Mean Boy

by Lynn Coady

  Feeling a sudden need to busy myself, I pulled my desk chair over and sat myself across from him. Maybe Jim would be inclined to stretch out if I gave him the couch to himself.

  “I gotta catch the ferry early tomorrow,” I explained. “Christmas,” I rolled my eyes and shrugged so Jim would understand I had as much contempt for the holiday as he. “But you’re welcome to hang around here tomorrow as long as you like. As long as you don’t mind locking up.”

  Jim stared at me a moment longer before slumping forward. My couch was low to the ground and sagged, so his entire upper body was practically between his knees. He dangled his head like someone fighting off nausea.

  “Christmas,” he said into the floor. “S’posed to bring people together. Instead I watch my friends leave me, one by one.”

  “Hey, Jim,” I said, alarmed. “I’ll only be gone a few days, you know? I put it off as long as I could … You know how parents are about Christmas.”

  Jim looked up at me, body still dangling.

  “I find it oppressive,” he confided, blinking his black, wet eyes. “I find it a particularly oppressive holiday for some reason.”

  “Oh yeah, me too,” I assured him.

  “Get yourself a drink, Larry,” he told me, talking to the floor again.

  “I better not, Jim, I have to get up at seven.”

  “I said, get yourself a fucking drink!”

  There were tears in his voice. I reached spasmodically for the rum from off my desk. When Jim raised his head to look at me, I uncapped it and showed it to him. He kept looking, so I took a swig. He didn’t stop looking until I took three more. Once I did, he allowed himself to blink.

  “Ah, kid.” He knuckled the corners of his eyes like a weepy child. “I’m falling apart, I think.”

  I leaned closer. “Jim, you’re not. You’ve had a few too many. We all get a little mopey.”

  “I don’t know …” Jim shook his head. His voice had broken again, choking off any other words. In fact, he looked very much as if he was falling apart. Falling apart right in front of me.

  “Jim,” I said again, after a moment or two. Giving myself just enough time to register my own awe and fear at the situation—Jim Arsenault on my couch. Jim Arsenault crying on my couch. The weirdness of it prickling my skin like salt water beginning to dry.

  “Jim,” I repeated, not knowing what I could possibly say to make things better. “Don’t drink,” is what I said. “Don’t have any more to drink, okay?”

  In response, Jim reached between his legs for the drink he had placed on the floor and took a loud, slurpy sip.

  “I’m all right, Larry,” he assured me, putting it down again.

  “No, but Jim, I really think it makes things worse. I think it makes things seem a lot worse than they are.”

  Jim peered up at me. “I don’t see how that’s possible, frankly.”

  “I think you’ll feel better after you get some sleep.”

  “And so you’re telling me,” said Jim, “it’s all in my head.”

  “No, no.”

  “You’re saying I’m imagining all this. That I’m under constant siege from the powers that be. That my friends are so busy covering their own asses they don’t dare get behind me all the way. One moment they’re there, the next—poof. Off lickin’ Bob Sparrow’s behind lest he question their loyalty.”

  This struck me as horrifically unfair and horrifically true all at once. I remembered myself sweating and smiling on the other side of Sparrow’s desk.

  “Jim—you know—we’re all in the same boat,” I floundered. “Everyone’s position is—is tenuous …”

  Jim straightened, seeming to grow bigger. “That’s right, we’re all in the same boat and nobody wants to be seen to be rocking it, do they?”

  “It’s not that, it’s just—”

  “Ah, Jesus Christ, look at you, Larry. Look at you flailing around trying to justify plain human cowardice.”

  I made a conscious effort to reign myself in at that point—to cease any involuntary flailing I might have been doing.

  “I’m just trying to explain. You have to see it from—from someone like Dekker’s point of view.”

  “I do goddamn see it from Dekker’s point of view, I see it from everybody’s point of view. I’m the one that’s under attack, I’m the one bearing the full brunt of university censure, and everyone around me is terrified they’ll be next. Terrified of getting too close and being contaminated. And yet at the same time—”

  Then Jim moved closer to me, sidling across the couch on his butt, and suddenly smiling with a grotesque lack of humour.

  “At the same time, though, you wanna be close-close-close, dontcha, Larry? ‘Cause that raising-shit quality of mine, that’s part of the magic, isn’t it? And you all wanna get close to the magic, you’re all hoping just a little bit of that magic is gonna rub off. But oh, Jesus, not too much though. Jesus Christ, no. Too much and it might start carrying over into our mundane, day-to-day lives, right? Might unsettle things. Too much and the idols might start wobbling on their altars, yeah? And we can’t have that, now, can we, Larry?”

  I swallowed. “I don’t think that’s fair.”

  Jim settled back into the couch, watching me, still smiling.

  “I getcha angry, Larry? Little pissed off now?”

  “I just don’t think you’re being fair to me.” My face, I could feel, was burning, and so to distract us both from this I took a swig of rum, which caused it to burn even brighter.

  “You don’t think I’m being fair,” considered Jim. “Let’s see, now—fair. What would it be fair to say about young Larry?”

  Something in my stomach clenched as Jim inclined his head, pretending to consider.

  “Jim,” I pleaded, feeling myself begin to babble in the panic to keep him from saying the next thing. “I’ve been, I’ve been nothing but loyal. I’ve supported you from day one, I—”

  “And so where are you going?” Jim demanded, jerking forward.

  I blinked. “What?”

  “Where are you going, my dearest and truest of friends? Tomorrow,” said Jim. “Tomorrow A.M.”

  We stared at each other.

  “Home,” I said after a moment.

  “Home,” he spat back. “Home for the holidays.”

  “Like,” I said, “tomorrow is the twentieth. It’s practically Christmas.”

  “Christmas,” repeated Jim as though the word were coated in slime. “Eat some turkey. See your folks. And meanwhile, I’m alone. Always left alone, when it really counts. So that’s your idea of loyalty, is it, Larry? As long as it doesn’t spoil your Christmas.”

  Jim dangled forward again, turning all his attention to the drink between his feet. I sat there, blinking and processing. Perplexity wrestling with a kind of perverse thrill. That Jim should want me to stay. That he should need me that much. That my friendship was so important to him, it made him angry I would go away, even for a handful of days. It made him kind of nasty even. And here’s where the perversity really kicked in: this joy that Jim should care so much about me as to prove it with abuse—with outright hostility.

  And yet of course it was ridiculous.

  “Jim, for God’s sake. It’s like a week. I’ll be gone a week.”

  “I understand, Larry,” Jim said around his drink. “Gotta get that Christmas turkey. Gotta getcher presents from Mom and Dad, wha?”

  “It’s not that Jim, it’s just—it’s a break. I just need a break.”

  I felt the truth of it very strongly at this particular point in time. I needed a break—from everything—badly. Fatigue washed over me. I stood and stretched. Jim didn’t look up.

  “Off to bed, are we, Larry? Gotta catch that ferry, eh?”

  “I think we should both get some sleep.”

  I stood there, looking down at Jim, waiting for a movement, an appeasing flicker of the eye. If I hadn’t been so tired, I might have kept waiting for it. I would have sat again and tried t
o reason with him, I assured myself. I would have stayed up all night if I could. But the booze was dragging at my blood, and the tension of our exchange made me feel like I had swum the Northumberland.

  Plus—I was feeling it. For the first time ever. The need to self-preserve. The need to get away from Jim and his mood. It was stronger than anything else—any guilt, any imperative to prove myself—and I knew I would find myself making all and any excuses to indulge it.

  “You can have the bed,” I offered brightly. “You’re welcome to the bed.”

  Jim shook his head and waved me off.

  I let myself be waved.

  23.

  D. Schofield

  Department of English

  University of Ralston

  Peterborough, Ontario

  January 4, 1976

  Dear Larry,

  It was very nice to hear from you, and many thanks for your letter. I was in touch with Westcock administration after Christmas and got the details of my payment worked out, so I return your cheque herewith. But I want you to know how much I appreciate your concern and attentiveness. I enjoyed our talk as well and can assure you there is nothing to apologize for.

  You are too kind on the subject of my Westcock reading. It wasn’t exactly my finest hour, but neither was it my worst (I’ll save that story for another time). As often happens after tying myself in knots trying to express some profound, seemingly inexpressible point, I’ll open a book and discover some worthier writer has managed to get it across in a few lines, usually with breathtaking clarity and concision. This time it was Keats:

  I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—

  To think I could have saved myself (and Mrs. Dacey!) all that time, all those words. From now on, Keats goes wherever I do. I’ll underline the pertinent passages and have them ready to read out when I get stuck. I often get stuck.

  Best wishes,

  Dermot Schofield

  So Keats was obsessed with it too, that word. It seems to crop up a lot lately. The word I am not.

  24.

  AT THE HUMPHRIESES, as Lydia repeatedly wheezed Nonsense! and Maud shrieked and yelled and Uncle Stan made himself a forlorn lump shaking his head back and forth while the radio pleaded for a silent, holy night, Janet had at some point interjected the words, “I am going to New York! I will eat as much dessert as I want!”

  Nobody had responded in all the madness except for me—I snapped to attention like a cat near a can opener. At this point, however, Janet was not being given a chance to elucidate. It had been decided after the not-pregnant-after-all announcement that everything coming out of Janet’s mouth was de facto lunacy.

  “Oh, Jannie,” Stan kept saying as he shook his big pink head back and forth. “We would have taken care of you. It would have been all right.”

  “You are crazy!” Maud was yelling. “Those university people have made you crazy!”

  “… scholarship …” I heard Janet say. I held up my hand for silence then, but my mother grabbed it in both of hers and held all three hands against her chest.

  “This foolishness must stop now,” insisted Lydia, quaking in her chair.

  “… thesis …” said Janet. “Columbia, in New York City. ”

  My arm twitched against my mother. “Hey,” I said. “What?”

  “Oh my God,” said Maud. “I knew the mainland would ruin her.” She stood in the middle of the room and looked around, eyes finally settling on my mother. “I’m so upset,” she told my mother. “I’m so upset right now, Chrissie, I don’t know what to do.”

  My mother released my hand and stood to go to Maud.

  “I know, dear,” she said. Maud quieted as my mother took her by the elbow and steered her toward the kitchen.

  “This is just foolish,“ huffed Lydia. You could see her fingers twitching, yearning to wrap themselves around a good, solid piece of hickory. A branch from a crabapple tree would do.

  My father sighed in his chair. No one had yet gotten him a beer. Wayne was polishing off his own with the nearly-empty box of Turtles balanced on his lap. He looked like a kid at the movies.

  “I’ve been offered a full scholarship,” said Janet.

  “Janet,” I called, leaning forward. “What?” But Uncle Stan’s moaning drowned me out.

  “Jannie, Jannie,” he keened. “Anything. We would have done anything we could to help you. You’d never even have to lift a finger. I swear. I swear you wouldn’t.”

  Back and forth went Uncle Stan’s big pink head, a man’s disgraceful tears on his infant cheeks, which silenced us all after a while.

  When Janet and I got drunk on Boxing Day at a roadhouse called Little Billy’s much-favoured by Wayne, she told me the pregnancy thing began as a joke. She and some friends in the Psych department, she said, had initiated what Janet called a “kind of half-assed consciousness-raising group,” which I gathered was basically a clutch of girls getting together to drink margaritas and complain about their lives. I’d heard around campus that the Psych department was a hotbed of radicalism and women’s libbers because they have two women professors on the faculty—the most of any department at Westcock. And both of them are Americans.

  Janet’s biggest gripe to this group of hers was that she had packed on twenty or so pounds since arriving at Westcock and the collective Humphries response was, as she put it, “as if I had shot somebody in the face.”

  Here I stopped her.

  “Come on, Janet,” I said. “Not really.”

  “You weren’t there, Larry,” yelled Janet—who, now that her secret was out, seemed like an entirely different person to me. She yelled over the music at Little Billy’s—even between songs, when the music wasn’t playing. She took huge gulps of draft between sentences, waved her fleshy arms around in outrage and slammed her mug on the table, sloshing draft all over everything.

  “So one night I was ranting away about this,” continued Janet, “and my professor, Catherine, kind of joked—you should tell them you’re sick or something, like you have a disease, you can’t help it.”

  “Your professor was part of your group?” I interrupted.

  “Catherine, yeah,” said Janet. “Catherine started the group actually. So anyway, we’re all laughing, but then someone else says it won’t work, because if you’re sick, you usually don’t get fat, right? So Catherine hits upon it: You should tell them you’re pregnant. How would that go over? And all night long, we talked about the ramifications of you guys thinking I was pregnant, and, Larry it was fascinating to critique the family on that level.”

  I shifted position in my chair. “What do you mean, critique? What was so fascinating about it?”

  Janet widened her eyes at me. “You saw yourself the way they acted! Don’t you think it was fascinating? I mean, Jesus Christ, your father! He was a case study in and of himself!”

  I nodded, although it hadn’t occurred to me Dad’s behaviour was particularly fascinating. I’d just thought he was being old-fashioned, and kind of a jerk.

  “So wait a minute,” I said. “You guys predicted that everybody was going to behave that way?”

  Janet shook her head. “No, no, no, I didn’t plan any of this, Larry. We were just kidding around—I never thought I’d actually come out and do it. But they made me so mad at Thanksgiving, all these naughty-naughty grins every time I reached for the potatoes. What’s the big deal? Why is it any of their business anyway? Dad’s fat! Wayne’s fat! Why is it a national tragedy if Janet’s fat?”

  “You’re right,” I said, nodding some more.

  Mostly my part of the conversation was an exercise in trying to hide my annoyance at being made to feel a dupe. Janet had a point—it’s not nice to persecute someone for being fat. But it’s also not nice to lie to family. I was the only family member speaking to Janet at the moment and, although my parents thought I was doing it out of an altruistic impulse to act as the familial go-between, what I was real
ly doing was waiting to hear how Janet had managed to get herself into Columbia University on scholarship. This was the only element of the saga I found remotely fascinating.

  So Janet returned to her girl-group after Thanksgiving and told them what she had done. They were in awe of her, she said. And she was in awe of herself, that she had climbed aboard the ferry back to Cape Tormentine letting everyone in her family go on believing this cruel and fantastic lie.

  “Suddenly nobody gave a shit whether or not I was having ice cream on my pie anymore.”

  “I bet,” I said.

  “But you should have heard the way they started talking afterward, Larry. Once the shock had worn off, talking like I wasn’t there anymore. Well, she’s going to have to come home, that’s all there is to it. She can’t go back to school like this. We’ll get her room ready. Maybe Mike Sutherland will give her a job at the cwap, Mike owes us a favour. Or Wayne—you could use a hand at the museum, couldn’t you, Wayne?

  “And Mom’s like, Oh, she shouldn’t work, she can’t work in her condition.

  “And Dad’s like, No, I mean afterward. She’s going to have to do something with her life.

  “And finally I say, Everybody? I’ve only got five months to go before I graduate. And do you know what my mother says, Larry?”

  In fact I do. I can guess exactly what Maud would have said.

  “She looks at me and she goes, ‘But dear. What would be the point of all that now?’ ”

  Janet stares as if she’s expecting I’ll throw up my arms in outrage.

  “Wow,” I remark.

  It’s enough for Janet. “I know!” She hoists the pitcher of draft to top off both our mugs. “My group just couldn’t believe it. But Catherine was fascinated.”

  A lot of fascination going on.

  “Catherine—you know, she’s not from here,” explained Janet, “so she finds all this of great interest from a sociological perspective. She’s from New York, from a family of intellectuals.”

  “I don’t see what’s so interesting about it,” I interrupted. I was getting tired of Catherine. I imagined her perched up among the clouds, goggling down at us through some kind of huge celestial microscope. “It’s just parents being parents.”