Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good (25 page)

It’s about the fertility clinic, apparently. It’s a good one and it’s away, away from River, away from work. Here in Toronto some guy had been induced to wank off into a jar. His sperm had been frozen, screened for various diseases and prepped for putting up her, once today, once tomorrow.

“But how did River …?”

“He wormed it out of my mum. She doesn’t approve.”

“Weird.”

Kate grimaced, let that one go. “But my friends do, the ones I’ve told. Thank goodness for friends.”

Matt managed a nod at that one. “And now River wants to be part of it, is that what’s going on?”

“So he says.”

“You don’t believe him?”

“No. I mean yes, he wants to, or he thinks he does. Men always think they should want to have a baby, women too. Which made me want
not
to want to, rebel me. But I did, I wanted to. I want to.”

“But you should have told me, Kate.” There’s anger here, sure, but something else too. Exhilaration? “A person deserves to know.”

“Yes of course, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. It’s just … The other thing’s just so impersonal. Intimacy narrative, that’s what I’d say if I were a client, I was missing the
intimacy narrative.
There was no tender story I could tell myself? So that’s why I treated myself to this ridiculous place, to make it kind of a special occasion. Like a honeymoon. And then you.”

“But what gives you the right? This is my life, Kate. I get to
choose
to be a father. Or not.”

“Oh,” said Kate. “I’m sorry, did …?” She laid a hand on his arm. “That’s not what I meant. I have a diaphragm, I just … it was just about companionship. I all of a sudden couldn’t be alone.” She paused. “And actually, wouldn’t you kind of say you did choose? Those first couple of times with no condom? I was there, and it felt an awful lot like a choice to me.”

He got out fast. He got out just fast enough. Striding down the hall he had to stutter-step his way past a young guy (late twenties?) not quite his own height but way beefier, with black hair spiked up like some heartthrob from a boy band. Matt heard the knock behind him but kept going.

In the elevator he thought, comedy, tragedy? How’s a guy supposed to know? A soundtrack would help. Noodling clarinets and bassoons and it’s going to be funny. You can laugh at the poor bastard, even if the poor bastard is you. But strings moaning in some minor key? Maybe not so much.

And he thought, hey, things can actually
happen.
Who knew?

“What if movies really are dreams? What if movies work the same way for us collectively, fulfill that same role? Which is what?” Starlight pen, Starlight paper. A real readership, lordy. “Dream scenes in movies, dreams within dreams. Start with Buster Keaton in
Sherlock Jr.
The projectionist falls asleep and dreams himself onto the screen …”

Zilch on the tube, so Matt decides to check his email before he calls it a night. Here he brings into play another of his patented spiritual practices—to wait patiently for his messages. Load the browser, log on, the whole thing must take thirty, maybe even forty seconds. During this period Matt resists, or tries to resist, or tries to try to resist all torment and vexation. “Time is made of thought,” says Mariko. “Stop your thoughts and time stops too.” So he sits, and he strives to think nothing. Even if the connection’s a little slow and it takes a full fricking
minute,
as it does tonight, he just sits there. Submission as the highest form of something-or-other.

Wow, this is new. Matt’s got a whole whack of messages, and only about half of them have to do with the inadequacy of his penis or his pension fund. The rest are actually addressed to him, and make some mention, in their subject lines, of things kritikal. A quick survey suggests about fifty-fifty favourable and un, impressed and PO’d with Matt’s creative nonsense. How completely bizarre to be getting, all of a sudden, the torrent of email DennyD imagined he’d been getting from the start. Is this the point? Is this what Matt’s been angling for all along, is to be doused in attention?

What it’s doing for him so far is it’s giving him this achy feeling in his chest. He could sure use a tuck-in right about now, a serious snuggle with Toto. He makes do with a self-plumped pillow, slots himself in between the sheets and begins plaintively to sing. Liesl, Gretl, Brigitta, Kurt, he’s all the little von Trapps in their goodnight scene, falsetto-ing his farewells, his adieus. The watcher in the corner winks back at each theatrical wave.

No, the McKays weren’t big on movies. Before
Sound of Music
there was what?
Mary Poppins.
And after it
Born Free, Jungle Book,
maybe a couple of animations. One big popcorn and a Fanta for each kid. Things picked up a touch once movies became a favoured birthday option, head-to-head with bowling. The year Matt and Zane turned nine, Matt’s party went to
Planet of the Apes,
Zane’s to
Yellow Submarine.
Statue of Liberty, Blue Meanies. The next year both parties went to
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, peow-peow-peow.
To this day some of Matt’s favourite movies are from that era—Nagy’s forever griping about his paradise lost–type attachment to those days. Matt’s favourite title, too, is from the sixties, or anyway subtitle:
Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
Slim Pickens plunging earthward on his bucking beauty of a missile, his “taut chubby of sun” (Matt’s Reprise blurb), whooping and giddy-upping with his cowboy hat. Strange love.

The McKays were stingy with home movies too. Once a winter, though, they’d dig out the clackety projector, hang a sheet over the drapes in the den. Most of the footage was of birthdays and Christmases, but the choicest stuff was of one June they spent at Uncle Lenny’s place up on Georgian Bay.
Or: How Erin Learned to Stop Eating and Love the Water.
Not that she actually started stopping right then, but some ascetic impulse did begin to assert itself and to get all tangled up with her sudden addiction to swimming. What was it that sucked her in? The way the water resisted and then gave way before the force of her will, maybe that. The amniotic wholeness of the moment, the mounting ecstasy of fatigue in her limbs. The way her father felt about it too, the thrill he clearly got when he saw that this kind of struggle might thrill her.

Matt’s back in the den tonight, on the floor with Erin at his folks’ feet. No sound but the rolled
r
of the projector and the murmur of the elder McKays, one to another. “We must have been out of our
minds,
letting those kids …” First Erin and then Matt, geronimo-ing off the high rocks, dropping through the grainy air into the shattered glare of the water. Which leads to the show’s annual climax—the old man freezes the film and throws it into reverse. The bay draws in its frothy crown of waves, collects up its load of spit and
ptui,
fires the little McKays back up onto the rock. First Matt then Erin, the two of them dry and twitchy up there on the precipice. Matt wants to go first, you can see that, but you can see he’s afraid. Erin’s tender nudgings aren’t enough so in the end she jumps for him, shows him how it’s done. Yep, there she goes again …

Déjà vu. In and out, time falling forward and springing back, spending itself and gathering itself up over and over again. Comic, tragic. Funny, unfathomable. Finally the old man lets ‘er roll and
thwacka-thwacka-thwack,
the little tail of film spins on the reel. What’s left onscreen is pure light.

“
W
ho’s there?”

Yeah, like she’s going to hear him, trussed up as he is in his cowl of comforter. She? Assuming it’s Kate.

“Who’s
there?”

Dammit. The ol’ Do Not Disturb sign, that shushing finger, sure isn’t doing its job this morning. This is the third time in half an hour somebody’s come thumping, with an urgency that says
let me out
more than
let me in.
Another of Zane’s old jokes. What would James Dean be doing if he were alive today? Pounding on the inside of his coffin.

Sick man.

Doingg-doingg. Law and Order’s
almost over, it must be just about noon. This is Matt’s last show anyway. His
very
last show, he’s made the commitment. No more tube. It’s a resolution at which he’ll fail, but that’s fine. Mariko, back when she quit smoking (Matt still misses the avid way she sucked each cigarette, like some sort of holy hookah), had to go cold turkey about ten times before it took. It’s high time Matt, too, started setting goals he can’t reach.

He’s already fallen short once today, actually—this is the second time he’s quit. A couple of hours ago he flicked off Kevin Scion (“The present
is
the future, can’t you see?”) and went for a stroll. Out on God’s green acre, under God’s bare, zillion-watt bulb, there was a fresh crop of fauna. One of those little black birds with the white spots, for instance, kind of like Saturday’s grackle but squatter, schlubbier. Starling? She must have been a mum because she had a grey mini-me hopping around after her, hectoring her for a beak-full of regurgitated bug. No go—mum kept cold-shouldering the poor little guy. Time to cut the cord, shove him out there on his own. The world as two things, me and you, self and other. A genuine, capital N–type Nature moment is what it was, and Matt, budding naturalist, was right there to take it in. He’s going to have to get himself a proper birding checklist, that’s two species already.

Sheesh, she just won’t give up. It’s almost time to check out anyway, head Zaneward.
Hey man, sorry I split. You do want me here though, don’t you? When you said stay away, you meant come?

“All right, all right!” Matt rolls off the bed, tucks himself in en route to the door.
Doingg-doingg
—dammit, he’s going to miss closing arguments.

“Hi.” He’s got the chain on, peeking through the slot like a nervous perp.

“Hi. Um, can we talk?” Kate’s all gussied up again, and why not? Just back, presumably, from her second big date with the turkey baster.

“Sure.”

Beat. “Right. Funny. But I mean can I come in?”

“Where’s River?”

“He’s around. We had kind of a …”—she pauses as a maid with a loaded trolley trundles past behind her—“of a tough time last night. They didn’t have a room here so he went over to the Holiday Inn. He’ll be back today, though. I don’t feel up to it.”

“Neither do I.”

“Right, yes. But I have something to tell you.”

“Okay. Shoot.” From behind him somebody hollers “Objection!” over the banging of a gavel.

“Matt, please.”

“Why? What’s the point of—”

“I didn’t use it.”

“Pardon?”

“I do have a diaphragm. I didn’t use it.”

Matt closes the door. He opens it again, chain still on.

“I’m sorry,” says Kate. “See, what I figured was … I didn’t figure very well. I had eight floors, from the lobby up to here. I decided it wouldn’t matter as long as you didn’t know. Maybe you’d have a son or a daughter on the far side of the country, but there’d be no
connection.”
She shakes her head. “I wanted … I felt like I needed something, Matt. Something real. And you were … there was something about you.”

Matt’s face does an odd thing here, hard to say just what.

“Plus, I don’t know, I didn’t want it all to be up to me this time. God or whatever, I wanted something else to have a say.”

“God.”

“Or whatever. Chances are …”—another pause while the maid cloinks by the other way—“chances are it won’t be yours. According to my chart … well, say fifty-fifty. What odds were you figuring when you bent me over the other night?”

Matt closes the door again. Onscreen these scenes work so nicely. There’s a soupçon of suspense—you wait for the sound of the chain sliding, or not. Will the guy open up again or leave the door shut? Is this yes or no?

“Who the hell’s
there?”

It’s been less than an hour since that last knock. Checkout time has slipped past yet again—Matt’s called down to finagle one more night, what the heck.

It can’t be Kate, since there she is curled up at the far end of the couch. The two of them have been madly prepping, since he finally let her in, for a spot on
The Newlywed Game.
Bob what’s his name, not Barker but the other one. He was Erin’s fave—any-time she stayed home from school with a fake flu it was to watch him grill hubbies about their wives, wives about their hubbies.
So Matt, tell us, what’s the biggest secret Kate’s ever tried to keep from you?
They’ve run the gamut of personal trivia, from first kiss to favourite movie, from pets to pet peeves. Kate loves cats, hates crowds …

The point being what, exactly? Kate’s gathering clues (as she’s presumably been doing since the start) to help her make sense of her kid if she somehow confirms that it’s Matt’s—if it’s extra long and lanky, perhaps, and possessed of an extra heavy dose of wiseassery. But what’s in it for Matt? Is it really worth getting to know the mother of the maybe kid he’ll probably never meet?

Compared to Kate’s this knock is delicate, deferential. “Room service.”

Kate frowns. “You know what? Let’s ignore that.”

“Why?”

“Did you order room service?”

“No. So they made a mistake.”

“And you call yourself a
movie
guy? This is how they get you.”

“Get you?”

“The real room service guy is duct-taped in a closet someplace. Trust me.”

“Kate.”

“Or the bad guy’s hiding under the cart. As soon as you—”

“Okay, I get it. But there’s no way River could find you here.”

Another knock, infinitesimally firmer.

“Yeah, about that,” says Kate. “The thing is, I told him.” She swipes at the air. “I just wanted him to go
away.
I wanted it really badly.”