The Slip

by Mark Sampson

  For Rebecca

  Author’s note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Nothing in the world — indeed nothing even beyond the world — can possibly be conceived which could be called good without qualification except a good will.

  — IMMMANUEL KANT, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals

  However unwilling a person who has a strong opinion may admit the possibility that his opinion may be false, he ought to be moved by the consideration that, however true it may be, if it is not fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed, it will be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth.

  — JOHN STUART MILL, On Liberty

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Dedication

  Author's Note

  Monday, November 2

  Odious

  Tuesday, November 3

  The Jugglers Arms

  Wednesday, November 4

  Higher Learning

  Thursday, November 5

  Benazir

  Friday, November 6

  Victoria-by-the-Sea

  Saturday, November 7

  The Midwife

  Sunday, November 8

  Monday, November 9

  Tuesday, November 10

  Wednesday, November 11

  Epilogue: Recipe for the Bloody Joseph

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Monday, November 2

  I would have run to little Naomi when she cried out, except I had to get the poppy to stay on. That seemed paramount as I stood in the master bedroom at 4 Metcalfe Street, getting ready for my TV appearance. The producer at CBC’s Power Today had emailed us all with her fourth reminder since Friday morning. Okay, folks: We’re in Remembrance Day mode as of Monday, so we ask all on-air guests to have the poppy prominently displayed for broadcast. We won’t have a box of them in the studio yet, so please bring your own. Should go on the left, over your heart. Yes, yes. I had a track record for being one of these careless dolts who loses four or five poppies to the wind and just gives up somewhere around November 7. I im­agined hundreds of those plastic-and-felt florets I’d bought over the years clogging the gutters of Cabbagetown and the Annex, and the goddamn veterans counting up their gold like Scrooge McDuck. The things were clearly engineered to fall off. It became critical, in that moment, to get it fastened correctly. More critical than whatever else I planned to wear — brown tweed over blue shirt and some pleasantly centrist slacks — or my efforts to sooth the ginger flare of comb-over that sprang across my skull like the facehugger from Alien. (Cheryl Sneed, my fellow panellist and long-time nemesis on the Right, would make some green room remark about it, regardless. Either that or the wisp of PEI accent that still warped my rhotics — which I hammed up whenever I was in her presence, because I knew it annoyed her.) And, perhaps, more critical even than what my three-year-old daughter was screaming about down the hall in the bathroom. Grace was on it, anyway. I heard her fly out of Naomi’s bedroom with a panicked Sweetie, are you OKAY? followed by a quick gush from the faucet. I plucked the poppy off my bureau, fluttered it like a parasol in the mirror. Wait — where was my tweed? Oh right, of course. I hurried into the hallway.

  “Philip. Philip, are you there?”

  I was not. I bounded up the stairs to my third-floor office, zagging around the Dora the Explorer doll lying on the hardwood beneath my feet. Entering my office, I found the tweed where I last left it: thrown over the arm of the futon. I nabbed the jacket and laid it flat across my desk, moving manuscript printouts from my next book (tentatively called “Christianity and Its Dissidents”) out of the way. I bent over and manoeuvred the flower over the lapel. I poked the steel pin into the pure virgin wool and pressed the poppy in as deep as it would go. Then I raised the jacket up and looked at it. Already the plastic blossom had slid a few millimetres out of the lapel.

  Grace’s voice echoed from the hall and through the open office door.

  “Philip — seriously, are you there or not?”

  Just a minute, dear. I returned the jacket to the futon arm and then moved to the overflowing bookshelf on the opposite wall. I pulled down my author copy of Corporate Canada Today (Tuxedo House, 2014) and quickly confirmed a few facts about ODS Financial Group, which would be the subject of this afternoon’s Power Today interview. Yes, yes. Managing partner since ’99: Viktor Grozni. CFO: the lovely and talented Glenda Harkins-Smith. Market cap before the 2008 crash. Market cap just before Friday’s announcement. Number of Canadians with pensions directly managed by. Number of ancillary businesses shareholders had no idea existed. Amount of direct subsidy from the Harper Conservatives since 2011. Yes, yes. It was already there, all of it, in my head. Cheryl Sneed didn’t stand a chance.

  Time to throw the jacket on and quickly help Grace with whatever she and Naomi were dealing with in the bathroom (the child had stopped screaming, but continued with a kind of hiccupy crying that seemed to reverberate through the whole house) before heading downtown. I turned and reached for my tweed, only to have my gaze hauled to the floor. There on the hardwood lay my poppy, face down like a drunkard.

  Oh, that is it, I thought. Fucking veterans.

  I grabbed the tweed and picked up the poppy before storming back down the stairs. Time for Plan B.

  “Philip — Philip can you please come here.”

  I hustled down to the main floor. Stole a glance at the clock on the kitchen wall. Oh God. I hurried to the door leading to our basement. My basement, since Grace and the kids rarely went down there. More oubliette than man cave, it had a set of stairs that descended almost vertically into that dark, unfinished gizzard. I marched down and popped on the light, which only marginally diminished the darkness, then went to my small workbench with the poppy and jacket in tow. I rested the tweed flat and placed the scarlet bloom onto the lapel. Then I grabbed the industrial stapler I had bought at Canadian Tire to assemble some rather complicated birthday party decorations for my stepdaughter, Simone, when she turned thirteen a few weeks ago. The tool was heavy in my hand, like a weapon. I clamped one end of the nozzle over the flower and tucked the other under the tweed.

  BLAM! BLAM!

  There. Perfect. Well, not perfect. I held the jacket up once more. Hopefully the CBC’s cameras were not so HD that they would pick up the tiny planks of metal that now held the poppy in place.

  I hiked back up to the main floor, throwing the jacket on as I did. Moving to holler upstairs to Grace, I turned to see that she and Naomi were already in the kitchen, waiting for me. My wife leaned against the counter, arms folded over her chest, her bottom lip tucked under her top teeth, her head tilted. Oh, she was mad. I briefly scanned the kitchen for the source of her rage. Surely I hadn’t forgotten to clean up the wreckage of the Bloody Joseph (my third since breakfast): the inedible stump of celery sequestered in the compost, the tin of tomato juice washed out and blue-binned, the celery salt resuming its place in the spice rack, and various other accoutrements returned to their sentry posts in my bar fridge. But no. The kitchen was spotless, as per our agreement.

  “Oh, hey,” I ventured. “Look, I’m running late but would you mind —”

  “Did you not hear me calling you?”

  What was I to say to that?

  “I’m pretty sure you did hear me calling you, Philip,” she went on, “because I could hear you shuffling in the hallway outside the bathroom as I did.”

  “I wasn’t ‘shuffling,’” I said. “I was getting ready for this CBC thing. Look —”

  “The tub fau
cet upstairs still isn’t working right.”

  “Yes, it is,” I disagreed, stupidly. I had showered earlier in the day, as had Simone before she’d gone to school. (It wasn’t apparent whether Grace had had her shower yet.) But she was, technically, right — the tub faucet was still plagued with a peculiar problem: the cold water tap would spew piping-hot water for nearly a minute after you turned it on. It was the latest in a series of bathroom issues we’d been having. You’d think that for the ungodly sum I paid for 4 Metcalfe Street six years ago when we got married, we’d have a fully functional bathroom — not to mention a finished basement. But no, no.

  “You were supposed to get it fixed,” Grace said, “like, three weeks ago. And now —”

  “It’s on my list. You know it’s on my list.”

  “And now what I feared would happen — what I knew would happen if you didn’t get it fixed — has happened. Naomi went in there before I realized and turned on the tap and scalded herself.”

  “I had to take a pewp,” Naomi informed me with a sniffle, and displayed her reddened right wrist.

  I looked at her. “Did, did you poop in the tub, sweetie?”

  “She didn’t poop in the tub,” Grace barked. “Philip, you’re missing the point. Did you not hear your daughter scream out and start crying?”

  I did. Of course I did. But I knew — or at least assumed — that Grace had things well in hand. Which she did.

  My eyes flicked to the wall clock. Jesus.

  “Look, what do you want from me?” I tried a half smile. “I fixed the sink up there, didn’t I?”

  “Yes, you fixed the sink — after I nagged you about it for five months. What, do you want a medal for that?”

  “Grace —”

  “I’m serious, Philip. Would you like a prize for fixing the sink? We could write to the French government and get them to create a new international award for plumbing, and give it to you. They could call it the Douche d’Or.”

  “You’re hilarious,” I deadpanned, but then chuckled on the inside. She must have been sitting on that joke for weeks.

  I shrugged at her. “Look, what can I say? I’m not handy. You know that. This kind of stuff stresses me out, and I have enough stress in my life right now. I’m teaching two courses this term. I’ve got the new book. I’ve got the thesis defence I’m chairing in a few weeks, and …” My eyes floated back to the clock. “I’ve got this CBC thing this afternoon.”

  “So you don’t have time to pick up the phone and call a plumber, is what you’re saying.”

  “It’s not about calling a plumber, Grace. It’s about having the headspace to figure out if there are any plumbers left in this city who haven’t screwed us over.”

  “You weren’t teaching in the summer,” she pointed out. “You could have done it then.”

  “Yes, but I had a breakthrough with the book, and …” I pinched my nose, sighed. In that moment, I longed for my old life, before we bought this huge, and hugely expensive, house in Cabbagetown. For sixteen years prior to marrying Grace, I had lived in a loft in the Annex. If the sink broke, the landlord came and fixed it. Which felt like something that only happened in fairy tales, now.

  “Look,” I went on, “just because I wasn’t teaching doesn’t mean I had the capacity to deal with …” And yes, I said it then; the words just flew out of me. “… a bunch of domestic trifles.”

  “Wow,” she said, long and slow, and blinked at me. “So I guess what you’re saying is it’s really my responsibility, because you’ve got all that,” and here she mock-furrowed her brow at me, “deep thinking to do.”

  “Oh, come on, Grace.”

  But she took a step toward me then, her backside leaving the counter. In one fluid motion, she jutted her hip out, picked up Naomi, and parked the child upon it. Engaging, she was, in that most basic act of motherwork: to hold her child close. Then Grace threw back her thick, curly hair — sporting a henna dye job she’d acquired a few months ago, one I thoroughly approved of when she first modelled it for me, burying my face in its waves later that night, in bed — and looked at me with those wild, emerald eyes of hers.

  “I guess what I’m saying, Philip,” she said, “is that I don’t much care about the tub. Or the sink. What I care about is that you don’t really seem all that plugged in to what’s happening in your own house.”

  “Grace, do I need to remind you that I’m appearing on national television this afternoon?” I felt a more echt emotion than the one I’d been feigning for the last five minutes swell up inside me. “Do I need to remind you that what happened on Friday is going to make the 2008 crash look like a bad cocktail party? The CBC wants my commentary on it, and they’ve pitted me against —”

  “I don’t care,” she said. “Philip, your daughter scalded herself. And obviously you consider the tub issue to be a ‘domestic trifle.’”

  “I shouldn’t have said that —”

  “But you did. You did say it.”

  “And obviously, you don’t care that I’m now very late for this CBC thing.”

  “You know, you’re not the only one with a public persona to worry about,” she said. “You’re not the only one whose writing is important.”

  “Is that what this is about?” I asked. “That I’ve somehow disrespected your work by leaving you to deal with Naomi while I got ready? Well, I’m sorry, Grace. I’m sorry I can’t just satisfy your ego whenever you want.”

  “Well, Philip,” she said, “I’m getting pretty used to your inability to satisfy me whenever I want.”

  In shock, my jaw sort of unhinged then, like a python’s, and my eyes grew wide. “Oh,” I said, twisting my neck as if testing it for sprain. “Oh!” I looked at her, and she looked at me. “I … I can’t believe you said that.”

  She set Naomi back down and the child scampered off. This was clearly getting out of hand. The flesh around Grace’s throat and collarbones had turned an intense red — as if she were aroused rather than infuriated by our exchange. Which was, of course, possible: stranger things had turned my wife on in the past.

  “I can’t believe you said that to me,” I repeated.

  “Look, I can only talk about one of your inadequacies at a time,” she said. “I need you to focus. What I have a problem with — right now — is that you don’t seem all that interested in what goes on around here. You have trouble remembering things I tell you, or ask you to do.”

  “I remember lots of things,” I said.

  “Really?” she asked. “What are you doing on Wednesday night?”

  Quick — scan your brain! Scan your brain! “I’m … I’m taking Simone to that dance recital at the place up the street. She’s really looking forward to it.” I grinned, intensely proud of myself.

  “And what are we doing next Sunday?”

  The smirk slipped from my lips. Oh shit.

  “Philip — what are we doing on Sunday?”

  Something huge. Something important. I scoured hard, dug deep, but it wasn’t there. Just a big blank space where what it was should’ve been.

  “Look, I have to go. I’m extremely late.”

  She refolded her arms over her breasts and sneered at me. “What are we doing on Sunday, Philip?”

  “Look, we’ll talk about this when I get back,” I said.

  She gave her head a slight jiggle, her hennaed hair flapping, as if to say, I guess I made my point.

  “Look, I have to go. Wish me luck, okay?”

  But she looked away then, staring off into whatever galaxy of indignation floated before her mind’s eye.

  “Grace, wish me luck.”

  But she wouldn’t.

  So I left her there, and made my way to the front entry. Dug a decent pair of Payless shoes from the hall closet and stepped into them. Then I was out the door, finally, and onto Metcalfe Street. Down Carlto
n and over to the west side of Parliament. Raised my hand to hail a Beck taxi. Miraculously, one pulled up right away.

  “The CBC building on Front Street,” I said to the driver as I climbed in, then shut the door and sank into the leathery lung of his back seat. I inhaled a long, wheezy breath and tried to relax as we sailed southward. Took a moment to straighten myself and inspect my attire. And it was only then that my eyes fell onto the vast, empty pampa that was my jacket’s left lapel.

  Oh for Christsake!

  It’s love that sends me to bed every night, but it’s hate that gets me up in the morning.

  The love is, I hope, obvious to you, dear reader, despite the row I just described. There really aren’t adequate words in the English language to relay the kind of passion that consumes Grace and me, the unspoken timbre we share when even the longest, most tiring day is done. I often think it’s the passion that causes us to have such intense squabbles. Fire can, after all, burn in all sorts of directions. Which made her dig at my inconsistencies in the boudoir so out of left field. I mean — come on. Why would she say something so heinous to me?

  But let’s talk about the hate — the hate that gets me going every day. A term that, I admit, seems overly harsh coming from a self-described deontologist and centrist thinker. But it’s true: I often frame myself as the lone katechon against what Canada has become in recent years: a hotbed of anti-intellectualism, religious extremism, neo-conservativism and privatization. It’s why I dedicated nearly a third of Corporate Canada Today to profiling ODS Financial Group, and agreed to share my thoughts on the firm’s collapse with the CBC. I was prepared to express my indignation over how its C-suite had made off like bandits — golden handshakes for all! — and I relished the chance to lock horns with my fellow pundit, the grotesquely conservative Cheryl Sneed. Despite holding a mere B.A. in basket weaving earned in 1972, Cheryl has been a top columnist for the Toronto Times for nearly thirty-five years now, writing about politics, economics, religion, literature, gender issues, and various other topics she knows nothing about. She ran afoul of me after unfavourably reviewing two of my books — Capitalism and Other Pathologies (University of Guelph Press, 2005) and the short, scathing Stephen Harper: A Biography (Tuxedo House, 2010) — and we’d been exchanging barbs in the media ever since. Until Friday afternoon, she had been a kind of inverse Chicken Little about the ODS situation, and I looked forward to exposing her various blind spots and hyp­ocrisies. And though there was a wholesale lack of depth to her intellect, she was cagey, often bringing a homespun folksiness to her right-wing arguments. And I had to be mindful of that.