The Garneau Block (31 page)

 

90

mythic furniture

R
ajinder piloted the rented moving truck into a strip mall on Gateway Boulevard. It was an unusually warm December day, with a sweet-smelling wind blowing in from the distant western hills, so Jonas had the window open in the passenger seat. High in the cab of the truck, which came with a
CB
labelled “Don't Touch,” Jonas pretended his can of root beer wasn't diet. He pretended he cussed regularly and had trouble with his little lady back home.
Darlene
.

When Rajinder pulled the key out of the ignition, Jonas hopped out and pretended he was pot-bellied and bowlegged. He cussed quietly about Darlene, who never did the damn dishes.

“Did you hurt yourself?” Rajinder stopped at the entrance to Shangri-La Exotic Home Decor. “And who are you speaking with?”

Jonas walked normally. “It's a political exercise I've invented. Over the course of the election campaign, I want to
inhabit
the voters.”

“What does that mean?”

“I've never been a handyman, a mover, a roofer, a digger, a roughneck. I've never been a secretary or an accountant or a housewife. But I have to appeal to all of them.”

Rajinder did not seem to know how to respond. He opened the door to Shangri-La and allowed Jonas to lead him to the bookshelves and cabinets. To fully express Edmonton's diversity, they wanted to display the small objects of mythic power on furnishings from around the world. Nordic, yes, but African and Indonesian, too.

This was their fourth trip in the rented moving truck in as many days, as 10 Garneau was to be completed by the weekend. Rajinder and Jonas had moved the Perlitz belongings into storage. Then they had bought lumber, paint, and other building supplies for the volunteer carpenters and designers. Now, Rajinder and Jonas were driving all over the city to buy tables, counters, shelves, and hanging baskets.

The owner of Shangri-La offered them tea, coffee, or hot chocolate while they browsed. But they didn't have time to browse. Jonas chose two cabinets and Rajinder picked two matching bookshelves. They parked at the back of the strip mall and stuffed new items in with other shelves, tables, 1930s stereo boxes, and extended glass display cases.

Back in the van, Rajinder reached out and squeezed Jonas's arm. “Are you Jonas or are you inhabiting a garbage man or somesuch? At this moment?”

“At this moment, Jonas.”

“Good. Now, since you are Madison's best friend, this may feel like an imposition or a betrayal of her trust. But please. Tell me. How does she feel about traditions like marriage?”

Rajinder turned out on to the street. Jonas leaned into the passenger door and smiled. “You're blushing, Raj.”

“No, I am not.”

“You are.”

“Remember, I am brown. If I were to blush, it would be invisible to the eyes of a white man. Please, do me the favour of answering the question without drawing undue attention to it.”

Jonas crossed his legs and said, “Hmm.” It pleased him to torture Rajinder. “Let me see now. Madison, Madison. Marriage, marriage. I know she wanted
me
to get married after the bill passed in the summer, but of course I had no one to marry. Still don't. Never will, most likely. It's hard for someone like me because I'm picky. I don't want to be with a funboy or a homophobe or a German. I can't explain why, but I have an aversion to Germans. And the town of Blackfalds. It's not a word I like to say: Blackfalds. Now Granum, however, is another thing altogether. I like saying Granum. Say it with me, Raj: Granum.”

“No. Answer my question.”

“Granum, Raj.”

“We have a saying in Punjabi:
thusi kalay kuthay kahn
.”

“No. Granum.”

“Here you go then: Granum. Please enjoy it.”

The sun broke through the clouds and reflected off puddles, concrete, cars and trucks, old hotels, discarded Tim Hortons cups. Both men gasped and reached for sunglasses. “Madison is
all for marriage. If the right person asked, she would even convert to Sikhism.”

Rajinder smiled. Driving north on 109th Street, past the big church on the right, he shook his head. “That would be unnecessary.”

“How are you feeling, Raj, about the pregnant thing? She's getting
huge
. Every time I see her now, all I can think is, Wow. Girl, you definitely had sex.”

“The physicality of it is extraordinary. I cannot imagine going through this myself. Men are so very lucky. Our burdens are light.”

“Unless you're born fruity.”

“Indeed, fruitiness is a heavy thing to carry.”

Rajinder pulled into the Garneau Block and, to Jonas's delight, backed on to the sidewalk in front of the Perlitz house. “Beep, beep, beep,” said Jonas, in time with the truck. Workers stripping the vinyl siding from the house and donors standing in line with small objects of mythic power parted to make room.

“Hello, good-looking people,” said Jonas, to the crowd in front of 10 Garneau.

The good-looking people greeted him. A small group of men hurried across the yard to help carry the furniture inside. Jonas didn't want to lift another heavy item as he had to go door-to-door in the morning with his new red pamphlets. A strained lower back would make him one grumpy Liberal.

Instead of lifting half a table or a bookshelf, Jonas jumped inside the back of the truck and pretended to be a manager. He furrowed his eyebrows and looked at his watch, said, “God damn it,” and made disdainful remarks about the volunteers.
To the bald man who prepared to lift one of the Shangri-La cabinets with Rajinder, he said, “Come on, come on. I'm not paying you to pick your nose here.”

The man opened his mouth in apparent horror. “Pick my…pardon?”

“Please ignore him,” said Rajinder. “He is pretending to be a nuisance.”

“Oh.”

Jonas followed Rajinder down the ramp. “So are you gonna ask Madison to–you know–have a monsoon wedding?”

“Go get a table.”

“Well, answer this. Do you know how to build
IKEA
things?”

Rajinder opened his nostrils.

“It looks easy, Raj, but it's really hard.”

“Stop
inhabiting
an imbecile and help us.”

Jonas left Rajinder and the bald stranger near the front door of 10 Garneau and returned to the truck, where he accused some volunteers of wasting company time.

 

91

small objects

I
n the living room of 10 Garneau, Abby and Madison sat behind two computers. They catalogued each small object of mythic power according to a number, a description, the owner's name,
and a sentence about its resonant properties. Raymond Terletsky, who discovered he was born to be a curator, greeted each donor at a small desk in between the kitchen and living room.

“It's a bird,” said a tiny, elderly woman. She held the ornamental blue jay in her quivering hands as though it would fly away if given the chance. “A local bird.”

Raymond had already written her name–Gladys Poon–and a description of the object. What he had to extract from her was its meaning. “Why is it important to you, and Edmonton?”

“Well,” said Gladys Poon. “You see, I feel for it.”

He pretended to write that down. “Where did you get the small bird?”

“My husband bought it for me sixty-two years ago. Every year at this time we would put it on top of our Christmas tree.”

“Instead of a star?”

“Yes.”

“Does Christmas mean a lot to you?”

“I'm Buddhist but I love the lights, giving presents, sharing time with friends and family.”

“So the bird…”

“The bird has soaked up sixty-two Christmases in our house. My husband has passed now, and the children have their own families, their own children and grandchildren. The bird is not lovely enough for any of their Christmas trees.”

Raymond lifted his pen in triumph. “Soaked up sixty-two Buddhist Christmases in the house of Gladys Poon.”

“Arthur and Gladys Poon, if you please.”

Raymond made the adjustment and took the bird. He
shook the tiny hand of Gladys Poon and guided her to the door. “I thank you, Mrs. Poon, and the entire city thanks you.”

“You're very welcome.”

Abby and Madison looked up from their computer monitors to say, in tandem, “Thank you, Mrs. Poon!”

As the volunteer greeter helped Mrs. Poon out of 10 Garneau, Raymond tore the sheet out of his ninth notepad and placed it in the in-tray of the Weiss women. He took the blue jay's sticky number, 9012, and pasted the number to its underside. The bird would either sit on one of the shelves with its sentence of resonant properties or wait in the storage area downstairs for its two weeks on display.

Raymond's job as curator was becoming increasingly difficult. More and more Edmontonians were lining up with their objects of mythic power, and the house was beginning to feel small. The university president and her entourage would arrive for a tour of 10 Garneau on the eighteenth of December, so between now and then Raymond had to decide on an opening exhibit. The collection of items had to represent the whole of Edmonton, its history and its contemporary social and political culture, the peculiarities of its people. The Great Spirit had to be perfect, even though it would lack the buffalo head–for now.

The bird would stay upstairs.

Screaming electric saws and twenty hammers, multiple footsteps on the second floor, the echoing voices of men and women, filled the house. Each room had to be transformed into a gallery space. Due to an odd confluence of noise just as the next donor entered, Raymond had to introduce himself with a
scream. He was so accustomed to this ritual that he hardly noticed the man before him, with a copy of Henry Kreisel's
The Betrayal
in a gloved hand, was Dean Kesterman.

Dean Kesterman removed his right glove and offered forth the novel. “Signed first edition,” he said.

“Do you have a moment to sit down, Dean?” Raymond pointed at the chair. “We have a bit of a formal process here. How long were you waiting?”

“An hour and a half, two hours. But there's a musician out there singing and playing guitar, and a woman gave us coffee and puffed wheat squares. I'm a little bit jumpy.”

Raymond numbered the book and wrote the Dean's name. He tried his best not to appear nervous or shameful. “You think we have a chance here?”

“Not a hope in hell.”

“You're wrong.”

“Between you and me, certain people are whispering there are better places for the Isley Centre. But they aren't the right people.”

Raymond enunciated. “I need a sentence from you that explains the resonance of your object.”

“I hardly need to defend a Henry Kreisel first edition.”

“It's part of what we're doing here.”

The Dean removed his hat and scratched his temple. “Let's see. Expert use of the North Saskatchewan River as symbol. An urban Edmonton novel with elements of the immigrant experience, which is really the Canadian experience. The death camps–”

“Sorry, Dean, Not good enough.”

Dean Kesterman sat up in his chair. “Well. Well, I didn't know I was going to be
judged
.”

“How about a quotation?”

“That's what I'm trying to give you, Raymond.”

“No, a quotation from the novel. Do you remember what it's about?”

“Of course I do!”

Raymond assured the Dean he would take care of it, and escorted him to the door. In tandem, Abby and Madison looked up from their computer monitors to say, “Thank you, Dr. Kesterman!”

The volunteers led two tubby and nervous adolescent boys into the house. Raymond stood in front of the picture window and surveyed the scene before him. Workers putting a new facade on 10 Garneau. A seemingly endless line of donors. Three women and a man behind a table borrowed from the community hall, brewing coffee and singing along with the guitarist. Beyond them all, his house across the street,
his house again
, the warmest place in the world.

 

92

fitfamily

T
he floor of the abandoned health club was strewn with dust, glass, Molson Canadian cans, Burger King detritus, nails and
screws, and smashed fluorescent light tubes. It looked to David as though a coil of human feces had been left on the boot mat in the entrance.

“What is that?” Abby looked down at the coiler.

“Just keep walking, honey.”

“It didn't look like the Hell's Angels clubhouse a month ago.”

David found the rest of the lights and the health club, 20,000 square feet in a strip mall south of Bonnie Doon, buzzed alive. The white tile floor threatened to burn David's retinas. “Do you have the equipment list? We better make sure when they cleaned up they didn't
clean up
.”

Still dazed by the sight of the coiler, Abby waved a faxed sheet of paper and approached a stairclimber. She plugged the machine into the wall and began stepping. The machine whirred. “Hooray.”

David plugged in a bank of stationary bicycles and elliptical trainers. “These work too.”

They inspected the machines, counted the barbells, and met in the middle of the room. Abby buried her face in David's shirt. “Can we hire people to clean this place?”

“Absolutely not.”

For the next hour they explored the club and strategized. They drew crude plans and, finally, swept the floor. Abby unplugged the machines and David turned out the lights. In the Prius, fear struck David like a bout of food poisoning. “What if we've done the wrong thing?”

“We haven't.”

“How can we move out of our house and build FitFamily at the same time?”

“We'll find a way.” Abby reached over and scratched the back of David's head. Her voice took on that authoritative yet reasonable tone, that new tone. “Flabby locals, with their under-stimulated children, need us so badly. The engines of capitalism must be stoked.”

David shook his head and parroted her: The engines of capitalism must be stoked. As much as he understood the professor's oddly chaste dalliances with younger women, at least once every day David Weiss congratulated himself for marrying Abby and never needing younger, dumber, less beautiful women to satisfy…what?

They crossed the Whyte Avenue bridge over the Mill Creek Ravine and snaked through the east Strathcona neighbourhoods. The houses for sale were the same houses for sale a week previous, $350,000 dumps rented out to stoners who didn't shovel the snow off their sidewalks. David was about to criticize the prices, the houses, and the stoners who lived in them when Abby did it for him.

“Vancouver East.”

David waited to turn back on to Whyte. The street lamp glow highlighted his wife's pretty face. “I am so lucky.”

“And don't you forget it.”

“Is the Perlitz house going to be ready?”

Abby smiled. “Even if the whole block has to work all night on Friday.”

“I'm not letting Madison stay up a moment after midnight.” David was curious about his daughter and Rajinder, as they were spending time together again, but he was afraid to ask Madison. Since she became an adult, David had taken a
let her
tell me if she wants to tell me
approach to parenting. “Has she said anything about Rajinder?”

“Not a thing.”

“Are they?”

“I don't know, David.”

“She'll tell us when she's ready. She'll do that, right? Tell us?”

“The girl's six months pregnant. It would certainly be a bizarre courtship. I just hope she doesn't get her hopes up and, you know.”

David started north toward the block. “It's not so bad, getting your hopes up. What's the alternative?”

Every night for five nights it had been the same; they accepted objects of mythic power until 10:00 p.m. and then sent everyone away with a goody bag of puffed wheat squares and a tiny plastic container of hummus. Few, if any, people complained.

Environment Canada was saying a genuine blast of winter weather was on the way, but David couldn't feel it. Neither could the dancing crowds in front of 10 Garneau. One of the Sugarbowl
DJ
s had set up on the newly painted porch, designed to look straight out of 1905, and played music that sounded to David like it ought to be a cartoon soundtrack.

Abby had already gone inside 10 Garneau so David pulled his hood over his head and walked and danced among the Edmontonians in the lineup, hoping to learn a thing or two about voter sentiment. To his disappointment, no one talked about politics.

Near the front of the line David almost walked right into Barry Strongman. Barry held a small medicine pouch in his hand
and stared straight ahead with a satisfied smile. An assistant was on a little silver cellular phone, waving his arms and frowning.

In his suit and wool overcoat, Barry Strongman looked calm and confident. He held the medicine pouch with great care. Standing in soft snow in the middle of the lawn, David's next instinct–to hide behind a spruce tree and whip a snowball at the back of Barry Strongman's head–faded into something like pride.