Poison Shy (2 page)

It was after midnight when I got back to my place. I stripped down to my boxers, made myself a sandwich, and sat in front of the television. I put on the sports channel, turned the volume down low, and converted my pull-out couch to bed mode. I tried reading a book, some Dean Koontz bestseller, but I couldn't get Melanie out of my head. I went to the kitchen and opened the fridge. Stared mindlessly at a jar of pickles and a carton of milk. My copy of
The Frayne Exchange
was open on the kitchen table. I sat down and flipped to the back pages, to the section advertising escorts and prostitutes.

I came across a redhead named Suzie. The photo showed her bent over a chair with her face blurred out, two black stars over her nipples. I told myself that when the clock on the microwave changed, I would have to make a decision: call or don't.

12:37 became 12:38. I picked up my phone and dialled the number. It rang three or four times then a woman said, “Hello?” The voice was hoarse, like Kirstie Alley's.

I was silent. My mind was blank.

“Hello?” the woman asked again, a little louder.

“Yes, hi. Sorry. Is this, umm . . . Suzie?”

“It sure is. And who is this?”

“This is, uh, Darcy.”

“Nice to hear from you, Darcy. You don't have to be shy. It's all right. I'm friendly, see? You've woken me up and I don't mind. Are you looking for a date, honey?”

I admitted that I was and gave her my address. She said she'd be over in half an hour, she just needed to shower. I tried not to think about what that could mean.

After precisely half an hour — I'd been watching the clock — Suzie still hadn't shown up. I opened a beer and drank it down in three or four big gulps. I felt the stirrings of panic in the back of my skull. It occurred to me that I should call her back and cancel.

As soon as I picked up the phone, however, someone buzzed my apartment.

“Yeah?” I said into the intercom, trying to sound both casual and confident.

“Is this Darcy's place?”

I pinched my eyes shut. It was difficult to remain standing, to support my own body weight. “Uh, yes it is. Is this Suzie?”

“It sure is, honey. You wanna buzz me in?”

I thought about throwing on some pants and a T-shirt as I waited for her to come up the stairs, but decided it didn't matter. I'd just hired a prostitute for the first time in my life. Did I really need to be concerned about making a decent impression?

She reached the top of the stairs and knocked. I could smell her perfume through the door. I swept all my doubts into some far-off, cobwebbed corner of my conscience and turned the handle, half-expecting to be confronted by my father's ghost, or Medusa, or Jesus Christ Himself. Instead I saw a woman with curly red hair and large freckled breasts that were straining to burst out of her little black dress. She smiled at me with a mouth covered in red lipstick. A layer of wrinkles appeared at the corners of her eyes.

“Hey there.” She stepped inside, heels clicking on the hardwood floor. Her mauve-painted toenails were cracked and unusually long. She looked me up and down. “You look like you're ready to get down to business.”

She looked to be in her early fifties. Older than I expected, but I was so full of alcohol, so pathetically horny, that I found myself obscenely attracted to the idea of fucking her.

She asked for the money up front. Eighty bucks, a bit lower than I had thought. She slipped out of her dress and exposed her enormous, water-balloon breasts. Her thighs were full of bruises and cellulite, her kneecaps covered in scabs. She performed oral sex on me while I sat on my mattress and stared blankly at an infomercial for a vacuum cleaner with state-of-the-art sucking technology. I tried to conjure up a mental image of Melanie's face, but it kept morphing into Patricia's — the only other face I'd ever seen between my legs. I stared up at the ceiling and concentrated on finishing the job as quickly as possible.

When we were done, she asked to use my bathroom. I could hear her vomiting into the toilet. She came out reeking of perfume and handed me her business card, a shot of her much younger self straddling a stripper pole. I watched out my window as she got into a cab and drove off to wherever.

I felt dirty. I felt alone. I opened a bottle of whisky and drank myself to sleep.

I never paid much attention to clients' households. Whatever mess they left lying around — dirty laundry, credit card statements, pornography — my job was to come in, wipe out whatever vermin was making their lives miserable, and leave. There was no judgment involved, no snooping around. No scoffing at old family portraits or clever rearrangement of fridge magnets. The private lives of Frayne were about as interesting to me as the breeding habits of the common crayfish.

One time, when I was working with a guy named Ansel, we were called in to take care of a cockroach problem at the apartment of one of our frequent clients, Gottfried Burl. Mr. Burl was the owner of a breakfast diner called Egg on Yo' Face. It had been featured on one of those restaurant makeover reality shows, and became an overnight success as a result. Kill 'Em All
had a deal going with Mr. Burl: we sent him free rat traps in exchange for half-price takeout for all KEA employees.

None of us had ever been to Mr. Burl's home before. Ansel and I figured it was no big deal. We met him outside his building. He gave us the keys, said he was heading to Vancouver for a weekend “rendezvous.” We let ourselves into his apartment, and honest to God, the guy had swastikas all over the place. I mean
everywhere
. On the walls, on the lampshades, on the floor tiles. He even had a framed portrait of Adolf Hitler in his living room. It was like walking into a miniature Nazi museum.

I remember the expression on poor Ansel's face — sheer bewilderment. He was Jewish. I can only imagine how he must have felt, standing in that place in his mustard-brown uniform, a dented can of bug spray hanging at his waist like a gun. I remember thinking: if I were him, I'd trash the place. But Ansel was one of the most mild-mannered guys I've ever known. I told him he didn't have to stay, and after his shock wore off, he took me up on it and left. I finished the job myself, suppressing the urge to poison the food in Mr. Burl's fridge.

A week later, Ansel quit. I didn't blame him. He and his girlfriend moved into her parents' place in some suburb of Toronto. A few days after that, rumour got around that Mr. Burl had been shot and killed in a church basement poker game out west. His restaurant was turned over to his sister, and our rat-traps-for-takeout deal came to an end. I never told my boss what I saw in Mr. Burl's apartment, and I don't think Ansel did either. It was sort of an unwritten rule in the pest control business that we turn a blind eye to our clients' lives, no matter how troubling or strange — or alluring.

That rule was on my mind the next morning as I lay in bed, thinking about the fumigation at Melanie's apartment. I'd snooped around a bit. I hadn't been able to resist.

“Just gonna use the bathroom,” Bill had said, as soon as we stepped inside. “That pastrami sandwich isn't agreeing with me.” He hustled down the hallway, keys jingling.

“Take your time.”

The place was small. Cozy. There was something distinctly masculine about it: posters on the wall for
Pulp Fiction
and
The Shining
, empty beer cans on the duct-taped coffee table. A TV plunked on a sagging milk crate. An Xbox and a small pile of video games on the floor. Curtains fashioned out of faded bedsheets. An old sweatshirt slung over a lampshade. A mountain of unwashed dishes in the sink.

I could hear Bill grunting away in the bathroom, the spillage of his guts. I knew I had more time to look around, so I made my way to the bedrooms down the hall.

The first door I came to had a No Exit sign nailed to it. Written below the sign in black marker was the phrase
The truth is rarely pure and never simple
— Oscar Wilde's words, though I didn't know that at the time. I did know, right away, that this was Darcy's room. It smelled of wet dog and masturbation. The mess was similar to the one in the living room: two empty beer cans on the nightstand, dirty socks and underwear on the floor. Something resembling a cross had been crudely spray-painted on the wall above the crusty futon bed.

Across the hall was a plain white door. It was closed. I put my hand on the knob. My palms were moist. I bit my lip and entered.

Melanie's room smelled of sharp cloves and candle wax. The walls were painted a deep blue and had been decorated with an intricate collage of Polaroid photographs. One of the pictures showed Melanie in a thin white tube top and red short shorts. She held a cigarette in one hand and a half-drunk bottle of vodka in the other. She was walking along the seat of a park bench as though it were a tightrope. Her eyes were pinched shut and her mouth was wide open: an ecstatic scream, frozen in silence. The full moon shone directly over her head like a halo turned on its side. It was one photo among hundreds overlapping on the wall. I plucked it off and stuffed it in the back pocket of my uniform.

There was a heap of laundry on the floor, and another on the unmade bed. Some of the clothes looked like they could have been Darcy's, but it was hard to tell. On a small desk in the corner was a laptop, and above that, a vintage
Playboy
calendar. October's playmate was a petite brunette in cut-off jean shorts, stretched out topless on a bale of hay.

I looked at what Melanie had written on some of the dates.

October second:
Jill's 21
st
b-day

October fifteenth:
American Lit essay due

October thirty-first:
Halloween, bitches!

The toilet flushed. I scrambled back into the hallway. Bill emerged from the bathroom. I caught a throat-clenching whiff of shit mixed with air freshener.

“Jesus,” Bill said, fanning the air with his hand. “You think the bugs are already dead?” He laughed in a fit of wheezes. His self-deprecating jolliness made the stench more bearable, and I laughed along with him.

We put on our masks and sprayed the living room and kitchen before moving on to the bedrooms. Bill went straight for Melanie's room, so I got stuck with Darcy's. Wrestling his multi-stained futon into the plastic case was one of the more unpleasant experiences of my life. The side of my hand touched a stain that still felt wet.

I blocked it out and thought about Melanie. I wondered how old she was and where she'd grown up. Was she an only child like me? Were her parents alive? Did she have any bad habits or outrageous childhood dreams? I thought about taking her out to dinner, bombarding her with questions. Spotting constellations in her freckles. Would it be considered inappropriate to ask her out on a date?

My father had met my mother while rewiring her parents' two-bedroom home in London, Ontario. He was twenty-five at the time, she eighteen. According to the story I was told as a child, my father was down on his hands and knees in the upstairs hallway, examining a faulty outlet, when my mother came out of her bedroom in her nightgown without her glasses on. She was near-blind without them. On her way to the bathroom, she stumbled over my father and nearly broke her back. She said she fell in love with him in that instant, but I know that's just a simplification of things, the way the stories of our lives get pared down over time into these condensed and delusive versions of the truth.

Did the story of my parents' meeting influence my desire for Melanie in any way? It's possible. If so it was unconscious. It's funny how our parents can manoeuvre us into disastrous scenarios without even trying — sometimes without even being alive.

I'm not so naïve as to think my parents didn't have problems before I grew old enough to start noticing them. My mother was a religious fanatic and my father was a hedonistic drunk. Problems were inevitable. The sad thing is that these kinds of inexplicable unions are all too common, born of the clichéd notion that opposites attract. Maybe they do, but truisms are rarely conducive to happiness.

There was no watershed moment at which our family orb shattered into bits. It was more like a gradual splintering, each argument adding new chips and cracks with the force of a foot stomp.

The night of my tenth birthday stands out as one of the more damaging blows. My father hadn't been home for five consecutive days. I was afraid to ask my mother where he was because I didn't want my question to seem like a reminder or an accusation. She was doing a good job of pretending everything was normal, so I just went along with it.

I was in my bedroom playing video games when she came and stood in the doorway.

“Do you want me to take you to the mall?” she asked.

I paused my game and looked at her. There was violence stirring in her eyes. They seemed to quiver in their sockets. It was the first time I felt unsafe in her presence. I learned at a young age that my parents weren't the steady, reliable safeguards I'd once imagined them to be. Instead they were frail, selfish, and vengeful — just like everyone else.

“Okay,” I said, only because I didn't want to make matters worse.

While we shopped, my mother scanned the board games and stuffed animals like they were relics from another universe, touching them delicately with her fingers as though they might crumble into powder. She responded to everything I said with a vacant “Hmm?”

I showed her an expensive action figure I wanted. She'd refused to buy it for me a number of times before because it came with a small plastic rifle that shot real pellets. This time, she agreed to buy it without a fuss.

“I'm putting this on your father's credit card,” she said while we were standing in line. I had no idea why she would tell me that. I didn't know what credit cards were for.

When we arrived back home, my father's car was in the driveway. I thought my mother would be relieved, but she muttered “Fucking asshole” as we went up the walk. It made me want to stay outside, but for some reason I didn't.

My father sat with his legs crossed at the kitchen table, a cigarette clenched between his teeth in the centre of his mouth. He seemed different to me somehow, as if my memories of him from before his disappearance were of another man with the same face. He reached down into the plastic bag at his feet and pulled out the same action figure my mother had just bought me.

I looked at my mother for some indication of what to do.

“Go to your room, Brandon, okay? Mommy and Daddy need to talk.”

I went to leave, but my father had other ideas.

“Don't go anygoddamnwhere.” He exhaled two tusks of smoke. “What's the matter? You don't like your toy?”

“Brandon.” My mother's voice. “Go to your room.”

I didn't move.

My father got down onto one knee in front of me. He rested his elbow on his thigh and leaned forward. There was a circular burn mark on his forearm. He smelled like a bucket of old rain. He reached out, put his hand on my shoulder, and squeezed. “Happy birthday, little man.”

I'm not sure how it happened — I didn't even feel it happen — but as he knelt there in front of me, breathing smoke in my face, I pissed my pants.

The next thing I remember is my mother leading me upstairs to the bathroom.

“Why don't you have a hot bath?” she said, shaking. “I'll have to wash those pants.”

I stood in the doorway and watched her go back downstairs. When the yelling started I bolted inside the bathroom, locked the door behind me, and sat in the tub with the shower curtain drawn. Both of them were shouting over each other. I didn't hear the words, only wails and growls, raging human voices in combat. Fists pounding tabletops, dishes smashing. Feet thumping across the floor.

I crept out later and heard my mother cry, “No, Jack, no! Please no!” I had this image of my father breaking off my mother's limbs one by one with his bare hands, then tossing them into a pile at his feet.

I sat nervously at the top of the stairs. My father stomped toward the front door, holding a bloodstained dishtowel to his head. My mother darted after him and clawed the sleeve of his shirt, tearing it at the shoulder.

“Jack, please!”

He swatted her away with the bloody rag. There was a dark, pulpy gash above his ear. He swung the front door open and walked across the lawn to his car. My mother grasped at him with her fingernails, screaming his name, hysterical.

I don't remember coming down the stairs, but I must have. I watched them from the front doorway. I hated what I saw but couldn't look away.

My father got into his car and slammed the door, missing my mother's hand by inches. He started the engine and peeled out of the driveway. My mother ran barefoot onto the road after him. I thought my father would drive off and leave her alone in the middle of the road to scream into the dusk. Instead he let the car idle and revved the engine, his face a dark blur behind the tinted window. My mother grabbed the door handle and tugged on it frantically, using her full body weight in a series of violent jerks. She looked like someone being electrocuted.

Even as my father started pulling away she wouldn't let go. Her bare feet slapped on the pavement as she ran alongside the moving vehicle. The car picked up speed. My mother's legs flailed wildly. When she finally let go of the handle, she tumbled forward, scraping her knees, hands, and face on the road.

One of our neighbours had come out of his house. He approached my mother and helped her to her feet. Her face was scratched up but her eyes were calm. She dismissed her helper with a wave of her hand. I looked around at the faces in the windows on our street. They were all focused on my mother as she walked numbly back to our house, the corners of her mouth twisting into a smile.

In my whisky-soaked sleep I had a dream I was sitting in a fishing boat on a lake of black water. The sky was orange and smeared with sharp red clouds. Everything was still until something splashed behind me. I turned and saw Melanie treading water about twenty feet from my boat. She appeared to be naked. I stared at the pattern of freckles on her shoulders and collarbone that led down between her breasts. She lowered her head to the lake and slurped a mouthful of water until her cheeks were full, then spouted it in my direction.