Snuffy snaps awake, instantly aware of his semi-on and the fact that he is being watched. Gosse is craning his head around the headrest of the passenger seat. Whatever way he is turning, the skin on his neck and face is all pushed up and wrinkled, like a Shar Pei.
They are at the bottom of Signal Hill.
“You were snoring,” Gosse says.
“Sorry b’ys, late night last night. Caught up with me all of a sudden. What did I miss?”
“I was just saying we should get us some coffee and then we need to talk,” says Al, his gaze meeting Snuffy’s in the rear-view mirror.
“Sounds good to me.”
“How ’bout here?” Gosse says, directing Al to pull in at Chatters Café.
“Black for me,” Al says.
“You know mine,” says Gosse.
Although the coffee makes Snuffy feel more alert, he does not feel any more focussed. But alert and half-focussed is how he likes it. Having to stick to an agenda makes him nervous.
Al pulls into traffic, steering between a Harley Davidson and a rust-pocked minivan. As they pass the Five Season’s Motel, Al gestures towards its lit-up green and white sign: “Either of you ever wonder about the placement of the apostrophe in that sign?”
Neither Gosse nor Snuffy say anything.
“Alrighty then, down to business. Those two pictures I showed you back in the bar. The man is Freddy M and the woman is Lila, his wife.”
“Funny name, Emm.” Snuffy says.
“It’s a nom de plume.”
“A what?” Gosse asks, his voice suddenly all sunkers. Being talked down to is on the list of unpredictable things that spark rage in him. Other items include public transit and women who don’t make any noise in bed.
“A pen name. He’s a writer. Pretty famous with the wine and cheese set.”
“That’s why he looked familiar; must have seen his picture in the paper,” says Snuffy.
“See, old Freddy’s been neglecting his matrimonial duties to such as extent that I have been filling in for him with his old lady, if you get my drift. Drift being the operative word in this situation because that’s what she has been putting up her nose in recent weeks. Y’all hear what I’m saying. It’s put her in the unfortunate position where she needs cash in a bad way.”
“Speaking of the weather, how about a little bump?” Gosse asks.
“Wouldn’t mind one at all,” says Al.
“You know me,” says Snuffy.
Gosse removes a zip-lock baggie from his pocket. He opens the glove box and takes out a vinyl-bound user’s manual. He looks left and right, scanning the traffic on either side, before tipping the contents of the bag onto the smooth black surface.
“Don’t worry about being seen,” Al says, “these windows are light sensitive. You can’t see in unless someone turns on the overhead.”
While Gosse chops up the powder, dividing lines with his Blockbuster video card, Al continues: “So poor Lila has a problem. She needs money and needs it with some urgency. Lucky for her, Freddy is sitting on over a million in cash that he doesn’t know what to do with, most of it in a safety deposit box in the bank.”
“A million bucks. Holy shit,” says Snuffy.
“Pull over, Al.” Gosse says.
Al dutifully pulls into a parking space across from a church with a rounded steeple that had been plastered over. “Whoo-ee,” he says, “looks like a museum of the Apollo moon missions.”
Gosse passes him a rolled-up five dollar bill and the black vinyl book, which now has six lines of white power arranged diagonally across it. “The big dog first.”
“Why, I don’t mind if I do, boys. One thing, though, after I do a hit I like to concentrate on the feeling. Some guys find that a bit kinky, but that’s the way it is for me. It’s kind of a holy moment. The magic doesn’t last that long, you know, especially with the kind of cleat dust flooding the local market at the moment. I mean no offence to you, Mr. Gosse.”
“None taken.”
“But hell, if things go right we’ll soon have a much finer product at our disposal. So, what I’m saying is, don’t mind me if I just zone out for a minute or two.”
“No worries,” says Gosse.
Al sniffs back two lines of powder, one in each nostril. He smells ink from the rolled-up money, gets a burning sensation in his nose. He pictures red roses on purple wallpaper. The sweetness in the back of his throat tells him the count has been cut with a sugar substitute. The drug enters his bloodstream and he feels his heart thump. His iron-clad confidence alloys, changes into something even harder. There is some product in there after all, he decides. His palms sweat. He thinks of Lila, beautiful, desperate Lila, pictures her naked. He likes her better naked these days because she no longer looks good in clothes.
A fly buzzes wildly against the rear window, its wings making a sound like a whipper-snipper in wet grass. Snuffy leans around and swats at it half-heartedly, his signet ring cracking hard against the glass.
“Easy there, big fella,” Al says, “easy.”
10
WHAT LETS US talk with brutal honesty about other people while carrying on with our lives as if no one ever talks about us in the same way? What protective wall do we live behind? To overhear Al, Snuffy, and Gosse talking about my Lila makes my skin prickle and grow cold. It makes me want to kill. They talk about her as if she were an animal. They assess her physical beauty, her temperament, but all that is just code. To them, Lila is just meat.
I can usually stop myself from picturing what Lila got up to with Al, the nitty-gritty of hotel rooms, backseats of cars, the mechanics of the act. I keep such thoughts at bay by means of distraction, by dosing myself with alcohol, and by falling face down into a medicated sleep at the end of the day. But the images never quite go away. When they take centre stage, it’s all very gothic. I wake in the middle of the night to find demons around my bed. One is particularly grim, wears a frock coat, has mutton-chop sideburns and recites a maxim that I was much taken with as a young man, before I really understood what it meant: “A way to the good there may be but it demands a close look at the worst,” or words to that effect.
We have a complex and utterly flawed relationship with the truth, and we are all implicated in the great mess of it. We survive by seeing only those things we want to see and hearing only those things we want to hear.
Lila was beautiful, ugly, raw, armoured, selfish, kind, spineless, brave, a liar, and ultimately truthful. Like anyone else, she was a complex of contradictory impulses. If she had one great weakness, it was self-loathing. Time and again, I watched her plunder the riches that were hers in abundance, choose the bad news about herself over the good. She could have been the poster child for post-confederation Newfoundland.
The Polish writer and holocaust survivor Jerzy Kosinski would sometimes excuse himself from a house party, say his goodbyes, then sneak back into the house and hide because he wanted to hear what the hosts would say about their guests after the guests had all gone home. Kosinski committed suicide.
It seems that the best strategy for survival is selectivity. Lila couldn’t shut off her lacerating inner voice. Her attempts to do so only weakened her further.
And where does empathy enter into this equation, the old walk a mile in my shoes? It suggests that if I understand the battle you are fighting, I will be able to love you in spite of your flaws. And love—so we are told, from sources as diverse as Bible and beat box—cures everything. Held within its blinding light and warmth, we are opened up and cured.
Six weeks after the Holly Hollows’ Golf Club Christmas party, Lila and Al meet by chance outside Tim Horton’s. Al is at the very end of a line-up that snakes once around the interior of the coffee shop before spilling out the front door. In the driving sleet, Lila is pushing forward, trying to get as much of her body as possible under the door lintel, when she jostles the man in front of her. “Why it’s you,” Al says, breaking into a bashful grin. He immediately removes his rainco
at and hoists it above his head, inviting her to step under it, enter his personal space. At that moment, the sleet stops. Al looks around. “Freddy parking the car?”
“That’s a good one.”
“How so? Car in the shop?”
“We don’t own a vehicle.”
“Oh.”
“Freddy is where he always is. He’s working.”
“I see.”
They follow the shuffling line and pass the time reliving the horrors of the Christmas party. Al tells her he stayed until the very end, and does an impression of the dance floor antics of the old-school boys with their Upper Canadian accents and their whiskey shakes. “It was like a geriatric version of Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller ’ video,” he says.
“I hate Christmas.”
“Why is that, darlin’? Santa didn’t bring you what you wanted?”
“No, it’s not that. It’s not like that. I don’t care about that stuff. It’s the Christmas spirit I don’t get. Never have. And I wouldn’t mind, except that people keep shoving it down your throat until you have no choice but to play along. After a while you start to feel like the biggest kind of fake. It’s like when you’re young and single and everyone thinks they have the perfect guy for you, and it all makes sense to them but you just don’t have any chemistry with him and no matter how hard you try, it’s just not there.”
“Sounds like someone’s got the January blues.”
“Hard not to. Just look around. Nothing but ugliness. This place; why anyone ever settled here is beyond me.”
Five minutes later, double-doubles in hand, they emerge from the crowded coffee shop into another sleet shower.
“Now you just come with me, little darlin’. No sense you catching cold. And I ain’t taking no for an answer.”
Lila accepts his offer of a ride. She is not in the mood to be alone. The last thing she wants is to go home and fill the day trying not to disturb Freddy, creeping around the apartment, trying not to feel resentful.
Perhaps because the situation seems to demand it, she decides she likes Al, remembers how she felt about him at the Christmas party, how she thought about him later that night when she and Freddy fucked. She likes how at home he seems in himself. He is easy to talk to—a veritable chatterbox—and he’s funny. Better still, he listens.
They climb into the front of his SUV. He turns the key in the ignition and the leather seats begin to warm up. The radio is on, tuned to some French station. Al silences it. Lila wants to make some crack about the heated upholstery, about his choice of radio station, but once the car door slams shut, the intimacy of that enclosed space—the realization that they are alone together for the first time—makes her feel self-conscious. She sips her coffee and stares out at the parking lot.
Al is first to speak, volunteering information about a Newfoundland archaeologist who used the phrase “like sleet on a windshield” to describe the semi-translucent arrowheads made by the island’s prehistoric peoples. She tells him she has seen stone tools that meet that description at the provincial museum.
The sleet falls harder. It is mesmerizing to watch: the fat flakes smacking against the glass and sliding down to form a solid sheet above the wipers. It is no longer possible to see outside the car.
“It’s like a giant jigsaw puzzle,” Al says.
“More like watching a crystal grow before our eyes,” says Lila.
“Touché. I can see you have a way with description, pretty lady. Hey, I don’t suppose you’d like a shot of rum in that coffee? What do you say?”
“Why not?”
Al reaches into the glove compartment and retrieves a flask of Old Sam. She holds out her cup. He pours them both a double shot. She takes a sip and winces.
“What’s wrong?” he asks. “Don’t like the taste?”
She doesn’t want to tell him his preferred brand of rum is the same one favoured by street people. “No, it’s not that. They always put way too much sugar in my coffee. My teeth are zinging.”
“I’ve got just the cure,” he says, this time proffering a glass vial of white powder stoppered with a tiny cork. “Gold dust,” he says.
“I’m guessing that’s blow?” she says.
“The finest snow this side of January. Now, I want you to wet your fingertip. Trust me.”
Never trust a man who tells you to trust him, Lila thinks, but immediately finds that cautionary voice overwhelmed by her desire not to disappoint. She inserts the tip of her finger into her mouth and sucks on it gently, suggestively. When she pulls it out, it makes a faint popping sound.
“Horton hears a Who,” Al says.
She laughs outrageously, throwing back her head.
“Hold still now,” he says, sprinkling a little cone of white powder on her wet fingertip. “Ever see Naked Lunch?”
“The movie?”
“Ya.”
“Remember the bug?”
“The bug. Yes.”
“Rub a little on your gums,” he says, doing an impression of the insect’s bourbon-inflected voice.
Lila does as she is told. The skin on her gums feels loose under her fingertip, like wet plastic wrap. She thinks about half-thawed ground beef still in its packaging.
“That’s it,” Al says.
Lila can’t decide how to categorize the experience of massaging her gums in front of a complete stranger. Orthoslut, maybe?
“Feel anything yet?”
“No.”
“You will.”
He sprinkles more powder on the back of his hand and sniffs.
Lila begins to feel numbness and tingling in the tiny tendon that connects her top lip to her gums. She searches it out with her tongue. An instant later, she feels a rush of adrenaline. “Oh my God,” she cries, reaching toward Al to steady herself.
“There you go, sugar baby.” He brings his face close to hers. “Just ride it out. Breathe.” He moves his face in closer. “That’s it.” He tastes of coffee and rum. When he bites her neck, she feels the hairs on her body stand up. Her blood migrates to any part of her body he touches. Her inhibitions evaporate.
Before she knows it, she is leaning against the doorframe of suite No. 7 at the Five Season’s Motel, watching Al battle with the lock. She likes his long back—hopes it’s not covered in hair—likes the easy way he moves. She imagines the ripple of those lower back muscles under her hands as he pushes into her. He is different from Newfoundland men, she thinks, so many of whom come across as being restricted, bunched up in themselves, unable to express. She used to blame this on the long winters. Living for six months every year in snow, sleet, ice, ice pellets, rain, freezing rain, freezing fog, and relentless gale-force winds warps the local character, which expresses itself physically as stiffness. Now it comes to her that the influence is not so much environmental as social: the effect of a virulent strain of redneck culture. Recently, the deep-seated backwoods mentality has been reinvigorated by big-oil, big-truck-don’t-give a-fuck culture. It all combines into a toxic strain of machismo which even the artistic ones like Freddy work within, even when they say they are working against it. As she watches Al swipe and swipe the plastic key in the door slot, she tweaks her theory again, deciding that environmental influence can’t be removed entirely. Weather is a factor. So is isolation. And being depressed doesn’t help. The whole population is depressed for at least six months of every year. It’s complex, she decides. And the product of these multifarious influences is the Newfoundlander’s self-lacerating sense of humour, so prized in mainland Canada.
Once inside the motel room, Lila paces with her arms folded, unable to decide if she is nervous or excited. Al takes a seat on the edge of the tartan settee, laying out four short lines of coke on the glass-topped coffee table. She watches him remove the ink cartridge from the complimentary motel pen, carefully placing it to one side, before flicking the pen’s tiny spring. She loses sight of it as it flies across the room, hears it bing off the television screen.
“Bull�
��s eye,” he says. “Come over.”
She does as she is told.
He hands her the plastic tube. “Ladies first. One in each nostril.”
She leans over the table and sniffs up the cool powder, feels it clot in her sinuses. The effect is almost instant. She stands up, walks across the room, stops, arches her back, tilts her head towards the ceiling and gasps.
Al takes his turn, keeping one eye on Lila as he hoovers up his share. Then he walks over to the double bed, sits down, pats the spot next to him.
By now Lila is experiencing something like a fast rocket ride. She feels unrestricted. There is no delay between thought and action. Toot toot goes a ship’s horn in the harbour. And off with a flap go Lila’s clothes. Jacket and blouse flicked to the left, bra to the right, jeans and panties in a puddle on the floor. She begins to babble about how she can’t believe what she is doing and is this really happening and she has never done anything like this before but there is just something about him and can he just kiss her because he is like the sexiest man she has ever met. Like, really.
Al looks at her naked body in amazement. “Spray you with gold paint and you could be one of those Oscar statues,” he says.
The word Oscar strikes the right chord with Lila, the very outlines of the statue reverberating in her mind like wavelengths, as though they were the opening notes in the soundtrack to the movie she and Al were starring in: an A-list heist movie set in Europe during the 1960s.
The thin drapes lift. Shafts of sunlight penetrate the motel room. Lila knows who she is and where she is, but finds it easier to believe she is someone else and somewhere else. The drapes lift, not on an updraft from the baseboard heater, but on a warm ocean breeze. She and Al have run away together, not just on holiday, but to start a new life.
She stops and places a hand over her breast. “My heart is racing so fast. Oh my God.” She tells herself this feeling is pure excitement. She is totally naked, standing in front of a man she barely knows who happens to be fully dressed. She feels lascivious, lets herself revel in it. She could put on quite a show for him if she wanted. She is both there and not there. She is increasingly detached. Her mind teems with so many thoughts; each one seems to have a shape, like those theorems she used to have to draw on the blackboard back in high school. Only now the proof is at her fingertips, and the steps to solving the problem come to her unbidden, the logic as simple as stepping stones.
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