Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good

by John Gould

  Yipes. Matt lifts right up off the bed at the sound of the telephone. He mutes the tube—Eve’s noisy ecstasies are a bit much anyhow. He tugs straight the bedspread, runs a hand through his hair. “Hello?”

  “Matt? It’s Kate.”

  “Oh, hey Kate. What’s up?”

  There was a perfect time with Mariko. Two years or so, that stretch in town before they packed up and headed for paradise. Plenty of urban nature, plenty of loving sex. Is there any way to get back there?

  Kits, the place was called, Kitsilano, a funky-posh stretch of Vancouver right by the sea. Mariko had a condo, a squinchy one-bedroom into which they crammed two households’ worth of crap when Matt and Toto gave up their basement suite, its insolent roaches, its needle-strewn back lane. Matt was immediately mad about the new place, and about the little world in which it landed him. He could stride a couple of blocks downhill to the park, a modest patch of grass studded with chestnuts and willows and yews. Between the park and the sea ran a boulevard of sand, where neatly bucked driftwood logs had been lined up like park benches. It was all so phony, so fixed. Matt loved it. Couples strolled and squabbled, joggers huffed by in their sweats and their dazzling sneakers. Dog owners juggled their leashes and their little plastic bags of shit. Out on the bay you could watch the motionless motion of the two-tone tankers, the incessant sizzle of the waves. On the far side, houses swarmed up the slopes and were lost in the bristling green of the mountains, which in turn were lost in the bruised-black belly of the clouds. Sighting down the beach your eye lit on downtown, or anyway on the hyperdensity of the West End, high-rises lined up like the teeth of a busted comb.

  If downhill meant park and sea, uphill meant city. Fourth Avenue, or maybe Broadway. Wigs, flowers, appliances, lingerie. Gelato, sushi, pita, pizza. Get rubbed, get reikied, get trimmed, get tanned. Matt would peer into a bunch of windows, then settle for a coffee and a few quiet moments with a recent issue of Premiere or Film Comment at his favourite café. “Afternoon, Emma.” “Afternoon, Matt.” Then he’d head back and get started on the paella or the seared-scallop salad or the vegan pilaf. Mariko would scoot home from the office as early as she could, and they’d make hootchy-kootchy (her term) wherever they happened to be when they’d wrestled off their clothes. She’d shiver before she came—that’s how you knew she was ready—and stay mum right through to the end, silently seizuring. Afterwards they’d perch, robed and cross-legged, on the futon couch in front of the TV with their novelty Babar bowls and their chopsticks and their splasher of soy sauce. When the news came on Matt would get dressed and go to work.

  Work? Yep, Matt even had a job in those days, at a rep cinema that happened to be a walk from Mariko’s place. The Reprise was a fusty bit of business—it gave you the feeling, once you were inside, of being lost down the back of a big old burgundy couch. It had a balcony, and a trough urinal in the men’s room, and audiences that clapped. It was run by the Glücks, an eccentric childless couple not much older than Matt who nonetheless treated him like a son. Like them, Matt did everything. He shovelled popcorn (“Engevita yeast with that?”), tore tickets, made change in the unheated glass box out front. He even got to fiddle with the projector now and then when the image went wonky.

  By the time he’d been with them a year or so, the Glücks were letting Matt do all the programming. Classics, second-run Hollywood features, foreign films, he had his pick. The early show/late show thing allowed him to get clever in all kinds of harmlessly cute ways. He’d put a camp kung fu flick with one of the epic Kurosawas. He’d match a remake with its original—The Fly with The Fly, say—or two wildly different takes on the same traditional tale, Beauty and the Beast by Disney and by Cocteau. One time he put a whole batch of Dr. Seuss animations on with Dr. Strangelove. Another time he matched the wordless prayer Koyaanisqatsi (“life out of balance” in Hopi) with the chatterboxy My Dinner with André. That kind of thing.

  He even got to write the little blurbs for the flyer, which Mariko laid out on her fancy computer. “Canadian phenom David Cronenberg, with his 1986 remake of the Vincent Price classic, conjures The Fly as a hymn to body horror, braiding into it our fear of cancer and of AIDS, our whole dread of the finite as it’s embodied in our bodies …” Now and then somebody would notice the effort, maybe even scribble a few kind words for the cardboard Comments Please box.

  So it was rewarding work, or at least it was work that didn’t make you ashamed you weren’t doing something more worthwhile. It was creative—kreative, you might even say. It barely paid, but Mariko didn’t seem to mind. Matt made sure to keep ahead on the housework and the cooking, contribute that way. Evenings he wasn’t needed at the cinema they’d go out with Sue and Gary or some other corporate couple for whom Matt was an amusing curiosity. He was an easy enrichment of their lives—a Best of Bach tucked into an Abba-and-Eagles collection. For the most part he liked these folks, and liked the fact that they were already there, friends who didn’t need to be made.

  It all seemed weirdly right. A life, however briefly, in balance.

  Gauguin. That famous one of the woman lying on her tummy in that Tahitian Eden—Kate could be that woman now. Feet crossed, hands palm-down on the pillow. In the painting there’s a black-clad figure in the background, big-D Death probably, or the spirit of some ancestor, deceased and displeased. Matt fills that role here as he wanders unclad back into the room with a glass of water, having discreetly ditched his condom in the loo.

  “Mmph-rrrmph,” says Kate, her face still half-pillowed.

  Matt’s just about got her memorized from this angle. If he were a painter he’d have no trouble conjuring her at the studio. The convoluted conch of an ear. That startling silhouette as she cranes at him over her shoulder, one wide eye, amorous, amused. Backbone. Butt. Über-critic André Bazin once observed (this is late ‘40s, early peacetime) that sex appeal had migrated from leg to bosom, Dietrich to Hayworth and Russell. And nowadays? Having tarried awhile with the bronzed tummy is it time, perhaps, for the tush, complete the cycle?

  Kate goes up on her elbows. “Are you usually this, I don’t know … You’re awfully intense about sex. In a good way and everything, but oh my.”

  Matt slides back onto the bed, his still-slippery johnson kissing the sheet. After Kate’s call he hustled down to the gift-and-convenience shop in the lobby, lucked into a box of Trojans. Better late than never, no? Thank Christ the whatsit went on, and stayed on, without a hitch.

  “Are you like this with Mariko?”

  “No,” says Matt. Not exactly. Is this what Kate wants to hear? “It’s you. You do this to me.” He kisses her tattoo, a pair of oriental-type pictograms at the base of her back where it rises to become rump. Mariko took calligraphy for a little while once, and punctuated her notes with figures like these, fine columns of cryptic squiggles.

  “Love me like this,” says Kate, rolling over.

  Love? “Well, but why would I want to change you?”

  Kate giggles. “No, I mean that’s what my tattoo says, love me like this. At least that’s what it’s supposed to say. Hey, I’m getting hungry. Could I talk you into a picnic?”

  Matt gives his head a shake, shifting gears again. “Okay, yeah, maybe. Supposed to say?”

  “That’s what I asked for at the tattoo place.” Kate rolls back onto her belly. If somebody were filming her for pornographic purposes they’d want to do something about the faint blue squiggles on those pale legs. “The guy swore he knew Japanese. This is hilarious, no, it’s pathetic—the whole reason I got the tattoo in the first place was I had a thing for this Japanese guy. And then we finally sleep together, and guess what?”

  “What?”

  “Emergency exit. That’s what the moron had written on me, emergency exit. Can you believe it?”

  Matt rears back to observe the tattoo, which he’s been contemplatively licking. He laughs.

  “He must have got it off a sign or something.” She shrugs—an odd gesture when executed in the pro
ne position. “But what I was wondering was if it was Zane. You know, the sex thing, the intensity.”

  “Zane?”

  “If you might be trying to prove something. That you’re not.”

  “Not?”

  “Gay.” She shifts onto her back. They’d want to slip her into a bustier too, get those goddess-breasts to stay put. “Some people say male sex is about fear, that it is fear, actually. That a man having sex is a man acting out his terror that he’s not a man. Have you heard that?”

  “Yeah. Scares the crap out of me.”

  Kate dignifies this with a semi-snort of laughter. “So when you get close to Zane, I don’t know. Maybe you get feeling a bit fruity?”

  Fruit, yeah, that’s a good one. That and poofter are Matt’s favourites. Homosexual is so cold, so clinical. Homo? Too schoolyard. Fag is like fairy, kind of glib and snide. Gay is proud, queer is political. What else? Pansy, pansy’s kind of okay. Feygele, Yiddish for “little bird”—Zane taught him that one. Friend of Dorothy, cute but cumbersome … No, fruit and poof are his fondest, or best of all joof, for Jewish poof. To which Zane has yet to invent a fitting comeback. Wasperosexual, but that didn’t stick.

  Kate says, “Or am I crazy?”

  Well, yeah. Yeah, she’s crazy, but why let on? What Matt feels for Zane, sexually, seems to be nothing, not a blessed thing. This is a relief to Matt, but it doesn’t make him proud. His complete lack of appetite for man-sex feels like one more personal failure, one more ethical flop. Big-shot film guy and his imagination’s that small?

  Apparently so. Gay male sex, when he sees it in his head (he’s never seen it anyplace else), simply unsettles him. He knows it isn’t any odder than straight sex, that bodies are just bodies. It’s like that day Erin told him about mummy-daddy sex, it’s that same dismay. Any sex is odd unless it’s what you want, unless you’ve been bamboozled by that particular desire. Matt and Zane worked this out one night a few years ago, and Matt rejigged the idea for a piece on homophobia in action flicks. “Gay sex is scary to the straight man,” he wrote, “the same way any sex at all is scary to a kid who doesn’t yet crave it. The daddy puts his what in where? Gay sex to the straight man is sex that’s gone bizarre again, sex stripped of romance—the romance of conquest, the romance of communion. It’s sex as pure biology again, pure body. It’s sex as death.”

  It was what, a month later that Zane gave him his bad news, there in the cemetery? Yep, there are moments Matt wants to quit words too, shut the hell up for good.

  Here’s an angle Matt’s been working on—the Rio de Janeiro thing. It was Zane’s very first AIDS documentary, the first of his three, the only one he made before his own diagnosis. Matt’s plan is to use it on him, turn it against him.

  Farewell to Flesh. Like most of Zane’s documentaries it focuses on one person, who both is and isn’t everybody else. Cato, can that be right? Cato’s a Brazilian soap opera star, a straight guy who gets infected and has to deal with all the usual prejudice and scorn. He comes close to letting himself die but then resurrects himself as an activist. Zane structured his piece as a mock soap opera, shooting in shitty video, backlighting the star for his close-up as he broods, to swelling organ music, on the latest blood count. The whole thing’s so phony it turns real again.

  There are real bits too, action shots so outlandish they look phony. Cato climbing naked to Cristo Redentor, the giant Jesus who peers down from his mountaintop over Rio, arms spread wide like a cliff diver about to let himself go. Cato humming “The Girl from Ipanema” as he walks the famous beach, pinning red AIDS ribbons to swimsuits and umbrellas. Cato at the carnival, samba-ing down the street in an outrageous motley, a giant feathered fool frisbeeing condoms into the crowd. Carnival comes just before Lent, you learn, a last hurrah before the ascetic sets in, a farewell to flesh.

  And then the punchline. Thanks to activists like Cato—living activists, Zane—Brazil was the first developing country to achieve universal access to treatment. Brazil thumbed its nose at the multinationals, produced antiretrovirals at home. It pushed for the vote at the UN that declared AIDS treatment a human right. Cadavers, Zane, rarely make that kind of progress.

  Downplay Jesus, is Matt’s plan—the whole dying on the cross thing—and focus on the giant feathered fool.

  Most of the cars on the freeway aren’t actually cars so much as trucks, boxy big-wheelers with tinted windows and vanity plates. 4U FIFI. 3 SUUM. 2 WEERD. 1 DERFL. On TV ads these rigs bounce over sand dunes, scale mountain passes, spill gangs of rapturous campers at the lake. This summer Sunday each fuming vehicle bears one fuming manager or minion on the way to or from fricking work.

  Kate drives, Matt plays navigator. The plan is to picnic in his old neighbourhood, back to the source. Take the 401 to the Allen Expressway, the Allen to Eglinton, Eglinton to Yonge and hang south …

  Brick. Churches, schools, apartment buildings, houses, they’re all red or brown brick. Which makes Toronto, to Matt, the Real World. Out west everything’s wood, so it feels like cottage country, like getaway. The evergreens add to that effect—you think Georgian Bay, romping on the dock. Here in Reality all the trees are hardwood, chestnut, oak, ash. Everything’s so hard.

  “I love this city,” says Matt.

  “Left, did you say?”

  “Right. I mean wrong, right.”

  So then why did he leave? That was 1981, the year they launched the first space shuttle—Matt remembers being glued to the TV in the living room at home, he and his dad (“Three liquid-fuelled engines, hang on, son!”), when he ought to have been finishing up his final film projects. His final final film projects: it was time to graduate from York U, get out there and make something of himself. Houston, we have liftoff. The new virus would have been rising right about then too. None of its names would have materialized yet—GRID, Gay Plague, God’s Revenge—just some rumours out of San Francisco and New York about a nasty pneumonia, a strange skin cancer hitting young guys with no girlfriends. Zane would have heard those first whispers. By the time he gradded he was easing into the local gay scene, a giddy cabal energized by its repression, by the spectre of a radical release. There was a bar on Richmond, there was a gallery on Church—or so Matt gathered, he never had the nerve to tag along, and was never exactly invited anyway. Zane’s film career, too, was shifting into gear. His first paid gig was to edit footage from “Operation Soap,” the raids on the gay baths earlier that year. “Toronto’s Stonewall” is what Zane called the police action and the ensuing revolt.

  And then Erin. Her not-eating had climaxed during the winter that year, and she was dead by the longest day. Meg got into med school in Vancouver, and Matt begged her to accept. He was confident there’d be film work for him out west, and sure enough his degree helped him score the coveted day shift at Vic’s Video & Variety. Who says an arts education doesn’t pay?

  “Left here. And that’s my dad’s building.” Matt leans and twists, peers up and off the glinting glass.

  “Your dad? You mean he lives here?”

  “Yeah. Park anywhere, it’s a walk to the cemetery.”

  “Shouldn’t you be, I don’t know, seeing him or something?”

  “When I’m really over this. His breathing’s bad enough.” Shanumi in her pink bell-bottoms and “Talk Nerdy to Me” T-shirt, wheezing as she treks to the nearby clinic …

  “Wow. Okay.”

  “It’s his social afternoon anyway, come to think of it. He won’t be home.” Hm. “Let’s go around the block.”

  “Do you two get along?” Kate lurches to a stop at yet another red light.

  “Along?” says Matt. “Well, it’s weird, these days it’s almost like Dad’s forgotten that he considers me a failure. Or maybe he just doesn’t care anymore. Which makes it all of a sudden seem as though he cares. “Matt rewards himself with a chuckle for this dolorous insight. “Plus he adores my wife. They fight, but they’re friends.”

  Odd relationship. When they get together the old man will g
oad Mariko with the memory of little Jimmy Kent, the childhood buddy who in 1942 found himself a POW in Hong Kong, starving and half dead of dysentery. “Never the same, poor. Old Jimmy,” he’ll say. “Once the Japs got done with him.” Mariko will take it, but soon find a way to weave her mum into the conversation, the childhood she spent in the internment camp at Slocan. “But then she deserved it,” Mariko will say. “What with her having planned Pearl Harbor and everything.” These salvos out of the way the two will call a truce, settle into a tender détente. Has the old man ever been so crazy and conflicted about anybody else? Erin, just Erin.

  “Anyway,” says Matt, “the guy has bigger things on his mind these days. Way bigger.”

  “Like what?”

  “He’s old. He’s always been old, he and my mum were like ten years older than anybody else’s folks. It took them ages to have me, which is why they adopted Erin. And maybe why he leaned on her so hard, all that waiting. Left again. So anyway … Crop circles. He’s into crop circles.”

  “Seriously?”

  “And he got the idea from me.”

  Nostradamus? Bigfoot? Who knows what shape the old man’s wackiness might have assumed by now without that initial inspiration from Matt. He’d certainly never been a crop circle kind of guy, though he was born in the middle of a crop (he loves to tell it this way), a wheat field near Vulcan, Alberta. He might be there still if he hadn’t, as a young man, got a hankering to fly, to angle in out of the sun and pick off Jerry as he hummed across the Channel with his load for London. Bummer though, he turned out to be colour-blind (his one great grief, up until Erin’s death), so he had to make do with ground crew. The Fawn, the Crane, the Tiger Moth, he fell in love with these flying machines, and later with the rockets (first Mercury, then Apollo) that promised to lift humankind right clear of the planet.