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!”
 
************************************************

     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?”

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

TORONTO: A NOVEL—Chapter 45

Winter had moved haltingly into Spring.  Hyacinths and daffodils were pushing up into the watery sunlight—almost reluctantly, it seemed to Linc Ford, as if they simply couldn’t face one more annual incarnation of floral rapture.  It gets more and more anomalous, Linc decided, to be beautiful in an increasingly indifferent world.  For him, even the new bulbs seemed a little abashed at being harbingers of the bright new season.
     It was Austin-Healey time again—Linc didn’t like to drive the car through the salt-encrusted winter streets—and now his heart leaped up along with the perfect little red vintage sports car, as it came thrashing up the ramp of the underground garage of the condo he shared with fashion model Coal Blackstone.  The car, now having caught the scent of the spring air—at least this is how Linc saw it, given, as he was, to anthropomorphizing everything—sprang out into the street, made an exuberant left turn, and careered along King Street West, heading (the car having correctly read Linc’s mind) up to Bloor Street for a Greek coffee and a heavy slab of custard in phyllo pastry at the Athens-Astoria restaurant.
     He hadn’t seen Peter, the restaurant’s owner, for months.  For way too many months.  He loved visiting with him.  Whatever was bothering him or worrying him was always salved and smoothed away by his old friend’s endless tales of his days as a cook on a Greek freighter, all of them accompanied by lashings of Peter’s thick, rich coffee and slices of his soothing, anodyne custard pastry.  Mother’s milk! thought Linc. 
     He parked the Austin-Healey in the only place he could find—a block away—and strolled over to Peter’s.  He noticed that the window box running along beneath the big front window was already sparsely planted with perky yellow marigolds.  Peter always said he liked their spicy, acrid smell.
     The genial marigold man saw him and met him in the doorway. 
     “You’re being a bit stingy with the marigolds, aren’t you Peter?”  Peter grinned.
     “They bush out!” he assured Linc.  “Come on in, I make new coffee.”
     They passed the steam tables, already rich—though it was only late morning—with the day’s offerings.  There was a huge pan of moussaka—golden brown béchamel sauce on top, richly juicy underneath, down where the sliced potatoes, slices of eggplant and layers of ground lamb resided.  Next to it was an equally large pan of pastitsio—more toasty, semi-blackened bechamel, under which lurked layers of pasta and spicy ground beef.  And there were the usual—delectable—outrigger dishes: green beans in tomato sauce, Peter’s roasted potatoes, glistening in olive oil and tufted with sprigs of rosemary and oregano, fava beans stewed with tomatoes and onions, and the inevitable platter of dolmades---which Peter made better than anyone.  Linc hadn’t felt hungry when he got to Peter’s, but now he was ravenous.
     “So how’s Coal?”
     Linc ceased his lascivious reverie about Peter’s votive food long enough to convey to him that Coal was fine.
     “Still beautiful?” Peter asked puckishly.  Linc nodded.
     “Outrageously.”
     “That‘s good,” said Peter, filling two cups with strong Greek coffee.  “You what custard?”
     “You know what I’d really like,” Peter replied, “even if it’s a bit early for it?  A big helping of pastitsio, with some green beans!”
     Peter beamed. 
     “Not too early!  It is never too early for pastitsio.  Never  too late either!”  He went around to the other side of the steam table and sawed off a big square of the stuff, sliding it onto a warm plate.  Then he shovelled a hearty serving of beans in tomato sauce onto the plate beside the caked pasta, and set it heavily before Linc.
     “Kali oreksi!” said Peter proudly.
     “Which means?” asked Linc, cutting into his pistatsio.
     “Linc, you going to have to learn some Greek.  It means ‘hearty appetite,’ ‘enjoy your food,’ you know….” 
     “Like bon appetite,” said Linc, forking some beans.
     Peter sighed heavily.
     “I guess so, Linc.  But what you say sounds so weak.  So untrue.  Like you don’t want anybody to enjoy anything.  There’s no passion in these words.”
     “It’s French,” said Linc, taking a second forkful of pastitsio and thinking that he’d never eaten more delicious food in his entire life.
    “Oh well,” said Peter, taking as sip of his coffee, “that explains it.”
     “But,” Peter added, “I think you didn’t come to see me just for the pastitsio?”
     “That’s true,” Linc admitted, “though the pastitsio was uppermost in my mind.”
    “And so what is lowermost in your mind?” Peter asked him.
    Linc swallowed some thick coffee and returned his cup to its saucer.
    “I’ll tell you,” he said.

TORONTO: A NOVEL—Chapter 44

Fashion model Coal Blackstone lay naked in the arms of her photographer-lover, Lincoln Ford—this was one of their weeks to be together—who was, curiously, fully dressed in jeans and his Givenchy Mechanical Graphic Print shirt, a shirt that made him look as if he were wearing interlocking planes of circuit-board.
     Coal ran a tapering index finger from button to button down his chest, pausing at his belt buckle.
     “Why do you like this shirt?” she asked him.
     “For the same reason I like you,” he replied.
     “For its complexity, then?” she laughed.  “For its rationality?  Its dazzling specificity?”
     Linc smirked and gave her bare shoulders an affectionate teddy-bear squeeze.
      “Because I find it funny,” he grinned.
     “It makes you look robotic.”
     “And we both know how far from the truth that is,” he said, stoking her shining blue-black hair tenderly.
     Coal poked him with unnecessary vigour in the stomach.  He was just going to poke her back when the Samsung Galaxy S4 on his night table rang. 
     “It’s for you,” he said handing her the device, “It’s your friend Joy.”
     “Joy? At this hour?”
     “She sounds very upset.”
     “Hi Joy,” said Coal.  “Is there something the matter?”
     Linc signed her a declaration that he was going to the kitchen to make espresso.  She nodded at him and smiled encouragement.
     “Haven’t you seen the news or looked at your phone or read this morning’s paper or anything?”
     “No.  Linc and I were out late last night and we just woke up.  Why, what’s wrong?”
     Yesterday, just before noon, somebody tried to run Cass down with a car—a big black limousine.”
     “Is he alright?”
     “He’s fine, by some miracle or other.  But the car clipped one of his aides, and he’s in the hospital.”
     “Did anybody notice what kind of a car it was?” Coal asked her.  It was a question Joy found marginal enough to be irritating.
     “Cass knew.  He said it was a black 1956 Chrysler Imperial.  He likes cars and so he knew.  He said it was the one with the gun-sight taillights, whatever that’s supposed to mean.”
     “Well, it’s just that those cars are pretty rare,” Coal told her.  “Listen, is Cass feeling well enough for me to see him.  Or is he too shaken en up?”
     “No, he’s okay.  I’m sure he’d like to talk with you.  I’ll set up a time and phone you back.” And she hung up.
     Just then, Linc came back into the bedroom, carrying a small silver tray which bore two tiny cups of espresso.  And two miniature biscotti. 
     “Anything amiss?” he asked her, setting the tray on the might table.
     “The Mayor almost got run over.”
Linc laughed. 
     “He really ought to look where he’s going!”
     Coal took a sip of espresso and a nibble of biscotti.
     “That’s not what I meant,” she told him.


     Michael woke up staring up at the exuberant figure of Modulor Man, in the Le Corbusier lithograph May had hung over the bed.  Michael gazed in admiration at the figure’s noble hand raised high over his head in…what? Michael wondered.  Defiance?  Defiance of some onrush of mediocrity rumbling towards him out of the future?
     May rubbed her eyes gently and sat up, her long, straight, ink-black hair drifting slowly down over her creamy shoulders, arms and breasts.  Michael found he was all-too-easily able to disengage from his bout of Corbusier-rapture.  He looked at May and couldn’t quite believe the endless delicacy of which she was composed.
     “The nakedness of woman is the work of God,” Michael intoned smoothly, giving her a low-comedy kiss on the top of the head.  “Good morning, Naked Woman.”
     May smiled sleepily.
     “Who wrote that line about the nakedness of woman?” she asked him.
     “William Blake.  It’s in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
     “Do you think It’s true?’ May asked him through a decorous yawn.
     “No question.”
     “Does Blake say anything about the nakedness of Man?’ she asked, all the while reaching slowly, questingly, down under the duvet to his belly, then lower, letting her hand rest, with apparent innocence, just above the reach of his now pulsing cock.  Michael managed a strangled reply.
     “No,” he told her.
     “Oh” said May, in mock disappointment. “Well, that doesn’t seem fair.”
     I guess not,” Michael ventured, wishing and not wishing that she’d move her hand either upwards or more purposefully downwards. 
     “I think he felt men were simply beneath his notice.”
     “Imagine,” murmured May, first kissing his cheek for what seemed to Michael an inordinately long time, and then giving him a short but delectable, soft, open-mouthed kiss. After which, she sprang back from him, her dark eyes still full of purpose.  Michael felt as if she’d suddenly cut off his oxygen supply.
     “Duty calls!” she said briskly.
     “It does?” said Michael, trying very hard to recalibrate his priorities.
     “I have to get dressed, I have to eat two slices of buttered toast with cottage cheese, and drink some black coffee. Then I have to go to school and learn more about becoming an architect!”
     “Listen,” Michael told her, “stay here in bed with me and together we’ll stare hard at your beautiful Le Corbusier, and get very familiar with his Modulor, and the ways in which he recommended the use the human body as a tool of measurement, and in a couple of hours, after we’ve measured each other with great and delectable  thoroughness—following Corb’s lead—we’ll have given each other more architectural adrenalin by noon than any College in the world can provide!  What do you say?”
     “Michael Michael,” she said wonderingly.
     “Michael Michael what?”
     “You must have something you have to do today as well?”
     Michael thought for a moment, trying to remember.  Then he did—and wished he hadn’t.
     “There is something?” asked May, beginning to prepare the coffee.
     “Yes,” he told her glumly.  “I’ve got to go and see this brutish artist who paints like an Old Master/”
     “He does?” she asked him, pouring coffee into two petal-thin cups. 
     “He really does.  It’s improbable, but true.”
     “I wish I were going with you.”
     Michael groaned audibly at the whole idea.
     “No you don’t” he assured her.

TORONTO: A NOVEL—Chapter 43

Just as His Worship Mayor Cass Tamburlaine was about to take the first steamy bite of Chili-dog, he noticed, almost out of the corner of his eye, a long black car screaming along Queen Street, approaching at an unusually high speed from the east. 
     Cass didn’t think much about it—except how there were never any cops around when you needed them—until the car suddenly veered onto Nathan Phillips Square, raising a cloud of pigeons, and, narrowly missing a woman out strolling with a baby carriage, hurtled along the sidewalk in front of the long stretch of chip-wagons, where its front fender clipped the shoulder of Cass’s aide, Jeremiah Flood, catapulting him high into the air, his strawberry-petroleum sundae arcing into the air above his head like a vanilla shooting star.
     Cass had instinctively flattened himself against Maximilian’s chip-truck and watched in panic as the huge black car—its windows tinted black as well—hurled itself by him at what must have been seventy miles an hour, scraping along the side of the aluminum truck next to Maximilian’s and them bouncing back out onto the street, where it somehow negotiated a sharp left turn at York Street and disappeared.
    “A Chrysler Imperial!” thought Cass, his terror turning into outrage, his recent danger now reorganizing itself as nostalgia.  “A 1956 Chrysler Imperial!” he repeated wonderingly, as if he has just been sideswiped by three tons of black metal ghost.
     Maximilian suddenly reappeared at the window of his truck 
     “What the hell was that?” he asked Cass.
     “A 1956 Chrysler Imperial—the one with the gunsite taillights.  You never see them anymore!”
     “I wish I hadn’t seen this one.” Laughed Maximilian.
     “Call for an ambulance, Max,” said Cass.  “I think Jeremiah’s in a bad way.”      

TORONTO: A NOVEL—Chapter 42

“But don’t you want to see Fish?  It’s possible it’s actually your dog I’ve got,” Coal Blackstone told Bliss Carmen over the phone.
     There was a lengthy silence.
     “Yeh maybe,” said Bliss.
     “Who’s that on the phone?” Homer Rubik asked her, not looking up from a Massacre of the Innocents to which he was carefully adding lurid details.  “I told you, I don’t want anyone coming here!”
     “But that might be Fish she’s been looking after!” Bliss said to him.
     “Just tell her to email you the dog’s picture.”

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

     His Worship Cass (“The Mass”) Tamburlaine—for that’s what the press was calling him now—decided that, seeing how it was getting to be late morning and time for a little pre-luncheon snack, he would leave his office and stroll across Nathan Phillips Square to the wagon-train of chip-wagons stretched along Queen Street in front of City Hall where, as he had so often done before, he would conduct, with a couple of his cronies, a fast-food crawl from truck to truck, moving judiciously along the length of this mobile smorgasbord of deep-fried things, until he had grazed to his satisfaction.
     “Hand-cut fries,” he murmured to the crony on his immediate right, a portly middle-aged man with a handlebar moustache, whose name, Cass was reasonably sure, was Robert Stackbolt.
     “What’s that, Cass?” asked Robert Stackbolt.
     “It’s a nice phrase.”
     “What is?”
     “Hand-cut fries.  Something homey and…cottage-industry about it.”
     Robert Stackbolt murmured his assent.
     Cass, Robert Stackbolt and three other indistinguishable flunkies in grey suits and beige spring raincoats, were just passing the Henry Moore sculpture majestically moored in front of City Hall 
     “And ‘chili-dog.’
     “Pardon, Cass?”
     “Another heart-warming name.”
     “Oh.  Yeh, right.”
     “Smacks of the comic, somehow.  I mean ‘dog’ is sort of funny anyhow, and then when you hook it to ‘chili,’ it starts to get a bit goofy, wouldn’t you say?”
     Yes, I suppose it does,” Robert Stackbolt replied.  “I don’t usually give much thought to that kind of thing.”
     They had now reached the Queen Street curb, and Cass was as excited as a kid on Christmas morning.  The flotilla of food trucks pulled up to the sidewalk seemed to spread their welcoming, encompassing arms to him like old friends.  The deep-fry cooks within each wagon leaned out into the bright sunny morning and hailed him as a fellow fried-food traveler.
     “Good morning, your Worship!” cried out the grizzled man in the first truck.  “What’s your pleasure this fine day?”
     “Good morning, Maximilian!” boomed Cass.  “Fryer all charged up?”
     “Ready to serve your every deep-fry need!” Maximilian boomed back.  “What’ll it be, your Highness?”
    By now Cass’s cronies had caught up with him and a few of them were gazing in some alarm at the vast number of the Vulcan-like fast-food forges stretched out along the street. 
     “You guys hungry?” Cass asked them.
     There were rumblings of indecision.  Robert Stackbolt announced quietly that he might see his way clear to go for a hot dog.
     “Give me a chili dog, Maximilian!” boomed Cass. “And a large Coke.  And a large fries,”
     “Good choices,” grinned Maximilian, turning away then to prepare Cass’s heart-stopping pre-prandial snack.  Most of the others ordered coffees.  One, a vanilla-coloured aide named Jeremiah Flood, walked two trucks to the east and bought himself a large strawberry sundae.  Cass watched him out of the corner of his eye and over the top of his Styrofoam tray of crackling golden foods.
     “Hey Jeremiah!”
     “Yes Cass?” replied Jeremiah, steering his frozen tower of soft ice cream and florescent red sauce to a nearby bench.
     “You know what that stuff is, right?” 
     Jeremiah acknowledged that he really wasn’t too sure.
     “Petroleum!” Cass told him, a huge boyish satisfaction gurgling in his voice.
     “Whatdyamean?” asked Jeremiah Flood.
     “It’s not ice cream.  It’s an edible petroleum product.” 
     “What’s an edible petroleum product?” Jeremiah asked him.
     “I’m fucked if I know,” Cass answered, with a hearty guffaw.  “Another triumph of science, wouldn’t you say?”
     Jeremiah stuck his pink plastic spoon into the petroleum and heaved a sigh so total he almost dribbled red neon sauce on his tie.
     “So I guess I shouldn’t eat it.”
     “Nonsense my boy!” crowed Cass.  “It’s ingenious.  It’s inventive! It’s contemporary.  Ice cream is a 19th century treat.  But we live in the present!!  The urban present!  Eat up, enjoy!!”
     Jeremiah picked up his spoon again and dutifully plunged it into the vanilla oil fields resting on his lap.  Cass smiled at him encouragingly.
     “Well?” Cass asked him.
     “Good,” mumbled Jeremiah, reeling from brain-freeze and wishing he could lie down.           

TORONTO: A NOVEL—Chapter 41

Poet Rory Pendrift woke up feeling undervalued.
     At first he wasn’t even sure where he was, and then, gradually, as his eyes entered into alignment with the soft morning light slanting into his third-floor room through the little, porthole-like window in the east wall, he saw himself once again in the context he had contrived for himself—the poor young writer in his garret, the Thomas Chatterton of the 21st century—alone, unloved, unheralded, uncompromised.
     As yet uncompromised.   Rory’s father, condo developer, Pierpont Pendrift, had only recently begun to lessen his attacks on his son’s rudderless way of life, and, until a few mere weeks ago, had threatened his poetaster offspring with a small but promising niche in the family firm.  It was his father who had suggested—only a week ago Tuesday—that if Rory fancied himself a writer, he could settle down to write a few seductive brochures for the firm’s next condo-complex, a megalithic mini-city of four adjoining residential towers sitting atop a vast table-like plateau of restaurants and stores. 
     “We’re going to be calling it Ivanhoe Towers,” his father had told him, sawing off a mighty shard of his prime rib and lashing it with horseradish.
     “Why?” asked Rory.
     “I think there too much easy modernism around these days, said his father, emptying his goblet of red wine and quickly refilling it.  “I’m swinging the pendulum backwards,” he added.  “Reifying the past!”
     It’ll only be a Hollywood idea of the past,” Rory told him.  “Ivanhoe” sounds more like the 1950s than the Middle Ages.  Too bad you can’t get Robert Taylor to be your spokesman.”
     His father roared with laughter.
     “Robert Taylor!  That was the name of the tiger in that novel, Life of Pi, right?”
     Rory was dumbfounded.
    “You’ve read Life of Pi?”
     “Sure.  What’s the matter, you don’t think your old man can read?  I read all the time!”
     Rory nodded, and took another forkful of his scallop risotto.
     “I just wanted to point out that Robert Taylor is the name of the actor who played Ivanhoe in the Hollywood film,” said Rory quietly.  “It predates the Yann Martel novel by quite a lot.”
     “The what novel?”
     “Yann Martell.  The guy who wrote Life of Pi.”
     “Ah,” said his father, draining his carafe of wine.  “Listen, you want some dessert?”
     “No thanks.”
     “Well,” announced his father heartily, “I’m going to get me a big slab of New York Cherry Cheesecake.  And an expresso.”
     “Espresso,” said Rory quietly.
     “What?”
     “Espresso.  Es-presso.  Es, not ex.”
     “Whatever you say, Mr, Poet,” said his father, beckoning to the waiter.

*********************************************      
            
     Michael lay on May’s bed and watched her getting dressed.  He watched her walk over to the kitchen with a fresh pair of panties and a bra in her hand and, turning her back to him, skinny into the panties and then hook herself into the wispy flesh-coloured bra.  Then she turned back across the room, sat on the edge of the bed beside Michael, and pulled herself into her black jeans.
     “That looks nice,” Michael told her.
     “What does?”
     “You in your jeans and just your bra.”
May smiled.
     “I’m going to fix that in just a second.”
     “Oh don’t,” Michael implored her, with a mock urgency he hoped would amuse rather than offend her.
     “Well, I can’t go to the bookstore like this!”
     “I guess not, but you could come closer to me and lie in my arms and I could quietly take everything off again!”
     May laughed.
     “A girl doesn’t make much progress getting dressed with you around.”
     “It depends on what you mean by progress,” said Michael, carefully reaching around and unhooking her bra again. 

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

     Violet Dollop had finally purchased a fountain pen—not the Mont Blanc or the Lamy she wanted, but a pen she felt was likely, at least, to be serviceable.  It was a nice, rich, olive-green colour.  It was like holding an olive-branch in your hand, she thought idly, wondering then whether an olive branch wasn’t too iconically peace-oriented for her purposes.  A laurel leaf was what she needed.  A whole wreath of them.  A laurel wreath for the literary victor!  Well, she thought to herself, my olive-coloured pen could pass, I dare say, for a laurel-coloured pen.
     “I wonder why they don’t manufacture laurel-coloured pens,” she said to herself out loud.
     She was seated at the kitchen table, her coil-bound notebook open before her.  Tom had just left for the office and she was just now finishing the last of the coffee.  She was thinking about how it might be nice to brew a second pot—and realized, halfway through the reverie—that it was just another way of avoiding getting down to work.
     But what work?
     Well, she had one or two ideas.   One was that she would write an intense, up-close, shockingly, disturbingly intimate portrait of her own neighbourhood.   She’d lift the lid off all that complacency, she thought.  But then she rather liked and in some ways depended on that very complacency—which, while it was unadventurous, sometimes seemed like a salve on the wound of the rough and abrasive city that lay just beyond their suburb.
      So maybe she ought to write about that very roughness and abrasiveness?
     No.  It simply wasn’t her.
     But what was?  Then it came to her.  Tom was.
     Tom would be her subject.   She would anatomize her husband in prose.  Pillory him in language.  Pin him down in pushpin prose.  Fix him with sharpened dartboard words.  She could hardly wait for him to get home tonight.  His bland calling out to her, his eternal ‘Violet, I’m home!’ would no longer irritate her.  Not now.  Now she had a writer’s immunity to it.
     For now it was going to be the first sentence in her manuscript.  “Hi dear, how was your day?” 

TORONTO: A NOVEL—Chapter 40

When the Bliss Carmen’s cell phone rang, Homer Rubik was carefully adding telling touches to a small wooden panel he was painting based on Giorgione’s The Tempest.  

     He’d taken a few liberties with it.  He wasn’t a maker of persuasive old Master copies, after all.  The painting may have begun life as a Giorgione, but Homer was intent upon giving it a second existence—as a Homer Rubik.  

     To that end, he was painting the seated woman at the right into a slim black Chanel suit from the 1930s, unbuttoned to the waist so she could go on nursing her infant.  The young man over at the left of the painting, casually loitering in her vicinity though not profoundly tethered to her, was now clad in a cyclist’s spandex shorts and top—tight as sausage casings—an outfit so convincing that one looked, in the shrubbery on his side of the painting, for evidence of a bicycle parked nearby.  Just as the phone rang, Homer was beginning to re-jig the lightning that angled sharply through the unsettled sky—lightning far fiercer and more threatening than Giorgione’s. 

     “If that’s for me, I’m not here,” he barked at his voluminous friend and part-time lover, Bliss Carmen.  

     “How could it be for you?” she asked him irritably.  “It’s my cell phone.”  Bliss picked it up.  The call was indeed for her.        

     “You say you might have my dog?” Bliss bellowed into the phone.  “What makes you think so?”

     Her voice was as loud as a public address system.  Coal Blackstone, scarcely used to being boomed at, was a bit taken aback.

     “Well there was this poster,” said Coal, ‘with a phone number on it….”

     “That’s my cell number. That’s where you’re calling!”

     “Yes, well it mentioned a dog named Fish…”

     “My dog,” boomed Bliss.

     “Well, perhaps,” said Coal.  Who knows if the dog I found is Fish or not?”

     “Does he like chocolate?  Fish likes chocolate.”

     “I haven’t really noticed.” 

     “Well, try some on him.  Fish likes chocolate bars—like Crispy Crunch bars and Skor bars.  The crunchy ones.  Try one of those.  If he loves it, it’s probably Fish!”

     There was a pause on the line.

     “The fact of the matter is,” said Coal, “I called not so much about the dog—though if it is Fish we’ve got, we’ll be happy to get him back to you.  I called about the poster.

     “The poster?”

     “Yes. Your phone number is printed on a really quite exquisite painting—some Old Master or something—and I was curious about it.”

     “You were, huh?” 

     “Yes.  Who painted it?”

     “My boy friend.”

     “Really?”

     “Yeh, Homer.”

     “Homer?”  Coal quickly typed the name into her I-pad.  “Homer what?”

     “Rubik.”

     “Like the cube?

     “Yeh,” said Bliss.  Several stupid jokes about cubism jostled into Coal’s mind but she decided to let them go.

     “I’d like to come and see more of Mr. Rubik’s paintings sometime soon,” she told  Bliss.

     “That might be hard to arrange.”

     “Why is that?”

     “Because he doesn’t like having visitors.  He doesn’t like to be disturbed when he’s painting.”

     “But,” replied Coal, “he can’t paint all the time!”

     Bliss let out a huge and rather savage whoop of fake amusement.

     “Pretty near,” she said.     

     

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

     

     Michael and May were strolling back to the rooms she had rented on Huron Street.

     “I wanted something close to the School of Architecture,” she told Michael, as they quietly mounted the steps to the third floor.  “I was lucky to find this place.”  Michael was pleased she had finally agreed to let him visit her here.   She had been a bit reluctant about it before, and he hadn’t pushed her. 

     May unlocked the door and went in to turn on a table lamp that was near the door.  The light gave sudden shape and texture to the tiny two-room flat that, Michael could see, was attractively enlivened and enriched with books and pictures.  There was a drafting table in the first room. Nearby was a galley-sized kitchen—with a huge bright red espresso maker on the counter by the miniature sink.

     The second room was very sparse.  A bed.  A night table.  A lamp—a paper and wire Noguchi lamp—on the night table.  A big red and black Le Corbusier lithograph hung on the wall above the bed. 

     “Shall I make us an espresso?” May asked him. 

    “That would be great.” Michael told her.

     They sat on a small lime-green divan placed opposite the drafting table. Michael supped his espresso.  May had rested a bright curl of lemon peel on the top of each one.  The flat smelled refreshingly of coffee, lemon and some insinuating fragrance May was wearing.

     “What’s that wonderful scent you’re wearing?” he asked her.  May smiled.

     “I’m surprised you can smell it through the espresso.  It’s Issy Miyake.   L’eau d’Issey, to give it its full name.  Toilet water.  You like it?”

     “I love it.  It’s disturbingly…well, disturbing.” 

     “My goodness, Michael, I don’t want you to be disturbed!”  

     Michael grinned.

     “I can assure you, it’s a nice disturbance,” he said, leaning over to her and brushing her cheek with a kiss so ethereal it felt to May as if a butterfly had alighted momentarily upon her and then flittered away again.  She shivered, and then regrouped by taking another sip of her espresso.  Then she put the cup back on the table in front of them.

     “Michael,” she said, turning towards him, “will you stay here with me tonight?” 

     “Yes,” he told her.  “There’s nothing I want so much.”

TORONTO: A NOVEL—Chapter 39

Michael and May were finishing dinner at The New Sky restaurant.  Michael had been diligent in his adherence to the vegetarian foods May loved, and had found his mushroom hot-pot to be infinitely more succulent than he ever could have imagined.
     “There are about a half-dozen different kinds of mushrooms in this dish,” he told May enthusiastically, lifting to his mouth a dark plum-coloured fungus that looked like a length of groundsheet you’d take on a camping trip.
     “Nine actually,” said May.
     “Nine?”
     “There are nine different kinds of mushrooms in your hotpot,” she told him.
     Michael grinned.
     “I didn’t even know there were nine different kinds of mushrooms.  Here,” he said to her, “try one.”  Using his chopsticks as deftly as he could, he lifted to her mouth a dark, glistening mushroom that, he realized too late, was rather provocatively shaped, a smoothly knobby, glans-like thing that she might conceivably misconstrue as a symbol—or maybe even a suggestion.
     May opened her exquisitely shaped lips and slowly accepted the warm, shining mushroom cap into her mouth.  Her smile was deep and mysterious enough to convey to him that, yes, she thought the mushroom was indeed suggestively shaped, and yes, she imagined that Michael would by now be anxious about whether or not she’d be put off by the gesture, and no, she wasn’t, and yes, she regarded what it had implied as a perfectly lovely idea.
     “Good?” Michael asked her.
     May smiled a wonderfully languid, feline smile.
     “Absolutely delicious,” she sighed.

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

     Tom Dollop came home from the office the day his wife, Violet, decided that being a writer of some sort was bound to be more enjoyable than complaining endlessly about being bored and depressed, and informed her that though he would much rather do anything else, he had to get on a plane the next day for a meeting in Calgary.
     I’ll be back the day after tomorrow,” he told her.
     “That’s nice,” Violet replied, thinking that she really had to find herself another fountain pen to replace the one she used to have and now couldn’t locate.  They were harder to find than ever these days and she wanted a good one.  She knew she couldn’t afford a Mont Blanc.  She had looked up Mont Blancs online and found to her horror that even a Mont Blanc ballpoint pen could be $400!  A nice looking Lamy Fountain pen that had recently taken her fancy was almost $500.  I’ll write with a cheap Bic ballpoint, she thought to herself.  I’ll be a populist writer, the people’s writer.  The writer with the proletarian pencil.
     At dawn the next morning, Tom was out the door and into a waiting limo.
     “See you Thursday, Vi,” he called to her as he folded himself down into the limo’s velvety grey leather back seat, and was summarily lost behind its darkly tinted windows.  Violet waved at the black departing shape, now sighing away from the curb.   It’s like riding around in a giant pair of sunglasses, she thought to herself.
     Tom hated airports—not a very original attitude, he knew—and tried to see them as places to be got through with as much emotional economy as possible.  All the bars and bookstores and public artworks and duty-free shops in the universe didn’t make the transition from the earth to the sky any more enjoyable.
     When his flight was finally called, he filed obediently though the gate, down the tunnel—Alice’s rabbit hole—and onto the plane, always shrouded by the end of the umbilical entry-ramp so that he couldn’t peek into the cockpit and decide for himself whether or not the pilot looked flawlessly competent.
     Once on board, he belted himself into the Russian Roulette seat (as in “who would be beside him?  Someone survivable or not?”) and then, seat-belted tightly like a baby in a high-chair, gazed abstractly out over the tarmac, idly watching the little airport trucks busily zipping to and fro, lights winking, and the aircraft roustabouts, all clad in orange florescent jackets, making authoritative gestures to one another.
     It wasn’t long into his flight when dinner began.  Both Tom and his seatmate, a slender, exceedingly vertical young man with a sad, sallow face, had decided on the chicken choice (as opposed to the pasta dish or the beef offering) and both dinners now came abruptly.  Tom ordered a thin bottle of white wine with his meal—his seatmate had a asked for a coke—and the two of them began gingerly peeling the burning hot tinfoil cover away from the scalding hot, tinfoil, TV dinner-esque tray on which the food was huddled.  Microwave heat, thought Tom, is hotter and sharper than any other domestic heat.  And it gets cold way faster than seems reasonable.
     The slabs of chicken on their trays sat swimming in a reddish liquid, and featured a nearby moraine of steamed carrots and a pile of sadly diminished, next-to-lifeless broccoli florets.  A heap of white rice sat doggedly at the end of the tray.  There was a hard bread roll, and two pats of butter, both sealed in nearly impregnable nano-coffins.
     Tom had just begun to eat when his sallow-faced seatmate suddenly punched up a moronically violent and stupefyingly pointless movie on the monitor affixed to the seat before them and, for the next forty minutes, never took his eyes from the screen—the eating of his chicken dinner notwithstanding.
     The man’s outlandish concentration on the film made it possible for Tom to observe him more carefully.  And what he began to find oddly fascinating about him was the way the man methodically worked through his meal—in a progression, a narrative, from one side of his tin tray across to the other.
     He began by eating the chicken.  He’d saw off a chunk, rapidly convey it to his mouth, and chew it.  Then, while scarcely pausing to breathe, he’d saw off a second chunk and eat it.  Then a third.  Then a fourth and fifth and sixth until the chicken, which had never once been sullied by the reddish sauce, was entirely gone.
     He doesn’t like vegetables, thought Tom.  But no, with the chicken now dispatched, the sallow-faced man, still transfixed by a series of slow-motion explosions on the screen, began a rapid-fire assault on the carrots.  Two carrot chunks on his strafing fork, then two more chunks immediately afterwards, then a third pass to finish them off.  After which he moved on to the broccoli, which received the same relentless take-no-prisoners treatment as the carrots had.  The mound of rice remained untouched.
     He doesn’t like rice, Tom noted. 
     When the meal remnants were removed—the flight attendant carefully manoeuvring the sallow-faced man’s rice-laden tray so as to avoid a snowfall of rice over Tom’s knees—Tom ordered a glass of cognac.  The sallow-faced man wanted another coke and asked, as well, for a tube of Pringles’ potato chips.  The explosions on the screen raged on.
     Tom glanced at his watch.  Another two hours to Calgary.