TORONTO: A NOVEL—Chapter 38

  

Violet Dollop was bored to death.  And depressed around the edges.
     “Why don’t you take an art course?” her husband Tom suggested.  “You’ve always liked art.”
    Violet took a sip of her coffee and buttered a slice of rye toast.
    “I like looking at paintings in galleries,” she told him, spreading the toast with fig jam, “and in art books. That doesn’t mean I can do anything myself.”
      “Well, you never know,” Tom replied, finishing his tea and folding the paper neatly by the empty cup.  “Lots of people don’t know they can make things until, one day, they just sit down and make them.  Doesn’t have to be painting, “he added.
     “What do you think I should do, “Violet asked him.
     “I don’t know, Violet. That’s up to you.  But I do think you should to do something.”
     He got up from the table and started towards the door.
     “Gotta run,” he told her, giving her cheek the soft, glancing blow that constituted his breakfast kiss.  “Late.”
     Violet nodded glumly.
     “Oh do cheer up, Vi,” he admonished her.  “There must be something you find appealing—or that you‘re at least curious about?”
     “Bye, Tom,” she said.  “Hope you have a good day at work.”
     Tom stood by the front door.  “It’s never really a good day at work,” he told her.  I think a tolerable day is all I can realistically hope for.”
     And he was gone.
     “What was she curious about?”  The only answer that came back down and along the echoing corridors of her mind was no answer at all—a sound like rustling leaves blowing along a gutter.  
     What do other people do?  Then she thought about her inner leaves suddenly blowing along the dry gutter she had just devised in her mind.  But I didn’t devise it, she thought.  It just came to me.  If things just come to you, is that art? she asked herself.  Or is it only art when you  strive for something?
     She thought about it.  The fact is, things came to her all the time, unbidden, unlooked for: images, memories, questions, speculations, minor forms of irrationality, words floating free, untethered to any particular occasion, pure sound in her ears like birdsong. 
     Birdsong, she thought.  I don’t read anymore, she thought. Not the way I read in college.  I ought to read again.  It was strange how all the books had disappeared.  She used to own books—novels, books of poetry, a few art books.  Where were they?  Gone in garage sales, she thought. 
      She put the kettle on to make herself a second cup of coffee.  I need to read, she said to herself.  And after that, I need to write.   Or maybe I’ll start writing straightaway and start reading alongside the writing.  Twinned activities—like railway tracks.  She took a sheet of paper and a ballpoint pen from one of the kitchen drawers.  The kettle was boiling.  She smiled at it, as if it were sentient.  Boiling kettle as metaphor for percolating of ideas, she thought happily.  Plans.  She added a teaspoonful of coffee powder to her cup and filled it with hot water.  Then she went to the fridge where she decided against the milk and chose instead the carton of ten percent cream for her coffee.  Live it up, she laughed to herself.  Then she put the sheet of paper in front of her and picked up the pen.  Stupid ugly pen, she thought.  I need a fountain pen.  I used to own a fountain pen.  What happened to it? Maybe a garage sale happened to it?  Why would I sell my fountain pen?  I probably sold it for a couple of dollars.  Or maybe fifty cents.  The image of her fountain pen now hove briefly into view, hovering like a tiny, ice-blue dirigible above the butter dish.  They used to call them reservoir-pens, thought Violet.  When they were first invented.  A reservoir, she thought idly, is a lot of writing! 
     She began to scratch down words.  It was just a list.  “Rustling leaves blowing along a gutter,” she wrote.  “Birdsong.”  “Boiling kettle.”  “Railway tracks.”
     She looked at the paper. 
     “It’s just a list,” she said out loud.  But she knew it was more than that.  It wasn’t a poem, but it was more than just a list.  Maybe it’s a haiku novel, she thought, and then immediately chastised herself for being so cutely clever.   Especially, she thought, since I don’t know anything much about either haiku or novels.
     Just then the phone rang.  It was Tom.
     “How’s the search for meaning going?” he asked her, his voice stridently cheerful.  Ripping cloth, she thought.  She didn’t feel like telling him, anything.
     “Tom, have you seen my fountain pen anywhere?”
     “You have a fountain pen?”
     “Well, I used to have.”
     “What do you want a fountain pen for?”
     “Oh I just liked writing with it.  It was nice and smooth.  And I liked the weight of it in my hand.” 
     Tom chuckled. 
     “A fountain pen woman in a fibre-tip world!”
     “I don’t mind that,” said Violet

TORONTO: A NOVEL—Chapter 37



Mayor Cass Tamburlaine had just heaved open the lid of the massive flotation tank that sat ponderously to the immediate right of his mammoth desk.  His blinked his eyes like something newborn to the world of light, and began wondering—a pale narwhal about to breach the surface of the salty inland sea that filled the tank—whether or not he could clamber out of the tank himself or whether he would require the assistance of one his young subalterns to help him to regain dry land.
     He had just decided he probably could use some help when, somewhat to his consternation—a consternation rounded, admittedly, by a rind of decidedly enjoyable lecherousness—he saw the door to his office swing open and watched a disturbingly beautiful young woman, tall, with blue–black hair swinging around her shoulders, stride smartly across his vast sea of deep pile carpeting and stop in front of the tank.
     Cass pulled himself to a sitting position in the tank and looked her up and down.  She had the blackest hair he had ever seen.  And the whitest skin.  She was dressed in a sleek black leather jacket, worn over a fog-grey linen shirt and a pair of linen slacks of the same expensive, indefinable hue.  She wore shiny black leather boots, he noticed, with very wicked heels. 
     “Don’t I know you?” he asked her, slicking back his wet hair with a plump wet hand.  The young woman looked amused.  “Haven’t we met somewhere?”
     “Coal Blackstone,” she told him, deliberately not extending her own hand.  “Yes, we met here in your office.  You wanted to talk to me about some death-threat notes you were receiving.  You seemed quite upset.”
     “Yeh, well I’m still getting them, and I’m still quite upset.”
     “You’re also quite naked, and wet as a hippo, so maybe you’d like to slip something on?”   She handed him a gigantic, lime-green robe that lay over a nearby chair.
     “Okay, fine, I’ll do that,” he said.  He began pushing himself massively from the Dead Sea of the tank and, while waving as much of his nakedness around as he could in the effort, finally succeeded in entering his swaddling robe. 
     “You’re not easy with nakedness?” he asked her.
     “I’m okay with my own,” she laughed.  “I’m not so sanguine about yours.”
     “What’s wrong with mine?”
     “Well for one thing,” said Coal, with a disarming smile, “there’s an awful lot of it.” 
     Cass looked crestfallen, in all of his parts.
     “But,” added Coal brightly, “I’m not here to deconstruct the mysteries of your Worship’s nakedness.  I came about the death-threat notices.”
     “There’s a pile of them on my desk,” said Cass, slightly irritated by her marginalizing of his manhood.  “Help yourself.”
     While Cass pulled himself into his clothes, Coal sifted through the old-master death threats.  For that’s what they looked like.  Tiny Old Master paintings.  All of them—and there seemed to be about a dozen—were beautifully painted but murderously phrased.  It was like receiving a small Raphael or Caravaggio in the mail, upon which—with screaming inappropriateness—someone had scrawled a crude suggestion about the likelihood of an upcoming violent death: a fatal accident, a fall from a high window, a garrotting in the daylight corridors of City Hall, a drive-by shooting, a poisoned Reuben sandwich.  One of them actually suggested that.  “Look to your Russian dressing, you squalid Pig!”  “Pig” was in italics.  And underlined a number of times.
     Cass looked over at her.
     “Nasty, huh?”
     “Yes, quite unpleasant,” Coal agreed. “Why threaten you about Russian dressing?”
     It’s really creepy.  I guess somebody has seen me and Joy at this west-end diner where I like the Reuben sandwiches they make. 
     “With Russian dressing.”
     “Yeh. Why, do you like Russian dressing too?” Cass asked her.
     “I’m not sure I even know what it is,” Coal told him.
     “Salad dressing.  Ketchup and mayonnaise and sometimes horseradish.  Good on a Rueben.”
     Coal tried to hide her expression of distaste.  Coal hadn’t gazed upon a bottle of ketchup since she was a teenager.  And mayonnaise?  Well, no.
     Coal couldn’t help noticing that Cass was now settling down to a detailed optical tour of her charms and thought it best to guide him back to the business at hand.
     “The reason I’m here,” she remindcd him crisply, “is that Joy called me about a certain Missing Dog poster the two of  you saw the other day.”
     “Joy?” said Cass, now entirely occupied by his mental inventory of Coal’s mellifluous parts.  Just at the moment, he was marvelling at the tiny tautness of her waist and the generous flare of her left hip.
     “Yes, Joy.  Your mistress,” she said just a tad louder than she had meant to. 
     “Oh, right. Yes, Joy.”
     “Well,” Coal continued, growing more impatient by the second, “tell me about the poster.”
     “It’s here somewhere.  You can look at it.”
     “I think Joy said it was about a missing dog, rather improbably named Fish.  She said there was a name and phone number to call.”
     “The dog’s name is Fish?” said Cass.
     “Apparently.  And there was some name to call.”
     “Bliss,” said Cass.  “I remember that.  Can’t forget a name like that,” he told her, all the while vaguely bringing together in his mind, Coal’s beauty and the deep erotic promise locked, as he saw it, in the name on the poster.  Bliss it would be indeed to talk Coal out of her linens and leathers.  Bliss would it be to persuade her to join him for a quick immersion together in his beloved flotation tank.  Then he wondered if the tank would actually hold the two of them….
     When he suddenly emerged from this aquatic sex-reverie, he saw Coal inspecting the Fish poster—which she had found on his desk with the earlier death threats.  She held up one of the death-threat notices and the missing dog sign beside it.
     “What do you think, Cass?  Same artist, right?”
     “I suppose so. Yeh, could be.”
     “Almost certainly is.”
     “So?” said Cass.
     “So I’d better phone this Bliss character.”     

TORONTO, A NOVEL: Chapter 36





The phone rang just as Coal Blackstone was lifting Fish—now as wet and slippery as his name—from the sudsy bathtub wherein  he had just undergone his third bath in the three days since Coal and her partner, Lincoln Ford, had taken him in.  Coal hurriedly set Fish on the bathmat, swaddled him about in an enormous black towel and rushed down the hall to the phone.  It was Joy Pommery.
     “What are you doing right now?” Joy asked her.
     “Washing a dog.”
     “That doesn’t sound much like you,” said Joy.
     “I know,” said Coal, attempting to blow a tuft of bubble bath from the end of her nose.   “That’s what Linc says too.  What’s on your mind, Joy?  I really have to get back to the wet pooch. I left him in the bathroom, shivering in a towel.”
     “Well, I won‘t keep you long from your dog-wrangling,” said Joy. “It‘s just that this kind of odd thing has happened.”
     “Yes?”
     “Yes. Cass and I were having lunch yesterday at a little place he likes out in the west end,” Joy explained, “and as we were waiting for a cab, we noticed, stapled to a telephone pole, a poster reporting a lost dog….”
     “You think it’s the dog I brought home?  You think it’s the one I have?”
     “Well, I don’t know,” Joy told her.  “You can’t tell.  There was no picture of the dog on the poster.  Just the fact that it’s apparently called “Fish.”  And then there’s a name and phone number to call.  Somebody named Bliss.”
     “But how can anyone tell this Bliss they’ve got her dog if nobody knows what the creature looks like?”
     “Well that’s the thing,” agreed Joy.  “But that’s not really the reason I’m calling you.”
     “No?”
     “No.  The reason I’m calling is to tell you about these posters.   In the one Cass and I saw, the lost-dog message and the name “Bliss” and the phone number were all added on top of a really skilful—amazingly skilful—old master-type painting.  But it was clearly painted now.  Like yesterday.  And it wasn’t a reproduction or anything.  Whoever painted it, paints like Raphael or Caravaggio or…oh, I don’t know who.  Some great renaissance painter!”
     Coal kept thinking about the wet dog in the bathroom.
     “Did you take the poster with you?” she asked Joy.
     “Yes.  But listen, Coal—and I know you’re washing the new dog and all that—the painting of these posters was exactly the same kind—really very skilful—as were on those death-threat notes Cass was receiving.  Actually he’s still getting them.”
     “He is?”
     “Yes, I forgot to tell you.”
     “And you say the paintings of the notes look rather like the painting on the missing dog poster?”
     “Not rather like, Coal,” said Joy.  “Exactly alike.  I mean it has to be the same painter!
     Coal could hear the dog shaking excess water all over the bathroom.
     Listen, Joy, can you give me the phone number of this Bliss person?”
     “Sure. Got a pen?”
     “No, wait just a sec.”  Coal went to the kitchen, dried her hands, and came back to the phone with a small notebook and her favourite Mont Blanc fountain pen.
     “Shoot.”
     Joy gave her the number.
     “And you say the name is Bliss?”
     “Yes, and the dog’s name—if you can believe this—is ‘ Fish.”
     “Fish?” Coal was surprised to hear a sudden short yelp of what sounded about like recognition from the dog in the bathroom. 
     “I think I’d better give this Bliss person a call,” she told Joy.
     “Be careful, Coal.  It all sounds very weird to me.”
     “To me too,” Coal said. 

TORONTO, A NOVEL: Chapter 35


Bliss Carmen was a lot more upset about her dog Fish’s defection than she could possibly have imagined.
     “Well, I don’t miss how he takes a piss against my leg every time he has a chance,” Homer Rubik grumbled at her, pausing momentarily in his stapling of a Lost Dog poster to a telephone pole.  He then glanced back to observe his handiwork—in this case an urgent “Where is Fish?” message superimposed on Homer’s remarkably fine repainting of Judith with the Head of Holofernes by Lorenzo Lotto.
     Bliss looked again at the Xeroxed poster.
     “Don’t you think it would have been better with Fish’s picture on it?” Bliss asked him.
     “I didn’t feel like painting Fish,” Homer told her.  
“He pees on me all the time.”
     “So how will anybody recognize Fish if they see him?”
    “Oh they‘ll figure it out,” Homer muttered, mostly to himself
     “How come you know how to paint like this anyway?” she asked him.
     “I don’t know,” Homer told her.  “It’s just the way I paint.”
     But how come you painted this particular painting for Fish’s poster?”
     “I dunno.  I just liked it.”
     “What is it?”
     “It’s just something I saw in a book at the library.  I liked how this woman is holding this guy’s cut-off head.  Maybe she’s the one who cut it off, I dunno.” 
     “Why would she do that?” Bliss asked him.
     Homer spat into the curb near the telephone pole.
     “Maybe he asked her too goddam many questions.” He said.

*********************************************

       His Worship Mayor Cass Tamburlaine was getting nervous abut how the public didn’t seem halfway as worshipful as he thought they ought to be.
     “Muttered insults,” he told Joy, “whispered asides.”
     “Maybe they think that huge sensory deprivation tank in your office is a waste of Epsom salts,” smirked Joy.
     “Hahaha,” Cass replied, taking a mighty bite out of his Reuben and a huge gulp of Coke.
     Joy Pommery watched him work his way through the sandwich—this was his second one—with a look on her face that you might have read—had you been there—as either weariness or distaste—or both.  Perhaps oddly, there was also something in her soft green eyes that bespoke a wondering affection, largely inexplicable even to Joy. 
     They were sitting in a diner called The White Cow on Bloor Street West, out near Roncesvalles.  It was an unprepossessing place, a little grubby and soiled, that had been there for decades, dishing out burgers and fries, toasted westerns, club sandwiches, and—Cass’s beloved Reubens. He’d been coming here for years to eat them.
     “You can’t get a decent Reuben anymore,” Cass told her, reaching down to retrieve a strand of sauerkraut that had fallen onto his tie.  Joy leaned forward on her red naugahyde chair and, pulling a paper napkin from the dispenser on the table, dabbed daintily but thoroughly at droplet of Russian dressing that had come to rest at the corner of his mouth.
     “Just take that, for example,” he told her, taking the soiled napkin from her and holding it up to her.
     “Cass, for goddsake, put the napkin down!”
     “This,” he said, pointing a pudgy finger at the orange spot, “is what you can’t get anymore!”
     “What?” said Joy, “a messy napkin?”
     “Russian dressing!” thundered Cass.  “You can’t get Russian Dressing anymore!  They make Reubens with French Dressing—or god knows what—instead!!”
     “Who is they?” Joy wanted to know.
     “Everybody but here!” he told her, in a voice strident enough to cause five other people to look up at him from over their newspapers.
     I don’t even know what Russian dressing is, Joy told him.
     “Mayonnaise and ketchup,” said Cass, wolfing down his last bite of the sandwich, “sometimes with some horseradish.  That’s what they do here.  Horseradish.”
     Joy made a face.
     “I beg it isn’t even Russian,” she smirked.
     Cass drained his giant Coke.
     “Of course it isn’t Russian,” he told her. “It was invented by some guy in bloody New Jersey!”


      Tom Dollop and his wife, Violet, came into The White Cow and slid into a booth near the front door, just as Cass and Joy were leaving.
     “Isn’t that the Mayor?” Violet whispered to Tom.
     “Yeh it is,” he replied, watching Joy open the door and watching the two of them then walk out into a sunny noontime on Bloor Street.  I wonder who the woman is?”
     “His wife?” Suggested Violet.
     “Don’t be silly,” Tom replied, a little more abruptly than he really ought to have.  “You know the mayor isn’t married.”
     “Actually I didn’t know,” said Violet quietly.
     “Well, he’s definitely not.”  He looked first at the menu on the table and then at the list of the day’s specials, scrawled on a blackboard on the wall over the grill.
     “What do you want to eat?” he asked her.  Violet read the menu up and down and then gazed at the blackboard and then read the menu again.
     “Well?” Tom asked her impatiently.
     “I guess I’ll have a chicken salad sandwich and a cup of tea,” she told him.
     “That’s what you always have!” 
     “Well, that’s what I want.”
     “So why do you bother studying the menu?” he asked her.
     “Well, there might be something that catches my eye,”
     “But there never is.”
     “What do you care?” Violet asked him angrily.  “I can look at a menu for as long as I like, Tom, and I don’t see why it’s any of your business how long it takes me.”
      Tom sighed and looked out the window.  He watched Mayor Cass and the woman with him trying to hail a cab.
     “They’re certainly not married,” said Tom absently.
     Violet looked at him.
     “But we certainly are,” she said.
         

TORONTO, A NOVEL: Chapter 34


And so while Bliss Carmen stapled up, everywhere she could, Homer Rubik’s exquisite posters of her missing dog, Fish—who had inexplicably wandered through the open door of one of the cars of a north-south subway train early one morning the week before and had been whisked up to Yonge and Summerhill before deciding to disembark—Supermodel Coal Blackstone and her photographer-cum-lover, Lincoln Ford, found themselves (thanks only to Coal’s insistence) dog-owners.
     “We simply aren’t dog people!” Linc kept insisting.
     “How do you know?” Coal replied, pouring them each a towering Kahlua and milk.  “We’ve never had a dog.”
     Fish sat in their spotless kitchen—spotless except for him—listening to their arguments and counter-arguments.  What he really longed for, he decided, was a nice brittle, slightly stale Crispy Crunch bar.  He was also experiencing the growing need to pee, and while he would normally have just cocked his leg at pretty much anything that protruded, he felt, somehow, that right now he ought to try to restrain himself a bit, just until he found out how the land lay, Fish-wise. 
     He sat—a small scruffy disturbance, a bit of canine soot in the sparkling eye of the Coal Blackstone kitchen—wondering what was next.
     “The next thing,” Coal announced to Linc, is a bath!”
     “You’re suddenly going to have a bath?”
     “No, Linc,” said Coal patiently, “he is,” she said, pointing at Fish.
     Linc was aghast.
     “Do you have any idea at all what it’s like to give a dog a bath?  Especially a dog that doesn’t want one?”
     “Yes,” thought Fish to himself. “Especially a dog that  doesn’t want one!”
     “Oh, come now, how hard can it be?”
     “You wait,” said Linc ruefully.  He watched Coal herd Fish towards the bathroom, and then listened—half regretfully, half amused—as she began to run water into the tub.
     “You think I should add anything to the water?” she called out to him.
     “Soap,” he yelled back.
     “I mean in addition to the soap.  Something like bubblebath?     Or Epsom salts? 
     “You got any beef-bone essence?” Linc shouted over the tumult of the waters.  “Or some distillate of chicken?”
     “Or chocolate sauce?” thought Fish to himself, drooling slightly at the thought of it.
     Thirty minutes later, Coal began to see what Linc had meant.
     “He’s really a mess,” she shouted out to linc.  “His coat is all greasy and matted.  And he doesn’t smell very nice.”
     “I noticed that,” said Linc.  “That’s why I was trying to talk you out of this whole idea.”
     Coal was not to be dissuaded.
     “I don’t think he’s ever had a bath in his life,” said Coal.
    “Probably not.”
    “I’m lifting him out now,” she told him.  “Come and help me.”
     Linc sauntered into the bathroom.  There was so much steam, he could hardly find them.  And there were puffy little clouds of soap foam everywhere in the room—clinging to the ceiling, clinging to the walls, on the floor.  Fish—who suddenly looked very small and, he hated to admit it, almost cute—was wrapped in a thick yellow towel that made him look a bit like a daffodil.  Coal herself was wet to the skin—a condition Linc found way more appealing than he wanted it to.
     “Soapy,” he said, looking around in disbelief.
     “My always perceptive photographer,” smirked Coal.
     “You look very…umm..well…attractive,” he said to her, unable to stop enjoying the way her sodden T-shirt clung prettily to her breasts and belly.
     Coal laughed.
     “You guys are never far away from your libidos, are you?
     Linc grinned.
     “In the old days…like five hours ago…” he said, “I would now spirit you off to our big white bed.  After helping you dry off.”
     “And in the old days…like five hours ago,” Coal told him, “I’d have loved to have you dry me off…and all the rest.  But now, my sweet photographer, we have company—and new responsibilities!”
     Fish wagged his wet tail.
     Linc’s heart sank.
     “We’re like parents now,” Coal told him.
     “Parents never get laid,” he said, despondently.
     “How do you know, Linc?” she replied jauntily.  “Have you ever been a parent?”