Casserole Diplomacy and Other Stories (25 page)

Originally published in On Spec, Winter 2003 Vol 15 No 4 #55

A.M. Arruin
lives in an abandoned hotel in the Porcupine Hills, with a crow who talks, a cat who wishes he could, and a fish who thinks she can. He was once the author of
Crooked Timber: Seven Suburban Faerie Tales
, along with many published short stories and poems.

Laurie Channer

There’s a slam like a gunshot going off, makes you and Lesley both jump a foot on the couch, nerves instantly on edge. You look across the clutter of the big loft, to see Tim, electric and alone, near the door, his date nowhere in sight. “Shut up!” he yells over. “She’s gone, all right?” He whirls and punches the door, hard, twice, and that shakes you, too. “FUCK!” he blares. Of course he hurt himself. “FUCK!” again. Of course it made him madder. Past the plants, bookshelves and entertainment unit, he kicks at something you can’t see, and you hope it’s nothing of yours or Les’s. You know he’s acting out, but it twists your guts to see force applied like this.

He bounds over to his area and turns up his thrash metal. Slipknot or Tool or one of those bands whose name adorns most of his T-shirts. That’s not usually a problem, after all; you like Hole.

It’s getting harder to hear the movie you rented, but you bite your tongue before daring to say anything. Even before tonight, you’ve been finding it harder and harder to confront him, because of the ensuing hassles. “C’mon, Tim,” you try, more wheedling than decisive. You want this to be a nice night for Les, who’s had a bad week with pain. “What’s the rule about volume?”

He turns his too-bright eyes toward the two of you. It’s well-lit over where he is; he switched on his track lighting a while ago, and Les turned your lights down to watch the TV screen better at the start of the movie. It’s like he’s showcased in spotlights for you and Lesley, the audience, in the near dark, side by side on the sofa over in the other end of the loft. Tim waits just long enough to make you think he’s going to ignore you, which might actually be a relief in itself, but then he hops over to his stereo and dials it down to the marker you all agreed to six months ago when he moved in. It’s a line at 6 in red-black nail polish. It’s his, from a night he went to see Marilyn Manson. Les threw all her nail polish out years ago, and you’ve never owned any. Six is still kind of loud, but the loft is big enough that you’re supposed to be able to hear the TV in your end while he plays his music in the other end, near the door, no one disturbing the other, especially Lesley now that she’s on disability. You wondered when he moved in what you and Les would do if he didn’t respect the volume arrangement, what kind of trouble that would be. Those were the days.

Hyperacuity has set in now, though, and you’re sensitive to the slightest noise from Tim’s end. And the noise is more than slight. He’s still pissed, and he’s not done showing it. He wants to be noticed, of course, so you and Les avoid so much as glancing his way, the same reason and the same way you’ve made it a practice to determinedly stare away from stretch limos when you see them gliding through the centre of the city. You don’t want to give him the satisfaction of attention.

It’s
Lawrence of Arabia
on the DVD player, four hours of it, your pick because you’ve never seen it before and it’s supposed to be stupendous. It’s wasted, though, because with all Tim’s slamming around, you can’t concentrate, haven’t picked up on who the characters are or what’s going on. Every scene is newly disorienting. Les has had to explain to you nine times who Alec Guinness is playing. You can think of him only as Obi-Wan Kenobi, a calm and comforting presence from
Star Wars
, and you wish he was here. Instead, he looks so different in this picture, and it unsettles you more than it ought to. It’s only a movie. You reach for the remote, ready to bail on the whole thing, but Les takes it from you. “This is what we do. Don’t let him win.”

You know what she means. It’s Friday night: date night, movie night, pizza night. It
is
what you and she do together, and have done since you met. You do it even though she’s barely mobile any more with her fibromyalgia and her wrecked back. It’s the highlight of her week now that she can’t teach anymore.

The movie’s meant nothing to you now, though, since the first half hour. The pizza’s sitting cold on the coffee table in front of you, barely touched. Tim
has
won, even though his beef wasn’t with either of you. The more he bangs things around in his end of the loft, the more he enlarges his own angry sphere. He’s constricted yours and Lesley’s two-thirds of the loft until it feels like the two of you are sitting together on a little life raft the size of this couch, this table and this TV screen, exposed and adrift in his turmoil.

Tim is puttering slightly less noisily on his side of the loft. You sneak a look and see he’s rummaging through desk drawers, in the manner of a Muppet, even down to tossing the stuff he doesn’t want willy-nilly back over his shoulder. He moves to the kitchen, does the same through the utensil drawers.

“I can’t find the big scissors!” he yells. “Where’s the big scissors? I need the GOOOOOOD scissors!”

You stop looking. You know the sound each drawer makes, though, and can follow his path by listening, though you’re trying not to hear.

“SOMEONE HAS TO HELP ME FIND THE GOOD SCISSORS!”

You sit up straighter on the couch and start to open your mouth to holler back when Lesley puts a hand on your arm. She shakes her head wearily, her meds draining her. This is old news. Tim venting out loud. This is what
he
does. And what it always does to you. It’s always the same amplitude whether it’s something major like spilling coffee on his computer, or minor, like a pen that won’t write. But tonight you don’t know why it’s especially menacing. Maybe you and Lesley don’t need his share of the rent
that
badly.

“Are you just going to sit there, you great fat puddings, or is someone going to help me?”

Lesley shakes her head again. “Don’t take the bait,” she says, not taking her eyes from the screen. “Don’t give him the satisfaction.”

Sharing a loft is an exercise in
not
hearing. Your friends always ask, “Sure, maybe you can tune out somebody else’s TV or phone conversation, but what about, you know . . .
sex
?”

You actually
can
ignore the noises of him with a girl. In fact, it sounds so embarrassingly clumsy, you’d rather not listen in. And he’s had to tune out you and Lesley. He hasn’t said it’s a problem. In loft-living, when you can’t help but hear, the unspoken rule is to at least pretend you don’t. Despite the insinuations some people have made about him listening in, you seriously doubt he’s been getting off on the sound of two overweight, middle-aged dykes getting at it, as infrequently as it happens. It’s not what twenty-two-year-olds salivate over when they think of girl-on-girl scenarios.

But it’s why you don’t really know what’s gone on here tonight. You’ve gotten so good at tuning out that by the time you actually
did
hear the commotion, the sharp sounds, voices and that final slam, they were already vibrations dying away on the air. And then you weren’t sure what you’d heard. And it’s
that
and what you have or haven’t done about it that’s the real problem. Not Tim.

He’s still bashing around in his end, muttering away to himself, occasionally tramping back and forth to the bathroom, and you feel small in the face of it. You finally say to Les what’s been bothering you the most. You say it very quietly, sunk down as you are on the couch, partly so Tim can’t hear, and partly because you’re ashamed. It’s over an hour too late. “I think he hit her.”

Lesley’s answer is quick. She’s not as zoned on her medication as you thought she was. “No, he didn’t. He wouldn’t. We were sitting right here.”

“We heard something.”

Les is firm, “That was a door slam.”

“You don’t want to believe he hit her because we didn’t do anything.” All the things you and Les have stood for, marched for, spoken out about, the rainbow of ribbons you’ve worn. But that was years ago, before you both got so tired. Take Back the Night? Hell, tonight you can’t even Take Back the Loft.

“It wasn’t the sound of flesh hitting flesh,” Lesley says, “It was something hard. She slammed the door on her way out or he slammed it after her. She’s not here anymore, is she?”

You cast your mind back to that one specific moment, the first minute everything changed. There were raised voices you hadn’t been properly aware of except in retrospect, and the one loud sound that drew your attention to the fact that
something
had been going on. Les is right, it wasn’t a smack on skin, nor even a fist to soft flesh. It had been harder, sharper, woodier. It could have been the door. It could have been a body hitting a wall or something. But there was only one slam. The girl was gone now, so it had to have been the door. If she’d been slammed first, there’d have been two sounds. You take some consolation from that.

You know, however, that you’re rationalizing. Whatever the details, something happened tonight, under your roof, and the more it sits with you, the worse it sits with you. Something that caused Tim’s date to leave so abruptly was maybe something you and Les should have stepped in on. You are more uncomfortable than ever.

Eyes on the screen, you wish the movie was shorter, because you can’t bear the thought of sitting here, miserable, unable in your current circumstance to comprehend a word of it for another two hours plus. It might as well be a foreign movie with no subtitles and no dubbing, as you stare dumbly at it, not seeing. At the same time, you wish the movie was longer, because as soon as it’s over, you will have to move, speak, interact. Something more will be expected of you and you’re afraid of what that will be, or what effect it will have. For now it’s cover to hide behind.
This is what we do on Friday nights
. Instead of watching the moving images, all you can do is watch the digital counter on the DVD player tick over slow seconds.

“SHIT!” It’s another gunshot. You jump a foot, your nerves jangled all over again. Tim spikes at full voice over on his side, and throws something into something else with a loud metal clang. Lesley takes another piece of pizza. You don’t know how she can. The last bite you had tasted like you were eating the box. Tim works away at something on the other side of the loft, his back to you at his desk. You guess he’s found the scissors, or a suitable substitute.

In a few minutes, he canters cheerfully over to in front of your screen.

“Do you mind?” Lesley says, her irritation plain, craning to look around him. You have to look at him. To do otherwise would be to behave differently, exactly what Lesley told you not to do.

Tim doesn’t look like a Muppet now. He used to, his baby face with the short white-blonde hair and goatee framing it top and bottom. He’s got his pizza box, the other half of the two-for-one deal you phoned in for at the start of the evening. The orange and white box is greasy and red-smeared, as is his shirt. “Want this?” he asks. “I don’t.” He doesn’t wait for an answer and flings it onto the table, showering crumbs all over, knocking the remote onto the floor and spilling your Diet Coke over the magazines which slide off in a slow cascade, taking the pizza boxes with them.

“Tim, you idiot!” you cry out and jump up reflexively. Now you’re alive, Coke dripping onto your socks. But oddly, you’re shaking too. “Look at the mess you made!” you say, trying to hold on to the indignation even as your spirit drains away. How many times have you said that?

“Understatement of the year,” Tim laughs, unfazed, and bops off.

You don’t know what’s gone on in the movie, but suddenly, there’s Peter O’Toole at a bar, leaking blood in wet stripes through the back of his khaki shirt. Something has happened there, too. You lose it and start to sob tearlessly. “Don’t,” Les says quietly to you. “It’s okay. Just stay in this minute. Get through this minute.” She moves to get up. “We need to wipe this up.”