The Perfect Order of Things (2 page)

“Was that that chick?” Dean said. He turned his face toward me. He must have been eating chocolate again because his skin had broken out afresh.

I said, “I think I’m going to hitchhike to Toronto.”

Then he said something cruel about my ears. I looked at him speechlessly.

“I’m going to get in shit for this,” he said, as if we’d been talking about it for weeks. But that’s not what he was angry about. It was inconceivable to me then that, being two years older, he
could
be unhappy. I started down the stairs. I could hear him get off the bed. I took the last few steps two at a time. I tore through the kitchen, through the living room and out the front door, the screen door banging behind me, and started up the driveway. I got to the first bend and glanced over my shoulder. Dean was standing in the doorway in his underwear, the living room lit up behind him. Then I plunged into the darkness, the trees overhead, the stones under my feet, until I reached the main road that led to town and beyond.

I arrived at Clarissa’s address just as it was getting light. It was a big white apartment building on the edge of Forest Hill. A brightly lit lobby; black leather couches, abstract paintings. I pressed her number. A car drove by outside in the street. I pressed the number again. The lock on the door clicked once, then twice.

“Clarissa?” I said, bending over the speaker. No answer. I tried the door; it opened. And then I went inside.

She had done it before. You could tell. The way she took her clothes off and got into bed. But you could also tell that she was acting a bit. Then she talked about her boarding school in Switzerland, about having dinner once with Alfred Hitchcock; then she lit a cigarette and sat in a chair with no clothes on and told me a movie star had a crush on her, that he’d invited her to his cabin in New Mexico but her mother had found out and phoned the movie star and ruined everything. During these stories I had the feeling I was being lied to, that something
like
these stories had happened, only in a smaller, less spectacular way. But of course that’s true for almost everything you think about other people’s lives. Always smaller, always lonelier than you imagine.

I waited for her to bring up her ex-boyfriend, and I suspected that would be a lie too, whatever she told me. A particular lie with a particular slant. All her lies had the same slant, away from her, always toward someone else.

And I wished she would put some clothes on.

I knew her ex-boyfriend. Bill Cardelle was a party boy with a dash of red colouring in each cheek as if life or nature had given him an extra dose of vitality. He was a boy I’d never be like, a boy you saw in the halls at school and thought, “I’d be happy if I looked like that.” But my hair was too curly for a proper Beatles haircut, my jackets always rose up at the back (“Don’t slouch, dear!”) and I couldn’t dance like Bill Cardelle. At parties, even the boys watched him dance, not directly but with quick furtive glances between sips on a straw. In his white chinos and Oxford shirts and oxblood shoes, he had it all. Except for one thing: he wasn’t very bright. I adored him because he was gorgeous; he admired me because I was smarter than he was; and for a time, while I tutored him in Latin, we were friends.

I telephoned Dean long-distance at Grassmere the next morning and I noticed in his voice a slightly different tone and it took me many months to understand what that tone was—an almost unwilling approbation that would be the beginning of a whole new kind of problem between us. He was eating an apple, sounding matter-of-fact, but what caught my ear, what mattered to me, was that I could hear him
trying
to sound matter-of-fact.

“So you guys stayed up really late?” which was his way of asking me if I’d fucked her. And when I said yes, pretty late, and felt a flush of pleasure (vanity), I could also tell that he had hoped that wasn’t going to be the answer.

“So when are you coming home?” he asked. And in this too, things were different. Because normally he would have just ordered me around, told me to get back now.

I said that I’d get there for sure before Mother got home.

“Let’s hope you don’t run into her down there,” and for the first time ever it was like we were talking shop as equals.

I said, “Yeah, that’d be something.” We both had a good laugh over that one, longer than it deserved.

Then he said, “Don’t fuck me on this, okay?” and I said, “You’re a great guy, Kiv.” That was his pet name; only my mother and I called him that, and only when he was being soft enough to let us.

And then I put the phone down and went back into the living room. Clarissa was standing by the window; below you could see the ravine and on the other side of the ravine, the Jewish quarter with their big houses and wonderful deep backyards. She said, “Let’s go steal something.”

It must have been a week or so later that I came down to the city with my brown suitcase to stay with my uncle, Laddie. He was the family disgrace, plastered by noon every day. He had squandered his intelligence, his dark good looks, even a career as a hockey player. (I heard more than once, always in shaming tones, that he’d been invited to try out as a goalie for the Toronto Maple Leafs.) But his late wife, Ellen, was a kindly soul and had died before she could come to despise him, leaving behind a monthly, untouchable stipend, enough for Laddie to tipple himself to death more or less un-interfered with. And like many charming drunks, he’d quickly found a simple, decent woman to look after him, who saw, behind his puffy features and coarse humour, the classy educated gentleman he had once been and, in the grips of a ferocious hangover, could still be. A man who could quote Horace with his head in the toilet bowl.

My mother, who was Laddie’s sister, knew I was going to Toronto to “see a girl” and that romantic streak in her, the streak that allowed her to stay with my father despite his infidelities (he fucked her best friend on the couch at Grassmere early one morning when he thought, incorrectly, she was asleep in the far wing of the house), let her drive me to the bus station in Huntsville. She was a woman who simply could never say no to love, even to her fifteen-year-old son.

I haven’t described Clarissa. I’ll leave that to you, except to say that with her black eye makeup, her short “French” haircut, she struck me, from the first time I saw her in the kitchen at a Christmas party, as a girl out of my league. And yet how odd it is that in only a matter of days she went from being a girl I could never “get” to a girl I assumed belonged with me.

Her good looks—and her “big shot” father—got her a job as a model at the Exhibition, a giant old-fashioned fair at the edge of Lake Ontario. On warm summer evenings, tingling with the excitement of the city, of being caught up in and fluent in its swirl, I rattled downtown in the streetcar to see her. Wandering under the huge gates of the Exhibition, through the crowds, the bangs and pops and shrieks and swoops of rides and games, I felt that I was being pulled toward the centre of life; and at that centre there was Clarissa Bentley, a human mannequin who stood motionless on a slowly revolving podium in the Automotive Building. Wearing a pink dress or a blue jumper or jeans with a candy-cane top, she was the object of scrutiny—would she blink, would she twitch, could you make her smile?—for the parade of humanity, men mostly, occasionally dragging their plump wives and bored children among the new-model Chevrolets and Buicks and Cadillacs. Having a beautiful girlfriend is a certain kind of delicious when you’re young, and that moment when the podium ground gradually to a halt, when Clarissa’s arms came to life, a smile crossed her heavily made-up features (“Johnnie, look at that!”), that moment when, carefully, she stepped down from the dais, one step, then another, then another, and came over to me, to
me
, that single moment quite lifted me from who I used to be and made me, I was sure, into someone new. The life I had always been owed. The summer advanced. I have a photograph from that time, a coloured picture taken in a booth, me in a candy-coloured jacket and a straw boater, Clarissa in profile. I put it in a plastic gadget that lit up when you put it to your eye and pushed a button. I carried it around in my pocket like a passport.

And then one afternoon a boy from school, Justin Strawbridge, took me to the Place Pigalle, a gloomy downstairs tavern where, he said, we could get “served,” the drinking age in those days being twenty-one. I hated the taste of draft beer, it made me shiver with disgust. But I loved getting “served” and I loved doing things with Justin Strawbridge and so I drank and drank and gradually it seemed to me I was a very interesting, daring fellow.

And after Justin left (he had an errand to do for his unpleasant mother), I wandered through the twilight bar, talking to people, even sitting down once at a crowded table until I found myself talking to the back of an engineering student. But I didn’t take it personally. I let the sweep of things take me here and there.

It was such a gorgeous night when I emerged hours later, the sky a luminous, inexpressible blue, a sliver of moon hanging over the lake. So beautiful I couldn’t stand to leave it, and I walked all the way down to the Exhibition. The moon rose in the sky, the stars came out, the city was wrapped in a bubble of density and meaning. Passing under the Exhibition gates (they loomed like a canyon overhead), I slalomed through the caramel-sweet air and children and exuberant young men. A double-decker Ferris wheel spun backwards into the night.

Clarissa waited for me outside the auto pavilion. She was chatting to another model, a girl in a red sweater with eyes too big for her bony skull; and it seemed to me that this girl spoke to me in a rather supercilious manner, as if she’d gone from not knowing me to not liking me in about forty-five seconds.

I wasn’t as indulgent this time as I’d been with the engineering student, and I must have said something (I had quite the tongue back then), because she walked off without saying goodbye to either of us.

“Somebody’s been drinking,” Clarissa said. We started across the midway, the Saturday night crowd swollen and somehow more aggressive than other nights. Drifting in and out of the mob, fifty yards ahead of us, was Clarissa’s old boyfriend, Bill Cardelle, coming this way.

I didn’t know if they’d seen each other since he dumped her, but she wouldn’t look at him, kept looking around the crowd as if she was expecting someone. But Bill, being Bill, eased his way through it, wasn’t put off by her one-word answers, his hair falling just so over his forehead, his white chinos fashionably high up on the ankle and a pink shirt which, on anyone else, would have looked, well, you know. And after a while they fell into a conversation, friends in common, other couples, and the three of us, at my suggestion, made our way over to the Ferris wheel.

There was a messy lineup, couples changing their mind amidst a great deal of hilarity, teenagers butting in. I struck up a conversation with a grey-haired man and his wife. I did it, I think, to show Clarissa how easy, how confident I was with people, my gift of the gab. But it was my undoing, this gift of the gab, because while I was talking, Clarissa and Bill somehow got onto the Ferris wheel before me; down went the bar,
clank
, and the wheel moved up a notch. I got on.
Clank
. Then behind me the grey-haired man and his wife, who seemed not so interesting after all.

The ride started. Up, up, up we went; all the way to the top, where you could see the yellow clock tower of my school, like an owl’s eye, staring at me. And then with a rush of screams and exploding lights, down we went, around and around and around. I could see in the chair just above me that their heads, Bill’s and Clarissa’s, were bent close together, as if to hear better; she was asking him questions; he’d answer and then pull his head back to see her reaction and then she’d look at him, not saying anything. I sensed that I was in terrible danger; panic whipped through my body like a pinball. Around and around and around we went. It went on forever, this infernal ride, and with every revolution I could feel her moving away from me.

They got off first, and when I joined them, staggering a little theatrically, I could see that they were waiting on something, she looking at him, Bill looking down at his loafers. And my mouth went completely dry.

Bill was dim but he wasn’t vicious, and so he stood off at a decent distance while she told me. “I want to be with Bill now,” she said, and there was, Clarissa being Clarissa, a hint of impatience, the same I’d heard in her voice when she asked me, Was I coming down to see her in the city, as if, in this case, she wanted to get this part of the evening over with (me) and “get on with things.”

Bill drove me home to my uncle’s. Just the two of us sitting in the car, driving up the same big street I’d walked down only a few hours earlier. How could everything have changed, my whole life, in so brief a time?

“Is this your car?” I said.

“My dad’s.”

“It smells new. Is it new?”

“Is what new?” he said.

“The car. Is it a new car?”

“I think it is.”

“I like the smell of a new car,” I said.

We drove over the train yards, up through Chinatown, the moon in the rear-view mirror. A streetcar rattled by, empty now.

“Hard to believe it’s already August,” I said. I don’t think Bill found much of anything hard to believe. But he nodded cooperatively. He took his right hand off the wheel and rested it on the seat between us. His “petting” hand, it occurred to me.

“I always like the idea of summer,” I said. “But somehow it always ends up sort of a disappointment.”

Pulling to a graceful stop in front of my uncle’s house, Bill turned his handsome, almost feminine features to me. Even in the light from the street lamps, I could see the splash of blood in his cheeks. (
My
blood, it seemed to me.)

“I’m sorry about all this,” he said. And in his way, he was. I got out of the car, ran up the flagstone steps, made a small theatrical production of looking for my key, but when I turned to wave I could see from his face in the car window that he understood exactly how I felt but that in five minutes he wouldn’t be thinking about it anymore. On his way, no doubt, to Clarissa’s house. Her parents, she’d mentioned earlier, were at a film festival in San Sebastian.