TEN
As I get off the train at Eglinton Station the sharp pain in my chest suddenly returns and I lose my breath. It often hits me at night: a crippling tightness in my heart that makes it difficult to inhale. I know I’ll need another drink if I’m to fall asleep—a night cap, a libation, whatever you want to call it, I need it. I exit the station and hunch forward while clutching the left side of my chest for a block or two until I pass by another cocktail bar called Coquine. Inside, people are still standing and drinking beneath the neon blue lighting—an older crowd, mostly, well-dressed in suits and ties and expensive outfits. I cut through the flock and eventually find an empty stool at the end of the silver bar. The bartender pours me a double scotch on the rocks and I sip it and the pain gradually subsides. I quietly keep to myself, watching sport highlights on the television in the corner and staring at the various bottles of colourful liqueurs that adorn the shelf.
Later, as I’m trying to find the washroom, I come across a small table where a woman is holding a camera and taking a picture of what I can only assume are her two friends: one male and one female. She appears to be in her early thirties and she has curly brown hair and a low-cut black dress revealing ample cleavage. Sensing an opportunity to help her out—and to strike up a conversation—I fearlessly approach.
“Hey, I can take a picture of the three of you if you want.”
“Oh, no, that’s okay,” she says.
“Really, it’s no problem.”
She leans into my ear and whispers, “I don’t want to be in any pictures tonight.”
“Why not? You look great.”
“Because I’m cheating on my husband right now.”
I try to remain composed, act unsurprised, but I’m sure she can tell by my inadvertently raised eyebrows that I’m somewhat taken aback. “Well, we’ve all been in that situation before.”
“Not me. This is my first time.”
“My name’s Ethan.”
“Melanie.” She shakes my hand and her grip is soft. I don’t know what else to say, so I simply offer her encouragement.
“Well I hope this whole affair thing works out for you.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“I just want you to be happy, Melanie,” I say, touching her shoulder and tilting my head to the side in a gesture of sincerity. “I’ll be at the bar if you need a drink.”
About half an hour later I’m surprised to find Melanie pulling up a stool beside me. She orders a vodka martini and then shifts her body to face me. Fortunately, I’m significantly more intoxicated than I was before and brimming with self-confidence; I’ve even introduced myself to the bartender, Marty, who was kind enough to offer me a sample of Grey Goose on the house. “Customer appreciation,” he called it.
“You can put her martini on my tab,” I tell Marty. Then I look at her and ask, “What happened to your suitor?”
“He had to leave early.”
“I see. I’m probably more interesting than him anyway.”
I take a sip and she smiles. “What do you do, Ethan?”
I need to come up with something. Fast. Can’t let her know I’m an out-of-work ne’er-do-well who doesn’t contribute to society in any meaningful way. I’m currently enrolled in the journalism program at Ryerson, so I decide to run with it. “I’m a journalist.”
“Really? What kind? Like, print?”
“Yeah. Freelance, mostly.”
“Where have you been published?”
“Oh, y’know, the Star, the Globe and Mail, that paper they hand out for free on the subway. . . .” Desperately wanting to change the subject, I ask, “What about you?”
“I’m a teacher. Third grade. Up in North York. We’re on our summer break right now.”
“Cool. Do you like it?”
“It’s great. I love it.”
“What about the kids? They give you any trouble? If so, I can sort ’em out,” I say, grinding my fist into my palm.
“Nah, we get along fine. Well, there’s always one in every group. I’ll show you.” She opens her purse and pulls out a class picture—the kind we used to have before digital cameras were invented. It feels nice to hold an actual photo again.
“See this guy right here?” She points to a kid in the front row wearing a green sweater with red hair, freckles and a goofy smile on his face. “That’s Kevin. He’s a little cocksucker, that one.”
“A cocksucker, huh?”
“Yeah. Huge prick. Huge! His parents are pricks too. He made my life a living hell the first month. He has A.D.D. and is probably obsessive-compulsive.”
“So how’d you straighten him out?”
“Well, eventually we had a meeting and the doctor decided to put him on Ritalin. That definitely slowed him down. Sometimes I just bribed him with candy,” she says with a grin. “If he could be quiet for the whole day, I’d give him something sweet at the end. We got along great after that.”
“One in every group,” I repeat.
After a brief pause, she asks, “Do you smoke?” as she retrieves a pack of menthol cigarettes from her purse.
“Like a goddamn chimney! I go through two lighters a day.”
She smiles, not realizing I stole that joke from Bill Hicks.
“Let’s go outside.”
After finishing her pack of menthols and ordering a few more drinks before last call, I ask Melanie if she wants to come back to my place, split a bottle of wine and see what happens. Soon we’re standing in front of my apartment room door on the stained blue carpeting, and we’re slurring and giggling and her body is leaning into mine with her arm wrapped tightly around my waist. My room is still a mess—an accomplished, upstanding journalist of my supposed reputation would never live in a dump like this—but I’ve come too far to back out now.
“Do you have any roommates?” she asks as I fiddle with the keys.
“Yeah. He’s really messy. Just . . . disorganized. I think I’m gonna tell him to move out.” As soon as we’re through the door, she immediately pushes me up against the wall and starts kissing me, occasionally biting down on my lower lip. Her mouth tastes like an ashtray, but it still feels good. Then she stops for a moment to survey the room.
“Wow, he is messy.”
We start kissing again, and with my eyes closed I lead her toward the bedroom while trying to avoid all of the clothes and garbage on the floor. “Yeah, messy guy. That’s why I call him Tornado. He destroys everything in his path.”
As I’m guiding her through the apartment, her foot catches on a pair of boxer briefs and she trips and falls to the hardwood floor. I expect her to wince in pain, but she just snorts and laughs it off. I help her upright and we continue the foreplay without missing a beat. Then I accidentally smash my knee on the metal leg of a table. “Fuck! My knee!”
Damaged and bruised, we finally make it onto the bed. I worry I might be too drunk to engage in any carnal activity, which is often the case, but thankfully I’m not entirely numb yet. As her clothes come off, I feel that air of accomplishment and validation every man feels anytime he adds another notch to his belt. But when I start to fuck her—a married woman—the feeling is diminished, followed swiftly by an overwhelming sense of guilt, sadness and self-loathing.
—PART II—
INTO THE NADIR
ELEVEN
The audience has been lied to. That’s the first thought that flows through my mind as I wake. Lied to by books, television and movies, conditioned to believe that life and love can be explained in ninety minutes or less and that what happens here actually matters. It’s all just smoke and mirrors. In the real world there is no studio audience, no third act resolution, no storybook ending. We were lied to again and again: by the sycophantic politicians who sold us out for campaign contributions; the advertisers who bombarded us with imagery designed to feed off our insecurities;
the priests who told us to be kind to others while they were busy sodomizing children; the anti-drug campaigners who warned us that smoking marijuana would be fatal; the economists who predicted that globalization would lead us all to prosperity; and the school teachers who taught us to believe we could be anything we wanted to be. Liars. All of them.
I was too young to remember the fall of the Berlin Wall, but I know what it represented: an opportunity to remake the world, to get it right this time, with freedom, equality and justice for all. The Doomsday Clock was set at seventeen minutes to midnight. Seventeen! But we squandered that opportunity. In a few short years we became fat and complacent and let a small group of wealthy CEOs buy the politicians, ruin the planet and kill the middle class, and now they’ve pit us against each other to fight over the scraps. If you, like me, had any delusion that your existence on this earth would amount to more than just a hill of beans, imagine your dismay when you begin to realize you were wrong from the very start. The game is rigged. There are no goddamn beans. And we’ve all bought into the lie.
I’m lying naked on a mattress with my body only partially covered by a thin blue blanket. The balcony door is wide open and cold morning air is flowing into the room—I don’t know why I opened it last night. My head aches and my throat is dry and I can only remember the evening in fragments. I’m not even sure if I paid my tab—they might still have my credit card at the cocktail bar. Melanie is nowhere to be found. Did she leave already? I hope she did. The last time I brought a girl home, she didn’t leave until well into the afternoon. Just kept sleeping and snoring while I lay awake in bed staring at the ceiling. Eventually I had to wake her up and tell her I was going to be late for work. That was a lie. I went to the liquor store and bought a bottle of scotch and drank on my futon that day.
Suddenly I hear Melanie rustling in the bathroom, and a moment later she returns wearing the same black dress she wore the night before—albeit with her hair and make-up slightly askew. I squint my eyes, exhale, stretch out my arms and mumble, “Good morning.” How many times have I awoken to an awkward situation like this? I’ve been doing it for years and I never get any better at it. Never know what to do or what to say.
“Hey what’s with all the medication in your bathroom?” she asks. “Are you alright?”
She opened the medicine cabinet. Great. I should really get a padlock for that. “Yeah, I’m fine. I just . . . I have trouble sleeping sometimes.”
“I see.”
“Do you want some breakfast? I can make you bacon and eggs or something?”
“No, that’s okay. I’m allergic to eggs anyway.”
“Well, I probably have some Corn Flakes or Lucky Charms around here. . . . They’ve got those marshmallows and shit—”
“No, really, I’m fine. I should probably get going.”
For some reason I don’t want her to leave. Not yet. Not because I’m afraid I’ll miss her, but because I feel like I’ve done something wrong. “At least let me buy you breakfast? There’s a good place down the street from here.”
She reluctantly accepts and I throw on some dirty clothes and we go.
It’s ten o’clock in the morning and I’m sitting across from Melanie at a small table in a quiet diner. The radio in the background is barely audible over the sound of the wall clock and every tick of the second hand feels like an hour. Without alcohol, I realize, Melanie and I don’t have anything in common and there’s very little for us to talk about. I’m also unshaven, greasy-haired and probably smell like three different kinds of hard liquor.
Our food finally arrives and we start eating. She ordered pancakes, sausages and whole-wheat toast while I got a bowl of fruit and a glass of water because my stomach is too queasy to digest anything more substantial.
“How’s the toast?” I ask her.
“It’s good,” she says, chewing quietly. “It’s good toast.”
“Hmm. That’s good to hear.”
A few awkward seconds pass. I take a loud sip of water between mouthfuls and then glance down at her left hand and notice she’s not wearing her wedding ring. She takes another small bite of toast and says, “So, that roommate you mentioned . . . he doesn’t exist, right?”
“Who? Tornado?”
“Yeah.”
“No.”
“So that was all your stuff? All the trash? The bottles?”
“Uh huh.”
“I also noticed you had a class schedule on your fridge.”
“Hmm. That’s a pretty astute observation.”
“You’re still a student? You’re not really a journalist?”
“No. Not yet, anyway. These days, it’s kinda hard to, y’know, get your stuff out there and—”
“Are you always this full of shit?”
“Well . . .”
“And do you work? Or just drink all day?”
“I’m actually between jobs at the moment . . . but I do have somebody helping me with my résumé.”
The waitress comes by to refill my water.
“Really? You can’t eat any eggs?” I ask.
“No.”
While chewing on a large piece of cantaloupe, I add, “You mean you’ve never had a really good omelette? With ham?”
“Oh God,” she gasps, dropping her fork onto the plate and covering her face in embarrassment. She’s obviously upset. It’s understandable: she cheated on her husband with a drunken, unemployed loser ten years younger than she is.
“Look, I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t even know what happened last night. Honestly, it seems like every day I wake up and I can’t remember what I did the day before. It got so bad that, recently, I started writing everything down in a journal, just so I wouldn’t forget. Basic things, y’know, like where I went, what I did, who I ran into, what we said to each other, where I—”
“Why are you telling me this?” she snaps.
I pause. “In a couple of days I probably won’t remember you. At all. Your name, your face—it’ll be like none of this ever happened.”
Melanie remains quiet with her eyes focused on her plate, leisurely stirring her food around in a circle while I keep talking.
“You can still patch things up with whats-his-name. You’re great. He’s a lucky guy. I’m sure he knows that.”
“I don’t know what I’m gonna do,” she sighs. Reaching into her purse, she retrieves a twenty-dollar bill and places it on the tablecloth as she rises from her chair. “It’s on me. Good luck with the job hunt, Ethan.”
Seconds later, Melanie leaves through the front door and I’m left staring at her empty chair. With a big chunk of melon in my mouth, I point at her plate with my fork and mumble, “Hey, you forgot your toast!”
TWELVE
It’s around two o’clock in the afternoon and I’m still hungover. I don’t even have the energy to shit, shower and shave. My bedroom is hot and sweltering with no air conditioning; there’s nothing but a desk fan oscillating on the nightstand and the sunlight is seeping in through the blinds. Hungry, I throw on a pair of jeans and my blue dress shirt from last night and wander down the street to a pizza place on the corner. Inside, it’s even hotter than my apartment and the worker behind the counter is sweating profusely: his forehead, his underarms, probably his crotch and his balls, everything. I guess they don’t have air conditioning either. Or they’ve decided to forego it in an effort to save money. Times are tight. Hygienic concerns aside, I order a large pepperoni and ask him how long it’ll take.
“I have to finish this other one first. . . so maybe fifteen, twenty minutes?” As opposed to waiting and melting to death, I tell him I’ll come back when it’s ready.
Avoiding the hustle of the main streets, I light myself a cigarette and decide on a stroll through the nearby residential area. Row upon row of uniform houses, each two storeys tall and made of brown brick. Most of the hou
ses have a small wooden deck at the front, typically with a barbecue and a couple of chairs. Four sets of parents have congregated on one of the decks, talking and laughing while their children play on the front lawn, running around in circles and spraying each other with toy water guns.
The scene reminds me of the first time I met Rachael. We were really young—only twelve or thirteen—and one day after school some classmates and I walked to a friend’s house where all the neighbourhood kids were having a water fight. We joined in, and within ten minutes I was completely drenched. Feeling thirsty, I asked my friend where I could get a drink and he pointed to the house next door. There was a patio at the back and I walked up the stairs and opened the sliding door and saw her sitting there in the kitchen, alone, nursing a small bruise on her ankle. Apparently she had tripped while dodging an airborne water balloon. I found some ice in the freezer and wrapped it up in a paper towel and gave it to her to apply to the wound. “Thanks,” she said. Then she told me her name was Rachael.
It wasn’t long before we were calling each other on a daily basis. Ten-minute phone conversations turned into two-hour marathon sessions. Every Sunday she volunteered at a local children’s hospital, and she once complained to me that she had no one to eat lunch with, so I told her I’d meet her in the cafeteria any time she wanted—even though the hospital was an hour’s walk from my house and the weather was often cold, rainy and miserable. Still, I was true to my word. I would have taken any excuse to be with her. In many ways we were polar opposites: she was incredibly cheerful, bright, altruistic and always had something to say, whereas I was a shy, bitter, reclusive kid. Yet somehow we connected. Maybe because we could always make each other laugh, no matter how bad things got. I haven’t met anybody like that since.
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