“Okay.”
When he was gone, I wheeled over to my computer to check email, and discovered I had an additional forty-one notifications from Facebook waiting for me. I gaped at the list of unfamiliar names. Oh, people — get a life! I began batch-deleting them when I spotted another message sitting among the rabble. It was from U of T’s dean of Arts and Sciences. I opened it and read:
Philip:
I need to talk to you about this escalating situation. Please come by my office tomorrow morning, 8:30. You don’t have a class. I checked.
My stomach filled with annoyance and dread. In the twenty-two years I’ve been billeted at U of T’s Philosophy department, I have only been summoned to the dean’s office in this manner once before. And it did not go well.
I hit REPLY.
Sure, Tom. I’ll see you then.
I arrived back at 4 Metcalfe Street about an hour later in an anxiety so thick I was practically vibrating from it. As I came inside, I was greeted by the screams of Naomi and her playdate friend racing through the house in what looked like a game of tag. They came zooming past the front entry just as I was slipping out of my Payless.
“Hi, Daddy!”
“Sweetie — sweetie! No running in the house, okay!”
She cackled at the absurdity of such a request, and the two went tearing through the kitchen together.
“Naomi, what did I just say!”
I followed them in but then stopped when I spotted Grace sitting in the living room with her friend Stacey, the other girl’s mom. Grace’s mauve teapot sat on a trivet on our coffee table, surrounded by mugs and a plate of cranberry scones. Stacey — a mere whiff of a woman despite having three kids of her own — was the author of a couple of collections of short stories, and had known Grace for years. I often marvelled, though, at how their friendship seemed to be based almost entirely on the mutual need to gossip about other people they knew in the “writing community.” It was all, it appeared to me, that they ever did when the two of them got together.
They stopped talking when I appeared in the arch of the living room. Grace brought her bright green eyes up to where I stood, but Stacey just turned away, as if she couldn’t bear to look at me. Her corncob-coloured hair fell in her face as she did.
“Did class go okay?” Grace asked.
“No. It did not.” I raked my fingers through my bushy beard. “And the dean wants to meet with me first thing tomorrow.”
“Shit.” Maybe Grace was going to say something more — something comforting to me. But if so, she was cut off then by the sound of one or both of the girls’ bodies slamming into the cupboards in the kitchen, followed by a raucous round of giggling.
Grace was on her feet. “Naomi Woolf Sharpe-Daly — please come here.” The child obeyed, immediately. “Did you not hear your father say no running through the house?” Naomi nodded, a little embarrassed. Then, her tone softening, Grace said: “Why don’t you and Kim go colour some dinosaurs? Do something quiet.” The child agreed, and scurried off.
Grace returned to the couch, assuming a position that I always read as I am the queen of all I survey. Which, of course she was. I felt wholly redundant in the wake of it, as if I were little more than a functional piece of the furniture, or perhaps a helium balloon, attracting the eye with its novelty, but ultimately pointless. I looked at my wife, hoping she would finish what she’d been about to say. I thought: C’mon, Grace. Assure me that everything is going to be all right. You owe me that. I wouldn’t be in this mess if it weren’t for YOU.
But she said nothing. She and Stacey acted as if they were waiting for me to leave. Which they were. I clued in, then: they were, before I came in the door, gossiping about me.
“Anyway,” I said. “I guess I’ll head up to the office and work on the book for a while.”
Grace nodded, as if to say, Yeah, you do that.
I stopped by the kitchen on my way. Saw atop the counter the big bag of lemons she had brought me back from Loblaws, those bright yellow shapes shimmering through the plastic. I thought then to backtrack and thank her for picking them up. (We’d been working harder to say thank you in this house.) Instead, I just tore open the bag, pulled a lemon out, then took the remainder over to my bar fridge and dropped them into the vegetable crisper. Then I began to quickly assemble a Bloody Joseph. Not that one assembles a Bloody Joseph quickly, and I could feel Grace’s and Stacey’s eyes burning me in the back of my head as I poured and squeezed and shook over my martini tin. Waiting, they were, for me to just hurry up and disappear into this huge, overpriced house.
Upstairs, in the book-lined silence of my office, I checked email once again. Eleven more notifications from the Facebook. Fuckers. I was just reaching for the mouse to delete them when another email appeared in my inbox. I startled a little when I saw that boldfaced name and subject line:
Rani Sumita
What the hell, Sharpe???
Such a vertiginous feeling, to see her name there. It had been a while. I felt my stomach sink, but also my lips twist into a smile. This was the effect Rani always had on me: a cocktail of apprehension and intrigue. I swallowed hard. Had my slip made it all the way across the pond? Opening a new tab, I went to the BBC News website. I needed to scroll a bit, but sure enough there was a thumbnail photo of me with hyperlinked text next to it that read “Philip Sharpe’s on-air gaffe.” The article behind it was probably written by one of Rani’s colleagues, and she would have no doubt seen it.
I went back to my email, opened it. It read:
What the hell, Sharpe!!! Are you serious?? What the FUCK are you saying over there?
Not exactly helpful.
Should I respond? I thought. No, just leave it for now. There is work to do, and with all this tension between you and Grace, the last thing you need is get into a flirtatious exchange with Rani. Just leave it. For now. There is work to do.
So I shut down my email, and launched Microsoft Word. Got busy on the next chapter of my counterintuitive book about Christianity and its dissidents. In paradoxo veritas.
The Jugglers Arms
Don’t reach for your pen, dear reader. I am well aware of the missing apostrophe that haunted the name of my father’s pub like a phantom limb. That truant squiggle was the bane of my childhood, the pea under my intellectual mattress, at least since age eleven when I read Strunk & White for the first time and learned that something was amiss. Despite its punctuational malfeasance, Little Frankie’s business on Dorchester Street in the heart of old Charlottetown had been what the locals called “an Island institution,” and he and I lived in the large apartment above the pub. It’s all gone now, torn down and replaced by a dog park. But whenever I get into one of these scraps with Grace, whenever I feel the constricting squeeze of my domestic situation, I’m often taken back to my PEI youth, to my days inside the dour, smoky caverns of my childhood home.
Indeed, the wordplay in the pub’s name may have conjured images of an old-timey British tavern, but the Jugglers Arms was not, as they say, an upscale establishment. It was dark and dingy, with cadaver-grey floors and a low ceiling and a cigarette machine in the lobby. The pub’s one redeeming quality remained the small music stage where the occasional prospects (including, my father was proud to point out, a young Stompin’ Tom and a shy schoolteacher named Anne Murray) appeared before the larger, more profitable Friday- and Saturday-night crowds. Yet it was Little Frankie’s weekday clientele, the farouche farmers and blue-collar whatsits and tourism operators drinking their way through another PEI winter, that gave the dive its inimitable spirit. I often think that it was these men, more than Frankie, who raised me; and in my early teens it became my job to deliver their food and bus their tables as