We go across the yard. (‘Excuse me for taking you in this way but I don’t think the front door has been opened since Papa’s funeral, I’m afraid the hinges might drop off’), up the porch steps into the kitchen, which really is cool, high-ceilinged, the blinds of course down, a simple, clean threadbare room with waxed worn linoleum, potted geraniums, drinking pail and dipper, a round table with scrubbed oil cloth. In spite of the cleanliness, the wiped and swept surfaces, there is a faint sour smell — maybe of the dishrag or the tin dipper or the oilcloth or the old lady, because there is one, sitting in an easy chair under the clock shelf.
Walker Brothers Cowboy by Alice Munro
The three years in England came to an end, but Steve’s thesis remained unfinished, so they decided to go to Toronto where he could work on it a little longer with other, perhaps more helpful, supervisors. He flicked through the stout blue volume that was the university calendar.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘There’s a Drama Centre there too.’
Ten years after Madame de Correbas, Kate could study theatre.
They flew out from Heathrow, rising up through bleary cloud above the serpentine curves of the river moulding peninsulas of terraced houses and high streets with Boots the Chemist and Barclays and laundromats and building societies. Higher yet, they flew above hedgerows and woodlands and the little bosomy hills of the countryside. And out over the ocean and when they came down again, they were in Canada.
At first glance, Canada was white slabs of concrete carved into a sky of the most dazzling blue. Cars the size of pool tables swept down eight lanes of freeway before turning onto inner-city streets lined with horse chestnuts bearing candelabras of creamy blossom. It was all a surprise.
Kate knew nothing of Canada, other than some distant recall of the names of the Great Lakes. Canada was the piece that lay like a thick slab of pink icing on top of that other part of the continent which was fruit-cake thick with I Love Lucy and The Summer of Love and Catcher in the Rye and bourbon-and-coke and Bob Dylan, Henry James, The Graduate, highway diners, hamburgers, Manhattan, LA, Marilyn Monroe, the Monroe Doctrine, the Confederate South, the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, Abe Lincoln, convertibles, Cadillacs, Thunderbirds, Walt Disney, Walt Whitman, The Waltons, the White House, ‘The House of the Rising Sun’ and a million other random facts.
Kate had read just two Canadian books: Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery and Robertson Davies’ Fifth Business. The country was as shy, as understated and elusive as her own.
I stepped briskly — not running, but not dawdling — in front to the Dempsters just as Percy threw, and the snowball hit Mrs Dempster on the back of the head. She gave a cry and, clinging to her husband, slipped to the ground.
Fifth Business by Robertson Davies
They moved into a flat on Bay Street. It was a skinny house clad in brick-patterned tarpaper that peeled psoriatically at soffit and corner. It stood a little lopsidedly like a jerry-built kitchen cupboard on a corner, one block north of Bloor. Bay Street headed north until it ended, presumably, in the vicinity of Hudson Bay. South, it passed between the cliff faces of the downtown office blocks until it met the waters of Lake Ontario. Bloor Street ran east–west. Follow it far enough and it passed over an infinity of prairie, rose over vertiginous mountains and came at last to the distant Pacific. Follow it east and you came after a few thousand kilometres to the White Way of Delight.
Kate pushed up the window of their room. The sash cord had broken, exactly as the sash cords back home always broke, and the window had to be wedged open with a Collected Shakespeare. Outside the room an ash tree sent reflections dancing all over the ceiling. She looked out at their new view. The scale of the place, the expansiveness, was exhilarating. You could stretch as much as you wanted here, and never touch either wall.
Across the hall was Kevin from Kingston, who was studying medicine and lived in a room decorated with posters of women bursting like ripe fruit from black leather astride an assortment of big bikes. His ambition was to lure nurses, preferably ripe, preferably clad in black leather if at all possible — though he wasn’t fussy — back to this room, which he managed surprisingly often, given that he had hedgehog hair, thick specs and square yellow teeth like a row of wooden pegs. When a woman landed, he switched on an ultra-violet light that he had rigged to pulse in time to Led Zeppelin, his chosen music for fucking to. All night the flat vibrated to drumbeat and the grunts of mutual pleasure.
Downstairs on the first floor lived Tony, still studying his medieval saints, and across the hall from him, Clara from Alberta slept during the day, emerging as night fell to drop a tab before setting to work on one of the massive canvases that occupied the walls between her bedroom and the bathroom. She slashed at the canvases with a palette knife, producing thick intestinal tangles in savage primary colours. The bathroom was best approached with caution after midnight. Clara stood aside reluctantly as you edged past, her eyes glittery and blank as bottle-glass, the knife in her hand dripping thick blobs of bloody red onto the carpet.
Their landlord lived a few blocks away in the Annex. He called around from time to time to sit and drink coffee. William was only twenty-eight, not much older than any of his tenants, but he seemed already middle-aged. Maybe it was the suit: the tailored suit of fine wool, the white shirt, the silk tie. He worked at the stock exchange, dabbled in real estate and was determinedly set on his first million by thirty and retirement by forty. When he called round, he loosened the tie and said visiting the flat reminded him of grad school, which felt like a lifetime ago.
Two weeks after their arrival, he drove them up to Georgian Bay to ‘winterise’ the cottage. Houses here had to be tucked in, evidently, before the arrival of a winter more savage and determined than any Kate had previously encountered. They required special attention before being abandoned to the elements until the spring.
‘And you’ve got to see the fall colours,’ said Tony.
‘Oh indeed,’ said William. ‘The fall colours are compulsory.’ They said it the way people at home said, ‘You’ve got to see Waitomo.’ Or Mount Cook. Or the geysers at Rotorua. As if they were mentioning sights that were at once iconic and the clichés of a million postcards, a million souvenir calendars, a million placemats.
They may have been a cliché but Kate was unprepared for the exuberance of trees. Trees at home behaved with due restraint. They were subtle. They exhibited a kind of understated chic in shades of green and brown, season after season. Here the seasons clearly demanded something more dramatic. She looked out the window of William’s Volvo as they swooped past two-storeyed farmhouses and their attendant barns standing white and bare-boned against the rococo red and gold of their woodlots. She sat in William’s boat as they carved a deep wake between little pink islands upthrust like bare knees, skinned elbows, each bearing on their crests a twisted jackpine, a cottage with its flag lowered in deference to winter’s coming and a grove of golden leaf. William’s cats, Tristan and Isolde, meowed from their cages, thrusting out desperate paws like prisoners confined to some unspeakable Burmese jail. When the boat drew at last into one of the little islands, their cages were opened and they leapt forth to vanish, tails erect, into the brilliant wood.
The cottage stood solid and rough hewn overlooking an expanse of water turning gold in the setting sun. The air was already cold and scented with damp leaf and the end of summer and after dinner they sat by the fire and drank whisky because William said it was high time they learned to distinguish Laphroaig from Glenmorangie. Above the mantel hung a little row of wizened skins.
‘What are those?’ said Kate, sniffing for the vanilla tones that made such an unmistakable contrast, so William said, with the Islay tang of peat and seaweed.
William was selecting a cigar.
‘Philistine foreskins,’ he said. ‘Part of my collection.’ He rolled the cigar appreciatively, sniffed at the furled leaf. ‘I lure innocent young men up here and when I’ve had my wicked way with them, I toss their bodies into the water. But I always claim a souvenir first and nail it to the wall.’
‘They’re rattles,’ said Tony. ‘Snake rattles. There are quite a lot around here.’
‘So don’t go putting your handypandys into any crevices,’ said William. ‘You have no idea what may be lurking there.’ He struck a match, inhaled then exhaled luxuriously and stretched his boat shoes toward the fire. ‘The cats catch them,’ he said. ‘They are formidable hunters, aren’t you, my dears?’ The cats curled like velvet on his lap, resting between forays.
That night Kate lay listening to the strangeness of this place. The rustling of golden leaf, the yowling of cats reverting to the jungle, the cry of a bird somewhere out on the lake, of deepest despair, as if something irretrievable had been lost here for ever. She felt very small, like a child who had yet to learn a whole new language.
The next morning Tony showed her how to paddle an Indian canoe. They crossed the channel to a larger, neighbouring island while William fixed the shutters and Steve, the cabinetmaker’s son, helped him, happily wielding a hammer with a couple of nails clamped between his teeth. From mid-channel, Kate could hear the rap of their hammers echoing weirdly in the cavities of glaciated rock and the sound of William’s voice raised in a cheerful tuneless baritone. O contadi! he sang, to the brilliant morning.
Tony held the canoe steady as she stepped awkwardly ashore, then he walked ahead of her into the woods. Golden leaf covered the ground, golden leaf gathered overhead. He had on a red T-shirt with a little hole torn at one shoulder. Suddenly he lifted his hand and they both halted. Ahead, in a clearing, stood a young stag. They had approached him downwind and for just a second they were close enough to see the red flicker of his tongue tasting the air. He turned and saw them then, and once, twice he stamped his hoof, like some Spanish dancer in his pointed shoes, then he leapt to one side. There was some crackling of twigs and he had vanished. Gold leaves spiralled about dizzily where he had stood. Tony turned to her and his face was shining and Kate looked up at him among the flying leaves and thought, I love you.
The thought arrived from nowhere, unexpected, startling. She loved Tony, standing there with his rumpled hair and his ripped T-shirt and worn jeans. She loved Steve too of course, hammering away out there in the sunshine. She had assumed until then that marriage was a kind of inoculation: one jab, one set of vows, and you were preserved from falling in love with anyone else for life, but she’d been wrong.
For just a second, the possibility stands there, tasting the air: the kiss, the furtive liaison, passion in the afternoons behind drawn curtains once they return to the city, another life entirely. Tony is looking down at her. He reaches out and peels a leaf from her arm, gently as if it were another layer of skin.
‘Me too,’ he says, though she has said nothing. ‘I love you too.’ And the possibility leaps aside and disappears. They’ll do nothing further, say nothing more about it. But she loved him then. She’d love him always.
I love the subway. Not its denatured surfaces, not its weatherless tunnels, but its mad anonymous, hyperactive, scrambling and sorting; the doors sliding open in the station, the rush of people, their faces declaring serious and purposeful journeys they are undertaking … I like to think at the end of each of these rushed, wordless, singular journeys, there is someone waiting, someone who is loved.
The Box Garden by Carol Shields
Steve and Kate had no car, so they lived within the confines of the city. She loved the crowd waiting for the lights outside the subway entrance at Bloor and Bay, at the foot of the canyon where a small particular current always eddied, snatching at bags and briefcases and tossing women’s skirts around their waists. She loved Queen’s Park rattling with fallen leaves and the streetcars heading out to the Beaches, people resting bare arms on the windowsills in the last of the Indian summer and the press of all their languages on every side.
She loved kitchen tables in flats off Spadina or College where the talk was about events and people she had never previously heard of: Tommy Douglas, Joey Smallwood, the Winnipeg General Strike, the October Crisis and the War Measures Act and Emily Carr and federation and Louis Riel and Rene Levesque and the purging of Waffle from the NDP (they all voted NDP). NDP. CCF. RIN. FLQ. She loved the eccentricity that seemed to lurk below the earnest public decorum of Canada, where the country could be governed by a man like MacKenzie King who conducted a war on the basis of advice from his dead mother, whom he believed to inhabit the soul of his dog.
She loved hearing her friends talk about the places they had left to come here to the city: the Mennonite farm in Manitoba, with its acres of blue-flowering linen flax a misty ocean; the father who preached to his congregation in eighteenth-century German; the baby brother who died and was kept in a baby bath full of ice while the women of the community prepared his funeral; the crack in the earth from which snakes emerged after overwintering to mate in great seething knots in the weak spring sunshine.
They talked about canoe trips into the deep forests of the north, or skating parties along prairie drainage canals, the skaters spread out in a line moving across a disk where there were no hills or forests to break the perfect round bowl of the sky and its circular horizon.
Winter came to the city, and ice rinks formed in the parks where portly men, serious and pink-cheeked, skated about balanced on a single blade with one leg lifted elegantly behind, and the lights came on in the afternoon and the stores were filled with a dozen different contraptions for the toasting of sandwiches and a hundred different machines for the manufacture of the perfect latte. She loved winter evenings knocking a puck around a deserted schoolyard with garbage bins for goals and everyone playing hard, though she never quite got the rules.
‘Just slam it,’ said Tony, passing to her from the left. That seemed to be the only rule that counted.
Then spring arrived overnight: one minute it was slush and grime, the next the lawns had been rolled out and the flowers were fully formed and the smell of last year’s dog shit was sweet and noxious in the cool clear air and the chestnuts held knuckles of leaf. She loved the Beaches on an early summer morning, the joggers on the boardwalk, the sound of someone singing from an upstairs window, and hot summer nights when the Portuguese families played cards until after midnight on their porches and the Chinese ladies talked across the width of the street, their bamboo fans flapping like moths’ wings in the light from the open windows and the air was soft and heavy around them all as a woollen blanket.
They left the city infrequently, and when they did it was usually by train. Kate looked out at the townships along the way with their wide, empty streets and plain houses. Railway lines are sneaky things, designed for glimpsing the back door, the back yard, the heap of wrecked cars, the shambling downtown, not the bright perfect face presented to the road. She looked out at the towns and the farms and swamp and forest as the train, horn blaring, carried them up to Montreal to visit David and Toba, who had returned from Oxford to a house crammed with the astonishing clutter required for the nurture of small children: baby buggies and little bicycles parked in awkward hallways, swings on springs hung in doorframes, an avalanche of Lego over the living-room floor, the only uncluttered place the little back bedroom Toba used as a studio. Between nappy changes she painted: not the folk-art designs but tiny images of the sky, ‘because that’s what you notice when you come back to Canada, all that sky’, overlaid with details painstakingly copied from Mantegna, Vermeer, Holbein. A cherub’s upturned face, a pearl earring, ‘because it’s all I’ve got time for, and anyway, I like details. You can learn a lot from studying details.’
To have my closet inviolate, to be sole empress of my tea-table, which you must never presume to approach without first asking leave. And lastly, wherever I am, you shall always knock at the door before you come in. These articles subscribed, if I continue to endure you a little longer, I may by degrees dwindle into a wife.
The Way of the World by William Congreve
The Drama Centre had its offices in a miniature version of an Oxford college, complete with St Catherine’s bell and the standard ex-services porter breathing lunchtime ale through a waxed moustache. Robertson Davies presided. He strode magnificently each morning across the park in a Tennysonian hat and swinging a walking cane Kate suspected might be malacca. She passed him sometimes on her way to classes in dramatic theory and practice.
The students were a varied lot and plays at the centre were performed in a corresponding Babel of accents: Canadian of every provenance — rural Ontarian, prairie, eastern seaboard; a pick’n’mix from south of the border; English, both posh and regional; Scots; Irish; German; Australian. It did not seem to matter here. The Way of the World was about love and malice and what it meant was more important than uniformity of diction. Rehearsals went on late into the night and repaired afterwards to a café on Bloor Street where the cast ate French fries and steamed pudding among a mêlée of late workers and insomniacs: the kind of men who sat for hours over a coagulating coffee, probably planning how to concrete their landladies into the basement. The kind of women who tottered in from temperatures edging toward zero in halter tops, hot pants and silver wedge-sandals.
‘Well, here we are,’ said Donna, a law student who was playing Foible. She was picking all the currants from her pudding and arranging them, tinker tailor soldier sailor, around the rim of her bowl. ‘All looking for love on the twilit streets of the mean city.’
She was plump as a pudding herself, not to mention sporting a fierce squint and problematic facial hair.
‘Jello in a sack,’ she said, resignedly spooning up custard. ‘It’s just as well I’ve got a fabulous personality.’
But she was also a gifted mimic. In her hands, Foible was running off with the play.
Humh (says he), what, you are a hatching some plot (says he), you are so early abroad or catering (says he), ferreting for some disbanded officer … Night after night, the cast was reduced to that helpless hysterical rehearsal giggling that made the director sigh and say, ‘Okay, you guys, take five.’
Seated in Vic’s, Donna arranges the currants on her plate rich man poor man beggar man and performs episode 503 in the long-running soap that was the Disastrous Love Life of Donna Da Silva: the Date With The Man Who Worked With Her Cousin In Detroit. The Jazz Buff.
She had bought these new shoes, death-defying stilettos, micro skirt, shoulder-length earrings, the whole catastrophe, and he turned out to be five foot, a fact her cousin had omitted to mention. But never mind: they went to this place downtown — leather couches, jazz band, pocket-size dance-floor — and they were getting on fine. He talked, she sat and said a-ha, a-ha, the way they mistake for intelligence, and then he suggested they danced and he was one of those guys who throws you about, spins you out, reels you in and she was trying not to fall off the stilettos and then suddenly the band switched to slow and sexy and he came in for the clinch and he was whispering something against her neck and she nodded and Jesus, there was this ripping sound — brrrrrt — and whaddya know, his hair was caught in her earring. No kidding, it came right off, and there she was with some kinda squirrel hanging from one ear and this little bald guy was jumping about like Rumpelstiltskin hissing ‘Give it back! Give it back!’. But she couldn’t and the more he hissed the more hysterical she became but finally she got it disentangled and he snatched his hair and went off to the men’s room and just disappeared. Left her high and dry with the bill to pay.
‘So,’ says Donna, doctor lawyer Indian chief, ‘I don’t think I’ll be dating anyone recommended by any member of my family again. Not ever.’
She has them exactly: the irritable little man, the hopeful idiot who is herself. She makes a gift of her embarrassment and frustration, the story-teller’s gift, to the cast of rakes and ladies gathered in the steamy warmth at Vic’s.
Three nights a week Kate also worked late at the university library. Her job there was to issue books, alongside a stern Lithuanian who supervised the night shift. Valda wore a permed blonde helmet and was a passionate advocate of colonic irrigation. Between student enquiries, which she dismissed with brisk disdain, she described its benefits in graphic detail.
‘Iss amazink vott iss in ’ere,’ she said, patting Kate’s stomach. ‘Meat. In beeg lumps zat rot and steenk.’ She was in love too, with Max, who had been a businessman in Budapest but had been unable to find comparable employment here. He wore a suit and tie nevertheless to do the shelving, bowed slightly when encountered on the stairs and maintained a dignified demeanour at all times. The library extended several floors down. Silent secretive places where the smell of old paper mingled with the furtive pong of orange peel and chewing gum, though the rules were clear. NO EATING. Valda made it her duty every evening on the hour to patrol the stacks evicting wrongdoers. She returned with her hands full of unwrapped candy bars, bananas and peanut butter sandwiches.
A girl arrived one night at the desk, breathless.
‘There’s a man downstairs,’ she gasped. ‘He’s crawling between the desks and the wall. He … well, I had my shoes off while I was reading and he started rubbing his … well, his dick on my feet. He’s down there still. On C Floor.’
‘On C Floor?’ said Valda. ‘Zat is strange. Zis man, with ze feet, ’e is usually on B Floor. I shall call Mr Korda.’ She pressed the buzzer to summon Max. He materialised instantly from the stairwell in his grey suit like the ghost of Hamlet’s father emerging from the trap, immaculate even in death. Valda meanwhile was leaning toward the girl, who had run barefoot up three flights and was holding in one hand a half-eaten apple. Her eyes snapped.
‘You haff been eating!’ she said.
Kate walked home from rehearsal or library along the midnight streets, planning how to tell it. From the corner, she could see a light shining in their window on the top floor. Steve would be working, seated at the table they had found in a bin one night on Forest Hill: a perfectly good dining table along with two matching chairs. They had carried it home where it joined the other trophies in their room: the bed from another bin in the Annex, an awkward find that had to be carried with difficulty along the dark streets, Steve at the back, Kate at the front. The easy chair that was missing only one leg had come from Cabbagetown, where someone was busy rehabbing one of the old worker’s cottages. Beside the easy chair in the window embrasure stood their most valued find: the silver ashtray borne aloft by an ecstatic dancer. It was amazing what people here threw out. All their clothes came from bins too, or the Salvation Army Store. Winter jackets, jeans, a couple of curtains Kate had stitched together and wore with a tasselled cord as a belt. She loved roaming about this city scavenging, improvising their shared life.
Steve straightens up as she opens the door, wiping his eyes clear of the after-image of words. He had work too, translating a coffee table book on Viking art for Phaidon, its original Danish as convoluted as the tangle of serpents on a bronze shield.
‘How was work?’ he says.
Or, ‘How was rehearsal?’
And she tells him the stories she has planned on the way home: about Donna and the jazz buff’s toupée, or Valda and the foot fetishist from C Floor. They lie together on their pilfered bed, arms around each other, laughing and telling the inconsequential tales that those who sleep together under a single sheet exchange at the end of every day.