The Petty Details of So-And-So's Life

by Camilla Gibb

  Emma just stared at Andrew. Where the fuck did he get all those words? All those questions? They seemed to come naturally to him, an endless stream of conversational openers and possibilities. “That’s very interesting,” she said to him.

  “Isn’t it?” he grinned.

  So Emma began asking questions, even though she didn’t really know what she was asking questions about. It didn’t quite work at first.

  “I disagree. The Americans shouldn’t even think about stepping into the middle of that mess,” Annelisa said, arguing with Russell.

  “Have you always felt that way?” Emma asked, as she’d practised.

  “Um. Sorry, Emma? What do you mean ‘always’? They only announced the possibility of their intervention this morning.”

  Emma blushed.

  “It’s as simple as E=mc2,” Russell said.

  “You seem to have quite a passionate view on the subject, Russell.” Emma felt she was gaining new ground.

  “Well, not exactly passionate,” Russell coughed. “Pretty straightforward, really. I mean, it’s obvious if you sit down and add up the figures.”

  Stupid, Emma, she chastised herself. Andrew made it seem so easy.

  “No, Annelisa. Hess was really a minor player by that point. Hitler just kept him in the public eye out of personal loyalty. Payback for the early days.”

  “Oh,” Emma brightened. “He was the guy who wrote that book, right? You know, Andrew, you gave it to me.”

  “You mean Siddhartha? Emma, that was Hermann Hesse. They’re talking about Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy führer.”

  “Right,” Emma nodded. What a humiliating exercise this was, still, although there were more misses than hits, she was encouraged by the fact that even when she missed, people actually replied. The question mark had returned to her and she discovered it had a purpose she’d never known. Questions had the power to take you places. With the return of the question mark Emma’s world was becoming infinitely bigger.

  And then Russell turned to her with a question. “What are you planning on studying at university, Emma?”

  Emma gulped. No one in her own family had ever taken much interest in what she was going to do with her life, in fact, she’d never even really considered that life was anything more than all days past culminating in today. “In university?”

  “Yes, you’re not far off. You’ll make the most of it if you go in with a clear idea of what you want to study. You can do a general liberal arts degree, but I don’t think that’s the way to go.”

  “No, of course,” she agreed. She was making a huge mental leap, right over the question they didn’t even ask—whether she even wanted to go to university. “I don’t know if I know yet,” she finally replied.

  “Any ideas?” Russell encouraged. She looked blank. “What excites you?” he continued. “What do you have big questions about?”

  “Hmm. Well. Why dinosaurs disappeared. Whether they’ve discovered all the great tombs of ancient Egypt.”

  “Archaeology,” he nodded, flattered.

  “Yes,” she said, much to her amazement. There it was: her daydreams, the dinosaur tooth around her neck, her fascination with ruins and other lives all captured in a single word, a respectable word with a future. She felt an enormous sense of relief and looked at Russell with a smile of gratitude.

  Russell dragged dusty book after dusty book off his shelves and said, “Thought these might interest you. This one’s a little old, but most of the superstructure was unearthed by 1923 so the basics are here.” And so she read about burial customs and Mesopotamia and the discovery of stone tablets with the oldest alphabets in the world. She was enchanted, and that wonder showed in her face. Annelisa even started to look at her slightly differently, as if she were worthier somehow.

  It was becoming clear that by going to university she would be making a choice between slamming the door every morning and drinking herself to sleep every night and arguing with people at the dinner table. Argument would never be easy for her: this new language, although it had started to become intelligible, would never feel warm or familiar, but it was a passport to somewhere else where life looked like an elevator ride—push a button and reach a destination—rather than an endless ride on a merry-go-round in a decrepit playground. No matter how awkward, it was the way out of Niagara Falls. She’d be a pioneer of sorts—taking the well-worn path of relatives not her own to a place she might actually find belonging.

  Beach

  “It’s like she thinks she’s found a prince and she’s gone off to live in his castle,” Blue said to his mother. Ever since she’d met Andrew, she’d become all big-lady speak, started using words like “consternation” (which sounded like a painful crap to him) and “immaterial” (which made him think of Madonna) and talking about going to university.

  “Your sister’s just got class pretensions,” Elaine said drolly. Elaine was actually in shock, stunned by Emma’s pronouncement that she was moving into Andrew’s house. It wasn’t the move but the way Emma explained it that bewildered her. Neither Blue nor Elaine could believe how pompous she had begun to sound.

  “The environment is just more conducive for what I want to accomplish,” Emma had said.

  Pardon? Who do you think you are? Elaine thought, before saying, “You do what you need to do.” Fly, my little chickadee. See how far it gets you. But at some level, Elaine was relieved, unburdened. She started to talk to Blue like he was an ally. “Your father and I built our lives on the idea of rejecting that sort of bourgeois existence,” she said to Blue. “I had no idea Emma was that way inclined.”

  “I think she caught it, this bourgeois thing, whatever the hell that is exactly, from Andrew. I don’t like him,” he said. Andrew reminded him of an android: a big boring brain housed in a casing without soul or fire. Blue saw his sister running, separating, detaching herself. Orbiting around some idealized planet. Leaving Oliver in the dust. Leaving Blue to sweep up.

  Blue couldn’t help noticing that this was the first time in years Elaine had mentioned Oliver without lambasting him. She sounded wistful, almost affectionate. Blue might have been the only person on earth who knew where Oliver was. Only Oliver wasn’t technically Oliver any more: he’d cut up all the ID he’d ever owned and was changing his name more often than most people change their clothes. He wasn’t exactly living on the street—he was squatting in abandoned warehouses on the shores of Lake Ontario, never staying anywhere for long. He was living among stray dogs and rotten fruit and had given up on the basics like personal hygiene.

  “How is your father, anyway?” Elaine asked for the first time ever.

  Blue was so shocked by this that he didn’t immediately answer. “Ma, you didn’t really mean to ask me that, did you? I mean, you don’t really want to know, do you?”

  “Just curious,” she said. “I know you see him.”

  “Yeah, well …”

  “It’s all right, you don’t have to tell me anything.”

  “Well, he’s not too good.”

  “All right, don’t tell me,” she said then, realizing that she couldn’t really bear to know.

  It had taken some time for Blue to locate Oliver. He had only one clue: “the beach” Oliver had mentioned on the back of the postcard from Toronto. He could picture the waves of Lake Ontario lapping against his father’s face and eroding his features. Dead fish sticking out of his pocket and seagull feathers in his hair. With this image in mind, Blue had started taking the bus to Toronto every weekend and combing the shore. He started in Etobicoke, at the city’s western edge, determined to make his way east across the entire width of the city until he found his father. After two months of carrying an old picture of Oliver around, he finally found someone who thought they recognized the sunburnt man holding a chainsaw in the photograph. A photo taken in their backyard the summer that Oliver had declared he was going to fell the land.

  “The land?” Elaine had mocked. “It’s a patch of grass, Oliver. Who
do you think you are? Davy Crockett?”

  “It’s our patch of grass, Elaine. And I’m going to clear it.”

  “For what?”

  “You’ll just have to trust me.”

  “Right,” she had said, slamming the back door as she marched into the house.

  “Will you take a snap of your old man?” he had asked his son then. “For posterity?”

  “I know this guy,” a waitress in a nearly deserted coffee shop nodded. Blue was sitting in the shop, which was located in an industrial wasteland, warming himself on the way toward Cherry Beach. “He’s a semi-regular,” she said. “Takes his coffee black. One day you can’t shut him up, the next day he pretends he doesn’t know you. He’s working on some big project for the government—inventing some kind of security system or something. I don’t know.”

  It was the word “inventing” that triggered Blue. “I gotta find this guy,” Blue told the waitress.

  “He owe you money or something?”

  “No. He’s my dad.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope.”

  “Well, you look nothing like the guy. You’re a real cutie,” she said flirtatiously.

  “So, how often does he come round?” Blue said, trying not to turn red.

  “Once, maybe twice a week.”

  “Anybody else around here know him?”

  “Nah. The guy’s a loner.”

  “Well, thank you,” he said to her. “I really mean it.”

  “Sure thing. Any time. Come back and have a beer later, or something. I’m here until six.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” Blue blushed, reaching for money to pay for his breakfast.

  “It’s on me, okay?” she said, putting her hand on his.

  “But—”

  “Really,” she insisted. “It’s not every day a guy finds his dad, eh?”

  “Well, I haven’t found him yet.”

  “All right. Close, though. So when you really find him, I’ll give you extra bacon with your eggs.”

  “Thanks,” he said, sliding off his stool and walking out the door. He turned around and looked back through the glass once he was outside.

  She waved and pointed to her name tag. “My name’s Faith,” she mouthed.

  “Lou,” he said, pointing at himself.

  After a day of wandering around Cherry Beach, Blue did return to the coffee shop. He was grateful for Faith’s face, not exactly familiar, but less foreign and less hard than all of the others he had passed that day. “I just wanted to say that if you do see my dad, don’t tell him I was in here looking for him, okay?”

  “Sure,” she shrugged. “Is he in trouble?”

  “No, not really. I just think it might freak him out if he knew I was around. I don’t want him to take off. It’s taken me months to get this close to him.”

  “What’s he running from?”

  “I don’t know exactly.”

  “My dad took off, too,” she nodded. “What a dickhead. My mum was pregnant with my sisters then—she had twins actually. I was a twin but the other one died.”

  “Sorry,” said Blue.

  “Nothin’ to be sorry for. It’s just the way it goes.”

  “Pretty freaky though when it’s your twin. I mean, like the other half of you.”

  “Nah. I think that’s just sentimental. Twins only feel like twins because people treat them like twins.”

  “You don’t think they have some kind of special psychic connection or something?” he asked hopefully.

  “I think they think they do because people always tell them they’re so alike,” she stated matter-of-factly.

  “Well, sometimes I have that with my sister—only she’s not my twin.”

  “Why do you think that is?”

  “Dunno. We invented this whole kind of language when we were kids. We used to make up words and speak in fragments but we understood each other perfectly. Sometimes we didn’t even have to speak at all.”

  “So you’re a mind reader?” she said coyly, raising her eyebrows.

  “Nah,” he laughed, and looked down at the countertop, embarrassed.

  “Come on,” she provoked. “Try.” She leaned down with her elbows on the countertop in front of him, all brown cleavage in a white blouse and peach lip gloss. She was red-haired and he noticed that the freckles cascaded from her face, down her neck, and plunged between her breasts. “Why don’t you try and tell me what I’m thinking.”

  “This is like something out of a movie,” Blue smiled shyly.

  “It would be if I did this,” she said, unbuttoning her top button and licking her lips.

  They both laughed then and he took a clumsy sip of his beer.

  “I’m off now,” she said, nodding her head backwards at the clock. “So, ah, you want to come with me?” she smiled.

  It was the first night Blue had ever spent with a woman. And Faith was a woman—she was twenty-five years old and she had her own apartment and a beat-up little car without a muffler. Her apartment was full of paintings of nude women. She said they were self-portraits she’d done although none of them looked the slightest bit like her.

  It was a hot night but Blue felt embarrassed to take off his shirt, even after they had tumbled down onto the mattress on the floor with their jeans around their ankles.

  “What’s the matter, baby?” she asked him. “You got some horrible scar under there? You got a third nipple or something?”

  “Gross, no,” he shuddered. “I’m just a little shy, I guess. Sorry.”

  “You don’t kiss like a shy boy,” she said, clenching his tongue between her teeth.

  “It’s just …” he hesitated. “Well, I’m a virgin.”

  “I know, sweet pea. So am I.”

  “You’re not,” he said, surprised.

  “No, I’m not,” she conceded. “And I have a boyfriend. But I could be a virgin without a boyfriend if that would make you feel more comfortable.”

  “I feel comfortable,” he said.

  “We’ll go slow. We’ve got all night,” she said, wrapping her leg around his naked thigh. She moved her smooth leg up and down his calf and they kissed, tongues on tongues and teeth and lips for some time before she began moving her crotch against him. He thought of Emma on top of him in the basement. This was sort of the same, technically anyway, but entirely different in the feeling department. He could feel his cock hard and thick between them, Faith positioning herself on top of it and groaning. He stared at her lips and her breasts as she moved up and down the length of him.

  “Could you come this way?” she asked him after a while.

  “Uh-huh. If you kept doing that,” he said.

  “I could come this way, too,” she said so deeply that he had to moan.

  He began to get braver, pushing his pelvis up into her, closing his eyes, breathing deeper, until they burst with the seriousness of themselves into laughter.

  Afterwards, they cuddled and whispered in the dark. “I envy the girl who gets to love you for a lifetime,” Faith said as she lay in his arms.

  “Was that really okay?” he asked.

  “Oh, honey.” She stroked the sweat from his face. “It was so sweet. It was perfect.”

  He lay awake that night in a strange city on the mattress of a girl he’d only met that day and wondered if Oliver ever had moments like this. Moments of being suspended seductively in a space between bliss and uncertainty; a place worth the risk of staying because there was nowhere else you would rather be even though there were plenty of safer places to go. She was nice to him, this grown-up girl with the beat-up car and the freckles on her breasts.

  He showered in the morning and she greeted him with a towel and a protein shake. “For you, big boy,” she said. “ ’Cause you’ll need your strength today.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I just have a feeling.”

  “About my dad?”

  “Just a feeling,” she repeated.

  He began t
o believe in women’s intuition that day. Sure enough, Oliver walked in the restaurant around eleven o’clock that morning and took a seat in the booth in the corner. Faith raised her eyebrows and Blue turned around slowly and saw a man with thick grey hair, working intently on a crossword puzzle. Blue felt short of breath at the sight of him and the buzz of the fluorescent light above grew as loud as cicadas on a hot summer day. He took a couple of deep breaths, but he couldn’t stop the light from breaking up into bee-sized bits. Suddenly, he was in the middle of a swarm of black-and-yellow hornets.

  “You okay?” Faith asked him.

  “Uh-huh,” Blue nodded, although he felt like he was on the verge of throwing up.

  “Just take it easy,” she said, putting a hand on his shoulder.

  He sat there for a minute as long as a lifetime with his eyes closed. He tried to remember who he was and why he was there. You’re not a fucking faggot, are you? rang in his head. “No. I’m not a faggot. I’m Blue. I’m a boy. I’m your son. You’re my dad,” he said to himself. After a night with Faith, he was sure of it. He repeated this, looked over at Faith, and the hornets began to retreat. He saw the smoke-filled sunlight around him and stood up and walked to the corner of the room.

  “Dad?” he said, standing beside the booth.

  Oliver looked up and squinted at him. “Blue. Huh. Well, well. Small world, isn’t it?” He was so nonplussed at seeing his son that Blue wondered whether time and space had collapsed for him.

  “Can I sit down?” he asked.

  Oliver shrugged. “It’s a free world.”

  “How are you doing, Dad?” Blue said, sliding onto the red vinyl across from his father.

  “I’m all right. Just about done this crossword. What do you make of this: ‘Cantankerous just before Christmas in Sweden.’ Eight letters.”

  Blue just stared at him.