Idea in Stone (11 page)

A little girl sat across from him, playing with a plastic horse in the seat beside her mother, who read one of the daily tabloids. The girl caught Stefan looking at her. She smiled. A feeling filled Stefan’s chest, welling up to a geyser of a grin. The girl hadn’t learned the grown-up subway game yet. He hoped she never would.

He wondered where the mother and daughter were headed this late at night. He looked left and right. The subway was unusually busy given the hour. He poked fingers at his throat, trying to relieve the tightness there. This had been a long day, with two ads to voice over, a movie trailer, and an adult film—in French. When he was young, Delonia and he sometimes spoke French to each other, their secret code when they were up to something and didn’t want his father to know about it. But that was a long time ago, and he found himself that day trying to make the proper names of body parts sound deliberate and sexy, since he didn’t know any of the street words for them. Luckily, he didn’t need to construct full sentences after the cursory set-up of the movie’s premise (patient meets nurse, nurse undresses patient to bathe him, patient and nurse quickly decide to have sex, doctor checks up on patient, also has sex with nurse, three other nurses join them, and so on). Once the sex began, the filmmakers didn’t care if the sound matched the on-screen figures’ mouth movements, so Stefan developed a stock set of moans and phrases, and could now do his part while drinking coffee or reading the paper.

These other jobs all took place after a full day recording
Green Brigade
. His producer Jean and he had reached a détente that allowed Stefan creative expression in his voice-work as long as he kept quiet about the show’s writing and political intent. He didn’t feel bothered by this. He didn’t feel much of anything. It was February.

His life was being bent out of shape by Cerise’s ability to drive: Delonia reneged on her gift and Stefan had to take the subway or a streetcar to his various jobs. Just as well, he decided, he was saving a lot of money this way. He could barely remember what he was saving his money for, though. All he knew was that he was making lots of it.

He took off his gloves; the subway car’s vents blew great quantities of hot air into the small space. The little girl tugged at her mother’s sleeve. “Mom,” she said. Her mother patted the girl’s leg and continued reading. “Mo-om,” she pleaded with increasing intensity. Her mother told her to sit still. She responded by throwing up in her mother’s lap. The sharp blue cheese smell soon filled the car. People politely made gestures to cover their noses, then grew less polite. Eyes met, and people nodded to say,
Yeah, that’s awful
. A few people broke into laughter. “I hate the TTC!” someone finally yelled. Usually outbursts were reserved for the crazy and were studiously ignored. This one, though, got a round of applause and a few “Amens”.

In her own disgusting way, Stefan thought, the girl had broken the subway spell.

~

Stefan emerged from the tiled cavern of the subway into an afternoon overhung with low grey clouds, as if someone had stapled old bedding to the sky. He walked the four blocks to his agent’s office, passing victory homes with tiny square front yards penned in with low chain link fences. As he got closer to the office, the buildings changed to commercial properties, but most of these were derelict. He passed an old family hardware store with faded 1970s signage here, then a ‘jobbers’ with a sign offering daily work to secretaries, cleaners, and factory workers, then reached his agent’s office, with its smoky-tinted windows. He opened the stiff glass door and entered an interior of chocolate-coloured furniture, brass clocks and lamps, two old electric typewriters, and filing cabinets overflowing with papers.

Stefan had never been here until recently, when he’d taken on all his extra jobs. The
Green Brigade
work took care of itself, but now he needed his agent’s help to keep all his appointments from conflicting and to collect the cheques from various production companies.

“Hello, Stefan,” said the receptionist, who also happened to be the agent’s wife. The agency was modest by Toronto standards, but it was all he’d ever needed.

“Hiya, Hester. I’m supposed to see David.”

“Yep, he’s expecting you. Go right in.”

Stefan nodded and opened the door behind her desk. David sat there, looking out the window at a small backyard shared with a neighbouring house. A bookshelf and filing cabinet stood against one wall of his office. Every other surface was covered with black-and-white headshots. Most of these photographs were old. Stefan wondered about the pictures of children with precocious smiles. What had become of them? He recognised one of them from a television program about a family with an adopted alien son. Child stars had a short shelf-life, particularly in Canada. Stefan once saw the alien boy at a party looking weathered and distinctly stoned.

“Stefan, sit down,” said David, not rising, but sitting back in his creaking office chair, his stomach bulging like a hill covered with a starched white sheet.

“Hi, David,” said Stefan, sitting in one of the two chairs in front of the desk.

“I gotta say, son, I don’t know what’s got into you lately, but I like it.” He’d lowered his large glasses to look at a spreadsheet of some kind, then raised them again to look at Stefan. “You’re bringing in more residuals than all my other clients combined, did you know that?”

“No, I didn’t know that. I’m happy to be useful.”

“You’re being more than useful.”

“Well, like I said, I’m glad I’m helping out. You’ve always been good to me, even when I wasn’t doing much.” He shifted in his seat. “I just came by to pick up my cheques and find out where I’m supposed to go next week.”

“Right. Okay, we’ll get all that straightened out, and then I have a proposition for you.”

“Oh. O-kay,” said Stefan, unsure.

“Here’s your usual cheques for
The Green Show
—” (He rarely got the projects’ titles right.) “Here’s from the movie house. These are from that documentary about the bears—”
Otters,
thought Stefan. “And, um, here’s the
other
ones.” These were in a sealed envelope. David pushed it across to Stefan as if it were something old and dead.
Ah, the porn
.

“Now,” said David, lacing his hands together and leaning forward as Stefan put the various papers into his jacket pocket. David pushed his glasses up his squashed tomato of a nose. “You seem to be on an ambitious streak lately. I know for the past several years you’ve told me you only wanted to do
The Green Show
, and I respected that. But since you’ve been taking on all these other jobs lately, I thought you might be interested in something bigger.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I really don’t think I could do any more than I’m doing now.”

“I didn’t say ‘more’, Stefan, I said
‘bigger.”
David cleared his throat. “I put your demo in for a new Saturday morning cartoon. This is a sure thing, this show. It’s one of those computer cartoons, a tie-in with a product that’s been a top-seller for two years now. You’re up for the voice of a new lead character, and you’ve got a really good shot at it. He’s—I dunno, some kind of a robot or something. It’s called—” he checked a piece of paper in Stefan’s file “—
Machine Marines
. What do you think?”

“When would I have time to do this?”

“Stefan, you’re not hearing me. This job would
pay,
and pay
good.
You wouldn’t have to do anything else.”

“Oh.” Stefan looked out the window at the backyard. Snow was starting to fall from the newsprint sky, covering the hydro wires, the beige lawn, and the rusted swing-set. “Well.”

“Of course, you’d need to move to LA.”

“Oh.” Stefan’s eyebrows took flight.

David smiled. “Great, isn’t it?”

“Uh, yeah. That is great. Thanks for setting that up, David. I don’t know, though. I had some other plans. There was this project—“ He trailed off, looking at the lifeless faces on the wall.

“Oh, yeah, sorry about that—I’ve got a whole bunch of messages for you here from a woman named Helen.” He dug through a drawer and pulled out a stack of little yellow memo sheets. “She really wants to talk to you.” He read the notes. “Sets, casting, dates, venues, and something about funding. She was getting pretty pushy with Hester, but we know you don’t take phone calls.”

“Can’t.”

“Right,” said David, with no idea what Stefan meant. “Anyway, you should get in touch with her.”

“Yeah, I will. Look, David, I should get going. I’ve got to go meet some friends. Do you mind if I think about that offer for a few days?”

“Sure, that’s fine,” said David in a tone suggesting it was not fine. “Whatever you want.”

“Thanks. I appreciate all you’re doing for me.” He shook his agent’s hand and said goodbye to Hester on the way out. Large flakes of snow hit his face as he walked. Some melted in his hair and ran down his neck. He stopped walking: he forgot where he was supposed to go next.

~

Stefan closed his eyes on the dance floor and covered his ears. Coloured lights penetrated his eyelids and the beat pounded through his hands. He stood there, deliriously happy. His friends surrounded him, bumping into him from time to time as they danced.

He hadn’t seen them in weeks, he was so busy or so tired. He knew he couldn’t drink this much every night, and lots of times his gang’s attempts at big nights out turned into duds. Still, he wondered if there was some way to stay in this moment forever.

Somebody stumbled into him, then clapped him on the shoulder. He opened his eyes, and found his friends laughing, dancing in a circle around him.

~

Stefan ran a hand through his drooping hair and smacked his lips. His mouth tasted horrible. Allen offered him breakfast, but he declined, anxious to get home, clean himself properly, and change his clothes. He’d decided the night before that he was in no shape to walk home, and he’d been having such a good time that he accepted Allen’s offer of his fold-out couch.

Stefan stopped at a little bakery. Its name scrawled in black script across its teal-tiled exterior, Harbord Bakery. His favourite baked sweets from the shop were Jewish, but many of the staff inside looked Mediterranean. Toronto’s neighbourhoods were becoming hybrids: Italian/Korean, Greek/East Indian, Chinese/Nouveau Hippie. Perhaps, he thought, something was being lost. But then again, this opened up the communities like never before, and introduced people his age to foods and cultural activities his parents’ generation would never have considered sampling. Well, he reconsidered, perhaps not his mother, the most culturally sensitive person on earth.

He bought some coffee cake and ate it as he walked the rest of the way home, tearing off sticky chunks, licking his fingers after each one he put in his mouth. Sunday was living up to its name, and it was early enough that most of the snow was unblemished, except for that along the road, which looked like cola slush drink from a convenience store. He thought he might like one of those, but they were impossible to find in the winter. He crumpled the paper bag from the bakery, having finished his cake, and sneaked it into a garbage can in the laneway of a small brick house. He ran along the sidewalk then slid a long distance—the sun’s warmth made the snow heavy and wet, ideal for sliding. He reached up to jostle a tree-branch, then ducked away as heavy clumps of snow fell behind him.

This was good enough, all this. He thought about David’s offer, but put it out of his mind.
Not today
. Plans seemed too hard. He knew there was something else he was supposed to be working on, but it eluded him.

The smell of coffee greeted him as he opened the front door. Cerise’s presence wasn’t an altogether bad thing. It had cost him the car, but there were other concessions around the house that made life easier.

“Hi, Cerise,” said Stefan, filling a cup from the coffee maker urn. The beans were sure to have been picked by a well-paid group of revolutionary farmers, he figured, but he didn’t care about that as long as it tasted good. His mother tried for years to foist chicory on him, whose flavour he could only describe as “not coffee”.

“Hi, Stef,” said Cerise, looking up from a thick weekend paper (Delonia’s recycling efforts were strained to their limits by Cerise’s international newspaper fetish.) “Oh,” she said, “you might want to watch out for your mo—”

“Hello, Stefan,” said Delonia, entering the kitchen. “Could I speak with you in the study?”

This is not good,
he thought. That invitation had always been an ominous one. Surely he was too old to get in trouble. Confused, he followed her through to the back room and sat in a deep, padded wingback chair next to a wall lined with books. The look of the room suggested they might be legal texts, but they were Delonia’s music and human potential collection, ranging from joyful sex to the history of folk music to finding one’s spirit pet.

Delonia sat on the corner of the desk, looming above him, her broad mouth pursed. She started to speak, but stopped herself. She smiled at him with her large teeth, giving him her strange disappointed smile, which he’d seen only a few times. She breathed deeply, then spoke. “I spoke with Doug Hendry on Friday,” she said. Stefan’s face was a blank. “From the Canada Council.”

Stefan’s insides deflated. He wrapped his hands together. They were cold.