by Carol Mason
~ * * * ~
‘Have you been to the doctor’s yet?’ I put my mother on speaker-phone as I sit on the toilet lid looking in my magnifying mirror, applying a mid-grey shadow to my upper lash line. I can’t believe I’m going on a blind date to make Sherrie happy, instead of myself.
‘Why did that have to be the first question out of your mouth?’
‘So I take it you haven’t?’
‘I’ve really only just got home!’
‘Have you had any more fainting spells?’
‘Only one.’
‘You never told me!’
‘I’m telling you now.’
‘I was a bit annoyed you decided to stay longer, and not even tell me… If you don’t go to the doctor’s they’ll never find out what’s wrong with you and you’ll never get treatment and who knows what might happen then.’
‘That’s intelligent, Angela. Answer me one question, because you seem to have all the answers. If I ate your brain, would I get your knowledge?’
‘Oh, ha ha. Isn’t sarcasm the lowest form of a nit?’ I remind her of one of her famous expressions.
‘You’re the only nit round here. Anyway, I only stayed a few days longer. Don’t tell me off. Don’t spoil what might be my one last chance for happiness.’
I feel like the evil stepsister, or the jealous spinster friend who can’t be happy for you. ‘I’m sorry. Did you have a good time?’ I’m dying to get the skinny on Georgios.
‘I had a lovely time.’
‘And?’
‘And it was lovely.’
‘AND?’
‘Stop sniffing around my bottom Angela.’
‘I’d never want to sniff around your bottom. I’ll leave that to Georgios.’
I hear her titter.
‘So you’re not going to tell me, then?’ If he rogered you and you enjoyed it.
‘Some people… I don’t know… I have to repeat myself so many times I start to wonder if they’re a little bit simple in the head.’
I grin. ‘Please just tell me one thing…’
‘What?’ she says, tiresomely. ‘If you’re going to put that record back on and tell me to promise I’m going to the doctor’s… just don’t bother saying anything!’
There’s a silence. ‘Hello?’ she enquires, after moments.
‘I’m not bothering saying anything.’
~ * * * ~
On my way out to see my ‘date,’ I make a trip down to the garbage chute with the bag of clothes I was busy filling and all the crap that lay abandoned in the middle of the floor. Things are looking up. As I float along with the crowd, I realise I feel good about myself. I’ve just got back from Greece. In two days time I have an interview for a great, well-paying job. Now when I wake up each morning I give myself an exercise in positive thinking. I don’t believe people can change in fundamental ways, but they can change their outlook. So every day I tell myself that with each day I’m somehow going to improve myself, and so far, well, I think it might be working.
~ * * * ~
‘Holy Mackerel!’ I’ve just got Sherrie on speed-dial. I peer into Artigiano’s window.
‘There are two men sitting on their own, Sherrie, and one of them looks like Robin Williams with a toupé on his top lip, and the other’s old and orange and he’s wearing a shirt the colour of Thai Green Curry.’ I gasp. ‘Which one is he then?’
Of course I’m waiting for her to say, ‘Oh neither of those two, stupid!’ but instead she says, ‘He’s tanned and weathered looking because he’s a runner, Angie. Duh! Runners have outdoorsy complexions, they’re not pale freaks like you and me.’
She clears her throat. ‘A-hem! Two more features that the brochure fails to mention… He’s got a rockin’ body on him. And an enormous dick.’
‘A what?’ I zip away from the window in case I’m seen by the orange man before I have a chance to flee for the safety of my own celibacy. ‘How the hell would you know about his, his, his, penis?’
‘How? How do you think?’
I have to take a moment. ‘Oh no. You slept with him? You slept with the man you’re setting me up with!’ A couple of latte-drinkers on the patio look up at me in surprise.
‘I went on a date with him. What else was I supposed to do?’
She sounds pissed off at my pissed-offness. ‘I thought you’d consider it a bonus that I could give him such a good report. How many people do you know have their good friends test the merchandise for them? And if I can call it a whopper, trust me, I’ve seen plenty to know. You got it comin girl.’
‘I got it going, more like.’ I trot away from Artigiano’s as fast as my legs can carry me. I’m trying to picture an orange man with a huge one coming at me, and it’s enough to put me off sex for life.
‘Take a maturity pill! You can’t stand him up! You’ve got to at least have a coffee with him! He’s a great guy.’
‘Yeah, once you get over the fact that he looks like he’s been dipped in iodine.’
‘You’re looks-ist, Angela Chapman. I’ve noticed that about you for a long long time. And it’s not a good quality in someone your age. You know that song? Something about you might be young and beautiful now, but one day your looks will be bye-bye? Well that’s gonna be you, hun… You’re problem is you’re going around measuring everybody against Jonathan. Whereas what you should do is find somebody really ugly and gross and measure other guys against him. It’s called the glass is half full. But with you, if he’s not hot or cute, you’re not gonna give him a chance, are you?’
‘That’s not true!’ I flee across the grass in front of the art gallery, quickly summoning up the men I’ve most recently seen myself with on some level, just to disprove her point. But the faces that leap to mind are gorgeous Georgios, gorgeous Sean, and Roger the City Planner, who wasn’t gorgeous in the same way, but still his face lives in my memory.
‘Okay, just because he’s not great looking… Just because he’s quiet, and maybe not the most confident guy in the world… That’s not a reason to blow him off. Maybe, you know, some people have serious self-esteem issues. There are a lot of lonely single people who suffer from some sort of mental illness—’
‘Oh! Mental illness?’ I fling my free hand in the air, in exasperation. ‘That’s not a problem for me! I love a little dose of mental illness. It’s actually high up on my wish list for a man. Let’s think… there’s knockers first—I love a man boobs, particularly when they’re bigger than my own. Then there’s hairy hands. Got to love those as a close second…. Mental illness? Yeah, definitely third.’
‘Well you might think that’s funny now, but take it from me Ange, you’ve been out of the dating market for quite some time now, Vancouver’s a hard city for a single woman to find a man in. You better hope Jonathan’s gonna send you somebody because you’re gonna need all the help you can get. Everybody’s married in this city, because other than mountains and ocean for long romantic walks, there’s not that much else to do, so you only come here or settle here if you’ve got somebody to bonk and walk with for the rest of your life. If they’re single they’re usually gay or twenty-two. If they’re fifty, they’re usually divorced, and looking for somebody twenty-two—straight or gay. So it’s slim pickins… And even in general, if you’re young and perfect—which you’re neither—it’s hard finding a man. You got lucky the first time. But you met him in Toronto: totally different scene. But you need to remember an important thing Angela my friend: women rarely get the man they really want; they end up having to want what they can get.’
I cross at the lights at the corner of Georgia and Howe streets, not even heading in the direction of home, just sort of running off at the legs. And the mouth. ‘Well maybe you think like that, Sherrie, but I’ve never thought like that. That’s so lame. Not all of us settle. And some of us never will. If I never meet anybody else, I won’t just be with someone because he’ll do.’
‘I’m sorry if I offended you, Ange. I was really only trying to
help… All I am saying is—or trying to say, subtly—there’s an old Yiddish proverb. It goes like this: If you want your dreams to come true, don’t sleep.’
~ * * * ~
I walk home, a little bit furious. I am not a dreamer. I don’t think I ever have been. Maybe I no longer believe that Jonathan is going to send me a lover—if I ever did—but when I do eventually find one, I’d like to think he would be somebody who Jonathan would have approved of.
Coming into my apartment, I see the two green garbage bags in the middle of the floor and step over them. I’m just putting the kettle on, when an awful thought strikes me.
Jonathan’s ring and watch.
Weren’t they on the floor in an envelope?
I glance at the floor. I don’t see the envelope.
I dive-bomb onto the bag marked ‘Charity Shop’... Not in that one. I pat bags and squeeze bags, tip them up, clothes tumbling onto the floor. But I can’t see the little brown envelope with his jewellery in it.
That can only mean one thing: I must have chucked it out with the rubbish.
I don’t even wait for the lift. Instead, I gallop down eighteen flights of stairs. I can’t have thrown out his wedding ring. His watch that he loved so much.
It’s not pretty down here: the ‘dump’ at the back of the building, where the rubbish of two hundred apartments finds itself.
Life as a garbage rat isn’t that glamorous either. With the noise of the door opening, and my arrival, they squeak and scurry away.
The stink is something else too. A cross between rotten vegetables, the rancid entrails of a million abattoirs, dirty old homeless men, and shit. I cover my nose with a hand but it doesn’t help. I already feel contaminated. I can’t count how many fastened up carrier bags or spewing open carrier bags, or half-rat-eaten carrier bags there are down here, but there are a lot. Most of them are generic green bags just like mine. With fervid desperation, I pick my way over a heap of stinking squelch and start ripping open bags searching for something that looks vaguely like my own junk, knowing that it truly will be like finding a needle in a haystack. But I am not deterred. I have to find his jewellery, or I’m never going to forgive myself.
My hands get coated with globs of stinky wet stuff. I retch up a symphony. But I’m on a mission. My tearing becomes more frantic, and I think, Why did you have to die, Jonathan and leave me to care so much about the small things that are all I have left of you? Look what you’ve reduced me to. I tread over bags not caring what my feet touch, not caring that the stink is so bad I feel I’m swallowing it; I can taste it. I know I’ve gone mad, but I am powerless to stop myself. The faster I go the more hopeless it’s getting. I start to cry. A big rush of tears. Jonathan, why can’t you leave me alone? Let me be free of you? I feel like tears must be cleaning a trail down my grimy, stinky cheeks. I dab at my mouth with the back of my forearm.
Something tells me this hopeless.
I stand there stock still, with my heart pounding. And I realise something. I’m not crying for me. I’m not even crying for Jonathan. I’m crying for a ring and a broken watch, that, in no meaningful way affect my memory of him, or my love for him. This reality just visits me, surprising me with its logic, as though Jonathan has somehow suddenly put the thought in my head.
I rub one more time at my face. There is a simple truth here. One I will have to accept: Jonathan hasn’t gone away. Even though I was convinced, for a short while, that he finally had. And that’s both a bad thing, and exactly as it should be.
My heart-rate comes down. My crying stops. A tiny instinct in me says, go on, open one more bag, and if they’re not there…
But I suddenly feel exhausted to the bone. What’s the point? I look down at my hands. They’re like the hands of a street person who has forgotten what it’s like to have a bath. Some black fury creature trips across the top of my foot and I let out a scream. The echo of my own voice breaks through me like a flare going off inside me.
Give it up, I say to myself. But still that instinct says check one more bag…
Okay. There’s a bag right at my feet. I sink my fingers into the plastic and rip and say a small prayer.
And what do I see? There, on the top, is a little brown envelope.
Could it be my little brown envelope?
Inside the little brown envelope is Jonathan’s watch and Jonathan’s ring.
I pick the watch out and clutch it, looking at its face and rubbing it with my thumb, as though this has somehow brought Jonathan back to me. But what’s odd is, the watch doesn’t appear to be broken any more. Its pointers no longer stick at eight o’clock. The second hand is making a purposeful sweep around the dial.
Nineteen
Seagulls swoop off the building tops and soar to a blue sky. I catch my reflection in the window of the Hotel Vancouver—my high (and not particularly comfortable, but devastatingly sexy) black heels, and the pale grey suit (the closest I could find to the girl’s) that’s so fitted it gives me a bum when I thought I didn’t have any. The baby blue Benetton shirt, gaping open and showing my tan. My hair loose around my shoulders, sunglasses on head. Jessica rang me and offered to do my make-up again. I suppose my saying yes might have been a good thing for us, but I couldn’t bear to be fussed over. Besides, she might get to see that my skin isn’t perfect and might never want me in her house again.
Jervais Ladner’s building is as ‘corporate Vancouver’ as it gets: about thirty-five stories of earthquake-proofed, shimmering, floor-to-sky tinted glass—the type of windows you can see out of, but nobody can see in; three sets of revolving doors; pristine tiled floors that make your shoes clack; a blue-uniformed concierge sitting at a vast desk who will eventually get to call you by your name, because you’ll be the one person who is always first in when he comes on early shift, and the last person he shows out before he closes up to catch the last bus home. Eight elevators. JL is on the thirty-third floor. Nay, JL owns the thirty-third floor. The top execs will have the north-facing offices: best view in the whole damned city: mountains, park, ocean and sky. God of everything up there, you are—the heavens and the earth—only maybe not of yourself. Their windows never open. There’d be far too many suicides.
Progress, I think. That one word just cruises, ironically, through my head. I have come full circle.
‘Elevator to the right,’ the friendly black concierge points out, when he sees me hesitating.
I clack across the tiles, remembering how the sound of my own feet used to make me feel important. Somebody else walks behind me. A man.
But instead of feeling important, like I used to, I feel a tightening in the pit of my stomach. Going up. Of course. Literally and metaphorically. The man steps into the lift with me and we stand there, a foot apart. Whereas before, when I used to do this every day, I’d have felt a kinship with this person I didn’t even know, I’d have been vaguely impressed by him and would have wondered if he made as much money as I did, but now that a couple of years and a shift in priorities have distanced me from the corporate rat-race, I feel only pity for him.
I remember, as I stand here, with the lift climbing through floors, that I once went up, didn’t I? Up quite far actually, and quite fast in my career. But then, one day, I went down. Or, rather, I got sent down with a security guard who had orders to escort me off the premises. I’ve always thought it interesting how when they fire you they manage to make you feel a criminal instead of a victim.
We stop on the eighteenth floor. The doors open. The man puts a hand in his pants pockets and steps off.
I’ve often thought you have to be born to the corporate elite. Something has to drive you, beyond the money and the power and the deals. Nobody just kills themselves so they can drive around Vancouver in a brand-new Mercedes. And whatever that gene is, I guess it’s missing in me.
Ping. We’re at the thirty-third. My heart rate’s up; I hear it pound in my ears. The doors slowly slide open. My hands feel clammy, a sweat breaks out down my back. Then a
thought strikes me. If the biggest rush I got from knowing I’d landed this interview was finding a shirt, a jacket, a pair of pants, and a pair of shoes I can barely walk in—a whole ‘business’ identity that I didn’t even come up with on my own, I copied it off some girl I saw ten minutes previously in a coffee shop—shouldn’t that be telling me something? If I inwardly groaned when I scoured the pages of Marketing magazine because it was all so boring to me, shouldn’t that be telling me something too?
The scene that appears before my eyes is all too familiar. Elevator doors open out into a vast marble and stainless steel reception, behind which is a designer maize of glass offices filled with exotic plants and exotic people and furniture that looks too ‘artsy’ to be comfortable. The women are all gorgeous, it’s almost unfair that they’d also have a brain. But they do. They’d have to, to work here. The men are good-looking too, and highly game-playing. A young guy in jeans and a T-shirt walks past reception, kicking around a football. He’s probably trying to come up with the latest big campaign slogan for Honda. Because the creative people in advertising agencies get to dress casually and kick footballs around the office and call it work.
A pretty but semi-witless ‘receptionist’ smiles at my arrival. She’s smiling too keenly, which means she’s new. Which means she’s there because somebody’s told her you have to start at the bottom, that she’ll work her way up. But the only ‘working your way up’ that will get done as far as she’s concerned will be by some thinks-he’s-a-hotshot creative director who will work his way up her, with promises he would be in the position to keep, but of course he won’t. She’ll get screwed, used, and then she’ll leave. And she’ll look in the mirror and then she’ll think maybe I should have gone to college.
Jervais Ladner’s logo is blasted across the front of the desk.
I want to throw up.