Lost Between Houses (13 page)

“Just read the newspaper. You’ll see.”

We opened the door and I was stepping out when he hollered, “Don’t hate me. I’m testing your mettle, that’s all. Be grateful it’s coming from a friend. Bloody idiots! Don’t stand up for anything any more.”

Out in the corridor, the door shut, Scarlet said, “He’s going to have a terrible hangover in the morning.”

“I should hope so,” I said. “My goodness.”

“Don’t take it personally. He just likes to argue. He thinks it makes people think.”

“About what?”

“I don’t think he liked that remark about the blasting caps. I heard from the bathroom. I think he thought you were making fun of him.”

“I was.”

“Well, you shouldn’t. It’s very hurtful to have someone your age make fun of you. Particularly in front of everybody.”

She walked on to the elevator.

“Did
you
think I was rude?” I asked.

She took a breath as if she was losing interest in the subject.

“No, just a bit superior. But that can really set somebody off. You thought I was making it up didn’t you?” she said.

“What?”

“That he was a big shot.”

“No,” I said, “I didn’t.”

“He can get tickets to anything.”

“I’ll bet. Who’s Emily, by the way?” I said.

“Oh, that’s just a pet name. Only my family calls me that. Everybody else knows me as Scarlet.”

“What name’s on your birth certificate?”

“I don’t know. Emily probably. What’s it matter? I like Scarlet better. Come on,” she said. “This is getting off on the wrong foot.”

So we went down in the elevator. But I was rattled. I mean when people don’t like me, I usually figure it’s my fault, I’ve done something to provoke it. Been too mouthy or something.

And I’m usually right. Anyway, it’s stupid but I sort of wanted to go back to Scarlet’s place, go in, be funny, say something really clever, get everybody to like me, including her father, and then split. That way I could enjoy the evening.

But it was too late, we had to go to the fucking movie.

We went to the Imperial down near Dundas Street. It was this grand old place with red plush seats and a high domed ceiling. There were tickets waiting for us at the window. A woman with a white cone hairdo gave them to us. She seemed kind of neutral to me, but Scarlet didn’t see it that way.

“See what I mean?” she whispered, “she doesn’t want any
more
trouble.”

We sat beside the aisle. The lights went down. Scarlet threw her legs over the seat in front, and rested her hands in her crotch.

Sometime during the movie, I felt her staring at me and for a second I had a feeling she was trying to figure out if I was good-looking or not. I don’t love the way I look from the side. I don’t have very memorable features and I have a soft chin, I know that, it’s a nice face more than a handsome one, so I don’t like people staring at me for long. Finally she went back to looking at the movie but she didn’t say anything, which was unnerving. I mean you’d think if she was thinking something good it would have just burbled out on its own. It worried me. Thinking bad things about the person you’re with is just the worst kind of loneliness.

“What did you want to show me?” I whispered.

“I’ll tell you later,” she said, not even bothering looking over.

After the movie was finished, we came out onto the street.

“Well, that was a complete and absolute gross-out,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“Like it left me feeling I was covered in cobwebs.”

“I liked it.”

“You did not. You couldn’t. Nobody could.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“All those midgets and perverts and creepoids. God, where did they
find
those critters?”

“You’re so judgmental. They’re just people, Simon.”

“Not from my neighbourhood, they’re not. God, it’s enough to make you believe in compulsory euthanasia.”

“What’s that?”

“Mercy killing.”

She took one of those deep breaths you take when you’re trying not to let somebody bug you. “I liked the theme song, too.”

“Yeah, that was all right. What was it called?”

“How should I know?”

“So what do you want to do now?”

“Beats me. I’m sort of pooped actually.”

“You want to go home?”

“Might as well. Nothing going on down here.”

“Why would your father be interested in a movie like that?” I asked after a minute.

“Because it makes money, Simon. Duh.”

By the time we got to the intersection, I’d had enough. So I just said it. “Scarlet, do you not
like
me any more. Is that it?”

“No, I’m fine,” she said.

“Well I’m not. I have the feeling you’ve been looking at me all night like I’m something a pigeon left on your parents’ balcony.”

She broke out laughing.

“Jesus, Simon.” She walked on a bit and then stopped.

“God, it’s the strangest thing. It just broke right through everything,” she said.

“What did?”

“Oh God, that must mean I like you again. Don’t hate me for this, all right? Don’t. But I was really looking forward to seeing you. Like
too much,
you know? And then when I saw you in the living room, it was sort of a disappointment. I imagined that you looked different or something. And I thought, Oh God, I don’t like him any more. And then you said that stupid pigeon thing, and it was so
you,
and I thought, Oh God, I
do
like him after all. It was like we just connected, the second you said that.”

“So you do like me?”

“I just told you. Yes.”

“For awhile, I have to tell you, I sort of figured things were kaputskyville.”

“Well, now you know. Now we both do.”

“So what did you want to show me?” I said.

“Never mind. It’s stupid now.”

“No, tell me.”

“My tan,” she said. “Don’t you think I’m brown?”

After that it was easy, and sort of unimaginable how all the weirdness had happened. It was Scarlet again, instead of this super-cold bitch who was thinking the very worst, very truest things about me.

We walked up Yonge Street, all lit up and bustling on Saturday night, and turned west along Bloor toward the Village. It was jammed, busloads of tourists driving through; tough guys on motorcycles, skinny girls with their hair parted down the middle. Some of them smelt like incense, you could smell it when they walked past you. A go-go girl danced high in the second floor window of the Mynah Bird. We stuck our noses into a basement club across the street; there were four guys playing in
the band, pretty cool-looking, with their long straight hair cut like the Kinks and those Edwardian jackets.

“It’s your life,”
they sang,
“And you can do what you want”

The drummer doing a slow roll around his drums, ending up on the floor tom and giving the high hat a whack with his stick. Then they all came in:

It’s your life

And you can do what you want

But please don’t keep me waiting
.

Please don’t keep me waiting …

Very cool. An unimaginably cool life. Just the sound of the cymbals hissing and the electric guitars booming out onto the street made me ill with excitement and envy. The drummer was a kid my age and I got that weird, anxious feeling again, like I was never going to have a life as exciting as that. That I’d already missed the boat.

We came back out on the street. Some asshole tried to sell me some poetry. I’d seen this dickweed in action before. Eric the Poet. Bucktoothed, glasses with fishbowl lenses, he was about the ugliest son of a bitch you ever laid eyes on. But people liked him, they thought he was the real article, you know, a real live bohemian selling his wares in the street. Sometimes they’d invite him to sit at their table in an outdoor café and after a minute or two he’d be wailing away at them, telling them what bourgeois, brainless assholes they were and they’d sit there like children, sucking it in, thinking they were having a real experience. Unbelievable. I mean that fucking place, Yorkville, it was a great big fat fucking fraud. You could just feel it.

I ran into a friend of mine, Tony Osbourne, who’d dropped out of school. There he was with no shoes on, long hair, and living with a beautiful girl over top of the poster store. I used to
like him, he had some magical way of getting older guys to let him hang around with them. But he’d gone sort of cool on me since he’d quit school. Like I was a square who didn’t see the big picture. But his girlfriend sure was a dish; long black hair, bony little hips in tight jeans, you just wanted to reach down and bring your hand up right between her legs. Honest.

We stood there shooting the shit outside the poster shop, putting it on a bit for the chicks, me trying to get it across that I had some pretty wild friends and him, well, God knows what he was up to, maybe just out and out amazement that an asshole like me had such a classy girlfriend.

Anyway, after awhile the chicks started to get restless, they sort of knew what was going on, and we moved along. When we got to the corner, Scarlet said, “I like your friend Tony. He’s sort of mysterious.”

“Yeah, well, we’ll see how mysterious he is when he’s living in a cardboard box, selling pencils.”

“In today’s society,” she said, “you’ve got to make room for everybody.”

I don’t mean to be a snob, but when somebody starts a sentence with, “In today’s society,” you don’t have to listen to the rest of the sentence. Even when it comes out of your girlfriend’s mouth. Funny thing is, it was sort of reassuring to hear Scarlet say something stupid. It made her less scary.

We started up Avenue Road and I caught a glimpse of the big round clock at the top of the hill. The Upper Canada College tower. For a second I thought it was the moon.

“So what do you want to do now?” Scarlet said.

“Beats me.”

“We could go back to my place. They’ll be asleep by now. My father gets up at five in the morning. Reads the trades.”

The trades.
Very polished, very adult that. We were silent for awhile and I found myself wondering if she was smart or whether she just had a good memory. Collected neat stuff she’d heard and then just spouted it. Like
Reads the trades.

We caught the bus at St Clair, the one that goes up through Forest Hill. It was always empty, that bus, lit up and flying down those quiet streets. The air smelled different in this part of town. We got off near Dunvegan Road and went into a little circular park. From there you could hear the city below. Her head leaned a little against my shoulder, I touched the side of her face with my hand, I moved my head down very slowly, I could hear her say something. Then I kissed her.

“Come on,” she said, and she pulled me off the bench. “Let’s go back to my place.”

Quite frankly I sort of hoped her old man would still be up, maybe we could have a decent conversation and end this all on a good note, but the old guy had just had too many noggins I guess, and he was sawing logs somewhere in that big white apartment.

“Do you want a drink?” she asked.

“Sure.”

She disappeared out of the bedroom and turned up a minute later with these big green glasses on a tray. I could hear ice cubes clinking around inside.

I took one of the glasses and peered down into it and took a sniff. It made me shudder.

“Jesus Christ, Scarlet,” I whispered, “what’s this?”

“Scotch and coke. It’s the Beatles’ favourite drink.”

I looked at it again.

“Don’t analyze it, Simon. Just drink it.”

“Are you sure the Beatles drink this stuff?”

“Positive.”

She sat on the side of the bed, holding her elbow, this big green glass in her hand.

“You don’t really drink, do you?”

“Not motor oil.”

In a little while, she put her glass down.

“It’s too bright in here,” she said and put a red scarf over the lampshade.

“Is this going to be all right?” I whispered.

“As long as we’re quiet.”

We lay down on her bed. In a sort of mechanical way, we started smooching, as if, you know, it being the end of the evening and us being boyfriend and girlfriend, this was the sort of stuff we were supposed to do. But when I lifted her shirt up, when I looked down her body, at the dip from her ribs to her tummy, I could feel something black stir in me.

She was on top of me, sort of kissing me, then lifting her head back and looking at me, then kissing me again. It’s not my favourite way of kissing, it makes me vaguely self-conscious. From that angle nobody’s very attractive. But she kept doing it, slowly lowering her head, touching her lips to mine. They were dry, she’d been smoking. Suddenly she threw back her head and then smashed her teeth down on my lips really hard, so hard she cut me. I mean I could actually taste blood in my mouth.

“Jesus, Scarlet,” I said, sitting up, “what the fuck is going on here? Like are you mental or what?”

She was looking at me, all still, as if she was waiting for something. I wondered if maybe she wasn’t a bit bonkers.

Sometimes when I was alone, walking along the street or staring out the window, I found myself rehearsing conversations with
the old man. I hadn’t seen him since the blow-up in the boat but I knew I was going to and I kept thinking about what I was going to say. But, even in my imagination, it always seemed to go badly. I’d start out the conversation with some line I liked, but his answer, the one I gave him anyway, always seemed to find the chink, the essential chink, in my armour and I’d be back at square one. On top of which I wasn’t pissed off at him enough any more. Over the weeks I’d sort of slunk back to being scared of him. Except when I thought about boarding. When I thought about that, it was like so shameful, so embarrassing to be put in there, like your parents checking you into a leper colony, that I’d get hot all over again. Find myself talking out loud to him on the street. Sometimes I imagined him hitting me and me hitting him back. Sometimes I even imagined me socking him first. Man, that would have surprised the shit out of him. Pow!

Anyway, one day we went up to see him. It was Sunday, natch, shitty things always happen on Sunday. I sat in the back of the car and as we got up near the city limits, I spent my time picking out really crappy apartment buildings and imagining I lived there.