Monoceros

by Suzette Mayr

  — Thank you, says Jésus.

  He revs the truck’s engine. She slams the window shut to keep from sucking in the exhaust.

  — Hey! he mouths. Jogs his upper torso out of the truck and taps on the glass.

  — What?

  — Aren’t you supposed to say ‘Please come again’?

  — That’s McDonald’s.

  — Well say it anyway.

  — Um, no.

  The truck thrums away from the window.

  Her stomach flutters. Once.

  — Can I help you, she says into the mic.

  — I’d like an old-fashioned sugar Timbit.

  — Is that your boyfriend? asks her supervisor Morris. — Because this better not keep up all night.

  Morris barks at Jésus through the window, and Faraday cannot help smiling, reaching into her collar to straighten her bra strap.

  — A cruller Timbit please, croaks out the voice.

  — Fifteen cents, ma’am, Faraday says. — Please pull up to the window to pay for your purchase.

  She laughs into her hand. It smells of pennies and coffee grounds.

  Jésus hands her ten pennies, so she has to say, — You’re missing a nickel, ma’am.

  — Oh did I, Jésus squeaks, and adds a little neigh. — Here you go, he says, — One nickel. Don’t spend it here.

  He holds out the nickel, and as she reaches out to take it, he slides his middle finger along the inside of her palm.

  Her clitoris coughs.

  — When’re you done here? asks Jésus.

  — Sorry?

  — When’re you done here so we can go grab a coffee from somewhere good?

  — Okay?

  — So when’re you done?

  — No. I can’t do that.

  — Why not?

  — I just can’t.

  — Your loss, Faraday, he says, and his truck jangles away. The nickel warm and throbbing in her hand.

  Miss Maureen

  Five and a half months ago, Maureen and her slutty ex-husband, Alexey, forked over a hundred and twenty dollars — sixty dollars each— for Crêpe Suzette’s female-impersonator show. Her car lurched and screeched through a September afternoon rush hour; she swore the air foul and jabbed with her middle finger at perfectly law-abiding people through the wind-shield of a car that revved like it had a space missile for an engine, a car that belonged in a vehicle emergency ward. She broke her rule and drove into instead of around downtown, through the jungle of cranes, booby traps of fenced construction sites, and one-day-only, one-way streets, so typical of this stupid city Calgary. She cut out of the school early illegally, whipped on her coat and purse like Zorro’s cape and sword, strolled then trotted then galloped out the school’s back door. She leapt into her terminally ill car and pressed the accelerator past the floor because this female-impersonator show at the Galaxy Lounge was the one thing that actually counted as a romantic date for her floundering marriage and was the one thing they couldn’t, didn’t fight about. She threw her money at the guy behind the ticket counter and she stuffed those tickets into her purse, risking her job, her car, her life, because she loved Alexey, because he was her husband at the time, and because tickets sold out months ahead and could only be purchased in person during business hours.

  But now that Alexey trumpets out his farts and snores in some other woman’s bed, clutters up some other woman’s house with his baseball cap collection, neither Maureen nor Alexey is willing to give up a ticket to this show. She would rather chew on the Pope’s gummy cock; Alexey would rather slice off his balls in a salami slicer. They will each have their ticket, they will each eat their pasta— he will order veal ravioli, she will order linguini in marinara sauce— they will drink their wine and beer and watch the show like they are a married couple, a married couple where the husband left the wife five months before.

  Alexey tells her he wants to take his new girlfriend, her cousin Lorraine the macrobiotic-diet eater who’s also his new life coach, to the show, and Maureen says, — You have two choices: you give me the tickets and I go with a guy I dredge up on a singles’ website or you suck it up and go with me.

  They sit across from each other on the high stools. She concentrates on the fake palm tree in the corner that looks exactly like the ones at the zoo, remarkable. Alexey is touching his finger to each tine on his fork over and over again, and reading through the menu. When the aproned waitress presents herself at their table, all drippy ponytail and long earrings, he asks her, — Which of these pasta sauces is macrobiotic?

  He chooses plain spaghetti.

  No, he cannot help himself to some of her calamari. Now that he’s dumped her, he can order his own.

  She wears her red lace bra and matching thong. He won’t get to see either, but she knows what he’s missing. Now the bra is cutting into her ribs. Now the bra is wasted and she’ll have to wash it clean by hand. Like the past twenty-five years of her life. Pure poo. She doesn’t mind her buttocks so unhampered and free, though. Not one bit.

  She listens to him slurp and chew. She sips her wine in the clatter of the restaurant, her ex-husband chewing like an old giraffe, all grey lips and eyelashes.

  After the waitress and her ponytail clear away the plates, Maureen picks at the wax leaking from the candle. Alexey excuses himself and disappears into the bathroom. The discoball in the middle of the stage begins to twirl, a cancan line of drag queens glides out, her ex-husband knocks over a chair on his scramble back to the table, his fly still open, and Maureen pretends she is here alone, he is some stranger who happens to be sitting at her table, and she is painting the town bright brassiere red.

  — Here’s a nice couple, says Crêpe Suzette, tracing her palm in a circle on Alexey’s bald pate. — How long have you two been together?

  Alexey, purple as a grape, mumbles, — Twenty-five years!

  — Twenty-five years! croons Suzette. — Why I was just a twinkle in my mother’s eye.

  The other impersonators, Vaseline Dion and Miss Demeanour, laugh raucously.

  — Vaseline, barks Suzette, — does your cane come with batteries?

  Sweat drizzles down Suzette’s temples, around the artificially bright blue eyes, the makeup caked on her cheeks. His cheeks. Maureen wonders if Crêpe Suzette’s mother knows what he does for a living. What she tells the neighbours when they ask. How much he gets paid. If he likes his job. If when he was a boy he ever contemplated suicide.

  — Your fly’s undone just for meeeee? asks Suzette. — Oh honey, there’re some things I don’t want this big an audience for. Well, maybe just one or two of you. You over there, yes you, how’s about a sandwich later on, just you and me and Mr. Flying Low here.

  Suzette gives a giant, blue-eyed wink; Alexey fumbles at his crotch.

  — And you, says Crêpe Suzette, giving a graceful hop-kick in her high heels on her way to Maureen on the other side of the table. — What’s your name, honey?

  — Maureen, she squeaks.

  — Maureen, you’ve been together twenty-five years with this delicious gentleman. Can you tell us all what the secret is to a lasting relationship?

  — We’re divorced, squawks Maureen.

  — Divorced? Well you better tell him, Maureen, because he still thinks you’re married! You hound dog! says Crêpe Suzette, turning to Alexey, — You, Mr. Flying Low, I guess you ain’t nothing but a hound dog, ain’t that right, Vaseline?

  — We only divorced this week, mumbles Alexey.

  The sound of piano notes unfurling and Crêpe Suzette, Vaseline Dion and Miss Demeanour lipsync ‘I Will Survive’ right to Maureen, and she finally uncurls her fists and claps her hands, loudly, rudely in Alexey’s direction.

  — I think you can make more fucking noise than that! shouts Suzette, and Maureen whoops, her smile broad and mean, and she twirls around to look at everyone else applauding the timely end of her marriage, all the other women who’ve been treated like shit by their husbands and who will survive just lik
e her, no matter how much she wishes her husband would just come home.

  Gretta

  You are the dead boy’s mother, one eye green, one eye blue. You switch on the bedside lamp and finger your dead son’s locket. The curves, the gold, its antique, brazen feminine heart.

  Because you don’t believe in God or hell anymore, but you keep a rosary for decoration, for irony, for kitsch, the rosary apparently winding itself around your fingers. You swallow the grief away, the mould creeping into this closed space.

  You try to pray, your voice catching in the rawness of your throat:— Holy Mary Mother of God…

  — Our Lord…

  — Dear God…

  — Blessed Virgin…

  Your prayers, suspended below Heaven, above ground.

  The phone perches between your head and your shoulder and no one else is on the line but you talk and talk anyway. The way you used to keep talking to your son even after he’d left the room. The way you grasped his hand, tight, tight, that day and willed him to be normal. The day he told you he was gay. — Just be normal, you said. — Sell insurance if you want. Bum around Europe, then come home, go to university, save up for a car. You’ll find a girlfriend. You’ll be different then. You’ll grow into who you’ll be.

  Your husband in denial. Your husband insisting it’s just a phase.

  Your teeth chatter.

  Your skin is hard as a beetle’s carapace, and when you manage to walk, your beetle armour clicks in the joints. At night in bed you lie on your back, too tired even to breathe, too tired to stop breathing.

  The inside of you a tongueless yawn, a pile of contaminated dirt. A handful of hair torn out by the roots and lying in the crab grass and weeds by the side of the highway.

  His note to you an antique locket cast in the shape of a teenage heart.

  Your husband asks you what the big deal is about a stupid piece of jewellery, and when you try to caw out its meaning, he tells you, — You’re imagining things. That’s not the way it was at all.

  The day after the terrible thing, your husband pounded out an obituary on the computer, praising your son’s passion for wrestling, especially WWE on television. Refining, editing, composing your son’s death, composing your son. Then your husband retreated to his room.

  That flesh and metal heart. Thundering hooves on the roof, on the other side of every door you close.

  Furey, Patrick — Patrick Furey, known to his family as Patrick or Paddy, sadly passed away suddenly on February 17. This vibrant young man, who loved his family, who loved to watch wrestling (particularly World Wrestling Entertainment on television) and who had many friends and acquaintances both male and female, will be greatly missed by his parents Gabe and Gretta Furey, and both the Furey and Conroy clans. A memorial Mass followed by a reception will be held on February 19 at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, Calgary, AB, at 1:00 p.m.

  Sunday

  Max

  Breaking up is not a possibility, so of course Max just flicks the ash off the tip of his cigarette when Walter says he is moving out. — I’m moving on, Walter says, and in response Max snarls a laugh through the doorway and says, — The coffee’s not that bad.

  Sunday morning, six days and three hours after the boy hanged himself and everything started going terribly wrong, Walter stops by the house, — Your own house, Max says to him, just before Max would normally leave for Mass. He flicks through the pages of the scripture reading he’s supposed to give today. He didn’t know he was supposed to meet Walter at the bar last night. At the time, he understood meeting Walter at the bar as just a hypothetical possibility. In the future. And how stupid to break up because Max didn’t go to the bar. How can Walter move out? For what? They are middle-aged, who else would want either of them? Where does Walter think he is going to go? To live in that tiny closet of a condo? They have been together for seventeen years and now he tells Max— while scooping handfuls of breakfast cereal straight from the box into his mouth, Max handing Walter a bowl and the milk carton— that he still loves him, but that he is tired, as if seventeen years can roll away from them like an escaped roll of toilet paper wasting itself on a gritty bathroom stall floor. As if love and exhaustion are mutually exclusive.

  — You’re a very angry person, Walter says, packing all his shaving paraphernalia, his hard-water-crusted shampoo and conditioner bottles into a shoe box. A flake of cereal dots his goatee. Max flings around pots and pans, slams closed the dishwasher. — It’s hard to love someone who is so filled with rage, says Walter.

  — Your degree is in education! Max screams, his voice escaping him, control of his vocal cords evading him. — Not psychology! Not real psychology! You can’t even do your job!

  — Exactly, says Walter. — You finally got it.

  The ripe-vegetable young men they once were. Now freeze-dried.

  Max brushes his teeth so hard his brush turns pink. He accidentally stabs his lower gum so his whole jaw throbs, blood splotching in the sink. He turns on the water hard, flushing the sink in toothpaste froth and diluted blood, so that Walter can’t hear him sobbing, suspect the salt Max is tasting.

  A long time ago Max thought he could do without a man entirely, love the sinner hate the sin, but then he needed this man, his body, his smell. But he needed his job too. Needed the money and the benefits and the pension, Bald-Headed Baby Jesus his pension, he can never give up his pension, does Walter expect Max to quit his job for Walter and give up his pension? And now here is the man he needs, wrapping dishes and packing up books, his two-day-stubbled, goateed man pantomiming leaving, standing next to the china cabinet full of glass and ceramic while he bends and straightens, bends and straightens, breathing hard, sweat stains expanding in the armpits of his T-shirt, pulling out his antique compass collection and packing the compasses with too much newspaper into a box that used to hold bottles of Gato Blanco wine, the white, illustrated cat coiled on the side of the box. Max wants to put his face against its fur, feel its purr buzz his face, the quick pump of its heart, the gurgles and bubbles and pops of Walter’s stomach. The short, curly hair on Walter’s head, the kneecap smell of his growing bald spot.

  — I’m going to take some mulligatawny out of the freezer for lunch, said Max, his hands not shaking. — Do you want some?

  Max will call up Bozenna and tell her he can’t make it to church today, would she take over his scripture reading? He won’t go to Mass today, that should show Walter he’s serious, that Tupperware isn’t all Max cares about. Quite a few teachers attend his church, so he’ll sniffle like he’s sick around the office on Monday, but right now he’ll play hooky from his outside life, heat up lunch for his man, his oh-so-needed man.

  Walter has brought Lieutenant Fong over to the house this morning, allegedly to say goodbye. Lieutenant Fong snakes around the boxes, around Max’s legs. Butts open the flap of an empty box at his feet, jumps in. Max wants to jump in after her, bury his face in her fur. How wonderful, how generous of Walter to bring the cat along for this visit, dangle the cat in Max’s face. Max’s mouth opening and shutting and no sound coming out. As if Walter would ever leave him.

  The crackle of newspaper, the clink of plates and mugs. The cat biting a ball of newspaper, grabbing it to her chest, then gutting it with her hind feet.

  Today is Sunday, and tomorrow when he is a principal at St. Aloysius Senior High School, a principal who works 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. every single day, he will go to the office as usual, pretending he had a cold on the weekend, which is why he wasn’t at Mass, make phone calls and emails, nod understandingly to parents, hunt down delinquent teachers. Pretend that his husband has not abducted the cat and the Cuisinart. Pretend he is gay in the old-fashioned sense because without Walter, well, that is the only gay he’ll get to be.

  Max piles his arms with boxes from the basement and stacks their insides with the blue-and-white dishes from the second set in the cabinet. He wraps the dishes, the ones stamped with blue peacocks, in newspaper. Wrapped properly, not
all willy-nilly like Walter’s doing it. Collects a set of matching but unflamboyant cutlery, and the juice glasses with the orange squiggles, the plain burgundy coffee mugs, and he wonders, Why on this particular Sunday? Just after they’d ripped up most of the carpet downstairs? They ripped up the goddamn carpet because they had plans! He has to go to Mass. He says, — I have to go to Mass. Unless, he says, wrapping another sheet of newspaper around a mug, — you’ll stay for lunch. I’m supposed to do the reading this morning, but I could get Bozenna to do it and skip this one. For you. Stay for lunch.

  Walter squats next to a box, shows off a swath of brown, hairy plumber’s butt. What’s going to happen to all the renovations they were going to do? wonders Max. The carpet in the basement, for example. Max marches back down to the cellar. He digs through boxes. Mouse droppings, larvae husks. He bangs the boxes, punches, stacks them, so that Walter can’t hear the tears splurting down Max’s face, no matter how hard Max tries not to let them. These are Walter’s boxes, Max never would have piled boxes willy-nilly like this. When did the cellar turn into such a landfill? He sets the boxes next to the Gato Blanco ones Walter brought back from the liquor store. Of course Walter isn’t leaving him. How could he. One bar. One missed date. Big deal.

  Dust under Max’s fingernails from helping his lover pack. Dust and dirt drying out his fingers as he scrambles and digs through the boxes in the basement, exhumes the sturdier ones. Ones strong enough for Walter’s book collection, his favourite lamp with the polished granite bottom. Who is Walter, wanting to move out like he’s a teenager? And Max his mother. Max helping Walter leave him.

  — I’m heating up some mulligatawny for lunch, Max yells up the stairs.

  He wipes his hands on the dusty thighs of his pants, suddenly aware he’s standing with his legs spread, his ‘I Heart Colonel Shakira’ T-shirt splotched with dust bunnies. Streaks from a rusty bicycle chain on his church pants. He can smell his oily hair and he has to keep smoothing it back out of his eyes. Walter dumping his bag-of-garbage news before Max even has a chance to shower. Maybe if he had a better haircut, quit smoking. One minute later he fishes in his back pocket for his lighter. He kicks aside empty boxes, stacks of newspaper, and puffs on a cigar and walks through the house, trailing the thick smoke in the house he’s never been allowed to smoke in. — Freedom, he says. He glances at himself in the mirror at the top of the basement stairs, a cigar the size of a baby’s arm doinked in the corner of his mouth, his skin grey and barely clinging to his bones. His hair a tangle of white. Maybe if he’d dyed it Walter wouldn’t be leaving him.