The Third Part of Chapter 4: Merging and Reawakening

On the following Tuesday, James was busy at work when Courtney entered his office; James liked Courtney, who was always energetic, composed, and enthusiastic about everything to do with Valoix Consulting. Maurice liked her too, for the same reasons.

“Hi Jim. So, listen, I have the details of the account from that person, what’s-her-name, from Venneris. Oh, her name’s Eileen; I almost forgot. They seem to be doing fairly well, but I think they could diversify into printer cartridge paper. At the rate we’re going, we shall need plenty of cartridge paper,”

“It would also help if they stopped giving out free spools of newsprint to the local college; I know newsprint is cheap, but it can’t be that cheap, I mean, come on.”

“Yes, I also told them that. You know the details?”

“Yes, I received the e-mail, and it seems fairly straightforward. Diversify into cartridge paper and letterhead, there’s really not much to it in terms of economic advice, though on the technical side, I imagine it would be a little more difficult, and I ran a cost-analysis, and apparently, it will take a million dollars for them to convert some space in their mill to the production of cartridge paper. I don’t know, they might also look into egg cartons,”

“Perhaps someone should pay her a visit?” wondered James aloud, idly.

“Go to Newfoundland?”

“I’m sure a holiday there would be nice; it’s cool in the summer,” said James. He had wanted to go to Newfoundland for a while; for him, it was a mystical land, untamed with many unpopulated places, in addition to its lovely towns and villages. His view of the province owed plenty to the Newfoundland government’s concerted marketing campaign, and thus James thought of Newfoundland as a place filled with vivid colours, happy people, and lush vegetation. Whether this impression was accurate remained to be seen.

“So, how’s Clarissa?”

In surprise, James said, “Oh, it’s going very well, actually. You know the hiking trip we’re going on as a company fling just after Canada Day? Clarissa’s coming.”

“Really? That sounds exciting; I asked my boyfriend if he wanted to come, but he didn’t seem too interested. It’s mostly work that gets him excited, but me, I prefer a balance; the work week can only be so long before it completely takes over your life.” She understood the workweek to have a limit of sixty hours; Maurice, however, was of a different mindset, as everyone at the firm knew; his employees knew him for working over 100 hours in a week, being of an entrepreneurial mindset. He exalted hard, long hours at the office, and believed that this made him more macho. His wife disagreed with this sentiment, however, and everyone could guess that this was one of the reasons behind the divorce, which had just occurred; whenever Maurice was not talking about business, he was griping about Rose, who had taken custody of their youngest son.

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The Second Part of Chapter 4: Merging and Reawakening

At lunch, Vilia, Nicolas and Clarissa went to the food court in the adjoining mall. Clarissa had her own lunch, and purchased only some freshly squeezed juice. Nicolas had some chicken wings from a stand, while Vilia had poutine.

“Always the healthy eater,” noted Vilia, as she watched Clarissa eat her whole-wheat sandwich with turkey, cheese and spicy pepper rings.

“Healthy eating’s important, you know,” said Clarissa.

“Did you ever, you know, live a little? This poutine is tasty and rich, you know; perhaps you’d like to try some?”

“I’ve heard bad things about the amount of salt that’s in the gravy,” said Clarissa.

“So? It’s not like I’m going to get high blood pressure; I only do this every two weeks,”

“I heard that about salt too,” said Nicolas. “They just like to use it as a cheap flavouring. By the way, what does your boyfriend like to eat?”

“Salty snacks. I don’t see anything wrong with it,” said Clarissa. Nick raised his eyebrows.

“He is your boyfriend, though; you aren’t going to mould him in your image, starting with the gruelling workout regime?”

“I don’t see any need for a regimen; as long as he’s healthy and smart, I’ll take him,”

“Maddie tried to mould me,” said Nick. “It’s always, ‘you need to exercise more’, or ‘ne mange pas les croustilles’.”

“Yvon complains about that a lot,” said Clarissa. “You ought to hear him sometimes; just yesterday, he came into my office, and I thought he was going to talk about funding a program, but he just talked about how his wife was pushing him to give up chocolate mousse; I would never go that far,”

“You mean for yourself?”

“No, I mean for Jim.”

“You let him eat whatever he wants? Good woman; that’s exactly what I would want in a wife, by which I mean, not nitpicking over my eating habits,” said Nick. “I prefer not to worry about heart attacks and other results of high blood pressure and cholesterol, especially when the risk is low,”

“Thank you,” said Clarissa. “I mean, the risk might be higher for other people––I have heard of some people keeling over just out of the blue––but fortunately, that’s rare. Oh, and have I told you? I moved in with him. Now, instead of catching the bus at Hurdman, I’m walking to work,”

“Is that out of a desire to stay thin?”

“Actually, it’s because I don’t want to drive, and bus service isn’t that good downtown. It’s either half an hour walking, or twenty-five minutes on a bus. That’s how bad it is,”


When James arrived home that evening, he found Clarissa already there, cooking a dinner. “Thanks honey, I’ll wash up when we’re done,” he said. Thus, the relationship changed from courting to a more domestic one, although the couple still went on frequent dates; living together would also be cheaper than the two of them living separately, considering the lower costs of living, as far as housing and food were concerned.


The relationship progressed such that James and Clarissa did their grocery shopping together. On their first joint trip to Hartman’s, the nearest grocery store, they met Belinda, who knew the couple through their mutual friend, Eunice. Neither of them knew Belinda particularly well, but both of them knew her reputation for gossip.

“Hello, don’t you two look simply lovely,” said Belinda upon seeing them.

“You look nice too, Bela,” replied Clarissa. This was not entirely true, thought James; her slightly wavy hair was dishevelled, and looked like she had not washed it in a couple of days. She was also slightly sweaty, which was an effect that alcohol had on people during heat waves such as the one they were currently experiencing. Indeed, it seemed that it was summer immediately after the last vestiges of snow had melted; there was hardly any spring of which to speak.

“We’re just going to Hartman’s,” said James. “We need to stock up on vegetables, you know,”

Vegetables like potatoes that I can cut up and fry, thought he.

“I just told Jeannine how lovely you look together, and that you will be quite the item in the summer. I hope this impression is true,” said Belinda.

“Oh, it’s very true,” said James.

The interrogation went on in this vein for several minutes, covering everything Belinda could think of; towards the end, James and Clarissa were becoming slightly evasive in their answers; neither of them were willing to reveal every single personal detail.

“Well, see you around,”

“See you,”

“What do you think of her?” asked Clarissa.

“She seems rather prying. Is it really necessary for her to know every last detail of our lives?”

“For her, yes; she thrives on gossip like you and I thrive on bread and water.”

“Do you think we should um…try to minimise our contact with her?”

“She lives on Lyon Street, you know,” said Clarissa. “If she wants to come over from time to time to discuss the neighbours or whatever, I don’t see any reason to stop her, provided she doesn’t get too out of hand. She also has a reputation when it comes to the bottle; she likes anything alcoholic, as long as it tastes good, which is why I could never understand her obsession with wine. I hate the stuff; I think it tastes horrid.”

Belinda actually drank substantial amounts of wine, and considered herself a connoisseur; she had a substantial wine rack in her basement that dated back to her marriage to Kale, who was now divorced from her.

James opinion of Belinda declined steadily over the next few weeks, just as he and Clarissa grew more and more attached. Both of them were busy, but they could still spend their evenings together.

On one such evening, the two were discussing a seasonal topic: their mothers.

“Mom can seem overbearing at times,” said Clarissa.

“How so?”

“She seems to have her own suggestions for how everything in my life should go; it’s all done out of love of course,”

“Is she one of those who put the ‘mother’ in smother?”

“I wouldn’t say she’s smothering me; she let me go my own way when I turned twenty; she thought that by then, the mothering duties insofar as guiding her children had run its course,”

“Mom was not so much like that; she was much more hands-off with me; she would always say ‘boys will be boys’, and leave it at that,”

“Was she like that with Kate?”

“Not so much; with Kate, she was more like your mother,”

“I wonder why mothers would treat their sons one way and their daughters another,” said James.

“I think you’re pulling too broad a conclusion from too small a sample size; we are only talking about two mother-child relationships here,”

“I heard Eunice’s mom would let her do whatever she wanted,”

“Really? I heard that she was simply skilled at slipping through her mother’s fingers and flouting all the rules; she was quite the party girl in university,” said Clarissa.

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The First Part of Chapter 4: Merging and Reawakening

The week following Easter found both James and Clarissa in high spirits. Maurice noted that quality in James, even though he had always been a chipper man, and Vilia, Nicolas and Yvon noted the same quality in Clarissa. Yvon started referring to her as “Miss Head-in-the-Clouds,” or its French equivalent.

He commented, “Là va Mademoiselle Tête-dans-le-Ciel,”

“No, no, Yvon, I’m just as much grounded on the earth, just like you are,” said she after he made that comment when she passed by his office on her way to a meeting.

“She must be in paradise,” he said to himself; he, on the other hand, was beginning to grow bored of his married life; only his teenagers provided him excitement.

Clarissa moved in with James on the weekend following Easter. Her rental apartment was in the eastern suburbs, which meant that moving into James’s house would be a step up for Clarissa, so it was essentially a no-brainer: Clarissa should move in with James, not the other way around. Although James had owned his house for five years, his workweek was fifty hours, he was not particularly sociable, and therefore knew only a few of his neighbours, which amounted to only seven people, which was hardly anybody for such a densely populated area. It was a cold, crisp day in April, and last year’s detritus lay soggy on the ground, compressed under the weight of the heavy mantle of snow that had been present since November. There was also five centimetres of fresh snow that had fallen the previous evening, which was now melting, and creating large, slushy puddles. For this reason, Clarissa hurried in and out of her car and the moving van she had rented, which, considering she was renting her apartment, thankfully had plenty of spare room: she brought a mirror, her clothes, books, dresser, clothing, and various odds and ends. It was over in an hour, and the process had now moved to the spare bedroom that James had been using as an extra lounge. They had agreed to sleep in separate rooms for a month, and then get more intimate. This was not so much principle as circumstance: James did not have a double bed, and in an earlier discussion, Clarissa said she wanted to go further than just a double bed and get a queen-size bed.

“You know, I think we can buy a queen bed in three weeks or so; we’ll go to Ikea or somewhere and look for something on the first of May,” said James.

“We’re going shopping? This is obviously a sign of progress in our relationship. Come here, you.” They kissed.

“I think there are several other things we need to do…” said James vaguely, while pondering just what they had to buy: they needed new bookshelves, bed sheets, fresh herbs to put on his steaks and chickens, perhaps a carpet, and all manner of other things; he had not entirely grown out of his old buy-nearly-everything-you-see persona. Some features of his house had obvious qualities of a man-cave, including pictures of women in bikinis hung on the walls, a decided paucity of vegetables in the crisper, and clothes lying on the floor. James thought that it was the opinion of most women that par-terres should be made of plants arranged in an artistic pattern in a garden, not shirts and old socks laying at random on the bed and floor.

“Now that there’s a woman living in the house––I’m not just visiting anymore––the clothes lying on the ground are going to have to go.”

“There’s an easy concession. Will you promise to keep the bathtub drain free of hairs? I haven’t had that problem, as nobody with long hair has lived here before.”

“You know, I’ve just realised how many friends live nearby; there are Eunice and Mario, who live just down the street, Laura lives a few blocks away, and I believe Kevin’s house is on the other side of Dundonald Park.”

“Yes, it’s so wonderful knowing so many people in the neighbourhood already; I haven’t been too quick in getting to meet people; I’m more a work kind of guy and this home has essentially been a bedroom.”

“It’s been a similar situation with my apartment on the east side of the river; now we have each other; I expect this will become a real home. You know something else about this house? I can walk to work from here; it should take about half an hour,”

“I can’t do that, but I walk to the grocery store all the time, and since I take the bus to work and my friends either live close by or come to see me rather than the other way around, I rarely use my car; the last time I drove it was in mid-March on a trip to Cornwall.”

Moving into James’s house on McLeod Street improved Clarissa’s mood significantly; she did not explicitly tell James what the main factor was; he simply assumed it was a combination of living in a nice old house, being able to walk to work, not having to worry about the busses being stuck somewhere, or having more room, but he could tell she was happy, and he suspected that he wasn’t alone in this observation; her co-workers would notice, the neighbours who knew her would notice, and her parents would notice the perk in her voice during phone calls, which he knew she made at least once a week.


During the morning coffee break on Friday at 10:15, Vilia was talking to Nicolas while they sat at a small table among the tropical plants in the atrium of their office building; it was not anything important, but simply gossip.

“Clarissa’s looking unusually happy lately,” said Vilia.

“Have you heard? She’s dating someone who made a presentation here back in February.”

“That’s really nice for her,” Vilia had always admired Clarissa’s work ethic, and was really impressed: she was engaged, always smiling, and never batted an eyelid at anything, and contrary to many others in the office, never showed any signs of fatigue, even though she frequently put in extra hours and the directors noted her very high productivity. “Was he the really tall middle-aged man?”

“No, his name’s Maurice. She’s dating the other guy, James.”

“I would have thought that she would pick someone better looking; there’s nothing particularly special or eye-catching about him; he wasn’t too tall, and he seemed to have gone a bit to seed.”

“I don’t think she picked him for looks; if she did, that would severely limit the dating pool.”

Talking about Clarissa like this seems awkward, thought Nicolas; fortunately, in the atrium nobody pays too much attention to us. It was then that Clarissa came down the escalator for her morning coffee. Vilia and Nicolas both heard her approach first due to her pumps.

“Good morning, Nick, Vilia,” she said.

“Good morning, Clarissa,” said Vilia. Nicolas nodded. Their conversation turned to the labour market until Clarissa went back up the escalator, coffee in hand. Nicolas noted that she was looking unusually trim lately, but perhaps that was an effect of her smiling all the time.

“Do you find it rather odd that she always has a grin plastered to her face?”

“That would be her thinking of her beloved; I bet they’re quite enamoured of each other: couples become that way in that phase of their relationship,”

When Vilia arrived back at her desk, she went back to her original work, which was composing a long email for the head of a Service Canada Branch in Vancouver; it was on policy and the details of new programs, and she found the details too boring to discuss with someone who was not a co-worker, and everyone in the office knew about it anyways, so there was not any point in discussing it with them, either.


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