TORONTO: A NOVEL

TORONTO: A NOVEL—Chapter 54

While his two spiffy subalterns were poking gingerly at their hot hamburg sandwiches, Mayor Cass had been tucking into his western omelette, and was now swirling the last fragment of egg into a rivulet of dusty ketchup that edged his plate on its eastern side.
     “No sirree, not a bad western omelette!” boomed Cass. “I guess you make a ton of these things in a day, right?” he asked Homer.
     Homer shrugged. “They’re pretty popular.”
     “Ever make a Reuben sandwich?’
     “I don’t think so.”
     “Oh, you’d remember if you had. Smoked meat—like pastrami. Sauerkraut. Russian dressing. On dark rye.”
     Homer shrugged again. “Uh huh,” he said.
     “So what do you do when you’re not frying up the chitlins here?” Cass asked him.
     “I paint.”
     Cass was rather taken aback. So were the two subaltens, who looked at one another in something between bewilderment and amusement.
     “You mean like houses?” said Cass.
     “No, I mean like paintings,” Homer replied in a distinctively stony voice.
     “So what do you paint?” asked subaltern One. “Like clowns on velvet or something? Or children with big eyes?”
      Homer looked as if he were going to the kitchen for a meat cleaver.
     “Old Masters,” he said.
     There was a bewildered silence.
     “But haven’t the Old Masters already painted the old masters?” Cass asked him, grinning at his luncheon companions.
     “Not my way,” said Homer.
     “And what’s your way?” asked subaltern two.
     “Smaller, usually. But just as good.”
     “So you copy the Old Masters?” Cass asked him.
     “I copy them to start, and then I sort of bring them up to date.”
     “How?” Cass asked.
     Homer was beginning to chaff under the rubbing of all these questions.
     “You guys want more coffee?”
     They all did, so Homer passed from uplifted cup to uplifted cup, pouring out refills.
     “You don’t by any chance have any of your things here with you do you?” Cass inquired.
     “I got a couple in a portfolio out in the kitchen.”
     “May I see them?”
     “I’ll show you one, I guess,” said Homer, without much enthusiasm. He sauntered out to the kitchen and came back a few seconds later with a small painting on paper, clearly based on Raphael’s Saint George and the Dragon. He held it up for Cass to see.
     The Mayor was dumbfounded. He stared at the little painting for a long time in total silence.
     “What’s the matter, your Worshipfulness,” joked subaltern one, “you like this thing or something?”
     “Or hate it?” asked subaltern two.
     “Or are you afraid of it?” suggested Homer helpfully.
     Cass’s face had turned an unhealthy shade of beige. He looked again at the little painting and back again at Homer’s oddly impassive face and then back to the painting again.
     “And you painted this?”
     “Yep, I did. This and a couple hundred others. You oughta see my Boschs. They’re my best ones. Very nice and creepy! Organs and body parts everywhere!”
     “This one’s creepy enough,” said subaltern one.
     “But this looks just like the paintings I was getting in the mail with death threats scrawled across them,” said Cass, his voice anguished enough to alarm both subalterns at once.
     “Yeh that’s right,” replied Homer. “Those were the ones! They were my paintings. Well, okay, photocopies of them. And my death-threats.”
     “Jesus,” said Cass.
     “Scared you, huh?”
     “”Fuck, they scared the beejesus out of me! What do you think?!!”
     “I think they scared the beejesus out of you!”
     “But why? Did you really want to kill me? Do you now?”
     “Well, to tell you the truth, it sort of wore off—as a plan.”
     “I’m glad to hear it,” said Cass, beginning to perspire profusely.
     Subalterns one and two looked at one another in dismay. The Mayor seemed distressed, they observed, but not panicky.
     “Should we call the police?” subaltern one asked Cass. “Or an ambulance or something?” suggested subalten two.
     “An ambulance?” said Homer.
     “No, no of course not for chrissake!” Cass barked at them. “Why would I want an ambulance?”
     “Well, you know…for him,” said subaltern two, pointing at Homer. “You know…like with straightjackets and all that stuff!”
     “Restraint,” muttered subaltern one.
     “Balls!” said Cass.
     “That’s right,” said Homer, grinning broadly. “Balls!”
     “I don’t understand,” said Cass. “What‘ve you got against me?” The two subalterns glanced quickly at one another and tried to suppress smirks.
     “Well, I dunno,” Homer replied, “where do you want to start? First of all, everybody hates you, not just me.”
     Cass looked unhappy but not angry.
     “Yeh,” he said wearily. “I suppose so.”
     “So lots of people probably want to kill you, not just me.”
     “You really think so?” Cass turned to the subalterns. “You think that’s true?”
     “No question,” replied Subaltern one.
     “No question at all,” agreed subaltern two.
     “Listen,” Cass said to Homer. “You got any pie or anything”
     “There’s one slice of cherry left and two slices of apple,” Homer told him.
     “Fine. I’ll have the cherry and they,” he said, pointing to the subalterns, “can have the apples. With ice cream,” he added. The subalterns looked trapped.
     “We don’t have ice cream,” said Homer.
     “Without then,” said Cass.
     “Okay. I gotta tell you, though,” Homer added, “they’ve been sitting there for a while. They’re not real fresh.”
     “What do you care?” Cass asked him. “You’ve been sending me death threats!!! And now I’m supposed to be frightened of stale pie?”

TORONTO: A NOVEL—Chapter 53

Homer Rubik was slid the 68th western omelette of the day onto a plate and toted it the length of the counter to the only customer in the place—officer Brice Sweetman, who was perched heavily on the stool nearest the window.
     “Where’s Bliss today?” he asked Homer in as affable a voice as he could manage, now that he was actually thinking of Homer’s gigantic female friend. “I almost miss not having that stupid dog of hers piss on my pantleg!”
     “Fish really is a dope,” said Homer.
     “And Bliss?”
     “Back in her subway station, I guess, hanging around the payphone in case somebody calls her about the dumb dog.”
     Office Sweetman lifted a great forkful of fraying omelette to his mouth and washed it down with a swallow of cold coffee.
     “I’ll give you this, Homer,” he said. “You make a pretty decent western omelette.”
     Homer nodded moody thanks and thought about how much he disliked cops—including Brice Sweetman—and Bliss and Fish…oh gawd especially Fish…and omelettes and the dishwater that Nick’s restaurant had the balls to offer up as its daily soup, and the gypsum pies that lay about calcifying in glass cases, and the vat of soy-based gravy mix on the back burner of the stove, with which Homer would glumly anoint the innumerable plates of fries and the Hot Hamburger sandwiches (a ground beef patty, white bread, gravy all over everything, french fries and a spoonful of dead canned peas) which had remained steadfastly popular since Nick’s had first opened in 1946.
     What Homer hated the most about cooking up all this stuff was that for some cruelly perverse reason, it reminded him of painting. And painting was all he really ever wanted to do.
     Homer was just blue-skying increasingly impractical ideas about how to blow Nick’s to Kingdom come when the door swung open and in walked the Mayor of Toronto, the fatter-than-life Cass Tamburlaine. He had two guys in suits in tow and, much to Homer’s annoyance, the three of them seemed intent upon scoring lunch.
     “Gentlemen,” muttered Homer. “What can I get you?”
     The mayor looked quickly at Officer Brice Sweetman and his western omelette.
     “I tell you what,” said Cass Tamburlaine, stuffing himself into a maroon naugahyde booth, and gesturing that his two subalterns should join him there, “that omelette the officer’s having looks alright. Make me one of those. With white toast and coffee.”
     The other two looked slightly panicky and, in a momentary reversion to childhood dinners they had both endured with estranged fathers in southern Ontario bus terminals —circa 1972—simultaneously ordered Hot Hamburger sandwiches and diet cokes.
     “You going to drink something, Mister Mayor?” Homer asked Cass.
     So you recognize me!”
     “Pretty hard not to,” said Homer.
     “Sure, I’ll have a Tab,” Cass told him. “No wait, make that a Fresca.”
     “Fresca, right,” said Homer, repairing to the kitchen to extricate two frozen beef-like patties, a plastic bag of frozen fries, and two eggs from the refrigerator.
     “I’m normally in search of a perfect Reuben sandwich,” Cass told his companions, “or even an adequate Reuben sandwich,” but they’re so fucking hard to find now!”
     The two men nodded in a vaguely understanding way.
     “You know what a Reuben sandwich is, right?” Cass asked them. They both looked mildly embarrassed. They looked identically embarrassed, as a matter of fact, like Tweedle-Fucking-Dum and Tweedle-Fucking-Dee.   Cass sighed. He decided not to bother explaining. “Anyhow,” he told his luncheon companions, “There’s no point in trying to get one here.”
     The two nodded sagely, full of sense of appropriate regret for the losing of a sandwich neither of them knew anything about.
     “Well, be seeing you, Homer,” said Officer Sweetman, mopping his mouth with a paper napkin and throwing eight bucks onto the counter.
     “See you,” Homer called out from the kitchen.

*********************************************
     Across the city, in the penthouse of a stunningly transparent condo building near the waterfront, Coal Blackstone was slowly readying herself for an upcoming photo-shoot. This time it was for a magazine layout, a deliberate ripping-off-of-or-homage-to—depending how bitchy or charitable you felt—of editor Stephanie LaCava’s recent and influential insistence, in her magazine, Elle, that the “Lolita look” was back. “You can be Lolita forever,” La Cava had written—or words to that effect. Coal felt she had never encountered a more exhausting idea in her entire life.
     The photographer for the shoot was not to be her inamorato, Linc Ford—as she had hoped—but a guy named Gregory Ehrenburg, whose work Coal detested.
     Coal idly wondered if LaCava has ever actually read the Nabokov novel, or whether Ehrenburg had. She doubted it. The book was sad and funny and wise and dispiriting and incandescently brilliant.   She knew the opening by heart: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.”
     Lo. Lee. Ta.
     Just then, Linc strolled into the bedroom, holding a slice of last night’s pizza in one hand and a can of Orangina in the other.
     “Going out?”
     “It’s that ‘Lolita Look’ shoot,” she told him.
     Linc smiled.
     “It’s sort of a compliment to you, wouldn’t you say?”
     “You think so?”
     “Well,” said Linc, biting off a chunk of pizza, “Lolita was supposed to be pretty young, wasn’t she?”
     “Fourteen.”
     “Well, there you are!”
     “Where?”
     “Being able to pass!” grinned Linc.
     “Maybe with makeup and banks of lights and judiciously arranged shadows.”
     “Ah c’mon, Coal, you’re the very essence of Lolita!”
     “Linc, I just hate that idea! I’m two decades older than Nabokov’s nymphet, and I want to look like that!”
     “Geez, Coal,” Linc sighed, “it’s only fashion! Lighten up.”

TORONTO: A NOVEL—Chapter 52

     Rory was coming to regard this long walk he was taking through Toronto with Bongo Bearance—his newly-acquired muse—as a genuine journey of discovery. It was a rather compressed way, he decided, both of getting to know Bongo better, and of learning an awful lot about writing in a remarkably short time. Bongo, he decided, was a good bargain.
     She was also cute as heck. They were walking east along Hoskin Avenue, drifting past Trinity College and, at Bingo’s insistence, were about to turn north and stroll up Philosopher’s Walk to Bloor Street.
     Rory reached over to take Bongo’s hand in his. Bongo smiled sweetly and gently disengaged it from his tender, proffered grasp. Rory looked unhappy about this.
     “It’s just that I don’t think muses ought to hold their authors’ hands, or…” she giggled, “anything else belonging to them.” Rory looked crestfallen.
     “How come?”
     “Because if I’m supposed to be your Muse,” she told him, “we have to keep the channels clear.”
     “Channels?”
     “Yes. I guess it’s sort of like what happens in a séance. We can’t permit any sort of interference between us!
     “And you think erotic attraction would count as interference?”
     Bongo punched him playfully on the upper arm.
    “Oh my, yes!” she laughed.

     Violet Dollop found to her dismay—as well as to her delight—that writing was beginning to take over her life. What was both absurd and beguiling was the pressure—an intoxicating pressure but a pressure nevertheless—to get everything down: everything she saw, heard, tasted, felt, read about and pondered. She had never experienced this kind of archival imperative before. It bothered her a little, but not as much as it infused her with joy. What was so compelling about being a recording angel, she wondered. Was it really about leaving a trail behind you made up of everything you were and continued to become? Was it really, in the end, about mortality? Was she building a stout wall around her own vulnerability--as if the grim reaper might not recognize her if she were disguised as a bulwark, as a fortification.
     What a strange image this Grim Reaper figure was, she suddenly thought to herself. So pastoral. The harbinger of a leisurely country death, cutting you down as if you were bloomed wheat. She made a note to herself to write an essay about the Grim Reaper. She would call it “The Old Man and the Scythe.”
     But was the figure really a man? How could you tell? It was mostly black cloak. With a skeleton’s hands. What would today’s version be? A skeleton in guerrilla fatigues, waving around a…what? She took a moment to google for help. “Newest machine guns?” she typed into her laptop. Then she continued to write in her notebook: “a skeleton in guerrilla fatigues wielding a Korean Super Aegis 2.” Cumbersome, she noted, but probably accurate.
     Violet wrote and wrote and then read and then wrote again. She became so utterly dedicated to her labours that she didn’t even hear Tom come in.
     “Still at it?” he asked as cheerfully as he could, trying to mask the slight irritation he felt by passing it off as mere surprise. He hung up his coat and rubbed his hags together—a peculiar gesture, when you really look at it (as violet immediately did), that apparently announced a genial and hearty “what’s next?” kind of inquiry.
     “I’ve been at it all day,” Violet told him. “I rather lost track of the time.”
     “So there’s no dinner?”
     “Well, not yet anyhow,” replied Violet, “but there soon could be.”
     “Like what?” asked Tom suspiciously.
     “Well, I could make a pasta,’ said Violet. “And a salad.”
     “Okay. What kind of a pasta?”
     Violet thought for a moment.
     “How about a nice spicy Fettuccini Puttanesca?” she asked him. “Tomato sauce, onions, red peppers, chillies, black olives, anchovies, artichoke hearts, capers, oregano….”
     Wonderful!” said Tom, cheering up somewhat. “You got all that stuff?”
     “I think so. So listen, I’ll start getting things ready and you put on the water for the fettuccini, alright?”
     Tom rather sullenly out down the newspaper he had just picked up.
     “Violet, I’ve had a really long, demanding day,” he told her.
     She looked at Tom, sitting heavily in his favourite chair. “Fettuccini Puttanesca, which is to say, fettuccini as the whores like it,” Violet thought to herself.
     “I know dear,” she told him.

     May was sitting in her workspace at the School of Architecture, trying to come up with a more elegant solution for the design of a central atrium for a Mediterranean summer home than she had managed so far.
What he had done was pedestrian, heavy, without nuance.
     Her T.A., a gaunt young man wearing severe Le Corbusier spectacles, hadn’t been very impressed either. His name was Hugo Hayden and he was still, in this new age of architectural détente and “healing,” an unregenerate post-deconstructivist.
     Your scheme is too resolved,” Hugo told her. “What you want,” he insisted, “is something that seems more unsolicited. Your idea shows too much agenda,” he insisted, taking a pencil and scribbling “TMA” across the bottom of one of her drawings. May looked at the three letters and then at Hugo and then down at the three letters again. “TMA.” Thanks Mister Asshole! she thought merrily to herself.
     “Do you understand what I mean?” Hugo asked her, looking for just a second too long down the front of her blouse.
     “Oh yes,” said May, in a tone so steady you could check it with a spirit level. “I think so.” She immediately felt a little better to think that the lofty Mr. Hayden had merely been reading the back issues of Volume magazine again. ‘Unsolicited’ indeed, thought May.

TORONTO: A NOVEL—Chapter 51

Rory and his suddenly acquired muse, Bongo Bearance, were strolling east on Queen Street—past the street’s viral breakout of semi-chic restaurants, and its scattering of fast food outlets and clothing stores.
     “There used to be used bookstores all along here,” Rory observed.
     “Tons of them!” said Bongo. “I especially miss Abelard Books. I miss it very much.”
     “Me too.”
     “I once bought a really gorgeous three-volume set of Boswell’s Life of Johnson there.”
     “Nice,” said Rory, thinking it was a pleasantly odd sensation to be walking through the city with a woman who had read Sam Johnson.
     Bongo suddenly smiled rather puckishly at him.
     “Do you know Johnson’s definition, in his Dictionary, of ‘sonneteer’?”
     “Johnson wrote a dictionary?”
     “He did. In 1755. All by himself!”
     “And so what is a sonneteer?” Rory asked, feeling he really didn’t want to know very badly.
     “Sonneteer,” writes Johnson. “A small poet.”
     She laughed merrily, as if this revelation was the most amusing thing she’d heard for a long time.
     “Why is that funny?” Rory asked her.
     “Because,” said Bongo, poking him sharply in the chest with her right index finger, “that’s you, my poetaster friend!”
     “A small poet?”
     “Not in stature of course,” Bongo giggled, looking at him admiringly from head to toe, “but in poetic ambition, aspiration, vista, and all that, you are, so to speak, housebound.”
     Rory sighed.
     “Housebroken,” he added.
     Bongo smiled. “So what are we going to do about it?”
     “We?”
     “Well, I’m supposed to be your muse, aren’t I?”
     “I was half kidding.”
     “Well I wasn’t,” said Bongo gaily. “I’m on the job. I’m taking this muse business very seriously!”
     Rory didn’t know whether to be pleased or apprehensive. He decided to allow himself to be both.
     They had reached University Avenue and turned north.
     “I hate this street,” said Rory. “It’s wide and civic and hard and impersonal.”
     “I bet you’d like it better if it had a big whacking Arc de Triomph straddling it somewhere. Then you’d think you were in Paris and you’d feel all noble and exhilarated!”
     Twenty minutes later they were turning into the University campus.
     “Let’s go to Hart House and have tea!” said Bongo.
     “Hart House? I haven’t been there for years.”
     “I go there all the time,” said Bongo happily. For me, it’s still fragrant with the effluvia of Lawren Harris and A.Y. Jackson and Emily Carr and Carl Schaefer and Northrop Frye all those brilliant, larger-than-life people!”
     “The last time I was there,” said Rory glumly, somebody had backed a chair into a painting by E,J Hughes and put a dent in it.”
     “That’s awful,” said Bongo.
     “What’s more awful is that nobody seemed to notice—or care.”
     “Well,’ replied Bongo, “that’s where you have to locate your poetry.”
     “What do you mean?”
     “In the realm of damage and remembrance—among other carefully chosen locales.”
     They had their tea. Rory ordered a cinnamon roll, but it was stale, and he threw it in the garbage.
     “More poetry,” said Bongo.

TORONTO: A NOVEL—Chapter 50

Rory Pendrift swilled the last of his cafe latte—now ice cold. The cup was stuck all over inside with recalcitrant bits of crema, hard now like the stubborn, mussy snowdrifts of early spring.

Rory made his way out into the glare of a sunny Queen Street morning. It was shaping itself into another aimless day, he thought to himself, as he paused a minute to ponder whether to walk east or west. He chose east.

It was part of Rory’s contention, as he proceeded to pick up the threads of his fitful, fragmented but ongoing analysis of the causes and meanings of his rudderlessness, that everything would be different if he hadn’t been saddled with his absurdly ambitious father, the Old Artificer, who was now throwing up condo buildings all over Toronto.

“Ivanhoe!!” he said out loud as he walked, thus considerably unnerving a middle-aged woman passing in the other direction. “Why call a condo Ivanhoe? You may as well call It Classics Illustrated!!

In fact the whole idea of naming was causing Rory distress. How, for example, could he ever have titled his first—and so far only—book of poetry Dragon’s Breath? It was so fucking quaint. So goddammed Arthur Rackham! So gruesomely Edmund Dulac! Every word in the stupid book seemed to Rory to sprout elves ears. Every thought came equipped with little pointed leathern shoes curled up at the toes. He fervently he wished he could recall all 250 copies that had been printed—at his own expense. Well, maybe he still could. It wasn’t as of any of them had sold.

Six blocks further east on Queen Street, he went in to another coffee shop, sat in the front window—the chair now broiling with the blanketed heart of the midmorning sun, and—stupidly, he knew—ordered a second latte. It came promptly, far too promptly somehow, and by the end of the second sip, Rory knew it wasn’t a latte he wanted at all.

He wanted a muse.

But where did you get a muse?

High-powered fashion designers had muses, he knew. Like Valentino. Like Yves Saint Laurent. Maybe Karl Lagerfeld. Alexander McQueen sort of did. But did poets have muses? Real ones, he meant, not remote Robert-Graves-White-Goddesses lounging about in the night sky.

It’s what I need,” Rory said in a loud voice over his latte.

“What’s what you need?” asked a young woman he hadn’t yet bothered to notice who was sitting a few seats over from him in the greenhouse-hot front window. She was toying with an espresso and gazing at Rory with something like bemusement.

“A muse,” he said, scarcely glancing at her.

“Why?” she asked him.

“So I can write better poetry.”

“How does this muse person help with that?” she asked.

“I’m not really at all sure,” replied Rory, taking a sip of his unwanted coffee. “She just helps you be a better writer somehow.”

“But how?”

“I told you,” said Rory, beginning to grow agitated, “I don’t know how.”

“But you expect this muse person to know, right?” she said.

“Well, I think they’re trained to know all that stuff,” replied Rory weakly.

“Oh yeh? Where do they get that kind of knowledge? The girl asked him. “Is there s school for muses?”

I know you can get a museology degree,” Rory said.

The girl smirked.

“That’s for studying museums!” she told him. “Are you sure you’re a poet? You don’t really seem very bright!”

“Oh I guess I’m not, really,” Rory told her. Not knowing what to say next, he them decided to gaze out the window onto the street and stay gazing until a certain number of people had strode by. He watched them with little interest, just letting them settle into time like beads on a string. After a few moments, he turned back to the girl.

“Twenty-six.” She said.

“Twenty-six?”

You let twenty–six people go by before you looked at me again. An entire alphabet!”

“Really? Twenty-six? I didn’t do it on purpose.”

“Well, not consciously, anyhow.”

“You counted them?”

“Oh, not really,” she told him. I just looked up when it felt as if an alphabet’s worth of people had passed by our window!”

Rory was becoming intrigued by this strange girl, despite his best efforts not to be.

“Who are you?” he asked her.

“Who are you, first?” she asked back. “I don’t want to be first into the fray.”

:My name he is Rory Pendrift.”

“A contradiction in terms,” she laughed. “Rory is fierce like the roar of the MGM lion, while ‘Pendrift’ is tentative and goalless, a scratchy pen meandering across the paper, looking for completion, for closure, for haven, for rest. You don’t know where the hell you’re going do you, Rory Pendrift,” she smiled.

“No,” he answered quietly.

“So what‘s’ your name?”

“Bongo,” she told him. “Bongo Bearance.”

“Bongo?”

She took a final sip of her espresso.

“My father named me that—after a little cartoon bear in the funny papers when he was a kid. Bongo rolled around everywhere on a unicycle. He was a Disney character, but he was never very popular, and Disney finally dropped him. My real name,” she added sweetly, “is Bailey Bearance. But Bongo sort of stayed with me.”

“I like it,” said Rory.

“Me too,” grinned Bongo.

TORONTO: A NOVEL—chapter 49

They weren’t going to have desserts, but Akanksha was so persuasive about the light, buoyant wonder of the restaurant’s puddings, they each ordered one.
     Tom had Kheer, a rice pudding rich with cardamom and raisins, while Violet, led to it by Akanksha’s insistence that this particular dessert was almost an extension of her being, ordered Rasmalai, a light milk pudding made with ricotta cheese and flavoured with saffron and pistachios.
     Akaksha floated by as they were finishing.
     “And so does Mrs. Dollop feel well served by her Rasmalai?” he asked her, smiling broadly in the assurance of her answering in the affirmative.
     “Heavenly!” she told him. “Like a cloud!”
    Tom smiled.
     “How’s the writing going?” he asked her.


     While Lincoln Ford was busy pulling a rack of lamb chops from the broiler, Coal Blackstone was hard at work whipping up garlic mashed potatoes. Fish sat near them on the kitchen floor, a look of expectancy alternating with one of resignation. Would he get some lamb chop, he wondered, or would he not?
     Linc arranged the chops on a platter and looked dyspeptically at the eager Fish, waiting beside the refrigerator, looking as cute and deserving as he could make himself look.
     “So what are you intending to do about this dog?”
     “He’s cute isn’t he!”
     “No,” said Linc. “He‘s scruffy and weird and he makes me nervous.”   Linc turned away to uncork the wine. He set to the task first using their fancy-dancy Rabbit wine opener, for which he soon substituted an old-fashioned hardware-store corkscrew. Coal was amused.
     “You got something against the Rabbit too?” she laughed. Maybe you just don’t like animals!”
     “I don’t much.”
     “What’s the problem with the Rabbit?”
     “It looks too much like a real rabbit,” Linc told her. “I don’t like this silly kind of anthropomorphizing of everything. This is supposed to be a corkscrew, for goddsake, not the Easter Bunny! I feel a fool trying to uncork a bottle of wine with a rabbit. It’s like something out of an old Disney cartoon!”
     “Alice in Wonderland!” said Coal.
     “Yeh, maybe. They may as well manufacture Flamingo wine openers. Or Giraffes.”
     She looked up from her potatoes, to which she had just added a little additional splurge of cream, and then began spooning them into her favourite serving dish which, she hoped Linc wouldn’t really notice, was made to resemble thatched leaves of lettuce. Maybe a thing isn’t anthropomorphized unless it’s made to look like a creature, she thought to herself, drifting morsels of parsley over the top of the potatoes. Lettuce leaves probably didn’t count.
     “This wine,” Linc announced, “is going to be sublime.”
     “What is it?”
     “A Chateau Mont-Redon, Cotes-du-Rhone Rouge from 2005.”
     “2005?”
     “Yep. Almost ten years old!” said Linc proudly. Coal giggled.
     “What’s so funny?”
     “Oh nothing,” replied Coal gaily. “It’s just that I remember being at this swank restaurant in London once and the host, who was keen to make a huge, sweeping gesture of no-holds-barred hospitality, decided to order a bottle of sauterne from 1939—the year he was born. It was elaborately brought to the table, in its beautifully dusty, golden bottle, and we all dutifully read the venerable label, and when the waiter opened it, nothing came out! Not at first, anyhow. Then, as we all watched intently—torn between hope and relief—there was this soft, rather repulsive oleaginous gurgle, followed by a slow slide of thick honey-like material that came inching out of the bottle only to plop, finally, like very expensive jello, right onto the host’s plate! We were all horrified and amused, in equal measure. Our host was close to tears. The wine was certainly old, but it was simply too old!”
     “Well, sic transit Gloria,” Said Linc. “Glory fades.”
     Coal looked momentarily depressed.
    “But not yours,” he assured her quickly, kissing her on her forehead.


     The Mountainous Mayor Cass Tamburlaine was dining out with his long-time mistress, Joy Pommery, who had elicited from her worshipful lover a solemn promise that they would go somewhere—anywhere—where it was impossible to order a Reuben sandwich.
     And so they found themselves at 360, “The Restaurant at the CN Tower,” slowly revolving over the city. Cass always found the moving panoramic views exciting. Joy found them slightly queasy-making.
     “This place has been revolving for a long time now,” said Joy. Isn’t anybody afraid the mechanism will seize up or break or something. Like in metal fatigue?”
     “I’m not,” said Cass, beckoning a waiter.
     “It could be like that merry-go-round at the end of Strangers on a Train,” Joy persisted, “where the gears get jammed or something and it spins out of control, killing a lot of people!”
     “What do trains have to do with anything?” Cass asked her absently, beginning to study the wine list.
     “Things that spin around and go out of control,” said Joy.
     “Trains don’t spin around,” said Cass.
     “In the movie!”
     “What movie? What are you talking about?”
     “In Alfred Hitchcock’s film, Strangers on a Train,” Joy told him, her voice loud enough now, she noticed with some embarrassment, to catch the attention of a few of the other diners.
     Cass looked blank.
     “I don’t know it,” he said. “You know I’m too busy to go to movies, Joy,” he added.
     I don’t like being in high places like this,” Joy said in a suddenly tremulous voice. “Not after 9/11.”
     Oder some dinner,” said Cass. That’ll make you feel better. What do you want to eat?”
     “Vegetables,” she told him, her voice small with a anxiety.
     “Geez, Joy,” Cass told her, you’re really not a lot of fun to have dinner with!!”

TORONTO: A NOVEL—Chapter 48

Violet wrote all day. She filled page after page with stuff about car design and culture, about chromium trim and national ardour, about the tailfins of the 1950s—as emblems of American post-war optimism and vectors of workaday prosperity. She made a note on a facing page, reminding herself to write a novel—after she had gained a little more confidence—to be called Harley Earl: A Novel. She would keep notes for it in a separate workbook.
     When finally she looked at her watch, it was 5:30 pm. Tom would be home in about an hour. She hadn’t given any thought to dinner. She wondered if he had? Then she went back to her writing.
     At 6:27 on the dot she heard the car sigh into the driveway and at precisely 6:30, Tom opened the front door and strode into the hallway. He hung up his raincoat, looked around—as if he were faintly surprised to find the house the same as he had left it in the morning—and called out to Violet.
     “I’m in the kitchen,” she called out in reply.
     Tom came back to the kitchen, gave Violet a peck on lips, opened the refrigerator, bashed two ice cubes free from the grip of the stinging cold tray, carried them quickly across the room, where he took down a glass from the cupboard, tossed the ice cubes into it, dried his wet, freezing hand on a tea towel hanging by the sink, went back to the refrigerator, pulled the bottle of gin from the freezer, poured a couple of fingers of it over ice cubes, rummaged around in the fridge until he found what looked like the last can of Canada Dry tonic water, snapped the tab, and poured half of the can into the icy gin.
     “Do you want some lemon?” Violet asked him.
     Tom started, as if he’d been caught out at something slightly improper.
     “I’m sorry,” he told her. “I forgot to ask you if you’d like one of these!” Violet had just spotted a moment of verbal infelicity on her scrawled page and was leaning over to correct it.
     “Violet?”
     She looked up quickly.
     “Yes?”
     “Do you want a drink?”
     “Oh, I’m sorry, Tom, I just spied something stupid I’d written here and wanted to fix it before I forgot where it was.”
      “But about the drink…yea or nay?”
     “Nay,” said Violet absently. Then she looked up and smiled at him. “But thank you anyway.”
     Tom put his drink on the kitchen table and sat down.
     “Do you want to go out for something to eat?” he asked her.
     “Okay.”
     “Where would to like to go?”
     “I don’t know. Thai, maybe? Or would you like sushi?
     “Sushi seems too cold for tonight. It’s cool and rainy outside. I’d like something warm and comforting.”
     “How about Indian? That’d be warm and comforting.”
     “Or,” said Tom, insinuating his arm about her waist amd giving her a boyish grin, “we could just stay home and you could be warm and comforting.”
     Voilet gently unwound herself from his arm.
     “Let’s go out,” she said.
     An hour later they were seated at a table for two in the front window of the Agra Tandoori restaurant, which was not far from where they lived, out in the Junction. It was a nice little neighbourhood place, warm with red paint and gold hangings and brass elephants. The maitre d’, Akanksha, knew them, and they always felt comfortable there.
     What do you fancy?” Tom asked.
     You know what I’d love?” Violet told him. “a plate of Goll Baji with a dish of Tamarind puree! Heaven!”
     “Okay, but that’s just an appetizer. Aren’t you hungry?”
     “Not very. It’s the writing I think. It takes all my attention and I forget about eating.”
     Tom smiled. “Maybe dining here will bring it all back to you.” He glanced over at Akanksha, who came smiling up to their table.
     “Have you decided?”
     “What’s that wonderful okra dish we had here a few weeks ago?”
     “I think you and Mrs. Dollop has our Bhindo Masala,” said Akanksha.
     “It was great! Lets have it again,” said Tom. “And some Butter Chicken!”
     Akanksha looked momentarily discomfited. Butter chicken, yes,” said Akanksha thoughtfully. “I wonder if you and Mrs. Dollop would mind it I made an alternate suggestion?”
     “Speaking for myself,” said Violet, “Mrs Dollop would be delighted!”
     So would Mr. Dollop,” Tom added.
    “We have tonight a lovely Bombay dish called Parsi Chicken with a Apricots, rich with tomato, ginger, dried apricots and garnished with potato straws…”
     “Sounds delightful,” said Tom.
     “Most satisfying,” murmured Akanksha happily. And off he went to the kitchen.
     “And some Naan bread!” Violet called after him.
     Akanksha returned, smiling, to their table.
     “Try some Saag Roti,” he said. “Roti with a spinach base.”
     They both smiled up at him, and suddenly the dinner was entirely decided—fixed and promising.
     “You were right,” Violet told Tom happily.
     “About what?”
     “The idea of eating. It’s coming back to me!”

TORONTO: A NOVEL—Chapter 47

He did, yes. As unappetizing as Michael felt the experience might become, he really did want to look at some of Homer Rubik’s paintings. There was something uncanny about them. They looked like Old Master paintings—like greatly reduced versions of Titians, Tintorettos, Rembrandts, Caravaggios. It was all crazy but oddly compelling to gaze upon. And anyhow how in hell did this semi-bestial short-order cook learn to paint like this? With this much technical skill?
     And the thing was, Homer didn’t just paint small copies of Old Master paintings. He didn’t in fact, copy them at all. He never painted replicas. What he did was to paint new pictures that evoked the Old Masters, that were carefully painted in the traditional, historical ways.
     But the creepy thing about Homer’s paintings—despite the wondrous skill with which they were made—was that their content was always horribly awry. There was never any serenity in Homer’s paintings, never any grace. If he set painting a Saint George slaying a dragon, his dragon was sure to be depicted slaying Saint George.
     One painting, a big one for Homer, depicted the birth of Venus—a golden, tumble-haired Venus standing naked and assured on a giant clam shell now washed ashore. She was pretty much as she was in the Botticelli original, except for the fact that right behind her, emerging from the pretty Adriatic waves, was an enormous octopus waving its tentacles threateningly in her direction. Indeed, as Michael noticed upon closer inspection, one sinister tentacle had already encircled the goddess’s left ankle.
     Homer noticed Michael staring at his Venus.
     “Pretty hot, huh?” he said.
     “Disturbing” Michael replied.
     “Birth of Venus,” Homer grumbled.
     “Looks like her birth and imminent demise, all at the same time.”
     Homer gave a grunt and walked off to the kitchen. He was gone for over two minutes, at which time he reappeared carrying two cans of Coke and a Lost Dog poster. He handed Michael a can and held up the poster.
     “This is what I made for Bliss, to help find Fish,” he told Michael. It was the poster with the colour photo-copy of Lorenzo Lotto’s Judith clutching the severed head of Holofernes—with Bliss’s cell phone number on it. And no photo of Fish anywhere. The poster was Fish-free.
     “How did you expect Bliss to get Fish back if you didn’t show what the stupid dog looked like?” Michael asked.
     “I don’t care if she ever gets Fish back.” Homer said.
     “Yeh, that’s pretty clear. But so why make the poster at all?”
     “I didn’t want to piss off Bliss too bad,” Homer told him.
     “You cared what she’d think?”
     Homer grinned lasciviously.
     “I like to get laid,” he told Michael.

     Violet Dollop had now begun to write in earnest. She consigned her scribblings to coil–bound notebooks, which she bought, a dozen at a time, at the Dollar Store in a nearby shopping plaza.
     She usually wrote, once Tom left for the office, on the kitchen table—just after she cleared away the breakfast things.
     It was lovely and quiet after Tom’s departure. But while she was grateful for the quiet, her heart went out to Tom, who, given the company’s recently relocating their offices to somewhere in the wilds of Don Mills, now had to inch up the Don Valley Parkway every morning and inch back down again at the end of the day. Tonight, when he got home, she was going to ask him what he did—what he thought about in those three hours of inchworm transition-time. She supposed he listened to the radio. CFRB? CHUM-FM? Some Indie station or other? She hardly imagined he listened to the CBC. She wondered if he ever just sat at the wheel of the car, glassy-eyed, reading the licence plates of the cars in front of him. Se used to do that sometimes when they were stuck in traffic together. She smiled to herself. The couple that sits idling together stays together. That could be a bumper sticker.
     Lately, whenever she was in the car with Tom, and they were in traffic jams—and when were they not?—she had begun to study the design of automobile tail lights. They were weirdly similar—despite the make of car—and yet eerily distinctive.
     She found it surprisingly absorbing to note the way the red part of the fixture—the stoplight—shared a housing with the clear part—the back-up light—and how the car’s designers had decided upon and negotiated the relative authority of each light’s function. Surely stopping (red) was a more urgent signal than merely backing up (the clear lamp)? She could remember when cars didn’t even have back-up lamps. She could also remember when trucks didn’t go beep-beep-beep when they reversed. She often wondered whether any truck’s alarmed beeping had really ever prevented an accident or an injury?
     But it was tail lights she was really interested in. She found them fascinating enough that she had decided to attempt an essay about them.   She was intrigued how, of late, tail lights had been mounting up the back of cars and framing the rear window and even, sometimes, venturing out onto over the car’s’ rear hatch, up near the roof. She was astonished at how bright they had become. Tail lights today were almost as blinding as headlights.
     She sat at the kitchen table, opened a notebook, took her new fountain pen from its case, out on the kettle to make herself a cup of tea, and began to write. She had eight full hours before Tom would be home again.

TORONTO: A NOVEL—Chapter 46

“Well,” Linc began, “did you know that someone tried to run down the mayor with his car, just outside of City Hall? It was a big old Chrysler Imperial—from 1956. ”
     “I see it in the paper,” said Peter, refilling Linc’s cup with more thick, fragrant coffee. “Somebody doesn’t like the Mayor much I guess!”
     “Nobody likes the Mayor much,” Linc replied, “but most of us don’t try to run over him with cars!”
     “Would put a big dent in your…what is that car you got again?
     “An Austin-Healey.”
     “The little red one, yes?”
     “Yes.”
     “You hit the 300 pound Mayor and boom!”
     “Boom?”
     “No more Austin-Healey!!” said Peter. “Listen, you want some custard?”
     “No thanks, Peter, I gotta go. But let me know if you ever see a big black Imperial parked outside.”
     “The one with the gun-sight tail lights?” asked Peter.
     Linc laughed.
     “Nobody can forget those silly gin-sight tail lights!”

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

     May left for a day’s classes at the School of Architecture and Michael readied himself as best he could to pay the studio visit he had promised Bliss Carmen—no doubt foolishly—he would make to see more of Homer Rubik’s dismayingly precise and off-puttingly grotesque Old Master drawings and paintings.
     He was strangely troubled by the fact that Bliss Carmen, wasn’t going to be meeting him there.   Not that he was fond of the gargantuan Bliss—not by any means. But while she and her silly dog, Fish, were every bit as unwholesome to Michael as Homer Rubnik himself was, the last time he was at Home’s studio –if that’s what you’d really call such a malodorous ruin—she did serve admirably as a buffer. A big fleshy, boisterous buffer between him and her mad painter-lover, Homer. Michael didn’t relish having to navigate his way alone through Homer’s clenched and horrible pictures, or small-talk his way through Homer’s gnarled silences, but there really didn’t seem to be any way around it.
     At precisely eleven, therefore, he knocked on Homer’s door.
     “Who’s there?” growled a Homer-like voice from somewhere behind the door.
     “It’s me, Homer. Michael Moskos. I was supposed to meet you here today at eleven, remember?”
     The door swung viciously open, and there stood Homer Rubik, rumpled boy-genius, stained and smelling of a combination of oil pigments and the cheap vegetable oil in which he deep-fried everything at the diner where he worked part-time. Homer glared at him.
     “You’re late.”
     “I can’t be late,” Michael replied. “You said eleven and it’s just eleven now. Look!” he said, thrusting his wristwatch into Homer’s face. Homer stood gruffly aside and Michael proceeded further into the rank studio.
     “Want anything?”
     Michael looked quickly around the cluttered space, took in the encrusted coffee-maker and a couple of mouldy-looking cups, and decided he didn’t.
     “I’m fine,” he said. “Thanks all the same,” he added quickly, remembering how quick Homer was to take offense.
     “Whatdya want to see?”
     “Whatever you want to show me,’ Michael replied affably. “Why don’t you show me some of the posters you made when Fish went missing?”
     “Stupid dog,” muttered Homer.
     “Where is Bliss anyhow?” he asked Homer, as offhandedly as he could.
     “You like Bliss?” Homer asked him suspiciously.
     “Oh, well…yeh, I like Bliss okay, I guess. I don’t know her very well. I met her on a streetcar. Her and Fish.”
     “Dumb dog,” said Homer.
     “But Bliss told me Fish was missing. Wandered away or something.”
     Homer smirked.
     “He walked onto a subway train waiting at the Spadina station” he said. “Where Bliss lives,” he added. “Bliss is upset. Me, I’d be relieved!”
     “So she asked you to make some posters to put up around town.”
     “Near the subways,” said Homer.
     “Any luck so far?”
     “Getting him back, you mean?
     “Well, yes,” said Michael.
     “See, it’d be luck for me if she never got him back!”
     “But you made the posters anyhow,” said Michael encouragingly.
     “Yeh.” Homer grinned a most unpleasantly carnivorous grin. “But I didn’t put the stupid dog’s picture on them.”
     Michael thought this over for a second or two.
     “So, what good are they as posters then?”
     “No good at all, I hope,” said Homer fiercely. “So listen, do you want to look at some paintings or what?”

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

TORONTO: A NOVEL—Chapter 45

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