Keeping Things Whole (4 page)

Each photo was just the eyes, a strip from above the eyebrows down to the tops of the cheekbones, an inversion of a cartoon bandit's mask. I mounted them in a kind of family tree. Where a fourth photo should have been I'd drawn a big question mark.

Gran's eyes
Mom's ————— ?
mine

I kept that display at school until showtime. The night of the science fair, parents, teachers, and siblings milling around, Gran and Mom entered the school gymnasium still thinking their boy would want some ice cream after his big night. Not so after they saw that meathook of a question mark.

The photos could have been of any three generations, not even of the same family. In ways, they were just eyes, just colour and age. The two people who could spot my fiction within the science weren't likely to say anything. What I had called Generation B (
Mom + ?)
was really Generation C. Generation B was Victor-Conrad, forever sucking his bullet in France.

A decade later I'd better understand Mom's phrase “post-partum depression” for her enervated, doubt-filled crash after a play regardless of creative or professional success. More than just the stress of work and expectation hit her once a show was down. Change also came at her, but in a staggered, limping pace. That night at Science Fair, I was already starting to feel the PPD when Mom and Gran walked towards my booth. I had thought the project would show me more, get knowledge inside me and shake a few more answers out of Mom. But this was science. I should have known that what I wanted to discover was irrelevant to what I might discover. My sire and I had brown eyes, yet my readings and experiments hadn't moved knowledge of him forward an inch. For all my intrusive work with photos, the project was still just a mirror, and I already knew all the people caught in it.

Watching Gran and Mom approach, I suddenly wanted to shoo them off, call it a bust, retreat to familiar ground. Instead, I watched them read my displays, watched them look, watched their eyes return over and over to the cropped photographs of their own eyes.

Gran spoke first. “Very thorough, Antony. There's a place in my garden for those peas if you want to dig them in.” When Glore remained silent, Gran glanced around the gym then dipped her oars a little. “Is that Masie Carruthers I see? Excuse me a moment.”

Mom's lips were pressing down into their rage line, her nostrils sharp, so, well, strike or be struck. “These are his eyes, aren't they?” I asked. Defiance, not guilt, inflected my voice.

“Antony, someday you'll learn that asking questions is more of an art than a science.” She looked me hard in the eye then walked off, pacing her way around another school gymnasium.

Being in love is being
impressed. Leave your impression here. Arrive faster. Scratch my hidden itch. Be my gravity (my moaning, churning gravity). The L-word doesn't just mean you can't stop thinking
about
her/him; it means you can't stop thinking
like
her/him. When her brain slides into yours, when you think like someone else whether you want to or not, you're either in love or combat.

How to impress Kate, this high achiever with dimples that lit up when her smile shifted from fourth to fifth gear? I knew I was in trouble when I was haunted by parts of her I wouldn't normally think of as high action. Okay, yes, there was her chest, always, but also her long black hair a hundred times a day. The boomerang of her jawbone hit me on the way there and again on the way back. I could think of her smooth, endless back for an afternoon of painting, the way it spilled down into her hips but also paused at that planar triangle, neither large nor small, above the hips but not of them, that shovel into me. Mascara transformed her eyelashes into these black little frogs' paws I could watch dart around all day.

I wanted to hand her my best story, my golden fleece, yet this future lawyer couldn't afford to leave her fingerprints on it. I was just shy of twenty-five and made serious cabbage catapulting weed into fortress America. If only you could have seen me slinging the green. With the truck version of the trebuchet, I could fire my reeking load to catchers down near Zug Island then drive off in eight minutes. The back of my painting truck and some PVC pipes earned me a quarter of a new car every time I punted a load. Investment bankers aren't self-made men. I am. My trebuchet. My contacts. My (untaxed) pay.

Show me the non-geeky law student who doesn't smoke weed. Kate wasn't so young she'd be impressed by my breaking the law, but, secretly, I had independence in spades to offer. House painting wasn't exactly the best car in my showroom. For five solid hours of painting I'd go over and over the fact that I could not, could not, could not tell her about my punting weed. Then I'd fantasize endlessly about taking her out for a 3 a.m. lob with the trebuchet. I pictured her hair in braids beneath a black watch cap, my own opera Viking. I wanted her to feel the infectious thrill of letting the treb fly, feel something I designed and made kick and pitch the quarter-ton truck it rested in. We'd feel bound together as we watched the load fly, catching a faint whiff of green instead of Zug Island's acrid waft.

Until I met her, I'd loved working in secret—Dr. Jekyll and Mr. High. I'd gotten the swaggering bad boy out of my system selling loose joints to the American bar pilgrims as a teenager then learned discretion from dealer/lover Claire. With Kate half in my hands, humility and silence only seemed admirable in the gentlemanly abstract, not in the competitive day-to-day. How could a bright, achingly gorgeous law student with dimples that lit up like she was spitting a hundred dimes want to date a house painter? But I could not tell her about the punting—for her and for me.

I wanted every inch of her. Hour after hour, our mutual devour. But in my line, a rat was far more likely to get me caught than anything else. Loose lips sink ships and great-grandfathers. Feel flash, blab about your scheme, and you create a witness. Growing up at a supper table with Mom, conversation included gems like the fact that
Romeo and Juliet
is regarded as a “lesser tragedy” because the mechanism of tragedy is an accident. R & J are undone by a letter late in the mail, not an emotional outgrowth, not two competing desires held in the hero's sweaty hand. At sixteen, this was pork-chop conversation. Who knew it would also be prophecy?

I needed Kate to see I was smarter than the average bear. Bay Street financiers weren't the only people in the province who took risks and won. I desperately wanted to tell her, only her, that betting on yourself and winning is the second greatest feeling in the world, maybe even the greatest if you count how much longer it lasts.

At first I simply bought more time. You hungry? Let's pop into Grill, my treat. Bottles of lacy, chewy red every time she turned around. A kitchen gadget here, some roasted nut, bunny-loving eco body lotion there. The CD she liked at my place on Friday would be in her mailbox by Monday. It probably would have been cheaper if I'd just bought a lingerie store, not all that biweekly gear. Some nights I'd arrive at her apartment with a whole date of gifts. Roasted organic garlic and a pinot swirled into that spiralling MOMA decanter. A baguette younger than the day to be smeared with St. André (don't live too much longer without trying this: is it cheese or is it butter?). And of course a finger of organic indica for an appetizer. Smoke that and the whole world's pressed to your tongue.

I tried to let all my non-smuggling attributes stand a little taller. Not just the money but the independence. The free thinking, the eclectic reading, my painting days full of audiobooks. And with Detroit, we had a second chance for a second date. The second date is a lot like the second song on a CD. It has to be everything the first one is, yet more. Higher energy but also more latitude, casual elegance. Those early dates, you dress so carefully, wash clothes two days in advance, wipe the dust off your ironing board, all with the hope of tearing each other's clothes off. But how was a house painter supposed to compete with future lawyers? They had just twelve to fifteen hours of class a week. With painting and punting, I sometimes worked that in a single day. I had to hint about the math, indicate but never state that her classmates were advertising potential wealth but actually spending credit. These future lawyers who propositioned her daily, yes, they were eventually going to make money hand over fist (smooth hands, unscarred fists). But how many of them were actually going to run law firms? The world has employers and employees.

I was general of a gift army. Books that would make her want to curl up with me for a half-dressed hour. Nothing Canadian, obviously: no sex please, we're
fake
British. Get the ladies books, the right words, get them where they think and feel at the same time. If she loved a novel I gave her, she'd eat it up, would ban me from speaking while she finished it at the other end of the couch. With the novels, I was definitely my mother's son. I'd grown from being read to by Mom to reading to her to reading beside her. Eventually I noticed that books allowed Gloria to be alone but not lonely. With Kate I knew, but couldn't quite say, that if she were to date a law student, odds were better than not she'd find a TV in the bedroom, not novels, a TV bought on credit. She may have been fine dating a novel-hungry house painter when it was just the two of us, but no woman dates an island. I had to go the dinner party distance.

We needed another big date, not just a communal read, more than just another bottle of wine and wandering hands. Where to go in Windsor if you really want to impress someone? One afternoon I called her from a job site. “You can cross the border, right?”

“I'd be a pretty fucked up immigration lawyer if I couldn't.”

Detroit, plague city. Pockets of action amidst long stretches of blackened chaos, buildings abandoned or razed to the ground. People actually walk around on our side, multi-ethnic shoppers during the day and white drinkers at night. Our downtown, undeniably smaller but fattened by American coin, is centralized, one playground of sin. They have boarded-up or burnt-out nineteenth-century mansions abutting empty lots or chic new restaurants. There's no such thing as an empty lot in downtown Windsor. Every purchasable metre is a parking lot to some degree, even just a guy with a flashlight, a plywood sign, and a pocketful of bills. Anyone walking in Detroit is either moving from building to parking spot or is wiped-out poor, almost certainly homeless. Our downtown is surrounded by short blocks of run-down houses, slack-jawed aluminium siding, plastic toys, and rusting car parts littering four square metres of overgrown lawn. But they're still homes: roofs, running water, shelter from the river wind. Not Detroit, where you see the homeless every time you cross. They shuffle or push shopping carts past steaming sewer covers. I'm half an engineer and still don't know why Detroit sewers steam and ours don't. Even Canadian shit's self-effacing.

Detroit doesn't just have abandoned buildings; it has abandoned beautiful buildings, the world's best architecture of the 1920s. Before it sat empty for decades, the eleven-hundred-room Book Cadillac was once the tallest hotel on the planet. When the car-body Fisher Brothers gave Albert Kahn a blank cheque and carte blanche to design their headquarters, they were part of the betting pool that picked Detroit, not New York, for the capital of twentieth-century American commerce. All that decadent architecture from between the wars, Art Deco's last, glorious gasp, was lost to social failure in half a century. Throughout the smoking city, custom-made chandeliers were sold, abandoned, stolen, smashed, or left to fall unseen and unheard into marble carpeted with dust. Hand-carved marble balustrades and curlicued wrought-iron railings now protect, present, and divide nothing more than fetid air. Decadent hotels now decay, the Fort Shelby, Lee Plaza, and the train station's hotel sit empty in a city with ten thousand homeless. The same city that launched not one but two postwar musical sounds, styles as diverse as Motown and techno, now has theatres with perpetually fallen curtains: the National, the Adams. Office buildings officiate only dust and crack deals: the Kales Building, the Metropolitan, the Farwell. Every other Detroit building is the architectural undead, neither dead nor alive. When the wind is up it blows through their smashed-out windows, stirring an elegiac howl for siblings lost to the wrecking ball: the Statler Hotel, the Madison Theater. When Stalin was dynamiting churches for intellectual progress, Detroit was doing the same due to social ruin, St. Cyrils and Jefferson Baptist lifted unto heaven with a blasting box.

We were both stimulated by that jagged landscape of failure, the flush boom and charred bust. For our first trip over, I planned the datiest date ever. First stop was the Detroit Institute of the Arts, that escaped former tsar now huddling among the crack houses. The DIA has the best Van Gogh collection in America. His self-portrait with the corn-coloured hat is held hostage in the ruins. They've got a colour drawing Giacometti did of his wife that is the very picture of love—adoring, respectful, and slightly terrified. Most alluring for us were the Diego Rivera murals.

For a big date, we didn't go to Windsor's art gallery. When the Ontario government finally admitted they couldn't keep their hands out of gambling's busy till, they permitted one then two casinos, Windsor and the Rama First Nation (because Ontario cares). When the casino company (American, of course) needed to jump into temporary Windsor digs while they built their custom gaming house, the old Art Gallery of Windsor was an obvious place to start. On the water, broke, needing both cash and exposure, the AGW was handsomely paid to be temporarily relocated (to a mall, how Windsorian) and got coin for a new building. Shortly after all the international, interpersonal, Kate-Antony dust settled, one of Canada's newest art galleries was built to stand watch over the river not far from where the local rowing team used to line up for their crates of Cuba-bound whisky. Architecturally, this may be why the new gallery has a glass boat sailing through one side and out the other, (another) bow bound for America.

Date number two wasn't going to be at the Windsor Mall. Plus, I had a quasi-religious relationship with Diego Rivera's
Detroit Industry
murals. When Kate and I strolled into the DIA's Rivera Courtyard, with its painted, thirty-five-foot walls and numerous skylights, I stared up at Rivera's sprawling, living machine for probably the thirtieth time. I was just eight when Gloria first took me to see them. To my surprise, Kate was a Rivera virgin. The skylights and Rivera's metallic palette give the room an aquatic light. Kate treaded water then finally dove under.

We didn't speak for at least fifteen minutes, an eternity on an early date. Surely couples go on art gallery dates because, unlike at the movies, they can look at something but still talk. I cut her all the slack she wanted, her spine stretching in front of one wall, my chin climbing up another.

Like this memwire, the four painted walls of the room are undeniably linear in ways—one wall flowing horizontally into the next—yet each is also layered vertically, a strata of industry and human life. Ford's iconic assembly lines pulse with undeniable vitality. You gotta keep the line moving, keep it whole. Suspended rows of inert steering wheel columns lend depth near unattached car doors that roll as linearly as the boxcars of a train. Shafts and blades of orange and red sparks fly off whirring grindstones to occasionally brighten the sallow-faced workers in their drab aprons. All this beneath images of the body's own assembly lines. High on one wall, scientists in lab coats and masks hold up test tubes, while on another a baby swims in paisleyed utero.

I first saw all of this long before I'd met Kate, and it was in that same spacious gallery courtyard that Gloria had told me how, where, and mostly why Grandpa Bill had died behind us in the river. When Glore drove us back over the bridge Rivera's workmen lingered behind my eyes as I looked down at the alien blue of the industrial river. I imagined Bill entombed and Gran riding a ferry with a skirt she hoped the law wouldn't raise. Halfway across the bridge (in suspended, international air) Mom knew what I was thinking. “Always remember, Antony, he didn't have to die.”

In the date I'd planned with Kate—gallery, followed by drinks and paninis followed by a trip to a record store followed by another drink—I'd thought I might reach for her hand and maybe more, get some gallery hip, a little polite ass. But after twenty minutes in front of the murals she grabbed my hand like she was falling off a cliff. Hers was no faux-accidental brush of the fingers as each of us crossed from one wall to another, no delicate interlacing as we stood, heads canted for quiet talk and steady wonder.