Extraordinary (8 page)

“Surely you don't still see it that way? It sounds rather admirable to me,” Sally interrupted.

“What's admirable about it?”

“Just doing it. Just getting up and doing it and not whining about it.”

“I whined plenty, don't worry about that. But anyway. To snatch up the phone and hear Chloe's voice, the vibrating aliveness that I had felt so vividly that night in the hotel lobby, made me feel as if I were not standing at the
side
of life, but that I was engaged, however vaguely, at the heart of it.

“She got over the trombone player, and over the next while there was a string of cheerful melodramas, other boys with other trombones. I say cheerful because even while Chloe complained about this boy's cockiness or that boy's insensitivity or this guy's tiresome addictions, there was a quickness to laughter, an easy teasability. ‘Uncle M.,' she'd protest, ‘
je vous en prie!
You must desist!' Which meant, Give me more, give me more. She loved the attention, I think. In the darkness of my bedroom, I imagined her raising her face to the ceiling with uncontainable laughter, as though she were expelling a lungful of smoke.

“Privately, to be candid, I sympathized with these young men as they politely eyed the exit sign. How exhausting Chloe could be, this high-voltage
being
! It was as if she was born without a middle gear. Either asleep or hysterical.”

Sally laughed, and then I did too.

“‘Perhaps,' I said to her one evening on the phone, ‘you should try for older men.' I was thinking of someone like the French actor Gérard Depardieu. Do you know him?”

“Yes, yes. Divine.”

“A large, big-boned man whose physical and emotional weight might give our little humming-bird the perch she required.” (I also—and this I didn't mention to my sister—had a mild fever for Chloe myself, and had awoken on a few mornings entertaining fantasies that don't need to be described and certainly didn't need to be acted upon. Besides which, I believed then that Chloe's orientation was toward tall, pretty boys of ambivalent sexual orientation. You like what you like, and there's the end of it.)

“‘Maybe you should lay off the gays,' I said on a different occasion. (I'd been drinking.) My suggestion produced a pleased chirp in which I detected a hint of gratitude. Maybe it let her off the hook. It's one thing to get dumped by a lush-lipped young man with a trombone, but quite another for a homosexual to take a pass on you.

“‘Okay, Uncle M.,' she said, ‘no more fags, I promise.' And again hooted a cloud of invisible smoke at the ceiling.

“I didn't hear back from her. Maybe she got what she needed from me and moved on, I don't know. But I spotted her on the sidewalk in Toronto a year or so later. It was Thanksgiving, a cheerless, Herman Melville kind of day. She was home for the long weekend. I pulled my bicycle over to the curb. Her face lit up. She was on her way to a dress sale at Holt Renfrew at that very moment. A large shopping bag dangled from her wrist. She'd already been at it for a while. Shopping, I mean.

“I noticed, though, that the rouge on her cheekbones was uneven, the small pink circles didn't quite match one another. Perhaps she'd been in a hurry when she left your apartment that morning and had done a rush job. But there was something about the way she looked, this hastily applied rouge, that made me sad. Maybe it was the fall day—fall has always been a time of haunting nostalgia for me. Perhaps I was projecting my own disappointments onto her. But I don't think so. It was, I think, the image of this young woman out shopping, as if her young body was somehow misspent on this activity. That instead of lingering on a dull morning on the sidewalk with a shopping bag, her young body should have been instead lying in the shadows of a bedroom, the curtains stirring, the warmth of a lover's body only inches away. Such a waste, her capacity to love and to
be
loved and no one to share it with.

“But wait. Wait. Things changed.”

***

It was after midnight now. I poured us another round of Drambuie. Sally and I in her eighteenth-floor apartment.

“Damn,” she said, “I have to go to the washroom again. Will you hand me my crutches?”

I helped her to her feet. She turned a pale face toward me. “This is all getting less and less manageable.” I helped her into the bathroom. There were all sorts of things in there that you don't see in a regular bathroom. And a chemical smell that didn't smell human. Like embalming fluid. And it struck me for a second that that's how she felt, embalmed. And that this too, and the things that came with it, she'd had enough of. I wondered, too, who had phoned, whether I should have answered it. You never know. But to go against her wishes had seemed like a violation of our deal, of my promise.

But while I waited for her to emerge, I found myself pondering those words, “All this has become less and less manageable.” It was the second time she'd used those same words, and I found myself remembering an episode that had happened only a few months earlier. I had dropped by her apartment unexpectedly late one afternoon, the winter night already collecting like soot between the neighbouring high-rises and the discarded Christmas trees up and down the length of the street. It was the final hours of a sullen January day in Toronto, when even the cheeriest souls find themselves fingering a length of rope and looking appreciatively upwards at the available roof beams. (I'm phrase-making here, but you know what I mean.)

I buzzed her number. The glass door clicked open. I went up the elevator and down the hallway, which smelt, as always, of fragrant spices and large families. Behind one door, a shrill woman's voice chanted to a stringed instrument as though she were in mourning for the recently dead. Behind other doors, animated voices rose and fell.

Sally was wearing that green dress; her eyes carefully made up, cheeks lightly rouged, modest lipstick. She stood in the centre of the room, wobbling slightly on her crutches. It was clear that she was going out.

“I'm going to see—” She named a Christian revivalist, a perpetually tanned preacher whose unconvincing heterosexuality and next-world promises I had watched off and on for years on television on those afternoons when a nicotine-and-bourbon hangover made an excursion outdoors something you put off until nightfall.

It puzzled me, her going to a revival meeting. What on earth was she thinking? Or
was
she thinking? Sally was a rigorously intelligent woman, a bemused and articulate observer of the world, and for her to embrace the word of a bullshitter in an ice cream suit seemed tragic.

What was she after, taking an expensive taxi downtown to Maple Leaf Gardens, sitting in the front row in a gleaming line of wheelchairs and crutches, paralyzed limbs and distorted smiles? Did it mean that my sister had arrived at such a point of desperation, such a degree of unhappiness that, like Pascal's gamble about the existence of God, she had put her common sense on hold to embrace the possibility that this mincing Southern millionaire could lay his hands upon her useless legs and make them work?

I didn't ask. I was afraid, I suppose, of the answer. (How ungenerous I was in those days.) I simply took her down in the elevator and put her in the back of a taxi and waved as the red tail lights disappeared in the early evening darkness.

Over the months, my thoughts sometimes returned to that revival meeting, to her standing in the middle of the room in her green dress and glancing away, ever so slightly, when she told me where she was going. I never thought of it, never, without a kind of sinking feeling. But recently I've undergone a change of mind. Of heart, perhaps. I now see that evening, her descent into the throng of wounded and broken and famished souls, as something different, as something deeply poignant: her gameness, her willingness to try, even with a smile,
anything
, for a last kick at everyday happiness. When I think of my cherished Sally, I always come back to this word:
heroic.

(Do the dead forgive us, I wonder?)

The toilet flushed; the bathroom door opened. Sally emerged. She had clearly been thinking about something in there. She said, “Do you remember that television show Chloe worked on?”

“The imitation American police drama.”

“Yes, that's the one.”

“Sure, I remember. Chloe thought it might be a way into the world of scriptwriting. ‘Remunerative but sterile,' I told her that.”

“But it looked so promising there for a while. One minute she was bouncy, the next minute she was talking about leaving town.”

“You don't know about this?”

“Don't be coy. Tell me.”

“Well,” I said, a little archly, “I'll put it this way: instead of writing dialogue like ‘Step
away
from the vehicle' or ‘So what did the lab say?' she ended up in bed with the director. He was married, naturally, a strutting little wizard who could have been a Martin Scorsese or a Tarantino—he had a terrific eye—but he simply couldn't control his appetites for booze and cocaine and pretty assistants with clipboards, and ended up a big-shot director in the wastelands of Canadian dramatic television. And that
is
a tragedy. Jumping into bed with him wasn't.”

“You know him?” she said.

“Casually. But I like him. He's a mess, but a gifted mess. Anyway, what Chloe misunderstood from the outset was that she wasn't in university anymore, that in the grown-up world, when you sleep with a woman's husband, particularly a woman who has just had a
baby
, the consequences are—well—different. This wasn't a replay of Miranda and the trombonist. A few weeks into the first season, the director's wife got wind of things. She turned up at Chloe's apartment. She put a Japanese carving knife to her
own
throat and said that if she, Chloe, didn't stop fucking her husband, she (the wife) would slit herself from ear to ear.

“The drama played itself out over the next few months: bursts of hysteria, sulks, alcoholic confessions, blistering hangovers and public scenes, until the director did what he was destined to do all along, which was to return, droop-tailed, to his wife and work a solid, if brief, program at the Hillside rehab centre in Georgia. Eight thousand dollars a week. Nevertheless, a month later he was slugging back shot glasses of Russian vodka and got himself arrested for, get this, trying to strangle his wife outside a Yorkville restaurant.

“Never mind what addiction counsellors say, the only way to get over the loss of a cherished lover is to find a body that thrills you as much as the one you've lost. I know this from personal experience. (And not just once, either.) But when you're young, you think getting out of town will do the trick, and that's what Chloe decided to do. She thought about going to law school, somewhere ‘cool'—Mexico, the Caribbean maybe. She fancied herself a criminal lawyer, getting those Puerto Rican and Jamaican drug dealers a day in the sunshine of level-field jurisprudence. But after spending four or five days in the gallery at the University Avenue courthouse, she came to the conclusion that pretty much everyone down there is guilty. But worse, from her standpoint, was the daily spectacle of the doors of justice spinning like some nightmare fan, coughing out the same burnt-out lawyers and the same felons week in and week out. She said to me on the phone one day, ‘I get the distinct feeling that the best part of being a lawyer is going to law school. After that, it's strictly downhill.' My guess is that she was probably right, and I told her so. But considering what I was doing for a living at the time, I'm not so sure it was prudent advice.”

“And that got her to California?”

“Here's where the story gets good. After the TV show, she pissed around here and there. She wrote half a novel about a young girl who falls in love with a married film director. But the truth is, Chloe never had much affection for her own company, or for sitting in a room with her own shortcomings (who does?), so she gave it up. For a few months she taught English to Cambodian refugees in Vancouver, then did a night shift on a suicide hotline. Then worked for an essay writing service. Then painted sets for the low-budget horror film
Santa Claws.
Nothing quite worked. She phoned me one night, she was a bit drunk, said she was on her way back to Toronto, that she wanted to help the ‘little brown babies in India.' She meant it, too. But she never went.”

“Yes,” Sally said, “I recall that stage. The little brown babies stage.”

“One day, while she was working in a bookstore, she happened across a copy of
Vanity Fair.
On the cover was a photograph of the magazine's staff, mostly young people, sitting on desks, talking on the phone. She faxed it to me. That's what I want to do
,
she wrote—I want to do something with
people.
And that was it: a year later she was in California doing a very expensive degree in journalism.”

“But where did the
money
come from? Not from me. And certainly not from her father,” Sally said.

“How she got there, that was vintage Chloe. Other people could have done it, but few with the same panache. She called it her SP. Her Secret Project. When I inquired, she clammed up, got very mysterious. Until, that is, she sensed I was getting pissed off—I don't especially care for protracted intrigue—and confessed. Get this. She wrote a letter to the fifteen richest people in Canada and asked them to sponsor her degree. ‘I'm Chloe Sanders,' her letter declared, ‘and I'd like to do a master's degree at UC Berkeley in California. The tuition is forty thousand dollars a year. In exchange for your support, I will write you one letter a month with the details of my life on the West Coast.'

“It was an absurd proposition, but I loathe dream squashers, so I kept my mouth shut. Fourteen millionaires returned their regrets, but one guy, the retired owner of a string of multinational copper mines, nibbled. Could he see her letter of acceptance? She mailed it to him. A week later, she got the following telegram: ‘Pack your bags, Chloe Sanders, you're going to Berkeley.'”