Stone Mattress (23 page)

Jack slumped down at the table. “I know, I know,” he said. “Geez. I’m sorry. I’ll make it good, I just need a little more time.”

“Time for what?” said Jaffrey with a disbelieving smirk. “Absolute time, or relative time? Internal or measurable? Euclidean or Kantean?” It was way too early in the day for him to be starting up with the hair-splitting Philosophy 101 wordplay. He was such an asshole that way.

“Anyone have an aspirin?” said Jack. It was a weak move, but the only one he could lay his hands on. He did in truth have a fearsome headache. Irena stood up to get him a painkiller. She couldn’t resist the urge to play nursie.

“How much more time?” said Rod. He had out his little
greenish-brown notebook, the one in which he made his mathematical calculations: he was the bookkeeper for their joint enterprise.

“You’ve been needing more time for weeks,” said Irena. “Months, actually.” She set down two aspirins and a glass of water. “There’s Alka-Seltzer too,” she added.

“My novel,” said Jack, not that he hadn’t waved this excuse around before. “I need the time, I really … I’m almost finished.” This was untrue. In fact, he was stuck on the third chapter. He’d outlined the characters: four people – four attractive, hormone-sodden students – living in a three-storey pointy brick Victorian row house near the university, uttering cryptic sentences about their psyches and fornicating a lot, but he couldn’t move beyond that because he didn’t know what else they could possibly do. “I’ll get a job,” he said feebly.

“Such as what?” said obsidian-hearted Irena. “There’s ginger-ale, if you want some.”

“Maybe you could sell encyclopedias,” said Rod, and the three of them laughed. Encyclopedia-selling was known to be the last resort of the feckless, the inept, and the desperate; in addition to which the idea of him, Jack Dace, actually selling anything to anyone struck them as funny. Their view of him was that he was a fuck-up and a jinx from whom stray dogs fled because they could smell failure on him like catshit. Of late the three of them wouldn’t even let him dry the dishes because he’d dropped too many of them on the floor. He’d done that on purpose, since it was useful to be considered inept when it came to chore division, but it was working against him now.

“Why don’t you sell shares in your novel?” said Rod. He was in Economics; he played the stock market with his spare change and wasn’t too bad at it, which was how he paid his own fucking
rent. It made him smug and insufferable on the subject of money, characteristics he has retained ever since.

“Okay, I’m game,” Jack said. It was make-believe at that point. The three of them were humouring him – giving him a break, pretending to acknowledge his claim to talent, opening up a pathway to fiscal rectitude for him, if only a theoretical one. That was their story later: that they’d colluded in order to give him a boost up, lead him to believe that they believed in him, toss him some validation. Then he might actually get off his ass and do something, not that they expected this to actually happen. It wasn’t their fault that it had worked, and so spectacularly.

Rod was the one who drew up the contract. Rent for three months plus one – the three Jack hadn’t paid in the past, and the one that was about to happen. In return, the shares of the proceeds from his yet-to-be-completed novel were divided into four, with a quarter going to each of them, including Jack. It would be negatively motivating if there was no upside built in for Jack himself. With nothing to gain he might not feel energized about finishing the thing, said Rod, who was a believer in Economic Man. He sniggered at this last point, since he didn’t think Jack would finish it anyway.

Would Jack have signed such a contract if he hadn’t been so hung over? Probably. He didn’t want to be evicted. He didn’t want to land on the street, or, worse, back in his parents’ rec room in Don Mills, besieged by hand-wringing and pot roasts from his mother and tut-tutting lectures from his dad. So he’d agreed to every term, and signed, and breathed a sigh of relief, and, at Irena’s urging, had eaten a couple of forkfuls of noodle casserole because it was best to get something into his stomach, and had gone upstairs to take a nap.

But then he had to write the fucker.

No hope with the four student characters living in the Victorian row house. It was clear they’d refuse to get their paralyzed buttocks off the third-hand kitchen chairs onto which their anuses were at present stuck like the suckers of a collective octopus, even if he lit their feet on fire. He’d have to try something else, something very different; and fast, because writing the novel – any novel – had become a matter of pride. He couldn’t allow Jaffrey and Rod to continue jeering at him; he could no longer endure the pitying, dismissive look in Irena’s lovely blue eyes.

Please, please, he prayed to the gelid, fume-filled air. Help me out here! Anything, whatever! Anything that will sell!

In such ways are devil’s bargains made.

And there, suddenly, shimmering before him like a phosphorescent toadstool, was the vision of
The Hand
, fully formed: all he needed to do was more or less write it down, or so he said later on talk shows. Where did it come from,
The Dead Hand Loves You
? Who knows? Out of desperation. Out from under the bed. Out of his childhood nightmares. More possibly, out from the gruesome black-and-white comic books he used to filch from the corner drugstore when he was twelve: detached, dried-up, self-propelling body parts were a regular feature of those.

The plot was simple. Violet, a beautiful but cold-hearted girl who bore a resemblance to Irena, but an Irena even thinner of waist and plumper of boob, threw over her lovelorn fiancé, William, a handsome, sensitive young man at least six inches taller than Jack but with the same hair colour. She did this for crass motives:
her other suitor, Alf, a dead ringer for Jaffrey as far as appearance went, was rich as stink.

Violet did her act of jilting in the most humiliating way possible. Straight-arrow William had a date with Violet and had arrived at her moderately substantial house to pick her up. But Alf was there before him, and William caught Violet and Alf locked in a hot and immodest clinch on the porch swing. Worse, Alf had his hand up Violet’s skirt, a liberty William had never even attempted, the fool.

Outraged and shocked, William angrily challenged the two of them, but this got him nowhere. After scornfully flinging William’s hand-gathered bouquet of meadow daisies and wild roses down on the sidewalk along with the plain gold engagement band that had cost him two months’ earnings from his job at the encyclopedia company, Violet marched emphatically away on her audacious, red, high-heeled shoes, and she and Alf drove off in Alf’s silver Alfa Romeo convertible, a vehicle he had bought on a whim because it fitted with his name: he could afford flamboyant gestures like that. Their mocking laughter echoed in poor William’s ears; and to cap it off, the engagement band rolled along the street and clinked down through a sewer grating.

William was mortally wounded. His dreams were shattered, his image of perfect womanhood destroyed. He moped along to his cheap but clean rooming house, where he wrote down his will: he wanted his right hand cut off and buried separately from him, beside the park bench where he and Violet had spent so many idyllic evenings necking smooching tenderly embracing. Then he shot himself in the head with a service revolver inherited from his dead father – for William was an orphan – and used by the father, heroically, during the Second World War. That detail added a note of symbolic nobility, Jack felt.

William’s landlady, a kindly widow with a European accent and gypsy intuition, saw to it that his wish about the cut-off hand was honoured. In fact, she crept into the funeral parlour at night and severed the appendage herself with a fretsaw from her departed husband’s woodworking bench, a scene that, in the film – both films, the original and the remake – allowed for some ominous shadows and an eerie glow coming from the hand. That glow gave the landlady quite a turn, but she carried on. Then she buried the hand beside the park bench, deep enough so that it would not be dug up by skunks. She placed her crucifix on top of it; for, being from the old country, she was superstitious.

Like the hardhearted bitch she was, Violet snubbed the funeral, and she didn’t know about the severed hand. Nobody knew about it except the landlady, who shortly thereafter moved far away to Croatia, where she became a nun in order to expunge from her soul the possibly satanic act she had committed.

Time passed. Violet was now engaged to Alf. Their lavish wedding was being planned. Violet felt a little guilty about William and a little sorry for him, but all in all she gave him scarcely a passing thought. She was too busy trying on expensive new clothes and showing off the various diamond and sapphire objects bestowed on her by crass Alf, whose motto was that the way to a girl’s heart was through jewellery: dead right, in the case of Violet.

Jack diddled around with the next part of the story. Should he keep the Hand hidden right up to the wedding itself? Should he conceal it in the long satin wedding-dress train and have it follow Violet up the aisle, only to pop forth and cause a sensation just before she said,
I do
? No, too many witnesses. They’d all chase it around the church like an escaped monkey, and the effect would
be farcical rather than terrifying. Best to have it catch Violet alone; and, if possible, in a state of undress.

Several weeks before the wedding was to take place, a child at play in the park saw the housekeeper’s crucifix glittering in the sun, picked it up, and took it home with her, thus nullifying its protective role. (In the film – the first film, not the remake – this scene was accompanied by an ominous, retro soundtrack. In the remake the child was replaced by a dog that carried the religious trinket to its owner, who, not being versed in any kind of useful lore, tossed it into a shrub.)

Then, on the night of the next full moon, up through the soil beside the park bench came William’s hand, emerging like a sand crab or a mutated daffodil shoot. It was the worse for wear: brown and shrivelled, with long fingernails. It crept out of the park and down into a culvert, only to reappear with the callously discarded gold engagement band encircling its little finger.

It groped and scuttled its way to Violet’s house and shinnied up the ivy and in through Violet’s bedroom window, where it hid behind the dainty floral-patterned skirts of her dressing table and leered at her as she was taking off her clothes. Could it see? No, because it didn’t have eyes. But it had a kind of visionless vision, since it was animated by the spirit of William. Or by part of that spirit: not the nicer part.

(The ancient Freudian critic at the special session of the Modern Language Association dedicated to
Dead Hand
, thirteen or was it fifteen years ago, said that the Hand meant the Return of the Repressed. The Jungian critic took issue with this interpretation, citing many instances of hacked-off hands in myth and magic: the Hand, she said, was an echo of the Hand of Glory cut from a hanged criminal’s corpse and pickled, then set
alight with embedded candles, long used in break-and-entering charms. It was known in French as main de gloire, thus giving its name to mandragore, or mandrake. The Freudian expert said this folkloric information was both obsolete and beside the point. Voices were raised. Jack, the honourary guest, excused himself and went for a smoke; that was when he was still smoking, and had not yet been ordered by his heart doctor to quit or die.)

While the Hand peeping-tommed from under the dressing table, Violet divested herself of all her clothing, then disported herself in the shower, leaving the door to her ensuite bathroom ajar to afford both the Hand and the reader a tantalizing view. Pink sumptuousness was described, curvaceous voluptuousness. Jack overwrote this part, he knows that now, but twenty-two-year-old guys go for broke on such details. (The director of the first film shot the shower scene as a homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s
Psycho
, all the more appropriate as the first Violet was played by SueEllen Blake, a blond demigoddess who was a cross between Janet Leigh and Tippi Hedren, and whom Jack pursued relentlessly only to be disappointed: SueEllen was narcissistic enough to relish the preliminary gifts and acts of worship, but she didn’t like sex per se and hated getting her makeup smeared.)

Irena in her student days had not been a wearer of makeup, probably because it cost money, but the effect had been a fresh delicacy, unadorned and honestly itself, like a shucked oyster. Also she left no beige and red smears on pillowcases. (Jack has come to appreciate this, in retrospect.)

The Hand, watching Violet soaping various parts of her body, could barely contain itself. But it did not choose this moment to tip its hand, so to speak. Instead it waited patiently as adjective after adjective was applied to Violet. Hand, reader, and Violet admired Violet’s body as she patted it dry and teasingly rubbed
aromatic lotion over its flawless, creamy surfaces. Then she slithered into a clinging, gold-sequined gown, outlined her lush mouth with ruby lipstick, clasped a glittering necklace around her sinuous, chokeable neck, draped a priceless white fur around her soft, inviting shoulders, and lilted out of the room with a jaw-dropping hip swivel. The Hand, of course, did not have a jaw that could be dropped, but it suffered from erotic frustration in its own way, signalled in both of the film versions by a fit of truly repulsive writhing.