Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good (14 page)

Physically (why is Matt letting himself see all this just now?) Sophie’s everything Mariko isn’t. She’s the un-Mariko, the anti-Mariko. A touch pudgy, very pale. Blonde—dirty blonde, and just plain dirty. Matt’s never quite screwed up the courage to ask her how those dreadlocks work, how you get honky hair to
do
that. Meanwhile Jessie, the Jamaican woman who takes the other shift on the espresso machine, has straightened her hair and dyed it red. Go figure. Jessie’s almost frighteningly friendly, so Matt learned long ago to time his order at the café such that Sophie would take it. Those terse exchanges, studded with faux-Rasta locutions (he may once have called her
mawn)
have given him grist for some truly tangy fantasies.

Here’s a thought: how do those fantasies compare to Mariko’s? Is it possible that the two of them, he and Mariko, once lay spooned up together, both of their faces buried, visionary-wise, in that same ropy madness of hair?

What comes to Matt now is a ditty his mum used to get them to sing, him and Erin, on long car trips. Out west to Alberta that one time, for instance, to visit the McKay clan.

While the other person goes “rum, rum, rum-rum-rum,” bagpiping. Odd woman, Matt’s mother.

“A woman,” says Kate.

“Beg pardon?” says Matt. Sheesh, he was almost gone there.

“A woman.” Kate tugs the covers up to ear level, cozying down. “I think it would be better if she left your friend for a woman. It’s a bit more likely to be a phase, don’t you think?”

“Maybe,” says Matt. “Or maybe it starts that way but then she finds she likes it. A woman’s bound to be better, isn’t she, at pleasing a woman? Plus no birth control, no worry about any of that. I mean, if
you
had a choice?”

Kate sighs, not much longer for this world. “Don’t I?”

“
Y
up.”

Oh, for pity’s sake. Why can’t Zane get himself a cell, the fugging Luddite? “Hey Mercedes, me again.”

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

Greektown, they call it, Zane’s new neighbourhood. Nico lives nearby, part of the appeal, or anyway it used to be. Matt had his cab drop him a few blocks away this morning so he could stroll along the Danforth, wishing he were hale and hungry enough to stop in at one of the awninged cafés for a souvlaki or a falafel or a kabob or a chimichanga or a spring roll or a pappadum or a plate of pad thai or jerk chicken. Humantown, more like. This’d be the place to raise a kid, this is the world.

He settled for a big ol’ coffee to go.

Zane’s semi is a block south. Across the street and one door down there’s a daycare centre—“Starbaby’s,” can they be serious?—in another tall-skinny place with gingerbread eaves. At the foot of the walk is a stegosaurus-shaped bench speckled with shade at one end, blessed relief from this brutally perfect day. Matt slouches there trying not to look furtive, trying to look like a busy parent getting a couple of crucial calls out of the way while he waits for his toddler. It’s too soon for contact with Zane—Matt’s still hot-cold, his head aching in a way that can’t
just
be about last night’s beer—but there’s no harm getting closer. If Matt were cured, would he have the wherewithal to head on over and pound on that door, make his case? No need to answer that, so he doesn’t.

“Anyhow,” he says, wriggling for a less jabby spot on his dinosaur, “I don’t suppose the idiot’s around?”

“Nope, sorry,” says Mercedes. “He had to whip over to the clinic, he shouldn’t be long.”

“Okay, well, sorry to interrupt.”

What you don’t want to think about, when you get Mercedes on the line, is what exactly you might be interrupting her
at.
What poor bastard, what MP or priest or plain old palooka might be splayed out on her rack, begging to be spared the punishment he’s already paid for.
Hang on, hon, I’ve gotta take this. I’ll loosen you off a little
…

Last time Matt was at Zane and Mercedes’s place for dinner, just the three of them on the patio around back—wrought iron on flagstone, magnolia blossoms leaning lasciviously in—Matt excused himself to the loo and on the way up touched the leather, the silenced creak of one of those loam-black masks. He put his hand right out and fingered its cheek, its vacant eyehole, and strove to find it thrilling. No go. A cliché is what it felt like, the dried carapace of some dead desire. Or maybe death
was
the desire, maybe that was the longing embodied there, the lust for some ultimate, some radical unselfing. Pain transmuted to pleasure, death to rebirth …

Zane caught him at it, passed him on the stairs and held his tongue. As far as Matt knows Zane doesn’t employ this kind of paraphernalia, but then again, how far is that? How much of a clue does Matt really have when it comes to Zane’s erotic predilections? Back in the day they routinely slept together (sleepovers, camp-outs) without Matt ever twigging to his friend’s pooftuality. There was that spate of boyhood humping, but that was both of them, and Matt turned out to be straight, didn’t he? Oh dear. Human nature’s such a mystery, and Matt’s such a dimwit. Bad combo.

At table that evening, after a couple of gallon-sized glasses of Zane’s you-brew Merlot, Matt pointed a probing question or two Mercedes’s way.

“Say, Mercedes, that remote control? On the wall up there with your leather stuff? What do you do with that?”

At which she chortled. “You can’t even
begin
to afford to find out, babe.”

Fair enough. So he tried a more philosophical angle. “Can a person really, you know,
want
to be hurt?”

Mercedes did her usual thing of trying to turn it religious. Reverse theology? No,
negative
theology. The idea being that you can never say what God is, so you come at it the other way around, make do with saying what God isn’t. This isn’t God and this isn’t God and this isn’t God and this isn’t God … What’s left after all possible isn’ts must be divine.

Matt doubted the connection, but he found himself using the same argument on Nagy next time they quarrelled. Why did Matt’s reviews have to be so damn severe all the time? Well imagine, for a moment, a civilization whose guiding visions are a bunch of humdrum movies. How would you push such a civilization in the direction of a dream it hasn’t yet dreamt? This isn’t it and this isn’t it and this isn’t it and this isn’t it … Bogus most likely, but it shut Nagy up for a while.

Dominatrix, is that what this makes Matt? Or what do you call it when the whipper’s a guy?

“No problem,” says Mercedes. “Like I say, he won’t be long, and he really needs to talk to you. Hey, I just got my new book from the printer, wanna hear a bit?”

“Books are dead, Mercedes. Did you not know this?”

A phony huff from the far end. “Have I ever shown you the scold’s bridle, Matt?”

“Um, no.”

“The heretic’s fork? It’s got these prongs at both ends and what you do is you—”

“I’d love to hear a bit of your book, Mercedes. Another throbbing manhood, I presume?”

As romance novelist, Mercedes isn’t Mercedes at all but Jillian Ash—the name of her first pet (Jilly gerbil) plus the street she was born on. According to this formula Matt’s
nom de plume
should be Muffy Rose Park. Muffy, one of those little green turtles in a plastic, palm-treed bowl. Lived about fifteen minutes then got flushed, Matt’s very first heartbreak.

“No, it’s actually a philosophical thing,” says Mercedes. “My first. On Simone Weil?”
Vie,
she says it. Another of her GBFTs, as Zane calls them, her Great Big Fucking Thinkers. Jewish, this one, and Catholic, and Crazy. “It tackles the whole question of whether her mysticism, her idea of
decreation
… You know what, I think I’ve told you this already. Make me stop.”

“No, no, go ahead.” Matt makes a gun of his left, non-phone-holding hand. He cocks it, aims it at his temple. A woman with an infant in a sling staggers down the walk of Starbaby’s, fires him a nasty look.

“Okay,” says Mercedes, “well, I try to trace the decreation thing back to her time on the assembly line. That experience of slavery.”

Bang.

“This is basically what I argue, that Weil’s labour showed her that selfhood
itself
is slavery, that to be liberated we have to always be demolishing the self. Through pain and beauty and so on. And how that connects to her decision to let herself die, starve herself to death in the sanatorium. Ready? Do you really want to hear it?”

“Absolutely.”

“Okay, so.
Chapter One. Dr. Zachary Lewis reached over and shoved open the door of his two-seater Mercedes.
I usually save my Mercedes reference till later on, but this time I got it in early. Sorry, I’ll start again.
Chapter One. Dr. Zachary Lewis reached over and shoved open the door of his two-seater Mercedes.
”

“Zachary Lewis? Zane Levin?”

A flyer guy turns in at Zane’s place, shoves a fistful of junk mail through the slot. Muffled yelping from across the street and through the phone line, both.

“You got that, eh? Well, you would. What was her name, Minnie in your review—that was Mariko, right?”

“Guilty.”

“And how’d she take it?”

“Ehh.”

“So you think I should have been more subtle? Siegfried,
bad
boy.”

“No, Zane’ll love it. Does he look like Zane, this Zachary?”

Weil. Vie. What’s weird is that Erin got into her too, way back when. She got into a lot of wacky stuff towards the end there. Matt’s got a recipe card someplace, inscribed with a Weil quote—Erin had it taped on the wall by her bed.
The beautiful is that which we desire without wishing to eat it.
Jeezuz aitch.

“You tell me,” says Mercedes.
“Chapter One. Dr. Zachary Lewis reached over and shoved open the door of his two-seater Mercedes. His black sports jacket stretched taut across his broad shoulders, and his dark curls fell forward, briefly obscuring the penetrating blue of his eyes. Nikki Kendall, the nurse who’d done her very first shift on the pediatric floor with him that day—
”

“Nikki. Nico. You’ve been having some fun with this one.”

“Yup.
His black sports jacket stretched taut across his broad shoulders, and his dark curls fell forward, briefly obscuring the penetrating blue of his eyes. Nikki Kendall, the nurse who’d done her very first shift on the pediatric floor with him that day, collapsed into the seat beside him and slammed shut the door. ‘Dr. Lewis, you just saved my life!’ she exclaimed. ‘I would have drowned out there!’ And she was probably right. In the few strides it had taken her to reach his sports car from the bus shelter her blonde bangs had become plastered to her forehead, and her blouse—”

“Penetrating?” says Matt. He slurps at his coffee. “You can do better than that with Zane’s eyes, can’t you? And what about the other one?”

“In this genre you go one way or the other, my friend, blue eyes or brown. No freaks, please.”

“Right, okay. But broad? Zane isn’t so much broad as bulky.”

“Seen him recently?”

Ah.

Matt’s plan for today’s Zane call went something like this. Imagine he lives in a work of art, Zane does. In a work of art disease wants to be symbolic. It doesn’t just want to be itself, it wants to be emblematic of something, of some big affliction of character or culture. If Zane were in a movie or a book, then, what would his illness signify? With what would we be expected to associate this sort of infectious, ugly-making disease? Depravity, poverty, foreignness, otherness, all that good stuff—a reading real-life Zane may have failed to resist. So what if the virus has come to represent, for Zane, his guilt over his aberrance as artist and fruit? Better yet, what if it’s come to represent his guilt over this guilt, his shame that he’s allowed himself to feel ashamed? How could Matt talk him out of that interpretation? Say Zane isn’t dying of his disease, but of the meaning of his disease, a sense that it’s somehow right for him. How could Matt help him refuse that meaning?

“By the way,” says Mercedes, “did you know he had a fall last week?”

“Had a fall?” says Matt. “What is he, a little old man all of a sudden?” That queasiness, that sickening sense of his innards opening out.

“Sorry. Did you know he fell last week?”

“No. Is he all right?”

“He’s … yeah, he’s fine.” A moment of throatiness from Mercedes too.

Matt says, “How long did you say he’d be?”

“Should be any minute.
In the few strides it had taken her to reach his sports car from the bus shelter her blonde bangs had become plastered to her forehead, and her blouse had lost its crispness, yielding to the ripened roundness of …”

Caffeine. How, Matt’s often wondered, did he get so lucky as to be born into a time and place in which this shit’s
legal?
You can drop in just about anyplace these days and score it in its most potent form. When Matt’s feeling hard done by about living in a cretinous, soul-crushing culture, this is one upside to which he’ll cling.

By now he’s just about polished off that jumbo triple-shot and is feeling seriously jangled. This effect is exacerbated by the fact that he’s still got the damn cellphone plastered to the side of his head. How long do these things take to produce a tumour?

The original plan was to wait. He knew he could never
outsmart
Mercedes but maybe he could
outlast
her …

Or maybe not. About half an hour has so far crept past, and still no Zane. Zach and Nikki have gone through a plethora of miscues and misunderstandings, and are just now starting to make progress. “She
could feel his ardour straining urgently against her, and yet his hands were patient and gentle as they unbuttoned her blouse and drew it back, revealing the taut …”