by JoAnn McCaig
“Well,” says Ray, says Mister S. “Hmm, let me think. That could work, I guess. I probably won’t be going to the city this weekend.”
He’s been coming to the city? on weekends?
I say, “It’d be good to see you. Just give me a call, okay? Do you have the number?”
“Right here on my phone.” He repeats it back to me.
“That’s the one. Well. Good luck with the job from hell.”
“Thanks. Talk to you soon, then.”
When I replay the call in my mind later on, which I am given ample time to do, I try to remember exactly what I’d said next. Did I sound eager or indifferent? Did I actually say “no pressure” or “whatever” or do I just think I did?
I spend that Thursday evening watching the fire. A flattering sweater, a hint of colour on eyes and lips. Pubes freshly trimmed, amazing how sensitive that little exposure makes me, thighs and between tingling, mouth wanting to open, sweet scenes in my head, cheeky banter, passion’s throes, the heat cranking up higher and higher, for weeks now.
I even went online last month on a dare from Paula. Met a guy for coffee. An ex-army guy, forty-seven, now working in aircraft repair. New grandfather of a two-month-old boy. His daughter is twenty, lives in Sherwood Park. He was married twice. An amateur photographer. He very proudly showed me a local magazine for which he’d done the photos. I must remember to show the mag to someone, Paula or Manjini, so they’d know who to look for if I get stalked or murdered or abducted. And okay, okay, I should have pulled up short at his persistence. During the cyber courtship, he emailed twice a day, very keen to meet. Once I’d agreed, the pressure let up. We met at a coffee shop on a weekday, after my workout. And he seemed like an okay guy. Small, wiry — his parents escaped Hungary in 1956, just before the revolution. Attila — yes, his name was Attila, Paula nearly busted a gut over that — he talked quite charmingly of his travels as a peacekeeper, talked politics, kids, gardens. He insisted on buying my tea, and afterwards toured me through an art gallery that really did have some neat stuff in it, by Evan Penny: the ordinary human made grotesque, rendered surreal. So perhaps I let my guard down a bit. I’d been careful to call him only from a cell, and had given him a fake name. But then he was so little and cute and obviously keen that I gave him a hug when we said goodbye on the street. And he was very pleased by this, and very responsive. I wasn’t thinking straight, and I let him follow me to my car. Only later did I wonder whether he’d gotten my licence plate down. So I hopped inside, eager now to get away, said, “I’ll be in touch.” By that evening, there was an email headed Hello Gorgeous which, okay, okay, did my heart good. God, how long has it been since anyone said that to me? I remember last summer, sitting at the pub waiting for Paula to arrive, and seeing a man enter, look around, then stride over to a woman waiting for him at the bar, kiss her and say, “Hello, beautiful.” It made my heart ache. But this guy, this Attila, was — I don’t know — pretty intense. So I wrote him back a couple of days later, told him my circumstances have changed, I’ve met someone, nice to meet you, best of luck. You’re a nice guy.
He wrote back: Maybe I am a nice guy but it don’t seem to do me much good.
Hours pass, before the fire. My cute lines about only having meatloaf sandwiches to offer Ray this time become tiresome, and by eight, the wine bottle empty, the merest thought of meatloaf makes me want to gag, so I microwave a Lean Cuisine, which I shovel down my throat without enjoyment, just plugging the hole. Questions arise. How could he have missed seeing my car? You can’t miss it, there’s a clear view of my driveway from the neighbour’s gate.
And why would Stan have said there’s no one here? He knew I was coming up today, I’d called ahead to tell him so. Being protective or something, in league with Dad Moe to protect my infuriating virtue? He was there when I invited Ray for tea last September, maybe he saw Ray’s van there late that night. Fuck Stan, meddling old prick.
Because I knew I’d be confronting one last time the dissolution of the affair between Leland and Jay this weekend, the letting go, I’ve brought sad music — masses, requiems, chant. Despair flirts around the edges of this vast pulsing sticky wad of need, of foolish hope and obscene dreams, dances around it like the blue dervishes of flame that twirl and twist, rise and recede, against the bark of each new log. I just observe them, these dervishes, with benign interest. I know. He came for me. What other explanation could there possibly be? My back hurts, though. I take a couple of painkillers, deliberately forgetting to remember that this particular combination of drugs and alcohol lets me sleep, but leaves me depressed as hell the next day.
I can’t stop this. Now I’m in London, with the Englishman, the man who inspired Leland, in a pub before my reading the next day. The novel has been a huge success, and the Englishman has agreed to meet, to “give his blessing” is what he has said. After a drink, we stroll to a park bench.
He raises my hand to his lips and I start to cry: “I — oh god — I took that part out of the book because it was too corny. Too romantic.”
“I must have missed it,” he murmurs, “wished it were there, I guess,” and offers me a handkerchief. We sit together in the park. We like each other, a lot. My left hand strays to his leg. I grab it, slap it with the right — “bad hand, no!” — and he laughs. Gently frees the hand and sets it on his pant leg, covered by his own. Other arm around my shoulders. A kiss. Aaah.
Well —
Back to my hotel and it’s like the scene in Jane Eyre where Rochester’s saying goodnight after Jane saves him from the fire but he won’t let go of her hand.
Maybe I pull him along or maybe he follows after a moment.
and and and
well, yes.
But as he dresses to leave I ask him, “So what are you going to do about the pictures?”
“Pardon?”
“The photographs of us on the bench, the kiss. You walking into my hotel with your hand on my butt. You looking out the window of my room, with your chest bare.”
He sits down, heavily, on the edge of the bed. “I’ve made a mistake.”
“What I don’t get — actually, two things: first, what are the photos for? Blackmail? Or just publicity? I’m a small town girl, I don’t really understand how the real world works — ”
“Look — ”
“And the second question: why did you fuck me? You didn’t have to.”
His look of pain might make me feel sorry for him, if I weren’t so humiliated. He mutters, “I have spent thirty years — ”
“You could’ve just said no. To my query letter, to this meeting, to . . . all of it. I gave you the option, over and over.”
Angry now, he stands. “Look. I have spent thirty years building a reputation, and if you think a little snip nobody’s ever heard of can just waltz in and take what’s mine — ”
The fog settles in over the lake and Friday goes on forever. In the morning I manage a little work, editing some of the email banter between Leland and Jay, but as the day wears on and hope wears thin, I’m paralyzed, drawn to the chair before the fire, to sad songs. Amazing how even in this dry mountain air, even with the heat of the hearth drawing every drop of moisture from my body, I can still cry so much. I must remember to keep my fluids up though; I’m hungover enough from the wine and the pills.
I don’t get it. Or perhaps I do. Remembrance Day is over, after all, and out of nowhere, I remember, a few years ago, passing a couple of young guys outside Safeway. Overhearing one say to the other, “So I told her if she didn’t lose some weight, I was leaving her. I just wanted to see what she’d do.”
That’s what this kid said: I just wanted to see what she’d do.
That quick lie of Ray’s — yes, of course it was a lie — about going off to another job, at that time of day. How could Mister Sunshine be a liar? How could he have sat there on the couch before the fire six weeks ago and talked of his daughter and his life and his father’s illness and dancing at Shambala and how he
likes being a man and believes in intuition and yet be so smooth in a lie?
By midnight, I have it clear. As I circled the neighbour’s house yesterday afternoon, wearing my flattering mauve sweater, with my smudge of deep blue eyeliner, with my trimmed pubes, as I shyly called “Hello?” outside the silent house, the two men stood conspiratorially inside. Huddled together, stifling laughter. Stan’s in on it of course — the brotherhood. Ray has said, “You gotta help me out here,” and the two of them exchange mischievous glances when they peer through the closed curtains and see that I have walked away. To heighten the joke, Ray then sends Stan down the road in his pickup, to make sure I know. That Ray is there, that he’s alone in the neighbour’s house. For Ray, the best part is booting it up the road before I can walk the last half of the loop; he smiles to himself, picturing my quick eager stride, my expectant smile. He hasn’t told Stan why he booked this job for the 11th, though. He hasn’t told Stan that he scheduled things this way because he just wanted to see what I’d do.
When I was a kid, my mother hid the back issues of Dad’s Playboy magazines in a high cupboard in the laundry room. There was a recurring cartoon figure in those glossy pages: the lusty little old lady. Grey hair in a bun, spectacles, scrawny little body and pendulous sagging boobs. In every joke she is frustrated and disappointed, virile young men fleeing her advances with a mixture of terror and disgust. What could be more repulsive, more absurd, than a horny old woman?
That’s a sad story. Here’s another. Last Sunday, I went for a massage. I usually find the treatments very relaxing, even come close to falling asleep on the table while Liz works her mysterious magic on my poor crooked little body. I hadn’t been for a treatment for months though, not since the awakening. But this time, instead of just relaxing and falling asleep, I plunged fathoms deep into a fantasy about being naked with Ray. Odd that it was Ray, definitely Ray. But never mind. All this time, ever since the last bleed, I’ve just stayed very juicy, because I like it and it’s a nice change. And I hold the image in my mind of a beautiful hard circumcised cock, beautiful shapely head like a medieval helmet. The cock is very long and very hard, angled up. And I keep myself juiced, have done for months now, by imagining that cock going into me. I also picture strong hands grasping my hips, moving me back and forth on that marvellous cock, and sometimes above, faintly, I picture a man’s dark head, features unclear but a look that is merely serious and intent.
That image mutated into Ray that day on the table in Liz’s little lavender-scented massage room. His cock was beautiful. The whole session, ninety minutes, was just . . . oh, man. I took him in my mouth over and over. He entered me with serious purpose, over and over. I was red hot, I was miles away, ecstatic, wet, swollen. In so deep I feared I’d never come out again. I hope I didn’t moan. I really worried about Liz, such a funny shy woman who lives alone with her cats and has a troublesome mother and whose little hands warm and heal as if by magic. I worried she’d tune in to this energy somehow and just get, I don’t know, blasted across the room.
Late Friday night, cried out, I sit before the dying fire and page listlessly through an old Utne Reader that Paula left behind. I find an article about a woman in her fifties, happily married, who became fixated on a young man she’d met on a hiking trip. The woman wrestled with this infatuation, but ended up recognizing it as a larger lust, the call not of sex or romance but of something she learned to call her Inner Beloved: the soul of the world asking to love her and be loved by her.
I think about this, for a while. Remembering that moment on the deck, back in August, the opening up. Maybe.
But then I decide, ah, fuck my inner beloved. I just wanna get laid.
So there’s Ray, right now, at his parents’ place, a few miles away. He wears a secret smile. He knows where I am, right now. He can picture what I’m doing. All through dinner, he keeps his secret smile, and afterwards, he helps his mom lift and turn his dad, helps her clean the bedsores, check the dressings, adjust the morphine drip.
Saturday morning, I’m on the road before dawn. I’ve hardly noticed that I was in the mountains: all that beauty and peace unremarked, muffled in fog. I keep thinking that I’m cried out, but surprise myself over and over. A bloody hunk of roadkill, a stray thought, a pop tune like “Free Fallin’” and I’m off again, blurry, wet, a road menace. What is it gonna take? I wonder.
I wish I could tell Ray what a good time I would’ve shown him. After I did myself last night, second time that day, I laughed and muttered, “Suckerrr, you missed out on something amazing.” And he did. He missed out on me. Janet. Janet Mair. Mother writer woman teacher human being. I don’t know how it has happened, but it’s perfectly clear to me now that I have somehow become the sort of woman who only stupid and/or crazy men want to fuck. If I meet someone I can actually have a conversation with, he’s not interested. I get hit on by stupid men all the time.
Back home Saturday midday. House still standing, kids alive. So far so good. Eric wants to go for a sleepover at his buddy’s place. Great idea, I say. So I’m in my office, listening to REM. I have Ray’s cheery note, with his numbers. call me anytime
I have a plate. I have matches. Let the ceremony begin.
Ritual completed, and Saturday night looms. Matt’s at home tonight, hunched over the computer. I’m too tired for anything, ready to put my nightie on by 5:30, but I force myself to wait ’til at least seven, when it’s dark. What was life like before this delirium, what thoughts and hopes and nightmares? I can’t even remember, but am nostalgic anyway for the simplicity of whatever it might have been — any pain but this pain.
I rented a documentary called Gambling, Gods and LSD for the trip, but didn’t watch it — too busy crying — and decide to try it now. The director, Peter Mettler, begins with the manic ugliness of Toronto’s airport strip, the crass promise of the fantasy penthouse at the Constellation, then the bizarre antics of a Christian revival meeting — no, prior to that a recovering heroin addict who sucks life from a cigar, says he still misses the kick, still longs for the kick. Then Mettler moves to Los Alamos, and after that Las Vegas, where a slick man proudly shows off his Fantasy Museum — lifeless mannequins in leather and chains, a dildo so startlingly reminiscent of the cock of my dreams that I blush with shame. By the time Mettler’s camera moves inside a peep show booth, I am suddenly aware that my teenage son sits nearby at the computer, headphones blasting Nine Inch Nails, engrossed in Counter-Strike, his violent and powerful fantasy.
I turn off my video and go to bed, paging through the books piled there, prep for a novel I’m teaching that’s set in postwar Europe. According to the Cambridge History of Germany, in the GDR, the Reds re-used the Buchenwald infrastructure to torture and kill anti-communists by the tens of thousands. They even used ex-Nazi thugs as hired help; the guys required no training at all. And in Walking Since Daybreak, Modris Eksteins describes how the Russians regarded murder, looting, and rape as legitimate tools for the crushing of fascism. Stalin, when questioned on this point, replied with irritation, “Can’t he understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometers through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle?” And in Marcia Davenport’s Too Strong For Fantasy, the hideous hunger for power destroys love, destroys hope, destroys justice, steals Jan Masaryk and his father’s dream, turns the world again and always to shit to shit to shit.
Tears. An endless supply today, apparently. Mucous blocks my nose, I gasp for breath. When I finally stumble out of my room in search of more Kleenex, I realize that, down the hall in the family room, my son has the headphones off, can hear me. I get dressed, grab the car keys. “Can’t sleep, Matt. Going for a drive, okay?”
“Hope it makes you feel better, Mom.”
I drive. The way the tears blur the neon is kind of pretty. After an hour and a half, I stop at a drive-thru and I remember — this is remembrance weekend after all — to notice the trim young man working the window. To register, acknowledge, th
at this is how he is spending his Saturday night because there are things he needs and wants and he is willing to work this job to get them. And back at home, Matt is grateful for the cheeseburger combo I’ve brought him. Only then does it occur to me to wonder why he too is home alone on a Saturday night.
Oh I have ta’en too little care of this.
Dare I accuse Ray of deliberate cruelty or is that just my own fever dream? More likely mere carelessness. Or indifference. Likely all Ray’s guilty of is a few awkward lies (he realizes he shouldn’t have led me to believe he’s single, and now is caught in a trap of his own devising) or even fear (I’m too hungry, too serious, I scare the shit out of him, I’ll eat him alive). Not malice, just ambivalence. Which is worse? Malice certainly feels less humiliating.
While Matt finishes his burger at the kitchen table, I wander out onto the deck, look at the stars. Far fewer than the night, less than two months ago, when I stood at the gate with Ray. It occurs to me all over again that I am no longer the kind of woman that a sane man lunges at. And age isn’t the only reason for that. I tell myself, “Janet, you are no longer a dish. You are too opinionated. You do not please, anymore. You have forgotten how to please, and, admit it, even if you remembered how, you probably couldn’t be bothered. So from here on in, you really have to fucking insist. You have to draw a diagram.” And I understand, finally, that that’s exactly where Final Draft goes wrong, is dishonest. Because Leland reaches for Jay in that hotel room in Toronto the night they meet. That rings false. That would not happen.
I lie in bed, drifting, trying to sleep. And in my waking dream, the doorbell rings, and it’s Ray —
No.
I sleep, finally. And in my dream, the doorbell does ring. But it is not Leland, nor is it the man he stands in for. It’s not Ray, either. No. It’s the peacekeeper. It’s Attila.
And in my terrible dream, while my son lies sleeping in his basement lair, among his posters of Tony Hawk and Hilary Duff, dreaming his dreams of the perfect head shot, of something hard and sharp in a hot wet place, I, his mother, surrender to a great passion. I never even get a glimpse of what might have been the cock of my dreams. No. Just the kind strength of Attila’s hands.
