Some Great Thing (3 page)

“McGuinty!”

And the men I worked with. Italian, Irish, Canadian, the usual muddy mix. I was on that first site a week when Johnny Cooper came up out of the blue and clocked me in the jaw. That hurt. Tony Espolito shook my hand so hard when I first met him he pulled my pinkie out of its socket. He killed himself with a hammer once. There were ten of us on that site and there were nine hairy animals too many, I say with no restraint. I thought I knew what a man was.

E
VERYONE
’
S FINGER WAS GOLD
and the earth was hungry for houses. When I was in the middle of it I didn’t realize what I was in the middle of. It took me a few years, a few sleepless smelly years, to realize it was the greatest boom this land has ever seen. One of them, anyway. We couldn’t help but make a fortune.

I
AM JERRY MCGUINTY
.

Y
OU HAVE TO HAVE
strength and you have to be right. Accurate. No one survives as a builder if he has to do work over. The best builders I’ve worked with have been like professional athletes. Little ones, big ones, thin ones, thick ones, perfectly made for whatever they did. Chippies have the steadiest hands, and the quickest. Tony Antonioni could put up an A-frame in an hour and a half, if he remembered his tools. He also knew angles. He could cut a plank at exactly 32 degrees with nothing but a handsaw, if he remembered the wood.

I became an expert bricklayer, but it was plaster—plastering anything—that wrapped my pride in a creamy layer of gold. To plaster the simplest wall takes grace, patience, and a solid sense of how the world stands up. Some say it stands up straight. Some say it curves like hips. I say it stands as I tell it to. My walls will change your life.

Walk over to the nearest wall in your house and knock on it. If it makes a hollow sound it is plasterboard and you should be out earning money. If it is hard hard hard and creamy it is plaster, my friend, and I want you to take down your ugly pictures, stand back from it, put your glasses on or take them off and give that wall a good strong look. Does it make the room bigger? Smaller? Do you feel a little sick? A strong wall is plastered solid at the edges, but the middle is where it lives. A bit of pressure on my trowel can make you love your kids, a bit less and God help you breathe.

Smirk at your peril.

F
OR THE FIRST YEAR
I was still living with my parents, but the next January, always freaking January, my father kicked me out of the nest and my mother shoved me for emphasis. I rented a room in Mrs. Brookner’s basement, and I learned to like her as much as I liked banging my head on a beam.

Every morning I was up at four thirty and Mrs. Brookner made me eggs and ash.

By six I was at the site, no matter where it was, with my eye on a wall and my insides clawing their way to my mouth. Those early days were the hungriest in the history of my stomach. Trucks came by at eight o’clock, on the dot, and I still smell them coming: Jack’s Little Griddle, Ye Olde Lunch Wagon. Meals on greasy wheels, my friend, and never were they sweeter. A cup of hot gristle at ten o’clock on a January morning (in those days it was fresh) was our hot milk and honey. At twelve o’clock the grease rolled around again, and once again at four.

I
N THE FIRST TWO
years we built a hundred paper houses—a hundred holes and a thousand dirty troubles. They were young people’s houses, and to everyone but their builders they were dreams. I could put my hand against the inside of a wall—my own wall, the wall I was forced to build—and feel the wind blow through it.

By the time we were putting up the last house the rest had already been filled, and we got a close hard look at our victims. They were older than me, those dreamers who moved in, and I was too young to feel sorry for them. The difference between dreams and plasterboard, I tell you out of wisdom, is their shape.

Doors slammed loose and linoleum cracked, wires fizzled dead, hot and cold, hot and cold, all pipes burst, bottom edges curled in a hot shit-grime. For a while I answered complaints. My foreman sent me over.

“Good morning, ma’am, I’ve come to rebuild your house.”

All the visits were the same.

“Good morning, sir, I hear you’re having a problem with your upstairs window.”

“You’re goddamn right I am. There isn’t one.”

“There isn’t one?”

“There’s no goddamn window. Just the frame.”

“Well, I’m here to fix that. Let me go to the truck, and see if I can dig up a pane or two.”

And he’d follow me to the truck.

“No goddamn window for six weeks. And my goddamn wife’s trying to get pregnant.”

“Well, I’m here to fix that.” And I’d look in my truck and find a windowpane to make his wife pregnant.

I
WAS NEVER HOME
before ten o’clock and home was never home. Mrs. Brookner was always awake in the kitchen cutting up a head or a tongue which I’d find the next day in my sandwich. Even if I wasn’t tired there was nothing to stay up for.

But I was tired. I earned a sleep which I cannot describe because nothing ever happened but sleep. Four thirty came again and for thousands of my years it has never stopped coming. I was too tired to be weary and too scared to be tired. But slowly, slowly, I was learning how to live. I made friends.

“Hey, Cooper.”

“What do you want?”

“What?”

“You just said my fuckin name.”

“Sorry.”

And I got stronger. Strength is in the forearm, my friend, and I defy you to come near mine.

T
O SAVE MYSELF TIME
in the future I put extra compound over some of the plasterboard in those first houses. The wind stopped blowing
through them and the stupid young couples kept warm. That was the first of my plans.

I took no breaks and I had no time. But there was freedom between my ears, and I don’t mean what you think I mean. Building is ten percent concentration and ninety percent habit. You have to think about what you’re going to do, but you don’t while you’re doing it. It doesn’t matter how busy your body is, your mind is always free. Free if you have good forearms. Once I know where to put it, my trowel moves steady as the waves—habit moves it, and my thoughts are free. And that’s when you plan.

Johnny Cooper, Mario Calzone, and Tony Espolito, they don’t plan. When they’re staring at a wall or choking on sawdust, they’re thinking this: Woman, Blood, Bone. They’re thinking things you’ll never know.

But Jerry McGuinty plans.

The future was there one day, drying around my fingers.

I
N
1968 I
MET
her and everything white turned red.

W
HEN YOU BUILD ONE
hundred shameful houses, day after plasterboard day, you start to think that the world needs nothing better. You start building yourself into them. I caught myself one day, in the middle of Mrs. Brookner’s breakfast, thinking I would throw up one of those houses for myself. It would get me out of here, I thought. I counted up what the materials would cost and I thought about where I would build, and I even thought about asking the foreman for advice.

They change you, all those Januaries. Those first few years had more than a few of them. I was only in my twenties and I was already growing this here belly. My eyes were always red. I suppose I drank a lot of beer, but up yours if you’re going to judge me.

You change, you stay the same, or you do something in between. I didn’t know what to do. I thought about changing
crews—sometimes I’d get a taste of others during little jobs—but the men were all exactly the same. I’ve seen more Johnny Coopers than you’ve seen disappointment.

I thought about staying put, but then there was Johnny Cooper.

I thought about doing something in between but I didn’t know what that meant.

Building myself an ugly little house seemed the perfect thing to do. I had money (in those days the unions had Strength). I could buy the materials, build the house in my sleep, and by the age of twenty-two have more square feet than my father had at forty.

So there I was, regretting breakfast, staring at a wall, waiting for the courage to come to ask my foreman for advice, when I looked at my hands and it came to me.

Plaster. I felt stupid as a sack of grade-two cement. I’ll build a better house, I said. Plaster walls for smarter people.

The Story of Simon Struthers

C
ONTAINED IN SPACE, YEARNING
to get out, that is how I think of Simon when I look back over his life. That body of his that has spread sympathetically with every yearning, his body was the trap he always ignored. It was the space around him he blamed. There were very few rooms which he ever wanted to stay in; but if there happened to be company for his body, he stayed beyond his welcome.

The day he turned eleven, he held a dinner party for eight friends, all of them girls. Long before he ever properly yearned for girls he was taught to respect and befriend them, to get along with everyone. “Nothing wrong with girls,” his father said. Simon made a point of sitting next to them on the school bus. If there was an empty seat next to one, no matter who she was, no matter how the boys at the back laughed, no matter how the girl squirmed, he sat there. And it was in this spirit of getting along with everyone that his parents encouraged him to invite as many people as he liked to this dinner party, just like a grown-up, where conversation would bring everyone closer. “Just watch,” his mother said, holding ice to his eye one evening after school, “the dinner table is the antithesis of the playground.” He invited twenty-six girls and one other boy to the dinner in honor of his birthday, and eight of the girls, in honor of their parents’ desire to hear what it was like inside the Struthers’ house, did not return their regrets.

And they sat there.

The dining room felt fuller than when his father invited the PM and caucus. But not a word was spoken. Simon longed for his
room. The girls were all seated, all silent, and his mother poured iced tea with such deft unobtrusiveness that even the ice in the jug was silent when it moved.

Silence through the salad, the roof closing in, silence when the beef steamed its charms on every girl’s face.

It was Jenny Pearce who spoke, finally, first looking at Simon’s mother but then addressing Simon directly with such sweet warmth.

“I love green beans. My brothers hate them. But I love them.”

The table erupted into friendly controversy, most of the girls unable to believe that Jenny liked green beans. There was talk of food, generally, of food at school, of school generally, of Jenny’s brothers, which invoked a few blushes.

Suddenly Simon found himself yearning so achingly to remain in the bounds of that room. Eight jolly friends. And pretty. He had to admit they were growing very pretty.

He giggled, laughed outright whenever a girl laughed, and giggled no matter what was said. He spoke, said interesting, outrageous things, laughing all the time. His giggles prevented him from blowing out the candles on his cake. He wanted to walk around the table and hug each girl, realizing for the first time how exciting it would be to know a few of their secrets.

When it all seemed to be going wonderfully, Simon, reluctant to leave the room but eager to bring more of himself into it, left the table and went to fetch something upstairs. Anything. A piece of
him
that he could show the girls. He found his newest book:
Great Houses of England
, a guide to building models of a hundred noble estates. He flicked through the pages in his room, finding his favorites, and he even decided to show the girls the model he had started of Walpole’s Strawberry Hill.

When he came bounding downstairs he found his friends all gathered in the foyer, thanking his mother and waiting for their rides. Jenny Pearce thanked Simon directly, but she had a curious smile when she saw his model house.

For the next few months, Simon was known as Lord Struthers Who Spits When He Giggles.

It was the first time he realized what a traitor a room could be.

I
N
1974
SIMON MOVED
into Number Fifteen, Cowslip Crescent, The Glebe, and used inherited money to do so. A mortgage was not for him, for through some political simony his father had accrued a fortune, the exact amount of which he has never looked at for fear that it would shrink. (He had an MP father and a Type A mother and his childhood was long, golden, and pestilent.)

The Glebe contains houses containing people discreetly proud of being contained in a house in The Glebe—people who say hello when you say hello to them and are otherwise quite remarkable if you get to know them. Many of his neighbors moved in at the same time, and they moved as one ought to move: they smiled, looked openly around, let each other know that here was a new one of them.

If only you could have stood there, in the middle of that crescent, watching them all about to grow, their milky blood so far from clotting into cream. They may not have had personalities but most of them had promise. One by one, sometimes by twos, they wove a garland of introductions across their lawns, “Hello” they all smiled, their cars exchanged pleasantries. But Simon was always the break in the chain.

The day he arrived, he began a routine of ignoring his neighbors. Not looking up when bringing garbage to the curb. Nodding not waving. Nodding not speaking. Not looking down when happy little children tugged on his unhappy trousers. (He had learned the power of mystery and silence.)

The point is that as they all whirled around in May Day glee, promising drinks and dinner and risqué revelations, Simon stood apart.

If you were thirty-eight in 1974, as he was, you will remember
that year as one when you left behind some of the steak sandwiches and erections of your youth.

I
T WAS A SENSE
of change, more than change itself, which made that time memorable for Simon. It was more than the move to The Glebe. It was a move in the public service, a promotion, a new appointment. But it was more than that again. He knew that each day would bring more, and more. He knew that he would meet someone who could see behind his eyes.