by Lynn Coady
“Rank,” says Adam. “You said you didn’t want to fight.”
“I don’t remember ever saying that.”
“In hockey. You fucking walked out because you didn’t want to hurt anyone.”
“That was different.”
“And now you’re drunk and pushing Kyle around.”
“Stay out of it Grix he can’t fucking hurt me,” declares Kyle in a gush of outrage and adrenalin.
But already Rank can feel those same chemicals draining out of him, as if there’s a siphon connecting him to Kyle who is currently swelling with them — who can barely keep himself from leaping on Rank in response to the shove.
Rank raises his hands and takes a step back.
“Oh, now you’re backing off?” exclaims Kyle, his voice seeming to climb in pitch with every word. “How about you back right the fuck out of here?”
“You are an asshole about women,” says Rank.
Kyle is speechless. He flails in disbelief. He too has sisters. His mother is a tenured professor of psychology at McGill and has brought him up to be enlightened. He is one of the only guys on campus who dares, and gets away with, calling himself a feminist. When the student newspaper published a bonehead op-ed criticizing Take Back the Night (the only salient point being: did the night really need reclaiming in a town where the streets got rolled up at 7 p.m.?), Kyle wrote a letter of opposition in support of, as he called them, his “marching sisters.”
You can see all this, these innumerable defences and justifications, jostling around behind his eyes as Kyle’s mouth moves, trying to figure out which one he should articulate first.
“You hit her,” says Rank.
“Who?” shrieks Kyle.
“The highland dancer.”
“Janine? I did not fucking hit Janine.”
“We all heard it. Adam heard it.”
They both look at Adam, who has nothing to say on this front one way or another. Rank has an urge to knock him over. Kyle puts his hands on his hips and leans toward them both.
“We. Were. Having. Sex.”
“It was a slap.”
“You’re gonna hear stuff, Rank, if you guys are gonna sit out here like perverts while I’m in there with a girl. It’s not always gonna be PG. Sorry.”
“It was a slap.”
“I’m not gonna do this,” says Kyle, suddenly in motion. He strides across the room and grabs his jacket. “I’m not gonna go into detail about this with you.” Which Rank finds ironic because under any other circumstances Kyle is happy to go into detail about this very thing. Kyle yanks his bookbag onto one shoulder. His ears glow red as if lit from within.
“You think I hit Janine — if you actually believe that’s something I’m capable of — I tell you what. Find her and ask her. Check her for bruises.”
Rank feels himself losing ground at the same time, and at approximately the same rate, as his anger drains. He hates it. He wants to keep this feeling of being in the right — of being on the verge of righting wrong through sheer force and intimidation. He can’t believe that Kyle is leaving, instead of staying and insisting that Rank leave instead, which would make sense. Through his amber fog, it penetrates Rank’s brain that Kyle can barely speak. That Kyle will either cry or punch him at any moment, and doesn’t know which, and is desperate to leave before they all can find out.
Rank doesn’t want to let it go — he’s not satisfied. Nothing about the confrontation has turned out the way he wanted. He’s about to say something else to Kyle — something that will probably tear them up as friends for good — but Kyle’s gone.
So he says it to Adam. “He treats them like whores.”
“No he doesn’t,” says Adam.
“I can’t believe you’re defending him.”
“Because he doesn’t,” says Adam, flopping back down onto the couch, exhausted from the tension. “He’s just a hound, Rank. He’s a player.”
“He’s a fucking sleaze.”
“He’s a bit of a sleaze,” Adam allows. “But he’s a good guy.”
Rank has ducked into the kitchen and returns in the process of cracking another forty of rye, the sight of which makes Adam groan.
“It’s like,” says Rank, trying to focus his brain. “During the whole Take Back the Night thing last month. There was that poster around campus about virgins and whores. How guys think women can only be one or the other. Remember that?”
Adam’s head is cradled against the top of the couch, and his eyes are closed. The dim light of the room hits his Adam’s apple in such a way as to make it seem enormous. Adam’s apple, thinks Rank. Ha ha. Adam looks as if he’s offering up his throat.
“It’s just because you’re Catholic,” he mutters, eyes still closed.
“What? What’s just because I’m Catholic?”
“The virgin/whore complex. The two Marys. Of course that’s going to resonate all over the place with you.”
“But it’s true, right?” insists Rank. “That’s what he thinks. My old man’s like that too. Virgins or whores, one or the other. Except Kyle thinks they’re all whores. It’s not a virgin/whore complex it’s a . . . whore/whore complex.”
Rank is suddenly pleased with himself. If he can’t right Kyle’s wrong with sheer force, he will do it with the persuasive force of his mind, which seems to be throwing up gems of remarkable lucidity all of a sudden. And he will apply that force to Adam, who for some reason has fallen neatly — in Rank’s perception — into the role of judge to whom Rank must appeal.
“That’s not what he thinks, Rank.”
Rank cannot believe he isn’t getting through to Adam. This argument is gold. The moment he spoke it, the truth of it seemed to sing in the air around his head as if someone had struck a tuning fork.
“It is what he thinks!”
“It’s what you think.”
Rank has poured them each a fresh shot of rye. Now he puts the bottle down and gapes.
“Adam,” he says. “Will you stop lying there with your eyes closed like you’re hoping someone comes along and cuts your throat?”
Adam’s eyes pop open and he raises his head.
“I do not,” says Rank, “have a whore/whore complex.”
“You have the opposite,” says Adam. And has the audacity to lean back and close his eyes again, resuming the exact same posture on the couch, his Adam’s apple towering.
19
08/05/09, 11:21 a.m.
I HAVE NOT THOUGHT about that moment in a very long time. I’ve thought about that night a lot, yes — what happened later. Because that’s the night I told you what I told you as the morning light began to finger its way inside the room, and you put your hand against my head, and after yanking the story from myself like it was a barbed, endless tapeworm I leaned into your palm and, finally, rested. Yes, I’ve been remembering that night off and on ever since I read your book. And I remembered the fight with Kyle the second I locked eyes with him at Winners. But I’d forgotten all about that in-between time, the calming-down period, your enormous Adam’s apple glowing in the shadows, how you told me I had the opposite of a whore/whore complex and next thing I knew I just wanted to open up my throat and down all the alcohol in the world. If I’d thought I could absorb it through my pores, I would have filled up Wade and Kyle’s bathtub and climbed in for a soak.
I didn’t remember it until I started writing about it.
But what’s weird is that I’m sitting here not sure it really happened.
It seems to me it must have. I remember how Kyle’s ears glowed red. I remember the shove, and how he teetered, his face completely blank with disbelief. I’m sure I remember that. But I don’t remember remembering it as I wrote it, if that makes sense. I just wrote it — it spilled out of my head like it had been lodged somewhere in there, way in the back. It didn’t feel like a memory. It just felt like something that was happening in my head as I was typing.
I want to confess that the longer I do this, the stranger it g
ets. Half the time, I’m not sure I’m even getting the story right anymore — yet the whole idea of this little project, you’ll recall, was to ferret out the truth. To take your bullshit version of me, flush it like the steaming turd of half-truths and oversights it was, and replace it with the glorious, terrible, complex, astonishing truth of Reality. I still feel like that’s what I’m doing sometimes. I still find it all pretty complex and terrible. But recently I’ve been getting lost in it. I forget what I’m about. For example, I know it doesn’t seem like it, but I spent about a half-hour trying to figure out the best way to describe your Adam’s apple, how it seemed to glow, enormous in the shadows.
I’m worried that this is how the lying starts. You, for example. Maybe you started off writing your book with the noblest of intentions, wanting to get across something real and significant. Maybe you were holding something in your mind — some sacred value or belief — and thinking to yourself: This, this is what I want most to articulate. This is the most important thing. This is what the world must know. Maybe you actually meant to do good.
And what if this same thing happened to you? All of a sudden, you get sidelined. All of a sudden, you need to get the Adam’s apple exactly right — something totally stupid and insignificant and beside the point. You let it distract you from your noble purpose. Suddenly people in the story are doing and saying things you never meant for them to do or say — and you’re letting it happen, because it’s fun. It’s interesting. And maybe it’s simpler, too. Maybe it’s just simpler to say, “This bad guy, this innate criminal? His mom died, by the way. Yeah, so, poor old Danger Man, he’s had it pretty rough. Anyway, next chapter . . .” Rather than to sit down with the actual person whose actual life events you’re cherry-picking and take the time to peel back his flesh and deal with all the ugly underneath. I get it, Adam. You couldn’t bring yourself to break the skin. Who wants to face the mess below the surface, right?
And so you make stuff up. You get sucked into your own bullshit. You want to see where it’s all going. You let the story take you instead of you taking it in the direction you originally mapped out. The direction that your noble purpose dictates.
The noble purpose gets lost. And maybe, before you know it, you’re screwing over everyone who has ever meant anything to you, without even realizing it. You are changing them, interpreting them, riffing on them, without even asking their permission. Your family, your girlfriends. A bunch of guys you used to be tight with. From any objective standpoint, you’re producing what amounts to a kind of slander. But you can’t even see that anymore. You’re too busy trying to get the Adam’s apple right.
The question is, are you, therefore, an asshole?
Or, let’s put it in metaphysical terms. Is this a sin?
I put it this way because that’s the feeling it gives me — a feeling like I’ve sinned. Not the kind of sin I would have reproached myself for in my evangelical days — when, let’s face it, anything that didn’t serve the greater glory of God was suspect. I’m talking about a deeper, guiltier, Catholic kind of sin. A sort of trespassing.
The truth is, I was as every bit as surprised today, writing about you telling me I had a virgin/virgin complex, as I was when you said it, if you said it, twenty years ago.
In fact I think I’m maybe more surprised today.
And now I’m going to do something I never thought I’d do: cite my father’s parish priest, Father Augustine Waugh, as an authority.
“God love you,” remarked Father Waugh one Monday as I tore the cling-wrap from the Chinet plate of peanut-butter squares he’d set down, “you can’t leave the church, son.”
It was my first week back in town, and the Father had asked if I would be helping my poor disabled dad get to mass next Sunday. Rather than point out that even at his most sprightly Gord rarely made a point of rushing out to Sunday service, I took a bit of pleasure in painting myself as an apostate.
“Haven’t been to mass since high school,” I told him. Since my mother’s death, to be precise. “I’m afraid I left the church behind me long ago, Father.”
And that’s when he hit me with his Hotel California-ism.
“God love you,” he tittered. “You can’t leave the church, son.”
Son. I almost laughed down into his four-years-younger-than-me face.
“Yeah, well,” I said around a square. They were pure sugar, festooned with multicoloured marshmallows, and the sight of them, accompanied by my immediate desire to inhale the plateful, made me feel about seven years old. I turned to put the kettle on before Gord could yell at me to get the Father his tea. “It would seem you can.”
“Nope!” countered Waugh, settling down at the kitchen table. I glanced over at his placid face. Here, too, was faith. Not the raucous, shudder-and-squeal faith of Jimmy Swaggart, but the complacent, immovable dogma of the Catholic Church. Even via Waugh’s mild, dumpling-esque visage, two thousand years of papist absolutism projected itself.
“Yep!” I said, getting irritated only five minutes after Waugh’s arrival — a new record.
“No sir, you can’t. You were baptized, I assume. Took first communion. Confirmed. You’re with us for life.”
Something occurred to me then. “Hey Gord,” I yelled into the next room. “Was I baptized?”
“Of course you were baptized, what in Christ is wrong with you?”
“I’m just wondering because of being adopted.”
“You came into the world surrounded by nuns, sonny boy.”
I frowned. No getting around it; no escape clause. Father Waugh just sat there turning the Chinet plate of squares, smiling liplessly.
And the lousy thing is, he was right. You don’t just decide not to be a Catholic anymore — it doesn’t work that way. Catholicism is something that soaks into your skin like vitamin D. You can’t just stand there as the sun pours down upon you, saying, None for me, thanks. It seeps into your world view; it dictates how you act and everything you think you know. I see this now — thanks to writing down what you told me twenty years ago.
So you were right too, Adam — you’re up there in the Paunchy Sages Club with Father Augustine Waugh. I see it. I admit it. I had then, and have now, a virgin/virgin complex when it comes to women. I had, and have it, because I am, and will always be, a Catholic boy at heart.
There is only one person I can really blame for this.
I can’t believe I tried to depict her to you as a glimmer of light. I’m embarrassed about that now. It’s so obvious. I am very nearly forty years old, have not been inside a Catholic church since 1986, and I’m still as conditioned as a Pavlovian dog. Holy Mary Mother of God. Why didn’t I just put her in virginal robes, describe her ascending into heaven, hands over heart, eyes in the clouds?
All my girlfriends too, every last one. I see it now. You don’t know about them, because I figured I was being a hero. Protecting them from you, and making myself sound like some kind of holy celibate along the lines of Father Waugh in the process, when needless to say — you knew me in school — I’m not. But also, needless to say, Gord wasn’t the only one who considered Kirsten — a girl so inflated by the holy spirit her feet barely ever touched the ground — marriage material. And it’s no accident, I realize now, that she was the only one I ever felt that way about with total certainty.
I can’t remember much about the girls we knew in university. I remember the night we both had sex with whatsherface, and I remember being angry, and I remember you brushing it off with Kyle’s “Paris in the twenties” line although I could tell you were a bit freaked out yourself. But I can’t remember which one of you, exactly, I was pissed at. I can’t remember what I might have done or said or how I might have acted with women to lead you to the conclusion that I had a virgin/virgin complex.
Truth be told, and I never would have admitted this that night, I considered myself at least as much of a player as Kyle. But that’s not how you saw me, clearly. Somehow, before I’d even spoken one word to you
about Sylvie, you called it. You had me pegged.
Even now, speaking to me from twenty years ago, you have me pegged.
Which makes no sense when I think about your book. How is it you could have me so nailed down, and still get everything so wrong?
08/05/09, 2:31 p.m.
Okay so, fuck it. Here’s Kirsten.
Kirsten had her own curse word, tailor-made to be inoffensive to the Lord, which nonetheless she used only in moments of supreme agitation. It always made me howl, reminding me of my mother’s little-used cache of Franco-Ontarian curse words, which in English translation sounded ridiculous, not to mention utterly inoffensive: chalice of the tabernacle! Kirsten’s preference was to take four innocuous “curses” and smash them together as if to enhance their execratory power.
Darnfriggerbumheck!
She had dark hair, enormous blue eyes, and long bangs that stopped precisely at her eyelashes. She cut them herself about once a month, and I don’t know how she got them so straight and perfect every time. They were fantastic bangs, childish and sophisticated all at once. They were also a little naughty, a little Bettie Page. No other girl in the church wore bangs like that, except for some of the younger ones, who wore them with braids. When Kirsten wore them with braids, I’d go a bit nuts.
Kirsten grew up in the prairies and had been saved since the age of eleven. Her parents divorced due to her mother’s whirlwind, torrid infidelity with Jesus Christ. Kirsten’s father was a town engineer who worked practically all the time, and her mother had been lonely, and initiates of my former church, in the small prairie town of Lacombe, Alberta, happened to be practising their guileless, welcoming faith nearby. They held a revival meeting one weekend, featuring a charismatic preacher from the States, and because it was a small town, even the irreligious were interested in coming out to see the fundies roll around. It seemed so deep-south, so voodoo. It was rumoured there might be laying on of hands and speaking in tongues.
