The Answer to Everything (2 page)

Yes, there was an art to finding food and staying nourished. And I had no trouble mastering it. Rent, on the other hand, was a whole other matter.

The first time I saw John Aarons in the flesh was about five months after finding the exhibit in the Fine Arts Department. I was pretty sure it was him. He audited one of the classes I was in, a lecture on group influence and persuasion. I recognized the curly hair and the square jaw and the sly smile—he smiled a lot during the class and doodled spirographically on his white Converse sneakers while the rest of us took notes.

A week later, he turned up for Memory and Cognition. He was wearing a T-shirt that had “Eat More Cake” written on the front, and baby-blue, cockroach-killer cowboy boots. I tried to find him in the halls after class, but he had bolted. I started casually looking for him in the Arts wing. I’d eat lunch over there or take the long way to the bus stop, but I never ran into him.

Around that time I started sleeping with Ryan, my Statistics TA, and forgot about John for a while. Still, at the end of the year I made a point of attending the big Fine Arts exhibit opening-night party. He wasn’t there and had nothing on display. I asked one of the profs, and she said he had dropped out halfway through the year—she seemed kind of drunk, and when pressed, let it slip that it had something to do
with a series of bounced tuition cheques. I’m not quite sure why, but this piqued my interest in him more; maybe because I was bored and done with Ryan at that point. I Googled his name but got nothing relevant. There was no sign of him on Twitter/Vine/Vimeo, and while there was one “John Aarons” on Facebook, the listing was inactive—no profile picture and no Facebook friends. I figured I had seen the last of him.

If only!

I liked to watch the girls play. Philomena, Debbie, Gabriella, Jane. They lived on my street, and I would watch them do their hopscotch and gymnastics and skipping. I would watch them act out scenes with their Barbie dolls. They would fill a Tupperware container with water and the Barbies would have a pool party. Sometimes the girls played a game where they’d hold hands and dance around in a circle, singing a chant about flowers:
Apple blossom, almond blossom, fuchsia and azalea …

One day a new girl came to play. Her name was Nikita. She was six years old but at least half a foot taller than the other girls who were the same age. She had a big head, a long neck and the skinniest legs I’d ever seen. Like a newborn colt’s legs, barely able to support the weight of the body. Nikita did gymnastics with the others and everything seemed all right, but when the girls started to form a circle for the flower chant, she began to cry. She was on the sidewalk, sobbing, while the other girls stood in a circle on the lawn.

“What’s going on?” I said. I was ten years old and bigger than them.

“They won’t let me play,” said Nikita.

“Why won’t you let her play?” I asked the others.

Debbie said her parents told her not to touch black people. Philomena said her parents told her black people were bad.

“It’s not true,” I said. “Your parents are wrong.”

The girls were shocked to hear this. Parents could be wrong?

“They’re wrong,” I said. “Nikita’s skin is just a different colour than yours. How would you feel if the other girls wouldn’t let you play because you had green eyes?” I asked Philomena. “How would you feel,” I asked Debbie, “if the other girls wouldn’t let you play because of that large brown mole on your shin?”

I brought Nikita into the circle. The girls joined hands and started doing the flower chant. They were instantly happy and smiling again. Just like that, every one of them having perfect afternoon fun. I stood in the centre of the circle and watched them.
Apple blossom, almond blossom, fuchsia and azalea … baby’s breath and hollyhock, gardenia and camellia …
Faster and faster they went, chanting the names of the beautiful flowers—smiling faces spinning around me, faster and faster, an orbit of pretty—until they collapsed on the grass, all laughing and tangled, a kaleidoscope of happiness and relief.

I learned something that day. I learned that people sometimes need guidance. A small nudge in the direction of holy.

What ever happened to quiet desperation? All the bleating that goes on these days. I swear it makes my cochleas cringe.

When the ex turfed me out of our apartment (one that I’d found but had her fully employed, office-worker name on the lease), I didn’t write a memoir about it, I got busy trying to locate a place to live. I couldn’t afford anything on my own, so I had to look for shared accommodation. As far as I was concerned, there were only two options for potential roommates—gay males or straight females. Individuals from either of these subsets were far more likely to clean up after themselves, and perhaps even after me if I was lucky. They would never use flags as curtains and wouldn’t be slobbing around, watching sports all the time, trying to engage me in conversations about baseball or hockey or that most mystifying of pursuits, football. They would consistently have food in the fridge, and quality food too—butter (possibly organic) and premium, not-from-concentrate orange juice. None of those hetero male tubs of margarine and jumbo jugs of SunnyD crapola. More important, if I was charming enough, they would likely share their food with me, or at the very least not give me hell for pinching a pot of coffee or a bowl of cereal now and again.
Lesbians had good food too, but they tended toward vegetarianism (I need my meat) and usually chose female roommates. They were also savvy and man-wary and weren’t likely to put up with my crap.

Anything over $850 per month was out of the question. Anything north of Eglinton, west of High Park or east of Greenwood was out of the question. Any habitation with the owner living on-site or within a half-mile radius was out of the question.

It took about six days to find a handful of viable options and narrow the field to three candidates. There was Vickie, twenty-something, associate producer at CBC Radio, in a flat on the second floor of a house near Pape and Danforth. Good restaurants, shopping and subway nearby. Hardwood floors, dishwasher and a claw-footed tub that had recently been reglazed. Seven hundred and forty dollars per month plus half the cable. Not bad. No outdoor space, though. And Vickie was a very unattractive girl. On the one hand, this was a plus. Vickie would be less likely to bring home romantic partners, who would clutter up the space and use all the hot soaking-tub water. On the other hand, ugly Vickie might be at home every night, filling the couch with methane and dust mites, watching
Long Island Medium
or
Cake Boss
marathons on TLC. Vickie clearly wasn’t comfortable in her own, alarmingly oily, skin. The day I toured the apartment she wore a voluminous sweatshirt in an effort to hide her protruding belly and watermelon breasts. Because of my interest in social psychology, I knew that recent studies had shown that low self-esteem inhibits generosity and helpful behaviour. I required a generous and helpful roommate.

There was handsome Hal, an affable, twenty-something gay man who had a small, well-appointed condo to share on Hayden Street. The location was great, and the suite was decorated tastefully—all creamy natural colours, and framed black-and-white photos. Pretty pricey, though, at $850 per month. It did have a Juliet balcony, so one could at least step outside and taste the air, but the available bedroom was tiny and so narrow as to feel coffin-like. Hal seemed like a decent sort, but he was an actor, which meant he didn’t have regular hours outside the home. It also meant that he wanted the whole world to love him, and only felt truly real when he was the centre of attention, preferably with a camera pointed at his professionally whitened teeth. He would always be “on,” which could be annoying and emotionally exhausting. His grooming sessions in the bathroom would run long, and he’d probably want to host an annual Oscar party in what I would quickly come to consider
my
living room.

Finally, there was Amy, a university student in a mid-century high-rise just west of Yonge between St. Clair and Davisville. The area was a bit yuppie for my liking, and dull, but the space itself was good—a twelfth-floor penthouse apartment with an open and airy living room/dining room and two large bedrooms, either of which could easily accommodate a king-size bed, dresser and desk. The kitchen was substandard, an absurdly narrow galley affair that would not have looked out of place on a U-boat, but at least the midget-size fridge and stove were relatively new. The most astonishing feature of the apartment was its private rooftop patio, not attached to Amy’s corner suite but adjacent to it and accessible through a
door in the building’s stairwell at the top landing. The thing was colossal. It ran the depth of the building and was at least thirty feet across. It could have easily served as the outdoor space for the entire population of the high-rise, but for some reason it belonged to Amy’s apartment alone, even though she already had a regular balcony off her living room. There was a tiny window next to the locked steel entrance door to the roof, just big enough for the rest of the saps in the building to press their noses against and see what they were missing. This exclusive enclave appealed to me enormously, and I had visions of reclining in the sun on one of Amy’s blue-and-white-striped cushioned lounge chairs, while she, bikini-clad and straw-hatted, barbecued our dinner and, as the lamb burgers were cooking, refreshed my gin and tonics or applied coconut-scented sunscreen to the less hirsute portions of my dorsal vertebrae.

Amy was a good-looking girl. Not my type, but objectively attractive. I like soft, round, dark-haired women with some thigh and ass. Brown eyes and olive flesh, if we’re talking made-to-order. Amy was tall and bony and blue-eyed. She had close-cropped orange hair and the palest skin I’d ever seen. Her cheeks were perpetually flushed, and the effect of the pink on the white of her skin with those blue eyes and the orange hair was startling. She looked like a Victorian doll that had got its hair chopped off by the owner’s naughty brother. I didn’t want to fuck her, but I wanted to keep looking at her. I wanted to photograph her.

In many ways it seemed like a no-brainer to opt for Amy as a roommate over Vickie or Hal, but one thing that gave me pause was how enthusiastically she was pushing the apartment.
She seemed just a little too anxious to have me move in, which made me suspicious. The rent was already very reasonable—$640 per month—and when I asked about cable and phone expenses, she volunteered to take care of the costs, provided I didn’t make any long-distance calls that weren’t covered by her plan. She didn’t appear to mind that I could give her only first month’s rent, or that I didn’t have an actual employer. And while I didn’t know her from a hole in a squirrel’s ass, and had no behaviour to compare it to, I sensed that she was behaving unusually nervous and giggly. I’m no beast, but I’m not enough of a stud to provoke blushes and stammers from women. There was something off about it. I told her I’d get back to her.

As I was leaving her apartment, the guy who lived across the hall was leaving his. A sweet hashish smell wafted toward me. The dude was tall, at least six foot three, with shoulder-length locks. The only sign he wasn’t in his twenties was the hairline, ebbing a bit on the deeply tanned forehead. He was shirtless and had a faded kaffiyeh draped around his neck. He was wearing sweatpants, Birkenstock sandals and pink, Janis Joplin–style sunglasses. He was actually leaving his home dressed like that. He grinned at me—a stoned-out, Muppety grin—and I sensed in an instant that there could be a lot of gratis grass in my future.

Free pot, free cable, free North American long distance, a private rooftop patio and an easy-to-look-at roommate who would be around too much during the summer, but at school all day in the fall … I realized in the elevator as I watched my potential new neighbour put in his earbuds and begin
head-bopping to what I recognized as a Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan remix, that I hadn’t asked Amy what she was studying. When I got down to the lobby, I buzzed up.

“Hello?”

“Hey Amy, it’s John. Sorry to disturb you. It just occurred to me that I forgot to ask about the water pressure.”

“Oh. I’ve never had any problems with it.”

“Good. That’s good.”

“Do you want to come up and check it out?”

“No, no. I trust you. Thanks.”

“OK. Just let me know.”

“I will. Oh, and Amy, I also forgot to ask what you’re studying at school.”

A bit of crackle from the intercom, and then: “Does that matter?”

“No. Just curious.”

“Psychology” came distorted through the speaker.

“Hmm,” I said. “So the pressure’s pretty good, huh?”

“It’s phenomenal.”

“OK, you know what? I think I’m going to go ahead and take the room, if that’s all right with you.”

“That’s great,” said Amy.

She buzzed me in.

The next time I saw him was in a gallery on Spadina. I was off for Christmas break and I went to the K-Space Affordable Art sale, looking for nifty gifts. But even the so-called cheap art was out of my price range. I did score some stocking stuffers, though—white matchbooks with interesting bits of text stamped on them, like:
She was laughing on the outside but smiling wanly on the inside
. Fifty cents each. Not bad.

As I was leaving I heard sounds of a party down the corridor at the Wroblewski Gallery. It turned out to be the opening of a group show of electronic installation art, and front and centre was a piece by John Aarons. It was a Rube Goldberg–like contraption that had a box of photographs on one side and a clear glass container of liquid on the other. A robotic pincer picked up one of the photographs and conveyed it along a kind of ski-lift track to the front of the piece, where it was presented to the viewer. The gizmo featured a big black button labelled
SAVE
. If you pushed the button, the photograph moved back along a track and was deposited safely into a velvet-lined box. If you did nothing, the photograph inched along another track, dropped into the liquid—some kind of hydrochloric acid—and dissolved in a sizzle of chemicals.