Chandelier, page 19
I shouldn’t remember this drive. It’s been years and years and I’ve only made the effort a few times. And not to stay; only a hurried look to confirm the cabin is still intact. It’s got its charms. A dramatic landscape. Granite rock-cuts and Group of Seven pines, little sudden lakes glimpsed through valley drops. I’ll make a note of that. I’ll showcase it in the telling. “Scenic, country escape.” Get their minds off the pavement as they drive this empty highway.
Another note: bring clients in summer.
Better: October when the leaves are an autumnal, crimson-bronze mosaic. Ooh, so beautiful. Find a perfect day. A crisp, blue sky and gentle breeze. Sells itself.
But I wonder what the cabin looks like now. More than a few years. I’d forgotten the property, actually. Easy to forget, tucked away up there in the woods, at the end of a difficult road and a short hike. I’ve been told the road is better now. Widened and resurfaced several times. Layers of repair. The small lake at the bottom has attracted cottagers these past decades. There’s been some development, though the cabin is useless where it is, too far up the mountain and too rustic for a comfortable weekend stay at the lake. Leave it to my relatives to build on a steep hill instead of grabbing something lakeside that could sell considerably higher years later. Maybe that’s why I’ve forgotten the place existed. Never really mine anyway. My aunt and uncle owned it. Kathleen and Gerry. They even had their names wood-burned into a square of cedar, then lacquered and nailed above the door, as if anyone was ever likely to pass by and need to know the names of the owners. But when Aunt Kathleen died, predeceased by Gerry, and there was no one else, the property was released into my name, their only living relative. I remember getting the notification in the mail, suspicious of the attorney’s stamp. I tore the envelope open, bracing for a lawsuit. Instead, I said to Hugo, “I’ve inherited property!” He looked at me with his own suspicion, hearing the sarcasm in my voice.
Laughing at me. “You have an Uncle Gerry and Aunt Kathleen?”
Correcting him: “Had.”
I never talk about family, parents, all that. The past etc. Hugo, my ex-husband, would ask occasionally. But it was not a point of discussion on my part and he didn’t press me. Don’t press me: he learned my look for that. I’m told I have several looks, many subtexts. I could fill the room with cold air by disliking something. One way of handling indecision: unpredictability. My sales have always been good.
The “property” is a few acres of wood lot and a one-room cabin of pine logs and barn boards built on a rise not quite a kilometre above Lac Henri. Legend has it my aunt and uncle purchased it from a conscientious objector in the late forties. What he probably objected to was getting mortared in the South Pacific, from what I understand. So, he’d followed the Adirondack ridges to the Laurentians and slipped across the New York–Quebec border one night and managed to buy the land with the help of a fake birth certificate and a no-questions-asked supply of cash. The municipality was happy to sell it; he was happy to pay their inflated price. That kind of mutual concord clears a lot of paths in my business. He’d come from a family of moonshiners and Appalachian trappers and knew a thing or two about living off the land, clearing trees and keeping his head down. The story dries up there. How the place ended in my relatives’ possession, I don’t know.
I went there when I was a child. Three, four summers. For what? What do I remember? Mosquitos. The forest path to the lake. My friend Daniel and I spent an evening salting a slug in a plastic cup, then torturing it over the fire. Maybe there’s no magic in childhood, just cruelty disguised as boredom. At the end of my teens, I stopped my visits and never went back. Uncle Gerry rented it each summer to god knows who would need it—serial killers or recluse alcoholics or suicidal poets—until just a few years before he died. The lawyer told me he’d gone peacefully in his sleep, but I’d missed the funeral by two years. I had lost touch with all of them. Gerry and Kathleen and little Danny. I was busy with clients and the housing boom. At the time it was 24/7 for me. If I blinked, I’d lose a thousand dollars.
* * *
In the heavy rain, the twists and turns are daunting smears of progress. I jam the ball of my foot down on the brake pedal as a truck’s high headlights kaleidoscope my view. Shattered gems of glare. I actually put on my seatbelt. Hate them, but. Had the shop disengage the warning light. Clicking the thing into the belt, I lose track of the centre line and thunder over rumble strips again. Fuck. Around yet another bend there’s a roadside rest stop and I pull in, not to eat any disgusting highway food, but for a break from the downpour. No one around anyway. A fluorescent strip light fills the interior of a chip truck but there’s nobody there. Onions Ring and Pop: $2.50 says a misspelled, handwritten poster in the sliding service window. Three picnic tables under collapsed patio umbrellas attest to what should be a bustling Sunday trade of local potatoes in lethally hot grease. It’s not a day for overweight cottagers. Unless they are building an ark. Maybe Noah was just building some picnic tables and the project got out of control.
Something sad about a picnic table in the rain.
This has to let up at some point.
Makes me wonder what kind of shape the cabin might be in. Abandoned for those many years. Who knows how much abuse it’s taken from big old Time. Or Gerry’s anti-social tenants. The elements. Rain and snow and wildlife.
Preparing myself for: rotting wood, a collapsed roof, infested crawlspaces. Raccoons and swarms of squirrels. Bird-shit carpet. I’m ready to write the whole thing off, sell the land for firewood. Won’t go below fifteen, but I’ll ask for twenty thousand. Even start at forty, fight for fifteen. I can finesse this.
Cozy cabin on hiking trail, with private access to lakeshore.
Idyllic private location on 1.8 acres of matured trees.
Hillside oasis.
Beautiful.
Better to give the place a name. Give the dump some posh. Push another few grand into the price. Warburton Regency Estate? Too much. Warburton Acres. Well, there’s barely two acres, but it’s close to plural. Canadiana instead of British snobbery?
Warburton Beaver Lodge?
No.
Okay: Warburton Acres Lodge: Ninety years young with private access to secluded lake. This charming rustic log cottage is perfect for owners who love to swim, hike, listen to the resident loons, sit by an original cut-fieldstone fireplace and soak in a claw-foot bathtub in the midst of a peaceful six-hundred-acre hardwood forest. Hillside oasis!
Exclamation mark?
Exclamation mark.
The description is inviting enough. And technically true. Well, no fireplace but an old woodstove. Doesn’t sound terrifying at all. I almost want to buy it. But better add within forty-five-minute drive to Ottawa.
Better offer the chance of escape.
I will also need to find a claw-foot bathtub. And some charm.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
How I ended up on the road driving north into western Quebec, just south of the Laurentian Mountains, desperate for money, hoping to assess and prepare an abandoned forest cabin for a quick sale, isn’t a complicated story. Even if you gather up all the complicated threads of bad investments, it comes down to the combination of dumb trust and a bent investor. A classic Ponzi scheme, actually. Threw a whole lot of my money, a lot of savings, into a pot with a big hole in it, though I kept being told there was something significant cooking. Not too complicated after all. The scoundrel Trevor Brent, my “investment advisor” came on strong with talk of percentages, high returns and minimum risk. When I asked for quarterly reports, he gave me charts and showed me numbers. He even cautioned me to go slow at times, wait a bit and keep some money back. Did I keep some back? Not really. Not much. Then two weeks ago, I got the call from Douglas, my associate at the realtors, sounding deathly and weird. Telling me: “I’ve got bad news.” Douglas had recommended Brent. They’d gone to school together. He cited consistent profits. So, we both threw money at Brent.
And Brent fucked us.
Never trust someone with two first names.
“I thought you’d gone to school with him?” I said to Douglas, still in disbelief. As if that would guarantee some ethical failsafe.
Douglas saying: “I did. High school. It was a long time ago.”
A long time ago. Long enough for anything, or nothing, Douglas seemed to imply. Long enough to chuck simple decency. Long enough for a person to change into a greedy, life-destroying, shit-headed, shit-for-a-soul piece of shit.
The money was gone. And so was Brent. As soon as the Ponzi scheme started to show its holes, he had slithered through one of them. His message centre had filled up. His office cleared out. Police went around to his condo and learned it had been sold years ago, the money pulled from a now-closed account. They tracked his address to an extended-stay hotel on Cooper Street, where he’d lived for the past nine months, but he was gone from there also, with three outstanding months left on the year lease. He’d already prepared to be a ghost if he needed to.
“We’ll catch him,” the police told me. “He’s sloppy.”
* * *
I’d kill for that coffee right now. I’ve been good. I’ve cut the tobacco forever, but some caffeine would help. Staring at the service window of the chip truck, hoping for movement. Someone in there? Please see me out here, stranded in the rain. And put a pot on!
Lots of land. Satellite town of the future. With the right development. What they need is an attraction, a getaway, like a winery. The climate and soil are garbage for grapes though. Maybe a spa. A yoga centre in the woods. Serenity on the Canadian Shield. Hmm. Pictures of an open-concept pavilion with jigsaw white-pine flooring, fit and happy twenty-somethings blissing out in lotus position on multi-coloured mats while evergreens thrive in the background. That hot Bikram stuff in the winter would draw. Yes. Yes, it would.
Winter tranquility.
You could build a little town around the concept. This is destination stuff. These static properties. Stuff you could buy and resell. Hotcakes, if the timing’s right. I have to remember I’m still good at this. I may have been taken by a number-crunching weasel named Trevor Brent but I’m still good at this. I check my cellphone but of course there’s no service in this godforsaken wilderness.
Hugo must never hear about Trevor and my great financial mess. Oh, how he’d love to rub it in. I can see his face now, all self-satisfied and superior and mock-exasperated with concern. With “You should have checked this guy out a little” and “Why did you invest so much?” With “What can I do to help?” Hugo, who thinks he’s the master of finance even after his wild schemes and fuck-ups and mansplaining clarifications. He won’t hear a thing about any of this if I can help it. Since our divorce, we have successfully tiptoed around sharing anything of real significance in our lives, while gaining points through the art of humble brags. It’s chess by voicemail. “Hugo. Need to be in Boston for some brownstone sales. Can you check on Georgia?” I’d say, implying bountiful dollar signs in my accounts. Hugo grunting, “Must be off to Rio for an article,” blithely evoking exquisite locations with lavish perks. We were competitive, no doubt. We didn’t want to be equal, but better. Better than the other firms; better than each other. We bickered. We got petty. We amassed nitty details. And when Hugo’s façade started to slip and he got desperate, he didn’t ask for help. He just made a bigger mess.
Almost from the moment I met him, Hugo talked big. It was a vocation. He even got in a fist fight over me in a crap bar in Montreal, if I recall. I was their high priestess in a ceremony of male testosterone. The Aztecs sacrificed virgins to appease the gods. Modern man sacrifices his dignity.
Such high promise. We worked though. I worked. As he made his way through final courses of architecture school, I interviewed at some big realtors in Montreal. They were impressed by my bombast over room composition and aesthetic proportion, the art-speak of property turnover. I’d read enough of those books at the Centre for Architecture—my part-time job while studying design at LaSalle—to raise the discourse above bedroom numbers and nice views. Sure, the engineer report assures a client, but it’s the access-to-sunlight that signs the papers. Hugo and I were red-hot with plans those first lightning years. I finished my articling period and joined a real estate agency. Once graduated (barely), Hugo worked on designs at a gateway firm, a few conventional office towers mostly, while pursuing private commissions for wealthy acquaintances he’d met in school. He extended bedrooms and remodelled family areas, all the while handing out business cards for his own future firm. That didn’t sit well with his employers. Once they’d got wind of it, he was persona non grata and promptly invited to box up his personal belongings on St. Marc.
He didn’t blink. We were throwing shit at the walls and some of it stuck. Wasn’t long before he was co-designing a major renovation of a river-view embassy in Ottawa’s Rockcliffe Park. Meanwhile, back in Montreal, I had assisted in the turnover of a few houses in NDG, with decent percentages, and the higher-ups considered giving me a Westmount.
I remember that. The day before the showing, I dropped fifteen hundred on a Dolce & Gabbana stretch-wool jacket and pants. It was sleek. I looked like a knife with peak lapels and four-button cuffs. I rented a silver BMW for its spectacle. Its smell of success.
The front grill filleted the sunlight down Edgehill Road’s stately trees. Joseph was waiting for me in the driveway. A partner in the realty firm, he’d been nervous about the collective decision to “let me have a go” at this one. It was a beautiful four-bedroom residence sitting on a 547-square-metre lot but overpriced at three million. Listed all summer, they wanted it sold before October or they’d have to drop the price. Letting it sit there all winter sent out an unpleasant signal. Dropping the price, even worse. Joseph agreed to let me try the sale, but would step in if needed, which meant he would find something to step in about. I knew his kind. He’d find a way to take the credit. If I got something to grow, he’d rake around the dirt so everyone could see the lines he made. But I knew he couldn’t move this house. He was tired and had mumbled through the same patter for too many months, too many years. He was stuck on the wrong details. Rumpled suits. Saying the client’s name too often; pushing the process too quickly.
But he was happy to hold onto the leases so he could co-sign with his ridiculous Bic roller.
Joseph checked his watch while I put the car into park.
“Yes, I’m on fucking time,” I grunted to myself as I plucked the portfolio from the passenger seat. We had fifteen minutes before the client arrived.
Joseph handed me the keys. We started a walk-through.
I’d studied the house meticulously through the previous week, from its side-entrance columned porch to the chef’s kitchen lined with glass-panelled cabinetry. The buyer’s name was Barry Monclerc. I’d met him a few weeks prior to determine his house range, show him some options and go through some listing sheets. There was very little information available about Barry himself, online or anywhere. Some property development connections. Hints of importing through consortiums. I would have liked to know more, what personality to sell to, what features to spotlight.
While we waited for him, Joseph settled into another unsolicited tutorial on property sales.
“If you’re happy drawing a paycheque, or commission, it could take up to two years to start making money,” he was rabbiting on. “Really depends where you are in your life. I know a guy, did only residential work. He was an animal: first in the office at seven every day, way ahead of the curve, pulling salary and getting a licence, which will take a few months if you’re full-time at it. Hardest things of working on all these deals is prospecting, finding more deals or you’re dried up. The legends, the few guys in the real estate market who are legends, they just keep pumping it out . . .”
I was putting little effort into understanding the point.
“Fuck, there he is,” Joseph said.
Outside the sink window, a navy-blue KIA had parked flush beside my car on the double drive. Barry Monclerc, with a rugby-sized chest, dressed in a golf shirt, chinos and aviation shades, surfaced and strode along the manicured stone path toward the main entrance.
Joseph was prancing into the vestibule.
“Joseph,” I warned before he reached the door. He looked at me. “I thought I was doing this.”
He raised his hands in mock surrender and then flourished them, with a sneer, at the entrance. I tugged on the door handle. The frame separated from the weather-stripping in a gentle suck of air.
“Hello Barry. Welcome to Westmount,” I said, extending my hand. “You remember Joseph, my associate?” They nodded heads and shook hands.
Joseph said, “You’re early.”
“Is he?” I said, breezy and skeptical. Thanks, Joseph. Thanks for chiding our client for schedule mismanagement. Thanks for proposing we’re inconvenienced. Thanks for suggesting we’re checking, or even care about, the time. And thanks for wearing your fat, mismatched tie two inches too ridiculously long.
Barry gestured to the BMW. “Your rental is nicer than mine,” he said to me.
“Oh, that,” I laughed. “All they had left in the lot.”
Smiling.
“Do you know the neighbourhood?” I asked. He knew very little. So, I ran down a short history of Westmount, noting its French colony origins in the mid-seventeenth century. “Not far from here there’s a house from that period: Hurtubise House. A fifteen-minute walk from here,” I said. “It was built in 1739. You should have a look if you get a chance. It’s very beautiful. Three storeys, gable roof, two-foot-thick stone walls. The windows are framed by flat stones, very rare in those days. The family must have been very wealthy. They set an example for the neighbourhood. You could say it all started with them.”
