The Fire Pit

The weather remains unseasonably warm. Balmy, kindly, dry and bright; even the sun, so pale and thin usually at this time of year, is full and mellow, the sunsets lush. The brisk, smiley-face folks on the weather channel say it's due to some distant, dusty catastrophe-an earthquake, a volcano? Some new, murderous Act of God. Nocloud without a silver lining, is their motto. And no silver lining without a cloud.

Yesterday Walter drove me into Toronto for the appointment with the lawyer. It's a place he never goes if he can help it, but Myra put him up to it. That was after I said I'd be taking the bus. Myra wouldn't hear of it. As everyone knows, there's only one bus, and it leaves in the dark and returns in it. She said that when I got off the bus at night, the motorists would never see me and I'd be squashed like a bug. Anyway, I shouldn't be going to Toronto by myself, because, as everyone also knows, it's populated entirely by crooks and thugs. Walter, she said, would take care of me.

Walter wore a red baseball cap for the trip; between the back of it and the top of his jacket collar his bristly neck bulged out like a biceps. His eyelids were creased as knees. "I would of took the pickup," he said, "built like a brick shithouse, give the buggers something to think about before ramming into me. Only there's a few springs gone, so it's not such a smooth ride." According to him, the drivers in Toronto were all crazy. "Well, you'd have to be crazy to go there, eh?" he said.

"We're going there," I pointed out.

"But only the once. Like we used to tell the girls, once don't count."

"And did they believe you, Walter?" I said, stringing him along as he likes to be strung.

"Sure. Dumb as a stump. Specially the blondes." I could feel him grinning.

Built like a brick shithouse. That used to be said about women. It was meant as a compliment, in the days when not everyone had a brick shit-house: only wooden ones, flimsy and smelly and easy to push over.

As soon as he'd got me into the car and buckled me up, Walter turned on the radio: electric violins wailing, twisted romance, the foursquare beat of heartbreak. Trite suffering, but suffering nonetheless. The entertainment business. What voyeurs we have all become. I leaned back against the pillow provided by Myra. (She'd provisioned us as if for an ocean voyage-she'd packed a lap rug, tuna sandwiches, brownies, a thermos of coffee.) Out the window was the Jogues River, pursuing its sluggish course. We crossed it and turned north, past streets of what used to be workers' cottages and are now what is known as "starter homes," then a few small businesses: an auto wrecker, a foundering health-food emporium, an orthopaedic shoe outlet with a green neon foot flashing on and off as if walking all by itself in one place. Then a miniature shopping mall, five stores, of which only one had managed to get the Christmas tinsel up yet. Then Myra's beauty parlour, The Hair Port. There was a picture of a crop-headed person in the window, whether male or female I really couldn't say.

Then a motel that used to be called Journeys End. I suppose they were thinking of "Journeys end in lovers meeting," but not everyone could be expected to get the reference: it might have come across as too sinister, a building all entrances but no exits, reeking of aneurysms and thromboses and emptied bottles of sleeping pills and gun wounds to the head. Now it's called simply Journeys. How wise to have changed it. So much more inconclusive, so much less terminal. So much better to travel than to arrive.

We passed a few more franchises-smiling chickens offering platters of their own fried body parts, a grinning Mexican wielding tacos. The town water tank loomed up ahead, one of those huge bubbles of cement that dot the rural landscape like comic-strip voice balloons emptied of words. Now we'd hit open country. A metal silo lifted out of a field like a conning tower; by the roadside, three crows pecked at a furry burst lump of groundhog. Fences, more silos, a huddle of damp cows; a stand of dark cedar, then a patch of swamp, the summer's bulrushes already ragged and balding.

It began to drizzle. Walter turned the windscreen wipers on. To their soothing lullaby, I went to sleep.

When I woke up, my first thought was, Did I snore? If so, had my mouth been open? How unsightly, and therefore how humiliating. But I couldn't bring myself to ask. In case you're wondering, vanity never ends.

We were on the eight-lane freeway, close to Toronto. That was according to Walter: I couldn't see, because we were stuck behind a swaying farm truck top-heavy with crates of white geese, bound no doubt for market. Their long, doomed necks and frantic heads poked out here and there through the slats, their beaks opened and closed, uttering their tragic and ludicrous cries, drowned out by the racket of wheels. Feathers stuck to the windscreen, the car filled with the smell of goose shit and gas fumes.

The truck had a sign on it that said, If You're Close Enough To Read This You're Too Close. When it finally turned off, there was Toronto up ahead, an artificial mountain of glass and concrete rising from the flat lakeside plain, all crystals and spires and giant shining slabs and sharpedged obelisks, floating in an orange-brown haze of smog. It looked like something I'd never seen before-something that had grown up overnight, or that wasn't really there at all, like a mirage.

Black flakes flew past as if a mound of paper up ahead were smouldering. Anger vibrated in the air like heat. I thought of drive-by shootings.

The lawyer's office was near King and Bay. Walter got lost, then couldn't find parking. We had to walk five blocks, Walter propelling me by the elbow. I didn't know where we were, because everything has changed so much. It changes every time I go there, which is not often, and the cumulative effect is devastating-as if the city's been bombed level, then built again from scratch.

The downtown I remember-drab, Calvinistic, with white men in dark overcoats marching in lockstep on the sidewalks, interspersed with the occasional woman, in regulation high heels, gloves and hat, clutch purse under the arm, eyes front-is simply gone, but then it's been gone for some time. Toronto is no longer a Protestant city, it's a mediaeval one: the crowds clogging the street are many-hued, the clothing vivid. Hot-dog stands with yellow umbrellas, pretzel-sellers, hawkers of earrings and woven bags and leather belts, beggars hung with crayoned Out of Work signs: among them they've staked out the territory. I passed a flute player, a trio with electric guitars, a man with a kilt and bagpipes. At any moment I expected jugglers or fire-eaters, lepers in procession, with hoods and iron bells. There was a blare of noise; an iridescent film clung to my glasses like oil.

At last we made it as far as the lawyer's. When I first consulted this firm, back in the 1940s, it was located in one of those sooty red-brick Manchester-shaped office buildings, with a mosaic-tiled lobby and stone lions, and gold lettering on the wooden doors with their pebble-glass inserts. The elevator was the kind that had a crisscross grille of metal bars within the cage itself; stepping into it was like going briefly to jail. A woman in a navy-blue uniform and white gloves ran it, calling out the numbers, which reached only to ten.

Now the law firm is housed in a plate-glass tower, in an office suite fifty floors up. Walter and I ascended in the gleaming elevator, with its plastic marble interior and its smell of car upholstery and its crush of suited people, men and women both, all with the averted eyes and vacant faces of lifelong servants. People who see only what they're paid to see. The law office itself had a reception area that might as well have been that of a five-star hotel: a flower arrangement of eighteenth-century density and ostentation, thick mushroom-coloured wall-to-wall, an abstract painting composed of pricey smudges.

The lawyer arrived, shook hands, murmured, gestured: I was to accompany him. Walter said he would wait for me, right where he was. He stared with some alarm at the young, polished receptionist, with her black suit, mauve scarf and nacreous fingernails; she stared, not at him, but at his checked shirt and his immense, pod-like rubber-soled boots. Then he sat down on the two-bum sofa, into which he sank immediately as if into a pile of marshmallows; his knees jack-knifed, his pant legs shot up, revealing thick red loggers' socks. In front of him, on a suave coffee table, was an array of business magazines, advising him on how to maximise his investment dollar. He picked up the issue on mutual funds: in his vast paw it looked like a Kleenex. His eyes were rolling around in his head like a steer's at a stampede.

"I won't be long," I said, to calm him. I was in fact somewhat longer than I'd thought. Well, they bill by the minute, these lawyers, just like the cheaper whores. I kept expecting to hear a knock on the door, and an irritated voice: Hey in there. Whatcha waiting for? Get it up, get it in and get it out!

When I'd finished my business with the lawyer, we made our way back to the car and Walter said he'd take me to lunch. He knew a place, he said. I expect Myra had put him up to this: For Heaven's sakes make sure she eats something, at that age they eat like a bird, they don't even know when they're running out of steam, she could die of starvation in the car. Also he may have been hungry: he'd devoured all of Myra's carefully packed sandwiches while I was sleeping, and the brownies into the bargain.

The place he knew was called The Fire Pit, he said. He'd eaten there the last time, maybe two-three years ago, and it had been more or less decent, considering. Considering what? Considering that it was in Toronto. He'd had the double cheeseburger with all the trimmings. They did barbecued ribs there, and specialised in grilled things generally.

I remembered this eatery myself, from over a decade ago-back in the days when I'd been keeping an eye on Sabrina, after that first time she'd run away. I used to hang around her school at day's end, positioning myself on park benches, in spots where I might waylay her-no, where I might have been recognised by her, though there was scant chance of that. I'd hide behind an opened newspaper, like some obsessed, pathetic flasher, filled similarly with hopeless yearning for a girl who'd doubtless flee me as if I were a troll.

I wanted only to let Sabrina know I was there; that I existed; that I wasn't what she'd been told. That I could be a refuge for her. I knew she would need one, already needed one, because I knew Winifred. Nothing ever came of it though. She never spotted me, I never revealed myself. When it came to the point, I was too cowardly.

One day I tracked her to The Fire Pit. It appeared to be a place where the girls-the girls of that age, from that school-hung out at lunchtime, or when they were skipping classes. The sign outside its door was red, the window edges decorated with scallops of yellow plastic meant to be flames. I was alarmed by the Miltonic audacity of the name: could they possibly have known what they were invoking?

Hurl'd headlong flaming from th'Ethereal Sky

With hideous ruin and combustion down.

… A fiery Deluge, fed With ever-burning Sulphur unconsum'd.

No. They didn't know. The Fire Pit was Hell only for the meat.

The interior had hanging lamps with stained-glass shades, and mottled, fibrous plants in earthen pots-a sixties feel. I took the booth next to the one where Sabrina was sitting with two school friends, all of them wearing the same lumpy boyish uniforms, those blanket-like kilts with matching ties that Winifred always found so prestigious. The three girls had done their best to spoil the effect-drooping socks, shirts partly untucked, ties askew. They were chewing gum as if it were a religious duty, and talking in that bored, too-loud way girls of that age seem always to have mastered.

The three of them were beautiful, in the way all girls of that age are beautiful. It can't be helped, that sort of beauty, nor can it be conserved; it's a freshness, a plumpness of the cells, that's unearned and temporary, and that nothing can replicate. None of them was satisfied with it, however; already they were making attempts to alter themselves, to improve and distort and diminish, to cram themselves into some impossible, imaginary mould, plucking and pencilling away at their faces. I didn't blame them, having done the same once myself.

I sat there peering at Sabrina from under the brim of my floppy sun hat and eavesdropping on their trivial chatter, which they threw up in front of themselves like camouflage. None was saying what was on her mind, none trusted the others-quite rightly, as casual treachery is a daily affair at that age. The other two were blondes; Sabrina alone was dark and glossy as a mulberry. She wasn't really listening to her friends, or looking at them either. Behind the studied blankness of her gaze, revolt must have been simmering. I recognised that surliness, that stubbornness, that captive-princess indignation, which must be kept hidden until enough weapons have been collected. Watch your back, Winifred, I thought with satisfaction.

Sabrina didn't notice me. Or she did notice me, but she didn't know who I was. There was some glancing from the three of them, some whispering and giggling; I remember the sort of thing. Shrivelled-up frump, or the modern version of it. I expect my hat was the object of it. It was a long way from being fashionable, that hat. For Sabrina that day I was merely an old woman-an older woman-a nondescript older woman, not yet decrepit enough to be remarkable.

After the three of them had left, I went to the washroom. On the cubicle wall was a poem: I love Darren yes I do Meant for me not for you If you try to take my place I swear to God I'll smash your face.

Young girls have become more forthright than they used to be, although no better at punctuation.

When Walter and I finally located The Fire Pit, which wasn't (he said) where he'd left it, there was plywood nailed across the windows, an official notice of some kind stapled to it. Walter snuffled around the locked-up door like a dog that's misplaced a bone. "Looks like it's closed," he said. He stood for a long moment, hands in his pockets. "They're always changing things," he said. "You can't keep up with it."

After some casting about and a few false leads, we settled for a greasy spoon of sorts on Davenport, with vinyl seats and jukeboxes at the tables, stocked with country music and a sprinkling of old Beatles and Elvis Presley songs. Walter put on "Heartbreak Hotel," and we listened to it while we ate our hamburgers and drank our coffee. Walter insisted on paying-Myra again, without a doubt. She must have slipped him a twenty.

I ate only half of my hamburger. I couldn't manage the whole thing. Walter ate the other half, slotting it into his mouth in one bite as if mailing it.

On the way out of the city, I asked Walter to drive me past my old house-the house where I'd once lived with Richard. I remembered the way perfectly, but when I reached the house itself I didn't at first recognise it. It was still angular and graceless, squinty-windowed, ponderous, a dense brown like stewed tea, but ivy had grown up over the walls. The fake-chalet half-timbering, once cream-coloured, had been painted apple green, and the heavy front door as well.

Richard was against ivy. There had been some when we'd first moved in, but he'd pulled it down. It ate away at the brickwork, he said; it got into the chimneys, it encouraged rodents. This was when he was still coming up with reasons for what he thought and did, and was still presenting them as reasons for what I myself should think and do. It was before he'd thrown reasons to the wind.

I caught a glimpse of myself back then, in a straw hat, a pale-yellow dress, cotton because of the heat. It was late summer, the year after my marriage; the ground was like brick. At Winifred's instigation I had taken up gardening: I needed to have a hobby, she said. She'd decided I should start with a rock garden, because even if I killed the plants the rocks would still be there. Not much you can do to kill a rock, she'd joked. She'd sent over what she called three reliable men, who were to do the digging and the arranging of the rocks, so that I could then plant things.

There were already some rocks in the garden, ordered by Winifred: small ones, larger ones like slabs, strewn at random or piled like fallen dominoes. We were all standing there, the three reliable men and myself, looking at this jumbled heap of stone. They had their caps on, their jackets off, their shirt sleeves rolled up, their braces in plain view; they were waiting for my instructions, but I didn't know what to tell them.

I'd still wanted to change something back then-do something myself, make something, from whatever unpromising materials. I still thought I might. But I'd known nothing whatsoever about gardening. I'd felt like crying, but cry once and it's all over: if you cry, the reliable men will despise you, and then they will not be reliable any more.

Walter levered me out of the car, then waited silently, a little behind me, ready to catch me if I should topple. I stood on the sidewalk and looked at the house. The rock garden was still there, though much neglected. Of course it was winter, so therefore hard to tell, but I doubted that anything grew in it any more, except perhaps some dragon's blood, which will grow anywhere.

There was a large dumpster standing in the driveway, full of shattered wood, slabs of plaster: renovations were going on. Either that or there had been a fire: an upstairs window was smashed. Street people camp out in such houses, according to Myra: leave a house untenanted, in Toronto anyway, and they're into it like a shot, having their drug parties or whatever. Satanic cults, she's heard. They'll make bonfires on the hardwood floors, they'll plug up the toilets and crap in the sinks, they'll steal the faucets, the fancy doorknobs, anything they can sell. Though sometimes it's only kids who do the smashing-up, for fun. The young have a talent for it.

The house looked unowned, transient, like a picture in a realestate flyer. It no longer seemed connected with me in any way. I tried to recall the sound of my footsteps, in winter boots on the dry creaking snow, walking quickly home, late, concocting excuses; the inky portcullis of the doorway; the way the light from the street lamps fell on the snowbanks, ice blue at the edges and spotted with the yellow Braille of dog pee. The shadows were different back then. My uncalm heart, my breath unscrolling, white smoke in the freezing air. The hectic warmth of my fingers; the rawness of my mouth under my fresh lipstick.

There was a fireplace in the living room. I used to sit in front of it, with Richard, the light flickering on us, and on our glasses, each with its coaster to protect the veneer. Six in the evening, martini time. Richard liked to sum up the day: that's what he called it. He'd had a habit of putting his hand on the back of my neck-resting it there, just keeping it there lightly while he conducted the summing up. Summing up was what judges did before a case went to the jury. Is that how he saw himself? Perhaps. But his inner thoughts, his motives, were frequently obscure to me.

This was one source of the tension between us: my failure to understand him, to anticipate his wishes, which he set down to my wilful and even aggressive lack of attention. In reality it was also bafflement, and later, fear. As we went on, he became less and less like a man for me, with a skin and working parts, and more and more like a gigantic tangle of string, which I was doomed as if by enchantment to try every day to unravel. I never did succeed.

I stood outside my house, my former house, waiting to have an emotion of any kind at all. None came. Having experienced both, I am not sure which is worse: intense feeling, or the absence of it.

From the chestnut tree on the lawn a pair of legs was dangling, a woman's legs. I thought for a moment they were real legs, clambering down, escaping, until I looked more closely. It was a pair of pantyhose, stuffed with something-toilet paper, no doubt, or underwear-and thrown out of the upstairs window during some Satanic rite or adolescent prank or homeless revel. Caught in the branches.

It must have been my own window these disembodied legs had been thrown from. My former window. I pictured myself gazing out of that window, long ago. Plotting how I might slip out that way, unnoticed, and climb down through the tree-easing my shoes off, swinging myself over the sill, reaching one stockinged foot down and then the next, clinging on to the handholds. I hadn't done it though.

Gazing out the window. Hesitating. Thinking, How lost to myself I have become.