Dance the Rocks Ashore

by Lesley Choyce

  Forty-five minutes later, during an intermission, I leave and wait out the end of the show the at the Seahorse Tavern. I sit at a table with a couple of grisly characters who are arguing about the proper method of filleting cod. Although I don’t say anything, they like me and buy me a beer. One of them shows me his hand, missing two fingers that he lost in a winch on a trawler off the Grand Banks. “After a while, you never even miss ’em,” he says.

  At home, in bed with Kathy, she can’t sleep, still pumped up with the adrenaline of her performance and wanting to talk. “Roy tried to put the make on me after the show.”

  “Why would he want to bother? Looked like he already had his way with you there in your little horror show.” I don’t know when to keep my mouth shut.

  “Damn you.”

  We go to sleep with our backs to each other, ramrod straight and separated by a few inches that might as well be light years. I want to tell Kathy that I love her very much. I want to remind her of the first time she and I danced...at a high school dance. We both kept asking the band to just play slow dances while all the other kids were telling us to get lost. I fall asleep as my neck begins to stiffen, and the muscles knot from having spent too much time looking up at the ceiling trying to fit in the fluorescent tubes. My whole body feels tense. Kathy is immobile, her legs clamped together, her back rigid. It’s like sleeping in a quarry.

  Valerie Doyle is sitting in the day room in a rolling chair modelled after a child’s high chair. She wears a bib that keeps drool from wrecking her pale blue little-girl dress, and her hands dance nervously on the tray part of the chair that is locked into place so that she can’t fall out or wander off. The mother of five children — all boys now in the military and off living in places like Cold Lake, Alberta, and Timmins, Ontario — Valerie clutches a stuffed Smurf doll to her in moments of lonely desperation. She pays no attention to the game show host shouting and smiling on the television.

  It’s still early in the morning, and many of the residents are howling from their rooms that they don’t want to be changed, that they don’t want baths. At least one frail, pleading voice asks outright, “Why don’t you let me die?” I sit down beside Valerie and talk about the weather.

  On the tray before her she uses her index finger to spell out, “Nice day.” Her throat has been operated on ten years ago for cancer, and she can only grunt. So she usually spells things on an invisible blackboard before her. I’ve been told that Valerie was quite a singer in her day, that she sang popular songs in nightclubs in Montreal once. I give her paper and a pencil sometimes to write on, but she won’t use them. She only writes with her finger on the tray or in the air. I can follow her most of the time now and allow her to spell things quite quickly.

  The day room is almost empty, and no one is watching the television, so I turn it off and go over to the record player to put on one of the three records there. Some ancient, hideously scratched album called Romantic Moods, by the Allan Litby Orchestra. The music is corny, warm and soothing.

  I fake a waltz back over to Valerie and unlock the tray from her chair so she can get out. She stumbles, but I hold on good.

  When the nurses find us we are clumsily bumping around into chairs in the ballroom embrace, and Valerie is humming in my ear to the music, her voice a pathetic cement-mixer growl that doesn’t bother me in the least.

  Kathy still thinks I lost my job out of spite. Just so she’d have to work and give up dance school and her ambitions. It’s not so bad, I argue. Look at the economy. Everybody’s out of work. At least you have a job.

  She did get her way, in a sense. A professional dancer. She works from eight o’clock at night till two in the morning at a lounge, dancing around in a two-piece bathing suit. It’s not that bad; she doesn’t have to take anything off. It keeps her in shape. The pay is excellent. There’s something more honest about it than that crud she was doing with Roy Selange. No leotards, no graceless avant-guard jerks and twists. No whiteface. She looks warm and vulnerable like I remember her.

  Sometimes I go down to the lounge and just sit there with a single beer and watch her for a couple of hours. I think she’s a very talented woman.

  ROSE AND RHODODENDRON

  For DeMille, the summer had been corrupted by the fact that he was employed. The making of money never settled easily, even a summer course in twentieth-century American literature. The pay was good; who could resist?

  Here he was on the road driving to work. A commuter. The thought was somewhat oppressive. He turned the wheel sharply to the left while waiting for the light to change. This put unnecessary tension on the steering wheel. DeMille liked the feel of tenseness in his wrists fighting against the entropy. When the light turned green, the car vectored sharply off in the predestined direction, centrifugal force gleefully upsetting a half-consumed cup of tea all over a twelve-hundred-page anthology. Its tissue-like pages greedily lapped up the tannin and blighted the work of Gertrude Stein, John Dos Passos and H.D. Among others. Archibald Macleish and Ezra Pound had remained unscathed, save the diminution of a handful of scattered footnotes that DeMille would have ignored anyway.

  The bridge. Men painting rust with orange paint. Elbows leaning out of car windows flicking cigarette ashes onto the asphalt (ash-fault, as they had a habit of saying in Canada). When he heard the students pronounce that word, he had for the first time in his landed-immigrantcy felt like a foreigner in a strange land. She had been a thin, red-haired little girl who had confessed to having starred in a baked beans TV commercial when she was twelve. An English major at that, with an eye on the honours program, and she still pronounced it ash-fault.

  The traffic was clogged. DeMille checked his watch. Still twenty minutes before class. What did he care if he was late? But he hated being late. He was never late for anything. Being late made him sweat. Thinking about being late made him sweat. DeMille cursed. This was no place for a minor poet, stalled in traffic on a Tuesday morning above Halifax Harbour with a flock of dirty tugboats beneath him trying to point half of the Canadian navy out to sea. He longed to be back home by his window, high up in the coastal fog, alone and whining to himself about injustices in the publishing world.

  The CBC was a surprise this morning. An Englishman, an expert on bowel cancer, was discussing roughage and its role in the health of the bowels. He had measured and weighted stool samples in all the Third World countries but complained that North Americans knew little about their own bowel products. In Third World countries, where the roughage was higher, there was, he argued, no bowel cancer to speak of. In North America, where the stuff sank like rocks instead of floating like barges of grain, we were doing ourselves in for lack of bulk. And who could give a damn! The man was indignant, as rightly he should be, thought DeMille, who was himself a believer in the powers of fresh greens, unbleached flours and brewer’s yeast taken in liquid form. DeMille — as well as being a minor poet, part-time English professor and sometime jogging enthusiast — hoed a damn good row of spinach and knew how to pick zucchini at just the critical moment.

  Most mornings he was paranoid to a degree. Lately the chairman had been making more use of his office — stationed directly across from Professor DeMille’s classroom. A veteran of ten years, DeMille should not have been easily ruffled by a sharp look from his superior while pontificating upon the failure of Ezra Pound to rise above the evolutionary level of a sculpin. And yet DeMille had detected a flaring of nostrils from Marvin Winger, department chairman, as he had passed the open door and heard such literary honesty.

  Winger was an old-guard Canadian. DeMille still had no notion as to what really made Canadians tick. Winger could have been an Orangeman or something, or any one of those chaps who sincerely took the Queen, Wayne and Schuster, Stevie Smith and Joe Clark seriously. DeMille would try to stay out of Winger’s way, try to keep clear of political conversations, that sort of thing. As an ex-American, he was virulently scornful of
the States and offended Canadians when he spoke of his homeland with bitterness and outrage. Canadians could never see why he got so ruffled, and among his colleagues he soon learned that several actually believed Ronald Reagan to be less than fascist. But he loved teaching. He would try to remember to keep the classroom door closed, even if it did permit accumulative student smells to sometimes destroy the impact of his rhetoric.

  The semester was almost over. They were getting tired of him. Not one had the temerity to strap on a Sony Walkman surreptitiously in the back of the room, but still they squirmed, nodded, fiddled and yawned through Faulkner and the poems of John Crowe Ransom. When he held up the cover of Maclean’s, however, with a full-colour picture of the battleship New Jersey steaming toward Central America, they plucked up. DeMille had been upset that morning. This business over Central America was getting out of hand. Military games. “Some games are more deadly than others,” he warned his class. “They’re really screwed up this time. The Monroe Doctrine in 1983. The government in the US has its head up its ass.”

  It was upon the enunciation of the word ass that Marvin Winger was pulling his keys out of his pocket to open his office door. He frowned at DeMille, then rattled his key in the lock and went into his office. The door closed behind him with a distinct air of something askew in the department. DeMille stared at the door with its schematic of the seating inside the original Globe Theatre. Neo-fascist sympathizer. He didn’t say it. But his students could tell he was flustered.

  A voice from the back. There was one other American in the classroom. A young yahoo from Cheyenne, Wyoming. No, a reasonably sound mind inside a meat packer’s body. He wore boots to class. When he was late arriving, you could hear him from two blocks away clomping on concrete and hammering on wood floors like a late-night hot water pipe.

  “Sir, with all due respect, Central America is like our back yard. And those countries are receiving Soviet support. Did you know that El Salvador is closer to San Diego than Washington DC is?” You could tell that he was even a bit nervous to have the balls to confront the man in authority, the one up front with the mild hangover and the symbols of authority: the teacher’s edition of the Norton, the mangled briefcase, the massive oak-veneer desk and the trash can.

  Who cares about San Diego? But he didn’t say it. He could picture Winger inside his office, his ear up to the door, his other ear on a telephone receiver with some academic dean on the other end. Somehow he had to bring the discussion back around to Edna St. Vincent Millay. Mentally, he rifled the anthology for the right segue. He found it. “Some poets have seen death’s offer in many forms and accepted the outcome but ignored incommodious invitations.” (That was a good word, incommodious. Was Winger listening? Did he hear it correctly?) Edna herself wrote:

  I shall die, but that is all I shall do for death.

  I hear him leading his horse out of the stall; I hear the clatter on the barn-floor.

  He is in haste; he has business in Cuba, business in the Balkans, many calls to make this morning.

  Most of the class failed to see the connection. To DeMille himself it was somewhat shrouded, but he let it go at that. Truth would prevail somehow. He kept to the text thereafter. There was more to say about Edna, whose name contained a saint of something unknown. Hart Crane was yet to throw himself into the shark-infested waters of the South Atlantic. And the thing was to make it all seem less than medieval. Ever since he had denounced his own government, they seemed more attentive, eager for another expletive. DeMille wouldn’t let them sucker him into it.

  This morning had started with promise. The herons feeding on minnows in the saltflats at daybreak, the deer, soft brown and feeble, high on the hill eating wild foxberries and mercifully ignoring the beets and chard of his garden. But then, while driving through Westphal, a sparrow swooped low against the road and impaled itself on the hood ornament of his Omni. He had stopped and buried the skewered fledgling near the waterworks, beneath a sign that read: “Driver’s Not Speeding this Week: 93%.” He had to dig in hard with a heel of his shoe in the gravelly earth. There, too, Edna had come in handy:

  There will be rose and rhododendron

  When you are dead underground;

  Still will be heard from white syringas

  Heavy with bees, a sunny sound.

  Burials and funerals were always good excuses for being late. And he should have left the radio off. The damn news. Reagan wanted more missiles in Europe. Congress had approved money for chemical weapons of the most fashionable and up-to-date design and cruise testing for western Canada. DeMille pictured those monster machines zipping by headhigh through prairie towns and Eskimo settlements. He wanted to sit down later perhaps with the thick-jowled kid from Wyoming (what was he up to in Halifax, anyway?) And convert him. Send him back to the States with new idealism, pamphlets, armbands, rhetoric and open rebellion. Convince him to stuff all those silos out there with flowers. Rust up the hinges on the missile garages and insist on peaceful settlements. This would not be easy on a kid who probably grew up with three uncles who had missile launchers underground just a stone’s throw from the back yard barbecue.

  But he promised to keep his politics out of his classroom. If they didn’t hire him back in the fall for another section of Introduction to Literature, he would have to go on unemployment and then welfare. And he knew they were a conservative lot at the university: men who wore boxer shorts from Eaton’s, chaste women who fought abortion and wore fingernail polish, scholars from Calcutta, and recently graduated PhDs from Leeds and Edinburgh. Tenure was unthinkable but employment imperative. Best to keep the door closed. They wouldn’t use bugging devices so freely in Canada, and his students liked him, he was sure. None would go tramping to the chaplain, impugning DeMille for using four-letter words or overusing his privilege to discuss phallic images in the poetry of the Beat Generation.

  Parking was tricky. He was the proud possessor of three overdue summonses already, hoping the police department would see his credit good until the end of the month. But there was not a single slot along the street to park in, and he was already five minutes late by his watch — a nameless digital device that ran three to seven minutes off anyway no matter how often he tried to adjust the devil. DeMille settled for community with a fire hydrant that looked an unlikely candidate for use.

  There was Winger sitting in his office, pretending to read from the MLA Style Sheet. DeMille’s class looked up with polite, accepting smiles. We know, we know, they seemed to say. It’s all right, you are a busy man of arts and letters, poems to be written, publishers to be chided. DeMille wanted to speak of the dead sparrow but knew it would set things off on the wrong foot. The cowboy from Cheyenne gave him a look that said, “You’re late, pinko America-traitor, and you’re wasting my time.” A girl with long soft brown hair was sitting by the window using the reflection to help her put on makeup. She was caught up in her cosmetics; she hadn’t noticed that the professor had even arrived.

  DeMille had secretly looked forward to this day, the third from last of the term. Mailer and Kerouac. Odd bedfellows, but writers he could relate to. On the Road, Armies of the Night. Excerpts. Could he tell them that he, too, had been out there on the roads of America, the hot sticky Interstates, thumbing east and west to nowhere and everywhere, that he had once met a homosexual in Dallas who claimed to have had sex with Jack Kerouac? Could he tell them that Norman Mailer had once bummed a cigarette from him in a bar in Hackensack, New Jersey? Would this mean anything? No anecdotes. He would stick to the text. Good stuff there, even. Kerouac ping-ponging across the continent; Mailer, the buffoon, demonstrating at the Pentagon. Fiction as autobiography. Autobiography as art. Life as Art.

  Winger was attentive. He had traded in the Style Sheet for a recent biography of Milton that someone within the department had published. Nonetheless, it was a cover for his observations. If DeMille wanted a new contract, he would have to be good. Keep i
t boring, he told himself. Drone, if need be. Make endless references to the critics; and above all, point out the shortcomings of both Mailer and especially Jack. The French take Kerouac dead serious, but not the English, and certainly not the Canadian academics. Keep it straight.

  But of course he couldn’t. He loved Kerouac and was invigorated by the obnoxious prose of Norman Mailer: both rebels, both instigators of minor revolution. And so DeMille discussed traditions. He harped on Eliot, he doted on Henry James, he squandered half the class on a resurrection of Henry Adams, even (for his penance) Edith Wharton — tying them all in to Jack and Norman and making it sound as if the term was coming to some grand elaborate intellectual orgasm, unifying all American literature into a single blossom of expression. DeMille extrapolated, pontificated and modulated his voice to show illicit quiet reserve as he explicated the dynamic duo without praising them too highly or snubbing them irreverently. And, yes, was that a hand up in the back?

  The kid from Wyoming, one of three male students in the class — and American at that, a resented one. He had some problems with one section of the Mailer excerpt. He wanted some help.

  DeMille, unabashed, liberated, nimble of word and wit, was ready to tackle anything literature had to offer. The section of prose in question, however, concerned the issue of sodomy, a subject in which the professor was not well versed. His intellectually hygienic vocabulary on the subject, he discovered, was in fact wanting. He heard himself discussing the undiscussable to a roomful of sixth-generation Calvinist Scots. The girl who had performed in baked bean commercials was crimson with embarrassment. Her colour was shared. DeMille saw no light at the end of the tunnel. No way out of his predicament. Afraid to turn his head sideways to see if the chairman had caught wind of the discussion, he blundered on, admitting that sexual deviance was not uncommon in American literature or in the writers themselves. Whitman, Ginsberg of course. And wasn’t Gertrude Stein, after all, a dyke? Oops. Lesbian. He could hear Winger across the hall dialling his phone. Academic freedom, DeMille chanted to himself, expecting that he would be met with handcuffs at the end of the class (or, at the very least, a greeting from the American consul asking for his return to the United States before an international incident sparked).