“But wait. Wait. Things changed.”
***
It was after midnight now. I poured us another round of Drambuie. Sally and I in her eighteenth-floor apartment.
“Damn,” she said, “I have to go to the washroom again. Will you hand me my crutches?”
I helped her to her feet. She turned a pale face toward me. “This is all getting less and less manageable.” I helped her into the bathroom. There were all sorts of things in there that you don’t see in a regular bathroom. And a chemical smell that didn’t smell human. Like embalming fluid. And it struck me for a second that that’s how she felt, embalmed. And that this too, and the things that came with it, she’d had enough of. I wondered, too, who had phoned, whether I should have answered it. You never know. But to go against her wishes had seemed like a violation of our deal, of my promise.
But while I waited for her to emerge, I found myself pondering those words, “All this has become less and less manageable.” It was the second time she’d used those same words, and I found myself remembering an episode that had happened only a few months earlier. I had dropped by her apartment unexpectedly late one afternoon, the winter night already collecting like soot between the neighbouring high-rises and the discarded Christmas trees up and down the length of the street. It was the final hours of a sullen January day in Toronto, when even the cheeriest souls find themselves fingering a length of rope and looking appreciatively upwards at the available roof beams. (I’m phrase-making here, but you know what I mean.)
I buzzed her number. The glass door clicked open. I went up the elevator and down the hallway, which smelt, as always, of fragrant spices and large families. Behind one door, a shrill woman’s voice chanted to a stringed instrument as though she were in mourning for the recently dead. Behind other doors, animated voices rose and fell.
Sally was wearing that green dress; her eyes carefully made up, cheeks lightly rouged, modest lipstick. She stood in the centre of the room, wobbling slightly on her crutches. It was clear that she was going out.
“I’m going to see—” She named a Christian revivalist, a perpetually tanned preacher whose unconvincing heterosexuality and next-world promises I had watched off and on for years on television on those afternoons when a nicotine-and-bourbon hangover made an excursion outdoors something you put off until nightfall.
It puzzled me, her going to a revival meeting. What on earth was she thinking? Or was she thinking? Sally was a rigorously intelligent woman, a bemused and articulate observer of the world, and for her to embrace the word of a bullshitter in an ice cream suit seemed tragic.
What was she after, taking an expensive taxi downtown to Maple Leaf Gardens, sitting in the front row in a gleaming line of wheelchairs and crutches, paralyzed limbs and distorted smiles? Did it mean that my sister had arrived at such a point of desperation, such a degree of unhappiness that, like Pascal’s gamble about the existence of God, she had put her common sense on hold to embrace the possibility that this mincing Southern millionaire could lay his hands upon her useless legs and make them work?
I didn’t ask. I was afraid, I suppose, of the answer. (How ungenerous I was in those days.) I simply took her down in the elevator and put her in the back of a taxi and waved as the red tail lights disappeared in the early evening darkness.
Over the months, my thoughts sometimes returned to that revival meeting, to her standing in the middle of the room in her green dress and glancing away, ever so slightly, when she told me where she was going. I never thought of it, never, without a kind of sinking feeling. But recently I’ve undergone a change of mind. Of heart, perhaps. I now see that evening, her descent into the throng of wounded and broken and famished souls, as something different, as something deeply poignant: her gameness, her willingness to try, even with a smile, anything, for a last kick at everyday happiness. When I think of my cherished Sally, I always come back to this word: heroic.
(Do the dead forgive us, I wonder?)
The toilet flushed; the bathroom door opened. Sally emerged. She had clearly been thinking about something in there. She said, “Do you remember that television show Chloe worked on?”
“The imitation American police drama.”
“Yes, that’s the one.”
“Sure, I remember. Chloe thought it might be a way into the world of scriptwriting. ‘Remunerative but sterile,’ I told her that.”
“But it looked so promising there for a while. One minute she was bouncy, the next minute she was talking about leaving town.”
“You don’t know about this?”
“Don’t be coy. Tell me.”
“Well,” I said, a little archly, “I’ll put it this way: instead of writing dialogue like ‘Step away from the vehicle’ or ‘So what did the lab say?’ she ended up in bed with the director. He was married, naturally, a strutting little wizard who could have been a Martin Scorsese or a Tarantino—he had a terrific eye—but he simply couldn’t control his appetites for booze and cocaine and pretty assistants with clipboards, and ended up a big-shot director in the wastelands of Canadian dramatic television. And that is a tragedy. Jumping into bed with him wasn’t.”
“You know him?” she said.
“Casually. But I like him. He’s a mess, but a gifted mess. Anyway, what Chloe misunderstood from the outset was that she wasn’t in university anymore, that in the grown-up world, when you sleep with a woman’s husband, particularly a woman who has just had a baby, the consequences are—well—different. This wasn’t a replay of Miranda and the trombonist. A few weeks into the first season, the director’s wife got wind of things. She turned up at Chloe’s apartment. She put a Japanese carving knife to her own throat and said that if she, Chloe, didn’t stop fucking her husband, she (the wife) would slit herself from ear to ear.
“The drama played itself out over the next few months: bursts of hysteria, sulks, alcoholic confessions, blistering hangovers and public scenes, until the director did what he was destined to do all along, which was to return, droop-tailed, to his wife and work a solid, if brief, program at the Hillside rehab centre in Georgia. Eight thousand dollars a week. Nevertheless, a month later he was slugging back shot glasses of Russian vodka and got himself arrested for, get this, trying to strangle his wife outside a Yorkville restaurant.
“Never mind what addiction counsellors say, the only way to get over the loss of a cherished lover is to find a body that thrills you as much as the one you’ve lost. I know this from personal experience. (And not just once, either.) But when you’re young, you think getting out of town will do the trick, and that’s what Chloe decided to do. She thought about going to law school, somewhere ‘cool’—Mexico, the Caribbean maybe. She fancied herself a criminal lawyer, getting those Puerto Rican and Jamaican drug dealers a day in the sunshine of level-field jurisprudence. But after spending four or five days in the gallery at the University Avenue courthouse, she came to the conclusion that pretty much everyone down there is guilty. But worse, from her standpoint, was the daily spectacle of the doors of justice spinning like some nightmare fan, coughing out the same burnt-out lawyers and the same felons week in and week out. She said to me on the phone one day, ‘I get the distinct feeling that the best part of being a lawyer is going to law school. After that, it’s strictly downhill.’ My guess is that she was probably right, and I told her so. But considering what I was doing for a living at the time, I’m not so sure it was prudent advice.”
“And that got her to California?”
“Here’s where the story gets good. After the TV show, she pissed around here and there. She wrote half a novel about a young girl who falls in love with a married film director. But the truth is, Chloe never had much affection for her own company, or for sitting in a room with her own shortcomings (who does?), so she gave it up. For a few months she taught English to Cambodian refugees in Vancouver, then did a night shift on a suicide hotline. Then worked
for an essay writing service. Then painted sets for the low-budget horror film Santa Claws. Nothing quite worked. She phoned me one night, she was a bit drunk, said she was on her way back to Toronto, that she wanted to help the ‘little brown babies in India.’ She meant it, too. But she never went.”
“Yes,” Sally said, “I recall that stage. The little brown babies stage.”
“One day, while she was working in a bookstore, she happened across a copy of Vanity Fair. On the cover was a photograph of the magazine’s staff, mostly young people, sitting on desks, talking on the phone. She faxed it to me. That’s what I want to do, she wrote—I want to do something with people. And that was it: a year later she was in California doing a very expensive degree in journalism.”
“But where did the money come from? Not from me. And certainly not from her father,” Sally said.
“How she got there, that was vintage Chloe. Other people could have done it, but few with the same panache. She called it her SP. Her Secret Project. When I inquired, she clammed up, got very mysterious. Until, that is, she sensed I was getting pissed off—I don’t especially care for protracted intrigue—and confessed. Get this. She wrote a letter to the fifteen richest people in Canada and asked them to sponsor her degree. ‘I’m Chloe Sanders,’ her letter declared, ‘and I’d like to do a master’s degree at UC Berkeley in California. The tuition is forty thousand dollars a year. In exchange for your support, I will write you one letter a month with the details of my life on the West Coast.’
“It was an absurd proposition, but I loathe dream squashers, so I kept my mouth shut. Fourteen millionaires returned their regrets, but one guy, the retired owner of a string of multinational copper mines, nibbled. Could he see her letter of acceptance? She mailed it to him. A week later, she got the following telegram: ‘Pack your bags, Chloe Sanders, you’re going to Berkeley.’”
“In exchange for what?”
“That’s exactly what I said. But it turned out, in exchange for nothing. In fact, the guy wrote the cheques on his wife’s account.” I went on: “I’ve often wondered about that gesture, her writing strangers and asking for money with the assurance of an adored child. Where did she get the outrageous confidence? And it occurs to me, and not without a certain envy, that the answer lies in the question. She was an adored child. And that’s you, Sally. That’s you.”
We both sat silently for a while. Then Sally said, “I’m not making excuses for Chloe, for her cutting me out of whole sections of her life, but she had to do a lot of things that most young girls don’t, things that they usually have done for them. She had to learn to shop for groceries, to buy brown bread and not white bread, to buy healthy morning cereal, not the sugary junk her friends ate; how to detect a fresh cantaloupe; how to separate the whites from the darks downstairs in the laundry room; how to make scrambled eggs (no milk at a low heat). How to drive a car in the winter (turn into the skid). She had to learn not to forget her lunch, because she had a mother who couldn’t pop by the school and drop it off. All that must have been a hardship.”
“Perhaps,” I agreed, “but it made her exceptionally able.”
“Almost frighteningly able. But go on, please.”
“It must have been a lonely time, those first few months in an American city. Setting up a little apartment, eating dinner alone. Trying to make friends without seeming too hungry for friends. She started to phone me again. Chloe only phones me when she’s bleak. But that’s fine. She joined a ‘Newcomers to Berkeley’ society; she even went to church a few times. She went to Alcoholics Anonymous, not because she had a drinking problem but because there were people there. Because they all went out for coffee after the meeting and everyone was welcome.
“And then, one rainy November night, a young woman stepped out of the rain, folded up her umbrella and joined the circle of chairs. It was Miranda Treece, her old nemesis from Montreal. And she did have a drinking problem. She had done very little with her life in the intervening years except live on her family’s money and fuck a whole bunch of guys. She’d washed up in Berkeley on the heels of a failed romance and didn’t have the steam to leave town. I don’t know the details or even the timing, but one day Chloe found a small parcel in her mailbox. She opened it up. It was a T-shirt. And with it was a short handwritten note: I wore this for three days. If you like how it smells, call me. It was signed Miranda. And that, as they say, was that.”
I looked over at Sally. She was frowning as if she had not heard me correctly. But I wanted her to hear the end of the story before she responded. “Chloe has always been strangely private about that chapter of her life, even with me. Which is funny, because she could be alarmingly candid about her goings-on with men. Not with this, though. But when I saw her coming out of a movie theatre in Toronto with Miranda one afternoon a year or two later, there was a bloom on her cheeks, those lovely cheeks that had made me so sad that Sunday afternoon on the sidewalk. It was the kind of illumination that even a fool can see comes from being physically loved.”
I stopped talking. We both watched the candle flame for a while. Another plane, its tail illuminated like that of a bright red goldfish, descended over the airport. The events that happened in the wake of this conversation still seem extraordinary to me, the way life does and doesn’t work out. And for whom. But here’s something that did work out. Let’s jump ahead eight or nine years after that evening on the eighteenth floor. Chloe and Miranda came over to my apartment for dinner with their two children in tow (gay dads, turkey baster, enough said). Watching them from where I sat at the end of the table, I couldn’t help reflecting on how delicious, how mysterious it was that Miranda, this great love of Chloe’s life, now her legal wife, was the same girl who had once routed her for a boy who currently, I’m told, delivers booze in a little green car for an after-hours supplier. Near the end of the night, Miranda did a perfect handstand in the kitchen. The children were beside themselves with wonder. It turned out she’d been the San Antonio gymnastics champion during her last year of high school.
Five
It was nearly three in the morning now. The hum from the refrigerator clicked off, leaving the room in audible silence. It seemed as though the curtains, the lamps, the pictures on the wall were all waiting too. I was standing at the window looking down at the parking lot. A man in a white jacket moved between the cars and stepped under a spotlight. He looked up. We looked at each other for an unnaturally long time. Then he waved, a big wide wave as though he were on a boat and trying to catch the attention of a passing freighter. But I didn’t wave back. He seemed like bad luck and I stepped away from the window.
Sally came out of the bathroom and sat down heavily on the indentation on the couch, her usual place, and put her crutches carefully to one side, held them in place for a moment to be sure they didn’t wobble over. “I’m ready to do this thing now,” she said.
I looked at her face. It was grey and a little puffy, the face of an exhausted person, a party-goer who has come to the end of the night, knows it, but is too exhausted, among the wilting flowers and sweating cheese and lipstick-stained wineglasses, to get up and make it across the room to the door. Too tired to enjoy staying, too tired to leave.
I leaned forward in my chair. I closed my fingers together and then stretched them out. I saw she was watching my fingers. Then she looked up at me with a soft smile. “Could we skip this next part?”
I knew what she meant, of course, but I needed to hear her say it. “Which part would that be?”
“The questions that have obviously occurred to me a thousand times.”
“And tonight’s the night?”
“If you love me, please don’t make me plead.”
“Okay.”
“Do you have them?”
“Yes.”
“Are they with you?”
I took the dark bottle from my shoulder bag, which I had laid on the floor beside my chair
.
“Are there enough?”
“Yes, Sally, there are enough.”
“I don’t have to take, like, two hundred of them, do I?”
“No.”
“How many do I have to take?”
“Thirty. Tops.”
She looked at the bottle. “It looks scary, that bottle. Can’t we put them in something else?”
I got up, went into the kitchen, opened the pill bottle, removed the cotton batten (we didn’t need a sinister rattle coming from my bag as I crossed the room).
The phone rang again.
“Who the hell is that?” she said.
“Should I get it?”
“God, no. Please don’t. Let’s get on with this.” After a moment, she said, “I don’t want to throw up, be found half alive in a pool of vomit and spend the rest of my days with the IQ of a cabbage.”
“You know, Sally, for someone who says she’s had enough, you’re an awfully amusing woman.”
“Death concentrates the mind. I must have read that somewhere.”
“No, I believe that’s an original.”
She thought about it for a second; quietly mouthed the words again. “You’re sure? I don’t want to go out on a plagiarized note.”
“It’s yours. Straight up.”
“Where were we?” she said. I was about to open my mouth to protest, but she silenced me with a tilt of her head, a reminder to not make her plead.
I said, “Let’s have a drink first.”
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