The problem, of course, came when either or both of them actually were at wits’ end, and the other couldn’t tell if they were really having what, to all appearances, looked like a fight. Tracy was never 100 percent sure when Dave was genuinely threatening to move out, and Dave never knew for sure if Tracy was serious about catapulting his every last possession onto the train tracks. Should they go into full relationship-save mode, or keep the banter going?
Once Tracy had guessed wrong. It was a few months after Dave had moved in, and she broke down crying after he raised his voice to auctioneer levels and said there was no way he could reasonably be expected to live with someone who didn’t appreciate the genius of shoegazer. She’d hugged his knees together, sobbing from a deep and vulnerable place inside her, and said she’d try to listen again, really she would, if it meant that much to him. Then she looked up, nose running, lenses fogged, and all he’d been able to do was meekly back away, embarrassed for both of them but still not sure how to make things right. He spent the next five days puttering around the corners of the house, eating marmalade from the jar and mutely rearranging his record collection. They hadn’t mentioned it since.
Tracy looked across the table at Dave, who was picking shards of pear from around the knife and rattling off the subhuman conditions in which chamomile was grown and harvested, taking a long detour into the Nepalese workers’ revolution he was helping to indirectly orchestrate with some of his buddies from the forum. Picturing all of the ensuing chaos she was about to set into motion—the crying, the fights, the is-this-really-a-fight fight, the divvying up of the furniture, the changing of passwords and locks—made her feel exhausted. Lately it just made more sense to ignore the problem and focus on the manageable stuff, like what to eat for dinner, or next week’s readings. Neither of them was happy, she knew that. Dave’s tea crusade kept him upstairs for more and more of the day, and when they were together he seemed to increasingly regard her as an irritant—not to mention an organics naysayer, vampirically trying to suck the passion from his cause. And to think, she’d been the one to first tell him about fair-trade coffee and the arctic seal hunt, all those years and commitments ago. It seemed a parallel universe from here.
On the other hand, for things to get any better—for either one of them—first they’d have to get much, much worse.
“Dave,” she started, already feeling an entire night’s worth of tears pressing against the dams of her eyelids. “You know I—”
“What?” He looked at her distractedly.
“You know I want only—only the best for y—”
“Come on, Tracy. Speak up already!” Ah, yes. The other side effect of Dave’s cavalier music-listening habits was the occasional episode of tinnitus, which drowned out all other sounds completely, the way radio static swarms car speakers when you bump the dial. He tried to cover these attacks, even from Tracy, still, by pretending to be enthralled with some banal object—as he did now, picking up a ladle and studying it intently.
Tracy could already feel the adrenaline slowly subsiding, and something oddly resembling relief taking its place. Sometimes Dave was such a big, commanding personality, she thought. The kind of guy who charmed baristas, professors, and most small animals without even trying. The kind of guy who could instantly transform a dozen strangers into one rapt audience.
But sometimes he was just a sad, overgrown child, plugging his ears and waiting for the world to re-shape itself around his latest harebrained scheme.
She lit a cigarette—0 for 13 and counting—and plopped down in the chair opposite him. Not today, she thought. Then, because why not, she repeated it out loud. “Not today.” Dave still didn’t look up from the ladle. With each pull of her cigarette Tracy took extra relish in the cloud of tar that was no doubt whirlwinding through her lungs; she thought dark, sulking thoughts. Then, since she was apparently stuck with him for a little longer, she decided to announce a few more hidden grievances, the slow-burning kind that inevitably touch nerves and really aren’t worth bringing up for the fight they’ll set off. The kind of complaints that take years of gathering evidence to see the pattern.
“You never wash between the fork tines,” she said, looking straight into the distracted whites of Dave’s eyes. His hearing was still pure fuzz. “It grosses me right out. You can’t walk down the sidewalk in a straight line. You ball your socks up weird.”
Each tick of their kitchen clock pounded in the fall air. The only other sound for several minutes was the persistent glass tinkle of a hobo rummaging for bottles in the dumpster outside.
That evening they crawled into bed together and slept facing opposite walls. Meanwhile, their toothbrushes sat wet and foamy in the bathroom cabinet’s stainless steel cup, kissing like vintage film stars.
5
WHAT COLOUR IS A SUNSET?
“Alex! Check this bitch out! It’s like Pink Floyd records, right? Only they’re painted on the backs of these naked chicks.”
“Yeah.”
“All in a line, like ten of them. Just hanging out. Naked.”
“This is me ignoring you.”
“You can totally see their butts.”
“I saw it, believe me. You don’t have to take it down—”
Tyson went up on tiptoe, all five foot five of him strained toward the top row of display copies, each backed with a thin cardboard sheet and shrink-wrapped to preserve its shape. He shook the one he wanted free from the tiered contraption, brought it down, and held it out at chest height. “Look where their butts smoosh into the edge of the pool. That’s the hottest shit in the world, right there. Imagine the guy whose job that is.”
“Do you even like Pink Floyd?”
“Imagine what it’d be like to paint butts and tits all day.” Tyson flipped the poster (item code: FLOYDPOOL-NUDE) back to face him and held it up appraisingly. He cooed. The poster dwarfed his upper body the same way broadsheet newspapers did old men. “Naked bitches needing planets drawn on them, 24/7, 9–5.”
Alex looked back over each shoulder, streams of people swirling past the two of them as they made their way haltingly through the aisles. For two weeks every semester, a visiting poster company turned this corner of the AQ into a winding, synthetic corn maze. It was one of the highest areas of foot traffic on campus; accordingly, over the years it had become a ritual that everyone pay a visit to inspect the wares. “Name me one member of Pink Floyd. Name me one song.”
“Painting butts, man.” Tyson’s face peeked out over the top of the poster. “Do you think he’s a visual arts guy? Or just some lucky fuckface with a paint roller?”
The company had clearly done its research. Everything they sold was aimed like a homing missile at the modern dorm-room professional. Their periodic table of beers was a consistent big-ticket item; variant posters for suburban boy movies like Fight Club and Reservoir Dogs sold out early every single year. A young Bob Dylan tuning his bass nestled next to the bartender’s guide to cocktails, complete with pictures (item code: BOOZEGUIDE-2). Anything featuring Paris in black and white was a good bet for women and film students. They had WWII-era watercolour propaganda. Guernica. Hunter S. Thompson. There was an entire subsection for Dalí at the back, near the windows.
“Tyson, man, focus,” Alex said. “I’m coming to you as a friend here.”
“Fuck the triangle right off her back, I’m telling you,” Tyson mumbled, his eyes glassy. “I got something to put out that handshake guy on fire. Know what I mean? Aw, shit.”
“Just answer me this.”
“Wrong. The correct answer was My Dick.”
“What was the last great thing you read in The Peak?”
Tyson’s glance lingered on the poster as he considered the question. “Define great. Do you mean world-changing? As in, something worth recommending to another human, which you know I’d never do? I’ll tell you this: I just read some really great bathroom graffiti. World-class stuff. Not one hour ago. On the hand dryer, where there’s that picture
of three wavy red lines to simulate hot air? Someone wrote ‘bacon dispenser.’ Genius. Or, even, what about that video of the guy falling out of the AQ hedge? That thing has, like, ten million hits. I mean, I read The Peak every week, but you guys have never come close to shit like that.”
“So why do you still pick it up?”
“Because, dude. Because I’ll always have a few minutes to kill between classes. Because I like scouting the comics and seeing if any hot girls were interviewed for Peak Speak. Because it’s there.”
“You don’t look for breaking news. Or features that are, I don’t know, in depth?”
“Fuck no.” Tyson dropped the Pink Floyd poster against a bootleg print of Bart Simpson smoking a joint and kept walking. A group of girls gathered a few feet ahead of them. “Be honest with yourself,” he said to Alex. “When was the last time you looked for any of that shit?”
The girls were looking at a print of Che Guevara’s face against a dark blue background. All of them wore cardigans, expensive jeans with coloured stitching on the back pockets, and professionally worn-in caps that were meant to recreate the quaint old-world knitting techniques of their grandmothers. “I think I want this,” one of them was saying, “but in green. Do they make it in green?”
One of her friends flipped her bangs out of her eyes and took a big sip of bubble tea. “Green, seriously? That’s gnarly.”
A third chimed in, “You mean gnarly as in good?”
“God, just drop it already, Melissa,” said the bubble-tea girl, flipping her hair again. “I say orange.”
“Yeah,” the first agreed, “like a burnt, kind of … almond-y orange. You know? That would just kill it.”
Alex took in this conversation as if he was breathing truck exhaust. Tyson followed his friend’s line of sight. “Oh, nice. Funny story, actually. Which one do you like?”
“Jesus. None of them,” Alex said. “They’re trying to figure out which colour goes best with revolution. It’s fucking embarrassing. You want to record that kind of bullshit and play it back for them, just so they can hear what the rest of us hear.”
Newly engaged, Tyson waved his arms to get Alex’s attention back. “See, that’s exactly your problem,” he said. “You’re too worried about the words coming out of their mouths. You’ve gotta learn to get past that shit. It’ll ruin you every time.”
The bubble-tea girl looked over at Tyson with an extended, nervous glance, then drew her indecisive friend, who was wondering aloud what shade of orange a sunset is, around the corner toward a tangerine-ish print with “DANCE LIKE NOBODYS WATCHING” written overtop in loopy capitals. (That particular poster [item code: MOTIVATIONAL-DANCE] had been part of a series of blue-chip fixtures in the fridge-magnet and greeting-card industries for nearly a decade; this year marked its maiden voyage into the world of informal home decoration.)
“There are probably thirty girls in this whole school whose personality is a match with yours,” Tyson continued. “And guess what? Twenty-nine of them are golems. The other one is already fucking her TA.” He nodded at the girls as the last of them trailed out of sight. “Look at them. Probably what, nineteen years old? Psychology majors? They commute from somewhere an hour away, and have recently signed their first Greenpeace petition. Two of them have bumper stickers for the Dave Matthews Band.”
Alex’s nostrils flared involuntarily. Tyson pointed at them with a triumphant flourish.
“Exactly!” he said. “All of these are real possibilities, right?”
“Too real,” Alex muttered.
“So just don’t think about it, man. Block that shit out. You need to be a zen about sex. A blank slate. I mean, just look at her”—Tyson peeked through a gap in the display and pointed at the bubble-tea girl—“and see what your dick has to say about it. Imagine she’s stripping for you, real slow-like: what’s coming off first? Decide if you want to see, for instance, her butt smooshed into the edge of a pool. Most of the time you’ll get an enthusiastic, jeans-straining yes.” In one motion he turned his accusatory finger into a thumbs up, and continued holding it a few inches away from Alex’s nose. “It’s that simple.
“And besides,” Tyson added, “you don’t think they do it, too? Trust me: fewer chicks than you think are turned on by magic realism.”
“Hey, José Saramago is not a magic realist,” Alex said, with the pained expression of someone used to making his case to indifferent ears. “There’s a difference, okay? He doesn’t make people levitate. There aren’t any magic potions. What he’s actually doing—I think, anyway—is playing with logic, so things that might seem magical can happen once you start extrapolating.” For the second time that week Alex felt his audience turning on him. “Plus he has a Nobel Prize and lives on top of a volcano. How’re you going to tell me that’s not awesome?”
Tyson looked at his watch. “It took you twenty seconds to get that out, and now look. They’re fucking gone, dude. Presto. See how far that gets you? Now here’s a story drawn straight from real life. Pay attention—it’s got a moral.”
Alex steeled himself. After four years in residence—the average was closer to two—Tyson had fine-tuned a handbook for promiscuity in close quarters that never failed to disgust and captivate. Alex couldn’t even imagine having to walk down a rez hallway and see the same girl from the night before, now hungover and inquisitive in a baggy T-shirt and pajama bottoms. How could the two of you have a polite chat about dining hall hash browns when, mere hours earlier, you were licking her naked thighs and memorizing the way she bunched the sheets in her fists for future playback? Every conquest would just be one fewer girl Alex could ever conceivably speak to again, which put him pretty much back where he started: alone and pining.
“Can we get back to my real problem for a minute?” Alex said. “The Metro is going to put us out of business if I don’t figure this out.”
“Oh, Alex,” Tyson said. He made the softly nagging tsk tsk sound in the most irritating way he knew how. “This is your real problem.”
They continued their circuit through the poster grounds. All ironic tendencies aside, Alex was comforted by seeing stalwarts like James Dean and those two ladies tongue-kissing still in active rotation. This touring exhibit marked, in its own small way, a kind of mini-canonization of pop-culture ephemera. Sure, posters for new films and buzz bands came and went. But if your face was still recognizable enough for students to shell out six bucks to own a copy ten years after the fact, well, that meant something, didn’t it? These minor gods would live on for as long as undergrads had a taste for coarse philosophies about life and death and comedies about unlikely bongs.
But Tyson’s X-rated fable couldn’t be silenced for long. This one turned out to be the rambling story of last week’s Pub Night, where he allegedly convinced a lithe 2nd-year brunette to watch a meteor shower with him from the football field’s fifty-yard line. They smuggled out bottles of Alexander Keith’s in her purse, and, after fifteen minutes of innocently wondering where all the meteors were and if, just maybe, his astrologist had mixed up her dates again, Tyson made his move. By his count, they had sex four times (field, parking lot, bathroom, bunk), in all kinds of positions that sounded Rorschachian in their convoluted symmetry. He swore that when this girl had an orgasm, her whole body shook like a cell phone on vibrate.
Alex was never sure how much of this stuff was made up. It made him wonder what percentage of all the world’s sex anecdotes were real—fifty percent? Forty? One detail he knew for sure was a lie: Tyson swore that after two of the four sessions he came all over the girl’s tits. Impossible. No matter how good an idea it might seem in the heat of the moment, Alex knew nobody would take a stripe to the chest, mop themselves off with a Kleenex, then agree to act as bullseye again a few hours later. There was no way.
Tyson also threw around variations of the phrase “she loved it,” but Alex wrote that off as par for the course for someone raised on pornography—the kind of person who mistakes a simple sexual courte
sy for some throbbing, primal need.
“Anyway,” Tyson said, drawing the story to its roundabout conclusion, “the point is that I wore my trick underwear that night. And pay attention here, because underwear is one of those things that you barely notice on the way off, but becomes hugely fucking important the next morning. So when this girl wakes up and looks over, the first thing she sees is my back—facing the wall is also crucial—and ‘I LOVE TO FART’ written in huge chunky letters across my ass.” He spread his arms in victory. “Don’t you get it? I’m in the clear forever. Who would ever want to admit—”
“Point of information,” Alex said.
“Ugh. What?”
“Where do you even find shit like that? Don’t tell me custom order.”
Tyson shrugged. “Vegas. Or those prize machines at Safeway, next to the gumballs.”
The aisles around them were getting more and more crowded, so they decided their pilgrimage was just about complete. Tyson took a picture of the Pink Floyd poster with his phone, and on an urgent whim that he later couldn’t identify, Alex bought a print of Norman Rockwell’s Gossip (item code: ROCKWLEL-GOSSIP). Something about the closeness of the pairs of faces drew him to it—the way they all reveled in their small, shining moments as gatekeepers of knowledge, even though it was obvious the phrase they kept repeating had long been garbled beyond the point of utility.
On their way out, Alex and Tyson came face to face with the bubble-tea girl and her brunette friend. The friend had settled on a glossy portrait of NDP leader Jack Layton, his shiny head and arctic-white moustache framed by a starburst of the party’s official shade of orange.
Alex wondered where the other girls in the entourage had disappeared to, and he couldn’t suppress a quick smile as he pictured them dropping off like a space shuttle’s booster rockets, spent and not missed.
The Dilettantes Page 5