In the Beggarly Style of Imitation

by Jean Marc Ah-Sen

  “The Slump” poses a much more difficult case of accounting. I had not read this story until I was given proofs of this collection in preparation for writing these introductory remarks. It is a legitimate piece of juvenilia dating back to a decade ago when Ah‑Sen began writing in earnest. All I can venture here is a vague recollection of plans for Cherelle to become a failed novelist, so it would not be incongruous to suppose that the story exists, along with “Sentiments and Directions,” as one of Cherelle’s earliest literary offerings, and a middling specimen of vanity at that (Imitation is her codex, after all).

  The greatest artistic liberty on offer is undoubtedly the inclusion of “A Defence of Misanthropy,” which was published originally in a Translassic encyclical and drafted by my own hand after kilworthying a William Hazlitt essay. It is also attributed to Cherelle Darwish and perhaps accounts in greater detail for the psychological frame of mind she was in after divorcing her husband and separating from Roderick Borgloon. As anyone can well imagine, all these years onwards the piece appalls me, though I cannot help but marvel at Ah‑Sen’s complete abandonment of any kind of ethical framework for sourcing found, borrowed and stolen writing to cadge a publishing deal.

  It would be a monumental oversight not to mention the fact that Imitation had two paramount objectives unrelated to Ah‑Sen’s literary career: it was meant to publicly lend attention to the Translassic system, but it had to at the same time delegitimize the Sudimentarist school of writing, which encouraged writers to assume the lives of their fictional characters. Sudimentarism was the chief rival to all of the Translassic Society’s efforts for validation among writers. These impediments took the form of legal challenges, infiltration of the Society by intelligencers, and in two confirmed instances, the threat of physical violence towards high-ranking Translassic associates using bound Sudimentarist hardbacks, all under the direction of my father, Artepo Lepoitevin, the founder of Sudimentarism. The war of words between the two camps escalated well past acceptable laws of decorum, which undoubtedly contributed to the droves of disaffiliations on both sides. Ah‑Sen may have thrown the first stone and deserves his fair share of responsibility for characterizing my father as a participant in the “bourgeois diffidence that forbade extramarital affairs unless it concerned making love with run-on sentences.”

  An air of ill-starred futility suffuses my memories of these engagements. It is difficult to feel indignant when the source of your woes has left the surface of the earth. When my father died, the way was clear for Transmentarism—a bizarre amalgam of the two systems forged by Ah‑Sen’s hand—to take the place previously occupied by its primogenitors. Seemingly having cast off the two main stumbling blocks in his life, Ah‑Sen was free to pursue his sesquipedalian campaigns in the “literary underground” unencumbered by such inconsiderable factors as friendship, incorruptibility or sincerity of intention.

  If there is any justice in this world, Ah‑Sen will read this introduction and be mortified by the unlicensed look behind the iron curtain of his mind in the exact degree I was mortified to see no mention of my name in this windowless tome (unless you count “Tabitha Gotlieb-Ryder,” the most unflattering of tributes I could conceive for myself), my sizeable contributions to these pieces annulled by some cack-handed legerdemain. Mortification, as the saying goes, is good for the soul.

  Ah‑Sen can one day write on these issues and cease his parade of false attributions he has publicly advanced behind a monolithic selfdom of staged worry and mock principles. It made perfect sense when Translassitude was a going concern, and I would likewise take full credit for the novels Ah‑Sen draffsacked on my behalf, but those days are long behind us, and I derive no commercial benefit from doltish associations with the past; I see no need why he should either.

  I suppose Ah‑Sen will have the last laugh, though, a laugh partaking in what Jack London called the “grimness of infallibility.” He possesses confirmation that the final “sentiment and direction” I delivered unto him all those years ago in our studio on Ludlow Street was in fact a visionary diagnostic of our times; and while it was meant to be in the spirit of an exhortation, I now see that the suggestion that “there are no new ideas, only unusual ways of forgetting” has become little more than a dispensation to “write” with ungrudging impunity.

  –K. Tanner,

  NYC, 2020

  Underside of Love

  Mannerly Style of Elicitation

  Roderick Borgloon was more of a boor, a fool and a scrounger than was humanly possible, but our separation all these years didn’t make him any less my dependent. When we were together, things were horrible for me on account of his masculine remoteness and ability to reduce all the warmth of human contact into a wasted effort. The fact that Roddy knew this and still remained absent in my life in all the ways that mattered crushed my faith in him and put a distance between us that I kept alive. He could be morose, entitled, thunderously opinionated, but also thin-skinned and insecure (when I thought him at his best), nullifying my own expectations as a lover. He liked to complain about everything, the state of the world, the injustices that flung themselves onto the streets and into our paths unblessedly—what a world he painted in his mind, even if only half of it was true. Everything I was taught a man could aspire to, everything that a woman could expect in a romantic equal, found a cracked mirror in our domestic partnership.

  Part of my complaisance was due to how much I was told that Roddy’s affections were all he could muster on another person’s behalf—unimaginable feat of compassion that it was—and that whatever shortcomings were derived from this paucity of feeling, they should not be measured against the virtues of a better person: Borgloon was Borgloon, but indeed he was mine. I would be reminded that it was something to have someone to put up with, to coddle, to turn a blind eye to their tomcatting, to endure his ridicule and act as their only port of call for troubled odysseys.

  Roddy wanted to be unhappy in life out of a pure ideal of wretchedness. I didn’t find this clarity until much later, when I could deliberate on the matter free from the annihilating influence of his cynicism. I knew that he wasn’t interested in bettering himself; he only wanted to have something to hold over you. He was poor, he was passed over, he was overeducated and he never let anyone forget it. He loved to tell the story of how he compared pay stubs with a woman he was living with and asked her how in good conscience she could allow him to pay one red cent to live with her. Sane people push these antipathetic characters away, they maintain an undeluded distance, but over time Borgloon became my only kind of emotional sustenance. I experienced limerence over him, had sense abandon me and carve out hollow desire in its place (it was a sexual awakening for me). I absolutely needed the cheap emotions he could provide at the expense of my self-respect.

  The first time I laid eyes on him, my legs nearly gave out—it was a low point, so sue me—but I wasn’t dragooned into feeling anything for him until much later. A Wrangler jacket with Wrandam zigzags brushing against a yellow T-shirt that read Apex Novelties gave the illusion of substance to his blushing boy’s body; ketchup-stained velvet flares flowed over a pair of jodhpurs with soles scrupulously fastened by staples, and a brown rollie usually dangled from his mouth. A vision if you were inclined to see it that way. His snub nose had the effect of rendering his face inert and risible. He had a nice enough set of teeth though, except for this one snaggletooth that conveyed a sinister intention his conversation couldn’t honestly come by. A nose you couldn’t do anything about, that was just genetics, but hygiene told you everything you needed to know about a person.

  When we discovered that both our families lived in Antananarivo, biology took us by the reins. We Darwishes emigrated from Mauritius, the Rabinurs were Malagasy—Roddy took the name Borgloon after the city where he bedded his first white woman. It’s hard to describe the feeling of finding another islander when you’ve spent so much time feeling isolated and alone. When it’s a romantic attachment, it’s akin to jouissance,
but cut with paranoia and appalling need. In no time at all, I was rotated among a roster of other doe-eyed women in a cycle of anti-domesticity, non-entanglement, what have you. I was the only non-white woman. You couldn’t get Borgloon to commit to anything in his mind not worth committing to, but that was his way and the way of many young men who came before and after him.

  Borgloon and I had been engaged in this open arrangement for about eight or nine months when I found out I was with child. I knew I wanted to get rid of it as soon as possible. Having a baby here would take the decision of going back to Pereybere or Antananarivo out of my hands; besides, I was far too young to become a mother. I assumed I would be ploughing a lonely furrow. Roddy did not give me an opportunity to discuss the future before he broke all contact with me like the coward I suspected him to be (double-dyed-in-the-wool, podgy little brute who dashed off whenever life got hard). I don’t care how he found out about this little detail but I wouldn’t have to look very hard since I could count on my hands the people I told the nature of my predicament—Barbara, Harriet, Sveta; that is, the other women who dabbled in Roddy’s affections with me.

  I lost the child naturally. I had something called a tubal pregnancy, which saved me the trouble of paying out-of-pocket for an operation. I don’t know that I would have been able to get the time off work without getting fired in any event, so this was fortunate for me (in the broad sense). This was not the sticking point. It was the way Roddy went about it that had me at the end of my tether; that for all his high talk about the absence of rectitude among the taskmasters of society, when push came to shove, he was just like every other motherfucker in the world without any sort of class. It’s silly how this became the sore spot, more than his pusillanimity. I should probably explain what I mean about Roddy’s two-facedness a bit better.

  I would run into his associates asking after Roddy all the time; everywhere I went I couldn’t avoid someone who knew us formerly as a couple. There was this one dullard named Studholme whom I slept with to get back at Roddy. He used to jingle around with loose change in his pockets so people might think how hard up he was.

  “Where’s Borgloon? I’m weary-sick, he’s got the cure for what ails me.”

  “Oh, go hang,” I’d say.

  This was how we first hit it off; I thought I could disabuse the city of Roddy’s exaltedness one rut at a time.

  Studholme asked me why things ended with Roddy—I became very well-versed in this exercise. People would be dismayed to hear their patron saint of hypocrite scholastics impugned, even after I told them what he did to me. They would go on polishing his pedestal like a mea culpa was a slate-cleaner—how altruistic Roddy was, on the beam and working more righteously than anyone else to redress all manner of social ills. If they weren’t sleeping with him, they were waiting for his benediction. One night, Studholme was giving it to me a little rougher than usual. He collapsed on top of me and asked if I could recall the last thing Roddy was reading.

  Roddy didn’t care all that much that Studholme and other maundering pseudo-thinkers looked to him as a means to stiffen their resolve and validate their respective causes. Roddy was no academic, but he was no novitiate either; well-read in his own way but coming at a lot of information second-hand. I had no problem with organizing, but it was hard not to laugh at where the bar was set among this group. Flag-burning, Maoist calisthenics, people’s war in the Golden Horseshoe. The Rosedale Marxists were learning how to crawl (to and from their Stutz Blackhawks, I suppose).

  For every reason Borgloon gave you to despise him, he also reminded you how brilliant he could be. I would oscillate between opposing poles of feeling. I sometimes experienced his comrades’ incredulity at hearing Borgloon and I hailed from Africa, followed by their disappointment in not much more than a look that seemed to say “I wish we knew some real Africans.” Borgloon made an excellent point about how if we weren’t being fetishized for the currency our lives could give their theories, we were being decried—by these deputies taking offence in our honour—for losing our roots in the unnavigable canyons of the white world. It was but a handsel of Borgloon’s insight and I fell a little in love with him after he expressed it. Suddenly we were too white for their liking, this vanguard often composed of white men and women themselves. The only thing worse was when they worshipped the ground we walked on. What’s left is altogether benign and mundane, I’ll be the first to admit, but since when did Borgloon and I care if something was de rigueur or not to be to our liking?

  I respected Roddy’s zeal but I had no patience for these causes that were becoming fashionable (they smacked of undiscerning clubism). To me, arriving at the right conclusion was for nought if you did not come about it legitimately, through pertinacious individualism. Everybody had to take a stand for some thing or other, God forbid you be ignorant on these matters. Didn’t rub someone’s nose in on their absorption in a tyrannized life, that sort of rot. The problem with cultural ascendency is that all the bozos start getting on the train. A lot of Roddy’s associates were holding what I called “slummocking contests:” who could sink into squalor the fastest, who could ape the working class more convincingly, secure the job that sapped the most physical labour out of them. Studholme left a job in high finance to become a longshoreman! I had never seen anything like it (he used to crawl into bed next to me smelling to high heaven of fish) and I had to break his heart over it. My point is that although Borgloon was better than most pietists, this was a small consolation to someone like me. The least deluded person in the room still partakes in the grand delusion, after all. With any luck, I will have explained my frame of mind during this turbulent time with some degree of preciseness, if not detachment.

  I put two years—not so long a time as one would think—between the pregnancy and seeing Roddy again, years when I desperately tried not to think about his rack and ruin whenever I was reminded of him. It was nearly impossible, but I forced him out like any other thing worth doing—sort of like a bad way you’d been doing fractions. I was huddled in the corner of a St. Clair dance club one evening, I guess it would be about 1977, 1978. I just remember that Bill C-150 was still in the news almost ten years later, so old wounds were starting to open again. I was cramped on one end of a counter that curved around a diamond-shaped bar. I saw that across from me Roddy was nursing a bottle of Zundert.

  I was unfazed by the coincidence. After a few years living here, you become completely familiarized with the lengths to which the city will tinker with you—it’s still too tiny even with its corners stretching far and wide like a choked balloon. I think it was my ability to focus a lapseless conviction that allowed me to talk to him. I wasn’t planning on anything beyond a verbal confrontation. I pushed my way through the crowd to his side and without turning to look, I remember how in a practised, incurious way between sips, he greeted me with “What it is, what it is.”

  I steadied my hand on his wrist. “Look at me, Roddy.”

  He tittered behind the bottle at the mention of his name, which he brought across his face as one would defend themselves from a doust across the chin. “Roddy, listen to me. I came over because I know the least you could do is stand me some drinks.”

  He agreed before recognizing me, like this was a common occurrence with women approaching him in strange bars. He was chuckling while sifting through the receipts in his wallet. “You still drinking the same?”

  When the drink came, I knocked it over with my elbow. This really tickled Roddy.

  “I’ll have another,” I said.

  Roddy took up the glove because I appealed to his competitive nature. I knocked over the next Nick and Nora glass too. Roddy continued to foot the bill, and was still not pressing the matter. I was within an ace of a slap in the face though, I can tell you that much. The barkeep made a motion with his hand to chastise me when he gathered up the shattered glass, but Roddy took him by the scruff of his neck and shoved him into the people sitting on the barstools next to us.

 
The third drink I actually tasted, and I could tell that Roddy was both prepared to finish this absurd game of hawk-dove as the winner, but also relieved that he would not waste an entire packet of wages on a matter of personal pride. This rigmarole continued for a few minutes more, but I had moved on to taking sips of my drink, and then emptying its contents into Roddy’s beverages, spoiling them for him.

  “That’s enough, Cheree! When I get back, we’re going to stop this foolishness. You looking for a handout for your kid, I don’t blame you.”

  Roddy hot-headedly navigated the way to the toilet. When he was gone, I told a few people, the barkeep included, that I wanted to buy them all a round of their pleasure to make up for the disturbance. This was mostly received with nervous approval, barkeep’s face in particular turning to sour mush. I sat there for a few moments, waited for when he ducked down to fetch some glasses, and then swiftly exited the Maple Leaf Ballroom, putting the entire episode—minus the priceless look on Roddy’s sozzled face I would have to imagine to see—behind me.

  I really expected this to be the last of Roddy’s hide or hair in my life. I am not a vindictive person by nature (turnabout is fair play). I dispelled the possibility of future engagements with my former lover-leman. If we were walking on the same street, why I would just cross over to the other side and look away. That’s how big I was prepared to be about it. I knew he would never step through the club again, even if you crossed his palm with all the silver in the world. What had transpired between us hadn’t been notable enough for me to rationalize avoiding going there, though. It was one of those insignificant episodes that dotted my life, not to say I was prone to such retributions.