Cousin Wayne belches and gets to his feet simultaneously. “I’m gonna get a beer,” he announces.
“Get me one,” say Stan and Dad in stereo.
Lydia doesn’t even glance at Wayne as he lumbers past. Not so much as a milky-eyed glower for old Cousin Wayne.
I’m just about to turn to the tree and haul out a present for Maud when my mother’s voice pierces the air again.
“There’s some money for you there, Mummy.” She points into Lydia’s crotch.
The monster’s shoulders jump again. “My!” she exclaims, retrieving the five. This too, she holds up to the light. “Well, this will come in handy, no doubt. I can always use a bit of pin money. My, my, my. Thank you, boy.”
She places the five back between the folds of the card before setting it atop her pile of salvaged wrapping paper. I lurch, a second time, at the gift for Aunt Maud.
“What times we live in!” my grandmother pronounces, leaning back and folding her hands. “Brave new world! So pragmatic—here is a bit of money, please buy something for yourself. And yet even during the war, in times of such profound deprivation, we always scrambled during the holidays. Scraping together whatever we had. A plum pudding. A simple homemade scarf. Anything, you know, simply as a gesture, a token of appreciation. And to think, all that bother could have so easily been dispensed with. Things are so streamlined these days. Unfettered by sentiment.”
Wayne appears in the doorway with a can of beer, which he cracks and tips toward me in a wordless toast. Maud passes the box of Turtles up toward him, and Wayne manages to grab three in one manly hand.
Come, let us adore him
, the radio recommends.
My father sighs, too defeated by the atmosphere to repeat his request for beer. A man should not have to ask twice.
“Hey,” says Janet, swinging her feet down from the couch and leaning forward. “Hey, everybody.” We turn to look, grateful yet surprised. Janet’s been keeping the expected low profile most of the evening—as Lydia glowered and Dad looked in every direction but hers, and Uncle Stan, for some reason, doted excessively, loading her plate with second and third helpings and dumping a slice of pie onto it before she had even finished sopping up her gravy. Stan, it was apparent, had at some point graduated from horror to happiness with respect to Janet’s situation. He was pleased about it. Aunt Maud, on the other hand, maintained a rosy, almost drunken, flush of embarrassment—but I think it had more to do with Stan’s behaviour than with Janet herself.
Of course, it goes without saying that all of this went without saying. There was talk, but it was talk about hunting (Wayne), fishing (Dad, Stan), how good the dinner was (Mom, me), and how Stan and Maud had received a very fine set of linen napkins for their anniversary but perhaps they had been lost or misplaced and that would explain their wasting good money on the paper snowman napkins we were currently using, which would only be tossed in the garbage by evening’s end (Grandma Lydia).
That is to say, the talk wasn’t real. It was soundtrack, mood music, like that jangly, nerve-scraping piano that plays over silent films. But the movie itself was all about Janet, we knew, and talked louder. Janet kept her head down all the while. That was her role. That was her place.
“Listen, everybody.”
Now she removes the afghan from her meaty lap, puts it aside. None of us like the gesture, the deliberation of it, the way it seems to call us to attention like a curtain being pulled into the wings.
Because what’s she going to do, recite? Tell us a story? “The Night Before Christmas”?
THE BUNCH OF US
sat and stood facing Jim—a petrified forest of holiday revellers in the Dekkers’ mistletoed living room. He crammed a hand into the back pocket of his jeans and extracted a crumpled piece of notepaper, eyes crawling over us the whole time like rats across a garbage heap. He uncrumpled the paper, cheeks sucked in and lips puckered as if trying to hold back bile. My own mouth had long gone dry. Jim was like a gunfighter facing an enemy. Waiting for the bad guy to make his next move.
“I would like to begin with a quote from William Blake,” he barked. The party had gone dead a moment before. It had taken Jim into account—absorbing the black of his presence—and keeled over into open-mouthed silence. I stood and watched the way, I imagine, I’d stand and watch an airplane spiral smokingly toward the earth. I stared along with everybody else.
What had we done? To make him hate us so much?
“But YOU ought to KNOW,” Jim shouted, sending a sudden hum through the crystal port glasses Ruth Dekker had set out, sending a mini tsunami of ripples through the punch bowl.
“What is GRAND is necessarily OBSCURE to
WEAK. MEN
.”
He nearly screamed the words:
WEAK. MEN
. Spit flew, and landed. The Dekkers’ living room was really pretty small when you jammed twenty or so people into it for a literary reading. Spread throughout the house—as we had been for most of the evening before Jim arrived, sweaty and hate-eyed—you didn’t notice it so much. But—yes—crushed into one room together, an unwashed poet bathing everybody in spittle and contempt—quarters felt a bit close.
“I just wanna get this the fuck over with,” Jim told Dekker and me when he arrived at quarter to eleven. The reading had been scheduled to begin at nine. He had shoved his parka at me, and it smelled like his breath, which was sweetly rotting oranges.
“Jim—what’s wrong?” Dekker asked of Jim’s back. Jim was plowing his way to the punch bowl.
He scooped punch to the brim of his handleless cup and sloshed his way over to the Dekkers’ Christmas tree, which had received many compliments that night. It was enormous,
for one thing, the angel jammed almost horizontally up against the ceiling. Every single ornament was handmade—many of them by Ruth, I’d overheard earlier. There were elaborate woven snowflakes and wreaths, turtledoves with real feathers, and carved wooden Santas and elves. There was no tinsel or plastic bulbs hung with elastic bands or pipe cleaners—pretty much an aesthetic holiday staple at the Campbell household. It was the nicest tree I’d ever seen. Jim stood beside it with one hand dribbling punch and the other on his hip, as if competing. He glowered, like he resented the competition.
I suppose
, his demeanour spoke,
you people are more impressed by this gaudy empty symbol of a gaudy, empty holiday than you are by me
.
If we were, we weren’t for long. The crowd soon grew very impressed by Jim indeed. He stood there, glowering with his oil-slick eyes and, like some kind of telepathic alien, steadily began sucking the good cheer from the room.
I was standing in the doorway to the hall, hugging Jim’s coat, remembering the bleak, inexorable way his mood had washed over me a few days before. Later I flattered myself with the conviction that I’d succeeded, at least a little, in cheering Jim up. We’d spent well over an hour splitting wood in his yard, Jim giving me pointers on my flaccid, drunken technique as the two of us took turns holding our hands beneath our armpits to keep them warm while the other heaved the axe. Afterward, he’d been more animated over supper, praising my strength and endurance at the chopping block, telling me I could really be something if I’d just pull my nose out of a book from time to time and build myself up a little. We ate an entire loaf of Moira’s potato bread between the two of us, and killed three tins of beans. Since there was no booze left in the house, I went home that night feeling sober and restored, if gassy. This explained the anti-flatulent
in the medicine cabinet. The next day I couldn’t raise my arms to type—even reading, holding a book up in front of my face, was a whole new avenue of suffering. But I didn’t care. I’d gone to Jim. I’d been with him in his time of need. I’d helped him, I thought.
But I hadn’t. Jim’s purple-black mood hadn’t dissipated. On the contrary, it had taken on strength since Wednesday—it had deepened in hue. Jim’s mood was like the Blob: it ate every mood in its path. He was currently coating the room in it.
I felt deceived.
“WEAK. MEN,”
yelled Jim. At some point, Sherrie had sidled noiselessly up to me. I don’t know how she managed it without me noticing, considering the stale silence that had overwhelmed the room. She dug her fingers into my arm—fortunately cushioned by Jim’s parka. We stood that way.
“Jim!” yelped Dekker, hustling over to the tree. “I haven’t even given you a proper introduction …” He turned to the room, nose and forehead glistening with either perspiration or Jim’s airborne spittle of a moment ago. He bared his teeth in a lock-jawed smile. “Everybody—if I could—”
“Fuck
that, Bryant,” said Jim. “I’m here to read
poetry
, everybody, do we all understand?” His eyes crawled around the room, faux-indulgent. “I’m not here to give a holiday toast,” he enunciated. “I’m not here to wish you comfort and joy. This isn’t Dickens, are we clear? Scrooge isn’t showing up with a turkey any time soon. Scrooge is in his fucking counting house, where people like him will always be. The misers don’t reform. The philistines don’t grow miraculously enlightened, the hucksters never see the light and walk the straight and true path.
What is Grand is necessarily obscure to WEAK MEN
. The weak stay weak, they don’t change, you know why? Wanna hear the paradox? Because their
weakness
is their
strength
. Their ignorance is their bliss. Their wilful
obliviousness is their power. Is everybody paying attention? Their
power
. And they’re sure as hell not going to be giving up their power any time soon. Not at Christmas, not at any time of year. It’s a
joke,”
Jim spat. “It’s a
fairy tale
.”
Dekker turned his back on the crowd at that point. He stepped in close to Jim, head down, speaking.
“I will,” Jim said. “Of course, Bryant. That’s what I’m here to do after all.”
Dekker said something else.
“I
will
,“ repeated Jim, downing his punch and bending forward to place his handleless cup on the coffee table. The empty mug wobbled for an instant before toppling to its side. A thin rivulet of punch trickled onto the table, made a minuscule river before colliding with a linen napkin, where it blossomed into a startling red stain, a sudden poppy. Jim wiped his mouth with his wrist.
“So let’s get this show on the road. The first poem,” said Jim, with no poems on hand that I could see—the piece of paper on which the quote from Blake had been scrawled had been recrumpled and tossed at the tree—“is called ‘I, said the Sparrow.’ ”
Beside me, Sherrie kind of squeaked.
Whereas I winced. Mainly I was dismayed at the shoddy aesthetics of it. You don’t write poetry about real people and identify them by name—even I knew that. You change the names, like in
The Rape of the Lock
. You do it even if everyone knows whom you’re talking about—and in this case, was not half the room made up of junior professors? Dekker had said the evening would be informal, that it would just be people from the neighbourhood, but this, after all, was the university town of Timperly. The people from the neighbourhood of a young professor and his wife are by necessity going to be other young professors and their wives. And so I winced again—a delayed reaction—at the politics of it. The aesthetics were bad,
and that killed me, but the politics, I realized, were worse. I registered this at the sight of Dekker with both hands covering his proto-beard, the way they were pulling his eye sockets floorward. The bottom-insides of his eyes shone red in the candlelight. He became instantaneously haggard.
Jim was reciting. I tried to listen out of loyalty, but the work was incoherent. I was glad it was incoherent—that was probably fortunate. First there was something about someone called “Cock Robin,” who was shot by the Sparrow, “with his bow and arrow.” Then Cock Robin turned into Sisyphus. And the Sparrow became Zeus, “the swan-god,” and then a bull. And then there was this big part about Zeus being in heat, wandering around mounting everything that moves, “the dumb thrust” of his “Disneyland-loins” and his “Mickey Mouse cock.”
The politics were very bad.
Zeus, as sketched in the poem, was a complete banality and a pointlessly powerful buffoon. Zeus was a thug, we were meant to understand. A dangerous imbecile. So Zeus is lumbering around, happily raping nymphs and whatnot, and the noble but robin-sized Sisyphus endeavours to save a nymph or two. Zeus, “enraged child,” is having none of it and flicks Sisyphus down into Hades “like a fresh-picked snot.”
“Rolling rock, rock and roll,”
recited Jim.
“Welcome to America.”
The fact that Jim was making the poem up as he went along was growing steadily inescapable. It was nothing like what was in
Blinding White
, with its simple, resonant two-word lines, its three-line stanzas. This hurt to realize.
“Abandon all hope, in the home of the free.”
It was so terrible. He was doing a kind of beatnik thing in his recitation, drawing out his vowels, speaking in
rhythms as though a bongo and bass were playing in the background.
“Just roll that
rock,
and rock that rolllll.”
Nearby, I could hear hissing. I looked over and saw it was Dekker, speaking under his breath.
Finish
, he was saying.
Finish
. He was hissing the word without moving his teeth.
Dekker noticed me looking, returned my gaze and shook his head in a tight, futile sort of gesture. Beneath the scruff on his neck I could see his Adam’s apple bobbing away as if it was trying to escape.
“
Rolllllllll,”
Jim was saying, pinwheeling his hands. He was adding hand gestures now.
One time in class, someone brought in a poem in the shape of a tree. It consisted of nothing but the words
rustlingleaves rustlingleaves rustlingleaves
. We didn’t know who wrote it, because Jim blacked out the name before passing out copies, which was unusual. Also unusual was that he didn’t give us our standard opportunity to discuss it among ourselves before weighing in with his own opinion.