by Howard Akler
What’s so funny?
Nothing, says Phoebe. She wipes a tear from her eye.
Lily clears her throat. Okay if I cut out early?
Simultaneous nod and shrug from Sachs. The women wave and cut across Spadina. He watches them go. Something in their cadence, a drift he cannot catch. Unobserved, the wastrel makes off with four mysteries, unpaid.
Lily and Phoebe hit the Coffee Mill, a patio courtyard off Bloor. The owner, von Heczey, greets them as regulars and offers a corner table. Chatter all around, a swirl of conversations both raucous and discreet. Phoebe tops up their mugs with something from a flask. They clink and drink, two purveyors of radical politics who take the time to discuss concerns both amatory and monetary.
You’re not kidding? says Lily. You really fucked Vern?
What can I say, says Phoebe, I’m just a foot soldier in the sexual revolution.
Lily snorts.
Plus, Blatnyck canned me.
What? When? Did he give a reason?
Phoebe sips. Last week. No reason. Too many typos maybe? No more handjobs? The point is: my bank account’s in the toilet.
Geez, Pheeb.
And then Vern got evicted. Again. So, you know, it was good timing. He needed a place to crash. I needed some help with the rent.
Geez, Lily says again.
Stop saying that. Didn’t you do the same thing? Shacked up when you got fired?
I got suspended. Not fired.
Same diff.
The women pause to watch a bony number take the next table. Floppy red hat, big blue shades. She flips open the front section of the newspaper. Her lips move while she reads.
Lily follows the residue of coffee in her cup. I called my union rep the other day. Did I tell you this?
Un-uh.
There’s still some paperwork to be done. A hearing with the trustee and Libov. But he figures I’ll be reinstated in time for summer school.
Cool, says Phoebe.
I told him no thanks.
Huh?
I told him I’m not coming back. Said it’s time to try something different.
I thought you love teaching.
I do, says Lily. Parts of it. I love the kids, the ones who want to learn, anyway. But all the other bullshit. You know, the bureaucracy.
That, my friend, is everywhere.
Lily shrugs. Maybe, she says.
Phoebe checks her watch. Let’s go, she says. We’re meeting up at five.
◊
You pull an Idaho stop. The side streets are designed to calm traffic – alternate one-ways, chicanes – but a garbage truck is the only vehicle in sight. A worker, burly and tatted, hops off the back and drags a pair of green bins from the curb. The summer scent of organic waste. You weave around him and pass a toothy realtor’s crooked sign. The next house has a Little Free Library. You brake for a gander.
Major and Ulster streets, Brunswick Avenue: you obey the one-ways. Never used to. You, the downtown cyclist, dug the careen and dodge. You rode through thunderstorms, you rode in crazy heat. Nowadays, you go easier on the derailleur. Do the gentlest of index shifts. A gawker’s cadence: bay-andgables still catch your eye, no matter how many times you’ve pedalled past. The dilapidated ones stand out – drooped and peeled, with cracked brick that surrounds carved-sunburst corbels. You break for a stroller. Father and daughter toe-dip in the Fairley Park wading pool. Named for Margaret Fairley, the old Coleridge scholar and activist; Coleridge the Romantic and addict, who wrote that the difference between genius and talent is like the disparity between the egg and the eggshell.
◊
Can’t we wait somewhere else?
Why?
This guy, says Vern Dyson, he keeps checking me out.
Phoebe’s eye is less than covert. Him? she says. The guy in the white hot pants? He’s kinda cute.
Give me a break.
They play pinball in the St. Charles Tavern. The beer is flat. The lights, even late afternoon, are turned low. Two men sway to Peggy Lee’s ‘Fever,’ while Lily, on a pay phone beside the can, gets the lowdown from Irving: their wheels have fallen through.
A bum fan belt, Lily says to the others, but he thinks they can finagle another.
Whose?
Irv knows a guy.
Shit, says Vern. He sucks his teeth.
Be cool, man.
Lily leans against the machine, where the words Shoot Again blink against the backglass.
Got ourselves a free game, Phoebe says.
Looks like it.
The tide’s changing.
Turning.
Huh?
The tide turns, says Lily. Times change.
Phoebe fires the plunger. You said it, sister.
Dinnertime, uptown. A creamy Ford, plateless and dented, slows where Coldstream Avenue meets Glengrove. The spot is away from the street lights, out of the sightlines of middleclass windows. Claude cuts the ignition and the crew gets out. Vern Dyson carries a cardboard box filled with seed bombs. Lily’s the first one to reach in, the ball of sun-baked potter’s clay a perfect fit for her hand. She stands in front of the eight-foot-high security barrier. The big ditch is on the other side. Scrub and pebble and, at the bottom, the halfbuilt Eglinton expressway exit. She gauges height and distance and hurls the bomb. No explosion, but a healthy scatter of ovules. Her resistance to car culture comes with the hopeful future of germination.
What kind of seeds did you use? says Irving. He lobs one that hits the top of the fence and bounces back.
Sunflower seeds, mostly. Some cosmos. Hollyhock.
Phoebe whips one. Her arc is high and true.
You’ve got a good arm.
Ready for the big leagues.
Everyone rears back and fires. As the box empties, the sun begins to set. The sky takes on a cooler hue.
He stews under a lavender sky. Much foot-shuffling in this shade. It’s a long line outside the Imperial Theatre and he’s at the back, eyes out for her arrival. She will not make it. Sachs casts a sustained look at the box, at the napes and collars of the unticketed. This night is the final showing of A New Leaf.
Lily arrives and kisses him on the cheek. Sorry I’m late, she says.
I hate missing the credits.
She springs for popcorn. They share the bag without a touch of each’s buttered fingers. In the dark, on the screen, Matthau struggles to untangle May from her Grecian nightgown.
◊
Small irritations that go unmentioned. Clarifications formed in silence and stranded there. This is how the end begins. Neither Sachs nor Lily are inarticulate people and yet the locution of each gets sapped the longer they are together. Their first two months, even the third, were voluble and erogenous. The sex remained reciprocal for the fourth. Fifth, Sachs holds his tongue more and more, his touch saturnine. He now fucks like a husband.
◊
It’s a steady creaking shuffle he hears, one floor above. A copy of Going Places in his lap. He listens to the mind that wanders from windowsill to closet to kitchen counter: she can never find her keys. Sachs sighs, his chair creaks. A silverfish creeps out of the book’s gutter.
He flips the shop sign from Open to Closed and waits, fists in pockets, while Lily comes down.
You coming or not?
Un-huh, he says.
The Association needs you.
The Spadina Businessmen’s Association? What on earth do they need from me?
Solidarity. The security of a unified front.
I signed the petition. I signed a dozen petitions.
I just wish you’d be more involved.
In my own way, I am. The shop is the street, right? Like Jane Jacobs says.
Fuck Jane Jacobs. I’m not talking about just sitting around. I’m talking about being an active, engaged citizen.
She reaches out. Fingers on her right hand circle his wrist and tug with gentle intent. His gaze floats to a pair of pale freckles along her ulna. He studies them without augury.
Where’s Lily tonight? says Joe.
Giving a speech, says Sachs, to the Spadina Businessmen’s Association.
Why aren’t you there? You’re a Spadina businessman.
I already got the speech.
The bar is long and has such high polish he can see fragments of reflection, his outlined mug. Joe looks elsewhere. The fight on TV: Bad Bennie Briscoe lands a big right to some unranked schlub, a bleeder whose record will take a hit before the third bell.
I saw Briscoe once, says Joe. Three, four years back. In Philly. He KO’d Red Top Owens in the sixth.
Sachs signals for two more.
Sheesh. When’d you become such a boozer?
When’d you become such a lightweight?
Heh. Reminds me of this joke, says Joe. This old Yid sits at the bar. Real quiet. Sips his drink. And then this loudmouth shows up, a bruiser, real Aryan type, and he sneers at the old guy and buys a round for everyone – except, he says, for this dumb Jew. The old guy shrugs: whatever. Next night, same thing. A round for everyone. Except the dumb Jew. Every night for a week. Rounds for everyone. And then finally he can’t help himself. He says: What’s with you, Hebe? You too dumb to take the hint. And the old guy says, Nope…
Sachs interrupts with a raised forefinger. ‘I’m the owner,’ he says.
Oh, says Joe. You know that one.
◊
West on the Harbord bike lane. You’re wheel to wheel. In front, a fixed-gear dude with a bottleneck ajut out of his leather courier bag. And behind, a college girl with blue rinse and plastic daisies entwined in her wire basket. An e-bike toodles between you and an SUV.
◊
Five figures in a moonless parking lot. They leave no shadow as they take their positions at the north doors of Eaton’s department store. Vern Dyson looks in every direction.
You sure there’s no security here?
Sure I’m sure, says Irving. We’ve already scoped it out. This’ll be a snap. Claude?
Claude unzips a duffle bag and pulls out a pair of caulking guns. He loads a ten-ounce tube in each and hands one to his boyfriend. Irving squeezes the trigger. Gunk covers the door hinges and the jamb. The door is now stuck in its frame.
It’ll solidify in a minute or two, he says.
Ha! Good luck opening that this morning.
Eat it, Yorkdale!
Phoebe takes a step closer. Lemme try the next one.
There are five doors in each set, seven more sets around the entire mall. Lily does the last, the expressway’s cloverleaf exchange in the distance behind her. The nighttime air is damp, her palms sweaty. At the same moment, downtown, Sachs wakes to find her pillow is still cool.
All next day, a heaviness in the air. The sky in shades more and more grey – granite, slate, shale – and then with a boom not unexpected the rain comes, the sort of hard summer rain that drops the mercury and clears the sinuses. Lily opens the window. Drops of water pound the sill. Alice on the sofa stretches, sniffs, resettles. On the floor, Sachs again rearranges his tiles. There’s a double-letter square that he can reach via an upward column. He has a Q, but no U. He searches for an acceptable combination. QTBVIMJ. Scrabble is not his game; his interest lies in pure lexicon rather than strategy. Lily does not move. Her eyes adjust to the speed of rain.
Hey, says Sachs at last. Is tivy a word?
◊
Hope and Grubb take turns at the podium. Nomenclature notwithstanding, they manage to agree on one single fact: the city cannot approach its future until the province hands down the final decision on the expressway.
Hope: Whatever happens next, it will be neither an ending nor a beginning. Our communities will always be in flux. What matters is that we have found our voice. We have learned how to speak as one.
And then Grubb: It’s fair to say our operation is on hold. We have no firm plans yet. But the reality is that we are a development company. Our main concern is land. We will continue to pick up options. We will continue to buy properties.
Next, the Q&A: querulous, antagonistic. A Willowdale lawyer carps about his commute and gets shouted down by a quartet of angry ratepayers. Junction hard hats, desperate for work, cuss and boo. The Metro comptroller adjusts his figures, reporters from the Globe and Telegram and Star scribble with haste. Someone scrooches, someone elbows. The gym at Lord Lansdowne P.S. is full and hot and now comes the moment when oxygen turns fugitive: Grubb signals for an egress. His bruiser steps in, a deviated-septum sort in an ill-fitted suit. A holster spotted in his jacket gap. A worried buzz makes its way and finds Phoebe, who whispers to Lily, who alerts a nearby community police officer and, after another quiet word, the thug is frisked. He’s licensed; Lily’s incensed. She kicks the goon in the balls. A loud groan and several shoves and the cop arrests the only person within reach.
With no money to cover bail, Sachs has no choice but to drop a dime. He holds the handset loosely, then with a more insistent grip. He dials, hears mild static on the line after he hits up Joe for a loan.
What? he says.
I didn’t say anything, says Joe.
That’s a first.
Way to butter me up.
Can you front me the dough, Joe? You know I’m good for it.
Yeah, but is she?
I thought you liked her.
Buddy, I hate to say this. But: she’s taking you for a ride.
Well, says Sachs, you managed to say that without much difficulty.
You’re paying her rent.
Joe.
Now you’re paying her bail.
Joe!
Yeah?
Will you lend it to me or not?
Not three hours later, Sachs gets Lily out of the cooler. She remains, however, hot under the collar.
A gun? What kind of creep brings a gun to a community meeting?
She crumples her bail ticket and tosses it toward the trash, but the wad of paper hits the lip of the basket and tumbles onto the sidewalk in front of 51 Division.
Sachs is half a step behind her. First it’s public disturbance, he says in a voice nowhere near light enough. Now it’s littering. What’s your next crime going to be?
◊
Three blocks of Palmerston. Light speckles through leaves of silver maples. A row of nineteenth-century street lamps, their original glass globes recently replaced with polycarbonate ones. An old stone gate post at the end of the street. This was once a tony boulevard, an address for mayors and grocery barons, but the gentry departed and a new generation of landlords halved, quartered, eighthed the homes. For decades, wage earners and students moved in. Now the flats and bachelors and rooms are being reconverted, the heavy oak doors open again for the affluent and the splurgers.
You hesitate at the yellow light and have to brake at the red.
North of Bloor, brief contravention of a one-way, then you take the lane on the left. On your right, the Palmerston Library. Where, eleven years ago, you came in to pay overdue fines on a Planet Earth dvd. This was before streaming, before sexting. Behind the desk was Es. You had spoken only the barest pleasantries prior to this, but enthusiasm for the Birds of Paradise gave her voice.
Such gorgeous plumage, she said.
You fumbled your loonies. You had a wine stain on your white tee.
She scanned your card and up came the record of your patronage: name and address and the books you had checked out. What else did you have, back then, by way of definition? Es grew pinkish in the cheeks. She likes to say you were an easy read. Even at first blush.
Then came the second set of keys, and then a bigger bed. Double to a king, enough space to keep her out of range of your midnight restlessness. Before you knew it, a box on your tax return was marked common law. Breakfast and dinner with Es, thousands of times over. Make no mistake: this was the life you ha
d always imagined. The fatherless narrative, the enduring present. It lasted for a decade.
After that, it went back and forth. To have a child or not. The actual decision was far less momentous than what ensued: amniocentesis, sonograms, a tempo adjusted at your first parenting class. The teacher’s name was Leonora. She wore a Bikini Kill tee and schoolmarm glasses. Her cv listed obstetric nurse, midwife, lactation consultant. She had all the answers for parents-to-be. Save one.
Why can’t you keep the rhythm? she said to you.
Reggae, she had just told us, has the right bouncy cadence to rock newborns to sleep. “No Woman, No Cry” played from her phone. Each future father cradled a baby doll and slowly circled the room; all but you maintained 4/4 time. Around and around you went, your feet unable to find the skanky beat. You can still hear maternal titters, Marley’s semi-rhoticity, his unstressed syllables.
◊
The 7 bus chugs up the Davenport hill. The incline a steep reminder of the prehistoric lake that receded from here and so sculpted the municipal terrain: shore bluff, creek, and ravine. The city shaped by ancient absence.
Red light at the apex. Pedestrians cross. Three more passengers get on board, one an aged schmo with a walker. Sachs offers his seat.
All I’m saying, he says, is don’t tell her about your arrest.
Don’t tell me what to tell her.
Sorry. Just, I know how she’ll react. The whole visit will be strained.
Lily withholds her response. She pouts in contemplation. He hangs on a strap. Bathurst Street is all ups and downs. The road climbs and then straightens over the Cedarvale Ravine and the row of luxury apartments, circa 1920, lowrised and Deco-detailed. The bus speeds past a pair of synagogues, makes the light at Eglinton, and rides the strip-plaza gullet north of Lawrence, where Sachs gives a tentative yank on the stop-request cord.