Country of Cold (12 page)

After the matches, and the Velvet Olive, she would walk back through the snow to the room she had rented on the top floor of an elderly Hungarian widow’s house on Sherbrooke Avenue. There she drank piña colada coolers and fantasized about her and Rick living together in a house on a leafy street. She could buy him
his own little fitness centre, and he could give up professional wrestling. She imagined having a medical practice that she ran out of their living room and after he got home and she finished with her last patient, they could go watch Double A baseball out at the stadium.

When she had moved in over a year ago she had advised her landlady that she would likely only be there for a few months at the most, just as long as it took her to make some plans. Daphne had paid the rent that month and then the next and then the next after that. It had been easier to stay than she had expected. The limited space meant that she had few decisions to make about what she should buy to furnish the place. Anyway, she did not want to surround herself with clutter. She had decisions to make, and the less there was to get in the road of that, the better.

The state of in-transit reflection became, for Daphne, her dwelling place. Her mother telephoned her every week from Dunsmuir to ask what she was going to do next month. She agreed each time that it was time to make some decisions. But she soon developed sympathy for all the middle-aged unemployed unshaven men who rented rooms in her building and spoke ambitiously but imprecisely of the future.

At the bar this night wrestlers were in a good mood—most of them were headed to Mexico for a week, leaving the next day on a package tour to Mazatlán; the
travel agent was a fan of theirs and gave them a deal. Sultry Sally was dressed as a marimba dancer and bought a round of tequila for the table. Maurice Millard tried out his stammering Spanish on her. She laughed and let loose a string of Spanish invective with convincing fluidity.

The flight was leaving early the next morning and the wrestlers had to be at the airport two hours beforehand. Bon voyages were expressed. Promises to return with large bottles of forbidden foreign liquor were made. They left before midnight, leaving Rick and the Barracuda sitting there, marooned. In the sudden quiet, the Barracuda asked again how Rick’s back was. “Fine,” Rick said.

“Do you mind me asking you a question?”

“Sure,” Rick said, smiling as he sipped his Labatt Blue.

“How much longer do you see yourself doing this? With your back and everything?”

Rick shrugged. “Not too long, I don’t think.”

“Sorry about the top-rope thing.”

“It was as much my doing as yours,” Rick said. “I lost my balance there and popped right over.”

The Barracuda put some money on the table and stood. “I’ve got a sauna in my house—if you think the steam would help. There’s a massage table too.”

“I’m pretty tired,” Rick said. “I’ll be heading home myself in a few minutes. Just want to see the last of this Canadiens game.”

“Okay, see you around.”

Daphne watched the Barracuda leave and then she watched Rick watching the hockey game. She looked down at the wrestling schedule she had picked up at the match that afternoon. There was a cage match scheduled for January. Maurice versus “An Unidentified Menace.” Midget wrestling in the first week of February. Tag team championships on Valentine’s Day. Quite a year of sports entertainment shaping up.

She was startled when Rick pulled out the chair across from her at her table and sat down on it. His eyebrows were raised and he set his glass of beer down before him. “Hello,” Daphne said.

“Hi. Name’s Rick,” Rick replied, offering his hand.

“Daphne.”

“I’ve seen you around, haven’t I?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe.”

That night, at his apartment, Daphne studied the books on his shelves and the hockey posters on his walls as he poured drinks in his little kitchen. He possessed a formidable stock of alcohol. This could be interpreted as a demonstration of foresight for the Christmas season, or of anticipated excess, or both. Genuinely hard-core alcoholics rarely would have a cupboard that full, she decided—it wouldn’t last long enough to accumulate. She thought about that for a while. Still, there was no denying
where they had met. Where they spent most evenings every week. She wondered if she was a genuinely hardcore alcoholic. Probably even odds, at this point.

They were both partly drunk already. In the kitchen Rick was stirring away at the martinis with obvious concentration. His eyes were narrowed and, just by looking at him, she could taste his pleasure.

The apartment, for Daphne, took on the narrowed-depth-of-field focus of an arty photograph. Since she had come south, she had been imagining her life as a series of poses, stills. When Rick leaned closer to her he became blurred, and when he leaned back, even a little bit, his features merged into one another. When she leaned backward and forward, his bookshelf did likewise. The scene had the saturated colour and weighty dialogue of a Hal Hartley film. That’s it, she decided, I’m in a Hal Hartley film. What would happen next? I’ll lean forward and kiss him and he’ll reply with a meaning-laden non sequitur. She leaned forward and kissed him.

“Do you normally wear glasses?” he asked.

In the morning he rose before her and made scrambled eggs. There was coffee too and orange juice and toast. She sat at his little Formica table. He read the sports pages and she looked out on the tree-lined street outside his window. The skeletal bare branches swayed slowly in the wind and snow accumulated on the branches and then swept into the air. A blizzard was forming. This
made his otherwise generic and slightly squalid little apartment seem cozy and self-contained, when on any other day it would feel confining. People not from northern prairie cities think them cursed by their weather, but those who know them understand that the winter is their only redemption. She wanted to curl up for the whole day there on Rick’s oddly-coloured chesterfield, and watch the blowing snow. But she had already made that mistake. After breakfast, she had learned, one leaves.

In the last six months of not working she had swallowed a number of forkfuls of scrambled eggs and had left after a number of breakfasts, in a number of kitchens. She’d found the human contact tantalizing, and ultimately elusive. She read somewhere that the word “tantalize” comes from a mythical king named Tantalus, condemned forever to stand, parched, in a streambed, whose waters receded always just beyond his lips, and underneath a grape vine whose fruit withdrew similarly. Daphne kept waiting for the scrambled eggs to leap from her fork just as she opened her mouth, and that is pretty much what usually happened anyway.

So this morning at Rick’s she put on her coat right after breakfast and got ready to go. He looked surprised that she was leaving already and asked her if she didn’t want to stay for another cup of tea, almost as if he meant it. And she said, no, she had to go, with similar sincerity.
That night in the bar, she was reading her
People
magazine and pretending not to be watching any of the several entrances when he tipped her magazine over and grinned at her. She sat straight up, straighter than she had in fifteen months.

He sat down.

“You look well rested anyway,” he said.

“How was your workout?”

“Distracted.”

“Oh well.”

Daphne and Rick took turns buying one another Keno tickets and drinks. When it was time to leave she asked him to come to her room. As they walked there, they spoke, in the manner of stuck people, about their ambitions. Rick had been a gymnast in university but had taken a year off when he ran short of money. “I worked for the Parks Department for a while and then it became hard to stop. I’d get laid off every October when the snow fell and every summer I made way more than enough money to get me by. The idea was that I was making up my mind about what was next, but what was always immediately next was that job. Then one day my workout partner got a job wrestling and a few weeks after that he tore his anterior cruciate ligament and he called me. Getting used to wrestling took up another three years, and here I am. Still trying to figure out what comes next, still not. It isn’t anymore that I have such a long list of ambitions from which to choose.”

In her room he hung his jacket on the hook on the back of her door and looked around. Out the window was the streetlight-lit blowing snow that they had just walked through. There were a few cabs in sight, making their way up Ellice Avenue, and on the sidewalk, hunched-over men stumbled in the snow. The wind blew a little harder and her window rattled. He sat down on her bed, without being asked. He looked at her and lifted his eyebrows.

“I was a family doctor up north until a year ago,” she said.

He nodded.

“I mishandled a difficult situation. It was a catastrophe.”

“Did you get charged with something?”

She blinked. “You mean, by the police?”

He nodded. She shook her head. “It doesn’t work like that with these things. Unless there’s a pattern of it, or you were drunk, you just go away, generally. If you can put it out of your own mind, maybe no one ever mentions it to you again.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“What I’m doing.”

“Which is?”

And she kissed him.

Over breakfast the next morning, at the Harmon’s Drugs lunch counter, he poked at his over-easy eggs with a piece of whole wheat toast until the yolk was
liberated and he could soak it up. The little packages of marmalade beside his plate sat unused. It was just after noon and they were still waking up. The frozen stumble-dash to the diner had not waked them so much as added another layer of confused sensation to their bodies. Daphne drank her coffee and watched the waitresses bustle. She was happy. When she was happy, she remembered, she spoke more directly.

“This business of waiting for yourself to get on with things is funny. It’s like, if you know you have to, then what is the obstacle?”

He was still in his clothes from the night before, and smelled of cigarette smoke from the bar, and his hair was in disarray. He was markedly unshaven, and in the winter afternoon’s thin light, among the room full of hungover university students and socializing senior citizens, she thought to herself that she could sit here and prattle on to him forever.

He chewed his yolk-sodden toast for a moment and then swallowed. Gesticulating with the little triangular toast remnant in his hand, he replied, “I understand that this is just a little exercise in vanity, my life, the way it is now, the wrestling. But I look at the community college course calendar every now and then, and I just can’t picture being that guy, that welder, or refrigeration systems technician. I wonder, where is the greatness in that? We are what we do. Job-jobs like that terrify me.”

Their waitress, Evelyn smiley face, came by to refill their coffees. Rick smiled back at her. She asked if there was anything else they wanted. He looked at Daphne. She shook her head. Evelyn nodded and left the bill at the table.
“People
magazine does this to us,” he said. “We think that average is way below acceptable. Average is average. It’s normal. Being normal is healthy, or it always used to be. When we assume our lives to be in some way special, we load up our troubles with all this horsepower they aren’t really entitled to. I’ve been reading about that in this book,
Know and Set Your Limits: A Guide to Business Strategy in the New Economy, have
you read it?”

She shook her head no.

“The author teaches at the Stanford Business School, and climbs icefalls in his spare time, the jacket says. He seems to understand people pretty well.”

“I’ll have to get it from the library.”

“You can read my copy when I’m done with it.”

“Well hurry up and finish it then.”

“Don’t rush me, man.”

“Gimme a kiss.”

“Say please.”

“Gimme.”

“Gimme gimme never gets.”

Evelyn was standing beside the table with a coffeepot in her hand. She rolled her eyes and hoisted it with her eyebrows raised. They shook their heads in unison, mouths slightly agape. Evelyn walked off.

Daphne put her head on the table and covered it. “Whatever happened to my brain?” she asked, from within. She sounded like she was under a pile of clothing and her words came out almost unintelligible. She looked up at him. He patted her head and returned to the hockey pages of the paper. She watched him. She thought to herself that there it was, she was going to be okay now. Whichever way things went from here, she wasn’t entirely broken.

After another half hour of remarkably slow sports page reading, she counted out the money for the bill and stood. He reached for her coat and handed it to her. She put on her toque. He put on his. As they left the drugstore he wrapped her scarf around her.

The following weekend, at the indoor driving range, she finally took the bait: “I know what you’re saying and I know you like that book you’re reading, but it’s pretty hard to imagine not taking your own life pretty seriously.” She swung the driver as hard as she could and hit the ball squarely, watching it rise to the net. It was a good hit. She hated golf, but was discovering how much she liked hitting that little ball.

“Yeah, it is. But if we understood ourselves to be just exactly as important as we are, then we would save ourselves a lot of grief. That wouldn’t be not taking your life seriously, it would be seeing it realistically. And doing the job that you’re supposed to do. Like this book says …”

“Please don’t quote that book to me.”

He looked up. “Okay.”

“We have different problems, I think.”

“I think they’re the same problem. You are unable to conceive of anything but the obit version of your life—noble and self-sacrificing, uncomplicated by scandal or error. Me, I can’t come up with even that, for myself. But really, it’s the same problem.”

She hit the ball again. It flew straight to the end of the range and hit the net, still rising. She placed another ball quickly on the carpet in front of her and readied her driver, adjusting her grip. She realized that he was suddenly irritating her; she resented being reduced to an aphorism. She found her stance and swung the club back very far. She looked at his satisfied face and disliked how pleased he was with his phrase “obit version of your life.” No doubt it was a chapter subtitle in that book he was reading. She struck the ball hard, so hard that everyone nearby turned to glance at the crack and her own involuntary grunt. The ball sailed off to the end of the range; she lost sight of it long before it approached the net. She turned to him, her face set. “Your turn.”