Mount Pleasant

by Don Gillmor

  TWENTY-FOUR

  HARRY SAT IN HIS CAR in the shade of the expressway with the burden of Christmas upon him. He could feel the commuters above, hundreds of thousands inching home to a new set of frustrations. Ahead was a pixilated mural of red tail lights. He nudged into the right-hand lane with difficulty, then exited without signalling, narrowly missing a cyclist who was weaving through the stalled traffic.

  “Fucking idiot!” the man yelled.

  “Bicycle path, moron!” Harry yelled back, pointing to the bicycle path fifteen feet away. The windows of his car were closed and tinted. The cyclist was long gone.

  Harry hated cyclists, their self-righteousness, their courier invective, the raised middle finger as they went by. He hated this army of spandex shitheads. When he cycled to work, in good weather in the spring and fall, he hated the rage-filled drivers, hated their cramped, vengeful souls.

  He drove north, parked, then walked briskly. There was no snow on the ground. The temperature was above normal. The city was grey and naked, and the holiday decorations looked bereft, like they were for a dress rehearsal rather than the actual season. He wanted to get Gladys something thoughtful and unexpected for Christmas, something conciliatory. Christmas was an opportunity to soothe things between them with a gesture.

  He went into a store and stood in the aura of its ethically derived scents. He pressed the plunger of a tester, and a small glop of viscous lotion spilled out, some of it onto his hand, some onto the floor. He rubbed it into his wrist and sniffed. Peach. The lights seemed very bright. A rock version of a Christmas carol played. A small boy yanked on his mother’s hand, pulling her off-balance. An elderly woman took cream from a tester and spread it carefully over her deeply lined face, then left. Two teenagers giggled.

  A very pretty girl was saying something to Harry, smiling. “Circus time is swell,” she said again.

  Harry stared at her flawless skin and dyed hair. She had a tattoo peeking out from her V-neck T-shirt, an Asian character of some kind.

  “Circus time,” Harry repeated.

  “Citrus-lime. It also comes in citrus-lime. The body lotion. If you’re, like, a citrus freak.”

  Circus freak. Uncommitted syllables rounded into marbles that rolled freely within her so-called sentences. He was uncomfortably hot and left the store and stood for a moment on the sidewalk, relieved by the cold air.

  He was swept into Williams-Sonoma on a sea of people chattering into phones. This building used to be a cinema, the largest in the city. Harry remembered watching Apocalypse Now here as a student, sitting in the front row of the balcony, leaning against the rail and lighting a cigarette every time someone on screen did, back when you could smoke in the upper seats.

  In front of him were espresso machines of exquisite beauty: Gaggias and De’Longhis and Ascasos in red enamel and brushed steel. He looked around the room, at the Zoku dicers, OXO colanders, Emile Henry Artisan Ruffled Pie Dishes. None of this would do.

  Harry went outside and jostled once more. A dapper black man in a wool topcoat shoved a pamphlet toward him.

  “I thought February was Black History Month,” Harry said.

  “Sick Kids,” the man said wearily. “Sick Kids Hospital Foundation.”

  The pavement was pocked with dark spots where gum had stained, its half-life still mocking. Snow would have been welcome, a context that had gone missing.

  Gladys was home, not feeling well. Every Christmas Harry got sick, a ritual that Gladys now thought was psychosomatic. This year Harry was fine and Gladys was in bed. Harry wondered if she would prolong it to avoid the faculty Christmas party and the unhappy weight of New Year’s Eve. They had been invited to a dinner party that Harry didn’t want to go to. But the alternative was daunting: to stay home with one another and have a silent dinner.

  Harry walked along Bloor Street, examining the elaborate window displays. His cellphone rang, and Harry saw Dixie’s number displayed. He would have to deal with her at some point.

  “Dixie.”

  “Harry. Finally.”

  “It’s been a busy time, Dixie. Christmas, etc. Sorry I didn’t get back to you.”

  “My god, with everything that’s happened.”

  “All of it bad.”

  “But they’re going to find that money. They know who took it.”

  “The recovery rate for these things isn’t brilliant.” Harry was tired of Dixie, tired of her expectations.

  “But they’ll find some of it.”

  What irritated Harry most was that Dixie was a distorted version of himself. In her hunger for that money, he saw his own hunger.

  “They might, Dixie. Then it’s doled out to various stakeholders after a hierarchy is established.” A hierarchy where neither of them would be near the top.

  “But when will this all happen?”

  “It won’t happen, Dixie,” Harry said, unable to keep the irritation out of his voice. “The money’s gone. The chances of us seeing any of it are remote, and if we do see anything, it will be ten cents on the dollar and it will arrive seven years from now after acrimonious litigation eats up eighty percent of it. I’m letting it go, Dixie. Maybe you should do the same.”

  In the silence that followed, Harry imagined Dixie calculating desperately, wondering how much might be waiting, how much hope to invest. Harry wanted a clean break. He stood in front of the Holt Renfrew window, filled with mannequins that had slightly creepy penguin heads, dressed in Dolce & Gabbana suits. A stuffed life-sized reindeer wearing a cashmere sweater was lying down with an arrow sticking out of it. One of the D&G penguin people held a bow. Harry lingered for a moment and pondered this narrative. A few presents were littered around. One of the opened presents had a plastic heart in it. The dead reindeer glanced up at Harry. I died for love.

  “But can’t we—” Dixie began.

  “If you want to go after the money, Dixie, you should talk to your lawyer. But I’m through. I have to run. Merry Christmas.”

  He pressed End.

  Harry went inside Holt’s and looked at scarves. The most expensive was $3,295. A saleswoman smiled at him, instantly assessing his clothes and shoes, reading his face. Nowhere was there written the word “money.” There were people with money who dressed like bums, but it was a very particular uniform. Good clothes that should have been discarded: hardy tweeds from London, Ralph Lauren oxford cloth shirts with frayed collars, overcoats bought at this very store more than a decade earlier, brogues that had been made to order fifteen years ago. But that wasn’t Harry.

  The dull white noise that was his debt suddenly increased, building until it shut out all other sounds. The saleswoman said something; Harry watched her lips move and waited until they stopped, then said he was only browsing, hoping he wasn’t yelling. He stood rooted for a few moments, hoping the noise would subside, but it didn’t.

  The saleswoman stared at him blankly. A handsome Latina. His head had once been crowded with women like this, all of them complex and passionate and tasting of earth and olives, constructed from cinema and cliché.

  Harry got onto the escalator, gazing upward into the atrium, the crossing of escalators, the solemn lines of shoppers. Full lips bloomed on ancient faces. Tastefulness in all things except the flesh. He rose through the ranks, his debt getting louder, bringing in symphonic flourishes—the sudden sweep of a dozen violins, trumpets sounding, an oboe. Voices joined in, a choir of thousands celebrating the apex of the retail year, when credit was stretched and desire sated. This was the cathedral, the spire rising past Armani and Burberry, past Gucci and Prada. He could hear Gladys’s voice among the multitudes, her soft, lovely soprano. And Ben’s unsure tenor. All the debts and personal obligations of the holiday season forming a “Hallelujah Chorus” in his head.

  On the top floor a bass drum joined in, a martial touch. Harry nodded at a saleswoman whose mouth formed a pleasant query. He wandered the top floor, past the messy tables of sale clothes, the symphony screaming inside. It wasn’t ju
st his own debt, but those around him, the city’s, the nation’s, all nations. The whole system was straining, Marx seeking vindication among the ruins.

  He was jolted suddenly by a vision of a sickly future in which their house was gone, his marriage collapsed. Then he would quietly disappear from Ben’s life, the way Dale had. Harry’s job could end without warning. Polyps could flourish like mushrooms within him. A wasteland awaiting, burned stumps still smoking. Not a living thing for miles.

  He circled quickly to get on the descending escalator, his debt getting even louder. Harry continued down, seeking escape. He looked for familiar faces. But Felicia wouldn’t shop here now, and Erin was too organized to be shopping this close to Christmas. She would have wandered through here in late November, two days marked off on her phone calendar, a nice lunch booked nearby. Back on the main floor, cymbals arrived in a Teutonic clash. Horns blared, a bass thumped. Instruments and voices blended, heading toward an awful crescendo.

  Harry walked into the men’s department. He had come here with his mother to buy a suit for graduation. His father had wanted his tailor to make the suit, but his mother argued that Harry would look like a musty old stockbroker at his prom; he needed something fresher. So they came to Holt’s and Harry dutifully tried on suits, wishing he were elsewhere. In the end, they bought a navy suit and he looked a bit like a stockbroker anyway.

  Harry stood over shirts that were folded on a tray. They were regularly priced at $388, on sale for $254. The crescendo finally resolved in a single screaming note that exploded in Harry’s head. He brought his hands to his ears and bent over, trying to stop the noise. A salesman came over and said something, leaning down to Harry’s Quasimodo pose. The noise finally stopped, and Harry slowly straightened up, filled with relief. There was a ringing still. The salesman was saying something, but Harry couldn’t hear. A few people stared. He wondered if he’d yelled anything.

  Behind the salesman was his childhood friend Jimmy Carson, who looked at Harry with curiosity as much as recognition. Jimmy the drinker. He had done time for fraud, “a soft jolt,” as they say. Or maybe only a fine. Insider trading, something like that. Harry couldn’t recall any details. His thick, handsome face had begun its ruin, the veins streaky, the eyes bulging against the pressure of that flesh. Harry wondered if Jimmy was still married, if his wife had waited for him, like in a country and western song, or if she’d fled.

  The salesman had a hand on Harry’s arm. “Sir, are you all right?”

  “Fine, fine. Thank you.” He could hear again, though the voice seemed to be coming from a great distance.

  “You’re sure? Perhaps you should sit down.”

  “I’m fine.”

  Carson approached. “Harry,” he said. “Jesus, man. You okay? You having an attack of some kind?”

  “Tinnitus,” Harry said. “Hearing. It can get a bit … adventurous at times.”

  “What’s it been …”

  “A while.”

  “Years. How are you?”

  “Good, good. And you, Jimmy, are you still in … what was it?… arbitrage?” Harry asked.

  “With Jennings Albrecht. God, that was a while ago.”

  “You’re on to bigger things.”

  “There are no bigger things. Everything’s small now.”

  “But money’s still money. It’s still moving around out there.”

  “A little. I’m with Mercer Beem. You remember they got carried away on that quant model. We’ve repositioned ourselves. Look, Harry, do you know anyone on the University Endowment Fund Committee? They took one in the nuts. Big time. I mean like a billion and a half. Poof. Their impulse is to hunker down. I’m not arguing with that. The thing is, we could make them well, but I need to get into the room. You know Althorp, Davis, any of those guys?”

  Harry shook his head. If he did know them, he wouldn’t be sending ex-con Jimmy Carson to sell them the latest version of derivatives. Jimmy, who watched from his window while Harry’s father hit his mother. Jimmy, who sold naked pictures taken from a nudie magazine at school, who used the money from his sixteenth birthday to hire a prostitute.

  “I was sorry to hear about Dale,” Jimmy said.

  “Thanks, Jimmy. You heard about BRG?”

  “Hard to miss. A surprise.” Jimmy’s face had a sudden wariness.

  “They took my father’s money. Cleaned him out.” Harry assessed Jimmy’s face, blotchy under the light. “How hard is it, Jimmy?”

  Jimmy assessed him coldly for a minute, then shrugged and smiled his ex-con half-smile. “It’s all out there, all that paper—ABCs, CDOs, SIVs, subprime, NINJA loans. You sit in front of that screen and it’s like you’re in a snow globe and everything is fine, then you turn it upside down and suddenly all that paper is floating and you can hardly see there’s so much of it, and you reach out and try and grab as much of it as you can.”

  “And then?”

  “And then the problems start.”

  Outside, dark clouds moved in from the northwest. He called Felicia to check in. Marcie, the Barbadian nurse he’d hired to stop by twice a week, answered. Felicia was in the bathroom, she said, so he asked Marcie about his mother’s health, her drinking. Marcie said she had a few gins in the afternoon when they played cards. Which meant another six or so in the evening. Felicia was intent on going to Italy, a trip that made Harry nervous.

  “Do you think she should be travelling, Marcie?”

  “If something’s going to happen, it’s going to happen.”

  “That’s a great comfort.”

  Harry told Marcie that he’d be over tomorrow morning, then hung up. He continued along the street, past the armed guard in front of the jewellery store, the crush of shoppers, the pre–Boxing Day blowout sales. Harry breathed in deeply, yoga breaths that took it all in, the sense of communion as they thronged. He had read that the world’s wealthy had $32 trillion stashed offshore, out of reach of the tax man. All those secrets. The unbought espresso machines and Canali suits.

  Harry checked his phone for the number he’d entered this morning. He’d phoned the real estate office and gotten the cellphone number for Del, their agent from years ago. He’d left her a message this morning, saying he wanted to chat.

  He entered the number. She picked up, and Harry could hear her talking to someone else. Ten seconds went by before she finally addressed her cellphone.

  “Del, it’s Harry Salter. I left you a message.”

  “Harry, great to hear from you. How is that adorable house?” Harry could hear her again talking to someone else, pointing out the features in a house they were in. Did you notice the darling sconces?

  “I’m thinking of putting it on the market, Del. I need to get an idea of what it would go for.”

  “Off the top, Harry, sight unseen, which I never do, but since I was the agent, blah, blah. That neighbourhood—through the roof. I’d say eight ten on a bad day. Eight fifty if we get some cowboys blowing their brains out in a bidding war.”

  “A place on the block went for $900,000 in June. Bigger than ours, but in the ballpark.”

  “Well, June. Everyone loves June. December, not so much. Christmas is good for divorce and suicide. It’s death for real estate. You don’t want to show it until early spring if you can hang on. January, everyone feels poor after Christmas. Credit card bills coming in. Heating bills through the roof, not that we’ve actually had winter. February, everyone’s depressed. March, they start to stir. Then April is the new beginning. Why not take on more debt? The world is green.”

  “I’ll see, Del. May need to move a little earlier than that.”

  He wondered what she looked like now. Twenty years ago she had been an intense woman who didn’t seem to have any life outside selling houses. Dark-haired, distracted, sexy. But he’d get two other agents to give an opinion before he chose who to go with. He could hear Del talking to whomever she was with. You will die when you see the master bedroom.

  “Let’s chat this week,
Harry,” Del said before turning again to her clients.

  Harry pressed End.

  If they sold the house for $850,000, there would be roughly $420,000 left after paying off the mortgage, line of credit, real estate agent’s fee, taxes, legal fees, credit cards. They could pay cash for a very modest, possibly cheery condo downtown, cycle everywhere, get out to more plays, go to cheap, hip restaurants. No more ants or mice, no more damp basements. No more debt. Harry still wouldn’t have any money. His retirement was perilous, his employment tentative. He would be broke, but he’d have slain the dragon. A rebirth, then, not a retreat.

  The wind came charging through the tunnel formed by the buildings, a chaotic gale that blew in more than one direction at once. A snowflake sped by erratically. The shoppers were in dark hues, grim and purposeful, hunched against the wind, moving in ragged single file like mine workers on a shift change. Harry darted in and out of a dozen stores, the Christmas music lively and annoying. His debt revived, and now sat in his head like the Memphis horn section that had played on those Stax soul records he’d loved as a kid. It had a jaunty, danceable rhythm. In the end, he bought his mother a literary mystery novel that was set in Florence. He got Ben a boxed CD set of The Band, and Gladys got a pashmina. In his heart, his house had a hundred bidders; it sold for a million. He was free.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  “DO YOU THINK WE’D HAVE BEEN HAPPIER if your father had left us money? If he’d had money.” Gladys asked. It was New Year’s Eve, early in the evening. They carefully sipped wine. She was wearing the pashmina he’d bought her for Christmas, a modest hit.