The Garneau Block

by Todd Babiak

  A man in a camouflage jacket and a collection of rings in his lip and eyebrows waved. “I hate you too, buddy.”

  Jonas and the man met halfway across the room, shook hands and introduced themselves. For a couple of minutes they complained about urban sprawl, gun control, herbicide use, and the sorry state of contemporary literature. While this went on, Shirley dipped the last few deep-fried squid in tzatziki and gave her credit card to the passing server.

  Jonas returned. “That man’s nickname is The Goo. He introduces himself to strangers as The Goo.”

  “You see? Edmonton’s not so bad. The Goo lives here.”

  “It’ll take a lot more than The Goo to make me love this city again. I’m gonna need to win the lottery or something. Something drastic.”

  Shirley signed the bill and took her jacket from the nearby tree. Before it got too late she wanted to get back home to Steamer, who was probably reading that podiatry textbook she had bought for him. Jonas followed her out of the restaurant, laying some skin on The Goo as he passed.

  “Hate on, brother,” said The Goo.

  They crossed the avenue and passed the university theatre, where men and women in suits and dresses sipped drinks and nodded at one another and laughed. Jonas stopped. Shirley thought he was going to make a spiteful remark about the student actors. Instead, his eyes filled with tears. “I’m forty-something and I’m lonely.”

  In September, Raymond had been fired. Then, a day ago, regretful about his roguish behaviour on Halloween night, Steamer had cried twice about breaking his parents’ hearts and sinning himself straight to hell. Now, Shirley comforted her third crying man the way she always comforted a crying man, by rubbing her hand down the back of his head and saying, “Shhh.”

  She walked Jonas to his door and waited in the kitchen while he completed his bedtime washing, flossing, and brushing regimen. It was stuffy in his house, a marriage of unwashed dishes, cologne, and marijuana smoke, so she opened a window. When Jonas was finished in the bathroom, she drew a glass of water and tucked him into bed.

  “Am I going to be okay?” said Jonas, as Shirley walked out of his dark bedroom.

  “Of course you are.”

  Walking home, Shirley studied her neighbours’ houses. Madison’s lights were dim. Upstairs at the Weisses, there was life in the kitchen and in the spare bedroom, where Raymond lived. Through his picture window she could see Rajinder reading a hardcover book on the white couch, his legs crossed daintily.

  She entered her front door and a blast of wind sucked her in. This meant the back door was open, which was not an energy-effcient idea in November. She called out to Steamer, and Patch answered from downstairs, “He’s taking his last load out!”

  Downstairs, Patch was watching a show about swimsuit models.

  “Taking a load out to where?”

  “To the truck. I gotta drive him to the bus station.”

  “Why?”

  “Search me. Says he’s movin’ out.”

  “But why?”

  Patch ignored her, so Shirley climbed the stairs and went out the open door. On the parking pad in the alley, Steamer was arranging his bags and two boxes in the back of Patch’s big red truck, a thin flashlight between his teeth.

  Shirley watched him for a moment. He hopped into the truckbed and pretended not to see her, even when the flashlight stopped on her face. For several minutes, Steamer packed the truck in silence. Then he kicked a box and jumped down onto the concrete in front of Shirley. “This morning I woke up and decided it has to be one way or the other.”

  “It.”

  “Me and you.” Steamer turned away and started back to the house. He opened the back door. “Let’s go, Patch!”

  The motion sensor attached to the back door splashed 200 watts of light on Shirley. “You’re making too much of this. It was just some dancing and foot massages.”

  “Ms. Wong, don’t play-act here.”

  “Why does it have to be this way?” Shirley waited a moment, and then forced out: “Instead of…”

  Steamer didn’t answer. They stood together in the backyard light, until the sensor couldn’t read them and it went dark again. When Patch appeared on the porch, with his hand inside two opened buttons on his shirt, scratching his hairy chest, Shirley understood immediately what she had to do. “You might as well load up too, Patch.”

  “What? Why?”

  Steamer’s honesty had inspired her. “You’re a yob and I don’t want you in my house.”

  “A yob?” Patch turned to his teammate with his mouth opened. “But I’m Patch.”

  Steamer led Patch into 11 Garneau and down the stairs, to start packing.

  76

  the press conference

  Raymond Terletsky spent a sunny November morning in the Garneau Theatre, thinking about dry ice. It had fascinated him as a child. Was it still awesome? Was it too late to get some? The architects, Mr. Bradley from Calgary and Ms. Florette from Edmonton, positioned themselves behind a long table on stage and tested their microphones. Two sweating pitchers of water sat before them. Lynn, a very expensive public relations consultant, inspected the cinema for garbage and chewed gum.

  “We’re clean,” said Lynn, from the final row. “I’m going to open the doors.”

  Instead of looking through the Yellow Pages for a dry ice manufacturer, Raymond approached his boss. Rajinder sat in one of the first-row seats, rocking back and forth and lazily chewing a tuna sandwich. In his other hand, Rajinder held a small Styrofoam plate of strawberries plucked from the caterer’s table.

  “Are you ready?”

  Rajinder lifted his tuna salad sandwich in triumph. Then he said, “No. I really do not know, professor. It is difficult to focus and summon energy, and for that I apologize.”

  Voices and laughter echoed into the auditorium as Raymond sat next to Rajinder. Since he himself had been feeling this low or lower just a couple of months previous, Raymond understood. “Is there anything I can do? I know a couple of Ukrainian jokes.”

  With a sigh, Rajinder shook his head and pulled the lint off a strawberry.

  “Why don’t you just call her up?”

  “She does not answer the phone. I visited several times and she refused to come to the door. I bought flowers, sent candy-grams, hired circus children to do backflips before her as she walked home from the travel agency.”

  “And nothing?”

  “I admit, certainly, that I had imagined Madison to be without child when we began dating. I cannot deny I would have preferred to see my child in her belly than…the child of whomsoever. Yet…”

  Rajinder allowed the yet to float there, a helium balloon with a slow leak.

  “Figure out what you want and grab it, Raj.” Raymond mimed snatching something from an invisible shrubbery. “Take it!”

  A few chews of his tuna salad sandwich later, Rajinder sang, “Les feuilles mortes se ramassent à la pelle, les souvenirs et les regrets aussi…” and then bit into a strawberry.

  “I’m sorry to have to say this, Raj, because I really admire you. But you gotta learn to fight past this. Maybe she’s gone and, sure, that’s sad. But you’re a millionaire.”

  Rajinder helped Raymond up. “Very wise analysis, professor. Shall we attend to the lobby, shake some hands?”

  Lynn, the public relations consultant, was worth her fee. Among the milling people, several officials from the university stood near the food tables. Two television cameramen had arrived, and the theatre manager was leading them into the auditorium. Abby and David Weiss walked in, hand in hand. A few minutes later, Jonas walked through the door in jeans and a blazer. The mayor, a personal friend of Lynn’s, and his assistant followed Jonas inside.

  The mayor put his arm around Jonas and complimented him on the one-man show he had performed at the Roxy last March. “I’m just a business guy so I don’t always know art. But sometimes I know art and that was art.”

  “Thanks, Your Worship.”

  “What
’s next for you?”

  “I was thinking of selling Saabs.”

  The mayor laughed. “Come on, I mean it.”

  “Your Worship, I’ve been acting professionally twenty-five years and I can’t even get a decent credit card.”

  As Jonas walked up the stairs, a look of genuine disappointment passed over the mayor’s face. Before the mayor or his assistant could chase Jonas, Raymond moved in.

  “Mr. Mayor, hi. Sporting of you to come.” Raymond put his hands on the mayor’s shoulders. “Listen, you can’t let this happen. You can’t. If we lose the Garneau Block, the city loses everything. Everything. It’s the first brick in a collapsing building, really, the sign of cultural decay, a strike at the heart of–”

  “I look forward to hearing the presentation,” said the mayor, and his assistant led him to the food table, abandoning Raymond on the carpeted entrance steps of the theatre. He told himself to calm down, to control his enthusiasm before he “harassed” a politician or attractive television reporter.

  Raymond scanned the lobby, where the guests sipped wine and munched on spicy beef samosas. Almost everyone from the block was here now, save Rajinder, who had apparently returned to his seat in the auditorium, and Madison.

  Alone next to the popcorn machine, Raymond wondered if somehow everyone knew about his drives up and down 95th Street, his trouble with the masseuse, his lurid fantasies. Was he on an Internet watch list of Alberta perverts and harassers?

  The confidence drained out of Raymond, and he leaned against the wall. To his left, a poster advertised a movie about the day Wayne Gretzky announced he was leaving Edmonton to play for the Los Angeles Kings.

  Madison came in the main door and nodded. “Professor.”

  “Hello.”

  “I’m looking forward to your speech.”

  “You are?”

  “Of course, Raymond. Everyone is. You’re our last hope.”

  77

  the science of snubbing

  Madison was in the mood for neither samosas nor spanakopitas, watercress dip nor truffled goat cheese crudités. She had a hard time listening to her mother, Raymond Terletsky, the mayor, or anyone else who spoke to her over the food tables in the Garneau Theatre. Though she could not see him in the lobby, Madison knew Rajinder was in the building. The rumble in her stomach was stamped with his name, the smell of his cologne, the hair between his eyebrows.

  When the other guests filed into the auditorium, Madison lingered in the lobby. Jonas hovered next to her. “Want me to save you a seat?”

  She nodded.

  “Where do you want to sit?”

  She shook her head.

  “Come on, Maddy. Close to the stage or far away? On the sides, the second level? You know how I am about choosing seats. You might as well ask me which finger I should have chopped off.”

  The smell of last night’s buttered popcorn was wreaking havoc on her empty stomach. All morning and the night before she had been anxious about seeing Rajinder again. She had practised resonant phrases, drawn from haikus, in case he approached. Instead of answering Jonas, she waved him away and proceeded to the washroom.

  Over the gentle, echoing drip in the toilet, Madison could hear the professor’s amplified voice as the press conference began. “We decimated the buffalo in the name of progress and civilization yet we long for the beast’s return with every neutron in every cell in our bodies.”

  Madison felt the professor was overstating things a bit. How could he account for all the neutrons committed to the holiday shopping season, which had begun in earnest? Or the popularity of Latin American literature? She did appreciate the rising orchestral background; the string music was slow and delicate, with a hint of Eastern European failure about it.

  The nausea passed and Madison emerged from the bathroom to take the least offensive item on the food tables–an egg sandwich on rye. She crept into the auditorium and leaned on the carpeted baffle behind the floor seats.

  Rajinder sat on stage next to a young man and woman. According to the signs in front of them, these were architects. All three of them were turned to Raymond, who shook his fist behind the podium as he spoke of the need in our hearts for stories about ourselves. Not stories about young sorcerers from the United Kingdom and divorced New Yorkers who only think about shoes.

  “Handsome man, isn’t he?”

  Madison didn’t know if the woman next to her was referring to Raymond, Rajinder, or the young architect. “Yes.”

  “I understand he’s very wealthy. His parents owned half of Mumbai, I heard.”

  “Really?”

  The woman nodded. The sticker on the front of her blazer said LYNN. “Single too, they say. But he’s super quiet. I was here all morning with him and I didn’t hear a peep.”

  Usually, food pushed the nausea away. But at the moment, nothing would help. Madison sniffed the egg sandwich, regretted sniffng the sandwich, and dropped it in the garbage can next to Lynn. The architects took the podium, the lights went down, and the curtain opened. On the screen, a digital image of an enhanced 10 Garneau, covered in a shell shaped like a buffalo head. Some guests laughed, others gasped, and still others howled and applauded. “Yes,” one man said, “finally!”

  Back in the lobby, two women in uniform poured champagne into small disposable glasses. Madison walked to a side door that led to a concrete fire escape. For some time she stood there, watching the children run and scream in the playground of Garneau School. She resigned herself to moving out of her parents’ basement and into affordable housing somewhere on the LRT line.

  The blend of exhaust and wet mulch and pizza dough on the avenue was surprisingly pleasant. Madison took several long breaths and imagined herself back in the auditorium, laughing and applauding with all the normal people. Yes, he is handsome. Handsome indeed, Lynn, yes. Touch him and you fricken die.

  Madison sat in the lobby during the explanations and the question-and-answer session. The mayor and his assistant left the auditorium laughing. Twenty minutes later, the rest of the crowd followed. Almost everyone continued straight out the front doors except Lynn’s closest friends in politics and the media, some university officials, and the Garneau residents. They stood near the unveiled plastic model of the future block, complete with a buffalo head on the site of 10 Garneau. They pored over possible exhibits and interior designs. Some openly mocked it. Others openly mocked the mockers.

  Two camera lights shone on the tanned face of a public affairs official from the university. The gentleman understood the magnitude of the tragedy that occurred this summer in the neighbourhood, and the historic integrity of Garneau, and he applauded this creative, community-based plan.

  “But this land is ultimately under university control,” said the official. “We must find a site for a new veterinary research centre. Now, of course, we’re eager to work with anyone on cultural projects. For goodness’ sake, we’ve been trying to build our own museum for years.”

  Raymond hovered close to the cameras. Then, provoked by something, the professor bolted across the lobby to Rajinder, where he whispered and gestured wildly. Rajinder looked past him and met Madison’s eye. Slowly he lifted his hand. Unsure whether to continue torturing herself, Madison waved back.

  Just for a moment.

  Rajinder smiled and Madison didn’t want to smile but she smiled anyway. Her cheeks went hot and she bit her lips to banish the smile until Abby stepped between them.

  “Did you see that model? We could actually live next door to a buffalo head.”

  “Even if the university agrees, Jeanne won’t sell. She’ll hate it.”

  Abby snapped her fingers. “We could bring her a tray of carrot muffins. Who could say no to that?”

  “It’s best to leave her alone.”

  “Your father’s trying to snub the PCs.” Abby turned toward David, who stood near some men with suits, his chin raised. “But these people won’t be snubbed.”

  Madison turned away from the ine
ffective snubbing to stare at Rajinder, to try not to smile at him some more, but he was gone from his corner. She stepped into the middle of the lobby and spotted him, from behind, leaving the theatre with Raymond Terletsky.

  78

  american or japanese

  Abby Weiss sat behind the steering wheel of a hybrid SUV. “I liked the Toyota better.”

  “Listen sweetheart, you’re just saying that because this one’s an SUV. What I’m trying to get across is it’s a good SUV.” David summoned all of his energy and prepared himself for a long afternoon. “Now sit back in that tasty leather and give this one a chance. Put your hands on the wheel. Think about how this will blend with the giant buffalo head next door.”

  Abby pretended to drive. “We don’t need all this space, and the little cars are cheaper. Think of all the cows that had to die for these seats.”

  “They were going to die anyway, Abby. We barbecued them in August, remember?” David hopped out of the passenger door and walked around the vehicle. A salesman with fake hair had been hovering since they walked into the showroom. For ten minutes, David had done his best to avoid eye contact. But the salesman intercepted him by the opened hood before he could reach the driver’s side window, and Abby.

  “She’s a beauty, ain’t she?”

  “What’s your name?”

  The salesman shot his hand out so fast David thought he was about to receive a blow to the solar plexus. “Greg McPhee.”

  David kept his voice quiet, so Abby wouldn’t hear. “Listen, Greg McPhee, go grab a donut or something. We’re buying a hybrid and I want one of yours.” He turned around to see Abby leaning her head out the driver’s-side window. “My wife wants a little foreign number.”

  “No, no, no.” Greg McPhee shook his head. “That’d be a huge mistake, sir.”

  “I know, I know. But my wife’s easily infuriated by a certain kind of consumerism. She won’t like you at all. So how about this, Greg McPhee? If we want one of these, I’ll find you.”