Keeping Things Whole (11 page)

In romance and real estate,
only hindsight is 20/20. How did we survive Kate's chest-pounding accusation that I was a heart-breaking criminal? With love and a really gorgeous apartment.

Weekday nights and Saturday afternoons we were getting ready to move in together, yet I finally had the smuggling idea that would raise my game. I promised not to lie to Kate about work if she agreed to accept “I can't tell you that” as an answer. I know, I know, my side sounds like a philanderer's dream, but that wasn't an issue. We never had enough clothes on to worry about fidelity.

Over the years I've heard two and a half good pieces of relationship advice. One, the cliché is true, communication is the key. Sexual communication, emotional disclosures, the crap about in-laws—get it out, but constructively. Communication isn't whining or complaining. Tell me what (y)our problem is and, ideally, how to solve it. Two, as Kate wrote in the first card she gave me in the new place,
Love is a behaviour, not a feeling
. Genuine respect takes work, effort, sacrifice. And the half point: marry your sexual obsession. Mom once told me how shocked she was when Janice, the art teacher and regular set designer of her school shows, confessed that despite two kids and after a dozen years of marriage, she was incapable of being alone in the same room with her husband without having sex. First and foremost, we're looking for a mate. Then again, Rules 1 and 2 aren't always compatible with 2.5.

Lest Kate sound like a gold-digger, put yourself in her funky and attractive shoes. She went into our apartment hunt adamant she'd pay fifty-fifty, that we'd stick to a budget. For all the bad press single parenting gets, kids in single parent homes often receive a better financial education. Two parents talk to each other about money. Single parents still need an audience for the money chat, so single kids grow up learning that
have
,
want,
and
need
are three very different categories.

We had essentially three rental options. Contemporary apartment towers of soulless pre-fab with wafer-thin walls and cardboard doors, paper houses more written than built, contracts with doors. Better but still flawed were the fallen old places from between the wars, once-nice apartments that had come down in the world. One apartment had a genuine claw foot tub, but it had been painted, not re-enamelled, and its grey bottom was the colour of Spanish flu. Hot water tanks had been dropped into already cramped kitchens and sat as ominous as unexploded bombs. Down in the distillery district there were also the renovated money sinks for newlyweds and junior lawyers. Kate tried to hold out, but then we saw a place with two balconies (one for breakfast, another for cocktails). What were her defences compared to a granite counter and cherry wood cabinets? After the landlord showed us the heated bathroom tiles I let him stroll over to the windows without us then squish-hugged her up against the shower stall. Through her hair I cupped the back of her ear like we did to Voodoo then gave our joyous doggie command. “Take it!”

Leave it
is a great, all-purpose command for managing your dog.
Leave it
should be enough to keep your dog away from some trailside pile of rotting putrescence, another dog (meaner, more vulnerable, or across a busy street), or, ideally, anything at all. Gloria and I, then Kate, trained Voodoo to “leave it” by first having a treat in our palm.
Leave it
and the fingers close.
Leave it
again the next day and the palm can stay open. Finally, he'd get to hear
Take it
and eat the waiting treat. Snorf, gobble, snorf. By the time Kate was living with Vood, he already knew a jackpot awaited him if she laid little cubes of cheese up his sphinx-pose legs.
Ooookkkayyy, take it!
Snorf, snorf, gobble, snorf.

“What are you doing to me?” She tapped her forehead against mine.

“I love you. Let's live where and how we want.”

She, not I, walked out of the bathroom to ask for the lease. True to the spirit if not the letter of her budgetary laws, she has since saved me tens of thousands in housing costs.

What got easier when we moved in together, the sex or the talk? Or, that third overlapping circle, the sleep? I took us shopping for more bedding to celebrate the household merger, bought sheets with a thread count so high they were practically bullet proof (a joke I didn't make). We'd just spent nearly every night together for four months, yet we told ourselves the nights were different now in our own place. Our nightly nights had no end in sight. In bed, four lungs lay in a row like a small shelf of your absolutely favourite novels. The body mingle. In the waking hours there was food, the protracted, healthy arousal of into your body and mine. This local cider, these fresh eggs, cheddar half as old as we were. A live-in lover doesn't just cut the bills in half; she cuts the boredom of paying bills in half. Heat was no longer just heat, but our relaxation, our sprawl. The electricity bill said
reading lights, long shaving showers, frozen organic tomatoes.
I'd already courted her with a dozen kitchen gadgets, now I finally got to live with them.

Most notably, you're hunkering down with another body. You'll never really know someone else until you live with him/her. This gender fieldwork may be the third most compelling reason to cohabit. You see the other face much more than you see your own. Your man. Your woman. Not a possession but a subject, an area of expertise, a library book on renewable loan. On the couch one Sunday she groaned all the way up from her hips. “Agh, day two of my period—my version of tunnel war.” Tightening my jaw and thrusting out my bottom lip once while shaving in front of her, I claimed, “Every man is Mussolini when he shaves.”

And of course the body itself, that distinction in bone and flesh, the similar yet different chemistry swirling there beside you. How did her skin always stay so soft, so smooth? When I went without shaving, her thumbs, palms, and fingertips would trace over my cheeks, neck, and jaw with the same curiosity mine had for the reliable smoothness of her cheeks, the programmed curve of a breast. Our bodies so close yet so different, hips boxed or arced, strength and resilience variously mapped.

Lovers generally graduate from dorm rooms to apartments to houses as their bodies, not just their bank accounts, allow. Put us in the smallest space when we are most beautiful. Give us more room as we need it. Inevitably, apartments remind you that the body can alienate as much as it can arouse. The kitchen may be the heart of a house, but that's rarely true for apartments. There, the heart shifts between kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom, locus of good times and bad. The bathroom—epicentre of the abject. Part pharmacy, part operating theatre, the room of flow, of taps and drains. Even the towels—folded by Kate into rectangles she assured me were more attractive than the rectangles I made—were in constant flux, their stack depleting, their crisp edges rumpling with our wear. There in the in-and-out room, that thin architectural envelope full of half-secrets, nothing was more important, more life changing, and more alien than Kate's little strip of birth control pills, that credit card for a sexual shopping spree.

Tired one chilly night, we dropped our patience for taking turns in the bathroom. We left the door open and grinned through a bobbing choreography of rinsing, brushing, and spitting. The one body chore she had that I didn't was reaching for her oblong packet of pills. She held the pill out on the tip of one finger to say, “The centre of our home is very small but very powerful.” Then, bless her, she widened her eyes and pressed the nightly dose to her tongue.

Several times a week I'd overhear the horsy squirt of Kate peeing. The pill and her vitamin supplements made it more drugged than that of a racehorse. She told me that roughly 85 percent of Canadian women go on the pill at some point. Our sewers swim with excess estrogen. Zeus's father Cronus ate his children to circumvent a prophecy that would have him overthrown by one of them. Since 1964, women have been pre-emptively eating their children. Science versus nature. One nature versus another. One of the tricky trade secrets Melissa shared about escort and lap dance work is the fact that skin workers who don't take the pill make more money. No matter where they are, cold climate or warm, post-industrial or college town, skinners with an undiluted cycle clean up in tips. The whiff of them. Yet who needs to control birth more?

Another cohabiting surprise were the unexpected midnight chats in bed. We didn't lack conversation elsewhere, but there was something about the darkness, comfort, and ease of our shared bed that tugged out one casually honest conversation after another. She'd often save her most stimulating law school highlights for bedtime. I'd parcel out my inheritance, the Greek myths, the acting legends, and, always a gamble, even a little from my childhood comic book obsession.

“There's this guy, Cyclops, who has this red ray that shoots out his eyes.”

“Of course he does.”

“A special visor allows him to check the deadly rays when he's in costume, and some custom red glasses do the job when he mixes with the civvies.”

“And then one day…”

“He falls in love with his teammate, Phoenix—”

“Who moonlights as a van art model.”

“Totally: all tits and cascading red hair. She has the twin powers of telepathy and telekinesis.”

“So she knows what you want to watch
and
she can get the remote from across the room.”

I drew her in even closer to my chest. “So at some point her powers get augmented, through the roof. She knows what you think and can control your body better than you can. The rest of the team just take up space on the plane. But even the omnipotent need romance. Off she goes with lover man on a picnic. A hike in the woods in a cotton sweater. Let's forget about global evil for the afternoon. After lunch, she asks if she can stare into his eyes. He can never stop those deadly rays, only control them. Until now he has always felt a bit like a monster.”

“Which we pick up from the name
Cyclops
.”

“With her heightened powers, Lady Van Art can control those rays, can hold them back with her mind. Remember this is all done in comic-book frames: face-to-face master shot as she reaches for the glasses then in tight on his swirling red peepers. Picture love, fear, and wonder in red, picture terror and gratitude as she stares into a force that normally kills. To me, that's the pill.”

“Kills?”

“You know what I mean.”

Spooning in our darkened bedroom I couldn't see her face. Nor she mine.

I'm trying to come clean,
ugliness and all. My next bit of housing wasn't nearly so nice.

All managers should have dogs and try a stint as a criminal. In addition to the dozens of small lessons you learn actually doing things, not just swapping buzzwords, run under the law and you come smack up against the fact that every employee is just one threat or temptation away from becoming chief witness for the prosecution. Unless you're the lead dog, the scenery never changes.

My casino plan (Operation Roll the Dice) kept those two classic commercial gauges, time and money, perpetually in front of my eyes. Of course it would have been cheaper to try the casino legitimately—get hired as a valet, win over a crew, do my thing quietly with just a little grease. But it would have taken forever just to get hired. And the nepotistic union was all grease anyway, so what was a legitimate hire? Cousin X and Nephew Y would have beaten me to every valet job that came up. Even if I did get hired, there'd be the unpredictability of who I'd be working with. Business Lesson 4 or 5—fuck chance (especially when the money clock is always ticking).

People like Gloria, steady job, steady pay, they only reserve uncertain spending for life, not for making a living. For most, love, parenting, and maybe real estate are the only areas where they go in spending then keep spending indefinitely. For entrepreneurs, uncertain spending can be daily life. One roulette wheel or another is always spinning.

Worse than hemorrhaging money, the casino plan would no longer allow me to work alone. Every co-worker is a witness. With the house painting, I had always tried to know my crews a little. Where they lived. A bit of their past. Their family. Work is one long character interview. At my busiest, I'd be running five guys, most of them sub-contractors, four-handed painters who could coat a wall faster than you can measure one. Reese was with me the longest, a local boy who was there because he wanted to make money with his body without sacrificing it, which you absolutely have to do in full-scale construction. Bye-bye, knees. Reese had that bristling physical energy best tied to a paycheque. Send him up the highest ladder with a sheep (a roller with the deepest pile) and he'd finish the climb with one leg stretched out to balance the arm he was reaching well beyond sanity or comfort on the other side. He never minded a little dirt on his hands.

For the casino, I needed to run the valets when I wanted, how I wanted, and with my own crew. My recon included a little money lost on the tables and then plenty of hello tips for the valet staff. Say, who's your manager? Samir Hussein.

Samir was in the phonebook. Moy Ave., first block off Riverside. Easy to find, quick to leave. His house was in Walkerville, not too far from our new apartment. In the 1920s, Hiram Walker knew the lay of the land: legal booze on one side of the river, more customers and higher prices on the other. Walkerville was a classic company town. Sewers courtesy of Big Man Hiram. Local cattle fattening on the spent whisky mash. In Windsor, we're always moving something, and Canada's first electric streetcars ran between Walkerville and Windsor proper. That tram got people to and from work but was later ripped up so workers would buy the cars their neighbours were making at Ford, Chrysler, and GM. Take a VIA train into Windsor today and you still get off in a station called Walkerville, towering distillery silos all around you. When the wind is right and the boil is high, you can smell the fermenting rye anywhere in the city, like the smell of Grape Nuts and so thick you want a spoon.

Samir's house had signs of work everywhere. New windows throughout, and that surely meant a loan. New siding. Fresh white plastic sewer cap on the lawn announcing a redig. Here was the old real estate advice in action. Buy the cheapest house on a nice block. After a few strolls past the house with Voodoo, I saw Samir step out of a used BMW. I wanted to run over and lick the hood ornament. Instead I walked to the nearest pay phone and called City Hall. “Hi, I just moved in on Moy. When's the next recycling pickup? Thank you very much.”

At the end of the next day's painting, I took Reese out for a pitcher of beer.

“Next Wednesday, you want to make fifty bucks picking up a box?”

Reese was one of those guys of seemingly inflatable size. Not too tall, 5'9”, big enough one minute, compact the next. Round, simian head, meaty shoulders.

All week I'd been loading a new fine-paper recycling box with flyers, junk mail, even blank sheets. At 3:30 in the morning on recycling day, I drove by Samir's place in a rented van with Reese crouching by the side door. He grabbed Samir's recycling bin off the curb and switched it for the dummy before the tires stopped. Back at my garage, I got to know Samir. Three credit cards, a personal line of credit, car payments, and a heavy mortgage—another North American dangling from a long rope of debt. Aside from the bank statements, I burnt what paper I didn't need.

Putting the touch on Samir was as complex, as variable, and as challenging as designing and building the mule bags I'd invite him to make money ignoring. The human element, always tricky. Should I tap him on the way to work or coming home? Carrot or stick? How much stick? I knew he needed money, but not how he'd react. Need's enough to start.

I'd already logged thirty hours watching Samir by the time I sat down on a park bench with a clear view of the casino's employee parking lot and his Beemer. Thirty unpaid hours plus thirty hours of opportunity cost plus operational costs plus a significant risk of exposure. This was the casino—cameras everywhere. Rest assured that a disguise is the only time I wear a baseball cap. I sat with a decoy book open on my lap while actually listening to an audio book with earbuds.

When Samir finally stepped out into the parking lot I kept up my library poker face. I waited a little after he drove off then pretended to check my watch and strolled away. Only when I rounded a corner did I begin to hurry, unlocking my bike and racing through the ghetto streets that run parallel to the riverside street he'd be taking home. (That's right,
bike
. Cars have licence plates.) He had traffic lights and Windsor's version of rush hour to contend with. I only had a few stop signs to breeze past.

Honestly, I would have preferred to catch him at work. Talk business at business and never risk looking like I was threatening his family (which was the last thing I wanted to do, personally and commercially). But the casino was designed to look for exactly the kind of move I was trying to make. Sorry, Samir.

Mutual self-interest. All I've ever really tried to sell is mutual self-interest. Greed's a much better fuel than fear. Fear can be numbing. Greed stays fresh.

I had just enough time to lock my bike and get myself in front of Samir's house as he parked. I wiped the sweat off my brow before I approached. “Mr. Hussein, I'm Trevor Reynolds.” I gave him plenty of room. “Could I give you my business card?” I held out the fake card, a brown C-note paper-clipped beneath it. As he took it I made an obvious half-step back while he weighed the card and the cash. Commercial tai sabaki.

“My number's there. I'll walk away now and hope for your call. Perhaps we could meet sometime for coffee.”

After a day and a half with a phone practically glued to my wrist, Kate joked that my business was shady enough she never had any doubts I was waiting for a call from another woman. No sooner did I say, “I'm legit in places,” than Samir finally rang.

“What is this about?” he asked immediately.

But he and my C-note already knew what this was about. “Mr. Hussein, I wonder if we might meet for coffee. Wherever you like.”

Time bombs have counted seconds less dramatically than I did waiting for his answer. Marriage proposals have received less exciting replies.

“I won't be alone,” he finally said.

“I most certainly will.”

One of the few feelings better than holding an ace in the hole is winning without having to play it. I went to our meeting with Samir's groaning line of credit statement tucked into a blazer pocket.

We met at one of the ex-Iraqi restaurants down Wyandotte. During Gulf War I, every use of the word
Iraqi
had been covered over with
Mid-Eastern
. Vinyl banners were hung over their exterior signs. Laminated paper printouts were taped over the coloured, curving script of their hand-painted window lettering. The menu was stippled with tiny white stickers, tissues on so many global shaving cuts.

The restaurant had three public dining rooms, four (visible) men, and a few hundred mirrors. Every other surface was reflective. Mirrored tiles the size of your thumbnail curled around a pillar. Silver beads hung draped in door frames. Each of these tiny mirrors showed me that once again my greed made me the only white guy in a brown room. Samir sat in the innermost dining room with his back to the wall. Three younger Middle-Eastern men paced between a bar and Samir's table, tracksuit, wrist hair, gold chains, and cellphones on each of them.

I asked if I might take a seat. “Mr. Hussein, we have mutual business which could be mutually profitable.” I'd anticipated a list of his possible responses and got the best one. Not
I already have a job
. Not
What makes you think I'm looking for business?
Not
If this is about the casino, forget it
. Instead, golden silence. Then, even better, he nodded at the ‘waiters' and said something in Arabic (or pig Latin for all I knew.
We will garrotte this limp faggot in seconds
). They retreated to another room.

“I'd like to become nighttime valet manager, and I'm prepared to make that worth your while.”

“You think I'm stupid?” he asked.

“Just the opposite. I'll pay you a third of what they pay you.” Beat. “In cash.” Half beat. “Weekly.”

“And what am I to do for two hundred dollars a week?”

I smiled. “We both know that one-fifty a week is a third of your salary. We're here because neither of us is stupid.” I could have showed him his bank statement, but that might have scared him off. “Six hundred extra dollars a month, cash, to hire me and then just keep doing what you do. You do your job, I'll do mine.”

“Why would I risk my job for only a third of its pay?”

“Because right now you're already losing a quarter of your pay to interest.”

I got a little eyebrow for that. “So obviously I can't afford to lose my job. Nine hundred a month. And a five percent raise per year.”

We shook hands on $750. After the shake he confessed, “I don't have total control over hiring. There's management
and
the union.”

Fine. In Windsor, we were all brother$ in the union.