by Greg Kearney
He hears Lila let herself in the front door. Dear, doting Lila. Still drops in once a day on her lunch break, even though there’s less and less to do. Edmund wants to pay her still, but she won’t hear of it. When he was sick she was indispensable, but now … Dean was the one who needed an assistant: he was hopeless with all things clerical, all things practical. They came to love Lila as family. A lesbian fag hag, she thrilled to the minutiae of urban gay male culture, but was so shy around other women. She sometimes wept with worry that she’d never find a lover. But she did, a year ago. Marci. Very strong, protective of Lila, which is what Lila needs.
She has his dry cleaning. She looks like she has a slight sun-burn; she may just be flushed.
“Edmund White?”
“Not quite.” Ha ha. It was almost funny ten years ago. It’s hard to let go of shtick once it’s set in. Dear, indulgent Lila. She’s never read Edmund White, only knows the name. He gave her The Burning Library, a collection of his essays, but it reminded her of so many lost friends that she had to stop reading it.
“What’s up for today, Mister Ed?”
“You know me. I’m a dervish. I may cross my legs or cough at some point. Go, go, go.”
Lila strokes Edmund’s sparse black hair. She started in with this maternal affection when he was sick. Edmund savours her touch and leans into her palm like a cat. She plops down beside him. They watch The Young and the Restless for a bit.
Lila will be thirty-seven soon. Last few months, she’s also been working as a nanny for a wealthy, hapless couple who call her in the middle of the night because their daughter’s had a nightmare and they don’t know what to say to soothe her; annoyed by the parents and, for that matter, the haughty daughter, she gave her resignation a few days ago. She is a tender yet prudent caregiver; she can’t blindly dote on people she doesn’t enjoy.
Lila is Edmund’s only real friend, and he sees himself going to seed without her: talon toenails, KFC buckets strewn about, an ever-dissolving comprehension of conversational English. He’s open to getting to know Marci better; if Lila loves her, there must be more to her than her somewhat twitchy officiousness, brittle phone manner, surgically geometric black bangs, Nana Mouskouri glasses, and taught-tendon neck. Lila says Marci is the most charismatic woman she’s ever known, but charisma gets old when you’re folding its laundry and watching it chew. There must be more to Marci.
“So,” Lila says reluctantly. “A bit of news.” Edmund’s stomach sinks. How many times has he heard that awful preface, from friends, from doctors, from Dean. He braces himself for the worst.
“I’m preggo!” she says, pushing at him playfully with her knuckles. “Molto preggo! Preggo, preggo, preggo!”
“Congratulations! How far along are you?”
“Thirteen weeks.”
“Wow. So you’ve been pregnant for three months and you’re only telling me now.”
“I know. I’m sorry,” she says, biting a knuckle. “I was so scared I’d miscarry. And I was worried you wouldn’t ask me to run errands for you for fear that you’d cause me to miscarry.”
He puts his arm around her. How Lila of her to fear for his fear. He’s happy for Lila. A girlfriend and a baby is all she has ever wanted. This will be one lucky baby. She goes on to explain that Marci has been promoted at her film production company, freeing Lila to experience the pregnancy process in an uninterrupted, meditative way.
“So that means …” Lila wells up and breathes deeply. “Marci is adamant that I take time for myself. I probably might be a little hard to reach for the next little while.”
Of course. The baby will consume her and he will probably never see her again. She was there for Dean’s illness, all of it; she portioned out pills, cleaned him up, kept him out of Casey House, and mostly out of the hospital, until the last three days. She was at the hospital with Edmund those last three days, nestled against the right side of Dean, Edmund on the left.
“I am so, so happy for you. I really am. And I will be absolutely okay without you. I’ve never felt better. I’m seriously considering … big things. I love you.”
They hug. Lila sobs. Edmund leaks a tear or two. Also he stares at the Roy Lichtenstein print on the wall, a blond girl sobbing like the one in his arms. Dean insisted on that print; Edmund found it gaudy. Now it’s the only hint of humanity in the room. When Lila leaves, Edmund will go and stand beside it, as if warming himself.
3
TERESA FINDS TWO LETTERS, ONE to Joel and one to Dallas, going through her husband’s pockets in the laundry room. The one to Dallas is all chatty and breezy — How’ve you been keeping? Any interesting crime scenes lately? Anyway, your mom’s a bit under the weather these days. Give us a dingle when you get the chance. — completely undercutting the severity of the situation. The one to Joel — The lungs are full of cancer. It’s in the liver and a little bit in the brain. — is much too hysterical, almost cruel. This isn’t what they’d agreed on; they were going to say it was serious but not horribly serious, a female problem, vague and uninteresting like that. Since when does Hugh write letters to the boys? She may be full of cancer, but she still writes the letters in this family, is still the one who organizes such proceedings, lets each family member know which bit of information they should know and how they’re supposed to feel about said information. She is still very much at the helm of this family — even sick she is the only one who has a true sense of what is best for everyone. Hugh doesn’t know what’s best for himself, does he?Left to his own devices, he’d have a beard down to the floor, he’d forget how to speak, all of his whites would be grey. Dallas, her firstborn, he’s a great kid, but there’s not a lot of depth going on there apart from his basic, unstinting stamina — he can be OPP and do extreme sports on his days off and keep his spindly girlfriend off his back with his goofy swagger and simple, simply stated needs. There’s no reason to send him a follow-up letter to his father’s letter. Give us a dingle will do for Dallas.
Joel will need a follow-up letter. Jolie is so tender, so fretful as it is, so lost despite her constant, harsh criticism and instruction. Hugh’s letter will terrify him, God knows what stupid thing he’ll do to cope with the news, and he’ll feel betrayed that she didn’t confide everything straight away, as she has with everything else.
So she’ll put together a nice, thorough letter for him, along with a box of those sugared jelly slice candies he likes. Good, something to occupy her, keep her from thinking about her situation, keep her from tearing off into the night, screaming the awful vowels that already swarm her head all day long. Ooooooooh Aaaaaay Uuuuuuuh. A nice letter and some candy. Good.
Something else, first time ever in all her years of doing Hugh’s laundry: a skid mark in his underwear. He’s always been so fastidious about that kind of thing, almost annoyingly so — he’d bound out of bed right after sex to shower himself off. It’s plain that he is already falling apart. Something else to worry about. Good.
4
BRENDA IS BACK AT HER DESK, still dealing with the angry, thwarted castrato. They spoke for several minutes at Joel’s station until the guy realized he was still incurring charges while complaining. She keeps looking up at Joel, only now with a weary warmth. He has always got along with middle aged women. They trust him with their anxieties, their immobilizing upset over uppity convenience store cashiers, their dismay at having to love men. He listens to them, playfully pushes them to be pushier versions of themselves. Truth be told, he’s only known one or two middle-aged women well enough to counsel. His mother, mainly. Who is already pretty pushy.
Oh, but then there was Joel’s favourite childhood babysitter, back in Kenora. Sveta! Sveta was fifty-something. When she first started she had him spellbound with stories of her spooky childhood in Czechoslovakia: the clay figurines in her living room that came to life to forecast who would be the next to die in the village; her grandmother’s wooden teeth and
empty eye socket; her first boyfriend, a huge mute who would roughly grab her by way of communication, and throw her hurtling through the air when he was in a really good mood. Joel loved Sveta. He told her she was pretty enough to be a movie star, although she was not pretty, was really almost startlingly ugly with her crazy grey eyebrows and broken nose. Sveta cackled at the thought of herself as a movie star, laughed until she cried. Sveta liked Joel. She taught him conversational Czech.
One afternoon, Sveta asked Joel what he wanted to be when he grew up. He said he wanted to be a Barbie doll. Sveta said it wasn’t possible for a person to be a doll. “Farrah Fawcett, then,” he replied. Sveta didn’t understand; she thought “Farrah Fawcett” might have something to do with plumbing.
To clarify, five-year-old Joel enacted Farrah Fawcett, as he understood her. He hummed the theme from Charlie’s Angels, which he had only seen in reruns; he flounced his imaginary, feathered hair while skateboarding away from the bad guys, focused but flirty, smiling with both rows of teeth, just like Farrah. He lost himself in the impersonation. It went on for a good ten minutes.
Joel gathered himself and asked Sveta if she now knew who he was referring to. Sveta, suddenly stony, spoke, lapsing into Czech. “Fear the — sílený sodomita! (Fear the insane sodomite!) “Se smíchem démon s noži pro zuby!” (The laughing demon with knives for teeth!)
She was otherwise silent until Joel’s mother came home. Then she ran out of the house, never to be heard from again. When Joel’s mother called, she hung up. Not long after, she choked to death on a hot dog while walking down Matheson Street.
That was years ago. It is June 1998, and Joel is nearly twenty. He’s finding his way quite nicely without the approbation of his childhood babysitter. University wasn’t his bag — it was so thinky, so listeny — so he dropped out after three weeks. He thinks he may be a performance artist, but that is only a hunch. He knows he wants be deranged with love, and to have holy sexual experiences in which both he and the other guy weep throughout from the intensity of the intimacy. How could he possibly cultivate such relationships whilst stomping balls and slitting scrotums professionally? He couldn’t. He feels bad about what he has to tell Brenda when she gets off the phone.
“Wowee, he was a handful,” she says as she hangs up. “Clients like him, special needs clients I call them, you want to basically let them do their thing and egg them along vaguely. That was a challenging call. You did pretty good considering.”
“That means so much, thank you. Unfortunately, I can’t do this job. It’s already eating me alive. Sorry.”
“You’ve only had three calls! You’re just finding your rhythm.”
“I’ll never find my rhythm doing this. I’m not prepared to contend with so much human pain. It’s one thing if they’re like, ‘Hey, I’m in pain. Please help me.’ That I could deal with. But when it manifests as, like, cock and ball torture, I’m — yeah. No.”
“You’re taking it too seriously. It’s all in good fun. These guys don’t even know what they like. They think they want to have their balls crushed or what have you, but they don’t. They’re just like you and me — they go to work, come home, eat a pizza, watch Friends, have some pie and ice cream, some popcorn, and a bag of Cheetos, and call it a night.”
Is Brenda trying to play on his pity with this portrait of a lonely binge eater? He can’t waver. She sighs. The mouth of her huge carpetbag purse is agape beside her desk. Joel sees a small bottle of mouthwash. A big pack of Benson & Hedges menthols. A hairy hairbrush. “I like you,” she says. “I pride myself on our relatively low turnover rate. Why don’t you go home, think on things, then give it another go tomorrow? How about that?”
“I don’t know. I can’t see myself feeling any different come tomorrow. But I like you, too, and I’m grateful for the opportunity, so … Yeah. I’ll give it another go tomorrow.”
Brenda throws her fists in the air triumphantly, like she’s just won Wimbledon. Why does she care so much? Is she this invested in every employee? Must be. That’s what must make her a good supervisor. Joel suddenly feels terrible for what-ever distress he may have caused her. Will she go home and eat something dangerous as a result? Something with glass in it? She’s so fragile. He pats her on the arm and she shivers and smiles. Maybe he should give it another go tomorrow.
HOME NOW, AFTER his half-hour of transit, Joel paces his small room in the big house he shares with five mean gay men in their thirties. The men in his house all work in retail; they all eat takeout or TV dinners with plastic cutlery; they all, at least once each, have awoken from nightmares screaming, waking the other men, who may get up and press their ear to the door to listen for further screaming, but never actually check in on the person. They all have big problems, from the looks of their stricken faces in the common kitchen or on the front porch where they all smoke, ignoring each other. He would love to go over the day’s events with one of them, but he knows better than to make conversation.
As a child he had two girlfriends, Cheryl and Shannon. Cheryl and Shannon were both fat, freckled redheads. They hated each other on sight, so Joel could only hang out with one or the other. Their play consisted of gruff, cruel improvisation: I Have Something Wrong with Both My Arms and Both My Legs; The Five Seconds Before I Get Hit by a Bus; Fatal Figure Skating Wipeouts. Joel loved these mean scenarios. They made him giddy, but they left the girls fretful — especially Shannon, whose father was a policeman and a born-again Christian. At the first hint of puberty, both Cheryl and Shannon forsook their imaginations to focus exclusively on the daunting task of Being Pretty for a Fat Girl and Totally Not Stuck-Up. Joel wishes he could find a new Cheryl or Shannon. He likely would’ve made new girlfriends if he’d stayed in school. That’s no reason to stay in school though. Or is it? He wasn’t going to call nice Edmund from the phone line until tomorrow but he can’t wait. He doesn’t care if he comes across as desperate. Why wait when love looms? He practises saying “hello” for a few minutes first.
“Hell-oh!” he says, too brightly, when Edmund answers. “Whatcha doin’?”
“I’m — I’m sorry, who is this?”
“Ack. I’m so dim. Sorry. It’s Joel from the phone line? You gave me your number?”
“Oh, yes, of course. How great that you’ve called. How are you?”
“Great. Awful, but great. It’s hard being in the adult industry. I just hope I don’t have to do, like, drugs, to cope.”
“I’m not worried about you. You sound far too evolved to get hung up on addiction.”
“Really? That is so nice of you. What, like, specifically, is it about my sound that sounds evolved?”
“Just your general … I’d really need to experience you at length.”
“That would be great. What are you doing right now?”
“Right now I’m sitting. You want to come over? The house is a mess.”
“That’s okay. I totally don’t care about stuff like that.”
“Well … and I should also warn you that I have erectile issues, so even if the mind is willing …”
“I don’t care about that either. I’m all about intimacy that is, like, harrowing.”
“That sounds — quite gruelling. I’m forty-one, you know. I don’t normally do things that are harrowing.”
“Please? I can’t tell you how much it would mean to me.”
“I’d be a monster to refuse, wouldn’t I? Come over.”
JOEL TAKES DOWN Edmund’s address and transit directions. One of the directions is “turn left at the little statue of Aphrodite”: obviously he lives in a fancy area. Hopefully Edmund will ask him to sleep over. Edmund will ask him to sleep over, and then watch Joel as he sleeps, and fall in love with him and ask him to move in with him and hold him in his gigantic hands.
5
A BOY IS COMING OVER. When did that last happen, not counting nurses? Years. The last three-way he a
nd Dean had was Christmas 1990. Some small part of him is slightly excited. Even if the kid is homely, it’s companionship. And Edmund is only fully himself when he has someone to love and champion; only then is he not a dim spectre. Even Dean was an urchin at first. His native verve and his low-level, undulating rage could’ve easily flamed out in needle drugs and bar fights if Edmund hadn’t helped him along. Edmund happily placed his own hopes in abeyance (and what hopes were they, really — silly, hashish visions of solar panels, luscious plates of fruit, maybe a baby) and focused solely on Dean’s high-profile edification. Dean liked to make women look pretty and particular, and so Edmund founded Molto Cosmetics for him. (“I want it to be very, very — everything,” Dean said when they were brain-storming for a name. Dean was very, very into the word “very.” And so, “Molto.”) Success came fast. Now Dean is dead; although Edmund has divested himself of the business it will not go away: from billboards and magazine inserts it bellows Molto! Molto!, like a crazed Italian beggar woman whose voice seeps into his house despite closed windows, drawn blinds and all kinds of white noise.
Life with Dean: molto sweet, molto eventful, molto photographic, molto idyllic, molto enviable, molto.
So this kid will come over. He will be homely and needy, a diversion, and because Edmund has nothing of himself to offer, he can pretend to give of himself completely. He will introduce the kid to Thai takeout, and listen as the kid goes on and on about whatever it is he wants to be, and his young ideas of harrowing love. Maybe Edmund will take an honest interest, bask in the boy’s enthusiasm for a while. At the very least he’ll give the kid ample cab fare.
He takes off his bathrobe, puts on a big, black linen shirt and matching drawstring pants. He looks at his bare feet and their crumbled, fungal toenails, an afterthought infection when he was sick but one that is annoyingly persistent now that he’s well. He steps into a pair of black leather slippers. No need to expose the kid to all the horror right off the bat.