The Man Game (76 page)

Minna yawned, squeaked, and stretched up her arms. Woo, she said. I'm going straight home after we set up the bed. I'm totally 'zosted.

Don't want to stick around and watch a depressing movie with me and my roommate?

Your roommate's always watching depressing movies.

He finds them inspiring.

I find them depressing.

He finds life depressing.

A person can be positive or negative. It's a choice.

It's true, I said. But I've met happy positive people who are depressed.

Like who?

I don't know. Like you?

Me? How do you see that?

Oh, Minna. You're lonely. You're lonely like me. Sure you are. If it wasn't for me …

I trailed off. I didn't have the heart to say more; I'd tried before and it never worked. I could tell she thought I was joking again. Rolling her eyes. Fair enough. I was being selfish. She was the one who had been honest while I was the one who'd deceived myself. She was the ghost of a lover. The ghost of yesteryear's love or future's perfect. She was not present. Minna was everywhere in my life but today's body.

SEVENTEEN

You need to listen to your body because your body is listening to you.

–
PHILLIP CALVIN MCGRAW

Cane first, followed by the good leg, down on the riding heel of his leather boot, then, with cane and left leg, proceeding to stand upon the arrivals platform at the CPR train depot, greeted by celebrations beyond his reckoning. He brought the favoured leg down off the train as stiff as a rifle against his thigh. The crowds milled and dawdled through festoons of wild lily petals falling like snow, and shook their hats over their heads, hurrahs escalating all through the station. Refusing any assistance down the stairs from friendly porters and ticketers, the old man taxed everyone's time with his slow descent. A boy was paid to lug his bags, but no one would
ever
help Mr. Erwagen take a step. Sammy was familiar with this scene, or at least many just like it, in which his father's determination to do things himself wound up stalling everyone else around him. For as long as Sammy had known his father, he had been this old or older.

Sammy chewed his lip, absently reabsorbing his own salt.

She cooled herself with a paper fan. Man alive, she said, is it hot.

Indeed, said Sammy, seated still.

It was late May, and a taste of summer arrived with perfect timing to celebrate the first official passenger train to Vancouver's recently built CPR station on the False Creek flats. The moist wind off the water spiralled together with the engine's steam between the train and the station, coils of fog
here and gone, upsetting his father's black suit. The man was unperturbed; hunched, but only to protect his beaver pelt hat as the gust lifted his clothes around his frame, and he remained as rigid as a tent peg. His father's patriarchal skull sat bobbling atop this rigid frame like Death's glowering lantern. Behind his stature, Engine 374 wore a handsome wreath draped down its black flanks, twelve-point antlers, and a floral replica of the Queen's own crown fitted over the lamp. The cars behind it were arrayed with streamers and people waved their white summer hats out the windows, flower petals everywhere. The train carried a special message written by the Queen, stating how proud she was of her colony's accomplishment, a landmark achievement in ingenuity for her to celebrate on her Jubilee, the transcontinental railway, some hundred thousand miles of hand-pounded iron trestle.

What are ye doing? said Father to his son. Stand up from your chair and show respect. Get up, say I. No more a this nonsense, eh. Who do ye think ye are? I put out my hand, ye simply—

Father, Sammy said, I've been crippled in a fall.

Eyeing Toronto for the first time, Father said: Who be the Indian with you?

My ward, Toronto, said Sammy.

Squinting in the sun, he swung out his hand to Molly.
Lady
, he said with unalloyed suspicion. You're a true
lady
to stand by my son through such catastrophe. You're a model a strength for the rest a your sex.

They brought Father home in silence. Sammy's frail tall father held firmly to the silver handle of his cane as he lowered himself onto the sofa. The hands were bony and long, white as deep-sea cretins, with veins blue and red that wormed with blood. Sammy was unable to help him sit, no matter how much of a show his father made at the difficulty.

I must speak unto my son in private, were his words to Toronto and Molly once he was down. Seated, his eighthundred-year-old father's skull was still well above the woodscalloped edging of the backrest, but somehow Mr. Erwagen was not the same giant he'd once been; even taller now in his thinness, somehow in his frailer state he'd reached a greater, grander, somehow taller majesty. In his scaffold-like ricketyness, he towered higher in his decrepitude than he had in his middling robustness. All the nails showing in his construction, seated, his legs flung high and wide, with those terrible knees pointed like arrowheads under his wool slacks.

You may fool a lumbermill manager out in nowhere to adopt your profane techniques, his father said. Any professional in Toronto would surely balk at your imprudence.

Precisely why I moved, said Sammy.

After much direct and indirect conversation with the Lord, I came to realize what a victim a circumstance is thee. Born with your father's talents, and I did nurture them. I did try; try too hard, this I do not know. The Lord counsels a son to respect his father … But you never had my self-control. When your mother had the croup, I recall you so afraid, ha ha, afraid she would die that nay did you leave your room the entire time a her protracted illness. You never visited her. You surely recall this, eh.

That was a decade ago, Father. Yes, I remember.

How I de
man
ded. You, insisting not.

… In the study. I was in the study. You interrupted my studies. Twenty-two and in college. Studying for my exams.

Studies … She might well have died. Her last words were, Where is my baby?

Those weren't her dying words. She didn't die.

She
did
die, said his father, swishing his cane across the floor like a stiff probe. It suddenly fell out of his grasp and clattered on the ground in front of their feet.

Not then, said Sammy. She didn't die. That was thirteen years ago. Father, she was—. The doctor said she'd recover within the week. She did … the croup. Thirteen more years she lived. It's your own …

For you, excuses. Now look upon thee. Keep a secret from me, as usual, eh. I was the only healthy one in our family. Everyone was sick but me. Your brother was never long for … Oh, and for this I find myself alone, an old man asked to survive.

Listen to me, Father …

Why treachery? You must've cooked more deceits over this past year. What else must I get to learn? No. Wait until after I eat before you begin. Doubt I could endure it on an empty stomach.

The old creaking man stood up. He turned his back to Sammy, bent over slowly to pick up the cane, his bony ass in Sammy's face. And then, without thinking, Sammy gave him the boot.

What happened between us, said Sammy, as he explained it to Molly, was in its way as much a shock to my father as it was to me.

A shock indeed, said Molly, looking at her husband. I can hardly breathe. Since you can move again, make yourself useful and unbutton my dress.

Yes, it's true. My god, it feels so good to … feel. To feel you. It's as though I've drunk a hundred cups a coffee. Every sense is screaming, I can feel every thread of your slip, every pore on your body, every freckle.

Go on with the story …

Yes, I realized only after it happened. It was as incomprehensibly my own fault. Like the accident in the train tunnel a year ago. My first thought was you. Molly's got to know right away. Until Molly knows I can move, that my legs can move, that I've regained sensation throughout my body, then it isn't really true. He ran his thin, soft fingers through her black hair.

Well, like my brother, Father expected me to offer him a bed for the night, said Sammy. As he spoke, Molly listened with all her attention, no matter how often he became distracted by the feeling of his hands on her face. The pleasure of her nape
was blurrily intoxicating. When he passed his hands over her breasts and nipples, he heard each fret of his fingerprints ring out in his ears.

He knew I'd sent my brother away. He didn't know if I'd do the same to him. I certainly could have. I'm done climbing mountains trying to talk with him eye to eye on things.

This time he came to you.

As Sammy talked, he conducted a full investigation with his hands across her body. She set to work on an investigation of her own with her lips all over his neck. She wanted to know if there was anywhere on his body where sensation had not returned. Each of her moist kisses, wherever placed, be it his chest or his stomach, his navel or his hipbone, no matter where she laid those lips, he felt it, they burst as if a ripe plum were split open at the moment of contact with his skin.

At the time it gave me great pleasure to throw Dunbar out. Fortunately for Pa, I am a different man today than in the days a our youth, said Sammy, pinched between her thighs, as she, braced there, listened to him.

Much stronger now, I'm sure, said Molly, running a finger across her plumlips then rubbing the finger against his stomach. She. Making her way up beside him again so that their stomachs touched, and he felt that warmth that emanates only from a woman's belly and he wanted very much to enter that warmth to be a part of that warmth and so he pressed his stomach to hers and he gripped his weak hands to her ribcage and marvelled at the living organ, her skin, in all its radiant topologies.

The Erwagens were upstairs in their bedroom lovemaking on the black fur rug on the floor beside the window while Mr. Erwagen Sr. was in the main-floor dining room going through intermittent coughing fits as he supped.

We continued to talk, said Sammy. When he saw getting angry at me had no effect, and even made him feel rather guilty, I suspect, his frustration began to show. He began to sweep his cane to and fro. How many times I must have seen him do this, and it never ceased to grate on my nerves. I was
convinced that his cane sweeping betrayed his true feelings, unsympathetic, angry, urged to discipline me, punish me … an even deeper lack a respect. To see him absently staring at his cane, sweeping it to and fro across the rug. Looking at the arc he carved in the rug. It kept sweeping closer, and finally it tapped over a wheel on my chair and the handle fell out a his hand. He looked me in the eyes almost like a child. The expression faded quickly, but it was not his own childhood I saw there but my own. His face had accidentally mimicked my own, the face he saw so many times while he punished me. Just then, I relaxed. I felt it throughout my body, this sudden physical calm, but didn't immediately acknowledge it. That calmness was alive throughout my entire body. His features returned to their stern, frosty glare, which he pointed to his cane lying there on the floor.