Keeping Things Whole by Darryl Whetter

guy who grew. All right, sure, there were risks, layers of extra heat (two police forces, two coast guards, two border patrols—all that competing gun dick), but this was pre-9/11. We could all see that America did not spend federal dollars on Detroit. Every low-level dealer who refused to take me upstairs was insulting local history. We’d all heard stories of great-grandparents skating across the frozen river to sell booze. At parties, we’d smoked weed someone swore had been smuggled over on a windsurfer or a kayak. Where was their civic pride?
    I even tried following the tomatoes. Thirty minutes outside of Windsor is Leamington, tomato capital of Canada or maybe the world. Ketchup in Kansas or Idaho or Manitoba starts in fields just down my road. But the road suddenly lengthens if you actually want to cut up and eat a local tomato. Come Labour Day, if I walked into a big grocery store to buy “local” tomatoes, I was buying tomatoes that had been trucked from Leamington four hundred kilometres to Toronto, sold to a distributor who then sold them to grocery store chains, including my local stores, before trucking some of them four hundred kilometres back to Windsor.
Eat local
indeed.
    So off to Toronto I went, cash in one pocket, three phone numbers in the other. I had to party with an old friend for a day and a half before he’d hear why I was really there. All I wanted was a meeting, a meeting to see someone who sells a product and therefore likes customers, but oh the grief.
I don’t know. He’s really touchy about new people
. All I’m asking is for you to ask. I drove home empty-handed and almost maudlin enough to sing that ever-available Canadian chorus: Toronto only helps Toronto.
    In the end, by chance and then heavy payments, tae kwon do proved more helpful than anything else. I’m currently embarrassed to say that at eighteen I wouldn’t really have noticed a thirty-two-year-old woman anywhere outside of a taek class, black belt or no.
    One of the big sexual delights in life, surely in the top three, is surprise. Most of us meet the standard fare early on, and those pleasures’ll last as long as the libido does. Much later, you find your hidden desires. Or are shown them. Claire d’Entremont was a thirty-two-year-old whose ass caught the eye I should have kept focused on the coil of her elbows and her lightning back foot. If you’re thinking about anything other than the moving bodies, the taek instruction went, you weren’t working hard enough. But oh for Claire’s sculpted ass. I lingered on the sight of it while we sparred, lingered just long enough for her to brake a hammerfist two inches from my nose. As I registered my shock at that fist hanging off my face, she said, “But thanks.” At the end of class she asked me home to her place. Ah, thirty-two.
    Claire’s first lesson (or second, if you count the sparring emphasis on paying attention): girls get fucked; women fuck. Once after class, then again, then a long naked Saturday. Eventually, Claire would use words like
work, meetings,
and
clients
. She took a lot of brief cellphone calls but never punched a regular clock. When I asked her what she did, she replied, “A couple of fitness classes here, some promoting there. I get by.” As the sweaty weeks grew, I never saw her carry a briefcase, never heard her say
office
. And she always had a sack of the most pelvis-dissolving green. Once when she reached for her pungent little bag, I asked, “How can I get you to introduce me to your supplier?”
    She shook her head before we lit up. “We fuck or we do business. Not both.”
    Then pass me my gitch and your Rolodex.
    Claire proved to be the smartest dealer I have ever met. Aside from sex, I learned three other crucial lessons. One, don’t dress like a criminal or a pothead. Her clients were lawyers and office workers, and she dressed exactly like them. Yeah,