by Don Gillmor
They stopped at the wine store and picked up a Côtes du Rhône that had been recommended by the same columnist who had steered Harry to the bargain bin. In the car they were silent, listening to the comforting FM. The dashboard clock said 8:17.
“We should stop and get flowers for Paige,” Gladys finally said.
“We’re bringing appetizers and wine. I don’t know that flowers are necessary.”
“It’s her birthday.”
“I thought that was a month ago.”
“Technically, but this is a dinner party birthday party.”
“We’re already late. If we stop and get flowers … I don’t even know where you’re going to get them—some convenience store that’s selling shit roses for eight bucks? It’s going to look like an afterthought.”
“I think we should bring flowers, that’s all.”
“But we should have got them from a florist two hours ago. We’re late and bringing the appetizer. People will be eating dinner by the time we get there.”
They drove in silence for a few minutes before Harry said, “I don’t have a good feeling about Ben and Sarah. Who gets married these days? It seems so old-fashioned. Don’t you think they’re too young?”
“We were young.”
“Not that young.”
“Anyway, it’s just an engagement. They probably won’t get married for at least a year.”
“Long enough to realize the sex isn’t that great. I don’t imagine it is.”
“I haven’t given a lot of thought to that, Harry,” Gladys said. “She might be good for him.”
“I think his innate passivity will make her homicidal. If they adopt, as she threatens to—and almost everything seems to be a threat with her—their marriage will turn into a civil war.”
“I think you have to have a little faith.”
It felt odd to be arguing against the union. Usually it was Harry who was laissez-faire and Gladys who was the pragmatist. But that was before his conversion, before Dale died, before he saw life as a series of missteps that lead, finally, into a blind alley filled with poverty-tinged regret.
“What if we’re left to raise the baby?” Harry said.
“I can’t imagine Sarah would abandon the child.”
“She could eat her child. She barely has a pulse.”
“Harry.”
“It would be a burden, Gladys,” Harry said. “Another burden.”
They arrived at 8:37. The duck terrine in the cloth bag dangling from Harry’s hand felt heavy and lost. Four faces smiled hello.
“These are for you,” Gladys said, handing the discount freesias to Paige.
“Oh, Glad.”
“Nothing really.”
“No.”
Paige and Gladys had gone to school together and after a long hiatus had renewed their friendship. Her husband, Newton, a school principal, walked toward Harry with his hand extended. He was slowly rounding into the shape of a teardrop, his gait awkward, swishing.
“Harry.”
“Newton.” He offered up the wine, cheese and terrine, and Newton gathered them and trundled to the kitchen, calling over his shoulder, “Harry, this is Satori and Dean. Dean, Satori, Harry.”
Dean was a glum leftie in his fifties, dressed for a trade school dance. Satori was indeterminately Asian. They all shook hands.
Newton came back and handed Harry a glass of inexpensive Chilean Merlot. “Harry, we were talking about the New Poverty.”
“I was just getting used to the old kind,” Harry said.
“Dean thinks everyone’s going to be poor. We’re headed back to the barter system.”
Dean was a sculptor, an environmental scold who made unlikable shapes out of bicycle parts and discarded laptops. Gladys had shown Harry Dean’s website before they left the house. The home page was a photograph of Dean’s backyard with his sculptures in it, aggressive steel shapes with titles like Scheherazade Forgets the Words and listed at $9,300 per. The New Poverty would be inclusive and levelling, Dean said now: lawyers would take in laundry, doctors would perform vasectomies in exchange for homemade wine, investment bankers would labour over backyard vegetable gardens.
“What could you trade, Harry?” Dean asked. “What is it you do?”
“I teach political science.”
“Well, there you are,” Dean said. “We’ll always need political science.”
We’ve never needed political science, Harry thought. “We barely have politics anymore,” he said. “Half the electorate doesn’t vote.”
Dean ignored the rebuke. “The old systems have broken down,” he said. “Newspapers, TV, music, books, banks—it’s out of the hands of the corporate beast. The whole animal is dying and there is blood in the streets, and that’s a good thing.”
Satori looked at her husband when he talked, but her face didn’t reveal whether she was absorbed or appalled by his facile rant.
“It’s post-production,” Dean continued. “Innovation. The artist rules.”
Harry thought of asking Dean how he was ruling exactly, but the pre-dinner conversation balkanized, and Harry was stuck with Newton and Paige and the quiet Satori, while Dean chatted with Gladys in the living room. Newton was talking about the school system’s imminent collapse, betrayed by lack of funds and vision, the classrooms filled with dolts. Harry nodded and watched Dean and Gladys.
Dean’s head went back in a theatrical laugh. He would be laughing at something he had said, not something she’d said. From a distance, without the audio, it was like one of those nature shows where they run a montage of mating dances done by various species: Jaggeresque preening, intricate salsas, parts of birds and lizards puffed up for effect. Dean was in full display. His hair was outrageously thick, quills that sprouted, greying heroically, reminding Harry of a porcupine.
Harry had once seen a program on the mating ritual of the porcupine. They mated once a year in a stunning performance that had rarely been filmed. They were solitary and territorial animals, but in mating season, the male went in search of the female, and often two or more males would end up in the same area. They were too slow to move on; mating season would be over by the time any of them found another mate. So they stayed and preened and fought for the female’s attention. The male stood on its hind legs, displaying its erection. Unlike humans, with their fallible, abused members, the porcupine’s erection could last for hours. The males fought one another for this rare chance at sex, and afterward, bloodied and insane, carrying the barbs of their enemies—a hundred quills stuck in their faces!—they danced for the female, waving those reliable boners. Who would love her like she’d never been loved?
The lucky winner first showered the female with urine, then, as she flipped her tail onto her back, he mounted her delicately from behind, his front paws resting on her upturned tail, protected from her quills. They had sex repeatedly until the female broke it off and retreated to a tree.
The voiceover was done by a British actor, who spoke in a hushed, educated tone. “Sexual contact ends,” he said, “and is followed by hostile screaming.”
He watched Gladys laugh and put her hand on Dean’s forearm. Gladys was the kind of woman that men were usually attracted to after dinner rather than before. Her beauty was subtle; her soft wisdom took a while to penetrate. But Dean, the artist, had discerned her qualities immediately. As he flirted openly with Gladys, Harry shot a quick look at Satori, who was slightly older than Dean. She had registered the mood in the living room with a single glance. Harry guessed this was a familiar scene.
Paige announced that dinner was ready. “Come and sit, everyone.” She set two bowls down on the table. “Butternut squash soup with toasted pumpkin seeds and nutmeg,” she proclaimed.
“Oh, how lovely,” Gladys said. “So autumn.”
Dinner marched on. Dean drank and pronounced. Satori was soundless. Newton laughed heartily at everything. Paige and Gladys caught up. Harry drifted in and out of conversations. He was the negative space in
an expressionist painting, the blankness that surrounded the main subject; he filled the uncomfortable dining chair and picked at the farfalle con funghi. His marriage was disappearing, eroding like a glacier, helpless against the sun. He wondered about Dean and Satori—what was the nature of that relationship? He examined them for clues. Dean the serial philanderer and Satori the constant he returned to? Paige and Newton seemed unmysterious, middle-aged in the way middle age looks to children: solid, uninspired, sexless. But who knew?
“Harry. Harry? What’s your view?”
Newton’s face was poised across from him, waiting for an answer to a question Harry hadn’t heard.
“I think they should all be shot,” Harry ventured.
Newton laughed uproariously.
“Oh god, Harry,” Gladys said.
Harry noticed that Dean had gone from being cinematically drunk—filled with toasts and rants—to being almost comatose. In repose, he looked like one of van Gogh’s potato eaters, hollowed and blank, slumped in his seat.
The cake was finally served, a smallish mango mocha tart with a single candle in its centre, surrounded by blackberries. Dean had slumped farther in his chair, as if the air was slowly leaking out of a balloon. From Harry’s perspective, he was framed behind the small cake and single candle, and Harry thought he would make a brilliant photograph. There was the unplanned juxtaposition that photographers seek, that immediate visual irony. Seeing Dean publicly crumble made Harry feel he was somehow a little further ahead.
Paige blew out her candle and they ate the cake, though Dean didn’t touch his. And after the briefest possible gap that was still within the bounds of dinner party etiquette, Satori excused herself and came back with Dean’s coat and draped it over his shoulders like he was a damaged fighter.
“Thank you so much, Paige,” she said, kissing her on both cheeks. “It was wonderful to see you both. Happy birthday.” She turned to Harry and Gladys. “And it was a pleasure to meet you.”
On the way home, Harry wondered if Satori had led Dean away out of love or solidarity, if his collapse was something that happened on a regular basis. “How do you suppose they met?” Harry said.
“Newton and Paige?”
“No, Dean and Satori.”
“Art school would be my guess,” Gladys said.
“How old do you think she is?”
“Older than Dean. I gather all she does is yoga.”
“She was the exotic beauty and Dean was the enfant terrible,” Harry said. This had once been a game of theirs; to make up a history for everyone they met. “He had a long scarf and smoked Gauloises and said everything Picasso did after Guernica was shit. It must have been fun, don’t you think?”
“Less so now, I’d say.”
“Now his only joy comes from flirting with other people’s wives.”
“He was hardly flirting.”
“You were enjoying it. You were laughing.”
“It isn’t against the law to laugh at a dinner party.”
Gladys was driving, due to the large cognac Harry had accepted after Dean and Satori had gone. He stared at her profile, framed in passing bleats of light as they drove toward the ravine. She had both hands on the steering wheel, as they taught in driving school, placed at ten and two o’clock. In the ravine they were the only car going east, the steep, forested hills rising up on each side, the elegant bridge decorated with bloated graffiti letters. He wanted to see someone dangling up there with a can of spray paint; he wanted to see it actually happen. The city was decorated with the insistent signatures of idle youth; banal, self-referential, though you had to admire their initiative. How did they paint the side of a bridge? Dangling from harnesses? Held by the ankles by trusted friends?
The trees went by in a comforting blur. It reminded Harry of childhood car trips, when simply driving through the night was filled with mystery.
FOURTEEN
HARRY FIRST NOTICED THE DULL, NAGGING PAIN IN HIS lower abdomen shortly after the dinner party. When it persisted, he immediately suspected something serious. One of the benefits of the Internet was that it could confirm your worst fears about anything. Deep into a series of hyperlinked sites that demonstrated a causal link between cancer and negative thoughts, using pie charts and testimonials from doctors identified only by initials, Harry was convinced he carried the disease. These days, he only had negative thoughts.
He hastily scheduled a prostate exam, blood tests and a colonoscopy. The first had revealed normal swelling, the second came back clean, and the earliest colonoscopy appointment was months away. Then a cancellation allowed Harry to jump the Soviet-length queue, and now he sat in the endoscopy waiting room, that dismal casino. As he flipped through a dated magazine, he recalled the odds that someone had of developing colon cancer: a very promising seven percent if you were under fifty (which he almost was), had no obvious symptoms (no rectal bleeding) and no family history. He hadn’t been in a hospital since his vasectomy five years ago. He recalled the pleasant, middle-aged nurse washing his freshly shaven testicles in warm soapy water as they talked about funding cuts to hospitals, though the encounter ended with the soldering iron and the smell of his burning flesh.
This colonoscopy had already required two days of abstinence (no alcohol), fasting, laxatives and purgatives, which had left him feeling both empty and enlightened, in a religious state, ready to receive the spirit. He put on two hospital gowns that were so thin from a thousand washings they hung like gossamer. The first gown was open at the back, the second at the front. When we put on the uniform of the old and infirm, he thought, we inhabit their world. His exposed white calves were complicit: thin and hairless and vulnerable.
Led to a gurney and instructed to lie on his side, Harry contemplated the equipment hanging from the ceiling, de Sade–like and dated, like the waiting room magazines. The paint had peeled on the walls, and there were water stains on the acoustic tile ceiling. The anesthesiologist introduced herself—Marta?—an austere woman with narrow hips and a slight paunch that protruded under her scrubs. She put an IV into his hand and Harry watched something drip into him.
“What is that?”
She listed a handful of unfamiliar drugs.
“Are those morphine-based?” he asked.
“Morphine,” she repeated noncommittally.
Harry was already agreeably, effortlessly high. He wanted to engage this woman in conversation. He wanted to buy her a drink. A sign came into focus on the far wall—a small homemade sign that said, REMEMBER THE OXYGEN!
“That isn’t a good sign,” Harry said.
“What?”
“Remember the oxygen.”
“Oh,” she laughed. “It isn’t what you think.”
“That’s your story?”
“And I’m sticking to it.”
Harry was floating just above this woman and wanted to bring her along to where he was going. Perhaps he called her name (or what might be her name). He found himself in a darkness that was comforting, like floating in warm salt water. There were shapes just beyond his reach. Something crawled up inside him. The gate had been breached, a snake sliding in, stealing his secrets.
Few things are as elemental as the colon. You consume, you process, you excrete; this is the essential biology of the living. Whatever else you do is up to you. You procreate, if the mood strikes you.
When he used to bathe Ben, the happy, splashing baby, there was a comfort in the way those tiny hands held onto him like a marsupial. The perfect harmony that exists before language complicates everything. But he saw this scene from Ben’s perspective now, the looming shape of Harry over the bath, the looming shape of every father, large in their presence, larger in their absence. Harry’s face leaning down, young though not youthful, the smile and sounds that were reserved for children. And Ben’s (his own) arms reaching up.
Harry floated onward. Though he wasn’t alone in this; the world was unanchored—cut loose from history, free of the church, the nuclear fa
mily lurching into the sunset. What binds us now? Debt, all of us chained to the same rock, our livers being delicately gnawed at eighteen percent compounded annually.
The other shapes around him—were these people? He couldn’t tell; the light was so dim, the air so thick it was more like liquid. His limbs were moving, but he made so little progress. He could hear voices. Maybe it was only one. It was slowed down like a tape recorder with dying batteries. The vowels were drawn out, elongated into soft sounds.
Aaaauuuuglaahh.
What?
Harry, did you need it all? The voice was suddenly clear.
Did I need …
So much was unnecessary. The indulgence. All that wine. Pecan pie.
It wasn’t that much, really.
You’ve lost track. But not me.
Harry kited through the amniotic fluid, floating, arms out. Lost track, he echoed in a musical voice.
I remember every chocolate-covered espresso bean, every cognac, every woman you tasted, everything that passed through. I can’t forget.
Was Harry talking to his colon?
Now look at me. A camera. I guard my privacy, Harry.
Your fifteen minutes, Harry said. You should be happy for the attention.
I’m not happy, Harry. I wasn’t expecting company.
But look at you! I’ll bet you’re pink as a newborn, as fresh as lavender.
Harry, I don’t deserve this.
Harry suddenly had a bad feeling. It crept through the fluid, infiltrating his druggy dream. Have you betrayed me? he asked.
I betray you? I’m not capable of betrayal, Harry. I’m just a factory worker. I take what I’m given. You’re management. You betrayed me. You make the decisions and we all live with them. Try to live, anyway.
What the hell do you mean by that?
The room came into focus slowly, a different room. An old man lay on a bed next to Harry’s. Like Harry, he was on his side. A druggy groan came from him. Harry was still enviably stoned. He thought of the few drug experiences he’d had, the one time he took LSD, with Jonah Freedman in university. They went to the Army Surplus store and wandered the dark aisles, among the faded green jackets and heavy boots, and fell down laughing. They found everything in the store hysterical. Jonah tried on a helmet and looked into the cloudy mirror, then laughed so hard he peed his pants slightly. The owner berated them in an accent so thick they couldn’t understand what he was saying. Jonah tried to buy a switchblade knife at the counter, but the owner wouldn’t sell it to him and told them to leave. They stood on the suddenly bright street laughing, the world seen with what seemed to be absurd clarity. They counted their money four times before convincing themselves they had enough for a movie. It took three hours to decide which one and then find the theatre. It turned out to be one that both of them had already seen.
