Mount Pleasant (19 page)

Under Horst’s hasty guidance, they introduced themselves and stated their mostly redundant reasons for coming to the seminar. They spoke of the specific place they wanted to get to, encouraged to imagine it as a geographical location, to translate the concept of “Less Debt” to a small town that was within driving distance. Harry drifted farther away from Horst’s carnival.

The golden age of Harry Salter had never been golden. Now he was faced with ruin and with auditory hallucinations that made him distrust his hearing. Traffic sounded like a private reproach. The deadness of a subway train interior now roared. The city was as broke as he was. It had betrayed and mocked him, reneging on its promise of hierarchy (which he himself had rejected when he thought he was part of the elite). Cuts were coming, the mayor warned. To the bone.

Harry now saw everything in the context of debt. The seesaw of a marriage. Gladys granted him wild sex and he was indebted to her, responding with an intricate dinner (though that particular transaction hadn’t taken place for a very long time). And so it went. Divorce was merely the buildup of debt
by one partner who had no way of paying it off, no emotional, sexual or romantic capital left.

After they had finished their sharing and had reassembled in rows, a dull man came on stage and read a speech about just how unregulated the financial world was and how it would eventually spell the death of capitalism. He wrapped up his plodding vision of the apocalypse and reintroduced Horst, who talked about how money could rush into the hole left by personal loss, if you gave it permission to. This was at last too much for Harry, and he left quietly, finding relief in the sudden cavern of the lobby.

He walked north along the grand boulevard, his head down. It was 11:17 and the day had cost, he calculated, $319.25 with tax so far. He felt a familiar sense of loss, which he realized might never entirely disappear. He was already hungry for lunch and the north wind blew into his face in annoying gusts. When Harry heard a familiar voice saying “Change?” and looked up to see the man who had ruined his jacket, the man whom he’d bought the hot dog for, his homeless nemesis, he roared at him with atavistic power, “Fuck you, you Fagin fuck!”

In the wake of that adrenaline-fuelled roar, he closely examined the man’s surprised face and determined conclusively that it wasn’t the same person. Beneath the hood, this man’s hair was grey, rather than black. The faces had been battered by the same forces, coloured by the same sun, porous and thickened, Rushmore-like. But this man looked defeated, while the other one had had a breezy insanity. The panhandler quickly moved past him, and Harry stared after his stiff form jerkily moving south, his soiled trench coat flapping, a large flightless bird. Harry should catch up to him and give him money.

“Wait,” Harry yelled, walking quickly, his hand going to his pocket. “Hold on, I’m sorry, I thought you were …”

The man increased his pace, one arm motioning for Harry to keep away.

“Look, I made a mistake …” Harry searched his pockets, hoping for some coins, or even a $5 bill. All he had was a fifty that had come out of the bank machine. He couldn’t give him a fifty. The apology without any money wouldn’t mean anything, at least not to this man, who was in a half-run now, his right arm pawing the air behind him: Stay back.

“I just wanted …” Harry called out, taking a few more halfhearted steps. He stopped, feeling awful.

The man weaved through the light Saturday traffic and now stood on the small island between the north and southbound lanes. He looked like a gazelle that had managed to put a river between itself and a leopard. He stood there, staring at Harry.

Harry turned north and walked past the legislative buildings, dormant on Saturday, the elegant halls unfilled with accusations of economic stupidity and fiduciary betrayal. It would be easy, if he were slightly more paranoid, to imagine the entire city as a vast conspiracy against him, designed to take his money and leave him out on the street with the wretched men he encountered, the dishearteningly similar bums taking his change. And now one or more thieves had taken his father’s money, or his father himself might be the thief.

Harry went past the radical architecture and weekend shoppers on Bloor Street as clouds skidded eastward. He felt, suddenly, in the mood to watch a movie. Not something dark and European, but a movie that was explosively American. Harry bought a ticket for a one o’clock show, then went to a café and ordered a smoked salmon bagel and watched the people file by.

He spent the whole afternoon in the movie complex, finally emerging at 8:35 p.m., having seen all of one film and pieces
of five others. He had missed a lot of beginnings, joining movies already under way, the show times probably staggered to discourage exactly what Harry was doing: slinking from one theatre to the next without paying. The characters overlapped slightly; the troubled, tattooed love interest in the Scandinavian psychological thriller wasn’t all that different from the (almost fatal) tattooed love interest in the action movie. The existential chain-smoking detachment of the Serbian detective occasionally, surprisingly, reminded Harry of the bumbling suitor in the romantic comedy that he saw the last thirty-five minutes of. The various narratives sat jumbled in his head, pieces of unrelated puzzles: a tentative kiss; a decomposing corpse in the woods; a Porsche sailing merrily into a tanker truck hauling propane; a woman wiping tears on a windy beach in autumn; a man farting at a wedding; Neil Sedaka singing as the credits rolled. The careful constructions of a culture sashaying into the abyss. But Harry had seen six films for one low price. He calculated his savings to be $83.75, reclaiming part of the day’s losses.

Harry returned home after nine p.m. to find Gladys and Ben on the couch, deep in conversation, a conversation that stopped abruptly (cinematically, he thought) when he walked into the living room.

“I’ve been at the movies,” Harry announced in the tentative silence.

“Which one?” Gladys asked.

“All of them. I moved from film to film. I feel like I got it out of my system. My lack of movie-going.”

Gladys and Ben sat on the couch, staring at him.

“How’s school, Ben?” Harry asked. The same conversational non-starter he’d been using for fifteen years now. What did you learn today? From the evidence, Ben hadn’t learned
anything in more than a decade, an unbroken string of useless days. Ben sat silent. Glad was silent. It was, Harry thought, a complicit silence.

“Do you want dinner, Harry?” Gladys asked.

“I had some popcorn.”

“That stuff is lethal, Dad. It’s a petroleum by-product.”

Harry had eaten a bag of it, as well as a bag of red licorice, biting the ends off and using them as a straw in his water bottle, the way he’d done as a child.

“So, which one was best?” Gladys asked.

“Well, I only saw one from beginning to end. But the Serbian detective one looked good. I missed the first forty-five minutes. I’m not sure why he was so depressed and terse. Maybe there was a tragedy.”

“Maybe he was just Serbian. That might be enough,” Gladys said.

Harry was still standing with his coat on. The living room seemed underlit. Brahms was playing on the radio. The silence was recurring, and he suspected it would disappear as soon as he did.

“Why don’t you sit down, Harry?” his wife asked. “Take your coat off.”

Gladys’s invitation made Harry feel even more like a neighbour who has seen the light on and dropped by unannounced. He hung up his coat and took off his boots. He went to the kitchen and poured a glass of wine. When he came back, Ben was putting his own boots on. His gangly son stood up, unfolded upward, stood tall for an instant before assuming his natural slump. He reached for his coat.

“Anyway, I’ve gotta be going,” he said. “You know, school. Papers. Et cetera.”

“Nice to see you, Ben,” Harry said.

“We’ll talk,” Gladys said, ushering Ben out. The two of them stood talking on the porch for a moment until Gladys got too cold and waved goodbye and came back in.

“That’s real winter,” she said as she closed the door, giving a slightly exaggerated shiver. She brushed past Harry, her hand touching his waist. “I’d better clean up,” she said. She went into the kitchen and began filling the dishwasher. She and Ben had had dinner. Harry felt like he’d intruded on an intimacy. These were the kind of moments they had had when Ben was eleven months old, when the sunny-faced baby reached instinctively for his mother and Harry would arrive to find the two of them on the living room floor in front of the fire, hypnotized by their simple existence.

Harry slipped into bed beside the sleeping Gladys, who had been right about so many things. Her providential feminine ethos viewed the world as a series of causal relationships, where Harry saw a night sky filled with improbable fantasies, all of which became probable simply by dwelling on them after two glasses of wine. He settled into his side of the bed facing away from his wife, and was surprised when Gladys rolled toward him, her hand reaching for him, exploring gently, the remembered sequence of touching him, gently massaging, gauging arousal, feeling the stirring, a stirring that surprised him. He glanced over his shoulder; her eyes were still closed. Was she asleep? Her hand moved until he was hard, then she climbed on him in a single fluid motion. She hadn’t said anything. Her eyes were open now but staring upward.

Straddling Harry, she massaged her clitoris and rode rhythmically for several minutes. She still hadn’t looked at him. Pinned to the mattress, he watched this stranger. She finally rolled over
with a slight groan, pulling Harry on top, and he began fucking her. Her face was turned away, her eyes closed. They hadn’t kissed, and he thought it was somehow inappropriate now. They fucked vigorously for several minutes, then Harry moved to the side, behind her, into a spoon position, and they slowed down. He remembered a night on a trip to Greece years ago when an otherworldly lasciviousness had descended on Gladys like an ancient spell, and they crawled over one another and fucked with a purpose that left Harry quietly amazed for three days. It was in these moments that a marriage was contained.

At breakfast, Harry felt he should do something to carry the momentum of last night forward. He wondered if it had anything to do with his pending biopsy report. Perhaps Gladys felt she owed him for her indifference to his situation. He made two coffees and brought one to Gladys and sat down. The winter light filled the kitchen, one of the house’s graces. The light shone on Gladys’s hair. She looked up and smiled at him.

Harry assumed that he knew everything about his wife, the logical by-product of twenty-five years together. Though so much of her story had been told in those first intimate months. Pressed together in bed, telling each other the edited highlights of their childhoods, declaring themselves.

Looking at her now, in the afterglow of his gratitude, he could see the girl who was born of children of the Depression, who grew up on the prairies and carried those withered cattle and scouring sandstorms within them. Her mother saved pennies in Mason jars hidden beneath the workbench in the basement. She recycled paper lunch bags at a time when this was embarrassing rather than laudatory, and the eight-year-old Gladys was ashamed of the stains on the bag that held her
liverwurst sandwich and hid it in her desk. She wore a red plaid jacket in the fall, the most beautiful season in the Toronto suburb where her parents had hunkered down in a very modest split-level. If they desired anything for their two children—Gladys and her younger brother, Sam—it was security. They stressed education, vetted their children’s friends and strongly emphasized that government was a wonderful place for a career; the benefits and pensions were good and there was always room for advancement (you could become prime minister!). They were well-meaning and smothering, and any imagination they’d once possessed had been left on the prairie. Gladys grew up at least partly in their image. Her rebellions were small (briefly converting to Catholicism, going to Europe with a girlfriend after her undergraduate degree).

Harry had met Gladys at a dance pavilion on the lakeshore, a 1920s-era venue that had once hosted post-war youth—young men in blue blazers and nineteen-year-old women in dresses and pearls who waltzed in front of a twelve-piece band. By the time Harry came to it, in the 1970s, it was sheathed in irony. The band that was thrashing through its handful of chords was called Massive Stroke. Harry would have been more at home with the sailing crowd fifty years earlier. There was no point in approaching the dark kohl-eyed, hard-edged waifs bouncing on the dance floor. After standing at the back and kind of tapping his desert-booted foot to a Ramones cover, Harry went outside, stood on the sand, lit a cigarette and stared at the lake, the primitive pulse of the bass behind him. He saw Gladys standing barefoot on the beach, holding her shoes and letting the water come up to her feet. She looked elegant and slightly mysterious, and walking toward her, he didn’t know what he would say. By the time he got to her, the only thing he could think of was, “It’s cold, isn’t it?”

“I like it. It’s so hot in there.”

“Hmmm.”

She possessed a beauty that was almost Nordic, though her face held a kindness that was absent in the flinty, safety-pinned goths inside the dance hall. Harry recognized that neither of them were in any way hip.

Gladys told him she had grown up on the edges of the city, which wasn’t a bad place to be. All the important things came out to her suburb (the Beatles, cable, heavy petting) and fewer of the more confusing things (protests, lesbianism, Frank Zappa). She had finished her degree in library science, had seen a bit of the world with a girlfriend, though at the time she didn’t feel worldly; she felt like a suburban girl whose limited French and inherent conservatism was out of place among the tight jeans and high boots of Paris. She’d had sex with a Swedish student who she thought had a somewhat sixteenth-century notion of hygiene, and had met an Italian man with whom she fell stupidly in love and who disappeared on the seventh morning of their affair into the anonymity of Rome.