The Third Part of Chapter 1: Encounter

February was over, and on the last day, there had been the first really mild and pleasant day of the year: the sun was out until five thirty, the air, while not warm, was not bitingly cold, and it was possible to venture outside without a thick coat or a toque for an hour or two without getting dangerously cold. In other words, it was perfect weather for promenading, which was what James and Clarissa did that weekend: they went for a walk in the large park set aside for conservation. While it was a pleasant day, they had to keep to the paths, as the snow beside the paths was still waist-deep, and nobody could tell whether the snow concealed a ditch or a pool of water. The dating went on in a similar fashion for some time until in mid-March, when they went to Montréal together.

Clarissa told James, “It just sounds romantic,” as a justification for this. The city’s reputation as a boisterous party city filled with nightclubs overflowing with beautiful young women and bars filled with the same was the reason behind James’s attraction to Montréal, but he did not tell Clarissa this was the reason behind his fascination with the city. They went on a Friday evening, and Clarissa booked a hotel the Wednesday in advance.

On the train ride in, Clarissa remarked, “They said Montréal was supposed to be holding up reasonably well against the downturn last year, but that was not the impression I got of the place. Everywhere in the suburbs beside highway––I went by bus––I saw signs that said ‘à louer.’ It seemed that every other building had a sign like that, and it’s obviously not something you would expect to see in a city that’s supposedly missing out on the doldrums.”

“Yeah, and look, there’s a sign right now,” said James, as he pointed out the window at an unattractive square building. On the front, it bore a sign that said “Immeuble à louer. 100.000 pieds carrès” followed by a phone number.

“I think that whoever said Montréal was resilient was only looking downtown; I don’t think they even set foot in the suburban part of the island, or else they would have noticed all the ‘for lease’ signs.”

“Yeah, and 100,000 square feet of empty office space is very big to miss,” said James, referring to the big box they had passed. After ten more minutes, they arrived at the Central Train Station; it was 10:15.

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The Second Part of Chapter 1: Encounter

The snow was falling softly late Saturday afternoon as James put on a nice tie and a dark suit to go with it. The silence outside, with no birds, no animals, only the snow falling quietly in the evening contrasted with the nervousness he was feeling at that moment. It was not as if this was his first time, either, as he had several girlfriends in high school and university; he had simply chosen not to settle.

James felt it was important to be chivalrous on the first date and pay for both meals, after which they would drop these old-fashioned pretences later. He looked outside, thinking that the snow, which had fallen heavily since November, obscuring the landscape in its muffling mantle, was getting burdensome; he was finding it difficult to keep the driveway clear, given that the snow banks had piled up well over his head on both sides of the two metre wide lane, and all this was exacerbated by the fact that there had been exactly five days when the temperature had risen above freezing since the beginning of the previous December. He didn’t know why he was counting this; it was one of the unfortunate side-effects of being single that he had noticed since his last break-up three years previously with a woman named Claudine, and he had noticed it with break-ups before that: he found he paid much attention to the banal things that other people––married people––would not have noticed or considered. He looked at his watch: five o’clock; he had better get going. He walked out of the door to his car, noting with mild irritation that he had to brush it off: five centimetres had accumulated, and since the temperature was only minus two, the snow was of the thicker, heavier variety.

He had combed his hair, which, given that it was curly, was a futile gesture, showered that morning, and had shaven the previous evening. He was thinking of everything that could possibly go wrong: he could trip over the carpet as he introduced himself; he could trip her accidentally at some point in the evening; he might guffaw at an inappropriate time; what if the dinner landed on his lap rather than in his mouth, and what if he ordered the wine he hated, and had to drink it through the evening? He dismissed the last concern, as he did not have much taste for wine anyways, and as it happened, these scenarios failed to materialise.


“So, how long have you worked in economic consulting?” asked Clarissa; it was a conventional first date question; background checks were always essential, after all.

“Five Years. Before that, I worked at Scotiabank.”

“How long have you worked at HRSDC?”

“Four years. Before that, I was at Heritage,”

The conversation at dinner flowed smoothly, and he thought that they had hit it off, thought James.

He was saying, “The causes of reduced performance are always the same: the market, lack of regulation, and so on; but it’s the ‘universal remedy: vigorous downsizing––layoffs of those least responsible’, that bothers me.” He then reached for the saltshaker and sprinkled some salt on his chicken and some more on his mashed potatoes.

Clarissa perked up. “You’ve read Galbraith too? He’s one of my favourite economists, and his last book was really interesting,”

The economics of Innocent Fraud, published a few years ago, was interesting, thought James. It had taken him only an hour and a half to read, as it was such a slim volume; it was also highly prescient, and it was for this reason that he liked John Kenneth Galbraith so much. With this, the conversation turned to that economic thinker and paragon of liberalism in the American sense of the word.

James said, “He didn’t predict the downfall and financial crisis, of course, but what he said about fraud was very well-timed. By the way, when did you read it?”

“Two years ago; timed it right with the housing collapse in the States. It’s a pity he didn’t live to see his rhetoric proven, but on the other hand, he was ninety-seven; I don’t think he had anything to complain about, given that long and rich life.”

“No indeed,”

“If only people had listened to him more back then; were his words given their proper weight, we might never have had a stock crash, or an accompanying recession,”

“Things like that would have been consigned to the history books where they belonged,”

“The parallels between the two booms, of the 1920s and the millennium, that is, are so obvious as to be farcical: both were housing booms; both were driven by rampant speculation; both were accompanied by a lack of oversight, and still nobody did anything,”

“People saw it coming, though,”

“True; especially Paul Krugman. He’s my modern economic hero; he predicted the bursting of the bubble several years before it happened,”

“Well, innocent fraud was a very apt way to describe the ways in which executives were getting paid; I remember a case with a company, now bankrupt––Jessups, they were a conglomerate that made wrenches, various other tools, and dabbled into paper manufacturing, furniture and electronics. Anyways, the average salary for a factory worker was twenty dollars an hour; not too grandiose, but one could live on it, and a couple could raise a child on it if they knew what they were doing. The bigwigs––the CEO, the CFO, and the COO, made many millions, which a board essentially rubber-stamped because they were all agog with their star power, and I mean real star power; they were former Wall Street wizards, and supposedly knew their stuff. They went on a massive spending spree, bought up all sorts of skyscraper office space in Toronto, a whole skyscraper in San Francisco, and an island off the coast of Russia in a fit of ill-advised mineral speculation.”

“I doubt that they ever found anything on that island, and it was nationalised two years later. I have no idea what they were thinking; nobody in that company, as far as I know, was a geologist, and there was little expertise around. Debt fuelled all of this, and then the recession hit, and the creditors came to call; a recession has a funny way of making people think they need to redeem their bonds. They couldn’t pay the creditors, and had do declare bankruptcy. I take it they were cheats?”

“Yes, and magnificent actors, too,”

“A morality tale, as it were: never bite off more than you can chew, never buy what you can’t pay for, and definitely never pay people more than they are worth.”

“I think the executive pay set off an arms race; one company did it, so every company had to do it to ‘attract the top talent’.” James put air quotes around the last phrase in indication that the aforementioned rationale was, at best, laughable, and at worst, immoral and sinful. Of the seven deadly sins it was obviously greed.

“What happened to the executives at the top?”

“As it happens, the CEO, Isaac Scura, kept his job while Jessups haemorrhaged workers and eventually closed.”

The conversation went on in a similar fashion, exalting Galbraith and Krugman for the remainder of the evening, as they consumed their roast duck. After that came dessert: cheesecake drizzled liberally with chocolate syrup and topped with blackberries for him, and a sundae for her; the blackberries, whose season was late July and August, had been frozen, which resulted in them being runny. By now, the chivalrous streak that James had started the evening with had worn off, and they decided to split the bill, paying for their respective dinners; the gift would not be a meal, but each other’s company. The evening left James thinking very well of Clarissa; he looked into her eyes and saw that she was a kindred spirit; he reflected on this at length after he delivered her to her apartment.

Clarissa hugged James warmly before he departed from her apartment at 10:15 in the evening.


That went decently, thought James: there were no disasters; in fact, that went quite well. It is always very nice when a couple’s ideas are consonant rather than dissonant. Had he been a Keynesian and she a monetarist, the conversation would not have carried on nearly so smoothly, but would have been just as long, with a lot more gesticulating. It would have been worse still had she known nothing at all of economics, and had rather been into something like biology or English.

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The First Part of Chapter 1: Encounter

James had just finished speaking. That went well, he thought, staring at the clock on the opposite wall; he thought that it read 10:15, which was odd; he looked again, and saw that it was actually 2:51. His throat tended to get dry very quickly into a conversation, so he always needed to keep some liquid handy. This particular meeting involved talking for five minutes at a stretch, and he only had to take a drink three minutes into one of these speeches. It seemed well received too, he thought dreamily, as people were nodding understandingly, and nobody was looking at other people or at their Blackberrys. He did this from time to time, as the economic consulting firm where he worked advised various companies and levels of government on economic policies; this particular presentation was to Human Resources and Social Development Canada, with whom his firm was collaborating on a project looking into the effectiveness of Employment Insurance, and whether it or a job-creation strategy would be best-suited to alleviating the financial worry associated with unemployment.

A pretty brown-haired woman getting his attention brought James back into the room in mind as well as in body: “Oh, hello; I couldn’t help you looking at me.”

“What? Oh, sorry.”

“That’s quite all right. My name is Clarissa.”

“I’m James,” said James, quite forgetting that he had told the audience his name when he walked into the room about an hour previously. The meeting was over, and most attendees had filed out of the room. Only James, James’s boss Maurice, Clarissa, and Clarissa’s cubicle neighbour Nicolas remained.

“Clarissa’s a nice name,” said James. Clarissa walked over to the other side of the table where James was sitting and shook his hand.

“That was a very good presentation, James.”

“Thank you.” Her hands were soft and warm to the touch, despite the cold of the office and the fact that it was February, and thus snowing heavily. Her perfume had a lilac scent.

“So, I shall be seeing you again.”

It was a statement, not a question, and Clarissa wrote her phone number on a piece of paper. By now, Nicolas had gathered his notes and had left.

“Do you expect me to call you, and what makes you think I’m single? You’re right, you know; I am single.”

Clarissa smiled. “So am I. I’m looking to change that.”

“Well, I’ll see you around, then.”

Clarissa left the room, and James was alone. He helped himself to the last remaining donut; it turned out to be Boston cream, which was his favourite along with the honey cruller he had consumed at the start of the meeting.

It looks like Clarie finally got lucky, thought Nicolas; it looks similar to the way I met Madeleine. She was single for five years while she was working here, too; she also resisted the advances of the office boor, which was admittedly not altogether hard to do, considering he usually did it as a poorly-conceived running joke, and thus had another similarity with Clarissa; now, Madeleine was working for Service Canada. He had also noticed over the years that Clarissa had been working at the office that she was always dressed well and tastefully; although she was beautiful, her dress was never in any way provocative, and this prompted Yvon, the boor, to tell her to show a bit more skin or curves, perhaps she would attract some more attention from the boys. Speaking of which, when Nicolas was walking behind Clarissa on the way to his cubicle, Yvon came the other way and said, “well, aren’t we happy today,”

His eyes travelled down her body as she passed, primly ignoring him.

Clarissa would always roll her eyes or otherwise shrug off any half-serious advances from Yvon, and never talked to him unless she really had to. This was not to say that Yvon desired her himself: he was married, and had three teenage children, but he had never grown past the stage in a man’s life when he wolf-whistles at any attractive woman he sees. Thus, very few at the office took him seriously, with the significant exception of the directors. Nicolas walked back into his office, and Vilia, who had spent a substantial portion of the afternoon on the phone, followed, with a question from the Minister that the office received periodically. “He’s wondering about the impact of labour market policy on youth,” she explained.

“Very well, I’ll write him an answer,” said Nicolas, and wiggled the mouse around, which got rid of the picture of the ski jumper from Ste-Jovite who had won a medal on Saturday in Vancouver, replacing it with the picture of Madeleine that he had as a background screen.

“Clarissa looks quite happy,” said Vilia; she made comments about people as a way of distracting herself from the stresses of the job.

“She always is,” said Nick; he did not care for Vilia’s interest in people; he was a statistician, and when he gossiped, he did it with the neighbours at his cottage on the Mauricie River, not with co-workers. Vilia had seen the look on Clarissa’s face when she was going to the bathroom and passed Vilia’s cubicle on the way. Nick wrote a response to the Minister’s question, and then regarded with annoyance the snow that was falling outside, which meant that he would have to clear his driveway for the third time in the past week. Shovelling snow, for him, took some of the romance out of Valentine’s Day, when they had received a foot of it; he also had to shovel the roof that day at Madeleine’s behest.

While James and Maurice, who was James’s boss and owner of the consulting firm––he even named the firm eponymously as Valoix Consulting––walked to the elevators, James could hardly notice his surroundings or keep his feet on the ground; he was going on a date with a beautiful woman. He might as well have been walking on a cloud, and he did not want to try to come to earth, which only happened when he heard Maurice saying something.

“That went well,” he said.

“Hm?”

“The meeting; you did very well in your talk; I think the government will commend us,” said Maurice, who hoped for new clients and more business, which was then hard to come by. His home life was going on a decidedly different course, much to his regret; Rose was threatening divorce and to take custody of their youngest son, André; the older son, Michel, cared little for the whole proceeding, and as he was older than eighteen, he was left out of the impending custody battle. Maurice’s disastrous home life made him prefer to stay longer at work, just for the sake of avoiding the tumultuous household for a little while longer. He then noticed that James had seemed rather distracted. “Say Jim, did something happen in that meeting?”

“Well, of course, I talked about labour market policy,”

“You know that’s not what I meant,”

“I met a girl,”

“She looked more like a woman and a very attractive one at that; I didn’t really talk to anyone except those two people, Nicolas and Yvon; we were discussing statistics.” Of course Maurice knew exactly who James meant; of the three women in the room, one looked far too young, as if she were in university, the other had the harried look of the mother of several children, and there was the tall woman with shoulder-length, light brown hair; he had seen her and James talking at the end of the meeting from his vantage point at the opposite end of the room. The two then did little talking as they went downstairs, got into Maurice’s car, and drove back to their office.


On the Wednesday after James and Clarissa’s encounter, James phoned her.

“Hey, it’s James. You remember, from the meeting on Monday?”

“Of course I remember. I like your carefree hair,”

“Thanks,” replied James, blushing.

“So, are you doing anything this weekend?”

“I can do anything you like,”

James decided to play it safe with the first date idea: “How about going to a restaurant?”

“Did you have anything in mind?”

“The Empire Café?”

“Sounds good. Say, you sound just as nice on the phone as you do in person,”

“Thank you,” said James, reddening. “Your voice also sounds nice,”

Clarissa laughed, which to James came across as a musical sound.

“So, see you Saturday. How does five-thirty work?”

“Very well.”

“Oh, what should we do beforehand?”

“Oh, come over to my place,” said Clarissa, and she gave him her address.

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Cover Page

This is the novel's cover page. It's a scanned image of a painting.

Plan of the novel and serialisation schedule

Hello.

During the summer, I wrote a novel, entitled Fickle Fortune, and you can read it here; I shall start serialising it on September 13. Each post will range in length from just under 1000 words to 1500 words. The novel is approximately 100,000 words long, which means that at a rate of 1000-1500 words every day, the complete novel will be online in early December.

The novel is almost entirely a product of my imagination; however, some characters are based on real people.

I was inspired by the works of Thomas Hardy in the composition of this novel; Shakespeare was also a major influenceand the discipline of economics, though in terms of inspiration, I might include everything I have ever read, but listing that would be exhaustive.

Enjoy!