The Antagonist

by Lynn Coady

  Well hello, she said to me.

  This, I thought. This is the kind of woman you attract now, hotshot. This is where you find yourself at twenty-six.

  I just saw you sitting here all hunched over, she explained, and I thought you looked a little abject.

  Ab-ject, she pronounced it. It was jaunty, her pronunciation; it made me smile. Abject was not the kind of word I heard a lot of lately, even as an obsessive player of bar trivia — my single intellectual pursuit.

  She smiled back. Her lipstick was bright pink — a shade you might see on twelve-year-old girls in plastic barrettes. Her hair, like her lipstick, was frosted, sprouting stiffly from her scalp in aggressively gelled tufts.

  She liked gold, the fat lady. Her wrists jangled with bangles. Her earlobes drooped with hoops.

  She was wearing a velour purple hoodie, the luxuriant and authoritative colour of Monsignor’s robes.

  The overall effect was queenlike.

  I’m Beth, said the fat lady.

  I’m Rank, I said.

  You are most certainly not rank, replied Beth, folding her hands (the mere act of which caused an unholy racket of jangling bracelets). I’m sitting right across from you. I should know.

  A thin, frosted smile.

  She was quick, the fat lady. Most people just frowned and asked me to repeat myself a couple of times when I told them my name.

  Ha ha, I said, to show Beth my appreciation.

  Now tell me your name, insisted Beth.

  I’m Rank, Beth. Rank is my name.

  Rank is not your name.

  She lowered her head as if peering at me over glasses. But she wasn’t wearing glasses. I shrugged: What do you want? It’s my name. But she continued to peer like a schoolmarm waiting for a math lesson to sink in. This was an very odd mode of flirtation.

  Gordon, I said at last.

  Her face expanded — beyond even its current expanse — in a beatific smile. She spread her hands and her bracelets clattered, sliding down her thick wrists.

  Now, see? said Beth. That’s a perfectly lovely name.

  Oh what the hell, I thought, draining my rye. Let’s have sex with the middle-aged fat lady. It’ll be freaky. It’ll be one for the books.

  Can I buy you a drink? I asked, waving with both hands at the bartender.

  No thank you Gordon, but that’s very kind. I didn’t come here to drink. I came here to talk to you.

  Beth. I’m flattered. You don’t even know me.

  I knew you, Gordon, the moment I saw you.

  Over at the dartboard, a couple of my buddies had been entranced by the situation from the moment Beth sat down. Every once in a while I’d shift my eyes and see them performing various obscene pantomimes for my benefit, but now that the glee had worn off, they shot me more serious, questioning looks to ask if I needed a little conversational interference run. I leaned back and gave them a no-worries wave.

  Beth glanced over her hulking shoulder when I did.

  Your friends?

  My friends, yeah. Best there are.

  You know, Gordon, I’ve only caught a glimpse of them, but I find I really doubt that.

  I’d been waving my arms at the bartender again when she said this. Now I stopped and dropped my hands onto the table.

  You know, this isn’t a criticism or anything, Beth, but you’re very direct.

  (Of course it wasn’t so much that she was so direct, but that she was so accurate. They were by no means a quality pair of friends. They were sort of thick and irritating. One of them ingested nothing but creatine shakes three times a day in an eternal obsession with “getting big,” and clearly hung out with me in the surreal hope of somehow absorbing a percentage of my body mass. The other one had a creepy obsession with World War II, collected Nazi memorabilia, and when drunk would expound upon how what we needed in this country was another “good war” against a nation of “truly evil fuckers” like the Nazis so that we wouldn’t have to feel bad about completely annihilating them. “All this country needs,” he would explain, “is someone to annihilate. We’ve never just totally annihilated anyone before, and that’s why we get no respect on the world stage.”)

  Beth multiplied her chins in a serene, fleshy nod.

  Yes I am, Gordon, she agreed. I am direct. That’s something I’ve learned to be over the years. There’s not much point wasting time being anything else.

  For all the cacophony of her appearance, Beth possessed a low, pleasant voice and the sort of gaze I can only describe as quiet. Not quiet in the sense of being subdued, but more along the lines of intensity and concentration.

  It’s sort of fascinating, I admitted.

  Has no one ever spoken to you like this before, Gordon?

  Not really. And no one ever calls me Gordon, either, so that’s weird too.

  Are you finding our conversation a bit weird?

  Yeah, quite weird actually, considering I don’t even know you.

  But like I said. I knew you the moment I saw you.

  At that moment, I stopped smiling. I didn’t like the idea of that so much. Beth’s smile dropped as if to mirror mine, but not quite in mockery.

  Did I say something to upset you, Gordon?

  My rye arrived and I wrapped my hands around it.

  I’d like to know what you meant by that, exactly, I said.

  Exactly? All right. I meant that I came in here tonight looking for someone who needed my help. Someone who was lost. And that was you.

  That was me, I repeated. I’m the lost guy.

  You are the lost guy, Gordon.

  Beth’s smile began to resurface, but mine stayed buried.

  What makes you say that? I said, looking around the bar in affront. Me? I was the lost guy? What about the guy in his seventies with hair past his shoulders who could be counted upon at least once a night to shamble across the room and start humping the jukebox? What about Lingering Steve, who stank so badly that even when he was hustled outside after only a moment in the foyer, his olfactory signature would hang in the air long into the evening? What about my loser friends, for that matter — Creatine and the Annihilator? I was no lost guy. They were the lost guys, rambling and hovering around the bar, ricocheting against the VLTs, the tables and waitresses like sluggish pinballs. Whereas I, unlike maybe 90 percent of the soused clientele, was young and fit and winning. And I kept my mind sharp playing bar trivia, was in fact the reigning tournament champion, and had taken home my share of cash prizes.

  I was, if anything in company such as this, a prince among men.

  Why do you say that about me? I demanded again of Beth.

  The fat lady leaned forward, bracelets clattering as they collapsed across the tabletop.

  Gordon, she said, you wear it. It’s on you, from top to bottom. Like a rash. Or should I say: it’s wearing you.

  Hey Beth? I said after a moment of just sitting and looking rudely around the bar, as if bored — as if to look at anyone but her. My buddies, I noticed, had long since lost interest in our unlikely tête-à-tête and returned to their game of darts. It’s been nice talking to you, I said.

  You didn’t mind talking to me, replied Beth, when you thought I was just some silly old fat lady. But now that you intuit who I am, you find yourself uneasy.

  It’s just that you’re getting a little personal.

  Yes, agreed Beth. This is getting very personal, isn’t it?

  We sat and looked at each other. I noticed then that I was feeling cold. I was feeling cold, but I was sweating. I had been about to bark, What? at Beth with her implacable gaze. But the moment that basic, belligerent question arrived in my mind, it was answered by a voice I hadn’t heard in years.

  You know what, replied Constable Hamm. We both know what.

  Gordon, said Beth. You’re perspiring, I see.

  And then I was doing more than perspiring. I was crying. I was crying in the booth with the fat lady.

  Oh, Gordon, she said. Dear.

  Who are you
? I said.

  Her braceleted arms shot forward and noisily she took my hands in hers, which I allowed. Her palms gave off heat as if fresh-baked.

  I’m an envoy, Gordon.

  Of God, I said a moment later.

  Our whole booth was shaking. Even with Beth’s weight to steady it.

  He’s here now, Gordon. You think he hasn’t been but he’s always been. All you had to do was lift your gaze.

  She closed her eyes and leaned her full mass toward my hands, the knuckles of which she kissed.

  Part Three

  23

  08/10/09, 10:58 p.m.

  RANK NO LONGER answered the phone in his dorm — even when called to it, even when it was specifically for him — because whenever he came to the phone it was always his father, and ever since he quit the hockey team, Rank and his father did not so much converse as rail at each other. And because the phone was in the hallway (Rank’s school was old-school — it would be another year until phones were installed in individual student rooms), his dorm-mates would often congregate when these calls took place in the shared anticipation of seeing Rank completely lose his shit.

  It wasn’t that Gordon Sr. was angry at Rank for having quit the hockey team. Indeed, he lauded his son’s decision. He thought it was the finest thing a boy could do.

  “Just like your old man!” he’d crowed at the news. “Don’t take any crap from no one! You march to your own drummer, Gordie, and that’s a fine thing.”

  “Yeah well I probably marched myself right out of an education if I can’t pay tuition next semester.”

  Rank had said this a) because it was true but, also b) out of a vague, fantastical hope that somewhere Gord might have a cache of money tucked aside for precisely such a rainy day as this.

  Gord, however, had other ideas altogether. “Forget it, son,” he said. “And come on home.”

  “Come on home?” repeated Rank. “That’s what you want me to do?”

  “Come on home, live rent-free for a year, earn some money. You can always go back to school after a year.”

  “What am I gonna do?” demanded Rank. “You want me to work at SeaFare?” He could feel his grip on the receiver tightening and gaining heat in anticipation of what his father was about to suggest.

  “Come on back to the ID! I’ll make you assistant manager. Nice pay bump for ya. Shelly’s not working out anyhow, keeps having to run home to her consumptive crew a kids. One of them down with the flu every other day.”

  Even when Rank returned home for summer vacation after his first year, he hadn’t gone back to the Dream. He opted for a government grant requiring him to mow the lawns of every municipal building in town and, when all the lawns were mowed, walk up one side of the highway and down the other picking garbage.

  “You want me to work at the Icy Dream. This is what you’re suggesting to me.”

  “Oh for the love of Jesus, Gordie, it’s a job. What’s past is past. When are you gonna put all that shit behind you?”

  “All that shit,” repeated Rank.

  “Well I can see where this is going. I can see there’s no talking to you about this, as per usual.”

  At which point Rank began to shout into the phone, and the phone immediately began to shout back. Which sounds bad, but actually was good, because it attracted enough of a crowd that when Rank commenced his eventual attempt to wrestle the unit from the wall, enough guys were present to dissuade him.

  End-of-term exams were looming in the distance, radiating menace, like Dracula’s castle. Rank had no idea what to do about them. Why write exams when he was about to get kicked out on his ass? Wouldn’t it just be adding insult to injury? Then there was the question of Christmas break. Gord had kept asking, between bellows, sometimes via bellows, when the Jesus was Rank coming home for Christmas? Ivor, meanwhile, wanted to know if Rank would be around throughout the holidays. Lorna, he said, had kids and was looking to take some time off from behind the bar. If he could come a couple of extra nights over the next two weeks, she would train him, and he’d get a percentage of her tips.

  Having embarrassed himself in the dorm, Rank started pinballing in earnest back and forth between the Temple and Goldfinger’s. Often at two in the morning after his shift he’d head straight to the unlaundered squalor of Wade and Kyle’s crash pad as opposed to going home. Still, undergrads gossiped worse than bridge-playing grannies, and word spread fast about what he tried to do to the payphone. Wade made fun of him for it.

  “What the fuck, dude? Were you drunk or something?”

  “No,” said Rank. “Just my dad on the other end. Pissing me off.”

  “I can’t picture it,” said Wade. “You get crazy, but you don’t usually get violent and shit.”

  Kyle and Adam traded a look then that was not as surreptitious as they probably thought.

  Rank’s emotional spectrum during this time ranged from panic to anger to drunkenness to boredom (and yes, drunkenness can be described as an emotion in this instance, considering Rank experienced so much of it). First, there would be the panic of the realization that he was expected to write exams and papers by end of term. Then, the anger quick on the heels of this, knowing there was no point to worrying about his academic obligations since he would not be able to continue next semester anyway, swiftly followed by the drunkenness he used to alleviate both these sensations. The emotion of drunkenness, if Rank had to write a paper or an exam on it, say, could be described thusly: it was similar to relief. It was similar to the sensation of kicking back in front of the TV on a Sunday morning and letting Jimmy Swaggart experience fear of the Lord on your behalf. Watching some other guy rail and blubber and holler in love and terror as you stay calm and feel somehow edified by proxy. It was similar to relaxation — in the same way TV is similar to real life. It allowed you to delude yourself, to pretend and then forget that you’re pretending.

  And then boredom. It turned out that if you spent a lot of time inducing the emotion of drunkenness, the emotion of boredom would station itself just around the corner, just on the other side of sobriety, and wait — not to pounce, exactly, boredom wasn’t an emotion that pounced — but to sort of collapse against you and hang on, like a girl at a party late at night.

  Speaking of girls and speaking of parties and speaking of boredom: the night before had been Kyle and Wade’s Christmas hoedown (on campus, holiday parties inevitably took place in early December, since everyone but Rank would be heading home to their loving, gingerbread-scented nuclear families by mid-month). So Rank had experienced the party and the sloshed, clinging girl the night before, and presently, standing aching in the Temple’s annihilated kitchen as he squints at the inside of the fridge, Rank is experiencing the boredom full-throttle. He is a bit worried about the boredom. The boredom has taken on a kind of desperate intensity of late. The boredom seems to be the only thing waiting for him these days on the other side of drunkenness. Even panic and anger have retreated as if in deference to boredom’s sudden domination. Rank has never experienced a boredom like this before. This boredom has edge; it has teeth. It’s like waking up every morning to discover the colour has been sucked out of the world, and finding this insufferable, but also not having the energy to do anything about it except sink angrily down into the grey.

  Rank is the only person awake, and ready to die of thirst. His insides throb and shudder. He’s wishing there were some way of removing his entire nervous system and sending it out to be laundered. The kitchen’s overhead bulb hangs bare and unspeakably bright. It is nine o’clock in the morning. It is disgusting to be awake at nine o’clock in his state. Nobody should be awake at nine o’clock in the morning under such harsh light. He feels exposed, like a beetle. He has stuck his head under the kitchen sink tap and drunk a few gallons of water because there are no clean glasses anywhere in sight. Now he is looking for orange juice. He feels he could use a little vitamin C. There is a carton in the back, which he grabs and drinks from, discovering too late that it is mo
stly vodka.

  Adam enters the kitchen to find Rank retching gallons of water into the sink. He announces himself with a sigh.

  “Hey man,” glugs Rank, glancing up.

  “Paris,” says Adam, “in the twenties.”

  Rank holds on to either side of the sink and wonders, not for the first time, what the quip is actually supposed to mean and why they all find it so uproarious. Paris, okay. Land of elegance and cheese and, well, the French. Real French, not Canadian French, not hip-wader, goose-squashing chalice-of-the-tabernacle French. French perfume French. French bakery French.

  But what about the twenties? Rank knows nothing about the twenties. He racks his brain, hunched over the sink. Flappers. Titless women dancing the Charleston. He doesn’t fucking know. What is he doing here, with guys like these? He is a hulking, heaving hick. He is good at drinking, and lifting his fellow man over his head, and throwing up. Also, destroying lives. That’s why the not-so-good Lord placed him on this earth.

  Rank straightens up. “Sorry.” He wipes his mouth on his bare arm. “That was gross.”

  “No problem,” says Adam. “I just came to get some juice.”

  “Don’t drink the OJ,” advises Rank. “It’s all vodka.”

  Rank runs the tap to clean out the sink, grateful he had hardly eaten anything the night before.

  “No chunks,” he remarks to Adam.

  “Nice,” says Adam, pulling an unopened two-litre bottle of cola from the fridge.

  Rank watches as Adam slowly unscrews the cap, careful not to let the carbonation out in one fizzy spew. All at once he remembers they had sex with the same person the night before, a girl named, Rank is pretty sure, Jennifer. Yes, because she said she spelled it with a V. He remembers now. He remembers laughing and saying, You do not. No one spells Jennifer with a V. And she pretending to be miffed, going, That’s how it’s spelled. You made it up, insisted Rank. You made up this lame spelling because you wanted to be different and special. It’s on my fucking driver’s licence, replied Jennifer. You want me to show you? And then Rank recalls being a little chastened. He has met people with names like Zoltan and Paco and Mercedes since arriving at school and it didn’t take long for him to realize that his knee-jerk urge to laugh in these people’s faces when they introduced themselves did not make him the most sophisticated of men.