Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good (6 page)

Knock knock.

Who’s there?

Banana.

Banana who?

Knock knock.

Who’s there?

Banana.

Banana who?

Knock knock.

Who’s there?

Orange.

Orange who?

“Orange you glad …”

“Oh yes.” She reaches around to rake his rump. What with the height mismatch he’ll have to … maybe if he just …

The scent hits him hard, the scents: hers, his. He recognizes neither one, his fever-body is that foreign to him. New woman, new man.

Number five. And, in at least a handful of ways he’s already thought of, a first.

N
o birth control, for instance, that was a first. With Kim last night—with Kristin last night?—Matt had no protection. She didn’t use anything either as far as he knows, no goops, no gadgets. Matt’s always been scrupulous on this point, an avid non-reproducer. Always? Well, there was that one brief interlude with Mariko, that one patch of happy madness that went nowhere. Other than that, though, he’s thwarted every attempt his body’s ever made to repeat itself, to give the slip to its own mortality. And now? He scores some babe in an elevator and badda-bing, he’s on his way to being somebody’s dad.

This isn’t quite the first thought to strike Matt when he wakes up in the hotel. His first thought, as a shiv of light slices through the gap in the theatre-weight drapes (a baby squinting down the birth canal), is more along the lines of
#@*!?
A comicbook coming-to. He’s rewinding and fast-forwarding, striving to locate the scene he was watching just before he drifted off.

Time to buy a clue. He sends a hand out to recce the bedside table. This produces a clinking sound, one mini-bottle against another, gnomish chimes. Matt’s fingers move on to explore the corduroy casing of the clock radio, which (quick peek here) reads
11:11
in red LED. Then they close, ahhhh, around the comforting fistful of plastic with its Braille of buttons.

Remote control.

Matt’s been waking up in the wrong room for a couple of months now. He’s taken to flipping on the tube first thing, there in his study, so’s not to have to contemplate where he is or why. The idea is to pre-empt all thought, to silence his mind—the way meditation might do, for instance, if he could ever get back the gumption for that sort of thing. Another little death, another puny suicide,
goodbye, cruel world.
Well, not
silence
his mind, maybe. Jam it though, drown it in disorder. Neutralize it with input, the way a hacker will when he bombards a server with a zillion gibberish-filled emails.
Gunnysacked north of last armpit station each night of pylons
…

It was originally supposed to be a work thing, the home theatre in Matt’s study (its screen about the size, as Mariko observed, of the pick-your-own-lobster tank in a spiffy restaurant). Matt’s rationale for investing in the system was that he could run, in the distraction-free confines of his own sanctum, important antecedents of any film he might be reviewing. He could refresh his impression of, say, Sarah Bernhardt’s
Hamlet
and Asta Nielsen’s
Hamlet
and Laurence Olivier’s
Hamlet
and Maximilian Schell’s
Hamlet
and Innokenty Smoktunovsky’s
Hamlet
and Richard Burton’s
Hamlet
and Nicol Williamson’s
Hamlet
and Derek Jacobi’s
Hamlet
and Mel Gibson’s
Hamlet
and Kenneth Branagh’s
Hamlet
and Campbell Scott’s
Hamlet
in preparation for reviewing Ethan Hawke’s
Hamlet.
(Hamlet, now there was a guy who knew how not to do anything. There was a guy who knew how to spend himself pacing his bone cage.) Mariko bought into this notion, and didn’t so much as roll her eyes when the mammoth Visa bill materialized. This would have been early Sophie days, after Mariko had twigged to what was going on between the two of them but before she’d sprung the news on Matt. Raising the question, goodness or guilt? Which of these was motivating his wife to be even kinder than usual? Was there any way to tell the difference, even from inside?

Nowadays, at any rate, the big draw is cable. Matt keeps adding channels to the package, tier after tier—it takes longer every day, Mariko gripes, to establish that there’s not a blessed thing to watch. For Matt, though, this search, this daft scanning is precisely the point. He’s found that if he slows his breath and keeps his body perfectly still (the meditation motif again) he can click for a good half-hour before he needs to pee.

There’s an added benefit, too, to this new rig. Mariko’s morning noises? Matt can drown them out. Why
start
each day, he figures, in a paroxysm of nostalgia? The quaint creak as his wife rummages through the closet for her robe, the gentle slap of her bare feet across the hardwood hall. The pensive interlude as she composes herself upon the potty, and then the crooning from the shower, to which Matt used to sing lamely along from the kitchen. Show tunes mostly, Hoshi’s thing, her mum’s thing. “I Could Have Danced All Night.” “I Loves You Porgy.” “I Cain’t Say No.”

No. Better to spare himself this daily ordeal. Better to spare her, too, the ordeal of seeing him emerge, fuzzy-eyed and fancifully-crested, from his exile. Better to lie low till she’s gone out, or settled into her office at the far end of the house. Morning is his wife’s most tender time. Messing it up would make Matt feel like dirt, and does he need that? He does not.

Kristin isn’t right. Katherine? She only said it once, and kind of gaspily at that.

The hotel’s device takes a little figuring. By the light slicing through that slash in the curtains he finds the power button. By the light of the menu screen—“Welcome to the Starlight Executive Inn”—he finds the channel and volume changers, triangles aimed up and down.

So let’s see now. Here’s that sitcom star, what’s his name, and he’s written a book about his ex-wife’s postpartum depression. It’s a courageous book (this by his own admission), and he profoundly hopes it will help others. Here’s a woman weeping, over the caption “Ellie—about to meet her son’s father.” Here’s an emaciated kid cooking baby rats over an open fire in an African savannah setting, and here’s that guy from
Jeopardy!
begging us for help. Here’s the news: West Nile virus, Vatican sex crime cover-up, still no WMDs in Iraq, rogue asteroid, White House press conference.

The bigness and blandness, the sheer routinized horror of this world—surely it counts as some sort of meditative vision. Matt craves his regulars though, and hey, here’s
Law and Order,
that distinctive sting,
doingg-doingg,
a cross between a gavel gavelling and a cell door slamming shut.

“These are their stories,”
says Matt, or tries to—he’s so parched his tongue produces only a ticking sound against the roof of his mouth. He’s going to have to move soon. And he’s going to have to
move
soon, get the hell out of this palace. Starlight Executive Inn? Fricking Jatinder.

Matt risks another glance at the bedside table. Four bottles from the mini-bar, two scotches, two Drambuies. A pre- and a post-coital shot each. Or no, wait, Katherine declined, so Matt chivalrously drained hers too. Two before, while she freshened up, and two after, once she’d slipped away. Karen?

“I’m getting a young man, J-something. John? Jeff?” This is Kevin Scion, Matt’s second-favourite TV psychic. The audience member upon whom he’s trained his mediumistic gaze shakes his head, no. He’d love there to be a John or a Jeff but there isn’t one. Maybe, then, Kevin is a fake. Maybe there’s no afterlife, maybe this is
it.
Maybe our lives are pointless little flares of light between frigid eternities of impenetrable darkness.

“A brother,” Kevin insists. No panic. “A cousin? He was close to you, closer then either of you ever realized.”

Nope, sorry, nothing.

“There’s a voice, a young man’s voice, no, a young
woman’s
voice. Not a man, a woman. Jane? June?”

“Jenny,” says the poor guy, and he starts to weep.

Oh, Lord. Matt thumbs down the volume, rolls out of bed and slinks into the bathroom. He’s naked—he recalls waking up dawnish to strip off his T-shirt and jockeys, which were horrid with sweat. What was that dream? Zane was there, a young Zane, but Matt was old. There was a gnu too, bawling pathetically and crying out for his daddy. Matt and Zane tried to comfort him with a song but they couldn’t agree on what to sing. They couldn’t even agree on what kind of creature they were singing
to.
Matt said gnu, Zane said wildebeest. They scrapped about it, schoolyard scrapped—“Oh yeah?” “Yeah!” “Oh yeah?” “Yeah!”—until the flight attendant popped her head in and sang, “Gnu-u, wildebeest, Gnu-u, wildebeest …” to the tune of “I Feel Pretty” from
West Side Story.

Is this maybe a perk of fever, that your dreams get fancier? Most nights they’re so drab, Matt’s dreams.

He sits to pee. Still shaky but not so bad. With luck it’s already behind him, the what’s-it, the wacky temperature. How does West Nile work? On the toilet’s right arm (this toilet has
arms?)
there’s a console, knobs and buttons and blinking lights. Rear Jet, Front Jet, Water Pressure, Water Temp. A treat for later.

Matt’s bladder releases and he hazards a peek down. No condom, Christ. Never mind birth, what about death? This is exactly how it happens. You go decades being careful and then one night you get a little zesty and expansive, you get a little hopped up on fate and, bingo, it’s in your blood. She’ll be pregnant, he’ll be sick. Birth and death and it took
how
long?

Matt groans. Nice echo in here so he groans again. Is this how it was for Zane too? He’s another serial monogamy guy, his tally of partners just as pathetic as Matt’s. There was Jean Michel, there was Mauritz, there was Phil, there was Nico. Is Nico? And then that one slip-up, that one segue, that one episode of desperate whoopee between bouts of I-love-you …

Guilt, yeah. There’s guilt here for Matt (why
wasn’t
he there for his friend that night?) mixed in with something even stranger. Jealousy? Not precisely, but … Here it comes again. Burnished by years of handling, this memory, but imbued this morning with an extra edge, a hallucinatory intensity. Febrile, feverish …

You couldn’t call it fucking. For one thing they were always fully clothed, he and Zane. For another thing they were
ten years old
at the time. Their bodies weren’t capable of sex yet, so you couldn’t even say they had a sex, could you? A sexuality?

Summer of ‘69, a cinch to remember since it was the year of the
Apollo
landing, the first walk on the moon.
One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.
Erin had got herself a sex by then, in a rudimentary sort of way. Thirteen. That was the summer things started to change for her, to go wonky. That was the summer their parents bombshelled them, broke the big news. That was the summer, too, that Erin caught them at it, caught him and Zane. Their very last time.

It was Matt’s turn to be on top that day. He liked it on top. He liked it underneath too. Crush or be crushed, smother or be smothered, both were good, everything was good.

“Man,” he murmured—or at least that’s what he murmurs in his memory, and who’ll contradict him? “Man, is your mum …
whoa.”
Earlier that afternoon, when they’d crashed into Zane’s place to grab his cap gun, they’d surprised Mrs. Levin on the patio tending her pots in an orange two-piece. It’d knocked the wind right out of Matt, the water-bomb weight of those things—hooters, jugs, bazoongas—and the slo-mo way they shifted when she stood. Preview of the landing, just hours to go,
she’s on the moon.

Zane opened his eyes. He looked dopey, he looked drugged. His upper lip was still pricked with sweat from their game of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,
peow-peow-peow,
in the midsummer heat. Matt had been Robert Redford that day, Zane had been Paul Newman.

“Fuggoff,” Zane sighed. The syllables were muggy against Matt’s neck.

Matt executed a searching shimmy of his pelvis, denim on denim. He said, “You fuggoff.”

That’s another thing, they didn’t even know the word yet. Which didn’t stop them using it, of course. A spell, an incantation, doubly potent for being so impenetrable.
Fuggoff.
They’d shush it if need be, bring it right down to a lip-read—around adults, around other kids, around anybody but each other—but that just intensified it, that just sweetened it on the tongue.

That particular day, though, it felt different to Matt. In fact it felt kind of creepy. He and his friend weren’t saying the same thing anymore. For Matt the sound was now soured with meaning. Erin had overheard him
fuggoff
-ing the night before, and had taken it upon herself to straighten him out. “Only imbeciles use words they don’t understand,” she’d scolded, and gone on to detail the gross, the farcical mechanics. Cross-legged in her rose hot pants she’d had G.I. Joe bounce up and down on top of Barbie, little sis Skipper smiling sweetly on. In those days Erin was constantly bringing Matt bulletins from the grownup world, jabs of unwelcome news about Santa, or Disney, or death—a cruel-to-be-kind sort of thing, her way of inoculating him against the world and its betrayals. Most times Matt relayed these bolts of wisdom directly to Zane, but this fucking thing was too bizarre. And, since Erin had taught him the modifier while she was at it, too
fucking
bizarre.