Keeping Things Whole by Darryl Whetter Page A

yeah, yeah, dress codes are relaxing all the time, millionaires in jeans, but you know what I mean. Shave. No
Smoke the rich
T-shirts. Easy on the piercings and tats. Claire also unpacked the rhetoric of greed for me. You want to improve your standing with a dealer? Be on her call list when times get lean? Then don’t expect her to light you up for free during the deal. For whatever reason—the cannabis camaraderie, the illegality, contact high—some people want, need, or expect to smoke while buying. Maybe potheads are looking for parity with the provincial liquor stores and their army of slim fake blondes dispensing free samples. Point is, many buyers like to smoke during the deal and those that think they should be getting a freebie won’t be on speed-dial when times are tight. And my last lesson from Claire—genuine learning requires humility.
    Who knows what you really want the first few times you drop your clothes. Two weeks, three, four, the phone a silly piece of plastic in my hand, I finally admitted that what I wanted in Claire was a master, no other word. You know that martial arts myth about the bridge? Two warriors step onto opposite ends of a narrow bridge. The weaker will step aside to let the stronger pass. I did my bit with Claire, dedication here, some young muscle there, but she had me outclassed, outskilled, and outgunned. We both knew that she was giving me skills for life, would be with me in every new woman I met.
    And I suppose there was always this. A few months after Mom’s thesis production of
Medea
, I was invited to a June barbecue at one of her friend’s places. I strolled into the backyard with Claire all swishy and fit beside me. “Mom, I’d like you to meet Claire.” A summer dress on each of them.
    At the end of August, just before I was to start university, just before, as Claire knew, I’d be meeting ten new girls my age every day, she made me a proposition. “This isn’t about weed. It’s about money. No introduction is free in this business. The two of us will meet someone in a parking lot. Normally I buy half a key. Thanks to you, I’ll be driving away with a full one. I leave, you can stay behind for your chat. You cross that threshold, though, you no longer cross mine.”
    Deal.

16. Draft Age
    Family—we rarely say what we know. Every family speaks a little Cuban, some a lot. Kate had dared to ask and half-invited me to tell her if I sold weed, but then she also brought us closer again two days later. She left me another card on the breakfast table. The front was Van Gogh’s
Wheat Field under Threatening Skies with Crows
. Inside she’d written:
    â€œWhat is beauty but the beginning of terror?”
—Rilke
I think we’re beautiful.
    Within days we found ourselves in one of those unplanned, ridiculously hypothetical yet somehow inevitable discussions couples have, debating the merits of Rilke as the name for a child. I know, I know—I should have noticed the writing on the (vaginal) wall.
Wheat Field
was the last painting Van Gogh did before he shot himself.
    She was my gravity. If you do anything beyond breathe in physics class you learn that gravity isn’t necessarily a force that pulls things down. Gravity pulls mass together. The Earth just happens to be very massive and beneath us. In a vacuum, mass doesn’t fall; it gathers. That’s gravity’s big deal: things want to fly together, join, coalesce. Love is gravity. Helpless. Endless.
    That fall, Kate and I were crazy about each other. Our clothes dropped as steadily as the leaves in Ojibway Park. Evenings in the D. A weekend walking Chicago’s dozen little bridges. And daily life. The supper chat. Nights reading at opposite ends of the couch. As a student, she had a roommate. As a self-made criminal, I didn’t. She started November co-opting half of one of my dresser drawers and finished it with the whole thing,