Kicking Tomorrow

by Daniel Richler

  “Where are you, Bob?” Rosie called out from the bedroom. She did that, all the time. If he so much as went to pee. He flinched with irritation. Though he also had to admit to a secret twinge of pleasure – of knowing he was wanted so. But that secret twinge irritated him, too – it might oblige him to love her back. And he didn’t like anyone telling him how to feel. He locked the door of the Cocaine machine and slumped back to bed.

  Rosie worked mostly nights, and spent the days in bed beside him sleeping, waking, demanding neck rubs back rubs foot rubs calf rubs scalp rubs, and reading. She read just about anything; in his view, she had a myopic imagination; not discerning but stumbling over whatever random interests lay in her path – Aspasia of Miletus, Colette, The Female Eunuch, poetry of Sappho, Madame Blavatsky, Our Bodies Our Selves. The books piled up by the bed, and he resented her for being able to read so fast. Could she really be absorbing anything? It wouldn’t have been so bad if she didn’t insist on underlining as she read, but as he lay trying to watch The Price Is Right in peace, she sat there underlining with her pencil, underlining, underlining, underlining, underlining. And it wouldn’t have been so bad if she were more selective, but she was maniacal. He seethed as he sat there, listening to the pencil stroke the pages.

  “Rosie,” he finally said. “Have you thought of only underlining the things that don’t interest you? You’d save on pencils.”

  He hated himself for saying that. He had promised himself he’d make efforts to be nice, but it was tougher than he’d anticipated: nice felt unpleasantly supersensitive, like a layer of his skin had been peeled off, while not nice felt good and warm, heavy blood moving sluggish beneath his thickened hide. It occurred to him that he was addicted to being not nice, because it was true – he could actually feel his glands responding contentedly, relievedly, to his nastiness.

  He awoke one night with stabbing cramps in his belly, got up for water. Rosie was at the kitchen table all alone, doing something industrious with dozens of little scraps of paper.

  “Robbie!” she said, startled. “You SCARED me, creeping up like that.” She was trying to gather up the scraps. She knocked her coffee cup over, and swamped a few.

  “Careful,” Robbie said. “What is all this?”

  “Nothing of consequence to you, I wouldn’t imagine. I mean, before there was a person in this house who was interested in me truly, but I don’t see him around too much these days.”

  “C’mon, Rosie, lemme look. Watercolours, oh,” he said, suppressing his bemusement. “I didn’t know you could draw.”

  “I can’t,” Rosie said defiantly. Though she was blushing, chewing her gum furiously. “That’s not the point.”

  He inspected them more closely. They were tiny, but numerous – more work than he’d done in years – amulet-sized, filled with delicate, feather-brushed, kaleidoscopic designs. You had to hold them to your nose to make them out. There were dripping Gardens of Eden, it looked like, with alizarin skies and blue weeping willows and wispy white sprites frolicking on the duck-egg blue grass. There were green streams with lilac trees, in one a pink canoe, in another two minuscule nymphs fluttering on lemon wings.

  “You can, you know,” he said, impressed. He looked some more. What’s this. Heart-shaped butterflies, and childish handwriting: with love from Rose to Bob. Chrissake, a Valentine. Is it already February? He set it down quickly. He remembered the way Ivy had proven the uselessness of giving gifts. Well, that’s why he hadn’t thought of making anything for Rosie.

  “Wow,” he said, guiltily. “This is like Matisse. You should have an exhibition. And they’re so tiny you could show in a bus shelter. Serve Aqua Velva to the rummies.”

  “I don’t want an exhibition,” Rosie retorted. “They’re not for anyone but ME. I don’t want people’s judgements. I don’t care if they’re like Mateus, or anything else for that matter. As far as I can see, they’re like me. Which is all I’m looking for.”

  She was becoming quite difficult to get along with. Robbie shrugged. He’d been working on some secret art of his own, as a matter of fact, a complicated idea for some erotic art, which he hadn’t quite finished. It was secret because if Rosie found it she’d be sure to misunderstand a Barbie doll, bound and gagged, the legs twisted about like that pornographic doll of Hans Bellmer’s, an image of all women everywhere who’ve been submitted to the abuses of men, exactly like Rosie raved about; he had put a match to her, cut her breasts off with an Exacto knife, glued on fresh body parts snipped from the pages of Bosom Buddies, and painted a mad airline stewardess’ face on it with acrylics. It was a fine piece of work, but in the process he had become a little too feverish, and ended up masturbating on it. For one brief, hopeful moment, he’d imagined this would add to the integrity and horror of the art object, but it wasn’t long before he changed his mind, and dumped the sticky obscenity in a cupboard.

  What day was it? What night? He felt he hadn’t slept at all; he had twisted and rolled, and his dreams were shallow, like blisters on his conscience. Rosie was underlining, underlining, and the dreams had come in aggravating, repetitious episodes, stamped again and again, as if on some brutal assembly line: “Bob,” Rosie says, over and over. “Bob. How many times have I told you to be considerate of others and scrub the bathtub when you’re done?” She beckons him into the bathroom and demonstrates with an outstretched palm. There, clinging to the inside wall of the tub, is an embryo the colour of fish guts. Backstage, Dolores had talked to him filthily, and he’d ejaculated a thick fountain. The semen coagulated like eggwhite in boiling water, globbing and searching for a surface to cleave to…

  He felt like the Swamp Thing, reaching out from his marsh of sleepy molasses to drag the phone off its cradle. But it was the doorbell. And now knocks, on the front door. He got out of bed, tiptoed down the hall. It was pigs. He tried to sneak back into his bedroom, but one of them saw him through the window and rapped on the glass.

  As it turned out, they had no connection with Husker or Gaunt; they said they’d been asked by the Montreal Central Hospital to look him up – his phone was out of order, they said. One asked him, reading from a slip of paper,

  “Are you acquainted with a Mizz, er, Church? Chastity Church?”

  The smell of antiseptic, and the waiting room was filled with murmuring, moaning people. At least two of them were nursing sore or splintered bones from slipping on the ice outside. Robbie paced. He knew about this place.

  Time went by. No one fetched him. He was still in the dark. What had she done, killed herself because of him? No, that was a selfish thing to think. But maybe she had. It flattered him to think it. Finally, a nurse opened a double door and beckoned. She led him down a corridor, and then another. Nothing was said. He was told to wait some more. In time, two nurses wheeled an aluminum crib down the hall. He stood up. There was Rosie, with a tube up her nose. Her cheeks and forehead were a blotched yellow, her eyes swollen and black, her neck bandaged up.

  “What’d you do, Rosie?” Robbie said. “What a dumb thing, when you know you got friends. You look like you put too much makeup on. Arf arf.”

  They held hands, and Rosie smiled a little smile.

  “No, you stupid boy, I was raped, I think. Look at us war vets now.”

  “You think you were raped?”

  “I don’t remember it all. Oh, Bob, it hurts so much, if only you knew.”

  Robbie looked around him self-consciously, though no one was paying any attention to him at all: the busy corridor, patients in wheelchairs, doctors with a purpose, chattering nurses. He thought he saw one of the nurses who’d filled him up a year earlier. He resented them, hated the insouciant atmosphere that cheapened his personal drama.

  “They said I can be out this aft, if I want,” Rosie said, tugging at his arm. “If I have a place to go. Take me home, won’t you Bob?”

  Having Rosie convalesce in bed with you was like being stuck with the sequel to The Exorcist in your very own home. For two days and a night, wea
ring one of Robbie’s T-shirts, she hugged a pillow to her stomach and slept fitfully, rising up to suck liquids past her split lips, and allowing Robbie to mop her forehead with a cool face-cloth. He fixed her boysenberry tea and sandwiches too, that were easy to swallow, like tomato with cream cheese and fresh cucumber. She looked especially horrible at night in the light of the candle. Her eyes were reddish-brown and swollen and stared with a zombie’s stare, as if the real Rosie was locked up inside this body, crying to get out. Robbie had to look away. He sat beside her on the bed and watched a lot of TV.

  At last, several days later, she sat up and unravelled the bandages from her neck to reveal a necklace of bloody stripes. Some were cuts through the skin, where her larynx had provided a hard base, and all of them had stained her flesh with lateral bruises. Gingerly she felt under her neck, and then closed her eyes and swallowed painfully, as if a thought as threatening as a wave of nausea were coming up.

  “I was walking home, eh, so it must have been three or three-thirty, ’n I had to catch the last bus which leaves you by the overpass not far from Rockhead’s, right. At the best of times it’s gloomy, but last night or when was it, three nights ago, it was windy and made you skip along the sidewalk. I thought I sensed somebody move behind me, although when I looked of course it was all blurry shadows. Most of the time I’m used to that, but I couldn’t hear anything, it was so windy. Then a cop car comes cruising along real slow ’n I ran up ’n said something nice like, Hi, I think I’m being followed, but the cops just looked at me and didn’t stop, so I kept up with them, which was like hard on high heels eh, and I’m thinking Oh they think I’m a hooker, which makes me real mad because why should a hooker not get protection from the law if she needs it. I’m banging on the roof and saying, well begging, really, Please I’m scared couldn’t I catch a ride? and I was crying, too, and getting even madder just on principle, but you know what they did, Bob, I swear on my mother’s grave, you know what, they smiled, they smiled at me and took off and left me…” Rosie sucking in a sudden breath now, holding back a sob. “… all… on…” and making an ugly wiggly mouth as Robbie watches, all filled up with his own discomfort “… my, my owwwn.”

  Crying now in her lap with heaving shoulders, and Robbie’s mighty uncomfortable, clasping his hands and pressing his teeth together. Crying is a drag. Ivy never cried. Rosie looks too foolish in his KEEF SUCKS T-shirt and nothing else, the flushed flesh of her bottom and thighs creasing his sheets like a brass bedwarmer.

  “Go on,” he said.

  “Thank you, Bob, it’s good to see someone who understands, which is not what I found with the doctors or the cops after – you know, asking suspicious questions like What were you doing out so late ’n Why are you dressed like that ’n Where do you work ’n Why were you in that part of town ’n Did you know this man ’n Have you ever been in a situation like this before, can you believe it, as if it were my fault what happened. It’s sickening.”

  “Well, uh, did you know the guy? I mean, hopefully you’ll describe him when you’re feeling calm and rational.”

  “I am being rational, for Jesus’ sake,” Rosie wailed. “I am. I am telling you exactly what happened, except that I couldn’t see at the time. All I knew was he was mauling me and I was crying and trying to pull a nail file from my purse to gouge his eyes out, but he grabbed the purse and was strangling me with the strap. It was so dark, and I choked on my gum, and my legs were so cold on the sidewalk…” She paused to mop her eyes. “But, Bob, I know exactly who it was – that creepy weirdo. The regular, you know. The pud-puller, the captain of the raincoat brigade, remember? He was whispering, hot, wet disgusting words in my ear all while he was pulling on his thing, like blasphemer, harlot, mistress of Satan, stuff like that. Gross me out. He said, like, vile abjurer of Faith. Then he goes how he shudders at the sight of me, and rips my panties aside. Oh God, oh God, I can hear him in my ears, eeulch, he goes like, fornicator. Meat, mucus, and blood. Then he stuck his fingers up my nose and said what’s here what’s here, filth and then in my mouth and said what’s here, filth. And inside your belly. Filth. Beauty beauty. Skin deep. He kept repeating that, and said my skin is a sack of mucus. Oh, Jesus how disgusting. He said I’ll hatch evil things, me of all people.… And I think I’ve just decided.…” She straightened her shoulders, looked at the ceiling and snorted. “I don’t want to think about any of this again. It never happened that’s all. S’OK. I’m fine now.… Except, Bob, what if, what if his ugly semen has made me…pregnannnt.”

  She abandoned herself to sobbing again, and although it obviously hurt her throat to sob she did it anyway, drawing back abrupt and ragged breaths, sucking anguish up from the depths of her being, without any regard for what a mess she looked. Robbie watched her. He was sitting precisely three feet from her, but he didn’t move a muscle. He had caught himself thinking, She’s laying it on a little thick, and slapped himself mentally, with an imaginary hand. Then thought, The kindest thing I can do for her is be honest. He’d already decided he didn’t want to lead her on, as far as going out together was concerned, so he didn’t touch her. Sounds heartless, but it was honest. Well, listen to the way she talked, like someone running down a hill, unable to stop. She didn’t really merit his compassion, because she was dumb. He hung his bandaged hand limply on her shoulder. She didn’t really feel things as deeply as he did. She doesn’t keep a diary, he was thinking, like Ivy does, and she never talks about her dreams, just moans in her sleep; she doesn’t mark time. She’ll die one day and leave no record of herself. Returning as a ghost, she’ll find no traces. Ivy would say that even the most self-conscious among us, the most intelligent, do little more than scrawl graffiti under the overpasses of life’s highways, but that that is better than nothing. Most people just eat and shit and feel, and all their lives’ works are washed away in time. Even being nice to a person is only an act that washes away. But the achievements of the intellect endure for the betterment of the world. Like Hell’s Yells!

  He knows he always hated it when Ivy went silent on him, so why would he want to inflict the same treatment on Rosie, now? He doesn’t know. It’s partly because he doesn’t like thinking about the vulnerability of Rosie’s honeypot, or the damage to it – that soft pink flower, its petals just about torn off. It’s too disgusting to think about. Also, he’s thinking, Rosie asked for it. In a way. Maybe.… Doing that act.… And since she likes to make love so roughly in the first place, biting and all, is being raped such a big deal? So he just sits there instead, exulting in the power of this silence of his, while she cries. He resisted at first, it didn’t seem decent, but then he embraced it. And he senses he’s fucked for life, that of all the lessons he could have learned from Ivy, this is the poisoned one, the one that’ll get under his skin. But it feels too good, this silence – it’s narcotic. He’s addicted to not being nice. He should know better, but he doesn’t. Because he doesn’t know himself at all.

  19

  THE APARTMENT SMELLED OF CINNAMON, SWEAT, AND overripe fruit. A week later, Rosie was still afraid to go outside, and wouldn’t go to work. She asked Robbie to go to the club, and explain on her behalf. He was glad to do that, if only to get outdoors. Once he was out, though, he got to worrying. There were secrets in his apartment. He had become a keeper of secrets like bees in a hive. There was that heap of magazines right under the bed, in which Rosie lay like a kicked cat. And in the hallway cupboard the dreadfully abused Barbie doll. What if Rosie found those things?

  Pornography, he’d discovered, was like a bottle demon; it promised high times, but took a major toll on delivery. And putting it back in the bottle became harder as it grew bigger. This devil, Porn, cursed all he visited and spawned in them infectiously. And now Robbie was hungry in a new way: with this infected appetite, like Prometheus’ liver, desire regenerated inside of him. He enjoyed those pictures, just as he knew they were bad for him. The gloss on the pages was a skin on his emotions. The more he enjoyed them, the less he liked
the flesh and blood they professed to be about.

  The game shows he watched from bed were a fantastic circus of organized greed, but Robbie wasn’t into the washing machines or fabulous kitchen accessories; instead, morning after morning, he lay with an ache of yearning for the hostesses with their impossible smiles and tempty hooters. He’d lie there and wait for them to bend over and open an oven door, or caress the fringe of a carpet, in the hope that he’d catch a flash of bosom or thigh. He wondered, did that make him a pervert-in-training? Surely he wasn’t the only person in the world who did it? But one night, he and Rosie were watching The Nutcracker Suite (Rosie listened to it), and instead of appreciating the dancing, he found himself waiting only for glimpses of the ballerina’s panties beneath her nightie. At times like those, he bitterly wished he could put the demon back in the bottle. But he didn’t know how.

  What he told Rosie was that he was going for some beers with Louie Louie, and did she mind if he spent a bit of the money she was saving for supplies. Rosie looked distressed.

  “I don’t care about the money,” she said with a swollen mouth, “but I’m afraid to be alone in the house for too long. I see shadows. Please don’t leave me in this place at night.”

  “Yeah, yeah, no problem.”

  What he really intended to do was a take a bus to the nearest border town in the United States and buy some porn in person. Coming back across the border, he’d hide the magazines in a suitcase stuffed with drawings and paintings, and record jackets into which he’d have slipped the magazines. Go ahead, try it sometime.