Keeping Things Whole (10 page)

“Stop. Stop, you asshole, and listen to me. I have spent weeks not even knowing what I'm feeling. I stare at
shower taps
. I have suddenly forgotten terms I knew before I even started law school. I worry my professors must know why I'm not concentrating. I am afraid. I'm afraid to love you.”

You should know this, she grabbed me by the throat. Slowly, and not quite crushingly, but she wasn't stringing a necklace. “And if you're half as clever as you seem to be,” she tightened her grip, “you'll want me to want you to stop. Don't you expect me to find the same faults in you that you do?”

“Stop and what? Shuffle paper? Write blistering memos?” I leaned my Adam's apple into her thumb. “You said it yourself.
What is beauty but the beginning of terror?”

“That's just the beginning.”

She kept shaking her head as she walked to her car, as she drove away from me. Kate of the tail lights.

No matter how often I'm
in the D or how much money it's made me, no matter that half my blood's American or that eventually my real-estate deals there were much larger than those here, I always hit a point when I want to come back. Legally, politically, socially, architecturally—eventually the D fucks with my shadow. Let me back through the gate.

After our parking-lot fight, my desire to repatriate hit the second I saw her bumper pull away. By the time I squeezed onto Detroit's riverside Jefferson Ave., I soured back into indignation. Clipping my wings, she wanted to clip my wings.
Don't you expect me to find the same faults in you that you do?
Yeah, but the same virtues too. Risk, yes, but life full-sized every day of the week. Ask a dance movie, ask an incandescent novel: a life half-lived isn't worth living. At times I think Victor-Conrad must have preferred young glory to an aging fade, especially if he got to make that genetic deposit in France. Ol' Bill survived one international tunnel then died in another, but have you seen the tunnels that get forcibly opened in an old age home? Trench warfare all over again. What did Kate really want—me in a useless job pegging my life to two weeks' vacation? Centenarian Gran excepted, I come from the young dead, not the dead young. Worker drones. Shopper drones. No thanks.

But her hook was in. Kate had jabbed me in the chest and now a version of her voice kept on jabbing. Would Gran agree that her dead husband and dead son had lives worth living? Crossing back this time, I took the tunnel, not the bridge. The disapproving voices of Kate and Mom came into my car like radio I couldn't turn off, radio that didn't crackle and fade as I poured down into the greasy tunnel, all that family water pressing down above me.

By the time I had crawled out on the Canadian side and turned into the five-lane lineup for Customs, I was suddenly exhausted, resignedly contemplating a life without Kate, her intelligence, or her legs. As I glanced to the crowded lane on my left, I saw her just one car ahead. She quickly saw me too. We managed about a metre of pursed lips and the pretence we could ignore each other in this international purgatory of brake lights. That sham dissolved when yet another delay in her lane (some uppity black thinking he could cross the border without a hassle) and acceleration in mine (whites in a minivan, whites in a minivan) brought our cars abreast.

The chance flow of cars, the whims of the border guards, the fluke that had put me to her right not her left and the days we'd just spent apart suddenly gave new use to the back sides of all that silent dating paper in my jacket pocket. I fished a marker out of the glove box and scrawled GUN RUNNER → on one oblong sheet. I held it up to my window and pointed at her, rising in my seat and batting my head around in mock indignation. Her dime-spitting grin lit up her face before she could shake her head at me. I got so caught up in my tattler's mime, eyebrows sanctimoniously raised, shopping her all 'round, that I failed to notice her digging in her bag. Up she came with a piece of notepaper and PUBLIC ENEMY thrust out the entire length of her arm and pressed my way on her passenger window.

Here, finally, we both said no to drugs. The truth was the one weapon we weren't going to use. If we had been trying this stunt on the way into the US, which we
never
would have done, I would have had infinite ammo.
COMMIE. VEGAN. DYKE
.

STU LOAN FRAUD, I accused as our cars inched forward.

TAX CHEAT, came the counter charge.

I'd never been more prone to a 3 km/h accident than there juggling paper and slander, the laughs all the more irrepressible for our physical separation. With the fire of rage finally extinguished, I re-heard her parking lot tirade more clearly. “I'm afraid to love you,” she had said. There it was, the L-word, table-sweeping trump. The chuckles drained from my face. Fake sanctimony fell from my eyebrows. The woman I thought about more than I'd ever thought about another human was busy nailing up false charges to the window of her car and tempted to love me. Her lineup advanced, giving me time to scrawl ME TOO before I pulled back alongside.

We were then just three cars away from the Canadian border guards, and my ME TOO note clearly didn't make any sense. She raised her last card with furrowed eyebrows. PORN HOUND, said her window, but not her face. Another car advanced.

I tried recalling her line, writing AFRAID 2 LOVE U then again holding up ME TOO. Her frown and the resigned nod of her chin and the attention she returned to piloting her car to the guard's quadruply marked stop line all told me she thought I was saying that I too was afraid to love her.

“No,” I said aloud, rolling down my window, my voice already strange after the frantic writing. She tried to keep one eye on the impatient guard looming in her window. “Kate, I love you,” I called quickly, seeing just a glimpse of her before she rolled forward.

Flashing cameras recorded our licence plates. I, and no doubt she, stared up at a Canada Customs officer made furious by our irreverent propaganda war and our inability to find them intimidating. Yes, we were hauled out of line for the extra nasty talking to, the repeat showing of ID, the standing and waiting for torture by bilingual forms. So what. We'd known from our first inky volley that we were Canadians returning to Canada, just Canada. My hand found hers in front of a scuffed melamine desk. She squeezed back.

After Kate and I were
finally released from Canada Customs—our love definitely something to declare—she returned to my apartment. We made up for lost time that night, but come morning she reconvened the debate. She made tea, not coffee. Tied her hair up and sat me down.

“
What are you?
People have asked me that all my life, usually bluntly. Put Scottish and Chinese into the blender, this is one version of what you get. Mixie. Half-breed. Fusion that isn't welcome outside a restaurant.”

We were becoming the Web generation, but this was still life before Facebook (back when friends weren't virtual). She couldn't search for groups devoted to “the ethnically ambiguous.” No photo- and emoticon-rich collections of the Danish-Kenyans, Indo-Russians, or Swedish-Brazilians awaited her.

“As a kid, people were at me all the time.
What are you?
Somehow
Canadian
was never an acceptable answer. To the whiteys, sure, I look Asian. In high school that meant I was expected to be good at math and a geeky virgin. But get raised Chinese and they know in the cradle if you're a mixie. I could spread around all the orange New Year's gifts I wanted to my aunties and uncles, but still. During wedding games with my cousins I was never the bride, because marriage meant two Chinese kids, not one-point-five.

“When I was about fourteen, Amy, a ‘full-blooded' friend, and I had a code word: CHIN-ez, not chai-KNEES. If something was Chinez, it was still Asian but we were a little…
ashamed
is too strong a word. Just keeping it close.
Chinez
was for the world between home and school. The food we wanted to eat but were a little embarrassed to shop for. For a while there, Amy claimed to envy me because I was half-white.

“Point is, I've kind of just got myself sorted out, have just gotten over not being one or the other. Now with you it's doubt all over again. Doubt and/or impermanence. I love you, but I shouldn't. I love you, but I can't.”

“Who says you can't?” I reached for her hands. “Imagine making money and doing good at the same time. The money's tempting enough, but I'm also out pitching my load because it's right. The better part of the green team, we're revolutionaries.”

She withdrew her hands from mine and tucked them beneath her knees. For the rest of that eventful year she'd come back at me with a series of retorts. “Other people will always be willing to fight this revolution.” Or, “So you're Ché. Everything inside the revolution, yes, everything outside it, no?” In the pallid light of that January morning her actual response was much more pragmatic. “Do you honestly think for a second you'll win?”

“Did the suffragists win? Is abortion legal? In a few more years, when every baby boomer is either in chemo or loves somebody who is, yes, Canada stands a chance of legalizing. The US? I'm not hopeful.”

“Which just happens to be good for Windsor business, right?”

“Those rules I didn't make, but yes. Every North American who's ever been sixteen knows this is a completely failed prohibition. The law—those dolts. My side's not losing the war. We're bleeding them out in a draw. They waste money while we make it. Even when we're not winning, we're winning.” Damn me if I didn't smile.

“I need to go for a walk.”

At the W-word, Voodoo shot up and trotted over to her, a black arrow of intent. He gave her his full repertoire of manipulative pleading—the short-range pacing, the whines and snorts, his little ears rowing forward and back.

“You don't have to take him.”

“Him I'll take.”

Go, Ambassador Vood.

I left her a sandwich and a note then cleared out before she returned.

Sweets,
I hate seeing you upset, upset because of me. Feel free to study here or maybe you'll go to the library. I've got my cell and am going to do a little (honest) work for a few hours. Call me if you'd like to eat here tonight.
Yours,
—Ant

But of course it wasn't just a Sunday night supper I was proposing. She did stay behind for the afternoon, half in her clothes, half in mine. I wasn't in the door two minutes before she was drawing up a contract.

“You say
live with me
, that's gotta mean none of your
work
ever comes home.”

“Other than what we smoke, none of it ever has or will. You won't see it or smell it. I'm not some idiot with a pungent tub beneath his bed.”

“Let me get through the fine print. We're twenty-five, not twenty. I'm not going to hide the fact that essentially we're shopping around here. My sun's not going to rise and set on you, but I also don't want to see this—us—go to waste.”

“Hey, I'm not just putting in time here either. All love involves vulnerability, right?”

“But elsewhere the price of admission isn't as high. Yes, you're smarter than the average bear, but you're also more expensive, much more expensive.”

I hugged her low and hard. “And you're here precisely because you know that sometimes you get what you pay for.”

She smiled and shook her head simultaneously. “All right. Get your pants off.”

A few nights later we planned dinner out, in Windsor, to ceremoniously launch our hunt for a new apartment. We'd never been closer. The hanging, just detectable sense of reproach we/she had for me lent us an air of depravity and indulgent punishment. We enjoyed a couple's post-affair sense of increased closeness without the attendant doubts and recriminations. I even got a smile when I referred to her as my partner in crime.

We purposefully changed the sheets before heading out and wore enough clothes for a walk along the tinkling January river. On cold nights the river's million little pieces of irregularly sized ice bobbed and tinkled, supplying a constant, erratic music. Returning home we held mittens, trudged together in a shaving cold past the gaudy, busy casino. Walking beside her, my brain drifted in coupley neutral. No conscious thoughts, just plenty of images of how we'd spend the next twenty-four hours. I longed for the cold on her skin, for her skin warming against mine in the clean sheets. Visions of our usual bedroom routine danced in my head: sex, reading, sleeping. But then inspiration struck its fangs into me. The casino was bright and busy behind us. In front of us, on the bridge, the red thread of American-bound tail lights was sewn and resewn into the night. Shit.

Mom claims every story is a staircase. Maintain then change. Maintain then change. Well, Mother, what do you think smuggling is?

After years of painting and punting, I was bored with the treb. Really I'd outgrown it by the fifth successful lob. I liked the coin and the late-night fuckoffedness of it, but even I could see I was stuck in a boys-with-toys rut. Sure, the treb made money and it helped seed the weed—
Overgrow the government
—but basically I made my living with a large slingshot.

Thing is, business is about making money, not kicks. I knew I was bored with the treb, but knew also that boredom was to be used, not fled. Play the game but think of the season. Move your strategy, not just your chess piece. Don't say no until you can say yes to something better. Actual business—not inherited money or branded nothingness or the Bay Street country club, class with an income attached—actual buying and selling is all juggling. Ball 1: the product and/or service, the thing, the saleable. Ball 2: the current customer. Ball 3: the next customer. Each is vital.

My day job was proving just as immature as my night job. When a team of contractors carve up a new house, bragging here and robbing the client there, the sole consensus going is that painters are the boys of the site. The only time the electricians and plumbers stop insulting each other is when they mock a painter.
House Boy. Hey, Paint-by-Numbers. Deco Fag
. Generally, all that ribbing was water off a well-paid duck's back, but still.

Month after month, year-in, year-out for nearly five years, I tried to think of something better than punting a load over the river at three in the morning into some abandoned Detroit factory lot. I chewed this over before Kate and especially after we met. Infiltrate Shipping and Receiving at a busy auto parts factory? Sea kayak nightly? Bribe some of the Chinese Americans who came over every weekend for better Asian groceries? Only after I popped the half-question to Kate did I finally see the light(s).

On the bridge, that steady red line of tail lights, gamblers returning to Detroit—that red line was the devil's big grin. Eu-fuckin-reka. I didn't need to smuggle, I just had to have American sin-tourists smuggle for me. Time to play shepherd.

At least 75 percent of the cars leaving the casino were returning to the States. Cars are made of metal. Magnets stick to metal. Circuits open and close to power electromagnets. Looking at the casino and the red line of tail lights on the bridge, I saw ons and offs and green.

A bright new idea throbbing through me, I broke both my sleep-on-it-rule and my tell-her-nothing rule and drew Kate into my arms. Lights from two countries reflected off the tinkling, jostling ice and danced in her eyes. “I'm thinking of getting out of painting and wonder if you would still tear my clothes off if I wore a valet's uniform? The money would be
very
good.”

Mistake.