by Cary Fagan
What I actually became was a pharmaceutical rep.
I roam from medical office to doctor’s office with my square leather sample case, meeting doctors and suggesting to them that they prescribe our anti-depressant, our antiinflammatory, our analgesic pain killer, our contraceptive pill, our alternative to Viagra (no hot flushes, no seeing purple). I load them up with free samples to hand out to patients — candy, we call them. My territory is the northern outskirts of Toronto: Markham, Thornhill, the 905 arc over the city, which I traverse like a voyageur for the good of the distant mother country, a massive German pharmaceutical corporation. The job was supposed to be temporary. Candice was already working as a lawyer for the province and I felt bad every time we went to a restaurant and she took out her Visa. What I think happened, what I can reconstruct from certain painful flashes of memory, is that Candice was affected by watching me return every evening in my cheap Moore’s suit and clutching my Death of a Salesman sample bag. She started to imagine me in twenty years’ time. Receding hairline. Paunch. Not bothering to loosen my tie before heading for the liquor cabinet to pour myself a stiff one. It caused her to have panic attacks. And now I haven’t seen Candice for three months.
The Forty Winks Motel has a blinking neon eye on its sign. I am staying here because it is convenient to my work territory, because the weekly rate is cheap, because I will never run into anyone I know, and because the sheer crumminess of my present life will force me to make some decisions. As motel rooms go, this one could be worse. No smell of mould, roach killer, or someone else’s semen. The hotplate, provided (illegally) by the motel for an extra four dollars a day, is set up in the bathroom, the only counter space. The bedroom windows don’t face the highway out front, but look behind to a new subdivision going up on former farm land. Rows of townhouses disappearing into the vanishing point.
MY FIRST WEEK LIVING HERE, I drove into Toronto, crashing at my friend Aaron’s place. Aaron and I go back to high school, but Aaron has a serious girlfriend now, who is eight years older and has a kid, and Aaron let me know in an embarrassed, throat-clearing way that it wasn’t really convenient to have me around. I understand that of course, and I’m totally cool about it, so the next Saturday I stayed at Walt’s. Walt is single and has never been known to go on a date, but he has three large dogs who were not pleased about having their sofa taken over. Every so often, during the night, I could hear a low growl from behind the kitchen door. All Walt and I ended up doing was watching the ball game while eating Pizza Pizza. Sitting in that dark room, the television flickering and the air heavy with dog flatulence, it occurred to me that all our interesting friends had belonged to Candice.
Which only made me think about how much I missed her.
I will not pretend that it was a mutual break-up. Candice said she didn’t love me anymore, and that it had taken her weeks of talking with her therapist and the support of all her friends to get up the courage to leave. She said I was a wonderful person, but she just couldn’t be the person she wasn’t anymore and she had to save her own life. Tears, nose-blowing. There wasn’t much left for me to do but join the chorus of her friends and congratulate her for finding the courage to dump me.
I WAKE UP IN A sweat, a blade of light crossing my face, grope for the dollar-store alarm clock to see why it hasn’t rung. Even as I do, I realize it’s the weekend. A plunging in my stomach. Oh Jesus, I cannot believe that I feel sickened by the idea of Saturday, that I don’t know what I’m going to possibly do with myself.
A grinding outside. I push back the curtain to see a backhoe tearing up the earth in front of the new townhouses. Even though the workers are still finishing the interiors, carrying in sheets of drywall and squares of parquet flooring, the trees and shrubs and grass have arrived in the backs of three dump trucks. Instant neighbourhood.
I reach for my cellphone and start to punch in the code for Candice’s number. Then I hit the off button and put the phone down again. Candice is over and I know it. I am not the sort to make useless, grovelling phone calls — besides, I already have. On the other side of the wall, the television goes on and I hear whispers and moans. Somebody is watching a porn flick at seven in the morning. I get up, take a shower, shave and dress, put coffee in the “Little Bachelor” drip machine, open a snack pack of Alpha-Bits. I sit on the edge of the bed crunching letters when I hear “Ode to Joy” reduced to the electronic chimes of my cellphone.
“Mitch, I’ve finally got you.”
“Hey, Mom.”
“I’ve been trying for two days. I was going to call the apartment but you said not to.”
“Candice has a lot of stress at work right now. She’s really on edge.”
“Poor girl. She’s too dedicated for her own good.”
“Yeah, that’s just what I tell her. How’s Winnipeg?”
“Mosquitoes already. Marnie Hoffman’s aunt got West Nile. She’s paralyzed. It’s like one of the ten plagues. The rabbi was saying ...”
I take a sip of coffee. My mother did not go to synagogue regularly before my father died. It was Candice, a lapsed Anglican, who encouraged my mother to see it as a way to a new social life. My mother said that if it wasn’t for Candice she would have jumped into the grave after my father.
“Are you going to come at the end of June like you said?”
“I said maybe. It really depends on Candice’s work. Listen, there’s something I’ve got to do. I’ll talk to you later.”
“When?”
“Soon.”
“You tell that doll not to work so hard.”
I really do have something to do. My laundry. When that’s finished I stand by my car outside the laundromat, trying not to look at the little kid making faces at me through the window.
Back in the car, I pull onto the highway too quickly, cutting off the driver behind who leans on his horn and gives me the finger. I fiddle with the radio and snap it off again. It is a bright day, perfect early summer weather, but I’m too lethargic to wind down the window. Without thinking I turn into the drive of the Treasure Barn, my tires flinging up stones. The car comes to a halt beside a couple of rain barrels made into begonia planters. Along with the usual rocking chairs outside are whiteand black-faced lawn jockeys, several poorly carved wooden ducks, and an old baby carriage full of used videos. There’s a sign on the door in wood type that reads OPEN in reverse letters and I wonder if it means the place is actually closed, but the door swings in when I push it.
Through the filter of dust suspended in the air I see dressers from the 1950s, too ugly to be kitsch. A rack of suits in alarming check. Rusting rakes and shovels, imploding sofas, bicycle tire rims, mounted deer antlers. The woman behind the desk — or rather, inside a U-shape made from old jewellery display cases — looks up from her crocheting and smiles. I wonder if that’s a real gold tooth she has or just a fake for the weekend tourists. I decide I must buy something, no matter how inferior or useless. And then something catches my eye.
A guitar, and not much of a one — a cheap steel-string with the stencilled image of a bucking bronco on its flat top, which looks as if somebody had started to scrape off the bronco with a pen knife and gave up after removing a hind foot. I pick it up from the broken chair where it lies, put the fraying macramé strap around my neck, and strum a G chord. At least I think it’s a G chord. Of course the guitar is out of tune, but the neck looks straight so I take it up to the counter.
“I was wondering how much you want for this,” I say.
The woman peers at it over her reading glasses. “That’s a Martin. Two hundred.”
“It isn’t a Martin. It’s a Marvin. I’ll give you twenty-five bucks.”
“A hundred.”
“Twenty-five.”
“I got a case for it. Eighty.”
“I’ll take the case. Forty.”
She sizes me up; a city slicker who thinks he can pull one over on a country bumpkin.
“You got cash?”
I KNOW A FEW C
HORDS. Or think I do, because when I get back to the motel room and try to play, I find that my memory isn’t too good. Or maybe I don’t remember how to tune properly. Whatever the reason, all I get out of that shitbox is a godawful noise. I’m only banging on it for a couple of minutes before the porn addict next door starts pounding his hand on the wall because I’m ruining his appreciation of New Jersey Housewives. So I take the guitar and go down the hall and out the back door of the motel. I’d planned to sit at the picnic table but it turns out to be covered in bird shit from seagulls who seem to be lost, so I keep walking, over the collapsing link fence, through tall dandelions gone to feathery seed, to the first lawn of the new subdivision. Nobody seems to be working today and the little bulldozer has been left behind. I walk up the path to the third townhouse, third seems like a good spot, and sit down on the front steps since there’s no actual porch. I strum my chords again and then try to pick out a scale, but the truth is I don’t know what I’m doing and give up. I stand up again and on a whim try the front door of the townhouse. Lo and behold, it opens.
I’ve never been inside an unlived-in house before, and it’s a strange feeling, both spooky and alluring. This one looks just about finished, the walls painted white, the baseboards and sockets in, the oak-veneer kitchen cupboards installed. The only incongruity is a toilet squatting in the centre of the dining room, like a work by Duchamp. The bannister is still wrapped in plastic. Upstairs, the bedrooms are small but the master bedroom has an ensuite bath. Ah-ha, the bathroom is missing its toilet — thus the one downstairs.
Back on the ground floor, I put down the lid of the toilet and sit. I wonder who will live here and what their story will be. They will eat and laugh and bicker around the kitchen table, watch television in the den, play Monopoly in the basement. The kids will dare each other to enter the dark furnace room, the parents will wait until Saturday night to have sex.
Or maybe such lives don’t exist anymore. I know they once did; that’s what I fled from in the first place.
ON MONDAY, I USE MY cell to phone Long and McQuade in Toronto. I order an electronic tuner, a set of Martin strings, a capo, a dozen Fender picks, and three instruction books. The bill comes to more than twice what I paid for the guitar.
ON FRIDAY, WHEN I COME in, Fred, the motel owner, looks at me with the placidity of a man who knows that time is an illusion and hands me the package from Long and McQuade. Walking quickly to my room, my sample case in one hand and the package in the other, I fantasize about telling Candice that I have taken up guitar, as if somehow this might impress her the way I had hoped to impress girls when I was twelve. The fantasy is somewhat spoiled by my knowing that Candice would be confirmed in everything she thinks about me, but I’m feeling too expectant to let that get me down. On my bed, I unwrap the goodies and lay them out, everything just so cool. The first thing I do is change the crappy strings. It takes me a good forty-five minutes, puts me in a total sweat, and three times I lance the tip of a finger with the sharp end of a string.
Next, I tune up, checking one of the instruction manuals. Every Athlete Drinks Gatorade Before Exercising. Finally, I take one of the fake tortoiseshell picks, smooth and pleasing to the touch, find my G chord, and strum. To my amazement, the room expands with sweet fullness. Turns out even a shitbox of a guitar has music sleeping inside it. I strum hard and faster, but when I get a decent rhythm going, when I’m starting to feel good and thinking that I could play this one chord into eternity, the porn addict next door starts pounding on the wall again.
I take the guitar out back, along with the instruction book and an unrefrigerated beer. I head for the townhouse that I like to refer to as my own. I am vaguely dismayed by a SOLD sign on the one next to it, but I march right inside mine, calling, “Honey, I’m home!” and sit on the toilet in the dining room. With the instruction book open on the floor I practise these little four-bar exercises. After about ten minutes the fingertips of my left hand start to get sore, so I skip the next seven pages of exercises and plunge right into the first song, “On Top of Old Smoky.” Dang, I’ve always wanted to play that ol’ classic. I make my way haltingly through it, pausing for a swig of Blue, the working man’s beer.
“Candice, babe,” I say aloud, “It does not get better than this.”
TODAY I HAVE SEVEN APPOINTMENTS with doctors serving the suburban Chinese community from shopping mall clinics. I like these doctors, first or second-generation Canadians who are less arrogant and dismissive of parasites who feed on their underbellies. Plus, at lunch time I have my choice of Chinese restaurants.
Back at the motel, I change into jeans, grab a beer and my guitar, and head out back towards my townhouse. But, crossing the street, I hesitate. Someone is at the house on the other side from mine, pounding another SOLD sign into the ground. All I can see is that she is wearing a sweater and a knit skirt too warm for the weather, stockings and heels. I decide to lay the beer down at the roadside and continue on. She is straightening the sign as I come up the walkway. East Indian or Pakistani, pretty but thin, with a beaky nose and a premature streak of silver in her hair.
“Hello there,” she says, reaching out. I have to switch the guitar over to take her enthusiastic, real estate agent’s handshake. “Beautiful houses, aren’t they?”
“Yes, I’ve been admiring them,” I say, not altogether disingenuously. “It looks like they’re starting to sell.”
“More than half are already gone. The agents are too busy to put up the signs. Everything will be finished in two months. I find it so exciting when a new community begins. It’s like instant happiness.”
“So, who is moving in?”
“Very nice people, lovely people. Mostly from Mumbai. Originally, I mean.”
“Really.”
“The builders have some connections there. And there are a lot of Indian people living on the other side of the highway. Maybe you’ve seen the Hindu temple, it’s quite handsome.”
“Do you represent this one as well?” I asked, pointing to my house.
“Yes, I do. Would you care to take a look? It has an ensuite master bathroom.”
“I know. I mean, I’ve been inside. The door wasn’t locked.”
She frowned. “The tradespeople can be so irresponsible. Did you see the basement? Unfinished but very easily done. It would make a good play room for children. Do you have any kids?”
“No. Not yet, anyway.”
“It’s best to get into the market as early as you can. In housing, prices are always going up. Of course, it is more than an investment. It is your home. Do you know what mortgage you are able to carry?”
“I’m not really sure. I mean, I haven’t worked out the fine details.”
“What is the down payment you can make?”
I think of the money from my grandfather’s estate, which was invested in blue chip funds. I haven’t touched it except for taking Candice to Cuba last winter. “I’ve got about sixty thousand dollars,” I say, although actually it’s closer to forty.
“That’s quite good. Better than most who buy here. With the low interest rates, you would have to pay only nine hundred dollars a month mortgage, plus the tax, heating, and other usual bills. Could you manage that?”
“If I was careful.”
“It is good to be careful, I think,” she says and smiles. I’ve never seen a lovelier smile. I’m convinced she really wants me to be happy. “I must tell you that several families have come to see this house in the last two weeks. It won’t last long. Here, let me give you my card.”
She snaps open her purse, takes out a card, and hands it to me, just as her cellphone starts to ring. I nod to her, but she is already too involved in a conversation about plot surveys to notice, and retreat back across the road, swiping up my beer as I go.
I CONSIDER TELLING EVERY DOCTOR I visit of the various symptoms I have been experiencing lately. Depression punctuated by fleeting moments of desperate exhilaration. On my last call of the day I give in to the n
eed and confess to a family physician whose patients call him “Doctor Dan.” Without a word he takes his pad, writes a prescription, and hands it to me.
Rexapro.
“This is one of our competitors’ products,” I say. “I think it will suit you better.”
“Ours has fewer contra-indications.”
“This one is more generally effective, a wider umbrella.”
“Really?” I’m disappointed. The vice-president said that ours worked the best for the most people.
“You know what their rep gave me?” Doctor Dan says. “A cappuccino machine. Makes pretty good foam.”
BACK AT THE RANCH, I tuck the prescription into the Gideon Bible in the drawer by the bed. I have my usual sumptuous dinner and head out for a night on the town. Along the strip of highway, cars slide past, their lights receding in the dark. It takes me no time to reach Bob’s Place, and although it’s early in the week, there are a dozen Harley-Davidsons gleaming in the lot. I go up the chipped cement steps and open the door; the music that has been vibrating though the glass windows now blasts me in the face, along with the rank smell of beer. In the dark I can just make out the bikers at their tables, big guys with greying ponytails, leather vests or jackets, beefy hands around their mugs. Also a few women, who match them in bulk and smoke-scarred voices when they laugh. I wonder if they’re pissed off about tattoos becoming so popular. The band is crowded into the far corner, thrashing away on some Rush song as if they’re playing Maple Leaf Gardens. Most of the bar stools are empty and I pull myself onto one. The bartender, a woman my mother’s age (although I doubt my mother would show that amount of cleavage), gives me a friendly smile as she wipes down the bar.
“What can I do you for?”
“I’ll have a Blue.”
“You got it.”
The band takes a break. Only when they come down to join the bikers do I realize they’re not young guys. I don’t think the bikers are Hells Angels, at least it doesn’t say so on their jackets. The beer is so cold it hurts my teeth. Suddenly I have to pee and find the john down the hall from the grease-stinking kitchen. It reeks of piss and marijuana. I relieve myself, decide against touching the sink, and head back to the bar where I down half my beer. My hands are trembling, God knows why, and I slip my right hand into my pocket for some change to jangle but instead my fingers touch the smooth side of a pick. I must have put it in my pocket after practising. I bring out the pick and press it in my palm so that I can feel its rounded corners. I place it on the bar and admire its triangular shape, like it’s one of those basic forms of nature.
