“Do I have a choice?”
“I’ll be safe, Dad. I always am.” Andrew shut the door behind him.
102
Andrew can’t stop squirming around in the Pathfinder’s wide seat. Even in the few minutes before he remembers seat controls, he shifts left, right, fore and aft, amazed at this county of ass space. Out the window, every metre of blurring land brands him a traitor. One hundred and twenty kilometres an hour. An hour in a car, a long day on the bike.
“Here,” Glen offers, all but abandoning the steering wheel to lean across Andrew with his right hand to grope at the far side of his seat. “Lumbar support.” The leather seat actually inflates at the base of Andrew’s spine, pushing his hard stomach a little closer to Glen’s lingering arm.
“Is one of us actually going to drive?” Andrew asks.
“Thought you could use some comfort.”
“Alive is very comfy.”
Glen returns at least one hand to the wheel. “Oh, honeydew melon,” he says a few minutes later, motioning to another container in the back. “With lemon juice. Somehow the lemon makes the melon taste more like itself.”
Two, three bites into the bright green melon Andrew replies, “There must be a name for that, a thing that makes another thing more itself.”
“Yeah, alcohol.”
That Glen happens to have not one but two bottles of chilled white wine behind the seat is notable enough. Then there’s the conspicuously new mini-cooler in which they’re chilling. However keen he is for the wine, however delighted at the cool touch of the bottle’s slender neck, Andrew finally admits what’s happening here. The fruit Glen feeds him has been taken out of a dozen plastic shopping bags which have been relocated around his bike. Whatever domestic situation has this moneyed family guy piloting his Stupid User Vehicle in the early morning has him doing so with a load of family groceries.
The groceries have probably been in the car overnight, but the chilled wine and the cooler in which they sit have been purchased this morning in this belle province of gas station wine. Within a second of grabbing the bottle, Andrew knows it’s a screw-top, not corked, but he digs the knife out of his pocket anyway.
“Oh, screw-top. How convenient,” he says, briskly tapping his unopened knife on the neck of the bottle. He waits until he’s had a deep swallow before asking, “So, you saw me when?” He pauses just a second, smiles just a little, before leaning over, dropping a hand onto Glen’s substantial thigh and raising the bottle to his mouth. “I’ve got it. I’ve got it. You just drink.”
“Mmm. Maybe half an hour ago. I thought someone with a thousand-dollar bike between his legs and five dollars’ worth of clothes on his back might have a story to tell.” Glen motions for Andrew to raise the bottle to his lips again.
“Storytime’s over.” Andrew drinks again, guzzling wine that tastes like green apples spritzed with honey. “What if you didn’t find me on the way back — take the cooler home for family picnics?”
“I don’t think my family’s what interests you.”
Glen smiles, and so, sure, does Andrew. Kilometres whiz past every minute they drive, chat and drink.
103
Andrew had been evasive and dismissive of Stan’s questions about his night ride with Mark but was then a little annoyed when Mark rode up as taciturn as usual. On the phone Mark had been inviting, almost imploring. Collecting Andrew at the house, all he had to say was, “Let me know when you’ve warmed up.” On residential then downtown streets, Mark took corners and assumed Andrew would follow. They didn’t say a word until their approach spilled them toward a towering parking garage. Andrew kept even the question “This it?” from leaving his mouth, listening instead for Mark’s confirming downshift. As they slipped around the dropped yellow entrance barricades, Mark finally broke the vow of mileage to offer gearing advice (“Middle-middle”) before they commenced a race up each level of the parking garage.
“You can start on the inside,” was all Mark said.
And then they were off, racing up the parking garage’s constant incline, struggling from one corner to the next. Beside them, the still, dumb cars shone under caged fluorescent lights.
Despite the bleaching light and the layered reek of dirty concrete, exhaust and leaked engine oil, there were pleasures in this parkade’s spiral of right angles. Unlike any climb in the surrounding woods, the stained concrete incline was invariably even. By the second storey, will, lung and leg were as much freed as burnt by the steady slope. Pain was the third racer that night. There was also the electric novelty of riding at night, the long leash of light. The banks of caged fluorescents lined the ceiling as regularly as the strips of yellow paint carved up the concrete. Andrew had investigated but still not purchased cycling lamp systems capable of lighting his way through dense forest for hours. The parkade race was as novel as night baseball or skiing at nine p.m.
Here, finally, was width enough for a proper race. Week after week on the single track, Andrew had raced Mark’s pace, but from behind. Now each lane was at least as wide as a road, and he rode faster with Mark beside him, not in front of him.
The wide concrete lanes also afforded them the track racer’s lateral cat and mouse game. Block left defensively or pour it all ahead in a fleeing sprint? To not be cutting a line was to be cut by one. A moving obstacle came from above in the shape of an exiting sedan. Mark didn’t hide his excited grin as their change of play approached, whereas the driver’s face swung visibly between paralyzing confusion (movement without a car?) to projected rage (Because of you I might actually have to steer). The riders split to either side of the car like wind around a sail and were sucked together at its red close. In their parting, Mark must have released his pump because suddenly Andrew’s ribs took a token whack from the pump’s light rod as it played his triangle of ribs, arms and top tube. Andrew retaliated by drawing as large a mouthful of water as his burning lungs would permit, then spitting it in a thin jet onto Mark’s blue side. He laughed and choked and gulped while gunning for the next turn.
Parked cars calibrated the burning race, those bright turtle shells, those smirking gas boxes. The occasional tinted window flashed briefly with their greasy, deltoid reflections, chests bent into the climb.
Finally the choked, muzzy air began to loosen, and the envelope of their echoed tires spilled open. Had this climbing spiral ended in a cliff, Andrew would have gone over it as well. Oh, the steady push. Everything for the end. Here, finally, was the complete meeting point of strength and weakness. By surrendering everything to the pain, he could claim the pain for fuel. He painted each toenail with pain. Pain was speed; it was worship. Mark wasn’t ahead of him.
The cooler, fresher air of the parkade’s rooftop pulled them into an open-air decline. City lights pushed up against an overhang of stars. On the road below, a strip of red tail lights passed into the half-dark city. They didn’t stop until they reached the exterior wall of the parkade, a metre-high battlement for this castle of cars.
Four cleats clicked out. Helmets were dangled from abandoned bar ends. Water was gulped and spat. Finally, Andrew leaned his back over the low wall to stretch his head out over the noise and light of the traffic below. “We gotta get more guys.” A crown of sweat slipped back from his hairline. He rolled his skull back and forth, taking air so easily now. That tight little sound was a small zipper, but he didn’t look up. Then he heard the rasp of a match being lit. Ah, sure, the fug of weed. When Andrew began to lean forward for the joint he felt Mark’s hand in the middle of his chest.
“No, hang back,” said Mark. “Take it like that.” Mark kept the hot joint in his fingers and raised it to Andrew’s lips, suspended where they were out over the traffic.
104
In the Pathfinder, the wine bottle Andrew feeds Glen passes back and forth in front of the car stereo.
“No CDs?” Andrew asks.
“A few here and there. Mostly I just troll the radio.”
“Mind if I give h
er a spin?” Andrew doesn’t wait for an answer.
In rough terms, a radio’s seek and scan are all the GPS one needs in Canada. A sludge of US commercials marks a southern dip along the border. Do you suffer from vague paranoia and/or inexplicable hostility and/or emotional distance? If so, Centrax may be for you. Not just French but the abundance of talk, the actual human discussion of issues and events, heralds your entrance into Quebec. The Anglo bridge posts east and west of Quebec differ radically by density. If the radio’s seek stumbles every few seconds, you’re in Ontario. Here in rural Quebec, the receiver numbers climb and roll by the dozens, up and down the entire band, with just a few snags. The inevitable country music sanding down its planks of you, me and regret over and over again. Always surprising is the metal. In rural areas with population bases that make hospitals difficult, who’s bankrolling the thrash? Second most objectionable is the so-called contemporary rock, that emotional marketing of women pimped up and down the entire industry or male voices so thick with counterfeit feeling that you can hear their whiskers and see their squints. There is, of course, the reliable CBC, the radio birthright. Equally popular (but unsubsidized) is also classic rock. The state has laid one radio rail across the country, and the baby boomers have laid the other. From sea to shining sea, somebody’s angel is still the centrefold.
“How long have you been driving with just this shit?” Andrew asks.
“Mostly shit.” Glen raises a jaw to give Andrew an unmistakably appraising look. “I don’t just listen to music; I listen to chance. You’re probably just old enough to remember a VCR coming into the house, yes? That’s your generation. Not mine. Not the one after. You saw the shift into movies on demand, whereas younger kids don’t know any different. They can’t imagine that you used to have to catch movies. Sure, no one wants to go back to hanging off the mercy of TV, but movie rental spoiled us. A certain cartoon company fought like hell against the VCR before going on to make a fortune from it. Before that it was chance. Preferable? No. Totally annoying? Not at all. Back with thirteen channels or fewer, no DVDs in the mail, no specialty channels, a pair of rabbit ears bringing it all in, you got blessed. Late night at a cottage, too hot to sleep, voila — Bond at eleven.”
Andrew sits on both Glen’s passenger seat and on a frayed orange couch as a boy at Paul Tucker’s cottage, his short legs dangling between Paul’s and his father’s, a tiny screen glowing in one dark corner. Beside him here in the SUV, Dr. No is becoming Mr. Yes.
105
In the winter, when Andrew met Betty to walk her back to the house to explain his deception of September, he didn’t bring flowers or hot cocoa in a travel mug or her favourite little toque. He didn’t joke or grab at nostalgia, trying to rescue the them of now with the them of then. His hand didn’t accidentally brush hers. Instead, he thanked her for coming and told her directly he’d missed her. Only after they walked for two silent blocks did he say anything mildly ingratiating.
“I’ve always liked walking beside you.”
Given what he was about to say at the house, even that felt schemingly casual, but he had to let her know. Her jawbone wasn’t entirely sharpened with hostility.
At the house he simply said, “Front doorway only, I promise” and stooped to prop open the aluminum door with its imperfect little metal toggle. He opened the main door, stepped in to the base of the stairway and turned back to face her.
“Dog hygiene was my dad’s other big joke. You’ve heard this? Why do dogs lick their balls? Right. Because they can. I lied to you about when he died because I could. Not to hurt you; no, please, I promise. It was fear, not cruelty, fear and shame. I lied because, quite simply, no one was going to correct me. I wanted you, and he was gone. I knew these two things in the same way: what was gone, what I wanted. I’m still getting used to how permanent death is. In ways, though, you also see it right away. Over and over, you process the one big fact you see with your first glimpse of the body: never again.
“I’d gone riding at night, with Mark. Dad was okay every other time I went riding, but this was at night. He was needier at night. His trache tube. His hand splint. The electrodes. I was guilty and elated every minute I was out. The guilt fuelled the elation and vice versa. I’d resist taking a piss because I’d have to think of him needing to go, the seven to ten minutes he’d spend just getting to the washroom. Was he okay? Still I kept riding. And he fell.
“I knew as soon as I was back, as soon as I saw him. I jerked at the door, but I had my bike in my hands. His head was . . . his head was right there. I had to drop the bike, then move it before I could open the door. Do you understand? Doing these little things? Turning a door handle? Setting something down? All that time his head was draining. Not pumping, not squirting. Draining, balancing out.
“He would have called my name. Like at night, if there was ever a power failure and he was standing, he’d call my name like a kid. Andy. Andy. I know he would have yelled my name as he fell, but I was out riding. For fun.”
Neither of them acknowledged the climbing pitch of his voice or the tears on his cheeks — or hers — until she stepped through the doorway and he wasn’t speaking any more and she had him heaving in her arms. After a few minutes his shoulders did a little half-squirm as he pulled back his raw face to say, “I didn’t want you like this.”
“Shhh,” she said, “come here. Come here.” Eventually she reached behind her to shut out the cold winter air. She walked him to the couch in the next room. Crying, stroking (“Just let me get my arm out”), they lay braided together. A wet kiss, two. Her breasts, his shoulders and thighs, were brushed then clutched, stroked by a finger then grabbed in a hand. Wordless mouths made deep kisses and they chased a quick living-room fuck in the glow of the street lights. He apologized endlessly. He left her the blanket while he phoned for pizza. She held it out like wings as he hurried back.
“This is it, right?” she asked eventually. “You’re not also a three-time absentee father or a life support system for various STDs, are you?”
“I was also high, a little, with Mark. I was high when he fell. Other than that, no, no more skeletons in the hallway . . . I’ve got to sell the house, though. That’s what Larry has been phoning about. It’s in his will, graduate and go.”
“Oh.”
106
Crucially, and perhaps strategically, Glen leaves Andrew in the truck while he books their motel room. Andrew’s trust and comfort rise as he’s left alone with Glen’s cellphone, the remaining booze and a full name and address on his vehicle registration.
When they enter the musty motel room, Andrew proposes, “I’m gonna take the world’s longest shower. Seeing as you have my vehicle inside of yours, how about I take your car keys into the washroom with me?”
“Why not take me in there with you?”
“Nobody can want it this dirty,” Andrew replies. He sweeps up one wine bottle and holds out a hand for the keys.
“Take this too,” Glen says, offering a translucent shopping bag with a visible can of shaving cream.
“Boy Scout Glen.”
In seconds Andrew isn’t so much in a shower as in another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of wine, and of heat, cleansing, unknotting heat. Sleeves of dirt fall from his arms. The tan lines that cuff his thighs and arms are so precise he looks to be wearing an antique, one-piece male bathing costume of paleness, his body mapped into provinces of public and private life. His feet are so privately pale.
He drowns his filthy hiking shorts at the bottom of the tub. When he finally gives them a scrub he tries not to stare at his own stains, at the abject spectrum of his recent intestinal struggles. Already, yesterday’s hunger, dehydration and diarrhea are vague to him. As the shorts come clean, he feels both embarrassed and dethroned at the thought of hanging them here to dry, as if he should be the laundryless hooker, the mistress without utility bills. If they were his cycling shorts, he could at least hang up the male-male equivalent of a thong. A
s is, he looks like a waylaid tourist.
Glen would no doubt prefer that Andrew put the razor he bought to a more central environ, but Andrew’s fading yeast infection still forbids it. Instead he simply begins unearthing his face, shaving away at ten days’ worth of whiskers, peeling himself down to urban smoothness. He showers again to do his calves.
Stepping out of the small bathroom with a thin towel tied around his waist, Andrew is glad that all men are not created equal. Glen has been waiting in the bed wearing nothing more than a white sheet pulled halfway up his body. When he turns to stow some documents he’d been reading into a soft leather briefcase, Andrew is relieved at the modest size glimpsed between the sheets. He once heard a gay comedian list the three sizes of penis: Small, Medium and Keep That Thing Away From Me. His memory for jokes like this has been pulled through his brief adult life by uncertainty, curiosity and secrecy. Why do men buy so-called fitness magazines with bare-chested, ab-racked men on the front? The staff at some sports bars wear referee’s uniforms to serve a mostly male clientele. What are they really refereeing? Right now he is clean, warm, tipsy and fed. Bisexual is just a word, whereas his dick is cylindrically hard. As he crosses the room he sees his slim back in a mirror. He can feel the strength in his thighs despite the wine in his thin blood.
Andrew stands beside the bed and reaches under the sheets for Glen’s tackle. Ah, sex with men: he doesn’t first have to use four-syllable words to talk about well-respected novels, indie film, indie rock or fantasy travel — and undressing is the only foreplay required. When Glen reaches to undo his towel, Andrew says, “No, up first” and spreads his legs in the towel. This perpendicular start launches a sex of purposeful reaches and grabs that seems so much easier than anything commencing in a horizontal embrace. And why bother with the kissing? Fully, gleefully naked, Andrew raises and plants heels or knees, offering one minute, taking the next.
The Push & the Pull Page 25