Difficult People

by Catriona Wright

  A half-remembered poetry pep talk I’d been practising on my way there stuttered out of my mouth as the prisoners nodded encouragingly, as though I was a six-year-old butchering a violin solo at the local talent show. I had them write a poem using the words free and mellifluous. The second word—so utterly pretentious and wrongheaded, I find it almost sweet now—took on a staggering number of meanings, from a monster with a musical anus to a type of bright yellow hallucinogenic wine. In my youth and stupidity, I assumed the inmates didn’t know the true meaning of the word, but I would later learn they’d been fucking with me—I wasn’t the first Line Break graduate student they had encountered, and I wouldn’t be the last.

  Still, I must have done something right because the next day my carrel at the library was full of tulips and hyacinths, and there was a card from Jake that read, To the girl with the mellifluous voice, please free us from bullshit words like mellifluous. –Jake. P.S. Do you always dress like Steve Jobs? I couldn’t figure out how he had managed to contact a florist from prison until six months later when Jordan told me Jake always called him to arrange flowers.

  “Always, as in once? For me?” I’d said.

  “Sure,” Jordan said and smiled.

  Jordan was a tattoo artist specializing in morbid ink, the quasi-legal practice of mixing ink with ashes, a person’s or a pet’s, as part of a memorial tattoo. He would only do them for friends of friends because he was worried inspectors would start to crack down on it if the practice became widely known. Jordan was certain it was safe.

  “Carbon in the ink,” he said. “Carbon in the ashes. What’s the difference?”

  Still deluded enough to think of myself as a poet, I wrote several pieces on the subject with lines like “The skin white as the pearly gates./ Death inside./ Outside./ Forever.” I would read them to Jordan, who was nice enough to only smirk a little. “Love lasts forever but a tattoo lasts longer,” he would say by way of critique. I’d been hanging out with Jordan a lot. Nobody else would let me talk freely about Jake; nobody else took our relationship seriously.

  “Did you ever notice that Jake’s right eye is a slightly more intense blue than his left eye?” I would say as he sterilized his needles or arranged the sheets of Donald Duck and Chinese character flashes in the window.

  “Isn’t it sweet how Jake always mixes up their and there, and you’re and your?”

  Jordan never commented one way or the other, but sometimes we would get a beer at the Drunken Mermaid after work and he would tell stories about Jake: how as boys they would hold such intense Monopoly games that one time they both got bladder infections from holding their piss in for so long, neither wanting to go to the bathroom and risk the other one cheating, or how they would get their father to tell his alien abduction story whenever they wanted to avoid chores. When Jordan recounted stories about high school parties and double dates, I would crack peanut shells loudly and gnash the salty flesh until he stopped.

  Other people expressed either derision (my friends) or concern (my mother) about my relationship with Jake. Worst of all were the students in my workshops who thought I was making him up to get attention, to set myself apart and brand myself as an outlaw poet. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I should have nurtured this idea. Maybe then my supervisor wouldn’t have thought I was getting “too involved” and yanked me from the Line Break program.

  I’d initially met Jordan after Jake asked me to take care of his boxer, Bing Crosby II. He said he didn’t believe that Jordan took his duties sufficiently seriously. “I think he’s giving him No Name dog food,” he said. “All anuses and spleens and snouts.”

  I texted Jordan and he told me to meet him at the tattoo shop. Bing Crosby II was tied to a bike rack outside, tugging furiously on the leash. When I tried to pet him he barked this weird whiny bark that I can only describe as a mix between a foghorn and a didgeridoo.

  From inside the shop, I could hear someone laughing.

  Jordan came outside and shook my hand. He looked like Jake, same bald head and full lips, only scrawnier and with more tattoos.

  “He’s beautiful,” I said.

  “Inbred as fuck,” Jordan said. “I don’t know why my brother insisted on getting a thoroughbred. That’s some eugenics shit if you ask me.”

  “You know Jake,” I said and giggled. I wanted to get out of there, but I also wanted Jordan to tell his brother how hot and cool I was—why else would I have spent all morning deciding between a black dress with white polka dots and a white dress with black polka dots?

  Jordan nodded. “You free later? Want to grab a beer?”

  “Not today,” I said, a little taken aback. I didn’t want to give the impression that I was interested in him romantically. “Maybe I could come by with coffee tomorrow?”

  “Sure.” Jordan untied the dog and handed the leash to me. “Decaf soy latte, please.”

  The idea of having Jake’s dog, a being he’d potty trained and play-fought with and petted, thrilled me. I spent hours preparing steak and sweet potato for him on his first night, imagining the day when I would get to cook for Jake. But the thrill soon wore off with Bing Crosby II flailing through the apartment, his thick nails gouging the hardwood as he pissed and shat and impregnated my shitsu-poodle mix, Stanza. I forgave him when their progeny, Bing Crosby III, was born. The puppy was truly hideous with oversized paws, a limp pompadour and a stunted fluffy tail that almost looked like a rabbit’s but I loved him because he was a herald of the babies Jake and I would have. “Our beautiful son,” I wrote on the back of the photos I brought to Jake in prison. When Bing Crosby III was killed in a tragic car accident, I had him cremated, using some of the ashes for myself and saving some for Jake when he got out.

  When I was feeling frustrated about our situation, I liked to imagine myself taking care of Jake as a little boy, how we would play in the bath for hours building castles out of green apple-scented bubbles and drowning his rubber ducky and staging complex naval battles, his little wrinkled body secure in the claw-foot tub. I liked to imagine pushing him on a swing, high enough to freak him out a bit so he cowered in my arms afterward. I liked to imagine soothing him, ruffling his hair and rubbing his back, after a crushing Little League defeat. I liked to imagine daubing rubbing alcohol on a scraped knee, his whole body wincing against the sting. Best of all I liked to imagine sending him to his room without supper as punishment for some minor infraction—a broken lamp or a pinched cousin—and locking the door, knowing he was inside, a tantrum in Batman pajamas wailing against the injustice of the universe.

  Although she liked to protest, my mother was secretly pleased by the relationship. It gave her an excuse to call me all the time.

  “Any news about Jake’s parole?”

  “Nope,” I said, though in truth his lawyer had been flooding my inbox with messages on the subject.

  “I saw your father.” Talking about my father was the real reason she wanted to call me.

  “On route 123 or on the side of a bus?” I balanced the phone in the crook of my neck, propped my feet against the kitchen table and began painting my toenails red.

  “His face was in my mailbox.” My mother was probably sitting in her living room, stroking one of her cats or else in the kitchen staring out at the clouds.

  “I hope you threw him out.”

  Nothing.

  I put down the bottle of polish. “Seriously, mother.”

  “Fine, fine,” she said. “Have you spoken to him recently?”

  “Did you look at the websites I sent you?”

  “Online dating is for pervs and sad lonely people.”

  My toenails gleamed. I blew on them to speed up the drying process. “Perfect for a hardcore masochist.”

  “That isn’t funny. Talk sense. When are you coming to visit me?” My mother lived with two Persian cats who sashayed through her one-bedroom apartment like
glam-rock stars from the eighties, swishing their fabulous tails, purring a steady synth bassline and cocking their squished faces with haughty flair. I hated visiting her because I would leave covered in long white hairs too stubborn to be defeated by any lint roller.

  “Soon, Mom. I promise. But you have to promise to throw Dad out.”

  “Fine.”

  My father had cheated on her for many years, and after a brief attempt at an open marriage—one that ended with my mother dressed in head scarf and shades bawling in a movie theatre as she spied on Dad feeding his date a Swedish berry—they finally split up when I was five. My father quickly remarried. His second wife Lola was a financial planner who favoured hot pink caftans and hub cap-sized gold studs. She was loud and crass and always had a menthol in hand. At first I liked how outspoken and strong she seemed, so different from my sensitive mother. But as I got older, I started to regard her as tacky, especially after my father’s new ad campaign, which, I was convinced, was entirely her fault. I will never forget the first time I saw the park bench with his face on it. His bleached teeth and rusty skin and cowboy squint. “Been in an accident?” The sign read. “Call Leonard Martin at 1 800 CAR HIT U.” The ad was infuriating for many reasons, not the least of which was that it made no sense. Shouldn’t it have been “CAR HIT ME?” Whenever someone at school insulted the ad, I laughed along with everyone else. I laughed at the penises and cigars and speech bubbles that attached themselves to his mouth. My father and I spoke less and less, and then not at all.

  Jake was two years into an eight-year sentence when I met him. He seemed incapable of talking about his crime seriously, not that he didn’t love to talk about it; he did. Sometimes it involved duffle bags of cash and a beautiful, harelipped Yakuza hit dame named Princess Marigold, sometimes black-market firecrackers that exploded into an expression of the lighter’s darkest fear and once, a recalcitrant getaway camel. I never knew what to make of it but because he’d assured me that he never hurt or killed or sexually molested anyone, I let it go. A month before the wedding Jordan finally admitted, late one night after having tattooed a rose full of Aunt Rose’s ashes onto a young woman’s thigh, that Jake was in for dealing pot and mushrooms, a “fuckload of pot and mushrooms” according to Jordan, from his dorm room. I was grateful both because the banal nature of Jake’s crime made him more palatable to my mother and because it made him less palatable to the hordes of inmate lovers who stalked the Internet searching for their death-row Prince Charming.

  I know I should have felt a kinship with the other women visiting their husbands, the women I waited in line with on Tuesday afternoons, the women who wore wedge heels and tiny dresses with push-up bras, their hair blow-dried, their eyeliner and lip liner perfect and their nails freshly adhered, but I didn’t. I was an asshole. I didn’t believe Jake was like the other convicts, and by extension, I didn’t think I was like the other wives. Most of the visits happened in the waiting room, which was always crackling with energy. Jake would tell me about the guards’ shenanigans and gossip about the other inmates. He didn’t like to talk about himself unless it was to discuss a trip we would take together when he got out. “We’ll scuba dive in Australia and horseback ride in Argentina,” he’d say. “We’ll ski in Austria and surf in Antarctica. The only real country is a country that starts with a in my opinion.”

  We were allowed conjugal visits four times a year on the condition that Jake had been behaving himself. They took place in a nearby apartment full of white furniture made from particle board. The prison provided scratchy towels, discount condoms and thin wedges of yellow soap. They wouldn’t let me bring my own. A guard stood outside but we didn’t let that stop us from enjoying ourselves—looking back, it probably increased my enjoyment knowing Jake was stuck in there with me. I loved stripping for him and revealing my new tats: a tulip travelling up my shin, the letter j in courier beside the bright blue veins in my wrist. I loved washing him afterward, lathering the soap against his skin, his arms limp by his sides.

  After the wedding, I dropped out of grad school. The passive- aggressive workshops and love triangles just didn’t seem to matter anymore. My mother was relieved and suggested I do something practical like go to nursing school or write a sensational memoir about being married to a convict, preferably “something Opera Winfrey or HBO would appreciate.” Instead I became an apprentice at Jordan’s tattoo studio. I practised inking grapefruits and oranges with stars and hearts, then with busty ladies and barbed wire and Celtic knots. On my own thighs I wrote out stanzas from Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, each letter a different colour and font. Jordan was a patient teacher and my skill set became solid but never inspired. I could do any of the flashes, but Jordan still did all the original work. Naturally he took all the morbid ink jobs.

  Three months before Jake’s parole hearing, I began having a recurring nightmare in which I was a mother tearing through an airport looking for my child. I would screech and fall to my knees and grab security guards’ arms and be tasered to the ground. I awoke to Bing Crosby II howling at the sight of me thrashing in my bed.

  But that was at night. During the day, I prepared the apartment for him, scrubbing behind the refrigerator and dusting on top of the bookshelves. I bought new sheets and towels, both pale blue. I filled the apartment with plants because he always said that green was what he missed most about the outside. I practised making chicken-fried steak and spicy meatballs, his favourites. I got a beer-opener key chain for his new key and threw out all my period-stained underwear.

  The night before the parole hearing I’d gone out late so I came into the grey room reeking of whiskey and pot. My lipstick and eyeliner were smudged and my hair was snarled into a wasp nest. I wore a lavender slip with a ripped plaid shirt—which I’d stolen from Jordan—over top. I answered questions in vague, dreamy language cribbed from my own poems. Jake glared at me, and his lawyer, a puffy red-headed man who had prepped me the week before, coughed loudly as I explained that Jake would be coming home “to a dreamscape of love and chaos and the impermanence of desire.”

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Jake hissed at me, his anger making me feel vindicated and self-righteous.

  Straight to your room young man! I felt like saying.

  “Be good, my baby. I love you so much,” I said.

  Amazingly, the parole board decided in his favour. He would be released in a week. The day I found out, Jordan and I shared three mid-afternoon pitchers at the Drunken Mermaid. He walked me to my apartment. Once we got there, we sat on the stoop and stared at the sky, a cloudless dusky plum. Fat white petals from a nearby magnolia tree floated to the ground. I leaned over and kissed Jordan on the cheek, then on the mouth. He kissed me back with surprising tenderness, cupping my face with both hands. After a few minutes of making out, I excused myself, got up and puked daintily in the rose bushes.

  “Shit.” Jordan was standing now. “What about Jake?”

  “Jake the jailbird.” I burped and reached for his fly. “Want to come inside?”

  Gently pushing my hands away, he took a step back. “You’re only doing this because you’re nervous about Jake getting out.”

  “Does a Baby Ruth taste as sweet in a park as in a penitentiary?”

  “I’ve never told you this but the reason I didn’t go to the wedding is because I couldn’t handle seeing the two of you—”

  “Okay,” I said, not wanting to hear anymore. “Okay. Okay. Good night.”

  The next morning I woke up with peanut shells in my sheets. I could barely move my jaw and I spat blood into the sink. I must have been grinding my teeth all night. Stanza was curled in my armpit and Bing Crosby II was lying on the floor beside my bed, his dumb inbred eyes liquid and needy. After all his nighttime concerts, he had lost his voice, his bark barely a rasp.

  Two days before Jake’s release I was taking care of the shop while Jordan drove to his latest girlfriend’s house for s
ome afternoon delight, or so he said; in truth, I was pretty sure he was avoiding me. I was talking on the phone to my mom who was advising me to take things slow with Jake, to be prepared for toenail clippings on the kitchen counter and wet towels on the floor.

  “Check before you sit on the throne,” she said. “I don’t want you to fall in.”

  The chime on the door tinkled and a policeman entered. “I have to go, Mom.”

  “Can I help you, sir?” I said to the policeman after a few seconds had passed. He was wearing shorts, navy with yellow piping, and showing off his hairless legs. I wondered if he waxed them, which seemed likely given the luscious curly black hair on his head. He carried a white bicycle helmet under one arm. He had one of those inverted pyramid bodies—wide shoulders, tiny waist—that commonly belong to rowers or swimmers.

  “Yes,” he said. “I was hoping to get a tattoo.”

  Stepping out from behind the desk, I gestured toward the coffee table covered in binders full of designs. “These might interest you.”

  “I already know what I want.”

  He smelled strongly of Old Spice deodorant and mint toothpaste. How many people had he sent to the penitentiary over the years?

  “Perfect,” I said. “Do you have a sketch?”

  He took a crumpled piece of paper out of his wallet and smoothed it on the desk. A crude rendition of a baobab tree, violent limbs shooting out of a black trunk. I could tell he’d drawn it himself.

  “Beautiful,” I said, knowing full well that I should stop right there and promise that my colleague, the true artist, would be back soon. “Where do you want it?”

  “Right here,” he said, patting himself on the back.

  “Great. Take off your shirt and lie on this table. Would you like me to close the blinds? It’s pretty sunny out there.”