Architects Are Here (22 page)

Tessa: Nothing is going to happen between us.

I thought she meant us, but she meant her and Raoul, her husband.

We went for one last afternoon beer. That is the big difference between cities and the wild, I said. You have to make your own happenings in the wild, Tessa. You have to act if you want one moment to stand out from another.

My husband, Tessa said. Raoul doesnt want to do anything that will keep the peace. He wants to be who he is unbudging.

You want to feel good, I said.

Then choose to leave him, Tessa said. Leave when I’ve done no wrong and leave not when I’m feeling jealous. Have a good footing.

But you have felt jealous.

We were at his friends, Tessa said. Playing charades, and I saw Raoul carrying this woman, his friend’s wife. Put me down, she said. Then I heard her say, Put me down because Tessa won’t like it.

I knew what that meant. I used to be in a relationship like that. It’s hard on the valves in the heart.

He started serenading her, Tessa said. Two inches from her face. So I said to Raoul, Do you want to sleep with her? He looked at this thought and said to me:Tessa, pay attention.

I closed my eyes and tried to become Tessa. I said, So you walked away.

Tessa: I was upset.

I understand.

We were playing charades, she said, and Raoul crept around a doorway and pointed at me. Who is that, he said. Meaning Tessa. His fat cruel finger. No one says anything. He’s drunk. She’s jealous, he says. And they all share a look. He’s right, she is jealous, and there’s no recourse. But it made her feel small and frail.

Between you and me, I said, what you said is kind of sexy.

Tessa: I’m not up to being big enough. I had a bath last night, she said. And as I thought about it all two strands of hair floated together and made a Q. I thought, questions.

Me:The guy you dont officially trust.

It’s as if Raoul leaves it all out there but when you stare hard you realize there’s nothing of himself there at all.

The devil, I said, is a lived life.

Is there anyone out there who, if she called tonight and said come meet me, I’m in love with you, would you go?

I was ambushed with the face of Nell. And then I pushed her away to see if there was room for another soul, as Nell had abandoned me. When Tessa was that close, she reminded me of Maggie Pettipaw.

Come on, Tessa said. I have to pick my husband up at his ballgame.

I’ll drive you.

We stepped outside of ourselves, Tessa and I, and looked at each other out on the street. There was a long mirror in a framing store and we saw that we werent right for each other. It was hilarious to see we cared for each other and that was as far as it could go. We were both in a plight, different ones, and we saw each other’s humanity, though neither could fully save the other.

We drove the Matador along Parliament. The night was bright and warm. Then I parked on a side street and we walked to a green ball field lit with powerful tall lights. There was a soccer match at halftime. Raoul was playing. Tessa was supposed to walk over and stick her finger in his ribs. Instead we watched the players resting. Her husband was sitting on the sidelines, his diabetic kit out. Raoul was pricking the tip of a finger.

He has a photo of me, Tessa said, in his wallet. When I was seven. He gets in trouble when he tells people that’s my wife.

I touched Tessa’s shoulder once at that Havelock motor race and when she leaned over to listen she saw it was me. She’d forgotten and thought it was Raoul. Thing is, I would not touch her where I had if I was Raoul, but she accepted it as normal for Raoul.

THIRTEEN

D
AVID’S HOUSE
was on Grace. In the window a fan, he waved his hand at the screen. I walked in and looked up the white staircase, the plaster walls a little bashed, from the corners of moved furniture.

The car looks good from above, he said.

When Sok Hoon left he repainted and he did the painting himself, the walls a pastry colour, with cream trim. The walls were edible. No doors, just arced openings, Spanish. No books, he’d packed and sold his books after Sok Hoon left him. The one bookcase I saw was used for objects. David still read, he just read off the screen on his little pebble, he bought books online and read them on the pebble. I walked into the kitchen and admired his open cupboard with the little tins of condiments he liked to collect from various parts of the world. When he travelled he came home with something preserved or a jar of small fish that had an ornate label, a bear made of treacle or olives wrapped in a red painted ribbon in the claws of a golden eagle. David came downstairs with his luggage, sat it down, then opened the silver fridge and offered me a peach on a saucer. He had washed the peach. He said, what’s that.

I was handling the bar of gold. I told him the story.

Pass that here, he said.

He weighed it while I ate the peach. He looked like a man who had heard about gold but never seen it. I guess, beyond wedding rings, most of us have never seen it.

Do you know Gabe, if they put all the gold ever dug out of the earth together in one big square, it would fill a tennis court. That’s all there is.

He was wearing those cavalry pants again. I sat in the only chair in the kitchen and David decided to sit a few feet away from me on a plush cushion. He kept the gold. The furnishings were new and expensive, but poorly made. The couch, with winged angles, stained to mahogany, was broken in the centre, the back held up by a stack of technology magazines. There was something Savannah Georgia about it all.

Well, he said. Are we ready to hit the road?

What’s that, I said.

There was a small case in his luggage.

That, he said, is for hunting Hurley.

I finished the peach and I put the stone in David’s hand because I couldnt find the garbage. Then I looked at the case. It looked like it could hold a rabbit. Taped to the case was a photo of Sok Hoon wearing a wig that made her look like a transsexual. She was reading a paper and you could almost read the column. It was like an intimate kidnapper’s portrait.

I opened the case. A futuristic pistol.

Dave, I said.

That’s registered, he said. It’s all legal. Well legal if we were in the States.

I lifted it up and it was heavy. I used to box and when the trainer taped your hands for a fight, this is how the gun felt. Like you wanted to hit something. I suddenly understood the term
pistol-whipped
.

Dave I’m not driving with this in the car.

Forget it’s in the car.

I’m not into murdering anything.

Stun, Gabe. It’s a stun gun.

This thing can scramble brains.

I’ll show you the papers.

Dave this is staying home.

He brightened. Compromise, he said. I like you. Youve got a big-game rifle. Maybe we’ll see a moose.

My rifle’s in Corner Brook.

Well that’s when I’ll need it.

S
O HE LEFT THE TASER
on the promise that we could ride around Corner Brook with my rifle, a promise I had no intention of keeping. We drove back over to my place because David wanted to see the damage. He noticed Toby right off, how ugly he was. He’ll guard the car, I said and David said what he’ll do is guard your gold.

The sidewalk was still cordoned off around the building. Dave whistled and shoved his hands in his back pockets. He was not into physical gestures, or mannerisms. He found hand movements a sign of male weakness. His father used them and he did not want to replicate his father.

He said, Is that your computer?

He was pointing at my melted laptop sitting on the wet sidewalk along with all the furniture from the two apartments. It had been tagged, photographed and listed for insurance purposes and was now set for removal to Michigan in a convoy of twenty-one yellow trucks that motored down there every day with Ontario waste. The melted computer was standing there like it was a normal place to conduct business, but the stacks of burnt pre-cargo were a line of homeless people maintaining their dignity when no dignity was present.

It’s slightly damaged, I said.

They ship these to China, he said. You drive up to a farmhouse in Hunan province and you’ll smell the reek of burning plastic. There’s a man standing over a wok frying up the chip board, melting the lead off the chips. There’s a woman hoisting a hammer to blow out the monitor glass on a television to get at that nest of copper wire. Down by the river is a hill of copper wire on fire.

Since his conversion from stocks to soft commodities David had become ethical to the third world. He looked like he was going to slip the laptop into the trunk of the Matador, but then he let it slide back onto its tower of garbage. His outrage had turned to resignation.

David:What kind of eat would you like to bite?

Let’s go to Franco’s.

David asked if I’d detour down Churchill Street off Ossington.

It reminds me of home, he said.

It’s the only street in downtown Toronto that has a hill. And so we drove down it and he was right, for ten seconds it was just like being back in Newfoundland.

The boy in Franco’s said no they have no roast chicken, but you can get some good chicken at Rabedairas at Dundas. They speak English too, I know because theyre my uncles.

The boy tapped the end of a ballpoint pen on the counter.

David:There’s more than his chicken in this town.

And his family’s chickens.

Chickens of his entire race.

The Portuguese didnt invent chicken.

David: What’s the difference, something invented something discovered.

Me: It’s a processing thing.

No, it’s not.

Can you say something positive, Dave? Can you say, Interesting point?

I thought that was obvious. Did I say it was stupid?

Me: It’s part of the response. Interesting point, you say, a process.

That’s condescending. You want me—

I want you to be nice, if we’re driving three thousand miles let the miles be nice.

I can be nice. Nice as roses.

Good Italian chicken, the boy said.

D
AVID BOUGHT THE CHICKEN
at the Pacific Mall up at Kennedy and Steeles. I’d been up here to photograph cars, but never in the mall. It’s all Chinese and wealthy. David said Sok Hoon used to come here. They’d have dates. It’s a good place to buy computers and chicken. In the chicken store he stared at all the varieties of milk and it reminded me of the year we lived together and went grocery shopping once a week, how he bought a fifty-pound bag of potatoes and it lasted us twelve days. Dave took three different milk products out of the fridge and started reading the ingredients. While he did this, a fan in the cooling system caught a blade against something metal, just touching as it whined and it made all the milk seem possessed by a fast and threatening thing. Automobiles and accidents and high insurance.

He bought chicken, milk and a travel pack of thread and needles. This is for your gold, he said. And he meant to be mysterious. As we walked back to the car we both admired a jet streak in the sky. It was such a straight white line. David had proposed to Sok Hoon in the Concorde as it hit Mach 2. Elton John was on the plane, just eight seats up. David decided to tell Elton John that he’d proposed, and Elton said, Congratulations.

Hand me over Toby, he said.

What are you going to do with him.

I’m going to open him like a chicken.

Get him yourself.

He put the chicken and milk on the back seat and tugged Toby by his burnt tail. He flipped him over. Then pulled at a seam. He tore away at the belly.

Hand me the gold, he said.

I took the gold out of my pocket. The gold bar was about six inches long. He pushed the gold into Toby’s belly. Open up that packet and thread me a needle.

It was a good idea. I chose a thread that was the colour of Toby’s skin. And David had him sewed up and propped back in the rear window. He looked unlikely to be of any value.

Then we drove out to Highway 404 and David tore into the chicken and drank the milk from the spout.

Me:Youre deep into breast meat.

It came off with the wing.

Some good hey.

I couldnt have imagined you’d get this. A whole chicken for seven dollars. How much effort went into making it.

Or discovering or inventing it.

David: How many chickens do you think get demolished in Toronto in a day.

There’s a Lorca poem about that.

You know what’s really good? Is that we can be so silly in the midst of this major tragedy.

And his face fell, the colours of plum and ash and the folds of skin around his nose. It was a waxy profile and the sides of his seat cushioned his temples. Even though his eyes were open they felt dead. David Twombly was looking straight ahead, the way a corpse stares out of a coffin.

THREE

ONE

W
E WERE DRIVING
through the short, clogged collector lanes that fed into the big bend of the 401. Concrete sound barriers and the muted roofs of subdivisions. There were green highway signs alerting us to forthcoming cities, their population tallied in neat round numbers. Being numbered makes you feel like you belong, but also that youre part of a penal colony.

Places like Whitby and Kingston, I said. Who knew they were the same size as St John’s.

I slept with a married woman once, David said. She was from Kingston. The husband was big. One time he took my skull in his hand. He pressed it and said:What are you doing to my wife?

David gripped his hand around a skull of air.

Me:What were you doing.

I was thinking about how much you’d disapprove of that comment.

I’m lonely and I’m thinking about Nell.

I’ll tell you your problem, Gabe. You think everything can be told. You think you know everything, every thought Nell has. The secret life and it’s not always devious. Sometimes you get caught in things that are impossible to find words for.

She’s caught up in an impossible thing.

That’s what she’s doing.

I wanted to take a ceramic insulator and bash him in the temple. Then I breathed deep and tried to forget about it. I adjusted the stock-car rearview mirror to get correct and very wide angles. It was encouraging me to enjoy myself and so I rolled down my own window and let the empty heat of the early summer pummel us. But now I had to think of Nell caught up in an impossible thing. I sank the gas pedal and we throttled our way out of the bottleneck of the Lake Ontario basin and zipped along the grey fields of tarmac past the very modern power lines on towers that looked like columns of newsprint. We overtook transport trucks. How invigorating, David said, staring up, like we’re involved in a greater economy, a taller scale.