by M.G. Warenycia

                ‘And thro’ the drifts the snowy clifts

                Did send a dismal sheen;

                Ne shapes of men ne beasts we ken –

                The Ice was all between’  –  Coleridge

            The seasons are moods as much, or more, than they are sections in a calendar. Following the foetid, grossly humid summer in Toronto, the city enjoys, for a brief fortnight or perhaps a month or more, a sort of season, cool but not health-endangeringly frigid, where the life of the great northern metropolis proceeds in a relaxed, yet productive mode. This is particularly the case for students, hordes of whom are returning to the city’s several universities, but are not yet faced with the tedious burden of term papers or the looming existential dread of exams. It was an unremarked certainty that this quaint and pleasant season was over. It was clear, in the wind shipping down out of the Shield Country with all the unflinching sternness of a Puritan schoolmaster, rattling the glass-walled canyons, spearing through jacket collars and zipper seams, flinging empty coffee cups across the busy roadways.

The shuffling, hustling current of pedestrians moving along Dundas Street covered elbows with palms, tucked heads into collars and stiffened their gaits. It was, ironically, perhaps, not so bad for the immigrants – those still sufficiently ‘fresh off the boat,’ at least – who, coming from less-homicidal climes, had not adopted the schizophrenic local dress code: fur trimmed parkas as soon as they were bearable in autumn, beach or strip club fashions as soon as temps rose above fifteen degrees in the spring. Among the locals, many a pair of sockless ankles grew pink as boiled hams, and crossed arms gave a feeble boost to thin ‘mid-century’ print rompers. Ramen and Mongolian hot pot restaurants lining Dundas and nearby shipping streets did brisk business. Spadina fruit vendors huffed glum cloudlets of tobacco smoke as the chattering crowds ignored their pyramids of refreshing, but unfortunately cold and watery, bounty. And the rain began to pink bullets against streetcar windows and the plastic shells of bicycle helmets…

Jemma Paquette, luckily, was dressed more akin to the sensible foreigners, in an olive and beige patterned Aran Isles sweater of heavy wool and sturdy jeans, as opposed to the yoga tights which had rendered pants almost obsolete among the local womenfolk. This was not out of any desire to be unfashionable, nor because she was unattractive – quite the contrary, although a natural insecurity prevented her from showing herself off to best advantage. Rather, it was a habit formed in long hours spent drawing and painting in the studios at TCAD-U, the city’s – indeed, the country’s – premier arts-focused university. The combination of sitting still plus the strong AC in summer and weak heating in winter made such ungainly armour necessary.

As Jemma leaned forward and squinted her eyes against the wind, she had to simultaneously fight to steady the enormously broad, flat bag she was carrying. It caught the gusts like a galleon’s sail, paining her wrist and guilting her as it occasionally slapped a passer-by. A white plastic bag with the ‘Curry’s’ logo splashed across it. Jemma was coming from the location on Yonge, near the campus of Ryerson University, for they alone among the chain’s downtown outlets happened to have in stock the particular pigments she needed. She could not wait the four to six weeks to order online; she needed her tools now. The stretched canvas, which shaped the bag’s bulk, would embody months of thought, sketches and art theory research, including the term paper she had submitted at the end of the spring semester.

“I wouldn’t wanna get caught in that going home!” Jemma heard a familiar voice; “but I won’t, ‘cause I live like, right here!” Jemma saw her friend and classmate, Eunice Yu emerge from under the awning of a one of those shops selling Chinese curios and random goods that crowd in on the sidewalks of Chinatown. A faux-Qing Dynasty porcelain urn held out salvation in the form of some colourful, wood-handled umbrellas. A wise shopkeeper ran this place. Before Jemma could suggest that her companion wait a minute for her while she goes into the store, Eunice read her thoughts, “Bought ‘ya one!” and offered her a shield against the rain, which was now threatening to become a proper downpour.

Jemma and Eunice, in accord with a prearranged plan, walked northwards up Spadina. Eunice knew the place where they were going, a restaurant. Suggested it just off the top of their head, as she always did when they needed to eat or shop somewhere new. Jemma had to look up the review of the place on BlogThe6ix.com, even though she had lived in this area, owing to her studies, for the last 6 years. She marvelled at her classmate; envied her. Eunice knew these streets; knew their pulse and flow like a salmon knows its ancestral stream. She could navigate them just as well night or day, summer or snow, drunk or sober.

The two young ladies squealed in unison as a peal of thunder clapped the red and white plexiglass signboard, heralding the beginning of the real storm. Eunice called from a table in a nook by the window – she would never sit in the middle of a restaurant – talking in Chinese to the bowing, vest-clad waiter; rather overformal for what was really no more than a slightly glorified version of your typical ‘chop suey house’ sort of restaurant, which, along with beautifully illustrated cookbooks of dubious authenticity, was one of North America’s principle points of contact with Chinese cuisine during the very beginnings of the era of Multiculturalism back in the reign of the first Trudeau. New Ho King, being deep in Chinatown, and with (so one of Jemma’s Chinese classmates had told her) a fair number of allegedly triad-affiliated clientele, had a somewhat more elaborate menu than most and a ghost story or two to its name, but was still of the same basic type. BlogThe6ix online magazine gave it 4.5 out of 5 for providing hearty, greasy fodder for cheap, such that cold, hung-over students at the two nearby universities appreciated, served in a suitably “homey” (read: “close, cluttered, tacky”) and “authentic” (read: “just clean enough to get a Health Department ‘Pass’”) atmosphere. It probably lost the point-5 because there were no schoolgirl-looking waitresses, adorably incompetent and tittering uncontrollably in foreign languages, like at the wildly popular Korean cheesecake place around the corner. Also, it had obstinately kept serving sharks’ fin soup, even when, during a campaign to ban the stuff a couple years back, hipster students, fresh from classes where they had imbibed Edward Said’s Orientalism and raged at their country’s historic discrimination against certain immigrant cultures, proceeded to decry the fact that these Chinese immigrants were permitted to practice their barbaric, backward culture in the sacred and progressive municipality of Toronto. If the owner, old man Hwang, understood, one suspects he enjoyed the yu chi at this grandson’s wedding banquet all the more.

Jemma loved the place for all the reasons BlogThe6ix.com told her to. The dinginess made it even more comfortable a refuge from the blizzards of winter, or the blasting winds of autumn and spring. It was as if the greasy spirit of the past (visible and tactile on the wallpaper and picture frames) somehow lent its spicy, salty warmth to the diners in the present, making its Cantonese comfort food that much more comforting.

Jemma ordered General Tao’s Chicken – it didn’t feel wrong, now, with a Chinese friend – with hot and sour soup, while Eunice chose BBQ pork on rice, with pork blood soup. The rain was lashing down hard outside; so heavy it was like a curtain of water, enshrouding the scene beyond fifty feet or so from the restaurant window. That and the savoury, well-laden dishes made the conversation expand as their stomachs.

Eunice chatted, or, really, lectured about her latest boyfriend, how the crusty old judge had no right to sentence him for a full two years for what was just an ordinary break-and-enter; how school was busy and dull; how her father’s doctor said his blood pressure issues had mysterious vanished…Jemma wasn’t bored by this sort of talk. But, who, who has some secret affair or project, does not wish for others to ask about it and make it the centre of conversation? She wiped the syrupy General Tao sauce from her fingers and fumbled in the Curry’s bag, keeping her eyes and half-hearted smile on her companion. Taking advantage of a moment when Eunice turned to beckon the waiter to refill their teapot, Jemma drew out an object which she made an act of studying while nibbling the batter off a lump of chicken.

“What’s that? Paint?” Eunice was a painter herself, of exceptional talent, moulded by being crammed through all-day art school by her parents from kindergarten till their emigration to Canada when she was in high school. While even the professor paled next to her in sheer technical ability, Eunice was, unlike most artists, not too much of a snob to take genuine interest in individual styles different from her own. The soft tones and use of glowing, flooding light in Jemma’s works, especially her landscapes, impressed Eunice. For all the derivativeness of her subjects and her stilted forms, Jemma had that knack – impossible to learn from books – of using light to create and atmosphere that expressed the ‘mood’ of a season or place better than the light of whatever scene in a true-to-life photograph…kind of like how a horror movie director can make a clean modern office tower into a site of creepiness, or how 1980s Hong Kong filmmakers shot bar and party scenes that long onscreen just like how such experiences feel in the warm, drunk mind of one experiencing them or remembering them in melancholy reminiscence. “Something big cooking in the studio?” Eunice noted the impressive size of the tube.

            “No…” Jemma answered absent-mindedly. “I mean, yes, but, like, not in the studio on campus. You know, if you have a really original idea, how those lazy hipsters will just copy it and claim some shared inspiration”

            “Yeah, I know, right?” Eunice recollected, with no small bitterness, how she had one planned out a series of vaguely cubist-surrealist canvasses themed around the TTC. She had shown off her sketches (stunning works of art in themselves) to classmates, basking in the warm glow of being the first and most admired among colleagues all competing for the same thing. Her triumph was short-lived. Weeks before the end of semester, when she planned to make a dramatic presentation of her series, she saw a poster in the halls and cafeteria of the admin building. She immediately rushed over to the student gallery. Oh. Em. Gee: there was a full on show, complete with elaborate and ridiculous artists’ statements, music, even slam poetry. A couple of her adoring classmates, either more industrious or less scrupulous than her, had pumped out a dozen canvases, large and small, that, besides the signature were indistinguishable from those she was working on or hoped to begin work on. So much for hashtag sisterhood, hashtag ‘you go gurrrl!’ “What is it then?”

            “Well, you know like how the England like Thomas Hardy writes about had Constable, Victorian Australia had Tom Roberts and Frederick McCubbin, and the Boreal forest had the Group of Seven…”

            “Yes, I do know most of those names. Settler colonialist art? What are you getting at?”

            “No, that’s not what I mean…ugh!…It’s…It’s like, you know, an era in space and time, sort of crystallizing its spirit in a distinct style, not created but like channelled through a couple artists who just are that place, that time, that energy….you know?”

            Eunice’s broad, empty smile showed that she kind of got it though failed to see the profound relevance of Jemma’s remarks in the context of her hauling home the canvas and tubes of pigment.

             Jemma Paquette had had spent many years in earnest study of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, John Campbell’s theories of symbolism and archetypes, Gimbautus’ flattering but groundless pseudo-archaeology, the colour fetishism of the Romantics and the line-worship of the Neo-Classicists. She had diligently practiced, with varying degrees of success, but always with a solid competence, replicating the flat perspectives and unique palette of Ancient Egyptian papyri. She had created convincing works of Medieval illumination (with allowances for material limitations of budget and convenience), even though she had never read the Bible (though she had a self-satisfying sense of being persecuted by the Catholic Church) and found monkish piety unintelligible and revolting. English-style watercolours, cubism, Ab-Ex. She had done a little bit of everything, and done each morsel with the same exacting seriousness and technical proficiency, in her long period of study.

            Actually, you could say that Art, capital A, had been her raison d’être for the entirety of her reflective life, which one might fairly say begins in high school. Indeed, you could say the whole of her education was consecrated to the visual arts, for she had attended a small, selective (though not expensively private) high school, where the focus was on the arts and other ‘soft’ subjects, largely through the charismatic influence of the art teacher, a crazy but genuinely interested and caring old hippie who was also the history teacher, the ‘Ancient Civ’ teacher (Canadian history being taught by the principal), and the World Religions teacher. Poor marks in math and science classes were generally tolerated if a student showed promise in those that counted – not that many of the school’s graduates were inclined to pursue STEM fields in uni anyway.

            Like most of her colleagues at TCAD-U, there had not been a great deal of questioning as to what sort of major Jemma would pursue at uni. True, had she been a bit more aggressive and embittered, she might have gone in for Gender Studies. Had she had a messianic streak, Social Work may have beckoned. But there was never any thought of, say, engineering – so dull and practical; so devoid of soul-cleansing ideological indignation. Nor, for that matter, was the Sisyphean task of ploughing through law or medicine – and the necessity of having one’s skills tested in life or death matters – in the cards.

            She made the choices everyone, including herself, expected her to make. Like most of her colleagues, too, she never asked herself whether they were good choices; she just instinctively knew that every alternative was wrong or not up for consideration. If she needed any reassurance of this – such as when an ex-high school classmate, who had become insufferable for his constant complaints about Toronto (rendering him a pariah among Jemma’s friends and no small embarrassment as a guest at parties), actually left to become a lawyer in hot and easy-going Queensland – she merely had to consult NOW Magazine, BlogThe6ix, or the student newspaper. In an emergency, blocking on Facebook, or at least hiding posts from her feed would prevent any arrogantly posted photos from insulting her and her life choices.

            It was only in the last year of her undergrad and, especially, in the last year, that, unexpectedly and quite unnoticed at first, a nagging, unpleasant feeling had crept over Jemma like a pair of possessed sunglasses that made her world appear in hard-to-describe but manifestly discomfiting tints. As first, the ‘sunglasses’ could be batted off with little effort. Some energizing music, a shopping trip to Pacific Mall with Eunice, foodie-food or PSAs and gossip with the ‘gurrrls.’ An hour or two of the bright sun in the busy city. Then it would be gone for a month; a couple weeks at the very least. But the ‘sunglasses’ kept installing themselves in front of her eyes, casting the throbbing urban life-drama before her in that brooding, inexplicably isolating and mind-fatiguing light. It began to happen with increasing frequency, too. Gradually at first, till, last winter, it was like a person with a longstanding chronic lung complaint, who has suddenly met with cold, damp weather with an immune system that had been silently weakening for months.

            What ‘colour’ were these sunglasses? Of course, they had no colour in a literal sense – in that case she would have gone to a doctor. But there was a definite ‘colour’ nevertheless; not any of the major slices of the colour wheel in their bright, solid forms. No; it was an uncanny blend of tints, cool and murky; a good deal of titanium white blended in, but with some greying by a splash or two of strong ochre and ultramarine. Uncanny it was, too, that she had seen it before…knew it such that if it were in tube form she could come up with a catchy, descriptive name to stick on it. It was in her memory; she felt it in her young bones; in the prickly of her pale, lightly freckled skin. Try as she might, though, it would not burst out of her unconscious.

            A casual observer with a practical mind might have diagnosed the mundanely material worries of a student looking down the barrel at life in a city with few prospects for a young person seeking the normal sorts of things one is supposed to grow up into in a post-Second World War Western capitalist culture. What, with an average house in the City – and not even in the sacred core of the City, where any sane arts grad would want…would need to live being over a million dollars, while the average BA-holding barista-slash-office peon-slash-contract sweater-folder earned barely enough in a steady month to pay the rent on a cramped and scuzzy room in an apartment shared with a couple other random (and usually loud and filthy) co-habitants. And that on a diet of predominately instant noodles and Kraft Dinner to save pennies between the socially-obligatory, vigorously Instagrammed visits to the BlogThe6ix and Torontoist-approved Black Hoof charcuterie pub, Thai fusion at Spring Roll on Yonge, Cantonese comfort food at Kom Jug Yuen, Burgers from Hero and Burgers Priest and poutine from Smoke’s. Not to mention the unmentionable fact that a battery of Aboriginal Studies and feminist theory electives on top of the typical Toronto girl’s YOLO-forever attitudes and non-existent domestic skills had rendered her essentially unmarriageable to a man with prospects anywhere above barista, office peon or contract sweater-folder. A life lived on social media, in restaurants, bars, clubs and galleries, between long intervals of mercifully hidden drudgery, tedium, and doubting loneliness darker than an impasto gob of Mummy Black.

            Such an observer would, for the most part, be overthinking the problem. Though Jemma was not naïve, and all her friends were well-educated, none of them ever really thought about such problems in any theoretical sense. True, there were the aforementioned dissidents, but thankfully they mostly ceased to exist as soon as they passed south of the great lake, or east of the Bluffs. Everyone else she knew as in the same boat, whether they were a few years older or just starting undergrad.

            Sometimes, though, the never-ending orgy of consumerism and, above all, soul-cleansing toil, comforting because  it brought no awkward, guilt-ridden success to detach oneself from one’s friends and classmates…it was alive, real, vital…as a process. The brush strokes were textbook; the professors all nodded encouragement. Yet, in the wee hours of some mornings, or on a late-night walk past the century-old Bay & Gables whose narrow, fretwork-browed eyes glared in the eldritch shadows of the ancient lindens and silver maples…sometimes – just sometimes – her heart would skip a bit as she wondered what on earth she was painting?

            As the thermometer dropped and the wind bit at throats and eyelids, one tip of the iceberg weighing on Jemma’s mind revealed itself to her. It had not been detectable when the student and alumni gallery of TCAD-U was a new, hard-won and hence imposing privilege. Not when Delacroix, Kriehuber, Ingres, Alma Tadema and Bouguereau were just hard-to-spell names in books, more condensed representations of ideologies and aesthetic value-sets in textbooks and lectures; archetypes who existed in a purely hypothetical world with no real-life models to compare against. Familiarity breeds contempt, as the saying goes. When she entered undergrad and began to slavishly hang around the cafes and shops around campus, attending the regular uni social events and house as well as dinner parties, she assumed that her classmates were the modern incarnations of such great names. After all, was not the “starving artist” a creation of the fin de siècle in urban Europe? And was not the Queen West indie café the modern iteration of that in 1890s Vienna where delightfully deranged painters, political poets,  poetical revolutionaries and edgy psychiatrists had mixed and mingled – albeit with pumpkin spiced locally-sourced frapp’ foam and gluten-free macarons (not macaroons!) instead of kaffe mit schlag and sachertorte?

            As she struggled with preparing her Master’s ‘thesis’ for the spring – there is no doing an all-nighter before the due date with an oil painting – everything suddenly looked very different. Which is not to say it was different: everyone looked and acted exactly the same as in undergrad. That made it all the more disturbing. She finally got it after she – perfectly ingenuously – kept trying to discuss art and share her works with her colleagues. She felt like she was being magnanimous, inviting them to share in the creative process (and naturally offering to reciprocate herself), for, she was sure, it was only in their mutual sharing of their artsy lives together that they could live the types they modelled themselves on. To do otherwise would feel fraudulent and a waste of their precious years of uni time, all relatively free and easy (if impoverished). She’d held off on being more aggressive with publicly adopting an ‘artiste’ persona, in fact, until a massive accumulation of professor’s praise, high marks, and Facebook-liked finished works had given her shy nature sufficient confidence to shake off some of her habitual self-deprecating introversion. That loneliness, especially in the winter – it is a killer.

            When she actually went so far as to bring a sketchbook and a couple small canvasses over to a dinner party at Eunice’s, it was as though she’d fallen off her fixxy bike into a mass of urticating caterpillars, her romper-bared legs stung till she wanted to writhe in bloody madness. Oh, yes, Eunice gave the event some artsy name on Facebook, suggesting it was some clubby, insular meeting of avante garde types. Eunice’ own profile pic had her standing in a beret in front of the Louvre, too. Over several hours, what she witnessed was several generic-faced (she had thought all her female friends as beautiful as goddesses, but then she’d never been to Ryerson or bothered to realize that the fact drunken men will sleep with a woman does not make her beautiful), generically dressed young harpies bragging about how they are “like, genuinely, actually, a slut; for real!” Boasting about their exploits with random men at parties or on vacation in Jamaica, England or Spain – when she knew some of them had boyfriends, who were decent men. Stuffing their mildly overweight faces with coarse, greasy food (not regarded as ‘junk food,’ as what is expensive cannot be junk) and dry, weak local wines with no regard for ladylike etiquette. Conspiring with the preternatural cohesion of an ant colony surrounding an intruder to backbite and cause this or that friend of theirs who wasn’t there to break up with her boyfriend. He “wasn’t right for her,” “she could do better,” “she shouldn’t settle,” “he isn’t in her league.” Really, of course, what it really meant in translation was “he earns more money than her even though he doesn’t have a university degree,” “she got banged by someone hotter than him at Danielle’s Halloween party,” “she shouldn’t settle for someone who is not a handsome billionaire, seeing as she’s an up-and-coming young artist with a BA…even though she works at a coffee shop or as a retail clerk,” and “if she gets with him she might one day be above us.” What pathetic people, Jemma though, who would rather smash someone else’s happiness – and convince each other they are actually doing her a favour in it – than make the slightest real effort to improve their own lives. Not to be outdone were the gay-best-friends, with their affected lisps (apparently lisping and limp wrist tendons are causally related to having an address in the old Metro Toronto), skinny-fat physiques squeezed into plaid and skinny jeans fit for their 12-year-old selves, insecurity-concealing beards and shaved-sides long-top hairstyles. Many an honest, muscly but degree-less plumber and one scion of a prosperous Dubai-based Persian business family were spared months of annoyance and stress and perhaps the agony of a mispurchased diamond ring and premature Facebook relationship status due to the conversations that evening.

            And not one of them gave a damn about her sketches and paintings. Nor, for that matter, did they seem to give a damn about their own. It was as if being an “artist” to them really and truly meant the purchase of certain items of clothing, the renting of accommodations within a specific geographic area, riding a ‘vintage’ or otherwise shabby bicycle, particularly in weather and road conditions unsuited for the purpose, and espousing certain superficial ideologies. Nothing more. Nothing.

            The issue weighed her down for weeks afterward. How was she different? She looked at herself in the mirror. The skinny jeans, the thick-framed glasses she didn’t actually need to see, the ghastly and shapeless rompers, the Canada Goose jacket she had to wear on alternate days to Tabitha (who put up half the cost), the snotty bangs, the bicycle that took up a huge chunk of her allotted space in the shared rental which she rode whenever she didn’t need to get anywhere urgently or carry meaningful quantities of groceries or other goods.

            It all suddenly was superficial; hollow; as predestined to collapse as Gibbon’s Roman Empire. Yonge Street was fast becoming unrecognizable. Block after block, she could see it, tacked up beside the laundromat that had been open since Trudeau the First was in office, the army surplus emporium that had kitted out generations of punks and urban rebels, and the sushi place that opened to serve the first yuppies who predicted how the miraculous robot people of the Pacific Rim would become the ruling global superpower of the 90s. The grim black-and-white signs. The owner of this property has applied for re-zoning…to construct a tower as tall and un-godly as that of Babel. All the way from Xanadu in the south, where Eunice had briefly strip-danced to ‘pay her way through uni’ (though the government had already taken care of that) and rebel against her conservative Confucian father, to its main competitor, the Bronze Rail, in the north, and east, and west, soon to blot out what her aesthete’s eye cherished to see. She drew away from her classmates as much as politeness avowed. Indeed, she saw neither of her friends, besides Eunice and Parvaneh, whom she felt could not rightly be lumped with the others as they did not share the taint of their baseness. She would focus on her art, yes…though whether she was in fact an artist was now a matter for doubt.

            One late winter afternoon she and Parvaneh, another ex-high school buddy, were strolling along College Street near Bathurst. They were heading to a Persian restaurant, Parvaneh’s treat – she had plenty of spending cash. Then again, she lived with her doting, shamelessly bourgeois parents in North York. She wasn’t even an arts major – studied tropical agriculture, actually, a subject as practical as it was absurd. However, she had the hyper-developed aesthetic sense that all Persian people seem to have… “Am I being racist to think that?” Jemma wondered to herself. Parvaneh could share in the art galleries, museum visits, and the general appreciation of the beauty in the details of everyday life that Jemma regarded with unaffected seriousness – the bloom of the crabapples in April-May, the majesty of a hundred-year old willow waving on the banks of a watercourse, the sublime waves that crashed against the Beaches in all but the cheeriest weather. They passed a stone-fronted section of the sidewalk strip, where, between an upmarket curry house and a Japanese fashion store, was an art gallery, no doubt converted from some random shop closed more due to rent than lack of business. A small bay window projected beside the recessed door. While it was impossible to see inside the gallery proper from the sidewalk, the window bay was given over to a display of small to medium-sized paintings, stacked three layers high. Jemma broke off the trivial conversation she’d been carrying on with Parvaneh and stopped. She stared, half the enchanted dreamer, half the cynical critic.

           Every single one of the pictures was a recognizably “Toronto” scene. Not Canadian. Oil on canvas, watercolour, gouache – all were Toronto. Most were winter scenes, the more to distinguish the notoriously frigid city. Too, there was something about the winter and how it played on the pulses of the citizens. What it was Jemma could not specifically identify, but it was there. There were sections of old-school Victorian shop-tenement fronts, carefully cropped to exclude any chain stores or glass-and-steel condos looming in the background. There were certain famous intersections – Dundas and Spadina, for example, or that spot in front of the haunted old castle-looking building on the U of T campus – with streetcars passing. Without the streetcars, of course, the entire character of the scene would be lost. Usually vintage designs, the streetcars, often ones that were pulled out of service when Jemma was just starting high school…though the presence of modern cars and the still-recognizable arrangements of businesses in the images reminded one they were supposed to represent the unique character of the City as portraits, not as history pieces. None of the paintings, for instance, featured horse-drawn vehicles. It was a past that, to the ahistorical smartphone and Twitter generation, was blurry enough to be beyond critical analysis, yet near enough to somehow identify themselves with.

           “Hey!” Parvaneh tugged the fur-trimmed shoulder of Jemma’s parka. “I thought you were hungry. What’s so interesting?”

            Jemma stepped back and gestured to the window display.

            “Meh, they don’t have much character to them, do they?”

            “I…I think they’re charming scenes. And it’s our life,” Jemma tried to respond to the stinging but all-too-correct dismissal of the works that had so charmed her fifteen seconds earlier.

            “Ehhh, yeah, no, not really. I mean, there’s nothing like the architecture and history in the landscapes you can find here that would match any street corner in London or Tehran.” Both cities’ names were over-pronounced in volume and accent. Parvaneh never bragged about her degree, though it was a Master’s in a subject genuinely intellectually challenging. She did, however, endlessly lament how everything in Toronto was not like its unarguably superior equivalent in London (though her university was in Manchester) and equally not like its indisputably more cultured and exotic equivalent in Iran – even the bad aspects of which were so foreign they were interesting, at least in second-hand story telling.

            “But this is our City. The snow. The streetcars. Don’t you ever find it cool, you know when something that you have special feels for; something that you think is just like some stupid part of your own personal tastes…and, like, suddenly see it in some format you never expected. Like when they make a Hollywood movie out of your favourite TV show when you were a kid, or, like, an oil painting of Mario Kart, or a gourmet restaurant serving mac n’ cheese prepared by Michelin-starred chefs.”

            “I know what you’re talking about, yeah, ‘it’s ironic,’ But…these paintings…I mean, I guess you love ‘The 6ix’ and all, but you could do way better than that. It’s like they were all done by the same artist, although obviously, with the signature n’ things, it’s not. It’s like they are painting for cookie tins.”

            Jemma understood what Parvaneh meant. And she was right. Each of the paintings was of that style, hard to describe but familiar to any critical eye that’s seen it, if, indeed, it would be reckoned a style at all. Jemma had to admit that the paintings were more about their subjects than the art. Irony over inspiration. Jean-Leon Gerome and Edwin Lord Weeks also painted contemporaneous with photography. It was not for the simple purpose of possessing images of India and the Middle East that people bought works by Gerome and Weeks. They could get those easily enough and more economically from the camera – a whole genre of vintage French postcards attest to that. But the soul, vitality, ‘colour’ (in the metaphysical sense) of the Orient; that no mere camera could capture.

            Jemma sighed and the two girls carried on up the street. Their destination’s turquoise-framed door and sign styled like the inlaid walls of a Central Asian mosque were within sight when Jemma felt a hand grab her wrist. A hand larger, rougher and…she struggled against fear to turn her head…much darker than Parvaneh’s….aye, it was purplish black in parts, with dirt or necrosis from drug injections; possibly both. Parvaneh was dumbstruck; she motioned with her cellphone as if to suggest calling the police and held her mouth open as if to say something, but couldn’t figure what to do. Jemma giggled nervously. “I don’t have any spare change,” she tittered, pressing the palm of her free hand over the bulge of her wallet in her coat pocket.

            This hobo – no one would guess him anything but a member of that tribe which is all too numerous in Toronto, what with his long, dishevelled beard and hair, trembling, liquor-rotted frame and greasy, shapeless clothes – did not appear to be interested in ‘change!’ though.

“Get your hands off me!” Jemma managed to cry out.

 The leathery brown claw dropped, but the strange man, somehow still he held her, held her with his glittering eye: “Sorry, lil’ lady…I dunno, I dunno,” he slapped his forehead; “When I see the face, I just know it in my bones, Gawd, I got’s ta’ tell my story. Won’t cha’ hear my story, lil’ lady? There was a ship…”

“I, uh…I’ve got to go to the restaurant there with my friend…uh…I’ll…I’ll mace you!” but, brave words aside, it was as if she could not choose but to hear the ancient and filthy wanderer tell his tale, even as his overproof breath made her choke and wince.  

He rambled and ranted, yet his voice, and more so his glassy, hypnotic eye fixed the two girls in place, struggle as they might to tear away. At first, the tale appeared to be like the typical fantastic ravings of such individuals, replete as it was with mentions of golden apples on golden trees…golden apples for everyone….slithering eels and snakes crawling upon seas of slime and what appeared to be references to dreams that troubled him. It eventually became apparent that there was a coherent story to the greybeard lunatic’s mutterings…a story that, if true, might make an episode of the Fifth Estate. Something about a ship, a storm….there was mention, probably another fantastic element, of a “great gull” whose eyes could see the sins of a man’s soul, and whose piercing cry denounced the sinner to God and man (he stopped up his ears when he spoke these lines). Something about waves roaring with the voice of hell; about a beach; a hot summer night; lost souls dancing in the moonlight…

When he quivered out “The body and I pulled at the same rope…but she said nuttin’ ta’ me,” the two girls’ will and fear overpowered the spell and they sprinted into the restaurant.

The restaurant was one which Jemma loved to eat at whether in the harsh cold of winter or on sweltering summer nights, for the food and décor were equally suited to both. Mind you, just as she never went into certain Chinatown shops without Eunice (even where she did not anticipate any conversation with the staff), she would not eat here without Parvaneh as escort. She would not be looked askance at by the owners, who, for that matter, had netted much of their early clientele from among local professionals and academics who had done the ‘Hippie Trail” in their younger days – before the Revolution in 1979 that both put an end to that party and sent the restaurant’s owners and their beloved Monarch into exile (a portrait of the Shah and Shahbanu hung in a discrete but respectful location from the date of opening). Too, those well-paid baby boomers were willing to pay good coin to savour a slice of their youths, which required the owners to set the place up properly, almost opulent – like something out of a 1970s National Geographic. This suited the owners as much as their customers, for Mr. and Mrs. Ispahani, too, liked to be able to imagine themselves in a piece of pre-Revolution Iran, cryogenically preserved and transplanted. It was a sanctuary as much as a business.

As it was a weekday afternoon, Parvaneh was able to secure one of the coveted dining booths that were one of the restaurant’s main draws, now that plenty of other establishments in the area offered similar food. These were raised platforms towards the interior of the dining area, situated somewhat above the level of the regular tables and cordoned off by wooden railings and partition screens. Inside, one got to dine in an atmosphere right out of….well, a 1970s National Geographic… “The High Road through Central Asia” or some such. Patrons sat on cushions and rugs, lavish things hand woven by the most talented traditional labour (surely either blind old women or illiterate children), in rich maroons, blacks and creamy whites, with detailing in yellow and forest green. On the walls were calligraphy scrolls and framed reproductions of Qajar-era paintings of hunting and palace scenes.

Somehow, this time, the cosy and exotic atmosphere did not succeed in transporting Jemma’s mind to the freer, more interesting haunts of daydreams, however. While Parvaneh ravenously attacked her morasa polo, Jemma dug her spoon listlessly at her kashk-e bademjaan. Parvaneh may have been rich as well as pretty, but that did not prevent her from being sensitive to the moods of her friends who were less fortunate in both departments. “Hey, darling! Don’t play the mysterious artist with me! Something’s bothering you. Is it your roommates? A guy? Tell me and I will teach him to behave himself with you!” She gripped her knife in mock menace.

For a minute or so Jemma was silent. Eventually Parvaneh gave up and returned to the task of eating. Then Jemma suddenly leaned in to her, wide-eyed, “It’s my art…”

“Oh?  You got bad marks on your exams or something? Worried about that…thesis?”

“What? No. Not worried. I mean, I was but…it’s like I was given an epiphany today.”

“Today? When?”

“The wise man who shared his story with us before we…”

“What the…you mean the crazy homeless guy talking about…I dunno what…somebody he murdered out on a boat or something.”

“Buried in the shore, I think….but you get it was moving, right? Like, remember what I was saying about an oil painting of Mario Kart or something?”

“Yeah….but I don’t see….”

“Think about it. Ok, I know you like my art. But, be honest. It’s all so formulaic. Like everyone else who puts on a lumberjack shirt and skinny jeans and a toque and is like, ‘Oh-em-gee, I’m such an artist!’”

“Yeah but you’re more talented than your classmates. You’d think the first time some of them held a paintbrush was in the first semester of undergrad. That’s why they all go in for photography…as if it was difficult to take yet another pic of the CN Tower looking all spirey and tall, or of red streetcars in the white snow and the crowds huddling up in the cold at Yonge and Dundas under the bright lights…Oooh, the contrast!”

“I know, but it’s the same thing. I mean, in spirit, what’s different with me? I paint what the professor tells me. I take photographs everyone else takes. I’ve done art of the City. But what have I done for the art of the City? Do you get me?”

“No…” Parvaneh’s good will ran into a wall of perplexity. “I’m afraid I don’t, actually. You mean like volunteering at the AGO or something? You wanna do some artistic job outside class? Sure, why not…”

“No! Nnngggh!” Jemma clenched her hands. “That’s not what I mean! Like, ok, you know why people like us, progressive young people, now, in 2016, are moved by the poems that William Blake wrote back in the 1700s, or Wordsworth, and how people still read Dickens’ novels, but nobody gives a crap about Coleridge, or Bouguereau, and honestly the Brontes are more popular than Trollope or Wilkie Collins now? Right?”

“Umm I see what you mean but, uhh, my dad has a print of a Bouguereau up in his study. And, oh my God, what are you talking about…’as if some vast Tropic Tree, itself a wood;’ that one doesn’t make your spine tingle? There’s a reason I didn’t take Eng-lit.”

“Hear me out. There’s a reason people love the Impressionists and not Bouguereau; Dickens, not Wilkie Collins; Blake not Coleridge.”

“Depends on your people, but ok.”

“The Impressionists painted raw, authentic Life. Bars with tired, sultry-eyed ladies of the night drinking absinthe. Polynesian women, their innocent freedom unspoiled by civilization and patriarchy. Crowded, urban streetscapes on rainy evenings. Bouguereau painted, what? Exotified, Otherised Arab girls with thick eyebrows and devilish glances? Umm, the objectifying male gaze anyone? Dickens and Blake wrote about chimney sweeps; about mill workers; about the marginalized of early capitalist society. Collins wrote about ‘good ol’ boy’ white Anglo-Saxon heirs solving poor girls’ problems with their stuffy honest-to-a-fault chivalry and inherited fortunes. And stereotyping Indian and Caribbean religious practices for poetry…there’s a reason that shit just doesn’t reach educated people today.”

“Suit yourself. I’d like if my man was honest and respectable and bought a yacht and a big country mansion for me…and hired Bouguereau to paint my portrait…in oil! Take that, our high school art teacher!”

“Please tell me you see what I’m getting at. All of the contrasting artists I mentioned. They all, you can’t argue, reached the highest level of skill and technique in their respective mediums, yes? The difference was in their spirit; their choice of committing in faith and self-identification with…with who and what? With rich country squires and damsels with dulcimers? With emotionally dependant princess who die of sadness? With dying generals; soldiers in khaki lusting with yellow fever after colonized maidens with whom they have relationships with unhealthy power dynamics, because they can’t stand the strong, independent women back home?”

“Unladylike is more like it. But go on…”

“Identification plus inspiration. Plus talent, of course. And sheer determined energy. We respect Blake, Dickens, the Impressionists in ways we don’t respect the others because they chose to take all their skill and social status, and throw in their lot…live with, identify with, express the soul of the mill towns, the slums, the South Sea islands, the seedy cabarets. They volunteered themselves to serve as the conduit of the soul of their eras, places…”

“If I follow, you propose…to be to The 6ix, in the 2010s, what Constable was for the English countryside in the 18^th century? Wow, ambitious. I mean, I’m not saying you can’t do it but…how? What will you paint?”

“How? Classical oil painting. The most exacting, the most prestigious style. No acrylic cookie tin images. No abstract or surrealist easy excuses. No editing photos in with an App to look like paintings. As for what I will paint…”

“The CN Tower? The streetcars? The pretty signs and fruit stalls in Chinatown? The condo towers glittering at night?”

Jemma pondered. “Hmm, no. No…That’s…that’s its expression; the soul of the City’s expression in terms of higher level stuff, more superficial stuff, yes. I want the soul itself. To depict that; to speak that in paint. Not the Constable of The 6ix…the Caspar David Friedrich.”

Parvaneh had only the faintest idea of what her friend was saying, so let the matter lie. Eunice, too, forgot her girlfriend’s worried face and gloomy thoughts, blending them in her memory with the countless other vicissitudes of the hyper-emotional lives of perpetually up-and-coming university artists, struggling to find their individuality as they savagely beat themselves into narrow subcultural moulds.

It was several weeks, in fact, that neither of them had seen Jemma, though they never troubled themselves about it, nor thought it unusual. Late in semester, as exams are coming up, some students prefer to study on campus…perhaps for socialization, perhaps so they can be seen to be studying, or maybe their residence situation makes it necessary. Others instead cloister themselves in their apartments, compelling concentration with solitude. Jemma had been putting up regular Instagram posts. Never of social situations, though; always natural scenes, or pictures of old architecture in the still-lowrise-dominated parts of Toronto which can still properly be said to have something of an ‘urban forest.’ Cherry Beach was the most recently dated one, as Parvaneh checked her social media again after the gauntlet of exams and final papers had been run, though that was dated Friday. Now it was Monday. It was an unseasonably warm early December. Still cold in a general sense, of course – everyone in coats at least, though not necessarily full parkas, toques and boots yet. There was no snow on the ground though. Just decaying grass, flattened like gelled-down hair and faded to a sickly pale olive-yellow.

Cherry Beach. Parvaneh remembered, that was the ring tone on Jemma’s phone. Cherry Beach  Express. Something told her she should waste no time in hurrying down there. Hurrying was possible for her at least, as she didn’t have to rely on the riding ‘the rocket.’ She raced her mom’s Rav4 south through the downtown core, down to the beaches. Luckily, it was early in the afternoon, before the rush. She parked on a side street and trotted down the boardwalk, across the stiff hummocks of grass-knotted wet pink sand. She looked around. Not a soul in sight, besides a soccor mom running with her golden retriever two hundred yards or so down the shoreline. And the seagulls circling overhead – if those had souls. She instinctively walked over to a spindly but venerable white ash that she, Jemma and Eunice had often picnicked and sketched under. She remembered that the last time they had done that, on the Labour Day weekend, Jemma had remarked on how all the ash trees in the city would soon be gone; victimized by the emerald ash borer beetle, or cut down by the municipal authorities desirous of saving time. Probably to be replaced with Norway maples or oleasters, Jemma had lamented. Parvaneh remembered this, though she didn’t understand what it meant.

Then, half buried in a tuft of grass at the ash tree’s roots, she saw Jemma’s cell phone. There was no mistaking it. Jemma had made a point about bucking the trend towards ever-more-complicated and capable smartphones by acquiring an old mid-2000s flip phone from an indie trading site online. She used her own, much more effective device to call Eunice. “Hey, Eunice.”

“Sup, girl?”

“I need you to go to Jemma’s place. Need. Break down the door if you have to.”

“Haha, don’t worry, I know how to pick a lock. But…why exactly?”

“I can’t explain right now. I am not sure actually…just…just go. You’re like five minutes away.”

“Ok, sure thing, but you gotta explain if it’s some CIA shit your trying to get me involved in!”

It was an agonizing several minutes of waiting. Parvanah gazed out at the lake. The overcast winter weather meant that the New York side was not visible. It was as if the edge of the sand represented the end of her world. It was a windy day; the waves were enormous. The slimy green water, flecked with indecipherable objects, roared at the land and its inhabitants. It was opaque, as if the clear greenish pigment had been blended with a chalky white. She almost felt tempted to try dare the waves as they climbed up the shore with her foot, as she did on vacation in the Caribbean, laughing hysterically when the sea caught her bare ankles. She fought the temptation; it scared her.

Her phone rang. “Yeh, hi, Eunice again. Listen, her roommates know me and they didn’t mind to let me in. Her door wasn’t locked actually. But…I dunno how to explain this.”

“Just…ugh, tell me. Did you talk to her?”

“She’s…she’s not there. The girls here say she left out Saturday morning for a walk. Man, though…her housekeeping standards have really been slipping. You can hardly walk with all the Mr. Noodles cups and cooler bottles on the floor. Eww…I just saw a roach…”

“Is there…” Parvaneh didn’t want to admit to herself what she was asking. “Is there a note?”

“No but….there’s a painting. Huge. Like wide as the bed. Really amazing, too. Sublime. Like, a Gothic Romanticist sort of sublime. A landscape.”

“Just send me a pic!” Parvaneh yelled, losing herself for a moment.

Eunice duly did as requested. Parvaneh held up her phone in the shadow of the ash tree, so as to see the screen more clearly. She held it straight in front of her and stared. It was as though she were looking through her camera App. Above, a seagull shrieked. She cast the old flip phone in her other hand as far as she could fling it and ran, stumbling, across the hummocks and board steps up towards her car.

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