The Man Game (27 page)

You see, he said. Even under these conditions, I'm still able to provide for you. And for Toronto.

Yes, I know that. She sponged his back.

What I mean to say is—you remember how my father, how he …

Yes, you've become the bookkeeper that Toronto never would accept.

I've proven him wrong, and look at me. The victory is all the greater for my impairment.

We both knew Vancouver would be much more hospitable to your thinking than he ever was, or ever believed a city could be.

I so rarely admit to a personal triumph, Sammy said solemnly. Thank you.

And still I wish you'd tell him what's happened. And your mother.

He didn't answer. She took a cigarette out and lit it, pinned up a mountain of her hair. She leaned to the sink and ticked the ash. Her body seemed ever so long. She opened her mouth and smoke shimmied up her face. Then she swung forward and sandwiched the sponge between her fists and
lathered it in soap and water, brought it up to scrub his neck, behind his ears.

Through curls of cigarette smoke, she said: You understand how I must keep busy? You have your work. In my own way, this is my work as well. But let's concentrate on this moment, and only this moment. I'm so lonely for you. Lonely for your embrace. We never kiss anymore. I want to kiss you, Sammy.

Has it come to that time already … you want a whole man?

She put the cigarette to his lips. How do you mean? She paused once, then twice. Do you mean in the
sense
?

Yes, he said. In the sense. Only in the sense, in fact. He took a few puffs that tasted of her red apple lips before she put the cigarette back in her own mouth. I don't want you to leave me, Molly. You know how much I care for you, I love you. I love you so much that—. Another man for—. It hurts to say it. A man to satisfy what I can't.

She continued to soap him down even more thoroughly, kissed him on the cheek. This is the kind of conversation I've always imagined having, she said with true surprise, and affection he could feel.

I want what's best for you.

What tragic magnanimity you possess, intelligent man. I've often wondered—, she said, and trailed off. She seemed to be ignoring him entirely. Idly, like a slow square creature, the sponge bobbed down his body leaving a milty ooze of soap along the hairs of his chest, her grip squeezing free the sponge's white froth. It came to rest in his pelvic bowl. It stayed there hidden beneath the pearly water while she finished off the cigarette. She scooped the exhausted sponge from the water and rung it out until its wide pores filled with air and it relaxed back to its original shape. Then she smothered it all over again with a damp cake of soap and down it went into the water—sea sponge to meet sea lamprey.

Standing now, she neatly undressed. The bone buttons of her petticoats and skirts came from their slits with ease and soon all her clothes were rumpled on the floor. To Sammy, sunk in his bath, looking up at the vista of her long body, she
was uncharitably magnificent—oh, swaying a little at her hips with one knee bent so her heel was off the ground and her big toe could obligingly tickle the hardwood. He felt something stir in him that he related to curtains, perhaps stage fright, perhaps romance. He was a heavy tide to her moon-white skin, and he loved her deeply.

What a tease. She did a ginger impression of a tendu, then brazenly
rond de jambed
the raised leg over the tub for him to get a good eyeful of her wry zone.

You'll catch cold, he hardly said, briefly hating her for what seemed to be some kind of a sort of satanic impulse to fuck his mind.

I want to make love to you, she said. (He was so right, there was a devil in her.)

I don't. I can't.

Sammy, have you already stopped thinking a me?

Don't make me feel this way.

Her lips parted and he could see the edge of her tongue where it floated over her teeth. Don't you crave me?

Don't be cruel.

Her movements were smooth. Basic seventeen-year-old naked beauty. She leaned over the tub to begin her task again, to clean her man. Her carved torso was dappled with soap bubbles. A breast fell against his lips. Preconsciously he licked its hard ruby until his thirst for more of what he could never have was throbbing against his temples.

He had to get this load off his mind: I want you, too. Molly, Molly, he said.

Mmm, she said, wet to the wrists.

The sponge was such a delicate slimed tool, its spoor of lather clouded his hips. She soaped him down between the legs where he felt nothing. She jostled and padded lubriciously over the bagged weight of his former virility where he felt nothing. His bobbing eel, around which the sponge most wanted to grovel, felt nothing. Weep weep, cry cry. He was powerless, nothing but h-h-hot anxiety rose in him. If he closed his eyes long enough maybe possibly he
could contain his filthy soul from blurting out and curdling in the tub.

Have you tricked me this whole time, Sammy?

Tricked you?

She stepped into the milky water to share the tub. Her fingers in one of his ears, her mouth against the other, not speaking but still using her tongue. Sure enough, he saw it, there it was, mesmerized, sturdy, poised for her wet grasp. She lowered herself gently and with utmost grace and purpose onto the buoy of his lap, and if anything was possible, then before she left the house to embrace a life with other men, he'd give her all his coagulated love.

The sour odour of fish tails boiling forever boiling. Wet grease bubbles landed indelicately on the floor around the miniature cookstove. In the middle of the apartment she sat and stirred and stirred the hotpot. She sat hunched over the boil, dredging cabbage and tofu to the surface of the oily broth. A fishtail occasionally rose to the top of the soup and slid down the bowl edge and back under the simmer.

An infant slept below the hag's bosom, resting in the bend in her arm.

The only proper light came through the window blocked by their overcoats and bobbyhats and moustaches, so she was almost entirely shadowed. The darkened room bore no more resemblance to domesticity than a rotten tooth or a bullet hole.

Smells like something dead washed up on a beach in here, said Clough.

Now you watch here, Clough, said Constable Miller. He put his hand on Clough's shoulder to direct him back to the dirty windowpanes and the street below. He pointed to the fruit stand where two men kept shop: one mangy little old man with a stooped back and a pair of clippers in his hand, and a larger, unmoving figure in a leather apron with a
great twisting moustache and pigtails that hung down each side of his chest. You see the big guy there in the apron? said the constable. That's our watchman. Minute he gets a boo we're on the street, he takes one step back, presses the buzzer to send the signal, and everyone vanishes. What we need from you, Clough, are you listening to me?

Say now, I'm listening, for the love a—

Well then quit staring at that old lady, she ain't no criminal.

Staked out along with the constable and Clough were two other po-lice who liked to chortle and cluck, as interchangeable as pigeons lazing on the shoulder of a statue. One held an axe and the other had his arms crossed, letting his billy club swing to and fro like a stiff black tail whenever he moved. In their doublebreasted black uniforms with the two rows of big white buttons, they really were less than pigeons, thought Clough, less than ornaments, they were dominoes.

Pay attention to the street, you old hophead, said Miller. See how this watchman does business.

At first all he saw was Chinamen. Beyond the window and down on the street they crossed to and fro, dodging in between one another, pausing on occasion to greet a neighbour, as indistinguishable as a plague of pharoah ants, thought Clough, like souls without spirits, holding in the grip of their infestation the future of Canadian culture. He felt the urge again to stare at the creep and her hotpot.

See how nobody walks too close to the buildings? said Miller. That's to make way for the runners taking numbers for the lotteries. See, there's one now. See they practically run sideways, they stick so tight to the walls.

I seen two runners come at each other from opposite directions, eh, said the po-lice with the obsession for his cudgel, and the one going that way, he just plain old jumped over the one going this way, and the boy just ducked down a bit to let him go.

They got lotteries going by the hour, said Miller. The fan tans're taking bets and numbers, and their runners stick close to the walls going back and forth. So don't loiter against the
walls or you're going to cause a jam. Now look, Clough, how the watchman sees who wants in. He gives a signal, they cross and pretend to inspect the fruit … see, here we go.

Not even a word of greeting before the fiends slipped into the shadows behind the watchman and through a narrow breezeway between wood crates stamped BLUE CHERRY FARMS. A moment later, two others went right up to the watchman requesting entrance, and he turned them away.

You see what's going on here?

Yes, I do.

This is a big operation. There's a lot wrong with the world, and one day we'll clean out the whole mess. For now, we concentrate on the gambling den. I suspect this fan tan rakes in a thousand dollars a day from this one nest.

A thousand …

He understood what he was supposed to do now. The watchman was nothing more than a lock on a door, and Clough would be its pick. So be it. It got him in. The longer Clough stared at him the more completely conspicuous the watchman looked. The coolies themselves took on a sinister pall: not only were they corruptors of tradition, labour, and language, but also promotors of addiction, immorality, and greed.

It's a maze in there, said Constable Miller. You think you're going one way, instead you're going the next. Once they moved into the building, eh, the fan tan rebuilt the insides. There's hidden
rooms
. Whole floors are disguised. One room in there's a
gambling den
. And we got to find it. And I do expect a few collars out a this as well, don't I, boys?

Yes, sir, they said. The duller one heaved the axe off his shoulder and leaned on the handle like it was a cane, his legs bowed like a real lumberjack's boy.

Don't spook the Chinee, the constable told Clough. Like I says, he's got a mean tool, eh. Down his pants he carries a stick a bamboo with a rusty black blade from an old butcher's cleaver tied to it. How drunk are you?

I'm fine. I can do this.

Listen to me for once. You got to be drunk to do this. But you can't be too drunk, you kumtuks? Not so drunk you fuck it all up.

I won't.

You better not.

With his whisky bottle back in his fist Clough was down on the street mingling with the coolies, laundrymen, and mystics, inconspicuous as any drunk hobo looking to sober up at the nearest bar. Even in his ostensible stupor (however close to the truth his performance was that day) he easily passed some poor Chinaman dragging a cobbled-together barrow of fresh fruit and rotting vegetables.

Slow on the road, eh, he said.

The rutted, walnut face turned to him, the eyes intimations of a greater, more profound void. Suddenly the face stretched and he gave Clough a wide toothless smile and said: Kwinnum kwinnum.

Yes, I see, said Clough, how much is it for the cuke with all the mould on it, eh?

Ya ya, kwinnum.

And are them bananas meant to ooze from their skins or is that a—

Then he waited as the watchman stepped away from the fruit store to the edge of the boardwalk where he accomplished two things: a wider scan up and down Pender Street, just by chance failing to see Clough, and the release of a torrent of mucus from one nostril, then the other, onto the packed-dirt road where it was all soon trampled into the dust. As he swept away the remains from his face, Clough was on him. He took the watchman by the shoulder and said in his most wretchedly slurred halitosis: You got any lemons, sah?

The watchman took two steps back, his right hand instinctively reaching behind for the bamboo, but Clough, lightweight and sloppy, was already draped over him again, pulling the arm away from the butcher's axe, harmlessly drunk, unable to stand on his own two feet without help from a stranger.

You got lemons, sah?

Ya ya, said the watchman, trying to steady Clough on his buckling ankles. Ovah heeya, okay?

Hey, lissen, I got a prop-zition for ya, okay? How's aboot if I do your job for an hour and let you take a break, eh, and when you get back, I get myself
three
fresh lemons, sah? Fair deal?

No, no, ha ha, said the watchman, too busy for you.

Oh, I can handle it, sah. I worked in coal mines for five years until my assident. I can sure as spit work in a fruit stand, sah.

Ha ha, ya ya, said the watchman, letting himself be entertained, trying to keep Clough's odour away from his own, ya, you good worker, okay, I see, ha ha.

We're all hard workers, eh, you and me both. Why, I bet you could use a rest just as much I could use them lemons.