“Surprise.” Ann opens the door armed with two magnums of South African wine. She throws both arms around Vincent and drowns him in Taboo. Her body is warm and giving. Vincent’s brain has turned to Seven-Up.
“I can see the party has already started. Am I too late?” Vincent recognizes the voice. Someone has been hot-wiring reality. Arlene throws her coat down on a love seat and unbuttons the top two buttons of her blouse. “Do single men always keep their apartments this warm?” She sounds like she’s already been drinking a bit, and her voice is soft and husky, alluring. She shakes her head, teasing him.
Arlene says, “Such a pretty couple. Oh, well, I guess you saw him first.” Ann unwraps herself and goes to put the wine in the refrigerator.
Chuck and Carl walk in carrying more booze.
“Did you two clowns finally find a place to park that old wreck?” Arlene asks.
“You’re talking about a vintage automobile that is actually worth as much on the market today as when he bought the thing. Your husband knew when to invest in Japanese metal. A brilliant man. We should be so lucky to have men with the acumen of Carl at our firm.” Chuck is loaded and in good form.
“Tell that to my rusty fenders sometime, Chuck,” Carl counters, looking a little down in the mouth.
As it turned out, the boys just couldn’t leave the girls out. Ann would have been alone in the Hotel Nova Scotian with a two-channel TV set and a view of the container pier. Arlene was tired of baby-sitting an empty house and listening to the CBC. It was only fair.
Clinton is the last to arrive, with an uncased beat-up Martin under one arm and a begrudging Pam on the other. He has tracked her down and moved into her one-room apartment on Grafton Street, thanks to his ability to remember over a dozen early Ian and Sylvia songs.
“How can I finally get rid of that jerk?” she asks Vincent in his tiny kitchenette as he waits for his Beaumark frost-free icemaker to finish the last trayful of chipped ice.
He hasn’t seen Pam in months. To hear Clinton talk, she had grown broad and was sporting warts and chin stubble. Instead she looks just as Vincent knows her from the well-thumbed yearbook. Vincent pops a chip of ice into his mouth and chews on it.
“I don’t know,” is all Vince can bring himself to say, and he crunches up another wedge of ice. This makes Pam laugh. It’s the first time her face has become unlocked this evening. Clinton can be heard in the other room with his six-string doing Neil Young imitations. Pam eases over toward Vince, slides a leg between his and pushes her tongue into his mouth. She tastes sixteen and certain. Vincent’s eyes are closed, and he feels her hand rubbing the small of his back as Chuck elbows the door.
“Hey, you’re gonna ruin the ice. We got nothing to clank around in our glasses out there, and it’s getting awfully warm.” Chuck doesn’t seem to be taking the scene very seriously. “Besides, you don’t want to melt the hoar-frost on the old boy here.” He pats the sides of Vincent’s head, along the traitorous tips of grey that ring him like a fallen halo.
Pam giggles and makes her exit from the kitchen with the ice. Vincent feels confused, afraid. He wishes that there was some way to make major masonry improvements across the doorway into the living room. The walls of the kitchen are now grey, dim and distant. He loses all sense of colour. Human voices rattle like dry ice through the walls, but his ears begin to fill up with the sound of his own heart pumping blood. Thudding, dull, grey drums beat inside him as he begins to move table and chair in front of the door. He feels very childish but also grotesquely old. The world beyond his kitchen is a place of completion, a system of pairs. Here, he is alone, as it should be. From here on, the trick will be to avoid the dangers of possibility and to insure the safety of what he still possesses.
Beyond that, there can only be cold, life-sapping loss and public humiliation. Now he is moving the table back from the door and composing the face of the sole survivor.
“Dammit, Vince, if you’re through rearranging the furniture, would you bring in another bottle of vino.” Carl’s voice is encased in a slurred, arrogant cheerfulness.
Vincent grabs the first bottle he can see in the refrigerator, clenches his knuckles around a mahogany-handled corkscrew and walks back into the living room. Everyone is standing up and hovering. He is surrounded. He feels their warm, boozy breath all over him.
DANCING THE NIGHT AWAY
Despite the fact that it is a bright, warm October afternoon, all of the curtains at Briarwood Manor are drawn tight. Twin television sets in the “recreation room” are blasting out commercials for video games, and you can hear eighty-four-year-old Sterling Litton scream, “Blast the suckers!” and then retreat back into himself with a fit of coughing and hawking of phlegm.
In the hallway of the south wing, Molly Crawford confides in me that today is her birthday. She forgets how old she is and admits that she doesn’t know the date, but today is the day, and she damn well wants to celebrate. I prop my mop up against the tile wall and lean over to let her whisper in my ear. Her breath is medicinal and stale, but her hand on my neck is warm, and her eyes are wide with excitement. “Look at this, will ya?”
She opens an imaginary cabinet on the wall. With a key, and very delicately. She puts the key back into the pocket in her skirt and opens two doors. The hinges are exquisitely silent. Handing me an invisible glass, she begins to pour something into it. “You got it now?” I nod. She pours herself a tiny bit, then decides what the hell, it’s a birthday, and dumps in more until the glass must be brim full and sloshing on the floor. We bump glasses, and she snaps her head back and polishes hers off with lightning speed. I sip mine more cautiously.
“You want another one?” Molly asks, her eyes now watering from all the excitement, the imaginary booze rushing to her head. So sure, we kill the whole damn bottle. Molly’s giggling and has to remove her glasses to sop up the water running down her cheeks. Two nurses are headed our way, outlined as black figures against the distant light of the entranceway. From this end, the corridor looks to be over a mile long. It’s my job to insure that the entire length of the hallway is mopped twice each day. Dust and germs are the enemy. I kill both for a price.
The nurse will come and haul Molly away to sit in a whirlpool as part of her “therapy.” She’ll scream bloody murder for twenty minutes in the tub, and then, with a shot of something or other to calm her down, she’ll fall asleep in her bed and not wake up until six tomorrow morning. Molly sees the nurses coming and quickly closes the imaginary liquor cabinet. She locks it nervously and hands me the key, which I quickly stash in my pants pocket. Molly shakes my hand and says, “Thank you, sir. You are certainly a gentleman.” I smile and grab my mop to move further south before the north-end nurses wrestle Molly’s angelic face into a knot of fear.
At home, in the kitchen, Kathy is exercising again, firming up the muscles in her thighs. Her jogging suit is crumpled up in a pile on a chair, and a punchy-sounding post-disco instrumental song is pounding from the stereo. “How’s life at the Dead Centre?”
“I got in trouble for punching out Alice Liscomb.”
“You really beat up Alice Liscomb?” Even though Kathy has totally misunderstood my statement, she doesn’t break stride. Exercise is a very important part of living.
“No. I punched out her time card. On the clock. About fifteen minutes after she already split to go pick up her dog at the vet. Turned out the dog didn’t have rabies after all.”
“That’s good news. About the rabies, I mean.” Kathy is rotating the upper half of her body around her hips in a circular motion. Then she stands upright and just rotates her head in circles. I don’t think I could even do it without snapping a pair of vertebrae. I always think of her as masculine when she is exercising or jogging. Even standing here watching the pubic hair protruding outside of her leotard, I find her actions too mechanical, her body activity pre-meditated. For her, everything is done for a pur
pose.
“I got into that Modern Jazz class at the Dance Exchange. Just barely. You know how many younger girls want to become professionals these days? And you know how many professional dancers a town like Halifax can support?” Now she breaks into a sort of half dance, half kung fu routine that I haven’t seen before.
“I don’t know. How many?”
“I don’t know. Very few.”
“Why get yourself all worked up then? Use your well-tuned body for something else more in demand.”
“You suggest I take up street walking?” She’s just kidding. I know she doesn’t want to do anything other than dance, and it’s all right with me if she keeps taking classes for the rest of her life.
“Maybe you could offer a special package deal involving a little freeform ballet.”
“Yeah, and maybe not.”
After that we start to argue about higher ceilings. She wants to live in an apartment with higher ceilings so she doesn’t have to keep hitting her knuckles against the stippled paint. It’s an old, fruitless dialogue for us, but I keep up my half of the conflict for appearances. Sitting at the kitchen table, I watch a bead of sweat exploring the inside of her left thigh. Kathy has fantastic legs. But something about leotards turns me right off. Leotards, to Kathy, mean exercise and dance, and that means serious business, hard work. She believes that if you work hard, keep yourself in shape and project yourself, all good things come to you. She doesn’t know anything about decay, old age or things falling apart. I try to make sure of that.
“You’re still optimistic about your future in the world of dance, then?”
“Life, Mark, is like a sewer. What you get out of it is directly related to what you put into it.” This is an old standard I taught her way back when I was still in graduate school getting an MA in seventeenth-century literature. I stole the line from someone, Tom Lehrer, I think.
“Which reminds me. What about supper?”
Kathy twirls her way over to the stove and puts on two pots with water to start boiling. I go lie down on the chesterfield in front of the TV, where I watch a MASH rerun that I’ve seen five times before. One of the patients is going to die unless they can complete an operation in thirty minutes. They show a little clock on the screen in the corner to show you how much time is slipping away. In the end they don’t make it in time. But the soldier survives.
Arthur Klugman is sitting in a perfectly rigid posture on a hard wooden chair as I enter his room with my mop and bucket. He acknowledges that I’m there by the way he presses his lips together. A man of authority all of his adult life, he has been able to get by without having to put up with small talk from men who mop floors, and only now that his feet are like hard, lifeless rocks does he bother to try to make conversation at all with me.
“Don’t forget to do the bathroom, will ya? That idiot next door was having problems with his personal plumbing last night again.”
“Sure, no sweat.” Arthur says this to me most every day as a sort of salutation. Unlike many of the other residents, Arthur doesn’t share a bathroom with another room. Even though I’ve held down this job off and on for four years, I still can’t quite handle some of the smells of “personal plumbing” gone haywire. I’m an expert at holding my breath. Into the bathroom like a terrorist armed with a mop and bucket, thorough but quick, then out, all before the olfactory nerves have had to function at all. I’ve timed myself. I can hold my breath for ninety seconds. You can do a lot in ninety seconds. I mop out the tiny bathroom cubicle and rush over to the window by Klugman’s dresser to open it for air. I suck in my first gulp of oxygen in well over a minute and swear that I can feel brain cells, nearly robbed of the vital element, now relaxing and getting back to work. I remember that brain cells can’t be replaced. If I starve my brain of air long enough on the job, I might lose a bit of my memory. The trick would be trying to lose just the right part.
“And it was just about then that they ended the war.” It’s Klugman. He’s reliving 1945, a very disappointing year for him. We’ve been through it dozens of times.
“First the stinking Krauts give up right when the first shipment is on its way to Italy. It was a kick in the head, I’ll tell you that. You can’t trust a Hun.” Klugman was an American chemist. In 1944 he was deep into some very secret research concerning a new sort of military weapon — gas, but not like “dirty old mustard gas” as he calls it. He was one of five men responsible for developing a deadly nerve gas that, had the Germans just given him a fair chance, the Yanks would have used on them from the southern front.
“Clean. It was very clean. If they’d gone ahead and used it in Japan instead of the bomb, you wouldn’t a had none of that mess. You could have saved all those buildings. It’s a sin.”
The bitterness really shows on his face. He can’t give it up. Farmed out into special retirement since 1947, Klugman had to live through the humiliation of seeing his life’s work buried in the ground in Utah and heartlessly dumped in the Atlantic. In the late sixties he had moved to Canada, to Nova Scotia, where it had been reported that several barrels had floated into Halifax Harbour after years of lying wasted at sea.
“How’s your mother?” Klugman asks me in a voice like a brass-knuckled fist. He’s never met my mother and doesn’t have the slightest notion of who she is. He’s trying to be friendly.
“She’s taking a typing class at night. Hopes to pick up some part-time work in case my father doesn’t get back to work soon.”
“Damn good idea. Women need to learn how to type. It’s good work. Who are these piss-pants politicians who got us in this mess anyway?” Jumps around a bit. We’re on the economy now. “People in my day had jobs. Research. That was the thing. There was always a lot of typing in research. Politicians today don’t give a good god darn about decent research.”
I want to tell him about neutron bombs but keep my mouth shut. I’m thinking about a young secretary, in Washington DC maybe, who is typing the document that grants approval for the next megaweapon, more deadly than the last. She probably makes very few mistakes in her typing and, when she does, can correct them immediately with the latest technology.
Klugman is softening now. He’ll be sobbing in a minute. “It wouldn’t have been anything like mustard gas. And if it wasn’t for those idiots higher up, we could have had stuff sprayed in the German trenches, and we woulda been out of the war that much earlier. Could have saved a lot of our boys.”
I have to work late changing all of the fluorescent light tubes. For some reason they have to be changed after five o’clock while all the residents are eating supper. I catch a quick meal in the kitchen where the cook, a refugee from Poland who jumped ship here a couple of years ago, is leafing through a copy of Penthouse. Everything they serve here comes out of cans, and there’s a full-time dietician who decides what cans get bought.
Kathy’s first public performance starts at eight. I’m belching canned peaches as I walk up the four flights of stairs to the dance studio, a long, narrow, drafty room that was once a sweatshop for the manufacture of shoes. Rented chairs are set up in rows with an aisle down one side. I squeeze through, past women clutching pocketbooks, and make my way to the front. The second row. I don’t want to be accused of tripping a dancer accidentally. Let someone else take that rap.
The lights come up bright, and a weird electric hum starts up from somewhere. It keeps getting louder and louder, and then I realise that it is in fact the music for dancing as two figures in whiteface and black leotards move toward the centre of the floor in a series of crazy, spasmodic motions. I’m reminded of Mrs. Gallico’s first seizure and my own awareness of a human life in some sort of total physical war with itself. On her second attack, I had been the only one immediately nearby, and I had stuck my finger in her mouth because someone had told me the business about tongues. She bit down hard and might have gagged on the blood if a pair of nurses had not heard my
screaming.
One of the white-faced dancers is Kathy. The other is an unlike-able stone-faced character named Roy Selange, a nostril-flaring elitist type by my standards, who has made a name for himself as an artiste among the tiny Halifax dance intelligentsia. Whatever he wears under his leotard does little to mask his genitals. I’m reminded of a codpiece.
The lights waver and the music shifts. There is a trace of melody and then total dissonance. For some reason I was expecting something reminiscent of ballet rather than epilepsy. Kathy hadn’t warned me. Yet it is imperative that I like it, that I go home full of glowing praise and support. Roy has grabbed her by the arm and is twisting. Hard. She must be in pain, yet it’s part of the performance. I remember that the title of the piece is “Holocaust.” I don’t know why I was all set for a soft shoe or Swan Lake or something.
The music now begins to squeal and rail, and the dancers become more frenetic. I’m outraged by the sexuality of it now, as the whole thing appears to be more of a rape scene than anything. Somebody behind me is commenting in hushed tones that it is “a sort of erotic nihilism,” and I’m ready to stand up and start kicking a few heads. I can visualize myself doing a drop kick straight to Roy Selange’s codpiece. Still, I sit tight and endure.
Kathy, too, is enduring. She can’t be enjoying this. Her ability to withstand the pain of wrenching her body into such unnatural poses is to be commended, I suppose, but why put up with this abuse? The end of the piece is accompanied by a two-minute siren howl, and the lights go out over the scene of two corpse-like figures at centre stage. When the lights come back up, Kathy and Roy are smiling at the crowd as the applause echoes around the room. She doesn’t see me, even though I am trying to catch her eye. She doesn’t know I’m here.
Dance the Rocks Ashore Page 19
