Keeping Things Whole (25 page)

I went from digging in
another basement to digging through mouldy files at a Wayne County records office. That archival real-estate work is the closest I've ever come to wedding vows.
Do you this tax-foreclosure take to honour and cherish…?
Little paper riders were clamped all over the building's deed with the stapling equivalent of handcuffs. Triangles of thick, encasing paper had been machine-pressed over corner staples to fix stern, proprietary tax liens onto the deed. Thank you, American racism and global hyper-capitalism. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

You grow up in bed with an elephant, you get to know the sound of its snores. On the radio, local news could be from Windsor or Detroit. In the D, radio news always included arson and one mayoral scandal or another. When people had to leave the city to go make money elsewhere, and the city eventually couldn't afford to repossess any more abandoned buildings (however ornate), the local coffers obviously lacked for taxes.
Dear Mr. Mayor. If you're not too busy locking out your own council or doing jail time, I'd like to make you an offer on one of your derelict buildings.
Failure had never looked so good.

Heading home, I sat at multiple borders. I started off with a digital-camera-like instant nostalgia, remembering already the pipe in my hand of a just a few hours ago. But then it ceased to be just a pipe. Kate's trim calf muscles. Her lithe upper arms. The whole, exciting point about wanting someone is that we don't choose to want. We don't decide. We know. The smell of her. The sound of her laugh. A quarter century of personal experience had made our bodies into keys and locks, ropes and pulleys. My lips hadn't yet forgotten the feeling of her bottom lip sucked and held between them. My hand still knew the arc of her hips, a dozen intimate fits. In memory, my thighs could scissor into hers. I had to see her. I know, I know—too little, too late. But work at the casino and you'll see gamblers as shaken by winning as they are by losing.

All these years later I haven't changed my mind about how the heart wants. My eventual preference for tough, childfree women—that's magnetism, not a decision. The brain gets heard at a point. Eventually it can get us out of the arms of someone other parts of us foolishly want to be in. The parliament of emotion is always vulnerable to its upsetting by-elections and dicey non-confidence votes. The pregnancy was heart and head for Kate and me. She knew what she wanted, if not why, and I knew what I didn't want and told myself I knew why. None of these messages was clear and sudden. Genuine knowledge is a war, not just one battle.

While I was inching forward in the lines for the bridge and then Customs, I pictured Kate finishing her afternoon class then heading back to the apartment. Our apartment. I hadn't been there in a week. The me of me and the me of us barely knew each other anymore.

Space
—a word nearly as vague as
thing
.
Something I've been meaning to tell you. I'm in a different space now. She needs her space
. I told myself I'd been giving Kate space, that my arguments and horniness weren't what she needed. And hey, I'd already been exiled from the decision. My half-forsaking our apartment had just finalized the details, crossed the Ts on a contract she had written. But she was pregnant. Literal and figurative space had never mattered more.

It's easier to recognize that you don't want to be somewhere than it is to itemize all the reasons why. Windsor, Ontario. Bottom of Canada in more ways than one. I shouldn't have been there but couldn't be who I was anywhere else. Brampton, Oakville, London—sure, I'd have signed on to be another C-minus dad. Down here, I scored much higher as a smuggler.

I'd always admired that when Kate knew what she wanted to do, she did it. No hesitations. When I got to the apartment I knocked before using my key. Two steps in I could see she'd moved out. Her bookcase was gone, and mine had gaps like a defenseman's teeth. Her teapot, her floor lamp, her desk. Poof. No more bras on chair-backs. Not a skirt, flip-flop, or tall boot to be found. No more yucca-berry rainforest polymer shampoo. When a woman takes her shampoo, she's gone for good.

Of course I knew this was coming (so have you). Breakups, affairs, walkouts, and harsh dumpings—they're only surprising in the beginning. Really it's the mechanism, not the action, that's the surprise. That first tidal wave of sadness isn't surprise. It's admission, confirmation. No, this did not last. All things must indeed pass.

Thankfully we never let a
now
insult too much of our
then
. She sailed her ship, and I chose to stay behind. She left her Christmas-present dresser, with nothing remaining in it save a note on top. No
I thinks.
No
maybe
s. No
laters
.

The willing
and hopefully qualified
doing the personally necessary
for the potentially grateful.

Until this blog and your very, VERY welcome search, her note has echoed your grandsire's for me alone. Here,
look at both of them
.

Buying a building in another
country is pretty much a textbook example of self-inflicted tedium: skimming, inefficient bureaucracy in notarized triplicate. I won't linger on inspections, water damage, the nine permits necessary to buy and renovate the Detroit building, or the five I needed to open a coffee roastery and café. When I finally owned the building, I didn't celebrate by dousing my second dusty basement in champers. With two deeds in my name, I opened the pipe on the Detroit side, crossed back, descended Gran's stairs and opened up Bill's pipe. I leaned my face into the valve and inhaled. Darling, I smoked America.

I was fifteen casino-busy months between my pipe hunting B&E and the opening of The Earthly Paradise, café and loft living for the status-hungry of Detroit. My tenants had to want to live near the constant smell of roasting coffee beans (superb olfactory mask that it is). Artisanal food on the ground floor, bamboo flooring and milk paint in the loft condos upstairs. Young, professional couples upstairs and daily packets of green in the basement. Once again gender was my sword and shield. The auto industry is probably the worst place going to see the gender income gap (no wonder they deserve billions of our taxes). His four-year degree in engineering somehow earns him at least twice what her four-year degree in HR or marketing does. When it came to showing around my apartments, though, I knew who held the strings. Low-emission this, carbon footprint that, tuck a recycled paper pamphlet into her left hand with its one or two rings.

The Earthly Paradise
. I thought of calling the place
Ontario Farm III
, but if I wasn't going to be sentimental with you, I wasn't with the biz either. I took the title from Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac's 1702 account of the area he would one day run by slinging booze. I hung a portrait of the old liar on the café wall above his own words:

This river is scattered over, from one lake to another both on the mainland and the islands with large clusters of trees surrounded by charming meadows. Game is very common, as are geese, and all kinds of wild ducks. There are swans everywhere, there are quails, woodcocks, pheasants and rabbits, turkeys, partridges, hazelhens and a stupendous amount of turtledoves. This country is so temperate, so fertile and so beautiful that it may justly be called ‘The Earthly Paradise of North America.'

I didn't tell anyone save Reese about how Cadillac stole the coat of arms driving by our front windows. Live and let lie.

As for Gloria, we mended—to a degree. With Gran and Kate gone, who else? Not long after Kate left, Glore tried to tell me that if I wound up in prison I'd be dead to her. Words. Words. Words. My gamble, here and there, is that if the stakes are high enough there's usually a second chance. Curiosity may indeed kill the cat, but sometimes satisfaction brings her back.

You were born on the
twenty-third of April in Women's College Hospital, Toronto. Unlike Kate and presumably Gail, I didn't know you were a healthy girl until the next day. Medea Walker Chan. At first that was an island name, you and Kate cut off from the world. Less than two years later it became Medea Walker Chan-Briggs. Fine by me. Carve a name into timber or a state document, it's a story waiting to happen.

I've kept my eye on you since before you were born. It wasn't very expensive to get photos of pregnant Kate coming and going from Gail's. Mystery One solved, I just waited. At the hospital itself, well, only the idiotic would try to bribe a maternity nurse. They're all coo for the wee uns, all teeth for anyone else. But hospitals are employee dense. Porters, custodians, technicians, maintenance—plenty of people pushing carts. My guy walked around with a wad of cash, a stack of phone cards, and a great sense of who to proposition and how. I've had pictures from afar and some details: which schools, the dance lessons, piano.

I freely admit that for years I wished you weren't a girl. Not out of vanity, though—no gender identification blah-blah. I've been afraid that as a girl living with a father slippage, an unseen bio-dad and a loving stepfather, you'd be more likely to blame yourself and become another doormat in heels, your mother be damned. That or you'd become a different kind of casualty, another smart, privileged girl who falls for a series of charismatic parasites. Which'd be worse, you the simp or you perpetually falling for some whiskered cad allergic to fidelity, honesty, and the rent cheque? If you'd been a guy, you'd almost certainly have grown up reckless and defiant. Frankly that could have happened if I'd been around or not.

I worried that you had been told about me and that you hadn't. For a long time after your parents' wedding I figured I was another buried secret. There's always a price to be paid for living outside the law. Your parents knew I wasn't going to show up to a two-lawyer household demanding my “rights” when they could have put me in an orange jumpsuit with one phone call. Besides, you were actually getting parented—quiet nights after even days. I've seen photos of you and Scott since he was pushing you in a stroller. Decent guy, I'm sure.

The Kate before she left me definitely would have told you about sires versus fathers, but of course the Kate that raised you was a different woman. Even when I was hopeful she would tell you about me, I had no idea when. When to topple/enlarge your world? Four years old? Six? Twelve? When your sister was born I lost hope again. Why rock the family VW as it headed down the cottage lane? But your name kept my hope alive. Medea for the first-born and Cassandra for the second. A child killer for the heir and a neglected prophet for the spare. Scott-Schmott: with your name, Kate tipped her hand.

Every day for seventeen years I lived in doubt and hope until you finally found this site and logged in. Seventeen years. At the start I just clicked beads on the abacus, filled bank accounts for me and a trust fund for you. But as the Web deepened and your generation grew up with all of these digi-layers, my hope changed gears. Maybe I wouldn't have to approach you. Why intrude in the flesh when you could pull in this whole story? Keepingthingswhole.ca—viral marketing for one. Your logging in here is a start. If you've heard the poem, you've almost certainly heard it from Kate. Apparently loose lips can raise a few ships as well.

Occasionally I've felt guilty over the years not telling Gloria how much I know about you, not showing her any pictures, but I can't pick at the wound. In the rare moments I've thought of her dying, I've been flooded with guilt. Thankfully there's little risk of that: the old yoga-doing battleaxe, your partial namesake, stages increasingly elaborate and popular plays. Cronus Holdings and I have kept her busy in the theatre where she belongs, calling down the fates under moody lights. But when we had a grey-bearded and limping Voodoo put down I almost caved and told her everything I knew about you. For a time you can't help but think that death is a vacuum and only new life can fill it. I'm glad I didn't show up on your doorstep with Vood's empty collar still fragrant on the floor of my car.

Beckett has a point: waiting
is
absurd. Every night I've typed away at this, every time I've asked what you would make of what I'm doing, I've been simultaneously more and less me, fluid not solid. Waiting for you has been rejuvenating in ways: I am ruled by potential, not just actualities. Thank you for that. Never before has the possibility of judgement already judged me so much. I wound up framing Trevor's
unwilling and unqualified
note, moved it with me from house to house—mirror, screed, proclamation. You might think it's a little too coincidental that I cleaned up only after the post-9/11 paranoia finally died down and my rates resettled. It's been almost a decade since I made an illegal dollar. I sold the first commercial bag of fair-trade coffee east of Vancouver. I own a coffee bean farm in Costa Rica and now try to overgrow the government legitimately. You could work there some summer. Bring a friend. Skype with your mom.

Every story is a staircase. Let me know if ours only goes down. I didn't give you enough when you were a kid. Ask yourself if that really means I can't give you anything now. Is there a statute of limitations on gifts to and from the heart?

Medea, anything's possible if you reach over and hit
Send
. Lunch. Walks supervised by your parents or a friend. Maybe travel in the future. There's still so much we could try to keep whole.

I'm still waiting for you, Medea, for you alone. Medea. Medea.

This novel was substantially enabled
by a three-year grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Thanks also to Université Sainte-Anne and the Huntington Library.

Andrew Barrie's
War Underground
and
Beneath Flanders Fields: The Tunnellers' War, 1914–1918
by Peter Barton, Peter Doyle and Johan Vandewalle illuminated tunnel warfare. Various historians attest to German Great-War monikers for Canadian soldiers like “killers of Germans.” That phrase is lifted verbatim from the 11 September 1917 entry in the tremendously moving pocket diary of Lieutenant Howard Lawrence Scott (housed at the Canadian War Museum /
Musée canadien de la guerre)
. William Williams' list of the fallen are actual tunnel veterans, mostly of the embryonic 170th Tunnelling Company (UK). Marty Gervais's
The Rumrunners
and a September/October 1994 article in
Michigan History
by Phillip Mason sketch Windsor's history of prohibition collusion. Scholarship on the Western marijuana prohibition is vast, and the following were helpful:
The Pursuit of Oblivion
:
A Global History of Narcotics
by Richard Davenport-Hines,
The Botany of Desire
by Michael Pollan,
High Society
by Neil Boyd,
Reefer Madness
by Eric Schlosser, and
Drugs Without the Hot Air
by David Nutt.

The image of the Canada-US border as a candy store window is borrowed from Mordecai Richler's smuggling novel
Solomon Gursky Was Here
. Michael Stipe describes irony as “the shackles of youth.” Quotations from Euripides's
Medea
are from John Harrison's translation published by Cambridge UP. The novel's title is borrowed from Mark Strand's unforgettable poem “Keeping Things Whole.” The doubled-edged marriage advice comes from Martin Amis.