Men with suits were striding briskly in and out, the rubbers on their shoes squeaking foolishly across the marble floor. At first Robbie felt superior, just slouching there in his X-ray specs and dog collar and chain, but after three quarters of an hour Dad, apparently, was still tied up. He stood up, stuck the guard his middle finger, and strode out into the late-afternoon traffic.
The world was dark, the drizzled snow sparkling ruby-red in the brake lights of cars. He lifted a six-pack from a dépanneur and drank it sitting on a stoop overlooking the exclusive girls’ school on Côte-des-Neiges where Miriam went. He watched the girls cluster and squeal and smoke cigarettes at the bus stop. A couple of them flirted with him. When their bus drew up, he went to piss behind a snowbank. He filched an aerosol can from a hardware store – having seen photos of the graffiti that covered New York City like a cartoon fungus, he figured he could get people wondering all over Montreal, maybe in the papers too, with sober concern, What is this phenomenon, this, ah, Hell’s Yells?
First, he ducked into an alley and leaned behind a garbage haul. He broke a glass ampule of amyl nitrate beneath his nose and inhaled the rotten apple odour with his eyes closed. When he opened them, his body was humming. The slushy snow was a laugh. His loneliness was the bestest way to be, the world fell away from him like a flimsy toy theatre.
Graffiti artists require strong fingers; in less than five minutes, his thumb is aching and sticky. The paint won’t build up satisfactorily on the drizzle-streaked walls, and he gets nabbed by a pig. The pig’s in a holiday-bonus mood and only asks him to hand over the can, but Robbie’s in a frenzy, buzzed and dripping.
“Get away!” he blurts, “I’m improving on the cityscape, man. Who built these buildings? Who let ’em? Thirty floors of ugliness. Horror storeys, I call ’em, skycrappers. Seriously, these concrete bunkers. What does it say on it? Sir George Williams University. Chrissake, Hitler died in something that looked like this. It’s depressing. Looks like World War Three. Physical graffiti, is what it is. It affects people and they don’t even know it.”
“It’s private property, sir,” the pig says, patiently. “Now give me the paint can and go home before I book your ass.”
By the time he snuck back through his kitchen window, every little thing was driving him crazy. He had to pee badly from all that beer, and he was in an irritated snit about the whole world. He had a headache from the poppers, like someone was kicking at the back of his eyeballs. And cold, he decided, is not funny. His forehead was screaming – it was so cold outside that blood had come up on the skin of his temples. He kicked off his sneakers because he couldn’t manipulate the laces, leaving slush all over the kitchen floor. Cold made his stomach cramp too, and he was sick of being poor, and he sincerely wondered why he should be in this state of virtual eviction.
The falling dark, and a shower was just what he needed to soothe him. He put his fists up on the wall and stood there with his head under the faucet, glorying in the rush of water. Scalding, just this side of pain, thundering against his eardrums, coursing over his shoulders and streaming down his back – the waterdrops with their tadpole tails licking his ears and trickling ticklingly inside, the way they used to when Mom washed his hair, with his neck resting over the cool lip of the bathtub. He shuddered, felt like he was slipping his skin off. Like an onion in a bubbling hot soup. He was dissolving, he felt as if he could breathe in water. He was an amorphous wriggling sensitive creature, swimming through the water mains beneath the mucky sidewalks of the city, to emerge up the drain of Ivy’s bathroom to spawn. There she’d be, scented with lavender oil, rubbery wet, her pubic hair tapered to a dripping ducktail as she showered, and wouldn’t she be surprised.
Which was when the stream went freezing cold. Out of nowhere, just like that.
16
IT WAS HARD FOR HIM TO SAY WHICH WAS THE GREATER failure: his life to date, or his bid to end it. He’d slept most of the weekend down in the dungeon, but by Sunday morning Ivy’s silence was unendurable. He sat by the telephone with a palpitating heart and nerves that itched like rusting steel. When she hears what he’s done, he thought to himself (and hating himself as he dialled), how concerned she’ll be – contrite, even; she’ll see how cruel she was. His suicide attempt will be a bonding experience for them both. She’ll see how spontaneous he really is. It’ll be a lesson to her, too; she’ll see how there are limits to that convulsive business.
But all she said was, “God. You really do make all kinds of demands on me. God! OK, OK. Let’s meet at Chang’s. At 9:00, OK?”
He hung up with an awful sense of disintegrating resolve. He had miscalculated somewhere. All he had for certain, now, was a killing headache and cheesecloth for brains. With slow, sickening cognizance he saw that he might have damaged his brain. His stomach felt exhausted, and his head was sizzling with the residue of all that codeine. It was weird; all those happy drugs he had come through safely in his life, and now, an overdose of fucken aspirin has him toxically wasted. Obliviated. Of course, he might be suffering from the longer-term consequence of the acid, the hash, the beer, the brandy, the speed, the champagne, and the aspirin he’s done non-stop since the Bones’ show, but what did it matter now? He almost wished he’d gone through with killing himself properly. Now at least he could tell Ivy what thinking felt like: like pulling the soggiest blackened leaves from a week-old bag of spinach.
You could call human beings juicy radiators sometimes, he thought that night as, balanced precariously on a squeaky ledge of snow by the bus stop, he hugged Ivy hard; she was ribby, tepid, a wrought-iron rad. He hugged her, with passion, but was surprised to find himself remembering how much bigger, how much softer an embrace Rosie had given him – more mature, more comforting – and just thinking about her now, with her perfume and her plummy warm lips and the fresh shape of her tongue, the tongue of someone new, gave this bony hug the lie of a weirdly formal occasion.
Ivy pointed with a mittened hand to the restaurant at the corner of Girouard Park. Inside Chang’s Mountain Jewel Palace, strings of gold and silver announced Glad Tidings, but no one was eating there. The staff were clustered around a booth in the back, playing a vigorous game of mah-jongg. Robbie and Ivy sat down, and were soon warming their hands around an aluminum-teapot.
“It’s not even Chinese tea,” Robbie said. “Look. A Tetley tea bag.”
“I wish I was in Jamaica,” Ivy said. “I can picture it now. A ridge of hot white sand, you go over the top and then there’s the sea, blue as a jewel. Ganja in cone spliffs. And a bassy sound system from out of the mountains of Maroon County.”
“Yeah, well, you’re not.”
Ivy looked at him. “Don’t make it worse,” she said tersely. “You started this. I suppose you want to talk about yourself, now. That’s the problem with this relationship – we don’t have one, we only talk about it.”
An explosion of laughter at the mah-jongg game. Robbie looked over, searching for something, anything, to look at. Ivy took his hands across the table and squeezed.
“Hey,” she said.
Robbie flinched. His body was pulsing erratically, idling on an arrhythmic heart, fuelled with hatred and shame.
“Your family,” he pronounced, “it’s jinxed, you know. It’s sad to see. And I just hate your father.”
She whipped her hands back, narrowed her eyes. She was hissing, her nostrils flared.
“You hate my father? You’re so insensitive sometimes I ought to stick a fork in you. It’d let some air out. God, what have you got to be mad at? How do you think I feel?”
“Why don’t you move out then?”
“It’s not that. I just need to have my own space.”
“That’s what I said.”
Robbie shunting his shoes under the table and picking at a cuticle and thinking I’m right I’m right I’m right. She never listens, she drags me down, she doesn’t understand me. She’s incapable of expressing herself. I just want to go home. I love my family. And I wan
t to phone Rosie.
Ivy sighed, drew a deep breath, said, “Actually, I’m psyching myself up for it, but I need a job, obviously. I’m thinking I could be a nude model at the art school at the Musée des Beaux Arts.”
Robbie’s blood going thin at that one. “A nude model? That’s nice. Maybe you’ll meet somebody.”
“Maybe I’ll meet somebody? God. Listen to you. You’re already jealous and I haven’t met him yet.”
Robbie’s throat is tight; it’s like a boa constrictor crushing his heart. He’s thinking, vertiginously, We could break up tonight and I don’t care a bit. Merry Xmas, Happy fucken New Year. He wants to spurt the venom all over Ivy’s face. He thinks, she drove me to madness, she made me damage myself. She’s heartless. There are nicer people in the world. She’s only being nice now because she regrets what she did. Well, I never liked her in the first place. I had a crush, that’s all. The chase was fun, but now it’s over. Ivy was staring at him, but he wasn’t going to be fazed – he stared back, unflinching. A waiter came around.
“Flee compremantaly,” he said, smiling broadly, and placed a pair of eggrolls and plastic envelopes of plum sauce between them. “Onna house, you kids.”
“Hey man, cool,” Robbie said.
“Yes, Melly Chlistmas,” Ivy said, giggling.
Robbie frowned and shushed her. “Hey, that’s not funny, that’s rude.”
“What’s the point of funny if you can’t be rude?” she snapped. “God, I wish I were a child again. In another family of course. Remember when you’re a kid and you believe it when they sing about products on TV, that all the problems of your life can be solved? Well, the other day I was standing over the sink, and I picked up a bar of soap they used to have an ad for – where the girl says that corny line, Mommy how come your skin’s so soft? – and for a moment, for a split second, I felt I was six again. I went all hot and faint. I knocked one of those ridiculous little mascara brushes down the drain. God. Imagine having your life epitomized by a TV commercial.”
“Acid flashback, man.”
“No, ’cause I never did acid.”
“I was joking. That was a joke.”
“Then it wasn’t a good one, was it?”
They glared at one another. Robbie’s ears were humming. His throat a sluice of sadness now. What has he done? Why is he repulsed by Ivy the first time she expresses some real need? He doesn’t know. I’m OK, he’s thinking, she’s fucked up. He wants to say he’s sorry, but he can’t bring himself to do it. The sentence is all in there, crouching in his mouth like a spring, the words all coiled together. No, he won’t. She never would. She’d say, If you can’t read my mood, what’s the point of explaining it to you.
“You don’t really listen to me, you know,” she said. “You don’t care what I say or what I’m going through. You and I are completely and utterly different, and you know that as well as I. Have you any idea how selfish what you did was? How was I supposed to feel if you really went and killed yourself? How could I have lived with that? God, you must hate me.”
Robbie’s heart must be a fleshy yo-yo, spinning up and down his throat on a catgut string, because now he’s scrambling with an apology. “I didn’t know what I – I thought I was doing it for you. I’m sorry. Maybe if we try explaining ourselves more.”
“NO!” Ivy slamming the table. Robbie darting his eyes over to the mah-jongg players. “You haven’t listened to a thing I’ve said. If I have to explain now -”
“Then I wouldn’t understand. I know I know. K, forget I ever mentioned it.”
In the dead of winter in Montreal, when the streets are dark and the wind is still, the distance between the Earth and the sky appears to diminish; the night seems truly to have fallen, thin and inhospitable, and the planet they’ve paved beneath your feet is more palpably a planet, spinning alone in the refrigerated galaxy.
He walked her home, kicking meteors of spiny ice out of his way. Neither of them said a thing; they just tucked their heads into their coats. When they reached her porch, she broke the silence. She grabbed him by his shoulders. Her face was wild.
They were nose to nose. She shook him and spat out, “What are you doing? Don’t you understand anything?”
“No,” Robbie said, coolly. “I guess I don’t. I never understand you cause you never tell me a damn thing.”
“What do you want to know? Why do you need everything spelled out?”
“But you never spell anything out, fuck. Pardon the language.”
“Fuck the language,” Ivy hissed. “You want permission from me to swear, now? You never take a chance. You never just grab. You’ve been well brought up, haven’t you? Well, you bore me. You’re a coward, always leaving it up to me. Know what I did last week? I picked up a taxi driver. Don’t even ask, it was disgusting. Yeah, yeah, I can always feel you admiring me – like a prize pig – but that’s not enough for me, for God’s sake. You think I like myself? I’m a real vixen, a sex-bomb baby. A double-bagger, more like. I bet you think I parade in front of my mirror every night. Ever thought maybe I don’t want to be sexy? I see your eyes follow every girl in the street. I know you’d love to flip through every Bosom Buddies magazine in every dépanneur we pass. I have to know you want to sleep with me. It’s like my brother – I love him, but when he talks about girls, like on the reserve in Caughnawaga, ‘they’ve got either TB or VD, one or the other, so you only fuck the ones that cough.’ Ha fucking ha. You don’t know what it’s like. To be gang-raped. By bikers. You don’t know anything. For all it’s worth, for all it makes a person feel something, you should try being fucked, for once. Hung up on a hook. Also, by the way, you should feel what it’s like to shove a dry tampon up your cunt, just hoping for blood. It was all a false alarm, by the way, you never even asked. You just don’t know what it’s like. You ought to be signed up for Home Ec, just once. You should try being Daddy’s girl, peeling his fat fingers off your thighs. Why don’t you surprise me, for once. Make me feel wanted. Here.” She grabbed Robbie’s hand and jammed it between her legs and said in his ear, “Why don’t you ever get tough with me. C’mon, squeeze me. I can’t feel a thing.”
“It’s cold out here, that’s why,” Robbie said, helplessly.
“Don’t be a child. Let’s go upstairs and fuck.”
“Upstairs?”
“Yeah, c’mon. What d’you want, permission? What have we got to lose?”
Robbie shaking his head and making his eyes wide with incredulity as they tiptoed up the stairs, climbing up on the rubber ridge of each step to exert as little pressure as possible on the complaining wood. They pulled off their boots and placed the hard heels with infinite care on the mat. Sliding on solid-cold stockinged feet down the linoleum hallway. All the rooms dark, still smelling of reheated turkey dinner.
In the living room, the tablecloth had been folded up and laid on a chair, the tables had been put away, the fanfold wall was drawn to. Mr. Mills was snoring on the other side. Ivy guided Robbie to the couch, hands on his hips, pushing from behind; Robbie widening his windpipe and nasal passage so as not to let air out audibly. Ivy slipped away and returned after several agonizing minutes, nude, and white as a ghost, with something in her hand. She gestured at him to take his clothes off.
His parka was as loud as a chip bag in a theatre; each and every tooth of the zipper on his jeans made a sound like thick cloth tearing. Ivy laid one hand on the radiator by the couch and then took Robbie’s frozen niblet of a penis in it. As he thawed out in her grip, he couldn’t help but shoot glances at the parents’ bedroom wall, drawing his lower lip down off his tensed teeth to make a face like a person in the front seat of a roller coaster.
Putting his hands on her shoulders now, trying to relax. Ivy jumped, for his hands were cold, and she nipped him in the bud. He twiddled his naked toes to get some feeling into them, and it occurred to him that it should not be taking so long, since his heart was pumping overtime. And his penis was in bloom, although he wouldn’t describe
Ivy’s technique as consummate. She looked up at him with a very serious expression, yanking him up and down, and what’s in the other hand? Chrissake, a condom. He’d never used one of those before, except to fill with water and throw at buses. The main reason was: he was still a virgin. Oh, he’d fucked around, you know, been with all kinds of girls and done some sticky things, but he’s never actually, um…
Ivy pulled it on. For a moment that made him think of Keef, and how she was really a polluted canal. What will this be like? Will it be like taking a shower in a raincoat, as Louie Louie described it? Or making mudpies with rubber gloves, like Baimy said? He no longer cared if the parents woke up. He was going to shout with joy. He would slide back their bedroom wall and tell them all about it. Or would he, for now he heard a sound. Was it his imagination, or were Ivy’s parents being disgusting with each other in their bed? Ivy didn’t seem to have noticed, but Robbie was sure that was a man softly grunting. And that, without a doubt, was Mrs. Mills talking again. Does she ever stop? This was ridiculous, this was no fun. Now Robbie was perspiring. He jerked a thumb in the dark, trying to communicate his fear to Ivy, but she was squeezing him, like a shopper testing fruit for its ripeness. And now, Robbie had wilted inside his condom; it clung only half on now, and dangled down like a pom-pommed sleeping cap. Ivy gave him a ferocious look, and he sent back a miserable shrug. And somewhere outside, from several streets over, the brittle bells in the tower of St. Henri chimed, once,… just once.
The first excruciating week of this fresh new year has come and gone, and tomorrow it’s back to school.
As if the caf wasn’t dreary enough to start with, with its industrial toilet-orange paint; every day, Robbie also has to sit through lunch hour, stoned out of his brain in his TOO COOL FOR SCHOOL T-shirt, watching the pepsis play Ping-Pong with animal concentration on their faces, and wondering why Ivy hasn’t shown the whole first week of school. Pharte meanwhile has started piano over the holidays, it seems, for he is picking out some Favourite Melodies for the Beginner, stabbing at the keys with two fingers like he’s crushing bugs: The Godfather theme; “Chopsticks”; “Moonlight Sonata.” Robbie is feeling homicidal; only his drugs prevent him from getting up and wasting the nerd. From inside his head, the world sounds like a party balloon does when you put it to your ear and bonk it.
Kicking Tomorrow Page 26