Mount Pleasant

ALSO BY DON GILLMOR

FICTION

Kanata

NON
-
FICTION

Canada: A People’s History

The Desire of Every Living Thing

I Swear by Apollo

To Anne Collins

ONE

S
UNDAY DINNER ARRIVED WITH ITS DREAD
. Harry was making a squash risotto with Moroccan lamb and asparagus. The organic lamb cost $82, bought from the swarthy criminal at the boutique butcher shop. Harry had grown up in a world where university professors such as himself were financially comfortable and well respected, and butchers were dropouts with cleavers. Now, professors were marginalized and indebted, while butchers were wealthy artisans.

Lately, Harry’s debt had taken on an auditory quality, a buzzing that usually remained in the background though rarely went away. At times it was all he heard, awful moments when it had the quality of a high-speed periodontist’s drill, a brilliant German instrument that was burrowing into his skull, shrieking as it got closer to his brain. He stood in the kitchen, stirring the risotto, adding wine in the dull white noise.

Tonight Ben was bringing his girlfriend, Sarah, a wiry, pugnacious psychology major who had spent their last dinner
together outlining the appalling state of the world and ascribing blame to Harry’s generation. He first tried appeasement, then argued unsuccessfully with her, then got drunk and blithe.

Gladys appeared behind him, dressed in a cashmere sweater and navy pants. “You’re not going to fight with Sarah, are you,” she said, her tone balanced between the imperative and the interrogative.

“I won’t have to. She’ll fight with me.”

“Remember who the grown-up is.”

At dinner, Sarah ignored the food. “If the money spent on the American military was used to buy food, it would end world hunger in one year,” she said. Harry had heard versions of this thirty years ago when he was an undergraduate. Sarah’s hair was spiky and she wore loose jeans and a second-hand curling sweater with the name “Brian” stitched over the heart. She was, as Gladys had noted on more than one occasion, extremely bright. But she used these worn liberal platitudes like a club.
Shouldn’t that phase be coming to an end?
Harry wondered.

“While we’re having this dinner,” Ben added, “four thousand children will starve to death.” He stared at his father accusingly, as if the dinner Harry had made was the actual cause of the children’s deaths. Why is it never Gladys’s fault? he wondered. How is it that I’m solely to blame for the world’s poor showing?

“If the money spent downloading music by people under twenty-five was used to build affordable housing, there would be no homelessness,” Harry countered. He felt liberated by this fabrication. He tried another one. “The aggregate annual salary of North America’s athletes is greater than Pakistan’s GDP.” This was probably true.

“Harold,” Gladys said. A warning.

“It’s you people who are paying their salaries,” Sarah said. “You watch them.”

“I’m not much of a sports fan,” Harry said.

“Dad, you are a freak for sports,” Ben said. “You dragged me to those football games when they played outside at Exhibition Stadium. I’m, like, still cold from watching them.”

“I lost my appetite for it,” Harry said. “I was probably losing it back then.” He’d thought he’d regain his interest in sports by taking Ben, that his son’s enthusiasm would reignite his own. He once took Ben to an intersquad game, a father-son event sponsored by the league. Ben was nine, cold and uncomprehending. After the game, Harry took him to field level, where they collected autographs from sullen, oversized men. It was an overcast late-October day, and the icy wind from the lake distorted the players’ features so they looked monstrous. Ben started to quietly cry. On the way home, Harry bought him hot chocolate, a consolation.

“I think it’s pathetic that men need football as a metaphor for war,” Sarah said.

“We don’t need a metaphor for war,” Harry said. “We have war.” Who had said that? Susan Sontag? Perhaps it was Bud Grant, a glacial, crewcut football coach he remembered from the sixties. Harry examined his son’s girlfriend, her fox-like face, the nose small and upturned, eyes predatory. He wondered about her sexual appetites. Was it sex as politics with them, and she a strict, non-penetrative anti-imperialist; or did they practise tantric sex, a holy ritual illuminated by scented candles and drawn out to the point of boredom; or, lucky Ben, was Sarah surprisingly wild? She caught his gaze then, returning it as if she could hear his thoughts.

“This risotto is marvellous,” Gladys said. “It reminds me of that restaurant in Florence. What was it? Il …”

“La Fenice.”

He and Gladys had gone to Florence last year, both of them careful not to bill it as a romantic vacation so it couldn’t be declared a failure. They were in a marital lull and Florence became an (unstated) romantic grail. The planning, the reading of civic histories and Renaissance biographies, the immersion in all things Florentine. The hope was that when they walked its ancient streets and ate gelato in the Piazza della Signoria they would find themselves swept up in one another. They had been careful not to talk about the cost of the trip. It went without saying that it was unaffordable. But Harry had shielded Gladys from the actual state of their debt. She still had some of her own money, left over from the early retirement package she’d received from the library. She suspected, of course, that things weren’t going swimmingly, but made a point of not asking, the way some people who suspect they have a health problem make a point of not going to the doctor.

When it wasn’t buzzing in his head like a swarm of wasps, Harry tried to think of his debt the way governments thought of theirs, a mounting deficit that was worrisome but not lethal. Debt was a necessary burden that was passed on to others. Florence was like floating a government bond to pay for improved health care in rural areas.

He felt he wasn’t extravagant but knew he hadn’t entirely forsaken the sense of entitlement that he’d been born with. His generation didn’t carry the deep fiduciary scars that the Depression generation did, where every nickel had measurable weight. Savers of string, collectors of rainwater, backyard gardeners, buyers of cuts of meat that had to be slow-cooked for eight hours to be edible. They mended clothes and made do. They lived the lives they could afford, measured daily in pennies. But not Harry’s generation. Money was a vague ideational
pool they all splashed in. Saving was futile. If Harry bought the $14 Shiraz rather than the still very modest $24 Bordeaux, what would it save him? A few hundred a month. A spit in the ocean.

In Florence he’d returned to their hotel room late in the afternoon one day to find Gladys in the absurdly large faux marble bathtub and he took two overpriced drinks out of the mini-bar and took off his clothes and joined her. They chatted pleasantly and sipped their Campari out of water glasses, but when Harry began to soap her breasts, which sat, still invitingly, partially submerged, he could see the sudden shift in her eyes.

“I’ll get your back,” he had said, swiftly downgrading it to an affectionate service. When they did finally make love, it was with a sense of obligation, fulfilling the (unstated) pact that Florence would bring them joy.

It was the mornings he loved most on that trip. He would get up at six and walk for an hour through the compact city, watching it come alive, people sweeping the pavement in front of their stores and cafés, deliveries of meat and fish and newspapers dropped off. He stopped at the small piazza not far from the Duomo and sat at an outdoor café and slowly sipped espresso and read the
International Herald Tribune
. As he surveyed the dinner table, Harry wished, suddenly, that he was in Florence, alone, lingering in the Uffizi, following a dark-haired Italian tourist who looked like Audrey Hepburn.

“It was a wonderful restaurant,” Gladys said, bringing Harry back from his reverie. “You would have loved it, Ben. Absolutely unpretentious. Like being in someone’s home. The food was extraordinary, but it wasn’t fussy.”

This was for Sarah’s sake, Harry suspected, designed to show her how down-to-earth they were, yet how sophisticated, and how this could be the life that she and Ben would embrace in time. Did Gladys actually think that Sarah was somehow good
for Ben? Perhaps she saw her combative nature as complementary to Ben’s innate passivity, and that their son would need her aggression to navigate life’s forest. Gladys wasn’t a romantic, her judgment obscured by issues of love and sexual compatibility (though who wasn’t sexually compatible at nineteen?). She was looking at survival, the maternal Darwinism that women carried in their hearts.