by Greg Kearney
If you call, call after eight pm or so. She nods off pretty easy on the morphine, and she’s out like a light after eight.
Dad
He is dizzy. He opens the second letter, from his mother.
Dear Jolie Joel,
I just now came across your dad’s letter to you, in the back pocket of his work pants. Don’t tell him that I found it. Don’t tell him that I’m telling you what he tells you in his letter, because I told him to tell you I’m going in for a hysterectomy. If he knows that I’m telling you the truth in this letter, he’ll worry that I’m worrying about how you’re going to react to the bad news instead of just lying around not thinking about anything, like he wants me to do.
So yes, my Jolie, I am full of cancer like your dad’s letter says. It’s not fun. There’s no lung cancer in our family, so I don’t know where this came from; I’ve always been more of a social smoker. I’m still a bit dazed about it. This fall/winter was shaping up to be a really nice time for me. I was thinking of opening my own jewellery business. All that’s out the window now. It’s funny, now that I look back — maybe I was so hesitant to get going again in the months after you first left because I intuitively knew that I was going to get lung cancer really soon? Maybe not.
What I can say with certainty is that your dad is full of shit when he suggests in his letter that you going away and then dropping out of school and doing God knows what with your time was somehow the cause of my cancer. That’s just your dad being his usual bonehead self about emotional things, trying to rationalize our rough go right now. You did not cause my cancer. Don’t get me wrong — I was shocked, furious, and bitterly disappointed by your recent failures. It’s like the smart, talented son I brought up all these years — remember how smart you were in high school, with that big vocabulary of yours? — it’s like he died and was replaced by a moron zombie. That cut me to the quick. What if you get some awful cancer all of a sudden? What are they going to say at your funeral? “He dropped out of school after a week because it was too thinky.” How memorable. Please come home. Maybe the best thing for you is to take a step back from the godawful mess you’ve made of your life right now. Try and figure out what went wrong. I’d love to have the company. I’m lonely these days. All this time, your mother thought she was a real lone wolf. I thought I didn’t need friends, but that was because I had you to talk to. Now that you’re gone I’ve got nobody. I love your dad, but he’s as boring as he ever was. How much can you say about the taste of this year’s moose meat versus last year’s moose meat, or whether or not the lawn mower sounded a bit grindy the last time he ran it? I know you know what I mean.
I’ll tell you one thing. If you come home and you’re on drugs, you are going to wish you’d never been born. I will throw you out of the house and never talk to you again. I will wipe you from my life, and you will never get another penny from me.
Enclosed please find a cheque. Your dad has sent you bus fare, so this will be for incidentals. Please do laundry. Please bathe. Need I remind you of the painful foreskin infections you had time and again in junior high school?
Lots of hugs and kisses
Love from Mom
The last time they spoke, just two days ago, she sounded totally fine. There was sometimes a little gasp in her voice; that gasp could’ve been pain, although it sounded almost exactly like her taking a drag off her cigarette. They’re so close; why didn’t she share this with him as soon as it happened? Why choose now to hold back, when she has always been so forthcoming with him over other issues that were often none of his business?
She really did sound fine on the phone two days ago. And, apart from delivering the bad news, she sounds fine in her letter. Maybe she’s exaggerating the direness of her condition; she does like to exaggerate. He’ll call her. He’s afraid to call her, in case she doesn’t sound fine now. He’ll call her later.
He puts a pillow to his face, so he won’t disturb the other men in the house.
7
TERESA’S WIG, ON ITS STYROFOAM head, casts an oddly long shadow in the afternoon sun. The shadow looms over her bed like a mean nanny. Teresa slowly rises, pulls the curtains, switches on her red ceramic sleeping cat side lamp, slowly lays herself down again. If she is absolutely still, the nausea recedes slightly and she is able to get almost comfortable. A few months ago she was so toned and tanned that a young bagger at Safeway asked her if she’d ever been a fitness model. Now this.
And that wig. She doesn’t know why she hasn’t pitched the stupid thing. She wore it once, to the Valdy concert at the harbourfront; it itched like a bitch and she felt silly in it, like it was Halloween in June. She was almost certain that Valdy saw her and smiled sarcastically, during the first chorus of “Yes I Can.”
Hugh paid a fortune for it, though. Human hair from Europe, custom-made to look like your old hair. When he presented her with it, though, she wondered how he had been perceiving her, all these years; the wig was red and curly, where Teresa’s hair was only wavy and auburn. She looks like Little fucking Orphan Annie in it. And the way he gave the wig to her, all expectant, telling her that, with the beautiful wig, she’d be herself again — it was exactly the wrong thing to say to her, to any woman disfigured by illness. Hugh never was very intuitive about stuff like that. There are twenty-five years’ worth of lamely inscribed birthday and anniversary cards in a box in the closet. Happy 20th Anniversary. I think you know how I feel. From Hugh. Lordy, Lordy, look who’s forty! Good stuff, from Hugh. Oh well. He’s a solid guy, ever dependable, a real comfort, with those long arms of his. She’ll leave the wig where it is for now. Maybe she can take it to the girl she goes to at Heights of Fashion and she can shape it a bit, take out the curl, even dye it. That would be a lot of work. She’d have to get out of bed, dress. She’d have to click her seatbelt into place. Too much work.
“Maybe a year” is what the oncologist said when they pressed him. What a kick in the teeth. Her high school friends Vicki and Dina both licked cancer: a little surgery, a bit of radiation, no problem, back in the saddle in a few weeks. They both had breast, though. Everyone gets breast. Teresa would’ve killed for breast. Lung is a different plate of potatoes. How the hell does a forty-four-year-old woman come down with lung? And not simply lung: mesothelioma is what they called it. Caused by exposure to asbestos! Coal miners tend to get it, and she was certainly not a coal miner. Where could she possibly have inhaled asbestos? She’s always liked girly things: she’s had a subscription to the Mary Maxim craft catalogue since high school. Is she being punished simply for being vivacious? Because she liked having fun, a drink and a toke now and then, a little bit of the dirty business when the timing was right? She probably was. If she had married an accountant and taken in a First Nations fetal alcohol orphan like Vicki did, would she be free and clear? Probably, yes. Teresa loves life; she has a real zeal: even now she awakens with a sparky start in the morning, eager to taste coffee, smoke a first cigarette, listen to neighbours’ cars pop along gravel driveways on the way to work. There will be mail to read or at the very least flyers and glossy junk, and there will be the radio, always the radio, with Nick Haddock in the morning and Cal Benoit in the afternoon and Ronnie Golding through the night. Teresa had fun with Nick a couple times in ’87; she danced once with Cal at the legion hall when she was six months in with Joel, the spring of ’78. Ronnie she’s never met, but from all accounts he’s a really nice guy, an avid snowshoer, reliable neighbour. He bought Mrs. Hensrud’s old place on Redditt Road, and he’s made many circular beds of marigolds in the shade of the bent and broken oaks, front yard and back. Mrs. Hensrud let the lawns go all to hell in her last years.
Hugh is hammering something in the living room. He’s buggering something up, rendering furniture rickety for no reason. He fancies himself a handyman, but he isn’t. He hacked up Teresa’s cedar chest last year; he said he wanted to try something. That chest was one of the few nice pieces Teres
a had. Now it’s legless and won’t close unless she slams it shut. She’s glad he’s getting his woodworking jollies — if only he’d try it on something ugly.
He’s good at what he does at the paper mill, by all accounts, whatever it is that he does there. Thirty years he’s been at it. Give Hugh an assignment requiring improvisation or spatial reasoning, though … How many times did Dallas slide out of his crib before Hugh finally let Teresa get a store-bought one? Who builds a crib with no bars on the sides? She had to laugh.
With the pain contained by morphine, Teresa can get some of her own work done. She’s not going to get all morbid and precious about it like her friend Marlene did when she was dying — I need to see Fenelon Falls, one last time! — nor is she going to make her kids feel like shit for not being at her bedside round the clock like her rancid grandmother did with her equally rancid yet at least borderline-literate mother when she was dying. Obviously the whole jewellery business dream is out the window at this point. Teresa just wants to do some shopping, see a few people, have a bit more fun.
She’s going to start by getting up, pulling the hammer from Hugh’s hand, and throwing it in the garbage. In a minute. In a few minutes.
8
JOEL IS NOT LEAVING THE city until he has given a performance of his work somewhere. This much he knows. He has to leave his scent on the city in some way. He has had good gay sex and found a love object. All that’s left is a big-city artistic undertaking. Then he can leave, serene in the knowledge that a delightful, well-rounded life awaits him upon his return to Toronto.
He is going to perform a medley of his melodic, automatic poetry. It says, in NOW magazine, that there is a west end bar called Tandem starting up an open mic night on Wednesdays.
He flips through his notebook. Slim pickings, mainly juvenilia. He couldn’t possibly perform “Remember Bright Mountain” or “Only Sveta Knows.” He couldn’t possibly perform any of them, now that he’s sifted through all twenty-two pages. None of them evoke anything. None of them contain memorable images. His work is shit. What makes him think he’s a performer? Because he drunkenly sang “Crying” at karaoke and some woozy woman approached him, crying, and said that he sounded, if not like Roy Orbison himself, at least like one of his relatives?
Joel exhales violently, a kung fu exhale meant to silence himself. It does not matter that his poetry has no merit or that his ability as a performer has not been validated. What matters is that he is passionate. Yes. He is almost certainly passionate about performance art. And if he isn’t passionate specifically about performance art, he is certainly passionate in general.
He picks up a mustard-encrusted pen off the floor.
He said, “She has cancer,”
But I’m ensnared by an armour and marabou romancer,
Don’t take me back to my hometown
Woo hoo, Bobby Brown.
What more is there to say, really? He rips a page from his notebook and, in balloon letters, writes “Come and see me perform at Tandem, next Wednesday! Love, Joel.” He takes it downstairs and pins it on the otherwise barren bulletin board in the kitchen.
When he goes downstairs again an hour later, the note is gone from the bulletin board. In its place is another note, this one in black block letters: “THIS IS A PRIVATE HOME, NOT A TELEPHONE POLE!”
9
BEHIND THE OREGANO IN THE spice rack Edmund finds a tiny vial of coke. Dean must’ve stashed it there ages ago; Edmund has never liked coke. He never enjoyed the feeling of euphoria, nor any arcing sensation that didn’t ultimately result in a nap. Booze was his thing; for the longest time his biggest happiness — the face of God, even! — was the rollicking stupor that happened after six Jack and Cokes. Seven years, he’s been sober. It seemed important seven years ago, sobriety. Now, though … Maybe if he had got that clingy kid drugs he would’ve stopped talking and thrown himself into the sex. All this time he thought he wanted someone to talk to; with Joel all he wanted was to muzzle the kid and eat his ass. No, no — he does still want someone to talk to, someone who understands. What he doesn’t want is to explain. It’s too gruelling to be a tour guide through all those awful years. Joel is sweet, he has a nice face. Someone will gobble him right up. Besides, when Dean did coke he was an absolute motor-mouth. Coke is the last thing that kid needs.
He wonders: do party drugs go bad? If so, how will he know? If he sniffs a little of it, will he seize and die, or will it simply have no effect at all? He holds the vial tightly in his palm. How he railed against Dean’s drug benders when Dean was first diagnosed! How his drug benders drove Edmund to booze benders! But now, in the silence of the chilly kitchen, with this little old vial, the image of Dean running up and down the stairs for no reason … Edmund remembers the breeze of Dean, rushing past him through the house. He opens the vial and taps out a bit of powder onto the window sill.
“What do you think, Dean? Should I try some?” He listens. No word from Dean.
He takes a hesitant sniff.
Nothing. He feels no different. He pulls up a stool to the marble island. His growing gut has made sitting on a stool uncomfortable. If this is partying, then drug addicts must be addicted to tedium. He’s had a better buzz off a glass of Pepsi. It must’ve gone bad, the stuff. He has another huff.
He stands around. Someone nearby is mowing their lawn. Should Edmund mow his own lawn right now? It suddenly seems urgent that he also mow his lawn. Edmund maybe sort of does feel kind of … amplified. He looks at the stairs and considers running up and down them like Dean once did. He knows that he’ll turn an ankle, so instead he pops Tracy Chapman’s Crossroads into the cassette deck, and begins to dance around the house, his lurching dance, the dance he danced at Chaps and Boots and Komrads and The Barn, a dance that more than one dance floor partner has likened to a drunken woman looking for a place to puke.
After a few minutes Edmund finally concedes that Tracy Chapman isn’t especially danceable. He stops the tape and sits. For once his loneliness does not strike him as quaint, some small household imperfection that can be easily sidestepped, like a gouge in a floorboard. He is punctured by his loneliness. He has learned all he can learn from austerity. It’s officially Time for Fun. He could call the phone sex line, try to find new flesh to replace the gawky, fey flesh that just left, but who’s to say that he won’t encounter another mewling virgin who’ll paw at him like a fucking orphaned infant chimp?
He’s going out. Yes. On the town, to the village, to bar hop, to tilt a bottle of water against his breastbone and stand around, sway and bop a bit and stand around. Sure, these stand-around outings were only ever stultifying for Edmund, back in the day. But it’s a new day, and he’s on drugs.
As he manically swipes through his closet for a flattering shirt, delighting in the scraping sound of hangers moving on the metal rod, he tries to convince himself that times may very well have changed for the better since he last went out on the town. People may have become more playful; the epidemic may have worn away at gay men in a good way, rendering them more open, more empathetic, sweeter. Maybe? Possibly. Probably not. He picks out a black corduroy shirt that goes nearly to his knees. He can blouse it out around his belt, concealing his tummy.
In the bedroom half-bath he applies Molto styling pomade to his widow’s peak, spiking it into a modest Mohawk. It’s quite possible, he thinks as he studies himself in the mirror, that he can still look, with some effort … like a sad, pasty man making the most of the last of his hair. Still, “A” for effort, no? And he was never all that attractive, even when he had hair.
He locks up the house. Once outside he stands on the lawn and studies his lamp-lit rooms. How warm and inviting his home is, when he’s not there.
10
THERE ARE FOUR PEOPLE SET to perform at the open mic. There is a thin, bearded man with an acoustic guitar. There is a young woman Joel’s age with a ballerina bun and a long sweatshirt overtop
a blue spandex bodysuit. There is a tense-looking woman in a long black raincoat, the left lapel smeared with what looks like old toothpaste. And Joel.
The host is an older guy in blue-and-white tie-dyed MC Hammer pants; he holds a martini glass and babbles on about what a dangerous, provocative evening he has in store for the audience of twelve people, more dangerous even than his great experiment at Theatre Passe Muraille, summer of ’72. He seems to assume that the sparse audience knows exactly what his great experiment was.
Guitar guy goes first. Joel doesn’t pay much attention to the song — he hears the words “eternal” and “sexy damsel.” At the end of the song there is a smattering of oddly damp-sounding clapping, like the few people in attendance are all trying to burp babies. Guitar guy hoists his instrument in the air. You’d think he’d just closed the show at Farm Aid.
The lady in the raincoat is next. She holds a crumpled piece of paper, and before saying a word she looks around the room with exasperated contempt, as though she’d been locked in a closet, banging for hours to be let out, and they, the audience, have only now deigned to free her.
She glances at the crumpled paper, then resumes her hateful stare. “I remember the sex abuse!” she barks. “Zaydie! Zaydie! Which is Yiddish for ‘Grandfather! Grandfather!’ Why did you diaper me in such a lurid way when I was four months old? You didn’t think I’d remember, but I do! Everyone always says to me, ‘Oh, Shoshana, you’ve got the world at your feet, you’re a shift supervisor at Bally Total Fitness,’ but that is not the case, because I’m coping with trauma. It would be much more convenient for everyone concerned if I didn’t remember the sex abuse, but I do! The memory of it popped open in my mind like a daffodil! Except that this daffodil wasn’t all pretty and yellow and plucked from a garden. The petals of this daffodil were made from the tanned skins of exterminated Holocaust Jews! If that is an intense image, it’s supposed to be! I have come upon the sex abuse Holocaust-Jew-skin daffodil, Zaydie/ Grandfather, and you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to pick it! Then I’m going to go to your grave and I’m going to picket it! I’m going to pick it, and then I’m going to pick-et! Incestuous pedophile scum! I hate you!” She bows. “Thank you so much.”