The Endless Knot

planters filled with jumbo gold and rust chrysanthemums. Both had discrete brass plates on their front doors bearing the firm’s name in letters that were neither too large nor too small, but just right. Both had ramps to accommodate Zack, who had been a paraplegic since a childhood accident.

In the months Zack and I had been seeing each other, I’d occasionally met him at his office. Like all high- powered law firms, Falconer Shreve was driven by the maxim that those who didn’t keep up got left behind. There was always a hum in the air, but that Friday afternoon the hum had reached fever pitch. Denise-Dee Kaiswatum, the receptionist, was involved in a heated dispute with a courier, but she came up for air long enough to roll her eyes and point a manicured nail towards the office of Norine MacDonald, Zack’s executive assistant, who with Cerberus-like zeal guarded the door to the clients’ room. Norine told me she’d let me know when Zack was free and to make myself comfortable.

There are few agreeable reasons to be in a lawyer’s office, but Zack’s clients’ room was designed to reassure the anxious. The walls were painted a comforting forest green and the furnishings were timeless antiques whose burnished sheen suggested that whatever follies humans contrived, there would always be Windsor chairs to receive their sorry asses and glowing coffee tables on which they could leave their mark. Left to my own devices, I settled in with the morning paper. I had ploughed through the news and sports and reached the Review section when Glenda Parker came out of Zack’s office. In her ribbed turtleneck, jeans, and hiking boots, she appeared as androgynous as most university kids. Like many female students, Glenda eschewed makeup, and that year the style in which she wore her cornsilk hair – side-parted and cut short except for a long sleek bang, was favoured by half the young men and women on campus. There was nothing noteworthy about Glenda, except for the fact that every Canadian with access to a remote control had seen footage of her in her previous incarnation as an Olympic-calibre swimmer who competed as a male.

The footage had been shot at a swim meet two years before the publication of Too Much Hope. Intended only as a record of a few moments in an athlete’s life, the close-up was used as an illustration in Kathryn Morrissey’s book. After Sam Parker had been charged with attempted murder, the photo of Glenda, unmistakably male with shaved chest bare and genitals outlined by a Speedo brief, had appeared in every newspaper in Canada. The image was indelible, and as Norine introduced Glenda, I found myself searching for the boy in the swimsuit in the gentle young woman extending her hand to me.

We exchanged the usual pleasantries of people meeting for the first time. Glenda’s voice was an agreeable contralto, but she spoke with the care of someone learning a new language. In Too Much Hope, she had confided to Kathryn that one of the early tasks of transitioning genders was acquiring the voice of the other. Physical change, she explained, was only one stop on the transsexual road map. As I looked at Glenda, I was struck by how young she was – just twenty – but the pink-purple shadows beneath her eyes suggested that, for her, the path to self-realization had been riddled with land mines.

“When there’s something Zack doesn’t want me to have to testify to, he sends me out of the room,” she said.

I caught her eye. “Zack knows what he’s doing.”

Glenda’s expression was wry. “Let’s hope so,” she said. “Because he’s all we’ve got.”

At that moment, the door to Zack’s office opened, and Samuel Parker joined us, upping the wattage in the room as he had been upping the wattage in rooms for the past forty years. In the early 1960s, Sam and his wife, Bev, had been a folk-singing duo who wrote songs celebrating peace, justice, and the common man. When the Zeitgeist shifted from concern for Mother Earth to real estate lust, the Parkers’ careers faded, but the lyric beauty of their songs continued to charm. There were cover recordings and a small but steady flow of royalty payments. Sam and Bev left the business end of things to Bev’s brother, then a strange, weedy youth with a fascination for speculative fiction and the innovative use of technology. He had, as Sam pointed out in later interviews, invested the Parker money in one half-assed scheme after another, until 1971 when IBM got interested in a patent Sam had apparently acquired.

The money poured in with the profusion of the tears of the poor, and the Parkers were forced to re-evaluate their priorities and their friends. Luckily, both proved easy to change. For the past thirty-five years, Samuel and Beverly Parker had been pillars of the political right, big donors to conservative causes, and articulate spokespeople for groups that shared their ideology.

Even with charges for attempted murder hanging over his head, Sam Parker moved with the confidence of a man in charge. Tanned and immaculate, he extended his hand to me and introduced himself. When I explained that I was there to take his lawyer to lunch, he smiled.

“Zack’s been working too hard. He deserves a good meal with an attractive woman.” He turned to Glenda. “We deserve a good meal too. Any suggestions about a restaurant?”

“Sure,” Glenda said. “There’s this terrific new vegan place. You’ll love it, Dad. They don’t even use honey because it’s a product of the labour of bees.”

The Parkers exchanged glances, then they tilted their heads back at identical angles and laughed at their private joke. “Let’s go,” Samuel said. “Tofu waits for no one.”

Focused on his computer screen, Zack didn’t notice me, but I noticed him: his broad, high forehead, his heavy brows, his full lips; his power; his self-possession. I walked over and bent to kiss the curve of his forehead. He looked pleased. “What was that for?”

“Couldn’t resist such a good-looking guy,” I said. He turned his chair towards me, reached out, and drew me to him. “We have an hour and forty-five minutes till my next appointment,” he said.

“Not nearly enough,” I said. “But these days I take what I can get.”

“It’s not always going to be like this,” Zack said. “After the trial’s over, I’m going to cut back.”

I squeezed his shoulder. “Maybe. And maybe, as Dorothy Parker said, the Statue of Liberty is in Lake Ontario. Come on. The meter’s ticking. Let’s take your car, but I want to drive. I’ve spent my whole life behind the wheel of something sensible. It’s a rush knowing I can open up and leave everybody else in the dust.”

Zack grinned and tossed me the keys. “Go to town.”

For the first few minutes of our drive, the sheer pleasure of being together in a convertible on a dazzling fall day kept us silent, but when I stopped for a light, Zack turned to me. “So what did you think of Sam?”

“He surprised me,” I said. “And he impressed me. I was only with Glenda and him for a few minutes, but it’s obvious they love each other. More surprising, given Sam’s public persona – they seem genuinely to like each other.”

“They’re in a lousy situation,” Zack said, “but they try to keep it light – make each other laugh.”