The Hour of Bad Decisions

by Russell Wangersky

  I’ve looked at other houses, lots of them, and I know all the real estate signs. Red and blue, white and green. I know the faces of all of the agents in the newspaper guide, too, know which ones will answer their cellphones on the weekends and which ones will wait until Monday, even if it means losing a sale.

  I imagine they all know me – I imagine they get together sometimes and roll their eyes. “Had a viewing with Ivan Hennessey,” would be all one would have to say, and the others would nod and understand.

  Because I’m a serial viewer, a St. John’s open-house haunt, the constant wraith that never actually gets around to writing out an offer.

  And it’s not because I never see what I want, because really, I’m easy to please. Nor is it that I can’t afford to buy, because I can – if you’ve got a good job and you’re walking around with $60,000 worth of divorce settlement in your pocket, there isn’t much that you can’t look at around here. There’s not much that’s truly off the table.

  But you can be paralyzed. Sometimes you crash into stuff. An accident in a marriage is as easy as being rear-ended at a stop sign. One moment, you’re going in one direction, measured, slowly, ’til death do you part. The next, you realize everything has changed, and that the expected suddenly isn’t. That your back won’t straighten right any more, that the pain won’t let you sleep for any more than four hours without waking you and kicking you right out of the warm sleeve of bed. And two o’clock in the morning is just as desolate when you know exactly why it is you’re still awake, when you’re waiting for the pills to dissolve. When you realize that you know the geography of a new and small apartment so well that you can fly around it in the pitch dark never even touching a wall, like a pilot flying on instruments only.

  You don’t get to put the pieces back together the same way, because they don’t fit anymore. One moment, you’re outside watching your boy toddle around the yard, chasing the flinging, desperate grasshoppers, and the next, you’re living alone in an apartment with a foreign kitchen, where the spoons are never in the right drawer, where you look into the cupboards at a mystery that you seem unable to make sense of.

  I’ve put the palm of my hand on the rough lumber of basement stairs in a hundred houses just to remember what it felt like. You can feel it now, if you think hard, that rough, resisting prickle. And that’s not all. I’ve caressed newel posts, let my hand slide down bannisters, and I know the fast slick of varnish, the resisting grip of shellac. Shellac was originally made of bugs, you know. Maybe you don’t know that – that it was a resin excreted by the lac insect, until chemists found their own way to make it.

  And maybe you don’t know that the best of it is not the empty houses, that it isn’t the ones you have to furnish with truckloads of imagination.

  The best ones are the occupied ones, the ones with the full shelves of liquor, the ones where you wonder just what kind of occasion really calls for Sambuca. The more pieces to the puzzle, the better – I love the houses with the fugitive cats that gaze down balefully from the heights of closets, or that dart away quickly in ginger streaks, anticipating a kick. The houses where someone’s underwear is dangling out of the clothes basket, or where the kitchen sink has enough dishes to let you calculate how many came for supper the night before.

  I’m sure the agents think that I’m just never satis fied, that I’m looking for some sort of house that just doesn’t exist – because I’ve looked at everything. From three-storey Victorians with the whole top floor wide open and a soaker tub, to squat single-level old-style homes with peaked roofs and hip windows. Just about everything, really, and I remember most of them, except for the suburbans, which all fall and fade into one. Built-in appliances, washers and dryers that always come with the sale, anything to try and hook the fickle buyer.

  And it’s not that I didn’t want them either.

  I’ve wanted every single house, everything in them down to the margarine tubs of screws and nails in the basement. Down to the laundry baskets in the hall that bulge with clothing tossed there without even a thought about the casual house-comfort it represents. The security of not wondering, the ability to just have without ever knowing what it is that could be lost. The plodding, wonderful drudgery of the everyday. The casual ease of workshops where projects are sitting only half-finished, where things are left to dry or to harden, where the only thing missing is a hand to pick them back up. Cardboard moving boxes, folded flat and tucked into corners, so that it is only occasionally that you get to read the Magic-Markered directions saying “Kitchen” or “Front bedroom.”

  I’ve looked under stairs and behind closet doors, seen dry-cleaning hanging in its bags and nightdresses abandoned on hooks as if they were simply shed one day and never thought of again. Pillows, often still with dents. Rows of shoes and sneakers, waiting vainly for feet.

  A legion of shower curtains, frayed bathroom mats and magazines half-read, left hanging along the edge of a bathroom countertop.

  Sometimes, the realtors are busy – I remember one already on the cellphone, talking to the next appointment, and I lingered in the bathroom, looking at the toothpaste tube all messy around the cap, the toothbrushes standing in loose formation in a glass on the sink. Burying my face in a light-blue hand towel, hanging right there on the rack, and wondering if I was smelling detergent or someone’s shaving cream. Some realtors like to leave you pretty much alone – others tail you, endlessly explaining the obvious.

  “It’s a small kitchen, but with new cabinets…”

  “Not the biggest of rooms, but with new paint, it’d be brighter.”

  They’re the mind-readers, the ones who are trying to divine your intentions from your expression, from the way you hold your body when you go into each room.

  I don’t get many of them any more.

  Others are happy enough to let you stroll while they hover just within questioning range. I get them a lot.

  Happy enough to let you wander, happy enough to let you wonder. Happy enough when you leave, and when you do, they all have business cards with their photographs in the left corner, as if their faces will somehow make them harder to forget. Except that the cards wind up being exactly the same – they pile up in a green glass bowl in the kitchen of my apartment, and I put the bananas on top of them.

  Other things you remember better. There was a house with sloppy swastikas on the basement walls, poorly executed in red spray paint, and another where desperation had caused the owner to cut down through the concrete floor to lay seepage pipe.

  “Ever get water problems down here?” I asked, waiting to see how far someone would go for a sale. “No,” was the answer, “no problems with that,” even though in one concrete corner, a sledgehammer and an axe were welded to the floor with furry rust, the kind of rust that only occurs when something has been fully immersed.

  Another house where the owners were cleaning up, but where every step just showed off half-measures. The carpet cleaner plugged into an extension cord, making it clear that there was a bedroom with no electrical outlets at all. A basement, emptied of old bottles and the leftovers of things that inevitably end up downstairs, serving only to show the whole back wall wasn’t concrete at all, but just damp brown earth. Light blue carpet in the living room, pried up in one corner, just enough to show you that there wasn’t a salvageable floor underneath.

  “But look at that garden,” they said, nudging me towards the kitchen. “You just don’t get a garden like that downtown.”

  Tiled kitchens, painted kitchens, kitchens with cabinets from floor to the ceiling – I like the ones where you can look straight out a window from the kitchen sink, so that you can imagine doing dishes while you look across the quiet simplicity of the yard. Touring houses in the daylight, you never imagine that it might be night time when you finally get to wash dishes, and that all you might see is the accusing re flection of your own face against the inky black glass.

  And maybe then someone drives by and looks at the other side
of that glass, and imagines the way your hands must feel, warm and wet, deep in the dishwater.

  The way it is when I drive by your house.

  I’ve looked in your windows, watched the blue of the television re flecting from your ceiling – I’ve seen every inch of your life, bisected by the slats of your venetian blinds. I know the day when you bring the groceries home, the time in the evening when the light goes off in the back bedroom. But you can’t even begin to know the frustration of it.

  Sometimes I think I’m only half looking for a house, that I’m searching vainly instead for the simple irrational, quick-boiling irritation of someone else’s puddle left on the bathroom linoleum. Your puddle.

  I’m looking for the slow, even, annual metronome of leaves waiting to be raked, for the responsibilities that drag at your soul like weights, until that emptying moment when they are gone and you realize how much you actually miss them.

  And I drive by and look, and think to myself that I’ll be ready if your husband ever, ever puts the house up for sale.

  It’s the house – the house that I want.

  When he goes, he can leave the furniture behind; he can leave absolutely everything behind.

  In fact, I wish he would.

  Big Shoes

  THE HOSPITAL CALLED, AND THAT WAS THE first thing I knew about it. Sure, I probably should have known something sooner than that, but it’s been busy so I haven’t gone over as much as I could have.

  The nurse who called said he’d appeared in the emergency room in a wheelchair, with socks on his feet but no shoes, that he appeared to have had a stroke, that he couldn’t have come in by himself.

  And I went down right away, I did, and you have to wonder what the government’s doing with our taxes, because the place was filthy and crowded with people. My father was tucked into a corner of the emergency room like he was a piece of the furniture, covered with a ratty grey hospital blanket, his feet sticking out from under the edge, brown socks, one big toe poking through, tipped with a long, yellowed toenail.

  I couldn’t help but think that he would have been ashamed to have been seen like that – he used to put a tie on for a doctor’s appointment, for God’s sake, and wear his favourite brogues, expensive and brown and carefully tended – but the man in the wheelchair wasn’t really like my father at all. All the good had been cut out of him: his face was collapsed in on itself as if his teeth and tongue had been stolen.

  “Hello, Dad,” I said, kneeling down in front of him and reaching for his hand. His eyes stared off into space, unfocused. He was drooling. When I felt his arm it was barely more than bones wrapped in skin. He grunted, but he didn’t speak. One of the people sitting next to him moved so I could sit down.

  The place was dismal, really it was. Mauve plastic chairs, two tables with tattered magazines and empty paper coffee cups. A television on a bracket up near the ceiling, blaring professional wrestling. A woman on the pay phone, talking loudly to someone: “I was smoking too much and I just didn’t feel right, okay? So I called an ambulance, okay?”

  A beefy man with his arm wrapped in an elastic bandage kept shifting his weight, and turned to the person next to him. “Three fucking hours and nothing. The doctors here suck anyway. If they were any good, they’d be somewhere else, makin’ more fuckin’ money.”

  My father’s cheeks moved in and out every time he took a breath.

  The nurse said his wallet had been pinned to his jacket under the blanket, his health card sticking up on end. There wasn’t any money in it. Looking through it, I saw he’d cut my university graduation picture down to fit in that narrow plastic photo sleeve. Me in a mortarboard and academic gown, smiling uncomfortably, my last few seconds of higher education frozen in time. I always thought that moment was both his greatest pride, and, eventually, his biggest disappointment. I hadn’t continued on to be a scientist or an engineer, just became another one of the endless fleet of mid-level managers. In human resources, the dreaded hr, what my father would certainly have deridingly called “personnel.” He had never said a thing, but I always felt that it hung between us like a faint smell of something gone bad, that if he could ever bring himself to just tell the truth, he’d tell me how I had wasted my potential.

  “My best guess is his stroke was about three, four days ago,” the doctor said. “We’re going to admit him for now, but he’ll be going into full-time care. I really don’t think you’ll see much improvement.” He shrugged. “But I might be wrong.”

  A nurse leaving at the end of her shift gave me more information about how Dad had gotten there: “A little guy brought him in,” she said. “He walked funny, like his shoes were too big.”

  My father had been a scientist, world-famous in the way scientists are now: renowned in his own little corner of the scientific world, something to do with the way nutrients pass through plant membranes. Important enough that the condominium was full of scientific papers and framed, dusty honorary degrees. Well-known enough in his own branch of science that, when someone on the fringes of plant biology heard my last name, they’d ask if I was related to him. I think he would have preferred it if the tables had eventually turned, and people had started asking him if he was related to me.

  They gave me my father’s keys at the hospital, so getting into the condominium wasn’t a problem: I had my own set, of course, but you can’t always put your hands on keys right away – they were probably in my kitchen, but I couldn’t remember the last time I’d actually seen them.

  His door, when I got there, was latched, but the deadbolt wasn’t locked. I’d seen about getting that deadbolt installed after he’d made such a fuss about a few break-ins in other condos. Just kids, probably, after jewellery and cd players and camera gear – the kind of thieves that sweep through and move on – but you couldn’t tell him that, because once he makes his mind up, the discussion is finished. The world was going to the dogs, that’s the way he looked at it, and you just had to be prepared.

  So it was strange that the bolt wasn’t turned. Stranger still, once I had the door open. The place was a mess – well, more than the usual mess, anyway. His eyes hadn’t been any good for years now, so there was already a permanent kind of disorder to his place.

  You’d eat a candy from the dish at his place at your own peril: they could as easily have been put out a year ago as last week. Things would be on the floor that he’d dropped and hadn’t seen. Before we’d agreed that candles might not be such a good idea, I’d occasionally come in and gather up small handfuls – like pick-up-sticks – of lost strike-anywhere matches.

  But this time, the mess was different. Somehow, it looked more involved, more thorough.

  Like any house, there were drawers that might not be opened for a full year: the box with the silver, for example, and the cupboard holding what had been my mother’s tea set. But everything seemed to have been opened and then carelessly closed again.

  The small kitchen was filthy, the garbage over-flowing, dirty dishes piled in the sink. Every piece of cutlery seemed to be dirty; some of it was crusted and even mouldy. I was beginning to get really angry: it wasn’t supposed to be like this.

  The worst was the spare room.

  The television I’d gotten for him a couple of Christmases ago was set up in the spare room, sitting on top of a slim silver dvd player I’d never seen before. There were dirty plates on the floor, and a plastic dvd box – porno – next to the light. The bed was unmade, the covers thrown back. The dresser drawers weren’t quite closed, as if they’d been emptied and no one had cared to push them fully shut. Someone had been living there, that was obvious – but it looked like they weren’t living there any more.

  I’d been paying for home care, an arm and a leg really, and I tried call to the agency from the phone in the apartment. The phone wasn’t working, so I made the call on my cell. They told me their file had been closed four weeks earlier – that Frank Otanski had called and said there wasn’t any need anymore, that a family frie
nd had taken over.

  Well, I’m Frank Otanski, I said, and I hadn’t called anyone.

  “The last bill was paid off on Mr. Otanski’s visa card,” I was told primly, including the $100 penalty for dropping the service before month-end.

  I sat on Dad’s couch for a few moments, dazed, looking at the dusty pictures of my brother and me. Stephen, who had done science in university, who even now was banding scared and puking seabirds on some desolate strip of sand off the Nova Scotia coast.

  Just like Stephen to leave it all here in my hands. Sure, Dad thought the world of Stephen, but that didn’t mean Stephen actually did anything. I managed Dad’s affairs, paid the condo fees and the home care fees, paid to have Dad taken to the doctor and the dentist. I did the work, and Stephen would fly in for a few days every four or five months like the lost sheep, and you’d think Dad’s face was going to split, he was so happy. After a couple of days, Stephen would be gone again, and it would still all be on my shoulders.

  Looking around the room, I suddenly realized what was different about it. It looked looted.

  There was a space on the wall where there had been one small picture – a watercolour my father had bought my mother in an uncharacteristically romantic moment, a watercolour that had actually wound up being worth a few thousand dollars.

  My father had pulled on his beard and smiled when it had turned out to be valuable. Proof to him, I guess, that the rigours of science could be used to winkle out the answers to art as well. But it was gone, and so was the silver. Yes, family silver. Sounds trite these days, but it had been a full set of sterling silver, with stylized “Os” on the end of each piece – all of it in a rosewood box, set down in deep green velvet trenches. Murder to keep clean, probably black with disuse, but silver.