by Colin McAdam
“You will notice that . . .”
“Profound flaws!”
“It is not how we agreed to put it.”
“I don’t understand what you want.”
Leonard, as Chairman, put it to the ADM that the issue should be reviewed in six months and that some of the crucial studies outlined in the memo would be repeated. Leonard left the meeting with a triumphant smirk, as did Eleanor, it seemed, until she came closer and revealed to Simon a sideways dagger of a mouth. Totally inscrutable, frightening, sexy.
HE BECAME PREOCCUPIED. He stole more kisses in the elevator, stealing less and losing more. Simon’s stranger soul was drifting toward her world.
They were seen sitting together in the cafeteria where Eleanor normally sat on her own, frowning at a book. She now had a surprising look of dominance. Her kisses in the office became more frank, overwhelming, an orator’s tongue in deed not word. In word she was chastening and correct, which somehow pulled him closer.
“Do not move one millimeter closer, Mr. Struthers, not in front of my colleagues.”
She gave him the key to the cabinet in her office where there was barely enough room to hang her winter coat. He squeezed in there and waited like Casanova at the foot of Madame X’s stairs—but with no promise of a meal or satisfaction.
Love makes waiting precious to the lover who is sure that Love will keep his word. He pressed his face into her coat and waited, inhaling the smell of teeth that distinguished her body and clothes.
When she arrived she would kiss him, say nothing, occasionally put his hand on her breast. And she would send him out, desperate.
BUT THAT TOO ended quickly, as abruptly as it started.
“I wish to have nothing to do with you,” she said one evening in her office.
“Nothing?”
“Not one thing.”
“Not even professionally?”
“Mr. Struthers, to me you are a cipher. A mystery once, and now a perfect zero.”
She was so offensive as to be arousing.
“But you scarcely know me.”
“I believe there is nothing to know.”
“Nothing?”
“At first I thought you were interesting, but you are quite vain, a bit of a phony and rather vapid. You look well enough, as far as that goes. But l am looking for someone either considerably stronger or considerably weaker than I am. If I am looking for anyone at all. I do quite well on my own.”
Simon did not do well on his own. All that restraint over the fantasy of Eleanor had to find relief in Eleanor proper.
“Can’t we embrace, Eleanor?”
“What a dainty expression. You might have embraced me weeks ago. Taken me. Have you no strength?”
“None.”
“Are you powerless?”
“Yes.”
“Completely?”
“Yes.”
“I want the key to my cabinet back.”
“It is in my pocket.”
“Can you not get it?”
“No.”
“Are you powerless?”
“Completely.”
“Which pocket?”
“This one.”
“This one?”
“Deeper.”
“Here?”
“Please.”
“I have it.”
“Please.”
“I have it.”
“Please.”
“There.”
“God.”
It only took a few strokes.
THE LAND BECAME known as the Greenbelt, but I mustn’t get ahead of things.
The decision to review the issues was followed months later by a few eager applications for development on separate parts of the Belt. The names of the several applicants were Campo Partners, Davies Construction, Atlantic Commercial Builders and McGuinty Construction, all of whose applications can be found in the archives of the National Capital Division [ files (1973) C41, D10, AC11, Mc4].
Given the urgency of some of the applications and the inchoate policies on the ultimate purpose of the entire Belt, the National Capital Division was thrown into an exhausting phase of labor. The applications were mostly for domestic development, with one proposing a large shopping mall to serve the proposed local needs. The mall relied on the houses, the houses on the mall. If Simon had looked into the matter he might have found that all of the applicants had something to do with each other, but Simon had no interest in such things. He was preoccupied with navigating the strait between Eleanor and Renée.
Besides, developers are the grown-up versions of the towny boys who bloodied Simon’s nose whenever he left the bounds of school to search for tangy lollies. Their fists created his sense of furtiveness and shame. It would be foolish to get too close to them. Leonard, however, knew the developers well. That was his little secret.
ELEANOR, SIMON, AND RENÉE did not work well together.
Renée wished to favor the applicants from the beginning, which suggested to Simon that she was allied with Leonard. Eleanor had such a pedantic approach to any problem that she couldn’t help but be allied with Simon. But she opposed him despite herself.
Leonard wanted their disagreement to lead to further hatred, so that he could step in and do as he pleased. Simon wanted delay.
If only he could spend more time with them, and if only spending time meant becoming more mysterious to each other. If only conversations, polite laughs, tedious mundanities would diminish rather than increase over time. Simon didn’t want to be himself, he wanted to get back. He did not want to be the chap with sperm-stained trousers who had stood in Eleanor’s office. He did not want to be the growing bore not quite so interesting as Renée’s career (there were hints that she felt this way only seconds before he abandoned her).
He was the Enigma who subjected Renée to ecstatic humiliations. He was the sublime Undefinable who conquered, for an eye-blink, the categorical precision of Eleanor. He wanted delay, to sit in the room with them and make them wonder.
“This McGuinty proposal,” said Renée, finger on the M, “looks fine to me.”
“It is full of errors,” said Eleanor. “Here he says phase one will take ‘eighteen months,’ and here he says ‘eightee moths.’”
“The ‘n’ didn’t work,” said Simon.
“Pardon?”
“The ‘n’ on his typewriter may not have worked.”
“That is hardly professional,” said Eleanor.
“It is hardly important,” said Renée.
“It might give us pause,” said Simon.
“Not for a moment,” said Renée.
“It may be of interest,” said Simon.
“It is of no interest,” said Eleanor. “It is unacceptable. Anyway, Mr. Struthers, you make no sense. He could not type ‘eighteen months’ in the first instance if the ‘n’ did not work.”
“It was faulty.”
“I don’t think we need to say anything about typographical errors. I think this McGuinty proposal looks fine,” said Renée, tap tap on t.
“‘O e hudred and te houses of first class quality for the smarter family,’ he proposes. I find it laughable,” said Eleanor.
“What we are discussing here, Simon, Eleanor, is, as usual, whether we should be the guardians of this land. I, for one, am sick of this discussion. We are the guardians of this land. We own it. And we are the guardians of this land on behalf of the citizens of this capital city. Our mandate is to enhance their experience of the city. To experience the city they have to live in it. To live in it they have to have houses. Mr. McGuinty’s proposal is fine.” Finger (whitetipped) atop u.
“That is an admirable syllogism,” said Simon. That finger had been in his mouth.
“The proposal is a shambles,” said Eleanor. “Mr. McGuinty also has a poor grasp of arithmetic. He says, if we approve phase one before winter he can complete ‘seven houses in the first three moths, and eight in the next three moths, a total of fiftee in the first half year.’ L
ast I knew, the school system was still healthily functioning on the premise that eight plus seven was fifteen, not fifty.”
“It is the ‘n,’” said Simon.
“How do you know? He clearly can’t spell. I have no doubt that he is a stranger to numbers.”
“He is a builder, Eleanor.”
“No, Renée, he is more than a builder, he is a developer.”
“And his proposal is fine, Eleanor.”
“It is a shambles, Renée.”
“Look at the substance of it, Eleanor.”
“Form is substance,” interjected Simon.
Both women shot him a scornful glance.
“So you believe,” said Eleanor.
“So you agree that form is unimportant?”
“No, Renée, I do not agree. It is unimportant in the case of certain people. Meaningless. The opposite of substance. But not all people.”
“We are going nowhere,” said Renée.
“Yes,” said Simon.
“So you are on my side?” asked Renée.
“Of course,” said Simon.
“Of course he is.”
“I am on yours too, Eleanor.”
“Can we please focus on the substance of this proposal? Phase one is only thirty houses. Why can we not approve the building of thirty houses?” asked Renée.
“Because if we approve phase one, we will be expected to approve the next five phases, and that will be a large development.”
“That is very true,” said Simon.
“I do not need your glad hand, Mr. Struthers,”
“He does not, Eleanor, need your . . . what’s the word?”
“Truculence, perhaps.”
“Thank you, Simon.”
“Thank you, Renée.”
“Now, for God’s sake, focus on the issue, Simon. I don’t need your glad hand either.”
“Yes, Renée.”
“Yes, Renée,” Eleanor mimicked.
“Oh, to hell with you both,” Renée said, gathering her file. “Let’s meet in a month.”
She left Eleanor and Simon in the room together.
“Well, Mr. Struthers, why don’t you run after her?”
SIMON WAS AGING. You are wondering what else was happening while he settled into his new life, as he met and disappointed new people. He was aging.
Do you live in the same drowsy autumn?
There is no need to picture him doing anything when he was not at work. Picture him doing nothing, in a raiment of nothing, against a background of nothing, a pendulum swinging from each eye.
Or don’t.
He yearned. He wished age were so static, or that its only effect was the gravity of skin. He yearned more every day, and no matter what he did, no matter what adventures he had riding on the picaresque heels of his own libido, no matter what minor things he accomplished, he still awoke at half past seven, was a public servant at nine, at eleven o’clock his tongue tasted like tea and then, now, still, whenever he goes to bed he is one cruel inch from the nipple of fruition, no matter what is in his mouth, who is underneath him.
He yearned.
His stomach melted like wax.
THAT RUSH OF APPLICATIONS, the houses, the shopping mall, took more than eighteen months to approve. They all had other duties, other responsibilities. Despite Simon’s love, they all hated each other. Simon did not understand why Leonard, especially, hated (with a fervor that grew by the day) the fact that approval took eighteen months. Simon became isolated at work. He never saw anyone socially, he bowed out of working with Eleanor and Renée, letting Leonard make his decisions for a while.
And life kept blurring. His work was tedious on a daily level—assessing applications, considering needs was more minute and messy in practice than his mind could bear. Never a hope of seeing an idea come to life, never a policy that wasn’t sullied by others’ opinions or needs.
One small initiative kept him occupied briefly—a survey he created of new residents in the south of the city, near the land that was under review. He wrote the questions, and, despite protocol, visited people door-to-door presenting his survey. “Hello, I am Simon Struthers,” he would say, assessing them immediately. The questions on the survey gave him great pleasure: Are you married? For how long? Why? One in every twenty questions was bewildering and intrusive—often simply “Why?”—and its effect was honesty, people answering presumably out of confusion or fear. “Why?”
But learning secrets on paper wasn’t the same. Ultimately he was never, truly, invited in.
HE FINALLY GOT his hands firmly on the Dreambook, and secreted it in his office. He looked slyly through it, at first.
There was a plan for a memorial to great public servants.
There was a plan for an art gallery made of glass.
He had yet to realize what it all might mean for him.
After Eleanor and Renée, after the travel agent and his accountant, no one, for months, perhaps a year. Years. Just the women in his head, scenarios and desires from the past reimagined with limited variation.
The scenarios with Matty, in his head for so long, kept growing. He knew her better than he ever actually came to know her. That mouth, her confidence, that face insisting itself on the face of everyone else who populated his fantasies. But how could he ever see Matty again when Leonard had ceased inviting him to dinners? When all his colleagues, her friends, were beginning to shun him?
People in marriages say they lose their identities; they become, for better or worse, an amalgam of two people. That may be the case. But what was this life alone? Would Simon amount to the sum of the people he met, whom he wouldn’t meet often or long? He tried befriending some of his neighbors, some of the men, to test himself, to see if he could refrain from desiring their wives. He tried to prove that his house, in the middle of all theirs, was legitimate, was indeed a house, not just a vessel for a single, restless man. But the most he could ever bring himself to say was,“You’ll have to come over for a drink some time.” He shouted it from his car a few times. The neighbor to his right was once remarking upon the weather, and before he finished his remark, Simon shouted that invitation.
“I can’t believe how much snow we’ve had this year,” the neighbor said. “Last year, around this time, it was definitely looking like . . .”
“You’ll have to come over for a drink some time!”
And of course the man just stared. He did his best to seem grateful, cheerful, but he certainly never came knocking, and Simon never repeated his invitation because what was the point of having a man over who talked about snow? The man’s wife might have made snow seem charming, but the man himself . . . Men are predictably earnest or jocular. He knew all their routines.
No one, nothing, would ever surprise him or grow to a pleasant conclusion. The houses around him, especially his own house, seemed more and more like manifestations of mediocrity, not just vessels, but constant reminders of the boundaries that prevented Simon from growing, from learning who he really was. The people within them might once have been fascinating, perhaps still were, but how could Simon ever truly reach them? How could they ever learn who he was?
All he could keep was an unchanged persona and a hope or a hunger for other people’s lives.
THE DREAMBOOK ONCE mentioned converting the canal into a skating rink in winter. That idea was crossed out and made real. The longest skating rink in the world!
But most of the ideas remained dreams.
Someone had once proposed a wind tunnel. A gigantic white tube, is how the proposal described it.
ONE WAY TO STOP the blur, to keep things still and give them color, was to learn as much about as mjany people as he could.
He looked through the personnel files of his colleagues.
He read everyone’s, including his own, which he discreetly improved and corrected. He took the liberty of correcting Renée’s here and there, not according to what he had learned from her, but according to what he had originally imagined
she should be. He created new lives for himself and all of his colleagues.
Susan, his secretary, with contacts in personnel, was his aid. She was not only helpful, she was slim and lascivious, five feet six and three-quarter inches in heels stuck firm in the mind of Simon.
“Susan,” he said, “let’s have a look at our colleagues.”
She was an excellent facilitator, knew where to find everything, was open to all suggestion, gossiped homicidally, wore clothes like fleeting thoughts. It was inevitable that Simon would love her. She was always dropping things and bending far forward to pick them up. He was often there to help her. Bosses and their secretaries don’t really fall in love with each other. They don’t really even sleep together. They unite to share knowledge. The beating heart of any successful organization is a coupling boss and secretary: her wisdom, her acuity, her knowledge of process, of people, her dreams of dominion, combined with his jerky movements—such union is the only guarantee of an organization’s vitality. Simon’s coupling with Susan did much to improve his knowledge.
For one, he soon learned that he needn’t read their files to gain knowledge of his colleagues. Susan knew it all.
In Simon’s kitchen at home, on a Sunday morning in June, Simon mumbled the following thought with his lips on Susan’s thigh:
“Leonard’s file gives no home address. I wonder why that is.”
“Because he doesn’t want anyone to know where he lives.”
Simon thought for a moment. “Why do you think that is?” he asked.
“I know why it is. He’s bought a new house. Use your lips. His secretary told me. Mmm. But he doesn’t want mmm people to know. He has suspicious deals. With builders. Mmm. His secretary told me.”
Simon’s chin was wet like he was dreaming of hunger. A breeze was blowing through the house, from a window in the front, into the kitchen, over the counter, past his chin, out the kitchen window where the world was watching.
“He’s always taking bribes. His secretary’s been through his trousers. Mmm. Wads of cash. I think I’m going to come . . . no.”
“I wonder if it is a very grand house. Why does he not want people to know where it is?”
“Keep going. I think he just, you know, yeah . . . just doesn’t want to know, people to . . . I’m not . . . where . . . how he got his house . . . God . . . there’s something suspicious.”