TORONTO: A NOVEL—chapter 49



They weren’t going to have desserts, but Akanksha was so persuasive about the light, buoyant wonder of the restaurant’s puddings, they each ordered one. 
     Tom had Kheer, a rice pudding rich with cardamom and raisins, while Violet, led to it by Akanksha’s insistence that this particular dessert was almost an extension of her being, ordered Rasmalai, a light milk pudding made with ricotta cheese and flavoured with saffron and pistachios.
     Akaksha floated by as they were finishing.
     “And so does Mrs. Dollop feel well served by her Rasmalai?” he asked her, smiling broadly in the assurance of her answering in the affirmative.
     “Heavenly!” she told him.  “Like a cloud!”
    Tom smiled.
     “How’s the writing going?” he asked her.

    
     While Lincoln Ford was busy pulling a rack of lamb chops from the broiler, Coal Blackstone was hard at work whipping up garlic mashed potatoes.  Fish sat near them on the kitchen floor, a look of expectancy alternating with one of resignation.  Would he get some lamb chop, he  wondered, or would he not?
     Linc arranged the chops on a platter and looked dyspeptically at the eager Fish, waiting beside the refrigerator, looking as cute and deserving as he could make himself look.
     “So what are you intending to do about this dog?”
     “He’s cute isn’t he!”
     “No,” said Linc.  “He‘s scruffy and weird and he makes me nervous.”   Linc turned away to uncork the wine.  He set to the task first using their fancy-dancy Rabbit wine opener, for which he soon substituted an old-fashioned hardware-store corkscrew.  Coal was amused.
     “You got something against the Rabbit too?” she laughed.  Maybe you just don’t like animals!”
     “I don’t much.”
     “What’s the problem with the Rabbit?”
     “It looks too much like a real rabbit,” Linc told her.  “I don’t like this silly kind of anthropomorphizing of everything.  This is supposed to be a corkscrew, for goddsake, not the Easter Bunny!  I feel a fool trying to uncork a bottle of wine with a rabbit.  It’s like something out of an old Disney cartoon!”
     “Alice in Wonderland!” said Coal.
     “Yeh, maybe. They may as well manufacture Flamingo wine openers.  Or Giraffes.”
     She looked up from her potatoes, to which she had just added a little additional splurge of cream, and then began spooning them into her favourite serving dish which, she hoped Linc wouldn’t really notice, was made to resemble thatched leaves of lettuce.  Maybe a thing isn’t anthropomorphized unless it’s made to look like a creature, she thought to herself, drifting morsels of parsley over the top of the potatoes.  Lettuce leaves probably didn’t count.   
     “This wine,” Linc announced, “is going to be sublime.”
     “What is it?”
     “A Chateau Mont-Redon, Cotes-du-Rhone Rouge from 2005.”
     “2005?”
     “Yep.  Almost ten years old!” said Linc proudly.  Coal giggled.
     “What’s so funny?”
     “Oh nothing,” replied Coal gaily.  “It’s just that I remember being at this swank restaurant in London once and the host, who was keen to make a huge, sweeping gesture of no-holds-barred hospitality, decided  to order a bottle of sauterne from 1939—the year he was born.  It was elaborately brought to the table, in its beautifully dusty, golden bottle, and we all dutifully read the venerable label, and when the waiter opened it, nothing came out!  Not at first, anyhow.  Then, as we all watched intently—torn between hope and relief—there was this soft, rather repulsive oleaginous gurgle, followed by a slow slide of thick honey-like material that came inching out of the bottle only to plop, finally, like very expensive jello, right onto the host’s plate!  We were all horrified and amused, in equal measure.  Our host was close to tears.  The wine was  certainly old, but it was simply too old!”
     “Well, sic transit Gloria,” Said Linc.  “Glory fades.”
     Coal looked momentarily depressed.
    “But not yours,” he assured her quickly, kissing her on her forehead.
                

     The Mountainous Mayor Cass Tamburlaine was dining out with his long-time mistress, Joy Pommery, who had elicited from her worshipful lover a solemn promise that they would go somewhere—anywhere—where it was impossible to order a Reuben sandwich.
     And so they found themselves at 360, “The Restaurant at the CN Tower,” slowly revolving over the city.  Cass always found the moving panoramic views exciting.  Joy found them slightly queasy-making.
     “This place has been revolving for a long time now,” said Joy.  Isn’t anybody afraid the mechanism will seize up or break or something.  Like in metal fatigue?”
     “I’m not,” said Cass, beckoning a waiter.
     “It could be like that merry-go-round at the end of Strangers on a Train,” Joy persisted, “where the gears get jammed or something and it spins out of control, killing a lot of people!”
     “What do trains have to do with anything?” Cass asked her absently, beginning to study the wine list.
     “Things that spin around and go out of control,” said Joy.
     “Trains don’t spin around,” said Cass.
     “In the movie!”
     “What movie? What are you talking about?”
     “In Alfred Hitchcock’s film, Strangers on a Train,” Joy told him, her voice loud enough now, she noticed with some embarrassment, to catch the attention of a few of the other diners.
     Cass looked blank.
     “I don’t know it,” he said.  “You know I’m too busy to go to movies, Joy,” he added.
     I don’t like being in high places like this,” Joy said in a suddenly tremulous voice.  “Not after 9/11.”
     Oder some dinner,” said Cass. That’ll make you feel better.  What do you want to eat?”
     “Vegetables,” she told him, her voice small with a anxiety. 
     “Geez, Joy,” Cass told her, you’re really not a lot of fun to have dinner with!!”

TORONTO: A NOVEL—Chapter 48




 Violet wrote all day.  She filled page after page with stuff about car design and culture, about chromium trim and national ardour, about the tailfins of the 1950s—as emblems of American post-war optimism and vectors of workaday prosperity.  She made a note on a facing page, reminding herself to write a novel—after she had gained a little more confidence—to be called Harley Earl: A Novel.  She would keep notes for it in a separate workbook. 
     When finally she looked at her watch, it was 5:30 pm.  Tom would be home in about an hour.  She hadn’t given any thought to dinner.  She wondered if he had?  Then she went back to her writing.
     At 6:27 on the dot she heard the car sigh into the driveway and at precisely 6:30, Tom opened the front door and strode into the hallway.  He hung up his raincoat, looked around—as if he were faintly surprised to find the house the same as he had left it in the morning—and called out to Violet.
     “I’m in the kitchen,” she called out in reply.
     Tom came back to the kitchen, gave Violet a peck on lips, opened the refrigerator, bashed two ice cubes free from the grip of the stinging cold tray, carried them quickly across the room, where he took down a glass from the cupboard, tossed the ice cubes into it, dried his wet, freezing hand on a tea towel hanging by the sink, went back to the refrigerator, pulled the bottle of gin from the freezer, poured a couple of fingers of it over ice cubes, rummaged around in the fridge until he found what looked like the last can of Canada Dry tonic water, snapped the tab, and poured half of the can into the icy gin.
     “Do you want some lemon?” Violet asked him.
     Tom started, as if he’d been caught out at something slightly improper.
     “I’m sorry,” he told her.  “I forgot to ask you if you’d like one of these!”  Violet had just spotted a moment of verbal infelicity on her scrawled page and was leaning over to correct it. 
     “Violet?”
     She looked up quickly.
     “Yes?”
     “Do you want a drink?”
     “Oh, I’m sorry, Tom, I just spied something stupid I’d written here and wanted to fix it before I forgot where it was.”
      “But about the drink…yea or nay?”
     “Nay,” said Violet absently.  Then she looked up and smiled at him.  “But thank you anyway.”
     Tom put his drink on the kitchen table and sat down.
     “Do you want to go out for something to eat?” he asked her.
     “Okay.”
     “Where would to like to go?”
     “I don’t know.  Thai, maybe?  Or would you like sushi?
     “Sushi seems too cold for tonight.  It’s cool and rainy outside. I’d like something warm and comforting.”
     “How about Indian?  That’d be warm and comforting.”
     “Or,” said Tom, insinuating his arm about her waist amd giving her a boyish grin, “we could just stay home and you could be warm and comforting.”
     Voilet gently unwound herself from his arm.
     “Let’s go out,” she said. 
     An hour later they were seated at a table for two in the front window of the Agra Tandoori restaurant, which was not far from where they lived, out in the Junction.  It was a nice little neighbourhood place, warm with red paint and gold hangings and brass elephants.  The maitre d’, Akanksha, knew them, and they always felt comfortable there. 
     What do you fancy?” Tom asked.
     You know what I’d love?” Violet told him.  “a plate of Goll Baji with a dish of Tamarind puree!  Heaven!”
     “Okay, but that’s just an appetizer.  Aren’t you hungry?”
     “Not very.  It’s the writing I think.  It takes all my attention and I forget about eating.”
     Tom smiled.  “Maybe dining here will bring it all back to you.” He glanced over at Akanksha, who came smiling up to their table.
     “Have you decided?”
     “What’s that wonderful okra dish we had here a few weeks ago?”
     “I think you and Mrs. Dollop has our Bhindo Masala,” said Akanksha.
     “It was great! Lets have it again,” said Tom.  “And some Butter Chicken!”
     Akanksha looked momentarily discomfited.  Butter chicken, yes,” said Akanksha thoughtfully.  “I wonder if you and Mrs. Dollop would mind it I made an alternate suggestion?”
     “Speaking for myself,” said Violet, “Mrs Dollop would be delighted!”
     So would Mr. Dollop,” Tom added.
    “We have tonight a lovely Bombay dish called Parsi Chicken with a Apricots, rich with tomato, ginger, dried apricots and garnished with potato straws…”
     “Sounds delightful,” said Tom.
     “Most satisfying,” murmured Akanksha happily.  And off he went to the kitchen.
     “And some Naan bread!” Violet called after him.
     Akanksha returned, smiling, to their table.
     “Try some Saag Roti,” he said. “Roti with a spinach base.”
     They both smiled up at him, and suddenly the dinner was entirely decided—fixed and promising.
     “You were right,” Violet told Tom happily.
     “About what?”
     “The idea of eating.  It’s coming back to me!” 

TORONTO: A NOVEL—Chapter 47




He did, yes.  As unappetizing as Michael felt the experience might become, he really did want to look at some of Homer Rubik’s paintings.  There was something uncanny about them.  They looked like Old Master paintings—like greatly reduced versions of Titians, Tintorettos, Rembrandts, Caravaggios.  It was all crazy but oddly compelling to gaze upon.  And anyhow how in hell did this semi-bestial short-order cook learn to paint like this?  With this much technical skill?
     And the thing was, Homer didn’t just paint small copies of Old Master paintings.  He didn’t in fact, copy them at all.  He never painted replicas.  What he did was to paint new pictures that evoked the Old Masters, that were carefully painted in the traditional, historical ways. 
     But the creepy thing about Homer’s paintings—despite the wondrous skill with which they were made—was that their content was always horribly awry.  There was never any serenity in Homer’s paintings, never any grace.  If he set painting a Saint George slaying a dragon, his dragon was sure to be depicted slaying Saint George. 
     One painting, a big one for Homer, depicted the birth of Venus—a golden, tumble-haired Venus standing naked and assured on a giant clam shell now washed ashore.  She was pretty much as she was in the Botticelli original, except for the fact that right behind her, emerging from the pretty Adriatic waves, was an enormous octopus waving its tentacles threateningly in her direction.  Indeed, as Michael noticed upon closer inspection, one sinister tentacle had already encircled the goddess’s left ankle.
     Homer noticed Michael staring at his Venus.
     “Pretty hot, huh?” he said.
     “Disturbing” Michael replied. 
     “Birth of Venus,” Homer grumbled.
     “Looks like her birth and imminent demise, all at the same time.”
     Homer gave a grunt and walked off to the kitchen.  He was gone for over two minutes, at which time he reappeared carrying two cans of Coke and a Lost Dog poster.  He handed Michael a can and held up the poster.
     “This is what I made for Bliss, to help find Fish,” he told Michael.  It was the poster with the colour photo-copy of Lorenzo Lotto’s Judith clutching the severed head of Holofernes—with Bliss’s cell phone number on it. And no photo of Fish anywhere.  The poster was Fish-free.
     “How did you expect Bliss to get Fish back if you didn’t show what the stupid dog looked like?” Michael asked.
     “I don’t care if she ever gets Fish back.” Homer said.
     “Yeh, that’s pretty clear.  But so why make the poster at all?”
     “I didn’t want to piss off Bliss too bad,” Homer told him.
     “You cared what she’d think?”
     Homer grinned lasciviously.
     “I like to get laid,” he told Michael.


     Violet Dollop had now begun to write in earnest.  She consigned her scribblings to coil–bound notebooks, which she bought, a dozen at a time, at the Dollar Store in a nearby shopping plaza.
     She usually wrote, once Tom left for the office, on the kitchen table—just after she cleared away the breakfast things. 
     It was lovely and quiet after Tom’s departure.  But while she was grateful for the quiet, her heart went out to Tom, who, given the company’s recently relocating their offices to somewhere in the wilds of Don Mills, now had to inch up the Don Valley Parkway every morning and inch back down again at the end of the day.  Tonight, when he got home, she was going to ask him what he did—what he thought about in those three hours of inchworm transition-time.  She supposed he listened to the radio.  CFRB? CHUM-FM?  Some Indie station or other?  She hardly imagined he listened to the CBC.  She wondered if he ever just sat at the wheel of the car, glassy-eyed, reading the licence plates of the cars in front of him.  Se used to do that sometimes when they were stuck in traffic together.  She smiled to herself.  The couple that sits idling together stays together.  That could be a bumper sticker.
     Lately, whenever she was in the car with Tom, and they were in traffic jams—and when were they not?—she had begun to study the design of automobile tail lights.  They were weirdly similar—despite the make of car—and yet eerily distinctive. 
     She found it surprisingly absorbing to note the way the red part of the fixture—the stoplight—shared a housing with the clear part—the back-up light—and how the car’s designers had decided upon and negotiated the relative authority of each light’s function.  Surely stopping (red) was a more urgent signal than merely backing up (the clear lamp)?  She could remember when cars didn’t even have back-up lamps.  She could also remember when trucks didn’t go beep-beep-beep when they reversed.  She often wondered whether any truck’s alarmed beeping had really ever prevented an accident or an injury?
     But it was tail lights she was really interested in.  She found them fascinating enough that she had decided to attempt an essay about them.   She was intrigued how, of late, tail lights had been mounting up the back of cars and framing the rear window and even, sometimes, venturing out onto over the car’s’ rear hatch, up near the roof.  She was astonished at how bright they had become.  Tail lights today were almost as blinding as headlights. 
     She sat at the kitchen table, opened a notebook, took her new fountain pen from its case, out on the kettle to make herself a cup of tea, and began to write.  She had eight full hours before Tom would be home again.          

TORONTO: A NOVEL—Chapter 46



“Well,” Linc began, “did you know that someone tried to run down the mayor with his car, just outside of City Hall?  It was a big old Chrysler Imperial—from 1956. ”
     “I see it in the paper,” said Peter, refilling Linc’s cup with more thick, fragrant coffee.  “Somebody doesn’t like the Mayor much I guess!”
     “Nobody likes the Mayor much,” Linc replied, “but most of us don’t try to run over him with cars!”
     “Would put a big dent in your…what is that car you got again?
     “An Austin-Healey.”
     “The little red one, yes?”
     “Yes.”
     “You hit the 300 pound Mayor and boom!” 
     “Boom?”
     “No more Austin-Healey!!” said Peter. “Listen, you want some custard?”
     “No thanks, Peter, I gotta go.  But let me know if you ever see a big black Imperial parked outside.”
     “The one with the gun-sight tail lights?” asked Peter.
     Linc laughed.
     “Nobody can forget those silly gin-sight tail lights!”
 
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     May left for a day’s classes at the School of Architecture and Michael readied himself as best he could to pay the studio visit he had promised Bliss Carmen—no  doubt foolishly—he would make to see more of Homer Rubik’s dismayingly precise and off-puttingly grotesque Old Master drawings and paintings.
     He was strangely troubled by the fact that Bliss Carmen, wasn’t going to be meeting him there.   Not that he was fond of the gargantuan Bliss—not by any means.  But while she and her silly dog, Fish, were every bit as unwholesome to Michael as Homer Rubnik himself was, the last time he was at Home’s studio –if that’s what you’d really call such a malodorous ruin—she did serve admirably as a buffer.  A big fleshy, boisterous buffer between him and her mad painter-lover, Homer.  Michael didn’t relish having to navigate his way alone through Homer’s clenched and horrible pictures, or small-talk his way through Homer’s gnarled silences, but there really didn’t seem to be any way around it.
     At precisely eleven, therefore, he knocked on Homer’s door.
     “Who’s there?” growled a Homer-like voice from somewhere behind the door.
     “It’s me, Homer.  Michael Moskos.  I was supposed to meet you here today at eleven, remember?”
     The door swung viciously open, and there stood Homer  Rubik, rumpled boy-genius, stained and smelling of a combination of oil pigments and the cheap vegetable oil in  which he deep-fried everything at the diner where he  worked part-time.  Homer glared at him.
     “You’re late.”
     “I can’t be late,” Michael replied. “You said eleven and it’s just eleven now.  Look!” he said, thrusting his wristwatch into Homer’s face.  Homer stood gruffly aside and Michael proceeded further into the rank studio.
     “Want anything?” 
     Michael looked quickly around the cluttered space, took in the encrusted coffee-maker and a couple of mouldy-looking cups, and decided he didn’t. 
     “I’m fine,” he said.  “Thanks all the same,” he added quickly, remembering how quick Homer was to take offense.
     “Whatdya want to see?”
     “Whatever you want to show me,’ Michael replied affably.  “Why don’t you show me some of the posters you made when Fish went missing?”
     “Stupid dog,” muttered Homer.
     “Where is Bliss anyhow?” he asked Homer, as offhandedly as he could. 
     “You like Bliss?” Homer asked him suspiciously.
     “Oh, well…yeh, I like Bliss okay, I guess.  I don’t know her very well.  I met her on a streetcar.  Her and Fish.”
     “Dumb dog,” said Homer.
     “But Bliss told me Fish was missing.  Wandered away or something.”
     Homer smirked.
     “He walked onto a subway train waiting at the Spadina station” he said. “Where Bliss lives,” he added.  “Bliss is upset.  Me, I’d be relieved!”
     “So she asked you to make some posters to put up around town.”
     “Near the subways,” said Homer.
     “Any luck so far?”
     “Getting him back, you mean?
     “Well, yes,” said Michael.
     “See, it’d be luck for me if she never got him back!”
     “But you made the posters anyhow,” said Michael  encouragingly.
     “Yeh.”  Homer grinned a most unpleasantly carnivorous grin.  “But I didn’t put the stupid dog’s picture on them.”
     Michael thought this over for a second or two.
     “So, what good are they as posters then?”
     “No good at all, I hope,” said Homer fiercely.  “So listen, do you want to look at some paintings or what?”

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