The Slip

by Mark Sampson

  Philip:

  I need to talk to you about this escalating situation. Please come by my office tomorrow morning, 8:30. You don’t have a class. I checked.

  My stomach filled with annoyance and dread. In the twenty-two years I’ve been billeted at U of T’s Philosophy department, I have only been summoned to the dean’s office in this manner once before. And it did not go well.

  I hit REPLY.

  Sure, Tom. I’ll see you then.

  I arrived back at 4 Metcalfe Street about an hour later in an anxiety so thick I was practically vibrating from it. As I came inside, I was greeted by the screams of Naomi and her playdate friend racing through the house in what looked like a game of tag. They came zooming past the front entry just as I was slipping out of my Payless.

  “Hi, Daddy!”

  “Sweetie — sweetie! No running in the house, okay!”

  She cackled at the absurdity of such a request, and the two went tearing through the kitchen together.

  “Naomi, what did I just say!”

  I followed them in but then stopped when I spotted Grace sitting in the living room with her friend Stacey, the other girl’s mom. Grace’s mauve teapot sat on a trivet on our coffee table, surrounded by mugs and a plate of cranberry scones. Stacey — a mere whiff of a woman despite having three kids of her own — was the author of a couple of collections of short stories, and had known Grace for years. I often marvelled, though, at how their friendship seemed to be based almost entirely on the mutual need to gossip about other people they knew in the “writing community.” It was all, it appeared to me, that they ever did when the two of them got together.

  They stopped talking when I appeared in the arch of the living room. Grace brought her bright green eyes up to where I stood, but Stacey just turned away, as if she couldn’t bear to look at me. Her corncob-coloured hair fell in her face as she did.

  “Did class go okay?” Grace asked.

  “No. It did not.” I raked my fingers through my bushy beard. “And the dean wants to meet with me first thing tomorrow.”

  “Shit.” Maybe Grace was going to say something more — something comforting to me. But if so, she was cut off then by the sound of one or both of the girls’ bodies slamming into the cupboards in the kitchen, followed by a raucous round of giggling.

  Grace was on her feet. “Naomi Woolf Sharpe-Daly — please come here.” The child obeyed, immediately. “Did you not hear your father say no running through the house?” Naomi nodded, a little embarrassed. Then, her tone softening, Grace said: “Why don’t you and Kim go colour some dinosaurs? Do something quiet.” The child agreed, and scurried off.

  Grace returned to the couch, assuming a position that I always read as I am the queen of all I survey. Which, of course she was. I felt wholly redundant in the wake of it, as if I were little more than a functional piece of the furniture, or perhaps a helium balloon, attracting the eye with its novelty, but ultimately pointless. I looked at my wife, hoping she would finish what she’d been about to say. I thought: C’mon, Grace. Assure me that everything is going to be all right. You owe me that. I wouldn’t be in this mess if it weren’t for YOU.

  But she said nothing. She and Stacey acted as if they were waiting for me to leave. Which they were. I clued in, then: they were, before I came in the door, gossiping about me.

  “Anyway,” I said. “I guess I’ll head up to the office and work on the book for a while.”

  Grace nodded, as if to say, Yeah, you do that.

  I stopped by the kitchen on my way. Saw atop the counter the big bag of lemons she had brought me back from Loblaws, those bright yellow shapes shimmering through the plastic. I thought then to backtrack and thank her for picking them up. (We’d been working harder to say thank you in this house.) Instead, I just tore open the bag, pulled a lemon out, then took the remainder over to my bar fridge and dropped them into the vegetable crisper. Then I began to quickly assemble a Bloody Joseph. Not that one assembles a Bloody Joseph quickly, and I could feel Grace’s and Stacey’s eyes burning me in the back of my head as I poured and squeezed and shook over my martini tin. Waiting, they were, for me to just hurry up and disappear into this huge, overpriced house.

  Upstairs, in the book-lined silence of my office, I checked email once again. Eleven more notifications from the Facebook. Fuckers. I was just reaching for the mouse to delete them when another email appeared in my inbox. I startled a little when I saw that boldfaced name and subject line:

  Rani Sumita

  What the hell, Sharpe???

  Such a vertiginous feeling, to see her name there. It had been a while. I felt my stomach sink, but also my lips twist into a smile. This was the effect Rani always had on me: a cocktail of apprehension and intrigue. I swallowed hard. Had my slip made it all the way across the pond? Opening a new tab, I went to the BBC News website. I needed to scroll a bit, but sure enough there was a thumbnail photo of me with hyperlinked text next to it that read “Philip Sharpe’s on-air gaffe.” The article behind it was probably written by one of Rani’s colleagues, and she would have no doubt seen it.

  I went back to my email, opened it. It read:

  What the hell, Sharpe!!! Are you serious?? What the FUCK are you saying over there?

  Not exactly helpful.

  Should I respond? I thought. No, just leave it for now. There is work to do, and with all this tension between you and Grace, the last thing you need is get into a flirtatious exchange with Rani. Just leave it. For now. There is work to do.

  So I shut down my email, and launched Microsoft Word. Got busy on the next chapter of my counterintuitive book about Christianity and its dissidents. In paradoxo veritas.

  The Jugglers Arms

  Don’t reach for your pen, dear reader. I am well aware of the missing apostrophe that haunted the name of my father’s pub like a phantom limb. That truant squiggle was the bane of my childhood, the pea under my intellectual mattress, at least since age eleven when I read Strunk & White for the first time and learned that something was amiss. Despite its punctuational malfeasance, Little Frankie’s business on Dorchester Street in the heart of old Charlottetown had been what the locals called “an Island institution,” and he and I lived in the large apartment above the pub. It’s all gone now, torn down and replaced by a dog park. But whenever I get into one of these scraps with Grace, whenever I feel the constricting squeeze of my domestic situation, I’m often taken back to my PEI youth, to my days inside the dour, smoky caverns of my childhood home.

  Indeed, the wordplay in the pub’s name may have conjured images of an old-timey British tavern, but the Jugglers Arms was not, as they say, an upscale establishment. It was dark and dingy, with cadaver-grey floors and a low ceiling and a cigarette machine in the lobby. The pub’s one redeeming quality remained the small music stage where the occasional prospects (including, my father was proud to point out, a young Stompin’ Tom and a shy schoolteacher named Anne Murray) appeared before the larger, more profitable Friday- and Saturday-night crowds. Yet it was Little Frankie’s weekday clientele, the farouche farmers and blue-collar whatsits and tourism operators drinking their way through another PEI winter, that gave the dive its inimitable spirit. I often think that it was these men, more than Frankie, who raised me; and in my early teens it became my job to deliver their food and bus their tables as they glowered and argued over their pints of Schooner lager and Labatt 50.

  I should also describe Little Frankie himself. My dad was prone to both bursts of pride and fits of rage when it came to me, and his mood swings were about as predictable as a punch in the face. Part of the problem was that the Jugglers Arms had not been Frankie’s first, or even third, ambition. He had left Prince Edward Island at age twenty to pursue a series of unlikely opportunities: first a brief stint at academics (he fancied himself a scholar, despite having failed two grades); then a briefer stint in the Canadian military (he missed the
Korean conflict by mere months); and finally a six-year career as a busy but unsuccessful featherweight in Halifax’s pro boxing scene (retiring, reluctantly, in 1960 after suffering his eighth concussion). He returned to the Island shortly thereafter and took a job slinging drinks at an eatery on the outskirts of Charlottetown. Despite his short stature and now cauliflowered ears, he managed to attract the affections of the woman who would become my mother — a tall, red-headed, bedizened beauty who worked alongside him as a waitress, and who was not above exploiting her Rubenesque cleavage for tips. They soon married and decided to launch their own bar together, downtown.

  Problem was, they squabbled about what kind of establishment it should be. Little Frankie insisted on the name the Jugglers Arms, but because he didn’t know where the apostrophe was supposed to go, he left it off his signage completely (much to the consternation, years later, of his know-it-all son). I suppose he envisioned the place an upmarket pub where Kingsley Amis types would sit around drinking port and discussing important issues of the day. My mother disagreed. She said what tiny Charlottetown really needed was a strip club, and she was more than happy to be the Island’s first (and, if necessary, only) exotic dancer. This threw Little Frankie into a paroxysm of prudishness, and the two of them rowed and thwarted each other at every turn. Thus, with two equally far-fetched ideas about what the pub could be, the Jugglers Arms opened in the early sixties with a muddled identity, one it kept to closing day — that of a slightly seedy but loveable dump.

  My mother grew deeply unhappy there, and made sure my father knew it. She began to doubt whether she’d even want to take her clothes off in front of the down-market bums the bar was attracting. She was constantly threatening to leave, and Frankie soon encouraged her to do so. Then, the unspeakable happened. Despite her best attempts at birth control, my mother fell pregnant with me in 1965. My existence proved to be the straw that crushed the camel, as the various bodily indignities of motherhood soon filled her with torrents of disgust. Shortly after my second birthday, she abandoned me and Little Frankie and fled to Montreal, where, rumour had it, she took work in a burlesque house. My father felt betrayed, naturally, and spoke ill of her at every opportunity. (Indeed, throughout my childhood she was known simply as “your nymphomaniac mother”; though, to be fair, “nymphomaniac” was how Frankie described any woman whose sexual appetites outpaced his own.) Still, this turn of fate presented my father with yet another ambition, one he declared with great drama to the pub’s slouching, indifferent regulars: I Shall Raise the Boy Myself. He grew giddy at the prospect of bringing me up the way he wanted, without feminine interference.

  And I’ll give the guy credit. Despite our poverty — and we were poor, more or less, the pub falling victim to long winters of slow business and my father’s various get-rich-quick schemes — Frankie made sure to provide me with everything that a young, insatiable mind might need. When I showed an early voracity for reading, he bought me a leather-bound set of the Harvard Classics, which we displayed on a bookshelf near our large bay window overlooking old Charlottetown. I devoured these tomes, which included everything from Homer and Aesop’s Fables, to Cervantes, to various founding documents of the United States. When I went through a science phase, he got me a subscription to Scientific American; when I got hooked on journalism, he landed me a tour of the local CBC outlet. Frankie also educated me about music. While downstairs the pub played a nonsensical cocktail of honky-tonk songs and Top 40 hits, upstairs in our apartment he insisted we listen to real music, which for him meant classical. Being a barman, he was also particular about booze. While his regulars were happy to drink the swill on tap or the cheap spirits he kept behind the bar, upstairs Frankie insisted I learn the difference between a single malt and a blend, between a transcendental Gewürztraminer and a passable Chardonnay. Why did he go to such lengths? Well. It was clear he regretted not being better educated himself, and he loved living vicariously through this little sprezzatura-showing redhead he was raising. Every report card got displayed on the fridge; each academic commendation got bragged about to the pub’s staff.

  Of course all this would come back to bite him in the arse; and it started when, at age eleven, I first began pointing out the missing apostrophe on his signage. “Did you know,” I said, which was how I often began sentences at that age, “that there is a typo in the pub’s name?”

  “You don’t say,” he replied in his collared bar shirt, walking a keg of beer across the floor of the backroom. “Too bad you weren’t here when me and your nymphomaniac mother launched this joint. Here, grab the other end of this, would ya?” As I took one handle of the keg in both hands and we lifted together, I asked him, “Are you going to fix it?” but he answered me with a single dismissive snort. I asked again at age twelve, and age fourteen, and several times at age seventeen. By then I was reading Freud for fun and writing a monthly column on teen issues for the local rag, the Evening Patriot.

  “Look,” I said to him during one particularly dead afternoon, “you can either put an apostrophe before the s or after, it doesn’t matter. Though if you choose the latter, you really need to add a second juggler to the logo.”

  “Are you out of your fucking mind?” he said. “Philly, if I did that it’s not just the sign out front that would need to change. It’s every matchbook, every coaster, every bloody ashtray. I can’t afford to do that.”

  “But it’s wrong,” I replied. “We look like illiterates.”

  Frankie put both hands on the bar and leaned toward me. “Philly, Islanders don’t care about shit like that. The twenty-eight people in this town who know where apostrophes go would never drink in this dive anyway.” He went on to remind me that upstairs in the apartment he and I could gab at length about the intricacies of the English language, but down here in the pub it was strictly business. He said that when I was on his clock, I should spend less time jaw jacking about typos and more time keeping up with food and drink orders. And then he said something hurtful about the piss-poor job I did cleaning the bathrooms the previous night.

  That was the other thing about Frankie. For all his love for me, for all his pride in my “big brain,” he had a preternatural talent for pointing out my incompetency when it came to manual labour. I chalked it up to him being a boxer: he always knew how to hit you where it hurt. The irony was, when Frankie felt I was getting a bit too “uppity” with my booksmarts, he would take me down a peg by intimating that it was my fault the pub was struggling as much as it was. (And true, I did lack a certain acumen: by age sixteen I had read and grasped the entirety of Shakespeare, but still couldn’t settle the till properly, or help the dray men park their trucks, or remember how to reassemble a bar tap after cleaning it, no matter how many times Frankie roared instructions and belittled my efforts.) He loved the sight of me reading and doing homework, but more generalized idleness incensed him. He said that a real man didn’t just loaf around. If a man wasn’t working, or thinking about work, there was something profoundly flawed about his behaviour. Indeed, Frankie was forever on the lookout for people who were getting through life more easily than we were; and for all his parental illusions, he was, in the end, just another stressed-out entrepreneur, and my self-esteem was the furthest thing from his mind.

  And so who filled in the gaps? As I mentioned, much of my upbringing fell to the patria potestas of my father’s regulars. Oh God, they were awful men — beaten down by their hardscrabble lives on Prince Edward Island; by their grinding blue-collar jobs; by the dull, interminable winters; and, most specifically, by the fishwives they regretted marrying. Oh, that was the truth of it. And that’s why a quarrel with Grace now will stir a memory of these grizzled old-timers, will cause the black bile they instilled within me to rise. I’m ashamed to say that I made a childhood pledge never to get married because I didn’t want to end up like my father’s regulars. They told me that getting married was not something any man would choose to do; it just sort of happened
to you, like going bald or developing a paunch. These men questioned what function their wives actually served. Sure, they’d say, she cooked your meals, and cleaned your house, and raised your children, and occasionally had sex with you, but otherwise what was she good for? Housewives certainly didn’t contribute much to civilization, to say nothing of the household income. These Andy Capp types often complained about arriving home from the most soul-destroying workday and having to endure a barrage of nagging the minute they walked in the door — and from someone whose most stressful part of the day appeared to involve catching little Sally as she came down the kiddie slide at Rainbow Valley. These men knew that there must have been some advantage to having a crabby, indolent, entitled, irrational, unemployed person in their house, day after day, but they had long since forgotten what that was.

  Even as a boy, I was appalled by this barroom misogyny, but I also feared it. It’s not that I was afraid I would ever see eye to eye with these men — many of whom, despite being born in the 1920s or even ’30s, opposed female suffrage on principle — but that I would come to resent someone as much as they seemed to resent their wives. It didn’t help matters that Little Frankie often egged them on from behind the bar, declaring what a blessing it was that my nymphomaniac mother had decided to scram. I even had an image in my mind, a frightfully detailed paracosm, of the shrew I’d marry if I wasn’t careful: a squat, pear-shaped woman with a mass of curly hair like a cobra’s hood around her head, a permanent sneer contorting her pug face. I had a vision of this person standing at a kitchen sink somewhere in a perpetual state of fury, an utter Andes of backfat greeting me as I came in the door from a job I hated. In this vision, we would row every night, and I would say the most scalding things to her — the kind of things Frankie often said to me.