by John Metcalf
“What?” said David.
McPhee circled the appointment on his desk-diary and looked up.
“I don’t wish you to make hasty decisions,” he said. “I would like you to have the time to consider your position carefully. On Friday, I will require you to promise to end your relationship with the Haddad girl and to avoid any such attachments in the future. If you feel unable to comply, I have been authorized to offer you the chance to resign.”
“I don’t need two days to . . .”
“Friday,” interrupted McPhee.
“What do you think I . . .”
“NO, Mr. Appleby! I wish you to think. Calmly.”
He stood up.
“At three o’clock,” he said.
David stood up and turned to leave.
“Oh, perhaps . . .” said McPhee. “If you could just look at this general list compiled by Mrs. Lewis and indicate those titles . . .”
David took the proffered typewritten sheet.
McPhee handed him a ballpoint.
“Now?” said David.
“Thank you,” said McPhee.
Chapter Ten
Jim, clad in his underpants, was wedged into his armchair, his legs over the arm, reading Time Magazine.
David sighed.
“I wish you’d stop doing that,” Jim said.
“What?”
“That sighing. I’m trying to read.”
“Sorry.”
David got up and went to the window; the running bands of colour dyed the night sky over Ste. Catherine Street – red, green, yellow, red again. Soon the nighthawks would be coming back from wherever they went to, the white bars on their wings just visible as they dived through the light above the sign in pursuit of insects. He remembered a pair of them he’d seen last summer at twilight up near the cemetery, climbing and suddenly falling in great slides and swerves down miles of sky.
“And that,” said Jim.
“What?”
“That bloody tapping!”
“I’m terribly sorry!”
“Oh, Jesus Christ!” said Jim, throwing down the magazine. “Come off it, will you!”
“Come off what?”
“I thought we’d finished this last night.”
“Come off what?”
“This fucking Byron act all over the place.”
He clapped one hand to his naked chest and declaimed in a Shakespeary voice.
“Do your worst, fiendish McPhee, for the depth of my love will not allow me to betray it!”
“Very witty,” said David.
“I’m sorry,” said Jim. “I’m not in the mood for all this bathetic crap again. All this ‘betraying our relationship’ stuff. I’ve had a hard day. Profitable though,” he added. “Profitable.”
“O.K.” said David. “So you’re trying to read. I’m sorry.”
“Oh, fuck off!” said Jim. “You needn’t go all wounded either.”
“I wasn’t aware that I was.”
“Well you are,” said Jim.
There was a silence.
“You’re not contemplating anything bizarre, are you?” said Jim. “Starting with a flourish sort of thing? I mean, you don’t want to marry her?”
“No,” said David. “But that’s not the point.”
Jim shrugged.
“Is it?” said David.
“For Christ’s sake!” said Jim. “What are you ‘betraying’? You’re still going to go on seeing her whatever you say to McPhee. All that, well, it’s just mummery. So play it out. You won’t mean what you say and he won’t believe what you say. Right? And everyone’s happy. So tell me – explain to me – what, exactly, are you supposed to be ‘betraying’?”
David stared at him.
“Go on. I find all this very educational. Tell me.”
“I told you last night,” said David.
“You emoted rather tediously last night,” said Jim. “But tell me again. It’s the workings of your mind. Fascinating.”
David shrugged.
“All you’re saying,” said Jim, “is that you don’t want to kiss McPhee’s arse.”
“Maybe.”
“‘Maybe’ be buggered!” said Jim. “You know what you’ve got, mate? An aversion to the old osculum infame, that’s all. Not that you’ve much choice.”
“Why?”
“‘Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full, sir,’ and you’re away.”
“Why haven’t I much choice?”
Jim groaned.
“How much have you got in the bank?” he said.
“Not much. Twenty dollars or so. I can get a job.”
“Doing what?”
“With another Board maybe. Or a private school.”
“Thought of the Arctic, have you?” said Jim. “Department of Indian Affairs probably isn’t too fussy. Anywhere in this province and they’re going to get on the phone if you haven’t got references. Young guy called Appleby. Ah! Really? Gets into their panties, does he?”
“Well, I was thinking – I could say I’d just come from England. It’d mean dropping two increments on the scale, that’s all.”
“Well have another think,” said Jim. “The Department’s got you and so has the PAPT. Letters of Standing and your Certificate exam – all that stuff. Wouldn’t work.”
“Shit!” said David. “You’re right, I hadn’t thought of that. And would it be the same for a private school?”
“Probably. Most of them get provincial grants and they need certificated teachers for that.”
“But not all of them?”
“You might get away with it in Ontario,” said Jim. “Probably would. But you wouldn’t get a job in Toronto – that’s policy. If you’d fancy living in some hick town and going to sugaring-off parties or bowling or whatever the hell they do.”
“Well, I’ll look for some other job then.”
Jim gave a sudden snort of laughter.
“Did you ever meet that guy Fletcher at my school?” he said.
“Don’t think so.”
“Always wears silk suits, clammy hands. Smiles a lot.”
“No. Why?”
“I was just thinking. That first winter. God, was I embarrassed! He came up very confidentially and he said, ‘A few of the guys are planning a sugaring-off party and we wondered if you’d be interested?’ ”
“Sweetie!” said David.
“Like a Terry Southern thing,” said Jim. “All starkers with great, hairy sugar-coated dongs.”
“Rude,” agreed David.
Jim scooped up the Montreal Star.
“Do you want Time?” he said, chucking the magazine across.
“But there must be something, Jim! Advertising or something.”
Jim shook out the Classified section.
“The old parlez-vous’d be the problem for you, wouldn’t it?”
“Well you don’t need it for everything,” said David.
SKILLED HELP
“That’s out for a start,” said Jim.
“You know you said most private schools get provincial grants? Are there some that don’t? Where I could try the straight from England thing?”
SERIOUS man for wholesale fish company.
“Are there, Jim?”
“Look them up in the Yellow Pages.”
STEADY work for mature drivers.
David opened Time and stared at an advert for Old Clipper whisky.
What did one do?
Start with a photograph and then write words to fit?
HORIZONTAL boring mill operator.
The whole idea offended him.
I drink Old Clipper because it makes me drunk!
“Here’s a splendid one for you,” said Jim.
BODY MAN urgent.
“Where is the phone book?” said David.
“Your only other miscalculation,” said Jim, “is that they won’t be hiring teachers in the summer and they’ll probably have hired completely for next year anyway and your salary would
end next month.”
David slapped the magazine shut. “Hmmmm,” said Jim from behind the paper.
$150 PER wk. Car provided.
“Would you describe yourself as ‘aggressive,’” he went on, “and ‘customer-oriented’?”
“No,” said David.
“No, I wouldn’t either.”
“What about language schools?” said David.
$100 WKLY. draw against commission. Free training, free parking.
“Oh, shut up!”
“Trouble with you, mate,” said Jim, “you’re unskilled, unilingual, too old, over-educated. . . .”
“How about some tea?” said David.
“If you’re making it. You know,” said Jim, tapping the paper, “you could put one of these in yourself.”
UNILINGUAL CHILD-MOLESTER, intellectual interests, seeks opportunities teaching, other.
As David stood in the kitchen by the open window looking out on the jungle of pipes and the iron grills and ladders of the fireescape, he thought of a drink; of drinking. The back of his palate dry and sour. Rum. Rum for a hot evening. Trinidad rum. Ice with four ounces of Old Oak.
From Old Oaks great notions grow!
Definitely one for the glossies. One like that every day and he’d be earning $50,000 a year.
Mauve pigeon shit on the window sill again.
The Quebec Liquor Board employees were still on strike. The bars were running the stuff in from Ontario but the thought of getting dressed and going out and seeing people and having to talk perhaps – all too depressing. The kettle was coming to the boil.
Getting dressed to go out drinking. Ludicrous.
Cheap melodrama.
Like fat Harry Seagoon hammering on the door of the den of vice in the Indian Quarter of Bombay. The Street of a Thousand Households.
where a man may drink and forget his sorrows....
He slammed the kettle back onto the stove.
“Hey, Dave!”
“What?”
MESSENGER, 5-day wk. bicycle provided.
Taking the mugs into the living room, he said,
“But what I don’t understand – they had me two ways. Why the hell didn’t they just fire me?”
“Not their style, old son,” said Jim. “Not their style.”
David smiled and raised his sandwich in salutation as John Gardener ambled through the Common Room and on into the Men’s Staffroom. John smiled his vague smile and waved. He’d be invigilating in the last of the Matrics. Latin. Seven students. Sixty-nine years old, he’d been brought out of retirement for one class a day to burnish Bunceford’s efforts. David smiled. When Hubnichuk or Follet or McPhee talked at him, he turned off his hearing aid and stared at them like a bewildered baby; when irritated by his students he lowered his voice to an inaudible mumble. Once in a staff meeting, while Grierson had been outlining the Board’s revised policy on hair and uniforms, he had suddenly said in a loud voice,
“Would anyone care for an apple?”
He lived alone in an apartment downtown and spent most of his time translating Latin poetry into rather bad English verse. David and he had fallen into the habit of going out to dinner together a couple of times a month.
David always steered him home, taking his arm at crossings so that he didn’t jar himself stepping off the curb. In his apartment, they always drank cognac and the old man always played the harpsichord – the Two and Three Part Inventions, the Little Notebook – until his fingers began to stumble. And then he talked about his childhood in Ontario and his wife whose harpsichord it had been. Sometimes he recited Latin poets and lectured David on prosody, sometimes talked of his travels, the war, the family house near London, long since sold.
His face would become reddened, his speech more and more slurred, and then David would put him to bed, working off his shoes, peeling the hot socks from his puffy feet, getting him between the sheets in his underwear.
Then he would work the false teeth from the slack mouth and put them in the glass of water on the bedside table; turn the old man’s head to one side on the pillow and put out the light. Before letting himself out, he always emptied the ashtray and washed the snifters in the cramped kitchenette; always filled the electric kettle and put it beside the bed with a cup containing instant coffee and sugar.
Neither of them ever mentioned the evenings they spent together and John was always formally pleasant the next day.
David wondered how he could stand wearing a suit and a waistcoat on a day like this; habit, upbringing? Perhaps at that age one always felt cold.
Grit. David winced. She hadn’t washed the celery.
The Cafeteria woman was what Canadians called “ethnic” – a strange usage. French, English, or Americans were French, English, or American; Serbs, Estonians, Greeks etc. were “ethnic.” Presumably a euphemism for “immigrant” or “foreigner.” But whatever, she was bloody weird. The prospect of the end of term had produced a frenzy of odd sandwiches; she’d mixed tuna fish and cream cheese in this one, studding the result with chopped celery.
As David ate, he watched Henry Bardolini who was sitting at the other end of the long coffee table counting out nickels and pennies and arranging them in little ten-cent stacks. The proceeds of his daily Stamp Club meeting. He opened his Samsonite briefcase and checked through one of his little cellophane books of stamps. The compartments of the case bulged with packets and books of stamps, packets of sticky hinges, used envelopes, and promotional literature for the Wonder Book of Universal Knowledge. He was reputed to own an apartment building in Notre Dame de Grace and a smoked-meat shop on St. Lawrence. He taught French.
“HI THERE, HENRY!” boomed Hubnichuk, barging through the swing door from the Men’s Staffroom.
“WHAT DO YOU SAY, DAVY-BOY!”
“eight, nine, ten,” said Bardolini deliberately.
Hubnichuk dropped himself into the armchair opposite David.
“Well,” he said, slapping his meaty hands on his knees, “thank God it’s Friday!”
David nodded.
“Yes sir!” said Hubnichuk. “T.G.I.F.”
Oaf.
Ethnic-face.
“Guess it must have been a smart move with the play after all,” he said.
“Ummm?”
“Shifting it from the second term to the third.”
“Oh,” said David.
“Hear you cleared a profit,” said Hubnichuk.
David nodded, smiled.
“WELL!” said Hubnichuk slapping his knees again and getting up.
Cries, laughter, exclamations, a general twittering going on from the group of women round Miss Britnell. As Hubnichuk passed them, he bellowed, “TO WORK, LADIES! TO WORK!” David saw the brochure pass from hand to hand. He had seen a copy of it at recess. Hills, horses, a golf course with electric carts to ride about in, a bar, a man in a Stetson tossing a pancake, a group singing round a bonfire . . . tired but jubilant. The nitely Bar B-Q and songfest led by Luke, our trailboss.
Stringy Miss Britnell, senior and aged Phys. Ed. mistress, had joined forces with Miss Burgeon and Miss Leet to spend the holiday on a dude ranch in Montana.
David glanced at the clock above the door. Five minutes past one; seven minutes past one. He was free all afternoon.
He got up and wandered across to the window, staring out at the playing field, the goal posts, the big tree in the far corner.
All those handsome cowboys!
You’re so adventurous!
You’ll have to chaperone those girls, Miss Britnell!
A stampede was probably too much to hope for.
The tree stood in the furthest corner of the field, the wire-mesh fence forming a right angle behind its trunk. Behind the fence, the neat divided gardens of duplexes, the back galleries all painted battleship grey. It was a large tree. Not maple. Umbrellashaped. Probably the only large tree left in the area, the rest sacrificed to the numbered avenues where addresses and directions sounded like Control Tower t
o navigator. He could look across towards it when he was teaching on the top floor. For weeks now, rooks had been building and squabbling in its topmost branches. He had seen them beating across the field, flopping about ungainly in the tree’s crown thrashing the thin branches, heard their cawing as he taught. It irritated him that he didn’t know what kind of tree it was.
The bell rang. One-twenty. Teachers began to drift out leaving behind those the Matrics had freed.
Elm? Certainly not oak. And not chestnut.
Could you pass this to Mr. Appleby?
He turned from the window.
Visual Bloody Aid.
Complaints on several occasions, eh, Visual Aid? How would you like to complain about this, V.A.? And this! And my boot in your wizened proverbials.
“Yes, of course,” said David sitting down again and adding his signature to the others on the flyleaf of Canadian Pageant – part of Follet’s retirement gift from the Merrymount Staff.
(Enforced contribution: $3.00)
The major part of the gift was a brass-inlay binnacle and compass inscribed: To Arthur Ellis Follet from his Merrymount colleagues.
And may all who sail in her strike a rock.
Lachrymose last rites for Follet – another jollity for Monday’s final Staff Meeting.
. . . but who will remain with us in spirit . . .
BARF
One-twenty-five.
Garry stuck his head round the door.
“Hey, Garry!”
“Oh, hi, Dave.” He came in, nodding to Bardolini. “I’ve signed it,” he said to Visual Aid.
“I was looking for you,” said David. “Where’ve you been?”
Garry sat down in the armchair vacated by Hubnichuk. “Been stuck in the office all morning. Seen this?”
He handed across a copy of Saturday Review.
“The Ciardi essay’d interest you. Give it back to me, though, when you’re finished or stick it in my box, O.K.?”
“Thanks. You don’t have any spare cigarettes, do you?”
“Keep them,” said Garry. “I’ve got some more in my desk.”
“What are you doing, then?” said David.
“Just ploughing through some guidance files with Brunhoff. Some information I need.”
David nodded.