Aubrey McKee

by Alex Pugsley

  “Open bar—”

  Gail was already shaking her head. “I just find it a bit bizarre that you’re even considering going when that family is such a fucking nightmare.”

  “The bride happens to be one of your closest friends.”

  “And you don’t think it’s all a business decision?”

  “Gail—”

  “Spare me the niceties.”

  I was surprised by this flippancy—later I would learn of the twenty-two page letter Gail had written the bride explaining why she could not in good conscience be present at the service—but I guessed that Gail’s misgivings were really more with the groom’s side of the aisle. Gail’s relations with the Burrs were somewhat complicated, true, but I think she’d been determined to characterize Mrs. Burr as a dingbat Stepford Wife ever since a twelve-year-old Gail with her mother encountered the Burrs at the intermission of Equus and Mrs. Burr declared Gail too young to see it. Gail normally had in mind three or four Halifax-related thesis topics and The Adaptive Preference Formations of Tiggy Burr was a favourite subset of The Ongoing Pretend of the Halifax South End. For Gail, the South End was home to the tanned and bland, the prosperous and deeply square, and she had a great and open disdain for what she took to be the ignorance and solipsism of the moneyed families of our neighbourhoods. To her, the South End was a self-perpetuating family compact regulated by the requirements of social standing and social privilege—and enclosed within sanctimonious notions of community—so I asked if this was to be yet another diatribe on the limits of my people.

  “It’s all about who’s in and who’s out.”

  “That stuff doesn’t matter.”

  “It does if you’re out!” Gail stood in the centre of the room, pubic hair lushly untamed, rather as if she were a nude model for a life drawing class who had decided to abruptly commandeer the proceedings. “It’s not all lobster suppers at the Saraguay Club. The Grammar School? The Waeg? You think the kids in Spryfield and Jelly Bean Square—”

  “I haven’t met all the kids in Jelly Bean Square.”

  “And you won’t. You think they all had the same childhood you did? Because believe me, they didn’t. There’s a gargantuan fucking difference. Aubrey, you grew up in a very insulated pocket of privilege. And the Burrs—putting aside the fact that the father is a serial rapist who basically walks the streets of Halifax scot-free—what does this wedding mean, really? And who’s going to be there? It’s going to be Boyden and his brothers and all those fucking reggae stoner sailing guys—Jib Whitelaw, Digby Lynk, Jamie Swim—that fucking council of assholes.” Gail stared at me, more than a little alarmed. “They’re morons, Aubrey. You’ve known them your whole life. And who else’ll be there? All the little trollops that trail after them—Jody Jasperson, Pippa Flynn, Jenna Tibbets—that’s who’s going to be there?” Gail clutched her head with both hands. “And Boyden, I know he can be this sort of jocky nice guy but he’s just so awful. He’s like this monstropolous dinkweed. That guy can tell himself anything. What Boyden Burr tells himself and what really happens are two different things entirely. And I’ll tell you one thing.” Gail spoke with full certainty. “Boyden Burr is only interested in Boyden Burr and that’s all he’ll ever be interested in. He has no interest in anyone else.”

  “How do you know that? We don’t know that.”

  “Oh you think he’s going to change?”

  “Maybe he doesn’t know any better. Give the guy some latitude.”

  “Doesn’t know any better?” Gail shook her head as if she found my opinions only dismayingly juvenile. “Give the guy some latitude? Who am I—fucking Gandhi? No, Aubrey, Boyden Burr doesn’t know any better which is exactly why I would never give him any fucking latitude. Do you think he’s giving latitude to the families in Jelly Bean Square? Of course he isn’t. You think he’s interested in alternatives?” Gail’s expression implied the situation was shoddy—or worse than shoddy—disastrous. “Boyden Burr is a spoiled little brat and self-satisfied fuck-wad who is going to do just fine now that daddy’s got him into law school. So he can take the summer off and sail around and play some gigs and smile at the babes while he’s butchering ‘Stir It Up’ or ‘Brown-Eyed Girl’ or ‘Sweet Jane’ or whatever the fuck song he wants to destroy.”

  “Thanks. Amazing. Really going to open up a dialogue.”

  “Dialogue?” Gail’s face deformed with grotesque indignation, as if someone had just thrown dirt on her. “There is no dialogue! There will never be a dialogue. Not with these people. Because I’ll tell you what Boyden Burr wants in this life, Aubrey. He wants a wife as hot as mommy and a house as rich as daddy and a summer place where his kids can grow up to be rich little douche bags just like him and where everyone can go sailing just like him and hang around the same fucking friends he’s known since grade one and be pretty and rich and white together.”

  “I don’t know if you’ve had this talk with your parents, Gail, but you’re white.”

  “It’s like some bizarre version of false consciousness! The whole place is. I mean, fuck, Aubrey, you’re either someone who thinks things are fine the way they are or someone who thinks things can be changed for the better. Like this might come as a shock to you, but there are people in the world who think maybe investment in South Africa isn’t such a good idea. Or land mines aren’t so wonderful. Or female circumcision isn’t so amazing.”

  “No one’s asking you to circumcise any—”

  “One of the reasons I’m not going to this fucking wedding is because I wasn’t invited to this fucking wedding. I don’t get invited to weddings anymore. I don’t get invited to parties anymore either but I don’t particularly care because I don’t really give a fuck. They don’t want me there. I know I’m difficult. Who cares? But the real reason I’m not going to their wedding, Aubrey, is because every fucking day is their wedding.” Gail pointed at the newspapers on the floor beside the bed. “You know, I read in the paper about this poor girl from Shannon Park whose parents basically let her starve to death—” Gail shook her head as if she didn’t know how to possibly continue. “And then I think of Karin and Boyden’s wedding and all the wedding presents they don’t need and I get so fucking furious at their smug-little, fucking-little, entitled-little lives it makes me want to scream. And I think, ‘Why are people going to this wedding when we could be fixing this fucked-up city?’ That’s what I think. That’s what I think.” Gail sniffed and wiped at her nose, for she was crying now, or trying not to. “Don’t you wonder why nothing ever changes in this city? Why it’s the same families over and over again? Jesus. This city’s going to get left behind. This province is going to get left behind. And you want me to go sit with George and Judy Asshole and Tim and Tiggy Tidbit and make small-talk about Babba’s bridesmaid dress and—where are you going? That bathroom’s really stinky right now. I mean it. It’s a total stink-farm. Aubrey?”

  ~

  Her moods, her moods—in my life I’ve felt so lost and given over before Gail’s moods and it had been so long since I’d been present for this particular vector, with all its variance and deviation, that a getaway to the bathroom seemed for me the only way forward. Gail was admirable, fascinating, self-­involved—and quarrelsome, exhausting, ridiculous—and she would always be like this. She couldn’t help but be like this. She was fiercely and impossibly herself. Most of Halifax tended to think of her as someone with an unstable and persistent Oppositional Defiance Disorder—but she had a crazy dignity and prescience, I don’t know where she got it but my God it was hers, she owned it, she fairly burned with it, though sometimes it was all just too much for me. Here she was in the next room, stark raving naked, ready for all enemies, foreign and domestic—and I knew Gail in this mood was not about to surrender anything—but my worry was Halifax could not sustain her. For I saw on some subjects Gail had progressed to a sort of fanatical hatred that made up with insistency what it lacked in rationality.
My worry was that Gail, with all her struggles, would not be able to process her furious disappointments and would only rage, rage, rage against whatever or whomever happened to be in front of her . . . There would come a time, much later, long after the events of this day had concluded and long after their details had dissolved into folk history, when I would miss this version of Gail, the vulgar, lickety-split, farbrente Gail, for this version would not last the years, and the specifics that prompted these present hysterics would be mostly forgotten, even by her. But of course I didn’t know that back then. Back then, as I say, I was still full of hope.

  ~

  The song Gail was listening to when I returned to the room I didn’t recognize. It was a Cockney voice singing about the year 1649 and Saint George’s Hill and how a ragged band of somethings came to show the people’s will. It was “The World Turned Upside Down” by Billy Bragg but at the moment it was just a song on a boombox within whose spell Gail was wholly absorbed. Our friendship-relationship-­exship lived within a continuum of music, starting with our own punk band, proceeding through Madness and the Specials, then into a sea of synthpop. Bauhaus and Joy Division, Yazoo and New Order, these were discoveries we swapped back and forth in mix-tapes but this Cockney singer, and his solo-guitar style, I’d never heard. On the bed, Gail lay on her stomach, bobbing her head, and softly singing along with the song. She had a way of singing—and barging through misheard lyrics—that I found sort of endearing and maddening and dubious but at the moment I said nothing, so personal seemed her connection to the song, so private her communion with it, and when the singer-guitarist hit an open E major chord it seemed to mean everything to Gail, her solidarity with those who were working toward justice, her sympathy for anyone marginalized from standard concepts of society, her righteous resistance to all those who stood in her way. It was about how other people were obstacles and how, even if she were forced far inside herself, one day she would be proven right and one day, by God, one day she was going to charge through all obstructions with some kind of greatness and by then she’d be a different woman, a woman who wasn’t affected by weddings or cover bands or Halifax, that’s what the song meant to her. When it finished, Gail went still a moment, preoccupied, then pressed stop on the boombox and pushed herself off the bed. She went to a pile of clothes in the closet and pulled out a pair of army pants and a heavy turtleneck sweater. As she dressed, she spoke to me in a deliberate way, as if she had some design in mind or as if—and this was a feeling I’d had for some minutes—she wanted something to be at stake between us.

  “Aubrey,” she said. “Just tell me one thing. What the hell happened to Cyrus Mair?”

  I chose to say nothing. As you can tell, Gail kept in motion a number of prospects as to who might play Principal Villain in the skirmishes of her life and the person just named was always in contention. She was suspicious of any interest in the guy and the idea that people might be running around, moony-eyed with romantic admiration for Cyrus Mair, and there were a few, was for Gail a very impinging happenstance. He was also, it bears mentioning, someone who’d been twice engaged to the day’s bride-to-be.

  “I’d love to see what happened to the little freak.” Gail pulled the turtleneck over her head. “But it wouldn’t surprise me if he’s gone for good. Have you heard from him?”

  Tinker had leapt up to the windowsill and was now watching a seagull float in the wind beyond South Street. Before making a response, I stared at these two, waiting for some shift in the diorama.

  “So?” said Gail, after a few this-silence-has-gone-on-too-long moments. “I suppose you’re going to tell me Cyrus Mair isn’t weird?”

  Still facing the window, I shrugged.

  “Because he is fucking eerie. I will never understand your passion for that mutant. I mean, I’m sorry if I don’t find him so fucking magical. Like, he misses people he hasn’t even met yet? Right. That’s not weird.”

  Tinker flinched as a spit of sleet appeared on the storm window. Opening my mouth, and forcing my voice into a cracking falsetto, I made a loud and cretinous meowing noise.

  “Aubrey, what the fuck?”

  Staring at the sleet-spotted window, and speaking in a normal tone, I said, “I kind of liked it back when I was saying Fie. Remember that? That was good times. Good times when I was saying Fie.”

  After a brief sneer, as if I were someone she didn’t really care to know, Gail sat on the bed and opened a balled pair of work socks. “I cannot fathom the weirdness. I really can’t. I mean I know you want him to be a great guy and not a nut job but let’s face facts, shall we? Remember New Year’s Eve two years ago?”

  I said I remembered the story.

  “Because I certainly fucking remember. One minute he’s saying how wonderful it is we’re together and the next he’s in some fit of panic and jumping out a window? What the fuck is that? I mean what the fuck is that? Excuse me if I find that a little bit of a horror show. And what he does to the Zubers, breaking into their house to steal pictures of their foster children? Does that sound sane? Does that sound reasonable? Or does that sound like the behavior of a fucking psycho?” Gail wildly shook her head. “I think he’s mentally ill. I really do. I think the guy’s insane.”

  “I’m not sure he’s insane. Just sort of non-sane.”

  “Remember when you used to hate the guy?”

  “I didn’t hate the guy.”

  “And now you fucking worship the ground he slithers on. Because he’s got some psychosexual hold over you. So you two are up in his tree fort swapping guitar riffs in your little circle jerk of punk rock fuckery, I get it. Why don’t you just fuck him and get it over with?”

  “Why does this matter to you? Why are you being like this?”

  “Why are you defending him?” screamed Gail. “Because he’s so sensitive? Is that it? I don’t think anyone’s that sensitive. Because I don’t think there’s that much to be sensitive about. Do you? Seriously. Tell the truth, asshole.”

  “I’m an asshole. Boyden’s an asshole. Cyrus is an asshole—” I glanced at her. “What the fuck? We can’t all be assholes. Because, Gail, you say this about everybody! What’re you going to do when you’re by yourself?”

  “Look around!” said Gail. “I am by myself. Have you not been listening to anything I’ve said?”

  Gail continued to talk, her expressions clever with contempt and outrage, but I would stop listening. It was my turn to look blankly at something and I stared at the unsweetened cranberry juice, Kit Kat, and Twizzlers untouched on the kitchen table. How can I explain Gail whom I’ve known so closely? She has been near the centre of so much of my life and thinking and there has always been between us a feeling of connection and when we were going out of course I often asked myself if I was in love with her and, even if I understood I wasn’t always in love with who she was, I knew I could be in love with the person she might become but I was understanding, finally, with a sense of stalemate and dead end, that she was becoming someone else, someone I didn’t really know, and the thought came to me that life was stranger, deeper, and more complicated than I knew, than I wanted it to be, and I guessed the coming years would be riven with conflicts and disorders beyond my understanding.

  ~

  The flurries that floated in the air minutes before have thickened into a blowing blizzard, sucking light from the room and warmth from the hardwood floor. The room lights dim as the furnace surges somewhere below, baseboards creaking, radiators clanking. On the windowsill, Tinker twists her head as footsteps sound in the outside hallway. Someone is moving with swift purpose toward the door. I am able to exchange a look with Gail before a knocking begins and I open the door to see in the hallway a young man—slim, blond, wearing a blue cashmere coat and carrying a heavy­looking briefcase—disparate details that resolve themselves into the person known as Cyrus Mair. He is nervous, jumpy—his awareness flashing in all directions—and I ask what’s goi
ng on.

  “Everything,” says Cyrus Mair, his eyes glittering.

  The Return of Cyrus Mair

  Cyrus Mair, whiz kid, recluse, and weirdo—jittery, restless, tremulous, querulous, fucked-up, rousing, mercurial, self-sequestering—Cyrus Mair in all his quiddity had not been seen in Halifax for some years and although he’s only just now put in an appearance I’d like to pause the streaming media a moment before joining him on South Street. Gail asked if I’d heard from the guy and the quick truth is I did get, pace Karin Friday, a long, weird letter from him. After the fleeting moment that was the Changelings, after the dissolution of The Common Room, and after his loss of the Rhodes scholarship to the Fabled Ian DeGroot, Cyrus Mair withdrew into his family’s house where he sank in secret studies, reading volumes foreign, antique, and contemporary. “That boy,” remarked my father, “studies like a little Jesuit.” There followed a bursary from Cambridge where one imagined him within crowds of Sloanes and toffs and stooped-over dons, walking ancient cobblestones, and disappearing variously across courtyards at dusk. The letter in question was one of sundry written from Cambridge, we were freakish, high-volume correspondents in our young adult years, but it happens to be the only written communication from him to me extant. All his other dispatches would vanish in a canvas canoe pack in the Coppermine River along with a Mylar sleeping bag, three iffy tangerines, and a paperback copy of Dune Messiah. The letter—after which no one would hear from him the faintest peep—follows below in its entirety.

  Peterhouse

  Cambridge

  CB2 1RD

  6 January 1984

  Darkling Harold:

  So here I am a drunken son of memory, exhausted near a midnight, in this room which smells terribly of overripe fruit and inefficient heating, but I’ve decided finally to take your advice and so, as I’ve been drunk all holiday anyway, here on a Twelfth Night is your scotch-sodden letter. This might come out all at once so read quickly.