Mount Pleasant

by Don Gillmor

  Still, Harry reasoned, there was hope. He could flourish yet.

  Harry walked past the ravine that separated Rosedale from the chaos and public housing to the south. The evening air was a tonic. He congratulated himself on this ambitious trek to meet his friend Bloomberg for dinner. One of the subtle joys of Bloomberg’s company was that he was usually in much worse shape than Harry was. When he and Gladys first wandered into a marital lull a few years ago, Bloomberg and his wife, Brenda, were already in the throes of an operatic divorce that produced public threats and a legal Armageddon. As Harry’s money situation worsened, Bloomberg was dealing with the punitive Third-World economics of divorce, and had moved into a crummy cinderblock apartment that catered to students. Bloomberg was a philosophy professor who taught an ethics course in the business faculty, because basically no one was interested in philosophy anymore and everyone wanted to know what they could get away with in business.

  It took almost an hour to walk to the restaurant. Harry had saved on gas, on parking—the walk represented a net gain.

  Bloomberg was waiting for him, swirling wine in a glass then bringing it to his nose and inhaling, as Harry walked into the restaurant. He had dark, greying hair he wore swept back, was overweight, his bulk covered by an expensive jacket. He looked vital and messy, with the thick hands of a tradesman, though Leon Bloomberg had never held a hammer. The circles under his eyes, bluish rings, gave him a look of melancholia. Bloomberg had a face that announced its suffering. And who could suffer like the Jews?

  “Harry,” he said, getting up to embrace him.

  “Leon.”

  Their waitress arrived, an Italian woman in her thirties, a light sway to her walk, a dusting of moustache. Harry briefly imagined the two of them in Tuscany, their dark-haired children playing with wooden toys on the terrazzo tile of their converted farmhouse. Harry a successful something. She filled their water glasses and poured wine for Harry. Bloomberg and he quickly ordered.

  “Do you ever regret your divorce?” Harry asked after the waitress had gathered their menus.

  Bloomberg shrugged. “I lived in a loveless world. Twenty years. Though I don’t trust my memory on this. Divorce is a hotbed of revisionist history. Brenda is a woman whose sustenance for twenty years was her dissatisfaction with every aspect of me, of us. Now she needs to find new meat to chew. Not an easy thing. I saw her at the supermarket, pushing her cart with its meagre vegetables, and I waved. It’s remarkable: you live with someone for decades, share a bed, every flaw on parade in those rooms you share, and then you see one another and you wave like it’s a neighbour whose name you can’t remember. I went to a therapist. She told me not to think of Brenda as part of myself but as part of my life. These distinctions. I don’t know that the therapist was worth the trouble. We fell in together, Brenda and I, because we were always the last two to leave a party. We were the most argumentative, and we left together, arguing politics even as we undressed in that miserable apartment she had above the grill. We smelled like hamburgers and fried onions. No wonder she became a vegetarian.”

  Harry sipped a little of the excellent Barolo that Bloomberg had ordered. Which was worse: to be trapped in a loveless marriage or be trapped by divorce-induced poverty? Both had the power to diminish. Bloomberg should have divorced years earlier. Now he was of a certain age, his vitality seeping away. It was that vitality—that restless intellectual energy, his indulgent appetite for food and wine, the naturally uninhibited force within him that greeted the world—that made him attractive. Women were attracted to vitality and shunned its opposite. Would he find another partner? Romance was like the stock market, a tenuous conceit propped up by misplaced faith. Gold was worth $700 an ounce because we collectively suspected it might be. Then we wondered why other people would think that, and we worried that they’d stop thinking it, and the only solution was to stop thinking it first, and so Harry sold his gold stock. And gold went to $1,800. What woman will invest in Bloomberg?

  “And you and Gladys?” Bloomberg asked.

  “One of those lulls,” Harry said. “Did you ever have an affair, Leon?”

  “Only after we’d sailed into the abyss. That was ten years ago, mind you. Brenda and I hadn’t had sex for more than a year. That was my watermark. I was like one of those prisoners who are counting the days. If there was no sex within a year, I would break out of my cell and seek it.”

  “And …”

  “It was life-affirming. A student, which presented challenges.”

  “A student. Leon, you’re an ethics professor.”

  “The beauty of modern ethics is its elasticity, Harry. Every discipline has it now. Even physics, I’m told. The universe is a curved path of endless errors aligned to support life. Or it’s something else. Anyway, she was a mature student—thirty-two years old. It’s the age of relativism. Democracies use torture to ensure freedom.”

  “People steal to preserve wealth.”

  “Exactly. It’s a glorious time for ethics.”

  Harry ate a little of his orecchiette and goat cheese and roasted kale. They drank the Barolo and ordered more. They commiserated about prostates, money and the dull-witted administrative mire of the university. Bloomberg was childless, so Harry didn’t bring up Ben. But he told Leon about his mother’s stroke.

  “She’s fine now,” Harry said, “but it’s one more thing. How is your mother?”

  Bloomberg shrugged. “When she turned fifty, my mother sat me down at the dining room table. She said she had something important to tell me. ‘Leon, I’m dying,’ she said. I was eight years old. ‘It could be cancer,’ she said, ‘it might be something else. What do these doctors know? The whole world is sick.’ She sat on our porch for a year. Then the next year. She was on that porch, publicly dying for fifteen years. She loved dying. She was very good at it. The neighbours would drop by, less so after the first few years. But she had an audience. Then my father actually died, upstaging her. She moved to a condominium, and those years, they weren’t so good. A decade of dying in private. What’s the point? In the retirement home, though, she’s thriving. It’s a competition there. Who is best? Who is the queen? Those who actually die are disqualified, of course. But Ada, she is the champ. She’s a small woman, and she’s getting smaller. I could carry her in my pocket now. She’s ninety-three. Still dying with flare. I go every Sunday. I pray for both of us that it’s my last visit.”

  After dinner, Bloomberg drove Harry home in his battered, wheezy Civic, filled with paperbacks and smelling of spilled coffee. In front of Harry’s house, Bloomberg took a joint out of his pocket and lit it. Harry hadn’t smoked dope in more than twenty-five years and had never embraced it, even back then. It made him lethargic and worried; it made him feel middle-aged—the irony of a drug that could make a nineteen-year-old feel like he had a crushing mortgage. When Bloomberg went to hand him the joint, Harry waved it away.

  “It’s not like it was thirty years ago, Harry. Try it—it will lift your spirit.”

  Harry took an experimental toke and handed it back. Bloomberg took a deep drag and shuffled through the CDs that were lying on the floor. He picked up a Keith Jarrett disc and put it in the slot. “Shenandoah” came on.

  As they passed the joint back and forth, Harry told him about his father’s money, his missing inheritance.

  “What does that money mean to you, Harry?” Bloomberg asked, his face ballooning with held breath.

  “It’s what my father left.” Dale hadn’t taught him to box or tie a Windsor knot. His contribution as a father was distilled to money, and now that was an illusion. “It’s the only thing he left.”

  “Money carries a burden. Just lay it down, Harry.”

  Lay your burden down; financial advice reduced to Negro spiritual.

  They finished the joint and Harry felt an unfamiliar tingling and a gentle paralysis. He looked at the dashboard of the Civic, which suddenly seemed intricate enough to launch them into space. The dials were alarmingly comp
licated, indicating, he noted dully, speed, trajectory, compression, latitude and ennui. It would take weeks to master them. Keith Jarrett’s piano was heartbreaking. Bloomberg held one monstrous hand up, a finger pointing upward. The hairs on his hand were long enough to groom.

  “Here’s a case history I give my students,” Bloomberg said. “True story. A crooked fund manager steals a widow’s life savings. He can’t resist the cliché. She’s wiped out. She has to sell her house and move in with her son, a plumber of limited means. This loss, it eats her. She’s a child of the Depression. She withers, she dies. Was her death caused by the fund manager’s theft? Who knows? Who can be sure? But the son thinks so, and he’s filled with rage. He broods for a month, but he can’t live with this injustice. He goes to the man’s office and confronts him. The man tells him to take a hike. The plumber picks up a minor golf trophy and beats the fund manager to death with it. Of course he goes to jail. Three lives are ruined. Did any of them deserve their fate? Did they deserve to die? In the West, we’re told that life is sacrosanct. Some lives more than others, perhaps, but still.

  “Ethics is the study of possibility,” Bloomberg continued. “You see each choice as a tree branch that diverges, and each of those branches goes off in another direction and produces new branches. Your father’s money vanishes, you get obsessed, lose your job, hold up a convenience store, get shot by a rookie cop. What becomes of your son? Your wife? A new tree, with fewer branches.”

  Bloomberg talked on. Harry tried talking but found he’d lost the knack. The car engine wasn’t on, and the windows fogged. Perhaps they were trapped. It happened in northern countries all the time. People stuck in their snowbound cars for days, living on trail mix and gum.

  When Harry finally opened the door, after fifteen minutes or nine hours, it was a release; a new universe opened up. Bloomberg slowly drove off and Harry let himself into his house, examining the key with newfound curiosity. He walked with exaggerated quiet and peeked into his bedroom. Gladys was asleep. He got up to his third-floor study with difficulty. The room moved in lazy undulation. Harry lay on the sofa, his coat still on. His hand was in his pocket, though he didn’t remember putting it there. When he pulled it out, it held a penny. He brought it up to his face, looking at the year—1978—then turned it over to examine the profile of the young queen.

  I’ve been there, it said.

  Where?

  Buckingham Palace. 1991. In the pocket of a man named Terkel. He went to see the changing of the guard. When he pulled out money to pay for the taxi, I fell on the floor. Picked up by the cabbie who went to Omaha to visit his brother a year later. They fought like badgers. He bought a Hershey bar at the Piggly Wiggly, and I moved around that town for a dreary decade. I’ve seen a lot.

  You’re almost worthless.

  Glass houses, Harry.

  You’re endangered. Black rhino.

  But I’m still here.

  Isn’t your whole life spent in the dark? In pockets, in cash registers.

  That’s what makes the light so glorious.

  And now you’re mine.

  That’s what you’re supposed to think.

  TWENTY

  HARRY DROVE WEST PAST THE ROW HOUSES that had been erected for railway workers more than a century ago, now mostly renovated and filled with hopeful young families who lived alongside the original working class, a dwindling crowd of urban hillbillies who sat on their porches and smoked resentfully.

  He was on his way to meet his students and observe the Occupy movement first-hand. The windshield was briefly bleached in the sun’s glare, then the streets were suddenly eclipsed by a dark cloud. He got stuck behind a streetcar. In the back window, a small boy waved and smiled, but when Harry waved back, the kid gave him the finger. Harry turned south, parked and walked toward St. James Park. The Occupy campers had received eviction notices but were standing fast. His class was waiting for him near the gazebo, as specified. Harry did a head count. One short. “Who’s not here?”

  “Davis,” Verma said.

  “He’ll find us,” Harry said. “So, as we discussed in class, we split up, move around. Talk to people. Record your impressions. I want a sense of not just what the people here are saying, but how the media is working it. How will this history be written? What is this moment? Is this the beginning of a revolution? And if not, what is it?”

  They nodded and moved along, a few staying in pairs, nervous about integrating and approaching strangers, even these open-armed Woodstockians. There was a chant in the background that involved Afghanistan. The clouds were low and flinty. Stained blue and orange tents were staked around the park. Sleeping bags lay in heaps. A radio journalist that Harry recognized moved through the crowd like a predator. Harry guessed he was looking to interview the mentally ill to use as clips for the drive-home show.

  Money had congregated around privilege, hard work and luck, but it would never embrace this collection of kaftans, down jackets, Sherpa hats, hand-knit sweaters and CRUSH THE BANKS placards written unevenly on cardboard. The scene was medieval, the layers of clothing and makeshift tents, the hygiene and beards and feudal demands: a Breugel fair. Harry passed a circle of people playing guitars and singing raggedly about justice for the earth. A woman held a sign that read, WHAT DOES MONEY MEAN?

  A form of kinship, Harry thought. Money established hierarchies and punished the unlucky. He thought of those lottery winners who ended badly. They gave Corvettes to everyone at their high school reunion and were back repairing dishwashers before the year was out. Money conferred a sense of power to those who had it and a sense of possibility to those who didn’t. At least, it used to. As long as everyone believed life would get better, the plutocracy was celebrated. But when that necessary fiction crumbled, you were back in the fifteenth century.

  Most of the protesters were too young to have experienced capitalism’s golden moment. Harry had grown up in lockstep with the first suburbs; both he and the suburb had been so perfect in their conception. The city’s first real shopping mall had appeared in an optimistic suburb. And here was the miracle: in those stores, in that mall, they sold washing machines and refrigerators and candies and cosmetics that were manufactured ten blocks away. The workers drove to the factories in cars bought from the local Chrysler dealership and then assembled the Frigidaires and made the chocolate-coated raisins and Pink Lady eyeshadow and had coffee breaks and flirted with co-workers and went bowling together, and on Saturday they drove to the mall and bought the very things they had manufactured themselves and then had them delivered to their modest, perfectly kept-up homes, and on weekends they barbecued burgers and drank beer, and theirs was the best system in the world, and if the Russians could just take a break from that depressive drinking contest they called an economy and drop by for a barbecue, they’d give communism the heave-ho. But economies aren’t static. Another mall was built. A bigger mall. The old one withered, though it didn’t die. It gravitated toward bargains (discount clothes), then junk (Chinese toys, appliances that didn’t work). The original mall anticipated the poverty that would come.

  Now the city, like other financial centres, no longer manufactured much. It moved paper around in complex swirls, it shovelled money from building to building. The economy was fragile and opaque. The world of his youth had been gone for decades. All those gleaming Bel Airs being washed in driveways, outdoor hockey, two brands of jeans, Presbyterian cooking—all of it breathing its last. The factories quietly leaving, moving offshore, the workers losing their jobs to Malaysians. The suburb losing its way.

  Who was next? Would the sons of Rosedale find themselves scalding pigs in ill-lit abattoirs, standing in puddles of blood? Would they seek solace in beer and large families? Every empire collapses eventually, Harry thought. They lose energy and die of heartbreak.

  He saw Verma interviewing a woman in her forties, recording it on her phone camera. Briscow was passing a joint to a woman with dreadlocks wearing an ironic ill-fitting pinstriped suit. H
arry approached an earnest-looking man in his twenties with a Hutterite beard and introduced himself. The man was a Christian, representing the faith community, he said, committed to non-violence. His name was David, and he said he came from a small town no one had heard of.

  Harry asked one of the questions they’d decided on in class.

  “What do you hope to accomplish, David?”

  “To raise awareness of a dangerous and growing economic inequality.”

  “Do you think you’ve done that?”

  “Definitely. The key is sustaining it. I mean, this isn’t my first rodeo. I’ve been arrested four times. Everything peters out. The media moves on. It has its own agenda.”

  Are you hoping to get laid? Harry didn’t ask this. This man was pure of heart. But even God’s soldiers had needs.

  “We believe another world is possible. This is what the Reign of God looks like,” David said, sweeping his hand. “People talking, dialogue, sharing.”

  Harry moved on to a man who wanted to talk about the evils of the Tokyo Electric Power Company, the need to put baking soda in the drinking water to soak up the radioactive dust that had blown over from Fukushima. Harry thanked him for his views and walked on past other snatches of conversation that drifted toward him.

  “The global rising of the human spirit …”

  “The mainstream media doesn’t want to tell you about Argentina.”

  “Make money real.”

  “Two words: Arab Spring.”

  “Banking used to be a crime—read your Bible.”

  Capitalism has become a carnival, Harry thought. Every week a new scam was revealed, some of them so complex that armies of accountants were needed to sort them out. But others were remarkably crude. The simple dream of a greedy child, boldly acted upon; a company made of make-believe.