In a Glass House

by Nino Ricci

  “It’s not that,” Michael said. “It’s the scope of these things. You can’t change the world like that. Those are the same people that go home after and beat their wives, they don’t see the contradiction.”

  And my meetings after that seemed to lose the one satisfaction they’d still given me, that of allowing my own scepticism to take solid shape in me.

  Toward the end of third year I shot up with them once, in Michael’s rec room, the rest of his family away though there seemed something purposely cavalier in doing it there, in the defiance of it, in the tawdriness, the strange disjunction between the delinquency of what we were doing and the banality of where we were. Michael helped me raise a vein and put the needle in for me, the experience intimate like sharing a bodily function, the sight of the needle’s tip pricking the skin, of the blood swirling up into the syringe. Afterwards we went up to a floor party in my residence; I had the impression the drug hadn’t affected me though the world had taken on an odd liquid resistance.

  “Look at Vic, he’s already nodding,” Perry said. He made a face, a clown’s exaggerated grin.

  Gus began to work the room, disappearing into the crowd, while Michael and Perry went off in search of beer. Then a few minutes later Gus resurfaced beside me.

  “Vic, I’m having a bad trip. I’m freaking out.”

  He seemed visibly shaken, his body like a single nerve.

  “I’ve gotta stop doing this shit, Vic, I’m wrecking myself. I get it into my head and it’s all I can think of.”

  The intensity of him alarmed me. He seemed one instant merely desperate and then the next oddly lucid, inside the experience of his own brutal honesty as if it energized him.

  “Talk to me, Vic, talk me down.” But he continued to talk himself, increasingly paranoid and strange.

  “I get this hatred going through me sometimes, this pure hate, I think I could be one of those guys you hear about, those normal guys who start picking people off on the street from a roof one day. I’ve never told anyone about this before.”

  I felt truly disturbed now, less by what he was saying than by the responsibility for him he was urging on me.

  “Maybe we should go,” I said finally. “Just let me get Perry and Michael.”

  “Go? Why?” He looked at me suddenly in mock incomprehension. “Oh, all that stuff I was saying, is that it? I was just joking, Vic. Relax.”

  And he walked off into the crowd.

  I went down to my room. Half an hour or so later the three of them were at my door.

  “Hey, Vic, no hard feelings,” Gus said. “It was just a joke.”

  “What, did Gus pull one of his mind trips on you?” Perry said. “You’ve gotta make allowances for Gus, he gets a little cockeyed when he’s stoned.”

  But I was determined to feel betrayed, not just by Gus but by all of them, the thing they formed together.

  “Are you all right?” Michael said.

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “He’s okay,” Michael said, as if interpreting me for the others. “He just wants to be alone for a while, it’s his first time, you know what it’s like.”

  Michael came by to see me the next day.

  “Gus is a bit of an asshole sometimes,” he said.

  But what Gus had done seemed somehow beside the point.

  “It’s not just Gus, it’s all of you. You close people out. You make it seem as if the world should revolve around you.”

  But I’d put it more harshly than I’d intended. Michael seemed genuinely taken aback.

  “We’re individuals, Victor. Half the time we don’t even get along ourselves. You make it sound like a conspiracy or something.”

  “I’m not saying you do it consciously, it’s more subtle than that.”

  But I’d lost the offensive, had wanted to seem coldly perceptive but came across as merely resentful.

  “Victor, it’s normal you’d feel left out sometimes. We’ve known each other for years, you can’t just walk into something like that and understand it. I know what you’re like, you like to sit on the edge of things, check them out. I respect that. But you can’t hold back like that and then blame us for closing you out.”

  It was this reasonableness in him that was most frustrating, his ready, level-headed responses. I’d expected him to see at once the truth of what I was saying and capitulate; but finally he was the one in the right, seemed at bottom sincerely to want some connection between us while I’d simply been awaiting some clear excuse for a rupture.

  In the summer, back at my endless routine of work, I had a call one night from Michael: Gus’s parents had discovered he’d been using again and had thrown him out of the house.

  “He just needs a place to crash for a couple of days while they calm down.”

  “What about your place or Perry’s?”

  “It’s no good, our parents won’t have him. You know how it is with Italians, these things get around.”

  But they had other friends, more indebted, seemed to turn to me now as the path of least resistance.

  “We don’t even get along very well.”

  “He’s just uncomfortable around you, that’s all. He thinks you don’t like him. I thought this might give you a chance to get to know each other.”

  Gus stayed for nearly two weeks. Almost at once he made himself at home with an irritating imperiousness, his things everywhere, the kitchen littered with his mess.

  “I really appreciate this, Vic, I can’t tell you how much.”

  Yet the whole time we hardly spoke to each other, Gus only just rising from his cat’s bed of cushions when I left for work in the morning and out when I came in or forever on the phone.

  “Ma, it was the first time in three years, I swear it. I’m your own son, for God’s sake. You send me out like this to beg off stranieri, it’s humiliating.”

  But he didn’t sound humiliated at all, sounded his old self, lying, conniving, manipulating, though afterwards it was more Michael I felt used by than Gus, who after all was merely being himself, couldn’t help being himself.

  Oddly, Michael dropped out of Centennial that fall, only a few courses short of a degree, to enrol in a college course in computer repair.

  “Basically it’s easy money,” he said. “The younger guys there, it’s a kind of mission for them. But I get into the mindlessness of it, you know, Zen and computer repair, that sort of thing.”

  But he seemed to have capitulated to some lesser self in him, talked about being left free to pursue other things but with a backwash of unspoken defeat. Then part way into the year Gus dropped out as well, going to work full time for his father’s construction firm. I suspected some cosmetic compromise, some means he’d worked out of being able to support his habit while seeming to be drawn back into the fold; but the next time I saw him he seemed truly chastened.

  “Believe me, this is what I need right now.” There was the smug desperate assuredness in him of someone aping borrowed wisdom, strange for him. “They don’t give me the cash, eh, they’re not that stupid, it all goes right into a trust. But in a few years I’ll have enough to do whatever I want.”

  But I sensed the same resignation in him as in Michael, the same falling back into the world they’d come out of as if they’d been held there by some limit it had set on them.

  I had entered my last year at Centennial. I’d envisioned simply going on in school, but the weeks passed and still I’d made no enquiries, sent for no applications. Each time I opened a book or entered a class now I felt a resistance in me, a disjunction, the sense I’d been taking on faith some way of looking at things that finally had little to do with how the world was.

  There was an information session one evening for a development organization that sent students overseas to teach. I expected political rhetoric, the unreliable earnestness of the converted, felt my suspicions confirmed at the sight of the speaker, long haired and bandana-ed and bearded. But his talk unfolded anecdotal and small like a returned
vacationer’s, following a series of slides like the ones Father Mackinnon had sometimes shown us at St. Mike’s after one of his trips, the shanty towns, the blasted landscape, the people gravely posed before the camera as in a wedding portrait. It was exactly this unassumingness in the talk that seemed to draw me in, this sense of making a tiny, other life in some unknown place as if starting from scratch. The next week I began the lengthy process of application, and by early March I had been accepted to teach English the following fall in Nigeria, a country that a few months before I could not even have located on a map.

  The next weeks I passed in a kind of dream, set now on this future that had somehow been conjured out of nothing. The world took on an impermanence, everything already compared to the future’s imagined foreignness, the buildings and shops, the traffic lights, the strange organization of things, so arbitrary, roads and highways and malls, the endless civilized neatness of suburbs. Then my last day at Centennial had come: I felt no nostalgia, no remorse, only the unthinking relief at having got through again.

  I’d decided to spend the summer in Mersea. Michael came by the residence in his car to help me carry my things to the train station.

  “A lot of stuff,” he said. But I had been pleased at how little I’d thought I’d accumulated.

  After we’d checked my things we had a coffee in the station coffee shop.

  “So we never had much of a chance to talk about this Africa thing,” Michael said. “Maybe this is some kind of Catholic thing coming up in you, all that propaganda they used to feed us about missionaries. I remember they used to collect plastic bags from us to ship to Africa for people to put their rice in, bread bags and that. My mother would leave the crumbs in them so there’d be a little extra.”

  “I dunno, I’m just going over for the weather,” I said.

  “No, seriously, I know you were into that group for a while, I know you’re serious about this kind of thing. I just don’t know if this is the way. These groups always want to change people, make them think we’re better than they are. I’m not kidding, my mother used to leave the crumbs, that was her idea of charity. She thought they were animals or something.”

  “Whatever she thought, the bags probably helped.”

  “That’s not the point, Victor, it’s the attitude people have. All this development work, it doesn’t change anything if people don’t change how they think. You can’t do that on a big scale.”

  I felt my anger rise but said nothing. He’d often talked himself about going abroad but had never managed to, seemed simply to be rationalizing now his own lack of enterprise.

  We paid for our coffees and walked toward the departure gates. I moved to join the line that had begun to form for my train but Michael suggested we wait in the seating area.

  “There’s plenty of time, these trains are always late.”

  We sat. Michael lit up a cigarette though a No Smoking sign was posted nearby.

  “Vic, I know it’s a little late but there’s something I need to get off my chest.”

  I had feared this, Michael’s need to make some gesture. I expected a sort of apology, some expression of feeling though underhanded somehow, twisted into a proof of his own deep nature. But even yet I hadn’t understood him, was still awaiting some capitulation from him as if my own point of view was the only possible one.

  “I dunno how to put it, Vic. I guess I’ve never really had the feeling there was some sort of two-way thing going on with us. It’s just little things, I don’t want to seem petty. Like back there at the coffee shop, you could have offered to pay for the coffee at least, just a little token like that.”

  It was true: he’d driven me to the station, had been willing to be here for my departure, and yet I’d felt no spirit of generosity toward him.

  “Even that time when Gus stayed with you, I dunno, maybe it’s just a different way of looking at things.”

  But now I was truly confused.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Just the way you made it seem like such a big deal and all that. I mean the guy was in pretty rough shape, it’s just basic hospitality.”

  “He didn’t look like he was in very rough shape to me.”

  “Come on, you know what he’s like. He was covering himself, that’s all, he thought you were laughing at him. And then the little stuff, how you always put your food at the back of the fridge to give him a message or something. I don’t want to get into the nitty gritty of it, it’s just a feeling, that’s all, a way of dealing with people.”

  We sat in silence. I wanted to mount some defence but the gap between how we saw matters had left me dumbfounded.

  “Maybe it’s an Italian thing,” Michael said finally. “A kind of reverse prejudice, you-like-us-you-don’t kind of thing, trying to work out some stuff from your childhood or something.”

  “I don’t even think of you guys as Italian.”

  “I dunno, maybe that’s the point.”

  The line had begun to move forward; Michael and I joined the end of it.

  “Look, Vic, I don’t want it to seem like I’ve been holding all these grudges against you, it’s not that. I just wish we could have been closer, that’s all.”

  On the train I felt grim. I found an empty seat, setting my shoulder bag on the place next to me to discourage anyone from sitting there but then feeling despondent at my mean-spiritedness.

  “You’ll have to take that bag off the seat, son, we’ve got other passengers coming on.”

  At Oakville I received my punishment: a drunk, the very caricature of loutishness, hulking and bearded and leather-jacketed.

  “Hey, buddy.”

  Heads turned, energy homing in on us from the seats around us. A woman across the aisle smiled at me conspiratorially.

  “Just going down to London, eh, got a call from the fuckin’ old lady, she’s in some kind of shit.”

  He seemed willing to talk to the air, unfocused, yet I could feel him ready to turn on me if I closed him out.

  “So what’s that you’re reading there, you some kind of teacher or something?”

  A sort of conversation started up between us, mainly his drunken ramblings and my noncommittal attention.

  “The name’s Ace, that’s the name I took in the can.” He held a huge hand out to me with drunken aggression. “Aces up!”

  And afterwards he kept coming back to that phrase like a kind of mantra.

  “I don’t want any shit, eh, but the old lady called and I gotta go. I said to myself just three days on the wagon, that’s all you’ve gotta do. Then halfway to the station I’m already shitting bricks.”

  The conductor came collecting tickets. Ace took a moment to register what was happening, began to fumble through pockets.

  “Hurry it up there, I’ve got a whole train waiting behind you.”

  “Just hold your fuckin’ horses, sir,” Ace said, baitingly good-humoured, “I’ve got it here somewhere.”

  Heads turned again.

  “What was that?”

  Ace found the ticket, held it out grinning.

  “Here it is, sir, got it right here.”

  “You watch your language, buddy, or I’ll have you off this train faster than you can spit.”

  “Whatever you say, sir,” Ace said, still grinning. “I don’t want any trouble.”

  “Fucking a-hole,” he said when the conductor had gone. “Then he’s the type you get a few beers in him he’s swearing up a blue streak.”

  When the conductor passed back a few minutes later, Ace’s leg was stretched out in the aisle. The conductor stopped, seeming to be willing another confrontation.

  “You mind pulling your leg in there.”

  “No fuckin’ problem, sir.”

  “No, I think there is a problem here, you clean up your mouth or you’re out of here. You got that?”

  I could sense the anger rising in Ace, his helplessness in the face of it.

  “Give me a break, man, you’re the
one trying to bust my ass.”

  “I don’t think I’m getting through to you. These people paid for their tickets just like you did, they don’t have to put up with this kind of trash.”

  “You’re the only one seems to have a problem with it so why don’t you just go fuck yourself?”

  The hatred between them seemed close to violence now.

  “As far as I’m concerned you’re out of here.”

  The conductor headed back down the aisle, returning a few minutes later with another uniformed man, large and broad-shouldered and calm.

  “Why don’t you just come along with us.”

  But Ace was subdued now, rising up with an air of tired defeat.

  “See you around, man.”

  The whole episode had been so unnecessary: I ought to have interceded somehow, tried to pull Ace back. I resolved to speak to the conductor, feeling the falseness in this belated solidarity though still I made my way through the train, coming finally to a car empty except for four uniformed staff in a booth at the front and then Ace staring out a window toward the back. He caught my glance as I came in, nodded slightly but seemed either wary or confused, had perhaps already forgotten me.

  “Can we help you with something?”

  It was the conductor who’d argued with Ace, though he showed no recognition of me.

  “I was just wondering what you were going to do with that guy.”

  Immediately he grew imperious.

  “What’s it to you? A friend of yours?”

  “I just wanted to say I thought he’d be all right.” I glanced toward Ace, wanting him to hear me and not, afraid I would betray him somehow; but he was still staring oblivious out the window. “I mean he’s just a little drunk, that’s all. I don’t think he needs to be in any trouble right now.”

  “Don’t worry, buddy, we’ll look after him. Why don’t you just go on back to your seat.”

  I’d accomplished nothing. But when I searched the platform at Woodstock to see if Ace had been put off the train I couldn’t make out any sign of him.

  I went back to my reading and gradually drifted into sleep, the panicky sleep of trains, its half-awareness of the world as of something left unsettled. I dreamt that someone was being put off the train, a woman perhaps, my mother or my aunt, even from within it the dream’s meaning seeming strangely obvious; then something shifted and it appeared I’d made a mistake, that the woman was a stranger or I’d somehow entered the wrong dream, that while my attention was turned some more significant thing had happened elsewhere. But when I awoke I felt strangely elated, what had happened with Michael, with Ace, already fallen away: what seemed important about these things now was that there was no one I needed to share them with, distort the truth of them for, that they were simply incidents in a life that was truly mine.