The Ravine

by Paul Quarrington

  “Hi.”

  “You’re fucking van der Glick?”

  “Okay, now, let me just gather my thoughts here for a second. I was taking a nap.”

  “Because you were shit-faced last night?”

  “I wouldn’t say I was shit-faced.”

  “Jay said you guys were shit-faced. That is the exact term he used.”

  “You’ve been talking to Jay?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why were you talking to Jay?”

  “I don’t need a reason to talk to Jay. He is my brother-in-law.”

  “He’s your estranged brother-in-law.”

  “No. You are my estranged husband. Jay is my brother-in-law. He may be a little strange, I’ll grant you that.”

  “Okay. And he apparently informed you that I’ve seen Rainie a couple of times.”

  “Seen her? Jay said she had hold of your dick the whole night.”

  “Jay seems to have been very chatty.”

  “Well, at least he let me know what was going on. When were you going to fill me in?”

  “Last time I checked, Veronica, we had split up. I was thrown out of the house. You’ve taken up with Derwood, or whatever the youngster’s name is. So I don’t understand why this seems to bother you as much as it does.”

  “Because Rainie is a friend of mine, in case you didn’t know.”

  “Oh, I know. I know. I wrote about it, just a second, let me see if I can find the page. Hold on.”

  “Phil.”

  “The place is a bit of a mess. You know. Just hold on. Ah! Listen. ‘Rainie and Ronnie were friends, of a kind; they dined together two or three times a year and went on annual shopping campaigns.’”

  “Okay, first of all, wrong, we see each other more than that, second of all, bad, I mean the writing, it seems really pedestrian, third of all, what the hell kind of book are you writing?”

  “It’s an autobiographical novel.”

  “It’s like you’re taking real people, real relationships, and making little, I don’t know, little tiny versions of them so that they’ll fit in your damn book.”

  “You may have a point there, Ronnie. You may have a bit of a point. But I don’t mean to. When I write, sometimes I think I’m getting it all there, getting it all in, but when I read the pages the next day, it’s … I don’t know. Gone.”

  “Go back to television. Perhaps the novel is beyond you.”

  “Have you been sleeping with Hooper?”

  “Never mind who I’ve been sleeping with.”

  “You have, you have, dammit, you’ve been sleeping with Hooper!”

  “I have not been sleeping with Hooper, although I am going out to dinner with him …”

  “What?”

  “Not that this is any of your business, but he sent me a copy of Baxter, which I read and adored, so then he called and asked me out, and I said yes because I wanted to tell him how much I liked the book.”

  “I see. Won’t that be nice. But it might have been simpler, don’t you think, to rip my heart out of my chest and put it in the Cuisinart? Just keep pressing that pulse button?”

  “John is an old friend of mine. I knew him before I knew you. I don’t see the problem with my having dinner with him.”

  “John doesn’t have dinner. John has nourishment before the strenuous rutting commences. He carbo-loads for energy and stamina. Don’t be so naive.”

  “Hey. I am perfectly capable of resisting Hooper’s advances. I have a very nice boyfriend who I wouldn’t want to be unfaithful to—anyway, screw you, Charlie, you’re the one that’s fucking van der Glick.”

  “And what the hell do you mean, you adored it?”

  “What?”

  “Baxter. Which I read and adored.”

  “Well, of course I loved the book. Even you could understand that.”

  “Even me, what do you mean, even me—despite the fact I have the emotional intelligence of thirteen-year-old?”

  “Thirteen seems a little high.”

  “Why could even I understand that you loved the book?”

  “Haven’t you read it?”

  “Of course I haven’t read it.”

  “What do you think it’s about?”

  “I gather from the endless gushing in the dailies that it has something to do with the stage. A life in the theatah.”

  “It’s about me, Phil.”

  “No, no, that one was called Lissome Is the Naiad or, variously, Hellhag!”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Am I in the damned novel?”

  “The character Paul is not unlike you.”

  “But but … I am not fodder for Hooper’s fiction.”

  “Look, enough about Hooper. I called to talk about van der Glick.”

  “Rainie van der Glick and I have been friends since we were, I’m not sure, five years old or something.”

  “Are you in love with her?”

  “Um …”

  “I withdraw the question. It was an asinine thing to ask. Of course you aren’t in love with her.”

  “That’s what I was going to say.”

  “You’re not capable of love.”

  “Sure I am. I love you, don’t I?”

  “Yeah, well, people who love other people don’t go fucking other people and making the people they love feel like stupid ugly idiots.”

  “Okay, now, listen to what I’m saying, don’t attack me blindly here, but the thing is, I think what you just said is wrong. Behaviour and emotion are two different things.”

  “Phil, Phil. That is so pathetic.”

  “Anyway, like I say, you have your little boy toy, plus you’re going out with Hooper, so really, I don’t see what the big—Ronnie? Veronica? Oh, sure, hang up on me. That is really mature. You keep saying how I have this low-grade emotional maturity and what do you do? Hang up on me. You know what that is, Ronnie? That is petulant. Okay, I realize I’m being somewhat petulant right now, but at least you’re not at the other end of the phone to hear me. Oh, god. Oh, god, Ronnie. Oh, god.”

  When I emerged from my basement apartment, I was assailed by a miniature version of Black Chester Nipes. The creature had a six-gun drawn, clutched in two tiny hands; the weapon trembled with the effort of holding it aloft. This being’s face was informed by the telltale black smear, but the cloud’s centre was the mouth, and after a moment I guessed it was not gunpowder residue but chocolate, chocolate that had been consumed gluttonously. I saw the rightness of Jay’s choice of meeting-nights. (I understood Milligan’s comment—A nice touch—although I tried not to think about Edward Milligan too much.) It was Halloween.

  “Give me candy,” said Little Black Chester.

  “I don’t have any.”

  “Then you must die, earthling.” The kid had his mythologies confused, but who can blame him? Who among us have their mythologies all sorted out? He popped off a few caps, filling the air with little beads of acridity.

  I stumbled off, “stumbled” because sometimes I am literally hobbled by remorse. How could I have become so self-absorbed that I failed to note the advent of Halloween? (Answer: easy.) And wouldn’t the girls be heartbroken that I wasn’t there to share the event with them? (Answer: not really.) I resolved to head over there as soon as the “meeting” with Jay was done.

  The street was crowded with dwarf goblins and pygmy ghosts, but all was not absolutely macabre; there were also wee princesses, angels with minikin wings. There were many entities where I could recognize neither genus nor species. This may have been because I had never seen the spawning movie or television program, or it may have been because the disguisee was a ranker. This was a shared characteristic of my friends and me when we were kids—no one could ever tell what we were supposed to be on Halloween.

  As a kid, Rainie always tried to be some historical personage, a woman she admired, say, Carson McCullers. Toward this end, she would climb into a dress, pull on nylons and bedaub her face with lipstick. She would
appear at people’s doorways and even though she was immediately recognizable as a little whore, people would send up the call out of embarrassment: “What are you supposed to be?” My own costuming was, admittedly, obscure; I would portray characters from The Twilight Zone. I would, for instance, pretend to be the little boy from the episode entitled “Third Stone from the Sun,” the lad the townspeople came to believe was an alien. They believed this because he would say strange things—“I come from the third stone from the sun”—and when he was struck down by a car, he simply climbed back to his feet and walked away. Rod Serling’s little plot twist here is that the kid was born without a functioning nervous system and couldn’t feel pain. The odd things he said were explained to the unthinking townsfolk—The third stone from the sun is Earth, you idiots! He was nothing other than an ordinary little boy, which was dramatically very moving but didn’t really suggest any dynamic costuming ideas, so of course I too would receive the blank stare and the dumbfounded “What are you supposed to be?”

  When my brother stepped out of the shadows, however, about half a mile from our assigned meeting place, he looked at me, snapped his fingers and said, “Got it!”

  “Huh?”

  “The Trilight Zone!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I know who you’re supposed to be. You’re that guy, right, that librarian, who rejoiced when the world was destroyed. He believed he could therefore live forever in books.”

  “Time enough at last to read, read, read.” This was by way of being a correction to what Jay had said.

  “He organized all of the books from the library into piles on the steps. He had piles for this year, piles for the next year and the year after that …”

  “I know all this. I’m the one who told you.”

  “But what happened was, he bent over to pick up a book and his glasses flew from his face. They shattered. And he could see nothing. It seems to me he says, It’s not fair, it’s just not fair, but we the viewers understood. It is fair. It is what he deserved.”

  We began to amble down the street, knee-deep in poltergeists. Jay seemed to have a destination in mind.

  “By the way,” I said, “thanks for ratting me out to Veronica.”

  “Oh,” Jay said, quite seriously, “you’re welcome. It was my pleasure.”

  “That was certainly a pleasant call to receive. You’re fucking van der Glick!That’s what she said. That’s what she screamed.”

  “You are fucking van der Glick.”

  “So what? She’s going out to dinner with Hooper.”

  “Yes? And your point?”

  “It hurts.”

  “Ah. Good. Signs of life.”

  I took a moment to study Jay—because I had no idea what the hell he was talking about—when something struck me. “What are you supposed to be?”

  He wore a suit that was dark as pitch—at least, for the most part, because at various places—elbows and knees particularly—the material was so worn that the paleness of his skin shone through. Jay owned no suits, I knew that, so he had obviously purchased this at a second-hand store, or perhaps he’d bartered with a cadaver. He complemented this suit with jesus boots that appeared to be made of, I don’t know, jute or something. They looked ancient, these sandals—they seemed to have made innumerable journeys through wastelands. As odd as all this was, there was something about the plain white tee-shirt my brother wore underneath that looked odder still, something that was difficult to put one’s finger on. It struck me that the collar rode too high on the front, that it covered Jay’s prominent Adam’s apple, and where it did, there was the bulging expression of a manufacturer’s label. “Ah!” I said, because the answer to my own question occurred to me. Jay had the tee-shirt on backwards, which gave him this queerly canonical look. “You’re supposed to be a priest!”

  He smiled in a beatific manner.

  Jay’s Halloween costumes, when he was a boy, also tended to have a religious flavour. I don’t know why, because he otherwise evinced no interest in the Judeo-Christian tradition. (I didn’t know then that he was slipping over to the Valleyway United Church to pound away on the keyboards there.) But every October 31, Jay would appear as, oh, a shepherd or one of the Magi. One explanation might be the simplicity of these outfits—you put on a sheet, sash it with a piece of rope and carry around a big stick. There was one Halloween when he wanted to go out wearing only a diaper rendered somehow out of two knotted pillowcases and a crown made out of intertwined rose branches. And he wanted to lug over his shoulder a cross (two fence-boards nailed together). But my mother stopped him at the front door, and disallowed this costume on the grounds that he would be too cold.

  “That’s right,” said Jay now. “I’m supposed to be a priest. So I can hear your confession.”

  “Ergh.” That was a sound of both annoyance and fear. “Where are we going, anyway?”

  “Last known address.”

  “What?”

  “So you talked to Ronnie, huh?” said Jay, avoiding the question. “How did she seem?”

  “She seemed, um, the word for how she seemed would be livid.”

  “Because of van der Glick?”

  “Well, yes, I mean, that certainly brought the, um, lividity to the surface. But, hey, it’s always there.”

  “I see, my son.”

  “It made me think, though.”

  “Good. Share your thoughts.”

  “Well … it’s just that she was so mad, you know, so jealous. It made me think that she must still have feelings for me.”

  “It’s possible. People are plenty weird. Even Ronnie.”

  “You don’t think Ronnie’s weird?”

  “I just said she was.”

  “Yeah, but …”

  “Let me ask you something, my son.”

  “Quit calling me that.”

  “Do you love Rainie?”

  “Uh …”

  “The reason I ask is, she loves you.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, my son. We in the Church are currently giving much serious thought to adding a commandment. Which would make it number, um—”

  “Eleven.”

  “Quite so. And the eleventh commandment would be, Thou shalt pay fucking attention.”

  We moved into a peculiar section of the downtown area. Toronto doesn’t really have any slums—none that you can get to on foot, anyway, although horrific high-rise tenements circle the city like moons—but it certainly has its seedy sections. We came upon row houses, identical and hunched, dwarf dwellings that long ago were the quarters of the men who laboured for the nearby soap factory. It was very apparent that this wasn’t the best part of town, because the hordes of fairies had disappeared. There were one or two lumbering trick-or-treaters, well over six feet in height, their feet enormous, balaclavas and nylons obscuring their features. These boys would leap onto the stoop, pound on the door, wrench open their pillowcases and emit a small but emphatic grunt.

  Jay stopped to light a cigarette. He struck a match and held it in cupped hands. He dipped the smoke into the flame, and then began to puff with industry. When he did remove the cigarette, he held it hoodlum-style. I saw that we were taking a smoke-break, so I lit up a little cigar and wondered why. I got the sense that the evening was orchestrated, so this little respite was obviously planned.

  The answer, I suspected, lay in the building behind Jay, which was squat and strangled by ivy. It was a church, recognizable because of its two stained-glass windows, although all of the coloured panes had been replaced by dark, smoky ones. There was no light coming from them.

  “First of all,” said Jay, “I think you should have mentioned that I had all the badges.”

  “What?”

  “I had every badge that a Wolf Cub could get. And that includes knot-tying.”

  “So?”

  “So, you weren’t the only accomplished knot-tier in the troop.”

  “Is that so?”

  “
Yes, my son.”

  “And what’s your point?”

  “Ah, that’s the point, isn’t it? What’s the point is what’s my point.”

  “All right, maybe you were good with knots too; the thing is, I’ve fictionalized to a certain degree.”

  “What you’ve fictionalized is your life.”

  I thought about that and came to the same conclusion I’d come to many times before, i.e., my brother is just a little bit nuts. “What are we doing here, Jay?”

  He nodded his enormous head so emphatically that I spun around to look in the direction indicated. “Last known address,” said Jay. He tossed his butt away and crossed the street.

  One of the houses had a porch light burning. (The others all were dark, I guessed because the inhabitants were pretending not to be home, not wishing their rye-consumption to be disturbed by the menacing Halloweeners.) Once we achieved proximity to the little home, all hell broke loose, in the form of feline commotion and ado. Some of the pussies squawked and scattered, others yowled and raised themselves to piddy-paws, pleading for affectionate scritching. Jay nodded at the cats, offered a friendly “Meow.” Then he pressed a broken plastic button that rested in a setting of rust, and from within the house we heard an ominous bong. Jay folded his hands together and held them chest-level.

  There was no immediate reaction to the doorbell, and then no eventual one. Jay rang again, looked at me and said quietly, “Don’t worry, she’s home.”

  “Who’s home?”

  “You’ll see.”

  I did see, after the third ringing, when a woman shouldered open the wooden door and shouted, “I don’t have any candy!” The sentence I just composed makes it sound as though I recognized this human being as female when she first appeared, but that’s not really the case. The first impression was indeed of masculinity, because she was bald, for the most part, although long strands of faded golden hair clung to her skull. The voice was also no clear indicator, as it was smoke-choked and gravelly. But there was jewellery, a dress and a bizarre attempt at makeup, and although I am sophisticated enough not to be taken in by cross-dressing, there was such a cold absence of sexuality that I concluded that these trappings were adopted as a default position. It was a woman, then, a theory proven by Jay when he said, “Good evening, Mrs. Kitchen.”