Heaven Is Small (7 page)

When Gordon left Georgianne, she still had a faraway look in her eyes. She moved the computer screen around until there was no reflection in it. He noticed, glancing back, that she stood up and twisted the blinds closed anyway.

As he walked to the elevators, past Bentley’s podium, Bentley put a hand up to detain Gordon. “Small?”

Gordon waited, but Bentley wasn’t looking at him. His eyes were searching the second shelf of his station.

“Small?”

Gordon sighed, answered him with a sarcastic schoolboy’s “Yes . . . ?”

“You’ll need one of these, won’t you?” Bentley opened a miniature brown envelope and took out an oblong tab of black plastic.

With recognition and defeat, the word blipped out again. “Yes . . .”

It was a security card. For weeks Gordon had been signing in and out with the cow-eyed guard in the lobby, entry authorized by others, riding down with co-workers.

Bentley put the access card back in its coin envelope and slid it to Gordon across the wooden stand. Gordon picked it up only after Bentley’s hands had left it, as if they were sharing a woman. The tiny envelope had his name written across it in a flowing female hand:
For Gordon Small, Urgent.

“This mine?”

“Lily just sent it down for you.”

Gordon didn’t like the way he said Lillian’s name.
Lily.
Like it was something he could hold between his pasty thumbs.

“That’s HR,” Bentley continued. “Nothing’s important until they think it is. They could take a week or a month or a year to get you all approved and firmed up.”

Gordon didn’t like the way he said
firmed up
either.

“Thanks.” Gordon edged away from Bentley, still looking down at the object.

The plastic had a nice, compact, solid feel in his palm, like a dark, sand-polished skipping stone. Gordon ran his thumb over the loops and eyes of Lillian Payne’s handwriting before tucking the empty envelope in his pocket, safe against his groin. He hit the elevator with his new status, swiped himself for the first time, and watched the panel colour change. Like a rainbow. Gordon was official at Heaven. He held his own disco in the steel box as he dropped — thirteen storeys.

6

Gordon held the stub of his cheque aloft — the statement that alerted him that the company had made the most recent instant deposit. “Hello, my pet,” he said to the paper tongue. He fed it to his wallet like a dog treat and turned from his inbox to his telephone. Though he never visited the teller, Gordon was developing a simple and satisfying relationship with his bank account. Settling in at Heaven meant he no longer saw the inside of the bank. Or a grocery store or pharmacy for that matter.

When he checked his office voice mail, he found two messages from his co-worker Ivy Wolfe.

One: “Eden Eats has arrived, Gordon!”

Two: “Ivy again. Noticed you had some yogourt. Didn’t want that to turn inside out on you, so I’ve stashed it in the Net fridge. Venture up when you can.”

Within days of his Chloe Gold status circulating, the romantics and the granola heads had found him. Ivy was one of these, and when she said the word “Net,” her voice lifted ever so slightly. It was just a blip really, but to Gordon it spoke volumes about Heaven’s Internet Division. Ivy and her fellow Floor Fifty-Eight workers seemed to believe their department was the mecca of Heaven. The word always fell from their lips with a certain reverence. Whenever Gordon journeyed up to collect his groceries, he noticed that she and her co-workers lounged and twisted in their backless chairs as if they were practising yoga while typing.

Ivy was a chickpea-coloured politico who farted liberally — small vegetarian drafts smelling strangely of A1 Steak Sauce — and Gordon wondered if he should have trusted her. She had approached him to explain that there was an all-organic online grocery service that — if he were willing to join with her and several others in a group order — would save Gordon substantial amounts. He could schlep his food home from there, she had insisted, or, if he preferred, order only what he needed for his lunches. Previously Gordon’s shopping habits had tended toward the bigger and better. His grocery cart at the mall had always been loaded with Hungry-Man Sports Grill meals, which required no grill at all, just a spin of the microwave dial. Pre-Heaven, even his toothpaste had been turbo — Max Fresh. When the woman on the packaging opened her mouth, little icicle stars tumbled out.
iCouldwin
, Gordon’s cola case had declared, though he’d known he never would. Gordon had let Ivy sign him up, agreeing only out of sheer sloth. In the mornings he ate at the break-room table, masticated apricot granola and suckled on rice milk or strawberry soy. In a matter of days a new lifestyle had been built.

Eating all-organic did something funny to Gordon. Although he didn’t feel bunged up, some days he couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen the inside of the men’s room. Was this health? He needed to increase his bran intake, he decided. He went searching down in the concourse — or Passage, as the girls called it — for a raisin muffin. He found a corner outlet called Muffins Don’t Grow on Trees, and sadly it was true. There was a counter girl there with a paper hat perched upon dark curls. She had an incredibly long nose and an equally wide smile for Gordon. But the glass domes of all four muffin trays were empty, protecting only an array of brown and yellow crumbs. Brownies she had in abundance. Butter croissants. Brittle horns of cannoli. Cinnamon twists. Almond biscotti. Peach tarts glazed so thick the fruit appeared plastic. And old-fashioned granny-like scones that looked as though they had been dropped from a great height, landed, and hardened — plain, cheese, and cheese and ham. The aroma of the place almost did Gordon in. He contemplated a vanilla ladyfinger, but in the end he ducked his head into his shirt collar and the paper-hat girl smiled wider, self-consciously, as he turned and fled.

Chloe had been a baker who refused to eat her own concoctions. Instead, she broke them into very small pieces and nibbled mouselike on them. Going empty-handed to friends’ houses or family gatherings was to Chloe like wearing one’s clothes inside out and backwards. She would rather be two hours late and proudly present a waxed-paper package over the doorstep. She would make things and leave Gordon at home with them while they cooled, sometimes for hours. When she returned, she would always beam at Gordon — “Ate them all, did you?” — and rub his belly as if he were a Buddha figure and could grant her luck. He almost became fat while living with her. He gained ten pounds in the first year. Chloe began to refer to him as
man
rather than
boy
. She argued with herself about her tendency toward feminism and this strange urge to make things, to mince, whisk, roll, fold, sprinkle, grate, drop, frost. “Aprons,” she spat like a curse. She had five. She always smelled of cinnamon and vanilla, praline. Her mouth, however, was anything but. When Gordon kissed her on baking days, there were often traces of cigarettes he hadn’t seen her smoke. She tasted crisp, burnt. He wondered if beneath his thumbs she would crumble at the edges.

Later, after he’d started managing Whoopsy’s, he would walk past the new and irksome Cinnabon store twice a day. Its homemade perfume wafted nine stores in either direction. Each time he passed — six years, six and a half, seven years after they had parted ways — he thought of Chloe. He knew it was wrong that she had lodged in his brain like an unrequited love, but that was just it. She was elusive. Like a girl he’d never had, even when he’d had her. Chloe: sometimes sandalwood but always cinnamon. When he smelled it, she infused his thoughts for an hour, sometimes twelve.

Gordon rounded the Passage corner and put Muffins Don’t Grow on Trees out of view behind him, pressing the Up button seven times in quick succession. There was a different kind of granola available through Eden Eats, and he made a mental note to order it next time. Fruit too.

Over the past few weeks Gordon’s life had become such a streamlined, insular shuttle he hadn’t even noticed going to work and back to his door. He was surprised one evening to round the corner of Russet Avenue and find Grenwald’s sticky head bopping between the columns on the Ashbridge porch. It was obvious that no one had answered Grenwald’s knock, which was quite unusual. Gordon could not think where Mrs. Ashbridge could be. Though she had her morning groups, by this time of day his landlady was usually there, on the porch. To see his old mall buddy in her place was quite alarming. Grenwald was clearly agitated, in a way Gordon had seen only when Grenwald was bested by west-end youth, clubbed down by slang he did not know or unable to figure out exactly who had snatched that last Nike-swooshed shirt, tucked it into their pants, and made off with it gratis. Grenwald actually paced.

It dawned on Gordon that instead of walking up and greeting his friend, he had unconsciously stopped a short distance away. He put his hand on the tree beside him. With the exception of the Brass Taps and their daily bucket o’ beer, Gordon had never seen Grenwald outside of work. Always with the intention of approaching, Gordon observed.

With the pivot characteristic of a five-foot-seven salesman of sporting goods, Grenwald swung around the brick veranda. Instead of a basketball he had his keys, which busied one hand. He bounced them on a chain. The other hand was engaged in buttoning a telephone number into his cell. Though it was only six at night, it emitted a tetragon of blue from its mechanical face. Gordon was accustomed to Grenwald’s need to jabber away to one unfortunate girl or another, but this time Grenwald held the phone low to his chin and spoke directly into its mouthpiece as if he were issuing short-wave-radio directives rather than pillow musings. Then he did something highly atypical: he stopped speaking. He pressed the phone to his ear and stood staring so intently in Gordon’s direction that Gordon found himself stepping behind the tree. When he looked again, Grenwald had ended the call. For a moment he stood looking down into his palm, where the gadget lay. His thinking face. He pocketed the phone.

Grenwald strode out into the street and stood looking up at Gordon’s attic window. His back straightened as if he were taking a deep breath. Gordon could see it in his shoulders, the way they spread, fluid, backwards, the white jacket collecting up the last remaining strands of light and letting them run off like water. Up in the window a black suit bag stood watch. Gordon didn’t know if Grenwald could see it from where he stood, but he imagined he could, because Gordon suddenly had an eerie feeling, recollecting its shape where it hung against the closet door. Gordon didn’t even need to squint to see it.

A hunter green compact sped up the one-way street in the wrong direction. The driver seemed to express no hesitation about the decision, and parked, still facing the wrong direction, at the end of Mrs. Ashbridge’s walk. Some men know a woman from a great distance by the way she stands or walks; Gordon knew her by the way she drove. Before a leg ending in a no-nonsense Clarks shoe had emerged from the driver’s side, Gordon had begun pulling chunks of bark from the tree that hid him, tearing the coarse matter with his fingernails.

Above a basic white blouse and jeans belted with an olive scarf, Chloe’s cinnamon hair floated across the lawn. Her age was like a medallion around her neck. Her eyes were smudged with fatigue, creased at the corners in a way Gordon did not remember. She was not the woman he had known but rather some sort of sophisticated or graduate version, a woman with all the paperwork to claim she was Chloe — to the extent that even Gordon was impressed. Grenwald extended his hand, but Chloe clasped him instead in a quick hug. It was fast but expressive, and the sleeve fell back from Chloe’s forearm as she removed it from Grenwald’s neck.

Gordon ran his hand through his hair, but it felt like wood. He looked down at his hands. He had broken his nails on the tree bark without feeling it. He did something then that he didn’t understand, even as it happened. Gordon turned and fled.

He sprinted toward the neighbour’s backyard, through it, past the marble-eyed cat, into the yard of the next house, down its walk and into Pauline Avenue, up Pauline, and back around to Bloor, landing on his toes, footsteps ringing light as pins. He broke hard left, put the Indian dollar store behind him, the Portuguese bakery, the Islamic mosque, the Baptist church —
At the heart of every conflict is a selfish heart
— and swung down the subway stairs.

Later, rattling northward, head
tut-tut-tut
ting against the Pantene Pro-V poster that promised longer, stronger hair and 100 percent more shine enhancement, Gordon still didn’t know why he had reacted as he did. A thousand images nabbed him. He recalled Chloe at a book signing, though he was sure he had never attended one. Vividly the cover was shutting under her hand, then there was another book, another cover opened, another cover shut. He recalled the empty whisky glass on his bedside table. Why these images held such weight and why they should come at him now, he couldn’t say.

He rose and exited the car at the next stop. Gordon’s hands shook as he strode along the platform. He stopped for a moment. He closed his eyes. It was just a hug. Chloe hugged everyone. It was just a sleeve. Gordon saw it falling back again. Unplanned though it was, he saw the moment again, made more intimate by that glimpse of flesh so late in the fall. How had Chloe and Grenwald ever met? He tried to remember if he had ever told Grenwald about her. He hadn’t, he was certain he hadn’t. But what were they doing there on his porch? Waiting for him? Gordon took another step. A cautious step. Then he put his head down and sprinted up the subway station stairs, intending to cross over and come down on the other side, ride the seven stops back to his neighbourhood, and find out what had happened on Russet Avenue; why Grenwald was boomeranging around the porch; why Chloe, after eight years’ absence, was suddenly shooting down his street of crabapples, clipping shears, and quiet; why Gordon himself had felt that odd impulse to flee. But at the top of the stairs something stopped Gordon in his tracks.