Country of Cold (11 page)

In the bookcases beside the fireplace sat all of his old textbooks. From the publishing dates in them, Cora had established that he had gone to medical school from 1935 to 1940. Johns Hopkins, no less. The books were beautiful leather-bound hardcovers, with monochrome engravings protected by tissue paper, all carefully inscribed “Property of David A. Andrews.” His handwriting had been neat and elegant, with none of the tremor apparent in his chart entries of the last couple of years.

When he’d gone to medical school, penicillin had not yet been available. TB had been consumption and
essentially incurable. The most common cause of madness had been syphilis, and, with patience, one could talk schizophrenics out of their delusions. Every time Cora flipped through these books she learned something new. In 1939, they had thought they were right around the corner from curing lung cancer. And GPs did so much of their own surgery in those days—appendectomies, hernias, Caesarean sections; his surgery texts were magnificent, with beautiful colour plates and engravings with detail so fine you could have framed them. She could have prepared for her own exams from his anatomy texts. She recalled her gross anatomy prof introducing the course: “Structure, class, is the only constant. Learn it well once.”

She wandered back into the kitchen. The decorations in here were mostly the kind you’d throw in the cart at Safeway to fill up the wall space, make it seem homier. A porcelain swordfish. Picture of some state capitol. He would have hoped for a bigger difference.

Down the stairs, turning on lights as she went. She found the door to the den and carefully felt for the desk lamp. The room smelled of pipe tobacco. On the wall just above the desk were several rectangles of lightened wallpaper—his old diplomas. Cora sat down in the big leather chair behind the desk. Above her there were six missing ceiling tiles—no amount of scrubbing could make them come clean. Through the hole she could see exposed wiring and the wooden floor joist,
still frayed and stained dark brown. She leaned back in the chair, putting her feet up on the desk. It had been while looking at these walls that he had found his resolve. She crossed her arms in front of herself. Why then and not twenty years earlier? The phone rang. Long distance.

The first weekend she had stayed at his place: late summer and still so hot it felt like you couldn’t get a full lungful of air. His place was on a leafy street in the McGill Ghetto, and his neighbours above and below him were friends of his. All Saturday afternoon they dropped by with invitations to eat and requests to borrow. She was too hot to contemplate walking anywhere, and so they stayed there and drank iced tea and lolled around on the floor. Between visits, she pushed him on his back, and he stretched his arms over his head and she just stared at what she had wrought, pulling up on the small of his back and burying her mouth in his belly. The girls upstairs came by without knocking and extracted a bottle of vinegar from the kitchen with hardly a glance at the enmeshed bodies on the living-room floor. The sunlight blazed all through the apartment.

The next day they watched a hardcore band at the Spectrum and sucked in the air-conditioned and smoke-laden air like they were sea mammals up from a very long and deep dive. The music shook the walls and somehow everyone in the room seemed to know one of them; nods greeted them from every quarter but it
was too loud to explain who was who, even through a hollered-in ear. They ordered western sandwiches on white bread and drank Labatt Blue.

At the time neither of them understood how lucky they were.

Charging out into the snow, the wind still higher now, she couldn’t even see the highway. The erosive cold clawed at her face, tears freezing against her cheeks, and the back of her throat hurt from breathing in the cold air so fast. Snow filled up her slippers and began melting against her feet, the wind swept up her shirt and her breasts hurt from the cold. She’d told him not to bother shipping the boxes to her, to just give the clothes to the Salvation Army. He’d asked why she was so upset. Had she thought he was going to keep her stuff indefinitely?

In front of her was a branch that had been broken off by the wind … elm, the size of an axe handle. She swung it against a snowdrift; it hardly slowed. Snow flew everywhere, and she spun around from her own momentum. She strode to the oak that dominated the driveway. She was standing in snow up to her mid-thighs now, shaking from the cold, her feet completely numb. She swung the branch into the tree. Frozen, it rang like metal and her hands hurt up to her elbows. She swung it again. It cracked and rang out. She swung it again. It gave way at the fracture and bent noiselessly,
tendrils of bark and wood still holding the broken branch together.

She threw it into the snow. The air was so cold it smelled like ammonia.

This was in 2001.

It wasn’t so bad, the divorce, or anyway it wasn’t nearly as bad as it had seemed it would be. Robert left Montreal and made his way back to Manitoba that summer, without his wife, and mostly, no one even asked him about her. His friends were collectively batting about one for two in marital matters and he took shameful relief in this.

There was a slo-pitch softball league his old friends played in and they were often short of bodies. In the course of his three-week trip home he played eight games. He’d gotten fatter than he had realized in the city, and ran slower than he had expected—looking down at his feet as he trundled to first base, he’d think, What’s with this? But his friends were fatter than they had been, too. Drinking together late at night, the stars improbably bright in the excessively warm prairie
sky, they sweated with one another on a succession of patios and porches. Nobody talked about their marriages.

The world wears us all down. This is improbable but potent solace.

Rick “the Stick” Robinson was thrown over the top rope by the Barracuda in the last match of Maple Leaf Wrestling’s last event of the year, the day after Christmas, and when he hit the announcers’ collapsible plywood table the sound was like ten thousand Christmas crackers being pulled at the same instant. It echoed on and around the nearly empty Winnipeg Arena until long after the Barracuda had stopped prancing theatrically and had begun to look concerned, even climbing over the ropes in his flippers and taking off his green rubber fish mask to better see whether Rick was hurt.

Daphne stood when the action stopped, and her first instinct was to offer to help somehow, but then she saw Rick’s hand rise up from the wreckage of the table and she sat down and resumed eating her popcorn. A spare
microphone was located and Ralph Lazio, the announcer, resumed his breathless baritone. He emphasized to the ladies and gentlemen that Robinson
looks like he is really hurting—you can tell from the agony etched on his face
and admonished the referee for not disciplining that madman (voice deepening) the fishman, the Barra-CUDA. Daphne wondered idly where Lazio had ever heard of agony being etched on anyone’s face; earlier in the afternoon, he had protested the inability of the Stryker Brothers to subscribe to even the most fundamental precepts of sportsmanlike conduct. Ernie Stryker had looked confused when he heard that; it looked like his feelings might have been hurt. The drunker Lazio was, the stranger his narration became.

As the Stick began tentatively rising from the wreckage of the table, the referee, impotent and eternally silent little grey-haired man, began wagging his finger at the Barracuda, who had replaced his fish mask by this point and was posturing again. Rick stood and made tentative and insincere motions to climb back into the ring, but the referee had disqualified the Barra-CUDA by this point and the match was Rick’s anyway. Rick allowed his hand to be raised desultorily and a thin “ding” of the bell concluded the match. The Barracuda was already walking away. There was still time to get to the Boxing Day sales.

Daphne stood with the rest of the paltry audience and began to shuffle out. It was a bright and ferociously
cold day. Only the genuinely committed professional wrestling fan showed up on a day like this. Ralph Lazio’s amplified and effusive best wishes for the New Year trailed off in the clatter of folding chairs and Daphne made her way to the exit. Around her, men shuffled to the door, speaking quietly about the match and the home renovation projects they planned. There was a great deal of spotted plaid flannel involved and the burgundy industrial carpets that designated the walkway were stained with the muddy footprints of dozens and dozens of pairs of rubber-soled Grubers and Polartuffs.

Wrestling had undergone a resurgence of popularity since the Winnipeg Jets had moved traitorously to that hockey Mecca, Phoenix, Arizona.
Arizona
. And as wrestling came to fill the city’s Saturday afternoons, even the most committed sports-entertainment fans were conscious of the decline this represented, in the city, and in them. At the wrestling matches, half the crowd wore sweatpants; everyone seemed to have gone thinner on top.

Daphne had grown up just outside the city during the hockey years, and this place now seemed to her very different from the Winnipeg she had known; her re-acquaintance with the city had been complicated over these last few months by her familiarity with a more optimistic, now vanished version of this place.

Every young person she had known growing up had left the city, if they could. Their parents were often still
here, however, and when she ran into them, usually at the Hudson’s Bay downtown store, she spent odd minutes listening to news of her old friends. What was subsequently reported back to them, in turn, could not have been flattering, and afterwards, as she scurried to her car in the parking lot, Daphne would wince, thinking of the tenor of the next Sunday afternoon’s ritual telephone call.

At the Velvet Olive sports bar, the big-screen TV was already showing the pre-game interviews before the Canadiens took the ice. The city had mostly cheered for Montreal before the advent of the Jets, and most of the hockey fans were now in the painful process of coming around again to supporting their longtime nemesis, having individually concluded that, in the end, it is necessary to root for someone or it is impossible to watch sports, or do much else. Winnipeggers had spent their fifteen golden hockey-blessed years loathing Montreal precisely because they were so good: Patrick Roy’s preposterously quick hands in goal, and Guy Charboneau’s resolve on the red line—these points of aggravation now turned begrudgingly into something else. Allegiance changes of this sort always cost more than expected, and for many it was too painful. Instead of watching hockey on television they went to the wrestling matches, where their hearts were less likely to be broken.

Daphne had taken to spending time at the Olive because the wrestlers hung out here. They were here
most afternoons by three, after their workouts, and, except for Saturdays, they generally stayed here until closing. Individual elements varied but a central core persisted, including Rick the Stick, Barking Mad Maurice Millard, Sultry Sally, and Stainless Steel Stan. They were probably all alcoholics, Daphne had reflected at one point—at several points, actually—but the context of their lives made that a hard thing to judge. They got up at noon and worked out until the mid-afternoon and then they had finished their day’s work. She found them entertaining and she eavesdropped on them for hours at a stretch. This had been going on six months now. It was like living in a motel room—it had an alarming way of just going on. She had more money in the bank than she could understand and whenever her bank branch manager called her to talk about interest-bearing securities she said she was sick, could she call him back?

She thought that everyone has to make such a deal with themselves sometimes, so that they can get through the difficulty of living. What they are doing is the pragmatic thing to do, where they are living the pragmatic place to be. Afterwards they’ll return to where they are known and want to be and they’ll resume their life as they had left it, the only difference being that their most pressing problem will be solved and the rest of their problems may then be addressed at leisure.

She had begun dyeing her hair more red than she’d intended, and buying her clothes at the thrift shop across
the street from her apartment block. Her favourite outfit involved a sequined leather jacket with the word “Sparkle” spelled out across its back; there were, as well, a number of ruffled blouses she had found in used clothing shops that pleased her, and varieties of denim pants that spanned the fashion aesthetic. She made an impression in her bar, which is what she intended; everyone remembered her from one day to the next, and this provided for her at least the illusion of familiarity and acceptance. It sufficed.

That Boxing Day, Daphne studied Rick as he entered the Velvet Olive, limping and leaning to one side. His back, again. The paper had reported a compression fracture eight months earlier when the Belly had mistimed a pile driver and left Rick nearly a broken stick. This could be just a muscle pull this time, but he was going to have to be more careful. One of these days it was going to be a disc. She sipped her piña colada and flipped through the newspaper, watching as he sat down at the bar with his friends—who, like him, had never been approached by Vince McMahon as possible foils for his creations, and had never had even as much as a glimpse of making enough money that you didn’t have to have roommates. And now they were all pushing thirty and they were part-time professional wrestlers on the Maple Leaf Wrestling circuit, one of the better-known in western Canada, and the day after Christmas they were drinking Molsons in the Velvet Olive, and
avoiding the looks of one of the resident weirdos, who sat in the same chair whenever she was there, which was pretty much whenever, and faced them and pretended not to be staring.

Daphne had become preoccupied by Rick the Stick over the course of a dozen Saturday afternoons that winter, watching his good-but-dull straight-guy character being pummelled into one type of submission or another by a series of mustachioed black-tighted men and at least one woman. He had sandy brown hair and cautious sideburns that seemed cultivated to evoke the idea of the congenial home appliance repairman. He was not as muscular as any of the villains, and even his briefs were modest, the dark red of a collegiate swimmer’s bathing suit. He was booth-tanned and too polite for his vocation. The night he was beaten by Sultry Sally’s erstwhile rival, Nikki Stryker, he had just stood there as he was tossed from corner to corner like one of the wrestling midget cousins, the Lapierres. Except that René and Jean would have struggled more than he did. Anybody would have.