How Happy to Be (8 page)

But one day, an eager someone showed up at 8:30 a.m. and made a big noise. The boss admired the rogue sound, the tidy pile of paper that was waiting for him when he sat at his desk in the morning. The cubicle next to the eager someone caught wind, and the next morning, he let it be known that his day starts at 8:15. With hardly a breath, the subway grew pointy elbows and city skin regenerated its old grey layer and the days keep getting longer and longer.)

Sunera’s father had been an economist in Mumbai. Here, he ran a magazine stand in a downtown mall for twenty-five years, the final few of which were spent serving young MBAs copies of
Wired
and
Fast Company
, shaking his head as teenaged CEOs appeared before him in flip-flops and jeans, clutching their lattes in environmentally friendly mugs, offending his sense of capitalism. “They don’t even know who Keynes is!” he would shout to his wife, who rolled her eyes, sliding packages of gum into plastic bags.

Surrounded by balance sheets and pricing guns, Sunera chose words. It was the greatest accomplishment of her life, learning this language at ten years old. She could answer the girl outside the library who called her “Paki” with a cogent: “Actually, different country. Look it up.” She read
Middlemarch
and lost her accent, and won national awards for essays trumpeting the virtues of the Canadian mosaic. At thirteen, she flew to London to recite one to the Queen, who leaned in with her licorice breath and told her, “Lovely, my dear.”

But by university, Sunera began to feel like an Uncle Tom. She questioned her desire to “pass” as some internalized slave mentality and sought out rebellion. Under the tutelage of a radical feminist German lesbian teaching assistant with impaling studs on the back of her leather jacket, she went gay for a while. But that made her even more desirable to both men and women. Her phone never stopped ringing, and soon she was delivering speeches to snow-covered campuses, screaming, “Brown, queer, we’re still here!” The problem was that everyone agreed. They were brown, queer, here, and that was
totally okay;
in fact, it was encouraged. Envelopes of grant money addressed to Sunera kept arriving in the NABLATS (Network Alliance of Brown Lesbians and Transgendered Students) mailbox at the student union building, and one day, in the middle of a battle cry on the quad, Sunera surveyed the smiling, supportive white faces: “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to –.” She stopped. Everyone was used to it, including Sunera.

She left the stage, and read some more, lazily taking the exams for law school to silence her parents. But she deferred all the acceptances (and there were only acceptances) and took one of the magazine jobs that were waiting for her after graduation. She worked at a women’s magazine, composing articles on tampons that kill and massages that save, and the
opposite-of-women’s magazines (not men’s magazines, but magazines) courted her, even from south of the border. She considered leaving Canada. She considered it as she wrote her fifteenth piece on national identity, or Quebec sovereignty, or hockey moms. She considered it as she moved up the ranks from junior to associate to senior editor at the country’s only newsmagazine, where there were just two people above her on the masthead, each healthy and nostalgic for the Sixties and refusing to die.

So she agreed to meetings in New York. On the thirty-fifth floor of a building so old that the black-and-white tiles at the entrance spelled the magazine’s name under her feet, she spent a long hour dazzling an editor with her comparisons between the immigrant experience in Canada and the immigrant experience in America, basing much of her argument on
An American Tail
, the Disney cartoon about an upwardly mobile Russian-American rodent family, the Mousekewitzes. But when she really imagined packing her bags, stepping onto the airplane with a ticket in her pocket, the clouds in the sky clustered to form her mother’s face: “All our hard work, Sunera! All our sacrifice and you leave us in our old age? Oh, the shame of it!”

Luckily, her younger sister was selling leather pants out of a discount warehouse in Acton, so the parental rage was mostly pointed in that direction, leaving Sunera a little breathing room once she decided to stay. And somewhere in that space, she discovered that family dinners and work meetings were both improved by low-level substances, that their steady hum was just enough to calm the wake of those
tectonic shifting identities, provide some cohesion. But at the end of the day, when the magazines and talk shows ask, Why so single, fabulous girl? I think of how full Sunera must feel stomaching her family’s vacillation between smothering pride and sagging disappointment because all that she’s created can’t be babysat. I don’t think she’s got much left for the Steweys of the world.

As she sits in the plastic cafeteria chair, talking about Stewey’s teeth, I’m filling out expense forms with false numbers, trying to get my fire-me thing back on track. In the past week, I’ve missed several meetings and sat on dozens of unreturned phone calls and yesterday I propped open the fire-escape doors, causing a four-storey evacuation.

I fill in the form with six forty-dollar cab rides in two days. A receipt I found on the street for gumboots. A $200 restaurant tab (on the back, I write, “Lunch with Ethan Hawke”), which consists only of vodka and beer and of course took place last Saturday night at a stumbly table with Sunera and the rest.

Sunera opens a small silver cigarette case filled with blue and pink pills, separates the pink from the blue, daintily pops one of each into her mouth.

“Should I ask about this?” I say. “I’m asking about this.”

“Mood evener-outers,” she says, marble-mouthed.

“Prescriptive or street?”

“Very prescriptive. You should meet my doctor. He deals exclusively with media whores. It’s like
Valley of the Dolls
in there, with laptops,” she says, smiling that fluttery smile of the recently ingesting. “Interested?”

I’m a little disappointed that Sunera would engage the fleets of antidepressants that are servicing half of our industry. Her old-fashioned abuses please me more; she is the only person I know capable of disengaging an entire office sprinkler system so she can hot-box her office on an 11:00 a.m. break.

“I don’t know if I want my mood even,” I tell her. “I don’t know if I want
your
mood even. Aren’t moods kind of the whole point?”

Sunera looks at me. “Point of what?”

My cell rings: dad, from Arizona. Sunera snatches to see who I’m ignoring.

“Your poor dad,” she says.

“My poor dad? The absentee landlord of fathers?”

“I know, I know, he wasn’t around –”

“Oh, he was around, it was worse than that. He was the absentee landlord who lives in your apartment.”

Sunera’s face drops and I know she’s suddenly seeing me as a sooty foundling. “Still, he’s your dad, Max.” The way she says “dad” suggests all kinds of dadlike behaviours I never saw: the bedtime, the lecture, the strong silent type. She’s thinking of her own dad when she says, “You should call him back.”

I’m considering whether to snap at my best friend or hug her when Marvin comes swanning into the caf with a new haircut – pointy, blond, painful – and spinning like a bottle cap in a street-corner game, bursting with a piece of gossip.

“Did you hear? Did you did you did you?” This level of Did-you-hear? requires smoking. While carcinogenic bacon
as a lunch entree is deemed an acceptable health hazard here in
The Daily
caf, the room is non-smoking, all the better for my get-fired agenda, so I light up and ash into Sunera’s Diet Coke can.

“Baby Baron is selling!” hisses Marvin, leaning in all gleaming and giddy. “Rumours are flying. He’s selling
The Daily
to
television’ ”
Marvin makes television, his life’s work, sound like a swear word. “We’re hemorrhaging money, apparently. This is it. It’s the end of journalism as we know it,” says Marvin, like this is a bad thing.

“How so?” I ask.

“Convergence, Max,” he says. “They’ll use the same reporters from TV to write for the papers, and if there’s anyone left at the papers, they’ll have to appear on TV. Look at me! I’m not telegenic! I’m screwed.”

“You mean they’ll just cut out the whole middleman ‘writer’ thing and let the anchor-people talk directly into computers and some guy in a room with silver walls will press buttons on this old Hal-type computer, and this machine will just convert TV into newsprint, and bingo,” I put on my best evil sci-fi villain voice. “The future will be now, Marvin. And we will all be unemployed.”

Sunera shakes her head. “That’s not why you’ll all be unemployed,” she says. We look at her.

“Anytime there’s a corporate takeover, the new company needs to make its mark immediately. They’ll fire you to prove they’re serious,” she says.

“Serious about what?” asks Marvin.

“Serious about being new.”

Something occurs to me: the two words most writers want to hear are not, as some ambitious young things think,
bidding war
, but
severance package
. My escape strategy may be up for some modification.

Sunera is driving and talking on her cellphone and on the radio Howard Stern is shitting all over Renée Zellweger for being temporarily fat and I’m imagining my boardroom buyout, a teary goodbye, a billboard-sized novelty cheque in my hands: Baby Baron, the Editor, the Big Cheese gathered at the long espresso-coloured table weeping as they let me go …

Downtown on College Street, the latest neighbourhood to moult its immigrant past and make way for sommeliers and organic grocers, a white sheet flaps between street lamps like it might be advertising a small-town bake sale. Instead, it reads,
ACCLIMITIZE: SIX NEW ARTISTS
in black letters. The next sign, a few feet later, says,
BUS TO BLOW LOUNGE EXPERIENTIAL ENVIRONMENT. COLLEGE AND CLINTON
. 7
PM
,
WEDNESDAY
. The Ex and his new “collective.” Sunera gasps, phone branching from her ear.

The Ex spent our twelve years working as a bike courier in the day, painting in the living room at night. The galleries were indifferent, the government grant agencies puzzled by his proposals. “I’m interested in painting beautiful things,” I read over his shoulder before he slammed a forearm down over the papers.

“Add this clause: ‘ … about my experiences being molested,’ ” I suggested. “Trust me. That’s where the money is.”

He frowned.

The Ex was a terrible player. At parties, he stood frozen in front of anyone who mattered, his eyes unfocused. He was a limp handshake of a man in public.

But this new woman, this
woman he left me for
(what picture emerges? Loofahed elbows, multilingual, a saluting ass), got him out there, I hear. I hear, and I pretend to be deaf, putting my blankest face forward. I hear that she is very well connected in the arts scene, especially for a lawyer. They spent last summer in Europe at her parents’ “London flat” (the cruel casualness of cocktail conversation) with hot young British artists: the guy who puts sharks in tanks; the woman who sculpts the negative space inside bathtubs. And the Ex emerged from August with a group London show on his CV, enough to get him some press Here because it was a small success There. She must have media coached him too, because lately he’s been in the alternative weeklies and
The Other Daily
mouthing a new kind of futurism, a way of “talking back to the technology that talks for us,” phrases made bearable because he’s boyband cute in his woolly sweaters.

And every time I see him at a bar, or a party, or come across his new middling fame, I go over all of this again: how he got so far away. I can remember the events but not the feelings. Cool, indifferent documentation; an autopsy
report. Sunera’s silver cigarette case of pink and blue pills, not evened out, but dulled.

Theo McArdle, back in the day, wore second-hand striped pants like a court jester and dyed his hair a different primary colour every few months. I took to black then and fourteen years later I am still wearing black and listening to some boy-friendly Stan Getz with my legs tucked under my butt just so, accessorized by a glass of red wine and a cigarette, generally radiating a beautiful-woman-lounging vibe.

I’ve arranged myself so that when Theo McArdle comes up the snowy walk and peers in the sliver of window I’ve framed perfectly with the slightly open curtains, he’ll catch his breath at the sight of this staggering creature, this jazz-appreciator, this feline catch.

But Theo McArdle is a little late and
Entertainment Tonight
is on and I really need to catch up on the news for a second – work related – just for an update on the Tom-Nicole thing, so I have to disturb the tableau and I’m slithering low down (in case McArdle should peak in, I want to be out of his line of vision) with my wine spilling just a little and I’m rubbing that into the hardwood where the Ex’s rug used to be and I can’t really hear the TV over the Stan Getz so I’m propping up on my elbows and putting my ear close to the speaker and that way I can hear some beauty tips delivered by that girl from the sitcom (the one with the roommate who’s gay but she loves him and isn’t it hilarious how her entire life is
devoted to this farce of a relationship and week after week we tune in as he brings home some hunky boy from the gym or buys a ticket for one to Fire Island and she’s all devastated and the laugh track gets louder and louder and louder) – so I’m like this, belly down, wine spilling, when I feel a light tap on my shoulder.

Theo McArdle has decided to walk in. He made his way to the porch, opened the door, and strode right into my living room, where his first sight of the evening is not me, gently cast in the glow of the non-working fireplace, but rather me on my belly, a pin-sized noggin attached to the television, enraptured by celebrity shopping advice. And that gentle tap – a hello, really – feels from here like the calling card of an axe murderer. I let loose a scream that alarms my hand, causing it to jut upwards, knocking the red wine into a perfect slo-mo rainbow arc that ends all over my head.