The Fourth Part of Chapter 9: The New Arrangement

Maurice had organised a work dinner for September 24th; it was essentially a meeting at a restaurant with a lot of food. Given that it was expensive, and given that he had to keep some semblance of being above board, he paid for the dinner out of his own pocket, rather than out of the business account. There was some aspect of the dinner that was troubling him, and that was a growing feeling of unease in his mind; the firm was continuing to slide, and would do so until he took some decisive action; what was there to do? Certainly, some jobs will be lost, he thought, desiring to dissociate himself from these losses, as ultimately, he would be the one making the decisions and laying people off; given that layoffs were a nasty business, he tried to delay the inevitable as long as possible, but the inevitable was looming, larger and larger, like the financial crisis that had triggered the most spectacular losses of the past recession, which was foreseeable to some several years before the fact. Although many firms had recovered and were turning a profit, Maurice could not count Valoix consulting among them. There was no good way to do layoffs, and Maurice liked all of his employees; the least unfair method would be a lottery; he would draw names from a hat, and would not heed traditional qualifiers such as seniority, employment equity or anything like that. Quality of work was irrelevant in this context, as all of his employees, in his opinion, were exemplary. He artfully kept up pretences of cheerfulness as he led the group of twenty to the restaurant, and that bothered his conscience, as the best way would be to advise them of the impending cuts and suggest that it may be a good idea for people to update their résumés; there was no convenient time for him to do this, however. Each time he felt like telling them, he could see the smiles, and those smiles vanishing.

“Hello, we have a reservation. You’ll find it under Valoix,” said Maurice to the hostess, brushing the rain out of his hair. He attempted to banish the thought of impending layoffs from his mind, but it was ever-present, just below the surface, even tonight, when everyone at the firm were supposed to be enjoying themselves.

Clarissa smiled at James. “It’s very nice for you to have invited me,” she said. “Do you do this often?”

“Yes,” said James. “Maurice tries to do this every year,”

“We don’t get to do them that much in the public sector; bureaucrats aren’t supposed to have fun,” said Clarissa.

“So, your boss is the stereotypical frowning bureaucrat?”

“Not so much; we have fun in the office, for sure, but we always have to do it on our own money; the guy has a sardonic sense of humour,”

Clarissa turned to Arlene behind her. “Do you find Maurice to be a nice person? My husband says so,”

“Oh yeah, but you can always tell when there’s something on his mind. Like now, see; he’s pondering too much for it to be something good, and you can see it in his knitted brows right now,” Maurice overheard Arlene, and quickly looked away; he was, at heart, something of a secret-keeper; he rarely divulged very much about himself. “That’s setting me on edge,” said Arlene.

“My boss is like that whenever there’s a controversy over EI.”

“Did you hear of those noises being made about payroll taxes?”

“Yes, and it will mean a lot of work for us; weighing the pros and cons of EI financing through premiums is a very tricky business, and it involves all sorts of complicated mathematical models,”

“I can only imagine; I’m an accountant, myself,” said Arlene.

All told, foreboding subtexts or not, the dinner went well, save that Clarissa spilled some of her drink on her dress; Maurice didn’t think his employees were feeling unduly apprehensive, but therein lied a bigger problem: was it better for them to be on their toes and come begging him not to lay them off? The answer was uncertain, but Maurice didn’t want to deal with it; he had started the firm in 2002, over some objections from his wife, who wondered why he didn’t do something with more stability, such as teaching, a job in the public sector, or a bank in Toronto, but Maurice made it clear that he did it for the exhilaration; now, exhilaration’s downside was presenting itself. It would not do to make his employees nervous by telling them of impending layoffs and doom, but it would also not do to have the sudden shock of unemployment hit them; there was no good way out of the situation, and he could only offset the day of reckoning.

Economic tempests, while present for Maurice, were as far from James’s mind as could be; he was just discovering that married life could be a bore as well as the ideal espoused relentlessly by mainstream media; he thought that his revelation of married life as less than glamorous was actually what all the advice was striving for: a manual on how to achieve success in marriage would actually be a manual on how to achieve some kind of equilibrium, or some boredom; however, boredom breeds contempt, and James was just starting to feel the first glimmers of frustration; one must always feel that they are moving, thought James; equilibrium and stasis are for the dead. This was necessary for excitement; there must be something new, and he thought that the upcoming family Thanksgiving with the extended Varrette family might provide some drama, even if he and Margaret were at the centre of it due to their tension.

At the end of the dinner, the bill came to $203, which Maurice paid with his credit card; it had been cheaper than he was expecting; typically, this sort of dinner would run to over $20 per person, but that was not the case on this night.

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The Third Part of Chapter 9: The New Arrangement

On Friday evening, and James and Clarissa were in living room, discussing James’s relationship with Margaret, which by now should have been amicable, but had gotten off on the wrong foot at the outset. James thought to himself that this resembled a stereotypical session with a psychologist, and had Clarissa asked “how’s your relationship with my mother?” he wouldn’t be at all surprised; he actually might find that incongruously funny, and was half-relieved when that phrase did not make an appearance.

“I don’t understand your mother; for some reason she didn’t warm up to me.”

“I don’t really understand it myself; maybe she hasn’t seen enough of you,”

“I know I may have a few things wrong with me, like my eating habits, for instance; but does Margaret really need to dwell so significantly on every single fault I have?”

He recalled the phone conversation Clarissa had had with Margaret two nights previously, which he felt lingered rather unfairly on the topics of his waistline, which was not even so bad, and his job, which he thought was quite good; what made that woman think work would keep him away from Clarissa? That she would make these comments was one thing; but she seemed to find nothing good with him, ranging from his clothes, to what he was cooking for dinner. Listening to her led him to the conclusion that it was she, rather than he who was wrong. Is it not hypocrisy when someone is unable to find anything good with you? No, but it certainly leads there.

“You know, there can’t possibly be that much wrong with me, and her ‘worries’ about me working to much are simply spurious.”

“I’m sorry if my mother has such an attitude toward you; I personally think she gets judgmental of people at times,”

“You mean all the time? Could you tell her that she doesn’t need to read negative things into all of my actions, and some of what she says sounds like gratuitous attacks?”

“She also seemed to take it as something of a personal affront that I was moving in with you, and not the other way around. Did she really expect us to move in to that tiny apartment? No; your house is so much better,”

I also quite like the old Victorian feel to the building; it gives a sense of heritage and it looks distinguished, thought James.

“I think she has a certain mindset: the man must do x for his wife, and if x is not done, or if the wife does it, then it is simply not okay, no matter what. She can be at least a little judgmental.”

“I don’t think so; mom just needs to warm up a little to you, honey,”

“I hope that’s the case; mom seems very close to you,”

“Oh yes, Patricia’s been very nice,”

“Do you think it may have something to do with that common stereotype?”

“The one where a mother is less than warm to her son-in-law? Maybe, I don’t know; I hope not,”

“It certainly gets portrayed a lot in the media,”

“Who doesn’t know Patty and Selma Bouvier?”

“It’s because the tumultuous relationship is full of drama and conflict, upon which comedy thrives,”

“I hope that your relationship with mom improves and becomes something less dramatic and more predictable,”

“She probably wants that too; she doesn’t seem to be trying very hard, though.”

“I’m bored; you want to do something fun in the bedroom?” Clarissa winked at him as she said this, and touched his hand suggestively, drawing it slowly to her thigh.


Belinda took a Saturday in September, incidentally the last Saturday of the summer, to get away from pavement, concrete and masonry and visit a more bucolic scene, in particular, the hilly nature reserve north of the city, to which she travelled by bicycle. After her trip to the nature reserve, she looked at her grapevines when she arrived home, and she saw that their leaves were just showing the first signs of changing colour, and decided what she needed to do: she needed to satiate her appetite for gossip; therefore, she called Christine.

“Hello Christine,”

“Hello Belinda; I’m sure you could just come over if you wanted to, considering you live just down the street.”

“I just finished a hike; my legs are sort of tired right now. What’s going on?”

“Oh, you know,” said Christine, in an effort to tell Belinda something in which she would be interested, without resorting to an overly wrought, fanciful tale about some mutual friends that may or may not be true. “I overheard Jim and Clarissa talking about monetary policy and discount rates when they passed by on their way to Hartman’s,”

“I don’t know what that means,” said Belinda.

“I’m just as much in the dark as you are,” said Christine.

“I don’t know what they talk about when they’re alone together, but they’re so boring when they talk to each other. Did you know they discuss each other’s credit ratings as a romantic turn on? Oh, and get this: I heard them calculating their psychic discount rates. Like, really! What the hell is that?” At that moment, there was a sort of disconnect between what she was thinking and what she was saying. Given this, it was only natural that she should make some errors. At this particular moment, she was considering what to put in the new planter she had purchased at the farmer’s market: parsley, rosemary, or thyme? She had made this purchase the previous Wednesday evening on impulse. She had been thinking something along the lines of “Ooh, shiny!” as she picked it up.

“Have you heard about what Patrick Wakefield is saying? He thinks we should protect domestic manufacturing, and stop the flow of jobs overseas. According to him, it’s a fast-growing concern, and I think he’s right.” Belinda liked the emotive arguments that Wakefield, the leader of the New Democrats, made, and really felt for the hard-pressed factory workers.

“Really? Shouldn’t they be finding jobs in the service sector?”

“Well, that would take some very expensive retraining, wouldn’t it? And anyways, I think it will be hard on them.”

Belinda thought it was a very good idea to protect jobs, in the same way that it was a good idea to protect health, and she was at a loss as to why so many people opposed it.

“Well, maybe if those jobs are going to other people, then it’s a good thing,” said Christine, though she was far from certain. She had studied psychology in university, not trade, and thus she was unfamiliar with the ins and outs of exchange.

“Oh, by the way, how’s Zack doing?”

“Zack? The one Eunice keeps inviting over for dinners when I’m at her house? He seems all right; they’re not too interested in what’s going on at his job, though; they only care about their own books.” Christine was referring to Eunice and Mario; Mario, even though he ran a Food Basics, hired somebody else to help him with the accounting, though Eunice counted up all the receipts and inventory herself; Belinda thought that perhaps Zack would have some business opportunities on the side with Mario.

“Well, it’s been nice talking to you, Christine,” said Belinda, and with that, she ended the call. She then let her mind wander to James and Clarissa. They were really quite boring together, she thought; she had never met Clarissa’s parents, and the stereotype of the in-laws, as ruthlessly promoted and portrayed by Patty and Selma Bouvier, gave a fertile ground for speculation; was the mother like the daughter, pretty, but rather boring? Did she go for boring men? James’s parents, on the other hand, she knew well, considering they lived just a few blocks north; to her, they seemed the typical retired couple, even though neither was retired, and still very much in love with each other, which was sweet, but again boring. Boredom seemed to be a state ideally aimed for in a happy life, she thought, and she read somewhere, she could not remember exactly, that one should only aim to be in the news twice: as a birth notice and as a death notice. James and Clarissa were aiming very much for this sort of life, as was she, though she had to admit she was far from happy; there was the completely messy divorce a while back, and what on earth was I thinking marrying that insensitive man, she thought. She then went to the kitchen and washed the dishes in the sink, while her black cat, Pollux, watched lazily from the dining room table, where it was sitting by the vase full of dried flowers.

“Hello Pollux, have you enjoyed playing with your neighbourhood friends?” Pollux stretched his legs contentedly. Belinda knew that Christine had a new cat, and she knew that Pollux knew this as well; she had seen him over there. Then Belinda realised she forgot to ask about Zachary; she knew Eunice was attempting to play matchmaker in getting Christine and Zachary together, but she had no idea how that was going. Maybe next time, she thought.

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The Second Part of Chapter 9: The New Arrangement

On Wednesday, Margaret decided to call her daughter to see how she was doing, as she had not heard from her since the letter had arrived on the first day of the month. She dialled the phone, and on the second ring, Clarissa answered.

“Hello Clarissa,”

“Hi mom,”

“Does James answer the phone?”

“Usually. Why?

“I don’t know. It seems to me that he never answers the phone,”

“Must you judge Jim so harshly? You only called four times, once just after the wedding and during our honeymoon, and that was on my cell phone, and then two more while I was home and he was at work. Four phone calls are not what you would call a representative sample, you know.”

“Um, right. How’s married life?”

“Pretty good. I’ve noticed a string of small incidents, though. I think we’re getting clumsy, now that we don’t have to perform to the very best ideal, as we did when we were dating. There are small things, like, you know, this morning Jim dropped his toast on the floor, butter side down. I have been knocking glasses over; I go to reach for my drink, and suddenly I find it on the ground, making a puddle. The washing machine seems to be breaking down, which is something Jim said he only noticed yesterday.”

That seems unimportant, thought Margaret. What about his socks? She had intended this as a thought, and it was a major sticking point with Hyram; intentions and actions can sometimes point in different directions, though.

“His socks? They seem fine. He’s very good about his socks, actually: he throws out any socks that have holes in them, and so far, I haven’t had to pick them up after him,”

There goes one common complaint; it seems more of a fictional anecdote that people tell one another than actual truth some of the time. Still, we have evidence in the family: Hyram always leaves his lying around the bedroom, and Mary found Ian’s habit of going barefoot inside irritating for some reason. Surely, there must be peccadilloes she is omitting.

“His eating habits are rather like grazing, I’ve noticed: he doesn’t eat ice cream straight from the tub, but he always goes back for second helpings, and he hovers around the bowl full of nuts in the living room. There’s nothing wrong with a few salted nuts.”

“I think he has too much waistline. Do you?”

“Mom, you know perfectly well I’m thin.”

“No, I mean him,”

“Who cares about his waistline?”

“I think you should. Thirty-eight inches is not what you would call healthy,”

“Then what do you think about dad?”

“Hyram is in his sixties; it’s normal to gain a few pounds in one’s later years. It offsets other problems. In a man’s thirties, however, he should have a flat stomach. You should know that,”

“Mom, must you dwell on his waistline so much? It’s fine with me; therefore it should be fine with you,”

James was upstairs watching television, and he overheard this.

“What about his job? Is he treating you right?”

“Of course, but I don’t see how that relates to his job; that’s one of the reasons why I married him. Granted, we don’t see a whole lot of each other during the daytime, it’s only three hours in the evening, the weekends, and fifteen minutes at breakfast, but I don’t think it’s important: we’re going to spend the rest of our lives together; we’re married.”

“I think he should be spending some more time at home; you know, to attend to you and get used to you.”

“I don’t think we’ll have a problem, and it’s really fine, it’s not like he’s the only person in my world. And you didn’t have any problems with Hyram, and back then he was a purchasing agent for Omega Faucets and thus always on the road. So if you managed, then so will I.”

“Oh, we had quite a lot of fights back then: there was always something going on, it was the dishes, the garbage, hair clogging the shower drain, that sort of stuff.”

“I imagine emotional attachment would have played some role in there, too.”

“Maybe,” said Margaret, who was uncomfortable that Clarissa had hit the nail on the head, stating a truth in her marriage: she had indeed gone through an emotionally needy stage a few months in, before they had any children, when she was obsessively thinking of Hyram, and constantly worrying about where he was. It was then that they both decided they needed children, and after that she quickly became pregnant; a year into their marriage, she had Mary.

“Is there anything that you would like to talk about other than Jim’s imagined habits of, I don’t know, fiddling around with pens in his fingers?”

“He does that?”

“No! I was just stating some imagined behaviour that you would probably project onto him.”

“Well, sorry about that; I’m sure he presents a different face to me than he does to you. It’s you that he loves, not me,”

“That could be an explanation,”

“I think it is.”

There was an awkward silence. “So,” said Clarissa, in an effort to move past the conversation block. “Has Hyram been doing anything interesting?”

“There’s been a comprehensive bridge audit that’s been keeping him busy; he’s been always travelling the province,”

“I see.”

“He complains about the travel every evening, and last week he went to Nipigon and up north.”

“Was he tired after that?”

“Extremely; I think he’ll be looking into retirement sometime soon,”

“That should be nice for him; many people your age have been retired for ten years already,”

“You know me; I just like to keep busy; I’ll likely be working until I drop,”

“That should be fun,”

“Well, good-bye, Clarie. I’ll always love you,”

“Bye mom. I love you too.”

Clarissa hung up the phone, and James, having overheard a substantial portion of what Clarissa said, conjectured the questions Margaret had asked.

“What was that about?”

“Just mom. She wanted to see how we were doing.”

“Meaning she wanted to know about me,”

“Pretty much. The whole conversation revolved around you.”

“What did she want to know?”

“Various things. I don’t think she formed a good impression of you, and she simply wants to get a clearer image of you in her mind.”

James thought this description of the conversation was glossing things over, but did not tell Clarissa.

“Oh, and did I tell you, I just saw the most adorable little kitten playing in Christine’s front yard today; she told me she had got it when we were on our honeymoon. It looks so cute and fuzzy and soft" and she then went on to tell him that she saw that Christine had a rather handsome visitor over.

James noted the attempt to distract him from the conversation that she had just had with her mother, and murmured in acknowledgement. His mind was admittedly on other things: he was thinking about the accounting statements of various clients, financial analyses that he needed to do, and the fact that several of them appeared to be in trouble.

“What are you thinking?” James’s only answer to this was awkward silence. He wondered why women bothered to use this, as it usually had the opposite effect of that desired. Meant to start a conversation, or meant to peer into the innermost parts of one’s soul, it would simply elicit the response from him of “umm...” which was what he said. Many other women had asked him the same question, and normally, the relationship was over within a month if the woman in question were his girlfriend at the time, or else the remark would simply leave an awkward void in a room were the questioner his mother; this had happened in his teenage years, and Patricia had eventually learned not to ask him that.

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The First Part of Chapter 9: The New Arrangement

It was the 4th of September, and James and Clarissa were preparing dinner at home in anticipation of hosting a friend. The friend, Jonathan, had known James through a previous job at Scotiabank, where Jonathan still worked as a strategist and Maurice, looking for another client, had pulled some strings, and the result was that they had invited Jonathan and his wife, Iris, over for dinner. James was preparing bread, and Clarissa was roasting a pheasant. As it turned out, James had managed to burn the bread, as the cooking time recommended by the cookbook seemed to be ten minutes longer than the bread actually needed under normal conditions, and the oven’s thermometer was out of commission, which James had only just noticed. The pheasant, which was also in the oven, seemed to have been undercooked, a fact only noticed when Clarissa was carving into the bird. The atmosphere was unimproved when Iris slipped on the front step, and Jonathan got his trousers caught on a hook somewhere (James spent the night looking for said hook). Jonathan and Iris, however, didn’t pay much attention to these details, cared much more for James and Clarissa’s personalities rather than their cooking, and complimented them on everything they could think of, in an effort to keep up their flagging spirits, and out of human kindness.

“It’s so nice to see you here after five years,” said Jonathan. “It’s nice to see you’re taking care of yourself.”

“I don’t really try,”

“You’re still looking great,” said Jonathan, although he said this more in the fashion of reassurance than sincerity; James appeared as if he had put on a few pounds since he had left Scotiabank, and seemed to have moved up in terms of pants size.

After dinner had been finished and the guests departed, James expressed his dim opinion of that dinner to Clarissa.

“I’m glad that’s over,” said he. “It was so embarrassing when Iris slipped on the front step; I think I should have swept the leaves off,”

“It was just luck, and there aren’t any leaves on the steps; it was the rain.”

“The bread burning wasn’t luck,” said James.

“The thermometer breaking was. How old’s the oven?”

“Five years; I bought it when I purchased the house,”

“Well, there’s built-in obsolescence for you; they sure don’t make them like they used to,”

Jonathan and Iris, driving home from the same dinner, were also discussing the night’s events.
“James seems like a nice person, if a bit of a duffer; that wasn’t how I remembered him,” he said.

“It’s unfortunate that the pheasant was rare,” she added.

“They seem like quite a happy couple together, not like us; we’re constantly arguing over the small things,”

“––And then we make up for it at night.”

“I think that would be because they were just married in August, while we have been together for ten years. We also have kids, you know,”

“I know––what’s that supposed to mean?”

“Figure of speech, honey,”

“Hmm; ah yes, kids: they throw a wrench into every possible plan. I was looking forward to a
nice, quiet afternoon, and then little Vivienne wanted to know what happens when you microwave a goldfish.”

“That would be uproariously funny to an outsider,”

“But it caused no end of irritation to us, and particularly me. I had to clean the microwave of fried goldfish guts.”

The conversation continued in this vein until they were some way south, driving along the river, when the topic of conversation turned to work: “So, Scotiabank is pushing into other markets in South America; it’s a part of their overall growth strategy.”

“Yes, I hear that the Latin American Economies are doing quite well, for those who are reasonably well off.”

“’Reasonably well off’ is a key term; but, as you know, the companies are indifferent to the inequality in a country. We let governments deal with that.”

“I hope, for your sake, that it doesn’t blow up into some bubble, like that housing fiasco in The States two years ago,” said Iris.

“I think a key part of the success has been the personality of the management,” added Jonathan, changing the subject. “You see, there was a company that applied for a loan back in 2000. They paid their employees reasonably, but the management treated those under them like dispensable tools, you know, like a toaster, or a battery. The employees liked that little; they organised into a union, made all sorts of demands for improved conditions, and last year, they filed for bankruptcy, and now they no longer exist. This other company, Venneris, which makes newsprint, a dying industry, as you know, really values its workers, and I saw from that clandestine trip I took to Corner Brook last year that they prefer to retain workers, and employee turnover there is four percent.”

“So, the average employee will spend over half of their working life there.”

“That’s right; and for a company in a shrinking market, it’s holding up surprisingly well; they remain productive, and went through the recession nearly unscathed.”

“Luck also has a large part to play, of course. It might have been that Venneris took out a loan at a fixed rate in 2007, before the credit market dried up; other companies, who needed no credit at that particular time, did not take loans, and thus when they needed money, it was unavailable. Now, here we are, three years later, and Venneris is still making newsprint.”

“Oh yes, luck is a key component of success; you see it all the time in business: ‘it’s not what you know, it’s who you know’, as they say. So much depends on serendipity.”

With that, the rest of the trip home to their small village passed uneventfully; they had chosen to live in that village due to its quietness, and the fact that they could get to know all of their neighbours, which neither of them thought would be the case had they chosen to live in a larger city like Toronto or Montréal.

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