by Greg Kearney
He walks, resolute in imaginary high heels, back to his father at the front door.
“Unfortunately, I’m not able to leave the house at this time. Something has arisen with my partner that is very pressing. Please extend my indifference-mixed-with-resentment to all concerned.”
Hugh shakes his head. “I give up on the whole lot of ya,” he says. “This one has this stupid-ass hang-up, that one has another. I don’t understand any of you. We never used to act so goddamn stupid when there was a family problem. When I had Bell’s Palsy when you were ten, your mom stayed home from work and you cried and cried because you wanted to stay home, too.”
“I remember that. I didn’t think you’d remember that.”
“Yeah, the three of us sat on the couch that first day and listened to records. I can’t remember where Dallas was. And you taped my eye shut with masking tape ’cuz I couldn’t blink it.”
Joel sees his ten-year-old hand tamping down the tape on his father’s face. “After I get everything sorted out with my life part — with Donald — I’ll be able focus on family and my feelings about family.”
“Aren’t we lucky, then,” says Hugh, walking away. “You be sure to keep me posted on your family feelings.”
30
SHARY IS IN THE KITCHEN. Hugh’s home. But only Hugh, it sounds like.
“Hi, Hugh. Your son got Swiss Chalet. I’m just putting it onto plates. I’m a bit barfy right now, but I might have some later. Can I fix you a drink?”
“Like what? I only drink 50.”
“Oh. Can I open a 50 for you?”
“I’ll do it. You don’t know where the bottle opener is.”
He cracks a 50. In the dining room Teresa and Dallas sit at the table in silence.
“Dallas got us Swiss Chalet, Hugh. Wasn’t that nice of him?”
“It’s the least I could do, I guess,” Dallas says. “Now you’re here, I’ve got something I want to say.” He barks at Shary to come into the dining room. She enters with a plate of limp brown chicken. Dallas stands, and pulls a folded piece of paper from his front pants pocket. He tells Shary to sit. Shary says she has yet to put the fries on a plate and doesn’t want them to get cold. Dallas says what he has to say is more important and to sit. Shary sits beside Teresa.
“I wrote this while I was waiting at Swiss Chalet,” he says, unfolding the piece of paper. He clears his throat, exhales nervously.
“Hi, Shary. It’s Dallas. I’m sorry I ran out of the house today. I am very stressed out. I’m sorry I told my dad about squirty-squirt. Anyway, I like you. When we met you said that you thought that you were ugly, but you’re not, or at least I don’t think so. You are very nice. You had a baby and it is mine. That is very interesting. It is nice living with you. I like it a lot when I come home and everything is clean. I like sleeping with you. I don’t mean sexually, although that is also nice and interesting.
“When someone in your family is sick, it really makes you think about everything. You have been up my ass for a long time about getting married. I think we might as well. So why don’t we. Get married, I mean. So do you want to? Get married? Love from Dallas.”
Teresa smiles widely at this rare show of affection from Dallas and what must be the least romantic marriage proposal ever penned. He read the whole thing standing over Shary like a schoolmaster, and now he sits, foregoing even a hint of bended knee. Shary looks … conflicted, and … conflicted over being conflicted.
“Aw, Dallas,” she says. “That is so sweet. You wrote that all at Swiss Chalet?”
“Yeah. Well, it was a big order, so I had to wait a while.”
“Aw. And I know that you don’t really like writing notes like that. So that was really sweet. Thank you.”
When she doesn’t continue, Dallas starts to squirm; he looks exasperatedly at his father, who shrugs and chugs from his bottle of 50.
“Yeah, and?” Dallas asks. “So what’s it gonna be? I didn’t write that just for the hell of it.”
“Aw.”
“Stop fuckin’ saying ‘aw’! Jeez.”
Shary looks to Teresa, who fights to keep a neutral face.
“Can we maybe — talk about this more later, when we’re back at home? There’s so much going on right now. And the chips are definitely getting cold at this point.”
Shary goes back in the kitchen for the fries. Dallas snorts, clucks, and throws up his hands. He is not used to not getting his way. He’s not used to obstinacy, especially from someone well aware of his need for instant gratification.
When Shary returns with the fries, Teresa forces herself to exclaim over how good they smell, even though she can’t smell them, and how yummy they’re going to be, even though she’s lost the sense of taste.
“I’ve asked you to marry me, Shary. You can at least have the respect to give me an answer, here in front of my mom and dad.”
“Oh, gosh … Dallas. Okay. My answer is, I don’t know. There is a lot to think about. I want to do what’s best for Misty, and for me. And for you, naturally. We need to figure out what that is. What is best.”
“So you’re saying that marrying me might possibly be not the best thing for Misty and you?”
“That is not what I’m saying. Can I talk to you in the other room? Please?”
Teresa gestures at Dallas that he should follow Shary. More snorting, clucking, sighing. He slumps off with Shary to their bedroom. Teresa waits until she hears the door close, then rises to go eavesdrop.
“You. Sit,” Hugh commands. “Give them their privacy, Teresa.”
“I will, I just want to get the gist of what she’s saying. I’ll be back in a flash.”
Teresa tiptoes to their door.
“I don’t want to be married to someone who doesn’t love me.”
“Fuck. Did I not just say that I did in my note?”
“No. You said you ‘like’ me.”
“And then I ended it with ‘love from Dallas.’ So you’re full of shit.”
“I don’t know if I believe you. I’m twenty-two. I don’t want to spend my life with someone who only likes me and only thinks that I’m not ugly. That’s really not enough. I’m not strong like your mom. I can’t get married and then … supplement.”
“What do you mean, supplement?”
“Like your mom. We had the nicest talk. She’s so sweet. But I’m not going to marry you and then have affairs to feel fulfilled.”
“She told you to do that?”
Silence. Then a hard thud — a hurled shoe? Teresa makes her way back to the dining room as fast as she can.
“Mom!” Dallas bellows.
“What did you do,” Hugh asks a breathless Teresa back in her place at the table.
“Practically nothing,” she says. “Shary was lamenting the way things are going with Dallas — you know how he can be like you, but worse — and I tried to reassure her —”
“And she really did; reassure me, that is,” says Shary, followed by a crimson Dallas.
“Way to wreck my life, Mom. Way to wreck things with the woman I love.”
“I was trying to help you, both of you. You don’t want a wife who hates her life. She doesn’t want a husband who hates her.”
“You didn’t tell her to — you didn’t give her a game plan, did you?” asks Hugh with a wince.
“No, no. I just said supportive things. And I also encouraged her to, if need be, if it came to that, if she was really starving for special attention that her — Dallas — isn’t giving her, that she might consider finding … Well, I told her about you and I, and how sometimes I’ve had the need to —”
“Oh, Christ. You didn’t? Shit, they’re not even married yet! They’re not even engaged!”
Dallas makes a big show of finding and stepping into his shoes. “We have to leave. Get the baby ready. We have to
leave now.”
“Dallas, come on now,” Teresa pleads. “Don’t get all carried away. You know how I am. I’ll try any angle to make things come together.”
“No way. I was raised by an old whore, and now you’re trying to make it so my baby is raised by a — new whore. No way. This is over. Shary, come on.”
Shary doesn’t move. “Dallas, you always get grumpy when you haven’t eaten. Sit and eat.”
“Put your fucking coat on and let’s go.”
“I’m eating,” she says, helping herself to chicken and fries. “I get grumpy when I haven’t eaten, too.”
“What are you saying, Shary? Are you saying that you’re a whore? You’re going to take advice from a whore? You’re a whore now?”
“That is not what I’m saying, Dallas. I’m saying that I’m starving and I’m going to eat.”
Dallas, snorting and swearing, looks to his father for support. Not getting any, he looks to his whore mother. She extends a hand to him. He stomps off to the kitchen. He stomps back in.
“You’re seriously gonna eat?” he asks Shary.
“Yes,” Shary says with her mouth full.
He jolts one way then another, as though yanked about by angry ghosts. “Unbelievable,” he says, and sits.
Shary portions out food for him. “See? We’ll eat and get that out of the way. And then we can talk about who’s this and who’s that and everything. You know what? I think I prefer dark meat to white meat. I don’t know why everyone is so crazy for white meat. This is really yummy, this bit of dark meat right here.”
Teresa watches Shary gobble up her dear, dark meat. There’s a step, she thinks: if you know what kind of meat you like, there is hope that you’ll eventually find out what gives you an orgasm. Teresa eats a French fry, in full recall of how yummy a French fry can taste.
That night, after Shary relents and allows Dallas to drive her and the baby back to their place for further negotiation, and after Teresa has extracted a reluctant hug from Dallas and a promise to call the next day even if he’s still angry with her and still thinks her a whoremonger, Teresa and a tipsy Hugh lie together on her double bed.
“Am I a whore? When you think of me, do you think of me as a whore?”
“Huh? Nah. You’re good. We are doing good. But we’re not the typical couple. Most men don’t let their women run around.”
“I don’t need anyone to let me do anything.”
“And I was just going to say that. I knew when I met you that you were something. And I had to have you, any way I could. I knew that I wasn’t any — prince of the hill, or —”
“Prince of the hill?”
“Or you know what I mean. I knew that I was an average, y’know, an average person. So I had to let you do your thing. And that was hard, at first. Really hard. But then I decided that I wasn’t going to get all up in knots over it. We’ve all got our quirks. I know a lot of people think I’m a sucker, or else dumb as a post, but I honest-to-God do not care one bit.”
Teresa makes a book of her hands and covers her face. She mumbles something Hugh doesn’t understand. He gently pries a hand from her face and asks her to repeat herself.
“I say,” she says, “I hope I didn’t disappoint you too much.”
He wraps his body around hers. “You’re great. Wouldn’t change a thing,” he says into her neck.
“I think I gave all of us asbestos poisoning when I was fixing up Joel’s room in the attic.”
“Hey? What? Nah. There’s no asbestos in this house.”
“But there used to be.”
“Nah. I’m pretty sure when we bought it they said that everything was good and up to code.”
“Hmm. I’m worried.”
“I’m not.”
Then they do what they rarely do: they cuddle tightly and say small things to each other, little confessions of no real importance.
Before she drifts off she asks if Joel liked the marble cake. Even though Joel carelessly slid it across a countertop, Hugh says yes, Joel liked it a lot, he was too proud to say so but his eyes lit right up and you could tell he couldn’t wait to have a piece, that is for sure.
31
EDMUND DROPS BY THE HOUSE en route to suicide or the tubs. Beside a candle in the form of the Buddha he finds a rogue packet of crystal. He preps and smokes it. There’s no zing, no blaze. Has he reached the absolute summit of PNP fun, after which there is only frazzled, sleepless tedium? He hopes not.
He checks his voice mail. A whispered message from Lila. I know you’ve got your hands full, but I’m really hoping I might come over and stay for a bit. I overheard Marci talking to someone on the phone and she said something like “we’ll do what needs to be done,” and now I’m worried — I know this is cuckoo, but I’m wondering if she’s using her film connections to maybe have me framed or possibly even “taken out,” or something like that, because I lost the baby. That sounds so insane, now that I’m saying it. I’m just sick about all this. I don’t know what to do. I love you; please call me.
There is also a message from his mother, home again after a month in Greece with her best friend and housekeeper, a hobbled, eighty-year-old Filipino woman named Girlie.
Nothing from Binny. Things must be working out with the murderer. He feels happy for Binny, serenely mummified in a box on rollers under a bed somewhere.
He sits on the floor by the phone. The thing to do, of course, would be to close up shop and wait it out somewhere — Key West, maybe. He could find a nice rehab facility to wean off the crystal, a place with a huge pool, clay tennis courts, on-site deep tissue massage. That would be perfect. It’s a good time to disassociate from life as he knows it, to turn austere and reflective, to nap. But then what? More of the same, minus party drugs. More of this silent house, as his friends grow meaner, sadder and more bewildered, losing babies, mooning over the dead, deking out of Tantric deliverance with the living. He locks up and heads to the village.
He passes the only bathhouse in the city he’s never been to, the Cellar. He’s been scared off by the horror stories: the ancient amputee, crawling up and down the dark halls, feeling for his teeth on the floor; the shit-caked man, beaming and beckoning from his room; even the very recently dead, done in by the lethal one-two of Viagra and poppers and not yet detected by the lone employee, a prickly old man who prefers to sit at the front desk, chain smoking and reading Judith Krantz novels.
Edmund stops, turns back. Maybe the hellishness of the Cellar will provide him with fresh perspective.
The front desk attendant warns Edmund before he checks in that there is only one other guy in the building. Edmund assures him that an almost-empty bathhouse will actually be the perfect environment for him; he can unwind, take a shower, sit in the hot tub. The attendant warns Edmund that there is no hot tub and, since yesterday, no hot water at all. This gives Edmund pause, but he quickly decides that bathing is not that important right now. The attendant gives Edmund a thin, tiny, white towel and the key to his little room.
Edmund doesn’t bother disrobing. He flops onto the bleached sheet of his skinny bed. He craves a top-up; not a big hit, just a short puff. He can sense the edges of his exhaustion; he hears the muffled yelp of his middle-aged body, pushed past its limits and wanting only to lie motionless for days and days and days, bed sores be damned.
32
JOEL WONDERS, AS HE AND Donald peel the shells off their hard-boiled eggs, and Donald — once so enigmatic, such a challenge! — blathers on about girl singers from the thirties and forties, about Alice Faye’s way with a lyric, Ruth Etting’s verve and precision, and wasn’t Vera Lynn the embodiment of spunk, if maybe Donald is not his predestined life partner after all. Ever since Joel chose Donald over his family at Christmas, Donald has come to life, gabby, giddy life, waking Joel at dawn with stiff kisses all over his face, full of plans for the day ahead, none of
which account for Joel’s objectives. It’s as though, now that Donald has allowed himself to fall in love, he thinks that his own passions and tics are all that is needed to keep their affair afloat. Joel is thrilled for Donald, he really is, and he finds it a pleasure, in the main, to indulge Donald and observe his renewed vim. But when will Joel get the chance to play Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville and PJ Harvey’s To Bring You My Love on Donald’s stereo? When will Donald draw him out on subjects of interest to him? And if Donald has no intention of ever investigating Joel as a person, well, that’s a real concern. Because Joel may not be an artist, but that doesn’t mean he wants to spend the rest of his life smiling and nodding and proofreading fan letters to Queen Elizabeth.
Then there’s the button show. Joel has, these past months, immersed himself wholeheartedly in the button project: procuring the buttons, writing thank-you notes to high-profile button donors, polishing the buttons, writing crisp descriptions of each button for the display, grouping the buttons in elegant and unexpected ways. Until now Donald and Joel have been of one mind about the presentation of the button show; there would be no fanfare, no gaudy promotion. The celebrity buttons, be it Burton Cummings’ button or the late, former governor general Jeanne Sauvé’s button, would not be given any special treatment, but would be placed discreetly alongside the buttons of the common people. Now Donald has changed his tune. Ignoring the original title of the show — “Button Up” — which appeared on all the invitations, he now wants to call it “Buttons! Buttons! Buttons!” He wants to put a sandwich board on the sidewalk out front of the museum that screams “Buttons! Buttons! Buttons!” in magic marker. He wants to take an ad out in The Miner and News that says the same thing and also touts the famous buttons (“Come on out and see the button from Liona Boyd’s cape!”). To top it all off, Donald has started wearing his hair in a braided bun.