Mean Boy (36 page)

My immediate urge following Jim’s class is to run to Carl’s, order one of their bottomless pots of tea, and work on ghazals for the rest of the day—an urge I mercilessly squelch, forcing my feet in the direction of the library. It’s frustrating that Jim would hit me with this now, considering my new resolution to back off from poetry for the time being and turn my attention to something I’m actually good at: school. The new plan is to stay in on weekends in order to save money, study, and—
only
on weekends—work on my poems. Nothing but schoolwork during the week. But it’s as if Jim has intuited my new resolve and is trying to tempt me back into the fold, like someone waving a drink in front of a reformed alcoholic.

This has all come out of my most recent meeting with Sparrow, whom I went to see not long after my makeup session with Jim. I asked him to tell me more about what I would need to get into Oxford. Sparrow’s eyebrows had performed an exultant swoop or two before settling into a no-nonsense furrow.

“Of course, it’s no small matter, you understand, Lawrence. It has to be nothing but the canon from here on in, yes? Nothing but serious scholarship. If you want to apply somewhere like
Oxford
“—and only here did Sparrow allow his eyebrows another upward spurt, uttering the sacred name like any other man would utter
titties
—”your … other interests may have to take a back seat for a while.”

I nodded. Sparrow watched me nod, a clinical look to his eyes. It was as if he had injected me with something—some kind of drug, or poison—and was tracking its effects.

Everybody else is organizing everything—it feels almost as if they’ve intuited my new regime and have helpfully, wordlessly picked up the slack. Dekker has been helping Jim with our second poetry reading of the year, which has suddenly become a big deal because the guest poet, Abelard Creighton, has of late been awarded some sort of poetry prize by the city of Toronto. In class, Jim pointed out the irony of this—the fact that Creighton winning a Toronto award was national news but if someone from out here won a Charlottetown award or a Fredericton award it would be considered irrelevant to the country as a whole. Still, you could tell Jim was pleased. Dekker confided to me that Creighton was an old mentor of Jim’s. His award made Jim look good in the eyes of the department, because Jim had fought to get Creighton invited.

“He insisted,” Dekker recalled. “He told us when he was hired that there was a handful of writers in this country whose work was absolutely crucial, and he said in a few years they would be so prominent as to be beyond our reach. He said if the English Department genuinely cared about the literary innovations of today it would make a concerted effort to get people like Schofield and Creighton out here.”

Dekker told me this at the Stein, where the student poetry reading—organized entirely by Sherrie—was being held. He sat looking dreamy, telling me about the days after Jim had been hired, the promise perfuming the air. I was glad to hear him speaking of Jim with as much affection as ever. They had both forgotten Christmas—at least it looked as if they had. Just like it probably looked as if I had, too.

“I’m thinking this gets Jim back some of his credibility,” Dekker confided. “I hope it will have reminded the department why they hired him in the first place.”

“What’s Creighton like?”

“Older guy,” said Dekker, “A staunch nationalist from what I understand—he’s published essays dealing with culture and national identity.”

A sigh interrupted us. We looked over and were surprised by the person of Ruth. She’d been talking to Sherrie, but Sherrie must have gone off to get another drink, and so Ruth had sidled noiselessly across the bench to join us. She was on my side of the table, her ass only inches away from mine. I could scarcely believe I had been sitting that close to a warm, breathing presence and not realized it.

Ruth’s sigh was not like Moira’s. Moira sighed as punctuation to something she had already said. Ruth sighed in statements, declarations. She sighed to announce herself.

“Pardon, love?” said Dekker, inclining his bristly chin.

“Nationalism,” said Ruth. “The ultimate colonial giveaway.”

“Ah, Ruth,” said Dekker, actually turning his head 90 degrees away from her. And so Ruth looked my way.

“Should a country wish to announce itself as a backwater,” she said, gazing at me the way you might a blank wall, a void surface, “should a country wish to flaunt its insecurities—indulge in nationalism.”

Up until about then, I had been feeling well-disposed toward Ruth because Ruth was one of the only people present at our reading who wasn’t a student. Sparrow didn’t come, although I left a message with him through Marjorie—casually adding that Marjorie herself was more than welcome, should she be free. Of course I didn’t expect the blowsy Marjorie with her brood of children waiting at home to take me up on the invitation. But I had thought Sparrow might show. I’d thought Jim might, too. I had even, in all my deluded idiocy, imagined my reading might somehow bring the two together in their swelling pride and appreciation of a shared protégé. I would stand motionless, reciting under a spotlight, and they would stand rapt on opposite sides of the dead-silent room, lost in the power of my words. Through this transcendent experience, they would gradually come to realize how similar they both were, how much they had in common, how ultimately they both wanted the same thing—my success and well-being. I imagined one striding up to the other—probably Sparrow, the first move would be his—hand extended.
Professor … Jim. You should be proud
. And Jim grasps the smaller man’s hand with firm, resolute dignity.
The pride is ours to share, Sir
. Their eyes blaze into one another’s—dark into light. Afire with emotion, understanding, and mutual respect. Hostilities melt into nothing, swords are turned into ploughshares, and—it’s spring. A million flowers burst from the dead earth.

But neither of them came, and so I was left shouting about showdogs and pinpricks over a bunch of girls who I later found out had been sitting there drinking in celebration of someone’s birthday since four in the afternoon. I was the first to read, since we went in alphabetical order, and the microphone wasn’t working. I recited two poems through the indignity of ongoing girl-shrieks and giggles—one of them growing so bold as to yell, “Show us your thing!”—before sitting down in disgust.

Claude sauntered to the stage afterward, pausing to speak to the bartender, who made some vaguely technical motions with his hands. Claude fiddled with the mic, tapped it, blew, and finally wiggled the cord. The cord-wiggling was what did it, and unbelievably, all his fiddling around up there had managed to attract the interest of the whole room. By the time Claude was ready to read, everyone present was ready to listen. Even the sounds of the birthday girls had descended to intrigued murmurs.

“He’s got
presence,”
Ruth Dekker leaned over to say to Sherrie.

“I think we should have gotten an MC,” I announced to no one. “We should get an MC next time, to introduce people.”

“I’m sorry, Lawrence,” whispered Sherrie, because apparently Claude’s
presence
and the power of his work demanded hush, working microphone or no. “Do you want to go up again?”

I glanced around to see if anyone was looking at me, if anyone was showing a particular lively interest in what my response would be. My gaze collided with the smiling eyes of Todd. I turned back to the stage and forced a yawn.

“I’m fine.”

“I don’t say this to be disparaging,” continued Ruth. “We are from a colony as well, after all.”

I glanced over at Dekker to gauge his willingness to re-enter the conversation. But Dekker’s neck was actually straining—I could see the tendons bulge beneath his stubble—so vigorously had he turned his face from Ruth.

“I don’t think we really see ourselves as colonists anymore,” I remarked. “I mean, my grandmother will talk about ‘the empire’ from time to time …”

“You can never underestimate the deep-seatedness of the colonial mindset,” Ruth interrupted.

I craned my own neck around the bar, perhaps not as casually as courtesy would dictate.

Blessedly, Ruth excused herself to lumber off toward the ladies’ room, man-hands swinging like dual pendulums. Heads turned to follow her height and shining blondeness—male and female heads alike. Ruth too had presence.

“Lawrence,” Dekker called, causing me to look up. I realized as I did that I had been sitting there feeling somewhat gut-punched.

“Ruth didn’t mean to be insulting. She’s homesick.”

I nodded again. Was I insulted? Todd would be insulted—he’d be apoplectic. Not so much at the suggestion that Canada is a backwater, but at the insinuation that there’s anything wrong with that. But I wasn’t Todd. Hadn’t I shaken off such provincialism, placed myself above it? Wasn’t I going to Oxford?

“This is the
greatest
country,” he told me, leaning in. “Call it boring!” Dekker suddenly challenged me. “Call it boring if you will! Peace
is
boring. Sanity
is
boring.”

“I didn’t call it boring,” I objected, feeling defensive. I didn’t, did I? Thinking and saying are not the same thing—not the same kind of betrayal.

Dekker stared at me for a strangely blank moment before sitting back. His eyes darted toward the ladies’-room door.

“I know you didn’t, Lawrence. I’m sorry.”

I looked up, suddenly curious. “So then—where did you end up going to school? Did you go to school in Canada?”

He sat blinking a bit longer than I would have expected for such a basic question.

“Well I—I did an undergraduate degree in Cape Town, of course.”

“But then where? What got you out of there? Did you go to Oxford?”

He smiled, releasing a breath of laughter. “Oxford? No. No, Larry, I went to school in America. They wouldn’t have let someone like me within a mile of Oxford.”

Now it was my turn to blink. Each blink served to shape a growing certainty behind my eyes. Each blink was an echo of the words
someone like me
. I didn’t want to ask, because I was afraid I knew the answer already. I didn’t want to hear it, but I echoed, I asked.

“Someone like you?”

More self-deprecating smiles from Dekker—I was starting to think it was the only kind of smile he knew.

He scratched the scruff of his neck, still smiling. “How did I hear you put it one night? The way you described Rimbaud?”

I thought for a moment, and then it swam to the surface of my brain.
“Rimbaud was just some hick from a farm,”
I restated. With, I imagine, not quite as much aplomb as the original.

Dekker nodded at me, tapping himself in the chest.
Like me. Like us
.

After which there is not much to do but get drunk under the pretence of “celebrating” the dismal poetry reading, which is what I proceed to do. So. Let’s see where we stand here. Poetry? Nope, draw a line through that. How many cosmic hints do you need, after all, how many bolts to the head? How many alleys to be scuttled in and out of before you see you’re not wanted up any of them?

Oxford? That’s another line. Forgot where you came from for a minute there, didn’t you, big shot? Hullo, stranger. Welcome to the Highwayman Motor Hotel and Mini-Putt
(adjusts crotch, removes sprig of hay from teeth). My name is Mungo, and I’ll be changing your sheets and replacing your toilet paper for the rest of my natural life.

I finish my beer and gaze for a while at the bottom of my mug. When no one is looking, I hork into the mug, drawing it out. Making it last. I have christened the bottom of my mug Joanne.

Time passes and people ignore me, as is only fit. Slaughter shows up once he can be good and sure the poetry is over—not, as you might expect, on his own inclination, but because it turns out Sherrie asked him to stay away out of an attack of shyness. It’s ten o’clock and Slaughter is already well beyond three sheets to the wind, slapping my back so hard in greeting my vision of Joanne vibrates briefly. When Sherrie, still high from the success of her event, babbles to him how great Claude’s reading in particular was, how people applauded for him, and how some of the birthday girls even hollered—
Woo-woo!
—Slaughter suddenly whirls, grinning, and seizes Claude by the head.

“Guck,”
says Claude in the ensuing silence.

We all watch. Slaughter has grabbed people like me and Todd and flung us cheerfully back and forth like Raggedy-Andys on countless occasions. But it’s not the sort of thing you do to Claude. Nobody is smiling except Slaughter, who looks glazed and far away as he buries his knuckles into Claude’s scalp, rubbing furiously.

“Good for you, there, Frenchie!” he enthuses. I can hear bone grind against bone.

“Charles,”
says Sherrie. And Slaughter lets Claude go.

“What? It’s a congratulatory noogie!” Then he follows it up with what I suppose has to be a congratulatory shove. Claude staggers, but straightens up quickly. He smooths his
dishevelled hair and looks at his watch. Todd starts to laugh, and I’d like to punch him.