by Wayne Grady
When you asked Professor Curtis what he liked about teaching, he admitted it was the high. He said he got the same adrenalin rush that kept rock stars like Mick Jagger going night after night when they were on tour and turning eighty. Addicts. You seriously thought the professor was addicted to reading, or talking. He rarely did anything else. In the restaurant that afternoon—Christ, had it only been ten hours ago?—instead of asking, “Why did you turn down my offer of a scholarship?” he quoted a line from Shakespeare about friends forgot. That was one addict talking to another.
To be really good at something you had to have what the shrinks call an addictive personality. You had to be a bit obsessive. You had to take something that originated outside yourself and put it at the centre of your life. Baseball. Booze. Books. Having a touch of Asperger’s didn’t seem to hurt either. You looked it up: A certain deficiency in interpersonal communication skills compensated for by a heightened sensitivity to and use of language. Sound like anyone you know?
People at the university had no idea where you came from, none, it was like you’d materialized from the mud at the bottom of the Fraser River. Few of your White Falls friends even finished high school, and those who did didn’t go on to university. Some of them went to Madawaska College to take auto mechanics or data processing or whatever, or got jobs in some electronics outlet, but they stayed in White Falls or moved to a town exactly like White Falls only smaller, made Garage Band CDs of their own terrible music, posted them on Amazon and sat back waiting for the royalties to roll in. They thought that showed they had gumption, when if they actually had any gumption they’d have taken a course in songwriting and hired a marketing firm. Your dad would have killed you if you’d dropped out of school to spend the rest of your life pushing a stroller around Giant Tiger, but it wouldn’t have surprised anyone else. Kyle expected that. Even you half expected it. It was what people did. They got their girlfriends pregnant and started working at Home Depot or Canadian Tire. Started out at the bottom and scraped their way up a rung every couple of years. Moved from a basement apartment to a two-bedroom townhouse. Saved up for a condo. Bought a used RV on Craigslist and spent two weeks in August swatting mosquitoes in Algonquin Park, watching the kids swim in Canoe Lake and burning off bloodsuckers with the ends of cigarettes. Called it living. The good life. Does anyone know how tempting that can be to an addict? Like letting yourself sink into warm quicksand.
One of the books you read in first-year English was Robertson Davies’s What’s Bred in the Bone, which took place in a small town Davies called Blairlogie. It was supposedly Peterborough, but to you it was dead-on White Falls. Divided in half by the Madawaska River, the big houses on the east side built a hundred years earlier by lumber barons who became senators and members of Parliament, their houses now busted up into bed-and-breakfasts run by embittered Scots Presbyterian women who begrudged every muffin they served at breakfast and paid unwed mothers from the west end less than minimum wage to iron their sheets and clean their toilets. He got that part right, didn’t he, old Rob? The grimness, the pettiness, the caste system. But he also got the other part right. He gave small-town Ontario a horrific, smothering kind of dignity, the tempering childhood flame from which some, like Francis Cornish, like you, emerged as hard and sharp as a box cutter. You thought you made it out. You made it to Vancouver. You made yourself over: new clothes, new hair, new drugs, new man, new life, where no one from your past would ever find you. Or recognize you if they did. Not even your father. Congratulations, girl. You came right out of a Davies novel.
But the title still haunts you, doesn’t it? What’s Bred in the Bone. Can you ever be rid of what’s bred in the bone?
Or, to put it another way, why do you think you found Wendell more attractive than Paul?
It wasn’t only because of Paul’s betrayal. In fact, Paul didn’t betray you. He was simply being Paul. You just didn’t see it. And you didn’t see it because White Falls had trained you to understand only the Wendells of the world. Wendell went deeper than Paul. Paul was cocaine, but Wendell was your addiction to cocaine. Close your eyes and picture yourself happy. Where are you? Drinking champagne cocktails at a black-tie fundraiser with Paul, or lying naked on a mattress in Wendell’s van drinking white wine and passing a joint? Face it, girl, you weren’t addicted to the highs. You liked the highs, who doesn’t, but you were addicted to the lows.
Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, unto the green holly:
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly.
* * *
—
You thought you should be getting back upstairs. Coffee Guy might have forgotten you were down here and locked the place up for the night. So you stood up. Checked that nothing had fallen out of your bag, especially the canister. Lid on tight. Hair on straight. Went back up the narrow stairs. Your cup was not where you’d left it on the table. You strolled to the front of the café, where Coffee Guy looked at you askance. You looked at him askance. You had a grievance.
“Did you clear away my cup?”
“I did.”
“Why? I wasn’t finished.”
“You were downstairs for twenty-five minutes. We closed ten minutes ago.”
“No we didn’t.”
“We were supposed to.”
“Does that mean we’ve gained ten minutes, or lost ten minutes?”
He looked mournfully at her. “Everyone’s a quantum physicist these days,” he said. “What’s your name?”
“Martin.”
“Let me ask you something, Martin.”
“Okay.”
“Have you ever loved anyone?”
“What?”
“Do you know what I mean?”
“No, actually.”
“I’ll rephrase. Are you now or have you ever been in love with someone? Or something?”
He wiped an invisible smudge off the counter. Then he straightened.
“I love my apartment,” he said defiantly.
You let that sink in for a while. You thought about your apartment. It made a weird kind of sense. “That’s so sad,” you said. “Can I ask another question?”
“Shoot.”
“What are five things you hate?”
“Easy. Just five?”
“For starters.”
“The back-up beepers on trucks.”
“Check.”
“Yappy little dogs. Help-us-serve-you-better questionnaires.”
“Yup. That’s three.”
“Car speakers you can hear two blocks away.”
“The people who use them, the people who make them. One more.”
“Talk radio.”
“Excellent. There’s so much to hate in the world, isn’t there? I find it inspirational. All you need is hate, right?”
“Hate will keep us together.”
“Can I have a coffee to go, Martin?”
“Nope.”
“Nope? Why nope?”
“I’ve turned off the machine.”
“It’s snowing out there.”
“Sorry.” He grinned. “I hated saying that.”
“I need to check my friend’s number, then I need to phone him.”
“Five minutes.”
Outside the shop you looked up and down Powell Street. There was more snow on the ground, and the cold hit your bare legs. Only two sets of tracks on the sidewalk, yours and probably Paul’s. He must have walked past while you were downstairs. He probably went home. The van was in the opposite direction. But when you got to where the van had been, it wasn’t there. Shit. Wendell must have finished his poker game and gone home, too. Parked in its place was an ocean-blue Toyota Corolla with a dent in the passenger door and a child’s seat in the back. “University of Southern California” was stencilled on its rear window and under it, four white stick figures, a man, a frizzy-haired woman, a
toddler with his arms up in don’t-shoot position, and a small dog. You considered your options. Go into the café and throw yourself on the mercy of Martin. Get a cab and go to Wendell’s house. But he lived a forty-dollar cab ride away, and you didn’t have any money, and what if he wasn’t home? Maybe he was out looking for you. Christ, how could you not have your phone? Go back to Paul’s and get it and your keys. No, that was not an option.
You reached into your purse to make sure you didn’t have your phone and that you did have the canister. You did. Callooh! Callay! Present difficulties forgotten, you took the canister out of your purse and hefted it in your hand like a cantaloupe at the farmers’ market, opened it. A little puff floated out, which you sniffed in with a few snowflakes. Ah, Lac Tremblant. Lovely, powdery snow. If Wendell were here you’d spread some out on the lid of his glovebox, he’d hand you his Mexican straw and you’d snort your way into Inca heaven. You wouldn’t be standing in a snowstorm in the Downtown Eastside with no money, no phone, no key to your apartment, a purse full of prescription drugs, and a canister of cocaine, listening for footsteps and thinking maybe you made a mistake about your father.
Your father. Maybe you could call him? Option number three. It would take eight hours for him to get there, but what else did you have to do? You could call him from the coffee shop and wait there for him. Martin wouldn’t mind, especially if you showed him the canister. Open arms. You hurried back to the shop, a plan having formed, but the door was closed. Lights unlit, lock locked, alarm alarmed. Jesus, he said you had five minutes. You pounded on the door with your good hand. Maybe the apartment he was in love with was upstairs. You kicked the door. But rare was the door in the Downtown Eastside that could be kicked in. No lights flicked on. No one came to see what the fuss was about. So now what? Your list of options had been drastically reduced. They were now zero.
It was all so fucking tragic about your dad, wasn’t it? According to Shakespeare, that was not love that altered when it alteration found, but he was wrong. Love alters all the time. You still loved your dad, but you loved him differently than you had when you were, for example, ten. You didn’t love him much when you were thirteen. He was okay when you were fifteen and said you could live with him in Toronto, then it was your mother you didn’t love. You altered, he altered, love altered. In your email you told him you loved him but you didn’t want to see him for a while. What kind of love was that? But he was too passive in his love for you. He thought love was something that just happened, like chicken pox, everyone got it and most people got over it. Parents were supposed to love their kids unconditionally, but there was no such thing as unconditional love. There are terms of engagement. You can be my daughter as long as you stay in school, get good grades, don’t do drugs, meet a guy I like, get married, buy a car, buy a house, be happy, be grateful, be fruitful, multiply. Granted your dad never said any of those things, that’s what you meant by passive. But it was the system, and you knew he’d be happy if you stayed within it. He’d go on loving you.
Footsteps again. Paul. Why was he even bothering? You ran along Powell towards Main. Lights, people, you turned right on Dunlevy and slowed, clutching your bags. On your left was Oppenheimer Park, home of the homeless, dozens of tarps thrown over grocery-store carts and picnic tables, lit from inside by who knew what hellish flames, crack torches, crystal meth burners, heroin candles. Walk on, walk on. A guy across the street checking his cell phone. With hope in your heart. You turned right down a quiet alley, a sheltered vale, out of the wind, a bit dark but all the better not to see you with, my dear. And you’ll never walk alone. No marks in the snow, no visible condoms or needles or dog shit under your feet, though undoubtedly there. You laughed when you bumped into a dumpster. Dumped into a bumpster. You could just squeeze yourself between it and a vine hanging over a fence. Was it holly? A stupid place for a vine, or a fence, or you, but you were nicely hidden under it. Invisible. The rim of the bumpster was at your right breast. Now there was a good Old English line for you. Bitter breast-care have I abided. You wiped some snow off the ledge, reached into your bag, took out the canister, and dumped a sizable heap of coke on the rim. Two little hills. You didn’t need Paul’s credit card, or Wendell’s silver straw. That nice man in the coffee shop, Martin, was genuinely concerned about you, wasn’t he, you could tell. Didn’t he offer you a room? He’d for sure give you a refill, let you use his phone again, let you wait in his shop. But wait for what? Maybe he owned the building. Maybe he’d take you to a hospital where you could have your hand looked at. But first, why not have an oxy, now that you’ve got them out? Thank you, you think you will. Heigh-ho the holly, this life is most jolly.
Suddenly you saw the Dark Figure again at the top of the alley, backlit by the lights in Oppenheimer Park. Be still, my beating. No, be quick. The first pile went down extremely well, a little too much, you didn’t get it all but there was no rush. Well, actually there was quite a rush. Easy, there, Daph, don’t laugh, you’ll blow the rest away. Into the green holly. There went pile two. You were an Electrolux. Look, madame, clean as a whistle. How many clean whistles have you seen in your life? Now what? The dumpster was attempting liftoff. It was climbing. Booster rockets kicking in. You tried holding it down with your chin but it had too much thrust, it kept rising. It was pushing your jaw up. Christ, your tongue was in there. Now it was squeezing you against the vine. Heigh-ho, come in, Houston! You grabbed the edge and your bandaged hand hit something, shit, the canister, you knocked the fucking canister into the dumpster. You had to get it. You had to dive into the dumpster. It would be safer in there, anyway. Out of the howling wind. You could do it with a little effort. Your foot found a foothold, you heaved yourself over the edge. Rub-a-dub-dub, said the Owl to the Pussycat. Where was the canister? There it was. You’d be fine now. You were safe. No one would find you in there. Because thou wert not seen.
Harry
DECEMBER 1, 2009
Dorothy was right: even at two o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon the highway traffic to the airport is at a standstill. Doesn’t anyone work all day anymore? Why do they still call it rush hour? He’s stopped somewhere between Islington and Airport Road, wipers barely coping with the accumulating snow. The traffic used to be this bad only on long summer weekends. The August when Daphne was fourteen and spending the month with him and Elinor, he rented a cottage in the Haliburton Hills, north of Toronto, and the three of them made the four-hour trek every Friday afternoon. Elinor brought games for the car, but Daphne was at the age when reading books was an act of desperation, as though her life depended on getting through as many three-hundred-page novels in a weekend as possible. All those nineteenth-century doorstoppers he’d managed to avoid at university, she loved them. She told him about them when he drove her back to White Falls, as if the characters were people she met every day. He’d glance over at her in the passenger seat, looking out at a farmhouse they were passing and seeing Heathcliff or Roderick Random coming out of it, and think if it was good for her it was good for him. Elinor saw reading at that age as an entrance into an enchanted world entirely made up by the ego, the child shucking her juvenile self and literally constructing an adult world she could comfortably inhabit, but he couldn’t help thinking of “I’m reading” as a euphemism for “Stop pestering me, leave me alone, I don’t want to do whatever it is you are about to ask me to do.” Days at the cottage consisted of Elinor and Daphne sitting with their books on brightly painted Muskoka chairs on the small, sandy margin of the lake, or, in the evenings, when mosquitoes cruised for blood, in the tiny screened-in porch that in the fish-eye photo in the ad had looked immense and was called the Atrium. Elinor, wearing a black bathing suit and contact lenses, her sunglasses pushed up onto the top of her head, went for an occasional dip in the reedy lake. Under the Atrium he found a small fibreglass kayak and paddled it in the early mornings before the women were up, gliding across the water’s motionless surface. Some mornings he fell in with a squadro
n of mallards who didn’t seem to mind his presence, and once a pair of loons with chicks on their backs swam off when he drifted to within twenty feet of them, luring him farther and farther from the shore until, losing his nerve in what was essentially a child’s boat, he turned back. Usually El would be up by then, making coffee, mixing pancake batter, even though Daphne never showed up before ten and wouldn’t eat anything made of wheat. It was as if the three of them were taking separate vacations. Still, they agreed at the end of the month that the cottage had been a success, but maybe a different one next year, on a deeper lake. But then Daphne’s mother had got her a job in one of the ex-mayor’s mall outlets, and that had been that.
The traffic inches forward until suddenly, miraculously, he’s at Airport Road. He glances at the time. Elinor would just be getting through immigration. He texts her: “Will be there in 15 xx.”
“Can’t wait,” she texts back.
He smiles, then wonders what she means: she can’t wait to see him, or she literally can’t wait and is taking a taxi? In any case, her BlackBerry seems to be working.
* * *
—
He didn’t buy any food while she was away except for a barbecued chicken, the few slices of salami, and the triple-cream Saint André he finished off that morning to get rid of the evidence. He also took the rest of the wine bottles out to the neighbour’s recycling bin. The house is tidy, no sign that he has catastrophized about Elinor not coming back by retreating into Neanderthal mode. She has not been lost in the veldt, swallowed up by amnesia, or buried in a suburban thicket. But there is no food in the house. It looks as though he wasn’t expecting her to come home. In the fridge is nothing but a tub of plain yogurt and a somewhat flaccid cucumber.