by Bruce Meyer
Handing his nephew the drink, Uncle Garry looked into his with a profound, philosophical gaze as if he was thinking of something important to say. Whenever his uncle did that, something stupid usually came out. Uncle Garry had made a lot of money in the land flip business.
“This stuff will kill you,” he said, looking up and laughing at his own joke and poking a finger at Mike. “So Mike, you’re all grown up now. Finished a business degree. Got your own place, and all. I betcha got a good view from that condo.”
Mike thought for a moment. It was a rented condo, but he always felt nervous around his uncle and didn’t want to fix the broken fact. He nodded. In his mind the view, not a bad view for downtown, looked into another condo across the narrow street that had only recently been made out of the old rail lands. If he leaned from the tiny, two-chair balcony, far enough out to see but not so far as to lose his balance and fall from the sixteenth floor, he could see the lake. One Sunday morning, when he dared the view, the lake had been blue and sparkling. The rest of the time he never bothered to look. It was either too windy or he was too busy.
Mike said: “Yes sirree, a good view. I can see the lake. Can’t see much else.”
Mike decided not to tell his uncle about the Chinese girl. She lived directly across from him. One winter night, just a few months ago, he and the Chinese girl had the lights on late in their own little boxes, and Mike realized that neither wanted or could afford a decent set of drapes to shut the world off from the small quarters of their lives.
He had gone to the window to stare at the other buildings, to see if anyone would stare back. The girl had pushed her desk up against the sliding balcony door. Obviously, she wasn’t an out-doorsy type, or maybe during the day if she was home she preferred natural light to the artificial kind. Whatever the case, Mike had seen her. He stared for several minutes. People when they are being watched quickly get the sense that someone is looking at them. Mike loved sixth-sense games.
She looked up and saw him. Mike waved. She immediately stood up from her desk and turned off the lights.
Matilda lifted her feet off the coffee table. Mike was relieved he didn’t have to look at horse crap any more. She reached across the table and grabbed a copy of Town and Country.
“I’m in this issue,” she said as she tossed it to Mike. “Take it. There’s more where that came from. You can read all about my horsey life.” She got up and went to the bar and started reading the bottles as if they were a library shelf.
Garry said: “Yep, that was a great shoot they did last summer. The photographers, the light guys. They did a video, and all the stills. Hundreds of stills. Matty with the horse. Matty without the horse. Matty with the estate in the background. Matty in a deb dress, though she’s way beyond that. Then this French guy with a camera says: ‘Let’s get some action shots. Jump your horse over one of the fences.’”
“Bad idea,” Matilda interjected.
“I shoulda said something, but I’d had a few with the light guy when we’d got to talking about the big white disk he was carrying around, so I brought him in and we had some more.”
Matilda spoke up. “What Daddy is about to tell you is that the photographer didn’t like the actual practice rails in the side paddock because you could see the concession way off in the background, and they were doing some road work, and making dust smoke, so he tells me to jump Custer. You know Custer? He was the one I rode in the provincials last year. He tells me to jump Custer over one of the fences in the main paddock. I said no, and he said: ‘I see a cover shot.’ And the cover shot thing got the best of me.”
Garry said: “The bugger didn’t get his shot. I had to have one of our best horses put down. Custer’s last stand, if you know what I mean. Matty broke her shoulder.”
“Collarbone, Dad, collarbone. Not fun.”
“Fucking photographer.”
Mike said: “You’re okay now? Right?”
“It ruined my two months in Barbados.”
Garry spoke up again. “Enough, kitten. I got a question for Mike. Mike, my boy, you seem pretty enterprising. Would you like to come and work for me in my business? I need a regional manager for the northern territory.”
“The north? How far north?”
“All the other regions, well you know, I’ve got my gang, and all the other regions are fixed up right now. Not Arctic. We’re talking about near north. Sort of resorts, and lakes, and condos on lakes. That sort of thing.”
Mike’s hands parted and his palms turned upward. “Yeah, I’m interested. Can I think about it? Not long, but I’d like to think about it. It’s a great offer. I guess salary comes with it sort of like …”
Garry roared and looked at Matilda. “The little snipe wants to be paid! Waddya think of that, eh kitten? He wants to be paid. Yep, we can pay you. We’ll talk about that if you’re interested.”
Mike returned to the city. He stood in his darkened apartment, staring at the city lights and thinking about what he should do. The firm he was with now had hired him at a university job fair. He’d lined up with all the others, the hundreds of others, the ones who didn’t not get a job at the fair.
“You’re our man,” his boss had told him. “You have a future.”
Mike just didn’t know. He felt uneasy at the prospect of change, and worst of all, at the idea of working for his uncle. He knew too much about his uncle to be comfortable with it.
As he looked up, Mike saw the Chinese girl in the window. She was switching her desk lamp on and off to get his attention. When she was certain he had seen her, she left the lamp on and waved back.
Mike waved, too.
She pointed down, and kept pointing down, until Mike realized that she wanted him to go down to the street. He gave her a thumbs up.
The night was cool for a spring evening, but the road was shining and reflected the sodium vapour street lamps in the damp from a rain that had fallen earlier in the evening. His breath hung in front of him as he stood waiting on the sidewalk. The girl approached.
“I’m sorry I was rude to you back a few months ago when you waved. It startled me. You don’t expect to see another soul looking out their window in the middle of the night. I’m Sharon.”
“Mike,” he said as they shook hands. “Want to get a coffee?”
“Tea’d be nicer.”
“Tea it is then.” And they walked around the corner to an all-night doughnut place haunted by insomniacs. Mike went there often.
Sharon said: “I’ve seen you here. I usually sit at the back so I can watch people coming and going and not be seen. You usually sit in the window as if you are waiting for someone or something that never arrives.”
“Never does,” Mike said.
“Let’s talk about it,” Sharon said.
The sky was becoming pale-blue in the east as they headed back to their buildings. They’d been talking all night. Mike told her what he waited for when he sat in the window. “The future,” he said.
“I know what you mean,” Sharon replied.
They’d talked of their school years, their university years. She’d studied out of town. He’d studied in town because he couldn’t afford the residence fees. They talked about what they wanted, and how Mike had just been offered a job by his uncle, and he didn’t know because he thought the guy was a crook and a bastard, a spoiled bastard, and he felt his current job was a dead-end. Her job was like that, too. It was a “McJob,” she said and shook her head.
“You know, when you’re a kid you think you’re going to make it big, you’re going to be the star of the show because that’s what life teaches you,” Sharon said. “It tells you you have to shine. I got pushed by my parents. I love them, they want me to be a success, and I guess that’s their way of showing love, but my mother said to me that she didn’t raise me to work in an office even if I have four people working under me, and that I’d failed. It’s awful. That pressure.”
Mike nodded.
They agreed to go for dinner an
d a movie, or a movie and dinner. It didn’t matter what order, the following night. That’s when they began to be Mike and Sharon.
Every night they would flash their lights at each other before they went to sleep if they weren’t in his place together or her place together.
Garry called one night when they were watching a movie on Mike’s laptop and cuddling together with a bowl of popcorn on the couch.
“Heard you have a girl friend, hey guy? Bet she’s a hot one. That job is still on the table but I need an answer soon.”
Mike said he was still thinking about it, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to be on the road now that he was in a relationship.
“Well get back to me soon, fella,” Garry said as he hung up.
One Sunday afternoon when they were downtown window-shopping together, Sharon’s mother spotted them.
“Oh, my God,” Sharon said, almost frantic and in tears as she sat with Mike at her desk and shut the lid on her laptop before the movie was even half-way through. “She’s livid. I can’t keep it inside. She’s angry at me. She was screaming at me: ‘No white boy! No white boy!’ She’s old-fashioned. I told her I’d choose who I want. That’s sacrilege, Mike, sacrilege.”
They held each other. Neither knew what to do.
Garry called Mike at his office the next day.
“I saw you with that girl on the weekend. Yeah, yeah, I get around. Guy, let me tell you, she’s not worth it. If that’s what’s holding you up, I’m afraid I gotta get someone else. Sorry buddy, but time moves on. Time is money.”
Mike sat in silence. That night he told Sharon.
“We’re fucked, but we might as well make our own ways. If we’re going to be on our own, so be it. These are our lives. I love you.”
“I love you, too,” she said, tears welling up in her eyes as she tried to smile.
“We’re in the dark, but we found each other in the dark, and maybe that’s what’s meant to be. I don’t see us together in a grand estate out in the country. I don’t see us in our little condo apartments either. I just see us together. Let’s make our own way.”
Mike gave up his place and they moved in to her place that was equally tiny. They saved every dollar they could. There were married at City Hall, and had a party for their friends at an Italian restaurant in the west end of the downtown.
Neither Sharon’s parents nor Uncle Garry and the cousins would attend.
A few years later, they had saved enough for a starterhome down payment. They would ride the packed commuter train into the city, past the houses crammed together on nameless side streets, and past the cemeteries pressing against the right of way with rows of white and grey headstones that reminded them of teeth.
Their home was out on the edge of the developments where house farms sprang from the old fields and estates that had once been beyond the point that their friends called civilization.
“Are you happy here?” Mike asked Sharon one night as they lay together in bed.
“Yes, very. This is probably the first time in my life I’ve been happy.”
“Me, too. What makes happiness happen?”
Sharon thought for a moment. “Happiness is how we sustain ourselves. I think we’re still hunter-gatherers. I remember thinking that in an elective anthropology class at university. But instead of gathering food, we gather what we need. Those who over eat, who acquire more and more or demand that others acquire more and more, well, they’re gluttons. Their food supply won’t be there someday. Us? We gather what we need. I’ve got all I need, and that’s what makes me happy. I’ve got you. The baby on the way. A job. A roof over our heads. It is a veritable feast. We’re lucky.”
“Yes, I think we are. Thank you for doing this with me. Thank us for doing it together. For the first time in my life, I can see the future. I never was able to see it before. Someone always tried to point me to something else, something away from what I thought I saw. But I see it now.”
They rolled over and held each other, their breaths and even their heartbeats in sync. They stared into each other’s eyes. They listened to the sound of the night, the crickets in the late summer at the end of their garden where the world of the town and the world of the country met in their truce. They were the no-man’s land. They were the past on the verge of the future. Their house, their world together, was a bulwark against both town and country.
It was a small house, but it was an investment, and it was theirs. For a few years, before the world of avenues and addresses pushed the town farther and farther into the country, they would sit at the table in the dark of their kitchen and stare out the sliding glass door onto a deck just large enough for a barbecue.
Beyond the deck, beyond their garden that was not yet fenced, and beyond the wood lot in the distance where they gathered red and gold autumn leaves to decorate their Thanksgiving table, they would watch the sky grow brighter and brighter out of the darkness until they were certain it was dawn.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank David Moratto for his splendid design and loving detail to type and cover image. A very special thank you to Michael Mirolla of Guernica Editions for his careful eye and his patience in the production of this book. Thank you to Karen Wetmore of Grenville Printing at Georgian College for her assistance with countless requests for xeroxes of these stories as this book evolved, and to Professor Rich Butler of McMaster University for hosting me during the Whidden Lectures many years ago. And thank you to Margaret Meyer, Dr. Carolyn Meyer, Katie Meyer, my wife Kerry Johnston, and my writing companion, Daisy, for their support and encouragement with this book.
About the Author
Writer, editor, educator, photographer, poet, broadcaster, and storyteller, Bruce Meyer is author or editor of more than sixty books of poetry, short fiction, non-fiction, memoir, literary journalism and pedagogy. His most recent books include the anthologies Cli-Fi: Canadian Tales of Climate Change, That Dammed Beaver: Canadian Laughs, Gaffes, and Humour; the reissue/reconstruction of the lost World War One novel, Cry Havoc (by W. Redvers Dent), and the poetry collections The Seasons (which won the IP Medal for best book of poems published in North America and runner-up for the Cogswell Prize for Poetry), 1967: Centennial Year, The Arrow of Time (finalist for the Raymond Souster Prize), Testing the Elements, The Madness of Planets, and To Linares (published in Mexico in both English and Spanish). His work has been translated in Korean, Bangla, Spanish, Danish, French, Italian, and Chinese. His national bestsellers include The Golden Thread: A Reader’s Journey Through the Great Books and Portraits of Canadian Writers. He lives in Barrie, Ontario, with his wife, CBC journalist Kerry Johnston and their daughter, Katie. He was the inaugural Poet Laureate of the City of Barrie, and teaches at Georgian College and at Victoria College in the University of Toronto.