Kicking Tomorrow (42 page)

THE APARTMENT SMELLED OF CINNAMON, SWEAT, AND
overripe fruit. A week later, Rosie was still afraid to go outside, and wouldn’t go to work. She asked Robbie to go to the club, and explain on her behalf. He was glad to do that, if only to get outdoors. Once he was out, though, he got to worrying. There were secrets in his apartment. He had become a keeper of secrets like bees in a hive. There was that heap of magazines right under the bed, in which Rosie lay like a kicked cat. And in the hallway cupboard the dreadfully abused Barbie doll. What if Rosie found those things?

Pornography, he’d discovered, was like a bottle demon; it promised high times, but took a major toll on delivery. And putting it back in the bottle became harder as it grew bigger. This devil, Porn, cursed all he visited and spawned in them infectiously. And now Robbie was hungry in a new way: with this infected appetite, like Prometheus’ liver, desire regenerated inside of him. He enjoyed those pictures, just as he knew they were bad for him. The gloss on the pages was a skin on his emotions. The more he enjoyed them, the less he liked the flesh and blood they professed to be about.

The game shows he watched from bed were a fantastic circus of organized greed, but Robbie wasn’t into the washing machines or fabulous kitchen accessories; instead, morning after morning, he lay with an ache of yearning for the hostesses with their impossible smiles and tempty hooters. He’d lie there and wait for them to bend over and open an oven door, or caress the fringe of a carpet, in the hope that he’d catch a flash of bosom or thigh. He wondered, did that make him a pervert-in-training? Surely he wasn’t the only person in the world who did it? But one night, he and Rosie were watching
The Nutcracker Suite
(Rosie
listened
to it), and instead of appreciating the dancing, he found himself waiting only for glimpses of the ballerina’s panties beneath her nightie. At times like those, he bitterly wished he could put the demon back in the bottle. But he didn’t know how.

What he told Rosie was that he was going for some beers with Louie Louie, and did she mind if he spent a bit of the money she was saving for supplies. Rosie looked distressed.

“I don’t care about the money,” she said with a swollen mouth, “but I’m afraid to be alone in the house for too long. I see shadows. Please don’t leave me in this place at night.”

“Yeah, yeah, no problem.”

What he really intended to do was a take a bus to the nearest border town in the United States and buy some porn in person. Coming back across the border, he’d hide the magazines in a suitcase stuffed with drawings and paintings, and record jackets into which he’d have slipped the magazines. Go ahead, try it sometime.

From all he had read about the rising tide of immoral magazines and movies in the States, he imagined the country as a pornographic playpark. You could get
anything
there. In a community newspaper from Vermont that he had found at the
cottage on Xmas day, he saw a double bill playing till the end of February that looked promising.
She Stoops To Conquer
, and
School For Scandal
, starring some stud called Richard Brinsley Sheridan, if he remembered correctly. (It was amazing how Robbie could remember names and facts if he really put his mind to it.)

It was a four-hour bus ride from Montreal to Granby, Waterloo, Magog, Sherbrooke, on to North Troy, Newport, West Charleston, and then Derby Line, where the Constitution Playhouse had been since the turn of the century. As the bus pulled out of the terminal, Robbie couldn’t believe what he was doing. Was it so important to go so far? He was jittery, his blood fizzing with tiny air bubbles that propelled him on this desperate journey. His head was filled with forbidden delights: honeypots and joysticks galore. He pictured the location of the Constitution Playhouse: a special street, lined with throbbing sex stores and massage parlours. Since Derby Line, Vermont, was only a little bigger than the community in Kilborn, he didn’t imagine there would be a strip the size of a major fun fair, but he had his hopes up. All the American cities had them; wasn’t every mayor embroiled these days in trying to shut them down? Boston’s Combat Zone, New York’s 42nd Street, L.A.’s Hollywood and Vine. And one of the reasons he was going now was he feared the mayors might succeed before he ever got there.

On his way home again to Rosie, it was dark inside the bus. In the headlights, a galaxy of snowy stars zoomed in and out of the infinite. What a total goof he felt. He put his nose to the glass and replayed his day while he watched the cat’s-eyes light up and the highway’s centre line peel up off the tarmac like a strip of luminous tape.…

He had stood nervously in line at U.S. Customs; all the passengers on the bus had been required to step off for inspection. When his turn came, he had been asked for his passport or a birth
certificate. That was a shock – he had been across the border with his family so often just to eat at that little country restaurant in the mountains of Vermont, and the officer had never asked them for a passport. The customs officer was young, brush-cut, and wiry, and smacked of men’s soap. He had only one arm. He looked Robbie up and down, and curled his lip in displeasure.

“What is the purpose of your trip,
sir?”

“The purpose? The purpose is sightseeing and – uh – friends.”

“And what do you have in that bag, please?”

“Oh, nothing much. Some art. If you can call it that, arf arf.”

“Open it for me,
please.”

Robbie unzipped the suitcase. He wasn’t worried. The inspection that would make him anxious was on his return, when the suitcase would be several magazines heavier. The one-armed officer had trouble flipping through the sketches and rolled-up canvases and album covers and scraps of paper, so Robbie helped him, doing a real eager salesman trip on the guy. “This was going to be my first professional gig, for a nightclub, eh, and these are my album cover designs, like them? And this one I don’t dig so much, but these –”

“Is your trip for business,
sir
, or pleasure?”

“Why, for pleasure, like I said. Friends, like.”

“Bullshit
. Whut are the names of your friends?”

Robbie scrambling now. That swear word has had quite an unpleasant impact on him. “Uh, well, there’s Rosie and Baim –
Abraham –
and Louie.”

“Bullshit. Looey is a
French
name. Whut is your business, sir? Do you have a work permit? If not, I shall have to refuse you entry,
sir.”

It was pointless to insist. Robbie stuffed his artwork back, gnashing his teeth, and carried the heavy portfolio back out into the terminal area. He found a dépanneur on this, the Canadian
side, bought a six pack of Molson, and sat in the foul-smelling, piss – and dust-filled waiting room till dusk.

After a while, he felt some relief that it was all over, that he hadn’t gone to Pornville after all, and sated his repulsive seething desire. Mainly, he felt the old goatishness grow all over him. He slapped himself.
Stupid
. A traveller glanced at him from the bench by the door, quickly returned to studying the hem of her skirt.

On the bus back, he pees a torrent into the toilet. He’s drunk again and full to bursting.
Drunk as a, as a… trout
, he thinks to himself, for his vision’s a fuzzy fish-eye lens inside this tiny room. The bus is lurching wildly on the snow-covered country roads, and his pee is looping all over the place like a skipping rope that’s been let go on one end. The window, frosted over like ground glass, lights up periodically as cars overtake the bus. He turns on the hot water, which comes out scalding, and mists up the chilled mirror above the sink. He rubs it and looks at himself. He’s hard to see. He can barely recognize himself. The image looks like the ghost in him. Moisture collects and dribbles down. He feels sick. He has sunk to this.

He was thinking about Rosie, curled up in his apartment and licking her wounds as, three hours later, he rounded the corner by Wu’s Grocery and the Parthenon Fil-U-Up. It was snowing heavily now, and bitterly cold. He stopped still.

A small crowd had gathered outside his apartment. The dim streetlamps and Eccelucci’s billboard made the falling snow fizz with electric light. Robbie’s stomach clenched, tight as a fist. He hesitated, considered ducking down the back alley, but there was Rosie at the top of his stairs, and she had spotted him. She waved him over frantically.

The crowd was made up of tenants and neighbours. Queenie Graves was there, and her husband. Mrs. Grissom was standing
in her nightgown and overcoat, moaning. Big Mr. Graves and another man were laying a dark body on a blanket. Mr. Graves slipped on the ice as he bent down to lift the body up, and landed hard on his knee.

“Hi,” Robbie said, stupidly. “What’s up?”

Everyone turned to look at him. Their faces were shrouded and shrunk beneath their hoods and hats. They lifted old Mr. Grissom and carried him into his apartment, and Mrs. Grissom followed after him. She shot an evil face at Robbie. He shrugged. What did she want him to say? All right, it was his fault, maybe he hadn’t done his shovelling job as well as all that – anyway, he’d thought he was off the hook after Rosie paid the rent. There was no use in getting on his back about it now. Sorry.
K
, satisfied?

He climbed his stairs. He was wondering how he was going to explain his suitcase to Rosie. In the end he didn’t have to; she was so distressed that, when everyone had dispersed, he was able to distract her by cracking a feeble joke.

“By popular request,” he said in a
TV
announcer’s obituary voice, “Mr. Grissom,
AKA
Marcello ‘Red’ Manzoli, has flown through the air with the greatest of ease. For the very last time, it is feared.”

When Mr. Graves told him he better clear out that very week, Robbie was not surprised, but he was aggrieved; when he asked Mr. Graves for a good reason, the guy just made a fist, and called that one.

His relationship with Rosie was strained to the limit of their endurance, as well. Robbie was sick of the way she analyzed his every move, his every word. He didn’t have to be told he was afraid of confronting his own failure; he didn’t need to hear he was building patterns of procrastination; it was none of her
business that he rationalized his ignorance by hurling abuse at the status quo; he never asked anyone to tell him he pursued impossible dreams, or, that like most men with a problem, he put Ivy up in an ivory tower of unattainable desire.

“You didn’t use to have any of these clever-dick ideas,” Robbie said. “Don’t get so high on your horse. You’re just getting them now from books. You should stick to women’s magazines. I can’t get a handle on you any more. You’re the one in need of shrink-rapping.”

“Ha ha. You can’t discredit my ideas ’cause I get them from books, you condescending male-chauvinist jerk,” Rosie retorted, chewing her gum militantly, with marching jaws, chewing
at
him.

“Hey, I only say that ’cause I care for you.”

“So care for me a little less.”

“So I suppose you didn’t like the Valentine I gave you yesterday.”

“Oh
that
. A shoebox coffin with
LOVE
scrawled in blood on the inside? That’s when
I first
saw the light of day.”

“Hey, I did it my way,
OK
. Whaddo you want? Least I’m
here
, aren’t I? Least I’m
around
. Isn’t that a show of, um, of love?”

“Oh, Bob, why couldn’t you just give me
chocolates?
I can’t get a handle on you, either. Before, there was someone who was compassionate and brave. Now I see a person all wrapped up in himself and projecting his insecurities on others. On me.”

“
K, OK
. Since you put it that way.
Here’s
something funny,” Robbie snapped, “You always talk about seeing ‘this person who’ and ‘that person who’, like I’m someone who’s not standing right in front of you, which I am. Well, if you don’t want to see stuff, s’OK with me, but don’t deliberately put me out of focus, too. That’s how you sound when you talk about me – like I’m out of focus.”

He said that weakly, because he knew he was only resentful of being nailed down. He especially resented her when her analysis
was dead on. He wouldn’t permit her such conceit. He didn’t like to seem so transparent. He fancied that he had a personality as bewildering as a house of mirrors. He flattered himself that he reserved judgement on other people until he had given them a fair chance.

“You’re just jealous of everything I do,” Rosie sniffed. “You’re so jealous you even hate it when I’m involved with a book. Typical male – to you women are footstools or pedestals. You wish I’d pose for you all the time like, like…” She pointed out the window. “Like that horrible
billboard
. You liked me better when I was at the club because I was caged there. You’re no better than the bikers who took over the place. Poor Dolores, she’ll never get out, now. But I have. I’m different. I’m fed up with being forlorn. Oh, and by the way, I’ve got a brand-new method of contraception – staying away from men like you.”