How Happy to Be (12 page)

A DJ is in the centre of the gallery under red strobes, headset held to one ear, neck bobbing to electronica, music robots would make out to. This is one of the hottest tickets of the film festival, according to the free ticket that arrived in my mailbox at
The Daily
. Film festival party passes marked Exclusive and Non-Transferrable and Arrive Early are
circulated like Chinese restaurant takeout menus at this time of year. Studios run off excess invitations to ensure hundreds of people are left at the door, creating the illusion of desire. The star will enter from the alleyway.

This party is hosted by an American film company, so the drinks are bottomless and back behind a red rope next to the Etruscan jewellery collection – so
The Examiner
informs me as he sprints past – Nicole Kidman is nursing a Perrier and waiting to go back to Hollywood.

The music is so loud that no one is talking, no lips move as bodies snake through one another. Theo appears, hands me a vodka. Inviting Theo here is a little like inviting him to my cubicle. I am at work, really, and usually I go alone or cling to the corners with Sunera and Marvin. But how easy it was to conjure up Theo: I called him, and he came. I wonder if everyone can see that he doesn’t fit in, calm and cool in vintage cowboy shirt and jeans. I don’t want to talk to anyone else, or introduce him to the media mass. He could get tainted, start talking about Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, and be mistaken for simply charming, or just simple. He could embarrass me. Wait: what I mean is, I could embarrass him.

Theo mouths something I can’t make out. He signals and I follow him through the crowd of men in pastel dress shirts and women in stiletto boots and black cocktail dresses, each differentiated from the next by only the smallest detail: a bow at the waist, a piece of silver at the neck. These dresses are so simple – knee-length, wispy, sleeveless – and so expensive; thousands of dollars wrapping the reed bodies of twenty-seven-year-old women. Wealth is the pulse of the
city right now, and an adjacent nervousness; heads thrown back laughing loudly, eyes darting suspiciously toward the next person, as if the fun might be mugged out from under each of them.

The crowd thins until there is no one but Theo and me in a dark hall. Glass cases of Byzantine coins are lit like crusty subway tokens. A security guard steps out of the shadows, gives us a look, and steps away.

“Money is the oldest language,” says Theo. “After the iconoclast period, Jesus started turning up on coins. That’s him with the halo and the book of gospels.”

“It seems sort of perverse, doesn’t it? Jesus on a coin?” I say. “What’s that thing about moneylenders in the temple?”

He nods, smiles. Theo tells me these coins are partially made of fabric.

“You are a nerd,” I say. He shrugs and I’m wishing he would take one step closer, his body meeting mine at the waist. “It’s amazingly cool just how uncool you are.”

“I sometimes come here on my lunch. My office is just over there,” he gestures toward the university campus spread out behind the museum.

“You know most people go to McDonald’s on lunch, right?” Theo doesn’t mind being teased.

A pocket of gigglers moves in next to us. They are a self-contained unit, moving without any acknowledgment that we share the same space. One by one, each gleaming young thing hangs its head over a case, as if examining the coins. The sporty grinner looks, then a gangly redheaded woman in a pink dress, then a man in a pinstriped suit. They are so
dressed up that I think, Grown-ups. But no, they are a decade younger than me. I’m impressed by their reverence for history until I hear the redhead say, “God, my front teeth are totally numb.” They’re doing coke lines off the coins. This detail hits Theo at the same time it hits me.

“Let’s go,” I tell him. He’s very still, his face darkening. Something in this look is unnerving. What if Theo has heroic delusions? I grab his hand and start walking. He walks too, but slowly, then stops and turns.

“What’s wrong with you people?” he says, almost curiously, as if examining a foreign custom:
Why do locals dress this way on Sundays? What is the significance of that finger gesture?

Pinstripes looks at Theo, completely baffled. The other two are laughing, not meanly and not at Theo, just laughing the way high people laugh.

“Show some respect,” says Theo, with anger this time.

Pinstripes is surprised at the tone. Theo drops my hand, a gesture that means he might make a fist. I wonder in a detached way if I’m in the presence of a man moment, a showdown. I see the cases shattering, glass falling, a coin rolling around the corner onto the dance floor to be crushed under a high heel.

“What did you say, man?” says Pinstripes. I notice that he is taller than Theo, but rangier. I have a strange thought: Theo could take him.

“Don’t be so arrogant,” says Theo. Pinstripes considers this. He looks like a man whose synapses are firing for the first time in a while, trying to make some connection. And I realize at that moment that there cannot be a fight because
this guy has no idea what he has done to offend Theo. There is nothing at stake for him.

“Come on, man,” murmurs his friend, who is no longer grinning but looking worried, eyes darting.

Pinstripes licks his lips. The redhead muffles a giggle. The moment has gone from loaded to pathetic.

“Whatever,” says Pinstripes and he turns his back on us.

I hear Theo exhale and I realize he is nervous. He is not a fighter, but he cared enough to pretend.

Then he is pulling my hand, leading me back through the robot music, the undancing crowd. Outside, we move down the red-carpet stairs and away from the party into the cold air. Drivers lean on the hoods of limousines, smoking. Theo is still holding my hand.

“Are you okay?” I ask him. He nods. He’s walking with purpose.

“You were very alpha male back there,” I tell him, lame attempt to lighten the mood. He doesn’t say anything. “In a good way.”

He stops, drops my hand again. We are on a dark foot path that leads from the museum to the university, surrounded by trees. “Those people are assholes,” says Theo gruffly.

“I know,” I say, but he seems strangely harsh, a different person than the one I’ve been imagining. Maybe I’ve spotted it, the self-righteousness that comes with idealism.

“They were just high, I guess,” I say, a bit defensive, thinking of all the things I’ve done that are worse than snorting cocaine off artifacts.

Theo exhales again, and out goes that grimness from his face. He looks at me, not angry but puzzled, exasperated. “How can you stand working in that world?” he asks. His voice is steady, but I feel judged anyway. I shake my head. I nod. I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to explain, reason myself into mattering to him. What I want is to think about the fact that no part of our bodies is touching for the first time since the night began. I reach out and unbutton his wool jacket, move my hands around to his back.

“Max,” he says, pushing me away slightly. “What are you doing?” A question that could mean all kinds of things, none of which I have an answer for, so I pull him toward me, his waist warm through his shirt. This time he doesn’t stop me. His body relaxes, and we are unbuttoning, fighting the layers until pressed to one another, tongues and surfaces moving from gentle to hard.

Theo’s heart is beating through his shirt.

“Maybe you should come see my office,” he says.

“But will I get free drinks? Because my work may be evil, but there are perks.” Theo laughs and gives me another rough kiss.

We duck through an alley next to the planetarium. My heels slip on the melting snow and Theo takes my elbow. Formal, a gesture for a blind woman.

The university is quiet, gothic under ice. We follow the path past the Anglican altar toward the ugly part of campus, the part that isn’t in the image of old mother England, but
1960s utilitarian, the cruel future of the new world. A massive grey cinder block where Theo goes every day to work.

The doors are open. On a Saturday night, a few bloodshot students mill around the atrium, drinking Coke, reading on couches in silence.

Theo runs a security pass through a small electronic box that unlocks his office door.

I don’t know what I expect from science; time machines, monkeys regenerating themselves in plastic chambers. I do not expect this. Theo’s office is the size of an elevator, as windowless and grey. He turns on a small chrome lamp by an old telephone, the kind with the earpiece attached by a chord. A stainless-steel desk covered in papers and a computer. Walls of books, stacked on top of each other instead of in rows.

“This room is completely depressing,” I tell him.

“Isn’t it?” He shuts the door and pulls out the desk chair for me. “What did you think my office would look like?”

I mention the monkeys. He laughs, circling the room, straightening books. “There are two ways to be a quantum physicist,” he says. “One is theoretical physics, which means math, and the other is experimental physics, where you get to build expensive machines to test and see if the math is right.”

“Time machines,” I say. I pick a pad of graph paper off the desk where Theo has scribbled numbers in parentheses, and letters, and more numbers. “You’re on the math side. These papers are like props from a movie.”

Theo shakes his head. “I’m a neophyte.”

“At everything?” I’m half-kidding, playing at movie banter, but Theo ignores the note of irony, sits down at my feet. He spins the chair until his face is next to my knees.

“I have an idea,” he says. The room is quiet and hot with closed air. The lightbulb in the desk lamp hisses faintly.

Theo unzips one of my boots, determined. He unzips my other boot and I alert, my body rigid, waiting. Fast, now, he rolls down my tights, pushes up my skirt with one hand. He looks me in the face first, a look I don’t recognize from Theo: a focus, control. Then he is between my legs, his tongue brushing, thrashing, and stopping, starting. I close my eyes, gripping the edges of the chair, reluctant to go over, to hand off into this perfect, forgotten release.

Outside the Big Cheese’s office, I scan
The Daily
front page:
STANDOFF: TENT CITY GROWING, BIG BOX RETAILER GRUMBLING
.

The Big Cheese waves me in. His large, blockish hands click at e-mail, while his skull is fastened to a headset on which he’s chatting as Ravel murmurs out of a Bang & Olufsen CD player on the wall, a stereo designed to look like art. The whole office resembles the interior of a sports car, black and low lit, dashboard lighting his chin from the desk. It’s staggering what the human body is capable of now, how many places our heads can be at one time.

I ease down into a black leather chair that puts me several inches lower than the Big Cheese. He mutters and curses, then disentangles from all the electronic wires, runs his
hands over his head to make sure he’s free of plugs and sparks, spins to face me.

“So why are we here?” he asks. He is famous for speaking in riddles and rhetorical questions.

This one is easy, however. “Because my editor called a meeting,” I say. I scan his desk for a severance cheque, and glance out the door to see if security is waiting to escort me from the building. Surely, with my bad behaviour of late, I would be one of the first to get laid off if the Cheese was cleaning house before the big takeover. Yesterday the Editor caught me opening a beer bottle with my mouse.

“Ah yes. She’s on her way, I believe,” says the Cheese. He checks his ear for technology one more time, shaking his neck like a swimmer just out of the pool. I expect a tiny silicon chip to fall out.

“What’s going on with you these days?” he asks. I never know how to answer that question and the Big Cheese always asks it. Is he looking for a wacky single gal anecdote, or does he want me to throw him some story ideas, get professional?

I give him a combo: part self-deprecating personal story, but work related: “I accidentally on purpose lit a filing cabinet on fire with my cigarette. Did you catch that?”

Cheese smirks, almost approvingly, then goes blank.

“What’s going on with you?”

As usual, he ignores this question. On a shelf behind him, Cheese has a miniature bust of George Orwell, sporting a Queen’s University baseball cap.

“She’s saying you’re late a lot, and I’m supposed to reprimand you,” he says, picking up a pink squeezable ball designed to release stress. Someone has drawn an angry face on it with a V between the eyebrows. The face is smudged from squeezing, mouthless. “What do you think?”

“I think I am late a lot.”

“Do you want to know what I think?”

“Umm –”

“I don’t really care if you’re late. I don’t care if you come in at all as long as your stories are filed on time and they’re your usual calibre,” he says. Squeeze, squeeze. “That piece on you and Ethan Hawke was very funny.”

“You’re not going to fire me?” I ask.

“Why should I fire you?”

“Uh … because I nap at the office. I’m surly. I’m …” I’m searching here. “I’m late a lot.”

Big Cheese silent laughs. “Well, you chose the right profession. If you want to get fired for that behaviour, you should work in a bank.”

We sit there, the squeeze toy wheezing.

“You know,” he says finally, “you should write about your bad work habits. A column about lighting a filing cabinet on fire could be funny. Maybe you need to move more in the Allissa Allan direction, dating and mating. Girl stuff. We could sell some ads. Loft furnishings, martini mixes –”

I laugh, but he doesn’t. I realize with a start that the Cheese, a man who interviewed Gorbachev in the Kremlin, is serious. My head starts pounding. “Is thirty-four still a girl?” I ask.

The Cheese sighs. “You’re only as old as you feel, Max. Quick, who’s the most famous Max in movies?”

“That’s what Woody Allen’s friend calls him in
Annie Hall.”

“You’re right, Max.” Cheese always asks me the Annie Hall question and looks pleased when I answer it. I wonder if he knows that the Woody Allen character hates being called Max, that it’s an arbitrary, meaningless nickname.