Read Greetings from the Vodka Sea Online

Authors: Chris Gudgeon

Tags: #Canadian Fiction, #Love Stories, Canadian, #Short Stories, #Canadian Short Stories, #eBook, #Chris Gudgeon, #Goose Lane Editions

Greetings from the Vodka Sea (19 page)

BOOK: Greetings from the Vodka Sea
12.89Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

The woman depressed him — Luellen — and the poetess and the academic and Mr. Dutton and General Montcalm and the earnest, hardworking grad student who'd only wanted to please him. But what depressed Wonnacott most was Wonnacott. He'd thought his trip to Orillia would take him back to happier times (not that times now were particularly unhappy or happy; they were simply times). But the town had changed just enough to remind him that it was no longer the same. In fact, the town looked younger and fresher, with new sidewalks and well-paved streets and rows of modern houses and a supermart where the grocery once stood. The town had gotten younger; only his memories were old. Time was the enemy, he liked to say. In fact, time had already won. It had sacked the present, injecting him with nostalgia, the morphine of the vanquished, as it marched on.

Wonnacott had finished the Canadian Club and worked his way through a bottle of Smirnoff's that seemed like a child's toy in his gargantuan hand. The beer was next, and then the other beer and then the other . . .

This time, Thérèse picked up the phone and answered in a dreamy voice.

“Did I wake you, love?” he asked.

Thérèse yawned, then lowered her voice. “I was waiting for your call . . .”

“The line was busy . . .”

“But now I can't really talk. I have a man here.”

“Really? Who's that?”

“Mmmm. Just an old friend.”

“I see.”

“I'm just about to fuck him, do you understand?”

“Yes . . .”

“I've got his cock in my hand and I'm about to put it in my mouth.”

It was an old game. Whenever he went away, he would call her. They would make love from a distance with people they'd only just invented. Go big or stay home. That's what Thérèse called it.

“Just a moment.” Wonnacott kicked off his pants and hopped onto the bed.

“Are you comfortable, now?”

“Yes. Go on.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, please.”

“Good. Because he's slipping his hands up my dress, and I want to tell you all about it . . .”

. . .

They had met on the bus to Orillia. By chance, he'd found himself alone in the back row with Thérèse and an old woman whom he mistook for her grandmother. Soon the old woman got off, leaving the two young people virtually alone. They had barely spoken up to this point, and both pretended to be engrossed in their reading material, when Thérèse subtly shifted her leg. Now, if he looked — and he did — he could see the edge of her panties. At this point, she began talking to him, as if she'd always known him. She wondered about the book he was reading (
More Poems for People
, by the radical poet Milton Acorn) and asked him if he liked Leonard Cohen and if he was going to Orillia and why (not so much why Orillia, but more a general why, why anything? Why not?). She had some beers in her backpack, and he had a couple of joints, which they smoked with their heads close to the window, carefully blowing the smoke outside so as not to alert the bus driver. Not that he really gave a shit. He probably enjoyed getting high on the job. Soon Wonnacott let his hand slip onto her knee, and she was asking him if he had a place to stay in Orillia and he already answering no. He moved his hand up her leg slowly. Until, that is, she grabbed it and slipped it inside her panties.

“Maybe we could find a place together,” she said.

He took another toke and tickled her pubic hair. It was a classic case of lust at first sight.

. . .

They used to stay up late and listen to the rats. At first she'd been afraid of them. He'd been afraid of them too but hid it better, using her fear as his camouflage. After impaling one of them that first night, she'd slept sitting upright with a cast iron frying pan in her hand. Both of them were wrecked for work the next day; she'd fallen asleep and burnt the macaroni lunch, he got into an argument with the second woman on his list, then packed it in early and got drunk with some Indians in Couchiching Park. In time they grew more comfortable with their roommates. They'd leave out bits of leftovers — there wasn't much; it would have been fairer if the rats left food out for them — and it got to the point where a couple of the bigger, braver rats would eat right out of their hands. Not that any of them were tiny; on average, they were roughly the size and shape of a shoebox. Even the cats, great mousers in their own rights, mostly left the rats alone. By the end of the summer, he and Thérèse had come to see them as friends and more, gnawing, scurrying, voracious gods who watched over them as they slept.

. . .

If misery were a rainbow, the Authors' Breakfast would be at the highest end of the spectrum, a special kind of invisible, ultraviolet misery that only particularly sensitive and habitually mistreated bats could detect. Before the wet eggs and undercooked bacon were served, an asthmatic canon read a meandering prayer, along with several of the longer verses from the Book of Deuteronomy. Then Dutton, standing at attention before a portrait of the Red Ensign (which, to the best of Wonnacott's recollection, hadn't been the country's flag for eleven years) led the group in a rousing chorus of “God Save the Queen.” Wonnacott did not join in, although he stood up exceedingly slowly and remained on his feet, shifting his weight from one leg to the other, for the duration of the anthem, just to be polite (and even then, only polite enough). Next the ill-used poetess rose and read a seven-hundred-line epic narrative entitled “The Death of Wolfe,” for which she was apparently quite famous locally and, most deservedly, completely unknown everywhere else.

The horse, that steed, the Captain held

Before the mighty General fell'd . . .

And on and on in thumping iambs, until the poem surpassed mere annoyance and entered the realm of almost hypnotic irritation. By the end, Wonnacott's neck hurt from nodding the measure. And just when it seemed the morning could not get any worse, the academic arose. “I have been asked to read one of my favourite of Dr. Leacock's pieces,” he said, offering no hint of the plague that was about to descend. “I have selected his master's thesis,
The Doctrine of Laissez Faire
.”

It was lunch by the time breakfast ended.

. . .

He had the feeling he was being watched. Not looked at, which was to be expected — he was, after all, the conference's star attraction, a best-selling author who'd twice been long-listed for the CBC short story competition (it was a very long longlist, Bob Weaver assured him) and once very seriously considered for a Governor General's award. But this was different. Not captured schoolgirl glances, but burning, clicking, sucking eyes, taking him in, taking him on. When he tried to return eye contact and smile and nod, they (many of them at least) looked away, frowning. Clearly they did not approve of him. He spotted Luellen in the back, a bald husband latched to her arm. She turned her head quickly. But he did not, only grabbing his wife tighter and fixed his eyes on Wonnacott.

After the breakfast, Wonnacott stayed on the podium. Not that he wanted to talk to any of the attendees, or worse, let any of them talk to him, but because he did not want to face the ambush that seemed to wait for him by the doors. Luellen and her husband stood there, he with his arms folded, staring directly at Wonnacott, she cooing, it seemed, to get him to leave with her. Finally Wonnacott decided to escape through the kitchen, but as he pushed his way through the yellow room divider and toward a narrow corridor, Dutton grabbed his arm.

“A word, Mr. Wonnacott, if I may . . .”

He had that familiar look publicists and conference organizers get whenever they have to deliver bad news to writers, a drawn-out, pained smile that would not look out of place in a Edvard Munch painting.

“Ah, Dutton. Great breakfast. Thank you so much.”

“The eggs were a little overdone, don't you think?”

“I hardly noticed.”

“Excellent. And the room? It's to your liking?” Dutton still held onto his napkin and twisted it obsessively as he spoke.

“I like it fine. It has a fine view of . . . everything.”

“Oh, that's fine. Fine!”

“Yes, fine.”

“Fine, indeed. I know you used to live here, and thought, you know, the view.”

“Yes. Indeed. The view. It really hasn't changed. When I wrote the book . . .”

“I love the book, by the way.
Sunshine Sketches of
. . .
a . . . Little
. . .”


Sunshine Sketches of a Rat-Infested Shitbox
.”

“Yes. Wonderful book. Memoir, is it not?”

“After a fashion.”

In the long pause, Dutton twisted his napkin ever more vigorously. Wonnacott was not about to make his job easier. There was an undeclared war between writers and conference organizers — or not a war so much as a destructive dependence. Like mutual parasites, they had to feed off one another to survive.

“Excellent. Lovely. Anyway. There is a small programming change I think you should know about.”

“Programming change?”

“Programming change. We'd like to add Humphries to the reading tonight.”

“I'm not sure I understand.”

“Tonight, at dinner. Humphries is going to read as well.”

“But —”

“I'd really hoped to get him more to do this morning, but I couldn't very well interrupt Miss Davis's poem, and everyone else ran on a bit.”

“I'll be honest. I'm not sure we'd compliment each other. He's rather more —” Wonnacott struggled for an acceptable euphemism for “dull.”

“I know, it's all of a sudden.”

“I'd prefer if ­. . .”

“You'll still be keynote speaker, of course. Everyone will be expecting that.”

“I'm . . .”

“We'll just save him for later. An after-dinner treat.”

“I'm reading
first
?”

“That would be more appropriate, don't you think?”

“Look, I could see him saying a few words before me, to sort of warm up the crowd. But I am, as you say, the attraction here — in all modesty — and it would be highly unusual — unorthodox — for the keynote speaker to go before . . . someone else.”

“I see your point. Perhaps, then, we should make him co-keynote speaker?”

“What?”

“Let's give it some thought, shall we?”

That was that. Dutton had made up his mind. They could stand there for another hour pretending not to argue, or Wonnacott could simply let it go and hope he'd never be asked back.

“It's your call, Dutton.”

But there was something else. The grimace, the twisting continued.

“Is that it?”

“There's just one more thing.”

“Yes?”

“I'm not really sure how to broach this, so I'll just say it.”

“Please.”

“I . . . I try to run a tight ship. We — myself and the organizers and volunteers — it's like a family.”

“The point being?”

“It's just that, well, frankly, you people blow into town and do your business, and that's really none of my concern, except that I'm the one left standing here to pick up the pieces.” Dutton had become quite animated during that last bit, punctuating every other word by pecking his finger in the air. He was intimating some darker purpose, but his point was lost on Wonnacott.

“I'm not sure I . . .”

“I'm talking about Luellen Dupris, Mr. Wonnacott. And I'd appreciate it if you kept your filthy hands off her.”

. . .

After lunch in his room — soup — Wonnacott had returned to the old house on Park Street. He parked in front of the vacant lot where he and Thérèse used to hunt for garter snakes. The rats, as it turned out, were particularly fond of snakes. Thérèse would cut their heads off, leave them bleeding on the kitchen floor and watch the room fill with rats. She'd named most of them, the regulars anyway: Pratt, PK, Leonard, Archibald, Uncle Milty, Miss Johnson, Purdy. She liked them exactly because other women would have found them repulsive. She liked to be contradictory. One night, after Grace's son had come and set traps in the gutters and attic, killing perhaps a dozen rats in one sortie and ending their nocturnal visits for the summer, Thérèse smoked almost an entire bag of weed on her own. “You know,” she said, “youth is a trap that only catches you when it's not there.”

“What?”

“I said, youth is a trap that only catches you when it's not there.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

Thérèse paused to take another long toke, then started to laugh. She laughed and she laughed and she laughed and she laughed. Wonnacott laughed too. It was, indeed, the stupidest thing she'd ever said.

She would come to say far stupider things than that, and so would he. As the summer came to its close, it seemed that one stupid thing only followed another. And that's when Wonnacott said the stupidest thing of all. Goodbye. One afternoon he'd left her in the Park Street house with their rats and future memories and found a train home on his own. The summer was over. Go big or stay home.

BOOK: Greetings from the Vodka Sea
12.89Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Luna by Sharon Butala
The Merry Widow by BROWN, KOKO
All That's True by Jackie Lee Miles
The Door by Magda Szabo