In Vancouver, the host of past heartache, the author says goodbye to all that
I have been in Vancouver International Airport’s baggage claim area about a dozen times. Every time I stood waiting for my luggage to appear from a flight arriving from Toronto or Montreal, I had the same feeling — a toxic mixture of hopeless love and aching lust, peppered with a knowledge that I was both stupid and doomed.
About a dozen times I stood there waiting for the same someone “special” to meet me in arrivals. Every time I knew I was being an idiot, and every time I convinced myself otherwise. Vancouver has the distinct pleasure of being the city that hosted my youth’s most essential, reckless decision. As life choices go, it’s not the worst one a girl in her early twenties can make — I misguidedly followed a boy across the country. (I’m quite sure now he didn’t really want to be followed, but was much too nice to say so.) He had been offered a job on the Left Coast, and after suffering through a long-distance relationship and multiple flights back and forth, I decided enough was enough. After four years in Montreal, clutching my mostly useless bachelor’s degree, I sold my belongings and boarded a plane to Vancouver because of love. I had no apartment, no job, and no plans — just a romantic notion of “going westward as into the future.” What was worse was that, even after all those visits, I wasn’t even all that sure I liked Vancouver, and as the months passed I became quite sure I hated it. At the time, my wise and irritatingly rational scientist father told me that no matter what my experience on the West Coast became, I should stay a full 365 days to give it the proverbial chance. A year to a fresh graduate is an excruciatingly long time, but now that rain-soaked memory seems only like a blip on an otherwise expansive map.
I’d been blaming my failure in Vancouver on a lack of funds for as long as I can remember, but there had always been a small voice in my head that suggested I should look deeper. So after ten years away (and with a boatload of repressed regret), I have reluctantly come back, out of morbid curiosity, stubbornly trying to prove something, or kill something, or maybe just to satisfy my masochism. This time I’ve landed in YVR with a healthy credit limit and no need to shoplift. Again I am baggage claim, this time on business instead of (attempted) pleasure, yet still feeling that inexplicable stupid doom that comes from a relationship that will never work out. And let me just say, Vancouver on love and Vancouver on business are two very different places.
* * *
Vancouver exists in opposition to Toronto and Montreal. It is Canada’s version of “Go West, Young Fucked-Up Chick,” a place where those wrung out by the glorious filth of Montreal’s late nights and stomped on by the grind of Toronto’s early mornings can pretend for a while. My “Vancouver phase” was about me trying on something that didn’t fit, and 372 days later I flew home, back to my parents’ house in Toronto, single and unemployed, my tail between my legs, over $10,000 in debt.
My youthful Vancouver disappointment wasn’t a total loss. My crippling loneliness and misery pushed me to write a novel, and the benefit of needing three jobs to stay afloat is that your résumé ends up looking pretty good pretty quickly. But it did eventually become clear to me that there are people who can do Vancouver, people who can’t, and very few people in-between. Now I’ve had a decade apart from No Fun City to analyze why it didn’t fit me (beyond the fact that I simply couldn’t afford it, and no amount of free samples at the high-end grocery stores could remedy that). Did I like my dirty vices too much? Did I like to sleep in and stay up too late? Did I have too little interest in mountain biking and yoga? Did a soya latte seem like complete absurdity to me?
On my return, I am determined to make myriad things work now that wouldn’t then, and arriving this time with cash in hand fills me with an indescribable resentment, especially when the concierge eagerly takes my bags and calls me “Ma’am” at check-in.
* * *
In Gary Stephen Ross’s take on the soggy city (“A Tale of Two Cities,” March 2010), he rightly claims “it’s possible to be startled by Vancouver, right there in front of you, but not quite take it in.” I feel severed from it as much now as I did then, but the startled feeling is distinctly different. Perhaps it’s because I’m actually looking up, instead of down at my miserable feet. Perhaps it’s because I’m not worrying if I can afford the bar tab anymore. Perhaps it’s because I’m beyond misguided life decisions made in the name of love.
In my hotel room overlooking the bay — with its conscientious and almost annoyingly doting staff, with its turndown, complimentary pastry service, and fully stocked minibar — I feel like an incredible fraud when they call me “Mrs. Fowles.” I am angry that what couldn’t work then accidentally works now. Working on a novel while drinking room service Merlot in a white bathrobe — this is the stuff of fantasies for the girl who ten years ago followed a boy across the country.
For the four days I am here, I spend the majority of my non-business time wandering aimlessly by myself, trying to grapple with how I feel about the city now, trying to divorce it from my old struggle to stay afloat while bearing the weight of a stomped-on heart. I sit in a bar in Gastown, a lonely traveller desperate for conversation, while businessmen ordering manhattans throw me awkward, sidelong glances. Only the bartender obliges, and even he is a tad standoffish. The feeling is different, but familiar — I am no longer invisible by virtue of my poverty, but because people are choosing to ignore me. This culture is, as before, a strange mix of aloof and excruciatingly friendly. Transplants are responsive — Japanese students and Australian party hunters buy you a cocktail with pocket change in the hope of befriending you, while locals hold you at arms’ length with plastic smiles and promises of future coffee. Despite the gentrification, the ongoing revitalization of downtrodden neighbourhoods, Vancouverites are just as afraid to get close as I remember.
It becomes apparent that even with means, I still don’t know how to navigate this world. I feel clumsy and sick. Vancouver is the kind of squeaky-clean city that makes me want to smoke cigarettes and swear. It feels propped up and constructed, a Disneyland of privilege and a horror show of poverty. And undeniably beautiful in a way I can never feel a part of.
* * *
After a few glasses of that room service Merlot I considered contacting him, that boy who used to greet me with kisses in baggage claim, asking him to grab dinner with me so we could inevitably rehash the what, why, and what-the-fucks of our fall out. He was a Montreal transplant who fell in love and found success in this place in a way I was too flawed to. I consider a meeting to ask the jealous question, “Why did this world work for you and not for me?” But what would be the point? The year that was Vancouver was never really about him anyway.
I am angry at this city for being easy when it was so hard ten years ago. Its mountain views and kindnesses fill me with animosity. This is a new view of Vancouver I’ve never seen, one so accommodating that it demands I text message friends to tell them the shocking details of my bounty. (There’s a television embedded in the bathroom mirror! The bathtub is the size of a small Toronto apartment!) I am a grown-up, travelling on business with a per diem, but mentally I still feel close to that struggling girl who shoplifted to make ends meet.
On my last evening in Vancouver I sit in one more bar and write. I drink a side car while a small woman is perched at a white piano dramatically singing “I Will Always Love You,” and the twenty-year-old guys next to me snort audibly at the ridiculousness of it. I realize the bar is full of out-of-towners, and the pretty blonde waitresses are dressed identically, like bridesmaids at a deluxe wedding. This atmosphere is manufactured, but for this reason it is the perfect metaphor for Vancouver. A light breeze ambles off the water onto the patio and the women wrap shawls around their shoulders as men in crisp shirts laugh heartily at each other’s jokes.
Unlike in Toronto, or Montreal, no one in this bar has even the vaguest, far-off look of unhappiness, anger, or even discomfort. Nothing could ever possibly go wrong here. Not like it went disastrously for me, when I wasn’t even aware that this side of the city, this world, existed.
And it’s the propped-up absurdity of this town that I’ll never get used to. When I’m here I long for something more manic, with more meaning. This city has no depth, no identity, and instead leans on its landscape for support. To every optimistic new arrival it promises the clean, empty comfort of a picturesque life.
I’m not buying it, even though everything is already paid for.
Legong: I know I am replying to this pathetic, racist statement a little late and the whole ignorant rant probably doesn’t even deserve a reply. Wanhenglo, if we were all to generalise about...
Legong: I know I am replying to this pathetic, racist statement a little late and the whole ignorant rant probably doesn’t even deserve a reply. Wanhenglo, if we were all to generalise about...
Sky Goodden: This is startling, refreshing, overdue, and damn good. Thank you, Shary.
Mark: It’s not just in Canada, it seems all over artists don’t get the local recogtnition they should. I was in Malaga where Picasso was born and it is much different, but then he is...
Seenloitering: The “gender analysis” in this article is upside down. Marie Calloway is a threat to the status quo because she threatens the myth that women are morally superior, above...
Jefry: I do not really like to read a story like a novel or a real story but I think this is very interesting and need to be read
Guest: I didn’t want babies or a period any more. I KNEW without a doubt I did not want children so I had been asking for a hysterectomy since I was 19. I finally got it at 39. My...
Djzklj: Pretty interesting article, despite that I don’t wanna make a voyage there
Sanyo Seiki: I love this game! Very addicted! Sanyo Seiki
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