TORONTO: A NOVEL—Chapter 45

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

TORONTO: A NOVEL—Chapter 44

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


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

TORONTO: A NOVEL—Chapter 43

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

TORONTO: A NOVEL—Chapter 42

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

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

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

TORONTO: A NOVEL—Chapter 41

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

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

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

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

TORONTO: A NOVEL—Chapter 40

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     “My dog,” boomed Bliss.

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

     “Does he like chocolate?  Fish likes chocolate.”

     “I haven’t really noticed.” 

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

     There was a pause on the line.

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

     “The poster?”

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

     “You were, huh?” 

     “Yes.  Who painted it?”

     “My boy friend.”

     “Really?”

     “Yeh, Homer.”

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

     “Rubik.”

     “Like the cube?

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

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

     “That might be hard to arrange.”

     “Why is that?”

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

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

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

     “Pretty near,” she said.     

     

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

     

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

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

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

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

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

    “That would be great.” Michael told her.

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

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

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

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

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

     Michael grinned.

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

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

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

TORONTO: A NOVEL—Chapter 39

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

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

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

TORONTO: A NOVEL—Chapter 38

  

Violet Dollop was bored to death.  And depressed around the edges.
     “Why don’t you take an art course?” her husband Tom suggested.  “You’ve always liked art.”
    Violet took a sip of her coffee and buttered a slice of rye toast.
    “I like looking at paintings in galleries,” she told him, spreading the toast with fig jam, “and in art books. That doesn’t mean I can do anything myself.”
      “Well, you never know,” Tom replied, finishing his tea and folding the paper neatly by the empty cup.  “Lots of people don’t know they can make things until, one day, they just sit down and make them.  Doesn’t have to be painting, “he added.
     “What do you think I should do, “Violet asked him.
     “I don’t know, Violet. That’s up to you.  But I do think you should to do something.”
     He got up from the table and started towards the door.
     “Gotta run,” he told her, giving her cheek the soft, glancing blow that constituted his breakfast kiss.  “Late.”
     Violet nodded glumly.
     “Oh do cheer up, Vi,” he admonished her.  “There must be something you find appealing—or that you‘re at least curious about?”
     “Bye, Tom,” she said.  “Hope you have a good day at work.”
     Tom stood by the front door.  “It’s never really a good day at work,” he told her.  I think a tolerable day is all I can realistically hope for.”
     And he was gone.
     “What was she curious about?”  The only answer that came back down and along the echoing corridors of her mind was no answer at all—a sound like rustling leaves blowing along a gutter.  
     What do other people do?  Then she thought about her inner leaves suddenly blowing along the dry gutter she had just devised in her mind.  But I didn’t devise it, she thought.  It just came to me.  If things just come to you, is that art? she asked herself.  Or is it only art when you  strive for something?
     She thought about it.  The fact is, things came to her all the time, unbidden, unlooked for: images, memories, questions, speculations, minor forms of irrationality, words floating free, untethered to any particular occasion, pure sound in her ears like birdsong. 
     Birdsong, she thought.  I don’t read anymore, she thought. Not the way I read in college.  I ought to read again.  It was strange how all the books had disappeared.  She used to own books—novels, books of poetry, a few art books.  Where were they?  Gone in garage sales, she thought. 
      She put the kettle on to make herself a second cup of coffee.  I need to read, she said to herself.  And after that, I need to write.   Or maybe I’ll start writing straightaway and start reading alongside the writing.  Twinned activities—like railway tracks.  She took a sheet of paper and a ballpoint pen from one of the kitchen drawers.  The kettle was boiling.  She smiled at it, as if it were sentient.  Boiling kettle as metaphor for percolating of ideas, she thought happily.  Plans.  She added a teaspoonful of coffee powder to her cup and filled it with hot water.  Then she went to the fridge where she decided against the milk and chose instead the carton of ten percent cream for her coffee.  Live it up, she laughed to herself.  Then she put the sheet of paper in front of her and picked up the pen.  Stupid ugly pen, she thought.  I need a fountain pen.  I used to own a fountain pen.  What happened to it? Maybe a garage sale happened to it?  Why would I sell my fountain pen?  I probably sold it for a couple of dollars.  Or maybe fifty cents.  The image of her fountain pen now hove briefly into view, hovering like a tiny, ice-blue dirigible above the butter dish.  They used to call them reservoir-pens, thought Violet.  When they were first invented.  A reservoir, she thought idly, is a lot of writing! 
     She began to scratch down words.  It was just a list.  “Rustling leaves blowing along a gutter,” she wrote.  “Birdsong.”  “Boiling kettle.”  “Railway tracks.”
     She looked at the paper. 
     “It’s just a list,” she said out loud.  But she knew it was more than that.  It wasn’t a poem, but it was more than just a list.  Maybe it’s a haiku novel, she thought, and then immediately chastised herself for being so cutely clever.   Especially, she thought, since I don’t know anything much about either haiku or novels.
     Just then the phone rang.  It was Tom.
     “How’s the search for meaning going?” he asked her, his voice stridently cheerful.  Ripping cloth, she thought.  She didn’t feel like telling him, anything.
     “Tom, have you seen my fountain pen anywhere?”
     “You have a fountain pen?”
     “Well, I used to have.”
     “What do you want a fountain pen for?”
     “Oh I just liked writing with it.  It was nice and smooth.  And I liked the weight of it in my hand.” 
     Tom chuckled. 
     “A fountain pen woman in a fibre-tip world!”
     “I don’t mind that,” said Violet

TORONTO: A NOVEL—Chapter 37

Mayor Cass Tamburlaine had just heaved open the lid of the massive flotation tank that sat ponderously to the immediate right of his mammoth desk.  His blinked his eyes like something newborn to the world of light, and began wondering—a pale narwhal about to breach the surface of the salty inland sea that filled the tank—whether or not he could clamber out of the tank himself or whether he would require the assistance of one his young subalterns to help him to regain dry land.
     He had just decided he probably could use some help when, somewhat to his consternation—a consternation rounded, admittedly, by a rind of decidedly enjoyable lecherousness—he saw the door to his office swing open and watched a disturbingly beautiful young woman, tall, with blue–black hair swinging around her shoulders, stride smartly across his vast sea of deep pile carpeting and stop in front of the tank.
     Cass pulled himself to a sitting position in the tank and looked her up and down.  She had the blackest hair he had ever seen.  And the whitest skin.  She was dressed in a sleek black leather jacket, worn over a fog-grey linen shirt and a pair of linen slacks of the same expensive, indefinable hue.  She wore shiny black leather boots, he noticed, with very wicked heels. 
     “Don’t I know you?” he asked her, slicking back his wet hair with a plump wet hand.  The young woman looked amused.  “Haven’t we met somewhere?”
     “Coal Blackstone,” she told him, deliberately not extending her own hand.  “Yes, we met here in your office.  You wanted to talk to me about some death-threat notes you were receiving.  You seemed quite upset.”
     “Yeh, well I’m still getting them, and I’m still quite upset.”
     “You’re also quite naked, and wet as a hippo, so maybe you’d like to slip something on?”   She handed him a gigantic, lime-green robe that lay over a nearby chair.
     “Okay, fine, I’ll do that,” he said.  He began pushing himself massively from the Dead Sea of the tank and, while waving as much of his nakedness around as he could in the effort, finally succeeded in entering his swaddling robe. 
     “You’re not easy with nakedness?” he asked her.
     “I’m okay with my own,” she laughed.  “I’m not so sanguine about yours.”
     “What’s wrong with mine?”
     “Well for one thing,” said Coal, with a disarming smile, “there’s an awful lot of it.” 
     Cass looked crestfallen, in all of his parts.
     “But,” added Coal brightly, “I’m not here to deconstruct the mysteries of your Worship’s nakedness.  I came about the death-threat notices.”
     “There’s a pile of them on my desk,” said Cass, slightly irritated by her marginalizing of his manhood.  “Help yourself.”
     While Cass pulled himself into his clothes, Coal sifted through the old-master death threats.  For that’s what they looked like.  Tiny Old Master paintings.  All of them—and there seemed to be about a dozen—were beautifully painted but murderously phrased.  It was like receiving a small Raphael or Caravaggio in the mail, upon which—with screaming inappropriateness—someone had scrawled a crude suggestion about the likelihood of an upcoming violent death: a fatal accident, a fall from a high window, a garrotting in the daylight corridors of City Hall, a drive-by shooting, a poisoned Reuben sandwich.  One of them actually suggested that.  “Look to your Russian dressing, you squalid Pig!”  “Pig” was in italics.  And underlined a number of times.
     Cass looked over at her.
     “Nasty, huh?”
     “Yes, quite unpleasant,” Coal agreed. “Why threaten you about Russian dressing?”
     It’s really creepy.  I guess somebody has seen me and Joy at this west-end diner where I like the Reuben sandwiches they make. 
     “With Russian dressing.”
     “Yeh. Why, do you like Russian dressing too?” Cass asked her.
     “I’m not sure I even know what it is,” Coal told him.
     “Salad dressing.  Ketchup and mayonnaise and sometimes horseradish.  Good on a Rueben.”
     Coal tried to hide her expression of distaste.  Coal hadn’t gazed upon a bottle of ketchup since she was a teenager.  And mayonnaise?  Well, no.
     Coal couldn’t help noticing that Cass was now settling down to a detailed optical tour of her charms and thought it best to guide him back to the business at hand.
     “The reason I’m here,” she remindcd him crisply, “is that Joy called me about a certain Missing Dog poster the two of  you saw the other day.”
     “Joy?” said Cass, now entirely occupied by his mental inventory of Coal’s mellifluous parts.  Just at the moment, he was marvelling at the tiny tautness of her waist and the generous flare of her left hip.
     “Yes, Joy.  Your mistress,” she said just a tad louder than she had meant to. 
     “Oh, right. Yes, Joy.”
     “Well,” Coal continued, growing more impatient by the second, “tell me about the poster.”
     “It’s here somewhere.  You can look at it.”
     “I think Joy said it was about a missing dog, rather improbably named Fish.  She said there was a name and phone number to call.”
     “The dog’s name is Fish?” said Cass.
     “Apparently.  And there was some name to call.”
     “Bliss,” said Cass.  “I remember that.  Can’t forget a name like that,” he told her, all the while vaguely bringing together in his mind, Coal’s beauty and the deep erotic promise locked, as he saw it, in the name on the poster.  Bliss it would be indeed to talk Coal out of her linens and leathers.  Bliss would it be to persuade her to join him for a quick immersion together in his beloved flotation tank.  Then he wondered if the tank would actually hold the two of them….
     When he suddenly emerged from this aquatic sex-reverie, he saw Coal inspecting the Fish poster—which she had found on his desk with the earlier death threats.  She held up one of the death-threat notices and the missing dog sign beside it.
     “What do you think, Cass?  Same artist, right?”
     “I suppose so. Yeh, could be.”
     “Almost certainly is.”
     “So?” said Cass.
     “So I’d better phone this Bliss character.”     

TORONTO, A NOVEL: Chapter 36

The phone rang just as Coal Blackstone was lifting Fish—now as wet and slippery as his name—from the sudsy bathtub wherein  he had just undergone his third bath in the three days since Coal and her partner, Lincoln Ford, had taken him in.  Coal hurriedly set Fish on the bathmat, swaddled him about in an enormous black towel and rushed down the hall to the phone.  It was Joy Pommery.
     “What are you doing right now?” Joy asked her.
     “Washing a dog.”
     “That doesn’t sound much like you,” said Joy.
     “I know,” said Coal, attempting to blow a tuft of bubble bath from the end of her nose.   “That’s what Linc says too.  What’s on your mind, Joy?  I really have to get back to the wet pooch. I left him in the bathroom, shivering in a towel.”
     “Well, I won‘t keep you long from your dog-wrangling,” said Joy. “It‘s just that this kind of odd thing has happened.”
     “Yes?”
     “Yes. Cass and I were having lunch yesterday at a little place he likes out in the west end,” Joy explained, “and as we were waiting for a cab, we noticed, stapled to a telephone pole, a poster reporting a lost dog….”
     “You think it’s the dog I brought home?  You think it’s the one I have?”
     “Well, I don’t know,” Joy told her.  “You can’t tell.  There was no picture of the dog on the poster.  Just the fact that it’s apparently called “Fish.”  And then there’s a name and phone number to call.  Somebody named Bliss.”
     “But how can anyone tell this Bliss they’ve got her dog if nobody knows what the creature looks like?”
     “Well that’s the thing,” agreed Joy.  “But that’s not really the reason I’m calling you.”
     “No?”
     “No.  The reason I’m calling is to tell you about these posters.   In the one Cass and I saw, the lost-dog message and the name “Bliss” and the phone number were all added on top of a really skilful—amazingly skilful—old master-type painting.  But it was clearly painted now.  Like yesterday.  And it wasn’t a reproduction or anything.  Whoever painted it, paints like Raphael or Caravaggio or…oh, I don’t know who.  Some great renaissance painter!”
     Coal kept thinking about the wet dog in the bathroom.
     “Did you take the poster with you?” she asked Joy.
     “Yes.  But listen, Coal—and I know you’re washing the new dog and all that—the painting of these posters was exactly the same kind—really very skilful—as were on those death-threat notes Cass was receiving.  Actually he’s still getting them.”
     “He is?”
     “Yes, I forgot to tell you.”
     “And you say the paintings of the notes look rather like the painting on the missing dog poster?”
     “Not rather like, Coal,” said Joy.  “Exactly alike.  I mean it has to be the same painter!
     Coal could hear the dog shaking excess water all over the bathroom.
     Listen, Joy, can you give me the phone number of this Bliss person?”
     “Sure. Got a pen?”
     “No, wait just a sec.”  Coal went to the kitchen, dried her hands, and came back to the phone with a small notebook and her favourite Mont Blanc fountain pen.
     “Shoot.”
     Joy gave her the number.
     “And you say the name is Bliss?”
     “Yes, and the dog’s name—if you can believe this—is ‘ Fish.”
     “Fish?” Coal was surprised to hear a sudden short yelp of what sounded about like recognition from the dog in the bathroom. 
     “I think I’d better give this Bliss person a call,” she told Joy.
     “Be careful, Coal.  It all sounds very weird to me.”
     “To me too,” Coal said.