DeMille did his best to bring lust back around to love and corrected “deviance” to “sexual preference,” lest he had in fact insulted someone in the class. He assigned Malcolm X, Flannery O’Connor and John Updike for the morrow and started wiping chalk dust from his hands onto his pants. Charles Norris, the kid from Wyoming, walked by, boot heels clicking on the hardwood, and gave DeMille a grin and shake of the head. It could have meant anything. But DeMille saw what he had been missing. He had been set up. Norris suckered him into a trap, and Winger had been waiting.
On the day of the final exam, DeMille was relieved that it was almost over. He hadn’t seen Winger for a couple of days, and he had managed to keep an unusual amount of decorum in his final lectures. Now he could sit back and watch his students suffer through the torture of a major test, worth one third of their grade. DeMille, however, suffered, too. Not only did he find it debilitating to watch his beloved students in literary anguish for two full hours, but his wife had confessed that they were having personal cash flow difficulties, and if he didn’t try to sort out the overdrafts on their checking account, the bank was going to send them packing to a credit union. So he fought with the numbers and drank four cups of coffee as he invigilated. At the end of two hours, the economics were clear. DeMille and his wife, Thalia, had spent the summer’s earnings and then some, even though their lifestyle had the trappings of a pair of Zen monastics.
The class departed with smiles, sweaty handshakes and maudlin niceties. DeMille had then examined the deflation of his spirit, the inflation of the economy and the plethora of hostilities in both hemispheres. It wasn’t a pretty picture. Just then Charles Norris’s boot heels came wandering back to the classroom. “I wanna buy you a beer. It’s been a very interesting class,” he said. He was smiling even though his eyes darted around at the unwashed blackboard.
“Excellent idea. Let me put these in my office, and I’ll be with you.” On his way to his temporary office, DeMille noticed two letters in his mailbox from Canadian publishers. He left them untouched.
“I want to know what you think of the Caribbean blockade,” Norris asked DeMille in the dimly lit tavern.
“I think Reagan wants to start World War Three. Are you going to enlist, Charlie?” DeMille was being rude. He didn’t mean to be.
“Call me Chuck.”
“Are you going to enlist, Chuck?”
“I don’t know. My old man is in the military. He was sent to Halifax on some military crap. If he had his way, he’d like to see a fight. Shoot, he’d like to be in it. Claims he missed all the good wars. Can’t quite stare it down.”
“You got a farm back in Wyoming, your family, that is?”
“A ranch. Three hundred acres. A small ranch.”
“Any missile silos in your back forty?”
“They said we had the wrong kind of soil.”
“Tough luck.” DeMille found himself getting cynical. The beer went down like water but hit him like vodka.
Chuck realized he was being pushed. “Look, not everybody’s a brilliant intellectual like you, who can pack their bags and leave their country ’cause they disagree with the government. Some of us want to stick it out. I don’t know if I’d fight. But I wouldn’t run.”
“Two more draft,” DeMille half-shouted to the waiter from across the room. Chuck looked flustered, sulked in his beer.
“You arm wrestle?” DeMille asked him.
“What?”
“Do you arm wrestle? I never met an American male who didn’t.”
“Sure.” The beers were set down on the table. DeMille asked if they’d take a cheque he showed his faculty ID. They would.
Both slugged back half a glass of beer and cocked elbows on the Formica-topped surface. “Go.”
DeMille had been good at this. At university he had been able to win bets with strangers because no one believed he possessed much strength. His physical appearance had always been less than commanding. He was laying a trap for Chuck, who he figured would see an easy way to regain some self-esteem. Almost against his better judgement, DeMille wanted to beat him badly.
The tensed, rigid muscles, the shaking, locked fists and the faces pumped up like over-inflated tires gave the scene a comic appearance. It was a stalemate. DeMille was amazed that he hadn’t instantly snapped his opponent’s wrist to the table. Norris was surprised that his professor hadn’t fallen over at once with a heart attack. Both pushed on. Minutes passed. Colours were rearranged in the cheeks. Something wrong here, DeMille lectured himself. But where the flesh is weak, the spirit must be strong. He stared Norris in the eyes. He could break the will if he wanted. An old teacher’s trick, and he knew how to use it exquisitely when he was driven to do so.
Norris stared back. No anger, not hate. Just determination — the stuff you learn on muddy, half-frozen football fields and sweat-sopping high school wrestling mats and out on ruler-straight highways with the pedal to the floor of your old man’s TransAm.
DeMille had been the first to let up on the eye contact, but he swore he had not let up on the grip. Yet he was down. His arm was slapped down onto a beer-sticky table and held hard there by his student. He had hurt something in his lower arm, strained the muscles. It ached and he rubbed the spot. Norris’s triumph was short- lived. He stopped himself from saying anything. DeMille slugged back the rest of his beer with his good arm and got up to leave.
“Congratulations, Chuck.” He sounded crestfallen. “I have to go mark some of those papers.”
Chuck looked a bit nervous. “C’mon, let me buy you another beer first?”
“I never grade on a full bladder. Thanks anyway.” DeMille bumped into a couple of chairs as he was finding his way out of he gloom. His abrupt exodus had thrown the kid off base. Chuck looked hurt, then nervous, but DeMille had pretended to ignore him and had returned to a professorial formality.
Outside in a glaring noon-day sun, Norris caught up to DeMille and grabbed his sleeve. “Hey, wait. Look, I’m really sorry about that. I mean, I hope I didn’t hurt you.”
DeMille gave him a polite brush-off. “Not to worry,” he said in such a way that it sounded artificial and insincere. DeMille knew that Norris was really worrying about his grade. Had the teacher been offended enough to lower it, to fail him, even? DeMille didn’t let the student know what the net effect of their contest would be. He wanted to let him sweat it out on his own.
MY FATHER WAS A BOOK REVIEWER
My father was a book reviewer, so he never had much time for us. We lived in a very small house on a comfortably large suburban lot. Also on our property, on the far side, was an exceptionally large two-storey garage. In the garage, my father sat at a small, dark desk, leaning over a puddle of light provided by a goose-neck lamp. Reading. Reviewing.
The high walls of the main floor of the garage, where a car might park, were lined with a decade of books he had either reviewed or ignored. One day, my father said, he would call the used bookstore downtown and have them come to buy the books. It was the way book reviewers made sly money. Only my father never got around to it. He was too busy reviewing one damn book after another as each season’s titles piled one upon another.
My mother was also a literary type. She had written a very important how-to book for housewives of her generation. She was a woman who performed miracles with vinegar and ammonia. My mother believed that vinegar and ammonia were the two essentials to modern living. She told me proudly one day, “On some planets” — I think she meant Jupiter — “there’s nothing to breathe but ammonia.” I could tell by the sound of her voice that she approved of such planets.
But my mom did not fully approve of the literary life. She had written her best-seller with good intentions. It was a useful little book that went through a dozen printings, but Mom had negotiated her contract poorly and made little money on it. Nonetheless, she was a legend in the community. People called night a
nd day asking questions about stains or laundry bluing.
My parents had met at the Herald, of course. Mom was writing the “Ask Anything” column for housewives, and my father was, you guessed it, reviewing books. He spilled a large cup of black coffee on a favoured corduroy jacket. My mother came to the rescue.
It seems that she has been rescuing our family ever since.
I was an only child except for my sister, Eileen. Eileen had cultivated invisibility ever since the time she was two years old, when she had torn a full chapter out of a novel that my father was supposed to be criticizing. She tore out what must have been a very important chapter near the end of the book, which she found in the living room, a six-hundred-page epic, and she chewed it up. Then swallowed it. The chapter had agreed with her, and she was working on the next one when discovered.
My father was, as usual, completely incapable of expressing any anger except for that kind of low-key, disciplined anger which vented itself in print over the success of a best-selling but implicitly flawed work of fiction. He spoke so rarely to us that, as children, we knew little about him anyway. But he had a way of looking at you. He looked that way at my sister. Eileen regurgitated the chapter immediately all over the Persian carpet.
My father had not read that particular chapter, and, when he wrote his review, he made some fatal reviewer’s slip-up, something that indicated he had not fully read the book. The publisher of the novel phoned the publisher of the newspaper later and demanded that my father be fired. Somehow my father kept his reviewing job by the skin of his teeth. But the silent wrath felt by Eileen scarred her for life. She kept to her room a lot and, when she was old enough, would read my mother’s own best-seller over and over as if it were a powerful religious book.
* * *
At the time of the fire, I was twelve. Eileen was nine. My mother was the same age as she had always been. She was incapable of change — a steadfast kitchen worker, an organizer of kitchen gadgetry, a person who cleaned the labels on spice bottles weekly. She led a busy, happy life and never felt alone as long as she had handy a pail of water mixed with ammonia.
The fire began in the Grand Canyon of books in the loft of the garage, where I had been experimenting with cigarettes. My father was at his newspaper office chewing the erasers off pencil stubs at the time. He always did a first draft at home, then worried over it for a near-sleepless night, then drove to the office in the morning and worried some more until his stomach bothered him. He would phone my mother for medical advice, and she would advise baking soda or doing a shoulder stand. My father never once did a shoulder stand at the newspaper but kept in his top right-hand drawer a large, economy-size box of baking soda, large enough to neutralize most of the stomach acid in the county.
Now, exactly why my father reviewed books was unclear. It had something to do with safeguarding the public, I think. “The reviewer’s job is to steer the public away from trash,” he said to my mother one night at supper. It was like an answer to a question but no one had asked the question. Eileen looked at him with large, worry-filled eyes. She felt the words were directed at her somehow because she read surreptitious comic books in her room and hid them in her underwear drawer, where they were regularly found by my mother but never reported to the upholder of literary standards.
“If anything becomes a best-seller,” my father pontificated, “that’s an automatic indication that it must be trash. For it must appeal to the lowest common denominator.” The lowest common denominator meant regular people, and my father was not particularly fond of regular people. He liked words okay. As long as they were spelled correctly and put in their proper order. But he had problems with people.
Suddenly my mother stopped chewing. The air above the dinner table was alive with unspoken language. My father realized his mistake. The best-seller issue again. He tried to change the subject. “You know, I came across three misplaced modifiers and a comma splice today in a book that was supposedly edited.” But it was too late.
The table was already being cleared even though none of us had finished. There was no desert, nothing. My mother retreated to the kitchen, my father to the desk and the puddle of light in the garage.
Sometimes, insulting letters came directly to the house from writers who had received scathing reviews. For some of them, it seemed, dreams had been shattered, because my father was a very powerful, even legendary, reviewer. One threatened to murder my father. Another said he would burn our house down. My father was unwavering in his duty, though. He would see us all destitute and naked in the street before he would allow the public to be ill-informed about the literary merit of new books.
The arrival of the fire trucks in our neighbourhood was the most excitement my block had seen since Cominski’s dog had been run over last year and had to be shot by Ed Cominski in front of everyone. The two-storey garage full of reviewed and ignored books made a towering inferno in our side yard. The heat was so intense it melted the insulation off nearby telephone wires, and it turned all the leaves on Ed Cominski’s oak tree brown.
I had been smoking cigarettes in the garage the day of the fire. I had been playing with matches, lighting them and flicking them through the darkness. It had been the most excitement I had had all month, possibly in my entire life. Before I had gone off to take Eileen to check for frogs in the stream, I had dutifully opened the garage door to let out any trace of smoke. And I had picked up all the burnt matches I had flicked into the darkness.
But I must have missed something. For, as we walked home form the ditch, I saw the smoke, then the flames licking up at the blue sky. Then I saw the fire truck, and Ed Cominski running out of his house next door, yelling something about his tree.
The firemen seemed slower than I would have expected. I think they realized that the building had already blazed beyond salvation. I thought of the several thousand books and millions of words up in smoke. Eileen had ruined only one chapter and then some of a good novel. I had obliterated half the publishing history of our country.
My mother was standing on the lawn. Her hands were on her hips, and she was wringing droplets out of a dish towel. We ran up to her, and she said, “I don’t know what happened.”
And then the fire melted down to charred wood and smoke. The sky was filled with black pages and ash that scattered to the south. Black water floated charred bits of books down our driveway and into the street. I knew my smoking career was over.
Just then, our old grey station wagon pulled up on the street. My father got out and walked to my mother. He held her in his arms.
Eileen and I stumbled toward them. I was flush with guilt, but it was my sister who cried, not me. The firemen were rolling up their hoses already. A few were laughing. As we shuffled onward, I was prepared to meet my doom. Ed Cominski was yelling at my father about his singed oak tree, but then he was a man “prone to belligerence,” as my father had told us many times.
Then my father did a very unusual thing for him. He started yelling back at Cominski. He used four-letter words and the kind of sentence structure you hear at hockey games and wrestling matches. My father had flipped, I was sure. He was completely undone.
But my mother, as she gathered Eileen and me into her ammonia-scented arms, looked at him and began to smile. “We’ve finally brought him back into the real world,” she said, not to us but to the world.
When my father was through shouting, and Ed Cominski had slammed his screen door and kicked it several times, my father turned back to us, his face reddened but his eyes full of a living fire that had been borrowed from the burning garage. I was ready to confess and accept the death penalty. Eileen had already withdrawn to another hiding place, in spirit if not in the flesh.
My father sat down on the doorstep and studied the firemen coiling their hoses. Then he let his eyes linger on the black lagoon where the garage library once stood. Then he looked at the rest of his family.
“I burned it down on purpose,” my mother said, out of the blue
, fracturing the quiet with her revelation.
My father looked puzzled. Not angry, just bewildered. It was the look he would have given an editor who had called his syntax incompetent.
“Three parts kerosene, one part gasoline, and a pinch of flame.”
A fireman walked our way, a man with a clipboard and smudged black face. He wanted to know if we had any idea as to what caused the fire. My mother was about to speak. She was a woman of truth. But before she could, my father said, “Yes. I think it was an old electric heater. Forgot to turn it off this morning.”
The fireman jotted a few notes, picked his nose and said, “Okay, well, we’ll be back later to get a full report. Cheers.”
“Cheers,” my old man echoed.
Was my father trying to protect my mother while my mother was trying to protect me? What the hell was going on here?
“What are we going to do now?” It was Mother who asked the question. She wanted something from my old man; she wanted to know if anything was different.
My father studied his hands, then he put them in his pockets and looked at the singed leaves on Ed Cominski’s tree.
“A lot of those books deserved burning,” he said at last.
Dance the Rocks Ashore Page 21