TORONTO, A NOVEL: Chapter 33

Fish, having peed against a couple of subway seats and—as was usual with him—against the legs of a few early-morning, northbound passengers (one of whom, a young woman, seemed mightily displeased with him for showering her red alligator pumps) decided he had worn out his welcome, and, when the train ground to a stop, trotted out through the open door of the car and out onto the platform of the Summerhill Station.
     Subway Station platforms were home to Fish, living, as he did, at the Spadina Station (north-south line).  But this one, he noticed, wasn’t exactly like the one where he and Bliss Carmen lived.  And so finding nothing to detain him at trainside, he mounted the steps at the end of the platform and found himself out on the street.
     Fish hadn’t seen many cars and trucks. Mostly just streetcars.  And Yonge Street (for that’s what it was) seemed especially busy, just at the moment, with hundreds of these small, fast, non-streetcars zipping up and down.  He did notice, though, that from time to time, they’d all come to a halt together, all at the same time,   He also noticed, being a smart pooch (his brain acute with candy bars), that whenever all the cars stopped, certain people, who had been waiting on the sidewalk, now took advantage of this lull, and stepped out bravely, moving between the throbbing vehicles, now momentarily arrested, heading quickly for the other side of the street.
     And that’s what Fish did.  Which landed him safely on the south-west corner of Summerhill and Yonge.  To Fish, this corner looked almost like the one from which he had just departed except for the presence there of a large warehouse-like building there. Its door was ajar doors, and from inside, an insistent, abrasive kind of music pulsed out onto the street.
     Fish liked music.  And open doors.  So he went in.
     The building was mostly dark, but there was a large open space near its centre which burned with light brighter than the sunlight he had left out on the street.  Fish moved carefully closer.  Just close enough in fact that the edge of the pool of light reached out and gathered him into its all-pervasive glare.  Fish’s spiky hair and his bristly whiskers suddenly looked as if they had caught on fire.
     There was a shriek. 
     “What’s that?? screamed a female voice.  Fish looked back into the shadows behind him and couldn’t see anything.
     “What?  What on earth do you mean?” replied a tense, harried, impatient male voice.  Suddenly there were agitated, questing voices everywhere and then all the lights came on.  Fish stood there, in what had been the veiling comfort of shadow, now entirely revealed.  He felt more lost and out of place than ever.
     “My god, it’s a dog!!” said the female voice.
     “That’s a dog??” said the male voice.
     Fish mustered the canine equivalent to a wry and hopeful smile and wagged what passed for his tail.
     “A spook!” cried another voice.
     “A shade!”
     “A little hairy Manticore!” cried a fifth voice—belonging to someone who had clearly been doing some reading.
     Then the female voice spoke again, softer this time.
     “It’s just a strange little dog and—oh dear—he seems to be lost!  Oh, Linc, let’s take him home and look after him!”
     “Coal, we don’t live like that.  We’re not stray dog people!”
     “Well maybe we ought to be.”
     Fish couldn’t have known it, of course, but he had inadvertently wandered into a fashion shoot.  Coal Blackstone, the supermodel who now shown him such compassion was being photographed by her favourite photographer and sometime lover, Lincoln Ford.  The floor under the area’s pool of light was sandy, and Coal was dressed in a crisp blue-and-white, and therefore vaguely nautical two-piece swimsuit—like two signal flags flying from the trim navy torpedoboat of her body.  She stood before Linc’s cameras as if she were the sole inhabitant of a Pacific atoll and were patiently waiting for rescue.  The only incongruity in the scene was a big pink beachball resting near Coal on the sand.  Coal had protested that it was unlikely that a castaway would come ashore armed with a beachball, but Link had felt at the time that the scene might well be re-jigged into something more domestic—like as frolic at Malibu. 
     But now a scruffy little dog has washed ashore—or at least trotted into the scenario.  And the on-again-off-again beachball concern was now made irrelevant, however, by Fish’s taking a liking to the big pink sphere, and cocking his back leg against it.
     “Aww geez, look at that!” fumed Linc, pointing to the steaming beachball.
     “Well, now we’re committed to the atoll!” laughed Coal.  “C’mon Link, let’s finish up.”


     Meanwhile, unwilling to wait any longer for Michael to show up and help he search fur Fish, Bliss had gone over to the studio of her friend, painter and short-order cook, Homer Rubik—who was soon at work producing “Lost Dog” posters for her.  He was taking an awfully long time about each one of them too.
     “Can’t you hurry it up?” Bliss asked him.  Time’s going by and who knows how far Fish has got to?”
     But Homer couldn’t be hurried.  Each Fish-poster he made was a small renaissance-style masterpiece, jewel-like, immaculate.

TORONTO: A NOVEL--Chapter 32

     The phone rang.  It rang in that jagged way phones ring when there’s someone in great agitation at the other end of the line.  Michael picked up his wristwatch from the bedside table and peered at it.  6am. 
     May stirred in her sleep.  Her black, black hair lay tangled on the pillow.  In the course of Michael’s turning over to peer at his watch, the duvet had slipped down to reveal one of he pearlescent shoulders, glowing in the early light like a waning moon.
     The phone continued to ring, and Michael found himself torn between answering it or ignoring it and returning to the soft welcome of May’s peaceful body, as warm, he thought to himself, as a croissant from the oven.  May always reminded him, when she awakened, of fresh pastry.
     “A crescent moon,” he said out loud, proud of his pun, so early in the morning.  He picked up the phone.
     “Michael?” shrieked the voice at the other end.
    “Of course,” he replied.  “At six in the morning, who else?”
     “It’s Bliss,” boomed the voice.
     “I know,” he said. “Everybody in the building knows.”
     May shifted in the depths of the duvet and turned to peer up at him.
     “Is anything the matter?”
     Michael smiled at her.
     “Only the fact that I’m on the stupid phone instead of cozy with you.” 
     May slipped down further under the duvet and tried to go back to sleep
     “Michael?  Are you there?  Who are you talking to?”
     “I’m talking to May,” Michael told her.  “Who else would I be talking to?”
     “Well,” said Bliss crisply, “I want you to talk to me!”
     “What about?  It’s six o’clock in the morning, do you know that, Bliss?”
     “Michael, Fish is gone!”
     “Really?” he said through a yawn.  “Where?”
     “For Chrissake, Michael, if I knew where, I wouldn’t be calling you!”
     “Why did you call me, Bliss?
     “Because I want you to help me find him.”
     Michael picked up his watch and strapped it on, looking around the room, at the bed with May in it, at his worktable, piled so high with books and papers he couldn’t see his laptop, at a huge all-blue painting on the wall above the bed—a painting he had made last year, having convinced himself it was his special, heartfelt homage to French artist Yves Klein—to the chair on May’s side of the bed, where, last night, she had carefully deposited her neatly folded jeans, sweater, bra and panties, and back to the bed again.  May, now having reluctantly given up the idea of more sleep, sat up in bed and stretched.  Her white breasts lifted and fell again, like foam on a wave.
     “Good morning” she whispered in Michael’s direction.  He placed his hand over the receiver.
     “Good morning,” he whispered back.
     “Michael??”  He had almost entirely forgotten about Bliss—no easy feat, he thought to himself.
     “Yes, I’m still here, Bliss.”
     “You’ve got to help me.”
     “But Bliss, I have no idea where Fish would go.  How am I supposed to find him?”
     “Well, you understand dogs,” she said.
     “No, I don’t,” he told her, rather more vehemently than he had meant to.  “When did you last see him?”
     “Just before I called you.”
     “Where was he?”
     “He walked right through the open door of a waiting subway car,” Bliss told him. This wasn’t as odd as it first sounded, given that she and Bliss lived—somehow--in the Spadina Subway station.
     “He took the first train!” Michael laughed.  “Ambitious dog!”
     “That’s not funny, Michael.  Where could he be?”
     “What train was it?  Northbound or southbound?”
     “What difference does it make?”
     “Well, I don’t know, it narrows the search by quite a bit!”
     “Okay, north.  It was a northbound train.”
     “I wonder where he got off?” said Michael, still only half serious about this whole thing.
     “Maybe somebody saw him,” Bliss suggested.
     “Maybe. Well, actually, I’m sure lots of people saw him.  Fish is an easy dog to spot, and difficult to forget.” Especially, thought Michael to himself, if he pissed on the legs of a few early-morning subway passengers.  As he was wont do do.
     “He’ll be hungry, poor lamb,” wailed Bliss.
     “He’ll be fine.  He’ll just steal a few Crispy Crunch bars from a newsstand.”
     “Or a Skor bar,” whimpered Bliss, now close to tears.
     “Sure,” said Michael.

TORONTO: A NOVEL Chapter 31

 “Dragon’s Breath, right?”
     “Yes, that’s right” said Rory Penlift, already feeling oddly defensive about the title of his poetry-book-to-come.  Who was this guy Michael, anyhow, to make him feel unsure of himself?  A friend of May’s or no friend of May’s, it didn’t seem right for a guy he’d just met to be so immediately confrontational.  Geez, he hadn’t even finished the tea May had made for the two of them.
     “Why?”  Rory added, “You don’t like that title?”
     Michael glanced at May, in whose eyes he thought he glimpsed both disapproval and the fervent wish that he’d just leave the whole subject alone.
     “This will be Rory’s first book,” said May carefully, pouring out the last of their tea.
     Michael nodded.  Rory beamed.
     “But why Dragon’s Breath?” Michael asked again.
     “I just liked the sound of it,” Rory answered. “For me, it suggested a certain power, verbal force, unknowable heat!”
     “The trouble is, it also suggests a whole lot of other things as well.”
     “Oh yeh?  Like what?”
     “Well, said Michael, warming to his task and avoiding May’s disapproving stare, “like a beer called Dragon’s Breath.  And there’s a red opal called Dragon’s Breath. And a blue cheese.  But,” said Michael, in his most intimidating, authoritative voice, “the best known Dragon’s Breath of all, is a certain kind of incendiary ammunition for a 12-gauge shotgun.  It makes a rifle into a flamethrower.  Nice, huh?
     May got up to go and rinse out the teapot.
     “Wow,” said Rory quietly.
     “Wow nothing, do you really want to live with any of those associations?”
     “Well, the shotgun thing is pretty powerful,” said Rory.
     “But does it have anything at all to do with your poems?” Michael asked him, getting rapidly bored with the whole business and beginning to wonder how May and this callow boy could possibly be friends.
     “No, I suppose not,” Rory admitted.  When I wrote the poems I was going more with the whole medieval thing.  You know, St. George and the Dragon and all that.  Fiery breath.” 
     Michael was ready to take a whack at him.
     But just then May returned with the washed teapot.
     Michael got up to go.
     “Listen,” May told him, “why don’t we meet late this afternoon, after I close up the store?  There’s a new tea place that’s opened, just up on Bloor Street.  Let’s met there and then go to dinner.  What do you say?”
     Michael grinned.
     “I say okay,” he told her. He then offered Rory his unenthusiastic congratulations on the book and made his departure.
     Rory looked at May. 
     “Tough kind of a guy,” he said.
     “Michael’s lovely,” she replied.  “He gets impatient.”
     “So do I,” said Rory.
     “No you don’t.”
     “No, I guess not.  Not very often anyway.”
     “Not ever,” said May.
     The coffee shop May wanted to try was called David Pythagoras Fine Teas and it was white as an iceberg inside.
The walls were white and the floors were white.  The light from the ceiling racks of LED bulbs—there seemed to be hundreds of them—was blinding and, since it ignited both the walls and the floor in an integrated miasma of volcanically intense white radiance, it caused you, when you entered the shop, to pick your way tentatively across the space, uncertain of the depth and placement of things.  The light made you appear to be treading water.  It was like walking in a substanceless cold cream.
     May and Michael picked their way through the front part of the shop, making for one of what seemed to be four tiny jet-black tables and chairs at the back.  Over at the right, running the length of the store, there was a prodigious wall of shiny silvered canisters, each one labelled with the name of the tea it presumably held.  Through the glare, Michael could just make out, behind the counter, a girl-shaped density in the whitened space that he thought might possibly be a waitress or sales person.
     “Good evening!” the girl-shaped density sang out, just moving enough so that Michael could see that she was indeed a figure—detached and whole—set against the ground of tea canisters.
     “Bright,” whispered May.
     “Blinding,” said Michael. “Cauterizing.”
     The tables seemed remarkably delicate and, given their shiny blackness and their morphologically unfathomable design—each was as attenuated as a false eyelash, and as ultimately unstable as wrought-iron made from liquorice twizzlers—not as much a haven as one might have liked in this dizzying, omnidirectional glare.  Michael tried to sit down and nearly missed the seat.  May, on the other hand, slid as gracefully into her black spiderweb as a leaf alighting on the surface of a sooty pond.
     “Lots of teas,” she said.
     “Too many,” said Michael, still trying to disentangle his right foot from the table—which seemed to sport cunning black flanges and scallops of metal embroidery and had now effected some unimaginable hold on his trouser leg.
     “What sort of tea do you feel like?” she asked him.
      “Something green, I guess.”
     May disentangled herself lithely from her sooty faerie-table and walked gracefully through the glare to the girl-shaped density behind the counter.   She was gone a long time.
     When she returned, she was carrying a hefty glass teapot and two glass cups.
     “This,” she announced proudly, “setting the giant teapot heavily on the spindly table, “is a green tea called Countess of Seville!”
     “Spanish green tea?” Michael asked.  “What’s in it?”
     “The girl told me …”
     “There’s a girl over there?” Michael asked her.
     “The girl told me,” May continued, “that the tea was imbued with orange oil…”
     “Which explains the Seville part, I guess.”
     “AND,” May added loudly, “oil of Bergamot.”
     Michael picked up his glass cup to hand to her.
     “That’s odd,” he said.  “It feels as light as a soap bubble.  Not like glass at all.”
     May poured the Countess of Seville into both their cups.
It was pale yellow—like white wine or like a urine sample.
     Michael spoke through the preternatural whiteness to the girl-shaped clerk over at the tea-wall.
     “Is this really glass?” he asked, holding up his cup.
     “Of course,” she assured him.
     “But it doesn’t feel like glass.  It isn’t heavy enough.”
     “Well, it’s actually a kind of hybrid glass that all David  Pythagoras tea shops use.”
     “What do you mean, hybrid?” asked Michael, squinting through the shop’s whiteness.
     “Wait.” said the girl-voice, “I’ll look it up in the computer.”
     She busied herself for a few minutes, while they sipped their Seville.  Then, after what seemed like twenty minutes or so, she called out to them.
     “Here it is!  It says it’s called “material glass,” and is basically—mostly—silicone-based.”
     “Silicone?”
     “It says here it’s heat resistant.”
     Michael put his cup down on the spidery table.
     “Let’s get out of here.”
     “But you’ve hardly tasted your tea,” said May.
     “That’s okay, “said Michael, “I don’t know what oil of Bergamot tastes like anyhow.  And,” he added, “I’m sure he Countess of Seville will understand.”

TORONTO: A NOVEL Chapter 30

Rory Penlift was happier than he’d been in months.    

     After years of fruitlessly shopping it around from publisher to publisher, his latest book of verse—which was actually four years old now—was soon to come bravely into the realm of visible, above-ground literature where, he felt sure, it was destined to blaze brilliant new trails through the dismal thickets of conventional thinking, swaddled in the shopworn, cobwebby language offered by all the other poets he had ever read.  How weary he was of everyone’s writing but his own!  

     His book was called Dragon Breath, and it was being published in a couple of months by the tiny Seaweed Press in Halifax.  The book—which seemed to him a burning volcano of galvanizing, transformative diction sluiced along in a hot, lava-like matrix of unassailably original thinking—was made up of a protracted sonnet sequence called “Grail Cups,” surrounded on all sides by the pitter-patter of freshly minted lyrical poems—poems he believed to be of stunning beauty.  

     At least he had felt that way about them four years ago when he had finished them.  Four years is a long time for lyrical poems to go on scintillating all by themselves in a dark dresser drawer, but he still had faith in them.  And as for the sonnets—a progression of one hundred of them, each as hard and as unassailable as a clenched fist—why surely they were as relentlessly beautiful and timeless as the Great Wall of China!  

     He held in his hand the letter from the Seaweed Press, which he had received that very morning.  “Dear Mr. Penlift,” it began, “We are pleased to inform you that we have read Dragon Breath with the greatest interest [“interest?” thought Rory, “a rather tepid word”] and           

are eager to publish it….”  “Well,” thought Rory, “eager is a little more like it.” 

     After reading the letter twenty or thirty more times, he decided he needed to leave his room and go out into the world.  He wanted to see if the letter still read as well in the glare of the mid-morning sunlight on Queen Street West.

     Where, he thought to himself, does a poet, in mid-morning, go to bask in his achievement?  Not a coffee shop, not just a coffee shop, he thought, as he passed by two or three of them, each fuming like a standing locomotive, billowing clouds of coffee-steam out onto the street.  Not a coffee shop.

     But, he thought, as he passed the Red Tea Box, a tea house, yes.  And he entered the shop.

     Beautiful beautiful.  Red, warm, with walls of assorted elegant, eloquent teas and shining tea accessories.  He pressed further into the store, finally moving all the way to the back where he unfolded himself at last into a huge antique mahogany chair, upholstered with great delirious splashes of chintz roses.  He was carrying a paperback copy of Evelyn Underhill’s The Essentials of Mysticism, into which he had tucked his congratulatory letter.  He placed the book on a delicate side table and began looking at the menu. 

     Expensive!  Still, how many mornings are there when you get a letter like the one he’d just got?  

     He was ready to order, but apparently the Red Tea Box was not yet ready to serve him.  He waited for what seemed like a conventional amount of time, and then he waited some more—for what seemed like an unnecessarily long amount of additional time.  A waitress—he assumed she was a waitress—hovered quite near him for a moment or two.  She seemed to be plumping up some slightly dusty pink roses in an ormolu vase on another little table.

     “Excuse me…” he began, but she was gone with the twitch of her feather duster.  He was alone in the room.

     He picked up his Evelyn Underhill.  He had placed his letter in the book—at page 65, as it turned out—where he now read “It is coming to be realized more and more clearly that it is the business of the artist not only to delight us, but to enlighten us: in Blake’s words, to ‘Cleanse the doors of perception, so that everything may appear as it is—infinite’.” 

     Rory looked around.  Everything was small and cluttered, not infinite.  How was he to make his world infinite?

     Finally the waitress came. 

     “What do you want?” she asked him—rather roughly he thought.  His first inclination was to tell her he wanted congratulation, admiration.  Then he thought better of it.

     “I’ll have a pot of Sencha,” he told her.

     “What kind?

     “There are kinds?” Rory asked, feeling increasingly out of place.

     The waitress mustered an elaborate sigh.

     “Sencha Ashikubo,” she told him. “Gyokuro….”

     “I’ll have Gyokuro,” he told her happily, liking the sound and unaware that it was twice as expensive as any of the other teas.

     “Fine.”  She turned to go.

     “And,” added Rory, “I want a dessert—a slice of the Vanilla Rose Petal White Chocolate Cake.”

     “Right.”

     Rory sat reading his Evelyn Underhill for twenty more minutes.   

     His tea and cake came.  The cake was good, if a tad elaborate.  The tea was peculiar.  Rory figured you had to acquire a taste for it.  The bill lay on a saucer beside the teapot.  It was for $27.65.

     Once again the waitress hovered near him.  He rummaged in his pocket for the couple of twenties he knew were in there someplace.  The waitress watched his fumblings with distaste.

     “I’m just about to publish my first book,” he told her happily, as he lay the two bills on the table. 

     “Is that right?” she said, scooping up the money.

“Will you need change?”

     Rory was so tense he just wanted to get back out onto the street.

     “That’s okay,” he told her, grabbing his book and scrambling to his feet.  Okay?  Jesus, he’d just left the woman a thirteen dollar tip!

     Outside, the sun was shining brightly, generously, he thought—as a kind of compensation for his tea travail.

He walked a few doors east where, in front of the TD bank, there was an array of pay telephones.  He dropped a quarter into the slot and dialed the number of the bookstore where his friend May worked.  

     “Where are you?” May asked him.

     He told her.

     “What are you doing there?”

     “Well, I was trying to celebrate—I just got a letter of acceptance from The Seaweed Press. They’re going to publish Dragon Breath.  So I bought myself forty bucks worth of tea and cake.”

     May giggled. 

     “Drop by the bookstore,” she told him, and I’ll make you a pot of tea for free.’

TORONTO: A NOVEL Chapter 29

 

     Violet Dollop had never been the sort of woman who had made much use of housekeeping hints or cooking tips by professionals, whether Martha Stewart’s or the ones in the Food & Drink magazines published by the LCBO.  Now, suddenly, she was assiduously buying Martha Stewart cookbooks and respectfully downloading Martha’s emails, as well as collecting and filing Food and Drink issues every time she saw them in the store. 

     Lately, there wasn’t a time when, as Tom left to get some beer or a bottle of wine, Violet wouldn’t sing out from the kitchen, “Don’t forget to see if they have a new Food & Drink!”  He always did forget.  Which annoyed her considerably because they only printed so many copies and they went fast and when they were gone they were gone.

     “I think it’s just a quarterly,” she said to Tom.

     “What is?”

     “Food and Drink.”

     Tom had no idea what she was talking about.

     “The food magazine I ask you to pick up at the LCBO.”

     “Ah,” said Tom.

     “So that’s why you have to pick one up as soon as they come in.”

     “Sure,” said Tom. “I can see that.”

     Violet knew perfectly well Tom hadn’t followed any of what she’d said.

     “You can see what?” she asked him.

     “About the LCBO,” Tom replied.

     Violet went back to her sewing room.

     Mayor Cass Tamburlaine was pacing his vast, softly carpeted floor of his office.  His Isolation tank sat heavily in the middle of the room like a hippopotamus in a tropical river.  He gazed at it for a moment or two and then called Joy Pommery, his sometime mistress.  Her phone rang softly—three times.  On the fourth ring she picked up.

     “Why Cass, how nice to hear from you.  And it’s not even three in the morning!”

    “Yeh.  What are you doing?”

     “Well, actually, dear, I’m with a client.”  Joy was a psychotherapist with an electronics company located, for the time being, out near the airport.

     “When will you be through?”

     “In a couple of hours.  Why?”
     “I’ve been getting more death threats in the mail.”

     “More of those pretty ones—the Old Master paintings?”

     “I don’t find them so goddam pretty.”

     “I suppose not.”
    “Listen, remember your friend, the fashion-model-detective?”

     “Coal Blackstone.”

     “Yeh.  Can you get hold of her again for me?
     “Don’t you have her number?”

     “I dunno, I must have thrown it out.  I’d really like to talk to her.”

     Joy tells him the number again.

     “Write it down somewhere where you won’t lose it.”

     “I have.”

     “Were did you write it?”

     There was a breathy pause.

     “Cass?”

     “On my thigh,” he told her. “I wrote it on my thigh.”

     “Oh Cass, “laughed Joy, “are you naked in the office again?

     Michael finally bid farewell to Bliss Carmen and her painter and short-order-cook boyfriend, Homer Rubik, and making way back out onto the fire escape outside of Homer’s unwholesome, maliferous studio, gratefully took a big lungful of clean air.  Bliss had followed him outside.

     “So whatdyathink, Zorba?  Isn’t he great?”

     “Well, he certainly can draw and paint.  He’s skilful.”

     “Fuckin’ right!” boomed Bliss.  “But is he a great artist?”

     “Well, not yet of course.  Why,” Michael asked her, “are you in a hurry?”

     “Yeh, a big hurry!”

     “How come?”

     “I’m not getting any younger,” Bliss told him.  “Homer neither.”

     Michael was puzzled. 

     “What do you have…some cutoff date by which Homer should be famous?”

     Famous and,” Bliss added—rather coyly, Michael thought—“wealthy.”

     “I see.”

     “You think he has the stuff?” Bliss persisted.

     “I don’t know.”

     “Well he better,” Bliss muttered darkly.

     May sat in the bookstore, hoping that, on such a wet, sleety afternoon, nobody would come in.  She had the store all to herself this afternoon.  She was sitting at the desk, her copy of John Cowper Powys’s Wolf Solent open in front of her.  She was sipping from a glass of hot green tea.  It was cool in the store and the steam was rising from the glass.

     “A species of deep, lethargic numbness to everything except the immediate suggestion of his voice and touch seemed to have taken possession of her”, she read.  “His arm round her. Her cream-coloured cloak hanging loose, her cheeks pale, she let herself be led across the intervening tract of grass to the open door of the little shed….”

     “A little shed,” she mused aloud.  “A sweet little shed where I could go with Michael.  Across an intervening tract of grass.  A cream-coloured cloak….” 

     Just then the bell over the door jangled and a tall, elderly man entered the store.  He smiled at her.  She attempted to smile back pleasantly.

     “Do you by any chance have books by Alice Munro?” he asked her.

     “Many” she said, getting up to lead him to the Canadian fiction section. 

     After a little while, he came to the desk with three or four volumes of Munro’s short stories.

     “And what are you reading?” he asked her pleasantly.

     “Michael” she said absently.

    

     Coal Blackstone lay happily exhausted in the arms of her favourite photographer and part-time lover, Lincoln Ford.  She looked very white, Linc thought, against the black sheets.  White, almost to the point of iridescence.  Abalone shell.

     “Beautiful,” Linc whispered in her ear, repositioning a damp wisp of her jet-black hair that had ended up glued to her cheek.  “You’re exquisite.”

     “Oh I bet you say that to all the high-fashion models you’ve just had meaningful congress with,” Coal laughed, toying ineffectually with the rivulet of curly black hair that meandered down Linc’s stomach.

     “Sure, all the time,” Linc smirked, “but…well, I don’t often use the word ‘irridescent’.”

     “What do you mean? You didn’t use it with me either.”

     “I didn’t?”

     “No.”

     “That’s funny.  I was thinking it.   I was also thinking ‘Abalone shell’.”

     “You were?  That’s nice.  You didn’t say that either.”

     “I guess I figured they were sort of fancy-dancy ways of describing you, and that they might sound a bit silly.  I wouldn’t want you laughing at me!”

     “Not in bed anyhow,” smiled Coal. 

     “That’s right,” he said, deftly clasping her left knee.

     “You planning on moving your hand up or down?” she asked him winsomely.

     “I hadn’t decided yet,” Linc told her.  “Geez, how much planning do you think I actually put into our times together?  Being in bed with you isn’t like taking your photograph, you know.”

     “No?” Coal giggled.  “I thought it was all love love love, no matter what you were doing!”

     Linc scowled.

     “You keep talking like that and I’m going to take back my Abalone shell,” he said.

    

    

    

TORONTO A NOVEL : Chapter 28

 

     It was with a certain weariness of both heart and spirit that Michael began to look through Homer Rubik’s work.  The task—for Michael felt that’s what it was—was scarcely made easier by Bliss Carmen’s looming stage-mother eagerness, by her rabid, over-the-shoulder determination that Michael would find in Homer’s paintings and drawings the lashings of genius.

     “Look how much stuff he’s made!” boomed Bliss.

     “Impressive,” Michael agreed. “though of course it isn’t the number of works he’s made but their quality that counts,” he added hastily—and, he felt, pointlessly.  Bliss was deaf to anything even remotely negative or even cautionary about Homer’s work.   Homer, for his part, stood like a neglected statue, watching Michael’s deliberations.  He wasn’t nearly as interested in Michael’s approval as Bliss was, but he had a practiced ear for an insult, a put-down or even a reservation.  He watched Michael, scowling.

     Bliss noticed Homer’s un-tethered condition and deemed it dangerous.  Bliss was enough of a loose-cannon herself not to be wary of it in others.  All she needed right now was for Homer to plummet into his feral mode and start growling at the visiting art critic.

     “Why don’t you make coffee, Homer?” she suggested, as gaily as possible.

     “None for me,” said Michael abstractly, now perusing a strange little Goya-like painting of some unidentified massacre on an unidentified plain located somewhere in Homer’s rough, antique imagination.

     Homer stiffened with the beginnings of rage.  Bliss gave Michael a resounding, corrective whack across the shoulders.

     “Well, okay,” he told Homer, trying quickly to fabricate a smile.  “a coffee might be nice after all.”

     Homer went the fridge and opened the door.  Michael could smell the sour, empty air from inside from across the room.

     “Fuck!” said Homer.

     “What’s the matter, Homer?” asked Bliss nervously, anxious not to disrupt the atmosphere of studious connoisseurship she was trying hard to establish in the dank kitchen-studio.

     “No milk,” said Homer darkly.

     “Who the hell cares??” roared Bliss.  “Make some goddam coffee!!”

     Michael tried hard to believe he was somewhere else.  Watching May dust shelves in the bookstore, maybe.

     He dutifully examined work after work.  Most of the pictures were small, notebook-sized, usually in oil on paper, though there were a few executed in tempera.  The drawings were either made with charcoal or, more often, drawn in sepia ink—which lent them a certain old-masterish earnestness.

     But it was Homer’s subject matter that intrigued him most—intrigued him and dismayed him.  The paintings were technically skilful—astoundingly so—but uniformly ghastly in subject matter.  There were gory battles, the mounted, charging figures as tiny and exacting as those in a Messonnier.  There were Inqusition-like scenes, like plunderings from Goya’s etchings: burnings, hangings, torturings, dismemberings.  There were beheadings, drownings, whippings, stranglings.  There were pictures in which the humanoid subjects were so distorted and convoluted they made the hallucinated figures in Hieronymus Bosch seem sensible and well-ordered.

     Michael felt sweaty and a little dizzy.

     “So what do you think, Zorba?” bellowed Bliss.  “Amazing aren’t they?”

     “They are that,” Michael agreed, feeling bilious.

     Homer stood listening, torn between the desire to be accommodating and the fierce need to tear this intrusive art critic limb from limb.

     “You like ‘em?” he asked Michael with a growl.

     Michael was momentarily frozen with indecision.  Ought he to say what he really felt or just carefully dissemble for a while?

     “Well,” he said at last, trying to keep his eyes on the pile of paintings and not look either at Homer or at Bliss, "I can tell you truthfully that I’ve never seen anything quite like them before!”

     Bliss was exultant.  But Homer, who suddenly seemed smarter and more perceptive than Michael had given him credit for, scowled and rumbled.

     “I mean do you think they’re good?”

     “Oh sure,” Michael faltered, trying too smile convincingly.  “Unique!”

     “There!” said Bliss exultantly, giving Homer a python-like squeeze around the waist.  “You see??” 

         

TORONTO: A NOVEL—Chapter 27

     Michael sat with a cup of green tea, watching May while she dusted most of the bookstore’s philosophy section.

     “Who gathers the most dust?” he asked her, grinning.  “Heidegger?  John Stuart Mill?  Derrida?”

     “It’s pretty evenly distributed,” she told him.

     “That’s too bad,” said Michael, taking another sip of tea, “I was sort of hoping old Heidegger would be the front-runner, dust-wise!”

     “Dust-wise?”

     “A rolling philosopher gathers no dust,” he assured her.

     “What on earth do you mean?” May asked him.

     “Oh nothing, really. I’m just talking silly to justify my sitting here and gazing at you.”

     May put down the feather duster and gave him a kiss on the forehead. 

     “Don’t you have anything more pressing to do?”

     “I do, but I’m putting it off for as long as possible.  I sort of half-promised a painter I know that I’d go see his work.  A guy named Homer Rubik.”

     “That’s an odd name,” said May, moving from the philosophy section to the history section.

     “Well, he’s an odd guy,” said Michael, “and his name suits him nicely.  ‘Homer’ may be a bit lofty for him, but “Rubik’ is perfect—like the infamous cube, he’s shifty, lots of sides, lots of angles, ultimately unknowable, and, in the end, probably pointless.”

     “Why do you care about him then?”

     “I don’t, really.  But the stuff he makes is extraordinary—in a sort of unhealthy, unwholesome way.”

     “What’s it like?”

     “Very strange.  It’s like Old Master painting, but small—on scrap pieces of paper.  He paints on anything—envelopes, butcher paper, newspapers, pages torn from magazines, flattened-out cardboard boxes….  He’s like a back-alley Raphael or Caravaggio!”

     “So you’re going to visit his studio?”

     “Well, he doesn’t really have a studio. The guy is a short-order cook in a diner.  I’m told he lives in a two room apartment and apparently paints in his kitchen.”

     “Maybe he’s a genius!”

     “Yeh maybe.”

     “But probably not?”

     “No, probably not.”

     “And now you’ll see for yourself.”

     “Yeh.  Lucky me.

     It took  Michael some time, but he finally found what he took to be Homer’s little flat—high atop the rusty fire-escape at the back of a five-story building on Stafford Street, south of Trinity Bellwoods Park.  He was standing at the foot of the stairs when he suddenly spied Bliss Carmen, leaning over the railing outside Homer’s door.  Fish was with her, of course, and took this opportunity to undertake a feat of aerial bladder evacuation, cocking his left back leg against one of the steel railings of the fire escape and pissing a yellow rain that fell perilously close to Michael.

     “Missed you!!” cried Bliss happily.

     “Yeh,” said Michael.  “The happy intervention of a sudden breeze from the west.”

     “C’mon up!” boomed Bliss.

     Michael climbed the fire escape, feeling more certain with every step that this whole visit was a mistake.

     Bliss led him into the first of Homer’s dank rooms. It seemed to be some kind of sitting room, though there really wasn’t anyplace to sit.  There was a greasy mattress on the floor.

     “That’s where we sleep,” Bliss announced.  “This is our boudoir.”

     Michael suppressed a shudder.  A shudder not so much engendered by the ad hoc bed as by the whole idea of sleeping with Bliss.  Geez, thought Michael to himself, did any woman ever bear such an inappropriate name!

     He heard Homer stirring in the second room.

     “Homer,” boomed Bliss, “get out here! My big Writer Friend is here!”

     “You mean Zorba?” muttered Homer.

     Michael felt like strangling them both.

     “Yeh, he might write something about your work!”

     “Listen, I never said I…” Michael began when Bliss shushed him. 

     “Don’t be like that,” she told him in a loud whisper. “Homer needs encouragement.”

     Homer finally appeared in the doorway, naked to the waste, his jeans stiff with what Michael supposed might equally be dried oil paint or congealed egg.

     “You come to see my stuff?”

    “Yes,” Michael, told him.  “You have some things here?”

     “I’ve been doing stuff,” said Homer.

     “Home’s very prolific!” boomed Bliss. “He always has work around!”

     “Okay,” said Michael.  “Let’s look through some things.”

     Home returned to the second room—the kitchen he used to paint in—and beckoned Michael to follow.

     “I would have thought you’d have had enough of kitchens!” said Michael, trying for a preliminary pleasantry.

     “What?” said Homer.

     “Michael means that you just seem to go from one kitchen to another!” she said heartily.  “That’s what you meant, wasn’t it, Michael?”

     Michael smiled weakly.

     “Fish, stop that!!” yelled Bliss suddenly.  Fish had lifted his leg and peed copiously on a pile of ink drawings.  The ink had now begun to run and was pooling on the floor.

     “Ha!” laughed Bliss, “a new medium!”

     Homer gave Fish a kick.

     “Andy Warhol did a series of piss paintings once,” said Michael.  “They were on metal.  He called them his ‘Oxidation paintings’ because the urine changed into beautiful colours when it dried on the metal backing!”

     “Who?” asked Homer.

     “Andy Warhol,” said Bliss, speaking loudly and distinctly to him as if she were speaking to someone with hearing problems.

     “So what?” said Homer.

     Michael couldn’t think of a good answer.

     “    

          

 

TORONTO: A NOVEL—Chapter 26

 

     Tom Dollop was sitting in front of the TV, in his scruffy  but comfy movie-watching chair, trying gently to scrape the sale price sticker off a DVD case when his wife, Violet,

approached him purposefully, holding out a spoonful of something she wanted him to try.

     “What’s this?” he asked her, continuing to peel the price tag away with his fingernail.  Tom hated price stickers on things.  He figured nobody had to know how much he’d paid for anything—in this case for a previously-viewed copy of Kings Go Forth with Frank Sinatra and Tony Curtis.

     “Green curry paste,” Violet told him.  “Try it and tells me if it needs anything.”

     Tom tasted it.

     “Good,” he said.  “Good I guess.  I’m no green curry paste expert.”

     “But you like it?”

     “Sure.”

     Violet went back to the kitchen.  Only to return a few moments later—without the spoon.  Tom looked up from his DVD.

     “Do you love me?”

     “What do you mean?” he asked her.

     “You don’t understand the question?” said Violet.

     “Not really, no.”

     “I asked you if you loved me.”

     “Yeh, but why ask me now?” Tom said.  “Do you not feel I love you?”

     “Not the way you used to.”

     Tom looked around the room, at the shelves of CDs and DVDs, and at the poster by Georgia O’Keeffe, advertising the Santa Fe music festival for 1972.

     “How far back are you going?” he asked her.  “Are you asking me if I love you as much as I did before you started making that green curry paste, or are you going back as far as, say, last week, when we went out to see The Grandmaster?’

     “Why did we see that film anyhow?” she asked him.

     “Because it was presented by Martin Scorcese.  He liked it.  He thought it was elegant.”

     “I didn’t think it was very elegant.”

     “No?  You think you know more about films than Martin Scorcese?” Tom asked her.

     “Well it isn’t that.”

     “Then what is it then?”

     Violet turned and walked back to the kitchen.

    

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

    

     Coal Blackstone and Lincoln Ford were just finishing their seafood risotto and dividing the last of the wine.

     “Would you like coffee?” Coal asked him.

     “Maybe if you corrected it,” said Linc.

     “Corrected it?”

     “Yeh,” Linc grinned.  “Café corretto.  Corrected coffee!”

     “And exactly how do I go about correcting this coffee I’m about to make us?”

     “By giving it a little push—a “corrective” shot of Grappa or Sambuca.”

      “Ah.  Do we have any Grappa or Sambuca?” Coal asked him.

     “We have Grappa.”

     “We do?”

     “Yeh, it was just a whim.  I was passing an LCBO the other day and had this yen for a bottle of Grappa…”

     “Some strange yen,” said Coal.

     “Well, I felt pretty sure they wouldn’t have any, but they actually did have a couple of bottles…”

     “Yes, I’m sure Grappa’s a big seller,” smirked Coal.

     “…so I got one.”

     “Okay,” she said briskly, “I’ll make the coffee and you can correct it.”

     “Fair enough,” said Linc.

     Forty-five minutes and three coffee correctives later they were in bed together. 

     “We should correct things whenever we can,” said Coal, dreamily outlining Linc’s mouth with the tip of her index finger.

     “I couldn’t agree more,” said Linc, tracing the outline of Coal’s left ear with the thumb.

    “The truth is,” she said, dragging her finger slowly down the middle of Linc’s chest, “Grappa tastes a bit like the Venetian Lagoon.”

    “Gave you ever actually tasted the waters of the Venetian Lagoon?” Linc asked her, idly massaging her left shoulder with his right hand.

     Coal was silent.

     “Coal?” Linc said.  “Are you there?”

     “Oh yes, sorry Linc, I was just enjoying your ad hoc massage,” she told him, “which, by the way, was delightfully asymmetrical.”

     “Here,” said Linc, moving his hand to her right shoulder, “let me symmetricize you.”

     “It puts me a million miles away.”

     “In Venice perhaps?”

     “I guess so, yes.”

     “Taking the waters?” laughed Linc.

     “You don’t take the waters in Venice,” Coal said.  “That’d be worse than drinking from Lake Ontario.”

     “So since you don’t know anything at all about the potability of Lagoon-water—except that it’s vile stuff—you’re going to have to take back your grappa comment.”

     “Okay, I take it back.”

     “You’re awfully agreeable tonight,” he smiled.

     Coal leaned back onto the pillows and raised her arms so that Linc could lift up her black satin chemise and toss it on the chair beside the bed. 

     “You have no idea how agreeable I’m going to be tonight,” she told him, sticking her finger gently in his mouth.

     “You taste like grappa,” he laughed.

     

TORONTO: A NOVEL—CHAPTER 25

 

     Coal Blackstone was in the kitchen with her favourite photographer and also on-again-off-again lover, Lincoln Ford.  This week, they were on-again.

     She was slowly stirring what was going to be a clearly hefty shrimp and scallop risotto, and Link was sitting at the kitchen table attentively watching her add periodic sluicings of chicken stock and white wine to the melange. He was sipping a glass of the same wine.

     “Pass me that little pile of chopped dill on the cuttingboard, will you Linc?” she asked him. 

     Linc didn’t move.

     “Linc, the dill?”

     He looked at her as if he had suddenly returned to the room from somewhere else.

     “Which one is the dill?”

     “The little pile of chopped green stems on the cuttingboard.  The only pile of green things there.”

     Linc scooped it up and brought a handful over to the sauté pan.

     “Shall I dump in in?” he asked her.

     “Why not?” she told him, amused at his sudden and uncharacteristic remoteness.

     “Where have you been?”

     “I was thinking about the mayor.”

     Coal was surprised.  “Really?  I never think about old crass Cass.  Why would you be thinking about him, and why now?”

     “I remember being worried that you were going to see him.  Actually, it was my Greek friend Peter who was worried when I told him you were visiting the mayor.”

     “Why was he worried?”

     Linc took a swallow of the wine.

     “This isn’t really all that good, is it?” he told Coal, staring at his glass.

     “Why was your friend Peter concerned about my meeting with Cass?” she asked him again.

     “I don’t know, he didn’t really say.”

     “Rather odd.”

     “Well, I think he’d heard a couple of guys talking together in the restaurant or something.”

     “Talking about what?”

     Linc poured himself a second glass of wine.

     “Oh the usual stuff….you know, politics, women, drugs mostly….and the dumb immersion tank business.  Apparently the mayor’s new tank got into all the papers.”

     Coal laughed.  “And the hippos were boiled in their tanks,” she sang out gaily, giving her risotto a spirited grind of rough-hewn pepper.

     “What?” asked Linc.

     “Oh nothing.  There was this novel that Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs wrote in collaboration in 1945, early in their careers.  They wrote alternate chapters.  The title came from a radio broadcast the two of them heard sitting in a bar one night, about a fire in the London zoo, about how the fire raced across the fields ‘and,” said the breathless radio announcer, ‘the hippos were boiled in their tanks’!”

     “One more thing for Tamburlaine to worry about,” said Linc.  “How’s the risotto coming?”

     “Getting nice and creamy,” Coal told him.  “Just five or six minutes more.”

     Linc continued to stare into his wine glass, while Coal tipped a bowl of shrimp and scallops into the pan of fragrant rice.

     “I got a call from Joy Pommery today,” she told him.

     “Joy Pommery?”

     “Yes, you remember, she and I had dinner a few months ago.  She was worried about those death threats against the mayor.  She has some sort of odd relationship with his Largeness.”

     “You mean a sexual one?”

     “Apparently,” said Coal.

     “God, how could she?” asked Linc, getting up to prod a shrimp with a fork. “It’d be like sleeping with a narwhal!”

     “It puzzles me too,” Coal admitted.  “She’s an attractive woman. And smart.  She’s a psychiatrist or a psychotherapist or something.  She works for an advertising company.”

     “Physician, heal thyself,” murmured Linc.

     “Yes, you’d think so, wouldn’t you?

     “What did she want—when she called?”

     “I don’t know.  We’ll have to meet again and talk over a drink.  Listen, this risotto is almost there.  Why don’t you pour us some more wine and warm a couple of bowls?”

                          

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

     About the same time as Coal and Linc were settling into their seafood risotto, Michael and May were settling into their first meal together—at the New Sky restaurant.

     They were both looking at menus.

     “They make a really good Hot and Sour Soup here,” said Michael, idly reorganizing the napkins, plates, bowls, chopsticks and bottles of soy sauce and hot sauce on the table.

     “I love Hot and Sour soup!” said May.  “Perfect for a chilly evening like this.”

     “Every place makes it a bit differently,” Michael added.

     “That’s true,” May agreed.

     “We should go on a Hot and Sour soup crawl sometime,” Michael said.  “We could sample five or six restaurants, see how they compare,” he added.

     May smiled.  “That’s a lot of hotness and sourness,” she said.

     “I guess so.  Here, they offer two versions—the regular one and a vegetarian version.”

     “What’s the basic difference?” May asked him.

     “Well, with the vegetarian one, they don’t include all those little pale shrimps they put in the regular soup.  I like it much better without them.”

     “Don’t you like shrimps?”

     “Yeh, usually, but these are really tiny tiny micro-shrimps and they’re so pale you can sort of see right through them, and then they look like insects or grubs or something.  They sort of put me off.”

     “Ah,” said May.

     “And anyhow I think the soup tastes better without them.”

     “Well, that would suit me fine, because I’m a vegetarian.”

     “Really?” said Michael.  “Well, I’m almost a vegetarian.”

     “How can you be almost a vegetarian?” May smiled. “Surely one either is a vegetarian or one is not?”

     Michael pondered this for a moment, all the while distracted by May’s dark, liquid eyes and the deep glowing white-jadeness of her skin.  Then he wrenched himself forcefully back to the discussion under way.

     “I’ve just decided something,” he announced to her.

     “Yes?” said May.

     “As of this very moment, I am absolutely, totally, a vegetarian!”

     “You’ve just decided this now?”

     “Yes.  But then I was on the way anyhow.”

     “Well that’s lovely,” said May.  “But you’re not doing this just for me?”

     “Well, yes I am.  That and anything else I can do to please you.”

     May put her menu down.

     “You don’t have to do anything to please me,” she told him.  “All you have to do is be.”