The End of the Ice Age, page 11
“Lots to work with here,” the agent is saying. “There’s good fir flooring once you get rid of all this shag.”
The owners haven’t put the slightest effort into making a good impression. They’ve rented the place out for years, an investment property, and now they’re counting on the area’s recent rise in popularity to make the sale for them. Donna feels queasy when she sees the dirt that has accumulated in the crack between the stove and the kitchen counter. Several linoleum tiles are missing, and she can read a history of plumbing disasters in the stains on the ceiling. It isn’t her place to point out these things, especially when Ted loves the place so much, but from the way the tour is going, it looks like she won’t have to.
“What would you recommend about that exterior siding?” Ted asks.
“The shingles underneath are still good. Just a question of taking it off.”
“I mean the asbestos.”
“Sir?”
“That’s why they put the stuff on in the first place,” Ted says. “It’s fireproof.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Then you probably don’t know how dangerous it is, either.”
“Maybe you’d like to speak to a building inspector on this issue.”
“A single fibre in your lungs and you’ll be spitting blood all the way to your grave.”
Over the next half hour, Ted points out the absence of drain tile, the sagging foundations and the knob-and-tube wiring that should have been condemned years ago.
“That’s why it’s advertised as a fixer-upper,” the agent says.
It’s the end of the tour, and people are walking away. Some put their brochures back into the pile they took them from.
“I think you mean a tear-it-down-and-start-againer,” Ted says.
Later in bed that night, Donna tells Ted she’s sorry the house was a disappointment. She tells him it’s better to leave some memories alone. “It’s true what they say,” she says. “You can’t go home again.”
“What are you talking about?”
“How much work your old house needs. The way it’s falling apart.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that house,” Ted says. “I told Christy to put in a bid, ten below asking. I’d have gone lower, but there’s no point taking a risk when you really want something”
Donna is confused. “I thought we hated it.”
“Pretty good act, wasn’t it? Christy was impressed, said I should change careers.”
“But I don’t want to live there, Ted. It’ll cost a fortune. That place isn’t half of what we’ve got right where we are.”
“People don’t get a chance like this every day, Donna.”
Two weeks before Christmas, Ted huddles with his kids in front of the family computer, showing them pictures of their new house. Donna tells them it’s an “experiment,” something their father has always wanted to try. The word bothers her, though – its association with explosions and hideous deformities – so after a few minutes she starts calling it a holiday, a word she likes better because it suggests an end. People come home from holidays, don’t they? As a concession to Donna, Ted agrees not to sell their house. They will take out a mortgage on it, instead, and rent it out to help with the payments.
“I can’t believe some stranger is going to be eating in our kitchen,” Justin says. “Doesn’t that make you feel creepy?”
“Je vous déteste,” Jenny tells her mother. She decides not to speak to her father who refuses to grant her choice of a bedroom. She wants the room over the porch, the one that catches the sunset and a view of the sea.
“That was my room, Jenny,” her father says. “It wouldn’t be right for a girl to have it.”
“But you never had a sister,” she says. “Where am I supposed to go?”
He tells her his parents always wanted a girl. They even picked out a name for her.
“Joanne,” he says “and they would have called her Jo for short.”
But a girl wasn’t in the cards, and the room that would have been Joanne’s became his mother’s sewing room and the guest bedroom. It’s at the back of the house and the sun rises in its window every day. She can have that one.
“The guest room,” she says. “That’s just perfect.”
Ted and Donna will move into the master bedroom between the two others. He describes where his parents’ bed once sat, their highboy, too, and his mother’s chevalier mirror, the one Ted’s grandfather gave them as a wedding gift.
“We’ll have to look for one of those,” he says.
“Ted,” Donna says, “we have a perfectly good mirror already. It goes with my dresser.”
“It’s not the same,” he says.
Ted has his work cut out for him. All those years as a rental have taken their toll, but it’s actually a good thing the owners didn’t invest any money in the house. For one thing, the place has been empty for over a month because of the rats, and Ted and Donna can move in pretty much whenever they want. Ted is pushing for Christmas Day. He’s even put up a tree in the front window, exactly where he remembers one standing when he was young. So little about the place has changed. Still the same paint in the dining room, and the lamp fixtures above the fireplace still give off the soft green glow he loves. If this were a dream, he’d never want to wake up.
Ted works obliquely on his old house, approaching each task from an angle, delicately, as though he is engaged in an archeological dig where any false move might destroy a priceless artifact. Odds are there’s a baseboard somewhere, a door jamb, a window sill, that carries a fingerprint of his from those years, some trace of him that hasn’t been erased, and the thought intrigues Ted while he works. He rents a dumpster and throws in it worn carpet, mattresses abandoned by former tenants, broken lawn furniture. The floor finishers sand off a layer of varnish and grime. The furnace gets an overhaul. But there are no changes to the floor plan. There are no Tuscan highlights. Donna tackles the kitchen and bathrooms with her rubber gloves and a gallon of Lysol.
“I never thought we’d be doing this again,” she says.
“Cleaning? Ted asks.
“Hardly,” she says. “I clean our house all the time.”
“What then?”
“I don’t know,” Donna says. “Just this, I guess.”
“Oh,” Ted says, and for a second he almost sees what she means.
On Christmas Eve, Jenny and Justin join them. They bring sleeping bags. They bring candles. They bring presents. They bring tea and muffins for Christmas breakfast. The floors are bare except where the finishers have placed swatches of cardboard to walk on while the varnish hardens. The house echoes. They can even hear their clothes. The tree wears only a set of clear mini-lights. No ornaments. No tinsel. Donna plugs in a portable CD player and puts on some Christmas music, the Dean Martin Ted likes so much. They lie on their sleeping bags in a semicircle around the tree and watch the rain as it falls through the shaft of light under the power pole on the boulevard. Midnight’s only an hour away and everyone is tired.
“I wonder if I’ll buy our house back when I get old,” Justin says. “Our other house, I mean.”
“Not if I buy it first,” Jenny says.
“No arguing,” Donna tells them. “It’s Christmas.”
“Listen to that rain,” Ted says. “Just listen to it, will you?”
MOLE
THE USUAL LIBRARY CROWD: a few welfare mothers; this young couple with their first kid; a history buff with his cane and his Nazi belt buckle. I was no better than any of them. I’d scammed a research grant from the city, a story I’d fed the Archives Development Committee about the opium trade, links to early families, pioneer wives in particular. Sexy stuff. I talked about spinoffs, tours of Chinatown. Interactive stations. That was the word I used: stations. Even some poems set in concrete. Poems! Six months rent plus expenses, a year if they liked it. Ended up I never wrote a word, at least none they could use.
It was after lunch. I’d grabbed a gyro at Eugene’s, and it was coming back on me. The line to check out books was a long one. I hated the idea of losing my place just to use the washroom, but it was either that or ruin everybody’s day. There’s something wrong with my pyloric valve. The doctor explained it to me once: the flap at the back of my throat that keeps all the acid and food and enzymes down doesn’t work. I should’ve known Greek was a bad idea. It was a year of bad ideas. I had pretty much made up my mind to lose my dinner down the toilet when my first girlfriend walked by.
Puke was crawling up the back of my throat. The bathroom was on the second floor. My old girlfriend was flipping through CDs, the classical music she never used to like. I left my books on the counter and ran up some stairs, past people reading local papers and down an aisle of stacks I thought would never end.
The bathroom door’s hydraulic closer was broken, and, as I slammed it open, I was thinking I might not make it to the toilet in time and how it was twenty years since I’d last seen her and what a pain it would be to have to look up those books all over again, when BAM, the door hit the tiled wall and the noise nearly blew out my ears. What the guy in the first cubicle was thinking, I couldn’t say. A dinner that took ten minutes to eat flew out of my mouth in less than thirty seconds. I was washing my hands when he finally left the safety of his stall.
“You all right?” he asked.
“I am now,” I said.
But of course I wasn’t. I threw a bit of water on my face and slicked some through my hair and walked out the door and back along the stacks to the top of the stairs. First girlfriends are a kind of religion with most men I know. Something sacred. A dream they never stop having. It was no different with me. I was looking down from the mezzanine where she was flipping through the bins of music, and my two hands gripped the banister like it was the guardrail of a bridge and I was working up the courage to throw myself over. There ought to be some kind of electric current in the air that prevents a person from running into past lovers, the way some homeowners have wireless electric fences to keep their dogs from wandering into the road and getting killed by a passing truck. A hundred volts right through the collar and into the dog’s neck every time it tries to poke its dumb nose out of the yard. I could see how something like that would come in handy for a man in my situation, except maybe they should wrap the collar around a man’s dick instead of his neck.
My books were still sitting on the librarian’s desk. I could just walk down the stairs and check them out and leave. Keep my head down, eyes on my own business. She probably wouldn’t recognize me, anyway. Twenty years was a long time for both of us. Even from where I stood, I could see the grey in her hair, how she was having second thoughts about hiding it, the colour growing out.
People can say what they want about artists and grants and the public purse, but the truth is nobody gets rich. At best, I can swear off part-time shifts at the liquor store for a while. No pressure to take sessional work this term at the college, either. Other than that, not much changes. Rent gets paid, groceries get bought. And I can keep thinking of myself as a journalist, a local historian, someone whose two university degrees weren’t a total waste. I didn’t use to think this way, but what a person is at any given moment rarely has to contend with what he once was. He forgets. I’ve always thought of myself as a mole, the kind of creature that digs his way in the dark, pushing the dirt behind him as he goes. The past gets buried. Unless it walks right by.
More school was the last thing on my mind when I was with Christine, and that was what was so hard to remember. By hard I mean painful, the sort of pain those high school years always seem to carry for people once they’re past thirty, what it feels like to remember a time when days flipped by one after the other like a deck of cards with a thousand suits. We were together until we were eighteen – though, really, she was nineteen. Sometimes she made me feel how critical those extra nine months were, and that’s part of why we didn’t last. It seemed like she was always waiting for me to catch up, or at least that’s how I remember it.
Anyone who’s put his fingers around the handle of a fire alarm will know what I was feeling, the urge to be perverse, to see how easily a normal day could crumble to shit. Or not. Isn’t that the dream? Turn back the clock?
I kissed my research goodbye and walked down the stairs to the music department, an arm’s length from where she was standing. The idea was for her to turn to me and make the connection, but things didn’t work out the way I planned. I’d say they never do, but that would make me sound depressive, which I’m not. I’m just realistic. I could have stood there all night waiting for her to look my way, and the novelty of coincidence was wearing off as I watched. Funny gear she was wearing. Layers, a long dress with a pair of black silky trousers underneath. Nothing franchised. No brand names showing, elegant. The shoes added height which she didn’t need, but they looked good, too. I never need much to recognize someone, the tip of a nose, a chin, a hand holding a glass. This was overkill. She was reading liner notes like they were some kind of code, encrypted instructions to whatever it is middle-aged women dream about. Like I would know. Patience was never my long suit, so I coughed and looked over at her.
“Hey!” I said. The tone of surprise in my voice was as genuine as I could make it.
“Dennis,” she said, after a glance in my direction. “I was wondering when you’d get up the courage to walk over here.”
“You saw me?”
“An hour ago. You were sitting at the microfiche talking to yourself.”
“It’s a bad habit,” I said.
“An old one, too.”
“All my habits are old ones,” I said. It was a little disappointing not to have had the effect I was hoping for. Made sense, though. She was a sharp one, always had been. In one way, I was even a little more excited. It was a crazy thought, but isn’t there some part in every guy that says maybe he can get back in with a woman, any woman, no matter what he’s done in the past, no matter what bridge he’s burned? I asked if she wanted to get some coffee, but she said she didn’t have a lot of time. She didn’t say why, but she didn’t have to. Married people have a look about them, like basketball players who decide it’s time to become a coach. Married people also wear rings, and hers was a big one. So, we walked over to an empty reading room and sat on one of the couches by a window. The rain outside was streaking the glass, and the radiators underneath the sill were pumping out heat. It was the closest to cozy I’d felt in years.
When I see high-school girls now, they all seem beautiful in a kind of wholesome and clean way, but my eyes have changed. Anyone young looks good now, and by good I mean pure, unspoiled, no matter how sexy the girl thinks she looks. It didn’t use to be that way. The first time I saw Christine, it felt like a crime just to be staring. We were on the third floor of our high school, and she did nothing more than walk down the hall with a couple of friends. Just walked, one foot in front of another, but she crippled me. It was her graduating year, and I still had one to go. After that I looked for her everywhere. I wanted to speak to her, get her attention somehow, but the words I thought of saying to her sounded moronic. They were moronic. Whatever motives a kid like me had for speaking to a girl like that – beauty, romance, love – there was really only one reason and it was sex. Part of me knew that, and I hated that scene, the sports talk that reduced girls to pieces of meat, something to be fucked and forgotten. Ask me about it now, and I’d say so what? That’s the way things are. But I was a bit of a prig back then. I wanted my life to be “different.” Not an original idea, I know. Knew it then, too. In fact I’d heard it in a film I’d seen, something with Dustin Hoffman or Robert Redford. Like I said, it was a long time ago. One day, the pointlessness got to be too much for me, and when Christine walked past this time I banged my head on the wall just the way my film-hero did. It was the gesture of a desperate mind, but it worked.
“It’s good to see you,” I said.
“You, too,” she said. “I’ve been away a long time.”
“I never thought it would happen,” I said. “Not like this. I’d sort of imagined running into you somewhere else. I wondered what happened to you, what you were up to, but I never thought it would be here. I was thinking an airport or a French restaurant. A restaurant in France, I mean.”
“This is a better bet,” she said. “I don’t eat out that much, and I hate flying.”
“I remember.”
“We never flew anywhere together, did we?”
“No, but you were afraid of heights,” I said. “Did you ever think you’d run into me in a library?”
“I guess I thought I would run into you somewhere, especially now I’m back, but that’s about as far as it went.”
I had no idea what she was implying by that, but in the years we were together, she’d always held her cards pretty close to her chest. Inscrutable was a word I didn’t know back then. I remember the time someone first told me what it meant, though, and I immediately thought of her. To see her again like this was a strange experience, a kind of realtime hallucination. For a few moments, it was as though I was talking to someone who was impersonating Christine, someone who had her mannerisms, her way of speaking. There were creases I’d never seen before, and the folds of flesh around her throat were something that would have horrified me at sixteen. But after a while my eyes adjusted to the years, and time just kind of rolled back. She was the same. She was beautiful. Of course, while I was looking at her, I was wondering what she saw when she looked at me. Was there any magic stripping away the wrinkles from my face, filling in the missing hair?
“So,” she said. “Is this a regular thing?”
“It’s a living,” I said.
