Mount Pleasant (24 page)

NINETEEN

H
ARRY DIALLED
and a woman picked up. “Dr. Nathlett’s office.”

“Hi, it’s Harry Salter. I’m calling about my test results.”

“I’ll have to put you on hold.”

A Beatles song played annoyingly, an instrumental version of “Here Comes the Sun.” “Hi, hi, hi, sorry,” the receptionist said three minutes later in her little girl’s voice.

“I was in for a colonoscopy a few weeks ago. Some polyps were removed. The biopsy report. Harry Salter.”

“Salter … Salter … Salter. Hang on. No, that’s not it. How long ago was this?”

“Two weeks. Two and a half.”

“Hang on … Here it is. Salter.” Harry heard muttering. She was scanning the text. “Hyperplastic,” she said. “Wait. Okay, so six of them were hyperplastic.”

“Which means?”

“Benign.”

“And number seven?”

“Well, this is the odd thing: it’s listed as adenoma. So there was some cancer found there.”

Harry felt the air punched out of him. A shroud fell across part of his brain. “You found cancer.”

“Well, in one polyp, and it was removed. There’s a note that Dr. Nathlett wants you to come in for another colonoscopy next year. I can book it now.”

“That’s it? Are you saying there’s no cancer now? That it was removed?”

“Well, there are no guarantees in this business, Mr. Salter. But Dr. Nathlett doesn’t think it’s urgent.”

“But he thinks this is the only sign, that there isn’t—”

“Hang on, I have to take this.”

Harry listened to the orchestral sweep of “Like a Rolling Stone,” though it took a few bars to identify it. The song ended and another one started that he couldn’t identify.

“Madhouse. Total, madhouse,” she said.

“I’d like to book an appointment with Dr. Nathlett.”

“Okay, sure. We’d be looking at …” Pages flipped. “We’re into February. The fourteenth. Valentine’s Day. Ha ha. Three o’clock.”

“Beautiful.”

Three hours later Harry was walking along the Bloor Viaduct, staring at the darkening valley through the elegant cables of the suicide barrier. It was cold, and he walked briskly toward the centre of the city. At a point in his life when he needed to marshal his resources, when he needed money, patience and wisdom to deal with his various challenges, none of these were available. In their place was a growing fear.

His city itself, he reflected, had been born in fear: in 1793,
a threatened American invasion prompted British officials to establish a naval arsenal and build Fort York. The capital was moved from Niagara, which was too exposed to the U.S. border. Merchants arrived to supply the military, and the town grew while the American threat subsided (though never entirely disappeared).

But by 1841, the city was in danger of losing purpose; it wasn’t going to be the country’s capital, after all. It could have withered then, a cold outpost between a gloomy lake and the endless pines. Yet it survived—flourished, even. Its simple grid grew outward, and more than a century later it was the largest city in the country. Though the nation was slow to embrace cities. Poets wrote about the land; painters turned out forbidding landscapes by the truckload: prairie vistas, naked pines, dark lakes. The collective soul was wilderness.

Still, Harry reasoned, there was hope. He could flourish yet.

Harry walked past the ravine that separated Rosedale from the chaos and public housing to the south. The evening air was a tonic. He congratulated himself on this ambitious trek to meet his friend Bloomberg for dinner. One of the subtle joys of Bloomberg’s company was that he was usually in much worse shape than Harry was. When he and Gladys first wandered into a marital lull a few years ago, Bloomberg and his wife, Brenda, were already in the throes of an operatic divorce that produced public threats and a legal Armageddon. As Harry’s money situation worsened, Bloomberg was dealing with the punitive Third-World economics of divorce, and had moved into a crummy cinderblock apartment that catered to students. Bloomberg was a philosophy professor who taught an ethics course in the business faculty, because basically no one was interested in philosophy anymore and everyone wanted to know what they could get away with in business.

It took almost an hour to walk to the restaurant. Harry had saved on gas, on parking—the walk represented a net gain.

Bloomberg was waiting for him, swirling wine in a glass then bringing it to his nose and inhaling, as Harry walked into the restaurant. He had dark, greying hair he wore swept back, was overweight, his bulk covered by an expensive jacket. He looked vital and messy, with the thick hands of a tradesman, though Leon Bloomberg had never held a hammer. The circles under his eyes, bluish rings, gave him a look of melancholia. Bloomberg had a face that announced its suffering. And who could suffer like the Jews?

“Harry,” he said, getting up to embrace him.

“Leon.”

Their waitress arrived, an Italian woman in her thirties, a light sway to her walk, a dusting of moustache. Harry briefly imagined the two of them in Tuscany, their dark-haired children playing with wooden toys on the terrazzo tile of their converted farmhouse. Harry a successful something. She filled their water glasses and poured wine for Harry. Bloomberg and he quickly ordered.

“Do you ever regret your divorce?” Harry asked after the waitress had gathered their menus.

Bloomberg shrugged. “I lived in a loveless world. Twenty years. Though I don’t trust my memory on this. Divorce is a hotbed of revisionist history. Brenda is a woman whose sustenance for twenty years was her dissatisfaction with every aspect of me, of us. Now she needs to find new meat to chew. Not an easy thing. I saw her at the supermarket, pushing her cart with its meagre vegetables, and I waved. It’s remarkable: you live with someone for decades, share a bed, every flaw on parade in those rooms you share, and then you see one another and you wave like it’s a neighbour whose name you can’t remember. I
went to a therapist. She told me not to think of Brenda as part of myself but as part of my life. These distinctions. I don’t know that the therapist was worth the trouble. We fell in together, Brenda and I, because we were always the last two to leave a party. We were the most argumentative, and we left together, arguing politics even as we undressed in that miserable apartment she had above the grill. We smelled like hamburgers and fried onions. No wonder she became a vegetarian.”

Harry sipped a little of the excellent Barolo that Bloomberg had ordered. Which was worse: to be trapped in a loveless marriage or be trapped by divorce-induced poverty? Both had the power to diminish. Bloomberg should have divorced years earlier. Now he was of a certain age, his vitality seeping away. It was that vitality—that restless intellectual energy, his indulgent appetite for food and wine, the naturally uninhibited force within him that greeted the world—that made him attractive. Women were attracted to vitality and shunned its opposite. Would he find another partner? Romance was like the stock market, a tenuous conceit propped up by misplaced faith. Gold was worth $700 an ounce because we collectively suspected it might be. Then we wondered why other people would think that, and we worried that they’d stop thinking it, and the only solution was to stop thinking it first, and so Harry sold his gold stock. And gold went to $1,800. What woman will invest in Bloomberg?

“And you and Gladys?” Bloomberg asked.

“One of those lulls,” Harry said. “Did you ever have an affair, Leon?”

“Only after we’d sailed into the abyss. That was ten years ago, mind you. Brenda and I hadn’t had sex for more than a year. That was my watermark. I was like one of those prisoners who are counting the days. If there was no sex within a year, I would break out of my cell and seek it.”

“And …”

“It was life-affirming. A student, which presented challenges.”

“A student. Leon, you’re an ethics professor.”

“The beauty of modern ethics is its elasticity, Harry. Every discipline has it now. Even physics, I’m told. The universe is a curved path of endless errors aligned to support life. Or it’s something else. Anyway, she was a mature student—thirty-two years old. It’s the age of relativism. Democracies use torture to ensure freedom.”

“People steal to preserve wealth.”

“Exactly. It’s a glorious time for ethics.”

Harry ate a little of his orecchiette and goat cheese and roasted kale. They drank the Barolo and ordered more. They commiserated about prostates, money and the dull-witted administrative mire of the university. Bloomberg was childless, so Harry didn’t bring up Ben. But he told Leon about his mother’s stroke.

“She’s fine now,” Harry said, “but it’s one more thing. How is your mother?”

Bloomberg shrugged. “When she turned fifty, my mother sat me down at the dining room table. She said she had something important to tell me. ‘Leon, I’m dying,’ she said. I was eight years old. ‘It could be cancer,’ she said, ‘it might be something else. What do these doctors know? The whole world is sick.’ She sat on our porch for a year. Then the next year. She was on that porch, publicly dying for fifteen years. She loved dying. She was very good at it. The neighbours would drop by, less so after the first few years. But she had an audience. Then my father actually died, upstaging her. She moved to a condominium, and those years, they weren’t so good. A decade of dying in private. What’s the point? In the retirement home, though, she’s thriving. It’s a competition there. Who is best?
Who is the queen? Those who actually die are disqualified, of course. But Ada, she is the champ. She’s a small woman, and she’s getting smaller. I could carry her in my pocket now. She’s ninety-three. Still dying with flare. I go every Sunday. I pray for both of us that it’s my last visit.”

After dinner, Bloomberg drove Harry home in his battered, wheezy Civic, filled with paperbacks and smelling of spilled coffee. In front of Harry’s house, Bloomberg took a joint out of his pocket and lit it. Harry hadn’t smoked dope in more than twenty-five years and had never embraced it, even back then. It made him lethargic and worried; it made him feel middle-aged—the irony of a drug that could make a nineteen-year-old feel like he had a crushing mortgage. When Bloomberg went to hand him the joint, Harry waved it away.

“It’s not like it was thirty years ago, Harry. Try it—it will lift your spirit.”

Harry took an experimental toke and handed it back. Bloomberg took a deep drag and shuffled through the CDs that were lying on the floor. He picked up a Keith Jarrett disc and put it in the slot. “Shenandoah” came on.

As they passed the joint back and forth, Harry told him about his father’s money, his missing inheritance.

“What does that money mean to you, Harry?” Bloomberg asked, his face ballooning with held breath.

“It’s what my father left.” Dale hadn’t taught him to box or tie a Windsor knot. His contribution as a father was distilled to money, and now that was an illusion. “It’s the only thing he left.”

“Money carries a burden. Just lay it down, Harry.”

Lay your burden down; financial advice reduced to Negro spiritual.

They finished the joint and Harry felt an unfamiliar tingling and a gentle paralysis. He looked at the dashboard of the Civic,
which suddenly seemed intricate enough to launch them into space. The dials were alarmingly complicated, indicating, he noted dully, speed, trajectory, compression, latitude and ennui. It would take weeks to master them. Keith Jarrett’s piano was heartbreaking. Bloomberg held one monstrous hand up, a finger pointing upward. The hairs on his hand were long enough to groom.

“Here’s a case history I give my students,” Bloomberg said. “True story. A crooked fund manager steals a widow’s life savings. He can’t resist the cliché. She’s wiped out. She has to sell her house and move in with her son, a plumber of limited means. This loss, it eats her. She’s a child of the Depression. She withers, she dies. Was her death caused by the fund manager’s theft? Who knows? Who can be sure? But the son thinks so, and he’s filled with rage. He broods for a month, but he can’t live with this injustice. He goes to the man’s office and confronts him. The man tells him to take a hike. The plumber picks up a minor golf trophy and beats the fund manager to death with it. Of course he goes to jail. Three lives are ruined. Did any of them deserve their fate? Did they deserve to die? In the West, we’re told that life is sacrosanct. Some lives more than others, perhaps, but still.

“Ethics is the study of possibility,” Bloomberg continued. “You see each choice as a tree branch that diverges, and each of those branches goes off in another direction and produces new branches. Your father’s money vanishes, you get obsessed, lose your job, hold up a convenience store, get shot by a rookie cop. What becomes of your son? Your wife? A new tree, with fewer branches.”

Bloomberg talked on. Harry tried talking but found he’d lost the knack. The car engine wasn’t on, and the windows fogged. Perhaps they were trapped. It happened in northern
countries all the time. People stuck in their snowbound cars for days, living on trail mix and gum.

When Harry finally opened the door, after fifteen minutes or nine hours, it was a release; a new universe opened up. Bloomberg slowly drove off and Harry let himself into his house, examining the key with newfound curiosity. He walked with exaggerated quiet and peeked into his bedroom. Gladys was asleep. He got up to his third-floor study with difficulty. The room moved in lazy undulation. Harry lay on the sofa, his coat still on. His hand was in his pocket, though he didn’t remember putting it there. When he pulled it out, it held a penny. He brought it up to his face, looking at the year—1978—then turned it over to examine the profile of the young queen.