“Anyway,” I say, exhausted all of a sudden, “we can change the subject now if you want to.”
Sherrie looks up at me, finally. It turns out she doesn’t want to.
AND YOU KNOW
, it’s nothing really. It’s nothing I couldn’t have worked out on my own, just by putting two and two together. I see now I was too preoccupied with my own prurient imaginings—my lurid little worst-case scenarios. I can be forgiven for this, can’t I? It’s undeniable there’s a quality about Sherrie that makes a guy assume the worst. And there’s a similar quality about Jim, now that I consider it.
And at the very moment I’m considering it—this quality of Sherrie’s coupled with this quality of Jim’s—the universe rushes up to agree. The universe scrambles to provide an illustration of this principle in the person of Todd Smiley. Hovering, as he does. Looming silently, sullenly a few feet away, waiting to be taken into account. But we take him into account too late, Sherrie and I, deep in conversation as we are.
Sherrie had been saying: So it was all my fault. The whole thing with Sparrow, the whole thing with his tenure. I just knew it had to be my fault and I felt so
horrible
.
And I had been saying: Sherrie, there are lots of reasons Jim’s tenure could have been pulled.
And Sherrie was saying: But it happened right after I made the complaint. Right after, Lawrence!
And then I heard myself saying: Lots of people could have complained about Jim. You’re right—he misses classes, he doesn’t keep office hours. He … he fucks people around.
That statement—monumental as it felt—was not the part Todd heard—at least I don’t think it was. Imagine Todd
bearing witness to such blasphemy. He’d bring the temple down on all our heads.
Sherrie looked at me with her wide-open face—eyes and mouth agape.
“He
does,”
she squeaked. “He
does
fuck people around. He fucks people around, and I was
tired
of it. Are you saying he fucked
you
around too, Lawrence? Is that what you’re saying?”
I nodded. I couldn’t do more than that. The sense of betrayal had caught up with me, and my brain felt heavy and sluggish like a cloud full of rain.
And then something happened to Sherrie’s face I’d never seen before. It went ugly.
“He never read my poems,” she whispered. “I know he didn’t. One or two short ones, maybe. I would ask him about them, and I could see him faking it. I mean, half the time he wouldn’t even put any effort into it, Lawrence, he couldn’t even be
bothered
faking it. Or he’d just change the subject—I came in to talk to him about my assignment one day, and Jim just launched into this lecture on Sexton, told me I should read her. I mean, Christ!”
I kept nodding. I gave her arm a squeeze, hoping to calm her down and relay empathy without uttering further mutinies. But also I was kind of struck dumb. Sherrie’s pink face was practically pulsing. Her enormous blue eyes were squeezed into Schofield-esque pinpricks. Her teeth were even bared. This might seems strange to say, but all at once Sherrie made sense to me. Sherrie the poet, that is. In her anger.
Here’s what Todd would have seen and heard as he approached: Sherrie gone ugly, gesturing in jerks and swiping at her eyes, talking fast and squeaky. A tantalizing word or phrase might have reached him—
I know he didn’t … faking it … effort into … he’d just … him … Jim … Christ!
Me standing close, nodding urgently.
“I had such respect for him,” Sherrie was saying. “I mean,
I still do, Lawrence. Jim’s brilliant. I love him.” She stopped talking abruptly and seemed to suck for a moment on the inside of her mouth as though getting ready to spit. “That’s why it was so infuriating. I loved Jim so much and he just fucked me around. He didn’t even care.”
That’s what Todd comes in on. Those last two sentences. At least, that’s when we finally take him into account. Having just arrived, perhaps, but already veering away.
At a party like this, the problem is, you lose track. You don’t keep your attention focused where you should. It switches around, seemingly on its own accord—like when someone else is controlling the radio dial. Sherrie and I, for example, should have stayed focused on Todd—and what the universe was trying to impress upon us—instead of watching him veer, dreamy-seeming, off into the crowd. We should have called him to us, pulled him into our circle instead of letting him drift away like an unmoored ship with a cargo of gunpowder.
Things began to speed up, then, blink on and off. I lost time, found myself in the kitchen listening to vomiting, castigations, and barks coming from outside (which a peek out the window informed me were Jim, Moira, and Panda respectively), lost more time, sat beside Ruth for a while insisting that Moira was the
real
poet of the household (Moira was an oral storyteller, I maintained, embroidering outlandish dreamscapes—or something like that), until I noticed Dekker standing a few feet a way listening and grinning a little too broadly, so got up and went outside to take a piss and clear my head. Jim was still there, breathing fire, or so it seemed. It was snowing and going to snow, the temperature had dropped, the air was winter-cold, and so his breath came out like smoke. Or no—he was smoking. It
was
smoke.
He sat on the chopping block, smoking and going to
smoke, with Moira no longer in sight, but Panda spent at his feet. There Jim was.
And here I am, back in now.
I pee discreetly before preparing to say hello, but don’t have time to say hello because this is where Charles Slaughter comes in. Comes out, that is. I see him and think through my haze that there is something I should have been keeping on top of tonight. What was it again? I meant to be paying attention to something. Todd. He should be here. We haven’t talked since I walked away from his proffered palm. I have a feeling I shouldn’t keep walking away from Todd like that. And Slaughter—what about him? He keeps lurching out of place. The universe and I, we pin him neatly down under headings like “friend,” and “sane”—he rips himself off the page and blunders off, headingless, till we can pin him down again.
Then Todd does appear, almost as if I have invoked his stubby presence, which materializes in the doorway just as Slaughter is approaching the chopping block. Jim turns, chucking his cigarette into the night, and sees me standing behind him apparently playing with my groin as I tuck myself in. He sets his lips for a bemused comment, but is interrupted when Charles shoves him off the stump.
“Hey, man,” Smiley calls to Slaughter.
“Well—” says Jim from the ground, as if collecting his thoughts.
Slaughter kicks Jim.
You weren’t supposed to hear that, man
, Todd is in the middle of saying—this drowns out any further sound Jim might have made.
Jim rolls away fast, like a tumbleweed. Slaughter takes a step forward and, get this: Todd—Todd hurls himself onto Slaughter’s back.
And Panda’s gone. Panda’s lost it. Panda all but turns himself inside out. He shrieks and capers.
Todd goes flying and rolls away in awkward imitation of Jim. Slaughter takes another step forward and I am yelling
Charles, Charles Slaughter, Chuck you stop right fucking now
as Panda yells a crazed-dog version of the same thing. Jim has gotten to his feet and now hunkers on the other side of the yard, monkey arms a-dangle at his sides. He’s not bothering to protest or demand an explanation. He’s putting everything he has into being ready.
“Ugfh,”
says Todd from the ground as Slaughter takes another step away from him, toward Jim. Jim moves slightly to the side. Soon they will be circling each other like gladiators.
“Slaughter, Slaughter, look at me,”
I’m yelling. Slaughter takes another step forward.
“Look at me you—you goddamn ape!”
Slaughter takes another step forward, so I yell louder. I yell and yell—variations of the above. I force the words into higher decibels with every step he takes. My voice scrapes away at my throat like a harrow, but I keep yelling, I keep screaming. What else can I do?
Until finally Slaughter turns his head. He turns to me, the universe slows, and the five of us seem to hang in time, like planets across the void. Even Panda goes quiet, haunches trembling.
RING, RING
.
Ring, ring.
Ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring.
Oh, why.
Ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring—
“Hello!”
“Larry?”
“Yes!”
“I’m sorry. Were you … just getting up?”
I look up at my kitchen clock. It’s one in the afternoon. I am just getting up.
“No, no, no, no. No. I was doing something in the bathroom.”
“Ah.”
“Having a shower!”
“I see.”
And then I recognize the voice. My body unclenches and drops onto the couch.
“Oh my gosh. Hi, Dermot.”
“Hi,” he laughs—slightly. “You know, I can call back.”
“No!”
“No?”
“I mean—I’m sorry. I am just getting up, actually, I lied.”
“I can call back,” says Schofield again.
“No, it’s great to talk to you. Sorry, I’m just all fogged up.”
I scratch. I’m cold—the temperature has dropped to a ridiculous degree over the weekend. It’s going to snow again—you can taste the crystal in the air. I’m naked. I reach behind me and pull at the afghan draped across the back of my couch. It’s an identical pattern to the one in Janet’s apartment, only composed of man-colours like black and green. Crocheted by my grandmother’s own two grudging hands.
“I just found your letter in my mailbox this morning, Larry, and I had some time, thought I might as well give you a call,” says Dermot. “The poems were great, by the way.”
I’m warm.
“The poems?”
“The ghazals? A bit unorthodox in terms of some of the content, strictly speaking. But some compelling stuff. There’s an energy there.”
“I wrote them all in one afternoon,” I tell him.
“Is that right?”
“I wrote sixteen of them! I can send you the rest if you—”
“Well, I’d encourage you to send them into
Re:Strain
, eventually, yes. And, my goodness, if you have sixteen of them, don’t hesitate to shop them around, Larry, you won’t hurt my feelings. We’d like to publish one or two from this batch if that’s all right with you. As long as the editorial board okays it.”
“Don’t let Joanne read them.”
Dermot laughs. “I have some sway with Joanne, Larry, I wouldn’t worry.”
“Which ones,” I ask. “Which ones do you want to publish?”
“Well, I very much like the ones about the wax museum.”
“The Hollywood Horrors?”
“Yes. Don’t tell me that’s a real place.”
“It is! In Summerside! You never went when you were there?”
“I must have missed that,” Dermot confesses.
I lay back on the couch. “What did you like about them?” I can’t stop myself from asking.
Dermot chuckles, hearing the loopy joy in my voice. “Well, they have a certain vividness, I think. They really evoke the notion of childhood as a kind of Gothic landscape. This wax museum, it’s a great metaphor. The intermingling of glamour with the grotesque. Hollywood Horrors.”
“I didn’t even send you all the poems I wrote about it.”
“I can see it carrying a whole book,” says Dermot. “You should think about that.”
I don’t answer him. I’m thinking about that.
“Surely,” ventures Schofield after a while, “Jim has told you something similar? You mentioned Jim’s been overseeing the work?”
“Jim,” I repeat, and have to pause because it’s the first time I’ve spoken
Jim
today, and the word still brings on pain.
Another Friday. We all sit staring into the void of the blackboard. There was no notice on the door. Dekker hasn’t yet come bustling in to substitute.
Fifteen minutes, we’re still sitting. Everyone’s pre-class conversations have long since died to silence.
“You know,” someone announces in back, “to hell with this.” He scrapes his chair, and walks out. A couple of people follow after a moment.
Another few minutes, and the class has nearly emptied itself except for the four of us.
Sherrie says, “We should call. We should call and see how he is. Has anyone spoken to him since Friday night?”
I stayed overnight but don’t feel like telling anybody this. I don’t feel like describing the Arsenault household in the scarred morning light.
“I thought you said he was okay,” says Claude, turning around. His lips are still pretty swollen. He kind of looks like Mick Jagger.
“He was—he wasn’t hurt at all,” Todd hurries to assure him. “Chuck only shoved him a couple of times.”
Todd’s voice is loud. It echoes in the almost empty classroom. He looks over at me like a dog desperate for a pat.
“Because of Lawrence,” he adds. “Campbell got everybody out there, on top of him, so fast.”
“What
about
Slaughter, anyway?” I say, pointedly not to Todd. “What happened to Slaughter, has anyone seen him?”
“He went to the Mariner, afterward,” says Sherrie, leaning
her face on her hands. At this moment she looks to me like one of those remote, round-faced women you see in Renaissance paintings—women whose very blankness meant the height of desirability. “Dekker took him home, but he went out again. I heard he went and tried to pick a fight with Scarsdale.”
“Have you talked to him?” I ask.
Sherrie keeps herself blank. “Nobody’s talked to him. Nobody’s seen him.”
“Jesus Christ!” says Todd. “Isn’t Scarsdale some kind of gangster?”
Above the blackboard, the minute hand moves. We all hear it click into place.
“It’s a nice day,” Claude remarks. We’ve ended up walking down Bridge Street together. I’m on autopilot for Carl’s—tea and studying. Sherrie’s drifted back to her dorm. Todd didn’t even have it in him to hover very long.
“Cold though,” I gripe. “It’s going to snow again.”
“Maybe not,” says Claude.
We trudge away, the sun in our eyes. The ranks of students downtown have noticeably thinned. Midterms. They’re all in their hovels, panicked over books.