I have lunch in an underground food court with the city’s senior bureaucrat on economic development.
At 1 p.m., I decide it’s time for a drive with the top down and a cigar. I started smoking cigars the same week in 2006 that I stopped drinking. Now, they’re an expensive and regular habit—Cuban, Nicaraguan, the occasional Honduran.
I’m driving nowhere in particular, but thinking I might pick up some cigars, when I remember I have to buy an anniversary present for Susan. On Queen Street West I notice a shop that sells Japanese paper and fancy notebooks. Susan likes notebooks, little ones, to make to-do lists and collect phone numbers for household fixers.
I spend a half-hour browsing, finding the right notebook and the right pen. A chiyogami-covered journal and a Micron art pen. I buy a fancy origami bag and tissue to put it in. It will fit nicely into our self-imposed anniversary budget. I do not imagine that the first entry in the notebook, some hours hence, will be the telephone number of a criminal lawyer.
On the trip back to the office, I try not to check my BlackBerry while I’m driving because it’s dangerous, illegal, and I voted for the legislation that made it a Provincial Offences Act violation. But at stoplights I do it anyway. There are messages.
My friend Andy wants to meet for a cigar later in the week. Answer: Great! Nikki wants to know when I’ll be back in the office. Answer: Two minutes.
Susan says she’s arranged for Sarah to stay late and babysit tonight. Answer: Yay! (Was I supposed to do that?)
Back at the office, I have more meetings. When my mind wanders, I worry whether the gift I bought Susan is too practical and unromantic. She is practical, but getting the balance right matters.
Our marriage is in trouble. We know it. We’ve been in counselling since the spring. It’s our second counsellor. A gift that strikes the wrong note could wreck the night. And what about the card? Too gushy and it would sound insincere. Too close to the mark and there’d be no respite, even for a few hours this evening, from the tension that’s become the new normal. So I choose one of those little tags, enough to write her name and “Happy Anniversary” and “Love, Michael” and “xoxox.”
Time for a jog. Running has become an obsession. And the clothes! Yes, obsessive about those, too—Jacflash, Great Stuff, Boomer, eBay, Cabaret. The National Post had recently done a story on Invest Toronto’s new CEO “on the town” shopping for clothes. Cringeworthy. Still, this deep dive to shallowness seemed appropriate for someone—me—who appeared fit, but whose self-esteem was growing obese.
I shower at home after my run, and put on cologne Susan had given me for an earlier birthday present. Smelling like a Parisian cabinet minister, I linger outside with a cigar.
Then I remember that I was to pick Susan up at her office. Shit! I’m about to be late for our anniversary. I jump in the Saab and drive down Avenue Road, left on Adelaide. I’m lucky with traffic—all the streetlights go my way, no unexpected obstructions, no speed traps. I stop outside First Canadian Place, Susan’s building.
It’s about 6:45 p.m., right on schedule, when she appears, opens the passenger door, and falls into the low-running convertible. We transfer the gift she’s carrying to the trunk, settle into the car, and, top down, head north and west toward College Street, talking about …
“My mom’s train arrives at—”
“Did you transfer the $500 into the joint account—”
“When do you want to close the cottage—”
“Brenda called, looking for the cheque—”
… married stuff.
Looping around Queen’s Park, I go quiet. I’d resigned as Member of Provincial Parliament for St. Paul’s less than three months earlier. I’d been there for a decade. It was over. Except it wasn’t.
West down College Street, west past Spadina, an illegal U-turn around Grace Street before Bathurst. We score a parking spot about 70 feet from the restaurant. Pay for parking. Put the ticket on the windshield. Leave the top down. Walk to the resto.
And our anniversary celebration begins.
THE RESTAURANT, Ghazale Middle Eastern & Vegetarian Foods, was a Lebanese spot that served our favourite shawarma in Toronto. It was a modest place—less than a restaurant, perhaps, but more than a fast-food joint. It had wobbly white plastic tables and chairs on the sidewalk, seating a half-dozen people tops. Inside were stools and a counter.
Actually, Ghazale was our favourite shawarma place, transplanted. The original establishment was on Bloor Street West, beside the local retro movie theatre in a neighbourhood called the Annex. The Lebanese owner was unforgettable for having only one eye, the other socket empty, with no glass eye replacing or patch covering where the left eyeball should have been.
We had lived in that neighbourhood, on Palmerston Avenue, beside a children’s library. Until Louie was born the little two-bedroom red-brick house, our first, had accommodated the three of us without feeling cramped. Those days on Palmerston were fun—lots of fun.
Neither of us had grown up in Toronto. Susan was from Montreal, by way of Ottawa, New York, and Paris; I came from Victoria, B.C., by way of Vancouver, Ottawa, Boston, and London, England.
On Palmerston, we were steps from the subway and every cuisine imaginable. The Lebanese joint was a regular takeout for us. Then the one-eyed owner moved his restaurant south a few blocks, to College Street.
At $6.99, the most expensive item on the menu was the Shawarma Platter, which we each ordered. I ordered Nestea in a can. Susan had water. We collected our dinners, pita wrapped in tin foil with vegetables in a moulded Styrofoam takeout container, all placed on a faded brown plastic tray. I dropped the Nestea while trying to balance the gourmet anniversary meal. We ate outside.
“Happy anniversary.” And we toasted ourselves, Nestea can to water bottle, the eye contact brief, her smile forced, air blown through her teeth. Happy Nervous Anniversary.
I ate too fast. Susan talked about her work, me mine. We tried to remember anniversaries past, which scared me. To begin with, I can’t remember many. They are lost, for now, to bourbon-pickled brain cells. But what scared me most was the absence of heartfelt anything at that moment, apparently for both of us.
We were perfectly aware that no relationship is effortless, that few romances remain unaltered, that ardour invariably is cooled by time’s tide. Sandcastles are built, then washed away. At first, you think things are just hidden, buried under there somewhere, in the sand. The realization that a moment has come and gone can be dispiriting. But then a couple needs to want to build another sandcastle, together. And another. And another. It takes a lot more than just conjuring wistful memories of the original castle, effortlessly refashioned into being on some perfect, long-ago afternoon.
We were trying, both of us. But to me, we sounded more weary than anything else.
It took us just over half an hour to finish our meal.
“Walk on the beach?”
“Let’s do it.”
So at about 8 p.m., with the sun dropping, we drove along Lakeshore Boulevard to the Beach—or Beaches—at Lake Ontario in Toronto’s east end. (It tells you everything you need to know about the relatively charmed status of that self-consciously Bohemian neighbourhood that the locals have time and energy enough to argue about its name.)
We parked. We took the tissue-stuffed gift bags out of the trunk of the car. I’d also packed some casual clothes for Susan. It was an effort to seem “thoughtful,” not my usual forte. But she decided not to change.
Twilight now, barely, and we walked to a bench beside the boardwalk and sat down to exchange gifts. Susan gave me a smallish cigar humidor, the kind you can travel with, with two Cuban cigars inside to humour my newest obsession. The gift was thoughtful and smart, like Susan. I gave her the pen and notebook.
Then, we went walking. Susan, still in business uniform, had heels on. One got snagged between the planks of the boardwalk as we crossed, so she pulled them off and barefooted it—shoes held aloft on a finger—toward the s
horeline.
We talked about our marriage—part debate, part monologue, part argument. Then, at about 8:30 p.m., we walked back to the car.
I’ve often mused since that if Susan had maybe been stuck in the boardwalk a bit longer—only half a minute or so—delaying our departure, or if I hadn’t dropped the Nestea can back at the restaurant, or if we’d just moved through the evening more quickly, it all might have unfolded differently. But life doesn’t work that way.
Instead, we continued our evening.
“Wanna sweet? Maybe a baklava?” I asked.
“Brilliant,” she said.
So we drove north to the Danforth, as it’s known in Toronto, then west along the Greektown strip. We had no particular place in mind. We did that maddening, stop-and-start drive of people not quite sure where to go or park. For blocks, we drove past closed bakeries and loud restaurants, until we came upon the perfect place, Akropolis Pastries & Pies, east of Pape Avenue.
Inside was a counter with the desserts displayed. A few people were eating outside. There on the sidewalk was the second wobbly plastic table and chair set we’d sit upon that night. The proprietor shooed some regulars away from the table for us. This was a table for lovers, it seemed.
I had mint tea and Susan did too, and we shared some baklava. The proprietor insisted on serving us on a polished silver tray, with china cups and saucers. I paid the $10 bill while Susan slid a tip under her saucer.
The receipt said it was 9:36 p.m. when we left Akropolis—or so the newspapers reported that week. Susan mentioned wanting a travel book for Brazil. She was to travel there on business to the Rio Film Festival, and was taking her mother along. The trip wasn’t until October, but she liked to plan ahead.
I kicked myself for not thinking of adding the travel book to her anniversary present. I suggested that, if we hurried, we could make the Indigo book store at Bay and Bloor, near Yorkville, on the way home. One of us called to find out that they closed at 10 p.m.
The evening was still warm. I loved driving with the top down on the Saab. After we crossed the Bloor Viaduct, we decided we wouldn’t make it in time to get the book at Indigo, or at least we’d be too rushed. So we never did make the left turn on Bay that might have rerouted our fate.
Approaching Yonge Street, westbound about 50 yards east of Yonge and Bloor, the traffic slowed; I assumed it was because of construction. We were bumper to bumper, sometimes at a standstill. So I undid my seatbelt and rose up in the seat, looking to see what was holding us up.
I saw large orange-and-black traffic pylons, maybe four feet high, placed randomly across the road, blocking traffic. I saw a man on the southeast corner of Yonge and Bloor, behaving like a Tasmanian devil—presumably the man, I surmised, who had strewn the pylons across one of the busiest intersections on the continent—screaming at a white SUV, spit spraying the windshield. Then, he began tossing garbage into the traffic.
He was pretty clearly under the influence of something. My first thought was, “Hello, brother. You’re one of us, aren’t you?”
I yanked up the emergency brake, opened the door and, with the presence of a peacock, got out to move a pylon. I talked to a pedestrian standing by the road.
“That guy’s trouble,” the man said. “He’s trouble,” nodding toward Yonge and Bloor.
I have no idea if the “trouble” in question saw me leave the car and undo his handiwork. Maybe he did. Maybe it was the provocation that prompted what followed.
I got back in the car and continued west along Bloor Street. What I didn’t do was what, under the circumstances, any prudent urbanite might have. I didn’t raise the convertible top. I didn’t crank up the windows. I didn’t lock the door.
As we moved on, I saw the man on a bicycle, doing figure eights in front of another car, taunting the driver to pass, then blocking his way, laughing. He was yelling and laughing incoherently, making a lot of noise.
We must have passed him at some point. I passed Bay Street, still heading west on Bloor. This is where, had we been going to the bookstore, we would have turned left, onto a different course, in every sense of the term. But we didn’t. I came to a red light at a pedestrian crossing between Bay and Avenue Road.
Just past the crossing, construction vehicles took up the lanes adjacent to the centre line in both directions. Westbound traffic was funnelled into one lane near the curb, as was eastbound traffic on the other side.
We were stopped across from the Chanel store on the Mink Mile. Susan was chatting away, but I wasn’t listening. Something was wrong. I had no idea where that crazy cyclist had gone but I feared his return. I was peering past Susan at the mirror on her side, the curb side, where I expected he might appear.
The light turned green. I started to drive forward. Something entered my peripheral vision on the left.
The man on the bicycle breezed by, swung at my face, then swerved in front of our car and stopped. I hit the brakes. The old Saab stopped and stalled.
The man pivoted around to confront me. He growled and glared. Soon he would throw his heavy Kryptonite bicycle lock and bag at me (and miss).
“Now what’re ya gonna do?”
The 28 seconds had begun.
I kept him in my sight as much as possible, flickering my eyes up to the rearview mirror, ready to back up the Saab, looking to drive around him and escape.
I don’t know what drew him to me, made me the lightning rod for the erratic lightning he personified. Maybe my crime was simply leaving the top down and making us an inviting target. Maybe it was that I had failed to stay put during his staredown. Maybe if I’d done nothing, he would have spent his fury, grown bored, gone away.
Whatever it was, the man seemed to grow larger as he approached, looming over Susan and me, growling and cackling.
I didn’t ask Susan what I should do. I just decided, myself, how to escape this nightmare, to will—as I almost always had been able to before—the result I wanted, to get away, to continue my long winning streak, to sustain my sense of invincibility.
What had brought Darcy Allan Sheppard to Bloor Street that night was a lifetime of misfortune and bad decisions I wouldn’t learn about until much later.
What had brought me to that intersection was a dizzying run of good luck that was about to end.
TWO
Made in B.C.
I was pretty much born into politics.
My arrival in the world in 1966, as the second child and first son of Ray and Margaret Bryant, came the same year my father became Mayor of Esquimalt, B.C. He was, at 29, the youngest mayor in Canada at the time. And just as I would follow my dad into politics, he had followed his.
My grandfather, Jimmie Bryant, was born in Cornwall, England, and arrived in Canada at age six with my greatgrandmother. My great-grandfather, Thomas, had come out ahead, in the immigrant custom, to earn passage for his family and was working at the Esquimalt navy dockyards, the No. 1 employer in town.
The dockyards dated back to 1837 and were commanded by the British Royal Navy until 1905. The Canadian Navy was born five years later, and the Esquimalt Dockyard was formally transferred to Canada in late 1910. This was where Jimmie Bryant would work as a machinist, as his father had before him.
My grandfather had polio as a boy and had a bum leg, having ditched his leg braces every morning behind the house in St. Ives, Cornwall, in order to play goalie in the soccer games. As a result, in adulthood he wore a special shoe that weighed 100 pounds—or so it seemed to me as a boy when I tried to pick it up. He walked with a heavy limp and used a cane. But he refused to let it affect his life or slow his pace. He was a man about town in Esquimalt, a union organizer and an alderman. My dad tells me how, when the film projector at the movie theatre would go on the blink, his father would get up on stage and lead the audience in song.
Legend has it that my grandfather founded Saxe Point Park, which once had been Hudson Bay Company land used as a funeral pyre by the East Indian community and became a garbage dump
in the 1920s. There was a small pond in the area that the Esquimalt municipality started filling with refuse. Then, in 1934, the municipality purchased the land from HBC in a tax sale. A municipal by-law written that year set Saxe Point aside as parkland.
I’m told Jimmie would hobble and hack his way through forest to study the site. He was going to turn the garbage dump into a park. And he did. It’s now 15 acres of peninsula seafront, with magnificent views of Juan de Fuca Strait and the Olympic Mountains, a place of exposed rock, craggy cliffs, gardens, woods, trails, picnic benches on green lawns, a sheltered beach. This was where his—and later his wife’s—ashes were scattered. It’s where I go to visit them when I’m in town. And it’s where I proposed marriage to Susan.
There was also a big empty field where Jimmie imagined a recreation centre. So the town built the hockey rink and rec centre on Esquimalt Road. Many also credit Jimmie Bryant for transforming the Gorge Park from its 1950 vandalized drabness to its current splendour. He was a visionary, an organizer, and a showman. And he got stuff done.
He’s my political idol, I guess. Not Pierre Trudeau or John F. Kennedy or anyone like that. Him, my Papa Bryant. He was a councillor for 15 years and he greatly improved the community. My first taste of overwhelming, heart-scalding grief was when, in 1977, my mom put down a laundry basket she was carrying, red plastic and oval, and told me my grandfather had died.
About a year before I was born, the mayor’s chair opened up and everybody assumed Jimmie was going to run for mayor. But he didn’t have any post-secondary education, as he thought a mayor should. Instead, he urged my father to run. By then, Dad had a commerce degree and had graduated from law school. So my father ran for mayor, and my grandfather ran for council. Everybody voted for Bryant and Bryant and Dad was elected mayor at 29. Father and son served on council together.
But it lasted only one term. In 1968, my dad got re-elected as mayor, but Jimmie didn’t campaign. He thought it was immodest and that his record spoke for itself. It didn’t turn out to be a good strategy; he lost by a few votes. And that lesson stuck with me. No matter how good you are or how well you serve, the day could come when you would be given the boot.
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