Keeping Things Whole Read online

  11. (M)otherwise

  When possession is the crime, best keep the shit moving. My job involved juggling a female plant. Apparently I’m not so good at holding onto the ladies in life, either. At the end of high school, Mom unintentionally accelerated my street slinging, and ultimately proved to be as important in my career selection as border-dodging Gran or the straight-dealing Claire. Without Gloria’s own American invasion, would I have become what Kate did and didn’t want nearly a decade later?

  Gloria, a tough freethinker who cries at dance movies. For a while during her self-appointed school campaign against uptalk—young people? almost always girls? making every statement sound like a question?—I foolishly tried to be their supper-table defence attorney. “Why can’t they speak how they want to speak?”

  “They can, but only once they’ve broken out of how they’ve been trained to speak. No one can want to sound so flagrantly uncertain.”

  At her high school, Gloria created a one-teacher campaign she called Down with Uptalk. She transformed a little brass desk plaque so it read The buck uptalk stops here. In Mom’s class, if not at their parties, young women could finally protest the misogyny of hip-hop lyrics. She knew she couldn’t win over the uptalking girls by herself and that many of her so-called fellow teachers would be less than no help (oh the church ladies with a B.Ed., oh the MRS grads). To win, she had to first win over a few girls, the right girls, and then, as in any fiefdom, have them police their peers. She’d pull an uptalker aside or send her a note. Natalia, I’m certain you’re bound for university and could, with application, aspire to any number of meaningful careers. Today, however, the intelligence of your comments on Juliet were undermined by…. She’d never go toe-to-toe with the popularity queen herself: no one wins a land war in Asia. Instead, she’d go for a lady in waiting with a wart on her fanny. Not the brightest lady in waiting—too easy a convert and too easily resented by the others—but the ambitious one, Iago in knee socks. One converted uptalker would turn another down, and so on. No doubt she felt her ends justified her means (what else could?). Eventually I agreed with her and was proud to tell these stories to a Kate who once returned home from a Safe Sisters event groaning, “Nothing but thongs, Frangelico, and uptalk.” As for Gloria’s campaign of onesies, Kate was fine with the craptards when they were just a story.

  If you want to see maternity leave in action, go to an Ontario public school. Their union has more members than some provinces have people. Their pension fund owns a chunk of the local shopping mall and the country’s biggest newspaper. Unlike at universities, corporations (excuse the redundancy), and law offices, a public school teacher meets no quiet penalties for mat leave. Promotion isn’t slowed or capped. Research isn’t threatened. Seniority doesn’t stall. So the broodmares waddle in and out.

  The same conscientiousness that had Gloria never forget a teacher’s partner’s name (it’s not so hard: she just keeps a list), littering hellos at Christmas parties and June barbecues, the very politeness that had her query correct spellings, allowed her to present pregnant fellow teachers with a custom printed onesie with a hyphenated last name stencilled on the front. An organic cotton, clay-dyed, eco-wonder with Franzen-Carey or Griebel-Aitken emblazoned across the chest of a baby she knew full well was only going to carry its father’s name. These scorecard onesies may never have been worn, may have been a waste of time, money, and pollution, but not a single colleague returned one as inappropriate. Mom was the first to confess that she wasn’t well liked because of the onesies. She was respected, and the few friends she had at her school loved her dearly, but she too was willing to pay for what she wanted.

  Given her uptalk campaign and the damning onesies, how would you take Gloria going off to do an acting MFA during my last year of high school? She left during my last year or, as I really suspected, for my last year. It was a pre-emptive strike, of course it was. Oh sure, she wanted the degree—thwarted ambitions finally realized, better intellectual company, blah pension blah. But just as obvious was the fact that she left me the year before she thought I’d be leaving her, left me to fend for myself and care for Gran (watch where that one got her). To her, an empty nest was a theatre of war. I don’t blame her for leaving; eventually you’ll see that. Better still, I admire her. Best acting I’ve ever seen her do. Still, even Mom and I broke up in stages. For the first email I sent her in Chicago, I had changed the default name on my account from Antony Williams to Trevor Reynolds. She didn’t say anything about it and, point made, neither did I.

  In my second-last year of high school, mail from various universities began crossing our threshold by the pound. All that curling ivy and all those multi-ethnic smiles were just for me, right? The computer labs in the brochures never had the broken chairs, flickering lights, and booger-studded keyboards of real life. Young, photogenic professors at University X sat amidst a handful of students, while in actual classes his ESL teaching assistant stood at a microphone in front of four hundred paying customers. All that education sold with photographs of gyms and exercise equipment. The StairMaster, seat of learning. A few years earlier, a national news magazine had rescued its revenue stream by handing out an annual report card to Canadian universities. Their hard-hitting pedagogical inquiries are illustrated annually by a young piece of fuck on the cover. A new cover girl each year, all dental work and blowjob eyes. Her representation of academic life in Canada, with its chilly September-to-April calendar, usually includes a robust tan.

  Until late high school my career as a mail recipient had been pretty limited, though not without potential. Until I was about ten, Mom and/or Gran always mailed me a birthday card from across the city. More than just a tender little surprise, these cards were designed to distract me from the one letter I waited for every weekday and prayed for constantly throughout the month of my birthday. Every day, day after day, year after year, I looked for an envelope with an American stamp addressed to me in Trevor Reynolds’s phantom hand. By grade two, I already knew mail days from holidays. Oh, the wasteland of a long weekend. Return address or no, I wanted him to trace all the letters of my name. I clung to the idea of that thin hello.

  When I told Kate of that aching young hope for a letter or a birthday card from a man I should have despised, found words so easily for this in our muzzy dark, she recognized that I wanted a letter because it was contact at its least confrontational or demanding, none of the awkward air or hanging silence of a phone call, none of the towering threat or paunchy disappointment, the balding, moustachioed weirdness, of a physical meeting.

  No high-school student can think the pile of university mail at his door, often with his name misspelled, is sent to him as an individual. I got so used to these bulk mail-outs I assumed anything mailed to our house from a university was for me. The Chicago School of Fine Arts taught me (m)otherwise.

  I swear my opening Mom’s envelope was just dumb habit. But Mom had a point: being inattentive is hardly an admirable defence. Even pre-MFA Mom knew that habit is the enemy. Honestly (I think), hers was just one more envelope I opened while inhaling a mini-pizza after school.

  Dear Ms. Williams,

  We are delighted by your interest in the Acting MFA program at the Chicago School of Fine Arts, one of the premier art and performance colleges in America…

  Whoops. The fuck?! Whoops.

  Have that classic mixed lot of high-school friends—the rich kid, the muscular guy, the musician, the chick who doesn’t eat—and someone will have totalitarian parents who open their kid’s mail. Pure Stasi mind slap. Yet there I was, Mom’s envelope open in my hand. Equal to my guilt was electric, protean shock. And selfishness. An MFA? What about me?

  I was contrite, but I was also sixteen (and, you might say, male). When she got home, something leapt in front of my apology. “Looks like they’ve got the wrong Williams over in Chicago. I opened this accidentally, I swear.”

  “What, you accidentally thought
you were me?” She hung up her coat, set down keys and bag.

  “No, I just—well, it’s a school. When would you be going to Chicago?”

  “Ant, my going is far more a question of if than when. I’m just testing the water here.” Finally she directed me to the couch in the next room.

  “At its least attractive an MFA would increase my pay. Each and every year. That means more money now, more money ten years from now, and more in retirement.” Uh-oh, a reassuring hand on my shoulder. “Canada has very, very limited graduate programs in acting. Why bother connecting our education dollars with our arts dollars? But listen, Windsor Community Theatre isn’t exactly the best reference I can hope for. I have to be prepared to be rejected, especially the first year I apply. If I get to go at all, it’s almost certain to be after you.”

  But what’s certain?

  12. We Safe Here?

  What couple lives without drugs? Alcohol, yes. And how does the day start? Coffee. The wake-up drug. The be-smart drug. It too was once illegal, vilified by a status quo nervous to see people congregating around the foreign coffee merchant’s counter instead of the altar or flagpole. Behold the maddened eyes of the coffee drinker! Smell his demon breath! For years, Oxford and Cambridge students were forbidden to enter coffee houses. Students without coffee! Only when the increases in productivity were observed were the copy clerks allowed new stains on their sleeves.

  Coffee is the official drug of work. What’s the official drug of relationships? Used even more regularly than wine? For all the talk on those early dates, no question is more significant than Are you on the pill? You can get every stitch of her clothing off, have lowered, chased, or baited her body into every conceivable offer and exchange, be chased and baited, yet nothing reveals like this yes or no. With drugs, we are indisputably and quintessentially human, especially in this most animalistic of acts. Voodoo and I were never more clearly on opposite sides of knowledge versus sensation than whenever I had to shove a pill down his throat.

  Are you on the pill? This information, the revelatory, data-rich syllable of her answer, a sliding yes or a grounding no, can be more arousing than anything in her bra or pants. I want to see here, here, and will you show me here? Let me glimpse your pharmacy soul. Show me which risks you avoid and which you’re willing to take. I agree, the price of pleasure is always risk. No risk, no rise. Yet another drug to keep things moving, or whole. Or both.

  In the early tumbles with Kate I was no smarter than my customers’ customers. As with any drug, part of what you’re chasing is a romantic idea. In my—forgive me—tunnel vision, I would forget that many women take the pill for regulation or now even to avoid the monthly carnage altogether. I’d hear a Yes full of slutty sibilance because that’s what I wanted to hear. Delusion is always the meta-high.

  For all the times I’ve stood in a grocery store lineup flipping through Cosmo (that primer for speaking Tramp), I’ve never once seen a poll or graph describing the context and location in which a man first asks a woman if she’s on the pill. Much later in a relationship a very different question may get popped, but that first big question is usually dropped. Sure, it could be posed in a bar, car, or restaurant. Email might make it another digi-confession flying through the ether like this one. But I’m sure I’m not the only one who waits until the plane’s taxiing down the runway before asking how high we’re going to fly. We okay here? We safe? You get to know each other pharmacologically as you get to know each other biblically.

  From what I’ve been told, I was less of an asshole than most about birth control. A few years before Kate, true, I didn’t always steer so safely away from disease, but from pregnancy, always. I may have rattled the key in the lock a little first, but at least I’d ask. We okay here? In relationships, I’d suit up or pay for the pill. (How do women tolerate guys who don’t?) Nothing could save a guy more money than paying for the pill, or half of it if that’s the brand of Feminism™ going (though it almost never is). With Kate I wanted to do everything right, originally at least. I planned on the full, adult dating trajectory of latex, testing, then abandon, not its younger, worried inverse.

  I loved those early dates with her. The weekend outfits planned all week. The polished shoes. Six months later we knew every shirt and sweater, each article of clothing from tip to toe. We’d watch clothes getting purchased, would wash, hang, and fold them, picked them up off shared floors. Eventually, I’d see all her shoes ranked in our hall closet, pairs of fighter planes grouped into formation on the deck of the aircraft carrier HMS Taste. But nothing compared to those early dates when each shirt was cut from whole cloth, each zipper an unknown pathway.

  Foretalk, those early dates were all foretalk. The restaurants, the parks and wine bars, they all built up the sex, each declaration, question, and answer more wood for the eventual fire. But she wasn’t planning her date underwear half a week in advance and shaving her legs every other day just to chat.

  “Talking with you is so great I almost forget I want to kiss you.” I meant it, I did, but it was also a line. Kate’s Safe Sister Melissa confided that her strangest clients were the ones who tried to seduce her, who had hired her, she quickly saw, to build confidence. Again, all of this is different because of the Web. Melissa’s clients found their pickup lines online, so she often heard the same ones repeated by big-bellied Nigel and skin-condition Paul.

  Aside from keeping my green secret I was effortlessly honest on those early dates. In just a few conversations with her I was getting to say things I hadn’t fully realized I needed or wanted to say. Only she understood my excitement about working for myself, even with the house painting: the whiff of the deal, the hints I’d drop, the hooks I’d reel in. Gran had cared, but family care is always a little proprietary or conscripted. On other dates I’d tell women that I ran a painting company and they’d ask what else I did. Right, like only concert cellists and neurosurgeons normally ever got a hand in their pants. And with Kate, I got to ask the question other students usually asked me. Why Windsor? In one of Canada’s last lunch-bucket towns, citizenship is always a question. What do you get to offset the pollution?

  “Toronto’s fine,” she said at the end of another restaurant meal. “I’ll probably go back. But for immigration law I want to be at a border. As we sit here, van doors are being yanked open by jerks with badges and flashlights. I want clients who have more at stake than waiting a little longer in their Richmond Hill apartment.”

  And she didn’t take any shit. When I mentioned Windsor smuggling Joyce’s Ulysses into the States she said, “Admire the smuggling, not the writing.” At last, clear-sighted honesty. A skinny American singer once described irony as “the shackles of youth.” I disagree. Indecision shackles youth. Indecision or insincerity. Irony deepens with age. Everything gets layered. I wanted the whole layer cake of her. She could do the sauciest little grin, was curator of my lust.

  Doggie Vood saw me off on every date, not caring at all for my exposed shirttail, V-neck sweater, and blazer combo. At first he wasn’t exactly the welcome wagon when Kate slept over, wasn’t above dragging a hundred-dollar bra back to his crate for a chew. Sexually, maybe even romantically, who doesn’t envy his dog? Live with a dog and you see that they have just three reactions to other dogs: yes, no, or maybe. Fighting or fucking, they sniff aft, middle, and fore, twirl and circle about, and they let you know: I’ll fight you, I’ll let you sniff or see my crotch, or I’ll leave it undecided for now. Why do we pretend we’re any different?

  Early on, clothes strewn from one end of her apartment to the other, smirched wine glasses and stubby little roaches smeared in candlelight, I was asking for more than just information, more than just that deepest invitation. Are you on the pill? We safe?

  Yes and no. And apparently I wasn’t the only one who realized it was question time. When we were getting ready to sleep one night I opened the drawer of her night table to drop in the little packet of
green we’d been sampling.

  She reached out and laid a hand on my shoulder. “You sell it, don’t you?”

  She’d finally exploded the underground mine she’d been digging for weeks, showed me where the charges lay, shook my muddy ground.

  “Let’s just say I know how it’s grown. It’s organic. It’s not biker bud. I want that for you.”

  She rose up on one elbow. “Antony, you either spend every cent you make trying to spoil me or you make a lot more than a house painter should.”

  “Define ‘should.’ Do you know any other painters? I price the client, not the job.”

  But she reached up and sealed my lips with her finger. That might have been endurable, would have been just a smart future lawyer hedging her bets. It was the shake of her head that got me. A finger to my lips then a slow shake, side to side, a Kate eraser rubbing away at me.

  13. McTreb

  Part of this is a war story, and in war there’s always a catch. Sometimes a feeling gives us a phrase and sometimes a phrase gives us a feeling. Catch-22—you know the phrase even if you don’t know its war, Victor-Conrad’s war. In our teens, we can’t get sexual confidence without sexual experience, but we can’t get sexual experience without sexual confidence. Kate really got me, stirred me between the shoulders and ears, not just the hips, with a simple little card, a scene of slashing Japanese rain daubed with red lanterns. All she wrote was: I don’t love you, yet. Later, she amended it with a speech.