by Don Gillmor
Eaton, still unsettled after a century of death, buried in a black wool suit from the men’s department (goods satisfactory or your money refunded), answers, But I was a giant, Robert.
Harry walked past Glenn Gould’s grave. He had all of his Bach recordings and still found comfort in them, in Gould’s fluidity and eccentricity, the creaking of his favourite chair that could be heard in the background. He had seen Gould on television once, hosting a show about the city, and was surprised to find him so normal-sounding. He had expected a twitchy genius. Though Gould had looked like a homeless man with that overcoat and tweed hat.
Harry stopped briefly in front of his grandfather’s crypt, then finally came to his father’s grave, which still seemed fresh. The loss of the house was the final pillar of Harry’s childhood to topple. The comfort of his father’s money was gone, and now the refuge of his mother’s house. His line of credit had been murdered by the bank, and, of course, there was Dixie, that moral quicksand he had willingly jumped into. His father lay beneath him, with his many sins. How had he managed to carry all that?
“Dixie called for you,” Gladys said when he got home. “Your father’s … what do we call her now? Widow?”
In his head, Harry reacted as if Gladys had crept up behind him and yelled in his ear. He hoped he hadn’t looked startled. “Ex-girlfriend might be more accurate.”
“She left a number.”
Gladys’s tone was neutral. Was it calculatedly neutral, or genuinely neutral? Harry couldn’t tell. Her face didn’t offer any clues, and into this void, Harry projected a terrible feminine knowledge.
What could Dixie want? Was this a threat? Or was she just registering her presence, her dangerous proximity? Like thugs loitering casually at your children’s school, just to remind you of what you’re risking.
“What do you suppose she wants?” Gladys asked.
Harry shrugged. “Who knows? What we all want.”
EIGHT
HARRY PUT OFF CALLING AS LONG AS HE COULD, which was just under twenty-four hours. Any longer, he felt, and Dixie would call again. There was no possibility of good news. She would either want to get together for another guilty coupling (or she would make it clear she didn’t want to, which somehow wasn’t good news either, another affront to Harry’s potency), or she would want to formalize their mutual effort to find Dale’s money.
“Dixie.”
“Oh, Harry, I’m glad you called me back. Look, after we talked, I was thinking that we owe it to Dale to find that money.”
“Well, if there is any.”
“But he must have had more money. I mean he couldn’t have only had that.”
Dixie’s options were few. She was an attractive woman of a certain age, unattached, listlessly working in the travel business, now largely the province of the Internet. Once it had been fun, Harry guessed. Endless trips to sunny places. The kind of job you do because it has the promise of adventure. How many times had she visited Mexico? How many margaritas? None of the tanned men she had flirted with at beachfront bars, who spent the night licking the faint salt tang on her skin, tasting the ocean between her legs—none of them had lasted. A life lived in the present.
“Well, if there is money, we should definitely find it,” Harry said.
“But, I mean, where do we start, Harry?”
Harry twitched uncomfortably. “I’m going to make some calls,” he said, noncommittally.
“Let’s check in a few days from now, then.”
“Give me a week.”
There was an awkward silence before they hung up, a few seconds that contained their coupling and its messy, unstated aftermath.
He went downstairs and sat in his Volvo and turned the key to complete silence. There wasn’t even the discouraging sound of the engine sluggishly turning over without catching. The last repair bill had been $1,438. The car was eleven years old. Perhaps it was dead this time, another Swedish suicide.
If the car was dead, they’d have to buy a used one. A new car was out of their range. A used car was out of their range. It would devastate their budget, if they’d had one. The notion of a budget had loomed on their horizon for years. It sat like a threat, an organizing principle that they both suspected would somehow diminish them. And there was, in their marriage, as in most marriages, the instinctive shared knowledge of what the relationship could bear. Harry knew they had reached a threshold of disappointment with their lot that was best left unstated and undefined. A budget would establish borders that they could not comfortably live within, so it existed as a code word for the reality that they had to spend less money. The reason they had to spend less money was so they could avoid ever having to sit down and make a marriage-destroying budget.
Three days later, the Volvo irrevocably dead, he and Gladys stood in the toasty showroom of the Toyota dealer, looking at the Camrys.
“This is the one I drive,” the salesman said, opening the door of a gleaming XLE. The features went by like he was a child reciting the books of the Bible in Sunday school: Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Smart Key, Blue Tooth, Dual-Zone Climate Control with Plasmacluster. He listed the automotive awards it had won, the sterling resale value and the safety record, which, despite recent setbacks that may or may not have been politically motivated, was now even more unimpeachable than it had been before the recalls. “You drive into a wall, no kidding, this is the chariot to do it in.” The salesman wore a grey sports jacket. His face was as wide as a prairie wheat field, his eyes separated by an unfortunate span. His teeth weren’t up to salesman standards.
As a child, Harry had believed that Cadillac manufactured a superior luxury car (the Eldorado). He had believed in God and the Maple Leafs, and that the X-ray glasses advertised in his Aquaman comic would allow him to see his grade three teacher’s nipples. And he had watched in sorrow as those beliefs had joined St. Nick on the scrap heap.
Harry remembered going to the Cadillac showroom with his father, who bought a new Eldorado every two years. He did it for decades before switching abruptly to Lincolns without explanation. The salesman knew Dale by name and would expertly steer him toward the new Eldorado and recount the amazing innovations that had been added in the previous twenty-four months, as if a team of engineers in Detroit had spent all that time trying to figure out what Dale Salter might want or need two years down the road. Inside the trunk would be a revolutionary new strap that lashed down his golf clubs so the Ben Hogan driver wouldn’t rattle around. They would drive away in the new car, the warm September air rushing in and meeting the new car smell as Harry tested the electric windows until Dale told him to stop fiddling with it or you’ll break it.
But he and Gladys weren’t looking for a new Camry. The showroom spiel was simply the standard, fruitless prelude before the trudge outside into the unseasonable October cold and the particular bitterness it held, to look at the used Camrys lined up at the edge of the lot. Glad had collated the stats and reviews from Consumer Reports and three semi-authoritative online sources on all four of the cars they intended to test drive that day. A two-year-old Camry with low mileage was the Holy Grail. They wanted to buy from a dealer, despite the obvious markup, because they would have recourse if things went wrong.
Harry looked south through the spotless showroom windows to the stream of traffic on the highway, new vehicles speeding toward downtown. He had gone to Shenzhen, China, two years earlier to deliver a paper at a conference on the future of cities, and the traffic there had left a lasting impression. Not just its volume, but its extraordinary variety. Large trucks, Buicks and Volkswagens shared the road with tiny Chinese-manufactured cars and thousands of scooters and dirt bikes and old women on ancient black bicycles with four feet of Styrofoam strapped to their backs and braces of soft dead birds draped over the handlebars. The traffic in Toronto was approaching that level of chaos, a Third-World mélange of scooters, motorized bicycles and inline skaters weaving through stalled cars.
“Now, I don’t want to stee
r you away from what you want,” the salesman, Dick or Dirk, said. “Believe me, that is not what we are about. We want you to leave here with what is right for you.” They stepped outside to where the used cars were. The air was hard and carried the iron tang of industrial pollution. They walked up to a Camry that was on the list Dick/Dirk carried with him. “Let me just get the keys,” he said, and walked briskly back toward the showroom.
“Is it Dick or Dirk?” Harry asked Gladys, staring after him.
“It’s Robert.”
Gladys was wearing a wool peacoat and a flowing silk scarf that might be too light for this weather. It was grey near the lake, with a thin line of light near the horizon as if to mark where the edge of the world was. They stood out there in the wind, waiting for Robert to return with the key.
“It seems fine,” Harry said, assessing the car. There was a time when he recognized every car on the road. Now they all looked the same. He simply wanted something reliable and inexpensive, and he was already bored by the act of shopping for a new one, even though this was their first stop. He was prepared to buy the beige two-year-old Camry SE they hovered over.
Gladys had pages of notes in her purse, annotated in neat schoolgirl script, with boxes and arrows and asterisks. She had printed out a list of Tips and Necessary Questions, and pulled it out now, trying to memorize the important ones before Robert returned. An organized woman, admirably, unbearably.
Robert half-sprinted toward them, still in his sports jacket, and handed Harry the keys.
They drove east along the lakeshore and Harry was neither happy nor unhappy with the car. “It’s got the best ride of any car in its class,” Robert said from the passenger seat. “The engineers at Honda have been taking it apart for years trying to figure out why.”
Harry pulled over into a supermarket parking lot and told Gladys she should give it a try. They switched places, and when Robert turned on the radio, Gladys reached over and turned it off. One of her tips warned her against this old salesman’s trick, to get you to listen to how fabulous the six-speaker stereo was so you didn’t hear the wheezing engine. Though neither of them would be able to identify engine trouble by anything other than it stopping.
Gladys drove east, both hands on the wheel.
“The handling, they modified the Formula One,” Robert said. “I mean, it’s for the city. But the technology, basically … it takes some getting used to, because it handles too well.” He gave a laugh that was intended to be conspiratorial, as if all three of them were now part of the Toyota family, and god have mercy on those poor Honda people.
This couldn’t be easy for the man, Harry thought. Robert didn’t know which of them to address with his flurry of specs: 2.4 litre, 158 hp, 15 cubic feet cargo. Harry was distracted, and Gladys held to the script she had tucked back into her purse. It seemed to Harry that even the manufacturers had thrown in the towel and that was why so many cars looked alike, why a Lincoln and a Honda were almost indistinguishable. How many cars were sold in China in the time it took Robert to describe the safety features of the SE? A hundred? A thousand?
Robert should move to Guangzhou. It had been more than a generation since the car had represented a romantic notion in the West, since it had embodied a form of freedom (not just mobility, but sexual freedom for the sixteen-year-old Harry). But China was just arriving at that moment. It was, Harry reflected, a good time to be a sixteen-year-old in China.
“The extended warranty—listen. You’re going to find a lot of people pushing this on you. Between us?” Robert waved his hand and made a soft blowing noise that indicated, Harry assumed, nothingness. “Waste of money. You did not hear this from me.”
When was the last time Harry had sat in the back seat of a car? He felt like the oversized, unsuccessful offspring of the two adults in the front seat. On the way home from the cottage on Sunday nights when he was a kid, he and Erin would fall asleep in the back of the Cadillac. There was a particular kind of silence in the interior of their car at night, a muteness that incorporated the subtle hum of the engine, the feel of the tires. The back seat was huge, like a private palace. If they were stuck in traffic, they sometimes played games with the cars beside them. Once, Erin took the crayons and construction paper that Felicia had given them to occupy themselves and wrote HELP, WE ARE BEING KIDNAPPED and held it up to a woman in a white Thunderbird who was stuck beside them. The woman looked alarmed, but didn’t try to save them.
Back at the dealership, Robert tried to close, a creepy, nice-guy-no-pressure kind of pressure that was easy to resist.
By mid-afternoon, he and Gladys were in a Starbucks, considering their options, Harry sipping an ill-advised espresso, Gladys drinking herbal tea. The Mazda was peppy and handled well. The Passat was precise. The Honda was Toyotaesque, the Honda salesman intent on becoming their new best friend. By the time they’d driven the Mazda, Harry could sense that Gladys’s interest was flagging too, but she bravely pressed on, asking the short, bewildered salesman with the unpronounceable name if the front brakes oscillated during low-speed turns, checking her notes to see if she’d gotten the question right.
Harry felt that not buying a car this afternoon would be failing at something that was already, unto itself, a failure. Shopping for a used car indicated a failure to evolve. Twenty-five years on, he and Gladys were still students wondering if they should buy that used Corolla with 270,000 kilometres on it from the guy who said fuck engineering, he was going back to the Punjab.
“Which way are you leaning?” Harry asked.
“The Toyota and Honda have the best resale.”
“But it’s a used car—we probably won’t resell it. We’re the ones paying that premium. We’ll just drive it until it dies, like the Volvo. Which one is most likely to die first?”
Gladys consulted her notes, which were spread out on the small table. “I don’t like the Mazda’s chances,” she said. “What did you think of the Passat?”
Harry was thinking he could take it or leave it, but said, “There’s something about the Passat. Like you can hear the machinery ticking or something. It’s not as fluid, maybe. I don’t know. They all drive better than our old Volvo.”
“I didn’t like the Honda salesman. I don’t like it when they tell you all about their family.” Gladys took a sip of her tea. “I’m not sure he even had one. I think he made them up.”
“You think he pretended to have a son in university?”
“If we’d said we’d adopted eight kids, he would have had eight adopted kids.”
“So we can scratch the Honda.”
Harry thought of how Dale used to just drive to the Cadillac dealer and pick out the colour. Years later, Harry found out that the same guy bought Dale’s old Cadillac every time he traded it in. Dale took care of his cars. This guy made a deal and he picked up Dale’s old car hours after Dale drove away in a new one. Sometimes the guy was there and saw Dale drive away in the car he would be buying two years later.
Harry sat in the cramped, caffeinated interior of Starbucks and tried to think of this purchase as a new beginning. Like on a road trip with their parents, when he and Erin used to restart their game of finding cars in alphabetical order (Acadian, Bel Air, Chevrolet, Dodge, Econoline, Falcon) every time they got stuck, with one of them saying, “Starting now.” It suddenly seemed critical to come out of all this with a car. This would be the new beginning. Starting now.
“The Camry. I think that’s the way we should go,” Harry said. “They’re still hungry after that big recall. The service is going to be good. It doesn’t handle as well as the Mazda, but it scores higher on reliability. I like the safety specs. It’s maybe the largest car company in the world, and at this moment, maybe only at this moment, they have the power that comes with scale and they are humbled by the recall. We should climb on now. He wants eighteen; we offer seventeen and be prepared to walk if he doesn’t drop down five hundred bucks and throw in a one-year warranty on everything, drive train, all of it. W
e tell Robert/Dick/Dirk that it’s our way or the highway, then drive off into the sunset.”
“So, the Camry, then.”
They sat in the silence of this decision for a few minutes, then Gladys said, “You’re still wondering where the money went.”
“You’re not?” Harry raised his cup to his lips to find it empty. “I just can’t believe my father died more or less penniless.”
Gladys shrugged. “I think it’s a shame that Ben didn’t benefit. But your father hardly acknowledged him when he was alive. I think I would have felt more settled if he’d left something to Ben.” She looked out the window at the students milling in front of the college across the street. “It might have opened up Ben’s options.”
Outside on the sidewalk, a woman pushed a stroller filled with twins. She made that face, the rhetorical talk-to-your-baby face one makes, that Harry had made. Who’s a sweet baby?
Ben’s options were an ongoing topic. His chief gift appeared to be for renunciation. Any child could grow up to be prime minister, but not every adolescent. By the time they got to Ben’s age, only a handful truly had a shot. This was life’s essence—a narrowing of possibilities until the final choice: another breath on the respirator or endless sleep.
If Gladys found a job, it would help. Gladys had worked as a librarian, and as the libraries were hit by budget cuts and gradually became more automated, she accepted a retirement package that had seemed like a windfall at the time but had quickly gone to the mortgage, credit card debt and a holiday. She still had a little money left, and used it for the odd luxury. She had taken an editing course and occasionally got work editing textbooks or a cookbook, but it was uneven, uninteresting and low-paying work. For a while she had talked about going back to school, but every plan invited unpleasant math: If I’m out in two or three years with a teaching certificate/law degree, I’ll be over fifty. Who will hire me? Why not take the energetic twenty-five year-old—why not integrate those perky breasts into the system?