Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good (30 page)

Except that no, they aren’t. The ironic reversal. After a year or two, during which she’s completely overhauled her life to suit her new heritage, a second bit of news reveals that Sara (now Sarah) isn’t Jewish after all—the original documents had been forged by Nazis to incriminate her family. Sara isn’t Sara any longer, but she isn’t Sarah either. She isn’t her old self, she isn’t her new self. Now what? Matt’s favourite part of his review was the nifty bit of Northrop Frye he managed to weave in.
“The story of the loss and regaining of identity is the framework of all literature.
Okay, Northrop, but what about people who go the other way? What about people who gain their identity and then lose it?” Lovely.

“Hey, Zane.” The bus is signalling now, searching out its exit ramp. Soon it’ll bear its load of youth off to their field trip, to their wildlife preserve or Group of Seven gallery. The girls are flinging kisses at the boys—old men?—clutching at their hearts as though they’re being broken. Matt and Zane clutch theirs too.

“Yeah, Matt?”

“I’ve been wondering.”

“Super.”

“That piece, you never said what you thought about it.”

“Which piece?”

“You know, now-I’m-Jewish, now-I’m-not.”

“Oh, yeah. Yeah, it’s good. A little hard maybe, a little harsh, but good. I’d like to make it. The two of us, you and me. If I don’t die first.”

“Really?” says Matt. “So maybe a trilogy, we could do all three.”

“Have your people call my people.”

“No, have your people call my people.”

“No, have
your—”

“I could kill myself,” says Matt. “Before you can even die I could kill myself. What about that?”

Zane flaps his hands, forget it. “You’re too much of a wimp.”

Any point telling the guy?
I’ve still got my kit, man, tucked under the futon
… “Yeah, you’re probably right. But what if I just plain die? Heart attack or something, all this stress? Did I mention I’ve been having chest pain this week?” Sure, the pain has all but ebbed away, but no need to share that part.

“Really? Are you serious?”

“Just a little.”

“Shit, man, you should get that checked out.”

“What, you mean I should
live?”

Hm. That wasn’t quite the tone he was going for. Zane flinches, falls silent. After a stretch of silent driving Matt says, “Price of fame, I guess. Heart trouble.”

“Fame?”

“I’m a hotshot now, do you not read the papers? I figured that’s why you were suddenly kissing up to me. Yeah, the counterfeit reviews, people are lining up for a piece of this action.”

“No kidding. I like it.” Zane grips an invisible mike, waves it in Matt’s face. “So Matt, how long have you been full of crap?”

Matt strikes a pose for the photographers, lets it go. “God, it must be awful. How did you get so good at it, the media thing? It’s like you’re
yourself
almost.”

“I make sure to spend time with the little people,” says Zane. He gives Matt an appreciative pat on the knee. “Plus a stable home life.”

Matt shakes his head. “So you really did it? You plundered her honeyed folds?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Have any trouble? I mean, did you have to think about Nico or somebody?”

Zane groans. “Mind your own beeswax.”

“Who
do
you guys think about anyway? I mean Brad Pitt or somebody? Or does the guy you think about have to be gay too?”

“I thought about you, Matt. I always think about you.”

Big raspberry. “So you really are married then, you son of a gun.” He punches Zane in the shoulder. “Hey, remember in Morocco? That wedding?”

“Hanna and Helena,” says Zane.

Hanna and Helena. Two blondes from Helsinki—the boys hooked up with them at the end of their big trip together, on a boat from Spain to Morocco. Europe had been great, but so hopelessly
European,
so white, so known-world. The boys decided to go wild, slip down into North Africa, wrap up with an exotic flourish. They hit it off with the girls, so they all four made their way to a campsite on the beach at a place called Martil. They got blitzed on the make-believe blue of the Mediterranean, and on a pipe or two of black hash bummed from fellow travellers. Then they pitched their tents and headed into town.

Stroke of luck, there turned out to be a wedding on that day, local colour or what. Out front were musicians banging on drums, clapping cymbals, wailing away on funny-looking horns. At the heart of about a hundred partiers bobbed a big box, born aloft by four strapping chaps and draped with fancy fabrics. Hanna pointed. “The bride is in there. They have been to the mosque. Now they are taking her to her husband’s home. He can divorce her if anyone sees her in the next fifteen days.”

Helena shook her head in disgust.
“Paskan marjat,
” she said. And, in response to the boys’ puzzled stares, “Shitberries.”

The Finns, as it transpired, were geniuses. They spoke about seven languages each, and were soon to start at the Sorbonne. They seemed to know more about Morocco than the Moroccans.

Matt said, “Cool little snake charmer thingies those guys were playing, eh?” The four were strolling back to the campsite, swigging by turns from a bottle of retsina.

“They call that a
ghaytah,”
said Helena. “It’s double-reeded, like a
zurna
from Turkey.”

“Or a
mizmar
from Egypt,” said Hanna.

“Or a
zamr
from Lebanon,” said Helena.

“Or a
shenay
from India,” said Hanna.

So there were patches of conversation from which the boys were more or less excluded. They handled it by getting all giggly, cracking puerile in-jokes. They riffed like mad, needless to say, on
Casablanca,
the famed city being just a couple of hundred miles down the Atlantic coast. Hanna and Helena were weirdly tolerant. They didn’t exactly flirt but they didn’t throw up their hands and flee either, or make a fuss about boyfriends back in Finland. And there were
two
of them, for pity’s sake. A sign.

“Or a
sunay
from China,” said Helena. Matt smiled, contrived a shoulder-brush with her. She smiled back, but then grabbed Hanna and scooted ahead for some girl-talk.

Matt fell in beside Zane. “So what’s the plan, buddy? Hanna or Helena, your choice.”

Zane said, “Yeah, tough call. Hey listen, here’s another one for you. How would you … What if one of us were gay?”

“Gay?” said Matt. “You’re so fugging bizarre. Though if one of us were faggy I guess it’d be better if both of us were.” Snort of hilarity. “That way we could ditch the geniuses, it’d just be the two of us idiots again.”

Zane shrugged.

All he did was shrug. It was like that day Erin told Matt about Santa, or rather
didn’t
tell him about Santa. Matt was busy listing the Christmas gifts he’d ask for that year, Etch A Sketch, Spirograph, Creepy Crawlers. Erin said, “You know about Santa, don’t you?” And he did. In that moment Matt knew about Santa, felt the knowledge rise up from where it had been lodged within him, a burp that just needed patting. Santa was a crock, some old gaffer in a goofy costume. Matt knew it, had been unwittingly knowing for some time. In this fashion, too, everything he was ready to know about Zane was let loose in him by the shrug. His best friend was into guys.

“Oh,” said Matt.

Back at the campsite the girls rejoined them, but Matt and Zane brushed them off and went walking. They followed the white trail of the beach towards the darkening bulk of what Hanna had identified as the Rif Mountains. They paced back and forth pretty much until dawn, under a toenail-clipping moon, talking not about the issue but in light of it, rejigging their friendship to function under this new dispensation. The big thing was to steer clear of the tent, which all at once looked so puny.

In the morning Zane bundled up his stuff and split for Casablanca. He’d keep on going through Marrakesh and into Algeria, Niger, Nigeria (Shanumi would have been a toddler at the time), further and further south to consummate his love affair with Africa. “Come for the animals,” he’d later scrawl on the back of a pride-of-lions photo mailed to Matt, “stay for the people.”

Which left Matt alone and tentless with two girls and their three-man tent. Hanna and Helena eventually invited him in, but with a caveat. They wouldn’t be having sex with him, since the only sex they ever had was with one another.

Ah.

As it turned out, though, the two weren’t mutually exclusive, girl-sex and guy-sex. Hashed up and tipsy, the Finns got experimental. Penetration was out, but pretty much everything else was in. Equilateral, isosceles, scalene. Right, obtuse, acute. Who knew high school geometry would come in so handy? There were three nights of this, three candlelit nights—on two occasions a corner of sleeping bag began stinkily sizzling and the trio had to spill out into the briny gloom. Matt spent the days resting and rehydrating, and filling his diary with inanely mystical footnotes. In one place: “What if there were four of us? What if the triangle had become a quadrilateral? Trapezium, parallelogram, rhombus, rectangle, square.”

“My friend there?” he said to the girls one day. “Turns out he’s gay too.”

The Finns shared a good-grief look with one another. “How is it possible you didn’t know this?” said Hanna. “We thought you both were.”
Gaydar,
did the word even exist back then?

“Until you shoulder-checked me,” said Helena, mimicking Matt’s smooth move.

On the fourth morning the girls announced their plan to head east for Egypt, and ultimately Israel. Matt toyed with the idea of tagging along. It wasn’t until much later that he realized he’d been living in a porn addict’s dream, that what he should have wanted was to loop it forever. Maybe it was the girls’ unsettling bursts of laughter—could his pecker keep on being that funny?—or maybe it was the new feeling of lostness the sex couldn’t quite blot out. For one reason or another Matt decided to let them go.

He toyed, too, with the idea of heading south. Maybe he could pick up Zane’s trail, overtake him out on some sunbaked savannah,
Born Free
terrain. Was that what Zane was hoping, that Matt would hunt him down? Or had he intended all along to find himself alone?

Matt’s safest route was the route home. Next time though, in India? Matt will have a camera, and Zane will never shake him.

If DennyD’s at all mortified at being caught out in a lie, he isn’t showing it. He simply made no mention, in this morning’s message, of his claim to have seen the non-existent
House of Straw.
Then again, why should he be mortified? Who hasn’t been caught out in a lie this week? “I’m used to READING you in the press and now I’m reading ABOUT you, this just gets better and better. It’s so totally POST, the writer becoming the story because he’s written non-fiction about fictional things …”

And then—what the hell—that message from Nagy, the one Matt’s been avoiding since Saturday. Procrastination just keeps getting tougher as time goes on.

kritik@home, hey, not half-bad. A dream job for Matt, or at least it would be if it paid more than pocket change. The freedom to do work he cares about in the comfort of his own fetid study …

But no, not yet. Matt isn’t ready to abandon the cinema, the cathedral itself. Sure, he cherishes the fancy rig he’s got at home, but it isn’t the Real Thing. Even in its updated, vulgarized form, Matt still loves the thing of going-to-a-movie. Loves it? Needs it. From the first waft of faux-butter warming in the squirter machine to the sticky-treaded shuffle out at the end, it’s all sacred, it’s all sublime. This came clear again just last night, as he settled in to be Terminated. Coming Attractions: the vicious strobe of action sequences, the pushbutton emotion of hundred-decibel pop, the rivet-machine repetition of nauseating clichés … On either side of him Kate and Zane shifted and shuddered. Matt? For the first time in days he felt almost perfectly serene. The “primal screen” Sarris called it, the return of that luminous union you felt your very first time.

Plus his buddies. Going to a movie is one of the few things Matt isn’t just as happy to do alone. He’s always wished Mariko would join him more often. The uncanny combo of private and public, the appealing weirdness of being in your own little world in the company of others—could this be the solution, finally, to the riddle of individual and crowd, of self and other? “For wherever two or more are gathered in my name, there am I.” You’re huddled in the dark, staring together into the light …

Why hasn’t he ever fantasized about Sophie
and
Mariko? This is a question that grips Matt as he and Zane speed south. They’ve just about run out of Canada here, and are flashing past signs for the border.

Rainbow Bridge. Will Bush be there to greet them?

“Well, I just knew we couldn’t count on you Canadian pussies,” drawls Matt. “But that’s alrat. We’ll sort
Saddam
out just fan all by our lonesomes.”

“Wow, that’s an amazing accent,” says Zane. “Scottish, right?”

He’s certainly fantasized about Sophie, Matt has. Lithe and guileless—Franka Potente maybe, from the
Bourne
movies. Franka in blonde dreads. And of course he’s fantasized about Mariko, more and more often in recent months as their sex life has hardened into history. He’s fantasized about him and Mariko both fantasizing about Sophie, and he’s even, on one curious occasion, fantasized about Sophie fantasizing about him and Mariko. So why not—shades of Hanna and Helena—the obvious threesome? Butch and Sundance and the teacher lady, but the other way around?