Today I Learned It Was You

by Edward Riche

  Thrilling? Yes, the kiss was thrilling.

  Matt was going to apologize to Alessandra, say he was inexplicably overcome and undisciplined and they should . . . should what? Matt was then going to put it behind them with a return to business, was going to explain that however objectionable to Alessandra was the selling of naming rights to public spaces it was the new normal, that certain interests had convinced the public that taxation was an evil and so the spending side of the equation was therefore . . . well . . . that was it, wasn’t it? They would agree to disagree on Jerjuice Park, on much else. That should be the nature of their relationship henceforward, cordial but apart.

  To stand for election on a platform of greater taxation would take kamikaze courage. To say things plainly, to tell it like it was, was a position no serious candidate could entertain. If he ran for the Conservatives next federal election, Matt would adhere to a script, would preach that taxation was indeed a wrong, would extol family values, free trade, vigilance against terror, would stand for the energy warehouse, hockey and Tim’s. If he told Alessandra that he was going to stand for the Conservatives that would surely convince her that kissing him was a terrible mistake, that she was confused by the situation with her husband, that it was an accident, an accident, nobody’s fault.

  Matt saw Planning Durnford’s back through a glass wall and turned on his heels.

  Hockey. The Conservatives were going to run him on hockey, of course. Taxation, trade weren’t ever going to come into it. They recruited Matt because they didn’t think he was that smart. Maybe they got that right.

  He decided to take an hour or two and drive out to the Mercedes dealership.

  He started the car. The passenger side door opened. Alessandra climbed in.

  “Just drive,” she said.

  Not knowing where else he should go, Matt bore westward in the direction of the car dealerships.

  “I am happily married,” he said.

  “So am I,” said Alessandra. “More or less. But that’s nothing to do with it.”

  “No?”

  “No. It’s something else.”

  Forty

  It was something else, it was as shocking as it was natural, it was radiation from the stars, it was hailstones on a blazing hot day. It was as dizzying as whiskey. It stood by itself, untempered by her other feelings for Matt. It was pure and fierce. She knew a want that existed free of anything else, that was its own reason.

  “Take us somewhere,” she said.

  “I think what happened in the park,” said Matt, “. . . it was an accident.”

  “Not a mistake though.”

  “No. I don’t know.”

  “Take us somewhere,” she said.

  “Where!” he shouted, not at Alessandra but through the windshield at the world beyond. “Where in this village can I possibly take us?”

  Forty-One

  It was thorns. It was a heart attack. His head was pounding. His cock was filling with blood and his balls were tugging a cramp that would twist and tear him in two.

  There was a Ramada Inn not five minutes away but it was always the site of some meeting or conference and so familiar faces. There was the Capital but the manager there, Leon Sexton, was on the Board of Trade. The Chateau Park in Mount Pearl? No, the parking lot was right on the street. He turned the car from one street to another, directionless. They were now in a shabby subdivision, amidst bungalows, in a channel walled by vinyl siding.

  “Take us somewhere, Matt,” she said again.

  There was an expansive graveyard out his window. From this elevation he could see east across the city, could see the harbour narrows and the sea beyond. He should turn left and head back to City Hall. He put on the blinker, left.

  “I don’t think —” he started.

  “Then don’t,” she answered. “I don’t need to hear anything about before, or what comes next, okay? Take us somewhere.”

  He turned right, the car behind blaring its horn at his false indication. He was on Blackmarsh Road and ahead saw the Blackmarsh Inn.

  Alessandra hung back by the entrance to the compact lobby. The place was plain but reasonably clean and well-maintained. The desk clerk was a bulky, grave man in a boxy grey suit Matt could not imagine anyone choosing off the rack. The melancholic motelier, “Des” said his name tag, knew what was going on, of course he did, discretion was his business, and he took pains not to too often look up. He showed no sign of recognizing Matt’s face or name and was swift but unhurried with the paperwork.

  “Room 107,” he said, handing Matt an actual key — not a magnetically stripped card — a heavy metal key dangling from a diamond-shaped hard plastic tab.

  Alessandra undid his belt as they crossed the threshold. She pulled his jacket back off his shoulders with her forehead pressed hard into his chest, as if to gain leverage, putting everything she had into this.

  He could not get her out of the dress quick enough so she’d pushed him away, going for a zipper or hasp on the back as if she was reaching for an arrow in a quiver.

  He had not enough time to look at her, even though she paused, standing, for a moment after peeling the hose from her legs.

  She took hold of his arms at his triceps, above his elbow and she walked backwards, steered him, showing him a dance step, back onto the bed.

  And as he’d dreamed, just as he’d dreamed, her knees were up and her hand was on the back of his neck and they were together.

  The motel room viewed from the bed was squat and sordid. There was a static electric felt of dust on the screen of the television. The wallpaper was pimpled, covered with keloids. Matt could hear a winded vacuum in the hallway and steady traffic on the four lanes outside.

  So much of the day was pointless repetitions, stacking things up and then knocking them down so you could pick them up again, driving back and forth over the same roads.

  His clothes were on the floor; they’d be creased and dirty. He reeked of sex, of spit and cum, and would have to shower. What had he done? He was devoted to his wife, to Patty; they were a family.

  Was he mad, had he gone mad?

  Forty-Two

  His was the weight of a wave, like walking into the surf. Bones, locked, had come undone. There’d been a burr of noise in her ears, a roar.

  Alessandra noticed light coming from behind the curtains, brilliant filaments fraying in dusty air. The day seemed full, the purpose to merely be in it. There was a warm trickle, sticky as jam, running down her thigh and a burn on her face from his.

  Their clothes were decorating the floor of the room like flags, semaphore, surrender, and prayer. Her mouth was sandy. She craved wine and a cigarette. A lover. Take a lover. Matt was devoted to his wife, Alessandra could not remember the woman’s name, and he would go back, safely, to his family, and Alessandra needn’t think of him until she wanted him again, needed him again.

  It was mad, life was mad.

  Forty-Three

  Where was Ales? She was supposed to be home? Was there an appointment? The doctor was/they kept changing it/Alessandra’s father was a trial/the mother was another story/her name was . . .

  No/there was something to do with a deer/she said there were deer in the park/venison wine Venice.

  Stag? Jules knew to write it down/in the kitchen/on the fridge there was the pad he wrote things on to remember them.

  Not to put on the kettle/set an alarm.

  Stage, he wrote.

  Where was I?

  A deer. A ruminant. A horn.

  Ruminate.

  Deer man was only looking for a place to think/somewhere quiet to sort one’s thoughts/the calm of the country for the city was chaos and they kept changing everything.

  Ruminate. Chew the cud.

  Rumen. Ruminis. Gullet. Guts.

  It takes guts.

  Guts for gar
ters!

  I don’t know the whole story.

  Forty-Four

  The day before, coming home from Fiddler’s, Lloyd opened a squelchy voice mail from his brother announcing his pending return from France, less than nine weeks since his departure. Lloyd was sure Dave had told him he was going for eighty-five days.

  It was Lloyd’s intention to hire a housecleaner before his brother’s arrival, but he thought he was near the limit of his renegotiated bank overdraft. Attempting and failing to withdraw $200 from an ATM, he learned he was broke. Lloyd was skint with nowhere to turn.

  Everything he needed to tackle the job himself was beneath the kitchen sink: cleansers as luminous as radium, a bucket, rubber gloves, brushes, and sponges.

  On his knees in the bathroom, scrubbing around the toilet, haloed with ammonia, with chlorine and piss, he wondered if this wasn’t his future. Poor Harry Davenant became a security guard. Lloyd naively held teaching as his last resort, believing that positions were easy to come by. Dupes were forever going to seminars and classes to learn how to write screenplays. People who would never imagine writing a novel after reading one, or a play after seeing one, could still easily convince themselves they knew how to make a movie having dozed through a few. Only too late did Lloyd learn that experience in the film and television business counted for naught in the Academy. They were more likely to give a job to someone who garnered a Ph.D. studying cinema than making pictures. Some regional colleges stooped to having English profs lecture on the craft.

  And to conduct one of those high-priced screenwriting seminars one first had to concoct some hare-brained theory concerning the structure of filmed stories. They were parabolic or played in seven and a half acts or the characters were spirit vectors or the mouse takes the fucking cheese.

  Gripping the fat lip of the porcelain bowl, Lloyd pushed himself up off the tiled floor.

  He stood over his guest bed wondering if he should strip it now or tomorrow. Whether he was going to spend one more night here at his Hôtel d’Alsace or take up Natalie’s offer of dinner, an invitation he assumed included a sleep over. He didn’t yet know. He would check his emails and then revisit the question.

  The Facebook page he’d created had taken on a life of its own. Lloyd no longer needed to feed it, to bait and prompt. A dynamic online community, The Deer Friends, had grown around the cause of Harry Davenant. They all stood by Harry’s choice and took this shared belief as an opportunity to post pictures of themselves and share other items distantly related to the matter of the one-time thespian’s adventure of self-discovery in the park. Lloyd had an aversion to having his picture taken and considered sharing images of oneself on the Internet unimaginably vulgar; taking one’s own picture and then sharing it with the world was pathological. There were actors for that. It was another attitude that seemed to put him further and further outside social norms.

  There was chatter among the Deer Friends of creating a fawn-coloured ribbon and an adhesive ribbon-like sticker for the back of one’s car that would show support for Harry. But the Friends were such an amorphous group, so virtual, that no one took the initiative to have anything made. The fawn ribbon would be worn, like a bandage, in the mind.

  There were, Lloyd learned from the Facebook page, folks all over in various states of transitioning from man to beast. There were two people in Ontario, one in Thunder Bay, another in Orillia, whose advocates took pains to clarify were not suffering hypertrichosis — that is, did not have “werewolf syndrome” but were, at heart, wolves. There was a man in Sydney Mines, Nova Scotia, who wanted it made equally clear that he was a werewolf and not a wolf. Several nuns of the same order at a Karmelitenkloster in Graz, Austria, were accepting that they were goats. A woman in Vancouver and another in Calgary were “cat people” in the truest sense. There was only one other deer out there, a woman in California, whose husband seemed, genuinely, to be looking for someone of the same species to keep her company. A group of deer, Lloyd discovered, was called a mob.

  Today there was a flurry of complaints on the Facebook page concerning an anonymous mock Twitter feed, one purporting to be the social media voice of Harry himself. It called itself Feral Theatric. Lloyd dared to see for himself:

  After cull enrages ‘Save Bambi’ crowd, B.C. creates $100k/year ‘advisory committee’ on urban deer http://natpo.st/1LYcgWH

  Disney’s deer was a frequent theme. Another tweet came with a link to a clip from the movie, Thumper saying, If you can’t say something nice don’t say nothing at all.

  Another coupled to YouTube and some Elizabethan minstrel group calling itself The Bare Naked Ladies singing “The Deer Song” from a Stratford Theatre production of As You Like It:

  What shall he have that killed the deer?

  His leather skin and horns to wear.

  Then sing him home.

  (The rest shall bear this burden.)

  Take thou no scorn to wear the horn.

  It was a crest ere thou wast born.

  Thy father’s father wore it,

  And thy father bore it.

  The horn, the horn, the lusty horn

  Is not a thing to laugh to scorn.

  Another led clickers to a news story about a Saskatoon couple’s fight to keep a raccoon as a pet, with Fake Harry’s comment: “Being petted is so degrading. And there are things I could tell you about raccoons . . . ”

  Lloyd thought tweets were supposed to be concise but these, together, constituted a staccato aggregation of spurious connections. The big screen had surrendered to the small screen, which was giving way to the smallest screens, those held in hand or dancing on laps. They were hysteria accelerators as much as they were communications devices. The medium wasn’t the message, it was the mania. Lloyd closed the Twitter box but it only got worse.

  Next on the Facebook page was a threat. Below a logo, the stylized mountain lion — ears back, lips curled, fangs forward — of an outfit calling itself Animal Separation was the message: YOU ARE HOMOSAPIEN ASSIMILATORS. ANIMALS ARE SOVEREIGN. ANIMALS DO NOT SERVE. ANIMALS ARE APART. STAY OUT OF THE FOREST.

  What idiots, thought Lloyd. Did they imagine that Harry had defected to the deer side and people were trying to lure him back to humanity? Or make Harry into a double agent for the opposable thumbers? Or that . . . what? Jaysus, it was that sort of unknowable dumb, that kind of obtuseness that came in an iron dome. Lloyd had been altogether too clever. His prank, he sensed, was coming back to bite him, literally perhaps, in the ass. If people learned they were nursing a delusion of Lloyd’s invention they would surely lynch him.

  And while Lloyd’s phone number may have been deleted from the speed dials of Hollywood, had been wilfully forgotten in his trade, he had not been bestowed with the gift of invisibility. Lloyd’s was the indignity of having vanished with a trace. The nutters could easily track him.

  People delighted in their outrage, thought Lloyd, a notion that compelled him to smoke. He went out onto the rotting wooden stairs from the backyard to the rear door and lit up.

  Professional storytelling worked best when it was the earliest transcription of the zeitgeist. You couldn’t tell the people out there in television land a better new story than their own. Lloyd’s little improv about Harry . . . well, his lie about Harry . . . got such traction because people out there could see themselves running from their homes, their jobs, and their family and into the woods.

  There was a show in it, no? Perhaps not of the kind Lloyd fancied, but times changed and one had to adapt. Factual Entertainment. Unscripted Drama. It was the kind of thing Mike Vargas liked to hear pitched these days. If Harry was up-to-date with his Actors Guild dues then maybe . . .

  Lloyd took his phone from his shirt pocket and lifted his specs up to his bald pate so he could read the tiny print on the touchscreen. Letter by letter, his digit too fat for accurate strokes, he answered Natalie’s invitation. “A st
esk steak soumds sounds grest great. What rime time?”

  Forty-Five

  Should have been laying smacks to that mainlander’s face. Wally would have too, if buddy hadn’t walked out of the bar. And then the barmaid giving Wally the gears. Shit on Fiddler’s. Was the place even up to code? Wally was going to see there was an inspection. And woe betide ’em they applied for some permit from the city. Wally had lots of loyal friends in the Engineering Department. Buddy said he was from Notre Dame Bay. Yeah, right. Dressed like a quiff, white jacket and pants. Was he going on safari? Quiff. Should’ve put a glass right in his ear. No hesitation and swinging for the one on the other side of his head. Like Brendan told him, never mind your hands, deal with that later, let that rum tumbler explode in his ear and then whale on buddy, don’t stop until you’re so baffed-out you can’t throw another punch or land another kick.

  Wally was in his truck and already to the Ruby Line so thought, shag it all, go get the quad, put ’er aboard, and take ’er for a spin down to the Skin Tilt. Get away from cock-eating St. John’s. He needed it.

  And Herin Deshpande, Wally was going to have to watch that Paki, make sure the O’Neill Evacuation System didn’t show up in a few years as Herin’s idea. And what about Gerry Hayden, ditching him, leaving Deshpande to tell Wally to go to Labrador out of it? Brother Des wanted to hear, “right away,” what Gerald Hayden’s answer was, but Wally didn’t have the heart to phone him after the meeting. Des had been calling Wally all day but Wally hadn’t answered.

  Quad was in the shed at Des’s place. If Des was home from the motel Wally would deliver the bad news in person, when he was getting the machine.

  Forty-Six

  Newfoundland was beautiful, stunning, get no argument on that score from Gary. Flying in the first time, the Airbus banked over the sea and turned back for the airport so Gary could see the unassailable cliffs plunging into the cold cold waters. There were hues of blue and green and grey down there with weight, colours Gary did not know existed. But the Newfies were hell-bent on despoiling their outpost. Gary had never seen so much litter. He’d never seen so much garish roadside signage — firewood, road salt, discount nail salons. He never got over how ugly were the buildings in St. John’s. There were a few lovely decorated cakes clinging to the hills in the downtown, but the drive down the Ruby Line to his house in the Southlands took him past one heap of shit after another. The area to the west of the city was once agricultural, hay fields and rows of cabbage and potato running to treed hills, goulds, nearer the coastline. You’d think the setting would inspire them to erect something attractive, but no, they flung up metal sheds and baby barns and the worst sort of suburban tract housing. They shared a love of the two-car garage — most of the houses seemed built around them, great thrusts of garage out to meet the street. They worshipped the road, never setting houses back on their lots, but coming as close to the pavement as possible. This, Gary now knew, after a few months policing the place, was not for economic reasons but so they could better reconnoitre one another’s comings and goings. They were so goddamned prying and meddlesome. He couldn’t get to Arizona soon enough.