Keeping Things Whole Read online

  “My number’s there. I’ll walk away now and hope for your call. Perhaps we could meet sometime for coffee.”

  After a day and a half with a phone practically glued to my wrist, Kate joked that my business was shady enough she never had any doubts I was waiting for a call from another woman. No sooner did I say, “I’m legit in places,” than Samir finally rang.

  “What is this about?” he asked immediately.

  But he and my C-note already knew what this was about. “Mr. Hussein, I wonder if we might meet for coffee. Wherever you like.”

  Time bombs have counted seconds less dramatically than I did waiting for his answer. Marriage proposals have received less exciting replies.

  “I won’t be alone,” he finally said.

  “I most certainly will.”

  One of the few feelings better than holding an ace in the hole is winning without having to play it. I went to our meeting with Samir’s groaning line of credit statement tucked into a blazer pocket.

  We met at one of the ex-Iraqi restaurants down Wyandotte. During Gulf War I, every use of the word Iraqi had been covered over with Mid-Eastern. Vinyl banners were hung over their exterior signs. Laminated paper printouts were taped over the coloured, curving script of their hand-painted window lettering. The menu was stippled with tiny white stickers, tissues on so many global shaving cuts.

  The restaurant had three public dining rooms, four (visible) men, and a few hundred mirrors. Every other surface was reflective. Mirrored tiles the size of your thumbnail curled around a pillar. Silver beads hung draped in door frames. Each of these tiny mirrors showed me that once again my greed made me the only white guy in a brown room. Samir sat in the innermost dining room with his back to the wall. Three younger Middle-Eastern men paced between a bar and Samir’s table, tracksuit, wrist hair, gold chains, and cellphones on each of them.

  I asked if I might take a seat. “Mr. Hussein, we have mutual business which could be mutually profitable.” I’d anticipated a list of his possible responses and got the best one. Not I already have a job. Not What makes you think I’m looking for business? Not If this is about the casino, forget it. Instead, golden silence. Then, even better, he nodded at the ‘waiters’ and said something in Arabic (or pig Latin for all I knew. We will garrotte this limp faggot in seconds). They retreated to another room.

  “I’d like to become nighttime valet manager, and I’m prepared to make that worth your while.”

  “You think I’m stupid?” he asked.

  “Just the opposite. I’ll pay you a third of what they pay you.” Beat. “In cash.” Half beat. “Weekly.”

  “And what am I to do for two hundred dollars a week?”

  I smiled. “We both know that one-fifty a week is a third of your salary. We’re here because neither of us is stupid.” I could have showed him his bank statement, but that might have scared him off. “Six hundred extra dollars a month, cash, to hire me and then just keep doing what you do. You do your job, I’ll do mine.”

  “Why would I risk my job for only a third of its pay?”

  “Because right now you’re already losing a quarter of your pay to interest.”

  I got a little eyebrow for that. “So obviously I can’t afford to lose my job. Nine hundred a month. And a five percent raise per year.”

  We shook hands on $750. After the shake he confessed, “I don’t have total control over hiring. There’s management and the union.”

  Fine. In Windsor, we were all brother$ in the union.

  24. (Beneath) the Belly of the Beast

  The chief complaint—Kate’s complaint, Mom’s, yours?—is that I saw things too technically, that I solved problems without seeing what problems my solutions created. The punting money had been good, but my life changed with the mule bags I slung out of the casino. Like most fortunes, it was built on the backs of others. Or, more accurately, their undersides.

  Guilty as charged: when I sent an electromagnetic bag of high-test off under some white Michigander’s Lexus, well, I wasn’t risking a mirror pole or sniffer dog myself. I still claim I didn’t take from Kate or my family, that anything I received emotionally was freely given. But with the mule bags, yes, I took from others. My profit, their risk. But we all take something. To be alive is to take. Romantically, takers never become givers, yet you can’t love someone who only ever gives (or pretends to). Admit you’re alive, or you’re not really playing the game. The organic coffee farm I run now is only possible because I once had dirt, and blood, under my fingernails.

  First getting the bags over took months: infiltrating the casino, earning the trust and fear of my crew, learning to wire bags that would drop off at the press of a button. Once I had error-free bags and a casino crew who didn’t know their associates on the other side from the Detroit Pistons, sorting out who looked for what when couldn’t have been easier thanks to Blogspot. You might not believe this, but there are multiple websites devoted to car poetry. Pimpedridepoetry.com wasn’t the only site featuring tripe like Oh Fiesta / my little blue siesta. On mine, I’d number the poems to show the numerals in our mule’s licence plate and sign the poem with the poet’s initials for the letters. State or province of poetic residence. Go, mule bags, go.

  I’m trying to be honest here, not another male braggart: by the time it was up and running the casino work quintupled my take-home income. I wasn’t quite the Montreal Angels, no half-mil a day for me, but by spring I was doing better than I ever thought I would. In those first heady months, Kate was only human.

  As others have said before me, if you’re going down on the Titanic, at least sail first class. At the casino, my hours were actually more reliable than when I’d been punting with the treb, and the pay was much, much higher. Kate caved. Our apartment quickly had more Danish end tables than a Copenhagen furniture museum. Reading was Pleasure No. 2 for us, and our living room had an armada of reclining chairs and sofas, each with its small, attentive light. Living across from the D also meant living across from an American airport, and we were off to a new city every long weekend. San Francisco. Rainy, potty Seattle. Houston on a Rothko pilgrimage.

  If you think Kate more spend-happy with my money than she had originally wanted to be, realize how tempting actual cash is, especially cash that will never see a bank account. Kate had made vows of self-sufficiency when we looked for a place, but those campaign trail promises didn’t survive into the backroom legislation, at least not at first. In part, she was ruined by the physical, untraceable cash, such a rarity in these days of direct deposit, credit cards, and Web transfers. Each of us was just old enough to remember whining in huge Friday afternoon bank lineups as our mothers and half the city waited to deposit their bimonthly paycheques.

  I had multiple safety deposit boxes around town and steadily laundered money through Reese and the painting company he was now running for me. Still the paper piled up. Restaurants, groceries, bookstores, folding money for work—all greased by cash the government wasn’t counting. If I spent extra living with Kate, our kitchen outfitted in more stainless steel than a microbrewery, that was joy, a happy tax I was willing to pay. All the same, she wouldn’t accept any donations for Safe Sisters. Some restorative smoke, sure. A nice warm place to come home to and surgically programmed, morning cappu-organa everything, yes. But no slices off my green brick when it came to hooker justice.

  Perhaps because my life had no official scorecard other than my pile, I was extremely interested in her exams and assignments. She was two-thirds of the way through law school, halfway to becoming a lawyer and willing to spend the summer with me in life-threateningly humid and polluted Windsor. I kept celebrating. In addition to travel, there was a fleet of new wine glasses and some Boreal forest protected in each of our names. I threw some cash at a foster-family, goat-adoption, third-world guilt something and got Voodoo’s teeth cleaned. Popped corks all around. Yet one of the best ideas I had
didn’t feel right to share. Loving Kate, I also wanted to do right by Gloria.

  Before, during, and immediately after Mom’s Chicago MFA, sure, doing it had seemed like a great idea. Her artistic renaissance. Her professional expansion. A test of who she was and who she could be. I certainly never lived around her in the same way after her starring performance in Medea. If my mother hadn’t played a tear-jerking, respect-inspiring Medea, would I have so readily followed a woman who ran in the rain? But a high IQ and artistic vision still have to get through the work week, might still care about a pension. She had gone off to Chicago a high-school drama teacher and in large measure she came back a high-school drama teacher. Her MFA had been a peak, and invariably there was a valley after it.

  Head over heels in love with Kate and lamenting Gloria’s funk, I registered a new company without breathing a word about it to either of them. Shortly after we came back from a May trip to Barcelona, Cronus Holdings Ltd. was a paper entity. A week later it had a rented mailbox and a website full of soft-edged clip art. Clear skinned women with shiny ponytails wore telephone headsets. Fit, multi-ethnic office workers exchanged documents and grave but determined looks. Translucent numbers collected in one corner of the screen like lucrative snow.

  Gloria would never have taken money from me directly but needed production dollars if she was ever going to do more than produce gymnasium plays scheduled around volleyball tournaments. Sometimes generosity is more generous when it’s anonymous. I side-hired a low-level bean counter at my accounting firm to answer cellphone calls and emails from me or Glore and to offer her financial backing for her next production. That Kate and I would invariably see such a production didn’t dissuade me from keeping quiet about my donation. The play, not its backer, should have been the thing.

  25. Getting Her Spine

  Throughout the spring and most of the summer I invaded the American mind via the undersides of Lexuses, Lincolns, and, the obvious target of choice, Cadillacs. Come the heat and stink of August, Kate reminded me of how many other packages I’d also let go.

  She’s right, I was indeed “less observant” that August, at least on one crucial front. Windsor is an absolute inferno in the summer, nine circles of smoggy hell. We spent half of July up north at a rented cottage, but the grow must go on. I was the only link between my Windsor crew and the Detroit team, and I had to keep it that way. The Safe Sisters and I knew that so much of good business is like safe sex: you’ll never have to pay for costs you don’t incur in the first place.

  Come August, Kate and I were back in the inferno living on iced everything. Between the iced coffees, iced green teas, and ice water with cucumber we endured smears of days with a temperature constantly above 30° before the humidex. Kate claimed it was too hot for booze. Gone, suddenly, was my gin-and-tonic partner, my Orvieto comrade. One night I wondered aloud if this new teetotaller with a shiny forehead wasn’t an impostor. When she once again declined a drink I fake-shook her shoulders and asked, “What have you done with Kate?!” I could’ve handled annoyance or disapproval, but her response was simultaneously squishy and sharp. She looked at me with such a bottomless sadness I was terrified.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “You’re less observant than you once were,” was all she said before she headed off to bed early (again).

  I let it drift, blamed the constant and cumulative heat, the drain of her summer job reading photocopies at a law firm run by yucking men. Every day was another day in the oven. Sure, she was irritable and despondent, but then we had our hours of fit and gulp.

  Given how the fight started—Kate leaving and letting me know by sending me flowers at work—you might be thinking I’d settled down with the second theatrical woman in my life, Sigmund Freud the casting director in life’s rich pageant. Gloria claims we all already speak theatre, that drama only uses the body language, exchanges, and emotions of life. Look at the manipulation and spite Kate wrapped around a dozen red roses.

  Usually when she bought flowers at the market, shooting a little colour into her life of grinding study, she chose jubilant, multicoloured things. Fat discs of Gerbera daisies or zinnias, or waxy, spherical blobs of rudely homogenous colour. That or an arrangement of spindly, gawky beauty, papery Icelandic poppies. But to get me at work she chose a dozen arrow-like roses, all crimson blood and uniformity. I didn’t think of this at first, but if she came back, roses would still be alive and strong after a weekend away.

  When I watched the flower delivery go through the casino doors then come back out toward the valet kiosk, I somehow knew they were for me. Even when the bouquet was handed to me, I didn’t for a second expect to read a card saying, I’m at my mother’s, --K.

  Here, see for yourself. (When our grandchildren ask why we chose to make scanners, bigger TVs, and computers that didn’t last as long as a shirt instead of renewable power, drinking water, and sustainable food, what will we tell them?)

  I’m at my mother’s. For the second time in my life, I read a short note in which each word was a stepping stone away from me.

  The mother moat. The drawbridge is up and you, Mr. Penis, won’t be getting across. As intended, I was consumed by the phrase. It became my instant mantra, my state propaganda, my doublethink.

  And let’s not forget that the target for Kate’s crimson missiles was my work, not our home. The next, lonely morning a fresh meaning poked me awake. If she had said, I’ve gone to my mother’s, there may at least have been the possibility of her coming back. Damn it, I deserved a because. I’m at my mother’s because…. Because you are or because you did or because I need. That would hurt, alarm, disrupt, it would be just as fucking inconvenient considering the 12k drop I had planned for that night, but it would still resemble a little something called common courtesy.

  I tried her cell even before I’d had breakfast. I had to pace around the apartment to endure its shrill ring and caught my reflection in four or five mirrors. My hair looked like Voodoo had been licking it all night. It was the hair of someone never getting past his lover’s voicemail.

  So I’d been working a lot. It wasn’t as if she didn’t regularly work fourteen, sixteen, even eighteen hours a day during term. Sure, some of that was in the home, but that’s not necessarily better. Working from home can be great for the person doing it. Fewer germs. Comfy clothes. Caffeine and snacks at hand. But what a drag for the other cohabitant. Textbooks open on every table. Having to use headphones if you want to listen to music. Dirty coffee cups and plates with toast crumbs everywhere. Half-eaten tins of soup abandoned on the counter. And where does cohabitant lust squeeze into a twenty-page paper on intellectual copyright or tort law exam prep?

  Lust isn’t welcome in fury. Nor doubt either. Damn her. Without a proper note, without a solid accusation to debate or some taunting intonation to replay, I had to reconsider everything. She had snubbed me to the max. Fuck-you dialled to 11, and all with the request (the demand? the test of loyalty?) that I stop making money hand over pungent fist and chase after her.

  My breakfast consisted of two eggs and the admission that my hopping in the car was a question of when, not if. But going after her meant stalling a Saturday night drop. Kate’s offence was its own defence, as much her plan as mine. Every inch of the 401 I covered had me digging myself deeper into holes I never wanted to be in. For a start, Trevor Reynolds’s rented storage shed now held a damnable amount of reeking weed. Precisely because of what I did—delivering, not growing—that weed belonged to two criminals, not just one. Both buyer and seller suddenly wanted to piss lava in my name. Managerially, I could have bought back a bit of the time I was wasting, but that’d look weak. A simple lie and some pulled rank temporarily spared me the hook, but that was a pass I didn’t like to take. If I blogged out a coded message about the cops or the DEA, I might eventually have sources to discuss. A lie is a false wall, paper thin and ready to collapse. I could collar my own crew, but
ground those jockeys too many times, send them home with just their casino wage, and one of those punks was bound to start thinking he could run the show as easily as I did. None of the monkeys were ready to wire their own bags, but money solves most problems. If I had learned to make bags that could fall off a car at the touch of a button, so could someone else. I was angering criminals, tempting some more and making myself into one with a locker full of pungent icky, all so I could run to Kate’s whistle.

  Weaving through highway traffic, I tried to just breathe, to let one breath pull in the next. Rage is a fuel, but an erratic one. I wasn’t pounding the steering wheel, didn’t throw a finger at every other driver, but I was still incandescent with rage. For the nineteenth time I thought of turning around, grabbing a phone, and restringing my deal. For the nine hundredth time I thought of her charge that I was “less observant than I once was.”

  Okay, yes, I’d changed a little with our living together. I’d laughed, pleaded guilty, and adored her a few weeks earlier when she’d asked me, “Do you remember eating with me without getting food on your face?” So we weren’t on a first date anymore. We lived together, cooked together, no longer had to finish all our sentences. Before her boozeless August, come five o’clock I could offer her a glass of wine with nothing more than a raised eyebrow and a nod towards our rack of glasses. True, we didn’t seduce each other anymore so much as take off our own pants, but she too reached for her belt, not mine.

  Inhale. Exhale. Make your case. To her and to you. I had to decide what the relationship needed to be if I was to stay in it. That resolve didn’t last past her mother’s front door. I had been to Gail’s at Christmas. She’d been down to Windsor for a few suppers, and we forced our chats on the phone before the star took the line. Gail and I were emotional colleagues, not friends—keen to like something about each other and palpably relieved not to dislike too much. But whatever Kate had told Gail in the last day had dissolved our affected civility. I got the full hoodlum greeting at the front door. Curtain swept back for a look-see, muffled voices conferring behind an engaged deadbolt. Finally an orchestra of locks was thrown open, although Gail kept the door chained (oh please). A hot August night and my relationship fell down around me.