Mean Boy (19 page)

So here’s me, dreaming on the floor, contemplating my upcoming tussle with the corpse, my as-yet-undiscovered hairline fracture, my future as the nation’s premier paraplegic poet. And dreaming of that, I also dream something else way back in my head—something suffused, I’ll admit, with a weird, masochistic euphoria. It’s a brief thought, like a dirty, forbidden impulse—a Freud kind of thought, like sleeping with your mother—there but almost not. For just a second, one luxurious split second, I convince myself my neck is broken. I dream it into being.

I dream these words, murmured by students and lovers of literature throughout the century to come. Pored over by diligent readers of literary biography. Keats died of a bad review. Byron drank wine from a skull.

 … and Lawrence Campbell broke his neck—for Jim Arsenault
.

IN BRYANT DEKKER’S
living room, we sit fondling steaming mugfuls of mulled wine—it’s like we’re drinking hot blood. None of the cups in the Dekker household have handles for some reason, so people balance them on or between their knees, trying not to burn their palms. I have worked out an ingenious method of pulling down the cuffs of my shirt and manoeuvring the cup between my protected wrists. Sherrie is watching me as I take a precarious sip. She’s smiling. She has both hands wrapped fearlessly around her own mug.

“It’s really not that hot, Lawrence.”

I hate the mulled wine. I hate the mugs. I hate Dekker’s place, which is the opposite of Jim’s creaky, unpretentious farmhouse. It’s because of Dekker’s wife. She is six feet tall, blonde, and mean, with an unlikely hippie sensibility that dominates every corner of the house. Woven rugs of vaguely oriental design, plush bloblike furniture meant to be sunk into so that it’s impossible to lean forward and have a conversation with Jim or anyone else. It’s the kind of furniture you’re supposed to loll around on preoccupied by your handleless mug as you sniff at the surrounding incense and soak up
chi
or whatever. And just when you’ve managed to choke down your last gulp of mulled wine, Ruth Dekker comes along and yanks the mug away.

“I’ll get more,” she says in her terse, maddening accent. Ruth’s accent is Dekker’s times ten, like Princess Anne with elocution lessons from Zsa Zsa Gabor. I’ve given up trying to place it. When I got my first look at her at Schofield’s reading, settling into one of the Edwardian loveseats with Dekker and lighting up the room with her canary hair, I’d instantly thought,
Sweden
. And also I’d thought,
Wow, she’s gorgeous
. But after stealing a couple of more glances as Schofield coughed and hemmed up by the mantelpiece, I realized Ruth
wasn’t actually gorgeous at all. She just possessed the kind of traits you instantly assume make a woman gorgeous when you first register them. Blonde. Amazonian in height—at least as tall as Jim. But a closer look at Ruth shows you that her hair is stringy, her complexion ruddy, her jawline expansive and uber-Slavic. It’s a man’s jawline, and her hands are man-hands. Big-knuckled like my Grandpa Humphries. I looked away from Ruth with a shudder, thinking that. A grandpa-handed woman.

“Lawrence,” Dekker said to me after the reading. “Please meet my wife, Ruth.” At which point I had to shake one of those things. Her skin was so dry it left scratches on mine.

“I didn’t know Professor Dekker was married,” I said, tired from everything and running out of cogent small talk.

Ruth smirked, then, the smirk that hasn’t left her face all evening.

“I am this town’s best-kept secret,” she said.

Whatever that was supposed to mean.

Ruth Dekker, it turns out, is a painter, and her paintings are all over the house. Each canvas takes up approximately one wall. For the most part, her work consists of a lot of different-coloured blobs—blobby like her furniture—although on the wall directly across from me is a rendition of a big orange toilet against a grey background.

“I like your toilet,” hollers Todd across the room to Ruth at one point. Todd has showed no aversion whatsoever to the mulled wine this evening.

Ruth turns her radiant smirk on Todd. “That toilet,” she calls back, “was in my apartment in Cape Town. It was the only thing in there that ever worked. It became kind of a god to me, eventually.”

No one knows what to say. All night Ruth has been making utterances that have the context and rhythm of jokes but are completely unfunny.

Jim and Schofield are curled up on their respective blobs of furniture in the far corner of the room—the farthest possible point they could be from me, it would seem. They lean toward each other, immersed in conversation. Jim is gesturing, explaining. Schofield is pursing and nodding. Todd sits on the floor about a foot away from them, craning and yearning and generally being pathetic.

Meanwhile, Claude, of all people, has somehow ended up sharing my blob. After several moments of sitting side by side in silence, he is the one to give in and toss out a conversational gambit. I’ve been content to loll and sip and languish thus far. “So how did you like the reading?” he wants to know.

“I thought it was okay,” I answer carefully. “How did you like it?”

“Schofield’s brilliant,” says Claude, sighing as though he hates to admit it.

I had assumed Claude would be too cool to just come out with it like that. Don’t care. Be bored. I look at him with my mouth open.

“You didn’t think so?” he asks, frowning.

“Of course,” I say. “It was the best reading I’ve ever heard. I just didn’t think it was your kind of thing.”

“Because it was good,” states Claude, lips forming a straight line.

The reading, in fact, was like nothing I’d ever seen. By the time we got everyone chairs, and ran back and forth between buildings a few times to make sure there were no confused souls lingering outside the Sociology seminar, the hour was
closing in on eight. Janet showed up accompanied by the very same sweet-faced old woman who was so indulgent of my tea-drinking at Carl’s. This turned out to be her landlady, Mrs. Dacey. I shook Mrs. Dacey’s gloved hand and took a moment to compliment her on her raisin pie, because it has occurred to me again that Janet’s house is going to be available after she graduates this year. Then I led them to a couple of good seats close to the mantelpiece.

That was our crowd. The eight of us from Jim’s seminar, a couple of strangers, Janet, Mrs. Dacey, Bryant and Ruth Dekker, and Charles the-sore-thumb Slaughter. I kept waiting to see Doctor Sparrow come slinking around a corner to take in the show. But he never did.

Schofield just sat down in a chair by himself until Jim went up to him and told him he could start.

When Schofield stood and turned to face us, I thought he was sick. His eyes were squeezed shut behind his glasses, and his head was down. In his right mitt, he held an untidy clutch of paper that must have been shoved in his jacket or pants the whole time I was with him this evening.

“I would like to thank …,” he said.

Schofield’s face blossomed red the instant he started speaking. I had never seen anything like it except in grade 6 when Joey Cahill got so pissed off at the math teacher that he blurted she could kiss his ass. An instantaneous faceful of red, just like Schofield now. I nearly stood up and walked over to help him to a chair.

“I’d like to thank my good friend Jim Arsenault,” Schofield managed to finish, “for inviting me to be here today and for exerting such a profound and felicitous influence on myself and, I would have to say, Canadian poetry as a whole. We are all of us the better, for the likes of Jim Arsenault—I say that with all sincerity. He makes me proud to be a fellow practitioner. I would also like to thank the
department of English, one Larry Campbell, who was kind enough to keep me company this stormy evening, and, as ever, the Heritage Arts Coalition, which made this and so many other wonderful events like it a reality. I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to read to you today. I thank you all for being here.”

Schofield did not raise his head, shift his position, or open his eyes once during this entire speech.

He’s having a heart attack
, I thought to myself, watching his face pulsate as he chewed out every syllable like a series of minuscule light bulbs.

And then Schofield raised his head, eyes open, looked directly out at us, and recited his poetry for twenty minutes. It was like he was possessed by gods. Or demons. It was wonderful. It was riveting. He started with the man-word/woman-word poem. He did not consult the twisted sheaf of paper in his right hand at any time during the recitation, although he did pause to shuffle the pages, for some reason, between each poem. He
performed
the poems, giving them exactly the right cadence, emphasizing precisely the words and phrases he wanted us to most notice. His reading voice was nothing like his speaking voice. It was an actor’s voice, and not the least bit reedy. He was a muted, less stagy Gregory Peck.

And yet, it wasn’t as if he was acting—there was no sense of remove, like how in a play everyone pretends the actors aren’t standing there in front of you but are somewhere else, oblivious to your presence. Schofield was by no means oblivious to our presence. He leaned toward us as he recited, he looked us in the eye, he harangued, he appealed, he explained. That was especially how the man/woman poem struck me—as a patient, meticulous explanation of something ineffable. It’s the same kind of feeling I sometimes have listening to classical music, or even staring at the lines in the
palm of my hand, sometimes. The sense that there’s a language there, that something is being expressed, communicated. Something infinite, beyond words.

But Schofield did use words.

My cousin’s landlady raised her hand the moment Schofield finished his recitation, having dropped his head again and thanked us. She sat there with her entire arm in the air like a septuagenarian schoolgirl, while everybody else clapped hard and long.

“Hello,” said Schofield when he finally peeped through his scrunched eyes and noticed what Mrs. Dacey was doing.

“Hello,” she said back.

“Did you have a question?”

“Yes, I do,” said Mrs. Dacey in a clear and rather youthful voice. “I would like to know,” she continued, “why is it people feel they have to concern themselves with matters of the bedroom so much lately.”

Schofield looked around as if not quite sure where he was.

“Do you mean people … in general?” he asked after a moment.

“I suppose I do,” said Mrs. Dacey. “I suppose it’s something you see quite a bit nowadays. But I thought you might be the man to ask, considering the nature of some of those poems you were reading.”

Schofield blinked a few times behind his glasses. “They were
my
poems.”

“Yes, I assumed that,” Mrs. Dacey snapped, sensing condescension. “You’re the man of the hour, so to speak.”

Jim interrupted at this point.

“I think,” he said, rearranging his limbs in his chair in a pertinent sort of way, “with the storm and people needing to
get home and everything, we may have to keep the questions to a minimum this evening.”

Mrs. Dacey responded to Jim, but kept staring at Schofield. “Storms don’t bother me,” she told him. “I walked here from my house and I’ll walk back. I’m not bothered by any storm, never have been. I grew up on the Bay of Fundy with the wind coming straight off the Atlantic Ocean every winter. You’d never see me bat an eyelash in a storm.”

Schofield pursed his lips and nodded at this.

“All the same,” said Jim, and didn’t finish the sentence—as at a loss as I’ve ever seen him. No one came to his rescue.

“So let’s hear it,” said Mrs. Dacey to Schofield.

“Bedroom matters,”
repeated Schofield.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Dacey. “You tell me: What’s the story on that, now?”

“Well, I can’t speak for others,” Schofield began.

“I understand that,” Mrs. Dacey assured him.

“But I can say that love … and poetry, historically, have always gone hand and hand. Um. Shakespeare, for example—”

Mrs. Dacey was having none of it.

“Love is one thing,” she interrupted. “But I’m talking about things that go on, or should only go on, in the privacy of the bedroom.
Bedroom … matters
. Love is fine, and I think it’s just wonderful if a poet wants to write something about love, I have no problem with that at all. But here’s my question—”

We waited. Nobody could look at anything in the room except their own twiddling fingers in their laps.

“Why is it that people think there’s this need these days to discuss private and intimate things for entertainment? For the amusement of others? You see,” said Mrs. Dacey, shifting her weight forward, “what people don’t seem to understand is that
that
is basically the definition of pornography.
Entertaining others, in the public arena, with private and intimate things. And I’m just afraid that people get so caught up in their art or selling their books or whatever that they don’t realize when they are crossing certain pornographic boundaries.”

Mrs. Dacey sat back and folded her hands, keeping her bright little eyes pinned on Schofield. Dermot’s own huge mitt was resting against his heart as if to quiet it down.

As the seconds passed and we all sat waiting for Dermot’s defence, the entire English Department began to vibrate with the noise of what can only be described as a guffaw—a guffaw in the truest sense of the word. In fact it onomatopoeically came close to sounding like the word
guffaw
.

“Hawg!”
it went.
“Hawg, hawg, hawg, hawg!”

It was the loudest, rudest laugh I’ve ever heard. It was coming, I noted, craning my neck along with everyone else, from Charles Slaughter, seated sprawl-legged in the back.

“Hawg, hawg, hawg, hawg, hawg, hawg, hawg!”

The furniture shook with it.

Mrs. Dacey straightened her delicate shoulders once Slaughter was finished. It took him a moment or two.

“I beg your pardon if I’ve said something funny,” she said, not fazed, not taking her hamster eyes off Schofield. By this time I was somewhat in awe of Mrs. Dacey.