The First Part of Chapter 15: Past and Future

Yvon was at work, modelling revenue projections for EI Premiums; it was in response to a question that the Minister anticipated in the House of Commons; the answer that came out was $20 billion next year, and slowly growing in subsequent years. The result may have been obvious, but Yvon was careful; the figure of $20 billion was the result of much iteration of several methodologies, including moving averages and an ARIMA model, among others. On top of that, there was the explanation of the methodology that he had to write; he worked on it from after his break until lunch. He had been too tired to make a lunch the previous evening, as parenting three teenagers was hard work; this meant that he was stuck with fare offered in the food court, which was rarely appetizing. The best bet for a lunch would be the pita place across the street. On the way down the elevator, he met Clarissa, who was still wearing dark clothing, which today consisted of black trousers and a black cashmere sweater.

“Cream colours suit you better,”

“Oh, hi Yvon,” she said. She had still failed to give him any snarky retorts, which were normally about his waistline or his greying hair.

“You look so sad lately; you kind of remind me of my aunt from Joliette, and that’s not a good thing,”

“You mean the bipolar one who slit her wrists?”

“It created a terrible mess. I hope you’re not headed that way,”

“I’m not,”

“That’s not very believable, you know; if you were a bit perkier, you would be rolling your eyes or something. I admit, one less unfriendly face would be welcome, but come on,”

Clarissa reacted little, but the other person in the elevator, someone who worked in an office upstairs, rolled her eyes. The elevator emptied into the lobby, and Yvon and Clarissa continued the conversation while riding down the escalator.

“I’m going to the pita place across the street. Want to come?”

“Sure,”

“Do you want some company after what happened?”

“That’s all right; I have enough company,”

“But your mom lives in Toronto, that’s not company; come on, Clarie, I’m the one you see most often; we hang around each other for eight hours of the day, and never have you warmed up to me,”

“Yes, well, things sometimes don’t work out.”

At this point they were at the pita place, called Alors, Pita!; it was a fast food restaurant, and Yvon ordered chicken and lettuce in his pita. Clarissa did the same. Over lunch, they continued the conversation.

“Do you want to go out sometime?”

“I don’t remember you being this nice to anyone,”

“Well, I went through something similar in my teenage years. We call it the family crazies. Not that you’re crazy, of course; in my family, there’s always some maladjusted kid. That was me.”

“You just seemed to be prickly,”

“About going out: yes or no?”

“What would your wife say?”

“She kind of expects it of me. Every Friday, I drink with a neighbour, and return at midnight. I usually have a couple beers, maybe a shot of rum, you know, stuff like that.”

“That would explain your mood on Fridays,”

“Oh yeah, Friday’s the best day of the week for me,”

“Well, what day did you have in mind?”

“Some Saturday, maybe the twentieth. We could go to a nice restaurant, or a movie.”

“What would your wife think?”

“What does it matter? There’s nothing dirty going on, and anyway, there’s not much chance of that happening, don’t flatter yourself. Normally I would invite you drinking, but considering your pregnancy, I didn’t think that would be such a good idea,”

This was the longest conversation Yvon had had with Clarissa in a long time, possibly the longest ever; normally, they would exchange one-liners, and on occasion, when they were in meetings together, they would have short dialogues, but due to the cold relationship between them, those would be perfunctory, short, and have a veneer of professionalism beneath which lay mutual antagonism. That was when she was single. When she was dating, she was even colder to him, and brushed him off freely, and without a care to what the directors thought; the directors actually treated it as a joke, as they knew his personality, and appreciated him for his detailed knowledge of the field of econometrics. The director-general, a sprightly man, simply poked fun at him. Now, however, her voice was dull, and instead of saying something like “Go away” in an ironically buoyant voice, she sounded dull and worn; if a frayed and bald carpet could speak, this is what it would sound like, thought Yvon. Additionally, she always used to flash her teeth whenever she spoke, as a way of showing them off with a bright smile; today, however, there was none of that; her mouth was unsmiling, and so were her eyes. Overall, this was a very interesting perspective into her mind, or would be, if she were talking to somebody who cared, in an academic fashion, about psychology; Yvon’s interest was primarily with her as a person, however, because she reminded him of the aunt who had slit her wrists a few months before she did so, or his sister, who had been depressed just out of university. Given his personal and familial experience with the disease, it actually distressed him to see somebody else, not just sad, but completely unhappy; he knew depression as an absence of happiness, and the feeling that happiness would not return, and to him it was an unbearable feeling, one that left him in the foetal position in his bed when he was seventeen, crying. Nobody deserved to feel that emotion, that sense of hopelessness. They ate the rest of their lunch without discussing emotional problems, and discussed economics, which was a good thing to discuss, considering that talks about economics generally involved very little emotion, and people who talked about economics, at least those who knew economics, tended to agree; thus, the remainder of their dialogue was a non-conversation.

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