TWELVE
DAVID TWOMBLY WAS, technically, an American. He had an American passport and he voted during American elections. His parents had moved to Newfoundland in the sixties. It was that great pulse of immigration to Canada, which had brought my family over. For Arthur Twombly, it was sympathy to those younger than himself in the States who were avoiding the draft. David’s mother found work at the US army base in Stephenville, she was a civilian lawyer for the army, and Arthur got established with the newly built college. They returned to the States for the summers and sabbaticals. They had Zac in Michigan and David was born in Stephenville, on the army base. This army base birth gives David, occasionally, the ambitious comfort that he could one day be president of the United States. He believed in a free market, he did not criticize, as his parents certainly did, American culture and expansionism. He was more like his grandfather, an internationalist who believed in trickle-down economics but had a good heart. The idea of Canada he found, in the end, to be one of a fifty-first state. While he was at McGill he did not think about Quebec separatism except in how it might facilitate the American absorption of Canada and Mexico. He took French. He was excited by developments, that he was living in an era of change. His peers were men and women about to be handed the reins of Canadian power, but he saw Canadian power as a diminished position. He was agreeable to the notion of insidious takeover. That Canada could retain its name, the way that an airline turned private can keep a country’s name, as long as it never raised an army against US trade law or foreign policy. He predicted a Canadian wing in the US military. His work encouraged software and special forces that Canada could provide for any American occupying force. And yet he donated ten percent of his salary to causes, as long as the causes were tax-deductible.
THEY FOLLOWED HIM HOME. They cased him. They slid a back door open and took the keys. They were in David’s house. That’s the worst part, he said. Like I’d invite any of those guys back to my house.
But he was awake and aware. He’d called the police. He gave the police a good profile.
The convertible, I said, is not a good cross-country vehicle.
It’s a rental, he said. And what are you saying about my taste in automobiles.
I told him about buying a car that we could sell. Why be stuck in Newfoundland having to drive back. By that time, I said, your no-fly status will be cleared up and you can take air travel again.
Some hybrid, he said.
Me:Theyre expensive.
Hang the expense. No perhaps we should worry about expenses. I might have to go bankrupt, I was just meeting with my lawyer. What about one of those cars from India. One of those two-thousand-dollar cars where they use strong adhesives rather than welds.
Me:You want to drive around in a bamboo crate.
Theyre made with lightweight composites, Gabe. Theyre made with the same adhesives as airplanes.
Dave youre not going to find one of those cars around here.
There was a pause on the phone which meant I did not realize the world was a neighbourhood now. And perhaps with David’s connections he could order and import and license one of those Indian cars in three days. If he was going to go cheap, he wanted to go futuristic.
I’ll find a deal at Auto Trader. Let’s make a trip of it, I said.
He thought about that. What I want to drive, he said, is something state of the art.
BUT THEN A DAY WENT BY and he was against the whole thing. He’d rather spend his energy fighting the no-fly caution on his airport ID. That’s the other thing about David, an enthusiasm for any adventure that quickly burns off and an underlying force takes over.
But I felt trapped now in Toronto, without an apartment, with no Nell, and no reason to be here. So why not begin my summer early and purchase a car and drive. I was thinking about an Audi, like the one David’s dad had been creamed in. A boxy, foreign car good on gas and they depreciate slowly. But then I remembered the converted police cruiser, Zac’s car. Now that would have some hustle. A pursuit vehicle. What would it fetch in Newfoundland. Three grand. I walked to the library and looked it up online at the Auto Trader auction. Twice in the last three months Alice Stebbins has called Tessa Walcott and trimmed a hundred dollars off the asking price. She’s down to twenty-four hundred dollars. Tessa finds it odd when a client doesnt want to run the old photo. Though Alice has not asked for another photographer.
I went over to look at it. As a buyer.
The engine leaks oil, Alice Stebbins said.
Worn valves, I said.
Alice:Too many car chases.
She popped the hood and I lifted it and found the metal wand.
Or a tapered cylinder wall, I said.
We both stared hard at the engine.
That allows oil to enter the combustion chamber, I said. That’s what causes the oil burning.
I would take a loss on it if you factored in the miles per gallon. But she was desperate and had removed her reserve. A minimum bid. I could key in fifteen hundred dollars. I liked the idea of bringing something from Jane and Finch to Newfoundland. But I also wanted to make it a personal transaction, to hand Alice Stebbins cash on the spot, the old-fashioned way.
I TRIED TO PUT ON HOLD my new life in Toronto. I sent Nell another email, in case she was alive in that form. I warned her the apartment was gone, and that I had put in a claim to the landlord’s insurance company. I said I was going to make a trip with David. That we would talk about what happened and do the male thing and come out the end stronger for it. Bonding. That would make her terrified. She’d want to warn him.
I made a fist and touched the screen, which was her solar plexus. I brushed it with my knuckles. Youre not to do that Nell, I said quietly. I was pretending she stood before me.
NEXT DOOR TO ME at the Days Inn I saw Irene Loudermilk inserting her key card.
Hey, I said.
Neighbour.
Some fire.
Some love letter.
It had been Irene burning the love letter. It was a man who had made her move to Toronto in the first place, a man named Arnold Cream from Calgary who worked in oil and whose head offices relocated to Toronto during the Conservative years when Ontario’s provincial government loosened corporate tax regulations.
I’d never spent much time thinking about Irene Loudermilk. She was polite and sorted our mail on the stairs without its ever feeling snoopy. She was quiet and smoked a lot of pot and played guitar in a country-and-western band. She was older than Nell and me but she was still beautiful in a forty-five-year-old way. We sat at the hotel bar and had a drink and I realized beauty from the past can still visit in pulses and in fact could be a more vivid beauty for its gathering and diminishing returns. It made the present more urgent and vital. We knew nothing of each other, though she said she could hear a lot through the bathroom, that Nell and I argued a lot in the bathroom, or it could have been elsewhere but came to her through the bathroom.
I didnt know we argued.
You yelled at her a lot.
I yelled?
Irene rested her chin on the rim of her scotch. I hadnt seen a woman do that on a first drink. Did we argue or were we passionate? Was it about David Twombly or was it Nell assuming more of my inner life. You can be territorial when the country of your own thoughts is devoured by the one you love.
Irene Loudermilk had a whiteness around her eyelids and her nostrils were flared from drug use or just a lot of colds. I realized I hadnt looked at her before and she was interesting. She did interesting things with her fingers when she spoke and she wore a topaz belt buckle that flashed as she leaned in and out from the bar with her elbows. It was as if she held a map on the bar and was pointing things out, a map of emotional terrain. She’d had a child when she was sixteen, she said, and then met Arnold and he urged her to give the baby up so that they could start anew. I was astonished at how close her story was to Nell’s. It was a terrible mistake, Irene said. They lived Arnold’s life for twenty years. He for
got completely about her early sacrifice and did not understand how the friction between them resulted from his wrong-headed starting gate. But even so Irene stuck by him and moved out east when his office relocated (to Irene, Toronto was the East Coast). But then Arnold’s mandate at work was revised and he was more often in Alberta than he’d been when they lived in Calgary. He visited junior oil companies outside Red Deer, there were drilling services and regulatory bodies he had to negotiate with inside the shale till zone of small pocket reserves. They were living in Richmond Hill and, even during the ten years they lived there, the place became unrecognizable to them.
There were photos of us and it looked, she said, like we’d kept moving house.
Fields of maple turned into malls, schools imploded for automotive showrooms. So Irene sold the house one winter while Arnold was in Red Deer and moved down into our retro neighbourhood, Roncesvalles, where she could at least see some history and attach herself to a big park. She stripped the house of all its furnishings and sold them in the paper and had the Salvation Army pick up the rest. Arnold had given her a vibrator. You can’t really give it to the Goodwill like the sheets. So she left it in the house.
Her mother was Ukrainian and the Polish area felt like her mother, but Arnold never liked it and when he came home he stayed in a hotel and she went to visit him.
For a moment we both realized we were in Arnold’s hotel, and I half expected him to appear perhaps to freshen our drinks.
Then she got a letter.
She caught the attention of the bartender and I realized this was a big deal coming now and she needed a stepping stone into the depth of it.
How excited he was, Irene said. Arnold had fallen in love with a woman at work, a woman they’d once had over, her and her husband. The letter didnt literally say Arnold was excited, in fact he wrote about how sorry he was, but Irene could tell in the enthusiasm and urgency that he was excited, if a little guilty. It was an admission that avoided both deceit and distrust.
So that was it. Irene was burning a letter on her back step when a corner floated away and slipped through a crack in the siding. She felt the whip of light flow into the apartment and a murmur of hoses expanding and she had her bare shoulder against the brick footing of the basement and that’s what protected her, well all the effort went north, went out of the top, went through our apartment.
We drank and the light outside became darker than the bar. I was drinking with Irene Loudermilk, homeless and abandoned and we both had the sense to laugh at that. I’m not that attracted to you, she said, but I wouldnt say no if you wanted to come to my room and compare it to yours.
I must have told her about Nell. Though I didnt recall telling her, and then I remembered Irene saying we argued.
We lay on her bed and it was the exact set-up as my room, in reverse. So our headboards were adjacent. We were both old enough to take pleasure in an embrace without being nervous. We lay on her bed and she opened the mini bar and poured us some mini drinks and we lay there and I closed my eyes and listened to the traffic flow down King Street. Then we made another assault on the mini bar and we drank standing up, sort of pointing at each other with our shoulders and listening to the street. The streetcars were having a hard time making the tight turn into their depot, it required a lot of friction on the track. One could hardly believe steel to be so resilient. We didnt think to open the cupboard doors to watch television, at least it never occurred to me. I could hear Irene’s drink doing work around her lips, the clink of teeth. When I heard that I turned and kissed a part of her body, then I fell asleep with my clothes on. Though I did not know I had fallen asleep. I was thinking about Nell and where she was gone. I thought about Vegas. That was where she had met David again. I turned into a bird that watched Nell at thirty feet. I was in a desert with Nell walking along Highway 93, a dirt road just east of the Nevada Test Site. This is a story she had told me about how she had met David. A truck from the Moapa Indian Reservation had slowed past her and heaved over.
Where you headed.
Nell:Vegas.
He was trucking gauges, oxygen tanks and flippers.
Youve got scuba gear, she said. In the desert.
You never know, he said.
They drove into Las Vegas. He had grown up admiring Jacques Cousteau, or perhaps he was a grandson, a descendant who had come out of the oceans to live on dry land but still carried the apparatus of his origins. Nell had wanted to see how far she could get away from Vegas just thumbing but then had grown tired of it and thumbed back. She had a conference to attend. The man didnt think that was unusual. He looked like he’d seen a lot of things, and that’s why he was prepared for all eventualities, dry or wet.
They drove into the Bellagio and he parked up on a concrete ramp beside a thick palm tree. He parked with the windshield in the shade. The fountains were silent. They were not working. They got out and he stripped to his shorts. He dragged out a tub which had his regulator and buoyancy compensator vest and flippers. Can you help me with this tank, he said. She tilted the tank on the open tailgate and he crouched and slipped it on. Turn that nozzle a half turn, he said. And he leaned on her shoulder for support as he slipped his feet into the flippers. These are dainty manoeuvres. He walked backwards to the edge of the pool and then bent his knees and fell over into the water and twisted himself down with a little shrug of his hips. He was going deep, a pulse of bubbles distorted the surface and when they calmed he was gone. Nell waited but he did not come back.
She had gone into the conference, the cool wave of air conditioning, and received her name tag and album of papers. The name tags were spread alphabetically over two desks and she saw David Twombly’s name below hers. There was a plenary session that lasted two hours. They heard of the new police security, Taser technology and CCT monitors. The world, it seemed, was out to get you and you had to be diligent. Three hours later she found him. He had been looking for her. He had seen her name in the schedule. They went outside and quickly put on sunglasses. Out here in Vegas, why not give in to a little thing. Men dressed as gorillas pitched dinner coupons at them, there were at least three heavyweight champions of the world. Bullfighters and pigmies. It seemed everyone was dressed up as someone outrageous, asking you to come to dinner for ten percent off. They leaned over the railing in the bright four oclock sun and stared at the malfunctioning fountain. Then an object, blurred, rising in the pool. He lifted a wrench over his head. Hey, David said. And the frogman gave him the okay. He was negotiating the cement stairs. His tank clanked against the side. Hey you, David said. And made for him. Nell had to run after David, and explain.
I WOKE UP and Irene Loudermilk was under the covers. She had undressed and was trying to pull more over herself except my weight was stopping it all. So I got up and this made my jaw thump, and I thought of the word thrombosis. I looked at Irene and her eyes were open. Her eyes had no expectation. She was taking care of herself.
If the insurance company hears about this, I said, we’ll lose one of the rooms.
You better go in and ruffle your sheets.
I went in and messed up my bed. What a strange thing to do.
Then I went back to Irene’s room. I had to knock as the door had sprung shut. Irene came up to the shut door and said, Look I have to shave a sweater.
Okay, I said. I realized she was reasonable, what the hell was I thinking. And I felt awful for the things I had done with Irene and the lack of fear I had in wrecking things. But then I remembered that I was wronged, that I had every right to be bad if I wanted, though in fact I’d behaved well. My gum was inflamed and I looked for the cannabis spray but that was gone now in the fire and I had to make do with headache pills.
I had a shower and I grated an aspirin over my back teeth. I chucked Toby under the chin and did some arm curls with the gold. I spend perhaps three nights a year in a hotel, so I’m up for enjoying the experience. This one had a mirror on an expandable arm that magnified your face. My face looked horren
dous and my jaw was puffy. So I flattened the mirror and draped a hand towel over it.
I checked the rate for local calls and it was a dollar twenty-five, so I went down to the lobby and used a payphone. There was a woman there with a boy watching a cop show on TV. The boy looked like he’d never seen TV before. He was talking excitedly about it and she said to him, Use your indoor voice.
David, I said, I’m all for getting out of here today.
My friend let us drive our troubles away.
I hung up and the boy had turned from the TV to ask his mother a question.
Mother: Throw them in jail is an expression, honey. They dont really throw them in jail.
I TOOK A TAXI to David’s and he was waiting there in the road, checking his stocks on his pebble. He jumped in. We kept going up to Jane and Finch and I saw him wince. He was not used to these areas of Toronto. The wide roads with narrow sidewalks and no trees. Noisy and dusty. What kind of car, he said. I didnt want to tell him. I wanted to see his face. He had this look now. Like he was being patient, but also that he was game. It was the same look when he flipped through my English comic books. How did anyone find black and white entertaining. But he did flick through the comics. He was willing to look at the world my way. For ten minutes.
We walked over to the Matador. He was walking like he was out on a day pass. Then he put up his arms in mock surrender.
I’m not driving across Canada in that, officer.
We’re only driving across half of Canada.
There’s a van for sale in the Loblaws parking lot, David said. A silver van with a handicapped licence. We could sleep in it.
David this baby can move.
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