Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good (20 page)

The slightly bulbous face, the madly moguled hair.

“Mmm, I don’t think so,” says Kate.

Matt ventures a couple of tentative steps up the walk.

“I mean maybe if you’re still young, but after fifteen years?”

Charlotte, or her stand-in, has caught sight of Matt now. She leans, squints.
“McKay?”

They meet at the bottom of the steps, Charlotte high-heeling her way gingerly through the broken glass. They give each other three or four hugs in rapid succession, taking breaks for holy-shit looks in between.

“What are you … what the hell are you
doing
here?”

“I missed you,” says Matt.

“Very funny.”

“Yeah, and I’ve been worried. Shouldn’t you be getting your own place?”

Charlotte slugs him in the shoulder, not gently. “Still the smartass, eh, McKay? No, I’m just here sorting out my mum’s stuff.”

“Oh, Jeez. I’m really sorry to hear that.” Can the woman’s liver possibly have held out this long?

“No, that’s not what I mean,” says Charlotte. “No, Mum’s fine. She’s fallen in love, actually, and she’s taken off with this guy. He’s very well off. Raisins. They’re at his place down in Mexico, so I’m helping her get the house ready to sell.”

“Raisins, eh?”

“Hey, I was thinking about you recently.” Charlotte guides a loose twist of hair (blonder than ever, and scrupulously streaked) behind an ear. She employs a pinkie for this purpose, the same queen-to-tea manoeuvre she used to pull. Matt strives to picture her seventeen again, shoving stuffies (lions, elephants, giraffes) off her bed to make room for him. Her mum would be passed out down below in front of
Jeopardy!,
her dad long gone, the neighbourhood’s first divorce. Talk about luck. “Zane Levin was in the paper. That movie of his was causing a ruckus, the one about Arabs in movies?”

“Right.”

“How Arab actors feel about playing, you know, wily zealots the whole time. He’s quite the big shot, eh?”

“Well.” A couple of low-budget features, a few edgy shorts, a handful of documentaries,
big shot
may be stretching it. Or maybe not. Matt’s buddy is actually a bit of a sensation. He can’t kill himself then, can he? You can’t quit unless you’re losing, right?

Charlotte says, “Not many people spend their lives the way they wanted to, do they? Sad.” Though there isn’t a whiff of melancholy about her, there never was. “Do you see him? Zane?”

“Yeah, we’re in pretty good touch.”

How did Charlotte hope to spend her life? Matt should remember. Teacher? Nurse? Nun? Judging by her outfit she’s gone more banker, broker. Her clothes don’t scream money, because they don’t have to. They whisper money, they croon money. They induce in Matt an ugly awareness of his baggy-kneed jeans, his artlessly distressed T-shirt.
T-shirt,
it says in a logo-like, mock-corporate style. Oh, clever.

“I always thought you’d be in movies too,” says Charlotte.

“Yeah, well. I probably would be if I were Jewish or gay or something.”

“What?”

“Well really, what am I? I’m not even a
woman.”

Charlotte makes as though to check out his hooters. “I see what you mean.”

“Actually, Zane and I are going to make a movie together. Like old times.”

“Really?”

“Mumbai.”

“Pardon?”

“Mumbai. You probably know it as Bombay. Sixty thousand sex workers in one little area, and more than half of them are infected.” Matt’s been busy on the web, ferreting out dreadful details with which to lure Zane in. “Most of them were kidnapped, or sold by their own families.” Big bonus, there’s an ashram nearby. You don’t talk, you don’t drink, you don’t have sex, you don’t watch TV. You eliminate craving, aversion, ignorance, how much better could it get?

“Wow, that’s wonderful. I mean it’s horrible, but it’s wonderful. What’s that?”

“This? Nothing.” Matt’s just picked up his bagged box, which he’d set down for the embrace.

“Third Eye Books? Are you going airy-fairy on us, McKay?”

“No. My dad is.”

“Please.”

She looks awful, Charlotte looks awful. Actually no, she looks good. For forty-four, are you kidding? She looks great. She’s kept her figure (Pilates probably, Jazzercise), hips, bum and breasts still distinct, not yet sunken into the morass of her middle-aged self. The fullness of her face has kept it relatively intact too, relatively uncreased. But here’s the thing: she isn’t nineteen. She just isn’t.

“Hi,” says Charlotte.

“Hi,” says Kate. She’s inched her way up the walk to join them. “I’m Kate. I’ve heard so much—oh. You’re bleeding.”

Sure enough, there’s a freshet of blood zigging and zagging its way down the front of one of Charlotte’s fish-netted shins. They’re all staring down at it when the door swings wide a second time. A boy emerges from the house, a great gangle of fidgets and acne, and crunches his way scowling down the front steps.

He’s Charlotte’s all right. The flat, fleshy nose, the surprising chin. “Hi, bozo,” she says to him. She has to reach up to sling a buddy-buddy arm over his shoulders.

“Can I have this?” The boy has a football hold on an old phone, black bakelite with a metal dial. A grandma phone, the kind that doesn’t bleep or bloop but actually rings.

“This is my son, Paul,” says Charlotte. “Paul, this is Matt, a really really old friend of mine.” The blood’s still negotiating its way down her leg, strawberry sauce down the side of a sundae. Matt masters the urge to bend, dip a finger. He flashes on their very first time, up in that bedroom—the sudden, shocking Rorschach of red on Charlotte’s pink sheet. “And this is Kate, his … are you two …?”

“Yes, wife,” says Kate. “Hi, Paul.”

“Hey,” says Paul, looking her dead in the eye the way kids do these days. He sports a decent array of hardware, the umgirl’d be impressed. A couple of earrings, a single rivet through his left eyebrow, and a tiny ball—it might be a bead of drool—in the middle of his lower lip.

“Great to meet you, Paul,” says Matt, offering the lad his hand. And what if he were a McKay? In one of Kate’s parallel universes, what if this kid were to call Matt Dad? He’d be even taller, for one thing, and stringier. Stranger too, fraught or fucked up in some barely detectable way. Yeah, so maybe it’s just as well. Maybe Matt just needs a better rationale, a better explanation for why he’s ended up forsaking fatherhood. Maybe he just needs something a little more impressive to have forsaken it for.

“No, no kids yet,” Kate’s saying—Charlotte must have come right out and asked. “But that may change any day now, eh, honey?”

Matt has a go at the jovial-hubby thing. He leers, aims a slap at her rump. “You betcha, babe.”

And look—Charlotte, still the sweetheart, believes.

“
A
fternoon, sir.”

“Afternoon, um, Albert. Really, it’s afternoon already?”

“Yessir.”

“Oh dear. The Danforth please.”

It’s gotta be safe by now. Matt’s got a new symptom today—a dull pain in the centre of his chest—but that’ll just be tension. Or maybe it’s his heart, but who cares? He’ll die (two hours he’s been famous and it’s about to finish him off!), but he won’t kill anybody.

No, it’d take a greater hypochondriac than Matt, it’d take a truly world-class hypochondriac to convince himself he’s infectious today. What was that old joke of Zane’s? This month’s meeting of Procrastinators Anonymous has been postponed indefinitely, hardy har. Zane, who couldn’t procrastinate to save his life.

The plan is to drop in and stun the guy, then retreat to the hotel for one last night with Kate.

Matt executes a few
kapalbhatis,
a few Cleansing Breaths. He’s never done one before—he never got this fancy during his enlightenment phase back in high school—but what the heck. He’s watched Anirvachaniya often enough, how hard can it be? Deep inhalation, hold it in for a jiff and then, lips pursed, blow it out in a series of sudden blasts. It feels good, eases the ache in his chest and gives him a bit of a head rush. Then, “Hey, Toronto’s an Indian word, isn’t it, Albert?”

“Could be, sir.”

“Not Indian Indian, but you know. The folks who were here first.”

“Could be.”

“Mohawk, I think. I can’t remember what it means. Place of No-Breath. But yeah, there was probably air back then.”

Albert nods as though in appreciation of some grave profundity. He can’t nod far, though, before his chins start to pile up on the rugged plateau of his chest. Albert is big. Albert is enormous. Fat Albert, how many times must he have heard that when he was a kid, the Bill Cosby routine?

“Three twenty,” says Albert.

“Beg pardon?”

“That’s what I weigh, three twenty. You were wondering.”

“I … No, I really wasn’t. Albert.”

“Oh, sorry.” He meets Matt’s eye in the rearview. “When a guy gawks at me I just figure.” He’s gunning it now, getting up to speed to join the lunacy of the 401, which is weirdly freewheeling at the moment. “Unless maybe you fancy me, is that it?” Something English about the accent, or anyway about the usage,
fancy
for
desire.
Friday there was Jatinder, then yesterday Eddy from Jamaica, Shan from Sri Lanka. Only newcomers know their way around, is that it?

The city. Here it comes again. From where he sits Matt can see only Albert, but he knows they’re out there, the other five million souls, cocooned in their cars, cordwooded behind concrete and reflective glass. Matt’s of the view that human beings are hard-wired for tribal life—a few dozen cousins all speaking the same tongue, thinking the same animistic thoughts. Which explains the panic attack, the prolonged collective freak-out that is city life. We just aren’t
meant
for this. But then shouldn’t Matt crave the very life he’s resisting, communal, close to the land? Shouldn’t he cling to the life he’s losing?

“Fancy?” says Matt. “Fancy, no. No, I was just thinking.”

“Thinking,
oh,” says Albert. “That’s different, innit.”

This concludes their confab. Matt sits silently, managing his gaze and endeavouring not to think anymore. If only he had his cello with him on this trip, that’d settle him down. He adores the feel of it between his thighs—sexual if you’re a woman, surely, and if you’re not a woman what? It’s Erin’s cello, Matt’s main memento, sprung from the shrine her bedroom became after her death. Erin, too, was talentless at the cello, never got much beyond “Hot Cross Buns,” “Twinkle Twinkle.” This is crucial to Matt, to celebrate what was mediocre about his startling sister, what was run-of-the-mill.

Matt’s own forte is the Bach Suites for Solo Cello. Okay, the first suite of the Bach Suites for Solo Cello. Okay, the prelude of the first suite of the Bach Suites for Solo Cello. Okay, the opening few bars of the prelude of the first suite of the Bach Suites for Solo Cello … It’s a series of chords fanned out into their separate notes—you get this rocking-horse thing going, simultaneous motion and stillness. Time moves and stands still at the same time. Matt grinds it out over and over again pretty much daily. He swoons, he sways, he grimaces with emotive agony—if he had any gift at all he’d be a genius, right up there with the Yo-Yos of this world. Plus the Sibelius, the cello part of his Fourth Symphony, that long swelling solo passage at the start. Sibelius, so say the liner notes, had already suffered a bout of throat cancer when he composed the thing. The cancer was gone, but was it gone for keeps?

Matt scowls. He’s watched one person decide to die, is he game for another? Erin died of a disease, sure, but only in the sense that a free choice can be a symptom. It still had a new-word smell to it back then:
anorexia.
You whispered it, you wondered what it meant. What it meant was nothing. This is what his sister died of: she died of nothing. “I ate earlier. My stomach’s upset, some kind of flu I think.” Once she started saying no she never stopped. Starvation became beautiful to her, beautiful in the way a bottle is to a dipso, a price-tagged trinket is to a klepto. Beautiful in the way food is to a guy like Fat Albert. Sustenance was there for Erin, delicacies delivered to her like oblations, in the end, like gifts to the gods. Maybe if there hadn’t been so much of everything she’d have wanted more.

Matt could scream. What if he just screamed?

Cheese slices. “Cheese” slices, orange slabs of something synthetic individually wrapped in plastic—these had always been Erin’s favourite, so Matt brought a packet with him whenever he visited her in her rented digs downtown. Plus eggs and bananas and broccoli, because he’d heard they were perfect foods. Plus pizza, because you could put everything on it and
make
it a perfect food. Erin would arrange these offerings on a platter and poke at them for a while, Matt pretending not to notice or care. The only thing more painful than watching her not eat was watching the pantomime she put on for his benefit. Eventually he’d break down and eat the gifts himself. Erin would sit on the floor and play with Bell, the stray cat she’d taken in and named after Marilyn Bell, a schoolgirl who’d made history by swimming the frigid expanse of Lake Ontario. The perfect idol for Erin, a kid who’d gone ahead and done what was perfectly impossible.

Until the end, until Erin’s system actually collapsed and her heart quit pumping blood, none of them—not even Erin, Matt suspects—believed it was death she was choosing. She was choosing power. She was choosing perfection. She was choosing to inflict pain on herself so’s not to be, any longer, its passive recipient. Or whatever. Oblivion is only a turn-on as long as it’s beyond you—such is Matt’s conviction. He too craved it for a little while there, until it occurred to him that he could have it. You couldn’t keep wanting it after that, could you? The desire for death must always be a mistake, surely, a misunderstanding.