The Adjustment League (4 page)

People ask for adjustments all the time—it's practically all they talk about, if you listen—but just the asking isn't reason enough. In fact, sometimes the adjustment needed is opposite to what the asker wants. Like the student pleading for rescue from a persecuting TA. A jealous terror dyke, sabotaging her GPA, derailing her law school plans. When I found out this student had been plagiarizing her essays, I dug through library stacks for two days to find her sources, then made sure copies with highlighted sections got to the TA. No payment on that one, other than the satisfaction of hearing she'd been hauled before the Dean and bounced from the faculty. Her family would buy her a second chance—they'd bought her the first—but the price would climb. And it wasn't the plagiarism that wound me up. It was the teary self-pity she'd played me with, running me around inside, wasting my energies. That awoke the anger I needed to make an adjustment. It stoked the fire that had scorched the inner terrain, exhausting combustible materials, so it had to locate the right class of fuel outside.

Though fire a flawed analogy, since fire always produces ash, and ash always has its uses—as fertilizer, as insulation to bank the next fire.
Metaphors teach the eye nothing.
Still, they point as far as can be seen and help you conjure what's around the bend.

How did I get into them? When? I can hardly remember, and don't entirely trust the dates and events that do come to mind. It felt like a drift, but an inevitable one. Fresca left me with intimations of something dim and ancient—old patterns, old ways of being in the world—rising into sharper focus, becoming more acute and willed. The more I learned about an area, or areas, of myself that were beyond adjustment, the more I sought out outer adjustments that could still be made. That sounds simplistic, like a formula. But sometimes the simple is simply true, or the start of truth. And plenty of formulas describe a certain class of events with perfect clarity.

§

The stock's ready, I turn it off to cool. A rich fug of poultry permeates the space. The smell of home, some would say. Though the smells of long-term rental are the smells I trust, the ones most likely to let me sleep.

I turn on the counter radio, tuned to CJRT, while I chop the vegetables and measure them into two-cup bags. I'm not a jazz buff, though I've become a moderate fan. The pop stations drove me there, a refugee from groove-paralysis. At 91.1 the DJs actually love the music, which gives them a sense of adventure. Dust off the backlist, play the new bands live. Here's a quirky new take on an eighty-year-old standard. Whereas Classic Rock—the soundtrack of my childhood—is dead and stuffed and mounted on the rec-room wall. Hendrix fronting mindless cinder block. A hundred decent tracks by the Stones, yet they punch the same five out at you. New Rock's not much better. Different bands, same handful of hits. Tire hum of given up.

So listen to the jazzheads. A quartet now—who knows who—ticking and thrumming and tinkling and beeping time into its atomic elements.

Listen and stir. Skin detaches from flesh, flesh from bone. Carrot bits, onion. Stir, stir. Stir to stretch two hundred grand into a lifetime.
Stir because you'll never work again and psychosis doesn't come with a pension plan.

§

The phone rings as a voice is telling me the sun is shining. I buzz them up.

“Are you the super?”

“So the Owner keeps reminding me.”

Stiff smiles, hers fading first. Late twenties, cookie-cut from Condo Life. Their visit not off to a good start: slice of nameless gray between the Favorite and the Latimer, lurching ancient elevator box. And now me. But you have to see a scope-out through.
You never know.

A few minutes later, they're glad they did. 305, like the other units, looks better inside than out. No Name Towers reverses the norm, that way. Gray slab of door, but behind it three large bedrooms and wide windows, parquet floors, passable appliances and plumbing. Experienced hunters, they have no trouble mentally erasing the tacky furnishings and installing their own. I leave them to explore, burbling in low voices about space and light, while I hang back by the door.

After a few minutes, the guy comes back to confirm the rent I gave him over the phone.

“That seems… reasonable.” Trying out his trading floor voice.

“In this neighbourhood it's a lot better than that. Ask the Owner.”

He nods, scoots back to her. My mouth, like my face, will be a carrying cost.

The Owner can't do math. He can't even do basic arithmetic, since he won't put a minus sign on any side but yours. He yowled at the hundred bucks the Old Man knocked off my rent for the help I gave him: shovelling snow, cleaning and painting vacated apartments, caulking, unplugging toilets, showing units when he was sick or just too tired. We worked in speechless synchrony, super and protegé. I'd reached an eerie, afterlife-ish calm, where I knew I'd never be Admitted and wear a plastic bracelet again, because the ward was something I carried wherever I went. I just needed to rack up living arrangements. When I took over from the Old Man—still in ICU, but headed for a home—I was told by the voice on the phone I was only entitled to free rent in the dinky first-floor unit. For the two-bedroom I was occupying, I'd have to settle for half off. But half off doesn't equal the one-bedroom rent, I said. And eventually got him to see, or agree at least, though I had to rub his face in it awhile.

We do the same dance with every vacancy. The Owner hyped to jack the rent, it's his only redress for the socialist crime of rent controls. And I have to explain, each time, that the “market value” rents he's barking down the line won't bring in the “better class of tenants” he's dreaming of—with these halls? that vertical coffin lift?—they'll just force the unit-sharing, two students, two waiters and a cook, divvying up the rent. Which means more parties. Which means more noise. And which also means more vacancies, since sooner or later one finds a girlfriend, or a boyfriend, or they argue. And they leave.

Or don't leave. And I have to make them. Like the cruise ship musicians in 305. Nice when they're gone, but when they aren't, they think midnight is a good time to start wailing. Off key, too. Though quality hardly matters when you're punching a 6 a.m. clock—the guy in 205—or nursing nerves so tender an elf fart wakes you—either of the couple in 405.

The Owner's all for evictions. But though he may rule Bay Street, he can't see that rent jacked two hundred dollars will mean eight months to recoup his losses if the unit stands empty a month. Almost a year and a half if it stretches to two. He can't do math.

So he grumbles and fulminates and finally sticks a dial tone in my ear.

The couple comes back. She leads with the line they've decided on. “It seems to be in…
fairly
decent shape. The apartment, at least. We do have some questions about the building. But we like the neighbourhood.”

“We all do. We're poaching on Forest Hill, basically. This row dates from the forties. North of the mansions then. Then the second-tier burghers caught up and built in around them. You can use the services they require—good restaurants, cafés, all kinds of shops—without paying their property taxes. Or their mortgages.” They exchange a glance they think I don't catch. Who in their right mind would delay buying a house a second longer than they had to? No need to hype them to my view.
To rent is to live a little longer. To own is to die. A baby rents its patch of flesh. A corpse owns it.

“You may be wondering”—the guy again—“why we need three bedrooms, since we don't have kids and aren't planning on any for a while.”

I wasn't wondering. They
need
house space while they're saving house cash. No downbeat scrimping like their parents did. But I stare above them at a blazing maple while he lays out how she needs a studio for her painting, watercolours mostly, and he, he's developing a software project, early days of course, but some promising offers…

They're almost touching, this new breed of birds.
Us
-triches, with plans so long-range subtle they assume they're invisible to the guy slicing their sashimi or unclogging their drain.

“It's long-term rental we're thinking of.” She cuts into his rap, which has gone meandery. “Three or four years minimum. Five, maybe.”

A lie, clearly. These two will treadmill toonies into their mutual fund. But they'll be quiet at least. Sipping fair trade lattes while they split the
Post
Financial.

“Short-term's what I'm thinking of. It'll be vacant at midnight on the thirty-first, occupied at 12:01 on the first. Right now, that minute's up for grabs.”

As they leave clutching the Owner's application, I can hear the dilemma that will envelop them two steps out the door.
Decent place, lotsa' room. Great location! Not a bad rent. But that guy!

Well, everything comes at a price, my dears. But I hope they take it, they're not bad little strivers compared to some.

And will inherit what's left of the earth, no question.

§

The soup down, the jazz still ticking.
Nothing takes long enough.
Not in hyper.

3 p.m. Not a time of day for reading. Not morning, not night. Halfway House.

I move around the premises. The faded IKEA furniture Lois's father bought us. Her parents playing house, fixing it up for the kids who would give them grandkids. After twenty years, it looks like the Goodwill gear they wanted to save us from. They did save
us
. It's just me using it. Living room. Bedroom.

Building a life from other people's lack of imagination
. Jordan and Melanie unable to picture their twenty-three-year-old daughter living in a shitty apartment. “Starving artist,” all right, but please, at least a decent sofa, Queen bed… And when pregnancy surprised, utterly unable and unwilling—no wiggle here—to imagine their grandchild living much past infancy in rented rooms. Gifting us the house down payment. And all predicated on their greatest failure of vision: to see no reason why a thirty-five-year-old shipper-receiver with “brains to burn” couldn't scale the heights belatedly. Lois, smart as she was, inherited this blindness—or love dimmed her sight, made her a dreamy myope. Because she'd met me in a quiescent phase that might be mistaken for the ups and downs of a “moody” person, calm of the Island she helped create, she heard my stories of the Hurricane Years as just that, stories. And she loved stories.
Imagination feeding lack of imagination. Murmuring to Terror, “It's only a dream…”

I avoid opening the second bedroom door until avoiding it's all I'm aware of doing.

Absence, empty space, has its own life stages. Like a series of ugly worms that can become a butterfly—given enough time and the right conditions.

Starting as sheer torture, as it must, absence modulates to a trial. That's when most people rush to fill it, stupidly, since the filling is often worse than the hole. Hang on through that, though, and
gone
—the clinging, hanging sense of
un
—can become a habit. A nagging one, to start with, then just habit: mindless
non
.

From there—in special cases—it may evolve into positive need, a nutrient approaching pleasure.

Vacuum become oxygen. Black space spreading and drying its wings in your lungs.

Big Empty looks like it did twenty-three years ago. The Old Man gave us the ten days before move-in to clean and paint. It was the first room we did.

Windexed the big, south-facing panes. Patched and painted the white walls and ceiling. I give them a fresh coat every few years, otherwise just wipe them down with a damp cloth when they look dull, maybe four times a year. Mr. Cleaned the parquet squares up to shine. I still do that at least once a month, oftener than they need. Liking the pine-honey gleams.

Sanctum
. Sitting room. And many nights—every night as a window closes—my lying room. The last place I can chase sleep.

Smelling the subtle aromas of time and space in a vacant room. Scents that never cloy or tire.

It brings you things, Big Empty. Never what, or when, you expect. News on its own schedule.

Today, just two memories. Lois and I making it on the bare wood floor. Laughing afterwards. Lying on our backs, seeing a spot we'd missed. Late August. Traffic sounds in the claggy air.

Her father handing me the cheque in Sunnybrook. Not quite twenty-eight months—lifetimes—later. Waiting there—how long?—in the lounge outside ICU, to make sure I got no further. A shock to realize that. With conditions and lawyer-drawn papers—going to his partner, no less—to make sure they stuck.

A shock in stages: the elevator, the parking lot. The bus, going home. No snow yet, but lights on trees and window frames.

Someone willing to spend a fifth of a million dollars to keep you clear of Lois. Clear of Megan.

Of all the names you called him down the years, bad father never among them.

§

That is not what killed my mother.

Force it down.
Not now, not now, no time
. Stone saying it to me, or me saying it to Stone? Does it even matter anymore?

Adjustment more than drooping blood sugar. Afternoon sag of sleep-poor nights. Four hours, five—how many weeks now?

Open Mr. Noodle, pitch the chemical flavour pack. Boil three minutes, drain. Warm up a container of the fresh stock. Four more in the fridge, the rest in the freezer, two older to the front. Discipline. Add a baggie of vegetables. The noodles.

4 p.m.

Nothing takes long enough.

Though speed the perfect weight-loss regimen. Twenty waking hours to burn off calories, ten hours between meals.

Look around. Too early to leave. Too late not to.