by Bill Turpin
She’s a busy love-maker, but Max doesn’t really notice her attentions because he’s been greedily consuming her. Smelling her shiny brown hair, tasting her mouth, feeling her skin against his cheek, teasing and tasting her nipples; simultaneously tasting and feeling and sniffing her long back. Max inspects the dimples above her buttocks, first with his eyes and then with his tongue. She giggles. He flips her over and, for the first time, considers a new frontier. He rests his chin on her mons for a moment, looking up the length of her torso and between her adorable breasts to see if his intentions are understood and accepted.
She raises her head: “Yes, Captain,” she says. “You may boldly go where — incidentally — no man has gone before.”
“Stand by, Ensign,” he replies. “. . . engaging . . . .” The starship shudders a little.
Some time later she draws him northward. Now, at last, he is poised above her, feeling her heat. His crazed erection beats time to an insane pulse. Her hand, surprisingly cool, takes control.
“Captain,” she says. “We’ve landed on an Earth-like planet. I can feel a large, smooth cactus . . . should I take it aboard? . . .”
“A cactus. A large one, you say?”
“Oh, VERY large, Captain.”
Max’s voice is husky: “Very well then, Ensign . . . proceed to bring the cactus aboard the . . . ahh . . . main cargo bay.”
He yields to her firm pull. Her affection for him, so obvious when they entered the room, is supplanted by the look of a woman who has gone feral. Max is not far behind.
When they return to their senses, she rolls Max onto his back, and stretches out beside him.
Deadpan: “Max, I worry that you’re repulsed by my body.”
“I can adapt,” he says.
He clears his throat.
“Max, don’t say it,” she says.
“Don’t say what?”
“You know what.”
“Don’t say it ever?”
“Don’t say it now.”
Max obeys, silently and once again pondering the inscrutability of human females.
Without ceremony, she compresses the entirety of his precious male equipment in one hand and squeezes, more or less gently.
“Here are my terms,” she says, her breath caressing his ear. “From here on in, you are mine. For greater certainty, this includes — but is not restricted to — what I am holding in my hand. Do you understand what I am saying and all that it implies?”
“Is this a relationship conversation?” he says lightly.
She squeezes harder. “Careful, Max. I want you, but I’m willing to let you go.”
“I accept your terms. And all that they imply.” Max pulls the blankets over them. “Now can I say it?”
“Later.”
She settles her head on his chest and says “hmmm”.
Max is alarmed and confused to hear his own voice in his head. He has the spooky notion the voice is speaking from another time.
“Here. Let us stay here together,” the voice says.
But the weird sensation is short-lived. The football game, the open door, the smell of her, the feel of her and feel of his heart opened wide are escaping him. The more he wants to hang on to it all, the faster it disappears.
1981
Wife to Max:
Don't Hurt My Baby
THE NIGHT NEWS Editor at the Montreal Daily lights yet another noxious Gauloise and immediately jams it into his heaping ashtray, where it will smoulder for the rest of its foul life. The fan from his computer blows the manure-scented smoke into Max’s face. The Night News Editor is the only person under 35 Max has ever met who could be described as ruddy. He scrolls through stories on the computer screen while he talks on the phone with the Managing Editor, nicknamed Pickup, who likes to be safe at home before any critical decisions are made, but never fails to call in before the night crew really gets going.
The Night News Editor has the demeanour of a Clint Eastwood character and a weird ability to track everyone in the newsroom without shifting his gaze from his computer screen. Thus you always have the sense he is looking at you, but you can never be sure.
This time, however, Max’s reporter instinct tells him he is definitely the topic of conversation.
“He did?” the Night News Editor asks, with a level grin simultaneously conveying satisfaction and bloodlust. “Fuck me . . . Jesus fucking Christ . . . the cocksucker . . . God, what an asshole.”
The last epithet is the kiss of death in journalism. Max isn’t sure how he earned it, but suspects he hasn’t done enough to hide his disdain for his job as night police reporter after toiling in Latin American shitholes.
But the newsroom consensus was that the Montreal Daily never needed a Latin America correspondent and that Max should be happy just to have a job after the shocking round of layoffs endured back home. This despite Max’s world-beating story on the counter-coup, which prompted the Montreal Daily to hire him in the first place, promote him, and then bring him back to Montreal to chase police cars, all in the space of a couple of years.
“Okay. Yeah. I’ll tell him. Count on it,” the Night News Editor says.
“Hey, Max,” he says without, of course, turning his head. “You know the Owner and Publisher?”
“Yep. They’re actually the same guy.”
“Well, if I said the Owner and Publisher of this piece-of-shit newspaper has left a note for you in Pickup’s mailbox, what would you do?”
“Ask you if the Managing Editor was supposed to have given it to me personally?”
“Correct.”
“But Pickup didn’t want to be around when I read it?”
“Correct.”
“Pickup” is the name the Managing Editor earned during his glory days as the paper’s Washington correspondent. He was so named by the very same Night News Editor, who at the time ran the foreign desk. Pickup was unloved for the way he handled all the major U.S. stories. He would phone in two or three ambiguous paragraphs to the foreign desk and then say “pick up the rest from the wires.” This meant pawing through reams of wire stories printed on brown paper, gluing the best stuff together and sometimes rewriting around Pickup’s lead before sticking it — and his byline — on the top. In time, the Owner realized that Pickup had lost the respect of his peers. He therefore brought him back to Montreal and promoted him.
“Correct,” says the Night News Editor. “He’s a Type B Asshole — doesn’t want to be near the debris field before or after an explosion.”
“Got it,” Max says.
“Yeah . . . Jesus Christ . . . cocksucker.”
As he leaves to retrieve the note, Max hears the Night News Editor say: “Max fucked up the Form Reduction Committee.”
“How is that possible?” someone asks.
When Max returns, sealed envelope in hand, the half-dozen people around the desk have tears in their eyes from laughing. The Photo Editor is making a big display of rolling on the floor in mirth, supposedly unable to crawl back into his chair.
The Wire Editor walks over to the coat hook and performs the ritual pantomime of retrieving the newsroom’s mythical set of invisible kneepads. “You’ll need these for the meeting tomorrow, Max. The Owner’s a delayed ejaculator. And don’t forget to shave tomorrow . . .”
Har-har.
“Yeah,” says the Night News Editor, joining in the routine. “He hates getting beard-burn on his thighs.”
Guffaws all around before everyone settles back into editing the night’s copy.
“Hey Max,” the Photo Editor says. “Somewhere in the distance, a dog is barking.”
It’s a reference to a favourite cliché of novelists and over-reaching foreign correspondents, and sets off another round of guffaws.
“Ask not for whom the dog barks, Max, it barks for you.” Apparently, this is
even funnier.
Max opens the memo. He can tell from the pointedly restrained tone that it means real trouble:
Max,
I’m disappointed by reports I’ve heard concerning your contribution to the Form Reduction Committee. Doubly disappointed because I thought you alone among the failed poets and fly-by-nights I employ understood that this company is a team.
There are no fucking teams, Max thinks. Only gangs.
In addition to reporters, photographers and editors, newspapers also comprise proofreaders, compositors, advertising production people, ad salesmen, secretaries, executives, printers, truck drivers and delivery boys. It’s really quite a long list.
I thought you knew and appreciated that, and so I requested your participation on the interdepartmental team tackling the proliferation of forms — all 102 of them — in this company. We are buried in paper, like autumn leaves. I also believed this would forge a badly needed spirit of co-operation in our company.
The Montreal mob co-operates brilliantly.
I am now informed that, after two meetings, during which you were quite voluble, the committee unanimously recommended the creation of a new form, the ‘Form Reduction Form.’ I’m sad to say that I was not aware of this development until 1,000 copies of the Form Reduction Form had been printed. And so, we now have 103 forms to contend with and a demoralized Form Reduction Committee.
I strongly suspect this is your handiwork, Max. It’s the kind of lampooning of process that your father liked. However, I recall that he also delivered the goods as a reporter.
This is a serious matter, Max. I look forward, albeit pessimistically, to your denial.
Max is guilty as charged, but he’s enraged by the reference to his father.
Below the Owner’s typed message is a space reserved for replying. He gets to work with a ballpoint pen:
How can we track the forms we eliminate without a form for that?
For the record, I produced more than 1500 stories for you as a correspondent often while covering my own expenses.
As a reluctant police reporter, I have produced several hundred more.
The only thing my father ever did was make the alkies laugh in the tavern across the street — during working hours — and drink himself into second childhood.
• • •
Max and the Wife have managed to get the Son to sleep after a day of teething pain. Now, Max thinks, the boy’s growing brain will process the experience and add it to the expanding list of painful mysteries that will someday constitute adulthood.
The family’s “four and a half” room apartment is dim because its windows face the building’s other wing, 25 feet away. Everyone’s windows are open, allowing all to share their sounds and smells. Max notes that the Screamer and her dogged husband are at it early. “Whoa-OH-ho!” she moans. “Whoa-OH-ho! Whoa-OH-ho!” It’s as regular and rhythmic as a handsaw cutting a two-by-four.
Max fishes his stopwatch from the kitchen junk drawer. He starts it, and saunters into the living room. The Wife puts down her newspaper and spots the stopwatch.
“Do you think they’ll break the record tonight?”
“Don’t know,” says Max. “The heat has to tire them out. On the other hand, this could be their biggest audience of the summer. They’ll want to make the best of it.”
“Listen to her,” the Wife says. “Is he screwing her or sawing her in half?”
The Wife points out that the copulators, like the other neighbours, have been listening to the Son cry for the past three hours: “You’d think it would illustrate to her the advantage of blow jobs,” she says brightly.
On hearing the phrase “blow-job” Max perks up like a retriever hearing a gunshot. But the Wife just rolls her eyes at him and shakes her head.
Max has learned lately that women have to feel sexy before they’ll do sexy things. The Wife loves her baby fiercely, but believes the pregnancy made her fat and unsexy.
Max disagrees. He’s not even sure she’s heavier now than she was before the baby — her actual weight appears to be a national security issue — but if she has gained, it’s in all the right places.
She’s let her light brown hair grow into loose curls. Her face is still well-defined. Her limbs are shapely. And, if anything, pregnancy has made her breasts even more enticing. For Max, this makes her “earth-mother-sexy”. He tells her this often, but she doesn’t buy it.
“I don’t sit down to read anymore,” she likes to say. “I just pick a landing spot for my drooping butt and drop. The rest of me arrives a few moments later to form a fatty cone with my head on top.”
“Whoa-OH-ho! Whoa-OH-ho!” They both roll their eyes.
Alas, with early morning oral sex out of the question, Max concludes he might as well tell her about the memo from the Owner. He hands the Wife his copy of it. He is shocked to see her expression change from exhaustion to alarm.
“Max. This reply, did you send what you wrote to the Owner?”
He asks whether something is wrong with that.
“He’s going to fire you,” she says quietly.
“Why would he do that?”
“Because you’re being a prick.”
“That’s crazy!”
“He’s laid off 30 people but found a way to keep you, and this is how repay him?”
Max is exasperated. “Fuck! I was all over Latin America for him.”
Now the Wife stands up. “Yeah, and I was alone here, except for two visits to your bureau where, incidentally, you got me pregnant. And that was after you had six months as a freelance getting the correspondent thing out of your system — supposedly, that is.”
“But it was a full-time job. You could have moved in with me.”
“Then I would have been alone in a foreign country while you camped out with guerrillas,” she says, angry now. “You were going to have to choose between your family and the bureau anyway. Luckily, the decision was made for us.”
Max groans: “But I wound up as the night cop reporter.”
“And your salary is the same as the Washington bureau chief’s. How many cop reporters make that kind of money?”
“It’s not about the money.”
“Okay. What, then?”
“I dunno. It’s just not enough,” Max says.
“You’re ready to throw your job overboard, but you don’t know why.”
Max knows where the Wife is going with this. He sees himself in the 19th-century lecture theatre, laid out on a slab in the cool air. The Wife — not Max — is giving the lecture.
“And so, I submit to you that there is an overarching problem here,” she says, gesturing to Max. “This specimen is becoming an idiot.”
The white-coated crowd is silent for a moment before breaking into furious applause. ‘Eureka!’ they shout, over and over.
“Max, you’re turning into an asshole right before my eyes,” she says.
If the Wife had accused him of having leprosy he would have been no less astonished. “Me? I’m not an asshole!”
She patiently explains that she agrees, but only because she is in love with him. Others merely have his words and actions by which to judge him. These, she says, have been tending toward “assholish” for some time now.
They hear the Son fussing and stop talking.
Suddenly the Wife is on him with “Spousal Warning Expression No. 11,” known to the lay community as “you broke it, you fix it.” It’s impressive, but by no means the only arrow in her quiver. She wants to know if Max understands that her part-time salary at the Sunday Tabloid obviously cannot support the three of them.
“You know why I don’t mind being fat?” she says, her voice low and even.
“You’re not . . .”
“Be quiet. I don’t mind being fat because life is simple for me. Life is simple because only one thing
— one thing — matters. And that is the well-being of our little boy. God help anybody — ANYBODY — who gets between me and his well-being.”
“I know that.”
“So get down there and fix this.”
Max tells her “no problem” and stands at the open door, waiting for the ritual goodbye kiss.
It is not forthcoming.
From the apartment hallway, he hears a faint “Whoa-OH-oh! Whoa-OH-oh!”
• • •
Ten steps into Montreal Daily’s newsroom, Max reads the signs and concludes the situation is already out of control. The atmosphere is just not right. And there’s more to it than the presence of a few straggling dayside reporters, most of whom are usually gone before Max arrives.
The Night News Editor raises his head from his computer terminal and looks Max directly in the eye. “It’s bad, Max.”
Oops. Fight-or-flight time, he thinks.
“Bad for who?”
“You.”
“How bad?”
“Look,” says the Night News Editor, “Pickup didn’t even stay for the news meeting. He took off early, doing his busy-walk.”
The busy-walk is famous in the newsroom, which likens it to someone whose buttocks have been sutured together.
“But I caught up with him at the elevators and he spilled right away,” the Night News Editor says. “There’s a memo in your mail slot. Pickup says you’re fired.”
“All this because of the Form Reduction Form?”
The Night News Editor looks around and then motions Max to join him in the Cage, Max’s current work-station. It’s a tobacco-stained, glass-walled room featuring half a dozen squawking police radio scanners and the lingering body odour of countless crime reporters. All “real” reporters have done stints in the Cage. Some, like budgies, won’t come out even when you open the door and offer a better job on the outside.
The two of them settle in, taking a moment to savour the atmosphere.
