Splitsville Read online

  copyright © Howard Akler, 2018

  first edition

  Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Please note that this is a work of fiction. While some events and characters are rooted in historical fact, this is a fictional interpretation of that history.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Akler, Howard, 1969-, author

  Splitsville / Howard Akler.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-55245-373-5 (softcover).

  I. Title.

  PS8601.K56S65 2018

  C813′.6

  C2018-903943-4

  C2018-903944-2

  Splitsville is available as an ebook: ISBN 978 1 77056 567 8 (EPUB), ISBN 978 1 77056 568 5 (PDF)

  Purchase of the print version of this book entitles you to a free digital copy. To claim your ebook of this title, please email [email protected] with proof of purchase. (Coach House Books reserves the right to terminate the free digital download offer at any time.)

  for Hazel Akler

  Sachs unpacks. His hands vanish inside a carton and come out with a pair of old books. He blows the dust off their covers. Glances briefly at condition and title, then begins a pile on his left. He pulls out another, a thick one. Hefts it. Runs his forefinger along deckled pages and adds it to the other two. The stack grows – slipcased, hardcovered, spine-cracked. Lily watches without impatience, oddly absorbed by his silent assessments. She shifts her weight. The floor creaks. Sachs looks up, purses his lips as if to speak, but in the end he says nothing.

  This is how you always imagine him. This moment: in a thin cardigan, with a thick Adam’s apple. Stack of books on his desk, a dozen more on the floor. Stacks and stacks with clear precipitous balance. He and Lily are alone in the shop. He thumbs a recto, the pages suddenly so cathected that when she brushes a strand of hair behind her ear the act becomes indecent.

  Theirs was a lingering fling. Six months all told, January to June, 1971. Not even a flicker in history and yet something in the nature of ardour emanates still, forty-five years later.

  ◊

  The old bookshop has been vacant for years. It was a pho joint for a stretch, a printer’s prior to that. You study grime on the display window. Peer past. It’s an abject fenestration. The fixtures remain the same, tiles on the floor perhaps also. What else? You lock your bike in the late morning sun. Squint streetwise. This was the city that saved nothing, that for decades did little but demolish and rebuild. The rarity of Spadina Avenue is its bric-a-brac evolution: twentiethcentury storefronts nailed onto nineteenth-century mansions, Chinese street signs with the names of dead British statesmen: Cecil, Baldwin, D’Arcy. You step back, the capacious sidewalk suddenly stuffed with eyes.

  A ramshackle gent steps off the curb in sync with a gangly kid in a hoodie. You follow, between fenders and then the first three lanes of traffic. Watch a streetcar glide south, a trio of jaywalkers who make way. Everyone hustles to the safety of the sidewalks. You huff between a tattoo parlour and a board-game café, turn onto Oxford, and there, before a row of mephitic Victorians, you arrive at last at a single diastolic moment. You text Es quick dumb endearments. She’s due any day, enormous, unable to do much except watch nature documentaries on Netflix and wait for the next appointment with the midwife. Not you. You, with a crib still to assemble, accepted her entreaty and got out of the apartment.

  You jostle and are jostled. Make your way past a new tacqueria, dives real and faux. The clenched streets of Kensington Market. Oxford and Augusta are dense with transaction. You dodge a delivery truck, three cyclists, and a dog and end up at one of your old haunts, a post-and-beam place with a Hindu barista and distressed tables. You sit down with your demitasse. You never take sugar, but you like to twiddle the spoon.

  ◊

  It begins with a death. One of his regulars, Sid Klein, who liked books about tough Jews and who was himself tough enough not to squawk during a deep December chill on the picket line. He was an organizer, a diehard. Barely even flinched before pneumonia did him in on New Year’s Eve.

  Sachs is more of a slouch. He skips the sub-zero graveside service and shows up in the Sullivan Street apartment for the shiva. Mourners elbow-to-elbow. Distant Klein cousins lurch for the coffee cake, distraught needleworkers pass a flask. Sachs shuffles through, and there, among the stooped and the bulbous, comes sudden terrible knowledge: all his best customers are dying off.

  He loosens his tie, looks both ways for the daughter, a high school civics teacher. He offers his condolences.

  I’m a little relieved actually, says Lily Klein. It would’ve been just like him to drag it out.

  She sloshes her glass. That sounds terrible, doesn’t it?

  Sachs shrugs. It’s a difficult time.

  Plus, I’ve been drinking too much.

  Plus, maybe you’ve been drinking too much.

  He sees her pupils dilate; in the wider aperture perhaps some shifting appraisal. None of their previous conversations were personal – he would pull a book off the shelf for her, point out something on the spinner rack. But now she leans close. She smells of whisky and oranges.

  We’ve been packing up his books, she says.

  Bring them by, he says. I can have a look.

  She nods. Make me an offer.

  Their talk mingles with the mourner’s prayer. Ten men in solemn recitation. Sachs an unbeliever, but something nonetheless begins to stir. He has a boner at the Kaddish.

  ◊

  How quickly the past scrolls by. Pages and pages of old newspaper on your phone, months of digitized broadsheet passing so rapidly your eyes are soon stuffed with a faded quotidian: bell-bottoms on sale at Simpsons, ten-cent cups of coffee. You sit here, sip your three-dollar espresso, and zoom in on decades-old coverage of the failed Spadina Expressway. You read items about appropriated homes, air pollution. Uptown and downtown rhetoric. In concrete terms, Spadina was to be six miles of six-lane road. Citizens of the mid-century were told to look forward to speedy trips through town, the flow of traffic from home to work and back would be unimpeded by stoplights and occluded streets. The old future was sleek, antiseptic, fast. Or so the planners said. The future that actually arrived was far messier.

  ◊

  Cecil Street Books. The sign reads: Used and Rare. Through the big store window, a subdued January light falls on photos of Paley and Koufax and also the back of Hal Sachs. He lugs an armful of poetry. Jams a Mandelstam.

  Lily shows up with a cabload of cartons. Sachs begins to examine her father’s library. There’s an Arendt, of course, and one or two by Nizer. Gentle foxing on the Liebling. Worn paperbacks by Appel and Gold and then a real find: Helstein’s 1929 translation of Red Cavalry – the first in English – but with comments, alas, in the dead man’s hand.

  Marginalia, says Sachs.

  He always said he couldn’t think without a pencil in his hand.

  Don’t much care for other people’s scribbles. It’s like trying to watch a movie with someone nattering in your ear.

  Lily smiles without humour. He was a natterer all right.

  Sachs rolls up the sleeves of his denim shirt. He has thin forearms, dusty fingernails. He shoots a brief grey squint at his surroundings: three aisles in the shop run the same way for two generations. A lineage bookish and commodified. The original proprietors, his parents, sniffed out Spadina opportunity and for years cajoled a living out of the same spot. Their renown ran for blocks, their scion wracked with constancy.

  L
ily returns two days later with a last box. She sees Sachs twiddle his pencil, his elbow abutting Books in Print. She takes a step closer but his eyes remain far-off.

  What’re you thinking about?

  About getting a cup of coffee. Join me?

  Down Spadina they go, light flurries on lintel and dormer. They pass a three-store complex with two vacancies and the holdout, Kaplan Imports, about to bite the dust. They watch the missus paper over the window.

  Lily blows on her hands. Fucking expressway, she says. It’s going to kill this street.

  Sachs shrugs. There’s still time, he says. Nothing’s been decided.

  All the big money’s behind it. That’s the real problem. Capital has become consolidated into fewer and fewer hands.

  They cross the street to Switzer’s. Sachs holds the door open and smiles. I’m buying, he says.

  ◊

  This is a story about growth, about a city that doubled in size. From the 1950s to the 1970s, two decades, more than a million newcomers: Hungarians, Vietnamese, Koreans, Portuguese. The old downtown neighbourhoods and streets no longer fit. Borders were loosened, an uneasy alliance negotiated between the urban centre and surrounding villages, townships. The suburban sprawl called for order and control, so a new tier of administrators – Metro – was set up to coordinate massive new infrastructure projects: water mains, sewer systems, the first subway line, a series of expressways. Fred C. Gardiner, former reeve of Forest Hill village, was in charge. They called him Big Daddy.

  ◊

  Nothing but browsers when he returns. Mrs. Mintz at the spinner rack, a young couple cooing in History. Sachs at his desk does some foot dangling and, after long internal debate, gets off his duff. He continues to straighten Poetry, eyeballs the distance between spines and then stuffs in another. This is the most limited of muscle memory – schlep and shelve – the familiar task that frees up enough space for any meagre detail to hit with concussive, useless force.

  My nerves are strained, he locates in a Yevtushenko, like wires between the city of No and the city of Yes!

  He inspects Crane’s Collected Stories. Nice tight spine, small stain on the flyleaf. Next, a pristine copy of The Double Hook. He prices them in pencil, the lulling scratch of graphite silenced by sudden horripilation. He rates a Berenice Abbott monograph without scrutiny, then an illustrated Bartleby he fingers like a bruise.

  ◊

  You were three years old when your uncle disappeared. The news has lingered in your ears almost half a century and now echoes, because of your soon-to-be-born child, with fresh inflection. The due date is June 2, which also happens to be the last day Hal Sachs was ever seen.

  There was no note. The police asked their obligatory questions, but answers only came later, with a slight shift of emphasis. He went from missing to gone. Four letters filled with a wrong-eared finality; unlike the permanance of death or divorce, a man who disappears can still return.

  There was always something so damned equivocal about the man, Lily Klein told you years later.

  ◊

  Metro’s plan was ambitious: a series of wider, faster roads that would connect the old with the new. Spadina was only the start; once completed, it would be hitched up to future inner-city routes, like the Crosstown and the Christie-Clinton. The whole thing was mapped out decades in advance. Sam Cass, the roads and traffic commissioner, wanted every Torontonian to be no more than three-quarters of a mile from the nearest on-ramp.

  Earlier expressways ran along natural corridors, Don River to the east and Lake Ontario to the south, and so caused relatively little disruption. Not so Spadina. Plans called for it to rumble right through the heart of the city. Houses in middle-class neighbourhoods such as Cedarvale and the Annex would be appropriated and demolished. Buildings would be razed, then paved over for parking lots. Outraged residents found their collective voice and shouted STOP. Many uptowners, those desperate for an unfettered route downtown, had an equally loud retort: GO.

  It was a war of words.

  The Spadina Expressway was to be built in segments. When the initial two-mile stretch from Wilson Heights south to Lawrence Avenue was completed in 1967, the GO side was giddy. Their city was taking shape. No less pleased were the owners of the new Yorkdale Shopping Plaza – vehicles offramped right to their front doors. The department-store lobby was adamant things continue apace.

  So, on it went. Land from Lawrence down to Eglinton Avenue was cleared. A ditch was dug. The roadbed was completed but not yet paved before opposition grew too loud for politicians to ignore. They halted construction and referred the matter to the body of provincial oversight, the Ontario Municipal Board, for review. For the next eighteen months, everyone idled.

  ◊

  Lily comes back from bereavement leave and discovers her Grade 11 class at Harbord Collegiate to be clobbered by ennui. The substitute teacher took two days to describe the passage of a private member’s bill in the provincial legislature, a detailed incursion of gobbledygook that levelled the kids’ already unsteady attention spans. So, the first thing Lily has to do is prod them, revive their interest in civics with the lingo of resistance. She steers the lecture toward the Spadina Expressway battle, even manages to use the phrase Stick it to the man with a straight face.

  First they said it’d cost thirty million, Lily says. Then seventy million. Now it’s two hundred million. Maybe more. For a road. A big road, mind you. An expressway that will run six lanes from Wilson down to Dupont. McLuhan says it’ll be like a dagger through the heart of the city.

  Who? says Jerry, from the front row. A furious notetaker, he fumbles with his eraser.

  The point is: people are really steamed. They’re organizing. That’s the true meaning of democracy. It’s not as simple as majority rules. It’s more about voice, about speaking up and about the city learning to listen to other points of view.

  She wears a snug navy blouse. There’s a loose thread on her suede skirt. Lily just beyond thirty though surely antediluvian in the eyes of her students.

  Remember, guys, political power is no longer relegated to the voting booth. That’s what the STOP movement is all about. Thoughts?

  So many gazes go deskbound. The jocks and heads, of course, but also the browners too preoccupied by insistent intense feelings and resultant vague notions. Their adulthood coming both too fast and not fast enough.

  Yes, Trudy?

  Will this be on the test?

  The period ticks down. She spots Principal Libov at the door. With his flat head squashed onto his shoulders, he looks like a man perpetually ducking for cover.

  Lillian? he says. A word.

  She’s a good two inches taller than the principal, but opts for subtler advantage. Sits on the edge of the desk so her eyes, while resolute, remain level with his.

  Lillian, says Libov.

  He offers the weakest smile she’s ever seen.

  No one is happier to see you back than I. Really. Your enthusiasm for the subject matter is, uh, admirable, especially after your leave of absence. Our students have always responded well to you.

  But?

  But.

  Libov strides to the chalkboard. He grabs a piece of chalk and crosses out her squiggled definitions of gradual and cataclysmic money. His Xs are quite firm.

  We’ve discussed this before. Your personal opinions are not part of the curriculum.

  Can’t you please cut me some slack, Marv?

  Libov sighs. Look, he says. You have only recently suffered a grievous loss. I understand. Your judgment is askew. Let me straighten it out for you. No more straying from the material. No more tangents. Capisce?

  Lily looks down at the textbook. She drums her fingers.

  Car horns collide at an advanced green. Two storeys up, a window rattles in the frame. Their apartment is damp and cool, so Lily grabs an afghan for her feet. She twirls the stem of her wineglass between thumb and forefinger.

  So I was told to keep my trap shut.

 
Effective technique, says Phoebe Dinkins, for a teacher. Maybe take up mime.

  Lily snorts. Might as well. Libov says I better not discuss Spadina in class again.

  But you teach civics!

  Exactly what I said. And I was told to keep my opinions to myself.

  Phoebe takes a good glug of wine and her tongue turns groovy: A lesson in suppression!

  Be serious, Pheeb. How the fuck are these kids going to learn the value of citizenship if they see me cave so quickly?

  Phoebe at the hi-fi abides the rhetorical. Reads the liner notes on Out to Lunch. She drops the needle, but it skips the groove. Alice the cat leaps out of nowhere.

  Shit, says Lily.

  The tabby, one-eyed after some ancient scrap, winks.

  ◊

  Two June 2s, forty-five years apart. Your entire lifetime, almost. And in that long span of days, your desire was never to reproduce, but to recreate. To take from the mind’s associative clutter hints of rhythmic unity, attach historical tidbit to bookish notions. And now? Now all you hear is the midwife’s Doppler measure strong heartbeat, the moment when child and father must both emerge, kicking and screaming.

  Es is forty weeks. All signs are good: blood pressure, uterus measurement, heart rate perhaps a little fast. Yours, too. Blood floods your amygdala, increased flow that makes you mindful of every prior moment. The uneasy valence of biography.

  ◊

  In the Blue Cellar Room, where only the stout-armed can serve enormous platters of fried schnitzel, pork chops, and chicken livers. Everywhere glistening carnivorous lips and plates of gristle and bone. Lily and Sachs stick to goulash, split a bottle of Bull’s Blood. He finishes his first glass and says, The earliest booksellers were copyists. Did you know that? I’m talking the sixth century or so. They wrote all their books by hand.