Architects Are Here (11 page)

I went and had a coffee with him. I told him that I didnt need a job at the moment, but thank you. Lars Pony is a tall man, and he had been the only black man I’d known in Corner Brook. Not that I knew him, just his son Lennox. Lars told me his father had been in the navy. His father was stationed out of Boston. During the war the black enlisted men were segregated. They ate and slept in separate quarters. Their cruiser was torpedoed one night in the Atlantic. They were seventeen nautical miles off the south coast of Newfoundland. They sent out a beacon and steamed for land. They threw over green lifeboats and his father found a vest. He hit the water and that’s all he can remember of what happened that night.

My father woke up, Lars said, and he heard a woman saying, I can’t get it off his skin—no matter how hard I scrub it won’t come out. He was in a big room with nurses, these white nurses bathing the men. He was naked. This white woman cleaning his arms and legs. He said, It won’t come off. That’s my skin.

He spent three weeks in Newfoundland convalescing. He had never experienced such care from white people. No one seemed to mind that he was black.

My father, Lars said, told me that story often when I was young. To let me know that whites arent all bad. So when I got to leave home, one of the places I wanted to go was Newfoundland. I ended up on a paper boat that docked in Corner Brook. And I swam ashore. I worked in a meal plant in Benoit’s Cove. Then I met Lennox’s mother.

They live now in Regent Park, in Toronto. Lars and his Newfoundland wife. Did she ever think she’d live away from home.

D
AVID HELPED PUSH ME
through my crazy days, for it was a phase, anyone could see that, though phases can last decades. He arranged dates with women. He took me to extravagant parties. This, too, is how Newfoundlanders take care of one another in the larger world, which they claim to be pan-Newfoundland, or at least their minority interest in a stock they cannot fully control but which listens to them intently during the annual shareholders meeting. David had found me an apartment, then invested my money wisely. Now he was grooming me for a woman he thought would be good for me.

I thought, let it roll. I invested the socked-away money in David’s company. I kept telling women, using mainly body language and tone of voice, about how my heart was played out, how I wasnt suitable for commitment. I thought that would be the state of things, and it wasnt all bad. Though I was turning into someone who enjoys being alone. It takes all kinds, but I wasnt sure I wanted to be that kind. David was vexed. Over long dinners in his red leather dining room chairs, eating pears and hard cheese and British chocolates, I told him I couldnt commit, and he lectured me on the merits of a long-term relationship and having children. Owen, he said. Reason for being. But I wasnt ready for monogamy and neither did I think I’d find anyone. Monogamy, he said. Who’s talking monogamy? And then, in a voice piped in from a third lung:You have a lover on the side, he said. This, on the occasions when Sok Hoon was in Malaysia or in the next room with music dampening our voices. I looked at his big hands and then his shaved head. He had a life on the seat beside him.

Me:The same woman?

It’s marvellous, he said.

But he would not get into it.

David began introducing me to single women he thought I could have kids with. These were different women from the ones he’d chosen for my cavalier days. It was superior of him—he had shucked the moroseness of his brother’s death, even though his father had not forgiven him, and now he wanted everyone to be living his life. His intentions were generous: He loved his life. He wore short-sleeved shirts and he looked good in them. His forearms. He had good healthy forearms and a platinum watch that sat nicely on the hair at his wrist. There was a confidence there. I could never pull that off. If I was meeting someone for a deal I’d wear a long-sleeved shirt. A short one would be like wearing sandals. Too vulnerable. But I saw David cut a lot of deals in sandals.

Youve developed a small pocket of acting that isnt entirely untrue, David said, diagnosing me. You can get away for thirty-six months, he said, with a line about an exhausted heart. But that’s it, youve run out your line of credit.

I bought a used car that my brother had chosen long-distance over the phone, and I drove it home to Newfoundland. I lived in St John’s during the summer, subletting a house on Signal Hill that has a garden and the earliest postal code in Canada: A1A 1A1. You can taste the salt water in the arugula leaves and at night the lighthouse strobe from Cape Spear flares over the Atlantic. I hung out with my old friends and their growing families and I hunted big game. At the end of summer I drove the car to my brother’s and I flew back to Toronto with two styrofoam boxes full of frozen caribou. My brother sold the car and we split the profit. I did this, with little variation, for three revolutions of the sun.

TWO

T
HEN THE SHARE PRICE
in David’s company doubled. I sold half and the remaining half tripled. I was trying to figure out what to do with the money, but it was hard for me to be frivolous and so I banked the money in the general coffers. Then I thought it was wrong, somehow, to be paying the rent and buying food with windfalls. I decided to write again, but this time it wouldnt be fiction. I did not want to be cutting edge. I wanted something old fashioned, and it was not out of a desire to resuscitate a dying art. In ways I’ve always been drawn to the arts that are extinct rather than the methods that are avant-garde. I thought about what my ideal job would be and it came to me that copywriting was the most humble of writing jobs. I would love to write for a TV guide, someone who writes out the synopses for television programs. I did not own a television, which made the enterprise all the more beguiling. So I walked down to the local cable network and asked for a position. But that sort of go-between job doesnt exist any more, they just format what the stations feed to them, a receptionist told me, which meant working for a television network in Buffalo, and I have my limits. Then, when I left their studios on Queen Street, I passed the newspaper vending boxes and looked at them and noticed the free weekly guide called
Auto Trader
. I flicked through one and realized, under the masthead, that it was the magazine that Lars Pony worked for. People’s cars. Why did people sell cars, why did people buy them. I looked around at the busy network of commerce and gridlock. There was something in this, something that reflected the changing fortunes of a populace. I took the magazine home and looked at it again at my desk. I stared at it intently, as though it were a work of art. I looked at the column of names of who worked at
Auto Trader
. Tessa Walcott web design. Lars Pony photographs. You dont see a name like Lars Pony very often, not in print, and there he was, Mr Pony of Corner Brook, whose father had learned the magnanimity of the innocent. Lars had operated a salvage yard, his son managed the severe torment we all gave him, though Lennox was a good goalie. My father knew Lars and liked the Ponys. So I contacted
Auto Trader
. I talked to the woman named Tessa Walcott. I told her my skills and I explained that I knew Lars Pony from when I was a kid. That Lars had called me some months before. I went in and met them. How is Lennox, I said again. And this time Mr Pony looked prouder. His son was in the oil patch. He was one of those Newfoundlanders who had gone west to Fort McMurray. There were more Newfoundlanders there than in Corner Brook. You want a job, he said, you got a job.

And so I wrote captions that accompanied the vehicles. I was good at it. They liked the adjectives I employed and the narrative voice. I turned every car into a little story. It was like an orphanage, this magazine, and it advertised the love you could receive from a loyal vehicle. I felt it was a creative output that was humble and I enjoyed being sneaky with language and wondered if anyone would notice.

Lars worked at the magazine during the day and picked up an extra two hundred a night teaching a photography course. And during the fall he persuaded me to take the course. Again, photography, in the age of the internet, seemed like a practice from a previous century, like copywriting, so I took to it. And Lars liked me, he humoured my penchant for old-fashioned things. Sometimes we walked home together. Then I saw him at the Y bench-pressing fifty kilos. I used to work weights with David back in high school. So I spotted him. He asked if I was any good at basketball. They had a pick-up game. I told him how Lennox, much younger than me, was picked before I was for sports. Lars was now in his late fifties and played guard. Once, about thirty-five years ago, he’d had a ten-day contract with the Indiana Pacers. This was before he’d ended up in Corner Brook. It was his last attempt to live an American life. Did we know this story about Lennox’s father? So I played with him—I was the only white man on four teams of five. We played ten-minute games and Lars took me on as a project. What if you came with me, he said. I take the pictures and you do the interview.

I was spotting him and he strained with the weights and popped open his eyes as his elbows straightened out. And in this way a column was born in
Auto Trader
. A sort of day-in-the-life of a vehicle owner. Lars snapped pictures of light trucks, classic cars, boats, bikes and RVs. It’s a good way to get to know a new city. I told David Twombly about Lars and he remembered Lennox and I suggested he should have Mr Pony over. That never happened. Somehow Lars Pony was not the person David wanted over. I realized there was a limit to David. That I represented some kind of artistic talent that he wanted to foster, but Lars Pony was a dead end, literally the scrap heap of civilization. I took it as a failing in David, but not something to argue about. I felt lucky that I could be happy with both ends of modern western living. I felt it vaguely important to know a black man. But David had this desire as well, he had gone to school at McGill partly so he could study French. For him, diversity in information was important for personal growth.

Lars lived in a block apartment in Regent Park. His wife was a Guinchard from Frenchman’s Cove, she wore a trucker’s cap with a pompom on it. I realized I’d never met her in Corner Brook. And then, one day last spring, Lars said he was leaving soon, moving to Montreal where his wife wanted to live. He told me this as we sat in a cafeteria eating German sausages. His legs bent so deeply that his knees almost touched the floor. You should come on board, he said, as a shadow. And take the pictures.

Under Lars Pony’s tutelage I’ve shot cottages and all-terrain vehicles, sleds and heavy equipment, using a digital camera, of course. I felt I had begun a new segment of life and it’s true that since I’d turned thirty-five I had begun to note that a life can be captured in seven-year intervals. But the past kept hauling into view.

For instance, David Twombly.

The rise in our relationship reached a crest and then continued on in a flat line, not increasing or decreasing in volume or activity. Perhaps there was only so much we had in common. We got together to drink. I was his legacy of artistic promise, but for how long could a connection be maintained based on a legacy? Especially since I’d surrendered to the fiction censor. I’d come to that convergence of talent and critical eye that stymies creation, that tells you most work is mediocre and so is your own, and why bother foisting it on a public when wiser, funnier and more dramatic examples of contemporary realism exist.

David invited me to house parties, grand affairs full of guests carrying passports. There were caterers in his kitchen and then stacks of white Italian plates that were handed around the circle and bright large cutlery rolled in powder blue napkins. We were to eat sitting where we could sit, with a shiny grilled scallop the size of a baseball sliced in half. And then a platter of carved beef that looked like chocolate, a chocolate filled with pink rhubarb. So it was like camp although I was alarmed to see that I was the only one wearing jeans. I sat between a woman who could not explain the work she did and a man who made synthesizers involved in speech recognition. His wife, he said, was at home. She was an artist. She made chocolate using a bicycle.

That’s where I saw her—at a catered party celebrating Sok Hoon’s birthday, where it was hard to count your drinks. Waiters kept filling your glass. There was dancing and through the dancing I noticed the movements of her body. You should trust how you react to a woman’s body. A bit of her jocularly cut dark hair and her sleeveless arm, her arm that kept darting in the air and then she pushed back to laugh. Watching her was like peering through a fence. A moving fence, or I was moving.

David barrelled into me. He was all hugs and leaning on my shoulder. Who is that, I said.

You dont remember Nell.

His voice was both grave and delicious.

I know her?

A long long time ago, he said in a songish voice.

And I knew he wasnt going to tell me. So I said, You got rid of the furniture.

David: Sold it. Every last stick.

Me:Times are tough.

Sok Hoon is leaving me.

I took a cracker and dipped it into olive paste and as I ate the cracker I thought of David without Sok Hoon. I realized I’d held a hunch that she was going to leave him, or at least should leave him. I’m not a diehard stay-together type of person. And Sok Hoon was smothered by David. Even her birthday was more about David’s lavishness at presenting her with organized love. She wasnt rash, either—her wisdom was perhaps superior to both mine and David’s. I also felt that David was strong enough to get through this, that in fact he might enjoy her departure. I wasnt upset or thinking I should help him. In fact I was looking at the dancers. I thought of Owen. And I knew that this might be David’s last house party. It was early summer, there were crocuses.

Nell’s the one, he said, who had the affair with my father.

Nell, I said. Nell Tarkington.

David was saying that this woman who had caught my eye, this Nell, who had seemed to be someone who might be from a country with a name like Formosa, had come to Corner Brook to study and ended up breaking his parents apart. It seemed improbable and yet not unlikely either that lives you know a little about, or have affected friends in the past, might flare over one’s own life in the future. I knew in my bones that this was the type of woman I could enjoy—in a sense it was like revisiting that old printout of my face, a face I once knew. I wasnt happy with strangers or people who did not know me when I was young. It was the appeal, I realized, of Lars Pony. And part of the reason I wasted talented women in Toronto was I needed a woman who knew something of my past from her own experience. What an odd realization. Nell Tarkington. She was just there, dancing with a handsome man who was too well dressed to be attractive. Nell, if I spoke to her, would know of the things I speak. A fantasy thought, yes, but real nonetheless. And I felt I was in one of those moments where the tectonic plates of life’s decisions move over each other like platters of cake in a revolving glass cabinet. I could get together with this woman, I thought. If I tried very hard. Why not be wilful? She was dancing with a man who looked like he wanted to enjoy her.