How Happy to Be (13 page)

This darting conversation alarms me. In the past, the Cheese has always been placid, sleepy even, but resolute. I know how much he wanted to run this paper. There were rumours of scheming and plotting, trips to England and confidences betrayed at the news bureau where we were working. It is a talent of the very rich and very educated to be viciously ambitious while appearing disinterested at the same time. But today, he is something different. The paper is dying, and he is desperate. Baby Baron has the attention span of a spider monkey and may already be onto the next thing: the women in Australia are much hotter than the women here, it seems. It occurs to me that I might be witnessing a man on the cusp. I’ve strolled into the den of someone whose dream is floating away from him.

Cheese starts rambling: “Do you know how busy I am? See that phone?” On a desk entirely hidden by papers and magazines and squeeze toys, the far left corner holds a sleek silver phone, accentuated by a moat of empty desk space around it.

“Nice phone,” I say.

“That phone is a direct line between our esteemed chairman and this paper. It’s a bloodline, Max. I have one at home too. Any time, day or night, the chairman can call me and tell me what to do with my paper. Include a photo of some lady friend of his on the society page. Change the font …” He closes his eyes. “Computers, Max. A person should never feel alone in this world.” His eyes snap open. “Do you know what time it is in London, Max?”

“Umm … Six hours ahead?”

“No, Miss Montessori, five hours, five hours from here. Which means at four in the morning here, the chairman is up and on the computer and he’s got a few things to say before I’ve even had a shit and a shave.” He grabs the ball, squeezes once with intent to kill, then winds up and barrels it right over my head, where it smashes a wall pockmarked with squeeze-ball dents.

“It’s a difficult time, Max,” he says, a vague statement. I am stunned that he is speaking so frankly to me, an entertainment reporter. Either this is a testament to the complete irrelevance of my work – surely a real reporter would not be privy to an editor-in-chief’s breakdown – or his own budding madness.

I think about Marvin out there, chewing his fingernails to the quick, and I have to ask, “So is the paper going to be sold? Are we all going to lose our jobs?”

Cheese sighs. “We need more advertisers, Max. People don’t change their reading habits easily.”

“No one’s buying the paper?”

Suddenly, he’s rooting through the files on his desk. Photographs of ex-wives and children rattle. He mutters, “Maybe they’re right. Maybe there isn’t room for another paper in this country.”

A light rap and the Editor enters, drops down next to me, and sits with her hands clasped in front of her so tight she could turn air into diamonds. The Big Cheese finds what he’s looking for, sheer delight on his face: “Ah-ha!” He produces an old muffin from under the papers and holds it up triumphantly. The room is very quiet, but for the masticating man in the rumpled suit.

“We received a call yesterday from a certain studio,” says the Editor through her stumpy teeth. “They were quite irate about your behaviour at a certain press conference where journalists were expressly forbidden to ask certain questions. They feel you harassed the talent. Nicole Kidman, to be exact.”

“What did they say?”

The Editor clears her throat. “They said, ‘We invited her to dinner, and she defecated on our table.’ ”

“They didn’t say that.”

“Actually, they said shit.”

The Big Cheese coughs, as if swallowing a laugh. Suddenly his hand juts out toward the silver phone and he thrusts the receiver to his ear, panicked. A beat, relief, and he puts it down.

“Still working,” he says to no one in particular.

“We, of course, believe in journalistic freedom,” says the Editor. “However, we cannot live under the char-ahd that these are not perilous times at the paper.”

It’s rare to experience a real moment. It’s rare to feel like you’re being thrust into a future you haven’t lived before, final frame of a movie, lights on, and it’s just you again. But when you’re in a moment, in a real potentially life-altering situation, that’s usually when you start considering the banal. The thing I should be thinking about is whether this conversation threatens the sacred ideals of a free press, or just my place within it, but what I’m thinking instead is how amazing it is the Editor will always find a way to include at least one word requiring British pronunciation in any conversation. I wonder if I could trick her into one more before the meeting is over.

The Cheese eats on.

I say, “Don’t you wish muffins came in some other kind of packaging? Like that shiny silver stuff, what’s it called? You know … ”

“Tinfoil?” says the Big Cheese, like this is the most normal conversation in the world.

“Yes, but what’s the other name for it …”

The Editor is getting annoyed, clasping and reclasping her hands, veins emerging on her forearms.

“They pulled their advertising,” says the Editor. “And I want to know what you’re going to do about it, Maxime.”

“Do?” I ask, looking back and forth at the two of them for clarification. Neither meets my eye. Silence, and then finally the Big Cheese sucks the last crumbs of the muffin from the paper and murmurs sleepily, “Come on, Max. Just be good.”

My head fills in the blanks: Good like a muffin. Good like a girl. “What are you saying?” I ask slowly. “Is this about me or the paper?”

Cheese says nothing. He balls up the muffin wrapper and tosses it against the wall where it falls to the floor, next to a small army of squeeze balls.

“Very well then,” says the Editor, standing up with the air of someone who has pressing matters to attend. “And not that it’s germane to anything,” she says as she heads out the door, “but the phrase is al-u-min-i-um foil.”

T
HERE’S AN ART HAPPENING HAPPENING AND ALL I
feel like doing is going home and looking up ethics in the dictionary, but somehow I’m part of it and this bumpy bus ride is hurting my bones. Blow Lounge isn’t a place, but a “concept,” according to the flyers we’re grasping, and out in this “enviro-interface” we will be “perturbed, moved, perhaps even disgusted” by six new works by six new artists known as ACCLIMITIZE, one of whom is the Ex. I did not want to come.

“Where the hell is this going? I haven’t been on a short-bus since I was in the Special Olympics,” I say to Sunera. We’re elbow to elbow, lurching along some muddy pathway that’s either north, south, east, or west of the city, if you’re one of those people who can determine such things. On our right sits an amusement park, deserted for the winter. Plastic mountains glimmering pink and blue against the white sky, a stilled Yo-Yo, and naked tracks of roller coasters, teeth bared.

“Sorry,” says Sunera as we hit a pothole in the mud and she lands in my lap. The two young women in front of us with geometric retro-Eighties haircuts (red and green, perhaps left over from Christmas?) lose grasp of their water bottles and scream as they drench themselves. A guy with bolts in his earlobes and a T-shirt that reads, I Want to Be a Millionaire, And That’s My Final Answer! is talking to himself across the aisle, laughing and rocking back and forth.

“Is that guy insane or is he art?” I whisper to Sunera, not without admiration. She peers across me – slams me, really, as we lurch over another pothole – then shakes her head.

“Cellular implant. You get the phone permanently sutured to your eardrum, like a cochlear implant. Latest thing.” I cannot tell if she’s kidding.

The bus careens off the muddy path and into a parking lot, next to several other buses flanking a huge white tent. Flat, brown fields tinged with snow on all sides, and in the distance, a half-finished housing development, rows of tiny faux-Edwardian houses built from Styrofoam light enough to sprout wings and flap away. The city is spreading.

We descend: middle-aged men in fabrics too synthetic for skin older than twenty, hard lipstick-mouthed women in long second-hand black leather jackets, girls in crocheted granny hats, managers of doomed co-operative galleries and editors at art magazines printed half in English, half in French. Feet in platform zipped-and-chained boots stick in the mud. Mouths frantically puffing cigarettes, trying to get enough tobacco sustenance on this six-minute walk between the school bus and the tent, just enough nicotine to make what’s coming up bearable. Someone thought it would be a good idea to expose a child to this world and there he is, a scowling toddler whose neck vertebrae are collapsing under ten pounds of dreadlocks, a sock monkey tucked under his arm.

I shove Sunera ahead of me.

“Your idea,” I tell her, inhaling one last time and tossing my half-finished cigarette into the mud.

Before we get inside, I hear a loud, slow boom, like a native drum being beaten.

“Motherfucker,” Sunera says under her breath.

The shiny black floor of the tent is covered with naked bodies. It’s a casual scene, naked bodies like a pile of leaves lying one atop the other, a heaving, chilly (so says the field of nipples) pile of human bodies of all different colours and, presumably, languages (funding). Legs crossed, lying on their backs, sides, stomachs, tongues out, tongues in. They shift a little, moan occasionally through the drum boom.

It’s hard to differentiate the good bodies from the bad bodies, which is, of course, the first thing I do whenever I see a naked body. Is that what a body looks like these days? Is
that person considered beautiful? Are those gathers, those lines, those nodules and hairy patches acceptable? Could I get away with that?

Banners flap from the ceiling. Words in black on white:
HISTORY. MEMORY. BODY. HISTORY. MEMORY. BODY
.

“Not those old thematic chestnuts,” whispers Sunera as we make our way around the bodies.

“I wrote many an undergrad paper on the shifting metonymic female body fifteen years ago,” I whisper back. “Would you say that girl’s fat?”

“Which one?”

“The fat one.”

So we’re laughing a little – is that such a crime? One of the bodies thinks so, a blonde with a tattoo of an Egyptian ankh on her shoulder. She makes a shhhh gesture, elbowing a burly black guy.

“Your oppressive gesture is purely performative, so I forgive you,” I tell her, and someone behind me applauds lightly.

I turn. “I’m not part of the happening,” I tell a balding gentleman with a handlebar moustache.

He leans in: “Exactly!”

Sunera and I leave the room through a slit in the tent, into a smaller space that’s pulsating with house music and bus riders sipping out of miniature plastic wineglasses. On one wall is a large canvas, about fifteen feet tall, entirely black except for a small computer chip glued to the centre and a fist-sized cartoon owl in the lower left corner. I look at the tag: “Facilitate/destroy – $6,500.” My God. It’s the Ex. He’s
finally done it. All those drawing classes I paid for: “I don’t mind, I really don’t,” I’d say, and he’d scowl and snatch the cheque from my hand like it was payment for rental on his balls that I kept in a little jar on a windowsill.

I wonder if people could tell, looking at this computer chip, that the artist once drew a model’s naked back and made me cry it was so beautiful. I wonder what he did with those canvases of stars and trees and me. I imagine them propped up against a wet wall in a basement somewhere, growing toxic mould.

I do a scan for him, try to pull him out from all the other skinny tall boy-men in vintage horn-rimmed glasses.

“Did you admire the piece?” a voice croons in my ear, and there he is, Theo McArdle, working his way down my spine with one hand. I’m surprised, but relieved too. I don’t have to look for the Ex any more. I am distracted.

“I believe it will require repeated exposure over time to transcend received notions of stature,” I say. “Speaking of which, did you transcend space and time today?”

Theo smiles his shaggy smile. “No, but I did have some success with a problem I’ve been working on for three years. Did you use your wit to decimate another innocent movie star?”

I’m loving this repartee, preparing a comeback when Sunera and Marvin pop up on either side, dragging us toward a dim corner. Marvin’s got offerings: a glass of this, a vial of that. I look at Theo McArdle, wondering how we fit into his day, nervous how he might see me. Just a little, I want the Theo from that other night to stop things, to draw
lines. There’s a moment where he pulls back, a shadow of good judgment moves across his face, then he shrugs: “What the hell. I had a good day.” This is the opposite of how everyone else uses drugs – bad day, more drugs – and another reason Theo McArdle is approaching perfection.

Four coked-up people chattering in a tent otherwise filled with subdued art types sound like a bunch of cats in a bag, and that’s the feeling in my head too, each thought scrambling to get on top of the last one, all pads, paws, and claws, and I’m taking in the room, eyes sweeping for the Ex and trying to imagine what I would say to him, if I’m the kind of person who could wish him well, but all I see is that aging Canadian rock star who is at every event. He’s over in the corner staring at a laundry pile of stuffed animals.

Theo McArdle has his hand on my shoulder and I like that feeling, it’s vaguely romantic except for the tap, tap, tapping part or is that just the drum sound leaking in from the body room?

Only it’s not Theo McArdle tapping. I turn and the tapping is attached to a woman, a short woman with white hair past her shoulders, a gentle beluga smile on her small face. I can’t quite put these pieces together, can’t quite figure out how this face fits in this room. It’s the poncho that cinches it, a Haida meets Technicolor Dreamcoat cape of blood red with a huge black raven sewn from buttons across the front, abalone squares for eyes.

“Elaine,” I gasp, staring at the raven, concentrating on the buttons and threads to try to focus, keep my breath inside. “What are you doing here?”

She opens up her arms, and there it is, a big red and black raven bidding me to bend, waiting to enfold me. So I go – wouldn’t you? I hand my empty wine cup to Theo McArdle and down I go, into her arms, into the distant smell of cedar and paint. I push and rock, like I’m trying to get past the bone of her neck and chest plate. Elaine doesn’t laugh, or say anything, she just keeps her arms around me, hands firm on my back.