The Now Art Café
By Nat Kishchuk
Meriem Before
The wan Lachine sun slanting through the managers’ open doors uplights the ninth-floor dust. The managers are all at the meeting in Miami, hustling their way into new boss jobs in the merged company, Meriem thinks as she wheels the recycling bin down the passage. Probably by a pool, with umbrella cocktails.
She surveys the cubicle landscape. The juniors have already cleared out, leaving stacks of banker boxes in the aisles. Across the way, Gina has also been emptying her files. Two boxes are half-filled and empty brown file folders are strewn about. Orange, purple, and neon green Post-It Notes stuck to the overhead shelf flutter above the desk; poor Gina, those little bursts of corporate enthusiasm hadn’t saved her job either. Still, the Post-Its are bright flashes in the dusty grayness: the grey tweed cubicles, the grey metal shelves stacked with financials, the grey matter in the managers’ heads churning marginal gains and alpha-driven risk-adjusted returns. As Meriem watches, an orange Post-It detaches itself from a purple one and dives, leaving a deeper violet patch, bruise-like.
Sourness rising, Meriem turns to her own space and jams the bin inside. This untacks the list of Floor Emergency Captains from the tweed divider. Bending to retrieve it, she feels like she needs to lie down, and does so, on her stomach, chin on hands. From that vantage, she notices for the first time the silver metal divider feet splayed like ducks’, lined up all the way across D sector. She hears the dividers rustle quietly, gathering themselves to waddle off, all connected in tidy lines, maybe to ride the elevators, maybe to hurl themselves down the shafts. They want her to waddle along with them, right over the edge: hurtling, splintering, splatting.
While contemplating this, she sees human feet turn the corner. She moves into a crouch, listening. Passing greetings signal the imminent arrival of Matt from Internal Audit. Making a sudden decision, she stands quickly, grabs her coffee thermos, and slings her coat and purse over her shoulder, leaving her ID badge on the desk. She turns to step out, but Matt is at her cubicle. He plants his feet squarely in the opening.
“Hey Meriem,” he says, taking in her state of packing and then turning his earnest young eyes to her, “Didja have a chance to fill in that performance indicators report?”
She angles her head forward slightly and blinks as if to say, what report, then counters, “Hey Matt, how’s it going? I guess you’re not doing this on the tenth, eh?” gesturing toward the recycling bin. She looks down at her purse and pulls out her keys, jangling.
Matt persists: “You know they need it upstairs, the new management team wants it by Monday and we want to have everything all in order. Third quarter results coming out soon, right?” He rocks from side to side, cajoling but still blocking the way.
Leading with her purse elbow, she slides by him and keeps walking. “Yeah, I got started on the report, should be done tomorrow,” she lies over her shoulder. She bypasses the elevator and takes all the stairs down.
Joan Before
The reception is huge: everyone who was at the church seems to have turned up here too. Her ex-mother-in-law had been a wonderful cook, so maybe people are hoping the lunch will be a spread. Her brother finally shows up. He brings her a coffee and comes with her to have a look around. Although it's been a while, she’s never been to her ex’s new place and is constantly running into stuff she formerly co-owned. On the very top floor, they can see her ex through the glass in a kind of a sunroom with a big desk and a filing cabinet in it. He is on his phone and at the same time watering flowering plants from a green plastic can. Huh, she thinks, in all the years we were married, I never ever saw him do that.
The call ends but she doesn’t think she’s up to talking to him, so they go downstairs and then out back to look at the guest house. The grass is soggy in spots, she guesses because the rivière des Prairies is still high. Through the cedar hedge, she can see a couple of sails at sharp angles. She wonders why her ex hasn’t put his office in the guesthouse instead of upstairs with the orchids and azaleas. Then she thinks it could make a good studio—she’s heard the new wife is a musician of some kind. A nephew from her ex’s side is in there too, and tells them they should go down the spiral staircase in the corner and see, there’s a deck opening onto the river. Although Joan feels she should inspect this feature, her brother isn’t interested, so they just go back outside.
While her brother goes to find the washroom, she wanders around the yard, looking at the early daylilies and late irises, and chatting with some former in-laws, sounding as ditsy as they expect her to. The coffee is awful. She resists the temptation to pour it into a planter and instead goes back to the guesthouse to find a garbage can. Hearing the water, she decides to go see the deck.
The deck is right next to the river. The grey-black water is moving fast; silvery chunks are swirling and crashing past her, glinting in the late afternoon sun. The river is crooning at her to wade out, murmuring it would be so cold she wouldn't even know she was going under, coaxing her to just let herself be swept away, scarf dramatically abaft. She shivers. Drawing her arm back, she flings the coffee cup, beige water arcing, into the water. Then she climbs back up, crosses the yard and goes in the patio door, hoping they have started serving the desserts.
Nadia Before
Nadia’s tan steel-toed shoes, a recent find at the Value Village on Pie-IX, are really a size too big. She watches them tread clumsily up the curved metal staircase as she carries her scraping-and-painting kit to the second-floor balcony, where the boss is waiting. He pushes the door open, then follows her up the stifling inner staircase to the top-floor apartment. The boss says nothing, but his abrupt movements signal impatience—with her, with the client, with life, she has no idea.
Upstairs, she kicks her new shoes off outside 302 and shifts the kit to her skinny hip so as not to nick the fresh latex as they cross the empty apartment to the rear balcony. It is darker out here, and as she steps outside, the tall black buildings all around suddenly shove toward her, vying for height, choking out her light and air. The client, or maybe he is a contractor, is on his phone, smoking and pacing. Seeing them, he gestures with his cigarette hand to the railings she had scraped and painted last week.
“What is this shit?” he snaps. “It's supposed to be Rustoleum Navy, not whatever the hell this is! This doesn’t match”—gesturing at the next-door balcony, accusing the boss—“you cheap fucker!” The boss and the client start yelling at each other in a French too fast for her to follow. Nadia hides a violent shudder and wants to grip the railing to steady herself, but knows it will compel her urgently to fling herself up and over, flailing down down down to the alley. She sees herself in a new arrangement over the hood of a Prius.
She focuses on breathing and tries to turn her mind’s eye to the painting she had been working on late last night. She believes the boss would cut any corner for a profit, and although she doesn’t know anything about industrial paint brands, she can easily see the paint she had used is not close to the blue on the neighbouring balconies’ railings. After answering the Kijiji ad “Painter Wanted,” she had used the paint the boss had left in a jumbly box in her cousin’s driveway—her cousin having grudgingly allowed her to crash there until she can find an apartment closer to the college where she is supposed to start in Visual Arts next month—with a list of addresses and a flat rate per address scrawled on a torn sheet taped to the top of a can.
“You,” yells the client, glowering, further choking her air. “Osti, c’est pas la bonne couleur, right?” challenging her to wade in. She slides her right hand in the air above the railing, thinking of the twilight prairie landscape she had been trying to copy from memory to canvas: lavendering periwinkle banded with tangerine and flame, distant auric sparks that could be yard lights or stars, the comfort of no horizon, nothing hidden, the world wide open.
She offers, “C’est un couleur beau, le soleil, when it's bright, la same,” nodding sideways at the other balconies.
The boss jerks his thumb toward the door, a signal to décrisse in any language. She takes her gear and thumps out and down to her battered pickup, thinking she probably won't get paid, she will be short for tuition, then of her landscape: feeling her fingers coax the texture of a tender dusk from the tip of her No. 6 brush. She opens the truck cap, puts her kit inside and then, gently and with a little flourish, closes the tailgate.
Meriem Then
Meriem dumps the basket of fries onto the tray under the warming light. She glances out the order window to see how many people are still lined up, then rips open another greasy plastic bag and, holding it by the bottom corners, upends its contents into the fryer.
This is the first job Meriem could get without previous-employer references. While parts of it are pleasant monotony—spearing fried chicken parts into cardboard box after bucket, the fork rhythmically whacking the edge to make the pieces fall—there are things she kind of dislikes. The smells, mainly. The bloody-water smell of the walk-in where the chicken parts are piled. The powdered-skim waft of the eggwash mix. Her hair after her shift, like rancid fryer shortening, coagulated. But the coffee most of all: cheap industrial coffee too long on the burner. Once that smell gets into the back of her nostrils, she can’t get it out.
When the last draggletailed drunks, molly insomniacs, and now-ravenous lovers are gone, she locks the front door and starts the close-out cleanup. She washes the cookers and breading table with grey terrycloth rags, slimes the mop over greasy tiles, disinfect-sprays and tidies the packaging counter, and then makes sure enough boxes are unfolded and stacked for the morning girls.
Kevin, the night manager, is sitting at the deck in the crammed office, cashing out. As she picks up the garbage can next to him, it sloshes: someone, probably Kevin, has dumped a half-full Pepsi in it on top of the scrap paper.
“Fuck,” he says, accusatory, though Meriem wasn’t cashiering today, “short again.”
Glancing down at his reconciliation spreadsheet on the screen, she sees right away he has added the morning float twice. She hesitates, but remembers that his boss’s reference for her bank loan had been helpful, so points it out. He barks at her to hurry the hell up with the garbage.
As she ties the last of the big black garbage bags, Kevin’s juiced-up Civic guns out of the parking lot and down Sherbrooke. She hucks the bag out the back door, then gets her coat and purse. Outside in the crisp night air, one sneakered foot holding the door open, she checks to make sure she has her phone and keys. The door double slams. She heaves the garbage bags into the bin, takes a deep nose-breath, then heads for her day job at the café.
Joan Then
Joan’s adult ed night class is watching a video demonstration of good sales techniques for condos. The instructor, sighting the remote like a weapon, keeps stopping the video to emphasize conquest points like reserve funds and walkability scores. Joan keeps getting distracted by the artwork in the show homes, seeing better ways to arrange it, and wants to ask the instructor to back up so they can study this. A Styrofoam burp from the cafeteria coffee almost makes her start hiccupping. She roots around in her oversized elephant-print bag hoping she’ll find a mint or one of those little foil-wrapped squares of milk chocolate.
Her phone buzzes in the pocket of her fuzzy yellow sweater. She looks down at it sideways without taking it out. It's a text from the programming director of one of the places she does art therapy, wanting to know when she will be done her course and can she please get back to them so they can set up the fall group sessions.
Joan has wanted to be someone else for a while, but hasn't given a definitive no to this north-end seniors’ day centre, of which she is very fond. They frame the students’ art, hold a vernissage, and, if the students agree, put it up in the main hallway for at least a month, all of which Joan adores.
Try to stick to at least something, she tells herself, and turns her phone off in her pocket. The video is now on to bidding wars and realtor percentage commissions. She straightens up in the orange plastic chair and musters.
Nadia Then
Head still under the sleeping bag on the saggy couch they rent her, Nadia hears the last of her roommates leave in a late-for-class shouty clatter. Nadia sits up then and gathers the bag around her, cross legged, not having any class to go to. By the time she had scraped the tuition together, the program was full and the person she had spoken to was clearly uninterested in seeing her portfolio anyway. It's cold in the apartment, the top half of a disintegrating brick house in student alley, so she keeps the sleeping bag around her as she heads to the bathroom.
From the bathroom Nadia wanders into the kitchen. Dirty dishes are overflowing the sink and counters and there’s an open pizza box with a pile of crusts on the stove top. She has a bit of yogurt left but no coffee, so she fishes in the garbage for a used pod to rerun though the machine. The garbage too is overflowing, mostly with half-empty take-out containers, wine bottles, and Amazon packaging. She finds a pod looking like it was used just once, only about a third of the way down.
As thin brown water is dripping into a chipped Tim’s mug, Nadia reaches to the back of the fridge for her yogurt jar, on which she has painted a hyperrealist severed hand. This involves moving a large metal bowl of dried-out cooked spaghetti and several tottering half-full sushi trays. At first she can’t see her jar, but then finds it on the lower shelf behind a bundle of brown-weeping vegetation, probably not kale, possibly chard. Despite the hand, her jar has been emptied. This, though, gives her license to eat someone else’s food. As she is looking for something non-dubious, sunlight slips behind her through the dusty kitchen window and lights up a mason jar half-full of something liquid with an undulating top layer of chartreuse-and-teal mold. A citrine bubble rolls up from the bottom of the jar and distends the wavy velveteen surface a little but doesn't break it.
Nadia carefully takes this jar from the fridge, sets it on the edge of the counter in the sunlight and watches it, sipping her coffee. Then she arranges a couple of pizza crusts next to it and goes back to the living room to get her easel and paints from where she hides them behind the couch.
The Now Art Café
Meriem is polishing clear glass coffee mugs, holding them up to the autumn sunlight streaming in from Notre Dame Street, when she sees a young woman with fluffy purple hair and a scruffy black portfolio try the door. The slump of her shoulders on finding it locked and the way she just stands there for a minute looking down makes Meriem decide to open a little early. She rattles her keys to get the girl’s attention through the window, turns down Frisco Lee, and comes over to unlock the door. She holds it open and the young woman glides inside, head down, mumbling “Thanks.” Meriem turns the oval sign on the chain to “Ouvert,” then goes behind the counter to switch on the lights. The girl stands looking around, deciding where to sit. Meriem picks up her orange-and-yellow-striped cloth and the next mug, tapping along to “The Brubeck Space Station.”
She lets the young woman choose a chair and table, settle her things and herself. When she begins to look around at the vivid graphic art on the walls and the abstract ceramic sculptures hanging from the ceiling, Meriem comes over and asks, “What can I get you?” The girl looks up, blue eyes stricken and brimming, and bites her lower lip just slightly, as though too much head movement will dislodge the tears.
“Take your time hon,” she says gently, laying her left hand on the table for a moment. “My name’s Meriem.”
“Nadia,” says the girl.
“Take your time, Nadia.”
The door tinkles. Joan peers in, exclaiming, “You’re open early!”
“Yup,” says Meriem, with a slight glance to the girl, who is now studying the table menu card, purple hair hiding all of her face but nothing of her reddened ears. Meriem goes to make Joan’s usual mocha latte with caramel drizzle, and Joan, after picking a few dead leaves off the ficus by the door, takes her usual stool at the counter. She raises her eyebrows at Meriem, who shrugs she doesn't know. Joan pulls a stuffed file folder out of her elephant bag, sets it on the counter after jiggling it a little to make the papers line up or at least to hide the doodles on their edges, and then takes out her phone, scrolling through messages.
“I finally heard back from Toronto, they’re open to you leasing the upstairs for the gallery if you cover the janitor costs, have full insurance, and don’t touch the electrical. They’ll add three thousand a month to your lease down here.”
Meriem nods but doesn’t say anything. When she had started looking for a space for her experimental art slash performance art slash coffee house, Joan was the only real estate agent who returned her calls, it being only her second shaky month into this post-divorce impulse career. They both know the upstairs space is not worth that price, just like they both know Joan isn’t going to be a very good real estate agent. They have hit it off, though. Joan is more interested in Meriem’s art café project than her other clients’ rental exigencies, and they have already agreed Joan will offer creative self-expression workshops there when it opens.
The lilting smell of Joan’s latte suffuses the bright space. Nadia looks up from the menu card. Meriem goes over to her, standing a little closer than normal, and tilts her head.
“I’ll just have a coffee, I guess.”
“Sure thing,” says Meriem. “Hey, everything ok?” Joan swivels a quarter-turn on her stool to observe somewhat discreetly.
Nadia looks at the wall, inhales as she raises her shoulders, then puts her elbows on the table, trembling fingertips touching.
“I just sold a painting, first one,” she says. Her tears well over.
“Hey hey hey,” Meriem says, “that’s wonderful Nadia, congratulations! Coffee’s on me!”
Joan slides off her stool and leans against it, now facing the other two, joining in with “Woo hoo! Bravo! What else have you got? Can we see your stuff?”
Nadia smiles shyly and reaches for her portfolio.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Nat Kishchuk began writing fiction a couple of years ago after decades of doing something completely else. She mainly writes speculative fiction as a means of advancing social justice, creating alternative but cotemporaneous worlds that aim to shift perceptions of current, unacceptable realities. Originally from Saskatchewan, she is grateful to live and work in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal), on the traditional, unceded territory of the Kanien’kehá:ka people.