How Happy to Be (5 page)

“You two know each other?” Sunera looks surprised. Not part of the plan. He lights up this big smile, just plugs that sucker right in, and I still don’t recognize it; was it directed my way once before?

“Theo McArdle,” he says in this deep, sleepy voice. “From university.”

Again with that smile and suddenly I’m all elastic in the chest, like he just leaned over and put a hand on my cheek
and cleared away my hair and I fell over from the warmth of it – this is what memory is like for me these days, a full-body takedown. Why I’m avoiding memory are moments like these. I knew Theo McArdle a million years ago and then I didn’t. He’s broader all over, but thinner at the temples; no trace of the old chick-yellow buzzcut.

“I know Stewey from home,” says Theo. I haven’t said anything yet, and he’s looking at me with both warmth and wariness, the way you look at someone who might be mentally unstable. “So I came out tonight.” I’m drug-mute, so he goes off, not unpleasantly, on a little thing about how he just moved to the city from Saint John, New Brunswick, and he wondered if he would run into me and he saw my columns and he can just keep on going and going because I’m back in time, feet on the ground in combat boots and ripped jeans back in the snowstorm, ice-block cold of our alma matter in another town. Theo McArdle did this thing with his eyes then, staring into yours like a doctor checking for vitals. I couldn’t get out from under those eyes, even though we only hooked up maybe three times, and we never had sex even, but we stayed up talking and fell asleep on his futon. He was outdoorsy and into science and that made two strikes. But even though all signs said, No, no, no, this is impossible – those eyes and Theo McArdle’s kiss. I went back a few times, and what I remember most is how well I slept those three nights next to Theo McArdle. Theo McArdle was a giant skateboarding sleeping pill for me.

It made my eyes hurt, all that gazing. So on the third morning I got up while he was sleeping. I pulled on my boots,
and I left. I spent the next year of university hiding behind pillars and bushes, pretending not to know him. Over the months, his face changed. First he said hello, but I didn’t say it back. Then he frowned. Then he glared. And then it was decided that we would pass each other like strangers.

It seems incredible to me now, fifteen years later, with Theo McArdle inches from me: those same hands have been on this same body. My hair in the curve of his armpit. Our mouths everywhere, and no record of it. What if every hand that laid itself on our bodies left a print? We could read each other better. The loneliest people would be flesh-coloured, and the most abused covered in black. I look at Theo’s wrist, the spray of hair, a vein; no trace of me. Disappointing.

So I’m strolling from one stoned insight to the next when I hear him say, “I always felt bad about how things went with us –”

And then I stop him: “No, no, I always felt bad. I was really young.” And stupid, I might add, though I don’t.

He rescues me: “I’ve thought about you a lot since then. You were …” And this I want to hear – What was I? Really, what was I? My God, I’d like to know – but Theo McArdle lets the sentence trickle off. He averts his eyes, freeing me from his gaze. I take a big snort of breath, thinking I’ll need it for later if he looks at me again.

He glances around the club, as if he’s trying to locate the source of the snort.

Don’t do this
. They all start out looking good and then before you know it it’s 3:00 a.m. two weeks later and they’re
confessing their sins and crying in your arms, telling you they’re into motivational speaking or sports.

From a few feet away, Sunera delivers a royal wave – a signal that she’ll come in for the rescue if need be – then turns her attention back to a rapt Stewey. Theo McArdle and I have descended into silence. Suddenly, he looks about five years old, staring out some picture window, waiting for his life to unfold.

I open my mouth to speak and this comes out: “I’m trying to get fired.”

“Yeah?” He sounds curious.

I gesture to the pockets of pundits and writers and TV hosts and media chasers and former dot.comers clutching their pink slips. Only it’s weird, because I look at Theo McArdle looking around and what he reflects back at me is totally different. It’s like he doesn’t see the things I see.

“Theo, let me ask you something. Are you in media?”

“No.”

“Dot.com?” I ask.

“No.” Then Theo McArdle says it, “I’m a physicist. I’m doing research at the university.”

I pause. “What kind of research?”

“Theoretical research. On what makes up the universe.”

If this were a teen sex comedy, I’d do a spit take. Instead, I laugh a squinty woodpecker laugh. Theo McArdle: physicist.

“Would it make you stop laughing if I told you that last year I was teaching in a village in Africa?” he asks. He’s smiling.

“Oh God, that’s even better,” I say. “You’re not safe in here. All these journalists and TV people – if they know
there’s a real person in their midst, they’ll suck you dry. Don’t tell them anything about your life. Seriously. You’ll become a magazine feature.”

“A feature?” says Sunera, suddenly by my shoulder, looking concerned. Have I been shouting?

“Theo’s a real person,” I tell her. “Can you imagine?”

At that point the DJ cranks it up to tooth-knocking levels and it’s all too much so I take my high to the dance floor, leaving Sunera and Theo McArdle behind. I’m up and down and sweating from the nerves and goddamn it feels good, all slip away slippery, even this stupid bottled dance music that sounds like an upstairs neighbour moving a refrigerator – it’s pretty good right now, like the next thing is coming up up up –

But then there’s a visual noise, a blurry distraction at the edge of the dance floor that looks like a pair of giant pants sticking out of a speaker. I dance a little closer and realize they’re not pants, they’re a person, one of those crazy kids with his head jammed between the woofers and tweeters. Ecstasy. The E-kids get up my ass, and it’s not just that these barely-not-teens are going to create the first spine-free wheelchair-bound generation without a war but that they’re going to be deaf as hell too.

The other Japanese anime characters are out in full force tonight: girls in pink fuzzy toques sucking on pacifiers and boys in goggles and no one is saving the guy in the speaker from certain deafness. This is the love drug? I dance over through the wet and steaming bodies, crunching water bottles under my feet, and tap him on the ass in the most
non-lustful manner possible. Pants slowly emerges and he can’t be more than nineteen, with this white puff of cottony hair. He looks like a sleepy koala bear, his small wet lips slack. He comes up to my chest. I’m staring now at this homunculus thinking how fast you get out of touch, how quickly you don’t know what’s beautiful any more, or even fun, but I can’t do the thing I came over here to do, which is rescue him from a handicap because it’s much too loud to warn him away from anything. So I mime his ears and how to plug them, my attempt at a
save-yourself
gesture, and he looks puzzled, then amused. He waggles a finger to get closer. I lean in, my ear practically in his mouth.

“Don’t worry so much –” he giggles. But he’s not finished: “MOM.”

O
N SATURDAY, THE TORONTO WINTER FILM FESTIVAL
begins. I love this word
festival
. Get out your peasant skirts and clogs, tie ribbons round the trees in the town square, prepare the feast, sacrifice the children: the festival is coming! After weeks of teaser press releases (Big Names Will Soon Arrive in City), the festival executives have gathered the media in the gilded ballroom of a downtown hotel to announce which of the world’s famous feel daring enough to fly directly from the Sundance Festival in chilly Utah to Toronto, earmuffs still frozen, mukluks still slushy.

Entertainment writers love a press conference. It makes them feel like they have real careers with meetings and nodding and catering; there’s a lot of alone time in this job. The hacks are excited to be outside the cubicle, the older ones off in their corners staring down the eager young girl interns in their sleeveless sweaters. The free-food table lies a licked-clean mess of crumbs and wadded-up napkins. I spy a thimble of undrunk juice and aim for it, only to be cut off by a local TV entertainment correspondent, she of the bubble blond ‘do, mouth liplined in perpetual grin. I remember some theory I once heard that what makes a person cute is the proportion of big head, little body, like a Muppet baby. The other way round is simply disturbing. So technically, she’s cute.

Snagging my juice, she joins a circle of TV reporters, a far cleaner group than the print journalists. They stand next to their cameramen, tanned and glossy and waiting at attention to come to life, machines on pause. All that time laughing supportively at unfunny celebrity patter has distorted their interior judgment, and it would take only the slightest tweak of a plastic cheek or a stomp on the toe to uncork a giggle and a shout: “So true! So true! I loved you in that!”

Check cell. Nothing interesting.

The microphone bleats and there’s the Film Festival Czar in his horn-rimmed glasses the exact size of his eyeballs. The Czar hasn’t loosened his grip on this festival for years, and now that our fine city got a mention in
Vanity Fair
, and everyone’s slobbering over each other in a big moist cloud of congratulations, he’ll only go out in a pine box.

So off goes the Czar in his sensitive public radio voice, how this year’s festival will be world class and a celebration of the best films from around the globe and he’s on and on and on with how hard they’ve been looking for hidden greatness. Like what a tough job, machete-slashing through the jungles of Tanzania in search of some tribesman with a digital camera who’s going to subvert Hollywood through his sixteen-hour epic on the plight of the fruit fly. We’re world class, did he mention that?

But of course no one’s writing this down, and no one’s writing when the sponsoring cigarette companies and airlines send their representatives shaking into the spotlight to plug their products and contests (all the TV cameras shut down for the sponsors, cutting the light and sending the room into greyness), and the journalists are beginning to murmur and shift until the Czar regains the mic and finally gets on it: “And so, a few of the celebrities who will be attending next week –” He’s off. Camera lights flare up, pens scratch. Funny, that Tanzanian fruit-fly guy doesn’t quite get the attention of the Paltrows and Crowes and Cruises.

I’m not taking notes. I’m barely listening, in fact. It’s the same list as last year and the year before: Americans, a few Euros, a handful of Asians, and Atom Egoyan. I can just tweak some titles and run the same piece I run every year. I can’t remember the last time anyone spotted an error in the entertainment section of
The Daily
, or even read it at all. Mohsen may be our sole subscriber.

Instead of writing, I’m thinking about Theo McArdle’s laundry soap smell when he leaned over to open the cab door
for me, which leads me to think about the same thing I’ve been thinking about pretty much non-stop since I was eleven. Here’s how it works with sex these days. There’s the night sex, and the brunch sex. The night sex starts around ten or eleven when you meet the guy at the launch or the bar or the party and you zero in and he’s zeroing in and if he’s still around after you finish eviscerating whatever or whoever needs to be eviscerated that day, then you let him buy you the drink, then you move into the corner for some privacy, then one of you says, “Wanna get outta here?” It’s the perfect line. I highly recommend it. If the answer is, No, I don’t, you go: “Well I do. See you later!” and they end up feeling rejected. Chest-pass the pain whenever possible.

If the answer is yes, then you get the night sex.

The night sex is what it’s like with Ad Sales. You always go back to his place so that you can leave early and avoid breakfast. Because rarely is the breakfast guy also the night sex guy (okay, once the night sex guy became the breakfast guy, and it lasted twelve years. But that’s an anomaly).

Brunch sex starts sober. It’s the guy who knows a friend who knows you and he calls and you say, Brunch? Because brunch means if it doesn’t go well, you shake hands and have the rest of the day to analyze obsessively and tell everyone you know how bad it was.

If it goes well and he doesn’t humiliate the waitress or order something weird (“Heated lemon, please. No, that’s it.”), then you can add the walk past the cafés and galleries of Queen Street, past the textile shops and the lofts bumping up against the mental institution that used to mark the edge of
downtown. The walk could turn into a movie, which could turn into coffee at your place, which could mean sex just as the sun is setting and the light in the bedroom is that flattering mossy colour so you don’t feel like backing out of the room in a lame attempt at hiding your ass, going, “I always walk like this. Better for the shins.” And afternoon sex is imaginative, creative sex that ends with a nap and a goodbye hug (no kiss), then a long, solo bath with some good music. The difference between night sex and brunch sex is that with brunch sex, the next day, your skin is always better.

Theo McArdle looks like a man who could brunch.

I have a shadowy recollection that after my failed rescue of the kid from the speaker, Theo took my cellphone, and I took his cellphone, and we entered each other, so to speak. Then he stuck me in a cab and placed a folded ten-dollar bill for fare in my jacket pocket. So he has my number, but he hasn’t called. I’ve checked a few dozen times in the last hour. Well, maybe I’ll call him. We could meet next Sunday, see how he holds up sober. Then again, if we met up late enough in the day, we could have mimosas, or wine, or beer, or maybe a date. I’d be willing, I think, to risk nighttime with Theo McArdle, if he agreed to bring those hands.

The Czar finally gets his big round of applause, which snaps me awake and I move faster than I have in months to get the hell out, elbowing past the grabby publicists and Allissa Allan, who gives me a – could this be right? – black-power gesture with her fist.