Chump Change (7 page)

“What’s happening, Dave?” he asked me. “Never mind, it’s all too obvious. Writing the great Canadian novel, is that it?”

“Actually, I’m American.”

“Well, the great American Novel-in-Exile, then. Dave,
Dave, Dave,” he says, in a downward arpeggio. “When are you ever going to learn? Hey, I just had an idea. You know what you should be doing? You know what you should do starting right now, this morning?”

“No.”

“Write a sitcom pilot. You’re a funny guy, you could do it standing on your head. You know how much those guys make? Three grand a week! You’d make more in a year than you would in a lifetime of writing novels, and that’s if you’re lucky enough to get published, if you’re one of the luckiest, luckiest bastards. Don’t forget what I do for a living.” Max worked for the vast Cosmodemonic Broadcast Corporation as a script development officer (funny job title, I always thought: WEE-DO, WEE-DO, alright, pull over buddy, let’s see your script development licence). He approved or rejected sitcom and drama pilots for a living. “But I wouldn’t be doing you a favour. You should see the type of stuff I get in the mail — it’s unbelievable. It’s not just that the writing’s bad. Half the time I don’t even know what they’re trying to say.”

I knew what he meant. I’d just spent a year and a half reading letters from average Americans, and they were sheer madness.

“Forget it, Max,” I said. “I’m not selling out to TV.”

“Oh, the thoughts of the Great Genius are too lofty, he has no need of mere cash, he doesn’t soil his hands with the handling of filthy lucre. Tell me something, Dave: do you like sex?”

“Naturally.”

“How would you like, for example, to have sex with Leslie Lawson?”

“Sure!”

“Well, you never will, do you realize that?”

“But you said…”

“I know what I said. But that was before she saw what a
financial basket case you are. Don’t you realize men have been showering her with presents, fancy dinners, invitations to spend the weekend on a yacht or private island ever since she turned 16? What do you have to offer her? Nada. You couldn’t even afford to take her out for a hot dog. You don’t have a pot to piss in, you’re on skid row, you’re shipwrecked, you’re a…”

“Alright, alright. Can we change the subject already?”

“Whatever you say, Dave. Just trying to do you a favour. All this chit-chat’s making me hungry, anyway. How does eggs, bacon, and toast, all washed down with champagne and O.J. sound to you, eh?”

“Excellent!”

“Well, whip it up, man.” He snaps the paper open in front of his face. From behind the rustling pages, he says: “Make yourself useful for a change. I like my bacon crispy, but not too crispy. Know what I mean?”

I like to cook. It’s one of the great arts, I think; it roots you in the earth; in the fruits and vegetables and meats and grains and tubers of Mother Nature. It’s also a great way to get girls. Frankly, I don’t understand any bachelor who doesn’t cook. Any cheeseball can take a woman to a restaurant, but when you make a meal for a woman: a) she’s impressed by your competence and self-reliance; b) you control the music and atmosphere; c) it’s cheaper; d) she’s
already in your apartment
. If anything’s going to happen, there’s no will-she-won’t-she tango at the doorstep.

Old lady Lawson kept a great kitchen, too. Copper pots, strings of garlic and drying herbs, a huge old gas range, food-crammed fridge. I rooted around and found all the ingredients for my famous apple-and-Brie omelette. An easy dish — just fry apple wedges in a little butter, fold them in with the Brie when the time comes — but it always makes a big impression
on your breakfast guests. I tossed some bacon in a pan, whipped out the bread, and got cracking on the eggs.

First things first, though: the first step in making any meal, I feel, is to have a nice stiff drink or two. It loosens you up, gets the creative juices flowing. For me, this applies to breakfast, too, though I realize for some it’s still a bit early in the day. I whipped up a couple of champer-and-O.J.s, brought one out to Max, and received a grunt of thanks for my efforts.

The smell of bacon cooking — Nature’s alarm clock — lured the girls from their cozy quilts. They came down in their nightgowns, sleepy-eyed and tousle-haired. Need I mention, at this point, that Les looked more fetching than ever? I don’t think so. I believe it’s clear by now why Les was put on this earth: to torture me, and make me suffer, while God and Beelzebub, in a rare collaboration, watch the whole show on their celestial/ infernal couch with their arms around each other’s shoulders, laughing till the tears roll down their cheeks.

“Here’s some nice fresh coffee,” I said. “Bacon and eggs coming up in a few minutes.”

“You seem pretty chipper this morning,” Sam said. “Did you sleep well?”

“Actually, I hardly slept at all.”

“Why? What was the matter?”

“Nothing. I was reading, that’s all.”

This seemed to strike them both as a novel idea.

“Wow, reading usually puts me straight to sleep,” Sam said.

“Well, I was pretty into this book.”

“What was it?” Les asks.

“Hunger
, by Knut Hamsun. I found it in your Dad’s bookcase.”

“Was it good?”

“I thought it was amazing.”

“What’s it about?”

“The torments of a starving writer. He barely earns enough to eat, he’s always pawning things, sometimes he has to suck on a wood chip to convince his stomach he’s had something to eat.”

Les snickered. “Sounds familiar, Dave.”

“Why doesn’t he get a job?” Sam asks.

“Well, as Isaac Bashevis Singer says in the introduction, he starves out of spiritual necessity, that he is one of those who ‘must rise above their fellow creatures or perish.’”

Sam raises a sceptical eyebrow.

“Nutty.”

“
I’m hungry
,” Les says.

Breakfast was an excellent meal, if I do say so myself. We ate outside, on the verandah. Everyone read sections of the paper, so there wasn’t much conversation, just pass this, pass that, compliments to the chef. Which is as it should be. Breakfast is no time to try to be witty or interesting, and my three friends understood that, thank God.

In the afternoon, we went for a tromp around “the property,” as Sam referred to it. One thing was abundantly clear: old man Lawson had snapped up a pretty piece of real estate with all his advertising dough. Rolling fields, handmade fences, a picturesque pond overlooked by a huge willow. It sounds corny to say, but it was a real storybook farm. It even had a name: “Darlington.” So old man Lawson might say to his friends: “How would you like to come up to Darlington for the weekend?”

We squelched around in the mud, in borrowed rubber boots. Max and I hopped on one of those huge cylindrical hay-bales, and tried to get it rolling. Soon it became a competition to see who could stay on longest. Finally, Max aborted with an
oath. I kept rolling (why? to impress Les with my “balesmanship,” I guess) until I hit some sort of snag in the ground and pitched face-first in the mud.

Inside, I had a bath in the big clawfoot tub, and took a long nap. I drew the blinds, crawled into the bed, and with the smell of fresh-laundered sheets in my nostrils, I sank into a deep, dark hole.

I awoke from my sarcophagal snooze feeling refreshed, yet groggy and disoriented. With a towel around my waist, I staggered toward the shower like some sort of undersea creature. Clearly I had sunk, for six hours, to the lowest depths of sleep, to the bottom of the sea, where strange eyeless creatures scuttle across the sand and huge prehistoric leviathans slide silently through the inky blackness.

That shower really perked me up, though. First hot, then cold, then hot again. I came out feeling like a champ. I dressed, to impress Les, really. I’m a bit of a dandy, a fop, a Macaroni, a Count D’Orsay or Beau Brummel. Actually, I
wish
I could dress like those legendary 19th-century exquisites, especially the great Beau, “the greatest dandy of all time.” Not that he dressed showily, far from it. Beau spent hours in front of the mirror to achieve an effect, in the words of an astonished contemporary, “exactly like that of every other gentleman.” The difference was apparent only to the initiate, it was all in the details: the way only three links of his watch-fob ever showed, the way he polished the soles as well as the uppers of his Hessian boots to the same mirror-like sheen, the brilliance of his linen, the careful elaboration of his famous-throughout-Europe cravat.

Obviously, I could never hope to achieve such a level of almost spiritual dandyism. With my limited budget and secondhand wardrobe, I’m a faux fop, I guess, a
flâneur manqué
, a cheesy
Macaroni. Still, I try my best. I like to think of myself as in spirited revolt against the costume of our age. It’s too sporty, too casual, as if the wearer were saying life is casual, life is a sport. Whereas the costume of an earlier era proclaimed “Life is theatre,” a construct I infinitely prefer.

Sashaying down the stairs in my snappy haberdashery, I catch a whiff of an arrestingly appetizing aroma, an olfactory aria of garlic, cheese, tomatoes, and…nutmeg?

“Les’s famous lasagne,” Max informs me, when I join him in the library. Locally famous, he explains, for being the best lasagne anyone’s ever laid their lips on. “You won’t believe your tastebuds,” he says.

He’s sitting in the big chair by the fire, a drink perched on one arm, an ashtray on the other, feet perched on an ottoman,
Hunger
cracked in his lap, a bridge lamp staring over his shoulder. I cross to the bar, stage right.

“So, you say old man Lawson doesn’t care how much of his booze we drink?” I ask over my shoulder, somewhat disingenuously, after having lapped up so much of it last night.

“How many times do I have to tell you? Drink all you want, he couldn’t care less.”

Maybe the plane did crash, I think, and this is the after-life: all the scotch you can drink, a cozy stone farmhouse, a tantalizingly beautiful and sexy woman just out of reach. The only question was: which afterlife? Had I been a good boy or a bad boy?

Who cares? I grabbed a bottle of Lagavulin, my favourite single-malt scotch. I know many single-malt aficionados think Lagavulin errs on the side of smokiness and peatiness, but that’s just what I love so much about it. Sipping Lagavulin, you can almost hear the Gaelic curses of sun-blackened old Scotsmen as they pitch peat on the Isle of Skye. “Och the noo, I stabbed me bleedin’ toe with me fookin’ pitchfork.”

Me and my drink plunk down on the couch next to Max’s chair.

“So, you think this is a good book?” he asks.

“In my opinion it’s a
great
book,” I say.

Big mistake: Max is in a mood to argue. He employs syllogisms, lays logical bear-traps, snake-pits. I step into hidden nooses covered with deceptive layers of leaves. As if the greatness of a work of art could be proved or disproved, like a mathematical formula. But it doesn’t bother me, tonight. I’m feeling mellow, and answer his queries and sallies as if from a lofty promontory of contentment. Fire away, Max, I think, you old arguer, you.

“Listen, Max, it spoke to me,” I say finally. “What else can you say about a work of art?”

“But that sort of relativism leads inevitably to —”

Just then Les pokes her head in the door.

“Dinner’s ready.”

Saved by the bell.

Dinner was another memorable meal. We ate outside again, by candlelight this time, watching the sun set across a vista of muddy fields. Everyone’s dressed for dinner, and both Les and Sam have their hair up in chignons, my favourite hairstyle. Les is wearing a dark-blue silk dress, a dress the colour of night, so her head and shoulders seem to float out of the darkness like a vision in a dream.

The wine was likewise superb; Max dragged four bottles of dusty old red from old man Lawson’s cellar, including a 1974 Château Cantemerle. And Les’s lasagne was so delicious, when I found out there was another tray warming in the oven I almost burst into tears.

“Bring it on with all due haste,” I said, waving my napkin.
I felt witty, sexy, charming, theatrical, if not downright drunk. When the other tray appeared, I rose to my feet.

“I’d like to propose a toast. To Les’s lasagne.”

“Hear, hear,” Max says, raising his glass.

“Wait, I’m not finished. Les, no matter how I sweat and strain at my writing labours, no matter how I beat my head against the wall, I know I will never produce something as rich and soul-satisfying as this. With a bellyful of your lasagne, I feel like I could go 15 rounds with Cassius Clay in his prime, I could find the cure for cancer and spend the rest of my days receiving prizes and tributes from my fellow man.”

“Enough, enough,” Max said, raising his glass. “To Les’s lasagne.”

As usual, I had to teach everyone how to toast properly, passed down to me from my mother: hold the glass by the stem, not the bowl (it makes a more festive sound that way), and look into each other’s eyes as you bring the glasses together. People seem to find this last part pretty tough. Almost no one can do it without pulling a face. Max pulled a face, Sam raised an ironic eyebrow. Only Les was able to look me full in the eyes, and remain serious. She seemed moved. She’s the quiet type. Ah, Les, I thought. You would do me so much good, and I would do you so little harm.

“Coffee?” Sam asked.

“Yes, please,” Max said.

“Me, too, please,” Les said.

I went inside to help.

While Sam and I were fiddling around in the kitchen, she asked me: “So, are you in love with Les yet?”

“What makes you ask me that?”

“Dave, I’ve been best friends with her since we were 14. Do you have any idea what that would be like? Every man who lays
eyes on her falls in love. Sure, Max and I wound up together, but that was only after Les turned him down.”

“Yeah, I could see how that could get on your nerves after a while.”

After dinner, we sit in the library, sipping brandy. Max lights a bowl and we pass it back and forth. Everyone has a touch of the Sunday joneses, thinking about all the things they have to do in the upcoming work-week. Les is starting a new play. Max plugs back into his Cosmodemonic duties. Sam’s temping, she’s a receptionist at an “architorture” firm.