Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good (24 page)

Something along those lines.

“Right, good,” says Matt. The heavy door swings shut behind him. “You know what I think? I think all this talk, what it does is it puts you in the mood.” And he grabs her, and he heaves her onto the bed. She actually bounces, he’s tossed her that hard. It’s a me-Tarzan moment, meant to be funny and maybe a little bit thrilling too.

“In the mood?” says Kate, sitting up. “No, not really. I’m actually sort of …”

Matt’s standing over her, Trojan at the ready, a twist of foil between his teeth.

“Oops, but you’re all …” And she grabs him by the belt, and pulls him to her.

Lordy. Why is this so … what? The eerie intimacy of it. And the shifting of layers—it’s as though she were suddenly to start spouting theory from the slit between her legs. The personal and the impersonal absolutely conflated, mind and body.

And the sexlessness, in a weird way. Genderlessness. Matt paws at her buttons so she’ll know he wants her to lose her blouse and bra, which she does. He can’t get at her breasts so she attends to them herself, weighs and worries them and before long she slips a hand into the dark slot between her belly and her belted skirt. She times it (sheesh, it sure doesn’t take long when she handles it herself) so that they collapse as one onto the bed. Done, finished, kaput.

Average caloric content? Four calories.

“Freedonia?” Kate, it’s safe to say, rebounds from these sated moments more swiftly than does Matt. He’s barely flopped a wedge of bedspread over his funny bits before she’s up and rebloused. “And the other one, the one where Chico and Harpo …”

“Sylvania?” says Matt.

“Sylvania!”

“Not bad. Okay, so you’re getting a tougher one tomorrow.
Way
tougher.”

Kate makes an I’m-so-scared face, and then, “You have a lovely cock, by the way.”

“Really? Well hey, so do you.”

“Thanks.”

That’s the best sex I’ve ever had.
Matt’s been with Kate four times now and these are the words that pop into his head every time.
That’s the best sex I’ve ever had.
Weird, because what pops into his head after sex with Mariko is nothing. It goes all hushed in there is what it does, a room where the TV’s just been turned off. Everything’s stopped, and nothing’s started up again.

Kate’s at the window peering out, contemplatively hipshot against the mellowing light. Matt says, “So it went well, eh?” He wriggles up to the head of the bed, props himself on a pillow.

“Hm?”

“Your lecture. They liked it?”

“Oh, they loved it.” Again with the elated laugh.

“Did you always want to do this kind of stuff?” This is weird too—he wants to talk, whereas with Mariko it’s pure cuddle. “I mean, how did you find it?”

Kate turns, pauses. He can’t make out her face, but he can make out, in silhouette, her shrug. “Mr. Barclay, I guess,” she says. “I’m in high school, Sheet Harbour. Small small small town. There’s absolutely nothing going on. All of a sudden in science class we’re talking about, I don’t know, cosmic rays and stuff, and I start to see how humongous and amazing the world really is.”

“For me it was the sound of music,” says Matt.

“What music?”

“No,
The Sound of Music.
The movie?”

“Julie Andrews?” says Kate. “It was Julie Andrews who made you realize how humongous and amazing the world really is?” She settles into an armchair, her face still blacked out by the light behind her. If she were on TV this would be a show about infidelity or addiction or some such, and her voice would be distorted, mechanized.

“I loved that movie.” Matt folds an arm behind his head, bestows his gaze upon the ceiling. “It was a family outing, that made it a big deal. We never went anywhere. My sister was crazy to see it but I was going to hate it, it was going to be
so
wimpy.” He chuckles—he always chuckles at this point in the tale. “They had to carry me out of the damn place. I swear to God, my dad had to sling me over his shoulder and lug me to the car.”

“You were crying?”

“Crying?
I was …” What’s the word he always uses? It won’t come to him. “Yeah, you could say I was crying. How could it be over, that world? How could such a thing just
end?”

“How old were you?”

“Six. Seven. Part of it was that I was in love with Liesl. Going on seventeen? She looked a bit like Inga, our babysitter.” He makes a be-still-my-heart sort of gesture. “The only way they could get me to sleep that night was to promise to buy me the LP.” He accepts a phantom guitar from Fräulein Maria, begins plucking out “Edelweiss.”

“What a suck,” says Kate, before he can actually burst into song.

“You said it. So then I’m at film school and one of our profs reads us a review of it, of
The Sound of Music.
He meant it to be an example of something, I can’t remember what. That review was vicious, God, it was vicious. Pauline Kael. And I think to myself, hey, I’m going to do that too.”

Kate gets up, fishes a Perrier out of her mini-fridge. What
does
he taste like, anyway? She waves it at him, sharesies?

“Sure, thanks.”

It wasn’t quite as neat as all that. Still, something really did happen to Matt that day, under the spell of Kael’s caustic words. A shiver of rightness, of recognition—the way Mr. Kumar must have felt when he first set eyes on the chessboard, the way Erin must have felt when she first slipped into the pool. This was a worthy task, almost a holy task: to spot the hokum, to name it. Which would leave Matt free, presumably, to set about making the real thing, a film purified by his critical vision.

“Here you go.”

“Thanks.” Matt accepts his glass of fizzy water, cranks his head up just enough to sip from it. “Funny story,” he says, settling back down. He’s getting pleasantly groggy now, ready for his post-coital snooze. “Zane? He went to a singalong
Sound of Music
once. As a cream-coloured pony.”

“As a what?”

“A cream-coloured pony. One of Maria’s favourite things? His wife went as a man on the road with a load to tote.”

“His wife? But Zane’s gay, you said.”

“So’s she.”

Matt started a
Sound of Music
review of his own once, but he’s never been able to finish it. He worked his way in through the music, two versions of “My Favorite Things,” the film version by Julie Andrews—so trite and phony—and the later version by squonky jazz guy John Coltrane, to which Matt applied words like
coruscating
and
incandescent.
A reversal of time, then, of cause and effect, the faint copy preceding the fearsome original. From there Matt segued awkwardly to the claim that nothing else about the movie was authentic either. “The children are the kind of children adults fantasize about. The adults are the kind of adults children fantasize about. Hell, even the Nazis are the kind of Nazis non-Nazis fantasize about …” It was a good angle, but not good enough.

Worse, Matt’s never quite nailed his review of the other classic from his childhood,
The Wizard of Oz.
For the opposite reason, of course. No solvent he can apply to
Sound
will be keen enough to cut through the film’s fraudulence, and no light he can shine on
Wizard
will adequately reveal its truth.
Sound
and
Wizard,
these are the twin poles of Matt’s aesthetic. Maria and Dorothy, these are his two witches, his bad and his good …

Matt sighs, snuggles down. If he were to sprinkle enough Juniper Breeze into his bath, might Dorothy someday come to him in a bubble? If he could whip up a strong enough wind might he be able to raise the shack, sp-sp-spin it around a few times and drop it—

Da-da-dum, da-da-dum, da-da-dum-dum-dum.
Oops, must have dozed off there—the
William Tell
startles him awake. He’s instantly sinking again, Kate’s hush-hush voice drifting in from the bathroom, rising now and then to bear him a few words. “… which is
really
none of your … but you
know
we aren’t … I can’t
believe
…”

There’s a red light high in one corner of Matt’s room, a winking red eye. Not regular and not random, it’s actually attuned to his presence, flashes whenever he moves. Some kind of motion-sensitive surveillance system, presumably. As he emerges from the washroom tonight, flossed and brushed and boxered, it acknowledges his presence with a cordial flicker. He reaches out to touch Erin’s box—what
do
you do with your sister’s bones once you’ve got them?—and receives another wink. Spooky, but maybe better than being alone? After so many years spent watching people onscreen it’s hard not to feel watched anyhow, hard not to feel like the focus of some phantom crew. Grip, gaffer, boom operator, best boy, the whole gang’s here all the time, ready to roll.

And Matt, what’s that like for you? Are you aware of the crew as you do a scene?

Well, that’s an interesting question, John or Jill or Bill or Beth. I think, as time goes by, you learn how to sink more and more deeply into the part, and into the moment. Almost a Zen thing. Mind you, sex scenes present a whole other challenge.

Yes, ha ha, I just bet they do! Poor guy, we feel for ya! Say, Matt, of all the women you’ve done love scenes with, Uma and Andie and Jennifer and Reese and Gwyneth and Kim and Cate and Demi and Angelina and Charlize—whoosh, who can keep track!—which of them would you say was the most…

Fuck. This can’t really be happening. Can this really be happening?

When Matt woke up again, after his little nap there in Kate’s room, it was to Kate shaking him, telling him he had to go. This was seriously discombobulating, since he was still stuck in his dream, and in his dream he was still stuck at home in the Lair and Mariko was shaking him, telling him he had to go …

“Why?” Matt blinked—Kate was whirlwinding about the room switching on lights.

“You just do.”

This should have been enough. Matt should have gathered himself up, got himself out the door, gone back to his life, whatever’s left of it. “Yeah but why?”

“River’s here,” said Kate. “My boyfriend’s here. I mean ex.”

“Oh. Why?”

Kate stamped her foot, a mum losing it at bedtime. “Just
because,
okay?”

“Kate, I really—”

“If I tell you, you’ll leave, right? You’ll clear out?”

“Sure.”

So Kate arranged herself on the edge of the bed, and she took a deep breath, and she told him.

After a while Matt said, “So let me get this straight.” He’d managed to zip himself up, wriggle into a sitting position. Shred of dignity. “River’s a doctoral student at …
River?”

“His parents were hippies. But Matt, you really have to—”

“At Dalhousie, and he’s into the whole universe business. He’s a student, but he’s not a student of yours.”

“That’s right. The world as one thing.”

“What?”

“That’s his thesis topic, I got that from him. See, I didn’t want to drag you into this so I started making stuff up, and … and then I just kept
on
making stuff up. I guess I kind of got hooked on the story, I’m sorry about that, but it actually, I don’t know why, it actually made me feel closer to you. Can you believe that, please?”

Matt had a go at restraining his hair, clumped and scruffy from his snooze. “Okay, so River’s not a student of yours. You don’t teach this subject, you’re not an astronomer at all.”

“No. To tell you the truth I hated Mr. Barclay, skulking around in his lab coat with—”

“Right, okay, so you’re not an astronomer. You’re a psychiatrist, you said?”

“Psychologist.”

“You’re a psychologist, and you work at a group home for loonies.”

“Not a term we use, but yes. Schizophrenics mostly. One of my clients is River’s sister, Morning? That’s how we met. I studied up on his stuff, River’s stuff, when I was trying to, you know.”

“Get into his pants.”

Kate shrugged—sorry about all this. “I told you I go overboard.
Used
to go overboard. Look how sensible I’m being with you!” She tried on a good-girl grin.

“Right.”

“Anyway, I had all these night shifts for a while, plenty of time to read, so I crammed on the universe stuff. Plus I use it, the same way you’re going to use it on Zane. Something so big …” She checked her wrist, popped up and started poking around for her watch. The digital clock on the bedside table was blinking on 1
2:OO
—her room appeared to have suffered a blackout. “River was calling from the airport, he was about to grab a cab.”

“Jatinder’ll slow him down,” said Matt.

“Jatinder?”

“So you’re not here for an astronomy conference, obviously.”

“No. I—I’m an idiot. But you know what, can we possibly talk about this later? River can get kind of—”

“And you’re not here for a psychology conference either?”

“No.” With a last fretful look about the room Kate abandoned the watch hunt, settled back onto the edge of the bed. “Okay, so this is the thing.” Her eyes had never looked bigger, buggier—she seemed to be flabbergasting herself here too. “I’m actually … I’m here to get pregnant, Matt.”

If this scene appeared in a silent movie—such is Matt’s thought as he stares at the blank screen of the ceiling in his room—that’d be the caption. That’s the line they’d pull out of all the lip-reading chatter, flash on the screen overtop the melodramatic brass: “I’m actually … I’m here to get pregnant, Matt!!!” Then back to the couple’s mute gesticulations.

“It’s crazy,” Kate went on. “It’s
crazy,
but it’s right. I really believe that. I mean, I was nuts about River, but we weren’t going to be a family, not a chance. I was just … I was just so
sick
of the whole thing. And then all of a sudden … That’s what happened on the ocean, the day I told you about?”

“So that part,” said Matt, “the abortion and everything. That wasn’t bullshit?”

Kate stood up, sat back down. “No, Matt,” she said. “That wasn’t bullshit.”

“Right. Okay.”

“Burying her at sea, that wasn’t bullshit either. I was … I was stuck, and then I was unstuck. I was grieving, and then it turned into something else. And here I am.”