All the Anxious Girls on Earth (8 page)

Glenn smiled his patient, sensitive-New-Age-guy smile and said, “It’s the only meat you can eat that you don’t have to kill.”

“Fuck me.” Now Glenn would become the kind of person who was into homebirthing and making a casserole out of the placenta. “I hope you brushed your teeth before coming over.”

If Jack ever had a kid with Daisy, he’d have to make her first promise she wouldn’t be a placenta eater. He’d make her put it in writing. It was one of those things you didn’t think about until it was too late. Like waking up one day and finding your underwear was all jumbled up in a hamper with someone else’s. Like realizing her mother’s fingers were never far from your mind. Her pale, no-nonsense mouth.
Oh, Shock
.

“How’s the Daisy?” Glenn had this notion that he’d godfathered their relationship, since he’d been the one to invite Jack to Daisy’s twenty-eighth birthday party at the Blue Cellar Room two years ago. Jack had known her only peripherally as one of those daffy publicist types who occupied the fringes of his circle of bitter playwrights and aspiring screenwriters and actors who worked mainly as bicycle couriers, and languid women who played guitar in otherwise all-male bands, photographed well, and wore motorcycle jackets over flowered dresses. Jack had been going out with an Edie Sedgwick look-alike named Robyn whose last boyfriend had broken her wrist and who kept encouraging Jack to singe the hairs on her arm with a lighter. “Just see how close you can get,” she’d whisper dramatically, the tip of her tongue poking into his ear. She didn’t do this to be funny.

Jack and Robyn had been arguing across a blue-checked tablecloth, a pyramid of empty shot glasses at their elbows, when Daisy came over and asked him to dance. “I’m the birthday girl,” she’d told him when he hesitated. I get to dance with everyone.” And just
because Robyn’s kohl-ringed eyes suddenly looked so small and piggy and Daisy’s shone generously behind her big, red-plastic frames, Jack got up to dance. “So, has your girlfriend tried the Hungarian cherry cake, or has she already eaten this year?” Daisy asked. Jack laughed. Someone kept playing “Never on a Sunday” over and over on the jukebox. Jack hadn’t danced in public since junior high. And he had never necked in public. The way Jack remembers it, Daisy was wearing purple elbow-length gloves. Overtop of them, chunky Lucite rings glistened on most of her fingers. He felt feverish as he tugged gently at her thin lower lip with his teeth. They may have been on top of a table. People may have been applauding. The one thing he remembered for certain was Daisy pressing her knuckles to his neck—the rings were cool and just sharp enough to leave small dents, like teeth marks.

The bathrooms at the Blue Cellar were marked Mommies and Daddies. Robyn ended up in the Daddies room, setting toilet paper on fire with a guy who said he knew Cronenberg. And so Jack had gone home with Daisy.

“I wouldn’t tell Daisy about this little snack you just had,” Jack told Glenn, who had stretched himself out on the couch and was leafing through
The Dharma Bums
(“‘Rucksack’—I love that word. Don’t you love that word?”).

“Why not?”

“She had this baby brother who died.”

“Harsh. When?”

Jack looked out the window. A smiling man swaddled in about half a dozen layers of clothing rattled down the middle of the street with a shopping cart, a filing cabinet bouncing inside. Jack had seen him go by before, hauling old turntables, toaster ovens, and, once, a bean-bag chair. He considered the man a kind of jinx, a black cat across his path, a contagion of some terrible sadness.

“A while ago,” Jack said.

Daisy tells the fetus about Jack. She tells what she considers the definitive story, Jack in a nutshell, The Compleat Jack, the ultimate psychological profile. “When I want him to do something he doesn’t want to do, he always says, ‘I’m thirty-two years old,’ like it means something. I’ll say, ‘Check the expiry date on the mayonnaise,’ and he’ll say, ‘I’m thirty-two years old,’ and start spreading it on the bread without checking the date. So I’ll grab the jar to check the date and he’ll grab it back and I’ll grab it again, and then he’ll…” Daisy notices that the fetus doesn’t appear to be listening. He’s wrapping the umbilical cord around his left wrist and then tugging on it as if to test for tensile strength. He must feel her watching, because he suddenly looks dead at her. His eyes are large and swampy. Bayou eyes. Daisy hears a crooked accordion, the snap of alligator teeth. “I can’t really relate. I have no concept of age or time,” the fetus says. Her heart splays.

At that moment Daisy’s mother must have stepped outside onto a porch flooded with sunlight, because
suddenly the fetus is backlit, his outline edged in orange as if he were on fire.

“Go ahead, dude, ask me something in ancient Hebrew,” the guy said to Jack. He dragged another wedge of focaccia through the shallow dish of olive oil and balsamic vinegar and stuffed it into his mouth.

“How about a miracle,” Jack said, holding up a glass of San Pellegrino. “How about turning some water into wine?”

The guy laughed a big, full-blooded laugh, his motivational speaker teeth glinting in the candlelight, flecks of oregano stuck to them here and there. People at the surrounding tables turned to look at them, but the guy, Daisy’s new client, seemed completely unselfconscious. He was an entrepreneur from Cleveland, a whiz-kid designer of ergonomically sound computer keyboards who had self-published a book detailing his past-life experiences as Paul of Tarsus and his adventures with Jesus of Nazareth.

“Teddie is going to put me in touch with someone who’ll help me find out if I used to be anyone before,” Daisy said. “You should try it too, Jack.” Although she was still pouchy under the eyes and her face had a shiny tear-stained look as if she’d been dumped in a tub of shellac, Daisy was all abuzz. Even her hair was alive, big curls bouncing around as she laughed, defying gravity. By the time Jack had arrived, Daisy and her client were having a big old time. The guy kept calling her dudette,
which for some reason made Jack think of her as a giant chocolate-covered peanut.

“That’s right, dudette,” Teddie/St. Paul said, reeling off a bunch of big names from the past—Nefertiti, Josephine, Madame Curie, Amelia Earhart, Anne Frank—like he was plucking them from a Rolodex, casting for some kind of Hollywood blockbuster about great dames.

When Daisy had phoned to tell Jack they were going to Sorrento, he thought Irene must have relented after their lunch, that her mothering instinct had kicked in and she was going to help resolve this baby-brother thing, wrestle it to the mat. The only time they ever went to cloth-napkin restaurants was when Daisy felt brave enough to sit at the same table as her mother, who would eye every forkful that went into Daisy’s mouth as if it contained strontium 90. He was disappointed that it wasn’t Irene but an author Daisy was promoting who was taking them to dinner. But two restaurant meals in one day—Jack wasn’t going to complain. Besides, this was a first. Daisy usually publicized fringe theatre plays, small poetry launches, and AIDs benefits for organizations that couldn’t afford to spring for a cup of coffee, let alone platters of air-dried carpaccio.

This guy was, at least on surface evidence, raking it in. He had
people
. He had yet to appear on “Oprah,” but his people were working on it. He wore a deliberately rumpled Prada suit and a diamond stud flashed in his right earlobe. He had slurped back two Hennessy XOs as if they were Kool-Aid, and then good-naturedly stubbed out a Cohiba when it was pointed out to him by the
surgically enhanced redhead at the next table that city bylaws prohibited smoking in restaurants.

“If you could have been anybody who would you have been?” the guy leaned over and asked Jack while Daisy was off in the washroom. “You’re a writer, right? How about Shakespeare, dude? No, I’ve got it—Hemingway. Am I right or am I right?”

“You’re right,” Jack said. “I’ve always been curious about what it would be like to blow my own brains out.”

That was the trouble with the reincarnated, they were always famous people in their past lives. Like that woman on the West Coast who discovered through channelling that she was Guinevere and wrote a screenplay about her life in Camelot. Why were they never just tax collectors or lepers or chambermaids? Or silverfish?

Daisy returned from the washroom and sat down even closer to the reincarnation guy. Her eyes gleamed as he described how Jesus, contrary to popular belief, actually had a terrific sense of humour.
Dry as bone
. He explained that many of the parables were highly sophisticated dirty jokes, well, dirty for the times, anyway, but humour doesn’t travel through the centuries all that well—and he hadn’t put that in his book as it would have turned off potential Christian book buyers of a New-Age bent. He was a businessman, after all, in this life, anyway.

“‘If a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her: for
her
hair is given her for a covering,’” he said, reaching out and pulling down one of Daisy’s curls until it reached well past her shoulders. “First Corinthians 11:15. I wrote that. In my
first
book.” He waited until Daisy laughed and
then he laughed as well. Jack drank some more wine. He couldn’t figure out why Daisy was suddenly in such a good mood and why she was clinging to every word this con artist uttered like some kind of mindless groupie. Those Anthony Robbins teeth alone should’ve been worth ten demerit points. Jack kept waiting for Daisy to kick him under the table to indicate they could start sniggering at the guy’s expense.

“This morning,” Daisy said, “Teddie was so good on ‘Canada AM.’ Valerie Pringle asked him, ‘What message would Paul of Tarsus have for the Middle East today?’“

“And I said—”

Daisy jumped in, “And he said, ‘Lighten up!’“

Jack clenched his thighs. Or rather, they clenched him.

He drained his glass.

Daisy and her client clinked their wineglasses in a jaunty Hepburn-Tracy kind of way. Their laughter ran together like a zipper, pinching the skin between Jack’s eyes.

Toes. Stomach. Buttocks
.

Teddie laid a hand lightly on Daisy’s bare arm. “Dud
ette
. That was one smokin’ interview. I owe you.”

Asshole
.

The guy smiled so widely that
The Ten Commandments
, in 70mm Dolby Digital, could have been projected onto his ultra-white teeth. That would have been appropriate. Jack was convinced most people got their ideas about reincarnation from the movies. All those people who thought they had been Moses were really thinking, Wouldn’t it be great to be Charlton Heston and have a
toga-clad Anne Baxter admiring your pecs? Jack, if he was a reincarnation of anything, Jack would have been the anonymous, emaciated old guy stomping mud for the brick makers who collapses and is carried off while Charlton Heston takes his place in the bog. Behind them the pyramids grow large, the men and women scurrying hither and dither like ants. Nothing a little crumbled bay leaf wouldn’t take care of, Jack thought, or was that salt? He found himself emptying the contents of the salt mill onto the table. He’d never paid much attention to salt before. Never realized it was so white. So
salty
. Neither Daisy nor the guy were paying attention to him.

“So, Teddie,” Jack said, his brain a raft bobbing dangerously on a red sea, “did Jesus and Mary M. ever—or, whoa! You and her… ?” He let his jaw drop in that vacant way Daisy always found funny, but now she only narrowed her eyes at him. The author formerly known as Paul laughed, though.
A bone-dry laugh
.

On the way home in a cab, after dropping the reincarnation guy off at the Park Plaza, Daisy whispered a date in his ear. Jack wondered if it should mean anything to him: July 14, 1964. “Bastille Day?” Jack said.
“Vive le Quebec Libre?”

Daisy leaned close, her breath a mélange of chlorophyll gum and pesto. “Its the day my brother died. And,” she paused, “its also the day Teddie was born.” She sat back. “You probably think that’s just a coincidence.”

Then she laid her cheek against the back of the front passenger seat and just looked at Jack as the streetlights cast elongated shadows across her features like small
children making shadow puppets with their hands. I want the one that looks like a rabbit with big floppy ears, Jack thought, just before closing his eyes against the crackle of the taxis dispatch radio and Daisy’s altogether too bright face.