The Garneau Block

by Todd Babiak

  “Come on.”

  “I really feel this way. It happens to people. We’re losing each other.”

  They hugged and Madison reached up and slapped Jonas in the back of the head. “Let’s not.”

  “Deal.” Jonas held out his hand for a shake.

  Madison took it. “Deal.”

  “So can I come with you tomorrow, to see the Perlitz girls?”

  “I don’t know. It took a long time to get Jeanne to say yes at all, and it isn’t exactly a social visit. We have to get her to say no to the university and yes to our plan.”

  “That’s exactly why I should come. Jeanne loved me. Everyone loves me so much, you know, because I’m exceedingly funny and striking to behold. It’s sick and pitiless to deprive them of my company.” Jonas dropped to his knees, which smarted, and took the Frisbee out of Madison’s hand. He lifted the Frisbee to the purple sky and threatened to toss it down the hill. “Please?”

  Madison sighed. “It’s a sombre occasion. No shenanigans.”

  “None.”

  63

  the power dinner

  In all his time as president of the riding association, the party’s executive director had never summoned David Weiss for a private meeting. Though he was not the nervous sort, David found himself trying on different shirt-and-tie combinations following his late-afternoon, post-leaf-raking shower. White shirt and blue tie? White shirt and red tie? Open collar?

  David found the right complement for his black suit–white shirt and grey tie–and asked Abby for her opinion. She was at the dining room table with a glass of wine, listening to a Pavarotti greatest hits CD and fussing over the New York Times crossword. “Spin.”

  David spun.

  “You’re a stud, honey. What’s ‘baseball’s Garciaparra’?”

  “Nomar.”

  “Nomar? How’s anyone supposed to know that?”

  “Cubs shortstop. Can you take Garith for a walk in an hour?”

  The dog heard his name and walk and hopped up from his bed in the back porch. David picked him up. “Daddy’s going to meet the executive director for dinner at Culina tonight. By this time tomorrow, Daddy could be interim vice-president, Northern Alberta. Or, or, maybe he’s going to tell me the annexation is off. Either way, Garith my boy, this is a big night for Daddy. Yes it is. Yes it is.”

  “Stop that.” Abby pointed menacingly with her pencil. “Right now.”

  David pulled into the tiny parking lot behind Culina as a fellow traveller in a Ford Expedition pulled out of a spot. The man manoeuvred his giant Expedition back onto the street and they nodded at one another; two level-headed men who knew, deep in the pragmatic cores of their hearts, that oil would never run out.

  Inside the restaurant, the hostess led him to a table for four. David was a few minutes early and the first to arrive. Culina was such a small restaurant that the large table seemed an ungainly mistake. “How many are in our party?”

  “Four,” said the hostess.

  David bobbed his head in time with the Indian pop music and attempted to figure out the red art on the walls. The lights were so dim in the little restaurant he had to hold his menu over the candle-in-a-bag to read it. He wondered who the third and fourth people might be. The premier and his wife? He sat back and closed his eyes. These moments of beatific anticipation were rare. This nervous buzz was natural, for he had entered a new and exciting phase of his retirement. Grandfatherhood, leadership, influence, and respect.

  Woman Terry Ashton walked into the restaurant first, followed by Wayne Wernicke, the executive director. Immediately, something went sour in the back of David’s throat. The fourth person he didn’t recognize at first. He knew the man but there was something…no.

  David greeted Woman Terry with a malignant smile and handshake. He whispered quickly in her ear, before Wayne Wernicke and Barry Strongman had manoeuvred around the table in the centre of the room. “You betrayed me.”

  “Oh, grow up, David,” she said, a little too loud, in her British accent.

  “My friend.” Not only did Wayne Wernicke shake David’s hand, the executive director of the PC Association of Alberta cupped the meeting of flesh with his left. “It’s tremendous you were able to come tonight. Of course you know Mr. Barry Strongman.”

  During all of their morning social and political arguments on Whyte Avenue, David had appreciated Barry’s candour. His authenticity. Most of David’s other friends and acquaintances were double-dealers and cynics and strivers, so he had grown addicted to Barryness. The homeless man spoke what he saw as the truth. He was shamelessly self-reliant, an outsider, a genuine individual. If Barry had been a cartoon character he would have been Bugs Bunny, David’s all-time favourite.

  So in the weeks and months and years ahead, when David remembered the dinner at Culina, nothing echoed in his mind as powerfully as Barry’s affected smile, head tilt, and handshake. It signalled the end of something profound in the belief system of David Weiss. Not his political belief system, but that other, deeper, more inaccessible one. “Great to see you again,” said Barry. “You’re looking well.”

  They sat, and David noticed Barry’s teeth had been bleached. His hands were scrubbed clean, the fingernails shone. Wayne Wernicke warmed up the table with a few anecdotes about Liberals and the weather, but David could not stop staring at Barry Strongman. The haircut, the contact lenses, the trimmed eyebrows and glistening chin. Cologne. A phoney chuckle. Feigned warmth.

  At the end of Wayne Wernicke’s story, which concluded with a Liberal Party strategist attempting to fish with his bare hands in a mountain-fed lake, Barry Strongman shook his head as he laughed. “Hilarious, Wayne. Hilarious.”

  In no time, in a week, Barry Strongman had become a politician. He looked and smelled and gestured like a politician, repeated names, winked. When the server, a gorgeous young woman with severe black hair, took their drink orders, Barry ordered a San Pellegrino.

  “Does anyone want wine?” said Wayne Wernicke.

  Barry Strongman shook his head. No. Not for Barry.

  “I’ll take some wine.” David looked at the list. He knew Woman Terry was already the new president of the Strathcona PC Riding Association. This would be his final dinner on the Progressive Conservative American Express, so David took the initiative and ordered the second-most expensive bottle of red, a Canadian, something called a Sumac Ridge “Black Sage” Vineyard Meritage.

  Since the server had already written it down, and since she had already praised David, and the table, for their excellent choice, Wayne Wernicke was powerless. David smiled across the table with his coffee-stained teeth.

  He knew it would be his only victory.

  64

  non-psychotic desires

  Abby was asleep when David returned home not quite drunk. The Friday newspapers were stacked on the dining room table, so David poured himself a nightcap and searched through them.

  Wayne Wernicke had referenced a profile of Barry Strongman that appeared that day, and somehow David had missed it. The story wasn’t prominent but there it was, in the City Plus section: Barry, in the same suit he had worn at Culina, standing up on a podium at an Edmonton Chamber of Commerce breakfast.

  A man transformed.

  Three sentences before the end of the article, David tossed the paper. It fluttered into the living room and knocked two vanilla candles off the coffee table. Garith hopped out of his bed and growled.

  “David?” called Abby, from upstairs.

  The softness of the final D in his name, almost lisped in his wife’s sleepy voice, caused David to melt out of his chair and on to the wood floor. All that he had planned for the final twenty-five years of his life had been wiped away over a plate of pork tenderloin steaks with chimichurri sauce and couscous.

  “David?” she said again.

  With pawsteps like whispers, Garith moved across the floor to stare at his master. David lifted him up and accepted a few kisses, but lacked the energy for more. Inspi
red by the kisses, Garith sprinted across the room to retrieve his inside-the-house toy, a squeaky chipmunk, but David didn’t throw it. Garith nudged the chipmunk near David’s right hand, but David left it there.

  A slobber stain glistened on the chipmunk’s haunch.

  Abby walked down the stairs and into the living room, where she stood over her husband in the lamplight. She wiped her eyes and put on her glasses. “What happened to you?”

  Before he could answer, Abby dropped to her knees and embraced him on the dining room floor. Her left knee squished a yeep out of the chipmunk. For close to a minute they held each other, and Abby scratched the top of his head the way he liked.

  “I’m out.”

  “What do you mean, you’re out?”

  David helped his wife up. Garith ran in a circle and hopped at David’s leg, to no avail. “Woman Terry Ashton is the interim president, until they vote a new one in. They said I could still be in the party, and in the association, but only as a member. A non-voting member, for one year. I’m being disciplined.”

  “For what?”

  “For kicking the rising star of the PC party out of a meeting. Barry Strongman is going to be the next candidate for Edmonton-Strathcona.”

  “Your homeless friend?”

  “Let’s go to bed.”

  “No, let’s have some chamomile and talk about this.”

  “You were asleep.”

  “I was asleep.”

  David walked into the living room and picked up the newspaper. He set the smelly candles back up on their stainless steel foundations and plopped into his club chair. “All I really want to do is move away. Let’s go to Victoria with all the other old people.”

  “No.”

  “All my friends are…I’m ruined. My life in Alberta is finished.”

  Abby shook her head. “For one night and only one night I’m not going to say I told you so. I’m not going to say you deserve this.”

  “Good.”

  “Let’s pretend, husband, for the next hour, that we can do anything. Be anyone.”

  “We don’t have any money.”

  Abby laughed and walked into the kitchen.

  “I fail to see the humour in that.” David listened to her drawing water into the kettle, a comforting sound. A winter sound. When she returned, Abby sat on the chesterfield across from David with a notepad and a pen. “What do you really want to do?”

  “Lop off Wayne Wernicke’s head.”

  Abby didn’t make a note. “Only non-psychotic desires are allowed.”

  The squeaks and honks of the chipmunk interrupted David’s machete fantasy. Garith dropped the toy on David’s foot, so he lured the dog up onto his lap for a noisy game of pull-the-chipmunk. “I want to be a good dad and granddad.”

  “Very sane, very sane.” Abby made a note. “What else? More selfish now.”

  “Maybe we could travel a little.”

  Abby made another note and nodded. “Southeast Asia, before it gets too expensive. Andalusia. Maybe Israel, if things quiet down. Next.”

  “I’m going to miss the party, especially the conventions.”

  Abby closed her eyes tight for a second, put the notepad down, and got up from the chesterfield. She transferred Garith to an arm of the chair and sat on David’s lap. “Let’s take a sabbatical from politics, me and you. Let’s concentrate, for a year, on what we have in common.”

  “But–”

  “Maybe we’ll live a little longer if we stop talking so much about public policy.”

  “What about all your Gandhi quotations? Is that even possible?”

  Abby bit her bottom lip and nodded.

  “You should have seen Barry Strongman tonight. Everything I liked about him, they varnished over it. Now he’s like this doll. I could have shaved in front of his teeth.”

  “I’m only going to admit this tonight, okay?”

  “Admit what?”

  “Left-wingers are just as feckless and goofy. Sometimes they’re even more annoying than conservatives. I listen to the speeches, written and delivered by people without a sliver of talent. They know they’re lying and I know they’re lying and everyone else in the room knows they’re lying, and lazy, and stupid as a salad bar, but we clap anyway. We cheer. We give standing-Os.”

  “Why do we do that, Abby?”

  She kissed her husband. The water was boiling. “You know why we do it. Because we don’t want to feel powerless and ineffectual and retired. By aligning ourselves with something that seems important and bigger than we are, something that might outlast us, we don’t seem as–”

  “Old?”

  The kettle whistled. “It’s time to refocus.”

  If his wife was talking about shuffleboard and bridge tournaments, David wasn’t sure he wanted to refocus. Three hours ago, before Barry Strongman walked into Culina, he was feeling about as good as he had ever felt. If by refocus his wife meant giving up, he definitely wasn’t in. The kettle continued to whistle, and Abby continued to wait for his response, so he mumbled something that she wouldn’t hear. A false positive.

  65

  complete honesty

  Rajinder paced in slow motion, from the stereo system in his living room to the kitchen compost bucket. Every few minutes he looked at his watch and murmured to himself. Tango music from Argentina played at low volume and outside a light rain shower threatened to transform into snow.

  Apart from work and a Frisbee toss with Jonas, Madison had been spending most of her free time with Rajinder. Her excuses for not staying overnight were becoming more and more ridiculous, but Rajinder was too polite to question them. While he paced, she sat on the chesterfield pretending to read a fat paperback novel about a crippled boy in New Delhi. In an hour, they were due to arrive in Summerside for a visit with Jeanne and Katie Perlitz.

  Madison took a sip of her hot chocolate and smiled up at Rajinder. “Why’re you so nervous?”

  “Me?” Rajinder looked behind him. “I am not nervous.”

  “Why don’t you sit down?”

  “I have an aching knee. It helps to walk.”

  Madison nodded.

  “Yes, to be sure, yes. You have me.” Rajinder sat across from Madison, in a brown wing chair. He pulled a pillow out from under him, dropped it on the floor and allowed his head to droop. “I am extremely anxious.”

  “Is it because you lent Benjamin that money? I don’t understand. Does Jeanne not know?”

  Rajinder drooped some more. “For many of the past weeks, as you and I were seeing one another, I have dreaded saying this. But there is more.”

  “More what?” Madison’s feet tingled as though they had been asleep.

  “I am afraid I have not been completely honest with you.”

  Madison’s first instinct was to cross the room, squeeze Rajinder’s hand, and suggest they outlaw complete honestly. Who needs it, really? The past days of breakfasts and dinners and evening strolls, kissing and Patrice Leconte films, had been nearly perfect. Perfect but for the secret pregnancy growing between them, which so far had kept them out of the bedroom. Madison understood every new moment she didn’t confess was another wound in their future.

  “Good,” she said.

  “Good?”

  “You don’t have to be completely honest with me, if you don’t want to be.”

  Rajinder leaned forward. “Admittedly, I am not an expert in affairs of the heart, but that does not seem right.”

  “Is it something about your past? Something about your life before we got together?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, don’t feel guilty about keeping it a secret.” Madison snorted. “It’s none of my business, really.”

  Rajinder sat back in his wing chair. He looked toward the stereo system, the unsettling hum of Astor Piazzolla’s bandoneón. “I disagree.”

  “Okeedokee. I’m pregnant.”

  Rajinder made a squeaking sound.

  “Four months’ pregnant. Haven’t you notic
ed I’m, you know, expanding outward?”

  The tango music seemed to be too much for Rajinder. He walked to the stereo system and put in another CD, pressed play, and walked out of the room. A Willie Nelson song filled the room in his absence.

  Madison’s lips were dry so she licked them. Two competing forces in her body, the need to cry and the need to scream, crashed up against one another and caused a sort of emotional paralysis. Instead of thinking of Rajinder and the bedroom door he had just slammed–three times–Madison considered Willie Nelson’s long, braided pigtails. She wondered if Willie Nelson had paid those back taxes he owed the American government, and if his marijuana possession charges made touring difficult.

  The doorbell rang. Madison stood in front of the chesterfield, thinking about Willie Nelson. It rang again. On the third ring, Rajinder plodded through the living room to the front door without looking at Madison.

  “Hey, lovebirds!” said Jonas.

  When Willie Nelson wore his American flag bandana, was he being sincere or ironic or both? Even though Madison had never really liked Willie Nelson’s voice, she felt a certain kinship with him: the red hair, the aura of lost hope and disappointment.

  Rajinder took Jonas’s flowers, bottle of wine, and pony-shaped bundle.

  “They’re for Jeanne and Katie.” Jonas took a couple of steps and slid on the hardwood in his socks. “You have the slipperiest floor, Raj.”

  Rajinder stood near the dining room table clutching the wine, flowers, and pony. Madison could only see Jonas with the rightmost edge of her peripheral vision.

  Jonas stopped sliding. “I haven’t been listening to the news. Is Earth gonna be hit by a meteor?”

  All at once, the spell of Willie Nelson broke. “I told Rajinder I’m pregnant.”