Architects Are Here (26 page)

L
ARS BREATHED IN SLOWLY
and then exhaled, like he was drinking coffee. They said they’d be here for dinner but now it was midnight. It was the one thing he’d been waiting for. Last week he had come to the end of it. He had thought of a way with a hose through the back window. Shut the porch door with a towel under it and turn the car on, thirty minutes should do it. Then Gabriel English had called him and it cheered him. He had a friend. But they were late and there was nothing to do now, with a supper cooked and beds made for the men upstairs. He was on the porch with a beer and his breath had a shiver in it. He could bark like a dog he was that lonely and there was no reservoir left to muster a defence against loneliness. Then a car with the slowing sound of looking for an address.

Gabe had not heard about Lars Pony’s wife. How men, absent from day-to-day scrutiny, can change on you. Gabriel had been his friend at
Auto Trader
. Lars had taught him how to take pictures, the simple questions you asked and how to get out of the clutches of some people who apparently sold their cars in order to have someone to talk to. Now I’m the one who has clutches, Lars thought.

They sat there outside on his step, and Lars was good for a couple of beers, and sometimes that’s all you can ask of a wounded, older friend. Lars Pony had the base of his fingers wrapped in clean gauze, a gauze that seemed to be the exposed limit of a dressing that was keeping his frame together.

You want chicken.

We’re good Lars.

Dave was sensitive to a trouble in the air but at the same time not impressed. He took out his pebble, I’m going to call Sok Hoon.

Gabe: Do you have email?

He had blurted it out and he knew it was selfish. Lars let Gabriel check his mail on his wife’s computer. They were using him for his communication devices. When was the last time someone had called him. Well, it was Gabe, a week ago. There was energy in Gabriel’s focus at the computer. Lars watched him as he looked to see if anyone cared if he was alive. There was desire to live in Gabe. He stared at the screen until it refreshed itself and the word
Ntark
leapt at him in the newness of its bold lettering, a new message for Gabriel. It was an attachment. It’s Nell’s typing, Gabriel said, all caps:
SORRY FOR CHEWING YOU OUT LIKE A SLIPPER
. Nell had drawn a dog and a moccasin (she had that kind of software). Chewed me out? The dog’s tail was twitching. Twitch marks, who came up with those? Nell’s illustrations looked like they were done by someone who’s had brain damage.

David came in and Gabriel read it aloud. He realized he was the dog. Are you sorry for chewing me out like a slipper.

David: Does it say where she is.

I dont know how to look for that.

David keyed in some commands and came up with a server list that traced the email to Los Alamos.

That’s where Richard lives, he said.

I
EXTENDED MY WYOMING
and thought of Los Alamos. Where they did not wear labcoats. They wore turtlenecks in winter, Nell said once, when we were tired of the Toronto winter. And now in the bloom of summer, short sleeves and golf pants and soft shoes with no laces. Nell had told me that. She often described what people wore in a given climate or country. They wore two ID tags, one on the shirt pocket and another on a retractable cord at the hip. The doors recorded when people entered and left. Richard Text was peeling off neoprene gloves when he got the call, and he swiped his hip card to accept the call. He had the pale skin of someone indoors. They want me when. For how long. For who. Okay he wants to make a tour of the plant or does he want to interact with the plant. That’s the Bethlehem facility with the cold reactor, that’s the one we’re talking about? I can oversee that.

FIVE

S
O SHE’S BACK
with Richard.

David: And Richard’s in New Hampshire with my sister.

Is that a common event?

Gabe no event is now uncommon.

We left the dog with Lars Pony. The dog had a pink neck from the temporary rope. Dye.

You boys have rooms upstairs you can use.

David:We have people waiting on us, Lars.

Do I have to keep her chained on.

You could bring her into the house.

Lars looked at her. No she dont even want to look at the house.

Dave’s son is allergic to dogs, I said. That was our excuse for dropping in on Lars and our polite method of moving on. We’ll call on you, Lars. Sok Hoon had said come on over she was having a party for the Prince of Wales.

What’s his name, Lars said.

The Prince of Wales?

The dog’s name.

She doesnt have a name.

David:The dog’s name is Bucephalus.

So you’ll come by.

We’ll visit.

Bucephalus! It made me laugh but then I wondered if we were being bad. Was it wrong of us to drop off a dog and leave. But I could tell David wasnt curious about Lars, and during hours of exhaustion I cave to David’s level of attention to the world, even though that attention is sometimes elitist.

The Prince of Wales. He was involved because of the fabric that covers water. He likes things like that. He was winding down a minor Canadian visit.

W
E DROVE
into NDG and ended up opposite a small private French school. We parked on the road. In Sok Hoon’s driveway stood the black Land Rover. Beside it a security car with two armed men. A woman from the party was throwing rose petals onto their laps and the driver was pressing the button to wind up his window. It was about one in the morning, the front door wide open and music, as if music had opened the front door.

You sure this is it.

This, David said, is the exact address of my ex-wife.

He was admiring the moxie of Sok Hoon to create a new life.

Should we just leave everything in the car.

Let’s risk it.

We had to talk to the men to get in. They were RCMP and they were impressed when David said the Land Rover was the same one Osama bin Laden uses. The men were wearing headsets and took a digital picture of us. They made a copy on a printer in the back of the security car and laid it on a stack in the back seat. Then they got out to look at us and we all walked over to the Land Rover. There was technology in the dash.

This used to be my Rover, Dave said to me. As though they were deaf or new speakers of English. There is something about the British speaking English that makes them sound now like it’s a second language to them. I own this house, David said, with Sok Hoon. This Victorian with pressure-treated weave fence.

And he stared at it as if he did own it, but I knew that he probably didnt.

Enjoy yourselves, the RCMP said.

David looked at the front of the house.

Is the Prince of Wales actually present in the house?

The shorter man held up a piece of machinery and looked at it. He’s thirty-two feet southeast of us, he said. Perhaps the Prince wears a chip, like a dog.

We ploughed through glamour, through tinsel and lights and flamboyant scooped numbers. We brushed our way out of the front hall and David found Sok Hoon on the lap of a woman in a green sleeveless gown. This was Allegra Campinghorst. Allegra, I said. And introduced myself. He was the one, David said, who helped write those letters.

Then you need a glass of whisky, Allegra said. And it was the voice. It was her radio voice.

She helped us find glasses above the breadbox and poured out some whisky. Her gown was ridiculous in the crush, but it was a gown made from insects, she said. It was a fabric woven of insects and wood. Well, cellulose.

Tiny desserts floated by. Several millionaires looked at their watches—they were visiting millionaires, as Montreal does not breed rich men. David kissed Sok Hoon and said goodbye to Allegra. Then he slapped the shoulders of a few men who greeted him, I thought, a little coldly. He knew these people, some of them, they were the successful graduates that Sok Hoon and David had gone to McGill with. Connections.

Ambiguity leads to richness, Sok Hoon said.

Be persuasive, I said. Cheers.

An expression, Sok Hoon said, has to be sandwiched by an impression.

Then, close to my chin she said, The only opportunity with David is to degrade him.

The Prince was standing in the next room. He was intently listening.

Look at his tie, Sok Hoon said. That’s a regimental tie. And who else can get away with a double-breasted suit. Look at the flare of his shirt collar.

This made me touch the opening of my own shirt.

I plan, I said, to spend most of this summer drunk.

Sok Hoon:Thing is, when youre single, the best thing you can ask for is a fight.

I’m not single, I said. I’ve got Nell.

And Sok Hoon looked at me with a tenderness I thought might break her own heart.

We walked through the rooms past the Prince—I tiptoed—to the back deck.

Sok Hoon: Maybe I’m naive but I’ve never had casual sex. I was naive when I hooked up with David. And I’ve never not been present. Always present.

Me:You mean youve never fantasized?

That’s not what I meant.

It was colder here, as if we had entered water. It was different air. We watched David and Allegra, beyond the Prince, move in on each other.

Me: She looks like she’s hunting David down.

David, Sok Hoon said, likes to get in the middle of perverted things.

Sok Hoon was half Chinese and she grew up in Vancouver, or Hongcouver as she herself described it.

David came over. I’m just going to go in and look at my son.

Dont let him get up.

There’s discipline, David said, and then there’s quashing the human spirit.

Sok Hoon’s parents had met as crew on a sailing vessel in the Pacific. They survived a rogue wave and that’s where Sok Hoon was conceived, in the Indian Ocean. Perhaps her work at glazing over water is connected to a rogue wave conception. They were employed by tycoons who needed craft pushed from one group of archipelagos to another. They bought and sold fibreglass hulls out of Honolulu. So many marriages end in Hawaii, Sok Hoon had told me once, when she was still married and, I thought, happy. The year-long round-the-world voyage is fine out of San Francisco. But the monotony kicks in for one partner, usually the wife, by the time Honolulu rears out of the Pacific. Her mother is from Honolulu. Honolulu probably means Resentment. The marriage cracks, the boat is sold. It happened to her parents. So they sent Sok Hoon to private schools in Vancouver and then to McGill where she did a degree while hooking up with David and making a living in Toronto for three years organizing environmental credits for industrial polluters. They tried moving to New York but understood they could live a richer life in Toronto. They had Owen and then David fucked up, big time. Affair, she said. That affair was her Hawaii. She moved back to Montreal—her Chinese grandparents live here and offer support. Her work is in Asia now, the fashion industry is big there, and she also gets an unspecified amount from David, though often in the past year it is she who is making deposits in the joint account.

So how are things progressing in fashion.

Sok Hoon: It’s not progress. Fashion is circular. Taste doesnt evolve, it revolves.

Me:That could be said for a lot of human ingenuity and wisdom.

She handed me a key from a nail under an old milk delivery chute. And then embraced a woman who had come up behind us. It was Allegra Campinghorst.

Sok Hoon: Are you getting outrageously drunk on white wine and club soda?

Allegra pinned her own corsage on me. She was a year older than me, we must have compared birthdates. There’s something about women being just a touch older. Nell was a year older. Allegra’s glasses were tortoiseshell and I realized up close she was tall and had some flesh on her. The green dress disappeared and it was just her skin you noticed. She was a bit like Nell when she talked and her voice, when I closed my eyes, it reminded me of those late nights in St John’s, when Dave and I listened to her show, when she played music that mattered a lot to us. Her hair was cut like a boy’s. I was getting a chill.

Let’s go inside.

Two men grumbled around Sok Hoon’s silent TV—playoff basketball. One said, What do you love the most. The other:The word
lucrative
. First guy:What do you hate the most. Second:When I’m wiping my ass and I get shit on my balls.

They made me nervous because they were wearing ties and they were cold to David and aloof to me. The bright hardwood on the TV made you realize how dark Sok Hoon’s floors were. And then David returned and said, Allegra. He said it the way you’d say abracadabra.

David wasnt talking to the men. This was his graduation class, but there was a shunning going on. They had heard, or they disapproved or they did not want to be associated with the different angle David was now taking. It made us want to leave the room and so Allegra escorted us downstairs where I ended up on a leather couch holding hands with her. I asked Allegra for one outrageous fact. I watched her face search itself for a fact. Then she brightened and swivelled to me. She said there is a doll house that has a doll house in it. And everything in that doll’s doll house is a replica, except for the champagne in the bottles. The bubbles of champagne are too big to pass through the neck of the bottles.

David’s knees on the stairs. Then a moment when David casts an approving eye over me, an eye that feels like a too-big champagne bubble. He was considering me on the prowl when I wasnt at all, I was with Nell. I was happy and solid with her. I did not feel like a bachelor and I hated this eye of David considering it to be so. He made me feel like a shit disturber.

Allegra stared at me and wet her finger. Then she sculpted my eyebrow. She was a woman who ate three meals a day.

I have no idea where my bike is, Allegra said. Or where I am.

You came here on bike?

Then the Prince peered in with his bodyguards. He was looking for her. Are you Malaysian, he said to Allegra.

I’ve been to Japan, she said.

This made him comfortable. No one can read a park sign in Japan, the Prince said. Seventy percent of Japan is wooded.