Double Talk (21 page)

“Oh Jesus, oh God, the bloody condom broke.” Visions of pregnancy, incredulous parents and a shotgun wedding flooded my brain. My life was ruined before it had even begun.

“What are we going to do? What if you get pregnant?”

She laughed, though not cruelly, but easily, as if it were nothing to worry about. “There's not much chance of that. It's not the right time of the month.”

“How do you know?”

“I just know.” She began to twine one lovely brown curl around her index finger. Her hair had a coppery sheen where it caught the light.

“But how do you know?” Had we entered the whiskery vale of woman lore? I thought of my mother's pronouncements about a woman's heart containing many secrets. A bluff if there ever was one. “Are you sure?”

“I'm sure.”

Something flapped past the window, probably one of those gigantic gulls that sometimes alighted on the roof of the house before bad weather hit. I thought they were magnificent, with their hard yellow eyes and their tapered white necks like full milk bottles. Shit hawks, Keppie called them.

“Look at you, worry wart.” She reached over and tousled my hair.

“I can't help it,” I said, trying to conceal my irritation. “The last thing my mother said to me every night before I went out was to not leave any bundles on her doorstep.”

She laughed again. I hadn't meant it to sound funny.

“Wow! Your mom sounds really cool.”

But the thought that I had possibly set in motion a biological process that would influence the rest of my life would not let me go. “But how can you be sure?”

“God, Brian, you're like a dog with a bone.” She wrinkled up her nose in a way that made several of her larger freckles join together. “Let me make it as simple as I can. I-am-due-my-period-any-day-now, so it's unlikely that I can get pregnant.”

“But there must be something we can do.”

“There is.” And with that she jumped out of bed and reached for her jeans.

I panicked. “You're leaving?”

“No, silly. Oh-my-God, will you just relax. I'm going across the road to the drugstore to see what they have. I'll get some condoms while I'm there. Do you have any cash?”

“There's a twenty on the dresser,” I said, and felt a spectacularly dirty thrill watching her pick up the bill and push it into her pocket.

One minute I was in bliss and the next I was in torment. What if she were pregnant? Was I being silly? How dare she tell me I was being silly? I didn't want to be a father. I'd have to leave the country. Maybe she was already pregnant and was using me as cover. Were all Canadian girls this easy? No, that wasn't fair. She was nice. But we had just met and already we were probably going to have a baby. Did I want to spend the rest of my life with her? Was she that nice? Maybe it would be okay. There was always abortion. Was it possible to get an abortion in St. John's? Would she be up for it? I should have known better than to get involved with an older woman. I mean, she must have been twenty-three at least.

I thought about running away, but that seemed pointless because she already knew where I lived. I thought about running downstairs and locking the front door so she couldn't get back in, but then heard the distinctive sound the door made when it unstuck and swung open. In my mind's eye I saw the glass shimmer, lifting the reflection of trees and cars on the street behind.

Violet came bounding up the stairs and into the room. Back in her clothes just a few minutes and I found it hard to persuade myself that I had ever seen her naked. “I bought these.” She flicked me a box of Trojans. “I got them large, because, hey, we don't want that to happen again, big boy.”

Oh Violet. I felt so ashamed about what I had just been thinking.

“And I got this,” She pulled a slim white box out of the bag, “Proctor & Gamble's most excellent spermicidal foam!”

“What does that do?”

“You're supposed to apply it internally before you have sex. The foam kills sperm. I guess it's just as likely to work after the fact as before. Not that I need to use it. I'm doing this for
your
peace of mind,” she paused a moment, “because I like you and because you're so cute when you're worried.”

She disappeared into the bathroom. I wanted to ask her if I could watch — not only because I was a pervert but also because I was interested in everything about her. When she came out again, she was naked: a naked woman in my draughty room, tiptoeing around books, ashtrays, and tea mugs, some of which wore a collar of thick green mould. She was so confident, so at home in her body that she made all my slavering and fantasizing seem puerile. What could be more natural after all? I was now a man of the world.

“I also got this,” she said with a grin, and held up a plastic bottle shaped like a bear.

“What's that?”

“It's honey.”

“Does that kill sperm, too?”

“You're funny.”

Time began to distort soon after I met Violet Budd. It was as if I had opened the elevator door on one fat second and stepped inside. I was suddenly contained in a molasses bubble. Time moved forward and back almost imperceptibly and at varying speeds. The elevator doors opened and it was a new hour, a new day or a new month. I opened my eyes and I was in the student centre, a place I had long avoided because to sit alone among the chattering groups made me feel like a failure. Suddenly I was there every day, smoking and drinking coffee with Keppie and Violet and Nancy and Devlin and with whoever else might come along. It was there, eight days after the broken condom incident, an ashen-faced and slightly swollen Violet whispered to me over tea that her period had arrived.

“Great news!”

“Great for you, maybe,” she said, with uncharacteristic sullenness, before stalking off.

“What's up with her?” asked Keppie.

“She's on the rag, b'y,” I said, delighted to feel that b'y slip off my tongue as if I had been saying it all my life.

By July first that year, spring had completed its hundred-yard dash into summer. Canada Day also marked the two-month anniversary of our moving into the solid two-storey house that was 117 Patrick Street — my first student digs. I stood in the upstairs master bedroom and took in the view. The maple trees surrounding the house were in full leaf. The lilac bushes in the garden across the road were piled high with purple cone-shaped blooms, some of which were already turning to ash. A white cat walked in the shadow of the wall. The previous few days had been hot, a sultry wind blowing from the southwest.

Beside me, Violet was dozing on our foam rubber mattress, her body all blotchy from beard burn. We had just made love for the fifty-eighth time. I had been keeping count in the back page of my diary, a tick for each fuck and a tick with a barb when it came with a blow job. My tallying was the result of something Geoff said one night. He said that even after getting laid for the first time a boy or a girl remained in a semi-virginal state for an indefinite period. “The French have a term to describe it,” he said. “They refer to a boy or girl in that state as a
demi-vierge
.” Then he winked at Violet. There had been much teasing talk about my being with an older woman. “That's stupid,” I said. All the same, the notion stuck in my head, and I mysteriously arrived at one hundred fucks as the number I would need to rack up in order to safely leave behind my inbetweenie status.

How silly that all seemed to me within a few short weeks. The more often I made love to Violet the more my categorical view of myself as a he-man-bringer-of-pleasure-to womankind failed. It was Violet who inadvertently pointed out the fallacy of my thinking. “You're so not a macho man,” she said.

“Yes I am.” I remember feeling vaguely insulted.

“No, you're not. Macho guys are just interested in their own pleasure. You're a beautiful lover.”

“And so are you.”

The more often we had sex the less it seemed like sex. Sometimes Violet cried afterward, clinging to my neck so tightly I thought it might snap. If sex was intimate, this was something else again. I began to feel a growing ease in just being with her and an intense desire to prolong and protect that feeling. Often, I felt such moments as a pressure on my chest as though something were trying to move out of my body by exiting through my mouth. At first, I denied it, told myself I should give up home-rolled cigarettes and go back to shop-bought filtered. But sometimes I recognized the same response in Violet. We didn't so much keep that mushrooming feeling at bay as we decided to let it be. Somehow we knew that a period of time had to pass before it could be safely transposed into words.

Our moving into 117 Patrick Street was Keppie's doing. The house belonged to an Australian geologist, Peter from Perth, who spent almost all his time up in the woods surveying and tapping on rocks.

“It's dirt cheap,” said Keppie, “and the utilities are included. Seventy bucks each a month if we split the rent five ways.”

“It sounds too good to be true. What's the catch?” Nancy wanted to know.

“There's no catch, so to speak.”

“Keppie?”

“The only catch is that Pete will crash there the odd time. But he says that he only comes into town once every few months and usually only for a weekend. He says he'll give us notice if he can.”

Peter from Perth was true to his word; in the first two months we saw him only once. He was a tall, rangy man with wind-burned skin. His eyes had a watered down look that gave him the appearance of being prematurely old — he couldn't have been more than fifty. “He's a hard man for the boo,” said Keppie. Peter's only other distinguishing feature was his nose; it was badly scarred.

“I bent down one time to pet a crackie and the bugger jumped up and latched onto me snoz,” he said. “Had a bloody devil of a time getting him off.”

His self-deprecating humour, the fact that he was an infrequent visitor, plus the fact that he refused to occupy the small fourth bedroom when he did show up, choosing the couch instead, endeared him to us. After two months, even Nancy had to agree that Keppie had got us a deal.

It was July first, early afternoon, and the house was uncharacteristically quiet. Violet had begun to snore gently. I looked around the room. Apart from the foam rubber mattress, our furniture consisted of two cardboard dressers and a giant spool that once held electrical cable and which now functioned as our nightstand. The windows were covered with buckled Venetian blinds. The whole place smelled of cats.

I cocked an ear towards the next room down the hall, which belonged to Devlin's girlfriend, Amy. No sound from in there. Devlin pleaded poverty as the reason he could not officially move in. “You're just a Mama's boy,” said Nancy. While Devlin had not moved in, he was always around. He usually stayed weekends, and his weekends had begun to last until mid-week. If anyone minded, they didn't say. It helped that he always had dope and was willing to share it. It helped, as well, that he had a mellowing effect on Amy, whose zeal for all things Newfoundland sometimes made her prickly. In Amy's view, Violet and I were sinners: Violet because she was from the mainland and me because I never had anything good to say about Ireland, a place so mythical in Amy's imagination that she was almost willing to argue that she knew more about it than I did. “You can always tell a woman from the Goulds,” said Keppie, “but you can't tell her much.” The hard truth was that we put up with Amy because we liked Devlin and also because she was useful. She was first up every day and always cleaned up the aftermath of the night before. If she was bitter about this, she didn't let on. She even argued against Violet's proposed cleaning schedule, insisting that it was not necessary.

It was just as well, really, because Keppie and Nancy — even though they supported the idea — would have never lived up to it. Neither one would wash a dish or even pick up an empty beer bottle unless they were planning to cash it in for the deposit refund. “I cook,” said Nancy. And it was true. No one cooked fish better than Nancy, who got it free by the box load from her family once a month. “The trick,” she said, “is to barely cook it at all.” I still have this mental picture of her in T-shirt and sweatpants standing at the stove and frying up a skillet full of cod, while four full-grown cats and five kittens watched her from their various perches.

“Them dirty cats,” said Keppie. “They stink.”

“Then why don't you make yourself useful and clean out the litter box from time to time?” Violet chimed in. “Or when you find that Libby has shit in the tub, swish it down the drain.”

“I don't do cats,” said Keppie.

“What is it you do again?” asked Violet.

Keppie appeared to think about it. “I roll a mean J. I bone Nancy. And I shovel snow. You'll find out my true value next winter.”

“I wait with bated breath,” said Violet.

Keppie gave me a look and raised his eyebrows. He had noticed Violet's occasional bad breath. “Breath like a Chinaman,” he said, “like she eats nothing but boiled rice.” The truth was that Keppie played a vital role in the house. His was the crazy glue that brought us together and that held us together. He was the one who reminded us of our one guiding principle: when you have fuck all, you share.