Splitsville Page 8

  Sorry, says Lily. Can you repeat that?

  Her throat muscles go taut, bloodshot eyes start to see everything in red: One eye! Isn’t that distinguishing enough?

  ◊

  Sachs starts to pace, then sits. He sits, then starts to pace. The apartment is quiet as paper.

  ◊

  Joe Sharpe is on a real run this morning. He takes a call from Grubb and learns another city inspector has been paid off. A questionable eviction has been upheld. He jumps at the chance to change the locks and afterward stops in a menswear store to celebrate with a new tie. Pink-and-green paisley. His mug in the mirror approves. With his wallet out, Joe starts to calculate. He’s always been a luck-pusher, the kind of guy who knows when to let it ride. So he sacrifices some shoe leather and figures to make a killing. The last step up Mrs. Mintz’s stairs is a jaunty one. He rings the bell.

  This is very sensitive information, he says.

  They recline on chintz cushions. He implies secret knowledge, takes the old bird into his suspect confidence.

  I’ve got the ear of an alderman – I can’t say who – but let’s just say I’ve got new assurances. This deal is going through, Mrs. Mintz. If you ask me, there’ll never be a better time to sell.

  Mrs. Mintz nibbles a sugar cookie. A chunk crumbles toward the carpet.

  Ten minutes later, he is back on the sidewalk. He whistles ‘Moonlight Serenade,’ the air light and aloft from his lips until a throaty mewl provides a surprise counterpoint. There’s a paw on his trousers. Joe glances down.

  Meeorrw, says Alice the cat.

  ◊

  The shop stays closed. In front of the unlit shelves, Sachs stands. Surrounded by a billion words – typeset, printed, bound – and yet not a single one, nor any combination, can help him encapsulate this certain instinct. Down the familiar aisle he goes and with an inward humour puts up the sign: Back in 5 Minutes. His key is out, the deadbolt passes slyly through the strike plate. Outside, the evening is cool and there are wide-open spaces along the sidewalk. Quick look at the passenger-side window of a parked car, millisecond of a wised-up gaze. There is little traffic on Spadina Avenue. He moves through these early morning hours with a peculiar grace, elides streetwalkers and stoners and nightshifters and passes under lighted windows, the windows of both lovers and insomniacs.

  ◊

  The boys rouse themselves just after noon. Coffee cools off, yet still they speak with bitter tongues.

  It’s simple, says Irving. A little fertilizer, a wad of cotton. You soak it in diesel fuel, light the fucker, and boom.

  Claude smacks the tabletop. BOOM! he says.

  Lily’s lids are heavy. Her forehead worries.

  No one’ll get hurt. It’ll be the dead of night.

  Just gonna blow that hunk of concrete to bits.

  The on-ramp?

  The off-ramp, says Claude. So people can’t get to the mall.

  Lily clears her throat. Her voice is raspy and dangerous, like a struck match. Wanton destruction, she says. It’ll rally the other side.

  Phoebe is in the shower. A water stain on the north wall spreads like gangrene.

  We already voted on this, says Irving. Four to one. He pulls a fresh smoke from a pack. Three clicks on his lighter before the spark and catch.

  Besides, Vern’s already out buying the manure.

  With a deft wiggle of his Slim Jim, Claude pops the lock. He reaches under the dash and connects the red wires. The engine revs. The crew climbs in. An innocuous speed at three a.m. A long stretch of Bathurst is empty, save for a mismatch of cabs and fares. Further uptown, Irving spots a police cruiser parked at a gas station. The headlights are off, a bulky shadow behind the wheel. Claude stays easy on the gas. In the back seat, variations of pulse: Phoebe and Vern Dyson squeeze damp hands. Lily rolls down her window. It’s breezeless inside the car, a cool soup. A left turn onto Lawrence Avenue, past a corner plaza. They are not far from Min and Larry’s. There is a block of public housing, a block of bungalows, a high school. A burned-out street lamp above, a dark wink, and then, just ahead, the on-ramp. They accelerate. Tire drone beneath the chassis, a rubberized threnody for who-knows-what. Claude takes the Yorkdale cut-off hard and fast. His forearms jolt, the wheels squeal, and all five of them ooch and ugh as the hot Ford exits the expressway. One final screech around the curve of the cloverleaf. The auto smashes through the guardrail and, fenderless and unfixable, hisses to a halt under the concrete off-ramp. The hood steams. The radicals wobble.

  Phew, says Phoebe. That was dramatic.

  Irving opens the trunk. Get moving!

  With rehearsed precision, they pack fertilizer into paper bags. Douse the cotton in diesel and stuff one homemade bomb beside the gas tank and another in the glove compartment. The blast will shatter everything within five hundred square feet. They have calculated how far they have to run to safety, and how fast.

  Claude smooches Irving. Let’s do it.

  Irving flicks his lighter. Nothing. Again and again. He whips it away. The others frisk themselves. No one has anything.

  Lily, with relaxed and unculpable hands, takes a minute to study the three-starred sky. Well, she says. This is just stupid.

  ◊

  For chrissakes, says Larry, He’s a grown man. Maybe he doesn’t want to talk to his sister every day.

  What every day? What’s wrong with once a week?

  Min long ago had learned to fake certain kinds of acceptance: her husband’s distaste for leftovers, the way her brother was tardy with his return calls. Sure, she might fill the tape in his answering machine, but it was always with a casual air. She could wait. She could listen to the dial tone without portent. She could also grab his spare keys and drive down there. Traffic is bad. Road repair south of Glencairn accelerates her nerves and for the first time in her life she exceeds the speed limit. Her radio is on:

  If we are building a transportation system to serve the automobile, Premier William Davis says to the Provincial Legislature on June 3, 1971, the Spadina Expressway would be a good place to start. But if we are building a transportation system to serve people, the Spadina Expressway is a good place to stop.

  Lily is on the street when word gets out. A teamster she knows, through a mouthful of onion bun, schmecks something that sounds like topple.

  What?

  The teamster’s second try is purple-faced. He horks and chokes. Five hard backslaps from Lily force the troublesome wad of dough from windpipe to sidewalk.

  They – stopped – it.

  Spadina Avenue, from this moment, becomes bloated with detail: over the airwaves, across the countertops, off the tongues of professors and furriers. The afternoon editions are soon unbundled and beneath twelve-point type are blackand-white jubilations and teeth-grit quotes. Mayor Dennison, on city business in Ceprano, expresses his utter disbelief. Some are on record assuring the death of civic autonomy, others the birth of a responsive government. Nowhere does the news resound more than in the half-empty shelves of Cecil Street Books, the darkened display window. The indecision that unwavered there, the inability to take a step forward. It’s all up for grabs now. The stock will be sold off. The lease will be broken. There will be no payoff.

  ◊

  Try to reimagine him, maybe somewhere warm. Dawndappled sweetgum, a dusty road. He hitches a ride with an apple-cheeked nun. She offers him a Kool. Sachs closes his eyes, his head still hurts from the blow to his temple. The drive through Texas is lulling. Abeline, Big Spring. He is unshaven, without a book in his pocket. Gets dropped off just outside of Sanderson, where he paces well into the night, the dark motel lot occasionally aglow with the streaking red lights of intercontinental rigs.

  ◊

  Twenty-three years of plans made and amended. Seventyfive million dollars spent, with future costs expected to triple, quadruple, quintuple. The expressway was renamed W. R. Allen Road. From Lawrence south to Eglinton, it had remained unbuilt. Uptown wags called it the Davis Ditch, the road to now
here. Your favourite part came next: newspaper photos of kids on their bikes, wheelies on the unpaved roadbed. Such whimsy. In the distance, not even a speck of Chevies or Cadillacs. You wish it ended there. go mouthpiece Esther Shiner, elected to North York council in 1973, insisted that this unfinished stretch be completed. The province said no. The city said no. Metro said yes. So, in 1976, we were all nudged one stop further. Cars quickly snarled in every direction. Pedestrian crossings were placed, with impressive counterintuition, at the exact point where drivers accelerated onto the ramps. It was the worst intersection in town. But Premier Davis was not outdone: he used his last day in office to extend his middle finger and lease one metre of land to the City of Toronto. The land, just beyond the Eglinton exit, blocks all possible construction. The lease was for ninetynine years. See you in 2084.

  ◊

  You don’t bother to lock your bike. You remove your helmet. There’s a crack in the shell. Deviant but unbroken, like a fracture in the skull. Your apartment is on the second floor of a semi-detatched. You drop your keys. Pick them up. Turn the lock. On the landing, Es waits. She has one hand on the banister, the other on her belly.

  It’s time, she says.

  Notes and Acknowledgements

  The history of the Spadina Expressway was much longer and more complicated than portrayed here. I have simplified events for the purposes of narrative.

  Several books have informed this one, in ways both obvious and subtle:

  All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, by Marshall Berman; The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects, by Lewis Mumford; The Bad Trip: The Untold Story of the Spadina Expressway, by David and Nadine Nowlan; The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life, by Richard Sennett.

  Quotations and references are from, in order of appearance:

  p. 16, ‘My nerves are strained…’: Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Bratsk Station and Other New Poems, 1967

  p. 28, ‘…more wildness in thinking than in lust’: Leonard Michaels, Shuffle, 1990

  p. 36: ‘…in the instant of becoming’: William James, The Principles of Pyschology, Vol. 1, 1890

  p. 112: ‘The apartment is quiet as paper’: Nadezhda Mandelstam, quoting the first line of a poem by her husband, Osip Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope: A Memoir, 1970

  p. 117: ‘But if we are building a transportation system…’: William B. Davis, speaking to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario, June 3, 1971.

  Financial assistance from the following is much appreciated: Toronto Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council, the Canada Council for the Arts, and, most importantly, the Writers' Trust of Canada’s Woodcock Fund.

  Thank you to my regular trio of readers: Jason McBride, Derek McCormack, and Adam Sternbergh.

  Special thanks to John Fraser.

  Deep gratitude to everyone at Coach House Books, especially Alana Wilcox.

  And, as always, to Suse.

  Howard Akler is the author of two books with Coach House: The City Man, which was nominated for the Amazon First Novel Award, the City of Toronto Book Award, and the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and Men of Action, which won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Memoir, was shortlisted for the Toronto Book Award, and was featured as a part of the 2015 New York Times Gift Guide.

  Typeset in Albertan, Tape Type, and Squareface

  Albertan was designed by the late Jim Rimmer of New Westminster, B.C., in 1982. He drew and cut the type in metal at the 16-pt size in roman only; it was intended for use only at his Pie Tree Press. He drew the italic in 1985, designing it with a narrow fit and a very slight incline, and created a digital version. The family was completed in 2005, when Rimmer redrew the bold weight and called it Albertan Black. The letterforms of this type family have an old-style character, with Rimmer’s own calligraphic hand in evidence, especially in the italic.

  Printed at the Coach House on bpNichol Lane in Toronto, Ontario, on Zephyr Antique Laid paper, which was manufactured, acid-free, in Saint-Jérôme, Quebec, from second-growth forests. This book was printed with vegetable-based ink on a 1973 Heidelberg kord offset litho press. Its pages were folded on a Baumfolder, gathered by hand, bound on a Sulby Auto-Minabinda, and trimmed on a Polar single-knife cutter.

  Edited and designed by Alana Wilcox

  Cover by Ingrid Paulson

  Cover photograph from the City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1567, Series 648, File 246, Item 5

  Coach House Books

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