How Happy to Be (9 page)

So I’m in the back of the cab, showered and wearing pink because the black is wine-soaked and I need to do laundry and my wet hair is slowly freezing into ice slabs. Theo McArdle is still apologizing and I’m smiling my no-no-no it’s-fine fakey-good-girl smile. (This is going to be another mess of epic proportions, I should not go out any more, it’s a sign, it’s a sign.) The snow is falling and the cab is slipping a little on the streetcar tracks, and I am inside a cloud of exhaustion. I’m thinking, Can I do this, can I really just start again, do the relationship two-step, climb into the phone booth and emerge wearing my Super Self suit and hand over
all the stories and little frayed pictures of my life, overload his poor arms with all the best parts of me?

I close my eyes. I don’t think I have it in me any more; the problem isn’t the giving-in part – I’m pretty good with the buckle and swoon – it’s the giving over. What I remember about love is that it succeeds or fails on the will to concede the rest, the part that’s outside the stories, outside desire, that aureole that tells you something deeper exists. What is that anyway? Some kind of self, I suppose. It’s tiring just to try to locate it, let alone hand it off to someone else.

Then Theo McArdle does something. He stops apologizing. He shuts up and his silence makes me turn my head, and he’s looking out the window, away from me, his breath leaving a small patch of fog. We hit a particularly slick patch of ice and he reaches out his hand and places it on my leg. His hand knows exactly where to go without even looking. There is still such a thing as instinct.

Theo McArdle can keep up. He can joke around with the waiter, but not too much. He mentions Christopher Hitchens and a book I would like to read if I ever read again. He tells me that the other day, this homeless guy came up and asked him for change, and Theo looked at him and said, Dave? They had been childhood friends back in New Brunswick, just normal friends with matching lives and now this guy lives under a pile of garbage in Tent City with his dogs and he’s worried the city’s going to bulldoze it for the Olympic bid, and it kills Theo to think about it. Theo talks like this, like he’s
unwounded, unafraid. He uses the same steady voice for all his stories, even the heartbreaking ones. When Theo was six, his older brother died of chicken pox. Theo remembers how his brother would take one walkie-talkie and tell Theo to wait in the basement with the other, listening for a signal. Hours later, Theo would find him in the backyard playing with neighbourhood kids. He remembers better things too, but being forgotten is what he remembers the most. It doesn’t embarrass him any more. He was just a kid, enumerating fights and disappointments.

“It was a long time ago,” he says.

Mine too, I think, but I don’t mention my mother yet. I’m not above pulling her out in a silence just to watch faces stiffen, mouths purse themselves in regret. But with Theo, I can’t imagine what I would say. His frankness startles me. I feel like I need to be more awake than I have been in years. I feel like I’m listening with new parts of my body.

Allissa Allan (whose column today in
The Other Daily
was on how hard it is to host a dinner party without proper rapini imports. Another burning civic issue addressed) and the New Left Ideologues are at a table by the window, and I ask Theo McArdle what he thinks of her writing and he looks puzzled. Turns out he has no idea who she is, and I love this about him.

I tell him what I know and what everyone who reads
The Other Daily
knows because she is her own source of news, and her news is this: Allissa Allan is a Torontonian born to a banker father and an oncologist mother, raised on the Bridle Path where streets once wide enough for equestrian trails now
carry sports cars into the driveways of Cape Cod colonial mansions belonging to American basketball players signed to the Toronto Raptors. She grew up with a barre in the special sunroom where she practised ballet until her toes were solid as wood. She is a girl who attended a girls’ school that, in the early Nineties, experienced a slight uprising after a hundred or so years of “hold your fork in this hand.” The girls, with knee socks and pleated skirts and ironed hair, were listening to Bikini Kill and making out with each other, writing words like RIOTGRRL across their knuckles in black ink.

Allissa and her friends listened to gangster rap and brought black boys from the public schools to cocktail parties. Their parents smiled supportively, driving the boys to the subway at midnight and not noticing, or pretending not to notice, when they walked right back over the North Toronto lawns and climbed the trellises into their daughters’ bedrooms.

In winter, Allissa Allan went to Florida and berated her parents for their complicit racism, and tried to befriend the weary Cuban wait staff. In summer, she stayed at her estate in Muskoka for two months and water-skied, dividing her literary mind between the
Cosmo
quiz and Susan Faludi.

In Allissa Allan’s final year of high school, Kurt Cobain died, and this marked a change, a release from Doc Martens and lumberjack shirts, a return to slim skirts and heels and fun. She attended a small college in the States, where she dated the son of a senator. Upon her return to the city, while dining at the Allans’ one night, the greying editor-in-chief of
The Other Daily
, a man not immune to the delights of breathless youth, offered Allissa a summer internship. Her
articles on dog aerobics and water-filled bras were remarkably readable; she could burp them out in record time, each as disposable, as mindlessly diverting as advertising copy. Within months, she was offered a column at the city desk. She thought about privilege, then decided she could do more good than harm with a platform from which to pontificate about how a conflicted young woman in the 2000s deals with the issues of the day: sex toys, dating, the inadequacy of self-tanners. Sometimes she threw in words like
deconstruction
and
aesthetic
to keep up the paper’s intelligentsia reputation, and satisfy some quieting part of herself. The public went mad for these porny little peeks, and the editors found the stories both cheap (no travel, no research expenses) and salacious – a winning combination – and they put their feet up on the boardroom table and said, Everything is in order. This is how we want our young women. No threat from below.

Her photo began to appear with regularity in the paper: Allissa consults Toronto’s best liposuction expert; Allissa goes on an Internet date; Allissa invites the mayor’s assistant for a man-back waxing. The editors put her pretty face on the newspaper boxes with her favourite phrase in bold font just under her bemused white grin: “It’s all good.”

Allissa Allan has become her only subject. I’m almost envious. She creates herself in that column; I create other people. I’m getting outdated, obsolete. We’re in a time of confession, and I’m mouthing other people’s sins.

I don’t mention this part to Theo. Instead, I say, “Rapini.”

Theo McArdle looks blank.

“That’s what she wrote about today.”

“Oh. I think I saw that, but it didn’t look very compelling,” he says. I learn something: Theo McArdle doesn’t just appreciate the columnists’ photos – he reads the stories.

And I’m trying to imagine what life is like for Theo McArdle, who once lived in East Africa building wells with his ex-girlfriend and misses his small town in New Brunswick where half the people speak English and half the people speak French; Theo, who suffers yearning for the moment that just went by. I remember that yearning from the first time I knew him, and this is how I want Theo McArdle to stay: sitting across from me, half-shaven, lips moving, body listening to mine. He is nothing to me yet. I know that whatever happens, I will never desire him as much as I do right now, unknown.

I remember that from the time I fell in love.

The Ex and I used to joke that we would tell our children about the band: three girls, guitar, bass, drums, amateur plodding 4-4 time less noticeable than sheer volume. We would make it a bedtime story, or a yarn to fill the hours on a cross-country road trip. I would say, Your father danced up to your mother in the mosh pit squall and said: “Excuse me, do you have the time?” This was your father’s sense of humour, but your mother didn’t know it yet. She thought, A weirdo, and totally gay – lanky and planed olive-skin features – and she said, “Time for you to come up with a new opener,” and felt very Lauren Bacall clever, but he didn’t hear her because the band was screaming loud about doing nothing for a living.

Your father was twenty, and your mother was twenty-one. Like any night, there were other people it could have been but your mother ended up with your father at 3:00 a.m. in the hot summer night, lying on the wine-coloured grass, drunk on bottles of beer. They checked each other out twenty and twenty-one-year-old style (in this order): music, film, books, beliefs (none yet, except for the bands and the movies and books, but both were hopeful that the lists would soon give rise to some scheme to live by).

In this way, they kissed on the grass, and two weeks later, he brought his army bag of clothing and his stained box of paints – a little garden – into her tiny apartment and your mother thought that the universe had turned itself inside out, had become something entirely good, and sex was a new and untried addiction and she never knew she could laugh so hard. They graduated, and moved to the city, and travelled, and got sober, and mostly they remembered that feeling of the upcoming, that push toward the next phase of the relationship, that momentum that had started in the mosh pit that was, my God, two years ago, then four, then five, then seven, then ten.

And then the part we wouldn’t tell, not even to each other. How we got older and the edges of the days emerged, shark fin out of water, and the world turned right side out and dulled. We read the newspaper over breakfast instead of talking about how the night before one had shifted this way in the sheets and the other noticed, or how we had sensed each other’s dreams. And all those conversations from before, about what to name the children (Clara and
Charles) and how the unbought house would be renovated and maybe we should make it official and get rings – other people were suddenly living those conversations all around, not just making science fictions about the future but building up and spreading out. Everyone got married and babies. And I looked at him one day on a street corner by a kicked-over newspaper box and said, These are just conversations, aren’t they? And he said, Yes, and he burst into tears because he was, it turned out, in love with someone else and I couldn’t believe I didn’t know it. I, who could once intuit the very thing he desired to eat just by examining the curve of his mouth, I had not sensed this in him, that the man I lived with was fingers and toes in someone else’s mind and body. I felt unsmart. I had lost my sensitivity to him. Now he wore on me like everybody else, another fatigue. That’s where he had been the night I waited up until 5:30 and he came home, smoky and drunk and mad at me for asking. He had been with a woman and she had a name and the name was Elizabeth.

In that way, the matter was decided, and the we of us, the much-discussed four of us, drifted to the sphere of dead ideas, and sometimes I feel those unborn children tugging: Don’t forget us, don’t forget us, don’t forget.

The past can be bossy. Just when it might seem to be shrinking in the distance, it waves its arms and makes itself known. But I’m ignoring the past, because after an award-winning dinner, I am in Theo McArdle’s apartment.

What you most fear when first invited to a guy’s place: any kind of framed car paraphernalia, like a poster of a red corvette; any reference to marijuana as a lifestyle choice, like say, a bedspread emblazoned with a leaf; an inordinate number of mom photos; push-pinned posters, especially of undeservingly push-pinned people from history, like Mozart or da Vinci; a wall of baseball hats.

Theo McArdle’s apartment does not break any of these rules, but it is not like any of the apartments I’ve been spending time in these days. Marvin’s loft (once a button factory, as he’ll proudly tell you), for instance, is a tribute to vinyl furniture. Sunera’s gone kind of bamboo minimalist in a momentary “Zen chic” fit she hasn’t rectified yet. But Theo McArdle’s running with a homier look, lots of aged wooden crates holding books and wiry brass statues that could be religious or could be bongs and fringy carpets and – my God – are those spindly green life forms plants? Needy buggers, they make me nervous.

“If I smoke in here, will it bother the plants?” I ask, and Theo smiles, hands me an ashtray with a Mexican death mask painted on it. “Cheerful,” I say.

What would be the worst music he could put on right now? “Mustang Sally.” “We Built This City (on Rock n’ Roll).” Bauhaus. But Theo McArdle foregoes the CD player for his turntable and puts on some scratchy blues. He stands there, moving the needle from track to track to get the right song sequence to backdrop a story he’s telling me about Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. Now here’s a guy with some slow blues voodoo who was married six times and fathered
maybe sixty kids who are trying to find each other on the Internet now. Then Theo asks me questions about my work, about British Columbia, about why I don’t have any furniture. He doesn’t nod, but he’s listening, his brow slightly knitted. He tells me that what he does in his lab at the university is pretty boring; he’s solving problems, the same problems he’s been working on for about a decade now. Sounds familiar, I tell him.

But what he loves is the abstraction in his field. Like did you know that, theoretically, an object can exist in two places at once? Newton was wrong. Most people are wrong. Even Einstein might have been wrong. When particles get small, everything we thought we knew about the universe breaks apart, the normal physical rules change, and you end up with quantum rules. Theo’s getting excited now, really and truly happy to tell me how there hasn’t been an Einstein in the quantum field to put it all together yet and make sense of all these theories, but there will be. Someone, or a bunch of someones, will come up with new rules to live by.