Architects Are Here

by Michael Winter

  I got up and rinsed out the percolator and let the water run and brushed my teeth. I made coffee.

  I’m going to make like a dog, I said, and fetch the paper.

  Okay, she said.

  She said okay into my pillow on the couch. My god she is so comfortable there. She is no trouble.

  I almost fell down the stairs. It would have killed me. The paper and eggs and some bread. I did this purchase with the film of the night before stretched over my skin. I was veneered in the debauch and the tension of seeing Nell Tarkington, a woman who had been David’s father’s lover. I shunted back to the apartment with the resignation of a hangover. It was not a good life, but all other lives were worse.

  The percolator wheezed and Nell would not eat a poached egg, just some jam on the toast. We shared the paper and she didnt like doing things like this, sharing the paper over toast, because she felt so many people in big cities—she couldnt do it without feeling the cliché. It was the notion of an aftermath. What one is left with. The action of the night before was marvellous, it was muscular and eventful and she loved being witnessed and interesting. But this is what it got her. A morning with a man she could not love, winding up the ritual with coffee and the paper. But I was no cliché. I refused it as well. I was in the same boat and had as much experience of these moments as she did. So that was interesting. I put no pressure on her. It wasnt my acquiescing to her unspoken wish, I wanted her to go.

  Nell was putting on her top. She whipped her head forward to bare her neck and tie the top behind her neck, with a shoelace bow. Thick black hair, that she ties back. Neither of us says I love you, but we both see it heavy in our eyes, though a flexing in the eyebrow says this is ridiculous. I mean, one night.

  I didnt even say I’ll call you. She put on her wool coat, the kind of wool they wear in warm countries, and kissed me. She was mature and knew all about me. She was through in her life with wasting years on reluctant men.

  I ATE SOME LEFTOVER MEAT and then the phone rang. It was Nell, and so I said Hey! as if I hadnt heard from her in a hundred years. She had gone to work and then located my crumpled number in her pocket. Yes the apartment, I sublet it while I’m in Newfoundland. Okay, she said, I’ll come and look at it.

  Havent you seen it.

  I wasnt paying that much attention to the apartment. And what I’m saying is, you should invite me to lunch.

  And in twenty minutes she was inside my apartment again.

  She said, You moved the table.

  What are you a detective?

  I have forensic training.

  I like to shift things around. I showed her the leather chair and how, if you sit in it and then get up, it talks to you. See, I said, what did it say.

  Nell: It said, How about a tuna sandwich.

  We ate and I told her how I had come to Toronto after having my heart broken.

  Sometimes, Nell said, I like to throw myself against the fridge in false tears. When a man is watching. For instance that man I was with last night.

  The man from United Architects.

  But if I’m on my own, she said, I’ll sit there, my knees touching, and stare at the edge of a chair.

  That is when she told me about her walk home that morning. She had strolled along the inside routes to back-yard garages, thinking about her husband, Richard Text, and her new date from United Architects. Brainy men, she said. She followed the interior small streets until they spilled onto Queen Street and hailed a cab. She found the hotel IKW was paying for and took the stairs to cry unabashedly, almost joyously, on her made bed.

  Youre working with David, I said.

  Toronto feels like a lonely city, she said.

  She told me about her last goodbye to her husband. She was a woman who had a box of tissues in every room. Then she realized I might know Richard Text. For she had met him in Corner Brook.

  Nell: He was the computer instructor.

  Yes, I said. I might have met him. Or seen him in the halls. I was only there for the one term.

  They had married, she said, to help each other out. It was professionally important for him to be married, and it was her way into the States.

  She had not spoken to Richard Text in three weeks. Would it hurt him to see her with someone.

  We werent that kind of couple, she said. As I’ve tried to point out, it was a marriage of convenience.

  Which meant a lot of things in my mind, but it did not seem appropriate to press her to be exact.

  You didnt fight over having a child.

  I have a child, she said. I had a child when I was eighteen.

  And I remembered, then, the entire old history of Nell Tarkington and David’s father. I had forgotten that the affair had resulted in a child. But then I remembered and it felt a bit like remembering that Antarctica is one of the continents.

  I saw you once, I said. On a park bench. You were with Joe Hurley and you had your baby.

  You saw my baby?

  You were with a baby. When you were working at that photography shop. You served me and took my picture.

  Do you remember me in Arthur Twombly’s class.

  You asked good questions, I said.

  NELL TOOK MY APARTMENT and I bought a second-hand Toyota and drove through Quebec and the Maritimes for a summer in St John’s. I felt like a carbonated litre of drink left open on a table overnight. I woke myself up. I exercised my mouth. I reverted to a plane of concentration, it’s a sort of looking under one’s brow at the world. I refused to be polite, yet I wasnt selfish. I opened doors but did not open myself to a compliment. I took up smoking cigarettes during the trip home and enjoyed winding down the window and leaving my hand with the cigarette on the rubber flange of the window. I wore the same jeans until I hit St John’s. I had a good ninety days in that city. I used every bit of it up. I fished in rivers and drank in the little side bars that connect Duckworth with Water Street and I grew salad greens. I visited my parents in Corner Brook and I used the rifle that I keep in my father’s locked cabinet and shot a caribou with my buddy Randy Jacobs. Randy was with the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary, so we had to hunt super legally, though I knew Randy had a darker side. Randy had connections with men who swallowed condoms full of heroin and brought them into this country. But that was a complicated, discreet and lucrative activity, whereas poaching was a blunt exercise not worth ruining an honest reputation for.

  IT WAS A SATISFYING RURAL SUMMER, and I appreciated the place as a visitor, a bit like Nell must have enjoyed it when she first arrived eighteen years ago. She described to me, through phone calls and emails, her early life and her affair with David’s father.

  I drove the car over every last mile of dirt road in Newfoundland. It was a little mission. I spent five weeks doing it. I grew filthy and enjoyed the greasiness of my hair. I boiled coffee in the morning or drove to a gas station, and was pleased that not once had I unpacked the Coleman stove (I used its grate over the fire). The fire kept me company, the coals of a fire are more absorbing than television. In a convenience store in Colinet a woman warmed formula in a take-away cup of hot water, and I imagined I was her husband in a Japanese car, and that I was taking care of her child. I realized I wanted a child.

  When I visited my parents I noted how Corner Brook was changing. There was an art college now and there were youngsters who had something going on other than the pulp mill. There was an air of frivolity rather than pure drive to make money or merely replace the aging mill workers and Vachon cake truck drivers. I doubt if any of the eighteen-year-olds now graduating high school thought to work the night shift as cleaners for the fast-food restaurants up on the highway, which I had considered for a while, purely out of lack of vision.

  I drove up the hill past the RCMP detachment and the junior high school and the high school and finally the university campus. All of my early education had been on this hill. I looked into the windows of the classroom where I’d met Nell, where I’d seen David’s father tell us about his son. T
hen I drove past David’s house, now occupied by his mother, Helen Crofter, and Dr Manamperi, and knew Nell had gone in there many years before to conduct her affair with Arthur Twombly.

  My mother wanted a closet cleaned out and in it I found an alumni book from the year Nell was at Grenfell. I was shocked by her face. Her face wasnt the same. She was a girl then. There was nothing in the face that made her an adult or gave any hint that she would become older. I thought she was the same but this photo made me realize how young she had been. Then I found that printout Nell had taken of my face. We were all very young. We had the faces of children because we were children.

  I sold the car and took a flight back to Toronto. My seasonal peregrinations had the odd result of making my body think of Newfoundland as a warm place and Toronto a cold one. I had chewed over the wilderness of Newfoundland, and was prepared now to enjoy the company of a curious woman. Nell Tarkington. And she too was at the corner of the twelfth floor to her own soul, trying to attack the world in as honest a light as she could. We had flirted through a summer inside the tiny packages of email and long-distance phone calls. I liked the shape of her and the words that came out of her mouth and she was devoted to a kind of work I found interesting. There didnt seem to be anything about her that annoyed me. I had arrived at a brave shoal, and I toyed with my emails and held Nell’s emails in my mouth, sucking the taste out of them. Was she coming on to me? Was I?

  I stared at Nell Tarkington with the fresh autumnal buds of anything. She had found an apartment close to mine. We went on dates. I watched her eat a pomegranate over the sink, with her forehead pressed to a cupboard door. We did not kiss. I kissed her once goodnight. There was not a fear of losing momentum. Her name was Nell Tarkington, a name like a ptarmigan ringing a bell, a name full of innocence and foreboding. Death knells, and it also harkens. Her great-grandfather, I discovered, had written The Magnificent Ambersons. Which meant nothing to her, what was a twelve percent resemblance in the genetic code?

  But that’s vulnerability for you. We had both opened up that compartment under the arm, a window into a new lung that made it hard to stay heavy about anything. The first kiss was in the shelter of someone’s stoop after a party at David Twombly’s.

  Nell was still working with David at IKW. She was focused on a thin wrapper that concentrated binary equations, which are long strings of ones and zeros. It’s a good thought, that any number can be made of counting a series of numbers that are always doubling: one, two, four, eight, sixteen. It reminded me of my one nightmare, of a box that grows and I have to push the box back into the distance, only to have it expand again. Push, expand, until I awake, my head crammed with a universe.

  I could not follow her for a sentence, but I was happy to live next to it, to see her success and somehow be a part of the new world without having to stretch my brain around the very world she was helping create. Having said that, I’d abandoned to some degree the old world. I used to write about it, the world of my family and friends, but now I was in a stage of dormancy. There’s a fallow period in the soul and I’m content to let the good times roll and witness it without too much hassle.

  One night, after coming home from work, she looked worried. I asked what was wrong. David’s in trouble, she said. He took the company public and there’s a missing level of funding.

  He’ll be all right, I said. David’s resourceful.

  We ate pears sliced in half and took the ferry across to Ward’s Island and watched the city turn dark. It was the only place in Toronto where you had a skyline. I was looking for rural things within the city, romantic things. We loved public, free things.

  But Nell was wary. I’m seeing someone, she said at last, though it isnt a full commitment. I took the small deflation. I remembered the big hands of the man from United Architects. I ate it and the world I had imagined imploded. I did not even realize I had projected a world onto the future. I’m usually a man of the moment. But I’d felt then that I wanted to get Nell pregnant.

  I saw an emotion tracking her forehead, an impulse—Nell had a beautiful intent. She was struggling to be as honest as she felt it was necessary to be. We went to movies and I bent my possibilities into a trickling vein of enjoyment. She was seeing someone.

  Through the fall we took streetcars to art galleries and ate in Chinatown and Little India. Have I mentioned her hair? It was smooth and black and she spent money to thin it fashionably. She pushed at the knuckles of her fingers, as though pushing on rings. I saw no evidence of the architect.

  FOUR

  A MONTH WENT BY under the normal rules of conduct and then Nell came by and told me that David had cleared his desk. I called him and he said I’ll pick you up and we’ll go for a drive. He liked speeding out to Ajax, a city named for a battleship, and as we sped out there in a silver convertible we imagined Ajax was moored on Lake Ontario, waiting for its papers to tell it what to destroy. Since Sok Hoon had taken the family car David leased vehicles. He kept them for three months and traded them in. He picked up hitchhikers and talked to them about their families and then let them out when he got bored. The economy had turned during the year, he said. Now all the tech money was flowing back into materials, trains and steel distribution and the shipping of potash to China. David was the IKW field worker. While the partners created information, David was the one on the ground that talked to sources, and when projects ran aground, he was the heavy who tried to smooth things over, and if that failed, he resorted to power and manipulation. IKW had gone public six months ago, he said, but had then been kicked down and to save it from collapse there’d been a stock buyback. But the buyback was less than the initial public offering.

  There was a criminal investigation, David said, and I was charged with assaulting this soybean grower in Saskatchewan.

  Soybeans, did I know IKW was involved in soybeans. He was not convicted but in the deep company investigation of itself it was noted that David Twombly had taken a forward strip out on IKW. He’d put a target of twenty-five dollars on the stock, but the price of IKW was sinking two percent a day and Massimo Sythe and the board were forced to ask him to leave the company.

  They were trying to put lipstick on a pig, David said. There’s been no mention of a leak to friends so your money is safe.

  This alarmed me—the idea that I might have done something wrong, and also that my money might be in jeopardy. David’s position sounds extreme, but it had all happened over a year, in increments, and I guess I hadnt noticed the buildup of trouble that David had created and now was having to abdicate. IKW was to go private again and the partners, David said, will make a paper fortune. I went from shame, David said, to feeling I was fucked around.

  He had shifted his money into real estate. Information was overrated, he said. In the long run you can’t beat land. He’d bought a chalet in western Newfoundland. He’d sold virtual condos to people who have property in South Africa and New Zealand and Mexico. People who needed safe havens and Canadian passports. He was at home now, with software from the company. He was trading in soft commodities—orange juice, cotton and hot rolled steel. Futures are better than gambling on stocks, he said. All you have to do is predict the weather. He had taken a few software projects with him, and was developing them into handheld devices.

  As we hit Ajax I realized you could trace the downturn in the David Twombly economy a little further back. It had begun when Sok Hoon left him. At first she threw a portable radiator at him. He was in bed. She’d come home and he could tell Sok Hoon thought he wasnt a friend. She decided, David said, that I was against her. She threw the radiator but it was plugged in and didnt travel far. Then she hoisted a lamp and it too was plugged in so she unplugged it and threw the wire at him also. How cold and heartless I am, Dave said to me. How in the final six weeks she had lost all her confidence, she cried when David wasnt around.

  As he drove me home I thought of David’s phrase from university:The architects are here. I think of it because we all wonder if we’
re at the end of the good times. Our generation will be the last, we think. And if not the last generation, then the last of the old generations. A head and shoulders has formed and now there is nothing but, at best, a slow decline in the natural world while the man-made world has accelerated and we will be the last ones able to separate the two. These were the last days before people began sending a hologram of themselves to conferences, before we strapped on sensory devices and experienced other places without leaving our bedrooms, before the West sent robots to war instead of real American soldiers. It was a complicated time, a transition period that made many of us skip having children because we couldnt muster the hope needed to pass the new world off onto youngsters. The architects are here, we said to ourselves, and to the future.

  He turned off the Gardiner at Jameson and found an off-ramp to Spadina and, now that he had to gear down to second, he retracted the top and we drove up through my neighbourhood, in the dark, feeling like kings.

  That’s only half the truth, what I’ve said about children. Another crowd went out doggedly to have children. You defied that feeling, and rammed it in the teeth. Take that, you said. David Twombly was like that, and I had decided that was my position as well.

  The seeds have grown and are bearing fruit. A crop of goodness next to a lake of repercussions. We have all been good and we have all dished out our share of asshole behaviour. You can get away with that for fifteen years, but then assholism too bears fruit.

  I WAS FORCED to sell the rest of my IKW shares and I had fifty thousand dollars in the bank. What to do with it. It felt wrong to leave it as a number printed in a book. I like money to be converted into things, and yet the paper world we were now in did not reassure me. All of the information that was now considered valuable could vanish. I preferred something solid. And I remembered meeting Geoff Stirling as a kid. How he’d encouraged David at that employment fair. Not enough people have the entrepreneurial spirit, he’d said. But my father had told me how he’d made his money. Geoff Stirling had bought gold. He bought bullion just before the world left behind the gold standard. At the time gold was thirty dollars an ounce, and most analysts thought it would sink further—there was no need for banks to keep it and so the world was awash in gold. But instead gold went up. It reached a hundred and fifty dollars, hovered, and then it burst through eight hundred dollars an ounce, where it’s never been since. But in the past couple of years gold was ascending again. It was making a comeback. Stirling had made a fortune out of gold and so could I.