Wilderness Tips (28 page)

Her column, which is read by some men as well as by many women, is about issues. Social issues, problems that may come up: caring for the aged at home, breast-feeding in public, bulimia in the workplace. She interviews people, she writes from the particular to the general; she believes, in what she considers to be an old-fashioned, romantic way, that life is something that happens to individuals, despite the current emphasis on statistics and trends. Lately things have taken a grimmer turn in Marcia’s column: there’s been more about such things as malnutrition in kindergartens, wife-beating, overcrowding in prisons, child abuse. How to behave if you have a friend with
AIDS
. Homeless people who ask for hand-outs at the entrances to subway stations.

Ian does not like this new slant of Marcia’s; he doesn’t like her bad news. Businessmen don’t want to read about this stuff, about people who can’t work the system. Or so Ian says. She’s heard this through the grapevine. He has called her style “hysterical.” He thinks she’s too soppy. Probably she is too soppy. Her days at
The World
are probably numbered.

As she opens a new file on the computer, Ian himself appears. He has on a new suit, a grey one. He looks laminated.

“We got some mail on that column of yours,” he says. “The one about free needles for junkies.”

“Oh,” says Marcia. “Hate mail?”

“Most of it,” says Ian. He’s pleased by this. “A lot of people don’t think taxpayers’ money should be spent on drugs.”

“It’s not
drugs,”
says Marcia irritably, “it’s public health.” Even to herself she sounds like a child talking back. In Ian’s mind another little black mark has just gone on her chart. Up yours, she thinks, smiling brightly. One of these days she’ll say something like that out loud, and then there will be trouble.

Marcia wonders what will happen if she gets fired. Something else may turn up for her; then again, she’s getting older, and it may
not. She might have to freelance again, or, worse, ghost-write. Usually it’s politicians who want the stories of their lives graven in stone for the benefit of future ages, or at least these are the ones who are willing to pay. She did that sort of thing when she was younger and more desperate, before she got the column, but she isn’t sure she has the stamina for it any more. She’s bitten her tongue enough for one lifetime. She isn’t sure she still has the knack of lying.

Luckily, she and Eric have the mortgage on their house almost paid off, and the children are within a few years of finishing university. Eric makes some money on his own, of course. He writes engorged and thunderous books of popular history, about things like the fur trade and the War of 1812, in which he denounces almost everybody. His former colleagues, the academic historians, cross the street to avoid him, partly because they may remember the faculty meetings and conferences at which he also denounced everybody, before he resigned, but partly because they disapprove of him. He does not partake of their measured vocabularies. His books sell well, much better than theirs, and they find that annoying.

But, even with the royalties from Eric’s books, there will not be enough money. Also, Eric is slowing down. It has come to him lately that these books have not changed the course of history, and he is running out of steam. Even his denunciations, even his pranks, are rooted in a growing despair. His despair is not focused on any one thing; it’s general, like the increasingly bad city air. He doesn’t say much about it, but Marcia knows it’s there. Every day she fights against it, and breathes it in.

Sometimes he talks about moving – to some other country, somewhere with more self-respect, or somewhere warmer. Or just somewhere else. But where? And how could they afford it?

Marcia will have to bestir herself. She will have to cut corners. She will have to beg – in some way, somehow. She will have to compromise.

Marcia has almost finished typing her column into the computer when her friend Gus drifts by. He says hello to attract her attention, raises his hand in a glass-lifting motion, signals her with a finger: one o’clock. It’s an invitation to lunch, and Marcia nods. This charade goes with their shared, only half-humorous pretence that the walls have ears and that it’s dangerous for them to be seen too openly together.

The restaurant, their usual, is a Spanish one, well above Bloor Street and far enough away from
The World
so that they don’t expect to run into anyone from there. They arrive at it separately, Marcia first; Gus makes an entrance for her with his coat collar turned up, pausing in the doorway to do a furtive skulk. “I don’t think I was followed,” he says.

“Ian has his methods,” says Marcia. “Maybe he’s a Mountie in disguise. Or
CIA
, I wouldn’t put it past him. Or maybe he’s subverted the staff here. He used to be a waiter.” This is untrue, but it’s part of an ongoing series of theirs: the former jobs of Ian. (Washroom attendant. Numismatist. Gerbil breeder.)

“No!” says Gus. “So that’s where he got his unctuous charm! Well, that’s where I got mine. I did six months of it – in Soho, no less – back when I was a beardless youth. Never be rude to a waiter, darling. They’ll spit on your steak in the kitchen.”

Marcia orders a sangria, and settles her widening bottom thankfully into her chair. Here she can eat imported food without feeling like a traitor. She intends to order blood oranges if she can get them. Those, and garlic soup. If Eric cross-examines her later, her conscience will be clear.

Gus is Marcia’s latest buddy, and mole, at the paper. Her latest and her last: the others have all been fired or have left. Gus himself is not one of the old guard. He was imported only a few months ago to edit the Entertainment section, in one more of Ian the Terrible’s
attempts to shore up the credibility of his eroding paper. Even Ian knows there’s something wrong, but he’s failed to make the connections: he’s failed to realize that even businessmen have other interests, and also standards. They’ve figured out that you can no longer read
The World
to find out what’s going on, only to find out what’s going on inside Ian’s head.

He made a mistake with Gus, though. Gus has his own ideas.

Gus is tall and barrel-shaped and has dark, curly hair. He might be in his mid-thirties, or even younger. He has square, white, even teeth, the same size all the way along, like Mr. Punch. This gives him a formidable grin. He is English and Jewish, both at once. To Marcia he seems more English; still, she isn’t sure whether his full name is Augustus or Gustav or something else entirely. Possibly he is also gay: it’s hard for her to tell with literate Englishmen. Some days they all seem gay to her, other days they all seem not gay. Flirtation is no clue, because Englishmen of this class will flirt with anything. She’s noticed this before. They will flirt with dogs if nothing else is handy. What they want is a reaction: they want their charm to have an effect, to be reflected back to them.

Gus flirts with Marcia, lightly and effortlessly, almost as if it were piano practice; or that’s what Marcia thinks. She has no intention of taking him seriously and making a fool of herself. Anyway, he’s too young. It’s only in magazines like
True Woman
that younger men take a severe erotic interest in older women without making invidious comparisons involving body parts. Marcia prefers her dignity, or she intends to prefer it if offered the choice.

Today Gus’s flirtation takes the form of an exaggerated interest in Eric, whom he has never met. He wants to know all about Eric. He’s found out that Eric’s nickname at the paper is Eric the Red, and asks Marcia with false innocence if this has anything to do with Vikings. Marcia finds herself explaining that it’s just the way
The World
people think: they think anyone who doesn’t agree with them is a
communist. Eric is not a communist; instead he’s a sort of Tory, but not the kind they have in England. Not even the kind they have now in Canada: Eric thinks the Canadian Tory government is made up mostly of used-car salesmen on the make. He is outraged by the Prime Minister’s two hundred new suits, not because there are two hundred of them but because they were ordered in Hong Kong. He thinks the taxpayers’ money should go to local tailors.

Gus quirks an eyebrow, and Marcia realizes that this conversation is becoming too complicated. As a sort of joke, she says that Gus will never be able to understand Eric unless he studies the War of 1812. That is a war Gus clearly does not remember. He gets out of it by saying that he used to think “interesting Canadian” was an oxymoron, but that Eric is obviously an exception; and Marcia sees that what he is in search of is eccentricity, and that he has made the mistake of deciding that this is where Eric fits in. She is annoyed, and smiles and orders another drink to keep from showing it. Eric is not so eccentric. About a lot of things he’s even right. This doesn’t always make him less maddening, but Marcia does not like having him patronized.

Now Gus turns the full force of his attention onto Marcia herself. How does she manage monogamy? he wants to know. Monogamy is something Marcia and Eric have a reputation for, as others have a reputation for heavy drinking. Monogamy, Gus implies, is a curious anthropological artefact, or else a sort of heroic feat. “How do you do it?” he asks.

No, Marcia thinks, he is not gay. “I wasn’t always monogamous,” she wants to say. She did not get from one marriage to another along a tidy route. She got there by bad judgements, escapades, misery; Eric himself began as a tumultuous and improbable scuffle. But if she confesses to any of this Gus will only become nosy, or – worse – sceptical, and beg her to tell all. Then, when she does, he’ll
assume the polite, beady-eyed expression the English get when they think you’re too quaint for words, or else boring as hell.

So Marcia avoids the subject, and entertains Gus in other ways. She trots out for him the story of the panties embroidered with the days of the week, and her mother’s warnings about being run over by a bus. From there she goes on to construct for him the Canada of old; she describes the dark and dingy Toronto beer parlours with their evil-smelling Men Only sections, she describes the Sunday blue laws. Marcia isn’t sure why she wants to make her country out as such a dour and Gothic place. Possibly she wants war stories, like other people. Possibly she wants to appear brave or stalwart, to have endured the rigours of citizenship in such a country. She is suspicious of her own motives.

She tells on, however. She describes Mackenzie King, the longest-ruling Canadian Prime Minister, deciding state policy with the help of his dead mother, who, he was convinced, was inhabiting his pet terrier. Gus thinks she’s making this up, but no, she assures him, it’s entirely true. There are documents.

This brings them to the end of the garlic soup. When the deep-fried calamari arrive, Gus takes his turn. What he has to offer is gossip about
The World
. “Ian the Terrible is trying to organize us into pods,” he says. He looks delighted: he has something to add to the list of local absurdities he is compiling, for when he returns to England. He doesn’t know yet that he will return, but Marcia knows. Canada will never be a real place for him.

“Pods?” says Marcia.

“As in killer whales,” says Gus. “Three writers to a pod, with a pod leader. He thinks it will promote team spirit.”

“He might as well write the whole paper all by himself,” says Marcia, trying not to sound bitter. She thinks the pod idea is extremely stupid, but at the same time she is feeling left out, because
she herself has not been included in a pod. She will miss out on something, some of the fun.

“He’s working on it,” says Gus. “He’s cut back on the Letters to the Editor to make space for a new column, written by guess who?”

“No,” says Marcia with dismay. “Called what?”

“ ‘My Opinionzzzz,’ ” says Gus, grinning his alarming grin. “No. I lie. ‘The Snorey of My Life,’ by Ian Emmiry.”

“You’re cruel,” Marcia murmurs, trying to disguise her approval.

“Well, he deserves it. The man should be hanged for the wilful infliction of grievous terminal boredom. He wants the Entertainment section to put on a bun-fest called The Critical Forum. He thinks we should all come in on free overtime to listen to some mouldy old university professor rabbit on about how to keep from going stale. This is not a fabrication.”

“My God,” says Marcia. “What’ll you do?”

“I’m egging him on,” says Gus. “I smile, and smile, and am a villain.”

“They won’t stand for it,” says Marcia.

“That’s the general idea,” says Gus, grinning from ear to ear. He’s mobile. He does not have a mortgage, or children, or monogamy.

Marcia has downed her second drink too quickly. Now she has lost the thread. Instead of listening, she is staring at Gus, imagining what it would in fact be like to have an affair with him. Too many witticisms, she thinks. Also, he would tell.

She looks at him, shining as he is with naughty pleasure, and all of a sudden she sees what he would have been like as a small boy. A ten-year-old. With that grin, he would have been the class joker. Nobody would have got the better of him, not even the bullies. He’d have known everyone’s weak place, where to get the knife in. How to protect himself.

She often thinks this way about men, especially after a drink or two. She can just look at a face and see in past the surface, to that
other – child’s – face which is still there. She has seen Eric in this way, stocky and freckled and defiant, outraged by schoolyard lapses from honour. She has even seen Ian the Terrible, a stolid, plodding boy who must have known others thought of him as dull; she has seen him studying hard, hoping in vain for a best friend, storing up his revenges. It has helped her to forgive him, somewhat.

Marcia returns to the conversation. She seems to have missed several paragraphs: now Gus has switched focus and is talking about Noriega. “He’s hiding out in the jungle,” he says. “He’s thumbing his nose at them. They’ll never get him – he’ll be off to Cuba or somewhere – and then it’ll just be back to the old graft and squalor, with a brand-new
CIA
flunkey.” He lifts his glass, signals for a refill. He’s drinking white wine. “A year from now it’ll all be fish-wrap.”