Across the room Al mauls through one of the cardboard boxes he keeps his clothes in. Gordon buttons his shirt and watches him as he used to watch any beautiful man. It’s a gluttonous, suspenseful feeling. It’s like something stacked too high. Like something that should topple but won’t.
“Shoot,” Al mutters. He throws several odd socks out of the box. Is he looking for red ones? He has told Gordon that if you go into a queer bar where nobody knows you, wearing red socks is a sign that you’re not from the vice squad.
No, he’s looking for a navy-and-green argyle. He finds one and holds on to it as he continues his search.
“Does he pay you less if your socks don’t match?” Gordon asks. This is not as sarcastic as it sounds. For the first time he is truly curious about the sugar daddies.
Al finds the other sock and hops on one foot as he pulls it up. “You don’t know everything, Pops.”
Pops? Where did that come from? Things are sliding downhill fast. Why tonight, though, their best night so far? They did it three times. In the shower, on the chair with Al straddling his lap, then half kneeling, half standing on the chesterfield, Gordon’s forehead butting the throat of the Marlboro Man. And when Gordon was lying on the bed and drifting off he felt Al combing a hand through his hair.
“I always wanted my hair to be black,” Al said, one of his rare confidences. A few minutes later he added—or did Gordon dream this?—“I used to shoe-polish it, but you could tell.”
Al goes into the kitchen and returns wearing grey flannel trousers and with a belt in each hand. Gordon has never seen him dressed so formally. From belt to belt Al scowls, back and forth while Gordon, overcome now by an almost pleasant lassitude, watches him. Believing himself to be nothing but mildly interested, he asks, “Are we going to see each other again?”
Right past his face, missing him by an inch, one of the belts flies and lands on the bed.
“Jesus,” Gordon murmurs.
Al starts threading the other belt through the loops of his trousers. “You cuss too much,” he says.
Gordon stands there, radiating some kind of hot wave. Maybe it’s relief. After a moment he asks, “What if we meet in the hall at work?” Funnily enough, it hasn’t happened yet.
“Me, I’m blowing this turkey-trot town.”
Gordon puts on his hat and coat. He walks to the door. No, this is not relief.
“Hey, hold on a minute.”
Gordon stops. What he wouldn’t give right now. Who he wouldn’t sacrifice.
But Al is only handing him a pen. Gordon’s fountain pen. “I had to write a message,” he says.
He looks sly, up to something. Gordon’s heart starts working. “For Christ’s sake, Al—“ Hearing the profanity, he breaks off, gives a weak laugh.
Al’s eyes flicker out.
And Gordon … Gordon gets hard again. He can’t believe it. He accepts the pen and pockets it in his trousers, letting his fingers brush the tip of his erection. He can’t believe it.
“You know who you are?” Al says in a tone of having only just realized.
Gordon waits.
So does Al.
“The pornographer of lost causes,” Gordon answers at last, more to himself.
“A taker,” Al says.
Gordon blinks, uncomprehending. It’s over this time. Dead. He knows it, but his hard prick is like fingernails still growing in the morgue, so he rips apart “taker” for a speck of hope.
“Folks are either givers or takers,” Al elaborates. “You go around acting like you’re a giver but you’re a taker.” He shrugs. “Anyhow—“ He folds his Paul Bunyan arms over his chest.
“I love you,” Gordon says. Even to himself it sounds false and grotesquely inappropriate, a stupid surprise like a squirt in the face from a carnation. Al grimaces. Gordon turns. He reaches for the doorknob, tears warping his vision. “Goodbye,” he says.
“Adios,” Al says. “Watch your back.”
T
his was six years ago. When Marcy was in grade one, it must have been, because she knew how to read but Joan hadn’t been born yet.
It was morning. Marcy pushed open the bathroom door, and her father was in there, shaving. He was in his pyjama bottoms, and on his bare back there were letters.
“Al was here,” Marcy said slowly, reading.
Her father went still, holding the razor at his throat. “What did you say?”
She pointed. “On your back. It says, ?1 was here.’”
He jerked around to see in the mirror.
“Who’s Al, Daddy?”
“Jesus,” he murmured. That scared her. He whipped on his glasses, then grabbed her mother’s hand mirror and positioned it to see himself from behind. “Jesus.” He looked at her, wide-eyed.
“I didn’t do it!” Before she could back away he gripped her by the shoulders. He had never hit her, but she thought he was going to. He brought his face right up to hers. His white foam beard, his sour breath. “I didn’t!” she cried, trying to squirm free. He was hurting her.
“Shh.” With his foot he shut the door. He let go of her and began stroking her head, hard. “Honey, it’s okay, it’s okay.”
“I was just reading what it said,” she whimpered.
“I know. Honey, I know you were. Shh. Be quiet.”
He told her that it was a joke. Somebody must have done it last night, he said. Written right through his shirt when he was
Standing at the bar. Some joker. “Al?” she suggested meekly. Yes, that was right. Al. Ruining his good white shirt, which was why he swore. He said that he shouldn’t have sworn.
Then he said, “We’d better not tell Mom. You know her, she’ll have a fit. I’ll just throw the shirt out and buy a new one, and that way we won’t upset anybody. Okay? We’ll keep it a secret, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Promise?”
She promised, although she knew that she hadn’t heard the whole story, or even the true one. It didn’t make sense. Why would her mother have a fit over a measly shirt? Why would her father? And how could you write on someone’s back without the person feeling it?
When she was undressing for bed that night she saw in the mirror that both of her shoulders were bruised, front and back. After the initial awe, after she had studied and fingered the bruises and would have been disappointed if they had turned out to be dirt, she quickly pulled on her pyjama top before her mother came in. Later, under the covers, she fixed her eyes on the line of light beneath the door. What if the man, Al, opened it? She would scream. She kept touching her shoulders, pressing a little for the pain.
Still later—it would have been the next day or the day after that—she went looking for the shirt. She couldn’t find it, not in any of the garbage pails, not in the laundry basket, not balled-up somewhere in her father’s workshop. Finally she took one of his soiled shirts out of the laundry basket and wrote
AL WAS HERE
on it herself, using his good fountain pen. She then shoved the shirt into a bag of rags. Because she had crumpled the shirt up before the ink was dry, the “
L
” had stamped out an “I” and the message actually read
ALI WAS HERE
. She didn’t know this, though.
She is thirteen years old now. She has a nice boyfriend
named Al. But “Al was here” is what she writes—her secret code—where otherwise she might draw a skull and crossbones. “Al was here” also means “bruise.” Any time Marcy and her friend Pammy spot a bruise on someone they say, “Al was here,” Marcy having informed Pammy that gangsters used to say this after they had been roughed up.
“Who’s Al?” Pammy asked through her fingers.
“Al Capone,” Marcy said. “Of course.” She has become an expert liar. She has become a girl after her mother’s own heart.
Pammy is the opposite. She cannot tell a lie. Or recognize one. Or get over one. She is a person who believes everything and who is shocked by everything. One hand covering her mouth is her listening. She drives other girls crazy. “You’re so
naive,”
they say. But Marcy is in the last, flaming years of her pious period, and she has a feeling that Pammy is a lamb of God. So meek and mild. It was Pammy who pointed out that her own head is peanut-shaped—“See, I have a wide, wide forehead, then I go in here at my eyes, then out again here, and then I have this big chin”—to account for why she doesn’t have a boyfriend. “I’m not exactly a femme fatale,” she said, shocked at the idea.
To Marcy, all girls are either femme fatales or frumps. To Pammy, they’re either femme fatales or not femme fatales. Pammy can’t say frump. She can’t say anything the least bit mean or even critical, the most obnoxious behaviour alarming her only a fraction more than normal behaviour does. Still, Marcy is careful not to alarm Pammy too much, not to alarm her away. She pretends that she has only one boyfriend and she says, primly, “We
kiss,”
when Pammy petrifies herself by asking if Marcy and her boyfriend neck. It is for another girl to clue Pammy in about hickeys. The two times that Pammy has seen them on Marcy she has said—Marcy is not kidding—“Al was here.” Pretty funny, if Pammy only knew.
Actually, not that funny because it isn’t Al who gives Marcy
hickeys, it’s Gary Short, the
Telegram
paperboy. “Punk,” her mother says, fishing the newspaper out of the rose bush, but she never complains to
him,
far from it, she overtips—fifty cents, a dollar once—and even flirts, calling after him not to do anything she wouldn’t do. It’s obvious to Marcy that like everyone else her mother is afraid of getting on his bad side.
Gary Short is a criminal. When he was only eight years old he stole the stethoscope from his father’s doctor bag and tried to crack the Dominion store safe. He just strode through the meat department and up the stairs to the office, and nobody saw him, not even Miss Slitz, the old woman who was working there that day. When the alarm sounded (the hitch in Gary’s plan: an alarm set to go off after ten unsuccessful spins of the combination), Miss Slitz fainted, and the meat manager ran in to find Gary listening to her chest with the stethoscope. “She’s dead,” Gary announced. Lucky for him, she wasn’t.
Two years later he set fire to his own bed and burned down half his house. But did he? Marcy wonders if the culprit wasn’t his retarded brother, Cedric. Why isn’t Cedric at the Mother Goose Home? Marcy would like to know. Cedric scares her, his big lolling head and lumpy body, his Jack Benny imitation. “Woo-ell,” Cedric says, crossing his arms and slapping his own face.
What nobody would believe is how kind Gary is to Cedric. “Not now, okay, Ceddie?” Gary says. “Later, okay?”
“Woo-ell,” Cedric says, stumbling backwards out of the garage.
“Go watch TV and I’ll be in soon,” Gary says. Then he slides a crowbar through the handles of the garage doors and sits back up on the barrel. And Marcy, who hasn’t appreciated the interruption, resumes her stripping, undoing the neck buttons of her powder blue surgical-collared Ben Casey blouse, working her arms out of the sleeves. So as not to knock her glasses off she tugs the blouse down over her hips and steps out of it, carefully because her boots are mucky.
Her teeth chatter. Her breath smokes. Light from the setting sun slices through the slats between the wall boards and fashions gold bracelets all down her arm when she lifts it to drape her blouse on top of her navy-and-green kilt. From the other handle of the lawnmower, which has been hoisted up on a rack, hang her navy cardigan, her red wool jacket and her red-yellow-and-purple angora tam with the grapefruit-sized orange pompom. The tam was made by Sonja. Sonja knits gloves too, but she didn’t knit the white angora ones that Marcy is wearing, still wearing as she wiggles her half-slip down her legs. When it is off she holds it out like a silk sash and drops it over her kilt.
She is getting better at these stripteases. Not so hurried and clumsy, more like a lady in a magic act. She wishes she had a bra, though. Nobody in her class (nobody except for the fat, grandmotherly-looking Karen Kennelworth) wears a bra, and usually Marcy doesn’t want one, but as she manoeuvres her arms out of her undershirt she imagines reaching behind herself to undo hooks, how that would make her arms wings. How she could dangle a bra from her baby finger and then toss it at him.
No, she would never do that! She can’t even look at him. She looks straight ahead, at that piece of wood laddered in light. There or at herself, her white gloves, her clothes peeling off. She is the beautiful, elegant lady. He is the man. With her first boyfriend, Dug, she used to play a game they called “Romantic,” where the haughty lady slinked by the man who whistled and said, “Hows about a kiss, baby” and “Hey, good-looking,” and the woman said, “Flattery will get you nowhere” and “Fresh!” and slapped at his groping hands but eventually let him kiss her. Sometimes Marcy was the lady, sometimes Dug was. This switching was his idea, and led to fights.
“You
be the man,” he’d say. “No,” she’d say,
“you
be the man.”
She should have pulled down his pants, she thinks now.
That would have shown him who was the man. She isn’t serious. Her own underpants she has never pulled down for anyone. She has never had to, she has never been made to. The first time Gary suggested she take her clothes off she naturally assumed he meant all of them, and her only qualm was what if her underpants were dirty? It didn’t occur to her, either to refuse or that he wouldn’t be interested in seeing her bum.
He isn’t interested this time, either. As soon as she steps out of her undershirt he jumps down from the barrel and comes over, and she holds out her goose-bumped arms and is perfectly still to be outlined by knives. Neither of them say anything. He touches her left breast first. Her left breast is bigger than her right one, which is not saying much. Both are always sore. Always. Just him dabbing with the palm of his hand hurts. He dabs for a while then pushes her nipple with one finger, in and out, lightly, testing, as if he expects to hear a buzz. Then he starts squeezing and rubbing, not hard but it’s torture.
After a minute or so he stops squeezing and begins to rub the nipple back and forth between his thumb and forefinger, the way you turn a knob. Or a combination lock. Why does he do this? She’d give anything to be a mind reader. He is screwing a nail into her it feels like, but she doesn’t blame him, he knows not what he does. Darling, she thinks. He moves on to her right breast, and she allows her aching held-out arms to drift down and around his back. Shivering into his jacket, she inhales his steel-bar and Arrowroot-cookie smell. Oh, my dreamboat, she thinks, soft and amazed.