Authors: Joan Thomas
In a workshop held in an old convent, in a stale-smelling room with a crucifix and dried reeds over the door, they talked about their primary relationships. Aiden told the group about an incident with Liz from the early days, before Sylvie was born. He owned a motorcycle, a Honda Interstate, and one day he and his buddy Glen went out for a highway ride. The big Harley-Davidson rally was happening that week in Sturgis, South Dakota, and when they stopped to grab a bite to eat, Glen suggested going, just for a laugh. Aiden had a chunk of time off, so he said, “Sure.” He called Liz from a payphone at the gas station and ended up leaving a cryptic message, intending to call again later. Somehow it didn’t happen that first day, and then it didn’t happen at all. When he got home, every muscle shaken to mush after four days on the road and sporting a
WHAT WOULD JESUS RIDE
? T-shirt, Liz’s sister Maureen, who lived in Toronto, was at the house. She and her husband both came to meet him at the door, as though they lived there and Aiden didn’t. It turned out that Liz’s father had suffered a heart attack the night Aiden left for Sturgis, and he’d passed away just that morning. He was sixty, an insurance salesman, about to retire.
Possibly the crucifix over the door had encouraged Aiden to mistake his therapy group for a confessional, but that’s the first story he told them. Edith Wong was the one who spoke into the silence when he was done. “How did your wife react when she saw you?”
“She said, ‘I’d throw you out if I had the energy.’ She got over it eventually. But I felt like a true piece of shit.”
“And why didn’t you call her?”
“Well, obviously, if I’d had any idea what was happening—”
Edith cut him off. “Come on,” she said. “This isn’t about your father-in-law’s death. This is about the disrespect you show your wife when you take off for four days and don’t even let her know where you are.”
“I had every intention of calling again the first day. And then when I realized I’d forgotten … I guess the idea of not calling began to take hold.” This was more than he had ever admitted to Liz.
“So it made you feel good to think of her in distress?”
Well, all right, this was the sort of ballsy response he came to value in that group. With all those thoughtful female eyes on him, he acknowledged something he’d never seen before: how afraid he was of being sucked into something that would drain the life out of him. But he also took a stand for a high degree of autonomy in relationships, as a matter of principle, as a counterbalance to all the compromises you have to make. His own quasi-marriage was better off for a bit of breathing room, he insisted, though he didn’t go so far as to mention the great sex he and Liz sometimes had after a nasty standoff.
But the women in his group got the picture. “Woo-hoo, Aiden,” somebody called. “Treat her mean, keep her keen.”
Okay. He came out of that group understanding that few relationships would have survived what he put Liz through in their early
days. But he never cheated on her and he never lied, not about anything big. And she was feisty as well. If he didn’t come home when she expected, she never whined, she never said, I was terrified. I thought you were dead in an alley somewhere. She got what it was about and she met it square on.
And as provocative as his behaviour might sometimes look from the outside, as unlucky as the timing of that Sturgis trip turned out to be, somebody had to draw a line in the sand with Liz. When he first met her, she had him over for an amazing meal – Moroccan-style lamb cooked in an authentic tagine dish. Sitting in an armchair afterwards, finishing off the Beaujolais and soaking up the quirky charm of her apartment, he said to himself, It could be like this every day. But of course that sort of comfort comes with a pile of domestic expectations. Liz came by it honestly – you spent an evening with her mother and by eight o’clock you were ready to stick pins in your eyes.
And there was this: if Liz had had power of veto over his entry into the
MIFT
program, she would have used it, and she’d have been wrong. His move to counselling made no external sense but it had a deep internal logic. He was doing something hopeful and he was better at the work than he would have predicted. He’d found a profession that asked him to bring to it everything he was. You didn’t need to have worked through all your own issues – well, you did, to the point that your ego needs didn’t intrude in the relationship with the client – but beyond that it was a matter of listening intelligently and being real.
He swallows the last of his coffee. It’s stone cold. He feels weighed down by sadness. For his lovely daughter and for himself as well, because her energy and spirit have buoyed him up for two decades. He can trace his funk right back to the Grandparents’ Summit, to that moment at the end, the Annunciation. All night
he brooded on the angel’s terrible message:
Business as usual, over the brink
.
He glances at the clock on the mantel. It’s after eleven. He’s got to muster his energy, get into some reading, start a project of some kind. Be the sort of person who charts the squirrel population in his spare time. Work would have helped him today. Every tiny step a client takes, negligible in itself, helps to build the dike that holds back the deluge. Or maybe it’s just that work lifts him out of himself. Is out of himself where he wants to be?
To forestall getting sucked into that particular loop, he leans over, picks up the phone, and calls his message function. He can hardly recall who he saw just before Christmas, what with all the chaos at home. Odette Zimmerman. And there’s fallout, a message left on Christmas Day.
“Mr. Phimister,” she says (already he knows she’s in a rage), “I need a therapist who understands that feelings are honest and need to be affirmed. Not a
moralist
who thinks in black and white. On Thursday I paid you a hundred dollars to be told what a bad person I am. I’ve been sitting here wondering why I would keep doing that. This message is to cancel my standing appointment.” An intake of breath.
Click
.
Oh shit. Aiden sinks his fingers into Max’s ruff and stares at the ashes in the fireplace. He has to talk to Edith Wong.
And then worry for a different client starts up – for Jake Peloquin, a.k.a. Defrag, who is never far from Aiden’s thoughts, especially when he cancels so abruptly. He’s been a client off and on since Aiden started his practice. He takes a break when he’s maxed out his benefits package, and then when he’s eligible again or has enough cash, he phones Aiden and says, “Can you fit me in for a defrag?”
Jake makes it sound like a discretionary thing, but Aiden has been his lifeline for years. He’s alone. His long-time girlfriend was
someone Aiden knew by reputation, a woman named Jessie Alwin who had started a terrific transition-to-employment program for youth in the North End. She was very highly regarded in the city. But she had one of those diseases where your body turns against itself, and it eventually killed her. Her death was the tipping point for Defrag. When he first came to see Aiden, he had serious slashes crosshatching the insides of both arms. For a while he was also seeing a psychiatrist, who had him on antidepressants, and Aiden and the psychiatrist consulted. But now it’s just him and Aiden.
Defrag has a job at the university, some arcane singular position related to data flow, but he’s always got an art project on the go. He’s into the sort of work where the artist surrenders any role in shaping the image. Lately he’s been taping pinhole cameras to trees. They’re 35-millimetre film canisters with a hole pierced in them using the finest needle available, an acupuncture needle. The little bit of light leaking through that tiny hole is enough to leave a ghostly impression on the film or paper or whatever’s inside. Defrag’s hidden these cameras all over the city. He’s going to leave them up for six months and see what they have to show him.
Defrag has a project
. A little gust of hope and energy accompanies this thought. Seizing on it, Aiden climbs the stairs to the loft and gets dressed. When he comes downstairs in his running gear, the dog is thrilled. “Sorry, buddy,” Aiden says, pushing past him out the door.
It’s a relief to be outside. He walks up to Portage Avenue, catches a westbound bus, and gets off at the park. Standing by a bench, he bends over his extended femur, counts to thirty. Lifts his head, looks up through the trees into space, at garbage from satellites falling into the ether. Straightens, gives himself a shake. Does a little prance, impersonating a runner, just to get his blood up. Picks his gravel path and sets off. One of Defrag’s cameras is along this
trail. He first located it about a month ago – Defrag told him how to triangulate to find it.
It’s still there, duct-taped to the trunk of a native basswood almost bereft of branches, about eight feet up. It looks undisturbed. As Aiden runs by he can’t resist lifting a hand in a two-finger wave.
When he gets home, Liz is in the kitchen, just hanging up the phone. “So that’s that,” she says, aggrieved, which is always her way when she’s fighting tears. “I guess I was hoping Sylvie got it wrong.”
“Sylvie’s doctor? You tracked her down?”
Liz nods.
“What did she say?”
“She wouldn’t talk to me about it, as I’m not the patient. But she said, ‘I can’t refer for an emergency ultrasound unless the case is urgent. Like, if the pregnant woman is in the first trimester and termination is still an option.’ ”
So. They stand and look at each other for a long minute.
“She sounds about twelve,” Liz says. “But I can only assume she’s qualified.”
“Are you going to tell Sylvie you called?”
“Of course not. I’m going to go upstairs and email the child support guidelines to Maggie. Then I’m going to break the news to Vacances françaises and
beg
them to refund the deposit for Sarlat. After that I’m going to cancel our airline tickets and get a voucher from Air Canada. Then I’m going to check out the private adoption websites.”
They turn down two invitations and they even bow out of the New Year’s Eve party on the next street. Noah’s still in Calgary and Sylvie is working on her take-home exams and her botany paper. Her friends come calling – the big-haired little troll and others he doesn’t know. They crowd into the hall with suppressed excitement
on their faces, never mentioning the baby, as though Sylvie is pulling a fast one on her parents. Sylvie comes up from the basement wearing a big sweater that hides what her friends likely call her bump. She looks as though she’s run out of nerve.
On a day when hoarfrost blossoms over the city, Aiden walks up to the little house north of Portage where he was raised. He chips the ice off Rupert’s sidewalk and then he starts up Rupert’s old Chevy and takes him grocery shopping. It’s been five years since Rupert lost his licence but he’s stubbornly hung on to the Chevy Caprice Brougham he bought new in 1986 and considered the fulfillment of all his earthly ambitions. His wife died in that car, and he just kept on driving it.
After the groceries are hauled in and unpacked, Aiden collects the garbage and takes it out, in the process locating the source of the stench in the kitchen, a hamburger patty rotting on a saucer in the cereal cupboard. He cleans the bathroom, scrubbing at the dried piss spackling the floor. How long can this go on? Nobody else is going to step up. Carl is three thousand miles away and apparently doesn’t own a phone, and Ken – who knows? A few years back he did time for boosting merchandise off the loading dock at Home Depot, and then he dropped out of sight altogether.
All afternoon Rupert sits in his recliner watching game shows. Once in a while Aiden throws a jocular comment in his direction, but he never gets anything back. It’s characterized by aphasia, Rupert’s dementia, but it’s of a piece with how he’s always been. He’s shrinking, he’s stooped, his stomach is rising towards his armpits, forcing all his fundamental qualities to the surface: his disgust for everything outside his narrow ken, his contempt for words. “Feet” is the one cogent thing he’s said to Aiden all day, as in
Wipe them
. (“Aw, suck it up,” Aiden said under his breath.)
He tramps down to the basement and then he’s pulled back to a savage fight he had there with Ken, in which he resorted to scoring Ken’s ribs with a pick comb. A girl’s defence – no wonder they despised him. A lifetime ago, but it still hangs in the air in this house, the ugly fear that wracked him for years: that, unlike his brothers, he would fail at being a thug. “Where are ya now, ya losers?” Aiden calls, flicking on the basement light.
Three cheap vacuum cleaners are snarled under the basement stairs. None of them work. Aiden messes with them for a while and then he gives up, goes back upstairs to the kitchen and runs a rag mop over the linoleum floor. He picks up two bread crusts and a Bran Buds box from under the table. He shoves a footbath up onto the hat shelf in the closet to get it out of the way.
“Couldn’t walk out of Canadian Tire empty-handed, could you, Dad,” he says. In fact, that’s the entire reason Rupert owned wilderness property – it was an excuse to buy stuff. To talk about stuff with other men, to source it cheap, to transport it and install it and tinker with it. Diesel engines and generators, fish locators, buoys. Log splitters, chainsaws, power winches, gas tanks. After Aiden took possession of the cottage, he had the guy from the marina bring over the construction barge and they loaded it up with all that dreck, as well as an old
TV
and rabbit ears (which had never remotely worked), two lawn mowers, two large animal traps, a hooded hairdryer, plastic fish, a plastic lettuce spinner, and a fucking plastic swimming pool. Aiden paid a fortune to have it all hauled away and dumped on some other patch of the Canadian Shield.
He sticks the mop back into the crack beside the fridge and glances over to the chair, where Rupert is asleep now, his chin on his chest. “And it’ll be me who shovels this shithole into landfill,” Aiden says. He raises his voice. “As if I don’t have enough of my own crap.” Rupert doesn’t stir.
Midafternoon, he closes the door and steps outside. The frosted branches and telephone wires are still extravagantly beautiful against a blue sky, but they’re starting to drop white petals in the sun. He stands on the back step for a minute, breathing out his rancour into the humid air, before he sets out for home.