Double Talk

by Patrick Warner

  Not that there weren’t other unforgettable images from that day. Never having been to the Waterford before, Violet and Brian made the mistake of getting off on the wrong floor. No sooner had the elevator doors slid open than they found themselves in a shabby corridor filled with a tittering, staring, counting, tapping, drooling, masturbating, howling sub-set of humanity, some of whom ran towards them clapping their hands in delight and some of whom fled from them in panic. Violet would not have believed such a scene possible in the late twentieth century. She had imagined soothing white rooms with billowing curtains, plush couches, and piped music, where the patients wore designer pyjamas and were sedated with designer drugs that didn’t so much make them bloated and befuddled as elegantly thin and existentially bemused.

  When they finally located Wallace, Brian literally took one look before he turned on his heel and ran. Even when she caught up with him by the elevator, he refused to come back. He said he would meet her across the road in the park. Violet found him there a short time later — Wallace having been rendered pharmacologically uncommunicative — sitting on a bench below the Peter Pan statue and not so much feeding the park ducks as throwing seed at them. He was trembling when she put her arms around him. “What am I going to do with him? What am I going to do?” he wanted to know.

  Violet told him not to worry. She told him that Geoff was not likely to abandon his long-time partner. She told him that they could try to visit again the next day or that they could even wait until Wallace was released, but Brian only shook his head, saying, “That’s not Wallace. That creature is not Wallace.”

  Violet awakes sometime later to the sound of glass breaking downstairs. She listens. She can hear the squeal of very loud music pouring tinnily through headphones. She knows Brian is home, after his tear. She debates whether or not to get up — she doesn’t want to encounter a drunken Frank James — but then decides she had better risk it, just in case Brian has cut himself.

  Tiptoeing downstairs and across the hardwood floor in the hallway, she peeps in through the living room’s French door to see Brian, minus shirt and shoes, dancing around with his arms above his head. He turns just as she walks into the room and looks at her in the way that very drunk people often do, as if they have just been delivered from oblivion and are still trying to get used to the strange facts of the physical world, while being at the same time caught in a dilemma: not sure if they should embrace it or strike out at it.

  “So, your presentation went well?” she says as chirpily as she can. Violet can tell from his stunned expression that he has no idea what she is talking about. His eyes are black. The only neurons still firing in his brain are those hot-wired to his groin. The next thing he is on his knees, pushing his head up under her nightgown, bucking at her like a lamb, pressing his face into her crotch and urging her, his voice both slurred and muffled, to keep dancing. She recognizes, at once, that he is playing out some vulgar fantasy, probably one he had dreamed up in a strip joint. She is no longer his wife, but merely some slut from Montreal he has slipped twenty bucks to and now expects to be rewarded with a close-up of the pink purse of her vulva.

  “Okay, big boy,” she says, pulling him up by the ears, “if we’re going to do that, it’s upstairs, now.” He grins at her and, bouncing off the door frame, makes his way to the stairs, which he mounts on hands and knees.

  Violet gets the brush and scoop and begins to clean up the remnants of the beer glass he knocked off the edge of the coffee table. She knows that by the time she goes upstairs he will be unconscious.

  Baby Power

  Time began to distort soon after I met Violet Budd, an effect intensified by a winter that, having stayed a month too long, was making its loudest argument before giving in. I was still learning that Newfoundland did not have a spring, unless you count that one hectic week at the beginning of June when all the flowers and leaf buds split open as though at the command of a starter gun.

  Time distorted. One minute I was slinking through the Student Centre trying to avoid Keppie and his gang, and the next I was sipping draft beer with Violet in a basement club off Water Street.

  One minute it was spring — March pet days coaxing people outdoors in their shirt sleeves and drawing a torrent of butterscotch and purple crocuses through puke-coloured lawns — and the next it was winter again. The snows, heavy and wet, melted within days, and yet it remained bitterly cold. If the crocuses survived, seemingly unharmed, the spring storms were far harder on people. False hope dashed gave way to rage which in turn gave way to weepiness and depression. The well-heeled fled to Florida and the Caribbean islands.

  “It just goes to show,” said Violet, “that the Newfoundlander, even after hundreds of years of living on this barren rock, is still genetically wired for an early spring.”

  Though I wanted to believe otherwise, it was false spring when Violet phoned me out of the blue and asked me if I would go out for a drink with her.

  “You mean like a date?”

  “Yes, a date.”

  “Yes. I’d love to.” That yes rolled off my tongue before I had time to second guess.

  We met in Uncle Albert’s, a murky, half-underground bar where identity was fluid — no one checked for IDs, ever. I asked her if her hometown of Victoria lived up to Victorian traditions. “Yes,” she said. “Where I live — the Uplands — is often said to be more British than Britain.” She described the city as being a little bit bigger than St. John’s. She said it was a prosperous and conservative place, so conservative that multinationals favoured it when test-marketing new products: sell there and you can sell anywhere. She said that City Council marketed Victoria as a great place to hold conventions because delegates were unlikely to show up for sessions hung-over. She talked like an anti-tourist brochure. I listened, enthralled. Exotic to me were her deep-throat vowels and her sarcastic tone, which made everything she said seem exciting. Victoria, British Columbia, to my ear had that ring of sophistication. And Violet, being from that place, seemed glamorous, too; all the more so because she tried to play it down. It was as if she were trying to distance herself from a famous sibling.

  I did my best to play it cool, banish the thought that at some point she would decide she had made a mistake, and, concocting some half-hearted excuse, walk away, leaving me there with my glass of yellow beer. But I was wrong. We stayed until closing.

  I didn’t care if it was spring or false spring. I didn’t care if Violet was real or my dream, because real was the feeling of her tongue touching mine when we kissed outside the main doors of Curtis House later on that night. Real, too, was her stale breath under a halter of hops and barley.

  Time distorted. One minute I was walking home through the frozen, dark streets of St. John’s and the next it was bright sunlight and she was buzzing me up to the residence room she shared with someone called Darlene — parting the night before, we had agreed to go for a hike, to explore Pippy Park the next day.

  One minute I was looking in my bathroom mirror desperately trying to wet down a cow-lick and the next I was knocking on a door with a punched out peep-hole. She called out that it was open.

  I entered expecting to find her tastefully dressed in expensive hiking clothes, but instead found her sitting up in bed, her legs obscured under blankets, her upper body wound in a sheet. “A change of plans,” she said, giving me her big, gap-tooth grin. Above her bed, tacked to the wall, was a giant mandala that was half-coloured in. Her hair looked damp and the room smelled faintly of apples. She looked excited and only slightly tentative, as if she had calculated that there was less than a ten percent chance that I would bolt.

  Surely I was dreaming; I had taken a story from Penthouse Forum and imagined myself into it. One minute I was standing by her single bed all tongue-tied and the next she was pulling me towards her by the waistband of my jeans. Those were not glossy, air-brushed tits, but real breasts swaying drunkenly as she struggled with my belt buckle. Sensing she wanted to be in control, I stood wit
h my hands by my sides, letting her undress me, layer by layer. I felt like a small boy being undressed by his mother.

  She said I was the only guy she had ever known who wore a T-shirt under his shirt. I had no response to that.

  When I climbed under the covers, the silk shock of her naked body was almost too much to bear. She was not shy. It seemed like only minutes before we’d been making awkward conversation in Uncle Albert’s pub, and now here she was with her hand between my legs.

  If she knew I was a virgin, she was kind enough not to let on. She let me take control, responding to my strokes with goosebumps, moaning “there” and “there” when I at last located the elusive blister, under its cowl, deep in that humid tangle of hair. But enough was enough. When I sank under blankets, a snouty pig intent on her truffle, she pulled me back up by the ears.

  “I want you inside me,” she said, retrieving a crinkling condom sachet from under her pillow. A pirate queen, she ripped it open with her teeth. And not only that, she helped me put it on, pinching the bottle-nose tip while I rolled that fine skin down to its rind.

  “I’m ready,” she said, reclining. A battering ram, the wild-haired barbarian with the keys to the town, I inched my way up the incline. Then her eyes swam — such feeling. Such comic notes, too: fingers snagging hair and belly farts interrupting our rhythm. But such a sweet rhythm when at last we found it. Until, all at once, we completely lost it.

  I expected her not to be there when I finally lifted my head from the pillow. But she was there. She looked as if she was going to cry. I asked her if she was okay. “Just fine,” she said, and cuddled in close. “You’re so beautiful.”

  “I feel beautiful.” What a stupid thing to say.

  Whether it was false spring or true, I didn’t know. As we lay in that cinder block room and looked across at Darlene’s empty bed, I knew only that I no longer felt lonely. I had broken out of my beach head and was moving steadily inland. I was going to prosper in this new country.

  Spring was the feeling that made us do it twice more that afternoon. Spring was the hunger that made us feed each other pineapple chunks from a pull-top tin. One minute she was on the phone asking me for a date and the next I was pouring pineapple juice into her belly-button, a perfect inny.

  Spring was in my step as I walked home that night through a flurry of snowflakes so fat they made a sound when they hit my anorak.

  Time began to distort soon after I met Violet Budd. One minute I was drifting off into blissful sleep and the next I was awakened by the cicada-like peal of Wallace and Geoff’s electric doorbell. I had slept a solid twelve hours.

  “Hi. I bet you’re surprised to see me.” It was Violet.

  “Yes. I mean, no. Well, yes.

  “I forgot that PCO were supposed to spray for carpenters and earwigs today. I can’t go back to residence for two days.” She was carrying a shoulder bag big enough to contain at least a change of clothes. I was rapidly trying to calculate how many times we could have sex in two days and then second guessing myself by wondering if she meant to stay with me at all. Maybe she was just dropping by on her way to somewhere else.

  “Can I come in?”

  Ten minutes later, leaving two half-finished cups of tea on the kitchen table, we raced upstairs to bed. Ten minutes after that I was ransacking Wallace and Geoff’s room for a condom, eventually finding one under their mattress. It looked old, its ring visible through the foil package. Just how old it was, I found out in the post-orgasmic swoon when, to my horror, instead of withdrawing a white-toqued sausage skin I withdrew a string of latex bunting. That explained both the faint pop I felt and the sudden intense tickle that made me come.

  “Oh Jesus, oh God, the bloody condom broke.” Visions of pregnancy, incredulous parents and a shotgun wedding flooded my brain. My life was ruined before it had even begun.

  “What are we going to do? What if you get pregnant?”

  She laughed, though not cruelly, but easily, as if it were nothing to worry about. “There’s not much chance of that. It’s not the right time of the month.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just know.” She began to twine one lovely brown curl around her index finger. Her hair had a coppery sheen where it caught the light.

  “But how do you know?” Had we entered the whiskery vale of woman lore? I thought of my mother’s pronouncements about a woman’s heart containing many secrets. A bluff if there ever was one. “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  Something flapped past the window, probably one of those gigantic gulls that sometimes alighted on the roof of the house before bad weather hit. I thought they were magnificent, with their hard yellow eyes and their tapered white necks like full milk bottles. Shit hawks, Keppie called them.

  “Look at you, worry wart.” She reached over and tousled my hair.

  “I can’t help it,” I said, trying to conceal my irritation. “The last thing my mother said to me every night before I went out was to not leave any bundles on her doorstep.”

  She laughed again. I hadn’t meant it to sound funny.

  “Wow! Your mom sounds really cool.”

  But the thought that I had possibly set in motion a biological process that would influence the rest of my life would not let me go. “But how can you be sure?”

  “God, Brian, you’re like a dog with a bone.” She wrinkled up her nose in a way that made several of her larger freckles join together. “Let me make it as simple as I can. I-am-due-my-period-any-day-now, so it’s unlikely that I can get pregnant.”

  “But there must be something we can do.”

  “There is.” And with that she jumped out of bed and reached for her jeans.

  I panicked. “You’re leaving?”

  “No, silly. Oh-my-God, will you just relax. I’m going across the road to the drugstore to see what they have. I’ll get some condoms while I’m there. Do you have any cash?”

  “There’s a twenty on the dresser,” I said, and felt a spectacularly dirty thrill watching her pick up the bill and push it into her pocket.

  One minute I was in bliss and the next I was in torment. What if she were pregnant? Was I being silly? How dare she tell me I was being silly? I didn’t want to be a father. I’d have to leave the country. Maybe she was already pregnant and was using me as cover. Were all Canadian girls this easy? No, that wasn’t fair. She was nice. But we had just met and already we were probably going to have a baby. Did I want to spend the rest of my life with her? Was she that nice? Maybe it would be okay. There was always abortion. Was it possible to get an abortion in St. John’s? Would she be up for it? I should have known better than to get involved with an older woman. I mean, she must have been twenty-three at least.

  I thought about running away, but that seemed pointless because she already knew where I lived. I thought about running downstairs and locking the front door so she couldn’t get back in, but then heard the distinctive sound the door made when it unstuck and swung open. In my mind’s eye I saw the glass shimmer, lifting the reflection of trees and cars on the street behind.

  Violet came bounding up the stairs and into the room. Back in her clothes just a few minutes and I found it hard to persuade myself that I had ever seen her naked. “I bought these.” She flicked me a box of Trojans. “I got them large, because, hey, we don’t want that to happen again, big boy.”

  Oh Violet. I felt so ashamed about what I had just been thinking.

  “And I got this,” She pulled a slim white box out of the bag, “Proctor & Gamble’s most excellent spermicidal foam!”

  “What does that do?”

  “You’re supposed to apply it internally before you have sex. The foam kills sperm. I guess it’s just as likely to work after the fact as before. Not that I need to use it. I’m doing this for your peace of mind,” she paused a moment, “because I like you and because you’re so cute when you’re worried.”

  She disappeared into the bathroom. I wanted to ask her if
I could watch — not only because I was a pervert but also because I was interested in everything about her. When she came out again, she was naked: a naked woman in my draughty room, tiptoeing around books, ashtrays, and tea mugs, some of which wore a collar of thick green mould. She was so confident, so at home in her body that she made all my slavering and fantasizing seem puerile. What could be more natural after all? I was now a man of the world.

  “I also got this,” she said with a grin, and held up a plastic bottle shaped like a bear.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s honey.”

  “Does that kill sperm, too?”

  “You’re funny.”

  Time began to distort soon after I met Violet Budd. It was as if I had opened the elevator door on one fat second and stepped inside. I was suddenly contained in a molasses bubble. Time moved forward and back almost imperceptibly and at varying speeds. The elevator doors opened and it was a new hour, a new day or a new month. I opened my eyes and I was in the student centre, a place I had long avoided because to sit alone among the chattering groups made me feel like a failure. Suddenly I was there every day, smoking and drinking coffee with Keppie and Violet and Nancy and Devlin and with whoever else might come along. It was there, eight days after the broken condom incident, an ashen-faced and slightly swollen Violet whispered to me over tea that her period had arrived.

  “Great news!”

  “Great for you, maybe,” she said, with uncharacteristic sullenness, before stalking off.

  “What’s up with her?” asked Keppie.

  “She’s on the rag, b’y,” I said, delighted to feel that b’y slip off my tongue as if I had been saying it all my life.

  By July first that year, spring had completed its hundred-yard dash into summer. Canada Day also marked the two-month anniversary of our moving into the solid two-storey house that was 117 Patrick Street — my first student digs. I stood in the upstairs master bedroom and took in the view. The maple trees surrounding the house were in full leaf. The lilac bushes in the garden across the road were piled high with purple cone-shaped blooms, some of which were already turning to ash. A white cat walked in the shadow of the wall. The previous few days had been hot, a sultry wind blowing from the southwest.