Architects Are Here (15 page)

We ordered the local microbrewery beers and occasionally just a plain old-fashioned beer our fathers drank and we always drank from bottles rather than the pints that were poured from hoses. I was convinced draft beers were home to mould in the tubes and also the mixing agents were not as clean as a bottled beer, especially during the warm months. In winter I’d give in and order a pint of Guinness.

From Ted’s we often met up with David Twombly. In the past year, David and Sok Hoon had separated and then David had lost the company and Nell had heard about her son. It made Nell and me think how lucky we were not to let the world cleave us, that we understood and were both in our thirties and had survived early relationships when jealousy, ambition and your own boredom crept in and destroyed the apple orchards.

We clinked bottles and waited and David Twombly arrived. His house was around the corner on Grace and he often popped in to look around to see if anyone was there he could talk to. He was happy to see us. David didnt do that Toronto thing where people kissed, he was too affectionate for that, so you had to settle for his big happy face and how silly he could be at seeing you. He hadnt wanted Nell and me to get together but then resolved himself to it, and I had that feeling you get with confidence that made Nell a filter to my own emotional landscape. I preferred a man to be intimate with me through the agency of a girlfriend. They had known each other a long time. They had worked together. That’s an entire world to share and sometimes I found them commiserating. They liked to hold hands. They did not, actually, have much to do with each other these days, but David understood the assholes and tension and elevator Nell was working with every day.

David ordered a red wine, a bottle of it. He put his communication box in front of him, it was called a pebble, and I touched its soft chrome surface. It was one of his new projects since leaving IKW. It felt like rubber, like a sex toy. It was a device that connected him to anything man-made that he owned, he just had to think of it. I’m field-testing it, he said.

Me: It’s not as small as I’d imagine.

They can make them smaller, but what’s the point.

Theyre making them to fit the hand again, Nell said.

David was on wine because he didnt want to get fat. I was the opposite. David had always been fat but now was working out and there was a pinched quality to his face. I was broadening. When youre skinny all your life you enjoy the thickening that happens, and I was giving in to my slowing metabolism.

He drank the wine carefully and Nell switched over to the wine. He was the only man at Ted’s Collision to be drinking wine. I think we talked about potatoes, and how you boil red potatoes and fry yellow ones. Or is it the other way around.

In the mornings David swam and then came home to work on his laptop. He traded call and put options. He invested in thirteen junior mining stocks, juniors that he had visited while working for IKW, or he’d met management at the Spoke Club or flown over property in a helicopter and knew that one of the thirteen would strike it big. Those arent bad odds. Only one junior in three thousand ever turns into a mine, he explained. If you have success with the drill bit, David said, there was the factor of ten thousand. But David wasnt looking for an operable mine. What he cared about was a mine with sizable opportunity. Where there was tremendous upside only in the ability to attract capital. Then you had to time the rise of share price and tabulate volume and get out before the price faltered. David realized he had a facility for stacking plates into piles and recognizing when those plates teetered too wildly and selling before that moment and buying back later at the very instant that other traders were shitting their pants and reeling in the panic of a throat-slashing, bottomless, no-buyers vacuum, and as soon as they had sold to you out of tremendous relief for your foolhardy risk, that’s when plates were again being stacked and faith restored in markets, in the idea that objects and raw materials and services could actually be looked at as money. You traded on consumer confidence and trader sentiment. Sometimes though all the plates were smashed and someone went into the warehouse and took a sledgehammer to the crates of stock still in their boxes and then someone lit the corner of the warehouse and the side of the town the warehouse was in was blown off the earth. David learned to read the signs of men lifting their sledgehammers or a warehouse prone to fire and shorted everything. He borrowed stock from anyone who was holding long and returned the stock seventeen minutes later. He worked in financials and housing and then when the flavour was sucked out of those equities he’d trade over in technology and commodity futures, in wool and cotton and precious metals.

That’s where he was at now, in the soft commodities. When the volatility in that market felt played out he’d move into consumer discretionary. He watched the plates stack and teeter and the number of bids outnumber the asks and he withdrew his support and watched the plates crash again. Or it was like fire, the embers flaring up and down and wood being consumed or withdrawn. Sometimes there was no air and other times no fuel and then in spots there was tremendous fuel and oxygen and you had to be fully in then and let the entire position roar into life and get out again before the fire understood that it was hovering over water and had no right to be over the surface it thought it owned.

W
E LEFT
David at Ted’s and walked home. Nell and I had just come back from a weekend trip north. It wasnt a good trip. Nell was tense and had something on her mind. We had been with David and friends from IKW. Massimo Sythe had been loyal to David, had backed him up. Massimo had a cottage on an island. A pale blue kevlar speedboat picked us up. We were asked to bring cold wine and food and ice. It’s wonderful to feel a jet boat plough through water. They had piled wood on the beach, a broken chair on top. And Massimo was operating a chainsaw after wine and a toke. He was a little jubilant on it, carving off lengths of an old fallen tree. At one point he passed the saw to me. He was afraid of nipping the blade and he knew that I was used to chainsaws.

We left the pile like that, the chair sitting on the heap of beach wood. The chair wasnt something you sat on, it was sitting itself. It had leapt out of chairness and become its own master.

We ate and then changed into our swimsuits and Massimo brought down a two-gallon container of gasoline. It’s windy, he said, and hard to light the fire. He handed the gasoline to David, and I realized in that gesture that Massimo was risky, but he wasnt about to take foolish chances. The gasoline chugged out of the yellow nozzle over David’s hands. And then a flame licked his wrist and leapt to the wood and a plume of boiling fire spewed like something out of a forge. David Twombly sucked in his chest to stop himself from being savaged.

We stripped off and swam, baked ourselves against the hot fire, dipped again. But Nell is not close to me and it makes my brain bang open and shut and I drink my face off.

When we came home thieves had ransacked our apartment. Pictures were off the walls, some ornaments above the fireplace were broken. Books were strewn on the floor. Toby the stuffed fox had been lifted and thrown. Then there was shit on the couch and on the floor. Small smears of grey shit. Just to rub it in.

A bird, Nell said.

Thieves brought a bird in.

Nell had gone through the books before we left. She wanted something to read. She had left the mess. And we had left the front window open.

A pigeon was in the apartment. We found birdshit in the bathroom and birdshit in my study. The pigeon had gone to every window, frantic with an energy to be outside.

This seemed to exhaust us. We filled buckets of sudsy water and cleaned up. And then Nell checked the messages and we went to bed without talking. But then I felt a nudging and Nell was in tears. She said the bonfire had reminded her of that night with Arthur Twombly. The little plane flight and the time she was pregnant. She missed her parents, she said. Could I hold her. Could I bring Toby over and give her a hug.

EIGHT

A
YEAR WENT BY
and Nell and I were both excited now to know what the weather would bring and how we could plan to grow tomatoes on the roof and put away the winter slippers for the lighter Chinese slippers Nell had found on Spadina Avenue. We marvelled at how much food we cooked, how little we used the restaurants except for the favourite two. There was a Vietnamese one and a sushi bar which we lined up to eat at after watching a movie at the repertory cinema that no longer had many old films at all but simply showed the new films that had come out six months before. We loved the movies and the simple food and the walk home along Bloor Street to our apartment on Roncesvalles Avenue, which is a Polish area of Toronto. I was sometimes surprised that we could walk the mile home without feeling bored or unloved and I took that as a sign that she loved me and was happy. It was true that I’d find her sometimes crying or the evidence of crying appeared on her face and when I asked if anything was wrong she cheered up and said it was allergies.

I thought the story of Nell’s history and how I came to be living with her would have been enough for a novel, one with enough drama and tension and happiness for a version of these aforementioned incidents to form a satisfying narrative, but more was to happen that turned this short history into a preliminary hearing for the more important events, events that, in retrospect, take on the whiff of the inevitable, of fate, though I heartily disagree with people who are satisfied with fate.

Nell and David were both involved in the transformations that were under way to move us from a society based on moving objects to one relying on the transportation of ideas. I was happy with the old ratio of these two qualities. It’s not that I thought the old balance was better, I was comfortable with it and thought younger people should adopt the newer ratio, not us. But besides this, I had no doubt and yet I guess in a relationship there is someone who will doubt. But when you are content you dont look under rocks for trouble, at least I dont. I’m like a dog when I’m happy, I just eat my food and sleep and run after the ball. Then last night, when Nell came home from work, I could tell she was vulnerable and I wanted to reassure her. I knew she didnt have the being-a-dog talent that I had. She was wide open and then I could sense something soft and unformed fall out of her. She said I havent told you this and I should have told you. I didnt want to tell you because I didnt want it to affect your relationship with David.

What, I said.

I’ve been seeing David.

She’d been seeing David.

I just told him. I said this has to stop now.

Now. It has to stop now?

I’ve been seeing him, she said, every year perhaps twice a year. For the last. For the last forever.

Seen him.

And I felt like I’d dropped a novel I’d been reading into the bathtub. The shock of a world you believed, solid, flat and dry, was turning wet, dissolving to pulp. It hadnt been the man from United Architects.

Whenever we’re away someplace, she said. It’s never been here, just some other part of the world. That was the arrangement. It was supposed to be our other selves.

And it all clicked like tumblers in a lock. How David had tried to settle me down, and reassure me that you can have a woman on the side. Youre his French affair, I said.

She was trembling and I tried to say the right thing but perhaps the right thing would have been to hold her and the hell with it I couldnt hold her. I’d been wanting to have a kid with her. What a joke. They had been to a conference three months ago, I remembered that. I guess that constitutes another country. We were standing around the sink, a lot of work for us gets done around the sink.

Me: So youve seen him since we’ve been together.

When we got together, she said, a year ago, I decided it was the last time.

When you cut your hair.

But I’ve seen him twice. So this last time I thought I had to tell you.

I had an eerie feeling, like looking at words written in a mix of capitals and lowercase letters, and then the words exploded.

So are you telling me you slept with David Twombly.

Yes.

And since we’ve been together.

Yes.

Just the once?

No.

Twice?

She explained the reasonableness of the affair and that’s when I pounded the wall. The wall needed fixing. When David said
affair
I had imagined a woman half his age plus seven years. But Nell was our age. She was actually a year older than me. Then I realized David had never used the term
French affair
and neither had Nell. I was imagining the phrase, I had come up with it the night David had urged me to have kids. Something on the side, he said. But this was a mistress. This was about as European as you could get in Canada. Such are my inaccurate leaps. I wanted to approach Nell but all I felt was a rage the size of a bag of oranges that ebbed after ten minutes. I wanted to know the details but Nell said, I guess that must be a man thing.

And she kept walking around, bending over surfaces to tidy them. She wasnt giving me her full attention. She was folding laundry. Why David, I said, why be so unimaginative and what about Sok Hoon.

She stopped the folding and sat on our bed and Nell confessed her affair using words that were honest and careful. It’s true that it was a moment that widened my heart to her, or at least some part of my heart, perhaps the left ventricle. She said she did not think about Sok Hoon, that it had nothing to do with her. That her arrangement with David predated his relationship with Sok Hoon, and that she was like a farm in another country that a man visits to keep the infrastructure going and to reassure the farm that he loves and understands her. But when I started seeing you, she said, I realized how awful it was. How it would be good to distance myself from Dave. I thought he loved me. But it began because David wanted to piss his father off. Perhaps we both wanted to piss him off. And then it became something underground, a visit to the underground that feels like a double life, some life that the rest of your world doesnt have to know about. But now I see how terrible it was of David not to tell Sok Hoon.