by Tim Bowling
“That’s okay. I’m not all that hungry. I’ll just go over there and grab a coffee and a muffin. Then I’ll find a table.”
“Hey, Chels,” a heavy-set, crewcutted young man with a noble Dracula nose shouted. “You got a shift today?”
“Tonight,” she said.
I left before the whole subject of the primate in her coat came up. The truth was, I needed a few minutes to myself. I might even have needed a few years to myself. That is the problem. We don’t get years to ourselves until we no longer want them.
I bought a tall Americano from a short Filipino and decided against a muffin. The first taste of coffee was a delight, and it helped, it really did. I felt strengthened at once as I found a table amongst the office-tower workers on their lunch hours and the street people and the shining, well-fed consumers and the lonely elderly and the Pippi Longstockings with monkeys in their coats. Chelsea still stood under the banner of the New York Fries. I resolved to make the most of my no doubt fleeting solitude.
I checked my watch. It was almost one o’clock. I checked my pulse. It was still quick, but not alarmingly so. I checked my mood. It had sped through a few phases since the morning, and now had slid down toward where it started. Much had happened, but little had changed. I still didn’t feel that I could teach a class, today or any time soon. I still didn’t feel that I was a vital part of the human story. I might have been wealthier, on account of the rare mechanical bank. But I was also more vulnerable and sensitive, exposed like the transparent horse. And I had committed a crime, or at least been an unwitting accomplice who’d eventually decided to join the gang of two. Much had happened; little had changed. Was this, then, the definition of life? Or maybe I wasn’t appreciating the change. This young woman, Chelsea, for example – who now walked towards me with a bag of fries in one hand and some kind of drink in the other – had she entered my life only to leave it as quickly, or had I made a new friend? The jury remained out. God! Wrong expression! I really didn’t want to think about juries. Never mind the existential concerns; there were practical ones to face. We needed to discuss them.
I looked closely at my accomplice as she sat down opposite me. Her mascara had somehow been cleaned up and the red sweat-radiation had evaporated. The girl was a marvel of resourcefulness: when had she managed the cosmetic touch-up? And with a monkey in her coat? I supposed this was yet another example of the remarkable multi-tasking capabilities of the young, a product of the whirlwinds of the digital age. Every day in this millennium was a cyclonic celebration of the fast, with everyone standing perfectly positioned in the new global economy, trusting that the two-tonne house front of history would crash over us and not leave a mark. In any case, Chelsea seemed just fine. I couldn’t help but be uplifted. She was eighteen or nineteen years old and, at least for the moment, happy. If I wanted a definition of life, then why not this one? Why not this one?
She took a sip of her drink, pinched a fry in her long fingers like a cigarette and, with her other hand, held her coat together to keep Greg Arious from capering free. His tiny dirty-blond head poked out like a graduation corsage.
“Have a fry, Professor. I don’t want to eat them all.”
“No, thank you.”
Inevitably, perhaps, an awkwardness descended over us. From the moment of our meeting, the pace of experience had accelerated, and now we were coming down off the high. Just as well, as I had no business being in her company at all. I cleared my throat.
“I was right about him.” I pointed at the monkey. “You could probably bring a circus in here and no one would say a thing.” But just bring in a petition to stop violence against women on the anniversary of the Montreal Massacre and see how quickly the mall security reacted. A general spiritual fatigue kept me from speaking the thought aloud, and even Delmore let it pass. He was too busy sucking on his paws and moaning something about lifting the lid on the coffin of the human character.
“Yeah. I love the food court.” Chelsea’s tone more or less claimed the place as her home. “I always love coming here.”
“You do? Why?”
She let go of her coat and held her arms out to both sides. “Well, everyone’s here. All kinds of people, I mean. You wouldn’t believe who I’ve met here. Big business types and dudes from indie bands I like and . . .” She leaned forward, eyes even wider, and closed her coat just before Greg Arious sprang out like that creature from Alien. “Did you know that Oprah’s coming to Edmonton? I wouldn’t be surprised if she came in here. I hope I’ll be on shift then.”
Yes, I had heard of Oprah. The Grand no-longer-young Oprah. You couldn’t be an author and not have someone – often a family member – suggest that you should send your book to Oprah. But wasn’t she the celebrity who was always dieting? Back in the nineties, at least, she was dieting. Did women on diets eat at mall food courts? I sighed lengthily but discreetly. Chelsea obviously had a good heart. She wasn’t even into her twenties. Frankly, I was tired of judging everyone. Besides, the worry had begun to rise once more.
“You shouldn’t drive your car for a while,” I said. “The police are looking for it.”
She nodded. “But what about finding that homeless dude? I was going to help.”
Before I could respond, she answered her own question. “We’ll walk. It’s a nice day, and he’s probably not far from here anyway. Oh? You’re okay to walk, aren’t you?”
I smiled. “Yes. I’m okay to walk.” That was about all that I was okay to do, but I made no further comment.
“Hey! I just thought of something.” Chelsea swallowed some masticated fry and sprang to her feet.
I followed her over to a table on the opposite side of the court where the shawled figure sat, hunched like a mossy stump. This whiskered, bony-jawed woman was knitting without needles or yarn. Her large, gnarled hands were mostly covered with dull-red fingerless mitts, and she rubbed them together so fiercely that the fabric might have been raw flesh. I thought of Lady Macbeth trying to remove the incarnadine spots of guilt. When Chelsea leaned down and spoke to this person (she called her Ardeth or something remotely Scandinavian), the figure looked slowly up, as if out of the depths of the girlhood she had once known.
“We’re looking for a Dumpster diver who pushes a shopping cart around. He was – where was it exactly, Professor, that you met him?”
“Jasper. Jasper and 107th Street.”
“Can you describe him for . . .”
Ardeth? Arleth? Abishag? I couldn’t quite tell. I gave a description, emphasizing the sheer number of blue recycling bags. Even though I saw him most vividly as a Confederate soldier near the end of the Civil War – ragged, fierce and quietly desperate – I didn’t think the image would clarify anything for Ardeth.
She mumbled something without lifting her head from her mitted hands.
“Harvard?” Chelsea turned to me. “Isn’t that some big college?”
“Hee hee hee.” I knew without looking whose delighted giggle that was. “Plenty of rust on the ivy. See if she knows what Yale is. Go on, ask her.”
I shook my head. The American poets of the postwar generation had been obsessed with teaching at the Ivy League schools. Delmore Schwartz, who’d been both a star student and a teacher at Harvard when Jews were rather exotic and, frankly, unwelcome in that “Brahmin establishment,” obviously enjoyed Chelsea’s tentative definition. But I didn’t have time for those long-ago politics.
“It’s a prestigious American university, yes. Why?”
“Ardeth says the dude we’re looking for is probably Harvard.”
Again came the mumbled words spoken into the red mitts.
Chelsea said, “Oh,” then turned and looked up at me. “That’s just what everyone calls him because he’s smart.”
“Ha!” Delmore snorted.
I scowled at him, but I was mostly relieved that he had come out of his gloomy hibernation. “You should accept with grace that people still connect intelligence with Harvard. The place hasn�
��t fallen as far as you think.”
“It’s only because you can’t give someone a nickname like ‘The New School for Social Research.’”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the original New School for Social Research had simply become The New School, the embarrassing social research reference having been dropped by the administration some years before.
“Where do you think we could find him now?” Chelsea pressed.
Ardeth – grubby, withdrawn, wholly marginalized – reached into her shawl, which was thin as sashimi – and pulled out a cellphone. The gnarled thumbs did not move with anything like the speed Chelsea employed, but Ardeth was clearly familiar with the device. Since she didn’t raise it to her grubby, quivering lips to mumble, I assumed that she was checking some sort of Google map that zeroed in on the homeless.
“She’s texting,” Chelsea said, as if she’d read my lame mind.
Many seconds passed. I sipped my Americano. Over at the New York Fries, Keaton’s ghost fiddled with the ketchup dispenser. He removed his porkpie hat, held it under the nozzle and pushed. It was The Butcher Boy all over again, with ketchup instead of molasses as the foundation of the gag. But no Fatty Arbuckle or Al St. John stood on this set. Nineteen seventeen was almost a hundred years ago. And yet why shouldn’t it be The Butcher Boy all over again? Where else should it be reenacted but in a food court in the bowels of a mall, which is, in fact, the contemporary general store.
Ardeth studied the screen. She mumbled. Chelsea thanked her.
“She says her son saw Harvard about ten minutes ago, and he was headed this way. Sometimes he plays chess in the library.”
“Harvard and the squares. Oho!” came a delighted quip.
“That’s beneath you,” I said to Delmore, then quickly returned my attention to Chelsea. “Well, let’s go see. Maybe he’s there now.”
Ardeth mumbled some more. She seemed to drop the words from her lips like pomegranate seeds.
“Oh, yeah? Thanks.” Chelsea turned and muttered, “I guess he’s a pretty serious chess player.”
Great, I thought, just great. I wasn’t much of a chess player, but I knew that the opponents could sit there like – well, like chess pieces – and not move for hours. But surely even a serious chess player, if homeless, would be happy to interrupt his game for the sake of several thousand dollars.
“Do you mind if we hang here a while, Professor? I want to finish my fries. And hey, you can finish your coffee. Besides, I should get something for this little guy to eat.” Chelsea smiled down into her coat as I wondered what on earth a capuchin monkey ate. Bananas seemed too obvious. Maybe he was an insect-eating monkey. Had the franchise Vietnamese places introduced the full range of the South Asian diet to the North American palate? As long as there was a ketchup dispenser to sweeten the crunchy thorax, perhaps . . .
With her left hand, Chelsea conducted an Internet search on her phone, then announced that the monkey could eat almost anything we eat, and hurried away. I found another table and sagged into the chair. My body, if not my spirit, anticipated something, and that something, I knew, wasn’t going to be easy. Delmore obviously sensed it, too. He squeezed into the opposite chair – not forming a pretty picture – covered his burning black eyes with his massive paws and moaned lowly. Even Keaton’s ghost had stopped horsing around with the ketchup dispenser. He sat a few tables away, suddenly middle-aged, and the ketchup trickled like blood down from his hat and stained his white-powdered cheeks. He might even have been crying blood, but he was too distant to see clearly. I felt the presence of other spirits, and they were not easy. Delmore and Keaton had tightened like violin strings. I looked around the ring of franchises, each counter manned or womaned by someone far from their native place. By the time Chelsea returned, I understood that she had more on her mind than finishing her fries.
“I’m sorry,” she began, and sat heavily down. “I never . . . well . . . I haven’t . . .” She shook her head and blinked rapidly. “Shit.” The one whispered curse was like a novel of her emotional life, and it had been years since I’d had any time to read novels. Chelsea kept her head lowered. I waited, distracting myself with the monkey’s regal gnawing of whatever he held in his . . . I wanted to say hands, but why create more humans on our already overpopulated planet?
“Don’t don’t don’t,” Delmore moaned. His black eyes roamed the artificial sky, the way they must have roamed the hallway ceiling when he lay on his back that fatal morning in 1963, in cardiac arrest, the trash from the trash bag he’d been carrying scattered around him.
Just before I could say, tensely, “Don’t what?” Chelsea raised her face to me. As God – whatever god you like – was my witness, the monkey stopped eating and lifted one tiny hand and traced her jawline with it, then cupped her chin. She smiled down at him, seeming to gain some strength from the touch.
“It’s just that I didn’t thank you. Not properly.”
“Oh.” In truth, I wasn’t exactly sure what I had done to merit her thanks.
“I guess I’m not used to it,” she continued, losing breath with each word.
Now my confusion really set in. It must have showed, for she immediately went on.
“People your age being nice to me, I mean.”
“Don’t don’t oh please don’t.”
And though I was fairly certain it was Delmore who had moaned the words, I was also not entirely certain. After all, the conversation could only get worse. What had people my age done to her? And when? Please. Don’t.
“My mom hasn’t had the best of luck with boyfriends.”
I was breaking over the tenderness of the monkey’s touch. He had placed his little hand on Chelsea’s cheek and blessed her life; his palm rested warmly on the curve of the Earth as it revolved into cold space. I had to stop the direction of Chelsea’s words; I could not face the boyfriends, I simply could not bear it.
“Your father,” I began, and Delmore’s moan rose to a howl that would, I thought in a panic, bring the security guards rushing over.
Chelsea, of course, hadn’t noticed. The two words, your father, had hit her as they hit most human beings and always had, with the impact of Oedipus learning at last who he’d killed at the crossroads, with the impact of Hamlet listening wide-eyed to the avenging ghost of his own genesis. But the words didn’t break her. Or, if they did, she somehow held the pieces together.
“He left when I was a kid.” She drew in her breath, and tightened her jaw. “I hardly remember him.”
“He left, he left, he left.” Delmore’s howling had stopped, and his moan, lower than before, resumed. Keaton, meanwhile, hadn’t moved. He remained stock-still by the ketchup dispensers, gaping at us. In the odd undersea silence of the food court, I could hear a single tear land on the top of his slap shoe. It was the opposite for him from Chelsea’s experience; he had walked out on his father in 1917, when Old Joe’s drunkenness had made the family act an embarrassment. Maybe leaving and being left weren’t quite opposite, at least not in the case of children and fathers.
Say something, I chastised myself. For once in your life, be as human as a goddamned monkey. Because it was plain from the girl’s tone that she did remember her father, though I could hardly correct her. “I’m sorry to hear that.” A long pause ensued. The camera panned in for a dramatic close-up. I railed against the maddening self-consciousness and stumbled ahead. “How old were you?”
Delmore stopped moaning long enough to snarl at me. “Three years, seven months and nine days. Christ! What difference does it make how old she was?”
“I think I was four. My mom doesn’t like to talk about it. Except sometimes, when she’s been . . . she . . .” Chelsea suddenly pulled her coat together at her neck, as if Greg Arious were the past that she didn’t want to escape into the open. “And my grandpa, he used to just get angry. He never had anything good to say about my dad.”
Okay, so the mother drinks, and the grandfather died. Jesus. Maybe there isn’t
anything good to say, I thought, trying to imagine what kind of man could walk out on his four-year-old child. But it happened all the time. And Alberta, I knew, led the country in cases of such abandonment. Never mind oil revenues building the Heritage Savings Trust Fund; the province could be filthy rich on collected child-support payments. O land of the maverick and renegade. But I was sensitive enough to understand that Chelsea wanted more than to have abuse heaped on her father. And who was I, in my current state, to provide it? I couldn’t even face thirty teenagers needing their comma faults corrected – how could I possibly face one who needed her past and future resolved? Because what else could it mean to question a parent’s behaviour if it didn’t mean to partially answer the riddle to your own fate?
“A couple of years ago, when I got my licence,” Chelsea continued, almost sheepishly, “I went looking for him. All I knew was that he was from somewhere near Brooks, down around the badlands. Well, I knew his name, too. It’s on my birth certificate.”
This was terrible, far too much like listening to a student explain why her essay on “A Rose for Emily” was late. I wanted to cry out to her, “But this isn’t your fault! Don’t apologize!” But who was I to comment? Me, who talked with my mother every other day, who had golfed almost daily with my father through his seventies and then sat by his deathbed as he died?
“My father,” Delmore said quietly, “after the divorce, when he remarried, offered to buy me for seventy-five thousand dollars.”
“What?” I wrenched my head around.
“Sure, he would have overpaid at that price. But this was before the crash. He had plenty of dough then.” Delmore grinned weakly. “You don’t know the half of it. Poets and their fathers. Poets as fathers. God, I didn’t have to go through that part, at least.”
“I never found him.” Chelsea’s eyes looked beyond me, as if in expectation of seeing her father on the escalator, descending slowly, à la Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard in her famous DeMille close-up. “But I found the house where he grew up. It was in Patricia, which is so weird because that’s my mom’s name.” Her voice kept dropping, each word like a tear, and soon I had to strain to catch the words. “Of course, the house was abandoned.”