Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good (11 page)

“I’m Kate Moreau.”

Kate.
Kate. He hears it again as he heard it last night, that sigh of startled desire.

She offers him a brisk shake, how d’ya do. “I’m awfully sorry about that. I’m bad, I shouldn’t be teasing a sick guy. Are you feeling any better, I hope?”

“A touch. It’s strange, I never get these things.”

“So you said. Well, so starting fresh … Nice to meet you, Matt. Where are you from?”

“Vancouver. Ish.” He raises his eyebrows. Both of them, or anyway he tries.

Kate points at herself, the shadowed cleft of her cleavage. “Halifax. I’m at Dalhousie? God, it’s so good to get
away.”
She blinks as if in disbelief.

Why this woman? She’s perfect in a way—a big mind in a vibrant body—but she’s also random, she’s also just an accident. Unless there’s something predestined here, invisible forces bearing down. What would a physicist say? If this goes on much longer he’ll ask her. “So, east and west,” he says. “Atlantic, Pacific.” He spreads his arms. “And we’ve met here in the middle.” He smacks his palms together—like a performing seal, it strikes him. He really hasn’t done this in a while. Has he
ever
done this? “How long are you in town?”

“About a week. The conference is only a few days but I’m treating myself, might be my last chance for a bit. And what brings you”—a magician-like unfurling of her fingers—“here? Last night you said work, but you didn’t say what kind.”

“Yeah, well, there’s always work, isn’t there?” How much do you tell a person you’ve boffed (goofy term, but it feels about right) but whose name you can’t hang on to? “This visit’s mostly about a friend of mine, actually. He’s sick, so I can’t see him yet. Because
I’m
sick.” Matt shrugs. “AIDS, he has AIDS.”

Kate sucks in some air. There’s something puffy about her anyway, something hyperinflated, an almost infantile openness. Dianne Wiest?
Edward Scissorhands.

What if he told her everything? What if he just dumped the whole knotted ball in her lap, could she maybe tease it apart for him? “And it’s my fault.”

“What do you mean? What’s your fault?”

“That he’s sick, that my friend’s sick.”

“Oh. Oh.” Kate starts to rise here, almost to levitate. Not as though she’s going to bolt but as though she’s going to burst right through the ceiling.

“No.” Matt bats at the air. “Christ, no, I’m sorry. No, I don’t mean I
gave
it to him. I’m fine, and anyway, I’m not, we don’t …”

Kate makes prayer-hands, peers down at him. “You don’t make love to him?”

“No, I don’t make love to him.”

Kate hisses out some breath, begins a hesitant descent back into her chair.

Matt says, “It’s more like he got sick because I
wasn’t
there.”

“I see,” says Kate, though there’s no way she can. “Sorry, I’m just a little jumpy at the moment.”

“I’m such an idiot,” says Matt.

Kate musters a quarter of a smile, half a smile. “That’s okay.”

“Really,” says Matt. “Cross my heart”—he does—“and hope to die. I’m not into men. Anyway, I play it so safe it’s a joke.”

“Ah,” says Kate. “Because you know, you could have fooled me.” She does a little something with her hips that says, That was you last night, wasn’t it?

Matt nervously guffaws. “Touché.”

“So let’s say we’re even,” says Kate. “Now, your friend. Tell me about him. Is he all right?”

“Sort of.”

“I have a cousin? The new drugs are incredible.”

“Yeah.”

Kate frowns. “But you don’t sound convinced.”

“Well see, that’s the loopy part. He’s not … Zane’s not taking them.” Kate’s got her big eyes going full bore now. It makes Matt want to keep talking, keep feeding that fascination or whatever it is. Glandular condition most likely. “It’s a protest thing, at least that’s what I think it is.”

“A protest against?”

“The fact that other people can’t get treatment. In Africa and places like that. India.”

“Well, that should get him some attention. Refusing treatment, that’s kind of brilliant.”

“Yeah. The press would be all over him, I suppose, if he were ever to let on.”

“What do you mean? He hasn’t
told
anybody?”

“Yep. Nope. He’s keeping it a secret.”

Wasps? Bees? It’s one or the other—bees?—that die once they’ve stung you. If you’re going to die anyway, wouldn’t you want to get your sting in first? That time Matt thought about snuffing himself (pills and a plastic bag, he actually started to get things organized), it occurred to him to wonder, what sting? What would he be dying
for?
No good answer, which is one reason he decided not to pop the pills, pull the bag over his head. That plus the plan had already worked, in a way. Just contemplating the thing had given him a liberating whiff of I-lessness. Maybe that’ll do it for Zane too?

Kate says, “But that’s crazy. That’s like … that’s like he’s going on a hunger strike and he’s not letting anybody see him
starve.
”

“Yeah, good one. I’m going to use that.” The folks at the far end of the lounge have acquired drinks now, neon martinis—pink, green, tangerine—and are making sure everybody knows just how spunky and spontaneous they are. “See, Zane’s kind of … you’d have to know him.”
Shanumi sipping on a soda. Shanumi ducking through the plank door of her shack, a child’s floppy body in her arms …

“So why don’t you tell me?”

“Tell you?”

“About Zane.”

“Oh. Well, he has two different eyes. I mean his eyes are two different colours.”

“I see. So that’s why he’s doing this?”

Matt shrugs.

“But you’re going to talk him out of it.”

“Yeah.”

“Even if it’s what he really wants? I’m going through something like that, and—”

“Yeah, even if it’s what he really wants.”

Kate makes a little ticking noise as she processes this. “How?”

“I’m going to kill him.” Hey, not a bad idea. “He goes on the meds or I shoot him.”

“You have a gun?”

“He goes on the meds or I shove him off a bridge.”

“Zane,” says Kate. She seems to be trying it on with her tongue. “Like Zane Grey? The cowboy guy?”

“His dad was a buff. Plus he’s Jewish, lucky bastard.”

“Lucky?”

“Bastard.
Plus
he’s gay,
plus
he’s dying.”

“I see.”

“Anyway, it turns out to mean something in Hebrew, Zane does. God’s gracious gift?”

Kate makes a grab for his hand. Lunges for it, really. She turns it over, examines its upper side (long and knuckly, eskered with veins) as you might an ancient artifact riddled with runes.

Nope. No way. He wants to, he almost
needs
to, but no way. He’s already unfaithful, he can’t afford to be any unfaith-fuller. The fact that Mariko was unfaithful first ought to help, but it doesn’t. It makes this feel even lamer, a revenge thing, tit for tat.

Besides, he isn’t prepared. No condoms, and he’s not going there again. And what if he had one? What if one of those hooting bozos down the way strode over and slipped him a french tickler? Still, bad idea. Matt’s resorted to rubbers a number of times in the past—four times, at the start of each of his four monogamies—and his history with them is not a happy one.

With Charlotte, for instance. They were seventeen when they got serious, grade eleven. Matt had the knack—puritanical, you’d have to call it—of pretending he wasn’t going to have sex right up until the moment he was actually having it. This meant he couldn’t be relied upon to procure the safes. Charlotte, resourceful girl, got a box through the boyfriend of a friend’s older sister. Bad news: they were extra large. They were enormous. They were “King Kong.” The first one kept slipping off Matt’s johnson.

If Charlotte had laughed at that moment, what then? Would Matt have slugged her and stormed out, started down the path of boozing and embitterment? Probably not, but it sure would have been a bummer. Instead she feigned a headache, granted him a swift hand job (still a benchmark for Matt in terms of intensity, of sheer orgasmic oomph) and showed up the next weekend with the right-sized rubbers. How is it that he’s always been so lucky with his women? Lucky right up till the day they give him the hoof.

With Meg, again, it was an ego issue. Matt had a spot of trouble erection-wise one night, and thereafter got himself into such a self-obsessed state that every hard-on would halfway unharden in the moment it took to tear open the package and figure out which way was up. Lucky again: Meg arrived one evening with a packet of flavoured condoms and used up half of them perfecting, on a zucchini from her own garden, the technique for rolling them on with lips and tongue. Voila.

With Caitlin the problem got more intense. It was simple enough—the condom broke. They were mid-quickie, indulging in an aren’t-we-crazy moment on the way out the door to a movie. Cat was at the crest of her fertility curve, so she popped a morning-after pill, which basically made her pregnant for a day, upset tummy and tender boobs. She didn’t exactly blame Matt for the trauma, but didn’t exactly not blame him either.

And with Mariko, more intense still. Another pregnancy spook—they fell asleep with him inside her one night and when they woke up, all but one candle self-snuffed, it looked as though there’d been leakage. Matt freaked out, and that freaked out Mariko.

“You really think it’s okay to have sex with somebody you can’t stand to get
pregnant?”
she said. “You know the two are connected, right?”

Right. And when Mariko did get knocked up a couple of years later, Matt went totally the other way. He fixed up one of the Lair’s extra rooms, pored over baby books, assembled lists of names. Odd, but that’s when things started to go wrong between the two of them—after the mistake that led to the miscarriage, after the miscarriage led them to start trying. It wasn’t as though the relationship was predicated on the family thing, far from it, but once they were at it, once they were well and truly “boinking for a baby” (Mariko’s phrase), it felt as though failure would be a problem. And it was. A new kind of life had been conjured, which they were then free to lose. Matt had let himself want something he’d never even dared to contemplate before. Who knew he could want it so bad?

Kate says, “Okay, so here’s one. Why does time only ever go one way?”

“Come on, that’s too easy.” Matt’s got his hand back. He’s into a third pint by now, Kate’s into a second Perrier. They’ve shared a plate of nachos. Matt’s already fessed up to his profession, going with “film critic” instead of the more accurate but too banal “movie reviewer.” He’s crowed in an offhand way about the message he got earlier today (“egghead with an attitude”) from some upstart filmmaker named DennyD. It’s Matt’s first truly fanatical bit of fan mail, and it’ll almost certainly be his last. Why not make the most of it?

“You must get so incredibly sick of admirers,” Mr. D. had blandished, “but what the hell, I’m gonna bug you anyway, to tell you what a HUGE impact your work has had on me.” Honest? “Your criticism is part of an underground war being waged WORLDWIDE against the cultural hegemony of Holywood. We all WEAR the same things, we all WATCH the same things, Tom Cruise, Calvin Klein, Tom Cruise in Calvin Kleins, I don’t need to explain any of this to YOU. You’re a vandal wrecking the stuff that’s WRONG.” A great gush of this kiss-assy kind of stuff. Matt read it three times, took a break, then read it three more.

“Wow, must be nice to have groupies,” said Kate. “I’ll bet you meet all the big shots too. George what’s-his-face, Lucas and everybody.”

“Oh, sure. I’ll probably have lunch with George next time I’m in LA.”

“Seriously? Wow. Do you like his movies?”

“That depends. Which one do you mean?”

“Any of them.”

“Well … no.”

“Oh.”

“I don’t like almost anybody’s movies. That’s why I started inventing my own. I mean, that’s why I started reviewing movies that don’t exist.”

Kate’s face went puzzled. “I don’t get it. You write reviews of movies …”

“That I made up.”

This was the most touching aspect of Denny’s message, and the most entertaining. “I agree about
House of Straw,”
he wrote, “that film COMPLETELY floored me. Your review (‘Pynchonesque labyrinth’ is right) is dead-on.” Matt’s review certainly ought to be dead-on, since the movie’s only ever been screened in his own damn head. DennyD, then, is full of crap, a lying sycophant out for favours. The thing is, though, he sounds like kind of a good kid, and what if he’s right? What if Matt really does have something to say?

All this took some explaining, but Kate hung gamely on. Matt didn’t go out of his way to reveal how proud he is of the three phony reviews he published before he got fired. He left out the whole getting-fired thing, actually, but let on that there’s been a public fuss since the fakes were exposed, and that there are now bigger projects in the works. Then—“enough about me”—he steered things back in Kate’s direction, got her talking about her “job.”

Is it possible people actually
do
this nine to five? It’s all questions. Star Trekky kind of questions, wish-we-were-stoned kind of questions.

“Why can’t we go back and forth in time? In space we can go both ways, right? You flew east to get here, didn’t you? And whenever you want you can just fly west to get home again.”

“Sure,” says Matt, though this is far from certain. He’s feeling a touch spinny here—there’s an intriguing synergy evolving between this beer and what’s left of his fever. Cheap high, or it would be if each pint weren’t the price of a decent bottle of wine.

“But what you can’t do is fly into the past, back to the moment you left. The past is always in the past, it’s never in the future. How come?”

“Like I say,” says Matt, “that’s such an easy one.” He’s trying to picture Kate in a lab coat, ink-stained pocket porcupined with pens. No luck so far. “I’m not even going to insult you with—”

“Right,” says Kate. “And nobody else has the faintest idea either. We think it might be connected to entropy. Time and entropy are both arrows, they both only go one way, so maybe—”