Vital Signs

by John Metcalf

  Sunlight bathed the hanging plant and lay warm across his bare feet. His feet were sweaty on the cool tiles. The plant always received Martha’s special attentions. It hung down in ropes of leaves shaped like miniature bunches of bananas. Peculiar-looking thing. He chomped with sudden savagery on the two pieces of Nikoban gum in the hope that this would release into his bloodstream increased surges of the active ingredient, lobeline sulphate, effective as a smoking deterrent since 1931.

  He deliberately thought of breakfast as an antidote to thoughts of a Rothman’s King Size. He could have one egg, medium, boiled, and one slice of toast, dry, with black coffee for a calorie count of (140) or a small bowl of Shredded Wheat with no sugar for (150) or a piece of melon, cantaloupe, medium, one half for (60). And then, if at lunch he stuffed his face with alfalfa sprouts or handfuls of grass, he’d be able to splurge at dinner with a nice bit of tasteless chicken with the skin removed.

  He could feel bad temper tighten and coil.

  The bunches-of-bananas plant made him think with exasperation and affection of Martha and of the generally peculiar and incomprehensible nature of life. Martha would soon be picking off green tomatoes to make chutney, filling the house with the smell of vats of the evil stuff, onions, vinegar. She did it every year. No one ever ate the chutney. Not even Martha. In their various moves, the vintages of preceding years had accompanied them. The basement was full of the stuff. She put little labels on the jars. It seemed to be some blind, seasonal activity like spring-stirred badgers lugging out the old bedding or bowerbirds dashing about in the undergrowth collecting shiny stones, though the chutney-making had, so far as he could see, absolutely no sexual motivation overt or otherwise. It only made her more tired than usual.

  Over the shower rail hung a damp and dwarfish pair of pantyhose.

  The edge of the washbasin and the countertop were freckled, as they were every day, with some dark orange powder she brushed on her face. He wiped it off with a Kleenex as he did every day. When he put on his bathrobe after his shower, her plastic shower cap, always lodged on top of his bathrobe on the back of the door, would plop onto the floor.

  He stood staring at the array of her bottles, unguents and lotions, creams. With its scarlet cap, there stood the bottle, the red label: Dissolvant de polis d’ongles.

  Norma, the girl he’d come to think of as Polly Ongle, would soon be in the gallery, would soon be busying herself shining up bits of Ethiopian silver, necklaces, pendants, Coptic crosses hammered from Maria Theresa thalers. He could picture her working over the glass top of the display case, the curtain of black hair, the incredibly slim waist cinched by the wide, antique Turcoman belt studded with cornelians, her long fingers sorting and stringing old trade beads and copal amber, following the designs in colour photos in African Arts magazine.

  Since Christmas Eve, he had tried to stop himself thinking about her hands, those slender fingers.

  He sighed as he settled himself on the toilet seat.

  He enjoyed the emptiness of the house in the mornings, Martha off to work, the deepening silence left behind by the children after the fights about who’d taken this, touched that, his lunch had grapes, well yours had an orange, the penetrating shushings rising to shouts of Be quiet! Daddy’s sleeping!

  This morning hour seemed the only period of complete peace in the entire day.

  He reached round behind him for his copy of The Penguin Book of Modern Quotations. He placed the box of Kleenex at his feet. Recently, bowel movements had been accompanied by a stream of clear liquid running from his nose. He had thought at first that this was probably the symptom of some terminal disease, but as nothing had happened further and he felt relatively healthy, he had accepted it as possibly being natural. Though it had never happened to him before and he’d never heard of it happening to anyone else. But, on the other hand, it wasn’t the kind of thing likely to crop up in normal conversation.

  The bear was worrying him.

  He was pleased that he’d had the sense to stow it away in the gallery stockroom before coming home. He could not have stood a morning conversation with Martha about stuffed bears, the questions leading to denunciations and accusations of fecklessness and immaturity, the whole entirely justified harangue shrilling off into the price of sneakers, orthodontistry, day camps, the mounting fines at the Ottawa Public Library because he was so bloody lazy, the price of meat.

  “Ha!” he said aloud.

  His eye had fallen on an apposite quotation from Frances Cornford concerning Rupert Brooke:

  Magnificently unprepared / for the long littleness of life.

  He wondered what would have happened to Rupert Brooke if he’d lived long enough to have had a slight paunch, stuff running out of his nose every time he had a crap, and a kid with purple hair. No one was prepared for that. Who could imagine it?

  Who in hell could he sell a very large bear to?

  He wondered what Polly had thought when she’d opened the stockroom and seen six feet three of reared grizzly.

  He thought about the Turcoman belt studded with cornelians; he thought about the belt clasping her waist; he tried to stop himself thinking about navels. Shirts or blouses knotted above the waist exposing midriffs, in strong sunshine a down of fine hair glinting . . .

  He had given her the belt for Christmas. He had not told Martha that he had given it to her. He felt vaguely guilty about having given it to her. He felt uncomfortable both about the gift and about keeping it from Martha.

  On Christmas Eve, after the flurry of last small sales, he had taken Polly for a Christmas drink. Nothing had happened. They were sitting in a booth at the back of the dimly lit bar. On the wall just above the table was a lamp with a yellowed shade. It cast an almost amber light. She’d been drinking Pernod. She didn’t usually speak much; she’d been saying something about the ambassador from Togo who’d been in that morning and who’d been offensively imperious, as he always was.

  Her hands were within the pool of amber light. He’d been tranced by the light glinting on the clear nail polish, hinting as she gestured. That was all. Light, glancing. That was all that had happened.

  Paul stiffened and stared at the back of the closed bathroom door.

  From below, a doorknob, footsteps.

  He gripped the book.

  A stream of urine drilling into the toilet bowl.

  PETER!

  Must have persuaded Martha he was sick.

  Probably had an exam.

  Or gym.

  A loud, moist fart.

  Orangutan noises.

  Bam BAM ba-ba Bam

  Bam BAM ba-ba Bam

  Burn DOWN the fuck’n town.

  A drawer opening, slamming.

  “Dad-ee?”

  Creakings up the stairs.

  “Oh, Dad-deee!”

  Probably peering through the open-plan banisters like something from a zoo.

  Only feet away.

  Outburst of ape-gibbering.

  Pyjama bottoms wrinkled round his ankles, breathing carefully through his open mouth, silently, Paul sat tense on the toilet.

  * * *

  Paul followed what Dr. Leeson called his “auxiliary” into what Dr. Leeson called, always, “the inner sanctum.”

  “How!” said Dr. Leeson, raising a palm.

  Paul smiled.

  Dr. Leeson had started greeting Paul in this way some four years earlier after he’d chanced to see, in the Ottawa Citizen, a review of an exhibition of Indian pichwais in Paul’s gallery. Despite references in the review to India and to Krishna, Ganesh, and Shiva, Dr. Leeson had somehow understood the show to concern Indians from North America. Paul thought the greeting was probably a fair sample of dental humour.

  “No more gum trouble? Bleeding?”

  Paul shook his head.

  “No more looseness in the fron
t here?”

  “No, just fine.”

  “That looseness,” said Dr. Leeson, “that can be a sign of adult diabetes but periodontal infection’s the—that’s it, your head here towards me . . . hmm hmmmm—hmm hmmmm . . .”

  Warm, peppermint breath.

  “. . . and broke it apart, Suzanne, Oh my Suzanne!”

  Paul, his eyes pulled open wide, stared over the back of Dr. Leeson’s immense hand at the setting sun, an orb in yellow majesty against a wild red deepening to a foreground black. Printed on the blackness of the poster in white were the words:

  The goal for my practice is simply to help my patients retain their teeth all of their lives if possible—in maximum comfort, function, health, and aesthetics—and to accomplish this appropriately.

  Dr. Leeson settled the small rubber nose mask and pulled the tubes high up onto Paul’s cheeks. Paul breathed in the thick, slightly sweet gas waiting for the tingling in his hands and feet to start. The mask quickly became slimy, a rubbery smell mixing with the smell of the gas. His mouth was dry. He closed his eyes.

  “. . . up to the lake?” said the auxiliary.

  Sounds of instruments on the plastic tray.

  “How you doing?”

  Paul grunted.

  In the coloured darkness, his mind raced. He made a mental note to speak to the kids about picking at the plaster on the second floor. And about not leaving their skateboards in the hall. After this, the bank. Capital Plastics, another phone call that had to be made.

  “Relax,” said Dr. Leeson, “we’re doing good.”

  As always when the noise started, he felt panicky, felt he must be insane to trust a man younger than himself who wore plaid trousers, felt he must check the man’s credentials, actually read those framed certificates. He felt that no really responsible doctor would wear cowboy boots to work; there was something about the man, something about his large red face and blond eyelashes, which suggested the Ontario Beef Marketing Board; this Leeson, he realized, in whose hands he was, frequented roadhouses and rode mechanical bulls.

  The steel was in his mouth.

  They were talking at a dark remove from him; he had a sudden conviction their relationship was more than dental.

  He concentrated on picturing the silent kitchen where for breakfast he’d eaten half a cantaloupe; he conjured up the Boston fern in its earthenware pot, the sleek chrome-and-black-plastic design of the Italian espresso machine Martha had bought him for Christmas, the dark aroma of the coffee beans in the waxed-paper Van Houte bag, cluttering the fridge door the invitations to birthday parties, the shopping lists, medical appointment cards, crayonings of intergalactic battle, all held by Happy Face magnets.

  Until he’d heard Peter slamming out of the house, Paul had remained hidden in the bathroom.

  On the kitchen counter, beside a glass that had contained orange juice, Peter had left a library book. The book was in French. Judging from his report cards and the comments of Mrs. Addison on the last parent-teacher evening, he’d be entirely incapable of reading it. The book was entitled C’est Bon la sexualité and contained diagrams of wombs.

  Sitting there in the whiteness of the kitchen, the sunshine, the silence, Paul had been moved by a surge of pity and compassion.

  He was swallowing water; could feel wetness on his cheek.

  He tried to think, deliberately, of what was to be done that day.

  Letters to go out, bulk mailing, for the exhibition of Shona stone carving. The photocopy place. Capital Plastics to price lucite bases for the Mossi flutes. Rosenfeld in Washington to deal with over the crate of pre-Columbian pots; Customs. A new rubber ring-thing—what was the word?—rubber belt for the carpet part of the vacuum cleaner.

  The carpet in the gallery was coir matting, suitably simple and primitive, hard on the vacuum cleaner’s wheels and brushes.

  The word “coir” made him think of “copra,” “coitus,” “copulation.”

  Nearly everything did.

  The current exhibition at the Uhuru Gallery of Primitive Arts was a collection, on consignment, of modern Makonde carvings, every single one of which he loathed. Preceding them had been exhibitions of contemporary “temple” carvings from India, shadow puppets from Indonesia, papier-mâché anthropomorphic frogs from Suriname, garish clay airplanes from Mexico, and drawings from the remote highlands of New Guinea executed in Magic Marker.

  Soon it would be twenty years since his life had taken the turn that had led him to where he was now. Okoro Training College. Port Harcourt. Sometimes when he looked through the old snapshots in the chocolate box he felt he was looking at preposterous strangers: Martha with long black hair tied back with a ribbon; he wearing ridiculous British khaki shorts and knee socks; Martha standing with Joséph, the houseboy, in his shabby gown, with his long, splayed toes; Mr. Oko Enwo in his academic gown; he and Joséph posing on either side of a dead snake slung over the compound clothesline.

  Strangers.

  Sun-bleached strangers.

  At first, the gallery had done well; he had sold, cheaply, many of the good carvings he’d collected in Nigeria. But then what small supply there was dried up. The young men were drifting from the ceremonies of the dance to the beer-hall bands and city discos. The world he’d been privileged to glimpse on holiday expeditions to those Igbo villages upcountry all those years ago had been even then a world close to extinction, a world about to be swept away on a tide of plastic sandals, cheap stainless-steel watches from Russia, Polaroid cameras, calculators.

  The Uhuru Gallery, which had opened with passion and vision, had become little more than an emporium of Third-World tourist junk. The only genuine carving on his walls was a stern Bambara mask whose austerity was a daily rebuke.

  He dreamed, sometimes still, of the journeys upcountry jammed in the back of the rackety Bedford lorries that served as buses, journeys of dust and shimmering heat which ended in the packed excitement of the village commons surrounded by the mud walls and thatch of the compounds.

  Often he had been offered a seat of honour among the elders in the shade, while Martha had been packed in with the women and the glistening children, the sun splintering through the leaves and fronds of the trees beyond the compounds.

  And then the tranced hours of the festival, glasses of palm wine cloudy green, the sun beating down and the air pulsing with the rhythms of the four drummers, quivering with the notes of the gongs and the village xylophone, shush-shuffle of seed rattles. Muzzle-loaders exploding into the blue signalled the approach of the procession from the Men’s House of the cloth-and raffia-clad masks—beke, igri, mma ji, mkpe, umurumu—individual dancers breaking from the chorus to raise the red dust until their feet were lost in the haze.

  Then the slow unfolding of the story-songs, the high call-and-response of the two leaders, the great wave of sound from behind the painted masks. And between the stories, the masked dancers burrowing into the crowd to demand “dashes,” the lines of akparakpa dancers in parody of female dancing, each man wearing thick rolls of women’s plastic waist-beads, buttocks stuck out, greeted by the women with shrieks of aiy aiy aiy aiy aiy. Until there seemed no end, the drums sounding inside one’s head, the notes of the xylophone vibrating, gong and slit drum, dust, sun, the praise-sayers, the singing.

  “Mr. Denton?”

  “Umm?”

  The chair rising to an upright position.

  “Mr. Denton! You’re all finished now. I’m going to leave you just on the oxygen for a couple of minutes, okay? Like we usually do? Okay?”

  He opened his eyes.

  Yellow. Red. Black patterned with white marks.

  “Fine. Sorry. Yes, sure.”

  He lay staring at the poster of the setting sun against the wild red sky.

  * * *

  The fragrance from a tangle of wild roses in front of a house on Gilmour Street lay
heavily on the humid air. Paul stopped to breathe it in; it was almost indecent. His teeth felt foreign. Exploring them with his tongue, he turned onto Elgin Street. After the darkness of the gas, after the strange shapes of chairs, carpets, counters, the buttons in the elevator, had once again assumed their form and function and steadied into place, he always felt almost resurrected when he walked out into the world.

  Sunlight glittering on spokes and rims. Back straight, fingertips of one hand on top of the handlebars, a girl on a ten-speed bike coasting in towards the red light. White top, blue linen skirt, she jutted like a ship’s figurehead. Just before she drew level, she swooped to apply her brakes. Staring into an abyss of pristine cleavage, Paul stumbled over an Airedale terrier and, babbling apologies, shot through the doorway into Mike’s Milk.

  After prolonged dental torture, nerves stretched to breaking point, one cigarette, he reasoned, was understandable and forgivable; he was not really letting himself down; he would probably throw away the rest of the package. Or perhaps ration them judiciously, using them in conjunction with the Nikoban gum to effect a more rational withdrawal; it was, he thought, an unrealistic and possibly injurious strain on the system to diet, jog, and stop smoking all at the same time.

  With some five minutes in hand before the bank opened, he strolled down Elgin Street. The cigarette tasted so wonderful that he felt he ought to be smoking it through a long onyx holder. His trousers seemed definitely looser at the waist. He crossed against red lights.

  Standing in the line-up idly watching the top halves of tellers, he thought about the girl with the huge hoop earrings, wisps of hair escaping from her collapsing bun, the absent eyes. Unless she was in the vault, she wasn’t on duty. Oddly Victorian-looking girl. As one might imagine the daughter of an impoverished rural vicar in an old novel. He suspected she was profoundly crazy and was attracted by the idea of whatever mayhem or enforced redistribution of wealth she might be capable of. Once when he hadn’t seen her in the bank for some weeks, he’d asked her if she’d been sick.