The Perfect Order of Things Read Free

I saw her in the kitchen at a Christmas party, as a girl out of my league. And yet how odd it is that in only a matter of days she went from being a girl I could never “get” to a girl I assumed belonged with me.
    Her good looks—and her “big shot” father—got her a job as a model at the Exhibition, a giant old-fashioned fair at the edge of Lake Ontario. On warm summer evenings, tingling with the excitement of the city, of being caught up in and fluent in its swirl, I rattled downtown in the streetcar to see her. Wandering under the huge gates of the Exhibition, through the crowds, the bangs and pops and shrieks and swoops of rides and games, I felt that I was being pulled toward the centre of life; and at that centre there was Clarissa Bentley, a human mannequin who stood motionless on a slowly revolving podium in the Automotive Building. Wearing a pink dress or a blue jumper or jeans with a candy-cane top, she was the object of scrutiny—would she blink, would she twitch, could you make her smile?—for the parade of humanity, men mostly, occasionally dragging their plump wives and bored children among the new-model Chevrolets and Buicks and Cadillacs. Having a beautiful girlfriend is a certain kind of delicious when you’re young, and that moment when the podium ground gradually to a halt, when Clarissa’s arms came to life, a smile crossed her heavily made-up features (“Johnnie, look at that!”), that moment when, carefully, she stepped down from the dais, one step, then another, then another, and came over to me, to me , that single moment quite lifted me from who I used to be and made me, I was sure, into someone new. The life I had always been owed. The summer advanced. I have a photograph from that time, a coloured picture taken in a booth, me in a candy-coloured jacket and a straw boater, Clarissa in profile. I put it in a plastic gadget that lit up when you put it to your eye and pushed a button. I carried it around in my pocket like a passport.
    And then one afternoon a boy from school, Justin Strawbridge, took me to the Place Pigalle, a gloomy downstairs tavern where, he said, we could get “served,” the drinking age in those days being twenty-one. I hated the taste of draft beer, it made me shiver with disgust. But I loved getting “served” and I loved doing things with Justin Strawbridge and so I drank and drank and gradually it seemed to me I was a very interesting, daring fellow.
    And after Justin left (he had an errand to do for his unpleasant mother), I wandered through the twilight bar, talking to people, even sitting down once at a crowded table until I found myself talking to the back of an engineering student. But I didn’t take it personally. I let the sweep of things take me here and there.
    It was such a gorgeous night when I emerged hours later, the sky a luminous, inexpressible blue, a sliver of moon hanging over the lake. So beautiful I couldn’t stand to leave it, and I walked all the way down to the Exhibition. The moon rose in the sky, the stars came out, the city was wrapped in a bubble of density and meaning. Passing under the Exhibition gates (they loomed like a canyon overhead), I slalomed through the caramel-sweet air and children and exuberant young men. A double-decker Ferris wheel spun backwards into the night.
    Clarissa waited for me outside the auto pavilion. She was chatting to another model, a girl in a red sweater with eyes too big for her bony skull; and it seemed to me that this girl spoke to me in a rather supercilious manner, as if she’d gone from not knowing me to not liking me in about forty-five seconds.
    I wasn’t as indulgent this time as I’d been with the engineering student, and I must have said something (I had quite the tongue back then), because she walked off without saying goodbye to either of us.
    “Somebody’s been drinking,” Clarissa said. We started across the midway, the Saturday night crowd swollen and somehow more aggressive than