Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good

by John Gould

  Besides, he isn’t prepared. No condoms, and he’s not going there again. And what if he had one? What if one of those hooting bozos down the way strode over and slipped him a french tickler? Still, bad idea. Matt’s resorted to rubbers a number of times in the past—four times, at the start of each of his four monogamies—and his history with them is not a happy one.

  With Charlotte, for instance. They were seventeen when they got serious, grade eleven. Matt had the knack—puritanical, you’d have to call it—of pretending he wasn’t going to have sex right up until the moment he was actually having it. This meant he couldn’t be relied upon to procure the safes. Charlotte, resourceful girl, got a box through the boyfriend of a friend’s older sister. Bad news: they were extra large. They were enormous. They were “King Kong.” The first one kept slipping off Matt’s johnson.

  If Charlotte had laughed at that moment, what then? Would Matt have slugged her and stormed out, started down the path of boozing and embitterment? Probably not, but it sure would have been a bummer. Instead she feigned a headache, granted him a swift hand job (still a benchmark for Matt in terms of intensity, of sheer orgasmic oomph) and showed up the next weekend with the right-sized rubbers. How is it that he’s always been so lucky with his women? Lucky right up till the day they give him the hoof.

  With Meg, again, it was an ego issue. Matt had a spot of trouble erection-wise one night, and thereafter got himself into such a self-obsessed state that every hard-on would halfway unharden in the moment it took to tear open the package and figure out which way was up. Lucky again: Meg arrived one evening with a packet of flavoured condoms and used up half of them perfecting, on a zucchini from her own garden, the technique for rolling them on with lips and tongue. Voila.

  With Caitlin the problem got more intense. It was simple enough—the condom broke. They were mid-quickie, indulging in an aren’t-we-crazy moment on the way out the door to a movie. Cat was at the crest of her fertility curve, so she popped a morning-after pill, which basically made her pregnant for a day, upset tummy and tender boobs. She didn’t exactly blame Matt for the trauma, but didn’t exactly not blame him either.

  And with Mariko, more intense still. Another pregnancy spook—they fell asleep with him inside her one night and when they woke up, all but one candle self-snuffed, it looked as though there’d been leakage. Matt freaked out, and that freaked out Mariko.

  “You really think it’s okay to have sex with somebody you can’t stand to get pregnant?” she said. “You know the two are connected, right?”

  Right. And when Mariko did get knocked up a couple of years later, Matt went totally the other way. He fixed up one of the Lair’s extra rooms, pored over baby books, assembled lists of names. Odd, but that’s when things started to go wrong between the two of them—after the mistake that led to the miscarriage, after the miscarriage led them to start trying. It wasn’t as though the relationship was predicated on the family thing, far from it, but once they were at it, once they were well and truly “boinking for a baby” (Mariko’s phrase), it felt as though failure would be a problem. And it was. A new kind of life had been conjured, which they were then free to lose. Matt had let himself want something he’d never even dared to contemplate before. Who knew he could want it so bad?

  Kate says, “Okay, so here’s one. Why does time only ever go one way?”

  “Come on, that’s too easy.” Matt’s got his hand back. He’s into a third pint by now, Kate’s into a second Perrier. They’ve shared a plate of nachos. Matt’s already fessed up to his profession, going with “film critic” instead of the more accurate but too banal “movie reviewer.” He’s crowed in an offhand way about the message he got earlier today (“egghead with an attitude”) from some upstart filmmaker named DennyD. It’s Matt’s first truly fanatical bit of fan mail, and it’ll almost certainly be his last. Why not make the most of it?

  “You must get so incredibly sick of admirers,” Mr. D. had blandished, “but what the hell, I’m gonna bug you anyway, to tell you what a HUGE impact your work has had on me.” Honest? “Your criticism is part of an underground war being waged WORLDWIDE against the cultural hegemony of Holywood. We all WEAR the same things, we all WATCH the same things, Tom Cruise, Calvin Klein, Tom Cruise in Calvin Kleins, I don’t need to explain any of this to YOU. You’re a vandal wrecking the stuff that’s WRONG.” A great gush of this kiss-assy kind of stuff. Matt read it three times, took a break, then read it three more.

  “Wow, must be nice to have groupies,” said Kate. “I’ll bet you meet all the big shots too. George what’s-his-face, Lucas and everybody.”

  “Oh, sure. I’ll probably have lunch with George next time I’m in LA.”

  “Seriously? Wow. Do you like his movies?”

  “That depends. Which one do you mean?”

  “Any of them.”

  “Well … no.”

  “Oh.”

  “I don’t like almost anybody’s movies. That’s why I started inventing my own. I mean, that’s why I started reviewing movies that don’t exist.”

  Kate’s face went puzzled. “I don’t get it. You write reviews of movies …”

  “That I made up.”

  This was the most touching aspect of Denny’s message, and the most entertaining. “I agree about House of Straw,” he wrote, “that film COMPLETELY floored me. Your review (‘Pynchonesque labyrinth’ is right) is dead-on.” Matt’s review certainly ought to be dead-on, since the movie’s only ever been screened in his own damn head. DennyD, then, is full of crap, a lying sycophant out for favours. The thing is, though, he sounds like kind of a good kid, and what if he’s right? What if Matt really does have something to say?

  All this took some explaining, but Kate hung gamely on. Matt didn’t go out of his way to reveal how proud he is of the three phony reviews he published before he got fired. He left out the whole getting-fired thing, actually, but let on that there’s been a public fuss since the fakes were exposed, and that there are now bigger projects in the works. Then—“enough about me”—he steered things back in Kate’s direction, got her talking about her “job.”

  Is it possible people actually do this nine to five? It’s all questions. Star Trekky kind of questions, wish-we-were-stoned kind of questions.

  “Why can’t we go back and forth in time? In space we can go both ways, right? You flew east to get here, didn’t you? And whenever you want you can just fly west to get home again.”

  “Sure,” says Matt, though this is far from certain. He’s feeling a touch spinny here—there’s an intriguing synergy evolving between this beer and what’s left of his fever. Cheap high, or it would be if each pint weren’t the price of a decent bottle of wine.

  “But what you can’t do is fly into the past, back to the moment you left. The past is always in the past, it’s never in the future. How come?”

  “Like I say,” says Matt, “that’s such an easy one.” He’s trying to picture Kate in a lab coat, ink-stained pocket porcupined with pens. No luck so far. “I’m not even going to insult you with—”

  “Right,” says Kate. “And nobody else has the faintest idea either. We think it might be connected to entropy. Time and entropy are both arrows, they both only go one way, so maybe—”

  “Entropy?”

  Matt reviewed a movie about this sort of stuff once. Cosmology, they called it—big stuff, but the movie was about a tiny little guy, an English bloke shrunken with Lou Gehrig’s disease. “A grinning pixie or E.T. type,” is how Matt described him—he can still picture the black, batlike wheelchair, the head flopped over to one side, the robotic voice eerily emanating from the speech synthesizer. Again with the questions. Are black holes really black? Can twin black holes merge to make one big black hole? ALS was supposed to kill the chap but instead transformed him from a cranky underachiever into a happy family man and gabby genius. Go figure. Matt wove some sciencey material into his piece—“movies are just photons is all they are, tiny packets of energy bu
rsting on your eyeballs”—but he didn’t particularly understand any of it.

  “You know, entropy,” says Kate.

  “Oh right.”

  Kate clucks schoolmarmishly, kids these days. “Disorder?” she says. “Decadence? Everything just keeps falling apart, doesn’t it?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “You comb your hair in the morning, you get it all to go the same way, and by evening?” She takes a swipe at Matt’s mop, or rather broom. “Higgledy-piggledy.”

  “Hey,” says Matt. He makes a comb of his fingers and reworks the fine frenzy on his head. It’s only been a couple of hours, actually.

  “And that’s entropy, everything decays. Everything, including everything, including the whole universe, eventually dies and goes still. Maybe those two things are linked in some way. Maybe they’re the same thing.”

  “And this is what you think about all day?”

  Kate shrugs, smiles. No shortage of teeth. “What do you think about? What are you thinking about right now?”

  “My sister,” says Matt, but by the time he says it, it’s a lie. He was thinking about Erin for a moment there—about her amazing, her diamond-tipped mind, into what arcane layers of knowledge it might have drilled—but he’s switched back over now to thinking about Kate. About her eyes, those peepholes into this puzzling new creature, what he might see in there if he could get past the glare. And about her rump.

  From behind last night, with her folded over, was it submissive? Compliant? More like calisthenic, is what it felt like. Standing doggie is the technical term—Meg once bought him a book. Mariko never offers him that angle and he’s never proposed it, too anxious with regard to its political implications. Where would such a request—“Bend over, wouldja, honey?”—place him in the entirely unfunny narrative of gender relations? And how does the same position parse when the coupling is male-male? Maybe he’ll ask Zane. Maybe he won’t.

  The closest Matt’s ever come is that time with Dr. Damphousse, a first prostate check. Pants around his ankles Matt bent over and braced himself against the examining table, its tissue crinkling beneath his nervous weight. Snap of latex, twist of a jar top—and the guy was inside him. It couldn’t have felt any more queer, any more uncanny if the good doctor had slid a finger a few inches into his ear and prodded his brain’s backside, his cerebellum. Kitchy kitchy koo.

  “Your sister? So she’s here in Toronto too?”

  “Yeah. No. She’s … she died.”

  Again the quick inhalation from Kate—the un-word, the anti-word.

  “No, it’s okay. I mean, it was a long time ago.”

  Say it’s true, this idea that time only goes one way, that it refuses to back up. Can it be induced to slow down though, to stutter? Some moment of surpassing intensity, could it cause time to stand still? What Matt wants to envision is an instant of romance, of erotic promise or consummation. That first night with Mariko, say—her flesh, her mind, her fleshy mind, the whole wholeness of her. Afternoon actually, a matinee. They couldn’t wait, brought each other off through denim during Apollo 13, five, four, three, two, one …

  Yep, that’s close, love-sex is close. And death may be even closer. Erin’s death, for instance, that infinitely unforgettable day. He and Meg had had a mega-squabble the night before—“You’re being cold” (Matt), “Yeah well you’re being clutchy” (Meg)—as was the pattern during those days of Erin’s decline. That evening he’d gone out and got himself wasted with a couple of film buddies—no Zane, since he was off exploring the new universe his queerness had recently cracked open for him. When Matt arrived for his morning visit with his sis he was hungover. Not in that cute, comedic way, Andy Capp with his crown of ice cubes, but the other way: totally, traumatically, tragically. Why couldn’t he just die? This was the thought on his mind as he crept off the elevator on Erin’s floor at the hospital, wincing once again at the bile green walls. He had a fluffy, four-foot Felix the Cat wedged under his arm—the perfect gift, to Matt, being the perfect non sequitur. He spied his dad outside his sister’s door at the end of the hall, gazing out the TV-sized window over the soot-mottled city. Was there a new stoop, a more definitive slope to the man’s shoulders?

  What penetrated Matt at that moment didn’t feel like pain or pleasure but like a precursor to both of those sensations, a primal form of stimulus. Pure voltage. It didn’t kill him but it did cause him, for some period of time, not to exist. During that time no time passed. It still hasn’t, he’s standing there still, he hasn’t budged.

  Of the three hundred–odd reviews Matt’s cranked out for Omega, all but three have been of real movies, movies that exist. A pretty respectable ratio, to Matt’s mind. Anybody who cares to analyze his work (Matt daydreams a rush of doctoral theses once the scandal really breaks) will note that the fabricated reviews differ from the others in a number of pivotal ways.

  For instance, they’re more positive. They’re way more positive. Whereas most of Matt’s reviews are cool, his phony ones are warmly enthusiastic. Whereas his normal reviews are land-mined with words like cant and contrived, vile and vacuous, pandering and pap, his faux reviews feature terms such as sublime, redemptive, epiphany. In one of the three he over-the-topped-it with the expression sublime redemptive epiphany, what the hell. Matt has a rating system designed for him by Mariko, a movie viewer in silhouette sitting upright, or sagging, or slumping, or gone. For the nonexistent movies that homunculus is always erect.

  So why didn’t people rush off to find these films? Why didn’t Matt get busted right off the bat—four months ago, say, when he ran that first fake, the crop circle thing?

  Matt entertains two possible explanations. The first is that nobody reads his reviews. The thing is, though, he does have a following—a little wee one, but still. Which leaves explanation number two, that nobody heeds his reviews. That the movies he praises, most especially the ones he makes up, are of interest to precisely no one.

  Here, in fact, Matt has demonstrated an uncharacteristic touch of shrewdness. While most of his reviews take on giant American productions, the movies he creates are little homegrown affairs. Nobody, Matt reasons, ever really expects to have heard of his arcane Canadian art films, his rogue Canadian directors, his raw Canadian stars. And nobody’s surprised that they can’t be found. When Matt’s jig was finally up (just last week, can it be?), Nagy lumped two real Canadian movies in with the three fakes. Sad-funny, funny-sad.

  But that last piece, what, did he want to get caught? Who, save a goofy enthusiast like DennyD, could possibly have been duped? Matt’s starting to think of himself as one of those lame self-saboteurs who tearfully confess on daytime TV. “I knew Natasha was coming home at lunch, I guess I meant her to catch me in her leotard …” When he hung up the phone that day, Nagy’s voice still bleating at the other end of the line, Matt reread the review that got him busted. Reread it in print—Nagy had twigged too late.

  Okay, Matt had pushed it that time. The not-so-subtle self-reference, for a start. “This film is like a kiss blown to an imaginary lover,” he’d mused in his review. “It’s like a sacrifice to a non-existent God. It’s like a review of some film we’ll never see.” Lordy. And then all the personal, self-reflexive stuff. He’d dubbed the director “Martin McCall” and blessed him with a revolutionary “egghead with an attitude” approach. He’d named the movie House of Straw, and encoded his shattered life with little Mariko—“Minnie” in the movie—into the lives of the lead characters.

  What with all the fuss, what with her husband getting fired and everything, Mariko up and read this review, a practice she’d lately abandoned—not because she’d quit caring, Matt’s pretty sure, but because she still cared too much, found her husband’s ire too alarming. She was amused for a bit by the House of Straw piece—“You’ve been making movies up? I guess you’ve still got it, buddy”—but then she was irked. “Why wouldn’t you at least tell me about it, share that with me?”

  “I’m not comfortable tal
king about that kind of stuff,” said Matt. “Creative stuff.” Though in fact Zane had been in on it from the start.

  “And I suppose that’s me, I suppose Minnie’s me,” said Mariko. “Lesbian love affair, fruitless womb.” She ran her eye down the column. “Flaky faux-Rasta, that’d be Sophie of course. Low-rent guru, is that supposed to be Roshi? My God, Matt.”

  And then appalled. She was amused, and then she was irked, and then she was appalled. Fair enough, she’d scored Matt the gig at Omega in the first place. “Blowing this job, Matt …” She smacked the splayed paper with the back of her hand. “What’s up with you?”

  Matt can scarcely bear to think of it but he had a go, that day, at defending himself. He hit Mariko with the whole Great Artist schtick.

  “It’s inevitable,” he said—he intoned, almost—“that an art form will ultimately rebel against its subject matter.” Striding about the kitchen he urged her to think of a painter—“your Kandinsky, your Klee”—as he makes his first non-figurative stroke. “He’s in his garret. He’s permitted himself more than his usual thimbleful of schnapps. ‘This isn’t a breast,’ he cries out, ‘this isn’t the belly of a boat. This is a slash of paint. Period. Look, I have line, I have colour, what do I need with your world?’”

  It sounded rehearsed, and it was—Matt had been prepping since the day he slipped in that first phony piece. He paused to judge the effect of his performance—and he charged on anyway. “So why should I wait for a movie to exist before I review it? What did Kandinsky say?” He made as if to canvass his memory. “Right, the content of painting is painting. And the content of a movie review is a movie review. A signifier without a signified. A finger pointing at no moon.”

  Mariko laughed. There was pretty much everything in that laugh, there was pleasure, there was pity, there was pain. Man, could that woman laugh.

  Matt jams an arm between the clunking-shut doors of the elevator, pries them apart.