In this City

by Austin Clarke

  “Eight hundred a month,” the man said. “Of course, you pay two months in advance, and so on and so on.” He seemed as if he had other things to attend to. When she walked with him to the door of his apartment, the door was ajar, and amongst the furniture which was too much for the room, an easy-boy sprawled with nobody in it; a large low coffee table piled with newspapers; and the television set, the largest piece in the room, bright and loud and with the natural colours of summer in it, she could see a million faces laughing and countless eyes looking up to heaven, while a voice said, “Oh boy, oh boy! It’s hit-a-ton! There she goes! A home run for George Bell!” The announcer said how many home runs he had hit, but she missed that. Slowly, the man was moving towards her now, all the time looking back at the stream of faces; and then he closed the door.

  And in truth, she could see the tall spire of the CN Tower, and the top of Sky Dome, and the haze-like thin clouds in the distance; and the lake and some sails like white pages of paper tacking in the steady breeze on the lake, and the buildings high in the sky, glistening in the sharp, blinding light. She looked at her watch: fifteen minutes more before she was due back at her desk in one of those tall buildings that were surrounding her, as she stood tantalized by the beauty of Toronto, and in two minds about the cost of the rent.

  She had been living with a girlfriend, also from Timmins, in a one-bedroom apartment in a basement in the Annex, a stone’s throw from the university where her friend was doing graduate work in library science. They had got along well: had been friends since high school; had gone on double dates to dances at the Schumacher Legion Hall; but now in this city, she found herself spending from Friday night until Sunday in the dark basement which sweated, and whose walls harboured little things that crawled and moved imperceptibly slow, so slow that at times she thought it was the movement of ideas in her head that caused her to imagine that there were bugs crawling in the apartment. The books that her friend brought from the three libraries on campus were scattered throughout the small one-bedroom apartment and printed her friend’s life with a more important intellectual effect and priority, and she was left to sleep on the couch in the living room. She could almost follow the books, marked at pages with ballpoint pens, facing downwards like collapsed tents, and imagine them as the tracks she would follow each moose-hunting season in the bush just outside Timmins, as she walked scared beside her father, gun in hand, gathering meat for the long burying winter. And the basement seemed to her to be too similar to that dimness beneath the tall trees in the bush, and too similar to that smell of damp decaying leaves and shrub, that even the smell of cigarettes her friend smoked, and the incense that she bought outside the Eaton Centre from a black man dressed in white, in a robe that looked like her grandmother’s nightgown, nothing could eradicate the fragrance of the ground, of being buried, the smell of fresh mould in a grave just prepared.

  The feeling of power that came with the height at which she was now standing, looking towards the lake, and the exhilaration of the seventeenth floor, and the clean smell of the silk wallpaper on three sides with its pattern of spring flowers she had never seen, the large expanse of glass in her three windows, since she has this corner apartment, so clear, so transparent that standing before all this glass, the city came right up to her and she felt she was suspended, cut off from the people in her past. The glass was so clean from the Windex the man had used on it that there seemed to be no glass at all, as if it was not there to prevent her from the fall seventeen flights down to the hard granite in the walkway, so far in her drop on the two white boxes of crusted stone, like coral, the size from this height, of two shoe boxes. In Timmins, all through grade three, she kept her dolls in two shoeboxes.

  It was exhilarating. She looked down, and in the seconds her gaze took to reach the pink impatiens, she imagined what it would be like to fall.

  Her hand trembled as she held the pen and guided it over the paper of the contract; it was recycled; and over the blue cheque, and in the small space in the short line where she recorded all her charges and credits that affected her chequing account. Above the line she was writing now was $139.50 for her Visa; and above that, two days earlier, she had recorded “the Bay (dress), $80.00.” At the end of the line, in the column for her balance, she had made the calculation, $13.85. But she did not write it in. When she was finished she had $13.84 – a slight mistake with a penny – left in her account. Her next payday was eleven days to come.

  But the skies were blue all of July; and the two stone boxes were multiplied by five, as impatiens, mums and geraniums blossomed and transformed the entrance to her building, into an English garden; and she would walk along Yonge Street in the early weekend evenings and feel safe, before the tough, noisy teenagers who occupied the strip between Wellesley and Dundas; and she reproduced in her apartment a portion of the ebullience in the boxes she passed at least two times a day. And she would stand at her window that pointed to the lake, in the full smell of her pink geraniums, in two green plastic pots; and more flowers at peace and in bloom in the containers from Chinese dinners of chow mein. As she passed the five closed doors from her own door, on her way along the red-patterned carpet that muffled the clip of her heels, one of these five doors would be ajar, and a quick glance showed her the ferns and palms and cut flowers and the brass and the glass in the living room of her unknown, unseen neighbour. A large colour television flicked and switched the faces of dolls that were speaking like small children; or she would see the thousand cheering faces, and hear the scream, “There she goes!” She had never seen this neighbour since she moved in.

  But she wanted to live like this. And she learned to tell the styles and designs that young men and young women wore and she could tell the stores they shopped in, along Yorkville and Cumberland; and she could call the names of all the boutiques in the Eaton Centre, knew the names by their fragrance, of the scents and perfumes they used; and she could pick them out on the exact page of Vanity Fair and of Vogue. She had cancelled her subscription to Chatelaine, and had mailed the old ones to her mother, in Timmins. In these evenings filled with the dying romance of August, she would walk along Yorkville, after a visit to her former roommate who still lived in the Annex in the basement with her books and bugs; and after coffee and cakes at the Other Café, and dinner at a pizza place on Bloor, or chicken at the Chalet, and with an ice cream cone in her left hand, for she was left-handed, walk and wonder; walk and dream; walk and was excited in her new -formed independence.

  She was right to have made the excuse, tell the lie to her friend, and not go with her to Montreal. She was wise to have made the excuse, tell the little lie, and escape going with her last March break to Florida. And her friend’s pestering urges to shop with her in the second-hand stores in the Village and along Queen Street West and the money she could save in those incense-filled, darkened boutiques did not make her change her mind. She wanted to be her own woman. She knew she had not spent three years at the University of Western Ontario for nothing.

  Her apartment was spartan. But she had no social demands upon her time or upon the single mattress that lay on the floor, against a wall, with pillows propped against the wall, to make it into a settee by day, and a bed during the long, sometimes sleepless nights. One modern plastic chair, Art Deco, a few pots and pans, two dinner plates bought from Ashley’s at a 70 percent discount sale, three large posters of her favourite rock stars, Police, U2 and Springsteen, and one of a landscape of snow powdering trees, in a place that could be Timmins, she had no money put aside for social things. She had just put a small rebuilt stereo and an alarm clock radio on her Visa card. And the payday following her second rent cheque, she had put five records on the card. So, she licked the melting ice cream cone clean, licked her fingers, and walked and looked at the sports cars and the Jaguars and Mercedes-Benz that flowed past her, almost touching the sidewalk, noiseless as the chocolate chip that had melted on her hand and turned her fingers into the colour of the bodies of some of th
e women tanned in a hue that made her think of that afternoon in early August.

  The pulsing beat of calypso music had come right through the thick-paned glass, and she looked over the roof of the bus station, through the haze of exhausts, and heard that starting and stopping noise of the buses, and saw the West Indian taxi drivers lolling in their cabs, using the drivers’ seats for beds, and then the riot of the colours and the noise. The parade of drums and music and the rainbow in the colours and clothes of the thousands of men and women, and the sequins glistening like stars on the costumes, held her tapping her feet to this new blood-coursing sound, tied to her window most of that August Saturday afternoon. It was too new, too rich, too diverse in colours and in rhythm for her to dare to be closer to it. Its richness frightened her.

  That day passed. The ten boxes of colour at the entrance wilted part of the day; the watering van cleansed the roads, and sometimes when the stalks of the impatiens stood erect, she thought the summer was coming back. September now, and longer walks alone, on Bloor to Creeds and Holt Renfrew, and to Coles where she bought the magazines that told her about fashions and how to dress, what fabrics to wear; was she a winter or a summer, or a fall; how to make a gourmet dinner without meat, and how a young woman like she should present herself to the world, in the masculine brown panelling of her office; and without going home to change, how she could be sexy and fresh and still professional, in case she was taken amongst the indoor plants at Fenton’s, on the high stools of Vines, or amongst the thick white linen cloths and dim lamps of the Prince Arthur Room. A young woman of her office took her one Thursday night to a symphony at the Thomson Hall, and afterwards to the King Edward Hotel to dinner, and after that to her apartment on Lascelles Boulevard, where she lived on the ninth floor, to sit and just talk and maybe we could sit on the balcony and watch the subway trains come into the Davisville Station, “I am attracted to you.” She left her at the corner of King and Yonge, and the next day in the office she did not see her, but her body was shivering as if her veins were filled with ice water. It was the first time this had happened to her, although in the office they said this woman, who walked with a bounce and wore her hair cut like some men in Timmins would, was so. “I don’t know, I really can’t say it’s so, but I am damn sure!” they said about this woman, in the office.

  She warmed things up in bright-coloured waterproof packages in her stove; and five days a week, slipped out alone at noon and ate her apple and cheese sandwich on a park bench in front of City Hall; and as the weather cooled she went shopping though she could shop only with her eyes, and purchase in her mind clothes two other women in her office wore, as if they were going to weddings every day of the week, conscious that her longing eyes and imagination were larger than her balance at the bank. But most of all, she liked to finger the clothes and the shoes at Holt Renfrew, which she came to call Holts, at Creeds and in the boutiques on Cumberland, touching the silk and the crocodile leather in bags and shoes and leaving piles unbought behind her. She liked to push her dainty feet, size five, into shoes that smelled so differently from her own, even when they were new. And the attendants, dressed like the models in Vogue and Vanity Fair, got to know her, and smiled, and after a time moved away from her, leaving their smiles behind to make her comfortable and not too self-conscious. “You may take your time,” they would say. “Just take your time and look. If you want help, just . . .” And so, she was left to live in this world of graciousness and richness and fantasy, and of clothes that came alive and jumped on her body, from the pages of Vogue and Vanity Fair.

  A man in the office smiled at her on Wednesday afternoon beside the coffee machine. That Friday, he asked her for a drink. She took a glass of white wine as she sat on a stool at Vines, elevated from the other men and women laughing into their glasses. The second glass almost made her topple. He saved her fall, and he held her, light and respectful, at her waist. She climbed back onto the stool with his help. And Nancy, the tall woman who served the wine, became three giggling women. She saw the large bright band of gold, bright as an alarm, as two golden warnings on his left wedding finger. “Yes,” he said when she asked the question, brave now and tipsy and talkative from the wine. “For six years now. With two kids. But I was thinking of taking you home.” The wine was wearing off. He stood beside her, silent in the ascent to the seventeenth floor, her thoughts of his conquest whirring in her head, her trepidation at this confinement making her soberer still, until they walked along the red-patterned carpet, until they reached her door, when the neighbour opened her door, with two plastic bags in her hands. “Thanks for bringing me home,” she said to the man. He bowed and smiled and left. He never smiled at her after that, that way. But the work she had to do for him increased.

  Darkness came earlier now. She left for work when it seemed night had not yet ended, and when she returned, passing the ten stone boxes covered in light snow, as if the mound around the geraniums was coated white, it was already dark. She lived in almost total darkness now. Her friend, the graduate student, went to Montreal for the September term. The man in the office passed her desk these days and called her “Miss”; and the woman who lived on Lascelles Boulevard, in her short skirts and red leotards, wore her hair even shorter now; and the glass in her windows became panes of frost, and the definition of things and people below on Bay Street, and the CN Tower and the other buildings were illustrated now only through the countless lights that burned in them. The lights never slept. Perhaps the woman who had taken her to the symphony, and the man who used to smile at her, were working late together. The woman was the niece of the president. The president lived in Miami every year after October. She had never seen the president. She had seen this man with the large gold ring smile with the president’s niece, felt relieved from both of them and concluded he was now after her.

  The lights around her remained on, beacons on the secrets and the enjoyment that surrounded her in a powerful, unknown, enviable voltage. Next door, the music was loud on weekends; and, alone in the apartment, she moved her body on the mattress on the floor, and had difficulty retrieving the slipping futon to her cold body, clothes in flannel pyjamas that had a pattern of scattering daisies, as she imagines the crystal glasses and the ferns, the rice biscuits and the paté, and caviar; the white wines and the imported beer, and their bodies clenched together, whenever the music is no longer loud; and the lights being put out, one by one, when magic and assumed love make their legs refuse to follow even the soft slowness of a waltz; and there is the promise of two filled bodies collapsing on a bed, by agreement from the wine. She cannot find the futon. She cannot tell which is its long side from its short. So, she sits up and stretches out her hand, and feels the table lamp which has no table, and it falls over, and its noise helps her locate the switch. In the darkness she was listening. There is soft laughter beside her. She hears their intimate footsteps and their whispers and their laughter again, passing her door. She turns the lamp on. Its shade had fallen off.

  On her table, assembled one Saturday afternoon after she had picked it up from IKEA, were Christmas cards bought from Coles, with angels holding candles; and some from a fancy shop on Front Street, from England, for her father and mother, her brothers and little sister, her former roommate and the young woman who had taken her to the symphony. Hers was the first card she had received, signed “I still love you.” One of these fancy cards, when they were addressed, would go to her high-school English teacher, and others to her friends back in Timmins; and as she sat looking at the cards, she listened to the laughter next door. As the door opened, she could hear the music clearer. Reggae. She recognized the beat. That was the beat that rang in her ears, part of that glorious August afternoon, on University Avenue. Everyone she had met in the few months in the city would get a Christmas card. She was determined to build a network of cards and friends. But the moment she sat down to address them, she changed her mind. She would send one only: to her high-school English teacher.

 
; She went to the fridge for a drink. The half-empty bottle of Perrier water stood in front, the light of the efficiency fridge pouring through its bottle glass, reminding her of the purity of the water in the lakes she had fished with her father. On the same shelf with the Perrier were yogurt, mild cheddar cheese, tomato ketchup and orange juice. The wire shelves and the strong bulb in the refrigerator made it look empty. This must have crossed her mind, for with the Perrier bottle in her hand she opened the door to the freezing compartment, and looked at the accumulated frost which had almost buried the two ice trays that were empty, and the two flat packages of frozen dinners. The fact that there were two reminded her that it was Wednesday night.

  The cold draught touched her face and the awakened sensation sent her back to Timmins, in this time of year when her father’s car would be buried in the snow, the day he parked it; and it would remain buried, an uninhabited igloo, or a sentry box painted white, before the front gate; it sent her back, back to the warm house on McKelvie Avenue swimming in the smells of Christmas, to the sap of the tree stolen from the reforestation field owned by the Ministry of Natural Resources; to the subtle, sensual smells of the cloth for their Christmas church; and to the oil applied to the sewing machine pedalled by her mother, religiously for graduations, Easters, dances and for weddings which broke out like an epidemic of pure love, and those that were quiet, to save the face in sudden pregnancies, and for Christmases. The preserves and the fruits; and the red wine her father made in the basement; and the high smell of meat not bought in the supermarket but shot in the bush, and therefore wild, but made less tough from the generous doses of red wine in which her father, Mr. Petrochuck to the entire street, became an expert; both in its tasting and in its illegal manufacture. She could see the living room floor covered with the pieces of cloth, dresses and shirts, in sections pinned on to tissue paper with markings of directions on them; and common pins onto which she had stepped and had got small dots of blood on her heels, lying undisturbed against the tramping of feet and the stomping of boots. The dress patterns always looked to her like sections of carcasses left to dry. Her Christmas dress, with its complicated front and back, lay on the green indoor-outdoor carpeting, like two sides of a large cow. Yes, the activity and the laughter and the enduring patience of her mother, working into the night that approached dawn, when the horn from the nearby mine sounded; and how she used to raise her tired, company-keeping young body from the couch beside her mother and stare into those eyes, grey with colour and with age, and see her anxiety and measure the beat of her heart in the meaning of the mine horn, and the possible result of that summons; her mother sitting erect now, though deadened in her chair by the labour of peering at the thread which had become invisible, and feeling the muscles in her legs, her calves, which could still summon her tired husband to bed; even after eight hours buried underground like an animal, searching for gold. She would sit and watch her mother, and feel the volume of her silence, follow the imperception of the day getting older, and wonder if she too, in whatever house, in whatever marriage, in whatever social status of this community of miners, would some day have to sit and wait in this heavy silence for footsteps at the door, when the horn sounded. It was that living through eternity, thirty minutes long, that made her vow, in grade twelve, that she would leave Timmins. To escape the fate in the friendly town, in that familiar, greeting town, so healthy to grow up in, so easy to swallow you in order to seek a better life in Toronto.