by John Metcalf
He’d always liked the song, thought it the best of Cole Porter’s, the least offensively clever, one of the few where intelligence and emotion seemed to marry.
He gazed into the snifter, amber light fragmenting, sipped.
The song was drawing to its close .
. . . from major to minor
ev’ry time we say goodbye.
He thought about that. Admired the subtlety, the poetry, admired the line’s movement. Was “elegance” the word he was looking for? Partly. It was partly that. But it was also true. Things did move from major to minor. Though in his case it was more minor to major, more a question of hello—the long day in the Uhuru and then the anticipation on the homeward journey, the seeing her. But major to minor, minor to major—that didn’t, so far as he could see, change the point. Change the point of what the song said.
He suddenly found himself groping.
What?
Said?
Said what?
He considered the possibility of his being drunk. His thoughts seemed to be moving slowly, thickly, as if viscous, somehow like the brandy in the glass. Which added up to roughly (200) calories. He patted his pockets, listening for the rattle of the Nikoban gum. He attempted the painful mental arithmetic of computing the number of calories he’d drunk; it was hard; large numbers were involved; it seemed to total somewhere in the region of (2,000).
Not taking into account two bowls of potato chips.
And shrimps slathered in mayonnaise.
The girl was singing “Misty.”
He closed his eyes again.
I get misty,
she sang,
just holding your hand . . .
Suddenly, he felt like crying.
It was true.
Yes, it was true.
Even after all these years, he did, he did get misty. Not that there weren’t other parts of her he’d like to hold, and much more frequently. But sometimes still—after dinner, say, when the kids were in bed, and they strolled up in the twilight towards the yellow bloom of the corner-store window for an ice cream or an Oh Henry bar, along the sidewalks, black where the sprinklers were arcing, under the deepening green mounds of the maples, past the squall and chirping of sparrows roosting behind the Virginia creeper on the side of St. Andrew’s Church—sometimes still he’d hold her hand, shy and happy as a boy.
He shifted his chair further from the table, crossed his legs. Banged his knee.
Straightened the rucked tablecloth.
The girl was singing.
the way you sip your . . . the memory of all that . . .
Nothing could take away from him the things they’d shared, the way they’d become. The way she worried he’d be struck by lightning via metal street lights, the way she unpacked grocery boxes on the front porch to prevent the entry of mythical cockroaches, the way she poked with a broom handle because of miners’ lung disease, parrots, psi-something, whatever it was called, poking with a broom handle attempting to dislodge nesting pigeons from the upper windows’ gingerbread—the list was endless, part of life’s fabric, a ballad without end. And this morning? What had been this morning’s contribution? Goldfish!
White strings.
In which case, that being so, which it unarguably was, what, just what was he doing in this ridiculous restaurant with this—ordinary. With this very ordinary girl? What was he doing with a girl who was nearly young enough to be his daughter? Was young enough to be his daughter. With a girl who was only—he calculated—was only—good God!—five years older than Peter!
What was he doing with a girl whose silences were abrasive, whose conversation was boring? Who spoke of “getting into” things? What was he doing with a girl who’d never heard of Jacques Tati? With a girl in whose hands he’d once seen an historical romance, tartan and claymores, entitled The Master of Stong? What was he doing with a girl who transported her toiletries in an army-surplus bag?
He stared at it where it hung from the back of her chair.
The writing in gilt on the hairbrush handle glinted.
Pinned to the front of the bag was a black-and-white button that said:
GRAVITY SUCKS
Behind her head, the movement of figures on the dance floor.
The brightly lit stage.
Knife and fork.
She looked up and smiled.
With sudden and startling clarity, the realization came to him that she wasn’t her at all. She simply wasn’t her. Polly, he realized, was Polly but Norma wasn’t.
But Polly . . .
What of Polly? What was she?
He sat thinking about that.
* * *
The waitress was mouthing something. Leaning forward and peering up at her face from about eighteen inches away, he watched her lips moving.
He pointed at his ear and shrugged.
He traced on the low tabletop a figure 5 and a zero. Her lips seemed to shape: 50?
She disappeared into the gloom.
The noise was hurting his eyes.
Beside him on the banquette sat a pair of lovelies whose hair was shaved off to a line an inch or so above the ears; above that, it was cut the same length all the way round so that it sat on their heads like caps. They reminded him of the mushrooms in Fantasia. Of collaborators. Of a boy called Gregory who’d had ringworm. Light glanced off the skulls, off the shiny, pallid skin. The girl was drenched in obnoxiously cheap perfume which was beginning to make him feel nauseated. Under the shiny skin, a vein crawled. Her escort was naked to the waist save for red-and-white suspenders.
From behind the amplified drummer, lights like lightning flick-flickered flick-flickered. He began to fear induced epilepsy. On the dance floor in front of the stage, shapes heaved and cavorted in the stuttering light. Some were running on the spot. Some seemed to be miming log-rolling. Others were leaping erratically as though to avoid bowling balls being launched at their ankles.
One of the guitarists was wearing ear-mufflers of the kind worn by ground crews at airports.
The Iron Guard looked much like all the other sneering degenerates who adorned the record albums littering Peter’s room—sexually ambivalent, grubby, used.
The banquette itself was vibrating. The amplified white-plastic violin which had started up was making his teeth ache. Its sound was demented. He could feel vibration deep inside his body; his very organs were being shaken loose.
Norma had described The Iron Guard as being “mainstream”; he could not imagine the sound of something she’d consider avant-garde. The word “mainstream” made him think of “midstream,” of the tests he’d undergone after his heart-thing, of his kidneys vibrating.
The waitress planked down two bottles of Labatt’s Fifty Ale and two wet glasses, took his proffered ten-dollar bill, and disappeared into the fug. He felt Norma’s breath on the side of his face as she shouted something. He smiled back then stopped because smiling seemed to intensify the pain in his teeth.
Now and again, he caught a few words bellowed by the lead degenerate . . .
MIS-ER-RY
AS YOU ALL CAN SEE . . .
A large pink bubble was swelling from the mushroom girl’s blank face. She and her mushroom consort looked, he thought, as if they’d been used for medical experiments.
He wondered if they found each other sexually attractive; he wondered if they would breed.
He was feeling very tired and very old.
He wished, more than anything, that he was at home in the silent kitchen with a peanut-butter sandwich, a glass of milk, three aspirins, and a new issue of African Arts, the only sound the occasional scrabble of the basement mouse.
Outside the Château Laurier, and before the taxi, he had not been able to think of any kind and plausible way of excusing himself but now, oppressed by guilt and toothach
e, he decided that he would leave—the advancing hour—as soon as the beer was finished and the band had executed another number. If this monstrous and outrageous noise was indeed divided into “numbers.”
It seemed more than possible that it just went on.
Despite his severe pangs of guilt, despite his realization that Polly wasn’t Norma, or, more clearly, that Norma wasn’t Polly, and despite his welling love for Martha, it was, at the same time, undeniably flattering that Norma felt attracted to a man with drooping pectorals and four white hairs on his chest. But flattering as it was, he almost winced as he thought of the way the evening could have turned out. He dwelt for a few moments on the compounding horror of an embroilment with a child-woman and employee. He blessed his blind and stupid luck that had preserved him from laying hot hands on her essentials.
Surveying his behaviour over the course of the evening, he could not recall having responded in any way, verbally or physically, that had in any sense committed him. His responses had, he believed, been sufficiently ambiguous. It was she, amazingly enough, who had made all the running. He had not really stepped over the line. Legs under tables could, he decided, be looked on merely as friendly contiguity. Bridges intact, retreat was possible.
Caught in an extraordinary storm, a pleasant evening with a charming young employee of whom he was fond. A few comments tomorrow about how pleasant it had been, up past his bedtime, a matter of taste, of course, but this sweating hellhole perhaps better suited to the younger generation . . .
Harrumph!
Major Hoople.
That was the stance.
Avuncular.
The harem pants stretched over her long thighs, she was leaning back on the banquette with her feet up on the ledge beneath the table. He looked at her pale toes.
She was attractive, of course, impossible to deny, but he saw that it was the attractiveness of a kitten or a puppy, the charm of a filly in a summer field. A matter of sentiment and aesthetics. He appreciated her, he decided, much in the way that he appreciated a painting or a carvmg.
No.
That had some truth in it but it was not strictly true.
He thought of the glycerine-drenched inner parts of ladies which greeted him in the corner-store every time he went to buy a quart of milk.
Fantasy.
That seemed the essential point to hold onto.
Surreptitiously, he tried to lick off the back of his hand the blue heart and arrow the doorkeeper had stamped him with.
A change in the noise was taking place. To the continuous-car-crash effect was being added a noise which sounded like the whingeing of giant metal mosquitoes. The mushroom girl was gawping, a bubblegum bubble deflated on her lower lip. And then the white-plastic violin capered into high gear and the lead degenerate, bent double for some reason, started moaning and bellowing again and Paul realized that the whole thing was still the
MIS-ER-RY
AS YOU ALL CAN SEE . . .
recitative still going on but possibly, he dared to hope, ending.
There was a long-drawn-out crescendo of appalling noises—noises of things under dreadful tension snapping and shearing, of tortured metal screeching, of things being smashed flat, crushed, ripped apart, ricocheting—and then, suddenly, silence.
The crowd’s applause, wild whistles, and rebel yells sounded by comparison soft and muted as the shush of waves on distant shore.
He could scarcely believe it had stopped.
He extended his wrist and watch towards Norma and tapped the watch-face.
He mouthed: Let’s go.
“What?”
“Sorry.”
“Go?” she said.
“It’s late. I need my beauty sleep.”
“But we’ve only just got here.”
He stood up.
He wanted to be on the other side of the padded doors before The Iron Guard grated again into gear. Sound was coming to him oddly as it sometimes did during the descent into an airport; the inside of his head felt as though it had been somehow scoured.
The set of Norma’s body suggested disgruntlement.
They threaded their way through the hairstyles and vintage clothing and he heaved open one side of the heavy doors. It was immediately easier to breathe. The tiny foyer was ill-lighted and tiled white like a public washroom. The concrete stairs rose steeply to the door that led out onto the sidewalk.
He was still trying to think of something to say that would be suitably old-dufferish, avuncular, and affable and which would set the tone for their parting, and, more to the point, for their meeting again in the morning, when the street door above them banged back against the wall and the narrow doorway was jammed by three struggling figures in black. The two outer figures were manoeuvring a central, drooping figure.
As Paul and Norma stared up at these noisy shapes looming over them, the nearest stumbled on the first step. He let go of the central figure to save himself. The central figure slumped to one side, pulling the other supporting figure off balance and then, as if in slow motion, fell forward. A yell was echoing. Rubbery, more or less on his feet, gaining momentum, his body hit the handrail, caromed off to hit the wall, bounced off the wall turning somehow so that he was tumbling backwards, windmill arms, hit the rail again. Reflex pushed Paul forward and the figure landed against his chest and arm. He staggered back under the impact.
“Fuckinankle!” screamed a voice on the stairs.
Paul was staring down at the face of his son.
“Peter!
“Peter! Are you hurt? Peter!”
His face was white and his eyes were closed.
“Who is it?” said Norma.
“Come on! Peter!”
Someone belched.
“What happened to him?”
“Oh, good evening, Mr. Denton.”
It was the one in his twenties who wore things suspiciously like blouses.
“What happened to him?”
“Do you mean,” said Norma, “it’s your Peter?”
Paul lowered the body to the tiled floor and knelt beside him. He quickly checked arms and legs. Felt round the back of his head. Nothing was obviously broken.
“For Christ’s sake, what happened to him?”
“Is it?” said Norma. “Peter?”
“Well, I lost my balance, Mr. Denton, and he . . .”
“I know you lost your balance, you fucking dimwit. I want to know what happened to him before.”
Peter groaned and opened his eyes.
His head rolled.
He seemed to be staring at Norma.
“Peter? Hey, Peter!”
He was trying to say something.
Bent over him, trying to peer at his pupils in the uncertain light, Paul could scarcely believe the obvious: it was not concussion; it was not hypoglycemia; it was not cerebral edema; it was booze. The boy reeked of booze. He felt suddenly weak and shaky; he could still hear the terrifying sound the boy’s head would have made as it hit the tiled floor.
He stared up at—Deet, was it? Wiggo? Or was this the one that sounded like something from Sesame Street?
He was regarding Paul and Peter owlishly.
As Paul stared at him, he wrinkled his upper lip and nose and sniffed moistly. He wiped his nose on his sleeve.
Paul shook his head slowly.
“Jesus Christ!” he said. “Je-sus Christ!”
“Paul?” said Norma. “Is he okay?”
Paul got slowly to his feet.
With both hands, he smoothed back his hair.
He lowered his head and massaged the muscles in his neck.
“Norma,” he said, looking up, ‘’I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to ask you to excuse me. I think it’d be better if you left me to deal with this.”
“Oh,” she
said. “You mean . . .”
‘’I’d like to talk privately to these . . .”
He gestured at Wiggo and at the other character who was sitting on the steps.
“Well,” she said. “Umm . . . okay.”
“I’ll talk to you in the morning.”
She hitched up the strap of the army-surplus bag.
‘’I’m sorry,” said Paul.
“Well,” she said, “thank you for dinner.”
Paul nodded.
Her sandals slapped up the echoing stairs.
At the top of the stairs, she looked down and said,
“Well, goodnight, Paul.”
The push-bar door clanged shut behind her.
“Now,” said Paul. “Let’s start again. Wiggo, isn’t it?”
“It’s Munchy, Mr. Denton.”
The one who worked in the speculative-fiction bookstore, the one Peter had said was into Tolstoy.
“Munchy, then. Listen carefully, Munchy. I am going to ask you a question. Where has Peter been and what happened to him?”
“We were in my apartment, Mr. Denton.”
“And?”
“Listening to tapes.”
“You were in your apartment and you were listening to tapes—I haven’t got all night, Munchy.”
He could feel the pounding of his heart, the dryness in his mouth. It would have been a release and a pleasure to have thumped this pair until stretchers were necessary. He felt pressure at his temples and behind his eyes, thought of tubes contracting, pictured pink things swelling. He took a deep breath and held it.
Munchy was groping about in his pockets.
“Pay attention! I’m talking to you!”
‘’I’m sorry, Mr. Denton. Have you got a Kleenex?”
Peter was stirring on the floor, groaning. Paul glanced down at him. Then stared. He was drawing his knees up to his body. His exhalations were becoming harsh and noisy. Red-tinged saliva was drooling and spindling from the corner of his mouth. It was beginning to pool and glisten on the white tiles.
Quickly, Paul knelt beside him.
“Did he fall before? Was he hit or something? A car?”
Munchy shook his head.
“Did he hurt himself before he fell downstairs?”