Faites vos jeux
Baņuta: Hey, Alan….
Remember those steamy nights at Monte Carlo? How you dazzled the crowd in your starched tuxedo, how I slid past the silk sheaths, those women with the long bare arms reaching towards the roulette table. The two of us found a spot at the table with our martinis and, with a nod, stacked all our chips on the black, not the red, or the red, not the black, until the bald croupier with the scanty moustache shouted, Faites vos jeux; rien ne va plus! — “game over” — and the ball went around and around, around and around, and you grabbed my hand, and I held my breath, and then the wheel stopped, and we had lost everything.
If you don’t remember, it’s because Monte Carlo never happened. But losing? That happened today.
The landlady arrived today with a contractor and her son. We’re going to leave things as they are, she said.
The magic studio I wanted to work in is gone, and we don’t keep this house.
We gambled. We lost.
Alan: The landlady and her contractor are walking around our home, inspecting it. We have been waiting two weeks for the landlady to decide if we can stay here. But she’s brought her son with her and I hear the death knell. If she was going to let us stay here, she would have had no reason to bring her whiny ne’er-do-well son with her. And sure enough Baņuta comes into my room and tells me that the landlady told her she wanted to keep things the way they were, which meant that we have to leave.
I kind of thought that would happen, I don’t think Baņuta did because she looks pretty crestfallen. And I don’t blame her. It was nice to live inside the cloud of hope for a couple of weeks and now it’s gone and we’re thrust back out into the cold world of apartment hunting.
I’m going to tell you some of the reasons I’m sad we likely have to leave but first let’s go back to the procession of landlady, son and contractor traipsing around our house talking about the stupid changes they might make and I say stupid because an open concept main floor is one thing but an open concept second floor is ridiculous. You want a huge bedroom, is that it? Good luck selling it when you’re done.
She’s talking about how she’s owned it for 50 years. She bought it in 1973. I’m so happy for her. The point is she owns the house and she has a right to traipse through it when she gives the tenants enough notice. But it’s so sickening as the tenant to listen to them make gleeful plans for what they’re going to do to your room or your washroom or your daughter’s room when they finally get you out of your home and take over what is their right to take over.
It's just an adversarial situation. We’re the tenants, they’re the owners. I was once an owner. It’s a nice feeling. And you can’t be too apologetic about the fact that you own the rooms where your tenants live. But maybe you could be sensitive to their feelings.
The landlord’s son sees me and says a pleasant hello. He doesn’t know I kind of hate him. And you know, maybe he doesn’t deserve the hate. Like I say, his mother owns this house and someday he will own it, even if as I suspect he hasn’t worked a day in his life. He’s happy because he’s going to get his way. His mother is going to move into this house and he and his new bride can move in by themselves to the house where he has lived his whole life with his mother.
He's 32. Did I say that?
He’s just having a bit too much fun talking to the contractor about walls they can knock out. But if he were sensitive enough to know that all this happy talk might be upsetting his tenants, then maybe he wouldn’t have lived with his mother his whole life and wouldn’t now be counting on her to give him a free place to live with his new wife.
I wonder what she’s like. He showed me a picture of her the last time he was here. Showed me is not the right way to say it. Shoved the photo in my face in order to prove that there was a live human woman who wanted to marry him. “Here, look!” he said as he pushed his iPhone towards me so close I couldn’t see anything but two figures, one of whom kind of looked female.
Anyway enough of that bitterness. Last week Baņuta and I went for a nice walk beside the Humber River. We saw a heron in a tree. A few days earlier we had gone for a walk with my daughter along the prettiest stretch of High Park which we can reach in about ten minutes. Walking along the Humber that day I felt so lucky that I’ve lived the last few years halfway between these two major parks in Toronto.
I didn’t take advantage of it at first but I’ve been walking daily this year and I really appreciate not just those two natural areas nearby but the very pretty streets of our neighbourhood. It’s unlikely we’re going to find anything around here because it’s actually a pretty prosperous neighbourhood and we probably couldn’t afford a house if it did go up for rent.
I won’t miss the woman across the street or her minions of parking nazis but I’ll miss a lot about this street and the neighbourhood in general. And if you want to hear about the parking nazis maybe I’ll dust off the article I wrote about her but never tried to get published. She won’t miss us, that’s for sure. Nor will the mysterious man across the street who won’t go out in public without a balaclava. Maybe he’s another Elephant Man. I hope not but I really wish I knew. So often I’ve thought of saying hello to him and fantasized that he would stop and chat and he’d be a friendly funny man who nobody talked to, and he would open up to me. I wouldn’t ask him to take off his balaclava. But I’d love to know if he sometimes takes our cat in because most of the time I see Oreo on the street he seems to be hanging out on Balaclava Man’s porch.
We’re back to the grind of looking. Lots of ads have come in but I’ve ignored them. Now I’ll open that app again and get repeatedly disappointed. And we’ll look in the East end and probably find something there but the place we find won’t have that studio that Baņuta wanted so much and that will make it harder for me to say yes to it. But if the west end of Toronto insists on carving up every three bedroom house into two or three three-bedroom apartments then the west end of Toronto where I’ve lived for seven decades can go fuck itself.