Garth stood in the doorway of Jean’s bedroom, braced like a deckhand stepping into an unforgiving gale. It would be weeks, he figured, before she learned about the pay cut, and in the meantime, he wanted to renegotiate his allowance.
“Why would you bring that up?” Jean spat from her bed. “After all I’ve been through with those pigeons!”
“I just —” Garth started.
“Any other man would have handled them. But no, I’m left here to worry myself sick while you’re at that stupid newspaper being demoted!”
Jean was so stupid, Garth reminded himself, that she did not realize that the demotion meant a salary cut. She arrogantly assumed that her life would stay the same. Garth backed off the oriental carpet, wondering how Jean was connecting pigeons with his meagre allowance, fixed and non-indexed at five bucks a week. Five bucks a week was something back in 1974, Garth reasoned, but now it was as insubstantial as vapour, with beer at twelve bucks a case and a lousy sandwich at three dollars. Five bucks through twenty years of inflation and double-digit interest, twenty years of GST, PST, and clawbacks.
“You know I have an appointment with Dr. Zimmer.” Jean dropped her voice, exhausted by an undetected ailment. “God knows what he’ll find.”
Garth made a sympathetic sniff, which was more for himself than Jean, who, once through with Dr. Zimmer, would visit a tanning salon. To save on cab fare, she often accepted a ride home with Harvey, the real estate agent, whose office was in the same building as the salon. When he wasn’t wearing his orange blazer, Harvey favoured yellow golf shirts and shiny beige pants. Garth hadn’t bought a new shirt in years; he looked as shabby as Albert Conrad in his white Velcro sneakers. Always short of cash, Garth hid whenever someone in the office collected money for a worker who was pregnant or retiring. What could you do with five bucks when model glue was priced at five-fifty a tube and paint at seven dollars? It was twenty-one dollars alone for his Red Baron series.
“Dr. Zimmer says I am an amazing woman the way I am holding up under the stress. If you worked for a decent company like the one Harvey works for . . .” Each word was a crack of the whip driving Garth back into his sanctum of airplane models and faded formations. “If you had something to show for all of these years, you wouldn’t need an allowance.”
It wasn’t just about money, Garth realized, since they had nothing when they married. For the ceremony at city hall, Jean had borrowed a suit from her cousin; her father had worn a plaid shirt with ketchup stains. No, this was payback for something bigger. Was it all of those years of reporter’s wages, out-of-town assignments, night shifts, and card games? His obsession with his job? Jean was an unforgiving woman, and he, on every imaginable level, had somehow fallen short.
Hey diddle diddle. Garth cleared his throat and left her room.
He could tolerate his wife’s harangues, but that didn’t solve his principal problem. Garth needed disposable income, so little by little, over the years, he had learned how to steal. He had started with false receipts for items that went through the Standard’s petty cash unchecked: twelve bucks for a meal he’d never shared with a staffer, eight bucks for a taxi ride he had never taken to a meeting with advertisers.
After a while, he could count on fifty bucks a week, enough for beer, food, and gloss cote, money that Jean never saw.
When no one noticed, Garth knew that he could do better. That is when he had thought of Helen Anderson, his mother-in-law, who was in a nursing home, diabetic and delusional. Garth had signing authority for Helen, cashing her paltry cheques and paying her bills. Helen’s freelance byline started appearing on a regular basis on the Lifestyles pages, where it blended with reams of innocuous drivel. What to do with a cranky cat? Seventy-five bucks. How to select the best apples for pie? Another fifty.
Garth could produce a Helen Anderson submission in ten minutes by pulling a story off the wire and inserting a local, albeit manufactured, quote from someone in the city. Before long, Helen consumed the freelance budget for Lifestyles, her copy blurring into one forgettable bore, the process becoming so easy that, after a while, Garth stopped writing and simply submitted the bills.