The Ravine (11 page)

“So did you have any trouble getting here?”

“No. Just took the subway to Eglinton, walked over.”

“Subway? How the mighty have fallen.”

I do not drive, something I have, perhaps unconsciously, been keeping from you. I know that earlier in these pages I used the phrase “dropped them [the girls] off at their schools,” and you likely pictured me rolling up in front in some sort of SUV or sleek Volvo tank, which is what all the parents drive. But I walked with the kids, toting both their schoolbags because I am not good at negotiation. When we got to the grammar school (grades one through six) I kissed Ellis and sent her inside. Currer attends middle school a couple of blocks away, and she said she would walk there herself, and I nodded and said,
Fine.
Currer turned away, plugging in her headphones, proceeding at an excruciating slow pace, her footsteps as small as a geisha’s. I ran after her, explaining that I wanted to buy a Sunday
New York Times
and some little cigars, purchases I could effect at a store on the same block as her school. I sometimes have to think hard to come up with chores that take me to the vicinity of Currer’s school. There is a fine wine shop nearby, and that comes in handy, although not as handy as you might think, because the owners know a wino when they see one. I ask all sorts of questions about vintages and vineyards, but usually my eyes are red and my breath is stale and wailing, and I know the proprietors want to hand me a bottle of Four Aces and tell me never to return.

“Hey!” Something occurred to me as I sat at Rainie’s dining-room table, which is surprising because my mind was occupied with trying to determine just how much wine I should pour into my empty glass. Rainie had filled me up shortly after my arrival, but that was long gone. I had refilled modestly, drained it, and now I was looking at the bottle and wondering how much I could and should claim. I didn’t want the ullage to exceed half, because Rainie hadn’t
had a glass yet, but then again, I craved more than another mere mouthful.

“Drink up,” said Rainie. “I bought two bottles, plus you brought one.”

“Okay.”

“We might as well get lit to the tits,” said Rainie van der Glick.

“I was wondering,” I mused, giving my glass-filling an aura of civility, “about your spectacles. What did you use to do to them?”

“Huh?”

“Sometimes the lenses would be black—”

“Oh, right. I used to hold them in a candle-flame to blacken the lenses. I wanted sunglasses, right, but Mother would never buy me prescription sunglasses, because, well, I was a homely girl and such vanity did not suit me. Quote unquote.”

“Parents don’t understand the burden of spectacles.”

“Quite so, Philip.” Rainie had come over to the table to pour herself a glass of wine, so she too was affecting culture. There is nothing so refined as the language of two boozehounds in the early stages of wine-consumption.

Rainie returned to the kitchen and, watching her go, I noticed that her stabs at femininity weren’t half as heartbreaking as they had once been. “So,” she called over her shoulder, “what’s happening with you and Veronica?”

“What’s happening? What’s happening is that Ronnie hates me.”

“I’m sure she’s angry with you,” acknowledged Rainie, which is much like acknowledging that water is wet. “I’m also sure she doesn’t hate you.”

I shrugged, because I wasn’t really interested in discussing Ronnie’s emotions. I wasn’t
capable
of it, to tell the truth, although that may not have been my fault entirely. Veronica’s heart is like the
sun; it may be comprised of various gases in various combinations, but the big point is, it’s way too hot to go anywhere near, or to look at directly.

Rainie and Ronnie were friends, of a kind; they dined together two or three times a year and went on annual shopping campaigns, a couple of which I witnessed in my capacity as sherpa. These campaigns were mounted post-Christmas, when the witless shopkeepers lowered the prices in an effort to clear stock. Ronnie and Rainie would hit each store with the intensity and coordination of bank robbers, Rainie booting open the door, Ronnie making for, not the nearest sales table, rather the one farthest to the rear. Ronnie would throw the merchandise in the air, judging quality and aesthetic appeal through slitted eyes. Rainie would work on the closest tables, winnowing out articles that might have worth and merit, which she would show to Veronica as that woman made a patrol of the perimeter, circling as a hawk circles, ever ready to pounce. Ronnie would dismiss the stuff in Rainie’s hands, and Rainie would toss it back onto tables, never the table whence it originated. It was as though the women were punishing the shopkeepers for selling such shoddy merchandise.

So I suppose Rainie might have had insight into my wife, but I didn’t draw her out on the subject. There is a large element of shamefaced reserve here, because although I’d told Rainie the headlines—
MCQUIGGE HAS AFFAIR WITH MAKEUP, IS THROWN OUT OF THE HOUSE
—I’d managed to avoid spilling most of the actual beans.

“What happened,” asked Rainie, setting before me a plate of pasta with pesto,
“exactly?”

“Hello?”

“Hello, is Phil there? Philly Four-Eyes?”

“Who is this, please?”

“This is Bill Nystrom. From the Valleyway United Church?”

“… Yes?”

“Well, I’m returning your call!”

“There’s been some misunderstanding.”

“That goes without saying, Phil.”

“Hmmm?”

“A joke!”

“Mr. Nystrom—”

“Please.
Bill.”

“Bill, look, I was just, you know, resting. You know. With my eyes closed. Isn’t it some ungodly hour of the morning?”

“Nine-thirty! Hardly ungodly.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Besides which, there’s really no hour of the day that’s
ungodly
, is there, Phil?”

“You called me
Philly Four-Eyes.”

“Correct. Well, that’s what you called yourself on the message machine.”

“Oh! I left a message!”

“Yes, last evening. Don’t you remember?”

“Well … no. Not exactly.”

“You asked if we could
check the books
, that’s what you said,
check the books
, and see if we could dig out any information on a
Norman Kitchen.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You understand, Phil, that we don’t really keep those kinds of books.”

“No. No, I guess not.”

“I don’t even know what kind of books those might be! Might I ask what this is all about?”

“You see, Norman Kitchen and I both attended Wolf Cubs at the church, in the early sixties.”

“Indeed? Well, I really should be able to help you then.”

“Why? Were you a Cub, too?”

“I was the scoutmaster for many years.”

“You were the guy who held Akela? The guy with the really bony knees?”

“Yes. Yes, that’s me. Not
too
bony.”

“No, no. Not at all. I just remember they were a little bony. It’s Phil. Little Philip McQuigge. Don’t you remember me?”

“Oh, gosh, I’m sorry, Phil. There were just so many young lads over the years.”

“I wore glasses. Really, really thick ones.”

“There were several boys who wore spectacles.”

“I was stocky.
Husky
was the word they used back then. My mom bought all my clothes from the Boy’s
Husky
section at Eaton’s.”

“Mmmm … I’m so sorry.”

“I had a brother named Jay.”

“Oh, yes! I remember Jay.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yes, Jay. He would play the piano in the rectory. He would come over often, to the church, and he would play the piano. Once or twice we even let him have a go at the organ, mind you, back then we couldn’t afford a real pipe organ, still can’t, although we have mounted a campaign, a drive, perhaps you might care to donate a few dollars?”

“Jay would go over to the church?”

“Yes.
McQuigge
, that’s right, it’s coming back to me now. A strange name. Jay McQuigge. You boys didn’t have a father.”

“Well, we were rankers. Rankers don’t really have fathers.”

“Er, ah, beg your pardon?”

“Sorry. I just meant, yes, we had no father.”

“Was your mother a divorcée?”

“No, a widow. My father died. In a car accident. He sailed a blood-red Edsel into an abutment of the Diamond Bridge. Remember the Diamond Bridge?”

“Yes indeed. How old were you when this happened?”

“Oh, I was young. Four. Nobody really knows much about it. There was no evidence of steering failure, the weather was good, and back then there was no such thing as blood-alcohol levels, so there’s no way of knowing what happened. I have to admit, Bill, that I have entertained the notion that he suicided. I entertain the notion especially late at night, especially these days.”

“Especially these days?”

“It is not insignificant to me that my father died while crossing the Don River. My father died going through the ravine.”

“Ah. The ravine can be a very dangerous place.”

“Who are you, Bill?”

“Who am I in what sense, Phil?”

“Well, you tell me you were the scoutmaster, and I remember a tall man with a tallow complexion, clutching the broomstick that held the plastic wolf’s head. I remember your knuckles would blanch, that’s how seriously you undertook that task. You were a kindly man, but you didn’t say much.”

“I see. Yes. That sounds like me, all right.”

“You showed me how to tie knots. And I was good at it, the best in the whole troop.”

“Pack.”

“Yes, the best in the whole pack. That’s probably the thing I’m best at in life, tying knots.”

“What is it you do for a living, Phil?”

“Oh … I’m in the television business. I was. Writer slash producer.”

“Anything I might know?”

“Did you ever watch
Padre?”

“Yes, indeed. In fact, that show is the only reason my grandchildren find me in the least bit
with it.”

“You actually cradled the phone under your chin and made those little quote marks when you said that, didn’t you?”

“Now that you mention it, I did!”

“So, what are you talking about, anyway? Why did my show alter your grandchildren’s perception of you?”

“Well, you know. Because I too am a man of the cloth.”

“Yipes!!”

“Hmm?”

“You’re a priest?”

“We don’t have priests in the United Church of Canada, Phil. You know that, don’t you?”

“And all the time you were holding that wolf’s head—Akela, dib dib dib—you were a priest?”

“A minister. Retired now, but they can’t seem to clear me out of the place. I attend to the clerical work, I answer the telephones, check the messages … so what is the deal here, Phil? You and this Kitchen boy were close friends and now you want to reconnect?”

“Something like that. We were never all that connected.”

“Google him!”

“I don’t have access to the Internet, Father. Don’t have it, don’t need it. I’m more comfortable with ancient technology, like this telephone. I prefer real human contact.”

“Are you making a joke, Phil?”

“No. I don’t think so. I guess I am.”

“If you want real human contact, come by the church sometime.”

“I’d love to. But I’m somewhat busy these days. Working on a book, kind of a memoir. Only I’m calling it a novel because my
memory is so fuzzy. Right now I’m writing about my dinner with Rainie van der Glick. I really should be getting back to that.”

“Well, I’m here. Anytime you want to talk. But I wouldn’t leave it too long, Phil.”

“You mean, I should attend to matters of the spirit whilst I may. Seek my salvation before it’s too late.”

“That, and the fact that I’m eighty-seven years old.”

“Got it. Nice talking to you, Bill.”

TRUTH-TELLING IS EASY. AT LEAST, IT CAN BE. THAT IS THE OBSERVATION
I am delivering, although you should know that it is, what, two o’clock in the morning. I am hovering over the laptop. Beside me is a bottle of wine, three-quarters full. But you know what? That’s not the bottle I’m drinking from, ha ha, fooled everybody. No, in the kitchenette there is a soldier an inch away from being dead, that’s the baby I’ve been sucking on. There are also a few beer cans retired to the recycling, enabling me to forget that I ever drank them, that they ever existed.

You wonder what I’ve been doing all these hours? When Reverend Nystrom woke me up this morning, I implied that I was going to buckle down and get to work right away. And that truly was my intention, but somehow I’ve managed to fritter the day away. I had errands to run, which is how I refer to the act of walking to the liquor store and buying booze. They’ve opened a new LCBO a few blocks away, a huge one with an extensive Vintages section, which is where they really gouge you for the plonk. Still, I tend to select from the Vintages section, hoping to give the impression I’m some sort of connoisseur. Then I take my purchase to the cash desks and select the queue I will stand in. My selection is not based on length of line,
rather on which clerk is working the till, and how many days it’s been since he or she has seen me. I’ve got them on a four-day rotation. Anyway, I bought some wine, then on the way home I impulsively ducked into the public library. All right, all right, I admit it, I pulled
Baxter
down from its perch in the “New and Notable” shelf, I leafed through briefly and determined that it was much like Hooper’s other books, dense and impenetrable. And then I waited for a very long time for one of the computers to free up. There were four terminals, but young Asian men occupied them all, each intent on, I don’t know, proving Fermat’s Theorem or something. They clouded the screens with symbols I couldn’t fathom, strings of numbers that seemed to stretch into infinity, squared and cubed and squared again. Finally one of them was successful at whatever he was doing and he signed off and I jumped into the wooden chair and called up the Google screen. Then I entered the name “Norman Kitchen,” and was surprised to find no fewer than forty-eight of them spread across the North American continent. Forty-eight men with elaborate hairdos and fat, blubbery lips. Forty-eight men who’d had something terrible done to them before they were able to discover that life held beauty and wonder. I lost my stomach for the search, wandered out of the library and went for a long walk, which ended when I passed through the doors of Jilly’s, a strip club. I sat there and looked at naked women and wondered if I would ever feel anything again. I wondered if I had ever felt anything. I came home, drank one of the bottles of wine—a very tasty Pinot Noir—slept it off, got up, and even though it seems like about an hour and a half’s worth of activity, it’s taken me until now… two o’clock in the morning.