Hellgoing

by Lynn Coady

  I don’t know anybody here. Wherever shall I go? Whatever shall I do?

  Frankly, my dear …

  Please, Cal. I’m begging you.

  I’m sorry, Rain’s wife. (No, he wouldn’t even say he was sorry. He didn’t have to say that.) I can’t help you, Rain’s wife. There’s nothing I can do for you. Absolutely nothing. You have one month. To get out. To get the hell out. To hell with you.

  Then, as if she had heard all this — as if the shameful echoes in his head had somehow transmitted themselves to her — she called.

  “It’s Angie,” she said.

  “What?” said Cal, even though he’d recognized her voice at once.

  “Angie. At the house?”

  “Oh, yes. Hi, Angie,” said Cal.

  “How are you?” she said.

  “I’m fine, dear,” said Cal. “Everything okay?”

  “All of a sudden,” she said, laughing a little, “it’s so warm!”

  “I know,” he said. “Strange weather.”

  “I see there’s an air conditioner in the basement.”

  It was too early for an air conditioner. And not nearly hot enough to justify one. She was supposed to be from California.

  “Oh dear,” he said. “You have to understand about the weather here. We’re just as likely to get another snowstorm next month.”

  She laughed again like he was kidding. “I was going to fire it up,” she said. “But then I realized the storm windows were still up.”

  “Honestly, dear,” he said, “I’d keep them up for a while yet.” And how did she suppose she was going to get the air conditioner up the stairs herself?

  “It’s just so warm,” she persisted. “And I can’t really open the windows to get a cross breeze.”

  “Right,” he said. “Well, I could come by.”

  “Would you?”

  “Of course,” he said.

  But he put it off for over a week. Then she called again.

  Cal apologized. He’d been very busy. His daughter’s graduation coming up. Lots of activity. To his surprise, the fine weather hadn’t abated. He had supposed the temperature would drop again and she would see the wisdom of putting off the storm windows for later in the season. He told her he would stop by as soon as he had a moment. She was grateful. But he didn’t go until the following Wednesday, and he didn’t call to tell her he was coming.

  “Oh no,” he yelped at the sight of them. “No, no, no!”

  Angie and a man were in the yard, struggling to remove one of the storm windows from its hooks at the top of the frame. It had come free of one hook, but they were having trouble with the other, so the entire five-by-three-foot pane was dangling by one corner. The man had barely the arm-span to manage it. They had dragged the picnic table, of all things, over to the side of the house and the man was standing on it, on his tiptoes, stretching to his very last inch in the attempt to hoist the window free of the hook. He didn’t have the height or the strength for this. His T-shirt rode up and Cal registered a queasy contrast of black hair against white belly, the hair thickening considerably as it approached his crotch. This could only be Rain.

  Angie stood on the ground beside him, ineffectually reaching up to steady the window.

  It seemed only Cal was aware that the moment the thing came free of the hook, it would fall backwards, shattering on top of both their heads. Rain, face blank with exertion, glanced over as Cal scrambled up onto the table to take charge.

  “Let’s get it back up there,” said Cal, grabbing a side. “Get it back on the other hook so you can take a rest.”

  Rain grunted in agreement and the two of them managed to reattach the other corner.

  “This is Cal,” Angie said from somewhere behind him.

  Standing together on the brutalized, corpse-yellow lawn, the men shook hands.

  “Rain,” said Rain. He was wearing a sports jacket and black basketball sneakers. His T-shirt said Talk Nerdy to Me. His bushy head of hair, unlike the hair on his belly, was almost completely grey.

  This was a professor, Cal reminded himself. At the university. The university had hired him to teach students political science. Would Terry be taking political science? Rain tried not to pant, his grey mop soaked in sweat. Cal wondered how long the two of them had struggled with the window. The thought of them like that — Rain helpless with the oversized pane, Angie helpless on the ground beside him, both about to be grated like cheddar — made his bowels flutter.

  “Rain,” repeated Cal, and the name was like a mouthful of spoiled food. “Listen, that window might be rusted onto the hook up there. You just leave it to me. I’ll get a stepladder and —” at this point, had he been talking to Angie, Cal would have stopped himself — “do it properly.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Rain. “Thanks, bro. Seriously. Angie says you’ve been great.”

  “Oh,” said Cal, flustered by a near-irresistible urge to shove Rain as hard as he was physically capable of doing.

  “So I should get going,” said Rain.

  “I’d like a word with you,” said Cal.

  Angie went inside the house and the two of them stood in the alleyway together. Cal had no idea what he would say, he only knew he wanted to talk at this man. He felt it like a sudden, stabbing hunger, when you know you’ll eat whatever’s put in front of you. He opened his mouth and listened to himself as he would an authoritative voice on the radio.

  “You have abandoned this girl,” Cal heard himself saying. “This is Abandonment.” He said it over and over again, hearing the capital A in his voice, as if he were charging Rain with a crime — wanting to impress upon him the seriousness of his transgression. Rain stood with his hands on his hips, gazing at the ground and shaking his head. Sometimes he shook it tightly, as if in defiance, and other times loosely, in apparent disbelief. Cal realized with disgust that Rain was never going to raise his head and look him in the eye.

  At the same time, Cal knew men left women and women left men and it was all perfectly legal — even natural. It was a tragedy, but only in the way that all of nature was a tragedy. But there were rules, there were truths and virtues, and that was all he wanted Rain to acknowledge.

  The question was, what if Rain didn’t know? This is what kept Cal talking, fast and mindless, in a voice that sounded abraded and high-pitched, like Angie’s chipper scraping concrete. What if Rain, who continued to stand there and shake his head with loose, angry amusement, who was from Santa Cruz, who merely wanted someone to talk nerdy to him — what if Rain had no idea what Cal was talking about? What if Rain was oblivious? What if Rain — who should have been laughable, and who instead made no one laugh — what if Rain, himself, laughed?

  BODY CONDOM

  It had only been a handful of months since she agreed to be in love with Hart. And now that she was, he kept issuing edicts, startling her with statements like, “Seeing as it’s official now, we should probably cut out flirting. We need to separate our flirting friends from our friend-friends.”

  She’d tell him, “I don’t have flirting friends.”

  “Oh, sure you do.”

  “You have flirting friends. That’s all you have. I barely have friend-friends.”

  “Oh, I do not. You do so.”

  At first, deciding to be in love felt to Kim like a process of having to explain to Hart, in different ways, every day, that she was nothing like him. And Hart not believing her, and her having to convince him. Then one day the process came to an end — Hart abruptly agreed to consider each of them as individual people with separate experiences and differing points of view.

  “You’re not as gregarious as I am,” Hart announced one day after failing to drag her to a friend’s open mic event. “You don’t need as much social stimulation.”

  “That’s right!”

  “But I need a lot. I need a lot more than most people.”

  “It’s true, Hart. You do.”

  “So I can just go out for a few hours, say hi to everybody.
And you can just stay here,” Hart hypothesized, frowning like he was trying to do math in his head. “And then I’ll come back!”

  Kim bobbed her head at him — encouraging.

  “It’ll be all right,” Hart assured himself, fingering the jacket he always hung on the doorknob when he arrived.

  “NOW THAT WE’RE in love we need to have serious conversations. Okay? We really need to talk about real stuff. It can’t just be superficial banter.”

  This was new. This was Hart, heralding an official New Stage.

  “What?”

  “We haven’t really delved.”

  “I delve.”

  “No — we’ve been coasting. And it’s been great — so great. Sexy repartee. Very Nick and Nora. But we have to get serious now.”

  “I’m always serious!”

  “Don’t get angry, honey. Things are changing, that’s all. We’re evolving as a couple.”

  And he had started to call her honey.

  What was daunting for Kim, and what she was finding difficult to express now that they were supposed to only talk seriously to one another, was that the whole reason she had agreed to be in love had to do with how Hart had behaved previous to the agreement. The way they had been together, at first. It was true that she had not taken Hart seriously for a very long time. “You weren’t supposed to,” Hart told her later. “That’s my M.O.” Hart was, by her reading, a walking erection. “I know!” agreed Hart. “I totally am. Was! Tee hee.” She would see him at one of the cabaret nights, always insisting on going on first, it seemed to Kim, precisely so he could reap the maximum rewards of his onstage charm via several fulsome hours of female appreciation. As she prepared for her set, Kim would notice him slipping like mercury through the crowd, breastbone-first, a head taller than everyone else. Erect was the only word that fit. At practically every second woman Hart would exclaim in decibels that could be heard even above the sound system and dart forward for a hug — not so much a hug as what Kim came to refer to in her mind as The Great Enfolding.

  After a few nights on the same bill, Kim inevitably became one of the enfolded. She didn’t mind. She’d done her time with charismatic men, knew enough to enjoy the lingering hug for the warm, physical moment it was, never letting herself settle in too deep. But who was she to turn away a comforting expanse of male chest in the thick of an indifferent crowd?

  “You have to teach me to play ukulele like you do!”

  She laughed. Hart was a virtuoso. His set alternated between guitar, banjo and violin.

  “It’s four strings, Hart. I think you can figure it out.”

  “It’s the way you play it, baby. Like you’re nursing it. Like you’re cradling a man’s head.”

  “Okay, see you, Hart.”

  “That wasn’t a reference to your breasts, exactly. It kind of was but — HOLY SHIT CONNIE! CONNIE IS THAT YOU? WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL SUMMER, GIRL, GET OVER HERE!”

  After a few months of more or less identical conversations — ecstatic greeting, Great Enfolding, compliment, innuendo, see you, Hart — she decided one night to change the script. It had been a grim set. Kim had recently decided to go all-ukulele and was discovering how the instrument antagonized a certain demographic. That night, the crowd was especially hostile due to a local Tom Waits wannabe on the bill who wrote songs about accidentally killing hookers during heroin binges in blood-spattered hotel rooms. Kim had it on pretty good authority this guy had grown up in West Point Grey, but his fans made up most of the crowd and some shit-faced bike courier with dried mud splattered across his leg tattoos kept shouting up at her: Too old!

  So as Hart’s friendly breastbone loomed closer, she did the obligatory leaning-in, submitted to the sweat-fragrant enfolding, made the requisite how-you-been small talk until the inevitable moment when she knew he would dangle his penis into the conversation like the proverbial worm on a hook. She told him, “I’m too old for this, Hart,” slouching off toward the bathroom before he could recognize the next beloved woman of his acquaintance and wade, bellowing, in her direction.

  Instead, Hart waded after Kim. “Me too!” he was calling. “I’m too old for this too!”

  “THAT WAS THE moment,” Hart said later. “That was the first real moment between us. When we cut through the bullshit. You did. We need more of those moments. It needs to be all those moments from here on in.”

  Kim was about to tell him she loved his superficial side as much as she loved anything else about him, his mesmerizing charm, his ease with the unnerving force of his own sexuality — the way he kept it at heel like it was nothing, like he was leading around a panther on a leash, but he’d grown up with the panther, the panther was no big deal to him, meanwhile people stood rigid and sweating as he passed.

  She was about to tell him all that one afternoon as they sat in her apartment teaching themselves Gillian Welch, except Hart started to cry.

  He’d been talking about really talking for the last month. It was only their second month of being officially in love. The first few months together had been sexual Disneyland — nothing but endorphins and giddy indulgence. It seemed early to be putting the brakes on that — this was Kim’s guilty first thought.

  She held his head against her like a ukulele and rocked.

  HART DID NOT drink — that should have been her first hint. She had told herself this was refreshing. So many guys in her life did not know how to stop drinking like teenagers, because playing music kept you teenage in so many ways (in her twenties, that seemed like such an upside, and then in her thirties all of a sudden it didn’t). Hart drank ginger ale and never remarked upon it, never told people he was “cutting back” or “had to stay sharp”’ for his set — none of the excuses of social drinkers. This telegraphed a message to Kim that she ignored: Note how cheerful and upbeat Hart is at all times. How hard at work.

  Hart drank only once, he told her, at fifteen, a few days after he ran away from home the first time, and disappeared for a month. He had taken his first sip of a friend’s strawberry margarita at one end of Vancouver Island and woken up on the exact opposite end, on a bench overlooking Victoria harbour, almost five hundred kilometres south. There was a man in his sixties sitting beside Hart, a stranger in a yellow golf shirt with white blow-dried hair, his arm around him.

  They were on the ferry to Port Hardy and the stories just kept coming. Hart drank one ginger ale after another as he talked. Sugar was his drug now. He told her it used to be cola, but he went crazy for the caffeine. “I have no impulse control,” he told her. “Anything that affects my brain, I can’t get enough of it.” Not two years ago he was downing espressos on the hour. “I was in a state of crisis every minute of the day. Everything was so major! Everything felt crucial! I’d go to my friend’s place and they’d say, Oh, we’re out of milk and I’d be like OH MY GOD! WHAT IS TO BE DONE! And my heart was racing and life was just … so exciting! That was hard to walk back from. I was so depressed for like a year. Getting off caffeine is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, honey.”

  Everything he told her on that ferry ride was a blow to Kim; a shot to the kidneys. Because she understood their sex life now. She had thought they were so compatible. As her body crept toward forty — the way Hart had crept north along the highway, returning home on the Greyhound after his first and only blackout — her libido had gone from polite, to politely insistent, to beseeching, to basically a fire engine’s siren. She started to understand the clichés of television — the embarrassing, oversexed Older Woman. She had split up with depressive Malcolm mid-beseeching phase, after eleven years together, five of them essentially sexless, and wanted nothing more than to sleep with anyone she had ever felt the remotest inkling toward. Six months of that kind of indulgence had been enough. There was no room for dignity in this new circumstance.

  Things had been looking hopeless until Hart, man of boundless energy, boundlessly horny, declared himself to her. For a while, as he sprawled long-limbed around her apartment speaking o
f moving in together, a musical retreat on a lake somewhere in the interior, even making late-life babies, Kim had let herself imagine it might be possible to set up house in Disneyland on a permanent basis — to spend every day riding the rides, wind whipping your hair, fireworks nightly, gorging on nothing but hot dogs and cotton candy. Never getting sick, or full.

  But it was just, she discovered on the ferry, that Hart was an addict; a sensation-junkie. He spoke to a counsellor every week, she learned, a woman he called “my lifeline.” And his mother was an addict, too, he told her. And his brother, who lived with his mother, was an addict, also clinically depressed. There had been “a couple of suicide attempts,” confessed Hart, though he didn’t bother to attach either attempt to anyone in his family specifically. It reminded Kim of her final few years with Malcolm, the monosyllables, the sleep-stink of the bedroom because the bed was never changed, because the bed never didn’t have anyone in it, every day a sort of funeral — we are gathered here to say goodbye to our beloved childhood companion Fun; today we bury Careless Youth, taken from us too soon. It reminded her of the vow she’d made: Never this again.

  They were on their way to see them — the brother and mother — and then Hart’s rock-and-roll father, Wilf, who lived with his girlfriend farther down the coast. Kim and Hart sat on the deck, as close to the bow as they could, watching the ocean come at them, inhaling its molecules. She made herself imagine one vertebra of her spine after another turning into iron with every new family revelation of Hart’s, until finally the metal would meet her brain stem and she would be nothing but fortitude.

  But before that could happen, just before the ferry docked, he confessed to her the horror of his father and she stood up and walked to the other end of the ship. She didn’t run. She told him she was going to buy chips. If she’d run Hart would’ve chased her.

  IT WAS SUPPOSED to be a vacation. That’s how he sold it to her. She would meet his family (it had sounded so innocent then, romantic, the next Big Step, another New Stage), but they would also have fun, because the island was beautiful. They would camp on Long Beach and listen to waves the length of city blocks roll in. They would go surfing. There was a weekend yoga retreat run by a friend of his where they could “recharge after the family stuff,” said Hart — so lightly, he had said this. Family stuff: childhood photo albums, stilted conversation, awkward getting-to-know-you back and forth on opposite sides of the kitchen table — that’s what Kim had thought he meant by “family stuff.” It had all been a plot. Hart had staged-managed the whole thing.