TORONTO: A NOVEL—Chapter 58

Violet Dollop now has two passions in her life: writing and Indian food.  Oddly, the one, Indian food, seemed like an extension or continuation of the other, the writing.  Indian food seemed to Violet to be so directly about life’s processes—the challenge of heat, the silky consolations of cool pudding-smoothness, the unprepared for eventfulness of sudden big encounters with spices: cardamom seeds, as black and present as insects.  Indian food, thought Violet, is terrain.  Indian food is a silent movie.  She loved it with an accelerating fervor so intense she knew that, despite her non-Indian-ness, she would someday have to write an Indian cookbook.  Or at least a book about the proliferating excitements generated by the Indian Food milieu: Indian Food—The Long Metaphor.
     It had been her husband Tom who had first encouraged her forays into Indian food—and who had then, curiously, begun to retreat from them.  For Tom, eating at their favourite Indian restaurant was just a night out.  A brief holiday from cooking at home.  For Violet it was the very stuff of literature and life.
     That’s what cars had become to her as well.  Violet had begun writing casually about automobile design—about taillights in particular (she loved the desperate changes wrought by car designers in the essentially banal object that a taillight is: infinite variation visited upon a fixed function in a fixed location).  Now her car-scribbling had taken her into the study of automotive history, into the larger-than-life personalities that were the fixed and galvanizing points of that history (Louis Chevrolet, Karl Benz, Gottlieb Daimler, Louis Renault, Ransom E. Olds—as in “Oldsmobile”—Henry Ford, Andre Citroen, Ettore Bugatti, Virgil Exner, Harley Earl…), into the arcanities of styling and marketing, into the symbolism of the car, its archaeology, its joys and poisons and runaway cultural implications, its weather-vane-litmus-paper delineations of cultural health and weakness.  It seemed to Violet like a lifetime of work.  It seemed to the increasingly disaffiliated Tom—who wanted his wife back—like a gathering threat.
     “You must have been keen on cars when you were a kid, weren’t you?” Violet asked Tom one night over a vegetable biryani she had made herself.
     “When I was about twelve,” Tom told her, “but I got over it.”
     “But I’d never noticed cars before,” Violet replied.  “They were invisible.”
     “Until that taillight study of yours.”
     “Yes, and then I extrapolated myself from the taillight to the whole car, its history and culture.” 
     “And now you’re in love with Harley Earl and Virgil Exner.”
    “Beautiful names, aren’t they?” sighed Violet. “Why do car designers always have such beautiful names?”
     “They all don’t.  Look at Henry J. Kaiser.  Imagine naming a car the Henry J!”
     “Henry J. Kaiser was an industrialist, not a car designer.  He founded Kaiser Aluminum.  Cars were a sideline.”
     “A sideline that failed,” said Tom.
     “Still,” said Violet wistfully, “I wish we owned a 1954 Kaiser Manhattan.”
     “What colour?”
     “Turquoise Green. The only Kaiser colour that mattered.”
     “Wow, I didn’t realize you were so deep into your fantasies,” said Tom.  “A 1954 Kaiser Manhattan.  What specificity!”
     “In turquoise or Green,” Violet added.


     Michael and May were sharing a table at the New Sky with poet Rory Pendrift and his shiny new Muse, Bongo Bearance.
     “We like it here,” Michael told them, as Rory and Bongo looked around and settled in.  “This was the first place I ever took May for dinner.”
     “Coals to Newcastle,” laughed Rory who immediately after winced theatrically from the pain of Bongo’s having kicked him smartly under the table.
     Mat smiled.  “I know. Michael thought that too.  He also assumed that I’d be slighted or something by being invited to dine at a Chinese restaurant.”
     “Because, see, I ate here all the time before I knew May,” said Michael, “and I just thought of it as a cozy place with good food!  I never gave any thought at all to its Chinese-ness.”
     “Same as when you met me,” giggled May.  “I don’t think my being Chinese was the first thing you thought about.”
     “I can assure you it was not,” said Michael, squeezing her hand.  “But it did occur to me when you spoke to our waiter in Chinese!”
     “Can you order our food tonight in Chinese?” Rory asked her.
     “You can be a real dork,” said Bongo.  “How can you ever hope to become a real poet if you’re always acting like a dork?”
     Rory looked chastened.
     Listen, Rory,” May told him, “if it’ll make you feel happy and…uh…sophisticated, I’ll speak nothing but Chinese for the rest of the evening!”
     “Do it!” said Michael, delighted at Rory’s discomfiture.
     And May did that.  And it was a very international evening indeed.     

TORONTO: A NOVEL—Chapter 57

Rory Spindrift felt he was beginning to learn something real and useful about poetry.  And he attributed this continuous enlargement of his sensibility to the energies of the muse he had so casually—almost accidentally—acquired.  Bongo Bearance was a gift.  A gift that, as beautiful as she was, he was not being encouraged to unwrap.
     “In order for a Muse to be effective,” Bongo explained to him one sunny Saturday afternoon as they nestled in adjoining voluminous red leather chairs in the Hart House reading room, “she has to remain pretty much aloof from her supplicant.”
     “Pretty much?” repeated Rory, trying to rise above his momentary enjoyment of the way Bongo’s breasts rose and fell so prettily beneath her partially-unbuttoned denim shirt.  Her legs, tucked up beneath her in the chair, were so achingly svelte he had to look away.  Bongo, who was one of those people on whom nothing is ever lost, noticed his enjoyable discomfiture and was amused.
     “Yes, pretty much,” she said, her big grey eyes dancing.  She shifted in her chair, striving to achieve what she hoped was a more studious, less encouraging position.   “I don’t suppose you’ve read The White Goddess?” she said.
     Is that a Rider Haggard novel?” he asked her.  “Like She or The Virgin of the Sun?”
     Bongo laughed.  “You’re like a ten year old,” she told him.  “No, The White Goddess is a book by the English poet Robert Graves about muses and mythology.  It was written in 1948.  The White Goddess is an ancient pagan goddess of love, birth and death.  She still moves among us and now appears to us as the moon.  She is what Graves called the “Ninefold Muse.”  He refers to her as ‘the patroness of the white magic of poetry’.”
     “You think I should read this book?”
     “No, I’d be surprised if you could!” Bongo answered him gaily.  Graves even warned potential readers away from it.  He writes in the book‘s Foreword that it’s a queer book—he uses the word in the old-fashioned sense—adding that it ought to be avoided by anyone with a “distracted, tired or rigidly scientific mind.”
     “I guess the ‘distracted’ part that applies to me,” Rory told her.
     “Yes, you don’t really seem tired,” Bongo agreed, “or ‘rigidly scientific’!”
     “Listen.” said Rory suddenly, “do you want to go for a beer?”
     “A beer?”
     “Well, I know it’s probably not as very muse-like drink,” said Rory.  “Not like the juice of fresh flowers, or 
a tipple of over-proof moonshine….”
     “Well, okay,” said Bongo.  And she unfolded herself prettily from the big red chair.

*********************************************
     Just as Rory and Bongo were leaving Hart House, Michael and May were strolling Philosopher’s Walk, in order to head south on St. George, and then make their way over to Spadina Avenue where, in a few hours, they had planned to have dinner at the New Sky restaurant where they gone for their first meal together.
     “It doesn’t seem very long ago that we were first there,” said Michael.
     Well it really wasn’t that long ago,” replied May.  “You were so funny,” she added, squeezing Michael’s hand, “being all nervous about whether taking a Chinese girl to a Chinese restaurant smacked of racism!”
     “It just seemed a bit too obvious to feel sophisticated,” he replied.
     “And you were of course trying for high sophistication” she observed.
     “Trying and failing,” said Michael.
     “Maybe we ought to have found a Greek restaurant to honour the Greek in you.”
     But I loved hearing you speak Chinese to the waiter at the New Sky,” said Michael, “whereas you’d never get to hear me speaking Greek to a Greek waiter.”
     “Why not?”
     “Because I don’t know any Greek,” laughed Michael.  “My father was Greek and he took off when I was just a year old.  I was raised by my grandparents—my mother’s parents—and they were from England.”
     “I wish you did speak Greek,” said May wistfully. “My Zorba!”
     “I guess I could try to learn.”
     “Oh I don’t expect that much of you,” May giggled.  “Besides, then I wouldn’t understand anything you said.”
     “We’d have to have recourse to the international language of love,” said Michael.  “An Esperanto of Pure Eroticism!”
     “Sounds okay,” said May, lifting he face to be kissed.
     The kiss, which may well have become a lengthy one, was interrupted by someone’s calling May’s name.  She and Michael looked around awkwardly, almost as disturbed as if someone had abruptly entered a bedroom where they had been making love.
     “May!”
     It was Rory Spendrift, calling her from the other side of St. George Street.
     “Rory?” said May, pulling herself together.
     Rory and the young woman on his arm crossed the street and came up to Michael and May, Rory’s hand extended in greeting.
     “You remember Rory Spendrift, Michael?  My poet friend?  You met him one day at the bookstore.”
     “Oh sure,” said Michael rather laconically.  “Dragon’s Breath.”
     Rory looked embarrassed.
     “I’ve left all that behind me,” he told Michael and May. “And this,” he said, pulling Bongo closer into the conversation, “is the reason.  This is Bongo Bearance!”
     “Hello,” said May and Michael simultaneously.
     “My Muse,” Rory added proudly.
               
             

TORONTO: A NOVEL: Chapter 56

 Coal decided to call Linc before Bliss Carmen turned up to reclaim her dog Fish.  He answered the phone, but he was way out at the beaches.  Coal could hardly hear him over the wind whistling off the lake.
     “What’s the shoot?” she asked him.
     “Mens’ Windbreakers!” he shouted into the phone. “Lacoste, Fred Perry, Adidas, nothing special.”
     “When will you be back?”
     “Three, four hours,” Linc told her.  “Another two hours here, and an hour trying to buck the traffic home.  Why?”
     “You remember that Bliss Carmen character?  The one who owns Fish?”
     “Hard to forget,” bellowed Linc over the tumult of the onshore breezes.  “I hope she’s taking Fish home with her?”
     “Apparently she is.  I’m actually more concerned though about her role in those murder threats the Mayor was getting.  It was her lunatic boyfriend that painted them, remember?”
     “You think she’s dangerous?”
     “Well, I don’t know” said Coal. “I’m pretty anxious about her coming here.”
     “I’ll be there as soon as I can,” Linc told her and hung up. 
     Half an hour later the intercom buzzed.
     “What kind of a dumb, pansified place is this anyhow?”  roared Bliss into the speaker.  “Mr. prettyboy Security guard here seems to think I’m some kind of goddam intruder or something.”
     “Let me speak to him,” said Coal quietly.  When he came on, Coal explained the situation as well as she could, knowing Bliss was standing right there listening to every word.  There was a authoritative buzz and decisive click and then an oppressive silence which stretched out like cloud cover over what Coal knew was Bliss’s progress to the elevator and her silent ascension up to Coal’s penthouse. A minute or two later there was a thundering knock on the door.
     “Open up in there!” Bliss bellowed.  “I’ve come for my dog!”
     “Why hello,” said Coal to Bliss’s enormous bulk that took up most of the doorway and blocked out the light.  “She’s like a cloud bank,” thought Coal, “or something more immovable—like a concrete wall.  “Please come in,” she said to the wall, quickly standing to one side so that Bliss, moving slowly and ponderously, could attain the hallway.  Bliss took a dyspeptic look around.
     “It’s like a damned Ikea store in here,” she announced—a remark that puzzled Coal, whose tastes ran more to chairs by Mies van der Rohe and Alvaar Alto  than to democratic objects bearing names like “Hendriksdal” and “Nils.”
     “We like it,” Coal murmured.
     “Who’s we?’ asked Bliss.
     “My partner, Lincoln Ford,” said Coal.  “He’s a photographer.   I’m actually expecting him any minute,” she added—with what she recognized as undue nervousness.
     “Where’s Fish?” bellowed Bliss, suddenly spinning around and narrowly missing an Alvaar Alto vase on the side table.  “You still got him, I hope?”
     “Oh yes,” Coal assured her.  He’s been well cared for.”
     “Probably too well,” sneered Bliss, turning an incendiary glance upon the stuffed bookshelves and the Corbusier sofa in the living room.
     “Ever give him candy bars?” Bliss asked Coal accusingly.
     “Dear me, no!  They can’t be good for a dog surely?”
     “Well that’s too bad” boomed Bliss, “cause that’s what he likes.  Especially the hard ones like Skor bars and Crispy Crunch!”
     “Oh,” said Coal.  “Well,” she went on brightly, “I’m afraid he’s been out of luck. 
     “Figures,” replied Bliss, now positively annoyed at—among other annoying things—the sight of the huge Harold Klunder painting hanging on the far wall.
     “What’s that?” Bliss asked Coal, pointing to what she considered an abominable maelstrom of paint that had mistakenly found its way up onto the wall.  “Or that?” she asked again, pointing at Coal’s Roy Lichtenstein painting of what seemed to be a drowning girl.  Coal tried to explain both paintings, fervently wishing, once she had began, that she’d never got into the whole thing.
     Bliss listened with barely suppressed contempt.
     “My boyfriend paints way better than these guys!” she announced.
     “Does he?” asked Coal, remembering with a shudder the beautifully repulsive old master paintings Bliss’s clearly demented partner had sent to the Mayor, each one of them despoiled by aggressive red scrawls promising mayhem and murder.  “What does he paint?”
     “Old masters,” said Bliss, looking as if she were searching for an available spittoon.
     “Odd for a young painter.”
     “Homer isn’t what you’d think of as young.  He never was young.”
     “That’s his name?  Homer?”
     “Homer Rubik.”
     “Like the cube?”
     “That’s what everybody says.”  Bliss looked around the penthouse again.  “So where’s Fish?”
     “I’ll get him,” said Coal. 
     While she was gone, Bliss assessed the mighty living room.  Books everywhere.  She picked up a handful from a coffee table.  The Real Real Thing: The Model in the Mirror of Art by Wendy Steiner.   The Fashion System by Roland Barthes.  How to Have Style by Isaac Mizrahi.  Steve Martin’s novel, An Object of Beauty.  “Bullshit,” she said out loud—just as Coal re-entered the room, leading a diffident Fish on a red leather leash.
     “I beg your pardon?” asked Coal.
     “I was just saying that your books are bullshit,” said Bliss.
     “Kind of you.”
     Coal unsnapped Fish’s leash and waited for the joyful reunion.  Which didn’t come.  Instead, Fish sat down on one of the highly figured carpets and looked strangely weary.
     “Hey Fish!” boomed Bliss.  “It’s me!!”
     Fish looked away disconsolately.
     “He doesn’t seem, very happy to see you,” observed Coal.
     “Sure he is,” said Bliss.  “Anybody can see that!”