Vinyl Cafe Unplugged

by Stuart McLean

  Margaret had sent the Tamagotchi early that December.

  Was it last Christmas? Or was it the Christmas before?

  “I had to lie to get it,” Margaret said proudly on the telephone.

  “It’s the last Tamagotchi in Cape Breton,” she said.

  Tamagotchis were a big deal that Christmas. Such a deal that they were hard to come by. Margaret phoned all over Cape Breton looking for one, and when she found a store with one left, she asked the clerk to put it aside, to hold it for her. They didn’t do that, he said. In a moment of inspired improvisation Margaret appealed to the clerk’s goodwill. She told him that her grandson was very sick, critically sick. The clerk put the Tamagotchi under the counter. You have to come today, he said.

  When Margaret told her all this, Morley didn’t know what to say.

  Morley doesn’t feel comfortable with those kinds of lies.

  When it finally arrived in Margaret’s Christmas package in early December, Morley worried that the Tamagotchi was jinxed. It would be tempting fate, she thought, to give Sam something that had been bought under those circumstances.

  She agonized about this for days. How much easier she thought, if she had been born Catholic instead of Presbyterian. If she had been born Catholic she could have gone to confession—preferably in a church where they didn’t know her—and she could have asked the priest where on the scale of mortal sins lying to store clerks ranked.

  But Morley wasn’t Catholic, so she couldn’t talk to a priest. All she could do was talk to herself. And worrying that this awful little computer chip might be a death sentence, Morley had hidden it in the box of pants and, without intending to, had forgotten where she had put it.

  She sat on her pile of boxes in the basement and stared at the toy. Then she did something that she was sure the priest would have told her was wrong. She ripped the plastic bubble off its cardboard backing and let the game fall into her hand. The screen was blank. There were two buttons underneath it. She pressed one—nothing happened; she pressed the other. Still nothing happened. She picked up the cardboard packaging that she had dropped onto the floor. There were no instructions written on it. Not even in Japanese. She looked at the toy again and pressed both buttons at once and two things happened simultaneously. A little egg bounced abruptly onto the Tamagotchi screen, and Dave appeared.

  When Morley saw her husband walking across the basement, she slipped the Tamagotchi into her pocket. Maybe if she had already found the blue sweater she would have shared this discovery with him, but she hadn’t, and he didn’t need to know about it. He didn’t need to know that she was the one who had lost the present his mother had sent Sam last Christmas—not now anyway. If she could lose track of a toy, she could, by extension, lose track of a sweater. She slipped the Tamagotchi into her pocket and looked around for cover—for something that might explain why she was sitting on a cardboard box in the basement.

  The only thing within reach was the box of magazines. She picked a magazine out of the box, which happened to be People magazine, and which happened to have a picture of the actor Harrison Ford on the cover.

  It was a casual photograph. Harrison Ford sitting on a porch—maybe at his home. He was wearing jeans and a black T-shirt and nothing on his feet. His feet were the closest thing to the camera. Morley was staring at the picture of Harrison Ford when Dave sat down beside her.

  “He really is something,” she said.

  Dave sat down and peered at the picture over her shoulder.

  “Even the scar is perfect,” said Morley.

  Dave squinted.

  “On his chin,” she said. “He had a car accident when he was twenty-one. He hit the steering wheel with his chin.” She handed him the magazine. “Look at his toes.”

  Dave looked earnestly.

  “They’re perfect,” said Morley. “He must have pedicures.” She wasn’t thinking straight. If she hadn’t been anxious about the sweater and preoccupied with the Tamagotchi, she wouldn’t have said any of that. She knew that just as there are things that men can say among themselves in locker rooms, things that are all right to say when the only thing they are wearing is a jock strap and the only people listening are other men, so too are there things that can be said among women that should not, in the interest of long and happy marriages, be said at home.

  She threw the magazine back in the box.

  “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go upstairs.”

  It took an hour.

  They were watching the news when Dave, without taking his eyes off the television, said, “What’s wrong with my toes?”

  Morley sighed.

  “That’s not what I meant,” she said. “I said, I think he has pedicures.”

  “You said they were perfect toes.”

  “They are perfect toes,” said Morley. “That’s the point . . . I don’t know men who have pedicures.”

  “If you are not attracted to Harrison Ford’s toes, then why are we talking about them?” asked Dave.

  “You brought them up,” said Morley.

  “No,” said Dave, “I brought my toes up. You brought up Harrison Ford’s toes.”

  “Because,” said Morley. She was being very careful here. She was not going to have a fight about Harrison Ford’s toes.

  “Because,” said Morley, “I’ve never heard of a man who has pedicures.”

  Then she said, “I think I would leave you if you started having pedicures.”

  Dave frowned.

  “Well,” said Morley, “I’d be awfully suspicious.”

  While she was getting undressed for bed, Morley remembered the Tamagotchi in her pocket and slipped it into her purse. She would dispose of it the next day—at work.

  She crawled into bed beside her husband. The lights were already off. They were beside each other, but not together. Both of them lying on their backs, both of them staring at the ceiling, both of them absorbed in thought. Just as Morley was slipping away, Dave propped himself up on an elbow.

  “Remember,” he said. “Remember when I killed the snake last summer?”

  Morley grunted softly and turned toward her husband.

  “At the cottage,” he said. “When I killed that snake?”

  Morley nodded.

  Dave said, “Harrison Ford is afraid of snakes, you know.”

  Morley raised her head. “What?”

  Dave said, “It’s like a phobia. He would be chewing on his toes if there was a snake in that picture on the cover of People.”

  Morley dropped her head down on her pillow. “Dave,” she said, “that’s Indiana Jones who’s afraid of snakes.”

  The next morning, the morning after he had found Morley in the basement, Dave set off for work as usual. When he got there he began his usual ritual. He flipped on the lamp by the cash register, hung his windbreaker on the back of the chair behind the counter, dug the float out of a drawer—seventy-five dollars—and stuck it in the till, and he opened his coffee.

  Dave is not really a coffee hound. There was a time, when he was on the road and still smoking, when he used to drink a lot of coffee. First thing he would do when he got up, first thing he did when he got to an arena, was have a coffee—first things first, he used to say.

  These days he often doesn’t drink coffee first thing in the morning, although he always has a cup when he gets to work. Sometimes he brews a pot himself. If he is walking, which he mostly does, he often picks up a cup from a diner along the way. He favors restaurant coffee—old-fashioned restaurant coffee served in thick porcelain diner cups, cups designed to hold the heat. There is something about the flavor of restaurant coffee, something about the color and the taste. The coffee all the ubiquitous and trendy franchises push is too oily, too bitter, too expensive and, mostly, too complicated. Dave drinks his coffee black. If he is feeling like a treat, he might add cream—cream, not milk. He likes the way cream tastes. He likes the way it spiders into the coffee like ink in water.

  Dave believes his morni
ng coffee slows him down as much as picks him up. For Dave, the act of drinking is as important as the drink itself. It’s a mental thing. It’s about taking time, like stopping for breath. It’s about first things first.

  Sometimes Dave reads the newspaper while he drinks his coffee. Sometimes he just sits and thinks. Often he sits and doesn’t think. This particular morning, he pulled a magazine out of his briefcase.

  People magazine.

  He had sneaked it from the basement on his way to work. He flipped to the cover story about Harrison Ford and scanned the pictures. He just about fell off his chair when he saw the shot from The Conversation—the chilling 1974 Francis Ford Coppola classic starring Gene Hackman was one of Dave’s favorite films. He was only aware of Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones and Hans Solo. He was in The Conversation?

  “What?” he said out loud.

  How could he not know this?

  He closed the article and studied the magazine cover. There was no denying Harrison Ford was a good-looking man. He flipped the magazine open and settled down to read the piece.

  “No way,” he said out loud a paragraph later.

  No way Harrison Ford was nearly sixty years old.

  No way a man ten years older than Dave could look that . . . good. And he did look good. He looked natural too. He didn’t have that aura of artificial preservation that lingers around the likes of Dick Clark or George Hamilton.

  “Jesus,” said Dave a paragraph later.

  He still smoked?

  There had to be a mistake. He couldn’t be sixty. It wasn’t . . . natural. There had to be an explanation. There had to be . . . liposuction? Steroids? Cosmetic surgery?

  Three times that day Dave hauled the magazine out from under the counter and showed it to customers.

  “How old do you think he is?” he asked Brian, stabbing the picture of Ford with his finger.

  “Harrison Ford?” said Brian. “Got to love the man. Forty-five?”

  “Exactly,” said Dave. “Exactly.”

  That’s what everyone thought.

  “Guess what color his eyes are?” he asked Brian.

  “Blue?” said Brian.

  “Hazel,” said Dave. “And they change color depending on what he’s wearing.”

  “Jesus,” said Brian. “Who writes his copy?”

  About the same time Dave was flipping through the magazine with Brian, Morley was about to pay for her lunch at a downtown cafeteria. She was fumbling through her purse, looking for her wallet, when her hand landed on the Tamagotchi instead. How many times, she wondered, was she going to forget this thing? She pulled it out and stared at it. The egg she had produced by pushing the two buttons in the basement was rocking back and forth on the little screen. As she watched, it started to rock faster and faster. Then, right before her eyes, right in the cafeteria line—it hatched. Suddenly instead of the egg, there was a little creature pacing back and forth across the screen.

  Morley was mesmerized. She stood in front of the cash register staring at the thing—the egg had hatched into a little animated chicken. The man in the line behind her said, Excuse me, and pushed by her. Morley barely noticed. The little chicken looked out at her and chirped. And the most unexpected thing happened—Morley was hit by a wave of maternal instinct. She was forty-six years old. Her youngest child was ten. And she had just given birth again . . . in public. She looked around to see if anyone had noticed. She paid for her lunch and sat at a table in the corner.

  Before she had a bite of her sandwich—chicken salad—Morley spent fifteen minutes playing with her baby. It took her five minutes of trial and error to figure out which buttons to press to feed it. A few more to figure out how to clean its cage. When she finally put the Tamagotchi down, she felt simultaneously proud and ashamed. She stuffed it back in her purse, ate her sandwich and went back to work. Twice in the afternoon she pulled it out.

  Caring for it at work was easy enough. Caring for it at home was more complicated. She hadn’t told anyone about it. How could she? As the days passed, the chicken got more and more demanding.

  “Excuse me,” she said two days later when it began to chirp while she was washing the dishes. She went to the bathroom and locked the door. She pulled the toy out of her pocket and pressed the buttons. She knew it was ridiculous, but she wasn’t about to let a chicken starve to death in her house.

  Twenty minutes later while she was straightening out the pile of shoes by the front door, the Tamagotchi chirped again. She was frowning as she headed back to the bathroom.

  “Are you okay?” asked Dave, who was walking out as she was walking in.

  Morley kept the Tamagotchi in her T-shirt drawer at night. It was night three when it chirped from the bureau. Dave, who was reading a magazine in bed, looked up, puzzled.

  Morley said, “It’s a stopwatch I brought from work.”

  She hopped over to the dresser, scooped her Tamagotchi and took it into the bathroom, carefully closing the door behind her. She looked at the chicken with exasperation.

  “You can’t be serious,” she said. “I just fed you.”

  Dave was too busy with his own thoughts to wonder what Morley was up to. The picture of Harrison Ford on the cover of People had rattled him. He had brought the magazine home from work so he could study it. It was hidden under a pile of books on his side of the bed. The more Dave stared at the picture—the more he compared himself to Harrison Ford—the more he was forced to face the fact that he had let himself go soft.

  Before he climbed into bed Dave had stood in front of the full-length bedroom mirror, wearing only his underwear. Turning sideways, he gazed at his belly in despair. Where had it come from? He didn’t remember it sticking out like that. When he stared at his face in the bathroom mirror it seemed even softer. He put his fingers on his cheeks and pushed his skin up toward his ears. It made him look startlingly younger. He needed a facelift! He was getting old and soft.

  Harrison Ford didn’t look old and soft. Harrison Ford seemed to have defied the ravages of age. Harrison Ford seemed to have stopped time. To get even half as fit as Harrison Ford, Dave figured he would have to change his diet, hire a personal trainer and spend hours a day under a bank of sun lamps. Fat chance.

  Far easier to wallow in a pool of self-loathing.

  He was standing in the bathroom the next morning, brushing his teeth, staring down at his ugly feet and loathing them, when he realized there was something he could do. He pulled his belly in and hauled his shoulders back. If he couldn’t have Harrison Ford’s body, at least he could have his toes. He looked down at his feet again and wiggled them. Just as Betty Friedan had cleared the way for many women to walk proudly out of their kitchens and into the workplace, Harrison Ford had made it possible for Dave to have a pedicure. All he had to do was make sure it wasn’t at some neighborhood place where he might be recognized.

  It was an impulse born as much from curiosity as insecurity. Dave knew Morley wasn’t going to leave him because some movie star had prettier feet. It had just never occurred to Dave that a man could have his nails done. It seemed like a waste of money to pay someone to cut your nails—If God had wanted me to have pedicures, thought Dave, why would he have given me teeth?

  When Dave got to work he hauled out the yellow pages. The woman at the first place said, “I don’t know if we do men. No one has ever asked.” There was no confusion at the second salon. “We do men’s hands but not their feet,” said the receptionist. And then she added mysteriously, “We don’t wax men either.”

  It had taken Dave all morning to gather the courage to make these calls. But once he had started, nothing was going to stop him. He stared at the ads. “German pedicures,” said the one at the top of the page.

  “When do you want to come?” asked the woman. Dave did not ask what a German pedicure involved. He didn’t want to look stupid.

  He didn’t ask about anything until it was way too late—until he was sitting in a chair so space-age and contoured that it
might have been pried out of the shuttle. His feet were soaking in water, his eyes were glued to the woman who had introduced herself as Ulla. He watched Ulla’s every move as she laid out an assortment of implements—tools that looked as if they belonged in a surgery. She plugged in what appeared to be a router, and plucked Dave’s right foot out of the water.

  “We begin,” she said, “by grinding the calluses.”

  Morley had always said that having her feet done was “the best.” Once when she said that, Dave had asked, “Better than a massage?” And Morley had said, “Way better. Better than anything.”

  Because he didn’t tell Morley that he had gone for a pedicure, Dave was not able to ask her how allowing someone to work on the soles of her feet with power tools could possibly be thought of in the same context as a massage. The very idea that his wife could enjoy this cast her in a new and worrying light. If this, thought Dave, what else?

  But he didn’t tell her about the pedicure. Couldn’t tell her. Not because his feet looked bad. Because they looked so darn good. They were the best-looking part of him. Dave didn’t know that Ulla would put nail polish on his toes. His toes looked as though they had been Varathaned. They looked so much better than any other part of his body that they only intensified his shame.