by Lynn Coady
“Campbell,” interrupts Charles Slaughter after having sat listening to us with his face in a knot of distaste. “It’s bad enough you like poetry, are you telling me you like fag poetry?”
“Look!” I huff, aware I’m being baited but enjoying it somewhat. “It’s all fag poetry. I mean, poetry is faggy in general, I’ve accepted that long ago—”
“Well, this is pretty much the thrust of my complaint,” says Chuck.
“Excuse me,” Todd interrupts. “Poetry is not ‘faggy in general.’ I don’t know what you guys think you’re talking about. Robert Service!”
I groan and hold my head. “It rhymes!” I say before I can recall that Todd’s poetry rhymes too.
“So what?” thunders Todd.
Chuck spreads his hands. “Sorry, man,” he says. “Rhyming is gay.”
Dekker has his fingers entwined across his chest, very much the professor. “The future of literary discourse,” he remarks.
“I mean,” I say, “I’ve been told my whole life poetry is not manly. Okay! I accept that! It’s not manly—fuck it, I like it anyway.”
Todd shakes his whole body like a wet dog. “No, no, no, that’s the old way of thinking. Campbell, you’re living a hundred years in the past.” He holds his fist in front of my face and starts counting off fingers. “It’s not about rich people, it’s not about privilege and decadence, it’s not a bunch of counts and lords walking around in a field of daffodils, wandering lonely as a cloud wearing monocles and cravats. It’s about real people living real lives! Working and fucking and hunting and scraping out a living … and community and family.”
“Family?” I repeat, horrified.
“Todd,” interrupts Dekker, “Rimbaud was no aristocrat.”
“Yeah, but my point is,” says Todd, turning feverishly to glance at the actual authority in our midst, “it’s not about that visionary shit anymore. It’s about real life and real people. The concrete. Blood, sweat, and tears.”
“Visionary shit,” muses Dekker.
I’m about to tell Todd he is crazy. If poetry is about real life and real people, then I should be writing about Grandma Lydia’s sugar cookies and working at the mini-putt all summer. I should be writing about my dad’s curling sweater. Poetry—I’m about to quote T.S. Eliot—is an escape from reality, not an embrace of it. Or something like that. I don’t quote it because I’ll never hear the end of it from Todd if I get it wrong. But escape is the operative word. It’s an escape, an escape! I want to wave my arms and yell. Then Todd shuts me up. He throws down his trump card, as it were.
“Like Jim writes,” he says, folding his skinny white arms.
“Like I write,” says Jim, emerging sweaty from the kitchen. “I assume you’ve been discussing brilliant fucking poetry up to this point.”
“Yeah, we have,” drawls Charles Slaughter. “I’m about ready to shit my pants just to change the subject.”
“Don’t do that,” advises Jim. “Dinner’s served.”
What time is it, ten o’clock? Eleven? I stand up and my brain sort of wobbles in its fluid, reminding me of last month’s hangover. I should be careful. I should eat a big dinner. I should ask for some water. I look over at Todd and am gratified to see him stagger minutely and check to see if I’m looking.
Jim leads us to his huge slab of a dining-room table, covered with what appears to be a bedspread. There are rolls and butter and the two bottles of wine and a pile of knives and forks sitting in the centre of it, waiting to be claimed. Moira appears, cigarette dangling from the middle of her mouth, carrying a steaming cauldron that appears to weigh more than she does. She hefts it onto the table with a ponderous slosh.
“It took so long,” she tells us, “because this one wanted dumplings.” She points across the table at Jim. Lydia used to threaten to chop off fingers whenever we pointed. Like the farmer’s wife, with a carving knife, in “Three Blind Mice.”
Jim passes out cutlery, intoning, “You don’t have stew without dumplings,” like he’s quoting Cicero or someone.
“They’re just flour and water, and we already have rolls,” Moira gripes, taking a seat. “I never made the damn things before in my life.”
Dekker reaches to open one of the bottles of wine. “You weren’t in there all night slaving over them, I hope,” he says to Moira.
“No, no.” She leans back in her chair, looking perfectly relaxed to be out among us at last. I had thought perhaps she was shy. “I got a TV in there to keep me occupied.”
Dekker pops the wine and pours Moira a glass, which she seizes.
“Go easy on that,” Jim tells her, filling bowls for each of us. He passes me one.
“This smells amazing,” I say.
“Yes, yes,” says Moira—I don’t know to which one of us she is responding. “The potatoes wouldn’t cook neither.”
I poke at my stew. The potatoes are in a near-liquid state, like porridge.
“Larry! You didn’t get a dumpling!” scolds Jim, splashing a mound of dough into the centre of my bowl. There are no napkins, so I wipe the splatters from my face with the sleeve of my graduation sweater.
Todd is already eating. “This is great!”
Slaughter is already finished. “I’d like another of them doughy things.”
Dekker is intrigued by his dumpling. “What do you call these again, Jim?”
“Dumplings! Just like mother used to make. Some people call them ‘doughboys’ in these parts. Soak up the juice.”
“Hm,” says Dekker, chewing.
Jim pours everyone a glass of wine, placing each glassful beside the bottles of beer we all brought to the table. I realize, in my usual overly-self-conscious way, that this is one of the first sit-down dinners I’ve ever been to where a blessing has not been said. It leaves me with a strange feeling of incompletion—or maybe it’s something as banal as a violated sense of my own entrenched Presbyterian propriety.
At that moment Jim raises a glass, as if he’s read my mind, felt my itch for ceremony. He hasn’t even let himself sit down yet.
“To friends and poetry.”
“Oh, Christ,” Charles Slaughter sighs, wiping his mouth with the bedspread tablecloth.
“All right,” amends Jim, laughing. “Poetry later. To friends. To good friends—the real thing.”
We raise our glasses and clink. I stand to make sure my glass connects with Jim’s—we’re on opposite sides of the table from one another. He looks me in the eye and winks.
Somehow I end up on the couch beside Moira. I am kind of annoyed. When I got up to go to the bathroom I had been having a pretty wonderful conversation with Jim about what Todd said earlier. How poetry’s not about visionary shit anymore, or being written by fops and courtiers about their pansified concerns. Jim warmed me with his response to Todd, he warmed me to my centre like a hot gulp from the teapot. He said, in essence, Todd was wrong. He said Todd is excited by the kind of poetry that is being written now, and for good reason—because it speaks to him personally, it speaks to his background. Suddenly the experience of people like us (us!) is no longer being dismissed, explained Jim. It counts for something. But that doesn’t mean, he said, that we don’t have anything to learn from those who have come before us.
“Rimbaud was just some hick from a farm!” I burbled at this point.
“Rimbaud was just some hick from a farm,” agreed Jim. Like us, like us. “He didn’t let that limit him. He didn’t let that stifle his imagination.”
“That’s exactly what I was trying to say!”
I was bursting to talk about a hundred other things with Jim, realizing this was the moment I’d been waiting for since the day I came to Timperly. Intimate friendship with Jim Arsenault, conversing like old pals over beers in his living room. I could hardly contain myself. At that moment, however, the same was true of my bladder—I hadn’t used the bathroom since I’d arrived, afraid I might miss an opportunity just like this one. So I excused myself, wincing with pain and reluctan
ce, and made my way to the kitchen. I had to go through the kitchen to get to the bathroom—like in a lot of old houses, it had been installed as close to the wood stove as possible. Grandma Lydia has a similarly unappetizing set-up in her evil, be-doilied hut.
The kitchen looked as though a couple of bags of flour had exploded therein, followed by a minor typhoon. The strangest thing, however, was the dog. There was a dog just sitting there, in the middle of the flour, staring at me as if I was the bizarre apparition instead of it. I didn’t remember seeing a dog last time I was at Jim’s. As I stared back, it got to its feet, went to the corner of the room to acquire a brownish tennis ball, carried the tennis ball back to where it—the dog—had originally been sitting, and placed it—the ball—on the floor. Then it sat down to resume looking at me. When I smiled, it ducked its head and nudged the ball so that it rolled toward my feet.
I kicked the ball slightly, heading to the toilet, but the dog sprang to its feet and began to spin around in rapid circles, barking its head off. The thing looked to be taking a fit—I was expecting to see foam at any moment. It wouldn’t stop barking. I shushed at it and waved my arms, which made it bark louder. Somehow I’d driven Jim’s dog insane.
“Don’t throw that dog the ball!” Moira shouted from the next room.
“Okay!” I sang back. “Shh!” I said to the dog. The dog shrieked barks back at me, so loud its voice cracked. I thought it was going to be sick.
“If you throw the ball, it just gets him more excited!” Moira yelled.
“Okay!” I ran to the bathroom and shut the door. The barking stopped like a recording had been switched off.
I stood there for a while after I’d used the toilet, looking around. There was no tub, no shower either. I wondered where Jim and Moira bathed. I explored the medicine cabinet. Aspirins and anti-flatulent.
When I came out, the dog was sitting in the same spot, with the filthy ball in its mouth. It placed the ball on the floor the moment I stepped across the threshold, then lifted its beady eyes to meet mine—aglint with psychotic readiness.
Of course Jim was gone from the chesterfield by the time I manoeuvred my way out of the kitchen, replaced by Moira, who sat alone viciously biting her nails.
God, stop that, I wanted to say when I sat down beside her. She was chewing away at the cuticle of her thumb with a sick, desperate fervour—the way you imagine wolves in leg traps would gnaw at their own ensnared limbs.
After Moira explained to me one final time that I must never play ball with the dog, as it “only gets him riled up,” I sat down and asked, needing to change the subject, so how did you and Jim meet? She hasn’t stopped talking since.
At this point I don’t even remember what her original answer was. Jim is huddled by the record player arguing with Charles Slaughter about the finer points of bluegrass music. Todd is talking beseechingly of Robert Service to Professor Dekker.
Moira is saying:
“Well, my brother’s in jail now, but I’m keeping his things for him whenever he gets out, but we don’t know when he’s getting out because he got himself in quite a bit of trouble and he never told us what. Like, million-dollar trouble, he said. So he’s in jail down in the States and there’s nothing we can do about it—don’t know why he’s there or what he did. But anyway, he sends me all his things, so God knows what all’s in there, but I write him and I tell him I’m gonna sell half this crap because we’re dead broke and if you’re in million-dollar trouble, why don’t you send us some? But he’s in jail, right, so he can’t do nothing one way or the other. And he’s just: whatever you do, don’t sell my dragon blade. And I would never, ever do that because I know how much that thing means to him. It’s like this blade that you throw, he got it from Thailand, like ancient Thailand fighters used it or something and—you should see this thing. I don’t know what the hell it’s made of but it’s perfectly balanced. It just feels, like, powerful in your hand—you can feel the power coming off it. I threw it into an oak tree once, this huge, thousand-year-old oak, and you know what? Tree died. Dead. So this thing, you know, if I were to sell it we’d probably be set for life, but I’d never do that to him, it’s all he’s got left.”
Chew, chew, gnaw, masticate—the whole time her fist is practically in her mouth, she’s got some kind of oral fixation—I wish she’d have a smoke. I stare at her and slurp at my wine and try to feel some kind of attraction, but Moira is nothing like I imagined. She doesn’t have the welcoming cushiness of Brenda L. to her. She’s all edges and angles—pointy shoulders, jutting collarbone—with epic circles under her eyes. Jim describes her in his poems as having a face like the Madonna, a moonface, radiating bliss and wisdom like you see in paintings. Similarly, I seem to recall, he describes her as silent. That’s also how the virgin is depicted—smiling, close-mouthed like the Mona Lisa. Soft and round.
The other thing is, Moira’s talk is crazy talk. Tree died. Dragon blade. Or perhaps there is some kind of secret profundity behind it all that I am too drunk to detect. What did Jim call it? The muse’s antique lying language.
I’m sitting on the floor trying to tell Jim two things. One, that I read and enjoyed his review of Dermot Schofield’s chapbook in Atlantica. Two, that I am sorry not to have brought the bottle of wine I purchased specifically for this evening, and I would have to bring it to him at a later date.
“Don’t worry about it, Larry, we’re not hurting for booze around here.”
“—left it sitting on my kitchen table—don’t know what I was thinking.”
“Ah, you can have it yourself when you get home.”
“Can I have a glass of water?” I say, but my question gets lost in the conversation. Jim has brought out a bottle of whisky, handed out glasses, and plunked it into the centre of the room along with the basket of uneaten buns from dinner. I’m finding the whisky strong, but it isn’t so bad if I take a bite of bun with every sip. All of us are sitting on the floor except Slaughter and Moira. She’s still up on the chesterfield, and Slaughter hasn’t left his throne.
“I don’t know what I’m gonna do with that cocksucker when he gets here,” Jim is saying to Dekker.
“Just go through the motions,” Dekker replies. “Let him do his reading, put him up for the night.”
“I’ll be damned if I’m putting him up here.”
“I doubt the department will spring for a hotel room.”
“I’ll pay out of my own pocket if I have to.”
I figure out they’re talking about Schofield. When I babbled his name earlier, Jim went off on a bit of a tangent, and now, I realize, he’s still on it.
“Schofield’s coming here?” I ask.
Jim twists his mouth. “I invited him. Back before I knew what he was capable of.”
“What was he capable of?”
Dekker starts to answer with a grin, but Jim gets there first, reaching toward the centre of the room for the whisky bottle. “Bad faith. Bad poetry.”
“Come on now, Jim,” says Dekker.
“You come on, Bryant.”
“Your review of Malignant Cove was great,” I say, because it seems as if Jim needs cheering all of a sudden. “Did I tell you that already?”
He whirls on me. “My review was honest—that was my purpose in writing it. It was a reaction precisely against the mincing, rubber-spined pabulum someone like Schofield is spewing from his professor’s chair at York or wherever the hell he is.”
Todd, whose chin has been bobbing around on his chest for the past half hour or so, manages to hoist his head upright at this.
“Malignant Cove is in Nova Scotia,” he slobbers, the slack of his mouth kind of reminding me of Janet, ten years old and immersed in her Barbie pornography. “Is he from Nova Scotia?”
“It doesn’t matter where he’s from anymore,” instructs Jim. “He’s cast his lot with the cynics and whores of Upper Canada.”
“He sounds like an asshole!” I enthuse. This wins me a grim nod from Jim.
&nb
sp; “Malignant Cove is a real place?” says Dekker, leaning toward Todd.
“Yeah—a place. It’s about like it sounds,” Todd slurs into his chest.
Dekker shakes his head again. He’s been doing that a lot this evening. “This is a fascinating part of the country,” he says, leaning back in Jim’s rocking chair with a tight, pleased smile on his black-stubbled face. I wonder where the hell he’s from anyway.
I’m happy to note that every time Todd or Dekker disappears into the kitchen on his way to the bathroom, a round of frenzied barking ensues. It wasn’t something about me personally that maddened Jim’s dog. Chuck Slaughter would seem to be lacking a bladder—he hasn’t budged all night. Maybe all the piss has been steadily trickling out of him throughout the evening, soaking Jim’s armchair. My grandfather Humphries was like that near the end. Maybe that’s why Slaughter never stands up.
The dog’s name, I’ve determined from Moira’s kitchen-ward shouts of reproach and instruction, is Panda. Jim named it Pan originally, but Moira tells me she thought it was stupid.
Now we are packed in Jim’s car heading downtown to steal the flag with the misplaced quotation marks from Rory Scarsdale Holdings—“Ask For Rory!” I can’t remember how this got decided, but I must have started it. I told them about “Ham Dinner” at the Legion back home, giving the lawn a “trim.” We are all convulsed, laughing and making quotation marks in the air with our fingers every time one of us says something. Only Slaughter is oblivious to the hilarity. Slaughter is driving and foaming at the mouth over Scarsdale. From Chuck I have recently learned that Scarsdale also runs the Mariner—a bar at the bottom of town by the railway station, where all the locals go. Slaughter says he got kicked out of it once, by Scarsdale himself and his “goons.”
“Buncha fuckin’ townie rubes figured they’d kick the shit outta me, Scarsdale doesn’t lift a goddamn finger.”
Chuck is bubbling away on the topic of Scarsdale like an overcooked stew. We’re laughing because he hasn’t ceased his litany since we left Jim’s place. It’s remarkable. After seven hours of warming Jim’s armchair, drinking beer and only occasionally complaining about how dull an evening he was having, Slaughter suddenly came alive. He leapt from the chair at the name of Scarsdale, seized up Jim’s telephone, and started maniacally dialing numbers with his cigar-sized fingers. He was calling Rory Scarsdale, we eventually deciphered from the stream of obscenities—calling him right then and there—although God only knew how Chuck could have had his number memorized, he might have been calling his parents for all we knew.