicillin. Nah, he says. That ship has sailed. You, though: I got to admit I never thought I’d see you play house.
Sachs shrugs and hands over a plate. I’m a changed man.
Joe taps his fingernail on the china and says, You missed a spot.
◊
February 17. After sixteen days of hearings, the Ontario Municipal Board voted to approve funds for the continued construction of the Spadina Expressway. It was a split decision, two to one; ironically, the dissenter, chair J. A. Kennedy, had helped pass the original plan back in 1963. The ensuing seven years, he said, had taught him much about the impact of expressways: destruction of neighbourhoods, loss of parkland, air pollution that would reach unendurable levels by 1995.
In order to avoid a civic crisis, he changed his mind.
February 17, later. Sachs in a lather. San Severo Barbershop, two chairs, no waiting. Gus Bosetti puts downs his brush and mug. Lily just broke the news about the OMB. She flips open the afternoon edition of the Telegram. Says from behind headlines, No Pasquale today?
The barber shakes his head. Opens his straight razor and takes three steps forward. From sink to chair, he leaves a trail of other men’s hair.
No more Pasquale. He stays home. The doctor says he has too much blood in his leg.
Too much blood? Lily looks at the other chair, empty. You mean thrombosis?
Sì. A terrible thing for a barber. All day we stand. This is how I do my job. I cannot cut the hair – he does a quick squat – if I sit.
I’m sorry to hear that, Gus.
Sachs stays silent. Keeps his eyes closed and tilts his head according to Gus’s touch. Firm strokes on the right side of his face scrape and scrape and scrape.
Seventeen years we are open here.
I know.
We come on the boat together. To this country. We are boys together. The same town. San Severo. You know where this is? The south.
The boot.
The heel of the boot. Like a fancy woman’s heel. How you say? Long. Pointy.
Stiletto?
Sì, the stiletto. The heel of the boot of Italy. Ionian Sea. Adriatic Sea.
Gus shifts his feet. Wipes soap off the blade.
I miss the water, he says.
Lily and Sachs arm-in-arm down the street. His face frigid and stung from aftershave. They pass the local screw-up, who trails behind him an empty coat rack and the whiff of reefer. Two teens hit them up for a dollar. There’s dog piss in the snow.
She packs a ball of slush and ice and fires at the orangeand-black sign stuck to storefront hoarding: Dur-Splat!-wood-Splat! Gru-Splat!-bb.
◊
You lean back and yawn. Rub your eyes. The coffee shop is filled with tweets and chirps, laptop piffle. Everyone up to the minute and even you begin to rouse from the rut of then. What next? You do the first thing that comes to mind: order another.
◊
They cram into the small flat, a candlelit five. Disaffected with the state of the Stop Spadina campaign, they arm themselves with scissors and glue and engage in tannin-flecked debate about the need to secede.
Injunctions, says Irving. Affadavits. We’re wasting our time with these turkeys.
Agreed, says Claude. The two poli-sci students sit side by side; one clips letters out of an old magazine, the other reshuffles headlines from Good Housekeeping into shibboleth. Crumpled memoranda all around them. Pages of legalese. J.
J. Robinette, counsel for the Stop Spadina Save Our City Coordinating Committee, filed an appeal with the province. The OMB would not have the last word.
They’re fighting the system on its own terms. We need to level the playing field.
How? says Lily.
That’s what we’re here to decide, says Irving. He lights a Belmont and blows smoke through the room.
Phoebe fans her face. There’s a blueprint for stopping expressways, she says. Remember the Lower Manhattan? Jacobs versus Moses?
Speaking truth to power, says Lily.
Exactly, says Phoebe.
If that’s your take, says Irving, why are you here?
I live here, remember.
Vern Dyson burps. He rolls up his sleeves and says, I think what she’s trying to say –
I can speak for myself, Vern!
– is that, uh –
Lily’s voice rises, a febrile lilt. You want to splinter. Don’t you?
I want to be part of a group that does something.
You can’t just break off suddenly.
Why not? says Claude
We’d need a name, Vern says. Something snappier than ss-soccc.
Gee, says Phoebe. That’s a puzzler.
How about the Guerrilla Army of Spadina?
Great. The papers’ll call us gas.
Irving grinds out his butt. Who cares what the papers say?
Listen, says Lily. We’ve all invested a lot of time in building up the movement.
For all the good it’s done.
It’s done plenty of good. Public opinion has definitely shifted.
Yeah, but public opinion alone won’t cut it. We need to tackle private interest. We need to consider more aggressive tactics.
Lily leans forward. What did you have in mind?
Caffeine jag under a high sky. The second espresso was
ill-advised. There’s an anxious jump in your step, an out-of-the-Market stride that takes you back to Spadina in no time. You wait to cross, toe-tap. Streetcars south and north. Two women – one with a walker, the other a pale blue parasol – attempt to figure out the fare machines. Your phone is almost out of juice. You text Es again and tell her you are about to head home.
◊
Two copies of The Bad Trip on display at the cash. A browser on her knees searches for hidden gems. Sachs stares out the window, eyes maunder around the foot traffic on Spadina Avenue. Day after day, an otiose observance: pedestrians’ pale winter flesh now revealed in the warm weather of nearsummer. He shifts in his chair, his point of view restricted to what he’s able to see on the other side of the pane.
◊
Up the stairs with a box of bottles and then one final heft into the kitchen, a wobble in her knees. Lily huffs. She’s bought whisky and wine. There are snacks on hand. Nineteen booksellers soon to arrive, their annual May party hosted this year by Sachs. And her. She has her breath back. Gives the apartment the once-over: there’s ants in the pantry, dust bunnies, bread crumbs between the sofa cushions. Lily shrugs and empties a bag of potato chips into a bowl. Alice bolts from nowhere into her lap. They share a handful. The cat licks her chops.
The apartment clogged with bodies. It’s hard to hear, modicums of wit lost to noise and gesture. One unused glass sits on the sloppy kitchen counter. An editor from New Canadian Press cracks a walnut, while Millard John, all nostril and cilia, boasts about a cache of Bloomsbury letters. Lily, arms folded in front of her breasts, nods. Twice she’s inverted the man’s name. Acorn and MacEwen arrive uninvited. A glass breaks. Alice hides under the bed. Lily needs to refresh her drink.
Excuse me, she says.
MacEwen and Acorn leave. Somebody asks for ice. Sachs hip-to-hip with Betty Porterfield, co-owner of Hoskin Bookseller. She gabs, two drinks in, about her hot find: a Thin Man with the word ‘erection’ on page 138. It caused such a scandal, she says. Can you believe it? Knopf tried to pulp the entire first run. This is rare, baby, rare.
Sachs goes to look for Lily. Excuse me, he says.
Davy Goyen, fusty, musty, collects first-edition Surrealists. He sparks some cheap Mexican hay. Others gather. They beat their gums and smoke the stick down.
Sunday morning on the sofa. Lily reads the first line: After slapping Alexei Tolstoy in the face, M. immediately left for Moscow. Her left thumb taps the page. She reads the sentence again. Tap tap. Her cuticle picked raw, fresh habit developed this past week. She flips back to the author photo opposite the title page: Nadja Mandelstam, wife of the martyred Osip. She titled her memoir Hope Against Hope, a pun on the English translation of her given name, Nadezhda. The poet’s wife has worry lines on her forehead, tired eyes, and lips that look like they smirk under pressure. Lily rubs her lunula: the notion that a woman’s future could tear from the past, like a hangnail.
Sachs gets off the phone. Well, he says, she’s on her way.
No one speaks while the adding machine clacks. There are shared glances from the siblings, an eyeball shorthand that Lily deciphers without trouble. She’s ass-cheek on the kitchen counter. She wears a worn denim shirt. His.
At the table, Sachs slouches. Min punches the final button. Through half-rims, she peeks. It’s shaping up to be another net loss this year, she says.
Lily saunters to the fridge and pops open an earlyafternoon Molson. The sound of the fizz leaves the sister, no doubt, discomfited.
What next?
What what next? There is no next. Sell more books. Buy less? Keep inventory lower.
We’re known, says Sachs, for our selection.
The best in town, says Lily.
Well, that’s not what the numbers say.
Lily takes a swig. That’s not very helpful, Min.
Min stands up and starts to pack her adding machine, her eraser. There are loose carbons on the floor. She bends down. I have a stake in this, too, she says. Whatever happens to the store affects me.
Aren’t you supposed to be a silent partner?
Min takes it on the chin, a sharp jab to be sure, but it’s Sachs who winces.
◊
There’s a noonday drunk beside your bike. He has a rangy face and uncorked opinions. From a double-parked Audi comes Missy E, full blast. You struggle to hear your own soft curses, your bike sticks and unsticks. The drunk belts it out, an imagined mic at his mouth, I’ll shave your chocha…
He curtsies, asks for a toonie. You have half to offer. With a chinstrap click and a last look at the old bookshop, you hit the pedals. Hand-signal one block north and slide into the left-turn lane. The advance green imminent.
iPhones Unlocked! Vegan Burritos! The blink of storefront signs as you barrel along. Alert amid the bustle of College Street, mildly adrenal. A cabbie picks up a fare and pulls away from the curb. You have plenty of time to brake. There’s a hunched old woman with a handcart, marooned on the traffic island; her demented chortle greets the streetcar riders as they deboard. An old couple holding hands. A gaggle of high schoolers, their anatomy of headphones and sneakers. Some Bluetoothed bozo tries to skirt the crowd and snags her high heel on the tracks. She falls, yelps. No one helps.
The cyclist ahead runs the red. You stop. Pedestrian phalanx in all directions. There’s a ghost bike on your right, chained to a post and ring. More and more of these around town, the junked three-speeds painted white and repurposed as roadside memorials to riders killed by cars. This one festooned with azaleas and ribbon. You check the time on your phone even though the clocktower on the Bellevue fire hall stands tall above the intersection. They are three minutes apart.
◊
The credenza, yes. No. No. In cherry. Do you have the one in cherry? Uh-huh. The seventy-two-inch? Good. Add that. What’s the total now? Goodness. The cost of remodelling. Oh well. Now, about those end tables.
Phoebe hangs up the phone. Flashes Lily a wicked grin. The pair of them found a creative approach to civil disobedience, guerrilla tactics applied with apt metaphor: the plan is to bung up Eaton’s warehouse with its own cheap commercial shit. They take turns with the order department. In palaver of the bourgeoisie, they have ridiculous amounts of furniture sent to incorrect addresses. The recipients are all proponents of the expressway. Unwanted shipments will be returned, inventory scrambled. The company will be kicked right in the bottom line.
Now, Lily. She takes a deep breath, dials, and, in a voice that swirls martinis, asks for the most expensive bedroom set to be sent to the home of Mayor Dennison.
◊
Memory of a week ago: the darkness of the room, of the womb, and we were all awake. The baby kicked. Es sighed.
The kid’s got your sleeping habits, she said.
Before bed, we had read that dopamine and melatonin flow from the placenta to the still-developing brain. So even without a peep of natural light, the unborn child would learn the difference between night and day.
The opposite, however, seemed to be true: the baby slept when Es was up and about, her steps a soporific. And when she lay down, nothing but a ruckus in her uterus.
Keep it down in there, you said to her stomach.
And – surprise! – there was stillness.
How odd that unborn ears can recognize your voice, that the vibrations of air you create can hit the cochlea, the auditory cortex, but stay free from semantics. Your child attuned not to what you say, but how.
◊
He rings up three customers in a row. Four more with wallets ready. There’s a welcome patter in the shop, marginal commerce. Despite deep sacral protestation, Sachs at last emptied out the backroom. He’s ready to reduce stock. A weekend sale moves a lot of books. Friday-night strollers drop by and open their wallets. So, too, the students of philosophy and literature, with long reading lists and short supplies of cash. He jaws with a local poet whose name he never remembers. The cash drawer opens and closes, opens and closes. Lily works the floor an
d sells all three copies of The Silent Spring. A fat Atget. Organization Man in both hard and soft cover. At the end of Friday evening, there are vacancies on every shelf. Sachs nods to Lily and turns out the lights. In the darkness, dust motes float.
Night droops onto the rooftops of the city. The moon wanes and drops a weak oblong of light against the living room window. Alice is a shadow across the floor, through a door. She hurtles herself bedward and lands, claws out.
Ow! Shit!
What?
Lily rolls off Sachs. He sits up. His dick already soft. He flicks on the lamp and inspects the cat scratches high on his ankle.
Shit, he says again. Alice curls up beside him and purrs.
Saturday morning, they open ten minutes late. There is a pair already at the door: Mrs. Mintz, dying to haggle, and a lit prof with a taste for the outré. Lily, in denim dress with white stitching, greets him by name: Dr. Gleeman. He checks her out, then the Célines, the Genets. An unfamiliar customer plops a copy of Topaz onto the counter. There is a smudge on the bottom corner of the dust jacket.
I should get a discount.
It’s already half-price, Sachs says.
The customer’s facial features are scrunched between forehead and jaw, a putrid physiognomy. He sniffs. Stomps out. The shop door does not slam; it drifts. Sachs takes the Uris and starts to daub the cover with rubbing alcohol. He gets the ball game on the radio: so, there’s two balls on Fraser and here’s the pitch…
Pammy DaSilva, Lily’s former student, comes in for No Mean City, Eric Arthur’s paean to demolished history. She flips page after page after page, her first encounter with the lost pilasters of downtown, the turrets, keystones. Sachs reads the girl who reads about those architectural details now dust.
And that’s hit deep, deep, but…foul.
Betty Porterfield drops by to snag something good. There’s a wastrel in army surplus, lost in whodunits. A blue-haired type buys everything in Natural History; she wants to charge $86.43 to her card, but it’s cash only so her actual purchase is less than half. Sachs carries three heavy shopping bags to her car and returns to find Phoebe whispering something to Lily. Their initial guffaw restrained at his approach.