by Colin McAdam
“I see,” said Simon. His face was getting wetter. “Do you know where he lives?”
“Yes. Would you mind if I sort of . . . turned around? There. Nice. No, I don’t . . . I do know where he lives but . . . I don’t know exactly . . . God, that’s nice . . .”
Why did Simon want to know Leonard’s address? Why not keep it all imaginary, everything, everyone, where Leonard lived, what he looked like in his living room? Why did he want to know?
“I know the address. Why do you want to know? Don’t tell me . . . don’t tell me yet . . . don’t tell me . . . don’t tell me . . .”
The breeze, persuasive, kept blowing through the house— through the foyer, through the dining room, into
“I’m coming.”
Past Simon’s chin.
He did not wait to be asked again. He hadn’t even known the answer until it came out of his mouth. “I want to know,” he said, “because I think I am interested in his wife, Matty.”
THE BREEZE BLEW over the houses, carrying Simon’s sentence with it. The sentence tickled its belly on roofs, luxuriated in the sun, spent several weeks blowing around. It took a while before it caused trouble.
Susan did not like to hear, naturally, that Simon was interested in someone else, not while she was there on his counter naked from the waist down. So she curtly told him where Leonard had bought his house and within a couple of weeks she had told enough people at work that Simon was interested in Matty that Leonard caught wind of it.
And, eventually, when he tired of his own surveys and introducing himself to strangers, Simon went to that area of new houses, and knocked on Matty’s door.
2
THERE’S MY JERRY up high.
Look up there.
Giggling.
Having a jiggle.
I discovered when he was around the age of five that he liked to ride in the shovel of a tractor. He was on-site one morning and I guess I lost track of him for a while. Next thing I see is Tony Espolito driving toward me in a tractor about to pick up a load and there’s my Jerry sitting sort of primly in the shovel with a laugh on his face, Tony unaware of it all. Jerry was up high, coming lower, lower, lower with his smile and a pair of bouncing happy fists. (He wasn’t hurt.)
So I’m taking him for a ride now—that’s what he’s doing up there. He is still around five or so, maybe six. And that’s a new John Deere (maker of the finest tractors since I don’t care when), which I bought cash in hand, on the barrel, bang.
If you keep looking up, seeing Jerry’s dangling feet, the new yellow shovel, the blue sky he’s eating, you don’t have to notice that it’s January, that you can’t feel your fingers. And if you just hold on to that lever there, just hold this speed and keep it straight, I’m going to climb up the arm and join Jerry in the shovel.
Ohh, it’s blue! It’s bright and goddamn loud, isn’t it, buddy?
I think he loved the noise, the rumble of it. I loved that smile on him. He just kept looking forward, rumbling into the blue, bouncing his fists on his knees and swinging his feet.
I’ll tell you what the feeling is from my point of view. It doesn’t feel like flying. It doesn’t feel like you’re sitting on a tractor looking like a goof. It doesn’t feel comfortable. It doesn’t feel fast. It doesn’t feel like nothing. It’s slow enough and the sky is empty enough that you feel like you’re standing still. But the noise and the shake of the thing make you feel like you’re moving in every direction, and you are actually going fast enough that if you fell you would feel it (especially if you were five) and you would probably be run over.
But everything’s all right and Jerry doesn’t need me there in the shovel with him, so I’ll climb back down and drive, thanks. That’s how I prefer it—Jerry up high, sun in the sky, and me driving after him.
That’s, at least, how I preferred it then. I don’t know why. It felt safer. Not for Jerry, for me. Driving straight down a halfbuilt road, Jerry always in front of me.
THINGS WERE GOING well (my friend). I was into my second big development. I had a couple of crews now.
I owned things. New things. Some equipment is better to own secondhand, but some that was smarter to own new, I owned, and when I wasn’t using it I leased it out. Admire me, if you wish.
I was still completely in debt, but I was in a phase where I felt rich despite my debt. I understood that there are huge mountains under the oceans, which are still mountains even though they’re not above ground.
The first development was sold, every brick in it (boy), and that’s a happy moment. I loved—I still love—being able to look at that development and turn my back on it. To turn around, or walk past it, like it’s any other neighborhood that has been there for a while. That is true manhood, I tell you, it’s a sign that you are becoming one of the wise ones, when you know you have created something big and you can walk right past it because it is just your modest contribution to the bigness of the world. It’s just another neighborhood. It melted my insides and chafed a mile of skin, but it is just another neighborhood. I truly had the wisdom to think that.
I wanted to turn my back on it, too, because I was also sick of living there. Our house wouldn’t keep clean, for one thing. Kathleen could not look after Jerry and keep the feckin house clean, and it occurred to me that I could actually build a house that looked after some of the cleaning itself. (I was ahead of my time.) And a new sort of house was exactly what I needed for another development.
KATHLEEN AND I HAD been through a rough patch, a bumpy ride, some trouble, whatever you pale, lazy people like to label the plights of strangers. We had some trouble, I’ll be the first to admit it, but we worked through it.
It reached its worst when, on top of all my labor, I realized that to make it all worth anything I had to perfect my business sense, my office work. You can’t just build in secret, draw back a curtain to reveal what you’ve built and watch while strangers start bidding for it. From beginning to end, it has to be planned, plotted, written down, proposed, asked for, noticed, advertised—all that. It’s not the side of things I liked.
I had to set up a small office at home, get a calculator and typewriter, filing cabinets, all sorts of expensive stuff that welcomed me home after a long day at work, and I never saw Kathleen. It was too much for me sometimes and it appeared to be too much for Kathleen.
One thing I never quite understood was the fact that Kathleen would get angry when Jerry and I were together. He would come into my study sometimes, sneaking out of bed, and we’d have a little chat. (It was very rare, because I was usually home too late.) Within thirty seconds Kathleen would be in my study telling Jerry to get back to bed. It didn’t matter where she had been, whether she had been fast asleep or in the farthest corner of the house; as soon as Jerry and I exchanged some words Kathleen was onto us.
I was only just getting used to Jerry as a human, so they were important chats. I have some shame in admitting that I had been a bit scared when Jerry first changed from a baby to a boy to a bigger proper boy. It’s a little spooky to watch a thing become a person. So our chats were about testing each other, partly. He would look at me closely and I would feel a bit shy.
“What’s up, big guy?”
“I painted.”
“Oh yeah. What did you paint?”
“I dunno.”
“Oh yeah.”
But it wasn’t like I wanted Kathleen to come screaming at him, or at us. We should have spent more time together.
It felt like Jerry and I were conspirators. Maybe it was something to do with where we met: a typewriter, filing cabinets, and a calculator were the tools of conspiracies.
No?
Anyway, after Jerry came and chatted maybe ten or so times (probably spread out over a year, so that each time he was a different boy), Kathleen really lost her temper. She pushed the typewriter off the desk, I really shouted at her for one of the first times, and Jerry stopped his visits.
I don’t remember exactly how that fig
ht started—it was something aside from Jerry talking to me. I think that might have been the time when she ran into the room and threw an empty roll of toilet paper at me, wondering how I could use so much if I was never at home. Anyway, it was soon “What is he doing in here at this time of night!” and then the usual buildup with Jerry somehow disappearing from the room and Kathleen hitting something. This time she knocked the typewriter off the desk.
That’s what pissed me off. I hate the sound of things crashing, and I hate a broken machine that I don’t know how to fix.
I grabbed Kathleen by the shoulders, shouted and shook her, and there was one precious moment (the kind that grabs a man by his joint and says, Do it Son, you can Do as you fuckin Please) when Kathleen was totally submissive and boneless. She looked like she really loved me for that moment. But then either I said, weakly, “What is it?,” or my eyes said it, and off she went shouting again. My strength made her weak, her weakness made me weak, my weakness made her strong again.
But what was it? She didn’t like the idea of me and Jerry having fun together; that was one bit of truth we chipped away from that fight. She didn’t have much fun with him because he was five years old and apparently he was flippin hard work.
I won’t describe the fight more because I realize, buddy, that you don’t want to keep listening to other people’s fights. But I will tell you one thing that led to a solution. Basically, piecing everything together over the next couple of days (I was plastering ceilings at the time and when things were upside down against a background of white, they were clear), I realized that really the problem must have been her past.
She had been free before, and she had been in love, and now she was in love again, you bet, but she wasn’t very free. I hadn’t really thought much about her past love, Tom, the guy she followed over from Ireland, but it was Johnny Cash who reminded me.
I was doing a ceiling and listening to the radio and on came the Man in Black with “Cold, Cold Heart” coming straight from under his joint. I said, “That is what it is.”
Tom treated her badly, dumped her, she set up on her own, she met me, we had Jerry, she lost her freedom, so she started thinking about some happy past with Tom. I understood.
So the solution was to pick up the typewriter, forget about the shouting and the crying, and borrow from the Man in Black. I wrote Kathleen a Johnny Cash love letter to show I understood. The typewriter actually worked, most of it, so I made the letter neat. I’ve got it here:
I tried so hard, my dear, to show
That you’re my every dream
Yet you’re afraid each thi g I do
Is just some evil scheme.
A memory from your lo esome past
Keeps us so far apart
Why ca ’t I free your doubtful mi d
A d melt your cold, cold heart?
A other love before my time
Made your heart sad a d blue
A d so my heart is payi g ow
For thi gs I did ’t do.
I a ger u ki d words were said
That made the teardrops start
Why ca ’t I free your doubtful mi d
A d melt your cold, cold heart?
It worked, my friend: she was like fire, but soft.
I MAY HAVE HATED the office work, the writing things down and all that, but, I tell you, I was good at it. Especially the plotting—I was good at the plotting.
Edgar was cornering the market on blowaway cheapness, I was making a name for myself for quality. I designed my own signs, advertising the quality of my first development. I had called it Pine Grove Park, because I jammed a few pine trees into the ground. It wasn’t a park because it was covered with houses, but promoting developments is usually a matter of calling them what they aren’t. (I enjoyed that part of the plotting—being free to create my own world.)
I met Edgar over on his sites, and I’d see his crews putting up walls. They’d use round-headed screws on their studs which would dimple through the plasterboard. The boards were always four-by-eight, they never staggered sizes, always ran the boards vertically so the seams were as predictable and obvious as long bad jokes. There would always be cracks over the doors. They wouldn’t bother with wood strapping on ceiling joists, so if your husband wiggles his hairy toes upstairs you will hear it downstairs when you’re trying to relax.
I might as well take the opportunity to mention that I profited from their half asses. With a designer buddy I knew I developed a steel corner with tape already attached: it made cornering easier for the less intelligent plasterer, and around here it is still known as the McGuinty Corner, which I named after my son, Jerry.
I myself linger on my walls like I wished I could on Kathleen. I use fine gypsum laths which l ice with the ree-al thing, boy: Plaster. I even used wood laths instead of gypsum on the first two houses of Pine Grove Park, but you don’t want to be an idiot about tradition.
I built thirty houses for every hundred of Edgar’s, and I will rest in heaven.
I knew what he wanted to do, he knew what I wanted to do, and when we promoted ourselves, when we made tenders and when we made proposals to councils, we had a quiet agreement to keep our different ambitions in mind.
I kept little jobs going all the time. I was one of the few plasterers with any real skill, so I got some odd jobs repairing proper old plaster, which is as rare as beauty. (In fact, at this very moment, this very Jerry—with the drooping chops—is spending some of his retirement repairing old plaster: Chateau Laurier, that sort of building. Yeah.)
But mostly it was my plans, my plotting, that kept my crew busy, so busy that, as I said, I put together another crew. I’ve decided not to tell you much about that crew. Too many names for your little head. They were guys I knew, that’s all. And they multiplied. At the height of my career, at the very peak of Mount McGuinty, I had over a hundred men (including subcontractors) working for me.
I kept the original boys tight with me—Cooper and the rest of them—because we were working smooth. They almost respected me by the time we finished Pine Grove Park, and I was almost paying them on time. They never complained to the unions.
We got one big private commission to build a monster of a house that ten years later was made into apartments. And then my second big development came through, basically a repeat of Pine Grove Park but its name was an outright fib: The Oaks. (Although I did use oak for the cupboards.)
While The Oaks was underway, Edgar Davies and I hatched a plan for two huge sets of houses and a shopping mall, which about ten separate bodies (investors and builders) became involved in.
This is when things started to get complicated, when people and types of people appeared out of nowhere like monsters in a dream. Things had been more or less within my control until then. I at least knew who I owed. But suddenly here are these investors, slick as oiled sharks, who somehow always knew exactly what I would do—what ought to be done—a few feet ahead of me doing it. They wore clothes and spoke a language that I had never witnessed. I thought they were a rank above men that God and the scientists were too dumb to have labeled.
For example, one of these investors—one of these angel demons—is listening to me tell him about a little problem I foresee with distributing water to the planned phase four, given the lay of the land and whatnot; and he is nodding to me, wearing a suit as shiny and deep as a pupil, politely waiting for me to finish; and I do; and he produces some figures that are like a map in math of all I said in English; and he starts explaining all sorts of additional problems that my mind had not yet encountered, which he then offers beautiful solutions to; and all this time his mouth is like a ballet.
Cooper thought they were fags, but they were better than that: stronger. I knew that I should obey them, learn from them, follow their advice. It was their money, and they taught me that there really is such a thing as “smart money,” which most of us will never understand.
It was my smart plan that got them involved in the first place,
though. Edgar and I wondered how we could put two opposite developments near each other without one detracting from the other. A mall is what I proposed. Keep the developments separated by shops, cater to necessity and greed under one warm roof, the neighborhoods can stay distinct and both take advantage of the building that keeps them apart.
It was too big for me and Edgar to think of doing ourselves, but it didn’t take long to attract these angel demons. They were interested in the mall particularly, and right they were. I always thought it was ridiculous how rarely Canadians kept their shops together, how you would have to suffer like a settler braving miles of winter wind if you wanted to buy food and clothes in one trip. The investors knew that shopping malls would keep our country together.
Hang on a second while I get a beer.
SO, FUCK ME, it got complicated.
One reason Edgar and I wanted to build near each other was that out of the ever blue blue came a surprise that regularly pissed me off for the rest of my career. Mile after mile of the ripest land in the history of possible plucking was brought under the control of Federal God Fuck Government. Miles of it. The best of it. One day we were buying whatever plots we pleased, dealing with tax-happy councils; the next we had to contend with some mysterious Crown Corporation, who saw no benefit from what we builders did. For them it was all ideas, and a bother.
I have no clue how it happened. I approached local council to get approval to build The Oaks, council tells me that I couldn’t build all of it, that they no longer have control of it: “Apply at head office,” they said, meaning the Federal Boys.
Kathleen was with me that day, and Jerry. We were driving in Kathleen’s truck, which I figured Jerry would love. (It would be like knowing the ice-cream man. I figured he could tell all his friends, but he was, what, maybe six, and might not have had any friends.)
Kathleen’s there waiting in the truck with Jerry while I’m talking to council.
“It’s the big boys, not us,” they tell me. “Apply at head office. They’ve taken over. And mind your p’s and q’s, McGuinty, it’s a different set of rules.”