Harmless (6 page)

“It’s more about what
I
don’t want to see.”

Liz was now at Jane’s side. “Does he have a new girlfriend?”

“I have a new ex,” he said, welcoming the teasing he knew was coming. He couldn’t stop staring at Liz’s thick auburn hair, sculpted into a wavy wedge that made her hypersensitive brown eyes look even wider and younger. A real adult haircut.

“It didn’t work out with my lady friend.”

“Too crazy?” Jane said.

He smiled.

“Too stable?”

“Maybe. Apparently security chafes my skin like a wet sweater.”

“Listen to the
writer
,” Jane said to Liz. “And no, Joseph, I don’t read your column.”

“I didn’t ask.”

“You’ve been dying to since you got here.”

He let out a big laugh. She knew him so well.

“Don’t take it personally: I don’t have time to read anything.”

“What’s it like, being a famous columnist?” Liz asked, without irony.

“Oh, I know what it’s like,” Jane said, batting her eyelashes.
“Oh my God, you’re a writer. You must be soooo smart.”
She played the bohemian groupie with burlesque exaggeration, but it still turned him on. “
Do you write books too?
”

“There’s talk of collecting my best columns in book form.” There
had
been talk, but he couldn’t bring sustained concentration to any project for more than an afternoon.

“You were going to dedicate your first novel to Jane,” Liz said. “It was so romantic.”

“What would we have said if someone had called us romantics?” he said to Jane, expecting a laugh. Instead, she turned away and returned to her post at the stove. He was an idiot. Of course they’d been romantic. Even their fights had been operatic. Public screaming matches capping off extended drinking binges, the strategic use of other lovers—often mutual friends—to drive each other over the cliff of jealousy. He’d punched some poser who hit on her at a party, and she’d punched Joseph hard enough to loosen a molar for reasons they couldn’t remember the next day, which made it so much funnier. But there was also the fantastic sex, the talking all night like a pair of kids at their first sleepover, the reading to each other in bed all afternoon while swapping tales of their latest exploits. Had he been happier since, so wrenched from his habitual emotions by an appetite for experience greater than his own? Maybe he wasn’t supposed to be—every life had a high-water mark.

His face must have expressed a passing stab of regret, because Liz fixed on him with that faraway look she got when she was trying to stay ahead of her friends’ pitfalls, so engrossed by other people’s problems that she missed the catastrophes in her own path. It used to make her easy prey for manipulative men—users, big talkers, druggies, and wannabe artists. She’d told Joseph in the car that if he hadn’t set her straight on a few of those men back in the day, if he hadn’t educated her about the cold, hard world, she might have ended up in a cult. He tried to picture himself at twenty, guiding Liz through a rough patch, with no
hope of sexual reward, because even his and Jane’s theatrically transgressive love affair had had boundaries. He must have been drunk, transported by those raptures of generalized love that always nailed him near the end of a three-night bender. It was a nice thought—that his finest self had not been completely asleep during all that womanizing and glory chasing. He’d like to meet this noble man, hear his version of those mythic days, ask him who did what to whom. Someone must have been keeping score.

When Joseph looked up, Alex was standing beside Jane at the stove. He must have been in the living room, where the girls were watching
TV
, but Joseph couldn’t shake the uncanny feeling that he’d overheard them talking in the kitchen.

So what? Everyone flirts
.

Alex was almost pressed against Jane’s body, his coiled posture suggesting exhausted defeat and energized resolve. He rested his hand on her hip as though he could transfer his grievances directly into her nervous system. Rebecca must have been giving him the silent treatment again. He was a good father, a model of engagement and natural authority, and his daughter couldn’t get away from him fast enough. It must be killing him inside. Jane peeked into the living room and pulled Alex further from the doorway, and when she spoke he was gravely attentive, as if he was receiving counsel from a more experienced officer. Joseph heard her say something about backing off, that Rebecca had to make her own mistakes. Alex mouthed his assent, though his shoulders and hands had other ideas. He started to speak, but Jane’s hand shot up between them—she’d heard enough.

“A man walks into a doctor’s office and says, ‘Doctor, my brother thinks he’s a chicken.’ ”

Joseph got the desired groans from the boys at the kiddie table. Franny and Rebecca, locked together at the elbows at the far end of the big kitchen table, rolled their eyes. He was into his third beer, and the alcohol made him expansive—the trick was not to float
too
high above the crowd.

“The doctor says, ‘A chicken? This is
very
serious. Have you told your brother he’s
not
a chicken?’ ”

Franny tensed for the assault of an embarrassing punchline, and the joke went as hard as an egg in his mouth.

“ ‘Not a chicken?’ the guy says. ‘Of course we haven’t told him he’s not a chicken: we need the eggs.’ ”

Franny started laughing before the punchline. The adults joined in, which made the boys laugh, and even Rebecca lowered her head to hide a smile.

“Your jokes are lame,” Franny said with pride, proof he still had a few emotional credits left in her ledger. “I don’t get it!”

“I don’t get it either,” Liz admitted, her pained expression causing more laughter.

They were all infused with good feelings—Saturday night of a long weekend, a big spread of food, and look who’s here, Party Boy Julian, his rock-star face easing into its striking, folk-revival incarnation, his crooked smile complimented by a nose broken so many times the doctors must have left the cartilage to find its own shape. The positive vibes were even restoring his lover Amber after a shaky start to the meal, when she’d presented Jane with a small cheese from Quebec, explaining that the artisans who made it did
not pasteurize the milk. The other adults, denied so many of their parents’ luxuries—cottages, pensions, affordable city homes—appreciated this token of the Good Life.

Only Mike broke ranks. “So it costs
more
for unpasteurized cheese?” he said. “You’re paying extra for something the artisans
didn’t
do?”

Alex had graciously steered Mike’s sarcasm away from its easy target, and now Amber’s velvet stoner-bubble had expanded to include these
beautiful people
, old friends sharing a meal at the communal table, rediscovering forgotten
life rhythms
.

“What we forget,” she said, “is that before electricity and
TV
, people gathered in the kitchen to warm themselves by the stove to
talk
about things that mattered—family, community, the land. Wisdom was passed from one generation to the next—stories and family histories.” She looked to Julian for confirmation. “There’s no
apprenticeship
anymore, nothing handed down.”

Her words tugged something loose in Joseph, opening a vein of sympathy.
Apprenticeship
—scenes from a socialist mural rose up: heroically self-sacrificing men and women teaching the young to sole a shoe, weave a blanket, run a mill, and bring in the harvest, channelling the nervous, hopeful energy of youth into meaningful labour. He would have mocked the idea of surrendering his will to a craftsperson when he was fifteen, yet here he was, wishing that a crofter or weaver would help guide Franny through her teens.

Jane’s waitress-holler announcing the next course prevented another Amber homily. Joseph pulled on his beer and took in the faces flushed with heat and alcohol, the
girls lit from behind by the glowing kitchen window. Jane and Liz brought plates heaped with steaming shepherd’s pie and corn to the table, and after the men outdid each other complimenting the cooks, everyone dug in—even Franny, who ate without stopping to do a mental calorie count before every forkful. Joseph washed down the shepherd’s pie with another gulp of beer that almost drained the bottle, and looked up to see Jane squeezing Alex’s hand, wrapped now with fresh gauze. He’d overheard them arguing again in the back office just before dinner, Jane ending her diatribe by telling Alex to “give it a fucking rest, for my sake. I
need
this weekend.”

Alex had more than obeyed Jane’s order—he was practically buoyant, restored to his place as the male half of the Golden Couple, now relocated to a modest country home where friends came to escape their overworked lives and share a meal at his handmade dinner table, venturing beyond the acceptable mealtime topics of real estate, careers, and cable
TV
shows that were inevitably described as being “as rich as novels.” He asked Liz if she was having better luck this summer with her garden, and for the next half-hour he kept the conversation moving from guest to guest, flattering each of them with his full attention, teasing out their most engaging self. Even the girls were temporarily drawn out when Amber explained the significance of the tattoos lacing her arms, the left representing her “Celtic ancestors,” the other her “Mohawk heritage.”

No surprise really: Alex had always been a great talker, and an even better listener. Tonight it was as if he was using those gifts to bring out the best in his guests and to
demonstrate, if only for a couple of hours, how an egalitarian community would function at the daily domestic level. And maybe two hours could be stretched into two days, and days into weeks, and so on, deep into the young century. It made Joseph wonder if the congenial host across the table was a domestic version of the Alex who was radicalizing the locals at his Friday-night meetings, drawing out their inchoate anger and directing it at a series of targets. If Derek was any indicator, results were mixed.

“Julian, I can’t believe you’re here,” Liz said, letting Alex finish his dinner. “What have you been doing for the last, oh, twenty years?”

“I did a little bit of acting,” Julian said. “I played some guitar, tried some things. I even worked for my dad for a year.” He lingered on this early run of hope. “Then I moved out to the Coast. I got involved with the wrong people, picked up bad habits—
very
bad habits. I lost the plot. That’s what addiction does—makes you forget who you are.”

He snapped his head up, as if he’d remembered this wasn’t a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, then brightened as Liam squeezed between him and Jane to grab the salt shaker. Julian tapped the boy on the shoulder and opened his mouth dentist-chair wide, sending a set of false upper teeth flying into his palm, the extraction shrinking his face so that he looked, not like an old man, but twenty-five years younger. And yet he’d had such beautiful teeth as a teenager, an honour guard of polished white shields massed behind his full lips.

Liam laughed and asked him what had happened to his real teeth.

“I lost them in a fight—
with myself
.” He capped the joke by fake-punching his own mouth.

The situation rescued, Jane turned to Franny. “I can’t believe how much taller you’ve gotten since March. Your dad was the same way.”

It felt good hearing this positive father–daughter connection asserted. “I remember my big growth spurt,” Joseph said. “Seven inches in a year.”

“Your dad was one of the shortest boys in school in Grade Nine,” Jane said.

“I was a bit of a geek.”

“
Was
, Daddy? You keep trying to get me to watch the
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
box set with you.”

He let the laughs die down, admiring Franny’s droll delivery. “I grew so fast that my body felt like a pair of shoes three sizes too big for me. I kept bumping into doorways and tripping on stairs.” He took a deep drink from a fresh beer, letting the story pull him along as Jane watched from over her wine glass, her face as radiant as if she’d just emerged from a cold lake.

“It took me another year to grow into my new body. Everyone treated me like I was a different person.” Gaining seven inches and thirty pounds was a sixteen-year-old boy’s deepest wish granted—and the wish, too, of a dozen or so bright, beautiful girls who only months earlier had called him
friend
, if they’d called him anything. He drew looks from girls with pupils so dilated they might have been watching him from inside dark rooms, and what did they want from him? Only that his new body, his new
self
, fulfill the romantic expectations these girls learned from
hundreds of love songs and movies. There were rewards for playing this role, which he’d collected like a bounty hunter.

Jane gave him a secret approving smirk that directed his wandering memory straight to their last year of high school, when she asked
him
to the prom, the two of them too cool, too punk to take the evening’s pageantry seriously. It was a lark, he’d told his Jane-coveting buddies, a chance to play bodyguard for a girl whose face all the school freaks sketched in their gloomy notebooks. He even half-believed his own shtick until he got to her family’s apartment and saw her prom dress, a strapless indigo gown tailored from a single bolt of cloth supported, as far as he could see, by nothing more than her body’s curves. Her hair was heaped into fertile bunches, and he wanted to kick her kid brother when he cracked a joke about her high heels. He stayed by her side all night, recklessly funny, drunk as a pagan warrior on the eve of a battle that could not be won. Later, on a hotel-room balcony, the after-party blaring inside, the city lights spread out before them like a flotilla of lanterns, he pressed her against the railing, the loosened cones of hair tumbling down her shoulders and falling eighteen storeys to the ground for all he cared.

He couldn’t help saying it out loud: “Prom night.”

“Can you believe it?” Jane turned to Franny. “Your father took me to the prom.”