-A novel in progress
MY FEET in thick woolen socks rested on my studio’s old warehouse floor, painted a thick glossy grey. The hot water rods against the wall — about five feet behind my hammock, slung between two white posts — were still vibrating with heat, but in less than an hour, it would dwindle from the invisible landlord’s hands tinkering in the basement. The daytime temperature was rising steadily as spring advanced. Behind the thin remains of draft beer, I could still taste the tart fermentation of the four glasses of Soave Bianco I had with ravioli during a late afternoon dinner at the Peter Pan Restaurant  with Gilles, a vanguard art dealer, and Jannis, one of his top painters.  I had left them, in no mood for Annabella’s company right then, still feeling determined to obliterate the bitter-sweet feeling left over from spending most of the day with Maria, also the lingering feeling of severed yet connected intimacy and responsibility associated with marital separation.

I had crossed Queen Street and strolled south along its wide sidewalk. Nearing Spadina, I heard my name being yelled from the doorway of the Horseshoe Tavern, which I had just walked by, without noticing Ray and Josh, two of my peers in the art world. In a few minutes, mugs of ‘draft’ started coming, and  by nine o’clock, we had drifted further down Queen to the Cameron, where Ray and Josh, who by now had revealed their own reasons for going on a binge, encouraged others to spend on us. We talked, cleverly ridiculing each-other’s talent, even though sharing a belief in our creative calling. Finally, I gave some excuse about needing some fresh air outside, away from all the smoke, drunken voices, and the terrible live jazz band. Once outside, I crossed Queen Street and stumbled down an alleyway of lit-up house kitchens  overlooking old garages which led to my studio’s quiet street.

Now I stared at the dark grey puddle my woolen blanket formed when it fell from my bare legs as I capsized out of my hammock and sat up in its middle. I picked up my round metal-rimmed glasses from beneath the hammock, and they helped trim the blurr from two grimy glass windows, which nevertheless were glowing with early morning sunlight. My life might be tough, I thought, but it wasn’t sad. All those tough scenes I had absorbed from ‘Westerns’ were like cushions under my insecure head. As I pushed up a ‘sash’ window, I heard the heavy clang of streetcars a few corners away on Spadina  Avenue, beyond a thawed Park of budding fresh green visible from my window. Out of nowhere, I remembered the bearded Robert Mitchum in his sombrero in the first reel of ‘The Wonderful Country’, where he rides into an almost deserted border town with tumbleweeds rolling across its dusty street, and one gets tangled in a front leg of his strutting horse, and they capsize to the ground, and only an old peasant takes him in, nurses him back to health with his broken leg, while he spends time healing under a heavy woolen blanket like the one forming a puddle on my studio floor. My studio was like that old man: Taking care of me. And one thing I liked about this cool northern climate was you could leave things like salami, bread, cheese, butter, and milk out on a table beside a chilly window and it kept fresh. I sat on one of the two wooden fold-up chairs I had bought with a round café table and began to cut slices of salami and cheese, then buttered a few slices of whole wheat bread and made a sandwich. I plugged in an old cream electric kettle my mom had given me, and dished out two spoons of instant coffee into a blue ware cup. I stretched my legs across to the other chair, and thought about Maria’s visit with me yesterday. How does a six-year-old girl communicate something profound to a so-called adult mind? A child’s meaning may not be consciously intended, of course, I thought, because it was inseparable from instinctive self-expression. Or was I really only thinking about myself as an artist; a painter who discovers  the  imaginative logic of obsessive painting, or art-making, after it was done? I remembered Maria did not arrive empty-handed; she never does. She had her little pink bag with an illustration of typical playful figures printed on it, slung across her little chest. She also clutched Henry, a male Cabbage-Patch doll, even as she abruptly brought up some of her breakfast while hurriedly arriving up the warehouse stairs, holding her mother’s hand. What was that remotely familiar flowery scent lingering on my face and my tangled hair? Johnson’s Baby Powder? Of course! Zelda must have splashed Maria’s chest, underarms and back as she usually does after giving her a bath. And when I thought of it now, if I had to define a moment of happiness, it would have to be remembering Maria lying on her belly in the bathtub, splashing water with her hands while ‘Rubber Ducky’ and other toys floated around her… Or Maria peeping around the edge of the door to her swimming class, dripping water from her little bathing suit, smiling at me but not saying anything, before quickly vanishing among her little friends to have a last swim when I went to pick her up from a recreation centre. I realized now what Maria had done while I was busy working on an essay at this very table yesterday. After her mother had bathed, powdered, and dressed her, then was occupied with something else, Maria had dumped the same powder on Henry as well. When I suggested we go for a walk in the Park, she put Henry  in my hammock and said: “Henry, you take a nap. I’m going out for a little while.” When we came back, she was a bit tired after all the jumping up and down on the Park bench, playing at the fountain,  climbing in and out the monkey bars, speeding down the metal slide, at one point accepting the challenge when I tested her courage  and confidence and told her to jump off the veranda of the slide and I would catch her. “Would I let you fall? Would I?” And smiling, she floated down into my arms. Once back in the studio, she went straight to Henry and looked in the hammock. “Shhh!” she said to me, with a finger to her lips. “Henry is still napping.” I took off her little sneakers, and she got in with Henry. I swung them a bit, and before long, she was having a nap too, clutching Henry beside her. Last night when I stumbled in sweet, forgetting even to bolt the door, struggling out of my clothes in the glow cast by  a street light in a side street through my dusty let down window, I had fallen asleep with my head on the powdered spot left by Maria and Henry in my hammock. While she had napped, I had managed to complete the essay on Delmer Daves’ Westerns I was working on. When Maria got up, briefly drowsy, she must have noticed I was still writing and set about doing her own imitation of being busy. From where I now sat, chewing on a cold salami-and-cheese sandwich, I could see the circular shape of a sticker she must have taken out of her little pink bag and posted to one of the white posts supporting my hammock. I got up and had a closer look at the sticker, which turned out to be a corncob man, or woman, emerging from its green sheath, with one hand combing its wavy hair. Next to it was a silver sticker with a few sweethearts with her name printed in red beneath it, and her name again pressed in red from a little rubberstamp. The three items, which she probably made at school, were beside each other on the post. That sneaky little scamp! Here they were again, stuck on the inside of the front and back covers of my notebook! She must have done it after her mom arrived and we became engrossed in one of those cryptic conversations disguising jealousy, or competition, or just plain simmering resentment.

Zelda had arrived silently on sneakers down the hall and rapped on the studio door. Maria, of course, ran to
open it.
“Mommy!”
“How’s my little girl?” Zelda stooped down in tight blue jeans and hugged her daughter.

“Guess what? We went to the Park, and I jumped off the top of the slide,  and dad caught me!”   

“Well, that’s what dads are for!”
“Thanks. I hadn’t thought of that before,” I said. She looked at me and must have thought for awhile about the unconfirmed implications of what she had said, and what I had said, then replied in a hasty, dismissive tone.

“Spare me your cleverness!” I noticed she wasn’t dressed in the same corduroy skirt, sweater and windbreaker as when she dropped Maria off in the morning. She must have gone back home to change after wherever it was she went. She also looked fresher, younger, and more relaxed than when she had left hurriedly seven hours ago. I dared not ask why, of course. As though she were reading my thoughts, she suddenly said: “I had to take a roll of film in to develop.”

“Was it one I had shot of you?” I said.

“When last did you shoot a roll of film on me?”she said, standing with one hand on her hip looking down at me as I sat at my round café table before my notebook and speed-ball pen. She had a faintly amused or mischievous look on her face, as though she was saying: ‘Take a good look at me, dummy! Notice anything different?’ What the hell! I thought. She could have felt the same way about me when she dropped off Maria early this morning.

“Mommy, was I in your picture too?”

“You were in many with mommy, and with daddy, before. Don’t you remember?” Maria stared at her mom as though still waiting on a real reply. I wanted to say I remember, but Zelda suddenly turned to me and said: “By the way, how’s your painting going?” She could have been trying to change the subject, but it was also a genuine attitude of hers I was familiar with. The problem was: It was the sort of question I hated. Maybe she knew that too. I looked down the length of my studio to where an unfinished five-by-six-foot canvas lay on the floor. No reply came to my lips, but Zelda had already walked over to the large canvas in the centre of the floor and stood looking down at it. She knew she shouldn’t look at the others stacked facing a wall without asking to. Maria ran over to the edge of my unfinished canvas on the floor and stooped down. She decided to assist her mother, who was silently staring at what I had done so far. “It’s my chocolate ice-cream popsicle, and popcorn cracker jack, and spray from the water fountain in the Park, mommy!”

“Oh! That’s what it is!” Zelda said, and we both started laughing. Maria must have felt a bit uncertain about her explanation, as she ran over to me, asking: “Isn’t it, daddy; isn’t it?” It was the best thing she could have said and done, and I felt an incredible happiness come over me. I held her face between my palms playfully and said: “Of course, it is!”

Just then, Zelda changed the subject again, or rather, rephrased her initial question about my career. “Any word yet on your Arts Council grant?” Now I understood what she was getting at. I had always known her as a practical, business-oriented woman. While she held down a steady, dependable job as a financial analyst at a leading security brokerage, I did various odd jobs, keeping my luck-and-chance hopes alive as a professional artist. Her family noticed this persistent inequality of social roles, which had gone on for most of our marriage, and it didn’t help their disenchantment with me.

“No, nothing yet,” I said, which was the truth.

“Anyway, we gotta run.” Zelda snapped back into her speedy self after I filled in her questionnaire. “We can’t miss ‘Sesame Street’, right Mari?” she said.

“And ‘Fame’!” Maria added, throwing her little arms up in the air and doing a clumsy pirouette with little sways, like she had seen the stars of ‘Fame’ do on the famous TV programme. Then she started singing: “Fame! I’m going to live forever, I’m going to learn how to fly!” spinning round and round until Zelda stopped her, saying: “You’re going to get yourself all dizzy!” Then Maria fell theatrically forward into her mother’s arms upon hearing this, and Zelda grabbed Henry and Maria’s pink bag. And, as she reached the door, said to me: “Hang in there, kiddo.” Maria ran to me for a last kiss on the lips, then turned back while dashing after her mom and said: “Daddy, are you going to keep me again soon?”

“Of course!” I said. “We’ll look at ‘Fame’ together.”

“Oh goody!” she said, and ran down the hall after her mother.