Vital Signs

by John Metcalf

  “Anything else?” he repeated.

  “Yes,” she said. “Something nice for dessert?”

  POLLY ONGLE

  Paul denton’s morning erection was thrusting the sheet into a comic tent. He regarded this sheeted protuberance with resigned pleasure. In one of those manuals which he somehow always found himself ashamedly scanning in bookstores, it had stated that REM sleep was accompanied by erections in males and by engorgement of the labia in females. He thought about that; he thought about engorged labia. He felt generally engorged most of the time but summers were more engorged than winters. He had thought when younger that sexual desire would diminish with age but now, his forty-sixth birthday approaching, he found it was getting worse.

  The day’s heat was already building.

  He felt swept as if on tides of sap, febrile, almost deranged.

  Visible in the corner of the window, a great, still spread of maple leaves. In front of the window, the hanging plant’s soft tendrils were already brushing the Victorian balloon-back chair. At the back of the house, the small garden plot was teeming with a matto grosso of zucchini and cucumber, stiff, hairy stems and open-mouthed flowers. The tomato plants were heavy with green clusters. The tight skin of the green tomatoes, their chaste shine, the hints of white and yellow beneath the green as though they were somehow lighted from within, promising a warmth and swelling, made him think of firm, girlish breasts . . .

  Beneath the sheet, he worked his ankle. The pain was quite severe. His laboured jogging along the canal would be impossible for a few days until the shin splints abated, which was probably just as well because it would spare him the torture of having to observe the bob of breasts, cotton shorts wedged in buttock clefts, nipples standing against sweaty T-shirts.

  Though the word “bob” hardly summed the matter up. Some, simultaneously with the “bob,” seemed to shimmy, a tremor of flesh which suggested, regardless of size, such confined amplitude, such richness, that it made him want to whimper.

  He cranked his ankle harder to see if the pain would dispel, or at least control, the summer riot in his mind of breast, thigh, cleavage, pubic mounds etched by cotton shorts or wind-tautened skirts.

  From three floors below rose the voices of Martha and Jennifer.

  But what’s so bad about goldfish?

  Because white cords come out of them and it makes me sick and who has to flush them down the toilet?

  What white cords? What are white cords? What . . .

  The front door closed on the voices.

  He regretted, daily, having been swayed by the mad enthusiasms of the renovator; he regretted, daily, the very idea of open-plan architecture. The restless night-turnings of his children, the blurts of sleep talking, the coughs, the soft padding of bare feet on cushioned carpet, the rubber seal on the refrigerator door meeting rubber seal with a plup—from his bedroom eyrie in what had been the attic, he could have heard a mouse break wind.

  It was open-plan design which he blamed, in part, for the impoverishment of his sex life. Martha felt uncomfortable, unable to relax if the children were still awake or restless. They used the word “children” to refer to Alan and Jennifer, who were eleven and eight. Peter at fifteen had passed beyond being thought a child by either of them, and especially so by Paul.

  It seemed to Paul that whenever he was gripped by sexual desire, which was very often, his desires were thwarted by Martha’s worrying that the children would hear, would interrupt, that Peter, who was inevitably out, would come in, that the phone might ring, a phone that could not be taken off the hook because Peter, who was out, might have been run over by a truck or fallen into the river or been entrapped by white slavers. Experience had taught him the futility of attempting to counter these anxieties with reasoned argument; it was futile to point out that Peter had been crossing roads unaided for ten years, that there were no open bodies of water within miles of the movie theatre in which he was seated, that only the most desperate of Arab potentates could lust after a boy with an obnoxious mouth and purple hair.

  Nor were the prospects any brighter if Peter were in, the family door secured against the legions of burglars and perverts. If he were in, he refused, flatly, to go to bed. This meant that lubricity in any form was impossible because he was awake, probably listening, possibly recording, and almost certainly drinking the last of the milk and eating the fruit for the children’s lunches.

  Outsitting him was not feasible strategy. Exhausted by her daily labours at the Ministry of Energy, Mines, and Resources and then further exhausted by cooking, homework consultations, and the general wear and tear of motherhood, Martha was red-eyed with fatigue by nine thirty. Any sexual activity past that hour bordered on necrophilia.

  Mornings were an impossible alternative. The differences in their circadian rhythms were such that Martha’s eyes sprang open with the dawn chorus while his were blear and his mood surly until eleven thirty, at which time Martha was beginning to droop.

  Weekends were no better and were not exactly weekends. Saturday was his busiest day in the gallery and on Mondays, the traditional closing day for galleries, Martha was, of course, at work in the Ministry of Energy, Mines, and Resources. This left Sundays. The logistics of organizing the absence of all three children at the same time and ensuring that absence for at least an hour were next to impossible, and if he attempted to hustle her upstairs for a rushed sortie she complained that it didn’t seem very “romantic,” a charge that left him stunned.

  He had learned not to count his chickens even when Martha and he, by some miracle, lay naked and entwined; open-plan coughing would erupt, open-plan allergies would strike, so that nights that began with tumescent promise ended with the dispensing of Chlor-Tripolon and Benedryl.

  When she or he returned from these errands of mercy—usually she because of his monstrous and adamantine visibility—she would always say:

  I’m sorry, Paul. Do you mind if we don’t tonight? It’s just that, well, you know. . . .

  He did not, in fact, know really what it was that she presumed he knew because he would have been capable of enjoying intercourse had the house been under frontal assault by urban guerillas, but he always made polite noises before going into the bathroom and getting his mouth round the gritty-sweet neck of the Benedryl bottle in the hope that the side effects of two disgusting swallows would assist him towards unconsciousness.

  Paul had endured these frustrations for years and as far as he could see they could only get worse, because when the other two were a little older they, too, like Peter, would stay up past nine thirty and would wish to go out and come in.

  In his more despondent moments, it seemed likely to Paul that he would not be able to make love to his wife again for ten more years—and that figure was based on the assumption that Jennifer would leave home at eighteen, which was probably being optimistic. At which time, and over his most violent objections, Peter, who would then be twenty-five, and who would have contracted a disastrous marriage, would doubtless be returning to offload on them damned babies which would be subject every night to croup, grippe, projectile vomiting, and open-plan convulsions.

  In ten more years he would be fifty-six.

  In ten years after that, if he lived, sixty-six.

  He thought about being old; about being him and being old; about being married and being old. He thought of a funny line from a forgotten thriller, an aging lecher who had said that intercourse in the twilight years was all too often like trying to force a piece of Turkish Delight into a piggy bank. Paul was perfectly prepared to accept that this might be so; what depressed him was the almost certain knowledge that he’d still ache to try.

  Since his heart attack, or what he persisted in thinking of as his heart attack, he often found himself considering the form and shape of his life. He lived with a great restlessness and longing, as if the frustrations of his semi-celibacy had spread li
ke a malignancy. He did not know what it was he longed for. His life, he felt, was like a man labouring to take a deep breath but being unable to fill out his lungs. Everything, he felt, seemed somehow to be slipping away, fading. He daydreamed constantly, daydreamed of robbing banks, of doing sweaty things with Bianca Jagger, of fighting heroically against BOSS to free Nelson Mandela from Robben Island . . . Kalashnikov rifles, the pungent reek of cordite . . .

  This restlessness had expressed itself the night before, in Montreal, in his impulsive purchase at Pinney’s Fine Art Auction of a stuffed grizzly bear. Driving back to Ottawa on Highway 17 with the grizzly’s torso and snarling head sticking out of the window, he had felt pleased and superior to all the cars that lacked a bear.

  Now, he did not wish to think about it.

  He lay on his side of the bed listening to the throaty pigeons fluttering and treading behind the fretwork gingerbread which framed the dormer window and rose to one of the twin turrets which were the real reason for his having bought the house.

  On the bedside table lay the packet of Nikoban gum.

  “Effective as a Smoking Deterrent,” he said into the silence of the bedroom, “since 1931.”

  The other turret rose above the curved end of the bathtub; during the night more granular insulation had sifted down. He had run out of renovation money eighteen months before. Only the ground floor was finished; the rest of the house looked as if it were in the early stages of demolition. The turret above the bathtub, the renovator had said, could be opened up and finished inside, painted white, lighted possibly, so that when one was lying in the tub it would be rather like looking up the inside of a “wizard’s hat.” Paul remembered his exact words; he remembered the turn of the renovator’s wrist and fingers as he conjured this whimsy from the air. All that could be seen through the smashed hole in the ceiling was a dangling sheet of tin or zinc, pieces of two-by-four, and deepening blackness punctured by a point of light. Lying in the tub and gazing up always made Paul think not of the inside of a wizard’s hat but of being trapped at the bottom of a caved-in mineshaft.

  He bent to examine the wavering arrow. It returned obstinately to 168 lbs.; this meant that, despite not eating bread at lunch and despite passing up potatoes at dinner he had, in the face of the laws of nature, gained three pounds overnight.

  He teased the four white hairs on his chest.

  Treat this as a warning, Mr. Denton.

  Staring unseeing into the mirror, he pictured himself jogging along the side of the canal, felt the flab over his kidneys jounce. His route unreeled in his mind like the Stations of the Cross: Patterson Avenue, past First, Second, Third, and Fourth Avenues, the stand of pine trees, then the Lansdowne Stadium stretch, and then, rounding the curve, the first sight of the Bank Street bridge. In the final stretch between the Bank Street bridge and the bridge at Bronson, the canal narrowed, the trees overhanging and the bushes crowding in to suggest a sombre tunnel. It was here that he always saw the carp, great silent shapes rising to the scummed surface to suck down floating weed, their lips, thick and horny, gaping into orange circles.

  And then, rubbery legs, breath distressed, almost staggering, into the shadows of the Bronson bridge and out, out to the canal widening into the blue expanse of Dow’s Lake sparkling, the open sky, the gentle slopes of the Arboretum on the far shore, white sails standing on the water.

  Treat this as a warning, Mr. Denton.

  He had known when the intense pains came that he was dying and so had done nothing. But Martha had detected it, something in his face or posture perhaps, and had badgered him until he’d admitted to some slight discomfort. It was she who had phoned their doctor and she who had secured him an emergency appointment. Constriction of the blood vessels and the muscles of the chest wall caused by tension was the diagnosis.

  Overweight, under-exercised, a pack of cigarettes a day, tension . . . treat this as a warning.

  “You would be wise to avoid,” the pompous little fart had said, “life-situations which generate anxiety and stress.”

  Paul shook the can of shaving foam, tested the heat of the water in the basin.

  He pulled flesh tight over the angle of his jaw.

  How would you avoid, he would have liked to ask, how would you avoid being consumed with unsatisfied sexual desire? Unsatisfiable desire, given the combination of Martha’s anxieties and the interior construction of the house. Answer me that, smug little physician. Go on! What do you suggest? Castration? Investing in a sound-proofed house? Trading in the present wife for something a touch more feral? Snuffing the kids?

  And how, you scrawny little processor of Ontario Health Insurance Plan cards, how would you avoid just the faintest twinge of anxiety about a business that’s barely paying the rent? A business, furthermore, of which the proprietor is ashamed.

  Two aspirins and retire to bed?

  Keep warm?

  And while we’re on the subject of tension, stress, anxiety, surges of adrenalin, and so on and so forth, here’s a life situation over which you might care to make a couple of magic passes with your little caduceus. What advice do you have to offer about the best way to avoid one’s son?

  Yes, son.

  S-O-N.

  He had noticed the blue-sprayed markings on neighbourhood walls weeks earlier. The script was cramped, busy, fussy squiggles and dots; he had thought it might represent slogans in a foreign language, possibly a very demotic Arabic or Farsi. Given the high concentration of Lebanese in his area, he had thought that these bright blue writings might possibly be charms against the Evil Eye. It had taken weeks of glancing before he’d suddenly recognized them as being in English.

  Two of the more decipherable of these mysterious blue messages said:

  Check out!

  and

  (something) Zod!

  Coming home late one night from a local estate auction at the Ukrainian Hall, which had advertised “primitive African carvings” that had turned out to be two slick pieces of Makonde junk and a pair of salad servers from Nairobi, he had let himself into the silent house to find in the vestibule a can of blue spray-paint fizzling indelibly onto the newly installed quarry tile.

  He had stood there long moments, staring.

  Paul no longer attempted to deny to himself or to Martha that the presence of his son snagged on his nerves and curdled the food in his stomach. He did not understand the boy; he no longer wanted to understand him. It was not unusual for Paul immediately after dinner to be stricken with nervous diarrhea.

  Even thinking of Peter constricted Paul with rage, made his pulse pound in his neck, throb in the roof of his mouth. He knew that the words “burst with rage” were no cliché. During these rages, he always found the word “aneurism” swelling in his mind, pictured a section of artery in his neck or near his heart distending like a red balloon to the very palest of terrifying pinks.

  Paul was enraged by his son’s appearance, manners, attitudes, reflex hostility, hobbies, and habits. He was reduced to incoherent anger by the boy’s having mutilated all his clothes by inserting zippers in legs and sleeves, zippers which were secured by bicycle padlocks, so that he looked like an emaciated scarecrow constructed by a sexual deviant, by his smelly old draped jackets which he purchased from what he called “vintage clothes stores,” by his bleached hair which he coloured at weekends with purple food dye, by his ruminant of a girlfriend whose mousy hair was bleached in two stripes intersecting at right angles so that she looked like a hot cross bun, by his wearing loathsome plastic shoes because he didn’t want to be party to the death of an animal, by his advocacy of the execution of all “oppressors,” which seemed to mean, roughly, everyone over twenty-five who could read, by his intense ignorance of everything that had happened prior to 1970, by his inexplicable and seemingly inexhaustible supply of ready cash, by his recent espousal of self-righteous vegetarianism, which was pure and total
except for a dispensation in the case of pepperoni red-hots, by his abandoning in the fridge plastic containers of degenerating tofu, by his rotten music, by his membership in an alleged band called The Virgin Exterminators, by his loutish buddies, by the names of his loutish buddies, names which reminded Paul of science fiction about the primitive descendants of those who’d survived the final nuclear holocaust, names like Deet, Wiggo, Munchy, etc., by his diamanté nose-clip and trilby hat, which accessories, in combination with his dark zippered trousers and draped zippered jacket, gave him the appearance of an Hasidic pervert, by his endless readiness to chip in with his mindless two bits concerning: the Baha’i faith, conspiracies, environmental pollution, the injustice of wealth, fibre-rich food, the computer revolution, the oppressive nature of parental authority—Jesus Christ! Oh, God, was there no end?—by his festering bedroom, by his pissing on the toilet seat, by his coming into his, Paul’s, bathroom and removing his, Paul’s, box of Kleenex, by his pallor, his spots, his zits, his dirty long fingernails, his encyclopedic knowledge of carcinogens, his pretentious sipping of Earl Grey tea, his habit of strumming and chording during dinner on an imaginary guitar, of bursting into sudden ape noises, of referring to him, Paul, as “an older person,” by . . . Dear Christ! How he hated that malignant cat with its obnoxiously pink arsehole! Misguidedly saved, but days ago, from the SPCA without his, Paul’s, permission. Not for his bloody son a kitten but a mangy, baleful presence which was missing one ear and had things in the other.

  It would, inevitably, shed some of what hair it had left. The hair would, inevitably, stimulate a new range of allergies in Jennifer and Alan. The allergy attacks would strike, inevitably, just as the stars stood in rare and fruitful conjunction leading, inevitably, to yet more nights of throttled rage and Benedryl.

  Paul completed the series of faces indicative of amazed contempt, loathing, rage, and resignation, all of which were slightly invalidated by the blobs of shaving foam under his ears and on his Adam’s apple, and washed off the razor under the hot tap. Only a friend, he thought with sudden honesty, could describe his pectoral muscles as “muscles.” And even such minor movement as brushing his teeth set jiggling what once had been triceps.