So, as the sun swam up the skim-milk sky, disturbing a pale film of curdled clouds, Robbie sat at the window of his new apartment with his remaining money laid out on the sill. Amazing: only twenty bones left. How fast a thousand went! Cruelly hungover, he watched the air pop with tiny sparks, synaptic explosions, and had a staring match with the luscious Eccelucci model on the billboard outside; when the model posed for the picture, she had looked straight at the camera so that now, wherever you were, she seemed to be fixing you with her gaze and defying you not to want to undress her. Robbie pictured the nerd at the Baron downtown wiping the counter for the last time.
Midnight madness, that’s what it had been – Robbie leaving everyone in his dust, cabbing it down alone to Old Montreal, to St-Antoine where the pawn shops are. Scurvy Music’s FULL MOON MIDNIGHT MADNESS SALE! WE MUST BE CRAZY! and he’d splurged his entire wad on some battered old shit – though a thousand bones didn’t go far at all. That was OK with Scurvy; he said he liked Robbie so much he’d give him a discounted instalment purchase plan and throw in free delivery. The plan had a lot of pages stapled together: interest rates, forfeits, repossession clauses, payment schedules. Robbie figured, s’cool, Hell’s Yells will make triple this in half the time.
And so, later that afternoon, when Rosie opened her eyes, he was lying face up beside her with his sneakers and parka on, and he’d kicked slush on the bedsheets. She popped her gum back in her mouth and, squinting, felt her way to the bathroom to put her makeup on before he awoke. But he was only pretending to sleep, suppressing chuckles, just relishing her reaction. For, out in the hallway, and in all six remaining rooms of the apartment, there were amps, amps everywhere; big, black, bolted, silent with their cables coiled up, stacked and marshalled like sinister Jack-in-the-Boxes, enough noise-pollution equipment to bring the building down like Jericho. Should anyone be so wicked enough as to switch it all on.
10
EVENINGS, DURING HER BREAKS FROM THE ROXY CANDY counter, Ivy began to phone Robbie. Too much! Major advance in the relationship. Problem was, while he wanted to believe it meant she loved him, he could never be sure, exactly, because phoning him up was all she did; she wouldn’t actually speak. Robbie would sit at his end, waiting and wondering, trying to picture her. He’d sit and listen to her lips burst softly as she smoked cigarettes. Was she reading a book with the phone cradled on her shoulder? Was she drinking from the brown paper bag under the candy counter? Was he expected to talk? Or maybe this was all some cruel joke, for every now and then he’d hear someone approach her and elicit the sort of lively response she never had for Robbie. Then, with him feeling empty and sad and blaming himself for not being able to galvanize her like other people could, she’d say, abruptly, “Have to go. Kiss,” and Miriam would look up from a comic book at the kitchen table and say, “Boy, you didn’t make a sound for ten minutes. Whoever that is, she must be one big blabbermouth.”
Worrying only about Gaston at first, Robbie now found himself jealous of everyone Ivy knew; since she refused to tell him of the guys in her past, he figured he had reason to be jealous. And because she told him nothing of her past, he had to assume that she was hiding things from him in the present as well: he was jealous of Gaston and Olly, and he was especially jealous of the guys in her dreams – Keef, for example – and since he had come that far, he allowed himself to be jealous of the guys in her future, too.
He didn’t enjoy being jealous, but she forced him; she delighted in telling him about the people she wished she was with, people who really knew how to live. The infamous Nicola Lingus, for example, who took a bottle of gin to bed with her every night, and was raped as a child and slept in her bra so her breasts wouldn’t sag; who lived off the royalties of that incredible hit song Keef gave to her for her birthday, and survived an odyssey of heroin addiction only to die choking on a pastrami sandwich. Ivy said she wished her life was half as full.
Although Ivy identified with all the vulnerables, kooks, and suicides of the world, she never yearned to dig up Robbie’s secrets. In a way, Robbie was glad of that, because when he tried to think of things to impress her, or things to make up, nothing came. The more she told stories of people she admired, the more he felt bland, humourless, uninventive, and without potential. How, for instance, could he ever compete with Spark Combo? There was a guy who knew no limits: an acolyte of Anton Szandor LaVey, he only wore clothes purchased from the estate of Aleister Crowley, played poker only if the stakes were a night with his opponents’ daughters or sons, carried condoms in Byron’s snuffbox, and died a tragically slow death, strangled by cancer of the throat.
“I never really understood,” Robbie said, squeezing out a generous attitude, “what exactly Spark Combo did with his life.”
“Nothing, of course,” Ivy said. “That’s what’s so incredible. He was the world’s only living castrato, but he refused to record. He’d sing only at dinner parties. I wish I was there. Wouldn’t you love to live like that? Just be king of all you can see and be drunk all the time?”
Lying in the dungeon, with Ivy in his arms and a bottle of Mateus on his chest, he had to agree with that much, at least. He gazed at her flesh up close, likening the inoculation scar on her shoulder to a flaw in a Greek vase, something done deliberately, in deference to the Gods, to spoil an otherwise perfect thing, and considered how her skin had the resiliency of sliced apple flesh exposed to the air for a day.
“Here, this scar,” she said, “this is where the mother stabbed me with a fork when I was just a bitty baby. And this row of bruises is pretty recent, the father’s left-handed see. You’ve got to be cruel to be kind, he told me, quoting Shakespeare, then walloped me on the head with a compendium of the Bard’s plays I’d borrowed from the library. Oh, and these, these are track marks I guess.”
While Miriam and Barnabus watched TV upstairs, Robbie and Ivy did the babysitting with their shirts off, sticky backs in a vinyl beanbag chair. The crunching of the polystyrene pellets, the swish of their skin, the snapping of an elbow. Him slyly stealing looks at her nipples that stood up as high as pencil erasers, and asking himself what his favourite parts of the female body were. He knew Louie Louie would say, “De tits.” And Baimy would say, “The cunt, of course,” but for him it was the drift of dark baby down at the nape of her neck, the crooks of her arms, the dual dimples in the small of her back. He gazed at her body lazily, and as his eyes drifted from their moorings, the image of her subdivided and dissolved before him, and it looked like her ethereal body was lifting off her material one.
“Do you sometimes feel like you’re the only person in the world?” she asked him. Well, him, in a way. “How do you know you exist at all? What does it feel like to think? At AA they tell you to look to a Force, to help you contact reality again. Reality? I’m addicted to it, but I’m trying to kick tomorrow all the time. I mean, where’s the borderline? Where are the doors of perception? What is decadence? What is depravity? Sometimes I feel like barbed wire is being dragged through my veins.”
Robbie thinking, – but squeezing her shoulders to signal confirmation and attempting, cautiously, “It’s hard for me to say. About being depraved, I mean. Our family always did OK. Just about whatever I wanted I got, which is my biggest problem I guess.”
Ivy sat up. “That’s deprived, you idiot. I said depraved. What am I doing here. What I said just went right by you, didn’t it? God, sometimes I feel like going downtown to hustle someone I don’t even know, and just have a straight fast fuck.”
“Oh well, yes, of course.” Robbie said, gamely. “Me too.”
But Ivy looked at him and said, “No you wouldn’t,” and he felt ashamed that she was right.
One of her favourite bars, not least because they were lax about checking ID, was Rockhead’s Paradise, under the Ville-Marie Expressway, down by the same set of tracks that ran past her family’s apartment. During the days of the Montreal Maroons, black baseball players gathered there, up from the States with an evening to spar
e, and that’s where the city’s steamiest jazz used to go down; in the seventies, in the classy area upstairs, the bands were strictly stupid, disco-pated Motown with stupid, spangly choreography (observed the Robbie Bookbinder, Montreal’s official music critic), but downstairs you could still catch three grizzled old guys grinding out grooves on a scuffed bass, a gnawed guitar, and a drum kit as honest as an alleyful of trashcans.
By the harsh white light, reflected in the mirror behind the bar, Robbie was shocked to see what a wreck he made – perched on the edge of his chair, wild with suspicion every time Ivy so much as looked across the room, crazed when she went to the can for longer than three minutes. He wished he could relax like her – face puffy and flushed, voice grown hoarse, rolling ciggies endlessly and smoking like a locomotive, not giving a shit about anyone. And now he was monitoring her with bugeyes as she stood at a table of black dudes who were slapping their long thighs with long hands, every time she made a joke.
When eventually she sat back down again, heavily, she said, “God, stop, would you? Any time I’m off your leash, you get idiotically frantic.”
Robbie put his hand to his chest, eyebrows up, mouthing, me?
“Yes, you. Like when I was talking to Gaston outside school this morning. Rushing over to give me lots of caring attention. I hate that.”
“Oh, like then.” (So, he was right when he saw what he thought he saw: Gaston puckering up his hairy lips at Ivy, and Ivy not instinctively tearing his tongue out for what he did to Robbie the week before.) “I just wanted to know you were safe,” he ventured weakly.
“First, that’s none of your beeswax, really. I mean what’s wrong with unsafe? But, if you really must know, he was telling me he’s been expelled – they caught him dealing – and now he wants to meet my brother to get in the gang. Nobody wants him, not even the Jean-Guys. He’s incredibly pathetic. I was telling him to fuck right off as a matter of fact. But you, you were jealous, I could see it a mile away.”
Kicking Tomorrow Page 13