JIM SHOWS UP in class every week, comb ruts dug across his scalp. He introduces us to a new form called the ghazal, which is basically a series of unrhyming couplets, and shows us some very old Persian translations as well as a couple of modern examples by a poet named Jim Harrison, who is wonderful. I try to keep from getting too excited. It’s one of the loveliest forms I’ve seen. It’s muscular and vague all at once—Potent yet airy, says Jim. I like it so much I want it to be just mine. I don’t ever want to write anything else. I have this childish urge to stand up in the middle of the class and insist that no one else be allowed to experiment with this form. Where does it come from, I wonder, that mean human desire to keep all the most beautiful things to yourself?
My immediate urge following Jim’s class is to run to Carl’s, order one of their bottomless pots of tea, and work on ghazals for the rest of the day—an urge I mercilessly squelch, forcing my feet in the direction of the library. It’s frustrating that Jim would hit me with this now, considering my new resolution to back off from poetry for the time being and turn my attention to something I’m actually good at: school. The new plan is to stay in on weekends in order to save money, study, and—only on weekends—work on my poems. Nothing but schoolwork during the week. But it’s as if Jim has intuited my new resolve and is trying to tempt me back into the fold, like someone waving a drink in front of a reformed alcoholic.
This has all come out of my most recent meeting with Sparrow, whom I went to see not long after my makeup session with Jim. I asked him to tell me more about what I would need to get into Oxford. Sparrow’s eyebrows had performed an exultant swoop or two before settling into a no-nonsense furrow.
“Of course, it’s no small matter, you understand, Lawrence. It has to be nothing but the canon from here on in, yes? Nothing but serious scholarship. If you want to apply somewhere like Oxford“—and only here did Sparrow allow his eyebrows another upward spurt, uttering the sacred name like any other man would utter titties—”your … other interests may have to take a back seat for a while.”
I nodded. Sparrow watched me nod, a clinical look to his eyes. It was as if he had injected me with something—some kind of drug, or poison—and was tracking its effects.
Everybody else is organizing everything—it feels almost as if they’ve intuited my new regime and have helpfully, wordlessly picked up the slack. Dekker has been helping Jim with our second poetry reading of the year, which has suddenly become a big deal because the guest poet, Abelard Creighton, has of late been awarded some sort of poetry prize by the city of Toronto. In class, Jim pointed out the irony of this—the fact that Creighton winning a Toronto award was national news but if someone from out here won a Charlottetown award or a Fredericton award it would be considered irrelevant to the country as a whole. Still, you could tell Jim was pleased. Dekker confided to me that Creighton was an old mentor of Jim’s. His award made Jim look good in the eyes of the department, because Jim had fought to get Creighton invited.
“He insisted,” Dekker recalled. “He told us when he was hired that there was a handful of writers in this country whose work was absolutely crucial, and he said in a few years they would be so prominent as to be beyond our reach. He said if the English Department genuinely cared about the literary innovations of today it would make a concerted effort to get people like Schofield and Creighton out here.”
Dekker told me this at the Stein, where the student poetry reading—organized entirely by Sherrie—was being held. He sat looking dreamy, telling me about the days after Jim had been hired, the promise perfuming the air. I was glad to hear him speaking of Jim with as much affection as ever. They had both forgotten Christmas—at least it looked as if they had. Just like it probably looked as if I had, too.
“I’m thinking this gets Jim back some of his credibility,” Dekker confided. “I hope it will have reminded the department why they hired him in the first place.”
“What’s Creighton like?”
“Older guy,” said Dekker, “A staunch nationalist from what I understand—he’s published essays dealing with culture and national identity.”
A sigh interrupted us. We looked over and were surprised by the person of Ruth. She’d been talking to Sherrie, but Sherrie must have gone off to get another drink, and so Ruth had sidled noiselessly across the bench to join us. She was on my side of the table, her ass only inches away from mine. I could scarcely believe I had been sitting that close to a warm, breathing presence and not realized it.
Ruth’s sigh was not like Moira’s. Moira sighed as punctuation to something she had already said. Ruth sighed in statements, declarations. She sighed to announce herself.
“Pardon, love?” said Dekker, inclining his bristly chin.
“Nationalism,” said Ruth. “The ultimate colonial giveaway.”
“Ah, Ruth,” said Dekker, actually turning his head 90 degrees away from her. And so Ruth looked my way.
“Should a country wish to announce itself as a backwater,” she said, gazing at me the way you might a blank wall, a void surface, “should a country wish to flaunt its insecurities—indulge in nationalism.”
Up until about then, I had been feeling well-disposed toward Ruth because Ruth was one of the only people present at our reading who wasn’t a student. Sparrow didn’t come, although I left a message with him through Marjorie—casually adding that Marjorie herself was more than welcome, should she be free. Of course I didn’t expect the blowsy Marjorie with her brood of children waiting at home to take me up on the invitation. But I had thought Sparrow might show. I’d thought Jim might, too. I had even, in all my deluded idiocy, imagined my reading might somehow bring the two together in their swelling pride and appreciation of a shared protégé. I would stand motionless, reciting under a spotlight, and they would stand rapt on opposite sides of the dead-silent room, lost in the power of my words. Through this transcendent experience, they would gradually come to realize how similar they both were, how much they had in common, how ultimately they both wanted the same thing—my success and well-being. I imagined one striding up to the other—probably Sparrow, the first move would be his—hand extended. Professor … Jim. You should be proud. And Jim grasps the smaller man’s hand with firm, resolute dignity. The pride is ours to share, Sir. Their eyes blaze into one another’s—dark into light. Afire with emotion, understanding, and mutual respect. Hostilities melt into nothing, swords are turned into ploughshares, and—it’s spring. A million flowers burst from the dead earth.
But neither of them came, and so I was left shouting about showdogs and pinpricks over a bunch of girls who I later found out had been sitting there drinking in celebration of someone’s birthday since four in the afternoon. I was the first to read, since we went in alphabetical order, and the microphone wasn’t working. I recited two poems through the indignity of ongoing girl-shrieks and giggles—one of them growing so bold as to yell, “Show us your thing!”—before sitting down in disgust.
Claude sauntered to the stage afterward, pausing to speak to the bartender, who made some vaguely technical motions with his hands. Claude fiddled with the mic, tapped it, blew, and finally wiggled the cord. The cord-wiggling was what did it, and unbelievably, all his fiddling around up there had managed to attract the interest of the whole room. By the time Claude was ready to read, everyone present was ready to listen. Even the sounds of the birthday girls had descended to intrigued murmurs.
“He’s got presence,” Ruth Dekker leaned over to say to Sherrie.
“I think we should have gotten an MC,” I announced to no one. “We should get an MC next time, to introduce people.”
“I’m sorry, Lawrence,” whispered Sherrie, because apparently Claude’s presence and the power of his work demanded hush, working microphone or no. “Do you want to go up again?”
I glanced around to see if anyone was looking at me, if anyone was showing a particular lively interest in what my response would be. My gaze collided with the smiling eyes of Todd. I turned back to the stage and forced a yawn.
“I’m fine.”
“I don’t say this to be disparaging,” continued Ruth. “We are from a colony as well, after all.”
I glanced over at Dekker to gauge his willingness to re-enter the conversation. But Dekker’s neck was actually straining—I could see the tendons bulge beneath his stubble—so vigorously had he turned his face from Ruth.
“I don’t think we really see ourselves as colonists anymore,” I remarked. “I mean, my grandmother will talk about ‘the empire’ from time to time …”
“You can never underestimate the deep-seatedness of the colonial mindset,” Ruth interrupted.
I craned my own neck around the bar, perhaps not as casually as courtesy would dictate.
Blessedly, Ruth excused herself to lumber off toward the ladies’ room, man-hands swinging like dual pendulums. Heads turned to follow her height and shining blondeness—male and female heads alike. Ruth too had presence.
“Lawrence,” Dekker called, causing me to look up. I realized as I did that I had been sitting there feeling somewhat gut-punched.
“Ruth didn’t mean to be insulting. She’s homesick.”
I nodded again. Was I insulted? Todd would be insulted—he’d be apoplectic. Not so much at the suggestion that Canada is a backwater, but at the insinuation that there’s anything wrong with that. But I wasn’t Todd. Hadn’t I shaken off such provincialism, placed myself above it? Wasn’t I going to Oxford?
“This is the greatest country,” he told me, leaning in. “Call it boring!” Dekker suddenly challenged me. “Call it boring if you will! Peace is boring. Sanity is boring.”
“I didn’t call it boring,” I objected, feeling defensive. I didn’t, did I? Thinking and saying are not the same thing—not the same kind of betrayal.
Dekker stared at me for a strangely blank moment before sitting back. His eyes darted toward the ladies’-room door.
“I know you didn’t, Lawrence. I’m sorry.”
I looked up, suddenly curious. “So then—where did you end up going to school? Did you go to school in Canada?”
He sat blinking a bit longer than I would have expected for such a basic question.
“Well I—I did an undergraduate degree in Cape Town, of course.”
“But then where? What got you out of there? Did you go to Oxford?”
He smiled, releasing a breath of laughter. “Oxford? No. No, Larry, I went to school in America. They wouldn’t have let someone like me within a mile of Oxford.”
Now it was my turn to blink. Each blink served to shape a growing certainty behind my eyes. Each blink was an echo of the words someone like me. I didn’t want to ask, because I was afraid I knew the answer already. I didn’t want to hear it, but I echoed, I asked.
“Someone like you?”
More self-deprecating smiles from Dekker—I was starting to think it was the only kind of smile he knew.
He scratched the scruff of his neck, still smiling. “How did I hear you put it one night? The way you described Rimbaud?”
I thought for a moment, and then it swam to the surface of my brain. “Rimbaud was just some hick from a farm,” I restated. With, I imagine, not quite as much aplomb as the original.
Dekker nodded at me, tapping himself in the chest. Like me. Like us.
After which there is not much to do but get drunk under the pretence of “celebrating” the dismal poetry reading, which is what I proceed to do. So. Let’s see where we stand here. Poetry? Nope, draw a line through that. How many cosmic hints do you need, after all, how many bolts to the head? How many alleys to be scuttled in and out of before you see you’re not wanted up any of them?
Oxford? That’s another line. Forgot where you came from for a minute there, didn’t you, big shot? Hullo, stranger. Welcome to the Highwayman Motor Hotel and Mini-Putt (adjusts crotch, removes sprig of hay from teeth). My name is Mungo, and I’ll be changing your sheets and replacing your toilet paper for the rest of my natural life.
I finish my beer and gaze for a while at the bottom of my mug. When no one is looking, I hork into the mug, drawing it out. Making it last. I have christened the bottom of my mug Joanne.
Time passes and people ignore me, as is only fit. Slaughter shows up once he can be good and sure the poetry is over—not, as you might expect, on his own inclination, but because it turns out Sherrie asked him to stay away out of an attack of shyness. It’s ten o’clock and Slaughter is already well beyond three sheets to the wind, slapping my back so hard in greeting my vision of Joanne vibrates briefly. When Sherrie, still high from the success of her event, babbles to him how great Claude’s reading in particular was, how people applauded for him, and how some of the birthday girls even hollered—Woo-woo!—Slaughter suddenly whirls, grinning, and seizes Claude by the head.
“Guck,” says Claude in the ensuing silence.
We all watch. Slaughter has grabbed people like me and Todd and flung us cheerfully back and forth like Raggedy-Andys on countless occasions. But it’s not the sort of thing you do to Claude. Nobody is smiling except Slaughter, who looks glazed and far away as he buries his knuckles into Claude’s scalp, rubbing furiously.
“Good for you, there, Frenchie!” he enthuses. I can hear bone grind against bone.
“Charles,” says Sherrie. And Slaughter lets Claude go.
“What? It’s a congratulatory noogie!” Then he follows it up with what I suppose has to be a congratulatory shove. Claude staggers, but straightens up quickly. He smooths his dishevelled hair and looks at his watch. Todd starts to laugh, and I’d like to punch him.
“I’m going to get a beer,” says Claude, looking off toward the bar since he can only look at his watch for so long.
“Okay,” says Sherrie, seeming to gasp for breath. “But, um.”
Slaughter drowns her out by yelling for a pitcher, and I’m the only one who sees when Claude walks past the bar and out the door.
Chuck keeps bellowing, “Let’s do the Mariner, you assholes, whaddya say?” every five minutes, and jumps up, ready to herd us into the street.
“The Mariner makes you too crazy,” Sherrie vetoes whenever he does this—but Sherrie would probably veto Slaughter if he suggested going out and making snow angels, after what happened with Claude. “You get weird about the Mariner.”
“You get weird about the Mariner!” Chuck hollers back, cheerfully incoherent. “You and Rory, it’s all you can talk about half the time, kicking his fuckin’ head in. You’re obsessed.”
“Yes, that’s right, Charles.”
“I’m getting damn sick of it, if you want to know the truth. What did that asshole Rory ever do to you?”
“Nothing, Charles.”
“Nothing! Poor old Rory anyway, everybody wanting to kick his head in. Rory’s had a tough life. Rory never hurt anyone.”
“I thought he was some kind of gangster,” Todd interrupts.
“That’s just town gossip,” says Sherrie.
“He is a gangster!” Slaughter insists. “He fuckin’ bootlegs. Sells drugs. Whores. It’s like the Old West down there.”
Sherrie closes her eyes like a clubbed baby seal after whores. “He does not.”
“Campbell’s a wildman,” yells Slaughter, suddenly grabbing me around the shoulders. This causes the entire room to shift as if we are in a ship’s hull. “Me and him, we musta snorted coke off every whore on Rory’s payroll.”
“All right,” says Sherrie, looking around the room as if for Claude. It’s been hours since he left.
“I’m telling you he’s got whores on the go! I got a different kinda sore on my dick from every last one of them!”
The clubbed-seal look again from Sherrie and then a hearty round of hawg, hawg, hawg. Todd tries to join in, opening his mouth, but then shuts it abruptly. It’s a look I’ve drunk with him enough to recognize. He weaves hastily to the men’s room and I know it’s the last we’ll see of him all night. Todd gets shy when he gets sick, slinking off like a hurt animal to tough it out on his own.
Twenty minutes later, the waitress yells last call. Slaughter stands, then falls like a wounded moose, then heaves himself up again, using Sherrie and me for balance, laughing.
With some people, the cold air makes them sober. But Slaughter, I realized after seeing him sink to the floor, was beyond being sobered. The cold air is like a slap. Like a punch. It makes him crazy. He runs ahead of us toward Scarsdale Holdings, ready to poach another flag and singing “I Am Woman” by Helen Reddy at the top of his lungs.
Sherrie and I look at each other. “I hate that song,” she tells me. “He knows it.”
Even half-cut I can feel the trouble coming.
I hear a whoop out of Chuck, peer down the street, and there it sits, parked—huge and yellow—just a few feet past Scarsdale’s. The driver is probably off drinking himself somewhere.
Slaughter forgets all about the flag—he runs right past— it even flutters in the breeze he creates. “Oh my God,” Chuck howls. “The keys are in it, man! The fuckin’ keys are in it!”
“Chuck,” I call, breaking into a wobbly run.
“Let’s go dig up the graveyard!”
He vaults into the seat before we can even catch up with him. He starts up the thing before we can say a word.
The noise is like a backhoe belching itself to life in a small town in the dead of a winter’s night. Slaughter keeps gesturing like a train conductor for us to climb aboard, and we keep hopping up and down shaking our heads back and forth, yelling “No,” and “Stop,” and not hearing ourselves.
After a minute or so of this, he turns from us in disgust and yanks one of the levers in front of him. The backhoe belches and lurches like a goosed dinosaur. He shoots us a prideful grin as if to say, See how well I’m doing? and pushes the lever forward. The thing gives a roar and begins to move.
It is happening so stupidly fast, I decide this must be one of my nutso dreams. We’ll follow him to the graveyard and Lydia will pop up from behind a tombstone waving her Milton, exhorting us to rein in desires lest we get fat like Janet, warning us off temptation.
And then Slaughter will lower the shovel, pierce earth, and—snakes. Serpents everywhere.
CHUCK WAVES ONE HAND in the air like a cowboy riding a bull as he trundles off down Livingston Street. Sherrie and I run about a block in the opposite direction, panicked and sobered by the sudden criminality saturating the air—desperate to get away from it. We’ve always been so good.
I hear myself yelling, when I can hear my own voice again. I’m yelling that Slaughter is crazy.
This is how we end up bushwhacking our way through the paths that encircle the marsh. People come here in summer to picnic and make out because it is private, surrounded by shrubs and the occasional stately willow. This allows them to imagine it to be a romantic lagoon-type place, as opposed to the swamp that it is. But Sherrie and I have plunged into the paths to hide, jazzed on the fear that someone has noticed Slaughter’s hijack—and who wouldn’t notice a backhoe roaring to life at two in the morning?—and called the cops.
Reeds poke up from the snow, frozen cattails. I’ve never been in here at night, or in winter. We push our way through the brush like adventurers, a full moon piercing down. I am freaked out and babbling, demanding to know what the fuck is wrong with Slaughter, and what the fuck Slaughter thought he was doing, and does Slaughter want to get us all the fuck arrested and expelled.
“He drinks too much,” Sherrie whispers. “And does God knows what else. And then he gets crazy.”
“Well that’s—” I stammer, aware of the liquor and adrenalin battling it out for supremacy in my brain. “That’s—that’s pretty much obvious now isn’t it? But he can’t pull that kind of shit.”
Sherrie is walking ahead of me and whispering so that I can hardly hear her over the noise of our feet punching through the snow, the bone-rattle of frozen branches as we move them aside.
“What?”
“There is something wrong with Charles.” She keeps whispering, but turns her head to say it this time.
“Once again, stating the obvious.”
Sherrie stops walking and I bash into her.
“Oh, look,” she says. Through a break in the trees, we can see the whole marsh, the ghostly brightness of the moon, the glowing snow. Jutting reeds and branches, leafless, sagging. It feels like another graveyard, but a natural, incidental sort of graveyard—which means peaceful, and deathful, but without all that human fear.
What is wrong with Slaughter, anyway? Why would he want to disturb such peace? So immediately? So instinctively?
Now that we’ve stopped walking, nothing but winter silence. No birds, no bugs. No distant noise of some marauding backhoe. We stand in it—the cold silence—very much alone together.
And I swear I didn’t even know it was coming. It’s my still-racing heart, my booze-heated blood. The words sneak out before my brain can catch up. It’s like I’m dreaming awake again.
“Is there,” I hear myself saying, “a thing with Jim?”
Sherrie turns to face me. Her big eyes seem to lose their colour in the dark, seem black inside—all pupil.
“A thing with Jim.”
“Um,” I say.
“What do you mean? A thing with Jim and Charles?”
“No,” I say, “I’m not talking about Slaughter anymore.”
Sherrie goes back to gazing at the marsh.
“It’s just that,” I say, “there’s been a couple of times when you seemed sad. About Jim.”
“Well we’re all sad about Jim.” She waves a hand.
“Yes,” I agree.
“About what’s happened to him,” Sherrie adds.
“Yes,” I say. “But—I don’t know. There’s just been a couple of moments where. Um. You seemed. Particularly sad.”
Sherrie sucks a lungful of frozen air into herself as I speak, raising her shoulders to her ears and then letting them drop as she exhales.
“I’m your friend,” I add. I put my hand on one of the shoulders because somehow it seems like the thing to do. “And so. I thought I should ask.”
“I know you’re my friend,” Sherrie whispers, looking down.
I am actually kind of surprised by this.
“You’re probably my best friend at Westcock, Lawrence.”
I’m really surprised by that. My hand is still on her shoulder, and I knead it a little, moving closer as I do. This also seems like the thing to do. That’s how it works in dreams, after all. Things just happen. It’s not like you have any say. I put my other hand on Sherrie’s other shoulder and turn her to face me. She keeps her eyes on the ground.
“But I can’t talk to you about it right now,” she says. “I want to, and I probably will, but right now I have to wait.”
She won’t look at me. I feel like she’s resisting the dream, struggling to wake us both up. What’s supposed to happen, I feel very strongly, is that she is supposed to look at me. And then I look at her and we see each other and she folds herself into my chest and the smell of her hair wafts up my nose and things start to warm up around here.
“Wait for what?” I whisper, squeezing her shoulders with creeping impatience. My fingers are already starting to tingle with the cold and I want to shove them back in my pockets. I can feel a very un-friend-like desire taking hold of me. “Prurient interest,” I think it’s called. I heard the expression in a bootlegged Lenny Bruce recording one time. It means wanting to know what you know you shouldn’t know. It means wanting the dirty details.
“I have to wait,” say Sherrie, glancing up at me, “for the time to be right.”
“To be ripe?”
I wiggle my toes around in my boots to keep them from going numb, to get my curiosity under control, the overwhelming need to wheedle. With that—the cold and the curiosity prickling away at me—the stupid dream dissipates. I awake to find myself a drunken, runny-nosed fuckwit in the middle of a frozen swamp.
“So let’s not talk about it right now, okay?” she says, glancing up at me in a kind of plea. “We will. But not now.”
I let my hands drop, turning away to look up at the moon. There is a thing with Jim. Fuckwit. There is.
“Slaughter,” I say. “Speaking as a friend? It might be best not to get too attached to him. He just wants to get into your pants.”
Sherrie sputters laughter, which is not the effect I was angling for.
“Okay, Lawrence. Thanks for the tip.”
“Yeah,” I say, shifting my weight and shoving my hands in my pockets. “Can we go?”
“No,” says Sherrie, putting her hand on my chest because I’ve started to move away. “We have to stay for a couple more minutes.”
I turn back to her, sighing, and the next thing I know I am sighing into Sherrie’s mouth. I freeze. I stop breathing entirely. Then I put my hands on her shoulders again and try to resume, inhaling surreptitiously through my nose. The smell of her hair fills my head.
And just when things are starting to warm up the way I dreamed, she isn’t there anymore. I open my eyes, groping for her.
“I want us to stay friends,” she tells me, stepping back. “Just friends. Okay, Lawrence?”
I’m hopeful for a moment. “So we can we keep doing that? Every once in a while?”
“No,” she says. “That was just to get it out of the way.”
“I am having a terrible semester,” I fret to Sherrie. “Nothing is working out for me.”
So Sherrie gives in and lets it happen one more time.
THE MAIN EXHIBITS of the Hollywood Horrors used to give me nightmares as a kid, just like everybody else I grew up with. And then we all got a little older, got used to them, and started laughing at our younger, chickenshit selves, scared of a cartoon character like Vincent Price with his pencil moustache. In the summer, we would go into the Hollywood as a joke, run our hands up one of Tippi Hedren’s cold thighs if the caretaker’s head was turned, take turns positioning our necks beneath Dracula’s dripping fangs. The real test of fear was approaching the dummies, extending your hands to them, making contact. Dracula’s leering rictus didn’t scare us at this point. The monsters weren’t the problem. It was the physical reality of the dummies themselves—and the small, gruesome details of the regular-people dummies, the ones under attack.
Eventually, though, we got used to that too. We forced ourselves to get used to it because that’s what growing up is all about.
But right around that time we were deemed old enough to ascend to new levels of psychic discomfort. At sixteen, you were allowed to view the legendary “hidden” exhibit. The older kids had always terrified the younger ones with stories of what lay beyond a thick set of curtains in the back of the museum—curtains so black that light got lost in them, and if you didn’t know they were there, you never would until the day someone drew them apart with a malignant flourish and bade you witness the abominations that lay beyond.
Spikes through heads, the older kids avowed. Brains, dripping. Women pinned spread-eagled on tables, naked. Working guillotines. Expelled eyeballs, dangling from heads. By the time we hit thirteen, no self-respecting kid claimed to believe in the hidden exhibit. The older ones who kept insisting upon its existence were a pack of boys crying wolf as far as we were concerned. We stopped up our ears, wore sneers the moment the subject came up. How stupid did they think we were? Tell us the one about Santa Claus next. Tell us about the guy with the hook where his hand should be.
But you know what? It was there. I got to see it before anyone else in my grade because that was the year Cousin Wayne got hired, when I was fifteen. Wayne made an age exception for me. It was his first job. It was the only job Wayne had ever wanted in his life. He was eager to show off his realm.
Wayne didn’t really have the imagination to build it up to me, however—to try and weave an air of suspense around the hidden exhibit’s unveiling. It wasn’t even his idea to let me see. When I found out he’d been hired, I sought him out and asked him point-blank whether or not it existed.
“You mean the Torture Chamber?” he said. “Yeah, come by this week and I’ll show you when nobody’s around. It’s really gross.”
I remember being disappointed. I had been planning on rounding up a few guys and taking them with me to witness this greatest of our childhood mysteries revealed. But Wayne’s offhand affirmation—sure, the hidden exhibit existed; yes, it was gross—stripped the thing of its allure. It sounded like nothing; it was probably boring. The hidden exhibit was just another story the island told itself about the world beyond its shores—a world of spooky shadows, plastic bogeymen. I decided it was no big deal, that I could just as well see it alone.
That’s what I was dreaming about last night. The day Wayne showed me.
Jim arrives not quite ten minutes into class, rosy with rush. He favours us all with a grin and an apologetic wave, dumping a pile of handouts onto his desk and raking a hand through his windswept, unrutted hair. It’s the first time I’ve seen him without the comb ruts all of this new year. He looks like Claude after his congratulatory noogie. Jim hums to himself—the long, quavering notes of Hank Snow—taking a few moments to organize the handouts into piles, and pausing between hummed verses to glance up at us all and mutter various benedictions—good to see everyone, hope we’ve all been writing, everyone ready for the Creighton reading, and so forth. A few people up front, including me, answer him. It’s impossible not to—he meets our eyes in expectation and his demeanour draws it out of us. The atmosphere Jim has brought with him—and, I realize only today, Jim always brings an atmosphere—is light, intangibly festive. It reminds me of how he was at the beginning of the year, and, now that I’m reminded, the exhilaration of that time comes burbling back, like a stream unleashed, water bursting through ice.
The Jim-thrill—there it is again—straightening my spine, singing through my veins. I am surprised to realize how long it’s been, but already I’m forgetting what the lack of it was like. I lean forward. Jim winks as he places a batch of copied poems on my desk for me to pass back. He goes to tousle my hair with one hand but enjoys the feel of my head so much, he brings his other hand into it and massages my head like I’m a dog, growling with affection.
The class laughs. Jim laughs. I laugh. And—it’s spring. In real life I was alone—ushered by Wayne—but in the dream Janet was with me, although sometimes it seemed as if Janet, like Wayne, was an employee of the museum and had known about the exhibit all along. In real life it was Wayne who drew back the curtain, but in the dream, sometimes, it was Jim. In real life the first thing I looked for was the naked lady on the table, and that’s what I looked for in the dream as well. In real life she wasn’t really naked, but naked under a sheet, and you could see the dent of her groin, the muscular triangle of her legs, spread open, tied apart. You could see her nipples, eternally erect. The look on her face was stunned and the requisite leering madman hovered a couple of feet away, hands clasped against his chest as if to say, Goody!
In the dream the lady was naked. It was as if I had come upon her too late. The sheet had been torn aside, the stunned look had been wiped from her face. She was no longer tied up because there wasn’t any reason. She had been alive just moments before but now she was dead, and the madman was nowhere in sight—perhaps hiding.
She was Brenda L. She had been Brenda L.
“That asshole,” said Wayne in my dream, annoyed in a janitorial kind of way. “Shit.” And he went and placed the sheet back over Brenda L.’s torso and tied her hands and feet again, which I thought was ridiculous.
“You’re not fooling anyone,” I complained to Wayne, who was Jim, and told me to shut up.
“I won’t shut up,” I declared, feeling nervously audacious and wandering off toward the next exhibit. Janet had gone off on her own ahead of me but every once in a while would cast an amused look over her chubby shoulder.
It was true. In real life most of it was true. There were spikes through heads. There were dangling eyeballs. There was a guillotine—even though a guillotine has nothing to do with torture, per se, a guillotine is simply death—and I doubt if it actually worked, as people had said. The guillotine cradled a freshly decapitated victim—you could see the severed spinal cord in his neck, surrounded by a red murk of muscle and tissue. Placed before the guillotine was a basket, of course, and in the basket, a baffled head.
In real life Wayne remarked, “I mean, that’s sick. They really did that, apparently, back in the old days, the goddamn frogs. What in hell is wrong with people, eh?”
“I hear it’s actually pretty humane,” I said for something to say. “As far as executions go.”
We stood side by side gazing into the basket.
“Yeah, it looks really goddamn humane,” Wayne replied. He killed living things for sport, my cousin Wayne. It struck me for the first time that this bestowed its own kind of wisdom on a person.
Next, Jim lets us know about everything we can expect from Abelard Creighton’s visit to Westcock this week, making it sound like a kind of intellectual Mardi Gras. Creighton will be giving a lecture in the Social Sciences department as well as an unprecedented two readings—one in the daytime for students and faculty only, and one in the evening for whoever wants to come. Jim encourages us to attend both events and ask questions, particularly at the student reading. To that end, he hands out five of Creighton’s poems. I flip through the pages. All mercifully short.
After the Thursday-night reading, he adds, a reception will take place in the lobby of Grayson Hall, to which we are all of course invited.
“The reading’s at Grayson Hall?” I ask, not bothering to raise my hand because it isn’t that kind of day.
Jim nods, “Yes, Larry—thanks. I should have made that clear to begin with. Grayson Hall, everybody. Eight o’clock. Write it down, please.”
A murmur sounds among us, for we are impressed as a group. Grayson Hall is where convocations are held. Jim must be expecting a huge turnout.
In the dream there was no guillotine, but there was a head—a tiny one like the kind you see in movies about cannibals, who carry them around on sticks. The head had been shrunk, and looked like a shrivelled orange gone brown and hard, forgotten in the fridge—an oversized raisin with a pinched, angry face. A wild dog sat chewing and pawing at the head compulsively. Panda. Panda with rabies.
“Everybody,” says Jim, placing himself in his favoured pedagogical position—in front of his desk, buttocks lightly poised against its edge. “One more thing before we begin today. I don’t think I’ve told you all how much I’ve appreciated your support this year, let alone what a great group of students you’ve been. We’re coming up toward the end of the year and, yes, it’s been a bumpy one. You’ve all been patient, loyal, and somehow not one of you has managed to lose sight of the most important thing going on here—the thing that really matters. The work. You’ve all continued to grow and develop and explore, and I want you to know I really admire you for that.”
There is something going on here. Jim’s words are generous and wonderful. I can feel the people around me loosening at the sound of them—hardened layers of tension, built up like plaque on teeth over the past few months, now crumbling away. Behind me, I hear actual sighs wafting toward the ceiling.
But I’m not loosening. I’m tightening. My shoulders seem to be inching themselves up toward my ears.
Jim shakes his head, smiles whitely. For a guy who’s never placed that high a premium on personal hygiene, his teeth have always dazzled.
“Anyway, we’re coming into the home stretch here folks, and I just thought you should know how well you’ve all done in your own way. You’re one of the finest groups I’ve ever taught, and I thank you. I just really thank you.”
This sounds like the end, but Jim continues to ramble a bit longer and I know why. He has to say more, because he’s not really saying what he’s saying. He’s saying something else. I know it, and so does one other person in the room.
“Anyway, I’m rambling,” apologizes Jim. “I just wanted to say thanks to all you folks. And let you know that you’ve done great, and—all is well. All is well.”
Somehow I know the code. I know the message. The message is forgiveness, and it isn’t meant for me.
THE DREAM SETS OFF this mini-cascade—it’s as if a dammed-up part of my brain has broken through. I write sixteen ghazals in the course of one marathon afternoon at Carl’s. Six are about the hidden exhibit, its various displays. Four are about the Hollywood Horrors itself, and going there with my friends as kids—forcing ourselves to get used to all the awful human dummies in their monstrous predicaments. Tippi Hedren squinting through her spider-lashes at the descending flock of crows. The violent mess of black in the air above her.
dangling, mid-attack, I describe the crows,
from dusted wires
Another one is about staring into the guillotine basket alongside Cousin Wayne. I describe the anticlimax of finally seeing the hidden exhibit, and the way Wayne’s dull, familiar presence de-toothed it in my mind. But then the last few couplets evoke how Wayne surprised me with his compassion for the head—how he saw the guillotine as not just a cool, gross gimmick the way thugs like him were supposed to, but a mark of something real and upsetting about people.
his humanity, I end the couplet,
throwing heat into mine.
I sit back after that one, liking it. I’m not sure about the word humanity, it might be too straightforward, but I like the last line, the idea of shared heat. I can go back and work on humanity later. This is wonderful. This hasn’t happened to me in ages.
I wonder if there is a word for developing an immediate fascination for something, or someone, you immediately despise. For fixating on it, and being able to speak and think of nothing else, precisely as if you were in love. I read somewhere that hate isn’t the opposite of love—indifference is. So if hate isn’t anti-love, it can only be a sort of insulted version of it.
I should say first and foremost that the five poems Jim gave out by Abelard Creighton were not bad. They read a bit like jokes, some of them—or cocktail party anecdotes—starting with an image or a scenario, usually well evoked, and then ending with a wry kind of punchline observation which tied the thing together, made you sort of go, huh! They were clever. They were too short and sharp to really blow my mind, but they made me interested enough to want to read more. As Jim might say, they held promise.
The poems Creighton reads today are not short. In fact, he is about five minutes into the first one before I even understand that it’s a poem. He announced he was about to read a poem. He said the poem had to do with an experience he’d had in Paris with “the tourist trade,” and smiled around the room for a moment. Then he gathered up the sheaf of papers resting on the lectern before him, glanced down at them through a pair of bifocals and started to talk.
“There I was in the city of Proust,” said Creighton. “City of poets. In Hemingway’s cafés I lingered, light-footed in the city of lights. Ah, but those bastard sons of the great white hunter and gun, there came the American dreamers …”
This went on for a bit, Creighton telling us about Paris, what the women were like (“smokey-slim”), and how young he was (“green as grapes”), how entranced by the city’s romantic past, when a bunch of Americans showed up and ruined everything by being vulgar and boorish. Eventually I leaned against Sherrie.
“I wish he’d get on with it,” I whispered.
She lowered her head to hiss back. “You don’t like it?”
“I just wanna hear the poetry.”
Sherrie turned her head to listen. I thought for a second she was just pausing to pretend she was listening, the way she did in Dekker’s Shakespeare, but after a few more stories of cobblestones and cafés she ducked her head toward me again.
“I think this is it, Lawrence.”
I sat up and searched Sherrie’s face for seriousness. She nodded. I turned and paid very close attention after that. Todd was leaning so far forward, his ass was practically hovering over the seat of his chair.
So Creighton reads for forty-five minutes. Every single poem he reads is about Americans or America. Every single poem begins with the words I was, or There I was, or Here I am, or I am. Every single poem talks about Creighton being somewhere and meeting Americans, and the Americans being some combination of stupid and greedy and vulgar and cruel. Actually, that’s not true. Some of the poems talk about Creighton being somewhere and talking to a Canadian who doesn’t think Americans are all that bad. Then the poem goes on to reveal the combination of stupidity, greed, and vulgarity in the featured Canadian.
Forty-five minutes of this. I keep waiting for Jim, sitting up front, to throw up his hands in an uncontainable show of mirth and yell April Fool’s or something. I keep looking around expecting someone to leap to his or her feet in outrage, denounce the proceedings as a sham, a joke. At the very least, I expect to meet the indignant eye of someone like me, someone desperately looking around for someone like them.
Finally, Creighton stops talking and smiles. He’s been pausing between lines of poetry to smile deliberately around at us throughout the recitation. The smiles always arrive on the heels of what Creighton obviously believes to be his wittiest, most cutting lines, as if to help us along in our understanding of his drollery: Clever, no? It’s a taut, closed-mouth, crinkle-eyed smile, and insufferable.
In the hallway, after the reading, Sherrie keeps begging me to keep my voice down, and I’ll look around before hunching toward her and reiterating my objections in an urgent series of mutters. I think I’m doing a pretty good job, but a few minutes later Sherrie hushes me again, and I realize that I was practically shouting and people on their way down the hall had to duck to avoid my flying arms.
“You get so angry, Lawrence,” Sherrie hisses.
“I’m not angry,” I hiss back. “I’m perplexed. I don’t understand.”
“Shh!”
I pull my arms in and glance around. Jim is herding Creighton out into the hall, hand resting on one of the poet’s shoulders. Todd trails in their wake like a flower girl after a bride and groom. Claude is also nearby, leaning against a wall with his arms folded, close enough to hear what I’m saying but bodily placing himself outside the conversation.
“I feel like I must be missing something,” I hiss.
Sherrie puts on a patient, teacherly face.
“It’s just a different kind of poetry, Lawrence. It’s kind of Bukowski, I thought. In the narrative sense I mean. You don’t have to like it.”
This infuriates me.
“No! That’s bullshit!”
“Shh!”
I look around again. Jim is now standing between Creighton and Todd, as if mediating their conversation. He looks over at me and grins.
“He heard you,” Sherrie accuses.
“I agree,” says Claude.
“What do you mean, you agree?” says Sherrie. Meanwhile, I’m agape because, looking at Claude, I already know.
Claude hoists one shoulder as if he can’t even be bothered producing a full-on shrug. “I mean I agree with Lawrence. It’s jingoistic claptrap.”
My gape widens into an open-mouthed, all-embracing smile. “Yes! Yes! See?” I pinch Sherrie’s shoulder by way of emphasis. She gives me a look before rounding on Claude again.
“I’m surprised at you. You’re usually so tolerant of different kinds of work.”
“I am, if it’s good,” admits Claude. “But this—” He gestures down the hall toward Creighton. “—is no good. The only difference between me and Lawrence is that I don’t see the point in getting worked up about it.”
“It’s jingoistic claptrap,“ I exclaim. “It’s just one big polemic.”
Claude’s nodding. “Polemics and poetry don’t work.”
“No,” I agree. “They don’t.” I have to suppress an urge to slap Claude on the back, or start pumping his hand or something.
Sherrie seems to have taken a micro-step away from us both. “Well,” she says, “Jim seems to like it.”
We all glance toward Jim and note that he’s approaching. He ambles smilingly down the corridor, taking his time, trailing his still-sunny atmosphere along with him, warming the hallway. Our faces turn to him like flowers.
“Folks,” he greets, arm landing soft across my shoulders, like a blanket. No crazy heat burning from his armpit these days, but there’s a smell. The unlaundered Jim-smell of outdoors and woodsmoke and dog. I haven’t noticed it since before Christmas.
“So howdja like that?” Jim asks of us all.
“I enjoyed it very much,” says Sherrie after a moment.
“What about you, Claude?” asks Jim, grinning as if he’s just set some sort of ingenious trap. It occurs to me that I have never seen Jim speak to Sherrie directly, except when he answers her points in the seminar. But even then he’s responding in a general, classroom-oriented way.
Claude smiles and shrugs. Jim points an endless index finger at him.
“That,” he says, seeming pleased, “is exactly what I was expecting.”
He laughs, and turns his laughing face to me. For some reason, I’m the guy appointed to laugh with him.
I don’t let Jim down on this front. I don’t see how I can. Claude just keeps smiling, arms folded tightly as if to lock himself into a permanent shrug. Sherrie, after a moment or two, turns away—either to look for Todd or else just to look at something else—and I feel, for some reason, queasy. Lately a pair of words keeps popping into my mind unbidden, always accompanied by the feeling I associate with Janet and her bedroom—an eight-year-old’s bowel-level shame.
occasionally struggles
Once we’ve finished laughing, Jim gives me another little pat and wipes his eyes. “Now, I just wanted you folks to know,” he says, “you’re all invited over to my place Friday night after the second reading.”
Sherrie turns back, and I’m not sure I can describe the expression on her face except to say that I feel for her the way you do when a good friend’s fly is open—I want to take her aside, to usher her out of view until she’s properly zipped up.
Charles Slaughter is sitting at his desk with a pile of mushrooms and medicinal capsules in front of him, methodically bashing the mushrooms into dust with a hammer. A few guys were gathered meekly around his open door when I arrived, pleading with him to stop because they were trying to study, and Slaughter, not looking up from his work, was yelling at them to go stick their heads up their asses if they were looking for quiet, and not to be such fucking useless pussies while they were at it, because he was busy.
It turns out Chuck is preparing for the weekend. He had the capsules from an old prescription lying around, he tells me, and had discovered that once he cracked them and dumped out the medicine, he could bash about twenty mushrooms up into a fine powder and cram all the powder into a single capsule. I sit on his bed watching him for a while, wincing every time the hammer lands. Chuck is turning the surface of his desk into a pitted moonscape.
“See?” he says, holding up a completed capsule. “This way, you can do, like, twenty mushrooms in one pop.”
I lean forward to squint my appreciation. “But,” I say, “should a person do twenty mushrooms in one pop?”
“Of course, a person should,” says Charles, and swallows it.
“Please stop the noise,” a timid freshman calls from the doorway.
“I will come over there,” replies Slaughter, “and I will impale you on my fist.”
Slaughter may seem like an odd sort of friend for a poet to have—I certainly thought so when I learned of his friendship with Jim. But now that I’ve gotten to know him, it seems to me that Chuck is a kind of poet himself. That is to say, there is a poetry about his weirdness, and his bigness, and his violence. His good cheer and his loyalty. I don’t really know how to explain it, but I heard someone describe poetry once as something you experience not intellectually, but with your nerves and instincts—and this is how I’ve always experienced Slaughter. Nothing is laid out or explicit with him, but evoked. You never know quite what the deal is, but you get feelings—feelings of unease, or warmth, or tension—and they circle. They never seem to land but just keep circling, blurring into one another.
“What ever happened with the backhoe?” I ask once we’re sitting across from one another at Quackers.
“What backhoe?” says Slaughter, gazing over my shoulder, out the window and onto the street.
“On the weekend? You stole a backhoe.”
Slaughter’s mouth opens. “I did, didn’t I? Fuck, that explains it.”
“Explains what?”
“Why Mittens has been so pissy all week.”
I don’t mention Claude, or Slaughter seizing him by the neck, which seems to me a more obvious, if less flamboyant, motive for Sherrie’s pissiness. Instead I ask, “What is the deal with you and Sherrie, anyway?” stretching my arms to illustrate how relaxed I am. “Are you two going out or what?”
“Well, she’s mad at me now,” grunts Slaughter. “So, no. I don’t fucking know.”
“She’s mad about the backhoe?”
“Oh, who knows what she’s mad about.” Slaughter keeps staring past me out the window. He doesn’t seem much for conversation today. “I’m too big an asshole when I get drunk or something.”
“So are you going to the Creighton reading?” I ask, since a conversation-change is clearly what’s required here.
Slaughter frowns. “Who is this Creighton fuckwad, anyway?”
I lean forward. “He’s awful. He’s the worst poet I’ve ever heard.”
“Let’s kill him,” says Charles, cheering up.
“I’d like to. I hate him. Like—the moment I saw him.”
“I love that,” says Slaughter, nodding approval. “I love hating people like that.”
I point across the table. “I thought of you, actually. When I was sitting there hating him. It was just like you and Rory Scarsdale.”
Something happens then in Slaughter’s face and, it seems, throughout the bar. The lights are lowered in acknowledgment of evening, voices grow subdued, the jukebox music shrieks and grates. Night falls all at once.
It takes me a moment to realize what’s happening. Slaughter just sits there, letting silence fill up his turn to talk. His mouth hangs open and his eyes have wandered off—he grows a crease between his eyebrows. It’s like he’s listening to a distant, unfamiliar voice.
“What’s the thing with Scarsdale, anyway?” I say. “Is it because he threw you out the one time?”
Slaughter grips the edge of the table, causing our beer mugs to shudder.
And then Slaughter starts talking like this:
“It’s because there are all these fucking men, all right? And they’re saying stuff and showing you … like … all this neat stuff. And you don’t know, you just go along, right? Because you figure they know what they’re doing. And everybody’s supposed to be fucking friends. You’re sitting around and it’s like, Okay! This is how it is, I get it, and it must be true because they say so, we’re looking out for each other, you know? And then one day the fucker hands you a shovel. And he’s like, dig. And you’re like, why? And he’s like, because I fuckin’ told you to dig. And you’re like, well that’s not a good enough reason, that’s not, it’s not reasonable, and everything you told me before, it’s all—like all of your reasons are based on … on reasonability, right?”
“Charles,” I say, looking around.
“And it’s like they hate you all of a sudden! And then you’re thinking that maybe they hated you all along! And maybe this was all a big fucking ploy! And maybe the whole deal was to just get you here, in the middle of a yard, with this goddamn shovel in your hand, as if everything’s been your fault all along and they’ve just been waiting to punish you and make you suffer for it!”
“Charles,” I say, “people are …”
“I didn’t do anything, Campbell!”
He’s yelling at me.
“I know, Chuck,” I tell him.
We stare at each other. The bar has gone quiet and noisy all at once. That is, it’s so quiet, tiny noises like coughing and pouring and muttering seem amplified.
“I gotta—” says Slaughter, looking slowly around. “Fuckin.’ ”
“Chuck?” I say. “How you doing?”
“I gotta call Mitts. I’ll be right back.”
And then, instead of pushing himself away from the table, Chuck pushes the table away from himself and beer flops itself from the mugs, onto me and everywhere else.
When I look up, Slaughter’s gone. I flag the waitress for help and she comes with a rag and tells me that I, and my university compatriots in general, are slobs and idiots to a man.
“Little Lord Fauntleroys,” the waitress keeps repeating, never raising her head to look at me as she sops the spilled beer. “Every one of you kids. Townload of Little Lord Fauntleroys flouncing around. Doing whatever the hell you please.”
I sit at the bar for the next half hour or so, not self-conscious about it because there is such a fuss of activity all around me that the fact of my being here alone isn’t pathetically apparent. Besides, it feels kind of cool to be sitting at the bar by my lonesome. The poet, alone with his musings, needing drink but not company. It strikes me as a pose I might find Claude in.
After a while, though, I’m feeling bold and bored enough to let my eye wander around the bar, see if anyone is taking note of my poetic isolation. Just as I turn on my stool, Cousin Janet, whom I haven’t seen since Little Billy’s, walks in. She is with a gaggle of girls and looking thinner since Christmas.
“Hey, Larry!” Janet’s eyes are glassy and wobbly as puddles. I’m fogged by a dual waft of patchouli and vodka fumes.
“Janet,” I say. “You’re half-cut.”
“I’m fully cut,” says Janet. “I’m fully cut, mon cuz. You have to meet all my friends!” And the next twenty minutes or so are lost in a disorienting deluge of hails and sloppy, hollered introductions. The other girls are as fully cut as Janet, shine-eyed, rose-cheeked, and they all seem delighted to meet me. One of them yells that they have been having a party. Another yells that Janet is the best friend she’s ever had. Janet bellows like a cow and hugs this person before leaning into me and explaining the party was for her. A going away party. A congratulations party.
Whooo! The girls suddenly exclaim in unison and raise their drinks. I’m starting to feel a bit overwhelmed.
“For Columbia?” I holler to Janet.
“Yes,” she says. “For Columbia!”
“Are you excited?” I yell.
“I don’t know,” Janet yells back, staring at me through the puddles of her eyes.
“You don’t know?” I repeat.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I’m drunk. I’m just drunk. That’s all I know for now.” Janet grins at me, face shining and slick.
“What about your folks?” I say, not sure what I’m asking, but speaking intuitively.
Janet shakes her head. “They don’t care what I do anymore. Nobody cares. Who cares?”
Janet yells the “Who cares?” around at her friends and they all raise a bizarre hybrid racket of mournful celebration. One of them throws her arms around Janet.
“We care,” she keens. “We love you!”
“I love you guys too!” Janet yells, turning from me—just getting lost in her friends for a while.
Another half hour later I’m back at the bar about to place an order of margaritas for Janet’s gang when in the mirror I notice Charles Slaughter lumbering up behind me wearing the same open-mouthed, distant-eyed expression he had when he shoved the table away.
“Chuck,” I say, turning.
“Fuckwit,” he acknowledges. On the stool beside me is a girl’s purse, and on the stool beside the purse, a girl. “Anyone sitting here?” Chuck asks the girl, lurching toward her as if the floor has suddenly shifted beneath his feet.
The girl looks way up at Slaughter, having to lean back slightly. I can see a decision being made. “My—” she stammers, gesturing at her purse. “My bag is.”
Slaughter looks down at the bag, swoops it up in one of his paws and places it in the girl’s lap as he sits down.
“Well, now my bag is,” he tells her.
The girl is hardly charmed. The girl, who is pretty but not intimidatingly so, whom I was thinking I might talk to at some point, gets up and leaves.
“Gallant,” I say to Chuck.
Slaughter just ahems and places his hands in front of him, staring at himself in the mirror behind the bar.
“Did you talk to Sherrie?” I ask.
Slaughter’s arms are such that just resting them on the bar means he can almost reach over and grasp the inside of it. He leans forward a little, and does exactly that. The position reminds me of a guy on a police show—a plainclothes cop having leapt on the hood of the getaway car, braced for a long and dangerous ride.
“I dunno,” says Slaughter. “Yeah. Mittens is mad at me.”
“Still?”
“She’s mad at me,” says Slaughter.
I watch him for a moment or two. Slaughter hasn’t taken his eyes from his reflected eyes in the mirror since he sat down.
“Charles,” I begin.
“Lawrence,” says Charles, stopping the words in my mouth, because Slaughter has never addressed me by name since I’ve known him. “I think you should get away from me. I think I’m going crazy.”
SOMETHING HAPPENS. The evening goes mad. It’s not just Chuck, soon it’s me too, and everybody. I only remember drinking one margarita, but it felt like I drank it for an awfully long time. Green, sweet, and numbing.
I find a pay phone and call Sherrie. Ring, ring. She’s there. Something Slaughter. Something crazy. He thinks you’re mad at him, he’s losing it, Sherrie. You have to come.
Yeah, I am, I am mad at him. There’s no talking to him, Lawrence, he thinks he can get himself all fucked up and then come over and have a serious conversation with me, it’s ridiculous.
But he’s really messed up right now, I don’t know what to say to him.
I know he’s messed up. I almost called campus security to get rid of him. I told him I’m not going to deal with him when he’s like that.
Come, I say, and my voice feels like it’s happening above my head. Please come. Like someone else is doing the talking.
Sherrie’s voice goes wah-wah in my ear for a while, like the grown-ups in a Charlie Brown cartoon. One of Janet’s friends comes over carrying a blue cocktail and yells and laughs holding it up to my face until I agree to have some.
It’s good! I say.
It’s not good, says Sherrie, whom I can suddenly understand again. It’s not good, Lawrence.
What’s not good?
This thing with Charles. It’s not good.
I can feel myself drifting again, eyes bouncing lazily, balloonlike, around the bar. They alight on Janet, on her friends as they dance and swoon together, football players, the angry waitress. I want to drop the phone but a lone remaining tadpole of coherence thrashes its way to the surface of my brain, pokes its head out, demanding to be heard.
But why? asks the tadpole. Why are you so mad at Chuck anyway?
Scarsdale, says Sherrie, and now I’ve lapsed back to catching Charlie Brown snippets as the crowd seems to swell then subside like the middle of the ocean. Wah-wah whores, says Sherrie in the distance. Wah-wah sores. He wasn’t kidding about that, Lawrence. He wasn’t kidding about any of that stuff.
One of Janet’s friends tells me her name is Susan, and I seize upon this. Susan, I say. Susan, can I tell you something, Susan?
Susan is laughing at me. Janet is nearby. Susan tells Janet I’m hilarious.
But, Susan, I say. Listen to me will you Susan?
He is so fucked up, says Susan.
Not he, Susan. Not he. Me. Come on Susan I’m right here.
Okay, I’m sorry I’m sorry but it’s funny.
Okay.
So, says Susan. What is it Lawrence? What would you like to say?
Here’s what it is. Here it is Susan. Poetry.
Susan looks at Janet, is about to say something, but then remembers—not he. So looks back at me.
He really likes poetry, explains Janet.
Not he! I yell. Me!
He’s getting upset, says Susan.
And so I am. I get up, and they call for me not to go. I go.
I don’t know where I go.
It’s dark and warm and soft, the place I happen to be.
Sherrie, I say. Oh, Brenda L.
Her laughter is dark and warm and soft.
The sun glares in at me through gauzy white curtains; curtains which actually seem to embrace the light instead of keeping it out. The curtains pull the sun into the room, fling it around. I’m on a couch, and not in the mood to leave it any time soon, more in the mood to turn over and lose my face in its cavernous dust-smelling crevasse, which is what I do.
A no-thought period ensues for a while, here in the dark of the couch, which I enjoy. I shove my fingers into its depths and feel around. Crumbs, and cool metal springs. I feel blindly for a while, groping like a baby, for no purpose but sensation.
Then the brain starts up. Suddenly, horribly. The raisin of dread leaps to attention, shockingly none the worse for wear after last night. Nourished, it would seem, on margaritas. Enlivened.
There are only two I can think of. Lord Byron and Edgar Allan Poe.
It seems typical of a Little Lord Fauntleroy like Byron, totally in keeping with his entitled, nothing-off-limits approach toward the world. I don’t like that Byron is one. I’m not supposed to have anything in common with Byron.
All I really know about Edgar Allan Poe is that, coincidentally enough, he was a huge fan of Byron. So points off Poe right there. And, since Poe got famous as a writer of horror stories, I assume I can safely dismiss his poetry. I always envisioned Poe as being like the pencil-moustachioed Vincent Price in the Hollywood Horrors—a kind of cartoon creep. The thing with his cousin confirmed that image.
With Byron, it was his half-sister Augusta Leigh. It was a huge scandal and he had to leave London. That’s the limit, society told him. It’s been very flamboyant and Dionysian and all, but that’s about as much as we can take from you, Byron.
Poe’s cousin’s name was Virginia. She was thirteen when he married her, and he loved her faithfully until she died.
I turn over again, masochistically allowing the sunlight to rake my eyes, not just because I know I deserve to suffer, but because I’ve realized all at once how very important it is for me to get up and leave right now. I’m fully clothed, thank God, and suddenly hot. One of Grandma Lydia’s knitted afghans has been thrown on top of me at some point. I fling it away, and months of settled dust takes wing, riding the sunbeams. I feel suffocated. I sneeze. The sneeze is bad, it shakes things loose, wakes things up I’d rather keep dormant.
Temporarily unable to leap to my feet and bolt out the door, therefore, I let myself lie back to gather strength and do some thinking. I think to myself that there are only a few months left of school. I avoided her most of last semester, certainly I can avoid her for most of this one. If I am very careful, I might well be able to avoid her until September, when she’ll be safely across the border, Big Apple bound, out of sight and memory.
And now it is imperative I try and sit up again.
It’s a perfect day for hating, the hangover shaping itself into a thundercloud behind my eyes, and I take my seat in the back rows, primed for hatred, ready to seethe and writhe. Seethe and writhe—this reminds me of how I used to mishear the national anthem when I was a kid. Only a geek who read dictionaries for fun would misinterpret such a simple construction as “we see thee rise” as “we seethe and writhe,” but the thee threw me off, and that’s what I thought it was for years. With glowing hearts, we seethe and writhe, our true north strong and free.
Creighton’s wearing his signature white shirt and a skinny Texas-oilman tie, but today, perhaps since he’s in his academic’s hat, we’re favoured with the requisite tweed sports jacket. Once the bifocals get positioned just above the pinkish bulb of his nose, the professorial picture is complete.
So where’s the hate? By all rights it should be rising like bile at this point, but I can’t seem to really get it going today. My mood is black, no question, but the rest of my being is otherwise exhausted from the surreal excesses of the night before. Maybe my raisin of hatred has been toppled for the time being. Maybe that’s how it works. Maybe different brands of booze knock out different cerebral raisins.
More likely is that I am finding Creighton less obnoxious out of his poet’s hat. He’s talking about Canada today, and how wonderful a place it is. It’s sort of soothing to listen to. Our nation glimmers, he tells us, with potential and cultural distinctiveness. By some, it has been called a “frontier”—and these people mean the word to have less than flattering connotations. But it is indeed a frontier, affirms Creighton. A new frontier, an intellectual frontier, still being shaped by the precious raw materials that we are fortunate enough to claim as our birthright.
Around me, on occasion, I hear sighs. Sighs of boredom, sighs of impatience—the standard thing at lectures. Still, some of the sighs sound more pertinent than others, more deliberate—closer to actual comments. At one point, as Creighton scoldingly asks the students present how many of us plan to do graduate work outside of the country, one sigh comes at me with particular vehemence, and because I feel goosed by the question, I turn around to glare.
White-blue eyes meet mine, smiling, inviting collusion. I glance into the brown ones beside them, and the smile they send me is one of apology. Sitting even farther back than I am. They must have come in late. But why in God’s name would he bring her to this?
Even more surprising, I note another latecomer, lingering in the back doorway, as extreme latecomers often do. Latecomers, but also people with a message to get across. A slouch to the shoulders, a loose, dismissive fold to the arms.
Before I can jerk my face forward again, he catches my eye. Another conspirator’s smile. Another invitation—one I can’t very well turn down.
The first thing I see, after emerging into the hallway after the lecture, is the mind-mussing triad of Jim, Creighton, and Robert A. Sparrow, department head. All of Jim’s poet friends are gigantic like himself. He and Creighton loom over the dainty Sparrow. As I gape, Jim makes introductions, gesturing from one to the other. Sparrow extends a delicate scholar’s hand to the crinkle-eyed Creighton.
The presence of Sparrow is the one force in the universe capable of prying Todd from the orbit of Jim and Creighton. He skulks a few feet away, pinning himself against a wall—seemingly trying to flatten and wriggle himself in behind a bulletin board.
I arrive at Todd before approaching the mirage farther down.
“They shook hands,” Todd whispers. “Just a second ago. Sparrow, like, hailed him. And walked over there. And they shook hands.”
“Well—that’s good,” I say.
Todd shakes his head. “I don’t like it.”
“They’re smiling,” I observe. But are they? Their mouths are smiling—corners turned up. Although Creighton has one of those odd, droll smiles where the corners turn down. But his is not either of the smiles Todd and I are interested in.
“They look like they’re smiling,” I amend.
“They’re putting it on for each other.” Todd sounds like he’s begging. “You can tell they can’t stand each other.”
At the same moment as I take a step forward, Sparrow makes gestures of self-extraction from the triad. He bows toward Creighton, shakes his hand a second time. A quick farewell remark to Jim, who nods—smiling? Smirking? Either way, Sparrow is now fully extracted and hoofing his small-boned way toward Todd and me. Todd pulls his head in like a turtle, turns, and faces the bulletin board. He mutters to himself as if reading, as if it were possible to read documents when they’re shoved practically up your nose.
I do nothing to adjust my naked gape, however. So, unlike Todd, Sparrow takes me into account.
“Hello, Lawrence,” he nods, he slows, but slightly.
“Hi, Sir.”
“You haven’t been to see me of late.”
“No,” I say.
“Make an appointment with Marjorie,” he calls over his shoulder. “We must get caught up.”
Instead, I follow him down the hall. Todd is long gone in the opposite direction.
“Do you have a minute now, Sir?”
“I have a minute. I’m on my way to a meeting—you can walk with me, can you?”
“Sure,” I say. We walk. Down the stairwell—flinging loud, echoing footfalls into the air around us—and out the door. Into the quad, where the freakish warmth of an early thaw hits us.
“This is lovely,” says Sparrow, inhaling rot. “This warm spell we’re having.”
I look around at the bare trees, the yellow grass. “It’ll be depressing,” I remark, “when the cold hits again.”
“Never,” avows Sparrow. “I can’t believe that winter ever was.”
“One of the worst blizzards I ever saw,” I tell him, “was in late April, after everything had melted. Birds were back, crocuses were coming up. Knocked out the phones and electricity for weeks.”
Sparrow laughs at me. “Do stop, Lawrence,” he entreats. “You’ll have me heading straight for the English stairwell.”
That’s the Westcock euphemism for suicide.
I walk Sparrow across the quad to the Administration building without managing to make any further conversation.
“Well—here we are,” he prompts. He turns to me in front of the building’s Gothic double doors.
“How did you like the talk, Sir?” I ask, voice girlish with a strained attempt at casualness.
Sparrow’s eyes flutter behind his glasses. Often when we speak I’ve noticed I find myself wishing he’d take off his glasses. Sometimes I twitch to simply lean forward and bat them off his face.
“The talk?” repeats Sparrow.
“The lecture,” I say.
“Oh, just now, you mean! Well, I found it very interesting, Lawrence.”
Sparrow’s eyes are a dark, muddy blue, if that’s possible. Blue murk, like the marsh from a distance on the clearest of days. And he’s shorter than me, too. I’ve never noticed that before.
“Did you,” I say. “Do you think it’s accurate? What Creighton said?”
“Mister Creighton? Oh yes, I suppose he did make some good points.”
Sparrow glances at his right wrist, which is bare. He frowns slightly, then raises his left, which sports a watch. Sparrow beams down at it like you would a newborn babe.
“Ah, I’m late,” he coos. “I must be off, Lawrence.”
All of a sudden, I’m Slaughter. I’m my cousin Wayne. That is to say, a dumb bloodlust descends and I want nothing more than to grab that bird-boned wrist of his. Sparrow is a shrimp! I could take him. I could yank his wrist behind his back, and up, up, up, until he squealed. Then might be the time to inquire why he’s been waving his Oxford bullshit under my nose these past few months—simultaneously shooing me off poetry like a fly from a pie.
“But,” I say, wringing my hands to keep them from flying out at him. “I mean … do you think that’s something I should be thinking about? What Creighton said, about not doing graduate work in Canada?”
Sparrow hauls on one of the double doors, grunting slightly with the effort. He looks like a child in a fairy tale—Jack sneaking into the giant’s castle.
“Indeed, indeed,” he tells me, nodding with vehemence. “He’s absolutely right. There’s no point doing graduate work in Canada. None at all, just as the man said. But do come see me before exams, Lawrence.”
His voice is echoing now, throughout the lobby of Administration. “We’ll talk about your course load for next year.”
The door heaves itself shut between us.
I don’t know what it is, but I go directly home after this conversation. I sit down at the typewriter without taking off my jacket or boots, type up a bunch of my new ghazals, and put them in an envelope addressed to Dermot Schofield at Ralston University. I walk to the post office and, on impulse, fork over some extra coin to send the letter express. Not just to expedite things, but because I know it will make the missive look like something official—something far too important to pass on to the lowly likes of Joanne or one of her fellow editorial barracudas.
Now it’s Friday night and I still feel hungover from Wednesday. It’s the oddest hangover so far. I haven’t felt sick. What I feel is decelerated, like a movie in slo-mo. Minutes drag. Walking home from campus, I noticed how the wind seemed to crawl up my body like a big, sun-stupefied lizard. I forget about my kettle, it takes so long to boil. Big Blue refuses to steep.
In particular, my thought process. I dwell. I linger. I’m not able to yank my thoughts up and away from a particular notion in my usual yo-yo-like fashion. It’s a handy skill of self-preservation, the ability to bounce one’s thoughts away from unsavoury truths like a flea escaping a looming thumb. That’s what I’ve been doing a lot of lately. Not much dwelling. Very little lingering. And now that the hangover has forced the condition on me—made measured thought compulsory—I understand why.
Because there’s this bland checklist in my head. I always make checklists when I’m studying—it’s the final step of my overall regimen, which begins with the taking of detailed notes in class that I write out over and over again in my notebooks, gradually trimming the information of any superfluous detail, so that eventually all I have left on the page are a series of points. A list. Gleaming gems of information, polished into the perfection of a mere handful of words. Concepts, dense with meaning. Study-poems.
Because apparently my subconscious has been honing all the experiences of the past few months down into a similar kind of list, just waiting for the right moment to present it—neatly typed, in point form, unassailable—to my conscious mind.
Because it’s like this:
• The head of my department, upon whose good graces my potential academic career hangs, is either malicious or dense—one or the other.
• I had some sort of sexual congress with my first cousin on Wednesday night.
• This is something hillbillies do.
• I think the poetry of Abelard Creighton is a joke.
• Jim Arsenault doesn’t think the poetry of Abelard Creighton is a joke.
• I think Jim Arsenault is a genius.
• I want to be a good poet. I want to be a genius.
• I have no idea what good poetry is.
• I know what I like. This is the cry of the dilettante.
• Dilettante: n: A dabbler in the arts, or field of knowledge. See amateur.
Furthermore:
• If Jim Arsenault is a genius, then I need Jim Arsenault to take me seriously as a poet.
• I need Jim Arsenault to love me.
• Because that will mean I have worth. That will mean there is a point. That will mean I am not a PEI hillbilly going hyuck-hyuck, chawing on a sprig of hay (or in my case maybe a hunk of raw potato), and poking around with his first cousin.
• It will mean, instead, that I am a free spirit, an iconoclast, a brilliant, unfettered Dionysian soul from admittedly humble means—which makes my literary ascendancy all the more astonishing.
• The Real Thing.
• The truth I am not.
Finally:
• Jim Arsenault has been messing around with my grades. With my head. With my poetry.
• There is no possible universe wherein the above could be interpreted as gestures of esteem.
AT CREIGHTON’S RECEPTION, Todd and I stand on either side of a table eating steadily from a plate heaped with cheese cubes, as though we are in competition. I use a toothpick to spear them one by one, but Todd just stands gobbling the cheese by the handful. If it were a competition, he’d be winning.
“Corpse of milk,” I say after a moment or two. Watching Todd has subdued my interest in the cheese somewhat.
“Whaf?” says Todd behind his hand.
“Cheese,” I say. “Joyce.”
Todd chews and swallows before replying. “Joyce,” he sneers.
“He’s an Irishman,” I say. “Catholic boy like yourself. Doesn’t he win any points there?”
“The Irish don’t even like him,” Todd says. “Most of them don’t even know who he is.”
His teeth are bright orange. I look away, around.
Creighton’s final reading was an embarrassment for all concerned, though no one has acknowledged it, and Jim and the visiting poet himself seem genuinely oblivious. Grayson Hall was cavernous in its extreme lack of audience. It’s been renovated to seat a hundred at least. There were about seventeen of us in attendance—the only locals being a smattering of granny types. Old ladies in their hats and gloves, desperate for diversion, something to nibble at their intelligences besides doilies and church. Mrs. Dacey not among them.
By the entrance, Sherrie is quietly tearing a strip off Charles Slaughter, who stands with his arms folded, staring grimly ahead like one of the Queen’s guards at Buckingham Palace. The reading was a particular embarrassment to Sherrie, because Slaughter lumbered in about halfway through and started belching her name. Her other name.
“Mittens. Mitts! Mitts, Mitts! Mittens!” The belching tone, I could only assume, was Slaughter’s attempt at a whisper.
Creighton had stopped reading and given a baleful crinkle. A fart in church—that’s exactly what it was like. Well, that went over like a fart in church, my mother used to say in moments of social indecorum.
“It would seem someone’s mittens are lost,” the poet remarked. Tart, puckered lips. Another expression of my parents’ drifted to mind—my father this time: Mouth on him like a hen’s hole.
I hadn’t been expecting it, Dad’s voice, Dad’s words, so clear and wry—which made things worse for Sherrie when I burst out laughing. Her hands went red and she scrambled down the aisle, hunkering down, practically crawling on all fours.
Todd notices me watching the pair of them and turns to look for himself, grinning when he takes into account the pissed-off hunch to Sherrie’s shoulders. Whatever she’s been saying has finally penetrated Slaughter’s demeanour—he glares around the room like a bouncer seeking provocation. Waiting for someone to slip up, be bad.
Todd smirks around his cheese, blowing crumbs. “Never thought I’d see a guy that big so whipped.”
“Claude didn’t even bother to come,” I note after a while.
“Claude,” says Todd, the same way he said Joyce. Which makes me a little jealous of Claude.
Dink-dink-dink! A sound reaches us. Dink-dink-dink! Jim stands shoulder to shoulder with Creighton alongside the table where Creighton has been swapping books for cash. Every granny now has a signed copy tucked into her bag.
Dink-dink-dink! Jim is tapping on a wine glass with a knife, so hard it makes me cringe.
“Shh!” scolds a granny, and everyone does.
“Everybody!” says Jim. “Well, now. I just wanna thank you all for coming tonight to this very special event, and I’d like you to join me in thanking Abe Creighton for a wonderful week—for having enlightened and entertained us. This guy, I think you’ll agree, this guy talks a lot about cultural resources. Well, he’s one of the richest founts we have.”
Everyone smiles and heh-hehs and then, at Jim’s instigation, we clap. It was a clumsy remark, delivered like a joke, cueing laughter as opposed to eliciting it. But Jim’s mood, Jim’s smile, is not to be denied. It’s grown a bit goofy in the last half hour or so. There is something in the air, tickling everyone’s expectations like a communal sneeze.
“Jim’s looped,” Todd mutters with approval.
“Thank you,” Creighton calls around to us, raising hands like the pope. He turns to Jim in the wake of applause and gives his shoulder a squeeze, speaking into his ear. Jim nods and signals for quiet.
“All right,” says Jim. “To hell with it. It’s a bit early to be making this announcement, but I look around and I see I’m among friends. Good friends—some of the best I’ve ever had. It’s been a rough few months for me, as most of you are aware. But even such trying times as these—you know—it makes you realize there’s a reason for everything. You learn, under this kind of pressure, and you learn fast. I learned who my friends were, and that’s been invaluable and heartening—very heartening I’d like to say. That’s what got me through this very difficult year: your friendship.”
The grannies, who have no idea what he’s talking about, are nonetheless transfixed. When we break into applause, it’s a granny who’s initiated it.
Smiles all around. Jim’s teeth, Creighton’s teeth (yellowed, like his hair), and, a few feet away, Dekker’s teeth. Dekker knows what’s coming, I can tell. There’s not a hint of expectancy on his face, which is more relaxed than I think I’ve ever seen it in Jim’s presence.
Ruth Dekker hasn’t bothered to put in an appearance either. Ruth and Claude. They’re the only two people who can make themselves more present in their absences.
“Listen, I’m lousy at giving speeches, so I’ll get to the meat of this thing,” Jim continues once the cheers have died. It’s fortunate the lobby of Grayson Hall is more cloistered that the auditorium—the cheers possess power, conviction. I don’t like to think how mewling they would have sounded within. Creighton’s applause had come across like splatters of paint hitting the ground.
“First, I’d like you all to know,” says Jim, eyes dancing around the room, “that in response to everyone’s efforts and support, the administration has agreed to reconsider my application for tenure. Second, I’d like everyone present to come to my home and drink themselves silly tonight in celebration.”
Squeaks, gasps. And then a huge communal roar and it’s nothing but clapped backs, pumped hands, even a hug or two. One of the hugs, authored by Todd, is received by me. He practically leaps across the tray of cheese the moment the announcement is made. Doubly stunned, I do nothing in return. Todd draws back so fast I’m not sure it happened for a moment. It’s like in Superman comics, when Superman saves you with super speed. One moment you’re in the path of an oncoming bus, you blink, and you’re on the sidewalk.
I stare at him with a cube of de-toothpicked cheese crushed to putty in my right hand. Todd smiles and shakes his head in a gesture of disbelieving glee.
“All right!” he exclaims. “Far out! Can you believe it, man?”
And in his need to make a celebratory gesture, in his struggle to negate the uncool display of a second ago, Todd instigates a ritual I would never have expected from him. He extends his hand palm up for me to slap.
I place my cheese in it and wander away.
It’s funny. I should be dancing. I should have smacked Todd’s grubby white palm with gusto. I should have hugged him back, at least, bashed him between the shoulder blades the way guys do. Instead, I’m moving through the crowd as if inside a sturdily shimmering bubble. Maybe the news just hasn’t registered yet. This is good news, yes? This is great news. Jim Arsenault is at Westcock to stay.
I float into the presence of Slaughter and Sherrie.
Sherrie is saying, “I’m not your mother, you know—I’m not available to you around the clock—whenever you just decide you want to hang out.”
“I know you’re not my fucking mother,” answers Chuck. He’s got a vague, angry look on his face as though annoyed to be not exactly sure where he is.
“I know—I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that,” Sherrie says quickly. “Anyway, this is Jim’s night. Lawrence!” She catches sight of me in my bubble and I get another hug—a visceral reminder—warmth in the middle of the frozen marsh.
“It’s so great about Jim! Oh my God, what a relief!”
She pulls away, revealing Slaughter’s face to me from behind her nimbus of hair. His face has changed a little now that I’m here. His eyes have focused in—narrowed, even—whatever that means. It’s something I’ve always read in books—depictions of people’s eyes narrowing, but I could never picture what it meant. Now I have a picture. Slaughter’s muddy brown ones turning sharp, honing in.
“Chuck,” I say. “Are you all right?”
“He’s on something—he won’t tell me what it is.” Sherrie twists her mouth.
“I’m all right,” Slaughter barks. Very much at me. I decide it would be prudent to resume my drift through the crowd at this point.
Next I arrive at Bryant Dekker, in his own little bubble, standing against a wall a few feet away from where Creighton and Jim are holding court over a congratulatory clutch of departing grannies. They congratulate Jim, whom they don’t know but whom they assure they are very happy for, and thank Creighton for his enlightening performance.
“You know, I usually don’t even care for poetry,” I hear one of the women confide in a marvelling tone.
“Lawrence,” greets Dekker, pumping my hand. “What do you say?”
“Great news,” is what I say.
“I thought you’d be pleased,” he grins. “It’s all paid off—everyone’s faith and hard work. Gives a person renewed hope in the entire system.”
Together we watch Creighton and Jim smile and press frail hands.
“Is the system that hopeless?” I ask after a moment or two.
Dekker turns to look at me. “You mean the university? Well. I shouldn’t be cynical. I was a bit idealistic about the whole thing when I started, I suppose. Those old illusions die hard.”
I nod. We watch Jim and Creighton some more. Jim catches my eye. The famous wink.
“Not that there’s anything wrong with idealism,” amends Dekker, sipping from a plastic glass of wine. “That’s what gets you there in the first place.”
“If,” I say, “it’s where you truly want to be.”
Dekker nods and scratches a bristled cheek. This seems like the last thing we should be talking about, with people celebrating all around us.
“Did you always want to be a professor?” I ask.
“Oh God.” Dekker smiles and drains his wine convulsively. “I don’t know if anyone starts out wanting to be a professor. I wanted education, and everything that represented. I wanted to read great works and sit at the feet of masters and just—soak everything up. You have to understand my background. Maybe certain temperaments just fixate on having the one thing they’re told over and over again is impossible for them. Maybe if people had told me over and over again I could never be a farmer, I’d be in South Africa right now, turning soil.”
Dekker smiles some more. He’s reminding me of someone right now. The self-conscious wriggling around, the confessional, apologetic demeanour. Dermot Schofield discussing the love of his life.
Over by the book table, Jim beckons to me, saying something in Creighton’s ear. Creighton glances over with interest, peppered eyebrows at full mast. Jim gestures again, waving a copy of True North, Creighton’s prizewinning claptrap. I smile, hold up a finger, and turn back to Dekker.
“I was told all my life I could have it,” I tell him. “That it was a really rare and special thing, but I could have it because I was rare and special too.”
“Then you were very fortunate, Lawrence,” says Dekker, drawing himself in a bit.
I think about it. My parents giving up their stately Georgian inn for the hicky Highwayman. Just to get me somewhere like Westcock.
“So you didn’t know what you wanted to do?” I ask Dekker. “You just went into it—education—as an end in itself?”
“Well, I was probably a bit more single-minded than most.” He bows his head meditatively. “It would never have happened,” he tells me, “if it weren’t for the bank. None of it—I wouldn’t be here. Our farm was doing poorly and the bank kept sending my father these official letters. Written in English, which nobody in my family could read. So I got sent to school to learn to read and write English because I was the youngest. Well, from the first day I realized that the moment everything was worked out with the bank was the moment I’d be pulled out of school and put back to work. I was told as much.”
I didn’t think it was possible for Dekker to come from what was clearly a bigger pile of sticks than where I’m from. Imagine a place where even sending a kid to school is seen as big-feeling—as putting on airs.
“So what did you do?” I ask, striving to sound less fascinated than I am.
“I started writing the bank, in secret,” he tells me. “I wrote them every month—sometimes more—under my father’s name, which happened to be the same as mine. I asked them inane questions—whatever I could think up. Pretty soon I struck up a correspondence with the head teller—he became a kind of pen pal. His letters would arrive on bank stationery and I’d tell my father it was just details about his loan, financial gobbledegook, nothing too worrisome, but a little bit worrisome, or so I would hint because I didn’t want my father getting too comfortable. Really, my teller friend would be responding to my last letter, telling me about his day, what his wife cooked him for dinner, and so forth.”
“How long?” I demand in amazement. “How long did you have to write this guy?”
“I wrote him every month, right up until the month I graduated from high school,” shrugs Dekker, a coolness coming through in his tone. “And then I got out of there. I never wrote to him again.”
He looks at me and smiles, blinking like a baby who’s just woken up.
“So your dad is named Bryant too?” I ask.
The smile disappears but not the vagueness. He seems to have no idea what I’m talking about.
“My father? Oh!” Dekker laughs. “No. My father’s name was Obed. Bryant was—is—the name I chose for myself.”
He looks away, embarrassment descending again.
“That’s interesting,” I say. I don’t ask him why he changed his name from his father’s because I can guess that one. “Why did you call yourself Bryant?”
Dekker sighs and rolls his eyes at himself. “Oh—I suppose I thought it sounded sophisticated. I was—Well, I’ll be honest with you, Lawrence.” He seems to make a decision and hunches toward me.
“I couldn’t bring myself to change my name to Byron,” he tells me, voice low—smile small and wry. “Which is what I really wanted to do. I thought Bryant sounded close to Byron.”
I blink at him. “You liked Byron?”
“Liked?” repeats Dekker, cringing at the memory of his young self—himself at more or less my age, it occurs to me now. “Worshipped is more like it. Byron—” Dekker shakes his head. “Ah, well, say what you will about Byron. With his skull, and his turban. But he’s what got me out of there. I told myself: Byron existed, so that way of being had to exist as well—which meant there must be lots of ways of being. That’s what I needed to believe. My father used to say to me, You really think it’s any different anywhere else? You really think you can go somewhere and be any different, be any better than you are here?”
Dekker pauses to smirk at the memory and I realize our faces are just inches from one another. Over the noise of the crowd I’ve drawn closer and closer to hear him. I can see the follicles like an angry rash across his jawline, red and brutalized from hasty shaving.
“Byron was my proof,” he tells me. “He was the most flamboyant refutation of my father that I knew of.” Dekker glances at me, not quite able to keep his distancing smirk in place. We meet eyes and it feels for a moment like I’ve been grabbed by the shoulders.
And then: I am grabbed. I’m in a headlock.
JIM, CORRALLING EVERYBODY for the next phase of celebration, which will take place at his house out at Rock Point. But first he finds it necessary to drag me by the head over to Abelard Creighton for proper introductions.
“Whaddya think yer doin’?” Jim demands on the way, sporting his full-on backwoods twang. “Can’t even be bothered to tell a fella congratulations?”
“Congratulations,” I call up from beneath his arm, laughing and choking.
And I’m released before Creighton, who stands in his white shirt and Texas tie, looking for all the world like Colonel Sanders.
“Here he is,” announces Jim. Creighton extends a big warm hand.
“It’s nice to meet you, son. Jim tells me you’re his star protégé.”
“Really?” I ask, grinning like a fool.
My bubble’s been punctured and now I can feel the craziness in the air. Jim leans against me and I keep having to shift around on my feet in order to bear his weight. All around us, people seem to be shrieking laughter.
“Yes, indeed,” Creighton affirms.
“I told him,” Jim yells in my ear, “I said, this is your man right here, Abe—this is what you’ve been talking about all along. If anyone is gonna save Canadian poetry, it’s Larry Campbell.”
All I can do is laugh breathlessly at this.
A wine bottle gets knocked off the table and clunks noisily, emptily onto the polished floor. Jim is yelling around at everyone to get their coats.
It’s hard not to watch the way Ruth watches Moira. She sits on the couch beside Dekker, draped in a shawl the colour of dried blood over a burgundy velvet dress. She looks like mulled wine. She is the best-dressed person in the room.
“Can I help you with anything?” she said to Moira upon our arrival.
Moira, in a pair of floppy-assed jeans, seemed physically unable to look upon Ruth. Her eyes kept darting toward and then bouncing away from her.
“I don’t plan on doing a goddamn thing,” she huffed. “Beer’s in the fridge, food and wine’s on the table. If anyone needs anything else they can talk to that one there.” And jabbed her cigarette at Jim, crouched by his record player. “I been cutting fuckin’ vegetables all afternoon.” She held up her hands to show us where she had nicked herself in the process.
“Well, it’s very nice to meet you,” said Ruth after a glance at Dekker.
The comment met with Moira’s back.
“Don’t tease that dog,” she was yelling, hustling her assless way across the room.
“She’s so thin,“ murmured Ruth.
After a while, Panda gets shoved into the kitchen and guests are instructed to enter cautiously when they have to pass through to use the washroom or get a beer. By no means should they look Panda in the eye, or respond in any way to his ball-nudgings. So every time I go into the kitchen, I’m reminded of my dream. Panda crouched in the corner, gnawing, mad-eyed.
At some point, Jim has passed me my very own copy of True North. He bought it for me and got Creighton to inscribe it as a way of saying thanks, he told me. For all I’ve done throughout the year, all my friendship and support. I smiled up at him, thinking how much I would have preferred a signed copy of Blinding White since pages were starting to fall out of mine. Anyway, I smiled, thanked, and Jim hugged me for what felt like a good minute. He’s been going around hugging everyone all night long, leaving sweetish wafts of rum-smell in his wake.
“Ah, kiddo,” I heard him say. I could hear him speaking through his shoulder, which my ear was pressed against. The words seemed to vibrate their way directly from his vocal cords into my brain. “It’s all been worth it, kid. The hordes have retreated—for the time being, anyway.”
It struck me as funny that Jim thought of stodgy, traditionalist Westcock as the rampaging horde, himself as the desolate fortress under attack. You’d think it would be the other way around—Jim, the barbarian at the gate. It’s like with all the old French forts perched on their wind-blasted hills up and down the coast—signifying either victory or defeat, depending on how you look at it.
Sherrie and Todd and a few others from class are being smart and taking advantage of Creighton’s presence among us. That is to say, they are gathered more or less at his feet as he rocks in Jim’s rocker pronouncing on God knows what while Jim calls merrily to him from time to time, to consult on matters such as what records to play and what he would like next to drink.
Slaughter looms against a nearby wall, having resumed his bouncer’s posture. Or maybe it’s that of a bodyguard. Even as I’m talking to him, his eyes stay on Sherrie, flickering at the every flick of her hand.
“How you doing, Chuck?”
“I’m all right.”
“You seem kind of out of it tonight.”
“I’m a bit fucked up,” Slaughter admits. “I took something.”
“Not another one of those capsules?”
“Nah. Something. I just fuckin’ got it from a guy down at the Mariner. Put me in a bad mood.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Yeah, it’s a real fuckin’ bummer if you wanna know the truth, Campbell.”
Slaughter speaks like he’s reading off a cue card. We stand in a not particularly friendly silence.
“Mitts keeps hassling me about it,” he mutters a moment later.
“About what?”
“About taking stuff all the time. Like,” Chuck unfolds his arms suddenly and becomes animated, grimacing and gesturing, “she doesn’t get that guys are different than chicks. She’s this tiny little person and I’m this great big person. She can’t drink a couple of beer without getting shitfaced. I can handle whatever I take, she doesn’t get that. It’s drugs though, mostly. She thinks dope is dangerous.”
“Hm.” I’m trying to sound noncommittal.
“I go to her, look at Campbell. He’s half as big as me, and it didn’t hurt Campbell.”
I gaze at Creighton as he leans toward Sherrie to impart some particularly savoury morsel of insight.
“Chuck?” I say after a moment or two. “What didn’t hurt me? When we did the mushrooms at the Mariner that time?”
“The other night,” says Chuck, resuming his surveillance of Sherrie. He refolds his arms. “Whatever it was we had at Quackers. Might be the same thing I’m on now.”
I stare some more at Creighton and his crowd, mouth open.
My father: every single thing he warned me about the summer before I went off to Westcock—regarded by me at the time as nothing so much as an island bumpkin’s rantings against the “big city”—is being replayed in my head.
Now, don’t you go touching that wacky tabaccy, because people will tell you it’s fine but it’s not. You lose control and you can find yourself jumping out a window, or out in front of a car or some such thing—you saw those goddamn armpit sniffers on the news, they didn’t know where the hell they were rolling around in the mud up there at that show in New York.
Dad—it’s New Brunswick. It’s a ferry ride away.
They send the drug dealers into all the university towns—they come up from the States. Sometimes it’s the goddamn draft-dodging professors who do the deals, the way I hear it.
Dad—Westcock professors aren’t drug dealers.
Well, you don’t know, now, do ya? You’ve never been there now, have ya? This is my point—you don’t even know what it is you’re walking into. You go in there thinking, oh yah, this is just great, everybody’s my friend and all that, and then some bastard you think is your friend sticks a needle in your ass, or slips something in your drink at a party and then what happens?
Dad—nobody is going to
I have to go to the kitchen and drink a beer. I have to sit on the floor and pet Panda for a while. To calm myself, work through my rage. I can’t yet tell if I’m more angry about Slaughter dosing me or about the fact that my father’s been proven right about something other than lawnmowers or different kinds of paint. How dare Slaughter side with my father in this way. How dare he exemplify every boneheaded, fear-mongering stereotype about our generation. How dare he make us look so bad, so foolish. So naive—above everything else.
Although I probably look quite serene, sitting here. People keep coming in to get beer or go to the can, and they always pause at the sight of me and Panda huddled so companionably.
“Aw,” they’ll say for the most part.
In comes Jim. He sees me here, cuddled up with his dog, smiles, and takes down a bottle of rum from a high shelf in one of the cupboards. It looks to me like it is a secret bottle of rum, one that’s been kept from prying eyes. Without a word, he clinks a couple of glasses together in one hand, picking them up, and comes to sit on the floor across from me. Panda whines and nudges him the ball.
“Shut up,” says Jim, replacing it beneath Panda’s muzzle. He reaches over and starts scratching the dog between ears. Panda resigns himself and goes back to his obsessive gnawing.
“Well, then,” Jim says, pouring me a drink. “Here’s to us, and tonight. This fine, long-awaited celebration. To friendship, eh?”
I put my beer down on the floor beside me so I can accept the glass.
“To friendship,” I say, shoving Slaughter from my thoughts and taking a sip.
Jim looks at me, smacking his lips. His rum is gone.
“You have to down it.”
“Oh,” I say. I close my eyes and down it. “I usually have it with Coke,” I explain, blinking at him.
“The only thing you should mix with rum is spit,” pronounces Jim, glass in the air as if he’s making another toast. “Now, what are you hiding in here for, anyway? If you were smart, you’d be out there shooting the shit with old Crotch. He runs a small press out of Toronto.”
“Does he?”
“Publishes a lot of first-timers, too, always on the lookout. I been chatting you up.”
A first book, a Toronto press, maybe before I even graduate. I peer at him through my rum-watered vision. “Jeez. Thanks, Jim.”
Jim smiles and meets my gratitude square in the eye. He knows exactly what he’s doing for me, exactly how much it means.
“But I can’t do all the work, so you get out there at some point, all right?”
“I will,” I promise.
Jim pours us two more shots, in silence. If it could be always like this, I think in a kind of mourning. Just two men quiet on the kitchen floor together.
“Why do you call him Crotch?” I ask, just as Moira comes in. She notices us and takes a few steps forward, hands on her nonexistent hips.
“Oh, what?” huffs Jim, looking away.
“You’re an arsehole, is what,” says Moira. “You’re a stupid cocksucker, is what.” And then she turns, as they say, on her heel, and leaves without doing whatever she came in here to do.
Jim grins at me. “I told her I wouldn’t.” He raises his glass meaningfully, and knocks it back.
“Is she mad?” I ask, hoping she isn’t. Not for Jim’s sake in particular, but because I’m starting to feel there’s a surplus of madness curdling the air tonight.
And so I just want to stay here for a moment, I just want to dwell on the ensuing half hour or so, when Jim and I sit talking and drinking by ourselves in the kitchen, muted crowd sounds coming to us from the next room. I just want to stay here because everything turns to shit so rapidly afterward.
This is the sacred moment, after all, the scenario I’ve been pursuing for the past two years—this is what I’ve dreamed of. Dreamed is a good word for it too, because the whole set-up has been a lot like a dream—one of those endlessly aggravating dreams where you come within a hair’s breadth of getting what you want only to have it shimmer into nothing, or turn to something like mercury and slither between your fingers at the moment of attainment. Jim, I realize, is the White Rabbit. Jim is my White Rabbit, and I’ve been like Alice, diving heedlessly into Wonderland after him.
But all I’ve wanted is this, which is not such a big deal really—which is not so much to ask. Alice wouldn’t have been able to tell you what she wanted, but I’ve known what I wanted from the beginning. I just wanted this. To get Jim alone. To sit and talk, quietly, with Jim.
The amazing thing is, we don’t even discuss poetry. True, it’s Jim who does most of the talking. He tells me about Creighton. Not my favourite subject, but at the very least he expounds upon his fondness for the guy—which I assume explains his willingness to overlook the fact that “Crotch” is an atrocious poet. I mean, Jim has to know this, and at some point he’s going to shoot me a black-eyed wink, an impishly meaningful look, which will blast all doubt from my head in this regard.
Creighton was one of his profs at U of T, he tells me as I sit waiting for the look. Creighton published an early chapbook of Jim’s, one I’ve never heard of, to my surprise, and one Jim says I never want to read. (“Juvenilia,” he dismisses.) The important thing, says Jim, is that Creighton gave him hope, and encouragement when he needed it most. He made Jim believe poetry was important enough to give his life to.
“That was a gift,” emphasizes Jim. “You see that, Larry? That was the greatest gift I ever got.”
“That’s what you’ve done for me,” I say. I just let myself blurt it out. I don’t let myself think about it—how it sounds, how it might make me look in Jim’s eyes. I don’t care, I just say it.
Jim was in the process of downing another shot when I did. Now he lowers his glass and his thrown-back head slowly. He smiles, also slowly, and draws in breath to speak. I swallow in preparation for the words, am leaning toward him. His black eyes nestle themselves into mine. For the first time ever, the first time since we’ve met, I genuinely have the feeling that Jim sees me. I’m here for him suddenly, in a way I haven’t been before—real and breathing and alive. More than that—I can tell he knows what I need to hear, I can see from the placid comprehension dawning in his face. At long last. Oh, long-awaited day.
“UM,” SAYS SHERRIE, embarrassed to be interrupting us, “Charles is crying.”
Jim and I continue to sit spellbound for a second or two as our moment disintegrates around us. We glance at each other, then Jim pulls himself to his feet, weaves his way past Sherrie, and exits into the next room without a word.
“Slaughter’s what?” I say.
“He’s just standing there crying,” says Sherrie.
Guilt and a low-key kind of horror take me by the guts. Horror at the thought of it—giant-man Slaughter crying in the middle of a party, people standing around watching, taking note.
“God,” I say. “When did this start?” I’m positive it has to be my fault—what I said to him.
“I don’t know, I just noticed it when I went over to talk to him. He’s just standing there, Lawrence, with his arms folded, with tears rolling down his face.”
I stand as if full of purpose, taking my glass and the bottle of rum with me. I place them on the table, but that’s about as far as I get. Sherrie and I look at each other. Neither of us want to deal with this, it would seem. Neither of us want to go out there.
“Did he say anything to you, Lawrence?” Sherrie wants to know.
“He was being kind of an asshole when I spoke to him,” I tell her, and Sherrie seems to levitate slightly, chewing her nails.
“He’s pissed off at you, Lawrence. I should have said something, I’m sorry.”
“Slaughter’s angry at me?”
“It was that thing you said about him just wanting to get in my pants. I made a joke about it a few days ago. I knew—I mean, I didn’t take it seriously.”
I remember myself in Slaughter’s dorm two days ago. Sitting so companionably on his bed. Slaughter with the hammer, destroying his desktop.
“Holy shit, Sherrie.” I shake my head and have to lean against the table, legs gone to juice. It’s like I’ve been dangling on the edge of the Grand Canyon all week and have only just looked down. “You told him about the marsh?”
She shakes her head rapidly. “I only told him what you said. That one thing.”
“Well, why in God’s name would you tell him something like that?”
Sherrie stares up at me, her guilt-spark abruptly extinguished. Now it’s a different kind of spark.
“I don’t know, Lawrence,” she snaps. “Maybe it was the same reason you’d say what you did to me.”
And so the guilt-spark gets transferred. It was me all along. I’m the guy my dad warned me about. I’m the friend who can’t be trusted.
“His mother died last year,” Sherrie tells me.
I try to imagine it, and find that I can’t.
“Oh, man,” I say.
“He goes out, he gets as messed up as he possibly can, and then he calls and begs me to come over. And then he just cries all night, Lawrence.”
“Jesus Christ,” I say, controlling the urge to cover my ears. Why do I not want to hear this so much?
Then Jim returns with an entourage, as noisy as he was quiet when he left the kitchen a moment ago. Jim has an arm around Slaughter, babbling about how good and okay everything is going to be, and Creighton is walking ahead lecturing them both on the salutary effects of ice water. Todd trails behind as though tethered to the bunch of them.
Jim sits Slaughter down at the table, keeping up a steady stream of patter, and not taking his hands off Chuck, as if he fears that the moment he does, Slaughter will leap to his feet and do or say something irrevocable. So as Jim speaks, he punctuates and embellishes with soothing, miniature pats and the kneading of muscles.
“Yahhh, the big guy just needs a shot of coffee or some such thing, wha? Maybe something to eat, eh, Chuck? You try any of them cocktail wieners we got out there, I bought those just for you, now …”
Creighton, meanwhile, is bashing an ice tray against the counter, undertaking his own non-stop line of patter, with which he occasionally responds to Jim.
“Ice water is the thing, I always keep a tall glass of ice water at my side these days, keeps the senses sharp, the sufferings of the morning after at bay—oh good Lord, Jimmy, don’t offer him those, surely you have real food to put before the young man …”
I remember this from being a kid. Bee stings, the ball in the face. This is what men do when boys cry. They talk and talk loud until it’s over.
It’s odd, because Slaughter’s face hasn’t changed. It hasn’t crumpled, or otherwise contorted. It’s exactly the same as when I spoke to him earlier. Closed, impenetrable, like a building boarded up. The only thing is the tears, the bloodshot eyes.
“It’s just the drugs,” I hear Slaughter say.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Chuck, that’s what you goddamn well deserve if you’re gonna take that crap,” complains Jim.
“What’d you take?” inquires Todd.
“I don’t fucking know,” says Slaughter.
“That’s right responsible now, isn’t it,” says Jim.
“There now!” Creighton places a plastic tumbler of water, clunking and brimming with ice cubes, in front of Chuck. “Sip that slowly, young man. Bracing.”
Slaughter scoops a chunk of ice from the cup and places it in his mouth. I watch him, wincing because Chuck is chewing the ice too slowly. I can feel my teeth start to ache from the roots.
All the while, Jim grinds tiny circles into Chuck’s shoulders with his thumbs. Slaughter doesn’t appear to notice, just keeps staring straight ahead.
“How’s that?” Jim keeps asking. “How’s that now? Ya want anything else?”
“I’m all right,” says Chuck, chomping away. He scoops a couple more ice cubes from the cup. Creighton, I notice, is also watching the ice-chewing performance with some discomfort crinkling his face.
“Drink, boy,” he commands. “Take a nice long sip of that, now.”
“Where’s Sherrie?” says Chuck, not looking around. “Mittens?”
“I’m right here, Charles,” says Sherrie.
“Where’s Claude?” says Slaughter.
Jim looks over at Sherrie and me, and Sherrie and I look at each other.
“I called him when we got here,” Sherrie tells Chuck. “He wasn’t around.”
Slaughter closes his eyes, picks up the tumbler, and drinks the whole thing down—much to Creighton’s crinkle-eyed delight.
“There you go now, son!” he exhorts as Slaughter’s doorknob of an Adam’s apple bobs away. “Refreshing, isn’t it? Now you just keep that filled up for the rest of the night.”
Jim’s thumb-circles have meanwhile evolved into a full-on pummelling of the muscles beneath his hands. “That’s it, you listen to Crotch, this old bastard’s learned more than a few tricks over the years when it comes to drinking—taught me a few good ones back in the day, haven’t ya, Abe?”
I feel impatient watching the two of them grin and wink across the kitchen at each other. I want to tell them this has nothing to do with getting drunk in Toronto ten years ago. It doesn’t have anything to do with them. It doesn’t even have anything to do with poetry, for a change. It’s all just Slaughter and the world of his weirdness, which I’m starting to think none of us have a clue about.
Slaughter returns the emptied tumbler to the table—he places it precisely within the water ring it made when he picked it up.
“Ahhh,” he says, and I can tell it’s an insincere Ahh, an Ahh performed for our benefit.
“How ‘bout a beer?” Slaughter requests with an abashed smirk, and the two poets clap hands and clap shoulders in a display of muted jubilance, like their team has scored a point.
That’s when I have my epiphany. Concerning, of all people, Sparrow. I didn’t realize Sparrow had been fluttering in the back of my mind this whole time, but the moment the epiphany descends, it’s clear he has. The question of Sparrow. The mystery of Sparrow, his blank looks, his Oxford chimera—chewing away at my subconscious all evening long.
And here it is. That maybe Sparrow isn’t malicious. Maybe Sparrow isn’t dense. Maybe Sparrow hasn’t been deliberately screwing with my hopes and dreams and expectations all this time after all.
Maybe people just live their lives hearing whatever they want to hear and thinking whatever they want to think. Maybe it’s as simple and as stupid as that.
Sherrie has gone, so I decide to go find her.
And I’m drunk. The door separating the kitchen from the living room takes me from relatively sober to all-of-a-sudden drunk, like some kind of mystic portal. Like the rabbit hole to Wonderland. I stand on the other side of the door, surveying the party, trying to keep myself from weaving. Moira and Ruth are side by side on the couch. Moira is talking, twisting her knuckly hands around in front of her like she’s making incantations. I intuit she’s describing her brother’s Dragon Blade again, demonstrating how perfectly balanced it is. Ruth nods and smiles from her crimson depths. The two of them make a striking pair—Moira’s deep-socketed eyes, Ruth’s harsh-angled jaw. The weird sisters minus one.
Sherrie is a few feet away from them, huddled over the telephone with a finger shoved into her free ear. I make my way over, balancing like a tightrope walker.
“You,” Moira calls to me, interrupting her monologue. “Some help you are. Some goddamn help.”
“What?” I say.
“You’re supposed to be his friend,” snipes Moira, jabbing at me with the heat-bright tip of her cigarette. “You’re supposed to be so decent. You’re just like the rest of those assholes.”
“I am not,” I assure her, “just like the rest of those assholes.”
“The bunch of you,” Moira complains, “just treat him like King Shit. I don’t know what in hell is wrong with you. Your husband, too,” Moira turns abruptly on Ruth, who doesn’t even flinch, who actually smiles a little.
“For Christ’s sake, that one could be—he could take a crap on your kitchen floor,” Moira sputters, turning toward me again. “He could be hitting himself on the head with a hammer saying, how do you like that, now, boys? Whaddya think about that little trick? And what would you bastards say?”
At this point Moira actually pauses as if I’m going to answer her.
“I don’t know,” I tell her.
She folds her arms. They remind me of two tree roots woven together above the earth.
“You don’t know,” says Moira, turning to Ruth. “He doesn’t know.”
“Perhaps they would say,” offers Ruth in her strange accent, “yes, King Shit. Very good, King Shit.”
For the first time since I’ve met her, Moira laughs. She laughs worse than Ruth. She coughs as she laughs, a smoker’s cough, harsh, wet, and red-sounding. Gravel scrapes her windpipe. It makes me want to shrivel up and die.
“Very good, King Shit,” caws Moira, smacking Ruth across a velvet thigh. Aren’t they just getting along like a house on fire.
Ruth smiles some more, rubbing where Moira smacked.
“So what am I supposed to do?” I hear myself saying. It’s like I’m suddenly in one of my dreams somehow. I have a lot of dreams where I’m being accused of something, and furiously defending myself. “What am I supposed to do?” I repeat. “I’m supposed to tell Jim not to drink?”
“Oh, heaven forbid,” says Moira, rolling her eyes like a bad actor. “Heaven forbid you ever did that. World would end. Sky’d come falling down.”
I continue my high-wire act across the room toward Sherrie, fuming somewhat. Moira has to be kidding. Jim, your wife would really prefer it if you didn’t drink. As some nineteen-year-old idiot, I feel it’s my place to tell you this. Besides, haven’t I already told him? I told him at Christmas. And look what it got me. A confection, ultimately. Exile—from which I’ve only just managed to claw my way back.
“Everybody’s here, though!” Sherrie is hollering into the phone, finger still jammed into her ear to block out the party noises. It’s practically buried up to the second knuckle.
“Where have you been all night? Why? Really? But why?”
“Is that Claude?” I say.
“But come on! Everyone’s having a really good time!”
“It’s a crazy party!” I yell to be helpful.
“That’s Lawrence!” says Sherrie. “He wants to talk to you!”
The phone is in my hand, against my head.
“No, I have to go, I don’t want to talk to him,” Claude is calling.
“Hi!” I say.
“Hey, Lawrence,” says Claude.
“What’s the matter, you studying or something?”
“Yeah, I’m studying,” answers Claude in a strange, slurred voice.
“You don’t sound like you’re studying.”
Claude sighs something in French.
“Pardon?” I say in French back at him. “Donne moi le poulet.”
Claude snickers. “You’re in a good mood.”
“I’m just really drunk,” I tell him. “You hear the good news?”
“I heard,” says Claude. “Congratulate Jim for me.”
“I think the idea is for you to come and do that yourself.”
“I’m not feeling so good,” says Claude.
I look up at Sherrie. “He says he’s not feeling good.”
She takes the phone back from me.
“Why aren’t you feeling good?” Sherrie demands, turning away.
I just stand there while Sherrie harangues, watching her shoulder blades moving beneath her sweater. I can’t quite muster the will to turn back to the party as yet, although I hear it, swelling, behind me. I hear Moira hack as though her previous laughing fit has shaken something loose, and Ruth’s low, gleeful croak in reply. I can hear that Crotch is back out among us now, holding forth on the Black Mountain poetry movement and the TISH Group, and, if I’m hearing this correctly, trying to convince someone that the word TISH is shit spelled backward. Those are the voices that drift above the crowd—the high notes. Below them, it’s just a garbled chorus.
And now my consciousness seems to be getting snagged on moments, like when I was in the kitchen with Jim. Time drops away and I’m drifting, dreaming awake in the eternity of right now with the party behind me, Sherrie’s back in front of me, her shoulder blades jerking. Next month I will turn twenty, and more years will follow that, supposedly. I can’t imagine them, just as I can’t imagine Slaughter’s mother dying—what it would be like. The future is theoretical, thank God. How will I be? I won’t be—I can’t imagine it. I just am. I’ll always am. I’ll stay in this moment forever, this hinge of time. Secrets need not be revealed, the trauma of knowledge and experience can be forgone. There won’t be any more of those shattering, heartbreaking moments that hit you like a ball in the face and cause your personality to grow at warped and unexplored trajectories. Nothing left to learn, nothing from which to recover. I’ll just stay here, drunk and out of sync. Turned away, and turned away from. En-bubbled in this moment.
“Well, something is very wrong there,” says Sherrie, blue headlights shining in my eyes like a cop’s flashlight.
“Your eyes are so beautiful,” someone above me says.
Sherrie’s face squeezes itself up with mirth and pain. “Oh God, Lawrence, snap out of it.”
I do, but can’t help resenting her for starting time up again.
“I’m hammered,” I tell her quickly. “Sorry. I mean they are, you—you probably know that. I’m not hitting on you, honest to God.”
“I know, Lawrence, stop babbling.”
“I like fat girls,” I babble.
This arrests Sherrie’s attention completely. Everything about her stops except for the flap-flap of her eyelashes.
Both my hands have at some point jammed themselves against my mouth. I remove them to amend: “I mean, not fat, exactly. You know, bigger girls. Just girls with … more meat on their bones.” That sounds disgusting—like I want to slap them on the barbecue.
Blink, blink, blink, goes Sherrie, like a tentative, big-eyed bird hopping toward somebody’s picnic.
“Please don’t tell anyone.” Though my back’s still turned to the party, I imagine every face burning into me like the tip of Moira’s smoke. The talk has become more focused, scandalized, intent. Soon the voices will gather together as one to condemn and pronounce, like in a Greek tragedy.
And then my vision is washed in gold, my nose invaded with the unearthly smell of Head and Shoulders shampoo.
“I would never tell anyone,” Sherrie promises, releasing me. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of, Lawrence, I think it’s lovely.”
“It’s not lovely, Sherrie.”
“Well it’s fine, then.”
“Okay,” I tell her. “I just wanted—this whole conversation—I came over here wanting to tell you I’m sorry for what I said about Chuck—that’s all. That night in the marsh.”
Sherrie waves her hands to make me stop talking. She looks down at the floor.
“I was just being an asshole because—” I stop and glance around, not so drunk it doesn’t occur to me to lower my voice. “The whole thing with Jim. I really wanted you to tell me what was going on, uh … with you guys. And you wouldn’t. It was none of my business but—it pissed me off.”
There was more to it, of course, but that seems to be the only aspect I’m able to articulate.
“Anyway,” I say, exhausted all of a sudden, “we can change the subject now if you want to.”
Sherrie looks up at me, finally. It turns out she doesn’t want to.
AND YOU KNOW, it’s nothing really. It’s nothing I couldn’t have worked out on my own, just by putting two and two together. I see now I was too preoccupied with my own prurient imaginings—my lurid little worst-case scenarios. I can be forgiven for this, can’t I? It’s undeniable there’s a quality about Sherrie that makes a guy assume the worst. And there’s a similar quality about Jim, now that I consider it.
And at the very moment I’m considering it—this quality of Sherrie’s coupled with this quality of Jim’s—the universe rushes up to agree. The universe scrambles to provide an illustration of this principle in the person of Todd Smiley. Hovering, as he does. Looming silently, sullenly a few feet away, waiting to be taken into account. But we take him into account too late, Sherrie and I, deep in conversation as we are.
Sherrie had been saying: So it was all my fault. The whole thing with Sparrow, the whole thing with his tenure. I just knew it had to be my fault and I felt so horrible.
And I had been saying: Sherrie, there are lots of reasons Jim’s tenure could have been pulled.
And Sherrie was saying: But it happened right after I made the complaint. Right after, Lawrence!
And then I heard myself saying: Lots of people could have complained about Jim. You’re right—he misses classes, he doesn’t keep office hours. He … he fucks people around.
That statement—monumental as it felt—was not the part Todd heard—at least I don’t think it was. Imagine Todd bearing witness to such blasphemy. He’d bring the temple down on all our heads.
Sherrie looked at me with her wide-open face—eyes and mouth agape.
“He does,” she squeaked. “He does fuck people around. He fucks people around, and I was tired of it. Are you saying he fucked you around too, Lawrence? Is that what you’re saying?”
I nodded. I couldn’t do more than that. The sense of betrayal had caught up with me, and my brain felt heavy and sluggish like a cloud full of rain.
And then something happened to Sherrie’s face I’d never seen before. It went ugly.
“He never read my poems,” she whispered. “I know he didn’t. One or two short ones, maybe. I would ask him about them, and I could see him faking it. I mean, half the time he wouldn’t even put any effort into it, Lawrence, he couldn’t even be bothered faking it. Or he’d just change the subject—I came in to talk to him about my assignment one day, and Jim just launched into this lecture on Sexton, told me I should read her. I mean, Christ!”
I kept nodding. I gave her arm a squeeze, hoping to calm her down and relay empathy without uttering further mutinies. But also I was kind of struck dumb. Sherrie’s pink face was practically pulsing. Her enormous blue eyes were squeezed into Schofield-esque pinpricks. Her teeth were even bared. This might seems strange to say, but all at once Sherrie made sense to me. Sherrie the poet, that is. In her anger.
Here’s what Todd would have seen and heard as he approached: Sherrie gone ugly, gesturing in jerks and swiping at her eyes, talking fast and squeaky. A tantalizing word or phrase might have reached him—I know he didn’t … faking it … effort into … he’d just … him … Jim … Christ! Me standing close, nodding urgently.
“I had such respect for him,” Sherrie was saying. “I mean, I still do, Lawrence. Jim’s brilliant. I love him.” She stopped talking abruptly and seemed to suck for a moment on the inside of her mouth as though getting ready to spit. “That’s why it was so infuriating. I loved Jim so much and he just fucked me around. He didn’t even care.”
That’s what Todd comes in on. Those last two sentences. At least, that’s when we finally take him into account. Having just arrived, perhaps, but already veering away.
At a party like this, the problem is, you lose track. You don’t keep your attention focused where you should. It switches around, seemingly on its own accord—like when someone else is controlling the radio dial. Sherrie and I, for example, should have stayed focused on Todd—and what the universe was trying to impress upon us—instead of watching him veer, dreamy-seeming, off into the crowd. We should have called him to us, pulled him into our circle instead of letting him drift away like an unmoored ship with a cargo of gunpowder.
Things began to speed up, then, blink on and off. I lost time, found myself in the kitchen listening to vomiting, castigations, and barks coming from outside (which a peek out the window informed me were Jim, Moira, and Panda respectively), lost more time, sat beside Ruth for a while insisting that Moira was the real poet of the household (Moira was an oral storyteller, I maintained, embroidering outlandish dreamscapes—or something like that), until I noticed Dekker standing a few feet a way listening and grinning a little too broadly, so got up and went outside to take a piss and clear my head. Jim was still there, breathing fire, or so it seemed. It was snowing and going to snow, the temperature had dropped, the air was winter-cold, and so his breath came out like smoke. Or no—he was smoking. It was smoke.
He sat on the chopping block, smoking and going to smoke, with Moira no longer in sight, but Panda spent at his feet. There Jim was.
And here I am, back in now.
I pee discreetly before preparing to say hello, but don’t have time to say hello because this is where Charles Slaughter comes in. Comes out, that is. I see him and think through my haze that there is something I should have been keeping on top of tonight. What was it again? I meant to be paying attention to something. Todd. He should be here. We haven’t talked since I walked away from his proffered palm. I have a feeling I shouldn’t keep walking away from Todd like that. And Slaughter—what about him? He keeps lurching out of place. The universe and I, we pin him neatly down under headings like “friend,” and “sane”—he rips himself off the page and blunders off, headingless, till we can pin him down again.
Then Todd does appear, almost as if I have invoked his stubby presence, which materializes in the doorway just as Slaughter is approaching the chopping block. Jim turns, chucking his cigarette into the night, and sees me standing behind him apparently playing with my groin as I tuck myself in. He sets his lips for a bemused comment, but is interrupted when Charles shoves him off the stump.
“Hey, man,” Smiley calls to Slaughter.
“Well—” says Jim from the ground, as if collecting his thoughts.
Slaughter kicks Jim.
You weren’t supposed to hear that, man, Todd is in the middle of saying—this drowns out any further sound Jim might have made.
Jim rolls away fast, like a tumbleweed. Slaughter takes a step forward and, get this: Todd—Todd hurls himself onto Slaughter’s back.
And Panda’s gone. Panda’s lost it. Panda all but turns himself inside out. He shrieks and capers.
Todd goes flying and rolls away in awkward imitation of Jim. Slaughter takes another step forward and I am yelling Charles, Charles Slaughter, Chuck you stop right fucking now as Panda yells a crazed-dog version of the same thing. Jim has gotten to his feet and now hunkers on the other side of the yard, monkey arms a-dangle at his sides. He’s not bothering to protest or demand an explanation. He’s putting everything he has into being ready.
“Ugfh,” says Todd from the ground as Slaughter takes another step away from him, toward Jim. Jim moves slightly to the side. Soon they will be circling each other like gladiators.
“Slaughter, Slaughter, look at me,” I’m yelling. Slaughter takes another step forward. “Look at me you—you goddamn ape!”
Slaughter takes another step forward, so I yell louder. I yell and yell—variations of the above. I force the words into higher decibels with every step he takes. My voice scrapes away at my throat like a harrow, but I keep yelling, I keep screaming. What else can I do?
Until finally Slaughter turns his head. He turns to me, the universe slows, and the five of us seem to hang in time, like planets across the void. Even Panda goes quiet, haunches trembling.
RING, RING.
Ring, ring.
Ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring.
Ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring—
“Hello!”
“Larry?”
“Yes!”
“I’m sorry. Were you … just getting up?”
I look up at my kitchen clock. It’s one in the afternoon. I am just getting up.
“No, no, no, no. No. I was doing something in the bathroom.”
“Ah.”
“Having a shower!”
“I see.”
And then I recognize the voice. My body unclenches and drops onto the couch.
“Oh my gosh. Hi, Dermot.”
“Hi,” he laughs—slightly. “You know, I can call back.”
“No!”
“No?”
“I mean—I’m sorry. I am just getting up, actually, I lied.”
“I can call back,” says Schofield again.
“No, it’s great to talk to you. Sorry, I’m just all fogged up.”
I scratch. I’m cold—the temperature has dropped to a ridiculous degree over the weekend. It’s going to snow again—you can taste the crystal in the air. I’m naked. I reach behind me and pull at the afghan draped across the back of my couch. It’s an identical pattern to the one in Janet’s apartment, only composed of man-colours like black and green. Crocheted by my grandmother’s own two grudging hands.
“I just found your letter in my mailbox this morning, Larry, and I had some time, thought I might as well give you a call,” says Dermot. “The poems were great, by the way.”
I’m warm.
“The poems?”
“The ghazals? A bit unorthodox in terms of some of the content, strictly speaking. But some compelling stuff. There’s an energy there.”
“I wrote them all in one afternoon,” I tell him.
“Is that right?”
“I wrote sixteen of them! I can send you the rest if you—”
“Well, I’d encourage you to send them into Re:Strain, eventually, yes. And, my goodness, if you have sixteen of them, don’t hesitate to shop them around, Larry, you won’t hurt my feelings. We’d like to publish one or two from this batch if that’s all right with you. As long as the editorial board okays it.”
“Don’t let Joanne read them.”
Dermot laughs. “I have some sway with Joanne, Larry, I wouldn’t worry.”
“Which ones,” I ask. “Which ones do you want to publish?”
“Well, I very much like the ones about the wax museum.”
“The Hollywood Horrors?”
“Yes. Don’t tell me that’s a real place.”
“It is! In Summerside! You never went when you were there?”
“I must have missed that,” Dermot confesses.
I lay back on the couch. “What did you like about them?” I can’t stop myself from asking.
Dermot chuckles, hearing the loopy joy in my voice. “Well, they have a certain vividness, I think. They really evoke the notion of childhood as a kind of Gothic landscape. This wax museum, it’s a great metaphor. The intermingling of glamour with the grotesque. Hollywood Horrors.”
“I didn’t even send you all the poems I wrote about it.”
“I can see it carrying a whole book,” says Dermot. “You should think about that.”
I don’t answer him. I’m thinking about that.
“Surely,” ventures Schofield after a while, “Jim has told you something similar? You mentioned Jim’s been overseeing the work?”
“Jim,” I repeat, and have to pause because it’s the first time I’ve spoken Jim today, and the word still brings on pain.
Another Friday. We all sit staring into the void of the blackboard. There was no notice on the door. Dekker hasn’t yet come bustling in to substitute.
Fifteen minutes, we’re still sitting. Everyone’s pre-class conversations have long since died to silence.
“You know,” someone announces in back, “to hell with this.” He scrapes his chair, and walks out. A couple of people follow after a moment.
Another few minutes, and the class has nearly emptied itself except for the four of us.
Sherrie says, “We should call. We should call and see how he is. Has anyone spoken to him since Friday night?”
I stayed overnight but don’t feel like telling anybody this. I don’t feel like describing the Arsenault household in the scarred morning light.
“I thought you said he was okay,” says Claude, turning around. His lips are still pretty swollen. He kind of looks like Mick Jagger.
“He was—he wasn’t hurt at all,” Todd hurries to assure him. “Chuck only shoved him a couple of times.”
Todd’s voice is loud. It echoes in the almost empty classroom. He looks over at me like a dog desperate for a pat.
“Because of Lawrence,” he adds. “Campbell got everybody out there, on top of him, so fast.”
“What about Slaughter, anyway?” I say, pointedly not to Todd. “What happened to Slaughter, has anyone seen him?”
“He went to the Mariner, afterward,” says Sherrie, leaning her face on her hands. At this moment she looks to me like one of those remote, round-faced women you see in Renaissance paintings—women whose very blankness meant the height of desirability. “Dekker took him home, but he went out again. I heard he went and tried to pick a fight with Scarsdale.”
“Have you talked to him?” I ask.
Sherrie keeps herself blank. “Nobody’s talked to him. Nobody’s seen him.”
“Jesus Christ!” says Todd. “Isn’t Scarsdale some kind of gangster?”
Above the blackboard, the minute hand moves. We all hear it click into place.
“It’s a nice day,” Claude remarks. We’ve ended up walking down Bridge Street together. I’m on autopilot for Carl’s—tea and studying. Sherrie’s drifted back to her dorm. Todd didn’t even have it in him to hover very long.
“Cold though,” I gripe. “It’s going to snow again.”
“Maybe not,” says Claude.
We trudge away, the sun in our eyes. The ranks of students downtown have noticeably thinned. Midterms. They’re all in their hovels, panicked over books.
We stand together at the intersection.
“You going to Carl’s?” I inquire. Claude has never struck me as the tea and french fries type.
“There’s a coffee place a few doors down,” he says. “I thought I’d get some to go and walk around for a while. I’m kind of glad about Jim, actually.”
I jerk like I’ve been bitten or pinched.
“What do you mean, you’re glad about Jim?”
The light changes—the only traffic light in town. Claude glances at me, and we make our way to the other corner.
“I just mean I’m glad there was no class. I know it’s bad news—it’s really bad for Jim. Someone’s bound to complain. I just meant—I’m glad there’s no class, just for today. I feel like getting some air, going for a walk.”
We trudge. We’re almost at Carl’s.
“I feel like going for a walk too,” I say.
We take our coffees down to the marsh, to the paths tucked away behind the flesh-toned church, where I last went with Sherrie.
“The sunshine is good,” says Claude, strangely chipper for a guy in a black turtleneck. The dead vegetation crunches beneath our shoes.
“You know,” I say after a while. After pondering how to bring the subject up. “My grandmother punched me in the face once.”
Claude frowns and sips between his puffed lips, bathing his own face in steam.
“In the mouth? God. How old was your grandmother?”
“Oh, who knows, she’s always been around a hundred. She’s ageless, like Satan.” I also take a sip. Coffee is horrible, I learn. It tastes the way it looks—blackness.
“No, not in the mouth,” I continue, swallowing with effort. “And actually she didn’t really punch me. But she might as well have. My nose had just been broken and she, like, flicked it really hard.”
“Jesus Christ,” says Claude.
“Yeah. I was only twelve or something. I’d gotten in fights before,” I say. “That is, I got beaten up, by guys my own age. But this was the most violent thing I’d ever experienced. It was—” I look for a word that won’t make me sound too ridiculous—too much like I’m groping for the right word. “It was shattering.”
“Because of the betrayal,” says Claude.
I nod and sip, wincing again at the taste. We crunch our way through the skeleton cattails.
“Well,” says Claude after a while. He slurps his coffee the same noisy way I slurp my tea. “I can’t say it felt like that with Slaughter. It’s not like we were friends. He just put up with me because of Sherrie—he made that pretty clear.”
“So you didn’t feel betrayed?” I ask—wondering if that would really make it any better.
“No,” says Claude with a bored exhale. Although I’m starting to realize that what I always assumed was boredom with Claude is something else altogether. Something closer to fatigue.
“You know, there’s an upside to betrayal,” he tells me. “If you get to expect it all the time. Eventually it just becomes—experience.”
“Yes,” I acknowledge after a while. “That’s cheering.”
We walk for a bit until we come to the same spot I stopped with Sherrie, the place where the trees part and you can see all the way across to the other side of the marsh. The water is blue like the tropics today—you could convince yourself it’s summer if it weren’t for the grasping, naked trees and yellow reeds.
“Why do you think he did it, really?” I ask after a while. “I mean, come on, man, it must have been kind of surprising at least.”
Because we eventually pried the information out of Claude that Slaughter came right to his door that Friday. Slaughter made his way to Claude’s residence in the middle of a sunny, warmer afternoon than this, climbed the stairs, ambled down the hall, knocked on the door, greeted, “Hi, faggot,” punching Claude in the mouth. Lightly, actually, said Claude. Meaning not as hard as Slaughter could have, but hard enough.
My parents call. Lydia has broken her hip, as grandparents will, and now she thinks she’s dying.
“She’s never been sick a day in her life,” my mother tells me. “She was always so careful. I don’t even remember her ever hurting herself. That’s why she was always so impatient with me and Stannie, whenever we got scrapes, or caught a bug. It was our own fault. We weren’t being careful enough.”
“She said fuck,” exclaims my Dad before I can comment.
“No, she didn’t,” negates Mom in an instant.
“Your mother blocked it out. It’s the damnedest thing. She heard it just as well as I did.”
“Oh, Dad, I did not.”
“Your mother’d probably go blind if she saw the old thing naked.”
“I would not,” maintains my mother.
“Gramma said fuck?”
“No,” says Mom. “Your father’s crazy.”
“We’re having dinner over at Stan and Maud’s. She’s heading to that downstairs bathroom—you know how she is, she wobbles around like she’s riding a goddamn unicycle, but oh no, she never needs any help—”
“I think her knee gave way—”
“We all heard it, plain as day, you just ask your uncle Stan when you’re here, son.”
“Your father laughed.”
“You laughed, Dad?”
“Well, I couldn’t believe my own goddamn ears!”
“An old lady falls and breaks her hip—”
“Well, I didn’t know she broke her hip. Wayne laughed too, a little.”
“Oh, he did not.”
“Your uncle Stan just turned white.”
“Because she fell! Because he knew she’d hurt herself, he heard the crack!”
“There wasn’t any crack—”
“There was so a crack, that’s what you heard.”
“I did not hear any crack, I know what I damn well heard, Larry.”
“Don’t you listen to him, Larry.”
“Anyway, now she thinks she’s dying. The old thing’s in the hospital, probably cursing out the nurses. Talking about her will, gathering her loved ones to her.”
“Midterms are starting soon,” I say, because I know what’s coming.
“Well, you can come home for a weekend, can’t you?” my mother demands.
“I have a break in February,” I stammer, because it’s not usually my mother who does the barking down the phone. “And one on Easter …”
“Hear that, Mom?” chortles Dad. “He’ll be there to see her rise on the third day.”
There’s some silence, and then: “You Catholics,” she hisses down the wires at my convert father—shocking us both.
Then the heavy, plastic noise of the phone going down.
“Mom?” I say after a second or two.
“Ah, Christ,” mutters my father. “Made her mad, Larry.”
“No kidding.”
“It’s not funny, I s’pose. Brick shithouse like Lydia. It’s thrown your mum pretty good. Her and Stan both.”
“I guess it has,” I agree, still rippling with the shock of it. My mother has never hung up on me.
“Like watching your house burn down or something, I suppose. House you grew up in—never thought it wouldn’t be there.”
“Well, your cousin is over, anyhow. She’s been a good help. Saw her at the hospital.”
My cousin.
“Janet?” I say. “Janet’s there?”
“Came back when she heard about Lydia,” Dad tells me. “Came right over. Stan and Maud picked her up.”
Dad relays this last piece of information with a slight emphasis. What he’s emphasizing is the fact that Stan and Maud didn’t let her take the bus, like they usually do when she comes over alone. Not this time, though, not even with the excuse of Lydia being in the hospital. This time Janet was worth the trip.
This is interesting to me—I can tell it’s interesting to Dad for the same reason. That slight, thoughtful emphasis he gives. I hear him rolling it around in his mind.
Now that she has hurt them back. Now that she has made the break. Now she’s welcome home.
HERE IS THE STORY of the red morning at Jim’s. Memory delayed doesn’t make memory better. Memories strengthen like cheese, when put aside. That has been my experience this year. That is the biggest of all my discoveries. The longer you wait to open the container, the more the smell will knock you out when you do. Corpse of milk—the smell of the corpse. So here is the story of the red morning at Jim’s.
I woke up early and had the place to myself for a while, which would have been nice except that I was freezing. I tried to remember the proper way to light a wood stove, casting my mind back to afternoons in the Humphrieses’ cottage. It seemed to me I couldn’t go wrong with kindling and newspaper, which happened to be in a box by my feet, so that was what I used, dumping a couple of logs in on top of it, and finally a match. Then I just dragged a chair over and huddled up beside it like a baby chick against its mother for warmth. I had a quilt Jim had tossed at me from the night before around my shoulders, and had pulled on my jacket, gloves, and boots the moment I woke up.
There was nothing to do for the next little while but sit and wait to get warm. So this is how Jim lives, I thought. I imagined having a bath—immersing myself in a tub of hot water—but remembered there was no bathtub. Jim was a professor at Westcock University, the most respected undergraduate college east of Ontario. He had a full-time job, an expectation of tenure. Why did he live like a goddamn pioneer?
Tea, I thought after a while, on early-morning instinct, and then recoiled. The word—the night—the Lions Club mug on its side in the corner. We hadn’t bothered to pick it up and put it away, afterward. Even more remarkably, the thing was still intact. It hadn’t even been chipped.
I was there because Jim said, Don’t go. Don’t go. I need my friends around me tonight. I need to know who my friends are. Stay the night, Larry. Don’t go.
“Always,” Moira was reduced to repeating, once she had barked herself out. The sight of him like that at the kitchen table seemed to infuriate her. The defeated slouch. The refusal to go to bed, to let anyone else, to put the booze away.
“Always-always you get like this. You know you’re going to get like this and I tell you you’re going to get like this, and then you just go and you get like this. I watch you do it.”
“I’m off to bed,” sang Creighton, his tone an attempt to radiate light. “Now, Jimmy. You mustn’t let yourself get so morose.”
Jim stared at the table. “Stay up with me, please, Abe.”
“No, no. Early start tomorrow, you know that, Jimmy.”
I’d noticed Creighton couldn’t get away from him fast enough once Jim had settled into his funk. Slaughter had long been rousted, calmed to a degree, and stuffed into Dekker’s car before he could wind himself up again. But instead of shrugging and putting the whole thing down to drunken stupidity, as everyone else was more than ready to do, Jim took the incident as some sort of divine negative portent, like a black mark on the sun. He’d stationed himself away from the party, at the kitchen table with his no-longer-secret bottle of rum, for the rest of the night. Any remaining levity had pretty much fizzled from the party after Slaughter. People trickled from the house.
But to be fair, it wasn’t Slaughter who was responsible for this. A lot of people found the fight kind of exciting, as well they might. The party was shot through with adrenalin at first—I could hardly hear my thoughts or Sherrie’s laments over the keyed-up babble on all sides of us. Slaughter’s attack was the sort of thing you stayed up all night animatedly discussing, marvelling over, dissecting from every angle. So the fight wasn’t the problem—the fight, if anything, should have given the night longevity.
The drain was Jim. It was Jim who stopped the party cold. Jim sat down at the kitchen table and made himself a vortex.
Creighton drew himself up and looked around with evident impatience. His light tone and easy gestures couldn’t penetrate the metastasizing gloom, and you could see him feeling his powerlessness—a feeling Creighton clearly didn’t like.
“James, now. Come on. A kid got drunk and took a swing at you. So what?”
“A kid I trusted. A kid I asked into my home, and counted as a friend.”
“Always,” intoned Moira, hoarse by this point. “Always, always.” With that she left the kitchen huffing and puffing like a long-distance runner.
Soon Creighton gave up. Defeat and disgust throbbed briefly on his face as he looked over at me. “I really must be off to bed,” he insisted to neither Jim nor me in particular. “Train in the morning. You have young Larry here. He’ll keep you company, won’t you, son?”
And so it was left to me. Me and Jim—the dog and dying stove.
“There he goes, Larry. One of my oldest and dearest friends. Mentor and confidant. Off he waltzes to his beddy-bye. Can’t haul ass back to Toronto fast enough.”
I gazed down the hall as if still watching Creighton—who had already disappeared up the stairs—retreat. “Well, he’s got an early day tomorrow.”
“Early day,” agreed Jim, shoving himself abruptly from the table. This was the first move he’d made in well over an hour. His chair shrieked, and Panda, who had been dozing on his blanket, leapt to his feet as though goosed. He barked once, pathetically, looking around for reassurance.
“Shut up,” answered Jim, hauling open the fridge. He was looking for more beer.
“What about some tea, Jim?” I suggested.
“You like some tea, Larry?”
“Be a nice way to end the evening.”
“Ah, but the night’s still young.” Jim placed a Ten-Penny in front of me and, before I could protest, cracked it with an opener he seemed to have produced from mid-air. I looked at the beer with mixed feelings. I’d drunk so much beer, it kind of made me want to vomit. On the other hand, I’d drunk so much beer, it seemed I might as well drink more. It wasn’t logical, but it was nonetheless the case. I took a swig.
“But I’ll getcha some tea if you want some tea,” Jim said, whirling lopsidedly toward the cupboard. “Tea and beer don’t go too badly together. And by the time it’s steeped you’ll be done anyway.”
“Have a cup with me, Jim.”
“You know, Larry,” said Jim in the forced and fakey tone he’d been using since Creighton had creaked his way upstairs. “There’s nothing more embarrassing than one man trying to trick another out of his booze. It’s something a woman would do. Like in that song there. ‘Don’t hide my liquor, try to serve me tea.’ You know that song?”
I flushed. “Yeah.”
Jim folded his arms and leaned against the stove. He stared at me for a moment, then nodded a sharp, upward nod like an animal sniffing the wind.
“You think I’m a drunk, Larry?”
Fatigue dropped over me like a net. I was responding viscerally to the turn of Jim’s mood, feeling the suddenness of it in my guts like when a car hits a patch of ice and starts to spin.
I rubbed my face.
“Because if you think I’m a drunk, you should just come out and tell me. You know, like a man would do.”
I slapped my hands onto the table and sighed. “I just think it makes you miserable, all right? I don’t like to see you miserable.”
Jim kind of hooted under his breath. He held his beer up in front of him like a guy in a TV commercial. “This? You think this is the cause of my misery? If anything, this is what makes it bearable.”
“I think that’s an excuse, Jim.”
He gazed at me with sudden, fearsome lucidity. This happened at Christmas, I remembered—Jim sharpening up, vitalized by hostility.
“Oh, you do, eh, Larry? An excuse for what, exactly?”
This was a good question. I’d said what I said without thinking, it had just arrived on my lips. An excuse for what?
“An excuse …” I said, “an excuse for …”
“A-an excuse, an excuse-fer,” Jim repeated like a retarded parrot.
I looked up at him, speechless, in high school, bashed against lockers, tackled from behind.
“A-an excuse, an excuse-fer,” slobbered Jim. “Wonderful point, Larry. Brilliantly executed! By God, you’ll go far in this world.”
I blinked down at my beer.
“The red face on him,” Jim remarked after a moment, as if to a cadre of like-minded thugs.
“That’s so,” I said, trying to keep my breathing even. “That’s so childish. ”
“I’m the one who’s childish,” declared Jim, gesturing with a ceramic Fredericton Lions Club mug he’d brought down from the cupboard at some point. “I merely ask you to clarify your point in such a way as I can understand it, and all you can do is sit there stuttering and stammering with your face all red.”
And then Jim did it again, contorted his face, adjusted his voice. “A-an excuse, an excuse-fer,” he drawled. “An excuse for what, Larry? For what? You’ll have to do better than that airy-fairy crap.”
I looked up, and I think I was about to tell him. I think I really was for a minute. But then I noticed something. The way Jim’s eyes were dancing, how he kept wetting his lips, swinging the Lions mug around, pushing his face at me. This was Jim making himself feel better. This was why Jim needed me around.
“You hear me, Larry? I have to say, now, you’re losing some esteem in my eyes. You’re usually so goddamn articulate. An excuse for what? For what? Come on. Pretend you’re in the classroom. Pretend that A average of yours is at stake—that oughta snap ya to attention. An excuse for what?”
He wasn’t fake-goading me, he really wanted to hear it, whatever it was. The worse, the better. He was hoping I would say something irrevocable. He wanted me to pull the house down on our heads.
He wanted it, because he wanted the attention.
“Let’s have tea,” I said, gripping my beer with both hands.
“Sure!” declared Jim, waving the mug with a sarcastic flourish, whirling away from me, toward the stove. He’d had his fingers curled loosely around the mug’s handle, and maybe as a result of the sarcastic flourish, maybe the whirl, the Lions mug flew from his fingers, across the room, catching Panda—who had settled into his blanket again—on the head.
It made this sound.
Panda leapt again to his feet, assuming a weary, yet defiant sort of dog-stance, as if to announce he had finally had enough. He took a gurgling step forward, all business, and then his knees gave out.
I’d never seen a dog fall in quite this way. A kind of slow sinking.
“Oh,” gasped Jim. He wrapped his endless arms about his torso like a panicked child.
Gradually, I came to grasp how early it was. My skull and bones had a throbbing, hollow feeling, which I now had enough experience to recognize as the precursor to a pretty serious hangover. I hadn’t woken naturally, I realized—I’d woken from the booze and assumed it must be time to get up. But it wasn’t anywhere near time to get up. Nobody else would be up for hours. Maybe Creighton, although it seemed obvious he’d been exaggerating about his early-morning train—he’d just wanted to get some sleep, to get away.
Likely, there wouldn’t be anyone stirring until noon at least considering the time we went to bed. Which would have been only about three hours ago. As I was comprehending this, the light coming into the kitchen went from grey to red—as if bombs had exploded outside. I could hear winter birds going crazy at the sudden, violent dawn. Red sky in the morning is a shepherd’s warning. That’s one of the first poems I ever learned.
But maybe Jim wouldn’t be getting up at all today. I had a feeling. There was not just the exhaustion of the late night to take into account, but the hour of futile digging out by the chopping block. Hacking and stabbing at the frozen earth until finally we agreed to simply drag the thing into the woods and leave it there. The awful white gash of the moon overhead, Jim’s white face luminescent and pleading.
Don’t tell her. Don’t leave me. Don’t Larry let anyone leave me.
My own hands throbbed, and I pulled off my gloves for a moment to look at them. The pads below my fingers glowed as red as the room.
I left the gloves off long enough to lace my boots and zip my jacket up to my neck. I put two more logs on the fire even though there wasn’t quite enough room for them in the stove, leaving the cast-iron burner balanced where the edge of the log poked slightly out. I figured the wood would burn down fast enough. They’d be all day waiting for the house to heat up otherwise.
I pulled my gloves on again and just stood there looking at Jim’s squat black stove for a while, listening to the famished licking of the flames inside. Smoke billowed through the crack.
I stood there so long that the red of the kitchen had started to mellow and shift—give way to something more gingery—and finally sat back down in the chair, thinking I’d better wait for the logs to burn down at least enough so I could close the stove properly. It was bad enough to be leaving a fire unattended while people slept. I tried not to think of what my father would say.