by Lynn Coady
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.
35.
“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?”
Sherri
e 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!”
