Double Talk

by Patrick Warner

  Who was Humphrey? I wondered. Was he their ringleader?

  Violet smiled at them, nodding her head enthusiastically.

  “C’mon guys,” she called out in her sweet voice. “Be nice.”

  The man called back again. This time I heard the words “boyfriend” and more disconcertingly the word “pussy.”

  “Hey!” I shouted. But no one answered. “Hey!” I shouted louder, but they still ignored me. Violet did not even look in my direction. I started to feel as though I were shrinking. While the men shouted and made cat calls they kept the light trained on me. It seemed to hold me in place, preventing me from walking back to the fire to be at her side. I felt exposed and at the same time disenfranchised.

  “But please,” she said, her voice taking on a whiney, begging tone.

  Don’t be like that, I wanted to shout, don’t beg them. But my heart was beating so fast that I was sure my voice would quaver if I spoke up.

  “Okay. Thank you. Thank you.”

  “Okay what?” I shouted to her, but before she could answer me the man shouted something else.

  “We will,” she said. “We promise.”

  “Will what?” I muttered, feeling certain that her apparent willingness to go along with whatever they were demanding would put us in an even more vulnerable position.

  “Can we not just stay until the morning, please?” she called.

  There came another series of grunts. Then the flashlight was turned off.

  “Okay,” said Violet, her voice suddenly emotional and sweet, like a little girl who is promising to be good. “Yes, we’ll put it out right now.”

  The man shouted again, his voice higher now, laughing almost.

  “Yes, we’ll make sure,” shouted Violet. “And thank you. Thank you. Goodnight.”

  “We have to put out the fire. We have to put out the fire, now!” said Violet when I finally crossed the damp grass to where she stood. Her voice sounded anguished.

  “Are you okay?”

  She didn’t answer me.

  “What was all that about?” I asked, trying to play it cool.

  “We have to put the fire out now, please.”

  I grabbed the pot and slowly made my way back and forth from the river, dumping water on our fine blaze while she poked at the coals with a stick. We worked in silence. Thick smoke billowed up, but once it cleared the stars were brighter. The heavens had opened. We stood looking upward. It was the same sky that had earlier filled us with wonder, but now the cold immensity of what we saw made us retreat to the tent. We burrowed into our zipped-together sleeping bags. Violet lay with her back to me, her body tense and going rigid when I put my arms around her.

  “Violet, what’s the matter? It’s all right. It’s okay.”

  When she spoke again, her voice was small, trapped somewhere at the back of her throat. “You heard.”

  “Yes. We’re on private property and they want us out of here.”

  She was holding her breath. “They wanted us out of here tonight.”

  “But you got them to agree to the morning.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you know one of them?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Well, I couldn’t hear all that well, but it sounded like you were talking about stuff that had nothing to do with us being on private property.”

  “You heard then?”

  “Most of it.”

  At that moment the moon cleared from wherever it had been hiding, its unearthly light turning even more unearthly as it passed through the tent’s green canvas. Violet rolled over and looked at me. Her eyes were black and filled with tears. She looked like some kind of undersea creature. She began to shake. “I’m so sorry. I’m so so sorry.”

  “It’s okay, Vi.” I was upset that she was upset, which in turn made me even hungrier to know what I’d pretended to already know. “You can tell me about it — him, I mean. Humphrey.”

  “Sir Humphrey’s, you mean.”

  Hearing her say the name of St. John’s only strip bar came as something of a shock. “Ya, that’s what I meant.”

  She closed her eyes.

  “You used to work there?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer.

  “You can tell me.”

  “Promise you won’t hate me?”

  “Violet!”

  “Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  “Give me a cigarette first.”

  I lit two cigarettes and passed one to her.

  “It was back when I first moved here, before you ever got here. I flew back home for mid-term break and had a terrible fight with my dad. He told me I was wasting my time becoming a teacher. When I told him I was leaning more towards women’s studies he just about fell over laughing. He’s such a fucking asshole. I walked out. Spent the night in the airport and arrived back in St. John’s the next night with exactly eleven dollars in my pocket. I needed a job fast and the only one I could find was as a part-time waitress at Sir Humphrey’s — I guess you’ve been there?”

  I hadn’t been there, though I had wanted to go. Twice I had gone so far as to walk up to the front door, but I always lost my nerve at the last minute. The thought of Violet waitressing at a strip club was titillating. “I’ve never been there.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “Why do you find that so hard to believe?”

  “You’re so sweet.” She looked up at me with puppy dog eyes.

  It was the first time I had ever felt myself to be in a position of power with Violet. “Go on.”

  “My dad and I were on bad terms for months after. He sent me money from time to time, but I always sent it back. I was living mostly on tips, which were pretty good usually. But then one month they weren’t so good and I was late with the rent and, God, this is starting to sound like a really shitty movie-of-the-week.”

  “You don’t have to go on if you don’t want to.”

  “No, I want to. Please. It’s important.”

  “Go on then.”

  “There were these guys in the club one night and they kept asking me how much money I wanted to strip for them. Guys are like that. A naked woman on one side of the bar and they’re all looking at the waitress. They wouldn’t leave me alone. The bar got emptier and emptier and those guys got more and more drunk. They obviously had lots of money. Kept saying, name your price. Name your price, sweetheart. They were engineers or oil people, something like that — blowhards. Finally, there was only the manager and them in the place. Name your price, they kept saying. The manager laughed and shrugged. He didn’t care. He was always trying to get the waitresses to expand their career options. Finally, the guys were so drunk that I figured they wouldn’t remember anyway, so I decided to do it.”

  “It’s okay, Vi.”

  “No it’s not. There was part of me that thought it would be the easiest five hundred bucks I had ever made.”

  Five hundred bucks is an awful lot of cash, I wanted to say, but didn’t.

  “As well — and this is the part I find hardest to understand about myself — there was something about the thought of doing it that felt like a dare. I guess I was really kicking against the pricks at the time, against gender stereotypes, against sex roles, against the whole patriarchal circus. At the very least, I thought, I would learn something about the lives of marginal women. So I decided to do it.”

  “And those men across the river tonight, you mean those were the same men?”

  “At least two of them were.”

  It seemed like an unbelievable coincidence. At the same time, my mother’s voice spoke in the back of my mind: remember your sins will find you out. “Holy fuck,” I said. “That’s incredible.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  It was my turn to breathe in shallow breaths. Violet’s confession had left me feeling both aroused and weirdly disembodied. I wanted her to go on. I wanted her to shut up. I wanted to hear details. Did they touch her? Did she get turned on? Di
d she go home with one or more than one of them? At the same time I was horrified, angered to think that she was capable of selling her body for money. How could I ever trust her again? It was true then: any woman can be bought. Any woman under the right combination of circumstances will behave like a whore. All of their piety and morality is just a device, a way to control demand. The evidence is everywhere: beautiful young women marry rich old men.

  But then she started to cry, great hydraulic sobs accompanied by odd seal-like barks. “It was the most degrading experience of my life. It was so horrible, so horrible. And those men, those men — they were like animals.”

  “Shush, Violet. It’s okay. Not all men are like that.”

  “I feel so ashamed, so ashamed. And you’re so good. How can you ever want to look at me again?”

  It was a good question, and it drew from me a response I could not have predicted. Suddenly, and for no discernable reason — call it a moment of grace, an act of divine intervention — all of my anger and revulsion just disappeared. I understood that by revealing her dark side to me she had demonstrated that her virtue was wholly intact.

  At the same time, and even as she buried her face in my neck, I could feel my erection threatening to break the teeth of my zipper. Oh sweet mercy, was life ever just one thing at one time?

  Listening to her cry, I struggled with the old sense of being in two places at once, the feeling of being neither here nor there that had dogged me since my first days in Newfoundland. Only now this double sense began to blur into one. I had a choice, but at the same time no choice. Everything in me was drawn towards the place Violet’s confession had exposed. And everything about that place sizzled with newness. I felt in myself the flux of the worn-out as it disperses, before being baptized into a new form. I stared through that foggy window into the future and saw my death. But the death I saw there was birth by another name. This was not the end but the beginning.

  Ya, right.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to Rochelle Baker for her many helpful suggestions during the writing of this novel. Thanks as well to Susan Rendell and Lisa Moore for their questions and encouragement. Thanks to Janet Russell of Rattling Books who published a section of the novel in Earlit Shorts 3. Thanks to everyone involved with administering and adjudicating the Percy Janes First Novel Award. And finally, thanks to Annamarie Beckel and all the gang at Breakwater Books.