And the light. The light in the room is fantastic. Vermeer, all business, hands on his hips, directing the sun. Of course, there’s the berber rug. Not a Paul-Bowles-got-wasted-on-this-rug berber, but creamy, white wool, Yaletown berber.
Nina, sitting cross-legged on her basement suite’s futon couch, fennel tea cooling beside her on the upturned milk crate draped with a beach towel, really does want to hate them. She has already started that ascent to the dizzying heights a decent bout of righteous anger can transport her to-that place where the air thins, the blood grows hypoxic, and you can muse on your own demise in an oddly detached manner- but the fine print gets in the way. Dramatization, it reads in tiny type at the bottom of the magazine ad. The clients’ names and story are fictitious and intended to be an illustration of services available through Merrill Lynch. Investment results may vary.
Still, there’s that light and the unnerving placement of naïf objets d’art. And Patricia, coiled to spring even in repose. It’s as if Jeff Wall has done an ad for Merrill Lynch. The People You Will Never Be So Kill Yourself Now (cibachrome, 2006).
Another house on the North Shore has been swallowed by the mountainside. A stunning cliff-edge post-and-beam completed in 1956. It’s been happening with alarming frequency lately. There are those who find these disappearances-what else to call them?-less dramatic but more frightening than the mudslides triggered by torrential rains that have destroyed both houses and their inhabitants. Those incidents could be ascribed to foul weather and bureaucratic ineptitude. Those tragedies are always well attended by debris and rescue squads and grim-looking television news crews who are secretly elated by the great fucking visuals (a direct quote).
What happens goes something like this: You leave for work in the morning and on your return there is the peeling arbutus, with the tire swing still dangling from the lowest branch, the rope slightly frayed but not so much you’ve ever noticed. There’s the cedar hedge that hid the partially disassembled Triumph Twin in the carport that you will now never ride down the I-5 to the Coast Highway, cruising all the way to Eureka to visit that chowder shack where you first met (so never mind that the clam chowder tasted like it had been stewed in an ashtray, you’ll always remember it as ambrosia). There’s the empty koi pond-so incompatible with the wandering black bears and the fat, happy raccoons-with ghost fish flickering in the shallows. The upturned blue box is still at the curb. And in the spot where the house once stood is a long, dull pucker, a barely perceptible seam where the earth has hastily knit itself together.
And no insurance policy in the world with a clause to cover what has happened.
Honey Fortunata (her real name) sings “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” as she manoeuvres her new lease-to-own Hummer along Georgia towards the Lions Gate Bridge. It’s been her anthem, practically a mantra, ever since she heard it on Martha Stewart’s Apprentice. “Everybody’s looking for thomething…” The slightest trace of an accent-people often mistake it for a lisp-creeps into her voice whenever she’s feeling emotional.
There are those who would view the Hummer as capitulation, but Honey tends to look on the bright side-that’s how she stays afloat. She kept what her favourite British children’s stories called a stiff upper lip when her mother left seven-yearold Honey with her grandmother in Davao City and flew fifteen time zones across the Pacific to take care of another woman’s children. The lip barely quivered at age fourteen when she didn’t even recognize her own mother on the international arrivals level of the Vancouver airport, or the six-year-old girl who, her mother told Honey, was her sister. That same lip, encased in sensible matte-finish Taupe by MAC, stayed the course when her mother died and when her little sister, Charity, decided that sliding her crotch up and down the pole at No. 5 Orange was preferable to attending classes at Van Tech Secondary while Honey worked days sorting processed meats into neat stacks at Subway and studying nights for her real estate licence.
Let the other agents travel in packs like cowardly hyenas or teenaged boys with pants riding the barrens of their non-existent buttocks. Let them retreat in fear, taking jobs in felt-lined cubicles on the nineteenth floor of a securities company. Honey Fortunata, snug in her Kevlar pantsuit, behind the wheel of her bulletproof high-mobility multi-purpose vehicle (civilian version), is on her way to close on the $7-million-plus split-level on Decourcy Court. And no thwarted buyer taking potshots at real estate agents is going to stop her. She even has the RE/MAX logo on the driver’s side door-the #1 in We’re #1 in West Van! forming what could be construed as a perfect bull’s eye at her left breast.
From her dashboard, above the combat-grade instrument cluster with its eerily glowing global-positioning device, a hollow plastic Virgin Mary filled with holy water from Cap-dela-Madeleine, hands open at her sides, smiles wryly at Honey as if to say, Let me tell you about stiff upper lip.
It’s difficult to say just how badly Nina is sweating inside her Olympic mascot costume, as even under ideal circumstances she is the Lance Armstrong of perspiration. If there were an Olympic medal for sweating, there she’d be, on the tier of the podium closest to heaven, her Athens-vintage Roots singlet plastered to her body, brandishing gold. She blames her Eastern European heritage, something hirsute and unfavourable embedded in her twist of DNA, combined with a childhood of pork fat, too many root vegetables, and polyester stretch pants. Yet there is something distinctly working class about excess sweat, which is why she’s never followed up on her mother’s suggestion (may she squirm in eternal unrest) that she have some of her eccrine glands removed. I secrete therefore I am, Nina liked to scoff. And really, is there anything more bourgeois than elective surgery?
This is where a lifelong commitment to battling environmental degradation has led her. She is a thirty-eight-year-old woman lumbering around Granville Island Public Market dressed like a roly-poly Vancouver Island marmot, an animal that in real life is about to tip into the abyss, but who crookedly grins from all the banners spanning the city’s bridges, and whose smaller but no less roly-poly Beanie Baby™ version is clutched by American and British and German and Japanese children passing through upgraded security at the Vancouver International Airport, children who (kids will be kids) Olympics organizers are counting on to relentlessly badger their parents to bring them back four years from now for the Games (cue visual of Eternal Flame).
Community service, they call it. Her week-long jail sentence has been commuted to this: a month of waddling through zombie-like crowds anaesthetized by all manner of smoked salmon tidbits. Nina waves in what she’s decided is a jaunty manner, while giving the finger from safely inside a fat, plush paw to anyone who has a sharp crease ironed into her professionally laundered jeans or looks even remotely aware of what a stock option is. Armies of pigeons swoop low overhead at regular intervals in eerily coordinated phalanxes. Toddlers lurch erratically at the birds that land on the wharf outside the market. Gulls screech and dive for rogue french fries with the precision of heat-seeking missiles. In the distance, a guitarist is trying to bring a Roberta Flack tune back from the dead. There are many who call this paradise.