16.

THE DAY OF CINDY’S MEMORIAL, I had planned to skip work to spend a quiet morning preparing myself psychologically for the impending ordeal. I would show solidarity with the community and solidarity with Wanda, whom I still loved if no longer cherished.

But my quiet morning was not to be. Instead, I endured a string of unwanted phone calls—first from a bill collector, then my mother, and finally Carmen apologizing that she would not be able to open the store.

The bill collector called at six a.m., presumably to catch me asleep and off guard, which he did.

At the time, I was imprisoned in a dream in which I was being chased, accused of some unspecified crime for which I bore some obscure, generic guilt. I had escaped into a church and slipped into the back pew, only to notice my mother in the pulpit, standing upright and clothed in a purple robe. I ducked, but not in time.

“Marguerite, I see you,” she intoned.

Slowly and purposefully, she lifted a white surpliced arm and pointed at me.

“Listen to your mother,” she said. “I have met with the Reverend Jerry Falwell, and he has explained to me how the rampant homosexual lifestyle has brought upon us the wrath of God. Now he may not be Catholic, but the man knows that of which he speaks. Marguerite, it is you and your ilk who carry the responsibility for this latest campaign of terror. The world is being punished for your sins. Beg God for forgiveness. Now! Before it is too late.”

She jangled a rosary at me—jangle, jangle, jangle—like a jangling telephone.

Half-awake, I fumbled for the receiver.

“You better be ready to go to jail,” a voice shouted in response to my foggy hello.

I didn’t do anything, I thought. It wasn’t me.

“Better start saying your goodbyes.”

“Pardon?” I said, still too disoriented to be other than polite.

“This is Ms. Requeer? Ms. Sara Requeer, owner of Common Reader Books?”

Despite the mispronunciation of my surname, which is Requier, I admitted to being myself.

“Well then, Ms. Requeer, I’m informing you officially that you are on your way to jail. Fraud is a criminal offence in this country, in case you don’t know.”

Fraud? I sat up.

“Who is this? What are you talking about?”

The voice was calling on behalf of Dustycan Publishers and referred to a specific outstanding invoice for $312. I vaguely remembered the amount and less vaguely a pile of statements on my desk at work: Final Notice, stamped in red.

“You ordered and accepted books that you had no intention of paying for, and that, in the eyes of the law, is fraud.”

“But I had every intention of paying for those books, and I still do. It’s just that the fall season has been unusually slow. I should be able to send you a cheque next week. We just hosted a very successful reading, and we’re planning a huge sale next weekend.”

“A closeout sale, you mean.”

“What? Good heavens no. Just a plain old regular sale.”

“Really. My sources inform me that you’re in the process of closing down the business.”

Sources? What sources?

I had discussed my financial difficulties with only two people: Wanda and the bankruptcy trustee. Wanda, for all her faults, is intensely private and would not have said anything to anyone, not even her new darling Cindy. As for the bankruptcy trustee, he had assured me that our discussion was confidential. Perhaps the book reps had been gossiping. They could not but have noticed the dwindling stock and small advance orders I had been placing.

“It’s true that I might decide to close the bookstore at some point,” I told the bill collector, “but for now, I’m doing my best to keep it going.”

“Which is neither here nor there. The facts are clear, Ms. Requeer. If a cheque for the full amount is not on my desk within five business days, I will see to it personally that you are prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”

I pictured a balding man reclining in a black leather chair, feet up on a cluttered desk, a smoking cigar butt in a stinky ashtray, hands clasped behind his head as he barked into a speakerphone.

“Look, I’ll send you money at the beginning of next week, I promise. And I’ll do my best to pay the whole amount.”

“You’re not suggesting partial payment?”

“Well, yes, I am. It’s not just Dustycan, you see. I’m behind with some of the other publishers as well, and I’d like to send you each a little something. Spread the wealth, so to speak.”

“Not acceptable, I’m afraid. Five days. Full payment. Or else.”

The voice was suddenly closer, deeper, more intimate, as if it were no longer on speakerphone—the voice of those kneecappers on kitschy gangster shows.

“I repeat. You have five business days. That gives you until Friday, five p.m., Eastern Daylight Time. Otherwise, I will see you in court. Good day, Ms. Requeer.”

His drawn-out Ms. buzzed like a sarcastic cut at the entire Women’s Movement: Mzzzzzz….

After the bill collector, my mother called.

No hellos. My mother got straight to the point. The devil had taken up residence in her computer, the brand new one she bought only last week. He had snuck in sometime during the night.

“When I turned it on this morning, he was already skulking around in there,” she said. “The computer wouldn’t respond to anything I did. Even when I tried to shut it off, it kept on with its dirty business until it was finished. Then it shut itself down, just like that.”

I sighed and explained that it was probably a worm or a virus of some kind.

“It’s normal,” I said. “It happens all the time. It can be fixed.”

“Marguerite, this was anything but normal. I’m telling you, it was him. Oh, these are evil times, evil wicked times. And, listen to this: it was eleven a.m. when I bought the computer—on Tuesday the eleventh, remember? I checked the bill. Now eleven o’clock is exactly fifteen minutes after Flight Eleven—note, Flight Eleven—crashed into the World Trade Center. And it was eleven p.m. on the dot when the computer shut down of its own accord. And don’t forget that your father died on November eleventh. Now you can’t tell me all of that is coincidence. The devil has an affinity for certain numbers, you know.”

“What exactly were you doing when it happened?”

“Trying to print some prayer cards. Yesterday after Mass, Father Mulligan asked for volunteers to make copies of some special prayers, you know, prayers to protect us from the terrorists. As usual, I was the only one who stepped up, even though there are other people in the congregation who know lots more about computers than I do. Mr. Schmidt, for example. I don’t know why he never volunteers but he never does. He owns his own computer company and everything. Anyway, you know how I am, always willing to do whatever I can to help. I found this beautiful, precious image of the baby Jesus on the Internet, and I spent all of last night formatting the cards with it. But this morning, when I tried to print the cards, there he was, ready to pounce.”

“Mr. Schmidt or the baby Jesus?”

“Don’t mock me, Marguerite. You know who I’m talking about.”

By the time my mother had got the finished prayer card up on the monitor and pushed “Print,” the baby Jesus had mysteriously transmuted into a naked man, and the new and speedy laser printer had spewed out one colour copy after another of what I imagine was a generously endowed male hunk.

“It was sacrilege, Marguerite, absolute sacrilege. Blasphemy. I closed my eyes and made the sign of the cross, but when I opened them that disgusting man was still there on the screen. I feel faint just thinking about it.”

My mother pushed Ctrl/Alt/Del, only to have a different naked man pop up. She tried to shut the power off, but each time she touched a key or clicked the mouse, a different beefy male popped up to fill up the screen.

“I tell you Marguerite, I was beside myself. Then I remembered that Herb knows about computers, so I ran to the top of the stairs and called down for him to come up right away.”

Herb is the man with no legs who lives in my mother’s basement during the coldest months of the year. In the summer, he stays at an inner-city shelter. I don’t know his last name or how my mother met him, but I think it had something to do with the church. I have a vague recollection of a story that involved Herb collecting alms on the cathedral steps and the church administration chasing him off and threatening to call the police, and my mother rescuing him. In any case, the arrangement seems to be a mutually beneficial one. In winter, he pays his share of the utilities and also serves as a TV-watching companion.

Herb made his way up the steps while my mother raced to her bedroom to fetch one of the vials of holy water that she purchased on a parish tour to the Vatican five years ago and which she keeps on hand for just such emergencies.

“Béni soit Dieu, that it’s Herb’s legs that are missing and not his arms,” she said.

She sprinkled the room with holy water and placed both the monitor and keyboard on the floor so Herb could reach them.

Herb typed and my mother prayed aloud, vowing to stay on her knees until her prayers were answered (as she believes they always are as long as we pray hard enough). I could see the two of them: Herb tapping commands into the computer as my mother cried out a series of ejaculations to the Blessed Virgin while clutching the scapular of the Immaculate Heart that she never removes from her neck, not even when she’s in the bath.

The incident used up an entire vial of holy water. My mother had only three left now, and regretted that she had not bought more when she had had the chance.

“After all,” she said, “the arrival of the new millennium hasn’t exactly been a surprise. We’ve had plenty of warning that another Holy War is on its way. I myself have witnessed the faithless mobs in the Holy Land with my own eyes. People here, they walk around with blinders on. Did they really think that the terrorists weren’t smart enough to figure out how to get here? That the devil can’t swim? That he doesn’t go wherever he wants to whenever he wants? I’m telling you, Marguerite, our Christian world is once again under attack. It’s happening now, and we are witness to it.”

I protested that the Palestinians had nothing to do with the attack on the World Trade Center, and that in any case, many of them were Christian, but my mother would have none of it.

“Listen to me, mon chouchou, this society we live in is an evil, godless one. Just turn on the radio and listen to what they call music these days. And it’s not just the music, it’s the movies, and then of course there’s the TV. All the profanity, all that nudity and sex. It’s shameful. Shameful. I thank the Lord every day that your father is not alive to see it. I tell you, it would kill him.”

In my mother’s mind, the pop-up ad on her computer, the attack on the World Trade Center, episodes of Will & Grace—these were all works of the devil.

Had she managed to get the cards printed?

Yes, mercifully, through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the devil had finally been sent packing.

“You’ll be sure and offer up a prayer next Sunday, won’t you Marguerite? Prayer is the only hope for our poor world.”

Except as a tourist, I had not seen the inside of a church in twenty-five years, but I agreed to pray for the sinners of the world.

Fifty-three years old, and I was still lying to my mother, albeit mostly by omission. No mention of my financial worries, and no question of divulging my troubles with Wanda. How could I even begin to talk about my soured love life if my mother refused to acknowledge that Wanda and I were a couple in the first place?

WANDA AND I TACITLY AGREED that for the present time, I would retain the upstairs bedroom and she the spare room in the basement. Her clothes remained in the walk-in closet upstairs, but I helped her move a dresser, bedside table and lamp to the basement, as well as most of her books, including the Faber and Faber edition of Nightwood in original purple cloth, and the 1928 Modern Library first edition of Mrs. Dalloway.

I myself remain unseduced by the first-edition market. My business is to locate the cleanest and cheapest copies possible for my customers. Once the trade paperback of a title is available, I return the hardcovers to the publisher, and once the mass market is out, the trade paperbacks go back.

Our avoidance routine has been working surprisingly well. Most workdays, Wanda is gone by the time I get up, and she’s the first one home at night. She usually retrieves any clothes she needs from the closet when I’m out of the house.

Day and night, Snuffles races up and down the stairs, confused. With both of us still in the house, our friends are probably also confused about the nature of our relationship, about whether or not to invite both of us over, and if not both, which one? I can imagine the nattering that goes on. So, are they still a couple or what?

By the time I had finished talking to the bill collector and my mother, the sun was burning through the curtains and my pillow was drenched with sweat. I dragged the cool dry side over my aching head, but no sooner had I drifted off again than Carmen called. Her son was sick, which meant that I would have to open up. There was no one else.

I decided to go in early to work on the accounts, neglected because there was no money in the bank to pay Dustycan or anyone else for that matter. But cash or no cash, the figures still needed to be entered in the ledger.