THE RESEARCH HE’D BEEN DOING was walking through the park. If he got to know Alexandra Park, he figured he’d know something about Jackie. So he would take the walk through the park not to run into her by chance, well, not wholly, but to gain something of her that he might have, like everything else perhaps, taken for granted. The one time that Jackie had allowed them to come to her house was when they were all suspended from high school. He only remembered vaguely. Her mother teaching them to play euchre, a glass of Southern Comfort at hand and a cigarette to her lips. Jackie was uncomfortable, he remembered. She kept emptying her mother’s ashtray and wiping the table. That was years ago, but now that he revisited the occasion in his mind, that is what he recalled. Jackie’s discomfort. None of them had thought anything of the surroundings. They all lived in houses with their parents, but Jackie’s parents’ tiny apartment did not strike them at the time as so different. His walk now told him something else. His parents weren’t rich or even well off by any means, but they obviously lived better than people in Vanauley Way. And this is where Jackie had always lived.
He knew, as a black man his age knows, that the park had a reputation. It was turf in the low-level war for such places waged by poor people. If there was history being made in the city, if history was the high-level war rich people waged for their own turf in the city—those wars about waterfront developments and opera houses and real-estate deals and privatization contracts—then the poor waged wars for control of their small alleyways and walkways, their streets and the trade in unofficial goods. Their currency was not stocks, wealth and influence peddling, but tough reputations and threats of physical damage; their gains weren’t stock options and expensive homes but momentary physical control and perennially contested fearsomeness. This war was a more volatile war, perhaps. There was no cushion of security to land on if you lost a skirmish.
Come to think of it, now that he recalled, that experience hadn’t brought them closer to Jackie, hadn’t brought him, to be exact; she had become more aloof with him. Her mother had taken a liking to him and had said to him jokingly, “You sweet on my Jackie, eh, boy? You’d make a fine man, you will,” and Jackie had frozen him out after that. Though he was so stupid, he thought now, that he’d kept asking Jackie how her mother was. He had liked her. There was a sweet drunken look in her eyes and a faded beauty to her face—something lurking that had come alive when she said, “You sweet on my Jackie, eh, boy?” A glint in her language, something smoky and seductive. Jackie had given her a hateful look and said, “Mom, puh-lease!” And the disdain gathered in that “puh-lease!” had fallen on him in some ways ever since.
Fair enough, he thought, nobody wanted to have the approval of their parents for their love life—after all, look what a mess they’d made of their own, for God’s sake. His own parents’ marriage went through seasons of emotional drought bordering on hatred, then periods of what only seemed to be nostalgia for their younger, more exciting selves. He certainly wouldn’t take a drop of advice from them about love. And he would suspect anyone they thought would suit him as a lover. But that was then and this was now. Come to think of it, he had been faithful to that moment of Jackie’s mother’s seduction. She had added her own allure to what he felt for Jackie.
What he felt now was no teenaged crush but a big man’s love and lust, a powerful pull that told him he would not enjoy his life fully if she were not close to him, if he could not talk to her, if he could not always be in the orbit of her face. So he had resolved that if he wanted her, he would have to know what she knew, walk where she had walked, and figure out the things that had given shape to her. Alexandra Park was one of those things.
He’d never met Jackie’s father, but there was a tall man, just as tall as he, coming toward him who was unmistakably him. Oku felt nervous but realized that Jackie’s father didn’t know him, so he could easily pass him by. The man had a limp to his walk, probably not a limp from any injury but from some sense of style. His head leaned to one side the way black men in sixties movies leaned their heads. A comfortable thought passed through Oku. The brother was old school. It was that lean of the head that told him this was Jackie’s father. Jackie had the same slant, the same way of sizing you up at the same time as making you know that she was dangerous. Jackie resembled her mother more than her father, but his height and that threatening lean of his head Jackie had taken from him. He limped toward Oku, and assessing him as no threat, he walked by. Oku called to him: “Mr. Bernard.”
Jackie’s father stopped. “I know you, man?” he asked. Oku felt as if his answer had better be correct. In that “I know you, man?” was a challenge for respect. Oku recognized it. It was couched in another generation, but the machismo was recognizable. It was a question about dominance, and territory, it said, Don’t be trifling, and what the fuck do you want?
“No, sir,” Oku said with the required deference. “I’m a friend of Jackie’s, and I saw you and I just knew you had to be her father.”
“Oh yeah, that’s my girl, how you know her?”
He hadn’t said the right thing. The interrogation would get deeper now, the stakes were higher. “We went to high school together, sir.” He dropped the second “sir” in to reassure Jackie’s father of his total respect.
“She ain’t around today. Haven’t seen her in a week or so, you know. She down at that store …” Jackie’s father trailed off as if he’d found something disturbing in what he’d said.
“Oh, I was just passing by. You tell her I said hi, eh?” Jackie’s father looked at him quizzically. “Oku’s my name, sir.” Oku reached his hand out, and Jackie’s father took it.
“All right, young brother, all right. See you on the tip.” He limped on, going toward Queen Street.
Oku watched him go, then regretted not asking him to go for a beer or something. Maybe he’d lost an opportunity, but he didn’t want Jackie feeling he was prying, he didn’t want to repeat that incident years ago when her mother’s attention got him the cold shoulder. So he watched Jackie’s father go. There was the old player in her father; the hand clasping his had been cool yet brotherly. The face was slightly twisted in the way that older black men’s faces invariably were. Something wry seemed to be constantly slipping across their lips; some knowing tale, as if to say, “Yes, I know that bullshit. Took me a life to figure it out and I still ain’t got it. Beat that.” One day his own face would register that truth, but he hoped not.
As Jackie’s father disappeared west along Queen, Oku felt wistful for him. He felt the concentration of the man, the insecurities that had to be gathered up, the opportunities that were imagined but never came, the vanity that his body allowed him, all gathered in that limp like some bird feigning weakness to protect what was valuable. He looked around at the perilous stuff of Alexandra Park.
What must have scared Jackie was Vanauley Way. The scarred brown buildings. The dry hot walkway in the summer, the dry cold walkway in the winter. Her coats with the polyester stuffing coming out, the nylon tearing so easily. Why couldn’t they have planted a good tree anywhere here, why couldn’t they have laid out beds of plants and flowers, a forsythia bush or two, a grove of hostas, some forget-me-nots, some phlox, smoke trees now and then, mint bushes and rosemary, why had it been so hard for the city to come up with a bit of beauty?
The narrow winding walkway, virtually empty in the daytime, scarred-looking, teemed with a ghostly, sometimes scary life at night. With one thought they could have made it beautiful, but perhaps they didn’t think that poor people deserved beauty. Lavender, for instance, could grow anywhere. No reason at all that the walkways, which were not built for cars, could not have been made into an oasis of flowers, grasses, bushes, with perhaps a cobbled walk. But at least lavender. Then at night it wouldn’t be that shadowy, that dim. And in the daytime people would have come out to front yards and puttered around, had a coffee, said “hello” and “how you doing?” to children, and “careful there, careful now.” In the nighttime the gloom would have been lit by people sitting in their gardens with lanterns, a little laughter would have passed in the air—not the kind of laughter that was derision and self-mockery or smirking at someone else’s folly or misfortune but real laughter from the small joy of life. There would have been wine and music, and not the kind of wine that you drank eventually to numb the inconsequential-to-anyone-else disaster of your life, and not the music that makes you remember a perfectly lovely time at the Paramount bitterly, but the music that makes you remember that time self-indulgently.
A rose bush in the front of 113½ Vanauley Way would have tasted the rains of fifteen, twenty years in Toronto and thickened and twisted its wood over that doorway like loveliness. Yes, why not a plantation of rose bushes all along Vanauley Way, millions of petals growing and falling, giving off a little velvet. It’s amazing what a garden can do. And Jackie could have sure done with a place like that. They themselves tried a few perennials in window boxes; they tried to make the best, but then had it been a garden instead of that dry narrow roadway, Jackie’s childhood might have been less hazardous.
People defended that park, saying to the city, in so many words, Don’t drop all your negative vibes on us, we’re trying to live the same as everybody, but if you couldn’t see it in your heart to put a garden in here, if you tarred over every piece of earth, then don’t blame us. Would it have killed them to splash a little colour on the buildings? Yes, it may have cost a little more in the first place to make the ceilings a little higher, the hallways a little less narrow, but in the last place think of the perspective: the general outlook might have been worth it. The sense of space might have triggered lighter emotions, less depressing thoughts, a sense of well-being. God, hope! The park wouldn’t have driven Jackie’s father and mother to drink like it had. And the dream of going back down east for good wouldn’t have faded and died right there on the narrow asphalt paths of Vanauley Way.
Even the dream of staying in this city would have survived. A barbershop of his own, maybe, for Jackie’s father instead of the penitentiary in Guelph for two years less a day—which turned out to be eight months that time—for receiving stolen goods. Another stint for B and E at a computer factory when he sold IBMs for ten points on the street. And why did he have to come back to Jackie’s mother hanging out at Wilson’s on Bloor, some asshole following her around and calling her up and hanging up in his ear? So she said to him that she couldn’t be waiting around for him forever, and he said, “fair enough,” but she knew that he was doing time for them, doing time wasn’t recreational, what did she think, he was up in jail partying? And why’d she have to rub it in his face, bring it in his house, and what about Jackie, did Jackie have to see all this shit going on, what kind of woman was she going to turn out to be if her mother was a whore?
“Whore, whore,” she said. Now he’d gone too far, now he’d gone just too far; did he want her to leave his ass this minute, this very minute, ’cause if she was a whore, she wouldn’t be with him, he should be glad she wasn’t no whore, a whore wouldn’t have time with his sorry ass, and look, look here, he had promised her a good life down here, and there it was, he was in jail half the time and they were starving or ducking the police half the time, and the nasty words he saved for her, and where was the sweet life when he could not even hold down a chair at Golden’s Barbershop for one half second and he was running the streets and had her tailing behind him and they had a mouth to feed, and where did he think she got the money to feed herself and Jackie while he was gone? Think some government cheque was enough to cover their ass, and time, doing time for them, yeah, all right, true enough, but do some time outside, do some time here with her and Jackie. Had she, she, not stayed as long as she could in that godawful job in the comb factory? Packing one green comb, one yellow comb, one pink comb, and one red comb in a box all day long for four dollars and twenty-five cents an hour. She’d packed combs until she was dizzy; she’d given combs to friends, sold extra combs at the hairdresser’s, until the novelty of working in a comb factory had worn off and she was sick of packing one green, one yellow, one pink, and one red comb into a box the whole livelong day. And love, love was about finished, where was her joystick, where was her man, she was a young woman still, where was her loving?
Jackie’s father said that he could feel his “boy,” meaning his dick, growing deader year after year. He could feel it beginning with the tip. Each year another centimetre would go. Which is why Jackie’s mother began to get terrible bruises on her face and arms, raccoon eyes, and just a low-down feeling in her gut the whole time.
They weren’t the same people who had taken that train to Toronto fifteen years ago. Well, no one ever is, but they weren’t those two people much more so than they’d imagined. They weren’t the people they were going to be or had set out to be, the people they had envisioned. Look, okay, they hadn’t envisioned. Who does, except rich people? You simply throw yourself at life, and the narcissism of being young and beautiful and handsome and strong and eager and ready is supposed to see you through. So when Jackie’s father asked Jackie’s mother to marry him and they had a big wedding at the Cornwallis Baptist Church in Halifax and everybody turned out and Jackie’s mother got pregnant that very night when they rolled around on satin sheets at the Four Seasons Hotel for that one night for which Jackie’s father had cut hair and shaved chins like a demon, they were young and in love with each other and themselves and the world. And when Jackie’s father’s uncle phoned up and said, “Come on out here, boy. It’s a happening town,” they got on the train in their psychedelic pants and cocked hat and Indian blouses and came just like that because they were still young and still in love with each other and themselves and the world. What’s wrong with that kind of narcissism? So they didn’t envision, no, they thought that they were young and beautiful, and it wasn’t a lie, and it ought to have been enough. It’s enough for a lot of people, why not them?
Jackie heard all this when her mother and father were trying to keep their arguing low and when they were so mad they didn’t care to spare her. Between her parents and Vanauley Way, she wondered what she was going to do. She did them all a favour by making a plan. If the city didn’t have the good grace to plant a shrub or two, she would cultivate it with her own trees and flowers. And so she did. In her mind.
Every day she walked down paths of magnolia trees and lilac bushes; wisteria hung over the arbour and doorway of 113½. In the spring she walked around complimenting the tulips: the parrots, the Rembrandts, the triumphs, the double early, the viridiflora, the double late, the hummingbird, the clusiana. She loved lobelia at her feet and just the names helianthemum and habranthus. All these and more she found in a book called The Expert’s Flowers by Dr. N. T. Humphreys. She walked from Vanualey Way to Harbord Collegiate in tumbling, arching cream shrub roses. And if her mother and father couldn’t love one another or could only love one another in this reckless, undefined, unreliable way, she would love them with a passion but with a discipline.
It was riding the tip of his tongue; it was hovering in his brain. He knew it wasn’t simple. Jackie hadn’t left Alexandra Park. She owed a loyalty to her mother and father. That faithfulness didn’t mean that she wanted to have it burn her as it had them. Hence, the white boy. Oku knew this logic. He knew that to Jackie he probably looked like so many burned-out guys in Vanauley Way. Young, but burned out, so much wreckage. How could he tell her that he wasn’t wreckage? How could he, when he was depending on her to tell him that? What could he tell her then? Number one, that he wasn’t a player. He would have to shed any ambivalence about that. Number two, he wasn’t her father. He would never allow that look to come into his eyes, the wry look, the defeated look, the bitter look. He was going to work the rest of the summer, the rest of the year, then go back and finish the master’s. Why? Because he loved that, and what he loved he wasn’t going to have taken from him or give up. Next, he had held her, he had felt her, he was certain, he simply had to be there. Jesus, who was he promising all this to? All right then, himself. He was promising this to himself.