The Petty Details of So-And-So's Life (10 page)

“Because Dad said I could,” Blue shouted when Elaine went ballistic.

“Your father has no right—” she continued yelling, but Blue walked straight past her, out the door, and into the street, leaving her anger to bounce off the walls and come hurtling straight back at her.

Blue got a job as a busboy in a fancy-ish restaurant, scraping bird shit off patio furniture and occasionally stealing tips as compensation. Pulling out chairs for women with peroxide-blonde hair and men with thick rugs on their heads who wrote off lunches during which they talked about their affairs. Blue continued living at home and spent most of his money on dope. He wondered where he would next see
Oliver. He wanted Oliver to see him: he hoped his father would be proud to see that he'd left the schoolyard and found a grown-up way of earning his keep.

While Blue was spending his money on dope, Elaine was spending hers on Scotch, and Emma was praying some strange and miraculous occurrence would happen and transport her out of her horrible life. Oliver, she supposed, was busy schmoozing his way through life with monopoly money. Maybe he was standing on a street corner begging for funds in exchange for ideas. “I'm an ideas man, Emma,” she remembered how he used to say. “It's just a question of hooking up with the right company. I should get paid for my ideas.”

Emma could picture it. Oliver in a windowless room on the twenty-eighth floor of some high-rise building in Toronto being paid to spend the day thinking his great thoughts. “Take a dictation, will you, Margie?” he would shout into a speakerphone. “Immigrants,” he would start. “The solution is finally within reach …”

She'd had no exchange with Oliver. “Do you still see Dad sometimes?” she asked her brother.

“I thought you didn't want to know.”

“I don't really. But I do want to know why he comes to see you and not me. I don't get it.”

“Maybe you remind him too much of Mum,” Blue shrugged.

“But I'm nothing like Mum. Fuck. Am I?” Nothing could be worse than being a brittle and bitter alcoholic with a bad perm and no friends. She'd rather be an earthworm, created out of some dismembered bit of her own body.

“Kinda,” he shrugged.

“Like the way I look?”

“Yeah. And sometimes the way you act.”

“What do you mean?” she asked defensively.

“Ahh, forget it. I don't mean anything.” He had been plucking at straws. Oliver continued to seek out his son because there seemed to be no end to the things he wanted to say to him. Insults, criticisms, cruelties. Without them, Blue wouldn't know who he was. Emma was actually much more like Oliver than Elaine. Oliver had removed himself and they were all supposed to keep on living. Emma was quite capable of doing the same.

Emma and Blue had started to live separate lives, half-lives with uncomfortably sticky edges. When Blue dropped out of school, Emma started to seek refuge in anonymous public spaces. She would pace around parks, determine their geographic centre and lie there for hours at a time even if the ground was covered in dog shit, even if there was frost on the grass on which she lay.

Once a week, she took the black-robed shell that housed her molten interior to the public library. The library tamed her angry soul. She sat in lumpy chairs and went through trashy novels like cotton candy—sickly sweet, all fluff and melt, immediate gratification subsiding into craving for substance leading to yet again more sickly sweet.

On the heels of another predictable ending, she would look up at the acoustic tiles of the ceiling and connect the dots. But on the heels of one particularly trashy ending, somebody sneezed. She looked up at the sneezer with disdain, her routine interrupted, but the boy-man of indeterminate age sitting across from her was so absorbed in his
Scientific American
that he didn't look up. She kept staring. She coughed. Still nothing. She was determined to provoke him. He was
determined to remain unaware. He was so clean-looking that she was sure he must squeak. Must get straight As. She noticed drool coming from the corner of his mouth and a vein pulsating on his forehead.

The following Saturday, he was sitting in exactly the same chair. She plopped herself down dramatically in the opposite chair and cranked her Walkman up to its most deafening level. She pretended to read but she must have been singing out loud because when she looked up, he was mouthing something at her.

“What?” she shouted. She couldn't hear a thing outside her ear-phoned world.

“I said, do you fancy yourself a Caterpillar Girl?” she heard the boy-man saying in an English accent as she pulled her earphones off.

“Do I what?” Emma asked.

“It's The Cure, right?” he said.

“Yeah. So?”

“Do you fancy yourself a ‘Caterpillar Girl'?” he repeated.

“I don't know what you mean. What do you mean, ‘fancy'? A fancy caterpillar?”

“Fancy, as in ‘take a fancy to.' Like.”

“You mean do I
like
caterpillars?”

“Not to worry. Sorry to have disturbed you,” he said somewhat sarcastically, and went back to his reading.

Emma put her earphones back on and stared at the cover of the magazine he was reading. Stared through it to a place she couldn't see. Are you there, mister? she silently wondered.

He was there again the following Saturday. Reading the
New England Journal of Medicine
this time. Emma couldn't resist sitting down across from him and asking him if he fancied himself.

“Do you mean in some kind of autoerotic way?” he asked her.

“Yeah, sure,” she smirked.

“I'm not a wanker, if that's what you're trying to ask,” he laughed.

“No, I'm sure you're not,” she said.

It sort of started from there somehow, with him saying a lot of things Emma didn't really understand, and Emma telling jokes that fell like lead balloons, but neither of them budging from their chairs. Emma didn't know whether he was a loser or whether he thought she was, but there seemed to be a strange tug of war going on between them, as if they were both pulling on a piece of fishing line. It was unclear which one of them was holding the rod and which one was caught on the hook. Neither of them wanted to move too abruptly and have the line snap back in their face.

Over the course of several Saturdays, Emma found that, despite her resistance, her angry poetry was starting to yield to even greater clichés—ones about (God forbid) longing and love, although she used every other word possible. Weeks passed in this way until the boy-man, whose name was Andrew, asked Emma if she wanted to come and see a band playing at McMaster University, where he was a physics student.

“Sure, why not?” Emma shrugged, cool and cavalier, although saying yes propelled her into an epic clothing crisis for the rest of the week where she tried on every item in her closet and thought she was fat—fatter than fat, obese, criminally so—despite what the mirror said,
the lying mirror
.

She applied toothpaste to the zit that emerged the morning of their date and thought about cancelling because of it. Fortunately, he didn't seem to notice. He picked her up in a battered Suzuki jeep without any heat, and they drove to Hamilton, where they spent the night dancing and drinking beer. Emma thought the beer tasted like piss and would
have said as much if she weren't so determined to look cool. She plugged her nose and swallowed it instead.

He escorted her out of the hall some time after midnight and she promptly threw up all over his shoes. She sat in the passenger seat beside him with her head between her knees the whole way back to and beyond Niagara Falls. They pulled into a circular drive in front of a huge house that seemed to stand alone in the middle of a wooded park overlooking the Niagara Gorge. He left his vomit-covered shoes on the front porch and then, once they were inside, Emma threw up on the Persian rug in the front hall. “Not to worry,” he assured her. “There are plenty of others.” He hoisted Emma over his shoulder and climbed the stairs with her alternately groaning and apologizing.

They slept in a four-poster bed in their clothes and she woke up in the night and listened to his breathing, inhaling the sweet smell of alcohol leaking from his skin. He was nothing more than a gentle body in sleep, nothing to be afraid of, and she gingerly traced her finger down his tanned, hairless arm.

Emma woke in a huge room with dark wood panelling and plush mahogany drapes. “Who lives here?” she whispered to the boy-man lying next to her.

“I do,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Alone?”

“For the time being,” he acknowledged somewhat sadly. “It's the house my mother grew up in. She inherited it after my grandparents died. My parents are only here during the holidays. They teach in Montreal and my sister is away at school.”

“But doesn't it give you the creeps living here alone?”

“Sometimes,” he nodded. “It's a little big. A little empty.”

“My house is like a shoebox,” Emma said. “There's nowhere to hide. That's why I come to the library all the time. To have some privacy.”

“That's funny,” he said. “I go for company.”

“I would love to have all this room to be alone.”

“Trust me, the novelty wears off. It gets lonely. But you're welcome here. I mean, to spend some time here if you want. I wouldn't mind trading you.”

He couldn't possibly mean that, she thought. Trade me for what? And have me here? Throwing up on Persian rugs and breaking mirrors and clogging the bidet? I'm not the most domestic of creatures. Boys had never been particularly nice to her. She knew it was because she wasn't pretty, didn't have big tits, and didn't wear inviting makeup and a Wonder Bra like the other girls at school. They still called her a loser and when they really want to be cruel, a dyke. She hadn't outlived her reputation as the girl who preferred hermaphrodites to boys.

“What's this?” he asked her, fingering the tooth around her neck.

“Dinosaur tooth.”

“Is that right?” he laughed. “And where does one get a dinosaur tooth?”

“There's only one way,” Emma told him. “Your father has to reach through a hole in the back of your closet and find it for you.”

“Can your father find one for me?”

“I don't have a father any more.”

“Is he dead?”

“Vanished.”

“Vanished? How does a father vanish?” he asked her.

“Poof,” she said, and gestured with her hands—up in smoke.

“Is that why you always look so sad?” he asked her.

“I don't know,” she said, her eyes filling with tears.

Saturdays were fast becoming the days when the world was different. Imagine if I actually lived here, she thought, looking at the walls of books in Andrew's house. Imagine if I'd grown up here. Supposing I'd grown up in a rich, literary household rather than a silent and broken home—I'd be nothing like Emma Taylor at all. The books in Andrew's house were worlds away from the sickly sweet trash she was used to tearing through. They were denser, heavier, older, and the more famous they were, the longer they took to read. Everything was slower, calmer, and quieter here.

She read books on a long divan in front of French doors through which sunlight streamed and imagined she was the long-lost daughter of Bavarian aristocrats who had searched for her for years and finally brought her home. There were no neon lights in this wilderness. She imagined herself a caterpillar girl in a garden full of vegetables and knew she was falling in love.

Andrew played the piano in a room in the near distance. Late in the afternoon he would find Emma lying in the very spot he had left her hours before, engrossed in the pages of the same book. Emma stretched her limbs and smiled at him and asked him to tell her about Truth. Andrew had introduced her to this big, elusive love of his life. He'd been reading about the properties of quarks named Strange, Charm, Up, Down, Beauty, and the as-yet-undiscovered sixth partner in all this—a little girl named Truth. Andrew wanted to spend his life in heroic pursuit of this elusive quark. He wanted to be the Little Bo Peep of the subatomic world. He dreamt of Geneva, where he hoped to one day smash atoms in a particle accelerator that straddles the border between Switzerland and France.

Emma had no trouble inserting herself into his fantasy. She wondered if they would give her a job sweeping nuclear dust off the accelerator floor. She would be the Border collie guarding the five other sheep in the pen if he asked her to. She wanted to smell him, dusty, in bed beside her every night. That's all she wanted. We don't even have to talk, she thought to herself. Even if he just crashes into bed late in his lab coat and dirty shoes—I really don't care—just as long as I can wake up to the smell of him every morning.

“I suppose it would be time for tea,” she said playfully. She liked his strange rituals.

“Why, yes,” he said. “Spot on. I think you are instinctively British.”

Emma pulled open all the cupboards in the kitchen looking for teacups like the ones on “Coronation Street.” She found them—all gilt-edged and frilly with saucers to match.

“Shall I be Mother?” Andrew asked, gesturing to pour.

“As long as that doesn't mean I have to be Father,” Emma laughed, but her smile turned down as she realized the seriousness of what she'd just said. If Oliver could see her right now, he'd be shaking his head. Thinking: Christ, Emma, who do you think you are? What kind of pretence have you got yourself caught up in? Whose house is this? Looks like it belongs to some mercenary bastards who inherited a whack of cash from some decrepit aunt and haven't had to work a fucking day in their lives.

“Oh, don't, Emma,” Andrew said gently. “You were looking so happy. You've started to look so much happier than when I first saw you come into the library. You were so foul-tempered then.”