Mean Boy

by Lynn Coady

  What you said about love, it almost killed me.

  Dear Mr. Schofield,

  Thank you so much for coming to town and giving such a wonderful and impressive reading. Everybody was talking about what you said after—ward. I just wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed meeting and spending time with you. I can’t thank you enough for taking me to dinner at the Crowfeather. It was a privilege just to speak with a poet of your stature and abilities you. I’m afraid I did a poor job of expressing this as we were saying goodbye, so I thought I would write and try again.

  You were really patient and kind to put up with all my idiotic

  Mostly I wanted to let you know that our discussion

  Please find enclosed a cheque for one hundred dollars, to cover the amount you paid for your stay at the Crowfeather Inn. As I have been helping Jim with the administrative side of the reading, he asked that I get the money to you; however, I thought it best not to send cash in the mail. So I hope you don’t mind if I send a personal cheque. Once again, I apologize for the mixup with the deposit, and the room where the reading was being held, and not being on time to meet your bus. It was all totally my fault.

  I’m also enclosing three poems for your journal, one of which I just wrote this morning!

  I very much look forward to the opportunity to speak with you again one day. Thank you again for gracing visiting our campus. It meant a lot to me.

  Yours truly,

  Lawrence Larry Campbell

  I will fix it later.

  3

  rustlingleaves

  17.

  I’M TOO SICK to do anything. Every time I look down at a page—be it my notebook or the library copy of Poets of Contemporary Canada I brought along—my guts heave. Janet’s not sick. I’m so sick, I begrudge her this fact. I thought pregnant women were supposed to be puking constantly, but she actually looks pretty content for a girl with no future—all curled up in her seat across from me, wool coat draped over her knees, immersed in George Eliot. Janet is never to be seen without some hefty old novel under her arm. As long as it’s not of this century and is over six hundred pages, she’ll read it. Must be the Lydia in her. Janet says she doesn’t like “modern” literature. She once told me she finds Hemingway “bland,” and because everyone is so influenced by Hemingway, it’s all bland now. I think she just likes reading about corsets and pince-nez and the like.

  Every once in a while she’ll look up at me, not so much out of concern but, I imagine, because it’s unsettling to have me sitting across from her just staring into space. And I’ll admit—I’m not just staring into space. Sometimes I’ll forget myself in all my nausea and sit staring at her. To get my mind off the nausea, I’ll wonder about Janet. The girl with no future. She’s got four months worth of baby in her now.

  “Oh, Larry,” says Janet when she looks up at me. Her face pinches. “You’re so green!”

  I force a verdant smile before turning my face to the window. The sky is grey and the sea is greyer, choppy. “The chop,” I’ve heard seagoing types call it. Gotta look out for that chop, they’ll say. Chop’s bad today. Would make a good title for a poem come to think of it, “The Chop.” But I don’t write it down.

  The rainbow of awfulness I’m experiencing this morning comes in a varied spectrum. Green is for my hangover—because there’s no way I’ll accept that, after all these years, I’ve lost my sea legs and have turned into one of those mainland types who need to take a Gravol before even setting foot on the pier. So the green is a hangover green, not, I emphasize, a seasickness green. Any seasickness I may be experiencing is a direct result of the hangover, is what’s causing the slightly yellowish tinge to the green.

  Then there’s the red. Red is for fear, and Christmas. Yellow doesn’t work for fear as far as I’m concerned, it’s too sunny a colour—daffodils, Van Gogh sunflowers. Yellow is not of my spectrum today, except in the sickly tinge it brings to the green. Red is what’s fear. It’s alarming, gory. Red is the colour that warns you to stop. Blood, Santa Claus. He opens his jolly old bag and out comes—nothing. Because I still have no money for Christmas presents. Especially now.

  Then the red merges with blue. It doesn’t form a cheery purple as you might expect, because this blue is too dark. The blue of guilt and apprehension. When the red bleeds into it, the tone goes muddy. Just one big, brownish Rorschach blotch of worry over Jim, and whether or not I have let him down. Assuredly I have. Assuredly he will never talk to me again.

  It is my own fault for not having grasped how sad a man Jim is. There is a basic melancholy at his core, the same universal sadness at the centre of every creative genius—all those suicides and self-destruction artists who came before. Let’s see, who killed themselves? Berryman, off a bridge, not three years ago. Celan, in the Seine. Sylvia Plath—the old head-in-the-oven trick. She left lunch out for her kids before lowering the door, kneeling down, leaning forward as if in prayer.

  Then there are the more social types, like Dylan Thomas, who did it the convivial way. The kind of suicide where you can still pretend to everyone you’re having a good time, you can still attend the shindigs. You could be in the middle of a swinging hotel room, shouting chin-chin! and wearing a lampshade on your head. No one but you would know. Maybe not even you. Armies of them, the sad ones, in bars, at parties. Gregarious to the end.

  See, the fact that I am thinking of Jim with respect to these types, the fact that I am thinking Jim and suicide as I sit here riding out the chop. This tells me I should never have left. This tells me I made the wrong decision. Who’da thunk it? Lawrence Campbell, fucking things up. Getting things wrong.

  And why?

  Because I wanted to go home for Christmas. I wanted to go home. I wanted presents. I wanted to be fed. I wanted to see my mom and dad.

  Why else?

  I wanted to get away from him.

  What I’ve learned: Jim gets excited first, he gets manic. Like one of those birthday-party sparklers, popping and crackling crazily away before sputtering out. When I arrived at his office the Monday after the Schofield reading, he was on his feet. His posture struck me—how straight he stood—like a man experiencing upright electric shock, all the bones and muscles stretched to capacity. He was in front of his bookshelf reading. Blinding White. It seemed as if his hair should have been standing on end.

  I knocked on the door frame to get his attention. His head shot up, expression remote, like a face on a totem pole.

  But when he saw it was me, he smiled. Blinding white.

  “Larry!”

  “Jim!” I laughed.

  “Just the man I wanna see!”

  “At your service!” I rejoined.

  There is something about being greeted in such a manner—the dazzling smile, the joyful moment of recognition. It takes your breath away. It takes your doubts away. I felt confident and happy at once. I flopped into the ripped leather chair Jim keeps in the corner of his office for students. The seat sags so deeply, has been flopped into by so many varieties of butts, it’s almost like sitting on an overlarge open toilet.

  Simultaneously, I frisbeed my portfolio onto his desk. “There it is,” I announced as it skidded to a landing.

  “What’s that?” said Jim.

  “My portfolio.”

  “Oh! Nice going, kid.” Jim moved around to the other side of his desk. He flipped open a folder and made a quick checkmark somewhere before smiling back up at me. I stretched a leg over the arm of his chair and slouched deeper into its bum-hole.

  “So?” said Jim. “That it for the semester?”

  “One more paper,” I sighed. “No more exams. But I’m finished. I just have to type it.”

  “What’s the paper?” Jim asked, stuffing my portfolio into a drawer without a glance.

  “Classical literature. Antigone.”

  Jim shook his head in seeming repudiation. “Oedipus Rex,” he said. “Ya done that one yet?”

  “No.” I made an instantaneous mental n
ote, as I always do when Jim mentions work he approves of.

  “That’s the play,” he said, coming back around to the front of his desk in order to sit on it. “That’s the only one you need to know. That’s the one that’s set us down the path we’re currently on.”

  “The guy pokes his eyes out, right?” I ventured.

  “Freud,” replied Jim, confusing me. “Shakespeare. Fathers and sons, that’s the kernel of it, Larry. That’s the whole thing. It all comes from Oedipus Rex.”

  “I’ll read it,” I said.

  “You’re goddamn right you’ll read it. Then you come over to the house and we’ll talk about it over a shot or two of rum.”

  “Sounds good,” I said, before closing my lips over an otherwise foolish grin.

  “Larry,” said Jim, jolting forward. “I have to tell ya. Friday night got me all fired up.”

  I blinked. “The reading?”

  “Goddamnit, we have to be doing more of that sort of thing around here. It’s exactly what’s needed, don’t you think? We forget in this place, it’s a forgetting-factory, we get so buried in things like grades and texts and committees and meetings and then one day you wake up and say, Wait a minute. This is about writing. This is about art. What in hell are we doing?”

  I adjusted my ass in the gully of Jim’s chair in order to lean forward. “Jim,” I said, nodding. “That’s so true, you know down at the Mariner Friday night Sherrie and I were talking about this very thing, holding readings on a regular basis—”

  “And listen, kid,” interrupted Jim. “I never had a chance to say this, but you did a great job on Friday.”

  My words were abruptly cut off, not because of Jim interrupting, but because I found myself having to cover up yet another stupid grin.

  “A great job,” re-emphasized Jim.

  “Jim,” I said after a moment, drinking in his look of significance and appreciation. “Thanks so much. It really means a lot that you—”

  “So here’s the plan,” said Jim, clenching his hands together in front of his chest and then shaking the knot of them at me. “Let’s do it again. Right now. We’ll do a Christmas reading.”

  I stared, my mouth went slack. I was thinking of the date, calculating. It was Monday, December 15, the year of our lord nineteen hundred and seventy-five. I had just completed writing my final paper, had only to type it. I wanted to go home for Christmas.

  “A Christmas reading?” I repeated. “You mean … on Christmas?”

  “No, no, no, not on Christmas Day, of course not,” snorted Jim.

  “Oh!” I laughed, carefully.

  “Nobody’s gonna wanna go to a poetry reading on Christmas Day!” Jim bellowed, practically holding his sides.

  “Of course not!” I said, laughing louder, more carefully.

  “We’ll do it this weekend,” said Jim.

  I pressed my lips together again, no longer to hide a grin, but sucking them in slightly. I could feel the delicate crunch of the veined flesh between my teeth—pulpy, like a wedge of orange.

  “Well, Jim,” I said after a moment. “Friday would be … the nineteenth.”

  “Still be a few people around,” Jim shrugged. “When were you planning on taking off?”

  “Friday the nineteenth,” I admitted. I had it all set up with Janet and my parents.

  “Well, you can put it off ‘til after the weekend, can’t you? Get some drinking done with me before heading over on the boat?”

  “Um,” I said.

  “How long the ferries running?”

  “I think right up until the twenty-fourth,” I admitted.

  “There ya go!” said Jim.

  I coughed, fixing a deliberate look of mulling-over on my face. “My only concern,” I said, noticing my leg was no longer flung over the arm of the chair. My comfort and confidence seemed to have abandoned me, going off hand in hand like the dish running away with the spoon. “My only concern, I guess, is that probably every one else would be gone home.”

  Jim waved a hand, miming a backhanded slap. “Ah, there’s always a few stragglers around.”

  “Sure, sure,” I nodded. “But, you know, the kind of people on campus who would go to a poetry reading … I mean,” I flailed for a couple of heartbeats, wondering if Jim was aware that normal people, as a rule, don’t even like poetry. And if not, did I want to be the one to break it to him. “Well, for example, the bulk of Schofield’s crowd were people from our seminar. It might be best left until the new year, don’t you think, Jim?”

  Jim’s face darkened. His eyebrows plunged, causing something in my throat to ascend. He lowered his head and scratched it with both hands.

  “I gotta tell ya, Larry,” he said, looking up at me when he was finished. “I’m just jazzed. I’m ready to do this now. I haven’t read from my work in so long and I realized this weekend that one of the things that’s been blocking me is clearly just a lack of—of feedback. The ongoing isolation of this fucking place, the lack of peers. I’m just living out there on the point with a woman and a dog and then I come into town and meet students and mark papers and try not to feel under fucking siege by Sparrow and his cronies …”

  Jim lowered his head again, scratching minutely. Oh, I thought, understanding. He wants a reading for himself. Somehow it made more sense to me then. It seemed that if Jim Arsenault wanted to do a reading, we should call off exams, alert the media, and book Grayson Hall for the event. But at the same time, I knew it could never work. To try and hold a reading in less than a week would never do Jim’s poetry justice. It would inevitably be half-assed, even more half-assed than Schofield’s, and the only people present would be me and Dekker. I had to convince him of that.

  “I wanna do this,” Jim said, looking up at me.

  “Then we’ll do it,” I replied.

  18.

  APPARENTLY DAD’S PLAN is to cross-examine me about my diet all the way to Stan and Maud’s, where he’ll be able to dump the pregnant niece without having to utter a word to her. Normally, I wouldn’t mind this sort of thing so much, understanding that the food obsession is parental instinct, and after months of tea and canned ham I’m about ready for my fatted calf. But the green of my hangover, tinged yellow with seasickness as it is—the mud of my guilt about Jim—it all kind of gets sloshed together, stirred up by Dad’s deliberate ignoring of Janet. The colour goes a deep, brick red, finally taking on an irascible, copperish glare.

  “So don’t they feed you at university, or what?” he wants to know.

  “No,” I say. “They don’t.”

  “What?” My mom turns around in her seat. If she weren’t buckled in she would climb up onto her knees like a kid. “How can they not feed the students?”

  “That was last year, Mom, when I lived in residence and had a meal plan. I’m off campus now.” Why is it they can never keep track of this? Why must I reiterate and re-confirm every exotic aspect of university life every time I see them? It’s like children who insist you read from the same storybook over and over again.

  “Can’t you still get a meal plan?” Mom wants to know.

  “Why would I do that, when I have my own kitchen? I’d have to walk to campus three times a day.”

  “Well, you’re not using your kitchen,” barks my dad over his shoulder. “That’s clear enough.”

  “How do you eat?” my mother wants to know.

  “I go to the store. I buy bread. I buy tea. I buy peanut butter. I take the food back to my apartment, I put it in the cupboard—”

  “You’re not getting any hot meals, that’s the problem right there,” says Dad.

  “I buy soup.”

  “Your mother will give you a roasting pan to take back,” says Dad.

  “I don’t have an extra roasting pan,” demurs Mom.

  “We’ll pick you up a roasting pan at the Co-op,” amends Dad, who pronounces it cwap. “You take that. You buy yourself a chicken, or one of them little pot roasts. You stick it in the oven an hour or so. Throw
in some onions, potatoes, and there you go.”

  I look over to Janet not so much to confirm that she’s laughing at me, but to gauge precisely how hard. I assume she’d have both fists stuffed in her mouth at this point. But Janet’s moonface is as serene as the one Jim describes in “Erato”—the face that is nothing like Moira’s. She’s gazing outside at the rolling white.

  I envy her outsider status. I want very much to involve Janet in the conversation at this point, if only to discomfit Dad.

  “Janet eats well,” I state. She turns and stares at me. That was the wrong thing to say, I suppose.

  “Do you, dear?” Mom inquires, lowering her pitch.

  “I guess,” says Janet, still staring.

  “I mean, her landlady cooks for her. She’s really lucky.” I try to shoot Janet a comradely smile, but it gets filtered through my bad mood and hangover and feels greasy, insincere.

  “Well, she bakes,” admits Janet.

  “Oh, does she bake for you?”

  “Yeah—she’s really great.”

  “Isn’t that nice,” says my mother. Dad is driving in silence. It’s my turn to add to the conversation, but I know that the moment I do, he’ll jump right in again, assured that no one will make the mistake of thinking he’s talking to Janet. So I let there be silence.

  Therefore, my mother starts rambling away. It’s always Mom who bears the burden of keeping things upbeat, and one way she does it is by forcing her voice into its highest octaves. The higher she goes, the more despairing she is of the overall mood, you can tell. At the moment, dog’s ears are pricking up across all Prince Edward Island.

  Bryant Dekker was my salvation, having negotiated a pretty cagey compromise with Jim. Dekker told me he’d been planning a Christmas party on the weekend—he and Ruth. Nothing to do with the university, per se, just a quiet get-together with folks from the neighbourhood. The Dekkers only moved to Timperly five years ago, apparently—Dekker says “only,” but to me five years seems like a long time. Ruth, he said, was having trouble getting settled, and they’ve been trying to “forge bonds” in the community ever since. There would be punch, more mulled wine, fondue, and the like. Jim could give his reading at the party. It would be casual, Dekker stressed to Jim. A casual, convivial atmosphere. Unpretentious, he emphasized.