Architects Are Here (12 page)

Me: Is she with that one?

That one, David said, works for United Architects.

United Architects, I said, in a tone that meant nothing to me.

They were the ones, David explained, with those fabulous towers for New York.

Me:The ones that were never built.

We all liked that design.

It had bent knees, I said. It looked like five people needing to pee.

I would have to break the bond of the hands of that man. He had big hands for a man who worked on a keyboard. As I considered his genetic gift I felt my mouth crack in half, as if my skull had split open and I reeled back with the shock and my tongue collected a tooth, I spat out a tooth and it was black, the nub of a black tooth and of course I had a mouth cancer, I was doomed. My life was over and it was a good life. I’m an easy man to give up the spirit.

David held up my black tooth. An olive pit, he said.

I wanted to drive someone in the liver, but thank god. Then David said, They are wearing bras that turn tits into tennis balls.

His voice altered the focus in my eyes. No, it was the tears from the pain of cracking my tooth on an olive pit. She was gone now. A woman was disappearing and my head was full of a blurry David Twombly. He added more information: Sok Hoon was taking their son, Owen, and going to live in Montreal.

I’m sorry Dave I’m dying here. I just broke a tooth.

Which did not seem to Dave like I was helping him. I guess he noticed me wiping my eyes and rubbing my jaw. Can I be myself with you, he said.

I assured him he could.

He said, They are shaving. The young ones are shaving everything off.

He was ignoring me and so I left him to feel sorry for himself. I searched for a mirror to check out my injury. I needed to spit in a sink and then find Nell. In this way I was not there for David Twombly. I did not notice, really, that Sok Hoon and David were at opposite ends of a photograph of a road disappearing to the horizon. David was in the deep background, chained into the landscape, whereas Sok Hoon had every choice available to her. She was busting out of the frame.

I ventured upstairs to find an available bathroom. I passed the two framed maps David loved, one of Manhattan and the other of Glover Island. They were the same size, these islands, twenty miles long and two miles broad. One with the most densely populated real estate on the continent, the other where not a soul lived.

In the mirror I checked my mouth and all seemed sturdy. I swivelled a flank of mirror to light up my molars. A prescription bottle on the shelf behind and I picked it up and read that it was an antidepressant. Sok Hoon, I thought, but then saw the name. Which was another surprise and yet it is hard to remain forever surprised. Once a shock is received we get used to it.

I scanned about for Nell again. For her mirthful hair. And I realized then that I had created a fanciful projection, using my Wyoming, which is a little game I play with myself. The inner self unspools and I catch that self taking over my body.

My mouth was ginger, the tooth felt both nervous and solid. I returned with drinks. And there was Nell, bending her knee at the side of David’s leg, a leg I now realized was artificially exuberant, staving off a desire to lie down and be depressed.

She’s looking for a place to live, David said. I was thinking you.

Yes, Nell said. You were the squash buddy.

Me:You walked up to me in the cafeteria once and sat with me and said why do you look like youve just gotten out of bed.

Yes, she said, that was my way of flirting.

Isnt it strange, David said, the way the world touches back on itself.

Nell’s eyes narrowed as she tried to see me, almost eighteen years ago, walking through Corner Brook. Eighteen years—it was part of a larger realization we’d all been having that we were now of an age where peers were grand enough to have huge backstories. There was something enjoyable in our wonky connection, and we live in a time when all sorts of coincidences are celebrated. The past is pushed into our eyes.

She was working for IKW and needed someplace to stay. A sublet for the summer would be ideal. We went out to the dark garden and a joint was passed around, rolled in a paper that had a wire in it, so you could bend down the wire as a roach clip. Her mouth had these little folds on either side of it that indicated she was a happy person. Nell liked to laugh. The light from the party seemed to make the green shoots of perennials glow, and there were many of them, like an audience in a dark theatre. Then I was left alone with Nell. Something moved in behind a dark shrub—David’s old dog, Wolf, was arranging foliage with his nose. I might have done the same. It was a warm night.

I looked at Nell’s face as she watched Wolf and I remembered the few times I’d seen her from such a long time ago. I realized she had the same face, she hadnt changed. She had made an impression and yet I had not thought of her in all the years since. Behind us the buzz of the party, a kitchen chair pulled out as if clearing its throat, the intense recessed lighting, a slice of another room down the yellow hall, the bend of a woman’s elbow in the front porch, collecting a light jacket. If you blasted through that elbow, you’d see the open door, guests rummaging for keys, the quarter panel of David Twombly’s hearty Land Rover—the car Sok Hoon would load up and buckle Owen into and drive to Montreal leaving David with the dog, a dog that will have to be put down in six months, and then a deep funnel of night (David’s Toronto house is on a corner), and far away, perhaps a thousand feet down, a red and silver Dundas streetcar slips across an intersection, so sly and distant you could believe it was an inner gear of clockwork shifting, some packed-in-grease mechanism to allow the course of events to be manipulated, if you were prone to believing the world was a contrived stage propped up to make you think all stimuli were natural. I was, of course, slightly stoned.

You had a job, I said, at the mall in Corner Brook at a photo developing shop.

That was my first real job.

I passed by and you reeled me in with your finger. Stand there, you said. Just there. And you took a picture of me with a machine on a table.

That was the second method I had for flirting.

The machine had hummed and out of a dot matrix printer unpeeled a sheet with my picture, a pixelated image in black and white, it was as if someone had made my face on a typewriter. I still have it.

I could feel the heat off her face. We stared out into the harder night and I knew now that no one was left inside except for the caterers and David and Sok Hoon. Sok Hoon was probably in bed. Someone had turned up the music, it was religious music. Nell was in Toronto after leaving Richard Text, she said, her husband in Santa Fe. I was going home to St John’s for the summer and I was wondering about that. I could sense the profile of Nell’s face in the periphery. Very quickly, a few clouds converged and caused a short, tremendous thunder that made the dog afraid.

Do you want to change anything, Nell said.

I turned and faced her. I think, every day, about Leonard Woolf’s caveat about his wife’s journals—that Virginia was happy and fun loving, but only wrote in her diary when she was depressed.

Youre a loving person, she said.

She was filling me up. She was pouring fuel into me. Do you want to see a sublet, I said.

And we walked out of David’s, which was empty now except for the three caterers stacking their stainless steel tureens in crates and collecting wine glasses upside down between their fingers. David was in the front room, alone, with the stereo cranked to nine. He was listening to Mahalia Jackson. David was the least religious person I knew, but in the dark hours he was devoted to Mahalia Jackson, a woman who refused to sing anything but gospel. We left him to Mahalia, he was in good hands, and we took a cab over to my apartment. We could still hear the music when I closed the cab door and the massive chassis jerked away from the curb.

THREE

T
HANKS FOR HAVING ME OVER
.

Youre welcome.

That was nice.

I like doing nice things.

It’s a nice apartment.

We stared at the dark ceiling and Nell held me with an affection I knew belonged to couples who have been together a long time.

Nell:You lead a sort of retro life.

I believe, I said, the past is coming back.

This is your fault, Nell said, and tomorrow morning it’s still going to be your fault.

The dimple in the nails of her thumbs, something she said only women get. I was holding both of her hands like they were a pair of leather gloves.

So are you happy enough, I said. Just to bump into each other like this.

She thought about that. I was glad to know she could think about it. It was giving my question the correct amount of consideration. Nell Tarkington was honest and could not be criticized.

Me: Because I’ll be coming back in a few months.

I dont think, Nell said, I’m capable of anything more.

Yeah.

She nudged her nose into my neck. Because.

Yeah I know. I’m just gonna lie here a bit more and pretend we love each other.

For some reason the immense loneliness of the world had descended upon us, and we were little animals that had found shelter, but a shelter neither of us thought could last. We lay there and she looked at her watch. I should be going, she said.

If you want there’s a couch. I mean, I could sleep on the couch.

She thought about that and said she wouldnt put me out, that she would sleep on the couch. I thought of her asleep there. In the morning light. When youre in your thirties you get to say things like this. Cavalier, risky, betting on the final loves possible, or loves that might have enough long haul in them for you to be old and witness opinions melt and grow with time. Nell was a good woman. She was sexy and funny and smart. She knew two and a half languages.

I got up and rinsed out the percolator and let the water run and brushed my teeth. I made coffee.

I’m going to make like a dog, I said, and fetch the paper.

Okay, she said.

She said okay into my pillow on the couch. My god she is so comfortable there. She is no trouble.

I almost fell down the stairs. It would have killed me. The paper and eggs and some bread. I did this purchase with the film of the night before stretched over my skin. I was veneered in the debauch and the tension of seeing Nell Tarkington, a woman who had been David’s father’s lover. I shunted back to the apartment with the resignation of a hangover. It was not a good life, but all other lives were worse.

The percolator wheezed and Nell would not eat a poached egg, just some jam on the toast. We shared the paper and she didnt like doing things like this, sharing the paper over toast, because she felt so many people in big cities—she couldnt do it without feeling the cliché. It was the notion of an aftermath. What one is left with. The action of the night before was marvellous, it was muscular and eventful and she loved being witnessed and interesting. But this is what it got her. A morning with a man she could not love, winding up the ritual with coffee and the paper. But I was no cliché. I refused it as well. I was in the same boat and had as much experience of these moments as she did. So that was interesting. I put no pressure on her. It wasnt my acquiescing to her unspoken wish, I wanted her to go.

Nell was putting on her top. She whipped her head forward to bare her neck and tie the top behind her neck, with a shoelace bow. Thick black hair, that she ties back. Neither of us says I love you, but we both see it heavy in our eyes, though a flexing in the eyebrow says this is ridiculous. I mean, one night.

I didnt even say I’ll call you. She put on her wool coat, the kind of wool they wear in warm countries, and kissed me. She was mature and knew all about me. She was through in her life with wasting years on reluctant men.

I
ATE SOME LEFTOVER MEAT
and then the phone rang. It was Nell, and so I said Hey! as if I hadnt heard from her in a hundred years. She had gone to work and then located my crumpled number in her pocket. Yes the apartment, I sublet it while I’m in Newfoundland. Okay, she said, I’ll come and look at it.

Havent you seen it.

I wasnt paying that much attention to the apartment. And what I’m saying is, you should invite me to lunch.

And in twenty minutes she was inside my apartment again.

She said, You moved the table.

What are you a detective?

I have forensic training.

I like to shift things around. I showed her the leather chair and how, if you sit in it and then get up, it talks to you. See, I said, what did it say.

Nell: It said, How about a tuna sandwich.

We ate and I told her how I had come to Toronto after having my heart broken.

Sometimes, Nell said, I like to throw myself against the fridge in false tears. When a man is watching. For instance that man I was with last night.

The man from United Architects.

But if I’m on my own, she said, I’ll sit there, my knees touching, and stare at the edge of a chair.

That is when she told me about her walk home that morning. She had strolled along the inside routes to back-yard garages, thinking about her husband, Richard Text, and her new date from United Architects. Brainy men, she said. She followed the interior small streets until they spilled onto Queen Street and hailed a cab. She found the hotel IKW was paying for and took the stairs to cry unabashedly, almost joyously, on her made bed.

Youre working with David, I said.

Toronto feels like a lonely city, she said.

She told me about her last goodbye to her husband. She was a woman who had a box of tissues in every room. Then she realized I might know Richard Text. For she had met him in Corner Brook.

Nell: He was the computer instructor.

Yes, I said. I might have met him. Or seen him in the halls. I was only there for the one term.

They had married, she said, to help each other out. It was professionally important for him to be married, and it was her way into the States.