“Excuse me,” I said, as the streetcar rolled sluggishly toward my stop. Engrossed as they were, neither of the strangers heard me. I thumped the woman lightly on the back, fueled by that momentary and ridiculous panic one feels that one will not successfully exit the vehicle. “I need to get past you, please.”
“Do you mind?” she retorted, with startling indignation. “I’m on the phone.”
Several passengers, including me, stared at her for a beat and then laughed at the sheer witlessness of what she had said. I elbowed my way to the exit and stepped down onto the icy street in a much better mood.
Thankfully I did not dread returning to work, the way I used to when I held clerical jobs, just out of college. I used to sit at my desk completely mesmerized by the tick of the clock toward five. My pay hadn’t improved much since those days, given that the Review couldn’t attract high-end advertisers like Gucci, say, to flash wares between reviews of “Abortion: A Social History” and “The Bosnian Experience in Canada.” But the work absorbed me and the space was quiet. In the renovated warehouse on Adelaide Street that held our modest office—a converted slaughterhouse with exposed-brick walls—Avery and I mostly sat in companionable silence.
Our loft was sparely furnished. Along one wall stood a slanted design table for Goran, our Croatian art director, who strolled in for a week or so at the end of each month to put the magazine to bed, otherwise devoting himself to designing Flash files for display on the Web.
We had a couple of rickety shelves for our books, and for us, two schoolteacher’s desks that faced each other across a vast expanse of maple flooring. Manuscripts fanned out around each desk like plumage as we picked through the upcoming books we were going to assign for review. Avery and I consulted one another as if we were husband and wife dining at either end of a long, invisible table.
I told Avery about Lester’s new acquaintance with religion, and he responded by quoting the comic Eddie Izzard, who he’d just seen performing at the Opera House, on the subject of how God made the world in seven days.
“On the first day he created light, and air, and fish, and jam, and soup, and potatoes, and haircuts, and arguments, and small things, and rabbits, and people with noses.”
Avery spoke in a deep bass with crisp, scholarly pronunciation. If you were to hear him on the telephone, you might imagine a man of great physical presence and immaculate attire, an MI5 man perhaps, like James Bond’s boss. But in fact he seemed rather tubercular, so slender his chest appeared to be concave. He wore dingy white dress shirts that billowed out at the front where his size-two pants were cinched with a belt, and more often than not, his shirt worked itself free and hung over his gray flannels like an apron. His chin was piquant, his cheeks sallow and his eyes enormous. He might have been beautiful, if he weren’t so awkward.
Avery’s looks had nothing to do with tragedy at Moulin Rouge and everything to do with the fact that he ate nothing but turkey. He was impossible to go to restaurants with, really, because he shunned almost all foodstuffs. If there wasn’t turkey, which there rarely was, he would settle for minestrone soup with saltine crackers. Failing that, he would eat dinner rolls and sip ice water. Avery was the picky child whose mother had died when he was three, freezing him in the business of being picky; his father had never addressed his refusals and corrected them, and he’d grown to manhood with these peculiarities of diet, about which he was totally unselfconscious. Hand him a package of Maple Leaf turkey slices, and he would settle down as cheerfully as if he had a feast before him.
In spite of this malnutrition, he never lacked for energy. His arms were intriguingly elastic—they waved and twisted snakishly whenever he grew animated in conversation. Calvin had turned this unique display into a noun, which he called “Avery-ness.” Nobody else waved their arms this way, or subsisted exclusively on Thanksgiving dinners, or revealed such a strange absence of awareness about all things twenty-first century. Avery wrote by hand, possessed neither a cell phone nor an answering machine, and didn’t know how to drive. Instead, he pedaled around town on bicycles which were frequently stolen, because he tended to lock them to portable objects.
He was the sort of person to whom things happened, good or ill, entirely due to his Avery-ness. Once, for example, he got thrown out of the Drake Hotel, a chic bar very much consumed by its own image, because he hogged the bathroom for half an hour—by an oversight on Avery’s part, it happened to be the women’s bathroom—seated on the toilet reading the last chapter of his Pushkin novel, as if he were at home. He was unable to dispel the bartender’s conviction that he had either barfed and passed out, or was in there snorting lines. I tried to rescue him to no avail, and he was summarily escorted out the door.
For all of his oddities, Avery was a man of great common sense and sly perceptiveness. Last year, he came up with the name for the new start-up magazine down the hall from us, when the editors were standing about scratching their heads and gnawing their pen tips.
“I have an idea,” Avery had offered, not bothering to explain that his idea came straight out of a Mark Twain story about dueling, back-stabbing, gun-fighting broadsheet editors in the Confederate South. And the editors cried, “That’s a great idea!” So it was that they unveiled Canada’s first ultra-conservative magazine as the Moral Volcano.
It was a very important niche magazine, the Moral Volcano, for it swiftly became a must-read every week for the nation’s conservatives. I had never met the proprietor, Frederick Dunst, but Avery’s father had taught him Latin at private school, and thus Avery knew that Frederick was heir to the Dunst chocolate-peanut fortune. Further, Avery had heard that the younger Dunst once got three sheets to the wind with George W. Bush, at a party in Palm Beach in the mid-eighties. He developed such a nostalgic adoration for this magical night of slurred opinions, and held—at any rate—such similar views about homosexuals, Cubans and French politicians—that he eventually bankrolled a magazine to rally the Canadian right to the Bush cause. Naturally, he staffed it with like-minded thinkers, who I often ran into in the stairwell. We had this huffing, stair-climbing sort of passing acquaintance, in which we’d nod in recognition, but I didn’t know anyone by name until I met Hilary. She was the managing editor, whose son Niall had been in kindergym with Lester.
“Why don’t you come take a peek at our space,” Hilary invited me one day after we ascended to the second floor together, chatting about how much preschoolers liked trampolines. Hilary was a moon-faced blond with wide-set green eyes and a penchant for wearing slimming black suits. Her husband, Brad, was a banker, she told me, which enabled her to afford monthly sprees at Holt Renfrew in spite of her editing salary. She had a big, robust laugh and a flair for hospitality.
Unlike our big empty rectangle of an office, the Volcano divvied up its half of the second floor into cubicles. There was a common lounge at the end, with an overstuffed leather couch and a coffee table piled with copies of the Wall Street Journal and the National Review. On the wall, someone had posted a large photograph of the United Nations, at which the editors threw suction-cup darts when they needed some downtime. “So that’s a lot of fun,” Hilary said. “And the other thing we do is, every Friday we break out the cocktails and destroy something French.” She smiled and gave a mischievous wink.
Ah, so that explained it. I had wondered, once, when I was working late and walked down the hall to the bathroom, why the Volcano staff were chortling and hooting as they stomped on a baguette.
Hilary’s description raised more questions than it answered, but I was too self-conscious to ask them. I didn’t know how to bring it up as stairwell chat, because what I wanted to know, rather than being casual and jokey, would by necessity be pressing. “What is the deal with your hostility toward Gauls and multilateralism?” It was easier to confess all my sins to Father McPhee than to ask a loaded question like that.
14
This much I owed to Lester, and to Father McPhee. I would take my son to St. Stephen’s, t
he little brick church down the street from us in Toronto, last refuge for a smattering of Anglicans in a community now dominated by Portuguese Catholics, Vietnamese Buddhists and Goths, so that Lester could wrap his mind around Heaven and Hell and I could kneel down on a pew with my parka bunched around my waist and think nice things about Bernice.
I suppose I might have chosen a different church, if I’d had the faintest clue how to shop for churches in a city with hundreds of them. St. Stephen’s won my allegiance by dint of being so close; off we went in our snowsuits while Calvin remained a lump in the bed, recovering from a night of sin and debauchery at a viola concert at Massey Hall.
Sunday school at St. Stephen’s took place after a procession, two prayers and a hymn, which children shared with the general congregation. After that, a handful of kids would rise and straggle toward the choir door, leaving behind a dozen adults scattered thinly across the pews. I found it a bit disheartening to attend this church, for it was not unlike being part of the meager audience at a poorly reviewed play. Nevertheless, having decided that this was my spiritual community, I dutifully accompanied Lester on the trip downstairs. This was our new routine, our new leaf turned, him and me going to church.
Down we went to the basement room full of toys, pots of paint and a piano, feeling righteous and simply curious, respectively. Following the lead of others, we sat down on teensy plastic chairs arranged in a circle. Three acne-scarred teenagers stood around alertly—a Christian youth trio here to assist Andrew, the teacher.
You wonder, sometimes, who becomes a Sunday-school teacher. Whether they have a facility with children, or they feel obliged, or what. Because certainly in this day and age, it isn’t a totally obvious thing to volunteer for. Andrew, I noticed, seemed decidedly uncomfortable. In some ways, he was an absolutely classic Canadian WASP of the church-going variety: mild-mannered, stiff-jointed, possessing not even a wisp of charisma, attired in corduroy pants and plaid shirt, and struggling visibly with the mission of interesting small children in lessons from the Bible. But was he innately impaired in his teaching, I wondered, or was it the result of his ambivalence? Did his wife make him do this?
In any event, at the start of each class Andrew invited the children to light candles for his miniature altar. He handed a wooden match to the first child in the queue—for all children will instantly line up for the opportunity to play with fire—and then went rigid with fear, convinced that the church was going to go up in flames. He bent over each child with his two hands clutched like chicken claws around the match, visibly sweating, and then repeated the ritual seven times.
I like to imagine Andrew coming up with this idea of the candles and feeling almost giddy with relief at discovering something creative to do with children, before actually undertaking the task. Once the altar had been lit, Andrew generally launched into a Bible reading, upon which basis he would then have the children do some sort of craft. Here I should append a note to parents considering Sunday school: the vexing surprise is that there is no official Day One. The story never unfolds in chronological order. Your know-nothing child doesn’t get to start at the beginning, with God creating the world. He dives, instead, into baffling, out-of-context lessons and discussions about mysterious characters who primarily engage in agriculture.
“Boys and girls?” Andrew would begin, experimentally testing his command of the room. “Today we’re going to talk about Job and the fig tree.
“Lo, and God said to Job …”
Afterwards, I’d have to explain to Lester what “lo” means, and who Job was.
Perhaps the language of the Bible should be updated a touch, if only for the sake of our children. I only say this because words dating back to the reign of King James, son of Mary, Queen of Scots, do tend to complicate simple tales for children more used to reading Walter the Farting Dog. Consider the word “lo,” which doesn’t come up that often in modern conversations. I’m not even sure that I know what it means. I told Lester that it was the ancient version of “yo,” but I wouldn’t defend that to a theologian. With nineteenth-century classics, like Mother Goose, I can simultaneously translate as I read, turning six pence into a dollar if I need to and that sort of thing. But biblical language defies me. After a few Sunday-school sessions, I tried using biblical language around the house to see if I could just get used to it, like practicing French, or a cockney accent. In this manner, I would relay the day’s events to Calvin:
“‘And lo,’ I said unto Lester, ‘thou shalt not make a triple-decker sandwich with cream cheese and icing sugar, because thou wilt not eat it, and it will wasteth the bread.’
“And Lester said unto me, ‘Yea, though I shalt not eat it truly, I shalt give it to Daddy as a present.’
“‘No-est,’ I saith. ‘Daddy will not want it. He dost not like sandwiches made of cream cheese and icing sugar, and thus he shall cast it away as boxes of Tuna Helper upon the waters of the Nile. And there will be no bread for toast tomorrow, before daycare.’”
“Are you taking Lester tomorrow, or am I?” Calvin would reply, watching hockey on TV and not listening to me at all.
Andrew was frequently interrupted by his own son, John, an exuberant ten-year-old who obviously knew Bible stuff inside and out and had an instinct for livening things up. This made Andrew furious.
“John?” Andrew would say, his voice as taut as a mountaineer’s cable, “There’s only one teacher here today …”
“John? Please face the right way in your chair.”
“John? If you don’t settle down, you’ll have to stay here while the others go into the kitchen and make the cookies.”
Each remonstration was enunciated in a voice so deliberately soft, so forcibly sing-song that you just knew Andrew wanted to explode into violence. Particularly, you understood this because his son was barely obstreperous by anyone’s standards, and could mostly stand accused of sensing his father’s insecurity and choosing to push the big red button in his psyche marked DO NOT PUSH.
“Momma,” Lester asked me after Sunday in February, “why can angels see God, but I can’t see him?”
“Well,” I answered, having wondered that very thing myself, “people do still see God, honey, I’m pretty sure. It’s just that, ever since we left the garden and got lost in the woods, it seems like it’s harder to find him.”
“I bet I can find him,” Lester said, taking on the challenge. “I’ll leave food out for him, like we did for Santa.”
“Okay, hon.” I squeezed his shoulders through my mitts, game to entertain his sense of hope. My mind flew to the to-do-list challenge of remembering to eat whatever food Lester left out for God in the kitchen tonight. Who needs cocaine to make reality precarious? Try being a parent. Pile lies upon lies, artifice upon wish, Tooth Fairy upon Santa Claus upon God, all of them whisking away their proffered gifts at midnight until the time, the one time, Momma plain forgets and the cosmology comes crashing down.
“When you get home from the Horseshoe Tavern tonight,” I reminded Calvin later that day, “don’t forget to turn off the porch light and eat God’s food.”
15
One Sunday morning, I found myself in an unexpected conversation with a fellow named Don Yancy. I’d wandered into the after-service church social, hoping to grab something to eat while I waited for Lester, and a mutual acquaintance introduced Mr. Yancy to me as “a marvelous son-of-a-gun who had a near-death experience in Costa Rica.” This description made Mr. Yancy blush furiously.
“Wow,” I said, after our mutual acquaintance turned to join another conversation, “that’s so amazing.”
“Well, yeah, I mean, it’s …” Mr. Yancy shrugged. “I am not afraid of death.”
“No?” I marveled.
“That is so liberating, my friend,” he said.
“Oh, it must be,” I said, greatly envious. “I mean, in a way, it’s the ultimate freedom. I can’t imagine.”
“No, you can’t. You cannot. It’s changed my life. Death has chan
ged life. Ironic, no?”
“Yes.” I smiled. “Yeah, very much so.”
He gazed off into the middle distance, contemplating how his life had been changed in the rain forest. The airy, oak-floored hall echoed with parishioners’ voices as they chatted and clattered their coffee cups. Mr. Yancy was panda-shaped and clown-coiffed, his bald pate ringed with frizzed brown hair. He wore square black glasses and stood very still, his arms hanging at his sides.
“So, tell me what happened,” I prompted. “You were in Costa Rica with your wife and you got bitten by a termite?”
“Nooo,” said Mr. Yancy. “You’re not going to have a near-death experience with a termite, my friend. That’s unlikely.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” I ran my hand self-consciously through my hair. “What was it?”
“It was a black widow spider. Very lethal, those critters. It bit me on the leg.”
I awaited further elaboration. He shifted his gaze to me, and then away again, as if to indicate that it would be my task to animate him further, to pull a string on his lower back, or wind him up or belt him.
“So, after that happened …” I ventured, encouragingly.
“Yeah. And all I remember is this intense flare of redhot pain. Like, ouch!” He mimed grabbing at his leg. “And Marci, my wife, says I dropped to the ground and started convulsing.”
“Oh no,” I murmured.
“I don’t actually remember that. I’m sure it wasn’t pretty. Like, sometimes I worry that I was lying there writhing in my shorts and maybe somebody saw …” His voice faltered. After a moment’s hesitation, he soldiered on. “But I just—I was in pain and then I wasn’t—I was floating above myself in a swirl of green. I was hovering in the rain-forest canopy, really, is what it felt like, like a hummingbird, only not like that because I wasn’t darting around, I was looking down at Marci and thinking, ‘Wow, she doesn’t notice that I’m up here, she thinks I’m still in that body.’”
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