Architects Are Here (21 page)

There were photos of us and it looked, she said, like we’d kept moving house.

Fields of maple turned into malls, schools imploded for automotive showrooms. So Irene sold the house one winter while Arnold was in Red Deer and moved down into our retro neighbourhood, Roncesvalles, where she could at least see some history and attach herself to a big park. She stripped the house of all its furnishings and sold them in the paper and had the Salvation Army pick up the rest. Arnold had given her a vibrator. You can’t really give it to the Goodwill like the sheets. So she left it in the house.

Her mother was Ukrainian and the Polish area felt like her mother, but Arnold never liked it and when he came home he stayed in a hotel and she went to visit him.

For a moment we both realized we were in Arnold’s hotel, and I half expected him to appear perhaps to freshen our drinks.

Then she got a letter.

She caught the attention of the bartender and I realized this was a big deal coming now and she needed a stepping stone into the depth of it.

How excited he was, Irene said. Arnold had fallen in love with a woman at work, a woman they’d once had over, her and her husband. The letter didnt literally say Arnold was excited, in fact he wrote about how sorry he was, but Irene could tell in the enthusiasm and urgency that he was excited, if a little guilty. It was an admission that avoided both deceit and distrust.

So that was it. Irene was burning a letter on her back step when a corner floated away and slipped through a crack in the siding. She felt the whip of light flow into the apartment and a murmur of hoses expanding and she had her bare shoulder against the brick footing of the basement and that’s what protected her, well all the effort went north, went out of the top, went through our apartment.

We drank and the light outside became darker than the bar. I was drinking with Irene Loudermilk, homeless and abandoned and we both had the sense to laugh at that. I’m not that attracted to you, she said, but I wouldnt say no if you wanted to come to my room and compare it to yours.

I must have told her about Nell. Though I didnt recall telling her, and then I remembered Irene saying we argued.

We lay on her bed and it was the exact set-up as my room, in reverse. So our headboards were adjacent. We were both old enough to take pleasure in an embrace without being nervous. We lay on her bed and she opened the mini bar and poured us some mini drinks and we lay there and I closed my eyes and listened to the traffic flow down King Street. Then we made another assault on the mini bar and we drank standing up, sort of pointing at each other with our shoulders and listening to the street. The streetcars were having a hard time making the tight turn into their depot, it required a lot of friction on the track. One could hardly believe steel to be so resilient. We didnt think to open the cupboard doors to watch television, at least it never occurred to me. I could hear Irene’s drink doing work around her lips, the clink of teeth. When I heard that I turned and kissed a part of her body, then I fell asleep with my clothes on. Though I did not know I had fallen asleep. I was thinking about Nell and where she was gone. I thought about Vegas. That was where she had met David again. I turned into a bird that watched Nell at thirty feet. I was in a desert with Nell walking along Highway 93, a dirt road just east of the Nevada Test Site. This is a story she had told me about how she had met David. A truck from the Moapa Indian Reservation had slowed past her and heaved over.

Where you headed.

Nell:Vegas.

He was trucking gauges, oxygen tanks and flippers.

Youve got scuba gear, she said. In the desert.

You never know, he said.

They drove into Las Vegas. He had grown up admiring Jacques Cousteau, or perhaps he was a grandson, a descendant who had come out of the oceans to live on dry land but still carried the apparatus of his origins. Nell had wanted to see how far she could get away from Vegas just thumbing but then had grown tired of it and thumbed back. She had a conference to attend. The man didnt think that was unusual. He looked like he’d seen a lot of things, and that’s why he was prepared for all eventualities, dry or wet.

They drove into the Bellagio and he parked up on a concrete ramp beside a thick palm tree. He parked with the windshield in the shade. The fountains were silent. They were not working. They got out and he stripped to his shorts. He dragged out a tub which had his regulator and buoyancy compensator vest and flippers. Can you help me with this tank, he said. She tilted the tank on the open tailgate and he crouched and slipped it on. Turn that nozzle a half turn, he said. And he leaned on her shoulder for support as he slipped his feet into the flippers. These are dainty manoeuvres. He walked backwards to the edge of the pool and then bent his knees and fell over into the water and twisted himself down with a little shrug of his hips. He was going deep, a pulse of bubbles distorted the surface and when they calmed he was gone. Nell waited but he did not come back.

She had gone into the conference, the cool wave of air conditioning, and received her name tag and album of papers. The name tags were spread alphabetically over two desks and she saw David Twombly’s name below hers. There was a plenary session that lasted two hours. They heard of the new police security, Taser technology and CCT monitors. The world, it seemed, was out to get you and you had to be diligent. Three hours later she found him. He had been looking for her. He had seen her name in the schedule. They went outside and quickly put on sunglasses. Out here in Vegas, why not give in to a little thing. Men dressed as gorillas pitched dinner coupons at them, there were at least three heavyweight champions of the world. Bullfighters and pigmies. It seemed everyone was dressed up as someone outrageous, asking you to come to dinner for ten percent off. They leaned over the railing in the bright four oclock sun and stared at the malfunctioning fountain. Then an object, blurred, rising in the pool. He lifted a wrench over his head. Hey, David said. And the frogman gave him the okay. He was negotiating the cement stairs. His tank clanked against the side. Hey you, David said. And made for him. Nell had to run after David, and explain.

I
WOKE UP
and Irene Loudermilk was under the covers. She had undressed and was trying to pull more over herself except my weight was stopping it all. So I got up and this made my jaw thump, and I thought of the word
thrombosis
. I looked at Irene and her eyes were open. Her eyes had no expectation. She was taking care of herself.

If the insurance company hears about this, I said, we’ll lose one of the rooms.

You better go in and ruffle your sheets.

I went in and messed up my bed. What a strange thing to do.

Then I went back to Irene’s room. I had to knock as the door had sprung shut. Irene came up to the shut door and said, Look I have to shave a sweater.

Okay, I said. I realized she was reasonable, what the hell was I thinking. And I felt awful for the things I had done with Irene and the lack of fear I had in wrecking things. But then I remembered that I was wronged, that I had every right to be bad if I wanted, though in fact I’d behaved well. My gum was inflamed and I looked for the cannabis spray but that was gone now in the fire and I had to make do with headache pills.

I had a shower and I grated an aspirin over my back teeth. I chucked Toby under the chin and did some arm curls with the gold. I spend perhaps three nights a year in a hotel, so I’m up for enjoying the experience. This one had a mirror on an expandable arm that magnified your face. My face looked horrendous and my jaw was puffy. So I flattened the mirror and draped a hand towel over it.

I checked the rate for local calls and it was a dollar twenty-five, so I went down to the lobby and used a payphone. There was a woman there with a boy watching a cop show on TV. The boy looked like he’d never seen TV before. He was talking excitedly about it and she said to him, Use your indoor voice.

David, I said, I’m all for getting out of here today.

My friend let us drive our troubles away.

I hung up and the boy had turned from the TV to ask his mother a question.

Mother: Throw them in jail is an expression, honey. They dont really throw them in jail.

I
TOOK A TAXI
to David’s and he was waiting there in the road, checking his stocks on his pebble. He jumped in. We kept going up to Jane and Finch and I saw him wince. He was not used to these areas of Toronto. The wide roads with narrow sidewalks and no trees. Noisy and dusty. What kind of car, he said. I didnt want to tell him. I wanted to see his face. He had this look now. Like he was being patient, but also that he was game. It was the same look when he flipped through my English comic books. How did anyone find black and white entertaining. But he did flick through the comics. He was willing to look at the world my way. For ten minutes.

We walked over to the Matador. He was walking like he was out on a day pass. Then he put up his arms in mock surrender.

I’m not driving across Canada in that, officer.

We’re only driving across half of Canada.

There’s a van for sale in the Loblaws parking lot, David said. A silver van with a handicapped licence. We could sleep in it.

David this baby can move.

Dont I know it, he said.

And then he thought about it. We both knelt at the grille and were impressed. You want to return to something in the past, he said.

It’s not Zac’s car, I said. It’s a genuine LAPD ghost car.

It’s Zac’s car. With an oil leak.

I knew the oil leak wasnt from worn piston rings. I was keeping that from Alice Stebbins. Usually I’m a very honest person, but when car sales are involved, I chisel. It was just a clogged crankcase ventilation system. The PCV valve. It would cost thirty-two dollars to fix.

Alice Stebbins came out and so too did her mother.

My husband, the mother said, he loved this car. He took such care of it. He made sure of all the inspections and he changed the oil regularly and he waxed it every Saturday afternoon before the ballgame.

Alice was jangling the keys. She was carrying a portable radio with a cigarette lighter adaptor cable. She said, You have to kiss me. You have to hug me and give me a nice kiss.

You got it, David said. And kissed her. She looked like she had a sweet mouth.

She’s all yours, she said.

Mrs Stebbins: Honor rotated the tires and he never drove it hard and he was careful even when he shut the doors.

Honor? Men are named Honor?

David got in and slammed shut the door. He rolled down the window and then started it up, the powerful low rumble of a V8. The mother leaned in through the open window and told David her husband treated the car like a member of the family.

Well all that, David said, is about to change.

W
E TOOK IT
for a test drive along Dupont and under the railroad overpass. It had one of those stock-car rear-view mirrors where you can see everything coming behind you. My god the suspension was rock-hard. But the power was strong, and in a parking lot David tried some sharp cornering and the steering was fine.

This car grew up in Los Angeles, David said.

Toronto is a lot like Los Angeles.

This car is the opposite of a time machine, he said. It’s a wayback machine.

David had once spent a month driving through Byelorussia in a Belaz truck. That’s what we want, he said, a Belaz truck. You could fix it with a hammer and a wrench.

We drove back to Alice Stebbins and signed the paperwork and I handed her a cheque for fifteen hundred dollars. I know people in garages and so Dave went home while I got Carl Thoms in Unit 6 to sign the emissions certificate. Carl stared at the Matador from fifty feet, whistled, and handed me my cleared inspection. I flipped the registration for sixty dollars and filled the tank until the pump clicked off the trigger on the nozzle. I took her in for an oil change and filter. I serviced the charcoal fuel vapour canister myself. I know what to spend on a car to get your money’s worth. I checked the tire pressure and was astonished to see the gauge pop up to eighty pounds. We were riding on four bombs. I let out, in total, a hundred and eighty pounds of air. And I drove away on suspension smooth as cream.

I
PACKED UP
Toby and my father’s wrench and the gold. I wedged Toby onto the shelf below the rear windshield. He looked insane. The gold I kept between my thighs. I couldnt think of a better place. I dropped off my last disc to Tessa. I said I was heading home for a little vacation. I told her about the fire.

That was your place. My god Gabe my god youre all right.

The whole apartment, Tessa. The works. A raccoon family was burnt due to a leak and a love letter. The
CUBA SÍ
billboard fell on our bed.

Tessa stood up and hugged me. For the second time in as many visits, Tessa Walcott had reached out to be affectionate. It was erratic and quick and she felt nice. It was good to be held and to bury my nose in her ear.

You need a place to crash.

I found a goose in the bathtub.

A live goose.

I mean it was in the bathroom.

That’s not a good omen.

What isnt.

A bird in the home. It’s supposed to be bad luck.

It’s the second bird that’s been in the house. There was a pigeon.

You are probably asking yourself if I have ever thought of Tessa Walcott. Guyanese by birth, raised in England, living here in Toronto. She’s twenty-eight, a narrow frame and she wears coffee-coloured pants with an overcoat and rubber boots, her hair clipped short, gold earrings. Married, no children. Here are the reasons I have not:

(1) She has flirted with me in only very small pulses.

(2) In three years, I have spent more than an hour with her on only two occasions.

(3) Her husband. I like him.

(4) Her husband. He big and strong.

(5) In Wyoming, I do not like to fantasize about women I know well.

I told Tessa I was at the Days Inn. I told her I couldnt do the work any longer. I said that it was a lark and now that my life was being shifted on me I had to stand my ground and solve the things that were within my range. I couldnt just be taking photographs of vehicles. Youre leaving us, she said. And she gave me a look that said she loved me. Those are the best looks, when people you know slightly give themselves over to you with a look. We’re all in it together, that look said.