Consolation

by Michael Redhill

  “It’s not a claim. And anyway, by the time they get to the point where they want to pour, they’ll be past forty feet. Right? They’ll have found it by then.”

  “Or not.” She returned her attention to the window. He could hear the distant mechanical sounds from three hundred feet below them. Whirrs and clanks. He closed his eyes and felt the whole of it in his mind: the big dirty space, the machines avoiding each other in their slow progressions, the earth being removed. He saw the land as a cross-section and imagined a shape just below the surface, rising. Or the land falling, like water receding and revealing. It would be a miracle if there was anything there, he thought, but it was something worth hoping for.

  He considered Marianne as she stood in the window, seeing echoes of Bridget in her spine, in her neck — Bridget’s form embedded in her mother’s. He’d noticed these similarities before but had averted his attention from them because he was busy being in love and couldn’t imagine Bridget any other way than as she was. As an adult, he had no person around whose older body he could see himself winding like a vine, but here was Bridget, the future’s Bridget, standing in front of him. Into the window, Marianne said, “Should we make small talk?”

  “Do you want to?”

  “Bright for November,” she said.

  “I never notice those kinds of things.”

  “You don’t notice November is dark? Don’t you usually feel like killing yourself in November?”

  “Not especially in November, no.”

  She laughed; he imagined she’d thought him clever for a moment. “Well, fine, how’s work? You do someone’s bookkeeping, right?”

  “It’s more research.”

  “Right.” He heard her fingertips ripple along the top of the ledge. “I guess it’s hard to apply an accounting degree when you hate accounting.”

  “I thought it was a practical major. I didn’t realize I didn’t have the talent for it.”

  She looked at him with what seemed to be something of a leer. “Was it really a matter of talent? Does one need talent to use a calculator?”

  He gave a faint shrug. “Do you know bookkeeping is the only word in English with three double letters in a row?”

  “You’re a panic, John. I’ve never been able to think of you as an accounting type.”

  “I guess I’m not.”

  “Would this be why you work as a researcher for a failed playwright rather than raking in the bucks on Bay Street?”

  “Could be,” he said.

  She fell silent. He released his breath, controlling his rib cage so it wouldn’t make a sound. “Are you going to be useful to me, John?”

  “Useful?”

  “I’m just wondering if you’re here to perform some kind of a service. Maybe I can’t afford you.”

  He went along with the joke, but he knew his face looked wrong. “This is a special offer,” he said. He felt stupid.

  She came closer, but he stood his ground in front of her. She was entitled, he thought, but he hoped she wouldn’t hit him. “Come back tomorrow,” she said. “I’ve had enough company for today.”

  “I thought we could —”

  “You thought wrong.”

  ON WEDNESDAY, SHE called him a cat and told him to go away again. Her eyes were gray and red. That night, while he was sharing a pizza with Bridget in front of the television, she’d debated aloud whether it was time to call her mother. He looked at her without moving his head. “Do you think you can talk to her calmly?” he asked.

  “Do you think I can?”

  “Maybe wait a few more days,” he said. She subsided to silence then, her attention on the TV, and his secret was still safe, although “safety” was not on the spectrum of feelings he was having these days. She was lethargic at night, willing to eat whatever John brought home, but she only picked at her food. He noted her skin was pale, as if grieving for her father was leeching the color from her. In the middle of the night her groaning woke him up and all he could get out of her was the word foot. When he lifted the covers off her legs, one of her feet was cramping — her big toe pointed at an almost ninety-degree angle to her instep. He held her foot against the inside of his leg and pushed against the long muscle running down the edge of her sole. When the cramp subsided, she began to cry, but the entire time she had remained asleep. He tried to imagine how her sleeping mind had coded the pain and release as a dream.

  HE LEFT MARIANNE on her own on Thursday and spent the day on the fifth floor of the Toronto Reference Library looking up the symptoms of Legionnaires’ disease for Howard Rosen. It rained all afternoon and then the sun came out just as he left, a benediction.

  Late on Friday afternoon she said, as if in hope, “I thought I’d scared you off for good.” She’d opened the door and then gone back to the window. Now she was in jeans and a black blouse. A room service lunch, a linen napkin covering a plate, was waiting on a wheeled table near the door. She asked him to leave the door open.

  Even in the house on Banff Road he’d not felt he was in her territory as keenly as he did now, in this space that was, temporarily, hers alone; he’d never felt he was taking his life into his own hands. Here now, there was nothing but Marianne, Marianne detached from the grid of her life and her mind pointing down into the dirt like the head of a shovel. She would not be moved and he had already decided, anyway, not to try to move her. She could uncover her own version here and it would disturb nothing that he knew. He could probably live with that.

  He pushed the lunch table into the hall.

  “I spoke with Alison,” she said. “She told me she was disappointed. Do you think a child should say she’s disappointed in her parent?”

  “She’s trying to be honest with you. I thought you wanted that.”

  She hmphed and pointed at the unslept-in bed. There was a pile of books on it. “I think you may last longer if we don’t speak. I made you a reading list.”

  “Is it for me or for you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you want me to make notes?”

  “If you want.” She yawned as if considering the prospect of having to read a dozen précis. He’d begun to see that the piles around the room hadn’t changed much in his four visits. They kept an unread shape. Perhaps they were there only to buzz and whisper. Conversations heard through a wall. “See if you can’t tease out a salient detail or two.” She tossed him a small pad and a pen.

  He let her go back to what she was doing at the window (he’d been careful, this time, to appear uninterested) and sat on the bed. The first thing in the pile was not a book but a photocopy of the sort of thing he never knew had existed before the 1930s: a travel guide. It was for people planning to visit or move to Toronto in the mid-nineteenth century. Beneath it was The Annals of York, which appeared to collect the goings-on in city chambers to well back in the nineteenth century. Then Canada and Why We Like It, by Mrs. Edward Copleston, and at the bottom of the pile, like a nostrum vouchsafing sleep, was Smith’s Canadian Gazetteer for 1846. He’d had to rifle through one of these catalogs for David himself, to confirm the name of a wharf. That was in 1996, when David had asked him to help with the monograph, his hands too unsteady to take his own notes anymore.

  Six hundred and ten barrels of ash exported from Windsor Harbor in 1844.

  He glanced up at Marianne to ensure he was doing what was required of him. She was drawing concentric circles in a notebook. Twenty-three pages of the city guide offered the Latin names of local trees and animals and bugs, most of which no one had seen in the city since the First World War. (He had the image of berobed monks walking the streets in a long line, reciting these names in a long chant.) In the winter of 1854, Vespertilio noveboracensis, the “New York bat,” was found by a local entomologist, a Mr. Couper. John wrote down that the man “stuffed it and sent it to the celebrated naturalist L. Agassiz, to whom it was of the utmost importance.” Further on, there was a section enumerating the professionals in various trades. Two basket m
akers, two hundred and three tailors, thirteen artists. Ages, nativities, religions. Fifty-seven Jews in the city in 1856. Howard might want to know that, he thought, and wrote it down as well. Their sole synagogue was located at Richmond and Yonge, above “the apothecarists.”

  The writer — he was signed a member of the press — wrote in a personal tone, as if he were standing right there beside you, pointing out a clever gilt vane here, a peculiar odor there. John found himself engrossed in that voice, happy to be anywhere but in Marianne Hollis’s bedroom, the voice so alive despite its calling out from a distance. He wondered how difficult it would be, if a person were so inclined, to manufacture a case for one thing or another, abetted by a witness like this.

  “Do you think my behavior is ‘disappointing’?” she said, and he lowered the book to his lap. She’d crept closer to “his” side of the room.

  “No. I understand it.”

  “And what does Bridget say?”

  “She’s frustrated.”

  Marianne’s laugh was crisp and mocking. “You are a diplomat, aren’t you? Is that a euphemism for she thinks I’m nuts?”

  “No.”

  “It would be courteous, you know, if you insist on showing up here, to stop the embroidery. Don’t make me prod you like we’re on a date.”

  “If you’re asking me what I think —”

  “I’m asking you what you know.”

  “What I think is that the two of you should be talking.”

  “We are. Through you. Just like David did. I hope that makes you feel useful.”

  He held her eyes steadily now. “I don’t tell her anything, Marianne.”

  “Why.”

  “Because she doesn’t know I’m here.”

  She became very still, and instinctively, he leaned back on the bed. “Really. Are you threatening to become interesting?”

  “I will tell her.”

  “And here I thought she was getting a front-row seat to my misery.”

  “Are you miserable?”

  “I thought you knew.” She stared at him with a menacing blankness. “Avert your eyes is the first rule of someone else’s suffering,” she said, “but you’re far too earnest for that. My daughters have figured it out, but not you. You want to be helpful! Wow. You’d probably rescue a parakeet from a burning building.”

  “I’m not here just for you.”

  “Get your own room then.”

  “Marianne —”

  “What did I do? Tell me what I did.” There was that expression of almost comic bewilderment he’d seen on the faces of others from time to time. An unraveling he could cause. It told him he had the power to affect others, even though he felt he was somehow an uncharged particle, a conduit through which a force could travel but not remain. “So you’re here for yourself. You’re here just to see for yourself?”

  “It’s more than that,” he said.

  “But basically.”

  “No.”

  “You know what? I should be watching people dig instead of trying to figure you out. I don’t care why you’re here. I know why I’m here.” She turned away from him again and looked outside.

  He went into the bathroom and filled a drinking glass with water, drank it, and then washed the glass out under hot water, running soapy fingers around the rim. He took in his plain, unmysterious features in the mirror and wondered if Marianne thought of him as a con man. He came back out and noted that the light was beginning to fade. She was sitting on her bed, facing the one he’d been on, lost in thought, holding the Copleston book.

  “What David did wasn’t because of you,” he said.

  “And you know.”

  “You know too, Marianne.”

  She rubbed her hands along the top of her legs — a gesture so familiar to him that he was embarrassed to see it.

  FIVE

  ON THE WEEKEND, John and Bridget saw little of each other. She worked both days at the ministry, catching up on work she’d let slip in the confused week and a half of her mother’s strange behavior. She was still trying to impress her superiors, working overtime when she thought she’d be seen and taking paperwork home with her every night. John stayed in the apartment, cleaning and taking the dog to the park every couple of hours. He ran with her there until they were both exhausted, and then she slept on the couch, a small beige oval, her back leg twitching once in a while and pulling his thoughts back to her.

  On Sunday night, Bridget reached across him in bed and switched off his light as he was reading, took his book from him and dropped it to the floor on her side of the bed. Then the sound of fabric lifting, her arms near him and the smell of the inside of her shirt: detergent, her skin. “I don’t want to talk,” she said, and she put her mouth to his to prevent him from even agreeing, and he was glad for it. Anything he might have said would be an omission of the truth: not speaking at all was somehow more honest. She moved on top of him and he knew what she wanted, put his hands on her hips and pulled down on her as she fought him, and he arced his back and drew her down. Then held her against him, biting her mouth, the heel of his palm hard against the scoop of her lower back.

  HOWARD ROSEN BACKED away from the door. “You’re kidding me.”

  “I’m not,” said John. He listened to Howard gather up the tea things — this was how all his visits with his employer began. Rosen lived on the top floor of a run-down three-flat house on Brunswick Street, just above Harbord, an area he frequently eulogized as the lost heart of the city’s Jewish culture. John’s regular day was Tuesday, usually for three hours in the morning, and for this Howard gave him the unlikely salary of four hundred dollars a month. It nearly paid a third of his and Bridget’s rent on the Hogarth Avenue apartment. It was as close as John got to holding his own.

  Below Howard, in the other two apartments, lived tenants John had never met, and the glass doors on the main level were obscured from the inside by a bedsheet. The whole house smelled stale; John was certain the other two tenants were men as well. Howard Rosen’s life was emblematic of a certain kind of city living: boxed in by the many, but basically alone.

  Howard came down the hall with the tray in his hand and they went into the front room — the bedroom, library, and living room — and John stood in the verge, reading this Tuesday’s disarray. More index cards had been added to the display on the long wall beside Howard’s bed: the makings of a new play, new still being the only word to describe something that, if he ever finished it, would be Howard’s first play in seven years. Every six months, like clockwork, the artistic director of the theater that produced his work held a reading of the thing “in progress,” and this was enough to renew the funding for Howard’s so-called residency at the theater. The residency consisted of an office on the third floor of the theater with a chair and a table in it, a room Howard had never actually seen and which was increasingly being used to store boxes of Styrofoam cups and photocopying paper.

  Howard had hired John after advertising for an “amanuensis,” a job title that was more likely to attract applicants than “general dogsbody,” which was closer to the truth. For John it was further proof that his degree was useless. He was primarily a stacks-sniffer for Howard — which talent was not completely out of keeping with his “training” (what is accounting if not the excavation of patterns?) — but he was also company, and he let himself be treated as on call. Once or twice a month an “emergency” required John to do some shopping or faxing or interference-running. And sometimes, to show he liked him, John would arrive unannounced and cook Howard supper and stay and eat with him in the battered, horrible kitchen. It seemed to John heroic that Howard went on when there was hardly a point. “A cul-de-sac,” Howard had once said, “gives you an excellent vantage point on the direction to go in.” The man’s mind was like a high-octane engine with a faulty carburetor: his ideas flashed and sputtered and all of his progress in life after his play of seven years ago (not such a giant hit as to trigger writer’s block) was really more a fit
ful kind of inertia than forward motion.

  “You like things complicated, John. You should be a writer.”

  “And give up everything I’ve spent my life building?”

  “You’re right. My mistake. One doesn’t ditch an empire on a whim.” Howard’s voice was like a cheese grater on leather: the result of a severed nerve during bypass surgery at forty-eight. He had shoulder-length straight gray hair, and since the lifesaving operation five years earlier, he’d managed to smoke and eat himself back into the danger zone. The topic was off-limits. “So what’s with the shacking up with both mother and daughter then?”

  “I don’t sleep at the hotel.”

  “See, if this was a play, you would. And Bridget would show up and either kill you both or join in — no matter, it’s a smash. Can I have it?”

  “You should finish this one first.”

  “Ah, yes.” He cast a forlorn glance at his planning wall. “I’ve moved some more scenes around. You should go look. I’m starting the play with the home movies now, and then later on I’m adding some scenes from those movies, verbatim, but the adults speak the lines.”

  “Home movies back then were silent,” said John. “Bridget’s dad had a bunch.”

  “Say these are videos then. You can talk your face off in a video.”

  “Not in 1935, you don’t.” He spent a moment orienting himself to Howard’s latest structure. Rewriting hadn’t been working, and he’d spent much of the year moving scenes around, waiting for something in the moribund play to ignite. “Back then, it was all silent eight millimeter.”

  “Well, write it down for next week,” Howard said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Find out if there was any eight millimeter with sound. And if there isn’t, we’ll figure out how to work in some dialogue over the movie. Maybe the mother speaks the children’s lines as their mouths move — you know, she has complete recall of every last thing that ever fell from their darling mouths.”

  “I’ll look into it.” He joined Howard on the couch and took his tea. Like most people without much of a life, Howard had found some little things to focus on, such as obsessively archiving his work, buying antique paperweights, and becoming an expert in tea. The pot he was serving contained Monkey-Picked Tie Guan Yin, which he explained was no longer picked by monkeys but was very rare indeed. They sipped it, and John guessed correctly it was an oolong. “Top note?” said Howard.