Double Talk

by Patrick Warner

  “Well, he made it!” shouted Wallace from behind me.

  “And you made it too,” called back a heavy-set man with a bizarre looking moustache. “We thought the RNC would have you for impaired.” His voice was droll and world weary.

  “Welcome! Welcome!” said a slight man, his voice so deep that it almost sounded as if it had passed through a synthesizer, the kind kidnappers use to disguise their voices. He wore gold chains around his neck, and a rug of dark hair curled over the neckline of his white singlet. He had on tight acid-washed jeans with a button-up fly that emphasised his crotch region. A large bunch of keys dangled from a clip at his waist. His hair was cut very short and he sported a pencil moustache. “I’m Fabian,” he said. “But you can call me Fab, as in fab-u-lous.” The other men rolled their eyes.

  “More like flab,” said the man who looked like Rock Hudson.

  “Gosh, where are my manners?” said Fabian. “Introductions! This is Darcy,” he said, pointing to the guy who wore a handlebar moustache waxed to a curl at both ends. Darcy nodded his head.

  “That saucy one there,” he said, gesturing to Rock Hudson, “that’s Ian. Ian is in the same dental practice as Wallace.”

  “Nice to meet you, Bri-an,” said Ian, drawing out the first syllable of my name and batting his eyes at me. I was a little bit taken aback. Growing up, I had been known to everyone in Bridgetown by a hated nick-name: Baby. I had for as long as I remembered dreamed of a world where people would call me by my real name: Brian. But the effect of being addressed like that was not what I expected. The name entered my ear and made me feel dizzy. That one syllable felt as big and empty as the house I was standing in. Instantly, I felt like an impostor.

  “And this is Geoff. Wallace’s partner.”

  Did he mean dental practice partner or partner-partner? I wondered, but felt too shy to ask.

  “Hello, Brian,” said Geoff, in what I recognized as a Glaswegian working-class accent. When he stood up he seemed to fill the room. My hand disappeared inside his huge freckled hand. He had an Afro of red-blond hair and a very pink complexion. His nose looked like it had been broken a half-dozen times. The most noticeable thing about him, though, was how sad he seemed. His eyes were misty and had dark circles under them. Where the others had empty glasses and bottles in front of them, his place at the table had only a coffee cup and a crystal ashtray jam-packed with cigarette butts.

  It suddenly felt cool to feel cool about Uncle Wallace being gay. It meant I was that much more grown up, that I had been let in on another one of life’s big secrets. This must have been what my mother meant when she said that life in Ireland had not been easy for her brother. I didn’t know whether to feel betrayed by her or not. My mother and I were close: she told me everything, or so I had thought. Perhaps she wasn’t sure herself. Maybe Wallace was gay but not gay, the way the owner of Bridgetown’s best shoe shop and the manager of Bridgetown’s Unisex salon and the art teacher at Bridgetown’s convent school were gay: everyone knew it, but no one said it.

  Fabian offered me a beer, and this, too, was a thrill. I had only ever drunk beer once before. I looked to Wallace for his permission. He just shrugged his shoulders. “Oh my,” growled Fabian. “My son, sure, most of us did all our serious drinking before we were nineteen. Sure, we’re all Irish here, me fine laddio.” He handed me a brown stubby bottle that said Blue Star. I took a big swig and tried not to show how much I hated the taste.

  They asked me about my journey, and, for some reason, I started to tell them about the carpenter I had met on the flight to Boston. I then told them about the bureaucratic snafu that allowed me to buy two bottles of duty-free spirits at Shannon Airport, but allowed me to bring only one into the United States. I described the customs officer: a big ham-faced Yank with a shock of white hair, his neck flesh hanging over his shirt collar. I told them how he had examined my ticket and when he saw that I was travelling on to Canada the next day said, “So, you’re bringing these bottles with you to NewFOUNDland?”

  “No. They’re a gift for the man I’m staying with tonight in Boston.”

  “So, you’re bringing these bottles with you to NewFOUNDland?”

  I thought he was a bit hard of hearing, so I repeated myself. “No. They’re a gift for the man I’m staying with tonight in Boston.”

  He started to laugh. “Okay, kid,” he said. “Let me try it one more time. So you’re bringing these bottles with you to NewFOUNDland?” He gave me a bulldog stare.

  “Oh, yes!” The penny dropped. “I am.”

  “Oh, yes. What?”

  “I’m bringing these bottles with me to Newfoundland.”

  “Next,” he said, and hit my passport with a stamper that made a sound like a Winchester rifle being loaded.

  This prompted Fabian to tell a story about his good friend Broderick O’Brien who was once caught in a similar dilemma when returning to New York from the Old Country and whose solution was to pull up a chair and polish off one bottle of whiskey before he passed through customs.

  “It wasn’t O’Brien. It was Declan Dillon,” said Geoff.

  “No. I’m certain it was Broderick.”

  “It was DD,” said Ian, rolling his eyes again.

  Someone offered me a second bottle of beer. I was starting to feel very relaxed. There I was, seventeen years old, a thousand miles from home, drinking beer with a bunch of queers and not feeling at all out of my element. I was a long way from Bridgetown. “Call me Baby,” I wanted to say, each time I was addressed as Brian. And then I noticed a smell like black tea burning, like when you drop a teabag on a hot stove ring.

  “What’s the awful stink?” I asked. They all laughed.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “It’s weed,” said Wallace.

  “Can I try some?”

  “Have you ever smoked it before?”

  “No.”

  Wallace hesitated.

  “Oh give the kid a draw,” said Ian. “It’s not like he’s not going to encounter it everywhere, anyway.” I was grateful to Ian, but at the same time I didn’t like the way he called me kid. Wallace passed me the joint.

  “Don’t tell your mother I let you smoke dope, okay?”

  The joint was very small and thin, nothing like the kind you saw Rasta men smoking on television. I took a few inhales as they had done, making the appropriate choo-choo sounds and holding the smoke deep in my lungs. It tasted sickly.

  “So you stayed with who-was-it-again in Boston?” asked Wallace.

  “Frank Dowd,” I said.

  “I don’t remember a Frank Dowd.”

  “He was someone my father used to drive with back in the war, when they used to haul timber.” Suddenly I had the urge to tell the story my father used to tell me about Frank. It was not like me to want to tell stories. Also, for some reason, I felt compelled — perhaps for Wallace’s benefit — to tell it exactly as my father would have told it.

  “I remember one night we were carrying a load of pit props from Wexford to Navan,” I began. “I had a helper with me that day: Frank Dowd. A nice fella, Frank, but awful excitable. Bleb, some of the lads called him because he had this long beak nose and when it was cold he always had a drop of clear snot on the tip of it. We’d been on the road all day. McClusky’s, the crowd we were hauling timber for, had some awful junk heaps on the road. They didn’t give a tuppenny damn for the drivers. It was all piece work at that time, too, so every delay cost us. The lorry had broken down outside Enniscorthy that morning and we had to spend half the day waiting for them to come with the part to fix it. It was past midnight when we arrived at a boarding a house I knew about. The landlady, God bless her, Mrs. Gerraghty, I remember she stuck her head out the top window and said she had no bed for us unless we would share a double bed with another driver who was there for the night. We said we didn’t mind if he didn’t mind. ‘He won’t mind,’ she said, ‘because he’s already in the bed and sound asleep. He’s a famous sleeper.’ So we went up anywa
y and there was your man in the bed and we got in one on either side of him. Well, we were no sooner in than didn’t he start up snoring. Oh Mother of God, you should have heard him. I can still see him with his head thrown back and his mouth wide open. A lawn mower had nothing on him. No exaggeration now, but he made the glass rattle in the windows. I’m not kidding you. We tried everything. We slept with pillows over our ears. We poked at him and prodded at him and he’d stop for a while but then start up again, just as we were drifting off to sleep. It was cruel altogether. I suppose, after hours of tossing and turning and listening to your man, Frank decided he’d had enough. I must have drifted off because the next thing you know I felt someone standing up on the bed. I looked up and there was Frank above, squinting like he was taking aim. And the next thing you know, didn’t he piss down into your man’s open mouth! Well, bucko woke up with such a start. ‘Jeethes. Jeethes,’ he said. He had some kind of lisp or an accent. ‘Now, ya bastard,’ shouted Frank. ‘That’ll put a stop to you!’ And of course the man had no idea who we were. Well, I’ll tell you we took off out of there like a shot. It was a shocking thing to do really, when you think about it.”

  They were all buckled over laughing on the other side of the table, Fabian wheezing like a faulty car ignition. I was a hit. And then right at the high point, so to speak, I felt cold fingers creeping through my body and my brain. My hands and feet were icy cold. My mouth was dry. My prick felt both shrivelled and hard, like some kind of parody of an erection. A shock of fear and nervousness rolled through me and something else that I didn’t have a name for. I was suddenly afraid that my father’s story about Frank Dowd pissing in your man’s mouth would be taken the wrong way, that they would think I was trying to make fun of them. “Jeethes. Jeethes,” what had I said? And what had I said only a few minutes before about the fat customs officer? Darcy must surely have thought I was taking the piss out of him. I suddenly couldn’t look him in the eye. He seemed like a monster with that ridiculous handlebar moustache, like an aging extra from Gunga Din.

  And then doubleness struck me with deadly force. Where was I? What was I doing away from everyone and everything I had known? I was neither here nor there. And who was I to make fun of Frank Dowd who had been kind enough to put me — a complete stranger — up for the night? Frank and his wife Consuelo in that fine bungalow on the outskirts of Boston. Who’d have thought Frank would have married a Nicaraguan? Frank, whose fifteen-year-old daughter — a redhead with deeply tanned skin — had given up her own bed for me. And how I had slept that night, surrounded by Barbie dolls and pictures of Bruce Springsteen, until I dreamed Frank’s daughter crawled into bed beside me and began raking my thighs and my belly with long white fingernails. I woke up in a pool of spunk. It was my best wet dream ever. In no time, however, I went from the high of that pleasure to the shame of realizing that I had inked a map of Mayo on Frank Dowd’s daughter’s crisp lemon sheets, a stain that she would surely discover. I could barely look at her or Frank or Consuelo the next morning. And even as the plane lifted off from Logan Airport and I knew I was safe, all I could think was: Boston, a town in which I will be forever known as a pervert.

  II

  Violet Budd

  Violet Budd both loves and hates her mother. In the months leading up to her wedding, she mostly hates her. Violet knows this is immature. She wants to get over it, but can’t. Her life since her teen years has been a fantasy in which she walks away from her family forever. But guilt keeps pulling her back in, guilt and some kind of socially constructed impulse to be nice.

  Their wedding fight happens on the second day of Violet’s “cutting-them-off-at-the-pass” trip home, as Brian will later call it. Violet and her mother are in the kitchen. Mother and daughter are trawling for just the right approach to the thorny subject of Violet’s impending nuptials. More precisely, Violet’s mother is going through French cuisine recipes. She is beginning to unfold her vision for the ceremony. It is to be formal: black tie for the men, white tux for Brian. Violet cackles, internally. The wedding dress will be a taffeta and satin strapless gown with embroidery and cinched waist detail. Beading tucked into the skirt pickups and continuing onto the chapel-length train, the gown will be pearl white with a silver trim. Violet suspects that her mother has either studied the dress in a catalogue or spoken with a designer. The reception will be held in a marquee in the back garden of her parents’ house — the bougainvillea along the terrace will be in full bloom. Catering can be by none other than Algernon. Violet’s mother sets a cap of four hundred and fifty guests; Violet imagines her mother imagining them twittering like birds and sipping from bottomless fonts of sparkling wine. Her mother drops tantalizing hints of a tropical, all-expense-paid honeymoon. But then she goes too far, pulling out a stack of Bridezilla magazines from under the counter, a sure sign they are about to get into the nitty-gritty. Violet experiences an overwhelming urge of put her foot down and decides to act on it. She doesn’t care if her mother has made non-refundable bookings of some or all the things she has just mentioned.

  Violet places her hand over her mother’s hand. She tells her, as gently as she can, that she will under no circumstance agree to that kind of wedding.

  Uncharacteristically, her mother begins to cry. Violet can’t ever remember seeing her cry more than a few crocodile tears before, and notices — to her horror — that they weep in the same way: silently at first, the only indication being a slight up and down movement of the shoulders. Violet begins to panic. Later she tells Brian that she might have caved in on the spot had not her father — always a bit of a snoop — entered the kitchen at a fast hobble, his lumbago obviously acting up again.

  “Goddamn it, Violet, do you always have to be such a selfish pipsqueak? What’s wrong with you? What the hell is the matter with you?”

  She turns and glares at him. His hands are straight down by his sides, fists clenched. His forehead is one massive frown, a landslide that half buries his eyebrows. His eyes bulge. His mouth hangs open a little, his bottom lip dangling ever so slightly. More a polyp than a lip, Violet thinks, and tries not to imagine what it would be like to have to kiss it. She feels instant sympathy for her mother.

  “Can’t you see that your mother just wants to be involved? Is it too much to ask that you accommodate her just this once?”

  With consummate skill he taps into the familial well of guilt. Violet feels ashamed. But that is soon overwhelmed by an anger that draws on years of resentment: years of having to watch him eat, chewing with his mouth open (he only did this at home, never when they were out); years of having to watch him walk around at the cabin in his long johns, and worse, squatting in his long johns when he built the fire, his little ball-sac clearly outlined in waffle weave; and how can she forget the way he teased her about her fly-bite boobs when she was a teen; the way he always smelled of whiskey in the morning, even when her friends were over; the way he always rushed out to buy the latest household gadget on the market so he could show it off to friends and neighbours — and all of it just a pretext for his blowhard talk.

  “You know there are plenty of kids out there who would love to have had your opportunities …”

  He reels off his indictments in his best Upper Canada College accent, his vowels drawled, the final syllable of each line dragged out. Violet thinks he is pretty convincing. Not many people would know that he grew up impoverished on a farm near Duncan. She knows that if it had not been for the war, he probably would never have escaped his origins. He would not have gone on to become a front-page lawyer. Violet believes all public reputations are a sham.

  The same old bluffer, she thinks. His face is red, as if he has been drinking. A hank of grey hair, yellowed from years of smoking, hangs down across his forehead. Stripped of his expensive suits, she knows he would not look out of place salting a tray of draft beer at the Legion. Violet guesses what’s coming next and decides not to wait for it.

  “Oh here we go again with the I-grew-up-so-poor story.
You’re like that Monty Python sketch — we lived in a shoebox in the middle of the road. Boo-hoo. Poor you. But it’s not funny, Dad. And it doesn’t give you the right to put us through what you’ve put us through. It doesn’t give you the right to bully us. God, do you have any idea what it was like growing up in this house? Do you? Having to put up with your moods. Walking on eggshells because you had a big case coming up. Because you had a hangover. Give me a break.”

  Always the favourite daughter, the one who can speak her mind and get away with it, Violet assumes her bile will stop him in his tracks. So she can hardly believe it when he grips her arms and backs her slowly up against the fridge door. She hears the rattle of condiment jars and the slosh of water inside the gallon plastic jug. The thought that she has finally gone too far is establishing itself in direct proportion to the increasing pain in her upper arms. This is not violence, she thinks. His face close to hers, she notices that his eyes, once described as steely grey in Macleans, are now the colour of slush. His nose and cheeks are filigreed with purple and red-wine coloured capillaries. His trademark satin cravat has billowed up under his neck like a mating bullfrog’s vocal sack. Bluffer, she thinks, staring back at him with all the hatred she can muster. She will not admit to being afraid.

  “Dad, you’re hurting me.”

  “Harold. Please. That’s enough,” her mother says, approaching slowly from behind and touching him gently on the shoulder. “Harold, please.”

  He squeezes harder for a second, then, relinquishing his grip, turns and walks out of the kitchen.

  She pulls “a Violet,” as it’s known in her family. She packs her bag and leaves without saying goodbye. She is still angry when she arrives back in St. John’s a day later. She finds Brian sitting in the dark, playing solitaire on the computer.