Extreme Vinyl Café (4 page)

“Hello,” he called.

“Hello,” he called again. “Anybody? I am trapped in the elevator.”

There was no reply.

“Help,” he called. “I am in the elevator.”

He hit the walls with his hands. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. He sat on the floor. He stood up. He took a deep breath and reached out and put his hand on the door handle. He opened the elevator door.

He was staring at a wall of plaster lathing. There was a big 3 written on the lathing in red chalk. He felt a wave of claustrophobia. He felt as if he had been buried alive.

“Help,” he called, again.

He sat in the corner, with his head in his arms. He realized he might die in here. But really, what did that matter? If he didn’t get the cake to the hall on time, Mary would kill him anyway.

A
n hour went by. The party would be just beginning. Dave was still in the elevator. And he was still hungry. He was wondering whether, when you were starving to death, if you gnawed off and ate your own arm that would count as sustenance. Or if eating your own arm would be a zero-sum game.

Jean-Claude Van Damme wouldn’t eat off his arm. Jean-Claude Van Damme would haul himself out the emergency door in the ceiling and climb up the cable to safety. Dave glanced up at the ceiling. There was no emergency door. He felt a wave of relief. He would rather die in there than climb up a cable to safety.

He stared at the cake.

Surely Mary wouldn’t miss one of those little buttercream shrubs.

M
ary, had, actually, only just missed Dave.

“Shouldn’t he be here by now?” said Mary to Bert. The guests were beginning to arrive. The party was getting going.

“He’ll be here,” said Bert, with more hope than conviction. “He is probably sitting in a taxi right now, with the cake in his lap.”

Morley, who was standing just within earshot, helped herself to a glass of wine. A large one.

Bert was half right. Dave was
not
in a taxi. But he did have the cake in his lap. He had eaten every second shrub.

Half an hour later the little golf course had shrunk from nine to seven holes, the marzipan foursome was a twosome and Dave was eyeing their little golf cart. And that was when he spotted the emergency phone. It didn’t fill him with hope. There was no dial. It was covered in dust. He picked it up and brought it to his ear.

T
he headquarters of ProCor Security Inc. is not what you would expect if all you knew of them was their shiny web page. Their web page features pictures of high-rises, and fit men in well-fitting uniforms, and a dog leaping over a fence, and a con-trol panel that looks like the command centre for a space flight.

The headquarters of ProCor Security is actually in the middle of a shabby industrial part of town, in a tiny cinderblock building with a flat roof and a peeling wooden
sign. It looks more like the office of an auto repair shop than the headquarters of a security firm.

On Saturday evening, when Dave picked up the emergency phone, ProCor Security, the other end of that phone, and therefore Dave’s only salvation, was in the hands of a university student. The student, a part-time employee, was beginning his second-ever overnight shift. And he was stretched across three office chairs in front of the surveillance panel, so deeply asleep that he wasn’t only snoring, he was drooling. The hands that were holding Dave’s life were tucked under his head.

The student had been trained the previous night by the woman who had the shift before him. She had been in a hurry to leave. His training lasted less than fifteen minutes. She showed him the computer and said nothing about phones.

So when a phone began to ring, it took the student by complete surprise. He sat up with a jerk and looked around. He was so dopey with sleep he couldn’t figure out where the ringing was coming from.

When he finally opened the cupboard on the far side of the room, he almost fell over. There wasn’t a phone in there. There were fifty phones in there—all of them attached to the wall, all of them red, all of them missing their dials. They looked like the kind of phones you might use to launch a missile strike. Except for the dust. They were all covered in dust.

There were so many of them it was impossible to tell which one was ringing. The student started picking the phones up at random. Before he found the right one, the ringing stopped. It took him awhile to get back to sleep after that.

About an hour passed before the phone rang again. This time he ran to the cupboard right away. This time he got the right phone on the fifth ring.

“Hello?” he said.

The student was as surprised as Dave to find someone on the other end of the line.

“Who are you?” the student asked.

“I am stuck in an elevator,” said Dave. Then just to be sure this person on the phone understood the severity of his situation, he added, “with Mary’s cake.”

“Where?” said the student.

“In the elevator,” said Dave. “I’m all alone in here.”

“Which elevator?” said the student.

“How many elevators are there?” said Dave.

“I don’t know,” said the student. “I’m new.”

Dave explained about the house on the mountain and the cake and the party.

“I know where I am going,” said Dave. “But I don’t where I am.”

The student said, “Is this like a test or something?”

A
n awful thought came over Dave. He wasn’t talking to a security guard in Montreal. He was talking to a call centre in Mumbai.

Dave said, “Are you in Mumbai?”

The student said, “Are
you
in Mumbai?”

Dave said, “I’m in Montreal. You’ve got to get me out of this elevator.”

The student said, “This is just my second shift. I’ve never done this before. I can’t roll trucks if I don’t know where you
are. We get fined. Call me back when you know where you are.” And he hung up.

D
ave stood in his elevator staring at the handset in disbelief.

He was so hungry he could barely think straight.

Desperate times require desperate measures.

He slid the cake so it was half off the tray and held it very carefully over his head. Then he reached up from the bottom and stuck his hand right into it. He pulled out a fistful of the truffle ganache filling.

Mary would never know.

He sat on the floor licking the icing off his fingers.

He picked up the phone again.

It rang ten times.

“Hello?”

“It’s me,” said Dave.

“Me too,” said the student.

“Listen, I’m sorry I hung up,” said the student. “I am a little scared.”

“Me too,” said Dave. “What are
you
scared of?”

“I’m scared I might get fired if you die. Do you think I would have to put it on my resumé?”

It took them half an hour to figure it out. There was a number on the phone: 52. They were talking on phone 52. All the other phones had different numbers. The student found a binder with a legend, and in it an address that corresponded to each phone number.

“You are on Upper Walnut Crescent,” he said.

B
ack at the hotel, Mary was beside herself. The main course had been served and there was still no sign of Dave.

Bert said, “I’ll go. I’m sure everything is fine.”

But he wasn’t really sure.

Morley, now on her third glass of wine, was feigning interest in a conversation with a man just big enough to shield her entirely from Mary Turlington’s sight.

Mary stared at Bert. Mary said, “You stay here.”

W
hen Mary’s taxi pulled up in front of the Gallivans’ house, the fire trucks had been there for about fifteen minutes. So Mary missed the part where they drove the axe through the red-oak front doors. But she was there when the elevator started to make whirring sounds and then began to drop smoothly. She was there when the brass doors opened onto the glass-strewn foyer. And she was there to see Dave, huddled over her cake like a raccoon huddled over a garbage can, his hands and face covered in icing.

He had been trying to smooth out the cake surface with his fingers. He held out the cake and smiled at her like a child handing in a class project.

“Safe and sound,” he said.

They both stared at the cake without saying a word, and as they did the lone marzipan golfer, standing by what was now the sixth and final hole, started to sink slowly—first to his knees and then to his waist, as the entire cake began to collapse into itself as if it were built on a giant sinkhole.

N
either of them said anything for most of the long drive back to the party. At Dave’s suggestion, they stopped at an all-night grocery store and bought a replacement cake, the only cake left in the store. A My Little Pony cake.

T
he drive home the next day was even quieter—perhaps “steamier” captures it better—as was the rest of the autumn. It was the first time there was a noticeable strain between the neighbours. It was not actual unpleasantness, just a determined quiet, which was unpleasant enough in itself. And then one night, out of the blue, Bert called and invited Dave and Morley for dinner. They couldn’t have picked a worse night. It was Dave’s birthday. Dave and Morley had reservations at a little Italian place they favour.

“Cancel them,” said Morley.

And so Dave and Morley went next door, and dinner was not unbearable, though it was awkward. Mary was obviously trying to let bygones be bygones, but you could tell it was a struggle. And then it was time for dessert.

And out came a birthday cake.

A My Little Pony birthday cake.

Mary carried it to the table and set it down. Then she blew out the candles, picked up the cake and very carefully turned it over. She scooped a handful from the bottom of the cake and plopped it on Dave’s plate.

She said, “That’s the way you like it, right?”

Dave sat there, staring at his plate, not knowing what he should do, looking back and forth at Mary and his wife. It was
Morley who started to giggle. Morley giggled. Mary smiled. And then Bert started laughing so hard he was pounding the table. They all laughed and laughed.

It was really their only choice. You swallow your pride and you laugh, or you fight. So they laughed. It’s what good neighbours do.

Dear Mr. McLean,

I have started to date a lovely woman who has a five-year-old son. I don’t think the boy likes me. Any advice?

Serge

Dear Serge,

Avoid ladders.

A
few springs ago, when Dave’s mother, Margaret, was going through a bad spot, feeling old and overwhelmed, Dave flew home to Cape Breton Island for a weekend to give her a hand with the things that need a hand when the seasons are changing. He went on a Thursday night and stayed until Sunday afternoon.

While he was there, Dave took down the storm windows and put up the screens. He turned the garden, raked the twigs off the lawn and cleaned out the eaves. In the evenings, he walked with his mother into town to buy ice cream. He stopped in at the Maple Leaf Restaurant on Saturday morning and had breakfast with some childhood friends. And each night, he stretched out on his childhood bed in his old room at the top of the stairs, and he slept like a boy, deep and far away. When he left that Sunday, he left thinking that this was something he should have been doing for years.

Since that spring, Dave has made the flight home twice a year, once every April to lay things out, and then again in October to pack them away. It makes him feel useful; connected to things gone by and to the swing of the seasons. He knows his mother looks forward to these visits. He likes that too.

So Dave was surprised, to say the least, the spring he stepped out of his rented car onto his mother’s gravel driveway in the little town of Big Narrows, to see she had hired a man, and the two of them were working away at the windows without him.

The man, his white hair wispy and whipping in the wind, was up the old wooden ladder, with a bucket hooked on the top rung, washing the windows of Dave’s sister’s old bedroom. His mother, with a rag and bucket of her own, was working on a pile of storm windows propped against the front porch.

“David!” she said, as he stepped out of the car, her rag dangling by her side.

He had taken an early plane, and his sweet time on the drive from Sydney, choosing the old road along the St. Andrew’s Channel. He had stopped for a coffee and sandwich in Irish Bay, eating it outside even though it was uncomfortably windy for that.

“It’s David,” Margaret said to the man on the ladder, stomping toward Dave in her Wellingtons, big wet splotches on her olive-coloured pants.

It felt good to be out of the rental car, the wind on his face again. Dave hugged his mother.

“How was your flight?” she asked.

They walked away from the car together, instinctively heading toward the garden, which Dave was surprised to see had already been turned. He pointed at the cold frame, at the little tomato seedlings pumping away.

“You’ve been busy,” he said.

“Smith’s been helping,” said Margaret.

“Smith,” called Margaret, again, “it’s David.”

The man came down the ladder effortlessly, almost carelessly, as if he had been living on ladders all his life. It was hard to tell how old he was, but he was older up close than he was coming down the ladder, that’s for sure.

He was wearing a beige canvas jacket, with a grey fisherman’s sweater under it. The jacket was frayed at the cuffs and had clips instead of buttons. Dave was shaking the man’s hand, trying to remember where he had heard his name before, and coveting the jacket all at once.

“Nice of you to help out,” said Dave.

Then he remembered. This wasn’t a hired hand. This was the retired fire chief. This was the guy who had sealed up his mother’s laundry chute.

“Get your stuff out of the car,” said Margaret. “Supper is nearly ready. I have a chicken going.”

D
ave took his suitcase upstairs, threw it onto his bed and walked to the window. With the trees still not in bud, he could see all the way down to the storefronts on Railroad Street— the steeple on the United Church at one end, and the tallest building in town, the clock tower on the town hall, at the other. He leaned into the window, letting his breath fog the glass. Everything was still the same. The view from the window was the same view he had had when he was a boy. There was no other place in the world where time had stopped like it had here.