Extraordinary by David Gilmour Page A

Jumping into bed with him wasn’t.”
    â€œYou know him?” she said.
    â€œCasually. But I like him. He’s a mess, but a gifted mess. Anyway, what Chloe misunderstood from the outset was that she wasn’t in university anymore, that in the grown-up world, when you sleep with a woman’s husband, particularly a woman who has just had a
baby
, the consequences are—well—different. This wasn’t a replay of Miranda and the trombonist. A few weeks into the first season, the director’s wife got wind of things. She turned up at Chloe’s apartment. She put a Japanese carving knife to her
own
throat and said that if she, Chloe, didn’t stop fucking her husband, she (the wife) would slit herself from ear to ear.
    â€œThe drama played itself out over the next few months: bursts of hysteria, sulks, alcoholic confessions, blistering hangovers and public scenes, until the director did what he was destined to do all along, which was to return, droop-tailed, to his wife and work a solid, if brief, program at the Hillside rehab centre in Georgia. Eight thousand dollars a week. Nevertheless, a month later he was slugging back shot glasses of Russian vodka and got himself arrested for, get this, trying to strangle his wife outside a Yorkville restaurant.
    â€œNever mind what addiction counsellors say, the only way to get over the loss of a cherished lover is to find a body that thrills you as much as the one you’ve lost. I know this from personal experience. (And not just once, either.) But when you’re young, you think getting out of town will do the trick, and that’s what Chloe decided to do. She thought about going to law school, somewhere ‘cool’—Mexico, the Caribbean maybe. She fancied herself a criminal lawyer, getting those Puerto Rican and Jamaican drug dealers a day in the sunshine of level-field jurisprudence. But after spending four or five days in the gallery at the University Avenue courthouse, she came to the conclusion that pretty much everyone down there is guilty. But worse, from her standpoint, was the daily spectacle of the doors of justice spinning like some nightmare fan, coughing out the same burnt-out lawyers and the same felons week in and week out. She said to me on the phone one day, ‘I get the distinct feeling that the best part of being a lawyer is going to law school. After that, it’s strictly downhill.’ My guess is that she was probably right, and I told her so. But considering what I was doing for a living at the time, I’m not so sure it was prudent advice.”
    â€œAnd that got her to California?”
    â€œHere’s where the story gets good. After the TV show, she pissed around here and there. She wrote half a novel about a young girl who falls in love with a married film director. But the truth is, Chloe never had much affection for her own company, or for sitting in a room with her own shortcomings (who does?), so she gave it up. For a few months she taught English to Cambodian refugees in Vancouver, then did a night shift on a suicide hotline. Then worked for an essay writing service. Then painted sets for the low-budget horror film
Santa Claws.
Nothing quite worked. She phoned me one night, she was a bit drunk, said she was on her way back to Toronto, that she wanted to help the ‘little brown babies in India.’ She meant it, too. But she never went.”
    â€œYes,” Sally said, “I recall that stage. The little brown babies stage.”
    â€œOne day, while she was working in a bookstore, she happened across a copy of
Vanity Fair.
On the cover was a photograph of the magazine’s staff, mostly young people, sitting on desks, talking on the phone. She faxed it to me. That’s what I want to do
,
she wrote—I want to do something with
people.
And that was it: a year later she was in California doing a very expensive degree in journalism.”
    â€œBut where did