by Andrew Pyper
There’s one photograph though. Unenlarged, tucked into a dollar-store black plastic frame. There, on the bare coffee table, facing the corner so that an observer must stoop to make out the details: my parents, caught in a balance between posed smile and laughter, arms around each other’s waists, standing before a setting sun the color of a Singapore Sling. I keep meaning to put it away, tuck it on a shelf in the closet or maybe just turn it even further to the wall to lessen the directness of the angle, but then I forget, so that I’m always surprised by their faces shining back at me. A happy couple moving into the middle years of accomplishment without visible hints of regret, baring to the camera the familiar faces of strangers. No strain behind the smile, neither spine stiffened by the other’s touch. The sort of picture that comes with the frame when you buy it.
I walk over to the window and open one of the glass panels wide enough to let me stick my head and shoulders through. Below, the street is a river of headlight and brakelight crosscurrents, the air swirling up in warm gushes sharpened by the rotten fish and vegetables piled high in boxes in front of the Chinese markets a couple blocks north. Close my eyes and inhale. It used to make my stomach turn, but now it’s almost welcome. A signal in the atmosphere to let you know that you’re home, back in your proper space.
PART TWO
FOUR
I can move fast when I want to. Lift myself up to the heroic heights at which my working life takes place. This state of being goes by a name which carries the resonance of a philosophical concept or historical epoch: Billable Time.
But this transition requires a little help. Most opt for the coffee and doughnut approach, but as coffee holds some antagonisms toward my bladder and doughnuts leave a suspicious film over tonsil and gums, I prefer a line or two of reasonably priced but honorably cut cocaine. This involves some embarrassment to admit even to myself, as more than a few years have passed since this particular narcotic was the hippest in town. Call me old-fashioned, but coke just suits my go-get-’em, 80s temperament. And in the end, the entire matter of which drug is coolest is ultimately beyond rational criticism or debate. Who can argue with tried and true physiological addictions?
With me, I never have to wait for a birthday or anniversary—it’s breakfast in bed every morning. Two lines taken off the bedside table and the day opens up before me, burns through every vessel in my head and washes cool bleach down the back of my throat. Everything at once electric and numb, a sense of purpose pulsing through tissue and tickling over skin. And along with all this a yearning to sing. Don’t even hum in the shower (and fake it every time I have to stand for the national anthem) but there it is, a balloon of song rising up from a fist of hot muscle in my chest. Sometimes, if I happen to pass a mirror at times like these, I can see myself as one of those grinning lunatics from a Technicolor musical who’s always on the verge of abandoning speech in favor of expressing themselves through rollicking chorus numbers instead. Not joy but a feeling that’s somehow suggestive of the word: the fish hook “j,” startled “o,” the raised hands of a blissful “y.” Even now I know it’s nothing more than the word itself though. For surely if it was the real thing you’d be too busy being joyful to imagine how it might look printed on heavy bond paper under the office letterhead.
I’m up. Pull back the bedsheet, peer down the neglected but so far—praise God!—still flat expanse of stomach and slouch over to the nectarines for another line. Then another. And then (only after a moment’s balanced consideration) one more for the road.
I pack, pick a few things up at the office (dictaphone, tapes, laptop, color markers, yellow pads—lawyers’ friends all) and swing down to the car rental place near Union Station to set myself up with some wheels. Normally, it is advisable practice to confirm the price of such items with one’s client, because in the end he’s the one who faces the numbers under the column headed “Disbursements” on the fee statement. But seeing as Mr. Tripp is unavailable at the moment, I don’t see the need to be nitpicky with the professional procedure on this particular morning.
“Compact, Mid or Full?” the guy at the counter asks once he’s got my essentials tapped in.
“Anything bigger than Full?”
“You want a limo?”
“No, although I suppose I should be thinking about booking ahead for the prom…”
No smile from the guy. Then I remember: for the rest of the world, the coffee and doughnut is already wearing off.
“Whatever you have in the Full will be fine.”
“We got a Lincoln Continental that’s clean.”
“A clean Lincoln. Splendid.”
The sign at the side of Highway 400 appears for 69 North and I steer the big car onto the off-ramp, jelly around the curve that sets it on a new course. The way of the weekend pioneers heading up to their vacation properties, rich but preferring to go by the name of middle-class, over-leveraged, under stress, a family. And today an entire generation of children moving into adulthood sharing little but the memory of blazing Friday afternoons, carsick-ness, the view from the flip-up backseats of station wagons. Peeling off at the exits marked by signs for lodges alternately named after long-gone species of tree and Indian tribes. But not today. Everything clamped shut the morning after Labor Day as though from annual news of approaching plague.
For the first while I share the highway with pickup trucks, occasional semis hauling gravel, farm machinery lumbering along the shoulder. But as the organized fields of corn, beans and dozing cattle yield to outcroppings of rock, bogs coated green with algae and undisciplined acres of thorny underbrush, the road thins of even this traffic, narrows to two lanes, and leaves me alone. I push the speedometer up to 70 m.p.h. with the idea that increased velocity might move the land behind me more efficiently, but it makes no difference. The engine remains virtually noiseless, and the passing trees roll by in steady blocks interrupted every mile or so by an overgrown lane to mark the line between properties. The deeper I press the gas pedal the less I’m passing through the landscape and the more I’m moving into it, sinking with every curve into its ragged texture.
Something’s different up here.
The brush creeps up to the orange line that marks the boundary of the road and reaches across as a territorial challenge. Lone fenceposts push up from the earth like bent thumbs. Occasional signs giving directions to marinas, campgrounds and private side roads that are no longer there. Then even the signs become difficult to see as bugs begin to kamikaze the windshield, obscuring my view with their yellow guts. On go the windshield wipers and I squeeze off a couple good sprays of washer fluid, but there’s something in the insects’ blood that resists easy removal and I’m left to peer ahead through a smudgy haze of horsefly, dragonfly and moth.
Of course on a map it all looks the same: a vast white space marked by a couple of rail lines, watercolor dabs of small blue lakes, jagged veins for rivers throughout. But when you get here the map might as well be a child’s crayon drawing. The lines are imaginary, nothing relates. You can’t see the lakes or rivers from the highway, and you don’t believe a train would have any business passing through such a place.
No matter where you start from, north is always so close in this country. Almost any exit taken off the main highway along Lake Ontario after the heavy industries, warehouses and nuclear power stations have passed and in only a couple of hours it’s all over you. A place where the ratio of altered to unaltered space gets shifted dramatically in the latter’s favor and there is little more ahead than an interminable expanse of humanlessness. Despite patchy settlement and the logical plotting of county lines the north communicates to those traveling through it what it probably always has: there is good reason why most people on this continent hug the ocean, lakeshores or riverbanks, for those are places where someone might have a clue where they are.
Of the true character and magnitude of nature I know nothing, of course. I recall novels and poems fed to us in high school which involved lonely settlers and
their wives, the difficulties in building a log cabin, and the eventual freezing to death of the protagonist. This, I believed throughout my schoolboy career, was the single plot and full extent of Canadian Literature. And so too of nature. For Barth Crane is no adventurer. At least not of the compass and pup tent variety. Fresh air inspires nothing in me but suspicion and quick fatigue. A city slicker born in a country where the cities are few and far between.
But here I am anyway. Only a couple hundred miles north of where the six-lane artery from Toronto ends, from well-lit service centers and towns with hotel and restaurant chains large enough to have network TV commercials and American head offices, from the bedroom communities where the commuting middle-class has staked its claim, wrestles with the mortgage, and in the evenings haggles over which of the thousand satellite channels to watch for that particular half-hour—two hundred miles from the world lies the north. And I don’t belong.
The only indications that forest might soon be giving way to an outpost of civilization are the two or three roadside stands that begin to appear, clapboard rectangles wedged into the trees: one for blueberries, one firewood, one earthworms, all closed. The area had long ago been touted as a future destination for wealthy Torontonians once the four-lane highway was extended north as promised by a provincial government ousted four or five elections ago. However, after some bean-counter pointed out the cost of the project and its unlikely benefits, the extension was never undertaken. Those wealthy Torontonians not already in possession of family summer places either stayed put or ponied up the dough to get their foot in the Establishment door in Muskoka, having wisely decided that five hours was too long a drive just to smell pine sap six weekends a year.
Still, there must have been a few who took the bait, for there, stencilled onto a slab of wood resting against the town sign that tells me where I am (MURDOCH—pop. 4400—GATEWAY TO THE MID-NORTH) and the local service clubs (Optimists and Rotary only) is the now-belated greeting, WELCOME BACK, SUMMER PEOPLE!
“I am not a summer person,” I say out loud as I pass at a speed that most would consider improper for a town populated by young pedestrians, seniors and pets. “I am a man for all seasons.”
I search for lodgings. The first candidate is the Sunshine Motor Inn on the edge of town. Comfortable enough looking in a homely, anonymous way, but currently suffering from “renovations” which consist of a pickup truck of yokels knocking down a wall in the reception area and hammering a bar in place on the other side to make way for what the owner winkingly promises will be the town’s new “meeting place.” It’s immediately clear that the future of the Sunshine lies in providing shelter to adulterous middle-agers for the half-hour they require to complete their blub-bery poundings. While this type of market repositioning doesn’t trouble me, the shriek of circular saws and the grunted profanities of workmen does. On the way back to my car I seek the advice of one of the hammer-holders who appears to be acting as foreman (sporting a shirt and the fewest tattoos) as to alternative accommodation.
“You stayin’ in town?”
“Or as near to it as possible.”
“Well, the only other hotel round here is The Empire. But nobody stays there but the peelers.”
“The owner’s family?”
“They’re no family. Peelers are strippers, man.”
“Ah! How do I get there?”
“Downtown. Across from the old Bank of Commerce.”
“I’m not familiar with it, but I’m sure The Empire’s marquee will be a sufficient beacon.”
This brings a smile to the foreman’s lips, or what may be a smile. A brief exposure of blackened gums before he returns to his work.
The Empire Hotel. I like the sound of it, its suggestions of local history and color. The former jewel of the county with a once distinguished tavern on the main floor and high-ceilinged rooms above, one likely containing a bed that was once given the business by some duchess or prince visiting the colonies as part of their regrettable royal obligations. Every Ontario town has such a place, and most have either gone pay-by-the-week or been gutted and drywalled into bingo halls. But with a name that Protestant, that splendidly Victorian, that naively overreaching—The Empire Hotel—how far could it have declined during the region’s intervening decades of brief boom and prolonged bust?
The Empire Hotel sits at one end of Murdoch’s main thoroughfare, Ontario Street, and the County Court House at the other. Between them there’s a coffee shop with floral curtains halfway up its grease-coated windows, a used bookstore, used children’s clothing store, as well as a pawnshop called All Things Used!, two women’s hair salons (the Glamor-ette and Split Enz), a closet-size barber shop, an army surplus place, a butcher and a baker (but no candlestick maker, alas). A third of the windows are empty, and many of these seem to have given up hope of occupation, barren even of FOR LEASE, RENT or SALE signs. I’ve always taken this as a sure indication of a local economy’s health. When the real estate brokers stop trying to sell it, it’s pretty much all over.
When I reach the end of the street I lean over to the passenger window and confirm I’m at the right place from the electric blue letters that round the corner of the building, with THE EMP facing Ontario Street and IRE HOTEL over Victoria Avenue, all with bulbs inside them strong enough to illuminate the snaking trails of rust descending from each of the “E”s. A small marquee screwed above the entrance to the bar on the south side announces: COM NG EVE TS—GIRLS! FRI AND SAT. None of the usual mention of “dancers” qualified as “beautiful” or “exotic.” Perhaps this is simply because the girls of The Empire Hotel are neither beautiful nor exotic. Nor do they dance, as that word is commonly understood.
The building itself is a four-story whitewashed affair whose plainness is offset by some copper detailing over the main floor windows (roaring lions before fluttering Union Jacks and, behind them, EST. 1904) as well as a series of stone gargoyles set along the rooftop’s edge. Not the standard depictions of growling mastiff or sneering gremlin either. These are clearly human, faces sculpted by a stonemason whose wonky craftsmanship is apparent even in the gray light of dusk. All male and bearded in the ministerial, turn-of-the-century style of early immigrant Brits. From this I surmise that these are the heads of Murdoch’s founding fathers. Yet their expressions are anything but noble. It’s impossible to tell if it’s the result of intended caricature or the mistake of limited artistic ability, but each of the heads seems to bear its own unique threat or perversion. Eyes halfshut in drunken lasciviousness or bulging in madness or terror. Mouths held tight as though keeping a secret within or opened wide with a pointed tongue lolling out.
I park the Lincoln on the street before the front door and stand for a moment with my head craned back, taking in one head and then another. It’s as though their expressions change while I look at them so that when I turn from the second back to the first, eyes that were open have closed shut, or from the fourth back to the third, a tongue extended that had previously been licking lips. A blur of movement just beyond the peripheral range of what I can see. It’s a common sort of illusion, I suppose, but real enough that I have to force a laugh and lower my head to street level again to rid myself of it. But no matter what I tell myself as I pull my garment bag and briefcase out of the trunk and step up to the door, I don’t look up.
The hotel lobby is lit by a single oversize chandelier fitted with a half-dozen of those fake gaslamp bulbs, so that one has to peer for direction and footing through an orange fog. The next striking thing is the smell. Something distinctly geriatric ward about it: a combination of damp linen, bean soup and the sting of chemicals wafting out from the stack of deodorizing pucks that sit at the bottom of the men’s room urinals. To the left is the padded black leather door to the bar and above it a screwed-in sign with fancy script: THE LORD BYRON COCKTAIL LOUNGE. GENTLEMEN’S ENTRANCE. From the other side of the stuffing and wood comes the sound of music, or at least certain wavering vibrations which never move above or
below the middle range—the sleepy murk of elevators, waiting rooms and department stores. On the right is an open archway to an unlit room that, judging from the streetlight that finds its way through the salty grease of the front window, was at one time the parlor. There’s a fireplace (now enclosed by splintered plywood), and a large mirror over the mantel that sends back a picture of me standing in the lobby. Faded, sickly, a smudge of paleness fixed over the dark background. A yellowed newspaper photograph discovered in an attic trunk.
I step up to the reception desk and bring my palm down on the service bell. No immediate stir-rings, and for a time I stand and wait, staring into the pattern of complicated vines bulging out from the velvet wallpaper. It’s as old and smoke-stained as everything else but isn’t dreadful, probably even an admired extravagance when first plastered up fifty or sixty years ago. In fact the only thing that seems to belong to the present decade is the bottom-of-the-line computer which sits behind the desk and displays a blue screen unblemished by text. Beside it a quarter-full coffeepot sitting on a hot plate, islands of turquoise mold floating on its surface.
Ring the bell again. This time there’s the sound of crumpling tinfoil from the back office, and then a man with papery skin and a bald head mapped with burst capillaries steps out into the dull marine light.
“What can I do you for?” he asks, the inside of his mouth caked with sandwich residue.
“You can do me for a room. Something large, with generous natural light. And quiet, if you can manage that.”
