Dead Flowers

by Alex Laidlaw

  I read that to Annie once, Franklin said after a pause. It was when we were in Greece and she was so wild about Rilke. We used to read it to each other every night before bed, and in the morning we would talk about what we had read. I asked her about that particular passage but she said she didn’t remember it. She said she must have fallen asleep.

  Franklin continued to read from the book, but quietly, only to himself.

  I wish she wouldn’t come back, I said. Again, I had turned away from the bed. I didn’t know if Franklin was listening. I’ve spent the last three nights with Elliot, and I’ll be with him again tomorrow, and I just can’t tell you how good it is just to fall asleep in his bed. I woke up this morning and I didn’t need to worry about Annie or about anything else. I didn’t need to hurry or sneak around. It’s like, how can I describe it? It’s like I’ve almost got something, something so basic and ordinary, and like it’s almost real. I can hold it, almost, just as long as she doesn’t come home. For as long as she’s away I can pretend that it’s mine and that it really exists.

  I turned and saw that Franklin had swung his legs off the bed.

  We should study, he said. Then he started taking books out of his bag.

  We spread our notes on the kitchen table and tried for a while to study. Franklin started coughing, though, complaining that there was too much dust in this old house. Before I could say anything, he went into the bathroom to blow his nose. I even heard him splash water on his face.

  After that we tried to go on studying, but Franklin kept coughing and getting up. He rubbed his eyes until they were red, and it became clear we wouldn’t get anything done.

  Maybe it’s for the best, said Franklin. I don’t think I should stay here tonight after all.

  Really? I said. You’re going to go home?

  It’s because of the dust, he said.

  The next thing I knew Franklin had packed his things, had grabbed his bag out of Annie’s room and was on his way to the door. He paused on the landing only long enough to say goodbye. And just like that, he was gone.

  I never believed it was Franklin’s allergies that drove him away that night, but I can’t say I know for sure what it was. Maybe he was overwhelmed and didn’t want to sleep in Annie’s bed. Maybe I had finally offended him. Maybe I had hurt him with my callousness, set against the woman he loved. Anyway, that night he behaved in a way I had never seen him behave before. He shut himself off, he ran away and left me standing there, without an explanation. Maybe it was just the dust.

  After Franklin left I tried going back to my study notes but the effort didn’t last very long. Eventually I packed up my things, turned out the kitchen light and went around turning out every other light in the house. Finally, I wound up sitting in the living room. There was enough glare coming in at the windows that I could sit in the dark and still see fairly well. Not that there was anything to see.

  I had some pot in my dresser, but I figured if I wasn’t going to study, I shouldn’t get stoned. I lit a cigarette instead and let the ashes fall into a pile on the floor. There was a bottle of wine in the kitchen, so I thought I might have a glass of that. I put on some music and had another glass. I went for a walk and brought the whole bottle along. In the end, I spent half that night sitting on the living room floor, drinking wine and drawing shapes with the tip of my finger in a mixture of ashes and dust.

  War Story

  The baby woke us up around one, and my wife got out of bed with him because it was her turn. I think she nursed him, but I quickly fell asleep. The next thing I knew she was shaking my foot with a free hand, and I couldn’t quite make sense of what was happening. I looked at the clock and saw that more than an hour had passed, which meant she’d been up with him all this time, going room to room through the apartment, rocking him and singing to him, trying to keep him from crying, trying to get him to sleep. I got up and pulled on a shirt, found my jeans in a pile on the floor and put them on. At some point in the last two weeks I had learned that the only way to get the baby to sleep at a time like this, in the middle of the night, when every other recourse had failed, was to take him for a walk around the neighbourhood.

  I stood at the top of the stairs, and with Henry in my arms, and without bending down, tried to shimmy a foot into my canvas shoe. My kitchen shoes were also by the door, and they were more comfortable and easier too to slip on, but being as they were coated underfoot with a layer of grease, they presented something of a hazard, something to be avoided while descending our stairs in the dark with a one-month old babe in my arms. As I stood there refusing to take a chance in those shoes, I gave myself a mental congratulations. After all, this was proof I was maturing. I was learning. I was being responsible.

  We were still new to Montreal, having moved here in the winter while my wife had been pregnant. She hadn’t known that she was pregnant at the time. If she’d have known, we never would have moved, she never would have come. She hated Montreal and I respected her for that because she, I thought, was a rare kind of animal.

  Everyone I’d ever met had been enamoured with the place, as I was too. The red brick, the iron stairs, particularly those in our neighbourhood, with balconies overhanging the street, and even trees locked into their little plots on the sidewalk—every little piece of it had me enthralled.

  Out at two or three in the morning, it was calm and quiet. Being summer, it was warm. So warm that my son could be dressed in pajamas and I could walk with him simply cradled in my arms as if the city was ours, belonged to us, as if the world was our living room.

  Up Saint-Philippe to Notre-Dame, past the tattoo parlours and the mattress stores, the marchés aux puces with their doors caged for the night. As usual, we walked past the Café Riviera and stopped and stood for a while. Through the big front windows we studied the pattern of shadows and light on the floor. I tried to explain to Henry that this was where I worked, that here was the place I spent my days. This is where your Dad goes when he isn’t at home, I said to his incomprehension. This is where I am when I’m gone away (and here I shifted him to release one arm, and with my free hand made a gesture like a bird flying away).

  We crossed the street and went into the park, which was where he would always fall asleep, his eyes growing heavy, looking up into the trees. Tonight was as usual. Henry drifted off as we rounded the fountain. I knew that now I could go home if I wanted. I could put him down and put myself to bed, but I decided instead to keep going, to walk at least until I reached the canal. After all, I was already up, and despite the hour, it felt good to be out. It felt like nothing really mattered, as if in all of life there was nothing more important than this, nothing of greater significance. Just to be walking in the night with my son in my arms.

  The next morning I’d need to be up by six, and I’d be tired but okay with it. It was summer now anyway, so every morning was bright and it felt almost good to be up and about. Walking to work, I would take the back streets. Down Sainte-Marguerite and once again through the park. I would believe I could feel the whole city also coming to life, waking out of its slumber. I’d be almost inspired to be a part of this massive, daily movement of people, getting out of bed and into the world. Meanwhile, I was a cook in a small café, so I had my own role to play. While they were getting ready to walk out the door, I’d be brushing their morning pastry. Then, while they were at their offices, eyes deep in screens, I’d be putting together their lunch. Fine feelings, I had then, but of course those wouldn’t last. Because doesn’t every summer have to come to an end? This one was no different. It began with a chill. The mornings were fresh, then brisk, then cold. Leaves began to turn in the park and pretty soon it was dark as I was getting out of bed. And though it was still bright walking down along Sainte-Marguerite on my way to the café, it was bright with a sun that didn’t offer any warmth.

  One morning while approaching the café, I spied one of our baristas on the patio. She was sitting with her back against the
wall, her legs stretched out in front of her and smoking a cigarette with her eyes closed while a dappled light played against her face. Her name was Emily and she had a reputation for being kind of brainy. I think it was only because she had recently graduated with an honours degree in literature, and given the state of the economy or whatnot, she had wound up so far only working here. As I approached her, I shook the keys to the café from my pocket. When Emily opened her eyes, I spoke.

  It looked as if you were lost in thought, I said. Sorry to interrupt.

  Emily said something that was evidently a quote. That time of year thou mayest in me behold, she said, when yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang…

  That word “yellow” made me think of the particular light of these mornings, and I figured that what Emily had said was meant to refer in some way to this season, and to the particular way in which it went creeping into the mind, taking its effect.

  It’s Shakespeare, Emily said.

  No. I mean, of course it is, I said.

  There was an awkward moment, and whatever I’d been thinking, I couldn’t recover it now. Being unable to explain that a misunderstanding had just occurred, I capitulated.

  That was lovely, I said.

  I asked Emily what she was doing here since it had just occurred to me that as this morning’s barista, she didn’t need to be in for another half hour. Emily waved her hand in the air and the smoke of her cigarette did a little dance.

  I was awake, she said, so I thought I might as well come in.

  I nodded, and stepping past her, opened the side door into the kitchen. At that time it didn’t seem at all strange that someone would want to come in early for their shift. The café still had a kind of warmth and a quality of easy-goingness. Of course, all of that too would change, and only a few weeks later, Emily’s eagerness, or say her willingness to get to work, would seem almost unthinkable.

  When I’d started working at the café, the situation had been that the owners were in charge of our daily operations. Vincent and Valerie were in their mid-thirties and were remarkably well established, both for their age and for the type of people they were. It was Vincent’s family, I supposed, that owned the building which housed the café. Above us was his brother’s apartment, and still above that was another apartment, this one belonging to Vincent, Valerie and to their toddler-aged son, Napoli.

  It had been Valerie’s project to open the café. She’d been a chef for more than a dozen years working in various restaurants and some hotels. When I first arrived, she was running the kitchen, but then in the following months, eased herself out of the position, wanting instead to focus on becoming a yoga instructor. Truth is, I was glad when she left. Valerie could be sweet at times, even kind, warm and generous, but there were days during which she slipped into inscrutable moods, when she would enter the café in a hoodie with sunglasses over her eyes, when she would make herself a coffee and a light snack, then stand in the kitchen and manage to slip a few barbs into whoever was working, saying that what they were doing was wrong, all wrong, and that they would need to do it over again. What a shame, what a waste, what a stupid mistake, she would say, and then leave as quickly as she’d come.

  When Val started training in yoga, she made a rule for herself not to enter the kitchen. She didn’t even want to know what was happening there. Her removal from the job had to be total, she’d said. So from that point on, Vincent took over, although he had no background in this kind of work. Essentially, he left those of us working in the café to our own devices, only coming into the kitchen occasionally, always late in the morning, and looking as if he had just woken up. Invariably, Napoli would be riding on his hip, the boy dressed in a T-shirt with no bottoms, no diaper, his bare bum pressed into the meat of Vincent’s arm. On such occasions, Vincent’s great contribution to our work was usually to describe a late-night sandwich he had eaten recently at a place on Rue Saint-Laurent. At one of those charcuterie places, he would explain. It had roast chicken, tomato sauce and I think maybe some swiss? And it was simple, but like real fucking food, you know? Like the kind of thing that makes you want to start a family, that makes you want to build a house.

  Then Vincent would wonder if we could add something like that to our menu. Of course, everyone knew to ignore such requests since it had happened time and again that when one of us did put in the effort, say to visit Saint-Laurent to eat a sandwich and then attempt to create a facsimile, by the time we’d been able to put it together, Vincent would have already moved on, forgotten entirely that the suggestion for this sandwich had been his, and would dismiss our work with something like: It isn’t Italian enough.

  As a result, those of us working in the café learned to manage ourselves. We were in charge of the menu, and of ordering stock. We were responsible for seeing that nothing got wasted, and that there were sufficient quantities to meet the shifting demands of the day. It was up to us cooks to keep the kitchen running smoothly, and the same was true of the baristas in the front of the house. If there were any conflicts, it was our job to solve them, or at least to behave in a reasonable way. To work things out amongst ourselves.

  All of this was hard, and of course some of us did better than others, but everything that happened each day resulted directly from the work we put in. Every success belonged to us. And in this arrangement, we each felt a great deal of freedom, too. We were allowed to organize our time and invent our own methods for getting things done. We were free to create and to improvise. We were free to be lost in our work. For me, it was a feeling I hadn’t ever had at a job in the past, and I didn’t know it was possible.

  But all of that changed in October, when Vincent and Valerie hired a manager. Not only did they hire a manager, they hired the worst possible person to come and take charge of the situation. Teresa was in her forties, and like Valerie, she had worked for a decade at a slew of different places around the city. Before that, she’d been living in Toronto. She admitted she still felt out of place here. She didn’t know her way around the city at all, and she didn’t speak a word of French. That on its own should have been a strike against her, seeing that more than half the members of our staff were francophones.

  Practically overnight, Teresa turned the prevailing scene at the café from something light to something heavy, from easy to anxious, something now tinged with paranoia. One of her first decrees was that from now on, everyone in the kitchen would need to wear a uniform. From now on, we would need to wear a white coat, black pants and a tidy black cap on our heads. But it wasn’t just the uniform that irked, after all the coat and pants and even those caps had always been available to us on a rack in the basement if we’d wanted them, but it was the principle of now being told what to wear, the inflexibility of Teresa’s demand, and the pettiness with which it was enforced that made the difference. We were given to understand that from now on, Vincent and Valerie wanted nothing more to do with the business of running the café, and so they vested their authority in Teresa. And forget it if you wanted to complain. They would turn a blind ear, a cold shoulder, and would tell you that whatever your problem was, take it up with the boss.

  Teresa’s position was by default defensive. Her expression was invariably stiff, her eyes calculating and scrutinizing. In every conversation, she came forward bearing arms. It was as if she were always prepared to do battle, and she wanted you to see it. She wanted you to recognize this about her because it was a challenge and a threat and a warning on her part.

  For a group like us who had grown accustomed to our liberties, it was unnerving to have someone peering over your shoulder while you worked, to have someone correcting your work, and mostly for reasons that seemed arbitrary, to have a person with little else to do than exercise authority and a lot of people couldn’t take it. Some of us were fired for trying to stand up to her. Others simply quit, either because they couldn’t stand to work with her, or because they were able to read the
writing on the wall and see that what the café had been, it would no longer be. It was as if the job you thought you had was suddenly taken away and replaced with something else altogether. For those of us who did remain, it was hard to see so many coworkers fall, bizarre to witness an influx of new employees, and disappointing—but also gratifying—to then see those new hires quickly turn against Teresa too. It was dizzying to see all of this happen so fast, but then what could you do other than to come into work every day?

  Ricky was another cook, and something of a friend. He’d been working at the café for only a couple of months when Teresa fired him. He and I had been working the weekend shift. Teresa never worked the weekend shift, so Ricky and I enjoyed an oasis without her. Every weekend, the café was as it had been before Teresa. People were relaxed, cheerful and talkative. Ricky went around cracking jokes and singing songs. He was a musician, actually. He wasn’t a cook at all, although he worked as one. Music was really what he cared about.

  Between Ricky and I, more than anything else, there was a difference of circumstance. Because here we were: me with my early nights and platitudes, doing things in life like trying not to drink as much alcohol anymore, while Ricky was this guy who had two smoking pistols tattooed on his forearm, their barrels crossed and the name Marita written in smoke as an homage to his grandfather. At home, he had trays of psilocybin mushrooms growing in a bedroom closet. Every week he showed me pictures of the progress they had made, scrolling dotingly through entire albums on his phone. So we were in different places, but we were comfortable. We fell into a kind of rhythm, working together.

  At the end of each day, I would let Ricky talk me into sharing a smoke on the patio. Although I wasn’t really a smoker, never keeping a pack of my own, I would watch with anticipation as Ricky pulled his from a pocket in his coat and took out two cigarettes. I would reach for one and let it rest in my lips until he tendered a flame.