The Antagonist

by Lynn Coady

  Anyway: Jenniver drank like a linebacker. She had been all about the Jell-O shots the night before — had an endless repertoire of shooter-based games she insisted everyone play. Afterwards, Rank had found himself fiddling with her wiry black hair as they slouched side by side on the couch, twirling the curls around his finger, to which they clung as if having been cultivated for this very purpose. And then he and Jenniver stumbled into the crash pad and had the kind of sex that Rank can barely remember. He mostly recollects trying to stuff both her boobs in his mouth and a distant gratitude that he’d been able to get it up. And Jenniver leaving to pee every five minutes. And then taking a long time to come back — in fact not coming back. At which point it was about four in the morning. And Rank, on the verge of passing out, suddenly brought around by an image of Jenniver lying on her back in the bathroom bubbling vomit through her nose. So getting up to check on her. And Wade passed out on the couch. But noises coming from Wade’s room. And, after finding the bathroom empty, going to see what those noises were.

  So. That had been awkward.

  Now Rank and Adam blink and wince and each other at 9 a.m. in the Temple’s kitchen with its screaming white overhead bulb practically bleaching them out of existence. Rank is only wearing shorts and Adam only jeans and they face each other bare-chested like boxers.

  “Hey,” says Rank, leaning against the counter. “I get that we’re being ironic when we say it — I understand that much. But what was supposed to be so great about Paris in the twenties anyway? I mean in all seriousness.”

  Adam takes a swig of cola, but the carbonation invades his nasal passages so he ends up having to spit it into the unfortunate sink.

  “Ernest Hemingway,” he says once he has recovered.

  “Hemingway? That’s it?”

  “Well, you know. Paris. Everything Paris implies.”

  “Yeah, yeah. But what about the whole twenties thing. Why is that a big deal?”

  Adam takes another, more careful swig, thinking about it.

  Eventually he shrugs.

  “You don’t know?” says Rank, delighted.

  “Why am I supposed to know?” says Adam.

  “Because,” says Rank. “What’s the point of having guys like you around if you don’t know that stuff?”

  Adam blinks at him a few more times, trying to gauge the atmosphere. It’s tricky, because everything is slightly off. The fact that it is nine o’clock in the morning, the fact of the operating-room light bulb overhead, the fact that they are half naked and semi-crippled by hangovers, the fact that they just had sex with the same girl, the fact that they haven’t had a real conversation since the night Rank delivered to Adam his grotesque confession.

  And, needless to say, Rank has insulted and ridden his friend Adam many times in the past — for being pretentious, for being fruity, for being slight of frame, for wearing glasses, for being overly interested in school, for doing poorly with the opposite sex. Yes, this is standard operating procedure as far as their friendship goes. But there was something in Rank’s tone just now — what’s the point of guys like you? — that can’t be ignored. Rank is ready to deny it, but he knows it was there as well as Adam does. He’d been helpless to suppress it. It had something to do with this new, improved version of boredom he’s been experiencing of late: the edgy boredom, the boredom that doesn’t seem to give a fuck one way or another.

  “I’m going back to bed,” says Adam, turning.

  “Hey!” calls Rank. “Is Jennifer with a V still around? You finished with her yet?”

  It has to be understood at this point that Adam is entirely the kind of guy who would wave a dismissive hand — or finger — at this comment and continue on his way back to bed. Adam is a high-road kind of guy, the object of macho taunts and tough-guy jeers his entire life, one can only assume. So this kind of remark could typically be counted upon to bounce right off him for the most part.

  Rank, therefore, is surprised to see him stop and turn back.

  “If you’re pissed off at me,” says Adam, “just say it.”

  “What,” says Rank. “Share and share alike, right?”

  “She was completely shitfaced, Rank.”

  “So you figured the gentlemanly thing to do . . .”

  “A woman climbs on top of me in the middle of the night . . .”

  “Look I’m saying I don’t care, man.”

  “Okay, fine. And I’m just saying, if you do care I’d like you to tell me now because I’d rather not end up getting shoved across the room like Kyle some night when you’re pissed out of your head.”

  Rank pauses to grind his molars. He’s at a loss for words due to the fact that his feelings are hurt. He certainly didn’t shove Kyle across the room. He knocked him off balance a little, yes. It was barely a shove at all — it was more of a gesture of aggression than an act. He is hurt that Adam could consider it otherwise, that Adam would portray his friend Rank as some kind of ongoing threat.

  “Maybe,” says Adam, after Rank’s silence has entrenched itself, “you shouldn’t hang around here so much right now, you know? It’s almost exam time and you seem kind of out of control.”

  “I have nowhere to go,” says Rank.

  “Like . . . go to the library or something.”

  Rank snorts so that Adam won’t notice him shudder. There’s no way to explain that the library is haunted for him now. T.S. Eliot lies in wait, crouched somewhere behind the stacks with a protective arm around his unfortunate friend Croft — still weeping angelically, still bleeding from the ears.

  “Go to bed Adam,” says Rank. “Nighty-night.”

  Instead, Adam takes a step closer and scratches his scalp in such a way to make his already preposterous bed-head even more mad-scientist than what he walked into the kitchen with. He now looks like he’s stepped out of a wind tunnel.

  “Are you going home for Christmas?” Adam wants to know.

  “No. I’m gonna work through the holidays. Make some money.”

  Which, he knows, is stupid. What he’ll make over December working at Goldfinger’s, even behind the bar, won’t be anywhere near enough to cover his tuition next semester. At the same time, he doesn’t have to worry about his living expenses, because he’d paid for the room and meal plan in advance at the beginning of the year. So really, there is no compelling reason whatsoever to work at Goldfinger’s over Christmas break. And there is no good reason for him to stay on campus by himself in an empty dormitory over the holidays, with no one but a handful of lonely, language-challenged Chinese and Middle Eastern students to keep him company. He is just being perverse, and Adam seems to know it.

  “You could come to my house,” suggests Adam, and Rank realizes something all of a sudden. The reason Adam looks so squinty and diminished this morning. It’s not the hangover, or the glaring overhead bulb.

  He’s not wearing his glasses, is the thing.

  “My folks are only three hours away,” he adds. “I’m taking off next week.”

  Right, Adam’s “folks.” Adam’s folks, who are divorced, but still “friends.” Still friends. As if marriage and friendship are of the horse and carriage variety. Imagine having “folks,” and they are “friends”: chucking each other on the shoulder, getting together in bars to shoot some pool. Rank opens up the fridge again and sticks his head inside because he doesn’t want Adam to see his face. He has to appear to be looking for something, so he grabs the bottle of cola.

  “I told you, man,” he says, staring down at the cap as he unscrews it. “I gotta work.”

  Some of us, he wants to say, don’t have “folks” waiting three hours away. Some of us have tiny screaming lunatics instead, waiting in an empty house with a fresh-dead mother congesting every room.

  Adam is just standing there and even though Rank has already unscrewed the cap he finds he is too sickened to drink. He stares at the bottle in his hands. If Adam doesn’t go back to bed soon, Rank is going to say something shitty to him. He can feel it
creeping up his esophagus and filling his throat with sour. Something irrevocable.

  24

  08/11/09, 9:35 p.m.

  ONE BIG BLOWOUT BEFORE they go their separate ways for Christmas, Kyle insists. Just the four of them. The Boys. The Overseers of the Temple. Kyle is a young man of acute social instinct. It could be that he senses the group has lost cohesion in the past month or so, that the guys are not as tight as they once felt themselves to be. Kyle is not having it. Kyle, at heart, is a sentimental goof — having grown up with only sisters, he calls the other three his “brothers,” insists they’ll be together unto death. Sometimes he rhapsodizes about the four of them going into business together, assigns them each a role based on their diverse talents and gifts (Rank always seems to end up doing the heavy lifting in these scenarios), making scads of money, buying real estate, Italian suits, vacationing with their supermodel girlfriends and, eventually, once wild oats have been thoroughly sown, their children — so beautiful and gifted you’d think they’d been engineered in labs.

  Maybe Kyle intuits that these rhapsodies of his — these fantastic future scenarios he’s mapped out for the four of them — are not as heartily indulged by his compadres as once they were. It used to be the boys would join in. Wade would mostly grin and nod while trying to weave a rock star subplot into Kyle’s reverie, and Adam would shake his head and try to explain to Kyle that four guys can’t just start their own business out of the blue (“You need capital. And you need, like, an idea other than just ‘a business’”) and Rank would tell Adam to shut up and insist that they should locate their offices in Trump Tower in New York City. Or, if not Trump Tower, then directly across the street in order to draw inspiration.

  “We’ll get an idea, eventually,” Kyle always assured Adam. “An idea will come. What’s important, right now, is the concept. And the concept is us. The four of us are a winning proposition, my brothers, no matter how you slice it.”

  Except that lately when Kyle spoke this way, the only one to react with the old enthusiasm was Wade with his reliable grin and nod. Adam would look at his lap. Rank would tilt his head back and finish whatever he was drinking.

  And so the boys needed to get together before Christmas, Kyle decided. The boys needed a night on the town, just the old crew — the original four.

  “I gotta work,” said Rank.

  “I need to study,” said Adam.

  “Guys, don’t be dicks,” pleaded Kyle. “When’s everybody’s last exam?”

  Everyone but Rank already knew their schedule by heart. Rank was in the process of deciding whether or not to even write his. On the one hand, there was no point; on the other, if he didn’t, it would raise the kind of questions among his friends he wasn’t prepared to face just yet.

  Besides, what was wrong with indulging in his college life a little longer, even if it meant the hassle and needless stress of sitting down to write exams, even if he was only going through the motions at this point? After all, who knew how many weeks of higher education he had left, how long he’d be left to linger in the dorm before the university bureaucracy roused itself to inquire as to the next instalment of his tuition? Being left out of exams — leaving himself out — would, he knew, make him sad. Would be an acknowledgement. He would be nostalgic for the experience of exams all too soon — lonesome for that sense of harassed community and beleaguered fellowship.

  Truth be told, he’d already spent the past month floating around campus in a fog of pre-emptive nostalgia for this time, this place, these people. Now all that was left was to set about hardening himself against all three.

  Which would not be an easy thing to do with Kyle and his soupy talk of brotherhood growing faggier by the moment as the holidays approached.

  We’ll get it over with, thought Rank back at the dorm, dutifully tearing apart his sock-smelling berth in search of his exam schedule. Screw it: one last night out, one big blowout with the boys. Raise glasses, toast themselves, cut each other’s palms and mingle blood like kids in a clubhouse, let Kyle spin his future dreamscapes, utter vows and proclamations, bestow hugs, brand their asses Brothers of the Temple, give them all fucking pet names if he wants to. Get it over with — one final time, and then.

  And then: what?

  And then the black hole of the future that was Christmas/New Year’s ’91. The other side of which remained unfathomable to Rank.

  Lorna could not grasp the simple fact that patrons of Goldfinger’s responded differently to a bartender like Rank than they did a bartender like Lorna. She noticed how the ancient, ruined regulars — who usually liked to linger at the bar after paying for a drink, hacking up bon mots along the lines of Boys oh boys I wuz so fuckin hammered last night — tended to just mutely accept their drinks and change and shamble back to their table when dealing with Rank. It concerned her. She didn’t like to see the Goldfinger’s customer-service dynamic thrown off.

  “The regulars,” she explained to Rank, “they like to joke around, you know? Like to chat with us up here at the bar. Makes them feel they belong.”

  They like to chat up here at the bar, Rank wanted to say, because you wear that corset thing and have dyed blonde hair that you have grown down to where the cleft of your ass begins. Which I can see, by the way, emerging from your pants every time you bend even the tiniest bit forward.

  He told her, “I am always very nice to the customers.”

  “I know you are, lovey, but you’re a big fella and maybe you scare them a little.”

  “I’m as nice as I can be,” protested Rank.

  Truth be told there was nothing he was less interested in than chatting up the regulars. He didn’t find them lovable or endearing the way Lorna pretended to. They were last-stage alcoholics, ageless in their decrepitude, shaking, stinking, their shrivelled grey heads sloshing with permanently pickled brain cells, only able to make conversation on the off-chance that one such depleted cell happened to slosh against another somewhere in the depths of their cerebral brine.

  Oily ol’ fuck so I get home last night and I get outta bed to take a piss and don’t he forget he’s wearing pants! So I’m standing looking down at the toilet thinking: Where’s it goin? It’s gotta be going somewhere. Well it’s goin down my leg is where its goin! Har har hagh . . . HAUGH! Hwack hwack hagh . . hagh . . ugh. S’cuse me Lorna darlin.

  More importantly, they rarely tipped. They were drink-cagers by and large, relying on the kindness of strangers. Why indulge them? Why did Richard even let them in the place? He could readily imagine how Gordon Sr. would respond to such a customer base. But when he pointed this out to Lorna, protesting that the barflies contributed nothing but a frankly scuzzball ambiance, she shook her head.

  “You’re not here on Welfare Wednesday, lovey.” She tapped the tip jar with a turquoise fingernail. “That’s when Santa comes to town.”

  Okay, so Lorna was worried for her welfare tips. That explained it, but didn’t particularly prompt Rank to take her advice seriously. Heaven forbid he not endear himself to the pub’s incontinent habitants. Besides, he was perfectly civil — he just wasn’t a blonde in a corset who called them “lovey.” Why would the alkies stay and talk to Rank? Swap weight-room stories? Compare how much they can bench?

  It was only after Ivor approached him on the same matter that Rank started to think perhaps he did require an attitude adjustment.

  “Rich,” Ivor said, “is thinking maybe you’re not having such a good time behind the bar.”

  Rank hesitated, before responding, in a moment of startled respect for Rich. Rank scarcely ever caught a glimpse of the guy, yet somehow he had managed to attune himself to the mood of his most insignificant staff member.

  “No,” insisted Rank. “I really like it, actually.” And in fact, when the place was busy, he did. It was a million times more diverting than standing around with his arms folded scanning the crowd for violence. When things got cooking, three hours could pass in an eye-blink, Rank bouncing back and forth from the
bar to the till to the beer fridge, serving a steady stream of hoarse, happy revellers who tipped bigger and bigger as the night wore on.

  “Rich says you come off a little tense.”

  Rank did his best to clamp down on a smirk. This coming from a man so coked he practically vibrated.

  “No, you know what it is, man,” said Rank. “Exams. Stressing me out.”

  “Fuckin exams,” commiserated Ivor, nodding as if in perfect understanding, like a departmental chair.

  “You know,” continued Rank, “I should be studying, but I gotta work. I need the money for tuition next year otherwise they’ll kick me out.”

  It was weird, Rank reflected later, how in the Goldfinger’s environment he was able to articulate the worst thing going on in his life with such a casual air. Of course his excuse was more a version of the truth than the truth itself, but the fact remained he had just confessed something to Ivor that he’d spoken not a word of to his friends, or anyone other than Gordon Sr. He’d spoken it like an afterthought: otherwise they’ll kick me out.

  He’d told his friends he needed money for tuition, but that was all, and to them it was a statement so obvious as to be unremarkable. After all, they were students — everyone was living on a shoestring. If he’d said the same to Kyle, with his two professor parents at McGill, Kyle would have responded, Oh yeah, me too man, I’m so screwed for money.

  Ivor leaned, placing his bloated forearms on the bar, and then reached up to scratch his entire head, starting with either side of his chin and working his way up and back. It came across as a kind of frantic thinking ritual, so Rank politely stood and waited for it to be over.