Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good (16 page)

If Matt were
making
the movie though, things would be different. Things would be inside out, upside down. The sick guy would save the healthy guy, something like that, the ironic reversal. Life, though? Life’s so lame.

It takes Matt a little longer than it should to regain his room. The gizmo on the door keeps rejecting his card, which turns out actually to be his organ donor card … Still not firing on all cylinders, no.

“Okay, so I’ve got another one for you.” Kate on the voice mail. “Never mind
who
am I, what about
why
am I? You like the philosophical stuff, right? So why is there anything at all?” Typical mushy stuff, new love. “You’ve got nothing, and that splits into two things, energy and gravity. Like evil and good coming out of … whatever they came out of, you tell me. But what made it do that? And once something’s something, can it really be nothing again? Oh and also, I’m still humming from last night, seriously humming. Just so you know. B-bye.”

Matt paces the room a spell before dialing. Answer a question with a question, seems to be his best bet. He’s run a movie trivia contest or two in his day, he ought to be able to come up with something dastardly. Oh, here’s a good one. “Get ready, smarty-puss. How many movies have titles that start with
Jesus Christ?
B-bye yourself.”

How long has it been since Matt last spent the night with another woman? Seven years. He still hasn’t spent a whole night—he was awake and headachy at dawn today, gave the sleeping Kate a peck on the cheek and skulked back down to his floor. Tucked into the Emperor, he resisted the allure of the remote control, went instead for his bedside reading.

She.
He grabbed a handful, sniffed at the pages. Any sign of Mariko, her papaya bubble bath, her leafy perfume? Nope, nothing. In desperation, then, he tried the words themselves, tried
reading
the darn thing. Sure enough, there she was—the earnestness, the daffy love for even the most hopeless of humans. Matt imagined arriving at this world Mariko had concocted, imagined himself marooned and defenseless in her new-deal paradise. He imagined her licking the salt from his sea-soaked body, not to excite him but to
clean
him, to purify him. And he fell asleep, and he dreamt, and he forgot his dreams.

He’s made it to mid-afternoon now, but he’s still got a good hour to kill before Kate’s free. Time for a little tube. Matt clicks through the various movie menus, Drama, Comedy, Family, and finds nothing to which he hasn’t already applied his kritikal acumen. Which leaves Adult.

For a guy who’s exposed himself to so much celluloid over the years, Matt’s weirdly virginal when it comes to Adult. There was the odd softcore movie when he was a teenager—he recalls watching one with Zane on a sleepover, there in the blue-lit gloom of the McKay living room. A producer auditions young women for a smutty movie, a skin flick
about
skin flicks, cutting-edge stuff. Matt was horrendously, excruciatingly aroused. And his friend? What was going on in Zane’s jammies? What was going on in Zane’s head?

Of late—since sleep has become a no-go, there in the musty sanctum of his study—Matt’s taken to snooping around on late-night TV again, catching the odd libidinous offering. Arty coupling in arty films, parodies of porn in middlebrow thrillers, infomercials for phone sex or Crazy Gurl videos—it’s all arousing, it’s all appalling. After five minutes or so, any night Matt blunders into this stuff, he’s one big shaken cocktail of lust and shame. He’ll click off the tube and scuttle down the hall to Mariko’s bedroom—his bedroom?—and play ghost at the cracked-open door. Mariko’s sleep is almost laughably serene, each breath a rumour of a breeze. Shouldn’t she sense him there, rise to the tug of his attention? Would she have, in the old days?

Well, hm. Tough call. Matt clicks a title at random, hits Purchase—and instantly feels naked. Where’s his notebook? Oh wait, the hotel stationery, the hotel pen. Matt skitters over to the desk. The paper comes in single cream-coloured sheets, each tipping the scales at about eight pounds. He hefts one, notes the almost fluffy feel of the thing, takes a thumbnail to its gold embossing.

Oops, opening credits. Matt clambers back onto the bed, punches a couple of pillows into position and settles down to work. What comes to him first (it often works this way) is his review’s last line. “Watching hardcore porn to get horny is like going to the slaughterhouse to get hungry.” Brutal. Brilliant. Whether or not it’s accurate remains to be seen (onscreen everybody’s still dressed), but this is not the kritik’s immediate concern.

Matt’s never witnessed hardcore porn before. This fact becomes evident about three minutes into today’s entertainment. There turns out to be one big difference between softcore—the stuff he’s previously consumed—and hardcore. This difference is the dink. Relegated to the role of subtext or absent centre in softcore, the dink would seem to be furiously foregrounded in hardcore. Matt often averts his gaze—should he really be staring at some other guy’s weenie, if this film is meant to be straight?—but the male member is clearly hardcore’s main character. It generates the plot’s premise, rising action and resolution. It’s the point. “Possibility that this is always the case?” Matt scrawls. “That all narrative is sex-shaped? Develop.”

Half an hour or so goes by. Into it are wedged five carnal encounters, or maybe it’s just four—threesomes, twosomes, one-somes. Matt takes advantage of a spate of chit-chat to get down some thoughts. This is his act of rebellion, writing instead of wanking off. Rugged individualist.

“In terms of sex positions this film displays a deplorable poverty of imagination. You’ve got your missionary, your doggie, your standing doggie, your cowgirl, your reverse cowgirl, and that’s about all she wrote. Excuse me, but what about the butterfly? What about the peace sign? What about the kneeling pretzel, the split level, the armchair, the wheelbarrow”—oh, how he pored over that book of Meg’s!—“the rainbow arch, the froggy, the proposal, the squashing of the deck chair, the playing of the cello …” He’ll add more later. Back to the movie.

After an inspired flourish of character development—“I mean, what does he expect if he’s going to go away every single weekend?”—it’s back to business. If Matt had the nerve he’d tackle the race thing, the gender thing, the thing about race and gender. All the women in jolly old pornland seem to be white or Asian, whereas all the men seem to be white or black. Whither the Asian male? Whither the black female? Whither the brown folks of either persuasion? There’s definitely an article in this, though it may mean fidgeting through one more film to make sure the research is rock-solid. Or he could have a go at condoms, the complete lack thereof …

But no, he won’t go there.

“The thing about Eve,” Matt scribbles, “is—you guessed it—she’s innocent. In fact Eve (played by Cheyenne ‘Let’s-see-some-ID’ Sweet) is so innocent she’s never even seen a male organ, let alone had to deal with one. This deplorable situation her friends resolve to correct. Eve obediently tags along to various erotic encounters, watching—with us—just how it’s done. Thus is she prepared for the movie’s climactic scene, in which Dirk ‘Ohmigawd’ Winsome joins her in her verdant garden and … But don’t let me spoil it for you.”

You?

What comes to Matt last is the start of his review. He’ll go with stats again. He did a bunch of research one time for his piece on
The Seven Year Itch
at the Reprise, but never used it. The average time spent on foreplay is nineteen-point-something minutes. The average duration of a female orgasm is six seconds. The average man will climax seven thousand times between puberty and death. Forty percent of people have had unprotected sex with a new partner in the last year, despite the fact that … Anyway, he’ll open with a barrage of these numbers, and then he’ll—

Yipes. Matt lifts right up off the bed at the sound of the telephone. He mutes the tube—Eve’s noisy ecstasies are a bit much anyhow. He tugs straight the bedspread, runs a hand through his hair. “Hello?”

“Matt? It’s Kate.”

“Oh, hey Kate. What’s up?”

There was a perfect time with Mariko. Two years or so, that stretch in town before they packed up and headed for paradise. Plenty of urban nature, plenty of loving sex. Is there any way to get back there?

Kits, the place was called, Kitsilano, a funky-posh stretch of Vancouver right by the sea. Mariko had a condo, a squinchy one-bedroom into which they crammed two households’ worth of crap when Matt and Toto gave up their basement suite, its insolent roaches, its needle-strewn back lane. Matt was immediately mad about the new place, and about the little world in which it landed him. He could stride a couple of blocks downhill to the park, a modest patch of grass studded with chestnuts and willows and yews. Between the park and the sea ran a boulevard of sand, where neatly bucked driftwood logs had been lined up like park benches. It was all so phony, so fixed. Matt loved it. Couples strolled and squabbled, joggers huffed by in their sweats and their dazzling sneakers. Dog owners juggled their leashes and their little plastic bags of shit. Out on the bay you could watch the motionless motion of the two-tone tankers, the incessant sizzle of the waves. On the far side, houses swarmed up the slopes and were lost in the bristling green of the mountains, which in turn were lost in the bruised-black belly of the clouds. Sighting down the beach your eye lit on downtown, or anyway on the hyperdensity of the West End, high-rises lined up like the teeth of a busted comb.

If downhill meant park and sea, uphill meant city. Fourth Avenue, or maybe Broadway. Wigs, flowers, appliances, lingerie. Gelato, sushi, pita, pizza. Get rubbed, get reikied, get trimmed, get tanned. Matt would peer into a bunch of windows, then settle for a coffee and a few quiet moments with a recent issue of
Premiere
or
Film Comment
at his favourite café. “Afternoon, Emma.” “Afternoon, Matt.” Then he’d head back and get started on the paella or the seared-scallop salad or the vegan pilaf. Mariko would scoot home from the office as early as she could, and they’d make hootchy-kootchy (her term) wherever they happened to be when they’d wrestled off their clothes. She’d shiver before she came—that’s how you knew she was ready—and stay mum right through to the end, silently seizuring. Afterwards they’d perch, robed and cross-legged, on the futon couch in front of the TV with their novelty Babar bowls and their chopsticks and their splasher of soy sauce. When the news came on Matt would get dressed and go to work.

Work? Yep, Matt even had a job in those days, at a rep cinema that happened to be a walk from Mariko’s place. The Reprise was a fusty bit of business—it gave you the feeling, once you were inside, of being lost down the back of a big old burgundy couch. It had a balcony, and a trough urinal in the men’s room, and audiences that clapped. It was run by the Glücks, an eccentric childless couple not much older than Matt who nonetheless treated him like a son. Like them, Matt did everything. He shovelled popcorn (“Engevita yeast with that?”), tore tickets, made change in the unheated glass box out front. He even got to fiddle with the projector now and then when the image went wonky.

By the time he’d been with them a year or so, the Glücks were letting Matt do all the programming. Classics, second-run Hollywood features, foreign films, he had his pick. The early show/late show thing allowed him to get clever in all kinds of harmlessly cute ways. He’d put a camp kung fu flick with one of the epic Kurosawas. He’d match a remake with its original
—The Fly
with
The Fly,
say—or two wildly different takes on the same traditional tale,
Beauty and the Beast
by Disney and by Cocteau. One time he put a whole batch of Dr. Seuss animations on with
Dr. Strangelove.
Another time he matched the wordless prayer
Koyaanisqatsi
(“life out of balance” in Hopi) with the chatterboxy
My Dinner with André.
That kind of thing.

He even got to write the little blurbs for the flyer, which Mariko laid out on her fancy computer. “Canadian phenom David Cronenberg, with his 1986 remake of the Vincent Price classic, conjures
The Fly
as a hymn to body horror, braiding into it our fear of cancer and of AIDS, our whole dread of the finite as it’s embodied in our bodies …” Now and then somebody would notice the effort, maybe even scribble a few kind words for the cardboard Comments Please box.

So it was rewarding work, or at least it was work that didn’t make you ashamed you weren’t doing something more worthwhile. It was creative—kreative, you might even say. It barely paid, but Mariko didn’t seem to mind. Matt made sure to keep ahead on the housework and the cooking, contribute that way. Evenings he wasn’t needed at the cinema they’d go out with Sue and Gary or some other corporate couple for whom Matt was an amusing curiosity. He was an easy enrichment of their lives—a Best of Bach tucked into an Abba-and-Eagles collection. For the most part he liked these folks, and liked the fact that they were already there, friends who didn’t need to be made.

It all seemed weirdly right. A life, however briefly, in balance.

Gauguin. That famous one of the woman lying on her tummy in that Tahitian Eden—Kate could be that woman now. Feet crossed, hands palm-down on the pillow. In the painting there’s a black-clad figure in the background, big-D Death probably, or the spirit of some ancestor, deceased and displeased. Matt fills that role here as he wanders unclad back into the room with a glass of water, having discreetly ditched his condom in the loo.

“Mmph-rrrmph,”
says Kate, her face still half-pillowed.

Matt’s just about got her memorized from this angle. If he were a painter he’d have no trouble conjuring her at the studio. The convoluted conch of an ear. That startling silhouette as she cranes at him over her shoulder, one wide eye, amorous, amused. Backbone. Butt. Über-critic André Bazin once observed (this is late ‘40s, early peacetime) that sex appeal had migrated from leg to bosom, Dietrich to Hayworth and Russell. And nowadays? Having tarried awhile with the bronzed tummy is it time, perhaps, for the tush, complete the cycle?