Harmless (7 page)

Liz laughed and Julian clapped his hands together.

“He kept the weirdos away that night,” Jane said.

This was it then, their first night together revised for public consumption. He took a swig from his beer. What was it about being in on a lie that made him want to drink?

“You were at that prom too, eh, Julian?”

He didn’t like Mike’s faux-innocent expression. Mike hadn’t met Liz until almost ten years later, but he knew the prom party ended in Julian’s dad’s hot tub at five in the morning. Very soft-core, but it put Jane and Joseph in the same vicinity.

“I was there, in my powder blues,” Julian said.

“And that ruffled shirt.” Liz laughed. “Like cotton candy.”

Franny and Rebecca leaned in closer, sensing intrigue.

“Did you rent a tux for the big night?” Franny asked.

Joseph nodded, not trusting himself to elaborate. He didn’t need Franny overhearing any cherished stories from his wild youth or even wilder early twenties, the details filling a biographical hole with the very Party Boy antics he needed to warn her off of. Dad with a dated haircut prowling the rec rooms, video arcades, and park parties of yesteryear, stoned, drunk, and on the make. Liz might as well hand Franny a photo, and by the end of the weekend she just might—even in the maelstrom, Liz had packed a camera.

Luckily Jane mentioned dessert, and the boys reminded their mothers about a promised after-dinner movie. She shrugged as the kids ran to the fridge, followed by Franny and Rebecca, signalling the end of her formal parenting duties. Joseph took the hint and went to retrieve his belated housewarming gift, two bottles he’d picked up at industry events.

When he got back to the table, Alex was telling an anecdote that tweaked Joseph’s memory. It was from when Alex was still living in the city, slogging away on another reality
TV
show, this one about downtown home renovations he’d
nicknamed “The Shock Troops of Gentrification,” working fourteen-hour days without paid overtime. He’d tried to organize his fellow crew members into a union, a plan that went over as well as a recruiting drive for the Khmer Rouge and got him blacklisted after someone ratted him out to the producers. Alex had worked himself into an uncharacteristic fury when he found out, raging about his co-workers to Joseph with a torrent of personal contempt that Joseph mistook for drunkenness at first, lambasting their stupidity for supporting a system that would eat them up and shit them out at an accountant’s whim. And yet he’d left the bosses who blacklisted him unscathed, as if he expected no better from the executive class.

“After I picked up my severance pay I just wandered around the west end,” Alex said. “I was on this side street that looked very familiar, and I didn’t understand why until I saw an old Baptist church that I’d walked past when I first moved to the city with Jane. I remembered it because I’d seen a man planting a young oak tree on the side lawn. He was having trouble fitting the tree roots into the hole, so I stopped to help him. Turned out he was the minister.

“He’d been sent to the parish to try to raise the congregation numbers. The neighbourhood was changing, he told me, young families moving downtown because they wanted to walk to local stores and talk to their neighbours. They also wanted to tap into the traditions their parents had cast aside. The church could provide some of that, the minister said. He gave me a tour of the building—the daycare, the meeting spaces they were making available to community groups, and the hall where they had a soup kitchen. Finally,
he took me to the top of the bell tower and showed me the bells. They were all rusted and pushed into a corner, bathed in purple and red light from the windows. He told me he wanted to restore the bells. ‘People love the sound of bells on a Sunday,’ he said, ‘it sets the day apart and reminds them to spend time with their family and their community, that there’s more to life than work and entertainment. What’s wrong with that?’ he asked me.”

“Nothing,” Joseph said, picturing the earnest minister’s face.

“If we’d lived closer I’d have checked out a service,” Alex continued, “but I didn’t return until the day I got fired. I was so angry.”

Talk about an understatement.

“But I felt a wave of calm as I looked up at the bell tower. The stained-glass windows had been restored, the brickwork sandblasted, the roof re-shingled. And his oak tree was still there, twelve feet high and surrounded by perennials. The church must have looked like that a hundred years earlier, when the first service was held.”

He let them linger over the image, of young families and elders in their best clothes, walking in dignified groups to the church they’d banded together to build.

“When I looked at the tower I thought,
At least somebody has made their community a better place
. Then I realized what should have been obvious. The building wasn’t an actual church anymore. Some developer had converted it into condos. I felt like I’d been kicked in the gut.

“Why did I feel so gutted? Churches were closing all over the city—why shouldn’t the beautiful buildings be put
to use?” He gripped Jane’s hand. He was struggling to articulate a swath of emotions he couldn’t wrestle into the usual categories, and he instinctively sought her help. “I saw that it was a continuation of a bigger pattern. When the manufacturing jobs went overseas, developers turned the factories and warehouses into lofts and office spaces—you can’t compete in the new knowledge-economy without an address in a former foundry or dry-goods warehouse. Once the industrial buildings were converted, they went after the old churches.” He shook his head, chastising himself for not seeing it coming, and took a swig of his beer. “You know how suburban streets are named after the natural landmarks they paved over? It’s the same with church condos: Abbey Lofts, The Priory, Glebe Space. This place was called The Rectory! Never mind if the actual rectory was torn down decades ago—it
sounds
churchy.”

Joseph felt exposed by the clarity of Alex’s outrage, but the rest of the diners weren’t feeling it. Jane stared blankly—back at her early days with Alex, or maybe forward into the evening, when she could drink with her friends. Mike was reading a text message. Even Julian and Amber fidgeted in their seats.

“It was a glimpse of the future,” Alex said, a little more desperately. “In ten years, when the loyal soldiers of the global management class have filled up all the old churches, the developers will turn the legislature buildings into condos. Why not? Politicians would love the cash infusion from selling off the real estate. Democracy Towers, Legislature Lofts, Ordinance Hall—turrets, columns, period light fixtures, and wainscoting memorializing the democratic
impulse.” He lingered on the face of each guest, as if to acknowledge their shared plight.

“Last time I checked we still live in a democracy,” Mike said.

“True.” Alex gave the
r
a short roll, mimicking the acrobatics of his parents’ mother tongue. His family had moved back to Finland for a few years when he was five, long enough for him to acquire a faint, floating accent that Mike accused him of using like an eighteen-point font—
Finnaca sans serif
—to underscore a point with European gravitas. “But when people have no say over economic decisions, they no longer live in a democracy. Every major economic decision for the last quarter-century has been made in anonymous towers in Brussels, Hong Kong, Davos, Houston.” His face had a strange, sweat-less glow. “Power has liberated itself from geography.”

Never had the word
geography
—Joseph’s favourite subject in grade school—sounded so ominous. Alex was right, but why dam the stream of good feelings by rubbing everyone’s faces in the evils of global neo-liberalism? Did he want to hear their own despairing anecdotes? They all had them—they were the first downwardly mobile generation since the Great Depression.

“The government buildings are still standing,” Alex said, “but the officials inside have as much power as a McDonald’s branch manager does over the menu.”

Jane slipped her hand from Alex’s. She wanted an intervention. This was
her
night.

“I’ve brought gifts from the city,” Joseph said in a boisterous tone he’d pulled from his quiver of voices. He brought
out the cloth bag he’d stored beneath the bench. “A new tequila from a Mexican fair-trade collective. And a Russian vodka distilled from the tears of former Politburo clerks.”

Mike went to get fresh glasses, and dinner plates were pushed to the centre of the table as Joseph poured drinks, ignoring Alex’s wounded expression. There’d be time to make it up to him later. Time to talk to Franny. Time to figure out his money problems. But now it was drinking time.

He lifted his shot of tequila and said, “Fellow adults, old friends, visitors from enchanted lands: the children have retired, let us talk freely.”

“Oh God, he’s going to get deep.”

“We’ll finally make it into his column: ‘The Splendours of the Dinner Hour.’ A three-part series.”

“A toast!” Joseph said. “To our fat savings accounts!”

Jane let out the first bitter laugh. Personal debt was their generation’s only taboo topic, but the liquor made them brave.

“To our
RRSPS!
” she said.

“To our pensions!” Mike said.

“To juggling ’til I’m eighty!”

Liz wasn’t ready to spit in the face of her real estate career, but she poured everyone another shot. “To my sagging ass!”

“We’d all better stay in shape ’til we’re old,” Alex said. Amber agreed. “Fitness is important.”

“Franny gets my maxed-out gold card.”

“She will, actually,” Alex said.

“They’ll have property,” Liz said.

“They’ll have
mortgages
.” Alex was making a last run up his favourite hill. “If we’re
lucky
our kids will inherit
a half-paid-off property—which they’ll have to divide between them.”

“Our inherited capital spread ever thinner,” Joseph said, “until the Lord of the Manor asserts first-night privileges on our great-great-granddaughters. But this is more of a hangover conversation.”

Amber’s beaded braids and the distant roar of movie pirates dispatching foes with corny tag lines smoothed the silence but not the sight of Alex’s flushed, hurt face.

“When we’re old and poor we can share Julian’s beautiful teeth.”

Julian high-fived Joseph.

“Shit, man!”

“I know!”

“I can’t believe we’re all here!” Liz said.

Jane cackled. “Oh God, remember the football team?”

Of course—a girl fell for Julian at a house party. Turned out she was the quarterback’s girlfriend. Team spirit came in the form of the offensive line chasing Julian into the ravine.

“I thought I’d have to sleep down there. Wouldn’t have been the first time.” Julian’s big smile pinched the creases around his eyes into agreeable bunches. “Those boys were only doing what they thought was right.”

“Remember Linda Cheever’s party?” Joseph let the name hang in the air. “Liz was only doing what
she
thought was right!”

Big laughter.

“You crashed the party,” Jane said, exaggerating Joseph’s former bravado.

“I was invited.”

“Like hell you were!” She fixed on Joseph an expression he recognized from the old days.
Bring it on
, she was saying.
Bring it on
.

B
ecause it was still light out, the flaming logs looked artificial, like a video installation commenting on the cultural practice of building bonfires on summer holidays. Joseph was giggling. They’d gone behind the shed to sample the dope Mike had bought from Derek that afternoon, then dragged the lawn chairs to the unnecessary fire. He wanted to tell Jane the thing about the fire, but his thoughts kept floating away like clouds with pleasing shapes. Where had he heard that before? He was giggling again, because after being away from dope for years he found the giggles and the trippy connections right where he’d left them, like a shelf of knick-knacks in a childhood bedroom. Mike handed him a bottle of microbrewery beer—nice hoppy flavour, no preservatives, brewed with local spring water.

“I’d endorse this beer,” Joseph said.

Jane was in the chair next to him, her calf against his, their ankles warm where they touched, as though their feet rested in the same fire-warmed pool. They’d danced in the living room after dinner, Joseph exploring the curves he’d
known as a covetous young man, and even now he could feel where their bodies had been pressed together, as if the blood were still pooled there under his skin, in his hands, his chest. Everyone had danced except Alex, who watched from the doorway, too pissed off about his failed dinner speech to join them. Then the jangly opening chords of “Sweet Child o’ Mine” sounded, still able to call a packed room to such desperate life you thought the furniture would start dancing, and Jane pulled away from Joseph to dance with Liz and Amber, because the girls had always danced to that song with one another. Now Julian, two lawn chairs away, was trying to tell Jane what those long-gone days of high school meant to him.

“I always felt very comfortable around you. Even at that age, we understood things people
never
get, without even
saying
anything. You really impressed me, without any reservations.”

“Get out the incense and purple light bulbs,” she said, watching Alex return to the fire with a load of wood. “I’m amazed we got in two words to each other at those parties.” She spoke loudly enough for Alex to catch this minor historical revision.

“I will always follow you and Liz, at any point in my life. I know I can come to you when I want to touch my root.”

“Which root is that?”

“I’m
sincere
.”

“Presses stopped,” Mike chirped.

Jane patted Julian’s leg. “You were always a sweet-talker.”

Amber was resting her chin on Julian’s shoulder, their
black shirts merging so that two heads seemed to spring from one broad torso, the first head a lion’s—wide in the face, proud, and scarred—the other an old hunting bird’s—dark-eyed, sharp, riding updrafts into strange heights.