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.  “CafĂ© 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 sautĂ© 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.
   
     .