In the City of Pigs by André Forget · Audiobook preview

Tantor

Audio, a division of Recorded Books, presents

In

the City of Pigs by André Forgé, narrated by Andrew Joseph Pérez.

My

words appear to leave you cold.

Poor

babes, I will not be your scolder. Reflect,

the

devil, he is old. To understand him,

best

grow older.

Goethe,

Faust, Part 2

First

Movement

The

City of Pigs

One. I

have nothing to say about Montreal.

I

remember only the slow inevitability of the train pulling out of Central Station, the benevolent red glow of the Five Roses sign,

the

whiteness of the year's first snow sprinkling the trackside. Montreal was a dream from which I awoke as we sped past the Lake of Two Mountains,

a

patchwork of brown, nocturnal memories,

a

puddle of piss turning to steam on the sidewalk.

We

left the last suburbs behind us.

The

beverage cart came by and I ordered a drink.

The

porter flipped open the tab of the beer can with a disdainful thumb. I could tell he thought I was a train drunk.

He

didn't understand that this was not a thoughtless or routine drink, but a drink laden with ritual meaning, drunk to memorialize the end of a catastrophe, and not, therefore, subject to the usual conventions governing alcohol consumption.

He

placed the can on the tray in front of me, covered by a superfluous plastic cup,

and

I felt only pity. Outside the window, dead fields lay under a dusting of snow so fine the darkness of the furrowed earth was still visible.

It

was the last day of November. Laptops snapped open around me, and my fellow passengers pulled up their spreadsheets and quarterly reports.

I

had no work to do.

I

turned to the window and listened to Glenn Gould's recording of the Brahms intermezzo on my phone.

I

was in a sentimental mood,

and

nothing has ever been more sentimental than Gould's fingers landing on the opening cords of that E-flat major intermezzo.

There

was nothing outside the window but farmers' fields and ditches and forests. Occasionally, a small town's asphalt roofs and dejected steeples passed by.

The

only indication we were leaving one unhappy province and entering another was the signposts. Towns named for polysyllabic saints gave way to towns named for colonial administrators.

And

yet I couldn't look away. Montreal had died for me so the rest of the world could come alive.

I

hadn't been to Toronto in years, but the city had, over the past months, taken on a dense significance in my mind.

This

was not because of Gould and his delicate E-flat major intermezzo. Gould's Toronto had disappeared decades ago, buried under condo towers and chain pharmacies.

If

anything, the more or less complete erasure of the city Gould had known made it possible to imagine moving there.

Toronto

attracted me in direct proportion to the claustrophobia and disgust I felt walking the streets of Montreal.

The

city, as it existed in my mind, was an elaborate perversion.

A

glassy necropolis where skinny men in Tiger of Sweden suits ran free beneath a sky refracted and colored glass. A vulgar and frictionless place. A city that could now never produce a Gould.

My

fellow passengers were staring at their screens, sleek in their cotton blazers and wool ties.

Their

proximity thrilled me.

I

wanted to follow these people into their 12th floor condos and watch them send one last email while leaning against Formica-topped islands, drinking glasses of $20 Chianti.

To

wait outside their bathroom doors while they listened to Alt-Pop and brushed their teeth. To watch them get two pages into some CBC-recommended novel before going back to their phones and eventually falling asleep nestled amid enormous pillows.

The

lives of these people seemed impossibly exotic.

Perhaps

I, too, might find a middle management job at a bank where I would spend my days denying people loans. My face would grow smooth from shaving, I would get a gym membership, and I would invite sophisticated older women to join me at the symphony.

I

would surprise them with charming anecdotes about the lives of German Baroque composers and smile mysteriously when they asked me where I'd learned such things. Soothed by these fantasies and calmed by the gentle rocking of the train, I fell into a light sleep somewhere west of Kingston.

The

snow had turned to rain by the time we got to Toronto.

I

stepped out onto a platform that smelled of diesel and rusting metal. Descending into the warren of corridors and half-finished hallways beneath the station, the people I had been watching with such curiosity became hunched and ordinary, diminished by arrival.

It

took me several attempts to locate the exit.

When

I finally emerged from the underground, I found myself on a large plaza bounded on one side by the blank façade of Union Station, and on the other by an ostentatious hotel.

There

was a line of taxis waiting with lit lanterns.

I

walked up the main avenue, away from the station, suitcase banging against my leg.

The

pavements were slippery beneath my feet.

Everything

seemed to be closed.

I

had thought to catch a streetcar a few blocks north, but the misting rain turned into a proper downpour.

Cold

water trickled down the inside of my collar.

I

took shelter in a construction passageway and waved my arm at a passing cab.

The

address I had been given meant nothing to me, but the driver wordlessly pulled away from the curb and into the stream of traffic heading west.

He

was following a foreign language program on the radio with great interest.

We

drove down narrow corridors threaded between tall towers whose sides glowed black and orange in the darkness, through blinking intersections and echoing boulevards.

The

skyscrapers gave way to older, more human architecture.

The

streets became cheerful and welcoming, lined with boutiques and restaurants that had the kind of expensively dirty look that marks a cresting wave of gentrification.

After

blocks of parks and promenades and increasingly dingy bars, the driver pulled up beside a storefront.

It

was completely empty save for an old soccer ball that had what appeared to be a cactus growing out of it.

A

series of numerals and diacritical marks were plastered over the entrance.

He

looked back at me expectantly, and I gathered that we had arrived.

I

paid the fare and stepped into the rain with my suitcase.

There

was a black door with a tarnished lion's head knocker beside the mysterious shop,

and

above the lintel was the address I'd been given.

The

handle wouldn't open, and the number I had been told to call when I arrived went straight to voicemail.

The

rain was falling more softly now,

and

the wet asphalt mirrored the golden light of the street lamps into a yellow sky.

I

sat on my suitcase in the shelter of the awning and sent a text.

The

minutes ticked past.

I

was almost resigned to a night in the park when I heard a clatter of steps and the turning of a deadbolt.

The

door swung open, and framed in the darkness was a man wearing a pair of old sweatpants and a t-shirt advertising a sinister-looking hot dog franchise.

He

blinked unhappily in the cold, started to speak, and then cleared his throat and tried again. It's not the first, is it?

He

asked, in a way that suggested he was aware of the date.

I

nodded silently.

Are

you sure? Yes, I said. I mean, technically.

The

arrangement I made with Charles, he said I could arrive evening of the 30th.

I

was under the impression he'd cleared that with you. Uh-huh.

I'm

Alexander Otkozov.

I

believe we corresponded about me subletting the apartment.

This

was more a statement than a question, but

I

was standing on an unknown street in a strange city with everything I owned packed in a suitcase, and I hesitated to make the point more forcefully.

That

was probably in the email, wasn't it? I believe so. Right. Okay, well,

come

in then.

He

led me up a narrow flight of stairs that terminated in a dark room.

The

man gestured to a short hallway leading to the front of the building.

You're

in the room at the end. That was Charles's.

I'm

at the back. Sasha is next to you. Washroom is on the other side of the kitchen.

I'm

working early tomorrow, but I can show you around the rest of the place in the evening. Or Sasha can, or you can show yourself around. It's not a big apartment.

I'm

Ted, by the way.

He

said, extending his hand.

I

shook it and felt calluses on his upper palm and on the pads of his fingers. Pleasure to meet you, Ted.

Make

yourself comfortable,

or

whatever.

Ted

disappeared into the darkness at the back of the apartment, and I carried my suitcases to my room.

It

was completely bare, with a bay window overlooking the street.

I

took off my coat

and

laid a towel on the floor beside one of the walls, padding the pia with a few sweaters, and lay down.

The

ceiling was covered in whorls of textured plaster.

The

pale, periodic chime of a streetcar bell rang outside the window.

I

listened to the mechanical shudder

of

great metal bodies stopping and starting until somewhere in the depths of the night I fell asleep.

Two. I

awoke the next morning to pale light shining through the dirty glass of the window, illuminating things I had not noticed in the dark.

The

walls were cracked and discolored, crosshatched with scratches and lines where furniture had been moved and repositioned and moved again.

The

closet doors hung at odd angles, and there was a slant to the floor that inclined me toward the wall.

These

imperfections had a comforting effect.

However

much money there was in Toronto, the neighborhood I had moved into was marked by a reassuring kind of decay.

I

might have stayed there in the crook of the floor the entire morning had the need to use a washroom not impressed itself on me.

The

hallway was stygian after the winter light,

and

I didn't notice until I was halfway through the living room that I was not alone. Stretched out under a blanket on a green paisley divan,

there

was a woman reading a magazine.

Good

morning,

she

said, looking up. Welcome to Toronto.

The

woman's dark eyes were framed by a square-cut bob,

and

she was wearing a crimson house coat that looked like it had come from a period drama.

She

did not seem surprised to see me.

Are

you Sasha? Yes.

I'm

Alexander.

I

know. Oh.

You

got the email, then.

I

got the email.

Sasha

returned to her magazine, and I made my way to the bathroom.

It

was covered in beige ceramic tile, and there were intricate arabesques of mold on the ceiling.

The

toilet didn't flush very well, and I detected the unhappy scent of rotting drywall.

A

variety of male and female grooming products were arrayed on every available surface.

Do

you want some coffee? Sasha asked when I emerged.

You

can help yourself,

she

gestured toward a half-full French press on the counter.

On

the stove next to it, a very large stainless steel pot was bubbling with a brownish liquid that smelled agricultural.

I

poured a cup of coffee and sat down on the only other piece of furniture in the living room, a sort of low bank of mattress foam covered in an afghan, mounted on what appeared to be milk crates.

The

coffee tasted much better than I expected it to.

Sorry

about that, Sasha said, looking up from her magazine. Ted built it last summer. He's become very attached to it.

I

don't want you to get the impression we can't afford a second couch. Ted just prefers to make his own furniture. It's his name on the lease, so...

It's

quite comfortable. I'd be careful with that kind of politeness. He might insist on building you a bed.

I

do need a bed, actually. Charles hadn't mentioned, yeah, I think he actually meant to leave you some furniture, but the bed he was using belonged to an, uh, ex or something, and she came by to pick it up a couple of weeks ago. I'd take a careful look at Ted's bed before you take him up on any carpentry offers.

As

it turned out, Ted had put his skills to work on a number of domestic construction projects. The living room was smaller than it had seemed the night before, a series of shelves in fantastical geometric shapes hanging from the walls and suspended from the ceiling using hooks and rope.

It

opened onto an equally small kitchen done in blue Mediterranean tile work.

Most

of the shelves were empty. Sasha encouraged me to use as much room as I wanted.

He

found this old turntable and hi-fi system by the side of the street last summer and decided he was going to get into record collecting, and built all these shelves to store the records he was going to buy, but he only picked up, like, four albums, by bands his university friends were in, and then lost interest. That's all we really listen to, so if you've got books or records or whatever, feel free.

I've

been using them to store back issues of Vogue,

trying

to raise the tone around here, you know.

Did

you bring any records?

That's

a shame.

I'm

getting a bit sick of Ted's collection, to be honest. Sasha slid gracefully from the divan and tied the belt of her dressing gown around her narrow waist.

In

her slippers, she was nearly as tall as I was.

She

had the purposeful walk of someone used to running things.

The

apartment was a long, narrow rectangle, with rooms stacked back from the street, one behind the other.

The

main living area divided mine and Sasha's rooms at the front from Ted's at the back.

A

narrow corridor running beside Ted's room connected these common spaces to a long rooftop patio that opened onto the back alley.

An

extensive network of gardens had been built along the cinderblock parapets of the rooftop, and out of these poured a jungle of dead vegetable matter. Plastic planter pots dotted the concrete deck, and here and there could be seen the withered remains of tomato plants clinging grimly to bamboo stakes.

A

large trough of earth running along the back wall of the roof had a tree growing out of it.

It's

paradise in the summer, said Sasha, leading me back inside. So long as you don't mind the raccoons, or the rats, or the smell of bad meat.

The

dumpster out back belongs to the butchers next door. We throw our garbage in there at night. Otherwise, we'd have to buy bags from the city. Sasha's main job was waiting tables at a restaurant, but she also reviewed art shows for one of the local newspapers.

She

had moved in with Ted the year before, after a breakup had forced her out of a third-floor loft in one of the cooler retrofitted warehouse buildings off Queen West.

It

was the best apartment I've ever lived in. Sean was absolutely not the best boyfriend I've ever had, but his apartment?

You're

from Montreal, so maybe you don't understand. Sasha and Ted had done fine art degrees at the same university, but she'd stopped booking shows a couple of years after graduation because she was tired of writing explanatory essays.

I

made an abstract painting. It uses a lot of red. Do I really need to pretend it's a meditation on menstrual blood and the Catholic Church? I mean, Jesus Christ.

She

was quick to explain that she wasn't planning on staying in the apartment long. In fact, she was constantly on the lookout for new places. It was just hard to argue with the rent. $450 for a bedroom with a back roof, a decent kitchen, and three excellent bars within a two-minute walk?

Take

that into account, and living with Ted really isn't so bad.

So

what's your thing? She asked, taking a seat by the kitchen window and lighting a cigarette.

You

a sculptor? A DJ? Not really.

Does

that mean you have, like, an artistic practice that you never actually do? Or do you mean you're actually not an artist and know Charles through axe-throwing or something?

I

don't know Charles through axe-throwing.

Yeah,

you don't seem like the type.

I

trained as a pianist.

Right.

It didn't work out.

I

coughed politely.

I

wasn't generally opposed to smoking indoors, but Sasha had forgotten to open the window, and the kitchen had quickly filled with a yellowy haze.

Sasha

began frantically jerking the window up with one hand and waving the clouds of smoke into the narrow alley between our building and the next.

I

always forget to do that,

she

said apologetically. She slid the pack of cigarettes across the table.

Help

yourself.

It'll

give your lungs a chance to build up some resistance.

We

sat by the window, smoking, and I gave an abbreviated version of how I had come to leave Montreal. Sasha was inquisitive, but easily bored, and before long the conversation moved on to other things.

I

was grateful. Sasha was beautiful, in an aristocratic way that was both intimidating and vaguely asexual, and she had a kind of energetic detachment that made me feel like I was being interviewed for an extremely cool job I wasn't qualified for.

It

was very stimulating.

So

you don't, like, have work or anything? Sasha finally asked after I finished explaining that I no longer had any real confidence in the potential of contemporary art music to radically expand the horizons of piano repertoire in particular, and the Western musical tradition in general.

Not

exactly. Charles sort of suggested you had a few things lined up.

He

said rent wasn't going to be an issue.

It

won't be. Right.

The

thing is, this city has a way of eating into your savings account. Not to put too fine a point on it.

I

can put in a word for you with the manager at the place where I'm working if you decide you want to supplement your revenue stream.

It's

a kind of high-end brunch spot down on King Street.

The

tips are good, everything else is bad, but I make more in two months serving three shifts a week there than I used to make working an entire semester as a sessional instructor. So,

you

know,

think

about it.

Sasha

had said all this so matter-of-factly that it was hard to tell whether she was concerned about the possibility of my skipping out on the rent or was merely being polite.

I

told her I'd let her know.

She

briskly explained a few further elements of housekeeping to me, including that I was under no circumstances to eat any of Ted's jam

and

stubbed out her cigarette on a saucer and flicked it into the alley. Wrapping her housecoat tightly around her shoulders, she returned to the divan and took up her magazine.

I

sat at the window until the last ribbon of smoke disappeared.

Three. In

the days that followed, I established a routine of rewarding leisure.

I

slept until late in the morning and in the afternoon took long walks through the west end and down to the lakefront.

The

weather, though cold, lacked the vicious edge I had gotten used to in Montreal.

Each

day brought new diversions.

I

explored the boutiques of Queen West and the last remaining Maltese cafes of the junction.

I

cut my way through the stench of new money and Catholic nostalgia on Roncesvalles and Little Italy.

I

watched the swans beat each other for crusts of bread by the breakwater.

I

became acquainted with the midnight world of Ossington Avenue.

My

senses seemed sharper,

the

world denser and more textured.

Those

frosty December days were not without their anxieties, but

I

still remember very clearly certain details from those walks.

The

scroll work on a pair of wooden corbels on an old house in Kensington Market,

the

knot of sparrows nesting in a bush of witch hazel.

I

almost felt happy.

Ted

got home from work at seven o'clock most nights, and the majority of Sasha's restaurant shifts were for brunch.

In

the evening,

we

would gather in the kitchen and listen to one of Ted's four records and talk about what had or had not happened to us that day.

Ted

had a connoisseur's attitude toward beer, and the endless pots bubbling on the stovetop were the mash for his homebrew.

We

drank out of mason jars while Ted led me point by point through the beer-making process and what distinguished a pilsner from a lager. Sasha didn't bother to feign interest.

She'd

heard all this before, and she considered beer to be calorically wasteful.

Her

preference was for extremely dirty martinis made with cheap gin and expensive vermouth.

Sasha

was one of the few Torontonians actually born there.

Her

parents had emigrated from Hong Kong in the 1980s,

and

during their first decade in Toronto established a small design firm specializing in print advertising in English and Cantonese.

Their

venture was so successful

that

when their only daughter had completed her primary education,

she

was sent to an Anglican boarding school somewhere in Forest Hill, as a day student.

This

was followed by a brief stint at the University of Toronto, where she picked up and dropped a variety of subjects in quick succession, eventually receiving a degree in drawing and painting at OCAD. Unfortunately, her parents' business had fallen victim to the irreversible collapse in fortunes that hit the newspaper industry in the first years of the 2000s.

They

salvaged parts of the company and pivoted to digital work, but the relationships they had built up with Chinese and English-language newspapers were dealt a near-fatal blow.

By

the time Sasha graduated, she had taken a job at a diner to cover her tuition fees.

She

came out of these experiences a confirmed atheist with a pronounced, if largely performative, sympathy for the tenets of Marxism-Leninism and an abiding hatred for rich fucks.

Most

of this I pieced together on my own. Sasha didn't like talking about her life before university, a reticence made only more remarkable by the total candor with which she shared stories from her adulthood.

At

OCAD, the repressed Protestantism of her early life had flowered into the healthy bon ami of a party girl.

At

25, she had met a minor art critic from Paris on the train to Montreal.

They

fell in love when he asked if the Québécois couple sitting across from them also sounded like peasants to her.

She

returned to Canada at 27, disillusioned as much with art as with the Frenchman.

She

took a job at the restaurant to make rent and started to take writing more seriously.

If

that idiot could build a career off of blowing cigarette smoke in people's faces and declaring things to be dérive, so can I,

she

explained.

All

through those final weeks of December, we spent our nights smoking on the back roof, watching the lights go on in the neighboring apartments,

the

slow change of the colors on the CN Tower off in the distance.

I

found myself able to think about Montreal without wincing.

I

even started telling little jokes about my life there.

To

my own great shock and surprise, my plan seemed to have worked.

4.

Reality came crashing in with the new year.

Filled

with disgust after a particularly costly night of shouting at Sasha and Ted over a live band at the Cameron house, I faced the music and looked at my bank balance.

The

mocking little numbers on my phone told me in no uncertain terms that I needed to start working again.

I

had a cigarette with Sasha that evening and delicately suggested I might not turn down the prospect of a job if one was available.

It's

a bad time of year, Alexander, she said, blowing smoke out through her perfect nostrils. You know what the number one financial resolution people make in January is?

Spend

less money eating out.

And

I don't know if you've noticed, but the weather makes that kind of easy.

It

doesn't last, of course, but we're definitely in belt-tightening season. I thought that might be the case.

You

should have said something last month. We were hiring before Christmas. Right.

Are

you going to be able to make rent?

Don't

worry about it. That's not encouraging.

Look,

one of the barbacks was caught doing coke in the main dining room after his shift ended, so they might decide to replace him.

The

head manager likes me these days.

Give

me your resume and I'll put in a good word.

I

crafted a CV so inflated it was almost fictitious and waited for a phone call.

It

came a couple of days later. A neutral-sounding voice asked if I could come in for an interview, and I rushed down to Liberty Village, hair still wet from the shower.

As

in so many of the old industrial neighborhoods, where the solid manufacturing economy of the 20th century had given way to the steroidal finance capitalism of the 21st, attempts to preserve Liberty Village's architecture only rendered it ridiculous.

Sheer

glass fragments jutted precipitously out of the roofs of three-story brick shopfronts, brand-new English pubs designed to look as though they'd been built in the 19th century, set cheek to jowl with the corrugated steel of squat box doors.

Everything

was scrubbed and new and extremely well-lit.

I

felt like a trespasser in someone else's erotic dream.

The

restaurant was in a converted warehouse standing on a rise off Atlantic Avenue, overlooking the rail line that curved gently into the heart of the city.

A

broad flight of concrete steps led up from street level, and beside it, a ramp rose in thoughtful cutbacks to an elevated promenade that ran beside a showroom selling fast furniture marketed to the upwardly mobile.

I

made my way up the stairs, shoes crunching over the salt that covered every surface.

The

people of Toronto, I surmised, were extremely litigious about icefall incidents. Inside, the restaurant had the unnerving look of a place that had been designed to pass off thrift as good taste.

The

ceiling was impossibly high, and under the painted steel girders, all kinds of flowing bits of fabric were suspended from steel wires, intended perhaps to make the space feel less cavernous.

The

color scheme was a blend of light pastels and heavy charcoal,

and

the seating appeared to have been designed by a sex pervert who wanted to maximize patrons' discomfort in ways that would make them suggestible to arcane forms of depravity.

It

was completely empty.

I

hadn't been waiting long when a young woman emerged from behind a curtain near the front vestibule. She ushered me around a corner to the bar where another young woman, even taller and skinnier than the first, was slowly shredding a piece of celery with a potato peeler.

She

nodded at me, with calculated neutrality.

I'd

barely had the chance to get uncomfortable when a third woman appeared suddenly from a set of swinging doors and told the celery shredder to make two lattes.

Do

you like lattes? She asked in the faintest Berliner accent. A latte would be, I'd love a beer, of course, but it's not five o'clock yet. That's just a bit of fun, of course. We try not to drink on the job here, she said, giving the celery shredder an exaggerated and slightly deranged wink.

The

celery shredder tightened the muscles of her mouth in a way that was technically a smile. Sasha said you're looking for a job. Do you have any restaurant experience?

I

pushed my resume across the bar, and she glanced over it quickly.

You're

from Montreal, I take it. Most recently.

Good

city for restaurants? Yeah. Based on this, I assume you've tended bar?

I

thought it best to let her assume what she wanted. I had spent a lot of time in bars, after all, and a lot of time making drinks, and for a few disastrous months had even been employed as a dishwasher.

I

felt this was close enough to being a bartender. Only for six months, though, the woman said as if she

was a bartender. She

was catching me out in something. Unfortunately, we can't hire you to work behind the bar with this experience, but we do have an opening for a steward. We'd need you for two weekend shifts to start, plus one weeknight. You'd be working for minimum, plus a cut of the tips. How does that sound? Does that sound good? We'd need a commitment right away. Can you make a commitment?

I

made a commitment.

By

the time I walked back out into the ice and the salt and the wind, the darkness had set in completely, and I'd been booked for a training shift.

I

bought myself a bottle of the good Canadian club on the way back to the apartment. Sasha was waiting for me with an empty glass.

I'd

offer my congratulations, she said, but it's unlikely you'll be thanking me for this in two months.

It isn't

possible to really know a city without working in it.

Not

because work forces you to interact with unpleasant people you would otherwise avoid,

which

can easily be managed by hanging around an art gallery or going to the beach,

but

because a city is essentially a massive production line, and only by entering its infernal machinery can you see how it operates.

This

was the main reason I'd avoided having a job whenever possible.

There

are things I preferred not to know.

The

work I had reluctantly picked up over the years, playing music, teaching piano lessons, freelance writing, allowed me to remain aloof and mobile, retaining the illusion of freedom.

I

liked jobs where I was paid to make a very specific contribution. Jobs with titles like Head of Product Acquisition or Customer Relations Associate had until very recently left me with a sense of incipient dread.

Working

at a restaurant was far from ideal, but

it

was a low-investment way of paying the bills.

And

unlike my peers, whose more purely North American pedigree allowed them the illusion that art is subversive,

I

understood very well that musicians are always in a basically symbiotic relationship with the ruling class.

I

might have preferred playing piano to pouring drinks, but

I

was not stupid enough to believe these were fundamentally different things.

After

I got over the initial humiliation, being a steward was rather peaceful compared with other jobs in the restaurant.

The

premise was so absurdly simple, carrying food to customers, carting away dirty dishes, that I quickly learned to dissociate from all the people yelling at me.

It

became a very pure experience of time. Packing up a plate of $15 French fries for a customer so they could throw them out the next morning took about two and a half minutes. Clearing, cleaning, and resetting a high top took around three minutes, if the napkins hadn't already been folded.

Do

these two tasks back to back, and I'd killed five whole minutes. If I needed to clear a four-person dinner immediately after, that was another five minutes, which meant I'd be one-sixth of the way through the hour, or one-thirtieth of the way through a five-hour shift.

So

long as I avoided thinking about it in the scope of my life, it wasn't at all depressing.

Of

course, moving things about was only a small part of the job.

Most

of it was managing the anxieties of the servers, the manager, the kitchen staff, the customers, and anyone else who might wander in.

This,

too, was a matter of mental discipline. All I needed to do was pretend I was not doing what I was doing, or rather that I was not the one doing

it. I

was not myself, but a character in a film whose only interest lay in doing the task assigned.

The

entire service economy rested on these kinds of willful, imaginative acts. The customer entered the restaurant hungry, ill-tempered, looking for an experience that would be nourishing, convenient, and socially pleasing. They put themselves at the mercy of strangers who touched their food, recorded how much they ate and drank, handled their dirty napkins, cleaned up their spills, and generally judged them on their breeding, table manners, and generosity.

The

psychic strain involved in engaging in this practice week after week, year after year, would have been enormous if the diners weren't able to convince themselves that the person serving them was a social inferior whose opinion didn't really matter.

Having

thus been put into the position of the subordinate, the server or steward was faced with the problem of how to retain their dignity, which could be done only by creating some kind of distance between themselves as a worker and themselves as a person.

Money

was at the heart of this relationship, not only because money was the lubricant that facilitated the exchange, but because it served as a justification.

The

fact that our customers had money and I wanted money gave me license to debase myself in all kinds of ways. At the same time, it allowed the customer to not feel that they were, in fact, debasing me. Money hovered over these routine encounters like a dense fog, an essential veil that allowed us all to preserve some measure of self-respect.

And

where there was money, there was sex.

The

servers fluttered and pouted and told dirty jokes, the kitchen resembled a never-ending stag party, and grabbing one's crotch was an established way of answering a question.

The

bawdiness was alienating and exciting.

I

couldn't remember the last time I'd slept with someone. There had been many patchy nights during those bleak final months in Montreal. Some of the things I remembered were probably dreams, and some of the things I thought were dreams might perhaps have happened.

But

even at the best of times, sex, for me, was basically meteorological. It came into my life with the same unpredictable regularity as an ice storm, and left about the same amount of damage in its wake.

I

understood that the sexual economy could be manipulated, that with enough charm and attention you could talk someone into bed. But this seemed an achievement on par with splitting the atom,

and

so I kept my distance from the restaurant's hypogeal erotic currents and left as soon as my shift was over.

This

changed on a Tuesday evening in February, when I burst into the dish pit with a tub full of dirty china to find a tall, muscular individual with brown skin and a pencil-thin mustache, polishing glassware and singing to himself.

He

was the most beautiful man I'd ever seen.

He

swirled a bit of linen around the inside of a wine glass before pausing for the big line.

I said,

sliding the dishes onto one of the side tables.

He

stopped polishing the glass and looked at me suspiciously.

You're

not Italian, are you?

God,

no.

A

musician, then.

In

another life.

I

hope I can rely on you not to tell anyone what that aria is about.

It's

Leporello, talking about how much he likes his job.

Yeah,

exactly,

said

the singer, going back to his polishing.

My

name's Alexander, I said. Sev,

he

said, flipping the cloth over his shoulder and shaking my hand.

You'll

never believe the conversation I just had with one of the sous chefs.

He

asked if I was practicing for a musical. A musical!

I

have two master's degrees.

Most

people don't even have one master's degree. Exactly.

Like

I'm going to perform in a fucking musical.

I

started polishing a wine glass.

There

was something about Sev that made me immediately want to be liked by him.

Is

that your polishing, Aria? I asked.

It's

whatever I want it to be.

I'm

playing Leporello in a chamber production this spring, so, as you can imagine.

Of

course.

Are

you working on anything right now?

Oh, I've

left all that behind.

I

don't even own a piano anymore.

I

didn't know that was possible.

Lots

of people don't own pianos. Yeah,

I

mean the other part.

Like

one day you just decided you didn't want to play music.

How

does that work?

It's

a long story.

I

bet it is.

Don't

tell it to me, though. I can't deal with that kind of chaotic energy right now.

I

picked up another glass and started polishing.

There

were a lot of glasses, and the manager had told me the lull wouldn't last forever.

But

Sev had stopped working and seemed slightly agitated.

Just

to be clear, you're still into music, right? You still listen to it. This isn't some weird religious thing. Definitely not a religious thing. It's just the playing I've given up. I'm actually listening to a lot of Feldman these days.

People

talk a lot about the more overtly experimental work. You know, the big 60s and 70s pieces. But his early piano and chamber work in the 40s and 50s, it's really... Feldman who? Quite bad. Morton Feldman, the New York school guy?

Sorry,

dude,

but

all that shit sucks. Putting microphones on cacti? Grow up. There's more to it than that.

Sure

there is, Sev said, attacking the next wine glass. Scores with colors instead of notes. Performances where you don't actually play anything. I'm not some kind of conservative freak, but as a singer, it all stops being interesting to me after Britain.

I

mean, I understand it. Dodecophony, serialism, all that stuff. But for Christ's sake, give me something to work with. Give me a character. Strauss, Berg.

You

can push the envelope musically without giving up on the psychology, the narrative. And I'd argue that we still haven't completely even exhausted the possibilities of the good old classical 18th century. Especially not now, when decadence is again...

I

didn't find out what decadence was, again, because Sev's speech was interrupted by the appearance of our manager, who hissed something about how hands were needed to deliver a plate of sliders.

Sev

jerked his chin in the direction of the door and kept polishing.

Can't

you do it? I'm still figuring the situation out here.

I've

been here longer than you.

I

picked up the plates from the chef's station and headed out to the floor, where a number of people were already quite mad at me.

When

the tables had been reset for the next day and the glasses were gleaming on their shelves, the floor manager invited everyone to have a drink at the bar.

Sev

told me to try the Rioja, and picked up his discourse on modern music exactly where he'd left off.

My

point is that for all the emphasis on the 20th century break, I think there's a lot that can still be learned from the classical period. Take the economics of music. If you wanted to compose or play back then, you basically needed to sell your soul. To the church, to the aristocracy, to any rich slaver who could pay you. Sound familiar?

And

speaking purely musically, it was a period of revolutionary change, right? You had old Bach and young Bach, the baroque and the classical, the exhaustion with counterpoint.

The

movement toward a new kind of secular individualism, freedom from the church and its superstitions, a shift in the ideological weather between generations. It's very fertile ground.

It

was then, at least.

It

can be again.

I'm

sorry, I've forgotten your name. Alexander. Alexander. Is it okay if I call you Alex? No, I'd prefer. The 18th century is extremely good, Alex, and I'd take 24 bars of a Mozart sonata over an entire opera by Debussy any day.

I

was about to disagree, but found myself unable to.

I

hated Peleas et Melissons.

It

depends on which Mozart sonata we're talking about, I said, trying to affect a thoughtful attitude.

But we

may have to agree to disagree. Bullshit.

Tell

you what, Tofu Musik is doing a double feature tomorrow night. Mozart's 40th and 41st back-to-back. Tickets are so cheap they're basically free.

If

you come out of the performance thinking the 18th century is a wash, I'll buy you a drink.

I

was not in the position to turn down a free drink. Sev gulped down the last of his wine in a very satisfied way

and

told me to text him the following afternoon.

As

I put on my coat in the foyer,

I

could see the skinny bartender smiling as she poured him another glass. Six.

It

snowed overnight,

but

the weather turned and by afternoon the slush in the streets had been whipped into a foul meringue.

I

soon regretted having left my apartment.

For

reasons that remained opaque to me,

every

homeowner in Toronto was responsible for clearing the patch of sidewalk directly abutting their house.

As

these homes were owned by people so rich they traversed the city via levitation, my shoes were white with salt, and a film of sand had worked its way into my socks by the time I reached the concert hall.

An

old man took my ticket at the door and pointed me toward the foyer. Inside, the faces were either craggy with age or ghoulishly young and fashionable.

It

was unclear where I was meant to sit or

whether

any kind of seat assignment system did in fact exist.

This

was Sev's fault, and I was eager to find him so he could see just how much I had been put through.

But

then there was a tap on my shoulder,

and

all of a sudden he was introducing me to a group of old friends he'd just happened to run into, and I had to start laughing and smiling along with the people who had until moments ago filled me with anxiety and revulsion. Sev introduced me as a disillusioned pianist and explained that he had wagered I wouldn't be able to make it through the performance without having my jaded and adolescent prejudice against Mozart exposed for the affectation it was.

I

responded by making energetic and entirely insincere pronouncements about how music had, in general, only gotten better, and how music of the classical was actually deeply degrading to the listener and should be studied strictly as a historical folly, like rockabilly or the Crusades.

My

blather was cut mercifully short by a discreet usher who told us things were about to get started.

I

understood what Sev had been talking about as soon as the music began.

The

famous opening measures were played with surprising hesitation and pathos,

and

when the 28th bar came, it was like a great sun rose over the stage.

The

musicians were vibrating out of their seats. They played like they'd never heard the hackneyed old progression before and were discovering for the first time the layers of feeling latent within a simple G minor scale.

It

was

fun. So

fun, in fact, that I didn't mind being reintroduced to all the same old cynical tricks.

Or

perhaps I just felt generous, grateful to be at a concert with people I hadn't known forever, people who weren't from Montreal.

These

positive feelings created a degree of awkwardness at the intermission. I felt it necessary, for the sake of appearances,

to

pretend I had hated everything.

But

Sev's friends were good-natured enough to play along by heaping abuse on me, accusing me of being an unreconstructed ideologue, a cloth-eared snob who had long since lost interest in music as a performed thing, and cared about it only as a set of ideas that corresponded with my own blinkered and ultimately academic view of the world.

When

we returned to our seats and the 41st began,

I

was accustomed enough to the extraordinary level of musicianship on display to be reminded of

what

I found so unpleasant in Mozart.

There

was clearly a great intelligence behind the music, but it was the intelligence of a professional charmer who expected his audience to be distracted by baubles.

Like

any conjurer, he knew exactly when a darker progression could be used to add the illusion of depth. But these detours were meant only to titillate. Mozart glided through his world like a courtier, seeing the violence and filth, but never letting it color his art.

I

refused to be delighted by the breathtaking fugato at the end.

The

lights went up, and everyone started frantically clapping.

The

orchestra bowed so many times I began to worry that the timpanist, who was rather fat, would collapse onto his drums.

I

made a concession to manners by rising to my feet to applaud. It is a well-known fact that in Toronto, even a symphony performed by deaf orangutans would be entitled to a standing ovation, so long as at least half of the orangutans showed up. But I could feel Sev's eyes on me the entire time, and when we left the church, he insisted I had been converted to his way of seeing things by the vigor of the molto allegro, and invited us all to retire to the Bedford Academy for a drink.

The

Bedford Academy turned out to be an old house north of St. George Station that had, at some indeterminate point, been turned into a schizophrenic pub.

The

front half was tastefully lined with leather-bound books. Upon closer inspection, these were revealed to be the proceedings of the Law Society of Upper Canada,

while

the back half was laid out like a sports bar, with large televisions and framed pictures of curvaceous bums.

The

server, perhaps doing some quick calculations about our tipping capabilities, suggested we would be more comfortable at a long table jammed under a poster of naked women whose backs had been painted to resemble Pink Floyd albums.

I

was seated next to a sad-looking man named Liam, who immediately started talking about the tuning of the instruments, a subject of particular interest to him. Apparently, the performance could not be considered a success from a strictly historical perspective, because the orchestra had been tuned to concert pitch.

He

spoke with a bleating, home-county's accent, and had the kind of round English face that looks like a bowl of porridge an unwell person has spat into.

I

looked around the table with a sinking feeling.

At

the far end, Sev was leaning in to hear what a woman with an exquisite Persian nose introduced to me as Nusha had to say about some recent scandal.

I

wondered if I had been positioned to contain Liam, or worse, if we had been positioned to contain each other. Of course, tuning is only one aspect of a performance, possibly not even the most important one for most audience members. But we must remember that the notion of tuning to 440 Hz is a modern innovation.

We

hope you enjoyed this preview.

To

continue listening to this audiobook on Google Play Books, use the link in the video description.