How Happy to Be (4 page)

D
OZENS OF
DAILIES
IN THEIR UNTOUCHED PLASTIC
delivery bags form a perfect pitcher’s mound on my front porch.

Mine is the ground-floor apartment of a divided west-end Victorian that’s peeling and weeping from leaks on the outside and renovated to tragic blandness on the inside. The Italian landlords boarded up the fireplace and put linoleum over the floors for easy washing, stripped the cornices and pediments, and replaced the bay windows with brown vinyl frames. The Ex lifted the plastic and sanded the hardwood,
opened the unworking fireplace so we could look at its green tiles, keep warm by its prettiness, but the apartment is still blank.

A cat might fill it up, but buying a cat is like lying down on a beach towel in a big Iraqi minefield and saying, Okay, universe, I do not care any more. Sometimes I think about it, about opening the door to my apartment and seeing a little brown fluffy face and that’s cool for a moment, but then suddenly it’s fifteen years down the road and the small brown face is as old and puckered as mine, peering up at me as I sit on my couch eating beans out of a can and watching
Entertainment Tonight
. Because I’m a little scared of him by now, the longest-running relationship of my life, I’ve taken the time to get Mr. Foofaraw his vewy own pewter cat plate so he’s eating off the coffee table and that makes me the animal who people stopped taking for walks. They got busy with babies and gardens and no one wanted to eat out any more.

I know how that works because a year and a half ago, I lived there. I showered more then, and this apartment had more stuff in it because it had his stuff in it. Now it has endless white walls, which, luckily, seems to be the fashion. When I open the door, there’s a lingering scent of expectation, some kind of sense memory of a life I once had here.

I need a drink to block the smell. The fridge is empty, except for a pitcher of water with a filter that’s supposed to remove the cancer-causing microbes and a bottle with a teaspoon of vodka at the bottom.

Check my messages. Plans confirmed. Sunera: Tom and Nicole are breaking up! One from my dad, who’s in Arizona
living in a teepee with the Hopi Indians. One from a friend in New York: the market’s still dropping, the jig is up, the dot.com shit has hit the fan, and she’s worried for her fake corporate life that she hates anyway but the only thing worse than her fake life is not having it.

With today’s
Daily
in my hand, I lie back on the one piece of furniture in the living room, a big white leather couch that seemed like a good idea at the time. But it doesn’t have arms, so lying on it is as comfy as lying on a park bench and in the summer it speaks of sweaty thighs with an unfortunate farting sound.

Today’s hed:
“TENT CITY” EMERGES ON ARSENIC-LACED LAKESIDE
. Today’s deck:
80 residents set up home on industrial wasteland owned by big box hardware company
. Below the fold, also on the front page, in the corner of the paper known as “the basement” (lower right) is an article I
WROTE: MONKEY MAKES MOVIE, PLAYS HOCKEY
.
Primate on skates rejuvenates children’s cinema; our reporter interviews furry friend
. I throw the paper on the floor and pick up
Entertainment Weekly
.

Seems that Sunera is right. Tom and Nicole are breaking up – which may or may not have something to do with the dot.com meltdown, according to
Entertainment Weekly –
and there’s this little part of me that’s off doing its own thing altogether, which seems to be happening to me more and more lately. Know this? I’m half in the moment in that Be Here Now way my dad sometimes yammered about, eating my tuna sandwich or fucking Ad Sales or whatever activity I’ve chosen to help push me more quickly through the
pneumatic tube of time, and then – bam – my mind just clicks over to some other image. It’s like those monster suburban TVs where you have the big picture, and a little picture in the corner that shows a different channel. In that little picture is some other part of me I’ve been trying to avoid, and in the big one – here it is – Tom and Nicole dividing up their property and their children (India and Basquiat? I should look that up; I’m paid to know this stuff), but down in the corner of the TV, it’s two years ago on a Friday night and I’m opening that door to the smell of paint, the Ex having spent the entire day covering a piece of canvas in two or three solid slabs of primary colour. Mustard dusk in the apartment and maybe I bought some vegetables at the market and I cooked something healthy and we sat in front of the TV and watched an old movie, or talked about what we were reading. We were doing an impression of something from a Woody Allen movie. We had been together most of our twenties, and our twenties were over.

He took the cookbooks.

I think I should get it together. I know I should get it together, but the problem isn’t getting it, it’s keeping it from taking off again. I mean, if you can’t do it with three live-in nannies and a personal stylist and an eight-bazillion-dollar-a-year dual family income, how am I, a mere mortal, supposed to keep
gravitas
at bay?

I add my hat and jacket to the hulking pile of coats on the radiator that’s migrating slowly toward the ground. As if
reading my mind, Sunera – already stripped of her alpaca jacket and looking bad-ass angelic as ever in head-to-toe black – starts in with one of her weird facts: “If we were in Norway, we would have a place to put our coats and mittens. In Norway, there are cloakrooms in the bars, even little bars like this. The problem with Canada is that we’re in denial of our Canadian-ness. We keep thinking we’re in New York, but look out there, it’s freezing. Now imagine the psychological state this induces. An entire country – a nation of imposters – perpetually longing for an identity that’s already taken. Max, this is Stewey.”

Sunera’s not one for breathing between clauses. Thing is, she’s still getting up early on Sunday and reading – she has to, she’s an editor at a newsmagazine – so she has these crazy facts crowding her head and she needs to do some verbal trepanning and let them out. In an industry of mockers and haters, Sunera is universally adored, her big eyes and brown skin make men stammer, her clean kindness makes women feel safe. She takes care of everyone: parents, two sisters, me. I wouldn’t be able to look this goodness in the eye except I know that 90 per cent of the time, Sunera is quietly and totally stoned.

“I think the coat-rack thing wasn’t such an issue before the return of the puffy coat,” I say. “Coats are too fat now. Unwieldy. Vodka and tonic, please.”

“I wonder if there’s a story in puffy coats,” murmurs Sunera, always looking to fill the pages of the magazine. She writes
puffy
on a napkin.

Stewey is cute, in a tucked-in kind of way, and clearly he’s already mentally signed the mortgage on the house he and
Sunera will raise their children in. The guy, a television producer who met Sunera at a party exactly one week ago, is full moony. He’s got this grin that’s aggressively twinkly, which is about all he’s contributing, grinning bright and nodding.

Sunera is speculating about Tom and Nicole. “Gay, gay, gay,” I offer, but I always think that. My dad sat me down at thirteen not only to have the birds and the bees talk but to tell me, nervously, that if I “chose to love women” he would stand by my decision. I was like: Man, I’m still in neutered boy-band fantasy mode. Check out this Ricky Schroeder foldout in
16 Magazine
. Don’t rush me.

Sunera’s clearly got a better view of the room than I do because suddenly she’s all: “Don’t look. AA is here.” There are four million people in this city, but when I leave my house, it’s always the same ten or fifteen who wander across the sets like some real-life
Truman Show
.

Allissa Allan is the decade-plus-younger, much-marketed city columnist at
The Other Daily
, and my physical opposite; I’m Lucy, she’s the Little Red-Headed Girl. I get lower in my chair, taking the vodka with me, and then Allissa’s next to Sunera, going, “So I just came from a panel on
Newsworld
. Check out this makeup! I look like a sex-trade worker!” Allissa Allan will not use the word
whore
any more, even though it’s so often useful. She’s gone “global action.” I glance up and she’s not wrong about the makeup thing; she’s yellowy, like a Simpson.

Allissa Allan has something to say about everything. She’s a pundit for rent, and that’s a good thing to be in this city these days. Imagine: you’re a TV producer and you have
to fill your cable-TV roundtable with “opinion makers” day in, day out, year-round. I am only an expert in such things as celebrity shoe and hair trends, but still, these are the calls I get in a given week:
Swing music is back, could you take an anti-swing stance? What do you think of Gap greeters? Is sex the new virginity? Virginity the new modesty?
Allissa doesn’t say no to any request. Last time I saw her she was drifting backwards down an escalator on the Women’s Gynecological Channel weighing in on bunions.

“Hi, Maxime,” she says, voice in the shape of a happy face. “How’s the paper doing? I hear rumours of its demise.”

I’m sucking an ice cube now to try to get the last drop of vodka so when I talk I’m all: “Fjklsos?”

AA doesn’t require a response. She just keeps on talking. “Listen, do you guys know any women who are buying diamonds for themselves? I’m working on a piece about the new girl indulgence.”

AA’s column last week was on her vagina, which is logical since it’s been a long time since the phrase
city hall
has come up in her columns. The city beat, it seems, does not preclude lengthy series about her ass, her boyfriend’s crooked penis, her new loft, and the further travails of being a wealthy, overemployed twenty-something in a semi-thriving metropolis. The city outside her sixteen-block radius of lofts and lounges, the city with its racial-profiling police and ludicrous little mayor, proved too thorny for AA. She has now moved on to subjects that don’t require her to get out of her chair, except perhaps to locate a pocket mirror.

As she scurries away, AA actually says, “Peace out.”

“I hate her,” says Sunera, which is a phrase we use a lot, surely betraying my radical feminist roots. I grew them in the mess hall pressing ferns into clay while the pottery mothers at the compound talked about false consciousness and the men who had abandoned them. All those Saturday mornings filled with well-meaning female bodies wrapped in scratchy natural fabrics rancid as wet dog from the West Coast rain. Too much kindness. Too many you-poor-orphan weepy eyes.

AA is tucked in a booth with a pair of married New Left ideologues – they have his and her talk shows on CBC – and the lead singer of a local band who’s been waiting a decade for the big music labels to come up north for the rescue. I’m looking at AA’s curly red hair and the way her mouth lacks those tiny paper-cut wrinkles I recently noticed above my lips and I’m imagining her suddenly choking on the toothpick in her olive, hands at her neck, skin turning from yellow to green.

It is not a sisterly moment, so I make a mental list of women I don’t hate: Ms. Johannsen, my second-grade teacher back in Squamish who gave every person in the class a brand-new paperback at Christmas. My friend Elspeth, a once-aspiring reporter who said, “Fuck this noise” and moved to New Zealand to teach skiing. My mother. Elaine, dad’s ex-girlfriend whose hands smelled like lychee nuts as she pulled the sheets up to my shoulders. I got a call from her just a couple of days ago, a coming-to-the-city message in an are-you-drifting? voice of concern.

But I couldn’t face the prospect of sitting across from Elaine in a health food restaurant, those wide, unlifted eyes posing her kindly interrogations like she did when I was
fourteen. I saw the West Coast area code and I turned off the ringer.

“Call display has fucked me royally,” I tell Stewey and Sunera, diving into a fresh drink. “When’s the last time you picked up your phone without knowing who was on the other end? If it says ‘Private Call,’ I physically cannot pick up. Too much mystery.”

Stewey nods and says something at last, the first time I’ve heard his voice: “Information age.”

New street signs recently christened the downtown area south of Queen Street “Entertainment District.” If you find it entertaining to watch drunken college kids between club stops shivering around food-vendor carts, smoking and eating submarine sandwiches or puking off of curbs, then you believe this zone is well named.

Unfortunately, these dozen or so industrial blocks contain all the dancing possibilities in the city, and so, sometimes, regretfully and drunkenly, I have ended up down here. The clubs look the same: windowless boxes with one-word names like Liquid and Verve in silver sans-serif font guarded by bouncers in sunglasses and parkas. As soon as we’re within the black walls of this one – Apothecary? Cadmium? – I have a Johnny Rotten thought: Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated? I’m beginning to suspect that all this time Stewey and Sunera have had a little plan and he’s right here at the bar in a T-shirt and dark jeans, that much taller than everyone else, head and shoulders hanging down a little, repentant, and he’s
waving at Stewey from a kind of half-profile position I can’t fully check out until he turns and: “Hey, Max, remember me?”

This sentence makes me a tad nervous. I’m nervous enough as it is because in the cab on the way over Sunera pulled out her lipstick bong and we hot-boxed the car to the cabbie’s dismay. Pot makes me buggy with curiosity, while Sunera gets chatty, and Stewey, it seems, already the silent type, develops lockjaw.

So here’s the part where you’re supposed to look at the guy and say, That’s the one she ends up with, right, because when you see him from the back, he has that little patch of skin between the collar of his T-shirt and the uneven shag at the bottom of his hair that looks like it would fit your hand exactly if you pulled him closer, and in those fingers – long, squared – curled around a beer is all the possibility in the world. There’s something endearing in messy hair and old-school runners at a time when most het guys are starting to overcoiff, like Stewey here in his bicep-enhancing pressed silk dress shirt and orange suede shoes. And then the body is turning and saying, as if I might not have heard him the first time, “So you don’t remember me?”