The Silver Age (11 page)

Once or twice during their shopping expeditions, it had
occurred to Stephan to wonder how tourism was able to support so much
commercial infrastructure here. This wasn’t Venice or Machu Picchu, after all –
how many sales of scented bath salts and antique chandeliers did it take to
keep a place like this going? He chalked it up to the mysteries of capitalism,
the complex meanderings of which were as alien and inscrutable to him as the
currents of the river.

He held on to the hope that the time they were spending
together marked a new beginning for their relationship. One day ten years from
now they would look back on this trip as a milestone, the moment when they put
immaturity behind them and became a real couple. After all, a casual observer
could easily have mistaken them for a pair of newlyweds on their honeymoon, or
young parents enjoying a refreshing weekend away from the demands of their
toddler, having packed the little monster off to his grandparents’. He dropped
a couple of hints, testing the waters. During their lunch at the vineyard,
after a waiter referred to her as “The Madame,” Stephan had asked her, in a
jocular tone, if she thought many of the people they’d encountered had assumed
they were a married couple.

“Oh, people will believe anything, whatever appeals to
them in the moment,” she said with a shrug. “In my job, I’ve learned not to
worry too much about it.”

“I guess you need to protect yourself.”

“I’d go mad in a week, otherwise.”

He pretended he wasn’t disappointed – knowing by now the
futility of going down that road – but that night, at dinner in a bistro on the
village’s main strip, he slipped into a funk. It was their last night; the following
morning they’d be returning to the city.

“Everything okay?” she asked, catching his mood. “The
duck confit not to your liking?”

“No, it’s good,” he said. “I was just, uh, thinking about
some work I have to catch up on when we get back.”

“Don’t go there, you fool.”

“Sorry. You’re right, I know.”

A part of him wanted to end the charade, to confront her
about the subtle dishonesty of what they were doing. But he lacked the energy
for a fight, and had heard all of her counter-arguments before, anyway.

That night, unable to fall asleep (no doubt it was all
the rich food they’d been eating), he lay in the grey darkness listening to the
river’s murmur. On their first night as he drifted off he’d imagined whispered
voices within the white noise, and had expected that at any moment he would
begin to make out words, entire sentences. But now he knew it was just the
ceaseless racket of the water, babbling away mindlessly as it had done for
thousands of years, saying nothing.

The next morning, before checking out, they went for a
walk along the gorge. It was a perfect September day. The sky was so
generically beautiful – cottony clouds against a vivid blue dome – that it
reminded him of a stock photo. The gurgle of the river and the whisper of the
wind in the treetops were like something from a CD of soothing nature sounds.
Following a gravel path that led downstream from the mill, they strolled
beneath an arched opening in a stone wall and into a stand of thick-trunked
cedars. The roots of the cedars snaked across the trail here and there, ready
to trip up the inattentive. They could hear the roar of the rapids close at
hand, but the steep walls of the gorge at first blocked the river from view.

A short way into the woods, they came upon the ruins of
two stone structures that must have once been outbuildings of the mill. Now all
that remained of them were bare walls. Tree branches poked through what had
once been windows, as if for a view of what was going on outside. Intrigued,
Stephan paused to take a few photos, struck by how different these ruins were
from the abandoned factories and warehouses he’d photographed in the city. Both
sites had a strong presence, but here the rustic, natural setting gave the
ruins a picturesque quality rather than a gritty one. They could almost be
called pretty.

“It’s as if they were always meant to be here, now, in
this state,” Jenny said.

He nodded. “You’re right.”

They lingered for a few minutes, poking around, before
continuing on down the trail. It was silly, but Stephan felt as if they were
plunging into a remote wilderness, even though they’d barely just left the
village. The path wound its way up to the craggy edge of the gorge, and now
they began to catch glimpses of the frothing rapids through the leaves and
trunks of the woods. Every hundred feet or so, the cliff face gave way to a
narrow chute that plunged steeply down to the river’s edge, where water pooled
and eddied away from the rapids’ main thrust.

He glimpsed a pair of kayakers who’d pulled their boats –
one the colour of a traffic pylon, the other in a blue that was a close match
with the sky overhead – up onto a narrow beach situated between sets of rapids.
The two men were munching on energy bars, drinking from plastic water bottles
and talking in an excited way, their hands tracing lines down an invisible
chart of the river in the air between them. Stephan was intrigued by the idea
of running the gorge in a kayak, of skimming along the frothing surface of the
river, although he knew it was something he’d likely never get around to
actually doing.

After fifteen minutes, the ground about twenty feet to
their right, on the opposite side of them from the river bank, began to drop
steeply away, soon forming a second cliff face parallel to the one overlooking
the river. It took him a minute to realize that there was another, much
smaller, body of water – you would call it a creek, he supposed – at the bottom
of this second face. It seemed that they were walking out onto a sharp point
formed by the joining up of the smaller creek on their right, which ran through
its own narrow gorge, with the main river. Yes, that was it.

A minute later, they came to the tip of the point, where
the two cliff faces met in a triangular outcropping shaped like a ship’s prow.
Water flowed past on either side, and since the “prow” faced downstream, it
seemed as if it belonged to a huge ship that was sailing backwards up towards
the headwaters of the river somewhere off behind them. The tip of the point was
crowned with a circular viewing platform, built right out over the edge of the
cliff, and circled round with a low stone safety wall.

He stepped up to the edge of the platform, rested his
hands on the top of the wall to steady himself, and peered down into the gorge.
The smaller creek was clear, its shallow waters transparent windows on its
pebbled bottom, in contrast to the main river, which he now realized was tinted
with rust-coloured sediment. A sharp line marked the spot where the clear water
of the creek imbibed the dark sediment of the main river. The single, united
river then fell away in sets of steeply layered rapids and passed under a high
concrete bridge, before vanishing from view around a sharp bend.

He stepped back from the edge, and was going to ask Jenny
what she thought was beyond the bend, but she had vanished. A jolt of fear ran
through him. Was it possible that she have fallen into the river while he’d
been looking the other way and been carried off? But after a moment she came
walking up a half-hidden stairway that (as he now saw) led to a second, smaller
observation platform tucked away just below the main one.

“Ah, there you are,” he said, blasé, hiding his relief.

“It’s so beautiful here.” Her face was radiant in the
sunlight. “I know it’s cheesy, but it would be nice to get a picture.”

“Sure.”

Right on cue, another couple emerged from the woods and
strolled up to the point.

“Excuse me!” Jenny called, rushing over to chat them up.
Stephan followed.

They were many years older than he and Jenny were. Early
sixties, possibly, prosperous in a down-to-earth suburban sort of way that
Stephan knew well from his home town. The woman’s hair was grey, the man’s bone
white, and they were dressed head to toe in Gore-Tex and polar fleece.

“We’d be glad to,” the woman was saying. “Maybe you could
do the same for us afterwards?”

“Certainly!” Jenny cried, all smiles.

Stephan lifted the strap of his K-1000 over his head and
passed the camera over to the man.

“Wow, I haven’t seen one of these babies in years,” the
man said, with a whistle. He lifted it a couple of times in his hands, feeling
the weight. “These old cameras had a heft to them.”

“Here, I’ll set it up for you,” Stephan offered. He knew
the camera so well that he barely had to look down as his fingers snapped the
f-stop and aperture into position.

“What brings you to this place?” Jenny asked the woman as
the man fiddled with the focus.

“We’re doing some travelling around the province. A
second honeymoon, you might say – my husband just retired this spring.”

“How lovely. You’ve picked an idyllic spot.”

“Yes, isn’t it beautiful?” The woman seemed to be waiting
for Jenny to offer something about herself and Stephan in return, but she
didn’t, and anyway it was time for the photo.

The image would turn out surprisingly well, for a snapshot,
as he discovered when he developed the roll a few days later. The leaves on the
overhanging trees refracting the sunlight in a thousand directions, creating a
stippled effect, like an impressionist painting. The gorge spread out behind
them, the last of the morning mist hovering above it, the bridge visible in the
distance, an elegant grey-green arc. At the focal point the two of them, Jenny
with her arm wrapped tightly around his torso, all smiles. It was just as he’d
suspected: they looked exactly like a real couple.

Laters, flyboy

by Jenny Wynne

Oh the times they are a-changin’, doo dee doo dee doo doo
dee doo doo dee doo doo.

Of course, the times are always a-changin’, otherwise
they’d be standing still, the one thing that time never does (unless you’re
watching the latest season of the Sopranos, that is… soooo sloooooow, Tony! Dr.
Melfi is going to blow her own head off out of sheer boredom if you don’t start
whacking people, stat).

But sometimes the times change more than at other times.
I’m not talking about a full-scale revolution – sorry hippie generation, Bob
Dylan quote above notwithstanding, this isn’t Woodstock 2.0. Nothing quite so
gauche.

What’s this new phase going to look like? To be honest, I
have no idea, and frankly I don’t give a hoot (n.b.: apparently all the more
common things a person might “not give...” are banned as swears at this fine
publication – how quaint). Just let it be new, and fabulous, and not boring.
Also not another war,
s’il vous plait
– been there done that, thank you
very much.

I know what you’re saying: “That Jenny Wynne, she may be
youthful and cherubic and hella fun, but what does she know about History with
a capital haitch?” Well, listen, bub, I’ve been around the block once or twice,
and I don’t simply mean when it comes to handsome, successful men.

When I was still in my teens, in the aftermath of George
Bush Senior’s Iraq War, I grooved to Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins with the
best of them. Next came Geeks bearing Gifts, and the dotcom tide was unleashed.
There was much rejoicing and much surfing of free Internet porn. Bubble goes
pop. Boo. Next up: September 11, not to mention two ensuing wars. Enough said.

My point being, times change, trends come and go, the
worm turns (whatever that bizarre old saying means). Icarus falls from the sky,
and ships go sailing blithely on past. Laters, flyboy. Except that for a moment
there we did pause, if by pause you mean that we shopped and consumed, stayed
calm and complacent, as instructed by the relevant authorities. Even when
Junior’s Iraq War the second hit, we just kept on keeping on, same as before
(and if those WMDs ever materialize, by the way, then apparently yellow cake is
just plain old French vanilla after all).

Frankly, and with all due respect, Tony, this cultural
moment we’re in is starting to get a little repetitive. You go around the block
one too many times and eventually you get sick of the seeing same old houses
over and over again. Maybe the houses get sick of you too. As the great
German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin might say, the angel of history shall
take wing once again. And unlike loser Icarus that fine lady never touches down
for long.

Of course, change can be scary. Renovations can be a pain
in the ass, unless you happen to enjoy the services of a certain superb British
contractor named Gerald with impeccable taste in fixtures and superhuman pecs
to boot (as well as an impeccable boot). But that’s no reason to shrink from
the future – especially when the present’s getting so damn tired.

As I said, I have no idea what’s next, but I do know one
thing: I’m not going to be sitting back, getting a pedicure and waiting for the
memo. No, I’m going to take the bull by the horns, suck the marrow out of life,
etc., because that’s what I do best. Mmmmm…. mmmmarrow. (Speaking of which,
remember Mmmmarvelous Mmmmmuffins, the mall food court muffin stands from the
eighties? So good, right up there with Orange Julius. But I digress.)

I may even be forced to ditch this pop stand, if it comes
down to it, get out into the big, wide world, play the prodigal daughter. But
don’t worry, kids – I’ll be sure to keep you posted with my latest dispatches
from the front lines of the next revolution.

Until then, peace out.

Chapter 10

A week later she was seeing a journeyman film director
from Los Angeles, in town for a job on a made-for-TV movie about a New
York-based vampire baseball team and its battle for recognition and respect in
the big leagues. Stephan made a few discreet inquiries, gathered what information
he could, as much out of old habit as genuine anguish. The director was said to
be related to William Shatner. Apparently “Uncle Willie,” with his Canadian
roots, had helped the director land the vampire baseball gig.

The director began appearing around town with Jenny Wynne
on his arm. Amanda from
This City
had run into them at a dinner party in
Riverdale, where a minor kerfuffle had taken place. The hostess that evening
had prepared an ironically folksy apple pie for dessert. In a contemptuous
tone, the director had declined his slice, on account of the crust containing
saturated fats, Amanda said, which it did not. But the man would not be
convinced. Also during the dinner, he had claimed to have run afoul of shadowy
powers within the motion picture industry, which had arranged his exile to this
frozen hinterland. But he was grateful to have come here for one reason, at
least, he’d said in the next breath, turning to his date. Jenny Wynne had
smiled sweetly at this, then given him an affectionate pinch on the cheek.

“It was pretty sick-making,” Amanda noted, a remark that
Stephan appreciated. He wondered what Jenny Wynne could possibly see in such a
character. Was she really that shallow?

Perhaps.

Or perhaps the screenplay she’d been tinkering with since
Stephan had first gotten to know her had something to do with it. She might
have been banking on the Shatner connection to open a few doors.

But soon Jenny Wynne’s relationship with the film
director began to sour. At a “festival of ideas” modeled by a local media
entrepreneur on the American TED conferences, she appeared at the closing-night
party on the arm of the guitarist from Pooch Troop, the celebrated local indie
rock band. The director spent much of the evening searching for Jenny Wynne and
her new friend in a state of increasing distress. But apparently he’d burned
the wrong bridges during his brief stay in the city, and his VIP pass did not
entitle him to enter the secret ultra-VIP area (hidden within the party’s
regular VIP area) to which Jenny and the guitarist had fled.

A week later, the director was gone. His unit had
finished production, and it was reported that he wasn’t likely to return any
time soon. People Stephan knew on the film production side were saying the
movie might never be finished. One of the key financial backers had pulled out,
and the project was now on hold pending alternative funding arrangements, which
might or might not ever come together. Jenny Wynne had made a brief appearance
at the wrap party at the conclusion of the director’s shoot. She had gently
wished the man well before leaving for another engagement. (Stephan noted that
Pooch Troop was playing a big show that night at Lee’s Palace.) After Jenny
Wynne left the party, the director was said to have gotten very drunk indeed.
Stephan did not find this last detail particularly surprising.

Stephan was 30 years old now, and increasingly he found
himself accepting that his life was moving on to a new phase. He still wasn’t
making a large amount of money. Even someone who earned an ordinary
middle-class wage – Pete, say – would have been surprised by the modesty of
Stephan’s annual income. But the editorial and advertising jobs were steadily
coming his way, and he had enough money now to live comfortably. He’d finally paid
off the line of credit he’d taken out when he first left Helmut’s, and some
modest savings had begun to accrue in his bank account. Progress.

At the end of September, 2003, when Jenny’s affair with
the director was in full swing, Stephan had left his basement apartment in the
Annex and moved into a loft-style condominium in a converted fudge factory a
couple of blocks north of his studio. The space had high ceilings, exposed
brick walls and huge floor-to-ceiling windows. The footprint was tiny, sure, but
it wasn’t as if a bachelor like him needed a huge amount of floor space.
(Gamblor, for her part, took to the space immediately.)

When he wasn’t working, he’d wander up and down Queen
West and marvel at the changes taking place there. More and more of the strange
old shops that had once dominated the strip – a dealer in Swedish mangles, a
wholesale Greek-column emporium – were being replaced by galleries, modernist
furniture stores and self-consciously named brunch joints. A respected local
film director, who’d once been nominated for a foreign-picture Academy Award,
had opened a cinema and bar just up the block from Stephan’s studio that served
white wine and martinis, and screened Truffaut and Antonioni retrospectives.

An old hand in the neighbourhood, at least compared to
the recent wave of arrivals, he received regular invitations to openings,
readings and shows, and could have had a full social calendar. But he had never
had many social aspirations, and was put off by the idea of becoming a
ubiquitous denizen of the district scene, always on hand for the latest
happening or entertainment.

His dream of moving to New York was on the back burner
for now, despite his fear that he was beginning to outgrow the local
photography market. The city was not an obvious place for a person like him to
realize his full potential, he’d come to believe, any more than the Caribbean
was a natural breeding ground for champion bobsledders. But all the same he was
comfortable. Through endurance and hard work he had built up a solid client
roster. He had a comfortable condo, and dozens of contacts, whereas in New York
he knew nobody, literally nobody. One day he would make the leap, perhaps, but
for now he was content with what he had, at least on the work side of things.

He’d been looking forward to the fall that year, as
usual, counting on the chill air to fill him with his old nervous energy and a
corresponding desire to delve into new projects, but the feeling never hit him.

Partly it was the weather.

It rained. Endlessly. Not a cleansing rain to wash the
streets clean, or a soothing rain playing percussion on the windows as you sat
inside, cozy and dry, and watched trashy TV. It was a dreary, dirty rain that
seemed to leave everything it touched sodden and toxic. But it was more than
just the weather: he felt that fall that he had lost his bearings, as if
something had gone awry with his internal compass. Finding himself slipping
into a funk, he started in on a new project, in a bid to recharge. As a
follow-up to his abandoned buildings show, he would shoot a new series in and
around the city’s commercial port. The once-busy port district, located on an
artificial peninsula at the mouth of the Don River, had fallen into disuse in
recent decades. There had been talk of redeveloping the entire area into a new
neighbourhood of condos and shops, and he wanted to capture the place on film
before that happened.

On his first visit to the port he attacked the project
whole-heartedly. He worked for hours that day and shot off several rolls of
film. He photographed a rusted lake freighter as it was unloaded by a rickety
crane. He photographed seagulls fighting over a pizza crust at the end of an
abandoned pier. He shot the port’s empty turning basin, a forlorn rectangle of
stagnant brown water at the north end of the district. It went quite well, even
if the material wasn’t exactly uplifting. But his second and third visits were
less successful, and he began to sense that he was already running out of
material, not to mention inspiration. There simply wasn’t as much worth
shooting here, he soon concluded, as there had been at his previous location.
Moreover, he worried that he was repeating himself, rehashing ideas that he’d
already worked through in the previous project. And so after his third visit to
the port he put the idea on hold, leaving most of his film tucked away at the
back of a drawer, undeveloped and more or less forgotten.

He drifted back into his funk. There was a base level of
work that needed doing (finishing assignments, sending out invoices) if he
wanted to keep his business on track. With a concerted effort of will, he
forced himself to deal with such tasks. The rest of his time he spent lolling
around his new condominium, rearranging the furniture with the television on in
the background, looping BBC World Service updates on Iraq. The news there was
of bombings and unrest outside the Green Zone; the recent calm was giving way
to something more fractured and ominous, and commentators were, tentatively,
beginning to use the word “insurgency” to describe the situation.

The news reminded him of how trivial his own petty
problems were in the grand scheme of things. He fed Gamblor and refilled her
water dish. He ordered pizza for dinner. He went to bed early and slept in
late. He tried not to think too much.

*  *  *  *  *

On a Saturday evening in early November, Stephan took a
streetcar out to Pete and Sally’s place for a small party in honour of Pete’s
30th birthday. It had been a grey, mellow fall day – good photography weather.
Now, dusk was beginning to descend. The leaves on the trees around the Regent
Park housing projects, their branches bare of leaves, cast long shadows across
empty lawns. As the streetcar mounted the Queen Street Bridge, taking him once
again across the Don River, he looked up in time to glimpse the iron sign that
hung above the roadway at the bridge’s peak. It was part of an art
installation, Pete had told him, commissioned as part of a neighbourhood
revitalization program. “The river I step in is not the river I stand in,” it
read. Stephan knew this was true, and that his own life’s river had been far
too stagnant of late.

Sally greeted him at the door with a hug and a peck on
the cheek.

“That’s the first good kiss I’ve had in quite a while,”
he admitted, chuckling.

“I find that hard to believe,” Sally said. “Handsome
young man about town like yourself.”

“I think this should have been for you,” Stephan said,
handing over a small gift-wrapped parcel. “Just don’t tell Pete I gave his
birthday present to someone nicer.”

It was a waterfront print, one of the few he’d actually
gotten around to finishing. He’d amused himself while gift-wrapping it by
imagining that it would someday be a collector’s item, one of the only extant
prints from the great Stephan Stern’s lost waterfront series.

“Pete’s just over here,” Sally said, guiding him into the
living room, where the party was already well underway. The room was full –
people laughing, drinking, telling stories, debating. Stephan spotted a couple
of old friends of Pete’s he vaguely knew, and would be happy to catch up with,
but first he went over to the birthday boy, who was standing in a circle of
people near the back of the living room.

“There he is!” Pete said, with a lopsided grin, as
Stephan approached. “I was beginning to think you weren’t going to make it.”

They shook hands – Pete didn’t hesitate to break out the
old secret handshake in public – and then hugged, as Stephan wished his friend
well. Pete then introduced him to a few of the people he’d just been speaking
with. Jane was a museum curator, Craig did PR for the Ministry of the
Environment. A web designer and a couple of teachers rounded out the group.
They weren’t all that different from the people Stephan worked with, but they
were different enough. A few were older and some were already parents. In fact,
there were several kids at the party, babies and young toddlers, something he
wasn’t used to. He liked the energy that the kids brought, though – silly and
carefree. They lightened the mood. One little girl even took a brief ride
around the living room on Pete’s labradoodle, Echo.

At times it seemed to Stephan that everyone in the world
was basically the same, and that their differing paths were a matter of chance.
In his own case, for example, a precise series of events in his life had led
him towards photography. His favourite uncle, a film editor from the UK, had
given him his first good camera as a Christmas gift just as he was entering his
teens. A couple of years later, he had stumbled upon the photography club at
his high school. At university, he’d won a minor award in a magazine photo
contest just when his interest might have otherwise flagged. If any one of
these things had not occurred, he might easily have wound up doing something totally
different with his life. He could have been a musician or accountant or tree
surgeon. Or maybe that was all nonsense, and he would have found his way to
where he was now by some other path.

He hung out in Pete’s kitchen for a while, listening to a
group of the parents talking in arcane detail about neighbourhood daycares,
like rocket scientists discussing the relative merits of solid and liquid fuel
engines. His attention wandering, he slid open the glass back door and stepped
out onto the deck to get some air. There were a handful of people already
outside – stalwart smokers for the most part. The night was chilly, but the air
seemed fresh and clean, for a change. He took a big draught of it into his
lungs, and then slowly exhaled, his chest relaxing. The house wasn’t far from
downtown, but it seemed somehow bucolic and healthful out here in the backyard,
as if it were in the middle of the countryside rather than the midst of a
metropolis.

What would have had to be different in his own life for
him to have wound up in such a house? Probably not all that much, and of
course, he still might at some point down the road, you never knew, although it
was unlikely to happen any time soon. Would he be happy living in such a house,
and with the lifestyle accoutrements that it seemed inexorably to imply: the
sensible car and the labradoodle, the procreative schemes? It was, after all, a
tried and true package in comparison to what he had chosen for himself, and one
that had surely resulted in a meaningful, gratifying existence for millions
upon millions.