Fog, a Novel Read online

  “The fog was like a cover; a warm blanket through which you could see the stars if you wanted. There was not so much parody on the streets, no relentless mockery. There were large writings and advertisements on the brick walls, awnings freshly painted to match the shops next door. There was, how do you say, conviviality? There was art, too; paintings in the shops, always. Beautiful paintings everywhere. Even if it was a sausage seller! And in the night, the lamps glowed within the fog hanging low over everyone. People looked out of their second-floor windows and called out gently to their neighbours. The fog wasn’t a fog. It was a feeling.” She laughed out loud, startled by her own words.

  Chapter Seven

  Pieces of Napkin

  Have you seen Myra lately? Have you seen the girl who walks around aimlessly? I sat making notes with my back to the big glass windows in Merise’s Bar. My sign off on a waybill had helped destroy a civilian airplane gliding innocently above a pristine green riverine landscape; I had been the final cog in a murder plot that had obliterated the dreams of others.

  The west side of the bar was lit with bright sunlight prowling in at an exploratory angle. Then the light bounced off the white, un-tanned shoulders of a young woman who had a sea-horse tattooed on her muscular arms before spilling onto the burgundy stained sides of the bar and counter. I knew her skin must have been burning. I could sense it, as she rubbed her shoulders gently with the palm of her hands. I stared at her arm, thinking of Myra.

  Nat careened by on his bike. I wanted to run out and call to him, but he was pedalling too fast. He wouldn’t have noticed me. Outside the window, pink geraniums wobbled amusingly, prodded by an erratic summer breeze. The un-tanned woman remained where she was, firmly gripping her Griffon Blonde, staring at her tabloid with barely open eyes. The rays of the bona fide summer sun, available scarcely four months a year, continued to highlight her shoulders. I had seen this girl cycling around the Plateau. She looked athletic. I think she was a personal trainer at the Y on Parc Ave, and during the day worked as a translator. Yes, Nat had said that about her.

  It occurred to me that people knew each other in this part of town in a special kind of way. If you needed a recording engineer, common names would crop up from several sources. If you were looking for a video editor, a cameraman, a story editor, a carpenter, or a translator, you could ask the barman and have several names in no time. If you talked to a musician you could get the contacts for someone who had a private studio in the Townships, and then your best friend would corroborate and give you the same phone number. If you wanted a notary, there were many, but everyone knew all of them and had an opinion on each. If you needed an Egyptologist, she was actually the pianist in the combo two doors over in the next bar. One lounge singer’s bass player is his cousin’s lover, and probably good at fixing brakes. People seemed to know about each other like worms in a dark soil, like a row of nervous peas snug in a pod. It was a world where one skill was never enough. It seemed to follow that everyone was observant, competitive, and incestuous but living precariously from one temporary job to another.

  I stared at the nicely tattooed arms of the woman. I looked outside, and in the distance, someone was striding across St-Laurent in a long skirt. I stood up and narrowed my eyes. I sat back down. Not her.

  Somewhere else not too far away, the woman with the dark shades was getting into her Benz.

  I picked up the weekly tabloid and started leafing through the classifieds in the back. Amongst the escort service ads, the bankruptcy sales, and the second-hand laptop giveaways was a quarter-page ad announcing “Careers abroad for men and women in good physical shape, of strong mental character, keen for adventure. Learn new skills in the surveillance and protection industry.”

  The personal trainer with the sea-horse tattoo got up, paid at the bar, and left. I watched her walking towards the Main, every step a controlled display of muscular awareness. She could apply for that job in the “protection industry.” She began to turn the corner where there’s a slight curve in the road, and I leaned back in my chair to look at her one more time.

  The May sun was finally streaming in, as it should, and my back felt comfortably warm. There was still a Montreal chill in the air outside, where the sun missed the sidewalk; a nip that made you wish you had left home wearing a baseball cap and had high collars and large side pockets in your sweatshirt. I was wearing a sweater and cobbling away at a vegetarian chili that the Portuguese waitress had served. I had known her a while. She was friendly and carefree. Once Nat and I had been sitting at the bar on a busy night and the shoulder strap of her blouse kept sliding off, revealing an attractive upper arm and the hint of an equally energetic upper torso. She didn’t seem to care, smiled at both of us and filled our glasses. At some point, while she was carrying a full tray of beer mugs, Nat lifted her strap and put it over her shoulder. She’d appreciated that. Was he “keen for adventure abroad?” What were the options he was considering?

  Now alone, she listened distractedly to a large man. I say large because the floors in Merise’s don’t usually creak when someone walks. With this guy, the floor audibly suffered as he shifted his chassis from side to side, moving his weight from foot to foot, snorting heavily through his pock-marked nose. If he would just sit down, it’d be fine. Maybe the bar stool was too petite for his XXXL arse. I decided I had endured this long enough and laid my shades on the counter in a firm gesture with a distinct click, then supplemented that with a direct and hostile stare. It didn’t register.

  The students at the back, however, where the tabletops have chess and scrabble boards laminated on top, were trying to concentrate. Despite their habitual use of the requisite iPod earphones, the creaking overwhelmed them, too, and they acted disturbed. The waitress looked at the large man with antipathy. He was not only brash and noisy, he insisted on flirting with her in broken French, idiomatic Portuguese, and dismantled English. She, on the other hand, was perfectly bilingual and also spoke a bit of rough Portuguese. Whenever he looked away, she looked at me sideways and rolled her eyes. At some point she hastened over to ask if the chili was good. Then she returned with more nachos and sour cream, but I wasn’t in the mood to redeem her from her compatriot. In fact, I enjoyed her discomfort. I knew the man, had seen him around, a heavy-breathing know-it-all who had a part-time job at the fish store at the corner of Avenue des Pins. I used to see him against the back door of the store wearing a bloodied apron and holding a large curved fish knife. There were fish scales, octopus parts, gills, and entrails sticking to his apron. He was usually panting heavily then, too.

  Trying to avoid him, she kept retreating to the far side of the bar to adjust the draft beer handles, clean out some pans, make a fresh pot of coffee, and attempt to ignore his overtures. The man snorted and smiled, trying to entice her back to his side.

  Finally, I decided to save her. I still hadn’t seen Myra, so I asked, “Have you seen Myra Banks lately? You know, the girl who does bit roles in TV ads and movies.” I didn’t have to say more. She came as near to me as the bar would allow and, shaking her chest left to right and back, pouting a lip sliding smile, asked “You mean this one?”

  The Portuguese big guy couldn’t help but notice her little breast-bouncing impression and looked at me with curiosity.

  “Yeah, well…maybe that one.” I answered sadly. Having met Myra the few occasions I had, I wasn’t convinced she deserved the reputation.

  “Yeah, yeah! She’s been coming around. Sometimes she’s alone with her large shades on, sometimes she’s with a different guy . . . you know what I mean.” Her response felt like a pair of sharp crab pincers closing in at the core of my heart.

  “She was here a few days ago with the guy who rollerblades everywhere, you know, the Meeropol kid? They’re both actors.” She said this with so much disdain for Myra that I felt she was herself in love with Nat and wanted Myra out of the way. “He’s a serious guy: got career goals, a family
business, you know? But, like, her, I don’t know, what does she do? She told me she was working at an office and then got fired. So now she walks around in a way that’s not too cool, you know? She got this tattoo on her arm which isn’t all that bad actually, as far as that kind of tattoo goes. She hangs around. Too demonstrative, you know?”

  I hadn’t seen a tattoo on Myra. “She’s not a walker,” I said firmly. “I know that. Just going through a bad patch.”

  The pudgy Portuguese fishmonger finally realized he had completely lost the woman’s attention and chose to shuffle out, braying adieus loudly and blowing a kiss. It was truly sad.

  I had torn up the napkin in front of me. I had written a thought on each of the small pieces: fog, diamonds, Myra, Malia, infidelity, insurance, plane, Mercedes, tango, Johnny Depp, Mrs. Meeropol, diaspora, empire, painting, Nat, migrants, river. Then I had pushed them all into a small pile. The bartender considered this with a curious expression, smiled, then returned to the middle of her now-quiet bar.

  I recognized that Myra might not be totally well adjusted. Her mum was stand-offish, distant, and determinedly conceited. She, on the other hand, was lively, feisty, and friendly. Apparently, she had told Nat, “I gotta find something totally groovy, something occupying! I need to immerse myself in it. I hate these short stints doing stuff here and there. I want a long, torrid affair . . . with cinema! Whaddya say? I want it to happen, Nat.”

  For me, the logic of that quote clarified her character. Somehow, as confused and diffused as it was, it made perfect sense. Nat had also told me that she was bored easily, pointing to the smacking sounds she made while chewing gum as empirical evidence.

  Okay, I could accept that.

  “You’re still interested in her, huh?” he had said with a weird smile. I lied in return, “Maybe, maybe. But maybe not! I’m not sure.”

  Hell, I was attracted to her like crazy!

  Her mother had a French last name but moved in the Anglo milieu. There must be a story behind that. According to Nat, Myra had acted in quite a few English plays but periodically dropped out of sight. No one knew where she had gone or what she was doing. The unpredictability had eventually cost her her reputation. I understood, but I didn’t agree.

  So my overwhelming attraction to Myra was compounded by an increasing curiosity and concern for her well-being, though I was loathe to admit it. I tried to rationalize my feelings from a neighbourhood point of view, as if we had to protect each other from constant mislabelling and she was being called a walker. What a pussy I was, making a virtue of intense desire.

  Both she and Nat sought personal validation in a world that wouldn’t give it. As Nat argued, “It’s a tough world, man! Dog-eat-dog! You have it or you don’t. The agents are all ma’fuckers! They keep tellin’ you—change your parting, get stubble, change your accent—what the fuck am I supposed to do? I don’t have a fucking Yiddish accent. I lost it. I don’t have an Anglo accent from the ‘burbs, either. What do they want? Brooklyn? Huh! I say doig already!”

  Sometimes I’d see him rollerblading down a side street and then plunge down a wheelchair access to careen onto the pavement at an impossible angle before coming to a dead halt. He had that manoeuvre down, but it wasn’t satisfying. Since his dad had passed on, he’d been looking for ways to get more auditions in New York, without luck. He worked on his physique; always muscular, he seemed to be getting stronger and stronger. Security business, said the ad.

  Malia didn’t reply to my email. Although I now knew that Nat had set up our meeting, I still waited for an email from her without his involvement. The failed tryst at the Majestic had almost done me in. I was attracted to her and wanted to meet, but on the other hand it wasn’t only about her anymore. There was the damned diamond dust. And the plane crash. It was now somewhere between the personal and the moral. The plane crash.

  I tried to methodically rearrange the torn shreds of napkin in front of me. But I couldn’t find any implicit order, so I finally called Nat. He immediately asked me to come over to Bagg Street. I’d find that a relief, to talk to him and his mom, so I picked up the paper bits and put them in my pocket. Then I said good-bye to the Portuguese waitress whose name had finally come to me: Nathalie.

  Nat lived opposite the synagogue. I walked along Roy, passed the back of the fish store, and crossed over onto the shaded side of St-Laurent. I looked up as usual, staring at the facades, the rooftops, the sloping windows, the slate tiles, and the elaborately moulded plaster work along the high edges. I noted again how precarious were the balconies with wrought-iron railings on most of the upper floor apartments. Somewhere, up there, Myra was holed up. But I didn’t know where. Nat had never told me and I didn’t want to sound too inquisitive, especially after I’d told him to quit pimping for me.

  The phone rang: it was Mrs. Meeropol. “Chuck, since you’re coming over, would you like to have an early dinner with us?” She liked me. I felt that. I continued briskly.

  I’d never had the chance to sit down and chat with Nat’s father. He had always been at work, though I’d seen him a few times when I met Nat at the business. His father nodded his head when he saw me, knowing I was from Nat’s high school days. He spoke gently and in whispers. I often felt that there was graveness about him. I enjoyed my pun. The fact that his heart had given out and he fell to the pavement and went unnoticed for a long time depressed me. Things like that screw me up. I get overcome. A lot of kids in my generation have a cold, hard attitude about the losses of anyone older. If some kid flipped his lid over drugs, everyone would turn up and hug each other and bring flowers. If there was a hit-and-run everyone turned up wailing and lighting candles. But if someone from an older generation passed on, it was, like . . . normal, even uninteresting. Nat and I were different, perhaps because we had spent so much time with grandparents. We had the patience to sit down and listen while they planted unfinished stories in our heads. And those stories never left me. I’d try to write everything I remembered down whenever I had a spare weekend afternoon, either sitting in my apartment or at one of the bistros on the Main. I kept walking.

  We sat down. Mrs. Meeropol brought out some cheese hors d’oeuvres and Nat gulped beer from a bottle while folding clothes in front of the dryer. “What took you so long, man? The lady’s been pacin’ the floor waitin’.” I didn’t reply, but I did notice that the ad from the tabloid about the “protection services” was circled with a felt pen and now lay on the coffee table. I went up close to him.

  “You’re so fucked up. She tells me stuff about the hood that you don’t know shit about. It’s background material for my epic. Get it? She remembers. You don’t. Here! All in here.” I took out my notebook in a very officious manner. Stuck my fingers on it. He ignored me, as usual.

  “While we have dinner, Chuck, I’ve thought of a few events that you should know about.” She looked at us from the side of her eyes, with a lot of emphasis. Earnestness.

  “Oh yeah,” he reacted immediately. “Let’s begin by trashing the folks who abandoned the hood, then trash the folks who took over the hood, and then trash all those who never came back to the hood. Heh!” She looked at him sharply. They had been arguing.

  “They’re the ones who owned all the buildings but moved on. They are the smooth operators. They talk from both sides of their mouth. On the one hand they’re all high and mighty, even though they’re often nasty and crooked. Not exactly the way it’s supposed to be, you know! They talk about righteousness like they’re the only ones who know what that is, unlike the poorer ones who’ve lived here all of their lives and loved it and had their kids grow up here and went to the church or the synagogue just over there.”

  I’d gotten her going. “But that’s the way it is with all the communities that have passed through the Main, isn’t it?”

  “The Portuguese are different. They lived on the upper floor and rented out the lower floors. Some of them bought two hou
ses, adjacent, lived in one and rented the other, but they never bashed others or talked in high and mighty tones. Most of the time they argued about soccer.”

  I didn’t want to contradict her, but several of my friends had Portuguese landlords. When it came to fixing things in the buildings they were ruthless. The moment you asked them to address a leak or a noisy radiator, you could be sure there’d be a sharp hike in next year’s rent.

  “Jewish people like continuity,” I said. “They remember everything and want to tell their children about it. Pass it on. No matter where they live.” I was being boring and pleasing and not making any headway in finding Myra or diving deeper into the plane blow-up.

  “Oh! Yeah! Big time!” Nat had decided to enjoy himself as he folded his shirt on the ironing board. “They have stories going back to the forty years they spent wandering around in the desert. They’ve been settlin’ all these years all over the place and tellin’ stories.”

  “Talking about settling down, let’s eat,” Mrs. Meeropol said.

  She had made filet mignon, beet salad with red onions and goat cheese, steamed asparagus, and grilled potatoes. Nat and I devoured it all with hardly a sound. She picked up the thread when the silence was unmistakable. Nat had no time for what she would have to say.

  He finished his dessert and picked up the tabloid from the coffee table and took it away into his room. For the rest of the evening he breezed by, going from room to room, launching flying comments on everything and anything we discussed. I noticed he was collecting clothes and throwing them on his bed in the room at the end of the corridor.

  “Where you going?” I asked him.

  “Just a trip,” he said, without looking at me.

  A trip? Like down the rapids? Like a boat trip? A plane trip? A hike? Like what’s the fucking mystery here? I decided not to push. A time would come when he’d choose to tell me. His mother felt the tension rising as he kept running about, acting as if he were too busy to give either of us the time of day.