by Ed Kavanagh
After I’d known Lar for a while we started having this regular get-together. Every Wednesday night we’d meet down on the veranda of the Park Bungalow. Then we’d walk the half mile up to the liquor store. Beer was too bulky to be carrying around, and liquor was too expensive, so Lar would go in and buy us a bottle of wine. Every week we had a different wine—Lar liked variety. It didn’t make a whole lot of difference what wine it was. Cheap wine is cheap wine, and as long as it wasn’t Baby Duck or Cold Duck we didn’t much care. That duck stuff is only fit for girls. They’d drink it and pretend to get drunk. What a laugh! It wouldn’t get a duck drunk if you ask me. We weren’t experts, but we knew that stuff was piss-poor.
Lar liked the Portuguese wines best. He said they warmed you up better because Portugal was a hot country with orange trees and sandy beaches. I liked that. Sitting there in the dark on that cold veranda, just the two of us, with the trees all black and shadowy, and the snow deep on the lawn and piled up high over the railings, it was like we were drinking in some of that sunshine and warmth. We’d pass the bottle back and forth and smoke and talk; or maybe we wouldn’t talk—just sit and listen to the silence or the cars passing by.
Around ten we’d leave for home. Me and Lar would walk through the park up to Kenny’s store where I’d go my way and he’d go his.
I heard some priest say once that if you got something wrong with you, then God will give you something to make up for it. I thought it was a lot of bull. I thought God had forgotten all about Lar. But then I saw him dance one night. He’s the best dancer I ever saw in my whole life—well, outside of Fred Astaire and those guys in the musicals. It’s funny. He looks like he was put together out of leftover parts, but can that guy dance! Slow or fast, it don’t make any difference. When the music started Lar would start clapping his hands and stamping his feet—just like those Flamenco dancers. And then he’d ease into the wildest, craziest, most graceful dance you’ll ever see. Spins, splits, turns—about the only thing the guy didn’t do was somersaults, and he told me once he was working on that. It’s the one thing that redeemed him in the eyes of the girls. Even the ones who wouldn’t talk to him much except to bum a cigarette would dance with him. No matter what he looked like, he was just more fun to dance with than the rest of us—Walt included. The guys have got unspoken rules about how much you can move when you dance before you stop being cool. I guess Lar always knew he wasn’t cool, so why give a damn about rules?
Lar quit school when he was in Grade 9 and took a bunch of crappy jobs—in a service station, doing construction, and washing up in the Kentucky Fried Chicken. That’s what he was doing when I started hanging around with him. I guess you could say he didn’t have much of a social life. I don’t remember him having a whole lot of dates. Actually, first when I started hanging around with him, I don’t remember him having any dates. The only things he really looked forward to were our Wednesday Wine Nights and the Saturday night dance at the parish hall. But he’d always show up at parties and tell jokes and act crazy with that weird way he’s got of tapping cigarettes out of the package, and clicking his heels together and saluting you like a Nazi soldier and calling you “Mein Kapitain.” Except half the time he’d get his languages screwed up and say something like, “Oui, mein Kapitain.” And dancing? He was always dancing. Even if no one else felt like it, he’d just go out in the middle of the floor and dance by himself. At the Saturday dances he prided himself on never missing a song. He was always the first one on the floor and the last one off.
This weird thing happened one night when he was dancing with Nancy Morgan. It was all because Nancy had on her yellow mohair sweater. So what, right? Well, you should see Nancy in that sweater—in any sweater. I could hardly take my eyes off her—and I wasn’t the only one. She looked like she stepped right out of a Wonder Bra commercial. Lar was dancing with her, and I noticed he wasn’t doing any of his trick stuff. He was hardly moving around at all. And then I saw it was because he was staring at Nancy. I mean not like I’d been staring at her. He was staring at her like . . . like he wanted to devour her. Nancy was dancing in that delicate way she’s got, tossing the hair out of her eyes and making these cute spins. She didn’t realize Lar was staring at her; she was off in her own world. When the music stopped, Nancy smiled and was about to say her polite little thank you to Lar, when he stepped toward her and hugged her. I don’t mean one of those affectionate hugs like your grandmother gives you when you’re a kid. I mean a bear hug. He lifted Nancy Morgan right off her feet. You could hear her gasp all over the hall. And the thing was, Lar didn’t let her go. Nancy started pounding on his back and giggling nervously, but you could see she was pretty pissed off. And there was more than that: she was pretty disgusted, too. That was bad enough, but Lar kept on hugging her. He was hugging her so hard he was hurting her. Nancy was turning red in the face—partly because the breath was being squeezed out of her, partly because she was in pain, and partly because she was embarrassed as hell. And still Lar wouldn’t let her go. Then everyone in the whole place just stopped what they were doing and looked—even the stupid band looked. They looked, and then they started to laugh. That’s when Lar finally let up. Nancy made a bee-line for the girls’ washroom, closely pursued by Molly and Denise, who were all concerned and asking her what the hell was going on, and glancing over their shoulders with dirty looks at Lar.
“Louse, you dirty dog!” someone yelled, laughing.
Soon there was laughter coming from all over the hall. The girls tsk-tsked and said, “Poor Nancy!” and Lar stood there all flushed, alone in the middle of the dance floor, with a stupid confused grin on his face like he just woke up out of a coma. He opened his mouth to say something, but the band started up again and drowned him out.
We walked home together that night. You could tell it was still on his mind, but neither of us mentioned it. But I thought about it later. The way I figured it, Lar had just reached a kind of breaking point. It sort of struck me for the first time that just because he never went out with girls it didn’t mean he never thought about them. I remembered that when we discussed girls on our Wednesday nights, it was me who did most of the talking. He’d never say much except the standard lines. It was like the talk embarrassed him because he thought that’s all it would ever be—just talk. But that night, dancing with Nancy Morgan, something inside him must have said, I want to know what it feels like to hold a girl like that, to feel that yellow mohair sweater pressed into my chest, and the deep fullness and softness of her, and the heat of her, and the smell of her hair and perfume. The only problem was that when he felt it, it felt so good he couldn’t let it go.
For a while after that Lar took a lot of kidding about Nancy Morgan. The guys called him a dirty old man and asked him when they were getting married. Lar just laughed.
A couple of weeks later there was sort of a miracle: Lar finally got his first girlfriend. Her name was Darlene Saunders and she was from the Southside. She certainly wasn’t the brightest girl around, and she was a bit of a hard case, but nice enough, and pretty good-looking. She had thin brown hair, and brown doe-like eyes, and a really dark complexion. She was a chain-smoker, just like Lar, and she always wore pink frosted lipstick. She worked on the cash at the Kentucky Fried Chicken. Darlene liked Lar’s sense of humour; she said it helped her get through her shift. Lar and Darlene got to be friends and started showing up places together. A lot of people had a good laugh over it and made cracks like, “Here comes Beauty and the Beast!” Lar didn’t care: he was pretty thrilled with it all.
Darlene liked me too. I thought it was just because I was Lar’s friend, but there was more to it than that. I can always tell when a girl really likes me because it doesn’t happen all that often. I didn’t think much about it, though. Darlene liked Lar: that was the important thing. You could tell by the way she looked at him. I didn’t even worry too much that maybe she’d get his hopes up and drop him.
But she did drop him. It was a mystery to me
why she did it, but then I found out that it wasn’t her at all. It was her friends. Some of them thought that Darlene’s going out with Lar had gone a little too far and looked bad for their image. They told her she could do better. She even quit her job at the Kentucky Fried.
Lar fell hard. On Wednesday nights he hardly spoke. He just hunched down in his corner and smoked his brains out.
By the time summer came around he was pretty well back to normal—playing the fool, cracking jokes, and dancing like a demon. That was also when I quit hanging around with him so much. Don’t ask me why. It started one night after the Saturday dance. Instead of walking home with Lar, I took a lift with a guy who lived up by me and had just gotten this new Dodge. And we gradually quit our Wednesday Wine Nights, too. You didn’t need wine to warm you up in the summertime. And there always seemed to be people hanging around the Bungalow. Of course we saw each other—the size of the place made it impossible not to. We still chatted, and he still gave me cigarettes and even money when I was broke, but it wasn’t the same.
And then there was the night I did the crazy thing. I was walking home from a party, and in a pretty lousy mood. The party had started off great. Molly Drake was there and we’d been dancing. She’d been acting real friendly, which suited me fine. I’d had my eye on her for weeks. But, just when I’d worked up the courage to ask her if I could walk her home, she disappeared. Took off with Walt in his car.
Anyway, it was two o’clock in the morning, pitch-black, not a soul around. I was hoofing it past the Bungalow when I looked up and saw two people sitting on the railing—well, not the people exactly, I saw their cigarettes glowing in the dark. I stopped and listened and Lar’s laugh drifted across the lawn. I figured he’d be heading home soon, so I called out and went on over.
Lar was sitting there in his regular corner. I didn’t know who the hell the other person was, until a voice said, “Hello, Billy.” And then I knew who it was. And I knew why Lar hadn’t gone to the party. It was Darlene.
“How was the party?” he says.
“Typical. Styles got into a racket with Fleming. Busted his nose. There was blood all over the place.”
“Serves him right,” Lar says. “What was he doing, hitting on Heather?”
“I guess. I didn’t know nothin’ until I seen him fly across the room.”
And the funny thing was, even as we were talking, I knew Darlene was looking at me. I watched her smoking in the dark and the arc the flame on her cigarette made when she raised it up to her mouth, and how it glowed redder when she sucked in on it. It was pitch, but I knew she was looking at me. And then I found myself sitting down next to her. Lar was asking me something about the party, but I wasn’t listening anymore. And the next thing I knew I had Darlene Saunders by the hand and we were going down the steps and across the road into the trees.
We didn’t hardly even talk. I pulled her down on top of me and started kissing her. She still had her chewing gum in her mouth. I opened her jacket and slipped my hands under her white top. And for a while it was nice— real nice. But then I could taste her chewing gum and her breath smelled like an ashtray. I felt myself getting sick. I pushed her off me and looked up at the stars. My stomach was turning over like one of those ticket bins you see on the TV game shows. All I could think of was Lar sitting up there on that veranda by himself. I could taste Darlene’s pink frosted lipstick on my mouth and I thought I was going to vomit.
“I’m sorry,” I mumbled. “I’ve got to go home.”
Darlene looked at me like I must’ve escaped from a mental institution or something.
“Suit yerself,” she said, getting up and brushing the grass off her slacks. “See ya around.”
She glanced quickly up towards the Bungalow. Then she picked up her purse and headed down the road.
I lay on that cold ground for about twenty minutes. Up on the veranda I could see one cigarette burning. I walked up the steps. Lar was sitting on the railing, slowly swinging his legs back and forth.
We didn’t say anything for a long time. “You heading home?” I said finally.
Lar didn’t look at me or answer for a minute. Then he got up and stamped out his cigarette. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m heading home.”
I don’t remember much about the rest of the conversation. All I know is that there wasn’t a lot of it. When we got up to Kenny’s store we stopped and looked at each other.
“Hey, Lar, listen . . .”
He looked away and lit up another cigarette.
I turned around and headed up the road. I’d only gone about thirty feet, though, when I heard something. I stopped and looked back. Lar had walked out into the middle of the road. And do you know what he was doing? He was dancing, humming to himself and tapping on the pavement like Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain. Except it wasn’t raining. He was spinning around under the streetlight with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.
I stood and watched him for a while. It was hard not to. Then I turned around and headed home.
Two weeks later Lar left for the mainland. No one heard from him, and he didn’t tell anyone where he was going. A couple of months passed by, and then Walt came up to me one night at the dance. He told me Lar had finally called home.
“Can you believe it?” he said. “Louse is after joining the army. I guess they must be hard up for recruits, hey?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Must be.”
Anyway, I finally got a letter from him the other day— well, a postcard. I didn’t realize I’d been waiting for it until it turned up on the supper table. Lar hadn’t written much. He said the army is okay even though the officers are all a bunch of stiffs with no sense of humour. He said he liked his uniform and thought he looked pretty sharp in it. There was a dance on the base every month. He told me to not drink too much wine and to say hello to all his friends. That was about it. But I guess it was enough.
Nice Boy
Outside the Earl’s Court station, Maria dropped her heavy suitcases and stood mute and blinking in the noon sun. The Saturday crowds teemed around her; she could not get her bearings. Child’s Street was east, but which way was that? She peered up and down the road and tried to remember the direction she had taken the day before. It had been raining then. Things always looked different in the rain.
Maria smelled the spicy-sweet tang of curry and saw a small restaurant open to the road, its striped awning ruffling in the breeze. Instantly the scene focussed and she remembered walking past that restaurant. Left, she told herself. I must go left.
Maria looked down at her suitcases and grimaced. Sometimes I am a proper fool, she thought. I’ll never carry them to Child’s Street. But she had been determined when Enrique had offered to help. She had made up her mind that he wouldn’t see her new flat; she had even refused to tell him where it was. She was sick of him and his childish ways. She would move her own things and damn him.
You’re a fool. You have no money. Come home with me.
But what to do now? Just walking up the stairs had exhausted her. She grappled with the faded suitcases. Everything she owned in the world was in those suitcases, her knapsack, and her bulky leather purse.
What will you do? You have no skills. It’s not like you are a man.
Maria shuffled her things to the edge of the pavement and looked out into the wide road. She studied the traffic and couldn’t help but smile. The English are so stiff and regimental, she thought. Even the traffic is properly ordered. It wasn’t like Santiago. There were things she missed about Chile, but she was a city girl and she would get used to this one. Enrique had never liked London. Still, he should have given it a chance. But, no. He wants to go home to Santiago; home to his mother’s warm arms; home to slave for nothing in the bosom of family and friends who all slave for nothing.
Maria closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She picked up her suitcases and struggled over to the restaurant. She sat down, took off her knapsack, dragged the suitcases in around her calves, and or
dered iced tea. There was no hurry.
The Indian waiter appraised her openly as he passed her the tea. Maria was used to men staring at her and liking what they saw. Poor Enrique! How his eyes had bugged out the first time he had seen her. It was at the Santiago a Mil festival, and she had worn her white dress and imitation pearls. She had brushed her hair until it shone, sprayed it with orange scent, and pulled it back tightly from her fine forehead. She had pinned yellow and red roses to her dress and worn her good leather shoes with the silver buckles. How Enrique had stared. And he has such a shy nature, Maria thought. He said he just couldn’t help it. Maria sipped her tea and felt her strength seeping back.
Her mind returned to the matter at hand. Perhaps I can take a cab, she thought, and knew immediately that she shouldn’t, that she couldn’t afford it. No, she thought, I can make it if I just stop every now and then to rest. She stood up and paid for the tea, noting with amusement the waiter’s widening, wandering eyes.
Maria took out her compact and checked her makeup. Then she gathered her things and started down the road.
It was difficult moving against the flood of people. The suitcases banged painfully against her legs. I’ll be black and blue tomorrow, she thought. Well, no matter. No one will see my legs anyway.
Maria laboured for a hundred yards. Soon she was sweating and sticky. There was nothing she hated more. Her heavy black overcoat was smothering her. What a coat! Enrique had bought it for her at a flea market in Santiago. They had expected English winters to be much colder. Before they left Chile, they had stocked up on wools and sweaters. Now she needed a whole new wardrobe of cottons and light pullovers. Well, she thought, it takes time to learn these things.