Small Claims

  02. Plaintiffs & Defendants

  Courtroom 347 has yellow walls, no windows, and a power couple in their mid-forties sitting next—but not close—to each other behind the long wooden table on the right. The defendants have arrived before the bailiff, the court reporter, and the justice. Even the plaintiffs haven’t arrived yet. The garbage cans are empty. The long wooden tables smell of lemon-scented cleaner. The carpet has been vacuumed so recently that the lines left by the machine are still visible, rake marks in a zen garden of dry beige berber. The defendants continue staring straight ahead. They do not touch. Whether this absence of physical contact is the result of respecting each other’s personal space or the fear of reprisal should they breach that personal space is unclear, although that absence is what convinces me they’re husband and wife.

  “We’re on the wrong side.” Helen has jet-black hair and she’s at least fifteen pounds too thin, which gives her prominent cheekbones a touch of Halloween. Her husband shakes his head with a condescending certainty. His charcoal suit is gorgeous, professionally tailored, which, combined with the sense of entitlement he somehow manages to project solely through the sharp angle of his shoulders, informs the world that this is a man used to making decisions, not mistakes. This may or may not explain why he fails to believe his wife, even though there’s a sign less than six inches in front of him that reads Plaintiff.

  “Are you sure?”

  Helen has already collected her binders and pens. She moves to the table on the left, opens a binder, and begins making notes with a silver ballpoint pen. She pushes the pen forcefully into the paper. It’s easy to imagine that Helen isn’t composing preparatory notes but simply writing the phrase I hate my husband over and over again. And if she were holding a knife and not a pen, she’d be carving this phrase into the table.

  Last night, my wife, Julie, and I went to the restaurant where we usually go to celebrate things. It had been quite some time since we’d been there, so long that the interior had been redecorated since our last visit. We didn’t recognize any of the staff. We didn’t get the table by the window and were seated in a booth by the kitchen. I sat across from Julie. I crossed my legs. I didn’t open my menu because I was going to have what I always have. When I looked up at Julie, I got the distinct impression she was using all of her self-control to resist picking up her fork and gleefully, joyfully, repeatedly stabbing it into my hand.

  “Aren’t you hungry?” she asked.

  “Very. I’m very hungry.”

  “What are you having?”

  “The peppercorn steak.”

  “I don’t see it.”

  “What?”

  “It’s not here.”

  “Really?”

  “No, I’m lying to you.” Julie put down her menu, quickly. This created a breeze strong enough to make the candle on the table flicker, although it wasn’t enough to extinguish the flame altogether. Julie didn’t notice. She wasn’t looking at the candle. She looked directly at me for the first time since we’d sat down. Her eyes were narrow. The skin around her mouth was tight.

  Seeing how angry she was hurt me, which I attempted to cover up by becoming angry myself. So that’s how we stayed for a while, sitting across the table from each other, not speaking, just being angry.

  I wasn’t planning on going to small claims court today. It’s a surprise that I’m here. I’m not sure when I made the decision to come, or if I made it at all. This morning, after walking Jenny and Jack to school, I decided to take a stroll away from my house instead of toward it. This is something I sometimes do, part of preparing to write, a meditative exercise to help me focus. Five minutes later, I found myself standing in front of the Christie subway entrance. I already felt like a passenger. I paid the fare, took the Bloor train east, and transferred to the Yonge line, which I rode north to the North York stop. A flight of stairs, a push through the turnstile, a short walk, and I found myself standing in front 47 Sheppard Avenue East.

  The building is a grey concrete rectangle squinting into the street through narrow linear windows. It stands as a physical manifestation of governmental wishy-washiness, a design so obviously chosen by committee, green-lit specifically because it was deemed the least offensive option. I’m just guessing, of course, but how else would a building like this get built? Who else but those eager to be re-elected, to rock no boats, willing to please none over displeasing a few, would have given this concrete shitbox the honour of housing the noblest aspects of our civilization? My gaze kept slipping off it, choosing instead to focus on a small bank of clouds to the right, which drifted across the sky like a group of lost children.

  Just to the right of the elevator on the third floor is a sheet of green paper stapled to a corkboard. It lists the dockets of various courtrooms. I chose courtroom 347 partly at random and partly because there were several people waiting in the hallway outside it and I knew I could file in with everyone else unnoticed. That’s how I came to be here. How Helen and Doug arrived is a little more complicated. They still haven’t made eye contact. All three of us sit quietly, staring at nothing for five minutes, until Anthony, a man ten percent too young, wearing a suit twenty percent too fashionable, arrives.

  Anthony stands behind the table on the right, opens a vintage-style leather briefcase, then looks over at Ted and Helen. He gives a small, sincere wave. Neither Ted nor Helen returns it. Anthony looks a bit hurt by the snub. Then Justice Royal enters the courtroom and everyone rises. Justice Royal is a tall, thin man with an afro of curly white hair that gives his head the impression of being a dandelion gone to seed. Without fanfare or fidgeting, without any sense of ritual at all, Justice Royal sits down.

  “Okay, over to you.” Justice Royal points at Doug, and the trial begins.

  “I’ll just be fifteen minutes.” Doug collects a stack of papers. He takes a deep breath, holds it dramatically, then slowly exhales. Glasses hang around his neck, and Doug leaves them there as he begins reading from a prepared statement. His cadence is both monotonous and stumbling, a perfect, potentially rehearsed impression of an eight-year-old narrator. Five minutes into his prepared statement, Helen begins studying her right palm, running her left thumb up and down the various lines. The fifteen-minute mark comes and goes. Time stops being literal, as the monotony of Doug’s voice stretches each second longer and longer. Twenty-seven minutes later, Justice Royal interrupts.

  “Is this still your opening statement?”

  “It is.”

  “Is there more?” Justice Royal turns in his chair to look over his shoulder at the clock behind him.

  “Yes.”

  “A lot more?”

  “I’ll be brief.”

  “Very well.”

  Doug looks down at his papers and resumes reading, his nasally narration strangely in sync with the overlit space. Helen no longer looks directly in front of her. She’s looking to the right, her eyes cast as far away from the sight of her husband as the room allows.

  We ordered. The food came. We ate the food. Just after the dishes were cleared and we’d both refused dessert, Julie took the white linen napkin off her lap, folded it neatly, and set it aside. That feeling of insecurity returned, the one I’ve been having more and more, an unshakable certainty that the next ten or twelve seconds could witness the end of my marriage.

  Neither of us can figure out exactly what the problem is or how to stop the fighting, or the arguing, or the constant undercutting of every decision the other makes, even the small ones. We know that we still love each other, but we’ve started to wonder if our love is too strong to die or if we’re too weak to kill it. It is not a comfortable feeling, this notion that holding on to love, fighting for it, spending so much of our time and energy, complicating our lives to defend it, may not be born of a noble instinct but of weakness.

  “Why are you so angry all the time?” Julie asked, her voice quiet and calm. Her face became clocklike, an instrument objectively stating not the time but that all of this, ou
r unhappiness, the conflict between us, the pale dark pall that’s been cast over the future, is my fault. Perhaps it is. Maybe I am solely to blame. But I’m afraid to even contemplate this for fear that admitting it would transform me, make me someone else, an imitation of myself, a scarecrow stuffed with mildewed hay, slumping beneath the large black ravens circling overhead. It’s difficult to explain. The importance of maintaining this rigidly feels much more honourable and valid in my head, as if inflexibility is the only thing keeping my masculinity from deflating completely.

  Julie continued staring at me, her expression expressing nothing, articulating neither anger nor contempt, but containing no compassion or love either. The need to hear my response to her question hung in the air between us, a cheap special effect from a black-and-white movie, a hovering spectre only the two of us could see. I found myself leaning forward in my chair, anxious to hear what I was going to say just as much as Julie, if not slightly more.

  Doug continues talking. We learn that he and Helen own a 6,000-square-foot, one-hundred-year-old home worth approximately $3.5 million in downtown Toronto. In 2010, they decided to renovate the kitchen. For reasons that Doug fails to make clear, their regular bank—the bank that holds the mortgage to their seven-bedroom, four-bathroom dream home in the affluent and coveted Rosedale neighbourhood—was unwilling to give them a new mortgage. Doug and Helen were asking for $175,000, a sum that does not seem outrageous considering the potential resale price of their home in the ludicrously hot Toronto housing market.

  Although not willing to cough up the funds themselves, their bank was more than happy to recommend an interested third party, a loan company named Perpetual. Doug concedes that a draft mortgage was drawn up, but he maintains that this agreement was never signed. This is very important to him. He repeats it several times, so I will, too: the draft contract was never signed.

  Now, it’s September, and even though Doug hasn’t signed his name at the bottom of the drafted mortgage with the Perpetual Loan Company, using a cursive that I can only speculate would be flowery and ornate, the type of signature that prioritizes dramatic loops and swirls over legibility—a signature much like my own—work on the renovation somehow gets underway. Doug never explicitly states this, but I’m assuming that the couple used their own money—or worse, family money—as stopgap financing to hire a contractor and begin the renovation. Anxious to pay his bills, Doug’s now eager to sign and get the money, but Perpetual has begun demanding to see things, trivial things, like building permits.

  Perpetual sees these demands as satisfying legal requirements. Doug is of the opinion that these building permits fall outside the scope of the project and are nothing but an attempt to sandbag him and his wife, that the paperwork is unnecessary and designed to rack up fees and expenses. This difference in opinion leads to an impasse. Doug receives no money. The deal goes into limbo, like sea monkeys stuck in their packaging, and the entire transaction is trapped in suspended animation until December 31, New Year’s Eve.

  Maybe Helen was putting the finishing touches on her makeup and wiggling into a little black dress as Doug fiddled with sterling-silver cufflinks. Perhaps she was rushed, as the hired car had already arrived to take them both to a chic downtown party. Whatever the circumstances, this is when Helen emailed Perpetual and broke it off, informed them that the couple would no longer be requiring their services. Now we’ve reached the present. The kitchen renovation is almost done and Perpetual is suing Doug and Helen for commitment, legal, and standby fees incurred, a figure they reckon to be $11,397. It seems important to note that this case is being fought over money that never changed hands.

  The only answer I could come up with to give Julie, to explain why I’m perpetually angry, a response to justify or at least articulate why a dark cynical tar coats each and every one of my emotions, was the story of how our daughter puked all over my back last January. It was just the three of us—me, Jenny, and Jack—in the car. I’m not sure why Julie wasn’t there. I was rushing because we were running late, driving east on the 401 to their ski lesson. Jenny’s vomiting was truly inspired. She used to get carsick all the time, but I thought she’d grown out of it. The vomit sprayed onto the back of my neck with considerable force. Thick and warm, it dripped downward between my shirt and my skin. I took shallow breaths through my mouth and tried not to think about the chunky cubes bathed in hot mucus slime soaking my shirt. Beginning to gag, I rolled down the window and looked for an exit. It was snowing. There was a thin layer of slush under the tires. To my left, a white rental van travelled a little faster than we were. On my right was the eighteen-wheeler I was attempting to pass. My daughter started to cry. I tried to change lanes, but the transport blocked my way and we missed the first exit.

  “It smells! It smells so bad!” Jack screamed.

  “It’s okay.”

  “But she stinks!”

  “It’s okay!”

  “She smells so bad!”

  “Stop it!”

  “So bad!”

  “Goddamn it! Just be a good brother!” I screamed at my son. He began to cry. They were both crying. I wanted to cry, too. The white rental van sped up. His back right tire kicked spray onto my windshield and at the same moment he began to move into my lane. To the right were the middle six wheels of the transport truck. I was terrified and desperately trying to hide this fact from my children.

  “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have yelled! I’m sorry!”

  My daughter’s puke slid farther down my back. It cooled and stuck to my skin. The van was directly in front of me. Its tail lights came on. I applied my brakes. Our car began to fishtail. Not a lot, but enough. The transport zoomed by me, revealing the next exit. Without looking in my rear-view mirror, I pulled into the right-hand lane.

  “How’s your sister?”

  “I’m sorry!”

  “I’m sorry, too!”

  Decelerating, I took the turnoff, then twisted the rear-view mirror so I could see her. Puke coated her ski jacket, her car seat, her hair. I forced a smile that I hoped expressed benevolence. Jenny puked again, the vomit seeping out of her mouth like a pot of vegetable soup boiling over on the stove. I turned the mirror so I couldn’t see her anymore and pulled into a gas station.

  The amount of cleanup I was able to perform with the scratchy brown paper towels dispensed at the pumps was minimal. Much of the puke was matted into Jenny’s hair and rubbing it with the paper towels only made it worse. The stench of vomit mixed with the smell of gasoline. Gagging, I handed my phone to my son, and his vomit-coated sister was quickly forgotten as he began playing Minecraft. I hate the power those games have over him.

  “I still feel sick,” Jenny said.

  “I’ll be right back.”

  Jack didn’t look up from my phone. Jenny looked at me like she expected I was never coming back. The inside of the gas station was designed to induce the sensation of an operating room, overlit with white walls, glistening stainless-steel shelves holding products arranged in calculated rows. I walked to the counter, behind which a teenager pretended not to notice me, the only customer he had. I admit that I stared too long at his black fingernail polish.

  “Can I get some water?”

  “In the cooler, at the back.” He shook his shaggy head in the general direction, leaving his hands free to continue holding his phone.

  “No, sorry, my daughter threw up in the car. I just need some water to clean her up.”

  “Bottles of water are in the cooler.”

  “Are you serious?”

  He shrugged.

  “Come on.”

  He shrugged again.

  “Really?”

  “I can’t just give you water.”

  “Yes. You can. You easily can.”

  “You’ll have to buy a bottle.”

  “Of water? You can’t even give me water?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Then give me the key to the bathroom.”

  “Bathrooms are
for customers.”

  If I were forced to pinpoint the exact moment in which I lost faith in this world, it wouldn’t be in grade school, when I was taught about Nazis and death camps and that the only two times the world has ever banded together was to fight each other. It wouldn’t be our currently suspended disbelief, having discovered global warming and yet continuing to do nothing about it. It wouldn’t be my first trip to the big city, when I saw scruffy men sleeping outdoors. It wouldn’t be during Grade Ten, when my mother sat me down and told me that my father was having an affair and that all of our lives, as we knew them, were ending. The precise second that the world finally, once and for all, irredeemably failed to live up to my expectations was as I walked to the cooler at the back of that gas-station convenience store. Surveying the prices, I selected the cheapest bottle and carried it back to the counter. The cashier punched buttons into the cash register. The screen told me I owed $1.47. I put a toonie on the counter and he gave me back fifty cents.

  “Now give me the key to the bathroom.”

  It was a small victory. Taking it made me a small man. This is the problem with the modern world: even the victories diminish you. Leaving the bottle of water behind, I took the key and helped my daughter out of the car. She held my hand as we walked to the bathroom.

  “I can’t go into the boys.”

  “It’s an emergency.”

  Inside the tiny room, I removed the mess from my daughter and spread it around the bathroom. Flecks were flicked on the sink, the mirror, the wall. The smell of vomit inhabited the space in a way I knew would not soon leave. The garbage can overflowed with paper towels grown soggy with water and puke. When my daughter was vomit-free, or at least as vomit-free as the circumstances allowed, I took her hand and opened the bathroom door.