Kicking Tomorrow (18 page)

And so, later that afternoon, when Rosie opened her eyes, he was lying face up beside her with his sneakers and parka on, and he’d kicked slush on the bedsheets. She popped her gum back in her mouth and, squinting, felt her way to the bathroom to put her makeup on before he awoke. But he was only pretending to
sleep, suppressing chuckles, just relishing her reaction. For, out in the hallway, and in all six remaining rooms of the apartment, there were amps, amps everywhere; big, black, bolted, silent with their cables coiled up, stacked and marshalled like sinister Jack-in-the-Boxes, enough noise-pollution equipment to bring the building down like Jericho. Should anyone be so wicked enough as to switch it all on.

EVENINGS, DURING HER BREAKS FROM THE ROXY CANDY
counter, Ivy began to phone Robbie. Too much! Major advance in the relationship. Problem was, while he wanted to believe it meant she loved him, he could never be sure, exactly, because phoning him up was all she did; she wouldn’t actually speak. Robbie would sit at his end, waiting and wondering, trying to picture her. He’d sit and listen to her lips burst softly as she smoked cigarettes. Was she reading a book with the phone cradled on her shoulder? Was she drinking from the brown paper bag under the candy counter? Was he expected to talk? Or maybe this was all some cruel joke, for every now and then he’d hear someone approach her and elicit the sort of lively response she never had for Robbie. Then, with him feeling empty and sad and blaming himself for not being able to galvanize her like other people could, she’d say, abruptly, “Have to go. Kiss,” and Miriam would look up from a comic book at the kitchen table and say, “Boy, you didn’t make a sound for ten minutes. Whoever that is, she must be one big blabbermouth.”

Worrying only about Gaston at first, Robbie now found himself jealous of everyone Ivy knew; since she refused to tell
him of the guys in her past, he figured he had reason to be jealous. And because she told him nothing of her past, he had to assume that she was hiding things from him in the present as well: he was jealous of Gaston and Olly, and he was especially jealous of the guys in her dreams – Keef, for example – and since he had come that far, he allowed himself to be jealous of the guys in her future, too.

He didn’t enjoy being jealous, but she forced him; she delighted in telling him about the people she wished she was with, people who really knew how to live. The infamous Nicola Lingus, for example, who took a bottle of gin to bed with her every night, and was raped as a child and slept in her bra so her breasts wouldn’t sag; who lived off the royalties of that incredible hit song Keef gave to her for her birthday, and survived an odyssey of heroin addiction only to die choking on a pastrami sandwich. Ivy said she wished her life was half as full.

Although Ivy identified with all the vulnerables, kooks, and suicides of the world, she never yearned to dig up Robbie’s secrets. In a way, Robbie was glad of that, because when he tried to think of things to impress her, or things to make up, nothing came. The more she told stories of people she admired, the more he felt bland, humourless, uninventive, and without potential. How, for instance, could he ever compete with Spark Combo? There was a guy who knew no limits: an acolyte of Anton Szandor LaVey, he only wore clothes purchased from the estate of Aleister Crowley, played poker only if the stakes were a night with his opponents’ daughters or sons, carried condoms in Byron’s snuffbox, and died a tragically slow death, strangled by cancer of the throat.

“I never really understood,” Robbie said, squeezing out a generous attitude, “what exactly Spark Combo did with his life.”

“Nothing, of course,” Ivy said. “That’s what’s so incredible. He was the world’s only living castrato, but he refused to record.
He’d sing only at dinner parties. I wish I was there. Wouldn’t you love to live like that? Just be king of all you can see and be drunk all the time?”

Lying in the dungeon, with Ivy in his arms and a bottle of Mateus on his chest, he had to agree with that much, at least. He gazed at her flesh up close, likening the inoculation scar on her shoulder to a flaw in a Greek vase, something done deliberately, in deference to the Gods, to spoil an otherwise perfect thing, and considered how her skin had the resiliency of sliced apple flesh exposed to the air for a day.

“Here, this scar,” she said, “this is where the mother stabbed me with a fork when I was just a bitty baby. And this row of bruises is pretty recent, the father’s left-handed see. You’ve got to be cruel to be kind, he told me, quoting Shakespeare, then walloped me on the head with a compendium of the Bard’s plays I’d borrowed from the library. Oh, and these, these are track marks I guess.”

While Miriam and Barnabus watched
TV
upstairs, Robbie and Ivy did the babysitting with their shirts off, sticky backs in a vinyl beanbag chair. The crunching of the polystyrene pellets, the swish of their skin, the snapping of an elbow. Him slyly stealing looks at her nipples that stood up as high as pencil erasers, and asking himself what his favourite parts of the female body were. He knew Louie Louie would say, “De tits.” And Baimy would say, “The cunt, of course,” but for him it was the drift of dark baby down at the nape of her neck, the crooks of her arms, the dual dimples in the small of her back. He gazed at her body lazily, and as his eyes drifted from their moorings, the image of her subdivided and dissolved before him, and it looked like her ethereal body was lifting off her material one.

“Do you sometimes feel like you’re the only person in the world?” she asked him. Well, him, in a way. “How do you know you exist at all? What does
it feel
like to think? At
AA
they tell you
to look to a Force, to help you contact reality again. Reality? I’m addicted to it, but I’m trying to kick tomorrow all the time. I mean, where’s the borderline? Where are the doors of perception? What is decadence? What is depravity? Sometimes I feel like barbed wire is being dragged through my veins.”

Robbie thinking, – but squeezing her shoulders to signal confirmation and attempting, cautiously, “It’s hard for me to say. About being depraved, I mean. Our family always did
OK
. Just about whatever I wanted I got, which is my biggest problem I guess.”

Ivy sat up. “That’s
deprived
, you idiot. I said
depraved
. What am I doing here. What I said just went right by you, didn’t it? God, sometimes I feel like going downtown to hustle someone I don’t even know, and just have a straight fast fuck.”

“Oh well, yes, of course.” Robbie said, gamely. “Me too.”

But Ivy looked at him and said, “No you wouldn’t,” and he felt ashamed that she was right.

One of her favourite bars, not least because they were lax about checking
ID
, was Rockhead’s Paradise, under the Ville-Marie Expressway, down by the same set of tracks that ran past her family’s apartment. During the days of the Montreal Maroons, black baseball players gathered there, up from the States with an evening to spare, and that’s where the city’s steamiest jazz used to go down; in the seventies, in the classy area upstairs, the bands were strictly stupid, disco-pated Motown with stupid, spangly choreography (observed
the
Robbie Bookbinder, Montreal’s official music critic), but downstairs you could still catch three grizzled old guys grinding out grooves on a scuffed bass, a gnawed guitar, and a drum kit as honest as an alleyful of trashcans.

By the harsh white light, reflected in the mirror behind the bar, Robbie was shocked to see what a wreck he made – perched on the edge of his chair, wild with suspicion every time Ivy so
much as looked across the room, crazed when she went to the can for longer than three minutes. He wished he could relax like her – face puffy and flushed, voice grown hoarse, rolling ciggies endlessly and smoking like a locomotive, not giving a shit about anyone. And now he was monitoring her with bugeyes as she stood at a table of black dudes who were slapping their long thighs with long hands, every time she made a joke.

When eventually she sat back down again, heavily, she said, “God,
stop
, would you? Any time I’m off your leash, you get idiotically frantic.”

Robbie put his hand to his chest, eyebrows up, mouthing,
me?

“Yes,
you
. Like when I was talking to Gaston outside school this morning. Rushing over to give me lots of caring attention. I hate that.”

“Oh, like
then.”
(So, he was right when he saw what he thought he saw: Gaston puckering up his hairy lips at Ivy, and Ivy not instinctively tearing his tongue out for what he did to Robbie the week before.) “I just wanted to know you were safe,” he ventured weakly.

“First, that’s none of your beeswax, really. I mean what’s wrong with
unsafe?
But, if you really must know, he was telling me he’s been expelled – they caught him dealing – and now he wants to meet my brother to get in the gang. Nobody wants him, not even the Jean-Guys. He’s incredibly pathetic. I was telling him to fuck right off as a matter of fact. But you, you were jealous, I could see it a mile away.”

“Well,” Robbie said, cautiously, “what’s wrong with – doesn’t jealous mean I like you?”

“It doesn’t mean a thing. Just that you want me all to yourself.”

“But you hardly give me any of yourself.” Stating this plain truth gave Robbie’s heart a little electric shock. In the Bookbinder family, no one ever really fought – Mom said that families who
fight all the time, and say it doesn’t mean anything, are also the ones that hug and say I love you without meaning it either – but the consequence of constant kindness for Robbie, he realized now as the distance yawned between him and Ivy, was that he was terrified any rift, no matter how small, would be irreparable. He knew that challenging her was as bad as admitting they were no good for each other.

“I suppose I’ll have to spell it out for you,” Ivy said, sighing smoke in streams through her teeth. “Listen. Say we’re at a party and I’m talking to someone, would you be jealous?”

“Uhh, no,” Robbie said, rubbing an eyelid.

“And if I talked to this guy for a long time, would you try to stop me?”

He bought time in his beer, biting the glass. Finally he replied, “Which guy? No, course not.”

“And if I said I wanted to stay late because we were having a good conversation, would you stick around like a watchdog?”

“Well, no…”

“And then if I told you the next day that we had talked till five in the morning, would you be jealous?”

“Uh, not if you hadn’t done nothing, no.”

“Uh, not if you hadn’t done nothing, no,”
Ivy mimicked, stubbing a butt out with the particular precision of a practised drunk, aiming at the ashtray from several inches up and bringing it down hard, like a pin representing the present position of her troops versus Robbie’s on a map of ash. “Well, that makes no sense at all.”

“Why not?”

“Because if we had been
fucking
all night, which is what you’re worried about, this guy and I wouldn’t have a thing to show for it in the morning. But if we had talked all that time, we would have a
real
relationship, and that should give you much greater cause for jealousy. Look, Robbie, face it. You haven’t the slightest clue what love is. You just want to own me.”

“No, I don’t,” Robbie said. But he was unsure about that. He knew it wasn’t – aum – to want to own – but wasn’t it better than – fuck, his head was a misery-go-round. He looked at his beer, flat now.
“K, OK,”
he mumbled. “You’re right. Of course. Sorry.”

“God,” Ivy said, getting up again. “Roll yourself a cigarette while I get us a drink.”

One thing Robbie had learned quickly enough about Ivy was that whenever she suggested going downtown for a drink, you didn’t go for just a drink. You went for
all
the drinks.
Life will be convulsive
, remember? So, when eventually Ivy returned from the bar with burning cheeks and said, “Rockhead told me personally there’s no more drinks,” he had to dumbly follow her out to find some elsewhere.

He followed her to L’Enfer Strip, down in the disco zone between Bishop and Peel. He’d seen it from the outside often enough before, driving past with the family on the way to the Champlain bridge. He’d seen the entrance, on which were painted several crude nudes prodded at by devils in a pit of flames, and steamily wondered about its real contents all the way to the Townships.

“You
know
some people here?” he said, stamping snow off his boots. “Gee. Looks warm inside, at least.”

It was so warm inside that most of the girls in the place weren’t even wearing clothes. At least ten of them were standing on tabletops and boxes, nude as you please but for the strapped and stilettoed shoes they perched on. They were all up to their thighs in whooping men, and on the chrome-topped stage three were insinuating a ménage-à-trois to a throbbing disco rhythm. The whooping men were folding dollar bills lengthwise, and gingerly inserting them between the dancers’ knees, and if a dancer was still wearing some thread of clothing, that’s where the bill got tucked. The dancers harvested the bills with their long fingernails and slipped them between their fingers, building Spanish
fans of money. With their hands splayed out like that, and the shadowy men all jerking about at their feet, they looked to Robbie like weird, nude puppeteers.

Scotch-taped to the walls were
Bosom Buddies
centrefolds. He averted his eyes from them, like old friends you don’t want to admit having ever associated with. Beneath an illuminated plastic Molson clock there hung a Businessman’s Lunch-Special menu. Above the stage a banner was strung that read in glitter-glue letters:

and everywhere, instructions written on white cards in fat magic marker: