The Third Part of Chapter 6: Cleaning and Arranging

As it happened, and as both James and Clarissa knew, they had been planning to be quite busy on Canada Day, and all of their plans came to fruition. The day started out very early, with both of them rising at seven to get ready for their biking trip; needless to say, it went very smoothly; they encountered very little traffic on the way to the reserve, and the roads in the reserve were nearly empty, which was a highly improbable event. It was also a pleasant sort of day for biking: not too warm and moderately cloudy but without the promise of rain; the whole trip went well, save one close encounter with a black bear––James saw it and mistook it for a Newfoundland dog, but it quickly went into a thicket. The trip was over at four when they pedalled to their house, and from there, they quickly packed for the Bruce Trail hike the next day, and getting there would prove much more complicated than travelling to King Mountain, because while they could both see King Mountain from their respective offices, Wiarton was five hundred kilometres away.

The train ride to Toronto also passed uneventfully, though the subsequent drive from Toronto to Wiarton went a little less smoothly; it was the most grating part of the trip, in James’s opinion, as he had always disliked travelling in cars, and this was due to a number of reasons: car travel always made him edgy, there was the unreasonable delay of car traffic, there was the pollution to deal with, and it was simply unhealthy. It was for all of these reasons that James used cars sparingly, and he thought of his car as mostly an expensive driveway “decoration” purchased for show, now having served that purpose.

After two and a half hours, they arrived in Wiarton. The hike on the Bruce Peninsula was a work party in the same sense that other businesspeople thought of golf as a work party, but this particular executive was an avid hiker and lover of nature and for this reason had arranged the trip to Wiarton. Maurice greeted them as they pulled into the parking lot beside the short path that led to the Bruce Trail. Courtney was standing beside him; they had travelled together.

“Hi Jim, oh, and you must be Clarissa! Jim told me a lot about you, of course.”

“Hello, Maurice. It’s a pleasure meeting you.”

My, James certainly made a nice catch, thought Maurice.

“I prefer to be thought of as more than just a catch,” said Clarissa.

Oops! I can't believe I just said that, thought Maurice. I had better be more careful; there had better not be any open mouth, insert foot moments.

“Was there a momentary disconnect between brain and tongue?”

“Er, yeah, that must be it. I haven’t had lunch.”

“Oh, good, we brought some soup along. It’s our mutual favourite: French onion.”

“So, um how far along are you in the relationship? And didn’t I see you in February?”

“Oh yeah, that’s when we met. Now we’re living together, and engaged; the wedding’s in August.”

“So soon? But I haven’t heard of it before!”

“We move quickly. Clarie’s just right for me.”

“­––And Jim’s right for me.”

“Well, I’m glad for both of you,”

The hike, both James and Clarissa agreed, was spectacular; the trail near Wiarton hugged the edge of the escarpment quite closely, and so afforded spectacular views of the azure waters of Georgian Bay. The flora was verdant and gave an air of adventure and mystery: ferns and mosses grew in profusion underfoot, fed by the moist air and frequent rain, which had thankfully not shown up on that particular day, and their hike was sheltered from the sun by the shade of various species of tree. In a word, it was perfect. The client was a man named Sergey Noganov, and was head of a company that sold tires; thus they were entertained throughout the hike with talk of all kinds of tires and their technical details: their tread, the grip, which ones were best for driving on muddy roads, which ones were preferred––by professionals, it was implied––for driving in the snow, among other things. Maurice, James and Clarissa discussed their specialty.

“Well, demand for machinery is picking up, which should be good for you, considering that you make tires for tractors; I hear the housing market is recovering quite nicely.”

“Not in the States, though.”

“No, not in the States; we anticipate the housing recovery there to be slower than it is here.”

“By the way, we are coming up with a list of wedding guests, and if you would like to attend, we would be delighted,” said Clarissa.

“Of course I would like to go to your wedding. Where is it?” asked Maurice.

“It’s a kilometre west of the office, and it will be on the fifteenth of August,” said James.

“The fifteenth of August; very good, that will be a Sunday,”

The rest of the hike passed uneventfully, and Maurice hoped he had a new client; new clients were important, considering how many were going out of business; that car seat maker was a particularly important client, who had generated nearly a million dollars worth of business since he had founded Valoix Consulting, and Maurice was sorry to see it go bankrupt. Maurice was always thinking of his firm, but now it was elevated; revenues were declining, and it wasn’t enough to cover his costs, and he was growing increasingly concerned.

The summer leading up to the wedding passed uneventfully for James and Clarissa; it seemed to them and all their friends that they were a run-of-the-mill, happily engaged couple, doing all the things that one would expect couples to do together, which consisted of dates, bike rides, picnics, and all sorts of things that best shared between two people. At the same time, they were incredibly busy, especially during the first half of August; Clarissa decided that their siblings and sibling’s spouses would be the bridesmaids and best men, which meant Mary, Alice, and Katherine all went to dress fittings in Toronto, while, Mary’s husband Andrew and Alice’s husband Jacob purchased new matching tuxedoes.

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The Second Part of Chapter 6: Cleaning and Arranging

Belinda, upon hearing the news, felt in a way similar to the way she had felt after the divorce; she was angry, frustrated, and had a sort of disbelief of her circumstances. If what Pia was saying was true, then she deserved it. If it was not, then this was clearly an attempt to ostracise her. It might be both; attempts to isolate people usually go with some “justification”. Thinking this made her reflect on her divorce, which had occurred under similar circumstances, insofar that she was an alcoholic at the time and may have stepped on a few toes. Whom am I kidding, she thought. I’m still an alcoholic, just not to the extent that I was before the divorce. Just what had she done that night? She remembered Kevin, all right; who wouldn’t? She could also recall, faintly, the sound of a baby crying very loudly. Maybe it was true about me stepping on baby Jason when I was wearing my stilettos. I must get an opinion of a sober person, she thought; which is to say, a sober person other than Pia. That was why she called Clarissa.

“Hello?”

“Hi Clarissa. How was last night?”

“Last night was wonderful. I’m engaged!” Belinda was unclear on all the details of the garden party; she simply knew there was plenty of food and noise.

“Wow, really? Jim proposed to you at the garden party?

“Yes, he did. We ‘went to the washroom’, so to speak,”

“Ooh, sounds frisky. What about the wedding?”

“Oh, it’s in August. So, why did you call? Are people doing anything interesting? I hear there’s some kind of game of broken telephone going on at Parliament Hill.”

“No. I’m actually calling about last night. Pia read me The Riot Act, and now I’m having doubts about how everything went.”

“I wasn’t there the whole time, but you were making sexually suggestive gestures at David, which is a major faux-pas, especially considering his wife could see. I wasn’t there the whole time because I was busy with, uh, other matters, but I could hear a baby crying when I went back out with him.”

“She said I stepped on Jason’s foot with a stiletto,”

“That would explain the crying. I think it’s just her disliking your behaviour in general last night. Which reminds me, I’m faced with a choice of having a dry wedding and you not being there, and I would prefer to have alcohol at my wedding. Hence, you are not invited. I’m sorry.”

“Is there a chance things will change?”

“Don’t push your luck.”

“Well, goodbye then.”

“Goodbye, Belinda,”

The initial shock of the termination of the friendship with Pia prepared her somewhat for this; still it made her feel bad, as she was missing the major event of the season. Just imagine all the people who would be there! On the other hand, the wedding was likely to be full of economists, considering how both James and Clarissa were themselves economists, and that would make for decidedly uninteresting talk about Taylor series, Nashian equilibria and such other conversation that would fly right over her head. This thought assuaged her somewhat.


Arranging a wedding within a month and a half was a tall order, which would take a lot of planning and a substantial amount of luck, but James and Clarissa were good at that. They were also helped, by the bankruptcy filing of a car seat maker, Inxton Car Seats, which had recently gone out of business; this particular company had booked a ballroom in a convention centre for their annual shareholder’s meeting, and as the company had shuttered its doors, there was not going to be any shareholders’ meeting any longer. For some reason, the name of Inxton was familiar to James, but it escaped him for the time being; he was doing a financial analysis of the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Fund, and that had taken most of the morning. Of course, it helped that this particular ballroom was five kilometres from their house, and James was quick on the uptake; he was listening to the radio at work when he heard that the company went bankrupt; fortuitously, the details of the annual shareholders’ meeting was mentioned with this piece of news; he called the convention centre at once, and within ten minutes, the wedding had a venue. Now, all he had to do was find a local church for the ceremony, and he would be done with the hardest part of planning the wedding.

He arrived home that evening, and greeted Clarissa, who had also recently arrived home. “Hi honey, guess what? We have a venue for the wedding reception!”

“Really? That’s great!”

“It’s at the Lakeside Convention Centre; some car seat maker went bankrupt, and that opened up a spot in their convention schedule.”

“Awesome! I mean, about the venue, not the car seat maker. Anyways, I also looked into the question of where the ceremony would be, and two churches have spaces open. Neither of us is particularly religious, so I wasn’t fussy. I found a church close to home, and another one out in the suburbs that have open spots. The Lakeside Convention Centre, you say? That’s in the west of the city; well, I called a Baptist church near there, and I think there’s also a Catholic church nearby.”

“So, things are going well, in other words.”

“Yes.”

“What do you think we should do for Canada Day?”

“I was thinking of going biking in the hills,” she said, referring to the escarpment just north of the city.

“That sounds nice.”

“Yeah, we’ll make a day of it,”

“And then, there’s fun to look forward to on the Bruce Peninsula. By the way, how were you planning on getting there?”

“Well, there’s a train that leaves for Toronto in the evening, and then it’s a matter of renting a car to drive to Owen Sound or Wiarton. Yes, I think the group’s going to Wiarton.”

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The First Part of Chapter 6: Cleaning and Arranging

It was the day after the garden party, and David and Pia were cleaning up the mess that inevitably resulted from such things. There were three bags full of paper plates, disposable tablecloths, plastic cutlery, beer bottles, plastic glasses and the like. “Pia,” he called out, “We need to talk about Belinda,”

“Are you referring to her behaviour last night?”

“Yes. Where did she come from?”

“She’s an old friend from university, we had classes together, and I’m sorry for the way she acted; she stepped on baby Jason’s fingers for goodness sake.”

“You know, Laura and Clarissa called last night to complain.”

“Yes, and Rick did so earlier, and that was Jeannine who just called. Needless to say, I’m not impressed.”

“Yes, and that’s why I don’t want her invited here. She was doing all sorts of things. Did you see the gestures she made at me? I certainly wasn’t going to reciprocate her ‘come hither’ stare, and I felt very uncomfortable avoiding eye contact all evening.”

“Yes, well, I’ll call her,” said Pia, as she wiped down the kitchen counter. David took the last garbage bag to the garage.

“How is Jason doing?”

“He’s sleeping soundly, which you can tell because you can’t hear any screaming; getting stepped on with stiletto heels is no picnic, though,”

“About that. Belinda seemed like she was dressed to go clubbing. That’s very different from socialising at a garden party. Where does she get her fashion tastes from?”

“I saw her mother a few times, and I noticed that they like to wear similar sorts of clothing.”

“Shall we focus on the ways the party succeeded? You did very well on the punch. How did you know I liked lemoncella?”

“I saw a bottle of the stuff in the recycling once when we were courting, and I figured that you must have a taste for it. Oh, and the calls weren’t all bad; Clarissa complimented me on the food, and she said that she liked the bread you made. I’ll call Belinda now.”

While his wife was talking to Belinda, David turned to a story in the newspaper about the Prime Minister’s wife, as written by Ford Dasker, a reporter who seemed ambiguous about nearly everything; he never seemed to take sides, and when one day he would write a glowing piece about someone, the next article he would write would be decidedly more negative. The affair in Parliament seemed a soap opera writ large, and Cathaline Meach was feeling disengaged from her husband, according to all the gossip columns and magazines that his wife liked to read. Why would she act cold? He wondered. She has so much, after all, being close to power; one only has to enjoy the benefits. “I feel unloved” was a quote that an errant reporter had attributed to her during the past week. It was an obvious slow news week, which was often what happened in June. It turned out that she did not actually say, “I feel unloved”; that was actually the reporter poorly paraphrasing what she had said. She had actually said was, “sometimes I don’t feel [Bruce Meach] pays attention to me. He still cares for me, but it can get a little lonely at times.” He had no idea how the journalist twisted that simple statement into “I feel unloved”, and the story he was reading (in the Focus section of The Globe and Mail from the previous Saturday) was about this:

The misquote by reporter Thomas McNulty caused a considerable brouhaha when it was taken inappropriately out of context on CityTV, which opens a new debate about the role of the journalists in reporting on the personal lives of parliamentarians. The questions are, how shall accuracy in reporting be ensured, and where should the line be drawn on reporting on the personal lives of politicians? These questions are particularly relevant given the quantity of talk it has inspired in Ottawa it has inspired about a matter that ought to remain private. The Prime Minister, while a public figure has a right to private life and the events in that bedroom is, to paraphrase Pierre Trudeau, none of the nation’s business.

Really? Then what was The Globe doing perpetuating this soap opera?

Pia was concurrently talking to Belinda.

“We need to talk about what happened last night,”

The voice on the other end of the line sounded sleepy. “Oh yeah, great party. Thanks Pia.”

“I think the party was rather too good for you. Do you recall what you did last night?”

“Um, I had a couple of drinks. Hey, you know Kevin? What does he think of me?”

“Never mind Kevin. He said he was gay, anyways. This conversation is about you.”

“What about me?”

“Your behaviour last night was less than exemplary, to put it mildly. You had four drinks, you were saying all sorts of things about Henrietta that I would rather not hear, you were making eyes at my husband––and hands off, by the way––and you stepped on my baby Jason’s toes in your stilettos.”

“Really? Oh my, I’m so sorry,” Belinda was beginning to break up; Pia could tell, even over the phone, when somebody was crying.

“How can I ever make it up to you?”

Pia wanted the conversation to be over quickly: “It’s simple. We are not inviting you to any of our parties anymore. Goodbye,”

Pia hung up the phone, not wanting to hear Belinda’s caterwauling.

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