‘You have my word.’
Later that afternoon Helen Ross phoned me at the hotel to inform me she had received the necessary bona fides from Laurence Phillips and the lease would be ready to sign tomorrow. I would have to provide one month’s rent in advance and an additional one month’s deposit.
‘No problem,’ I said.
We met at the apartment the next day. I signed the lease. I handed over $1,250 in cash. I went shopping. At Helen’s suggestion I also rented a car for a couple of days – she had a friend at the downtown branch of Alamo who gave me a sub-compact for three days for $100, all taxes and insurances included (I was conscious of every dollar I spent). She also pointed me in the direction of a mall called Chinook just fifteen minutes from my house where she told me I could buy everything I needed.
Before we parted she put a hand on my shoulder and said: ‘We naturally had to run basic background checks on you. And I did use a search engine to find out about your academic career. That’s when I also read about your tragedy.’
I suddenly stiffened . . . and wanted to be anywhere but here.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she continued. ‘I don’t know how—’
‘Stop, please,’ I said.
She withdrew her hand.
‘Excuse me. I didn’t mean to seem like I was prying.’
‘You weren’t prying. It’s just . . .’
So this is how the world now worked. You met someone, you discovered they might have a credential or two, you Googled them, and you found out . . .
But this knowledge simply made me resolve to limit all human contacts to an absolute minimum. I just couldn’t bear any form of decency or kindness right now. People always asked questions about you. Even though they were usually well-meaning questions they were still
questions
. And questions led to answers. And answers led to . . .
So I would withdraw completely.
But before that, I needed to buy some essential items for my new 250-square-foot world.
The Chinook Mall was like all other malls – all those brand names and designer emporiums tempting you to purchase all sorts of things you didn’t need. Still, I did find a household goods place where I bought two sets of dark gray sheets, two pillows, a duvet and two gray covers, bathroom towels, a coffee maker, basic pots and pans, a set of white plates, cutlery, glassware. All in, I dropped just under $1,000 – but for that money the apartment was completely set up, bar a small stereo which cost me an additional $200.
I returned home. I unpacked everything. I plugged in the stereo. I found CBC Radio 2 – the classical service. I sat down in the armchair. Out of nowhere, it all hit me again, and I found that I simply couldn’t stop weeping until I was so wrung out there was no choice but to stagger into the bathroom and splash cold water on my face and grab my coat and car keys and . . .
Drive.
As I had the car for another two and a half days I decided to take advantage of it and . . . drive.
So I spent the time exploring as many parts of Calgary as possible. And what did I discover . . . ?
That cab driver I met on my first morning in Calgary was right – the city was a sprawl. Like all sprawls – especially those set on prairies – it often had the feeling of being jerry-built, thrown up in a hurry, half thought out. There was no sense of a past, a heritage, a coherent urban identity. In a used bookshop on 17th Avenue SW I came across some 1920s photographs of Calgary, all of which showed a bustling North American cityscape of the type that mixed frontier architecture with certain turn-of-the-century Chicago flourishes. Bar the occasional remnant in the downtown core, it had all been detonated away, replaced by towers of glass and steel. There were some interesting neighborhoods. Kensington – which fronted the Bow River – had an excellent bookshop, an old-style picture house which showed art films, a couple of terrific coffee places and a general Cambridge-style atmosphere. There was also a nearby area called Mission with similar trendy shops and restaurants, and Inglewood, a warehouse district just beyond the ‘downtown core’ (as Calgarians seemed to always call it) with a burgeoning attempt at what design magazines call ‘a loft scene’.
Then there were the millionaire-oilmen houses in Mount Royal, the expensive bachelor pads around Eau Claire, and the endless ’burbs – track after track of the same ranch-style house or bungalow, stretching into near-infinity on the prairie. All these subdivisions and estates had fanciful names: Killarney, Sweetwater, Sunridge, Westhills. All were grouped around shopping centers and strip malls. All had the sort of uniformity one associates with military housing. All represented so much of the prosaic and the stifling in modern life. As I toured their byways, the sight of a mother loading up her daughter into the family SUV would detonate a sorrow that still seemed limitless. This was accompanied by the knowledge that, no matter where I turned, I would always see children. They would be in shops, in malls, being pushed in strollers, getting off schoolbuses, being guided through museums, walking home with parents after school. It wasn’t just the three-year-olds who cut me to the quick. From this time onwards, every child at every stage of life – right up through adolescence and beyond – would remind me of all those stages we would have gone through together . . . what could have been, what now never would be.
So I decided to steer clear of these suburban enclaves because they had a higher density of children than the area around my neighborhood. I did a little more shopping for the apartment – a desk lamp, a floor lamp, a rug for the floor – and then returned the car, vowing not to venture outside the central core of the city again.
Once I had the apartment set up, a routine developed. I would wake most days around noon. Then I would walk down to 17th and 9th – and my morning haunt, Caffé Beano. It was a 1950s retro coffee joint. They knew how to make excellent espresso. They served proper bagels and muffins. They sold that morning’s edition of the
Globe and Mail
and the
Calgary Herald
. They left you alone . . . though, after I had showed up every morning for a while, the barista on duty asked me my name.
‘Nice to meet you, Jane,’ he said. ‘I’m Stu.’
‘Nice to meet you, Stu.’
End of conversation.
I would spend over an hour and a half in Caffé Beano, then I would haunt the two or three used bookshops on 17th. Here too the staff got to know me, especially at Prism Books, where I scored a complete hardcover edition of
Remembrance of Things Past
and a 1902 English edition of the complete Dickens. I could have kept buying more, except that my small apartment would only take so many books and I was very conscious about curbing my expenditure.
Jan was the girl behind the counter at the bookshop. She was somewhat punky – her hair had been dyed the color of cotton candy – and she told me she’d already had a couple of ‘out there’ stories published in small magazines. She also tried to engage me in dialog.
‘You’re in here every afternoon,’ she said.
‘I’m a person of routine.’
‘And a good customer. You wouldn’t happen to be a writer?’
‘Just a reader.’
‘You mind me asking you your name?’
We introduced ourselves.
‘Well, if you’re not a writer – and you’re in here every day – what do you do?’
‘I’m just taking a little time out from everything right now,’ I said.
‘And you chose Calgary to do that?’
‘I kind of fell into the place.’
‘Tell me about it. I was raised in Regina – a dump – and came here to the U. of C., and kind of never left. And, like, half of me thinks that the city is an ugly shithole – but one with these little pockets of cool which just about counterbalance the fact that the place looks like the set of one of those Kieslowski movies located in some Warsaw housing estate. You ever see
The Decalogue?
’
‘Yes, I know all ten full-filled episodes.’
‘Well, there are a bunch of us who get together every Thursday night in a room above here – and we show a couple of interesting movies and drink a bit too much and pretend we’re in Paris or Prague or Berlin. If you were interested . . .’
‘I’ll think about it,’ I said. My tone hinted that I wasn’t in a sociable place right now.
Jan seemed to understand as she said: ‘Anyway, if you’re ever up for hanging out with some like-minded souls, consider this an open invitation. We all think of ourselves as being in internal exile here.’
But I didn’t take Jan up on her offer. Because that would have meant actually talking with other people. Which, in turn, would lead to questions. And the questions would lead to . . .
Still, Jan seemed to grasp that I needed to play the solipsistic card right now, as she never pushed me for any further details about myself. I would drop in, browse, occasionally make a big purchase, and otherwise would pick up a book or two a week – and our talk would be limited to literature, something in the news, a new movie that just opened at the Uptown or the Globe or the Plaza: the three decent cinemas in town.
I had this sort of genial but distant relationship with every shopkeeper I got to know in my area. The guy at International News (where I could buy the
New Yorker
and the
New York Review of Books
), the woman at Reid’s stationers where I purchased ink and notebooks, the guy in the wine and cheese place on 11th Avenue where I dropped by twice a week to stock up on drink and comfort food . . . they all knew my name. They all exchanged pleasantries with me. They never tried to engage with me – because the signal I sent out to the world was:
Please don’t come too close
. This may have been a small city, but it was still
a city
. As such, if you chose a certain form of anonymity, people would accept it. Because that was the urban code . . . even in Calgary.
Time. I suddenly had a great deal of it on my hands. With no employment, no ties, no responsibilities, no clear need to do anything other than get through the day, I found myself still looking for ways to keep busy. The café. The bookshop. Home to read for three hours. A longish walk, during which I’d also buy groceries. Home again to do ninety minutes’ worth of French (I bought grammar books and some basic texts, determined to finally crack the language . . . but also knowing that it filled a gap during the day). Then I would force myself out most nights – to a movie, a concert, a talk at a bookshop, anything that could divert me.
Time. Time. Time. By the end of April the temperature was gradually heading north. I bought a second-hand bicycle with a decent set of panniers large enough to fit in several days’ worth of groceries. It also brought me around town. With the exception of events at the University of Calgary, the bike would get me pretty much everywhere I wanted to go: to the cinemas, to a coffee place in Kensington which roasted its own beans, to the bi-weekly literary readings at the McNally bookshop on 8th, to the occasional classical concert at the Jack Singer Hall . . .
Had I wanted to, I could have rented a car and headed out of town in the direction of Banff and the Rockies. But I knew I still couldn’t bear the idea of looking at anything scenic, dramatic, momentous. Best to stick to Calgary’s concrete mundanity. Its habitable bleakness perfectly reflected the inside of my head.
Time. Time. Time. I broke down and bought a small television and a DVD player. Though I never signed up for the cable television service in the building, I did start to make use of a very good film library a few streets away from me. It proved useful on those nights when the pills didn’t do their chemical magic and I jolted awake and had to read or watch something to keep the darkness at bay. I found that, in the middle of the night, I couldn’t handle anything life-affirming or consoling. No Frank Capra movies, no re-viewings of
ET
. I worked my way through Dickens’s
Bleak House
, fascinated by the way he could write a social novel that also grappled with melancholia. I watched Carl Theodore Dreyer’s
Day of Wrath
– about witch burning in seventeenth-century Denmark – and all of Bergman’s island films. When I found myself in the film-rental place reaching for Klimov’s
Come and See
(about the Nazi massacre of a Belarus village) I actually had a manic fit of the giggles and wondered:
Will there ever come a moment when I can get through a night again without a medicinal dose of desolation?
The problem was compounded by the amount of booze I was putting away. I’d get home from a film or a concert. I’d down three glasses of wine and then take my pills. Sleep would hit. Four hours later I would be wide awake again. So I’d open Dickens or pop on Bergman’s
The Passion of Anna
and down another three glasses of something red – and maybe surrender to sleep sometime just before seven, staying in bed until noon. But after around three months of broken nights I woke up yet again with another hangover and thought:
Maybe I do need to take this in hand
.
This meant going to a doctor. In turn this also meant finally dealing with officialdom. After four months in Calgary I was finally informing Canada that I was residing in their country. So I went to the payphone I used outside the Shopper’s Drugstore, called Information and asked the woman on the line: ‘How do I register for social security?’
‘You mean social insurance?’
‘Is that what they call it?’
‘Yes, that’s what they call it,’ she said, polite but just a little tetchy. ‘Here’s the number . . .’
That afternoon I presented myself at a government building. I filled out the requisite forms. I proffered my passport. I was interviewed by a courteous if chilly woman who asked me a lot of questions about why I had only now, at the age of thirty-three, registered for a social insurance number.
‘I’ve never lived in Canada.’
‘And why was that?’ she asked, her tone officious.
‘Because I was brought up in the United States.’