The Life of Hope

by Paul Quarrington

  “No, it’s a natural thing,” Harvey went on. “I don’t masturbate myself, but that’s only because I get laid so much.”

  Harvey lies through his teeth.

  My wimpy dick now wanted to go to the bathroom. I couldn’t see going through life with that mamby-pamby attached to me. I jumped off the bed and plodded toward the staircase. Harvey Benson trailed along behind me. “Wow,” said he, “is your ass ever flabby.”

  The staircase led down to the kitchen. I emerged there to find three young girls seated at the table drinking tea.

  “Here’s the great Canadian novelist!” roared Harvey, blocking my only avenue of escape. I covered my private parts and made a valiant attempt to smile. “Paul,” Harvey went on, “I’d like you to meet some students of mine …”

  “Harv, could I just pop off to the washroom first?”

  “It won’t take a second. This is Sheila.”

  Sheila was a rather obese girl with a great bubble of curly black hair. She said “Hi” and I nodded.

  “And this is Lee …”

  Lee was tall and blondish. She wore spectacles with extremely thick lenses that distorted her eyes, making them appear huge and fishlike. Lee waved, and I waved back.

  “And this is Sara.”

  Sara was a small, dark girl with gray eyes. I’d rarely seen a sadder looking face, and her attempt to fashion that face into an attitude of friendly greeting almost broke my heart. “Want some tea?” asked Sara. Her voice was thick and sultry and seemed to come from deep in her throat.

  “Um, maybe in a minute. I’m going to the John now.”

  “We’re having a seminar,” explained Harvey. “ ‘The Modern Novel: What Purpose Does It Serve?’ We thought you might have some insight, even if you are a baseball novelist and a tad on the trivial side.”

  “I’m going to the John,” I snarled at Harvey.

  “Oh, right. Sure.”

  I headed off for the can, wondering if my ass was really as flabby as all that. I spent a long time in the washroom before emerging, modestly wrapped in a huge towel.

  Harvey was saying, “Fine, fine, we can decide that the novel should be a political tool. But, and this is the thing, the danger is of the medium becoming a vehicle for propaganda! What do you think, Paulie?”

  “Well …”

  “Paul is apolitical,” explained Harvey to the young women. “A moral coward through and through.”

  I wouldn’t say that, Harv,” I protested. “I mean, I’m concerned about the state of the world.”

  “You’re concerned about the state of your own sweet ass!” Harvey laughed. Harvey has one of the ugliest laughs imaginable, desperate and rhythmic, too loud by a hundred decibels.

  “I think I’ll go throw some clothes on,” I muttered.

  “Hey, you don’t have to because of us,” said Harvey quickly. “I was just telling the girls.”

  “Huh?”

  Lee said, “Yeah. If you’re a nudist, that’s cool.” The two others nodded gracious agreement.

  “Sure,” said Harvey. “I mean, hey, it’s no big thing.”

  “Harvey, might I just have a word with you?”

  “By all means, Paulie.” Harvey followed me up the stairs and into my bedroom. I shut the door behind us and whispered, “What the fuck are you doing?”

  “We can get those chickies naked, no sweat!” said Harvey urgently. “Did you check out the snoobies on that Sheila? Fucking out to here! And they all got young skin, not a wrinkle between them.”

  “I thought you were conducting a seminar.”

  “I can conduct it with them in the nude! It’ll be great. I think we can get an orgy happening.”

  “I don’t want to get an orgy happening.”

  “I want to get an orgy happening.”

  Harvey’s trouble was, he was fairly ugly. Not very or profoundly, just fairly and obviously. He was short, bald and paunchy and looked years older than his actual age of thirty-seven. Harv sported a long beard and wire-rimmed granny glasses, relics from his hippie days. Harvey was also chock-a-block full of hormones. “All you got to do is go back downstairs naked,” Harvey continued, “and I’ll say like, ‘Look how comfy Paul is,’ and then I’ll suggest we all take off our clothes.” Harvey grinned evilly, and looked like one of Santa’s helpers on dangerous drugs. “Think of all those twenty-year-old asses,” he whispered, “all puckered and perfect!” Harvey Benson smacked his lips.

  “I’d like to help,” I said, “but I ain’t gonna walk around naked. I’ll just stay up here and read, and you can tell them I don’t have any clothes on.”

  “You gotta help with the seminar. You’re the only novelist in the house.”

  “Anyway, I thought you told me you never use this place.”

  “I said I hardly ever use it. Sometimes I conduct seminars here, on weekends.”

  I’d lost track of the days. “Today’s Saturday?”

  “Right.”

  “Harvey …”

  “Please!!” Harvey folded his hands together imploringly.

  “No.” To show Harvey how adamant I was about the whole thing, I began to pull on clothes.

  “Stop!” he bellowed quietly.

  I put on my jeans and pulled a T-shirt over my head. “There,” I said.

  Harvey Benson looked close to tears.

  “Look,” I said, my heart softening toward the little man, “conduct the seminar outside, in the sun. Then, when they get hot, suggest a refreshing swim in the pond. They’ll get naked, just like that.” I snapped my fingers, or at least I tried to, producing only a fatty, almost inaudible sound.

  “They will?”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay, okay!” Harvey was almost beside himself with excitement. He ran down the stairs and burst into the kitchen slightly sweaty and out of breath. “Outside!” he roared. “Let’s go outside and conduct the seminar in the sun!”

  “Sure,” the girls said.

  I entered the kitchen behind Benson.

  Sad-looking Sara asked, “Are you coming, too?”

  “Yeah,” I answered, and the girl turned her thick lips upward in a brief and pitiful smile.

  The day was gorgeous. I turned my head upward and examined the sky. There wasn’t a cloud to be seen, only a bright blue stretched from one end of the world to the other. High in the sky was a hawk, turning lonely, savage circles.

  The five of us sat down on the grass near the pond.

  “God, it’s hot,” said Harvey, and he undid two or three buttons on his shirt.

  Down at the other end of the pond was a great blue heron. The bird crept toward the water on stilty legs, his head moving back and forth slowly. When the heron reached the edge it remained motionless for a long moment, frozen as if struck by a sudden thought or memory, and then it lashed forward. Its head was briefly in the water and resurfaced with a fish writhing in its bill.

  “Who do you like?” asked Sara. She seemed suddenly embarrassed by the quality of her question. “I mean, who do you like to read? What novelists do you admire?”

  “I like a lot of writers,” I started.

  Harvey added, “Goddamn, it’s hot.”

  “I like, for instance, John Gardner a lot.”

  There was a general shaking of heads and tsking of tongues.

  “You guys don’t like John Gardner?”

  Lee answered, “He sucks. All that ‘moral’ shit.” Lee said “moral” as if it were a dirty word, and she said “shit” like it floated in the air. “Let’s face it,” she went on, “the world is going to hell in a handcart, and who needs books about people in Vermont who are totally oblivious?”

  Sheila nodded. “Grendel,” she pronounced, “was not a bad little book. Cute, I would call it.”

  “And where,” Lee pondered aloud, “does Gardner get off writing that On Moral Fiction?” Lee proceeded to make her point in a non-academic fashion. She rammed her long forefinger down her throat and gagged.

  “I thought h
e made some valid points,” I said.

  “Bullshit! He writes all this dumbo crappola, Mickelsson’s Ghosts and The Sunlight Dialogues, both of which are totally laughable, and then he goes and says nasty things about the few writers who are making valid points!”

  “Like whom, pray tell?” I demanded.

  Lee named someone whose work I had never read. I had, however, gone out drinking with him on one occasion. I was aghast. “The man’s a psychopath! He weighs four hundred pounds and carries a gun! He’s an …” I stopped myself.

  “Irrelevant,” snapped Lee. Something in her eyes dared me to add “alcoholic” to the list. “His work is socially meaningful. He deals with what this warped society has come to, ultima ratio regum. Not like your boy Gardner. Gardner is stuck in Vermont and places, writing about these, these people!”

  “Gardner’s dead, you know,” I told them. “The man got wiped out on his motorcycle.”

  “Irrelevant,” was Lee’s assessment of this information.

  “Christ, Harvey,” I said, half laughing, “what the hell are you teaching these people?”

  Harvey pulled off his shirt. Harvey had an incredibly hairy body; tight little curls covered his chest, shoulders and back like a two-inch pile rug. “Whew,” he puffed, “it surely is hot.”

  “Who else do you like?” asked Sara.

  “Well, let me see.” I decided to proceed in a cavalier, devil-may-care manner. “I like Charles Dickens.”

  The answer received a good many titters.

  “You guys don’t like Charles Dickens?”

  “I guess there’s nothing wrong with him,” said Sheila, “if you happen to like comic books.”

  “Or,” I proceeded bravely, “James. Henry James.”

  “Sorry,” said Lee.

  “What the hell do you mean, ‘sorry?’ ”

  “Why don’t you read someone who has some inkling of what’s going on?”

  “And what the hell is going on?” I almost shouted. “I don’t know what the hell is going on.”

  “That’s because,” Sheila said calmly, “you don’t read the right people.”

  “How about Graham Greene? John Fowles? They might have some slight conception, some vague glimmer in the back of their minds …”

  Lee interrupted. “Let’s please keep this serious.”

  “Hey!” I shouted. “I’ll tell you who I like. I like old farts. I like Hermie Melville and Tony Trollope.”

  There was giggling and even a couple of guffaws.

  “Get this!” I screamed. “I like Nathaniel fucking Hawthorne!”

  Lee and Sheila laughed with derisive delight. Sara stared at me sorrowfully.

  “I got an idea,” said Professor Benson. “Let’s go swimming.”

  “Good idea,” said Lee. She climbed to her feet and pulled off her shorts. Her underwear was red and very tiny. Lee reached behind her and yanked at the string that fastened her halter-top. It fell away to reveal small, elegantly fashioned breasts. She began to walk toward the water, taking off her underwear en route, a deftly executed maneuver that involved some nimble footwork. Finally, at the water’s edge, she removed her thick spectacles. The glasses were the one item Lee seemed reluctant to shed.

  Sheila pulled off her shorts and removed her top. A mosquito immediately landed on the right breast, probably crazed by the sight of the white, fleshy mountain. Sheila squashed it, her tit bouncing back and forth. She brushed at her breast vigorously and gave me an impish look. “Hawthorne,” she snickered, and ran off for the water.

  Sara pulled off her shorts slowly. They were too tight, and her white underwear was dragged downward with them. For some reason Sara tugged her panties back up, took off her shorts, and then pulled down her underwear. “Coming in?” she asked me.

  “Sure.” I began to pull off my clothes.

  Sara waited for me, idly scratching her backside.

  “Coming, Harv?”

  Harvey’s eyes were glazed like an opium eater’s. He seemed incapable of speech. Sara and I left him sitting there.

  The Thing Contained in the Night

  Hope, Ontario, 1983

  Wherein our Biographer presses his Friend Benson for information and is Set Upon by Hobgoblins, both tiny and large.

  “What a great fucking seminar!” said Professor Harvey Benson.

  Harv and I were sharing drinks out on the flagstone patio. From where we sat on our chaise lounges we could see the pond. It was feeding time for the little fish, and therefore for some big birds as well, the heron down at the far end, two kingfishers closer to us, and the scene was one of subtle, muted massacre. I concentrated on the kamikaze kingfishers. They soared at an altitude of twenty or thirty feet and then suddenly plummeted as if shot, diving into the water. I knew, from watching “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom,” that in the world of nature the odds are four to one in favor of the prey, against the predator. As I watched the spearing and skewering that was going on in the little pond, it occurred to me that I wouldn’t take those odds.

  “Yup,” nodded Harvey. “Just a great fucking seminar.”

  The seminar had resumed after the girls and I had our little swim. Sara, Sheila and Lee hadn’t put their clothes back on. Instead they’d assumed various naked sunbathing positions around Harvey, directing him to start afresh the discussion of the modern novel and its purpose in a world that was about to get nuked into nothingness. Harvey Benson had done so, although it required for him a superhuman act of will. The girls flipped over like meat on a barbecue spit. After almost three hours of discussion the three young women rose and put on their clothes, announcing their intention of hiking through the woods. I pointed out the pathway, warned them against poison ivy, and they set off for the hills. Harvey watched them leave, smiling like a man who’d lived a long, good life and was now prepared to throw off the mortal coil. “What a great fucking seminar,” marvelled Dr. Benson.

  He and I had made drinks, and now we were drinking them in the great outdoors.

  “So, Harvard,” I said.

  “So, Paulie.”

  The mysteries of Hope seemed too many, too jumbled in my own mind with sadness and drink. “How long,” I asked, “does a fish live?”

  Harvey was oblivious to the quiet carnage taking place at pond level. He shrugged and sucked on a cigar. “Maybe three, four years,” he told me. “I don’t know. Maybe longer.”

  “So then, I take it that you personally don’t believe in Ol’ Mossback?”

  “Believe in him?” said Harv, his voice rising. “Man, I fucking seen him!”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “I was fishing over there at Lookout Lake,” he remembered, “and I saw some bird come flying across, real low over the water, and all of a sudden … kerpow! … Ol’ Mossback comes up, grabs said birdie by the throat, and then they were both gone. Christ, that motherfucking fish has got to be like six feet long!”

  “No shit?”

  “I wouldn’t shit you about something like that,” said Benson with great sincerity.

  “I bought a book about him,” I told Harvey. “Fishing for …”

  Harvey completed the title, “Ol’ Mossback, sure,” and even knew the name of the author, “by Gregory Opdycke. It’s a classic.”

  “It is?”

  “Sort of.” Harvey reconsidered and changed his opinion slightly. “It’s a well-known book.”

  “Hmm!” I decided I’d have to finish reading the thing. “So, anyway, I been spending some time down at The Willing Mind.”

  “I figured you would,” nodded Harvey. I had the impression he was still viewing the girls’ nude bodies somewhere in his bald and twisted head.

  “There’s a guy there who’s in the book,” I mentioned quietly.

  Harvey said, “No way. The book was written eighty, ninety years ago.”

  “I know. But it’s the same guy. Jonathon Whitecrow, the guy who talks to Ol’ Mossback.”

  Harvey pulled himself forward in the chaise loung
e and began to look around, searching for something or someone.

  “What are you doing?” I asked him.

  “Looking for Rod Serling,” Harvey answered.

  “Come on,” I snapped, a little annoyed.

  “Did it ever occur to you,” asked Harvey, “that some guys have fathers and even grandfathers, and that sometimes they have the same fucking name?”

  “Oh.” I had to admit, it hadn’t.

  “I know Jonathon Whitecrow,” said Harvey. “He’s that old, gay Indian, right?”

  “Right,” I nodded. “The guy who has ‘Visions.’ ”

  “Yeah, yeah! He had a Vision about me once. Told me I was going to meet a very extremely beautiful young chickie-poo.”

  Well, I thought, it was good to know Whitecrow didn’t bat a thousand.

  “He had a Vision about me, too,” I said. “He saw Ellie crying.”

  Harvey took a puff on his stogie emphatically. “Don’t you worry about that!”

  “Huh?”

  “Don’t worry about it, that’s all.” Benson finished his drink and waved the empty glass at me. “Want another?”

  “What did you mean, don’t worry about that?”

  “Just don’t worry! Why worry? Relax and work on your novel!”

  “Harvard,” I said sternly, “what did you mean?”

  “Okay. All I know is, I saw Ellie on the street last night, just by accident, and you don’t have to worry about her crying, that’s all I’m saying. You were worried about it, I’m here to tell you not to be. Drink?”

  “Why shouldn’t I worry about it?”

  “Why? Because she was happy. Okay? Don’t worry.”

  “Why happy, how do you mean happy?”