Extraordinary

Forest Hill folk, athletes, ex-convicts, priests, writers—creatures of a different cloth. It lasts a while and then the circle closes again. Anyway, Marek didn’t stop, not for a second, on Bruce, who was wearing a green shirt and leaning with one arm on the fireplace mantel, his jacket open, his little pot belly exposed. Leaning and giving me the look. Eyes half shut like a reptile. I could feel myself getting nervous. I was thinking, Oh-oh, he’s mad at me. He’s going to sulk in the car, he’s going to get out of bed in the morning and sit on the couch in his pyjama bottoms, smoking a cigarette and clearing his throat. No, nope, nothing’s wrong. And I’d flounce around, chirping like a bird, trying to cajole him out of his foul mood. God, is there anything that creates self-disgust faster than apologizing when you haven’t done anything wrong? The person you end up hating is yourself.

“So I waved him over. I thought it would make everything transparent, innocent. I introduced them. ‘Marek, this is my husband.’ Marek asked him a few questions. Just good manners. Did he work in the neighbourhood, how long had he lived in Toronto, how old were our children? But the ball never came back over the net. Bruce stood there, drink in hand, yes, no, looking into the contents of the glass as if he were waiting for the ice to melt.

“It worked. He’d done it before. He knew how to do it, this bubble of toxicity. It drove Marek away. Within seconds, everything was gone. Marek took everything with him when he walked away. There was just me left behind—me and this red-faced man with his sports jacket riding up at the back.

“I peeked over his shoulder, hoping Marek might be looking this way or waiting to come back. But no—he had landed in a clutter of middle-aged women, tennis players, rich, polished, tactile. He was theirs now.”

“And then?”

“We went home a little while later, Bruce and I. But something miraculous happened in the car. It was as if a virus had come of age. I didn’t formulate the sentence, I didn’t think of its ramifications. But it found its way out of my mouth all on its own. I said, ‘I don’t love you anymore.’

“We drove the rest of the way in silence. I went into the house and straight to the kitchen. When he came in after me, I pulled a steak knife out of the drawer. I didn’t say anything, I just turned around and stood there with a steak knife in my hand. And that was the end of it.”

A small bell pinged and the elevator doors clanged shut at the end of the corridor.

“Tell me if I’m talking too much,” she said.

“Go on. Please.”

“I moved my children into a yellow apartment and got a job in an art gallery. A boutique in Yorkville next door to a French bistro. To have somewhere to go every day, people to say hello to—those wonderful, sparkly, frivolous conversations about nothing at all—to have my own paycheque. It was the happiest I’d been in years, maybe my whole adult life. And no one to make me nervous.”

“And Marek?”

“Ah, Marek,” she said, settling back into her chair. “I don’t believe in God, but if I did, I’d say that the arrival of Marek Grunbaum with his pink handkerchief that night was God saying to me, ‘I’ve overlooked you. Here’s a make-up present.’ He had a wife and three children who adored him. He made a few awkward sounds about leaving his wife, but we both knew he wasn’t going to, that I was the latest in a short but piquant list of lovers. That was fine. Just knowing that every Tuesday night I was going to go to that bistro, sit at the same table, our table, have two ice-cold martinis and a bottle of wine, and then go home and get laid—just having that to look forward to made the whole week divine. I hope that doesn’t sound coarse.”

“No. Not at all.”

“There were two gay men living downstairs. Sean and his boyfriend, Peter. They worried about me: was I lonely? was I unhappy seeing a married man? did I have enough money? Isn’t that a scream? The only time in my life I didn’t need to be worried about. It was as if a grey screen between me and the world had been lifted and I could see everything so vividly.

“One day, I’d just finished reupholstering a chesterfield—Sean had passed it along—and I found myself with a couple of bolts of cloth left over. Just for fun, while I was watching television, I took a pair of long scissors and cut out the shape of a sailboat, a blue sailboat, and pasted it onto a square of leftover yellow cloth. I put a mast on it and a sun and a big swordfish jumping in the air. Then I hung it over the fireplace.

“Peter Ungster, my neighbour, came upstairs one evening to borrow a corkscrew and noticed the wall hanging. He lingered in front of it with a sort of puzzled expression on his face. ‘Where did you get that?’ he said. (He sounded a bit like Truman Capote when he talked, like a sleepy porpoise. How he survived growing up in a mining town in northern Ontario is a mystery. But that’s another story.) ‘Is it for sale?’ he asked, tilting his head. I thought he was playing it up a bit, indulging the new widow in her little hobby, but he wrote me a cheque for twenty-five dollars and took the swordfish back home with him. You never forget a moment like that, the first time you sell something you made. The money makes it different, makes you different.

“His boyfriend, Sean, knew a woman who owned a shop for children’s things: toys, pictures, puppets, stuffed animals. She saw the sailboat and ordered five of them in different colours. A red sailboat, a green sailboat. I put a moon overhead, a flying fish sailing over the bow, a lantern on the mast. Soon I had two teenage girls working for me, doing the cutting, the dyeing, the shipping. I kept one as a souvenir. It’s faded a bit—the sun coming through the window does that—but it’s over there. Yes, that’s it, over the sideboard.”

A blue whale winked mischievously at me from the mouth of a lagoon.

“And the job at the art gallery?”

She leaned forward in a gust of enthusiasm. “It was a period in my life where I couldn’t seem to do anything wrong. Things just fell into place, like musical notes. Most people who work in the art world don’t wish you well, especially if you’re leaving to do something artistic. They want you to fail—it makes their lives less haunting. I understand that, and I expected it. Long faces, sour faces. But I guess life had just given me enough shit for the time being. They threw me a party at the boutique. A little one. Marek Grunbaum came in a cream suit. He looked smashing. A fluffed pink handkerchief stuffed in his breast pocket. It was like showing off your boyfriend at a high school dance. He drove me home that night, and I remember looking out the car window as we passed up through the city, past the parliament buildings, past that park with the man on the horse, and I remember thinking, I’ll never be this happy again.”

“Were you?”

“Was I what?”

“Ever that happy again?”

“Of course I was. You’re never just happy once in your life. Life isn’t like that.” She paused. “Will you have a small Drambuie with me? It’s up there in the cupboard over the fridge. Yes, there, right behind your hand. Could you heat it up? Just put it in those snifters and pop it into the microwave.”

“Did Marek like Drambuie?”

Deadpan. Eyebrows raised. “Marek liked everything. It’s wonderful to be with a man who adores a woman’s body. Every inch of it. But wait.” She pointed to the microwave. “Yes. Thirty seconds should be enough.”

“Is that too hot?”

“No, it’s perfect. Smell that. I’ve been saving this for a rainy day.”

I sat back down. It was eleven o’clock.

“My little sailboats caught on. I did a craft show in Memphis. A rep from a middle-sized American chain saw my stuff and bought me out. I like that about Americans, how they do business. They come in, they look around, and they write a cheque. No pussyfooting. So suddenly there I was, with a bunch of money and two teenage children. What to do?

“Peter Ungster was trying on a new hat in my mirror, and he said in that funny voice, ‘Why don’t you move to Mexico? There’s an artists’ colony in San Miguel de Allende. That sounds like baloney, I know, and there is a lot of baloney down there, but not entirely. You could open a little shop—you could paint—do whatever you want. Leonard Cohen lives there. Or people say he lives there. Nobody ever seems to see him. For a while I had a friend there, an antique collector, soi-disant, but it turned out he was just looking for some Mexican boy to fuck him in the bum and leave him for dead. Which isn’t far from what happened. But don’t get me get started on that one.’

“So I went. San Miguel is a pretty town nine thousand feet up in the air with a sweeping cathedral right in