by D. D. Miller
I sit down at the computer. There’s a Firefox window open and I see the sign-in page from Gmail. I delete my son’s email address and am about to type in mine when I notice that the History is up as a sidebar. DinosaurPorn.com is clearly visible.
I hear Jordan’s heavy, sluggish footsteps trudge down the front hall. The front door opens and then slams shut.
Rachel’s about an hour or so late getting home. She didn’t email, and I just have to sit and wait anxiously. Eventually, I hear the car pull up and go to open the front door for her.
“Sorry. I know I’m late.” She’s breathless when she gets to the top of the steps.
I lean over to kiss her as she passes, but she doesn’t notice and walks right into the kitchen.
“So, I got sushi,” she yells.
“That end-of-day-Duffy-Mall-discount shit?” I follow her into the kitchen.
“Yes, that shit. You know what it can be like there on Fridays. It was an hour wait at Thai Noodle, easy.”
She goes to get changed and I uncork the bottle of red I bought, which I guess will go with the sushi. I know she’s upstairs in our bedroom. I know she’s changing her clothes, probably throwing them over the hamper. My heart beats harder and harder until I hear her come back down the stairs. She’s dressed in her robe. Thin, silky, mauve. I bought it for her last year.
We don’t speak while we eat our first few bites of sushi. It’s all generic and more tasteless than raw fish and wasabi should possibly be. I’m missing our usual MSG-filled, North American–style Thai noodles and curries. I would’ve waited in line.
“This is disgusting,” she says, taking a large drink of her wine. “But the wine’s nice.”
“So what’re we going to do tonight?” I ask.
“What do you think?” She plops a long slimy piece of red faux-fish into her mouth. Some soya sauce slips over her lips.
I shrug; watch her lick the soya sauce. Wonder if I can just go over there and start kissing her now. Lead her upstairs.
“Hasn’t this just become our designated sex night?” she looks me straight in my eyes as she says it and my heart jumps.
“Um, well, no,” I say. “It’s just a night for us to be together.” I didn’t think it had become that predictable.
“When else do we have sex?”
She’s got a point. Our son hasn’t spent a Friday night at home since he was fourteen. Or at least it feels that way, and we’re always alone. I guess sometimes it feels obligatory.
I refill our glasses and we drink, both of us ignoring the last sushi roll. There is silence, and I wish I’d turned on some music before we started eating. Even having the television news on in another room would be better than this.
“So maybe I was expecting sex, but that doesn’t mean we have to talk about it,” I say and immediately regret it. “It just kind of, you know, ruins the mood if you talk about it.”
She shakes her head. “What mood? Why the hell do you think I’m wearing this robe? Should I have dressed in layers to build the suspense?” She sits up, pulls her robe closed.
“Fine.” I empty my glass.
After a few moments, she stands up and walks around the table. She shoves me a little and I push the chair out. She sits on my lap and the robe falls open over her legs. She’s not wearing anything underneath it. “Sorry, babe, didn’t mean to ruin anything.” She looks at me with mock concern on her face. Touches her forehead to mine. “How can I bring it back?” She kisses me.
I bring my hand up and touch her legs. Run it up along her thighs. She shifts, parts her legs. She feels damp, still, from the shower. Warm.
“See, it’s back, right?” She leans back and closes her eyes. She pushes herself at me. “The mood?”
I’m shaking, sweating just a little. Light-headed from the wine. “Let’s watch some porn,” I whisper, and I don’t even know where it comes from. It just comes out.
“What?” She closes her legs on my hand. Opens her eyes.
“Um. Porn.” I think back to that night in the Paris hotel room.
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” I say. I can see that she’s not ready for that. Not at the moment. “Never mind.”
“What porn? Do you have porn?”
“No, no. Like Internet. On the Internet.” Suddenly I look at her face and I can see her online. An image of her in grainy, black-and-white footage. The way her whole face elongates during sex: her eyebrows seeming to touch her hairline, jaw resting on her chest.
“No. God. Why?”
Now I’ve ruined the mood. I pull my hand away.
“You want me to watch your Internet porn?” She stands up, reaches across the table to grab her glass of wine.
“No, it’s not that. I just a thought . . . Nothing.” My wine glass is empty.
She stands there and drinks her wine, staring at me in a way I can’t read. Blank. But not quite angry. I don’t think. I don’t know. She just looks tired.
And she stands there like that for a long time, staring not quite at me, but in my direction. She’s taking sip after sip of her wine. Emptying it slowly. Eventually she turns, leaves me alone in the room. I hear her footsteps – her bare feet on the wood of the stairs – and then the creak of the floor above me. Faintly, I hear our bedroom door close.
he phone rang, waking me up. To get it, I had to sit up and reach over Sandy and fumble around the bedside table, around the alarm clock and the lamp and whatever book she was reading. I managed to grab the handset, but the receiver fell from the table and hung there, rocking against the table leg.
“John? It’s me.”
“Jesus, Everett. It’s two in the morning. We gotta work tomorrow.”
“Obviously it’s important, I wouldn’t call . . .”
“You been drinkin’?” Back when my brother was drinking heavy, he used to call in the middle of the night all drunk. “I’m not talkin’ to you if you been drinking.”
“I have not been drinking.”
Sandy rolled over with a “hmph” and mumbled something in her sleep. My brother got quiet.
“I have bad news,” he said and paused. “John, Dad’s not doing so well.” He paused again and I waited. There had to be more, Dad hadn’t been doing so good for a long time.
“John?”
“I’m here! What the hell do you mean?”
“He had a heart attack,” Everett said.
“How do you know?”
“What do you mean, ‘how do I know?’ Mom called me.”
“Why ain’t she calling me?”
“Christ, John, ain’t? Don’t be such a hick.”
“It’s two in the morning, Eve. I ain’t thinkin’ much about my words.”
“Don’t call me that,” he said.
Sandy rolled over again with another snort. She whimpered a few times and seemed to go back to sleep. I told him I’d go downstairs and call him back. I hung up and lifted myself out of bed as gently as possible.
“Who’s on the phone? Something wrong?” Sandy’s voice was creamy like she was talking in her sleep.
I thought for a moment, then said, “Just Everett. Needs to talk.” I didn’t need her being all emotional. She didn’t say anything else, so I walked out.
I sat down on the toilet and lit a smoke. I liked the bathroom. It was one of the only places I could really think. I rarely read, like others seem to. I decided to finish my whole smoke before I called Everett.
My family still lived in Nova Scotia. Parents in the same two-bedroom bungalow in Dartmouth I grew up in, brother living in his partner’s condo across the harbour in Halifax. I knew Dad would be at the QEII right then. Lying in some bed, hooked up to a bunch of machines while my mom sat holding his hand. He treated her like shit, beat her and belittled her, but he was all she had.
Everett had more reason to be relieved than any of us.
When Everett was only fifteen he came home with an earring. He was already acting pretty fruity anyway, so it was no sur
prise to me. Dad freaked out, chased him around the house yelling that he was going to tear it out of his ear, my mom crying and begging him to stop. Dad ended up calling him a faggot – the first, but certainly not last, time he’d use that word – and told him to get rid of the earring or get out of the house. Everett got rid of the earring that night. Dad was a big man, an intimidating man. His forearms were the size of Everett’s waist; his fist, Everett’s head. Dad had always disciplined hard and often, but after that – even at his age – Everett got beat for anything and everything. That’s also around the time my brother started his drinking.
When he came home after his first year of university in Quebec with a boyfriend, Dad didn’t say anything to him. Instead he said some godawful things to my mom and told her that if those two didn’t leave he was going to grab his rifle and shoot them. He said this with them standing right there. He wouldn’t really have done anything so bad as that, but he said it and that was enough. My brother and his friend left.
It seemed that the worse he treated Everett, the better he treated me. I remember on my eighteenth birthday he sat me down after dinner and slipped me a Schooner like it was a big moment, like I’d never had a beer before. I thought Schooner tasted like shit, but I never told him that.
Then he said, “Listen up. Yer a man now. And this is the biggest piece of advice I can pass on to you.” He took a big swig of beer and eyed me so I took one too. Then he leaned forward. “You ever notice that your mom ain’t the brightest lady? Huh? If you find a smart woman, get rid a her. Never marry a smart woman, John. They’ll be nothin’ but trouble. They’ll ruin ya.”
I threw the cigarette between my legs, heard it fizzle in the toilet and stood up. I grabbed a can of air freshener from under the sink and sprayed it. Sandy hated it when I smoked in the bathroom, but we shit in there and I didn’t see how smoking was any worse.
I grabbed my housecoat from the back of the door and put it on in front of the mirror. I was thirty-nine years old, Dad only sixty-one, and I’d inherited some traits. I liked to drink beer, smoke. And, as much as I hated to admit it, I looked like him. Same nose and body; well, not quite as big, but big enough. Same green eyes sunk back under my forehead, and a bum-chin too. I was even balding like he did, starting in the centre of my head, then spiralling, like the hair’s getting sucked into my skull. I hadn’t been to a doctor in God-only-knew-how-long, so maybe I only had another twenty years in me. I turned away from the mirror and headed downstairs.
In the kitchen there was a phone on the wall next to the fridge. The phone was old, but it had this gloss to it as if it’d been rubbed down before we went to bed. It made me notice the order and control of the kitchen, with everything in its place. I couldn’t figure it out. Every day almost, I’d use something that as far as I could tell just sat wherever on the counter, and then Sandy would come around behind me and put it back in its certain place.
I took a deep breath, grabbed the phone and dialled Everett’s number. It went five rings before a sleepy voice greeted me on the other end. It was Jason, Everett’s partner. He told me that my mom had called and things were worse. My brother had left for the hospital right away and was going to call me when he got there. I apologized to Jason for waking him, thanked him for the news and hung up. Everett wouldn’t have gone to the hospital unless things were really bad, like if there was no chance of Dad attacking him. They hadn’t seen each other for a bunch of years, since Dad found out he’d moved in with another guy.
I put on a pot of coffee and waited for it to brew.
Everett was trying to be a poet, and things weren’t going so good for him in that regard, but Jason was the editor of a gay monthly paper in Halifax – Gay Times, The Queer Press, something obvious like that – and Everett wrote articles for it to get by. Plus, he’d been sober for five years. So I guess he was doing all right.
The phone rang while I was pouring my second coffee. I wiped up some sugar I’d spilt on the counter while I answered it.
Everett didn’t wait a second to tell me what was going on. “Dad’s dead, John. Mom is freaking out. I can’t talk right now.” His voiced buzzed with energy.
“Wait, wait. Dad’s dead?” I felt this little pang in my chest that I wasn’t expecting.
“I have to go be with Mom. I’ll call back when things calm down. Caroline is here too, so she’ll help with things.”
“Christ. It’s over, eh? Wow.” I didn’t know what to say. He hung up and I sat down at the kitchen table with my coffee. Felt like a big goddamn tire was just plopped down on my chest then yanked right off again.
Everett was upset: his voice was unstable, and I could tell he must have been crying. And Caroline was there, which would just make things worse. Caroline, my mom’s little sister, was a total bitch. I knew right then she’d be on the phone calling everyone, taking charge, sucking in the sympathy like it was her who’d just lost her husband. And boy, did she ever hate Everett.
“God didn’t make us like that,” she once said to me about him. “It’s unnatural and a sin.”
“Whaddya mean ‘God didn’t make us like that’?” I said right back. “It works, right? It fits.” I tried to laugh it off, but this disgusted her to no end, and she gave up on me after that.
I downed another cup of coffee and started thinking about going to sleep. But when I stood up I realized that I was loaded on caffeine and my mind was spinning with the idea that my old man was dead and everything that meant. Like a funeral. I wasn’t sure I could afford to fly home for a funeral, not at the moment. And I wondered what would happen to Mom. Should me and Sandy offer for her to come live with us, or even just to visit for a vacation? I hadn’t been home or seen my mother in over three years. When I moved away, I promised I’d visit once a year. I did for the first few years.
I wasn’t doing anything spectacular back home at the time I left: working in my uncle’s shop, drinking. I’d once dated a girl for almost a year, but then I got drunk one night at a party and fooled around on her. I was just going in circles. It was Everett who told me to leave, to go check things out, live a little, then come back and think about settling; he’d already gone to university in Quebec for four years and moved back home by then. When I moved to Toronto, I wasn’t planning on staying for too long. But shit happens. I was there a year and a half when I met Sandy.
Things were just starting to even out for me and her, and we weren’t fighting so much. We had steady jobs and we’d bought a house out in Scarborough, close enough to Toronto and big enough on its own that we got everything we needed and more. My work was starting to come together too. A mechanic by trade, I’d found it hard to get steady work. So when I first moved, I got into doing a lot of bodywork, repair, painting and stuff, and I turned out to be pretty good at it. I became the go-to kill-it-and-fill-it guy at the shop because I was good at working out dents. I had a particular knack for sheet metal lowering: taking out high spots created by dents, working them down, filling them and smoothing them out. Sometimes I missed working on the inside of cars, but there was just something about working on bodies. Everett says it’s more artistic. I don’t know about that, but there is something nice about being able to see your work when it’s done. When a car drives out of the shop and there it is: freshly painted, that dent beat out of existence. Glistening. Engines can go long before bodies start to fall apart, and they got a mind of their own; all you can do is tinker around with them. Bodies though, they need us.
When I first moved to Toronto, I lived in Etobicoke, Rexdale actually, on the other side of the city. My buddy Derek and me had taken to this little pub near our place. We didn’t have much else to do with our time and money and spent a lot of it there drinking beer and playing pool. It was a dingy little shithole, but comfortable and full of regulars like us.
When Sandy and her coworkers showed up one night, they stood out. I didn’t even notice Sandy at first. She was regular looking: reddish-brown hair that she kept long, and she had these gl
ittery green eyes. I don’t know how to explain it, but you could tell by her eyes that she loved to talk. And her body was about average, maybe a little on the full side, but I liked that in a woman. Someone who wouldn’t spend all her time worrying about how she looked in this pair of jeans, or whether she could wear this particular sweater or did it make her look too fat.
So I didn’t really notice her until she and one of the other girls came over to me and Derek and asked to play a game of pool. I got partnered up with the other girl, Dawn.
“This is the leftovers of a staff party,” she told me. “Us girls thought we’d go out for a little female bonding.” We learned that they were all working at a security company’s call centre in a nearby industrial park.
After Dawn made her first awful shot, we started joking that they needed a little manly advice. Derek got behind Sandy, who was playing right along, had one hand wrapped around her body, showing her how to square-up. The other rested on her lead arm to show her how to aim. She crammed a ball in the corner, across a helluva lot of green, and left the white perfect for her next shot.
“Gee, I guess I must be a natural,” she said and went on to sink a whack of balls. That’s when I really noticed her. You couldn’t help but notice the way she moved around the table with that stick in her hand. She held a cue like it was nothing, just a part of her arm. And even to this day she is never more comfortable than when she’s around a table.
I had no intention of taking Sandy or anyone home that night, but that’s just the way it happened. We got to talking in the bar after everyone left, or she got to talking, I just listened mostly. Managed to get in a little about Nova Scotia, which she had never visited. I found out she played in pool leagues around Toronto, and won the odd tournament too. She told me about growing up in Northern Manitoba and her family and how she’d moved to Toronto to go to school and fell in love with it. She’d never left, nor had any intention of leaving.