The plan was to buy new shoes. Instead, I found the McDonald’s napkin with Marla’s phone number still balled up in my pocket. She was unlike anyone I’d ever met. She seemed to live by her own code. The Marla code. Independent and unafraid. Dangerously so. I liked that. The shoes could wait. I called her as soon as I was out of Hornsmith’s.
“I’m going to a gallery opening of a friend of mine tonight. A photographer,” she said when I asked what she was up to. “Why don’t you come?”
Gallery openings didn’t interest me. For the most part, what the posers and hipsters fobbed off as art didn’t grab my attention. But I burned to see Marla again.
“I’ll see if I can make it.” Desperation is so unattractive.
“Good,” she said, “there’s going to be to be music and lots of wine. I’ll see you there.”
The photographer called himself Rossini. His pictures were of the faux Polaroid variety. Badly lit, out-of-focus abstracts in bleached maple frames that sold for over a thousand dollars a print. The gallery was packed with girls in black party dresses and guys with pointy shoes and uncombed hair. Rossini held a glass of champagne high above his head in overstated gratitude to the people in attendance. He spoke with a nasal lisp — an affectation, no doubt.
“I want to thank everyone here tonight for supporting these works of madness I’ve produced from the recesses of my mind,” he said to the crowd, who kept their noise down to a reverent tinkle of glasses. “The images you see here represent to me the richness of our sexual nature, the rawness of the laws of attraction, and the sensuality of unfettered animal lust.”
His head rolled back. For a moment it seemed he might topple over. As if to steady himself, he swung his left hand deep into the pocket of his trousers. He scratched his balls and leered at a nearby alcohol-flushed groupie completely wrapped up in his act.
“With these pieces,” he said, “I am hoping to explore the ambiguous bond between sex and desire in ways that both unite and alienate the viewer. It’s a study of my insights while I was in rehab, a period of my life that brought my sexual nature into sharp focus for the first time.”
The crowd applauded. Music started to play again. People started to sway. Too cool to dance. Too high to resist. This was no place for me. I made myself exit-ready until I saw her across the room with one arm around that rascal Rossini. She laughed as he whispered something in her ear. Lust and envy clouded my mind. I was uncertain what she could possibly see in his mediocre photos or his tedious speechifying. Unfortunately, my departure was now impossible, because she’d disengaged herself from the pig to make her way over to greet me.
“I wasn’t sure you’d come,” Marla said when she was next to me. She kissed my cheek, her breasts brushing against my arm.
“I’m not sure if I should be here,” I said. “What a crowd.”
“Have you seen his work?”
“It’s interesting.”
“Maybe you don’t understand it?”
“I understand it’s underexposed and out of focus. Like the ‘work’ of a child.”
“Be nice. He’s a real talent.” She laughed like she knew a secret in a way that made me uneasy about my outspoken opinion.
“I’ll be right back,” she said. “Don’t leave me here.”
She seemed to know everyone in the room, kissing and hugging as she made her way back into the throng, attending to some private agenda. Left on my own, I bravely sniffed around the party’s various corners with a vodka and soda in hand. Unwelcome in others’ conversations, I soon found myself alone in a back room of the gallery, confronted by three framed nudes.
The model appeared otherworldly, hand-tinted in yellow and green. In one picture, she sat on a wooden chair, legs spread, hands in her crotch, her head thrown back in some small private ecstasy. In another, she was against a plaster wall, wrapped in a stained sheet, as if something horrible had transpired. Her face stared blankly at a spot on the floor. In the third and final print, she was seated on a toilet, her breasts covered by her boney arms as she looked into the lens. It took a moment before I noticed they were all Marla. The realization left me frothy with lust.
“Do I make you nervous, baby?” she crooned in my ear from out of nowhere. She slipped her arm through mine.
“Yes, you do,” I said, glad that she was back.
“I did those last year. I needed the money.”
“We all do things for money.”
“Get me another gin and tonic?”
I complied, and when I found her again in the crowd, she was wrapped around a fashionable guy with a carefully constructed head of blond dreadlocks. A Celtic tattoo ran up his arm, something mystical, no doubt. She saw me with her drink and smiled at me, her neutered pageboy.
She said, “This is Dominic. He’s a talented experimental video director from Montreal. Dominic, meet Paul. Paul’s a writer.”
The director offered his hand.
“She’s a beautiful woman who exaggerates my skills,” he said in a heavy French Canadian accent as he ran his other hand over her ass.
I pretended to break out in an outrageous cough and poured vodka over his blue-velvet pants. He lurched back. Too late.
“Sorry,” I said and staggered off to find the exit before anyone reacted.
Outside, the sweet night air was a welcome relief. I’d hoped to have her to myself and hadn’t counted on her social butterfly act. A cab would soon put all this behind me.
“You leaving already, baby?” she said.
And there she was, next to me on the sidewalk.
“Yeah,” I said, “it’s a great party, but I should go. Work in the morning.”
She moved closer. Her breath slow.
“I can’t stand it here, either.” She pressed a car key into my hand. “I’m trashed. Drive me.”
We stumbled in the dark across an empty gravel parking lot. She slipped her arm through mine to steady herself on the loose stones. The touch of her sweaty skin distracted me. A couple of tall cracked oaks swayed in the warm night breeze. Somewhere a dog barked.
At the car, the lock was hard to open in the dark. She watched for a moment before she took back the key. We found ourselves close and awkward against the door until I drew my face into her hot neck. She shuddered, then leaned her ear into my kiss. She squirmed and pulled at my hair. She bit my chest until she chewed right into my heart.
THREE
This New Life
BY THE TIME I showed up the next morning, Hornsmith, dressed in a patched brown-corduroy jacket, worn jeans, and a red plaid shirt, was already at his desk with his feet up, reading the Globe and Mail. His pipe smouldered in the ashtray.
“Shoes say a lot about a man,” he said from behind his paper. “Yours say you still only own one pair. Comfortable, neutral, and suitable for all occasions. They say you think you can get away with shortcuts. They give you away, Latour. Mine, on the other hand, suggest that while I might look dishevelled, I’m a lively fellow. Someone to be taken seriously. Creative. Innovative. Ready to take my own road. A leader.”
He stuck his right foot out to show off a stylish red-leather running shoe.
“Steve Maddens. I don’t need to wear anything else when I wear these. People who see me know. Watch and learn.”
He pointed to a stack of papers on the floor.
“While you meditate on a man’s sartorial choices, we need a new client. Why don’t you begin browsing through that for someone suitable?”
Admonished, I retreated with the pile to an empty desk across the room. It was a random collection of business journals, telephone books, newspapers, brochures, and travel magazines.
“What am I looking for?”
“Companies with glossy, slick advertisements are usually a good bet. We like the midsized ones who want to become front-runners. What they do doesn’t matter. The Business is sophisticated enough to handle any sort of client.”
He pointed to something in the paper.
“He
re: the York Hotel. Nine hundred rooms with views of Niagara Falls. Air conditioning and Wi-Fi in every room. Multiple restaurants. A weekend lovers’ special, including champagne. That’s a prospect. Write these people down, Latour. You can bet these bums don’t have nine hundred rooms with Falls views. However, look at the size of the ad. And a toll-free number to convince you how accessible they are. And the photo …”
He held up the page.
“You’d think they were the only hotel in Niagara Falls. I’ll wager a view of the Falls involves having to stand on your toes and stick your neck out a little window to peer around a brick wall and over some trees for a glimpse of the water. The swine. And look at that doorman’s costume. You can rent those at Malabar. Add them to our potential client list, Latour. Write them down. Write them down.”
I dug around the desk for a notepad and pen and wrote Prospects, underlined twice, followed by York Hotel, Niagara Falls. The place offered no obvious value, since we had no knowledge of the hotel business, and it wasn’t even in the city.
“I know what you’re thinking, Latour, but don’t concern yourself with that,” Hornsmith said. “The making of lists needs to be free of censorship. Every idea is valid. Later, we’ll review our work. For now, don’t hold back. Ideally, we’ll end up with twenty prospects: ten in town and ten out of town. All in different industries, for a diversified portfolio.”
To me, it wasn’t clear what we were doing. It sure didn’t look like the ghostwriting business. Hornsmith’s plan, if he had one, was elusive. The pile was diversified enough. How it led to business was another matter. Farm equipment. A trucking fleet. A furniture manufacturer. A brochure for a cruise line. A seven-day all-inclusive Caribbean paradise. That sounded good. All-inclusive paradise.
“What about these guys?”
From across the room, Hornsmith squinted over his reading glasses at the glossy sell sheet in my hand. He scoffed.
“Travel? Ha. You know, the word travel comes from the French word travail — work. They’ve taken the travail out of travel, Latour. You should know this. You’re French, aren’t you?”
“Says you,” I said.
“Well, I can’t recall,” he said, “but what those people offer is devoid of personal enrichment. It’s a staged stimulation sold as excitement to morons trying to mainline the world without taking any risks.” He ripped into the word risks like a hungry dog on a hunk of meat. “If travel is the metaphor for life’s journey, the cruise ship business represents a culture where our lust for life has been replaced by sanitized little doses of sadness disguised as a good time. It’s the metamorphosis of Man the Adventurer, Man the Hunter-Gatherer, Man the Survivor into Man the Complacent, Man the Fatted Calf, Man the Hen-Pecked Limp Dick. The journey, the life, becomes the complete antithesis of its intent. Are you listening, Latour?”
The notepad had more doodles than lists. Marla’s scent lingered in my nose. My fingers still tingled from her skin. I’d never met anyone like her. She infected me. Defenceless, I yearned for one thing: to crawl back to her.
“It’s a metaphor,” I said.
“Latour, for a sleepy, callow young man, you manage moments of clarity,” Hornsmith said. “That’s it exactly. A metaphor. Spiritually, we’re all Ulyssians wandering through treacherous landscapes, trying to get back home. In the concrete world, the metaphor degenerates to a hollow experience around a twenty-four-hour buffet at sea. Insight is an inner journey. Not something you get at the salad bar.”
He paused to catch his breath. “What the hell, put them on the list. Who else have you got?”
For days, we carried on like this, scanning magazines, talking nonsense, and making lists. Never once did he mention the manuscript owed to Dr. Courtney. Moreover, whenever I raised my concern, he promised we’d get to it soon enough.
“The thing only has value,” he said, “if it’s late.”
In time, brown full brogues replaced my old desert boots. Mr. Gupta the tailor coordinated several stylish outfits, including blue and grey two-button suits. A fresh haircut rounded off my transformation. As autumn started to nip the air, there was enough coke in my apartment to kill a horse and enough cash in my pockets that bar tabs were never out of reach.
Marla said she never liked the movies when I took her to the Bloor Cinema to see The African Queen one warm Indian summer evening. She only came along because it was a funky revue theatre and not a mall. She didn’t care much for Bogey’s act. Too anachronistic, all that he-manliness. Katharine Hepburn, on the other hand, made her laugh. “Could you make a torpedo?” She liked that. Of course she would. She was a torpedo-building kind of person herself. Out on the street afterward, we laughed about the marriage, too. “Proceed with the execution,” says the German ship captain right after he pronounces them man and wife. Turned out, that’s how she saw things, too. Turned out, Marla had just never seen the right kinds of movies before.
We stopped in a bar for a bottle of wine. Snuck into the toilet and snorted some coke. Laughed. And talked about the movie. When it was time to go, I said I’d walk her home, which was okay by her. Together, we walked along Bloor Street and up Brunswick into the Annex.
“I’m off in the morning,” she said. “We’re on the road. Up north for two weeks.”
She toured with The Raging Socket into the distant territories. Places that people usually came from. Charlottetown. Moncton. Thunder Bay. Brandon. Days on the bus. Nights in beery barf dumps. Her music career.
“It’s another world,” she said. “The travel is hard, the gigs don’t pay much, and my manager is a pain in the ass. Sometimes I let him fuck me just to keep him in line.”
“That work for you?” I said, as if this didn’t move me.
“It’s just business. He’s a dope dealer. We launder the money through the band tours. My end of the deal is we get to use part of the money to make our record in LA.”
I didn’t know what to say. I tried to act casual, like this sort of arrangement was normal to me. Like I was cool and not a hapless lovesick idiot caught in a lusty maze. Lost and confused.
“I don’t care what happens to my body,” she said. “He can’t get to me, though sometimes I don’t know who I hate more, the asshole I let into my bed or myself for being so desperate to be humiliated.”
“I don’t stand a chance, do I?”
“You still have some things to figure out.”
I lit a joint as we walked toward her place. She took me on her own terms. She had a life that excluded me. On the dope cloud, I high-zoned through the distance between us. I pretended not to care. To care was weak. Marla despised weak. I was weak.
She laughed at me. “I want a cat in the yard. A swing in a tree. A house with a dining room. A man who loves me. Preferably one who’s blind or handicapped. Not crazy or depressed or mean. Someone who relies on me. Someone I can take care of.”
Maternal Marla. Hard to picture it.
“That’s not going to be me, is it?” I couldn’t stop myself.
“No, baby,” she said, “it’s not.”
We walked in silence for a while. Then she pointed to a darkened house. “This is my place, up on the third floor. Want to come up?”
Dope dread made me case the place. I felt something horrible was about to happen. Checked the windows and locks. Lover Man could burst through the door with a smoking .45. Jealous violence. Possession. Cameras. Death threats. Forced to mule dope. Forced to hear them in the next room. Marla keeping Lover Man in line. She watched me, amused.
“Come lie down,” she said.
She took my hand. Resistance was futile. Dizzy from the coke and the wine and the pot, I let her lead me to the bedroom, where she wrapped me in a down comforter.
“You’re trembling, baby,” she said. “You’re all jacked up.”
“You give me fever,” I said, “and it hurts my bones.”
The bed felt lumpy. Behind the small of my back was a stuffed brown bear. One ear chewed off. Its beady black eyes r
eproached me as she took it and cradled it in her arms.
“My mom died when I was little,” she said. “Choked on a hot dog at a family picnic. My father lost his mind. They locked him up for a while. He never came back for me. I threw out all my dolls after that. Only kept the bear he gave me.”
She pointed to a little lead-framed photo on her dresser. Marla’s mom: a girl in a checkered dress standing in a hayfield, squinting into the sun. Cool air seeped through the open window into the room. Outside, a church bell chimed midnight.
“Just twenty-two.”
Marla said she’d lived at her aunt’s after that. A wild child with no one to watch over her. She lit a smoke and lay down beside me on the bed.
“One day after Mama died, I was sitting at my aunt’s vanity playing with her makeup. Uncle Hank found me and slapped me. He reeked of gasoline and cigars. He told me I looked slutty in the lipstick. Then he hit me again, this time with his belt. He was drunk. I was seven.”
She looked at the red-hot end of her cigarette.
“By the time I was thirteen, I’d pretty much stopped going to school. No one cared. I followed my granddaddy to the Kaladar Hotel out on Highway 7, where he’d drink with his old army buddies. They wore their medals and berets. They’d get pissed and relive old Nazi battles and talk about friends they’d buried over there. In the corner was a piano where one of them played their songs. He was about eighty. He’d let me sit next to him on the bench so’s I could touch the keys and he could touch my hands. I learned the piano like that.”
A few years on, the old guys were even older, one or two more were dead, and Marla still pounded the piano in the back, the main entertainment by then. No one thought it strange, a young girl at the piano in the bar. They’d fought the Hun, after all; after that, nothing was strange again.
We lay in the dark for a while, Marla and me. Too tired. Too drugged. Too weak to struggle from her embrace. I drifted downwards into sleep, and a silent black-and-white newsreel played behind my closed eyes. The old guys on a convoy of tanks rolled across misty Belgian farmlands. The enemy was on the run. Grandpa fought the Hun. Marla learned the old songs. My heart was invaded. Occupied. Resisters sent to camps. Grandpa fought the Hun. Marla fronted a dope racket with Lover Man.
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