How Happy to Be (18 page)

“Hey, don’t I hate you from somewhere?” I asked.

“You’re drunk,” he said.

“You’re in advertising,” I said.

Ad Sales laughed. “Haven’t done you in weeks,” he smirked. “Pardon me, I haven’t
seen
you, is what I meant to say. How’s the inner conflict going? Still self-loathing?” He began beeping from the waist. Checking his pager with one hand, he flipped open a cell with the other. “Wassssup? … right … I’m on it … out.”

“You’ll get brain cancer,” I said. “Plus, why do you need the pager when you have the phone? I don’t get that.”

“Max,” he sighed, putting one hand on my shoulder. “I have a secret to tell you. Lean in.” I leaned. “Really, lean in,” he said.

He moved his mouth next to my ear and breathed, “It’s okay to make money. It’s okay to be successful.”

He brushed my cheek, a cat batting a shadow. Then he kissed me, not friendly but mouth open, into the belly of the whale.

“Hey, hey,” I said and he looked at me without any regret or shame, totally blank. That’s Ad Sales for you. He’s a Buddha, really.

“We’re the same, you know?” he said, pulling a joint out of his crocodile-skin wallet.

“That’s bold. There are about twenty TV cameras two doors down.”

He shrugged, sparked up, asked, “You know how we’re the same?”

“Impulsive? After the rush? Cowardly?”

He laughed.

“Precisely.” He passed the joint and who am I to deny my body a little respite?

“They want you to be nicer, you know.”

“Who?”

“The movie companies. They think you’re too hard on the industry.” The crowd cheered a black stretch limousine. Paparazzi flashbulbs lit Ad Sales’s face, a kid in a sleeping bag with a flashlight.

“The industry is hard on
me,”
I said. “I spent two hours of my life last week watching ’NSync in Imax.”

“Hey, I kind of liked that one.”

I looked at Ad Sales, and he smiled. “I’m kidding. I haven’t seen it yet.” How does Ad Sales remain so unequivocally male in these sexually porous times? He really owns the
Rat Pack dominant bonobo angle. He leaves the cave and gets the dinosaur, which is why it was worrisome when he lowered his voice and said, as he did, “Let me take you home.”

I checked my cellphone – no call from Theo – and I agreed to a martini, knowing there was a clause in this agreement.

I did hesitate, I’m almost certain. It did cross my mind not to act this most predictable script, but I have never been very good at making pacts with myself. I am better at regret. I wish I had been certain and adult and fearful of easy bruises.

Ad Sales picked the bar, one of those places I didn’t even know existed, the way you don’t see your neighbourhood clearly when you’re living in it – all the car repair shops that suddenly appear the moment you buy a car.

Ad Sales said something to the bouncer, and we stepped into a cave of music that sounded like ring tones competing. He propped me against the bar and leaned across to give the bartender in a leather bra a kiss, saying something I couldn’t hear. She looked at me and laughed. I took the drink.

Shimmering in a red silk blazer, the host of a late-night TV show on BFD called Pop, as in “culture,” came cutting through the crowd with a microphone and a cameraman. “Maxime, from
The Daily!
” he cried, and the camera light clicked on, a prison-yard spotlight flushing me out from the dark corner. “Any thoughts on this year’s festival?”

I drained my martini. “World-class city, my friend.” Only I think it came out martini-massaged: “World-class shitty!”

The hair nodded. “Exactly! Thank you, Maxime!” He moved on to perkier prey.

Ad Sales told me how he was waiting out
The Daily’s
collapse by not so secretly working on a new Web site that will deliver cakes to your door, because what you really want the Internet to do is provide a human touch. What you really want is an electronic facsimile of your mother’s Sunday-night desserts, directly on your doorstop.

“Why not call the company In Lieu Of?” I asked.

“We have a name. Are you ready?”

“No.”

“Cake dot com.”

“Catchy.”

Ad Sales passed me a new drink. “So many dumb fuck companies have gone under that we can get the equipment for cheap. We’re picking up an entire office of Aeron chairs and a pool table for three hundred bucks from a dead-in-the-water startup.”

Something about all those barely worn chairs, and all the twenty-somethings who went back to being baristas at Starbucks and living in their parents’ basements in suburbia – something about Ad Sales’s tasselled toes casually slung across the furniture of broken dreams and his own adolescent confidence that nothing bad could ever happen to him – it was just too bleak to think about. So I stopped thinking. And when he asked me for the second time, I didn’t say yes or no. I bobbed along. It was easier, and we went to his apartment and we kind of fucked, and it was mediocre, and I climbed in a taxi as the sun came up, my contact lenses seared to my eyeballs.

Bug test.

That was almost two weeks before the first time I slept with Theo McArdle.

And now it’s this scene.

The doctor goes, “It’s positive” and I go, “You mean it’s negative,” and she says in her dull scientist voice, “That’s an old joke.”

W
HAT YOU DO IS … YOU GO FOR COFFEE AND THEN YOU THINK
, Can I still drink coffee? You get on the subway platform, swim forward through the people, just trying to make a place to breathe, and stand in that space and do it, thinking, Can I still ride the subway? Should I get a car with four doors and a baby seat and an alarm system? And then you think, What, all that car to drive to the clinic to have this thing removed? You start running your inadequate pea brain backwards through all the bad things you’ve done that surely crawled right up into your cells and bred infection and you
want to call someone, you want to tell someone, but what would you say? You have run out of repartee. You think of all the time you wasted watching when you should have been remembering what you once knew: how to start a fire with hands and twigs; how to sleep in a snow cave. You should have surrounded yourself with old people and listened to their tales of survival, really listened instead of jotting them down for later. You have entered your thirties without knowledge and you want it in a pile of sticks, a river, your bones.

You miss the train, you miss the second train, you miss the third train, but you still have this little space on the platform; no one’s trying to take it from you but that’s not what you want. What you want – of course this is what you really miss, most of all – what you want is your mother.

My parents were touched by the music of their time and in thrall to the clothes, but they were far away from revolution. For people like them, middle-class Canadian kids from medium-sized towns, the Sixties and Seventies were an exercise in long-distance sympathy. They hitchhiked to Vancouver and protested when a twenty-one-year-old Black Panther named Fred Hampton was shot in the head by police in Chicago, thirty-five hundred kilometres away. Back home in northern British Columbia, they traded stories about the Weather Underground and my mother fed a few draft dodgers hiding in the mountains, but there was nothing worth blowing up on the three sidewalks of Squamish’s Main Street. Anger was carefully distributed, not exploded. My
mother painstakingly typed a letter to the local paper about the bombings in Cambodia and walked downtown to drop it off by hand, a gesture so sweet it makes me angry to think about. The day it was published, my father cut the letter out and stuck it on the fridge with a magnet where it stayed until its edges curled. She had signed her married name.

I was young, and remember this time with the staccato rhythms of home movies we never took. I suppose I borrowed the stories, maybe from magazines I read later, or photographs belonging to someone else. What I have stitched together as my own, the setting I have chosen for my parents’ life, is a revolution of haircuts and temporary, chosen poverty. Probably there was sex, and definitely there were drugs. But for them, as for most, things weren’t that different than they were for the old man behind the ancient cash register with the bell on it in the hardware store, not that different from the women in orthopedic footwear making their way to church. The days went on in pursuit of enough money to live on, and enough love.

For my parents, it could have been 1942, but it was 1965. They meet comically: he is spending the summer living in a cave on the north shore of Vancouver, surveying for the government. One day he slips and falls in a river wearing his long army pants and though it’s warm, he is cold from the water; his wool undershirt drapes off his frame, a sagging wire hanger (and in the way of children, I have filled in the details that my father never revealed, and that my mother took with her when she died). He returns to the cave, wraps himself in a sleeping bag. My mother stumbles upon him by
accident. She is out picking berries with a group of young women from the community college where she is training to become a paralegal at her parents’ behest. She becomes separated from the others, and they are glad to see her go: her endless talking about places she is going to visit but has never been, about war and fictions. She reaches the mouth of a cave, and instead of hurrying past, she stops, moving closer to peer inside. She is fearless, even when a bear rises in front of her. Instinctively, she thrusts the ice-cream pail of berries forward – An offering? A defence? – but she does not move or scream. Part of her is terrified, fearing for her life as the thing rises on its haunches, expands and hulks toward her. But part of her is exhilarated too, thinking, Finally,
something is happening
.

Then, in an instant, she sees that the beast is just a person in a sleeping bag, a young man with matted shoulder-length hair and a long, concave face. He sees her too: a woman who defends herself with an ice-cream pail of berries. A woman who explores caves. They fall in love, and she spends the summer going back and forth between his bear world and hers. In the autumn, she doesn’t return to school.

He is playful with her in a way he will never be with anyone else, was never before, and has never been since. He tugs her long hair and watches with pride when she speaks her rapid speak to other people. She teases him gently, curls up on his stomach while he reads, and sings to herself. He laughs a wide rolling laugh in her presence that no one else ever hears.

But later does come, and this part isn’t story; I witnessed it. My father leaving piles of squirming bait on the kitchen
counter. My mother yelling. His jaw set in anger. Her voice through the walls, high-pitched, girly, and desperate. Hours of yelling through which he was silent.

For days, he would disappear to the woods and during those times she brought people into the house, friends and neighbours, with records and cigarette smoke, doors to the front porch opened to the street, always an invitation. (The adult questions only come up later when they can never be answered, and at the strangest times. I am twenty, undoing the belt buckle of a man I don’t care for when the varying currencies of sex occur to me, and suddenly I think, Were there lovers among my mother’s group?)

When he came back, forced to attend these parties, he sat in the corner, sketching onto notepads things he would build. He glared at the women in flesh-coloured pantyhose, their husbands with sweat stains under the armpits of their dress shirts. My mother welcomed all of them, any of them, and often.

So my parents were not just this two-headed creature so praised at her funeral. They were separate too, and sometimes hatefully. And I get confused because I remember also the whispered laughter, the two of them with their hands clasped walking toward my schoolyard to pick me up. The dance of two people cooking together, a small squeeze of my mother’s shoulder, her smile.

This was marriage for them. Thirteen years of youth. I still don’t know if it was normal, if love blackened can still be love. But for them, I think it was. I hope so.

I
N THE CENTRE OF KENSINGTON MARKET, AROUND THE
corner from the Cuban coffee shop and the dry goods sellers with their barrels of beans and cured meats, is a small park. In the summer, hippie girls play bongos underneath the maple trees, their boyfriends swinging from monkey bars. In the winter, small ponds of ice form next to the slush-covered sidewalk, and the benches are home to the occasional sleeping body wrapped in blankets and newspapers. Today, they’re all empty except for one, where a man is waiting for me.

At a distance, the Ex is still himself, rocking back and forth, looking up at the sky from under a mint green toque. If you didn’t know him – and I still know him, I realize, closing in on his bench, even after all this time not knowing him – you would think he had a Discman on. I used to tease him that he was autistic, put my hand on his leg at the movies to stop his body swaying when things were exploding, people dying, any kind of climax.

He sees me and the firm set of his jaw goes slack with pleasure. Then, immediately, his eyes narrow defensively. This was always the problem with both of us: We could never decide how happy to be.

“John,” I say, the first time I’ve said his name out loud in a year and a half.

“Max,” he says, and smiles, exposing a new chipped front tooth. This jars me; he has anecdotes I’ve never heard, the one about the chipped tooth. He stands up and gives me a hug that I can barely feel, weak through our thick jackets.

“Do you think it’s getting warmer?” I ask, thinking, This is the first thing you’re going to say to him? But I can’t stop myself. “I hope it’s getting warmer.” He does this thing he used to do: tilts back and blows air, watches how white he can make it. He swore he could tell the temperature that way.

“John,” I say again.

“Max,” and we’re both laughing now, which is strange. I can tell, even from his hug, John is still: tall, skinny, sombre, the person I love the most in the world.

“So what’s going on? Do you want to go for a walk? I only have about an hour,” He talks, as always, in a slightly high-pitched voice.