Bluebeard's Egg (10 page)

“Sure,” says Joel, sliding into an old habit: he’s never refused an offer to talk about it. But also he knows where talking about it leads. He pictures Becka’s body, which she always holds back as the clincher; which is what he calls lush and she calls fat. Some of their first arguments were over this difference of opinion. “I’ll be here,” he says. If it’s an offer, why turn it down?

But after he puts down the phone he regrets his easy acquiescence. So they go to bed. So what? What’s it expected to prove? Is she working up to another move, back in? He’s not sure he feels like going through the whole wash and spin cycle once again. Anyway, he’s hungry. He types out a note – writing would be too intimate – saying he’s been called out suddenly, to an important meeting, and he’ll talk to her later. He doesn’t say
see
. He opens the back door, which is the one she’ll use, and tapes the note to it, noticing as he does so that someone has thrown an egg at his door: the remains are oozing down the paintwork, partly solidified, the broken shell is on the sidewalk.

Joel goes back in, closes the door. It’s dark out there. Someone has taken a lot of trouble, going around to the back like that; someone who knows exactly who lives behind his door. It wasn’t just a random shot, someone who happened to be passing by with an egg in his hand and got a sudden urge to hurl it. He has choices: maybe it’s one of the nut-slicers, an idea he doesn’t relish. Maybe it’s the landlord: that’s what he thought last week, when he found a nail hammered through the back tire of his bicycle. He doesn’t think it’s anyone official. He’s suspected the
RCMP
of bugging his phone, more than once, he knows that squeaky-clean sound on the line, and no doubt he’s on their list, most people who do anything at all in this country are. But eggs they wouldn’t bother with.

Or maybe it’s Becka. Throwing an egg at his door, then phoning him to make up because she feels guilty about something she’ll never confess to him she’s done, that’s her style. “What egg?” she’ll say to him if he asks, making her innocent chipmunk eyes, and how will he ever know? Once, when they were at a party together, they heard a gossipy story about a woman who’d recently split up with a man they both knew. She’d gone to the post office and filled out a change-of-address card in his name, redirecting all his mail to a town somewhere in the middle of Africa. At the time, and because he didn’t like the guy much, Joel had found this hilarious. Becka hadn’t, though she’d listened to the story more carefully than he had, and had asked questions. It strikes him now that she’d been filing it away for future reference. Now he tries to remember the rest of the story, the other things the woman had done: intercepting the man’s shirts on the way back from the laundry and cutting off all the buttons, sending funeral wreaths to his new girl friend. Joel is safe on both counts: no laundered shirts, no new girl friend. It’s just the mail he’ll have to watch.

Now he’s wondering whether going out is such a good idea. Becka still has a key, which he’ll have to do something about pretty soon. Maybe she’ll be in his apartment, waiting for him, when he gets back. He decides to take his chances. When she finds he isn’t there, she can stay or she can go, it’s up to her. (Leaving it up to her has always been one of his best tactics. It drives her mad.) Either way, he’s made his move. He’s shown her he’s not eager. Any effort put out this time around is going to be hers.

As he searches for his wallet in the jumble of paperbacks, papers, and socks beside the bed, Uglypuss brushes against his legs, purring. He scratches her between the ears and pulls her up slowly by the tail, which he’s convinced cats like. (“Cut that out, you’ll break its spine,” Becka would protest. But Uglypuss was his goddamn cat, to begin with.)

“Uglypuss,” he says. He’s had her almost as long as he’s had his Lay-Zee-Boy recliner and his Ping-Pong table: she’s been through a lot with him. She turns her odd face up at him, half orange, half black, divided down the nose, a Yin and Yang cat, as Becka used to say during her organic-cereal and body-mind-energy phase.

She follows him to the door, the front one this time; he’ll leave through the communal vestibule, walk down the steps, where there are street lights. She meows, but he doesn’t want her going out, not at night. Even though she’s spayed, she wanders, and sometimes gets into fights. Maybe the toms can’t tell she’s a girl; or maybe they think she is, but she disagrees. He used to make pointed analyses of Uglypuss’s sexual hang-ups, to Becka, over breakfast. Whatever the reason, she gets herself messed up: her ears are nicked, and he’s had it with the antibiotic ointment, which she licks off anyway. He thinks of distracting her with food, but he’s out of cat kibble, which is one more reason for going out. He takes the container of dubious yoghurt out of the refrigerator and leaves it on the floor, opened for her.

Joel wipes his mouth, pushes the plate away. He’s stuffed down everything: weiner schnitzel, home fries, the lot. Now he’s full and lazy. The back room of the Blue Danube used to be one of his favourite places to eat, before he moved in with Becka, or rather, she moved in with him. It’s inexpensive and you get a lot for your money, good quality too. It has another advantage: other people who want cheap food come here, art students, in pairs or singly, out-of-work actors or actresses, those on the prowl but not desperate or rich or impervious enough to go to singles bars. Joel wouldn’t want to pick up the kind of girl who would go to singles bars.

Becka never liked this place, so he gradually eased out of the habit of coming here. The last time they ate together it was here, though: a sure sign, for both of them, that the tide had turned.

Becka had come back from the washroom and plunked herself down opposite him, as though she’d just made an earth-shattering discovery. “Guess what’s written in the women’s can?” she’d asked.

“I’ll bite,” said Joel.

“Women make love. Men make war,” she said.

“So?” Joel said. “Is the lipstick pink or red?”

“So it’s true.”

“That’s supposed to be an insight?” said Joel. “It’s not
men
that make war. It’s
some
men. You think those young working-class guys want to march off and be slaughtered? It’s the generals, it’s the.…”

“But it’s not women, is it?” said Becka.

“That’s got nothing to do with anything,” Joel said, exasperated.

“That’s what I mean about you,” said Becka. “It’s only your goddamned point of view that’s valid, right?”

“Bullshit,” he said. “We aren’t talking about points of view. We’re talking about
history.”

As he said this, the futility of what he was trying to do swept over him, as it sometimes does: what’s the point of continuing, in a society like this one, where it’s always two steps forward and two back? The frustration, the lack of money, the indifference, and on top of that the incessant puerile bickering on the left over who’s more pure. If there was a real fight (he thinks “guns” but not “war”), if it was out in the open, things would be clearer; but this too can be seen as a temptation, the impulse to romanticize other people’s struggles. It’s hard to decide what form of action is valid. Do you have to be dead to be authentic, as the purists seem to believe? Though he hasn’t noticed any of them actually lining up for the firing squads. Maybe he’s chosen the wrong mode; maybe street theatre doesn’t fit in up here, where the streets are so neat and clean and nobody lives on them, in shacks or storm sewers or laid out on mats along the sidewalks. Sometimes he thinks maybe they’re all just play-acting, indulging in a game of adult dress-ups that accomplishes nothing in the end.

But these moods of his seldom last long. “Wars are fought so those in power can stay there,” he said to Becka, trying to be patient.

“You don’t think you’re ever going to
win
, do you?” Becka said softly. She can read his mind, but only at bad times.

“It’s not about winning,” Joel said. “I know whose side I’d rather be on, that’s all.”

“How about being on mine?” Becka said. “For a change.”

“What the shit are you talking about?” said Joel.

“I’m not hungry,” said Becka. “Let’s go home.”

It’s the word
home
that echoes in the air here for Joel now, plaintively, in a minor key. Home isn’t a place, Becka said once, it’s a feeling. Maybe that’s what’s the matter with it, Joel answered. For him, when he was growing up, home was the absence of a thing that should have been there. Going home was going into nothingness. He’d rather be out.

He looks around the room, which is smoke-filled, bare-walled, his gaze passing over couples, resting longer on women by themselves. Why not admit it? He’s come out tonight because he’s looking for it, as so many times before: someone to go home with, to her home, not his, in the hope that this unknown place, yet another unknown place, will finally contain something he wants to have. It’s Becka’s phone call that’s done it: she has that effect on him. Every move to encircle him, pin him down, force him into a corner, only makes him more desperate to escape. She never came right out and said so, but what she wanted was permanence, commitment, monogamy, the works. Forty years of the same thing night after night was a long time to contemplate.

He sees a girl he knows slightly, remembers from the summer, when they were doing the Cannibal Monster Tomato play down near Leamington, for the itinerant harvesters. (Cold-water shacks. Insecticides in the lungs. No medical protection. Intimidation. It was a good piece.) The girl was a minor player, someone who carried a sign. As he recalls, she was getting laid by one of the troupe; that was the only explanation he could think of at the time for her presence among them. He hopes he was right, he hopes she’s not too political. Becka wasn’t political when he first met her. In those days she was doing art therapy at one of the nuthouses, helping the loonies to express themselves with wet newspaper and glue. She’d had a calmness, a patience that he’s since realized was only a professional veneer, but at the time he’d settled into it like a hammock. He’d enjoyed trying to educate her, and she’d gotten into it to parrot him or please him. What a mistake.

In recent years, he’s come to realize that the kind of women that ought to turn him on – left-leaning intellectual women who can hold up their end of a debate, who believe in fifty-fifty, who can be good pals – aren’t the kind that actually do. He’s not ashamed of this discovery, as he would have been once. He prefers women who are soft-spoken and who don’t live all the time in their heads, who don’t take everything with deadly seriousness. What he needs is someone who won’t argue about whether he’s too macho, whether he should or shouldn’t encourage the capitalists by using under-arm deodorant, whether the personal is political or the political is personal, whether he’s anti-Semitic, anti-female, anti-anything. Someone who won’t argue.

He pushes back his chair and walks over, ready for rejection. They can always tell him to go away. He doesn’t mind that much, he never tries to force the issue. There’s no sense in being obnoxious, and he doesn’t want to be with anyone who doesn’t want to be with him. He’s never seen the point of rape.

This girl has reddish hair, parted in the middle and drawn back. She’s crouched over her noodles, pretending to be absorbed in a large but paperbacked book that’s propped open beside her plate. Joel goes through the openers: “Hi, good to see you again. Mind if I join you?”

She glances up, with that little frown he’s seen on their faces so often, that coming-out-of-the-trance face,
Oh, you startled me
, as if she hasn’t been aware of his approach. She’s been aware. She recognizes him, hesitates, deciding; then she smiles. She’s grateful, he sees, for the company: it must be all over with what’s-his-name. Relieved, he sits down. Even though he knows no one is really watching him, it still makes him feel like an idiot to be sent away, like a puppy that’s made a mess.

Now for the book: that’s always a good way in. He turns it so he can see the title.
Quilt-Making Through History
. That’s a hard one: he knows nothing and cares less about quilt-making. He guesses that she’s the kind of girl who would read about it but would never actually do it; though opening up with a statement to this effect would be far too aggressive. It’s a mistake to begin by putting them down.

“Like a beer,” he says, “or are you a vegetarian?”

“As a matter of fact I am,” she says, with that superior tight mini-smile they give you. She hasn’t got the joke. Joel sighs; they’re off to a roaring start.

“Then I guess you mind if I smoke?” he says.

She relents; evidently she doesn’t want to drive him away. “You go ahead,” she says. “It’s a big room.” She doesn’t add that it’s full of smoke already, and he likes her better.

He thinks of saying, “Live around here?” but he can’t, not again. “Tell me about yourself” is out too. Instead he finds himself shifting almost immediately, much sooner than he usually does, into social realism. “This day has been total shit,” he says. He feels this, it’s not fake, the day
has
been total shit; but on another level he knows he wants sympathy, and on yet another one he’s aware it’s a useful ploy: if they feel sorry for you, how can they turn you down?