“Yes, Jim?” Thinking of the cushions remind me of the phone call where Jim was crying. It’s hard to believe, looking at him now. He is all smiles and swinging gorilla arms.
“How ya doing?” He shakes me by the shoulder. “Ya good?”
“I’m great!” I beam up at him.
“How ya like that record? Ya like that record?”
It’s an old-time country-and-western album twirling around on Jim’s lopsided turntable. To my ears it sounds like a series of squeaks and whimpers. “I love it,” I tell him.
“Goddamn right,” says Jim. “That’s Hank Snow right there.”
“Oh,” I say.
“Why don’t you play some fuckin’ music from this century?” Slaughter shouts from his throne. He’s sitting so far away, I don’t see how he can keep track of the conversation.
Jim waves one of his fanlike hands in Chuck’s direction. “The philistine in our midst will not be acknowledged.”
“You call me
Phyllis?”
demands Chuck, jerking forward in mock anger. Jim guffaws; his overbite could eat the world. I’ve never seen him guffaw. He’s very different overall than how he usually seems. For one thing, he’s got an accent like Moira’s.
“We were just talking about the petition,” says Todd, practically jumping up and down in his spot on the floor for Jim’s attention.
Jim whirls around in the centre of the room—the circle of us—like we’re all playing some kind of kid’s birthday game.
Button, button, who’s got the button?
I haven’t seen him sit since I arrived.
“Oh, the petition,” he drawls. “God love you fellas. How’s it going?”
“We start collecting signatures Monday,” I say.
“Well, God love you. All typed up and everything?”
“Yep,” says Todd, before I can utter
Sherrie
.
Jim is looking restless from just standing engaging in conversation. I can see his long limbs starting to twitch with the desire to wander around and poke and arrange things. He makes a move toward the record player.
“Oh, I just gotta play this one. You fellas gotta hear this. I bought this down in the states—Kentucky,” he says, thumbing through a series of albums stacked beneath the turntable. Then his accent shifts. “Not that I necessarily approve of American cultural infiltration, in fact I’ve pretty much had it up to here, everywhere you turn in this country you run up against Yankee garbage, but this kind of stuff, now—this took place long before the nation as a whole sold itself to the highest bidder. This could cauterize the wounds of that particular transaction if anyone gave a shit anymore, which no one does …” He finds what he’s looking for, shuffles it out of its jacket, and holds the record out to check for scratches and dust. Then, with the delicacy of a surgeon, he places it onto the turntable and lowers the needle.
More whimpers and squeaks. We all sit and listen for a moment, Jim with his eyes closed. Keeping them closed, he says, “I just want to thank you boys again for everything you’re doing. Except for you, Slaughter—as usual you’ve done dick-all.” His eyes pop open, twinkling, to see that Slaughter is showing him a listless middle finger. “Anyhow,” Jim resumes following a short, toothy guffaw, “I want you all to know how much I appreciate it. But tonight’s not the night for worrying about any of that bullshit. Tonight’s just a night for friends, all right? Friends and poetry.”
He smiles down on us like Jesus in a painting. The next moment, he’s tornadoing into the kitchen, shouting merry orders at his wife.
Three hours later and dinner is yet to be served and I am starving and have guzzled three beers and am having a wonderful time. Jim designated the evening a night of friends and poetry, so Todd and I got right to it—the poetry part, at least. We poked around the bookshelves together at Jim’s
invitation, me feeling overwhelmed by all the stuff I hadn’t read and knew I should—
George Herbert! I haven’t even gotten to George Herbert yet!
—and Todd throwing out commentary about everything, as if he’d devoured every single volume by junior high. (“Oh, Jacques Prévert—God it’s been such a long time …”) At some point we started discussing Rimbaud, who I think was a prophet and who Todd keeps saying was a fruit. I wave my arms and tell him that’s no kind of argument, but Todd says he doesn’t care, he thinks Rimbaud stank and was a fruit.
“Campbell,” interrupts Charles Slaughter after having sat listening to us with his face in a knot of distaste. “It’s bad enough you like poetry, are you telling me you like
fag
poetry?”
“Look!” I huff, aware I’m being baited but enjoying it somewhat. “It’s
all
fag poetry. I mean, poetry is faggy in general, I’ve accepted that long ago—”
“Well, this is pretty much the thrust of my complaint,” says Chuck.
“Excuse me,” Todd interrupts. “Poetry is
not
‘faggy in general.’ I don’t know what you guys think you’re talking about. Robert Service!”
I groan and hold my head. “It rhymes!” I say before I can recall that Todd’s poetry rhymes too.
“So what?” thunders Todd.
Chuck spreads his hands. “Sorry, man,” he says. “Rhyming is gay.”
Dekker has his fingers entwined across his chest, very much the professor. “The future of literary discourse,” he remarks.
“I mean,” I say, “I’ve been told my whole life poetry is not manly. Okay! I accept that! It’s not manly—fuck it, I like it anyway.”
Todd shakes his whole body like a wet dog. “No, no, no, that’s the old way of thinking. Campbell, you’re living a
hundred years in the past.” He holds his fist in front of my face and starts counting off fingers. “It’s
not
about rich people, it’s
not
about privilege and decadence, it’s
not
a bunch of counts and lords walking around in a field of daffodils, wandering lonely as a cloud wearing monocles and cravats. It’s about real people living real lives! Working and fucking and hunting and scraping out a living … and
community
and
family
.”
“Family?” I repeat, horrified.
“Todd,” interrupts Dekker, “Rimbaud was no aristocrat.”
“Yeah, but my point is,” says Todd, turning feverishly to glance at the actual authority in our midst, “it’s not about that visionary shit anymore. It’s about
real
life and
real
people. The concrete. Blood, sweat, and tears.”
“Visionary shit,” muses Dekker.
I’m about to tell Todd he is crazy. If poetry is about real life and real people, then I should be writing about Grandma Lydia’s sugar cookies and working at the mini-putt all summer. I should be writing about my dad’s curling sweater. Poetry—I’m about to quote T.S. Eliot—is an escape from reality, not an embrace of it. Or something like that. I don’t quote it because I’ll never hear the end of it from Todd if I get it wrong. But
escape
is the operative word.
It’s an escape, an escape!
I want to wave my arms and yell. Then Todd shuts me up. He throws down his trump card, as it were.
“Like Jim writes,” he says, folding his skinny white arms.
“Like I write,” says Jim, emerging sweaty from the kitchen. “I assume you’ve been discussing
brilliant fucking poetry
up to this point.”
“Yeah, we have,” drawls Charles Slaughter. “I’m about ready to shit my pants just to change the subject.”
“Don’t do that,” advises Jim. “Dinner’s served.”
What time is it, ten o’clock? Eleven? I stand up and my brain sort of wobbles in its fluid, reminding me of last month’s hangover. I should be careful. I should eat a big
dinner. I should ask for some water. I look over at Todd and am gratified to see him stagger minutely and check to see if I’m looking.
Jim leads us to his huge slab of a dining-room table, covered with what appears to be a bedspread. There are rolls and butter and the two bottles of wine and a pile of knives and forks sitting in the centre of it, waiting to be claimed. Moira appears, cigarette dangling from the middle of her mouth, carrying a steaming cauldron that appears to weigh more than she does. She hefts it onto the table with a ponderous
slosh
.
“It took so long,” she tells us, “because
this one
wanted dumplings.” She points across the table at Jim. Lydia used to threaten to chop off fingers whenever we pointed. Like the farmer’s wife, with a carving knife, in “Three Blind Mice.”
Jim passes out cutlery, intoning, “You don’t have stew without dumplings,” like he’s quoting Cicero or someone.
“They’re just flour and water, and we already have rolls,” Moira gripes, taking a seat. “I never made the damn things before in my life.”
Dekker reaches to open one of the bottles of wine. “You weren’t in there all night slaving over them, I hope,” he says to Moira.
“No, no.” She leans back in her chair, looking perfectly relaxed to be out among us at last. I had thought perhaps she was shy. “I got a TV in there to keep me occupied.”
Dekker pops the wine and pours Moira a glass, which she seizes.
“Go easy on that,” Jim tells her, filling bowls for each of us. He passes me one.
“This smells amazing,” I say.
“Yes, yes,” says Moira—I don’t know to which one of us she is responding. “The potatoes wouldn’t cook neither.”
I poke at my stew. The potatoes are in a near-liquid state, like porridge.
“Larry! You didn’t get a dumpling!” scolds Jim, splashing a mound of dough into the centre of my bowl. There are no napkins, so I wipe the splatters from my face with the sleeve of my graduation sweater.
Todd is already eating. “This is great!”
Slaughter is already finished. “I’d like another of them doughy things.”
Dekker is intrigued by his dumpling. “What do you call these again, Jim?”
“Dumplings! Just like mother used to make. Some people call them ‘doughboys’ in these parts. Soak up the juice.”
“Hm,” says Dekker, chewing.
Jim pours everyone a glass of wine, placing each glassful beside the bottles of beer we all brought to the table. I realize, in my usual overly-self-conscious way, that this is one of the first sit-down dinners I’ve ever been to where a blessing has not been said. It leaves me with a strange feeling of incompletion—or maybe it’s something as banal as a violated sense of my own entrenched Presbyterian propriety.
At that moment Jim raises a glass, as if he’s read my mind, felt my itch for ceremony. He hasn’t even let himself sit down yet.
“To friends and poetry.”
“Oh, Christ,” Charles Slaughter sighs, wiping his mouth with the bedspread tablecloth.
“All right,” amends Jim, laughing. “Poetry later. To friends. To good friends—the real thing.”
We raise our glasses and clink. I stand to make sure my glass connects with Jim’s—we’re on opposite sides of the table from one another. He looks me in the eye and winks.
Somehow I end up on the couch beside Moira. I am kind of annoyed. When I got up to go to the bathroom I had been
having a pretty wonderful conversation with Jim about what Todd said earlier. How poetry’s not about visionary shit anymore, or being written by fops and courtiers about their pansified concerns. Jim warmed me with his response to Todd, he warmed me to my centre like a hot gulp from the teapot. He said, in essence, Todd was wrong. He said Todd is excited by the kind of poetry that is being written now, and for good reason—because it speaks to him personally, it speaks to his background. Suddenly the experience of people like us
(us!)
is no longer being dismissed, explained Jim. It counts for something. But that doesn’t mean, he said, that we don’t have anything to learn from those who have come before us.
“Rimbaud was just some hick from a farm!” I burbled at this point.
“Rimbaud was just some hick from a farm,” agreed Jim.
Like us, like us
. “He didn’t let that limit him. He didn’t let that stifle his imagination.”
“That’s exactly what I was trying to say!”
I was bursting to talk about a hundred other things with Jim, realizing this was the moment I’d been waiting for since the day I came to Timperly. Intimate friendship with Jim Arsenault, conversing like old pals over beers in his living room. I could hardly contain myself. At that moment, however, the same was true of my bladder—I hadn’t used the bathroom since I’d arrived, afraid I might miss an opportunity just like this one. So I excused myself, wincing with pain and reluctance, and made my way to the kitchen. I had to go through the kitchen to get to the bathroom—like in a lot of old houses, it had been installed as close to the wood stove as possible. Grandma Lydia has a similarly unappetizing set-up in her evil, be-doilied hut.
The kitchen looked as though a couple of bags of flour had exploded therein, followed by a minor typhoon. The strangest thing, however, was the dog. There was a dog just
sitting there, in the middle of the flour, staring at me as if I was the bizarre apparition instead of it. I didn’t remember seeing a dog last time I was at Jim’s. As I stared back, it got to its feet, went to the corner of the room to acquire a brownish tennis ball, carried the tennis ball back to where it—the dog—had originally been sitting, and placed it—the ball—on the floor. Then it sat down to resume looking at me. When I smiled, it ducked its head and nudged the ball so that it rolled toward my feet.
I kicked the ball slightly, heading to the toilet, but the dog sprang to its feet and began to spin around in rapid circles, barking its head off. The thing looked to be taking a fit—I was expecting to see foam at any moment. It wouldn’t stop barking. I shushed at it and waved my arms, which made it bark louder. Somehow I’d driven Jim’s dog insane.
“Don’t throw that dog the ball!” Moira shouted from the next room.
“Okay!” I sang back. “Shh!” I said to the dog. The dog shrieked barks back at me, so loud its voice cracked. I thought it was going to be sick.
“If you throw the ball, it just gets him more excited!” Moira yelled.
“Okay!” I ran to the bathroom and shut the door. The barking stopped like a recording had been switched off.
I stood there for a while after I’d used the toilet, looking around. There was no tub, no shower either. I wondered where Jim and Moira bathed. I explored the medicine cabinet. Aspirins and anti-flatulent.