Extraordinary (7 page)

“Next thing we know, Kyle calls into work, says he's sick. Not a word to his sponsor, naturally. He knew the guy wouldn't buy it. Sometime around noon, Kyle ends up in a ravine with a couple of guys. The ravine right under the subway bridge that leads to GreekTown. They drink their way along the Danforth, walking out on a few bills, stop in to see one of the guy's girlfriends who works in a health spa and borrow some money from her. Somebody sells them an eight ball, crack and heroin.

“They come back across town and end up in that private school on Avenue Road. What's it called? The one you went to?”

“Upper Canada College.”

“They bust into lockers looking for something to steal. They figure, because it's a private school, all these rich kids have got to be keeping bags of loose cash in their lockers. A security guy hears them, they throw a pair of soccer boots at him and hightail it out of the school. They run across a cricket pitch where there's a game on, all these guys in white flannels and cricket bats. By the time the police arrive, they've disappeared over a side fence and are hiding out in a backyard in Forest Hill. An hour later, the police get a call from a woman who says there are three naked guys swimming in her pool. They get away again.

“Two days later, a cop sees an illegally parked car with no plates on it. He opens the door. It's my baby inside. Kyle. All by himself. They figured he died somewhere else and they dumped the body in a stolen car and walked away. In his pocket—and this always breaks my heart—is a city map, all the places he's been over the past few days, this long arc through the city heading back to his apartment. Inscribed on the map were the words,
I am on a voyage of mysterious intent.
He was like a fish swimming upstream. He thought he was going home, but he wasn't. He was getting ready to die. And he did.”

We sat in the silence for a moment; her refrigerator came on with a hum. She said, “I've thought about this a lot, and the truth is, I think he knew he couldn't manage more than six months of ‘being good,' and the alternative wasn't possible either.”

Somewhere in the wall behind me, a metal pipe clanked.

“But why do you suppose he chose
that
morning to go into the bar? Why not the day before? Why not the day after? You lose a child, you keep wondering about those little things. As though, if I could find an answer, I could somehow make it not have happened. Which is absurd, I know. But still, I can't seem to leave it alone.”

I said nothing.

She turned her dark eyes to me. “How could his sister be his sister and he be him?”

“What do you mean?”

“They slept in the same bedroom, they had the same parents, the same amount of love, the same things for breakfast. They used the same words, they spoke with the same speech rhythms. They liked the same TV shows. They disliked the same songs on the radio. They were like a little unit moving around the house together when they were small. How could they be so similar in so many ways and yet, in that small corner of their personalities where they were unalike, be
so
unalike, and have that same unlikeness be the deciding factor in the course of their lives? Why wouldn't it be the other things, the other qualities, that set the course? Can you explain this to me?”

“I can't.”

“It's the same with you and your brother, Jake. You hate each other.”

I said, “I haven't talked to Jake for years. Have you?”

“Sometimes. Rarely.”

“What's he like?” I asked, my voice rising half an octave, as though my body, independent of my will, was preparing to defend itself, as though the time between now and our last ugly confrontations had been reduced to a matter of days, not years.

“Unhappy. So unhappy. He's quite categorical about it. He says, ‘I'm not going to be happy until I'm fifty.'”

“Why fifty?”

“I don't know. He just said it.”

After a moment, I said, “What am
I
like?”

“At your best?”

“Let's start there.”

“Here. You're here. And all that that—implies.”

“At my worst?” I thought, Let's get it over with.

She shook her head. “You're here. That's what matters.”

The elevator doors opened down the hall. Voices passed the door.

“It's late,” she said. “I wonder who they are. I wonder where they're coming from.”

The candle sputtered.

“Am I safe to ask you something?” she said.

“Yes.”

“You're sure?”

“Yes, I'm sure.”

“Will you regret this? Will you drive through this neighbourhood some night twenty years from now and regret this?”

“It doesn't matter. Not tonight.”

“It's hard to imagine you in twenty years,” she said. “It's hard to imagine you a day older than tonight.”

“Why did you ask me if it was safe?” I said.

“Because I don't want to say the wrong thing.”

“Please, Sally.” I could feel my eyes watering.

“What?” she said suddenly.

“Please say whatever you want.”

The phone rang again.
Purr, purr.
I raised my eyebrows at Sally. She shook her head. She knew who it was, I thought, but didn't want to tell me. Finally, it went silent. And again the room seemed preternaturally quiet.

She said, “I've got to go to the bathroom. Can you hang on?”

“Sure.”

“You'll be here when I get back?”

“Yes.”

Sally got up on her crutches. I put my hand under her armpit—it was warm—and steadied her. “Okay?” I said.

She stared down at the carpet. Or her slippers, I couldn't tell which. “Yep,” she said, breathing in on the word the way people sometimes speak in the country, the way her grandmother spoke.

Out the window, I could see the flickering red lights of a plane slowly descending into the city. “I didn't think planes landed this late,” I said, but Sally was already in the bathroom.

After a while, I found myself thinking about my older brother, Jake, how he had gotten off to such a promising start: a good student, a teacher's favourite, a hit with girls, captain of the track and field team—even had his picture in the newspaper one spring day under the caption,
j
ake gillings champion prospect
! There he was in his whites with a trophy gleaming in the late afternoon sun.

Champion prospect indeed. I had so admired him! Watching him on the football field—his hands on his hips, watching the players move and shift just before the snap, reading the play—or making his way down the school corridor with a cluster of A-list friends, their jackets open, ties loosened, I felt as though I was observing a more successful model of myself. Better-looking (he looked like Kris Kristofferson), a better soccer player, better at backgammon, better at water skiing, better at Ping-Pong, even a better dancer at parties. Just better, better, better. And believe it or not, I basked in it. It gave me a charge, as they used to say, to be connected to him, to have people say, “Oh, that's Jake's little brother.”

But something happened to him in university. It was as though someone switched off the lights in the house and they never came back on: an unfinished degree, boarding houses, failed projects, disappointing travels, uneasy girlfriends, Eastern religions, a string of psychiatrists (who invariably, after three or four months' treatment, turned into “assholes”). I saw him once in a restaurant. He was screaming at a waitress. I hadn't known he was there until suddenly there was a commotion, smashing plates, an overturned table, an ashen manager hurrying across the floor. Where did it come from, this fury? This capacity to abandon himself to such a public display of childlike rage? A grown-up throwing a tantrum. Had some long-haired, cowboy boot–wearing sixties psychiatrist counselled him to “get in touch with his anger”? And poor Jake had got it wrong?

Why had he turned on me, who adored him? Why had he fucked my German girlfriend in my bed and made sure I heard about it? Why does he still, according to my cousin, rant at the drop of a hat about our long-dead parents, how they ruined his life? Can the dead ruin our lives? Can their talons be
that
long? Don't we win by dint of just being here?

And why had he turned on
himself
like that? This peculiar resignation to not being happy till he was fifty? Tonight, as I'm writing this, I wonder about him: He's out there in the city somewhere. But doing what? Thinking what? He must be, I don't know, sixty-three, sixty-four.

Are you happy yet, Jake? Are you?

One moment we had been such brothers, dancing side by side to the Zombies' “She's Not There” with a pair of sisters at a summer dance. And now this? What happened? Jake and Kyle. Chloe and I. What the
fuck
happened?

Something else: I noticed that night in the restaurant that he was dressed identically to me—black corduroys, brown leather jacket, crew-neck sweater and white running shoes. So odd: two aging schoolboys who hadn't spoken in years wearing the same clothes. That means something, I know—but what?

Sally emerged from the bathroom and settled back down in her chair. “What were you thinking about?” she said.

“Jake and Kyle. Kyle and Jake.”

She moved her crutches to the side. “You know what I want? After I'm gone, I want you to have a little party for me. Not right away. Nothing maudlin. But a birthday party. A party with lots of wine and candles. Martinis, too.”

“Sure.”

“I want to be in cheerful company and not be alone.”

“Okay, then.”

“And there's something else.”

“Yes?”

“There's a silver canister in my bedroom. On the dresser.”

“Yes, I've seen it.”

“Do you know what's in it?”

“No.”

“Those are Kyle's ashes. I was supposed to do something or other with them, but I couldn't stand any of the ideas. I couldn't stand, to be honest, to be so finally parted from him.”

“What would you like me to do?”

“When you leave here, tonight, tomorrow, whenever, I want you to take the ashes with you. I can't stand the idea of people poking through my affairs, opening the lid, going, ‘What's this?,' maybe flushing it down the toilet or packing it up in a cardboard box and sending it to Chloe in California.”

 

 

S
kinny, sharp-chinned
C
hloe. A dead
ringer for Arthur Rimbaud. Dagger tattoo on her arm. Sally's dark eyes. A lanky girl drifting along the sidewalk on a Sunday morning.

I said, “Tell me a little bit about Chloe. How old is she now?”

“Twenty-six.”

“And she's in California?”

“She calls it Cali. You know Chloe—she can't leave the English language alone.”

“And doing well?”

“So I gather.”

“You sound uncertain.”

“She's grown rather secretive. With me, anyway.”

“Is she single?”

“She has a friend. That's all she'll tell me.”

“Who is it?”

“That's what I asked.”

“And?”

“She tells me, in the nicest way, that it's none of my beeswax.”

“Beeswax. Her expression?”

“Who else?” Sally fell silent for a moment. “They move on, don't they? It's sort of shocking. You always think it must be something you did. Or did too much of.”

“I'm not following.”

“Well, put it this way.” Sally moved her crutch to a more stable upright position. “She was such an easygoing kid, the kind of teenager who hums while she's doing her homework. Tapping her pencil and humming and watching TV all at the same time. Then one day she came home early from high school, drank half a bottle of Marek's vodka, called her English teacher and told him she was dropping out, that she was tired of being a suck and an asshole. Her words. ‘A suck and an asshole.'

“Then she put on her pyjamas, got into bed, threw up so violently that she popped a vein in her throat. The sight of blood on the sheets totally unhinged her. She called an ambulance, which carted her off to the hospital on a gurney. Apparently she waved at one of the neighbours on the way out.

“They didn't pump her stomach or anything. They just gave her a stern talking-to and sent her home that evening. I waited a day or so and then, when she was back on her feet, I said, ‘What the hell were you thinking, drinking like that? Phoning Mr. Reed.' And she kept saying, over and over, ‘I'm so sad. I'm so sad.'

“And I said, ‘What are you sad about?'

“She said, ‘I can't say. I don't know. I'm just sad.'

“‘Is it me? Do I make you sad?'

“‘No, no, Mama,' she said, ‘don't be silly. You make me happy. This has nothing to do with you.'”

“And you never found out what it was?” I said.

“No, not really. But she was different after that. She changed her mind about going to university here. I said, ‘Well, you could stay in residence downtown on the main campus,' but no, no, she wanted to get out of town—get away from
me
, I think. She sent out a raft of applications, all out of city. McGill offered her a scholarship. So off she went. Marek and I packed her into a yellow van with two school friends and watched her drive down the street one late summer day, and that was that. She was gone.”

“Was that painful?”

“Yes, at first. Very painful. Surprisingly painful. I sat in the living room with Marek and drank a bottle of vodka and smoked a whole pack of cigarettes. But that's the way it goes: The healthy ones leave you behind. It's only the sick ones that stay home.” Pause. “The truth is, I think she just outgrew her
mother.
”

“And you didn't outgrow her?”

“You never do. It's a bit one-sided that way.”

“Do you see her? Talk to her?”

“Oh yes, scads. That's not a problem. But she's guarded now. There are certain things I'm just not permitted to ask about. I'm not even sure there's anything
to
know.” She carefully lifted her drink and took a sip. “Unless you know something.”

“Me?”

“You talk to her a bit. I know that,” she said.

“I do. But not much.”

“Tell me. I'm hungry for it. I'm hungry for news about her life.”

“It'll probably surprise you.”

“Tell me, please.”

So I fixed myself another drink, a good stiff belt, and told her what I knew. “It must have been during her second year at McGill. Yes, that was it. She was doing a degree in Russian literature and had this giant apartment on rue Sainte-Famille in the student ghetto. She was the house social director. Lots of parties. So many, in fact, that the police were on a first-name basis with her. But you know Chloe: when she turns it on, when she gives you that sun lamp smile, she's irresistible.”

“Go on,” her mother said. “I'm loving this.” She was watching the movie of her young daughter living out in the world for the first time.

“I had some business in Montreal that weekend, a misunderstanding with a supplier—I was in the pharmaceutical supply business back then. I gave her a call, saying I was going to be in town, would she be free. I knew better than to accept an invitation to stay with her. I need eight hours of sleep and I sensed that I wouldn't get that. Besides which, one of the girls she shared a flat with, Miranda Treece, a skinny Texan, was far too sexy to be around for a whole weekend. I'd met her once in front of the Park Plaza in Toronto, and the image of her wandering around the apartment with dirty hair in a ripped T-shirt and raggedy-ass jeans—well, you know what I mean. Forget it.

“I took the train from Toronto—it seemed like a romantic thing to do—and got a room at the Hôtel Nelligan in the old part of the city.

“Chloe, it turned out, was in love that semester with the trombone player of a university swing band. She wanted me to go see him that same night. You heard about this guy?”

“Not the romantic part.”

“At nine o'clock, I was sitting in my hotel room on the rue Saint-Paul, waiting for her to pick me up. Then it was ten o'clock, then eleven o'clock, then midnight, at which point, more pissed off than offended, I took the phone off the hook, got under one of those fluffy white French-Canadian duvets and fell asleep.

“Or I must have. Because I remember I had a little dream. I was walking along a quiet street in Amsterdam when a tree cracked and collapsed into the canal near me. Of course, there was no tree—it was the sound of Chloe banging her bony knuckles on my door. It was two o'clock in the morning. I peeked through the peephole. An unblinking eye circled in black makeup peered at me from the other side. The stuff Keith Richards wears.”

“Kohl.”

“Right. I opened the door and said, ‘Chloe, this is a ridiculous hour to turn up.'

“There were four beautiful young women in the hallway. Made-up faces, jangly party dresses, perfume wafting off them. They looked like movie stars.”

Sally listened, motionless with attention. “God, she's beautiful, isn't she? Even if you divide it in half because I'm her mother.”

I went on. “I suspected they were martini girls, which are an expensive breed. I was worried about money that year. You may remember our family stockbroker, Clyde Meadows?”

“No, I never got any of that money. But go on, go on.”

“Anyway, Clyde Meadows, that poor son of a bitch, shot himself in the wine cellar of his Rosedale mansion. But not before losing almost all of my inheritance. Jake's too.”

Sally said, “Was he the guy whose wife disappeared for a few weeks with the Mexican masseur?”

“Same guy. Anyway, I was pretty broke.
Ergo
that stupid job with the pharmacy company. And I knew that by heading out with these four swans, I was tacitly agreeing to pay for everything.

“Still, they were irresistible—their excitement, their beauty, the smell of them. Miranda, my God. She wore a noodle-strapped dress with a feather boa around her neck. I can't remember where the club was, just that the band was in full session when we arrived. They were swinging through a Glenn Miller standard, ‘Moonlight Serenade.' It was like stepping into a Woody Allen film.

“Chloe pointed out the trombone player. He was a classic nightmare for a young woman: lush lips, thick hair, rosy cheeks, a savvy, effortless way of holding his horn between riffs. You could see he took it all for granted—his outrageous beauty, the girls lining the front of the stage, the eternity of his youth. He was a star, and I knew he was going to make her suffer.”

“And did he?”

“You never heard this?”

“Not a peep. I think by then she thought she'd already told her mother
too
much. As if, by even mentioning it, she might put a jinx on it.”

I took a sip of my drink. I was quite drunk. “You have to be old to say that there's a good side to suffering. But there often is.”

“How so?”

“Well, I suppose it was because of the trombonist that Chloe and I got to know each other that winter.

“She phoned me long-distance the following Sunday morning. On the surface, it was a courtesy call. Thanks for coming out, for giving everybody such a swell evening. Two hundred dollars! Jesus. But there was something just a little bit sour hanging over the conversation, and I sensed she was in some kind of discomfort. I hesitated to inquire, though. I generally try to avoid asking young women about their romantic woes—the intimacy is somewhat neutering.

“Still, I felt she was on the edge of something, that all she needed was a small, encouraging push and she could get rid of it, like pulling a splinter out of her finger. And sure enough, after a while it came out. The three of them—she, the trombonist and Miranda Treece, the girl with the feather boa—had shared a taxi home at the end of the evening at the jazz club. They stopped first at the trombonist's. He got out. Miranda, who was sitting in the front seat, got out, Chloe thought, to change places. She couldn't see what was happening, but it was taking longer than it should to just say good night, and a few moments later Miranda popped that long neck of hers into the window and said she was going to hang around for a bit. See you back at the flat.

“So there she was, our little Chloe, in the back of the taxi all by herself, going home to nothing on a Saturday night. Just hearing the story broke my heart. It really did. It reminded me of my own disappointments. Everyone has them. You with Terry Blanchard, me with that German girl in university, now Chloe. In a way, the specifics never matter, although at the time they seem to do nothing
but
matter. They seem so unique in a creative, cruel way. But they're not, of course. In the end, all romantic complaints come down to the same thing: You want somebody who doesn't want you. Or doesn't want you as much as you want them. A million variations, but always the same wound. And while Mr. Trombone may have been myopic, while he may have been headed for a bad end fifteen years down the road, for the moment the truth was the truth, which was that he liked the skinny girl from Texas more.

“That should have been punishment enough in itself. But life can be imaginatively spiteful—it's almost enough to make you believe in a malevolent deity—so not only did Chloe have to observe in the brown eyes of the young musician his waning interest in her, but she was forced to listen to the nightly shrieks of pleasure from Miranda Treece's bedroom, which sounded, according to Chloe, ‘like they were murdering a hog in there!'

“I gave the impotent advice that the non-involved invariably offer. I suggested that the next time at bat, she might make herself a little less available—lay off the phone calls and neighbourly drop-ins. Chloe is an excitable creature, you know that better than I do, and it makes her impatient for things to go her way. I tried to explain to her that Sunday morning that men don't like fish that jump out of the lake into the boat. I was expecting a rewarding burst of laughter. Instead, I encountered granite silence.

“‘Chloe, dear,' I said, ‘I'm just trying to add some lightness to the situation. It's not life or death.'

“‘It is to me,' she said softly.”

“Did she say that?” her mother asked.

“Yes, but hang on, hang on. The story isn't finished yet.”

I got up and poured myself a glass of water and plopped a handful of ice into it. I could feel a tiny hammer tapping against my right temple, with worse things to come. I even contemplated keeping back one of Sally's sleeping pills for the brutal hangover that was coming up behind me like a silent train.

I sat back down. “I confess, I could feel my heart constrict for Chloe, for the agony she was suffering, and for its probable outcome, which was that things would go on for a while, this nightly scorching, but then, like all unrequited passions in the body of a healthy soul—and Chloe is, if nothing else, a robust soul—it would fizzle and fizzle and fizzle into a state of bemused bewilderment. A state of
What was I thinking?
But it would take a while. The clocks slow down for the heartbroken. It's like watering your fingernails: they grow at the pace they grow and not a second faster.”

“Did you say that to her?”

“Yes, but it's like that conversation you had with your mother in the car about Terry Blanchard. It made Chloe feel better for a bit. She even hooted with laughter now and again about the whole situation. But I knew that after she put down the phone, she was going back to feeling shitty.

“Sometimes on those nights, when I forgot to click off the ringer, my phone rang at three o'clock in the morning. ‘Uncle M.?' a young girl's voice said. But I was happy to hear her voice. Even if it was just to tell me that the trombonist smelt like bananas if you stood close to him, or the latest stupid thing Miranda said. But it was a lonely time in my life. I was single again, my American girlfriend having returned to her Arkansas roots, and I was beginning to find it tiresome to make new friends. Too much work, all that—the dinners, the conversation, the old stories trotted out once again. Like going to the gym.

“I spent my days on the back roads of Ontario delivering newfangled toilet seats, compression stockings, ankle stabilizers, blood pressure units, walkers—with and without wheels—to small-town drugstores. It didn't last long, this season in hell, but it's always seemed like a failure of nerve on my part to have embraced such a ludicrously unsuitable activity even in a moment of financial panic.”