Eleanor Rigby (v5) (epub)

by Douglas Coupland

  The Dwarf To Whom I Report came to visit, me still staring at the computer’s empty window.

  “Hello in there—”

  I looked up at him. “Oh—hi, Liam.”

  “Hello, Liz. Are you feeling better?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “How are your teeth?”

  “My teeth?” I was briefly stumped. “Oh, dear—my surgery—yes, I’d forgotten it. My teeth are fine. Couldn’t be better.”

  “And your week away?”

  “It’s hard to tell where to begin, Liam.” Hale-Bopp? The emergency ward? “It’s been very full, really.”

  In a conspiratorial tone he said, “Donna said you were looking swollen and bruised.”

  “She would, then, wouldn’t she?”

  Liam laughed. “Yes. She would.”

  Liam …

  Liam is short, or, rather, he’s shorter than me, and I’m short. (And yes, I’m fat and have red wavy hair.) He is a fussy man, as if he had read and taken to heart grooming advice from previous eras—old mildewed Esquires with articles on extinct subjects such as Richard Nixon or key parties. But I had only to look at his shoes and any aura vaporized. His shoes spoke to me, and what they said was, “$69.95.” They were made from the dull pigskin leather specific to medicine balls and dog collars. He had five discrete looks, one for every working day—and all of them subverted by shoes he probably traded at a flea market for a car battery with the cables thrown in. No. He bought them at the Metrotown mall on sale for $49.95 and thinks they’re functional. It’s just so—Liam. A failure of judgment at the final, most critical step.

  Liam also wears a Raiders of the Lost Ark–style fedora. A few years back he affected a three-day-stubble look that had the girls in Data yucking it up for weeks on end.

  But wait a second—wasn’t I saying earlier that physical descriptions of people are pointless? Well, yes—when it comes to the hero and heroine. I suppose that for incidental characters, description is a possibility. I’ve always felt sorry for those actors in movies and on TV whom you recognize instantly but whose name you’ll never know. They’re simply familiar, and that is the essence of their employability.

  When Liam went away, I opened some files and poked at them as if they were liver and onions, and was glad when the phone rang. It was Jeremy, who’d just made his first sale. I said, “Congratulations, you little huckster.”

  “It’s Ken’s last day and I wanted to impress him. It was so easy. It was this woman who had yuppie flu, or twentieth-century disease or whatever they’re calling it now. We both lay down on the Supreme Ultra-rest combo—Ken’s right, by the way, it’s all a total scam—and then it was so funny, we both fell asleep, and Ken came and woke us up after nearly an hour, and bingo, the sale was mine. And she slipped me her phone number.”

  “Congratulations again. How old was she?”

  “Eighty-six or something.”

  “No, how old was she really?”

  “Okay. Fortyish.”

  “A good forty or a scary forty?”

  “Good. But I got the feeling her standards are too high, so no matter how hard she tries, she always falls for the same guy.”

  “I had the yuppie flu once, you know.”

  “BS.”

  “No, really. Ten years ago—for almost a year. Mother told me it was all in my head and wouldn’t listen if it came up. Leslie said that I should try having a kid and then come to her to discuss having no energy. William said I wasn’t a yuppie and that the yuppie flu is horse crap anyway.”

  “But it’s not.”

  “No. But I only believed it because I knew I’d had it. Otherwise I’d think it was crap too.”

  “How’d you manage?”

  “After every test in the book came back negative, I resigned myself to it.”

  “It? Describe it.”

  “Waking up, feeling good for maybe ten minutes, and then feeling like a dying houseplant for the rest of the day. No energy. No nothing. I blamed everything—dairy, yeast, mineral deficiencies, lack of sunlight, too much sunlight, alcohol, Epstein-Barr.”

  “What happened?”

  “It just stopped one day. No reason. It just stopped.”

  I could tell we were getting too close to discussing MS on the level Jeremy hated, the meat-and-potatoes symptom level, as opposed to Ken the Sleep Consultant’s ink-black humour. He changed the subject. “You know, there’s a lot to be said for having a small, manageable dream. I’m going to set the sales record for this branch. Just you watch.”

  “I have no doubt.”

  “Gotta go. Let’s discuss dinner later today.” He hung up.

  It’s a measure of my social naïveté that when Donna gophered her head up again and asked, “Who was that?” I didn’t tell her to screw off. Instead, I said, “That was my son.”

  Well, her eyes bungeed out of her skull, but she quickly roped them in. “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Jeremy.”

  “What grade is he in?”

  “No grade. He’s twenty.”

  I could imagine Donna’s brain at work: Is he Liz’s biological child or is he something else? Why has Liz been so secretive about him, until now? Twenty? Maybe he’s hot. Maybe he’s … It was fun watching her be tortured by curiosity.

  I said, “I have to finish these files right now, Donna. Let’s talk later.”

  “What are you doing for lunch?”

  “Oh, I have plans already.” I didn’t, but this only made her torture worse. Quite cheerfully I opened up my files and went to work, not giving a rat’s ass about what they contained. Jeremy was this new paint that had rendered me visible to the world.

  * * *

  At home after work, Jeremy and I swapped stories about our days as we ate some pasta with artichoke hearts. He’d whipped it up from scratch, and I think it was one of the happiest meals of my life. Even the smallest of life’s daily details—new toner cartridge for the copier, a faulty traffic light on Marine Drive—seemed charmed and profound. Jeremy told me about a guy who came into the store only for a nap. It was engrossing.

  After this, we watched a Law & Order rerun on TV, heckling the program with the love and crabbiness that comes from addiction to a specific show. Mother came over shortly after nine to drop off some old clothes of William’s she thought Jeremy might like—Mother always needs a pretext for a visit. Before I knew it, I was in bed and falling asleep, content to repeat this day for a thousand years if I could.

  The week melted by. It was inconsequential, yet glorious. The weather was warm, and we ate on restaurant patios.

  At work, out of my newly discovered motherly concern, I phoned Social Services, to fill in some of the gaps in Jeremy’s history. It was a gamble, as they legally didn’t have to tell me anything, and I certainly wasn’t about to tell Jeremy any of this. I thought that if I didn’t call I’d feel like the sort of mother who leaves the kids playing with thumbtacks while going out to find a fix. I made a lunch appointment on Thursday to meet with Kayla, someone who actually knew Jeremy from way back, and who would bring along what knowledge she could.

  We met at a Japanese place two blocks from the office. Kayla was an efficient redhead with one of those faces that looks the same at ten or forty or eighty. We sat down and wiped our hands with hot oshibori towels.

  “From what I can gather, Jeremy was hard to place with families. He tended to get into trouble more often than not—”

  “What sort of trouble?”

  “There seems to have been a consistent problem of things going missing—”

  “What kinds of things?”

  “Not money, but small items, enough to spook the foster parents.”

  I filed this away with the stories of the stolen mozzarella and the family photos. I asked Kayla if Jeremy sold items to support a drug problem, but she didn’t think Jeremy was into drugs.

  “That issue never came up.”

  I
t was a difficult lunch, because Kayla was restricted in what she could tell me and there were blocks of silence.

  “What about his MS—how come you people couldn’t have helped him more?”

  “He was diagnosed at seventeen, but after eighteen there’s nothing we can do. He’s an adult.”

  “His families didn’t care?”

  “To be honest, no. Not much.”

  “And the disease can accelerate that quickly?”

  “Yup.”

  I wanted to grab the whole wretched foster system, Kayla included, and smush it into a ball, then step on the ball and crush it. I was furious, but there was no point in letting it show. Kayla was already pushing the rules on my behalf. It was an unsatisfactory meal by any standards, and we both knew it.

  Kayla tried making a call on her cellphone, but the battery was dead, so she came up to the office to use a Landover phone. I was in the kitchen getting a coffee when I heard Jeremy walk in. He was speaking to Donna, who was at the fax machine. I looked out. “Jeremy?”

  “Hi, Mom. I had the afternoon off, so I thought I’d come visit.”

  “That’s wonderful. How’d you get here?”

  “Cabbed.”

  Donna was dazed and tripping over her words. It was interesting watching her turn into a mumbling cheerleader. Jeremy was pulling out all the stops, using what he called his “winning smile”—a rehearsed showman’s grin that instantly swung a room his way. No wonder he sold so many mattresses. The three of us made small talk. This tiny discussion defined my life’s BEFORE photo and its AFTER version. I’ve never felt so popular, before or since.

  It was as the three of us were discussing box springs that Kayla came down the hall from where she’d been phoning. Jeremy turned around, saw her and collapsed on the spot.

  * * *

  What I haven’t mentioned here are Jeremy’s notes. I found them on scraps of paper around the condo, notes marred by coffee rings, phone numbers and ketchup stains. He obviously had no intention to keep or archive them; he simply blurted them onto paper and forgot them. But I saved them. I brought them to work with me, and kept them in my upper drawer along with Post-it notes, decongestant tablets, Sharpie pens and skin-tone concealer.

  Jeremy’s handwriting was appalling—a scrawl, really, not that mine’s much better. Penmanship has gone the way of typewriters and vinyl records.

  Here follow some of the ones I have here now, their spelling corrected …

  guns shooting at loaves of breads

  coyotes stumbling down an empty freeway. eyes are milk-y

  There’s too much sun.

  The sun shines whenever and- wherever it likes. Night is old

  fashioned.

  WHERE is the correct path?

  if time had to begin then it has to end at some point, too.

  what if God exists but he doesn’t really like people very much?

  We never discussed these notes. I’m not even sure if Jeremy knew I kept them, or if he thought I’d tossed them away. After he began working and taking his medication, his visions vanished, and I wanted these paper scraps as proof that there still existed this other Jeremy inside of him who pondered such things. I mean, if he gave me the word, I’d have been right back there on the highway again, crawling toward the west.

  Life is hard. We all need something to believe in, even if it’s cockamamie. I’d never thought much about belief one way or the other until Jeremy entered my life. His visions marked the first signs of an awakening within myself. Poor Jeremy had spent his childhood being bandied from family to family like a porn novel in a summer camp. It was hard for him to put his faith in any idea larger than his immediate world. We’d ended up marooned on the same beach. Curiously, one definition of health is that you have the same disease as all of your neighbours; in this sense, he and I were the picture of health.

  Was I falling in love with my son? It must sound like it, but no. However, I was realizing that I loved him very much indeed.

  * * *

  When Jeremy collapsed, he hit his head on a planter that held a ficus tree. There was no blood, and he was only out for about thirty seconds, but I thought I should take him to Emergency.

  He didn’t like the fuss we made about him in the office, and in the car he was silent, angry at me for speaking with Kayla. I said, “I can see your point. It might seem like I was going behind your back, but I was only doing what any mother would do.”

  “What did she tell you?”

  “Almost nothing. Is there something I should know?”

  We were on Marine Drive headed east. The car was dirty, and light catching the dirt made it hard to see what lay ahead.

  “Pull over.”

  I did. I turned off the engine. I asked him, “What’s up?”

  “When I was thirteen, there was this one family I was with for maybe three months. They were great. Sunday was like Thursday with them. They didn’t believe in anything but cars and skiing and schnauzer dogs. We went to restaurants all the time and they gave me ten bucks a week as allowance, with no lectures or anything.”

  “Why’d you leave?”

  “I woke up one night and I was in between them on their bed. I went mental, and ran down to the RCMP detachment office in my underwear. It was December and I froze, but they didn’t drive me back to the house. I have a hunch I wasn’t the first kid to run away.”

  “Okay.”

  “I can tell you more.”

  “Okay.”

  It has been said, by someone far wiser than myself, that nobody is boring who is willing to tell the truth about himself. To narrow this down further, someone equally wise said that the things that make us ashamed are also the things that make us interesting. And so Jeremy continued, mimicking some long-gone foster parent, “What’s faith unless you constantly expose it to challenges? What are your own ideas if they can be so easily eaten by the ideas of others?

  “If I’ve come away with anything, it’s that the moment foster parents start asking about your soul, you’re toast. The moment you start challenging their ideas, you’re gone. They’ll always talk about surrender, but it’s never really to God—they want you to surrender to them. Most of those foster people?—they’re just scamming some soiled nickels from the government.”

  “It can’t be that bad. I mean—” It was thoughtless of me to interrupt, but if he minded, he didn’t show it.

  “When you’re tired is when you’re at your weakest. When you’re tired is when they strike. Not tired in your soul, but just tired from a day of chopping wood or chain-sawing blackberry thickets, and maybe after you’ve drunk half a mickey of rye and tried to forget the family that came before the one you’re with now. It’s after dinnertime, and there’s nothing on TV, so you’re up in your room wishing there was a song able to describe your life on the radio, and you’re cursing the aurora borealis for interfering with radio waves from real places like Spokane or Vancouver or Seattle. And then suddenly there’s a knock on the door—assuming they’re that polite, or maybe crafty enough to use politeness as a tactic. So you open the door and in they walk, maybe angry, or maybe filled with fake concern, but somehow they manage to end up on your bed, and somehow, no matter how you position your body, they end up being too close to you. I’m your custodian—trust me—and if you don’t trust me, just go with it, because choice isn’t an option for you, is it? I’ve seen your record. So you fight for yourself as much as you can for your age and size.”

  “Jeremy, I don’t know how much more of this I ought to be hearing.”

  “You’re the one who called Kayla.”

  “That’s not fair. I wanted to find out more about your MS.”

  “I’m so tired of people seeing me as a walking disease.”

  “I don’t see you that way.”

  Each car that passed made my Honda jiggle. I didn’t know what to say, and then suddenly I did. “You’re mad at me for putting you up for adoption in the first place.”

  Silence.r />
  “Jeremy, I was sixteen.”

  Silence.

  “If I could redo it, I would. I don’t know what else to say.”

  We drove past a bunch of teenagers holding a car wash for breast cancer research. They seemed to me to be younger than children, Oompah-loompahs. Muppets. Imps.

  That’s where we left it, unspoken, knowing in our hearts that exploring the issue much further would yield no bonuses, that to go further would be to go only downhill—at least for the time being.

  We drove on to the hospital, Jeremy with his hand out the window, making it swoop up and down in the breeze.

  * * *

  An X-ray revealed no damage, and we were both relieved simply to go home and graze the cupboards for dinner. As an added bonus, we discovered an episode of Law & Order that neither of us had seen, and were well engrossed in it when there was a knock on the door. We made a face at each other, meaning, Should we open it? I decided I’d better, and when I did, I found Liam in the hallway.

  “Hi, Liz. Can I come in?”

  “Uh, sure.”

  We walked into the living room. “Jeremy, this is The Dw—Liam, my boss.”

  Liam sat down. “What’s the show you’re watching?”

  “Law & Order.”

  “Never seen it.”

  “It’s newish.”

  The thing about a favourite show is that it has the capacity to obliterate all real-world action short of nuclear war. Liam knew Jeremy and I were emotionally unavailable until it ended. When it did, Liam said, “Liz, I hear Jeremy had a bit of a fall today.”

  Jeremy cut in, “I’m fine.”

  “We went to Emergency, and X-rays showed no damage.”

  “That’s good.”

  Jeremy was mischievous and turned to Liam and said, “So, are you two an item?”

  “No. I just came to see if you were okay.”

  “I said I was fine.”

  “He’s fine, Liam.”

  “That’s good, then.”