Consolation

by Michael Redhill

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t move your mouth now. Thirty seconds. The children clamber up onto the bed. Times are different now, your parents would have frowned on such permissiveness, but you love these little bodies. Alice lifts the covers.” Hallam felt the heat of the nighttime billowing around him. “They tuck in, their cold little children’s feet. Laughter. This is what they have of you, what they think about and what they miss. Not that man in his waistcoat and garter, his tall hat. There you are. There is Jem Hallam, the father of two. Stay still now. Not long now.” Hallam sent his whole self into the box, down the arrow of his sight. “Done,” said Ennis. “You can rest.”

  “And what was that I drank?” Hallam said quietly, still in the thrall of the photo, as Mrs. Arnold had been.

  “Potatoes.”

  “Really.”

  “They have souls, you know, but you can’t get at them until they rot almost to hell. And then they become something quite as pure as a child’s soul and as clear. It’s very handy of them.”

  “I feel a little brutalized.” He realized the small amount of light in the room was hurting his eyes. He closed them and rubbed them with his fists. “But I’m happy.”

  “Wonderful,” said Ennis. “You can come round for the results tomorrow. In the afternoon, I’ll be guessing.”

  HALLAM WALKED HOME in the full dark, the sliver of a new moon casting a fog-like glow on the city, and above that moon, an ancient sky of stars. Along Adelaide Street, under the protection of the near-dark, women stood speaking with men, and other couples passed by. Even Camden Town transformed like this at night; it was no longer a source of surprise to him. But that it had reconstituted itself this completely, like a powder poured into the water of a new city, was startling. Toronto was but fifty years old, and already all level of trade existed there.

  “You need a lie-down, burgomaster?” said someone in the shadows. She laughed, a musical sound that was out of place.

  “No, thank you.”

  “That’s a fine suit of clothes to be walking crooked in.” She’d stepped out. She was young, with bright, clear eyes. “I can help you walk straighter.”

  He tried to smile in a sophisticated way. “I’ll be fine on my own,” he said, bowing slightly, and pulled his eyes away from the woman. He took Peter Street south in the direction of the lake. For some distance down this way (a street he’d never been on day or night), there was not a soul, and not so much as a candle burning in a window. A single bat burst from the underside of a bare tree and shot past his head like a shuttlecock.

  On Wellington Street, he turned left, coming within the ironish scent of the still-frozen lake, and passed the Parliament buildings and Bishop Strachan’s Palace, back into the comforting light of the gaslamps. At the very first of them, a pair of men sat huddling for warmth under its meager heat, and Hallam passed them each a coin, which they received with silent nods. Along here, he’d seen families begging in the warmer months, groups of four, two children and two adults, all revolving within the sphere of the Parliament, where their troubles were ignored. There but for . . . he thought, feeling grateful.

  It felt warmer, or perhaps he was warmed still, whether by the lethal cocktail Ennis had given him or by the seeming closeness of the people he loved, and he had an urge to visit the lakefront, to stand where he’d first stood almost nine months earlier, full of arrogant wishes and simple hopes. He walked down to Front Street, where people of a more familiar class were now to be seen near the American Hotel, standing in knots of conversation. He returned a happy wave of the hand to one of them, and inside the ground-floor windows of the hotel, frosted around the edges and fogged, he could hear the revelry of the guests in their grog, and a pianoforte playing in the background. I could close my eyes and be home.

  Hallam continued to the base of Brown’s Wharf and stood there surveying the expanse of frozen lake. There was slurried water where ships’ hulls made contact with the ice, tied up at their wharves and scratching at their element like animals in cages. Spring would come now — one could feel it in the air. Out into the dim light, the lake lay pale and off-white, encased in its icy sheath like a plate of tin covered in crystalline silver. Lunar caustic, that substance which drank light. Hallam stood before that expanse, a shiver of joy and fear in his muscles, looking at a giant photograph being made by stars.

  THREE

  THE EARTH MOVERS

  TORONTO, NOVEMBER 1997

  ONE

  AT SEVEN, JOHN arrived.

  David came out the front door and walked to the curb. The whole neighborhood smelled of August flowers, the phlox blooming at last, a tang in the peach-sweet air.

  John watched the way David moved and it made him want to jump from the car and take his arm. But he knew better and he let Bridget’s father make his slow way, his ankles loose, the backs of his hands somehow leading his body forward. John’s only concession was to reach across the passenger seat and push the door open an inch. David got in with a heavy exhale. He settled himself in the seat and struggled to bring the belt around.

  “Was Bridget awake?” he said.

  “No.”

  “I woke Marianne. But she was asleep when I left.”

  John took the end of the seat belt out of David’s fingers and snapped him in. “Are you going to be all right without a jacket?”

  “I don’t want a jacket.” He twisted stiffly in the seat. His clothes seemed to move independent of his body. “Are you okay, John?”

  “Are you?”

  “I’m ready.”

  John sat with his hands on the wheel, the street over the dashboard soaked in light, and he tried to think of something else to talk about, anything to keep them there, in front of the house. He began to speak, but David put a hand on his, and said, “Come on now, no more small talk. Let’s go.”

  Driving south, John saw the car as if from above, a view of the little red Corolla taking the side streets out slowly toward Eglinton Avenue and then joining the morning traffic there. Going south on Bayview toward the lake. A slow-moving form taking on the heat of other cars and the sun, and below them the huge expanse of lake. It hurt his eyes to look at it. At Bloor Street, passing under the viaduct, John realized he was probably equidistant from both of their women, both still sleeping, unaware of this invisible line he was drawing between them.

  They were talking as if merely passing the time of any day — David saying something about the smell of bricks baking in the old valley kilns — but John was distracted by the image of his car as a bead on a line and his mind ticked over into a strange consideration. The actual distance in feet or miles between two places would be constant, but the time it would take to bridge them was flexible. Distances between things had at least two independent qualities, a spatial one and a temporal one. This wasn’t a new thing, even a six-year-old would understand that if you ran home you’d get there quicker. What distressed him was that the speed at which he drove the car correlated to the establishment of a moment in time. David was asking him something about Bridget, and John answered by saying, “Until now, as well as you might expect. Although after today . . .”

  “Yes,” said David. “Of course.”

  “Little explosions.”

  John kept his attention on the traffic, which was building the further south they went, collecting cars from the Don Valley Parkway and the side streets. He didn’t want to invite David this morning to enlarge on anything very much; he didn’t want to be too direct about anything. There are forms of knowing, he thought, and many are better unacknowledged. He noticed his legs were shaking, and to cover, he patted his thigh, as if to music. But the car radio was off.

  He slowed down. He liked being with David, no matter why, liked the way David talked to him. None of the Hollises spoke to him the way David did. Not even Bridget, and although it would seem natural that one might expect a different kind of intimacy with one’s lover than with her father, John still felt it as a lack. David had said, during
an odd half-hour the previous spring, Will you begrudge me a drink? as if he actually believed it was in John’s power to deny him anything. Except that afterwards, John realized it hadn’t been a question but a test of kinship. Before this, he had done a number of small tasks for David — he’d realized long ago that his destiny was to be called upon — and he’d collected a book for David or looked up some small matter like a date or a street name. John’s so-called expertise was only a convenience, though. The two men were too far apart in age to settle on simple friendship, so their relationship was sown on the berm of being useful to each other. David, over the five years John had known him, had confided many of his passions: the city’s history, the Blue Jays, the lives of his daughters, certain flowers in certain seasons. But now, it felt to John, all of it had been leading to this morning. Fate employing them both in its inevitabilities. It came to him in a worrying flash that he didn’t know of a single city where you drove north to get to water.

  “Did you eat?” he asked.

  “I had a few Triscuits.”

  “We can pull off here and go to the Canary. Get a real breakfast.”

  “Why don’t you stop on the way back, John. Take some time for yourself. What do you think?”

  “I might do that.” John let the thought of how he’d be feeling slide from his mind and he drove past the exit to Eastern Avenue, another spot in the city it would be difficult to look at.

  Simply by living in a place the parts of it become invested with the power to memorialize pleasure or pain. He’d lived in Toronto since high school — only fourteen years, less than half his life — but the entire city was flecked with significances. The apartment his aunt Cecilia and uncle Jason paid for at Mount Pleasant and Eglinton when they sent him to Toronto to “start new” — an intersection that still filled him with hopeless loneliness. There too the North Toronto high school that, when he had reason to pass it, still emanated the stink of cigarette smoke and wet concrete, as well as the faint aural scar of the music he was forcibly loyal to in those days. (“The Lovecats”? “99 Luftballons”?)

  They came out onto Lakeshore Boulevard, which (David had once told him, and was now telling him again) had been built on debris. Directly behind them the abandoned industrial lands ranged back — tall gray stone faces at their edge and behind them squat weathered brick buildings and wild scrubby fields and a breakfast dive or two still pulling in enough people to keep opening their doors, fifty years beyond the last active days of that neighborhood.

  The Harbour Light Hotel was coming up in front of them on the left. Strangers still in their beds, stacked to the sky, unaware of anything but what was going on inside their minds, to be forgotten on waking. What slim thread of the world at street level might infect the place, John wondered, and turn the late dreaming within it darker, like a dropper of black ink squeezed into a swimming pool. He knew that every inch he proceeded with David in the car he shared with his fiancée would push the edges of that stain farther in all the directions of his own life.

  “Will you let me take you home?” John said, and David’s answer upset him, and he spun the car hard against oncoming traffic and swerved to the opposite curb. His face was hot and red. He suddenly tasted bright iron in his mouth and a wave of electricity flowed through the marrow of his teeth. They were at the walkway west of the hotel, near the ferry docks. John undid his seat belt.

  “Don’t get out,” David said.

  “I didn’t go through this to let you stumble the last steps to the docks. It’s three hundred feet to the turnstiles.”

  “I know how far it is,” said David. He leaned across the seat and kissed his future son-in-law on the cheek. “I love you,” he said, his hand cool against John’s face. “Take care of my girls.”

  TWO

  HE SAW THE light in the eyehole blot to darkness and he felt her staring at him as he stood in the hotel hallway. He could sense the waves of disbelief penetrating the door. She’d called Bridget for the first time almost a week ago; she had every reason to believe the knock at her door meant a thaw in relations. A moment of discomfort displaced by a tearful hug. He wasn’t sure she was going to open the door at all, but then it swung wide and it was somehow a grand gesture of displeasure.

  “I guess she must really be pissed off at me,” she said.

  “She’s concerned,” said John Lewis.

  “Well, you tell her I’m fine.”

  “Are you?”

  Marianne stared blankly at him, leaning on the door. He was trying to gather as much as he could, knowing the door could close at any moment. He smelled citrus in the air, a watery, thin thread of it, and soap coming off of Marianne. Home smells. She was wearing taupe slacks and a T-shirt David had bought her on their last Christmas. “Can you tell me what you’re doing here?”

  “Well, John, I’m having a vacation.”

  He stepped back from the door. “So I guess you’re fine, then?” She let him back up a step more. “Should I tell Bridget that?”

  “Sure. Tell her that, since she’s so worried about me.” He stood in the hallway, his hands deep in his pockets. “You’re just going to go?”

  “I guess.”

  “Fine,” she said.

  She walked back into the room and stood between the two double beds, leaving a right of way in front of him that led to the windows. He wiped his clean feet thoroughly outside the door and then entered with his eyes lowered. He inventoried the lamp outside the bathroom before he crossed to the windows, glancing around the room as he went, although not at her. The room was clean, if cluttered. One bed of two unmade. He could scratch utter madness off his list. The lake, glowing dully in the large west-facing window, drew him to the other side of the room. The early November light turned the water into a slowly undulating movie screen. The other window faced north onto the monolithic-seeming city, a window that took up only half of that wall. He stood there, looking down along the row of condos ranging westward along the lakefront, then faced the city in the other view. There was the muddy excavation at the foot of Bay Street.

  “This is what you’re doing?” he said, still looking through the window.

  “I have a hobby now. They’re always telling widows to get a hobby, so this is mine. Like trainspotting, only without trains. Or tracks.”

  “Or a destination.”

  “If you’re going to nitpick.”

  He stood straight. The door was still open, fifteen or so feet away. “Did David ever say he thought there’d be something right here? Right at the foot of the hotel?”

  “I don’t know, did he?”

  “Not to me.”

  “It’s a grand conjecture,” she said. “I’m not afraid of the outcome.”

  “Maybe some people are going to get put in their place.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “How long do you think?” he said, turning to face her. “Until they get down far enough?”

  She came to stand with him in the quay-facing window and he moved slightly to one side. At street level the site was walled in with pastel-colored boards painted with the images of local hockey heroes. From above, the walled hole looked like a grave. “Well, how far are they now?”

  “I have no idea,” he said.

  “Forty feet?”

  He tried to calculate if it was, but applying his brain to something as mechanical as a measurement was impossible in his current state of mind. His hands vibrated with pins and needles. He compared the depth of the wall on the far side of the hole to the machines and people he could see in it. There was no scale. “You think forty?”

  “Forty feet down, under the fill, that’s where the water’s surface would have been. The lake of 1850.”

  She went over to the little hotel desk and fished through the mess on it. The desk was the room in miniature: paper, books, scraps of hotel stationery with illegible notes and diagrams on them. Scribbled arrows pointing at boxes. He made out the word wharf under one of them. Cylinders of photocopied new
sprint leaned against the wall at the back of the desk like spent uranium rods. There were more paper tubes on the floor, a few of which had burst their elastic bands and flopped open there. Strange white paper blossoms. She brought out a press kit. “This says the foundation is going to be poured at fifty-two feet.”

  “It’s not even fifty feet yet.”

  “You sure?” She handed him a pair of binoculars. “Now look through these and tell me.”

  He had questions for her, but she’d already driven him from his purpose and he went along with it, waiting for the right moment. He lifted the binoculars, and through them he saw the dirt and the machines and the bits of garbage. He couldn’t think very well, aware that her eyes were on him. He tracked past the two or three large yellow machines making busy over the surface of the site, went up as far as he could and then back down when he saw cars, and refocused. He figured he could pile three bulldozers on top of one another and reach street level. Was a bulldozer seven feet tall? He’d never considered the height of a bulldozer before. He held the glasses steady and looked away to see if he could judge size by comparison. He had no idea. He said so.

  “Okay then,” said Marianne. “So you have nothing to offer me?”

  “I’m not good at guesstimation.”

  She laughed. “Add it to the list, John.”

  “I’ll go.”

  “And tell Bridget what? Now that you’ve venied and vidied?” She held out a hand and he put the binoculars in it.

  “I’ll tell her she should come and see you. Or call you, at least.”

  “I don’t want any more phone calls, John. She knows where I am.”

  Once he’d had to level a swing seat at his uncle’s farm by evening out two ropes tied to either end of it. By the time they were each a foot shorter the seat was still uneven and he gave up, and it struck him that this was a perfect image for Bridget and Marianne’s relationship. He could never tell Bridget this thought. Or tell Marianne the kinds of things her daughter, wrongly, thought of her. An agonic love held them together, and the strongest force in it was a complete and basic misunderstanding of each other. He said, “I guess the two of you are coping with David in your own way.”