The Life of Hope (11 page)

Joseph rose to his feet. He enjoyed the sensation of towering over Drinkwater. “And you, sir,” he said, his voice almost inhuman when he spoke quietly, “you are quite mad.”

“I am the greatest religious thinker of our age,” responded Theophilius matter-of-factly. “I am a prophet, and have been chosen to write the next installment of the Bible. You, on the other hand, are a small, insignificant speck of dust, a little tiny ant with a great big thingummy!” Drinkwater gestured toward Joseph’s crotch.

Mrs. Drinkwater came over with a huge pot of soup. “Boys, boys,” she admonished them gently. “Let’s be friends.”

“I’ve no intention of being friends with this young, small-minded puppy!” barked Theophilius.

“And I,” countered Joseph, “have no intention of being friends with this old, crack-minded … dwarf!”

Theophilius launched himself at Joseph with tiny fingers fashioned into claws. Drinkwater raked his nails over Joseph’s face, tearing off the black eye-patch, raising long red welts on Hope’s
pale skin. Joseph made no move to defend himself. Instead he began to search frantically for the covering to his empty eye socket. He ignored the weak little blows that Theophilius was administering.

“
Dwarf
!!?” screamed Drinkwater. “I’ll pummel you to a pound of horsemeat, then we’ll see who’s a dwarf!” Joseph found the patch and affixed it on his face even as his face was being slapped by Theophilius. Then Joseph simply shrugged, and Drinkwater flew away, crashing into the chairs and table.

“Get out!” screamed Theophilius Drinkwater.

Joseph decided that it was a bad time to ask for Polyphilia’s hand in marriage.

You know you’ve progressed beyond the rudimentary, abecedarian levels of fucking-up when, at thirty years of age, you’re caught sitting on your bed, hunched over your own meat, grinning like Mr. Monkey, consumed by lust.

This is what happened to me.

Harvey Benson appeared in the bedroom doorway and exclaimed, “Aha! Having a tug at Wee Willie, are we?”

I had awoken with the sort of rock-hard erection that only multiple hours of drunken half-sleep can bestow. So I recalled making love to Elspeth and tried to deal with the thing as best I could, using said memories as accompaniment.

Our love-making, by the way, was of a very satisfying nature. After ten years of practice, Ellie and I were very good at getting each other off. “How’s that?” one or the other of us
would ask constantly. “That’s, um, fine.” “Okay?” “Sure, okay.” There was very little in the way of passionate grunting and gasping when Elspeth and I made love. There was instead a lot of conversation.

“Does that hurt?”

“Nope.”

“Okay.”

“Hold on. I think there’s some air trapped up there.”

“Right-oh.”

“Okay, go.”

“Is this good?”

“Not really.”

“How about more like this here?”

“Sure, okay.”

“Is that good?”

“Yeah, this is nice.”

“Okay. Then I’ll just get up on my knees.”

“Sure. Fine.”

“Here we are.”

“I can’t breathe.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“Okay?”

“Okay, go.”

Anyway, Harvey’s entrance into my bedroom had the effect of shriveling my boner to near nothingness, despite his admonitions of, “Don’t mind me. Just pretend I’m not here.” It struck me that this was a new attitude on the part of my dick, this throwing in the sponge and knuckling under at the slightest pressure. My dick, formerly a “Never Say Die” kind of guy, had become a quitter.

I’d noticed it the week before with Elspeth, when we were still happily married. I was making love to her. We’d maneuvered ourselves into the doggy position and I was on my knees and knuckles, merrily, obliviously, thrusting in and out of Ellie. Elspeth had begun a low humming, which meant that she was on the brink of orgasm, as was I. Suddenly, I was filled with this quick and awful foreboding. This had also been happening more frequently, this sudden dread invading my being, so much
so that I’d considered getting one of those Medic Alert wrist bracelets that would clearly explain “Suffers acute fits of depressing epiphany and realizes that everything is overwhelmingly fucked: administer booze and any/all other available drugs.” My sweat turned clammy, and my knees gave out. My dick all but disappeared. “Return to Mothercraft!” I bellowed, and Elspeth and I collapsed, fortunately at the moment of her climax. I pretended to have come, too; I ran my fingers through Ellie’s hair. Elspeth, shuddering beneath me, asked, “Return to Mothercraft?” Ellie’s hair was everywhere, all over the bed, raven-black and smelling somehow of leaves in autumn. I wiped my tears away with her hair. “Sometimes you’re weird,” Elspeth noted with characteristic clarity.

“No, it’s a natural thing,” Harvey went on. “I don’t masturbate myself, but that’s only because I get laid so much.”

Harvey lies through his teeth.

My wimpy dick now wanted to go to the bathroom. I couldn’t see going through life with that mamby-pamby attached to me. I jumped off the bed and plodded toward the staircase. Harvey Benson trailed along behind me. “Wow,” said he, “is your ass ever flabby.”

The staircase led down to the kitchen. I emerged there to find three young girls seated at the table drinking tea.

“Here’s the great Canadian novelist!” roared Harvey, blocking my only avenue of escape. I covered my private parts and made a valiant attempt to smile. “Paul,” Harvey went on, “I’d like you to meet some students of mine …”

“Harv, could I just pop off to the washroom first?”

“It won’t take a second. This is Sheila.”

Sheila was a rather obese girl with a great bubble of curly black hair. She said “Hi” and I nodded.

“And this is Lee …”

Lee was tall and blondish. She wore spectacles with extremely thick lenses that distorted her eyes, making them appear huge and fishlike. Lee waved, and I waved back.

“And this is Sara.”

Sara was a small, dark girl with gray eyes. I’d rarely seen a sadder looking face, and her attempt to fashion that face into an attitude of friendly greeting almost broke my heart. “Want
some tea?” asked Sara. Her voice was thick and sultry and seemed to come from deep in her throat.

“Um, maybe in a minute. I’m going to the John now.”

“We’re having a seminar,” explained Harvey. “ ‘The Modern Novel: What Purpose Does It Serve?’ We thought you might have some insight, even if you are a baseball novelist and a tad on the trivial side.”

“I’m going to the John,” I snarled at Harvey.

“Oh, right. Sure.”

I headed off for the can, wondering if my ass was really as flabby as all that. I spent a long time in the washroom before emerging, modestly wrapped in a huge towel.

Harvey was saying, “Fine, fine, we can decide that the novel should be a political tool. But, and this is the thing, the danger is of the medium becoming a vehicle for propaganda! What do you think, Paulie?”

“Well …”

“Paul is apolitical,” explained Harvey to the young women. “A moral coward through and through.”

I wouldn’t say that, Harv,” I protested. “I mean, I’m concerned about the state of the world.”

“You’re concerned about the state of your own sweet ass!” Harvey laughed. Harvey has one of the ugliest laughs imaginable, desperate and rhythmic, too loud by a hundred decibels.

“I think I’ll go throw some clothes on,” I muttered.

“Hey, you don’t have to because of us,” said Harvey quickly. “I was just telling the girls.”

“Huh?”

Lee said, “Yeah. If you’re a nudist, that’s cool.” The two others nodded gracious agreement.

“Sure,” said Harvey. “I mean, hey, it’s no big thing.”

“Harvey, might I just have a word with you?”

“By all means, Paulie.” Harvey followed me up the stairs and into my bedroom. I shut the door behind us and whispered, “What the fuck are you doing?”

“We can get those chickies naked, no sweat!” said Harvey urgently. “Did you check out the snoobies on that Sheila? Fucking out to here! And they all got young skin, not a wrinkle between them.”

“I thought you were conducting a seminar.”

“I can conduct it with them in the nude! It’ll be great. I think we can get an orgy happening.”

“I don’t want to get an orgy happening.”

“I want to get an orgy happening.”

Harvey’s trouble was, he was fairly ugly. Not very or profoundly, just fairly and obviously. He was short, bald and paunchy and looked years older than his actual age of thirty-seven. Harv sported a long beard and wire-rimmed granny glasses, relics from his hippie days. Harvey was also chock-a-block full of hormones. “All you got to do is go back downstairs naked,” Harvey continued, “and I’ll say like, ‘Look how comfy Paul is,’ and then I’ll suggest we all take off our clothes.” Harvey grinned evilly, and looked like one of Santa’s helpers on dangerous drugs. “Think of all those twenty-year-old asses,” he whispered, “all puckered and perfect!” Harvey Benson smacked his lips.

“I’d like to help,” I said, “but I ain’t gonna walk around naked. I’ll just stay up here and read, and you can tell them I don’t have any clothes on.”

“You gotta help with the seminar. You’re the only novelist in the house.”

“Anyway, I thought you told me you never use this place.”

“I said I hardly ever use it. Sometimes I conduct seminars here, on weekends.”

I’d lost track of the days. “Today’s Saturday?”

“Right.”

“Harvey …”

“Please!!” Harvey folded his hands together imploringly.

“No.” To show Harvey how adamant I was about the whole thing, I began to pull on clothes.

“Stop!” he bellowed quietly.

I put on my jeans and pulled a T-shirt over my head. “There,” I said.

Harvey Benson looked close to tears.

“Look,” I said, my heart softening toward the little man, “conduct the seminar outside, in the sun. Then, when they get hot, suggest a refreshing swim in the pond. They’ll get naked, just like that.” I snapped my fingers, or at least I tried to, producing only a fatty, almost inaudible sound.

“They will?”

“Sure.”

“Okay, okay!” Harvey was almost beside himself with excitement. He ran down the stairs and burst into the kitchen slightly sweaty and out of breath. “Outside!” he roared. “Let’s go outside and conduct the seminar in the sun!”

“Sure,” the girls said.

I entered the kitchen behind Benson.

Sad-looking Sara asked, “Are you coming, too?”

“Yeah,” I answered, and the girl turned her thick lips upward in a brief and pitiful smile.

The day was gorgeous. I turned my head upward and examined the sky. There wasn’t a cloud to be seen, only a bright blue stretched from one end of the world to the other. High in the sky was a hawk, turning lonely, savage circles.

The five of us sat down on the grass near the pond.

“God, it’s hot,” said Harvey, and he undid two or three buttons on his shirt.

Down at the other end of the pond was a great blue heron. The bird crept toward the water on stilty legs, his head moving back and forth slowly. When the heron reached the edge it remained motionless for a long moment, frozen as if struck by a sudden thought or memory, and then it lashed forward. Its head was briefly in the water and resurfaced with a fish writhing in its bill.

“Who do you like?” asked Sara. She seemed suddenly embarrassed by the quality of her question. “I mean, who do you like to read? What novelists do you admire?”

“I like a lot of writers,” I started.

Harvey added, “Goddamn, it’s hot.”

“I like, for instance, John Gardner a lot.”

There was a general shaking of heads and tsking of tongues.

“You guys don’t like John Gardner?”

Lee answered, “He sucks. All that ‘moral’ shit.” Lee said “moral” as if it were a dirty word, and she said “shit” like it floated in the air. “Let’s face it,” she went on, “the world is going to hell in a handcart, and who needs books about people in Vermont who are totally oblivious?”

Sheila nodded.
“Grendel,”
she pronounced, “was not a bad little book. Cute, I would call it.”

“And where,” Lee pondered aloud, “does Gardner get off
writing that
On Moral Fiction
?” Lee proceeded to make her point in a non-academic fashion. She rammed her long forefinger down her throat and gagged.

“I thought he made some valid points,” I said.

“Bullshit! He writes all this dumbo crappola,
Mickelsson’s Ghosts
and
The Sunlight Dialogues
, both of which are totally laughable, and then he goes and says nasty things about the few writers who are making valid points!”

“Like whom, pray tell?” I demanded.

Lee named someone whose work I had never read. I had, however, gone out drinking with him on one occasion. I was aghast. “The man’s a psychopath! He weighs four hundred pounds and carries a gun! He’s an …” I stopped myself.

“Irrelevant,” snapped Lee. Something in her eyes dared me to add “alcoholic” to the list. “His work is socially meaningful. He deals with what this warped society has come to,
ultima ratio regum
. Not like your boy Gardner. Gardner is stuck in Vermont and places, writing about these, these
people
!”

“Gardner’s dead, you know,” I told them. “The man got wiped out on his motorcycle.”

“Irrelevant,” was Lee’s assessment of this information.

“Christ, Harvey,” I said, half laughing, “what the hell are you teaching these people?”

Harvey pulled off his shirt. Harvey had an incredibly hairy body; tight little curls covered his chest, shoulders and back like a two-inch pile rug. “Whew,” he puffed, “it surely is hot.”

“Who else do you like?” asked Sara.

“Well, let me see.” I decided to proceed in a cavalier, devil-may-care manner. “I like Charles Dickens.”

The answer received a good many titters.

“You guys don’t like Charles Dickens?”