Mean Boy

by Lynn Coady

  “I am going to school to learn to be a poet,“ I say. “That’s all I care about.”

  I choose to emphasize this because I know it’s the one thing that really drives my father crazy. He is convinced that any day now I’ll come to my senses and switch all my courses to law.

  “That’s being a ‘poet,’ then, is it?” he demands. “Running around like a chicken with a wick up its arse? Putting up posters, chauffeuring people around?”

  “It’s being part of a community, Dad,” I explain.

  “First,” says Dad, jerking forward again, this time with such violence his butt pulls the couch along with him, “don’t give me that oh-don’t-I-just-have-the-patience-of-Job attitude, all right? Second, that man is a professor at Westcock University—why doesn’t he have some uneducated dickhead like me to pick people up at the bus stop? Why couldn’t he have called a cab? We’re not sending you to school so you can clean up someone else’s shit.”

  “I don’t get it!” I yell, losing my patience of Job. “Half the time I’m here you tell me I’m too big for my britches, I’ve got it easy, when you were my age you were working in the woods, you almost lost a hand in the sawmill, you had to piss on your toes in winter to keep from getting frostbite on the way to school. Now—what? You’re telling me I’m too delicate, I’m too good to move chairs around and put up posters?”

  Dad is looking at me. His mouth moves.

  “Which is it? What do you want me to be? You want me to be the guy who organizes poetry readings, or you want me to be the guy who sweeps up at the rink?”

  Dad keeps staring at me. His face contorts like a sudden, infuriating stink has filled the room.

  “Well, for Christ’s sake!” he erupts. “There’s gotta be another option in there somewhere!”

  My grandmother’s Christmas frock is the bilious, black-faded green of Jim’s house in the woods. The sleeves go all the way down to her wrists, and white eyelet trim pokes girlishly out from beneath them. More eyelet pokes out from the neck. It’s as though the dress is full of eyelet instead of my grandmother. Slung about her bed-knob shoulders is a festive rain-grey sweater. A grotesque Christmas corsage of glitter and plastic berries completes the ensemble; she has suffered Aunt Maudie to pin it to her breast at some point in the evening.

  As I watch from my Santa-spot beside the tree, Lydia somehow manages to slit the end of the envelope open with one of her stubby fingernails. Lydia is the soul of fastidiousness on these occasions. She doesn’t tear into her presents like the rest of us, but carefully removes each piece of tape, balls it between her fingers, and places the ball on the end table beside her. Then she proceeds to unfold the paper from the gift before refolding it back into a utilitarian square, to be reused in seasons to come.

  “Perfectly beautiful paper,” she will glower at the rest of us, sitting there in our respective piles of shredded waste. “There was a time we took nothing for granted in this country. Such days are behind us now, it would seem.”

  If I thought that Grandma Lydia was constitutionally capable of experiencing pleasure, I would say she takes more pleasure in amassing her neat pile of wrapping-paper squares than in any other aspect of the holidays.

  I watch her slide the greeting card from its envelope. The envelope she puts aside—it can of course be Scotch-taped for future use. I know how this is going to go down. Stan and Janet have already opened their own cards, each identical to the other. A big poinsettia on the front, with Holiday Greetings written in gold. So I know how this is going to go down. Lydia said nothing as Janet and Uncle Stan (on behalf of himself and Aunt Maud, to whom a single card was addressed) unsheathed their own fresh-from-the-bank five-dollar bills. She said nothing as they muttered their bemused and insincere thanks, as my mother loudly proffered eggnog and my father hunched over the elaborately photographed tie-flying manual he’d unwrapped from Maud and Stan only minutes ago. Back then, things were holly-jolly. There was still some comfort and joy left wafting around the room.

  I see now the cards and bills were a mistake. But I still can’t accept how big a mistake they are. I’m still feeling a little indignant about the whole thing. Because how could what seemed like such simple genius only a few hours ago be such a mistake? To the extent that the blood in my face is boiling like acid? To the extent that I want to crawl in behind the Christmas tree and start sucking on the plugged-in icicles—electrocute myself among its needled fronds?

  But before that can happen, Grandma Lydia has to open her present from her grandson. And am I imaging this, or is the old bat making a production of it? Maybe she’s old and shaky, but does it really take this long to extract a card from its envelope? Does she really need to be turning it this way and that? Examining it from all sides?

  Lydia coughs—ahem. She holds the thing up to the light. Squints. Get this—the monster adjusts her glasses.

  “Holiday,” reads Lydia. “Greetings.”

  The only one who looks at me is Janet, wrapped in an afghan in a corner of the couch. She’s got her lips pressed together in an expression of sympathetic mirth.

  Lydia takes her crotchety hand from her glasses and opens the card. She holds it at a nice distance from her body so everyone can experience the effect of the flaccid five-dollar bill wafting into her lap. She affects not to notice, entranced by the tencent charms of Holiday Greetings.

  “To Grandmother Humphries,” reads Grandma. She’s not letting merest detail escape that milky old eye of hers. She even reads the lousy poem printed on the inside.

  “Wishing you and all your guests/A Christmas that’s the very best! Well!” says Lydia. “I see. Love your grandson Lawrence. Indeed. Lawrence, now, is it?” The milky old eye rolls up to meet mine.

  “Larry likes to be called Lawrence now that he’s in college,” my mother explains.

  On the radio, the faithful are being summoned by a heavenly choir, joyful and triumphant.

  “And in college,” inquires Grandma Lydia, “do they teach one that guests rhymes with best?”

  “It’s what’s been printed in the card,” I mutter.

  “Oh!” Lydia’s batlike shoulders jump, and she examines the card again. “Yes. I see now. And a fine card it is, boy.”

  She’s never called me anything but that.

  “ Guests, best,” she repeats.

  “I told him he should write you one of his own poems,” near-shrieks my mother. “You know how he loves to write poetry.”

  Cousin Wayne belches and gets to his feet simultaneously. “I’m gonna get a beer,” he announces.

  “Get me one,” say Stan and Dad in stereo.

  Lydia doesn’t even glance at Wayne as he lumbers past. Not so much as a milky-eyed glower for old Cousin Wayne.

  I’m just about to turn to the tree and haul out a present for Maud when my mother’s voice pierces the air again.

  “There’s some money for you there, Mummy.” She points into Lydia’s crotch.

  The monster’s shoulders jump again. “My!” she exclaims, retrieving the five. This too, she holds up to the light. “Well, this will come in handy, no doubt. I can always use a bit of pin money. My, my, my. Thank you, boy.”

  She places the five back between the folds of the card before setting it atop her pile of salvaged wrapping paper. I lurch, a second time, at the gift for Aunt Maud.

  “What times we live in!” my grandmother pronounces, leaning back and folding her hands. “Brave new world! So pragmatic—here is a bit of money, please buy something for yourself. And yet even during the war, in times of such profound deprivation, we always scrambled during the holidays. Scraping together whatever we had. A plum pudding. A simple homemade scarf. Anything, you know, simply as a gesture, a token of appreciation. And to think, all that bother could have so easily been dispensed with. Things are so streamlined these days. Unfettered by sentiment.”

  Wayne appears in the doorway with a can of beer, which he cracks and tips toward me in a wordless toast. Maud passes the box of
Turtles up toward him, and Wayne manages to grab three in one manly hand.

  Come, let us adore him, the radio recommends.

  My father sighs, too defeated by the atmosphere to repeat his request for beer. A man should not have to ask twice.

  “Hey,” says Janet, swinging her feet down from the couch and leaning forward. “Hey, everybody.” We turn to look, grateful yet surprised. Janet’s been keeping the expected low profile most of the evening—as Lydia glowered and Dad looked in every direction but hers, and Uncle Stan, for some reason, doted excessively, loading her plate with second and third helpings and dumping a slice of pie onto it before she had even finished sopping up her gravy. Stan, it was apparent, had at some point graduated from horror to happiness with respect to Janet’s situation. He was pleased about it. Aunt Maud, on the other hand, maintained a rosy, almost drunken, flush of embarrassment—but I think it had more to do with Stan’s behaviour than with Janet herself.

  Of course, it goes without saying that all of this went without saying. There was talk, but it was talk about hunting (Wayne), fishing (Dad, Stan), how good the dinner was (Mom, me), and how Stan and Maud had received a very fine set of linen napkins for their anniversary but perhaps they had been lost or misplaced and that would explain their wasting good money on the paper snowman napkins we were currently using, which would only be tossed in the garbage by evening’s end (Grandma Lydia).

  That is to say, the talk wasn’t real. It was soundtrack, mood music, like that jangly, nerve-scraping piano that plays over silent films. But the movie itself was all about Janet, we knew, and talked louder. Janet kept her head down all the while. That was her role. That was her place.

  “Listen, everybody.”

  Now she removes the afghan from her meaty lap, puts it aside. None of us like the gesture, the deliberation of it, the way it seems to call us to attention like a curtain being pulled into the wings.

  Because what’s she going to do, recite? Tell us a story? “The Night Before Christmas”?

  21.

  THE BUNCH OF US sat and stood facing Jim—a petrified forest of holiday revellers in the Dekkers’ mistletoed living room. He crammed a hand into the back pocket of his jeans and extracted a crumpled piece of notepaper, eyes crawling over us the whole time like rats across a garbage heap. He uncrumpled the paper, cheeks sucked in and lips puckered as if trying to hold back bile. My own mouth had long gone dry. Jim was like a gunfighter facing an enemy. Waiting for the bad guy to make his next move.

  “I would like to begin with a quote from William Blake,” he barked. The party had gone dead a moment before. It had taken Jim into account—absorbing the black of his presence—and keeled over into open-mouthed silence. I stood and watched the way, I imagine, I’d stand and watch an airplane spiral smokingly toward the earth. I stared along with everybody else.

  What had we done? To make him hate us so much?

  “But YOU ought to KNOW,” Jim shouted, sending a sudden hum through the crystal port glasses Ruth Dekker had set out, sending a mini tsunami of ripples through the punch bowl.

  “What is GRAND is necessarily OBSCURE to WEAK. MEN.”

  He nearly screamed the words: WEAK. MEN. Spit flew, and landed. The Dekkers’ living room was really pretty small when you jammed twenty or so people into it for a literary reading. Spread throughout the house—as we had been for most of the evening before Jim arrived, sweaty and hate-eyed—you didn’t notice it so much. But—yes—crushed into one room together, an unwashed poet bathing everybody in spittle and contempt—quarters felt a bit close.

  “I just wanna get this the fuck over with,” Jim told Dekker and me when he arrived at quarter to eleven. The reading had been scheduled to begin at nine. He had shoved his parka at me, and it smelled like his breath, which was sweetly rotting oranges.

  “Jim—what’s wrong?” Dekker asked of Jim’s back. Jim was plowing his way to the punch bowl.

  He scooped punch to the brim of his handleless cup and sloshed his way over to the Dekkers’ Christmas tree, which had received many compliments that night. It was enormous, for one thing, the angel jammed almost horizontally up against the ceiling. Every single ornament was handmade—many of them by Ruth, I’d overheard earlier. There were elaborate woven snowflakes and wreaths, turtledoves with real feathers, and carved wooden Santas and elves. There was no tinsel or plastic bulbs hung with elastic bands or pipe cleaners—pretty much an aesthetic holiday staple at the Campbell household. It was the nicest tree I’d ever seen. Jim stood beside it with one hand dribbling punch and the other on his hip, as if competing. He glowered, like he resented the competition.

  I suppose, his demeanour spoke, you people are more impressed by this gaudy empty symbol of a gaudy, empty holiday than you are by me.

  If we were, we weren’t for long. The crowd soon grew very impressed by Jim indeed. He stood there, glowering with his oil-slick eyes and, like some kind of telepathic alien, steadily began sucking the good cheer from the room.

  I was standing in the doorway to the hall, hugging Jim’s coat, remembering the bleak, inexorable way his mood had washed over me a few days before. Later I flattered myself with the conviction that I’d succeeded, at least a little, in cheering Jim up. We’d spent well over an hour splitting wood in his yard, Jim giving me pointers on my flaccid, drunken technique as the two of us took turns holding our hands beneath our armpits to keep them warm while the other heaved the axe. Afterward, he’d been more animated over supper, praising my strength and endurance at the chopping block, telling me I could really be something if I’d just pull my nose out of a book from time to time and build myself up a little. We ate an entire loaf of Moira’s potato bread between the two of us, and killed three tins of beans. Since there was no booze left in the house, I went home that night feeling sober and restored, if gassy. This explained the anti-flatulent in the medicine cabinet. The next day I couldn’t raise my arms to type—even reading, holding a book up in front of my face, was a whole new avenue of suffering. But I didn’t care. I’d gone to Jim. I’d been with him in his time of need. I’d helped him, I thought.

  But I hadn’t. Jim’s purple-black mood hadn’t dissipated. On the contrary, it had taken on strength since Wednesday—it had deepened in hue. Jim’s mood was like the Blob: it ate every mood in its path. He was currently coating the room in it.

  I felt deceived.

  “WEAK. MEN,” yelled Jim. At some point, Sherrie had sidled noiselessly up to me. I don’t know how she managed it without me noticing, considering the stale silence that had overwhelmed the room. She dug her fingers into my arm—fortunately cushioned by Jim’s parka. We stood that way.

  “Jim!” yelped Dekker, hustling over to the tree. “I haven’t even given you a proper introduction …” He turned to the room, nose and forehead glistening with either perspiration or Jim’s airborne spittle of a moment ago. He bared his teeth in a lock-jawed smile. “Everybody—if I could—”

  “Fuck that, Bryant,” said Jim. “I’m here to read poetry, everybody, do we all understand?” His eyes crawled around the room, faux-indulgent. “I’m not here to give a holiday toast,” he enunciated. “I’m not here to wish you comfort and joy. This isn’t Dickens, are we clear? Scrooge isn’t showing up with a turkey any time soon. Scrooge is in his fucking counting house, where people like him will always be. The misers don’t reform. The philistines don’t grow miraculously enlightened, the hucksters never see the light and walk the straight and true path. What is Grand is necessarily obscure to WEAK MEN. The weak stay weak, they don’t change, you know why? Wanna hear the paradox? Because their weakness is their strength. Their ignorance is their bliss. Their wilful obliviousness is their power. Is everybody paying attention? Their power. And they’re sure as hell not going to be giving up their power any time soon. Not at Christmas, not at any time of year. It’s a joke,” Jim spat. “It’s a fairy tale.”

  Dekker turned his back on the crowd at that point. He stepped in close to Jim, head down
, speaking.

  “I will,” Jim said. “Of course, Bryant. That’s what I’m here to do after all.”

  Dekker said something else.

  “I will,“ repeated Jim, downing his punch and bending forward to place his handleless cup on the coffee table. The empty mug wobbled for an instant before toppling to its side. A thin rivulet of punch trickled onto the table, made a minuscule river before colliding with a linen napkin, where it blossomed into a startling red stain, a sudden poppy. Jim wiped his mouth with his wrist.

  “So let’s get this show on the road. The first poem,” said Jim, with no poems on hand that I could see—the piece of paper on which the quote from Blake had been scrawled had been recrumpled and tossed at the tree—“is called ‘I, said the Sparrow.’ ”

  Beside me, Sherrie kind of squeaked.

  Whereas I winced. Mainly I was dismayed at the shoddy aesthetics of it. You don’t write poetry about real people and identify them by name—even I knew that. You change the names, like in The Rape of the Lock. You do it even if everyone knows whom you’re talking about—and in this case, was not half the room made up of junior professors? Dekker had said the evening would be informal, that it would just be people from the neighbourhood, but this, after all, was the university town of Timperly. The people from the neighbourhood of a young professor and his wife are by necessity going to be other young professors and their wives. And so I winced again—a delayed reaction—at the politics of it. The aesthetics were bad, and that killed me, but the politics, I realized, were worse. I registered this at the sight of Dekker with both hands covering his proto-beard, the way they were pulling his eye sockets floorward. The bottom-insides of his eyes shone red in the candlelight. He became instantaneously haggard.

  Jim was reciting. I tried to listen out of loyalty, but the work was incoherent. I was glad it was incoherent—that was probably fortunate. First there was something about someone called “Cock Robin,” who was shot by the Sparrow, “with his bow and arrow.” Then Cock Robin turned into Sisyphus. And the Sparrow became Zeus, “the swan-god,” and then a bull. And then there was this big part about Zeus being in heat, wandering around mounting everything that moves, “the dumb thrust” of his “Disneyland-loins” and his “Mickey Mouse cock.”