The Secrets Men Keep

by Mark Sampson

  Dinner was served promptly at seven. The grownups were seated at the long table in our dining room, made longer with the leaf in. We kids were seated at a row of card tables set up in the living room, as was our custom. I was at the very end of it, near the Christmas tree, close enough to have its branches poke me in the back; but I had an excellent view of the adults in the dining room, which is what I wanted. I was expecting—I suppose we were all expecting—the writer to live up to our image of him in our minds, to grow expansive and gregarious with each eggnog or glass of wine he consumed, to amuse us with the exotic foibles of his literary life. But the opposite happened. As the evening went on, he grew increasingly morose. Perhaps it was the sight of our middle-class bounty—the food, the decorations, the litters of children talking frivolously over their dinners in the next room—that brought on this depression. Whatever the cause, it seemed to imbue the writer with a deep sense of regret over his life choices, which he had no compunction vocalizing to all of us over and over again. “I am so alone,” he said. “My house, my life, is an empty husk. You people can’t begin to comprehend. I have nothing. I mean, look at me. I am relying on the pity of strangers for Christmas. I am. So. Fucking. Alone.” These lamentations hijacked the evening, seemed to drain the Christmas spirit right out of the room. My mother, seated directly across from the writer, stared into her plate, her face burning. My father, at the head of the table, just swirled his wine and waited for the writer to shut up.

  By the end of the night, the writer was very drunk and apologetic. My father accepted his contrition quickly, but only as a way to shoo him out the door. I stood at the living room window and watched the writer give a grouchy yank to his collar and then trudge off into the cold, dark night. When he was gone, there was a beat of silence in our house before my father said, “Well. He damn near ruined Christmas.” He then declared how much he regretted inviting the writer to our dinner. Ever gracious, my mother did not indulge in an I told you so moment. She could clearly see my father was unsettled that she could have an opinion about something and be right when it didn’t align with his own.

  The story should have ended there but didn’t. My mother was oddly pensive for the rest of the holidays, preoccupied, and I didn’t find out why until the week after New Year’s. I returned to school then and was anxious to resume my chief extracurricular activity, which that year was boxing lessons at a club near my school. I loved my boxing lessons—going after the heavy bag with its corset of duct tape around the middle, making the skipping rope wisp on the hardwood, and sparring with other boys in the ring that was just rope strung between four posts on one section of the floor. But when I arrived at the club on that frigid January afternoon following the first day back at school, I was surprised to find its windows dark and the sheet metal door locked. After a moment I realized that the club was staying closed for an extra week after the holidays, and wouldn’t open until the following Monday. I had clearly missed the notices about it around the gym.

  I called my mother from a payphone and told her she had to come retrieve me a full two hours before she had expected to. Usually this wouldn’t have been an issue—my mother always shuttled me and my brothers without complaint to wherever we needed to go—but on this day she seemed profoundly and uncharacteristically annoyed. She snapped at me that she was just on her way to run an errand and I would have to wait. I told her, “Well hurry up, it’s bloody cold out here.” Her arrival took forever and I wondered what the hell she could possibly be doing. Finally, her headlights came bouncing into the club’s gravel parking lot and I ran toward the passenger door. After I got in, I turned to throw my gym bag in the back seat and saw to my surprise that there was a cat there, a kitten, sitting inside a cardboard carrier and meowing quietly to be let out. I said, “Where did the cat come from?” and my mother said, “From the animal shelter downtown.” “We’re getting a cat?” I asked. “The cat’s not for us,” she replied without looking at me, signaling as she pulled out of the parking lot.

  We headed into the east end, passing homes with dried-out Christmas trees already dragged to the curb. We parked in front of the writer’s house and my mother got out. She fished the cat carrier from the back seat, said to me, “Wait here. Hopefully this will only take a moment,” and then closed the door. I watched as she hurried onto the writer’s stoop and rang his bell. He came out and they began talking. She motioned to the cat carrier and then to him, and they began to argue. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but it was getting very animated. My mother motioned to the carrier again, and this time the writer grabbed her arm, grabbed it in a way that was both forceful and a little too familiar. I rolled down my window so I could hear what they were saying. “You don’t just give somebody a cat, Claire,” the writer barked. “A cat is a lot of fucking responsibility!” I rolled my window back up. I had never heard anyone, not even my father, speak to my mother that way.

  They argued some more and then she retreated from his stoop, back to the car with tears in her eyes as the writer disappeared into his house. She maneuvered the carrier gruffly back in place, then slammed the door and got behind the wheel. “Are we going home now?” I asked. “No,” she said, wiping the tears unsentimentally off her face. “We have to take Marvin back to the shelter first.”

  I’m sad to report that life did not work out that well for the writer. As the years went on, his style and subject matter fell out of favour with readers and critics, and he soon had trouble getting his books published. He eventually had to sell his little house and move into a basement flat in someone else’s house. He grew old and then died, alone and unpleasantly, in the nursing home on the hill that overlooks our town. His reputation vanished for a while, but then there was a tribute issue done for him by one of those august literary journals that nobody reads. In it, the contributors praised the writer for his linguistic verve, for his lifelong commitment to his craft. They said his stories were great because they didn’t resort to the Big Reveal at the end, that they partook in subtler revelations.

  I became a writer myself, in a manner of speaking. Unlike the writer, I am a school teacher as well as an occasional journalist, but I have published a few books with various small presses around the country. With their three-figure advances and total lack of a marketing apparatus, these presses can’t give me the kind of career the writer had. My books aren’t always in the bookshops or even at the library; they don’t get reviewed very often, and I only do a few public readings a year. But it’s fine. I realize that it’s a different era now, that the writer belonged to an all-but-extinct breed known as the ‘midlist author.’ I shouldn’t complaint; my life is good. I usually write early in the mornings before my three gorgeous children are awake, demanding their breakfast and a drive to school.

  For the longest time, I didn’t know where my aptitude for writing came from. But then, last year, I did find out, after my mother died suddenly of an aneurism. My brothers and I were cleaning out the house afterwards (my father had died two years earlier) and we discovered a cardboard box full of short story manuscripts in one corner of my mother’s cold room, where she kept various preserves on wooden shelves nailed to the cement walls. We came to learn that my mother, unbeknownst to any of us, had studied creative writing briefly as a young woman and there was an entire oeuvre of her work in that box. Ever punctilious, she had written the date of completion at the bottom of each story, and I could follow along chronologically as her craft progressed. Many of the pieces had been critiqued; whoever the reader was had written generously in the margins. At first the comments were praiseful, glowing, and more than a little bit flirtatious. The kind of flirting, in fact, that one might find inappropriate in this day and age. But then something happened, something changed. The critiques turned curt, scornful, discouraging—despite the fact that the stories were getting demonstrably better. It didn’t make sense. At first I thought these remarks belonged to my father, even though he was not a big reader. B
ut they couldn’t have been his. These stories clearly predated their relationship. And besides, that wasn’t his handwriting anyway.

  ITAEWON

  I didn’t know an invitation for Kenny meant an invitation for everyone. Had I realized I would have kept my mouth shut in the staff room when they posed the question: How do YOU spend a Saturday night in Itaewon? The answer was: avoiding vulgarity. It was like an elaborate act of contortion: it could be done if you stuck to a nonnegotiable and well-practised routine. Looking to rebuild my circle of friends after my latest coterie had fled (student loans paid or grad-school acceptances received), I had reason to think that Kenny would enjoy an alternative to his typical weekend, which usually involved total strangers and spermicide. Yet somehow my invitation for Kenny turned into an invitation for everyone. I was now stranded on the corner outside Burger King waiting for them, my coworkers, with nothing to do but stare at the mindless neon and passing droves of off-duty U.S. soldiers. I hated this corner, this dark nexus of every dick-swinging Lothario in Seoul. Already my Saturday night felt ruined. (“We’ll all meet on the corner in front of Burger King,” my colleagues had exclaimed. Fine, yes, but be there at six or you’ll derail my whole itinerary.) It was now 6:23, and because none of them, including Kenny, knew where the hell New Delhi was, I was forced to wait here or risk being labeled a jerk come Monday.

  Finally, two of them emerged out of the nearby subway stop. Neither being Kenny. It was the Torontonian Couple. He Ben Affleck handsome and she the predictably wispy, well-spoken blonde on his arm. They had arrived in the country a couple of weeks ago from Toronto and were still getting over their culture shock.

  “Hey there, Alistair,” the male Torontonian called out as they approached. “You been waiting long?”

  “I’ve been waiting 23 minutes,” I clipped, but then lightened my tone. “But you know it’s a, erm, nice night. Lots of . . . interesting people about. Say, have you seen Kenny?”

  “Sorry, no,” the female Torontonian said before taking a long gander around. “God, I can’t get over how much Itaewon is like being back home.”

  Soon another colleague came lumbering toward the corner. Rupert. On his own, without Kenny. Rupert was a six-foot-four Rastafarian from Saskatchewan. (A Saskafarian, we called him.) His dreadlocks fell like palm tree branches from his multicoloured wool cap, and he smoked like a Kuwaiti oilfield. “Good evening there, mon!” he said with an obvious Prairie accent. “Ya’s all up for some jazz?” Soon others arrived. There was plump Erica, from British Columbia, rumoured to be ‘quite a handful’ in bed. There was pint-sized Suzi, possibly Labrador’s only cocaine addict. And Mr. Mallet, a New Brunswick Acadian who liked to pretend he didn’t speak French.

  “Are we all here?” I grumbled, though it was obvious that we weren’t.

  “Ya mon, got a call from Kenny on my handphone,” said Rupert. “He’s dumpin’ his Korean girlfriend tonight, so he’s running late. He said to go ahead to New Delhi without him. He’ll call for directions later.”

  “That’s fine. Let’s go,” I said. I stomped off the corner to join the line-up to cross the street, not caring whether anyone followed me. But of course they all did, my unwanted entourage. When the light turned, I entered the crosswalk. Just as I did, an off-duty GI in a Lakers jersey drifted into my earshot, crossing the street in the opposite direction.

  “So I said, fuck her hard! Fuck her till she farts!”

  I couldn’t get out of his way in time, and we knocked shoulders in the middle of the crosswalk, his nylon butting my tweed. The GI turned and glared at me, clearly on the hunt for World War Three. I glared back fearlessly, as if from behind a fence, determined to show empathy for whomever her was.

  ~

  Not that I was a creature of habit, but pulling off my cultured night in Itaewon required exquisite timing. Thus, the rigid schedule: Dinner at six at New Delhi, to be finished no later than seven-fifteen; wander down to jazz club by seven-thirty; yes, ridiculously early for the music, which started at nine, but necessary to get a decent table; three sets of jazz that took us to eleven-thirty; by then army curfew in effect and all obnoxious GIs tucked into their beds back at Yongsan garrison; thus, free to wander Itaewon at one’s leisure, perhaps even go to a bar and have a beer without being harassed by jingoistic sexual predators. If done properly, I could execute this schedule without encountering America at all. The only point of vulnerability was the steep back-alley street that led from the subway stop up to New Delhi. Thankfully, tonight, we chanced upon no one except a single tube-topped Brit high-heeling it down the hill, mammaries jiggling as she narrated her day into her handphone. Once our group reached New Delhi, the best Indian restaurant in Seoul with its excellent buffet and Gandhi-esque tranquility, our night was home free: no louts were ever patrons there, or at All That Jazz.

  Except. Except tonight I was dragging six unfamiliars in to the place, none of whom seemed to grasp the restaurant’s unstated protocol. Back in the day, my old coterie and I would sit at a table a while, enjoy some wine, chat amiably before sidling up to the buffet to explore the delights within. But not this crew. We came in and they immediately attacked the buffet line with porcine ferocity before we were even properly seated. They clanked their plates while piling on curries and Tandoori chicken while maintaining a stream of topicless nattering. My whole body winced when, right in front of the restaurant’s nose-studded Matriarch, the male Torontonian made fun of the Bollywood music video playing on the TV screen above the buffet. She gave me a look. How could you bring these heathens into my peaceful establishment?

  Back at the table with heaping plates in tow, our group continued conversing several decibels above the atmospheric norm. In fact, a gay couple dining two tables over got up and moved to the opposite end of the restaurant. Rupert’s handphone exploded to the tune of “Billy Jean” and he flipped it open and stuck it under his dreadlocks. It was Kenny, alighting the subway and looking for directions. I could never understand why Rupert and Kenny used each other as point men in this way, since they weren’t really friends; in fact they lay on opposing ends of the political spectrum, and antagonized each other at every turn. But to ask what made Kenny different, at least different enough for me to extend this invitation, that was it. He was different—and not disingenuously so. His views, for example, leaned honestly to the right, something that made him an unpopular curiosity in our staff room of arts-educated and not especially ambitious English teachers. When he expressed opinion, it instantly polarized the room, but he always backed himself up with memorized facts rather than emotion. I envied such assuredness, if not the stances in question. Beyond this, Kenny’s boldness served him well in wrestling with his Yellow Fever. He always found a way to make the 60–odd Korean girls he slept with each year feel special, at least in the moment. Of course, it would be beneath me to live vicariously through such repugnant escapades, but I was nonetheless attracted to Kenny’s confidence. He had the air of someone who could leave Korea at any time and have no trouble establishing a successful life outside it. And by bringing Kenny into my cadre of one, I hoped that such a characteristic might rub off on me, that I too might escape the endless cycle of 12–month teaching contracts, put Korea and my debts behind me, and return to the civilized world. That was the other thing: Kenny and I were both from Halifax and often engaged in salty reminiscences.

  Back at the table, the conversation took a turn for the worse as Mr. Mallet began one of his performances. Jesus, the Acadian had no social graces. He began regaling us about a recent trip to Seoul’s red light district, something he had a real taste for. He was just describing his extrication from a brothel by Korean cops when Kenny pulled open the door to New Delhi and sauntered in. Gelled up and cologned for more promise than this evening would deliver, Kenny plunked himself between Suzi and Erica, and without preamble launched into why his Korean girlfriend had needed to go. Seeing everyone’s attention drift, Mr. Mallet rampe
d up his crass narrative to little avail. Unable to follow (and thereby stop) both pubescent discourses at once, I lost the gist of each. Quick you fool, I thought to myself, steer them both toward civility before the Indians throw us out on our ear.

  “Hiya Kenny!” I squeaked.

  “Oh hey Al sorry I’m late do I have time to grab a bite let me get a plate I promise to eat fast—” And flung himself to the buffet.

  By the time Kenny returned with his heaping meal, I had my reiterations ready: You’re in for one excellent night, Kenny. I swear, classy all the way. No need to think of doing anything else. But I dithered, couldn’t spit it out in time. Meanwhile, Rupert was already lobbing the first volleys of the night, and Kenny returned fire in kind. “Man, I told you before: I ain’t reading your fucking Chomsky!”

  ~

  And so. It was 8:10 before we departed New Delhi. By now all good seats at the jazz club would be gone. Walking back down the hill toward Itaewon’s main strip, I sensed a couple of us were already contemplating breaking off and doing their own thing. Outside All That Jazz, we lost our first casualty when Suzi sashayed off to find more snortable pleasures. So now we were seven, noisily hiking up the stairs to the second floor and into the club’s smoke-filled darkness. As predicted the place was hopping, all good tables taken. I soaked up the joint’s familiar ambiance. Elongated and heroically stuffed shelves of vinyl records were lined up in rows behind the bar. There were posters of famed jazz musicians on the dark-panel ceiling: Maynard Ferguson, Zoot Sims, Al Cohn, Major Holly, Yusef Lateef. The air seemed to sweat cigarette smoke and passionate discourse.