Send Me A Lover (32 page)

‘I’m sorry if I offended you, Ange. I was really only trying to help… All I am saying is—or trying to say, subtly—there’s an old Yiddish proverb. It goes like this: If you want your dreams to come true, don’t sleep.’

~ * * * ~

I walk home, a little bit furious. I am not a dreamer. I don’t think I ever have been. Maybe I no longer believe that Jonathan is going to send me a lover—if I ever did—but when I do eventually find one, I’d like to think he would be somebody who Jonathan would have approved of.

Coming into my apartment, I see the two green garbage bags in the middle of the floor and step over them. I’m just putting the kettle on, when an awful thought strikes me.

Jonathan’s ring and watch.

Weren’t they on the floor in an envelope?

I glance at the floor. I don’t see the envelope.

I dive-bomb onto the bag marked ‘Charity Shop’... Not in that one. I pat bags and squeeze bags, tip them up, clothes tumbling onto the floor. But I can’t see the little brown envelope with his jewellery in it.

That can only mean one thing: I must have chucked it out with the rubbish.

I don’t even wait for the lift. Instead, I gallop down eighteen flights of stairs. I can’t have thrown out his wedding ring. His watch that he loved so much.

It’s not pretty down here: the ‘dump’ at the back of the building, where the rubbish of two hundred apartments finds itself.

Life as a garbage rat isn’t that glamorous either. With the noise of the door opening, and my arrival, they squeak and scurry away.

The stink is something else too. A cross between rotten vegetables, the rancid entrails of a million abattoirs, dirty old homeless men, and shit. I cover my nose with a hand but it doesn’t help. I already feel contaminated. I can’t count how many fastened up carrier bags or spewing open carrier bags, or half-rat-eaten carrier bags there are down here, but there are a lot. Most of them are generic green bags just like mine. With fervid desperation, I pick my way over a heap of stinking squelch and start ripping open bags searching for something that looks vaguely like my own junk, knowing that it truly will be like finding a needle in a haystack. But I am not deterred. I have to find his jewellery, or I’m never going to forgive myself.

My hands get coated with globs of stinky wet stuff. I retch up a symphony. But I’m on a mission. My tearing becomes more frantic, and I think,
Why did you have to die, Jonathan and leave me to care so much about the small things that are all I have left of you? Look what you’ve reduced me to.
I tread over bags not caring what my feet touch, not caring that the stink is so bad I feel I’m swallowing it; I can taste it. I know I’ve gone mad, but I am powerless to stop myself. The faster I go the more hopeless it’s getting. I start to cry. A big rush of tears.
Jonathan, why can’t you leave me alone? Let me be free of you?
I feel like tears must be cleaning a trail down my grimy, stinky cheeks. I dab at my mouth with the back of my forearm.

Something tells me this hopeless.

I stand there stock still, with my heart pounding. And I realise something. I’m not crying for me. I’m not even crying for Jonathan. I’m crying for a ring and a broken watch, that, in no meaningful way affect my memory of him, or my love for him. This reality just visits me, surprising me with its logic, as though Jonathan has somehow suddenly put the thought in my head.

I rub one more time at my face. There is a simple truth here. One I will have to accept: Jonathan hasn’t gone away. Even though I was convinced, for a short while, that he finally had. And that’s both a bad thing, and exactly as it should be.

My heart-rate comes down. My crying stops. A tiny instinct in me says, go on, open one more bag, and if they’re not there…

But I suddenly feel exhausted to the bone. What’s the point? I look down at my hands. They’re like the hands of a street person who has forgotten what it’s like to have a bath. Some black fury creature trips across the top of my foot and I let out a scream. The echo of my own voice breaks through me like a flare going off inside me.

Give it up
,
I say to myself. But still that instinct says check one more bag…

Okay. There’s a bag right at my feet. I sink my fingers into the plastic and rip and say a small prayer.

And what do I see? There, on the top, is a little brown envelope.

Could it be my little brown envelope?

Inside the little brown envelope is Jonathan’s watch and Jonathan’s ring.

I pick the watch out and clutch it, looking at its face and rubbing it with my thumb, as though this has somehow brought Jonathan back to me. But what’s odd is, the watch doesn’t appear to be broken any more. Its pointers no longer stick at eight o’clock. The second hand is making a purposeful sweep around the dial.

Seagulls swoop off the building tops and soar to a blue sky. I catch my reflection in the window of the Hotel Vancouver—my high (and not particularly comfortable, but devastatingly sexy) black heels, and the pale grey suit (the closest I could find to the girl’s) that’s so fitted it gives me a bum when I thought I didn’t have any. The baby blue Benetton shirt, gaping open and showing my tan. My hair loose around my shoulders, sunglasses on head. Jessica rang me and offered to do my make-up again. I suppose my saying yes might have been a good thing for us, but I couldn’t bear to be fussed over. Besides, she might get to see that my skin isn’t perfect and might never want me in her house again.

Jervais Ladner’s building is as ‘corporate Vancouver’ as it gets: about thirty-five stories of earthquake-proofed, shimmering, floor-to-sky tinted glass—the type of windows you can see out of, but nobody can see in; three sets of revolving doors; pristine tiled floors that make your shoes clack; a blue-uniformed concierge sitting at a vast desk who will eventually get to call you by your name, because you’ll be the one person who is always first in when he comes on early shift, and the last person he shows out before he closes up to catch the last bus home. Eight elevators. JL is on the thirty-third floor. Nay, JL owns the thirty-third floor. The top execs will have the north-facing offices: best view in the whole damned city: mountains, park, ocean and sky. God of everything up there, you are—the heavens and the earth—only maybe not of yourself. Their windows never open. There’d be far too many suicides.

Progress
, I think. That one word just cruises, ironically, through my head. I have come full circle.

‘Elevator to the right,’ the friendly black concierge points out, when he sees me hesitating.

I clack across the tiles, remembering how the sound of my own feet used to make me feel important. Somebody else walks behind me. A man.

But instead of feeling important, like I used to, I feel a tightening in the pit of my stomach. Going up. Of course. Literally and metaphorically. The man steps into the lift with me and we stand there, a foot apart. Whereas before, when I used to do this every day, I’d have felt a kinship with this person I didn’t even know, I’d have been vaguely impressed by him and would have wondered if he made as much money as I did, but now that a couple of years and a shift in priorities have distanced me from the corporate rat-race, I feel only pity for him.

I remember, as I stand here, with the lift climbing through floors, that I once went up, didn’t I? Up quite far actually, and quite fast in my career. But then, one day, I went down. Or, rather, I got sent down with a security guard who had orders to escort me off the premises. I’ve always thought it interesting how when they fire you they manage to make you feel a criminal instead of a victim.

We stop on the eighteenth floor. The doors open. The man puts a hand in his pants pockets and steps off.

I’ve often thought you have to be born to the corporate elite. Something has to drive you, beyond the money and the power and the deals. Nobody just kills themselves so they can drive around Vancouver in a brand-new Mercedes. And whatever that gene is, I guess it’s missing in me.

Ping. We’re at the thirty-third. My heart rate’s up; I hear it pound in my ears. The doors slowly slide open. My hands feel clammy, a sweat breaks out down my back. Then a thought strikes me. If the biggest rush I got from knowing I’d landed this interview was finding a shirt, a jacket, a pair of pants, and a pair of shoes I can barely walk in—a whole ‘business’ identity that I didn’t even come up with on my own, I copied it off some girl I saw ten minutes previously in a coffee shop—shouldn’t that be telling me something? If I inwardly groaned when I scoured the pages of
Marketing
magazine because it was all so boring to me, shouldn’t that be telling me something too?

The scene that appears before my eyes is all too familiar. Elevator doors open out into a vast marble and stainless steel reception, behind which is a designer maize of glass offices filled with exotic plants and exotic people and furniture that looks too ‘artsy’ to be comfortable. The women are all gorgeous, it’s almost unfair that they’d also have a brain. But they do. They’d have to, to work here. The men are good-looking too, and highly game-playing. A young guy in jeans and a T-shirt walks past reception, kicking around a football. He’s probably trying to come up with the latest big campaign slogan for Honda. Because the creative people in advertising agencies get to dress casually and kick footballs around the office and call it work.

A pretty but semi-witless ‘receptionist’ smiles at my arrival. She’s smiling too keenly, which means she’s new. Which means she’s there because somebody’s told her you have to start at the bottom, that she’ll work her way up. But the only ‘working your way up’ that will get done as far as she’s concerned will be by some thinks-he’s-a-hotshot creative director who will work his way up her, with promises he would be in the position to keep, but of course he won’t. She’ll get screwed, used, and then she’ll leave. And she’ll look in the mirror and then she’ll think maybe I should have gone to college.

Jervais Ladner’s logo is blasted across the front of the desk.

I want to throw up.

The pretty, poor girl who doesn’t know what she’s got coming, smiles at me. I smile back. My heart’s hammering so fast I’m sure she must hear it. I reach out a shaky arm and press the G button. The doors slowly close, eventually cutting off our phoney expressions. The elevator pings when we reach the bottom. The black concierge smiles at me and says ‘have a nice day.’

I pass through the revolving doors, out into the fresh air and late afternoon sunshine. I’m shaking. But it’s a good shaking.

Have a nice day, he said.

Yeah. I think I will.

There are three of us ‘new volunteers’ and the same number of Team Coordinators, in the tiny, airless, white-walled room on the second floor of the Epilepsy Canada building. There’s Kye, an extremely ‘Brad Pitt’, twenty-something Physical-Education teacher who watched a kid take a seizure after a game of football. ‘I stood there with about ten other kids, and watched him thrash around and turn blue,’ he tells us, twiddling his pen. ‘I thought he was going to die. We all did. A few of his team-mates started crying… I didn’t know what to do.’ He quickly catches my eye then looks around the table at the rest of the group. ‘I think our schools need to know more about epilepsy. I’d like to help in some way.’

Rhonda goes next. Rhonda is a twenty-four-year-old black, epileptic law student who said she’d like to get involved in mentoring young people with the disability. ‘I had it growing up, but I was lucky coz I grew out of it. But you never forget what it was like living with it… everybody else was fit and healthy, then there was you…’ She knits her brows, as though she’s perplexed. ‘I used to take about three grand mals a week. They couldn’t control it with meds. My seizures were all everybody focused on, because it was hard not to. Your family… your friends… you feel like you’re not the same as them. That you can’t achieve what they will.’ She sniggers. ‘I was out to prove them all wrong. I said, I’m going to show them.’ She shrugs. ‘But that’s just me. Not every kid with epilepsy is going to be like me, are they?’

Then there’s moi. About ten pairs of eyes focus on me when it’s my turn to address the room and tell the Team, and the other volunteers, why I have come here.

‘My name is Angela Chapman,’ I start out. ‘I don’t have epilepsy.’

‘Hello Angela Chapman,’ one of the older Team members says, jokingly. There are a few titters. This lightens me. ‘My background is in major advertising agencies managing brand development for such clients as Kraft Canada, and Yves Veggie Cuisine, to name two. But my present role is as Principal of
Write Strategies
…’ here goes the bullshit… ‘a company that provides writing consultancy services to corporate clients in Vancouver…’ I don’t mention that I’ve just done something either brave or very mad and quit the only crappy bit of employment I had, and am now in fact entirely jobless, given that
Write Strategies
—this company I’m supposedly the boss of—hasn’t earned me a bean, because, really, it doesn’t quite exist. But so far they look like they’re buying it. ‘I coach business executives of all levels to more effectively communicate on the page—everything from internal emails to reports, speeches and presentations.’