Daddy Lenin and Other Stories (4 page)

He lifted his head. No, the shrieks were coming from the Janaceks’ apartment. Hands dribbling water over the floor, Brewster crossed the living room, squared up in front of the wall, and stared at it. One of those blind rages he hadn’t felt for forty years surged up in him with such overwhelming force that black specks streamed in his eyes.

Very deliberately he drew back his fist and struck the wall. Hit it again. Then again and again and again. Faster and faster, harder and harder, a frenzy of blows. Janacek was hollering something, but the rapid-fire thud of Brewster’s fists obscured whatever Melvyn was saying. He slammed his knuckles into the wall until he could slam them no longer. The Marlborough was an older building and the lathe-and-plaster construction of the wall stood up to his assault admirably. Nothing more than a chip or dent here and there.

Chest heaving, he looked down at his hands, running slickly pink with mingled water and blood. There were
smears of it all over the wall. Melvyn was yelling at the top of his lungs; Brewster could hear him now, threatening to report him to the superintendent.

He wasn’t interested in anything Janacek had to say. A miracle had occurred. The torment in his hands had vanished. It appeared he had beaten it clean out of them.

Next morning the pain and the spasms were back with a vengeance. The rest of the week Brewster spent counting down the days until he could see the doctor again and make the case for a stronger painkiller. He was aware that the recent damage that he had done to his hands would put him in an awkward position if he didn’t manage to keep them tucked away out of sight during his visit to the doctor’s office. They were badly swollen and the skin over several of his knuckles was split. Charley Brewster, Munchausen case.

The only upside to his completely losing control of himself was that Melvyn appeared to have received the message loud and clear. For the last two days it had been all quiet on the Janacek front.

Friday afternoon, the doctor held up Brewster’s X-rays to the light and pointed to five old fractures, three in the right hand and two in the left. “You didn’t mention you had had injuries to your hands,” he said, a hint of chiding disappointment in his voice.

Brewster had prepared himself for a cross-examination. “Frankly, I’d sort of forgotten about it. It was such a long time ago. And they’ve never given me a moment’s trouble until now. Then out of nowhere, just like that my hands started to hurt like hell.”

“What was it? Some sort of an industrial accident? Did you get them crushed in machinery or something?”

He had his answer ready. “No, a car wreck. Back in the days before compulsory seat belt use,” he said with a wry smile. “I was a teenager, went into the windshield hands first. Trying to protect myself.”

“Any other injuries?”

Now Brewster had to improvise, mentally skip from one clumsy foot to the other. “Not really. I may have sprained my shoulder. Got a few cuts. That was about it.”

“You were lucky then,” observed the doctor. “Very lucky.” Fingering the X-ray film, he pursed his lips. “There’s a bit of a mystery here. I can’t see any evidence of osteoarthritis, any inflammation around the old injury sites. Did your former physician ever treat you for pain?”

“I’ve never really had a family doctor,” said Brewster, trying his best to look sheepish about his irresponsibility. “I’ve gone to walk-in clinics on a few occasions. Anyway, speaking of pain,” he added quickly, maybe a bit too quickly, “that Tylenol 3 doesn’t seem to be doing the job. I was wondering what else you might prescribe.”

“I couldn’t justify prescribing anything stronger at the moment,” said the doctor. “Not until I know what was causing your pain. I could send you to a rheumatologist, I suppose,” he said. It was clear he was thinking out loud. “It’s
possible I missed something, but I don’t think so,” he added, casting his eyes upward to the ceiling as if expecting confirmation of his infallibility from on high.

“I just want something to get me over the hump. Something temporary. The pain is interfering with my ability to work. I can’t concentrate.”

“As I say, I’m reluctant to change your prescription. The Tylenol 3 should be adequate.”

“Well, it isn’t,” said Brewster. “I can testify to that.”

“You know,” the doctor replied, “sometimes – I don’t know quite how to put this – people experience physical symptoms that are a proxy for other worries and anxieties. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying this is true of you, I don’t know you personally or your circumstances, but I wonder if you’re not undergoing stress in other areas of your life: difficulties at work, relationship problems, anything of that kind?”

All of the above and more
, thought Brewster. What he said was, “Nothing beyond the usual small day-to-day discontents.”

“I could refer you to our pain management clinic. Cognitive behavioural therapy sometimes produces good results. The clinic takes a holistic approach. They even offer kundalini yoga classes.”

“Thanks but no thanks,” said Brewster rising abruptly from his chair. “I’m not a kundalini kind of guy. I guess I’ll just bite the bullet and soldier on.”

Because of Eva’s busy academic life, Friday night was the one night a week that she would consent to spend at Brewster’s apartment. Although they both taught at the university, they had only met a year ago, when the faculty club hosted a touring jazz trio. Eva arrived late and, finding all the tables occupied, she had approached Brewster because he was, as usual, flying solo. Looking charmingly flustered, she had asked if he had any objections to her joining him. He hadn’t and so they had passed a few pleasant hours, chatting between sets, Eva talking enthusiastically and glowingly about the great work being done by The Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies, where she had recently been appointed director.

Brewster was more guarded about his own work, volunteering scarcely anything about his projects or professional interests. When the evening came to an end and he fished his cellphone out to call a taxi, Eva quickly offered to give him a ride home. She said it was a case of quid pro quo; after all, he had surrendered a seat at his table to a stranger. When they had pulled up outside The Marlborough in Eva’s Mini Cooper, Brewster asked if she would care for a nightcap. She accepted the invitation, one thing led to another, and now twelve months later they found themselves peevishly staggering to the end of something that should never have started in the first place.

Eva and Brewster both knew it was over, but hadn’t yet taken steps to initiate the mercy killing. They were too different for it ever to have worked. Eva was forty-seven, fifteen years younger than Brewster, and she was confidently, optimistically convinced that she was just hitting her stride as an academic. Like Gatsby, Brewster was staring longingly at the
green light beckoning at the end of the dock, which was, in his case, imminent retirement from a career that had proved to be less than stellar.

Eva prided herself on being cutting-edge. Recently, her students, affronted by the way women were sexualized in advertising, had made a video that portrayed males as sexual objects. Brewster had checked this video out, a morality play that involved overweight, hairy young men in cocksock underwear licking their lips, batting their eyelashes, and provocatively plumping their ripe-for-a-training-bra pectorals for the camera. Eva assured him that this had gone viral on YouTube.

Brewster knew he was definitely not cutting-edge; he wasn’t even sure that he qualified for blunted-edge designation. The opinion of his colleagues and certainly his students was that he belonged in some professorial Jurassic Park. The comments he received on Rate My Professor were dismissive.
Definately do not take a class from this guy. Only his opinion matters. I interpreted a poem and he trashed all my ideas because of punctuation. Maybe he should get a life
.

Of course, he had made the mistake of taking a peek at Eva’s online evaluations, which were uniformly laudatory and enthusiastic.
The best prof ever, I learned so much I can’t even say!!!!
Or
Everyday in her class is fun. If she gave a thousand classes I would take everyone. I would major in Professor Eva. She rocks my world!!!!

Right now, Eva was at work on her laptop preparing a class. For the past few hours she had been playing and replaying two performances of Henry Purcell’s “Cold Song” that she had tracked down on YouTube, one by Klaus Nomi, the
other by Sting. They would be the departure point for a class discussion on representations of masculinities. The Nomi version showed Klaus arrayed in what looked to be transparent rain gear designed for the consumer determined to get wet and stay wet. From the shoulders of the cape-like garment a fan-shaped contraption rose to a towering height, a backdrop for Klaus’s chalk-white face, his lips gleaming with a shockingly intense scarlet lipstick. Nomi’s singing was an unearthly, piercing castrato-warble.

In contrast, a deeper-voiced, bearded Sting sang lounging on a stool in a tweedy sports coat, a long scarf of the kind worn by British football fans draped casually around his neck. The chorus of attractive women who accompanied Sting periodically panted a refrain that was either meant to illustrate the effect of frigid weather on the respiratory system or to demonstrate what effect such close proximity to Sting had on the female libido.

Hearing Klaus and Sting trill the same song for the seventh or eighth time, coupled with the incessant pounding in his hands, was slowly driving Brewster out of his mind, but he knew better than to ask Eva to desist or even to turn down the volume, especially when she was so completely absorbed in frantically scribbling notes about the meaning these enactments of masculinities indicated.

Eva no longer needed to ponder or make notes on the sort of masculinity Charley Brewster enacted. It hadn’t taken her long to conclude that he was a poster boy for the bad hegemonic variety since he was white, heterosexual, and a member of a privileged profession. Once that was settled, her homophobia and misogyny sensors had gone on full alert.
They beeped a lot in his company. No matter how he combed his conscience, Brewster couldn’t help feeling her sensors were prone to giving a lot of false readings.

Three weeks ago, in the middle of one of their increasingly frequent and rancorous spats, Eva had said, “You know what, Charley? Whenever any of your assumptions are questioned, you start talking like a thug, acting like a thug.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Every second word is a curse word. It’s the way people with no ideas try to intimidate others.”

“My father was a working man. It’s the way he talked when something pissed him off. The gosling walks in the gander’s footsteps. I got imprinted. If it walks like a goose, talks like a goose, I guess it’s a goose. Don’t blame me, I’m a social construct.”

“I suppose
social construct
is a dig at my work. Don’t belittle me because I’m passionate about what I do. Unlike you, your department’s sleepwalker.”

“Not passionate about what I do? I’ll have you know I ferret out comma splices with great fervour.”

Coming in the door tonight Eva had taken one look at him and said, “So what’s wrong in Brewster’s Horizonless World now?”

“I feel like shit. I’ve got these terrible pains in my hands.”

“Pains from what?”

“I don’t know. Maybe arthritis. The doctor wasn’t sure.”

“Did you take something?”

“I’ve been taking something all day. The something doesn’t do squat.”

“I guess that means you didn’t make dinner.”

“I thought maybe we could order some Chinese.”

“No thanks. I’ll pass on the monosodium glutamate. But please yourself. I’ve got work to do.”

Sitting slumped on the sofa, Brewster was struck by the appropriateness of the music, how well Purcell’s “Cold Song” suited the frosty atmosphere reigning in his apartment. Of course, the ice jam could be broken, the relationship ended with a single stroke. All he needed to do was to tell Eva what was the matter with his hands.
Remember when you accused me of being an intellectual thug? Add physical thug to the indictment. There was a time when I bashed a lot of people. Broke my hands three times doing it. Who knows how many times I’d have broken them if I wasn’t convicted of assault causing bodily harm and sentenced to two years less a day
. Leave it at that. Make no mention of how getting skipped two grades in elementary school had caught up with the prepubescent, scrawny, brainy runt in high school where he provided easy pickings for the vultures, became everybody’s favourite punching bag. No need to mention boys like Ronnie Peel, who one day at the town’s swimming pool had hooked a finger in his bathing trunks and dropped a lighted cigarette butt down the front of them, forcing him to haul down his bathing suit in a panic, right in front of everybody because the cigarette stub was scorching his cock. And Ronnie’s girlfriend had sent all her female posse into a snorting giggling fit when she said, “Well, that little-bitty butt is the biggest thing that’s ever been in Charley Brewster’s pants.”

But he had had a sudden welcome growth spurt in the last few months of grade ten, suddenly sprouted tall and weedy. Over the summer holidays he ate everything in sight, tried to
pack on as many pounds as he could, bought a weight set, and lifted three times a day. When he went back to school in September he was still skinny but sinewy with new muscle. Learn by doing, his father had always said, and that’s what he did. He fought back, at first without much success, but with a lot of berserk determination. It scared people, even those with hard-boy reputations, that he didn’t respect the unwritten code of combat. Everybody understood that if you were taking a bad licking, you gave up. But Charley Brewster didn’t give up; he kept coming. And it was also understood that if you were giving somebody else a licking, you stopped at some point, or made a show of being reluctantly dragged off your opponent by bystanders. That was how things played out. But Brewster
really
had to be dragged off his victims; usually three or four guys had a monumental struggle to do it. The day he revenged himself on Ronnie Peel, Peel had ended up crouched on the ground, cowering, his arms wrapped around his head, whimpering. That’s the first time Brewster broke a hand, pounding Peel’s skull because he couldn’t get to something more vulnerable, his eyes, nose, or mouth.