Awaking to find her arm asleep, she
turned her body sideways feeling the full weight of the limb roll
onto the bedspread. Slowly the arm regained blood flow, the painless
cramp eased, and the tingling nerve endings resonated and faded like
a glissando of harp strings. She quietly moaned not so much for the
feeling returning to her fingers, as to the recollection of her
nightmare, an occasional recurrence, a variation on a theme. She was
once more back at her parent's third floor flat in Lachine. She was in a developing state of panic realizing she had a final test that evening
for her last university course, a course to complete her business degree, and
she hadn't prepared. In her efforts to locate her books and papers,
she was thwarted by her parents who happened to be sitting on them,
or inadvertently hiding them by their position. She sighed. At
forty-eight years of age, and twenty-five years since she'd finished
her degree, still this nightmare of anxiety arose from time to time,
and so real that in that semi-awake state she was actually convinced
she still had a course to finish, a degree to complete. She rolled
onto her back and stared at the high plaster ceiling thinking of her
parents and the working class poverty she'd escaped. Her father, his
teeth in the glass beside the bed—the poor man's aquarium—sleeping
off a night of beer drinking and hockey viewing with his
“associates” down at the brasserie, spending his factory
paychecks on beer, cigarettes and betting on les Canadiens and the
occasional flutter on the sulkies at Blue Bonnets during the summers.
Her mother ensconced on the flowered couch before her beloved glossy
veneered television cabinet with the pot of dusty dried flowers on
top, fully immersed in the lives of her family, those characters on
her favourite soap operas, all those forevers and tomorrows
of dramatic fantasy.
Which ones did she watch? The names came back to her like the
memories of undesirable relatives: As the World Turns, The Guiding
Light, All My Children, Another World, Search For Tomorrow.
She looked over to the sleek dark
digital clock and saw it was 6:45 a. m., the usual time of Declan's
rising. But he was in New York with Harry, at the proverbial round
of meetings. She was alone in their Old Montreal condominium and
glad of it.
In the kitchen she prepared her morning
health shake and stretched her back and neck between sips. Her hips
were sore. Did they need to replace the expensive mattress already?
The autumn issue of Vogue,
thick as a patio stone, lay on the smooth granite eating area;
it was the magazine issue she looked forward to each year, an issue
she'd advance through 150 pages of air-brushed fantasy advertisements
before reaching the hidden table of contents, the models staring back
at her as if she were looking at herself in the mirror, eye contact
making for a unification of the abstract, yes, this is you in the
Valentino, Dior, Versace, Christian LaCroix, Donna Karan, Stella
McCartney, Alexander McQueen, Chanel. She'd found it useless to
bookmark pages by turning the top corners down, so she just tore the
pages out and slipped them in at the end of the magazine for future
reference. Once finished, she left a sticky note on it for Louise,
their in-town housekeeper, to take. How it ended up making its way to
Louise's daughter and into scrap books and collages, she didn't know,
but such was the trajectory of the magazine's life, ending, no doubt,
in the recycling bin. So much money and creative effort spent, and
yet, so ephemeral. But the influences remained, money had been spent,
faces had been seen, names had been recognized, writers had been
read, charmed lives had been revealed, styles had been spun, shaken,
and stirred. The ripples of influence would diminish with time while
the inherent energies of the physical object would be recycled. Much
like human existence she thought.
She made her way down the hallway to
the large-windowed front rooms, looking at the dark framed
photographs on the wall as she passed, photographs taken by Thaddeus
of Declan and Harry with accomplished achievers: Guy Laliberté, Paul
Allen, Richard Branson, Dennis Tito. What was it with self-made men and women, she wondered? She sensed they shared a certain continuity like veins of gold running through bedrock—if gold ran through bedrock. They also reminded her of bespoke suits, everything made to measure, unique. She stopped and looked at Mr.
Tito's large smooth head and his sharp blue eyes and felt he exuded
enormous foresight and boundless energy. Declan had a touch of that
too, but not as much. Declan had said to her that if he'd had Dennis
Tito's analytical genius, he too would be a billionaire space tourist
planning on sending a male and a female to Mars, but as it was, he
was sending people home to their condominiums and their deluxe
vacation homes in exotic locales. Such was life. Declan had described
to her how Dennis Tito had used quantitative analytics to estimate
the trajectories of space probes for the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, and
had later applied similar techniques to investment markets to become
the billionaire he was today, “from orbits to markets,” Declan
had said, “a genius at applying mathematics and computers to
estimate risk and outcome.” Random variables, probability
distributions, algorithmic trading, statistical arbitrage, the terms
spun around her mind like space debris. She liked to keep up with the
latest in high finance and every so often regretted not pursuing a
Masters degree, but, having met Declan at an Alumni party, her orbit
had been drawn towards his. Analytics seemed so fastidious, precise, conclusive. What about instinct she wondered? What about human nature? She looked at
Harry and remembered how Declan had told her that when
Harry, a young black kid growing up with him amongst tough white kids
in Point St. Charles, had encountered racism, he calmly told his
offenders that racism was a hereditary disease, and they had better
see a doctor. Smart and tough.
Embraced by a compliment of patterned
cushions on the cream coloured sofa, she rested her outstretched
calves on the ottoman/cocktail table and looked down at the magazines
displayed like a winning poker hand, The Economist, Bloomberg
Markets, AAII Journal, Fortune, Architectural Digest. Looking
towards the living room windows, a trinity of nineteenth century high
arched design, she could see dawn had begun to etch the details of
the elaborate stone facade of the building across the street. It was
at moments like these, moments of quiet stillness, that she thought
she must have been here a hundred years ago, and all the people in
her life had been involved in that distant life as well, in different
roles, names, professions. She stretched her arms above her head and
yawned deliciously with involuntary gasps of her body's voice. Or was it really just due to the
romantic suspense novels she liked to read when she was younger, and
still resorted to on occasions when the arid and prosaic realities
of life lowered the temperature of her emotions? The conflicting
thoughts seemed intertwined like a strand of DNA. Strand. Duncan
Strand. She would have to wait until Friday to discuss the Duncan
Strand situation with Declan. Perhaps he could buy the stock of both
businesses outright and set up a library in the future condominium,
and the rope, well, sell it off to one of his connections in the
Caribbean. That could help the bookseller reset his life.
What would she do with such a chance?
Go back to school? Begin her own real estate company? She curled and
stretched her toes, the fine delicate bones cracked in the dry air
like the sound of wood burning in a fireplace,
and her toenails, shimmering like nacreous pearls, reminded
her of Alicia, their beach loving daughter in California, their Venus
rising from the scallop shell. She hoped she wasn't being foolish
like her mother. A fling with a painter? She shook her head. Had she dramatized a scene from one of those romantic suspense novels, or reenacted an episode of a past life? She would phone Alicia later to check on her and wish her luck in her
coming exams. Pre-med had been one of her own teenage dreams, a life
as a doctor, stethoscope around her neck, crisp blue blouse beneath
the white jacket, but the business degree had been the economical and
obtainable option. Wasn't California rife with temptation. the
bastion of the drug and sex trade? She looked at the clock on the
sideboard to see it was now 7:20 a. m., much too early to phone the
west coast. Alicia might have been up late studying, much like her
own late nights when a student at college and university. She
shivered as she recalled the days when a few of her friends had
finished high school and had begun working at low paying secretarial
and sales jobs and they would try to get her to come out with them on
the weekends to the discotheques downtown and the seedy bars attached to the cheap motels on St.
Jacques Street, places where dancing, drugs and abusive males were
like so many facets of the disco ball blinding them to reality, bars
that she'd called compounds of dangerous elements, the arsenic, lead,
plutonium and mercury that would ruin their lives. Thank God she
hadn't fallen into that darkness of early pregnancy, abandonment,
drug use, poverty. There, but for the grace of . . . something goes
Kathleen O'Connor. God? Common sense? Self-belief? Self-respect? Her
real name seemed so foreign to her now. Kathleen O'Connor. She'd left
it behind like a theatre progamme on a threadbare plush crimson
chair. No Facebook for her. Her father was deceased; her mother,
suffering with Alzheimer's, was in an old age facility; and a brother who
left home at sixteen, whereabouts unknown—she often wondered what
became of him: a roughneck on an Alberta oil rig? A longhaul trucker
down through the Midwest? A Casino sweeper? A grease monkey in a gas
station that still had one of those rubber tube ringers cars drive
over when they pull up to the gas pumps? A grifter moving across the
continent? Drug addict? Convict? Dead? She liked to think he was
living in suburbia with a wife, two kids and a dog, a new pick-up
truck and car in the driveway beneath one of those adjustable
basketball hoops, and maybe a trampoline in the backyard. He was the
wildcard that might be flung across the table at her one day, but for
now, Alicia was the future. Everything behind her, stepping stones
out of the shadows.
They'd decided to bring Alicia up
without organized religion, offering her a broader spirituality, a more
holistic view of life, like the airing of a fusty old room. She
herself, however, still had a weakness for the Virgin Mary, with the Ave
Maria, the Angelic Salutation at the ready, in a whisper,
under breath. She could see the blessed Virgin full of grace looking down on her,
the Goddess subsumed. Better than the Father, the Son, and the Holy
Ghost she thought. A woman to confide in, to understand. I have
sinned, forgive me. A moment of passion, of weakness.
Roused by her sense of guilt over
Jerome, she thought that she should ask Declan to increase the amount
of the scholarship they had set up, one that helped promising
students without financial means. Friday would be a day of requests
she thought. She would prepare a special fish dinner. One of Declan's
favourite.
*
“Duncan, Duncan, wake up,”
Amelia said, shaking his right shoulder.
“Agghh, what, what?”
Duncan muttered. He breathed in deeply and turned onto his back, the
tension in his body eased as he fully awoke from a dreamscape. “Sorry
. . . oh my god, bad dream." He licked his dry lips and felt like he'd just come up for air and was now floating on a water surface. "How bizarre. I was in my parent's home,
everyone was there, you were there too. There was a big commotion
over the plans to run a railway track between our neighbour's house
and ours, which is absurd for it must be all of fifteen feet between
them. Crazy. And they were going to build some kind of
shack in our backyard for an employee to work in, to monitor traffic
or something.” He shook his head and rubbed his eyes.
“Hmm, you're under a lot
of stress.”
“I was devising a plan to
sell the house quickly before anyone knew of the railway, before the
value of the property would fall. I was going around trying to figure
out how to move everything quickly.”
Amelia snuggled up against
him and kissed him on his warm, somewhat clammy cheek. “Well, we
know where that dream came from. Don't worry. We can move a lot of
the books to Uncle Edward's basement, and into the carriage house
basement as well. I'm sure Yves and Tom would help. Maybe even Pavor
and Jerome.” She squeezed him and rested her head on his chest.
“Or we can hire a moving company. Probably worth the money.”
© ralph patrick mackay
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