Architects Are Here

by Michael Winter

  City planning. I was following the practical road of making a living, but even here there was a man who wrote plays. A city planner, Arvo McMillan, wrote about a gorilla in Argentina. I went to see it at the LSPU Hall and realized St John’s had a downtown. It was artistic. There were people I liked and I took a few courses in creative writing and began, at night, to write stories.

  St John’s was my kind of town. Dave, I understood, did not quite fit in. He was oriented to money and that looked aggressive. He was looked upon as a typical Corner Brooker. Not the raw poor of the outports but the new money offered by Canada. The western shore of Newfoundland was seen, by those in the east, to be dipped in the national blood. David represented the Canadianization of Newfoundland.

  But I enjoyed myself with my artistic friends. This is how that slow conversion began. I was researching a paper on road salt. I looked up, in the card catalogues at the QEII Library, the usage of salt on roads. I flipped for a salt header in the alphabetical drawers of the card catalogue and came across “Saltus, Edgar A Transient Guest a novel.” Then I searched through the trans drawer for Transportation Canada’s role in road salt management. And this card appeared: “A Transient Guest, a novel by Edgar Saltus.”

  I took down the call number and went up into the stacks. The book was small. I sat on the carpet in the stacks and read the first page:

  Since the Koenig Wilhelm, of the Dutch East India Service, left Batavia, the sky had been torpidly blue, that suffocating indigo which seems so neighbourly that the traveller fancies were he a trifle taller he could touch it with the ferule of his stick. When night came, the stars would issue from their ambush and stab it through and through, but the glittering cicatrices which they made left it bluer even, more persistent than before. And now, as the ship entered the harbour, there was a cruelty about it that exulted and defied.

  Because of this book I gave up economic geography. I remember my last day at city planning. A man arrived. He said he heard there was a photocopier. I showed him to it. He looked at it. I left him alone, but I did not hear it working. He was staring at the top of the machine. How do you use it, he said. I lifted the lid and put his original down on the glass and pressed the button and the green light tracked across our eyes. The copy peeled out and he was astonished. He was one of those old-time Newfoundlanders. He had never seen a copy before. He thought there was printing involved, some kind of pressure. He knew nothing of the new age.

  I took some time off and went travelling. I was finding myself. That winter, about two hundred Bulgarians had sought refugee status at Gander. Their plane was refuelling on their way to Cuba. So I thought I’d go to Bulgaria. Then I headed south to Greece and ended up on Crete. I like islands. I visited Nikos Kazantzakis’s grave in Heraklion and read Report to Greco out loud. I stayed in a youth hostel in Mirthios and traded Report to Greco for one on the table by the woodstove. It was a book called House of Hate. It was a Canadian novel, I could tell from the cover, and then I was surprised to see that it was set in Corner Brook. The first line: Hate is the child of fear, and Saul Stone had been afraid of one thing or another all his life.

  No one had told me about this book. I was stunned by it. It was a Corner Brook from a generation before my own, but I understood the sense of it. And what’s more, it made me realize I could write about my life. I did not have to be fanciful like Edgar Saltus.

  I wrote short stories and then two novels. During this, because of my degree, I was hired by the federal government to track natural gas inventories in underground storage facilities across the country. It was mind-numbing work, but I’m dogged and I was afraid to live without money and I was frugal and saved, and I managed, during periods of downtime, to write sneakily. I met other young writers and we encouraged each other to publish. I dont think it would have occurred to me to publish without these people—St John’s is like that. If you feel alternative at all, you’ll end up writing a book or making a small film.

  Although I barely saw Dave during those fifteen years, we wrote letters. They were handwritten letters and then they were typed and finally, during the past few years, we went to email. They were like the letters we had sent to Allegra Campinghorst in Montreal. He was delighted that I wrote books. He said that was the reason he’d been friendly to me as kids—he knew I had the artistic temperament. He also insisted that any money I had I should sink into the stock market and he advised me on many high-tech companies and then told me, during the crucial spring of the early nineties, to sell it all quickly at market price and I did and, while I missed the final crest of new highs, I was one of the few to avoid the east slope of the Nasdaq bubble.

  When a relationship broke down I left the province and moved to Toronto. Most people are hemmed in by the country they live in. In Canada, if youre through with a mid-sized city, then the only options are to go rural and raise animals or move to Toronto. Montreal, perhaps, is the exception. Montreal was where Dave had gone. But for me, I wanted Toronto. I was thirty-five and I thought to change my life. On the plane, as I recall, I thought of the word suddenly. If you looked at the coat of my skin you’d see it slightly shirred. I was ruffled and drove with the wind and I lived hard and light at the same time. I did damage to myself but I also opened up and became less narrow-minded and as long as I did not break down too badly the wildness was for the good. I often thought of what Dave would do, the Dave I knew before his brother was killed. But it wasnt all pretending to be Dave. Part of it can be chalked up to being in your thirties and needing to widen out.

  I had bought a one-way air ticket to Toronto and vowed to act the opposite of the way I had acted back home. I had a month to find a place but apartments were tight. I was lining up with seventeen other candidates in hot, cramped bachelors and filling in forms with too much financial information, then bicycling home on a French bicycle I’d bought for fifty dollars, coasting behind propane-fuelled taxis and waiting for a landlord to call. I had a buffer of money and I was not interested in writing or in doing anything to make money. I had enough to live for a year like this, but I had no work, which appeared desperate, and both my references were in Newfoundland. Natural gas, and all liquids, had turned into a steady bearish stream for a decade now and there was no work in the oil patch or in commodities generally. But I was not worried about money, though I did not want to throw a lot of money at rent. It looked like I was going to share a house with three other men who were attending Ryerson, and I was imagining that, how we would move around the house, when the phone call came from Dave Twombly.

  Dave, I said.

  So when were you going to call me.

  And I wondered about that. If I’d ever call Dave. Why hadnt I. And I guess I was embarrassed with myself. I didnt want him to see me in the state I was in. I was broken-hearted and, while I’d written fiction, I thought I wouldnt write again. I was beside myself and I mean that literally: I was sitting next to the shell of the person who walked around and lived. For one thing, I’d written about people close to me and, in small, unforeseeable ways, at least unforeseeable to me, I had hurt them. My brother, for instance, had written me a letter. He said if I wrote about him again, he would deliver a punch to my head from which I may not recover.

  Dave gave a light high chuckle when he heard that. And then he grew earnest. Call me David, he said, and I knew that was a clue to his new life. In Toronto he wasnt Dave any more, he was David, and this cheered me. Hurrah to the new life. He’d heard I was in Toronto through people in Corner Brook. You need an apartment, he said. I can get you that.

  And sure enough, in three days I had a place. It was from a friend of his who was in Italy downsizing a billing company that was merging with twenty-one other billing companies throughout the new Europe. This man, who I still havent met, was overseeing the transition. That’s all I knew of him. And the books he’d left behind, which were on Vietnam and the history of the machine gun.

  That was how David Twombly came back into my life, from his act of generosit
y in helping an old friend. It had been fifteen years. His face had widened and his shirts had lavish collars. He had shaved his head.

  Youre the only man I know now, I said, from Corner Brook.

  And I called him David. In the end, why should we be troubled by a man’s attempt to be an adult. I liked people who called me Gabriel rather than Gabe. Though I enjoyed collecting both sets of people. My father calls me Gabe, my mother, Gabriel.

  The truth of it is, I saw that David could live with or without me. If I was close by he knew he could enjoy himself with me and there was something alluring about reclaiming a piece of the past, brushing it off and seeing it trot around the infield of the game youre trying to set up.

  We got together at his house and I met his wife, Sok Hoon, and their new baby, Owen. David called him the Oven, because he was so hot and he ate a lot. He said, Are you still in treasury bills and bonds.

  I told him about my hiatus and the buffer and yes, the buffer was in cash accounts. He did not look like a man who needed money, and I must have said this using my face.

  He said his company was going public and I should get in. His company was called Itinerant Knowledge Workers.

  I had spent years choosing options that were anti–Corner Brook, so the thought of returning to some material that was laden with Corner Brook appealed to me, especially a revitalized spinoff of Corner Brook that seemed complicated and international. For instance, David’s shaved head was a new unfolding of the possibilities of a Corner Brook childhood. That his wife was Chinese-Canadian seemed an event that could only have happened in the twenty-first century. This all was now part of the Corner Brook experience, for we had grown past the notion that place is confined to geography. David had met Sok Hoon at McGill and it was during McGill that the hockey players had begun shaving their receding hairlines, and so he did too. These, the simple answers to almost everyone’s complex scenario. And now they had a baby boy, Owen the Oven, and were living in Little Italy.

  Sok Hoon I liked—she was a fashion designer who made eco-friendly textiles, fabrics of the future, she called them. She used a lot of high-end cloth, premium fabrics that felt like the pelts of extinct animals. And Sok Hoon knew how to handle her husband’s friend with the wounded heart. But there was more to it than that, no mere one-sided empathy: for I was from the small milltown where her husband grew up, and there is something about Newfoundland that perplexes foreigners to that heritage. There are a handful of places like Newfoundland on this continent, I suppose—the American South, the Arctic, Quebec, and the Appalachians. She turned to me often, after David had remarked on something, as though I might provide a bilingual service. Even though what David had said was a result, not of any Newfoundland upbringing—for his parents were American—but more to do with his own character and bias, a position that far exceeded any influence Newfoundland could weigh upon him.

  During these early Toronto years is when I went a little crazy. A new city and a broken heart and a nest egg will do this to you. My father, from a distance, grew worried. I got a call one day from Lars Pony, the father of Lennox, the black kid who had hung around with us in Corner Brook. Mr Pony, who was living in Toronto, was asking if I needed a job. He worked for a magazine that sold second-hand cars. He said I heard you can write. This made me laugh. How’s Lennox? I said. Lennox is in Alberta, Mr Pony said. And he did not sound happy with his son that far from him. So they had sold the Lemon Yard and moved to Toronto.

  I went and had a coffee with him. I told him that I didnt need a job at the moment, but thank you. Lars Pony is a tall man, and he had been the only black man I’d known in Corner Brook. Not that I knew him, just his son Lennox. Lars told me his father had been in the navy. His father was stationed out of Boston. During the war the black enlisted men were segregated. They ate and slept in separate quarters. Their cruiser was torpedoed one night in the Atlantic. They were seventeen nautical miles off the south coast of Newfoundland. They sent out a beacon and steamed for land. They threw over green lifeboats and his father found a vest. He hit the water and that’s all he can remember of what happened that night.

  My father woke up, Lars said, and he heard a woman saying, I can’t get it off his skin—no matter how hard I scrub it won’t come out. He was in a big room with nurses, these white nurses bathing the men. He was naked. This white woman cleaning his arms and legs. He said, It won’t come off. That’s my skin.

  He spent three weeks in Newfoundland convalescing. He had never experienced such care from white people. No one seemed to mind that he was black.

  My father, Lars said, told me that story often when I was young. To let me know that whites arent all bad. So when I got to leave home, one of the places I wanted to go was Newfoundland. I ended up on a paper boat that docked in Corner Brook. And I swam ashore. I worked in a meal plant in Benoit’s Cove. Then I met Lennox’s mother.

  They live now in Regent Park, in Toronto. Lars and his Newfoundland wife. Did she ever think she’d live away from home.

  DAVID HELPED PUSH ME through my crazy days, for it was a phase, anyone could see that, though phases can last decades. He arranged dates with women. He took me to extravagant parties. This, too, is how Newfoundlanders take care of one another in the larger world, which they claim to be pan-Newfoundland, or at least their minority interest in a stock they cannot fully control but which listens to them intently during the annual shareholders meeting. David had found me an apartment, then invested my money wisely. Now he was grooming me for a woman he thought would be good for me.

  I thought, let it roll. I invested the socked-away money in David’s company. I kept telling women, using mainly body language and tone of voice, about how my heart was played out, how I wasnt suitable for commitment. I thought that would be the state of things, and it wasnt all bad. Though I was turning into someone who enjoys being alone. It takes all kinds, but I wasnt sure I wanted to be that kind. David was vexed. Over long dinners in his red leather dining room chairs, eating pears and hard cheese and British chocolates, I told him I couldnt commit, and he lectured me on the merits of a long-term relationship and having children. Owen, he said. Reason for being. But I wasnt ready for monogamy and neither did I think I’d find anyone. Monogamy, he said. Who’s talking monogamy? And then, in a voice piped in from a third lung:You have a lover on the side, he said. This, on the occasions when Sok Hoon was in Malaysia or in the next room with music dampening our voices. I looked at his big hands and then his shaved head. He had a life on the seat beside him.

  Me:The same woman?

  It’s marvellous, he said.

  But he would not get into it.

  David began introducing me to single women he thought I could have kids with. These were different women from the ones he’d chosen for my cavalier days. It was superior of him—he had shucked the moroseness of his brother’s death, even though his father had not forgiven him, and now he wanted everyone to be living his life. His intentions were generous: He loved his life. He wore short-sleeved shirts and he looked good in them. His forearms. He had good healthy forearms and a platinum watch that sat nicely on the hair at his wrist. There was a confidence there. I could never pull that off. If I was meeting someone for a deal I’d wear a long-sleeved shirt. A short one would be like wearing sandals. Too vulnerable. But I saw David cut a lot of deals in sandals.

  Youve developed a small pocket of acting that isnt entirely untrue, David said, diagnosing me. You can get away for thirty-six months, he said, with a line about an exhausted heart. But that’s it, youve run out your line of credit.

  I bought a used car that my brother had chosen long-distance over the phone, and I drove it home to Newfoundland. I lived in St John’s during the summer, subletting a house on Signal Hill that has a garden and the earliest postal code in Canada: A1A 1A1. You can taste the salt water in the arugula leaves and at night the lighthouse strobe from Cape Spear flares over the Atlantic. I hung out with my old friends and their growing families and I hunted big game.
At the end of summer I drove the car to my brother’s and I flew back to Toronto with two styrofoam boxes full of frozen caribou. My brother sold the car and we split the profit. I did this, with little variation, for three revolutions of the sun.

  TWO

  THEN THE SHARE PRICE in David’s company doubled. I sold half and the remaining half tripled. I was trying to figure out what to do with the money, but it was hard for me to be frivolous and so I banked the money in the general coffers. Then I thought it was wrong, somehow, to be paying the rent and buying food with windfalls. I decided to write again, but this time it wouldnt be fiction. I did not want to be cutting edge. I wanted something old fashioned, and it was not out of a desire to resuscitate a dying art. In ways I’ve always been drawn to the arts that are extinct rather than the methods that are avant-garde. I thought about what my ideal job would be and it came to me that copywriting was the most humble of writing jobs. I would love to write for a TV guide, someone who writes out the synopses for television programs. I did not own a television, which made the enterprise all the more beguiling. So I walked down to the local cable network and asked for a position. But that sort of go-between job doesnt exist any more, they just format what the stations feed to them, a receptionist told me, which meant working for a television network in Buffalo, and I have my limits. Then, when I left their studios on Queen Street, I passed the newspaper vending boxes and looked at them and noticed the free weekly guide called Auto Trader. I flicked through one and realized, under the masthead, that it was the magazine that Lars Pony worked for. People’s cars. Why did people sell cars, why did people buy them. I looked around at the busy network of commerce and gridlock. There was something in this, something that reflected the changing fortunes of a populace. I took the magazine home and looked at it again at my desk. I stared at it intently, as though it were a work of art. I looked at the column of names of who worked at Auto Trader. Tessa Walcott web design. Lars Pony photographs. You dont see a name like Lars Pony very often, not in print, and there he was, Mr Pony of Corner Brook, whose father had learned the magnanimity of the innocent. Lars had operated a salvage yard, his son managed the severe torment we all gave him, though Lennox was a good goalie. My father knew Lars and liked the Ponys. So I contacted Auto Trader. I talked to the woman named Tessa Walcott. I told her my skills and I explained that I knew Lars Pony from when I was a kid. That Lars had called me some months before. I went in and met them. How is Lennox, I said again. And this time Mr Pony looked prouder. His son was in the oil patch. He was one of those Newfoundlanders who had gone west to Fort McMurray. There were more Newfoundlanders there than in Corner Brook. You want a job, he said, you got a job.