The Garneau Block Page 3

  “Sweetheart, are you glum?” said Shirley, into his ear.

  He kissed his wife’s hand. “Just pensive.”

  “Why did you read ghastly Heidegger during dinner? Not reading Heidegger is what Monday nights are all about.”

  “Shhh.”

  The performers began walking out on stage, one by one, to introduce themselves. Every night of the soaps began this way, with the major characters delivering an improvised monologue. According to the photocopied program notes, the new season was set during the fur trade. There was a British governor type, who claimed in his monologue that he sought to deflower each of the savage virgins of the river valley. Next came a sexy native princess, wearing almost nothing, her warrior suitors wearing even less, a Jewish whisky trader, and a few voyageurs speaking snarly French. Shirley and Raymond’s Garneau Block neighbour and crowd favourite Jonas Pond came last, as the noble chief Lacumseh. During his brief introductory appearance on stage, Lacumseh sucked most of his laughs out of insulting the coureurs de bois.

  Madison Weiss was sitting directly in front of Raymond. She was another regular at the soaps, and she almost always came alone. The show began in earnest, with the director calling out the first scene–Lacumseh meeting with his sexy princess daughter to discuss birth control. Raymond waited until the audience was fully engrossed. When it was clear Shirley was not paying attention to him he leaned forward and tried to smell Madison’s shiny red hair and the soft skin at the back of her neck. The lights flashed, so he eased back. Raymond admired the texture of Madison’s laugh–the demure squeak at the climax and the falling rumble into silence.

  On stage, Lacumseh called his princess daughter a nihilist for refusing to believe in Manitou, the god of all that is good. The daughter sulked in the Cree equivalent of a black turtleneck and beret, and smoked her peace pipe in an affected manner. Raymond knew several people in his department, including the chair, would be shocked and offended by these portrayals: in 2005, First Nations peoples were not on the list of approved subjects for mockery. Personally, he was offended by the troupe’s shallow treatment of nihilism.

  Nihilism, for Raymond, was a rigorous philosophical concept. Once you got past yourself and your being-in-the-world, once you fully grasped nothingness, nihilism overcame nihilism. Once you understood there was no self and no soul outside the one you know intrinsically, the one who eats and drinks and excretes in the mundane world, you could return to the mundane world and see its magic. Once you accepted that everyone in the theatre, the performers and the audience, and all their dreams, would be rotten and forgotten in a hundred years, the world was a sudden carnival. Public opinion no longer affected you. Trends and fashions became irrelevant, or they became everything. Hallelujah, you would die. The blood pumping beneath the surfaces of your old skin was the entire universe.

  “Isn’t this hilarious?” Shirley whispered.

  Now the competing warriors were drinking firewater with the jolly whisky trader and a blindfolded voyageur whose eyes had been eaten out by bears. The warriors wanted to discover a way to impress the indifferent princess, so the blind voyageur suggested a semi-nude wrestling match: “It is the foremost desire of every princess.” Since the rules of improvisation require the dramatization of every suggestion, the warriors began removing their leather clothing.

  The audience howled as the lights went down. Madison clapped and said, “Aw, jeez.”

  What would it take, Raymond thought, for Madison Weiss or even her mother to say “Aw, jeez” about something he had done? Raymond applauded with the crowd as the lights came back up. The sweaty young men had dropped to the black stage floor in the darkness, and now they were fighting. Raymond could practically see the whirring of the improvisers’ brains as the battle transformed from amateur to professional wrestling. Lacumseh and his daughter were in birch thrones, sitting before the combatants. How old was Jonas Pond now? He must be in his mid-forties, yet he remained here, frolicking with these children. A man with his talent and nimble intelligence might have done anything, yet here he was, a professional actor in Edmonton. Living in one half of a rented duplex.

  Raymond vowed to speak with Jonas about his hopes and dreams, such as they were, and to correct his naïve definition of nihilism. Nihilism was so much more than an affectation. He wondered if Jonas would attend the Let’s Fix It meeting downtown next week.

  The scene ended as expected, with the beautiful princess bored by the display of masculinity. Yet the audience exploded in applause at the end of it, as though they had just witnessed a work of unqualified genius. This is what we do in Edmonton, thought Raymond. This is why Jonas Pond didn’t move to New York.

  Shirley had taken Raymond’s hand again, so when it came time to clap she slapped his wrist. In the darkness between scenes she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. Then, just before the lights came up again, Raymond seized the opportunity to lean down and smell the back of Madison’s neck.

  It smelled sweetly of nothing.

  7

  his name was carlos

  In the corner of The Next Act pub, three men in baseball caps and rugby jerseys smoked on the sly. They cupped their hands over their cigarettes, and the smoke sneaked up between their fingers. Jonas interrupted his theorizing about the Let’s Fix It signs to flag down the server.

  “Those three assholes back there are smoking.”

  The server took a deep breath, closed her eyes for a moment, and exhaled slowly. “Jonas, please. Don’t do this to me.”

  “I’ll call bylaw enforcement tomorrow morning if I must. What if a pregnant woman came in here? What about your own fragile lungs, and the cancer that runs in your family?”

  “How did you know cancer runs in my family?”

  Jonas pointed to his temple. Then he made a phone out of his hand.

  “You’re a dirty narc.”

  Jonas lifted his nearly empty pint glass and smiled. “And another one of these?”

  “I’m gonna spit in it,” said the server, and started over to the men in the corner.

  Madison pushed her glass of club soda and cranberry juice around the table. “Remember, it’s still a secret that I’m pregnant.”

  “I didn’t say anything specific about you.”

  “You haven’t told anyone?”

  “No and I never would. Not until you’re ready or it becomes obvious, fat-wise, and I can’t bear to hear people gossiping about how you’ve let yourself go.”

  In the darkness of her basement bedroom, during episodes of insomnia, Madison often found herself thinking about Jonas. He drank too much beer and he was about three times more sarcastic than he had to be, but she felt he would make a terrific father. Plus, he was smart and handsome, and sported visible stomach muscles. Out of selfishness, Madison found herself wishing Jonas could set his homosexuality aside for seventeen or eighteen years so they could raise her child together. Once or twice a week, with the bedroom curtain open, the moonlight hitting his body, they could…no.

  Jonas had been wondering aloud about 10 Garneau, whether Mr. or Mrs. Let’s Fix It was a literalist. Did the mystery person intend to erase Benjamin Perlitz from history? To repair the bullet holes and bloodstains, and make the house pretty again for Jeanne and Katie to move back in? If so, the mystery person was a jackass. The men in ball caps extinguished and surrendered their cigarettes. Jonas mimed applause and returned to his thought. He had started backstage with half a bottle of champagne, so a slur was easing into his voice. “In a couple of months, someone new will be in 10 Garneau. Your mom and Shirley can make dips, throw a welcome barbecue, a bottle of red and a bottle of white, some microbrew, the Barenaked Ladies on the hi-fi…”

  “Jonas, it’s not that easy.”

  “I’m not going to any meeting. No way. I’m ideologically opposed.” He lifted his glass, to remind the server. The server squinted with mock-malevolence. Jonas winked at her. “Our waitress covets me.”

  “We all do, Jonas.”

 
“I know, I know. Yet I’m so old.”

  “You’re not.”

  “For the last twenty years, I’ve been waiting for this special thing to happen to me. Do you know what that thing is?”

  “Yes, Jonas.”

  “I have been waiting patiently and tragically for Lorne Michaels to fly up here and whisk me to New York.”

  Madison played an invisible violin.

  Jonas slapped at the instrument. “All these cute young Edmonton boys have made it down there in the last few years, inferior performers. But I’ve been good about it. Haven’t I been good about it, supportive and gracious?”

  Madison had been through this many times before. For people like Jonas, to live in Edmonton was to live in a state of perpetual failure. His successful friends in Vancouver and Toronto begged him to leave, to live in a place where the same-sex marriage debate hadn’t been so mean. And what about the trucks? All the big, shiny, pointless trucks? “Absolutely supportive and gracious,” said Madison.

  The server arrived with his third pint of Honey Brown ale, and Jonas thanked her and called her gorgeous. “Swoon,” she said, and swooned.

  Jonas tinked his glass with Madison’s, and took a great slurp of beer. “I think, after I’m done this, we should go on a little expedition.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Yes, tonight.”

  “What sort of expedition?”

  “You’ll see, sister.”

  A young man, about Madison’s age, approached the table and cleared his throat. He wore khakis and a white T-shirt with a West Coast Choppers logo. On his right arm, just below the hem of the shirtsleeve, a Canadian flag tattoo. Madison expected him to ask for directions to the nearest Bruce Willis film festival.

  “Hi. Um, I just wanted to, uh, say…”

  Jonas hopped up out of his chair. “Spit it out!”

  Frightened, the young man took a step back. “I, uh, I think you’re real good.”

  “Real good, eh?”

  The young man swallowed, and nodded. “I just wanted to say that.”

  “Well, thanks. That’s very kind of you.”

  They stood about five feet apart. Madison recognized this as the usual distance between boxers, before they stepped in to wallop one another. The young man was handsome enough, in his way. But next to Jonas’s canary-yellow shirt and tight Diesel jeans, the stranger looked like a soccer referee.

  “My name’s Carlos,” he said, and extended his hand for a shake.

  “Oh, it is not!”

  Carlos took another step back and turned his head slightly, like a confused cat. “But. It is my name.”

  The oddly tense handshake made Madison feel like a voyeur. Jonas slapped him on the tattoo. “Carlos. I’ve seen you before.”

  “Whenever I’m not working I come to your plays, and the soaps.”

  “Want to join us for a drink?”

  Carlos looked down at Madison and smiled. “Uh, no. Thanks. I have to split. Bye.” And with that, he snaked around the tables and exited onto the sidewalk.

  “That was bizarre.” Jonas sat down, and took a sip of beer. “Wouldn’t you say?”

  “Quite bizarre.”

  “Sorry, I’m drunk and forgetful. What were we talking about before Carlos came around?”

  “An expedition.”

  “Yes!” Jonas attempted to finish his beer in one giant gulp. Near the bottom, he took a break to burp and breathe and say, “Whoa, that really burned.” He dabbed the corners of his mouth with a napkin. “Are you ready?”

  8

  fear and scotch whisky

  Jonas and Madison began the expedition at the Commercial Hotel liquor store. While Jonas went inside to spend his meagre theatrical earnings for the night on a bottle of twelve-year-old Scotch–the craving had hit him “like a tongue in the ear”–Madison waited on the sidewalk. She watched the bikers and the university students mingle inside Blues on Whyte and felt the bass line in her stomach. Mozart was good for developing babies. How about “Sweet Home Chicago”?

  The father was Québécois, she knew that much. One day in the middle of June, a different sort of craving had hit Jonas. Rocky Mountains! They borrowed David’s Yukon Denali and started out on the Yellowhead Highway. Jonas had never tried camping and he seemed quite eager, but as soon as they reached the site he grew fearful of grizzly bears, mosquitoes, bush people, and needing to pee in the middle of the night. So they booked a room at the Amethyst Lodge in Jasper.

  That evening, in the Downstream bar, they met a group of five unshaven Québécois. Jonas fell for their accents but, unfortunately, they were all straight and none of them was given to experimentation. One of the Québécois, who said his name was Steve, taught Madison how to play the Deer Hunter video game. When they were both drunk, Madison noticed that Steve’s friends smiled every time they called him Steve. It occurred to her that Steve was not, traditionally, a French name.

  Minutes after she agreed to go back to his hotel room, so she could try the Québécois delicacy Map-o-Spread, Madison was quite certain that one of these friends called him Jean-François. Or was it Jean-Luc? Jean-Marc? Looking back, she had been disappointed to learn that Map-o-Spread was sugary goo with artificial maple flavouring. And that Steve didn’t believe in deodorant. And, finally, that he had impregnated her sometime between 3:00 and 3:05 in the morning.

  Jonas emerged from the Commercial Hotel liquor store with a beige tube labelled The Balvenie. “Next to the liquor store, all these sad old people are playing video lottery terminals. You wanna see?”

  “I’m good, Jonas, thanks.”

  They started east down Whyte Avenue. Even on Monday night it was a zoo of young drunks screaming at one another. Harleys and four-cylinder cars with modified muffers popped and roared past young women, and the young women ignored them. Madison remembered a word from high school biology that defined this behaviour in the context of birds and baboons: displaying.

  Jonas pulled the Scotch bottle out of the tube, admired its shape aloud, and dropped it back inside.

  When the bars and nightclubs gave way to restaurants, clothing stores, and purveyors of French bread, they ventured north and walked up the dimly lit residential streets so Jonas could drink Scotch without getting a ticket. Lost in vague memories of her baby’s father and feeling guilty that she hadn’t been listening to any classical music in the last three months, Madison ignored Jonas. Somehow he had veered from video lottery terminals to the plight of Aboriginals. Inhabiting the great chief Lacumseh on stage had made him thoughtful.

  “It’s the great social tragedy of our era,” he said, with a rolling slur. “What are we supposed to do?”

  Madison knew what her father would say, so she said something like it. “There isn’t enough money in the world to pay everyone whose parents or grandparents or great-great-grandparents have been wronged. We can only facilitate.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything.”

  The dark living rooms of Strathcona flashed with blue television light. It felt later than midnight to Madison, who was losing her taste for an expedition. One of these days she would pass into her second trimester and she would stop feeling so tired and nauseous. Laundry detergent and roasted garlic would stop smelling like raw sewage.

  “Jonas, what sort of expedition is this? It seems we’re going home.”

  “Don’t attack the dignity of the expedition.”

  “I’m pretty tired. If this expedition ends in my bed, I’ll be very pleased.”

  When they reached the block, Madison was overcome with fatigue. She hoped Jonas had drowned his expeditionary energy with The Balvenie. She followed him past his duplex and past her parents’ house next door, and stopped with him before the shadowed misery of 10 Garneau. Street lamps illuminated the logo’d trash on the front lawn, evidence of the university students who had walked through the block that morning on their way to school. Madison stopped on the sidewalk and opened her mouth to repeat her preference for going to sleep when J
onas stepped into the yard.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Let’s move.”

  Madison hadn’t been on the property for two weeks, since the police and fire trucks and media vans had been parked out front. It was like walking under a ladder or crossing the path of a black cat or committing to atheism: maybe supernatural forces didn’t exist but maybe, just maybe, they did. She remained on the sidewalk.

  With the bottle of Scotch in one hand and the beige tube in the other, Jonas crept along the side of the house like a ninja with an inner-ear infection. He stopped at a basement window and turned around. “Come on, Maddy!”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “What are you afraid of?”

  Well, everything.

  9

  madison and jonas partake of an expedition

  When Benjamin and Jeanne Perlitz bought the half-burned brick bungalow at 10 Garneau in late winter 2000, large machinery arrived almost immediately. Madison’s parents had been relieved to learn a new family was moving into and renovating the house which had been a rental property before the electrical fire. The Garneau Block remained the cheapest and blandest crescent in the otherwise upscale historic neighbourhood, but the burned husk and the random piles of trash sitting in the yard for two years had dragged the other four houses into the realm of residential decay.

  Relief transformed to alarm at the end of March when the large machinery began tearing the house down. Soon afterward, a crew arrived to start building another one. What were those items in the trailer? Those couldn’t be strips of mustard-coloured vinyl siding. One morning in April, David Weiss wandered over and asked for the architect in charge of the project.

  Four men in hard hats laughed at him. Architect! That was a lulu.

  David got a petition together and took it to city council as treasurer of the Garneau Community League. He also subtly tossed in the fact that he was president of the Strathcona PC Riding Association. City council listened and understood, but there was really nothing they could do. Since the ninety-year-old house on the site had been damaged by fire, Benjamin and Jeanne Perlitz could build whatever they liked as long as it was up to code. Yes, Mr. Weiss, even a mustard monstrosity, a “retarded cardboard schoolbus of a house” that looked like it belonged in the deepest, most treeless subdivisions of northeast Calgary.