Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good

by John Gould

  Matt smelled the pee before he spotted it. He still remembers the pale pudge of Rosie’s thigh where it pancaked against the bench, the nearly clear rivulet creeping over the edge and snaking down her calf.

  And then she was soaked. The new guy next to her had had some kind of klutz attack, and flipped his plastic cup into the lap of her tunic. Everybody pointed, howled, “Spaz! Spaz!” While Rosie slipped away.

  Can it have been a coincidence? Can it have been anything else? It happened too fast to be intentional. If Zane reacted, he reacted the same way the cartoon guy reacts when the cartoon doctor raps his knee with the little rubber hammer. If it’s just a reflex it can’t be good, can it? Or can it be good only if it’s a reflex? These are just a couple of the questions Matt didn’t ask himself at the time. From that moment on, though, he felt he possessed a secret knowledge about Zane. The two boys avoided one another, took opposite sides in any scrap. A classic Hollywood romance: Matt loathed the new kid right up until he fell (how else to put it?) in love. Or gave in, perhaps, to his instant crush on the brat who rescued the ugly princess, who had the nerve to come right out and be so weird.

  More like a Manet now. A Morisot? Kate’s stretched out on her side, indolently luscious, gently lorded over by Nature.

  “I can’t believe you stole her,” she says. “That could be in a movie, don’t you think? A man rips off his sister’s ashes from his dad, liberates them? But then you’d have to do something with her.”

  “Not her,” says Matt. “This isn’t Erin, nothing’s Erin.” He sits cross-legged, checkerboard box on his lap. Beside him lies the paper bag from his dad’s place. “Third Eye Books” in mock-Sanskrit letters, and then, “Tarot • Numerology • Astrology • Goddess Worship • Wicca • Crystal Magic • Crop Circles • Much Much More.” Wicca, will that be next? The gruff old bastard a witch, a warlock, crafting a healing spell for his out-of-sorts son?

  “So you broke into your dad’s place and you stole …?”

  “Nothing.” Matt gives the box a shake, generates a faint maraca sound. “Dad won’t even know it’s missing, he doesn’t go in there. I don’t think. And it isn’t ash anyway.” He tries to get a bit of “Guantanamera” going. “It’s ground-up bone.”

  “Huh, wow. You’ve been giving this some thought.”

  Matt shrugs.

  “I was at a funeral for an old friend of mine?” says Kate. “They gave everybody a bit of ash, sorry, a bit of bone. Guess what they gave it to us in?”

  “A pipe so you could smoke it.”

  “Ha, close. A Pez dispenser. Seriously, Carey loved Pez so everybody got a Pez thing with a pinch of Carey in it. Mine was Tweety Bird.”

  “Cripes.”

  “We were all supposed to take it someplace we’d done something special with her and dump it out. I took it to the Reversing Falls, you know, at the Bay of Fundy? Which is where we hypnotized each other for the first time, we were both into that for a while. Would she like that?”

  “Erin? To be in a Pez dispenser?”

  “Okay, so what would she like?”

  “Nothing. Anything. It doesn’t matter.”

  Kate rolls onto her back. “When I had the abortion?” She laces her hands over her tummy, gives it a joggle. “I took a thing I had when I was little, a jade cat my mum gave me.” She sits up, balances the absent object on the palm of her hand. “I took it out on the ocean, on my friend’s fishing boat, and I dropped it in.” Plunk.

  “Huh. Nice.”

  Day’s just about done here. The odd ray still slants in but gently, not looking to burn or blind anybody. An occasional cyclist will tick past but otherwise it’s just Matt and Kate and the squirrels, the crows.

  Kate gets up, paces a few tight ellipses around Matt. “Your sister was different, right?” she says. “So you want to do something different.”

  “I don’t want to do anything at all,” says Matt. “I don’t want this to mean anything.” He gives the box a rap, shave and a haircut. “Which I guess is why I took it.” Two bits.

  Kate’s pacing turns into a dance. Goddess is right, she’s got that earthy weight to her. “Ashes, ashes,” she says, “we all … fall … down. “She makes sure to give Matt a good thump as she collapses.

  Matt obliges her with a grunt, and she giggles. Hey, it might be okay to cook for this woman someday. Chipotle chili? Genmai miso? Curried couscous? One world, Matt cooks from everyplace. He says, “Hey, Kate, I’ve been wanting to tell you something. You know I said I was married?”

  She lets her eyes go bigger.

  “It’s true, but only sort of.”

  “Uh-huh. Was that Mariko we were talking about last night? The woman with another woman?”

  Matt shrugs. “But I’m not sure that’s really the point.” Is it ever the other person? Isn’t it always you? “Two-spirit, she’s calling it. A man and a woman in one body. She’s into First Nations stuff, shamans and all that.” A man-woman, mutt again. More transcendence.

  “Oh. So your wife’s Indigenous?”

  “No.”

  Kate nods, leaves that alone. Then, “Please don’t let me eat any more.” She cradles her tummy again.

  Matt and Zane used to bring dates here together, back in the day. Zane was still straight, or trying to look it anyway with the unwitting aid of various girls. “A beard you call that,” Mariko recently explained to Matt—she’s been boning up for her new life. “A woman who gives a gay guy cover. If she’s gay too he’s her … gherkin? Merkin. A pussy wig.” What next from that woman?

  There was Terry, for instance. Tammy? Zane got to third base with her, just over there in the Eternal Gardens, got his hand right down her pants. Matt remembers being both irked and impressed by this accomplishment. The start of his sex life with Charlotte Tupper was still a few weeks away. All he managed that night—up against the cool stone of the Gateway of Hope—was an inept fiddle with her bra. Walking home afterwards Zane had actually (could two guys get any tighter?) given Matt a sniff of his fingers. What Matt picked up was the smell of popcorn (they’d taken the girls to a Pink Panther, Revenge of? Trail of? Strikes Again?), but he gave his buddy the benefit of the doubt. That was maybe the best part of those nights, the witching-hour rambles once the girls had been dropped off. Rewinding and replaying the evening, just the two of them, settling on the version they’d carry together into the future.

  “One,” says Kate. “I can only think of one.”

  “What? One what?”

  “Movie that starts with Jesus Christ.”

  “Oh. Five.”

  Kate pulls a face.

  “Jesus Christ Superstar, obviously.”

  “That’s the one I got.”

  “Jesus Christ Erlöser, which is ‘saviour.”’

  “Two.”

  Matt stretches out and does the dead thing, eyes closed, hands folded on his chest. Like his mum at her funeral (his dad insisted on an open casket), but she held a bouquet while Matt holds a cup half empty of wine. “Hey,” he says, “how about giving me a little more of your universe stuff. Something you could use on somebody who wants to kill himself.”

  During his punk rock phase (about a week and a half in the early ‘80s) Matt used to crank up a song called “Suicide Scene.” Fuck You? Fuck Off? He can’t quite recall the band’s name, but the lyrics have never left him.

  This ain’t no accident, accident, accident.

  You ain’t no accident, accident, accident.

  This ain’t no accident, accident, accident.

  You ain’t no accident, accident, accident.

  This ain’t no accident, accident, accident.

  You ain’t no accident, accident, accident …

  Not brilliant maybe, but maybe on target. You spend your whole life trying to do things on purpose, and then your death’s a fluke?

  “What do you mean by use?”

  “To make it, you know, harder.” Matt goes up on one elbow. The last line of that letter of Zane’s went, “Th
e worst thing is also the best thing.” Could this be true?

  Kate has a go at looking professorial in a supine sort of way. “That’s kind of what I do with my patients. Almost all their problems are about ego, right?”

  “Patients?”

  “Students. They feel like patients half the time.” She frowns, pondering. “Tell Zane how big the universe is.”

  “Okay. It’s big, right?”

  “Right. Tell him that thing he calls the sun”—she waves dismissively in the direction of the faded-denim west—“tell him that’s one teensy star in a galaxy that has hundreds of billions of stars in it.”

  “Right, got it. Jesus Christ Supercop.”

  “Really? What was that, three? And tell him his Milky Way, that smear down the middle of the sky at night, like a bit of baby barf? You can tell him that’s one galaxy in a universe that has hundreds of billions of galaxies in it.”

  “Right.”

  She purses her lips. Matt suddenly feels like smooching her, and gets himself a rush of first-kiss nerves. “Jesus Christ Airlines.”

  “Honestly?”

  “About flying aid into Biafra.”

  “So four. Tell him he could travel in any direction for like ten billion years without getting to the edge of anything. At the speed of light, which is a hundred and … which is really, really fast. Tell him that’s how big the universe is. Then tell him there isn’t just one great big giant universe but there are actually an infinite number of great big giant universes. Tell him the universe he can’t imagine is just one in an endless bunch of universes he can’t imagine, and all of them run parallel to one another, work out variations on one another.”

  “Tya,” says Matt, “tya-ta-da, da-da.”

  “Yes, tell him that,” says Kate. “Tell him he’s a speck, he’s less than a speck, he’s like a mini-speck. He’s a micro-speck.”

  “And that’s why he shouldn’t kill himself? Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter.”

  “Oh my God.”

  Matt sits up, pulls a modest fist pump. Then, what the hell, he leans in for that kiss. Kate’s mouth is small and oddly, agreeably cool in the heat. She doesn’t kiss back for a bit but then she does, her tongue in soundless ululation. This goes on for a while, there in the company of the decorous dead.

  Matt hasn’t set foot on the old street in years—not since the Dadinator sold the house, which was just a few months after he lost his wife. The neighbourhood’s an upscale version of itself now, Audis in place of Buicks, the odd brand new home like a crown in place of a bad tooth, pristine, unsightly. Instead of his own place, Matt heads for Charlotte Tupper’s a couple of blocks down. It’s even more thickly vined than back in the day, when Matt used to pussyfoot in and out at ungodly hours.

  “That window up there?” he tells Kate. “Second floor on the left, where the light just switched off? That was Charlie’s, that was my first girlfriend’s.” They’ve strolled over from the cemetery, their pace so unfrantic that the dusk has appreciably deepened, their rubbery footfalls increasing in volume as the day declined. On the way Kate’s purse played a few bars of the William Tell Overture, and she took a call on her cell. Miffed, monosyllabic. The ex-boyfriend, presumably. Here they stand now, the two of them, their hands stickily linked. Kate had gone quiet, gestating or laying fallow. At this news, though, she perks up again.

  “First girlfriend?”

  “Yeah, Charlotte. After Charlotte Brontë? Her mum was into whaddya call them … books. That was her room, Mrs. T.’s room, there on the right. Where that light just switched off.”

  “First love,” says Kate. “James. Never Jim, James. Jerk. I’ve always wished I could try that again. Too bad virginity doesn’t work that way.”

  “Actually, I think it does. They can fix you these days, stitch you back up.”

  The door of the house swings open, and onto the front stoop steps Charlotte. Well, obviously it isn’t Charlotte. A woman of about the right age and shape, though, appears carrying a picture frame, which she drops. Glass shatters. “Ah, damn. Paul?” she calls back through the door as it begins to creak shut again. “Paul? Will you give me a hand out here? Damn, damn, damn.” And she turns.

  The slightly bulbous face, the madly moguled hair.

  “Mmm, I don’t think so,” says Kate.

  Matt ventures a couple of tentative steps up the walk.

  “I mean maybe if you’re still young, but after fifteen years?”

  Charlotte, or her stand-in, has caught sight of Matt now. She leans, squints. “McKay?”

  They meet at the bottom of the steps, Charlotte high-heeling her way gingerly through the broken glass. They give each other three or four hugs in rapid succession, taking breaks for holy-shit looks in between.

  “What are you … what the hell are you doing here?”

  “I missed you,” says Matt.

  “Very funny.”

  “Yeah, and I’ve been worried. Shouldn’t you be getting your own place?”

  Charlotte slugs him in the shoulder, not gently. “Still the smartass, eh, McKay? No, I’m just here sorting out my mum’s stuff.”

  “Oh, Jeez. I’m really sorry to hear that.” Can the woman’s liver possibly have held out this long?

  “No, that’s not what I mean,” says Charlotte. “No, Mum’s fine. She’s fallen in love, actually, and she’s taken off with this guy. He’s very well off. Raisins. They’re at his place down in Mexico, so I’m helping her get the house ready to sell.”

  “Raisins, eh?”

  “Hey, I was thinking about you recently.” Charlotte guides a loose twist of hair (blonder than ever, and scrupulously streaked) behind an ear. She employs a pinkie for this purpose, the same queen-to-tea manoeuvre she used to pull. Matt strives to picture her seventeen again, shoving stuffies (lions, elephants, giraffes) off her bed to make room for him. Her mum would be passed out down below in front of Jeopardy!, her dad long gone, the neighbourhood’s first divorce. Talk about luck. “Zane Levin was in the paper. That movie of his was causing a ruckus, the one about Arabs in movies?”

  “Right.”

  “How Arab actors feel about playing, you know, wily zealots the whole time. He’s quite the big shot, eh?”

  “Well.” A couple of low-budget features, a few edgy shorts, a handful of documentaries, big shot may be stretching it. Or maybe not. Matt’s buddy is actually a bit of a sensation. He can’t kill himself then, can he? You can’t quit unless you’re losing, right?

  Charlotte says, “Not many people spend their lives the way they wanted to, do they? Sad.” Though there isn’t a whiff of melancholy about her, there never was. “Do you see him? Zane?”

  “Yeah, we’re in pretty good touch.”

  How did Charlotte hope to spend her life? Matt should remember. Teacher? Nurse? Nun? Judging by her outfit she’s gone more banker, broker. Her clothes don’t scream money, because they don’t have to. They whisper money, they croon money. They induce in Matt an ugly awareness of his baggy-kneed jeans, his artlessly distressed T-shirt. T-shirt, it says in a logo-like, mock-corporate style. Oh, clever.

  “I always thought you’d be in movies too,” says Charlotte.

  “Yeah, well. I probably would be if I were Jewish or gay or something.”

  “What?”

  “Well really, what am I? I’m not even a woman.”

  Charlotte makes as though to check out his hooters. “I see what you mean.”

  “Actually, Zane and I are going to make a movie together. Like old times.”

  “Really?”

  “Mumbai.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Mumbai. You probably know it as Bombay. Sixty thousand sex workers in one little area, and more than half of them are infected.” Matt’s been busy on the web, ferreting out dreadful details with which to lure Zane in. “Most of them were kidnapped, or sold by their own families.” Big bonus, there’s an ashram nearby. You don’t talk, you don’t drink, you don’t have sex, you don’t watch TV. You e
liminate craving, aversion, ignorance, how much better could it get?

  “Wow, that’s wonderful. I mean it’s horrible, but it’s wonderful. What’s that?”

  “This? Nothing.” Matt’s just picked up his bagged box, which he’d set down for the embrace.

  “Third Eye Books? Are you going airy-fairy on us, McKay?”

  “No. My dad is.”

  “Please.”

  She looks awful, Charlotte looks awful. Actually no, she looks good. For forty-four, are you kidding? She looks great. She’s kept her figure (Pilates probably, Jazzercise), hips, bum and breasts still distinct, not yet sunken into the morass of her middle-aged self. The fullness of her face has kept it relatively intact too, relatively uncreased. But here’s the thing: she isn’t nineteen. She just isn’t.

  “Hi,” says Charlotte.

  “Hi,” says Kate. She’s inched her way up the walk to join them. “I’m Kate. I’ve heard so much—oh. You’re bleeding.”

  Sure enough, there’s a freshet of blood zigging and zagging its way down the front of one of Charlotte’s fish-netted shins. They’re all staring down at it when the door swings wide a second time. A boy emerges from the house, a great gangle of fidgets and acne, and crunches his way scowling down the front steps.

  He’s Charlotte’s all right. The flat, fleshy nose, the surprising chin. “Hi, bozo,” she says to him. She has to reach up to sling a buddy-buddy arm over his shoulders.

  “Can I have this?” The boy has a football hold on an old phone, black bakelite with a metal dial. A grandma phone, the kind that doesn’t bleep or bloop but actually rings.

  “This is my son, Paul,” says Charlotte. “Paul, this is Matt, a really really old friend of mine.” The blood’s still negotiating its way down her leg, strawberry sauce down the side of a sundae. Matt masters the urge to bend, dip a finger. He flashes on their very first time, up in that bedroom—the sudden, shocking Rorschach of red on Charlotte’s pink sheet. “And this is Kate, his … are you two …?”