Extraordinary

million variations, but always the same wound. And while Mr. Trombone may have been myopic, while he may have been headed for a bad end fifteen years down the road, for the moment the truth was the truth, which was that he liked the skinny girl from Texas more.

“That should have been punishment enough in itself. But life can be imaginatively spiteful—it’s almost enough to make you believe in a malevolent deity—so not only did Chloe have to observe in the brown eyes of the young musician his waning interest in her, but she was forced to listen to the nightly shrieks of pleasure from Miranda Treece’s bedroom, which sounded, according to Chloe, ‘like they were murdering a hog in there!’

“I gave the impotent advice that the non-involved invariably offer. I suggested that the next time at bat, she might make herself a little less available—lay off the phone calls and neighbourly drop-ins. Chloe is an excitable creature, you know that better than I do, and it makes her impatient for things to go her way. I tried to explain to her that Sunday morning that men don’t like fish that jump out of the lake into the boat. I was expecting a rewarding burst of laughter. Instead, I encountered granite silence.

“‘Chloe, dear,’ I said, ‘I’m just trying to add some lightness to the situation. It’s not life or death.’

“‘It is to me,’ she said softly.”

“Did she say that?” her mother asked.

“Yes, but hang on, hang on. The story isn’t finished yet.”

I got up and poured myself a glass of water and plopped a handful of ice into it. I could feel a tiny hammer tapping against my right temple, with worse things to come. I even contemplated keeping back one of Sally’s sleeping pills for the brutal hangover that was coming up behind me like a silent train.

I sat back down. “I confess, I could feel my heart constrict for Chloe, for the agony she was suffering, and for its probable outcome, which was that things would go on for a while, this nightly scorching, but then, like all unrequited passions in the body of a healthy soul—and Chloe is, if nothing else, a robust soul—it would fizzle and fizzle and fizzle into a state of bemused bewilderment. A state of What was I thinking? But it would take a while. The clocks slow down for the heartbroken. It’s like watering your fingernails: they grow at the pace they grow and not a second faster.”

“Did you say that to her?”

“Yes, but it’s like that conversation you had with your mother in the car about Terry Blanchard. It made Chloe feel better for a bit. She even hooted with laughter now and again about the whole situation. But I knew that after she put down the phone, she was going back to feeling shitty.

“Sometimes on those nights, when I forgot to click off the ringer, my phone rang at three o’clock in the morning. ‘Uncle M.?’ a young girl’s voice said. But I was happy to hear her voice. Even if it was just to tell me that the trombonist smelt like bananas if you stood close to him, or the latest stupid thing Miranda said. But it was a lonely time in my life. I was single again, my American girlfriend having returned to her Arkansas roots, and I was beginning to find it tiresome to make new friends. Too much work, all that—the dinners, the conversation, the old stories trotted out once again. Like going to the gym.

“I spent my days on the back roads of Ontario delivering newfangled toilet seats, compression stockings, ankle stabilizers, blood pressure units, walkers—with and without wheels—to small-town drugstores. It didn’t last long, this season in hell, but it’s always seemed like a failure of nerve on my part to have embraced such a ludicrously unsuitable activity even in a moment of financial panic.”

“Surely you don’t still see it that way? It sounds rather admirable to me,” Sally interrupted.

“What’s admirable about it?”

“Just doing it. Just getting up and doing it and not whining about it.”

“I whined plenty, don’t worry about that. But anyway. To snatch up the phone and hear Chloe’s voice, the vibrating aliveness that I had felt so vividly that night in the hotel lobby, made me feel as if I were not standing at the side of life, but that I was engaged, however vaguely, at the heart of it.

“She got over the trombone player, and over the next while there was a string of cheerful melodramas, other boys with other trombones. I say cheerful because even while Chloe complained about this boy’s cockiness or that boy’s insensitivity or this guy’s tiresome addictions, there was a quickness to laughter, an easy teasability. ‘Uncle M.,’ she’d protest, ‘je vous en prie! You must desist!’ Which meant, Give me more, give me more. She loved the attention, I think. In the darkness of my bedroom, I imagined her raising her face to the ceiling with uncontainable laughter, as though she were expelling a lungful of smoke.

“Privately, to be candid, I sympathized with these young men as they politely eyed the exit sign. How exhausting Chloe could be, this high-voltage being! It was as if she was born without a middle gear. Either asleep or hysterical.”

Sally laughed, and then I did too.

“‘Perhaps,’ I said to her one evening on the phone, ‘you should try for older men.’ I was thinking of someone like the French actor Gerard Depardieu. Do you know him?”

“Yes, yes. Divine.”

“A large, big-boned man whose physical and emotional weight might give our little humming-bird the perch she required.” (I also—and this I didn’t mention to my sister—had a mild fever for Chloe myself, and had awoken on a few mornings entertaining fantasies that don’t need to be described and certainly didn’t need to be acted upon. Besides which, I believed then that Chloe’s orientation was toward tall, pretty boys of ambivalent sexual orientation. You like what you like, and there’s the end of it.)

“‘Maybe you should lay off the gays,’ I said on a different occasion. (I’d been drinking.) My suggestion produced a pleased chirp in which I detected a hint of gratitude. Maybe it let her off the hook. It’s one thing to get dumped by a lush-lipped young man with a trombone, but quite another for a homosexual to take a pass on you.

“‘Okay, Uncle M.,’ she said, ‘no more fags, I promise.’ And again hooted a cloud of invisible smoke at the ceiling.

“I didn’t hear back from her. Maybe she got what she needed from me and moved on, I don’t know. But I spotted her on the sidewalk in Toronto a year or so later. It was Thanksgiving, a cheerless, Herman Melville kind of day. She was home for the long weekend. I pulled my bicycle over to the curb. Her face lit up. She was on her way to a dress sale at Holt Renfrew at that very moment. A large shopping bag dangled from her wrist. She’d already been at it for a while. Shopping, I mean.

“I noticed, though, that the rouge on her cheekbones was uneven, the small pink circles didn’t quite match one another. Perhaps she’d been in a hurry when she left your apartment that morning and had done a rush job. But there was something about the way she looked, this hastily applied rouge, that made me sad. Maybe it was the fall day—fall has always been a time of haunting nostalgia for me. Perhaps I was projecting my own disappointments onto her. But I don’t think so. It was, I think, the image of this young woman out shopping, as if her young body was somehow misspent on this activity. That instead of lingering on a dull morning on the sidewalk with a shopping bag, her young body should have been instead lying in the shadows of a bedroom, the curtains stirring, the warmth of a lover’s body only inches away. Such a waste, her capacity to love and to be loved and no one to share it with.

“But wait. Wait. Things changed.”

* * *

It was after midnight now. I poured us another round of Drambuie. Sally and I in her eighteenth-floor apartment.

“Damn,” she said, “I have to go to the washroom again. Will you hand me my crutches?”

I helped her to her feet. She turned a pale face toward me. “This is all getting less and less manageable.” I helped her into the bathroom. There were all sorts of things in there that you don’t see in a regular bathroom. And a chemical smell that didn’t smell human. Like embalming fluid. And it struck me for a second that that’s how she felt, embalmed. And that this too, and the things that came with it, she’d had enough of. I wondered, too, who had phoned, whether I should have answered it. You never know. But to go against her wishes had seemed like a violation of our deal, of my promise.

But while I waited for her to emerge, I found myself pondering those words, “All this has become less and less manageable.” It was the second time she’d used those same words, and I found myself remembering an episode that had happened only a few months earlier. I had dropped by her apartment unexpectedly late one afternoon, the winter night already collecting like soot between the neighbouring high-rises and the discarded Christmas trees up and down the length of the street. It was the final hours of a sullen January day in Toronto,