TORONTO: A NOVEL—CHAPTER 21

   It was raining today in the city, and maybe nowhere else but here, so forceful a rain did it seem, long grey veils of it, washing down. 

     The low places in the sidewalks filled up with water and people out walking made split-second decisions about whether to go around puddles or whether to splash right on through them.

     May gazed from the window of the bookshop where she worked part time.  The wet street looked silvery and corrugated through the glass.  Because May felt like weeping, the raindrops halting down the window looked like tears.  Like everybody weeping at once.

     She turned away, thinking that Barbara was going to get awfully wet and was it worth it, really, to take her umbrella and walk all the way to Little Italy just to buy them a couple of squares of tiramisu to go with their tea?  Barbara did this often.  Too often, May thought.  She wanted her cup of green tea, but she didn’t need a great slab of something sweet to go with it.  Well, it was Barbara’s store, after all.

     As she turned away from the window, her eyes fell upon a huge brick-like book she hadn’t noticed on Wednesday, a giant one-volume paperback edition of Richardson’s Clarissa, published by Penguin Books.  She pried it from the shelf and riffled through it.  Fourteen hundred pages.  All in letters. An epistolary novel, she thought to herself.  A novel made of epistles.

     And for some reason, the ungainly book seemed suddenly remarkably appealing to her.  She read the back cover: “How Clarissa, in resisting parental pressure to marry a loathsome man for his money, falls prey to Lovelace, is raped and dies, is the bare outline of a story that blossomed in all directions under Richardson’s hands”.  

     The outline, thought May, is decidedly more lurid than it is bare.  But there was something so absurdly funny—and deeply appealing—about the author’s story having “blossoming in all directions” under his hands.  May felt strangely attracted to the book.  It promised to be a huge edifice of words, a wash of milky, repetitive, undemanding language that she suddenly knew would be just what she was looking for.

     The bell over the front door jangled and Barbara came in from the rain, bearing the white cardboard box May knew would contain the desserts. 

     “How’s everything been?” Barbara asked, shivering out of her raincoat and leaning her sodden umbrella in the corner. “Quiet?”

     “Very,” May replied, clutching her Clarissa.

     “What’s that?” asked Barbara.  May held the book out to her.

     “Clarissa?” Barbara lifted the tiramisu carefully from its box and lowered it onto plates. “What for?”

     May gazed at the big book and felt defensive.  “I feel it could help me with my English”, she replied.

     “How?” asked Barbara, thinking it strange that a young law student from Hong Kong should find anything helpful about such a juggernaut of a book.

     “I don’t know”, said May quietly, looking glumly at her Tiramisu and accepting a cup of tea.  Barbara reached for the book, held it up in the dusty light and glanced at the back cover.

     “Nobody back home is pressuring you to marry a loathsome man for his money, are they?” she asked gaily, giving the book back.

     “No”, May replied quietly.  They ate their tiramisu and drank their tea and looked out at the rain.  May opened the book again.  “I was still silent, looking down, the tears in my eyes”, she read to herself.  This was what she wanted.  An endless rush of clear language, animated to no purpose, eventful without incident, soft and sheeted and continuous as the rain against the window.

TORONTO: A NOVEL—Chapter 20

     Coal Blackstone was browsing through the morning paper, cozily nestled back onto the warm, hairless chest of her photographer and sometime lover, Lincoln Ford.    

     “I see his lardship, Heavyweight Mayor Cass, finally let it drop that he’s been receiving death threats,” Coal told Linc.

     “Does he sound scared?” Linc wanted to know, carefully negotiating a second demitasse of espresso over and around the mellifluous landscape of Coal’s golden torso.

     “It’s sort of hard to read between the lines,” she told him.  “You know that calculated blandness politicians employ.  But offhand, yes, I’d say old Cass sounds a bit shaken.  You can almost feel a tremor in the type from time to time,” she added gaily.

     Linc drained his coffee and put his cup down on the night table.  He put his arms around Coal’s waist and then, after gently removing her paper and folding it up next to his cup, lifted his arms so that they encircled her just below her breasts.

     “Did I ever tell you about the beauty of your ribcage?” he asked her.

     “My ribcage?  No, I don’t believe you have,” she replied dreamily, wriggling herself down a bit so that his arms were now confronted by the responsibility of her breasts.

     “Well, smiled Linc, “I was going to tell you about the beauty of your ribcage, but now you’ve gone and distracted me with bosoms!”

     “Oh come on, Linc, say things about my ribs.  Everything’s already been said about breasts, but nobody 

ever talks ribs.”

     “Okay, well I was just going to say that the ribcage is sort of like a rigid lampshade, protecting the heart and the other vital organs that are housed inside it–which are fragile, like the lightbulb in the lamp!”

     “Why Linc,” Coal said, swallowing the last of her coffee, “you clever thing!”

     Linc grinned.  “And you have a very pretty lampshade,” he told her, gently cupping her left breast in his hand.

     She smiled an almost over-dazzling smile and, gently disengaging his hand, pointed sweetly at the Michael Graves clock they kept on her side of the bed.

     “What’s wrong?” he asked her, trying as hard as possible to rise above his disappointment.

     “The siren song of high fashion,” she told him, laughing, “I have a shoot!”

     “You do?”

     Coal leapt delicately out of bed.

     “Yes, dummy, I do.  An hour from now.  And guess what?  It’s with you!!”

     “O god I forgot!  The Tom Ford thing!”

     “Yes,” Coal smirked. “You know, Linc, it’s a good thing you sleep with me or you’d never make any of your appointments!”

     But he was already off to the shower.

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

     It had been agreed that Michael would meet in a few days with Homer, Bliss and, inevitably with Fish—at Homer’s studio, if a studio was indeed what he had—and he was now heading home, strolling east along Bloor Street, towards High Park.  He had decided suddenly, despite the diet to which had realigned himself earlier that same morning, to take up the offer of sudden 7-Eleven store, an offer emblazoned on a banner stretched taut over its wide front door: Large Brownie and Coffee for $1.19.

     Why do they use the number “7” and yet spell out “eleven”? Michael wondered idly as he entered the store.  Probably, he thinks, because “Seven-Eleven” would be too cumbersome, and “7-11” was now impossible because of “9/11.”

     He finds a clerk in an absurdly red coat pretending to sweep the floor behind the cash register.  “How much is a brownie all by itself?” Michael asks him.  “I don’t want the coffee”

     “Just the brownie alone?” Disbelief widens his eyes.

     “Yes”, Michael repeats, “just the brownie.  I don’t want the coffee”.   

     The guy busies himself with the computer, as if launched upon a thorny problem in astrophysics.  He shows little sign of answering Michael’s question, apparently more intent upon ringing up this suddenly complex new coffee-brownie sale.

      “I asked you how much for the brownie alone?” Michael repeats.  The clerk glances up, as if surprised.

     “$1.59,” he says, looking sort of smug about it.

      “$1.59?” asks Michael, certain he must have heard wrong.

     “Yep,” says the clerk, “$1.59.”

    “You mean that having just the brownie alone costs forty cents more than having a brownie with coffee?”

     The clerk looks surprised, as if this were an entirely new way of looking at it.

     “Yeh”, he says, almost abashed himself at the sudden absurdity of it.

     “But that’s stupid,” Michael says.  “That’s ridiculous.  The coffee alone is worth—what?—a buck?

     “So?” says the clerk warily, as if being led into a trap. 

     “So why wouldn’t the brownie alone be cheaper than the brownie with the coffee?”  The clerk looks both perplexed and malicious at the same time.  Michael can see him beginning to form the conventional answer to all questions of this sort.  He can see the standard words taking shape in the clerk’s mouth.  And out it comes, sure enough.

     “Company policy”.

     Michael cannot believe he is suddenly getting as angry as he is. 

     “Then you can shove your company policy up your ass!!” he yells at the clerk and storms out into the descending twilight.

     A few days later, he is passing the same store.  The sight of the place makes him angry all over again.  But he goes in.  The clerk eyes him warily—the way you’d keep tabs on a puma somebody brought into the store on a leash.

     “I’ll have a brownie and a coffee,” Michael says carefully.  The clerk punches it all into the computer, and goes slowly to get the coffee and the cake.  He plunks them both distainfully on the counter.  Michael fishes out a toonie and gleefully pockets his change.  And leaves the coffee on the counter.

     “Hey, you forgot your coffee”, the clerk calls after him.

     “I told you before, I don’t want the fucking coffee!” Michael tells him, triumphantly ushering his brownie out into the crepuscular evening.

     He feels good.  Great.  Revenge is sweet—literally, in this case.  He takes a big salacious bite of his brownie.   

     And it’s stale.

     Naturally it’s stale. 

     Of course it is. 

     “Too bad Fish isn’t here,” he thinks to himself, tossing the dead brownie contemptuously into the gutter. 

      The clerk grins at him all the while through the plate glass window.  Then he began mouthing something through the streaky glass.  “Company Policy” is what Michael thinks the clerk is saying.  What else would he be saying?

     Michael began thinking how much Homer Rubik was like the clerk.   And the mountainous Bliss Carmen too.  And her grotesque little dog.  Not that any of this made sense.  What did he mean by this dreadful, shared clerkness, he wondered, this horrifying clerkitude?

     He only meant, he quickly realized, that they were all standing contentedly, triumphantly, on the wrong side of the chalk-line.  And he couldn’t understand anything on that side of the line.   

     “I won’t get angry,” he said out loud, to nobody.  

             

TORONTO: A NOVEL—Chapter 19

     Tom Dollop turned to his wife, Violet, in the middle of the night, pushed himself up close to her milky warmth and slid his hand delicately over the satiny knoll of her belly.

     “How are you feeling?” he whispered.

     “Wary,” she replied, slowly opening he eyes.

     “Why?”

     “I don’t know,” Violet said, yawning as sweetly as a cat.  “I expect I was dreaming.”

     “About being wary?” Tom asked her.

     “In my dreams, it’s always a risky, unusable world,” Violet told him. “Things that were solid melt and shift, and things that were soft and supple harden as solid as cement.”

     “Well it is like that.  And not just in your dreams either.  You know what I was just thinking about?  That big crazy girl I told you about on the subway, the one with the cake and the stupid dog.

     “That’s odd,” she said, rubbing her eyes.  “What time is it?”

     “Four.”

     “The witching hour,” smiled Violet.

     “Listen,” he told her, “I don’t believe in witching hours.”

     “Oh, well, actually either do I,” she said, snuggling back down into her pillow.
     “Let’s make love,” he said.  “Sweetly and gently.  Lovely, sleepy sex, dear Violet.  Won’t that make things less risky and shifty and unstable?”

     “Maybe,” she said.

He took her gently in his arms.  A siren hurled by two streets away.  Three dogs began barking, all of them quite near the house.

     “I like it when you hold me before we make love”, she tells him.

     “I thought women liked to be held afterwards.”

     “Yes, that too.” 

     Her belly ripples slightly as he moves his hand down to the soft triangle of hair between her legs, spindrift, he thinks, unable to remember where he’d read the word, but just liking the sound of it for her there.  It was something about sailing, or about the sea.  She sighs and opens her legs a little. 

     He is hard and it always feels so great, so expansive, to be hard.  He lifts his stiff cock from his jockey shorts and bends it over against her public hair, holding it there—an arrangement, a configuration in erotic space, the archetypal figure-ground projection.  He suddenly notices how quiet it is now in the bedroom and in the house itself and in the neighbourhood.  And in the city.  Who knows, he thinks, how far this plush silence extends?

     “Sometimes it’s thicker, and that’s so nice”, she says, gazing up at him.  “And then sometimes it’s longer.”

     “Not so nice?” he asks her.

     “No, that’s nice too”, she tells him.

He’s grateful.  He’s also a bit relieved.  But there’s a rind of worry, just a rough little edge of something unquiet and unresolved, starting up in his head.

     “Did you turn the furnace down?” Violet asks him.

He gets out of bed.  He likes to be useful.  He likes to be active.  He likes to do what needs to be done.  He goes downstairs.  Violet returns to sleep.

     Three days later, they are having Sunday morning Dim Sum at The Noble Restaurant, their favourite Cantonese restaurant, on Dundas Street West near Spadina. 

     They have finished the first four sevenths of their Dim Sum selection when the waitress deftly adds the final three dishes to their table—three puffy, barbecued pork buns—like hot snowballs, three little deep-fried bars of tofu (each surmounted by a pink, hat-like mastication of mashed shrimp), slices of turnip cake, and a spiky dish of flash-fried squid tentacles, Violet’s favourite.

     Tom spears a slab of turnip cake and saws it in half with his chopsticks.  He loves turnip cake.

     “You know,” he says to Violet—who detests turnip cake—“I bet these bacon bits sprinkled all through this stuff come out of a bottle.”

     “I’m sure of it,” she says.

     Then they begin talking again about having children.

     “For one thing, they cry all the time”, says Tom, lifting a pork bun out of its bamboo steamer and onto his plate.

     “They only cry if there’s something wrong.”

     “There’s always something wrong”.

     “Oh that’s not true”, Violet says, more defensively than she really meant to be.

     They eat in silence. 

     “There are always lots of parents with children here,” Violet observes at last, glancing around at their fellow diners.  She waves at a Chinese boy who looks to be about three, and he enthusiastically waves back.  It makes her feel warm and cozy.

     “Isn’t he cute?” she asks Tom.

     “Who?”

     “The little boy over there in the turquoise sweater”.

     “Ummm,” he says, absently chewing on a squid tentacle.  Violet waves again.  This time the boy doesn’t notice.  She is crestfallen.

     Just then a couple seats themselves at a table opposite their table, against the far wall.  They have two children, a girl about five and a toddler of some indefinite toddler age, but old enough to require packing upright into a highchair.  Violet is expecting the young man and his wife to go on adjusting their children when, much to her amazement, the husband suddenly leaves off with the kiddos and, walking around to his wife’s side of the table, plants a long, solid kiss on her forehead.  Prim feels something akin to shock.  What is it?  The specificity of the act?  Its deliberation? 

     Tom notices too.

     “Now there’s a good marriage!” he says.  He means it more or less as a joke.

     “Yes,” Violet agrees.  And she feels like weeping.

   

TORONTO: CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

     Officer Brice looked as helpless and abashed any officer might without support, sitting all alone on a stool in as greasy diner with cold coffee and a piss-wet leg.  If ever there were a candidate for a good sharp tasering it was this stupid dog, he thought to himself.

     “Probably wouldn’t be a bad idea for Bliss herself,” he muttered, realizing too late he had gone ahead and spoken out loud what he had only been thinking.

     “What wouldn’t?” asked Bliss.

     “Nothing,” said Officer Brice Sweetman, draining his clammy coffee and standing up to go.  “What’s your interest in these two?” he asked, turning to Michael.

     Michael shrugged.

     “He thinks Homer is some genius painter,” said Bliss proudly.  “Isn’t that right, Mr. Zorba?”

     Michael started to answer her and then decided against it. 

     “Homer?”

     “Yeh , Brice—Homer.  What’s so friggin hard to believe?”

     “Well, geez, Bliss, he can hardly scramble eggs!  How can he be a genius painter?  I doubt if he’d even be a good house painter,” he added, glancing into the kitchen.

     Homer poked his head around the doorway.

     “What’s the talk about?”

     “You, genius,” said Bliss, “and whether you’re paintings are any good.”
     Homer spat onto the grill—which sizzled contemptuously.

     “They’re good enough,” he said to nobody in particular.

     “Actually, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about, Homer,” said Michael, walking out to the kitchen.

     “What?’ said Homer, slapping three slices of greyish ham onto the grill.

     “Your painting.  It looks pretty good to me too.  What I’ve seen of it.  Which,” he added meaningfully, “isn’t  much.””

     “Well, it’s what I do,” Homer replied.  “And it suits me.”

     Michael explained to Homer—who seemed infinitely more interested in the progress of his sullen ham slices—that he wrote a lot about art for magazines and for art galleries and that he wanted to take a look at what Homer did because he thought his work might be exciting to write about.  He tried to explain to Homer that some art dealer might possibly be impressed too, and want to give him a solo exhibition.

     “You mean like that Lucy Crater friend of yours who showed the guy with the cellophane paintings?”

     “Yes, maybe.”

Homer spat again onto the grill, only just missing the sizzling ham slices.

     “That was total fucking crap.”

Michael was a bit taken aback.  

     “You didn’t like Rubel Force’s Cellophane paintings?

Homer spit again, this time catching a slice of ham on its flank.

     “Anybody could do it.”

     “Oh I hardly think that’s true,” countered Michael, “Could you paint those paintings?”

     “Sure I could, if I wanted to waste my time.”

 Bliss came sauntering out to the kitchen to join them, dragging Fish after her on his leash.  Offended by such high-handed treatment, the dog promptly peed on a cardboard box full of hamburger buns.

     “I told you, Zorba, my Homer is a genius,” boomed Bliss.  “He can paint anything he wants to.  But what he likes to paint, as I told you once before, are copies of the Old Masters.  Right, Homer?”

     “Raphael, Titian, Veronese, Caravaggio,” said Homer.

     “No Leonardo?” asked Michael.

     “He’s too weird and difficult.  And too faggy.  I don’t paint pictures by, like queers.”

     “Caravaggio was gay,” Michael pointed out helpfully.

     “Well, maybe,” conceded Homer, “but not queer!”

     

TORONTO: CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

     They pushed through the door of the diner where Homer worked —which bore the unprepossessing name of Nick’s—paused by the cash register so that Michael, at Bliss’s urging and against his better judgment, could buy the incontinent Fish his favourite Crispy Crunch bar, and spotted Homer in the kitchen, presiding over his sweaty grill, laconically frying up a dozen eggs, a rasher of bacon and, to one side of the grill, a hillock-like mound of home fries and onions.

     “Yo, Homer!” yelled Bliss at the top of her substantial lungs, a greeting forceful enough to cause three customers to look up from their newspapers.  Homer waved.

     One of the now dislodged customers was the inevitable Officer Brice Sweetman, who was carving the final scrapings of red jam from its little plastic coffin and carefully spreading it on a slice of cold whole wheat toast.

     “Honest to god, I think you actually live here, Brice!” boomed Bliss.

     He smiled wearily. 

     “I drop in,” he replied.

     Bliss introduced him to Michael.

     You know,” Officer Sweetman said to him, looking sadly at his toast, “this jam actually tastes red.” 

     “Red?” asked Michael.

     “Yeh, red.  Not strawberry.  I wonder if an actual strawberry ever came close to it?”

     “And if it did, how long ago,” added Michael.

     “Hey Homer,” Officer Sweetman yelled in the direction of the kitchen, “why don’t you get some real jam?  Put it in a little pot on the table.”

     “Ask Nick,” said Homer, suddenly flipping the bacon so its violent new hiss drowned out everything else.

     “I’m asking you,” said Officer Sweetman.

     Homer shrugged.

     “Homer,” said Bliss suddenly, “Come out here a minute.  I what you to meet my big deal writer friend, Michael.  You can call him Zorba!”

     “No you can’t,” Michael told them both.

     “Who’s Zorba?” Homer asked, striding from the kitchen and wiping his hands on his apron.  

     “A Greek writer,” said Bliss.

     “He’s not a Greek writer, he’s a character in a novel by a Greek writer.  Damn it, Bliss, I’ve told you this a dozen times now!”

     “Weird name,” muttered Homer.

     “So is Homer,” countered Bliss.

     “I wanted to talk to you some more,” Michael explained to Homer,  speaking loudly  enough to be heard over Homer’s sizzling grease-fire, “because of what Bliss has told me about your love of Renaissance painting—and about how good you are at painting in that manner.”

     “What manner?” said Homer, walking back to his spitting grill where now lay the inert oval patty for the cheeseburger someone had ordered ten minute ago.

     “Your Old Master manner,” Michael replied.

     “I don’t know what that is,” Homer shouted, over the sizzle of the still frosty hamburger patty.

     Michael glanced at Bliss.

     “He really doesn’t.” She told him.

     “He’s just a cook,” interjected Office Sweetman.  “And not a very good one at that.”

     Bliss lumbered out into the kitchen.

     “But he’s my sweet babybaby,” she cooed affectionately, snaking her heavy arms around Homer’s apron’d waist.

     “He is?” said Michael, surprised.

     “Oh sure,” replied Officer Sweetmam taking a final sip of his cold coffee, “they’ve been at it for some time now—six months maybe.”

     “Bliss and Homer?”

     “Right.  Homer and Bliss.  Homer and Bliss and Fish.  Hard to figure, huh?”

     “Quite hard, yes,” Michael replied.

     Hearing the sound of his name, Fish padded over to Officer Sweetman’s stool and pissed against his leg.

     “Goddammit, Bliss!” howled Office Sweetman, “can’t you teach this stupid mutt some manners?”

     Homer came hustling back into the restaurant. 

     “Watch it, Sweetman,” he said, with what Michael took to be unusual menace.

     “Or else what?” said Officer Sweetman.

     “Just don’t call Fish stupid,” Homer replied.  “He’s not stupid at all.”

     “No, in fact he’s just as smart as Homer is,” added Bliss.

     Michael and Officer Brice Sweetman looked at each other and grinned.

     “Do you want the punchline?” Michael asked him.

     “Oh no, you go right ahead.   Be my guest!”

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

TORONTO: A NOVEL--CHAPTER SIXTEEN:

 

     Coal was off early, speed-kissing him through a cloud of Issey Miyake Pleats Please, and murmuring something, on her way out the door, about going to see the mayor. 

     For Lincoln Ford, it was hard—virtually impossible—to bring together Coal and the avoirdupois Mayor of Toronto in the same sentence, especially in a sentence that stood there shivering by itself in time and space, beyond the reach of coffee and therefore vulnerable to misinterpretation.  Coal Blackstone sitting and talking demurely to His Worship Cass Tamberlaine?  He must have misheard her.

     But anyhow, Coal, he knew, could take care of herself.  The only danger he could envisage was her gradually expiring of boredom in conversation with the Lardly Cass.        

     But now his need for coffee was urgent, and while he usually made espresso for the two of them, he decided that just for this morning, Coal being off to the lair of the Mayor, he’d go visit his friend, dear old Peter of the Athens Astoria.    

     A diet’s a diet right enough, he thought as he came blazing up out of the parking garage in his red, 1960 Austin-Healey 3000, but a Greek coffee with a Greek custard pastry is something else again.

     Linc liked sweet stuff for breakfast and he particularly liked cold, creamy, pudding-like things—such as this devastatingly mild, milky, lemony custard Peter, the owner of the Astoria Athens, made fresh every day.

     Peter’s name was Peter something or other and while Linc had known him for seven or eight years now, he still had no idea what his last name was.  Linc knew a couple of things about him, though.  He knew, for example, that before he came to Toronto and opened his dark little restaurant on Bloor Street West, Peter had worked as the cook on a Greek freighter and made breakfast, lunch and dinner every day for twenty-five shipmates.

     Peter was a dab hand with Moussaka and with heavily herbed baked chicken legs (just the legs, never the breasts; what does he have, thought Linc, against chicken breasts?) and with olive-oil-soaked peas and rich, sodden but delicious green beans.  Sometimes he would make stuffed tomatoes and stuffed green peppers, and occasionally—all too rarely—he’d prepare his really spectacular stuffed zucchinis baked in a rich lemon sauce.  Still, it was Peter the Baker that Linc cherished, Peter the maker of morphologically inventive baklavas and innocent, angel-touched-custards like the tray of them sitting milky cool and buttery on Peter’s counter. 

     Peter had never learned much English, and a hearty “Yassou!” pretty much exhausts Linc’s Greek, so they simply nodded and smiled a lot.  Peter seemed remarkably fond of Linc and was very paternal towards him, and so whenever Linc would order a custard pastry and coffee—like this morning—Peter would bring him the coffee and two slabs of the custard.  Which he then had to consume (no problem!) with a sustained gusto (also no problem!) or Peter’s feelings—which were immense—would be hurt.

     Peter brought the two pastries to the table.  Two heavy, creamy portions of the gelatinous custard on flaky, slightly sharp, slightly vinegar’d phyllo pastry—each with a dusting of fine cinnamon on top.  Linc tucked into them—and was as delighted as always.

     “Delectable as usual, Peter!”

     Peter smiled and went to fetch coffee.  When he got back to Linc’s table with it, his hand was shaking.

     There’s been a change in Peter, thought Linc.  Every time now when he brings coffee to the table, his hand shakes.  And it’s getting worse.  Last week, Linc remembered, Peter had brought coffee and his hand had trembled so much that most of the coffee ended up in the saucer.  When that had happened, Linc had simply taken the saucer carefully from underneath the dripping cup and poured everything back inside again.  No need to mention anything.

     Today Peter’s hand was shaking so violently the full cup of coffee rattled in the saucer like castanets and the liquid brimmed over everywhere—onto the floor, onto the counter, some of it even dropped back into the cup.  Peter looked at Linc, wounded, humiliated.  Linc smiled encouragingly.  

     “Thank you,” said Linc, adding cream to the little bit of coffee that was left. 
     “You’re welcome,” Peter replied.  Linc had never heard him say that before.

     Linc was halfway through his second custard when an odd thought occurred to him.

     “Peter,” he asked, “does the mayor of Toronto ever eat here?”

     “The Mayor?  No, never.  Why?”

     “Oh I don’t know.  I was just thinking about the Mayor.”

     “Why would you think about the Mayor?” Peter asked.  “I bet he never thinks about you!  Why not think about that beautiful lady you live with instead?  Much more happy a thought!”

     “Coal?  Well, I was, as a matter of fact.  She’s in his office right now.”

     “Why?”

     “Apparently he’s been receiving death –threats.   She’s fascinated by things like that.”

     “The beautiful detective.”

     Linc smiled.

     “Tell her to be careful,” said Peter, attempting to refill Linc’s cup without slopping most of the coffee into his saucer.

TORONTO: A NOVEL--CHAPTER FIFTEEN:

     Michael hadn’t much enjoyed his brief encounter with Homer Rubik at The Lucy Crater Gallery.  His strange subway-dweller friend—or, more accurately acquaintance—Bliss Carmen, had introduced them.  And if the meeting stuck in his memory at all—and it did, like a fishbone lodged in his throat—it was because of Rubik’s apparent and highly unlikely admiration for, and slick emulation of, the art of the high renaissance. 

     Michael found it grotesque to imagine some bridge of sensibility stretching from Raphael, Leonardo, Uccello, Piero della Francesco and the other household gods of the quattrocento to the surly, roughhewn Homer Rubik.  Somebody, thought Michael—a father, a mother, a custodian?—had once given their baby the noble name of Homer, thus heading him, early and exuberantly, out onto the road to great things, a road Michael felt it was unlikely Homer could have followed for very long.

      Still Bliss had assured him Homer could draw and paint like an angel.  Even a fallen angel.  He’d like to see for himself.

     So one day when he didn’t feel either like the writing he was supposed to do or the painting he usually enjoyed doing, Michael wandered into the Spadina Subway station around eleven on a frosty Tuesday morning in search of Bliss.

     He spotted Fish first.  He was tied—too tightly, thought Michael—to a pillar.

     “Hello Fish,” he called out, with a cheerfulness he didn’t feel, “where’s your mistress?”

     Fish looked away and them cocked his leg against the pillar and peed.

     “Fish the Wonder Dog,” thought Michael.

     “Well if it’s not the Big Writer!” he heard a voice say, “Zorba the Greek!”

     “Zorba wasn’t a writer,” Michael told her.

     “But he was Greek, right?  Close enough!”

     Michael wanted to ask her straightaway about Homer Rubik, but, given Bliss’s never-ending heartiness and stridency, he had little choice but to ease into it.

     “What are you doing this morning?” he asked her.

     “Getting my bearings,” she told him.

     “How?”

     “Coffee.  Walking Fish.  Reading the paper.”

     “Did you enjoy my friend Rubel Force’s opening last week?

      “Not much,” said Bliss. “Friggin Paintings of friggin cellophane?  What the hell for?”

     “How about your pal Homer?  What did he think?”

     “Homer hated the whole evening.  But then Homer hates a lot of things.”

     Michael thought about this briefly and decided it was probably true.  But where did this angelic drawing skill of Rubik’s come from? 

     “I wouldn’t mind seeing some more of Homer’s stuff,” Michael told her. 

     “Why?’ Bliss asked.

     “Just curious,” he replied.  “He seems to be a remarkable artist.”   Michael didn’t want dilate, just at the moment, upon the ways in which Homer seemed remarkable .

     “Well, he’s just going to work around now,” she said, glancing at the subway station clock.  “We  could go and get something to eat where he’s the cook.”

     The idea of eating anything at the diner where Homer was the cook was an unappealing one, but Michael agreed they should go there.  He wanted to observe Mr. Renaissance Master in his everyday habitat.

     “You can buy me one of Homer’s all-day breakfasts,” Bliss said cheerfully.  “And you can buy Fish a Crispy Crunch bar!”

     Michael decided this wasn’t too high a price to pay for a start of a tour around Homer Rubik.

     “I still don’t get this interest of yours in Homer,” Bliss told him, as they stepped into a westbound Bloor subway train.  Bliss managed to yank Fish inside just as the doors were closing.

     “I thought I might write something about him,” Michael said.

     “Oh geez, there’s a really bad idea!”

     “Why? Most artists are desperate for coverage.”

     “Well not Homer.  He’s a real private guy.”

     “How private?”

     “Look,” said Bliss, “just don’t write anything about him, okay?”

     “It’d be more about his work than about him.”

    “Doesn’t matter,” Bliss told him.  “Don’t do it.”

     Michael was thinking this over when he noticed his left leg felt warm and wet.  He looked down.  Fish was pissing on him.

    

     

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

     Joy arranged a time when Coal Blackstone could conveniently undertake a searching chat with His Worship Cass Tamburlaine.  The way things worked out, she was shown into his plushy beige office at precisely eleven o’clock on a bright sunny February morning.   

     Cass was sprawled in a lavish yet stubbornly unaccommodating cream leather chair—rather NASA in feeling—behind a vast Victorian mahogany desk, a desk so heavily worked with dark clusters of carved fruits and heavy sprays of flowers, it seemed to breathe and heave with a fervid vitality stylistically foreign both to Cass’s space-age swivel chair, and to the porcine mass of his body—which he now struggled to lift up as a courteous gesture to his stunningly beauteous caller.  Cass raised himself about eight inches from the NASA chair and, with a breathy “whouff!”—like air hissing from a punctured inner tube—fell back again into the embryonic position he had assumed before Coal was ushered into his office.

     “Is there anything I can get you, your Worship,” his aide asked, “while I’m here?”

     Cass thought for a moment or two.

     “You know what would be good?” he replied, glancing at Coal and winking.  “A big container of white chocolate ice cream!”

     The aside scurried away and Cass turned to Coal. 

     “A hot day!” he said to her, apparently unresponsive to the   room’s temperature controls, that modulated the mayor’s surroundings into an approach to conventional comfort.

       “Ice cream will cool us off.”

     “Oh no, really, none for me,” said Coal quickly.  “But you go ahead.”

     Cass nodded.

     “Joy tells me you’re a model.”

     “Much of the time,” Coal told him.

     “A High fashion model?”

     “As high as possible.”

     Cass roared with laughter. 

     “And the rest of the time?” he asked her.

     “Oh I get interested in different things….”

     “Like death threats against the mayor?” Cass asked her.

     “Things like that, yes,” Coal replied.

     “Did Joy show you some of the death threats?”

     “Yes.”

     “What do you think?”

     “Well, they’re very skillfully made.  The drawings are exquisite.  The messages are perhaps not quite as charming.”

     The mayor exploded with rage. 

     “Not quite as charming??  Charming??’ Whoever sent them to me calls me a side of beef and wants me slaughtered!!”

     “There’s some strange mention of gravy as well,” added Coal softly.  “Which seems to imply that the sender has some odd culinary interest in you as well, Mr. Mayor.”

     “The sender is a cannibal!” Cass gasped.

     “Oh I doubt that,” said Coal.  “More likely a chef, wouldn’t you say?”

     All this talk of captive meat was both distressing for Cass and, at the same time, vaguely arousing.  He made a second attempt—a more successful one this time—to rise from his chair and, having attained a sweaty and approximate verticality this time, lurched around the end of his Edenic table to stand too close to Coal’s chair.  She shrunk back slightly from his massive nearness—but only slightly.

     “You,” Cass said, “are a very beautiful woman.”

     “Yes,” smiled Coal, I’ve heard that.”

     “I love beautiful women!”

     “So do I.” said Coal.

     Cass was rather taken aback.  “You like women?”

     “Of course,” Coal replied.

     “I mean like sexually—like in bed.”

     “Are you asking me if I’m a lesbian?”

     “Well…yeh. “

     “What do you care, Cass?”

     Cass thought about this for an overheated second or two.

     “Well, if you’re straight, I can fantasize about you in the usual way, and if you’re a lesbian, I’ll have to fantasize about you in a different way!  So which is it?”

     “How about you don’t fantasize about me at all,” Coal suggested.

     “You’re too beautiful.  I can’t help it.”

     “Then I can’t help you,” Coal told him, rising from her chair and turning to go.

     Just at that moment, there was a perfunctory knock at the door and the aide tiptoed in bearing a bucket of ice cream on a silver server.

     “Perfect,” said Coal to Cass and his aide.  “Now you can effect a titillating relationship with your stupid ice cream.  Which I feel certain excites you more than women do,” she added, striding across the carpet to the already open door.

     “And say hello to Joy for me.”

     Cass watched Coal’s exit and then looked down at the ice cream.  He turned helplessly to his aide.

     No spoon,” he said sadly.  “You forgot to bring me a spoon.”    

           

    

           

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

     “My God!”

     Just at the moment, Coal Blackstone was grateful for her martinis, though a second glance at the death threat letter sent earlier that day to Mayor Cass Tamburlaine’s office surprised her enough to put her off Chef Leroy Didier’s soufflé—which the waiter had just set before her.  She looked at Joy Pommery in some alarm.

     “And you say he’s been getting these for some time?”

     “For three or four days now, yes,” Joy replied.

     “And are they all as unsettling as this one?”

     “They’ve been getting steadily…more elaborate.  And each one is different.  They must have taken hours and hours to make.”

     Coal looked again at the note.  Where she might have expected obscenity, blood, gore and intimations of mayhem, spelled out in letters roughly cut from magazines and glued onto the page, what she was looking at instead was a dazzlingly conceived and queasily competent watercolor painting of a fallen angel—drawn and painted in an exalted high renaissance style, as if it had been limned by Raphael himself.  But while the painting offered a creepy virtuosity, the message was about par for death threats: “Hey fat Mayor Tamberlane…”

     Coal looked up.  “I see he spells Cass’s name incorrectly.”

     Joy nodded.

     And then she read the rest of it.  “You are an Incompetent Side of Beef and you will soon Hanging on a Hook, Making your own Gravy!”

     “Very nice,” she said, handing the sheet of paper back to Joy.  “Charming.  Have you contacted the police?”

     “No.  And Cass doesn’t want to.  Not yet anyhow.  It would all get out for sure and within hours, this fucking Old Master painting—she waved the pretty Fallen Angel at Coal—would be gracing the front page of the Toronto Sun.”

     “I hate to say so,” said Coal, taking a sip from her third martini, “but I suspect there are lots of people who’d be rooting for Raphael here.”

     “I know,” Joy sighed.  “But what do you think Cass should do?”

     “Nothing for the moment,” said Coal.

     “But do you think this Raphael, as you call him, is dangerous?”

     “Oh absolutely.”

     “So what’s the next step?”

     “Well, I think I’ll pay a call on His Worship.”

     “You’ll find he’s really pretty spooked about these notes,” said Joy.
    “So am I,” replied Coal.

        

                

CHAPTER TWELVE:

 

     Michael Moskos was sufficiently passionate about contemporary art that it caused him something like anguish to attend exhibition openings.  There were only a few galleries for which he had any respect anyhow.  On this particular Thursday night, he had made his way to one of them, impelled there by a long-standing friendship with the artist, a swaggering, amusingly arrogant, fiercely defensive painter named Rubel Force.

     By the time Michael got to the Lucy Crater Gallery, there were already a couple of hundred absurdly young people milling about—none of whom Michael knew—all of them laughing too loud, leaning out like starving baby birds for more wine, fiercely jabbing toothpicks into tiny cubes of putty-coloured cheese and exerting great care not to be caught gazing, even for an outlaw moment, upon any of Rubel’s pictures.

     Which consisted, for this exhibition, of exhaustingly detailed paintings of crumpled balls of cellophane, which, in the course of their crumpling, had come to look sort of like various creatures—a frog, a fish, a deer, a spermatozoa—and were therefore painted that way.  The name of each cello-creature, just in case its shape didn’t tell the story, was neatly lettered in black paint across the bottom of each painting.

     Michael spotted Rubel at the far side of the room, deep in conversation—or, more likely—deep in a desperate avoidance of conversation, with a massive young woman in overalls and nothing else who, ignoring all gallery remonstrances to the contrary, was dragging around with her, on a leash, an ugly little dog, shaped like a bottle brush. 

     “Michael the Big Writer!” shouted Bliss Carmen—for indeed it was Bliss Carmen loudly holding forth to a now considerably diminished Rubel Force—“come and meet Rubel!”

     “Hello Bliss.  Yes, I know Rubel.  We go way back,” he told her as he and the beleagered painter shook hands. 

     “Nice show,” he said to his friend.

     “Thanks,” said Rubel, looking around for some means of escape from Bliss’s volubility.  “Excuse me, I think I see Knox, and I’d better go say hello.”  And he trundled gratefully away.

     Knox Penworth was the art critic for The Globe & Mail.  He wasn’t as much a writer as he was a party animal, thought Michael, but he was sort of the only art critic in town.  Michael never read his stuff.

     “So,” boomed Bliss, “how’s Zorba?”

     “Who?” asked Michael.

     “You, dummy,” laughed Bliss. 

Michael regretted ever telling her he was half Greek.

     “What are you doing here, Bliss?”

     “Me?  I love art.  And I’ve gut a lot of artist friends.  See that guy over by the wall—keeping to himself?  That’s my pal, Homer Rubik.”

     Michael looked, and was astonished to see that Homer Rubik was the guy who was sitting across from him on the subway only a few days before—the guy struggling through Angels & Demons.  The feral reader!

     “He’s an artist too?”

     “Oh sure, a really great artist,” thundered Bliss.  You want to meet him?”

     “Oh well…no…not right now….” 

But Bliss was already gesturing wildly to Homer, insisting, in unmistakably imperative sign language, that he join them.

     Homer came slouching up.  He didn’t seem to recognize Michael—for which Michael was grateful.

     “Homer is a classical artist!” Bliss announced.

     “Which means what exactly?” asked Michael.

     “It means he draws and paints like Raphael or Michelangelo!” Bliss told him.  She turned to Homer.  “Isn’t that right?”

     Homer emitted a sort of low growl and finally nodded his head.

     “Yeh.”

     “How do you manage that?” Michael asked.

     “I took a course at night school.”

     “What kind of a course?”

     “Old Master Drawing and Painting,” Homer told him.

     “You like all that high renaissance material, do you?” asked Michael.

     “What?” said Homer.

     “Oh you know…frescoes and popes and….”

     “I like doing things properly,” said Homer abruptly.  “I’m reading this book right now about a bunch of renaissance guys called the Illuminati and how they kill some popes who don’t believe in them. “

     A tiny shudder ran down Michael’s spine.

     “What’s the name of the book?”

     “I don’t remember book names,” Homer replied, swaying from one foot to the other and looking increasingly uncomfortable. “Something about demons.”