Some Great Thing (27 page)

“Excuse me.”

“Hey, Jerry!”

“How are ya? Excuse me.”

And at least when I was in the living room I would have a good chance of bumping into Edgar there.

“Excuse me.”

But when I got to the living room, I couldn’t see Kathleen. I looked through to the foyer and saw Edgar going back through the door into the family room, in a circle. I made it into the foyer and gave up.

Buzz and Rip were standing near me. “Who but God could touch that ceiling?” I asked them.

“Cheers, Jer.”

“You know it, Jer.”

And I went outside because I felt a bit cramped. I had drunk enough not to notice the cold, so I sat on the top step of the porch. I’ve noticed that whenever people step outside from a party for a break, they always look a bit wise—they wear a look that says they must be more interesting than the party inside. Smokers especially. I was probably wearing one of those looks.

I didn’t really intend to think of anything but my mind seemed to want to go back to the hours before the party.

Kathleen had been wearing this pink spongy jumpsuit which she always wore when she was being efficient. (Jerry told me the other day that he used to try to avoid her whenever she wore it.) She had gotten up early and was banging cupboards, making the kitchen sound like a firing range. The theme of the day was “Why don’t you help me?
Don’t
help me!”

When I got down to the kitchen the first thing she said was, “I want every one of your tools put away before you do anything today, before you say anything to me. It’s like two kids and not just the one.”

It was fair warning to treat her gingerly, so I tiptoed behind her and went to make some toast.

“What are you doing?”

“Getting a bit of breakfast.”

“Didn’t you hear me?”

“What?”

“Pick up your goddamn toys from around the house. I’m not doing any cleaning until you pick up your tools. You were lying in bed, playing with yer penis no doubt, while I’ve been down here busy. You would think this party was for me.”

Jerry walked by the door of the kitchen so I called good morning to him and offered him some toast.

“Don’t you bring him on to your side now. He was in here when I came down this morning … eating … sitting up there eating his own peanut-butter toast like he was King Flippin Shit of the Manor. I’ve already told him off, so don’t go bringing him on to your side. Just put the bread down and pick up yer toys.”

So I got out of her way for a while, picking up my tools from around the place. You shouldn’t believe her when she implied they were all over the place. But it took a surprisingly long time to pick them up. I noticed one of my hammers had a hairline crack, which was something the manufacturer was going to hear about.

“Where the shit have you been?!” was the next thing I heard
from her. “We have six hours before that doorbell rings! Have we got enough booze?”

“I don’t know.”

“Check!”

We had far less than I thought we did. “Where’s all our vodka?” I said.

“How should I know? If we’re out you’d better get some. Well?”

“We’re out.”

“Well? Christ, Jerry, a bit of planning, eh? You want to impress your bigwigs, eh? Your Big Mr. Larges? You go out and buy more booze than you have ever bought, and if you’re not back in an hour, I’ll hurt you.”

So I did just that. I can still remember the bill for the booze but I still don’t believe it enough to say it aloud. I was back in forty-five minutes but it took me another forty-five to unload it all. Jerry helped me—that’s when I had the idea of making him bartender at the party.

“While you two have been out farting, I’ve mopped every fuckin floor in here. Every one.” She poked my shoulder for every floor in the house. “And the bathtubs, I’ve cleaned the bathtubs, the sinks, your disgusting toilet. And you,” she tried to backhand Jerry’s face but he ducked so she grabbed him and shook him. “How many times have I told you to make your bed, and on the one day I need you to really make your feckin bed, you still leave it a mess. Get out of my sight. You get out of my sight, too,” she said to me. “Go look around at your
self-cleaning
house and see how goddamn clever it is when I’m in it.”

I did as I was told and set up a few things wherever Kathleen wasn’t. I quickly whacked some legs into some chipboard, and behold, my friend, a bar. I set that up in the family room and covered it with a tablecloth.

“What are you doing now?” she said.

“Staying out of your way.”

“Well, how about helping me? How many times do I have to ask?”

“For God’s sake, Kathleen, you’ve been shouting at me all day. Take it easy.”

“I’ll take it easy when I know I have people in this house, men I can rely on. This is your party, Gerald.”

“My name is Jerry. It has never been anything other than Jerry. What do you mean, it’s my party? This whole fuckin thing was your idea.”

“Oh, if that’s the sort of grammar you’re going to use in front of your bigwigs, you might as well call it off. And don’t you start FUCKin well SHOUTing at me, Gerald McGuinty, because I’ll tell all your friends tonight, Edgar and the rest of them, how bad you really treat me. I’ll tell your bigwigs what you are
really
like, about all your poking and begging in bed. I’ll tell them about your vasectomy, Jerry and then we’ll see how well your business does. They don’t have to live with you like I do.”

It didn’t stop. All day she kept shouting like that. She told Jerry that he would embarrass the family if he was the bartender because he would cock it up like he cocked up all his chores. It was only ten minutes before the first guests arrived that I was able to bring him around to helping me.

And when Kathleen got out of her jumpsuit, when she showered, fixed her hair, put perfume on … when the doorbell rang and every hair on our three necks stood up … when she emerged from the bathroom looking like the woman every healthy man dreams of … when she smiled and said, “Oh, I wonder who that is?” … when I answered the door and she came down my intelligent stairs in the body I built them for … when she said “Hello!” and smiled at the guests … everything was all right.

It was a party.

I
WENT BACK IN
and joined the party because my ass was cold. There were still a lot of people there. I had a few whiskies to warm
up, and I was lost in thought for a long time. I found myself laughing and saying “exactly” to every guest I encountered. There was a strange, steady bang in the background somewhere but I didn’t pay much attention to it—sort of a “whirr, BANG, whirr, BANG.”

Guests left.

“Hey, Jer, you’re going to enjoy living in this house, aren’t you?”

“Exactly. Ha ha ha.”

“See ya, Jer. Catch you Monday morning, as always.”

“Exactly. Ha ha ha.”

Whirr, BANG, whirr, BANG, whirr, BANG.

I went to get myself another drink and I realized I hadn’t noticed Jerry behind the bar for a while. Whirr, BANG. And that’s when I became fully aware of the noise.

I followed it around, through the kitchen, and came to the dining room. There was Jerry opening the sliding door and banging it closed, opening the sliding door and banging it closed.

“Testing your father’s craftsmanship, are you, buddy?”

“No.”

“How come you’re not behind the bar any more?”

He didn’t say anything and went upstairs to bed. He had a handsome little curl on the crown of his head, a sort of an elegant swirl, like a king should have. I realized he had got that from me, but when I felt my own head I noticed that most of my hair was gone.

A
NORMALLY RELIABLE PRINCIPLE
of development is that once it starts, it won’t stop. There are breaths, little pauses, of course. But they are only breaths. Put a house on a piece of land one year, and a hundred years later you can be guaranteed a suburb. It’s partly based on the principle that people don’t know that they want something until they see it, and once they see it they want and want and want. But there is also the obvious practical explanation that once water, sewerage, and electricity are set, the rest is inevitable, and as
long as those webs of pipes and cables can be joined to new webs, we spider developers will be happy and fat and you flies can rest in peace.

Continuous development, my friend, is a beautiful thing.

But if something gets in the way, if something prevents those webs from linking, you have an abomination. My phase five and other future phases were encroaching on what the Government was calling the “Greenbelt.”

I don’t know whether I need to say anything about the Greenbelt other than its name: green belt. A
green belt
. Green, like leprechauns and fairies, weird, imaginary, squeaky little freaks that make everyone sort of uncomfortable. Just because green is the color of leaves and grass doesn’t mean it’s not a fuckin weird color. There’s nothing natural about it. A green belt. I think we understand each other.

Somehow it was growing into a buffer zone. There were our developments on one side of it and the airport on the other. What was being saved? The airport? It made no sense. And if we had to stop our developments on one side of it, and we couldn’t develop again for miles beyond the airport, there would be one of those breaks in the web. An abomination.

I’ll put it this way. You’ve got a city with needs, you’ve got a developer with ideas. The developer stakes his claim, the city commits some money, investors come in, roads are laid, the buildings go up, the city spreads, the needs increase, and it hums along like music. It can be such a beautiful thumping piece of music, even from one house to the next. In blocks of ten, I would put foundations here, frames up here, walls up here, mechanics here, painting here. Progress blowing from one block to the next like seeds in a springtime field. That is nature. That is music. You can’t put an end to that.

A
ND LET ME TELL
you about green, in Ottawa.

It doesn’t exist.

That land in the green belt was flat, white, and bitter. They talk about nature. Life. Drive near that area in the middle of winter and the only thing alive is the snow kicked up by your wheels, the snow that curls in the wind like evil empty questions. There’s nothing green, nothing to cherish. See, I’m there in my truck on this flat unused land, and I’m in an Espolito mood; those snowy questions blowing in through the cracks and down the neck of my coat.

I see Kathleen, you see, I see her parked near the future phase five, and I pull over feeling fluey, and I watch her, that yellow standing out all the more because the snow is blowing today, my friend, blowing sideways so the world is flat and is only the color of cold. I should have felt relieved to see that truck, but I am realizing, pulling over, that she is such a stranger that I’m afraid to get too near.

What is she doing here in the middle of nowhere?
Such
a
nowhere
. Our sites are a mile away. Her work is a mile away.

I just can’t get near her any more. I sit about a hundred yards behind her in my truck and I think about inching toward her, taking my foot off the brake a bit. I don’t think about racing up to her and hopping in for a warm embrace. I wonder why I don’t, and I tell myself it’s because she’s here, in the middle of nowhere. What’s she doing here?

Before I can admit that really I know perfectly well what she is doing, her truck takes off. She kicks up a cloud of snow, and I follow. I don’t know whether she sees me or not, but I realize that she is in a rush. She is racing away from our sites, away from work, and definitely racing. I’m speeding to keep her in sight and chasing her along this shitty gravel road that’s never plowed. It’s straight but any turn of the wheel would put us in a spin.

“Why are you running away from me, Kath?”

The snow was so cold it was like grease. She must have put a bit of weight on the brake and turned the wheel. The road was still straight so why she braked and turned I don’t know. I found out later she was drunk.

I watched her tip and start rolling, and the only thing I could do was worry about stopping in time, and not sliding right into the upside-down truck.

Kathleen was upside down, buckled into her seat and bleeding from her mouth.

Somehow Edgar went through the windshield feet first. Halfway through. He was stuck at his waist, moaning fuuuuuuck, like he had made a mistake.

A
GOLF COURSE
. T
HAT
’
S
one thing I thought of. Keep it
green
, but useful.

“W
HY EDGAR
?”

“Who are you?”

“Why Edgar?”

“He’s a man.”

“Are you saying I’m not a man?”

“Nurse! Fuckin, Nurse! Tell Jerry I’ve spilled my chips!”

“I’m right here, Kathleen.”

“Tell him to clean the oil in the truck, and fry it. Please? Pleeease?”

“M
R. HERLIHY
?”

“McGuinty.”

“Was that your wife?”

“Was?”

“Whom I just treated? Is that your wife?”

“Yes.”

“Did you bring her in?”

“Yes.”

“She’s a bit confused. Did you see her crash?”

“Yes.”

“What happened?”

“She crashed … snow. Snow.”

“Had she been drinking?”

“I don’t know.”

“She has a high level of alcohol in her blood.”

“I didn’t see that. I didn’t see her drinking.”

“The painkillers I’ve given her shouldn’t react with the alcohol. She is still intoxicated. She broke two ribs, Mr. Herlihy.”

“Her mouth was bleeding.”

“She lost a tooth. There’s no point in seeing her for a while. She is delusional. She seems to be concerned about her fries.”

“She told me.”

“I haven’t finished examining her, but the ribs didn’t puncture anything. You should let her rest.”

I
DON
’
T LIKE GOLF
. I don’t like sports generally. I hate golfers.

“W
HAT ABOUT EDGAR
?”

“Who?”

“Edgar Davies. He was in the truck. I brought him in with my wife.”

“Someone else is looking after him.”