TORONTO: A NOVEL Chapter 29


 
     Violet Dollop had never been the sort of woman who had made much use of housekeeping hints or cooking tips by professionals, whether Martha Stewart’s or the ones in the Food & Drink magazines published by the LCBO.  Now, suddenly, she was assiduously buying Martha Stewart cookbooks and respectfully downloading Martha’s emails, as well as collecting and filing Food and Drink issues every time she saw them in the store. 
     Lately, there wasn’t a time when, as Tom left to get some beer or a bottle of wine, Violet wouldn’t sing out from the kitchen, “Don’t forget to see if they have a new Food & Drink!”  He always did forget.  Which annoyed her considerably because they only printed so many copies and they went fast and when they were gone they were gone.
     “I think it’s just a quarterly,” she said to Tom.
     “What is?”
     “Food and Drink.”
     Tom had no idea what she was talking about.
     “The food magazine I ask you to pick up at the LCBO.”
     “Ah,” said Tom.
     “So that’s why you have to pick one up as soon as they come in.”
     “Sure,” said Tom. “I can see that.”
     Violet knew perfectly well Tom hadn’t followed any of what she’d said.
     “You can see what?” she asked him.
     “About the LCBO,” Tom replied.
     Violet went back to her sewing room.


     Mayor Cass Tamburlaine was pacing his vast, softly carpeted floor of his office.  His Isolation tank sat heavily in the middle of the room like a hippopotamus in a tropical river.  He gazed at it for a moment or two and then called Joy Pommery, his sometime mistress.  Her phone rang softly—three times.  On the fourth ring she picked up.
     “Why Cass, how nice to hear from you.  And it’s not even three in the morning!”
    “Yeh.  What are you doing?”
     “Well, actually, dear, I’m with a client.”  Joy was a psychotherapist with an electronics company located, for the time being, out near the airport.
     “When will you be through?”
     “In a couple of hours.  Why?”
     “I’ve been getting more death threats in the mail.”
     “More of those pretty ones—the Old Master paintings?”
     “I don’t find them so goddam pretty.”
     “I suppose not.”
    “Listen, remember your friend, the fashion-model-detective?”
     “Coal Blackstone.”
     “Yeh.  Can you get hold of her again for me?
     “Don’t you have her number?”
     “I dunno, I must have thrown it out.  I’d really like to talk to her.”
     Joy tells him the number again.
     “Write it down somewhere where you won’t lose it.”
     “I have.”
     “Were did you write it?”
     There was a breathy pause.
     “Cass?”
     “On my thigh,” he told her. “I wrote it on my thigh.”
     “Oh Cass, “laughed Joy, “are you naked in the office again?


     Michael finally bid farewell to Bliss Carmen and her painter and short-order-cook boyfriend, Homer Rubik, and making way back out onto the fire escape outside of Homer’s unwholesome, maliferous studio, gratefully took a big lungful of clean air.  Bliss had followed him outside.
     “So whatdyathink, Zorba?  Isn’t he great?”
     “Well, he certainly can draw and paint.  He’s skilful.”
     “Fuckin’ right!” boomed Bliss.  “But is he a great artist?”
     “Well, not yet of course.  Why,” Michael asked her, “are you in a hurry?”
     “Yeh, a big hurry!”
     “How come?”
     “I’m not getting any younger,” Bliss told him.  “Homer neither.”
     Michael was puzzled. 
     “What do you have…some cutoff date by which Homer should be famous?”
     Famous and,” Bliss added—rather coyly, Michael thought—“wealthy.”
     “I see.”
     “You think he has the stuff?” Bliss persisted.
     “I don’t know.”
     “Well he better,” Bliss muttered darkly.


     May sat in the bookstore, hoping that, on such a wet, sleety afternoon, nobody would come in.  She had the store all to herself this afternoon.  She was sitting at the desk, her copy of John Cowper Powys’s Wolf Solent open in front of her.  She was sipping from a glass of hot green tea.  It was cool in the store and the steam was rising from the glass.
     “A species of deep, lethargic numbness to everything except the immediate suggestion of his voice and touch seemed to have taken possession of her”, she read.  “His arm round her. Her cream-coloured cloak hanging loose, her cheeks pale, she let herself be led across the intervening tract of grass to the open door of the little shed….”
     “A little shed,” she mused aloud.  “A sweet little shed where I could go with Michael.  Across an intervening tract of grass.  A cream-coloured cloak….” 
     Just then the bell over the door jangled and a tall, elderly man entered the store.  He smiled at her.  She attempted to smile back pleasantly.
     “Do you by any chance have books by Alice Munro?” he asked her.
     “Many” she said, getting up to lead him to the Canadian fiction section. 
     After a little while, he came to the desk with three or four volumes of Munro’s short stories.
     “And what are you reading?” he asked her pleasantly.
     “Michael” she said absently.

    
     Coal Blackstone lay happily exhausted in the arms of her favourite photographer and part-time lover, Lincoln Ford.  She looked very white, Linc thought, against the black sheets.  White, almost to the point of iridescence.  Abalone shell.
     “Beautiful,” Linc whispered in her ear, repositioning a damp wisp of her jet-black hair that had ended up glued to her cheek.  “You’re exquisite.”
     “Oh I bet you say that to all the high-fashion models you’ve just had meaningful congress with,” Coal laughed, toying ineffectually with the rivulet of curly black hair that meandered down Linc’s stomach.
     “Sure, all the time,” Linc smirked, “but…well, I don’t often use the word ‘irridescent’.”
     “What do you mean? You didn’t use it with me either.”
     “I didn’t?”
     “No.”
     “That’s funny.  I was thinking it.   I was also thinking ‘Abalone shell’.”
     “You were?  That’s nice.  You didn’t say that either.”
     “I guess I figured they were sort of fancy-dancy ways of describing you, and that they might sound a bit silly.  I wouldn’t want you laughing at me!”
     “Not in bed anyhow,” smiled Coal. 
     “That’s right,” he said, deftly clasping her left knee.
     “You planning on moving your hand up or down?” she asked him winsomely.
     “I hadn’t decided yet,” Linc told her.  “Geez, how much planning do you think I actually put into our times together?  Being in bed with you isn’t like taking your photograph, you know.”
     “No?” Coal giggled.  “I thought it was all love love love, no matter what you were doing!”
     Linc scowled.
     “You keep talking like that and I’m going to take back my Abalone shell,” he said.


    
    
    

TORONTO A NOVEL : Chapter 28


 
     It was with a certain weariness of both heart and spirit that Michael began to look through Homer Rubik’s work.  The task—for Michael felt that’s what it was—was scarcely made easier by Bliss Carmen’s looming stage-mother eagerness, by her rabid, over-the-shoulder determination that Michael would find in Homer’s paintings and drawings the lashings of genius.
     “Look how much stuff he’s made!” boomed Bliss.
     “Impressive,” Michael agreed. “though of course it isn’t the number of works he’s made but their quality that counts,” he added hastily—and, he felt, pointlessly.  Bliss was deaf to anything even remotely negative or even cautionary about Homer’s work.   Homer, for his part, stood like a neglected statue, watching Michael’s deliberations.  He wasn’t nearly as interested in Michael’s approval as Bliss was, but he had a practiced ear for an insult, a put-down or even a reservation.  He watched Michael, scowling.
     Bliss noticed Homer’s un-tethered condition and deemed it dangerous.  Bliss was enough of a loose-cannon herself not to be wary of it in others.  All she needed right now was for Homer to plummet into his feral mode and start growling at the visiting art critic.
     “Why don’t you make coffee, Homer?” she suggested, as gaily as possible.
     “None for me,” said Michael abstractly, now perusing a strange little Goya-like painting of some unidentified massacre on an unidentified plain located somewhere in Homer’s rough, antique imagination.
     Homer stiffened with the beginnings of rage.  Bliss gave Michael a resounding, corrective whack across the shoulders.
     “Well, okay,” he told Homer, trying quickly to fabricate a smile.  “a coffee might be nice after all.”
     Homer went the fridge and opened the door.  Michael could smell the sour, empty air from inside from across the room.
     “Fuck!” said Homer.
     “What’s the matter, Homer?” asked Bliss nervously, anxious not to disrupt the atmosphere of studious connoisseurship she was trying hard to establish in the dank kitchen-studio.
     “No milk,” said Homer darkly.
     “Who the hell cares??” roared Bliss.  “Make some goddam coffee!!”
     Michael tried hard to believe he was somewhere else.  Watching May dust shelves in the bookstore, maybe.
     He dutifully examined work after work.  Most of the pictures were small, notebook-sized, usually in oil on paper, though there were a few executed in tempera.  The drawings were either made with charcoal or, more often, drawn in sepia ink—which lent them a certain old-masterish earnestness.
     But it was Homer’s subject matter that intrigued him most—intrigued him and dismayed him.  The paintings were technically skilful—astoundingly so—but uniformly ghastly in subject matter.  There were gory battles, the mounted, charging figures as tiny and exacting as those in a Messonnier.  There were Inqusition-like scenes, like plunderings from Goya’s etchings: burnings, hangings, torturings, dismemberings.  There were beheadings, drownings, whippings, stranglings.  There were pictures in which the humanoid subjects were so distorted and convoluted they made the hallucinated figures in Hieronymus Bosch seem sensible and well-ordered.
     Michael felt sweaty and a little dizzy.
     “So what do you think, Zorba?” bellowed Bliss.  “Amazing aren’t they?”
     “They are that,” Michael agreed, feeling bilious.
     Homer stood listening, torn between the desire to be accommodating and the fierce need to tear this intrusive art critic limb from limb.
     “You like ‘em?” he asked Michael with a growl.
     Michael was momentarily frozen with indecision.  Ought he to say what he really felt or just carefully dissemble for a while?
     “Well,” he said at last, trying to keep his eyes on the pile of paintings and not look either at Homer or at Bliss, "I can tell you truthfully that I’ve never seen anything quite like them before!”
     Bliss was exultant.  But Homer, who suddenly seemed smarter and more perceptive than Michael had given him credit for, scowled and rumbled.
     “I mean do you think they’re good?”
     “Oh sure,” Michael faltered, trying too smile convincingly.  “Unique!”
     “There!” said Bliss exultantly, giving Homer a python-like squeeze around the waist.  “You see??” 
         


TORONTO: A NOVEL—Chapter 27

     Michael sat with a cup of green tea, watching May while she dusted most of the bookstore’s philosophy section.
     “Who gathers the most dust?” he asked her, grinning.  “Heidegger?  John Stuart Mill?  Derrida?”
     “It’s pretty evenly distributed,” she told him.
     “That’s too bad,” said Michael, taking another sip of tea, “I was sort of hoping old Heidegger would be the front-runner, dust-wise!”
     “Dust-wise?”
     “A rolling philosopher gathers no dust,” he assured her.
     “What on earth do you mean?” May asked him.
     “Oh nothing, really. I’m just talking silly to justify my sitting here and gazing at you.”
     May put down the feather duster and gave him a kiss on the forehead. 
     “Don’t you have anything more pressing to do?”
     “I do, but I’m putting it off for as long as possible.  I sort of half-promised a painter I know that I’d go see his work.  A guy named Homer Rubik.”
     “That’s an odd name,” said May, moving from the philosophy section to the history section.
     “Well, he’s an odd guy,” said Michael, “and his name suits him nicely.  ‘Homer’ may be a bit lofty for him, but “Rubik’ is perfect—like the infamous cube, he’s shifty, lots of sides, lots of angles, ultimately unknowable, and, in the end, probably pointless.”
     “Why do you care about him then?”
     “I don’t, really.  But the stuff he makes is extraordinary—in a sort of unhealthy, unwholesome way.”
     “What’s it like?”
     “Very strange.  It’s like Old Master painting, but small—on scrap pieces of paper.  He paints on anything—envelopes, butcher paper, newspapers, pages torn from magazines, flattened-out cardboard boxes….  He’s like a back-alley Raphael or Caravaggio!”
     “So you’re going to visit his studio?”
     “Well, he doesn’t really have a studio. The guy is a short-order cook in a diner.  I’m told he lives in a two room apartment and apparently paints in his kitchen.”
     “Maybe he’s a genius!”
     “Yeh maybe.”
     “But probably not?”
     “No, probably not.”
     “And now you’ll see for yourself.”
     “Yeh.  Lucky me.
     It took  Michael some time, but he finally found what he took to be Homer’s little flat—high atop the rusty fire-escape at the back of a five-story building on Stafford Street, south of Trinity Bellwoods Park.  He was standing at the foot of the stairs when he suddenly spied Bliss Carmen, leaning over the railing outside Homer’s door.  Fish was with her, of course, and took this opportunity to undertake a feat of aerial bladder evacuation, cocking his left back leg against one of the steel railings of the fire escape and pissing a yellow rain that fell perilously close to Michael.
     “Missed you!!” cried Bliss happily.
     “Yeh,” said Michael.  “The happy intervention of a sudden breeze from the west.”
     “C’mon up!” boomed Bliss.
     Michael climbed the fire escape, feeling more certain with every step that this whole visit was a mistake.
     Bliss led him into the first of Homer’s dank rooms. It seemed to be some kind of sitting room, though there really wasn’t anyplace to sit.  There was a greasy mattress on the floor.
     “That’s where we sleep,” Bliss announced.  “This is our boudoir.”
     Michael suppressed a shudder.  A shudder not so much engendered by the ad hoc bed as by the whole idea of sleeping with Bliss.  Geez, thought Michael to himself, did any woman ever bear such an inappropriate name!
     He heard Homer stirring in the second room.
     “Homer,” boomed Bliss, “get out here! My big Writer Friend is here!”
     “You mean Zorba?” muttered Homer.
     Michael felt like strangling them both.
     “Yeh, he might write something about your work!”
     “Listen, I never said I…” Michael began when Bliss shushed him. 
     “Don’t be like that,” she told him in a loud whisper. “Homer needs encouragement.”
     Homer finally appeared in the doorway, naked to the waste, his jeans stiff with what Michael supposed might equally be dried oil paint or congealed egg.
     “You come to see my stuff?”
    “Yes,” Michael, told him.  “You have some things here?”
     “I’ve been doing stuff,” said Homer.
     “Home’s very prolific!” boomed Bliss. “He always has work around!”
     “Okay,” said Michael.  “Let’s look through some things.”
     Home returned to the second room—the kitchen he used to paint in—and beckoned Michael to follow.
     “I would have thought you’d have had enough of kitchens!” said Michael, trying for a preliminary pleasantry.
     “What?” said Homer.
     “Michael means that you just seem to go from one kitchen to another!” she said heartily.  “That’s what you meant, wasn’t it, Michael?”
     Michael smiled weakly.
     “Fish, stop that!!” yelled Bliss suddenly.  Fish had lifted his leg and peed copiously on a pile of ink drawings.  The ink had now begun to run and was pooling on the floor.
     “Ha!” laughed Bliss, “a new medium!”
     Homer gave Fish a kick.
     “Andy Warhol did a series of piss paintings once,” said Michael.  “They were on metal.  He called them his ‘Oxidation paintings’ because the urine changed into beautiful colours when it dried on the metal backing!”
     “Who?” asked Homer.
     “Andy Warhol,” said Bliss, speaking loudly and distinctly to him as if she were speaking to someone with hearing problems.
     “So what?” said Homer.
     Michael couldn’t think of a good answer.
     “    
          



 


TORONTO: A NOVEL—Chapter 26


 
     Tom Dollop was sitting in front of the TV, in his scruffy  but comfy movie-watching chair, trying gently to scrape the sale price sticker off a DVD case when his wife, Violet,
approached him purposefully, holding out a spoonful of something she wanted him to try.
     “What’s this?” he asked her, continuing to peel the price tag away with his fingernail.  Tom hated price stickers on things.  He figured nobody had to know how much he’d paid for anything—in this case for a previously-viewed copy of Kings Go Forth with Frank Sinatra and Tony Curtis.
     “Green curry paste,” Violet told him.  “Try it and tells me if it needs anything.”
     Tom tasted it.
     “Good,” he said.  “Good I guess.  I’m no green curry paste expert.”
     “But you like it?”
     “Sure.”
     Violet went back to the kitchen.  Only to return a few moments later—without the spoon.  Tom looked up from his DVD.
     “Do you love me?”
     “What do you mean?” he asked her.
     “You don’t understand the question?” said Violet.
     “Not really, no.”
     “I asked you if you loved me.”
     “Yeh, but why ask me now?” Tom said.  “Do you not feel I love you?”
     “Not the way you used to.”
     Tom looked around the room, at the shelves of CDs and DVDs, and at the poster by Georgia O’Keeffe, advertising the Santa Fe music festival for 1972.
     “How far back are you going?” he asked her.  “Are you asking me if I love you as much as I did before you started making that green curry paste, or are you going back as far as, say, last week, when we went out to see The Grandmaster?’
     “Why did we see that film anyhow?” she asked him.
     “Because it was presented by Martin Scorcese.  He liked it.  He thought it was elegant.”
     “I didn’t think it was very elegant.”
     “No?  You think you know more about films than Martin Scorcese?” Tom asked her.
     “Well it isn’t that.”
     “Then what is it then?”
     Violet turned and walked back to the kitchen.
    
     ***************************************
    
     Coal Blackstone and Lincoln Ford were just finishing their seafood risotto and dividing the last of the wine.
     “Would you like coffee?” Coal asked him.
     “Maybe if you corrected it,” said Linc.
     “Corrected it?”
     “Yeh,” Linc grinned.  “Café correttoCorrected coffee!”
     “And exactly how do I go about correcting this coffee I’m about to make us?”
     “By giving it a little push—a “corrective” shot of Grappa or Sambuca.”
      “Ah.  Do we have any Grappa or Sambuca?” Coal asked him.
     “We have Grappa.
     “We do?”
     “Yeh, it was just a whim.  I was passing an LCBO the other day and had this yen for a bottle of Grappa…”
     “Some strange yen,” said Coal.
     “Well, I felt pretty sure they wouldn’t have any, but they actually did have a couple of bottles…”
     “Yes, I’m sure Grappa’s a big seller,” smirked Coal.
     “…so I got one.”
     “Okay,” she said briskly, “I’ll make the coffee and you can correct it.”
     “Fair enough,” said Linc.
     Forty-five minutes and three coffee correctives later they were in bed together. 
     “We should correct things whenever we can,” said Coal, dreamily outlining Linc’s mouth with the tip of her index finger.
     “I couldn’t agree more,” said Linc, tracing the outline of Coal’s left ear with the thumb.
    “The truth is,” she said, dragging her finger slowly down the middle of Linc’s chest, “Grappa tastes a bit like the Venetian Lagoon.”
    “Gave you ever actually tasted the waters of the Venetian Lagoon?” Linc asked her, idly massaging her left shoulder with his right hand.
     Coal was silent.
     “Coal?” Linc said.  “Are you there?”
     “Oh yes, sorry Linc, I was just enjoying your ad hoc massage,” she told him, “which, by the way, was delightfully asymmetrical.”
     “Here,” said Linc, moving his hand to her right shoulder, “let me symmetricize you.”
     “It puts me a million miles away.”
     “In Venice perhaps?”
     “I guess so, yes.”
     “Taking the waters?” laughed Linc.
     “You don’t take the waters in Venice,” Coal said.  “That’d be worse than drinking from Lake Ontario.”
     “So since you don’t know anything at all about the potability of Lagoon-water—except that it’s vile stuff—you’re going to have to take back your grappa comment.”
     “Okay, I take it back.”
     “You’re awfully agreeable tonight,” he smiled.
     Coal leaned back onto the pillows and raised her arms so that Linc could lift up her black satin chemise and toss it on the chair beside the bed. 
     “You have no idea how agreeable I’m going to be tonight,” she told him, sticking her finger gently in his mouth.
     “You taste like grappa,” he laughed.



     

TORONTO: A NOVEL—CHAPTER 25


 
     Coal Blackstone was in the kitchen with her favourite photographer and also on-again-off-again lover, Lincoln Ford.  This week, they were on-again.
     She was slowly stirring what was going to be a clearly hefty shrimp and scallop risotto, and Link was sitting at the kitchen table attentively watching her add periodic sluicings of chicken stock and white wine to the melange. He was sipping a glass of the same wine.
     “Pass me that little pile of chopped dill on the cuttingboard, will you Linc?” she asked him. 
     Linc didn’t move.
     “Linc, the dill?”
     He looked at her as if he had suddenly returned to the room from somewhere else.
     “Which one is the dill?”
     “The little pile of chopped green stems on the cuttingboard.  The only pile of green things there.”
     Linc scooped it up and brought a handful over to the sauté pan.
     “Shall I dump in in?” he asked her.
     “Why not?” she told him, amused at his sudden and uncharacteristic remoteness.
     “Where have you been?”
     “I was thinking about the mayor.”
     Coal was surprised.  “Really?  I never think about old crass Cass.  Why would you be thinking about him, and why now?”
     “I remember being worried that you were going to see him.  Actually, it was my Greek friend Peter who was worried when I told him you were visiting the mayor.”
     “Why was he worried?”
     Linc took a swallow of the wine.
     “This isn’t really all that good, is it?” he told Coal, staring at his glass.
     “Why was your friend Peter concerned about my meeting with Cass?” she asked him again.
     “I don’t know, he didn’t really say.”
     “Rather odd.”
     “Well, I think he’d heard a couple of guys talking together in the restaurant or something.”
     “Talking about what?”
     Linc poured himself a second glass of wine.
     “Oh the usual stuff….you know, politics, women, drugs mostly….and the dumb immersion tank business.  Apparently the mayor’s new tank got into all the papers.”
     Coal laughed.  “And the hippos were boiled in their tanks,” she sang out gaily, giving her risotto a spirited grind of rough-hewn pepper.
     “What?” asked Linc.
     “Oh nothing.  There was this novel that Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs wrote in collaboration in 1945, early in their careers.  They wrote alternate chapters.  The title came from a radio broadcast the two of them heard sitting in a bar one night, about a fire in the London zoo, about how the fire raced across the fields ‘and,” said the breathless radio announcer, ‘the hippos were boiled in their tanks’!”
     “One more thing for Tamburlaine to worry about,” said Linc.  “How’s the risotto coming?”
     “Getting nice and creamy,” Coal told him.  “Just five or six minutes more.”
     Linc continued to stare into his wine glass, while Coal tipped a bowl of shrimp and scallops into the pan of fragrant rice.
     “I got a call from Joy Pommery today,” she told him.
     “Joy Pommery?”
     “Yes, you remember, she and I had dinner a few months ago.  She was worried about those death threats against the mayor.  She has some sort of odd relationship with his Largeness.”
     “You mean a sexual one?”
     “Apparently,” said Coal.
     “God, how could she?” asked Linc, getting up to prod a shrimp with a fork. “It’d be like sleeping with a narwhal!”
     “It puzzles me too,” Coal admitted.  “She’s an attractive woman. And smart.  She’s a psychiatrist or a psychotherapist or something.  She works for an advertising company.”
     “Physician, heal thyself,” murmured Linc.
     “Yes, you’d think so, wouldn’t you?
     “What did she want—when she called?”
     “I don’t know.  We’ll have to meet again and talk over a drink.  Listen, this risotto is almost there.  Why don’t you pour us some more wine and warm a couple of bowls?”
                          
                       *********************** 
     About the same time as Coal and Linc were settling into their seafood risotto, Michael and May were settling into their first meal together—at the New Sky restaurant.
     They were both looking at menus.
     “They make a really good Hot and Sour Soup here,” said Michael, idly reorganizing the napkins, plates, bowls, chopsticks and bottles of soy sauce and hot sauce on the table.
     “I love Hot and Sour soup!” said May.  “Perfect for a chilly evening like this.”
     “Every place makes it a bit differently,” Michael added.
     “That’s true,” May agreed.
     “We should go on a Hot and Sour soup crawl sometime,” Michael said.  “We could sample five or six restaurants, see how they compare,” he added.
     May smiled.  “That’s a lot of hotness and sourness,” she said.
     “I guess so.  Here, they offer two versions—the regular one and a vegetarian version.”
     “What’s the basic difference?” May asked him.
     “Well, with the vegetarian one, they don’t include all those little pale shrimps they put in the regular soup.  I like it much better without them.”
     “Don’t you like shrimps?”
     “Yeh, usually, but these are really tiny tiny micro-shrimps and they’re so pale you can sort of see right through them, and then they look like insects or grubs or something.  They sort of put me off.”
     “Ah,” said May.
     “And anyhow I think the soup tastes better without them.”
     “Well, that would suit me fine, because I’m a vegetarian.”
     “Really?” said Michael.  “Well, I’m almost a vegetarian.”
     “How can you be almost a vegetarian?” May smiled. “Surely one either is a vegetarian or one is not?”
     Michael pondered this for a moment, all the while distracted by May’s dark, liquid eyes and the deep glowing white-jadeness of her skin.  Then he wrenched himself forcefully back to the discussion under way.
     “I’ve just decided something,” he announced to her.
     “Yes?” said May.
     “As of this very moment, I am absolutely, totally, a vegetarian!”
     “You’ve just decided this now?”
     “Yes.  But then I was on the way anyhow.”
     “Well that’s lovely,” said May.  “But you’re not doing this just for me?”
     “Well, yes I am.  That and anything else I can do to please you.”
     May put her menu down.
     “You don’t have to do anything to please me,” she told him.  “All you have to do is be.”

           
    
             
    

 
 
          

TORONTO: A NOVEL—CHAPTER 24

     Whatever it was doing in the rest of the world, the sun was shining radiantly down upon Toronto all through this never-ending April afternoon.  Having impatiently filled the day as constructively as he could—mostly by reading in coffee shops—Michael set off, finally, at five-thirty, to make his way back to Books at Large.
     May had tried, during the past few hours—without much success—to keep her mind on the business of selling books, putting them back in their proper places on the shelves, dusting them.  She still had the boxed two-volume set of Wolf Solent by John Cowper Powys that Michael had purchased in the morning and which he was going to pick up when he came for her at closing time. 
     She pulled the first volume from the slipcase.  Beautiful binding, beautiful creamy paper, a beautiful typeface, a perfect, holdable size—the size of your hand.  The book smelled good too.  She looked at the title page.  It had been published in New York by Simon and Shuster in 1929.  Before or after Black Friday, she wondered.
     She opened it and read the first paragraph.  “From Waterloo Station to the small country town of Ramsgard in Dorset is a journey of not more than three or four hours, but having by good luck found a compartment to himself, Wolf Solent was able to indulge in such an orgy of concentrated thought, that these three or four hours lengthened themselves out into something beyond all human measurement.”
     May was enchanted.  And she remained so, musing upon the promised delights of a book she hadn’t yet read, when the bells over the front door jangled and Michael stepped into the store, trying to keep the joy he felt at suddenly seeing her again within the bounds of bookstore decorum.  He strode towards her, grinning broadly. 
     “I see you’ve already begun an acquaintance with the lordly John Cowper Powys,” he said gaily. 
     May smiled.  “I’m happy to hear you pronounce his name out loud,” she told him. “I wasn’t sure how to.”
     “Yes, it’s different from the way it looks.  The ‘Cowper’ is just pronounced ‘Cooper,’ and the ‘Powys’ is pronounced ‘POW-iss’.”  Easy!”
     “Easy maybe if you’re Welsh,” May smiled at him.
     “And I don’t think you are,” he grinned, thinking how exquisite she was.  “So,” he asked her, rallying momentarily from her beauty, “are you almost ready to close up?”
     “It will take me five minutes.”
     They wandered south on Spadina Avenue, through the early evening chill, the darkness settling down around them as if winter were still reluctant to give way to spring.  They talked about the architecture courses May was taking at the University of Toronto, about the books they liked, about the films they liked, about Michael’s writing—and, he confessed to her, about how he had to settle down and do a lot more of it—and about her growing up in Hong Kong, where her parents still lived.
     By now they were at the intersection of Spadina and College Street—on the cusp of Chinatown.  They stood there through a light change, the brisk wind lifting their coats and blowing May’s long black hair hither and thither.  
     “This must be one of the coldest intersections in the city,” said Michael. “Maybe in the world.”
     “Yes, I’m here all the time.  The School of Architecture is just over there,” she told him, pointing east through the rude, rough-shouldering wind.
     “I’m almost reluctant to bring this up,” said Michael, “but the fact is, there’s a restaurant I really like, just a block down Spadina on the east side.  It’s right over there,” he told her, pointing down the street.  “It’s called New Sky.”
     “If you like it, I’m sure I’d enjoy it too,” she replied.  “Our tastes seem to be remarkably similar.”
     Michael grinned.
     “Remarkably,” he agreed.  Then, for reasons May couldn’t yet fathom, he suddenly seemed just a little bit abashed, uncharacteristically unsure of himself.
     “What is it?” she asked him. “Is something the matter?”
     “Well, it’s really stupid, I guess,” he replied, “and maybe even a bit racist or something, in the subtlest possible way, but I just now realized that I’ve invited a Chinese girl to a Chinese restaurant….”
     “Yes?” said May, trying to mask her amusement.
     “And it suddenly seemed as if it might be somehow inappropriate….”
     “How?” May laughed. “You mean it would be a ‘coals to Newcastle’ sort of thing?”
     “I know it sounds silly,” said Michael, “but it did suddenly strike me there might be a certain indelicacy to it…as if I just took it for granted that Chinese food would be the kind of food you’d like.”
     May smiled and took his arm.
     “But I do like that ‘kind of food,’ she assured him.  That kind of food and a lot of other kinds of food—just as l’m sure you do!”
     Michael gave her a quick hug.
     “For example, you wouldn’t think it indelicate of me, would you, if I said to you, a Canadian man, ‘Michael, let’s go out and get some Canadian food’!”
     “I wouldn’t think it indelicate,” he laughed, “because I wouldn’t know what you meant,” he told her.  What would we go out for?”
     “Hamburgers and fries?” she suggested.
     “American” said Michael.
     “Pizza?”
     “Also American, after a long circuitous journey from Italy.”
     “So, what would we be eating if we ate Canadian?” May asked him.
     “Maybe pancakes and maple syrup,” he laughed.  “Or,” he added, “if we were in Quebec, maybe a beef tortiere!”
     By this time they were at New Sky.  It was bright and warm and fragrant as they stepped inside, and they were happy to leave the chilly evening behind them.
     The waiter led them to a table, and it was odd, Michael felt, to hear May speaking to him in Chinese.  Odd and, he thought, sort of thrilling.  He’d never heard May speak Chinese before.  He mentioned it to her.
     She smiled. “Well, given that our friendship is less than ten hours old,” she noted, “the opportunity to hear me speak Chinese has never really come up until now!”
     The waiter brought menus, soup bowls, plates, teacups and a pot of jasmine tea.  He also brought them chopsticks.
     “See, here’s another thing,” said Michael, picking one up.  I guess I shouldn’t be going on about this stuff, but I actually think the word ‘chopsticks’ is sort of racist too.  You know, ‘chop chop!’ as an exploitive slang phrase for ‘quick!’ or ‘right away!’….  I bet the Chinese have another word for them!”
     “Yes,” she said.  She smiled a gentle, beatific smile, and at precisely that moment, she fell in love with him.
   
     .   
     

     
       
          
           
    
    

TORONTO: A NOVEL—CHAPTER 23

    “Please come down to my office right now, I really need to talk with you.”
     There was a pause while the other party thought it over.
     “You’re not lying on the floor naked are you, Cass?”
     “Geez Joy, of course not,” he said irritably in the direction of the speakerphone.  “But actually, what do you care? You are my mistress,” he added winningly.
     “Not on the carpet in your office, I’m not,” said Joy.
     His Enormity, Mayor Cass Tamberlaine, was in the throes of an idea and desperately desired a second opinion.  It was three a.m.—the hour at which Cass invariably got his best ideas.  It was not, unfortunately, the hour at which Joy Pommery felt best disposed to listen to them.
     “Very well,” she told him wearily.  “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
     Cass switched off the phone and paced the deep-pile sea on which, at one end of the room, his desk sat marooned like a derelict freighter.  He went to the window to look out at the grimy city, sparkling, in what he always felt was an over-compensatory way, with twinkling lights.  Lights going wink wink wink all night long. 
     The lights always irritated him.  In burning through the darkness, in so effortlessly rising above it, they always seemed to possess some kind of secret and superior knowledge—as if they were little twinkling minds.  Maddening sprights of light—the city’s fireflies.  A million little pinpricks of conscience.
     “Alright,” he muttered out loud to himself, turning away from the window, “so I smoke too much and eat too much and am okay a little bit heavier than I should to be and, yes, am grateful once in a while for the artificial liftoff certain chemical compounds provide, surely that’s not enough to piss off the public, is it?  Beyond Reality TV shows and fried foods, people don’t know what the hell they what anyhow!”
     He went over to the mirror on the bathroom door and took another look.  Of course he didn’t like what he saw there.  He never liked what he saw.  He was indisputably a mountain of a man—a mountain that was soft and tumbledown, billowed, not a mountain that was hard and craggy.  He looked as if he were melting.
     “I’ve got to get in shape,” he said to his always unsympathetic reflection, a reflection that, he felt, invariably sneered back at him whenever he talked to it.  There was no help anywhere.
     Except that Joy was coming.
     “Godammit where is she anyhow?” he asked his empty office, and, receiving no reply beyond the disgruntled conch-shell roar of the shadowy, unused spaces through which he sluggishly paced, day after day, night after night, like a caged hippo, he threw himself disconsolately onto the floor.
     Lying there, bereft of comfort, unsustained by ideas or insight, Cass felt three quite different things all at the same time.  First, he felt, once again, like taking all his clothes off.   Second, he felt like having a big bucket of white chocolate ice cream.  And third, he wanted to feel the cool hand of Joy Pommery gently wiping his copiously perspiring forehead with his pocket handkerchief and whispering to him that all would be well.
      How could all—or anything at all—be well?  Someone one was, after all, trying to kill him.  He thought again about the horrible, beautifully painted death threats that had been sent to him—and were now stacked in one of his desk drawers.  To tell the truth, he couldn’t decide whether to give them to the police or have them framed and hung on the walls.
     But he did have this one idea, and he wanted to see what Joy felt about it.  If she ever turned up.
     Happily, at just that exact moment, there was a dainty knock—or maybe it was a weary knock—at the office door, after which Joy let herself in.
     “Joy!  Thank God!”
     “Glad to see me, are you?” she smiled at him.  “I sort of half expected to find you lying naked on the floor with a hopeless erection!”
     “Well, it almost came to that,” he told her. 
     “You said you had an idea you wanted to run past me.”
     “That’s right,” he told her. “Look at these.”
      He went to his desk and came back with three or four glossy-looking pamphlets.
     “What do you think of these?”
     Joy glanced at them.
     “Isolation tanks?” she asked.
     “Flotation tanks.  I think to float sounds more appealing than to be isolated.
     “What do you want with one of these?” Joy asked him.  “They’re sensory deprivation tanks.  They’re filled with warm water and Epsom salts and you get into the tank nude and somebody closes the lid and you float face-up in the dark and you can’t see anything, or hear anything or smell anything or feel anything.  Cass, you’d go mad in three minutes!  You’d be clawing and scratching to get out, screaming a dead, echoless scream like some overweight version of one of those Edgar Allan Poe buried-alive stories!”
     Cass looked crestfallen.
     “I thought it’d be good for my nerves,” he told her.
     “It’d probably introduce you to nerves you didn’t even know you had!” said Joy.
     “Well I’ve got a lot on my mind, Joy,” said Cass, “and I need some relief.  I need to calm down.  These things are supposed to help.”
     “I just can’t see one working for you, Cass.”
     “Well, anyway I want to give it a shot.”
     “Where are you going to put the damned thing?”
     “I thought right here in my office.”
     “You’re going to have to smuggle it in.  And it’s going to be as big as a Volkswagen!
     “Why will I have to smuggle it in?”
     “Because,” Joy told him patiently, marvelling once again at his lack of political savvy, “it isn’t a good idea for the already beleaguered citizens of Toronto to picture their mayor, naked, floating heavily like an iceberg in a closed, black, coffin-like box, whiling away his mayoralty time dreaming ancient dreams of nothingness in the dark.”
    “Okay so they don‘t have to know.”
    “Much better they shouldn’t,” said Joy.
    
           

        

TORONTO: A NOVEL--CHAPTER 22


 
     The next morning, at ten o’clock, May opened the bookstore herself. Barbara was coming in later, closer to noon—probably weighed down with pastries for their tea-break.  May sighed.  She’d had enough pastry for a lifetime.
     A couple of hours before May opened up, Michael was sitting in the living-room he used as a studio and finishing a cup of instant coffee, now grown tepid and, oddly enough, rather waxy.  After pushing back four or five books from the edge of a shelf, he then put the empty mug on the free space, making a mental note about where he’d left it—which, as it turned it, was right in front of two books by Rebecca Solnit: River of Shadows, about 19th century photographer Eadweard Muybridge, and Wanderlust: A History of Walking.  Careful not to dislodge his cup, he wiggled Wanderlust from its place and riffled through it.  “I like walking because it is slow,” Solnit proclaimed on page ten, “and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour.”
     “I’ll go for a walk,” Michael said to himself. 
”At about three miles an hour.”   
     Michael smiled to himself at how associative he was, about how easily he was led about, from interest to interest from idea to idea.  He was Toad of Toad Hall, he thought, and then laughed at how even this brief thought about Mr. Toad was enough to send him back to reread The Wind in the Willows.  It would be all too easy, Michael felt, to head into an endlessly burgeoning, blossoming retroactive life, his sensibility borne backwards, association by association, until had lost track of the present entirely.
     “I need an anchor,” he told himself, not entirely understanding what he meant.  He knew that one of the things he meant was that he really didn’t find the present all that hot a place to spend his time.  He also felt, sometimes, that he needed to know somebody else exceedingly well.
     He took his glance at Solnit seriously and began to get ready to go out.  For some reason he was more depressed these last few days than he usually was.  Well, actually, he knew some of the reasons: a brief—but not nearly brief enough—acquaintance with Bliss Carmen and her silly dog Fish, meeting and putting up with her strange pal, the surly Homer Rubik and his new Old Master drawings and watercolours, and even the stale brownie clerk at the convenience store.  It wasn’t all that much, he thought, it wasn’t anything, but it was enough to keep him disconsolate for several days now.  He can scarcely believe that he had offered to write an article about Homer and his outlandish facility.  And the thing of it was, he’d probably go right ahead and do it too.
     Anyhow, walking had always helped to restore his good spirits in the past, and this morning he would walk.  He would walk and walk and walk and would begin to feel better, he felt sure, with every step.
     Where should he walk to?  For Michael always found that while aimless, goal-less walking had a certain beauty—a metaphysical, for-itself meaning—any walk-off-your-depression walk pretty much required a destination. 
And what invariably made Michael feel better when he was feeling down, anxious or angry, was to browse for awhile in a used bookstore.
     The used bookstores had been disappearing steadily over the past few years, falling dark and silent to the easy inrush of stay-at-home bookbuyers, clicking their purchases through on Abebooks, Amazon, Alibris, or just settling into the little lighted lozenges of Kindle and other ebook readers.  And of course a lot of people had just stopped reading entirely.  Books, which had once been seen as sites of ideas, wisdom, eloquence and the necessary truth, books which had once been regarded as the agencies of ascension, were now looked upon as merely oppressive.  Books, Michael supposed, just took up entirely too much space in this weightless, speed-of-light world.  Michael understood this, but he didn’t want to.
      And so, for him, the used bookstore had become a haven.  A place of sanctuary.  A soft, quiet way-station on the superhighway of a proliferating pseudo-culture that amounted to little, as far as Michael could tell, but the bureaucratic onrush of me-first practicalities.  It was a world he had to live in—as everybody else did too—but when it got too abrasive and therefore too silly, he could at least repair to a used bookstore.
      Which was where he was headed this morning.
     Michael left his apartment, in an old house out near High Park, walked up to Bloor Street and turned east.
He strode along steadily for a couple of hours, pausing now and then at two different Book City stores, to flip through their glossy remainders, stopped once at a Second Cup for an unnecessary and unsatisfying cup of coffee, browsed quickly through a couple of video stores, and, finally getting as far east as Spadina Avenue (all the while trying not to think about the always looming Bliss Carmen, who lived in the subway station), turned south and walked three blocks to one of his favourite remaining book stores—a dusty, fecund place called Books At Large.  He hadn’t been there for six months.
     He glanced at his watch.  It was ten fifteen.  He gazed for a minute of two at the books in the front window (some Sherlock Holmes, Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night,
a handsome pocket-sized edition of Don Quixote, Jacques Derrida’s The Post Card, Roland Barthes’ The Eiffel Tower, Alan Mooreheads’s The White Nile…Studs Lonigan...Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City….).  And then opened the door and went in.
     May was sitting at the desk at the back of the store.  She looked up when she heard the door open and, for some reason that was not yet clear to her, smiled warmly at Michael.  He smiled back, and made his way carefully down the aisle towards her.
     “Good morning,” he said.
     “Good morning,” she replied, wondering if she could help with the strange purposefulness that seemed, at the moment, to animate him.  “Is there anything in particular you’re looking for?”
     “You know, “ Michael  told her, “the fact is that when I started out for a walk early this morning, and decided to end up you here, I just wanted to walk for a long time and then…well, you know…browse for a bit.”
     “Yes?” said May.
     “Yes, but now, suddenly, I have this sudden desire for a particular book by a beautiful, not-very-well-known Welsh writer named John Cowper Powys.  The novel is called Wolf Solent.  It’s pretty hard to find, I think, and you probably don’t have any of his books…really, I’d be surprised if you had!”
     May looked at him in some amazement.
     “But we do!” she told him, rather taken aback herself that they actually did.  Indeed she’d been looking at it just a few days ago, wondering about its odd title, not entirely certain how to pronounce the author’s name.  “Come, I’ll show it to you.”
     She got up and wandered along the far wall of shelves until she got to the “P” section.  Michael followed her, all the while admiring, more than he had intended to, her grace, the litheness of her moments, even the swing of her long, shiny black hair. 
     “Look!” said, pulling from the shelf a superb, two-volume boxed set of the novel.  The slipcase carried a noble photograph of the theatrically handsome John Cowper Powys.  May loved the book already, though she hadn’t read a single sentence of it.  She glanced again at the slipcase.
     “I’m afraid it’s rather expensive,” she told him.
     “How much is it?”
     “It’s sixty dollars—for the two volumes.”
     Michael was suddenly flooded with happiness.  He didn’t have a lot of money, and he knew he ought not to be so extravagant.  But he wanted the book with a deep, ecstatic kind of hunger, not because it was a beautiful edition of a truly great book, and not because of the bravado of its price but….it was hard to explain it to himself…because he had already—albeit inadvertently-- made the book into a sort of connection between him and May.  He smiled at her.
     “I’ll take it,” he told her.
     “I want to read it now too,” she said, with the beginnings of a sudden new passionate shyness in her voice.
     Michael looked again at the book.  Then he looked again at May.
     “I don’t mean to be forward or anything but…look, will you come and have a cup of coffee with me, after you’ve finished here today?”
     “Yes,” she told him.