Some Great Thing (8 page)

He had one or two affairs, sexual.

W
ALK WITH HIM DOWN
the pale new hallway of the Thomson Building, strangers all around. Light blue carpet, men in brown trousers with pens clipped to shirt pockets.

What sort of man will he be in this new job?

Simon wears a suit, dark blue, and a fresh white shirt. He is not yet sure whom to mock and whom he should defer to.

The Thomson Building, on a square modern plan, has yet to reveal a comfortable spot for him to be alone. The toilet on level twelve is cold.

His first few memos are clever.

W
HEN SIMON AND RENÉE
first met it was a perfect introduction to the challenges of the job. For the month leading up to the dinner at Madame Berger’s, they worked on a minor memo. The issue, as it would always be, was land. Should it be touched, or not.

She arrived at his office with a folder in hand, and a friendly tickle of her nails on his door.

“Hello, Mr. Struthers. I am Renée le Mesurier, from down the hall.”

He held her hand and squeezed it.

“I’ve got a C9 here that needs a redraft and a general change of focus before it gets properly adjusted for the perusal of the whole Division. The focus is all wrong, to tell the truth, thanks to Leonard, who, you may as well know, never understands this sort of thing. Do you have the time to do this?”

“Nescafé or percolator?”

He made a preliminary catalog.

Legs: tapered, certain, cereous behind the knee?

Wrists: like ankles of a doe.

Eyes: Greek! But blue.

Line from Ear to Chin to Shoulder: Serpentine.

Tan-skinned Renée is a patch of truffled soil, and he is a canny pig.

“The question is, how do we fill the memo? At the moment we are in the gathering stage, and for several weeks,” she says, “Leonard and I have been trying to put this together. What Leonard doesn’t understand is restraint, Mr. Struthers. A C9 tells us how to act, but never that we should. It is about information.”

“Frank.”

“Yes.”

“But controlled.”

“Yes.”

“A guide stepping forward.”

“Yes.”

“His hands behind his back.”

“I think we understand each other.”

“I think I can help you, Renée. Tell me about the topic.”

“I wouldn’t want to tell you everything, Mr. Struthers. Not in one sitting. There is a long history to this issue, which I could not make interesting. For thoroughness you should probably go to Leonard.”

“Let’s hang thoroughness for the moment.”

“I agree. Let’s just say the issue is conservation. Preservation. Do you have an opinion on preservation?”

“That depends on the thing preserved.”

“Interesting. That’s partly our problem. What is the thing preserved? Do you like questions, Mr. Struthers?”

“That depends on who asks them. Would you like to call me Simon?”

“This topic is full of questions, Simon. The first question, when Leonard tried to help, was exactly as you guessed. What is the thing preserved? The thing preserved is land. Land. But the next question is, is it?”

The desk stands between them like a fat governess. “I think I understand you, Renée. The question of preservation of land is never about land. It is about preserving what land might be. Land discovered is land used: either land pretending to be unused (children flying flapping kites), or land already developed. Preservation of discovered land is a moot pursuit. And preservation is anyway irrelevant when considering what might be, since past and future lead us in opposite directions. The issue is promise. Since we are fooled by promise in preservation’s clothes, it is appropriate only to ask questions, as we think something is lost as soon as use or preservation is decided. But questions won’t fill the C9, our Division won’t be informed, and what of the Public Good?”

Foreigners are often impressed by a certain sort of language, especially when they are not foreigners but Canadians pretending to come from France for the sake of cachet.

“Exactly. I have to confess, Simon. I was beginning to lose hope. Sometimes a new person, a new perspective. You may be just what the issue needs. I am so pleased you understand. It is actually all very interesting, but one forgets with all the process.”

“Shall we sit down?”

On his desk they constructed a Stoic’s porch, a brightly colored repository of learning that was all about inaction; and throughout he could only wonder if her fingers tasted like cinnamon.

“I don’t expect that we can finish this in one sitting.”

“That would be hasty.” But stay.

“Would you like to stop?”

“No. But …”

“I agree.”

H
IS OFFICE HAS THE
same blue carpet, handprints on walls, and smells of budget. Its memories can be counted in days and its paint is like spit on paper.

Those prints over there, low, fingers down, were the hands of Renée supporting her affable self: black hair and a handsome smile. Renée visited his office most days, the issue was demanding but the visits were short.

“Basically,” she says, “we are faced with a choice. I don’t really know how to put the choice in words, but as a question it is this: What sort of a future will we choose for this city? It is simple enough. I don’t know why I keep coming back to the beginning like this, to the choice. It is a choice between parkland or concrete, but it is so much more, isn’t it?”

“It is.”

“And Land and Environment can’t help us. Ten years ago this wouldn’t be an issue, but now it is not clear which way, politically, this should go. I think the Minister is inclined to encourage development. He is a practical man. And I am inclined to agree with him. But politically?”

“Politically?”

“Politically there are questions. The Minister could be credited with supporting a Division that specifically protects the environment.”

“Protects the body of the environment.”

“Hmm?”

“From depredations.”

“Yes.”

“From people.”

“Yes. Which … I don’t know, Simon. I am inclined to think that is nonsense. I like people.”

“I like bodies. It is a matter of whether one likes restraint or not. Here are you and I, at this desk, discussing the fate of a piece of the city … Hand me that memo …”

Silk!

“Where was I?”

“I don’t know.”

“Will you be going to dinner on Thursday?”

A
LL THOSE MEN IN
brown trousers. Whom would he befriend? They all have faces like clocks, expressions changing predictably as time ticks to ten, twelve, two, four thirty, home! when their true selves appear. Would any of them invite Simon home?

He never liked men.

A
T THE PROSPECT OF
possible naked scrutiny, he tends to withdraw, momentarily. His confidence, like his penis, retreats. That explains why he was rather quiet in the car with Renée. It is not because he found her unattractive or uninteresting. Certainly not. In fact, he watched her through her window over the previous night or two, once he had got her address.

M
ANY OF THEM WERE
below him anyway, these brown-trousered types. No need to consider befriending them. Rising in the public service was achieved by saying nothing to the right people.

But surely some were interesting. Hobbies, stories, collections of dreams on display in their homes. Certainly Simon was interesting.

B
UT HE WAS THE
type of man, you see, who inspired distrust. It wasn’t his fault.

As a boy, he was sometimes asked by his mother to read aloud for his father’s friends when they came to dinner. What a precocious little monkey we have. He read with perfect enunciation. His apple cheeks were meant to charm. But there was a tacit acknowledgment shared between him and those friends of his father’s, an acknowledgment that he didn’t understand many of the words he read and that his charms were purely superficial. No one trusts a
boy who seems clever; and he knew he wasn’t clever. We will call you a genius, we will notice your beauty, but we will never be convinced. He accepted their lack of conviction.

The tie he wore at school when he strode into his teens was always perfectly tied with a neat little dimple. “Simon is always so
neat
,” the girls would always say. “You always dress so
well
.” The other boys hated him for the notice of the girls. And beneath the girls’ admiration was that hint of distrust.

How fruitful this became when he grew up. Women watched him when he entered a room. He was charming at cocktail parties. He always had witty things to say when he had an audience. (And nothing to say when there was only one other.) The other men in the room, seeing the women so blatantly attracted, would distrust him, call him a poseur. To the women, this suggestion of being untrustworthy, hollow at the center, made him sexy. In this adult world, the consequence of his suspicious charm was that instead of being beaten up after school, he was promoted. People distrusted him to the extent that they felt he must be, should be, powerful.

Women loved him; men, despite themselves, ensured his rise because he could attract so many women. His rise made the women all the more amorous and all the more suspicious, and soon.

If his latest appointment owed something to the lingering force of his father’s legacy, it was also the product of widespread distrust. And so here he was in this pale blue office.

D
INNER WAS ON THURSDAY
, and Simon had agreed to drive Renée. So on Wednesday, at around midnight, he found himself standing on the fence outside her house peering through a window down her hallway upstairs. He had a good view, could see clearly, but the bedroom, the bathroom, the livelier rooms of a stranger’s house, couldn’t be seen from outside. He saw her cross the hallway once.

It was not something he had done before. I think it was completely out of character. At other moments in his life as he walked
down nighttime streets he had stopped, as we all do, to look into brightened windows. (“What a dramatic painting!”; “I wouldn’t have put plants there.”) But the stops were brief, they never gave him what he hoped for, and he never, very rarely, thought of going closer to the windows and watching for almost an hour.

Renée had given him her address so he could pick her up for dinner, and without thinking, without pausing, he simply found himself standing on her fence late on a Wednesday night, hoping for a look at her. And disingenuous as it sounds, he was only searching for a sense of belonging. He was trying to fit in. Certainly, he would have been pleased by a glimpse or more of her naked, but he was there to learn other secrets—any secrets that would help him to feel more comfortable in the middle of all the change. People and places belonged to him once he knew their secrets.

He saw her only once that night. The hallway was dark, so he saw his own face transparently imprinted on the scene, a sort of smoky portrait that he ignored as he strained to look through it to the hall. Every now and then his face would become his focus, but he paid little attention, looked through it again because acknowledging it would remind him that he was standing on a stranger’s fence, and that the flesh around his jaw was beginning to soften in a mournful way.

Lights appeared under doors, altering his view, altering his face. And then finally a door was opened, throwing light into the hall, and he saw Renée in her pyjamas. He was beginning to forget himself.

O
N THURSDAY EVENING HE
showered thoroughly and looked forward to the dinner. Renée dominated his thoughts at that point because she was the only new peer he had worked with so far. Eleanor Thomas seemed a bit severe; Randolph seemed neglible; Leonard, frankly, wore a dogsmell tweed; and his wife, Matty, if she was able to put up with a husband like Leonard, was not going to be of interest.
But Renée; there might be some fun with Renée. Over and over he thought of how he might greet her, what they might talk about in the car on the way to dinner, after the dinner. He thought he might as well kiss her when they met, get it over with, kiss her deeply if she liked, and then touch her thigh through dinner. And afterward … He showered until there was no hot water left.

He drove to Renée’s, proffered his lips in greeting and as a taste of things to come, but she took his hand, ignored his lips, and said, “Thanks for picking me up.”

She wasn’t wearing the skirt he had imagined, the space between his car seats was greater than he had remembered, and his interest had been lowered anyway because of his long and vigorous shower.

Not being kissed when one’s lips are pushed forward is humiliating, of course, so he quietly thought about that while he drove her to the restaurant. “Am I nothing but a colleague?” And at dinner, as soon as he met Matty, the confusion was compounded. My God, there was something vital about Matty, a confidence (that was it, confidence, he was already yearning for it then, you see), and a smile behind her words as though she knew what liars words can be but didn’t mind a bit.

No, he did not touch Renée’s thigh during dinner. No, he did not, over coffee, feel her stockinged foot between his legs.

But, yes, he slept with her that night. He drove her home, but halfway there, with Matty on his mind (that mouth) he asked Renée if she would like to go to his place for a drink. And in the car (why not?), before they went inside his house, he leaned over to present his lips again, and, with Matty on his mind, he kissed Renée and she met his tongue.

S
TAND THERE WITH ME
in front of the walls of waiting. A young Jerry waiting for fifteen days for hips and hope and hair curled like questions. Don’t look at me, because I looked like a kid, but listen to what I was thinking.

I was thinking of finishing touches. Sanding the walls of the last Rossi house, getting it ready for the painters.

I guess we can call what happened next a sort of beginning, the important beginning, the beginning of something that I didn’t notice then or didn’t want to notice and maybe only noticed a few days ago when I started thinking about all this. But there it was, definitely, by her goddamn little truck years ago. I don’t even know what to call it or how to describe it, and if I had to build it I wouldn’t be able to make a mix thin enough.