The Answer to Everything (3 page)

Her Name Is Julianne
¹

She curls like a cat in bed
²

Eyes gleaming
³

Strong yet soft
⁴

Ready to pounce
⁵

We roll like thunder in the covers
⁶

Her mouth on mine

And everywhere

I want it
⁷

1
. Actually, Julianne is her middle name. Her real name is Gladys, which suits her better, since it is also the name of her odious mother, who she is rapidly becoming. Take note, Teskey. Gladys Junior will someday sport a replica of Gladys Senior’s bulging belly and bubble butt and like Mommy Dearest will begin to resemble in posture Donald Duck, particularly when waddling to the fridge for another tumbler of Chardonnay.

2
. You’ll notice, Teskey, that she sounds like one too, should you ever successfully bring her to orgasm, which is doubtful.

3
. Orbs alight? What did you do, hold up a handful of cash?

4
. Just like bathroom tissue.

5
. Someone must have carried a Bundt cake into the bedroom.

6
. Elton John called; he wants his line back.

7
. Don’t get used to it, Teskey; she only goes down for the first couple of months.

Oddly enough, the next time I saw John Aarons was when he showed up at my door and asked to move in with me.

I had been sharing an apartment with my friend Barb van Vleck, who I’d known since middle school. We got along well and had agreed to stay put until we both graduated and secured jobs—Barb was studying to be an accountant. Then one day out of the blue she told me she had bought herself a condo in the Distillery District and gave me two months’ notice. I was pissed off. Not just because I instantly had to find someone reasonable to share my crappy home, or because we had just recently signed on for another shitty year at 55 Hawton Boulevard, but also because Barb and I had talked repeatedly about purchasing a duplex together when we finally had careers and incomes. I would never be able to buy a home on my own in Toronto. Even a 395-square-foot condo like Barb’s would be out of reach for the foreseeable future.

When I graduated from high school, my parents gave me money to take the summer off to travel. My mother’s people are from Ireland, and my dad’s are from Scotland. My folks seemed pleased with the idea of me tramping through the homelands before settling down to my studies. They weren’t nearly as
pleased when I met Olivio, a thirty-three-year-old Italian, in Dublin and went to live with him in Greece for a year and a half—until he decided to reunite with his ugly wife in Torino. I knew they had been planning to pay for my tuition, but by the time I got home they had changed their Presbyterian minds: “You’re an
independent
young woman now, Amy. You’ll have to make your own arrangements.” I qualified for a couple of small bursaries and worked as a waitress at Kalendar for six months before school started, but mostly I OSAPed myself into a whack of debt. I was jealous of Barb van Vleck, who was almost three years younger than me and already owned her own place. A minuscule place, but cute as hell—exposed brick wall, bamboo floors, poured concrete countertops. And she had what I coveted more than anything in the whole world: her very own washer and dryer. No more contending with the filthy cretins of the building, no more strangers’ fecal matter remnants contaminating the underthings. Not for Barb, anyway.

After returning from her luxe condo-warming soirée, my belly sloshing with red wine and resentment, I lay on the floor and made a mental list of some of the things Barb would no longer have to deal with now that she had her own place:

1.
Broken elevators
. There wasn’t a single week that I lived at 55 Hawton in which one of the two elevators hadn’t been on the fritz. Quite often it was both of them—usually when I got home from a long day at school with a packed knapsack and several bags of groceries, and a head cold and period cramps. That’s generally when I had to hoof it up twelve flights of stairs. Oh, and whenever it was horrendously hot and humid outside.

2.
Fire alarms in middle of the night
. In their boundless stupidity, the owners of the building had placed the lobby’s pull-down fire alarm three inches above the button that unlocks the inner door and allows residents to exit. Guess what? At 3 a.m., drunk and stoned subnormals were unable to resist pulling the fire alarm on their way out. It happened once or twice a week. Never in my life have I heard a more piercing blast than the air-raid sirens that bansheed me awake on a regular basis. Eventually the fire trucks would arrive. Bleary inhabitants would peer down from balconies, wondering if maybe, maybe this time it was for real. But it never was. Just another night of interrupted rest.

3.
Laundry room hell
. The absolute worst part about living at 55 Hawton: the communal laundry room. It was in the basement in a low-ceilinged, badly lit bunker of a room, a place in which only a rat or a serial killer would want to spend more than thirty seconds. There were five washing machines and five dryers for the entire building. At least one was always out of service. They had never been cleaned. In the middle of the room was what some might generously refer to as a folding table, although I can’t imagine anyone letting their clean clothes near this grimy, paint-peeling abomination. If you were not in the laundry room the second your washer or dryer had come to a stop, some degenerate scumbag who had just been scratching his ass or scooping pus out of an open sore would grab your freshly laundered underthings and place them in a heap on this sticky former picnic table. You’d then have to start the process all over again—that is, if you
were lucky enough to find an empty machine, or one without something crazy inside. For some reason the residents of 55 Hawton felt it was acceptable to jam absolutely anything into a washing machine. Some of the items I’d seen put through the wash there: a brown polyester three-piece suit, a pair of ski boots, sofa pillows, automobile floor mats and a fur coat. Not the kind of stuff you want to find when you’re about to put your panties in for a spin.

No wonder Barb van Vleck took a powder.

To be honest, I remained bitter and dejected until the day John Aarons showed up at my door. Then I knew it was fate, that Barb’s leaving me in the lurch was meant to be. Obviously there was a reason why our paths kept crossing. John Aarons and I were destined to come together. At the time I thought it was for romance. I didn’t realize that the powers had a different purpose in mind.

Almost all of my known relatives have been murdered. Deliberately starved or gleefully butchered. My mother’s people got it from the Young Turks in World War I. The Special Organization. My father’s side was nearly erased by the Arrow Cross Party in World War II. The Final Solution.

My parents found each other in a snowstorm in Canada when they passed on a Winnipeg street. She smiled. He fell (figuratively and also in the icy-sidewalk-meeting-your-tailbone sense). Later he would claim he knew in an instant she would become his wife. They had a lot in common. Not gardening or tennis or a taste for classical music. Trauma was their bond. Trumped only by their worship of me. I was the thing that was not supposed to happen. The beating Armenian/Jewish heart in the twenty-first century. The beautiful boy surrounded by millions of absences.

It was late in their lives when I arrived. My father had just turned fifty. My mother was forty-two and subsequently unable to produce more offspring. And so I was the most precious and prized, the treasure that needed to be protected and prepared. The stories they told were not the usual beddy-bye tales. No
Fox in Sox
for me. No
Wind in the Willows
. They told
me about corpses stacked like cordwood. They told me about infants tossed into the Black Sea. They told me about showers that weren’t really showers, so don’t be fooled, my love. Most of the world hates you, they assured me, and would prefer if you didn’t exist. Know that and be ready. At the end of the day, your neighbours will not save you. Prayers will not save you. Only you can save you.

Needless to say, I was raised an atheist. There were boxes of matzo in April, but no Seder. There was a Christmas tree in December, but no midnight Mass.

In our house there was no room for God. Not with all the genocide.

Sometimes when things don’t go our way, we get frustrated and mad. Sometimes when things are going really badly, we might even get mad at God.

God will not punish you for your anger.

It is your anger that will punish you.

John Aarons was a mooch and a liar. He paid his first month’s rent and then proceeded to sponge off me.

He moved in with nothing but an air mattress, a laptop, some camera equipment and his clothes. Oh, and a single kitchen item: a French press coffee maker. That was it. No furniture. No stereo. No books. He showed up like a homeless person with his entire life heaped in a shopping cart, one that he claimed to have found on the street, but I’m sure he stole from the Sobeys parking lot. He also pretended to return it, but I saw it a few days later, parked next to the Dumpsters beside the high-rises on Lascelles Boulevard—it was missing a couple of wheels at that point, but I’m willing to bet it was the same one. He didn’t even bring any bathroom products except for a stone-aged toothbrush and a jumbo bar of Irish Spring, the latter of which was placed on the upper built-in soap dish in the shower but never used. That bar never got any smaller, never even lost its Irish Spring logo imprint, although it grew less distinct over time because of the humidity. Obviously, he was using my pricey oatmeal soap from the health food store. He also helped himself to my very expensive Bumble and Bumble seaweed shampoo. I could smell it halfway across
the apartment when he came out of the shower—strutting, of course, in the tiniest of towels—but he denied it. Not that I ever confronted him directly, mind you. I was too smitten. I think I said something lame like “I can get a bigger shower caddy if you want to put some shampoo and stuff in there.”

He gave me his wise-ass smirk, knowing exactly what I was getting at. “That’s really nice of you,” he said. “But don’t worry about it. I’m just going to use bar soap on my hair until I start making some cash.”

Yeah right. Bar soap. What a joke. His big credo at the time was that as long as he was subsisting on a grant from the Arts Council, he felt a duty to the hard-working taxpayers of the land to live as frugally as possible. Very admirable, I thought. So noble. But considering he was eating my food, drinking my beer, watching my cable, calling Brooklyn and Los Angeles from my phone, and slathering his curls with my premium hair products, who should the hard-working taxpayers of the land have been thanking?

Of course, it was because of John Aarons that I became rich enough to fill a swimming pool with Bumble and Bumble seaweed shampoo, but that’s beside the point.

In the beginning, Amy turned out to be an even better roommate than I expected. She was neat and clean and pleasant to be around. And she wasn’t around that much. She spent a good deal of time outside the apartment, and a respectable number of hours in her room with the door closed. When she watched TV it was good TV—
Curb Your Enthusiasm; Louie; The Daily Show
. Except for her abominable
Property Brothers
or
Love It or List It
lapses, she was reasonably discerning. She cooked delicious food and often shared it with me. Her braised short ribs were divine. Her tortilla soup, superb. She understood that I was an impecunious artist and didn’t seem to mind if I used a squirt of her dishwashing liquid or a capful of her laundry detergent. In the early days, anyway, when our love was, ahem, new.

The building, on the other hand, didn’t measure up to my expectations. The elevators were maddeningly sluggish, and one or the other seemed to be always out of service. And every few days some sadistic prick would set off the fire alarm in the middle of the night. I do not like to be roused from slumber. It makes me cranky. The only upside was getting to see Amy charge from her bedroom in her typical sleeping attire: tank top and a pair of men’s-style cotton briefs. It was pretty. It was very pretty.

The first time we slept together was during one of those fire alarms. It was the third or fourth we’d had since I’d moved in. I was starting to get used to it. The noise would pierce my head like a knitting needle hammered in the ear. I’d lurch into a pair of gotchies and stumble hazy and adrenalized into the living room, at which point Amy, cursing like a knife-stuck sailor, would storm semi-clad from her bedroom. She’d hurtle out the front door, sniff the hallways and stairwells for smoke, then return, muttering and ranting. I’d follow her out onto the living-room balcony (where the cacophony was marginally less of an assault), and we’d look down upon the other balcony people, and the sprinkling of residents in their pyjamas and robes who had actually left the building—generally those with children—and they’d look up at us while we all waited for the fire trucks to arrive and make the horrible noise stop.

On that particular night, I told Amy, “I know why this keeps happening and who’s responsible.”

“Oh really,” she said, giving me a wry but flirty smile. There was a rising tide of flirtation in those early days. The levees were getting ready to burst.

“It’s a man who lives in that building across the way. He sneaks over here, pulls the alarm, then runs home and waits for you to come out in your skivvies.”

Amy laughed.

“He’s watching you right now.”

“Yeah, right. So in this day of Internet porn, where you can not only get wide-open beavs at the click of a mouse but virtually any smutty fantasy on earth, including plushy mascots doing it with dwarves—”