Architects Are Here (3 page)

Randy Jacobs poured a rink out of a green garden hose and we skated, all of us, for one last Christmas together, while a band of poplar trees watched. Dave held his nose with the thumb and finger of a hockey glove and hawked. We were all friends back then, Gerard and Joe Hurley, Randy Jacobs, and the young black kid, Lennox Pony. We hung around the S-turn with the older boys, men almost now, who worked the maintenance shift at McDonald’s, who were planning to drive the school bus or replace their fathers at the pulp mill. Others were slipping into dope dealing, like Gerard Hurley. I had gone to school with Gerard. In Grade One we got gold stars. We were the top boys. One day we were spelling words. Gerard had to spell
England
. He thought it began with an “I” because there were so many words that ended in -ing, and a country like Ingland would be responsible. English is my last name so I was a little dumbfounded at his error. A gold star for me while Gerard Hurley got a red stamp. It was his first red stamp and I saw his face collapse. Gerard Hurley realized he was working at his limits. He could not understand the new work, he was about to fall away. He had been applying himself full-on while I was coasting. Gerard’s predicament I wouldnt understand until university physics: this realization that people around you know how to do something with ease, while youve squeezed your eyes shut forcing a connection, and knowing deep in your chest it is beyond you.

The S-turn was a strip of road on the west side near the Lemon Yard, a salvage operation run by Lennox Pony’s father. The S-turn was where, at night, you could smoke under a single street light and drink a beer while sitting on the galvanized guardrail. If it wasnt for Dave I wouldnt have been allowed to play hockey or baseball with them. Even Lennox, who was three years younger, got to go in net, or catch. But Dave said, If Gabe doesnt play then I won’t play. I guess I’ll always be grateful to him for that, and I’ll back him no matter how bad it gets.

Dave wanted to leave because his mother, he said, had closed in on herself and his father had become artificially chatty. He couldnt walk around the house with Zac gone. His sister was still in high school and he felt bad abandoning her, but he was the one who was guilty for Zac’s death. He was dealing with the recriminations. But Dave did not want to go alone. Could we both move to St John’s and do our studies there. So we enrolled, but we were too late to get into residency during the middle of the year. Let’s share an apartment, Dave said. On New Year’s Day we drove across the island in Zac’s Matador and found a two-bedroom apartment near the university and we studied. We had hours of study each night. And David bought a piranha. He fed it goldfish. He bought the goldfish in a clear plastic bag. He opened the bag and tipped the goldfish into the aquarium. The piranha, like a rock on its side, lunged and the orange fish was gone. It was startling and yet unsatisfying to watch. So Dave took to just tossing the entire knotted bag in. The piranha was puzzled by this, but learned to punch through the bag. It often took him three or four attacks to tear open the plastic. I think the goldfish often died of a heart attack. It missed the severe final twenty seconds of its own body.

Back then Dave had a saying: The architects are here. It was a phrase that summed up his experience with his brother, that bad times were lurking, and even though Dave is one of the luckiest men I’ve known, he is possessed with a fatalism that one day he will be walking around homeless and broke, or unloved. The expression comes from a book by Suetonius, perhaps the only book Dave read thoroughly. There is a plot against Caesar. And when the assassins are in place, a guard issues the word: The architects are here. Dave would say it to the goldfish, as he cradled it in its baggie of water and slowly lowered it into the aquarium.

W
E DROVE HOME
in June, and it was our last summer together in Corner Brook. Dave was involved in a technology fair at the Glynmill Inn and asked if I’d man the booth with him. I let Dave talk about his software products and the computer languages he and Zac had worked on. Then a man came in we both recognized. It was Geoff Stirling, the millionaire who had gone to Cuba with Joey Smallwood. He was about sixty now but still wore a bomber jacket and tinted glasses. He looked over Dave’s software. That’s what this province needs more of, he said, is this entrepreneurial spirit. Who are you son? You need a job this summer?

This meeting greatly impressed us both. Geoff Stirling had given Dave the number to the news room in St John’s. You boys can work in news, he said. So Dave called. But the man he spoke to made Dave realize that there was no work in a news station for an eighteen-year-old. I’m headed for the mainland anyway, Dave said to me, but by the fall he’d heard back from the schools he’d tried to get into and his grade point average did not meet the standards. So we ended up living together for another full year in St John’s. He studied harder. We listened to late-night radio and Dave fell in love with the host of a show from Montreal and he wrote her letters. I helped with the letters. He cracked up at the little stories I made. We shoved the letters into homemade envelopes and invented names and sent them to Allegra Campinghorst, care of the CBC, in Montreal. In this small endeavour Dave could see the artist in me.

I remember his father coming to visit. He arrived at the apartment on Elizabeth Avenue. He was in town for a conference, he said. Mr Twombly remembered me from the class I’d taken, but he did not know my family that well. When Zac died, I had gone to the funeral. I’d asked my own father what should I say. We were laying a bed of pink insulation in the attic. My father thought for a moment, crouched with the blade of a carpet-cutter in his hand, poised. He was thinking about what he’d want someone to say to him, and in that space I realized he was imagining me in a box. I’m sorry for your loss, he said. If there’s anything I can do.

But when I approached Mr Twombly at the funeral I could not say those words. They were too adult and Dave and Sasha and their mother were in line. I felt the corners of my mouth move up and I thought, My mouth shouldnt be doing this. And Mr Twombly shook my hand warmly. He knew it had taken guts just to offer my hand.

He knocked on the door and I answered it. He had a pair of green tickets in his hand, for a senior hockey game at Memorial Stadium. Mr Twombly came in and did not take off his shoes. He opened the fridge and helped himself to a glass of orange juice and glanced around at his son’s living conditions. He looked like he hadnt formed an opinion before on how his son would live independently, and so wasnt disappointed. He was observing. He asked if I’d like to come, it would be easy enough to scalp a single, and while I knew it was a family occasion, I didnt know how to refuse. So I went with them and we found a ticket and, in the stands, Mr Twombly asked a man if he would shift over so we could all sit together. The way he said it was polished, you couldnt deny him. And yet there was a contrast to this public know-how and the inability he had to talk to his son. Mr Twombly had played hockey at the University of Michigan, and he fitted both his sons out to play as well.

Landscape makes character, he said. Newfoundland would be like Michigan if it warmed up ten degrees.

After the game Arthur drove us downtown. To the restaurant in the Battery Hotel. We had a view of the city from there, the harbour flaring from lights at the shipyard. Dave and I had not known the downtown existed. Neither of us had drifted below Military Road. So youre doing well. Dave’s hands tightened. His father often opened up with a question about quality, or hoping things were fine, or telling you that life was good. Dave wished his father would just tell him a story, rather than rating the experience of his life as it was happening. They had never had a direct relationship, their experiences had run through Zac or Sasha or their mother. I’m fine, Dad, he said. And I wished with all my heart I hadnt gone with them, it was an awful dinner.

TWO

T
HERE WAS THE SWIRL
of rumour about an affair, that Dave’s father had come to St John’s during our second year not for a conference but so a girl could have an abortion. And this is where Nell Tarkington comes in. Nell had moved to Corner Brook when she was eighteen. She was so young back then she took snapshots out her airplane window as they ascended from Pearson. Three hours then the wing banking over Deer Lake, how wet the province looked. She lived in residence in Corner Brook. Nell shared a cinder-block apartment with Lori Durdle and a woman from India. She had this communications professor, Arthur Twombly. She felt threads of her body pulling away from her when he lectured. He was American, about forty. He gave a tough assignment due just before the drop date, and that whittled the class down to seventeen. I was one of the seventeen. I knew how she felt, that we had managed a hurdle and something interesting might happen. By November Nell had learned how to write a paper that made Arthur Twombly want to see her in his office. His office did not have a window, but he tacked up a print of an impressionist painting of a window in France. What about your parents? he said. She did not want to tell him they were dead. She said they were neither proud nor disappointed. You get a BSc, great. You get a masters, fine. Does that mean we have to show up at your grad? Excellent.

We were a quiet bunch, I remember that, and Arthur Twombly enjoyed discussion. So Nell and I kept the talk going, though it was through the bridging of Professor Twombly’s associative leaps. He was a man who walked around with his hands in his pockets, his shoulders back, ready to enjoy himself. And during his period we learned how forces interpret an event rather than learn about the event itself. He engaged us in a world larger than the one of Corner Brook. And for Nell he confirmed her innate hunch that the modern world was the most interesting one to be living in.

But then Arthur Twombly was not present for the fifth class. Nell hadnt heard, as I had heard from David, what had happened with Zac.

Nell’s mother was a Newfoundlander but had left when she was very young. Nell’s parents had died the year before in a plane crash in northern British Columbia. That was why she had come to Corner Brook, to get away from her past life. She had taken a course from Arthur Twombly because she’d seen him in the gym on registration day and liked his demeanour. A son, Lori Durdle told her, had died in a hunting accident. Nell thought about the son and it made her feel a kinship. Zac Twombly. She herself was newly orphaned. And she wondered if children have much to say in how they get adopted. She had spent the summer in Burlington with her uncle. They’d gone for a trip to Connecticut and her uncle and aunt have a son, Howard, who is her age. Howard was spoiled, but Nell had enjoyed herself. It had been three numb months since her parents had fallen in a float plane and this had been meant as a distraction. I like Connecticut, Nell said, to be polite. It’s too much travel for Howard, her aunt said. And Nell realized that because of cousin Howard they would never go to Connecticut again and that any love she received from them would be conditional love.

She was involved, she realized, in monastic improvement. At the campus in Corner Brook she found a Buddha decal and stuck it to the back of a bronze bust of Wilfred Grenfell that stood in the foyer. She left notes inside the bust hoping someone would find them and write back. The college was named after Grenfell. Grenfell once ate his dogs and used their pelts to make a flag to attract attention. He was lost. Grenfell has a wonderful hospital in Labrador with thick banisters and ochre paint and glossy skirting boards. If you ever go there.

The next week Arthur Twombly was back and he mentioned the son and he hesitated and looked out the window as if Zac might be there, but then he stared hard at us. His son was in his students. You could see his arms galvanized to this realization and it made him touch his neck around the collarbones and breathe deeply.

Once, when she was about twelve, Nell was looking for Christmas gifts in her parents’ closet. She found a dozen bags of white sugar. They were stiff and stacked like bricks. There was trouble with Cuba. She realized her mother was preparing for a siege. There was something in how Arthur Twombly now arranged himself that made her think he was under siege. Some internal force had him cornered.

Arthur put his feet up on his desk. He wore shoes that were leather on the bottom and his socks had a pattern to them. They were expensive socks. He was vain. What do you want to do with your life?

She stared at his impressionist painting. I want to be a famous artist.

Do you know you just said famous.

She found it hard to talk to him. It strained her eyes. She wasnt used to concentrating on a person’s face. Or engaging. Concentration was something you did alone. You did it with a book.

I was kidding, she said. But she hadnt been. She knew she wouldnt paint or write or sing, but she had ambition and she wanted to be noticed. That’s where the Buddha came in, to shed these desires.

I want you to really see things, he said. Even dangerous things.

That Christmas she went to visit her aunt and uncle in Burlington. Burlington is about forty miles southwest of Toronto. It is named after a British parliamentarian who spent some time advocating land reform in the colonies (marshland from the Humber River should be drained and turned into port facilities). Those days are gone, the naming days. Now things are named with no connection between the place and the name. Anyway, my forlorn sadness at the state of things in Nell’s early adulthood. There was a carton of apple juice cans under her bed. She watched her uncle climb into his car, the way he closed his eyes as he ducked in. How he shut the door and pressed his brake lights on and pulled the choke. If only he could believe in me the way he believes in that car.

She switched her ticket and returned to Corner Brook before New Year’s. She took a pair of orange cross-country skis from the rafters in her uncle’s basement. They were Howard’s skis. She found matching lacquered bamboo poles tangled in a bunch in a corner. Her old cracked boots in a top closet and a bag of ski waxes in lead containers.