The Adjustment League

by Mike Barnes

  §

  On Elm, half a block before Dunbar, the Honda quits on me. There’s no warning, no sluggish churning, the engine just stops and I coast to a spot at the curb. I try several times but can’t restart it. There’s a brief buzzing sound the first time I try, and then no sound at all, just a click as I turn the key in its slot. I sit there, sighting down a double colonnade of old shade trees, their massy tops halfway to meeting above the street. Streetlights peeping companionably through them, like the warm yellow eyes of animals through ivy and sculpted shrubbery.

  Peaceful. Nobody on the street. Occasional surf of cars from Sherbourne behind me.

  What do I want? What can I get? Sitting in the dead car, I try to arrange the answers in my head. But they keep sliding out of sight—I’ll think I have a firm plan and then it will slither into shadow, its edges running.

  On the one hand, Wyvern money. Lots of it. On the other, the family’s determination not to let Judy get her hands on any of it. The family, or just Max? He’s the one with women problems—stick-fuls proving that. His balk at the figure of two hundred thousand—more than bargaining incredulity, it seemed. Would rather go to jail than enrich his sister. Of course, he doesn’t know jail. Still…

  Fifty thousand, I think finally. A cheque to Judy tonight, which I put in an account for her tomorrow. Salt it away before he’s in stir. But how does Judy keep it—or you keep your freedom—when Max, with nothing more to lose, starts howling extortion? Unknown. But if you can…

  Set it up with Ken so she draws down two hundred and fifty a month, say. Not much, but a lot to Judy. Better food, some treats. How does a ghost treat herself? Or maybe siphon off a bit of the principal, enough to kick it up to five hundred—until her OAS starts, five years or so from now.

  Maybe—the best idea yet—get it in your name and parcel it out to her. Regular cash gifts. Keep it from queering her benefits. Avoid mad splurges. How does a ghost splurge?

  Which means you keep on looking after her. An adjustment that keeps on adjusting. Commitment, people call it. Relationship.

  There’s a thought.

  §

  Flagstone walk—worn, with grass-moss strips anchoring the irregular shapes, like lead in stained glass—between neat hedges and flower beds. That warm yellow light flowing out from behind curtains through diamond-mullioned panes. Dark beams in stucco facing. The roof’s low-slung, generous overhang completes the home’s secluded, cottagey feel. Classy but understated. Cosy. I could be arriving for scones with Bilbo Baggins, rather than to shake down a perverted dentist who drugs young women and poses them in freak-porn shots.

  I ring the bell beside the blond oak door.

  “Dr. Wyvern?”

  “No other,” says the very tall, very old man with his hand on the jamb. Thin, distinguished-looking: dark slacks, cream shirt, gray cardigan. No glasses, despite his age.

  “That’s funny. You’re the second one I’ve met this week.”

  “Max Junior is a dentist.”

  “Someone should tell him. He’s got Dr. on his office door, Dr. on his business cards. Dr. on his bills, no doubt.”

  A long stare of appraisal ends in a thin smile. “Come in. I think we might be able to reach an understanding.”

  “I’m sure of it.”

  We’re involved in a courtly dance from the start. Max Senior is a charmer, he makes it seem natural. Knows the steps and knows how to lead without insisting. Without any feeling of oddness or displacement, I find myself being welcomed by a man I never suspected was alive until a minute ago. Shrugging out of my coat, which I seldom remove outside No Name, watching him hang it in the front closet. Removing my shoes and sliding my feet into a pair of soft slippers waiting in a row of different sizes. When I straighten, he’s eyeing me somewhat quizzically, with what may only be the mild puzzlement the wealthy sometimes feel in the presence of the poor. He’s extremely tall. It’s rare for eyes to meet mine straight on, unless they belong to a professional basketball player. I’m sure it’s never happened with someone in his mid-nineties. Without apparent effort, he stands erect, shoulders back, no stooping. A Nordic face. Long and lean as the rest of him. Max von Sydow in Three Days of the Condor, except Max Wyvern Sr. still has a full head of hair, blond gone white, with platinum gleams in places, combed back with water. He doesn’t look like any of his three children. Max Jr. would come closest, but besides having a more powerful build, the old man has stronger features, dominated by a Roman nose that would do a senator’s marble bust proud.

  “Follow me,” he says. “There’s really only one room in the place I occupy. Two, if you count the bedroom. I might as well be living in an apartment.”

  Which brings a dose of déjà vu. Jordan’s eternal battle with Melanie to exempt the scruffy room he called his “cave” from her relentless home improvements. Insisting, with a kind of reverse snobbery, that even the grandest mansion needed one room that looked “lived-in.”

  Following the tall old man, his gait as steady as his posture, through the formal outer rooms of heavy furnishings, untouched except by the hands that clean and polish them. Into a small room at the back of the house, where a low wood fire burns within a hearth of smoke-darkened brick. Deep cream carpet, heavy brown drapes. Matching maroon leather armchairs and hassocks, scuffed and cracked with use, set diagonally before the fire. Photographs and diplomas on the dark-panelled walls.

  “Well, now,” he says after I’m seated. “You’ll take a drop of Scotch, surely? I realize our business isn’t entirely pleasant, but that doesn’t mean it has to be entirely unpleasant, does it?” His smile stiff but gracious, under clear gray eyes tinged faintly with blue, like circles of spring ice reflecting sky. I like him, at least a little, and wish I didn’t at all. He’s sure his sons—most people maybe—are feckless wimps who can’t hold a candle to their old man, and I’m sure he’s right.

  “Yes,” I say without a moment’s thought. And then have time while he’s occupied at the sideboard to wonder at my answer.

  Management monk’s rule thrown overboard after twenty years, with what? Half a dozen lapses in them? Here? With him? With Maude’s old X-face come to life?

  A pseudo-mystery, since the answers come as promptly as my acceptance of the drink. I won’t see what I’m afraid of seeing tonight—how I’m sure of that I don’t know, but I am—and what I’ll see I’m not afraid of. And, too: This is the last adjustment. The thought arrives from nowhere, a pebble dislodged from a wall I can’t see, but it rolls to a stop in my mind and sits there, tiny and solid. Astounding. Not surprising.

  “Look around if you want,” says the man with his back to me, tilting a crystal decanter carefully, its stopper in his other hand. “An old man’s not a nimble bartender. He makes a good drink, not a quick one.”

  The pictures on the wall arranged artfully. A group with complementary subjects or tones, then blank wall before another cluster, higher or lower. Some pictures set off to stand alone. Using space, symmetry and asymmetry, to guide the eye in focusing, help it wander fruitfully. What you want but seldom see in professional galleries, which mostly shun the adventure of looking to deliver safe display.

  The subjects of the pictures are more typical: family life and cottage splendour. The latter celebrated not just in dock and picnic shots, but in scattered prints and watercolours. Muskoka Art. The same loon and sunset you can see for yourself, but here on your wall they remind you—and inform others—that you own them. Renters don’t display them, no more than the childless put up baby shots.

  Dinners, at home and in restaurants. Graduations. His retirement party. Non-cottage vacations: sun trips to various islands, hiking in mountains, a cruise with icebergs beyond the railing. Some pictures with handwritten captions—event, place, date. You have to know the family a bit to see how much editing and selection is in the seemingly comprehensive display. How much is left out to control the th
eme of the good and happy life. Like the principles of exclusion I saw operating in Maude’s room at Vivera, though far more strictly here.

  No picture of Judy alone, and none past what looks like her Grade Eight graduation, a frilly white dress with a pink bow between Mom and Dad in the garden. None of the boys past their thirties, the most recent probably the retirement dinner a quarter century ago, waiter-taken in a fancy restaurant. Lots of Maude—in bathing suits, in dresses before going out, in work clothes in her garden. But none past age sixty or so. And none of her early life—she enters the wall in a courtship picture with another couple, though Max is represented as a boy, a serviceman in uniform, a med student clowning with chums in a lab. And, in his life beyond Maude, as the esteemed and wealthy retired doctor and professor and current real estate speculator. Tall and lean, straight-spined. The wave of lush white hair trained back from the proud angular face. The clear gray eyes. Haughtiness, tempered by courtly restraint, gives him an aura of suffering dignity. Of burdens bravely and stoically borne. Two photos were taken beside pools. In the first he’s alone, with four medals around his neck above a caption in ceremonial script, like that on a diploma: Hart House Swimming Club Freestyle Champion, Senior Division, 2009–2012. His expression and posture send a double message. The wry, self-deprecating grin: Yeah, not bad for an old fart, I guess. The crossed arms and lifted chin: Don’t forget, Seniors starts at seventy, and over ninety I still whip ’em all. The other poolside photo is at a resort, also sometime in the last few years. A speedo bathing suit concedes the minimum to age. Flesh sagging where it must but without fat. Nothing but sinewy strings of self-preservation. More fat on the brown-skinned woman on the chaise beside his, though most of it in the right places: plump breasts and thighs in a bikini that should be wrong for a forty-something, but she pulls it off with a languid sexiness.

  The stringy tanned man reminds me of magazine photos of Ramses’s mummy. It’s partly Judy’s Sandman. But it’s also the sense, uncanny, of extreme power still managing to project itself through extreme dessication.

  Four walls of pure egotism. Undiluted vanity and self-absorption, whose overall title might be: The Ascendance and Continued Ascendancy of Maxwell Wyvern, MD. The profusion of other people blurs the theme at first, then underlines it. They enter and exit the stage according to how well they support its main business. Three little kids in Christmas cracker hats grinning as Father carves the bird and Mother points slyly at his crooked crown. The same kids in life jackets, a bit older, at the back of a big wooden boat, Father and a male friend waterskiing behind, knees bent as they prepare to jump the wake. Max and Sandor welcome even in their challenging primes, tall and fit young men in their early twenties and late teens, both with long hair then. The sixty-year-old standing between them at the end of the dock —all three dripping and grinning, the lake behind them—shows the origin of their swimmers’ builds, though he stands a head taller and may have just won or certainly made interesting the impromptu race to the point.

  The devil raped me. She always said it matter-of-factly. Never insisting, never with any emotion at all. It might be news to you, but to her it was an everyday fact of life. The devil raped me. Is this Judy’s devil? One of them anyway?

  News in a closing window comes unbidden. Or more unbidden, since all true information is gathering out ahead of you, waiting for you to pick it up. Words. Pictures. When the window’s almost shut, they arrive as confirmations from remote places, instants of sudden light that tell of cataclysms eons ago.

  “Drinks are served. If you’ve had enough of my rogues’ gallery, come have a seat.”

  Neither of us ventures a toast, but we clink glasses. The first sip. He closes his eyes a moment to savour it. So do I. Like a warm storm unrolling across the sky.

  “Good, isn’t it? Lagavulin. With just a sprinkle of water to open it up.”

  “It’s wonderful. Like sipping a campfire.”

  His eyebrows rise and he nods appreciatively. I might be a resident who surprised with a shrewd observation. “Exactly. But in all Max told me about you—quite a bit, as you can imagine—he never mentioned a poetic streak.”

  “Max doesn’t bring it out in me.”

  Another nod, a rueful smile. My son, the disappointment.

  The second sip, rolling it in my mouth, brings a vivid picture. Jordan’s face over a brandy snifter, telling one of his stories. In that brief phase when I was being inducted into the family, into a promised life, he and I repaired after dinner to a nook like this, muted talk and giggles from Lois and Melanie doing the dishes nearby. They must—when they got to the stage when they could mention my name at all—they must have asked each other how I could have turned my back on such a life. The honest perplexity the privileged feel in the face of misfortune, since a large part of their own good fortune is the delusion that choices and talent and effort were its chief architects. Why would Snag—why would anyone—choose to live on the street? In a cell? Why would they choose not to?

  “You have a nice house here. What I’ve seen of it anyway.”

  “Thank you. I’ll take credit for the purchase and a little of the decorating. But I haven’t done a stitch of housekeeping in years. And not a lot before that, I’ll admit. Oh, I’ll pull up my sheets in the morning and microwave some soup if someone else makes it. Even rinse my bowl and put it in the dishwasher. Men get lazier as they age. Women too perhaps, but not as quickly or as drastically. At least, that’s my experience.”

  I look around me. At the bits of a couple of rooms I can see through the door. Up at the ceiling.

  “I gave Iris the night off. She’s gone to visit a relative in Mississauga.”

  “Well, now,” he says, setting down his glass and placing his hands on his knees. Hands that show all their years: you can’t do laps for hands. “I think it’s time to move past niceties. I’ve never been slow, nor do you strike me as slow, to get down to the business at hand. And it’s hardly home appreciation that brought us here.”

  Actually it was precisely that. But no way to explain that to him, and anyway, I agree it’s time to move out of his charmed circle. I extend my hands in a Go on gesture.

  “Poker faces don’t fool me, even expert ones. So I know you weren’t surprised when I answered the door instead of my son. And yet we’ve never met. A small point maybe, but I’m curious.”

  No way to tell him about the transmissions in a window, especially a closing one. The swiftness and sureness with which you catch up to what you already know, to what part of you has travelled to and understood ahead of the rest. Or even the acquired sense of deepening Wyvern dirt, always another layer of crawling things hidden below what you think is the last. It had never occurred to me—not consciously—that the patriarch might still be alive. But a sense of forces pushing people around, a compelling demon or demons—that’s hovered behind every Wyvern I’ve met, including Maude. It came off Judy twenty years ago on Ward 4A. Like a shadow I could see, with the eyes I had then, behind and above one of her shoulders, then the other.

  “I’m used to getting the runaround from your family when I ask for a home visit. This is just the latest twist. Gwen gives me the message, but it’s someone else giving me the business.”

  “Poor Gwen. She’s never quite accepted that she’s not part of the family anymore. Though truth to tell, she never really was.”

  “You underestimate her. She knows exactly where she stands. And you can hardly blame her for not being able to compete with Vivian. How many women could?”

  A flash of something in the gray eyes at Vivian’s name. For a second, they look molten. Something Max Junior has that Max Senior likes? Or liked. Something he wants to have. Have again? Hit this guy with surprises. Knock him off the podium he likes speechifying from.

  “The other trend I’m getting used to is Max and Vivian using cheap help, then, when that craps out, getting something a little better. The
y’re sloppy employers, sloppy workers. Instead of picking the right tool straight off, they blunder their way up to it.”

  A pause as he takes two long sips. Getting himself under control, I think, though he does a good job of imitating a man merely savouring a single malt. Cups the tumbler in his palm. Exhales in a long sigh.

  “My children. I love them dearly, but they are… disappointments. Good people. Some of them.” Sucking a cheek, nodding in concession. Could play a retired judge. “But weak. Mentally. Morally. Both, sometimes.”

  “Dearly. Now there’s a red flag word.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Forget it. Go on.”

  “I heard you.”

  “I know you did.”

  For two seconds the gray eyes harden into rivets, pinning me fast.

  He sniffs, a long inhalation while he lifts his head. “They’re duds, to put it crudely.”

  “How so?”

  “You’ve met them, haven’t you?” He holds up a spotted hand, ticks off the defectives on his fingers. “Judy, my first. Troubled—a serious medical condition, no question—but she did nothing to help herself. Did one thing after another to make things worse. Drugs. A parade of men. Shutting my door to my own daughter was the hardest thing I ever did, and I did it years too late. I don’t know how many times I tried—”

  “But after that dud you got a doctor,” I say cheerfully. “One for two isn’t bad.”

  The gray rivets again. Not someone used to being interrupted. Not by sleeping patients, not by scared residents, not by real estate agents hungry for his business.

  “Max is a dentist.” A dry, mirthless chuckle. “Medical school was a bit too challenging. Particularly when you’ve been caught buying an exam your second year.”

  For an eyeblink I feel pity for Max. For anybody bringing their case before this hanging judge. “Sandor, then,” I say. I hold up three fingers of my own. Ticks to tick him off. “English teacher. Published author. And he took good care of his mother. For a long time.”