My Life Among the Apes (2 page)

YOU MUST UNDERSTAND, I KNOW that my husband worked extremely hard at a job of tremendous pressure. He was an otherwise attentive husband and a good father, and he never wavered in his support of my own career as a doctor, a lecturer, and later the co-founder of a women’s hospice. I would have stayed with him, no matter how sick I became of phrases such as “forcing,” “penetration frame,” and “coin clip,” or how often at a dinner party he would unscrew the top of the salt shaker, pour the contents into his hand, and then throw it at the guest across the table only to have the salt vanish. I would have stayed if, after his retirement, he had not decided — no, insisted — on turning professional.

For several months he did not tell me that he had hired a director, a man who had worked with several established acts in Las Vegas and New York, to help him create a stage show. That he had found a 150-seat theatre to rent every Saturday night where he would perform as Zardoff the Mysterious. That he had found a young woman assistant who was lithe enough to fold herself into a basket or fit into that same zig-zag girl cabinet. (Many of my friends would assume that Albert was having an affair with the young woman, a common occurrence in the magic world.) When he did tell me I said no. I was absolutely clear about it, but perhaps he didn’t believe me. Or he believed me but hoped that I would change my mind. Or believed me but decided to go ahead anyway. It was the last possibility that made me realize I could not change my mind even if I wanted to. And so, when he returned from opening night, I was gone.

I slept at the hospital for a few days, then a hotel, and then rented a condominium at Bay and Wellesley. Our kids, young adults by now, were angry at me. Especially our eldest son, who threatened to derail his plans to enter medical school, as if this was a way to get back at me. Our daughter, the middle one, kept her usual neutral stance, while the youngest boy decided to stay with me, although it meant a subway and bus trip to Forest Hill Collegiate every day.

I did not cut off all communication with Albert. We spoke on the phone for a few minutes every day, mostly about the kids but also about our work, never mentioning my having left or his magic show. I only knew it was still running from the entertainment listings. And then some anonymous “friend” sent me a review of the show in the weekly arts paper
Now
, with what intention I don’t know. The review both mocked and praised Albert’s solemn demeanour, but what caught my attention was the final paragraph.

Zardoff (whose real name is nowhere listed in the program) seems to think that the world has not changed in a hundred years and that people can still be astounded by objects vanishing, endless coins pouring into a top hat, and “spirits” writing messages on chalk boards. He believes that a striking head, lit in profile and with one hand raised, can make an audience grow silent with expectation. And he is weirdly right, or nearly so. But nothing that comes before will prepare you for the show’s pièce-de-résistance, the climactic illusion that he calls “The Floating Wife.” I heard people laugh and, when the lights came up, I saw more than a few surreptitiously wiping tears from their eyes. As for me, I just wanted to know how the damn trick worked.

Naturally I was dismayed and also possibly angry. How could I not be? Surely there were people in the audience on some nights who recognized Albert and knew me as well. It also occurred to me that, given Albert’s nature, I ought to be flattered. And then I discovered that all three of our children had gone to see the show.

“I’m not going to describe it for you,” my eldest son said on the phone. He was still refusing even to see where I lived. “It’s no more nor less than you deserve. I think it would do you good to see it for yourself.”

“I don’t think Dad means anything by it,” my daughter said. “It’s just a good illusion, that’s all. He probably wasn’t even thinking of you.”

“It’s sweet,” said my youngest at breakfast. “It’s
so
Dad. Go and see it. I bet you’ll cry and you don’t cry easily.”

It didn’t seem as if I had much choice. Still, I waited another week before finally booking a ticket on the telephone, which meant leaving my name on the answering machine. I wondered whether Albert knew that I was coming, and even if he had created “The Floating Wife” expecting that I would see it. The theatre was in a decrepit building, a small, former chicken slaughterhouse. The seats had been rescued from a cinema that was being torn down to put up a multiplex. It was a little more than half full, but there was nobody I knew in the audience. At eight o’clock the curtain did not go up. Nor at eight-thirty. Finally the assistant came out from between the curtains, clearly distraught. My first thought was maybe they were having an affair after all. And then she announced that “Mr. Zardoff” had become ill just before coming to the theatre and had been taken to hospital.

It took me ten minutes to find a cab. I urged him to drive faster, but it did no good. Albert was already dead. He’d suffered a myocardial infarction — a heart attack. They were only just cleaning up the emergency room and he was still on the table. I have seen more than my share of corpses, but when you see the body of the man you have shared your life with you are no longer a doctor.

We had been separated but still husband and wife, and the funeral arrangements fell to me. I wouldn’t have wanted it differently. The service was overflowing with friends, lawyers and judges and other members of the judicial system, the mayor, the premier and several cabinet ministers, people I didn’t recognize. Everyone silently agreed to overlook the fact of our late separation. But what none of them knew was that an hour before the service, I had a terrible argument with both the rabbi and the director of the Jewish funeral home.

There is a tradition that when a magician dies, his wand is broken in half and ceremoniously thrown into the coffin with him. The rabbi and the director did not want to allow it. In the end, we compromised. I broke the wand (Albert had about two dozen, I just picked one) and placed it in the coffin before the service.

I LIVE IN THE FOREST HILL house again, a widow. Unlike Albert, I have chosen not to retire. My practice is busier than ever, given the current crisis in our health care system, and I have taken on extra teaching duties as well. Exhausted from the day, I go to bed almost as soon as I get home. Every so often the doorbell rings: a magician, visiting town, has come to see Albert’s collection. I let them in, telling them to see themselves out when they are done. Sometimes the magician will ask me about “The Floating Wife,” an illusion that, as far as I can gather, has become something of a legend in conjuring circles. But of course, I can say nothing about it.

Shitbox

I AM TRYING TO BAlANCE the
New York Review of Books
on my lap while eating Kraft Dinner from a plastic bowl. Well, not actually Kraft Dinner, but a no-name imitation with cheese that is so intensely, unreally orange that it is almost fluorescent. I am struggling through an essay about the Armenian genocide that refers to several new books and also a film by Atom Egoyan. I used to know Atom when Candice and I went to a lot of Toronto parties and openings. I hadn't quite figured out what I was going to do: make films, write poems, or create some new cross-disciplinary form to capture the paradox of our late capitalist, terrorized, hypererotic Starbucks lives.

What I actually became was a pharmaceutical rep.

I roam from medical office to doctor's office with my square leather sample case, meeting doctors and suggesting to them that they prescribe our anti-depressant, our antiinflammatory, our analgesic pain killer, our contraceptive pill, our alternative to Viagra (no hot flushes, no seeing purple). I load them up with free samples to hand out to patients — candy, we call them. My territory is the northern outskirts of Toronto: Markham, Thornhill, the 905 arc over the city, which I traverse like a voyageur for the good of the distant mother country, a massive German pharmaceutical corporation. The job was supposed to be temporary. Candice was already working as a lawyer for the province and I felt bad every time we went to a restaurant and she took out her Visa. What I think happened, what I can reconstruct from certain painful flashes of memory, is that Candice was affected by watching me return every evening in my cheap Moore's suit and clutching my
Death of a Salesman
sample bag. She started to imagine me in twenty years' time. Receding hairline. Paunch. Not bothering to loosen my tie before heading for the liquor cabinet to pour myself a stiff one. It caused her to have panic attacks. And now I haven't seen Candice for three months.

The Forty Winks Motel has a blinking neon eye on its sign. I am staying here because it is convenient to my work territory, because the weekly rate is cheap, because I will never run into anyone I know, and because the sheer crumminess of my present life will force me to make some decisions. As motel rooms go, this one could be worse. No smell of mould, roach killer, or someone else's semen. The hotplate, provided (illegally) by the motel for an extra four dollars a day, is set up in the bathroom, the only counter space. The bedroom windows don't face the highway out front, but look behind to a new subdivision going up on former farm land. Rows of townhouses disappearing into the vanishing point.

MY FIRST WEEK LIVING HERE, I drove into Toronto, crashing at my friend Aaron's place. Aaron and I go back to high school, but Aaron has a serious girlfriend now, who is eight years older and has a kid, and Aaron let me know in an embarrassed, throat-clearing way that it wasn't really convenient to have me around. I understand that of course, and I'm totally cool about it, so the next Saturday I stayed at Walt's. Walt is single and has never been known to go on a date, but he has three large dogs who were not pleased about having their sofa taken over. Every so often, during the night, I could hear a low growl from behind the kitchen door. All Walt and I ended up doing was watching the ball game while eating Pizza Pizza. Sitting in that dark room, the television flickering and the air heavy with dog flatulence, it occurred to me that all our interesting friends had belonged to Candice.

Which only made me think about how much I missed her.

I will not pretend that it was a mutual break-up. Candice said she didn't love me anymore, and that it had taken her weeks of talking with her therapist and the support of all her friends to get up the courage to leave. She said I was a wonderful person, but she just couldn't be the person she wasn't anymore and she had to save her own life. Tears, nose-blowing. There wasn't much left for me to do but join the chorus of her friends and congratulate her for finding the courage to dump me.

I WAKE UP IN A sweat, a blade of light crossing my face, grope for the dollar-store alarm clock to see why it hasn't rung. Even as I do, I realize it's the weekend. A plunging in my stomach. Oh Jesus, I cannot believe that I feel sickened by the idea of Saturday, that I don't know what I'm going to possibly do with myself.

A grinding outside. I push back the curtain to see a backhoe tearing up the earth in front of the new townhouses. Even though the workers are still finishing the interiors, carrying in sheets of drywall and squares of parquet flooring, the trees and shrubs and grass have arrived in the backs of three dump trucks. Instant neighbourhood.

I reach for my cellphone and start to punch in the code for Candice's number. Then I hit the off button and put the phone down again. Candice is over and I know it. I am not the sort to make useless, grovelling phone calls — besides, I already have. On the other side of the wall, the television goes on and I hear whispers and moans. Somebody is watching a porn flick at seven in the morning. I get up, take a shower, shave and dress, put coffee in the “Little Bachelor” drip machine, open a snack pack of Alpha-Bits. I sit on the edge of the bed crunching letters when I hear “Ode to Joy” reduced to the electronic chimes of my cellphone.

“Mitch, I've finally got you.”

“Hey, Mom.”

“I've been trying for two days. I was going to call the apartment but you said not to.”

“Candice has a lot of stress at work right now. She's really on edge.”

“Poor girl. She's too dedicated for her own good.”

“Yeah, that's just what I tell her. How's Winnipeg?”

“Mosquitoes already. Marnie Hoffman's aunt got West Nile. She's paralyzed. It's like one of the ten plagues. The rabbi was saying ...”

I take a sip of coffee. My mother did not go to synagogue regularly before my father died. It was Candice, a lapsed Anglican, who encouraged my mother to see it as a way to a new social life. My mother said that if it wasn't for Candice she would have jumped into the grave after my father.

“Are you going to come at the end of June like you said?”

“I said maybe. It really depends on Candice's work. Listen, there's something I've got to do. I'll talk to you later.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

“You tell that doll not to work so hard.”

I really do have something to do. My laundry. When that's finished I stand by my car outside the laundromat, trying not to look at the little kid making faces at me through the window.

Back in the car, I pull onto the highway too quickly, cutting off the driver behind who leans on his horn and gives me the finger. I fiddle with the radio and snap it off again. It is a bright day, perfect early summer weather, but I'm too lethargic to wind down the window. Without thinking I turn into the drive of the Treasure Barn, my tires flinging up stones. The car comes to a halt beside a couple of rain barrels made into begonia planters. Along with the usual rocking chairs outside are whiteand black-faced lawn jockeys, several poorly carved wooden ducks, and an old baby carriage full of used videos. There's a sign on the door in wood type that reads OPEN in reverse letters and I wonder if it means the place is actually closed, but the door swings in when I push it.

Through the filter of dust suspended in the air I see dressers from the 1950s, too ugly to be kitsch. A rack of suits in alarming check. Rusting rakes and shovels, imploding sofas, bicycle tire rims, mounted deer antlers. The woman behind the desk — or rather, inside a U-shape made from old jewellery display cases — looks up from her crocheting and smiles. I wonder if that's a real gold tooth she has or just a fake for the weekend tourists. I decide I must buy something, no matter how inferior or useless. And then something catches my eye.

A guitar, and not much of a one — a cheap steel-string with the stencilled image of a bucking bronco on its flat top, which looks as if somebody had started to scrape off the bronco with a pen knife and gave up after removing a hind foot. I pick it up from the broken chair where it lies, put the fraying macramé strap around my neck, and strum a G chord. At least I think it's a G chord. Of course the guitar is out of tune, but the neck looks straight so I take it up to the counter.

“I was wondering how much you want for this,” I say.

The woman peers at it over her reading glasses. “That's a Martin. Two hundred.”

“It isn't a Martin. It's a
Marvin
. I'll give you twenty-five bucks.”

“A hundred.”

“Twenty-five.”

“I got a case for it. Eighty.”

“I'll take the case. Forty.”

She sizes me up; a city slicker who thinks he can pull one over on a country bumpkin.

“You got cash?”