“Oh, since the divorce, she’s been on a tear. I don’t know where she meets them. Online, probably. It’s all very casual, it’s just hookups.”
“No way. How, where do—” Dominic was picturing Helia, her vast breasts and her maternal way with him, as if he were Christine’s little brother. “Helia? Are women like this now? How did I miss this?” He supposed Christine herself was once like this, at the time when he had met her. “So it’s Helia who’s inspired you, right? I get it. You’ve been hearing her stories. You’re envious of her freedom.”
Christine shrugged. “I guess. Yes.”
“Well, me too.”
She sighed. “We need our drinks now.”
He said, more gently, “It’s the meeting and the dating that I’m scared of. It just exhausts me, the idea. All the spending and the waiting and then the tearful phone calls. And then meeting for coffee to apologize and be friends.”
“Oh god yes,” said Christine. “I have no interest in dates. And that’s probably the scariest thing about it. I’m not afraid someone would get weird in bed or pull a knife on me. I just don’t want him to send me a fucking poem the next day.”
“Ha.” Dominic tried to remember if he had sent Christine any poems, early on. Of course he had.
“Look,” she said, “the whole thing is embarrassing, I know. I can’t stand to hear people talking about dating. You know what they mean by dating? People say they are dating when what they mean is they took each other’s clothes off. And there’s something always a little embarrassing about that. They saw the other person’s squidgy genitals and breasts and hairs and then they touched mucous membranes, and they were excited and disgusted by this and wondered if they had to do it. When you say dating you make a picture of restaurants and glasses of wine. Dating is actually tasting someone’s genitals and trying to make them come. We should call it something more accurate.”
“Wow.” The cocktails were finally there. Dominic grabbed his, a murky amber tumbler with some kind of brown berry floating in froth at the top. It was sweet and bitter, like all of them.
The little waiter tried to remind them of what they had ordered. “So this is your Smokedrop, with the lingonberry, and the white—”
“Thank you, thank you. We’re fine.” The waiter turned quickly.
“I agree with all this,” said Dominic. “It’s a very strange thing. We should call it something more honest, it’s not dating, dating isn’t what it’s about. We should call it something that represents the most medical of nakedness, the exposing of the most private processes, like witnessing diarrhea. We should call it shedding. We should call it moulting.”
“Yes,” said Christine, “I am moulting with him, you would say, and people would look away, like you said I had a colonoscopy.”
Dominic laughed in the flash of pride he often had when Christine was on a roll; he wished his friends were around to see it, even Frederick should come over and be reminded. He said, “Should we ask Frederick over for a drink?” Then, “Do you want to do Frederick?”
“It would be too sad to do Frederick.”
“Oh, he’s not sad. He’s doing fine. Look at him, he’s working.”
“What does he work on? What does he work on all the time? What does he live on?”
This was a question she had been asking Dominic for years, and he still didn’t know, so there was no point in answering, which was fine, because another tiny waiter was on them, calling them guys and telling them about braised cabbage and pork brine and Northern Ontario pickerel and then informing them, once they had made their basically random choices—Dominic and Christine didn’t care about food all that much—that it was all good.
“So,” said Christine, “it’s all good. Or is it? You don’t really want to do it, do you? I thought you were so frustrated, you said yourself, predictable, our sex life has become so predictable.”
“Yes, I do want to. I said so years ago and you freaked out, no, no, don’t say you didn’t because I recall it exactly. So yes, I want to try it. I’m amazed that you want to. I’m just trying to process it. I would have been terrified to even suggest it to you. And I was always getting in trouble for staying out too late and having coffee with exes.”
“There was a lot of coffee with exes. A lot. Here’s Frederick.”
Frederick sat heavily on the banquette beside Christine. He did not look at them because he was looking down into the upturned screen of his video camera, as he always did. Frederick had not shaved in a few days and had had a cigarette very recently. His glasses were so thick one could never really see his eyes, except as giant projected eyes on small convex screens, like the mouths of fish in a bowl. “Tell me,” said Frederick, “what you are thinking right now.” The camera was pointing at Dominic.
“I am,” said Dominic. “I am wondering. About something. Something to do with my wife.” Dominic turned away and wrenched his hips again so that he could stare at Concetta Accoglienza’s daughter as he spoke about this. He said, “My wife has suggested to me that we have an open relationship.”
Frederick did not look up from his screen. He never did. This was his trick.
Concetta Accoglienza’s daughter—Dominic had met her, once, and should remember her name—Nicola, or something like that but with one more syllable, Eleganza, Fantasia, Porphyria, Cryptomania—was an unnatural redhead with cleavage. She had no jewellery on and possibly no makeup either. She sat erect and smiled at her mother and did not look at him, as of course she wouldn’t as she was only twenty-four or something, born when Dominic was already cheating on women he had been living with.
“I don’t know if she is being really serious about this,” he said to the room, “or if it’s just a titillating game, like the game of Who would you sleep with or which of my friends is the hottest that we used to play in our twenties before we all got scared off such games because they are evidently dangerous. It is a fun game and we don’t have to actually follow through on it.” He was aware that he was speaking as if before a class, and that this tone and manner could be irritating to his friends, but he couldn’t help himself, he enjoyed it. He did not glance at Christine’s face, he didn’t know how she was taking this and didn’t want to know. “The rules of this kind of relationship,” he said evenly, “are easy to figure out but less easy to implement. For example, we could have an agreement that we tell each other if we have some new partner in mind, fine, I think that’s what we would have to do, but the evening would come, the day of the date, and one of us, say my wife, would say, okay, I’m going out now with Raoul, you haven’t met him, he’s twenty-years-old, because we’ve agreed that nineteen is too young, have we not, and okay, he’s twenty-years-old and he’s six-foot-three and he doesn’t speak English very well, and I’ll be out all night, so don’t wait up. So then the other partner, say me, stays up all night, after having watched a lot of porn and trying very hard to get to sleep in various ways, and then is very sad and angry in the morning. I just don’t see that working either way.”
Christine spoke now. “Some of us are already used to that.”
Dominic sighed. “Frederick, you have hours of us talking like this, ten years, at least, of us talking like this, of everybody talking like this, what do you do with it?”
“The point is not what I do with it.” Frederick was panning the room now, slowly. “The doing is this. The point is the doing.”
“Is it all posted somewhere? Is it stored at least?” said Christine.
Frederick turned the lens on her. “It’s all stored and archived,” he said to the camera. “And you’ve seen excerpts of it in my gallery shows.”
Christine and Dominic were silent as they thought of Frederick’s shows, the dark galleries with the projections on the walls, static shots of corridors and parking lots and subway tunnels.
“I edit out all the dialogue,” said Frederick, helpfully.
“Aha.”
“You should shoot Concetta Accoglienza,” said Christine, “she’s over the
re.”
“The art lady?”
“And her daughter,” said Dominic, “Glossolalia.”
“Wow, she wears a lot of makeup.” Frederick got up. “Where you guys going after?”
“Oh we don’t go anywhere, after,” said Dominic, “any more. This is it for us. You?”
“There are some folks going to Petunia. Not till later.”
“Wow, Petunia. I’ve heard about it.”
“You haven’t been? Oh, you should.” Frederick was nodding very slowly and deliberately. “You definitely should. Petunia is very well . . . stocked.”
“Stocked,” said Dominic. “I can only picture that.”
“Oh, stop it,” said Christine, “you are not dead. I would love for you to go to Petunia. With Frederick. Go. Have a great time.”
“You are kidding me,” said Dominic.
“You guys work this out,” said Frederick, and walked away, his camera at his waist, aimed at Concetta Accoglienza and her daughter, who had just pulled her hair from her band and shaken it out over her shoulders. She had quite a lot of hair.
“You can sleep with her, if you like,” said Christine, “Catatonia. She’s beautiful. If Concetta Elaboranza Laborobora wouldn’t mind.”
“Oh right,” said Dominic. “You know what I look like to a twenty-year-old girl? First of all, I don’t look like anything, because I’m invisible. But if I do happen to cross her vision, somehow, because perhaps I am teaching her a class or she is introduced to me as one of her mother’s friends, what she would see is actually not a man at all, but a symbol representing authority figure. A symbol, a cipher, like a one of those, what do you call the signs on bathroom doors? Ideogram. It’s like when you see a guy in a red Santa suit. You just see the suit. You just see Santa.”
“You look like Santa to her.”
“I am Santa. I am some kind of person, an authority figure, but I have no body, I am just a brain in a tank, I am completely devoid of any sexuality or any physical component. Especially since . . . Speaking of Santa, would you do the elf?”
They watched him then, the elf, who was barking something at a chef behind the kitchen bar, and grabbing two plates with his claw-like hands and stalking with them, every tendon on display, through the tables where he was watched as one might watch a juggler or mime.
“I might,” said Christine.
“Are you joking?”
“He has it. He has that thing. That mean thing. That’s all it takes.”
Dominic watched him slam the plates down and saw it, he saw that thing. “You wouldn’t get a poem from him.”
“Exactly.”
“How would he climb you? Ropes and things. Pitons. It would hurt.”
“Yeah but he would whisper incredibly vile things in my ear in a squeaky voice.”
“So he’s not really a small man but rather a large penis.”
“I think so.”
“A spiky penis.”
“See I’m all turned on now.” She said this in a voice that was not turned on though.
Their food came, all brown and green and salty, and Dominic found he was very hungry for it, which he never used to be, he remembered, when they were out so much more often. He was eating more and drinking less. “I’m eating more,” he said.
“That’s good, that’s good for you.”
“It’s sad is what it is.”
“What, you’re going to put on weight? You will never, ever put on weight.”
“No, no, not at all. It’s sad that instead of sleeping with all these young people we just go and eat their food. We eat their food and look at them. The less sex we can have with them the more we eat their food. And look at them. They’re not eating their own food. They’re working. And then they’re going to get laid after.”
“Do you think,” said Christine, “that we’re ghouls? Like we come here out of hunger.”
“For their flesh. Excellent idea. I think it applies to anyone over forty who goes to a restaurant. They’re just sex ghouls.”
“Love the Sex Ghouls,” said Christine. “First album, though.”
Once a respectable portion of the salty food had disappeared, and all the wine, Dominic hoisted himself and began his prickling walk to the stairs to the washroom. If he had enough wine he found his gait was almost normal, aside from the unusual swing his left leg had taken, his foot like a ball at the end of a rope, and the tearing feeling, the feeling that something was being frayed with every step, was only on the forward step. The farther he walked, he hoped, the warmer the joint would get and the less noticeable this shredding would become. Although one of the neurologists had told him not to walk at all. That was a great idea.
The stairs were okay going down but would be full of stabs going up. The Mindfulness Advisor he had seen for four unreimbursed sessions would tell him not to think about that, about the pain of a few minutes hence, until it happened, as worrying about the future was the cause of all his, Dominic’s, angst. Dominic said, “You fucking prick,” in the stairwell just as a girl opened the bathroom door and started up the steps. It was Concetta Accoglienza’s daughter. She stopped, looked up at him. She was as pale as her mother. Dominic pretended to be humming a song whose lyrics were, “You fucking prick, hmmm hmmm.” He tried to make himself flat against the wall as she passed. Her eyes were down and she climbed quickly. Her hair brushed his face and it smelled like the first floor of a very forbidding white department store. It was not a good time to remind her that they had met when she was about twelve.
He hummed his pretend song all the way down.
When he emerged from a stall, there was Frederick at the stainless steel sinks. The camera was on the counter, unblinking. “Hey,” said Dominic.
“Hey.”
Dominic washed his hands. He winced as he bent. “The source of all my angst,” he said to the camera, “is not my inability to be in the moment but fucking pain. Actual pain. That is the source of all my angst.”
“You should come to Petunia,” said Frederick. “You haven’t been out for a while.”
“I’ve been under the weather.”
“You look fine. You’re fine.”
“Christine wouldn’t want to come.”
“So come without her.”
“Ah, that, as you know, is not the easiest—”
“I have.” Frederick produced a small rectangle of folded paper from his pocket and waved it. “The groove.” He began to open it.
“No, no,” said Dominic, staring at its contents. “No. Can’t. I’m on all these pain killers and I just don’t, I don’t any more.”
“That’s cool,” said Frederick. He went into a stall and closed the door.
Dominic waited, he wasn’t sure why. He stared at himself in the mirror, a narrow man. Drawn was the word. A drawn man. He waited for the sound of the long sniff. He was going to go right back upstairs. “Am I Santa?” he called, “or an elf?”
Frederick emerged. “I left a little bit for you. Just a touch.”
“Christ,” said Dominic, “no.”
“I’d rather be an elf.”
“A fucking angry elf. Yes.”
Frederick picked up his camera. “You will enjoy Petunia.”
Dominic went into the stall.
When he had clambered up all the stairs, grimacing, he was breathing hard. He went to the coat rack to get his cane before he went back to the table. He walked more confidently with the cane.
“I asked for the bill,” she said. “You all right?”
He sat and breathed. He said, “Were you really encouraging me to go out with Frederick after?”
“Why not?”
“Why not? Why not? Because not just a year ago you would have been frowning and sighing right now and asking me what time I would be home and who would be there, meaning what women, and making me promise I wouldn’t do any lines and to call if I was going to be late.”
“That’s just bullshit. Is that really how you see me?”
&n
bsp; “It is not bullshit, it is not even a slight exaggeration. You would have done everything in your power to discourage me from going to some place named Petunia with Frederick. It would have been like asking you if I could go to a hotel in Casablanca with Dominique Strauss Kahn.”
“I would go to a hotel in Casablanca with him.”
“What is going on with you? Do you have a date? Already?”
“I’m happy to go home. I want you to go out. Have some fun. It will be good for you.”
“Wow.”
“And I don’t mind if you are doing lines with Frederick.”
“Oh, no, he doesn’t, any more.”
Christine stood up, pushed the table towards him so she could slide out. “Don’t even try that on me. I can see you did a line with him right now.”
“What are you talking about? Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Oh stop. Who cares. Can you get our coats?”
Dominic snapped upwards. He crossed the floor almost without his cane. His hip was electric but in a not-intolerable way. He was overheating. He got the coats and helped Christine with hers and they called their thanks to the kitchen and the host and the elf. The elf stopped what he was doing, leaned against the bar and looked at Dominic. He opened his mouth and jerked his nose upwards. Then he stared a second longer and turned away.
“Okay,” said Dominic. Then he turned to Concetta Accoglienza’s table. She saw him and wrinkled her eyes. She waved.
“Go over,” said Christine. “Be nice.”
“Christ.” Dominic stretched his face into a rigid form he hoped would come across as more smile-like than electrocution-like, and moved through the tables. Concetta’s hair was black and shiny; everything about her was brilliant, except for her skin which had gone dry and papery, overnight it seemed, although it had been more than a year, probably, since Dominic had seen her.
“Sweetie,” said Concetta. “What happened to you? Did you fall at a rave?”
“Yes,” said Dominic, “I climbed on top of the speaker stacks. Thought I could fly. You know how it is.”
“Really?”
“No. It’s nothing serious. Hello,” he said to the daughter, and looked down at her chest, which was different from Concetta’s.
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