The Man Game (75 page)

I'm beside myself, I said.

Don't touch, don't touch, ew, ew.

I tried to pull the hair away but when I touched it, I was repulsed. The instant my fingertips were on the black hair I could tell she had used a quality shampoo. I backed away. It's silky smooth, I said, wincing and rubbing my fingers together to rid them of the horror.

Why?

I did not know.

Do you remember running over someone?

I said: I'd remember running over a woman with silky smooth hair. I'd remember. Someone must have put it there.

Hearing no more objections from Minna, I got into the driver's seat and keyed the ignition. She slid into the passenger side and did up her seatbelt. Those were nice guys, she said, putting her feet on the dashboard and unlacing her shoes. She started to say more but I interrupted.

Nice, I said, hitting the signal as I turned left at a corner. Nice. Yes, I said. They were very nice.

Well, I don't know. I thought they were nice enough to show us around the house. And explain what the hell they were doing. Showed us the archives.

The archives. Those archives were designed to suffocate. Those were the archives a some troubled incoherent person's whatever. No one could ever form that.

I bet you could, she said.

Who me?

Yes, you. Who else? Come on, admit you loved that.

I continued to drive. I drove past who cares. I drove past never mind. I drove past forget it. Even as I drove my disapproval faltered.

I thought you loved that kind a stuff, she said, all that unknown weird.

I do.

We argued for another few minutes while I tried to concentrate on the road. The pace of traffic this far east and south of my own neighbourhood was completely different, and I was having trouble adapting. Because of a strange congestion of right-lane traffic all wanting to get back into my lane from a dead stop I was a little tense. The lane was edged by leafless cherry trees. We passed a family of condos, the last of which was wrapped in tarp and scaffold while a construction team replaced all the rain-damaged cladding and fixed the many many leaks. I was in an unfamiliar part of town, but the problems were the same.

She grilled me on the man game but spared me the embarrassment of acknowledging that I was completely lost. My sense of direction was mucked with by the crescents and cul-de-sacs and the plenty of very similar truffle-brown townhouses with matching gateways. Then I saw the
WALLY
'
S BURGERS
sign in the middle distance and I felt my inner compass wheel violently back to north as I aimed us for Kingsway. At last, a street I knew. It was three in the afternoon. Blue sky had been replaced by shades of dishwater pink that moved smoothly over town. In an hour it would be night. Now the coverlet was approaching us all. Beyond its pale inestimable surface glowed an administrative light. It was an office ceiling, an indoor fluorescence that reminded me it was back to work tomorrow, and that we were driving to Knight Street to buy me a bed for tonight's sleep. My
new roommate said he wasn't going to get a bed, choosing instead to sleep on a blanket on top of a couple layers of bifurcated foam that my parents bought me at the Hudson's Bay downtown and which I offered him when we decided to move in together. He started to refer to himself as a prisoner of conscience, which perhaps left me in the position of warden. Why did it seem so perplexing to us that we were single? I was about to buy a bed out of an aluminum shed in the backyard of Minna's Chinese connection.

As we snaked down Kingsway and turned on to Knight Street, I kept one eye on the street numbers and another on Minna's thighs, pinched together on the blue velour car seat, jiggling to the rap music. I suppressed the violent urge to put my hand between her legs and rub the seam of her jeans with my middle finger. The urge was serious enough to consider—for only a moment—the idea of begging. The sky was a peptic colour, a cherry milk coating over the entire atmosphere. From a romantic context, I can see how this sky might have aphrodisiacal properties. But this was not a romance. I was not in a world where pink skies meant pink thighs, and every lonely man goes home with that which he desires most. I lived in a quieter world. I didn't want to live in this world any longer.

She said: That's the most beautiful sky I've ever seen. Oh, she squealed, and grabbed my knee and held it, rubbing and scolding (smak-smak-smak); she said: What a perfect day. I can't believe it. We have such fun together, don't we?

Hey, Minna, I said, steering this way and that. You know, I know we've gone over this before. When I kissed you that time last February, but anyway ha ha … And I realize we agreed to just be friends. But heck, I don't know. I tr
i
ed to see if I could be your friend, but actually I still am very hot for you.

Ha ha, she laughed, and tossed her head back, her feet going up on the dashboard again. Oh, Kat. That's so sweet. I had no idea. Oh my god, that's so sweet. Are you serious?

You're impossible. You really couldn't tell? All this time? What should we do? Marriage? Do you feel the same way? Are you hot for me, or what?

How many times a day do we have to have this conversation?

Look, I said, turning a corner, we've arrived.

Yes, she said, this is it.

We parked. The house across the street was about what I expected: painted a mud-brown that was old and cracked, shades pulled over all the windows, a marginally taller than average fence. Not enough to draw attention, but enough to keep away prying eyes. There was a sign on the wire gate that said:
BEWARE OF DOGS
.
Dog
had been pluralized by Jiffy marker. I made note of that. I was about to buy a bed from this place. And indeed I saw the storage unit at the back of the yard where he kept them. It was made of large sheets of corrugated plastic and aluminum, very filthy in the gutters, connected using ashy two by fours crawling with pumice-green lichen. This was where he kept the mattresses apparently.

Maybe he's not home and we should not come back, I said.

She walked up to the gate and looped her fingers through the wire. Immediately the house was alive with the sounds of the two beasts, barking loud enough behind insulated walls to pose a realistic threat.

Beware a dogs, I said.

Relax, she said.

No, I distinctly read the word
beware
. It doesn't say, Relax, There's Dogs. It says—

Okay, enough out a you.

He was a short, stout, middle-aged east-side Asian with a bowl cut, a strip-mall sweater, and denims. And sure enough, pit bulls. He held them on a short leash at the top of the staircase using his back to hold the screen door open. The pit bulls were scowling and slobber dangled off their teeth in ropes. Whenever they barked the saliva flew into the air, and he shortened the leash and told them to be quiet. With pit bulls it doesn't even look like rage, I thought to myself, it looks like blind pain. I was standing beside my Dynasty while Minna stood with her fingers through the gate, explaining we were here to buy a bed, dogs howling at her.

What's the name a your dogs? Minna asked.

King and Kong, the man said.

Remember me? Minna called out to him. I came here and bought a bed from you last year?

Looking her over, he shooed the two dogs back through the screen door, throwing their leashes along with them, and shut it firmly. Wiping his hands on his pale jeans, he walked down the stairs to meet us at the gate. Very protective, he said, and unlatched the gate to let us enter his backyard. What you looking for? Bed? he asked, and led the way to the shed. The troughs were thick with leaves; you could see them in the light from inside the shed, which was indeed stocked with beds, ten in total, five queens and five doubles stacked side by side, with matching boxsprings and metal frames. The mattresses were in fairly good to spongy condition, with few if any seriously unacceptable stains. They were all of a brand, pale blue and slippery to touch, with typical white piping along the edges. A tarpaulin on the floor kept them from resting right on the wet concrete. They were used mattresses to be sure. They were essentially being stored outside. Too late to be squeamish about it. I waved my eyebrows at Minna and she nodded like get a move on. I took a look at the queens. I asked how much all included.

You good customer, he said to Minna. I remember you. He looked at me. I sell it for two hundred dollars, okay?

That sounded like a deal.

You deliver?

Where you live?

I told him I lived in Mount Pleasant and he said: No problem. You good kids, right? he asked us. I show you inside? More furniture inside. Yeah, yeah. More furniture?

Like what? I asked.

Minna put a hand on my shoulder and pushed me forward, saying to the man: Yes, let's see what you have.

He unlocked a door on ground level underneath the staircase and went in first then held the door open for us, smiling and waving for us to enter. He made it seem like now we were in a hurry so I rushed in and thanked him awkwardly for holding the door open as I passed, not certain what I was
doing. I wondered if we should take our shoes off and he said: No no. As soon as we were inside, an unshaven man in a faded Mickey Mouse golf shirt slipped between us, excusing himself as he tiptoed in tubesocks from one room to another. I second-guessed our host about shoes, but already he was ushering us down the hall. As we followed him, I tried to get a look at where the other man had come from, saw a plywood door with a brass knob, the kind with a push lock, and a band of light along the carpet.

I followed behind Minna into a room where there was nothing but sidetables and lamps. The room smelled of cigarette smoke and old vinyl curtains, neither of which appeared anywhere among the piles of furniture. Most of the sidetables were in a dark wood veneer and octagonal, with the snapping doors that open the two front sides of the thing. Some other tables were of a paler grain. They were stacked on top of each other in no sort of organized way. The lamps were all of an identical design, this huge butternut squash-shape covered in a bubbly white skin. They were topped by the most nicotine-stained white lampshades, all more or less with the same amount of decorative trim, gold fabric braids with gold strands. I didn't want to buy any of these, but I realized that with this man's help I could decorate my apartment to look exactly like a room in a hotel off the main road.

Mirror? Dresser? Closet?

Oh, yes, said Minna, see there's mirrors along the back wall.

Yeah, mirrors, said the man, pointing to them. They were all that leaded kind in shapes that recalled chest armour. Very nice, very good.

I shook my head no thanks, smiling to show my appreciation for the offers. Our host was a perfectly nice gentleman, but we had to be on our way. I tried to express as much with my body language. While Minna opened and shut the drawers and seven-foot mahogany dressers I was facing the hallway, where I could see another spare bedroom on the other side where there were even more mattresses, and these ones had people on them.

People
. These mattresses were
in use
. Startled by them—I hadn't seen them till now—I didn't know where to put my head. I wanted to stare at them, but I didn't want to look like I was. At least a dozen mattresses and probably three times that many people. If I had to count. I saw people sleeping on beds, and sitting on them, and some of them looking away from me, and others looking at me as directly as I looked at them. The fluorescent light in our room was on, and the one in theirs was not. The difference was staggering. Their room was grey dark. The white plaster on the walls looked smoke blue. At ceiling level there was a single window with a steel bar across it that poked in a little light. Other mattresses were stacked against the wall. People were sleeping against those ones, too. I didn't really have the time to study their ashen faces more than to nod hello, and all were weak or sick or starving-looking. One of them wore an extra large granite-coloured Mickey Mouse shirt with a soy sauce stain over Mickey's white glove. Of the dozen or so people, none had fresh haircuts. A woman in there shouldn't have been pregnant. They seemed equally curious to see us. They were only ten feet away, after all, but it felt like a world apart.

I was about to speak when our host caught me looking at them, and laughed. He said: Big family. We have family reunion, ha ha.

Oh, I said, that's great. Lucky you have all the extra beds.

Ha ha, he said. Yes, yes.

I said: I like all these sidetables, but I'll just go with the bed for now.

Okay, ha ha, that's okay. Good bed. Maybe later you want lamps or tables.

Yes, maybe later.

We drove to my apartment and waited for the guy to arrive in his half-ton with the bed. The whole way back we talked about who we thought all those people in the other room were. We drew many conclusions. I stopped my Chrysler on the one
block in my neighbourhood that wasn't permit. There were already three cars parked on the same block of free parking. Minna called these kinds of parallel parking nightmares
tight pussy
spots. Nine points later, I jacked up the anti-theft bar, put my stereo's faceplate above the sun visor, power-locked the doors, and walked to my building where we stood in front and waited.