Stone Mattress

by Margaret Atwood

  I’m not a moron! I know all that! he wants to shout at the oval, enamelled blue-and-white plaque. He should forget about it, he should forget the whole episode as much as possible, but he can’t because it’s chained to his leg. He can’t resist peeking at the thing every time he’s in town for some filmfest or litfest or comicfest or monsterfest or other. On the one hand, it’s a reminder to him of his idiocy in signing the contract; on the other hand, it’s pathetically satisfying to read those three words: International Horror Classic. He obsesses over it too much, that plaque. Still, it’s a tribute to his major life accomplishment. Such as it is.

  Maybe that’s what it will say on his tombstone: THE DEAD HAND LOVES YOU, INTERNATIONAL HORROR CLASSSIC. Maybe nubile teeny girl fans with Goth eye makeup, and stitch marks tattooed on their necks like the Frankenstein creature, and dotted lines around their wrists with CUT HERE instructions, will visit his grave and leave him tributes composed of withered roses and whitened chicken bones. They send stuff like that to him already, and he’s not even dead.

  Sometimes they lurk around events he’s attending – panel discussions at which he’s expected to drone on about the inherent worthiness of “genres,” or retrospectives of the various movies spawned by his magnum opus – clad in ripped shrouds, with their faces painted a sickly green, bringing envelopes containing photos of themselves naked and/or with black ropes around their necks and their tongues sticking out, and/or baggies containing tufts of their pubic hair and offers of spectacular blowjobs to be performed by themselves while wearing vampire teeth – edgy, that, and he’s never accepted one of those jobs. But he hasn’t resisted other blandishments. How could he?

  It’s always a risk though, a risk to his ego. What if he underperforms in the sack, or rather – because these girls like a stimulant of moderate discomfort – on a floor, up against a wall, or on a chair with ropes and knots? What if they say, “I thought you would be different” while adjusting their leather undergear and slipping back into their spiderweb stockings and repairing their glued-on festering wounds in the bathroom mirror? It’s been known to happen, more frequently as age has withered him and custom staled.

  “You wrecked my wound” – they’ve even said things like that. Worse, they’ve said them straight, without irony. Pouting. Accusing. Dismissive. So it’s best to keep such girls at a distance, to let them worship his decadent satanic powers from afar. Anyway, these girls are getting younger and younger, so it’s difficult to make conversation with them at those moments when they expect him to talk. Half the time he has no idea what’s coming out of their mouths, when it isn’t tongues. They have a whole new vocabulary. Some days he thinks he’s been buried underground for a hundred years.

  Who could have predicted this odd form of success for him? Back when everyone who knew him thought he was a wastrel, including him. The Dead Hand Loves You must have been pure inspiration, from some tacky, pulp-hearted, flea-bitten muse; because he’d written that book straight off, with none of the usual stops and starts and dawdlings, the crumpling of the pages, the tossings into the wastebasket, the fits of lethargy and despair that had usually kept him from finishing anything. He’d sat down and typed it out, eight or nine or ten pages a day, on the old Remington he’d scored at a pawn shop. How strange to remember typewriters, with their jammed keys and snarled ribbons and the smudgy carbon paper for copies. It had taken him maybe three weeks. A month, at the max.

  Of course he hadn’t known it was going to be an International Horror Classic. He hadn’t run down two flights of stairs in his underwear and yelled in the kitchen, “I’ve just written an International Horror Classic!” And if he had, the other three would only have laughed at him as they sat at the Formica table drinking their instant coffee and eating the pallid casseroles Irena used to cook up for them, using a lot of rice and noodles and onions and cans of mushroom soup and tuna because those ingredients were cheap though nourishing. Irena was big on nourishing. Value for the dollar, that was her thing.

  The four of them would deposit their weekly food money in the dinner kitty, a cookie jar in the shape of a pig, but Irena contributed less cash because she did the actual cooking. The cooking, the shopping, the paying of the household bills such as light and heat – Irena liked doing all that. Women once did like performing such roles, and men liked that part too. He himself had enjoyed being clucked over and told he should eat more, no denying it. The deal was that the other three, including him, were supposed to do the dishes, though he can’t say that happened with any regularity, or not in his case.

  To do the cooking, Irena put on an apron. It had a pie appliquéd onto it, and he has to admit she looked good in that apron, partly because it tied around her waist so you could actually see that she had a waist. Her waist was usually concealed under the layers of thick knitted or woven clothing she wore to keep warm. Dark grey clothing, black clothing, like a secular nun.

  Having a waist meant she also had a visible bum and some tits, and Jack could not keep himself from picturing what she’d look like without any of her sturdy, nubbly garments on, not even the apron. And with her hair falling down, her blond hair she wore rolled up in the back. She’d look delectable and nourishing, plump and yielding; passively welcoming, like a flesh hot water bottle covered in pink velvet. She could have fooled him, she did fool him: he’d thought she had a soft heart, a heart like a down-filled pillow. He’d idealized her. What a sucker.

  Anyway, if he’d come into the noodle-and-tuna-scented kitchen and said he’d just written an International Horror Classic, the three of them would only have laughed at him, because they didn’t take him seriously then and they don’t take him seriously now.

  Jack had the top floor. The attic. It was the worst location. Boiling in summer, freezing in winter. The fumes went up there: cooking fumes, dirty sock fumes from the floors below, toilet stenches – they all wafted upward. There was nothing he could do in retaliation for the heat and the cold and the smells except stomp around on the floor; but that would bother only Irena, who was directly below him, and he didn’t want to annoy her because he wanted to get into her underthings.

  These were black in colour, as he’d shortly had an opportunity to discover. He’d thought black underwear was sexy at the time, sexy in a sleazy way, as in grotty five-and-dime police magazines. He’d been unacquainted with real-life panty colours other than white and pink, which was what his dates in high school had worn, not that he’d ever managed a good look at those panties in the frustrating darkness of parked cars. He’s realized in hindsight that Irena’s choice of black was not provocative but pragmatic: her black was a penny-pinching black, devoid of lace or any crisscross or peek-a-boo features, and had been selected not to display flesh but merely to hide the dirt and save on washings.

  Having sex with Irena was like having sex with a waffle iron, he used to joke to himself later, but that was after the sequel had distorted his retrospective glance and sheathed her in metal.

  Irena was not alone on the second floor. Jaffrey lived there too, a cause of jealous brooding for Jack: how easy for Jaffrey to slither along the hall in his malodorous wool sock feet, drooling and slavering with unwholesome lust, to Irena’s door, unseen, unheard, when Jack himself was dead to the world in his attic cubbyhole. But Jaffrey’s room was over the tacked-on, tar-papered, insufficiently insulated and subcutaneously grime-ridden kitchen that jutted out from the back of the house, so there was no ceiling above Jaffrey’s head that could be stomped on.

  Rod was similarly out of stomping range, and he, too, was suspected by Jack of having designs on Irena. His room was on the ground floor, in what would originally have been the dining room. They’d nailed shut the double doors with frosted glass panels that led to what was once the parlour and was now a kind of opium den, though they didn’t have any opium, only some fusty maroon cushions, a carpet in dog-vomit brown with potato chips and nut fragments ground into it, and a broken-down easy chair that stank of sickly sweet Old Sailo
r Port, the winos’ tipple of choice, drunk ironically by visiting philosophy students because it cost nearly nothing.

  That parlour was where they lounged around and had parties, not that it was large enough for that, so the parties spilled out into the narrow hall and up the stairs and back into the kitchen, the party-goers self-segregating into pot-smokers and drinkers – the pot-smokers not being hippies as such because those hadn’t happened yet, but a whiff of things to come, a mangy, self-conscious, quasi-beatnik group who hung out with jazz players and took up with their marginally transgressive ways; and at such times he – Jack Dace, the now be-plaqued one, revered author of an International Horror Classic – at such times he was glad his room was at the very top of the house, apart from the milling throng and the stench of alcohol and cigarette smoke and weed, and sometimes of upchuck because people didn’t know when to stop.

  With a room of his own, a room at the top, he could proffer a temporary refuge to some lovely, fatigued, world-weary, sophisticated, black-turtlenecked, heavily-eyelinered girl he might lure up the stairs into his newspaper-strewn boudoir and onto his Indian-bedspreaded bed with the promise of artistic talk about the craft of writing, and the throes and torments of creation, and the need for integrity, and the temptations of selling out, and the nobility of resisting such temptations, and so forth. A promise offered with a hint of self-mockery in case such a girl might think he was pompous and cocksure and full of himself. Which he was, because at that age you have to be that way in order to crawl out of bed in the morning and sustain your faith in your own illusory potential for the next twelve hours of being awake.

  But a successful luring of such a girl never actually took place, and if it had, it might have ruined his chances with Irena, who was giving tiny signs of maybe coming across. Irena did not drink or smoke weed herself, though she went around wiping up after those who did, and took mental notes of who was doing what to whom, and remembered everything in the morning. She never said that in so many words, she was discreet, but you could tell by what she avoided saying.

  After The Dead Hand Loves You was published to such acclaim – no, not acclaim, because that kind of book didn’t gather anything you could call acclaim, not then; only much later, once pulp and genre had established a toehold and then a beachhead on the shores of writerly legitimacy – after the book had been made into a film, then – that kind of luring became much easier for him. Once he had a reputation, at least as a commercial writer, a commercial writer with large paperback sales and book covers with raised gold lettering. He couldn’t get away with the Art gambit any more; but, in compensation, quite a few girls liked the macabre, or said they did. They liked it even then, before the Goth wave hit. Maybe it reminded them of their inner lives. Though maybe they were just hoping he’d help get them into the movies.

  Oh Jack, Jack, he tells himself, eyeing his baggy eyes in the mirror, fingering the thin patch at the back of his head, sucking in his belly, though he can’t hold it in for long. You’re such a wreck. You’re such a dupe. You’re so alone. Oh Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, with your once-dependable candlestick and your knack for impromptu bullshit. You used to be so full of beans. You used to be so trusting. You used to be so young.

  The contract thing had started off in an aggravating way. It was a day in late March, the lawns heaped with grey and porous melting snow, the air chilly and damp, the tempers peevish. It was lunchtime. Jack’s three roomies were sitting at the Formica kitchen table – red, with pearly swirls and chrome legs – chewing their way through the leftovers Irena typically dished up for lunch because she didn’t like to waste food. He himself had slept in, and no wonder: there had been a party the night before, an unusually foul and tedious party at which, thanks to Jaffrey – who liked to hold forth at length on the subject of foreign, impenetrable authors – Nietzsche and Camus had been under discussion, which was worse luck for him, Jack Dace, since what he knew about either of them could fit in a salt shaker. Though he could do a fair-enough riff on Kafka, who’d written the side-splitter in which the guy turns into a beetle, which was what he himself felt like on most mornings anyway. Some sadist had brought a flask of lab alcohol to the night-before party and mixed it with grape juice and vodka, and, crazed by the droning of competitive literary display, he, Jack Dace, had drunk too much of it and puked up his kneecaps. That, in addition to whatever he’d been smoking, which was most likely cut with crotch-itch powder.

  So he’d been in no mood to discuss the topic that was produced by Irena over the noodle-and-tuna leftovers, mercilessly, right off the bat.

  “You’re three months behind on the rent money,” she said. Before he even had a chance to drink his instant coffee.

  “Christ,” he said. “Look at that, my hands are shaking. I really tied one on last night!” Why couldn’t she be more understanding and nurturing, for fuck’s sake? Even a perceptive comment would have been assuaging. “You look like hell,” for instance.

  “Don’t change the subject,” said Irena. “As you’re aware, the rest of us have been forced to pay your share of the rent for you; otherwise we’ll all get evicted. But this has to stop. Either you find some way of paying or you’ll have to leave. We’ll need to rent out your room to someone who actually does pay.”

  Jack slumped down at the table. “I know, I know,” he said. “Geez. I’m sorry. I’ll make it good, I just need a little more time.”

  “Time for what?” said Jaffrey with a disbelieving smirk. “Absolute time, or relative time? Internal or measurable? Euclidean or Kantean?” It was way too early in the day for him to be starting up with the hair-splitting Philosophy 101 wordplay. He was such an asshole that way.

  “Anyone have an aspirin?” said Jack. It was a weak move, but the only one he could lay his hands on. He did in truth have a fearsome headache. Irena stood up to get him a painkiller. She couldn’t resist the urge to play nursie.

  “How much more time?” said Rod. He had out his little greenish-brown notebook, the one in which he made his mathematical calculations: he was the bookkeeper for their joint enterprise.

  “You’ve been needing more time for weeks,” said Irena. “Months, actually.” She set down two aspirins and a glass of water. “There’s Alka-Seltzer too,” she added.

  “My novel,” said Jack, not that he hadn’t waved this excuse around before. “I need the time, I really … I’m almost finished.” This was untrue. In fact, he was stuck on the third chapter. He’d outlined the characters: four people – four attractive, hormone-sodden students – living in a three-storey pointy brick Victorian row house near the university, uttering cryptic sentences about their psyches and fornicating a lot, but he couldn’t move beyond that because he didn’t know what else they could possibly do. “I’ll get a job,” he said feebly.

  “Such as what?” said obsidian-hearted Irena. “There’s ginger-ale, if you want some.”

  “Maybe you could sell encyclopedias,” said Rod, and the three of them laughed. Encyclopedia-selling was known to be the last resort of the feckless, the inept, and the desperate; in addition to which the idea of him, Jack Dace, actually selling anything to anyone struck them as funny. Their view of him was that he was a fuck-up and a jinx from whom stray dogs fled because they could smell failure on him like catshit. Of late the three of them wouldn’t even let him dry the dishes because he’d dropped too many of them on the floor. He’d done that on purpose, since it was useful to be considered inept when it came to chore division, but it was working against him now.

  “Why don’t you sell shares in your novel?” said Rod. He was in Economics; he played the stock market with his spare change and wasn’t too bad at it, which was how he paid his own fucking rent. It made him smug and insufferable on the subject of money, characteristics he has retained ever since.

  “Okay, I’m game,” Jack said. It was make-believe at that point. The three of them were humouring him – giving him a break, pretending to acknowledge his claim to talent, opening up
a pathway to fiscal rectitude for him, if only a theoretical one. That was their story later: that they’d colluded in order to give him a boost up, lead him to believe that they believed in him, toss him some validation. Then he might actually get off his ass and do something, not that they expected this to actually happen. It wasn’t their fault that it had worked, and so spectacularly.

  Rod was the one who drew up the contract. Rent for three months plus one – the three Jack hadn’t paid in the past, and the one that was about to happen. In return, the shares of the proceeds from his yet-to-be-completed novel were divided into four, with a quarter going to each of them, including Jack. It would be negatively motivating if there was no upside built in for Jack himself. With nothing to gain he might not feel energized about finishing the thing, said Rod, who was a believer in Economic Man. He sniggered at this last point, since he didn’t think Jack would finish it anyway.

  Would Jack have signed such a contract if he hadn’t been so hung over? Probably. He didn’t want to be evicted. He didn’t want to land on the street, or, worse, back in his parents’ rec room in Don Mills, besieged by hand-wringing and pot roasts from his mother and tut-tutting lectures from his dad. So he’d agreed to every term, and signed, and breathed a sigh of relief, and, at Irena’s urging, had eaten a couple of forkfuls of noodle casserole because it was best to get something into his stomach, and had gone upstairs to take a nap.

  But then he had to write the fucker.

  No hope with the four student characters living in the Victorian row house. It was clear they’d refuse to get their paralyzed buttocks off the third-hand kitchen chairs onto which their anuses were at present stuck like the suckers of a collective octopus, even if he lit their feet on fire. He’d have to try something else, something very different; and fast, because writing the novel – any novel – had become a matter of pride. He couldn’t allow Jaffrey and Rod to continue jeering at him; he could no longer endure the pitying, dismissive look in Irena’s lovely blue eyes.