The Garneau Block

by Todd Babiak

At four in the morning, Raymond Terletsky and Shirley Wong locked 10 Garneau. The winter storm was finally blowing in. Raymond’s lower back was so sore from bending and standing he leaned on his wife as they crossed the street.

  “Get off.”

  Raymond took a step away and slipped on the new sidewalk ice. He landed hard on his tailbone and sat there as Shirley continued to the front door. She opened it and turned.

  “You coming?”

  Instead of rolling on to his hands and knees and standing, Raymond lay back to watch the snow fall in whorls above his head. From his spot on the sidewalk, Raymond heard a sigh. Shirley started back down the steps and through the snow. She held a hand out for Raymond and helped him up. “You look like hell.”

  “I feel like hell.”

  After almost two weeks of cataloguing and curating the rotating exhibit that would be the modified Great Spirit, Raymond felt as though he ought to sleep until Christmas. The president and the mayor would come by in just a few hours, at noon, and Raymond might have done more–touched up the paint, polished the wood floors–but in his fatigue he was in danger of ruining something.

  He followed Shirley toward his front door. On the porch Raymond turned and looked back at 10 Garneau. In the front yard, lit by the street lamps but obscured by the snow, stood the man with the buffalo head. Raymond had not seen Death since Halloween night, and had certainly wondered what had become of him. Unless the man with the buffalo head wasn’t Death at all. Raymond waved to the man with the buffalo head.

  As he stepped inside, Shirley handed Raymond a snifter of cognac. He cradled it. “Thank you, darling.”

  “Get your shoes off and sit down. When’s the last time you really sat down?”

  “In prison, I suppose.” Raymond flopped on the couch.

  Shirley turned out all the lights except those on the Christmas tree. She sat next to Raymond on the couch. “We’re going to have to figure out what to do when the kids show up.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean the bedroom situation. The ‘no touching’ rule.”

  Raymond sipped the cognac. It was difficult to form words. “Your choice, darling. I wait anxiously for permission to touch you again.”

  “I pushed all the houses off the model downstairs the other day when I was mad at you. It’s a ping-pong table. All it needs is a net.”

  “Ping-pong,” said Raymond.

  “It’s difficult for me to say this but I’m proud of you. The house really does look like a museum, or something. It speaks.”

  The man with the buffalo head stood in the living room now, next to the Christmas tree. The sight of him did not startle Raymond but he didn’t want Shirley to see the man with the buffalo head and get the wrong idea.

  “You can go now,” he said, barely above a whisper. “I don’t need you.”

  Shirley turned to Raymond. “What?”

  “Talking to myself.”

  Raymond ignored the man with the buffalo head and, after a snort or two, the man turned and disappeared. Then Raymond reached down, took his wife’s feet, and lifted them on to his lap; he didn’t know why there were three bottles of peppermint foot rub underneath various coffee tables, and he didn’t think he wanted to know why. But he reached for one and opened the top.

  “You’re breaking rule number one,” said Shirley.

  He removed his wife’s socks and warmed the cream in his hands. From his own massages, Raymond knew a thing or two. He started with long strokes and gentle yet concentrated circles. He separated her toes and massaged between them. After a while he sneaked up her ankles, but not too far.

  “What am I going to do with you, Raymond?” Shirley’s voice wasn’t much more than breath. She lay back on the couch with her eyes closed.

  Raymond turned to see if the man with the buffalo head was gone for good, and he was. “Maybe we could go on dates once in a while. See a few more Oilers games, go watch A Christmas Carol.”

  “You’re bored at hockey games and you hate Charles Dickens.”

  “That was the old Raymond.”

  Shirley smiled. “That’s the way gamblers and addicts talk.”

  Even though he risked falling asleep on the floor, Raymond lowered himself on to his knees and crawled so he could rest his head on his wife’s chest. “How many times can I say I’m sorry? You have to let me prove myself. These rules…they’ll drive us both crazy.”

  “That foot massage was nice. I like foot massages.”

  “It’s a risk, right? If you trust me again and I’m good, the last thirty years of our lives together can be romantic and exciting. If you treat me like a mentally handicapped roommate, well, I don’t see much of a future for us.”

  His wife’s eyes were closed.

  In a few days, their children would arrive at home and he would be Dad again, in his sweater and slippers. The man who carves the turkey and fills up everyone’s glass of wine and stuffs the stockings hanging on the fireplace. For hours he would sit with them and listen to their new stories of social triumph because his son and daughter were the sorts of people who were unembarrassed to tell stories of social triumph. Maybe his children were boors. Maybe he was a boor and they were boors by default.

  There was nothing he could do about it now but love them. Let them see their own ghosts. Of course, he could always take the boy aside and warn him about propositioning massage therapists.

  Shirley was asleep. With his head rising and falling with her chest he listened to the soft breaths of the fragile being that was his wife and hoped she would live forever. Then he carried her to bed.

  95

  the last jog

  Rajinder was so adorable in his black tights Madison wanted to get down on her knees and take a bite out of his thigh. “Like this?” he said, as he stretched his calves against the mountain ash tree in front of her parents’ house.

  “Perfect.”

  A clean new blanket of snow covered the block. It hung heavily on the trees and roofs, and hid gutter sand. It was two hours before the mayor and the university president were due to arrive and, in the sunshine, 10 Garneau looked like an advertisement for northern living. Madison had gone to bed early the night before so she hadn’t seen the finished project. But she didn’t want to spoil the new snow for a peek into the window.

  “Remember, we must talk the whole time.” Rajinder jogged on the spot and pointed at her. In the four days since their engagement, Madison had been moving everything important out of her parents’ basement and into his house across the street. Before they went to sleep every night, Rajinder flipped through her pregnancy books and one of his own: The Expectant Father. “If you cannot speak normally, you are exercising too hard.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Madison was too far along to jog, really, so she planned to walk quickly while Rajinder ran. It was difficult to stretch. Her parents’ front door opened and Jonas Pond and David Weiss walked out on to the porch in black suits. Garith was with them, in his white knitted jacket and hat.

  Jonas hurried down to Madison and Rajinder and pulled one of his pamphlets out of the satchel. “You know where we’re going right now? Door-knocking.”

  “Best of luck to you, my friend.” Rajinder shook his hand. “You have my vote.”

  “That’s one,” said David Weiss.

  “You look nice, Dad.”

  “I know. Not nearly as nice as my future son-in-law, though, in his superhero tights. The Stinking Rich Hornet.”

  A shudder went through Madison. Now that they were engaged, soon to be married, it was perfectly acceptable to mock Rajinder. Once in a while, she knew, her father would say something inappropriate. Later this afternoon, after the mayor and university president visited 10 Garneau, she vowed to take her father aside and talk to him about that.

  Across the street, Raymond Terletsky appeared in a snow-mobile suit and a giant Russian fur hat. He held a shovel over his head. “If they say no today, one of these,” he said, and swung the
giant aluminum shovel through the air. “Just joking!”

  It was not funny. It was so not funny that Madison started her quick-walk out of the block. Rajinder trailed behind, and turned to wish Jonas good luck.

  The men of the Garneau Block cheered like football players. As she turned right toward Saskatchewan Drive, Madison amused herself by imagining them in a huddle.

  At the top of the stairs leading down to the river valley trails, Madison paused. “What happens if they say no?”

  Rajinder, already out of breath, shook his head. “We move somewhere else.”

  “They won’t say no, will they?”

  “The business case for saying no is very strong.”

  Madison started down the stairs. The extra twenty-two pounds were most noticeable on stairs. “You should be very proud, for everything you did. Tried to do.”

  Fifteen or twenty stairs later, Rajinder whispered thanks. Then he stopped Madison and kissed her. “I am unconditionally happy. For the first time since my parents died.”

  “I’m happy too.”

  “Well. What else is there?”

  Down the remainder of the stairs and on to the snowy path, Madison answered the question in silence. Money, air quality, Down syndrome, drinking and driving, nuclear proliferation, global poverty, new country music, climate change, semi-automatic weapons, fundamentalism, declining oil reserves, cancer, crime, crack cocaine, reality television, being forced out of your house, veterinary medicine.

  Yet there was also the soft skin at the back of Rajinder’s neck. The way he ate breakfast and read the newspaper wearing slippers with his suit. Two mornings ago, on her birthday, her millionaire fiancé did not buy her a present; instead, he sat at his piano and sang an Edith Piaf song. There was the modest altar to his parents upstairs, with photographs and his father’s turban, his mother’s favourite sari. How about the new pregnancy yoga DVD he bought and followed with her in his basement? How about crisp winter days leading to the gush of spring? Abby and David and haiku, mythic power, hummingbirds, the promise of travel? A baby?

  Twice Rajinder had to stop. He was not a jogger. On the east side of the Kinsmen Centre, he bent over to catch his breath.

  As she watched him, Madison worried, for a moment, about losing all of this. She worried their happiness would not last. They would get old and their feelings for one another would change. The cool wind on a Saturday in December would carry no pleasures, no simple mysteries.

  Rajinder stood up straight and surveyed the path before them. Then he took her hand and kissed it. “What?”

  Madison smiled. “Nothing,” she said, and they walked deeper into the valley.

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to my extraordinarily smart editor, Jennifer Lambert. Thank you to Ellen Seligman and all the other fine people at McClelland and Stewart.

  Thank you to my brave and supportive patrons at the Edmonton Journal, where this book had its first life as a daily serial–Linda Hughes, Allan Mayer, Barb Wilkinson, Peter Maser, Roy Wood, and my other extraordinarily smart editor, Shawn Ohler.

  Thank you to Edmonton. My original plan was to thank the small army of e-mail correspondents who followed The Garneau Block in the newspaper. People like Pete Gasper, Darka Tarnawsky, Dean McKenzie, and Annie Dugan. But the list was becoming very, very listy. Thank you, all of you, just the same.

  Thank you to David Robinson at The Scotsman, and to the great Alexander McCall Smith for reading, and liking, an early draft.

  Thank you to Gina Loewen, Avia Babiak, and all my other informal researchers: Shirley Schipper for the medical advice, Duncan Purvis and Tami Friesen for legal concerns, Karine Germann-Gibbings for les corrections, Kirk Babiak for information about hunting pronghorn, Nola Babiak for tips on mothering.

  Thank you to Anne McDermid and Martha Magor for seeing the potential in this, and in me.

  An excerpt from Todd Babiak’s new novel, The Book of Stanley.

  1

  Stanley Moss silenced the Cuban music and glanced at his watch. Frieda looked up at him and sighed. Apart from her sigh, the only sounds in the house on 77th Avenue were the turning pages of her novel and the random plunks and creaks of furnace and settling softwood. Outside, the neighbour’s modified Honda Civic accelerated from its parking spot and whined down the avenue.

  “Why does he do that?”

  “I don’t know, Stanley.”

  “Why would someone pay extra for a noisy muffler? The word itself: muffler.”

  Frieda didn’t respond. The novel she was reading for her book club, as far as Stanley understood, concerned life in India. It seemed every novel she read was about life in India, with poetic descriptions of vegetation. In the silence, as the minute hand slid forward again, Stanley considered pursuing this with Frieda: the political and social foundations of her obsession with India.

  The spring sun was about to set, sending an orange light into a corner of the house. It illuminated the dust, revealed the window streaks, and illustrated the particularities of his wife’s beauty: small green eyes, long fingers, a larger than average nose.

  Five past seven–the hour had now officially passed. Stanley shrugged. “That’s our boy.”

  “Why are you surprised?”

  “Because in the e-mail he promised to call.”

  “He promised, he promised.”

  Their son, Charles, lived in New York City. Charles was an investment banker with one of the most prestigious firms in America. When they visited, once every two years at Christmas-time, Charles attempted to be a good host. But he rarely had a free moment between seven in the morning and ten at night, even on Christmas Day. Stanley and Frieda rode around the park in a carriage pulled by steaming white horses, while the big bells rang. They went to museums and restaurants and delis recommended by guidebooks, and partook of Broadway shows that met Frieda’s standards for musical theatre. Stanley and Frieda accepted that being a proper host demanded skills that Charles had never acquired; it had to be good enough that they were in their son’s city, spending his money. At times, however, times like these, Stanley attempted to be angry with Charles instead of hurt. But Stanley understood he was the architect of his son’s flaws.

  “So what should I do?”

  “E-mail him again.”

  “How do I go about phrasing it?”

  Frieda closed her novel about life and vegetation in India and slid a finger across her bottom lip. “Dear Charles. Hello, how is your money doing? Good? Good. So, remember that shortness of breath I mentioned? Turns out I have advanced cancer. I wanted to tell you over the phone but you’re too busy to call us back.” Frieda took a deep breath and looked up at the white stucco ceiling. Stanley followed her gaze to a cobweb above the framed map of Clayoquot Sound. Finally, she finished. “I’m dying. Love, Dad.”

  Instead of arguing with Frieda about Charles and his maddening insensitivity, Stanley lifted the remote control and turned the Cuban music back on. “Which song were we at?”

  Frieda dabbed at her eyes with the pink handkerchief she kept handy and shook her head. It didn’t matter. Neither of them spoke Spanish, so the lyrics would not become repetitive. “Put it on shuffle.”

  “I don’t like shuffle. It ruins the artistic progression.” Stanley did not wait for Frieda to respond. He started with song number one.

  The oncologist and his family doctor had agreed that radiation and chemotherapy could prolong his life but would make Stanley miserable with nausea. Instead, they prescribed some drugs to dull the pain in his chest and aid his breathing. There was planning to do. The doctors figured Stanley and Frieda had a few months before things turned ghastly. Why not take a nice trip somewhere?

  Frieda was furious at the medical establishment for not catching this sooner, at Stanley for smoking until 1991, at the oil and gas industry and the Alberta government for environmental pollutants that might have sparked the illness, and, most profoundly, at Charles for being Charles. “We should have given him up for a
doption. Or fed him to jackals at birth.”

  “Frieda.”

  “He defines selfishness.”

  “He doesn’t know.”

  “And at this rate he never will.” Frieda stood up from the chesterfield and dropped her book on the coffee table. “Let’s order Korean and drink champagne until we pass out.”

  “That’s the spirit.”

  It took some time for Stanley to get out of his leather club chair. The tumours in his lungs had spread, and his body’s hopeless reaction to them left little strength for standing from a sitting position. Once he was up, he pulled his wife in for a hug. Stanley waited until he had enough breath, and then said, “Let’s go to the computer this instant and book a holiday.”

  “No.”

  “To Havana or Delhi or wherever you want.”

  Frieda shook her head. “You’ll get diarrhea on the first day and die. Gosh, that would be wild fun for both of us.”

  The song, a slow blend of acoustic guitars, hand drums, and horns, was a sultry provocation. Stanley forced Frieda into a dance. “We can lie about on a beach somewhere and read. The ocean air will open my lungs. I’ll be cured by cheap papaya.”

  “Stop talking.”

  For the rest of that song and half of the next one, Stanley and Frieda danced between the umbrella plant and the dining-room table.

  Frieda held his hand, which had gone cool and moist. “What time is your appointment tomorrow?”

  “Two.”

  She asked something else about the nature of palliative care but Stanley was not listening. There was a Korean restaurant in town and he wanted Frieda to phone it, but the name had fled from his memory. A result of the tumours that now lived in his brain, or possibly a side effect of the drugs. Something. It started with a B. Bap?

  “Is it designed to prolong your life?” she said. “Or do they just make death a more pleasant experience?”

  Bim. Bul?

  Frieda left the room and returned with a bottle. In the moment it took for her to strip the foil and wire away and ease the plastic cork out of their thirteen-dollar champagne, Stanley felt a buzz of anticipation. It reminded him vaguely of that instant before a teenage kiss or the first time he held his son. The cork popped, bounced off the ceiling, and rested in front of the stereo. Champagne gushed and fell on the hardwood floor with a slap.