Blasted (29 page)

“I wouldn't be so sure,” said Blue, taking a long, grim swallow from a bottle of wine.

I cracked my beer and downed half of it in one go. “You don't need to get involved,” I said. “Don't get dragged down by my problems. Walk away, just walk away.”

“We have Mr. Clean,” said Judith. “We have SOS scrubbing pads. We have J-cloths and garbage bags. We have a bucket. We have bleach. We have rubber gloves.”

“You'll need an entire rubber
suit
to deal with that toxic mess,” Tad interrupted.

“That,” said Judith, pulling him to her and kissing him, “can be arranged.”

The rest of us averted our eyes.

“They're married,” Jason said.

“
What
? I go away for three weeks and people get married?”

“We're not married yet,” Tad said, emerging from the kiss.

“Okay. To work. Blue, put on those gloves,” Judith said, taking control. I moved to put on a pair myself, and Blue shooed me away.

“We're dealing with this. You sit and drink, and issue instructions which we will then ignore.” I clambered up to sit on the kitchen counter, swinging my legs, and the rest of them crowded into the miniscule room.

Someone had mercifully swung the fridge door shut again.

Steve sniffed the air, then gagged. “Who farted?”

“It's the
fridge
, b'y,” I belched. “Gimme another beer.”

He absently handed me one, and Judith opened my back door, letting the night air inside. Silently we contemplated the ominous surface of the fridge. It stood crooked, partly pulled out from the wall; suddenly the engine whirred, and the fridge shuddered into life. “Well,” Steve said, “what are we waiting for?” and opened the door.

“Wow,” said Blue, for once speechless. “Just… wow.” Something lumpy and round, the size of a brain, lurked at the back, and an old lamb chop sloshed and rotted like a corpse inside a half-open margarine container. A plastic bag had fallen open on the bottom shelf; as we stared, greenish ooze slimed forwards and started dripping onto the kitchen floor.

Whitish lumps gleamed wetly in the fitful light.

“What did I tell you?” I said smugly into the silence.

They donned rubber gloves, produced the promised garbage bags, and started scooping. When all solid and liquid matter were entirely removed, Steve volunteered to run the garbage down the alley to a dumpster. “Come back to us,” I said, feeling like I was sending him off on the Crusades. He gingerly picked up the bags, trying to hold them well away from his legs. “Here, wait, don't go yet,” I said. “I'm having a superstitious shiver.” Steve rolled his eyes but put the bags back down. They squished. “Let's drink to Steve and his awful quest,” I said, holding my beer aloft. “To Steve,” everyone intoned, and drank.

“Thanks. I know I'll be safe now.” He took the bags down the back steps and into the night. The rest of the cleaning party sank down on the deck under the dim stars. Tad told us of awakening one morning last week to the scent of woodsmoke. Looking out his window, he discovered a battered multi-coloured mini-bus parked outside, belching smoke out of a crooked tin chimney. He went down thinking the thing was on fire, peered through a dirty window, “and who do I see cooking eggs over a small wood stove, but Jason here.”

“They towed my bus later that day,” Jason grumped. “No wonder I left Toronto!”

“Is it legal to have a woodstove in a bus?” Blue asked.

“Of course it isn't legal. He'd never bother having one if it were,” I said, shaking my beer up and spraying Jason with it, much to his delight. Jason was one of my few ex-es with whom I actually maintained cordial contact, maybe because he was nomadic and so mostly out of town. Also, as Blue informed me, because Jason was actually a nice guy. “You'd never stay interested in a man like him for long,” he'd said. “Poor Jason. That's why he travels so much – he knows he'd become unutterably boring if he stayed in one place.”

As I hosed him and the others ducked, we heard a great commotion beneath us. Steve came running back up the stairs, one of Izzie's tomato vines wrapped around his neck.

“It's like the Amazon down there!” he gasped.

“Whooo-oooo!” Jason bayed like a wolf at the moon.

I peered over the rail in the dark, wondering how much of Izzie's garden Steve had destroyed. “Now,” Blue's voice came from behind me, “we must proceed to the cleaning portion of the evening.”

I was swept by excruciating embarrassment; this felt like someone offering to wash my crusty underwear by hand. “Look, guys,” I said, turning to face them. “You've been great, but quit while you're ahead. Let's go out, see a film or something.”

“A what?” Steve asked.

“A film,” I replied. Steve and Jason looked at each other and sniggered. “You know, moving pictures, people walk and talk, the movies? A film, a FILM!”

“Fill-um, fill-um,” Steve echoed me, sniggering with Jason. Great. The funny accent routine.

“Hey, Ruby, what's another word for
cushion
?” Jason hooted.

“Shaddap.”

“Come on, say it.”

“Pillow,” I said sourly, knowing what was coming. Certain vowels came on strong when I was angry, drunk, or tender, and Steve and Jason never let it by.

“A-ha-ha,
pallow
!”

“Don't make fun of my regional accent!” I yelled.

“Don't listen to them,” Brendan advised.

“Are you men helping or not?” Judith called from the kitchen. Over my protests, they fell to cleaning the fridge. They took it in shifts, sluicing it out with water and bleach, scrubbing it with soap, then repeating.

After an hour of this, it became obvious that the smell refused to dissipate. “I don't understand it. Do you understand it, honey?” Tad said to Judith.

“Ladies and gentlemen. May I have your attention.” Brendan stood in the middle of the room, a fresh bottle in his hand. “We have come today in aid of our dear friend Ruby – here's to Ruby – ” he drank deeply and the others scrambled to find their drinks.

“To Ruby,” they chorused. I swayed, touched.

“To Ruby,” continued Brendan, “who has returned to us from the rocky isle of her birth, a place of magic…”

“Hear, hear,” Tad said.

“…of deep melancholy and holy joy, of passion and dark nights of the soul.”

“Aye,” they chorused.

“It only remains, dear friends,” Brendan went on, “to discover one thing. That is our mission this night, and I charge us all.” He gazed mistily over the group. “We must discover the source of the smell.”

“To the source of the smell!” Jason whooped, tossing back a drink.

“Oh, shush!” Blue said. “It's a solemn moment.”

But we never did discover the source of the smell. The fridge got scrubbed and disinfected about twenty times; eventually, in desperation, Blue anointed it by upending an entire bottle of red wine over it, much to Jason and Steve's disgust. I went around lighting incense, and Brendan and Tad got into a nephew-uncle pompous speech contest out on the back deck, and Judith became so drunk that she came out the other side and started acting stone cold sober. “You don't go in for woman friends, do you?” The two of us were lying side-by-each under the stars on the back deck, as far as possible from the speechifiers.

“What?”

She repeated herself. “No, no,” I protested, going rigid. “I have lots of woman friends. I have… Well, there's Juanita. Juanita back home.

We've been friends for ever.”

“I don't mean it in a rude way. It's just something I've noticed about you. You are more comfortable around men.”

“Am not.” I felt offended.

“Well.” She changed the subject. “Can I tell you something?”

“Sure.”

She wrapped her arms around me and whispered into my ear. “Tad and I are going to have children.”

“Whaa-aa?” I wondered confusedly if she were pregnant now.

“Not now,” she said, reading my mind. “After we get married.”

“Sure.” I swilled more beer. “Don't want kids out of wedlock, now.”

“Not because of that. Because… he's the first man I've met who I can trust.”

“Must be nice.”

She went on, ignoring the edge in my voice. “If you'd asked me two years ago if I'd ever have kids, I'd have laughed in your face.”

“It's a big step.” I murmured the commonplace thing.

“Especially for me.” She lowered her voice again. “When I was young, I had an abortion.”

“Me, too,” I said, surprising myself.

“You did?”

“Yeah. I was fifteen.” When she didn't reply, I looked up at her from where I lay. She was gazing at me, her huge dark eyes full of unshed tears. “Don't worry, it was a long time ago. I'm over it now,” I said hastily.

“Over it?”

“Yeah, it was a long time ago,” I repeated.

She thought for a moment, gazing intently at me, while I grew more and more agitated. At last she mused, “That's not how it took me. Everyone's different. My friend Marie had one and two days later she went to Vegas and…”

“It's not like there's some
rule
, that a person has to get all worked up about it…” I interrupted.

“Of course not, Rube.”

“…in touch with some eternal fucking womanhood or something…”

“I
know
, babe, I'm just saying that I…”

“I just don't think about it much at all!” I was breathing heavily.

She rolled away from me and stared up at the night sky. “I'm just saying that's not how it took
me
,” she said.

I'd been ranting. “Sorry.” I shut my mouth, then opened it again like a fish. “It's just not something that crosses my mind much.”

“That doesn't mean it's
over
for you.”

“Yes it does. To me, it does.”

“I still mourn for that child of mine,” she said. We lay in silence. The men's voices rose and fell in the darkness.

“I'm sure you and Tad will make wonderful parents,” I said at last. She didn't reply. After a moment she took me into her arms again, and I felt her tears wet on my forehead. I felt strangely as though she thought she was comforting me.

CHAPTER 20

Late the following afternoon I was awakened by knocking at my door. I wrapped myself in the sheet and answered it. It was Blue, keeping his date with me, looking almost miserable.

“Why is it,” I mumbled, “that you can look so good even from the depths of a hangover?”

“I've been up for several hours, dearest,” he grimaced, “whereas you have pillow-marks all over your face.”

“I think I'd have
died
if I'd had to get up early.”

“I very nearly did.” He sniffed. “You still reek of booze.”

I put on a kettle. He made tea while I splashed water over my poisoned body and got dressed. One good thing I noticed: my acne was healing fast. Once my ablutions were completed I marched into the kitchen and held out a mug toward him. “Tea me,” I commanded. He poured some from the pot, and I sucked it back. Subdued, we left my place for dinner at his.

On our way down the front steps Izzie surged out of her place, brandishing the broken remains of a tomato plant. “You!” she screeched. Then she launched a full-frontal onslaught: inarticulate howls of rage, dying down to slurred mumbles, soaring to heights of incoherent verbal invective. After a few moments I stopped trying to interrupt and explain. Blue was hovering in the background, probably wondering if he'd have to defend me physically. After about ten minutes, he leaned against the pitiful sapling that struggled to grow on the front lawn and studiously cleaned his nails.

“… and where's your money, that's what I like to know, you have
enough money to drink all night and bust up my garden
with big feet tramping back and forth on the ceiling the ceiling was peeling…
I need my sleep you know I got a lot to do
and Frank neeeever comes by… never comes by and it's all very well for HIM living out in Mississauga
oh yes very nice indeed
indeed indeed and screw him,
screw
him,
you'd like to screw him wouldn't you
and I don't got no goddamned boyfriend, no you can't have any
goddamned boyfriend
living here some
goddamned man some goddamned alcoholic busting everything up
…”

She sort of lunged toward me near the end, and I simply reached out and shoved her away. There was no heat in it. I just felt exhausted. She reeled and sat back hard on the steps.

“Come on, Blue.”

We left her shrieking like a harpy on the stairs, and under the watchful eyes of evening neighbours – I felt like swearing and shouting at them to go away – we made our way down the street.