Believing Cedric

by Mark Lavorato

  Someone nudged Nathan from behind, then someone else. He was, by default, the public relations guru among them. If he couldn’t talk them out of this mess, no one could. He was nudged forward farther, by another hand, until the forest of backs and shoulders opened onto an obese and fuming middle-aged man.

  Nathan was unnerved, panicky, trying desperately to conjure something from within, something strong and valiant, something that had to do with weeks of wartime ocean where U-boats lay in wait, or to do with jumping from a moving train, or battling unpredictable seas, something about his grandfather and the way he embraced adversity with a calm that made water look like a mirror. Unfortunately it felt like it slipped between his fingers.

  Nathan cleared his throat. Everyone turned to him, listening, including, in his mind, the fly. “Right,” he began, speaking above the stereo. “So, the thing is, no one’s really to blame here, sir, because, well, frankly speaking, it was just a matter of . . . a miscommunication between the, uhm . . . the . . . well, what I think it really boils down to is the fact that there was a . . . uhm . . . Yeah, I’m dying here, aren’t I? I am failing miserably at achieving any degree of eloquence, when I really just want to explain that this party, sir, Mr. Johnson, sir, was really, uhh . . . well it was . . .”

  Cedric, teeth gritted, took three quick steps toward Nathan, crumpled the front of his priceless second-hand shirt into his fist, pulled him closer, and slapped him across the face. Lightly. No sound, no damage. But a clear message nonetheless. No one interjected, said a word, even moved.

  Then something odd happened. Blinking hard, Mr. Johnson gave his head a shake and began looking around the room, hungrily taking in the details, as if trying to figure out exactly where he was. Once he was satisfied, he faced Nathan again, unclenching his shirt. “So. Guess the big slap’s already taken place then.” He stroked the crinkles in the fabric on Nathan’s chest, trying to smooth them over.

  The music was still blaring.

  “And what was your name again, kid? Gnat or something like that. Nate? Nathan,” he said, ostensibly answering himself. “Nathan.” He nodded, looking around again, this time as if slightly embarrassed. “Well, Nathan. If only you knew how much that little slap I gave you, way back when, is gonna cost . . . in my life.” He shook his head. “How much it’s gonna change things for me.” His brow was now creased, his posture dispirited. It was unsettling how instantly his rage had evaporated. Nathan wasn’t sure if this meant more violence was about to be doled out. He took an uneasy step back.

  People shifted, looked around at one another.

  Melissa appeared beside Nathan. “You okay?” she asked him.

  “Yeah, sure. Sure, fine.”

  She gave a sheepish glance at her father, “Dad . . .” she began, in a voice barely audible above the electric guitars.

  “Oh, Melissa,” Cedric said, “don’t you worry. I’ll get what I deserve. You just wait and see.”

  “What?” Melissa, squinting, looked around the room, not really knowing how to proceed. She was clearly in the wrong here, but her father was reacting to that wrong in the wrongest way he could.

  “I mean,” Cedric swallowed, “don’t you . . . get it? I . . . I am not a great man.” He pointed a quick finger at Melissa. “But you, I think you judge me like I should be, and . . .” He threw up his hands, at a loss. Then, to everyone’s surprise, he stepped forward, toward his daughter, who stiffened as if getting ready to be thrown across the room. Cedric reached out and clasped on to Melissa’s right arm, grinning, then awkwardly patted her in a plainly unpractised attempt to be affectionate. After that, he turned on his heels and walked out, stopping just before the hallway to right the vase that had tipped over onto the carpet there. It was a trendy melange of dried-and-dyed reeds and seedpods, which he stuffed back into the hole haphazardly before continuing on.

  Now everyone looked to Melissa’s mother, Julie, waiting for her to speak, to officially break up the party, usher everyone out the front doors, call the police: whatever she felt most appropriate. But she was too busy staring at her daughter, who was busy staring back. There seemed to be a kind of nonverbal exchange taking place, which didn’t concern how much trouble she was in or even about that evening or the party at all. It was something else, something bigger. And Nathan would swear it was as if an offering were being made, an alliance, a pact.

  Nathan shifted, cracked one of his knuckles.

  And still no one had turned off the music.

  ( ix )

  I discovered them first with my hands

  then explored them in slow light

  lines of down floating along her skin

  a dark mist, threaded fog

  Gossamer body hair

  finely patterned and

  pointing in directions as limply

  as wind-bent grass

  It spilled from her navel

  seeped from her jawline

  swirled her forearms

  I watched it all thirstily

  never telling

  stealing glances on café patios

  in parasol shade

  hoarding the details

  the velvet shimmer

  These markings on a creature

  both consummate and elusive

  wavering between aloof and skittish

  like the tracks and traces of an animal

  never seen, never taken

  An untouchable pelage

  touched

  It was the first time Melissa had ever been to the seaside, let alone lived on one. Everything she looked at was a surprise, or bizarre, seemed to have sprouted directly from the pages of an implausible science fiction novel. She was most taken with the tidal pools, stepping out among the green anemones and their orifices of filament tentacles, the tiny sculpins invisible in their camouflage, shore crabs scuttling into recesses, limbs tucking tight, the hiss of seagrapes. She liked the tracks and traces in the wet sand that adjoined the pools, the life that had ventured out of them. And the purple, orange, and maroon starfish that clung to the rocks in expressive positions, their reaching arms, shrugging shoulders, hanging heads, splayed out on the barnacle-sprinkled surfaces like sailors having just crawled onto land from a shipwreck, limp and exhausted, reduced to ragged stickmen.

  May 14, 2000

  Emily had asked to sit on the rooftop outside, a request that somewhat confused the waitress seating her. It wasn’t a nice day, a bit cool, mostly cloudy, and considering the time, the early afternoon lull between the lunch rush and dinner rush, she would most likely be the only person sitting there: a tall woman, robust and broad-shouldered, dressed in black, the solitary living shape amid two long rows of plastic chairs and weatherproof tables. To the waitress, it had seemed like such a bad idea that she’d asked twice if she really, really wanted to sit outside, pointing out the available tables everywhere else, in every corner of the dining room, where she would be able to blend quietly into the stylish decor, the post-postmodern lighting, the contemporary paintings on the walls as large and appealing to look into as windows. But Emily insisted. She had her reasons.

  Pulling the plastic of her chair legs over the wooden planks, she ordered a drink, wanting a glass of wine but opting for an orange juice instead, thinking of her quartet’s recital in a few hours. And oh, she’d said to the waitress before she’d slipped off to the bar, giving her a heads-up, she was waiting for someone.

  She sipped her orange juice and played with her watch for a quarter of an hour. She’d been early, and Cedric was late. Though consciously late. It was the way he had been the last couple weeks, trying, in his own losing way, to play the game. She knew that he was probably somewhere close by, waiting in his car, parked and pretending to listen to the news or to a classical piece on the CBC (something he wouldn’t have been caught dead doing only seven months ago), nodding his head in time to the movement, miming interest. All in an attempt to come across not quite as desperate as he really was.

  His letter had appe
ared in her mailbox on Friday, late morning, as if brought by the postman, though wasn’t stamped.

  Emily,

  Okay. You’re right. I know we’re not a perfect match. I know there’s a lot of things I’m not. Not a violinist or composer, not a poet. In fact I’m really just a normal everyday guy. But I’m also a man that’s developed this incredible need for you. And it’s the first time in my life that I’ve felt it like this.

  Since we spoke, I can’t sleep, can’t work, can’t pull myself out of bed, only because of the thought (just the thought) of not having you, there, in some way. Everything suddenly looks so plain, feels so lost and empty.

  I’ve never written a letter like this before either. (I don’t think I’ve ever written a letter.) So please. I just want to talk. Please. At Remy’s, 3:00, Sunday. Meet me there?

  Please.

  C

  Ironically, it was one of the few things she liked about him, the fact that he wasn’t a passionate man, wasn’t a poet. She’d had her lion’s share of fervid lovers, even married one, and they were never, in Emily’s experience, quite what they were cracked up to be.

  Emily Pereda had (according to her father) married too late and (according to her mother) divorced too early. Her marriage had lasted five years in total, but they were five years that had taken their toll, left her exhausted, etched unsightly lines around her mouth and the corners of her eyes.

  They’d formally met at a wedding, though she’d heard of him before, even listened to him play once. Most of the musicians in the city knew of most of the other musicians in the city—just the way it was. She’d heard his name, Shane, listed off as someone that other people had played with, and she recalled that he was purported to be a solid musician, that he specialized in early music, and that he was rumoured to be good in bed. However, at the wedding in question, she hadn’t found his playing to be all that much to write home about, and while sharing a tepid bottle of house wine after their set, she’d gotten into an argument with him about how smug he’d seemed concerning his performance. When they’d finally fallen quiet, it wasn’t clear who’d won, so she’d offered to continue the discussion at his place, provided he had better wine, of course. Shane hesitated a long while, plainly baffled, before agreeing.

  In the months that followed she found his tactics endearing, though never quite in the way he’d probably intended them to be. She felt like she was seeing him, as an impartial onlooker, considering most of his acts and gestures as being premeditated, what he perceived she would perceive as being winning and romantic. He would ask about the front yard of her childhood, go to her recitals to clap loudly from the back, and lift her heavy hair to kiss the nape of her neck. When walking past cedars or junipers, he would pluck a sprig from a branch, mulch it in his fingers, smell it, and hold them out to her as an offer to do the same. She rarely did, trying to smile in a manner that reflected she was seeing this all for what it really was; though he usually seemed to take it at face value, as an indication that she was genuinely impressed. She considered herself lucky that he’d never produced a red rose, as she wouldn’t have been able to stop herself from laughing out loud.

  She remembers the way he once knocked on her door with two snifters and a bottle of brandy, led her into the washroom, undressed her while filling the bathtub, helped her into it, and methodically washed her down, soaping every contour of her body, bit by bit, paying particular attention to her hands, pinching slippery suds into the weblike skin at the base of her fingers. The brandy was excellent. His method of shampooing was not. She remembers going over to his apartment, which was adorned with the bohemian intellectual standards, art prints advertising the museums they were bought in, ancient maps with galleons stencilled onto the seas and bobbing along curled and linear waves, and a self-assembled pinewood bookshelf that was teetering with volumes of Russian classics and selected works of philosophy that he’d probably never read or even paged through but had nevertheless arranged in alphabetical order, as if for quick reference; Dostoevsky, Kant, Nietzsche, Pushkin, Tolstoy. She would stand in his living room, snickering to herself, looking through his trinkets and CDs, a wineglass cradled to her chest, while he buzzed in the kitchen cooking a brightly coloured meal, cool jazz on the stereo, Chet Baker or Jimmy Giuffre, after having rushed around lighting candles as soon as she’d taken her shoes off at the door.

  When Shane had proposed, she considered it for three minutes of thick silence, considered the long hours she had spent alone on Friday nights, how eager he was to please, then accepted with a shrug. “Sure.”

  Emily had never wanted children, ever, even when she was sixteen years old and full of pipe dreams and idyllic futures, when she could have fabricated idyllic offspring jumping through sprinklers on an idyllic lawn in front of an idyllic house. She hadn’t. Instead she’d abhorred everything about kids for as long as she could remember. And it baffled her that, in this opinion, she was the exception and not the rule.

  To start with, she hated parents, how mothers were, at first, only capable of talking in numbers: “I was in labour for eighteen hours,” “he was seven pounds, three ounces,” “she drinks 120 cc now,” “he wakes up at three and then again at seven,” “he knows four words so far,” “grade one,” “top two readers in the class,” “95 per cent.” And she hated how fathers were always on the sidelines, boasting in what was deemed to be a more objective manner, injecting words like “gifted,” “advanced,” and “precocious.” Emily sometimes wanted to see a bar graph comparing “presumed future prodigies” to “actual prodigies that had surfaced from said presumptions.” She was confident there was a considerable disparity between the two.

  Beyond the parents, there were the creatures themselves; dirty, smelly, noisy, selfish, chaotic, thankless, and, most importantly in Emily’s view, dumb. They moved through stages that were all somehow equally disagreeable, from oozing diapers to drool and vomit, grunts and whines to ear-splitting tantrums, bruised knees and scratched elbows to mild concussions, barking orders to cold demands. And then, the clincher: at the moment that their blooming sexuality brings with it a swarm of new and disturbing worries to keep you up, again, all hours of the night, when they begin to display the rudiments of an adult mind where they might finally, finally have the ability to say something that could, potentially, waver on the line of interesting, of having the vague semblance of human dialogue, at that precise and potentially earth-shattering moment, they suddenly hate you. Only to blame you for their problems via your neglectful parenting and lack of nurturing understanding forthwith. And all of that for just hundreds of thousands of dollars and a few decades of your time. “Sure,” she’d said to Shane, capping off her rant, which he was hearing for the first time in a motel room on their six-month anniversary. “Sounds fantastic. Best of luck finding a surrogate wife.” She left to take a walk.

  She imagined Shane behind her, grinning at the closed door, sure that she would eventually change her mind. She was, after all, a woman. It was natural for her to want children, a given almost. She’d come around. He probably would’ve bet on it.

  And he would have lost.

  This concept, of losing and winning, had always been present between them. Initially born from their unremitting arguments and polemics—from the need to prove or disprove, to build up a solid case in support of an opinion, or tear one down, it gradually transformed itself into something more, into an artful vying for ground, a constant attempt to gain the upper hand, seize territory. Their discourse had become something tactical, the private weighing out of victories and losses, every word measured for the cutting quality of its edge, syllables jutting from the sentences like bayonets. There were times when Emily would hear herself setting up for a costly forward advance, one that was sure to find them both sulking long afterwards (or retreating to bathrooms and bedsheets to charily lick their wounds), and it would occur to her that, at that moment, there was no real benefit to be made by causing damage, nor did she even want to. Yet sh
e would. Fights about workspace, silence, selfishness, nickels and dimes, fridge magnets. Emily began to feel like a captive in the language that they’d developed between each other, tongue-tied in the dialect of combative exchange. How can we expect, she wondered—while he furiously washed the dishes, plates clanking above the major and minor scales that she was trying to warm up to—to fashion a lasting peace on a frontline when even armistices are written in the tongue of war? Soldiers and mercenaries are not trained to reconstruct, rebuild, start anew. They’re not meant to. They’ve committed themselves to something else, know nothing else. Which meant, Emily began to suspect, that the greatest obstacle for engaged opponents who found themselves finally wishing for peace wasn’t in figuring out how to lay their weapons down; it was in having taken up arms in the first place.

  It was a month before their fifth anniversary when Shane mentioned the place in the country he wanted to show her, a place, he’d promised, that she was going to love. Everything about the idea had made her uneasy from the get-go, though she hadn’t understood what his actual intentions were until she was there, standing in the cold and mildewed air of the brick-worked building, looking out from one of its windows. It was in the area where he’d grown up, on the outskirts of Beamsville, a small town on the Niagara Peninsula just across the lake from Toronto (whose bleary skyline could be seen from the shore on a clear day, writhing over a band of water mirage like gasoline vapour). The place belonged to friends of the family, a failed attempt at a guesthouse. Furniture unarranged and draped over with white sheets and mattress covers, to keep out the resourcefulness of moths and the patience of dust, armchairs and La-Z-Boys in the shape of Halloween ghouls, of children in ghost costumes with their eyeholes yet uncut, raising their arms in a still-framed “booOOooh,” which was as soundless as wind under the doorsills.