Heaven Is Small (5 page)

Then, on friday, the woman was suddenly there. She was the first.

Gordon felt her before he saw her. He could sense her long, dark eyelashes going blink-blink over the partition.

Gordon turned and — blink-blink — there she was. “Hi . . .” he mumbled, physically indexing his brain by pressing a pair of searching fingertips to his left temple.

“Erika,” she supplied. “Workman.”

“Erika Workman.” Gordon wagged his finger at her.

She quickly scooted from her perch — where, a fraction of a second before, one elbow had hooked over the cubicle wall — to the inside of Gordon’s not-so-vast workspace.

“Is it a truism?” she whispered.

“Is what a truism?”

She was leaning forward. To compensate, Gordon leaned backwards in his chair. The wheels yelped. If it weren’t for her proximity he would have assumed she had come for what they all came for: advice about straightening out some maxim or misquote. She was one of the youngest, her cheeks still puffed with dorm-room cider. There was a blemish along her jaw that had not vanished in the week Gordon had been at Heaven, but her eyes were absolute amber and her collarbone was incomparable. Blink.

“You know what they’re saying?”

“You want help with a saying?”

Blink. “No.” A blue and yellow set of breasts pressed against a cotton T as she leaned closer.

“What
they’re
saying,” she hissed through a small black gap in her front teeth. Her lips were the colour of penny candy. Gordon clutched
Webster’s
across his lap like a shield. She rolled her eyes slowly to indicate some presence beyond his head, beyond the cubicle. “What they’re saying, is it true?”

Nothing to do with a truism at all. What was it
they
were saying?
Gordon shook his head, let
Webster’s
slip a bit as Erika retreated a few inches. She set up camp on the corner of his desk, her denim skirt hitching up almost above the kneecap. One red sneaker dangled, its small suede body notched with brand. She was less churchy than the others, Gordon saw now. Her youth permitted her wardrobe to be more casual. She wore burgundy trouser socks, in spite of the skirt, and above them — that gulping patella as she let the red shoe swing. Back. Forward. Gordon’s eyes followed. When he looked up at her face again, she had turned her head away, was peering off over the cubicle’s top, on lookout as she waited for his answer.

“I — I don’t know what this is about. Are you sure it has to do with me?”

She ducked her brown head. “No . . . no.” Blink-blink. “It has to do with Chloe Gold.”

Somewhere in Design a book toppled to the floor. An outdated scanner slammed shut. A neon band of pain formed behind Gordon’s brow.

“Oh . . . Chloe.” At that moment the computer terminal went to sleep, and in its dark face Gordon could see himself visibly grimace.

“So you
know
her.”

“I know her,” he confirmed, the three words a more complex sentence than any he had edited so far.

“You. Know.
Chloe. Gold
.” Erika Workman’s voice jumped an octave with each word. The heel of her red shoe kicked the desk drawer, slamming it on its spring. The shoe swung haphazardly around the cubicle and Gordon desperately wondered how he could turn his pain to his advantage. Erika’s exposed kneecap was a porcelain pitcher of cream. Gordon loathed hearing his wife’s name parked next to such enthusiasm. But everything about Erika Workman was suddenly bobbing. “Chloe Gold, the
Goodbye to the Wind
author?” Erika leaned in so close that Gordon wondered if he should take cover again beneath the
Webster’s
. She wriggled ass-backwards so the desk supported her full weight, placed her hands on her bare knees, both feet off the floor now. “
The
Chloe Gold. So it is a truism?”

“No,” he said, “but it’s true.” He nodded, slowly, reluctantly. “She was my wife.”

“She’s your —”

“
Ex
—”

“— wife.”

“— wife.”

“Oh! Snap! Jinx!” Erika cheered, and sprang from the desk, denim down again. She put her finger to her lips — blink-blink — and tore away.

Before whoopsy’s on dufferin Avenue there had been the office on Bond Street.

In the office on Bond, Gordon had read manuscripts for Dr. Greer Black, at a literary magazine known simply as
post–
. He’d been fresh out of university and hadn’t even met Chloe yet. Dr. Black kept the manuscripts in apple boxes and banker’s boxes and paid Gordon $100 for each carton he emptied. Gordon went in for ten hours a week to read them. They came from all over — from the inhabitants of little islands in British Columbia that had no electricity; university grads teaching English in China, Korea, France, Sweden; farmwives suffocating on dust in Middle America; activists building schools in Peru; hockey coaches in factory towns who fancied themselves poets; and the sad pathetic souls, like Gordon, who had every faculty available to them for careers in literature but who couldn’t step far enough outside themselves to see that what they had set down on the page was little more than an undergrad diary written with the assistance of a thesaurus
.
“Don’t read — just skim,” Dr. Black told him. “You’ll never get through them otherwise. It’ll break your heart, it’s so hilarious.”

She was right. There were stories about husbands and wives who had gone missing from one another, then reunited only to share long, tragically boring marriages. There were illustrated cat and dog stories by adults burning with desire to be
auteurs
and
artistes
, who hadn’t studied either writing or drawing since sixth grade and didn’t understand why Gordon and Dr. Black wouldn’t accept their “graceful line renderings” and reproduce them in full colour. Pencil-crayoned dogs eating ice-cream cones married blue-Bic cats who held funerals for great-aunts with eating disorders, who were succeeded by adopted Chinese daughters, whose mothers went missing in small-town murder mysteries where cops hid their homosexual urges under heterosexual teen porn rings but wound up exposed by meddlesome academics with degrees in medieval literature and Japanese studies, who sat gazing from windows at leaves changing colour while remembering first loves they had played doctor with in root cellars, who wound up as thrift-conscious double divorcees, who wound up as cross-country-cycling swingers, who wound up as spiritual leaders, who wound up as pot-promoting grandparents, who wound up dying of colon cancer (or lung cancer or leukemia or AIDS), finally inducted into the Football Hall of Fame and leaving behind three manuscripts: one on financial planning, one of poetry (in spite of an inability to name a single poet living or dead), and one about the relationship between women and cats and men and dogs.

By the year’s end that little office on Bond was broken, rejection slips scattered across Gordon’s desk, still unmailed. He had worked with Dr. Black for eleven months and done away with only four apple boxes. According to the Manu-scripts Status logbook, Gordon had broken exactly 294 hearts. In the hallway six more boxes awaited his tearful gaze. They couldn’t have it. It wasn’t fair. Gordon began opening manila envelopes and shoving the forms in without so much as a glance. Grandfathers of famous dancers now living in Ukraine would put down their pens and stop chronicling as a result of Gordon’s carelessness. High school students with crushes on aging literary figures would turn off their computers, dye their hair black, and take up with Marilyn Manson instead. Master’s grads with bad habits in black-and-white photography and rhyming poetry would switch to cocaine and nightclubs.

Even now, in Gordon’s room on Russet Avenue, beneath the bed, there was still one last box, the one that had gone missing. Gordon had moved it three times because he hadn’t been able to bring himself to put them out on the street, those
works
. Good or bad, each belonged to someone, and he had imagined their aspiring authors coincidentally tripping by his recycling bin some rainy night, only to catch sight of their own title pages staring up at them. The box of broken dreams had been collecting dust for ten years, sleeping beneath the space where Gordon slept.

post–
was spelled intentionally with a dash and without a capital letter. It was an offshoot literary journal from Gordon’s alma mater, and Dr. Black was the only editor. She had, in fact, been the only editor, with the exception of a transient team of students, since 1974. The journal was an oddity, published twice yearly in hardcover — which was a large part of its appeal to up-and-coming writers. To be published in hardcover was somehow better than soft, in spite of
post–
’s obvious lack of newsstand presence. An acceptance to
post–
meant yes, you had made it. Merely by digging through the manuscript boxes then, by extension, Gordon had made it. The summer that Gordon cleared out all six apple boxes in four weeks, Dr. Black agreed to publish one of the three stories he had managed to bang out — the shortest one, she decided in the end
.

He was twenty-five years, two months, and two days old when
Gordon Small
appeared in cursive on the cover in a long list of other names of would-be writers.
post–
: ed. Dr. Greer Black; contributors: Chloe Gold, Gordon Small. The twenty or so other names in the 10-point font had since faded into the weave of the cover. Chloe’s poem was about flowers, tricks you could play on them. It was short and fidgety, full of word play and irregular line breaks. But good, Gordon thought, maybe. He could tell, the first time he read the poem, long before it appeared in print, that Chloe would be pretty.

The day
post–
had arrived from the printer, the office on Bond Street had swirled with the scent of ink toxins. Curlicues of Styrofoam had floated across the scarred production table. The sunlight had lilted across the sixty-pound paper stock that was
post–
’s trademark. Sections of someone else’s misprinted books had been stuffed, like black-and-white-striped pillows, inside the edges of
post–
’s boxes to keep their Gordon-Small– adorned covers from dinging against the sides. It was glorious, they were glorious, they were
post–
glorious. Dr. Black had held one up, squinted at it, and said, “Today,
post–
, tomorrow, post-
post–
,” as if there were anything else to go on to.

Gordon had gone home that day, taken a shower, and lain on his bed. He had been able to hear his roommate through the rented nicotined walls, unaware, attempting to play Zeppelin’s “Tangerine” on an acoustic guitar to Susan or Janey. Gordon had closed his eyes, and Susan
and
Janey had joined him on his newly published side of the wall.

He’d met Chloe Gold two weeks later, at the September launch of
post–.
She hadn’t been as pretty as he’d imagined, but she was one of only three women who had been published in the fall
post–
. Not only that, she’d had every confidence that Gordon was going to be the country’s next big thing. As always she’d been close enough to the truth to be worth believing: in the following year he’d pumped out an ultra-slim novel with a small press whose publisher was friendly with Dr. Black. The book had been printed on cheap paper and given the kind of marketing afforded a new style of gyro at a Greek restaurant. But on this particular night, belief had been all that mattered. The university faculty lounge had a balcony running all the way around it, complete with moon, and Chloe was wearing a black fringed shawl and a skirt with buttons like upturned blue eyeballs.

Gordon was sure Heaven had accepted him because he had managed to stretch his ten-hour-per-week
post–
experience into a virtual lifetime of work before he’d been sidetracked by “research” for a second novel set in the Dufferin neighbourhood. After all, he was the very first editor to select a piece for publication by the best-selling Chloe Gold.

Her name now appeared in his mind in uppercase foil letters. It shook him to remember the modesty of Chloe’s youth — its lowercased initials — and the days before he had begun dreaming of her funeral. Gordon was not the type of man to daydream-plan murder so much as the kind to envision a million possible scenarios for accidental death, flowers and elegies, the consolations of Chloe’s attractive sister, television interviews, his own comeback, and remarriage.

They all visited his cubicle after that. Gordon was Heaven’s minor celebrity. They came from Proofreading, Copy Editing — even Hello Sonja from Foreign Rights came, bringing her screensaver face with her. One of the men journeyed over from Design. He had to know, he whispered, was she really all that? Gordon leaned back in his chair, arms veed behind his head, and, strangely, enjoyed his newfound fame. In all his time at the mall, no one had ever asked about his personal life. There had been shoppers, even other mall employees, who must have known who Chloe Gold was, despite the mall’s obvious deficiency in books. But if those knowing souls existed, they had stayed on the other side of the line separating Whoopsy’s from the mall walkways, perhaps repelled by the television merchandise that surrounded Gordon. Besides, the wedding ring had made its way from his finger to his sock drawer, and Gordon had donned a shield of anonymity along with his Whoopsy’s golf shirt.

She was, Gordon said, all
that
, and he grinned at his own falsity, at the ease with which he had what others now wanted. The man, who had eyes like wilted cucumber, went away firm and crisp with hope. He’d given Gordon a look-over — the new suit now creased with daily wear — and had seen that Gordon was khaki, unironed, plain and brown in a pair of nearly soleless shoes. He’d sprung up, shaking Gordon’s hand as if it were the hammer for the strongman’s bell at a fairground.

Gordon stared at the kettle in the lunchroom. Wisps were coming out of it like spittle off a dog’s tongue in summer. It didn’t whistle, he’d learned the hard way, and he would be reprimanded if he went away and left it. He’d been told that someone had brought it in from home and they weren’t supposed to have it in the first place. The staff had been warned to be particularly careful with the few privileges they’d stolen.