The Glass Harmonica (19 page)

Just one surprise among many. It was a neighbourhood full of surprises. There was a woman in his bedroom again, still sleeping, and he was pretty sure that, this time, her name was Jillian. He was completely sure it was Saturday morning, though, and there was no easy escape in having to head out to work. No way to just put on a shirt and tie, mutter a half-chagrined “Sorry, gotta go,” and head straight away for the door, hoping she'd be gone when he got back.

By the time he was finished making the coffee, she was leaning on the door frame wearing black panties and a T-shirt. Bare feet, one small foot flat on the floor, the other tilted up against her opposite ankle.

She pointed at her chest. “Jillian,” she said, bringing the third syllable up high, like a question mark.

“Yeah, I know.”

“Just making sure.”

She had curly light brown hair. Good legs. A small, sharp face with high cheekbones, her eyebrows getting all involved with the conversation whenever she spoke. Looking at her, Sam wished he had a more complete picture of the night before. Some of the evening was sharp enough—he remembered coming back from the bar, leaning on the front door messing with the keys, and the part where they were laughing in the living room about spilled Scotch and a glass knocked off the side table. And the part where elbows were getting caught coming out of shirts.

But there were important short gaps, and when he thought about it, he could remember nothing at all from the part just before sleep. Looking at her now, he wished he could remember a little more about that. And just how it was that they'd met, well, that was a little less than clear too.

Jillian was drinking her coffee quietly, staring at him over the top of her cup, probably making her eyes big like that on purpose, he thought. And the kitchen hovered around them, the perfect space it was supposed to be, all formal and poised and quiet, and Sam couldn't help but think that the room was equally ready for the comfort of pancakes or the easy show-off of eggs Benedict.

And that wasn't such a bad thing either.

At least she wasn't playing the know-it-all card with him, not yet, not nudging at him by repeating things he couldn't even remember saying to her, catching him out for forgetting lies he couldn't remember her telling him in the first place. The occupational hazard of meeting people when you've already got a few drinks in, living a night where things are running faster than you would normally let them.

“Nice place,” she said, staring around the kitchen. “Nice to see when people take the time to do things right.”

“Get what you pay for,” he said, hoping she wouldn't ask exactly what it was that he had paid.

He had already started trying to figure out a strategy for getting her out of the house when he was pulling on his pants, but by the time he had really thought about it, she was already gone. Coffee-finished, clothes-on, kiss-on-the-cheek gone, saying only, “Gotta work,” and “My number's on the fridge, if you want.” She'd turned it all around, he smiled to himself, pulled the work thing on him before he'd done it to her first.

And how easy was that?

One broken glass, one of the good, expensive ones, but he was pretty sure a good fuck in return, judging by the torn-up bed—sheets strewn across the floor like they'd been involved in some kind of Olympic event—and even a telephone number on the fridge, he thought. He could throw the number away after his shower if he felt like it.

But he didn't.

He looked at the phone number for a moment when he came back downstairs, and even that impressed him—seven spare, unfamiliar digits and her name in a script that was only mildly looping and feminine. No circles or hearts over the
i
's, he thought. Just
Jillian
, no last name, one sweep through across a sheet of notepaper in ink, her script even and steady and plain. Simple and straightforward. Like the number was something she was quite happy to share with him but, at the same time, it wouldn't be the end of the world if he crumpled it up and tossed it in the trash.

He left the note where it was.

His hair was still wet and the clock said it was still morning, so he went outside into the bluff, bitter snottiness of a Newfoundland June, looking one way and then the other before making the decision to head towards Duckworth Street.

Sam's house was the middle one of what was fast becoming an assembly line of rebuilt row houses, his a sharp rust red clapboard bracketed by similar houses in dark blue on one side, forest green on the other. Blue was two married lawyers both trying to make partner, the woman with a fine ass but neither of them ever home until the middle of the night. Forest green owned a downtown bar and Sam had already complained once about noise when the whole crew had come back there after closing to continue the fun. In their own way, they were an island of three small castaways in the middle of an ocean of McKay.

Looking at the buildings, Sam realized just how precise the developer had been. All three of the houses were bright enough colours to be trendy, to be almost leading-edge, but still cautious enough to be instantly saleable. Sam felt something like he imagined a fish might feel, just when the cautious-colours hook struck home. That caution, though, was something that clearly hadn't occurred to all of his other neighbours: there was a flame orange house on one corner, three storeys straight up like an escaping bonfire, and a brave attempt at purple down the street that had somehow fallen flat, as if the rich round grape that had looked so very good in the paint can hadn't survived the translation to the flat expanse of the clapboard.

But they were something of an exception. More and more houses in the neighbourhood had new doors, new windows, new flat paint on new clapboard, and Sam knew without even peering in the windows that there would be hardwood or laminate floors inside, that the tile work in the new bathrooms wouldn't have had a chance to mildew yet.

And the redone ones were spreading through the others like a virus. The older ones were more careworn, dressed out with eyelet curtains and sheers that were yellow with age or heavy smoking, and even though it was almost summer, there was still one with a plastic Santa out front, its face carefully punched in.

Father Concave Christmas, Sam thought, wondering how hard someone would have to swing his fist—and what kind of mood he would be in—to beat up Santa.

The more ragged of the older houses always seemed to have pairs of haughty, patchy cats staring out the front windows, or else small, angry dogs barking up close behind the front doors. The kind of dogs that seemed to sense you passing, that listened for the gritch of your shoes on the pavement so that they could go berserk on the other side of the heavy doors.

And the older houses were like a secret handshake, he thought, like their owners had a membership card in the unspoken language of the “we've-always-been-here-and-you-haven't.”

It was as clear as a tide line on the beach, he thought, the difference between the old and the new. The old ones were being slowly shouldered out, the separation between the two sets of houses as clear to Sam as the water's edge.

Three doors down from the corner, there was a former rooming house where there had been a spectacular but short-lived fire. One of the addled residents had set up a hibachi in the front hall because it was raining and he didn't want to get wet cooking hot dogs. The box the barbecue came in said “Not for Indoor Use,” but the man hadn't ever had the box, and he wouldn't have liked the lecturing tone of the warning—only an approximate translation from the Japanese—anyway.

The fire was like its own kind of natural selection, Sam thought as he walked by the burned-out house.

When the house had been burning, the neighbours all came out and watched the firefighters breaking out the windows and cutting holes in the roof, watched with that peculiarly serious formality that comes from knowing your house and all your possessions are only a couple of doors away if the wind comes up and the firefighters suddenly lose control. It's one thing to be vicariously concerned about someone else's life and possessions, Sam thought. It's something quite different to be concerned about your own.

The row houses along the street often shared walls, and sometimes they shared misfortunes as well. People were only as safe as their neighbours were careful, and sometimes only as safe as the fire-rated wallboard city inspectors forced on them during renovations.

The rooming-house residents were gone now, the shell of the house snapped up in a real fire sale, and its interior walls and ceilings were piling up in scraps in a big blue Dumpster in front of the house. A couple of months and someone new would be buying the place, unaware there'd even been a fire, the only hint a faint smell of wet charcoal when the fall rains really came and the humidity was stuck up somewhere in the range of instant migraine.

Bit by bit, the whole neighbourhood was changing, Sam thought, and in a year or two his place wouldn't be overpriced for the block, but instead an obvious, solid investment. The whole street would be different then, with only a handful of the stubborn old owners left, hanging on like bad teeth, and they'd hardly be able to afford to stay on—because if the city was good at anything, it was good at ensuring the municipal taxes would rise in perfect lockstep with the neighbours' house prices.

You could already tell who was who just by the cars, Sam thought, the difference between the dull-painted Reliants and Tercels and the newer Volkswagens, even the occasional Volvo.

There were still signs that this had once been a self-contained small neighbourhood, the kind of place that might have a name like Georgestown or Rabbittown, a traditional kind of name that would be loosely known by every single person who lived there, even if the neighbourhood's real boundaries were only clear to the inhabitants who lived within them.

There was still a small butcher shop on the corner, but it was losing ground fast, the hand-drawn poster-paint signs for pork chops and hot Italian sausages fading in the sunlit front window because they hadn't been changed in months. Sam had never even been inside, but he imagined a white-aproned butcher, like you'd see in a sandwich-meat commercial, maybe with a moustache, red stains on the front of the apron, a bulky, square man standing rigid behind a wall of chest-high, old-fashioned, white-enamelled, glass-fronted coolers.

There wasn't a bakery anymore, but there had been. Now it was just an empty plate glass window in the midst of another conversion. But there was a corner store at Prescott, just a shell of itself, totally dependent on the triple addiction to beer and smokes and lottery tickets, looking as broken down and fading as many of the customers who shuffled their way in.

Mornings are hard here, Sam thought, looking down the street. Two neckless beer bottles, dropped. The bottles' decapitated tops were still capped, lying jagged and right next to each other, their bottoms half inside a torn shopping bag.

There was a wet wool hat, slowly draining the rain it had harvested overnight onto the pavement, and a spot where someone had bent over and thrown up next to the curb. There had been pigeons working over the remains of the vomit until he got close to them and the biggest of the pigeons poked its head forwards once or twice, feinting like a small and cocky fat-necked boxer. Then all the birds stumbled and tripped into the air and away, wings clapping together, wing tips touching with a light feathery slap like they were right on the edge of overreaching themselves in the effort of escaping.

Then there was more broken glass on the street: patterns of fallen shards where car mirrors had been starred and smashed out by a rock or a passing fist. At least it was only mirrors, Sam thought. It was cheaper to fix side mirrors than to be replacing car windows, and there were certainly parts of town still where people sometimes took out a car window for something as simple as a handful of change in the cupholder or the briefcase in the back seat that you'd forgotten to bring in overnight.

Ahead of him, someone on the street had put their garbage out early, ignoring the schedule so that the dark green bags had slumped on the curb for days, and the bags had been torn into by cats or seagulls. There was some kind of plastic packaging pulled and tufted out through the holes like the bags were in the process of being disembowelled. And that was just the bright morning leftovers. There were leftovers at night too.

There were still plenty of loud fights when there would be a police car left on the street, empty, its roof lights spinning and battering the houses with splashes of blue and white and red, while indoors a police officer would be standing between an angry couple, a referee up until the point where someone went too far, and then it would be a trip to the lock-up.

Screaming some nights, already one night clear enough that Sam could hear it from his bedroom. “Just fuck off and stay away from me, you bastard. Do you think I want whatever it is you caught from her?”

But that was surely changing, surely being shoved aside by the higher incomes and new people, he thought. It couldn't change fast enough for him, and he walked down McKay Street singling out houses in his head where he thought people should move, and the ones where they would be allowed to stay: 56 and 58 should go, 60 could stay, and 62 should just be torn down to the ground, the clapboard faded and hanging loose in places along the front, the windows already practically rotting. He felt like a judge at a dog show, scoring each house to decide best in class, and he went all the way down the street to the end before turning around, crossing the street and walking home, rating the houses on the other side as well.