Searching for Petronius Totem

by Peter Unwin

  There was something unnatural to me about forcing fifteen little girls who would otherwise be out screaming, yelling, and hurling their bodies across the city into the oppressive contours of an elitist French art form. Nonetheless, Madeline seemed to enjoy it, her little friends seemed to enjoy it, and the whole affair was delightful enough to look at.

  More delightful to look at was Madeline’s ballet instructor, a twenty-five-year-old private school knockout wearing a pair of saggy blue sweatpants with McMaster University stenciled across her butt, and the rest of her encased in a shimmering pink sleeveless dance-skin thingy. Her breasts were small but insistent, even vociferous. To make matters worse, they must have read my book, for they were calling to me for the entire performance. The right one broke in with a chorus of “Jack, Jack Vesoovian, you remember me, don’t you?” while the left one chimed “I’m your biggest fan?” I was under assault from a Greek siren call of breasts that compelled me to aim Elaine’s video camera in their direction. The screen showed black for several moments. The lens cap was on. Swiftly I removed it and got to work. Soon I found myself with nearly ten minutes of high-quality and professional-looking footage.

  When the show was over Madeline hurled her bright-eyed self into my lap and offered up her right wrist with a new edible gummy giraffe sticker on it for my inspection.

  “Did you get it on camera, Daddy?”

  “Every minute,” I said.

  We drove home to the house that I shared with Elaine, Maddy, Alex, three cats of unknown provenance, and the hamster named Quo Vadis. Elaine was at the farmer’s market, shopping with Alex. I set Madeline up in front of a century-old, vellum-bound copy of De Quincey’s The English Mail-Coach. Ancient bookworms had once lived in the confines of this book, and the pages were foxed with red.

  “Daddy, I don’t like De Quincey. It’s too hard.”

  “Honey,” I reassured her, “everyone likes De Quincey.”

  I had been trying for some time to effect a parental cure for her unhealthy childhood fascination with the Romantics, Keats and Shelley in particular. Left to herself she would be stuffing herself with English iambic pentameter, and third-rate Goethe translations. “Read it,” I ordered. “Pay particular attention to the impact of the knocking on the door of Macbeth’s castle. It anticipates Germanic fascination with the subconscious by nearly a full century.”

  While she was doing that I stepped out on the back porch and smoked a large joint. Then I fell asleep on the sofa in the living room.

  I woke up with Elaine looming over me. “Sheila,” I said, at once. It is an innocent but strange habit of mine that when awakened suddenly I typically mistake one woman for another one, a subconscious thing that predates Freud and never fails to piss off the woman I’m married to.

  “Great,” she said. “Really great. Thank you so much.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said, sleepily, lifting myself from the sofa and rubbing my eyes. What I had done to deserve her thanks was not clear. She dangled her Japanese-made video camera.

  I sensed in a dream-like fashion that something had gone wrong, and that in some remote way, I had a role to play in it.

  “Is there a problem?” I asked cautiously.

  Elaine lifted the camera by the strap to my eye level.

  “The problem, once again,” she said, “is tits. Ten minutes of tits. In fact, ten minutes minus seventeen seconds. Presumably it took you seventeen seconds to realize the lens cap was still on?”

  The room blistered with silence. Elaine drew a deep breath from the low regions of her chi, and attempted to calm herself with a series of even lower belly breaths. “What is it you want me to do when Maddy’s grandparents ask to see the tape? I promised them that. Her granddad is eighty-six years old, he has pancreatic cancer, and in the last ten years two-thirds of his intestines have been removed. He lives for that girl, do you understand? He will not survive the summer. His granddaughter will never be this age again. You have traded in your daughter’s history for ten minutes’ worth of tits. I hope you’re proud of yourself,” she said. Then she began to sob.

  There has always seemed something oppressively indulgent to me about a woman who cries, especially over me. My mother was a great blubberer and what few boyhood memories I retain are filled with marble-sized tears, moans, groans, and the insufferable melodramatics associated with prize-winning novels and silent movies.

  Elaine straightened herself and wiped away her tears with a brisk motion. “Prepare to die,” she said, laying the camera on the sofa.

  “Elaine, no, honey, sweetheart, not that. Think about it, please.”

  The last thing I wanted was another martial arts smack-down with my wife. It was bad enough that she had won the Olympic welterweight taekwondo bronze medal at the Sydney Olympics. What troubled me was that she had begun to study the fundamentals of aikido, and I was finding it increasingly difficult to get a good shot at her, especially a good head shot. You could pummel away at Elaine’s abdomen all day, hell, you could even poke her a few times with a steak knife, but unless you concussed her a bit, she was impossible to take down.

  “Look.” I used the steady, rock-solid masculine sotto voce that has on occasion proved successful for me with women over forty. “Elaine, I’m sorry if what I did offends you, I am truly sorry. But I am Jack Vesoovian, the Jack Vesoovian, artist. Literary artist. You know that. I can’t be held to the same moral standards as the rest of humanity. I live in the life-and-death seam between ritual and the transgressive act, and what goes on there requires split-second timing and a literary comprehension that extends from Beowulf to Mandelstam. Please, Elaine, do not weigh me down with the moral attitudes of men and women who don’t know their Cubo-Futurism from their D’Annunzio. I am Jack Vesoovian, literary artist!”

  Elaine began to paw the floor with the toe of her left foot, the same gesture I’d seen her employ moments before knocking out the heavily favoured Greek welterweight at the Olympic qualifying rounds in Quebec City. They had taken that woman out on a stretcher.

  “Elaine …”

  “Prepare to die,” she said and screamed once more, hard, deep from her belly.

  Her first attack failed only because she was my lover of many years and I was expecting it. She had used the exact same strategy on her forty-second birthday after finding out that I had sold her first-edition Langston Hughes for sixty dollars to take a talentless but facially-gifted short story writer out to dinner at the Universal Grill.

  “Elaine, listen to me.” I tried to pacify her with a swift and professorial “auteur” interpretation of the filmic object, beginning with Eisenstein and ending with the French New Wave, and Truffaut’s insistence that the female form was the filmic end in itself due to its inherent filmability. Elaine was not buying it.

  “Shut your filthy French New Wave mouth, you collaborator.” She threw a double roundhouse, feinting with the right leg, showing her carefully cultivated “sleepy eye,” which revealed nothing, certainly not the second half of the combination, the right leg follow-up that she executed in a split second, clipping me on the jaw and loosening an upper incisor on the left side.

  If there’s one thing a Canadian artist fears above all, it’s a dental bill, and I stood in Elaine’s living room testing the tooth with my right index finger.

  “Jesus, Elaine! That’s a four hundred dollar visit, right there. Where am I going to get that sort of money?”

  “Why don’t you prostitute your art,” she sneered. “The way you’ve prostituted everything else.” She expertly covered the ground between us with a side kick. I stopped her cold with a pressing block, countered with a backfist which somehow Elaine parried with an old-fashioned outer forearm. I countered with a spear-finger. To my surprise, and to Elaine’s as well, it went four inches deep into her stomach and winded her.

  At that point Maddy came into the room. She had put down De Quincey’s The English Mail-Coach and had picked up Keats’ selected poems, a volume that I suspected
contained a copy of “La Belle Dame sans Merci.”

  “No fighting,” she cried.

  “You mind your own business,” I shouted. It was a long-standing source of annoyance to me that Maddy had abandoned De Quincy in favour of Keats. I’m not trying to deny Keats a melodic intensity comparable to Shakespeare, I simply did not want Maddy’s little brain cluttered with a romantic vision of that young man dying in the Piazza di Spagna with his chest heaving and the green phlegm boiling in his throat.

  Elaine clocked me square in the chin with a perfectly executed front kick. It was her signature kick, the knee high up, the upper torso tilting back, the energy exploding through the hips, up the thigh, out the leg, the heel, and square into my face. I wobbled, I saw the silver, shivering spasm of white that meant that my brain had undergone a shift. I more than wobbled. On the way down I wondered, not for the first time, if Elaine and her daughter were secretly operating as an undercover tag team, with Madeline distracting her mother’s opponents at precisely the moment they threatened to defeat her. I collapsed in stages to the floor. I heard Alex from the hallway giving me a ten-count in Korean: “hana dul, set net,” and that was it.

  WHEN I CAME TO, I was on the sofa on my back, Blackie and the Rodeo Kings playing softly on the stereo and Madeline ostentatiously and not very convincingly barricaded behind De Quincey’s The English Mail-Coach, grinning and peeking over the cover to make sure that I could see her reading it, or pretending to read it. Elaine was on her knees engaging in another of her signature moves, stroking my forehead with her fingers, running them through my hair. She had done exactly that on the night of our first date on a green-painted bench in Mahoney Park, after I picked her up at the bar, and we walked past the crumbling steel works in the west end of the city, holding a breathless discussion about the merits of a four-minute table dance compared to the airy arabesques of Isadora Duncan.

  “Jack, sweetheart, if you are going to live in this house you really must keep your block up.”

  She was right of course. How many marriages have come to an end because of simple technical laziness on the part of the combatants.

  “I’m sorry about the thing with the video camera, Elaine.”

  “I’m sorry too, Jack.”

  “No. You’ve got nothing to be sorry about, darling. It’s me.”

  “No, Jack, I do. I did something.”

  As she spoke I felt a throbbing hurt on my right side. “You did something?” I shifted my right arm.

  “Jack, I think I cut your finger off.”

  No sooner had she said that than a spasm of raw agony shot up my right arm. I lifted it up. I stared at it. My hand was entirely swaddled in a white gauze bandage.

  “Jesus Christ!”

  “Jack!”

  I stared at her. “Jack what? Jack I cut your finger off? I’m sorry? Look at my arm. I look like Frosty the Snowman!”

  “I’m sorry, Jack. It’s just you were lying there on the carpet and I couldn’t stop myself. I saw your finger on the button, I saw you filming that girl’s boobs, I thought of all the places that finger has been, and the rage came up in me, Jack. I couldn’t stop it.”

  “So you cut my finger off? My trigger finger?”

  “I didn’t cut it off, I just stomped on it a few times.”

  “Yeah,” Madeline joined in happily. “She smooshed it.”

  “You smooshed it?”

  “I smooshed it.”

  “With a hammer?”

  “With my foot.”

  “You smooshed my finger with your foot while I was unconscious?”

  Elaine nodded.

  Despite the pain I ripped off Elaine’s bandage work and surveyed the damage.

  Where once had been the unlimited phallic potential of my right index finger was now the wasted flattened carcass of a bruised digit. Fluid gathered in bulging blisters. A flap of skin hung from the second knuckle.

  “Christ, Elaine, do you realize what you’ve done? Do you have any understanding of the role this finger has played in the consciousness of this country? Forget the literary contributions, this finger is the clitoral touchstone of the Dominion for God’s sake. Ask any woman, ask, ask —”

  “My sister?” she said icily.

  “Let’s not go there,” I cautioned. This was not the time for Elaine to be clinging to her resentments.

  “No fighting,” chirped Maddy.

  “You watch your mouth,” I shouted, suddenly incensed with her, incensed with the ingratitude of the reading public and of children in particular. “And furthermore if I ever hear you going on about how truth is beauty and beauty truth, you are going straight to your room and you are going to stay there forever. Do you understand? Time out for the rest of your life. No parole, no more Elizabeth Barrett Browning either. I know where you keep that book.” I was shouting.

  Maddy stuck out her tongue, dropped De Quincey’s The English Mail-Coach on the sofa, and left the room.

  “Jack, calm down, it’s just a finger, you’ve got more.”

  I looked at her again. “Christ Almighty!” With my good hand I withdrew a joint from my pocket and stuffed it between my lips. “Am I the only person in this house who is even remotely grounded in reality?” I fumbled with my lighter.

  “Not here,” she said. “Outside.”

  “Fine.” I went out onto the back stoop by the broken barbecue and tried to calm down.

  IN THE END Elaine must have forgiven herself for what she did to my finger because a month later all the intimate objects of our life together, including fifty Sealtest crates packed with my Grove Press first editions, were stacked neatly in the hallway. The yellow Post-it Note curled from the fridge.

  8.0

  HOT ON THE TRAIL

  WHAT IS IT ABOUT an endless car ride alone that calls up all of the distant joys and rhythm of being in love with someone or even married to them over a long period of time? This is what I wondered as I drove the rocky reaches up the north shore. A lone and unlikely barn burned gold with creosote and pioneer vitality. Lake Superior hugged the highway like a turquoise hitchhiker. Telephone poles ticked by with the regularity of home life. A daylight moon hung in the sky just like toothpaste splatter on the bathroom mirror and everything was familiar and as well-worn as it is in a long relationship.

  On either side of me hung the Watch for Falling Rocks signs, the burnt-down gas stations, the Pregnant-and-In-Distress billboards, and the shut restaurants with the collapsing roofs. I took all of this in and tried not to brood. I was doing it again. I was squandering the fleshy and once big-hearted legacy of Elaine to rescue my no-good loser friend and fellow artistic traveller. I was an idiot, twice over. Elaine was right.

  For the most part the radio reception was nonexistent but that didn’t stop me from snapping the volume up full. I drove grimly through the white hiss into the glory and the misery of being alive, or at least not dead. Soon I allowed myself to be galvanized by one of those pounding two-hundred-kilometre erections men get when they cross the Canadian Shield. Memories of various woman rose up of their own accord, to protect me from my infamy with Elaine. Old and problematic visions of Johanna entered my mind, an afternoon on the carpet in which she dragged me down and whispered gleefully, “My husband just bought a rifle.” Not encouraging words, but words that brought to mind her double-barrelled shotgun passion. Her husband did have a rifle, but he proved to be a mediocre shot, and in the end I walked away with a shattered front window, a flesh wound, and no hard feelings, or very few.

  On either side of the highway the rock cuts swallowed me up. I let my thoughts drift to Marion: her exquisite neck, exquisite wrists, exquisite everything. It was true that she harboured a fondness for the novels of Anthony Powell, but I refused to hold this against her. She suffered from allergies and woke up with headaches; she was insomniac, and self-obsessed. Her premenstrual cramps were legendary. Her taste in men ran to Vespa-riding Mediterranean soulful types with Old World manners, wealthy parents, and an earri
ng. Beauty was on her though, and I was smitten right down to the girlish flounce that she perpetrated into her late thirties. Her body shone with the fluorescent emanation a person gets when they lie on therapeutic couches all day and their only exercise comes from smashing a sponge hammer against a pillow meant to represent your mother’s head. Her eyes had a saucer-sized antidepressant immensity about them and underneath her fashionable clothing she was all slinkiness and beneath that she was a turmoil of psychological indignation. It was her belief that she had been cruelly abused by her two hapless parents, both of whom, as children, had survived the Nazi occupation of Holland. Each week she saw a massage therapist, a psychologist, a forensic psychiatrist, a hypno-therapist, an acupuncturist, an herbalist, and a host of shamans, bingo-callers, investment advisors, patent lawyers, and vitamin quacks all eager to nurture the child within her.

  The car crawled across the Canadian Shield, shifting gears automatically. I found myself shifting too, from Marion to Alyssa, she of the generous heart, the green thumb, and a fondness for mail-order perennials. In my opinion, she had been my girlfriend between the hours of nine and midnight on a Friday evening. Now where was she? Where were any of them? All of those names, all those women with their spellbinding figures? In my mind they were living in an opulent gated community and I was the guy who got to deliver the pizza, if he was lucky. I thought of Bonnie, of those days when we had youth to burn and spent our times buying elegant hats and elaborate costume jewellery on Hess Street. She had been an artist herself, but in the end couldn’t stand the heat. She went off to teach fingerpainting to millionaire preschoolers in some fabulously wealthy neighbourhood in Chicagoland and was carrying on a monogamous relationship with an Irish setter.

  But mostly I thought of Elaine. Forget the quibbles, forget the impending legal actions and our spectacular displays of domestic violence: it was unnatural not to have Elaine in the car with me. We had put a million miles beneath us, we had passed sandwiches back and forth and rattled maps against our knees, snapping old cassette tapes into the player, back when it was possible to do such things. How many times had we driven this very highway? Six times we had driven through the burning yellow canola fields of Saskatchewan, stopping beneath silent grain silos on silent prairies folded in the golden twilight of massive silent evenings, camping on empty baseball pitches that floated in sunsets of pure green. We’d watched black-and-white movies with our knees up and the sheets pulled to our chins in cut-rate motel rooms while the mosquitoes buzzed like fighter planes against the window screen. Inside we settled into The Petrified Forest years of our love, allowing it to mix freely with the quiet mixture of contentment and dissatisfaction that comes from knowing there is a very good chance you will spend the rest of your life with each other.