Today I have a meeting with Grace Showalter. Grace is a Legacy Coach. That is, she helps people figure out how to influence future generations through their stuff. Assets, investments, furniture, artwork, house. Since I have no offspring, my legacy can do all kinds of good for all kinds of people. Grace sits on the edge of my bed holding a very nice leather-bound binder. She is a pleasantly filled-out woman with what they used to call legs that go all the way up.
“I have a few ideas to run by you,” she says. “How about KancerKids? They have some really great programs, like FinalFantasy, where you get to—”
“No,” I say. “No kids’ stuff.”
“Hmm, well then, what do you think of Womb For More? They work with survivors of uterine, um, trauma. It might be appropriate.”
“Why?” I ask.
“Well, because of, you know—”
“Gosh,” I say, “isn’t there something with more of a, what do I mean, positive outlook?” Grace frowns at her binder. “Maybe we need to move away from the not-for-profit sector.”
“I wholeheartedly agree.”
I will tell you about my other legacy, which probably no one will receive. It’s a collection of positive adjectives. Incredible, great, awesome, fantastic. Most of them come from Reader’s Digest and are all-purpose. Some are from women’s magazines, and others I picked up from music videos and the internet. Some of them I’m less sure about: wicked, sextastic, sweet, bootylicious, rad. The thing about each of these adjectives is that when applied to the noun pain they both retain their original sense and create a whole new meaning. Incredible pain. Wicked pain. Awesome agony. Bootylicious suffering. Sweet affliction.
The filmmaker kneels on the edge of my bed, balancing her video camera on one shoulder. A skinny man hovers a boom mike on a long pole over my head while Abby tries to keep out of the way of its other end, which is jabbing dangerously close to her glucose bag.
“How long ago did you receive the diagnosis?” The filmmaker’s voice is calmly inquisitive.
I breathe in. “That video camera—did you know it comes from dinosaurs?”
“Sorry?”
“Dinosaurs. Fossil fuels come from the decayed bodies of dinosaurs, oil products are dead animals from a billion years ago. See?” I point to Abby’s pink plastic hairbrush. “Triceratops. The tubes coming out of our bodies, Abby’s and mine—brontosaurus. The sound guy’s vinyl pants…”
“Lemme guess,” the filmmaker says. “T. Rex?”
“Actually,” he says, “these are genuine leather.”
I take another breath. “Anyway. The dinosaurs couldn’t adapt, so they died, but they’re still with us, driving our cars and making our records and whatnot. Human beings probably won’t adapt either. But,” I sit up in bed and try to look prophetic, “at least we can try.”
I just received the paperwork for the Foundation for the Advancement of the Human Animal from Grace Showalter, who thoughtfully left it on the night table while she thought I was sleeping. In fact I was in a drug-induced stupor, but how was she to know the difference? Sometimes I’m not sure I do. It’s going to be a small foundation, funding research on environmental factors in physical evolution of the human species. Like B.B. Begood, like the tree man, like the dinosaurs, I am all about moving forward into the future. I push the paper back into its manila envelope and inhale the gluey smell of the seal. I close my eyes. It’s been a long day.
Fifty-two miles of floors mopped. Two car accidents. Seventy hours watching movie stars kiss. Three thousand and seventy-seven styrofoam cups. Three people who called me Darling. Thirteen funerals. And so on.
Moving Day
The moving vans are the first sound you hear. Other days there are garbage trucks, recycling trucks, the tang tang tang of the knife sharpener’s orange van. But today the moving vans unite the city with their hum: Lynnie asleep on her Therm-a-Rest, Mme Bruges-Robineau snoring under a down-filled duvet, the Love&Squalour House kids rotating on futons, Christophe already awake, having packed nothing, nervously eyeing his alarm clock, which is white and smooth like a Scotch mint. A young mayoral aide doing a sun salutation on bare hardwood, a truck driver clutching a styrofoam coffee cup. Outside their windows vans squat end to end, sniffing each others’ tailpipes, already gridlocked, and the sun barely up. Signs across the city, at every major intersection, read OFFICIAL MOVING DAY: NO PARKING. JULY 1ST ONLY.
Moving Day! Half civic crisis and half civic holiday. A festival of exhaust, sweat, lifting, garbage, boxes, masking tape, primer, longing and anticipation. Goodbye to low ceilings, dribbling water pressure, parquet flooring that was spaghetti-stained before you were born. Hello to a whole new bracket of problems, as yet unknown. A new apartment is like a new lover: the inevitability of disappointment understood only with the dry and logical part of the mind, the rest soaked with lust and thrilling at the prospect of the new! Each shortcoming a delight, a foible to be treasured, appreciated, loved! A chance to assess potential, scout necessary renovations, roll up the sleeves! The heart thumps at the discovery of an infestation of mould in the bathroom, a crack in a weight-bearing wall. Tenants sing as they mix buckets of plaster and pour one part bleach to three parts water, the tunes blending in the alleyways and giving each neighbourhood its distinctive feel.
This joyful, fluttering phase lasts three to five months. After that it starts to get old. New problems arise before old ones have fully abated; what once seemed like character is revealed to be dinge. The clever solutions you devised, the ways of making do, are proven shabby and superficial. Depression and despair creep in, more or less in sync with the mildew. But by then, twelve months have passed, and it’s time to move again!
Mme Bruges-Robineau hefts the last of her late husband’s Harvard Classics into the Easthill Nuisance Tube. She dusts off her hands and watches the books flutter into the vacuum-sealed tunnel, where they will merge with the waste of every other citizen of Easthill and tumble their way downhill into a dumpster in the centre of St. Louis-Cyr, which the kids of working-class families will pick through, looking for discarded video games that some rich child has outgrown. As a homeowner, Mme Bruges-Robineau isn’t obliged to participate in Moving Day, but she likes to make a symbolic gesture each year, casting off some long-hoarded item in solidarity with the tenants. She wonders if anyone in St. Louis-Cyr, maybe the vitamin-deficient child of a factory labourer, will look through her husband’s collection of canonic fiction and find something of value.
Alex, Sally, J-J-J-Jenny, and The Skills sit on the curb, pulling at tallboys concealed in paper bags. Sally’s homemade bike trailer, The Proletariat Chariot, idles, waiting to receive a load of discarded furniture culled from alleyways and curbs. Moving Day will provide them with enough “obtainium” to furnish their apartment. The rest will be sanded, repainted, hand-stencilled, and sold on consignment in one of the new boutiques on Rue Notre-Dame. For now they wait, fanning themselves with newspapers, huffing exhaust and stirred-up dust from the vans.
There’s a point at which packing becomes not a material question but an existential one. Lynnie sits on the Persian rug in the middle of the floor, the only thing left unboxed in her apartment, and stares at a pink milk crate marked “mixtapes.” God help us. Fifteen years of relationships, friendships, road trips, trades and theme parties, and what she has is this—a crate full of cassettes she doesn’t even own a player for. Half the labels on them have either smudged or peeled off, and others have been taped over, making the labels pointless.
She pulls out one marked who will police the police, and who’s gonna make up the make-up artist, and perches it on her nose like a pair of antique spectacles. The question is, will she be one of those people who hoards things like mixtapes just in case? For some unmet, barely fathomable progeny? Lynnie imagines herself explaining the phenomenon to a blurry group of children gathered around a hearth. “So this was how people in the olden days
would tell each other they were special?” one would ask. “Yes,” Lynnie would answer, “but you had to be careful. You couldn’t be too obvious about it.” “Why not?” another would pipe up, a girl with chestnut ringlets who looked a lot like Lynnie’s sister. “Well,” Lynnie would tell her, “let’s pretend that Uncle Sebastien gave me a tape where the first song is the one by The Brooks, the one that goes Hey hey baby you’re just a little girl, hey hey baby c’mon and rule my world. Does that make Seb a cool guy or a douchebag?” And together all the little children would chorus “DOUCHEBAG!”
No, Lynnie can’t really believe in that as a reason for holding on to the tapes. But how can she throw them out? She sighs. With a sharp flick of the wrist she snaps the tape back into the crate.
She pulls out a letter from her jeans pocket and reads it again, hoping that through some miracle the words have rearranged themselves. We regret to inform you that no vacancy is currently available… Please rest assured that the Bureau is working to change this unfortunate situation… Until further notice… Written on city letterhead and signed by Mayor Girofle herself. Lynnie licks a finger and rubs it over the signature. The ink doesn’t smear. A copy, then. It’s just as well.
She looks at her watch. The new tenant will arrive in an hour.
She decides to leave it up to fate. She will leave the pink crate on the curb. Whatever is left by the time she has to go, she will take with her. Let the Obtainium Crew decide what the children of tomorrow will know of her life.
A family of four is lounging on the grassy meridian between the northbound and southbound lanes of the expressway. They have erected a homemade signpost made out of an old coat rack and cardboard, on which is Sharpied Decarie Island. The sign is illustrated with a jagged palm tree and a smiling sun wearing wraparound shades, like an orange juice ad. The parents sprawl in lawn chairs, the woman reading the Journal de Montréal, while the two kids, boy and girl, sit in the scrub grass and play with beach toys. An elderly beagle squats panting beside the chairs. Behind the kids is a pup tent, and at the far end of the meridian is a portable toilet.
“I promised my family an island vacation,” the man says to reporters and curious onlookers. “With the economy the way it is this was all we could afford.”
They’ve been there for five days, but they say they will probably have to leave soon because of the threats from PETA.
“Because of the dog,” the woman says. Her skin is crisp-looking and coated in coconut oil. “They think he’s being exposed to dangerous levels of carbon monoxide.”
Cars on either side of the meridian stretch to the horizon.
Christophe isn’t going anywhere. That’s what he tells the new tenants—an East Indian family migrating south from St. Amande—as well as the neighbours, the landlord, Mayor Girofle’s team of aides and various media representatives.
“I worked for years to afford the rent on this place. Do you know how many legal briefs that is? A million. Roughly. And all I wanted was this. High ceilings, recently-sanded hardwood floors, stainless steel bathroom fixtures. Is that too much to ask?” He points to a heavy-looking hammered-brass doorknob. “Look. I ordered those myself from a manufacturer in Belgium. Going out of business sale. Last of their kind. Watched a video, learned how to install them myself. And for what? To pass it on to… to… a family of immigrants—no offense, I’m sure you’re very nice—who haven’t even heard of Charles and Ray Eames?” Christophe lifts a hand to his forehead and covers one eye, picturing a statue of a many-armed god, or some multicoloured prayer flags, in the window nook where his 1956 recliner sits.
One of Girofle’s aides starts to hum the Moving Day anthem, a soothing patriotic ditty. In situations like this he is meant to cite the Moving Day bylaws as well as the Moving Day poem, composed by the poet-in-residence at the Richler library, but he feels personally that music is the more effective medium for calming nerves and inspiring tenants to perform their duty. This time, though, it only makes the outgoing tenant stand his ground more firmly, while the incomers crowd the doorway, equally obstinate.
“I beg your pardon,” says the mother of the family. She is dressed in a puffy powder-blue coat, despite the heat. “I don’t know what they taught you in this country, but that was never an Eames chair.”
Christophe keeps his hand over his eye and stares at her in mono. “I’m sorry?”
“Look at how he looks at me,” the woman goes on. “It’s as though a dog has spoken. Typical Pepsi racist. Take your Ikea nonsense and get out of my house.”
A small muscle at the corner of Christophe’s mouth begins to twitch. “I will ignore that last remark,” he says, “if you will concede that you would not know an Eames chair if it walked up and asked you the time of day.”
The woman crosses her arms and lifts her chin. “Your rear end I wouldn’t,” she says. Her two children look at each other and giggle, while several camera flashes go off.
“Moving Day is an opportunity for growth!” the aide says. “A citizen embraces Moving Day like a child greeting the new day, like a morning peach, like a gazelle on the Serengeti, stretching its antlers to the sun—”
“You be quiet,” the woman says. The aide bows his head to his clipboard.
“Look,” Christophe says, “forget the chair. The point is that—” What is the point, actually? For a second he can’t recall. He scratches at the nape of his neck and stares out the window. Momentarily he imagines he is at the returns desk of a very large department store, arguing with a clerk over an espresso maker that was already broken when he removed it from its box. Then the lineup of trucks, crawling down the street an inch per minute, triggers his memory.
“I just think,” he says, “I mean, is this really necessary?” As soon as the word leaves his mouth he knows the argument is over.
“Necessary?” says another aide, this one a young woman with curly black hair. “Moving Day is not about necessary. It’s a matter of civic duty, an expression of love for your city. What is necessary? By whose standards? Do we need rainbows to live? Shadows? Fingernails? And yet, can we imagine life without them?”
She’s pretty good, Christophe thinks, and this momentary distraction allows the new tenant to push past him into the living room proper and throw down her suitcase with a loud leathery thump.
It is an Eames chair, Christophe knows it, but the idea is becoming more and more abstract, as though the chair’s provenance rested on the goodwill of the neighbourhood, the aides, the media, and not a seal burned into the leather on the chair’s underside. He will have to believe harder, next time.
When Lynnie brings the next load of junk out to the curb she sees what she expected to see—a young woman in a neon green tank top and sturdy overalls, coarse black hair pulled into a rat’s tail, picking through the tapes in her crate. Lynnie clears her throat, almost involuntarily.
“Hey,” says the young woman, looking up. “Are these yours?”
“Yup,” says Lynnie.
“You have, like, every Tutti Fervour album ever.”
“True fan,” says Lynnie, setting down a box of chipped mugs and dishes next to the crate.
“I haven’t listened to her in ages,” says the woman. “She rules. Why are you throwing them out?”
“Well…” says Lynnie. The answer to this seems so complicated she doesn’t know where to begin.
“Moving Day, right?” says the woman.
“Yeah.”
“And you didn’t want to bring them to your new place?”
“I don’t have a new place.”
The woman considers this. “That sucks,” she says.
“Big time,” says Lynnie.
The woman tilts her head and looks into the sun for a moment. Then she looks back at Lynnie, still squinting. “What’s your name?”
“Lynnie,” says Lynnie.
“Sally,” says Sally. �
�Maybe I can help.”
Philippe pops the clutch and shifts to second gear. He hears that sound again, the one like grinding teeth, coming from somewhere in the vicinity of what would be his truck’s kidneys if his truck had a digestive tract like a person, which he isn’t entirely convinced it doesn’t. Come on, baby, not today. Any day but today. A good mover like Philippe can pull down enough cash on Moving Day to coast through the rest of the summer like a CEO, but not if his truck craps out on him.
The radio is playing an odd assortment of military music and sixties bubble gum; he switches to the community station in time to hear the end of a report on standoffs between tenants and mayoral aides. The aides were reportedly using tactics like stinkbombs and high-decibel techno to clear out some especially residual residents. Not something for the city brochures, if you ask Philippe. The youthful journalist claims the newest batch of aides have been trained at the same military institution as certain guards at a notorious terrorist detention camp, but that seems like a bit much for his money.
Philippe thinks back to the conversation with the badger-faced man he had driven home from The Miracle. Easy money, the badger-face had promised. How often you use this truck anyway? Once a month? You know what this is? This is valuable real estate, is what this is. The words coming to Philippe on waves of vodka tonic. Greasy words from a greasy man.
He checks his GPS and pulls up a half-block before his first pickup. The truck is directly underneath an overpass at the mouth of St. Louis-Cyr. He slides out and goes around to the back, pops the latch and hoists the metal door.
“All right,” he says, “time’s up. Godspeed and all that.”
The family inside turns and blinks at him, all in unison, like a family of owls. They have a little cooking fire going in there, which is not according to Hoyle but he turns a blind eye sometimes, not like other movers he could name, bounty hunters et cetera who are all too eager to turn a paperless family in. They’re so coated in soot and grime it’s hard to tell what they are.
Sweet Affliction Page 3
