Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good

by John Gould

  TUESDAY

  Dear Zane,

  REASON NOT TO BE GOOD #5

  Virtue is a cover, a camouflage. Virtue always masks some deeper motivation, social, psychological, sexual, whatever. Virtue is a lie, and lying is a vice. Virtue is vice.

  So get a grip.

  Matt

  “Who’s there?”

  Yeah, like she’s going to hear him, trussed up as he is in his cowl of comforter. She? Assuming it’s Kate.

  “Who’s there?”

  Dammit. The ol’ Do Not Disturb sign, that shushing finger, sure isn’t doing its job this morning. This is the third time in half an hour somebody’s come thumping, with an urgency that says let me out more than let me in. Another of Zane’s old jokes. What would James Dean be doing if he were alive today? Pounding on the inside of his coffin.

  Sick man.

  Doingg-doingg. Law and Order’s almost over, it must be just about noon. This is Matt’s last show anyway. His very last show, he’s made the commitment. No more tube. It’s a resolution at which he’ll fail, but that’s fine. Mariko, back when she quit smoking (Matt still misses the avid way she sucked each cigarette, like some sort of holy hookah), had to go cold turkey about ten times before it took. It’s high time Matt, too, started setting goals he can’t reach.

  He’s already fallen short once today, actually—this is the second time he’s quit. A couple of hours ago he flicked off Kevin Scion (“The present is the future, can’t you see?”) and went for a stroll. Out on God’s green acre, under God’s bare, zillion-watt bulb, there was a fresh crop of fauna. One of those little black birds with the white spots, for instance, kind of like Saturday’s grackle but squatter, schlubbier. Starling? She must have been a mum because she had a grey mini-me hopping around after her, hectoring her for a beak-full of regurgitated bug. No go—mum kept cold-shouldering the poor little guy. Time to cut the cord, shove him out there on his own. The world as two things, me and you, self and other. A genuine, capital N–type Nature moment is what it was, and Matt, budding naturalist, was right there to take it in. He’s going to have to get himself a proper birding checklist, that’s two species already.

  Sheesh, she just won’t give up. It’s almost time to check out anyway, head Zaneward. Hey man, sorry I split. You do want me here though, don’t you? When you said stay away, you meant come?

  “All right, all right!” Matt rolls off the bed, tucks himself in en route to the door. Doingg-doingg—dammit, he’s going to miss closing arguments.

  “Hi.” He’s got the chain on, peeking through the slot like a nervous perp.

  “Hi. Um, can we talk?” Kate’s all gussied up again, and why not? Just back, presumably, from her second big date with the turkey baster.

  “Sure.”

  Beat. “Right. Funny. But I mean can I come in?”

  “Where’s River?”

  “He’s around. We had kind of a …”—she pauses as a maid with a loaded trolley trundles past behind her—“of a tough time last night. They didn’t have a room here so he went over to the Holiday Inn. He’ll be back today, though. I don’t feel up to it.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “Right, yes. But I have something to tell you.”

  “Okay. Shoot.” From behind him somebody hollers “Objection!” over the banging of a gavel.

  “Matt, please.”

  “Why? What’s the point of—”

  “I didn’t use it.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I do have a diaphragm. I didn’t use it.”

  Matt closes the door. He opens it again, chain still on.

  “I’m sorry,” says Kate. “See, what I figured was … I didn’t figure very well. I had eight floors, from the lobby up to here. I decided it wouldn’t matter as long as you didn’t know. Maybe you’d have a son or a daughter on the far side of the country, but there’d be no connection.” She shakes her head. “I wanted … I felt like I needed something, Matt. Something real. And you were … there was something about you.”

  Matt’s face does an odd thing here, hard to say just what.

  “Plus, I don’t know, I didn’t want it all to be up to me this time. God or whatever, I wanted something else to have a say.”

  “God.”

  “Or whatever. Chances are …”—another pause while the maid cloinks by the other way—“chances are it won’t be yours. According to my chart … well, say fifty-fifty. What odds were you figuring when you bent me over the other night?”

  Matt closes the door again. Onscreen these scenes work so nicely. There’s a soupçon of suspense—you wait for the sound of the chain sliding, or not. Will the guy open up again or leave the door shut? Is this yes or no?

  “Who the hell’s there?”

  It’s been less than an hour since that last knock. Checkout time has slipped past yet again—Matt’s called down to finagle one more night, what the heck.

  It can’t be Kate, since there she is curled up at the far end of the couch. The two of them have been madly prepping, since he finally let her in, for a spot on The Newlywed Game. Bob what’s his name, not Barker but the other one. He was Erin’s fave—any-time she stayed home from school with a fake flu it was to watch him grill hubbies about their wives, wives about their hubbies. So Matt, tell us, what’s the biggest secret Kate’s ever tried to keep from you? They’ve run the gamut of personal trivia, from first kiss to favourite movie, from pets to pet peeves. Kate loves cats, hates crowds …

  The point being what, exactly? Kate’s gathering clues (as she’s presumably been doing since the start) to help her make sense of her kid if she somehow confirms that it’s Matt’s—if it’s extra long and lanky, perhaps, and possessed of an extra heavy dose of wiseassery. But what’s in it for Matt? Is it really worth getting to know the mother of the maybe kid he’ll probably never meet?

  Compared to Kate’s this knock is delicate, deferential. “Room service.”

  Kate frowns. “You know what? Let’s ignore that.”

  “Why?”

  “Did you order room service?”

  “No. So they made a mistake.”

  “And you call yourself a movie guy? This is how they get you.”

  “Get you?”

  “The real room service guy is duct-taped in a closet someplace. Trust me.”

  “Kate.”

  “Or the bad guy’s hiding under the cart. As soon as you—”

  “Okay, I get it. But there’s no way River could find you here.”

  Another knock, infinitesimally firmer.

  “Yeah, about that,” says Kate. “The thing is, I told him.” She swipes at the air. “I just wanted him to go away. I wanted it really badly.”

  “Told him?”

  “That we’re serious, you and me.”

  “I see,” says Matt. “Is there … let’s be clear about this. Is there anything else I should know?”

  “No. Definitely not.”

  “You’re sure now? To recap: I may be the father of your child. A guy who actually wants to be the father of your child may be lurking homicidally outside my door. That it?”

  “I’m not saying homicidally, I’m just—”

  “That it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Right, okay. So let’s sort this out.” Matt springs up, strides across the room and—no chain—throws open the door. “Who died?” says Zane.

  “Who …?”

  “This place. Isn’t it a little pricey for you?”

  It suits him, the lean new physique. He looks good, Zane does, he looks hot for about the first time in his life—gaining beauty, it would seem, even as he prepares to let it go. Or what if the virus is a hoax? He’s thinned down a bit, sure, but that’s because he’s been hitting the gym, cutting the calories. Matt has the urge to quick-jab him in the tummy, check out those abs.

  “Yeah, thanks, I’d love to,” says Zane, shooing Matt backwards into the room.

  Maybe—here’s a thought—maybe Zane looks good becaus
e he is good. He’s a movie man, after all, and in the movies goodness and beauty go together. How do you pick the hero or heroine out from all the extras? Same way you pick the saint or saviour out from all the sinners in some old masterpiece—it’s the grace, it’s the glow, and Zane’s got these things nowadays. Okay, so he’s also got those half-moon bruises under his eyes, but beautiful people are cultivating that look, aren’t they? The urban goth thing, sexily strung out?

  “Zane,” says Zane.

  Or what if he’s doing this to himself on purpose, for a role in one of his own movies? He’s emaciating himself for the part of an AIDS guy, bucking for an Oscar. It worked for Tom Hanks in Philadelphia, didn’t it? Thirty pounds, probably worth losing that to take home the hardware. So maybe he’s—

  “Kate,” says Kate, rising from the couch.

  “Oh yeah, sorry,” says Matt. “Kate? This is Zane. He’s killing himself.”

  Zane nods. “Nice to meet you.”

  “Zane? This is Kate. I may have knocked her up.”

  Kate dips him a curtsy. “Yes, you too.”

  Zane settles into one of the massive chairs around the conference-sized coffee table. Settles? Slumps. Subsides. “Funny thing, Mariko didn’t … Oh, sorry.”

  “No, that’s all right.” Matt waves a hand in Kate’s direction. “No secrets here.”

  “Okay, I was just going to say, Mariko didn’t mention you knocking anybody up. She didn’t mention Kate at all, actually.”

  “So that’s how you tracked me down? You called Mariko?” Matt resumes the couch. Kate hesitates, then joins him.

  “After I tried your dad.” Zane shakes his head. “Guy got kind of irked with me, I’m afraid. When I kept insisting you were there.”

  Matt groans. That chest pain seems to be coming around again, wouldn’t it suck to die right now?

  “Yeah,” says Zane. “I even made him go look for you.”

  Matt gives the coffee table a smack. “Jesus Christ, Zane.”

  “Well, what was I supposed to think? You didn’t bother telling me you weren’t staying with him. You didn’t tell me much of bloody anything before you hightailed it yesterday, like some … Like some what?”

  “Like some huffy high school girl,” says Matt.

  “Like some huffy high school girl,” says Zane. “Thank you. Anyway, he wasn’t gone long, just had a quick look around. I don’t think he ever figured out who I was.”

  “Well that’s just—”

  “Cameron,” says Kate.

  Matt swivels to face her. “Cameron?” he says. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’ve been working on names. See, I want one that’ll work whether it turns out to be a boy or a girl. You’re naming the person, right, you’re not naming the sex? So I’ve been trying to think of movie star names that work like that.” She prods Matt’s thigh with a stockinged toe. “Movie star in your honour.”

  “So like Cameron Diaz,” says Zane.

  “Right.”

  “What about Cary?” says Matt. “Cary Grant.”

  “Glenn Close,” says Zane.

  “Pat Morita,” says Matt.

  “Drew Barrymore,” says Zane.

  “Lee Marvin,” says Matt.

  “Lee,” says Kate. “Lee, I like that.” She strokes her tummy. “Lee, are you in there?”

  Is it possible, actually, to picture a person who doesn’t exist yet? Matt’s often tried to envision the baby he and Mariko might cook up together. Actors, when they’re creating new characters, are supposed to splice together bits of different people they’ve known—Johnny Depp crossing Keith Richards with Pepe Le Pew for his pirate in Pirates of the Caribbean, sort of thing. Matt’s conjured a creature half-goofy (that’s his bit) and half-sublime. The result is almost beautiful.

  He actually saw a baby once who seemed to qualify. This was a couple of years ago, just after he and Mariko quit trying. He (she?) was pale, but there was something Pacific about him too. Polynesian? Matt’s length, Mariko’s curious green eyes. They were on a trip to Washington, DC, to visit her dad, Mr. Kuul himself. The infant and his mum were behind them in the security line. As Matt scooped up his keys and his coins he watched them inch through the arch and then, since they beeped, get swept with the baton. Mum held baby out at arm’s length (she might have been a grossed-out dad in a sitcom) while he submitted to his exam. There was something about the look on the baby’s face at that moment—an antsy fuddlement?—that reminded Matt precisely of himself.

  As for a baby he and Kate might concoct? Matt hasn’t yet begun to imagine.

  They stir at the same time, all three of them. Matt sighs, and he hears the others sigh too. There’s Kate, fetal at the far end of the couch; there’s Zane, slumped over in his chair like a baby in a backpack. Weird, how they all zoned out at once like that. They’d been gabbing in a dopey, desultory sort of way and then poof. Some primitive stress response, three panicky possums.

  “Hey,” Matt whispers, sliding his foot under Kate’s tush.

  “Hey yourself.”

  “What if it doesn’t work out?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What if neither one takes? Not me, not the baster?”

  Zane wriggles upright. “Hey you two,” he whispers, “it’s rude to whisper.”

  “Kate’s getting artificially inseminated too,” Matt whispers. “If she has a baby it might be mine, or it might be some other guy’s. There’ll be no way to know.”

  “Actually,” Kate whispers.

  “Actually?”

  “It won’t be that much of a mystery, I know stuff about the other man too.”

  “You get to choose?”

  “There’s a catalogue. Donor 1508, he’s a phys ed teacher but he has a masters in math too. Hobbies, sailing and jazz. Outgoing, adventurous. Tall. Medium build.”

  “Yeah, but I still don’t see how—”

  “Black.”

  The Happy Heifer, tacked onto one of the family-type hotels just down from the Starlight, is diner style. Leatherette booths, Formica-topped tables. You flip through the menu in a phony jukebox on the wall. Each booth is brooded over by some dead movie star, a James (Cagney or Dean), a Hepburn (Audrey or Katharine). Bogart, obviously. Bacall. Here and there they’ve stretched to include a Victor Mature, a Hedy Lamarr. Oh, and this is gratifying, a shot of the original King Kong, all eighteen inches of him, blow-dried fluffy in his rabbit fur. He peers amorously at the empty left paw into which Fay Wray will later be rear-projected.

  The three settle under the baffled gaze of Spencer Tracy. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, end days.

  “Sidney Poitier?” says Zane. “Thanks.” He gulps from his just-delivered water, cubes pleasantly clacking. “He was so fertummelt to be working with Tracy and Hepburn he had to play the big scenes to empty chairs.”

  “Fer-what?” says Kate.

  “Big man with his Yiddish,” says Matt.

  “Oh,” she says. “And they cut out the kisses, right, the black-on-white action?”

  “Hey, who’s a goddam film expert here and who isn’t?” says Matt.

  She sticks out her tongue.

  “And then he died,” says Zane. “Spencer Tracy. Have you been there? He’s got a little rock garden in this cemetery in LA.”

  “No, but I was at Al Jolson’s, Mariko and I. Statue of him down on one knee, all set to sing ‘Mammy.’”

  Zane shakes his head at whatever he’s about to say. He’s got a half-grown goatee going too. Without the moustache it looks almost exactly like Bowie’s on the cover of the umgirl’s magazine. And then of course the mismatched eyes, the blue and the brown—it stays weird, this feature, never quite gets familiar. The endless asymmetry of it. Which came first, the odd eyes or the odd guy behind them? “Mercedes thinks I should turn myself into a diamond.”

  “What?”

  “We’re mostly carbon, right? And what’s a diamond? So you pay them to crush you. All this”—he indicates his body with
a two-handed mamma mia kind of gesture—“and you get about a half-carat.”

  Matt says, “Who would you give you to?”

  “Well that’s the thing.” In this light, in the glare of this fluorescence, you can start to see it. A hint of the AIDS face, the skull asserting itself beneath the flesh. New concavities of cheek and temple. Shanumi sleeping on a woven mat, pale light glinting off the coal-dark jag of her jaw … Is it possible for a person to choose this? “I’ve already given Mercedes a wedding ring. Mum and Dad wouldn’t want it. You?”

  “I’d have to get pierced,” says Matt. “Ear, do you think?” He pinches the little flap where the umgirl had her new one. “Lip? Nose?”

  This was one of Matt’s meditations in the early days: be a diamond. Meditating was a desperation move back then, almost an act of vengeance. Erin had gone crazy over her swimming (and over her swimming coach of course, the scuzzy Mr. Skinner) and you couldn’t talk to her anymore. Zane had gone crazy over his camera. Not movies yet, just stills, gorgeous grainy black and whites: a bike leaning against a brick wall, a cheerleader with a shiner half hidden by her pom-pom, a close-up of a whorled fingertip.

  So Matt needed something to go crazy over too. He got his cue from Mr. Kumar, the Buddha thing you’d see him doing right there on the school grounds, the way it lifted him up above the ridicule. Matt got a couple of books out of the library, and before long he was at it on the floor beside his bed late at night, lotus-posing in his blue polar bear pajamas. His mum would poke her head in—“For pity’s sake at least put on some socks, you silly boy”—and then leave him alone. There was something called the Diamond Sutra which said that everything’s empty, that there’s no essence to anything, no ego, no self, and that recognizing this is enlightenment. It said that just getting yourself enlightened isn’t good enough, that it’s your job to lift everybody else up with you, and that the way to do this is to realize you’ve never been separate from anybody else anyway.

  Wild stuff. Matt concocted his own system whereby he’d picture himself as a diamond, pure and translucent. Empty, so everything could pass through. He kept at this practice pretty much nightly until Erin died. Then—wasn’t this the very moment it should have been prepping him for?—he gave up.