This was when Mom was living near the beach. She was living near my sister, out near the beach. I’m talking about the beach we used to go to when we were kids. For some reason everybody has ended up living near the beach.
~
Then one day people with ink spots on their shirt pockets start gravitating toward me.
20
I THINK it is this: I am not sure if I am coming in or going out. This is what I think it is. But I am not sure. I have the key in the door. I don’t know whether to turn it to the left or the right. I think it’s because I don’t know whether I am coming or going. Lately things have been that way. I can’t tell if I am coming or going.
~
A dog is waiting by the back door of our apartment building. Tutti says, “Whose dog is that?” We sit in the car for a while, looking at the dog. Tutti doesn’t want to get out of the car.
I drive around to the front of the building and let Tutti out there. I tell her to meet me at the elevator.
“This is stupid,” she says. She gets out of the car and closes the door. She looks around to make sure the dog has not followed us. Then she walks across the sidewalk and goes in the front door of the building.
I drive the car back around to the parking lot and park in our spot. The dog is still there, sitting by the back door. He comes over to me when I get out of the car. He follows me as I walk around to the front of the building. When I get to the front door I say, “Go away.”
Tutti and I go up to our apartment. As soon as we get inside, Tutti goes over to the window to see if she can see the dog.
~
This is the paradox at the heart of my troubles. Somewhere, deep inside me I suspect, lurks a bowler. This is the dangerous edge I fear will cut into my being, my speech, my table manners.
~
“What did you do down there?” He wanted to know.
“I picked up garbage outside a library in North York,” I told Him. “And also, I plunged toilets.”
“Where is North York?” He asked.
I showed Him on the little globe He kept on a pole by His desk. He went over to the window.
“Shouldn’t you know where North York is?” I asked.
“I know where North York is,” He said to me. He stayed where He was, His back to me, looking out the window.
“The mafia kingpin for the Toronto area used to live in North York. He wore lime green safari suits. This was late in his life, when he was old. He went over to the mall in these awful-looking suits.
“He fell in love with beautiful women whose pictures he saw in fashion magazines. He would show pictures of these women to his sons. He sat in the kitchen of the big house where he lived, and smoked. His sons would go out and find the beautiful women and bring them home and the old man would marry them.
“By this time the old man had only one lime green safari suit he was willing to wear, and he wore it all the time. It was very dirty, and it was crumpled, and he came to his weddings in this suit, and the beautiful women he was marrying, who were always there against their will in the first place, were disgusted by this smelly old man in the ugly suit, but the sons were there with submachine guns, so the women could not leave.
“The sons buried these women in the woods behind the house.”
~
When we first got married, Tutti used to come home with canned goods. She would come home with bags of canned goods, and she would bring the bags into the kitchen and set them down on the kitchen counter. She would stand there in the kitchen, in her coat, with the keys still in her hand and the smell of the outside still on her. “How was your day?” she would ask.
~
There are places in the middle of the city where a sort of silence settles, like snow, and all the noise seems far away, coming toward you like clouds.
~
Headlights kept hitting the backs of her legs. Her legs were white and formless, and they disappeared, eventually, into a pair of white shorts. It was dark enough now that I was losing sight of her. The headlights of cars coming toward her lit up the hair on her arms so she glowed around the edges. Then the headlights got past her and blinded me so I lost sight of her momentarily. When the headlights got past me, I could see her again, but it was growing darker and she was harder to see. What I saw now was mainly motion.
~
I knew him when he could stand up. He can’t stand up anymore.
It’s their heads that I notice.
Okay, who’s the guy who keeps saying maybe, and who’s the guy who keeps saying no? Who are all these guys?
~
Tutti says there is a God because of this Brad Pitt guy, who is the biggest honey of all time, if you listen to what Tutti has to say. Tutti says she doesn’t even know what the movie was about, she was too busy thanking God, because as far as she is concerned, yes, Robert Redford is still the god of gods when it comes to honeys, and, yes, he has still got what it takes, but, she’s sorry, a thing of that nature cannot go on forever. Eventually a person has to pass the crown and, up to now, as far as Tutti was concerned, there were no contenders.
The weird thing is, this Brad Pitt guy even smiles like Robert Redford.
“It’s his son,” Tutti says. “It’s Robert Redford’s son.”
“No,” I say. “It’s not. I saw it on TV that it’s not Robert Redford’s son.”
“It’s got to be his son. I don’t care what they say on TV.”
Tutti is cutting out patterns for her sewing projects. We have this movie with Brad Pitt going on the VCR. Whenever Brad Pitt comes on the screen, Tutti gets down on her hands and knees and starts to howl at the screen.
I get the clicker and turn up the volume. “I’m trying to hear what they’re saying,” I say.
“Who cares what they’re saying,” Tutti says.
“I care.”
The next morning, at breakfast, we’re both feeling rough. The movie was a long one. When it was finally over, Tutti lay beside me in bed going, “There is a God. There is a God.” Normally, I can go to sleep in an instant when Tutti is talking to me. As a matter of fact, this is a bone of contention between me and Tutti, because Tutti will be talking to me and right in the middle of a sentence, I’ll just go to sleep.
But with this Brad Pitt thing, things are different. Every time Tutti says, “There is a God,” I flinch.
So at breakfast, we both feel it. I feel swollen is what I feel. I feel as though there is water trapped beneath my skin. My cornflakes are going soggy.
“I’m sorry,” Tutti says, “but if that Brad Pitt guy asked me to sleep with him, I’d have to do it. I hope you could forgive me.”
I look at Tutti with her hair going out in fifteen different directions, and her eyes puffed out. She’s wearing her bathrobe that makes her look like a blue lamb.
~
Can anyone tell me where this area on the map is in the actual building?
21
IF YOU look at a book about Casa Loma, you will see that it originally had three bowling alleys. This was in 1914, the year construction on the castle ended.
When Tutti first learned she was pregnant, we went looking for a house. I’m not as naïve as I once was. I understand now why a guy might want to build a castle in the middle of a big city. And why he might want to put three bowling alleys in.
~
Tutti and Sammy are standing in the middle of the driveway when I get home from work. The two of them standing there. I stop the car and look out the front windshield. Sammy waves.