The Delusionist

by Grant Buday

  His first week driving went well enough: people were polite, they tipped, they got out. By the end of the week he was taking his sketchbook with him and when things got slow he did a little work, street scenes, pedestrians, lampposts. Then he switched to evenings where, according to Gilbert, the good money lived. At first Lemuel fed him easy trips. He drove some suits, some office girls, ferried some Korean sailors to the Seaman’s Club. Then there was a lull. Along with his sketchpad he had a textbook on Ukrainian History because he was considering going back to school. Paul once said Ukrainian Cossacks invaded Siberia in the late sixteenth century by carrying their riverboats over the Urals. Why anyone would want to invade Siberia mystified Cyril, but it was an impressive feat that sparked his curiosity. He was flipping through a chapter titled The Glory That Was Kiev when the cab doors swung open and two guys dropped into the back and a third hit the front causing the car to lurch on its springs.

  “My man! A hearty good evening. What’re you reading there?”

  Cyril showed him the cover.

  The kid plucked it from his hand. “Rooshyuh,” he said in a movie accent.

  “Where to?”

  “Know any fuck-houses?” demanded one in the back.

  “Yeah, we want to get us some.” As if choreographed, the two in back raised their fists and pumped their hips rocking the car.

  Cyril took his book from the kid’s hand and said he didn’t know any brothels. The guys were in their twenties, drunk, wearing sports shirts and jeans, clean-shaven, with good haircuts; suburban boys on the slum.

  The two in the back reached for the doors to get out, but the one up front was apparently intrigued by Cyril and, settling himself deeper in the seat, directed Cyril to just drive.

  “Just drive where?”

  He pointed in the direction the car was facing. “Just drive that way.”

  Gilbert had warned him about this. He’d also warned him to keep his doors locked to prevent anyone getting in before he’d had a chance to give them the once over. “I need a destination.”

  “Need or want?” asked the kid. He was big, with a meaty head and thick hair and heavy dark eyes. His T-shirt was expensive, Cyril could tell by the cut of the collar, not your three-for-one deal from Fields. “It’s important to distinguish need from want,” he advised.

  “Okay, I need and want a destination.”

  “Methinks you’re avoiding the issue.”

  “No, the issue is you should find another car,” said Cyril.

  The kid became sad. He exhaled long and he pouted. “You don’t like us.”

  Cyril’s glance flicked to the rearview. The two in back had tensed, like dogs at the alert, and he feared one would grab him around the neck. It was about eight o’clock and dark, a misty rain obscuring the windshield and blurring the lights of the shops that seemed far away down the suddenly empty stretch of Hastings. “You’ll have better luck with another cab,” he repeated in a more reasonable tone, as if genuinely eager to see their wants and needs satisfied.

  “You don’t like us and I don’t think you trust us.”

  Cyril rested his left hand on his left thigh and took a slow breath and thought of the .38 just inches from his hand. “I’m trying to work.”

  “And we want to offer you our custom. But you refuse to take us to a house where we can get our ills reputed.” He leaned to read Cyril’s driver ID. “Cyril Andrachuk.”

  The two in back chuckled.

  The one next to him rediscovered the text book on the seat between them. He picked it up with exaggerated care and slowly fanned the pages and came to a marker. “Ah. Stalin. You’re reading about the man who fucked your people up the ass without even the courtesy of lubricant.” He raised the book high for the benefit of his pals, as though it was a Bible and he was a preacher. “Stalin killed more people than Hitler. Did you know that? Stalin is the nightmare from which Russia has yet to awake. A man of charisma and cunning. A beast worshipped as a god. How I’d love to have met him. Purely in the interest of psychology, you understand.” He returned the book to the seat and gave it a fond pat. Then he mused, “I wonder if fucking a country is better than fucking a cunt?” The boys in back hee-hawed. “What do you think, Cyril?”

  “I think it’s time for you to get out.” Gripping the .38 he swivelled so that his back was braced against the door and pointed the gun at the kid’s head.

  When they were on the sidewalk, Cyril started the car and drove to the depot and gave Lemuel the keys, his trip sheet, announced that he was quitting, and went to his mother’s, where he’d been living since his return from Mexico while he looked for a place of his own. The next day two cops showed up and informed him that charges had been laid. It went before a judge who, while not unsympathetic to the three-on-one odds, observed that the gun was unregistered and thought that Cyril had overreacted. And while he gave him a suspended sentence it also meant that Cyril now had a criminal record.

  He got on with a house painter named Norbert Hek. On the first day Hek strode into the room Cyril was painting and stood with his hands on his hips and said he was worried. Roller in hand, Cyril asked what exactly Hek was worried about? It was hard to judge Hek’s age, he could be forty, he could be sixty, his skin was seamed, he was missing two teeth on the upper left side of his jaw, his eyes were grey and dry and his hair long and blond and brittle. “I’m worried about your relationship with the wall,” said Hek. They were undercoating the interior of a newly built house. “About your relationship with the surface.” With his fingertips he stroked the drying paint testing for ridges. “You’ve got to love the surface. I was listening to the sound of your roller. It doesn’t sound to me like you care about the surface.” Cyril was impressed that Hek could hear the sound of his roller from the next room and furthermore that he could read so much into this sound. As if hearing Cyril’s thoughts, he said, “Smack, smack, smack. That’s how it sounded.”

  “Smack, smack, smack?”

  Hek nodded. “Slow down. Stroke it.” He stroked the air. “Caress it. Make it feel good.” He ran his fingers—thick, stubby, paint scabbed—over the paint as though reading poetry in Braille. “Feather it out.”

  “Okay.”

  “Make it smooth.”

  Cyril nodded.

  “Think of skin.”

  “Skin.”

  “A woman’s thigh,” said Hek. “Right here.” He ran his palm down the inside of his leg, from groin to knee. He was wearing baggy white pants stained with various pale shades of paint. “Okay?”

  “Okay.” Cyril nodded to reassure him that he grasped the concept. Hek was about to go back to his own work when he said, “People don’t touch enough. We’re all eye. The eye should lead to the flesh. Me, I see a well-painted wall I want to get naked and press up against it.” He pressed himself to the Gyproc. Maintaining this position, he turned his head so that he could make eye contact and thus drive home his point. “You should want to make love to the wall.”

  Cyril maintained a politely attentive expression.

  “Understand?”

  “Got it.”

  Hek gave three grunting thrusts against the wall with his pelvis then left the room saying, “Now let’s see what those other monkeys are up to.”

  Cyril quit at the end of the day. Yet he had made two discoveries. First, even an idiot like Hek could succeed as a painting contractor; and, second, that he liked painting. The process was soothingly silent in contrast to the whack of hammers and the shriek of saws. A few days later he hooked up with a crew run by a sleepy-eyed German named Irwin who said he’d been, “Painting since I’m thirteen years.” There were half a dozen others on the crew. Irwin told them where to paint and they went at it with minimal interruption. If nothing else, painting seemed a step closer to drawing and Cyril felt a natural aptitude, discovering that painting a wall was like painting his mind: you covered one mood with another. Pale grey could be warmed up or a hot yellow could be cooled off. His mind wandered as he paint
ed, though rarely profoundly. My mind mindlessly meanders, he said to himself. My mindlessly meandering mind. My meanderlessly mindering mind  . . . He recalled a Three Stooges episode where Curly accidentally swaps Moe’s coffee with a can of paint and Moe takes a swallow. “Why you numbskull!” he says, and jabs two fingers in Curly’s eyes.

  Irwin was a philosopher of paint. He had theories about red and blue and green and yellow and black. “Red is not rage. Don’t let anyone tell you red is rage. It is not rage. I get mad I don’t see red I see black. Red is blood, yes, and violence maybe, but violence can be joy, communion, wine, sunset. Blue is the ice of the Virgin Mary’s eyes. Green is the wall of a madhouse but is also grass and forest. God is green, green as a frog.”

  Cyril was not inclined to argue with Irwin about anything, certainly not the colour of God. He nodded his acceptance of the notion that God was green. It certainly seemed as good a colour as any for the Creator. Wondering about the effects of decades of paint fumes on Irwin’s brain, Cyril decided to invest in a respirator for whenever he used a spray gun, and at the very least be sure the windows were wide open when he used a brush or roller. Wasn’t it lead-based paint that caused Goya to go deaf and mad?

  “But you know why people really love paint?” asked Irwin with more than a hint of disgust.

  Cyril was eager to hear Irwin’s theory. Painters it seemed had a lot of theories. “Why?”

  “Because they can cover up the past.”

  In the evenings Cyril resumed classes with Novak, who was interested to hear about his Mexican adventures and said, quite frankly, that he was surprised Cyril had come back at all. Cyril said he was wondering the same thing. He’d described Don Antonio Martin Smolenski and his daughter Remedios, though made no mention of Connie.

  He also enrolled in Ukrainian History. The course had two parts, lecture and tutorial. The professor was a short, thick, middle-aged woman who outlined the course content and expectations in terms of exams and grades, as well as codes of conduct—no swearing, no sexist or racist language, no eating and no drinking. After the fifty-minute lecture they broke into tutorials of another fifty minutes, each led by a graduate student. Cyril found his room. At the front stood a young man of about twenty-five years of age holding a paper cup of coffee which, when Cyril entered, fell from the fellow’s hand and splattered on the floor. The guy from the cab. All the other students turned questioningly toward Cyril who merely stood there. The tutorial leader said nothing, just went to the intercom and punched some numbers and within minutes two security guards arrived. The tutorial leader followed Cyril and the guards into the corridor.

  “How did you find me?”

  “I wasn’t looking for you. I’m only here to take the class.”

  “I can’t have violence in my classroom.”

  “Who’s violent?”

  “You threatened me with a gun.”

  “There were three of you,” said Cyril, controlling his tone. “You wouldn’t get out of my cab. It was you guys who were threatening me.”

  “We never laid a hand on you.”

  “You were mad that I wouldn’t take you to a whorehouse.”

  The tutorial leader’s gaze wavered. The security guards were following the debate with mounting interest. “I allow that my colleagues and I were somewhat intoxicated.”

  “The three of you refused to get out of my cab when I politely asked that you do so. All I wanted was to be left alone. I can’t believe you brought charges,” said Cyril, as if having been betrayed by an old friend. “It was a complete misrepresentation of the facts.”

  “That’s not what the judge thought.” He consulted his wristwatch and became fatigued. “Now this has all been very interesting, but I have a responsibility to this institution and to those people in that classroom. And I cannot in good conscience accept as a student a man who threatens people with a gun.”

  And with that Cyril was escorted to the parking lot and off the campus.

  PART THREE — 1982

  In Which Cyril Strikes a New Match

  ONE

  WHEN THE MODEL let her black robe drop to stand naked before the drawing class, Cyril saw a being cast down from Olympus and condemned to live among mortals. She was six-foot-one, had dark red hair to her hips, breasts like ski jumps, and teeth like a horse. As she took her pose, one foot propped on a stool and hands on her hips, she studied each artist in turn. When her gaze reached Cyril it halted. He stopped drawing. She smiled a shrug of a smile as if to say, Well, here we are, you and I, creatures, beings, alive and above all absurd, but with a destiny to fulfill. Later, he would insist that he’d read all this and more into that brief smile.

  When the session ended she looked over his shoulder then reached for his stick of charcoal and wrote her phone number in the corner. He invited her for a beer at the Europe. Her name was Yvonne, she was Quebecois, had lived a year in the Canaries and two years in India where she’d practised hatha yoga. She wanted to be an actress, but her size was proving problematic.

  “I am too high,” she said. “Maybe I can be Amazon or robot, but there are not so many calls for Amazon and robot.” She looked glum. She picked up her beer glass and ran her tongue along the rim. Then she brightened. “But I am jazz singer, too.”

  Cyril nodded encouragingly. Modelling, acting, singing. “How about dancing?” He could see her in a chorus line or a ballet.

  “Of course,” she said as if it was too obvious to mention.

  They stayed until closing then he drove her home. She lived in a basement suite off Commercial Drive with a ceiling so low her hair brushed the light fixtures. She made coffee with sweetened condensed milk and Nescafé, and told him how the landlord, Giancarlo, promised to leave her the house if she married him.

  He asked, “When’s the wedding?”

  She let loose a loud piratic laugh.

  Cyril said, “If he’s old and going to die soon maybe you should.”

  “Would you?”

  “Who knows?”

  She regarded him as though he’d revealed a facet she’d not anticipated but of which she approved. “You should find some old woman who will support you.”

  “Okay.”

  She was serious. “You must ’ave show. Old ladies will come. They will discover you.”

  They were seated on a battered couch. Yvonne sprawled at one end, legs crossed at the knee, bare foot bouncing provocatively. She stretched out her arm and clicked the radio on and began to sing along, “You’ve got the eyeeee of a tiiii-gerrr  . . .”

  Cyril was drunk. What rogues they were, plotting away in her lair. He grew bold. Leaning toward her he caught her foot in his hands and kissed her ankle and ran his tongue up her calf.

  They became lovers. One morning at Cyril’s place Yvonne asked if he thought the soul had a colour.

  “Sure. Grey.”

  This troubled her. “But I think it is sapphire or gold.”

  He said how a house painter he once knew said God was green like a frog. But as for the soul Cyril thought it was grey and had the texture of ashes.

  Yvonne was aghast. “Ashes are burnt. The devil is ashes. God is flower or waterfall. The soul is rainbow.”

  “You think so?”

  “But it is obvious!”

  “Okay,” he said, willing to be proved wrong.

  “Slavs are miserable,” she said. “In love with their own defeat.”

  He wondered about that.

  Yvonne was a gazelle. She liked to lounge in bed, take naps, lie on the beach, do the backstroke in the ocean with long slow sweeps of her long elegant arms. She’d model for him and then they’d make love pretending they lived in a rive gauche garret. Most nights together were spent at his place. He’d found an airy third floor suite with a northwest view in a vast old house that caught the sunset. He liked when Yvonne left clothes and magazines and jewellery. He liked arriving at Novak’s class hand-in-hand with her. The Hungarian marked this without comment though Cyril saw appro
val, or was it amusement, in his eyes.

  One evening after class she asked if her posing before other people bothered him.

  He said yes.

  “But they are all women.”

  “They look at you.”

  “They are supposed to look at me.”

  He shrugged.

  “You could ’ave them,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “The women in the class.”

  “Which one?”

  She grimaced as though he was simple. “All of them.”

  Cyril was intrigued and yet unsettled. Was this an invitation to pursue other women, to have an open relationship? They’d been seeing each other for three months. “I’m not interested.”

  She smiled as if he’d passed her little test.

  Wherever Yvonne went she drew looks. This bothered Cyril. He hadn’t introduced her to Gilbert, who was between marriages, and therefore on the prowl. Cyril liked it being just the two of them, it added an element of fantasy, their own private world, separate and far away.

  Yvonne knew he went to his mother’s most Sunday evenings. “Why you don’t show me to your family? You are embarrassed?”

  “Come this week.”