The Perfect Order of Things (16 page)

I went out onto the porch; you could see the twinkering lights of the grand hotels across the bay. Couples asleep, families asleep, safe in their beds, together. The reassuring swish of air conditioning in the background. The pills had worn off and I felt myself slipping into a kind of frightened sadness, a lament really, a
life
lament for all the time I’d wasted here as a young man. For the terrible hangovers, for the pointless love affair with Nessa Cornblum, for the pointless suffering that it involved. But there was something in addition to all that, a sinking realization that for years and years, even into my early thirties, I had persuaded myself that getting drunk in the Hotel La Mar bar and talking about Rimbaud was some kind of achievement.

“I don’t want this summer to be like last summer,” Larry had said. Yes, I understood that now, too.

There was a chill in the air. I crossed my arms and rubbed them. It was just getting light, the first goldfish traces of daybreak across the bay. Something moved at the edge of my vision. I turned my head slowly. It was as if a giant cocoon had been woven during the night, a cocoon at the end of a string. What sort of a beast could make a thing like
that
? But it wasn’t a cocoon. It was a man hanging by the neck from a clothesline. His shoulder turned slowly toward me. It was Larry. Larry, slowly turning in the morning breeze. A rooster crowed. And then the dogs woke up.

The police were still there when the taxi came. They were upstairs in Devane’s living quarters. I thought I heard the sound of laughter. I’d forgotten: Devane Johnston used to be a cop.

I didn’t bother saying goodbye. As we pulled away, the last thing I saw of the Hotel La Mar was the whore in purple from the night before. She was standing on the balcony outside Larry’s room with his nose guard on her face beneath a pair of pink, heart-shaped sunglasses. There was a different woman inside Larry’s room. You could see her through the open door. She was holding up a green shirt with bananas on it, trying to figure out if she liked it or not.

The taxi bumped slowly down the road, past Pamela on her stool, past a group of fat white men in Harley-Davidson muscle shirts looking for their younger bodies, past those sad little roadside conch shell stands, past a golf course, past a bandaged madman gesticulating wildly on the Green River bridge. A few minutes later, on a stretch of highway, a hot wind blew through the cab, like a stranger expelling a lungful of breath in your face. A sign loomed up on the left. YOU ARE NOW LEAVING SAN AGATHA.

A child in a pink dress looked quickly over her shoulder and disappeared down the embankment.

8

The Pigeon

A
friend of mine, a beautiful Chinese Canadian, recently discovered that her ex-boyfriend— she’d been the one to call it quits—had been sleeping with another woman the whole time he was with her. She staggered around for a week or so, stunned. How could this have happened? How could he have come home at the end of the day and asked, “What’s for dinner?” when, only an hour previously, he’d been banging some undergraduate’s head against her dormitory headboard?

And why had he told her
now
? Probably, I suggested, because he hoped it might spark some terrible jealousy that might, somehow, win her back. Or to get even, perhaps.

Quoting an old Chinese proverb, my friend said, “If you want revenge, dig a grave for two.”

Well, yes and no (although I certainly didn’t say that then). But she came to mind the other day, my Chinese friend, when I went down to the CBC broadcast centre. There was talk about my participation on one of those hokey television panels, this one on why Jane Austen novels make good movies. I was waiting for the show producer when I spotted René Goblin in the lobby. He was older now, his dreadlocks greying, his pink gums still flashing when he smiled. And still sporting those black, thick-framed glasses that made him look like an ousted African dictator. (Why are those men always so ugly?)

I’d forgotten. A while back, René Goblin had gone from being a staple book reviewer at the
Globe and Mail
to the host of an avant-garde, after-midnight radio program. He was at a table with young people, producers I guessed, talking in that deep, avuncular voice and showing, every so often, those appalling gums.

It surprised me how much pleasure it gave me to see him. Sometimes, contrary to what my Chinese friend says, revenge really works out, really cleans the barnacles off the bottom of the boat. This isn’t an especially attractive story, but it’s a true one. And to be quite honest, just thinking about it still makes me feel good.

It was my fourth novel; I’m not whining, no one forced my hand, but I’d worked very hard, had rewritten the thing seven times from scratch, from page one. It was just about to come out and I was very anxious indeed. The
Globe and Mail
, Canada’s newspaper of record, had wounded me three times in a row with bad reviews. René had done an especially nasty hatchet job on one of them. The fact that he’d rung up the paper and volunteered for the job gave me the unpleasant sensation that he was gunning for me and that he might well do it again. Make no mistake: people believe what they read in the newspaper. Worse, after a while they start to think that
they
thought it.

So I did something I’d never done before. I went to see the
Globe
’s book editor, Avery Lynch. He was a pink-faced man in his late fifties who fancied himself,
la grande
littérature
aside, quite the ladies’ man and detoured the conversation in that direction whenever he could. But I wasn’t there to talk about women. “I’ve gotten wonderful reviews,” I explained (cretinously), showing him (cretinously) clippings from New York, Vancouver and Miami newspapers. “But for some reason I’ve been getting panned over and over again in your paper. I can’t seem to get a good review in my hometown.”

“Really?” he said, looking at the clippings and then up at me. He mentioned the name of a woman novelist considerably more gifted than I and added, “And we’ve panned
her
three times.” He rounded his eyes with affected surprise.

I went on. “I’m particularly concerned about one of your reviewers. René Goblin.”

Avery nodded encouragingly.

I said, “The truth is, I don’t think René ever got enough girls in high school and I think he’s never forgiven me for the fact that I did.” Prior to opening my mouth, this had sounded plausible, even reasonable.

“Really?” Avery said, amused. A hint of mockery? I wasn’t sure. But I hurried to explain myself, and as I heard the slightly breathless tones in my voice, I felt myself sinking, my point getting lost in vanity and silliness.

“Well then,” Avery said, a smile still animating his pink features, “I’ll have a word with René. And if he
does
have a problem with you, we’ll make sure to get someone else.”

“Who?”

“Just somebody else.”

“Maybe
you
should review it,” I said. “I’d be very grateful—”

Avery cut me off. “Don’t worry, we’ll handle it at this end,” he said, and went on seamlessly to the subject of a young actress we both knew (she wore a slim gold chain around her neck), referring to her as “my lover.” I nodded judiciously, connoisseur to connoisseur. What a dope, I thought.

“Did you, by the way?” Avery asked, rising from his chair to shake my hand (short-sleeved white shirt and tie) and, in so doing, to signal our “meeting” was at an end.

“Did I what?”

“Get enough girls in high school?”

I considered my answer carefully. I knew what he
didn’t
want to hear. “Does one ever?” I said.

He gave a short bark of laughter in which you could feel the relief. For a second there, I think he was torturing himself with the image of a teenage boy (me) between the legs of a teenage girl, her jeans hanging from the bedpost.

It was an unorthodox thing to do—you’re not supposed to make that kind of personal appeal when you’ve got a book coming out—but I left Avery’s office and headed uptown feeling lighter in spirit, as if, by vocalizing my concern, I had removed a small, insistent headache from right behind my eyes.

So, fine. The book came out; there was a launch party at a bookstore, followed by a gathering at my apartment. My editor came, so did a few old friends and their pals, along with my girlfriend Molly Wentworth, her parents and embittered brother who taught at Stanford but wanted to teach at Harvard. (Academics are even nastier about each other than writers.) I looked around the apartment every so often; there were twenty or thirty people there, including both my ex-wives—M., hawk-featured and somehow “in charge” (she had prepared the food), and Catherine, my son’s mother, a lanky actress who liked everyone and was therefore liked back by everyone. It was, I thought, a pleasant party, everyone talking to everyone. And yet, as I moved from group to group around the room, I had the feeling that I was waiting for something. I couldn’t engage in conversation, not with anyone; each little bit of chit-chat felt as if it were holding me up, stopping me from doing something important. But what was it?

I couldn’t help but notice, though, that Avery Lynch from the
Globe and Mail
wasn’t there, and that struck me as odd. Usually he went to these things. He liked to turn up with his girlfriend with the little chain around her neck and talk to people with his arm around her. She was quite a bit younger than he was, his “lover.” Code for, “I’m fucking her,” of course.

Near three in the morning, as the guests cleared out— a drunken Englishman lolled about on the couch impersonating his rich mother—I started to gently dismantle the party, taking the empty wine bottles into the kitchen, covering the cheese plate and so on. Using a book from my bookshelf, an especially mediocre Canadian novel that had been reviewed with excessive generosity a while back, I began to cap the flames on a set of small pot lights which sat in a row directly above the couch. But I’d had a few drinks, I lost my balance and knocked one of them over; molten candle wax dribbled down onto the couch. I even got a splash on my pants. It was a disproportionately shocking accident. Fixable but somehow, it seemed, malevolent, as if the spilled wax symbolized the consequences of a careless life catching up with me. Of a life lived
incorrectly
. Why hadn’t I pushed the couch from beneath the candle’s reach before trying to extinguish it? Wasn’t the choice of an ungifted writer’s novel as a snuffing instrument a gesture of unattractive spite? Was I being punished for it? Had I not, in fact, knocked over a candle at almost exactly the same spot a few years earlier?

Still worse, the spilled wax seemed like a bad omen for my new novel, and Avery’s no-show at my party assumed an even more sinister tone. The remaining guests, noticing the spill, made sympathetic groans, but no one took it with any gravity. An actress with a haggard face (she really should quit smoking) suggested a hot iron and a brown paper bag; a playwright with big ears who had spent entirely too many years giggling (in an irritatingly high pitch) at parties and sleeping with women not his wife mentioned a brand name and giggled again.

The next day, I came down the stairs into the living room more hungover than I should have been; it was the kind of hangover you get from drinking to get a flat evening airborne, from “forcing” it. Thinking back on the party, though, there
had
been something rather sinister about it. But what? My book had come out at a difficult time of year, March break, people away on holidays, so several friends had been unable to attend. And that had given the evening a sort of
uninhabited
feel. Yes. True. But that wasn’t it.

Cleaning up the living room, rinsing the wineglasses, dumping the appalling cheese tray (I couldn’t stop noticing the candle-wax stain on the couch; it seemed to occupy the centre of the apartment), I was left with the feeling that I hadn’t had a single satisfactory conversation all evening long. I’d start talking and be interrupted; start again and be interrupted again. But what else could I do? I was too old to be a guest at my own party.

All day I wondered about the upcoming review in the
Globe and Mail
—it was scheduled to appear in the Saturday edition—and I kept returning, like picking at a blister, to Avery’s no-show. And to René Goblin with the black-rimmed glasses. I had a sick feeling, you know the kind, that I
knew
what was going to happen, that in spite of my visit Avery was going to get René to do the review. Just to show me what happens when a writer wanders into his office and starts telling people what to do.

On the other hand, somebody at the party had told me a young woman writer, a noodle-armed sexpot everyone had a crush on, was launching
her
new novel the same night as mine.
How To Be A Girl
, it was called. Bound for success, from the title onwards. So maybe Avery, “player” that he fancied himself to be, went there instead. To give her a sniff, so to speak. Mind you, you couldn’t fault him for that. I’d met this girl once; she was so erotic with her skinny arms and little-girl voice that I’d daydreamed about her for weeks . . .

Anyway, where was I? Yes, the review. I’d thrown the party
before
the review came out instead of after so that if things went poorly I wouldn’t have to contend with long-faced people showing up at my door or pretending they hadn’t read it or, worse, feeling sorry for me. The whole thing was a nightmare and at some point that afternoon, my hangover clicking in a notch, the stain from the candle wax accusing me every time I walked by the couch, I decided that I was never, ever going to write another novel. That it wasn’t worth the stress on my nervous system. No, I’d become a high school teacher instead. Drink too much at night and jack off in the staff washroom to images of Italian students in wet T-shirts. A much healthier existence, that!

Around eleven that same night, I fled my apartment as if it were on fire and hurried to my favourite newsstand (I’m a superstitious man); the early Saturday edition wasn’t in yet, but hang on, what’s this? A broken-down fellow in a long coat drifted along the sidewalk with an armful of newspapers. He was working the bars. “Paper. Saturday
Globe
,” he said in the tone of a man who knows no one is listening but makes his announcement anyway.