Wilderness Tips (21 page)

In the eighties, things started to slide. Toronto was not so much fun any more. There were too many people, too many poor people. You could see them begging on the streets, which were clogged with fumes and cars. The cheap artists’ studios were torn down or converted to coy and upscale office space; the artists had migrated elsewhere. Whole streets were torn up or knocked down. The air was full of windblown grit.

People were dying. They were dying too early. One of Jane’s
clients, a man who owned an antique store, died almost overnight of bone cancer. Another, a woman who was an entertainment lawyer, was trying on a dress in a boutique and had a heart attack. She fell over and they called the ambulance, and she was dead on arrival. A theatrical producer died of
AIDS
, and a photographer; the lover of the photographer shot himself, either out of grief or because he knew he was next. A friend of a friend died of emphysema, another of viral pneumonia, another of hepatitis picked up on a tropical vacation, another of spinal meningitis. It was as if they had been weakened by some mysterious agent, a thing like a colourless gas, scentless and invisible, so that any germ that happened along could invade their bodies, take them over.

Jane began to notice news items of the kind she’d once skimmed over. Maple groves dying of acid rain, hormones in the beef, mercury in the fish, pesticides in the vegetables, poison sprayed on the fruit, God knows what in the drinking water. She subscribed to a bottled spring-water service and felt better for a few weeks, then read in the paper that it wouldn’t do her much good, because whatever it was had been seeping into everything. Each time you took a breath, you breathed some of it in. She thought about moving out of the city, then read about toxic dumps, radioactive waste, concealed here and there in the countryside and masked by the lush, deceitful green of waving trees.

Vincent has been dead for less than a year. He was not put into the permafrost or frozen in ice. He went into the Necropolis, the only Toronto cemetery of whose general ambience he approved; he got flower bulbs planted on top of him, by Jane and others. Mostly by Jane. Right now John Torrington, recently thawed after a hundred and fifty years, probably looks better than Vincent.

A week before Vincent’s forty-third birthday, Jane went to see him in the hospital. He was in for tests. Like fun he was. He was in
for the unspeakable, the unknown. He was in for a mutated virus that didn’t even have a name yet. It was creeping up his spine, and when it reached his brain it would kill him. It was not, as they said, responding to treatment. He was in for the duration.

It was white in his room, wintry. He lay packed in ice, for the pain. A white sheet wrapped him, his white thin feet poked out the bottom of it. They were so pale and cold. Jane took one look at him, laid out on ice like a salmon, and began to cry.

“Oh Vincent,” she said. “What will I do without you?” This sounded awful. It sounded like Jane and Vincent making fun, of obsolete books, obsolete movies, their obsolete mothers. It also sounded selfish: here she was, worrying about herself and her future, when Vincent was the one who was sick. But it was true. There would be a lot less to do, altogether, without Vincent.

Vincent gazed up at her; the shadows under his eyes were cavernous. “Lighten up,” he said, not very loudly, because he could not speak very loudly now. By this time she was sitting down, leaning forward; she was holding one of his hands. It was thin as the claw of a bird. “Who says I’m going to die?” He spent a moment considering this, revised it. “You’re right,” he said. “They got me. It was the Pod People from outer space. They said, All I want is your poddy.’ ”

Jane cried more. It was worse because he was trying to be funny. “But what
is
it?” she said. “Have they found out yet?”

Vincent smiled his ancient, jaunty smile, his smile of detachment, of amusement. There were his beautiful teeth, juvenile as ever. “Who knows?” he said. “It must have been something I ate.”

Jane sat with the tears running down her face. She felt desolate: left behind, stranded. Their mothers had finally caught up to them and been proven right. There were consequences after all; but they were the consequences to things you didn’t even know you’d done.

The scientists are back on the screen. They are excited, their earnest mouths are twitching, you could almost call them joyful. They know why John Torrington died; they know, at last, why the Franklin Expedition went so terribly wrong. They’ve snipped off pieces of John Torrington, a fingernail, a lock of hair, they’ve run them through machines and come out with the answers.

There is a shot of an old tin can, pulled open to show the seam. It looks like a bomb casing. A finger points: it was the tin cans that did it, a new invention back then, a new technology, the ultimate defence against starvation and scurvy. The Franklin Expedition was excellently provisioned with tin cans, stuffed full of meat and soup and soldered together with lead. The whole expedition got lead-poisoning. Nobody knew it. Nobody could taste it. It invaded their bones, their lungs, their brains, weakening them and confusing their thinking, so that at the end those that had not yet died in the ships set out in an idiotic trek across the stony, icy ground, pulling a lifeboat laden down with toothbrushes, soap, handkerchiefs, and slippers, useless pieces of junk. When they were found ten years later, they were skeletons in tattered coats, lying where they’d collapsed. They’d been heading back towards the ships. It was what they’d been eating that had killed them.

Jane switches off the television and goes into her kitchen – all white, done over the year before last, the outmoded butcher-block counters from the seventies torn out and carted away – to make herself some hot milk and rum. Then she decides against it; she won’t sleep anyway. Everything in here looks ownerless. Her toaster oven, so perfect for solo dining, her microwave for the vegetables, her espresso maker – they’re sitting around waiting for her departure, for this evening or forever, in order to assume their final, real appearances of purposeless objects adrift in the physical world. They might as well be pieces of an exploded spaceship orbiting the moon.

She thinks about Vincent’s apartment, so carefully arranged, filled with the beautiful or deliberately ugly possessions he once loved. She thinks about his closet, with its quirky particular outfits, empty now of his arms and legs. It has all been broken up now, sold, given away.

Increasingly the sidewalk that runs past her house is cluttered with plastic drinking cups, crumpled soft-drink cans, used take-out plates. She picks them up, clears them away, but they appear again overnight, like a trail left by an army on the march or by the fleeing residents of a city under bombardment, discarding the objects that were once thought essential but are now too heavy to carry.

I
am gaining weight. I’m not getting bigger, only heavier. This doesn’t show up on the scales: technically, I’m the same. My clothes still fit, so it isn’t size, what they tell you about fat taking up more space than muscle. The heaviness I feel is in the energy I burn up getting myself around: along the sidewalk, up the stairs, through the day. It’s the pressure on my feet. It’s a density of the cells, as if I’ve been drinking heavy metals. Nothing you can measure, although there are the usual nubbins of flesh that must be firmed, roped in, worked off.
Worked
. It’s all getting to be too much work.

Some days, I think I’m not going to make it. I will have a hot flash, a car crash. I will have a heart attack. I will jump out the window.

This is what I’m thinking as I look at the man. He’s a rich man, that goes without saying: if he weren’t rich, neither of us would be here. He has excess money, and I’m trying to get some of it out of him. Not for myself; I’m doing nicely, thank you. For what we used to call charity and now call good causes. To be precise, a shelter for battered women. Molly’s Place, it’s called. It’s named after a lawyer who was murdered by her husband, with a claw hammer. He was the
kind of man who was good with tools. He had a workbench in the cellar. The lathe, the vise, the buzz saw, the works.

I wonder if this other man, sitting so cautiously across the tablecloth from me, has a workbench in the cellar too. He doesn’t have the hands for it. No calluses or little nicks. I don’t tell him about the claw hammer, or about the arms and legs hidden here and there around the province, in culverts, in wooded glades, like Easter eggs or the clues in some grotesque treasure hunt. I know how easily frightened such men can be by such possibilities. Real blood, the kind that cries out to you from the ground.

We’ve been through the ordering, which involved the rueful production of the reading glasses, by both of us, for the scanning of the ornate menu. We have at least one thing in common: our eyes are going. Now I smile at him and twiddle the stem of my wineglass, and lie judiciously. This isn’t even my thing, I tell him. I got sucked into it because I have a hard time saying no. I’m doing it for a friend. This is true enough: Molly was a friend.

He smiles and relaxes.
Good
, he’s thinking. I am not one of those earnest women, the kind who lecture and scold and open their own car doors. He’s right, it’s not my style. But he could have figured that out from my shoes: women like that do not wear shoes like this. I am not, in a word,
strident
, and his instinct in asking me to lunch has been justified.

This man has a name, of course. His name is Charles. He’s already said “Call me Charles.” Who knows what further delights await me? “Chuck” may lie ahead, or “Charlie.”
Charlie is my darling. Chuck, you big hunk
. I think I’ll stick with Charles.

The appetizers arrive, leek soup for him, a salad for me, endive with apples and walnuts, veiled with a light dressing, as the menu puts it.
Veiled
. So much for brides. The waiter is another out-of-work actor, but his grace and charm are lost on Charles, who does not reply when ordered to enjoy his meal.

“Cheers,” says Charles, lifting his glass. He’s already said this once, when the wine appeared. Heavy going. What are the odds I can get through this lunch without any mention of the bottom line?

Charles is about to tell a joke. The symptoms are all there: the slight reddening, the twitch of the jaw muscle, the crinkling around the eyes.

“What’s brown and white and looks good on a lawyer?”

I’ve heard it. “I’ll bite. What?”

“A pit bull.”

“Oh, that’s terrible. Oh, you are awful.”

Charles allows his mouth a small semicircular smile. Then, apologetically: “I didn’t mean woman lawyers, of course.”

“I don’t practise any more. I’m in business, remember?” But maybe he meant Molly.

Would Molly have found this joke funny? Probably. Certainly, at first. When we were in law school, working our little butts off because we knew we had to be twice as good as the men to end up less than the same, we used to go out for coffee breaks and kill ourselves laughing, making up silly meanings for the things we got called by the guys. Or women in general got called: but we knew they meant us.

“Strident
. A brand of medicated toothpick used in the treatment of gum disease.”

“Okay!
Shrill
. As in the Greater Shrill. A sharp-beaked shorebird native to the coasts of …”

“California? Yes.
Hysteria?”

“A sickly scented flowering vine that climbs all over Southern mansions.
Pushy?”

“Pushy. That’s a hard one. Rude word pertaining to female anatomy, uttered by drunk while making a pass?”

“Too obvious. How about a large, soft velvet cushion …”

“Pink or mauve …”

“Used for reclining on the floor, while …”

“While watching afternoon soaps,” I finished, not satisfied. There should be something better for
pushy
.

Molly was pushy. Or you could call it determined. She had to be, she was so short. She was like a scrappy little urchin, big eyes, bangs over the forehead, tough little chin she’d stick out when she got mad. She was not from a good home. She’d made it on brains. Neither was I, so did I; but it affected us differently. I, for instance, was tidy and had a dirt phobia. Molly had a cat named Catty, a stray, of course. They lived in cheerful squalor. Or not squalor: disorder. I couldn’t have stood it myself, but I liked it in her. She made the messes I wouldn’t allow myself to make. Chaos by proxy.

Molly and I had big ideas, then. We were going to change things. We were going to break the code, circumvent the old boys’ network, show that women could do it, whatever it might be. We were going to take on the system, get better divorce settlements, root for equal pay. We wanted justice and fair play. We thought that was what the law was for.

We were brave but we had it backwards. We didn’t know you had to begin with the judges.

But Molly didn’t hate men. With men, Molly was a toad-kisser. She thought any toad could be turned into a prince if he was only kissed enough, by her. I was different. I knew a toad was a toad and would remain so. The thing was to find the most congenial among the toads and learn to appreciate their finer points. You had to develop an eye for warts.