Double Talk
Page 13
In answer to what had brought me to their rocky shores, I told them I wanted to be a marine biologist. I said it was my plan to study whales and that I was a passionate admirer of Greenpeace, a confession which seemed to score points with Violet, but which Nancy seemed to find hilarious.
Replying to questions about my living situation, I told them about Wallace and Geoff. They thought it was cool that I was living with two gay men. And suddenly it was cool.
When it was Violet’s turn to answer my questions, she told me that she was from Vancouver Island, and that she had come down to Newfoundland to do a teaching degree, but was getting more interested in taking a degree in women’s studies. “But you’ll have to get that awful haircut,” I said, chancing that I wouldn’t offend her. I didn’t. She actually laughed. I had never thought of myself as being funny. Encouraged, I tried out another joke on the only occasion I found myself alone with her that evening — an accidental meeting outside the bathroom door: “How do you titillate an ocelot?”
“How do you titillate an ocelot?” she repeated, laying her hand on my arm, her eyes sparkling.
“You oscillate its tits a lot.”
When she laughed she opened her mouth so wide that I could see the little thingy at the back of her throat. Our eyes locked for a few moments — the possibility of tonsil hockey presented, then retreated. Afterwards, I reminded myself that her touching my arm meant nothing — North American girls were outgoing. After all, she touched Nancy as well; in fact, they spent half the evening sitting in each other’s laps.
Nancy, as it turned out, was harder to read, despite giving the appearance of being wide, wide open. She told me that she was from Patrick’s Cove and that her only dream in life was to get herself a job with the federal government, ideally with time off in the summer for the speedboat fishery. She was flirtatious, and yet I knew immediately that I wasn’t interested in her. Her hairy legs really turned me off, and she was doughy looking.
“You should see her naked,” Keppie said to me, at another get-together several months later, “she’s like a big touton.”
At some point in the evening I must have made a decision: Nancy was a definite no, while Violet was a definite maybe.
But then the night took a turn for the worse. It was shortly before midnight and the party had begun to wind down. Violet and Nancy had just left. “We’re heading back to Violet’s residence room to do unspeakable things to each other,” said Nancy.
“I wants pictures,” said Keppie.
We were down to our last six-pack and the munchies had set in. “My son,” said Devlin, suddenly sounding more Newfoundland than he had sounded all evening, “I’d eat the arse of a child through a chair.”
“I’d eat the left leg of the lamb of God,” said Keppie, not to be outdone.
We raided the fridge. It was almost empty.
“Grocery day tomorrow,” said Keppie, rummaging in the freezer. “Aha, what have we here?” He wrestled a large box from under bags of frozen peas and corn. “McCain’s Coconut Cream Pie.”
Devlin licked his lips. “I haven’t had one of those since grade six.”
“It has to thaw out first,” said Keppie, shucking it out of its cardboard sleeve and leaving the white pie in the middle of the table.
Just then the front door swung in and Bill Cheeseman stumbled into the hall, his face red from the cold. He was carrying two six-packs. He didn’t take off his boots; instead he marched straight into the kitchen, leaving a trail of footprints behind him.
“Bill, b’y, I thought you were going to work?” said Devlin.
“I was on my way. I got the bus to the mall and I was halfway up Kenmount Road when I decided, Fuck it, why should I be at work when everyone else is partying? The manager is a goddamn son of a bitch, anyway. Then, on my way back, I ran into Ronnie — you remember Ronnie with the ferret — and we decided to go for a game of pool.”
“Right on, Bill, sticking it to the man!” said Devlin, raising his hand for a high-five.
Keppie was less enthusiastic. “Things were just winding down.”
“Ah, come on, Keppie, b’y. There’s always time for a few more.”
Keppie shifted uneasily in his seat. Devlin gave me a sly wink, as if to say: You’re about to see something now.
Bill ripped open one of the boxes of Blue Star and handed beers to Keppie and Devlin. He took one out for himself. Then, reaching in a third time, he grabbed one of the stubby bottles by the neck and, grinning, jabbed it towards me. “You wants one, too, I suppose.”
The bottle seemed to come at me in slow motion. In fact, I was experiencing everything as if in slow motion. I had the feeling that I knew what Bill Cheeseman was going to do even before he did it. I cocked an eyebrow. “Well, when you ask so nicely.”
Keppie looked a little embarrassed. Devlin seemed to be enjoying the prospect of a Bill Cheeseman encore.
“You want one or not, Ireland?”
“Lay it on me, padner.”
“You seems to think you’re some smart … What’s your name again?”
“Brian.”
“Bri-onn.”
I wasn’t sure if he pronounced my name that way because of his accent or because he was drunk or because he was trying to take the piss.
“Chill out, Bill, fuck’s sake,” said Keppie.
Bill shrugged, and sat down.
They talked about hockey. Montreal had beaten Toronto earlier that night. Bill thought Toronto still had a chance of reaching the playoffs and began to list the strengths and weaknesses of the various players. He talked non-stop for what felt like half an hour, stopping only long enough to open more beer. He drank three bottles in the time it took me to drink one. When he turned his attention to me again his eyes were stone cold. “The Habs versus the Leafs,” he said. “It don’t get much better than that.”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“Want another beer?”
“No thanks.”
“Why not? My beer not good enough?”
“I’ve had enough.”
“You’ve had enough? What kind of Irishman are you?”
I debated whether I should explain myself and decided not to.
“Come to think of it, Brian, your accent don’t sound right to me. I’ve met plenty of people from Ireland and yours don’t seem right.”
I pulled a packet of cigarettes from my pocket and lit one.
“What’s wrong, b’y? Cat got your tongue?”
“For the love of God, Bill, give it up or I’m going to boot your arse out on the street,” said Keppie.
“Okay. Okay, my old buddy. Just asking a question. Just asking a question. No need to get yourself in a knot.”
“So who are ya for then, Ireland — the Habs or the Leafs?”
“I don’t know.”
Bill shrugged his shoulders. “You’re some hard to get along with.” Both Keppie and Devlin looked at me.
“The Leaves.”
“The wha?”
“The Leaves.”
Bill slapped his knee and then he slapped the table so hard all the empty beer bottles hopped into the air. And all the while he laughed he gave the sly eye to Keppie and Devlin, who were trying hard not to laugh along with him.
“The Leaves! Isn’t that the best ever? The Toronto Maple Leaves!”
What had I said that was so funny to them?
Finally, when Bill stopped braying, Keppie leaned across the table and said, “It’s the Leafs, b’y. The Toronto Maple Leafs.”
“You’re some stunned, my buddy,” said Bill.
“Y’know, Bill, no one in Ireland plays ice hockey.”
“You don’t have no hockey over in Ireland. My son, you’d be some sight on a hockey team. You’d be some little pussy.”
I knew I should have been angry, but the way he said “pussy,” while sticking out his big horse lips, made me want to laugh.
“So you’re a hockey player then? What position do you play?”
I imagined myself picking up the coconut cream pie and smashing it as hard as I could into his stupid-looking face. Here’s a new goalie mask for you, then, I wanted to say. I imagined the crackling sound the tinfoil pie plate made as it crumpled. I imagined cream and crumbs flying across the table, spattering Keppie and Devlin, both of whom would look at me in astonishment. I imagined Bill Cheeseman jumping to his feet, knocking his chair halfway across the kitchen. I imagined bracing myself for his punch, watching his fist rise up to his ear, then freeze in mid-air.
But as it turned out I didn’t have time to follow through on this fantasy.
“What in frig is going on, Keppie?” Keppie’s father was standing at the bottom of the stairs, his hands on his hips.
“Nothing,” said Keppie.
“Hi, Mr. Gushue,” said Bill. I imagined Bill grinning through his cream facial and giving an absurd little wave.
“It’s time for you all to go home.”
V
Violet Budd
Slamming through the door earlier that evening, Violet glanced quickly at Brian’s exclamation-studded note, but with Lucy whining that she had left Mr. Lamb at Nancy’s and Joe smelling like a ripe skunk, she didn’t have time to separate and weigh her feelings about it. Given what was at stake, she knew she should have been glad his presentation went so well; and yet all she could think was that he had torn a page from the W section of her leather-bound address book.
Three hours later, the kids in bed, she reads his note for the second time. If she is expecting an effervescent rush of happiness to flood her extremities with blood and send a tingle through her skin, she is sorely disappointed. The double-bond paper shakes in her grip. She is angry, unable to get past one glaring fact: instead of staying home to celebrate with his family, he chose to go downtown with Frank James.
Frank James. Violet is sick of the name. Brian can’t seem to get enough of his new old best buddy. Frank has recently returned to St. John’s after a decade in Toronto. Frank James, whose brimming pupils — at least back in their student days — always seemed perpetually about to discharge a clot of tadpoles; Frank James, whose all-natural product set many a young prince on the path to becoming a frog; Frank fucking James, she thinks, who in the intervening years — it is rumoured — had acquired a taste for expensive suits and new product lines.
She drops the note, watches it stick to the overlapping Olympic rings their glasses made on the table top. Rum, she suspects. There is a wet dishcloth abandoned on the Bombay Company sideboard, and a burnt-out cone of incense sits in the fire grate. The window next to the table is slightly ajar. She thinks she can smell hash. But more disturbing to her are the shards of pink plastic on the carpet. Like someone cracked open a disposable ladies’ razor. She scans the table surface for snow-white flecks, but finds none. Still, she is worried. If they had gotten that smashed that early, she wonders, what might they have gotten up to once they drank their way through happy hour?
The image of a stripper turning counterclockwise around a brass pole enters Violet’s mind, becomes yet another ingredient in the whirlpool of images that for hours has dizzied her brain, a whirlpool that also contains Stephanie and Marcella circling one another in her office, Nancy’s angry face at lunchtime as the taxi pulled a U-turn, and Wallace, poor bloated Wallace, turning helplessly on the very rim of the sinkhole.
Violet feels sick to her stomach. She wants the daydream-nightmare carousel to stop. She had hoped to fall asleep while putting Lucy and Joe down for the night, but not even her favourite lullaby, “Edelweiss,” sung nine times, could calm her racing thoughts.
Violet’s day had begun so differently. She awoke with a sense of possibility. The thought of their lives taking a turn for the better felt tangibly present. It was the day of Brian’s big presentation. If Violet was surprised that Brian had bid on a public tender to redesign the provincial government’s social services’ website, she was floored — though no more than he was — when he was invited by a monotonous-voiced Mr. Duffy, executive assistant to the ADM, to present his design before a panel of bureaucrats. “Oh-my-God,” Brian said, as they played the phone message for the third or fourth time, “it’s Marvin the Paranoid Android. He has to be a blood relative of the minister. Has to be.”
Violet knew it was a make-or-break day for Brian — for them. Paying their MasterCard bill by Visa and their Visa bill by MasterCard was becoming too much of a habit. They needed a second income. Brian had been a stay-at-home-dad since Violet’s maternity leave ran out a month earlier. Violet thought he was doing great with it — Joe being such an easy baby — though she knew Brian had no long-term plan to continue in the role. He wanted his business to take off. He wanted to be seen in the eyes of the world as someone.
Kissing him goodbye as she left the house that morning, Violet couldn’t help noticing how thin his freshly shaved neck looked inside his dress shirt collar. His little-worn suit seemed to deflate around his bones when she hugged him. She whispered in his ear that it would be fine, that they would love him. But secretly she wondered. She had no way of judging the presentation he had spent weeks preparing. He hadn’t allowed her even a glimpse of it. All he would say was that he was bringing Dante’s Inferno to the provincial government.
Violet’s day, which had started so well, with an easy handover of the kids to Nancy, with the bus being on time, with her and Brian being so pumped about the possibility of his landing a good job, took a turn for the worse at exactly ten minutes past ten o’clock, the precise moment the HR Manager and the Freight Forwarding Manager stepped into her office. Hindsight being 20-20, Violet can now see that there were omens she should have read. Just a few minutes earlier, as she reclined in her ergonomic chair, looking up at the window — her office is half above ground, and the only view its one window usually afforded is of weeds and grass stalks — her pigeon friend came knocking for the third time that week. She knew it was the same pigeon because it had some kind of globular growth at the top of its beak that seemed to be eating into its flesh, giving its red-rimmed eye a startled, pulled open look. At the time, she had no sense that it was a portentous pigeon, though she did note how it pecked rhythmically on the plate glass, repeating what was beginning to strike her as a pattern. In fact, Violet had just begun to toy with the idea of counting the number of taps it made each time, when an approaching pedestrian sent it flapping away. And what about that pedestrian, she wondered afterwards, presaging or what? That courier in loose fitting shorts who, squatting to tie the variegated laces on his trainers, inadvertently afforded her a glimpse of his dangling scrotum.
“Oh-my-God,” her assistant squealed, when Violet told her about it at break time: “A drive-by tea-bagging.”
The day which began so well for Violet had spun out of control. And it is still spinning at ten o’clock that night when she climbs the stairs to Brian’s study, clutching a beer in one hand and his written instructions about how to find his presentation in the other. She is still angry that he refused to show her his design while it was a work in progress. Angry and puzzled — Is his confidence so damaged? she wonders. Is there something about her that has a corrupting effect on him?
She flips the power switch on his new Pentium computer. She watches as the screen lights with that lovely ascending light-to-dark spectrum of blue that always has a calming effect on her, almost always makes her think of first light on a summer’s day. Tonight, though, it makes her feel melancholy, brings to mind Oscar Wilde’s maudlin lines, written soon after his release from prison: “Upon that little tent of blue/ which prisoners call the sky.”
Computers: had there ever been an invention that promised so much while delivering so little? Well, television, maybe, she thinks. It just amazes her that so many people choose to see the world through this little porthole — her own husband for one. He spends endless hours basking in the l
ight of that flickering screen. He says the Internet gives him a view on the entire planet. “But what are you doing, what are you looking at for all those hours?” she asks. He never gives her a satisfactory answer.
“You just don’t get it,” he says, “it’s more about the journey, the connections, the possibilities.”
Violet watches Brian’s desktop light up with rows of familiar software icons. She feels again the presence of Marcella Squires, HR Manager and ex figure-skating champion, and Stephanie Northcott, Freight Forwarding Manager and mainstay of the local Indie Rock scene. She keeps circling back to the moment, shortly before coffee break, when they entered her office unannounced. Again, she smells Marcella’s structured deodorant jostling with Stephanie’s cloud of patchouli. She notes Marcella’s crisp suit, stiletto heels, her sixty-year-old red hair and the set of her jaw. She recognizes Stephanie’s powerful shoulders and low centre of gravity — Who was it, Violet wonders, that said ninety percent of communication is non-verbal? She thinks about Dave, their CEO, and the day that she, a new hire, told him she was pregnant, how even as he smiled and offered congratulations he stuck out his coffee-bloated gut in an obscene parody of gestation. It was obvious to her from that one gesture that he did not approve of maternity leave. And it was obvious from Stephanie and Marcella’s rigid body language that they had come to a serious impasse, although in their case it was probably over something trivial.
Sometimes the workplace just gets to Violet — the niggardliness of it. And it has only gotten worse since Joe was born. Very little of what happens there seems important to her anymore. At any given hour of the workday — it makes no matter if she’s in a meeting or alone in her office — she can plunge into self-pity. “It’s like my inner talk gets stuck in a loop,” she tells Nancy. “I keep asking myself over and over why I’m there instead of at home with my children.” Violet has coined a name for her condition: workolepsy. And that morning she was stricken by it at the exact moment she was supposed to be paying attention to the two women standing in front of her. Suddenly, between the filing cabinet and the coffee maker (as in optical tests demonstrating the existence of blind spots) there was only a patch of beige carpet where both women had been. By the time Violet snapped back to attention, bantamweight Stephanie was on her feet, her crimson-tipped Mohawk bristling as she shook her fist in Marcella’s face while uttering a remarkably fluent stream of obscenities.