Help Me, Jacques Cousteau

by Gil Adamson

  I don’t know what happens next. My neck hurts from sitting on the couch too long. I shift a bit, and soon I’m asleep. It’s Utah this time, and I’m driving, and everything is truly bizarre.

  THE ELECTRIC CURTAIN

  ……………I’M IN A DISGUSTING MOOD this morning, sitting in a shaft of sunlight and thinking about my ex-boyfriend Nick for the first time in a long time. To keep busy, I look for the piece about my brother in the newspaper, folding the pages out over my toast and coffee, but I can’t find the right section. It’s a community newspaper, with print that stinks like cigars.

  So far, everything in the paper is about our neighbourhood’s pitiful blues festival — a disaster that goes on for a week; you can listen all day and never hear a single blues tune. Some days, you stand on your porch and the sounds of the various bands drift together, playing “The Girl from Ipanema” and “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.” The mess goes on all day and into the night, tunes coming through the bedroom window, forcing me to cover my head with a pillow. I wake up humming songs I hate. The newspaper chirps at me: “This Thursday!”

  For some reason, I woke up this morning thinking Nick was going to buy our house. I struggled out of bed to warn Dad, and was halfway down the stairs before I realized it couldn’t be true. I sat on the bottom step then, my head in my hands, and tried to convince myself that I wasn’t on my way into another Nick fixation. Nonetheless, the carpet under my feet didn’t seem to belong to me anymore. I was a bit worried; before this morning things had been going so well for months.

  I finally find Andrew in the “Home on the Range” section of the paper. It’s the kitchen section, but some weeks they run out of food tips and typo-riddled recipes, and they throw in anything that might have happened near a kitchen. Today, it’s Andrew’s solar-powered curtains.

  “Look,” I say, as Andrew digs around under the sink, “it’s about your curtains.”

  “Huh,” says Andrew.

  “They call you a genius — actually they call you a gerius — and it says that solar energy —”

  “Those curtains don’t work. They’re crap,” he says. This is his opinion of almost everything he does, and I’ve given up telling him not to be so down on himself. I’m looking at a grainy picture of my brother’s face. He is intent, serious, holding up a little solar chip.

  “You look like a grown man here, Andrew,” I say, holding the paper out.

  “I am a grown man,” he says.

  It’s true; he’s seventeen years old now, six foot two with arms like a boxer’s. If he keeps growing at this rate, he’ll soon be able to pick Dad up and bounce him on his knee.

  My brother yanks a long string of nylon rope out from under the sink and inspects the frayed ends. He exits the room, leaving the cupboard door open and dragging the rope behind him. The dog stares at the twitching frayed tail as it rounds the corner, but he doesn’t rise to chase it.

  In many ways, my brother is an updated version of my father. Between the two of them, they have booby-trapped the whole house. Everywhere there are devices that have been strung up, tied together, rigged with electrical tape and timers and light-emitting diodes and beepers. Apart from the curtains, which I know are Andrew’s, I’m not sure which project belongs to whom, and anyway, they collaborate. My father has a coffee maker on his bedside table that turns on when his alarm goes off. The problem is that, if he turns the alarm off, the coffee stops brewing. Every morning, my father leaps up and heads for the bathroom while his clock raaangs away under a pillow.

  The doorbell plays Christmas music, the garbage bin is booby-trapped against the dog as well as raccoons, and Dad’s car gets really good mileage. My father is in heaven, having finally convinced somebody that a life without gadgets is no life at all. Even my mother has softened and allowed Andrew to do a few things around her house, though she keeps asking for the doorbell’s tune to be changed to something other than “Silent Night.”

  During the day I work for an optometrist who calls me “sweetie” and very obviously loathes her job. At night I come home, drink beer, and write my ridiculous poems. Occasionally, I write something that makes sense, but mostly the poems are about lizards and apes and the A-bomb, which is why I’ll never get famous. I can’t seem to write about normal things, like, say, the optometrist and her fancy shoes and the crying sessions I hear from inside her little darkened room. She thinks I can’t hear her. But I can practically hear spiders walking, and now I know all about my boss, about her fondness for white powder, and her less than happy relationship with Revenue Canada.

  In fact, it was during one of her crying jags that I met Nick. If I were more like my mother, I would have considered that, in itself, to be a bad sign. I came out of the office door at a near-run with mail under my arm, hoping my boss would be finished weeping by the time I got back. I passed a workman who was repairing the marble by the elevator doors. He was bent over, so all I saw was his long back, and his butt. Later, coming back the other way, I smiled broadly at him, and he swivelled on his heel to watch me go.

  Over the week we began taking time to visit with each other. I’d stand with him, leaving the office door open so I could get to the phone quickly, or else he’d sit on his toolbox beside my desk and drink coffee. On his last day, I asked him out to dinner. He looked as if the question had caught him off guard, and he stammered a series of little nothings. For a moment I thought I’d made an error in judgement — he didn’t like me; he didn’t like girls; he was gay. But then Nick stammered that he’d like very much to go out, and he shoved his hands in his pockets, leaned forward, and kissed me on the cheek.

  The next night we were sitting in a little restaurant so cramped they had to hang the bread basket on a rope over the table. Almost right away he told me he had a girlfriend, and he was feeling guilty. I stared at him.

  “Why did you come, then?” I said.

  He said because he’d wanted to, but he was confused. By then, we were both confused, and neither of us could eat anything. I picked at my food and so did he. We sat there trying to smile or talk. After a long, depressing interval, we paid and left the restaurant.

  In the municipal parking lot where he had parked was a gang of little boys, and they chased each other like puppies and struck at tires and bumpers with their sticks. Nick was going home, and I was going home, and I knew he wouldn’t offer me a ride.

  “Well, thanks,” I said.

  He leaned over and kissed me on the cheek again. I should have turned and walked away, but I stood there like a fool, waiting. Then he started kissing me again, in earnest this time, pressing his groin and thighs hard against me. It was great. After a little time, we became aware of kissing noises from the shadows, and so we hurried away down darkened streets to a place by the water. We stood stupidly staring at a warehouse. The wind blew on my face and I closed my eyes against the airborne grit. Nick said he thought he should be going.

  We had this superb fight about why we were there together and who had started it. By the time we left each other — both furious and dazed — Nick had unbuttoned my shirt, pulled my skirt up, I’d had both hands down his pants, and we’d shouted at each other twice about who was being manipulative. It was amazing.

  Of course, Nick called me at work a week later. We saw each other secretly, irregularly. The sex was honest, but not unusual. At work, I’d whisper into the phone to him while patients dozed in the waiting room. This went on until he felt compelled to tell his girlfriend. Then it was all over — for two weeks.

  I was sitting reading on the back porch when the phone rang, and it was Nick on the other end. I went straight over to his apartment and had sex, the kind of sex that, in retrospect, gives you a little shock that it actually happened to you. In the kitchen afterwards, he kept glancing nervously at the clock on the stove, and I figured it was time for me to go.

  I confessed to Andrew about all this; I tell him about most things, and he followed the story attentively. But when it was over, he shook his h
ead.

  “What happened to the guy with the beard?” he asked. “I liked that one.” I looked at him, unable to remember who he was talking about.

  The weeks droned on and I didn’t hear from Nick again. My friend Jeannie told me, “You should be proud of yourself for surviving him.” But she also said, “If you ever find yourself being cheated on, you’ll know you deserve it.” In private moments, I found myself rehearsing confrontations with Nick until, over the months, my accusations became mantras, then the words meant nothing, then I forgot he existed.

  Sitting in the optometrist’s silent office, with its rack of ugly frames and its files and order forms and past-due bills, I gaze at the closed door and listen to the elevators as they hum up and down. A patient, late for her appointment, crashes through the door, knocking over the coffee table and a half-dead plant.

  “Made it!” she barks, her lenses fogging into blind discs, and just then I hear a tremulous sigh from the examination room behind me, and the snap of the lights being turned on.

  It’s official now: I want another job.

  When I get home, my grandparents’ Cadillac is parked half in the driveway, half on the lawn, and steam is coming out of the bathroom window upstairs. The keys are still in the ignition, but the car is empty. Andrew is in the garage leaning over his motorcycle and a girl is standing next to him, smoking. She asks him what he’s doing now, and he tells her to put out the cigarette.

  I’ve seen the girl annoying Andrew before; she’s the daughter of the Bison, the ugly man across the street, and everyone agrees that it’s lucky she doesn’t look like him. She’s about fifteen and pretty, a hint of a widow’s peak on her forehead, a mouth like a poppy. One evening, she even stuck around so long we had to ask her to have dinner with us. She and my father had a great time discussing her parents’ peculiar marriage. For instance, the Bison tells his wife when he’s on the verge of having an affair and begs her to go and talk the other woman out of it. My father found this quite demented, if entertaining. During all of this, Andrew looked at me as if it was my job to get rid of the girl.

  I go inside the house and stand in the hall listening. Someone is having a bath, and I conclude it’s my grandfather. I scrutinize the calendar, but there is nothing there to indicate that Dad is expecting his parents to visit. My grandmother comes rushing out of the front room, thrilled.

  “The curtains are electric!” she says to me as she passes.

  “What are you doing here, Granny?” I ask, but she’s gone upstairs to tell her husband about the boy’s latest invention.

  My grandparents don’t remember names. I think that’s why they gave their sons such odd names: Castor, Bishop, and North, names that don’t exactly blend in. I have been called “Becky,” “Annabel,” even “Tony,” whatever comes to mind. My brother, generally, is “the boy.”

  My grandfather comes down the stairs in a towel, trailed by my grandmother. He ignores me and goes into the front room, where he stands brazen in the window and puts his hand over the solar chip. The curtains, thinking it’s nighttime, slowly draw closed.

  “There!” my grandmother crows. “You see?”

  He takes his hand away and the curtains squeak open again. He does this a few more times until the mechanism makes a low hum and finally seizes, halfway closed. We scatter, hoping Andrew has seen nothing.

  I’ve got music on the radio in my room and I’m lying on the floor, smoking a cigarette. My boss and I started smoking around the same time and, for some reason, we still hide it from each other. “Want some coffee, sweetie?” she will say, already halfway out the office door.

  “No, no!” I’ll cry. “Let me get it.” But she’s out the door and I sit back, glaring at her retreating lab coat. She gets to smoke and I don’t, and we both know she owes me one.

  I watch the smoke curl towards my bedroom ceiling. The music stops and an ad for the blues festival comes on, an awful oom-pa-pa in the background. I sit up, infuriated: oom-pa-pa!? Why call it a blues festival at all? A woman’s voice purrs that there are only two days to go, admission is free, and then she names a bunch of bands with stupid names. Jim Dandy. Fred Moodie and the Mississauga Mood Mix. My favourite is a couple of idiot guys called the Two Tones. I whack the clock radio off, put my cigarette out, and stomp downstairs.

  I find Andrew at the dining room table wiping the grease from his hands with a yellow cloth. Grandfather is still swishing around in the bath, humming. I figure he said something mean to my grandmother again, because she has taken off in the car, leaving a long streak of burnt rubber on the street outside. I can picture my grandfather up there, reading a magazine, unperturbed.

  “How’s it going?” I ask Andrew.

  “I should have bought the Honda. This machine wastes oil.”

  I’m so irritable, I feel like I might cry. “Andrew,” I begin, but my voice drops off and I don’t really know what I was going to say anyway. My brother glances at me, his face alert. He’s a good-looking young man, and I can see why the girl pursues him. He’s not stupid, either, because he stands, comes around the table, and hugs me and thumps my back. After a while, he sits back down and takes up the oily cloth again.

  “Andrew, why don’t you like that girl? She’s pretty, isn’t she?”

  “Yes, she is.”

  “She likes you, right?”

  “She likes me, but she’s fifteen years old.”

  “So what? You’re only seventeen.”

  “Fifteen is young; that girl hasn’t even got all her teeth yet. That’s a fact. You get your last teeth when you’re twenty-one.”

  I’m considering my brother, and Nick, and I’m wondering: do I have some kind of problem seeing the impossible for what it is? There was this time in high school I went on a diet because I wanted Maria’s brother to notice me. I wouldn’t eat Christmas dinner, sat with a plate of dry toast in front of me, until my mother couldn’t stand it anymore and asked me to leave the table. I went down a waist size, got a lot of colds, and it was all for nothing. To Maria’s brother, I was just another little girl, all of us squealing away up in Maria’s room, no better than a box of puppies.

  Sex isn’t the problem. I don’t seem to have any trouble with sex, and most of my boyfriends are nice people — the guy with the beard, the law student, the petty criminal, the wine expert, the guy with the truck. I liked them all fine. But once in a while, I pick some guy and lose my mind over him. Maybe it’s the poetry; maybe it’s got some kind of side effect.

  Dad comes through the door, dropping his briefcase, bags of groceries, and a new leash for the dog, because the last leash got buried.

  “What happened to Andrew’s curtains?” he asks. From above, there is the unmistakable sound of someone’s backside squeaking around in the tub. Dad looks at Andrew, looks at me, looks at the ceiling, and then curses, swearing his way into the kitchen.

  It is a cool, damp night and the dog hops around in the dark backyard, woofing at a squirrel. The squirrel tightropewalks along a telephone line, past the upstairs windows, and then disappears into the blackness of a tree. Sitting outside on a garden chair, I listen to the sounds of rotten blues bands warming up several blocks over. By the end of a week of this music, I will feel like I’ve been scrubbed endlessly with a bristle-brush. Tonight, I make a bet with myself that the first tune I hear will be something from Cats. To my surprise, the sounds form themselves into a giddy, tumbling version of “Trouble in Mind.” I stand up, intrigued, and walk out the back gate to see what’s going on. My dad and Andrew have escaped already, and my grandparents are asleep in front of the TV, where a lady cook chatters soundlessly.

  People stream along the sidewalk, often forced onto the road. Streetcars inch carefully through the crowd, empty and inviting. Most restaurants have a band glittering in the front window under temporary lights. Some bands are arranged on the sidewalk, while several battle each other in the park, electrical cords running everywhere and light stands wavering in the crowd. I know from e
xperience that, later in the evening, there will be a few drunken scuffles, people swinging punches at empty air, cars burning rubber up and down the streets. I am looking for my father or my brother, but instead, under a woozy string of lanterns, I see Nick.

  I think: Great, perfect, fucking hell, but I still find myself walking towards him through the crowd. He sees me coming and turns to escape. A woman next to him grabs at his shirt, the way one grabs at a child who runs too much, but she misses him, shrugs, goes on talking to her friends.

  I follow Nick around the corner and down a side street, dark from the overhang of trees. Cars line the curb and people’s fences lean out over the sidewalk. It is quiet here, and the air is damp. I am running on a high, staring at Nick’s perfect, fascinating, panicked face.

  “Don’t you ever think about me?” I say, advancing on him.

  “This isn’t good —”

  “Answer me.”

  Nick gawps at me, mouth unhinged. I get closer, and he doesn’t bother backing away. He seems to be calculating something.

  “Do you ever think about me?” I say, softer.

  “Yes,” he admits, reddening.

  “What do you think about?”

  “You know, just …”

  He’s cornered, squirming in the shadows, and I am about to have a heart attack, my pulse out of control. We both stand there, stunned and waiting.

  “Remember the time in the truck?” I say. “Do you remember what you said?”

  He aims a furtive look over my shoulder at the light coming from the street.

  “I miss you sometimes,” he murmurs.