Architects Are Here

by Michael Winter

  That’s where he was at now, in the soft commodities. When the volatility in that market felt played out he’d move into consumer discretionary. He watched the plates stack and teeter and the number of bids outnumber the asks and he withdrew his support and watched the plates crash again. Or it was like fire, the embers flaring up and down and wood being consumed or withdrawn. Sometimes there was no air and other times no fuel and then in spots there was tremendous fuel and oxygen and you had to be fully in then and let the entire position roar into life and get out again before the fire understood that it was hovering over water and had no right to be over the surface it thought it owned.

  WE LEFT David at Ted’s and walked home. Nell and I had just come back from a weekend trip north. It wasnt a good trip. Nell was tense and had something on her mind. We had been with David and friends from IKW. Massimo Sythe had been loyal to David, had backed him up. Massimo had a cottage on an island. A pale blue kevlar speedboat picked us up. We were asked to bring cold wine and food and ice. It’s wonderful to feel a jet boat plough through water. They had piled wood on the beach, a broken chair on top. And Massimo was operating a chainsaw after wine and a toke. He was a little jubilant on it, carving off lengths of an old fallen tree. At one point he passed the saw to me. He was afraid of nipping the blade and he knew that I was used to chainsaws.

  We left the pile like that, the chair sitting on the heap of beach wood. The chair wasnt something you sat on, it was sitting itself. It had leapt out of chairness and become its own master.

  We ate and then changed into our swimsuits and Massimo brought down a two-gallon container of gasoline. It’s windy, he said, and hard to light the fire. He handed the gasoline to David, and I realized in that gesture that Massimo was risky, but he wasnt about to take foolish chances. The gasoline chugged out of the yellow nozzle over David’s hands. And then a flame licked his wrist and leapt to the wood and a plume of boiling fire spewed like something out of a forge. David Twombly sucked in his chest to stop himself from being savaged.

  We stripped off and swam, baked ourselves against the hot fire, dipped again. But Nell is not close to me and it makes my brain bang open and shut and I drink my face off.

  When we came home thieves had ransacked our apartment. Pictures were off the walls, some ornaments above the fireplace were broken. Books were strewn on the floor. Toby the stuffed fox had been lifted and thrown. Then there was shit on the couch and on the floor. Small smears of grey shit. Just to rub it in.

  A bird, Nell said.

  Thieves brought a bird in.

  Nell had gone through the books before we left. She wanted something to read. She had left the mess. And we had left the front window open.

  A pigeon was in the apartment. We found birdshit in the bathroom and birdshit in my study. The pigeon had gone to every window, frantic with an energy to be outside.

  This seemed to exhaust us. We filled buckets of sudsy water and cleaned up. And then Nell checked the messages and we went to bed without talking. But then I felt a nudging and Nell was in tears. She said the bonfire had reminded her of that night with Arthur Twombly. The little plane flight and the time she was pregnant. She missed her parents, she said. Could I hold her. Could I bring Toby over and give her a hug.

  EIGHT

  A YEAR WENT BY and Nell and I were both excited now to know what the weather would bring and how we could plan to grow tomatoes on the roof and put away the winter slippers for the lighter Chinese slippers Nell had found on Spadina Avenue. We marvelled at how much food we cooked, how little we used the restaurants except for the favourite two. There was a Vietnamese one and a sushi bar which we lined up to eat at after watching a movie at the repertory cinema that no longer had many old films at all but simply showed the new films that had come out six months before. We loved the movies and the simple food and the walk home along Bloor Street to our apartment on Roncesvalles Avenue, which is a Polish area of Toronto. I was sometimes surprised that we could walk the mile home without feeling bored or unloved and I took that as a sign that she loved me and was happy. It was true that I’d find her sometimes crying or the evidence of crying appeared on her face and when I asked if anything was wrong she cheered up and said it was allergies.

  I thought the story of Nell’s history and how I came to be living with her would have been enough for a novel, one with enough drama and tension and happiness for a version of these aforementioned incidents to form a satisfying narrative, but more was to happen that turned this short history into a preliminary hearing for the more important events, events that, in retrospect, take on the whiff of the inevitable, of fate, though I heartily disagree with people who are satisfied with fate.

  Nell and David were both involved in the transformations that were under way to move us from a society based on moving objects to one relying on the transportation of ideas. I was happy with the old ratio of these two qualities. It’s not that I thought the old balance was better, I was comfortable with it and thought younger people should adopt the newer ratio, not us. But besides this, I had no doubt and yet I guess in a relationship there is someone who will doubt. But when you are content you dont look under rocks for trouble, at least I dont. I’m like a dog when I’m happy, I just eat my food and sleep and run after the ball. Then last night, when Nell came home from work, I could tell she was vulnerable and I wanted to reassure her. I knew she didnt have the being-a-dog talent that I had. She was wide open and then I could sense something soft and unformed fall out of her. She said I havent told you this and I should have told you. I didnt want to tell you because I didnt want it to affect your relationship with David.

  What, I said.

  I’ve been seeing David.

  She’d been seeing David.

  I just told him. I said this has to stop now.

  Now. It has to stop now?

  I’ve been seeing him, she said, every year perhaps twice a year. For the last. For the last forever.

  Seen him.

  And I felt like I’d dropped a novel I’d been reading into the bathtub. The shock of a world you believed, solid, flat and dry, was turning wet, dissolving to pulp. It hadnt been the man from United Architects.

  Whenever we’re away someplace, she said. It’s never been here, just some other part of the world. That was the arrangement. It was supposed to be our other selves.

  And it all clicked like tumblers in a lock. How David had tried to settle me down, and reassure me that you can have a woman on the side. Youre his French affair, I said.

  She was trembling and I tried to say the right thing but perhaps the right thing would have been to hold her and the hell with it I couldnt hold her. I’d been wanting to have a kid with her. What a joke. They had been to a conference three months ago, I remembered that. I guess that constitutes another country. We were standing around the sink, a lot of work for us gets done around the sink.

  Me: So youve seen him since we’ve been together.

  When we got together, she said, a year ago, I decided it was the last time.

  When you cut your hair.

  But I’ve seen him twice. So this last time I thought I had to tell you.

  I had an eerie feeling, like looking at words written in a mix of capitals and lowercase letters, and then the words exploded.

  So are you telling me you slept with David Twombly.

  Yes.

  And since we’ve been together.

  Yes.

  Just the once?

  No.

  Twice?

  She explained the reasonableness of the affair and that’s when I pounded the wall. The wall needed fixing. When David said affair I had imagined a woman half his age plus seven years. But Nell was our age. She was actually a year older than me. Then I realized David had never used the term French affair and neither had Nell. I was imagining the phrase, I had come up with it the night David had urged me to have kids. Something on the side, he said. But this was a mistress. This was about as European as you could get in
Canada. Such are my inaccurate leaps. I wanted to approach Nell but all I felt was a rage the size of a bag of oranges that ebbed after ten minutes. I wanted to know the details but Nell said, I guess that must be a man thing.

  And she kept walking around, bending over surfaces to tidy them. She wasnt giving me her full attention. She was folding laundry. Why David, I said, why be so unimaginative and what about Sok Hoon.

  She stopped the folding and sat on our bed and Nell confessed her affair using words that were honest and careful. It’s true that it was a moment that widened my heart to her, or at least some part of my heart, perhaps the left ventricle. She said she did not think about Sok Hoon, that it had nothing to do with her. That her arrangement with David predated his relationship with Sok Hoon, and that she was like a farm in another country that a man visits to keep the infrastructure going and to reassure the farm that he loves and understands her. But when I started seeing you, she said, I realized how awful it was. How it would be good to distance myself from Dave. I thought he loved me. But it began because David wanted to piss his father off. Perhaps we both wanted to piss him off. And then it became something underground, a visit to the underground that feels like a double life, some life that the rest of your world doesnt have to know about. But now I see how terrible it was of David not to tell Sok Hoon.

  Me: So does he know I do that act where I pretend I’m on television.

  I might have mentioned that.

  So he knows the private stuff.

  He knows everything.

  Does he know about Toby.

  I told him about Toby.

  I asked her to be quiet and I walked around the apartment finishing glasses of water that Nell had half drunk and left. My mouth was dry. It seemed like that was the only good thing I could chalk up for her now, that she was a leaver of fresh glasses of water.

  Too good to be true, I thought.

  I couldnt help looking at her as if she was someone else. As if it was not honest and I’d been made a fool. But I tried to pull back the actor that wanted to voice betrayal. I wanted to be myself and perform in a unique way for this original moment. All of her life now seemed coloured from what I thought it was and I decided to be mean.

  Youre used goods.

  She closed her eyes and fixed her mouth in a disappointed firmness and I left her in the living room under the little painting she did of her ex-husband that I thought would be cute to have up on the wall. Now I looked at Richard Text and felt an affinity. I felt I knew what he must feel about Nell right now.

  You’ll always be used goods, I said. To any man living or dead.

  Whatever that meant. I had a fury in my head and I put on my shoes and remembered when I was young and my parents fought, and how my father would leave the porch and I’d hear the car start up and the side of the house all red from his parking lights, my father driving someplace.

  That’s what I did. I walked around the neighbourhood. I walked past the mosque on Boustead where the line of taxis idles, their vacant lights on. The taxis are not waiting for customers, it’s the drivers who are in the mosque. A little white dog made for me and then stood and barked, his pink nose. And the dog represented the ridiculousness of domestic strife. It made me turn around. I was about to go back to the apartment and apologize and do some work on the ground to instill a sense of love, but then a streetcar slid down Roncesvalles and stopped and so I got on it and let it carry me towards the lake and then twist east along King Street and I watched the benignly crazy people get on and off as if there was a movie happening, and I made up a story that happened in a room much like this room on a streetcar. You could see the dome of City Hall and I remembered the afternoon I ambled in there, to take in a council meeting, and was surprised how much the place looked like a spaceship. The streetcar took me a long way east, out past the old racetrack. I was on it for an hour and it only cost a token. I got off at the last stop and found some yellow store lights. A man had his mouth inside a shopping bag full of gasoline. I walked into an orange diner. I ordered a pint of beer and a small order of fish and chips and it was okay and my spirits rose. I heard the fat cry out as it doused the fish. I knew I’d be all right. I could withdraw three hundred dollars from the bank machine and keep going. I was hard in ways, though I had opened up to Nell. It was better to be alone and I could do that. I laughed at the position. I’m happy with looking at little things, these people in this diner. I’m very good at feeling sorry for myself and then laughing at my small complaint. I’ve got enough money and I can enjoy looking at a tree. In the end I’ll be one of those men dying in a hospital bed laughing at a memory of a tree. I’ll be okay. What I need is to evacuate, but then I remembered I’d evacuated Newfoundland and perhaps part of living the human life is learning from past experience.

  I WALKED PAST all the churches I could think of and stared at the stone and brick, trying to soak in some of the solidity of those faiths. There’s a new Baptist church and an older, Catholic one that took confession fifteen minutes before mass. There is a Buddhist temple that was built when we first moved into the neighbourhood, so I felt a kinship with the Nepalese. It was wintertime when we moved and we watched the Buddha arrive, a gold figure on the end of a crane hook, being lowered through the roof. And he sat in there all night with snow on his shoulders.

  I looked up at the apartment and the lights were still on. But there was no activity, no shadows moving on the wall, no flicker of a computer monitor. It was about four in the morning and I was cold and tired but full of the fried food I’d eaten on the east side of town. The bed was big enough and I knew I could just slip in without touching Nell. If, in the morning, I felt the same way then I could gather some things together. I walked up our stairs, past the second-floor apartment where Irene Loudermilk was asleep. The top door was locked. Nell wasnt in the apartment. Which was worse. It made me worried. I slept a few hours until the recycling trucks came by and I got up to look at the men vigorously emptying blue and grey containers.

  I went back to bed without Nell Tarkington in sight. I took up her great-grandfather’s book, the novel The Magnificent Ambersons, which we kept by the bed and often, as a form of horoscope, opened to a page and read out a line. I did it this time for myself: An ideal wife is any woman who has an ideal husband.

  I sank ninety feet into the mattress and thought of Las Vegas, the dryness, the wet lights. Nell had gone to Las Vegas. That was where she had begun the affair with David. They had attended a conference at the Bellagio on police security and the new software. There were men operating Tasers and CCT cameras for both private use and for distribution through airport terminals and casinos. I remember her saying she wanted to go to Vegas, whereas I had wanted to go to Cuba. She was a betting woman. She was betting on the proper future for herself. Perhaps she was having the same impulse that drove her to leave home all those years ago.

  I SLEPT THEN WOKE and it was still early but I had to go out for a walk. Grief is smaller when you make yourself small. Streetlife is big. A takeout booth with seven lit chickens rotating on a spit—who eats chicken at six in the morning? A variety store with thirteen varieties of phone cards. There was an argument outside of a nail, wax and toe joint. It was the butcher who specializes in halal meat. A car pulled out and jerked into early traffic and the butcher ran after it with a wooden chair. He threw the chair and it caromed off the rear window and clattered onto the road. The butcher walked into the traffic, yelling at the car, and picked up the chair. He dragged it by its two rear legs. He brought the chair inside his shop and sat down on it and he seemed now to be looking at me. These were the businesses with adjacent property taxes on a mixed-use parking lot.

  I went back home but I didnt sleep and then at about nine in the morning the telephone rang and I heard, in the receiver, a big room, a noisy atmosphere. It was David Twombly. Can you speak up, I said. He was using his pebble. His father was in an accident. I’m flying home, he said. David was in Terminal 1, punching his way through t
he express check-in, that faraway boarding call. His voice was rattled.

  What kind of accident.

  The Hurleys, they T-boned him.

  The what. They what.

  David, patient: He was hit by a van with a moose bar.

  Then I remembered what Nell had said six months before, that precipitated all of this. About her son. I did a moment of heavy concentrating.

  He was driving the Audi, David said.

  Where is your father.

  He’s in Western Memorial. He’s in hard shape, Gabe.

  He meant the hospital in Corner Brook. I pictured the Audi, the safety features and the reinforced cabin. An Audi, I said, it gives you a lot of protection.