The Affinities (7 page)

“But you
have
smoked.”

“Sure.” In high school, in the back of a friend's beat-up Ford Taurus, out at the quarry, and occasionally with Dex, my erstwhile roommate—more than occasionally if you count secondhand smoke.

She used her fingernails to pick apart a nugget of weed and fill the bowl. “So do you want to smoke
now
?”

“Lisa and, um, Loretta don't mind?”

“They don't like people smoking anything indoors, but if they weren't so busy they might have joined us out here.”

I didn't want to disappoint her. And how many chances would I have to smoke weed on the roof of a Rosedale mansion? So I took the pipe and the lighter and even managed to hold down a toke without coughing. At which point, in the ordinary course of things, I would have succumbed to my usual cannabis-induced self-consciousness; but for whatever reason I remained reasonably coherent—though the night seemed to inflate like a party balloon and the chorus of crickets became operatic in its complexity.

“So,” she said, “you want to talk about what's bothering you?”

“Why does everyone say that? How do you know something's bothering me?”

“You spent a half-hour watching TV with Tonya, for one thing.”

“I like Tonya.”

“Of course you do. She's a sweetie. But she's not a Tau.”

“You're reading a lot into—”

“It's also your body language, how you react when you shake hands with somebody, things like that.”

“You must have been watching me pretty closely.”

“It's just tranche telepathy. I mean, that's what people call it. It isn't really telepathy, obviously. We read each other better than ordinary people. So we can tell you're worried about something. You don't have to tell me about it, but we're tranchemates. Maybe I can help.”

I felt a little tingle when she called me her tranchemate, though it was the first time I had heard the word. Did she know that about me, too? Something in her smile suggested she did. We had quite a complex little silent conversation going on, in fact.

So I gave her a quick summary of the family curse. I told her about Grammy Fisk's stroke, my awkward relationship with my father, the tuition money. I told her I had dropped out of my Sheridan courses and given notice at my apartment—I had to be out by the end of the month. No money and nowhere to go but back home. I had been curious about tonight's meeting but I was embarrassed to admit that I'd never be back.

“Not worth worrying about, Adam. You're a Tau, you're welcome even for one night. But the thing about going back home—I gather you'd prefer to stay in Toronto?”

Before I came here for school I hadn't given the city a second thought. I had wanted to study in New York City, but my father was convinced that even a brief exposure to Manhattan would turn me into a gay-marrying Democrat-voting liberal, and not even Grammy Fisk could overcome his objections. He had agreed to Toronto because he imagined Canada to be a well-mannered country, suspiciously socialistic but hardly radical. I had agreed because Sheridan offered world-class graphics and media curricula. Did I want to stay here? Sure. But no job, no work permit, no crib. She said, “You're studying graphic design?”

“Was, before I dropped out.”

“So you should talk to Walter.”

“Who?”

“Walter Kohler. Lisa must have introduced you. Big guy? Six foot, two hundred fifty pounds, in his forties, wears a suit?”

I vaguely recalled such a person. He had smiled and shaken my hand, that was all.

Amanda tucked away her pipe and baggie. “Really, you need to talk to him.”

“Do I?”

“Walter used to work for one of the big ad agencies in town, but he's starting his own business—come on, we'll go see him.”

“What,
now
?”

“Of course now. Come on!” She practically vaulted back inside the dormer window. I was a little reluctant to leave the roof—it was a good place to be stoned: safe, scenic, undemanding—but I staggered after her.

*   *   *

Kohler was in the game room in the basement, knocking balls around a pool table for his own amusement. He was big enough that the cue looked small in his hands. Amanda re-introduced me and, mortifyingly, told him I was looking for a job.

“Actually I'm not,” I said. “I mean, I
can't
. I have a student work permit, but I'm not a student anymore. I don't even have a visa.” I explained again about my family situation.

“Finished three years at Sheridan?” Kohler asked.

“Yeah, but—”

“Tell me what courses you took.”

I listed them.

“Okay,” he said. “Promising. What kind of grades were you pulling down?”

I told him.

“Sounds like someone you could use,” suggested Amanda.

Kohler said, “What I'm setting up is basically a media-access and marketing business. People come to us, we give them what they want at whatever price point they can afford—TV, Internet, direct mail, anything from a full-court integrated ad campaign to a guy handing out leaflets on a street corner. So yeah, Amanda's right, I'm looking to hire folks with the appropriate skills. If you're up to speed on CSS and JavaScript, I can start you next week.”

“That's amazingly generous, and it's tempting, but like I said, I don't have a valid work permit—”

“I have a legal guy who can expedite the paperwork. And I'm willing to advance you your salary until you're authorized. Do you want to talk about salary?”

He cited numbers that seemed ridiculously generous. I nodded and said, “But, wait—I would love to do this but I'm kind of—”

“He's new,” Amanda said, as if this explained something.

“I'd have to find a place to stay—”

“Lisa!”
Kohler roared. He was a big man. Big chest cavity. He could roar pretty impressively. I tried not to flinch. “
Loretta!
Amanda, are the Sob Sisters upstairs?”

Lisa Wei came into the room before she could answer. “Keep your voice down, Walter; I'm sure they can hear you in Vancouver. What is it?”

“Homeless waif. A loose Tau.”

“Really?” Lisa took my hand and gave me a motherly look. Or what I imagined was a motherly look. I didn't remember my own mother very clearly. “Well, then, you have to stay with us! There are a couple of rooms you can choose from. Tonight isn't too soon, you know, if you don't have anywhere to go.”

“My lease is good to the end of the month, but—”

“Then you can move in anytime. Welcome home, Adam! I'll tell Loretta we have a new roomer.”

The next sound I heard was Amanda, laughing at the expression on my face.

*   *   *

“We call them the Sob Sisters,” Amanda said, “because they don't mind if you cry on their shoulders. You don't need to worry about imposing. Lisa and Loretta love having company. Tau company, anyway. So maybe I'll see you next time, Adam.”

“Are you leaving?”

“Soon. It's pretty late. I need to say my good-byes.” She hugged me and walked away.

But that was fine. A small miracle had taken place: somehow, over the course of a few hours, I had internalized the idea that I was
among family
—not the messy
modus vivendi
my Schuyler relations had arrived at, but family in a better and truer sense of the word. And for another forty-five minutes I drifted through the thinning crowd with a sheepish and slightly stoned grin on my face, striking up conversations that inevitably seemed to begin and end in mid-sentence. “Newbie euphoria,” someone called it. Fine. Yes. Exactly.

I caught a last glimpse of Amanda Mehta as she left the house. Dismayingly, she was on the arm of someone I hadn't been introduced to. A big guy—
huge
, actually—with a shaved head and black Maori-style tattoos all over his face.

“Is that her boyfriend?” I asked Lisa Wei, who had come to stand beside me, looking at the end of the evening like a slightly tattered apple doll.

“That's Trevor Holst. Amanda's roommate.”

Lisa registered my questioning look but wouldn't say more. Amanda waved to the room as the door was closing—at everyone, but I chose to take it personally.

“I should have thanked her,” I said.

“Thank her next time.”

“And, I mean, you, too. And Loretta. And Walter. For, well,
everything
.”

“You'd do the same in our place,” Lisa said calmly. “And sooner or later, you will.”

 

CHAPTER 4

The first big storm of the winter announced itself on a Friday in December. For two days a low-pressure cell rotated over the city like a millstone, grinding clouds into snow. All weekend, those of us who lived in the house and a handful of our tranchemates took turns excavating the driveway. Lisa and Loretta could have afforded a removal service, but we wouldn't let them pay for labor any able-bodied Tau could perform. By Monday morning the streets were mostly passable and I was able to get to work; at the end of the day I made my way home under streetlights that bled a muddy orange glow, the color of pill bottles and chronic depression.

But I wasn't depressed, just tired. Tired enough to slow down for the familiar quarter-mile walk from the subway; tired enough to be, as Amanda liked to say,
in the moment,
thinking about nothing in particular and paying casual attention to the street, the sidewalk, the few flakes of snow silting from a cloud-locked sky. I cataloged the cars parked by curbside, some still cloaked in the white burqas of the weekend blizzard. Which is how I happened to notice a Toyota Venza idling in the curb zone not far from the house. The skin of snow adhering to it suggested it had been in place for at least an hour. Much of its glass was opaque with condensation, but the moisture had been swiped from the side windows and windshield. Which meant I could see the shape of the car's sole occupant: a man in a navy-blue parka who quickly turned away when he saw me looking.

There was nothing very unusual about this, but the long shadows of the streetlights gave it a film-noir ambience, a hint of mystery, enough so that I mentioned it to Lisa when I came into the house and found her in the kitchen fixing a
paella de marisco
so fragrant I wished I had something better in store for my own dinner than ramen and bagged salad. “There's enough for three,” she said, tranche telepathy operating at optimum sensitivity, but I shook my head and asked whether she knew anybody who drove a green Venza.

She put her spoon on the counter and gave me her full attention. “Why do you ask?”

Which caused my own tranche telepathy to emit a cautionary buzz. “Because it's outside idling, and the guy at the wheel looks,” I tried to make this light-hearted,
“furtive.”

“Oh. I see.” Lisa exchanged a look with Loretta, who had come in from the next room with her finger marking her place in a hardcover novel.

“What? Is it somebody you know?”

“Adam, did you happen to notice the license number?”

“No—why would I notice the license number?”

Like two gray-feathered birds of distinct species cohabiting a single telephone wire, Lisa and Loretta frowned in concert. Lisa, ordinarily the voluble one, seemed reluctant to speak. Loretta, who seldom opened her mouth unless a word seemed urgent, said, “I'll call Trevor. Should we tell Mouse?”

“Maybe not,” Lisa said. “I mean, until we're
sure
…”

“Sure of what?” I asked. “What's this all about? What did I miss?”

“I'll let Trevor explain,” said Lisa.

*   *   *

I had learned some basic truths about what it meant to be a Tau in the three and a half months since I moved into the tranche house. One of those truths was
Taus don't gossip
.

Much. We were human beings; we talked about each other. But given how much time we spent together, I had heard very little malicious talk—and none that was
really
malicious. Our boundaries were pretty carefully respected, in other words, which was why I didn't know a whole lot about Mouse, the woman who lived in the basement.

Lisa and Loretta currently had three tenants including me, all Taus. One was a middle-aged used-bookstore owner with an income so sporadic that the money he saved by boarding here made the difference, some months, between eating and going hungry. I liked him, but we weren't especially close. The third tenant was Mouse. She was maybe thirty years old, and Mouse was a name she had given herself; I knew her by no other.

But she wasn't “mousy” in the ordinary sense of the word. She said she had taken the name because she was shy and liked enclosed spaces. (She had chosen her basement room over a more comfortable third-floor bedroom.) She was so obviously working her way through some deeply personal crisis that I had been careful not to ask about it. I had seen her in close conversation with Loretta several times, but they generally clammed up when I passed by. Which was fine: it was really none of my business.

Nor was this. While Lisa got on the phone to Trevor Holst, I set about fixing myself dinner. Lisa and Loretta were generous with living space but they weren't running a boarding house, and apart from a few planned communal meals it was pot luck and fend for yourself. Although I was allotted a few square inches of the big kitchen refrigerator, I was saving money for a bar fridge of my own. More space for palak paneer and freezer bags of homemade chili. All I heard of Lisa's conversation was the worried tone of her voice.

She handed me the phone as I forked the last noodle into my mouth. “Talk to Trevor,” she instructed me.

*   *   *

Back at the end of August, when I saw Trevor leaving the tranche party with Amanda, I had guessed they were lovers. (And I had felt a pang of jealousy so unjustifiable that I was instantly ashamed of it.)