That’s what he told Ivy once. Which, come to think of it, was where all the trouble began.
II
6
IT REALLY WAS ALL IVY’S FAULT.
They had met only nine months before, at Collège Blanchemains, in Outremont, a dirty whale of a building dating back to Confederation, with intestinal corridors and iron teeth around the windows. Robbie’s parents sent him there to master French; without French under his belt, Dad had warned, the world of business in this province, not to mention politics, would be closed to him when he got older. Business? thought Robbie. Politics? He was horrified. Older?
He didn’t meet Ivy Mills until December, but he already knew her name because he had stalked her all semester, often standing behind her on buses, peeking over her shoulder at the books in the crook of her arm. His nose had brushed the back of her hair. She smelled of something warm and sweet, weighed down with the mulched odour of rotting fruit. The classes were sexually segregated, if you can believe that in this day and age, but there was a co-ed cafeteria, and when he finally had the courage to set his tray down across from her, he smelled her breath and knew for sure.
“You drinking?”
Was she startled by his urbane opener? He couldn’t gauge her reaction. Fact is, his body was fighting down such a nervous riot that if she had sprouted horns and a black tongue, he couldn’t have gauged that, either. What she did was merely draw her cup close to her chest with one hand, holding her place on the page with the other, and say, “What’s it to you?”
His bowels went all soft, his stomach filled with air. His appetite evaporated up his throat. The clanking and clattering of the cafeteria with its cutlery and strings of silver Xmas tinsel whirled around his head, and the small distance between Ivy and him fell away like a yawning gorge. He managed, “You reading?”
“… Uh huh.”
“Who are you reading, may I ask.”
“George Sand,” she said. “Says on the cover, doesn’t it.”
“He good?”
Ivy sighed and rolled her eyes. “God. She’s incredible.”
She carved up her hamburger, one-handedly, with no more apparent interest in it than in him. She ate in large mouthfuls, eyes on her plate, fork loaded and waiting for her to swallow. The buttons down the centre of her navy cardigan were mismatched, he saw, the cuffs turned inward, and there were little round holes in the front. Moths? he wondered. Reefer? Through the holes he could see her skin. Therefore, Watson, she is not wearing a bra. He glanced at her bosom, searching furtively for a tell-tale shadow, there where she held her cup still. He looked for the slightest tumble of wool, the shallowest valley.…
Suddenly, she was speaking to him, looking straight at him for the first time. “You want a map? You’ll need one.”
“No, I – uh.”
He asked where she lived. She told him, murmuring disinterestedly, just Montreal. He asked if she liked music. Maybe. He asked what she thought of the school. Sucks. So, what was she drinking? Brandy. Then she went back to her book.
He was in love. Her impossibly wide mouth, filled with crooked teeth, how beautiful. And she hadn’t told him to fuck off or anything. Even if her attitude was (as it seemed to be), No one else in this hole speaks English so you’ll have to do, that was good enough for him.
“Since you’re a reader,” Robbie ventured, unfolding a piece of paper from his pocket, “perhaps you’ll appreciate the finer points of this.” He slipped the page across the table.
GRAMMATICAL USAGE OF THE WORD F—
As an adjunctive: the f—ing cat.
As a suburbanite clause: Watch out for the cat, f—.
As an oddverb: I f—ing ran over the cat.
As a nown: What the f—, it was just a cat.
And so on. Arf arf, hilarious, no? Ivy scrunched her hair. He’d used the school Gestetner, got giddy sniffing the papers as they rolled off, and then distributed them right before class, inviting entries for a French companion volume.
“I got back two measly submissions,” he told her, “both from this dork named Gaston Goupil. Chu f—é, which means I’m wasted, and f—ser. That means, for your information, to skip. School.”
“He is a dork,” Ivy said darkly. She wasn’t laughing too hard at the grammarian, either. “If I were you I’d steer clear.”
“You know Gaston?”
“We-ell.”
She offered him a sip. He took the cup and watched her over the rim, licking to savour her saliva. She pushed a plastic barrette tighter into her hair above her left ear. Her hair was coarse and untidily chopped, and she scrunched it constantly. It had no particular colour, either, as if she had tried and botched several different jobs at once: a patch of chestnut there on one side, with a streak of sandiness, a tawny clump on the other, like a ferret or a polecat. And this impression he had of her being akin to a fox, or a marmot, or something in a field, was heightened by her brown eyes and broad cheeks, and by her nose; it was like a muzzle, a lively nose that seemed to leap forward as if it had an opinion of its own. How he wanted to reach over and stroke it!
“I’m Robbie Bookbinder,” he said, finally.
“I know,” Ivy said. “Abigail Bookbinder’s your mother, from that show Hello World! My family watches all the time. She was in the news – didn’t she get arrested protesting a dam project in James Bay?”
“Yeah, well, she’s always.… Me, I’m in Hell’s Yells.”
“What’s that?” she grinned, showing a mouthful of crooked little teeth. Covering it quickly with her hand. “A gargle? Or a gargoyle?”
Then she got up, leaving her tray – and Robbie – behind. He watched her go, hoping she’d turn around to acknowledge him, but she walked right out of the caf without stopping.
He chased after her, at a discreet distance. In the corridor he watched her pull a great Afghan coat from her locker. He slipped on his own army-green parka with the RAF target on the back. Then she strode out of the school, crossed Avenue Van Horne, and disappeared into the dépanneur there. He leaned against a tree, and waited. When she came out, he waved, tentatively, but she was engrossed in rolling a cigarette, and didn’t seem to see him. He followed her down the street, trying to catch whiffs of the very smoke that had whirled inside her lungs. He followed her through Outremont, down Park Avenue, past the pool halls and souvlaki joints, south towards Mount Royal. And when, finally, she turned around and looked at him, she had rolled a cigarette for him, too, and was lighting it with hers, end to end.
It was the first time he had ever fucksed school. They walked, far from the chalky overheated classrooms, two flecks against the snow-covered mountain. Their fingers and toes frozen stiff, they kept strolling all afternoon, fuelled by the liquor Ivy poured from a silver flask. They walked until they came back down to the Main, where Schwartz’s delicatessen exhaled spicy steam through the grill above its door, and piles of pickles and carnatzel and hunks of hot smoked-meat sent condensation dribbling down the windows. Up the street, rolls of carpeting and bolts of cut-price cloth grew hoarfrost where they stood on the sidewalk. The pages of secondhand paperbacks on outdoor stalls were brittle with cold, and cracked when they flipped through them. Up and down the streets an elderly generation of immigrant Greeks, Italians, and Jews negotiated with halting steps the blisters of black ice on the pavement.
With prodding, Ivy talked about her family. Have one, in a way. Brothers and sisters? Some. Her Dad? A barber.
“A barber?” Robbie repeated, chilled to the bone.
“Not a hairdresser, note. Hairdressers are for faggots.”
“They’re not for everyone, agreed.”
“A barber with a strop and razor, keeping up tradition. He’s for royal rule, too. Hangs a picture of the Queen. The revolving pole outside’s a Union Jack. Your father?”
“Um, well –”
Ivy looked amused. Her breath, hot and alcoholic, hung in the air between them. “You don’t have to be embarrassed. I don’t care what
he does. Why, is your family poor, like mine? I would have thought your mother makes a bundle!”
“Well, ah –” Robbie said.
“Or maybe you’re rich, but subscribe to the idea that it’s cool to be poor and have a bad attitude.”
“Well, no, I –”
“I do, and I’m not ashamed of it. It’s ‘necessity’s sharp pinch’ that got me where I am – my excuse for a father certainly couldn’t afford to send me to Blanchemains. As far as I’m concerned, getting on a special educational program like I did – because I’m smart – mostly means I can be as bad as I like.”
“Right,” Robbie said. “Exactly.”
“Hey look!” She gripped his arm. “That woman in the fur coat. She’s a whore.”
“How do you know? Wow. Do you know that person?”
“God, no. What do you think she’s doing, waiting for a parade?”
They walked and walked until the sky and the snow beneath it turned purple and the street lights flickered on. Robbie couldn’t think of a thing to say. Ivy had clammed up, too. They walked. He was feeling grim. They obviously had nothing in common after all.
“Time to go,” she said at last. And embraced him violently. Their noses bonked, but he barely felt a thing. He heard his frozen parka crunch, and smelled warm beeswax and brandy escape from her Afghan coat. She opened that wide mouth, so full of crooked teeth the thought struck him that she must have an appetite for things he’d never even heard of yet. He closed his eyes and allowed himself to be devoured. It was hot and wet in there, and his entire being was engulfed in the kiss. His soul slithered down a dark-red, ribbed tunnel, and when they lost their balance together on the ice, he was surprised to find it was rush hour all around them. She finally released him. He watched her climb onto a bus. Then he turned and raced all the way home, knees buckling and the breath in his throat rasping so cold it barely made steam.
Ivy worked most evenings behind the candy counter at the old Roxy Cinema. That alone would have been enough reason to go out with her, for Robbie got to see Woodstock seven times in two weeks, all for free. But over lunch one day she told him the cinema had acquired an uncut 35mm copy of She Stoops to Conquer. “And I don’t mean Oliver Goldsmith,” she whispered, with a confidential smirk.
“No, of course not,” Robbie replied, pushing his lower lip up and nodding his head like he knew exactly what she was talking about.
Back in the forties, the Roxy had been the home of the Empire Burlesque Follies of Montreal – he’d heard stories of his grandfather going there to see Les Girls de Montmartre for only twenty cents. Now, an electric marquee was bolted over friezes of the theatre’s original Egyptian motif, that once depicted Osiris and Horas and Thoth ogling bare-breasted, feather-topped dancers; the city atmosphere had smudged and disfigured them, but Robbie preferred them that way; history seemed to lurk there.
He lined up to say hi at the candy counter, his heart turning over like an egg in boiling water. Ivy was up to her chest in carob bars and packages of Trail Mix. Her breath was heavy and sweet. “Oh, hello,” she said. “Don’t you look groovy.” Surreptitiously, she showed him a brown-bagged bottle she had stowed under the counter beside an Ayn Rand novel. She smiled with her mouth all full of teeth like a stuffed pocket, and Robbie was in heaven.
It was hot in the cinema, and the crowd was as quiet as if they were watching a thriller. The music was jaunty, like an ad for a holiday resort, but it was a great leaning tower of Penis that was projected on the screen. Robbie had never seen anything like it. And who was it up there also, but the one and only Kiki Van Garterbelt, star centrefold of Bosom Buddies magazine. He searched for a seat in the dark, but was forced to perch on a step by the fire escape, feeling conspicuous in the red glow of the EXIT sign above him. Kiki had the giant penis in her mouth, and the silence in the cinema was deafening. When the penis ejaculated there was a cheer from the audience; the same spontaneous cheer Canadian airline passengers let out when the pilot has managed a tricky landing, after which everyone laughs, realizing they weren’t the only ones afraid. And, right after that, there was a shout from the back of the room, and the image faded and the screen went white. The house lights were switched on and everybody turned their heads around to look.
“Raid!” someone shouted. “Les boeufs!”
Chrissake! Robbie fought to gather his jacket and flee, but there was a stampede in his direction and people were trampling over him to get to the fire escape. Someone stuck a shoe in his groovy oversized flares and tumbled forward, landing with a knee on his chest. Robbie was in a forest of legs and shoes and laughing, pushing people. His headband was yanked off. Then he was dragged aside by one arm and it was her saying, “Here, this way,” and after a scramble the two of them were hidden behind the cinema screen, peering between the curtains with their breath held fast. The police had blocked the doors. They were checking ID and taking names. Ivy took him by the hand and led him deeper backstage. She seemed to know it well, deftly manoeuvring through the dark obstacle course of cables and sandbags, rusting spotlights, splintered flats, and mounds of dank, mothy material.
He hadn’t imagined there would still be so many remains of the old burlesque house. Behind the screen and in the wings, plaster sphinx heads and thrones of pharaohs that had once dominated the walls high above the auditorium lay on the floor like the finds at an archaeological dig; they had been shorn off the walls to accommodate the automatic pulley system for the new movie curtains, and were now a damp and crumbled ruin, the damask and lapis lazuli paint flaking.
“What did you think of She Stoops to Conquer?” Ivy said.
“It was – OK,” Robbie said. “Compared to all the other – but – it seemed to me it… it showed you everything except, except… love. If you know what I mean.” He wasn’t sure just how honest or dishonest he was being; what he said was true, but he really wanted to show Ivy what a sensitive guy he was, and his disingenuousness was as clear as the impression his headband had left across his forehead.
“God, yes,” she said. “Of course. What did you expect?”
Still higher, off the precarious ramps and wrought-iron galleries, were the dressing rooms. Each narrow cell had a countertop filthy with greasepaint and dust, and a mirror bordered with sooty lightbulbs. On the floor in one room was a brown paper bag, darkened at the bottom by some viscous liquid. They peeked: the bag had been filled with haemorrhaging bait. A family of dead mice clustered there, bloated with their own blood.
He blew dust off an old Empire Follies program, its cover corrugated with moisture, filled with photographs of sultry artistes posing topless in their sequinned muu-muus, hands poised like girls on game shows, bare thigh thrust forward. Jacquie Diamantine, Régine Argent. They wore luminescent lipstick and clotted eyelashes. The Three Manzoli, beaming acrobats with Brylcreem flying, and the internationally known Lance Falwell, a blond Adonis, the program claimed, with the voice of an angel.
“Look at the ostrich feathers and the rhinestones,” Ivy said. She was standing close, to see, and her arm was firmly pressed against his. Turning a page, their hands touched.
“This one, piled high like a wedding cake. Looks like a Dr. Seuss,” he said.
“And the breasts on that one,” Ivy whispered. “Have you ever seen anything like?”
“Well,” Robbie said, thinking hard about what he really felt and determined not to end up lying again for no good reason.
“They’re pretty nice, I guess. But just cause they’re big like that, uh, –”
Bingo. Ivy took his hand and pressed it to her chest.
The next day they fucksed school altogether and lurked in the Bookbinders’ empty house. They got drunk, and fondled – whenever Ivy initiated it; the first time Robbie laid a wooden arm across her waist, she jolted away and said, “One track-minder, one night-stander.” The next she was a wildcat, biting his lips, yanking at his ears, mashing his testicles, forcing his hands to squash her breasts. When his fingers brushed he
r pubic hair, sprung tight as a mattress within her unsnapped Osh Kosh B’Goshes, she recoiled. “You just want to get into my pants,” she said. He couldn’t make head or tail of her.
Ivy smoked and read aloud to him. She carried several books in her satchel, and they were thumbworn, broken-spined, booze-crinkled, and densely underlined volumes with the pages raggedly cut. “Baudelaire, he’s incredible. Listen: It is essential to be drunk all the time. That is all: there’s no other problem. If you don’t want to feel the appalling weight of Time which breaks your shoulders and bends you to the ground, get drunk, and drunk again. What with? Wine, poetry, or being good, please yourself. But get drunk.”
Robbie’s lap warmed under Ivy’s weight, his head resting on her back, the afternoon waning, filling up the drunk old house with a grey, gruelly light. The rush-hour traffic at a whishing pitch on the slushy streets outside. He took a hit off of her cigarette, and the nicotine made him nauseous. “That’s only because,” he told her when she looked at him funny, “while weed is organic and natural, eh, the chemicals in tobacco always throw me for a loop.”
She wriggled free of his embrace. He watched her walk over to the bookshelf. And the way her body moved inside her dungarees, like she was sweetly, naturally, doing the twist! What was it like, he wondered, awestruck, to never have to worry about the way you look, to just be beautiful. How does she fall asleep with herself at night? If he were her, he figured he’d be up caressing himself till dawn.
Kicking Tomorrow Page 8