Noah's Turn (2 page)

She closed her eyes.

He quietly left the room and met Jeanne at the front door.

“This soup is for you. We've got too much.”

Jeanne handed him a Tupperware container of hot bean soup.

“You better not put it in your pack in case the top comes off.”

“Thanks, very generous, thank you,” he muttered as he got into his coat and his pack.

Jeanne picked up a glass of water and a bottle of pills from the hall table. “I have to give Auntie her pain medication.”

“What's the prescription?” Noah tried to sound medical as he eyed the bulging bottle of fat white pills.

“Per-co-cet,” Jeanne said reading the label.

“Mmhm,” Noah responded, as if to give his medical approval. He wanted to ask her to save them for him when his aunt died but at the moment couldn't summon the courage. “See you next week.”

“Auntie always likes it when you come. And so do I.”

Hold on to those babies, I'll be back, he thought as he stepped out into the cold. Noah picked up on Jeanne's “And so do I,” but only as much as something that flashes in and out of one's field of vision so quickly that its form can't be discerned.

The wind was at Noah's back on the way home, and most of the route was downhill. His Christian work was done for another week. He held the soup in front of him,
cupped in his hands like a religious offering, and could feel its heat through his gloves. The memory of its aroma now made him hungry. He couldn't wait to get home and when he stopped at a light, he popped the lid and took three deep gulps. “Good soup,” he muttered. He snapped the lid back on and kept going. He remembered one of the endless maxims that guided his mother's drunken, beautiful, spiteful, dramatic life as a “belle of Anglo society,” and that was, “The ability to delay our gratification, Noah, is what sets us apart from the other classes.” Soup without a spoon on a street corner—how the mighty had fallen! It was not just his uncontrolled hunger, but his monosyllabic appreciation, “Good soup.” Just flip that, he thought, to “soup good,” and he's not only a fallen upper-class WASP but some atavistic fucking caveman.

Noah now remembered, when he was small, sitting beside his mother watching
The Flintstones
and asking, “What if we were cavemen?” She said they were not cavemen, even if two Catholics had managed to marry their way into the family. He liked his mother's answers to his questions even though he didn't always understand them. She didn't talk to him as a child. She was sarcastic and funny and self-centred and he wanted to be like her when he grew up.

She usually had a drink in her hand when she watched TV, and when she sat right beside him he could smell the Scotch and the odour of cigarettes on her silk shirts. Her drink always made him feel secure because he knew she wouldn't jump up and do other stuff when she had one. It eventually killed her.

He reached his street and stood over the homeless bundle on the heating grate. He looked down at the woman's face, a fleshy circle framed by scarves and blankets. There was something peaceful about it. Not drunk or crazy. It was old, and Noah guessed Inuit. Her lips were clamped together in a horizontal, toothless pucker. He placed the container of soup beside her and nudged the bundle with his boot toe. “Are you sleeping?” Her eyes opened without focusing. He handed her a twenty-dollar bill. “Here.” She pulled a bare hand from between her knees and took it. She folded the bill and put it into a pocket without changing her expression or saying a word. Noah pointed at the container. “That's some soup. It's very good. Homemade.” Her eyes closed and she went back to sleep or to wherever she had been before his interruption.

As he waited for his cappuccino at the Starbucks below his apartment, Noah thought that the homeless
woman would not likely spend the twenty dollars today because it would mean leaving the grate and perhaps losing it to someone else. In this weather that could kill her, he thought. And he realized how far one can slip from the world most of us take for granted.

W
hen he stepped into his apartment Noah listened to his messages before removing his coat and boots. One call from McEwen. “It's Patrick. I know we're scheduled for lunch tomorrow at The Senator but I just got swamped with a horrible week. People from everywhere all over me. Can we make it next Tuesday, same time and place? Give me a break on this one. No need to confirm. If I don't hear from you I'll assume this is okay. See you then.”

Noah kicked off his boots and dropped his coat on the floor. He was home with no one to answer to, no questions about his work or personal habits or divorce. He thought of it as the wonderful dead zone. He took a beer from the fridge and dropped onto the couch. He
didn't want to but couldn't resist a masochistic need to listen to McEwen's message again. Just to confirm a few deconstructionist points. “A horrible week” was not a complaint but a McEwen swagger. It meant a week with every minute devoted to something important. Unlike Noah's normal week, which dribbled away like a leaking faucet he had no energy to repair. “People from everywhere all over me.” Far from the pestering annoyance it described, this measured the currency of McEwen's reputation and demand. “Give me a break on this one” was the most insidious of all. The dominant party, McEwen, with disingenuous magnanimity, transfers authority to the lesser party, Noah. An image came to Noah of someone playing with his dog in the park. The dog owner realizes he is late for a meeting and, scratching his dog under the chin, scolds him in mock anger. “Look what you've done! You've made me late for my meeting!” The authority is transferred to the dog—to Noah. And finally, “No need to confirm. If I don't hear from you I'll assume this is okay.” McEwen establishes who is really in charge.

“Fuck him.”

He timed his arrival at The Senator late enough to ensure that McEwen would already be there but not so late as to piss him off.

McEwen wasn't there. Noah took a booth and was about to take his laptop from his bag when he realized that he'd look like every other hopeless schmuck tapping away at Starbucks and faking a life. Instead he pulled out a newspaper just as McEwen walked through the door.

“Sorry. I got hung up. I had a crazy morning.” He reached for Noah's hand. “How are you?”

“I'm jerking off under the table. I'll just be a second,” Noah wanted to say, but then pulled his hand up from his lap and shook. “I should be working out more.”

“Then we have to play some squash,” McEwen insisted as if he was concerned for Noah's well-being.

“Any time you want.”

“Call me. We'll set it up.” McEwen knew exactly how to get the ball back. “How's Nora doing? These divorces are always tough.”

“She died.”

McEwen's face dropped for half a second before Noah continued. “Joking. She has the house, how bad can she be.”

“That was a great gesture on your part. No lawyers, no battles. You just gave her the house. I told Spencer, whose firm does a lot of high-end family law. He said you were a real pussy.”

“You are what you eat.”

“Oh, yeah.”

Oh, yeah? Noah repeated to himself. Fucker can't give me credit for the joke?

Noah shook his head in agreement. To what he wasn't quite sure. It was some kind of sycophantic tic that McEwen brought out in him. “Nora's a good person. She knows how to live in a house and do things with dishes and linens and changing light bulbs. I'm more at home in a cardboard box on the street.”

Noah knew that the way to hold McEwen's attention was to assume the lesser position, and he needed his attention today. But McEwen would never go for a nose right up his ass. That would be too complicit in low-life gamesmanship. Only subtle grovelling would work—self-deprecating humour that acknowledged McEwen's superiority. After all, McEwen had achieved a certain prominence both among the local literati and in the world of academe, and to be friends with this person he hated put Noah within reach of a world he coveted.
Unfortunately, the resulting relationship left him with a self-loathing that festered like a drug-resistant infection.

Noah knew that what attracted McEwen to him was strictly genealogical jealousy. Noah was from old money, to the manor born, and McEwen was working-class Irish. But as much as Noah could claim the class advantage, McEwen held the power. Noah was aware that social class, amongst the intelligentsia, could be easily dismissed, especially if the money was long gone, but reputation was everything. McEwen had reputation and Noah didn't.

McEwen's professional life, like the sound of his name, was all angles. He was an editor at a publishing house, which helped him get a book of short stories published, which landed him a position teaching creative writing at U of T (which assured him the weekly rapt attention of half a dozen nineteen-year-old co-eds with perfect breasts and silky inner thighs), which led to regular contributions to one of North America's top book-review journals. Unlike his angular name, his body was round and on the short side. He often wore a bow tie, which seemed to say, “I
can
wear a bow tie,” rather than “I am wearing a bow tie.” When he dressed for squash, he pulled his white socks up over his bulbous
calves just below his stubby knees and wore one of those ridiculous white tennis sweaters with a blue V-neck over a chubby belly.

As much as McEwen tried to dress his way out of his inherited position, Noah could spot the class characteristics that gave him away. Such as his marriage to Janice Hogan, a short, small-town Catholic with big tits and the social instincts of a Rottweiler, which had helped her chew her way to the position of editor-in-chief at the city's major lifestyle magazine. Although it took, as Noah said, the attention span of a gerbil to read through an issue, she was still able, in his opinion, to dumb it down considerably.

The waiter arrived. Noah ordered the burger, frites and a Coke and offered, uncontrollably, “This one's on me.” At which point he was sure that McEwen shifted his gaze to the more expensive section of the menu, from which he ordered the black cod and endive salad. “And I think a glass of this white.” The waiter picked up the menus and left. McEwen leaned slightly to Noah. “Can I pick up the wine? It's not a cheap glass.” Noah had a name for this question. He had coined it while dating a high-maintenance girlfriend who used it frequently. It was “the double reverse.” The double reverse
was an offer of generosity that put the other person in a money-grubbing position if he accepted it. “Don't be silly, it's all mine,” Noah said with a smile. “Where's the novel at?” he continued with as much enthusiasm as he could muster after being nailed with the cheque.

“I should have the second set of notes from my editor finished on the weekend. They love it. They think it's going to be huge. But that's the publisher. They talk like that. I should know, I'm one of them. They are in the business of selling books.” Noah could read McEwen. He had tossed this off to mean the publisher's gushing adoration somehow compromised his own creative integrity with commercial taint while also including himself in the lofty brotherhood. McEwen had to have it all. “I'd like you to read it.”

“Jesus, that would be fantastic, a real honour,” Noah blurted out, even though he knew that burning the book would be a more positive cultural act. How could I have said “honour”? he thought. What a fucking obvious blowjob!

McEwen swallowed the first bite of his cod and sipped his wine. His measured action was an almost balletic counterpoint to Noah's fumbling envy. “And your TV show?” McEwen asked without looking up.

“Same old shit. Cops screaming, ‘On your face! On the ground!' It's pulling teeth. I can't do it anymore. It's fucking soul-destroying.” Noah bit into his loaded burger, squeezing out its condiments, which ran down the inside of his left hand toward the entrance to his sleeve. McEwen took another sip of wine and said nothing as Noah caught the mustard-and-ketchup stream with his napkin. They continued to eat in silence for a minute, which seemed like an hour to Noah. His brain felt paralyzed, unable to come up with something interesting to say or at least something McEwen would respond to without a disinterested shrug. Noah could feel drops of sweat form in his armpits then slide down his sides under his shirt, where he picked them off with quick elbow jabs. Was McEwen testing him to see how long he could hold out in silence? Noah put his burger down, straightened up and wiped his mouth with his napkin. Was that too much physical punctuation for what was to come? He had planned to let it slip out in conversation but the conversation had stopped.