Double Talk

by Patrick Warner

  Beside me, Violet was dozing on our foam rubber mattress, her body all blotchy from beard burn. We had just made love for the fifty-eighth time. I had been keeping count in the back page of my diary, a tick for each fuck and a tick with a barb when it came with a blow job. My tallying was the result of something Geoff said one night. He said that even after getting laid for the first time a boy or a girl remained in a semi-virginal state for an indefinite period. “The French have a term to describe it,” he said. “They refer to a boy or girl in that state as a demi-vierge.” Then he winked at Violet. There had been much teasing talk about my being with an older woman. “That’s stupid,” I said. All the same, the notion stuck in my head, and I mysteriously arrived at one hundred fucks as the number I would need to rack up in order to safely leave behind my inbetweenie status.

  How silly that all seemed to me within a few short weeks. The more often I made love to Violet the more my categorical view of myself as a he-man-bringer-of-pleasure-to womankind failed. It was Violet who inadvertently pointed out the fallacy of my thinking. “You’re so not a macho man,” she said.

  “Yes I am.” I remember feeling vaguely insulted.

  “No, you’re not. Macho guys are just interested in their own pleasure. You’re a beautiful lover.”

  “And so are you.”

  The more often we had sex the less it seemed like sex. Sometimes Violet cried afterward, clinging to my neck so tightly I thought it might snap. If sex was intimate, this was something else again. I began to feel a growing ease in just being with her and an intense desire to prolong and protect that feeling. Often, I felt such moments as a pressure on my chest as though something were trying to move out of my body by exiting through my mouth. At first, I denied it, told myself I should give up home-rolled cigarettes and go back to shop-bought filtered. But sometimes I recognized the same response in Violet. We didn’t so much keep that mushrooming feeling at bay as we decided to let it be. Somehow we knew that a period of time had to pass before it could be safely transposed into words.

  Our moving into 117 Patrick Street was Keppie’s doing. The house belonged to an Australian geologist, Peter from Perth, who spent almost all his time up in the woods surveying and tapping on rocks.

  “It’s dirt cheap,” said Keppie, “and the utilities are included. Seventy bucks each a month if we split the rent five ways.”

  “It sounds too good to be true. What’s the catch?” Nancy wanted to know.

  “There’s no catch, so to speak.”

  “Keppie?”

  “The only catch is that Pete will crash there the odd time. But he says that he only comes into town once every few months and usually only for a weekend. He says he’ll give us notice if he can.”

  Peter from Perth was true to his word; in the first two months we saw him only once. He was a tall, rangy man with wind-burned skin. His eyes had a watered down look that gave him the appearance of being prematurely old — he couldn’t have been more than fifty. “He’s a hard man for the boo,” said Keppie. Peter’s only other distinguishing feature was his nose; it was badly scarred.

  “I bent down one time to pet a crackie and the bugger jumped up and latched onto me snoz,” he said. “Had a bloody devil of a time getting him off.”

  His self-deprecating humour, the fact that he was an infrequent visitor, plus the fact that he refused to occupy the small fourth bedroom when he did show up, choosing the couch instead, endeared him to us. After two months, even Nancy had to agree that Keppie had got us a deal.

  It was July first, early afternoon, and the house was uncharacteristically quiet. Violet had begun to snore gently. I looked around the room. Apart from the foam rubber mattress, our furniture consisted of two cardboard dressers and a giant spool that once held electrical cable and which now functioned as our nightstand. The windows were covered with buckled Venetian blinds. The whole place smelled of cats.

  I cocked an ear towards the next room down the hall, which belonged to Devlin’s girlfriend, Amy. No sound from in there. Devlin pleaded poverty as the reason he could not officially move in. “You’re just a Mama’s boy,” said Nancy. While Devlin had not moved in, he was always around. He usually stayed weekends, and his weekends had begun to last until mid-week. If anyone minded, they didn’t say. It helped that he always had dope and was willing to share it. It helped, as well, that he had a mellowing effect on Amy, whose zeal for all things Newfoundland sometimes made her prickly. In Amy’s view, Violet and I were sinners: Violet because she was from the mainland and me because I never had anything good to say about Ireland, a place so mythical in Amy’s imagination that she was almost willing to argue that she knew more about it than I did. “You can always tell a woman from the Goulds,” said Keppie, “but you can’t tell her much.” The hard truth was that we put up with Amy because we liked Devlin and also because she was useful. She was first up every day and always cleaned up the aftermath of the night before. If she was bitter about this, she didn’t let on. She even argued against Violet’s proposed cleaning schedule, insisting that it was not necessary.

  It was just as well, really, because Keppie and Nancy — even though they supported the idea — would have never lived up to it. Neither one would wash a dish or even pick up an empty beer bottle unless they were planning to cash it in for the deposit refund. “I cook,” said Nancy. And it was true. No one cooked fish better than Nancy, who got it free by the box load from her family once a month. “The trick,” she said, “is to barely cook it at all.” I still have this mental picture of her in T-shirt and sweatpants standing at the stove and frying up a skillet full of cod, while four full-grown cats and five kittens watched her from their various perches.

  “Them dirty cats,” said Keppie. “They stink.”

  “Then why don’t you make yourself useful and clean out the litter box from time to time?” Violet chimed in. “Or when you find that Libby has shit in the tub, swish it down the drain.”

  “I don’t do cats,” said Keppie.

  “What is it you do again?” asked Violet.

  Keppie appeared to think about it. “I roll a mean J. I bone Nancy. And I shovel snow. You’ll find out my true value next winter.”

  “I wait with bated breath,” said Violet.

  Keppie gave me a look and raised his eyebrows. He had noticed Violet’s occasional bad breath. “Breath like a Chinaman,” he said, “like she eats nothing but boiled rice.” The truth was that Keppie played a vital role in the house. His was the crazy glue that brought us together and that held us together. He was the one who reminded us of our one guiding principle: when you have fuck all, you share.

  I heard someone come in downstairs and call out “Hello!” It was Devlin. I heard other footsteps and then the unmistakable thump and rattle of a box of beer landing on the coffee table. I heard Amy’s voice and then two male voices I didn’t recognise. I heard the tinny cymbal-like shimmer of a flicked beer cap shuddering to a stop on hardwood floor. It was hot. I was suddenly thirsty. I heard more voices and more footsteps. Keppie and Nancy were among them. I heard ice hitting a glass in the kitchen and a few moments later the resounding pop of a cork leaving the neck of a wine bottle. I heard the opening strains of Warren Zevon’s “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner.” It was barely mid-afternoon, and the party was about to begin. I knew from experience it might rage for an hour or two or it might run right through to the next day, gathering steam as classes ended and pubs closed.

  I covered Violet with a knobbly sheet and straightened the Venetian blinds. She muttered something I didn’t catch. I wasn’t really in the mood for a crowd, but I did fancy a beer. It was Canada Day, after all.

  I wondered if Amy would get drunk. Perhaps we would all just have one or two and then everyone would go away — and pigs might fly. Before the first beer was gone, someone would spark up a J. Some of Keppie’s friends were serious potheads. Frank James would light five or six joints one after another. I’d find myself going from zero to one hundre
d in under a minute. Dope always played puck with my ability to socialize, which in turn made me chug my beer. When I found the right chemical balance I could be the life of the party, but more often than not I just chased it. Not that it mattered. Keppie always wanted to be the centre of attention, and I was happy enough to let him, finding enough sustenance in the introverted pockets of the room.

  Dope made Keppie crazy and funny. It seemed to remove his last few shreds of inhibition. He’d jump up on the coffee table and pull up his jeans until the waistband was almost to his armpits. “Now, b’ys,” he’d say, removing his baseball hat and attempting to smooth his hat hair. “I’m about to do a recitation. Would ye like to hare the one I calls ‘Ol’ Man Winter’ or the one I calls ‘De Mouse Invasion of ’87’?”

  “‘Ol’ Man Winter,’” someone would shout out.

  “‘De Mouse Invasion of ’87’ it is then.” And so he would begin his well-known take on Quint’s speech from Jaws: “Squint’s the name. There were eleven hundred of us in that first-year English class. A visiting Japanese professor left a submarine sandwich in the desk drawer, chief. Then accidentally locked us in. Then a blizzard hits. Didn’t see the first mouse for about a half an hour. A Tiger. A six incher. You can tell how long he is by lookin’ from the whiskers to the tail. Very first light, chief. The mice come cruisin’. So we formed into tight groups. You know it’s … kinda like ol’ squares in a battle, like you see on a calendar, like the battle of Waterloo. And the idea was, when a mouse approached, all the fellas would start poundin’ and hollerin’ and screamin’ and sometimes the mouse would go away. Sometimes he wouldn’t go away. Sometimes that mouse, he looks right into you. Right into your eyes. You know the thing about a mouse, he’s got … lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll’s eye. When he comes at ya, doesn’t seem to be livin’. Until he bites ya and those black eyes roll over white. And then, ah then you hear that terrible high-pitch screamin’ and the room turns red and in spite of all the poundin’ and the hollerin’ they all come in and rip you to pieces. Y’know by the end of that first day, we lost a hundred first-years! I don’t know how many mice, maybe a thousand! They averaged six of us an hour. On Thursday mornin’, chief, I bumped into a friend of mine, Brian Power from Bridgetown. Soccer player, bosom squeezer. I thought he was asleep, reached over to wake him up. Bobbed up and down in his desk, just like a kinda top. Up ended. Well … he’d been bitten in half below the waist. Noon the fifth day, a cleaner pushing a floor scrubber saw us. He swung in low on his Tomcat Disk Rider and he saw me. A young pilot, anyway he saw us and come in low. And three hours later a big fat PCO comes down and starts to pick us up. You know, that was the time I was most frightened? Waitin’ for my turn. So, eleven hundred students went in that lecture hall, three hundred and sixteen come out, the mice took the rest, February the fifth, 1987. Anyway, I passed the course.”

  Time would often slip a notch. I’d look at my wristwatch: three o’clock. When I looked again, after what felt like five minutes, it could be six o’clock or eight o’clock. Time could also work its trick in reverse, get stuck in a way that made five minutes feel like an hour. Money left pockets and pizza boxes arrived. Someone would do a run with empties and come back with more beer or with a couple of bottles of tequila and a bag of lemons. Tequila shots always shook the demons loose. Sometimes Devlin would collect money and take a run to The Blocks, arriving back with what always looked like a too small piece of pudgy black hash or a vial of oil that smeared green when spread on a paper. If anyone complained, Devlin would only shrug.

  As the evening went on, the room began to spin faster. Favourite stories were traded. Violet would tell about chasing Neil Young’s bus through the parking lot of a hotel in Vancouver. Keppie would tell us about the summer he spent making boxes in a factory in Toronto, and the old lady who lived in the apartment next door to him, who never threw her garbage out. The landlord finally forced entry when the other tenants — not Keppie — complained about the smell. They found garbage bags stacked from floor to ceiling, with only narrow passageways between rooms. “It was unbelievable,” said Keppie. “When the pest control people sprayed, the roaches poured out in a wave across the hallway ceiling. We had to run from the building with our coats over our heads.”

  One story ended and another began. There was the story of Rick Codner, who, on a dare, had driven over a cliff for a rack of honey-garlic ribs. There was Bill Cheeseman freaking out and asking if someone had “put acid in them joints.” And then, inevitably, there was the decision about whether we should stay put or go downtown. Usually, we stayed put. There was still the threat of getting asked for ID at the door and having some meathead bouncer ruin our collective high.

  People got drunker, faces whiter, eyes blacker. Colours got more garish, lights glared and sound came to my ears as if through a length of plastic tubing. It was a typical 117 Patrick Street house party, or at least it was up until the moment it occurred to me that something was missing. Perched on the arm of an armchair, I found myself sipping my beer and only half-heartedly inhaling when a joint made the rounds. For reasons I didn’t understand I was holding back. I couldn’t let go and howl at the moon as I usually did. I couldn’t just do my thing and let Violet do hers until we collided at the end of the night, collapsing together on our foam rubber mattress. The old double sense was beginning to make its presence felt again, only now it was Violet who split my attention. I found myself monitoring her, watching who she was talking to and for how long. Where before I hadn’t cared when she flirted with other guys — in fact, I found it flattering — I began to feel jealous. Where before I used to laugh along when Keppie teased her, imploring her to get up and dance for us, sometimes making obscene gestures at her with his tongue — “Come on, Vi, honey. Let’s see what ya gots” — I found myself getting angry. Though my anger was not so much directed at Keppie — he was just being himself — as it was at Violet, who always seemed to enjoy how the attention of the room focussed on her at such moments. In the glare of the social spotlight my girlfriend sometimes flowered unpredictably.

  That night, I realized it was me and not the scene that had changed. No matter how hard I tried, no matter how loudly I laughed or how stridently I took part in the banter, I just couldn’t relax. I found myself constantly searching out Violet’s eye while trying not to make it seem that I was desperate for her attention. At some point, it occurred to me that whatever affected Violet now felt personal to me. I tried to ignore the thought, telling myself that it was just something in the dope or that I had not drunk enough or that I had drunk too much on an empty stomach. Where was Frank James when I needed him? It was time for some heavy drugs.

  Still later again, when we all went out into the back yard to see if we could catch a glimpse of the fireworks, I coaxed Violet away to the tree-house platform at the end of the garden, persuading her to stay there when everyone else went back inside.

  “Is anything the matter?” she asked.

  “No. I just wanted a few minutes alone with you, that’s all. It’s so nice out here,” I said, lying back and looking up through the canopy of leaves at the stars. She lay down next to me.

  “It would be nice to get away together. Go somewhere out in the country, just the two of us. Get away from the crowd for a while. What do you think?”

  “That would be lovely,” she said.

  VI

  Violet Budd

  Violet awakes abruptly from her dream when the phone rings, its two-tone trill recalling her from her virtual seat on the Route Three bus. In her dream she was travelling up Military Road, passing the entrance to Bannerman Park. She was sitting near the back, literally holding her guts in her hands, feeding the blue casings through her fingers like a string of beads. There was no pain and no blood, only a dull sensation like pressure of fingers on anesthetised gums.

  Violet looks at the clock: its red digits say exactly 6:00 am. At that hour the phone always sounds urgent. “I’ll get it,” she says, to no one.
She swings her legs over the edge of the bed, finds her fuzzy slippers, and immediately forgets her dream — remembering it only later that day when, walking up Military Road, she realizes that the dream bus had been driving on the left-hand side.

  She runs to get the phone before it wakes Joe. The last hour of sleep before he rises is always so precious; it often makes the difference between a good and a bad day, for both of them. It’s probably Nancy, she thinks, as she makes her way along the hall, then down the stairs, stepping over their obdurate tom-cat, Titus, who claws at the hem of her nightgown as it flutters over him. She knows that Clarence, Nancy’s newborn, was sick the day before with an ear infection and Nancy had been debating whether to take him into Emergency. Nowhere in Violet’s mind is the thought that this might be the call, the one everyone secretly expects, the one bringing cataclysmic news.

  It’s Geoff on the other end, his voice hesitant and frogged, as though he’s been up all night. “Violet, love, I have bad news.”

  Her stomach ties a barrel hitch; she senses the worst.

  “Wallace died a half hour ago.”

  Everything goes still. “What happened?” is all she can think to say.

  “They don’t know yet, but they’re guessing a massive stroke.”

  “I’m so sorry. Oh, God. Where are you?”

  “I’m at the Health Sciences.”

  “We’ll come over.”

  “No. It’s okay. Fabian and Ian are with me.”