Architects Are Here (10 page)

I’m the son, Dave said. For he knew who she was, and who she was expecting to see in the office.

It’s like expecting someone, Nell said, and then seeing them as they were twenty years before.

I’m borrowing the office, Dave said, to be close to the library. My father is in a card shop. He likes to read cards.

It had never occurred to her. But the son was her age. He was studying in St John’s.

Dave knew who she was but he did not know that Nell would affect him. Then he became cool with himself and then the coolness was displaced by activity in his eyes. Dave was a charmer and he found himself overtly flirting and was outraged at his flaunting of taboo. I am defiant, he said to me once. But I’m drawn and there is something in her that is drawn to me, too.

He felt her attraction to his father was something they shared, and that perhaps Arthur Twombly was the bridge to their meeting. After she left he said to me, She’s only interesting because of the relationship with my father.

She had looked preoccupied. A woman talking to Dave in his father’s office. Nell had gone through something serious and hard. She was alert with anxiety and doubt. And she turned to walk away and saw me. I was part of a plan to trap her in the hallway and kill her in that room. It was a thought she pressed into me by the look she gave me. An animal look of fear. I didnt know Nell would affect me either.

T
HAT SUMMER
was my last with Dave. He moved to Montreal and began a degree at McGill and I continued on with my studies in St John’s and, for a while, forgot about Dave Twombly and Nell Tarkington. There is no will, there is reaction and a column of choices that men, usually, have listed down for you. Nell wasnt creating her own list out of the blue. Richard asked her to come down. That’s how she ended up accepting a registered letter with a one-way airline ticket in it. All the men she’d been with understood and forgave her. Is this a disturbed past.

TWO

ONE

D
AVE LEFT NEWFOUNDLAND
and moved to Montreal. He was working part-time on his tech business, and then McGill received him. I did not lay eyes on him again for fifteen years. During those years I lived in St John’s and finished a degree in economic geography. That’s the study of what gets built where, and why. I worked as a city planner. I worked on horizontal infrastructure: cloverleaf highway junctions, sewer systems. I saw plans for road design and, in one instance, we were brought in as consultants on the new bypass for Corner Brook. It cost ninety-four million dollars and when it was completed transport trucks could not make the turn and angle of ascent. They had to tear it all out and redo it and eventually they ruined the view from the highway of the entire bay.

City planning. I was following the practical road of making a living, but even here there was a man who wrote plays. A city planner, Arvo McMillan, wrote about a gorilla in Argentina. I went to see it at the LSPU Hall and realized St John’s had a downtown. It was artistic. There were people I liked and I took a few courses in creative writing and began, at night, to write stories.

St John’s was my kind of town. Dave, I understood, did not quite fit in. He was oriented to money and that looked aggressive. He was looked upon as a typical Corner Brooker. Not the raw poor of the outports but the new money offered by Canada. The western shore of Newfoundland was seen, by those in the east, to be dipped in the national blood. David represented the Canadianization of Newfoundland.

But I enjoyed myself with my artistic friends. This is how that slow conversion began. I was researching a paper on road salt. I looked up, in the card catalogues at the QEII Library, the usage of salt on roads. I flipped for a salt header in the alphabetical drawers of the card catalogue and came across “Saltus, Edgar
A Transient Guest
a novel.” Then I searched through the trans drawer for Transportation Canada’s role in road salt management. And this card appeared: “
A Transient Guest
, a novel by Edgar Saltus.”

I took down the call number and went up into the stacks. The book was small. I sat on the carpet in the stacks and read the first page:

Since the
Koenig Wilhelm
, of the Dutch East India Service, left Batavia, the sky had been torpidly blue, that suffocating indigo which seems so neighbourly that the traveller fancies were he a trifle taller he could touch it with the ferule of his stick. When night came, the stars would issue from their ambush and stab it through and through, but the glittering cicatrices which they made left it bluer even, more persistent than before. And now, as the ship entered the harbour, there was a cruelty about it that exulted and defied.

Because of this book I gave up economic geography. I remember my last day at city planning. A man arrived. He said he heard there was a photocopier. I showed him to it. He looked at it. I left him alone, but I did not hear it working. He was staring at the top of the machine. How do you use it, he said. I lifted the lid and put his original down on the glass and pressed the button and the green light tracked across our eyes. The copy peeled out and he was astonished. He was one of those old-time Newfoundlanders. He had never seen a copy before. He thought there was printing involved, some kind of pressure. He knew nothing of the new age.

I took some time off and went travelling. I was finding myself. That winter, about two hundred Bulgarians had sought refugee status at Gander. Their plane was refuelling on their way to Cuba. So I thought I’d go to Bulgaria. Then I headed south to Greece and ended up on Crete. I like islands. I visited Nikos Kazantzakis’s grave in Heraklion and read
Report to Greco
out loud. I stayed in a youth hostel in Mirthios and traded
Report to Greco
for one on the table by the woodstove. It was a book called
House of Hate
. It was a Canadian novel, I could tell from the cover, and then I was surprised to see that it was set in Corner Brook. The first line: Hate is the child of fear, and Saul Stone had been afraid of one thing or another all his life.

No one had told me about this book. I was stunned by it. It was a Corner Brook from a generation before my own, but I understood the sense of it. And what’s more, it made me realize I could write about my life. I did not have to be fanciful like Edgar Saltus.

I wrote short stories and then two novels. During this, because of my degree, I was hired by the federal government to track natural gas inventories in underground storage facilities across the country. It was mind-numbing work, but I’m dogged and I was afraid to live without money and I was frugal and saved, and I managed, during periods of downtime, to write sneakily. I met other young writers and we encouraged each other to publish. I dont think it would have occurred to me to publish without these people—St John’s is like that. If you feel alternative at all, you’ll end up writing a book or making a small film.

Although I barely saw Dave during those fifteen years, we wrote letters. They were handwritten letters and then they were typed and finally, during the past few years, we went to email. They were like the letters we had sent to Allegra Campinghorst in Montreal. He was delighted that I wrote books. He said that was the reason he’d been friendly to me as kids—he knew I had the artistic temperament. He also insisted that any money I had I should sink into the stock market and he advised me on many high-tech companies and then told me, during the crucial spring of the early nineties, to sell it all quickly at market price and I did and, while I missed the final crest of new highs, I was one of the few to avoid the east slope of the Nasdaq bubble.

When a relationship broke down I left the province and moved to Toronto. Most people are hemmed in by the country they live in. In Canada, if youre through with a mid-sized city, then the only options are to go rural and raise animals or move to Toronto. Montreal, perhaps, is the exception. Montreal was where Dave had gone. But for me, I wanted Toronto. I was thirty-five and I thought to change my life. On the plane, as I recall, I thought of the word
suddenly
. If you looked at the coat of my skin you’d see it slightly shirred. I was ruffled and drove with the wind and I lived hard and light at the same time. I did damage to myself but I also opened up and became less narrow-minded and as long as I did not break down too badly the wildness was for the good. I often thought of what Dave would do, the Dave I knew before his brother was killed. But it wasnt all pretending to be Dave. Part of it can be chalked up to being in your thirties and needing to widen out.

I had bought a one-way air ticket to Toronto and vowed to act the opposite of the way I had acted back home. I had a month to find a place but apartments were tight. I was lining up with seventeen other candidates in hot, cramped bachelors and filling in forms with too much financial information, then bicycling home on a French bicycle I’d bought for fifty dollars, coasting behind propane-fuelled taxis and waiting for a landlord to call. I had a buffer of money and I was not interested in writing or in doing anything to make money. I had enough to live for a year like this, but I had no work, which appeared desperate, and both my references were in Newfoundland. Natural gas, and all liquids, had turned into a steady bearish stream for a decade now and there was no work in the oil patch or in commodities generally. But I was not worried about money, though I did not want to throw a lot of money at rent. It looked like I was going to share a house with three other men who were attending Ryerson, and I was imagining that, how we would move around the house, when the phone call came from Dave Twombly.

Dave, I said.

So when were you going to call me.

And I wondered about that. If I’d ever call Dave. Why hadnt I. And I guess I was embarrassed with myself. I didnt want him to see me in the state I was in. I was broken-hearted and, while I’d written fiction, I thought I wouldnt write again. I was beside myself and I mean that literally: I was sitting next to the shell of the person who walked around and lived. For one thing, I’d written about people close to me and, in small, unforeseeable ways, at least unforeseeable to me, I had hurt them. My brother, for instance, had written me a letter. He said if I wrote about him again, he would deliver a punch to my head from which I may not recover.

Dave gave a light high chuckle when he heard that. And then he grew earnest. Call me David, he said, and I knew that was a clue to his new life. In Toronto he wasnt Dave any more, he was David, and this cheered me. Hurrah to the new life. He’d heard I was in Toronto through people in Corner Brook. You need an apartment, he said. I can get you that.

And sure enough, in three days I had a place. It was from a friend of his who was in Italy downsizing a billing company that was merging with twenty-one other billing companies throughout the new Europe. This man, who I still havent met, was overseeing the transition. That’s all I knew of him. And the books he’d left behind, which were on Vietnam and the history of the machine gun.

That was how David Twombly came back into my life, from his act of generosity in helping an old friend. It had been fifteen years. His face had widened and his shirts had lavish collars. He had shaved his head.

Youre the only man I know now, I said, from Corner Brook.

And I called him David. In the end, why should we be troubled by a man’s attempt to be an adult. I liked people who called me Gabriel rather than Gabe. Though I enjoyed collecting both sets of people. My father calls me Gabe, my mother, Gabriel.

The truth of it is, I saw that David could live with or without me. If I was close by he knew he could enjoy himself with me and there was something alluring about reclaiming a piece of the past, brushing it off and seeing it trot around the infield of the game youre trying to set up.

We got together at his house and I met his wife, Sok Hoon, and their new baby, Owen. David called him the Oven, because he was so hot and he ate a lot. He said, Are you still in treasury bills and bonds.

I told him about my hiatus and the buffer and yes, the buffer was in cash accounts. He did not look like a man who needed money, and I must have said this using my face.

He said his company was going public and I should get in. His company was called Itinerant Knowledge Workers.

I had spent years choosing options that were anti–Corner Brook, so the thought of returning to some material that was laden with Corner Brook appealed to me, especially a revitalized spinoff of Corner Brook that seemed complicated and international. For instance, David’s shaved head was a new unfolding of the possibilities of a Corner Brook childhood. That his wife was Chinese-Canadian seemed an event that could only have happened in the twenty-first century. This all was now part of the Corner Brook experience, for we had grown past the notion that place is confined to geography. David had met Sok Hoon at McGill and it was during McGill that the hockey players had begun shaving their receding hairlines, and so he did too. These, the simple answers to almost everyone’s complex scenario. And now they had a baby boy, Owen the Oven, and were living in Little Italy.

Sok Hoon I liked—she was a fashion designer who made eco-friendly textiles, fabrics of the future, she called them. She used a lot of high-end cloth, premium fabrics that felt like the pelts of extinct animals. And Sok Hoon knew how to handle her husband’s friend with the wounded heart. But there was more to it than that, no mere one-sided empathy: for I was from the small milltown where her husband grew up, and there is something about Newfoundland that perplexes foreigners to that heritage. There are a handful of places like Newfoundland on this continent, I suppose—the American South, the Arctic, Quebec, and the Appalachians. She turned to me often, after David had remarked on something, as though I might provide a bilingual service. Even though what David had said was a result, not of any Newfoundland upbringing—for his parents were American—but more to do with his own character and bias, a position that far exceeded any influence Newfoundland could weigh upon him.

During these early Toronto years is when I went a little crazy. A new city and a broken heart and a nest egg will do this to you. My father, from a distance, grew worried. I got a call one day from Lars Pony, the father of Lennox, the black kid who had hung around with us in Corner Brook. Mr Pony, who was living in Toronto, was asking if I needed a job. He worked for a magazine that sold second-hand cars. He said I heard you can write. This made me laugh. How’s Lennox? I said. Lennox is in Alberta, Mr Pony said. And he did not sound happy with his son that far from him. So they had sold the Lemon Yard and moved to Toronto.