Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good

by John Gould

  Their place, too, is insanely straight. On a movie set it would serve as home to the blandest of yuppie couples. The kitchen’s all brushed steel and dimmered pot light, the living room oak and ochre. There are GQ and House and Garden mags fanned out on the smoked-glass coffee table, which Siegfried, the neutered cocker spaniel, adorably whaps with his tail whenever he passes through. The walls are dominated by photographs, tasteful (read unaroused) male nudes. “Emasculated Mapplethorpes,” Zane calls them. These were snapped by Mercedes’s ex, a woman so fascinated by men that she finally became one, Lilly to Larry—at which point Mercedes gave him the heave-ho.

  There’s only one decorating choice that isn’t consonant with the bourgeois contentment of the whole place. On the landing between the second floor and the third, where Mercedes has set up her dungeon, there’s a museum-like display of the tools of her trade. One of her trades, anyway—not the romance writing, and not the dog walking either, though of course she uses leashes for that too. Alongside the leashes are whips, straps, crops, canes, handcuffs, paddles, masks. Even more unnerving, perhaps, are the ordinary items—a stuffed alligator, a woollen mitten, a spiral-bound ledger book, a universal remote—mixed in with the more predictable accoutrements. On hangers there’s an array of leather garb, designed, it would seem, to break the body down, flay it into strips and strands of flesh. All strangely inert, this gear—a set of Civil War revolvers you can’t imagine anybody actually using. But she does, if you ask her nicely and pay her a fortune. Zane, too, has lucked into a woman with some serious dough.

  “Dream on, sweetums,” says Mercedes. “No, the reason I was thinking of you, Zane showed me your review. The phony one? House of Straw.”

  “Right. Hey, I don’t suppose he’s around, is he?”

  “No, he’s with Nico. This project he’s working on.”

  “Wait, hold it,” says Matt. “You knew my review was a fake? How did you know that?”

  “Have you read it, Matt? Siegfried, no. Plus Zane told me.”

  “Son of a bitch. I specifically—”

  “Oh, settle down. I make my living keeping secrets, remember?”

  Matt got to shack up with Zane for a little while once too. Film school, third year. He and Zane and the Unholy Trinity, Trish, Tracy, Trina, three business school types. A shabby townhouse of which he and Zane shared the third floor. Now and then Meg stayed over, but Zane was single, so most nights it was just the two of them shooting ouzo or whatever horrible concoction they’d scrounged up, waxing brilliant about their favourite director of the day, Vigo or Murnau or De Sica. On the turntable might be Zappa, Beefheart; between songs you’d hear the thump and moan from downstairs, one of the girls getting it on with one of the boneheaded boyfriends. Good times.

  “Hey, by the way,” says Mercedes, “there’s something I wanted to tell you.”

  “Yeah?” The sparring seems to have fizzled here, something different’s going on.

  “I offered to pay.”

  “Pay?”

  “The drugs, anything Zane needs. I just wanted you to know.”

  “Know?”

  “It isn’t me. I’m not pushing him to do this.”

  “Oh, hey, I never imagined you were.” Though come to think of it. Mercedes with her big dark ideas, Mercedes with her jubilant nihilism, her blissed-out rage—this has obviously been part of the appeal for Zane. Hanging with somebody who’s more radical than he is for a change.

  “But I’m not trying to stop him either. I think it’s fucking brilliant, what he’s doing, what my man’s doing.”

  My man.

  “This is coming from inside him, Matt. It isn’t our place to bottle it up. It isn’t my place, and it isn’t yours.”

  “Inside?” This must be true, in some sense. You can’t force somebody to be a martyr, can you? A martyr has to choose to be a martyr or he isn’t a martyr at all, he’s just another loser like the rest of us.

  “Zane’s fucked up,” says Mercedes, “why shouldn’t he be? Why shouldn’t everybody? Why shouldn’t you?”

  “Oh, hey, Mercedes. I am.”

  But not fucked up enough, perhaps. Is that the trouble? People who do stuff, people who make heroic gestures are so often damaged in some fundamental way. It makes sense. If you aren’t too short or too fat, if you don’t have a limp or a learning disability, why would it ever occur to you to climb Everest or write a symphony or discover penicillin?

  “Yeah,” says Mercedes. “Yeah, of course you are. Sorry.”

  If he loses Zane, will that do it? Will that push Matt over some threshold, damage him deeply enough that he’ll be compelled to do something too? “Listen,” he says, “that’ll be Mariko on the other line. I’m supposed to pick her up at the ferry.” Or what about almost losing Zane, would that suffice? “Tell the big dunce I said fuggoff, will you? And tell him no need to call back, I’ll try him another day.”

  “You will? Promise?”

  “Yeah. Why, what do you mean?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just, I’m not sure you get how important this is. You are.”

  “Ah.”

  “You’ve got to be a good friend, Matt. A really good friend. He’s going to need you.”

  “I know.”

  “But more than you think.”

  “How so?”

  “Just … When’s the last time you really talked to him?”

  “You know what, Mercedes? You’re right. I suck at this. Too. I suck at this too.”

  An impatient phooph of air from the far end. “Okay, good, you go ahead and hate yourself. I’m so impressed, Matt. Hating yourself, that’s just bound to fucking help.”

  And she hung up hard.

  Grand piano. Plaid-vested barkeep. Row upon glinting row of rare single malt. Matt doesn’t have a regular watering hole, but if he did it’d be nothing like this, like the Starlight Lounge.

  It’s been an hour or so since he got done with Mercedes. He topped up his Jacuzzi, set the timer for twenty minutes, lowered his shaky frame into the froth of bubbles. “Juniper Breeze,” fresh as all get-out. The jets prodded and pummelled him from every angle, the motor hypnotized him with its Tibetan-monk drone. As he crawled out he managed to steer clear of the shaving mirror, its nightmare microscoping of pores and follicles. No escape, though, from the flat mega-mirror over the sink.

  Oh dear. His virtually pigmentless, night-of-the-living-dead skin had gone all patchy, lobstered here and there by the bath. A decent crop of hair (black with the odd grey squiggle) graced one pec, but the other was almost pubescent in its sparsity. Virtually everything about him—he’d never really noticed this before—was lopsided. Look at the eyebrows, one arched, one level, lending him an expression of aggrieved puzzlement. Look at the cockeyed prick, leaning inelegantly to the right. Matt had gleaned from a nature show once that babies, indeed animals of all kinds, are attracted to symmetry. Symmetry signifies life, sets the organic apart from the inorganic—the lion’s face apart from the rubble of rock, say. It makes sense, then, that you’d go crookeder and crookeder as you age, as you commence your transit from animate to inanimate, from living to that other thing.

  Nail clippers? It was all he had. He went at the whorl of hair on the right side of his chest like a topiarist with the teensiest possible pair of garden shears. After about five minutes he’d evened things up, though the right side looked ravaged more than trimmed. He spent the next few minutes practising his skeptical and surprised looks in the mirror, trying to get his two eyebrows to go up in tandem. Which just left his dick—a longer-term project, presumably. His package, that was the expression. What if he carried it on the other side of the seam for the next few months? Could it be trained, vinelike, to lean the other way?

  Matt’s on the first swig of his second pint of microbrewed I.P.A. when Karen wanders in. He’s just finished shifting his package, thank Christ. Karen does a brisk pan of the lounge, hunting her gang presumably, her fellow geniuses. Genii? “Hey Karen, over here!”
What the hell.

  She squints, picks him out of the clinky gloom.

  Should have gone with the blazer. It was a little rumpled after a day balled up in the bottom of his bag, but without it this khakis-and-crewneck rig is pretty dull. Karen’s look is jacket and slightly funky blouse, knee-length skirt with an unexpected belt—the more-than-meets-the-eye thing. She’s in orangey reds again, goldy browns, a fluster of falling leaves. Toronto about a month from now, when it too starts dying.

  “Hi, sweetheart.” She bends over him—gape of breasts going udderish, teatlike with gravity—and plants a slow kiss on his forehead. “Am I ever glad to see you! I was starting to think maybe you’d had second thoughts!” She laughs. Has he heard her laugh yet? It’s more petite than you’d expect, a piccolo note from a flute body.

  “Yeah, well,” says Matt. Second thoughts?

  “I called you earlier, but I guess you were out.” She catches the bartender’s eye, mouths, “Perrier? Lime?” pantomiming the squeeze.

  Matt says, “Not your people?” He tilts his head to indicate the far end of the lounge, where a conference or convention group is settling in. Folks muscle marble tables together, muster extra chairs from here and there.

  “Sorry?” says Karen. “Oh, no. No, our sessions are …” She waves her hand vaguely about. “Holiday Inn. I always stay someplace else, these things get kind of, you know, incestuous. Thanks.” She sips her high-toned water. “So, you really meant it then?”

  “Well see, the thing is …” Meant it?

  Karen looks stricken.

  “I’m not saying no, it’s just that sometimes in the heat of—”

  Ah. So this is her real laugh. It’s bigger, richer—somewhere between an oboe and a bassoon. “Very funny,” says Matt. “You had me going there. Wedding bells.” He takes a rueful pull at his pint. “Anyway, shall we start again?” Time’s all jumbled up here, they’re shooting their scenes out of order, the get-to-know-you scene after the climactic sex scene. “Gone With the Wind?” he says. “The very first scene they shot? Atlanta already up in flames.”

  “How about that!” says Karen.

  “Sorry, I … I’m in movies.”

  Those big eyes.

  “Matt McKay.” He sticks out his hand. Though maybe he should be keeping it anonymous, nameless. Last Tango in Toronto?

  “I’m Kate Moreau.”

  Kate. Kate. He hears it again as he heard it last night, that sigh of startled desire.

  She offers him a brisk shake, how d’ya do. “I’m awfully sorry about that. I’m bad, I shouldn’t be teasing a sick guy. Are you feeling any better, I hope?”

  “A touch. It’s strange, I never get these things.”

  “So you said. Well, so starting fresh … Nice to meet you, Matt. Where are you from?”

  “Vancouver. Ish.” He raises his eyebrows. Both of them, or anyway he tries.

  Kate points at herself, the shadowed cleft of her cleavage. “Halifax. I’m at Dalhousie? God, it’s so good to get away.” She blinks as if in disbelief.

  Why this woman? She’s perfect in a way—a big mind in a vibrant body—but she’s also random, she’s also just an accident. Unless there’s something predestined here, invisible forces bearing down. What would a physicist say? If this goes on much longer he’ll ask her. “So, east and west,” he says. “Atlantic, Pacific.” He spreads his arms. “And we’ve met here in the middle.” He smacks his palms together—like a performing seal, it strikes him. He really hasn’t done this in a while. Has he ever done this? “How long are you in town?”

  “About a week. The conference is only a few days but I’m treating myself, might be my last chance for a bit. And what brings you”—a magician-like unfurling of her fingers—“here? Last night you said work, but you didn’t say what kind.”

  “Yeah, well, there’s always work, isn’t there?” How much do you tell a person you’ve boffed (goofy term, but it feels about right) but whose name you can’t hang on to? “This visit’s mostly about a friend of mine, actually. He’s sick, so I can’t see him yet. Because I’m sick.” Matt shrugs. “AIDS, he has AIDS.”

  Kate sucks in some air. There’s something puffy about her anyway, something hyperinflated, an almost infantile openness. Dianne Wiest? Edward Scissorhands.

  What if he told her everything? What if he just dumped the whole knotted ball in her lap, could she maybe tease it apart for him? “And it’s my fault.”

  “What do you mean? What’s your fault?”

  “That he’s sick, that my friend’s sick.”

  “Oh. Oh.” Kate starts to rise here, almost to levitate. Not as though she’s going to bolt but as though she’s going to burst right through the ceiling.

  “No.” Matt bats at the air. “Christ, no, I’m sorry. No, I don’t mean I gave it to him. I’m fine, and anyway, I’m not, we don’t …”

  Kate makes prayer-hands, peers down at him. “You don’t make love to him?”

  “No, I don’t make love to him.”

  Kate hisses out some breath, begins a hesitant descent back into her chair.

  Matt says, “It’s more like he got sick because I wasn’t there.”

  “I see,” says Kate, though there’s no way she can. “Sorry, I’m just a little jumpy at the moment.”

  “I’m such an idiot,” says Matt.

  Kate musters a quarter of a smile, half a smile. “That’s okay.”

  “Really,” says Matt. “Cross my heart”—he does—“and hope to die. I’m not into men. Anyway, I play it so safe it’s a joke.”

  “Ah,” says Kate. “Because you know, you could have fooled me.” She does a little something with her hips that says, That was you last night, wasn’t it?

  Matt nervously guffaws. “Touché.”

  “So let’s say we’re even,” says Kate. “Now, your friend. Tell me about him. Is he all right?”

  “Sort of.”

  “I have a cousin? The new drugs are incredible.”

  “Yeah.”

  Kate frowns. “But you don’t sound convinced.”

  “Well see, that’s the loopy part. He’s not … Zane’s not taking them.” Kate’s got her big eyes going full bore now. It makes Matt want to keep talking, keep feeding that fascination or whatever it is. Glandular condition most likely. “It’s a protest thing, at least that’s what I think it is.”

  “A protest against?”

  “The fact that other people can’t get treatment. In Africa and places like that. India.”

  “Well, that should get him some attention. Refusing treatment, that’s kind of brilliant.”

  “Yeah. The press would be all over him, I suppose, if he were ever to let on.”

  “What do you mean? He hasn’t told anybody?”

  “Yep. Nope. He’s keeping it a secret.”

  Wasps? Bees? It’s one or the other—bees?—that die once they’ve stung you. If you’re going to die anyway, wouldn’t you want to get your sting in first? That time Matt thought about snuffing himself (pills and a plastic bag, he actually started to get things organized), it occurred to him to wonder, what sting? What would he be dying for? No good answer, which is one reason he decided not to pop the pills, pull the bag over his head. That plus the plan had already worked, in a way. Just contemplating the thing had given him a liberating whiff of I-lessness. Maybe that’ll do it for Zane too?

  Kate says, “But that’s crazy. That’s like … that’s like he’s going on a hunger strike and he’s not letting anybody see him starve.”

  “Yeah, good one. I’m going to use that.” The folks at the far end of the lounge have acquired drinks now, neon martinis—pink, green, tangerine—and are making sure everybody knows just how spunky and spontaneous they are. “See, Zane’s kind of … you’d have to know him.” Shanumi sipping on a soda. Shanumi ducking through the plank door of her shack, a child’s floppy body in her arms …

  “So why don’t you tell me?”

  “Tell you?”

 
“About Zane.”

  “Oh. Well, he has two different eyes. I mean his eyes are two different colours.”

  “I see. So that’s why he’s doing this?”

  Matt shrugs.

  “But you’re going to talk him out of it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Even if it’s what he really wants? I’m going through something like that, and—”

  “Yeah, even if it’s what he really wants.”

  Kate makes a little ticking noise as she processes this. “How?”

  “I’m going to kill him.” Hey, not a bad idea. “He goes on the meds or I shoot him.”

  “You have a gun?”

  “He goes on the meds or I shove him off a bridge.”

  “Zane,” says Kate. She seems to be trying it on with her tongue. “Like Zane Grey? The cowboy guy?”

  “His dad was a buff. Plus he’s Jewish, lucky bastard.”

  “Lucky?”

  “Bastard. Plus he’s gay, plus he’s dying.”

  “I see.”

  “Anyway, it turns out to mean something in Hebrew, Zane does. God’s gracious gift?”

  Kate makes a grab for his hand. Lunges for it, really. She turns it over, examines its upper side (long and knuckly, eskered with veins) as you might an ancient artifact riddled with runes.

  Nope. No way. He wants to, he almost needs to, but no way. He’s already unfaithful, he can’t afford to be any unfaith-fuller. The fact that Mariko was unfaithful first ought to help, but it doesn’t. It makes this feel even lamer, a revenge thing, tit for tat.