by Daniel Perry
Get a photo dancing between two hot young studs.
Come home with a pair of boxers.
Kiss a guy who’s not Wade. On the lips.
If we were in Huron Beach where we don’t know anyone, I’d do it all in ten minutes with two juiceheads and move on. At home I’m most afraid of the kiss, but it’s one night, it’s senseless, and it’s more for the other girls than me — if I show Wade the list after he’s had a few, he probably won’t care if I plant one on Mike. It could only be Mike.
But Paula ... no one accounted for Paula.
We order drinks and head for the dance floor, where girls we haven’t talked to since high school flock around us. Someone — Jessie — has tipped a couple of guys off, and already one’s approaching with his shorts in his hand. They’re clean, thank God, so I play it up for a few seconds, wearing them on my veil like a tiara. The girls all scream. The first ones to stop pull the lists from their purses and mechanically strike out a line.
Above the dance floor, on the riser, DJ Eric leans into his mic, turning on his Ultra Cool Voice. “Make sure to say hi to Stella Callaghan tonight,” he says. He’s worked here so long no one calls him just Eric, and these days he sounds like an infomercial. “This is her stagette. When you see her next week, she’ll be Stella Smith!”
The girls scream again. It’s too much. I grab Jessie’s elbow and we make for the bathroom. When we open the door she sticks an arm in front of me. I stop and we watch someone we’ve never seen here before stare into the mirror under her Betty Page cut. She has an open tube of lipstick in her hand, arm frozen at a right angle, and she hasn’t put any on her lips yet. Her reflection is centred in a frame drawn in black marker, probably by the same person that wrote FOR A GOOD TIME CALL 519–URA–SLUT above it. She looks at the ceiling and breathes, “How the hell did I get here?” Jessie and I look at each other; Jessie speaks first.
“You must be Paula,” she says. “I’m Jessie.”
The stranger doesn’t turn her head, doesn’t make eye contact even in the mirror — she just says, “I know.” A faint smile lifts her lips and she brings the red tube to them.
TWO DRINKS, TEN songs, and half the list later, Wade walks in wearing his old Comets jersey, number 76. He joins Brian and Mike, who are in untucked plaid shirts and scabby jeans, at a table with Paula and a guy I don’t know. His jeans fit closer, navy and expensive, and above them he wears a tailored black dress shirt. His long hair is trimmed instead of hanging out of a ball cap in a ponytail. He’s definitely not from around here.
I catch myself staring as a tray arrives, ten shots and ten beers. I turn away and watch sideways as they down the liquor. Paula lags on the second. They each take two Blues.
Jessie grabs my shoulder and points to the door. The Brown twins have arrived and they’re beelining toward me, convinced they still qualify as two hot young studs. Gary’s still in shape after four years in the O, but he’s been back since the NHL passed him over last June, working with his dad at Ritter and drinking at Brewskie’s with Jake, who quit hockey at fourteen and has the gut now to prove it. Gary’s hips sandwich me into Jake’s blubbery middle and it makes me glad Wade doesn’t skate well. Jessie’s camera flashes. The girls unfold their papers.
When the song ends I free myself and make for the bar, where I make my own double order. I take the drinks to Wade’s table and pull up another chair.
“This is my friend Gianluigi,” Mike says, pointing to the new guy. “He’s an exchange student from a small town in Italy. He came down with us” — Mike laughs — “for a once in a lifetime experience.” He shouts over the music, “Gianluigi! This is Stella!”
Wade adds, “My fiancée.”
“Hi,” I say.
Gianluigi looks into my eyes.
“Lucky man,” he says through a heavy accent. He glances at Wade then looks back to me. “Are you having fun?”
Wade grumbles, “Oh yeah. She’s got a whole list of it.”
Mike looks down at the table.
Paula clutches his hand.
Wade snorts.
Brian stares through Gianluigi.
Gianluigi says, “Show me.”
I hand him the paper. The kiss is all that’s left and I think Wade knows it. I start to say “It’s almost — ” but Gianluigi stands up. He puts his hands on the back of my head and kisses me. Full on the lips. As he pulls away his bangs brush my face.
I exhale.
I open my eyes.
Mike and Brian each have one of Wade’s arms and Brian’s on his feet, blocking the Italian. A rap song’s slow bass gives the standoff a heartbeat and again, the whole bar is watching.
Gianluigi meets Wade’s glare with a lopsided smile. He shrugs.
“There,” he says. “All finished. Now go get married.”
Teeth crack Wade’s stone face and he laughs sharply, then in rhythmic bursts, until he’s gasping with tears down his cheeks. Mike and Brian release him and the crowd starts applauding, led by Jessie in a chant of “Stel-la! Stel-la!” as I climb on the table. I raise the list over my head and rip frantically. Pieces flutter to the floor. I reach down and grab Wade by the jersey. He stands and I kiss him, softly, then hungrily. For show I leap into his arms. He cradles me against his torso and it’s still hard and muscular. No matter where he takes me, we’ll end up back here, but as we burst through the door I imagine a Ferrari — bright red, roof open, and zooming down a vineyard-lined highway. In the streetlights my hair leaves a long shining tail.
Ode
BRIAN
READING MIKE’S JOURNAL felt wrong, but I didn’t get a choice. I found out it existed when his mother delivered the green notebook to his and Paula’s rented house on the edge of Currie. I started to say, “Maybe we shouldn — ”, but Paula lunged in front of me and took it. Susan buried her head in Paula’s shoulder before leaving and whispered, “Thanks for showing me this.”
Paula led me up the stairs and we entered the second bedroom, where the desk had been cleared and Mike’s mementoes piled neatly to the left: a few certificates, a framed photo of him and Paula graduating Teacher’s College, and on top, a small jade carving of a bird. Paula wrapped the statuette in her fingers. She brought it to her chest. A whimper escaped her lips and she replaced it, glaring at me, having caught me staring.
“It’s a nightingale,” she said. “I got it for him in China.”
She sat on the chair and set the book in the centre of the desk. She opened it and turned the pages sternly, determined to read them all in one sitting.
That was two days ago. Things haven’t changed much. After every reading we do of Mike’s eulogy, she opens the book again.
Today, she whines when she reaches the end.
“Brian, you have to read it.”
“It’s none of my business.”
“You’re his oldest friend!”
This is the third time I’ve ever met her, and already, she’s yelling at me.
I keep my voice even.
“If he’d wanted me to read it, he’d have shown me.”
She snaps, “You’re a callous asshole, you know that?”
I sit heavily on the bed and it bounces beneath me. If I’ve learned anything about Paula, it’s that resisting is pointless. In a minute she’ll start beating her fists on the walls, turning her face blue. I reach out, she thrusts the book into my hand and I open it in the middle to a page that’s Xed over. The next one is missing. I flip until I find something I can read, some long ramble about softball that’s really about Jessie Mueller. He always went gaga over girls. I turn the page and entirely skip what’s next, the stuff about Paula. I doubt she’s any different, though she tells me she and Mike had been together five years; I guess I hadn’t seen him in a while. I turn more pages and last, before the blank end pages, is a screed about his father. I read two emotional paragraphs and then close the book. No one should see this. But at the desk, Paula pouts above her pink sweater. Her face is kind of ruddy, and her lipstick’s too red;
her black dye-job screams poser.
We’ve been stopping and starting for two days now, arguing about what to tell and what to leave out. Which ones best represent Mike. She wants to use the whole notebook, and her expression is falling. She’s going to start crying again. Fuck. I re-open to a part about a funeral that must’ve been his grandfather’s — everyone remembers Tom Burford’s suicide. I settle on a section about a Scout Camp we volunteered at when we were fourteen. I was there, I don’t need to relive it, but I take a small pad from my jacket and scribble some notes. Paula looks on, almost smiling.
As I hand her back the book, I wonder what Mike would want. The truth is, I don’t know anymore. It’s been almost ten years since we left Currie Township, Mike to study English at Western and me to the army, St-Jean, Quebec. We expected to still see each other all the time: Thanksgiving, Christmas, Slack Week for him and summer leave for me. We even planned a trip to Europe after his second year, but it fell through. We’d barely talked since.
Two nights ago, Mike jumped off the River Road Bridge, just outside Currie, and he died in the Waubnakee. The coroner said he drowned after head trauma from the fall. But we jumped all the time when we were kids, in winter, even, until that first year apart, when — drunk and home for Christmas — we set out to see who had gained more weight. The bridge is so low, you can’t hurt yourself even when the water’s frozen. I went first and I heard the cracking sounds the moment I landed. Mike watched me from above as I high-tailed it off the ice, his hand on the railing as he knelt in the snow, laughing. Really laughing.
Killing himself.
Had he died any other way, I’d tell this one tomorrow. It’s a perfect closer, too, I can hear it: “When his mother asked, ‘Well if Brian asked you to jump off a bridge with him ...?’ my oldest friend, Mike Carrion, said ‘Yes.’” I understand, though. We’ve got to get it right tomorrow because after death, a person only lives in words, his own and other people’s. His story. Paula’s taking it awfully literally, though, even for an English major, sitting there and leafing through the pages again and again. I’d rather we just get to the point. People are going to miss Mike, and it’s sad that he died. He was a great friend, once.
I cap my pen and put it in my pocket, and then I say her name.
PAULA
I HEAR HIM, I’m just ignoring him. God. It’s like he can’t see I’m in the middle of something. Just reading my soulmate’s last words, jerk-off. But of course, Brian doesn’t stop. He says my name again, drawing it out, with about seventeen As and Us between the P and L.
And again.
“Paula!”
“What, Brian? What do you want?”
“We’re almost finished,” he says, checking his watch. “We’re just under time and we’ve got lots to say. Let’s do one more read-through.”
A read-through. Like a weekday-morning seminar at some office job.
What Brian doesn’t know is that you can’t rehearse eulogies. You just stand up and see what comes out—even if you’re left a bawling mess. Crying at a funeral’s not weird; not crying is. You come across like the journalist with the obituary on file, three-quarters written and waiting.
Brian still expects me to answer. In his jeans and four-season jacket and balding already, he’s pathetic, overcompensating with an expensive silver watch that’s too big for him. The spoils of war, probably. I exaggerate a sigh from the back of my throat and hope to gas him with disgust. When it fails I say, “Sure.” I don’t look up.
I just want to finish this story.
Reid Watson threw the party he threw every summer and it fell the night before Doctor Laskey’s final. As usual, Summer School was proving itself an oxymoron, but I was one credit shy and determined to graduate. Watching everyone else move on in April really drove it home, and the sublets in the dingy bungalows on Huron Street were quieter than ever, empty for the summer. I stopped by Reid’s for a beer. Okay, three. The few guys who stayed in town to play on his softball team were there: Gary Connor and his girlfriend Stacey, Jumbo Joe Polack — not actually his last name, but all anyone could spell — and Craig and Michelle, and Jeff and —
Of course it’s true. When he really started writing, everything was and he left nothing out. The list goes on for a while. Things get better when I show up.
She was a year younger than me. Maybe more like two and a half. It doesn’t matter because I didn’t find out. Having failed last summer session because of just this party, I knew I was doomed to leave early, but still I stared, watching her strum Reid’s guitar on the porch and pretend she was shy, singing softly, holding it back. The next morning I wrote an exam worth a bright shining seventy-one, and afterward, instead of telling Doctor Laskey to stuff it, that I’d failed Romantic Lit for the last time, I just bolted to Reid’s to ask about The Nightingale.
Seriously. Like in Keats, or The Emperor And The. He only called me that once to my face, and I laughed at him. “What a cheeseball,” I said. “I will never date you.” In China two years later, I bought him the figurine; a peace offering for a long-forgotten slight.
“Fifteen seconds,” Brian says, checking the damned watch. He turns his wrist to show me. “I’m starting when the second hand gets to the twelve.”
“I can tell time, Brian.”
He breathes in. Checks again. Goes.
“Your friend and mine, Michael Carrion, will be sorely missed,” he begins. “Mike’s girlfriend Paula and I are honoured to be asked to memorialize a man who — ”
I quit listening and let my eyes glaze over. Memorialize? Is that even a word? It’s so unfeeling. He reads into the mirror with his hands at his sides, making sure to keep them out of his pockets. I don’t refocus until I hear “Scout Camp.”
“We’re at this cattle ranch, not far out of town,” he’s saying. “It’s an overnight hike, in the fall, and kids from every troop in MacKinnon County are running around playing war, shooting each other with the sticks they’ve gathered for firewood.
“But Mike, he wants no part of this. He picks up our tent, which is still limp on the ground, and tells me to take the other side. We carry it into the middle of this flat and set it up. A private camp, for just the two helpers from First Currie troop. That night, once the kids are all in bed, we make a small fire and cook canned soup, and we spend the night talking about every girl in Grade Nine, all spaghetti straps and nice legs and whose chest is still flat.” He laughs to set up his mandatory levity: “Which didn’t do so much for me, of course.”
I’ve read this one. It doesn’t go anywhere after the body parts. Playing it for a laugh at himself is really Brian’s only hope. The better stuff’s all in my part: undergrad, Teacher’s College, English classes in China, Mike’s first job, moving home with a Toronto Girl.
“When we wake up we’re surrounded by a hundred head of longhorn,” Brian says. “We didn’t know it, but we pitched our tent in their pasture, and now, all these cows are lowing and grazing and stomping around us, and the two of us are just waiting, cowering in our sleeping bags, hoping they take off soon.”
They do. The end.
A better story would have Mike reassure Brian, or crack a joke, or maybe even get up and chase away the longhorns, but that must not be how it happened. No matter. The mourners will laugh anyway. Easy pickings at a funeral. Brian chose a story and delivered it unflinchingly: off-book, with no tears, and no choking up. Ten out of ten.
“That’s just one of our great memories,” he says.
I forgot about the slam-bang conclusion, for bonus marks.
“And though we might not have seen each other much these last few years, I know in my heart that Mike cherished our childhood just like I — ”
“Brian, stop.”
He looks at his watch, to mark time.
“What?”
“When did you last see him?”
He takes his speech from the desk and raps it on the wood, like a news anchor wrapping up.
“I’ve known him s
ince Grade Nine.”
“That’s not what I asked — when?”
The hand holding his papers drifts to his side.
“I guess it was ... four years ago. Before Afghanistan.”
“You haven’t seen him since you’ve been home.”
His eyes bugged in protest.
“I’ve been in Wainwright. Do you even know where that is?”
I don’t, but I won’t let him change the subject.
“Do you even know what happened the night he died?”
“He was walking home.”
“From ...?”
“From Brewskie’s.”
I shake my head.
“No. He had just left our place.”
Brian’s eyes widen.
“So how’d he wind up dead in the river?”
I imagine punching his accusing face. Is he saying it was my fault?
“He had just gotten some bad news. He went out to clear his head.”
“What was it?”
“His dad.”
“Something happened to John?”
“Not John,” I say. “Ray. Who knows how he found our number, but he called up out of nowhere. I guess he married someone else, a year after he left Susan, and had three other kids. He asked Mike if they could reconnect — just like that, a whole second family. Like nothing had happened.”
Brian sits down on the bed. He runs a hand over what’s left of his hair.
“First call since ...?”
“Since ever.”
“And that’s why he killed himself.”
“You’re such an idiot, Brian. He didn’t kill himself.”
“So what, it was an accident? He fell off the bridge?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I do think he jumped — ”
“But?”
“But I don’t think he wanted to die.”
Brian looks down at his black boots.
I thought Susan had told him all this.
“Mike talked a lot that night about old memories,” I say. “About China, and how he’d moved beyond this place. He mentioned so many people I’d never heard of, kids who had moved away when he was still in elementary school only to resurface one day in Grade Ten in the smoking pit at CHS, who no one asked but everyone knew lived with an aunt or a grandparent now, or worse, one, or both of the parents they’d left town with — ”. I catch my breath. “He couldn’t believe he’d wound up back here, anyway, and he said he was sorry for dragging me down with him — that he’d understand if I went back to Toronto.”