Believing Cedric

by Mark Lavorato

  Before the class was through, he’d found himself in a desperate argument with the teacher, then with other classmates, the whole time standing firm behind the claim that Time Magazine was a sham, that it was making uninformed accusations on the actual, true-to-life reality of apartheid. Neil knew better. He was born and raised there, wasn’t he? He’d seen this phenomenon first-hand, and everything was fine with it, he was sure, he knew. He was SoewthAvrikun.

  He knew, that is, in the same way he had been sure he knew Cedric. Naivety is always obvious, glaring, tacit; unless it’s your own. That day, at the age of fifteen, Neil began his personal, complicated, and three-decade-long slide from a head-held-high pride about his native country to a head-hung-low shame. From a boy who shouted out his origin above the squeaking of swing sets to a receding-hairline insurance broker on the golf green, leaning over his putter, hunched, small, and mumbling the same country name under his breath before quickly changing the subject.

  As the topic of the injustices in South Africa mounted in the mid-to-late 1980s, pop culture picking it up and running with it—blockbuster films, television series, tabloid news programs, songs, concerts, venues—fingers began pointing. And it seemed like shame, as always, was appointed to the only people who kept their fingers to themselves. This, Neil found, helped let Canadians off in a way, let them conveniently forget about the long list of things that they had to be ashamed of from their own past. True, they weren’t loud with their accusations, weren’t belligerent, but they did make it clear that they believed they were in the right, and that, presumably, they always had been. It was a quiet pride. But it happened to be just boisterous enough to drown out the creaking rust of their wrongs.

  Yes, South Africa had given Neil shame. But that wasn’t all it had given him. Because what he had come to understand, and in the last few months more than ever, is that there were other things, things that permeated quietly, things that seeped in from the different places we’ve lived, the different skies we’ve walked beneath. Things that, for Neil, had to do with songs that his nanny had sung to him in another language entirely but whose meaning he had nevertheless understood. Things that had to do with the way sunlight could somehow move, ever so slightly, beads of glass that were suspended on a string. And something about those beads of glass themselves, and the way they could split the sunlight that was moving them, separate it, and lay it out in all its vibrant, disregarded fragments. Neil had been given a way to hold on to mystery, which he had almost forgotten along the way. Thankfully, he was able to recall just enough, enough for it to filter into his thoughts on this noon hour, January 30, 1991, while sitting across from Cedric Johnson. Just enough to allow for this strange conversation to take place, allow Neil to consider these claims of his now ex-business partner as being a real possibility. A small and archaic piece of him that could afford this one suspended moment of believing Cedric.

  Cedric cleared his throat, looked into his lap for a second, scratched his chin. “And you know,” he said abruptly, “while I’m at it, there’s another thing. You remember that one night, when we were all over at your place and were—into the cognac, was it?—and I made a complete ass of myself? God, we were liquored. And there was that . . . I mean, when me and your wife were in the kitchen for that long while, mixing drinks and . . . And you remember all this?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, I just wanted you to know that . . . nothing happened.”

  “I know.”

  A pause. “How do you know?”

  “Because she told me.”

  “And you believed her?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh.”

  Cedric looked into his lap again, and this time noticed something. He stretched his back out against the chair behind him, running his hands over his belly. “Guess I was a bit thinner back then too, eh?”

  “Thinner?” asked Neil, trying to assess Cedric’s paunch that was protruding under the table.

  “Well, thinner . . . than I become, I mean.”

  “Oh. Right.” Neil broke off to look around the dining lounge, which was really beginning to fill up. This was crazy really. The conversation, the things exchanged, the suspension of reality. “Well, must say, whatever is going on in that head of yours, it’s good . . . I mean, good . . . that you . . . kind of came clean, I guess.” He turned back to Cedric, who looked suddenly quite concerned.

  Cedric snatched his glass of water from the table, the ice tinkling against the sides, his eyes darting around the room as he drank from it. Then he put the glass down a touch too hard on the table, trying to smile. “Sorry?” he said, unfolding his napkin to dab his mouth. “Wha’d’you . . . wha’d’you mean—come clean?” He looked away quickly, scanning the room, pausing at one of the waiters, who was glaring at him while pouring a glass of wine at another table.

  Neil observed him for a long minute, noting the slight changes in his gestures, in the nuances of his body language, until he’d watched him long enough to know. He let out a half-snicker, shaking his head, opening his menu. “Nothing. Forget it. I didn’t mean anything.”

  They were words Cedric looked relieved to hear.

  “So.” Neil ran his finger down the entrees, trying not to look up from the list. “What’r’you gonna have?”

  They ate their meals, exchanged pleasantries and chitchat about nothing in particular, and when the waiter stiffly placed the bill on the table, Cedric slapped his Visa onto the billfold without reading the total, signed it a minute later, and they stood to leave.

  They shook hands in front of the restaurant, standing on the long-running sidewalk of Church Street, Neil offering Cedric a knowing, loaded smile, which found Cedric again becoming unnerved and ruffled, citing the cold as the reason for his hasty retreat. “Well, I’m off before I freeze to death. Talk soon, old boy,” he’d said, turning his back with a final wave.

  Neil waved at him in turn. “Talk soon.”

  Neil’s car was parked at the curb, and he hopped over the slush ruts, got in, and waited for the engine to warm, looking in the rear-view mirror. Cedric was gone now. And once the exhaust of Neil’s SUV had clouded his view, he shifted it into drive and pulled out, his all-terrain tires plowing easily through the slush. He looked down between his arms to check the gauges, the focal point of his clean and uncluttered dash. No warning lights. Everything was fine. He turned left onto Maitland, worked his buttocks deeper into the seat. They were non-leather seats, supportive, comfortable. He could hear the radio just beneath the purr of the engine (a 3.9-litre, fuel-injected, 8-cylinder); it was calmly discussing the Hudson Bay Company’s decision to stop selling furs. He switched it off, turned onto Yonge. Checked his gauges again. Everything was fine.

  Everything was fine.

  ( viii )

  The rocks under the water were as speckled eggs

  and noticing that, I noticed the swallows

  taking no notice of me,

  skilfully catching insects over the springtime lake,

  swooping and diving in abrupt curves

  until they’d caught one.

  Then, somehow, they’d signal to their mate

  who would meet them halfway, between

  their catch and the nest.

  And just before the two birds collided they would

  camber up, until their bodies had stalled,

  hanging there in an aerial balance,

  where, at that deadpoint of slipping for an instant

  out of gravity’s fingers, in the pause of their

  hovering weightless, beak to beak,

  the insect was handed off. Then, dropping to the

  surface with a twirl, a flutter, both would

  glide away in opposite directions.

  Such exactitude, delicate choreography in rearing their

  chicks, squeaky with thankless mouths wide,

  gawky and huddling in wait.

  Thinking that our dance to do the same had so little elegance,

&nbs
p; I picked one of the speckled stones from the water

  to take home, but put it back for its weight.

  Melissa pulled a sweater and the road atlas out of the car, slammed the door in the humming quiet of the gas station’s fluorescent lights, and ran her finger along the red line of the highway as if to measure how far they were from Thunder Bay. Just then a sizeable moth plopped onto the map next to her hand and became instantly still, probably sensing that there was something large and breathing hovering over it. The moth was pale green with a delicate maroon outline and a set of discerning eyes painted onto its wings. Two long lobes dropped from the mimicked face like tusks, the insect’s body in the centre making up a kind of furry nose. It was the most striking moth Melissa had ever seen, and she found herself looking up at the lights, as if to find more of them there. Once, her friend Nathan (some might have referred to him as an old boyfriend), who was a great collector and retainer of factoids and useless trivia, had told her about the way moths had evolved to navigate by the strongest celestial light: the moon—if it wasn’t new—or one of the brighter stars, Sirius, Arcturus, Alpha Centauri. Which is why, he’d said, when they pass by an artificial light, naturally assuming that it’s going to stay in the same place in the sky, directly above them, for example, they have no choice but to circle it in order to keep it there, at that one fixed point in their vision. They’re not, contrary to popular belief, attracted to light; they just can’t seem to get past it, disoriented by their only means of orientation—like an arctic airplane heading continually west in a spiral around the magnetic pole. They’re drawn into danger by a set of intuitions that they know only how to trust, into a blindness by the very way they see. And there was some aspect in that, considered Melissa, folding the map as the moth flew away to bounce off the lights again, that was really, and quite wonderfully, human.

  July 19, 1996

  Nathan and Richard could be heard several houses away, walking along the slow-arcing street of Leaside’s Sutherland Drive. The noise they were producing had people in their yards wandering to the sidewalk to stare at the teens as they approached. This was, after all, one of Toronto’s neighbourhoods that prided itself on its quietude, on its elegantly bricked homes, its streets that were maple-shaded, lower-speed-limited, hopping-black-squirrel-abundant. The boys had just finished a bout of beatboxing, Richard working the throaty bass and snare portion while Nathan provided the clicks, cowbells, and hi-hats to the piece. But it was an oeuvre they’d been playing with for a few blocks now, and one they seemed to have exhausted, both of them breaking off after a minimalist closing, then wiping a slow hand across their mouths. (Regardless of skill or discipline, beatboxing had the tendency to produce a not-exactly-negligible amount of salivary spray.)

  “Too good,” chuckled Nathan, jumping up at a broken and dangling branch, swiping at it. He missed. “Too good” was a phrase oft exchanged between the two, and was more or less considered their trademark. Though in their minds it was something they used sparingly, reserved for only the most authentically funky, genuinely quirky, or wildly original things.

  And in the spirit of using it sparingly, Richard didn’t agree or echo Nathan’s assessment. Instead he started into a jazzy walking bassline, the deep pluck of a contrabass resounding from his esophagus. Nathan waited, nodding to get the rhythm, then clamped his lips into a Miles Davis clench, eased open the far corner of his mouth, and broke in with something that sounded like a melange between a trumpet and an alto sax. They continued on this riff for another two blocks, until they arrived at Melissa’s house, where the party became louder as they strutted up the walkway.

  They stepped onto the landing and Richard rang the doorbell while Nathan plucked a small purple flower from one of the planters beside the doorway, inserting it into Richard’s hair. Richard lowered his chin and blinked at him in a gesture of bashful femininity.

  The door burst open. “Ricardo! Nater! Entrez, gentlemen, entrez. And dude. Like the flower.” It was Travis, a twelfth-grader who went to Leaside High School with them, and he was here, strangely, at a party of grade-eleveners. He was a nice-enough guy, even if he was only capable of rehashing the apparent hilarity of Saturday Night Live skits. And seeing as it was July, and summer was the season of reruns, it left him open to the previous season’s gags in its entirety. “Hey, juguys see that one with Jim Carrey and the like, Roxbury Guys, pickin’ up those geezers, noddin’ their heads in the car like . . . boom, boom, boom . . .”

  Neither of them answered as someone else had responded, bobbing his head in time to Travis’s. They all passed through the hall together, two bobbing their heads, two not, and stepped into the living room, where the air was awash with music and captions of conversation overlapping one another.

  “. . . and the guy’s like, screw that, I’m outta here . . .”

  “. . . we started doing tequila shooters and . . .”

  “. . . no way. Buffy is so lame. I mean, look at . . .”

  “. . . hey’ve you signed my cast yet? Cuz I, like, got this . . .”

  The CD in the stereo was Weezer’s Blue Album. A good choice as far as Nathan was concerned. He produced a mickey of vodka from the back pocket of his baggy cords (which were bought at a second-hand store, of course, like the rest of his wardrobe, with the exception of underwear—who bought second-hand underwear?) and he took a shallow swig, grimaced. He would have offered the next sip to Richard, but someone had already handed him a beer and was busy commenting on his flower.

  “Thanks. Can’t take the credit for the actual innovation, though, as it was the brainchild of this man here.” Richard pointed at Nathan, who moved in closer to elucidate.

  “My dearest Richard, I’m so very happy that you used the word ‘brainchild’ there, for the purple-flower-in-the-hair-of-naturally-curly-to-borderline-poodle-haired-young-men such as yourself came to me as an epiphany, as a cerebral-birth, okay? And it is undoubtedly set to be all the rage this year, on catwalks in Paris, London, New York, I tell you, la totalité du monde de la mode. The look has sparked several other creations, notably the main accessory to the flower thing, also sure to take the runways by storm in the coming months, which is the slightly protruding solar plexus muscle group as seen here.” Nathan was arching his back and running his mickeyless hand over a belly that was indeed protruding. “To the uninitiated fashion eye this could be mistaken as mere fat, likened to that of a common sea mammal, whereas it is in fact the overdeveloped six-pack. Dude, this is washboard muscle that has, as yet a mystery to science, become so overworked, so strained, that it’s begun to retain water. Fat? No. What this is, gentlemen, is cutting-edge-stylish water retention. It is now, it is hip, it is the very concept of sveltness—only enhanced.”

  Travis, who was in earshot, laughed.

  Richard was smiling and gave Nathan a slow nod. “Nice.”

  “Thank you, dear sir.”

  “Hey.” Someone else had noticed the two of them and was sidestepping through the crowd to come closer. “Hey! Thought you guys were in Nova Scotia still. Wasn’t that right? You both went down there? How’d’goi’dere’by! ”

  “Aye laddie, ’tis true, ’tis true. Just got back the other day,” affirmed Richard, who had gone there with the expectation of returning with at least a hint of a Maritimes accent. He’d also been waiting throughout the two weeks to hear himself referred to as a “yung by” or simply “by,” but the cliché never managed to surface. Not that he was disappointed. The experience was priceless, enthralling. He’d never said “too good” so much in his life.

  Nathan had enticed him to come along by relating a few of the idiosyncrasies of the tiny community where his grandfather was based, on the banks of the LaHave River on the South Shore, near Bridgewater. And though Nathan had spent anywhere from two weeks to two months every summer of his life in the area, he was seeing its quaint peculiarities as if for the first time, through the eyes of his neophyte counterpart, Richard. The two young men saw themselves as amate
ur documentary filmmakers, only without the cameras, essentially setting out to interview people, encouraging storytelling from anyone who had something to say, and boldly inviting themselves along with Nathan’s grandfather on routine errands and the sorting out of everyday problems.

  Nathan and Richard now had the unofficial attention of a small corner of the room, which had Richard taking the opportunity to recap some of the highlights of their trip. “Okay. So, full disclosure here: I am of the opinion that the place rocks. You should see, his grandpa took us to this, like, ‘sawdoctor’—literally—cuz his saw was busted, and the place was this garage-cum-junkyard thing with, like, all this metal carnage and these amateur welding projects all over the place, these freakish birds and animals with nut-bolt eyes and shovel-blade beaks, all spray-painted in these, like, bright Moto-Master colours. Wicked. And then inside there were these five guys in stained undershirts with these little thin moustaches, and, like, this AM radio with a blown speaker crackling out seventies rock. Oh! And one day we pulled over to the side of the road, to this dock that was also this kind of impromptu end-of-the-day fish market thingy, and we walk up to this guy, who had a car door slammed onto his head when he was a kid or something—and crushed his voice box—and Nathan’s grandpa taps his foot against one of the guy’s plastic pails with all these mussels inside ’em, and asks the guy what he’s selling them for today, and—no joke—the guy replies in this voice higher than Minnie Mouse’s—on like helium—and wheezes out: ‘Money.’”

  Nathan laughed with everyone else and listened to Richard excitedly ramble on. He was on a roll, and not to be stopped, even if Nathan was pretty sure he wasn’t quite doing the place justice. His grandfather, to Nathan anyway, was an epically cool, over-the-top man, who was to be unequivocally revered. He was a man who had immense hands, so thickly callused they were cigarette-stained yellow on the pads, and when Nathan imagined his life, he had always visualized it through the work that had gradually misshapen those hands. On the handles of his oars, heaving back, then lifting the shafts out of the water and placing them in his tiny dory, careful not to bash the wooden blades, standing up to tug at a longline, trawling for cod, hand over hand, deftly flipping the fish from the hook and into the boat, his dorymate re-baiting the line as it slipped into the water again on the other side, the fish utterly lifeless from the bends, being pulled up from so deep, some of their bladders protruding from their mouths, cleaning them back at the schooner, heads and gurry flung overboard, slime and bright blood stringing between his fingertips; or in the off-season when he would jump a train, gripping on to a rusted metal bar between two colossal railcars, pivoting noisily with the twists of the track, jumping off in the Annapolis Valley, rolling through a weed-choked ditch, standing up to dust off his overalls, cracked and stunted fingernails tweezing thorns out of his ring finger, then climbing the rungs of a ladder, reaching through scratching leaves and branchlets to a lime-green apple, freckled, blistered with raindrops, plucking it from the stem and into his wicker basket; then at the helm of an oil tanker in the Merchant Navy, thumb in a crook of the chrome wheel, spinning it to starboard to steer clear of surfacing U-boats, corvettes carving into sight to gun the submarines down; then disembarking after the war, his palm squeaking along the gangplank rail and into the pub of another country, a cigar between his cigar-thick fingers in Cuba, raising a glass of stout in England, ouzo in Greece, kir in France, sake in Japan.