Double Talk (3 page)

Move on — that was a good one, the best one ever, in fact. Two years of lying on the springs of my velour couch, observing that layer where stupid flies flew geometric patterns around the naked light bulb, had got me absolutely nowhere. It was all a matter of perspective, I sensed, a matter of stepping outside myself — that carnival trick. I soon worked my hunch into a theory and then a practice: daily, my shivering anima would float out to find warm spots in the landscape, places where it had once flourished. My hope was that drawing strength from my good memories would kick-start the healing process.

And so, quietly and as unobtrusively as thistledown camouflaged by falling snow, I would flutter down on the doorstep of Keppie's parents' house, on that winter night in 1985 when it had all begun. Keppie Gushue, who I had met only days before when he broke away from the b'ys with mullets under baseball caps and invited me to a party at his house, a party at which the door to the New World swung open. It was there, on that night, I met Keppie's
Mother-Jones
meets-
Ms.-
Magazine
-meets-flipper-pie girlfriend, Nancy, and her mainlander friend, Violet. It was there I met the diminutive and golden-haired Devlin, who — I learned a short time later — had recently traded mullet, jeans and Kodiak boots for free-flowing locks, tie-dyed pants, and sandals. It was there I met Devlin's girlfriend, Amy of the frozen tidal-wave bangs, Amy of the oversized glasses and high-necked blouses with ruffles and puff sleeves.

Often, I chose to alight on the steps of 117 Patrick Street, the two-storey tip where we first gelled as a group. I'd peer in through the cigarette smoke to see myself riding my rusty Triumph bike through the hallway, through the kitchen, then back around through the dining room and living room, trying not to run over our five cats and four kittens, while Keppie, Amy, Nancy and Violet timed my laps on an old stopwatch. I would lean on the door frame and listen to our wide-open conversations, bask in the glow of our nascent utopian vision.

Other times, I would alight at Fort Amherst and look down at the site where Violet and I tied the knot, seeing again the hand-dyed batiks flutter, smelling again the many bouquets of flowers. Despite everything that had gone wrong between us, I could never look back on that day without feeling joy, without my saffron-coloured monkfish anima flickering with phosphorescence.

I would drift by the old Grace Hospital and look up at the floor where both my children were born, recalling the sight of Joe's head emerging from Violet's body, recalling the sheer vulgarity and wonder of that moment, the obstetrician frowning, remarking that Violet had a lot of wrinkles down there, and Violet, despite hours and hours of labour, still finding the presence of mind to snap back that that was where she did all of her worrying.

But such was my mood in the post-Violet era that happy memories were soon swept away by an avalanche of self-accusation. Violet's refusal to stand up to the cops on my behalf had set loose in my labyrinth recall a fleet of dark thoughts that threatened to establish a permanent base. Killer Cabs, I called them. One could arrive at any time and wreak havoc on my perfectly good mood, inform me that all of my happy thinking was nothing but revisionist wanking. Knackers of the imagination, they were capable of bundling me on a tour of darker days; manhandling me into the junk room to find Violet, hysterical, forcing me to take in the sleek splendour of those damn snakeskin boots, coercing me to cooperate with those two sinister cops, neither one of whom showed the slightest iota of interest in listening to my side of the story.

The sites of my humiliation were many and varied. I might be transported to the freezing precinct of Prescott and Water streets, where, two weeks after the alleged incident, I watched Devlin and Amy cross the road to avoid me. I was devastated. Sure, I had noticed how the crowd at the Ship avoided my eye as I elbowed my way to the bar, but it came as a shock of an altogether different order to realize that my best friends had taken sides.

Invariably, my Killer Cabs tour ended with Keppie, my best friend in the whole world, who alone, five days after my arrest, had offered to help me move into my new one-bedroom apartment. Always it came down to the moment when, standing knee-deep in boxes, sipping a cold one and inhaling the mothball smell of my Salvation Army furniture, he turned on me and said, “Violet says you punched her.”

“I pushed her, Kep, that's all. We were arguing and she blocked the door and wouldn't let me through. I pushed her out of the way and she fell. That's all that happened. I swear.”

He shook his head. “Well,” he said, in his best John Wayne voice, “you're just going to have to explain that to the judge.” It was obvious he didn't believe me. The court of public opinion had reached a unanimous verdict of guilty. And with that I was returned to the near solitary confinement of my three-hundred-a-month shit-hole flat, to lie on the couch and shiver.

It wasn't until halfway through my second winter — the tide still pushing strongly in Violet's favour — that I made what felt like the long awaited breakthrough. The only way to end the spell was to let Violet go, even if that meant releasing my children to her for a while. Imagine digesting a soufflé of razor blades and triple hooks and you will have some idea of the gut impact of that home-cooked remedy. When Violet first mentioned oh-so-casually she was thinking of moving with the kids back to B.C., I was so shocked all I could think to do was ignore her. When I finally agreed to talk about it, she besieged me with phone calls. While she went on and on about the benefits, I peppered the flow of her talk with “No” or “You must be bloody well joking” or “I'm hanging up now.” Many of the calls ended with a simple “fuck off.” Predictably, she wore me down. She always did.

I finally gave in and agreed to the move when she promised she would let Lucy and Joe visit me each Christmas and again for a month each summer. My hope was that two visits a year would give me a fighting chance to keep connected to them. Violet, I knew, calculated that I would have trouble scraping together airfares twice a year. She also knew that Joe and Lucy would not want to leave her. Their mother's willingness to indulge their every whim had rendered me all but redundant in their eyes. They were starting to look at me like I was a stranger, a weird uncle they had to put up with from time to time. I resolved to let them go. My only consolation was the certainty that they would come back to me later, in their teen years or later again, after they had grown up. If there was one thing I knew for sure, it was that Violet would eventually drive them away. She would smother them by delving too deeply into their inner lives. To free themselves from her daily interference, they would have to run.

If Violet's relentless commentary had worn a groove in their brains, it had worn an ocean trench in mine. As I walked away that night, the Violet soundtrack — not really an LP, but a CD produced to sound like scratched vinyl — was playing full tilt. She lectured me, in clear and mellow tones, about my eternal dithering, my inability to commit, my unwillingness to resolve conflict; she pointed out my obsession with the past and how I was like a child forever nursing some primal hurt, afraid to move on. I listened and fingered the half joint in my pocket. I had broken my promise not to smoke up anymore. I felt bad about it, but Violet had a way of bringing out the worst. Of course, now that I had smoked half a J, I couldn't wait to spark up the other half: pot had a way of scrambling the Violet Channel.

Doubleness, the Disease of Life, how do I describe it? It's an inability to let things go. It's a tendency to second-guess, to think twice, to double-take, to correct. There is no ordinary world anymore, no ordinary thing. Everything begs for comparison, shouts its likeness. No thing speaks for itself alone but speaks for its place in other things. And all of that signalling points towards something new. It's the flux of the worn-out as it disperses, before being baptized into a new form. It's a disease of old people and those who live firmly in the past/present. It's a foggy window on the future. But the future of all old people is death. Goodbye, we whisper. Goodbye! And we wave our handkerchiefs: some wet with tears, some damp from mopping up our relief, some bone dry and snapping like flags of independence. But for those who have known “Doubleness, the Disease of Life,” death can never be seen as an end. The death it brings about is birth by another name.

Ya, right.

And yet, fourteen years earlier, as I lay sprawled across a row of plastic seats in St. John's International Airport, exhausted from my first ever trip across the Atlantic, I was already exhibiting symptoms. I was relieved to see Uncle Wallace, my mother's younger brother, looking harried, and hurriedly scanning the faces of passengers in the Arrivals area. The last leg of my flight from Ireland, the piece from Halifax to St. John's, had been diverted to Gander because of fog. I had travelled six hours by school bus along the Trans-Canada Highway, drifting in and out of sleep, my head banging against cool, breath-fogged glass. I felt as if we were travelling by submarine. I could see nothing out the window except darkness and the rain running in letter-h patterns down the pane. Images kept zapping through my head. Mr. Shaky, the carpenter I met on the first leg of my journey, on the Pan Am flight from Shannon to Boston; I kept seeing his feathery blond hair, his long skinny neck and scaly wrists. His eyes had a diluted look to them, and their expression wavered somewhere between awe and terror. But more often, the recurring image was of a stewardess on that flight, a Farrah Fawcett beauty with straw hair. She had the longest fingernails I'd ever seen; they were painted white with tips of brilliant white. She smelled of oranges and baby powder. She was high-class through and through, and way out of my league, or so I thought until I overheard her in the galley talking to another stewardess. “Are you kidding me?” she snarled. “I'd rather ram my finger up my ass.”

Uncle Wallace was wearing a lime-green tracksuit with double pink stripes down both sides. In terms of fashion, he was decades ahead of his time. His hairstyle was also so eccentric as to seem like an invention of the avant garde. He covered his baldness with a comb-over, though it was as much a coil as a comb-over — a gleaming lacquered confection that began at the bun of his skull and, by some miraculous feat of engineering and design, swept forward to fall in a lank, side-parted Hitleresque do. Around his neck he wore what looked to me like a St. Christopher medal. His accent, which I remembered as being English, had almost disappeared; it was firmly mid-Atlantic. And he was also shorter than I remembered. He shook my hand, mumbled something about the parking meter, and then motioned with a twitch of his head that I should follow him.

I remember the rubbery squeak of the automatic doors, and the blast of tropical air that hit us when we walked outside. The weather was not like Uncle Wallace had described in his letters. It was raining heavily. “It's the tail end of Hurricane Vernon,” he said. “It's been a really bad year down south for hurricanes.” I peered out into the darkness, past the airport lights, expecting to see the telltale shapes of giant palms and other exotic trees. Instead, all I saw was Wallace's distress as another gust of wind uncoiled his comb-over, arranging it perpendicular to his temple where it flapped like a great fern:
Nephrolepsis exaltata
.

Wallace had changed in the nine years since I had seen him. Not only had he lost the hippie clothes—the embroidered waistcoat, the tie-dyed T-shirt, the thick corduroys, the crucifix made from bent horseshoe nails, the braided thong bracelet and the wooden-soled clogs—he also seemed to have lost his easygoing attitude. He seemed nervous, or if not nervous, then worried about something. “I hope this doesn't put you out,” he said. “I hope you don't mind, but we're having a small gathering back at the house. Just a handful of friends to celebrate the sale going through. You knew we just bought a place, right?” It was news to me, the first of several surprises that night. The next was my finding out that his dental practice was not in St. John's at all, but in a town called Carbonear, about seventy miles away. The thought of being left alone in a strange city filled me with panic. And I was less than reassured by Wallace saying that they would be in town for a long weekend every other week. “In between,” he said, “you'll have the place to yourself.”

But there were some things about Wallace that had not changed. He still had a filthy tongue. He swore every time the car hit a pothole: “Christ Fucking Jesus!” he roared when the car's undercarriage scraped the surface of the road. “These goddamn potholes. You can't see them in the rain. This city is a disgrace.” In the half-darkness, I noticed that his face had flushed pink and his head was shaking ever so slightly, just like my mother's did when she had a few glasses of wine. I found it a comforting sight. We hit another pothole. His keychain swung and bashed against the dashboard. “Jesus Fucking Bastard!”

I noticed that his keychain had the Playboy Bunny logo. My mother had told me Wallace was always popular with the girls. So, playboy Wallace was settling down. Who was the other half of that “we”? I wondered. I would soon find out.

Ten minutes later, he opened the front door to his new house, and I walked into a porch and on into a hallway the likes of which I had never before seen. The house was almost bare: there were no pictures on the walls — though a few were stacked against the fireplace in the front room—and there was practically no furniture. Colours and patterns blared at me from the miles of bare walls. Midway down the hall, a red telephone in the shape of a kidney sat on top of a cast-iron radiator. At the end of the hallway was the kitchen, where I could see four men sitting at a round wooden table. Behind them was a fish tank with several goldfish in it. The hardwood floor creaked under my desert boots.