the times in between

“Vince is in la-la land again.”

I ignore Joy and resume my struggle with the passage I’m working on. An hour ago I woke with a hangover and an epiphany and headed straight to the writing table, an island in the middle of chaos. The kids have gotten up, and Joy’s got a visitor. They all know enough not to cross the imaginary border between their space – strewn with toys, bits of clothing, beer bottles and stuffed ashtrays – and my space, cleared for writing in the middle of it all, a certain sanctity within it.

Last night one of the poets from down the street came to the house for the first time. He’s being hailed by the writers’ union as “recently emerged” to indicate he’s at the beginning of his publishing career, even though he’s nearly forty. The whole “emerging” thing makes it sound as though he’s coming out of the closet or something. Joy invited him to do a reading; of course he was brilliant, the fucker. I remember starting out, when the words came like gifts and everyone thought I was exceptional. Some writers talk about it getting easier, but it’s been the opposite for me.

It wasn’t until he was here that I recognized him. At first I had difficulty placing him, but the niggling feeling that I should know the man wouldn’t dissipate. I must have been staring because he caught my eye and took it as an invitation to lope over to where I huddled on the couch, already drunk.

“It’s Vince, isn’t it?” He stuck out his hand, which I ignored. “Marcus Quinn,” he persisted. “I know you from Sheppard. You were a couple years ahead of me.”

Christ, I thought. I didn’t immediately make room for him on the sofa, as perhaps he might have expected. I left him standing there with that stupid grin on his face, waiting for me to congratulate him on his work, as I was sure he had come to expect. Instead, I downed my drink in one swallow and stood for the refill, tottering on my heels. I tried to push my way past him.

The determined little bastard grabbed my shoulder; his grip was surprisingly firm. When I felt his hand on my shoulder that way, I hoped this wouldn’t lead to a drunken brawl in the living room but was prepared to deck him if circumstances warranted. I tried to shrug his hand off, but he was insistent. I turned my face to his, only inches from my own, and breathed my sour breath purposely toward his nostrils. He pretended not to notice, but I saw his demeanour shift. He hung on tighter just then, and I saw him change his mind about what he would say to me.

“How’s your father?” he asked, squinting his eyes.

“Dead,” I said, refusing to be drawn into a let’s-reminisce-about-the-old-times conversation. What the fuck was he up to? I wondered.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said.

“No you’re not,” I said. My tone implied he was an idiot. “Why would you be?” I asked. “Who the fuck’s ‘sorry’ when the town drunk dies?”

His smile faded completely, and he readjusted his body slightly like someone faltering from a slap but trying to conceal the effects. Still, he kept his hand on my shoulder. “Vince,” he finally said, low and conspiratorially, leaning toward my ear. “I just wanted to tell you, I mean, I thought you should know. Everyone could see what was going on and, well, it was terrible – what happened to you.” He paused to be sure he had my attention, then said, “We all felt so sorry for you.” Then his hand dropped.

I lurched past him and into the kitchen, where I had to steady myself at the sink, my head bowed, as though praying to the holy mountain of dirty dishes. I must have looked to be contemplating sickness; someone asked me if I was okay. I shakily poured another drink and stumbled out the back door into the changed atmosphere of the evening.

How could a single sentence uttered by a stranger so shatter a person? We all felt so sorry for you. I was quite certain, just then, that my glass insides were rattling around in pieces by my ankles.

The beatings weren’t the worst of what my old man doled out, yet that’s surely what Quinn the outed poet was referring to. Did they really all feel sorry for me? Is that what it looked like from the outside?

“Tell me about your mother,” Joy said, shortly after we started going out. All she knew was that I had lost my mother when I was young.

“She died of a brain aneurysm,” I said. “I didn’t even know what that was. The principal had to explain it to me.” I didn’t tell Joy that I was convinced I’d witnessed the beginning of that injury. My mother and father were fighting when he pushed her and she fell, hitting her head on the corner of the stove. I thought she was dead that time, the way her head bobbed on her neck as she went down. My father left her where she fell and staggered out the door, leaving me to try to rouse her. Remarkably, there was no blood, just unconsciousness, and then the quiet complaint of a headache for days afterward.

But my father wasn’t always a mean drunk. Sometimes he was funny. One time he laughed as he picked my mother up in his arms like a groom taking his bride over the threshold. I thought it was good sport too until I saw her face, her eyes wide, her voice scared as she begged him to put her down. He took her to the large freezer chest where we kept the meat he brought home from hunting, after it was butchered and wrapped in its brown paper. I followed them, the smile quickly fading from my lips. He staggered as he carried her, even though she must have been light as a bird. From behind them, I watched her slender fingers as she clung to his neck and said his name, over and over.

“Richard, put me down. Richard, please.”

He flipped open the freezer chest lid with one hand and held her over the void, as though he would place her inside.

“Richard! Richard!” she cried, louder, on the edge of hysteria. She struggled, her slight body twisting to escape his grasp. My father laughed his gravelly laugh from the back of his throat. He held on tighter to her and continued to pretend he would put her into the freezer. Finally, he took a step back and let her legs drop to the floor. She stood for a minute, breathing hard, on the verge of crying, her one arm still around his shoulders.

“Chicken,” my dad said. He still seemed in a good mood.

My mother put a trembling hand to her mouth and caught my eye. Then she pushed past him, took me by the arm, and we fled to the bedroom.

The beatings weren’t the worst of it, though, as Quinn’s comment would imply. The worst were the times in between – the times when you didn’t know what would happen next – when maybe you could feel the trouble building inside the dusty house, ricocheting like an undercurrent off the crowded furniture. Instinct told you to run, and you did, but in the cold prairie winter in a musty little town where you had made no friends but everybody knew you as the son of the town drunk, how long could you stay away? People’s pity was just that, and you learned early not to mistake it for kindness. There may have been many who felt sorry for me but none who were willing to get involved.

I notice Kit and Casey, crouched on their haunches with their tiny, bare toes pressed to the edge of the invisible line that keeps them out. They wait for the spell to be broken, for me to be released from my self-imposed exile and notice them. I’ve found that when I pay attention to their antics, they get overexcited and lose control. I try, for Joy’s sake, to be a good father. Or at least a good enough father. But I see it in their eyes, they’re guarded with me, already, at their young age; they seem to have learnt not to trust me.

“Daddy! Daddy!” Casey used to shriek whenever I came in the door, running to show me some creation or to offer me a taste of whatever she was eating. After so many times of me pushing past her, saying, “Not now, Casey,” and, “Later, Casey,” she finally seems to have given up.

I don’t want to dislike my own children, and for the most part I don’t. I’m just not certain I like them all that much. And I’m probably overstating that. After all, what parent doesn’t wonder at the innocent softness of their child’s sleeping face, the perfection of ten tiny digits? I’m not immune to all of it. It’s other times I can’t bear – their sorry hopefulness, their persistence. I have an unnatural dread of being left alone with them. Joy rarely asks it of me.

In my drunken anger last night, I returned to the kitchen from the cool evening air of the backyard. I pushed through the people crowding my tiny house – writers and poets and their partners – making my way to the writing table where everyone knew not to touch the workspace or set their empty beer bottles. Sanctum sanctorum in the middle of chaos.

It was then that I saw them, Joy and Quinn, standing in the small hallway. He leaned against the wall with his shoulder, and she did the same, facing him. She held a drink with both hands, twirling the glass in her fingers. There was something playful in the casual turn of the glass, the cock of her head. It looked off, somehow. Too much like flirting, it seemed to me. Even though she was turned away from me, I could tell she was smiling.

I pushed my way to the writing table and grabbed the journals with my most recent notes, poems, sketches and outlines. The notebooks are where it all starts for me – where poems are born. Of course there is no copy of any of them. I stalked back through the kitchen and out to the yard, slamming the screen door carelessly. Into the fire pit I dumped the entire burden. Fumbling in my pockets for matches, I pictured Joy with Quinn. The congested papers wouldn’t light, and I was forced to handle them once again. As I tore and crumpled individual sheets, I averted my eyes from the inked words, the individual letters on the page – the little blue-black inflections, like stutters, t-t-tripping across the pages. I was afraid the sight of those letters, forming into words, might bring me to my senses.

Joy sets a glass of water cautiously on the table near my papers. I grunt acknowledgement, and she shoos the kids away. I can see by her demeanour that she’s waiting for me to be finished. I have the intense urge, just then, to explain myself to her. The words I love you hover on my tongue, urgent, and yet I’m not able to say them out loud. I’m sorry. That’s what I want to convey. None of those silly girls, most of whose names I can’t recall, ever meant a thing to me. All drunken distractions. She knows that. I always thought she knew that.

I would have liked for her and my mother to have known one another. It was after my mother died, and my father was drunk with an impossible regularity, that I made my way to the city. In my own drunken moment, at the party of an acquaintance from the Friday open mike, I spotted Joy across the room. I promptly walked up to her, mustered all the charm of a toad and blurted out Who the fuck are you? which, roughly deciphered, meant I’ve never seen you around here before. To my surprise, she was able to translate Drunken Asshole to English, and I went home with her that night.

She found me last night, smoking my unfiltered cigarettes one after another, my last drink long gone, the papers in the fire pit reduced to smouldering brown ashes. I refused to acknowledge her touch on my back or to hold her hand when she slipped it into mine, irrationally blaming her for bringing the outed poet to our house. For making me burn my papers.

Rather than go pick a fight with the poet, as I imagined would bring me satisfaction, I allowed myself instead to be led inside and put to bed like a child. The sensation of letting another man get the better of me in my own house dogged my dreams all night.

I’ve been thinking about it all day, trying to make sense of what really happened last night. Before I know it, the shadows get long and the stereo begins playing the cool sounds of Chet Baker. She’s purposely chosen my favourite. A glass of wine appears on my table, and I emerge from my cocoon to see the kids leaping around the couch in their underwear. Joy enters with a cup in her hand and perches on the ottoman, ignoring them. She notices me watching her and lifts her arm, bearing a toast. In the twilight window frame I see the ill-formed beginnings of my own reflection, watered down as it is by the light of a near full moon.

The look on Joy’s face is wry, as if she doesn’t quite believe in the toast herself. “To us,” the toast implies, but that look tells me it can’t deliver. Her look seems to question what the “us” is, any more. Or maybe these are just my own insecurities, projected onto her.

I don’t know why, but I drop my pen and get out of my chair. I kneel on the floor in front of her and place my arms alongside her legs. My head falls into her lap. I can sense a moment where she hesitates even to touch me, there on my knees in front of her. I don’t cry, but I just stay there, head down, feeling her warm legs against my cheek and my ear.

“What is it?” she asks, concerned. There’s a bit of an awkward laugh behind her words. The laugh tells me she’s afraid, afraid of what I’m going to say. Finally, she lays her free hand across my back, the other still holding her wine. “Vince?” she says, and then she repeats my name more insistently. “Vince!” She shakes my shoulder. “Vince, what have you done?”