A Loafer's Guide To Living

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Book excerpt

Chapter One 

Toronto, 2002

            It was the perfect moment. A loafable moment. And these were exceedingly rare. My wife had sashayed off to the gym. The twins played basketball outside. I wore my grey fleece cardigan with the overly large wingtip collar. I’d zipped it up to my chin with the collar covering my ears like the flaps of a leather helmet that had been up-ended. I lay prone with three large pillows supporting my head and my mother’s old seersucker bathrobe covering my feet. I can remember the day perfectly. It was late April and the winter had been long, frigid and forbidding, enough to make a person feel like a northerner when there was everything about that idea that I loathed. No, give me sun and sand and light winds on the beach. But on this day, milder weather had flounced in and although it brought an underlying chill, the heat of the sun overlaid the cold air like an insulating blanket. I opened the windows to the bedroom for circulation. I don’t think they’d been open since the previous September and it felt stuffy. And stale. That’s why I wore the fleece cardigan, to keep me warm and cozy as I melted into the comforter on our bed. It was bliss, sheer bliss. The closest to nothingness a human being, specifically, a male, could achieve. With the exception, perhaps, of the swaying hammock beneath the leafy maple tree on a hot day. That wasn’t bad, either. Pretty damned close I’d say.

            Tragically, the moment remained short-lived. No sooner had I drifted off into unconscious tranquillity, than I heard a fiddling with the lock and the front door swung open with a bang. Basketballs bounced in cacophonic rhythm on the ceramic tile floor in the hall. Their voices had deepened with the onset of puberty and they didn’t so much as talk as growl or croak in a verbal assault one might have mistaken for dialogue, interspersed as their conversation was, with lyrics from the latest rap ditty that repeated the phrase, “On your feet, muthafucka”.

            “Shit.”

I kicked the robe away and rolled off the bed, unzipped the fleece cardigan and shrugged it off, leaving it in a heap on the floor. I shoved my feet into some slippers and pounded into the kitchen where the teenage mongrels devoured cookies between gulps of orange juice straight from the jug, passing it between them as if it were a coveted prize.

            “What happened to basketball?”

            They shrugged. “It was boring,” Nathan said, then crammed a cookie into his mouth. “Nobody was there,” he continued spitting crumbs and bits of chocolate chip on to his T-shirt. His brother, Sean, pointed and laughed at him. We don’t get along, he and I. I’d describe our relationship as pointedly tense.

            My name is Bernard Goldman and I used to be a writer. Several years ago, I published a book, Spinning Through Time, a semi-autobiographical examination of my family and my father, in particular. My father, Eph Goldman, is now a retired history professor who wrote a seminal work, The Global View. This book has proved extraordinarily popular for decades and it built and sustained my father’s reputation. He is now living in Tuscany with his second wife, Catherine, a woman barely older than I am. Of me, my father would remark sardonically, “At least in this case, history is not repeating itself.” That says a lot about our relationship. Not warm. Hardly fuzzy.

            I’m working two manuscripts at the moment bouncing from one to the other. The first is called, Memories and is about a man who has amnesia but I keep forgetting where I am in the story. The second is called Das Vidaniya and details the life of a Jewish warrior who finds himself thrust into tough situations during The Second World War. Basically, the main character, cuts a swath of violence from Stalingrad to Berlin. But at least, I tell myself, he isn’t a victim. I have grown exceedingly tired of books about Jews during the War portrayed as victims.

            I met Hugo at the local community centre. Now 87, he had been a tank commander in the Soviet Army. Still vigorous, each day I see the ruthless side of him. We play basketball and I have not beaten him once in the previous seven years. Over 568 consecutive games of “21”, my highest score has been an “8”. Hugo put up an arcing shot and the ball swished through the basket.

            “That’s 569, I think.”

            “Bastard,” I muttered, bent over, panting like a winded turtle.

            Hugo broke out into a broad grin. “Want to go again?” he rasped.

            I shook my head. “I am going for a swim.”

            Hugo ran a gnarled hand through his stiff, iron-grey hair. “Good. So am I.”

            I groaned. It was always the same but he had good stories to tell.

            After the swim, I went into the office. I had rather foolishly ploughed some of the fees I collected from the first book into a magazine about Writers and Writing. Titled Bookology, it has just lurched into its fifth year of near-death survival. We subsist on the meagre advertising I can dredge up and those who take pity on us and actually buy a subscription. The pitiers number some 1200 now and I am proud to say, the subscribership has leapt some three or four percent since we began. In total, we print 15,000 copies of Bookology and circulate them across the country through retail outlets, newsstands, college and university writing programs and those who seem to be interested in getting published.

            I spend my days fending off would-be writers, fawning on real writers, putting off creditors and badgering advertisers, many of whom are book publishers and moments away from declaring bankruptcy themselves. Yet it is my task to squeeze some advertising out of them to keep us afloat. This includes my own publisher, Julian de Groot of the House of Erasmus. Julian is a very successful publisher and my book made him a lot of money. While he waits for me to turn out my next masterpiece, he throws some mad money my way as an incentive.

            “How are the manuscripts coming?” Julian de Groot drawled during his weekly call. “How many are there now? I’ve lost count, is it three or four?”

            “Just two,” I replied. “Incidentally, you haven’t paid our last invoice. I sent it out two months ago.”

            “Oh dear, I must have Clarisse look into that right away.” Clarisse was the bookkeeper.

            “Do that.”

            “You haven’t answered my question, dear boy.”

            “No, I haven’t.” I imagined de Groot, all six foot six of him, dressed in a white suit, long silvery hair hanging about his pristine collar, his yellowed fingers dangling a cigarette in a silver holder. “As well as can be expected actually.”

            “When will you have something to show me?”

            “I don’t know.”

            “Ollie North is looking for a good biographer, you know.”

            “So you said.”

            “So is Alan Greenspan.”

            “Julian, I don’t want to do biographies. I only did the last one to get me started. It’s time to move on, to expand, to grow.”

            I could hear him draw on the cigarette through the phone, then exhale languidly. “Well then, you need some Miracle Grow on the plants, old boy because things have been a little stunted lately, hmm?”

            “Don’t forget the invoice.”

I hung up the phone and cursed. He always got my goat but then he was a publisher waiting for something he could publish. I held up the gravy boat. Didn’t qualify as a train.

            Despite all the moaning and fumbling, Bookology, almost in spite of itself and despite my heroic leadership, gained a reputation in the industry that meant I was invited to all of the main line parties and publishing events. As both an author and a magazine publisher, I had sat on panels in conferences that examined the business of book publishing and the nuts and bolts of getting published. I had been asked to speak about the writer’s life and offer advice on getting published in what is a brutal, cut-throat sort of business. My talks tended to be short and to the point. “Have a famous father,” I’d say. I wasn’t often asked back but it was the best I could do and it had worked for me. Speak and write from personal experience was a common axiom exhorted to young up and comers, the sort I loathe really. The sort that actually get somewhere because they are talented. How irritating in the extreme when the opportunities dwindled down.

            So in my natural discombobulated state, I stood in the loo taking a whizz. I came to my senses upon feeling a warm, wet sensation on my right leg. I looked down.

            “Oh shit.”

            At that moment, my nemesis of sorts, one Eric Schwilden, found me standing, sans pants, in front of the hand dryer desperately rubbing the legs together and cursing under my breath.

            “Goldman,” he smirked. “Wet yourself, have you?”

            “No, of course not,” I retorted.

            “And that’s why you’re standing there half-naked drying your pants with the hand warmer?”

            “It was coffee actually. My hand slipped and the cup spilled. Pretty clumsy, I’ll admit.”

            Schwilden gave me a knowing grin. “Sure. If that’s the way you want to play it.”

            “It’s the truth.”

            Schwilden smiled and shook his head of perfectly groomed hair that rounded the backs of his ears and just covered the nape of his long neck. He stood tall and slim, about 30 and wore clothes well. They just hung on him properly like you see on runway models, no silly bags or bulges. His teeth were even and white and he seemed to have a perpetual tan. Schwilden was a partner in a successful software company and drove a Porsche Targa. I knew this because his parking spot sat next to mine. His car made my 12-year old Saab, held together by rust and diminishing paint, look like a found object in the forest. He dated only beautiful, intelligent women. I hated him ever since he tried hitting on my wife, a tall, well-proportioned redhead who, at age 37, could still make them whistle. Sharon and I married at 22, just after she finished her accountancy exams. I stood five-eleven and weighed in at 155 pounds and when I examined myself in the mirror, I looked gawky and uncoordinated. I went to the community centre and put up with the indignities foisted on me by Hugo so I wouldn’t turn into one of those paunchy dads who wore a baseball cap, Bermuda shorts, knee-high, white socks and open-toed sandals.

             Schwilden dried his hands on some paper and grinned at me sardonically while I continued to air out my trousers. Then, he cocked a finger at me, dropped the paper in the bin and took his leave. I could hear him laughing all the way down the corridor. I looked in the mirror. What a yutz, the image said back to me.

            Back in the office with my trousers nicely heated, I contemplated the “loafable” moment and decided that today I wouldn’t find one. It was difficult. There was no office in fact, but a large open space shared by myself, my editorial assistant Jessica, my partner Roberto, his graphic assistant, the lissome Angela and our crusty, wheezy receptionist, Ruth. Ruth was a dumpy little woman who travelled on a cloud of nicotine trailing wisps of cat hair in her wake. She lived for her two cats. Otherwise, she took surly and mean-spiritedness to new levels but unfortunately remained the only living entity that understood our convoluted invoicing system. Without her, we’d be bankrupt in short order and she knew it. My partner, Roberto, spent more time worrying about what he was going to have for lunch than working. He didn’t put any money into the business but brought a lot of computer equipment and in exchange I gave him a minority interest. If he wasn’t talking about food, on the phone with his mother, his wife, any of his several sisters or his children, he kibitzed with the lovely Angela, who, at six feet and gorgeous, intimidated us all. No, we stood together as a community and, as such, lived in close quarters. No chance for obvious loafing, I’m afraid. Without walls, it seemed virtually impossible, except for Angela, who, having a date the evening before or attended the latest rave, would simply put her head down and fall asleep. We never said a word. I didn’t dare tell Sharon, or she’d scream bloody murder that we hadn’t fired the girl for this sort of behaviour. But you see, we liked Angela and I didn’t want to fire her. She was good company and a crack graphic artist when she was awake. Needless to say, Schwilden hit on her constantly. So far, to my delight, she had turned him down flat, thinking him a stuck-up poser. I couldn’t be more pleased.

            I suspected my assistant, Jessica, harboured deep thoughts and conflicted emotions yet barely a word came out of her mouth. She was tall and slender with remarkably long, brown hair. Although she would reply when spoken to or asked a question. Thankfully, she was dedicated and extremely diligent, picking up where I slacked off. If I was having a bad day, which truthfully, could be any day, she’d pick up after me. I wouldn’t feel like writing the intros or the blurbs or transcribing the interviews or taking calls from press agents and publicists. Some days, I wanted to shut it all down. Jessica would smoothly take over with a shy smile and a quiet demeanour. I think she was very intuitive. Perhaps those that don’t speak much are that way.

            While I’m confessing, I might as well get it all out. I was conducting a cyber affair with a young woman in my wife’s office. A graphic designer named Charlotte. We met at the Cablestar Christmas party, the media conglomerate that Sharon manages as the CFO, the previous year and have been carrying on a lively correspondence ever since. I should say that’s all it has been and likely ever will be. Charlotte is married as I am but I’ve suspected it is a marriage of convenience, more like a friendship, really. Her husband, Michael, is Australian and needed to stay in the country. Charlotte hasn’t admitted as much but she travels a good deal, usually on her own. No children, obviously. We talk art and books and movies and architecture, the sorts of things that bore Sharon to tears and for which, she really has no time, focused as she is on the pragmatic things in life. Finance, for instance, which is her field, after all.

As I returned to my desk and punched up my email, a message pinged from Charlotte. My heart always quickened a bit. I couldn’t shake the feeling this was something very elicit yet I couldn’t say we were doing anything wrong. After all, I corresponded with a lot of people. Sharon did the same and probably more. Her inbox regularly had a couple hundred messages every morning. I was lucky if I had ten or twenty but that was more than enough. Corresponding with writers was never brief. Some of the emails I received ran five pages and more. So why did I feel a pang of pleasurable guilt when Charlotte’s name and address came up?

            Charlotte wrote: Hey you. Went to the Bergman festival last night. Simply fab. I’d forgotten how eerie and dark Seventh Seal was. Creepy really but creepy in a good kind of way. Afterward we retired to the Irish pub and got a bit smashed but it was good fun. I was drinking Guinness, which I never do, so that tells you I was in a strange mood after the film. You know, dark, brooding story, dark ale. There’s a psychic connection, don’t you think? Umm, I know we’ve never done this before but I’m going to the new China exhibit opening at the museum Friday evening. Care to join me? C.

            My mouth went very dry as I read that last bit. This was a turn of events and I began to panic. As I got up from my desk to go to the water cooler for a drink, I tripped over the lamp cord and it came crashing down bringing a load of files with it. Jessica jumped up.

            “No need to panic. I’ll get it,” I said as Roberto and Angela looked up from where they were huddling. Ruth twisted her fuzzy lips in what I interpreted as a smirk.

“Just an accident.”

And bent down to pick up the papers and file folders that lay spread out on the pitted hardwood floor. Before I could protest, Jessica swept things up while I fumbled and cursed under my breath.

“Really, there’s no need.”

She moved quickly for a wraith revealing a coiled strength in her sinewy arms as she stacked everything back in proper order on the surface of my old, glass-topped desk.

“Thank you.”

Her smile appeared; a grim crease that quickly sent crackling lines running up her face. Perhaps that’s why she smiled so seldom, preferring a composed complexion that suited her better, I’ll admit. At certain angles, she was a lovely looking girl, pert nose, a bit pointy and a pale complexion, too pale, almost ghostly.

            “Sure,” she said and bustled back to her computer and immediately began pounding the keys as if she’d never left or merely paused in mid-strike. The others turned away, back to their scheming or worse, loafing.

            Charlotte had thrown me and I was stymied with indecision, a natural state of being for a loafer. It was easier and less stressful not to do anything, or put things off while tucking them away from active thought. Don’t do anything, I told myself, there is danger in every direction. I liked Charlotte, I really did and I was attracted to her, no question. But I also loved and was attracted to Sharon and had been faithful these past 16 years, not a slip or a hint of a slip in all that time. No desire, in fact.