Here the Dark Page 3
Jennifer told me that I was raging against Holly, my wife, and that instead of snapping at the students I should go home and hit pillows or go out hunting bear. It was noon hour and we were in her classroom and I’d just asked her for some poetry because my father liked to be read to in the evenings. Jennifer was standing by the window and then she turned with the poetry book in her hand and we both leaned forward and kissed. It was a rather longish and hesitant kiss, as if we were walking into an unknown lake. I put my arms around her and thought of a Butterball turkey. She was tight. I’d expected a laxness, flab, like approaching a waterbed, but her body was hard, even her big breasts had a trampoline quality. She smelled good and her mouth was a marvel. I explored it awhile and she made little noises, as if she were saying something and I thought how Holly, when we kissed, would be silent and concentrate on my gums, my tongue, the shape of my teeth. When we separated I looked at Jennifer and saw that a voyage out was not a simple matter and I went home that evening and again asked Natalie if she liked Jennifer Donne. She told me to settle down and so I asked my father the same question and in a moment of clarity he said that her loins were certainly fruitful.
The following week, around midnight, Jennifer phoned and asked me to come over and so I went and found her in her kitchen baking cookies and drinking wine. She told me to sit and asked if we could lap dance and when I said yes she showed me her breasts and pushed my mouth against her and then she had me stand and unbuckled me and pulled down my pants and sat me down and then slid one leg out of her jeans and panties and straddled me again clothes flapping at one ankle and she put me inside and said, “Oh.” Dishwasher going, cookies baking, bright lights, her humming in my ear, the slap of her bum against my bare legs and then the quick gasps as she cried out that the baby was calling, hurry now, hmm, and then I was finished and she was off me and into her jeans and out the kitchen and upstairs to calm the baby. I looked around and pulled up my pants and waited. I drank a glass of wine and then another. Jennifer reappeared and sat across from me and said she hoped I didn’t feel attacked. I shook my head and looked at her and considered that she was fine, really, with her bullish neck and small fingers and all those children like so many limbs and I pictured myself as just one more limb. Life with her would be matter-of-fact, simple and quick: the children would come first. Which was why we began to meet at noon hours, taking my Topaz out to an empty parking lot near the airport where we would fumble past our clothes to the bright edges of skin, shivering with anticipation, our foreheads knocking together, and I’d swim around her and she’d hoot and call out within our hard cave. She didn’t ask, like another woman might, if she was too fat. Instead, in a highly erotic mix of math and sex, she said, “If you want to know my circumference, use your cock to find my radius.”
Holly called one evening, midweek, and at first I didn’t recognize her. She was drunk, that was a sure thing. She said that the Korean actor had left her and she was wondering if I would have her again. My heart was doing strange things and my mouth was working up to a howl. To stem this I told her I had a girlfriend and that she had moved in with me and she had five children and there was no more room in the house. Holly asked how Natalie was handling that and then not waiting for an answer she said she wished we had had more children. I didn’t respond. I could hear her breathing and I thought that if she were to come back, just show up at the door, I’d fold her in my arms and take her in and pull off her shoes and socks and kiss her bare feet. Then she said she needed money and I said okay and asked for her address. She gave it to me and later, after she’d hung up, I stared at it and thought that I could have gotten into my Topaz and driven over there. It was an apartment in the north end, close to the casino. But I didn’t go, instead I poured a drink and called up Jennifer and said I’d had a dream and in the dream she and the kids were living with me in my brick house and that we were a big happy family and that she and I shared a bed and the kids had their own rooms and my dad ruled the main floor in all his naked glory and Natalie had given up being a witch. Jennifer said that I couldn’t tell a thirteen-year-old what to believe and besides every girl that age did the witch thing and one thing for sure, before she moved in with me, I’d have to stop drinking. I looked at the glass in my hand and laid it gently on the windowsill and said that I could do that, no problem. After I hung up I looked at the glass and I thought about Natalie sleeping upstairs and how I should talk to her more and go to her volleyball games and be a better father. I thought about Holly and why she left me and I knew I could take some blame considering my love for the bottle, which she shared but not with the same devotion. Sometimes, when she was still with me, we would lie in bed happily drunk and the haze of alcohol made her float away from me and when she wanted to touch I said, “No, let’s just look.” My head and my heart were separate.
So, after classes the next day I unloaded my liquor cabinet and emptied the bottles into the sink. I took the beer cans from the fridge and dumped them. I cleaned out the cooking wine. When I was done I looked around the kitchen and thought that I should fix it up. I went down to the basement and found a can of yellow paint, a roller, and a brush. I had just started painting when my father walked in, sat down, and said that I should marry Jennifer. I asked him what he was talking about and he tilted his grey head and said that Jennifer was worth a thousand Hollys and that Natalie liked Jennifer and that it was time to supply some stability in my daughter’s life and maybe once I did that she would stop dancing around a cauldron. I said that I had stopped drinking and that I had big plans to maybe quit teaching and find a different job, one that didn’t suck the soul out of me.
I thought hard about what my father said, about Natalie and Jennifer and Holly, and at lunch one day, instead of having car sex by the airport, Jennifer and I drove to The Bay and looked at beds. We found this salesgirl whose name tag said Candace. She was wearing a tight black skirt, was skinny and tall, and she looked Jennifer up and down and her face went whoaa. I put my arm around Jennifer and said that we were newlyweds and were looking for a bed for the romper room. I winked at Candace and she led us over to a king size. Jennifer promptly sat down and rolled on to her back, legs in the air, wondering out loud if she would sink. “Come,” she said, and she patted the mattress. I shrugged and laid myself out like I was preparing to die. “Relax,” Jennifer said. She was wearing a low-cut blouse and a gold heart and a lot of perfume and I realized that this was the first time we’d been in bed together. It made me want to jump on her right there except anorexic Candace was hovering and still talking about size and strength. She asked if we wanted twin beds. Jennifer lifted her head and shook it so that her earrings dangled and spun. “Give us some time to think about it,” she said, and waved a hand, dismissing her. Then she pinned me and I could see down her top to her lacy bra and the gold heart in her cleavage and she bit my neck and said that all five of her children had agreed, they could live in the big brick house and they were pretty excited, so how about that.
And then on Monday evening Holly called again and I said, “Don’t call, I’m trying to stop drinking and talking to you won’t help.” She said that was good, really good, and then she asked how the family was. I told her we were fine, in fact we were just sitting down to roast beef and mashed potatoes and corn on the cob and spinach salad with roasted pecans and a dessert of apple cobbler. We were happy, I said. This took her breath away, I could tell, because the receiver creaked in her hand and she didn’t speak and I imagined her mouth and the shape of her perfect little nose and then she said that I was lucky and that she wanted to be lucky too and then she hung up. I went back into the kitchen and sat down with my dad, who was in boxers and a muscle shirt, and Natalie, who was eating crackers and peanut butter.
The next day I told my math class that I was marrying Jennifer Donne. The girls in the class thought this was neat and they shook their heads and smiled. But the boys were confused and it was James Gerbrandt who, indolent and predictable, a
sked, Why? I paused. Looked askance at James. The other boys. Then I said that there were many reasons I could cite: like how she so trippingly quoted poetry; or her multiple offspring, five beautiful sprites; her gusto for lemon pie; her Willie Nelson tapes; her witchiness, which my daughter adored; her Picasso calendar; her physical prowess, which I said I could not detail for young prudish minds; her love of my father’s crude, paunchy, dried out body which he displayed naked around the house; her ignorance of math, blessed thing that she didn’t know what n stood for; and finally, my Grade 12 wonders, I said, I was marrying her because she was gorgeous. I stopped talking and surveyed the class as it held its breath and watched me, soundless, and then Maxine began to clap and a few other girls joined in and finally the whole class applauded, even James.
The bed arrived on a Saturday morning. Two men in blue jumpsuits carried it up to the second floor while my father watched from his commode in the foyer and brayed instructions. Jennifer and the kids came over for breakfast, a trial run before they moved in the following Saturday. Jennifer hung a few pictures and unpacked her tea set and then we sat on the porch and ate toasted bagels while the kids romped on the second floor. Lionel, the two-year-old, fell down the stairs and broke a tooth and this initiated Jennifer’s exodus, the house suddenly silent as if caught in the eye of the storm. Natalie wanted to get a cat before the onslaught and so I drove her down to the Humane Society where we picked out a skinny tabby. She was quiet during the drive home and when I asked her if she was worried she said she wasn’t and I chose to believe her. I asked if we talked enough, about her school, about what was important. She said she wasn’t sure what was important but that I was a good father and she was glad I had stopped drinking because now she didn’t have to hide bottles anymore. I looked over at her. She was looking straight ahead and when one of her eyebrows went up and down I thought of Holly in the dull grey light of the upstairs room. In the morning Natalie and I had breakfast on the porch, which looked out onto the street. She was holding her new cat and scratching its ears. The lilacs were blooming on the bush alongside the house and when the wind blew from the south the scent came in through the open kitchen window and filled the house and drifted out to where we were sitting. Jennifer phoned in the afternoon to say that Lionel was okay, it was just a baby tooth, and the family was in the midst of packing. Then she hesitated and asked, “Are you sure, do you want this?” I looked around as if she were standing behind me, then I came back to the phone and said, “Yes, yes, I do.”
The next day in class Maxine Duras gave a presentation on the futility of studying math beyond Grade 10. She said that for other than purely aesthetic reasons, a tickling of the mind perhaps, imagination, or philosophy, there was no reason to do math. She asked, “Does it make me a better person?” She talked about Gulliver’s voyage to Laputa where mathematicians are sleepy dreamers and bad tailors. She said, “The smallest circle hath as many degrees as the largest,” and she flapped a bladder of pebbles for effect. I challenged Maxine, saying that even if mathematics was an abstract science, that didn’t make it irrelevant. I asked her this: if you go to the dentist with a toothache does the dentist extract the toothache, which is the specific, or the tooth, which represents the general? She muttered something about the tooth and the toothache being inseparable but I waved her away and squeaked open my Thermos, and the squeak itself produced a sharp longing. I poured myself coffee, black, and standing there, poised on the brink of a lesson, I saw the path ahead of me as arduous and full of moments of sharp longing, and the students before me appeared as a large group standing off in the distance, generously holding up a bottle as if to share it. The image was quick and full of allure. It arrived through a glass, dimly.
Hungry
I’m on my bike near Sargent and this guy Patty is running his mouth off at me. He’s wearing blue and his hands are in fists. He looks like my dog. His mouth is open. I tell Patty to shut up and he doesn’t so I call on him and he says something about Tiff Trinkett and takes off down the street.
It’s a good afternoon, my day off at the car wash, no afternoon classes, so I go past the school and sit on a curb. At three thirty Tiff comes out holding her books. She’s with Jennifer. Jennifer’s talking. Tiff’s laughing. Then they’re standing in front of me and I look up at them. There’s a white cloud, like scissors, in the sky.
Tiff’s got something written on her chest, close to her bare shoulder. It says, “Freak.”
“What the fuck,” I say.
She shrugs. Says Hazel wrote it. She scrubs at it with a fist.
We go to Subway. There’s an old woman with blue shoes and a dirty coat. The old woman has her face in her coffee. Swings her short legs. Jennifer buys a sub and we go outside and share a drink. Jennifer says her brother got a job at Western Glove.
“Sewing jeans for little girl’s asses,” Tiff says.
“Fourteen bucks an hour,” I say. Then I tell her that Patty was calling her down. Getting nasty.
“Prick,” she says.
I know she knows Patty. They were together two months ago and then Patty’s brother wanted in and Tiff ran. But I don’t speak. Just smoke and look at the writing on her chest and I think about this time in Geo when we were doing the layers of the earth and I brought in a display made out of food. Graham crackers for the crust, raspberry Jell-O for the core, other kinds of Jell-O, sugar, margarine. I have always been intense about marks and projects and my father, happy to see this, cheerleads me in my schooling and he helped me build the Jell-O piece. So, I brought it in for a display and during the class we gobbled up the earth piece. Used plastic spoons and jiggled it off the plywood platter to our mouths. Mr. Harrison said it was great, just great. One hundred per cent. He shook my hand. Then he talked about the age of the world. He took out these soil samples and pointed at the layers and named them. Lots of hard words that sounded like he was stuttering or maybe trying out a poem.
“Mr. Davis,” he said. “What’s this?” He pointed at the middle sample, middle layer.
I said, “Dirt.”
“No, no, no, no, Mr. Davis. It’s both your past and your future.” And he laughed. Then he passed around some black rocks that were sleeping on cotton inside little glass cubes. “Be careful,” Mr. Harrison said. “These are four billion years old.” He was terribly excited. And his voice went up and down, all music-like, and I didn’t hear the words, only the sounds he made.
Tiff and I leave Jen and go to my place. It’s a tiny green house behind the food bank. My father went into the food bank once and he came back with canned corn and scalloped potatoes in a box and a bag of rice. He didn’t know what to do with the rice so I ended up using it for another project, music class, where I built a hollow instrument out of paste and newspaper and poured the rice inside.
My house smells like bacon and I know my father had a big lunch and then left for work. The clock in the kitchen is tearing along forty-five minutes ahead of real time. Wanda’s there. He’s sitting on the couch with Harry, my dog, and they’re watching Terminator. Wanda showed up one day a couple of months ago. Just sitting on our couch eating chips. I asked him who he was and he mumbled something and then I asked him where he was from and he said Wanda. So, he’s Wanda. Little black kid with a mother who works three jobs, and when he’s home alone he’s scared and so he hangs at our house.
“Hey, Wanda,” Tiff says.
He looks up and then back at the TV.
“I saw your mom, Wanda,” I say. “She’s home. You can leave now.”
He says he wants to finish the movie. I make him a peanut butter sandwich and tell him to go home. He gets up and shuffles sideways and then out the door.
I sit down and Tiff sits on my lap and says what she wants. Leather couches, a fifty-seven-inch HD Sony, a tight little foreign car and an espresso machine. She closes her eyes and dreams about a tiny white cup with foam spilling over it. She wants a pair of hipsters fro
m Below the Belt. She keeps talking and her mouth twists when she gets greedy. “You getting a stick,” she says. Then she kisses me. Her breath all over my face. Harry’s lying on the floor, watching us.
She opens my jeans and goes, “Big stick.” She has a shiny green thong and a red bra and looking at her I think, Christmas. So we fool around, but we don’t do it. It makes her too sad when we do it. I have little tricks to change her mind, like I’m the cat and she’s the mouse, but I haven’t caught her for the last while. “C’mon, Sandy,” she mumbles, and we float. After, we put our clothes back on and we sit on the couch and eat popcorn and watch TV.
When my older brother Jack comes home he looks at us on the couch and then he goes in the kitchen and fries some eggs. He steps back into the living room, holding his plate, his fork up in the air like a spear. He eats slowly, watching us watch TV.
Tiff swivels her head from Jack to the TV and back again.
“It’s all good,” I say.
“How are ya, Tiff?” my brother says.
Tiff sits up. Puts one hand up near her neck. “Good. Jack. Everything’s good.”
My brother nods. Then he tells me that the boys at Midtown want me to work tomorrow morning.
“I got school,” I say.
“That so.”
He asks Tiff where I was today.
She doesn’t know. She looks at me with her wet eyes and says, “At school?”
“Yeah,” I say. And I tell Jack about Mr. Harrison and the soil samples. About the Jell-O and graham crackers, which isn’t really true, because it happened two months ago.
When I’m done, my brother nods and says, “You’re such a loser.”
At Midtown, I vacuum. Two minutes to do the front and back, shake out the mats, clean the trunk, and put everything back together. If I’m too slow, I lose a buck a car. If Earl finds gravel under the mats when he’s wiping down the inside with Armor All, he takes another dollar. Six o’clock we get a fifteen-minute break and I smoke two and a half cigarettes and listen to the boys talk. They think I’m shit. Jack’s little brother, a cracker.